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Gunshots in Khartoum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Immersive Hell

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

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

The Deliverance and the Patience, 2001 (detail).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Asset Strippers (Khorsabad, shed), 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

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Plenipotentiary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An earlier version of this article appeared in Sabzian.

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

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Finland’s Turn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Farmers’ Revolt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Strange Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Drowning in Deposits

The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank and its knock-on effects such as the bailout of Credit Suisse has elicited the usual flurry of social-psychologizing in the ‘quality press’. On a recent New York Times podcast, the former Treasury official Morgan Ricks reached new heights of pseudo-profundity by claiming that the problem was ‘panic itself’ – and that it could be resolved simply by extending a blanket guarantee to all depositors.

Such an account of the crisis provides no concrete explanation of what happened. The precise causes of the bank’s collapse are, of course, debatable; yet the basic structural context and its main lessons seem clear. SVB, which is supposed to serve what is widely viewed as the most dynamic and innovative sector of the global economy, ‘tech’, had parked a huge quantity of its deposits in low-yield – but supposedly safe – government-backed securities and low-interest bonds. When the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates, the value of these bonds declined, setting off a classic bank run as depositors scrambled to withdraw their money. Was the panic facilitated by social media or other means of digital communication that encouraged herd behaviour? Who knows, and who cares? The crucial point is that the bank was overwhelmed by the massive growth in deposits from its tech clients – and neither it nor they could find anything worthwhile to invest in.

In short, the SVB collapse is a beautiful, almost paradigmatic, demonstration of the fundamental structural problem of contemporary capitalism: a hyper-competitive system, clogged with excess capacity and savings, with no obvious outlets to soak them up. It must be emphasized that the current vogue for ‘industrial policy’ – quite pronounced in both the Biden and Macron governments inter alia – will do nothing to address this underlying issue. The immediate practical problem with a new round of investment in which the state seeks to incentivize capital is clear enough. The investors will want their quarterly returns. Why would they tie up capital in vastly ambitious projects, to promote the green transition or increase investment in health and education, which will have long time horizons and uncertain returns? More importantly, even if such a strategy were workable, would it be desirable?

Here we must speak clearly to the section of the left that might be described as ‘neo-Kautskyite’. It is clear by now that the Biden Administration is in no way a rerun of the Clinton-Obama years. It has an anti-neoliberal wing that is more than willing to deploy the power of the state to shape the ‘private sector’ (that peculiar neologism that ‘policymakers’ use to refer to capital). Some of its members would like to go further and engage in direct government investment. Their sincere desire is to create well-paid jobs and green the economy. In response, many on the US left criticize Biden’s programme for its political compromises and timidity. But how different is it, really, from the various notions of ‘interstitial transition’ so common among those who conceive of socialism’s establishment as an updated New Deal? Not much, branding aside.

The problem is that neither the Biden administration, nor the neo-Kautskyites, have a credible answer to the structural logic of capital. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Bidenomics in its most ambitious form were successful. What exactly would this mean? Above all it would lead to the onshoring of industrial capacity in both chip manufacturing and green tech. But that process would unfold in a global context in which all the other capitalist powers were vigorously attempting to do more or less the same thing. The consequence of this simultaneous industrialization drive would be a massive exacerbation of the problems of overcapacity on a world scale, putting sharp pressure on the returns of the same private capital that was ‘crowded-in’ by ‘market-making’ industrialization policies.

How might the US government react to this conjuncture? The response would likely be increased state support, which might take the form of monetary juicing leading to asset bubbles (what Robert Brenner has described as ‘bubblenomics’) or direct profitability guarantees. But this would only exacerbate the phenomenon of political capitalism. That is, directly political mechanisms would become increasingly necessary to generate returns.

