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Zeno’s Return

Zeno Cosini has difficulty lying, though not for lack of trying. Over and over, he tries to fib, but his inventions have a funny way of hardening into realities. He proposes to a woman as a desperate joke – only to end up marrying her. He tells a friend that his daughter is ill to escape a dull social engagement – only to find that the girl has come down with a fever. The narrator of Italo Svevo’s modernist masterpiece is an honest man despite himself, even and especially when he is fashioning the complex and contradictory fiction of the self.

Zeno’s Conscience was published in 1923, when selves were forged on Freudian’s fainting sofas. Accordingly, it takes the form of journal entries that its narrator maintains at the behest of his psychoanalyst. The disgruntled doctor introduces his client’s confessions by noting that he is publishing them ‘in revenge’; Zeno has betrayed him, he tells us, by abandoning analysis. But the patient persists with one aspect of his treatment, even when he no longer has any hope of being healed: like a true incurable, he goes on writing, scribbling the last sections of Zeno’s Conscience long after he accepted the intransigence of his Oedipus complex and his fears of castration. As it turns out, his graphomania persists even when his native novel is over: A Very Old Man, newly translated by Felicia Randall and published by New York Review Classics last year, contains a new store of Zeno’s post-analysis reflections. Svevo intended to massage the five interlinked pieces that comprise the volume into a full-fledged sequel, but he died in 1928, before he had the chance. The texts he left behind are charming if uneven, not quite stories so much as sketches that pick up where the first book left off.

Zeno’s Conscience begins with Zeno’s childhood recollections and weaves, with non-linear and free-associative good humor, to 1916, when he is well on his way to middle age. Its setting is Trieste, the initially Austro-Hungarian and subsequently Italian city where Zeno leads an outwardly comfortable (if inwardly overwrought) life. His journal is a witty record of his central biographical episodes: the death of his father, his unexpectedly affectionate marriage to the sister of the woman he thought he loved, his long-standing affair with a talentless singer, and the business that he and his brother-in-law jointly mismanage into bankruptcy.

Yet the drama and delight of Zeno’s Conscience are generated less by these bourgeois staples than by the narrator’s gift for creating problems for himself. Zeno is addicted to various fictions, foremost among them the fiction of his own frailty. As he describes his hypochondria, ‘Disease is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction’. Near the end of the first book, he is thrilled to receive a provisional diagnosis of diabetes, which at last confirms his conception of himself as an invalid; when further testing reveals that he is not diabetic after all, he remains unwilling to accept the sunny news. Perhaps Zeno’s real affliction is the highly modern malady of excessive self-awareness: ‘health doesn’t analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves’, he meditates at one point. Or perhaps he suffers from the degenerative disease of life itself. ‘Unlike other sicknesses’, he writes in the last section Zeno’s Conscience, ‘life is always fatal. It doesn’t tolerate therapies’. 

Another of Zeno’s most cherished fictions is that of his own resolve. The word ‘resolution’ occurs more than twenty times in William Weaver’s nimble translation of Zeno’s Conscience and six times in Randall’s A Very Old Man. (Twice, these resolutions are ‘ironclad’.) But Zeno is not capable of honouring a single one of these commitments, the ironclad ones least of all. In university, he resolves to dedicate himself to chemistry, then law, but cannot commit to a field and goes on switching back and forth; later, he resolves to leave his mistress but cannot bring himself to give her up, and the affair comes to an end only when she runs off with her music teacher. Perhaps Zeno’s most hilariously inefficacious resolutions concern his smoking habit. He is forever lighting last cigarettes, vowing over and over to quit for good. ‘In my desire to quit smoking altogether, I had never even considered the possibility of smoking less’, he explains, affably unreasonable as ever. He even visits a doctor who locks him in a room – and immediately bribes the attendant on guard to sneak him contraband cigarettes, then to free him. Why does he insist on going to the clinic, only to clamber out the window at the first opportunity? Perhaps the best answer is only the comic spectacle of his consistent inconsistency.

* * *

In A Very Old Man, Zeno is still the same cheerfully inconstant specimen, only now he is ‘very old’. The book opens in 1928, twelve years after the first set of journal entries ended and eight years after Trieste has been incorporated into Italy. Its contents are evidently unfinished drafts, riddled with redundant chunks of exposition and chronological discrepancies. Sometimes Zeno is sixty-one, sometimes sixty-three, sometimes seventy. His daughter, Antonia, is now a full-blown adult, and his son, Alfio, has soured into a moody teenager. Both characters are older than they have any right to be, given that the latter was a baby and the former a young child when Zeno’s Conscience ended. But these are quibbles, inimical to Zeno’s own eccentric logic. He has always been an unreliable narrator, and even if the ages are wrong, the emotional dynamics are right. What matters is that neither sibling has grown into a very likeable person.

Antonia is a bore, drunk on her own righteousness.  ‘I like to think she inherited the virtue from her mother and the exaggeration from me’, Zeno jokes.  Her husband, Valentino, is a stuffy businessman who dies of ‘premature aging’. The couple’s seven-year-old child, Umbertino, is the most redeeming consequence of their otherwise tedious union, and Zeno delights in his morning walks with his tirelessly curious grandson. Alfio, for his part, has become even more intolerable than his sister. An aspiring artist of staggering self-importance and enormous fragility, he is slow to compromise and quick to take offense. Zeno makes several concessions – he buys two of the boy’s paintings and even talks himself into admiring one of them – before wounding his son, perhaps irreparably, by mocking modern art at lunch.

Has Zeno matured now that he is a ‘very old man’? Not a whit, of course. True to form, he has not even managed to quit smoking. If Valentino died of premature aging, then Zeno survives by clinging to endless adolescence. He reports that ‘there is one great difference between the state of mind in which I told my life the first time, and this one. My situation has grown simpler. I continue to struggle between past and present, but hope doesn’t try to come into it, that anxious hope that belongs to the future.’ But he is for the most part the same loveable neurotic. He still laughs at his own pathologies – ‘I’m unable to quit smoking because my determination collapses when the news is good, when it’s bad, and when there’s no news at all’, he tells a friend – and he still relishes every sign of sickness.  

And he is still the same master of rationalization: he claims he is keeping the deleterious effects of aging at bay by demonstrating to nature that he remains fit for procreation, that is, by having an affair with a younger woman. ‘Let’s face it’, he writes, ‘Mother Nature is maniacal: she has a mania for reproduction. She’ll keep an organism alive so long as there’s hope it will reproduce. Then she kills it, in many and varied ways….I wanted to trick Mother nature and make her think I was still fit for reproduction, so I found myself a mistress’. He assures us that ‘it wasn’t lechery. I was thinking about death’. He does not especially care for his new lover, a cigarette vendor who has undoubtedly sold him many last smokes, but he knows that to give up on mischief is to give up on vivacity altogether.

Most importantly, the very old man is still a fabulist, and his lies still have marvellous staying power. To save face in front of staid Valentino, he pretends he has concluded a business deal that he is then obligated to go out and conclude. As ever, his circumstances clash with his imaginings – and as ever, it is reality that ultimately gives way and transforms.

* * *

Almost all of Svevo’s central characters resemble Zeno in leading double lives: lives of the imagination that contrast sharply with their lives at the office. In public, they are businessmen; in private, they are artists. ‘His official career was a quite subordinate post in an insurance society….His other career was literary’, Svevo writes of the protagonist of his second novel, As a Man Grows Older. In his gem of a novella, A Perfect Hoax, Mario is another aging writer with an office job who prides himself on the novel he wrote forty years prior. Still, Mario’s decades of inactivity are ‘full of dreams and void of any troublesome experience’, for he persists in regarding himself as ‘destined for glory’. It is this unflagging hope, so easily exploitable, that is the basis of the ‘perfect hoax’ of the title. When Mario’s malicious friend tells him that a major publisher wishes to reissue his book for the German-language market, he is eager to believe the lie.

But in Svevo’s own case, the fiction came true – though for many years, he resembled his obscure characters. Half-Italian and half-German-Jewish Aron Ettore Schmitz was working as a bank clerk in Trieste when he self-published his first novel, A Life, under the curious pseudonym ‘Italo Svevo’ (literally, ‘the Italian Swabian’). The book was roundly ignored. Schmitz continued working in the office, married, and became a partner in his father-in-law’s firm, which manufactured maritime paint. When he came out with the quietly harrowing As a Man Grows Older, it, too, was received with indifference. Schmitz had long retired Italo Svevo when he engaged a young English tutor in preparation for a business trip to England. The tutor was also a writer, and the two men grew close, meeting several times a week and exchanging works in progress. In 1926, when Schmitz sent his friend the manuscript of Zeno’s Conscience, his former tutor championed the text among his literary contacts in Paris.

The tutor was none other than James Joyce, and his circle was soon hailing Zeno’s creator as ‘the Italian Proust’. At last, Schmitz and Svevo converged. Until his death in 1928, Svevo watched his pseudonym subsume his humdrum identity. In exactly the sort of jolting twist that occurs so often in his novels, the old man’s fantasies crystallized into fact.

* * *

In A Perfect Hoax, the aging writer Mario is the victim of a ruse – and yet at least one part of it comes true. There may be no publisher set on resurrecting Mario’s forgotten novel, but the money he invests in expectation of an advance grows in value, until at last he finds himself enriched by a fake deal. More importantly, it emerges that Mario’s attachment to his art is too robust to be undermined by mockery or lack of recognition. For years, he has diverted himself by writing short fables, and in the wake of his humiliation, he discovers that it is not the idea of writing but writing itself that attracts him. The fables are ‘quite pure, not sullied by the hoax’. What begins as a fraud transforms into a premonition. He is the great writer he at first just imagined he was.

In Zeno’s case, the same structure recurs. He sets his heart on marrying the beautiful Ada, with whom he is painfully in love, and when she rejects him, he asks for the hand of her equally beautiful sister, Alberta; when she, too, turns him down, he proposes to plain, kindly Augusta. She initially replies, ‘you’re joking’, but she is soon coaxed into accepting. The real joke is on Zeno, not only because he has to follow through with the wedding, but because the ensuing union is so improbably happy. Ada is right to remark, ‘never did a man who thought he was acting hastily behave more wisely than you’.

Augusta is the right choice largely because she perceives from the first that Zeno’s fabrications are more important than any accurate reports could be. When he entertains the family with outrageous tall tales, his future bride understands at once that his stories are ‘more precious’ by virtue of their falsity. ‘As I had invented them’, Zeno explains, ‘they were more mine than if fate visited them upon me’. In A Very Old Man, he affirms her preference for fiction once again.  ‘The only thing that matters in life is collecting one’s thoughts’, he writes.

When everybody else understands this as clearly as I do, they will all write. Life will be literaturized. Half of humanity will devote itself to reading and studying what the other half has put down. And contemplation will take up as much time as possible – time to be subtracted from horrid real life. If one part of humanity rebels and refuses to read the lucubrations of the other part, so much the better. Each person will read himself. And whether each life becomes clearer or murkier, it will evolve, correct, crystallize.

He prizes his earlier journals because ‘the part of my life described there is the only part I have lived’. There is no Zeno outside of his own exercises in self-fashioning, but by the same token, he really is the person he at first only pretended to be. There is, he knows, no other way to become someone: the only thing to do with ‘horrid real life’ is to ‘literaturize’ it.     

Appropriately enough, Zeno’s final confession in Zeno’s Conscience is that the rest of the book is untrue. He concedes that he ‘invented’ everything in his journal, but consoles us, ‘inventing is a creation, not a lie. Mine were inventions like those of a fever, which walk around the room so that you see them from every side, and then they touch you. They had the solidity, the colour, the insolence of living things’. Zeno himself ‘literaturizes’ constantly. He acts as if he were on the verge of quitting smoking because ‘the taste of a cigarette is more intense when it’s your last’, and the pretext rearranges the world until it is in fact sharper and more beautiful. A last cigarette is more potent than a normal cigarette, even if it is the first of many. When Zeno resolves to quit smoking, when he produces a second set of embellishments about his life as a very old man, when he convinces himself that his affair is an attempt to cheat nature, when Schmitz postures as Svevo – these are the special sort of lies that come to life. In a word, fictions.

Read on: Christopher Prendergast, ‘Modernism’s Nightmare’, NLR 10.

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Renovation in Bolivia?

The 2020 Bolivian general election marked the return of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party to government after it was deposed by a right-wing coup. Since then, the leftist administration of Luis ‘Lucho’ Arce Catacora has tried to fortify itself against another antidemocratic campaign of destabilization by projecting an image of unity and strength. Yet during Arce’s tenure, the internal components of the MAS have grown increasingly discordant – with each factional dispute amplified by a hostile media. The respective supporters of president Arce, vice-president David Choquehuanca, and former president Evo Morales have each been vying for power, attempting to outmanoeuvre their factional opponents ahead of the 2025 elections. Meanwhile, centrifugal tendencies on the right have become even more pronounced, with different currents blaming one another for the left’s ascendancy. The result is an ongoing process of fragmentation across Bolivia’s two major political blocs, neither of which is capable of articulating a coherent ideological project. The country’s historic fault-lines – separating the cities from the countryside; indigenous masses from non-indigenous elites; the south and the east from the north and the west; the media, universities and middle classes from peasant confederations and workers’ unions; agro-industrial, hydrocarbon and financial capitalists from a burgeoning informal proletariat – no longer find self-evident political articulation in two antipodal camps. Beneath the superficial split between masistas and anti-masistas lies a more complex patchwork of rivalries and power centres.

In many respects, the disunity on both sides can be traced back to the 2019 coup d’état. Morales, who was propelled to power by the revolutionary upheavals of the new millennium, had become Bolivia’s longest-serving president and was constitutionally unable to seek re-election. Yet in 2016 he attempted to override these limits through a series of legal and political manipulations. In February of that year, he held a referendum on whether to amend the constitution to allow him to campaign for a fourth term. When 51% of the electorate voted ‘No’, he ignored the results and ran for the presidency anyway, on the basis of a dubious legal verdict from the country’s highest electoral tribunal. This fiasco became a call to arms among middle-class rebels and regional civic committees bent on ousting the MAS.

Bolivia’s electoral system requires the leading presidential candidate to secure more than 50% of the vote, or more than 40% of the vote plus a margin of 10% over the second-place candidate, to avoid a run-off. On the evening of the general election, in late October 2019, the ‘quick count’ tally showed Morales with 45%, compared to 38% for the centre-right runner-up Carlos Mesa. Then, after an unexplained delay of 22 hours, the updated count indicated Morales enjoying a lead over Mesa in excess of 10 points, obviating the need for a second round. The late shift in votes to Morales’s advantage was plausible given the demographics of the regions where ballots were counted later in the process, but the delay between the two tallies created the impression of foul-play. Though it could not provide any evidence, the entire opposition cried fraud – as did the Organization of American States. Violent protests against Morales erupted across the country, and the far-right of the eastern lowlands, backed by the military and police, launched a soft-coup that forced his resignation. The coup was petit-bourgeois and mestizo in composition, with some plebeian layers drawn into the antimasista hysteria. Its rallying cry was one of pure negation: ‘Fuera Evo’. No positive, alternative agenda was ever advanced by its leaders. Yet there was never any doubt about whose interests they were serving: those of agro-industrial, financial and hydrocarbon capital.

The coup-plotters succeeded in installing Jeanine Áñez, an ultra-conservative Catholic senator from Beni whose party had won only 4% in the previous election. With Morales and his inner-circle exiled to Mexico and Argentina, the obvious task for Áñez was to dismantle the statist elements of the MAS era – such as the quasi nationalization of hydrocarbons – and reverse collective indigenous rights. With the popular classes caught in a momentary stupor, and left-wing forces weakened by years of clientelist integration into the state under Morales, Áñez had the tools for oligarchic restoration at her disposal. Yet her regime was undermined from the start by its own ideological and practical excesses: above all, state repression – 36 assassinated, 80 injured, hundreds detained and exiled – and bureaucratic ineptitude in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. It had no plan to assemble a viable support base or manage the country’s economic instability. Instead, its stand-out features were brutal state violence, brazen corruption, administrative incompetence and a colossal decline in living standards, as the growth rate plummeted in 2020 and more than 3 million Bolivians became unable to meet their basic nutritional needs. The government also unleashed a new, virulent wave of anti-indigenous racism in civil society, with the dog whistles of state officials providing a soundtrack.   

As such, Áñez rapidly concentrated workers and peasants into a powerful opposition force, while at the same time losing the loyalty of the petit-bourgeois layers that had originally supported the coup. Amid the ongoing economic and health crises, significant parts of the new middle-class – forged during the expansionary period under Morales – were horrified to find themselves returned to proletarian or lumpen status. At the same time, social movements and unions, which were initially slow to respond to the coup, managed to rally their forces, erecting street barricades and disrupting supply chains. By the time the general election of December 2020 rolled around, the golpistas, having failed to prevent the MAS from running, had split into three rival presidential campaigns. Carlos Mesa’s centre-right Citizen Community led the pack, followed in the distance by the right-wing extremist Luis Fernando Camacho, followed by Áñez, who saw the writing on the wall and eventually withdrew from the race.

