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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.

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Syncretic Past

During the Russian Revolution, few groups experienced wilder twists of fate than Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Born into the serenity of Habsburg rule and enlisted in an imperial army that erased national distinctions, they returned to a Europe of independent states and competing ideologies. Many were radicalized by the ordeal. One of them was the muckraking Transylvanian journalist Béla Kun. ‘Captured in 1916 and interned in the Urals’, Jacob Mikanowski recounts in his new book Goodbye Eastern Europe, ‘a passing acquaintance with Lenin vaulted Kun into the revolution and the leadership of the fledging Hungarian Communist Party’. The 1919 revolution in Budapest yielded an independent Hungarian Soviet Republic that lasted only 133 days. By the time it collapsed, Kun had taken flight. From the roof of the Soviet headquarters at the Hotel Hungaria he piloted a small airplane, ‘staying so close to the ground that his face could be clearly seen by those walking below’. He carried with him several stolen gold chains and church relics, some of which he dropped by accident, before vanishing into the USSR.

Life stories as tumultuous and unusual as Kun’s are difficult to reduce to history lessons. History, if it teaches anything, only does so obliquely, by way of paradoxes, contradictions and accidents – all of which feature heavily in Goodbye Eastern Europe: a sprawling account of Eastern Europe from the Medieval period to the present day. Mikanowski’s book sets out to tell the history of the region’s cohesion at the moment it has begun to disappear as a cohesive region. If this sounds paradoxical, then the book’s central conceit is no less so. ‘This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist’, it opens. ‘There is no such thing as Eastern Europe anymore. No one comes from there’. What he means is that few people now ‘identify as Eastern European’: the Hungarians and the Polish think of themselves as Central European, while the Baltic states prefer to claim membership of the ‘Nordic’ zone’ to their north. The geographical rubric is an ‘outsider’s convenience’, often a ‘catch-all’ for stereotypes.

Has Eastern Europe ever been anything but a construction of the Western gaze? Most recently, the region’s various peoples were bound together by the shared experience of communism. Eastern Europe’s disappearance as ‘a tangible presence’ and ‘instantly recognizable reality’ coincides with the system’s demise, after which the region fractured into nation-states forging their own discrete identities. But Mikanowski argues that this cohesion, consolidated in the postwar period, reaches back further in time. Throughout the modern period, Eastern Europe was characterized by its distinctive and remarkable diversity: a ‘diversity of language, of ethnicity, and above all, of faith’.

This tension between diversity and cohesion finds expression in the region’s uniquely rich and heterogenous narrative traditions, especially its folklore and legends. ‘Hasidic Jews used to say that the best way to get to know their wonder-working rabbis was through the tales their disciples told about them’, Mikanowski writes. Similarly, ‘tales – stories, rumours, and folksongs . . . get to the heart of what it was like to experience the horrors of the fascist anti-utopia, the brief elation and prolonged terror of Stalinism, the stasis and scarcity of late socialism, and the sudden evaporation of solid values that accompanied the arrival of capitalism’.

Among the regional myths Mikanowski recounts is the story of a ‘great vampire plague that affected the Austrian military frontier in the 1720s and 30s’, during which Viennese officers, ‘their pockets bulging with treatises by Newton and Voltaire’, arrived in Balkan villages to find every grave exhumed and the freshest corpses ‘pierced through the heart with hawthorn stakes’. (The villagers told them matter-of-factly that this was how they dealt with the undead.) Mikanowski also mentions the Ottoman devşirme: the blood tax by which the Christian peoples of the empire were forced to give up their children ‘to be raised in the image of their conquerors’, converting to Islam and serving as soldiers and administrators. This, Mikanowski tells us, would later become the subject of various Serbian folk songs about Ottoman subjugation, sung by ‘wandering bards’ who carried with them ‘a stringed instrument called a gusle’.

In setting itself the task of describing and explaining this diversity, the book evokes another tension, one long prominent in Eastern Europe’s historiography: between the stories that populate it and the political or conceptual categories that try to tame them. Goodbye Eastern Europe is divided into three rather incommensurable parts: ‘Faiths’, ‘Empires and Peoples’ and ‘The Twentieth Century’. The first two interrogate categories of people – Pagans and Christians, Jews, Muslims, Wanderers, Empires, Nations, Heretics – while the last is a more conventional attempt at periodization. The narrative is chronological but rarely proceeds at the same pace. It skips around, dwells on exemplary episodes, shifts into the style of ethnography or into the personal one of family history.

A journalist and critic trained as an academic historian, Mikanowski has written for various American magazines about history, science, language and Eastern Europe. Raised in Pennsylvania, he spent much of his childhood in Poland with his half-Catholic and half-Jewish family. The book’s subtitle, ‘An Intimate History of a Divided Land’, yokes the historical to the personal, incorporating elements of memoir, travel writing and reportage. In the preface the author tells us that his ‘family’s history forms a braid running throughout’, and quotes Czesław Miłosz’s Native Realm: ‘awareness of one’s origins is like an anchor line plunged into the deep’ without which ‘historical intuition is virtually impossible’.

Terms like ‘intimate history’ and ‘historical intuition’ suggest a style of historical writing most accurately termed Romantic. Emphasizing intuition over analysis, and the ability of history to move us over our attempts to understand its workings, Romantic history makes ample use of literary techniques, aiming to provide the reader with a close encounter with the past rather than a mere representation of it. ‘Intimate history’, however, doesn’t simply name a genre. It also suggests that Eastern European history is itself of a different order: more tangible, vibrant, deeply felt. Though whether this is indeed the case, or whether it’s a trick of the light, is not easy to discern.

Just as Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye, Lenin! turns out not be a paroxysm of Ostalgie but a meditation on how people confabulate the past to create a liveable present, Goodbye Eastern Europe’s nostalgic overtones conceal a sophisticated argument about the power of storytelling – a form of practical magic that can be put to various ends: to justify pogroms or devise syncretic rituals. Mikanowski’s historical snapshots range from eighteenth-century messianic movements and their charlatan techniques, to the attempts by contemporary nation-states like Hungary, Poland and Ukraine to form ‘usable pasts’ out of their heavily redacted histories. Above all, he suggests, storytelling and popular rituals have been means of regional self-fashioning.

Mikanowski at one point cites an episode from the memorial book of his great-great grandfather Meir. In 1893, the shtetl of Zambrów suffered an exceptionally terrible outbreak of cholera, which at that time was ravaging Russia and Poland. At a loss, the residents organized a Shvartze Khasene: a ‘black wedding’ for the man and woman deemed the most miserable in the town (‘a pauper girl named Chana-Yenta and the old bachelor Velvel’). Rolls were baked and meat and fish prepared by local housewives, while the wider community supplied the couple’s attire. They ‘set up the wedding canopy – in the cemetery, of course’, and on the wedding day, ‘a lively throng accompanied the bride and groom to their huppah’: the wedding canopy in Jewish marriage ceremonies. Soon afterward, the plague ceased, and Chana-Yenta ‘became known as the “City’s Daughter-in-Law”. She was given the job of municipal water carrier, and her husband was given an official beggar’s licence’. The Shvartze Khasene wove the tradition of Catholic exorcism into Jewish shtetl life. The villagers invented a ritual that mended the fabric of the community by translating the expulsion of malevolent forces into the partial upending of social hierarchy.

Elsewhere, Mikanowski invites readers to imagine what it would be like ‘to journey down the Istanbul-Belgrade highway in Ottoman times’, or to picture the American-born nature writer Eleanor Perényi, née Stone, accompanying her parents through Budapest in 1937 and falling in love with a Hungarian nobleman. Perhaps the most famous literary antecedent here is Claudio Magris, whose Danubio (1986), subtitled ‘A Sentimental Journey’ in the English translation, also used first-person anecdotes and diary entries to construct a heterodox history of the region. Just as Magris ferries his reader down the continent along the Danube’s riverbanks, Mikanowski flies low over the terrains that formed the Western flank of the Soviet empire.

Even minor narrative forms can have world-shaping power, Mikanowski suggests, and it is this argument that allows him to illuminate the connections between Eastern Europe’s twentieth century and its earlier history; in particular, between its eclectic stock of legends, folk tales and rabbinical parables and the twentieth century ideologies that took root in the region: fascism, communism and neoliberalism. At the book’s core is an examination of the interplay between the historical experience of communism and the deeper cultural traditions that gave that system its particular regional shape.

