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Timekeeping

Unrueh – ‘unrest’ – the title of Swiss director Cyril Schäublin’s latest film, set in 1877 among anarchist watchmakers in Saint-Imier, a remote village in Switzerland’s Jura mountains, is the term for the wheel in the centre of a mechanical watch that ensures its continuous and even ticking. The unrest wheel inside a pocket watch is so tiny and the act of adjusting it so meticulous that, despite the film’s extended close-ups on the mechanism, its workings remain mysterious. Even the detailed explanations given by a young factory worker, Josephine Gräbli (Clara Gostynski), to her fellow anarchist, Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov), who happens to be visiting the village, don’t entirely clarify it. When Josephine asks if he understands her, Kropotkin replies: ‘I think so’. If the functioning of the unrest wheel is largely impenetrable, Unrueh suggests, so are the forces revolutionizing production in Kropotkin’s time (as well as those that keep our own economic system running).

Schäublin’s film, which picked up a prize at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, is, at a basic level, about the establishment and maintenance of clock time. Yet as the more familiar meaning of its title suggests, it is also about the disruptive effects of this technology on work and everyday life. That includes the lives of the watchmakers themselves, who are dissatisfied with the conditions in their factory, and inspired to resist them by the radical experiments unfolding elsewhere (the Paris Commune was established just six years earlier). The anarchist movement acquired a particular momentum in St Imier – which Kropotkin, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), ascribes to the fact that the small workshops where clocks were produced allowed for easy communication and organization among workers. The film portrays the interplay of these two counter-movements, technological advance and political resistance, at this crucial juncture in the industrial revolution. On one level, the watchmakers spend their days crafting devices that facilitate their own oppression: factory managers could measure the time required for each of the workers’ tasks and use these measurements to ramp up productivity. Yet their close-quartered working conditions also form the basis of their resistance.

The differences in tone and style between Unrueh and canonical cinematic representations of the industrial revolution are striking. In Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), the mechanized urban factory is the site of numerous slapstick incidents. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), we witness a highly technologized capitalism that has grown spectacular and monstrous in its brutality. Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) also focus on the city as the centre of modernity. Unrueh, however, transports us to an entirely different setting. Although St Imier is a centre of production, exporting watches all over the world, here the industrial revolution – and with it, the regime of linear time – has triumphed by stealth, its soundtrack the subtle yet insistent ticking of the clock. But the effects of the change are no less profound and all-encompassing.

The watchmakers resist the increasing domination of the factory over their lives in every way they can: by working slowly, forming international alliances (we see them exchange photographs of famous anarchists), registering their discontent at the ballot box and refusing to participate in a patriotic re-enactment of a Swiss Confederation battle from the Burgundian Wars in the 1470s. Kropotkin, a trained cartographer, is working on an anarchist map that reverses the factory managers’ efforts to rationalize space by assigning each place in the area a letter and a number; he instead draws on the traditional names used by people in the valley in an attempt to recapture the meanings these places had for them. ‘Science must reflect the ideas of the people’, he explains. Later in the film, we learn that the municipality is working on a map of its own. Different territorial logics compete, as do four different definitions of time: municipal, local, factory and church – none of them synchronized. Unrueh depicts the anarchists’ struggle against capital’s growing power over space and time, but also, significantly, over narrative itself.  

The film reflects on the power of another emerging technology, photography. As Josephine is guiding Kropotkin across the factory grounds, they encounter a set: someone is shooting a photograph – which requires a flash produced by a blazing of magnesium and potassium chlorate, as well as twenty minutes of stillness – for an advert whose caption reads: ‘Nowadays one cannot imagine a man without a watch in his hand’. We never see the image; instead we see only Kropotkin, who has been literally pushed out of the frame by the photographer. Similarly, the film treats the fledgling love story between Kropotkin and Josephine as peripheral, hinting at it but never depicting it directly. The two first meet in the distance behind two buildings that take up most of the frame. Later, when asked whether they are willing to take part in a play telling the story of the Paris Commune, they respond with the same phrase: ‘Je ne suis pas le protagoniste.’ By eschewing the convention of relaying historical events through the emotional arc of a love story, Schäublin’s film coyly undermines its own commercial potential. History, in Unrueh, is not merely a backdrop against which a personal drama unfolds; and the film’s steady, flat rhythm – its distance from the pacing of a traditional romance – seems to stage its own resistance to the rationalization of time.

Instead of building towards dramatic peaks, much of the action happens in long tableau shots, often featuring large groups. The narrative unfurls in casual, almost muted conversations, primarily about conditions of work and how to thwart the factory managers’ designs, which always seem to take place either before or after the fact: the time just prior to the shift, during the cigarette break, the end of the workday, and so on. The film’s roving focus is mirrored by its decentred compositions: the protagonists are regularly placed in the margins of the frame, with their extremities sometimes partially cropped. Despite its frequent wide angles, Unrueh stubbornly denies us an overview. We see neither the horizon, nor the streets or paths that connect the village’s squares and buildings. Schäublin’s tableaus are often stage-like units of space that we are unable to connect to a logical whole.

The connections between the present and the late nineteenth century are similarly obscure. Clock time, which in the film appears as a new mechanism of control, now seems to us as normal and natural as the rising and setting of the sun. Yet our relationship to it has also changed profoundly in the post-industrial age. Under the guise of flexibility and autonomy, the customary distinctions between different temporal and spatial dimensions are dissolving: free time is engulfed by productive time, and surveillance, once externally imposed by the factory, is now internalized. It is Unrueh’s subtly elusive form, which seems to resist the demands of rationalized space and time – instead drawing our attention to the peripheral, the before and after, the events usually left off-stage – that makes Schäublin’s film feel at once timely and timeless.

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

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After Solidarity

Tori et Lokita (2022), the latest film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, opens with a shot that has become a signal part of their visual repertoire: a face in the centre of the screen, crumbling under the voice of an unseen speaker. We see Lokita as she is interrogated by an immigration officer. At first, she seems impassive, but eventually she hesitates, and then breaks down in tears, unable to answer the officer’s questions. We witness the consequences of power, inscribed on a face.

Lokita is a Cameroonian from Garoua who met Tori – a resourceful Bariba child from Benin – en route to Belgium. Back home, he was denounced as a sorcerer, a claim that makes for an easier path to asylum in a West eager to believe in tales of African irrationality. Lokita, meanwhile, is forced to try to claim refugee status by pretending to be his sister. Both immigrants are in desperate circumstances, and both must work delivering drugs to pay off the debts they incurred while being trafficked to Belgium. Given the similarity of their situations, one of the basic questions posed by Tori et Lokita is why Tori should be given papers while Lokita is disbelieved. They share one life, and amid indifferent drug dealers and cold bureaucrats, it is their fictional kinship that proves the only real relationship in the film. Church and family, by contrast, are merely vessels for the extraction of capital. A Sunday service turns out to be where the traffickers who brought Tori and Lokita to Belgium take payments for their services. Lokita’s mother is interested only in the next remittance.

Fictional kinship is a motif the Dardennes have previously deployed. In Le Silence de Lorna (2008), an Albanian migrant’s sham marriage to a Belgian junky, Fabio, leads to his murder. Lorna attempts to salvage a non-transactional form of affinity from Fabio’s death by insisting that she is pregnant with the dead addict’s child: a fake pregnancy that eventually unravels her dream of owning a snack bar. All too often in the Dardennes’ films, it is attempts to find forms of solidarity – real or imagined – that lead to their characters’ downfall.

Solidarity was the focus of the Dardennes’ first works. Raised in Seraing, the Belgian city in which all their films are set, the brothers spent the early years of their career (1978-1983) making documentaries, many of which looked back to the city’s labour movement and its struggles during the 1960s, in the factories that line the banks of the river Meuse. By the 1990s, however, they had switched their attention to fiction films that assess the state of post-industrial Belgium, and memories of labour militancy are notable by their absence. In the Dardennes’ films, the factories have closed, and shuttered with them are any hopes of collective solidarity and worthwhile work.

Their oeuvre depicts a world in which everyone is struggling to survive, the conditions for solidarity are absent, and there is no moral difference between legal and illegal forms of money-making. In Tori et Lokita, we watch Tori cycle between drug deliveries made at the behest of his Albanian boss, Betim, who conducts his business from the kitchen of an Italian restaurant, where he alternates doling out cocaine and preparing caprese salads. Such under-the-counter operations are a familiar scene in the cinema of the Dardennes. There is hardly a single business that isn’t also a swindle; the hidden abode of production proves to be merely the necessary camouflage for illegal accumulation. La Promesse (1996) opens in a garage, with a young man, Igor, fixing the car of an elderly woman, who opines that ‘all work deserves payment.’ The claim evokes a world in which labour is fairly rewarded, and a moral economy could be mapped onto capitalism. Igor listens to her voice as if it emanates from another era; he has already swiped her wallet.

Other values have also been emptied out. Family is no longer a respite. The Dardennes’ films are full of fake marriages and traded babies. Domesticity is either the site of a brutal initiation into illegal business, or else simply the scene for yet another scam – as in L’Enfant (2005), in which a young man decides to sell his child to make some quick cash. Whether the family was ever meaningful, work redemptive, or solidarity possible, is unclear. Such questions belong to the prehistory of the Dardennes’ fiction films, whose characters come in two strains: those who evince no interest in anything other than playing their part in a brutal transactional economy, and those who look in vain for normative attachments. This second group is driven by the desire for normalcy: a job, a family, and a sense of a whole, ordered life. The world in which these dreams made sense is long gone, if it ever existed, but the desires remain.

It is these drives that provide much of the narrative propulsion in the Dardennes’ films, whose cameras follow their young protagonists – tracking them from behind with over-the-shoulder shots – as they search for a place in the world. Rosetta (1999) opens with the film’s eponymous heroine cannoning through a packing plant from which she has just been let go, in search of an explanation for her sacking. Her unnamed boss, le patron, tells her that there was no particular reason – it was simply cheaper to hire another trainee. Don’t take it personally, he suggests; yet all Rosetta wants is for someone to take her personally, and see that she works hard. In other films we encounter other drives. In Tori et Lokita, Tori cycles through the city to make his drug drop-offs and secure a place in Belgium. In Le Gamin au Vélo (2011), we see another child, Cyril, pedalling furiously as he searches for his deadbeat dad, possessed by the idea that they might be reunited. (His father isn’t interested.)

