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L’Europe profonde

I realise that agricultural policy rarely sets hearts and minds racing. But the recent farmers’ protests in Europe provide fundamental lessons in contemporary political science. Their significance rests not only on the fact that they constitute one of the rare victorious protests of recent decades. Nor that the protesters represent one of the most protected classes on the planet (and perhaps the two are not unconnected). Nor because the victory consisted in reasserting their right to poison water, land and air (and perhaps the three are connected). Nor even because of the extraordinary submissiveness and munificence of both national governments and the European Union­ (and are these four things not connected?). The lessons go far beyond that. But let’s start with the facts.

The recent outbreak of farmers’ protests began in Germany on 18 December, when 8,000 to 10,000 demonstrators and at least 3,000 tractors descended on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Demonstrations continued in the capital and spread throughout the country in the weeks that followed, by which time French farmers were also in revolt, proclaiming a ‘siege of Paris’ on 29 January and blocking its motorways. Similar protests broke out across ten other EU countries, including Spain, Czechia, Romania, Italy and Greece. The initial unrest was triggered by Germany’s Constitutional Court, which had forbidden the governing ‘traffic light’ coalition from using unallocated Covid-19 funds to balance its budget. Forced to look elsewhere, the government curtailed subsidies and introduced new taxes affecting agricultural motor vehicles and diesel.

Hence the revolt of the farmers, who added further items to their cahier de doléances. This included the EU measure excluding those who do not set aside 4% of their land each year from subsidies. It should be noted that this is only a tentative first step towards allowing the land to recover and giving it some relief from nitrogenous fertilisers which, when released into the air, contribute 310 times more than carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect (4% of all soil does not seem like much of a sacrifice to prevent it from deteriorating completely). The farmers also joined with their Polish confrères who have been protesting for a year against the tax-free import of Ukrainian agricultural products (wheat, maize, rape, poultry, eggs), in a dispute that complicates official narratives of unshakeable European solidarity with the war effort.

The protests thereby took on an anti-EU character, which is rather surprising in light of the figures. For the EU allocates more than a third of its total budget (€58.3 billion out of a total €169.5 billion in 2022) to farmers, though they produce only 2.5% of the Union’s GDP and represent only 4% of European workers (and actually much less in the large producing countries – France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands – because a third reside in Romania alone). German farmers receive around €7 billion from the EU as well as €2.4 billion from the German federal state. The protests are all the more astonishing when one considers average net profits: €115,400 for the 2022/23 crop year, marking an 45% increase over the previous one. Producers of fodder for livestock farming did especially well, with more than €143,000, while arable farmers made an average of €120,000. The farmers are therefore protesting after a record year of profits.

European farmers have now been a protected class for more than sixty years, following the introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 1962. Initially, this protection (import barriers, tax relief, subsidies, and guaranteed prices in the first decades) made electoral and political sense, as farmers still represented 29% of the population in Italy and 17% in France (to give two examples); but today, dedicating a third of EU resources to less than a twentieth of the population seems highly questionable. This is all the more true when one takes into account the evolution of the CAP. In the beginning it was based on centralised price support: products were bought by Brussels when their price fell below a threshold, and were then resold or simply destroyed. This method had several shortcomings: it stimulated overproduction, particularly of milk, fruit and cereals. In the 1980s, millions of tonnes of agricultural commodities were wasted. Moreover, because production was higher on large farms, agribusiness giants received the lion’s share of subsidies and relief.

With the neoliberal wave, however, centralised price intervention was reduced and management delegated largely to individual member states. The result is that subsidies, tax exemptions and incentives are fragmented into a jungle of local measures – a form of bureaucratic, computerised clientelism. The EU’s agricultural policy provoked criticism from non-EU countries which argued against the impenetrability of ‘fortress Europe’ for their agricultural industries, and also from Germany – a country dedicated to exports which found it an obstacle for trade agreements beyond Europe. It was also noted that even countries which benefit most from the policy, such as France (which receives €9.4 billion in contributions), pay more to the EU than they receive (the benefit lies elsewhere: in the free movement of goods and capital).

To grasp the dynamics of these protests, one must turn to their recent protype: the rebellion of the Dutch farmers over the past five years. Holland is the EU country with the most intensive agriculture industry. On an area of only 42,000 square kilometres (one sixth that of the United Kingdom), it raises 47 million chickens, 11.28 million pigs, 3.8 million cattle, as well as 660,00 sheep (the total human population is 17.5 million). France, on an area 15 times larger, raises the same number of pigs and only four times as many cattle. A country as small as the Netherlands is thus the second largest agricultural exporter in the world ($79 billion) behind the USA ($118 billion, over an area 250 times larger) and ahead of Germany ($79 billion, over an area nine times larger).

No wonder, then, that in 2019 the Dutch Institute of Public Health issued a warning about the ecological effects of livestock farming, showing that is responsible for 46% of nitrogen emissions (to feed livestock, the Netherlands has to import huge quantities of nitrogenous feed, on top of the nitrogenous compounds produced by the animals themselves), plus serious and irreversible damage to the soil. This can only be stopped by reducing the quantity of livestock reared; so, in response to these findings, the centre-right coalition government proposed a law to halve the overall number. The farmers’ reaction was swift: tractors advanced on The Hague, inaugurating almost four years of highly visible, sometimes violent protests, paralysing motorways and halting canal traffic. Soon, these protests were imitated in Berlin, Brussels and Milan. Farmers in the Netherlands make up only 1.5% of the population, but in March last year the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) won almost 20% of the vote and 15 out of 75 seats in the Senate, before collapsing in November’s early parliamentary elections to 4.65% and 7 seats in the House of Representatives.

Dutch governments (of whatever composition) are generally disliked by many EU countries for being the standard bearer of the ‘frugal states’, always ready to second the German Central Bank in its ordoliberal Strafexpeditionen. But it must be said that, although they eventually gave in, the governments showed much more backbone on the nitrogen issue than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe or even Brussels itself. This winter, faced with the threatening columns of tractors, the European Commission immediately folded on the fallow land ordinance. Instead of letting 4% of the land go unused, farmers will now be able to grow plants that ‘fix’ nitrogen in the soil such as ‘lentils or peas’. And national governments, starting with Germany, have withdrawn the tax on diesel fuel for agricultural use. There is now talk of new subsidies for the sector.

It is instructive to compare these reactions to those which met the gilets jaunes uprising in France. The trigger for the protests was similar: refusal to be burdened with the costs of ecological measures, in this case a rise in the price of road fuels. While the farmers’ demonstrations have never numbered more than ten thousand, and those involved has not exceeded a hundred thousand overall, the first gilets jaunes action on 17 November 2018 involved 287,710 protesters throughout France (this is according to the French Ministry of the Interior; there were likely many more). At least three million people took part in the movement over four months.

Police repression against the gilets jaunes was extremely violent; 2,500 protesters and 1,800 officers were injured in the clashes. An average of 1,800 people were detained every week; 8,645 were arrested and 2,000 sentenced, 40% of them to prison terms. By contrast, in the case of the recent French farmers protests I was able to find evidence of 91 detentions on 31 January and 6 at the Agricultural Fair on 24 February, where 8 policemen were slightly injured. During the ‘siege of Paris’ very few water cannons were used. The mildness of response was matched by other European police forces, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek and so on.

This leads to a second decisive difference between the two movements: the European dimension. It may come as a surprise that among the subaltern classes, the social group considered most archaic and most traditionalist is the first to develop a transnational character. Perhaps only the student movement of the 1960s managed to achieve something equivalent, with their actions spreading from capital to capital. It makes one reflect that the free movement of capital and labour did not produce a free movement of movements, with the exception of the farmers. After sixty years of the EU, the trade unions still stubbornly refuse to pursue actions on a continental level (it must be said that they feel absolutely no push from their bases in this direction). After decades of the Erasmus programme, we have yet to see a new student movement with a European dimension.

Even more striking is that this class is the only one capable of defending its interests effectively today. It has done so combatively throughout the last century. Take France: in 1907 in Languedoc and Roussillon farmers revolted against wine imports, and an entire department mutinied in solidarity, until they were eventually bloodily repressed by the army; in 1933 farmers invaded a prefecture for the first time; between 1957 and 1967 they fought the ‘artichoke war’; in 1961 the ‘potato war’ broke out, and in 1976 there were yet more gunfights and barricades. In 1972 flocks of sheep invaded the Champ de Mars in Paris and the cavalry officers’ ball was interrupted by a swarm of bees; in 1982 agriculture minister Edith Cresson was blockaded by farmers and had to flee by helicopter; in 1990 the Champs Elysées was covered in wheat grains; the minister’s office was ransacked in 1999; French president François Hollande was roughed up at the 2016 Agricultural Show.

In a paradox that would make Marx turn in his grave, it could be said that today the peasants, not the workers, are the only class that is internationalist in practice, precisely because they are chauvinist in ideology. As a social coalition, the gilets jaunes represented what Christophe Guilly called ‘La France périphérique’; the farmers by contrast could be said to represent ‘l’Europe profonde’. There is a world of difference between the two concepts: the former is marginal, outlying, the latter is fundamental, essential to the soul of the nation. Land is probably the most conservative concept ever developed. I remember once being in a vegetable shop in Greece and overhearing a customer ask the clerk for reassurance: ‘Are these potatoes Greek?’ There is the peculiar idea that if a fruit or plant comes from your land, then it is more genuine, less adulterated. It is no coincidence that the Italian premier Georgia Meloni is now weaponizing food in her nationalist identity offensive.

This helps to unravel at least some of the enigmas raised by the farmers’ protests of recent months. Instead of the classical alliance between workers and peasants proposed by Lenin, are we witnessing the formation of a new historic bloc? With tractors, combine harvesters and all the other machinery, the technological revolution wiped out the peasant masses Lenin was describing. Today’s peasants (at least those who have been protesting in Europe in recent months, and certainly not the labourers – often immigrants, even more often illegal ones – who work in their fields) are small landowners, similar to independent truck drivers, the small self-exploiting capitalists described by the Italian sociologist Sergio Bologna (one cannot help but remember the independent Chilean truck drivers who contributed so much to the fall of Salvador Allende).

Along with nutritional sustenance, peasants provide global capitalism with ideological support. This abstract financial system needs to anchor itself deep in our psyches in order to effectively govern at the level of the nation-state. Capital’s political representatives do not need farmers’ votes, nor their economic output, as much as they need the ‘imagined community’ that is created around the potato, the grape or the white asparagus. A representative of Dutch farmers remarked in 2019, ‘If there will soon be no more farmers, don’t say “wir haben es nicht gewusst”’. That he was unafraid of ridicule in making a comparison with the Holocaust is an indication of how far symbolic investment in the figure of the farmer can go.

What we are witnessing is therefore not a class alliance: the interests of small agrarian owners do not converge with those of financial capital. Quite the contrary, as the latter strangles them with debt. Finance capital shares interests instead with the large distribution networks and agribusiness corporations whose profits harm the vast majority of ‘tractor drivers’. To imagine that small farmers are allied with the big agribusiness conglomerates is like saying that small carpenters’ shops have the same interests as Ikea. This explains why, though the class of small farmer-owners is on average the most protected, and one of the most affluent, a part of it experiences hardship and has every reason to protest. The hardship of the Dutch peasantry – to give just one example – is due to the vertical integration between the oil industry, the chemical industry, the machine industry and large-scale distribution, which has made Holland the world’s second largest agricultural exporter.

But whatever their struggles, the fact is that today’s peasants are all smallholders. The ideology of ownership finds its purest manifestation in land ownership. The gilets jaunes did not protest as owners; the tractor drivers did. While sympathy from parts of the population is on grounds of identity, the indulgence of capital it is sympathy for a proprietary protest. Hence, a double attraction. The abandonment of environmentalist claims by governments (and also the idea of making consumers of fossil fuels pay for environmental conversion) reveals the ideological sway of ownership in contrast to that of the collective good.

In my book Masters, I posed a related problem: neoliberalism is an individualistic, atheistic, amoral ideology, based on the denial of any tradition, and on the idea of the human being as a behavioural tabula rasa. Yet why does neoliberalism constantly ally itself with religious fundamentalism, a communitarian, traditionalist, moralist ideology? The German neoliberals already provided the answer when they said that you cannot ask more from competition than what it is able to give. Competition is divisive, and therefore the system requires other components that can hold the social fabric together. For the neoliberal order, peasants are to society as religious fundamentalists are to ideology: remnants of the past, yet indispensable elements of identity cohesion. In the age of artificial intelligence, our rulers will make us fight for the European potato.

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

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In Cologne

That morning, on the weekend’s first flight from Heathrow the only other passengers are a dozen silent Rhineland businessmen, raising their coffee cups in greeting as they shuffle down the aisle. The transition from England to Germany is disturbingly seamless: at each end the same clean terminal corridors, the same overcast skies; only a shift in train moquette, Piccadilly blue to S-Bahn red, confirms arrival. Nine years ago, at the height of the refugee crisis, German stations were guarded by droves of heavily armed police. Now small khaki groups of soldiers mill around the ticket hall, chatting, scrolling, sipping Cokes. On exiting the Hauptbahnhof, the cathedral is too huge and too close to fit into one’s field of vision. It sits in the middle of the station forecourt, as if hastily dropped there. On its southern transept, the Gerhard Richter window, a derivation of his 4096 Farben painting: 11,500 coloured glass squares – ‘pixels’ – ordered by random number generator, then tweaked to avoid any suggestion of meaning.  

On the walk to Matthias Groebel’s studio, through the low-rise city centre, the sense of immanent Germanness deepens: long past their widespread disappearance in England, small independent shops of single purpose stagger on here under smart mid-century signs. The lettering of Elektronik van der Meyen is bright bee yellow; Top Service Reisebüro boasts a clean cobalt type; Boxspringbetten promises, in chirpy burgundy cursive, that you will ‘mehr als nur gut schlafen!’ From the direction of the river there’s the sound of a protest; I walk towards it and am, naively, astonished to see such numbers on German streets for Palestine. But it’s the red-white-green of Kurdish flags they’re waving, alongside banners bearing the face of Abdullah Öcalan – a proscribed image in a country where the PKK has long been banned. The crowd is mostly young men, escorted over the Rhine by black-clad members of the Bereitschaftspolizei.  