For Mikanowski, Eastern Europe’s superstitious and syncretic past holds the key to understanding communism’s industrial miracles, worker-heroes and paranoid surveillance apparatuses. The dogmatic and mystical character of the communist period is rooted, somewhat paradoxically, in the region’s deeper history of religious intermingling. In this part of the world, the resolutely atheist creed of Marxism was interpreted as yet another salvational doctrine, inspiring exceptionally zealous forms of devotion. Mikanowski tells the story of the Polish essayist Jerzy Stempowski, who, while walking with his father in Berdychiv in 1909, heard ‘a voice, intoning as in prayer’ and, after following it, arrived at a tailors’ guild hosting a live reading of Capital. The man reading Marx’s words had a ‘singsong voice, pausing after every sentence to answer questions. As the night wore on, the text – difficult to begin with – became even less clear, but that did not deter the tailors’.

Mikanowski also provides a striking account of the Holocaust, which dispenses with the high-altitude vantage of traditional histories in favour of an ‘up close, often face-to-face’ perspective on Nazi barbarism, as it was experienced among neighbours and within families, the author’s included. Instead of tracking large-scale trends or statistics, we are given vivid individual biographies that were deformed by the black hole of Nazism. Mikanowski tells the story of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, ‘the Proust of rubbish heaps’, who spent his whole life in Drohobycz, now in Ukraine, producing mesmerizing stories and illustrations as well as translating Kafka. While living under German occupation, he was protected by a Nazi officer who liked his drawings (in return, Schulz painted a mural for the officer’s children). But in 1942, another officer got into a personal feud with his protector, and both of them decided to shoot each other’s ‘pet Jews’. Schulz’s murder, Mikanowski suggests, doesn’t fit with the traditional image of the Nazis’ ‘mechanistic genocide’; ‘in most of Eastern Europe’, he writes, the Holocaust was experienced as ‘an intimate slaughter’. 

A history composed of extraordinary persons and remarkable events, emphasizing paradoxes and coincidences, sometimes threatens to dissolve broader ideas in the fizz of its colorful minutiae. At times the book’s argument, while impressive and complex, is in danger of getting lost among the curious anecdotes and vignettes about the author’s ancestors. Ironically, Goodbye Eastern Europe can sometimes feel like a series of scattered tales rather than a continuous history of a cohesive region. Still, for Mikanowski, the aim is not only to approximate the lived experience of the past, but to unlock insights that lie beyond the reach of conventional history – which fails to capture the kaleidoscopic complexity of the region’s competing narratives and belief systems. In this sense, perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is stylistic. It shows how the continuities in Eastern Europe’s longue durée can only be captured by a mode of writing that reflects its intimacy and heterogeneity.

Read on: Joachim Becker, ‘Europe’s Other Periphery’, NLR 99.

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False Alternative

In launching its assault on Gaza, the Israeli government had three primary aims: to exact revenge, to restore the prestige of the army – which had been severely damaged by the 7 October attack – and to guarantee Netanyahu’s political survival. So far it has proven relatively successful. The IDF has embarked on an effective public-relations campaign to rebuild its credibility as it lays waste to the Strip. And while Netanyahu’s popularity is at a nadir, calls for his resignation remain marginal; the public seem content to wait until the fighting is over to hold him accountable, which gives him an incentive to prolong it indefinitely.

Yet after four months, it is becoming harder to sustain the official narrative that the purpose of the war is to eliminate Hamas and secure the release of the hostages. It is increasingly clear that these goals are contradictory, since the greatest threat to the hostages’ lives is the continuation of the violence. With the number of IDF casualties rising, more than a hundred Israeli captives still being held in Gaza, and no significant gains in weakening Hamas’s operational capacities, public support for the war is declining. A significant majority – 58% – have expressed a lack of confidence in Netanyahu’s management of it. More Israelis now believe that returning the captives should take priority over the destruction of Hamas than vice versa.

Against this backdrop, a series of interconnected questions have come to dominate the Israeli political agenda: the future of Netanyahu, the future of the war, and the settlement that will be established in its wake. The most widely touted candidate to replace Netanyahu is the former army general and Defence Minister Benny Gantz, whose National Unity party is polling far ahead of Likud. Gantz’s political vision has never been particularly coherent. Over the years he has indicated support for some kind of diplomatic solution with the Palestinians, but he has also stressed that the present situation is ‘not ripe for a permanent agreement’. He opposed the Nation-State Law but abstained from voting when amendments were proposed in the Knesset. During the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms he avoided direct confrontation with the Prime Minister and stressed the need for a ‘mutual agreement’ between the two sides. Since October, Gantz has served in the war cabinet as a minister without portfolio. At times he has tried to distance himself from Netanyahu’s belligerent rhetoric, but in practice he has been just as active in prosecuting the military campaign. 

Among Israel’s Western backers, Gantz is seen as a welcome alternative who could save the country from the hard right and reestablish its identity as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. Washington, in particular, views him as someone who could be persuaded to accept a ‘constructive solution’ to the perennial problem of Palestine. The hope, among Biden and his team, is that once the war winds down Netanyahu will be ousted and replaced by this more reliable and less erratic partner. Yet both Gantz’s record and the current situation in Israel suggest that this is wishful thinking.

For one thing, there is a question mark over how much Gantz truly wants to lead the country. During his short political career, he has twice saved the political skin of the man he is supposedly trying to replace: first in April 2020, when he helped Netanyahu form an emergency government; then in October 2023, when he joined the war cabinet in the name of ‘national duty’. Having passed up these opportunities to topple his opponent, Gantz now finds himself without a clear pathway to power. As Israeli politics have moved rightward, his ‘centrist’ camp has lost the ability to assemble a Knesset majority on its own. It would need the support of Arab parties, which currently hold ten seats out of 120. But given Gantz’s attitude toward both Palestinians and Arab Israelis, winning their trust seems all but impossible. 

During the 2019 election campaign, Gantz boasted that he had ‘returned Gaza to the Stone Age’ during Operation Protective Edge, when he served as the IDF Chief of Staff. He also claimed to have ‘eliminated 1,364 terrorists’ – the total number of Palestinians killed in the assault, including hundreds of children. Now Gantz is replaying these apocalyptic fantasies on a much larger scale, waging a brutal war against an entrapped civilian population that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the same time, he is overseeing the systematic persecution of Arabs in Israel, whose treatment is reminiscent of the military rule imposed on them in the early years of the state. The legal organization Adalah has documented an ongoing crackdown on any expression of solidarity with Palestine, which has so far led to hundreds of arrests, a wave of unfair dismissals, and the expulsion of hundreds of students from higher education institutions. Earlier this month, four leading Arab politicians, including Mohammad Barakeh – head of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab citizens of Israel – were detained by police for trying to participate in an anti-war protest.

The government has also pushed through extensive budget cuts for Arab local authorities, which are already suffering from persistent neglect, crumbling infrastructure and an upsurge in organized crime that the state refuses to address. In light of this, it is unlikely that the Arab population will support Gantz’s elevation to prime ministerial office, even if he is presented as the ‘lesser evil’. In recent years, mainstream Israeli political discourse has become highly personalized, centred on Netanyahu as an individual figure: ‘Should he stay or should he go?’ But for Arabs his removal would make little meaningful difference.

One need only recall the anti-Netanyahu ‘Government of Change’, elected in 2020 and led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, to underscore this point. The coalition, which represented almost every part of the Israeli political spectrum – and even won the reluctant backing of the Arab parties – had no plans to break with its predecessor’s so-called security policies. It had no interest in ending the conflict or the occupation. After only a year, it dissolved itself in order to save the regulations governing the dual legal system in the West Bank, which were placed in jeopardy when the right refused to vote for their renewal. In the end, the Bennett–Lapid government preferred to return Netanyahu to power than to see the apartheid regime threatened.