Despite the world’s indifference to their desires, none of these characters can rid themselves of their unattainable dreams. Rosetta tells herself: ‘I want a normal life. I want a real job.’ She hopes to escape the abject trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother, but it is not affluence that she craves. Early on in the film, she throws away the salmon her mother scavenges from friends in favour of fishing in a lake. Later, she refuses a job on the black market and instead tips off a patron – rarely do figures of authority receive names in the Dardennes’ films – about a scam being run by one of his employees, Rosetta’s only friend, thereby allowing her to take his job. For a fleeting moment, Rosetta seems calm, almost pacified. Finally, she has a boss and a wage: a normal life. After the factory, the film suggests, there will be neither solidarity nor meaning in work. The best one can achieve is a stunted, precarious existence: in this world, waged labour is a prize for which one is willing to risk everything.

Lokita is also set on achieving a sense of normalcy, and uses the same techniques of auto-interpellation as Rosetta. She repeats to herself: I will get my papers, find work as a caregiver, and live with Tori. This vision sustains her as she delivers drugs for Betim, and during the mock immigration interviews that Tori stages so that she can credibly appear to be his sister. It might be the case that such a dream is achievable in contemporary Belgium, but we see no evidence of this in the Dardennes’ films, which take place solely in the half-light of illegal immigration and extra-legal exploitation. The real mystery is why dreams of normality have such a hold over these characters, despite all the evidence that such reveries cannot be realized.

In Deux Jours, Une Nuit (2014), Sandra has been let go from Solwal, a solar panel manufacturing company, after her colleagues were asked to choose between a €1,000 bonus and keeping her on as an employee. After pleading with management, she is granted another vote, and given the weekend to persuade her co-workers. Sandra is obsessed with getting her job back, though she gives no indication that she enjoyed her work or did it with any pride. What makes her obsession all the more remarkable is that her conversations with colleagues reveal that few of them rely solely on their jobs at Solwal. Willy also repairs garden tiles; Hamid does a night shift stacking shelves at a convenience store. A salaried position is no longer enough to survive. Work itself is unworkable, yet Sandra cannot escape the psychic hold it has over her. The redemptive power of labour in Deux Jours, Une Nuit, of family in Le Gamin au Vélo, and of legal residency in Tori et Lokita are fantasies – convincing only from the outside, to the unemployed, the orphaned, and the undocumented. The Dardennes’ narratives unfold in the ambiguous gap between dreams of a stable life and their foreclosure in the real world.

*

In Robert Pippin’s treatment of the Dardennes’ films, he makes much of the fact that they all contain a crisis of responsibility. In La Promesse, a dying immigrant worker, Amidou, makes Igor promise to look after his wife, Assita; in Rosetta, the protagonist informs on her only friend in order to take his job, but abruptly renounces the position later in the film; and in L’Enfant, a young man sells his child and then subsequently tries to retrieve it. Some critics, such as Martin O’Shaughnessy, have claimed that the Dardenne brothers are trying to articulate an ethics after the demise of collective politics. It’s quite possible that the directors themselves would endorse such a reading. The series of journals that the Dardennes have published chronicling the making of their films, Au dos de nos images, are full of Levinas and short on Marx. (The same could be said of Sur L’Affaire Humaine, Luc Dardenne’s sole philosophical treatise).

But the films are not the filmmakers. What makes the best parts of the Dardennes’ oeuvre so compelling are the deeply uncertain ethical impulses of the characters. Igor, about to get away with covering up Amidou’s death, confesses what happened to Assita. His motivation is unclear, and seems as much to do with trying to escape his overbearing father, who is intent on initiating him into the family business of people trafficking, as it does with honouring his promise to Amidou. Ultimately, his revelation doesn’t improve Assita’s life, and destroys Igor’s world. Rosetta’s decision to give up her job is similarly complex, bound up with the return of her alcoholic mother and her own preparations for suicide. If this is what ethics looks likes after politics, it is not a redemptive story about new forms of care, but a bleak assessment of our capacity for solidarity under conditions of abjection.

Tori et Lokita is not one of the Dardennes’ finer films. Partly, this is because it functions as something of a greatest hits collection: auto-interpellation, tracking the backs of the characters, and even Tori’s manic pedalling around Seraing have all appeared in other films, to greater effect. More importantly, however, the film locates the crisis of responsibility that propels the narrative beyond the world of the characters: Lokita’s initial asylum claim is denied by the immigration officer. In desperation, she turns to Betim, who promises to supply her with false papers on the condition that she spend a month doing unspecified work for him in relative isolation. The audience fears prostitution, but instead she is taken to – of course – an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city, where she is expected to tend to Betim’s cannabis crop. Her attachment to Tori proves her undoing. He breaks into the factory and reunites with Lokita, but things quickly go awry when Betim’s associates discover them together.

The film’s final scene is an address given by Tori at Lokita’s funeral: ‘Lokita, if you had your papers, you’d have become a caregiver, and we would have lived together in Belgium. Now, you are dead, and I am alone.’ The speech closes the circle of the film, which began with Lokita’s face as seen by an immigration officer, and ends with the consequences of that officer’s decision. Never before have the Dardennes allowed themselves to be so clearly identified with a particular perspective in their films. Tori’s address to the funeral becomes a polemic delivered to the audience, denouncing the violence meted out to immigrants and demanding a humane alternative. After screening Tori et Lokita at the London Film Festival, Luc Dardenne remarked that ‘We were indeed angry, and this anger motivated us to make this film, particularly when we found out that there’s a huge number of unaccompanied minors who disappear. No one seems to worry about it. That absolutely has to change.’

It is incontestable that the immigration policies of Europe in general and Belgium in particular are violent and racist, and there are many crusading documentaries that can and should be made about them. But what the Dardennes’ oeuvre suggests is that the situation cannot be remedied by mere policy adjustments. It’s much worse than that. In their films, papers do not bring security; they are simply another commodity to be traded in a cut-throat marketplace. The problem, the Dardennes’ films suggest, is not simply a world that cannot offer us safety, but our irredeemable desire for it. In this sense, the presiding spirit of the Dardenne brothers’ work is Lauren Berlant, who has written on La Promesse and Rosetta. Their characters are caught in what Berlant would call a state of ‘cruel optimism’, wedded to hopes and desires that post-industrial capitalism cannot deliver. Yet such is the unremitting bleakness of the Dardennes’ oeuvre that what Berlant intended as a historical diagnosis threatens to become a metaphysics: a world denuded of the possibilities of solidarity. In this world, policy reform doesn’t constitute an exit plan.

The endings of the Dardennes’ most interesting films gesture beyond this bleak vision. In La Promesse, Assita and Igor walk through a train station, not quite together but not entirely apart. We cannot sense any solidarity between the immigrant and the people trafficker – yet they keep walking. Rosetta ends with an equally silent encounter between the protagonist and the friend she ratted out to secure a job. There is no coming community in these films, but the characters have, potentially, left behind their normative attachments to impossible fantasies of the good life. There aren’t any words yet for the forms of life that follow the deaths of these dreams.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘A New Proletkino?’, NLR 109.

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Hollow States

The return of industrial policy is unmissable, catalyzed by the cumulative shocks of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine as well as longer-term structural issues: the ecological crisis, faltering productivity and alarm at the dependence of Western states on China’s productive apparatus. Together, these factors have steadily undermined governments’ confidence in the ability of private enterprise to drive economic development.

Of course, the ‘entrepreneurial state’ never disappeared, especially in the US. The deep pockets of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institutes of Health have been crucial in maintaining the country’s technological advantage – funding research and product development over the past few decades. Still, it is clear that a substantial shift is taking place. As a group of OECD economists noted, ‘So-called horizontal policies, i.e. interventions available to all firms and which include business framework conditions such as taxes, product or labour market regulations, are increasingly questioned’. Meanwhile, ‘the case for governments to more actively direct the structure of the business sector is gaining traction’. Hundreds of billions of targeted funding is now flooding businesses in the military, high-tech and green sectors on both sides of the Atlantic.

This pivot is part of a broader macro-institutional reconfiguration of capitalism, in which a high-pressure post-pandemic economy has tightened labour markets while the centrality of finance continues to wane. These phenomena are highly complementary: public funding stimulates the economy and may boost job creation, while the administrative allocation of credit serves as an admission that financial markets are unable to attract the investment necessary to meet major conjunctural challenges. At a very general level, this neo-industrial turn should be welcomed, since it implies that political deliberation may play a somewhat greater role in investment decisions. More concretely, though, there is much to worry about. At this stage, we can identify at least three problematic dimensions.

First is the extent of this turn itself. Though the sums are significant, they do not match the civilizational challenges we are facing – falling well short of the complete restructuring of the economy demanded by climate breakdown. This is particularly true in Europe, afflicted by chronic structural vulnerability due to self-inflicted austerity measures – currently rebranded ‘fiscal adjustment paths’ – and deepening divisions between core and periphery. The geopolitics of industrial policy are especially fraught within the context of the EU single market. Hayek was a strong supporter of federalism precisely because he knew that a union of this sort would create serious obstacles to state intervention. Reaching an agreement at the federal level to support a particular sector is exceptionally difficult due to diverging national interests, themselves a result of productive specialization and uneven development. At the national level, conversely, the relaxation of state aid provisions tends to elicit resistance from weaker member states, who fear that countries with larger fiscal space – Germany in particular – would be able to improve their competitive edge, further aggravating the Union’s productive polarization.

Because the entire European edifice was built on the premise that competition is sufficient to guarantee economic efficiency, there is close to zero technical-administrative capability to enforce industrial policy. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, austerity has had similarly damaging effects on state capacity. Asked about the viability of Biden’s programme, Brian Deese, the former director of the National Economic Council, sounded a cautious note: ‘A lot of that comes down to the professionalism of the civil service at the federal level and the state and local level – a lot of which has been hollowed out.’