‘Wider brush, more colour’. I’m on my haunches by the tank, peering at the machine. ‘Narrower – less’. Matthias puckers, mimes a nozzle spitting out a delicate drop of paint. In the centre of the cool-lit studio is a small booth with a computer, walled in with piles of papers and books, an antique set of stereoscopic lenses; a few small bottles of acrylic ink indicate what is produced here, but there are neither brushes nor palettes, not a single mark or stain on the whitewashed concrete walls. We are looking through two panes of glass at a mechanical painting device. I am here to view the images this machine creates; something happens when you do, a friend has told me, that can’t be reproduced in photos.  

‘An artist has every right to turn around.’  

‘Something changes in the world, something changes in how we see.’  

‘Photos fade, a hard drive collapses, tapes rot, a WhatsApp message once took a fucking day to arrive – painting functions in different time.’

Matthias speaks in slogans, like he’s composing a manifesto on the spot. Offence as defence by a painter who trained and worked as a pharmacist – a painter who doesn’t paint. His practice is, has always been, unusual, taking images from analogue video stills, converting them via homemade software into digital information – pixels – that his painting machine then applies to canvas (an apparent automation which is, as Moritz Scheper has written, full ‘of artistic decisions’). The machine is a ship of Theseus, its parts continually replaced, removed and recalibrated over thirty-odd years. Today it is a contraption of chrome tubes, silver springs, slithers of wire and gaffa tape, bike chains and bolts soldered together and perched on rails, shoebox in size. Its first form comprised parts adapted from a Fishertechnik toy drawing set and electrical debris scavenged from Westphalian junk yards. Put together in the early 1980s, before any analogous commercial process had been developed, its assembly was a matter of skill, obstinacy and persuasion: You’ll never get an electrician to wire it up for you, warned one mechanic. Good luck finding a mechanic who can put that together, cautioned an electrician. ‘I left them to it’, Matthias says, shrugging, ‘and in the end it worked.’ 

The paintings I’m here to see are of a single building in Whitechapel, the Rowland Tower House. Made in 2006, they represent a shift in Matthias’s approach which he divides (slicing the air with his hands) into two rough periods: from 1989 – 2000 he used images taken from satellite TV, which arrived in Germany in 1984. At first there were only two stations: Programmgesellschaft für Kabel- und Satellitenrundfunk and Radio Télévision Luxembourg; PKS and RTL, the country’s first private TV channels, both specialising in endless repeats of American chat and game shows, padded out with ad hoc local programming to fill the yawning pit of 24/7 broadcasting. The need for footage of anyone doing anything fostered an anarchic attitude among producers; Matthias was drawn to anonymous faces caught off guard, at awkward angles and in lo-res close ups, which, paused, he used as the source material for early works. But TV got too predictable, or rather, ways of being on TV became too predictable. People stopped acting normally weird and started acting weirdly normal – like they were on screen. They pulled faces and posed. They anticipated the shot. The images Matthias was looking for vanished. So, from 2000 onwards, he started making his own tapes. ‘I always used cheap tech’. He picks up a Canon video camera onto which he’s grafted a two-mirrored lens as a viewfinder. ‘No need for grants that way – no need to explain yourself.’  

A lurch of nausea, a rush of adrenaline, a front of pressure in the brow. Something happening that your body can’t understand. Six paintings, each with its own internal duplication, of video stills of the shuttered and boarded Tower House. On the left, the building is in a dilapidated state but uncovered, on the third and lowest canvas two elderly men in kurtas and skull caps walk towards the image’s edge, then do so again. On the right, the same sections of building, now covered in tarpaulin, scaffolding, adverts for the property developers who are gutting and selling this former doss house, a model of Victorian industrial philanthropy, in which Stalin, Orwell and Jack London all stayed, as well as thousands of anonymous working men.  

The effect is astonishing. Somehow – Matthias himself cannot explain it – there is depth in the canvas, not the flatness of a Magic Eye nor the pointed jabbing of a 3D movie, but textural latent space. The tarp over the building flattens and bulges as if the windows have inhaled, the poles of the scaffolding protrude and hang, retreating into the walls, the cornicing of the gated entrance might crack and fall in front of you. In another painting, from the same series, a girl in a hijab and long skirt twirls in front of a young boy who is about to walk through a wall. Matthias’s paintings are often referred to as ‘ghosts’. Before visiting, I thought this was a description of the figures within them, but I was wrong  (‘your eyes adjust to the depth of the frame at the wrong speed’ I write down ‘not too fast, not too slow, but wrong.’) A few years ago, the poet Timothy Thornton, wrote that ‘ghosts are people who remind people of nobody.’ But these aren’t paintings of ghosts; better to call them ‘ghost paintings’. Something awry, misplaced, there where it isn’t, caught on canvas but missing, an absence without a gap.  

Over dinner with Matthias’s family that evening, in their warm kitchen (the windows steamed from cooking, a cage of chattering budgies by the door, books and clothes and cushions scattered in just-orderly piles) we all forget the word for the animal we’re eating. Sophia, his wife, mimes antlers, Matthias cries ‘Hirsche!’, I yell ‘deer!’ and the table bursts out laughing at this impromptu game of charades. We finish our venison stew and I’m handed a pair of silver goggles to try on, each lens a kaleidoscope. Everyone doubles, blushes eight different shades of pink. Now in the cage behind me there are hundreds and hundreds of birds. 

Cologne’s art scene has cycled through boom, bust and back to modest boom again, Matthias and Sophia explain. Site of Dada’s formation in 1919, home of the storied Kunstverein and the first art fair in 1967, at the end of the 1980s openings had crowds queuing down the street: women decked out in furs, limos crawling towards the galleries. When the wall fell, the artists decamped, as a flock, to Berlin; rising costs in the capital had lately brought some back but gone were the days of David Zwirner cycling around town waving hello to painters, collectors, friends.  

What is a ghost? I ask Matthias before I leave. He answers without missing a beat: ‘a ghost is information out of place’.  

Back in London, a few days later, a friend shows me around the theatre where he works. We sit in the stalls to catch up; I tell him about my trip and ask if he’s ever seen a ghost. Not personally, he says, but recounts a story about his colleague, B., who has been known to take naps in the flies. One day, B. woke up and knew, immediately and certainly, that there were people on stage. There was no one there, of course, but nevertheless there they were. Information where it isn’t; something stuck in transmission – there in that gap between pixels and paint. 

17 – 18 February, 2024 

Read on: Julian Stallabrass, ‘Radical Camouflage‘, NLR 77.

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Against Solutionism

‘It’s coming ever more sharply into focus’, declared Anthony Blinken on a recent trip to Doha, speaking of a ‘practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel’. America’s Arab clients have also been invoking the two-state paradigm, with both the Saudis and Qataris stressing the need for such a ‘comprehensive settlement’. In the UK, David Cameron has declared his firm support for Palestinian statehood, while in Brussels Josep Borrell has insisted that this is ‘the only way to establish peace’. These statements can be seen as a frantic attempt at imperial containment. If the Palestinians cannot be ignored entirely, as in the Abraham Accords framework, better to push for a demilitarized, segmented Palestinian quasi-‘state’ so that Israeli normalization can proceed apace. Biden, personally and politically minutes to midnight, is desperate to put Jared Kushner’s agenda for the Middle East back on track after its derailing on 7 October.

How should we respond to the inglorious return and cadaverous persistence of two-statism? The most common reflex is to dismiss it as dangerous imperial ‘fantasy’, premised on the diplomatic formalization of the apartheid regime, and to advocate for one state as the only realistic alternative. This latter position was first formally put forward by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the aftermath of the Naksa. It was then adopted by Arafat and Abu Iyad as the official line of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In Oslo’s wake, Palestinian intellectuals – Edward Said, Ghada Karmi, Lama Abu-Odeh, Joseph Massad, Ali Abunimah, George Bisharat and Yousef Munayyer, among others – returned to this framework. Writing in 2002, Karmi noted that although the demand for a secular democracy ‘might seem utopian’, it is no more so than ‘the Zionist enterprise of constructing a Jewish state in someone else’s country’. Last year, she published a book-length intervention on the ‘inevitability’ of a single, democratic state.

Recognition that the two-state solution is foreclosed is increasingly common across the political spectrum. An essay in the latest Foreign Affairs argues that ‘the effect of talking again about two states is to mask a one-state reality that will almost surely become even more entrenched in the war’s aftermath’. On the whole this is a welcome shift, reflecting the mainstreaming of Palestine solidarity and support for multi-ethnic democracy over Zionist supremacism. Yet there are good reasons for the Western left to tread carefully here. Given the current regional coordinates, is one-statism still the most principled and realistic option? The irremediable sickness of settler society, clearer and more horrifying than ever, may be just as much a barrier to one state as the entrenched colonial geography of the Occupied Territories is to two. If the uprooting of settlers from the West Bank is impossible to imagine, it is surely harder still foresee Israelis accepting the end of ethno-nationalism and peacefully cohabitating with Palestinians.

The Palestinian people – in Gaza, the West Bank, historic Palestine and al-Shatat – will inevitably determine the telos of their struggle. Solutionism risks abrogating this basic principle, and even making major strategic and ethical judgements on their behalf. While two-state models tend to deny Palestinians the right of return, one-state discourses might mean telling them to surrender the fight for decolonization, make friends with their oppressors and permit all settlers to stay. Such decisions could at some point be made by the Palestinians themselves – hence the importance of democratizing their national political structures to enable genuine popular deliberation – but they cannot be presupposed. In this sense, valorization of final-status political forms can involve losing sight of anti-colonial first principles. It can also neglect the objective conditions needed to establish lasting peace in the region. For no ‘solution’ that fails to command mass support from the Palestinians will endure, and only an endpoint that upholds their inalienable rights is likely to have such democratic standing.

It is on this basis that organizations like Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign have long refused to take a position within the strictures of solutionist debates: one state, two states, no state. For them, the primary aim is to build political pressure to redress the crimes on which Israel was founded: the denial of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and the return of refugees. The struggle against these brutalities must precede the development of political blueprints for the region; indeed, the course of the former will invariably determine the shape of the latter. As the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi puts it: ‘I’m very secular about what the solution should be. Some people are very keen on two states . . . There are those who argue for one, bi-national state. I would say, it’s much simpler than that. Allow the injustice to be rectified . . . Once people can return to their homes, let those people democratically decide, the people that live there, what kind of framework they want.’

This perspective has particular relevance to the post-7 October reality. Given both the historic strength and popular legitimacy of the Palestinian armed resistance, it cannot be assumed that the establishment of one democratic state in, say, the coming three decades is more plausible than the liberation of some Palestinian land from colonial occupation. In 1974, the PLO’s Political Programme stated that it would ‘employ all means . . . to liberate Palestinian territory and to establish the independent combatant national authority for the people over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated’. This vision, of asserting Palestinian rule over portions of liberated land, now seems remarkably contemporary. As Tareq Baconi has shown, the strategic conception of Hamas’s founders was not dissimilar, in aiming to secure a ‘complete withdrawal from the West Bank, the Strip and Jerusalem without giving up on 80% of Palestine’. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi looked to Hezbollah’s success in forcing the Israelis out of south Lebanon as a model for how this approach might work.

Such a trajectory, however unlikely, may now be more probable than the miraculous deradicalization of Israeli society. Of course, the odds remain daunting, not least because of the triumph of counter-revolutionary forces across the Arab world over the past decade. Perhaps the single most consequential and dispiriting factor here is the decimation of radical civil society in Egypt under the iron rule of El-Sisi – which, until it is overturned, could well preclude justice for the Palestinians. Yet the picture is complicated by the gradual waning of American dominance and the striking durability of the ‘resistance axis’. On such overdetermined terrain, there is no reason to think that the Palestinian struggle will conform to neat teleologies or ideal-types. Both imperial two-statism and more honourable visions of secular democracy long for quick-fixes: the former hoping to impose ‘order’, the latter to end the unbearable suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. But it is vital to note that most Palestinian conceptions of the struggle are temporally indeterminate. This is a national liberation project that has learned to distrust false promises of imminent salvation. We might therefore ask whether there is an element of projection in the search for rapid ‘solutions’ which are more easily assimilable and less discomforting for Westerners than a protracted, armed, anti-colonial struggle.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The House of Zion’, NLR 96.

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Reactionary Ecology

For many continental philosophers, the first two decades of the new millennium were a time of vibrant matter, hyperobjects, and a weird fixation with intestinal microbes. The late Bruno Latour saw this ‘new materialist’ doctrine – which decentred the human subject in favour of the world of ‘things’, believed to have agency of their own – as a useful resource in his career-long polemic against Marxism. Yet as Alyssa Battistoni has argued, Latour nonetheless ‘inched to the left’ during the latter half of the 2010s, focusing increasingly on the climate crisis and its imbrication with capitalist production. By way of Gaia theory, he became less concerned with micro-agency and began to develop a concept of the totality of interlocking organic and inorganic planetary forces. In Down to Earth (2019), he even introduced a form of overarching social antagonism by suggesting that the primary division of the twenty-first century was between the majority of the global population, who recognized the earth’s biophysical boundaries, and the elites who transgressed and disavowed them. 

This apparent radicalization culminated in Latour’s final published work, On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo (2022), co-authored with the young Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz. Here, all prior reservations about terms like ‘class’, ‘society’ or ‘capitalism’ seem to have evaporated. No more sniffing the ground in search of lost microorganisms. Latour – true to his name – towers above the political landscape, scanning it in search of an ‘ecological class’ capable of salvaging the planet. Divided into 76 short entries, each of which takes up little more than a page, the Memo aims to develop a new ecologism capable of winning ‘the battle of ideas’ – just as ‘liberalism, followed by the various socialisms, then neoliberalism, and finally, more recently, the illiberal or neofascist parties’, have done. How should we assess this ambitious final project? To what extent can the late Latour be described as a figure of the left?

Latour and Schultz write that, in the present conjuncture, ecologism must cut across social categories to achieve hegemony. It must break the Marxist monopoly on class struggle and consolidate environmental activists of every variety into a single, universal subject. If this movement has not yet come to fruition, that is because of a ‘crisis in our mobilization capabilities’ caused by ‘anxiety, guilt and impotence’: ‘all these sad passions so characteristic of the times’. A ‘misalignment of affects’ at the level of our shared existence has left us ‘powerless to act collectively’. This, in turn, is described as the result of modernity’s ceaseless expansion of ‘production’, which has alienated and uprooted premodern community life. For Latour and Schultz, the fundamental problem isn’t property rights, capitalist social relations or wealth disparities; the world is simply out of joint. To realign it so that mass collective action is easier to imagine, the Memo urges us to recalibrate various political-ecological concepts: ‘soil, territory, land, nation, people, attachment, tradition, boundary, border.’ 