*

All those who had participated in the disaster of the Áñez administration were duly punished by the electorate. Arce returned the MAS to office with a decisive 55% of the vote, while Mesa obtained a paltry 29%. The MAS won in five of nine departments, with a majority in both houses of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly. Elements of the ‘undecided’ middle class that had shifted right in support of the coup had now swung back behind Arce – who benefited from making the economic crisis the leitmotif of his campaign. He admitted the errors of past MAS administrations, called for a national ‘renovation’ and promised to restore stability. Nostalgia for the bonanza years during the first stretch of Morales’s rule (2006-14) was a fire easily stoked. Arce could point to his relatively orthodox reign as MAS finance minister during an era of high commodity prices, dynamic capitalist accumulation, historic profits in extractive sectors and modest improvements in the livelihood of the urban working class and peasantry. In the end, he performed better throughout the west of the country than Morales did in 2019. Even in the eastern department of Santa Cruz, where Camacho secured 45%, Arce still bested Morales’s previous vote share. Polls had indicated a modest advantage for MAS in the first round, but no one anticipated this resounding victory.

Morales was still abroad during the 2020 ballot, yet he had personally selected Arce as the candidate after David Choquehuanca had been put forward by the grassroots, including the coalition of social movements known as the Unity Pact. Morales only reluctantly agreed to include Choquehuanca on the ticket at the Unity Pact’s insistence, and the MAS campaign slogan – ‘Lucho y David, un solo corazón’ – betrayed some anxiety about the divisions developing within the party. Unlike Choquehuanca, Arce was non-indigenous, had never shown any leadership ambitions, and had no social base of his own, so his ability to fill Morales’s shoes was questionable. Yet the election results made clear that masismo could not be reduced to evismo. His victory showed that it was possible to win without the party’s historic caudillo, while demonstrating the enduring popularity of the MAS’s neodevelopmentalist plurinational model.

Arce was raised in La Paz, the son of teachers, and earned an undergraduate degree at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, specializing in accounting. During his undergraduate years he was briefly affiliated with Socialist Party-One, whose intellectual and political north star, Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, had been assassinated by the Luis García Mesa dictatorship in 1980, when Arce was 17 years old. But unlike virtually all other leading figures of the MAS, Arce has no real history of involvement in the politics of indigenous liberation, social movements or trade union struggle. After graduating, he worked at various positions in the Central Bank, taking a brief hiatus to earn a Masters in economics from Warwick University.

Arce became Morales’s first finance minister in 2006 and remained in post for almost the entirety of the Morales era, only stepping aside from 2017 to 2019 to receive treatment for a kidney cancer diagnosis. As Finance Minister, he ran a tight ship, isolating his office from social-movement pressure and adhering rigidly to low inflation targets. Christopher Sabatini, a senior research fellow at Chatham house, described him as ‘a technocratic, moderate force within the Morales government’ who ‘maintained good relations with the international financial institutions and investors.’ Even in the high-MAS era of 2006-2014, there was never a thoroughgoing transformation of the country’s productive structure, thanks in part to Arce’s caution; yet wealth was distributed to the poorest so long as commodity prices remained high.

Now, two years into Arce’s tenure, how can we characterize his record? The president fulfilled his first policy commitments immediately upon taking office, including cash transfers of $140 per month to roughly a third of the population, a symbolic tax on large domestic fortunes and investigations into the repression of the Áñez regime. Yet, on the whole, his administration is a workaday technocracy, lacking any of the transformative aspirations that the early Morales period kindled among the poor and dispossessed. As sociologist Vladimir Mendoza Manjón has noted, the prevailing view within Arce’s cabinet is that the era of transformation has come to an end. Instead, the current period demands a defensive, administrative posture: at best, the consolidation of previous gains amid more challenging material conditions. The aim is to prioritize political stability and slowly reactivate the project of neodevelopmental capitalist modernization. This is likely to be Arce’s only horizon of possibility in the absence of serious pressure from social movements – whose supporters have been isolated within the government, controlling only the ministries of Education and Rural Culture and Development. Meanwhile, the Finance Ministry remains subject to Arce’s personal oversight. Lower-level functionaries from the Morales era have been elevated, while virtually none of the old guard remains in post. Evistas are entirely absent from Arce’s inner circle. In this sense at least, the promised ‘renovation’ has begun in earnest.

The Pink Tide leader whom Arce most closely resembles is perhaps Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. Although he lacks Correa’s repressive bent when dealing with opponents to his left, Arce’s approach to statecraft is similarly top-down and economistic. It rests on socially-isolated planning, pragmatic concessions to the balance of forces (statically understood), and technical fixes to political problems. Yet Arce governs without anything approximate to Correa’s hegemony at the height of the commodities boom. Bolivia’s commodities downturn began in 2014, driven by a collapse in natural gas prices, and its economy steadily declined until 2019, before contracting dramatically – by 8.7% – in 2020. This crisis was not merely a conjunctural effect of the pandemic; it was also the result of underlying structural problems, including the end of the gas cycle. Gas rents accruing to the state were $3.5 billion in 2013, but just $1.5 billion in 2017. Structural investment problems in the gas sector have persisted from the Morales era to the present, with fiscal and commercial deficits growing in recent years. Foreign reserves reached a peak of $15 billion in 2014, but have been drawn down ever since to finance public spending commitments amid lower state revenue.

The recent dynamics of the world market have had negative consequences for Latin America and the Caribbean – but, for various reasons, Bolivia has so far been an outlier. Regionally, strong inflationary pressures, weak job growth and falling investment predominate. The Russian war on Ukraine has limited the international food supply and driven up energy prices, compounding the problems set in motion by the pandemic and the afterlife of the 2008 financial crash. As a gas exporter, however, Bolivia has benefited from higher prices, temporarily transforming its commercial deficit into a surplus. And because the country continues to produce most of its food domestically, with targeted export controls on select agricultural exports, pressures on food prices have been tempered. Together with a longstanding state subsidy for domestic gas consumption, this helps to explain why Bolivia’s 2022 inflation rate was the lowest in the region: a trend that helps to explain Arce’s relatively strong approval ratings. Over the next decade, the country’s political economy – and ecologically-inflected class struggles – will be shaped by the nascent lithium-mining industry. But as yet this process is only in its infancy, and is unlikely to play a major role in the current administration.

*

Although Arce initially pledged to serve for only one term, now there is every indication he will seek to run again in 2025, as the constitution permits. But Morales, despite having lower approval ratings than both Arce and Choquehuanca, retains a powerful capacity for social mobilization, continues to control the MAS, and is open about his plan to become its candidate in 2025. When he returned from exile in November 2020, hundreds of indigenous supporters poured onto the streets to greet him. The following year, he organized the dramatic Marcha por la Patria: a mobilization that was at once a real defence of the Arce administration against destabilization threats from the opposition, and a signal to the country – including Arce and Choquehuanca – that the former president still wields the kind of social power that is impossible to tabulate in polling data. Álvaro García Linera, who served as vice-president from 2006 to 2019, asserts that Morales remains the indispensable ‘social and political leader’ of the party, while Arce is merely the ‘political and governmental leader’. For García Linera, the MAS project demands that both statesmen triangulate with each other and with the party’s loose federation of social organizations. Between these three elements, he says, ‘there has to be an ensemble of articulations, which are not always easy.’ Out of office, Morales has readopted the militant rhetoric of his early political career; but in policy terms, it is doubtful that a new Morales government would significantly diverge from Arce’s. After all, Morales more or less handed over the economy to Arce for the duration of his time in office, and the present material situation means that implementing any left-populist inclination would be an uphill battle.

Since returning to Bolivia, Morales has worked diligently to recover his lost authority. Overriding local resistance, he has used his position as leader of the MAS to dictate the party’s lists of candidates for municipal mayors and departmental governors in regional elections. In the process, several high-profile figures have been driven out of the party – including Eva Copa, the masista president of the Senate during the Áñez government, and Rolando Cuéllar, former leader of the Eastern Bloc of the party in Santa Cruz. (Copa ran under the Jallalla party banner instead and secured an overwhelming mandate as the new mayor of El Alto.) While trying to avoid the impression of a major split with Arce himself, Morales has openly criticized some of his cabinet ministers and has made cryptic statements about an ostensive right-wing faction within the government, which Morales accuses of planning to marginalize him with the help of elements in the Armed Forces. So far, Arce has ignored such provocations – aware that, although the ex-president retains an active support base, his overall popularity has been considerably diminished. 

Choquehuanca was previously one of Morales’s closest personal confidantes and political loyalists; yet the pair are now bitterly polarized. Following the 2017 referendum defeat, Choquehuanca stressed the need for a new leader of the party – a position only he could fill. When his ambition to replace Morales became clear, he was demoted from the highest to the lowest echelons of the party: relegated from the role of foreign affairs minister to a marginal diplomatic post. Morales also moved against a number of other former allies who had rallied behind Choquehuanca’s leadership bid. Now, Choquehuanca knows that his political career is finished if Morales successfully returns to the presidency. He is desperate to prevent this outcome, whether by rallying ‘renovation’ forces to block Morales’s candidacy, or, more likely, by helping to split the party once Morales has secured the nomination.

Choquehuanca has a galvanized social base in the Aymara altiplano. He played a minor role in the 2020 election campaign, but according to Pablo Stefanoni, one of the keenest observers of Bolivian politics, his occasional interventions were decisive in securing the indigenous base of the MAS and winning back some of those who had become disillusioned with Morales. Choquehuanca is popular among the younger generation of MAS militants, and among intermediary party officials who for one or another reason have been alienated by the Morales-dominated national leadership. Choquehuanca served in Morales’s cabinet for longer than anyone except Arce. Early on, he played the role of anti-intellectual, boasting that he hadn’t read a book in sixteen years when he assumed office as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Ideologically, however, he adapted more or less fully to the pragmatism of the Morales era. If his politics diverge from those of his former boss, it is in his greater underlying sympathy for Aymara nationalism; yet, in electoral terms, this is somewhat of a liability, which restricts the core of his potential base to the western altiplano. It’s unlikely his prospective bid for the presidency will be successful. More plausibly, he may assume the role of subcomandante in any eventual split from the MAS led by Arce.

As the journalist Fernando Molina has written, Bolivian political history is rife with social fragmentation and chaotic conflict – especially following the exit of a major caudillo, when battles to succeed him flare up. The novelty of the present moment is that Morales was coercively excluded from governmental power, yet remains a crucial internal vector who defines the country’s wider sociopolitical coordinates.

*

If the MAS is thus internally divided, what of Bolivia’s right-wing opposition? The political scene under Arce is still haunted by the spectres of the 2019 coup. Dozens of ex-military officials have been imprisoned for their role in Morales’s ouster, including the heads of the Armed Forces and police. Áñez was sentenced to ten years in prison – although she was only held accountable for the events of November 2019 and not the state massacres that followed. Marco Pumari, the ex-president of the Civic Committee of the department of Potosí, is in jail awaiting trial, accused of provoking the burning and sacking of the Electoral Tribunal in Potosí in the lead up to the coup. Mesa remains judicially unscathed, although his brand of washed-out centrism has become increasingly unpopular.

Until very recently, Camacho had managed to both avoid legal charges and strengthen his position. He was elected governor of Santa Cruz in March 2021 and became the face of a growing far-right movement, which carries particular political heft in Santa Cruz, Beni, Potosí, and Tarija. A few days after Christmas, however, Camacho was finally arrested for his role in the 2019 coup. He will spend the next few months in prison in La Paz awaiting trial. Arce timed the arrest to quell criticisms from Morales that his administration was lax in its treatment of the right-wing opposition, and to take advantage of incipient fractures within the local cruceño right between traditional lowland conservatism and Camacho radicalism.

In October and November 2022, the far right launched a 36-day ‘civic strike’ over the timing of the next national census, effectively shutting down the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s economic engine. Several months prior, Arce announced that he would be delaying the census by two years due to technical incapacity. Since the last census of 2012, the populations of the department and city of Santa Cruz had grown rapidly, driven in part by significant migration from the western highlands. As a result, a new census would invariably lead to a substantial eastward shift in state resources and legislative seats. Cruceño protests erupted over the claim that the government’s delay was in fact a veiled power grab, designed to prevent resource and seat alterations that would disadvantage the ruling party in the 2025 elections.

The civic strike was organized by the Inter-Institutional Committee of Santa Cruz. Its three leading figures were Camacho, Rómulo Calvo, president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, and Vicente Cuéllar, rector of the Autonomous University of Gabriel René Moreno. Since the early 2000s, the department of Santa Cruz has been the heart of regional autonomy struggles against centralized state power, mounting consistent challenges to Morales from the right, including strikes, mass gatherings and outbursts of violence. (The ‘civic coup’ attempt of 2008 marked the pinnacle of this trend.) This time around, enforcement of the strike in the predominantly indigenous informal markets of the city was carried out by roving motorcycle gangs armed with machetes and clubs – a signature of Camacho’s right-wing street politics – as well as coordinated assaults and robberies by the proto-fascist Cruceño Youth Union. Petty vendors opposed to the strike mounted resistance where they could, above all in the working-class municipal district of Plan 3000, leading to ferocious nightly clashes that helped weaken the strike toward the end of November. Arce has now agreed to bring the census forward to 23 March 2024, ensuring that the results will be factored into the next election.

The unrest in Santa Cruz revealed the persistent territorialized power of the extreme right in the eastern lowlands and their disquieting capacity for street violence. Yet it also exposed their inability to project national power by uniting with the country’s wider conservative forces or winning support from the state security apparatus. Despite the rhetoric of some on the left, and the deluded fantasies of some on the cruceño right, the civic mobilizations of October and November last year never threatened to develop into another full-scale coup. Business associations in Santa Cruz lent only tepid support as the civic strike wore on and Camacho’s unpredictable street politics became more of a burden than an expression of strength. The ephemeral unity that enabled the overthrow of Morales in 2019 is now a distant memory. Without the figure of Morales to provide focus and clarity, the myriad groupings that made up the golpista coalition immediately fractured, pursuing their separate, parochial priorities. With the arrest of Camacho, the cruceño elite will need to embark on an additional round of recomposition.

Yet, although the right lacks a viable national project, the masistas shouldn’t underestimate their adversaries. Their territorial power bases will allow them to launch more destabilizing actions. They have the support of domestic and international capital, and they control the media and universities. In conditions of stagnation and crisis, from which the MAS cannot easily escape, it would be unwise to assume that the petit bourgeoisie, the police and the military will continue to support the constitutional order. Their loyalties are fickle – and as they change, so will Bolivia.

Read on: Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thompson, ‘The Chequered Rainbow’, NLR 35.

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Highbrow’s Enemy

An enormously promising title, Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation arrives suggesting a tantalizing combination of coming-of-age movie memoir and deep dive into the spectacular films of the 1970s – Hollywood’s last golden age – via a celebrated and accomplished filmmaker with an infectious enthusiasm for the movies and a breathtaking facility with an impossible number of features, renowned and obscure. Tarantino has an encyclopedic knowledge of postwar American film history, often well-deployed in the book, and a keen eye for assessing source material. Most importantly, he understands and is able to convey what made the seventies special – and the eighties dismal: ‘After growing up in the anything-goes seventies, the eighties marked a play-it-safe decade.’ Unlike in the classic studio era, where films were subject to the draconian prohibitions of the Production Code Administration, ‘in the eighties, the restrictions Hollywood imposed on their own product were self-imposed . . . After the seventies, it seemed like film went back to the restraints of the fifties.’ In contrast, Tarantino captures the thrilling, liberating moral ambiguity that defined the New Hollywood, reminding the reader (or explaining to a younger audience raised on a steady diet of Marvel Movies and Message Movies), ‘Complex characters aren’t always sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likeable.’

Unfortunately, the literary equivalent of driving cross-country with Quentin Tarantino, whose best films include skilled sequences that force viewers to the edge of their seats, turns out to be an unpleasant prospect that few will wish to endure. Admittedly, there were reasons to be wary of climbing into the car in the first place. From a distance, on screen and off, the writer-director can give the impression of a vulgarian, with a taste for numbingly gratuitous, blood-soaked violence, and a serial weakness for that laziest and most irresponsible trope in cinema – the revenge fantasy (a genre invariably celebrated throughout this volume, with numerous entries lovingly referred to as ‘Revengeamatics’).

Such proclivities, however, turn out to be the least of this book’s problems. The Quentin Tarantino of Cinema Speculation comes across as a man of towering ego (the jacket copy describes its author as ‘possibly the most joyously infectious movie-lover alive’), modest insight and questionable taste. The self-regard is overwhelming, even by Hollywood standards. Describing his approach to filmmaking, Tarantino boasts of ‘a fearlessness that comes to me naturally.’ What begins as praise for some very fine directors takes this sudden turn: ‘But they don’t make genre films the way Jean Pierre Melville did. The way I do.’ The only thing missing from that particular reflection is Lloyd Bentsen entering the room to intone, ‘Senator, I knew Jean Pierre Melville.’ It is, regrettably, no surprise to find that the last eight lines of the book are a reminiscence of the moment he won an academy award for a film that was ‘a worldwide smash’ and include six invocations of either ‘me’ or ‘I’.  