Second, the substance of neo-industrialism is troubling. The choices currently being made about the direction of funding will shape the productive structure for decades to come. On the ecological front, the main issue is that they are almost exclusively conceived as subsidies for greening existing institutions and commodities, rather than reorienting the economy on the basis of sustainability. The car industry is a case in point. Ideally, green policies would develop multimodal transport solutions with a limited role for small, electrified vehicles. Yet this would imply a drastic downsizing of the car automotive sector – something unthinkable for profit-driven carmakers, who are instead pushing for fully electrified high-margin SUVs.

To reconcile increased productivity with environmental imperatives, industrial policy would need not only the resources to support structural change but also the means for state planners to discipline capitalists. The lessons of post WWII developmentalism drawn by Vivek Chibber remain valid: businesses understand industrial policy as ‘the socialization of risk, while leaving the private appropriation of profit intact’. They therefore strongly resist ‘measures which would give planners any real power over their investment decisions’.

Another qualitative issue is the global increase in military spending. In the absence of what Adam Tooze calls ‘a new security order based on the accommodation of China’s historic rise’, we have entered a New Cold War with the frightening potential to spread beyond the Ukrainian theatre. While some businesses have a lot to lose from a confrontation with China, others may stand to benefit. Along with the industrial-military complex, Silicon Valley corporations are deliberately fuelling fears about Chinese capabilities in AI, in the hope of securing public support for their activities and locking in access to foreign allied markets. This has created a mutually reinforcing relationship between private profit-seeking and state power, in traditional imperialist fashion.

The third problem involves the balance between classes. In her recently published book L’Etat droit dans le mur, Anne-Laure Delatte interrogates the economic roots of declining state legitimacy. She argues that, in France as elsewhere, rising taxes on households – most of them regressive – were accompanied by increased public spending for the benefit of corporations. This created a vitiated state, oriented largely towards the financial sector, and a general population increasingly distrustful of public policymaking. Today, it is easy to see how an ambitious industrial policy could aggravate such pro-corporate biases. Asset managers are especially eager to take advantage of the new rentier opportunities arising from state-backed infrastructure investment. Without increasing taxes on corporations and capital income, or taking industries into direct public ownership, state subsidies imply a transfer of resources from labour and the public sector to capital, exacerbating inequalities and resentments.

The West’s embrace of industrial policy is explicitly motivated by Chinese productive prowess. Yet one cannot overstate China’s singularity. There, state capital is dominant thanks to public ownership in strategic, upstream sectors of the economy – the ‘commanding heights’ in Leninist terms. As well as enjoying formal property rights to key assets, a highly specific form of state-class organization allows the CCP to exercise some control over the country’s general developmental path. Its culture of internal discipline is crucial in assigning politicians dual identities as masters of capital and servants of the party-state. This provides a firm foundation for public planning, allowing private accumulation to coexist with market-shaping forces such as credit and procurement policies. The CCP’s public-private network is also highly adaptable, enabling the government to implement major policy changes relatively quickly. Following the 2008 financial crisis, political instructions were immediately passed down to party members in anticipation of the huge state stimulus package, resulting in a much more rapid and effective fiscal response than in the US or EU.

In democratic societies, by contrast, effective discipline on corporations can only come from external popular pressure. Thus, for campaigning organizations and left parties, the neo-industrial turn is good news only to the extent that it gives new impetus to old concerns: Who decides where the money goes? What are its objectives? How is it used and misused? Perhaps, in helping us to formulate such questions, neo-industrialism will end up exposing the inadequacy of its own answers.

Read on: Aaron Benanav, ‘A Dissipating Glut?’, NLR 140/141.

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One Plus One

Mounted police charge striking workers, battering them as they try to flee. Children in threadbare coats watch the pandemonium, transfixed; women clutching swaddled babies look on. It’s as though a riot has broken out amidst the milling, workaday calm of Lowry’s Street Scene (Pendlebury). The American artist Alice Neel (1900-84) painted Uneeda Biscuit Strike (1936) at the peak of Depression-era labour militancy. The pictured strikers were employees of the National Biscuit Company, and the painting’s political message is, at first glance, clear-cut: support the workers. Its ostensibly polemical intent makes it easy to dismiss the work as a ‘bad’ painting – as unsophisticated and didactic. Yet its complex composition, on a closer look, is harder to grasp than its message.

Consider another painting from the same year, depicting a march in New York. It’s a dense dusk in May. The lights are on in the lofts and cold-water apartments on either side of the street. A column of rank-and-file Communist Party members and fellow travellers filter towards the vantage point that we, the viewer, now occupy. It’s as though we are among the crowd and have turned back to survey our fellow demonstrators, who carry luminescent hammer-and-sickle banners aloft like Chinese lanterns. In the foreground, we find ourselves face to face with four men, at the vanguard. One of them – the Welsh poet Sid Gottcliff – holds a white placard whose text gives the painting its title: ‘NAZIS MURDER JEWS.’ When Neel showed the work at the American Contemporary Art Gallery, one critic deemed it ‘an interesting picture, but the sign is too obvious.’ Neel’s response was characteristically curt: ‘But if they had noticed that sign, thousands of Jews might have been saved.’ The ACA’s director Herman Baron agreed, noting that ‘drawings and paintings can fight too.’

Uneeda Biscuit Strike, 1936. Oil on canvas. 91.4 x 109.5 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel and Victoria Miro. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel.

Uneeda Biscuit Strike and Nazis Murder Jews are currently on show in ‘Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle’ at the Barbican (until 21 May). Visitors have likely been drawn by Neel’s celebrated later portraits of expectant mothers, feminist critics, inter-racial partnerships, drag queens, and poets and artists such as Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol. (‘I always loved the working class and the most wretched’, Neel reflected at the end of her career, ‘but then I also loved the most effete and the most elegant.’) But the tensions discernible in these two early paintings provide an instructive framework through which to see, or read, an Alice Neel painting, and perhaps also a framework through which to understand the evolution of her subject matter and style.

The Barbican retrospective makes clear that Neel’s was ‘a lifelong commitment’ (the phrase is the name of one of the exhibition’s final rooms). Yet her commitment took various, sometimes conflicting forms. She was steadfastly devoted to her project – unfashionable in the age of Abstract Expressionism – of representing people with her signature combination of uncanny vividness and freewheeling acuity. And she was also committed to social causes, from unemployment and union organization in the 1930s, to women’s liberation in the 1960s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. In exploring the interplay between Neel’s commitment to politics and to portraits, ‘Hot off the Griddle’ probes the limits of realism as a means of political expression.

Neel was born in 1900 (she was ‘three weeks younger than the century’ as she liked to say). Difficult years spent in and out of psychiatric hospital and the loss of two daughters by the age of thirty (one to death from diphtheria, the other to forced adoption by her husband’s disapproving upper-class family in Havana) were followed by years of increased stability, if never luxury or tranquillity, in which she balanced her career with raising two young sons as a single mother. In the 1970s, two sea-changes – second-wave feminism and the development of postmodern critiques of Abstract Expressionism – converged on the art world, creating a wave of interest in women artists and figurative painting. In 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York staged a major retrospective of Neel’s work – the only show of such scale held in the US in her lifetime. In 1981 Phillip Bonosky, along with the Artists’ Union, organized an exhibition in Moscow, the first solo show of an American artist held in the Soviet Union. (‘I always wanted to exhibit in the Soviet Union, because I believe utterly in détente’, Neel said. ‘I always thought it would be a great thing for the Soviet people to see the American people as I see them.’)

Two travelling retrospectives have brought Neel to audiences across the US and Europe in the last eighteen months. People Come First opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before moving to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, then the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Un Regard Engagé was on show at the Pompidou Centre – and was broadly similar in scope and works to the Barbican exhibition – and will travel to the Munchmuseet in Oslo later this year.  Though these exhibitions were organized in collaboration with each other, they have had different designers and architects, and the paintings have been accompanied by different texts: each city has received a different version of Neel. If the Met gave her something of a DNC makeover – portraits of cultured New York liberals, figured as a diverse set of individuals, unmoored from society at large – then the Pompidou dragged the artist back to the barricades: ‘Radicale! Politique! Humaniste! Féministe!’ read the online advertisement. It is this latter version of Neel that has travelled to the Barbican, under the curation of Eleanor Nairne.

Mike Gold, 1952. Oil on canvas. 81.3 x 63.5 cm. Estate of Alice Neel. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel.

Most of the paintings in ‘Hot off the Griddle’ are portraits, though there is also a smattering of early interior and street scenes, as well as three accompanying films, of which Helen Levitt’s remarkable silent documentary In the Street (1948), depicting East Harlem in all its glimmering spit-and-sawdust, is a highlight. Nairne’s story-led solo exhibitions of New York artists at the Barbican – including Basquiat (2017) and Lee Krasner (2019) – tend to stage their early phases of tutelage and sacrifice in the eight small, dark rooms on the gallery’s upper floor, before leading the viewer downstairs into an expansive, light-flooded space of critical success. Nairne’s treatment of Neel conforms to this pattern; the upper gallery guides us through Neel’s early period of painting the poor on the streets of gilded-age Havana, Greenwich Village’s fabled inter-war bohemia and finally Spanish Harlem, where she set out to convey ‘the rich deep vein of human feeling buried under the fire engines.’ On display in the lower gallery are many of the works that made her name, including Marxist Girl (1972), in which a slouching Irene Peslikis, founder of the feminist NoHo Gallery in Manhattan, fixes the viewer with a confrontational stare. Also on show are several works depicting heavily pregnant women, including Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978) and Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967), in which an attractive young couple, she naked, he fully clothed, recline like dope-smoking odalisques on a wildly patterned bed.