What would be an adequate response to this dilemma from the standpoint of a humanized society? The main point is that no socialist should advocate an ‘industrial policy’ of any sort, nor have any truck with self-defeating New Deals, green or otherwise. What the planet and humanity need is massive investment in low-return, low-productivity activities: care, education and environmental restoration. Capital is incapable of doing this. It seeks ‘value’ which these sectors struggle to produce. The underlying reason is obvious: neither health, nor culture, nor the Umwelt function very well as commodities. Thus, as Oskar Lange had already intuited in the 1930s, gradualism cannot work. The commanding heights of the economy – in this period, finance – must be seized at once. Any other strategy will lead either to the cul-de-sac described above or to massive capital flight. Under current conditions, half-measures are self-contradictory absurdities. Blather about New Deals and sepia-toned ‘Rooseveltologia’ should be exposed for what it is: a backward-facing obstacle to the establishment of socialism. 

Read on: Dylan Riley & Robert Brenner, ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, NLR 138.

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The French Uprising

On Monday, 20 March, the homepages of the French national news sites were overcome with excitement as they reported on the vote of no-confidence in the government: tallying how deputies were likely to cast their ballots, assessing the motion’s chances, envisioning the wheeling and dealing, playing the insider – what a delight. Political journalism: a passport for political inanity.

Meanwhile, politics, with all its sudden force, has seized the country. Spontaneous events erupt on all sides: unannounced walkouts, road blockages, riotous outbursts and demonstrations, assemblies of student activists; youthful energy fills the Place de la Concorde, the streets. Everyone feels as if they are walking on hot coals, impatience coursing through their legs – but not on account of the trivialities which continue to occupy the Parisian goldfish bowl, its inhabitants each more ignorant than the next about what we’re now reaching: boiling point.

It’s beautiful what happens when the ruling order starts to unravel. Small but incredible things occur that shatter the resigned isolation and atomization on which the powerful rely. Here, farmers bring bags of vegetables to striking rail workers; there, a Lebanese restaurant owner hands out falafels to kettled protestors; students join pickets; soon, we’ll see individuals opening their doors to hide demonstrators from the police. The real movement has begun. We can already say that the situation is pre-revolutionary. What are its prospects? Might the ‘pre-’ be shaken off?

In France, the legitimacy of the power structure has collapsed; it is now nothing more than a coercive bloc. Having demolished all other mediations, the autocrat is separated from the people only by a police line. Nothing can be ruled out, for reason deserted him long ago.

Macron has never accepted otherness. He is in conversation only with himself; the outside world does not exist. That is why his speech – if we focus on the real meaning of his words – bears no trace of the collective validation that comes from rational discussion with others. On 3 June 2022, he could affirm, without batting an eyelid, that ‘the French are tired of reforms that come from above’; on 29 September that ‘the citizen is not someone on whom decisions will be imposed’. Isn’t it obvious that, confronted with a leader of this kind, there can be no possibility of dialogue? That nothing he says can ever be taken seriously? Such a person is incapable of owning up to any error save factitious ones, since you have to listen to the ‘outside’, to the non-self, to realize that you’ve made a mistake. This is why Macron’s promises of ‘reinvention’ – so enchanting to journalists – can be nothing other than pantomimes, produced in closed circuit.

For the despot, left to his own devices by political institutions that were always potentially – and are now actually – liberticidal, all forms of violence are foreseeable. Anything can happen; indeed, everything is happening. The footage of kettling on the rue Montorgueil this Sunday sends a clear signal that Macronian politics are in the process of dissolving. From now on, power governs by roundup. The police will cart off and arrest anyone, including passers-by with no connection to the protest, scared men and women, stupefied by what is happening to them. A single message: don’t go out in the street, stay home, watch TV, obey.

Here, the unconscious deal between the police and its recruits comes into view: an agreement between an institution dedicated to violence and individuals searching for legal sanction for their own violent impulses. A pre-revolutionary situation presents an unequalled opportunity, when power can cling on only by force, when acts of force acquire disproportionate significance – as well as a carte blanche. As we saw during the gilets jaunes, now is the time of sadists, of brutes in uniform.

In this context, the slogan ‘la police avec nous!’ is entirely obsolete, no longer has a chance: it rested on the illusion of objective social proximity, a vulgar materialism of ‘shared interests’, which is now overridden by the libidinal sway of authorized violence. This is how a structure produces its effects, and an order satisfies its needs: it travels by relay through the psyches of its chosen functionaries, from Macron at the top right down to the last police thug in the street.