The unwillingness of the Israeli ‘opposition’ to mount a genuine challenge to the present order was reflected in the mass protests last year, where hundreds of thousands took to the streets following Netanyahu’s judicial coup. The movement, which was supported by senior figures in the political and military establishment, claimed to be ‘defending democracy’. But this did not mean full political and legal equality for all, since that would have to include Arabs. Its image of democracy was rather a technical-procedural one, based on the separation of the executive and judicial branches. The protesters’ primary demand was for the courts – those which had ratified the Nation-State Law, along with countless other racist and discriminatory measures – to retain their formal independence. Above all, the leaders stressed that an impartial national legal system was necessary to protect Israeli soldiers from facing international war crimes tribunals. Unsurprisingly, this was a ‘democratic celebration’ in which Arab citizens refused to take part.   

Even if Israel’s ‘centrist’ bloc were to somehow form a new government, with the aim of changing the status quo on Palestine, the obstacles to a Western-backed settlement would still be insurmountable. Among them is the strength of the Israeli far right, which would fight tooth-and-nail to block any diplomatic ‘solution’, as well as the drastic decrease in public support for Palestinian statehood after 7 October. There is also the dramatic demographic changes in the occupied territories, caused by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the constant growth in the number of settlers, whom the Israeli government would never agree to relocate. In Palestine, meanwhile, there is the issue of widespread distrust for the PA, which lacks the credibility to implement any such arrangement.  

Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise 20% of its total population, are now succumbing to despair as the state continues to slaughter their brethren in Gaza. Large numbers of Israeli Jews have given up on the prospect of a legal settlement: a development that the far right is exploiting by calling for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their historic homeland. A government of the ‘centre’ would not solve this structural crisis. It would only put a thin layer of makeup on the face of Israeli society.

Read on: Yonatan Mendel, ‘New Jerusalem’, NLR 81.

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Asymmetries

As Israel’s assault on Gaza enters its fifth month, it remains unclear whether it will grow into a full-scale regional conflict. Among the decisive factors is Hezbollah, one of the most heavily armed non-state actors in the world, and arguably the most skilled in urban and alpine warfare. So far, the group has refrained from taking escalatory measures, aiming to prevent Lebanese involvement in the war while partially diverting the IDF with limited attacks from the north. Rather than targeting Israeli vital infrastructure, it has conducted hundreds of operations aimed at military outposts, forcing Israel to create an internal buffer zone by evacuating citizens from northern settlements. More than 170 Hezbollah fighters have been killed so far; but the party, which has an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 trained combatants, can handle such losses.

There are elements of the Israeli political and military leadership, however, which seem intent on provoking a major confrontation with Hezbollah. Their motives are clear enough. First, members of the Israeli cabinet, along with the IDF command and Mossad, know that their best chance of staying in power is to prolong the fighting – and they are not above sacrificing their own civilians to achieve this. Second, it is possible that if Israel continues to carry out mass murder without achieving any of its stated war aims, it may find itself more isolated on the international stage; whereas if Hezbollah were to start attacking Israeli cities and targeting civilians, Netanyahu’s government could revive the fantasy of an imperiled democratic state and rally the ‘forces of civilization’ to its cause. And third, there is a fear that Hezbollah might someday launch its own ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ across Israel’s northern border – prompting senior politicians, including Gantz, Gallant and Ben-Gvir, to call for a preemptive strike.

Israel has therefore been making repeated attempts to provoke its neighbour: targeting civilians in South Lebanon and launching attacks elsewhere in the country. Hezbollah and Hamas commanders, including Wissam Al-Tawil and Saleh Al-Arouri, have been assassinated on Lebanese soil, and Netanyahu has threatened to ‘turn Beirut and southern Lebanon into Gaza’. But Hezbollah remains committed to low-intensity warfare and has so far refused to respond with a major assault. What explains this strategic decision? It is not just a fear of further destruction that is preventing escalation; it is an awareness that this would not necessarily advance the group’s objectives, nor those of the Resistance Axis.

To understand Hezbollah’s calculation, we need to consider Lebanon’s position in the region. Since Obama announced the ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2009, the US has been trying to establish a new Middle Eastern security architecture that would allow it to minimize direct involvement in proxy wars and focus on containing China. As part of this process, the hegemon sought to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords. At the same time, Iran and Saudi Arabia began to pursue détente – hoping to reorient their economies, attract inward investment and forge ties with neighbouring countries, while reducing their respective roles in regional conflicts. Last year the two states reached a bilateral agreement in Beijing, the details of which remain obscure, but which seem to involve a compromise when it comes to nations where they both wield influence, such as Yemen and Lebanon. Some analysts have argued that Mohammed bin Salman is now ready to cooperate with Hezbollah and accept its status as the dominant political and military power in Lebanon. It may even be in the Saudis’ interest to have a strong deterrent force on Israel’s border, especially one for which they have no financial or political responsibility.

Given Lebanon’s ongoing economic misery, this could be a potential lifeline. The country’s downward spiral began in 2019 after the Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, cut off aid and divested from its real-estate and financial sectors. Challenging Hezbollah’s hegemony was cited as the motive, although the decision also came after the ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis finally reached the Gulf, forcing its leaders to restructure their foreign investment plans. Now, the Lebanese political class, including powerful elements in Hezbollah, believe that the Saudi–Iran accords – which have so far endured following 7 October – could allow them to turn back the clock to before the 2019 collapse. Their aim is to revive the rentier model that was established in the post-Mandate period and consolidated under Rafiq Al-Hariri in the 1990s: a dominant financial sector propping up the central state through regular loans, and a real-estate market dependent on inflows from Gulf investors and Lebanese expatriates. They also hope that the Lebanese financial system could now serve as a mediator for Gulf and Iranian investment in the reconstruction of Syria.

With the Saudi–Iran deal in place, and the effects of the financial crisis having passed, the barriers to investment in Lebanon could be removed and Hezbollah’s legitimacy could be recognized across the region. Moreover, if Iran is hoping to scale down its involvement in regional conflicts and establish lasting economic partnerships with erstwhile rivals, then it may want Hezbollah to do the same: reducing its military activity in Lebanon and Syria and focusing instead on economic revival and ‘good governance’. One should refrain from making categorical statements about the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah, since its contours are unclear, and the latter can hardly be described as a simple proxy. But Tehran’s foreign policy outlook would seem, prima facie, to align with Hezbollah’s approach to Gaza over recent months.

It would also appear to tally with the interests of Washington, which is eager to prevent the war from engulfing the Middle East, and has reportedly been making diplomatic efforts to convince Hezbollah to continue its policy of restraint. Though the details remain unclear and uncorroborated, briefings from Iranian officials and Hezbollah-affiliated media suggest that the White House has offered Hezbollah a new ‘settlement for the entire region’, so long as it does not expand the war. Habib Fayad, a Lebanese journalist (and brother of a Hezbollah MP), has argued that the Americans would accept ceding control over Lebanon to Hezbollah, on the condition that the party pledges to never launch a 7 October-style incursion into Israel.

Yet this supposed settlement may also create a dilemma for Hezbollah. Previously, the group was able to evade accountability for the Lebanese economic crisis, since it has no ties to the banking and real estate sectors. It could use its status as a transnational military movement to distance itself from Lebanon’s national political parties, loathed for their mismanagement and corruption. Were Hezbollah to accept this American offer, some of its cadres are worried that it would signal its slow transformation into something more like a conventional party of government: integrated into the establishment, sapped of its insurgent energy. Whether it will take this course remains uncertain. The group consists both of politicians, most of whom have no military background and may be favourable to such ‘normalization’, and a militant faction – more heavily represented in the leadership – which is reluctant to be co-opted. 

The present situation thus appears to be one of deep asymmetry. Israel, foundering on the battlefield and discrediting itself internationally, is under pressure to set out some sort of end-game for its war. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has no real time constraints. As the fighting drags on, it believes it can renew its credibility – which was damaged during the Syrian civil war and the 2019 protests in Lebanon – by striking a balance between armed solidarity with Palestine and concern for Lebanese security. This is not to say that Hezbollah is merely instrumentalizing the conflict; its dedication to the Palestinian cause is genuine and should not be understated. The point is that Israel and the Resistance Axis are operating on two different timeframes, one more urgent than the other.