By the time Neel moved to the Village in 1932, she was already volunteering with the Artists’ Union, producing illustrations for their pamphlet Art Journal. It was through this work that she met Communist intellectuals, writers and activists such as Bonosky, Horace Clayton, Art Shields, and Mike Gold, whose portraits hang in the two-room ‘Anarchic Humanism’ section of the exhibition. The portrait of Bonosky (painted in 1948), a sometime Moscow cultural correspondent for The Daily World, is particularly arresting: eyes fixed on us, his beloved Tolstoy’s War and Peace on a makeshift bookshelf behind. In the 2007 documentary about Neel made by her grandson, Bonosky appears as an avuncular figure and a compelling commentator on Neel’s work and its politics. Shields was once recognized as the greatest labour reporter in the United States, while Black Metropolis by Clayton wasrecently reappraised asa landmark study of race and urban life in Chicago, yet these men are largely forgotten figures today. Neel’s preternaturally vivid portraits of them seem to insist on their place in history.

Gold, the ageing firebrand, poses in a red tie and white shirt, staring prophetically into the middle distance. His right fist rests next to a newspaper, his folded glasses and an original copy of Masses, the American socialist magazine that was dissolved in 1917, and which Gold relaunched as New Masses in 1926. In compositional terms, Mike Gold (1952) recalls Neel’s 1935 portrait of Pat Whalen, a longshoreman who helped organize a Communist-led insurgency against the corrupt leadership of the International Longshoreman’s Association. Neel did several paintings of Whalen, including one in which he is depicted tearing down a swastika flag from the SS Bremen, which she later painted over. Made with oil, ink and newspaper on canvas, Pat Whalen portrays, in Neel’s words, ‘the ordinary Irishman’ who was ‘absolutely convinced of communism’ Like Gold’s, Whalen’s blue-bloodshot eyes are fixed in the area over the painter’s shoulder, while his fists – which would smash bar mirrors in the port of Baltimore to intimidate landlords into serving black patrons – are pressed firmly, like a fervent preacher gripping his scripture, on a copy of The Daily Worker, whose front page announces a further wave of trade union uprisings in the steel and coal industries. Pat Whalen is the one notable omission from Neel’s Great Depression works in the exhibition. The concentration of American socialist portraiture in the ‘Anarchic Humanism’ rooms cannot but bring to mind a comment of John Berger’s: ‘If an artist is painting a chair, then she or he does not automatically make it a Socialist painting by placing a copy of The Daily Worker upon it.’ The conspicuous paraphernalia in these portraits – the left newspapers, magazines and books advertising both the subject and artist’s political allegiances – gesture to the constraints of a realism that must ‘tell’, not show, the viewer what it wants to say.

Pregnant Julie and Algis, 1967. Oil on canvas. 106.7 x 162.6 cm. Estate of Alice Neel. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel.

Neel’s devotion to portraiture – and faith in its political possibilities – not only put her at odds with Abstract Expressionism, but with dominant left-wing attitudes to art. Portraiture was widely seen as bourgeois, concerned with aristocratic deference, and, by mid-century, inferior to documentary photography. During the Federal Art Project period (1935-1943), which funded artists including Neel, the mural was more popular than the easel painting because it lent itself to narrative and public use (as decoration for infrastructure, for example). Neel, though, saw her portraits as displaying the dignity and humanity of those living under a system that degraded individuals in the name of individualism. When, in the 1930s, Philip Rahv criticized her for painting portraits, Neel retorted: ‘Well, one plus one plus one is a crowd.’ Like microhistorians who aim to understand an entire era by chronicling the life of a single person or community, Neel sought to evoke her subjects’ material world by studying how they sat within it.

The tension at work in Neel’s committed portraiture – between making paintings with political force and painting people as they are – is one that her best works reconcile, or rather don’t accept in the first place. As she moved from dramatic street scenes to quieter portraits of individuals, lovers and unconventional families in the second half of her career, Neel increasingly honed a kind of authentically political portraiture, matter-of-fact yet sympathetic, that refused the distinction between evoking social conditions ­– in her words, those of ‘the loser’ and ‘the underdog’ – and capturing her subjects accurately and vividly. Neel’s approach recalls Vivian Gornick’s statement on her parents’ Communist friends: ‘paradoxically, the more each one identified himself or herself with the working-class movement, the more each one came individually alive.’ Neel’s work undercut the belief, widespread among twentieth-century American artists and art critics, that realism was obsolete, with little chance of renewal in the name of either aesthetic or political progress. Through her frankly perceptive and defiantly démodé portraits, Neel showed realism to be a living method for indelibly representing ordinary people in a changing world. A radical vision ‘can be best transformed into living art by utilizing the living tradition of painting’, wrote Neel as a co-signatory to the ‘New York Group’ manifesto in 1937. ‘There must be no talking down to people; we number ourselves among them.’

Read on: Saul Nelson, ‘Opposed Realities’, NLR 137.

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Death Merchants?

On 24 September 1938, Benito Mussolini posed a question to a large crowd of his followers in Belluno: ‘Faced with the absolutely ridiculous alternative: butter or guns, what have we chosen?’ Their response was unequivocal: ‘Guns!’ Over the following years, Italians would suffer the consequences of this choice: massacres, destruction, economic ruin. Yet, nowadays, not even Vladimir Putin would dream of asking an audience of Russians whether they prefer butter or missiles, since he knows that – notwithstanding the rhetoric of Holy Mother Russia – they would vote unanimously for buttered toast. Nor would any Western leader run the risk of consulting their citizens on such a ‘ridiculous alternative’, aware that foreign policy decisions are best kept out of public hands.

Today, of course, the choice of missiles and drones is a given. It’s even considered morally indispensable – a ‘humanitarian necessity’. NATO has officially sent Ukraine more than a thousand tanks and over two million rounds of ammunition (but really it’s much more than this). And the Russian army, in turn, has mustered an equivalent level of armaments. Once the logic of rearmament is triggered, the Thatcherite maxim concerning finance capitalism rings just as true: ‘there is no alternative’.

Even a cursory analysis shows the profundity of the gap separating 1938 from the present period. In the interwar years, phrases like ‘mercanti di cannoni’, or ‘death merchants’, were used to describe those who reap the spoils of war. Now such terms are virtually banned from public discussion. The fact that there are people profiting from mass slaughter has been expunged from our political consciousness. Not even the most lucid and disenchanted commentator would dare affirm, as Anatole France did in 1922, that ‘We think we are dying for our country; we are dying for the industrialists’.

To be sure, the peace movement still denounces increased arms sales. In 2022, the world spent $2.24 trillion on arms, 39% of which was accounted for by the United States, 13% by China, 3.9% by Russia, 3.6% by India and 3.3% by Saudi Arabia. NATO members made up 55% of the global total. Peace activists have responded to such figures by pointing out that the total spent on arms could be used to solve more urgent problems: ‘With $25 billion we could resolve the most serious humanitarian crises around the world, with $100 billion we could mount an efficient offensive to the global climate crisis, and with $200 billion we could reach all of the UN’s Sustainable Development goals’.

Yet, although their arguments may be the same, the tone and rhetoric of the anti-war movement has shifted. Addressing International League of Peace Fighters in 1932, Anne Capy began by giving a much more concrete tabulation of war expenditure following WWI:

With the money the war cost, we could have provided a house worth 75,000 francs to every family in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Belgium and Russia. We could even have fitted these houses with furniture worth up to 25,000 francs, and provided an advance of 100,000 francs to every family. There would still have been enough money to give each city of 200,000 inhabitants of the abovementioned countries 125 million for libraries, 125 million for hospitals and 125 million for universities. And there would still have remained a sum of capital which, placed at 5%, would have permitted to pay 125,000 schoolteachers and 125,000 nurses 25,000 francs per year.

She went on to denounce the ‘parasitic, international super-capitalism which dominates nations and has for years directed a great dance of speculation, governing behind governments reduced to the role of puppets’. It is hard to imagine such words being uttered today. Whereas Capy and her contemporaries had a clear critique of the ‘international profiteers of nationalism’ (a phrase used by Francis Delaisi in his 1913 pamphlet Le Patriotisme des plaques blindées), their inheritors typically use a more sanitized parlance – one that revolves around ‘human rights’, ‘diplomacy’ and the ‘rules-based order’.  

Indeed, who among us is capable of naming even a single Western capitalist or Russian oligarch profiting from the slaughter in Ukraine? Even if we were able to identify a few, it would be highly unusual to label them ‘geniuses of destruction’ (the appellation once given to Gustav Krupp), nor would we speak of the ‘Jackal International’, as Mil Zankin did in his 1933 pamphlet L’Internationale des charognards: Les marchands de canons veulent la guerre. Nowadays, it would be atypical to refer to an arms dealer in the following terms:

Sir Basil Zaharoff, the passion of whose declining years is orchid culture, would probably not be aghast at the suggestion that he was the greatest murderer the world has even known. He has heard it too often. And he may even enjoy the irony of his gifts (they took a few millions out of the hundreds of millions he made from the World War) for hospitalization of the ‘War wounded’.

This portrait of Zaharoff, then the world’s most powerful weapons magnate, wasn’t penned by an angry pacifist, but by an impeccably mainstream journalist for Fortune. The publication, founded in 1929 by Henry Luce, described itself as an ‘Ideal Super-Class Magazine’, a ‘luxury’ mouthpiece of American capitalism sold for a dollar a copy (equivalent to $16 today). In 1934 it published an unsigned dossier, ‘Arms and Men’, with the lengthy subtitle, ‘A primer on Europe’s armament makers; their mines, their smelters, their banks, their holding companies, their ability to supply everything you need for a war from cannons to the casus belli; their axioms, which are (a) prolong war, (b) disturb peace.’ Reproduced by Reader’s Digest, and later published as a pamphlet, the essay travelled widely. Its opening paragraph is striking, for it demonstrates how the capitalist class of the 1930s exhibited attitudes that have since become unthinkable. Imagine if the Wall Street Journal or Forbes began an article like this:

According to the best accountancy figures, it cost about $25,000 to kill a soldier during the World War. There is one class of Big Business Men in Europe that never rose up to denounce the extravagance of its governments in this regard – to point out that when death is left unhampered as an enterprise for the individual initiative of gangsters the cost of single killing seldom exceeds $100. The reason for the silence of these Big Business Men is quite simple: the killing is their business. Armaments are their stock in trade; governments are their customers; the ultimate consumers of their products are: historically, almost as often their compatriots as their enemies. That does not matter. The important point is that every time a burst shell fragment finds its way into the brain, the heart, or the intestines of a man in the front line, a great part of the $25,000 much of it profit, finds its way into the pocket of the armament maker.