The authors are aware of the reactionary connotations of these terms. Still, they insist that rather than invoking them as abstract values, they are repopulating them ‘with a whole host of living things’: feminist movements, decolonial uprisings, indigenous struggles for land rights. Religion, too, can supposedly be reclaimed for progressive ecology. Latour – described by one obituarist as ‘the most important Catholic philosopher in the world’ – views the faithful as potential future allies, who have already been labouring, ‘over the course of centuries, to transform souls’. ‘So let’s add to our list all those who work, rite after rite, to make sure that the “cry of the Earth and the Poor” – to take up the beautiful expression (or, rather, cry!) of Pope Francis – is finally heard’.

Drawing on Christian theology, the authors’ ultimate ambition is to gather together the lost souls from across the world and give them a renewed sense of purpose and direction under the banner of ecology. The Memo directly addresses anyone who may be inclined to fight for climate justice, urging them to overcome the internal obstacles to political activity. In their conclusion, the authors draw a parallel between military mobilization for war and affective mobilization for ecologism, asserting that in the final analysis, ‘political ecology’ is ‘the name of a war zone’.

Full of literary flourishes, programmatic statements and bombastic assertions, The Emergence of an Ecological Class mimics the style of an avant-garde manifesto. The reader is warned at the outset that they ‘won’t find nuances or notes’. Yet the book also begins by quoting the dictionary definition of ‘mémorandum’: originally a term for an official document outlining the government’s views on a given issue. This curious combination of forms speaks to an underlying tension: between the elite sensibility of the authors and the popular cause they claim to advocate. Latour and Shultz write that ‘Marx remains an indispensable guide’ in their endeavour, and they recycle his image of a haunting spectre – substituting ecologism for communism. But when faced with the radical implications of a Marxian approach to climate crisis, they instinctively recoil, and the Memo’s bureaucratic temperament supplants the manifesto’s political urgency. 

This is most apparent in the authors’ discussion of their eponymous class subject. Membership of the ecological class is not reserved for the proletarianized, the propertyless, the underemployed, the precariat, or the racialized ‘surplus’ populations disproportionally affected by climate change (though they are, presumably, welcome to join its ranks). It is rather defined by the question, ‘When disputes involve ecology, who do you feel close to and who do you feel terribly far away from?’ Latour and Shultz deny any structural division between owners and producers, creditors and debtors, and replace an analysis of material fault lines with a faux solidarity based on gut instinct.

The effect is to flatten the social terrain by making ‘affects’ the primary determinant of one’s socio-political position. Rather than pitting the exploited working masses against their natural enemies – settler colonizers, landowners, industrialists and rentiers – Latour and Schulz juxtapose ‘living beings’ to ‘modernization’. This leaves them with a quasi-Heideggerian ecology, saturated with the jargon of dwelling places and authentic existence. ‘Primitive’ life is idealized as the antidote to ecocidal ‘development’. Attempting to outrun the long shadow cast by the tradition of class struggle, the authors embrace a reactionary obscurantism.

At the same time, the Memo evokes the blandest variety of French centrism, asserting that ecologism represents ‘the grain of truth in the cliché “neither right nor left”’, and framing politics as a ‘battle of ideas’ instead of as a struggle between classes. Ni droite ni gauche was once a mantra of the far right, as Zeev Sternhell demonstrated in his 1983 study of L’idéologie fasciste en France. Today, it has become associated with the post-political vision of Macron – who, shortly after the news of Latour’s death, lamented the loss of this great ‘thinker of ecology’. Formally at least, Latour’s ecologism resembles macronisme in holding that ideas and principles, through their persuasive power alone, can surmount political divisions and win support from across the social spectrum.

Latour and Schulz argue that before sad passions paralysed the world, ‘people’s energies used to flow from their ideals’ and ‘understanding a situation was enough to mobilize’ for social change. Their primary task, then, is not political – to assess the balance of societal forces and the strategies for overturning them – but pedagogical: to ensure that those who are choosing between the ideology of the ‘ruling class’ and that of the ‘ecological class’ know that truth and justice are on the side of the latter. There is no need to undertake a detailed analysis of contemporary radical politics and the conditions of emergence for a unified climate movement. Instead, the proper role of intellectuals is closer to that of neoliberal politicians: ‘selling’ the correct environmentalist doctrine to the people.

The book’s proximity to a sales pitch is clear from its overwrought prose (not to mention its frequent use of exclamation marks!). Yet in the final analysis, what is being sold to the reader is not a set of principles or policies, but rather a series of self-help precepts. As is typical of the genre, the Memo lays out its central purpose on its title page: ‘How to promote the emergence of an ecological class that’s self-aware and proud.’ For Latour and Schulz, pride is the foremost remedy for ‘misaligned affects’, the emotion that will embolden the ecologically-minded to take action. Their aim is to instil this feeling, not in any particular class subject, but in anyone who – thanks to the onslaught of undifferentiated ‘modernity’ – has become paralysed by loneliness, frustration, fear, shame or guilt. On the Emergence of an Ecological Class must be read in this light: as a ‘how to’ book for would-be climate activists who yearn to escape their existential inertia but are still too timid to blow up a pipeline.

Read on: Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Latour’s Metamorphosis’, NLR—Sidecar.

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Death of the Innovator?

One of the many contradictions within the ideological realm of Silicon Valley and its satellites is between a faith in decentralization and an infatuation with corporate ‘leadership’. Identifying companies by the surnames of their chief executives – Altman for OpenAI, Ellison for Oracle, Zuckerberg for Meta – has become industry parlance. In the trade press, there is a prevailing sense that these names serve as synonyms rather than metonyms, as if the individual atop the corporation is also the hinge upon which its success or failure turns. Yahoo’s botched acquisitions, security breaches and monetization challenges throughout the 2010s were indelibly associated with its CEO Marissa Mayer. The triumphant comeback of a near-bankrupt Apple in the late 1990s was attributed to Steve Jobs’s fabled boardroom coup.

CEOs did not always occupy such a privileged place in global business culture. Corporate leaders were once as anonymous to the public ‘as their secretaries, chauffeurs, and shoe-shiners’, according to the Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana. In his 2002 study Searching for a Corporate Saviour: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, Khurana describes the shifting practical and symbolic function of these figures since the late nineteenth century. The original titans of industry – the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, Henry Ford, Charles Eastman et al. – gained public notoriety for their empire-building, technical and managerial innovations, philanthropic endeavours and anti-labour agitation. They embodied a distinctly bourgeois type of Weberian charismatic authority, wherein the accumulation of wealth was seen as a divinely ordained reward for their exceptional work ethic. By the mid-twentieth century, though, this image had been transformed, as the development of corporate routines, procedures, laws and norms led to a recognizably modern form of legal or rational authority.

At this point, the tycoon was reincarnated as a capable administrator. While Khurana attributes this to the rise of tyrants like Hitler and Mussolini, which burst the ‘myth of the self-made man’, a more comprehensive explanation might draw a connection between the midcentury CEO and the formal management principles of Taylorism. Appeals to rationality and efficiency impersonalized the subjugation of labour by capital. Exploitation could no longer be personified by the corporate baron, since workplace conditions were the result of an ethically neutral, law-like system of analysis, calculation and planning. Though organized labour continued to revolt against the ‘straw boss’ of the Fordized factory, by the 1950s the growing scale of corporate operations, as well as the supersession of entrepreneurs and their heirs by shareholders and then by boards of directors and managers, helped usher in a period during which the CEO delegated much of the firm’s visible daily operations.

By the 1980s, conditions were ripe for another transformation. The effect of the Dow Jones’s five-year bull market, followed by the much longer rally of the next decade, was reflected in the fortunes of the mutual fund. After the US Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1978 – which legalized and popularized tax-deferred, defined contribution plans, or 401(k)s – money poured into these pooled investment vehicles, which meant that the capital of non-professional or ‘everyday’ investors was funnelled into a diversified range of corporate shares. This had two significant implications. It supplied a broad baseline of demand for stocks, and it encouraged a widespread emotional commitment to the overall performance of the stock market. American news outlets still devote an overwhelming amount of airtime to stock price levels; Donald Trump often seemed to peg the success of his presidency to the performance of the S&P 500, and funds that replicate that index’s performance have surged in popularity in recent decades amongst the international investment community.

This enabled the rapid expansion of the business press – with outlets like CNBC, MSNBC and Bloomberg News founded during the 1980s and 1990s, alongside many more specialized finance reporting publications – as well as the coveted new job title of ‘stock market analyst’. Business journalism narrowed its focus, emphasizing the short-term performance of individual companies, for which the stock price was a clear and readily available barometer. Naturally, as Khurana notes, this coverage was always ‘tinged with the individualistic bias of American culture’, focussing on single personalities over complex strategies. Chief among them was the CEO, the most visible embodiment of a company’s fate.

At the same time, the duties of the CEO began to skew much more heavily toward media appearances, shareholder summits, industry conferences, earnings calls, one-on-one briefings and other responsibilities under the umbrella of ‘investor relations’. The ideal corporate leader was one who commanded the attention of, and inspired confidence in, a greatly expanded field of stakeholders. Those who could do so were remunerated with skyrocketing executive earnings. Khurana charts the rise of the ‘outsider CEO’, describing the process by which the scouting for a new chief executive evolved from a bland formality – merely the next promotion for a dutiful senior employee that had climbed the rungs of the corporate ladder – into a trumpeted media spectacle.

This period also saw the revival of the mythology of the founder-entrepreneur – which, not coincidentally, occurred in tandem with the tech boom, as well as a significant rise in both the popularity of venture capital funding models and the number of firms seeking access to capital. In this environment, technology moguls needed to proclaim paradigm-shifting ambitions for their work, and sought out creative ways of narrativizing those ambitions. This was reflected in the peculiar literary genre that emerged at this time and remains on the bestseller lists today: the evangelizing business biography or autobiography. A staple of this genre, as Khurana notes, is showing how the subject achieved success despite early-life misfortune: a stutter for Chrysler’s Jack Welch, dyslexia for Cisco’s John Chambers. More recent hagiographies have continued this trend: Walter Isaacson’s study of Steve Jobs dwells on his childhood adoption and pancreatic cancer diagnosis, while Ashlee Vance’s portrait of Elon Musk explains the effects of teenage bullying and marital breakdown on this ‘real-life Tony Stark’.

Can the cult of ‘the innovator’ sustain itself in the 2020s? Consider Jobs’s presentation at MacWorld 2007, a pomp-and-circumstance ceremony during which Apple announces its upcoming products. In his keynote, Jobs listed the three new devices to be released that year – ‘an iPod with touch controls, a phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device’ – before lifting the veil to reveal that these were, in fact, the functions of one single hybrid device, the iPhone. This has become the dominant template for technological innovation: what Jason E. Smith calls the ‘twenty-first-century Swiss army knife’, in which already-existing capabilities are mixed, assimilated, adapted and subsumed into multi-functional, composite tools. The consumer gadgets of recent decades are nifty chimeras that can recombine and superficially enhance familiar technological functions. This, Smith argues, signals the systemic absence of the kind of revolutionary innovation which once transformed daily life for the general population – automobiles, railroads, electrification, telecommunication, photography and cinematography – and made major productivity gains for the greater capitalist economy.

Today, we are witnessing this innovation-as-recombination reproduce itself at the level of the firm. The death of the internal research laboratory, once epitomized by institutions such as Bell Labs or the Manhattan Project, signals an organizational strategy that Nancy Ettlinger calls ‘the openness paradigm’, in which firms downsize or eliminate in-house R&D, opting for a coordinated practice of socialized innovation characterized by the external sourcing of research, technology and skills. Like the iPhone, the twenty-first-century technology firm becomes a composite tool, a heterogeneous collection of proprietary patents and licences, contracted vendors and suppliers, autonomous divisions and teams, open-source projects and frameworks, third-party integrations and cloud providers, browser-native applications and platforms, and transferrable educational competencies gathered across a transnational corporate reservoir. Amid this flux, the CEO must project an image of unity and integrity. Yet, when the market value of a company falls, the chief executive is revealed to be just another modular unit from the repository.

Read on: Sebastian Budgen, ‘A New “Spirit of Capitalism”’, NLR 1.

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Line of Succession

This year, elections across the world are offering a stark reminder that voters can expect very little from liberal democracy, even under conditions of ‘free and fair’ competition. It’s easy to bemoan the rigged results in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Russia, or the advantages of incumbency for the BJP in India and the ANC in South Africa. But the spectacle of a Biden-Trump rematch in the US, plus the dismal expectations for a Starmer government in the UK, suggest that problems with contemporary electoral systems are not confined to repressive or clientelist regimes. In Indonesia, the third most populous – and largest majority-Muslim – democracy in the world, a notoriously sinister and volatile figure is now set to take office. Prabowo Subianto, elected on 14 February, is an ex-son-in-law of the long-time military dictator Suharto, a former Army general dishonourably discharged after allegedly overseeing the kidnap and torture of dissidents, and a politician who has exploited ethnic and religious tensions and is now threatening to return the country to authoritarian rule.

Prabowo ran in the previous two elections and lost both times to Joko Widodo (‘Jokowi’). Having been co-opted as Jokowi’s Defence Minister in 2019, he stood again in 2024 with the president’s son Gibran Rakabuming Raka as his running mate – a clear sign that his candidacy had been blessed by the incumbent. Jokowi’s tacit endorsement – as well as the bullying, bribery and bandwagoning of local officials to mobilize support – may help to explain why Prabowo’s 58% vote share on election day was nearly ten percentage points above pre-election polls. The scale of his victory obviated the need for a run-off against his two opponents, former Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan, who picked up 24%, and Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo, who won only 17%. Yet to fully grasp why Indonesians have anointed this grotesque figure, we must take a closer look at the country’s political system.