Still, Hezbollah’s policy could yet be reversed if regional war is deemed necessary or inevitable. Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly asserted that in these circumstances, his forces would engage with no limits or constraints – which, according to some Lebanese commentators, could mean attacking strategic Israeli targets including ammonium nitrate factories, plus petrochemical and energy plants, in an attempt to redress the significant military imbalance between the two sides.

If Hezbollah is currently pursuing a non-escalatory strategy and asserting its willingness to negotiate with Israel on condition of a ceasefire, that is because it is confident that it can consolidate its power both in Lebanon and across the region. In other words, Hezbollah still has something to lose from entering a full-scale war. But if Hezbollah comes to believe that this kind of war – which could lay waste to Lebanon, damage the party’s military infrastructure and compromise it politically – is unavoidable, then it would have nothing to lose. In which case, Israel may end up with a powerful presence on its northern border: heavily armed, and no longer interested in restraint. 

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’, NLR 38.

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Unlearning Machines

There is no denying the technological marvels that have resulted from the application of transformers in machine learning. They represent a step-change in a line of technical research that has spent most of its history looking positively deluded, at least to its more sober initiates. On the left, the critical reflex to see this as yet another turn of the neoliberal screw, or to point out the labour and resource extraction that underpin it, falls somewhat flat in the face of a machine that can, at last, interpret natural-language instructions fairly accurately, and fluently turn out text and images in response. Not long ago, such things seemed impossible. The appropriate response to these wonders is not dismissal but dread, and it is perhaps there that we should start, for this magic is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few often idiosyncratic people at the social apex of an unstable world power. It would obviously be foolhardy to entrust such people with the reified intelligence of humanity at large, but that is where we are.

Here in the UK, tech-addled university managers are currently advocating for overstretched teaching staff to turn to generative AI for the production of teaching materials. More than half of undergraduates are already using the same technology to help them write essays, and various AI platforms are being trialled for the automation of marking. Followed through to their logical conclusion, these developments would amount to a repurposing of the education system as a training process for privately owned machine learning models: students, teachers, lecturers all converted into a kind of outsourced administrator or technician, tending to the learning of a black-boxed ‘intelligence’ that does not belong to them. Given that there is no known way of preventing Large Language Models from ‘hallucinating’ – weaving untruths and absurdities into their output, in ways that can be hard to spot unless one has already done the relevant work oneself – residual maintainers of intellectual standards would then be reduced to the role of providing corrective feedback to machinic drivel.

Where people don’t perform this function, the hallucinations will propagate unchecked. Already the web – which was once imagined, on the basis of CERN, as a sort of idealized scientific community – is being swamped by the pratings of statistical systems. Much as physical waste is shipped to the Global South for disposal, digital effluent is being dumped on the global poor: beyond the better-resourced languages, low-quality machine translations of low-quality English language content now dominate the web. This, of course, risks poisoning one of the major wells from which generative AI models have hitherto been drinking, raising the spectre of a degenerative loop analogous to the protein cycles of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease – machine learning turning into its opposite.

Humans, no doubt, will be called upon to correct such tendencies, filtering, correcting and structuring training data for the very processes that are leaving this trail of destruction. But the educator must of course be educated, and with even the book market being saturated with auto-generated rubbish, the culture in which future educators will learn cannot be taken for granted. In a famous passage, the young Marx argued that the process of self-transformation involved in real learning implied a radical transformation in the circumstances of learning. If learning now risks being reduced to a sanity check on the outputs of someone else’s machine, finessing relations of production that are structurally opposed to the learner, the first step towards self-education will have to involve a refusal to participate in this technological roll-out.

While the connectionist AI that underlies these developments has roots that predate even the electronic computer, its ascent is inextricable from the dynamics of a contemporary world raddled by serial crises. An education system that was already threatening to collapse provides fertile ground for the cultivation of a dangerous technology, whether this is driven by desperation, ingenuousness or cynicism on the part of individual actors. Healthcare, where the immediate risks may be even higher, is another domain which the boosters like to present as in-line for an AI-based shake-up. We might perceive in these developments a harbinger of future responses to the climate emergency. Forget about the standard apocalyptic scenarios peddled by the prophets of Artificial General Intelligence; they are a distraction from the disaster that is already upon us.

Matteo Pasquinelli’s recent book, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence, is probably the most sophisticated attempt so far to construct a critical-theoretical response to these developments. Its title is somewhat inaccurate: there is not much social history here – not in the conventional sense. Indeed, as was the case with Joy Lisi Rankin’s A People’s History of Computing in the United States (2018), it would be hard to construct such a history for a technical realm that has long been largely tucked away in rarefied academic and research environments. The social enters here by way of a theoretical reinterpretation of capitalist history centred on Babbage’s and Marx’s analyses of the labour process, which identifies even in nineteenth century mechanization and division of labour a sort of estrangement of the human intellect. This then lays the basis for an account of the early history of connectionist AI. The ‘eye’ of the title links the automation of pattern recognition to the history of the supervision of work.

If barely a history, the book is structured around a few striking scholarly discoveries that merit serious attention. It is well known that Babbage’s early efforts to automate computation were intimately connected with a political-economic perspective on the division of labour. A more novel perspective here comes from Pasquinelli’s tracing of Marx’s notion of the ‘general intellect’ to Ricardian socialist William Thompson’s 1824 book, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth. Thompson’s theory of labour highlighted the knowledge implied even in relatively lowly kinds of work – a knowledge that was appropriated by machines and set against the very people from whom it had been alienated. This set the stage for speculations about the possible economic fallout from this accumulation of technology, such as Marx’s famous ‘fragment on machines’.

But the separating out of a supposed ‘labour aristocracy’ within the workers’ movement made any emphasis on the more mental aspects of work hazardous for cohesion. As the project of Capital matured, Marx thus set aside the general intellect for the collective worker, de-emphasizing knowledge and intellect in favour of a focus on social coordination. In the process, an early theory of the role of knowledge and intellect in mechanization was obscured, and hence required reconstruction from the perspective of the age of the Large Language Model. The implication for us here is that capitalist production always involved an alienation of knowledge; and the mechanization of intelligence was always embedded in the division of labour.

If Pasquinelli stopped there, his book would amount to an interesting manoeuvre on the terrain of Marxology and the history of political economy. But this material provides the theoretical backdrop to a scholarly exploration of the origins of connectionist approaches to machine learning, first in the neuroscience and theories of self-organization of cybernetic thinkers like Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts and Ross Ashby that formed in the midst of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war, and then in the late-50s emergence, at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, of Frank Rosenblatt’s ‘perceptron’ – the earliest direct ancestor of contemporary machine learning models. Among the intellectual resources feeding into the development of the perceptron were a controversy between the cyberneticians and Gestalt psychologists on the question of Gestalt perception or pattern recognition; Hayek’s connectionist theory of mind – which he had begun to develop in a little-reported stint as a lab assistant to neuropathologist Constantin Monakow, and which paralleled his economic beliefs; and vectorization methods that had emerged from statistics and psychometrics, with their deep historical links to the eugenics movement. The latter connection has striking resonances in the context of much-publicized concerns over racial and other biases in contemporary AI.

Pasquinelli’s unusual strength here lies in combining a capacity to elaborate the detail of technical and intellectual developments in the early history of AI with an aspiration towards the construction of a broader social theory. Less well-developed is his attempt to tie the perceptron and all that has followed from it to the division of labour, via an emphasis on the automation not of intelligence in general, but of perception – linking this to the work of supervising production. But he may still have a point at the most abstract level, in attempting to ground the alienated intelligence that is currently bulldozing its way through digital media, education systems, healthcare and so on, in a deeper history of the machinic expropriation of an intellectuality that was previously embedded in labour processes from which head-work was an inextricable aspect.

The major difference with the current wave, perhaps, is the social and cultural status of the objects of automation. Where once it was the mindedness of manual labour that found itself embodied in new devices, in a context of stratifications where the intellectuality of such realms was denied, in current machine learning models it is human discourse per se that is objectified in machinery. If the politics of machinery was never neutral, the level of generality that mechanization is now reaching should be ringing alarm bells everywhere: these things cannot safely be entrusted to a narrow group of corporations and technical elites. As long as they are, these tools – however magical they might seem – will be our enemies, and finding alternatives to the dominant paths of technical development will be a pressing matter.