It isn’t that this unofficial spokesman of American capital woke up one morning with the pressing urge to denounce the European war industry (its US counterpart only got a cursory mention). It was rather that a national campaign was already underway, culminating in a Senate Committee tasked with investigating the ‘manufacturing and sale of munitions and the economic circumstances of US entry into World War I’. The Democratic majority in the Senate elected Gerald Nye, a Republican from North Dakota, as chairman – responsible for overseeing a total of 93 hearings. Predictably, although the investigation ‘produced a sordid report of intrigues and bribery; of collusion and excessive profits; of war scares artificially fostered’ and disarmament conferences ‘deliberately wrecked’, its ultimate impact was nil. It fulfilled the usual function of such inquiries: to brush the issue under the rug.

A few years later, it wasn’t just Mussolini and his supporters who chose guns over butter; the whole world followed suit. Thus, for all the sympathy and nostalgia that the anti-war movement of the 1930s may arouse today, there are two things worth noting about its trajectory: it was entirely inefficacious, and – as we shall see – most if not all of its arguments have been rendered outdated by our new political-economic conjuncture.

In the erstwhile discourse of pacifism, the ‘merchants of death’ were often presented as occult forces. As the Fortune piece asserted:

. . . without a shadow of doubt there is at the moment in Europe a huge and subversive force that lies behind the arming and counterarming of nations: there are mines, smelters, armament works, holding companies, and banks, entangled in an international embrace, yet working inevitably for the destruction of such little internationalism as the world has achieved so far. The control of these myriad companies vests, finally, in not more than a handful of men whose power, in some ways, reaches above the power of state itself.

This ‘handful of men’ whose power ‘reaches above the state’ were the same figures who, in Delaisi’s words, ‘specialise in manufacturing machines of war, concentrate on systematically corrupting the senior civil servants responsible for national defence, induce panic amongst an easily-excitable public opinion with loud press campaigns, exert pressure on legislatures to raise funds for lucrative orders and, by playing on patriotism as a dividend machine, entrench the odious regime of “armed peace” when not launching bloody conflicts directly.’ This image of puppet-masters pulling the strings of governments belonged to the era of magnate capitalism. But this regime was superseded by a distinct form of managerial capitalism at the turn of the Second World War. At that point, ‘death merchants’ were displaced by the ‘military-industrial complex’.

It was the American sociologist C. Wright Mills who, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, argued that a new oligarchy had consolidated itself, constituted by economic, political and military elites whose roles were increasingly integrated and intertwined. Politicians, Mills wrote, were no longer puppets controlled by industrialists and bankers, a ‘committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. They had been subsumed into the elite itself, and formed an essential element of its power structure – capable of shaping it and being shaped by it. The idea of a ‘military-industrial complex’, however, was most memorably conveyed by Dwight Eisenhower in his famous farewell message on 17 January 1961. ‘In the councils of government’, he declared, ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.’

From then on, talk of ‘death merchants’ was limited to shady figures who trafficked arms to Third World states and terrorist militias. World powers, on the other hand, could comfortably rely on their military-industrial complexes. Like snakes changing their skin, this moulting from death merchants to military-industrial functionaries had the effect of anonymizing the warmongers. Real-life people – who could in theory be named and shamed – were supplanted by an impersonal bureaucratic structure. The ‘complex’ saved them from accountability.

These days, if there’s a scarcity of munitions, arms producers will ask for assurances from governments before building new factories, as they don’t want to be stuck with idle factories once the war is over. The military-industrial complex therefore serves not only to produce armaments for the military, but also to guarantee that industrialists won’t find themselves with stranded assets. The constant interchange between the arms industry and the upper echelons of public life is best described through the metaphor of the ‘revolving door’; or, perhaps, the more expressive French term pantouflage: i.e., senior public officials (civil servants, cabinet ministers, generals) who become managers of private companies and vice versa. The current Italian Defence Minister, for instance, previously worked for the Leonardo group, a leader in the Italian armament sector, and served as president of the Federation of Italian Companies for Aerospace, Defence and Security.  

In the twenty-first-century imaginary, death merchants have been replaced with drug traffickers, as demonstrated by the endless Hollywood films in which the antagonist is a shady dealer in pills and powders. This represents an extraordinary act of misdirection, given that the global war industry employs more than 50 million workers and 500,000 scientists: a universe infinitely larger and more dangerous than that of drug pedalling. What’s more, the arms sector is now integrated into, and controlled by, the respected realm of finance. We now find great investment funds at the helm of arms companies. The same fund will invest in a chain of retirement homes in Germany, a lithium mine in Africa and a soy plantation in Brazil, as well as partnering with a multinational manufacturer of ‘suicide’ drones and buying equity in the US space industry. Everything is exchangeable, and therefore everything is permissible. For the investor, the anti-tank missile cannot be differentiated from the hospital bed, as both are bluntly characterised by their cost-benefit relationship, and hence subject to the same criterion of benchmarking.

Financialization of this sort has two primary effects. First, it stages the passage from the international to the global. A century ago, as Delaisi wrote, it was possible to identify a ‘Great International, long searched for by political idealists and working-class strategists, taking shape in the arms industry’. These were national figures operating according to an international logic; but now, in a striking inversion, we see transnational actors with global interests adapting themselves to national exigencies. Second, and perhaps even more insidiously, financialization has rendered all of us – the postman, the primary school teacher, the factory worker – shareholders (and thus, in a certain sense, both owners and profiteers) in the death industry. Since pensions have been privatized, our derisory retirement funds have to be invested, which means handing them over to corporations. Without knowing it, large swathes of the Western workforce have come to depend on the dividends of missiles launched in Ukraine. This may be an unconscious reason for the silence that surrounds the death merchants – a reticence that makes the indignation of the last century seem dated.  

Yet this doesn’t mean that, on at least a couple of points, we shouldn’t heed the old analysis of the arms industry. Fortune’s explanation of the ‘philosophy’ of the death merchants remains as relevant as ever: ‘Keep Europe in a constant state of nerves. Publish periodical war scares. Impress governmental officials with the vital necessity of maintaining armaments against the “aggressions” of neighbor states. Bribe as necessary. In every practical way create suspicion that security is threatened.’ In our current media landscape, these techniques still predominate – animating the nightly news coverage and shaping its parameters.

Moreover, the mutually reinforcing dynamic of arms sales is just as evident as it was in Delaisi’s time. ‘Under this strange system’, he wrote,

the war potential of a great country, or of a group of countries, is strengthened by the development of the adverse military power. The trade in arms is the only one in which the orders obtained by a competitor increase those of his rivals. The great armament firms of hostile powers oppose one another like pillars supporting the same arch. And the opposition of their governments makes their common prosperity.

This is why, as the Russian war machine experiences an unprecedented boom, its Western counterparts are also rejoicing. In the UK, BAE Systems has increased its revenues by 9% and seen its orders expand from £21,458 to £37,093 billion. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Germany’s principal defence provider, Rheinmetall, experienced a similar surge in orders, sending its revenue to €6.4 billion, inflating its profits by 61% and more than doubling the value of its stock. Even in a country like Italy, which has provided Ukraine with precious few weapons, the Leonardo group can boast of a 30% increase in orders, especially from allied states that need to replenish their arsenals.

As such, the idea that the great armament industries of hostile countries constitute pillars holding up the same arch – that the antagonism between their governments produces their common prosperity – is not so far-fetched. As ever, patriotism continues to function as a ‘dividend machine’.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Edward Thompson, ‘Notes on Exterminism’, NLR I/121.

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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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NATO’s Fabulators

‘That reptile’, Brecht once wrote in his journal, referring to Thomas Mann, ‘cannot imagine anyone doing anything for Germany (and against Hitler) without orders from anywhere’. The Manns had been spreading rumours around Los Angeles that Brecht was Moscow’s pawn: ‘slurs . . . they know full well can do a great deal of harm’. From the first prodromes of the ‘New Cold War’, a similar form of weaponized hearsay has been circulating in the US – with Trump accused of acting as a Kremlin stooge and winning the presidency through its patronage. What once seemed like merely an election-year contrivance of Clinton’s Democrats soon spread to Europe. There, without partisan inflection, it found expression in starker geopolitical terms when, in 2020, the European Parliament initiated an investigation into ‘Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union’.

The report of the INGE Special Committee depicted a pristine European Union threatened by Russian and Chinese designs. America’s extensive activity inside the EU was ignored – its European and African Command headquarters, 70,000 billeted troops, recent history of abduction and torture of EU citizens, use of European territory for CIA dungeons in the course of the War on Terror, industrial espionage and phone-tapping of heads of state, were all unmentionable. Instead, the Committee trained its attention exclusively on NATO’s eastern adversaries, decrying their attempts to ‘weaken and divide the EU’ through disinformation.

Such accusations are well-rehearsed. They are components of a hybrid war model the US has developed since the first decade of this century, in part through a network of NATO think tanks stationed across Europe devoted to the alliance’s expanded portfolio, which includes operations to manage public opinion – in effect the global Innenpolitik of US empire. As political parties have been transformed into administrative rather than mass-membership organizations, such centres of pseudo-expertise increasingly shape respectable politics. They provide readymade accounts of events and distinguish friends from enemies (however impoverished the evidence amassed or manufactured), marketing themselves as trustworthy by affecting an academic propriety. Europe is naturally a focus of such efforts given its geostrategic value for influence over Eurasia – the ‘chief geopolitical prize’ in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s judgment – at whose western extremity lies the ‘key and dynamic players’ of France and Germany. Integration of the greater ‘American-dominated West’ and the effective severing of relations between Berlin and Moscow is being undertaken in preparation for ultimate encirclement of the PRC.