Indeed, despite Tarantino’s zeal for the cinema of this era, his prose is a chore to read. The style is exhausting, characterized by an avalanche of obscenities which are presumably intended to seem honest and unbuckled, but which strike the reader as a tiresome affectation. Similarly disfiguring is the endless stream of unmotivated name dropping (‘The comedian Robert Wuhl once told me, “I’ve seen Bullitt four times and I couldn’t tell you what the plot is about’’’), all in the service of confidently expressed, unreflective assertions presented as gospel. This is not writing, it is talking – endless talking, and it is more than a little repetitive, as if the chapters were written individually and never intended to form a coherent whole.

It may be that there is ultimately no daylight between this writer-director of undeniably large talent, his (often-grating) public persona, and the uninterruptable know-it-all loudmouth riffing and sub-referencing revealed in these pages. Absurd as it is to invoke Gore Vidal in this context, a quote of his well describes what the reader will learn – or not learn – about Tarantino from this book: ‘I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.’ Yet I still harbour the suspicion that our narrator is actually more sophisticated than he lets on.

Cinema Speculation features chapters on films from 1968 to 1981 – the glory days of the New Hollywood – interspersed with thematic essays. There is no table of contents – and it is easy to imagine Tarantino explaining why: ‘If you’re gonna read it, who the fuck needs a fucking table of contents? Bruce Willis once told me he skipped over all that crap and just dove into the action of the fucking book.’ This disposition also likely explains the lack of a preface and acknowledgements as well. A summary overview of the chapters is nevertheless informative. The essays include a memoir of young Quentin’s voracious, very early exposure to the New Hollywood revolution, an appreciation of long-serving Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas, and a chapter that promises to express the essence of the enterprise, ‘The New Hollywood in the Seventies’. The movies selected for canonization are Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Deliverance, The Getaway, The Outfit, Sisters, Daisy Miller, Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder, Paradise Alley, Escape from Alcatraz, Hardcore, and The Funhouse.

‘Little Q Watching Big Movies’ provides a guided tour of some of the films that Tarantino saw at too young an age:  ‘In that year of 1970, I saw a lot of intense shit.’ That shit included M*A*S*H, whose seven-year-old viewer especially enjoyed the scene with Radar ‘placing the microphone under the bed as Hot Lips and Frank Burns fucked.’ More generally, he recalls, ‘some of those adult movies were fucking amazing!’ Two things emerge from this opening chapter. One is that Big Q is not much different from Little Q, who protested to his mother that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid shouldn’t have ended in a freeze frame, but instead shown the protagonists shredded to bloody ribbons. Why suggest, when you can show? ‘Despite how iconic that image has become, I still agree with me, “They should have shown it.’’ ’ Less is not more, more is more, and even more, especially if it’s blood-soaked, is even more still. The child is indeed the father of the man.

The second motif established early in the book is Tarantino’s idiosyncratic taste, expressed with little regard for logical consistency from one pronouncement to the next. He prefers, for example, the Roger Vadim clunker All the Pretty Maids in a Row – a mildly amusing curiosity at best – to John Boorman’s seminal Point Blank, which is waved off as a ‘nonentity crime film’. Ironically, All the Pretty Maids to its discredit looks like it was shot in the style of a made-for-TV movie, and is littered with small screen players – two condemnations that Tarantino erroneously hurls at Point Blank in his summary dismissal of that masterpiece. 

The ode to Kevin Thomas, a critic at the Times since 1962 who shares Tarantino’s taste for grindhouse cinema (and who has an uncommon reverence for the directing chops of breastsploitation maestro Russ Meyer), is an odd interregnum in Cinema Speculation’s narrative flow. Here the author pauses, often at length, to dump on critics he dislikes and to gripe a bit about some negative reviews. A highlight of this discussion is that it features the only potentially self-aware sentence in the entire book: when their tastes diverged, if was often due to the fact that ‘Thomas had a real distaste for mean-spirited violence.’ Speaking of a critic who gave a rave review to the generally reviled, blood-soaked Supervixens, Tarantino observes, ‘Is my taste in cinema more bloodthirsty than Kevin Thomas’? Clearly.’

‘The New Hollywood in the Seventies’ is particularly disappointing, as the title suggests it should get to the heart of what this book is all about. Instead, it is a slim and hurried rehash of material that seems scraped from Peter Biskind’s well-worn Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) and a handful of other studies name checked along the way, including James Monaco’s superb American Film Now (1979). (And probably others – you didn’t think this book would have a fucking bibliography did you?) Rather than articulating a distinct perspective, the chapter is not much more than a list of names and films – almost everybody gets their sentence. Surprisingly, Tarantino occasionally loses his bearings on what should be home turf, as when he lumps Peter Bogdanovich’s relentlessly downbeat The Last Picture Show (shot in black and white, then commercial poison) with The Sting and Star Wars – all of them dismissed as ‘cut for maximum audience enjoyment.’ Yet in what could be charitably described as something of a paradox, a few chapters later Tarantino reminds readers that Rocky is probably his all-time favorite film (though soon after he rates Rocky II even higher). It is hard to imagine a movie more purposefully, relentlessly and transparently designed to make its audience feel good. Don’t take it from me, take it from Tarantino: he ‘never . . . repeat never’ heard an audience cheer with such exuberance in a movie theater.

Of course, ‘feel good’ needs to be calibrated to taste: ‘The closest I came to an audience cheering like we did in Rocky was George Kennedy and William Devane blowing the fuck out of the killers that murdered their families.’ It is also more than passing strange that someone who incisively castigated eighties films for playing it safe would champion a movie that plays it safer than any film in the history of cinema. In any event, Stallone’s average-lug-beats-the-odds-and-gets-the-girl flick is, to say the least, an odd choice to represent the pinnacle ‘of a time when movies were fucking incredible.’ A throwback to simple times, simple stories, and pandering, spoon-fed finales, Rocky would have been just another boxing picture among many in the 1930s. Whereas for Tarantino, ‘Everything about Rocky took audiences by complete surprise.’ Another theory is that, at age thirteen, it took him by surprise.

The movie chapters are a little better – or at least more distinct – but collectively they amount to something less than a mixed bag. Things get off to an unpromising start with Bullitt, fifteen pages that are essentially a mash note to Steve McQueen, with nary a glimmer of insight into this rich and multifaceted film. The treatment of Dirty Harry, in contrast, is a pleasant surprise. In the best and most thoughtful chapter in the book, Tarantino shines, contextualizing the film in the context of director Don Siegel’s long career, and engages with uncharacteristic nuance in the debate surrounding the film’s problematic politics. Even here, though, the tendency to speak in breathless soundbites (‘If Dirty Harry were a boxer it would be Mike Tyson in his knockout prime’) derails the momentum of sustained analysis. Still, if every chapter in Cinema Speculation flashed the strengths of this one, it would be worth pushing through all the braggadocio and monologuing.

Perhaps the biggest bust in this volume is its treatment of The Getaway. A still from that production graces the cover, featuring the filmmaker’s favorites Sam Peckinpah and McQueen, so presumably Tarantino would have something to say about this one. Instead we are treated to twenty-five pages of not very much. Our raconteur picks apart a few holes in the plot, and tells us that ‘I asked Peter [Bogdanovich] what he thought about [the] novel.’ Observations about the movie, however, are limited to tossed-off remarks such as ‘It’s my feeling that Ali McGraw’s moment to moment work in this film is essential’ and ‘I used to like the ending more than I do now.’ The Getaway is no masterpiece, but it is a film worth talking about, and even taking seriously. Christina Newland, in a thoughtful, engaging and enthusiastic essay for Little White Lies, says more in a thousand words than Tarantino offers here.

Sisters provides the opportunity for an appreciation of the early films of Brian de Palma, and its long discussion of Taxi Driver knows enough to ask a key question: is this a movie about a racist or is it a racist movie? Unfortunately, yet again, over thirty pages there is not a single moment of critical acumen (nor any appreciation of the filmmaking). Instead, now too recognizably on brand, serious engagement with one of the landmarks of the New Hollywood is eschewed in favour of here’s-what-I-think-off-the-top-of-my-head. There is a time and place for such things – check out Tarantino’s brilliant revisionist interpretation (in character) of Top Gun from the 1994 movie Sleep with Me – but this isn’t it. Cinema Speculation gives the impression that any hint of visual analysis or even appreciation would fall under the category of highbrow – which, to Tarantino, is the ultimate obscenity. According to the index (yes, the book has a fucking index, probably to help people look themselves up), Alfred Hitchcock appears over twenty-five times in the text. Yet there is no engagement with the marvellous Hitchcockian flourishes that characterize some of Taxi Driver’s finest scenes. Instead, the discussion is limited to observations like ‘Travis was a fucking loon,’ and ‘no fucking way was Travis in Vietnam’ (um, okay, if you say so); and a report of the audience reaction at a favorite grindhouse cinema: ‘I dug it, they dug it, and as an audience, we dug it.’ Say what you will about these comments, but they are definitely not highbrow.

Quentin Tarantino is an accomplished filmmaker, and, necessarily, a capable artisan. One could not tell that from this book, which reads like a movie geek perhaps terrified at being seen as a movie nerd. This likely accounts for some of the odd gaps in the narrative, which runs away screaming from anything that might be remotely characterized as thoughtful. Robert Altman, whose many seventies landmarks include McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye and Nashville, is barely noted, invoked primarily as the target of ad hominem broadsides; Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View) goes unmentioned; Woody Allen’s output is reduced to a few words of high praise for the ‘early funny ones’. This list could easily be elaborated, but these examples raise a larger, more general concern.

Cinema Speculation presents itself as a celebration of ‘the most challenging movies of the greatest movie making era in the history of Hollywood.’ A sentiment that I (and many others) share. What is, finally, most bizarre about its baker’s dozen of features is not so much the idiosyncratic films included, but those that are left out. In trying to make the case that the seventies were indeed a golden age, it is unlikely that this set of movies would convince anybody of anything (although Taxi Driver soars, and you could argue the case for a couple of the others). Even Tarantino isn’t sold on some of them, largely deploying Hardcore as a vehicle to trash Paul Schrader (this is a book that pauses to settle numerous scores), and noting ‘Nothing that deep happens in Paradise Alley. It’s all surface.’ As for Fun House, Tarantino rates Hell Night from the same year as ‘far superior’. I haven’t seen Hell Night, which concerns a fraternity hazing ritual wherein four pledges are dropped off at an (apparently) abandoned mansion, but Roger Ebert’s one-star review plausibly describes it as ‘a relentlessly lackluster example of the Dead Teenager Movie.’ 

Maybe for some Hell Night is a towering achievement of the New Hollywood era, but while reading page after page about low-budget slasher flicks of modest repute, it is hard not to think of fifty treasures from that extraordinary decade left on the cutting room floor. Of course, much of this may simply boil down to questions of taste. In my view, Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the landmarks of the seventies film – among its enormous strengths: razor-sharp dialogue, bravura location work, and the contributions of the players, including, arguably, Robert Mitchum’s greatest performance. Yates’s Mother, Juggs, & Speed, by contrast, is an unmotivated, incoherent mess, an embarrassment to its distinguished cast, and littered with car crashes about once a reel as if fearful the audience would otherwise nod off (or walk out). In Tarantino’s assessment, Eddie Coyle is ‘overrated’ and Juggs ‘underrated.’ For those who share that view, Cinema Speculation might be a book worth reading.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, Hollywood’s New Wave’, NLR 121

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Green Empire?

In its conviction that the climate crisis ‘changes everything’, and in its search for a historical agent capable of coupling deliverance from catastrophe with radical social transformation, left climate politics is often sustained by a residual optimism. Yet this mood is far from universal. Some commentators have suggested that, given the shortage of time and the dim prospects for seizing state power, climate saviours will have to be drawn from enemy ranks. Take Michael Klare. A longtime peace studies scholar and defence correspondent for The Nation, he is now a cheerleader for the eco-conscious vanguard forming within the United States Department of Defense (DoD). ‘As global temperatures soar and vital resources dwindle’, Klare writes, the climate-mitigation efforts of the DoD have become ‘a model for the rest of society to emulate’. Not only that; the Pentagon’s outlook on global climate politics should be seen as ‘the starting point for America’s future foreign relations’. Has it really come to this? It may be true that, in the absence of a powerful socialist-environmentalist movement, the best hope for humanity is decarbonization from above. But what role is the American imperial apparatus likely to play in this process? Can it plausibly claim to be a ‘climate leader’?

This is the question Neta Crawford takes up in The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: The Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions, published last October. Crawford was recently appointed to Oxford’s top international relations professorship, previously held by League of Nations architect Alfred Zimmern and world-order theorist Hedley Bull. As an undergraduate at Brown in the 1980s, she studied a degree of her own design, ‘The War System and Alternatives to Militarism’, while working with E.P. Thompson and Joan Scott in the peace movement. At the same time, Crawford undertook exhaustive research on Soviet materiel as part of an Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies project to compile a database of all ‘major weapons’ manufactured globally in the post-war period. Within two years of graduating, she had authored a volume which runs to more than a thousand pages, documenting the quantitative minutiae of Soviet military aircraft.

This mastery of military data would inform Crawford’s later work. Since 2011 she has served as co-director of the Costs of War project, counting the human and economic toll of Washington’s war on terror. (At its last major count, the project estimated nearly one million people killed at a cost of over $8 trillion.) Crawford is also highly regarded as an IR theorist. In her first book, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (2002), she made the case that normative beliefs are a structuring force in world politics, and that persuasive ethical arguments can therefore effect historical change. A decade later, in Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars (2013), Crawford turned her attention to the US military, charting its gradual institutionalization of a regime of non-combatant protection, yet highlighting its enduring disregard for civilian harm ‘when military necessity is understood to be high’. This intellectual background has made her especially well-placed to anatomize the climate machinations of the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War is neatly divided into four sections, starting with an impressive account of the American military’s energy history. Citing an 1855 report by the US Secretary of the Navy which stated that the ‘increase in the number of steam-ships will make further purchase of coal necessary’, Crawford unfolds the argument that the US military was a significant driver of the widespread adoption of coal followed by oil. Fossil fuel, she explains, rapidly became the energetic basis of its force posture in the mid-nineteenth century. This led to a consensus among the political and military establishment that access to coal and oil supplies was a vital strategic interest, and protecting them an overriding military objective. As David Petraeus asserted in 2011, ‘Energy is the lifeblood of our warfighting capabilities’ – a claim that Crawford verifies by tracking the century-long arc from coal-fired US victory in the Spanish–American war to the establishment of Central Command (CENTCOM) as the lynchpin of Washington’s dominance in the Persian Gulf.

In this account, the carbonization of imperial power – gunboats combusting coal before fighter jets guzzled oil – imbued American expansion with a cyclical logic, ‘where the need for refuelling to expand and protect US interests required bases over ever-larger portions of the globe, while the bases and the fuel themselves became strategic interests.’ Crawford calls this ‘the deep cycle’: a spiralling process of ‘oil demand, consumption, militarization and conflict’. In her reading, it is most notably the beliefs of military planners and foreign policy elites about coal and oil’s centrality that helped institutionalize fossil fuel demand: ‘Institutions were constructed over the last two centuries to realize decision makers’ beliefs about the role of fossil fuels in war.’ By foregrounding the ideational dimension of historical change, Crawford makes the case that fossil fuel dependence was not inevitable; it was rather a contingent choice that could yet be overturned. As she wrote in her first book, focusing on the force of argument might ‘allow us to see room for human agency within the operations of seemingly inexorable political and economic forces.’

In the next section, Crawford considers the question of climate science and US military emissions, demonstrating that the DoD has been aware of the significance of carbon emissions since the late 1950s. Navy-funded research had determined that CO2 molecules dissolved into the ocean after fewer than ten years in the atmosphere, providing the impetus for systematic measurement of atmospheric CO2 levels. The CIA kept a watchful eye on these studies, as did the White House. Nixon’s urban affairs adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, outlined his concerns about ‘the carbon dioxide problem’ in a 1969 memo sent to the president’s chief of staff, warning that the next century could be marked by catastrophic sea level rises: ‘Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter. We have no data on Seattle.’ This was something ‘that the Administration ought to get involved with’, Moynihan counselled, adding that it was ‘a natural for NATO.’

Using documents from Georgetown’s National Security Archive, declassified through freedom of information requests, Crawford goes on to explain how the Pentagon successfully lobbied for the exemption of the bulk of military emissions from the Kyoto Protocol, having convinced the Clinton White House that ‘imposing greenhouse gas emissions limitations on tactical and strategic military systems would . . . adversely impact operations and readiness.’ The legacy of this American diplomatic triumph is that in IPCC accounting, whose conventions are followed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ‘emissions from [military] activity at overseas bases and multilateral operations are excluded from national totals.’