Compared to earlier iterations of democracy, the parameters of Indonesian politics have been set very narrowly since the return to competitive elections in 1999. During the early post-war struggle for independence, the beleaguered Republik was led by a succession of fractious multi-party governments. Following emancipation from Dutch rule, it saw a short-lived parliamentarist experiment, with four parties dominating the 1955 elections: Partai Nasionalis Indonesia (22%), Masyumi (21%), Nahdlatul Ulama (18%), and Partai Komunis Indonesia (16%). Each was a mass organization with its own regional and sociological strengths and onderbouw of civil society groups. At this time the PKI was steadily building power among the electorate and within the state. Its labour federation, peasant union, women’s and youth groups – along with its cadre of artists and intellectuals and its numerous party publications – made it a formidable presence in public life and political discourse: probably the largest legal, above-ground Communist Party outside the Soviet Union and the PRC.

But this highly inclusive and participatory system could not survive the Cold War era. Amidst the CIA-backed regional rebellions of 1957-59, President Soekarno proclaimed martial law and dissolved parliament, banning Masyumi in 1960. Following a military coup in late 1965, led by Army general Suharto and supported by the US, the PKI was obliterated in an anti-communist pogrom, with hundreds of thousands of activists and affiliates murdered, and millions more subjected to intimidation and incarceration. Over the next three decades, the military regime retained a thin veneer of pseudo-democratic legitimacy, with carefully stage-managed elections producing both a pliant parliament and a largely appointed supra-parliamentary body, which reliably ‘re-elected’ Suharto and his chosen vice-president every five years. The PNI and the two small Catholic and Protestant parties were forced to merge into the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI), while NU and other Islamic parties were combined into the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP, or United Development Party). Meanwhile, the regime’s electoral machine, Golkar (an abbreviation of Golongan Karya or ‘Functionary Groups’), dominated the largely rubber-stamp parliament thanks to the guaranteed support of the military establishment, the bureaucracy and, with the rise of Indonesian capital over the 1980s and early-mid 1990s, the expanding business class.

It was only amidst the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98, and Suharto’s stubborn prioritization of his children’s business empires and political fortunes, that open dissent and outright defections eventually destabilized the regime. In May 1998, Golkar leaders joined with cabinet ministers and senior Army figures to insist that Suharto give way to vice-president B.J. Habibie, the long-time Minister of Research and Technology and bitter rival of Suharto’s daughter Tutut. The diverse business interests represented within the regime – construction companies and customs brokerages, logging and mining concessions, agribusiness and real-estate firms – could not withstand the continuing depreciation of the rupiah and the deepening economic downturn. Suharto and his family had to go.

Habibie restored competitive elections in 1999 and Indonesia’s party system expanded, but within tightly circumscribed limits. Enduring anti-communism ruled out any resurrection of the PKI. Union organizers and student activists had little choice but to join the rebranded PDI-P (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle), which was led by Soekarno’s daughter Megawati Soekarnoputri, and backed by enough retired Army officers and evangelical Protestant businessmen to offset any left-leaning tendencies. The 1999 election results set the tone for Indonesian democracy in the new millennium: 34% for the PDI-P, 22% for Golkar, and much of the remaining votes split among a welter of smaller parties representing various streams of Islamic education and associational life. This new system offered a highly conservative form of pluralism, with each party and its financiers enjoying state patronage and policy influence in a succession of broad-based coalition governments, which onlookers soon began to label ‘party cartels’.

Against this backdrop, prospects for meaningful political or economic reform were largely confined to the presidency. After Megawati’s brief and disappointing stint in office between 2001 and 2004, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired Army general with a marketable reputation as a ‘professional soldier’ and experienced cabinet minister, was elected, first in 2004 and again in 2009, promising to rise above the corruption and fractiousness of party politics. But his ten years in office proved to be a decade of missed opportunities for institutional reform and industrial deepening, amidst the bonanza of multiple commodity booms driven by rising demand from nearby China.

In 2014, Jokowi’s presidential candidacy offered what appeared to be a more promising vision of change from the top down. A small-time businessman with a furniture-exporting company, Jokowi was praised for his problem-solving and coalition-building skills as the PDI-P mayor of the Central Javanese city of Solo, and for his well-publicized impromptu chats with local residents as Governor of Jakarta. His supposedly ‘clean’ business background, his record of campaigning and cooperating with ethnic-Chinese Christian deputies, his engagement with local NGOs, community groups and labour leaders, and his distance from Megawati – now chairwoman of the PDI-P – raised hopes that he would be an incorruptible, independent, inclusive and progressive president.

Under Jokowi’s tenure, economic growth continued thanks to global demand for Indonesian minerals, palm oil and other exports, and the government engaged in a massive infrastructure spending spree that helped to boost the president’s popularity. Jokowi also impressed some Indonesians by taking up the mantle of economic nationalism. He imposed a ban on the export of unprocessed minerals such as nickel, in which Indonesia holds a commanding share of the global market, spurring a wave of investment – most of it Chinese – in new mineral processing plants. In response to rising concerns about low-lying, flood-prone and continuously sinking Jakarta, Jokowi rolled out plans to relocate the national capital to a new planned city in a remote rural patch of East Kalimantan, in Indonesian Borneo. Such measures helped to sustain his popularity ratings, which remained above 80% throughout his two terms in office.

Yet expectations of progressive reform were sadly mistaken, as seen in the introduction of new laws placing restrictions on union organizing, the media and sexual freedoms. By the end of his decade in power, the labour movement, civic activists and human rights groups felt bitterly betrayed. Critics charged Jokowi with an increasingly authoritarian disposition and an intolerance for dissent. He retained as close advisers a number of retired Army generals such as A.M. Hendropriyono, the former head of Indonesia’s National Intelligence Agency, who was implicated in a massacre of Islamist activists in 1989 and the assassination of human rights activist Munir Said Thalib in 2004.

But the biggest disappointment was yet to come. Following raucous street protests after his re-election in 2019, Jokowi brought his two-time opponent Prabowo into the Cabinet as Defence Minister, ignoring concerns about the latter’s incendiary rhetoric and human rights record. In late 2023, rather than accepting Megawati’s choice of former Central Java Governor as the PDI-P’s presidential candidate, Jokowi struck a backroom deal with Prabowo and spent the final months of his presidency ensuring the victory of his anointed heir. So much for the promise of change.

How to characterize Prabowo himself? In most Western media coverage, there is a near-pathological tendency to portray him as a marginalized figure whose political resurrection reflects the ‘populist’ appeal of his brash and personalist style. But Prabowo’s ascent to the presidency can only be understood through a properly historicized analysis. He was born in 1951 into the ranks of the priyayi, the Javanese aristocracy which staffed the Dutch colonial state and survived the transition to independence, as well as subsequent decades of economic, social, and political change, with many of its privileges intact. His grandfather was a Dutch-educated colonial civil servant who joined the Republican government during the Revolusi and founded the country’s central bank. Prabowo’s father, Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, received his PhD in Economics from the University of Rotterdam and went on to hold key economic portfolios in successive cabinets in the 1950s. But as a leading member of the conservative Partai Sosialis Indonesia (PSI), Sumitro played a role in the anti-Soekarno rebellions later that decade, whose defeat forced him and his family into exile for much of Prabowo’s adolescence.

With the establishment of a conservative military regime under Suharto in the mid-1960s, however, Sumitro returned to Indonesia to serve as Minister of Trade (1968-73), playing a key role in the reopening of the Indonesian economy to foreign loans, investment and trade. Prabowo entered the Indonesian Military Academy in 1970 and graduated four years later. His family background and formative years bear the traces of Dutch colonial rule, aristocratic privilege and the success of conservative anti-communism and economic liberalism in weathering both the transition to independence and the eventual lurch to military dictatorship.

Prabowo’s Army career spanned much of the Suharto era and the heyday of military rule, with his marriage to one of Suharto’s daughters in 1983 ensuring his rise to senior leadership roles. Much of his career was spent in Special Forces (Kopassus), with long stints in Indonesian-occupied East Timor and alleged involvement in large-scale violence against civilians, including the deployment of irregular militias to terrorize the local population. He faced similar allegations when he led Kopassus operations in West Papua, where local resistance to forced incorporation into Indonesia in the late 1960s was met with harsh military repression throughout the Suharto era and beyond.

The mid-1990s saw Prabowo promoted to key Army positions in Jakarta, first as Commander of Kopassus and then as Commander of Kostrad, the Army Strategic Reserve – the position held by Suharto when he seized power in late 1965. By the spring of 1998, when the ageing dictator was facing an unprecedented economic crisis and calls for his resignation, Prabowo controlled the single largest garrison in Jakarta, while close friends held the key Kopassus and Greater Jakarta Region commands. It was in this context that Prabowo arranged for the illegal detention of leading student activists and orchestrated large-scale rioting in Jakarta, evidently envisaging a martial law scenario in which he could consolidate power.

But with the accelerating flight of capital and ethnic-Chinese businessmen from the country and defections from within the regime, an alternative re-stabilization plan was put in place in late May 1998. Suharto resigned, Habibie assumed the presidency, and Armed Forces Commander Wiranto regained effective control over the military establishment. Prabowo and his allies were summarily removed from their commands, and within months he was discharged from the Armed Forces. It took him no less than twenty-five years to make a full comeback, using his sizeable fortune (acquired through interests in fossil fuels and palm oil), party machinery (including his own Greater Indonesia Movement, Gerakan Indonesia Raya or Gerindra), and social-media presence to mount a successful presidential campaign, which promised continuity with his predecessor on key policy fronts.

For many younger Indonesian voters, this backstory may have seemed utterly irrelevant in the run-up to the election, and Prabowo’s larger-than-life personality may have inspired confidence in his ability to exert presidential authority more effectively than his opponents. Over the years Prabowo has built a reputation as an effective political operator. He heads his own party, and he managed to win both a cabinet seat and a tacit endorsement from Jokowi while appropriating some of his popularity. In a depressingly stable system of oligarchical democracy, where the political field is narrowed by the requirement of nomination by one of the major parties, along with the practical necessities of campaign financing, Prabowo’s election is hardly a ‘populist’ aberration. It is, rather, an ugly reflection of what democracy has come to mean in Indonesia today. Prabowo and his family played a central role in the country’s post-independence history, and he is emblematic of the ultra-conservative forces which continue to haunt its present and its future.

Read on: Rohana Kuddus, ‘Explaining Jokowi’, NLR 130.

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Sublimations

Terence Davies, who died late last year, described the final film he made – though he had no way of knowing it would be that at the time – as a love poem. Passing Time was commissioned as part of a project that paired directors with composers, and in the music of Florencia Di Concilio he heard the ‘tentative bittersweet sensation of remembering’. Consisting of a single, still shot captured on an iPhone, Davies shows us a view of the Essex countryside, the spire of a church looming in the distance. Birds rise into the air, lowering to land on the branches of distant trees. Their song rings out and fades into Di Concillio’s score, overlaid with Davies’s rich, low voice:

If you let me know you’re there,

in silence’s embrace; breathe a sigh and tell me so,

for you are gone and not replaced

but echoes of your lovely self will bear us through life’s cruel stream,

and if I am to join you there,

oh what joy your face will bring.

Oh tell me now,

oh tell me all,

for my poor heart with tears is ringed.

We hear the flutter of pages, and then the music swells and the screen fades to black. ‘We recorded the poem twice in my study at home; the first take I dissolved into floods of tears on the final word, and the second take had me shuffling the pages’, Davies explained. ‘I think we chose the best one.’ In these three minutes, we see so much of what distinguished Davies as a director. A love of nature, of music, of poetry, of family – matched by an acute awareness of suffering and loss. The looming presence of religion. The presence of Davies himself, made explicit here by the use of his own poetry and voice. And memory, pressing down like a thumb on a bruise. The poem is dedicated to his sister Maisie – ‘Her loss broke my heart’.

It’s hard to talk about Davies’s films without reference to his biography because the two are so closely entwined. Born into a working-class Liverpool family two months after the end of World War II, Terence was the youngest of ten children. ‘I don’t want to watch violence. I had enough of that in my childhood’, Davies later reflected. ‘My father was a psychopath’. He died when Davies was seven. ‘For about four years, I lived in utter bliss. I was happy all the time. Then I had to go up to secondary school…’ It was around this time that Davies realized he was gay. He struggled enormously. ‘I prayed to God: “Please make me like the others. Why must I be different from them?” Being homosexual destroyed my life. Really destroyed it. In school, I was beaten for it for four years.’ He left at fifteen to become a bookkeeper, prayed until his knees bled, and finally left the church when he was twenty-two. ‘I can’t revisit that’, Davies said of this time in his life. ‘My teenage years and my twenties were some of the most wretched in my life. True despair. Despair is worse than any pain.’

Yet Davies began his cinematic career by revisiting it. His first three films were a trilogy of shorts, Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration (1976-83). They follow Robert Tucker, Davies’s surrogate, through an unhappy childhood into lonely adulthood. While we see the beginnings of Davies’s signature style – long, elegant tracking shots and dissolves, an obsession with the human face, an associative and dreamlike structure that mimics memory, musical anachronism – it is entirely in service of despair. Robert weeps on ferries and in the records room in his office. His sexual fantasies and encounters are haunted, his interest in masochism tormented rather than the playful transgression of a Kenneth Anger or a John Waters. Robert’s only comfort is the love of his mother, whose death devastates him and leaves him with nothing except his own death ahead of him.

When asked about the choice to shoot the trilogy in black-and-white, Davies mused that ‘the problem with colour is that it does prettify and soften everything – there’s an intrinsic richness you can’t get away from. And I don’t like pretty pictures.’ These are beautiful films, but entirely without solace. ‘I was not only exploring literal truth – my relationship with my mother and father, my religious and sexual guilt’, Davies wrote in the introduction to a collection of his early screenplays. ‘I was also examining my terrors’. It is remarkable that Davies’s next films transcend this mood not by looking to the present or the future, but to the past. As T.S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets, poems which Davies loved so deeply he apparently carried a book of them when he travelled, ‘This is the use of memory: / For liberation – not less of love but expanding/ Of love beyond desire, and so liberation/ From the future as well as the past.’

