Ō koinon autadelphon Ismēnēs kara’

‘O common my-own-sibling’s head of Ismēnē’

That approaches to what Antigone says to Ismene her sister in the first line of Antigone, the play, though the Greek is not translatable; ‘koinon’ having both a sharper political and familial connotation than ‘common’ and ‘autadelphon’ having no equivalent in rarity and jewelled ambiguity - ‘my very sibling’, ‘my own sibling’, ‘my sibling herself’. This language cleaves as it joins, it is skilled in making incisions. The whole speech is rapturous, though it is a cold rapture, of the dual form of verbs and nouns, how that doubleness, two sisters, two brothers, is made phantasmagorically into one, wrenched back into its undefeated unity, born of incest.

The opening of Sappho 1 is:

ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ Ἀφρόδιτα

poikilothron’ athanat’ Aphrodita

Deathless Aphrodite of the many-coloured throne.

Or possibly ποικίλοφροιν’, of the many-coloured mind, which would be elegant. This poetry is as a black jet out of Homer, not created but always discovered in the mind, a permanent source of - its own power - only needing to be awakened on rereading. Then this too is the shock of recognition, with the slip-slapping ποικιλόθρον’, it lulls against ἀθανάτ‘, a change of sense, of semantic modality (symbolist sensuousness and blunt abstraction) no less flamboyant than a change of vowels. One wants this recognition, in Sappho one can always go further, find that your supplication may be redoubled, find new ways desire and the performance or protestation of desire may come to be the same thing. She speaks of Aphrodita as if the world was new-made, but she speaks to her for something she has already asked many times, satisfaction of her desires.

There is not much like the cutting in the verse of Greek tragedy. I know Greek extremely badly, but I now understand it better than when I took lessons in it and sat exams - understand its potentiality now I have read the tragedians. Its particular flexibilities can be made to stand in line, its sense of limitless background become merely the foil to some vast personal project of the tragic character, some rage towards the close. That is one pole to which all Greek, must implicitly respond. To watch how easily they seem to do it is to me a marvellous shock, as if the language itself were asking why, out of all human possibilities, this character, this actor, had arrived at this one.

How to prevent the seduction of such a writing - that is certainly what it must come to. You could not fail to think, reading that first line or speech of Antigone’s, that everything to come unfolds out of it like flat-pack furniture, there is an eerie smoothness to it all. Yet it is not true, knowing the endless discontinuity of history, knowing that though people are betrayed by their own intentions, it is the most incidental aspects of those intentions that undo them, or what structures them and which they see no reason to make note of until they realise - ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please’, these and similar clichés could be adduced. One has to just repeat that it is not true and hope that some alternative sense of what drama, and so (as Aristotle reminds us) action might be, will come out of this denial.

Maybe this is the serious problem. A confusion over drama is a confusion over action, and I am not confused enough over action. A tedious desire for the continuation of my mental existence has tended to destroy competing possibilities, to prevent the importance of decisions showing itself. And beyond that to remind myself how good I am at cutting and its less discriminate relatives, at crushing, at blasting. Certainly I can do it to other people and do occasionally. I know how to seem clever, aloof and thus to intimidate, without appearing to have done so too overtly, and I use this power without scruple. It keeps one at a nice distance. This is certainly no confession; it is a necessity. Everyone needs a way to indicate where they leave the conversation, where the grace one extends to others, except occasionally those closest to us, ends. The difficulty comes in turning them on oneself, these bullying tactics. Then I ransack my virtuosity and suggest politely that its continual leaping after textual and conceptual adventure is nothing more than the most insignificant game between mental nobodies, the wrestling of ghost-puppets; that nothing comes out substantive, weighed down with honours that are marks of the hard labour of getting it. I am pitiless towards my skill with words and thoughts, a correlate of my arrogance over it is not necessary to say, since it will be assumed anyway.

Cutting, I wish it were gone. This history of substance is enough to make one sound like a cultic Derridarian. Nevertheless it is horrible to think of all this drama of such insistent joints, this wretched non-splitting in splitting, one could wish for the sensual quiet of Sappho. If there were a drama which started from her that would be something; erase all the muck otherwise, begin with these songs. Otherwise the drama’s progression will spit me out.