In an effort to redress this wilful oversight, Crawford spends more than fifty pages setting out her own meticulous calculations of US military and military-industrial emissions. Her conclusion is unsurprising: that military emissions track conflict and have declined overall since the end of the Vietnam War, though they remain gargantuan. On her count, US military greenhouse gas emissions stood at just over 109 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMTCO2e) in 1975. By 2020, they had declined to 52 MMTCO2e. Energy consumed by DoD facilities has decreased by a similar magnitude over the same period, thanks to the closure of more than a thousand bases since 1991. Though direct Pentagon emissions are a very small component of the US national total (which stood at 5,222 MMTCO2e in 2020), military industrial emissions accounted for around 17% of total greenhouse emissions from industrial manufacturing in 2019, according to Crawford’s conservative estimate. 

A major polluter whose force is used to ‘protect access to Middle East oil’, the Pentagon has nevertheless devoted more thought to climate change and its consequences than most state institutions. Crawford follows this development in part three of the book, showing how the DoD has been at the forefront of conceiving climate breakdown as a major threat to American national security. What began in the 1990s with concern about battlefield efficiency and the link between environmental degradation and conflict gradually hardened over fifteen years into panic about the implications of ecological breakdown for American power. A series of military-linked reports were released in 2006-7, arguing that climate change ‘acts as a threat multiplier for instability’ which would ‘require the United States to support policies that insulate it as well as countries of strategic concern from the most severe effects’. This emergent consensus was evident in the DoD’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, which stated that ‘the Department is developing policies and plans to manage the effects of climate change on its operating environment, missions, and facilities.’ By 2019, a group of fifty-eight self-described ‘senior military and national security leaders’, led by John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, were pushing back against Trump’s attempt to use his National Security Council to subvert Pentagon and CIA climate change research programmes, writing in a letter to the president: ‘We support the science-driven patriots in our national security community who have rightly seen addressing climate change as a threat reduction issue, not a political one, since 1989.’

Crawford is broadly impressed by the Pentagon’s adaptation efforts. Yet she is also disturbed – and puzzled – by its failure to take climate mitigation more seriously or to recognize its own carbon footprint as a problem. Why are ‘some of the smartest, best-trained, and most determined people on this planet, given the resources of the richest nation on earth’ – long aware of anthropogenic warming and seeking to climate-proof their installations – so ‘strategically inflexible and blind’? For one thing, DoD leaders are surely right (on their own terms) to worry that stringent curbs on their emissions would begin to undercut American military pre-eminence. Greener equipment and weaponry can in some contexts be necessary for tactical and protective reasons, as US forces in Iraq learnt from the vulnerability of their fuel convoys to insurgent attacks. But as Crawford notes, the best that has been managed to date is the Navy running warships on a 10% beef fat, 90% petroleum mix as part of the ‘Great Green Fleet’ gimmick in 2009. It is hard, then, to envisage the Pentagon’s operations being more thoroughly decarbonized without a dramatic retrenchment. Cutting military emissions by massively downscaling the DoD’s size and operations – closing one-fifth of bases and installations, withdrawing from the Persian Gulf – is what Crawford proposes. But there is no mystery as to why the Pentagon would refuse to accept this. Generals are naturally reluctant to opt for their own liquidation. Indeed, even if the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department were to wield their power to accelerate decarbonization globally, they would struggle to build an eco-military. Unless the Pentagon can rapidly learn how to rule the skies and patrol the South China Sea propelled by biofuels rather than oil, a reconfiguration of American empire is more likely to take the form of green capital adjoined to a carbon military.

Reviewing The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, Erin Sikorsky cast aspersions on Crawford’s argument that ‘the military is more than just one entity among many that have created the systemic climate risks facing the world today’, querying the assumption that ‘the key to US decarbonization is demilitarization’. This objection is to be expected from Sikorsky – once a CIA officer, now the director of two leading military-linked climate security institutions. Yet perhaps there is a grain of truth in her criticism. For all the strengths of Crawford’s study, its fixation on military emissions can be inhibiting. Given the Pentagon’s emissions make up only around 1% of the US national total, the author’s suggestion – in the final part of the book – that the military could ‘play a major role’ in broader climate mitigation efforts by reducing its carbon footprint seems dubious.

More importantly, Crawford’s painstaking focus on quantifying the DoD’s emissions fails to capture the fundamental purpose of such energy expenditure. In excavating the American military’s energetic foundations since the nineteenth century, Crawford has, to be sure, provided us with an invaluable historical understanding of the relationship between climate change and US imperial firepower. Her concept of ‘the deep cycle’ illuminates the catalytic effects of war and the military industry on the general growth of emissions. Yet, given the specific form American power has taken since the second world war – a global empire of capital – the significant thing about military emissions is not so much their magnitude as the reason they are generated in the first place: namely, the Pentagon’s need to maintain unparalleled supremacy in order to underwrite a much wider, ecologically ruinous regime of accumulation. Washington’s role as guardian of global capital – and the military’s role as coercive guarantor of that position – is conterminous with what environmental historians call ‘the great acceleration’. The advent of the ‘Anthropocene’ and the spread of American-led transnational capitalism are intertwined. As such, the Pentagon’s deadly atmospheric legacy far outstrips the effect of its own emissions.

Crawford’s intellectual project is perhaps best understood as a progressive immanent critique of American empire, defined by intricate attention to the military as an institution – its political history, energy composition, ideologies, procedures, rules, and modes of killing. This kind of granular attention to military politics is vanishingly rare for contemporary scholars of the left, yet both its brilliance and its limitations derive from this immanent position. It is only by seeing the Pentagon as if from the inside that Crawford can produce such rich studies of its machinations. But taking the institution on its own terms can also weaken her critical perspective. In Accountability for Killing, she writes that

the US military has acted as an imperfect moral agent, and its gradual recognition of the problem of collateral damage, its initial ad hoc responses to the problem, and the gradual institutionalization of a program of civilian casualty mitigation illustrates a cycle of moral agency and a process of organizational learning. I argue that this process has been, with exceptions, mostly positive. But I also show where and how the US military could further act to reduce systemic and proportionality/double effect collateral damage.

Here, as with her suggestion that the potential for carbon and methane release caused by airstrikes should be incorporated as a consideration in targeting guidance, Crawford ends up missing the wood for the trees by focusing on – and overplaying – the Pentagon’s potential for ethical self-improvement. So too in some of her 2003-4 articles on the Bush administration, which describe the ‘best intentions’ of Washington policymakers and lament the military’s ‘unfortunate lapses’ in continually bombarding civilians. Crawford’s technocratic prescriptions are premised on a conviction that the practices of the US military, and indeed the empire more widely, are driven by normative beliefs which might be subject to change through ethical persuasion. Considering the ‘moral duties of American hegemony’ in a piece for the house journal of the US Navy, she insists that Washington ‘can in fact pursue a moral policy in Iraq and the rest of the world’, pointing to ‘the integration of ethical reasoning with prudence’ as the best path forward for its foreign policy.

This framework stems from Crawford’s first book, which recast the history of decolonization as a grand teleology of ethical argument: ‘if the roots of decolonization are in the demise of . . . slavery and forced labor, and the cause of abolition was changing normative beliefs through ethical argument, then ethical arguments are a powerful underlying cause of decolonization.’ There is an important continuity of method between this study and Crawford’s work on US empire: the Pentagon’s failure to take climate mitigation seriously is likewise attributed to ‘habits of mind’. The author’s stress on the determinant force of ethical argument, revolutions in normative beliefs and their subsequent institutionalization, helps to explain her moments of credulity about the extent to which the Pentagon can be reformed.

Green empire seems like an idea whose time has come in the West: NATO’s new security concept says it ‘should become the leading international organization when it comes to understanding and adapting to the impact of climate change on security’, while the European Greens promote retrofitting with the slogan ‘Isolate Putin. Insulate Homes.’ Crawford’s empirically rich work does much to deepen our understanding of this trend and its prehistory. But when her anatomy of the military is affixed to an analysis of the empire it shields, the strictures of the Pentagon’s role as a climate actor become clear. With the left in purgatory, it is understandable that scholars like Michael Klare should hope for Washington to take up the mantle of planetary rescue. The notion that there might be anything ethically palatable in a green American empire, though, is a delusion that must be dispensed with.

Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘Painting Nationalism Green’, NLR 124.

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Daney Finally Arrives

Any translation of Serge Daney is already late. Late owing to the numerous failed attempts to publish him in English; late in providing ideas which we have needed for so long. Rumour has it that the British Film Institute came close to issuing a collection thirty years ago, even circulating a manuscript with copyright logos and editors’ names attached (it began with a letter to Deleuze; no wonder the book never appeared). The fact a collection has now finally been published by Semiotext(e), a publisher better known for French theory and experimental literature, tells us something about the reason for this protracted absence, and the parochialism of those responsible for film and its histories. Yet as much as Daney’s arrival in English is late, his writing is – perhaps more than any other European film critic of the twentieth century – almost self-admonishingly up to date. It is writing that addresses the present violently, to use Gramsci’s famous phrase, in a field which is more than happy to go on pretending as if nothing has changed.

Snatches of Daney’s output have appeared infrequently in English over the years. One text will crop up in an anthology; another in a book on media or in an artist’s zine. These sightings have been recorded by Laurent Kretzschmar at sergedaney.blogspot.com, a monumental effort. There has also been one slim book-length translation, which consists of an extended interview with Daney by his former Cahiers du Cinéma co-editor Serge Toubiana, and one of his last essays, ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’ (envisaged as the first chapter of a planned autobiography of sorts). Many of his aphorisms have therefore already found their way into the Anglosphere, appearing like candles lighting a path to a different kind of visual history and criticism: ‘Cinema as a house for images that no longer have a home’; ‘Cinema as haunted by writing’; television as either ‘democratic project… or Police operation’. With The Cinema House & the World, 1962-1981 – the first of four volumes which will together collect the majority of his writing – English-language readers can now finally read these enigmatic lines in context. 

This first volume, translated by Christine Pichini, covers Daney’s formative period as a disciple of the nouvelle vague, his editorship of Cahiers du Cinéma from 1973, as well as his first texts for Libération, for which he left Cahiers to write full-time in 1981. Unlike his older colleagues – Rohmer, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette – Daney never turned to producing films. Instead, he led an advance of criticism beyond the theatre and the auteur onto new terrain. The political and cultural landmarks of the volume are the Algerian Revolution; the high point and subsequent split of the nouvelle vague; the failure of ’68; the ‘Red Years’ of Cahiers; the rise of New Hollywood; and Vietnam, the first televised war. The book, however, departs from strict chronology, with texts grouped loosely by theme – ‘In Film’s Wake’, ‘Elaborations’, ‘Auteur Theory’. Yet as much as these headings present Daney as a theorist, he was a critic in the best sense of the word, attentive to films in their concreteness. The collected articles typically follow the pace of new releases and festivals, with ideas evolving out of reviews, intermingled with observations about the problems of the day, and presented not as completed theorem but as the imprints of ongoing thinking. Hollywood and what Daney called ‘the Auteur Marketplace’ are treated concurrently and as imbricated phenomena; Daney’s critical attention ranges from B movies to militant documentaries to studio films, and onto televised political debates and tennis matches, without the object of inquiry ever becoming incongruent to wider problems of form and politics.

Over the course of the book, television begins to emerge as Daney’s central concern (one which will no doubt be even more extensively treated in later volumes). We await the complete set of columns from Le salaire du zappeur (‘The Wage of the Channel Hopper’), for example, during which Daney chronicled the daily output of French television. But from the earliest texts, the enduring themes of Daney’s oeuvre are present in incipient form. Apparatus (Althusser), codes (Barthes), realism (Bazin), spectacle (Debord): these are the building blocks for his mode of enquiry. Even his very first review of Hawks’s Rio Bravo, written at the age of 18 for his own short-lived magazine Visages du cinema, evinces his awareness of Hollywood’s ideological function, its synthetic imaginaries and its codes: ‘Every effort is made to show us that the Wild West is not as we imagine it to be: no longer is it a wasteland where adventurers duke it out but a calm and bourgeois town where adventurers no longer belong. The age of the pioneer has passed.’ But what age are we in now? This first text appears to us as far away in time as the Lumières were to Daney. It is reasonable to ask what reading them today might offer. We might ask: are we still the children of Coca-Cola and Marx?

For a reader who has absorbed more of film history via Pirate Bay than in the theatre, Daney offers an approach which is almost irresistible. It is a method that charts cinema, video and television as they evolve and mutate into new, intertwined forms; he responds to cinema’s end not through elegy but zealous reappraisal. Replace some of the dated terms and we’re close to what a contemporary film criticism should read like, I think: one that adapts to the changing systems of image-making (technical, but also ideological and political). Daney is a historian of the medium as it unfolds, tracing its changes and conversions as much as dispensing judgement on its products. Likely influenced by the Althusserian current of Cahiers under the editorship of Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, countless reviews return to problems of ideology. As heavy-going as this period of criticism can be to read today – Daney even joked at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1977 that he was criticised for being insufficiently Althusserian and Marxist-Leninist – Daney always interlaced this inquiry with aesthetic questions of mise en scène or camera movement, mapping political transformations onto developments of style and technique.

Time and territory emerge as central preoccupations in the collection. Timing: editing, action, history. Territory: mise en scène, empire, the state, ‘the concrete territory’ where film ‘performs its intervention’. The visual field – and its conditions of production and consumption – as described by Daney is marked by transformation and metamorphosis. From projection to broadcasting; from rebellion to institutionalisation. Daney scrutinizes such changes, tracking formal and thematic correspondences in the films he writes about: in Ici et ailleurs and Histoires d’A as much as The Blob and Jaws 2. These reviews are underwritten by a larger concern: what kind of subjects are produced or given ballast, what kind of political consciousness is enabled or foreclosed? ‘All films are militant films’ he writes bluntly at one point, a declaration that would be alien to contemporary discussion of Imperial superheroes and Monarchy dramas. For as much as he is open to the creations of studios and auteurs alike, Daney’s political commitment is never in doubt. The stakes are clear – especially during his writing in the 1970s – and there is only so much that can be brooked: ‘sometimes, the very project of a film is entirely structured by bourgeois ideology, that it never emerges from it, that it marks a territory that is entirely in the enemy’s hands from the start.’

Daney’s most arresting remarks typically arrive in unexpected asides and interjections. A review of a Roger Pic film takes a break in the second paragraph to ask of music played over the phone whilst on hold: ‘Isn’t it time we ask ourselves what we are being told with this music?’ Daney is as likely to stop to consider how cartoons effect montage (The Great Race) as he is the history of the French Communist Party (With the Blood of Others). He wonders if there is any need for, or interest in, in the production of films from military or petit-bourgeois states when ‘American soap operas or karate films seem sufficient to address the people’s imaginary’. A new favourite text of mine argues that Fassbinder can only be considered ‘the slightest bit political as a filmmaker’, not due to the widespread notion that his work is about alienation, but because he made ‘social climbing a cinematic subject worthy of attention’.

Today, the cinema of collective dreaming – a Saturday night of Modern Times and Pickpocket, sitting in an audience laughing and crying in the dark – is increasingly a specialist hobby. Daney foresaw this. In a late interview, he mentions his sadness at laughing alone in an empty theatre (‘To laugh alone, what anguish!’). I can’t help but wonder what he might have thought of online streaming; of the young falling asleep to American sitcoms. For today, Hollywood stares back at us. Attention economics and cinematography hold hands. Screens track our eyes and wrap our imaginaries in dazzling new codecs. Reading the young Daney we find the pre-history of this transformation as viewed by a critic of formidable intelligence, negotiating the admixture of technical procedures and dream-worlds we still inhabit. ‘His living room is a box in the theatre of the world’, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935. But it was Daney who explored its implications.

While many contemporary critics retreat to ‘Bazinian’ questions, Daney offers a way to confront our present of endless slogans, crises and visual stimuli. He takes up the task of understanding what ideologies and visions are sustained, and what could be fashioned in opposition. But those moments, as Daney is quick to warn ­– to dream or gather our strength – are always too late in appearing. Writing of Thomas Harlan’s Torre Bela and Gudie Lawaetz’s May 68, Daney describes the problem of witnessing – of presenting imagery ‘as if we were there’ – and how filmmaking relates to questions of struggle: ‘the film, by its very existence, suggests that History, perhaps, has been settled, and contributes to creating a new doxa, actual conformism and the stereotypes of tomorrow.’ At Daney’s most melancholic, this is presented as a kind of tragedy: a ‘perverse dialectic of belief and exhaustion is currently the last word of the “documentary” film’. Godard, Luc Moullet and Shinsuke Ogawa are differing examples of this ‘cinema of intervention’: films always too late in arriving, always ready to provide retrospective explanations for defeat. Yet such a problem is presented as something to be constantly questioned and re-examined, so as to refuse futile daydreaming.

Daney’s arrival may be late, but his work might help us to think through such problems of history and struggle, or at least to shrug off our fantasies of permanent defeat and missed victory. ‘What are the best vectors today of righteous violence, of this power to say no, of being radical?’ By reading Daney, we might perhaps begin to recover the belief that image-making can meaningfully contribute to answering such a question. It is to this end, I hope, for which Daney has finally arrived.

Read on: Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Missing Image’, NLR 34.