Counterforces protect us, however, from descent into tyranny, or more plainly, from being crushed by the cops. It is possible that some remnant of morality, some notion of tipping points and limits, still lingers within the state apparatus – though certainly not in the Ministry of the Interior, which has been entirely overrun by pox, and where a quasi-fascist minister reigns supreme. But perhaps in the cabinets, in the ‘entourages’ where, at any moment, an awareness of political transgression, an anxiety about committing an irreparable act, might develop. Yet, as we know, it’s better not to count on hypotheses that require a leap of virtue (a secular form of miracle), all the more so given the corruption, moral as much as financial, that blights the ‘exemplary republic’.

The excessive actions of the police might yet produce a more material counterforce. Not in the heat of a few localised battles – without the development of specialist tactics, these are probably hopeless – but in the country as a whole. If, somewhere in the Ministry of the Interior, there is a ‘big board’ in the style of Dr Strangelove, it must be twinkling like a Christmas tree – covered only in red. The police could just about hold out during the gilets jaunes because these protests took place in a limited number of cities at a rate of once a week. Now they are all over France and every day. The marvellous power of numbers – they horrify the powerful everywhere. Fatigue is already visible behind the visors. But as yet the thugs haven’t finished racking up kilometres in their paddy wagons. What is needed are fireworks, so that the tree becomes nothing more than a huge garland and the big board blows a fuse. Exhaustion of the police: a nerve centre for the movement.

There is, finally, a resource of another order: hatred of the police – insofar as it is a driving force. When power lets loose its henchmen, two radically different results can follow: intimidation, or the tenfold multiplication of rage. Upheavals occur when the first mutates into the second. There are many reasons to believe we’ve reached this stage. Antipathy towards the police promises to attain hitherto unknown breadths and depths. Yet Macron sticks with them; ipso facto, hatred of the them is converted into hatred of him. At present, we don’t yet know how he will end up – the best-case scenario would doubtless be in a helicopter.

Is it increasingly apparent that by dint of wanting to occupy the throne, to hoard all the glory, Macron has tied himself to the retirement law and the police – such that, by metonymy, he has become the living synthesis of all these particular hatreds: ultimately their sole object. By another metonymic twist, as much as by structural necessity, he likewise clings to the ‘capitalist order’. So the question on the agenda is now: how to put an end to ‘Macron-the-capitalist-order’. That is to say, a revolutionary question.

The question posed can be revolutionary without the situation necessarily being so. History has shown that there are two possible tendencies here: waiting until such a situation forms ‘by itself’, or actively helping it into existence – not without difficulty, perhaps, but with possible assistance from rhythms which, in certain conjunctures, can undergo dazzling accelerations. In any case, we won’t move from the ‘pre-revolutionary’ present to the ‘revolutionary’ future simply through the negative force of refusal. An affirmation is also necessary, a galvanizing reason ‘for’ that unifies the opposition. What could it be? The answer must be equal to the country’s ongoing uprising, even if the form of that uprising remains undefined. For an insurrection to develop into a means, not an end, for it to become a truly revolutionary process, it must be able to formulate a positive political desire in which the majority can recognize itself. You don’t have to look for too long to find one. In reality it’s all we know: to take care of our own business, beginning with production. The positive political desire, opposed by capitalism and bourgeois political institutions on point of principle, is that of sovereignty.

Sovereignty of the producers over production – here is a slogan with appeal, and well beyond the working class, those most directly concerned. Because, increasingly, those we call ‘white-collar workers’ also suffer from managerial stultification, from the blind control of shareholders, from the idiocy if not toxicity of their bosses’ choices. They aspire – a tremendous aspiration – to have a say on all that which has been taken from them.