Something happens in the Renaissance and I naturally do not know what it is, but more than before I can see it as something, as a catastrophe. I have preferred those painters who came before Raphael whilst conventionally hating the Pre-Raphaelites; now my repulsion feels justified. The Victorians did not realise how much had been lost when the gradual exfoliation of pictorial space after Giotto, the ways it was coaxed into revealing its crevices and linkages, to create a fine painting of relation, of bodies and limbs suddenly coming into light, being brought to bear on one another, the holy ghost appearing in flames over the head of the apostles, Christ’s blessing hand between Mary’s breasts and her wrist lighter than the light shade  on her cloak – when all this was collapsed by a hard flat colour, a pushing out into a world now with no careful architectural background behind it but a provocatively vague dream-landscape. The Doni Tondo is but a literalisation of the process with its obscure rhetoric of divine familial struggle of what the sweet Raphael is doing to his bland noblemen and noblewomen - forcing them into a new form of individuality, and of sexuality, which seem to suck attention into themselves, into an inward relationship with their own parts, rather than outward into a record of action or response to those around them. The decorations on the Uffizi ceiling – reminding the English viewer of Robert Adam – were not made for these paintings. Those decorations, in their combination of profusion of pattern and representation, implied a sensory ideal of controlled but ultimately full-bodied selection, of turning the senses easily from one graceful scene to another. The paintings inside inaugurate the reign of interpellation, of the rapturous coerciveness which would very swiftly become the signature of the aesthetic.  

They are already performing that work of separation, to recuperate of some quality of the world already being lost. And they are thus already attempting the ‘labour of negation’ – the effort to take what is external, hostile within themselves and cancel it out briefly. But the difficulty we have in looking at them is their scandalous positivity; they seem so much larger than the world they look out on, so inconsequentially larger. The ‘utopian dimension’ of art so much insisted on can undermine itself with an awareness of not so much its practical feebleness as its disproportion to the world, the lack of relation to any available positive project. But there is, naturally, no way out of that through more art or more writing about it.

This has become easier, as I have been, after much striving towards this end, becalmed, with little memory beyond choice and banal objects of nostalgia and no sense of the future. After many years of longing for the anxieties of premonitions and schemes, and for regret, to vanish, they have done so and I am bored by it. This has allowed me to read more voraciously than at any point since I discovered fiction when I was fourteen. I read now uninterrupted, caught in a nineteenth-century-French-dressing-gown pleasure in the sheer process of pages in comfortable settings, and on finishing down a book I always forget it immediately. I can follow any book with any other; from the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad to Clarice Lispector, to André Breton, then backwards, in a fashion, to the Rgveda, and on to Kabir, Joseph Roth, Robert Lowell (and they at least are connected, the result of bingeing on Michael Hofmann’s LRB essays recently), Virginia Woolf (the troubling Between the Acts, which I might write about) and then Vladimir Mayakovsky. I have been excited, but the burning constriction in the chest that can otherwise only be calmed by fierce pacing around the house has melted away. Perhaps this is the best condition for reviewing.

Currently I can find in me no ambition to be a writer; I just know I will end up as one. I do not know how long my prose will continue to assume this monotonous, after-the-thunder, linen-smooth cast, but I assure myself it is perfectly natural, and certainly convenient; it is perhaps something close to the voice I use when being most charitable to myself, when I speak to myself honestly and, like the best of friends, completely forgive myself every mistake, without waiting for any remorse or apology to the injured. It is thus perhaps the most truthful.