NATO’s cyber warfare – namely digital and internet-based attacks including espionage, propaganda and sabotage of infrastructure – as well as other militarized interventions into civil society, are often presented as novel developments. But in fact they have much in common with US-NATO strategy in the early 2000s, when ‘competitive intelligence’ – the use of allied agencies to launder claims – was employed to heighten a sense of urgency and accelerate the move towards war. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, for instance, Italy’s SISMI played a key role in furnishing the Pentagon with counterfeit evidence, as shown by investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D’Avanzo. Contemporary hybrid warfare also echoes its forerunners in focussing on domestic or allied populations. Snowden’s 2013 revelations documented GCHQ attempts – a parallel NSA programme must also be assumed – to manipulate the public by dissimulation and simulation.

Yet in spite of such continuities, NATO’s think tanks – comprised of twenty-eight so-called ‘Centres of Excellence’ as well as US State Department-funded outfits like the Bratislava-based GLOBSEC – have clearly stepped-up the modes of propaganda developed over the last quarter century of American warfare. To provide a snapshot of this change, it is worth surveying a few of these NATO-affiliated organizations and their attempts to shape public opinion in line with the alliance’s priorities on its eastern flank.

NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (StratCom), based in Riga and directed by Jānis Sārts of the Latvian Defence Ministry, was founded in 2014 to coordinate diplomatic and public relations as well as information and psychological operations. It was launched in part to repair NATO’s image after the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan. A critical report by retired Canadian colonel Brett Boudreau, ‘We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us’, found that there was ‘no Allied joint doctrine manual on StratCom’ – only a ‘conflicting or confusing’ set of policies. Accordingly, the Riga centre, given an annual budget of just under €600,000 and sponsored by NATO states on an ad hoc basis, devoted itself to developing the ‘doctrine’ and ‘concept’ of NATO communications, along with education, training and operational support. In 2014 it ran a seminar on the ‘Weaponisation of Social Media’ for ‘Ukrainian and Georgian Government representatives’. It also publishes a biannual academic journal, Defence Strategic Communications, edited from King’s College London.

The basic orientation of the Centre is articulated in Boudreau’s foundational essay as well as various contributions to its journal. ‘We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us’ called for the elimination of certain ‘firewalls’ – or divisions between disciplines of military communications. Public affairs and psychological operations, foreign and domestic audiences, political and military domains: such previously distinct sub-fields of propaganda should be brought together under joint control. Distinctions between psychological operations designed to manipulate audiences and the ‘value neutral’ dissemination of information in the realm of public affairs, would thereby be formally abolished. ‘The foreign/domestic audience separation’, wrote Boudreau, ‘is a faulty foundation on which to base organisational structure.’ The report furthermore recommended eliminating the division between political and military public affairs offices, so as to liberate NATO military personnel from strictures over directly political interventions.

The pages of Defence Strategic Communications are no less audacious. Two characteristic articles from the 2016 inaugural issue reveal much about NATO’s new publicity strategy: ‘The Narrative and Social Media’ by US Army Psychological Operations Specialist Miranda Holmstrom, and ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’ by the Softbank-backed financier Jeff Giesea. The former gives an especially stark framing of the contemporary media environment and NATO’s activity within it; the latter demonstrates the extent to which StratCom has openly considered the use of disinformation. Holmstrom, for her part, aims at ‘winning hearts and minds’ via social media by employing ‘simple yet complete narratives that can easily be reproduced’. She asserts that ‘narrative’, as ‘a framework for the plot and setting of a story’, is fundamental to ‘propaganda’ because it is a form of sense-making through which information can be shaped and remembered, and may even foster an irrational response to events. Much like the structure of the fabula in a work of fiction, propaganda uses ‘set-up, conflict, resolution’ to guide the thought and action of a target. This principle can be applied to the ‘horizontal propaganda’ deployed through individual-to-individual contacts, as on Twitter or Facebook. The form solicits activity and participation, and ‘creates the illusion of choice, free will and personal decision-making’. Giesea, meanwhile, advises using pseudonyms to mislead social media users. He recommends ‘more aggressive communication tactics’ and enjoins NATO to boost its capacity for waging ‘memetic warfare’ – or operations tailored to the online universe, in which the stakes are ‘social control in a social-media battlefield’.

StratCom has also taken an interest in the software of private firms, where ‘application programming interfaces’ are recommended for tracking users through the tools developed at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. In a separate report on ‘Social Media Manipulation’, the think tank boasts of having ‘partnered with US Senators Chuck Grassley and Chris Murphy’ to buy interactions on each of their accounts so as to test the public’s responses. A 2020 contribution to DSC, ‘Deepfakes – Primer and Forecast’ by Tim Hwang, focussed on technical innovations of visual disinformation and the use of artificial intelligence in creating convincing false images and videos. Formerly of Google, the MIT Media Lab and RAND, Hwang, who is now at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, was a participant in a 2016 social media experiment funded by the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). His article recommends building up ‘connections with the technical media forensics community’ in support of ‘research on the psychological dimensions of deepfakes’.

Founded in Tallinn in 2008, the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre (CCD) is one of the oldest of NATO-accredited Centres of Excellence, funded and staffed by a roster of EU-NATO and non-EU countries. It deals with the technical aspects of cyber conflict, strategy and law. Since 2009 it has hosted annual international conferences on such topics – drawing hundreds of military, academic and government participants to Estonia – with sponsorship by US software, appliances and services firms including Microsoft.  

The CCD produces NATO’s guidelines for cyber warfare, compiled in the Tallinn Manual. In its first edition, the Manual presented 95 ‘rules’ to which states must refer in the event of cyber conflict. Aside from the usual rhetoric about the right to self-defence, the document is notable for its gloss on cyberattacks which cause ‘injury or death to persons or damage or destruction to objects’ – weapons like Israel’s Stuxnet, used against Iranian infrastructure, are brought to mind – and the exemptions it makes for war against civilians. ‘Certain operations directed against the civilian population are lawful’, reads rule 31, including ‘psychological operations such as . . . making propaganda broadcasts’ or analogous operations ‘in the context of cyber warfare’. Elsewhere, the Manual finds the use of ‘ruses’ and ‘false information’ to be permissible.

Central to the CCD’s activity is the organization of regular military exercises. ‘Crossed Swords’ was launched in 2016 as a so-called ‘red-teaming’ drill, in which participants simulate cyberattacks and test the ability of special forces to carry out an offensive ‘full-scale cyber operation’. Since 2018, it has expanded considerably, and now includes the ‘cyber-kinetic’ use of the military – a domain of cyber warfare that can inflict real damage on infrastructure or personnel. Such exercises clearly exceed the CCD’s purportedly defensive mission. ‘Locked Shields’, inaugurated in 2010, is now one of the world’s largest cyber-military drills, enlisting participants from groups in so-called Computer Emergency Response Teams to simulate ‘the entire complexity of a massive cyber incident’. As well as academics, delegates from militaries, defence ministries and police agencies – including the FBI – are party to the war game. Journalists are invited to impersonate themselves in order to lend authenticity to the role-play. Private commercial interests are also present: the CCD for example has formal contracts with Siemens, which allows for the use of its hardware and software, while the firm in turn uses the simulations to study its own weaknesses.

In recent years, the CCD has simulated attacks on a military airport, energy supply systems and central computer networks, along with the vandalism of websites, circulation of false reports, data theft, commandeering of military drones and hijacking of airplane refuelling systems. In 2019, its drill simulated the use of disinformation aimed at ‘sowing doubt’ among a domestic population, and dispatched defensive teams to counter the incursion through social and traditional media channels. As with StratCom, the CCD enjoys the benefits of connections with US think tanks and spy agencies: prominent among its ambassadors is Kenneth Geers, an Atlantic Council Fellow who has worked for years with the NSA and US Navy and served as a ‘global threat analyst’ at FireEye, a Californian private security firm.

Finally, the Bratislava-based GLOBSEC, established in 2005, is the successor to the Slovak Atlantic Commission, which was founded in 1993 to support Slovakia’s accession to NATO. Unlike the Centres of Excellence, it is not overtly geared towards training the military and national security apparatuses of NATO states, but rather addresses Central and Eastern European countries, where it aids NATO’s consolidation and expansion by integrating compradors into the circuits of transatlantic capital and officialdom. This is the purpose of its regular ‘forum’, which GLOBSEC describes as ‘the preeminent international strategic conference on the frontlines of a newly divided world’. (The 2021 gathering featured a discussion between Victoria Nuland and the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, as well as a session with Alexei Navalny’s Chief of Staff, entitled ‘Democratic Change in Russia: How to increase the Odds?’)

When NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg announced the ‘NATO 2030’ publicity campaign, GLOBSEC contributed a series on ‘geopolitical competition in the information landscape’. It called for increased public-private collaboration to combat Russia and China, asserting that NATO must accelerate the subvention of small and medium-sized enterprises and NGOs. For this purpose, Riga’s StratCom was proposed as a conduit; it could ‘engage in enhanced interaction with citizens, including addressing disinformation, and promoting media literacy, and more.’ The think tank also concluded that ‘NATO’s storytelling’ must be sharpened. As a complement to its regular output of non-fiction media, it should consider branching out into fiction – recruiting studios and publishers in the production of films, books and video games. NATO should appear in ‘popular Hollywood movies or online streaming franchises’ and enlist a greater number of ‘creative and unconventional surrogates’. No culture industry asset can be discounted. Academia is another area where GLOBSEC is active. Its Slovak Aid fellowship integrates Belarusian specialists into the ranks of capitalist management by assigning them Slovakian mentors – namely, the economists and industrialists who oversaw the shock liberalization of the 1990s. GLOBSEC’s outposts in the Western Balkans act as the publicity arm of NATO’s eastern enlargement, most recently helping to facilitate the absorption of North Macedonia in 2020.

For all of the talk of a New Cold War, the political, economic and diplomatic coordinates of contemporary militarism are distinct from those of the twentieth century. Neoliberalism remains a global pensée unique, however battered its reputation is by successive economic crises. And the largest powers in the current face-off – the US, Russia and China – have either become more unequally matched in military affairs (US-Russia), or they have become essentially interdependent amid a far more fragile regime of global capital accumulation (US-China).