Read on: Hito Steyerl, ‘Common Sensing?’, NLR 144.

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Wenders, Canonized

The acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders was born in Dusseldorf in August 1945. These two biographical facts set the trajectory of his career. Along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, among others, Wenders became a key figure of the New German Cinema, a movement forged by that first postwar generation born into the ruins of the Third Reich. ‘I don’t think any country has had such a loss of faith in its own images, stories and myths as we have’, he reflected in 1977. ‘We, the directors of the New Cinema have felt this loss most keenly: in ourselves as the absence of a tradition of our own, as a generation without fathers; and in our audiences as confusion and apprehension.’ A society determined to forget its recent past and embarrassed by its cultural touchstones; with its own imagined community unavailable, another would have to do.

For Wenders, that would be America – or at least the version of America seen at the movies. This meant, especially, the endless highway, Coca-Cola, and rock music (starting with Little Richard and Chuck Berry, then continuing through the 1960s and long beyond). Like the woman in the Velvet Underground song whose ‘life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll’, Wenders observed ‘that was undoubtedly true in my case as well’. As well as, one imagines, the three years he spent at the University of Television and Film in Munich. Wenders had initially studied medicine, before switching to philosophy and then abandoning college and decamping to Paris to pursue a career in painting. But there, like the nouvelle vague directors before him he haunted the Cinémathèque Française – taking in as many as five films a day – and was nurtured by the influence of its legendary co-founder and director Henri Langlois, to whom he would later dedicate The American Friend (1977). Wenders too started out as a film critic, writing for the journal Filmkritik when he returned to Germany in 1967 (many of these essays are collected in Emotion Pictures: Reflections on Cinema) – and as a filmmaker, he was also eager to interrogate the form, reluctant to separate ‘the movies’ from ‘real life’, and saw a thin, nebulous line between documentary and drama.

Curzon Film (working with the Wim Wenders foundation which supervised meticulous restorations) has produced an impressive twenty-two-disc collection of his films. Each comes loaded with extras, including attendant interviews, featurettes and commentaries, with some supplemented by short films. Despite its imposing breadth, the set is, understandably, not ‘complete’ – but two early omissions are disappointing as each, notably, established many of the motifs that would characterize Wenders’s career. The short Alabama, 2000 Light Years (1969), was the first of his dozen collaborations with cinematographer Robby Müller. It’s not much, really, and the ‘plot’ needs to be intuited, but it’s all there: driving, smoking, jukeboxes, and, especially, music (including The Stones with ‘No Expectations’, Hendrix’s ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, and Dylan from John Wesley Harding). Summer in the City (1970), Wenders’s debut feature, also shot by Müller and edited by Peter Przygodda (the first of twenty collaborations) has its limitations too, but it is surely better than The Scarlet Letter (1973), a dreary film included in the set that was such an unhappy shoot it nearly chased Wenders from the business.

Like Alabama, Summer in the City was probably excluded due to the impossibility of securing music rights that were originally disregarded. Dedicated to the Kinks (and featuring five songs by that band), the movie, which sports some eye-catching night-for-night shooting, can be described as a bizarre cross between Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957). But it anticipates what would follow, with its lament for the shuttering of old movie houses, a visit to a photo booth, a prominently placed jukebox, a screening of Godard’s Alphaville and endless driving. In short order Wenders would do all of this again, often spectacularly.

Wenders’s bid for the pantheon ultimately rests on a quartet of brilliant, diverse, signature films: Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). Alice in the Cities, one of the cinematic achievements of the 1970s, remains his most intimate and personal. Journalist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, who often served as Wenders’s alter-ego) has wandered across America in search of a story he fails to write. Limping home to Europe by way of New York, circumstances leave him briefly responsible for young Alice (Yella Rottländer); a missed flight complicates efforts to reunite Alice with her mother, and, stranded, a search begins for her grandmother, which takes this odd couple on a road trip through Holland and Germany. One suggestion of this textured, subtle film is that America is far more alluring as an idea than as an actual place. Inspired by Wenders’s first two trips there, he would later write that the American dream is ‘a dream OF a country, IN a different country, that is located where the dream takes place.’ Describing experiences that parallel the journey of Philip Winter, he recalls ‘My second visit to America I just didn’t dare to leave New York . . . west of the Hudson, I knew now, lay wilderness’. Wenders would, however, subsequently develop an appreciation for ‘Arizona, Utah or New Mexico’ – that is, the West as seen in the films of John Ford, a figure that looms large in Alice in the Cities – and in Wenders’s filmmaking more generally. Shot by Robby Müller in impeccable black and white, two scenes stand out beyond the special sequences documenting mid-seventies New York City: an interlude where Philip takes in a Chuck Berry concert (all the more meaningful in that the song, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, about a father attempting to reconnect with his young daughter, was an important inspiration for the film); and a poignant, pivotal confession in a café, a location that also features an unmotivated shot of a boy, leaning against a jukebox, sipping a coke, which is undoubtedly an evocation of the filmmaker himself.

The American Friend, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, is Wenders’s most visually ambitious film, displaying an exquisite facility for shooting in colour, orchestrating a sophisticated palette that recalls Wenders’s one-time aspiration to be a painter. Music is, once again, an essential ingredient (and presumably the well-deployed songs by the Kinks and others were paid for this time around). The production also marked Wenders’s first collaboration with Bruno Ganz, an uncommonly gifted actor whose understated performance grounds the film, which is elliptical (especially on a first viewing) and distinguished by several bravura, suspenseful set pieces, many involving railways. Dennis Hopper fills the shoes of Tom Ripley, and though the performance is somewhat imbued with the actor’s own persona, it nevertheless works. American Friend is also distinguished by numerous cameo appearances, including nouvelle vague legend Jean Eustache and two directors from Wenders’s personal pantheon, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller. Of Ray, Wenders wrote, ‘There’s one thing wrong with Godard’s famous line that if there hadn’t been cinema, Nicholas Ray would have invented it . . . Ray did invent cinema, not many do’. Fuller, who appeared in several of Wenders’s films, was an important mentor (he helped rework the screenplay for Alice in the Cities). In Wenders’s estimation, he was not only ‘the greatest storyteller I ever met’, but ‘one of the great directors of the twentieth century’.

Paris, Texas won the grand prize at Cannes, among other accolades, yet it endures principally as a cult favourite. This is perhaps not surprising – Dirk Bogarde, the jury president that year, recalls in his memoir some dismay from the festival overlords: ‘We were to choose films which would please a family audience, not ones which would appeal to “a few students and a handful of faux intellectuals”’. Starring Harry Dean Stanton as a drifter reconnecting with his former life, the film loses a bit of its magic as it becomes more literal in its final third, and there is a structural wobble with the discarding of two key characters. Nevertheless, as often, the artists were right and the suits obtuse – this is a special film. Every frame is filled with purpose, and the ‘through the looking glass’ scenes between Stanton and his estranged wife (Nastassja Kinski) achieve rare heights. Ry Cooder’s score, featuring Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting blues instrumental from 1927, ‘Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground’, is inseparable from the performances, especially in the first half of the picture, where dialogue is sparse. Paris, Texas was co-written by Sam Shepard, who also wrote (and starred in, opposite Jessica Lange) the very fine Don’t Come Knocking (2005), another regrettable omission from the Curzon collection. Both films are very Fordian in their locations, visual disposition and as character studies of men who withdraw from society to re-emerge years later in search of some form of salvation.

Wings of Desire, Wenders’s best-known film, has also been justly lauded. Jonathan Rosenbaum describes a film that presents ‘an astonishing poetic documentary’ of its host city. It features Bruno Ganz (Daniel) and Otto Sander (Cassiel) as angels who hover over a divided Berlin. As witnesses to and chroniclers of history as it unfolds, they are unable to participate in human affairs (or prevent its horrors, epic or intimate); they can only observe, and in some cases (but, tragically, not all) provide a comforting presence to those in distress. The narrative swivels as Daniel decides he’s had his fill of immortality – so curious about the human condition that he wishes to experience it. Crashing to earth, he courts a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and encounters the music of Nick Cave. Peter Falk, whose affable celebrity has at times overshadowed his prodigious talent, excels playing a version of himself. His internal monologues feature some of the best writing (and line reads) to be found in Wenders’s oeuvre. The film was the third collaboration between Wenders and the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke. Handke co-wrote Wenders’s The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), an early landmark of the New German Cinema, based on his novel (Müller and Przygodda are also on hand, as are nods to Hitchcock, Americana, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Long as I Can See the Light’). Handke also wrote Wrong Move (1975), a wistful road film in which Germany’s dark past weighs more oppressively than in any other Wenders film.