London is very boring. It is hard to think of places, in the centre of the city at least, which have impressed me as possessing the taught-line charge of beauty: Somers Town, the flats between Baker Street Station and St. John’s Woof, parts of the City, the Alexandra Road Estate – these are just pockets. This is depressing, when it is summer and all things should run in sharp counterpoint, when the angles of shadows ought to matter as they never do on the syrupy London plaster, London stone. It is that I have just returned from India, very probably. This is very probably a cloying sweet melancholy coming up to overrun everything like a flood, but why shouldn’t one? Sometimes the truth is burning ardor and sometimes it is not, though something, an impulse of generosity, prevents one from admitting as much. But the world just has gone slack; no one is surprised that, in Marylebone, security guards stand outside ‘Joe and the Juice’; my brain is approaching the state of an old mattress. Regrettably I will find a way to make it through the year and even do quite well thank you – no apocalypse for me. For about a week, a long time ago, I believed in the vaulting strength of writing to leave an extra, a residue, the graceful way letters faded slightly after everything else; one aspect of my current immobility is to see all the words as expressions of intelligence, of undifferentiated mind which picks up and places all things, the mind which collectively runs the world as well as furnishing all the material for its own critique. Into one or another, then, all intelligence, sensibility, is locked in, part of the world entire. And now I feel little resonance in these words, I just hope they will travel from me to you exactly as I found them.

Here is a short-ish poem:

Gunk defined: Gunk: Gunk is what exists instead of everything else. Gunk is the replacement for matter.

Gunk: gunk is not junk1. Gunk is junk’s junk. Gunk is smaller than junk and omnipresent as junk does not hope to be in its most godawful nightmares.

Gunk: ‘something, every proper part of which itself has a proper part’2

Gunk: gunk is not the opposite of relation. Gunk has infinitely many possible relations none final all subsumed. Gunk is the name for the continuous anti-psychological anti-point indefinitely futilely arrestable non-flux of the city. You could go on forever, if it were not for the blinding light of the gunk.

Gunk: in the Robinson films of Patrick Keillor gunk is at the edge of the frame the second after the frame changes3.

Gunk: gunklight streaming from streetlights, neither bright nor not-bright but bright only insofar as brightness cannot be consciously apprehended upon its immediate impression but must be (on the contrary) investigated and a determination consequently made and consequently as it is discovered to be ‘bright’ fails in the primary obligation of brightness, viz, self-revelation, and does not erase its ‘brightness’ for that reason. Gunklight is the gap in time or the charm of neural activity between impression and comprehension of the least clear and distinct clear and distinct idea. Gunklight is the non-absolute non-opposite of phenomenology and the perversion of matter.

Gunk: gunkflavour in the cheap candy bar that goes through the mechanics of satisfaction viz. crunch flavour-burst explosion of tiny particles of sweetness into the backs of the gums and crevices between teeth, travel to the soft palette and soft entry down the throat courting the epiglottis with a feeling of a faint stickiness which would at the very very most make one slightly unwell, but without any of the fact of satisfaction.

Pastoral: the complex into the simple4.

Gunk: gunk is that whose slip from the understanding is not due to its own merits but is the mere bad clue to its own featurelessness (including lacking that feature), so noticing its featurelessness does not either cancel that quality nor assimilate it to some idea of the sublime. Gunk has an infinity of relations, none of which exist.

Gunk: gunk is infinitely compressible and stretchable. Gunkcompressing and gunkstretching are identical. On a gunkish street the quantity of gunk may make motion impossible and reaching the end a limit of human potentiality, because the street is so short.

Pastoral: . . . and the seas of pity lie // locked and frozen in each eye5.

Gunk Pastoral: gunk pastoral is scary. I took these photos of it but I really didn’t want to.

The method was to look at something really boring and then to find that point in the photograph which has the least interest or attractiveness and move the image towards that. The difficulty is to prevent any sort of visual satisfaction from appearing, requiring constant motion and the taking of a photo before the beautifying effects of the camera have the time to settle on your retina.

Perceptions of the physically embodied nature of gunk, hitherto inchoate, will have been gathered from these photographs. The difference from junk is clear: junk, invented in 2002, is BIG, iconic, Debordian, fluorescent, branded. Gunk is not a matter of surface. Gunk is structural, it is a question of total urban environment. Thus gunk spreads to previously ungunky areas and indeed coagulates especially there. Architects and urban theorists have a terrible loudness fetish but do not realise that capitalism creates quietness as much as anything and that they need to stop being so cool or up-to-date if they want to understand anything about anything. The world is precisely created by the not up-to-date reacting to the genuine up-to-dateness which the actual date genuinely must possess. Not that junk does not exist – in Tottenham Court Road, what can one say except ‘über-junkspace’ – but junk is mostly subsumed into gunk. Gunk is no one’s orphaned intention as junkspace is the orphaned intention of theorists of megastructure. Junk is about anxiety; gunk is about the boredom behind anxiety out of which it is generated. 