States must also contend with a number of internal stresses. One is the growing inability of nearly all societies to reproduce adequate employment and living standards for large segments of their populations – as can be seen in the rustbelts of both China and the US, the hinterlands of Europe and the downward mobility of educated urban populations. The political consequences are that states face the erosion of legitimacy and the eruption of ‘populist’ or other discontents. Flagging economic performance has led capital’s dependence on the state to become increasingly direct: where profitable investment in production is difficult, upward redistribution through corruption has taken hold, in a process anatomized by Robert Brenner. Sectors of capital closest to the state – finance, plus those which orbit the military, police and intelligence services – stand to benefit economically, but they may also anticipate that society will become increasingly unmanageable without greater levels of repression. Efforts to secure rule by consent today encounter domestic as well as international opposition, as rival sectors within national economies find their interests as much in conflict with one another as with international competitors. The upshot is concentration for politically well-connected firms, and a move towards confrontation abroad.

In the US, atop this sits a layer of imperial strategists committed to the constraint and management of China along with the integration of Russia into the American sphere of influence. Until 2018, war between America and its designated Eurasian rivals was not so openly anticipated. Today, their independent and uncooperative paths of development – forced by the economic realities putting all societies under pressure – have become an ineluctable source of friction. A coordinated revaluation of the yuan, or a rise in Chinese wages, might boost US manufacturing competitiveness, but would undercut the PRC’s world-historic export-led growth model, dependent as it is on combining rock-bottom labour costs with high-tech assembly. At the same time, the tightened US noose around Russia – by depriving its industry of cheap energy – obstructs Germany’s profitable export to China of its machine tools and their services: a lifeline during the last decade’s eurocrisis.

As the relationship between the major zones of global capitalism has capsized into open and sustained antagonism, the shaping of European public opinion has acquired greater significance. Overdetermined by domestic and international pressures, issuing from a zero-sum contest between national manufacturers and across different sectors, Washington is above all concerned with the consolidation of Europe as an Atlanticist stronghold. Here, Ukraine acts as ‘a geopolitical pivot’, as Brzezinski put it. Without it, ‘Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire’.

For a few large European companies, this security programme has clear economic benefits. But for the majority of the European population – who are instructed to ‘freeze for peace’ – its costs will be significant. The destruction of vital domestic industries and inflation of military budgets will follow the decades of austerity inflicted on the social state. Injunctions to intensify ‘memetic’, psychological and information warfare must be understood in this context. The exercises in digital sabotage undertaken by the CCD and its affiliates indicate that NATO’s propaganda is ultimately designed to condition the populations of client states to accept their fate as decreed by Washington. Since the War on Terror, the alliance has shown itself capable of impressive adaptation, learning from its self-diagnosed errors in a mode of low cunning. Anti-war forces could do worse than recognize this last point and get habituated to cruder thinking.

This piece draws on the findings of a 2021 report commissioned by the Left in the European Parliament.

Read on: Ed McNally, ‘Humble Grand Strategy’, NLR 140/141.

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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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A Bipolar Order?

Italians, it is said, are given to a perspective on politics that they call dietrismo. Dietro means behind, and dietrismo means a habitualized conviction that what you see is designed to hide what you get, by powers operating behind a curtain that divides the world into a stage and a backstage, the latter being where the real action is, the former where it is purposely mispresented. You read something, or hear about it on the radio or on TV, and as a well-trained dietrista you wonder, not so much about what you are being told but why you are being told it, and why now.

These days, after three years of Covid and one year of the Ukrainian war, it seems we have all become Italians, dietrismo now being as universal as pasta. More and more of us read the ‘narratives’ produced for our benefit by governments and their client media, no longer for what they say but for what they may mean: as distorted images of reality that nonetheless seem to signify something, a little like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Take, for example, the semi-official ersatz account of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, published by the New York Times and handed to the German weekly, Die Zeit: the supposed culprits were six people, as yet unknown, on a Polish yacht rented somewhere in East Germany, who had conveniently left traces on the boat’s kitchen table of the powerful explosives they had taken along to the crime scene. Apart from the truest of the true believers and, of course, the loyal manufacturers of public consent, it didn’t require a lot of thinking to see that the story had been concocted to crowd out the account presented by Seymour Hersh, the immortal investigative reporter. What was exciting about it for the dietristic mind was that it was so obviously ridiculous that it seemed its ridiculousness could not be due to incompetence – not even the CIA could be as dumb as that – but was rather intentional, raising the question of what it might have been intended for. Perhaps, political cynics suggested, the purpose was to humiliate the German government and its federal prosecutor’s office, thereby breaking their will, by having them publicly declare this obvious nonsense to be a valuable lead to follow in their unrelenting effort to resolve the mystery of the Nord Stream bombing.

Another intriguing feature of the story was that the suspected boat renters were said to have some connection to ‘pro-Ukrainian groups’. While according to the report there were no indications that these were connections with the Ukrainian government or military, any Le Carré connoisseur knows that where the secret services are involved, any kind of evidence can easily be discovered if needed. Unsurprisingly, the report caused panic in Kiev, where it was read, probably rightly, as a signal from the United States that its patience with Ukraine and its present leadership was not unlimited. In fact, at about the same time there were mounting reports on corruption in Ukraine, emanating from the United States, coinciding with and reinforcing growing resistance among Republicans in Congress against ever more dollars being diverted into the Ukrainian defence budget – as though corruption in Ukraine had not always been notoriously rampant (viz. Hunter Biden’s stint as energy policy expert on the board of Burisma Holdings Ltd.). Beginning in January this year, the Washington Post and New York Times published a series of articles on Ukrainian outrages, including army commanders using American dollars to buy cheap Russian diesel for Ukrainian tanks and pocketing the difference. A shocked Zelensky immediately dismissed two or three high-ranking officials, promising to fire more in time.

Why was this now presented as news, even though it has long been common knowledge that Ukraine is amongst the world’s most corrupt countries? Further adding to what, seen from Kiev, must increasingly have appeared to be ominous writing on the wall, secret American documents leaked in the second half of April showed that the US military’s confidence in the ability of Ukraine to launch a successful spring counteroffensive, let alone win the war as its government had promised to its citizens and international sponsors, was at an all-time low. To American opponents of the war, Republicans as well as Democrats, the documents confirmed that keeping the Ukrainian army in action might turn out to be unacceptably expensive, all the more so since both political parties in the United States agreed that their country had to get ready sooner rather than later for a much bigger war, fighting the Chinese in the Pacific. (By the end of 2022, the United States was estimated to have spent something like $46.6 billion on military aid to Ukraine; much more is expected to be required as the conflict drags on.) For Ukrainians and their European supporters, it seemed hard to avoid the conclusion that the United States might soon take leave of the battlefield, turning its unfinished European business over to the locals.

Of course, compared to Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and similar places, what the Americans are likely to abandon is in not nearly as messy a condition. Working with the Baltic states and Poland, the United States has managed in recent months to push Germany into something like a position of European leadership, on the provision that it takes responsibility for organizing and, importantly, financing the European contribution to the war. Step by step over the past year, the EU was simultaneously turned into an auxiliary of NATO – in charge, among other things, of economic warfare – while NATO became more than ever an instrument of American policy flagged as ‘Western’.

When in mid-2023 NATO’s general secretary, Jens Stoltenberg, is rewarded for his hard work with a well-deserved sinecure, the presidency of the Norwegian central bank, rumour has it that Ursula von der Leyen, currently president of the European Commission, will be promoted to succeed him. This would complete the EU’s subordination to NATO – that other, much more powerful international organization headquartered in Brussels which, unlike the EU, includes, and indeed is dominated by, the United States. In her earlier life, von der Leyen was, of course, German Defence Minister under Merkel, although according to general impression one of the more incompetent ones. While in this capacity she shared in the responsibility for the allegedly dismal condition of the German armed forces at the beginning of the Ukrainian war, she has now apparently been forgiven on account of her ardent Americanism-as-Europeanism or, as the case may be, Europeanism-as-Americanism. In any case, an agreement on closer cooperation was signed by the EU and NATO in January 2023, made possible not least by Finland and Sweden ending their neutrality and joining NATO. According to FAZ, the agreement establishes ‘in no uncertain terms the priority of the Alliance with respect to the collective defence of Europe’, thereby enshrining the leading role of the United States in European security policy, broadly defined.

The German government is now busy assembling battlefield-ready battalions of tanks of different European builds (the American M1 Abrams are said to arrive in a few months – how many months exactly is kept a secret – in Europe, where their Ukrainian crews will be trained on German military bases). It will also supply and keep in good repair the fighter planes that Germany, along with the United States, still refuses to deliver to Ukraine (though not for much longer if experience is to be a guide). Meanwhile Rheinmetall announced that it will build a tank factory in Ukraine with a capacity of 400 latest-model battle tanks per year. Also, on the eve of the 21 April meeting of the Ramstein support group, Germany signed an agreement with Poland and Ukraine on a repair shop, located in Poland, for Leopards damaged at the Ukrainian front, to go into operation already at the end of 2023 (obviously on the assumption that the war will not have ended by then). Add to this the promise, freely renewed by von der Leyen on behalf of the EU, that Ukraine will after the war be rebuilt at European, meaning German, expense – no mention, incidentally, of a contribution from the Ukrainian oligarchs, not many in number, but each of them all the richer for that. Indeed, an early April visit to Kiev by the German Economy Minister, Robert Habeck, together with a delegation of CEOs of large German firms, provided an opportunity to explore future business opportunities in the reconstruction of Ukraine once the war is over.

This may not happen anytime soon, however. The recently leaked American documents and the pronouncements of the semi-official commentariat indicate that a Ukrainian Endsieg is not expected imminently, if it is expected at all. Western delivery of military hardware seems to be fine-tuned to enable the Ukrainian army to hold its position; when the Russians gain territory, Ukraine will be given as much artillery, ammunition, tanks and fighter planes as it needs to push them back. A Ukrainian victory, however, declared essential for the survival of the Ukrainian people by its governing party, seems not to be on the American shopping list anymore. Looking at the delivery schedules for Abrams tanks and fighter bombers, to the extent that they can be gleaned from official announcements, the expectation is rather for something like drawn-out trench warfare with heavy bloodshed on both sides. It is interesting in this context that, in an apparently unguarded moment during one of his daily television addresses, Zelensky, demanding as always more Western military support, argued that Ukraine must win the war before the end of 2023 because the Ukrainian people may not be willing to bear its burden much longer.