It is fair to say, however ­– and this is reflected in the Curzon collection – that Wenders’s oeuvre, especially following the glory days of the seventies and eighties, is uneven. In the late 1990s, Roger Ebert would astutely describe ‘a gifted and poetic’ filmmaker ‘whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp’. Faraway, So Close! (1993), a post-reunification follow up to Wings of Desire, has some things to say, but is inconsistent and never quite works; The End of Violence (1997), though beautifully shot and well-cast, is an unfulfilling, ultimately incoherent affair (and a welcome omission from the set); The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), co-written by Bono, sees another fine cast wasted. These critiques can be taken too far, however, with commentators, perhaps understandably, grading on a curve – the way minor mid-career Dylan albums were often initially vilified, only to grow in esteem with the passage of time. In that spirit, Everything Will be Fine (2015), for example, widely dismissed upon release, is a welcome rediscovery. Had this small, thoughtful film been made by a young unknown, likely it would have been lauded as heralding the arrival of a promising new talent.     

Beyond Wenders’s four masterpieces, there is much to praise in the collection. Consider, most notably, two additional films that have the road as their theme (not surprisingly, Wenders’s production company is called ‘Road Movies’). Kings of the Road (1976), dedicated to Fritz Lang and running to three hours (plenty of time to touch base with the director’s familiar motifs, here adding an often-fraught homosocial relationship into the mix), follows its protagonists as they drive along the inter-German border, stopping at local, decaying cinema-houses. Until the End of the World (1991), at nearly five hours, is the ultimate expression of Wenders’s peripatetic urgency, traversing five continents and boasting an enormous, star-studded global cast (Max Von Sydow, Jeanne Moreau and Chishû Ryû among them). Perhaps less than the sum of its astonishing parts, the film nevertheless asks big questions, and presciently anticipated the worst aspects of twenty-first-century selfie culture. 

Arguably, all Wenders movies are in some sense road movies. Just as important as the road, however, is his fascination with the uneasy relationship between drama and documentary. Lightning over Water (1980), made with a dying Nicholas Ray, explores these themes most overtly. In the opening sequence, Wenders arrives at Ray’s SoHo apartment – in scenes handled so deftly the audience gets the impression that it is indeed privy to something very ‘real’ (though in retrospect there are multiple camera set ups). Soon enough, however, Wenders pulls back the curtain; the image shifts from pristine 35mm film to grainy video – and in the latter suddenly Ray’s lonely apartment is crowded with a film crew, harshly lit, and on a dime it’s that which seems real (though obviously, even that footage was shot and edited). But there are some inescapable realities here; Ray was indeed dying, and does not survive the shoot.

The State of Things (1982), which took home the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, is another meta-movie. Inspired by Wenders’s unhappy Hollywood interlude directing Hammett (1982), The State of Things, which opens with a movie-within-a-movie, follows a film crew stranded in Lisbon because the money has run dry while its director travels to Los Angeles to track down his furtive producer. Sam Fuller is a welcome presence, but the film really comes to life towards the end, when preternaturally intense seventies character actor Allen Garfield shows up as the missing money man on the run, monologuing in an R.V. A dozen years later, Lisbon Story (1994) explored similar themes in an informal sequel. An attractively shot trifle featuring Rüdiger Vogler, it is distinguished only by a pleasant musical interlude and welcome cameo from Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.   

Finally, and increasingly in late career, are excursions into straight non-fiction (as far as that goes), which showcase Wenders’s interests in and engagement with a panoply of the arts. These include cinema and music (of course), but also dance, architecture, fashion, and photography, a ubiquitous presence in Wenders’s life and in his films as well – photography plays an integral part not only in Alice in the Cities and The American Friend, but numerous later works, including, most explicitly, Palermo Shooting (2008). Of these productions, well represented in the set, two in particular stand out: Tokyo Ga (1985), Wenders’s moving homage to Japanese filmmaker Yasujirô Ozu (another important influence), and, irresistibly, Buena Vista Social Club (1999), which follows Ry Cooder, who travelled to Havana to lure long-forgotten Cuban musicians out of retirement. Wenders, now approaching his eightieth year, released two well received films last year, Perfect Days, a rumination on the experiences of a janitor in Tokyo, and Anselm, a documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer. With Nick Ray and Sam Fuller present in the pantheon, as Curzon’s impressive box set makes clear, surely there is a seat at that table for Wim Wenders as well.

Read on: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, NLR I/91.

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Ukania and Palestine

The UK government has been among the most hawkishly pro-Israel states in the Western world, and the opposition Labour Party has done its best to purge critics of Israel from its ranks – yet the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain has been the largest in Europe. As one of the chief organizers of that movement, how would you account for its impressive scale?

In many Western countries, the pro-Palestine movement has different components that don’t always work together: leftist, Muslim, Arab nationalist. When we set up the Stop the War Coalition in 2001 we tried to take a different approach, and began collaborating with Muslim groups from early on – for instance after the massacre in Jenin in spring 2002. We decided that the February 2003 mass demonstration against the Iraq war would also be a march for Palestinian liberation: the two slogans for the event were ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’ and ‘Freedom for Palestine’. Then, during the protests against Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, we made an alliance with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of Al Aqsa and the Palestine Forum in Britain, which remains in place today. We’ve also worked a lot with British trade unions, whose stance on this issue has generally been quite robust. So I think the strong links between these institutions make the UK a distinctive case.  

There’s also a fairly widespread awareness of Britain’s imperial history, including its role in the Zionist project: Balfour, Sykes–Picot, and of course the League of Nations Mandate. If you mention these things at a rally in London, people of very different backgrounds and social classes know what you’re talking about – which is interesting, since we’re not taught about them in school. Now, with the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and violence spreading across the region, people are horrified by the UK’s support for the Israeli war machine. They recognize that this is a watershed moment. So for seventeen consecutive weeks there have been either major national demonstrations, which have brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets, or significant numbers joining local actions. In response, the government has suggested banning Palestine flags, proscribing certain slogans and even outlawing the protests outright, as was done in France and Germany. But as yet they haven’t succeeded.  

Does that challenge the idea, which we heard throughout the Corbyn years, that anti-imperialism is a marginal, unpopular strain in British politics?

I think there’s a misconception that British workers have always been bought off by imperialism. But if you look at the history, there have been repeated mobilizations around international issues: from the Spanish Civil War to the Suez crisis to South African apartheid. William Morris bitterly opposed the Sudan war in 1884. The Lancashire working class supported the North during the US civil war even though they suffered hardship as a result. These were all popular causes. So there is a strong political current here – and I think it’s one of the main reasons why Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015. But of course, that current is anathema to the Labour establishment, whose foreign policy has been consistently reactionary, especially when it came to the independence and decolonization movements of the twentieth century. The right of the party couldn’t bear the idea that Corbyn would have changed Britain’s policy on the Middle East. And they couldn’t bear that a substantial segment of the population supported him on these questions. They could have tolerated him renationalizing the railways, but that was a bridge too far.

Does that also explain why the UK government has responded so aggressively to the recent protests?

I think the government was surprised by the response to October 7th. As the bombing of Gaza got underway, they decided to light up Downing Street in the colours of the Israeli flag. They thought this would be another Ukraine moment, with everyone rallying around Israel in a supposed clash between civilization and barbarism. They were gearing up for that kind of propaganda operation. But as early as October 9th, thousands of people gathered to protest outside the Israeli Embassy. As with 9/11, they saw that this attack would be used to justify killing on a much greater scale – and that the Israeli government would exploit this opportunity to try to expel the Arab population from historic Palestine. People didn’t trust the government, or the media coverage, or Keir Starmer. And this is a serious problem for the political class, because if the war continues to escalate they won’t have a mandate for intervention. They’ll struggle to gain consent for following the US into this military quagmire. And they won’t be believed when they tell us that Iran poses an existential threat, for example.