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The Traveller

It is fitting that the filmography of the great American filmmaker Robert Kramer (1939-1999) now comes to us from a distance, released in new restorations by the French distributor RE:VOIR. Not only because Kramer spent much of the latter half of his life in France, or because his work has been far more celebrated there than in his native country – in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, his sprawling mosaic of New Left demobilization, Milestones (1975), occasioned a roundtable, an essay by Serge Daney and even a poem by Jean-Pierre Oudart (‘Pour Milestones’). It is fitting too because Kramer’s cinema was one of dislocation, of distances measures and traversed.

A founding member of Newsreel, the activist film collective established in 1967 after the March on the Pentagon, Kramer emerged from the tradition of militant cinema. The son of a New York doctor, he was one of the many children of the middle class for whom the radical struggles of that decade – above all that of the North Vietnamese against American imperialism – precipitated what Kristin Ross has described as a ‘displacement’ from their assigned station and a passage towards the oppressed. A trip to Brazil in the early 1960s gave Kramer ‘the outsider’s view of my own country that I needed’; his first film, FALN (1965), co-directed with Peter Gessner, was composed of footage shot by Venezuelan guerrillas. In the years that followed, he would travel to North Vietnam (The People’s War, 1970), Portugal (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal, 1977) and the nascent People’s Republic of Angola (the photo-essay With Freedom in Their Eyes, 1976). ‘The places I filmed… formed a theatre of conflict’, Kramer told Cahiers, ‘but above all they were places, which meant that it was necessary to travel and to physically confront a land, a relief. Some place, somewhere, somebody.’

The journey was fundamental for Kramer. ‘There’s no English word for trajet’, he muses in Dear Doc (1990). ‘Trajectory is mechanical. The trajectory of a bullet, for example. But trajet gives the human scale of movement. My trajet.’ ‘Making movies’, he said, ‘is about moving toward and moving away. About arriving and departing. Or about the very distance necessary to make them.’ His itinerant spirit quickly proved at odds with the demands of propaganda. The People’s War is the only Newsreel film credited to Kramer (retroactively – most of Newsreel’s early films contained no credits), who left the group shortly after, out of a desire to ‘feel completely free’. ‘I feel culpability’, he stated, ‘but I’m very afraid of contexts and sedentariness. Militant cinema wants to impose an idea, a direction, an information’. We could say instead that Kramer’s cinema is that of the fellow traveller: his subject was the experience of the journey, what he describes as a ‘personal, subjective confrontation’ with events.

At the close of his Dziga Vertov Group period, Jean-Luc Godard made a film titled Ici et Ailleurs (1976). Having initially intended to make a militant pro-Palestinian film, Godard learned upon his return to Paris that his footage of the fedayeen was now of dead men, killed in the interim. The title of the resulting film (‘Here and Elsewhere’) measures the distance between France and Palestine, the militant filmmaker and his subjects – but not to relieve the director of his responsibility. As Daney wrote of the film, ‘what’s at stake is the engagement of the filmmaker as a filmmaker. For it’s in the nature of cinema (delay between the time of shooting and the time of projection) to be the art of here and elsewhere. . .the true place of the filmmaker is in the AND.’ Kramer’s work might be said to live in this interstice. A cinema of the fellow traveller: the one not identified with a group or community, but who involves himself all the same. ‘This’, Cyril Béghin writes, ‘is the centre of Kramer’s method: remoteness leads to all kinds of connections.’

His first solo-directed films were the ‘antithesis to Newsreel’s belligerence’ in David Fresko’s description. Cold and hermetic, they sought to return the militant statement (such as the propaganda film) to the lives of those who utter it. The first, In the Country (1967), is a study of political paralysis. Its early minutes foreground the distance between a New Left militant and the struggles of the oppressed: over a still photo of a black man, a white radical – the film’s subject – delivers an angry, self-loathing monologue: ‘I knew him. At least in the way I know people, functionally to work with. Imagine, this man, given all he knows, was capable of hope. Of course, I could always get out. But them, they can’t get away, but I can. That’s an impossible barrier.’ Concerned with political enervation and pathology (in one scene, the man – isolated in the countryside, avoiding a comrade facing imprisonment – compensates for his political impotence by fondling a rifle), In the Country presents a potential dead-end for Kramer’s cohort: the reification of their privileged distance, with ultra-left fantasies and a sense of political impotence substituting for engagement.

Writing of his second film, The Edge (1968) – about a group reckoning with a friend’s decision to assassinate the president – Kramer stated that the movie’s ‘major question’ was not the ideological or strategic rectitude of political violence, but rather ‘What am I myself doing? What is my relation to a movement for change in this country?’ If his early films thematize separation, it was not to abnegate commitment, but rather to make that space perceptible, to open the question of the relationship between the political and everyday life – and the possibility of their reconciliation. How can the two be reconciled? How can commitment to another’s cause be expressed without, as Deleuze said to Foucault, ‘the indignity of speaking for others’? These are the questions that animate Kramer’s work from his early involvement in militant cinema to his final films, made in the twilight of the century.

Two Newsreel-associated films, released in 1970 – The People’s War (co-directed with John Douglas and Norman Fruchter) and Ice – emblematize the two poles of Kramer’s cinema. The first, shot during a trip to Vietnam, documents the struggle against American imperialism. Its images are entirely of the Vietnamese – at combat, at work, performing a play – while a voiceover translates their testimonies for American viewers. Ice is its obverse; the camera turns back on the group itself: a militant cell based in New York, imagined in a near-future dystopian police state. Ice evokes Newsreel’s rough-hewn, verité aesthetics, but defuses any revolutionary fervour they might evoke. Instead, Kramer embeds the cell’s activities within their messy, intersubjective dynamics, characterized by paranoia, masculinism, and uncertainty. Newsreel refused to distribute the film.

Kramer would return to filmmaking only after the end of American involvement in Vietnam, his style reborn in the embers of ‘60s militancy. ‘I think this is the last film’, Kramer said of 1975’s Milestones (co-directed with John Douglas). ‘Everything has to be in it. Nothing left out because of “considerations”. All the play of the heart. All the fullness of life. The form will make itself passionately. Last movie, in which the form evaporates into life.’ Dedicated ‘with deep gratitude to the Vietnamese people, whose struggle for independence and freedom continues to point the way toward our common victory’, the film is an immense tapestry of a generation and country in transition. From the factory gates of Detroit to the communes of Free Vermont, we move between over fifty characters of roughly Kramer’s age and background – anti-war activists, hippies, labour organizers, dropouts. Blurring, like many of Kramer’s films, the boundary between documentary and fiction, Milestones emanates directly from the interior of its milieu – no longer as oblique psychodrama, but with the elemental intimacy of accumulated experience and comradery. With no establishing shots, the film is stitched together from private, melancholic conversations between lovers, comrades, and outcasts coming to terms with the experiences of the past decade and the uncertainty of their future. ‘I don’t think the centre of my beliefs has changed’, a man recently released from prison for anti-war work tells a friend, ‘but I have to live with them differently’.

The waning of direct militancy appears as a source of melancholy, but also potentially renewal: the chance to reconcile politics and everyday life. The year after Milestones’ release, Kramer expressed his belief that ‘imperialism has entered its final crisis, and that we’re going to be called upon to carry out much clearer tasks now’. The last image of the film – a rushing waterfall – signifies the thawing of the ‘ice’ of Kramer’s first films as much as the experience of, in the words of one character, watching ‘the whole context we did it in melt away.’ The only interruptions of this intimate New Left fresco are a series of black-and-white images of what frames its characters’ lives: the struggles of the Vietnamese, African Americans and indigenous Americans. ‘How do you not take their place and at the same time record their existence, their oppression, their resistance?’ asks Daney of these sequences. ‘One feels that they should be there but at the same time one does not have the right to speak in their place.’ One black-and-white insert comes from The People’s War, appearing as footage shot by a filmmaker played by Grace Paley. In the film’s final scene, she collects two sets of dailies: one, in black-and-white, for her Vietnam film, another, in colour, of her newly born granddaughter. Intimacy and distance, the events of a life and commitment to the struggle, placed side by side.

After trips to Portugal and Angola, Kramer relocated to France. The two films bookending the next period of his work are films of shipwreck, of the traveller washed up on the shores of political retrenchment. In Guns (1980) – an embodiment avant la lettre of what Fredric Jameson would later diagnose as the problem of ‘cognitive mapping’ – the lives of Kramer’s cohort are set on the edges of an opaque conspiracy involving international gun smuggling through shipping containers. Writing of the film, Kramer spoke of a ‘discontinuity’ between ‘my events’ and those of the world – the events of a life and the making of history now appear definitively severed. Eight years later, with Doc’s Kingdom (1988), he returned to the motif of the isolated radical, now in the depths of what Kramer’s friend Félix Guattari described as the ‘winter years’ of the 1980s.  A portrait of exile and creeping disillusionment, it introduces Doc (played by former Newsreel member Paul McIsaac): an American radical who, after years spent working with African independence movements, finds himself alone in Portugal. Doc, McIsaac wrote, ‘grew out of both of our lives and the lives of friends, some of whom were now dead, in jail or just “missing in action”. . . like Odysseus, Doc has been on a long journey home from the wars.’

The return journey is the theme of the two films that mark the end of the sequence begun with the founding of Newsreel: Route One/USA (1989) and Starting Place (1994). In Route One, Kramer and Doc are travel companions – Kramer behind the camera – making their way down the titular highway from the Canadian border to the edge of Florida. Kramer described the film as ‘the reverse angle shot’ of Milestones: no longer the ‘us’ of the radical milieu, but the ‘them’ of America’s people. Route One has the intimacy and sprawl of the former film; in both, the country’s present state is diagnosed not propositionally, but through a flowing series of impressions, gestures, conversations. The ‘secret background’ for the character of Doc, Kramer wrote, was A Fortunate Man (1967), John Berger and Jean Mohr’s portrait of a country doctor, and something of that book’s spirit permeates Route One. On their voyage south, the travellers immerse themselves in communities emerging from Reagan’s eighties, observing, listening, lending a hand where possible. Kramer and Doc are patient, tender – present to the lives encountered, imbued with a quiet melancholy for the country’s health (‘It makes me feel warm, sort of’, says Doc, remembering his mother’s happiness at a bingo hall, ‘but also really sort of angry, because it’s all that people have’). Well before the film’s end, Doc decides to part ways: it’s time, he tells Kramer, to cease wandering and ‘melt a bit into a community’. Kramer, speaking to an interviewer about this moment of the film, puts their divergence in these terms:

The idea behind this was a real collision between the footloose filmmaker, Robert… and Paul about the question of social responsibility… Doc says ‘Apparently as a filmmaker you can go on forever travelling with this kind of relationship to people’s lives, moving through their hearts and onto the next heart. But I’m a doctor, and a doctor only has a sense in the context of being somewhere and having patients.’

The filmmaker is always at the margins, between here and elsewhere.

Starting Place returns not only to places and people encountered in The People’s War, but to the point of departure for Kramer and his cohort: Vietnam. Opening with a quote from Chris Marker – the other great itinerant filmmaker of the left and Kramer’s collaborator the year before – on the role of images in human memory, Starting Place finds the country in the midst of its transition to a market economy, with traces of the war still present. The style is that of the true traveller: a subjective, observant camera – the vision of Kramer, the visitor – encountering a foreign place not yet schematized by habit, appearing as a rush of impressions and associations, and with this a humble deference to the other, the Vietnamese who tell him of memories of the war, their thoughts on Vietnam’s transformation, their daily lives.

Kramer features only one non-Vietnamese: Linda Evans, former member of SDS and the Weathermen, who he visits in prison, where she has been for over ten years. Shot in close-ups attentive to the subtle movements of her face and the play of light from a single window, Evans asks Kramer about his return to Vietnam, about how it has changed since her visit in 1969. Three times she says that the Vietnamese’s struggle changed her life, giving her ‘the vision of another humanity, you know, far beyond what I had experienced here. In my own small world that I was raised up in.’ We are returned to where Kramer’s cinema began: with the distance between one person and another (a people, a struggle), a distance traversed by Evans and her comrades. In the interstices, between the prison and Vietnam, Kramer’s camera now measures and bridges that gap. Over the credits, Kramer returns to Evans: ‘Vietnam is no further than the prison in California where Linda is’ he tells us. ‘She got forty years… She worked with blacks and Latinos… She fought against the Klu Klux Klan. Forty years!’ We feel our distance – from Linda in prison, from the isolation imposed on her – and, in the tenor of Kramer’s voice, the exigency of crossing it.

Read on: Ai Xiaoming, ‘The Citizen Camera’, NLR 72.

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Libya’s New Order

For years, whenever I would come to Tripoli, fighting was either raging or the next round was looming on the horizon. An internationally recognised but powerless government in Tripoli would look on as armed groups clashed over influence in the capital, and as the warlord Khalifa Haftar extended his power over eastern, central and southern Libya, often by extraordinarily violent means. Yet, on a visit last November, the atmosphere had changed. The country remained split between rival administrations, with competing foreign powers carving out their spheres of influence. But at a deeper level, the struggles of the past decade seemed to have reached maturity. Oil supplies and revenues were now flowing across political dividing lines. And out of a multitude of factions, a cast of victorious militia leaders, war profiteers and corrupt politicians had begun to emerge: the makings of a future ruling class.

The creation of this new elite has been both the cumulative result of countless acts of violence and an unintended consequence of failed peace-making efforts under the UN’s aegis. Yet the most immediate catalyst for the calm in Tripoli this winter was the clashes back in summer 2022. Tensions between two opposing coalitions of militias had been building up for months, driven by a power struggle between two competing central governments. The acting administration in Tripoli, led by the Qadhafi regime crony Abdelhamid Dabeiba, had taken office as the UN-backed Government of National Unity (GNU) in March 2021. But soon enough the façade of unity crumbled. Elections planned for the following December were cancelled as the leading presidential candidates – including Khalifa Haftar – contested each other’s right to run. Haftar eventually threw his weight behind his former opponent Fathi Bashagha, who was mandated by parts of the east-based parliament to form a new government in February 2022. But Dabeiba, contesting the legality of Bashagha’s government, refused to cede power. Throughout the spring of last year, the two prime ministers vied for the backing of armed groups in the greater Tripoli area, with promises of positions and payments.

The showdown finally came in August, when two Tripoli militias pre-emptively moved against rival groups whom they suspected of plotting to install Bashagha. One of the militias, known as the Stability Support Apparatus, led by Abdelghani al-Kikli, had initially supported Bashagha, but became his fiercest opponent after he ignored Kikli’s wishes in his pick of interior minister. The other, a powerful Salafist outfit that calls itself the Deterrence Apparatus, had so far kept its position in the power struggle opaque. But its links to the Nawasi Brigade, a militia that had become Bashagha’s strongest champion in Tripoli, led many to believe that it would ultimately line up behind Bashagha. A businessman with close ties to Nawasi’s leaders told me that ‘Nawasi were sure the Deterrence Apparatus had their back – until the last minute.’

On 27 August, the Deterrence Apparatus suddenly took over Nawasi’s bases, while Kikli launched attacks on other forces allegedly colluding with Bashagha. A handful of drone strikes – widely believed to have been carried out by Turkey, which has maintained a military presence in western Libya since the 2019-20 civil war – then stopped pro-Bashagha groups on Tripoli’s outskirts from bailing out their embattled allies. The day ended with Nawasi and several smaller armed groups being driven out of Tripoli, as much of the city fell under the control of only two militias: the Deterrence Apparatus and Kikli’s Stability Support Apparatus. The former now holds the capital’s only functioning airport and port, as well as the districts hosting the key government institutions. Kikli controls part of central Tripoli and vast swathes of the city’s south, including its most populous neighbourhood.

Some might dismiss this episode as yet another skirmish in an interminable conflict between the shifting armed alliances in Tripoli. And so it may be. But there is also a broader trend at work here. Over the years, these repeated confrontations have entrenched the power of several fearsome militias, which have become increasingly professionalized while gradually expanding their territory. Post-Qadhafi Libya offered exceptionally favourable conditions for such groups, most of which operate as official security forces and enjoy generous state funding. At first, these organizations were unruly, fractious and unambitious – prone to splits and petty internal rivalries. Yet over time they have developed centralized leadership structures and absorbed growing numbers of the former regime’s military and intelligence officers. The result has been the consolidation of a militia landscape that, in Tripoli alone, initially involved dozens of different armed groups.

Consolidation in Tripoli was preceded by the expansion of Haftar’s military campaign. Haftar started out in 2014 with a motley alliance of armed groups, but with robust foreign support – from Egypt, France, the UAE and Russia – he gradually built up forces of his own. His Libyan Arab Armed Forces are essentially a family business, with the strongest units run by his sons and in-laws, and financed by various illicit activities which the Haftar clan has successfully monopolized.

Perhaps the clearest sign that western Libyan militias are now also coming of age is the openly political part they have begun to play. Until the formation of the Dabeiba government, armed groups mostly contented themselves with exerting political influence behind the scenes. They left it to politicians to sit at the negotiating table, then strong-armed the newly designated top officials into appointing ministers of their choosing. Allies and clients of armed groups came to operate at all levels of the administration, forming entrenched patronage networks.