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) draw on the years of ‘utter bliss’ between the death of his father and the awakening of his sexuality. They remain his best-known films. The first was shot in two parts, two years apart, and concentrates on the lives of his older siblings: ‘they were all wonderful storytellers . . . They were so vivid that they became sort of part of my memory, I felt as though I’d almost experienced them’. Davies dramatizes this, reproducing events not as they happened but as he felt them; he shoots from the foot of the stairs, looking out like a child sitting by the door. The Long Day Closes then turns to his own experience. In this sense it covers the same ground as the first of the trilogy, but here the everyday is not haunted by pain but transfigured by the glimmering of memory. Streaks of rain on the windows, projected into oozing drips of light running down the wall. The voice of his mother singing softly in a darkened room; the sun flaring through the clouds for only a moment as they sail by. The whistle of a rod moving through the air as a teacher whips each student in turn. The shadows of two faces glimpsed behind the decorative glass of a door, uniting into one when their lips meet.

At the time of Distant Voices, Still Lives Davies explained that he made films ‘in order to come to terms with my family history’. But by 1992, he had reconsidered. ‘I thought it would be a catharsis, but it wasn’t. All it did was make me realize my sense of loss’. His next film – an adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s coming-of-age novel The Neon Bible (1995) set in rural Georgia – reflects this. The attempt to transpose his autobiographical concerns into an alien setting led to a strangely shaped film, which was a commercial and critical failure. In spite of moments of brilliance, it is at once too close to reality and too far from it. Davies accepted this, but he also saw it as a ‘transitional work’, insisting that he could not have made his subsequent Edith Wharton adaptation, The House of Mirth (2000), without it.

If The Neon Bible didn’t allow Davies’s style to expand fully, The House of Mirth is perfect for it. You can’t help but feel Davies is having fun, even as Lily Bart descends the social ladder into hell. How could he not, with a heroine firing off lines like ‘If obliquity were a vice, we should all be tainted’? On first viewing, the film plays like a standard melodrama – Davies’s trademark associative style replaced by plot and dialogue. Davies grew up watching ‘women’s pictures’, and the film has much in common with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or Frank Borzage. As Luc Moullet once wrote about Borzage’s I’ve Always Loved You, ‘the excess of insipidness and sentimentality exceeds all allowable limits and annihilates the power of criticism and reflection, giving way to pure beauty’. The House of Mirth succeeds on similar terms. The more hysterically defeated Lily is, the greater the power of the film – and the greater the power of Davies’s style. When Lily departs on a doomed trip to Europe, Davies slowly tracks through ghostly rooms filled with covered furniture, dissolving and moving through each one in turn until we see a garden doused in summer rain and then, finally, the liquid glitter of sunlight on water.

‘It seemed completely natural to me to make a women’s picture’, Davies said. When asked about his use of music, he revealed why it came so naturally:

I grew up with American musicals. It’s a woman’s genre, as people said then, but for me it was a frame of reference. That’s why there is so much singing in my autobiographical films. For minutes at a time, the camera stays on the singer’s face. Naturally, the songs didn’t do away with the brutality we were subjected to. Yet music was healing. That’s how women are in north England. They’re strong and capable, they have a sense of humour, and they sing. I grew up among these women. Neither the women nor I understood at the time that they expressed their feelings through their songs. Singing changed them, gave them a way to speak about themselves, without becoming too personal.

To suffer, to forgive, to learn the trick of transfiguration by turning experience into song. If autobiography had failed Davies, his identification with women’s lives and women’s suffering gave him the freedom of disguise. The House of Mirth was both an artistic breakthrough and a critical success, but Davies was unable to get another film made. He spent years shopping projects around, but they all fell through: ‘I’m sick of not working and having no money. Work is my raison d’etre, and if that’s taken away from me I don’t have a reason to be alive.’ His first films had been made with funding from the British Film Institute Production Board, which was abolished in 2000, and it was only through other sources of cultural funding that Davies found work again. His wonderful city symphony, Of Time and The City (2008), was commissioned as part of Liverpool’s tenure as European Capital of Culture. And his return to fiction, an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (2011), was commissioned by the Rattigan Trust to mark the playwright’s centenary.

The Deep Blue Sea and Sunset Song (2015) begin where House of Mirth’s sublimation of autobiographical concerns left off. Between them, they have all of Davies’s trademarks: tormented desire, a distaste for religion, groups of people bursting into song, abusive and unstable men, and women who somehow manage. Their heroines bear enormous suffering. Hester’s tormented, adulterous love affair and its painful consequences in The Deep Blue Sea; Chris’s abusive father, returned to her in the form of a doting husband transformed by World War I in Sunset Song. There is a rape scene in Sunset Song so horrible I found on revisiting the film that I remembered it almost exactly: the camera slowly moving closer as Chris weeps and struggles. She screams at her husband to put out the lights, and, mercifully, Davies puts the lights out too – the camera moving down to the darkness under the bed.

But there are also moments of perfect tenderness: Davies’s swooning camera moving through a pub singalong to ‘You Belong To Me’ in The Deep Blue Sea, the camera closing in on Hester and her lover. He sings to her, but she doesn’t know the words – stopping, laughing, watching his lips. And then just the two of them dancing in warm light, the camera pushing in closer still as they rotate slowly, her arms around his neck, clasping hands, kissing. Tenderness and suffering: the world will give you both, but not in equal measure. For Davies, the transformation of life into art was the only way to bear this fact. Perhaps this is why his last two feature films were about poets: Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016) and Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (2021). My favourite – perhaps of all his films, in spite of its occasional awkwardnesses – is A Quiet Passion, where Dickinson’s poetry hangs over the film like mist over water. In a scene where the young Emily sits in a firelit parlour with her family, she looks up at them with a faint smile on her lips. The camera follows her eyes, and we hear:

The heart asks pleasure first,

And then, excuse from pain;

And then, those little anodynes

That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;

And then, if it should be

The Will of its Inquisitor

The liberty to die.

It’s a moment that’s almost overdetermined – freighted with the relationship between Dickinson’s life and her work, between Davies’s life and his work, between pleasure and pain, life and death. The camera moves slowly around the room, lingering on the face of each family member in turn. It is perfectly silent except for the sound of a clock chiming and the crackle of the fire. And when the camera finally lights on Emily’s face again, something in her has changed. Her eyes glisten and shift side to side as if panicked, her lips turned down faintly. When asked about the scene, Davies said: ‘When we come back to her, I said to her, “But something in you has died,” and I didn’t explain it . . . Because I did that as a child, thinking one day, they will all be dead. And even as a child, I experienced the ecstasy of happiness, but knowing that it wouldn’t last.’

Read on: Ryan Ruby, ‘Privatized Grand Narratives’, NLR 131.

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Barbed Wire

Few topics are more politically contentious in the West than migration. In election campaigns, the right predictably attacks the left for being weak on border enforcement and pursuing irresponsibly lenient policies. Scaremongering about the ‘great replacement’, dark portraits of ‘criminal foreigners’, declarations of war on smugglers, complaints about the theft not only of jobs, but of housing and hospital beds – all these have become commonplace on both sides of the Atlantic.

One cannot fail to notice the political ironies of this spectacle. For, given the supposed effects of immigration on the labour market, the right could just as easily be in favour of maximizing inflows. Capital has always hoped for an increasing stock of labour to replenish the mythical ‘industrial reserve army’, put pressure on the unions and lower wages. As early as 1891, Eleanor Marx wrote in a letter to the American trade union leader Samuel Gompers: ‘The most immediate question is that of preventing the introduction from one country to another of unfair labour – i.e., of workers who, not knowing the conditions of the labour struggle in a particular country, are imported into that country by the capitalists, in order to reduce wages, lengthen the hours of labour, or both’.

A classic example was the ‘Great Migration’ in the US, when millions of African Americans left the South, some finding jobs in Northern factories, which were short of workers because the flow of European immigrants had slowed due to the First World War just as US industries were working at full pace to supply its allies with weapons. Empowered by the shortage, the most combative unions – such as the Wobblies – were making substantial demands. African Americans hired in Northern factories were immediately accused by white workers of being ‘strike-breakers’ and branded as a ‘scar race’, reinforcing the racism of the AFL-CIO (several unions belonging to the confederation excluded African American workers for many decades).

So why is the politics of migration more complicated and paradoxical than these alignments would suggest? Firstly, because political coalitions often include conflicting interests. Elements of both the left and the right’s constituencies, for example, may benefit in various ways from illegal migration. The wife of the worker whose job is endangered by migrants, for example, may be quite happy to employ an undocumented Filipina to look after her children, allowing her to stay in work and so keep the family budget afloat. The small-scale entrepreneur trading on the black market, meanwhile, who owes his profit margins to the illegal labour that saves him taxes, social security contributions and higher wages, also has an interest in blocking the legal flow of migrants that would force him to bring his business above board.

Then there are the contradictions between the economic interests of significant segments of the party’s base and its dominant ideology. As Dutch sociologist Hein de Haas writes in his stimulating – if at times verbose – recent book, How Migration Really Works, ‘left-wing parties have to accommodate the conflicting interests of labour unions who traditionally favour restrictive policies, and liberal and human rights groups favouring more open policies. Right-wing parties are divided between business lobbies favouring immigration and cultural conservatives asking for immigration restrictions.’ Rather than dividing the right from the left, migration splits both right and left formations internally.

Upon gaining power, the only way for both left and right to resolve this tangle of contradictions is through hypocrisy: to adopt practices that contradict public proclamations. Left-wing governments are often no more welcoming to immigrants than their right-wing counterparts. Recall that Obama – nicknamed ‘Deporter in Chief’ – consistently deported more immigrants than Trump, despite the ‘big, fat, beautiful wall’ the latter spoke of. As de Haas points out, ‘the highest-ever levels of legal immigration in the US were reached during the Trump presidency.’ Meanwhile, earlier this month Biden attacked Republicans for sinking his immigration bill, which he called ‘the toughest set of reforms’ that would ‘shut down the border’.

In reality, whoever is in government, it is always the labour market, in turn determined by relevant legislation, the business cycle and the geopolitical situation, that determines migration policies. This can be seen from long-term trends: the maximally restrictive phase between the two world wars was followed by an era of liberalisation during the Cold War, followed by a period of more restrictive measures that reduced migration, though it continued to rise. Increased entry controls, often draconian, have often been accompanied by more visas granted for work, family reunification and so on. In recent years the rather counterintuitive consequence has been that policies have often been less restrictive than they appeared.

This is among the surprising conclusions de Haas reaches in the course of dismantling 22 ‘myths’ about migration, drawing on copious and often unexpected data (though some of it marshalled in contradictory ways). One of these persistent misconceptions is that emigration is generated by poverty, meaning the way to reduce the flow of migration is to accelerate the economic progress of the countries people are leaving. As all specialists know, however, the development of a country leads, at least initially, to increased emigration, not to its reduction. The countries that generate the most emigrants – such as Turkey, India, Mexico, Morocco and the Philippines – tend to be in the middle-income bracket, not the lowest.

The reason for this, as de Haas explains, is that migration is the result of two factors: aspiration to migrate and ability to do so. Leaving one’s country is expensive – not only because of the plane tickets and visas, ‘the fees to be paid to recruiters and other middlemen’, but because ‘it usually takes time to migrate, settle and find work’, and relatives back home ‘need to be able to forgo the income from the labour of migrated family members for several months, or even longer’. If development makes migration more viable for more people, it may also increase the desire to emigrate: development does not only improve the living conditions of a country, it also transforms the culture of its inhabitants, especially its young people, who ‘surf the internet, obtain smartphones, are exposed to advertising, see foreign visitors and tourists and start to travel themselves’, and may begin to nurture new ambitions, at first heading to cities, and then abroad. In a growing country, the number of graduate students also tends to increase faster than the number of jobs suitable for their degrees, creating a surfeit of skilled labour that must look further afield.

Another of the myths debunked by de Haas is that tighter border controls reduce migration. Those who erect walls or intercept rafts neglect to consider the boomerang effect of these measures: they interrupt the circularity of some migration. Seasonal migrants who might have gone home instead settle in the host country because they know that once they leave, they are very likely to be unable to return. This settling produces more family reunifications. The grim display of barbed wire and barking dogs is, in other words, largely smoke and mirrors. As de Haas explains, if ‘protectionist’ governments really wanted to crack down on irregular immigration, they would devote themselves to inspecting the places where undocumented migrants work. Rather than patrolling the borders, they would prosecute the employers of those who have already illegally crossed them. They rarely do, of course. In the US, where there are an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants according to de Haas, Customs and Border Protection has 60,000 agents, whereas Homeland Security Investigations has just 10,000, of which only a fraction are dedicated to inspections in workplaces.

As a result, employer indictments have rarely exceeded 15–20 per year, and of these indictments only very few result in convictions. The average penalty for employers was only between $583 and $4,667. Even among foreign workers, the chances of being caught are low: between 117 and 779 individuals out of 11 million, even in the years of Trump’s much-trumpeted ‘crackdown’. It is in this contrast between governments’ inertia with regard to clandestine labour, and the belligerent posture of border controls, that the hypocrisy of draconian immigration policies appears most stark. Such hypocrisy must have something to do with the fact that, as de Haas observes, ‘immigration mainly benefits the wealthy, not workers’, the poorest of whom may lose out (a fact that helps to explain why recent immigrants are among the social groups most opposed to migration).

One could invoke many other examples of the circular self-deception of the so-called sovereigntists. For instance, scaremongering about the ‘great replacement’ is often accompanied by exhorting native women to procreate more, to be ‘brood-mares’, as was the case in Italy under Mussolini. But these sovereigntists ignore the fact that women may have fewer children because the welfare state has been dismantled (fewer crèches, less parental leave) and they can’t afford to give up working to raise children because their partner’s salary has also been reduced to below the level of labour force reproduction – which creates the need for migration.

Another often overlooked aspect of migration politics which de Haas draws attention to is that the rhetoric of tight border controls has a two-fold advantage for the lobbies that benefit from migration. On the one hand, it leaves intact, as we have seen, the migratory flow that is indispensable to a labour market increasingly in deficit (especially of ‘unskilled’ labour: contrary to popular belief, it is precisely lower-skilled workers that advanced economies need most, for agriculture, construction, hospitality, and care of the elderly and children). On the other, it generates huge demand and ballooning profits for the surveillance industry (‘the multibillion-dollar military-industrial complex in border controls’, as de Haas puts it). Between 2012 and 2022, the budget of Frontex, the EU’s border agency, soared from €85 million to €754 million. For the period 2021–27, the European budget for ‘migration and borders management’ totalled €22.7 billion, compared to €13 billion for the previous six years. In the United States, in 2018, the budget for border enforcement was $24 billion – three times the budget of the FBI ($8.3 billion), and 33% more than the sum of spending on the other major federal law enforcement agencies combined. This bounty rains down on the big arms manufacturers – in Europe: Airbus, Thales, Finmeccanica and BAE – and leading technology companies, such as Saab, Indra, Siemens and Diehl.