This is partly why we’ve seen the attempts to repress the movement. The government have branded the demos ‘hate marches’ and introduced legislation to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. They’ve also launched a crackdown on smaller fringe groups. The Muslim outfit Hizb ut-Tahrir has been labelled a terrorist organization – which obviously it isn’t, although we might disagree with it on most issues. Police have also arrested members of a small Maoist organization called the CPGB-ML, raided their houses and confiscated their literature. People in the Muslim community are being told that their children can’t talk about Palestine in school, otherwise they’ll be reported under the Prevent legislation. There is a real effort, from different sections of the establishment, to present pro-Palestine activists as Hamas supporters or antisemites. But despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail and the Metropolitan Police, they only ever manage to find about half a dozen people at each march who they can claim are carrying questionable placards.

More than 70% of the UK population now support a ceasefire, while the two main Westminster parties oppose it. What are the strategic implications of this situation for the left? Could it open up the space for an electoral challenge to Starmer’s Labour?

When the election is held later this year, Palestine will be on the ballot paper. Right now neither party is managing to satisfy its own supporters, let alone the wider public, so my guess is that there will be major abstention. It still looks like Labour will win a clear majority, but Starmer’s cheerleading for Netanyahu has prompted a mass exodus of members. Every week I hear about more local politicians who are leaving in disgust. In Liverpool, Hastings, Oxford and elsewhere, left-wing councillors have established independent groupings. Some of these people will probably run against Labour in the general election. It’s hard to predict how they’ll do, given the constraints of the first-past-the-post system, but they’ll certainly hurt the Labour vote share in various places – especially where there is strong support for a ceasefire. And this could, in theory, form the basis of a new organization: a new type of left party.

One of the big problems, though, is that the major trade unions remain tied to Labour. There are lots of general secretaries who come and speak at our Palestine demos, and several unions have backed our call for a ‘workplace day of action’ on February 7th, which is encouraging. But despite the strike wave that’s taken place over the last two years, the unions haven’t made significant gains in terms of their membership or influence. They are still relatively weak formations. So they’ll be keen to strike deals with Starmer once he gets into power, and reluctant to support autonomous political initiatives.

Might the unions begin to play a more militant role once a future Labour government starts imposing wage restraint on workers, as Starmer has indicated that it will?

Well I suppose we’ve been here before. Wilson launched a brutal attack on the Seamen’s Union in 1966, but the labour movement still refused to cut ties with his government. Since then, the unions have lost a great deal of their strength, which may put them in an even more precarious position; but then again so has Labour and Labourism, as a result of severing its organic connection with the working class. So I guess the answer is: some will wrest free of the party and some won’t. The Fire Brigades Union disaffiliated under Blair, and it’s conceivable that it and others like it might do so again. But my sense is that the larger unions will do everything they can to try to preserve a Labour government, even if its policies – on everything from austerity to the Middle East – are merely an echo of the Tories’.

Where next for the Palestine movement in the UK, especially given the tendency for regular A-to-B marches to lose momentum? How to preserve its energy?

The forms of action that can be taken are almost endless. Groups like Workers for a Free Palestine and Palestine Action have been shutting down weapons factories. Protesters have been staging sit-ins in railway stations. There was a day of action against Barclays Bank – which provides billions worth of investment to arms companies linked to Israel – and other types of BDS organizing are sure to continue. We’re preparing for limited walkouts across workplaces and campuses next week. But I don’t think we should see direct action and marches as somehow counterposed. To me, what the national demos do is bring very large numbers of people and groups together – which energizes them to go off and do different things. So that helps to keep the momentum going. If you don’t have the national demos, there’s a danger that the movement will fragment.

The other thing that will help to sustain the activism is a strong political core, which takes us back to the question of anti-imperialism. I think it’s important for people to see Gaza as integrally related to the wider setup in the Middle East – how it’s shaped by the United States, and to a lesser extent by Britain. So you need public meetings and discussions to develop that critique. And you also need writers and intellectuals to bring the issue into focus. Apparently Ghada Karmi’s 2023 book One State has sold out, and keeps selling out every time new copies are printed, which tells you that people are increasingly aware that the two-state ‘solution’ is a fantasy and are now thinking beyond it.

The thing is, even if there were a ceasefire tomorrow, this movement isn’t going away. The demos might get much smaller, and people might want to do more local actions, but the feeling among the organizers is that there has been a permanent sea-change in public attitudes towards Palestine. And this has already altered British politics. The establishment are still trying to weaponize accusations of antisemitism against anyone who criticizes Israel, but this has become much harder to pull off. The line that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ just doesn’t work anymore. Thanks to both the solidarity campaign and the ICJ ruling, Israel will now forever be associated with the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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Marx or Jefferson?

Du Bois’s relationship to Marxism has become a focus of considerable debate in US sociology; the stakes are at once intellectual and crypto-political. Some want to enroll Du Bois into the ranks of ‘intersectional theory’, a notion which holds that everything has exactly three causes (race, class, and gender), somewhat analogous to the way certain Weberians are dogmatically attached to a fixed set of ‘factors’ (ideological, economic, military, political). Others want to incorporate him into the tradition of Western Marxism and its signature problem of failed revolution. Broadly speaking, the first group tends to emphasize Du Bois’s earlier writings, thereby downplaying the influence of Marxism, while the second focuses on his later work, with its critiques of capitalism and imperialism and its reflections on the Soviet experiment.

But Du Bois’s masterwork, Black Reconstruction (1935), doesn’t fit either of these interpretations. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ appears nowhere, and there is no evidence that DuBois thought in these terms. Nor is Du Bois’s proletariat, or at least its most politically important part, the industrial working class; it is rather the family farmer, both in the West and the South, both black and white. Accordingly, his political ideal was ‘agrarian democracy’. He sometimes refers to those supporting this programme rather misleadingly as ‘peasant farmers’ or ‘peasant proprietors’, which might lead one to think that he is closer to ‘Populism’ in the Russian sense than to Marxism. But that too would be a misreading, for in his understanding the social foundation of democracy does not consist in a pre-capitalist village structure with collective ownership of land, but in a stratum of independent small holders (one that failed fully to appear in the South after the Civil War because of ferocious resistance by the plantocracy, which produced the amphibious figure of the share-cropper).

In contrast to Du Bois, most European Marxists have been wary of calling for the redistribution of large landed estates, on account of the political and economic consequences of establishing a small holding peasantry. Dividing up land can be both politically liberatory and economically regressive, as the French Revolution demonstrated most clearly. Remember too that Gramsci’s The Southern Question (1926), a text which bears a resemblance to Black Reconstruction, was written partially as a defence against the accusation that the nascent Italian communist party demanded the breakup of the southern latifundia.

It may be, after all, that Du Bois is best understood neither as a theorist of intersectionality avant la lettre, nor as a Marxist, but rather as a radical and consistent democrat. His ideal political subject was the independent family farmer, able to withdraw from labour and commodity markets to some extent, or at least to engage with them on favourable and independent terms. In this Du Bois is a deeply American thinker whose critique of capitalism is more republican than socialist. For Du Bois’s concern was not really the failure of a socialist revolution, but rather the missed opportunity of a Jeffersonian Arcadia.

Read On: John-Baptiste Oduor, ‘Segregations Sequiturs’, NLR 136.

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Chaos in Ecuador

In recent years, the surging violence in Ecuador has made international headlines. Initially, coverage centred on frequent prison riots and massacres, which have claimed four hundred lives since 2021. Then, as the turmoil spread beyond the penitentiary system, the focus shifted to gang shootings and executions. Last April, video footage of an attack in the coastal city of Esmeraldas, showing a speed boat full of armed men shooting people on the docks, went viral. The following summer, the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated and his alleged hitmen were murdered in custody. Now the country is reeling from a 24-hour rampage by drug gangs that culminated in a live, on-air hostage-taking on a TV news set. The incident prompted the newly inaugurated president Daniel Noboa to announce that the country was facing an ‘internal armed conflict’: constitutional parlance for a declaration of war, which essentially allows the military to take over from the police. Ecuador wasn’t always this cliche of a narco-state. It was once hailed as an ‘island of peace’, a security success story. What explains its spiral into chaos?