A red smear of a Robert Frank road blocked at its end by traffic lights; which are green; a good metaphor for gunk.

I go about it in this jokey way but this city, any city, it is so distended and locked out it makes me not want to, in this jokey way. It is so quiet but it did have some life in it, some colour; colour has not been drained but replayed, colour has a pastoral relationship to itself, it everywhere seeks to represent larger affairs, but scale them down, in such a way that flatters the nobility and the populace simultaneously. ‘It flatters the nobs by the vitality of their nobility and the proles by the nobility of their vitality’. A pacification of the eye which leaves the merest residue of what was violence in colour and might be freedom. Scrape off this mild, mild dew and you have gunk, which is what is so painful about the whole ordeal.

1.

Now I want whatever is outside human life. The altogether opposite of things; the unwriting of objects. Here is the back of El Anatsui’s installation, Behind the Red Moon, in the Turbine Hall. It is — nice. What is it?

It is — a sail! It is puckered human skin. It is the world’s largest display lattice of prehistoric flints. It is a map of all the arable land on the surface of Mars. A map like Borges’s which is the same size as that which it represents. It is red bedclothes slightly ruffled by the impress of a human being. It is the awning of a café in Paris on a dry, hot day, that has come on in under the awning and made a mockery of the shade. It does not shimmer. That is important. It looks like it may shimmer, but it does not. It has patches of light that glint, but those patches never move. It is partly autonomous – that is, it is in part what was called a sculpture. And yet it lets through its surface the lattice of the skylights of the Turbine Hall, and this feature of its environment undoubtedly contributes to the overall effect. It is the wall of a human lung. 

No, say rather: It is a reference, it is referential, to all the prehistoric flints used to make sails which sailed the earth on top of Parisian cafés. Say, it is the surface of Mars showing all the farmland that is made of dimpled human skin, a map that contains occasional trees – that is, the map itself contains trees. Say, that it is a lung, that it breathes, but it breathes in four dimensions, it expands to be all the things it might be and then retreats to itself again. Retreats behind itself again. 

Is this enough? Will this do? Is there the other side of the limit, as Wittgenstein said, the non-place and ground of all places, that which cannot be spoken and cannot not be? Is an apophatic art criticism possible – could you create the art criticism adequate to an art which absorbed all descriptions into it, and spat them out1?

Is an apophatic art criticism desirable? Would not this criticism have instead to be logorrheic, endlessly repeating but revising that famous original collision of a sewing machine and an umbrella? And not only because everyone has heard of that already, but because neither sewing machine nor umbrella has much independent existence anymore. The formal values of everyday life have degenerated. All the weight has drained out of objects, you have to do things the other way round now, you have to actually create a thing first, a matter of enormous difficulty, unimaginable labour, the only way to do it is to constantly add onto it modes, qualifiers, descriptions, but in such a way, almost unimaginable, as to suggest some Thing which went beyond all modes or qualifiers at all. So criticism could achieve a self-immolation of description.

Here is the other side of the sheet:

It is a vast assemblage of bottle-caps. The cross section of the outer gases of Jupiter. A textile portrait of a swordfish colliding with a medieval library lectern (look closely). An eagle buried in a statue of Rameses the Great and a tree on the other side, and a chicken gazing at a robin relaxing on a tree stump. Yellow paper – yellow press. Trampoline. Representation of a literary papyrus. Snotty tissue comfort blanket.

There are some old and unsuperseded attempts to come to terms with the rise of a multi-modal art, for instance: Michael Fried’s essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, published in Summer 1967; Rosalind Krauss’s essays ‘Grids’ (Summer 1979) and ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (Spring 1979). They are unsuperseded because they date from the last moment when the fissures in traditional modes were sufficiently contained, and the art was sufficiently related to the traditional formal criteria of each medium, that deviations could be identified. Krauss could claim to divide the material arts into eight categories; all possible arrangements of matter in space would lie in the field they made. And then the practice of art subsumed such awareness into itself and moved on, so that its relations to any genre seemed either infinitely complex, or opaque and thus non-existent. Criticism has had no chance to catch up. Now we have the Internet, a triumph of the terrifying collision of genres, collisions between categories we did not even know were genres, criticism never will. Its generic intelligence, which is the precondition of its formal intelligence, will never recover.