Legitimacy, and consequently sovereignty, belongs only to those who do the work. As for those who, despite their complete ignorance, nevertheless claim to organize the work of others – consultants and planners – they are nothing but parasites and must be driven out. The ultimate, irrefutable argument for the sovereignty of workers has been made by one trade unionist, Eric Lietchi of the Paris Energy branch of the CGT. The facts speak for themselves, as Lietchi observes: under the management of the parasite class, the country has been destroyed. The legal system is in ruins, education is in ruins, universities and research are in ruins, hospitals are in ruins as is the pharmaceutical supply – apothecaries are enjoined to cook up amoxycillin in the back of their shops. Last autumn, wrote Borne, the country could only hope that ‘by the grace of God’ it wouldn’t get so cold that the electricity grid, in ruins like everything else, might collapse over the winter. Teachers were hired in thirty-minute ‘flash recruitment’ drives. Civil servants were seconded as bus drivers – will stints as train drivers be next? And, amid all this, people are going hungry. One wouldn’t have thought it possible to write such a thing today but, here we are: a quarter of French people don’t get enough to eat. Young people are hungry. There are endless queues at foodbanks. Between this deprivation and the actions of police, if France 2 were to produce a programme on the ‘big picture’, without revealing the country in which it was filmed, a solidarity something-or-other would be organized in an instant – Binoche would cut off a lock of hair and Glücksmann pen a column – for these unfortunates on the other side of the world.

In the space of a few decades, and especially since 2017, an entire social model has been brought to its knees. They have brought the country to its knees. Not the CGT, not the Intersyndicale (if only) – they and they alone have done this. The country has been ruined by the competent. It is in a state of total disorganization. As we know, to oust the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie promoted university degrees and meritocratic symbols as replacements for blood and lineage. Hence a paradox (of which there are many) within late capitalism: the incompetence of the bourgeoisie has itself become a historical force, one which a minimal amendment to Schumpeter allows us to identify: destructive destruction. Or, to give it its proper name: McKinsey.

Here is where Lietchi’s argument acquires its fullest significance. Because the idea of workers’ sovereignty, usually dismissed as belonging to a dreamworld, now emerges as the logical consequence of an irrefutable analysis, whose conclusion is equally trenchant: we must get rid of these imbecilic pests and take back the totality of production. They didn’t know how to run it? The workers will – they already know. We could ask ourselves, what is the real meaning given to the phrase ‘general strike’? Not a general stoppage of work, but an initial act of the general reappropriation of tools – the beginning of workers’ sovereignty.

It is at this moment that the event signals its unprecedented power, even if, for the time being, that power resides only in the imagination. Incredible to imagine the effect on the physiognomy of companies when they are returned to the hands of their employees. Incredible to imagine the reorganization of public services when they are directed by those who know how to maintain and control the railway tracks, how to teach others to do so safely, how to drive the trains, how to signal, how to deliver the post while having time to talk to people. Incredible to imagine universities open to the public, the emancipation of art from the bourgeois artist and its capitalist sponsors. Incredible to imagine the collapse of the bourgeoisie, the historic condemnation of its characteristic mixture of arrogance and stupidity: unable to do anything itself, it only ever had things done for it.  

We can agree, of course, that we’ll need to be armed with more than just imagination – so much the better. But such imaginative scenarios do, at least, focus the mind. They give it a common direction, one derived from the political question that must be applied in all situations: who decides? The question is itself derived from a specific principle: all those concerned have a right to decide. This principle itself marks a watershed. The bourgeoisie believe that only they are competent enough to make decisions. CNews, which acts as their mouthpiece, is fully aware of the current peril: ‘Should we fear a return to communism?’ asks an anguished chyron. They are wise, no doubt unintentionally, to wonder – since ‘communism’ is correctly understood as the opposing party, the party of all, the party of general sovereignty, the party of equality.

The extraordinary uprising of the gilets jaunes never, to its disfavour, addressed the question of wages. As for the official voices tasked with posing this question, cogs installed in the warm centre of the system, they have never ceased to depoliticize it, transforming it into a mere matter of collective agreements. With and under such enlightened leadership we subscribed to defeat.

But now, in the space of two months, everything has changed. The forms of struggle diversify and complement each other: we can no longer separate the Thursday protests, massive but in vain, from the undeclared protests that keep the police on the run until the end of the night. The substance of class struggle is flowing into the mould of the gilets jaunes. It is an unprecedented combination, so long awaited; this time, astounding.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique.

Read on: Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘The French Insurgency’, NLR 116/117.  

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Atomizing

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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Crisis in Slow Motion?