When Rafael Correa became president in 2007, the national murder rate was 15.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. When he left office office ten years later, it had fallen to 5.8, one of the lowest in Latin America. Several policies lay behind this success. There were, undoubtedly, some elements of a traditional law-and-order approach. The police force grew by 40% and many of its personnel were replaced, partly as a result of a 2010 police mutiny in which the president was held hostage for a day. There were significant wage hikes – the salary of rank-and-file officers was tripled – as well as investment in training and equipment that were often sorely lacking. The policing doctrine was also reformed, with the government driving decentralization and a smaller-scale, neighbourhood approach. Such initiatives played a major role in reducing crime rates.

This was accompanied by broader institutional change: most notably the creation of a Coordinating Security Ministry which oversaw security policy and enabled collaboration between different state agencies, in an attempt to diminish rivalries between branches of the military, police and intelligence services. Correa’s government also invested in a widely celebrated 911 emergency response system, which established call centres in seventeen locations by 2015. The state was, in short, making itself present on its territory: an exercise in Weberian sovereignty unlike anything that had come before. 

Perhaps more importantly, the Correa administration implemented a series of ambitious social policies – striving, for instance, to rehabilitate and reintegrate members of Ecuador’s prominent urban gangs. It approached the Latin Kings and Queens, Ñetas and Masters of the Street in an attempt to convince them to ditch crime and enrol in social and educational schemes. The government recognized that these organizations had not yet been inserted into the structures of the larger Mexican-run cartels, and that it could therefore stop the problem from festering. Correa also decriminalized the possession of small quantities of narcotics, as part of a general shift towards treating drug consumption as a public health issue. The aim was to prevent overcrowding in the prison system and allow the police to focus on criminal organizations.

Beyond that, the administration oversaw a marked improvement in living conditions. It doubled social spending, with significant increases for health and education, plus robust welfare programmes and a higher minimum wage. It audited the public finances to suspend or restructure illegitimate debts, renegotiated the country’s oil contracts, and improved tax collection from $5bn in 2007 to $13bn in 2017. By the end of Correa’s tenure, poverty had been reduced by 41.6% and inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, had fallen by 16.7%. Ecuador was making the kind of social progress that renders drug cartels obsolete. 

The concrete effects of Correa’s policies belie the narrative, pedalled by the Ecuadorean establishment, that his ‘soft-on-crime’ tactics are to blame for the current security collapse. Media pundits often suggest that if Ecuador was peaceful under Correa, this was because his government had made a secret pact with the narcos. But this argument is fanciful. The gangs would only have accepted such a deal were they able to increase their drug traffic. Yet even the US Drug Enforcement Agency celebrated ‘the excellent results obtained by the anti-narcotics police’ under Correa, which significantly disrupted the trade. Since he left office, by contrast, drug exports have risen to unprecedented levels.

It was in 2017, under the presidency of Lenín Moreno, that the situation began to unravel. Having styled himself as a continuity candidate, once in office Moreno reversed most of his predecessor’s policies. Under the supervision of the IMF – which extended Ecuador a credit line in 2019, on the condition of a so-called ‘reform program aimed at modernising the economy’ – the social state was rolled back, budgets were slashed and thousands were laid off. The security sector was not spared. The prison system saw its budget cut by 30%, and several ministries, including the Coordinating Ministry of Security and the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, were closed. The Ministry of the Interior, in charge of the police, was dissolved in a merger, while the main intelligence agency was shut down and its activities handed over to a new outfit run by retired military officers. The White House cheered from the sidelines, applauding Moreno’s ‘transition away from “21st century socialism” to a democratic society focused on the defense of basic rights and a free market economy’.

The outcome was catastrophic. Poverty increased almost 17% by 2019. Once the pandemic hit, there was an upsurge of unemployment and informal work, along with crime and drug trafficking. Gangs used the shutdown to consolidate their control over territory and cultivate ties with impoverished sectors of the population. These internal problems coincided with growing external ones. Following the 2016 Colombian peace process, Colombian drug traffickers began to move their product across the southern border and gained access to Ecuador’s Pacific ports, turning the country into a key transit point for drugs en route to the United States, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Of course, we can only speculate as to how a different government would have dealt with these incursions. But it is clear that, rather than confronting a state with functional infrastructure and institutions, the cartels merely encountered Moreno’s neoliberal vacuum – and found it easy to fill. 

The government of Guillermo Lasso, which came to power in 2021, pushed ahead with the same IMF-supervised austerity and deregulation programme. His administration was weak – his party holding less than 10% of seats in the National Assembly – and marred by corruption. It did not take long for its approval ratings to reach a record low. This resulted in a deficit of leadership and legitimacy that constrained the state’s capacity to fight the crime syndicates, which began to flourish like never before. Still, the government retained the unflinching support of President Biden, who ignored frequent letters from Congressmen warning him about Lasso’s corruption and calling for a DOJ investigation into his hidden assets in the US. Allegations eventually surfaced that Danilo Carrera, Lasso’s brother-in-law and closest business collaborator, was linked to the ‘Albanian Mafia’ drug ring. Soon after, the key witness in the investigation was murdered, and Lasso’s scandal-ridden presidency began to fall apart. In May 2023, a few days before his likely impeachment by the National Assembly, he called new elections and relegated himself to the role of lame-duck president.

Violence meanwhile continued to mount. Prison massacres became commonplace and homicide rates climbed to an astonishing 45 per 100,000, an eight-fold increase since 2017. If Daniel Noboa, the centre-right businessman elected last October, is able to make even modest improvements in the security situation, he stands a chance of re-election when the country returns to the polls next year. His political prospects depend on convincing Ecuadorians that he is the man to defeat the cartels. So far he has tried to project toughness by reversing Correa’s decriminalization laws. He has also announced the construction of ‘maximum prisons’, contracted with an Israeli company, as well as ‘prison barges’ intended to conjure up images of Alcatraz or Devil’s Island. But aside from this, little is known about the specifics of his security plan. His ‘war’ on the gangs will be extremely costly, and the current economic outlook is not favourable. Though the incumbent benefits from relatively high crude oil prices – Ecuador’s main export – he is desperate to secure other sources of funding for his offensive. Judging from the recent decision to increase VAT from 12% to 15%, this could mean further attempts to squeeze the public.

This precarious situation makes the Noboa government highly dependent on the US. Bilateral security ties had already been strengthened over the last five years, particularly under Lasso. In October 2023, a cooperation agreement opened the door for an American military presence in Ecuador, which would be forced to relinquish some of the basic tenets of its sovereignty and grant full immunity to US personnel. (Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that, since the deal only involves ‘cooperation’ as opposed to a formal ‘alliance’, it does not require legislative authorisation.) This fits into a wider trend. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has used the War on Drugs as a tool to maintain its foothold in the Western Hemisphere and exert its influence over the security apparatus of Latin American states. Having charted a nonconformist course under Correa, Ecuador is now eager to signal its compliance with the hegemon. Another sign of this reorientation is the growing security partnership with Israel, which has managed to coax Ecuador – along with a number of other states in the Global South – into complicity with its expansionist project. As Palestinians are slaughtered in their tens of thousands, Noboa bleats that ‘we’re not going to condemn Israel’s actions nor are we going to take the position Brazil and Colombia did’.

The risk is that the president will now try to assuage public anger over rising crime with a host of repressive and reactionary measures, whose primary casualties will be ordinary Ecuadorians – in particular the impoverished youth of the urban peripheries. We have already seen how, in Colombia, security forces who are under pressure to deliver can sometimes be more concerned with the headcount, or even the bodycount, than with the accuracy of the targets. A renewed crackdown on crime, absent any social programme, could lead to mass arrests, incarcerations and even killings based on little evidence. Another potential threat is the appearance, as in the 1980s, of death squads often acting in cahoots with security forces. Ecuador is swiftly becoming the new frontline of the failed US War on Drugs. It may take years or even decades for the country to rebuild a state that can guarantee peace and security for its people.

Read on: Rafael Correa, ‘Ecuador’s Path’, NLR 77.