As they were courted by Dabeiba and Bashagha, however, western Libyan militia leaders assumed an entirely different role. They began meeting with Haftar’s sons, Saddam and Belgasem, to negotiate the terms of a Bashagha takeover or a Dabeiba incumbency. Participants in these meetings told me of their detailed discussions with Belgasem Haftar in May 2022, on a constitutional framework for elections to resolve the impasse between the two governments. Several similar meetings have taken place since – and though they have not produced any deal, they reflect the country’s overall political trajectory. Previously, few militia leaders had sufficiently centralized control over their groups to enter into controversial negotiations without facing internal challenges. Now, they are powerful enough to talk with long-reviled adversaries.

*

Twelve years after the 2011 uprising against Qadhafi, Libya’s revolution has long eaten its own. The initial revolutionary fervour having faded into a distant memory, holdovers from the ancien régime have made a comeback by allying with the newer gun-toting parvenus – a process epitomized by Dabeiba’s appointment as prime minister. (Towards the end of the Qadhafi era, Dabeiba had acquired spectacular wealth at the head of a public-sector construction company).

Over the last decade, this ruling-class-in-waiting – comprised of state officials, businessmen and militia leaders – have become experts at illicit enrichment. Drug smuggling and trafficking or detaining Europe-bound migrants are lucrative practices. Yet these pale in comparison to the benefits of defrauding the state itself. Militias in control of the energy infrastructure – most importantly Haftar, whose forces hold most oil fields and ports – have repeatedly shut down exports to extort large sums from the Tripoli government. More often, however, oil revenues have poured into the Central Bank in Tripoli, propping up an economy that is almost wholly dependent on them (Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa). The Libyan state currently employs more than two-thirds of the country’s working-age population. State purchases constitute a major market – medicine, vehicles, catering and construction contracts – which creates endless embezzlement opportunities for those who can move the administrative levers. The result has been pillage on a vast scale and the decay of public services.

Much of the proceeds from these transactions presumably make their way to bank accounts abroad. But Libya’s war profiteers are increasingly turning their new wealth into tangible assets in the country, preparing to reinvest their capital beyond the conflict’s current phase. Some do so overtly, but many use proxies – both to reduce their exposure and to build patronage networks. Real estate is the most popular target. In Tripoli, relatives of prime minister Dabeiba are using surrogates to buy up properties in the upscale Hay al-Andalus district, according to local residents. In the coastal cities of Zawiya and Sabratha, militia leaders own beach resorts, cafés and private clinics, among other assets. And in Benghazi, commanders in Haftar’s forces have accumulated properties, partly by seizing the homes of alleged ‘terrorists’ whom they forcibly displaced.

A new shopping centre in the city is officially owned by a businessman who is widely reputed to have made his money through drug smuggling and has close ties to Haftar’s son Saddam. (Last autumn, he published videos showing him buying a hunting falcon at the record price of $1m, shooting in the air to celebrate his acquisition, then giving the bird to Saddam as a gift.) Saddam himself informally controls a private bank headquartered in Benghazi, which he has used to finance a new private airline, Berniq Airways. Its equivalent in western Libya is Medsky, launched in 2022 by Mohamed Taher Issa, a businessman from Misrata who rose to prominence by benefiting from privileged access to foreign currency at the official exchange rate during  the worst years of the 2010s economic crisis.

Acquiring and protecting such assets requires influence over state bodies and, to varying degrees, the ability to wield coercion. Firepower also serves as a deterrent against potential prosecution. As such, these investments not only reflect the confidence of Libya’s new rulers; they are also helping to cement a security landscape that is fragmented into militia fiefdoms.

*

Libya’s vicious new order is emerging amidst a stalemate rather than a settlement. During the 2019-20 war over Tripoli, the opposing powers invited foreign actors into the country, whose presence has generally prevented major outbreaks of fighting since Haftar’s defeat. Turkey, which supported the Tripoli government against Haftar, has established military bases in western Libya, and is therefore able to deter Haftar while using its drones to effectively determine which western Libyan faction rules in Tripoli. Meanwhile, Russia’s Wagner Group, which fought for Haftar, mans a string of bases that run through Libya from Sirte on the coast to the far south.

The current geopolitical conjuncture is unfavourable to a resumption of civil war. During Haftar’s Tripoli offensive, Haftar’s Emirati and Egyptian backers had waged a proxy war against their regional rivals Turkey and Qatar. But since the conflict ended, both Turkey and Qatar have mended ties with their regional adversaries. At present, Haftar can count on neither Emirati drones nor petrodollars to start a new war, while Egypt remains heavily indebted. Wagner withdrew parts of its modest contingent from Libya following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and Russia remains too bogged down to support a new offensive. Turkey is similarly unwilling to enter into a direct confrontation, since this would jeopardize cooperation with Russia on other vital issues. This constellation of priorities and allegiances is undoubtedly subject to change – but, for the time being, ambitious Libyan warlords have their hands tied.

Political pathways out of the stalemate are equally blocked. Successive international plans to negotiate transitional unity governments and pave the way for elections produced administrations that were hijacked by small cliques and determined to stay in power indefinitely. Since the latest attempt to hold a vote failed in 2021, Western governments and the UN have reiterated that elections are the only way out of the crisis. Privately, though, many Western diplomats admit that they do not believe a vote will take place anytime soon.

The obstacles to elections are formidable. Key Libyan and foreign players – Haftar, Egypt, France – insist on introducing a presidential system. But like other leading candidates, Haftar only wants presidential elections if he can skew their legal framework in his favour, excluding the most popular competitors. Ultimately, no Libyan faction wants to risk a hostile president monopolizing executive authority. And even parliamentary elections require the adoption of new laws by the two competing legislative bodies, whose majorities have so far colluded to shoot down any proposals so that they can hold on to their seats.

While international diplomats spend their time debating their preferred solutions in an endless series of meetings, Libya’s nascent elite is creating a new reality on the ground. Ironically, foreign diplomacy has contributed to what could be the centrepiece of a future settlement among warlords, as opposed to a roadmap for fair elections. UN and US diplomats repeatedly pressed Dabeiba to transfer funds for salaries to Haftar’s forces, even as the latter refused to provide information on the recipients. Dabeiba’s government now makes these payments on a monthly basis as a matter of course. Another arrangement has linked Dabeiba and Haftar since the summer of 2022, when Dabeiba appointed a Haftar nominee as head of Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) in exchange for Haftar lifting his partial blockade of oil exports. That post has proved all the more important since the Tripoli authorities last year allocated an ‘exceptional budget’ of $7bn to NOC.

Such agreements do not yet add up to a settlement. Haftar, who has long wanted it all, still wants more – far more than Dabeiba can give him without antagonizing western Libyan armed groups. Haftar continues to use the Bashagha government’s existence to exert pressure on Dabeiba, and open up parallel financing mechanisms by forcing banks based in eastern Libya to accumulate debts. A corollary of this tactic is the entrenchment of institutional division between east and west.

Thus, it remains to be seen whether Libyans are witnessing the contours of a future arrangement between a new oligarchy, or the prelude to a separatist conflict once Haftar, who turns eighty this year, is no longer on the scene. Haftar has built his coalition on the promise of seizing absolute power, and he is currently seeking to prevent the rise of secessionist sentiments in the east. It is unclear whether his sons could retain control after his death – or even if they would stick together. In western Libya, too, further turbulence is likely – indeed, it looks like an inherent feature of the emerging order. Outside Tripoli, militia consolidation has yet to run its course, and Dabeiba may stumble while juggling competing demands from armed groups. Yet one thing is clear: the vested interests forged by years of conflict are there to stay. 

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Between Past and Future’, NLR 80.

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Goodbye Erdoğan?

Since 2019, Turkish economic policy has been characterized by Erdoğan’s repeated U-turns. Initially, his regime adopted a programme based on low interest rates and credit expansion, breaking with neoliberal orthodoxy in order to consolidate political support among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This led to the devaluation of the Lira, high rates of inflation, a mounting current account deficit and external debt, thanks to Turkey’s high dependence on imports. In an attempt to counterbalance these effects, the government pivoted to a traditional neoliberal programme: high interest rates to attract foreign capital and stabilize the value of the TL, along with credit contraction to fight inflation and indebtedness. Yet, because such policies imperil the AKP’s electoral base, the party has continually reverted to a more heterodox approach – a back-and-forth oscillation that Ümit Akcay has analyzed in these pages.

As long as the Turkish economy was integrated into the transatlantic neoliberal order, there appeared to be no alternative to Erdoğan’s zigzagging. The strategic imperative to keep SMEs afloat by means of expansionary economic policies was irreconcilable with the country’s position in the world market. However, more recently, this oscillatory movement seems to have been abandoned in favour of a firm commitment to economic heterodoxy. Since spring 2021, the interest rates of the Central Bank (TCMB) have been pushed down to the extent that real interest rates are now far into negative territory (approaching minus 80% at their nadir). Conventional Lira deposits, held by the vast majority of the population, are yielding massive losses. Meanwhile, commercial and consumer credit has been massively expanded.

As expected, these measures allowed Turkey to attain high growth figures in 2021 – but at the cost of a massive devaluation of the Lira and skyrocketing inflation. High growth concealed a massive slump in living standards for the majority of the population, whose incomes did not keep pace with inflation despite compensatory measures such as hikes in the minimum wage, price controls and tax reductions. This dynamic led to an economic standstill towards the end of 2021, as businesses were unable to make sound price calculations and lost out on commercial contracts denominated in foreign exchange. A full-scale economic catastrophe was only narrowly avoided when Erdoğan announced what was essentially a state guarantee for foreign exchange-hedged deposits on 20 December 2021.

Shortly after that, the TCMB rolled out a so-called ‘liraization strategy’ which involved de facto foreign exchange control mechanisms: restricting access to TCMB loans for companies with high amounts of foreign exchange, banning the use of foreign exchange in domestic transactions, and creating incentives for banks to switch to TL deposits. This aimed to boost private sector demand for TL and keep devaluation at bay. But because there were no deep structural changes in the Turkish economy, all the ills of this heterodox approach – devaluation, high inflation, a high current account deficit – returned or persisted. This time, though, they were accompanied by rising interest and debt.

This gave rise to an even more fatal policy paradox. Over the course of 2022, Turkey began to experiment with a series of ‘macro-prudential measures’ to contain the crisis, such as de facto capital controls – economic penalties for banks that gave out loans with interest rates above 30% – to boost low-cost lending in TL to the private sector. However, as devaluation decelerated due to the liraization strategy, the inflation rate remained above the devaluation rate, because of the delayed effect of devaluation on inflation and the inflationary pressures emanating from the world economy. This, in turn, led to the effective appreciation of the TL.

In other words, Erdoğan’s policies ended up achieving the exact opposite of what they intended. Rather than deflating the price of export goods, they managed to raise it. Similarly, lower interest rates were accompanied by a massive deceleration of lending by private banks, which saw their profit margins shrink and scrambled to offset the effects of government policy. This was only offset by another rise in public lending in autumn 2022.

The Turkish economy therefore remains caught between a rock and a hard place. The AKP is reluctant to impose neoliberal remedies yet unable to formulate a viable alternative. With presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for summer 2023 at the latest, the government’s hegemonic crisis is becoming more apparent. In this conjuncture, three distinct pathways have opened up: a mixture of improvisatory economic policies and authoritarian consolidation, favoured by the government; a full-scale neoliberal restoration, favoured by sections of capital and the main opposition; and a programme of popular-democratic reform, favoured by the left.

Implicit in Erdoğan’s new policy approach was an ‘import-substitution industrialization’ strategy, in which the high costs of imports, combined with the low cost of financing investments and cost advantages due to devaluation and low interest rates, would foster industrial investment – giving Turkey a way out of its overreliance on the world market. Yet this ambition was never likely to be realized, since its success depended on a state-led planning and/or investment strategy that was always sorely lacking. It would thus be more accurate to characterize Turkey’s recent heterodox turn as yet another attempt at crisis management rather than a transition to a new regime of accumulation. Its purpose was to protect large sections of the population, especially those who work in SMEs, from the effects of economic freefall – buying time for the AKP until the next general election.

A return to orthodox neoliberal economic policy would entail much higher political costs than an approach that tries to mitigate the effects of the crisis on SMEs and domestic consumption by simply muddling through. The AKP’s current political strategy is to position itself as the only lifeline for struggling small businesses while ramping up repression against potential threats to its hegemony. But this is not a foolproof method. For instance, high-performing SMEs that feel they can withstand the competitive pressures of an orthodox monetary policy may choose to ally with capitalists calling for an expansion of Turkey’s role in the global economy. Indeed, the factions of capital that are closest to the AKP – mostly export-oriented with lower import-dependency – have already begun to criticize the government for its botched currency devaluation.

So far, there has not been a decisive break between the leading factions of capital and the Erdoğan regime; most sectors are still returning high profits (banks have seen a whopping fivefold increase), thanks partly to wage suppression caused by inflation. But the country’s leading business association, the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSIAD), is becoming increasingly vocal in its demand to reimpose neoliberal policies, with the ultimate aim of increasing Turkey’s centrality in international production chains. It also advocates a shift away from AKP authoritarianism towards a model with more civil liberties and constitutional balances, so as to curtail what it sees as the socially destabilizing effects of the current system.

As the AKP’s interests have steadily diverged from those of big capital, the struggle between the regime and its political rivals has also come to a head. Polls show that the public mood had turned against the governing party, with its victory in the next election far from guaranteed. This has prompted the opposition bloc, led by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), to go on the offensive. More often than not, this means trying to outflank Erdoğan and his allies on Turkish nationalism and chauvinism. The opposition, should it come to power, has promised the persecution and repatriation of Syrian refugees along with a full-scale war on the PKK. Its would-be Economy Minister, Ali Babacan, has vowed to continue outlawing strikes. And the bloc has remained firmly against any form of popular mobilization. As CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu asserted, ‘Active opposition is one thing, taking to the streets is another…We have only one wish, that our people should remain as calm as possible, at least until elections come.’

The opposition’s goal is to re-establish the neoliberal regime on an expanded scale, purged of its current hyper-presidential structure yet incorporating some of the authoritarian and nationalist ideological elements associated with the AKP and its predecessors, while continuing to demobilize and depoliticize the population. This will be the trade-off for any small degree of democratic reform.

Can such a vision, uninspiring as it is, succeed in galvanizing the electorate to kick out the incumbent? Polls suggest a high level of disaffection with the government, but also scepticism concerning the opposition. Erdoğan, despite his various missteps, has been adept at maintaining the identitarian connection between his party and its base – which, combined with his short-term populist and redistributionary programme (including subsidies for household bills, further wage increases, social housing and state-led credit programmes for SMEs), may be enough to keep him in power. The most recent polls show an uptick for the AKP following the announcement of such measures.

No matter who wins the next election, though, there remains an alternative for Turkey beyond authoritarian consolidation and neoliberal restoration. It lies in new outfits such as the Labour and Freedom Alliance (Emek ve Özgürlük İttifakı), a coalition of pro-Kurdish and leftist parties which aims to unify these dissident forces. For them, the only route out of national crisis is a coherent, democratically-accountable economic strategy that fundamentally alters the Turkish model in favour of the popular classes, along with far-reaching political reform. Their attempts to organize in an increasingly repressive climate will be an uphill battle, but unless it is fought, the prospect of democratizing Turkey will vanish entirely.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads?’, NLR 127

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Other People’s Standards

White Noise. (L-R) Greta Gerwig as Babette, Raffey Cassidy as Denise, May Nivola as Steffie, Sam Nivola as Heinrich and Adam Driver as Jack in White Noise. Cr: Netflix © 2022

White Noise seems to represent a departure from a writer-director who, while not exactly stuck in his ways, has made it clear over the past quarter century that he knows what he’s about. Until now, the work of Noah Baumbach has been low-key and often lo-fi, and based on original screenplays. The characters, either lifelong New Yorkers, Californians resident in New York, or adoptive New Yorkers back in California, are aspiring writers (Kicking and Screaming, Mr Jealousy, Mistress America), established novelists (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding), ex-musicians (Greenberg), dancers (Frances Ha), documentary-makers (While We’re Young), sculptors (The Meyerowitz Stories), and collaborators in an experimental theatre troupe (Marriage Story). Reference-points and checkpoints include virtually every major museum and university in Manhattan and Brooklyn, plus the New Yorker, the nouvelle vague, the MacArthur Fellowship, Paul Ricoeur, Kafka, and Lionel Trilling.

In the new film, a faithful, full-dress rendering of Don Delillo’s novel, the trappings are different. The film begins in autumn 1984. Adam Driver, looking more than ever like a man wearing a mask of his own face, plays Jack Gladney, fiftyish and pot-bellied, who lives in a small Midwestern town, Blacksmith, with his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and four children, three of them from former marriages. The Gladney clan commune over television, engage with fads, read tabloid newspapers, eat frozen food, and enjoy giddy outings to the lavishly stocked local supermarket. They are products of that ‘triumphant, suffocating American philistinism’, that Philip Roth, in a 1989 essay, said it had been the duty of the post-war writer, armed with his Trilling and Kafka – or, to borrow Roth’s own preferences, his Kazin and Conrad – to defy. 