Financial hegemony died its first death during the crisis of 2008. Set off by the over-indebtedness of poor borrowers in the United States, this cataclysm demonstrated that the promises extended by complex financial products were nothing but phantasmagorias, unconnected to our economies’ real capacity to produce wealth. As if, in Marx’s phrase, ‘money could generate value and yield interest, much as it is an attribute of pear-trees to bear pears’.

The chain reaction that followed the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy exposed the myth of self-regulating financial markets. Incapable of supporting itself, finance had to abandon its claim to be the totalizing element of economic life, the site where the hopes of today would harmoniously align with the resources of tomorrow. At the commanding heights, however, this pretension persisted. In the throes of the Great Recession, amid the spasms of the Eurozone crisis and throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the authorities never stopped prioritizing financial stability. For example, in 2020 and 2021, to ensure that the effects of lockdown did not cause another collapse, the European Central Bank practically doubled its balance sheet, adding liquidity and buying securities to the tune of €4,000 billion: roughly a third of the Eurozone GDP, or €12,000 per inhabitant.

Now, the second death of financial hegemony has come at the hands of wealthy investors in Californian tech. In 2008, the banks were saved, but bankrupt borrowers were forced to abandon their homes. In 2023, start-ups and venture capitalists pleaded for, and obtained, Washington’s support to recuperate their savings from Silicon Valley Bank. As panic mounted, banks were once again rescued by sovereign largesse and liquidity valves were opened wide. (A great irony for a sector impregnated with libertarian ideology and profoundly hostile to state intervention.)

The scale of this support can be increased as needed. On 12 March, the Fed introduced the Bank Term Funding Program, a mechanism through which it accepts as loan collateral assets priced at their nominal value: that is to say their purchase price, rather than what they are actually worth on the market. The balance sheets of financial institutions were thus, as if by magic, immunized against losses. Better still, when Credit Suisse was saved by its compatriot UBS, the Swiss National Bank opened a €100 billion liquidity line – accessible, this time, without any guarantees. It seems that the ‘de-risking state’, as the British-based economist Daniela Gabor calls it, is working overtime to prevent a debacle like that of 2008.

This makes another mega-crash improbable. Although, naturally, an act of monumental stupidity by someone or other cannot be excluded. Remember that the rate hikes announced in 2011 by Jean-Claude Trichet’s ECB helped to encourage speculative attacks on Greek debt. This obvious error, compounded by short-sightedness and incompetence on the part of European politicians, plunged the continent into a social and economic crisis that was perfectly avoidable. On 16 March, the decision by that same ECB to raise rates by 0.5%, this time under the direction of Christine Lagarde, brings back bad memories. But obstinacy in pursuing monetary tightening despite unfortunate precedent is, above all, revealing of a radically new macroeconomic context.

‘Given that the processes underlying price and financial stability differ’, observed the economist Claude Borio, ‘it is not surprising that there may be material tensions between the two objectives.’ With inflation around 8%, these ‘tensions’ have become a major dilemma for central banks – one that calls into question the hegemony of finance itself. At present, central banks can prioritize the fight against inflation at the risk of precipitating the collapse of the financial system; or else, to address banking and financial turbulence, they can enlarge access to liquidity through different channels. In the latter case, they run up against the restrictive policy aimed at proving their determination to control rising prices. This dynamic threatens to gradually erode the value of debt and financial assets. Condemned to contraction, finance must choose between apoplexy – a crash – or a slow decrepitude, under the effects of rising prices. The coming period may therefore be one of a long, slow-motion financial crisis.

This conjuncture may also mark an inflection point for ultra-powerful central banks. Whether it’s the fight against inflation or the conditions of financing the economy, these institutions appear to be in over their heads. Price caps, surveillance of business margins, multi-annual salary negotiations, credit policies, investment banks and public services, and the development of social protection are all instruments that permit better coordination of economic activity over the long term, on the condition that strict regulation arrives to deflate the unsustainable financial sphere. Our epoch has more important things to worry about than the ups and downs of the market. The time has come to say farewell to financialization for good. It will only die twice.

Translated by Grey Anderson. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Le Monde.

Read on: Cédric Durand, ‘The End of Financial Hegemony?’, NLR 138.