Then there is the additional industry spawned by the barriers to entry, which have created the need for intermediaries who know how to interpret and circumvent the cumbersome (and often contradictory) national and, in the case of Europe, supranational legislation. This industry feeds huge multinationals specialising in the ‘administration of workers’ such as the Dutch Randstad (€24.6 billion turnover) based in Diemen, the French-Swiss Adecco (€20.9 billion turnover) based in Zurich and in the American firm Manpower ($20.7 billion) based in Wisconsin. These three multinationals ‘administer’ more than 1.6 million workers worldwide (rising to 4.3 million with Adecco’s recent expansion into China) and occupy a central position in the import and export of labour: global gangmasters in advanced-capitalist guise.

Read on: Rachel Malik, ‘Fables of Migration’, NLR–Sidecar.

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Breathing Space

Architecture is, along with finance and armaments, one of the few industries in which the United Kingdom punches above its weight; perhaps the more benign of the three. The fact of Britain’s prominence is somewhat counterintuitive, given the notoriously poor quality of the British built environment compared with elsewhere in northwestern Europe, but then this isn’t a matter of actual buildings in this country. It is owed to the global dominance of two largely British-based architectural trends: High-Tech, devised by Archigram, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers in the late sixties; and a more amorphous movement, spearheaded by designers based at the Architectural Association (AA) in Bloomsbury a decade later, such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, and occasionally known by its practitioners as Deconstructivism or Parametricism but more usually described through faintly insulting epithets – ‘starchitecture’, ‘signature architecture’, ‘iconic architecture’, ‘oligarchitecture’. Both of these initially distinct movements overcame a difficult 1980s to fuse as a house style for New Labour at home and the ‘emerging markets’ – mainly China and the UAE – abroad. Beneath the famous names – some of whom are dead, and few of whom are much involved today in the buildings that carry their signature – are a plethora of obscure multinationals with roots in Britain that have spent the 21st century quietly designing entire new cities, with the likes of Aedas, Atkins, Benoy or Broadway Malyan working in watered-down versions of the styles of the archicelebrities. The quality of what they do may be questionable, but the profits are substantial.

Throughout the period during which this architecture arose out of its Clerkenwell studios to bestride the globe, there were firms who practised some sort of principled refusal, working quietly and unobtrusively in Britain. The foremost non-players were perhaps Caruso St John, whose work since 1990 is now the subject of Collected Works, a valedictory two-volume set of monographs published by MACK. To see the firm’s major works, you have to go to Nottingham, Walsall or Zurich, rather than Abu Dhabi, Beijing or New York – or, for the most part, London. Adam Caruso is Canadian, trained at McGill in Montreal, and Peter St John is English, from the Surrey-South-West London interzone, trained at the AA. The pair met in London in the 1980s, working first for Florian Beigel, a designer in the Walter Segal tradition of participatory, socialistic building, and then for Arup, the global megacorp that grew out of the London firm established by the Danish engineer Ove Arup in the 1930s; Beigel appears to have become their model for what to do, Arup for what not to. The sparse oeuvre spread across these two slabs of books is, accordingly, devoid of computer-aided geometries, spectacle, giant spans and wild cantilevers; but it also wholly transcends the dull-minded literalness of neoclassicists like Quinlan Terry or Demetri Porphyrios. You can as little imagine a Caruso St John building in Poundbury as you can in Dubai.

To be sure, many of the firm’s virtues are negative ones – the explicit posture of refusal is helpful here. There are contemporaries working in a similar vein – Sergison Bates, Haworth Tompkins or Lynch Architects, for instance – and they can be seen as successors to slightly older designers whose work aims at subtle negotiations between classical and modern, like David Chipperfield or, especially, Tony Fretton. But unlike a superficially similar confrère such as Chipperfield or the German designer Hans Kollhoff, their engagement with classicism has no hint of totalitarian chic. Unlike the occasionally dour work of some of the firm’s London co-thinkers, there is always humour and imagination in Caruso St John’s designs, but in contrast to the similarly perverse but much more successful duo of Herzog and De Meuron, they have never given in to grand ‘iconic’ gestures, as the Swiss duo eventually did in their Hamburg Elbphilharmonie. There is no house style – every project is an event, a unique response to a place and a brief, a process which is, inevitably, expensive and long-winded. Because of this, and because of the delight and surprise their work provokes, they are the only London-based architects whose new work I will almost always make the effort to go and see. This is easy to do, as a major Caruso St John building comes along only once or twice a decade.


Caruso St John, Brick House, from Collected Works: Volume 1 1990-2005 (MACK, 2022). Photograph: Hélène Binet. Courtesy of Caruso St John and MACK.

The Collected Works may be sparse in terms of finished buildings, but they are bulked out with ideas. Their built and unbuilt work, interviews, dialogues and contemporary reviews are here placed alongside texts intended as a guide to how the buildings were conceived: a curious bunch, ranging from Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and Rosalind Krauss’s ‘The Double Negative’ to a dialogue between Wim Wenders and the young Hans Kollhoff on the gap sites of 1980s Berlin. With these are texts about or written by some of the architects they consider forebears, usually figures who ambiguously straddle modernism and classicism: Sigurd Lewerentz, Louis Sullivan and Ernesto Rogers (but never his nephew Richard). There are long-forgotten early built projects – an exceptionally deadpan doctor’s surgery in the sixties suburbia of Walton-on-Thames, a shed in the Isle of Wight – and there are shadow projects, such as competition entries for contests won by spectacular monuments by a very famous firm, for the London Architecture Foundation, which they note was ‘won by an inexplicable and unbuilt project by Zaha Hadid’; and for Rome’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, where Hadid again won, and would go on to construct an immense flowing mass of precipitous voids and sudden surges. Caruso St John’s proposal was for a giant corrugated iron barn, a hypertrophied version of the industrial buildings already on the site.


Caruso St John, Centre for Contemporary Arts Rome, competition model, from Collected Works. Model photograph: David Grandorge, 1999. Courtesy of Caruso St John and MACK.

The first volume begins with a combative joint lecture to the AA in 1998. It is aimed against, specifically, the work of Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), and the notion that ‘if it is to continue to be relevant, the discipline must have a closer knowledge of the workings of the global market economy’, and must perforce design its products – sprawl, luxury housing, airports, malls, infrastructure. This, in the work of OMA, results in ‘an architecture of exaggerated complexity, where bifurcating plates are somehow expressive of optimised programmatic systems and the non-Cartesian space made possible by the new descriptive tools of computing’. That formalism is placed explicitly in the service of neoliberalism, an ideology which the pair describe as ‘yet another abstracted economic model’, which they expect to be proven in time to be every bit as flawed as ‘the Soviet centralised economy’. The placement of this assault at the start of the book is surely a deliberate well, we told you so. Alongside the polemic is the positive programme, which they outline via a series of oblique slides: Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’; the stained sheet metal of a cement works in Rugby; corrugated iron houses in Georgia; accretive brick warehouses in Clerkenwell. They then present Caruso’s own house, built in and around a small, converted abattoir in a Highbury backstreet. Its brick shell has been added to with a perch of MDF and glass; inside is torn seventies wallpaper, dirty brick, bare concrete.

Caruso St John, Studio House, Swan Yard, from Collected Works. Photograph: Hélène Binet. Courtesy of Caruso St John and MACK.

At first, the firm’s position was laid out as being neither neoclassicist, in the banal sense then embraced by British developers and local authorities, nor neomodernist, in the manner of Foster, Rogers, Hadid or Koolhaas. In a late nineties article in High-Tech’s house journal Blueprint, Caruso argued, against the magazine’s raison d’etre, that ‘the hysteria that characterises the creation of new markets and the behaviour of existing ones cannot be financially sustainable and, more seriously, are not environmentally sustainable’. He agrees with Koolhaas that to build for much of the late 20th-century environment is to build for neoliberalism, and therefore the critical act was to refuse to do it. After all, ‘has the percentage of total construction involving architects ever been higher than one per cent?’ So why not drop out? Why not, instead of trying to harness all the madness of the stock market into computer-aided globules and crescendos, ‘put forward ameliorative strategies and paradigms that might suggest what could come after the global market and can remind us of things that are excluded within the current social model’?

Against the metaphors of movement – collapse, explosion, eruption – favoured by Hadid or OMA, Caruso insisted here that, being wholly inanimate, ‘architecture is by definition about stasis’. The photographs the firm favoured as documentation and displayed in their early lectures were also static, laconic, in a Dusseldorf School tradition indebted to Thomas Struth or the Bechers, and tended to depict all the mess around the building that was ostensibly the focus. The odd little perch in Highbury that Caruso and St John showed off to the AA is a case in point, a peculiar found object, and a very London one. The essays and talks collected in the first volume of Collected Works, dating from the mid-1990s, describe London lovingly, outlining something close to the oddly calm city depicted in the series of sustained shots that make up Patrick Keiller’s now-canonical 1994 film, London (the similarity is unsurprising given Keiller and Caruso St John share Beigel as a mentor). Dirty, depopulated and often derelict, defined by the legacies of 19th-century speculation and 20th-century public housing, it is a place to get lost in, irrational and at least partly abandoned by capital. In a 1998 dialogue at the AA, St John explains ‘we’ve always enjoyed the broken fabric and additive character of London, the way it accepts the new amongst the old without too much fuss’.

St John’s 2000 essay ‘London for instance’ depicts the English capital as a fragmentary city seen through odd angles and juxtapositions. Each form has its own value, with the space shared by the terrace, the warehouse and the council estate, all accepted for their distinct qualities: ‘in this openness is space for architects to breathe’. That city is long gone. In a later conversation from 2019, on the approaching thirtieth anniversary of the practice, Caruso remembers this ambiguous city, and cries: ‘it’s much more depressing now!’ Post-industrial London was repopulated and rebuilt after 1997, and ‘most sites have been built on in a very poor way. That development could have been controlled to make something so much better, but this late capitalist laissez-faire is very careless. Damaged urban fabric has a poetic content, and you can do something that is careful and attentive to those qualities’, but the Richard Rogers-inspired preference for ‘brownfield’ development quickly erased nearly all those interestingly empty dream-spaces.

The important buildings by the duo, the work for which I suspect they’ll be remembered, comprise two purpose-built art galleries in the English Midlands – Walsall New Art Gallery, designed in 1995 and opened in 2000, and Nottingham Contemporary, designed in 2004 and opened in 2009. These were for sites similar to those that Caruso and St John described in 1990s London: an apparently unplanned mess of industrial remnants, council housing, stray civic monuments, banal postmodernist retail and developer housing, wasteland, canals, viaducts. Both are highly atypical products of the wave of new arts funding and urban regeneration cash that flowed into post-industrial Britain in the Major and Blair years. After nearly a decade and a half of austerity, one can easily imagine a certain affection developing for New Labour architecture. The best of it – the late Will Alsop’s monumental, cranky Peckham Library, for instance – is now well-loved. But the great majority of this construction was, and is, patronising trash, galumphing into cityscapes in order to brighten and enliven an assumed Northern and Midland misery via lime-green cladding, barcode facades and meaningless giant atria. Most of all, very little of it showed the slightest engagement with what was already there. Indeed, that ignorance was precisely the point – these buildings were meant to launch Gateshead, Barnsley or Middlesbrough out of their depression into a future of creative industries and creative property development. Here, Caruso and St John’s interest in the mundane and ordinary and their scepticism towards the ‘aspirational’ bullshit of neoliberalism meant that they were able to design buildings in post-industrial towns and cities that felt wholly of their place, without ever being tediously ‘in keeping’. Neither of the two Midlands galleries could be imagined anywhere other than exactly where they are.


Caruso St John, View of New Art Gallery Walsall from the south, from Collected
Works. Photograph: Hélène Binet, 2000. Courtesy of Caruso St John and MACK.

Walsall, the earlier of the two, was designed to house the Garman Ryan Collection, a first-rate modern art collection granted to the town in the 1970s and then shoved into a room above the municipal library. So from the outset, rather than offering a shell for an amorphous programme, Caruso St John knew what they were designing for – small-scale, mostly modernist but figurative paintings, drawings and sculpture – and built around that, with the light and views precisely calibrated towards what was inside; and what was around it, with the apparently arbitrary arrangement of windows providing both frontal and oblique views of Victorian civic buildings and canal-side factories, framing your own little Dusseldorf School miniature. The stubby tower that housed the galleries was clad in grey tiles, with a blocky form that seemed designed to be appreciated like the grain silos or coal hoppers of a Bechers photograph. It isn’t all deadpan, and a certain perversity creeps into the detailing, with the same module used for the shuttering imprinted on the concrete and the wood of the stairwells. This love for decoration and paradox would come to the fore in the subsequent gallery in Nottingham. Rather than a flat site by a canal, this is on a steep hill connecting the railway station to the 19th-century Lace Market, between a main road and a tram viaduct. It is, again, rectilinear, slightly box-like, housing big concrete halls for temporary exhibitions; but these stacked forms are scalloped and then incised with a lace pattern.


Caruso St John, Nottingham Contemporary, from Collected Works. Courtesy of Caruso St John and MACK.

This sort of gesture towards long-gone industries was very popular at the time – think of the Dutch firm Mecanoo’s Library of Birmingham, whose decorative hoops were said to have been inspired by the city’s Jewellery Quarter, even though the designers had used them elsewhere. The lace pattern here is much more subtle, rewarding attention: a complex weave scanned and etched into precast concrete panels which is best seen up close, like the terracotta ornament on one of Louis Sullivan’s Chicago School office blocks. Nottingham Contemporary is also the closest the firm has ever come towards the computer-aided design deployed by their more successful contemporaries; not through the ultra-complex parametric equations and ‘scripting’ favoured by Hadid’s partner Patrik Schumacher, but through Photoshop: the duo discovered that darkening a banal digital image of lace would help its successful imprinting (via a latex mould) into the concrete.


Caruso St John, Nottingham Contemporary, facade detail, precast concrete, from Collected Works. Courtesy of Caruso St John and MACK.