Even Jack’s career, as a teacher of Advanced Nazism at the private College-on-the-Hill, reflects his populist credentials. Regarded as ‘shrewd’ where his colleagues are routinely labelled ‘brilliant’, Jack approaches his subject the same way as his buddies from the cultural-studies department, as a phenomenon in the history of mass taste. In a memorably choreographed sequence, Jack delivers a tag-team lecture with his perennially awestruck colleague Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) that turns on the kinship between their respective specialisms, Adolf Hitler and Elvis Presley, a pair of mothers’ boys who found relief from psychic burden in seducing a crowd. Jack is less a successor to embittered, much-divorced professor-fathers like Bernard Berkman the experimental fiction writer in The Squid and the Whale (Jeff Daniels) or Harold the overlooked sculptor in The Meyerowitz Stories (Dustin Hoffman), than to the supporting roles that Driver, acting his true age (b. 1983) and tapping the obnoxiousness in his persona, has performed for Baumbach: Zev the rich-kid playboy ‘artist’ in Frances Ha, Jamie the scheming wannabe film-maker in While We’re Young, Randy the pampered actor in The Meyerowitz Stories.

But Bernard and Harold were not heroic figures – nor, for that matter, was Josh Srebnick (Ben Stiller), the hyper-conscientious documentarian whom Jamie exploits for professional advancement. Baumbach has always been clear-eyed about the pitfalls of purity, and open to the virtues of a breezier or jockier outlook. Ivan, the tennis instructor who addresses his eleven-year-old student as ‘my brother’ in The Squid and the Whale, transcends Bernard’s charge that he’s a ‘philistine’, just as Patch, the Goldman Sachs banker ridiculed for using the greeting ‘sup, bra!’ in Frances Ha, proves a devoted partner to Frances’s best friend Sophie. Even Josh’s disgust with Jamie in While We’re Young is revealed as excessive (‘he’s not evil’, he concludes, in the final scene. ‘He’s just young.’)

This is a not a case of Baumbach consorting with the enemy, but of cultivating a part of his personality that he has so far under-explored. Baumbach grew up on Montgomery Place, in the Park Slope district of Brooklyn. His father, a notable experimental novelist, wrote for Partisan Review, identified as one of the forces for good in Philip Roth’s essay. Towards the end of The Squid and the Whale, Bernard, a version of Jonathan Baumbach, remembers going to see A Bout de Souffle at an arthouse cinema, The Thalia, with ‘the Dicksteins’, an allusion to Morris Dickstein, the historian and PR stalwart. But while Baumbach has preferred to depict bohemian types with delicate antennae, there have been hints of a mixed pedigree ever since his 1995 debut Kicking and Screaming, in which a group of friends, postponing life after graduation, natter about topics ranging from Immanuel Kant to Jason Voorhees, the killer from the Friday the 13th series.

Baumbach has expressed his regret at failing to honour his father, the basis for Bernard, as ‘a great movie companion’ who ‘wouldn’t diminish The Jerk’. He also omits to present Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), the character modelled on himself, as the kind of kid who would eagerly consume a Steve Martin comedy. White Noise, in the attention, even indulgence, it shows towards the Gladneys, is a reminder that Baumbach is an unresentful creature of the 1980s, with a taste for popular entertainment – ET, Beverly Hills Cop, National Lampoon’s Vacation series – as well as for those films, more self-conscious in approach and sinister in energy, which Fredric Jameson identified as contributions to the analysis of postmodern themes: De Palma’s Blow Out, Demme’s Something Wild, Lynch’s Blue Velvet. (In a piece from 1984, shortly before the appearance of White Noise, Jameson described Delillo as ‘the most interesting and talented of American post-modernist novelists.’)

Baumbach’s attitudes are underpinned not by the disdain of Roth or the New York Intellectuals but something closer to the eclecticism favoured by Woody Allen, a fellow Brooklynite and secular Jew, who, in one strain of his work, has been keen to announce and also embody his love for both Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman along with an aversion to taking either too far. Baumbach’s films to date resemble Allen in this middle range, with a shared priority of sympathetic but unillusioned character-drawing in a clearly defined milieu. Both directors have made use of voiceover, inter-titles, location shooting, black and white, NY-LA rivalry, the actor Wallace Shawn. Frances Ha borrows a joke from Annie Hall, While We’re Young pays homage to Crimes and Misdemeanours, another story of a political documentarian in a world besotted with cheap thrills. But Baumbach is no disciple or tribute act, and his films are distinctive achievements – trenchantly funny, affecting, resourceful, heaving with memorable characters.

White Noise offers something less personal – if not quite generic, then genre-bound. It’s like a turbo-charged version of While We’re Young, Baumbach’s previous attempt at a commercial venture – in that case a polished comedy of manners, in this one a period satire with noir and disaster-movie elements. The tone of the new film is at first too goofy, then too pulpy. Delillo’s ornery chatter proves hard to play, though Cheadle and Gerwig fare better than Driver, and the novel’s mysticism is largely sacrificed. Like While We’re Young, the result belongs in the Interesting Failures section of the Video Planet where the put-upon Shep gets a job in Kicking and Screaming. But here, as there, Baumbach uses a smoother-edged approach to explore the thematic concern that has driven all of his work – the relationship between contentment and fear, in particular the fear of change.

With some exceptions, Baumbach’s work to date has traced an arc that parallels his own, with stories of people in their early twenties, early thirties, early forties, and more recently, depictions of divorce, challenges related to fertility and child-rearing, problems with lumbar discs and bones and joints (‘arthritis arthritis?’), marital breakdown, ‘estate planning’. The new film is the first he has made in which the protagonist is paterfamilias, and never a sibling, son, or son-in-law. The quandary is no longer who to be, but how to tolerate threats to a cherished and fragile status quo. Following a collision between a lorry and a freight train which releases chemical waste, the Gladneys vacate their home and pile into the station wagon. On the way to a safe zone, Jack gets out of the car for petrol, and is exposed to toxic rain for two and a half minutes. When he asks a government official if he is going to die, he is told that Nyodene D. will live in his system for thirty years. What Jack discovers, as a newly concrete fact, is that he is ‘tentatively scheduled to die’.

This is not his first intimation of mortality. He sees negative portents everywhere. His pillow talk with Babette concerns which of them will die first. (Little wonder that, in a sequence invented by Baumbach, he suffers night terrors.) His response is to dwell on little moments, embrace the ‘aimless days’. In his intermittent voiceover, he urges, ‘Do not advance the action according to a plan’. It’s the same temporal binarism that Jameson traced in The Antinomies of Realism – narrative progression vs the ‘eternal’ or ‘existential’ moment of bodily affect, with novelistic storytelling requiring both. As Jack tells his students, ‘All plots move deathward’. It doesn’t matter how much he enjoys putting out the rubbish, delights in Birds Eye chicken, or fetishizes his wife’s ‘important hair’ (a bouncy blonde perm).

In its portrayal of negative thinking, Delillo’s novel provides a suitable fit – more than, say, the books that Baumbach’s characters have owned, like Gravity’s Rainbow and Rabbit is Rich, or the subject of his previous adaptation, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (an abortive HBO pilot). Babette takes an experimental drug, Dylar, to deal with her fear of death, which is Josh’s preoccupation at the ayahuasca ceremony in While We’re Young. Babette is informed that while ‘everyone’ is afraid of dying, she fears it ‘right up front’, as Lester in Mr Jealousy is told that he’s just expressing ‘more deeply’ the universal propensity towards envy. Lester’s girlfriend in Mr Jealousy suggests that he is jealous of himself; the Dylar dealer (Lars Eidinger) says, ‘I envied myself’. And Baumbach shares with Delillo an interest in the power of adjectives, as a reflection of neurosis and tool of aggression – words such as ‘difficult’, ‘good-looking’, ‘minor’, ‘painful’, ‘loud’, ‘weird’. In The Squid and the Whale, Walt breaks up with his girlfriend because ‘I thought I could do better’. ‘Better how?’ his mother wonders. ‘I don’t know.’ In White Noise, one of the Gladney children asks whether the winter is harsh or mild. To the reply ‘Compared to what?’ she answers, ‘I don’t know.’

Baumbach has added some highly characteristic details that would not have appeared out of place in Delillo’s novel. There’s a startling moment during the evacuation sequence when the camera closes in on the eleven-year-old Steffie as she calls, ‘We’re late’. Jack urges his children not to care about the behaviour of people in ‘other cars’. In an emergency scenario, acting a certain way carries a Darwinian dimension. But everyday existence also brings a profound awareness of standards derived from elsewhere, or greener grass tantalisingly nearby, a hovering shadow of the not-quite-realised or out-of-reach. Whereas the characters in Allen’s work are given a choice between two more or less philosophical approaches, inherited norms (‘some abstract vision of love’, ‘all these standard, accepted clichés of love’) versus situation-specific flexibility (‘whatever works’ ­– a phrase used in three of his films), Baumbach presents a harsher struggle, the effort to forge an authentic self amid an array of collective pressures. His characters are terrified of being, in a phrase he employed about his father’s literary career, ‘out of phase’. There’s an overwhelming feeling that, as Frances says of her plan to read Proust on a – two-day – trip to Paris, ‘it’s good to do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it’.  (A detail in draft scripts, about Patch’s expertise in ‘currency stability’, was changed to ‘anticipating inflection points’.)

One would struggle to name a body of work in which age is more reliably noted and sweated over. A key influence on Frances Ha was The Shadow-Line, Conrad’s late novella about the end of ‘early youth’. (It also includes the line, ‘This is not a marriage story.’) Margot’s sister, in Margot at the Wedding, raises the idea of getting a flat in Williamsburg and is told: ‘it’s only young people’. When Roger, in Greenberg, tells his ex-girlfriend, ‘I’m really trying do nothing for a while’, she replies, ‘That’s brave, at our age’. (He is about to turn forty-one.) While We’re Young opens with five screens’-worth of quotation from Wallace Shawn’s version of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, about a prominent architect who fears ‘young people’. The theme of physical decay has provided the occasion for a number of sub-Wildean reflections: ‘Getting old is terrible. I don’t care how universal it is’; ‘It’s weird, ageing – right? It’s like, what the hell is going on?’; ‘What the fuck is happening to us?’

But like most of the stories that Baumbach’s characters tell themselves, it is jostled and relativized. A wise sixteen-year-old in Kicking and Screaming explains that getting older is ‘not a disease’. There’s a short speech at the end of The Meyerowitz Stories, delivered with beautiful understatement by Rebecca Miller, in which the daughter of a renowned sculptor gives Danny the reasons why Harold is wrong to feel that, at seventy-eight, his life has yet to begin. Florence, Roger’s love interest, finds his voluntary hiatus inspiring: ‘you don’t feel all that bullshit pressure to be successful. I mean, by other people’s standards’. Baumbach has talked of his connection to Eric Rohmer’s characters, who hold ‘fast to their ideas of themselves’ – ‘their own philosophy’ – in the face of ‘outside evidence that maybe they aren’t like this or shouldn’t be like that’. As Adam Phillips put in an essay on success, ideals should be seen as ‘affinities, not impositions’, things ‘we have chosen’ and not just been given by ‘our culture’. That’s a possibility that Baumbach’s films raises without endorsing. He may want to believe in it, but the social realm, present in a thousand particulars, works to impose a horizon of choice, even if it’s a wider horizon than his characters sometimes fear.

It’s a view that recalls the arguments of modern sociologists at odds with the determinism of their tradition – Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor, for example, who offered two conflicting endings to their 1976 book Escape Attempts, or Anthony Giddens, who sought to protect the idea of agency with his theory of ‘structuration’, a borrowing from French intended to denote an ongoing process, the social structure as both the ‘medium’ and ‘outcome’ of actions taken in a self-reflexive spirit. Again, Delillo offers a fruitful outlet, being something close to Giddens in novelist garb. They were born in the second half of the 1930s, and published their first book in 1971; The Constitution of Society, the outline of structuration, and White Noise, Delillo’s first – one might say only – exercise in social portraiture, were published within three months of each other; and their work in the period since has been concerned with the fate of intimacy, the prospects for the good life in a world dominated by finance capitalism, terrorism, technology, and impending doom. But if Delillo allows Baumbach to explore sociological questions, he also serves to expose his soft centre. 

Baumbach is older than Delillo was when White Noise appeared, and the world in which he is writing is surely more benighted, but the version he has produced is cheerful, even carefree. The implication of its protracted end-credit dance sequence – in the midst of death we are in life – is hard to miss, or to square with Delillo’s minatory final lines about the awful potency of tabloid newspapers, as a stage or catalyst for the collective death drive. Instead, the crowd is affirmed as a source of energy and companionship. Jack wears dark glasses to hide from reality, and at certain points, Baumbach may be seen as a kindred spirit. His films tend to employ the same dramatic formula – a series of episodes built on frustration and confusion, culminating in a crushing low-point or cathartic showdown, and then a tentatively happy ending, with the worst-case scenario being a temporary farewell or lesson learned. While We’re Young was the closest he has come to delivering a culpable deus ex machina – literally, baby-from-adoption-agency – but the unforeseen way through has a habit of materialising. After a period of adjustment, following the breakdown of one’s parents’ marriage or one’s own, a depressive episode, a professional setback, a falling out, there is every reason to live.

In his essay ‘Worrying and its Discontents’, Adam Phillips argued that worrying is an ‘ironic form of hope’ – it is ‘a way of looking forward to things… a conscious conviction that a future exists’, but also to one in which ‘something terrible’ will happen. Death exists in Baumbach’s work, as presiding fear or proximate reality, but has so far afflicted just one character who appears on screen – and a minor one at that. When Jack says that ‘out of a persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope’, Delillo invites us to hear the element of denial, whereas Baumbach, who closes his adaptation with a variant of that line, presents the desire to carry on not as blue-sky thinking but spiritual resilience. (Then everybody dances.) Delillo’s novel might have yielded a film of greater ambition, or at least one more embracing of various kinds of bad news. But perhaps the feeling of disappointment can itself be transformed, via a kind of Baumbach-like logic, into an enticing prospect, of fresh worlds ripe for conquest, the realms of human and social experience that this director has yet to explore.

Read on: Paul Coates, ‘Pynchon’s Aesthetic Radicalism’, NLR I/60.

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Latour’s Metamorphosis

When the multi-hyphenate scholar of science Bruno Latour died last October at the age of 75, tributes poured in from all corners of academia and many beyond. In the aughts, Latour had been a ubiquitous reference point for Anglophone social and cultural theory, standing alongside Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on the list of most cited academics in fields ranging from geography to art history. Made notorious by the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s, he reinvented himself as a climate scholar and public intellectual in the last two decades of his life. Yet amidst the expressions of appreciation and grief, many on the left shrugged. Latour’s relationship to the left had long been fraught, if not entirely unsatisfactory to either: Latour enjoyed antagonizing the left; in turn, many leftists loved to hate Latour. His ascendance in the politically bleak years of the early twenty-first century was to many damning. And yet as he sought to respond to the political challenge of climate change in his final years, he turned, in his own deeply idiosyncratic way, to consider questions of production and class; transformation and struggle.

Latour was candid about his own background, readily acknowledging he hailed from the ‘typical French provincial bourgeoisie’. Born in 1947 in Beaune, Latour was the eighth child of a well-known Catholic winemaking family – proprietors of Maison Louis Latour, known for their Grand Cru Burgundys. With his older brother already slated to take over the family business, Latour was sent to Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague, a selective Jesuit private school in Paris. A leading placement in the agrégation led to a doctorate in theology from the Université de Tours. Twenty-one in 1968, Latour could be found not in the streets of Paris but the lecture halls of Dijon, where he studied biblical exegesis with the scholar and former Catholic priest André Malet. He wrote his dissertation on Charles Péguy, while working in the French civilian service in Abidjan, then capital of Côte d’Ivoire. There he was charged with conducting a survey on the ‘ideology of competence’ for a French development agency seeking to understand the absence of Ivoirians from managerial roles, while reading Anti-Oedipus by night. (‘Deleuze is in my bones’, he would later claim.) Racist attitudes, Latour’s report argued, were an obvious barrier to Ivoirian advancement. But these attitudes, in turn, produced other effects, a phenomenon which Latour described as the ‘creation of incompetence’: Ivoirians were placed in positions where they had little chance to become familiar with key technologies. ‘How does this factory or this school actually function’, Latour asked, ‘if one examines the circulation of information, of power, and of money?’

Following the ‘historical epistemology’ of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, postwar French philosophers from Louis Althusser to Foucault were intensely concerned with the status of science and truth. Though Latour shared this broad thematic interest, he thought historical epistemology insufficiently attentive to actual scientific practice. Consequently, his original intellectual home was not among the philosophes, but rather the foundling Anglophone field of ‘social studies of science’, which emerged from Britain’s sociology departments in the 1970s before quickly extending its influence into the United States. Its basic conceit was to complete the Durkheimian project for a sociology of knowledge by explaining even the rarefied content of science itself through scrutiny of the mundane social practices by which it was produced. In contrast to the French epistemologists’ efforts to distinguish the conditions of ‘true science’, the reigning principle of the ‘strong programme’ – the core method developed at Edinburgh – was symmetry: both successful and failed scientific ideas had to be studied via the same methods. It was the concrete workaday routines of what Thomas Kuhn had called ‘normal science’ that Latour described in his first book, Laboratory Life (1979), co-authored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, about the work of the scientists of the Salk Institute, the private biological sciences laboratory based in La Jolla, California. Drawing on his ethnographic experiences in Abidjan, Latour spent two years, from 1975-1977, as a would-be anthropologist observing the lab of Roger Guillemin, a French neuroscientist whom Latour had met in Dijon, and who would in 1977 win the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on hormones.