As the United States proceeds towards Europeanizing the war, it will be up to Germany not just to organize Western support for Ukraine but also to impress upon the Ukrainian government that at the end of the day this support may not suffice for the kind of victory that Ukrainian nationalists claim the Ukrainian nation needs. As American franchisee for the war, Germany will be first in line to take the blame if its outcome falls short of public expectations in Eastern Europe, in the United States, among German pro-Ukrainian militants, and certainly in Ukraine itself. This prospect must be even more uncomfortable for the German government, since it appears increasingly unlikely that how the war ends will be decided in Europe. An important, possibly decisive player in the background will be China, with its longstanding policies of opposing any use of nuclear arms and abstaining from delivering arms to countries at war, including Russia. Following a short visit to Beijing, Scholz claimed that these were concessions to Germany, even though they date back much further. Indeed, the apparent American reluctance to enable Ukraine to go for an all-out victory, leaving post-operational rehabilitation to Germany, may be motivated by a desire to enable China to stick to its policy – which it might not be able to do if Russia and its regime were at some point pushed against the wall. If this was not merely a tacit understanding but rather some sort of negotiated agreement, it would certainly not be made public at a time when the Biden administration is making preparations to go to war with China.

The super-nationalists in Kiev may already smell a rat. Shortly after the latest meeting of the Ramstein group, Deputy Foreign Minister Andriy Melnyk, representative of the classical-fascist Bandera element in the Ukrainian government, expressed his country’s gratitude for the promised arms deliveries. At the same time, he let it be known that they were pitifully insufficient to ensure a Ukrainian victory in 2023; for this, Melnyk insisted, no less than ten times as many tanks, planes, howitzers and the like would be required. Again applying dietristic hermeneutics, Melnyk, trained at Harvard University, must have known that this was bound to annoy his American patrons. That he doesn’t seem to care implies that he and his comrades-in-arms consider Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’ already underway. It also signals both the despair of the governing Ukrainian clique regarding the prospects of the war, as well as its willingness to fight to the bitter end, driven by the radical-nationalist belief that real nations grow on the battlefield, watered with the blood of their best.

The approaching nadir of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism signals the emergence of a new global order, the contours of which, including the place of Europe and the European Union, can be discerned only by bringing China into the picture. As the United States turns its attention to the Pacific, its aim is to build a global alliance encircling China, to keep Beijing from contesting American control of the Pacific. This would replace the unipolar world of the failed neocon ‘Project for a New American Century’ with a bipolar one: globalization, and indeed hyperglobalization, now with two centres, much like the Cold War of old, with a remote prospect of a return, perhaps after another hot war, to only one centre, a New World Order Mark II. (Capitalism, we must remind ourselves, transformed and re-formed itself more fundamentally and effectively than ever in the wake of the two Great Wars of the twentieth century, in 1918 and in 1945, securing its survival by taking a new shape; surely there must be some memory in the centres of capitalist grand-strategy of the rejuvenating effects of war.)

China’s geostrategic project, by contrast, seems to be a multipolar world. For reasons of both geography and military capacity, the goal of Chinese foreign and security policy cannot really be a bipolar order with China battling the United States for global dominance, nor a unipolar world with itself at the centre. As a land power bordering on a large number of potentially hostile nations, it needs first and foremost something like a cordon sanitaire, whereby its neighbouring countries are bound together with China by shared physical infrastructure, freely awarded credit, and a commitment to stay out of alliances with potentially hostile external powers – as opposed to the American desire to subject the world as a whole to a globalized Monroe Doctrine. (The United States has only two neighbours, Canada and Mexico, which are quite unlikely to turn into Chinese allies.) In addition, China actively encourages the formation of something like a league of non-aligned regional powers, including Brazil, South Africa, India and others: a new Third World which would keep out of a Sino-American confrontation and, importantly, refuse to join American economic sanctions against China and its new client state, Russia.

In fact, indications are that China would prefer to be seen as a neutral power among others, rather than one of two combatants for world domination, at least as long as it cannot be sure it would not lose a war against the United States. A desire to avoid a new bipolarism along the lines of the first Cold War would account for China’s refusal to provide arms to Russia, even though Ukraine is being armed to the teeth by the United States. (China can afford this because Russia has no choice other than to fall in line with it, arms or not, no matter the price China might extract for its protection.) In this context, the one-hour telephone conversation between Xi and Zelensky on 26 April, mentioned only in passing by most of the European press, may have been something of a turning point. Apparently Xi offered himself as mediator in the Russian-Ukrainian war, on the basis of a Chinese twelve-point peace plan that had been talked down as trivial and useless by Western leaders, if they took notice at all. Remarkably, Zelensky called the conversation ‘meaningful’, elaborating that ‘particular attention was paid to the ways of possible cooperation to establish a just and sustainable peace for Ukraine.’ If successful, the Chinese intervention might be of formative significance for the emerging global order after the end of the end of history.

In recent months the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has been crisscrossing the world on a mission to whip as many countries as possible into the American camp of a renewed bipolarism, by appealing to liberal – ‘Western’ – values, offering diplomatic, economic and military support, and threatening economic sanctions. In her capacity as America’s roaming ambassador, Baerbock’s credibility requires that her own country strictly follow the American line, including cutting China out of the global economy. This, however, is in fundamental conflict with the interests of German industry, and by extension of Germany as a country, forcing Baerbock to tread an awkward, often outright contradictory line in relation to China. For example, while she framed her recent visit to Beijing in aggressive and even hostile rhetoric both before her arrival and after her departure – so much so that her Chinese counterpart felt it necessary to explain to her at a joint press conference that the last thing China needed was lectures from the West – she also apparently indicated that German sanctions might be selective rather than all-encompassing, with trade relations in several industrial sectors continuing more or less unabated.

With an eye to what might be going on backstage, one may speculate whether Scholz could have managed to get the United States to give Germany some rope in its relations with its most important export market, as a reward for running the European war effort in Ukraine in line with American requirements. On the other hand, German producers seem to have recently lost market share in China, dramatically so in cars, where Chinese customers are spurning new electric vehicles from Germany in favour of homegrown ones. While this may be because German models are considered less attractive, German anti-Chinese rhetoric may have played a role in a country with strong nationalist and anti-Western sentiment. If this is so, it suggests that the problem of German industry being too dependent on China may be about to resolve itself.

German China policy, following the US’s bipolar world political project, causes conflicts not only domestically but also internationally, most of all with France, where it threatens to tear the European Union even further apart. French aspirations to ‘strategic autonomy’ for ‘Europe’ (and ‘strategic sovereignty’ for France) stand a chance only in a multipolar world populated by a good number of politically significant non-aligned countries, quite similar to what the Chinese seem to want. To what extent this implies some kind of equidistance to the United States and China is a question left open, probably deliberately, by Emmanuel Macron. Sometimes he seems to want equidistance, sometimes he denies that he wants it. In any case, this prospect is anathematized by German pro-Western militants, above all by the Greens who now control German foreign policy. Among them, suspicions run deep of Macron’s occasional protestations that ‘strategic autonomy’ is compatible with transatlantic loyalty, at a time of growing confrontation between ‘the West’ and the new East Asian Evil Empire. As a result, France is more isolated than ever in the EU.

Macron, like previous French presidents, has always known that in order to dominate the European Union, France needs Germany on its side, or more precisely, in Brussels jargon: on the backseat of a French-German tandem. His problem is that Germany has now dismounted the bicycle, and for good. Under Green leadership it dreams, together with Poland and the Baltic states in particular, of delivering Putin to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which requires Ukrainian-German tanks to drive into Moscow, just as Soviet tanks once drove into Berlin. Macron, instead, wants to allow Putin to ‘save face’ and hopes to offer Russia a resumption of economic relations, after a ceasefire mediated, if not by France, then perhaps by a coalition of non-aligned countries from the ‘Global South’, or even by China.

The Götterdämmerung of Franco-German domination of the European Union, and the transformation of its ruins into an anti-Russian economic and military infrastructure run by Eastern European countries on behalf of American trans-Atlanticism, was never more visible than in Macron’s trip to China on 6 April, following Scholz (4 November) and preceding Baerbock (13 April). Strangely, Macron allowed von der Leyen to accompany him, according to some as a German gouvernante charged with preventing him from embracing Xi too passionately, according to others to demonstrate to the Chinese that the president of the EU was not a real president but a subordinate to the President of France, ruling not just his own country but all of the EU with it. The Chinese, who may or may not have understood Macron’s signals, treated him royally although they were undoubtedly aware of his domestic troubles; von der Leyen, known as the Atlanticist hardliner that she is, was given a special non-treatment. While flying back on his plane, von der Leyen no longer travelling with him, Macron explained to the press that American allies are not American vassals, a remark widely understood to imply, again, that Europe’s position should be one of equal distance from China and the United States. Germany, first and foremost its Foreign Minister, was appalled and let it be known, no holds barred, with the German media dutifully and unanimously following suit.

A few days later, on 11 April, Baerbock attended the meeting of the G7 foreign ministers in Japan. There she got her colleagues, including the one from France, to pledge as much allegiance as humanly possible to the American flag, standing as it does for one world indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. By this time Macron, noting that his rhetorical battle against French vassalage had gone unnoticed by the opponents of his pension reform, had already backpedalled and, again, professed everlasting loyalty to NATO and the United States. There is no reason, however, to believe that this will halt the Zeitenwende of the European Union underway with the Ukrainian war: the split between France and Germany and the ascent of the East European member states to European dominance following the return of the United States to Europe under Biden, in preparation for a global confrontation with the Land of Xi, in the untiring American effort to make the world safe for democracy.

Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Weapon of Power, Matrix of Management’, NLR 140/141.

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Counterpoises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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