Around the time of the building’s completion, Caruso pondered that ‘getting close to vulgarity is an interesting place to go’, drawing on the ‘long tradition of ugliness’ in British architecture – the ‘rogues’ of High Victorian Gothic, the New Brutalism of Stirling and the Smithsons – and not coincidentally offending the good taste of High-Tech. The second volume of Collected Works begins with the V&A Museum of Childhood, an expansion project of the old ‘Brompton Boilers’, a Victorian hangar with instructional mosaics inside, which the firm supplemented with a new set of ornamental patterns in a new entrance pavilion. It was and is highly popular among High-Tech designers to add an abstract, wide-span steel and glass atrium to these sorts of Victorian futurist structures, but for the duo, ‘when we work . . . on a listed Victorian building, we’re interested in explicitly (using) ornament’. They took a similarly sympathetic approach to listed modernist buildings – their small additions to the Barbican (a new ceiling for the auditorium) or Denys Lasdun’s Hallfield Estate (new buildings for the estate’s school) worked with rather than against the ethos of these heroic modernist projects – but from here, the firm’s work develops ever closer to neoclassicism.

This can be seen in the small cafe Caruso St John designed for Chiswick House, the closest they get to Chipperfield, an example of austere, stripped classicism in lush materials (the duo note here that their interest in Burlington’s Palladianism is owed in part to its being ‘a rare example of England leading an architectural movement’). This highly establishment commission, expensively executed, must have helped them secure the job of refurbishing and redesigning Tate Britain. There are small additions throughout the building, but the focus here was a new staircase leading from the building’s Victorian baroque rotunda to the basement cafe, via a sensuous and somewhat camp stone spiral, with incised ornament in its terrazzo surfaces – an idea the firm first tried out in a new chancel for the Cathedral of St Gallen in Switzerland. In the face of the postmodernist and neomodernist additions by James Stirling and John Miller, this re-classicises the building, emphasising the bombast of rotunda and then undercutting it by burrowing underneath. It is also the first of a series of great staircases that the firm would start to specialise in, paradox-filled ascents and descents owing equal debts to Inigo Jones and Berthold Lubetkin.

There is another of these flamboyant staircases in the duo’s most complete London building, the Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall, which was designed to house the extensive art collection of Damien Hirst – sadly, much less eccentric and interesting than the Walsall art collections of Kathleen Garman and Sally Ryan – and as a new home for his silly and very 1990s pharmaceutical-themed bistro, Pharmacy. It is constructed on top of Hirst’s old studio, a block originally built for West End scenery painting. It has much of the found-object industrial deadpan of the firm’s 1990s work, linking it with the increasingly opulent turn of their designs of the 2010s, and it sits in one of those inner London spaces described so longingly thirty years ago – next to an LCC housing estate, with a scrubby park and some fragmentary Victorian terraces nearby, all hard up against the noisy railway viaduct into Waterloo. But the feeling of freedom that such spaces once offered is gone, with the site loomed over by the cluster of new luxury residential towers on the other side of the viaduct in Nine Elms. These have morphed in shape over the years from cheap, naff versions of High-Tech, like Broadway Malyan’s hideous St George Wharf, into austere brick and stone-clad grids, their quasi-classicism in no way hiding the feverish speculation that has brought them into being. Caruso and St John’s adversaries of the 1990s still build, and have a few successors, such as the bumptious ex-OMA Danish designer Bjarke Ingels or the ridiculous English charlatan Thomas Heatherwick, but they are loathed by critics and younger designers. The architecture schools, and the most feted architects in London, tend now to favour a dialogue with the past, a willingness to use ornament, and a scepticism towards big, dumb, iconic architecture. Caruso St John are now elder statesmen among them. How does this affect their work, and their posture of refusal?

Some of Caruso St John’s early ideas are now clichés: as Tom Wilkinson has pointed out, the found-object approach of leaving as much as possible of an existing building intact, no matter how banal, has become bathetic, as the marks left by an ordinary accidental fire in an ordinary London public building like Battersea Arts Centre are conserved with the same reverence as the scars left by the Battle of Berlin; and fetishizing the mess of a London that is unplanned and unaffordable, rather than unplanned and cheap, is somewhat less appealing. Meanwhile, the old men and women trained by the AA in the sixties and seventies are now so ridiculed by young architects and critics – look, for instance, at the disdain of the meme page Dank Lloyd Wright, or the scorn directed at that generation by the excellent New York Review of Architecture – that one has to remember that they spent the 1980s largely unemployed, submerged under the moronic, anti-urban and ostentatiously reactionary postmodern classicism that dominated that decade. Twenty years ago, it was novel and daring to link neoliberalism to Stalinism as yet another failed utopia, and to argue that the Junkspace elation of Koolhaas in Atlanta or Shenzhen – ‘his thrill at flying ever closer to the naked flame of capital’, as Caruso put it in 2012 – was yet another iteration of Le Corbusier’s wonder at aeroplanes and Ford factories. It is perhaps close now to being common sense.

In an essay on ‘The Alchemy of the Everyday’, Caruso lays out the firm’s case against heroic modernisms, whether of the 1920s or the 2000s: ‘this utopia, any utopia, is simply not interested in or able to engage with the granular detail of reality. Despite modernism’s self-evident interest in the quotidian, with its emphasis on housing, hygiene and the design of kitchens, these all too often lead to simplification rather than the complexity that one would expect from an interest in the everyday’. It is the valuing of everything that distinguishes their work – there are no failures, no eyesores, for Caruso St John, and in a situation where successive forms of working-class housing are seen as ‘problems’ to be solved rather than places to live, this remains refreshing. A planning department inspired by their work would never build an Aylesbury Estate or a Thamesmead, but it would never demolish one, either. Their position is far from a banal anti-modernism – the texts in the second volume of Collected Works refer approvingly to Fischli & Weiss’s photographs of the in-between spaces of Swiss post-war housing, for instance. What it is, is decisively anti-utopian, with the market seen as just another abstract utopia. In aesthetic terms, theirs remains a bracing approach given the tedious style wars between reified versions of modernism and classicism that still rage on social networks, despite their near-total irrelevance to much current practice. In 2012, Caruso lays out an alternative canon: ‘I want to reclaim the English Arts and Crafts, the Chicago School, the Wagnerschule, the Paris of Perret and Pouillon, the Milan School, and other so-called “peripheral” figures for a modernism of realism, a modernism of continuity, and a modernism that has the capacity to be socially and physically engaged’. This is sensible and liberating, but it does not translate well on the internet.

British architecture today is in a strange position. Major new construction outside of London and Manchester has been squeezed into near-nonexistence by austerity. Although Caruso St John’s rejection of ‘iconic architecture’ is now mainstream, they themselves appear to have benefited little from this; any third volume of the Collected Works, dealing with their production since 2012, would so far include just two British buildings – a tiny adaptive re-use project in Arbroath and an office block near King’s Cross. By now, they are effectively a European firm, designing housing, offices and entire city blocks in Germany, Belgium and especially Switzerland, a country which has become a mecca for younger architects, where they can admire the austere, beautifully detailed, somewhat brutalist, somewhat classicist works of cult figures such as Peter Märkli or Valerio Olgiati, and enjoy a global financial centre which still manages to employ its architects to build large quantities of social and co-operative housing. Caruso St John’s influence is very clear on the better London architects today, such as Amin Taha, 6A Architects, Apparata, Studio Weave, et al.: all equally happy referring to Palladio, William Morris, Gropius, Mies and the Smithsons. There is an entire microindustry of this now, with its own favoured photographers such as David Grandorge and Hélène Binet, and its own places of pilgrimage like Ghent or Basel, where Good Architects build Good Architecture at a reasonable scale.

Architecture critics love all of this, finding it a tonic after having to go and watch cladding panels fall off the latest computer-designed Googleplex, tech billionaire’s retreat, or arts centre with nothing in it, usually designed by Ingels, Thom Mayne, Heatherwick or the posthumous firm of Hadid. But relatively few of the alternatives have actually been built, with the position of refusal and the consequences of austerity melding to the point where interesting architecture can largely be found only in tiny infill projects in London suburbia while dross is stacked to the skies in Battersea and Deansgate. As one broadsheet architecture critic privately observed recently, much of his job now consists of reviewing house extensions.

Caruso St John’s deliberate, principled sitting out of the great constructional dramas that British-based architects have participated in – the urbanisation of China, in particular – has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The refusal of utopianism cuts both ways. In the work of Foster, Rogers, Koolhaas or Hadid, the progressivist, teleological, technocratic bent of utopian interwar modernism – however curdled by irony in Koolhaas’s case – was yoked to the building of a radically unequal world. In turn, this has created immense problems, of the sort that utopian modernism emerged to solve in the first place a century ago. A housing crisis the like of which hasn’t been seen in the rich world for a century; a desperate need for green infrastructure to achieve a transition away from fossil fuels; a new wave of public transport to drag people out of their cars. The redress of these enormous problems will surely require utopians as much as realists. But then who needs utopia when you have Switzerland?

Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘The Government of London’, NLR 122.

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Feminist Correctives

Nearly all novels remind us that the story of one person both is and is not the story of other people, each of whom is the main character of their own life. In the populous characterological world of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Hippolyte, a stableman at the inn in Yonville, must be pushed to the back of the crowd so Emma Bovary can seize the foreground. Hippolyte may in principle be worthy of a whole novel of his own, but that would be a different book; Hippolyte, not Madame Bovary. Rare exceptions such as Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, in which narrative agents take turns as primary and secondary characters, prove the rule: the bourgeois, legal principle that all men are equal under the law can’t be neatly transposed to the bourgeois novel, in which men and women are necessarily unequal under their creator.

The problems of narrative priority and characterological hierarchy – the axiomatic impossibility of every character achieving protagonist status – are especially rich in the realist novel, which emerges in an era of abstract equality among citizens, and simultaneous inequality in those citizens’ real conditions of life. Such problems don’t attend earlier forms (the ancient epic, for example, or the Elizabethan play) – quite natural that god-like heroes should get more air time than ordinary mortals, nobles more than commoners! It’s the legal principle of equality under the law, along with the democratic precept of equal dignity among human beings, that creates our uneasiness about the character system, as Alex Woloch calls it in his fundamental study, The One vs. the Many (2003), of the realist bourgeois novel. Since the flourishing of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, the form has exhibited what Woloch identifies as two apparently contradictory achievements: both ‘social expansiveness’ (encompassing everyone) and ‘depth psychology’ (usually reserved for just one person). To apply Woloch’s general formulation, Madame Bovary relies on this dialectic, at once casting ‘a wide narrative gaze over a complex social universe’ and depicting ‘the interior life of a single consciousness’.

When it comes to the identity of that consciousness – that is to say, who’s privileged with main character status – there exists an uncomfortable overlap or simultaneity between justifiable narrative efficiency on the one hand, and dishonourable existential or social priority on the other. At the level of the individual work, the former’s a simple matter of technique (we can only inhabit one consciousness at a time). At the level of the novel in general, however, it’s one of politics and even prejudice. Woloch’s readings of Balzac, Dickens and Austen suggest that in the realm of class, the two principles of narrative expediency on the one hand and social privilege on the other more or less coincide: protagonists are typically bourgeois subjects whose important interactions involve other bourgeois subjects, while the ranks of minor characters are filled out with silent, often nameless members of the working class. (John Lennon, in all the hale rancour of ‘Working Class Hero’, could have been singing about realist fiction and its character system: ‘As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small/By giving you no time instead of it all’.)

If this unequal apportionment of narrative attention is unsurprising – after all, it was the rich and educated who had the wherewithal to write and publish novels, and social solipsism means that their milieux were reflected in their fiction – we encounter something more complex in the realm of gender. While it would be a fair generalization to say the realist novel has neglected the proletariat, the same can’t be said of women: our socio-political subjugation did not correspond to narrative sidelining. For every serious young man pursuing the Napoleonic slogan of ‘la carrière ouvertes aux talents’, there exists a middle-class young woman whose intelligence and desire make her a main character, and whose social unfreedom (especially to marry and divorce, and to acquire and dispose of property) provides the novel its engine of tragedy. And to the ranks of the heroines of Eliot, Gaskell, Chopin and the Brontë sisters can be added an equally credible fictive sorority – that of male-authored women trying to get free: Emma Bovary, Isabel Archer, Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, plus a constellation of Hardy heroines among them. If gender difference hasn’t resulted in the same imaginative disability as class difference, this may be explained by the fact that men and women tend to get to know each other intimately in a way that property-owners and wage-laborers don’t. So it is that Flaubert, unable to get pregnant yet able to write persuasively of maternal ambivalence, could declare ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’

A few years ago, the critic Merve Emre tweeted about the Molly Bloom soliloquy that concludes Ulysses, writing: ‘I feel confident insisting that it is the best – the funniest, most touching, arousing, and honest – representation of a woman ever written’, adding, ‘this is shocking to me’. What’s salient here is not so much the testimony to a male author’s representation of a woman, as the word ‘shocking’. Such shock seems to emerge from a current intellectual mood of what might be called possessive identitarianism, which asks why should men speak for women, or indeed white people for people of colour, or cis people for trans people, or citizens for undocumented immigrants, when the latter groups can speak for themselves with more authority than any ventriloquist? Neither glib universalism, nor mutually incommensurable alterity, provide a satisfactory answer. And if such identitarianism were pursued to its extreme – dictating that fiction comprise only protagonists corresponding perfectly to their author’s identities – we’d be left with few novels.

In keeping with this anxiety, recent years have seen a proliferation of a type of work we might call the feminist corrective – the rewriting of canonical texts, ones originating in past paradigms of even greater sexism, from the perspective of an overlooked female character. An early instantiation came from Italian novelist Pia Pera, whose Lo’s Diary (1995) told the story of Nabokov’s Lolita in the voice of its eponymous teenager rather than that of her middle-aged male abuser. More recent examples include Pat Barker’s reimagining of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, The Silence of the Girls (2018), Jeet Thayil’s retelling of the New Testament as ventriloquized by its various women, Names of the Women (2021), Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships (2019) her version of the Trojan War from an exclusively female perspective, and her Stone Blind (2022), a reconstruction of Medusa – ‘the original monstered woman’ as its jacket copy has it.