Going from the ‘laws of science’ to the lab is, Latour would later argue, like going from the law books to Parliament. It reveals not a space of rational insight but of fierce debate, controversy, messiness, mistakes – of knowledge produced by human beings rather than disembodied minds. Accordingly, the book opens in medias res, plunging the reader into the laboratory as narrated through an observer’s notes. Laboratory Life claimed to undertake a material analysis of the lab not by tracing its funding sources or the usefulness of its findings to industry, but by mapping the actual physical space of the laboratory, taking an inventory of its equipment, detailing the labour of lab technicians. Latour’s exegetical training in Dijon also informed his study: what the laboratory really produced, he argued, was texts. Scientists were constantly making and interpreting inscriptions: jotting down measurements, writing up findings. It was through papers, after all, that ideas circulated between laboratories and acquired authority. Like its subject, Laboratory Life can be tedious at times. But if its wry tone and mundane observations deflated grandiose narratives of the heroic scientist, the book was not intended as an exposé. To the contrary, Latour and Woolgar insisted that ‘our “irreverence” or “lack of respect” for science is not intended as an attack on scientific activity’. Jonas Salk himself described the book as ‘consistent with the scientific ethos’ in an introduction.

Latour’s follow-up Science in Action, published in English in 1987, was a self-styled field manual for science studies as a whole, looking beyond the lab to the ways that science became powerful in the world at large. Scientific truth claimed to be backstopped by the authority of Nature itself, an ideal for which Galileo stood as the iconic figure: the lonely dissenter vindicated by reality. However great the Church’s religious authority, it was trumped by the fact that the Earth moved. Every contrarian since has fancied themselves a Galileo, standing firm against the corrupt powers that be. But it is not always so clear which side nature is on, Latour observed. Nature does not simply speak for ‘herself’ but through spokespeople – those who measure and interpret the physical world. It is only after the laboratories have been built, the studies published, the papers read, that nature says anything at all. Constructing a fact – showing that the Earth moves around the sun, say – is a difficult task which entails a demanding set of practices. The upshot is that scientific ‘dissenters’ cannot stand alone. They can succeed only by recruiting many others: researchers, funders, publics.

Latour developed this theme more pointedly in The Pasteurization of France (published in French in 1984 as Les microbes: guerre et paix, but widely received in the substantially revised English edition that appeared in 1988) which reinterpreted the legacy of another great man of science – Louis Pasteur, the French biologist credited with revolutionizing hygiene and health by discrediting theories of spontaneous generation and laying the foundations of germ theory. Latour’s account was in part a challenge to Canguilhem, who had identified Pasteur as a crucial figure in establishing medicine as a modern science, and for whom germ theory constituted an epistemological break with pre-scientific ideas. Latour, by contrast, argued that scientists did not produce revolutions in thought by dint of brilliant ideas alone. Instead, comparing Pasteur to Napoleon by way of Tolstoy, he claimed that Pasteur had successfully used theatrical demonstrations to assemble a powerful network of supporters, which in turn constituted the laboratory itself as a site of social authority. But he also challenged the Anglophone sociologists, who he claimed had placed too much weight on social factors alone. Their principle of ‘symmetry’ had to be extended still further to include nonhumans alongside humans as agents in their own right. Pasteur’s networks, in other words, comprised not only hygienists and farmers, but also microbes themselves.

Latour’s challenge to all corners of the field invited sharp responses. The philosopher David Bloor charged Latour with misrepresenting the sociology of science even as he largely hewed to its method, dressing up familiar moves in grand metaphysical claims about the production of nature and society; meanwhile Latour’s genuine innovations, Bloor argued, constituted a ‘step backwards’ towards uncritical empiricism. The historian Simon Schaffer argued that Latour had propped up Pasteur’s great man status rather than undermining it, while his emphasis on the role of microbes themselves served to side-line the significance of experimentation as method. Yet even these critiques worked to position Latour at the centre of the field, such that responding to his work became increasingly obligatory.

By the early 1990s, science studies had become prominent enough to attract its own set of external critics. Partisans in the Science Wars of this period lumped Latour into the ‘social constructivist’ and ‘relativist’ categories, typically deployed as terms of abuse. An appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton was blocked by the school’s physicists and mathematicians. Latour nevertheless claimed to be largely undaunted by the Science Wars, which he described as a ‘tempest in a teacup’. But he was surprised to learn that many thought he didn’t believe in scientific knowledge or even reality. He was interested in how facts were ‘constructed’ – but he had explicitly rejected what he saw as the fully social constructivist position advocated by others working in the field. For Latour, constructing facts was like constructing a building: you couldn’t do it with social relations alone. This was precisely why he thought it imperative to attend to the material practices of research and the nonhuman world that scientists investigated. The irony was that amongst the Anglo-American pioneers of science studies like Bloor, Latour was often seen as a realist, perhaps even a naïve one, whose method took the activity of microbes and electrons too much at face value.

Rather than using social analysis to deconstruct science, in other words, it was the category of ‘society’, and the claims of social theorists to superior knowledge, that Latour most eagerly sought to dismantle. He built on the ideas advanced in Science in Action and Pasteurization through a series of still more theoretical works – We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Pandora’s Hope (1999), The Politics of Nature (1999), Reassembling the Social (2005) – which outlined his methodological critique of the social sciences and programme for an alternative. If the controversy around Pasteurization put Latour at the heart of disputes in science studies, We Have Never Been Modern (1991), a short and polemical tour through modern Western philosophy, put him on the broader academic map. ‘The moderns’, Latour claimed, had performed a double move that made them all-powerful. On the one hand, they revealed ‘premodern’ beliefs to be mere superstition – showing, for example, that an earthquake was a physical event rather than an act of God. At the same time, the moderns revealed that seemingly natural phenomena were in fact social – that gender differences, for example, were constructed rather than innate. There was nothing that this double move couldn’t explain. Yet moderns’ inability to acknowledge, let alone resolve, the contradiction between these two moves, he argued, gave rise to a number of dysfunctions. Latour positioned his inquiry explicitly in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall and decline of socialism, declaring 1989 the ‘year of miracles’. But he argued that Western triumphalism was misplaced in light of the burgeoning global ecological crisis: the West, he claims, ‘leaves the Earth and its people to die’.

Unlike many other French liberal intellectuals, Latour was not an ideological anti-communist. He was a reliable critic of Marxism, but primarily on methodological grounds. Latour’s sharp-elbowed asides about Marxism were often really directed at Althusser, whose work stood accused of reproducing the flaws of French historical epistemology more broadly: namely, an uncritical scientism and a privileging of philosophical principles over the actual practices of scientists. Althusserian Marxism, in its aspiration to total knowledge, was for Latour the most modernist project of all – not, in his view, a compliment. He was more sympathetic to the Marxist contingent of the first generation of Anglophone science studies, developed via a different formation: anchored by the British Radical Science Journal, connected to the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements, and influenced by work ranging from British social history to Harry Braverman’s study of the labour process. Yet even this tradition, Latour suggested, fell prey to the sociological tendency to explain things with reference to social factors alone.

For his part, Latour was not oblivious to economic questions: he noted that it cost $60,000 to produce each paper in Guillemin’s lab; that the success of fuel cell technology depended not only on physics, but on whether an investor could be persuaded to commit; that Diesel’s engine design not only had to work, but to compete on the market. But he steadfastly rejected the attempt to identify a determining factor, even if only in the final instance. The infrequently read second half of Pasteurization, ‘Irreductions’, contains a striking philosophical set piece: Latour describes driving from Dijon to Gray in 1972 when he is so beset by what he called an ‘overdose of reductionism’ that he is compelled to pull over. Gazing at the blue winter sky like Sartre’s Roquentin at the chestnut tree, ‘for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free’. The lesson he draws is simple: ‘nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’.

The collapse of Marxist social science following the demise of the Soviet Union left a vacuum in the field of science studies which the committed ambiguity of Latour’s ‘irreductionist’ programme was well-suited to fill. This was centred in the formidable science studies unit he built with long-time collaborator Michel Callon at the École des Mines in Paris. Instead of treating ‘the social’ as a pre-existing category or imposing their theoretical frameworks on the world, Latour and Callon argued, social scientists should simply follow the connections between agents – human and nonhuman alike – without making assumptions about them in advance. ‘There are not only “social” relations, relations between man and man’, he had argued in Pasteurization. ‘Society is not made up just of men, for everywhere microbes intervene and act’. Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the method he developed with Callon, formalized this position. It called for abandoning familiar explanatory categories and frameworks, and indeed the project of explanation altogether, in favour of a new approach: only describe.

Many of his interventions seemed intentionally designed to provoke sociologists, and those on the left in particular. In Science in Action, Latour compared a union representative speaking for workers to a scientist speaking for neutrinos; in Reassembling the Social, he declared that Margaret Thatcher’s famous proclamation that ‘there is no such thing as society’ could serve as a slogan for ANT, albeit with different intent. He championed the idiosyncratic and little-known French sociologist Gabriel Tarde as the preferable alternative to his far better-known contemporaries, Durkheim and Marx: ‘Imagine how things might have turned out had no one ever paid attention to Das Kapital’, his 2009 book on Tarde, co-authored with the sociologist Vincent Antonin Lépinay, began. (Latour’s efforts to spark a Tarde revival attracted few allies.) The enmity was mutual. Pierre Bourdieu made a particular enemy out of Latour, reportedly icing him out of the Collège de France and other prestigious halls of French academia. Latour, in turn, needled Bourdieu every chance he got, at one point comparing Bourdieusian social theory to a conspiracist reading of 9/11. (It is hard to read Reassembling the Social as anything but an extended polemic against the Bourdieusian establishment in Paris.) Accordingly, Latour remained for most of his career at les Mines, moving to Sciences Po – of Paris’s elite academic institutions, the one most oriented towards the Anglosphere – only in 2007. It was nevertheless in this guise of anti-social theorist, one bent on showing that ‘the social’ didn’t really exist, that most academics encountered his work. He was interpellated by an astonishing range of scholars: by poststructuralists and new materialists; by art historians interested in material cultures and philosophers interested in ontology; by media theorists studying networks and economic sociologists studying statistics; by geographers, anthropologists, and historians whose interest in the relationship of nature and society was motivated by ecological questions.

Indeed, Latour’s careful attention to the labours involved in the construction of networks and the enrolment of allies might be read as a promissory manual for his own career. In particular, his ability to translate his position within the relatively small world of science studies into a droll philosophical register helped his ideas travel. His approach to style reflected one of his underlying claims: whereas the Anglophone tradition of analytic philosophy was suspicious of rhetoric’s power to obfuscate truth, Latour argued that the rhetorical and social elements of scientific practice – Pasteur’s use of theatre, for example – did not undermine their veracity. He was particularly inspired by the philosopher Michel Serres’s dense and allusive style. Yet where Serres’s prose was notoriously difficult to translate and little read outside France, Latour proved hugely popular in translation. He drew on rhetorical strategies from across the disciplines: from philosophy he took dialogues; from literature, narratives and metaphors; and from science itself diagrams, which often mystified as much as they clarified. He had a knack for turning phrases which became – to use one of them – ‘immutable mobiles’, circulating freely across fields. Perhaps most of all, Latour was fun to read. He peppered his bold, sometimes outrageous claims with jokes and illustrated them with memorable examples. Latour was if anything too readable, as liable to be misunderstood by his supporters as his critics.

As his star rose, Latour was increasingly preoccupied with climate change – at the time widely understood through the lens of belief and denial. In this context his influential 2004 Critical Inquiry essay ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?’ was a landmark, frequently seen as the dividing line in his own career, and as a moment of reckoning for science studies writ large. Famous for comparing science studies to global warming denial, it is typically read as a work of auto-critique. It is not, however, a mea culpa but a j’accuse – one among many entries in Latour’s longstanding critique of critique. ‘A certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path’, he suggested – but his apparent self-indictment was itself a rhetorical move. By ‘us’ he really meant others: those for whom critique meant debunking, pulling away the veil of mystification to reveal the superior insight of the critical theorist. Critique, Latour argued, was a ‘potent euphoric drug’ for self-satisfied academics: ‘You are always right!’ The paradox was that the essay suggested, however subtly, that Latour himself had always been right. If antipathy to intellectual smugness often drove him to think more creatively than the narrow channels of French academia permitted, his frequent calls for humility could belie his own ambition and self-assurance. By all accounts a generous interlocutor in person, in print he was prone to tendentious readings of others’ work; and even as he became one of the world’s most famous academics, he continued to style himself as an outsider.

What changed most, as Latour turned his attention to climate change, wasn’t so much his stance on science but his relationship to social science. Instead of critiquing critique, he sought to reinvigorate the project of construction, which he began to describe in terms of ‘composition’. Latour took on a new role: no longer enfant terrible but elder statesman. In this mode, he repeated the beats of earlier projects in a more earnest register. Instead of following neurobiologists in the laboratory, he followed Earth system scientists as they investigated the Critical Zone, the thin band of the planet which supports life. He revisited Galileo, claiming that the Gaia theory of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis had similarly upended our understanding of our home planet. He leaned still further into stylistic experimentation, undertaking art exhibitions and theatrical performances aimed not only at conveying ideas to non-academic audiences but including them as participants. To the surprise of many, he inched to the left. It was hard to describe the world accurately, after all, without recognizing that it was capital that made things move; without noting the outsized material impact of the wealthy or their ambitions to escape the Earth altogether. His 2019 pamphlet Down to Earth polemically suggested that climate change was a form of class war waged by the ruling class; his final book, Mémo sur la Nouvelle Classe Écologique, co-authored with Nikolaj Schultz and published in 2022, argues that a new ‘ecological class’ must be assembled to replace the productivist working class of past socialist imaginaries.

By the time Covid-19 spread around the world, Latour had largely left microbes behind. But the pandemic illustrated one of the most compelling elements of his thought: that scientific ideas require alliances to become powerful. Vaccines might be developed at record speed, and studies might demonstrate their efficacy – but this alone would not guarantee their uptake. Doctors, scientists, and public health experts revealed the messiness of science in action as they speculated and argued on social media networks, accruing literal followers in the process. Would-be Galileos abounded – and in a world where anti-vax movements and distrust of Big Pharma had been building for decades, these dissenters often became surprisingly powerful. Instead of accepting the chaos of facts in construction, however, self-declared defenders of science embraced the kind of simplistic messaging that Latour had long sought to challenge: ‘Science is Real’, declared as an article of faith.

If these had once been Latour’s central themes, however, he was no longer interested in diagnosing them. His penultimate book, After Lockdown (2021), addressed not the politics of facts but the possibilities for transformation in the wake of disruption, largely explored via an extended metaphor built on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Might imagining life as a giant insect help us to envision a different way of living on planet Earth? In particular, Latour hoped that the shutdown of the economy might help decentre production in favour of attention to ‘engendering’ – the relationships and activities, both human and nonhuman, which make our continued existence possible. Engendering, in other words, recalls longstanding socialist feminist analyses of reproduction – perhaps encountered by way of Donna Haraway, Latour’s frequent interlocutor over the years, who had emerged from the milieu of the Radical Science Journal in its heyday. Engendering is also central to Latour’s theorization of ‘ecological class’, which he sees as determined not by one’s position relative to the means of production but one’s position in a set of earthly interdependencies. If Latour continued to offer perfunctory critiques of the insufficiency of Marxist analysis, in other words, his own arguments tended to redescribe familiar left positions in his own idiom – or, conversely, to use Marxian language to talk about something else entirely.

If Latour’s late political turn saw him exploring new terrain, then, it also revealed the limits of his analytical tools. After decades spent challenging venerable traditions of social thought, he seemed unable to acknowledge what they had gotten right. Latour repeatedly argued that science, for all its messiness and power struggles, was trying to understand something real about the world. But he could not seem to accept that there might be anything but language games at work in invocations of ‘society’ or ‘the economy’, let alone capitalism; that social relations which empirical description could not immediately reveal might nevertheless be agential and powerful.

It is striking that many of Latour’s fiercest critics in recent years – most prominently the eco-Marxists Andreas Malm and Jason W. Moore – have drawn more on Latourian-inflected strains of thought than they have liked to acknowledge. Some of this is simply an artefact of history: Latour’s influence is almost impossible to avoid in recent theoretical and social scientific work on nature and ecology. But Latour was also right that Marxists had generally paid more attention to social relations than the likes of microbes and carbon molecules. (The late Mike Davis stands as a notable exception). Rather than being tarnished by association, the vitality of their work comes from a synthesis of the strengths of Marxist thought with insights gleaned elsewhere – a synthesis that Latour himself only reluctantly and belatedly undertook in reverse.

Read on: Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Freedom and Catastrophe’, NLR 135.