These examples named above take ancient, non-novelistic forms of literature as their starting text, but the most interesting examples of the genre are to be found in novels that rework novels. Among them, one of the most overtly hostile to its predecessor text is Lucy Snyckers’s Lacuna (2022) which presents itself as agonistic redress to J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). (Curiously, it seems to have been with the feminist corrective genre in mind that Coetzee wrote Elizabeth Costello (2003). That novel’s eponymous figure is a fictional Australian novelist best known for a book whose main character is Molly Bloom.) But what exactly is to be corrected in Disgrace? Much of the dynamism of Coetzee’s book lies in its troubling narrative symmetry. In the first half, a white professor, David Lurie, rapes one of his female students. Chillingly, in his own assessment David evades the term. ‘Not rape, not quite that’, he tells himself with repulsive ease and self-exculpation, ‘but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core’. Later, David’s ex-wife will accurately diagnose him: ‘you were always a great self-deceiver, David’. The author himself, however, is undeceived; Coetzee neither excuses nor anathematizes his creation. Exposed, David resigns and bolts to his daughter Lucy’s farm. When the novel’s second sexual crime occurs, it’s freighted by post-colonial history: Lucy is raped and the perpetrator is a Black man. Snyckers’s rejoinder to Coetzee is built around the conceit that there exists a real-life Lucy Lurie upon whom the author based his story. It’s this Lucy who narrates Lacuna and takes competitive pride in her trauma; at one point she fantasizes about dressing down another woman: ‘If they gave marks for rape trauma, mine would get an A-plus and yours would get a D-minus.’ Snyckers’s Lucy regards the narrative crimes committed by Coetzee as on par with the home invasion, arson and assault that she’s experienced. The author’s offenses, as Lucy sees them, include his appropriation of her suffering, his presentation of her fictional counterpart’s acceptance of rape as some sort of atonement for colonial sins, and – finally and least forgivably in her eyes – his reducing fictional Lucy to the titular ‘lacuna’ – a missing person in her own story.

There is, Snyckers/Lucy claims in Lacuna’s prologue, a ‘complete absence of the raped woman’s voice’ in Coetzee’s novel (‘the rape book’, as she refers to it.) The charge is readily refuted. Disgrace contains one of the more powerfully feminist orations of twentieth-century fiction: pregnant by one of her assailants and intent on keeping the baby, Coetzee’s Lucy makes a redoubtable speech to her horrified father: ‘You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through. Well, contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor’. With that, Lucy refuses minor character status, a refusal that seems directed at both her father and her author. When we compare Coetzee’s Lucy to Snyckers’s doubly-fictional Lucy, it’s as if Lacuna is dealing with a fictional, even fraudulent version of a real novel. In this way, Snyckers’s novel appears symptomatic of one of the least useful strains of identitarian politics, in which for a person characterized by one identity to speak for another person characterized by another amounts to the ‘erasure’ of the latter.

Snyckers seems to be replacing the idea of imaginative literature with literal testimony, which naturally can only be given by real people – a misprision arising from an over-hasty assimilation of literature to contemporary politics, in which the pieties of ‘listening’, and of ‘hearing from’ another voice can be conscience-salving substitutes for action. To invert this phenomenon: that we don’t have Lolita’s account, only that of her abuser, does not make Nabokov’s novel an endorsement of child rape. If Lo’s Diary was misbegotten it was perhaps due to an excessive belief in protagonism, in other words, the notion that hearing exclusively from one voice amounts to uncritical readerly sympathy. With Nabokov’s egregious and charismatic sex offender quite the opposite is true. When Humbert Humbert remarks, casually, and in passing, on the sound of Lolita’s sobs, it both indicts him and is grimly eloquent of his victim’s suffering.

A less antagonistic rewriting of a famous male author’s novel comes by way of Sandra Newman’s Julia (2003), ‘a feminist retelling’ of 1984 which boasts of being the first reworking of that novel to be approved by the Orwell estate. Unlike the original’s third person narrative, in which Winston is the main character and Julia his fellow party member and love interest, Newman’s novel is narrated by Julia herself, while hewing to the basic story of the original. If we take this work as exemplar, a merely cynical interpretation of the feminist corrective genre would attribute its rise to simple brand recognition. Orwell comes with seventy-four years of cultural cachet. The imprimatur of ‘feminist’ – having undergone its girlbossification via neoliberalism – also comes with dubious cachet, albeit a newer one. (Dubious since ‘feminist’ now too often describes something merely cosmetic, namely the substitution of some male executive with a female one who’ll oversee the corporation’s predations and exploitation just as efficiently as he did.) In this way, the conservative appeal of pre-approved prestige is given a little frisson of the putatively radical.

The totemic 1984, a book whose life has come to exist more beyond its pages than within them, is something more than canon; a work alluded to more than read. See the widespread abuse of the term ‘Orwellian’ to tar any political move found uncongenial – mostly from a book-banning right unwilling to acknowledge that Orwell was a committed socialist. Taking place in a future Britain in the grip of totalitarianism, and asking what possibilities of individual thought, freedom and selfhood exist under such circumstances, 1984’s protagonist, Winston, is necessarily more of a figure than a character; to borrow Forster’s term, he is ‘flat’, rather than a rounded, multi-dimensional person. This is also true of his lover, Julia. Brainwashed by the Party, neither has much ‘voice’ in a politico-literary sense. Orwell’s book is therefore a curious choice for a feminist retelling in that all its characters, whatever their gender, are effectively silenced. As Erich Fromm points out in the novel’s original Afterword: ‘the dehumanized characters of satire can be equated with the dehumanized subjects of totalitarianism. That is, the suffering of satirical characters is comical or inconsequential rather than tragic – because they are two-dimensional figures without a mature psychology, unable to inspire full sympathy in the reader.’ How does the Julia of Julia differ from the Julia of 1984? Not much. She remains chimerical. There is too meek and scrupulous a fidelity to the original. The wincing irony here is that of the sense of a novel written under Big Brother’s watchful eye – that of the Orwell estate. There are echoes, too, of the speciously feminist blockbuster reboot, albeit in higher-browed form. In the Hollywood formula, an established, profitable franchise exchanges men for women in the lead roles – usually resulting in a combination of select financial enrichment (a few studio executives) with mass cultural impoverishment. Part of that impoverishment is the way in which movies like Ghostbusters, Wonder Woman, and Ocean’s 8 trade on ‘feminist’ as if it were a synonym for ‘woman’ and vaunt the phrase ‘ass-kicking’ as though the violence enacted on screen by male characters becomes somehow emancipatory when perpetrated by female ones.

The faulty logic that views female liberation as a matter of personnel exchange (all men = bad, all women = good) is nonetheless aligned with a worthy epistemological question. Can a man rightly (in both senses: persuasively and justly) conjure the reality of a woman? This inquiry depends on the gender binary; it ceases to exist in a state of ungendered innocence. The closest a reader gets to that utopia is, paradoxically, when she is at her most impressionable. A girl reader of, say, Arthurian legend, not yet familiar with the terms ‘agency’ or ‘patriarchy’ and not yet exposed to the forces of a world whose problems include a pervasive erotics of female subordination, feels little impediment in imaginatively inhabiting the role of gallivanting hero rather than passive heroine. She’s valiant King Arthur, not maundering Guinevere; it doesn’t yet occur to her that empathetic allegiance should run along gender lines. This is both potentially emancipatory and possibly deleterious: soon she might wonder why Arthur is deemed a worthy protagonist and Guinevere isn’t. Is this a reflection or even endorsement of the exclusionary sexism of the world? Or, worse, does his maleness somehow, improbably, make him a priori more interesting than Guinevere in her femaleness? Later, this hypothetical girl reader might encounter the cohort David Foster Wallace damned as phallocrats – Mailer, Miller, Roth, and Bellow – and experience the cramping dismay of mostly finding women instrumentalized to either frustrate or gratify male protagonists. If these works make manifest their era’s ghastly sexism (one can delight in Bellow’s febrile high-low prose while also recoiling every time the word ‘bitch’ blights the page) what is to be fixed here is too amorphous to warrant a feminist rewrite – more a miasma of prejudice, rather than a formalistic problem of character and elision.        

The less successful feminist reworkings partake in the fallacy of ‘the one true story’, a monovocal ideology alien to literature, with its fundamental commitment to and reliance on intersubjectivity. Natasha Solomons’s Fair Rosaline (2023) for example, describes itself as not as a ‘retelling’ but an ‘untelling’ of Romeo and Juliet in which the title character (ditched by Romeo for her cousin in the original, lest you need a reminder) gets her own story. Shakespeare, so the implication goes, got it wrong. In Solomons’s novel, Rosaline ultimately saves Juliet from a man described in the author’s note as a ‘groomer’. In this way, Fair Rosaline seems to promote the idea that Shakespeare should be some kind of Esther Perel for teens, dispatching therapeutic pointers on healthy relationships. As the book’s press release reads: ‘it seems that forming an anxious attachment, and then suicide pact, with a controlling narcissist who comes and goes as he pleases may not have been the best model of true love to teach young literature students’. Even if delivered facetiously, such an attitude erases character in any meaningful sense of the term, by denying a fictional figure moral complexity and reducing them to something inert as a role model.

The presence of frustrating or misbegotten examples do not, however, make this a sterile genre. A rough typology emerges. The bad faith antagonism of Snyckers and Solomons presents one type, the redundantly respectful mode of Newman another. A third approach, in which the relationship to the original text is simultaneously complementary and critical, proves the most dynamic. Per Henry James: ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw […] the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ No man or woman is an island, not even a person on a literal island — as demonstrated by Foe, Coetzee’s 1986 reworking of Robinson Crusoe narrated by a female castaway. With 2003’s Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee performed a similar sleight of hand. As Elizabeth explains from within the novel: ‘Certain books are so prodigally inventive that there is plenty of material left over at the end, material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to build something of your own’. The implication here of fiction’s generative capability is heartening. It is because Molly Bloom is such a rightly written woman that she invites response as complement, rather than impels it as corrective. Elizabeth’s fictional novel is an enthusiastic supplement to Joyce’s real novel, taking up Ulysses’ implicit invitation to ‘build something of your own’.

Within this third type, what we might call the critical complement, the most exciting new addition comes not from a woman rewriting a male narrative but from a black novelist reconfiguring a canonical white story. Percival Everett’s James, published next month, is a revision of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, narrated not by Huck, the young white boy runaway, but by his friend Jim, the fugitive slave with whom he takes a raft down the Mississipi. Everett is not so much silencing the original as engaging it in conversation. Dialogue, especially between Huck and the narrator, forms a large part of the book, and thrillingly, the latter is given not one voice but effectively two – the interplay of these two voices lends the book a mordant dynamism. First, there is the speaking voice our narrator uses with white people. This is Jim-the-slave, whose exaggerated vernacular resembles Twain’s original. Second, there is the inner voice – sagacious, circumspect, wry – of James-the-man, and it’s this voice, the one we understand as the character’s ‘true’ voice, that narrates the novel. So it is that our narrator can outwardly answer one white character perturbed by signs of a disturbance in the library like this: ‘No, missums. I seen dem books, but I ain’t been in da room. Why fo you be askin’ me dat?’ while later, reflecting on Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke, can privately think to himself: ‘How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.’ The book’s drama has less to do with Huck’s moral awakening via the plight of his enslaved friend (even if that narrative thread remains) and more to do with the way in which the self-actualized voice of James must be freed from interiority to literally speak, thereby vanquishing, or at least claiming primacy over ‘Jim’. In a Tarantino-esque final flourish, our narrator trains a pistol on a slaver and declares, before wasting the guy: ‘I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night. I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.’

James’ most obvious antecedent is Jean Rhys’s terrifying and indelible Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) which takes Jane Eyre as its predecessor, and proceeds in the same dialogic spirit as Everett’s novel. ‘Do you think’, Jane demands of Mr. Rochester in Brontë’s original, with all the indignation of Coetzee’s Lucy Lurie inveighing against her father a hundred and fifty years later, ‘because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart!’ Security, for Brontë’s soulful and impecunious heroine, finally comes by way of a dead wife – the banished ‘madwoman in the attic’ and in Wide Sargasso Sea that silenced voice finds full expression. The implication of Rhys’s book is not that Brontë’s needed to be put right, but that hidden behind Jane’s story is the story of another woman. Wide Sargasso Sea assumes its own priority, scarcely acknowledging the presence of Jane Eyre, in a way that Snycker’s Lacuna, for example – trapped in protest against a famous work, thereby ironically reinforcing that work’s power – cannot. Both Everett and Rhys seem to recognize, to return to Elizabeth Costello’s term, the prodigality of self in the figures of Jim and Antoinette. It’s this same abundance that also allows characters within novels to become more than the sum of their parts. In other words, this extramural phenomenon – taking a character from an existing novel and writing a whole new novel for them – redounds upon the intramural qualities of literature.

Norman Rush’s Mating (1991) for example, might read in precis as a howler of white saviourism and sexism: ideologue white guy (sporting a ponytail, no less) instigates a female-only utopia in Botswana, and is pursued by a besotted white woman. Yet the ways in which Rush’s main characters refract, alter and complicate one another mean they cannot be reduced to damning superficial readings – he is not merely an egoist with a ponytail, she is not merely an admirer with a slavish crush. The implication here – that fictional people are brought into greater aliveness by one another – sits uncomfortably alongside a predominant strain of liberalism in which scarcity logic presumes a zero-sum situation of attention and sympathy. Such logic does indeed apply to the hiring committee and the judging panel – only one person, after all, can be awarded the tenure track job or the lucrative prize – but the spoils of readerly attention are less bounded. Sympathy is not a discrete and finite resource, and the dialogic world of fiction is not one but many worlds.

To use an overtly gendered term, the critical complement’s mode is not one-upmanship so much as fellowship. Rhys is not suppressing Brontë’s Jane, but adding to what she called ‘the lake’ – as one of her grandest, somewhat humble-bragging, yet most quotable pronouncements has it: ‘There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake’. When it comes to rectitude, literature is about as biddable as water. It’s not to be corrected but rather complemented and kept flowing with fresh currents. If contemporary fiction and its reception are suffering from Procrustean applications of non-literary logic, there’s optimism to be found in this flow being reversed – in the thought of some countermanding undertow that would bring generative literary principles of polyphony and healthy disputation trickling back into the political discourse.

Read on: Rachel Malik, ‘We Are Too Menny’, NLR 28.