Here is what is at the other end of the Turbine Hall:

A tapestry from the rubbish dumps of Mumbai. A tar-waterfall with a large wound. What would happen if you covered a bin-bag with a light film of veal pâté.

No. It is what happens when you cover a bin-bag with a light film of veal pâté.

No. It is a representation of all the bin-bags which have been covered with a light film of veal pâté.

That is the proper tense; the mimetic present of a past tense that did not happen. It’s not fiction; things in fiction aren’t real. These things are real. They just don’t exist: yet. That is, they don’t exist yet in the past. It would probably help to recast this in an abuse of the language of post-Lewis analytic metaphysics. These representations are of the things in actually existing possible worlds of the past as if the representations were in that possible world itself. It is a representation of that representation of the things in some possible world wherein no other world was possible; a uniquely necessary world which does not exist. No. That’s only one possibility. It’s a representation of the primal unnecessary world from which all worlds originate, the World of Forms, no less. Only there are all Forms here of all worlds and not all are good.

(Read this paragraph properly; some discrimination it would surely be good to cultivate. You can cut right through, but it does you no good, in the end.)

Nothing’s duller than modality. I ran away to do English rather than read On the Plurality of Worlds. Now it turns up in books, in art, all the time. There’s nothing weirder than modality. In analytic metaphysics, it created batteries of conceptual fields, all rich, dense, fascinating – and we understand none of the relations between them, we know nothing of their general metaphysical and, especially, epistemological statuses. We have given up on it; like the art critics. Give up, says El Anatsui’s installation, Behind the Red Moon, in the Turbine Hall. There is no outside of human experience; there is only the infinite totality of human experience, which is almost the same thing. Of which this fabric is a fragment, only a fragment, so small.

2.

Jannis Kounellis insists he is a painter; against all evidence. For instance, he does not usually use paint. There are more important reasons as well.

There are three great twentieth century ways to not be a painter. The first was associated with the word ‘materiality’ and involved the provision of a textural formalism and balance of interesting contraries for the slightsmiling pleasure of the spectator. This work of Kounellis is almost such a work:

You could have a pretty time attending to the fold-overs of the sack and the smooth metallic s-hooks ripping the green canvas and the ab-ex paint splashes and the slightly urban feel and the big swoops of the canvas. There is a lot to be busy about, there is a plenum of possibilities, the scales are indefinitely changeable, all things are possible, which may be some consolation for the fact that they are all the same. Human discrimination is not in fact mostly fine enough to distinguish qualitatively texture like this nor form in this distanced way and it all goes into experience, into gallery-going. Nevertheless, at best you may feel there has been transmitted to you some power of matter, some weight of the body has returned to you, which possibly you have lost.

The second way not to be a painter is to be a juxtaposer of psychic intensities, a surrealist of the old school. Like this (almost):

According to the gallery notes:

Here a single butcher’s knife hangs from a meat hook over an etching featuring a hand-drawn circle motif. The spiralling lines evoke an energetic scrawling gesture. This hints at a similarity between the knife and pencil: both are pointed instruments capable of leaving marks. The familiar and pristine appearance of the hanging blade, contrasting with the chaotic scribbled lines, only heightens the atmosphere of suspense and potential menace.

Here are some objects. They have a value as bare objects; they have a value as tools; they have a value symbolically. But their value for the juxtaposer is none of these and between them all. It is an attempt to use their value as bare objects as a gate, in which we arrive at their use and representation only for these qualities to submerge themselves in further references, in half associations, in the incongruences between levels. Thus these gallery notes are, for the juxtaposer, for the true surrealist, the beginning of the process of the art in the spectator. That this art can be explained by the gallery, its associations circumscribed, is not a contradiction, for such circumscription is an illusion. For ‘menace’, ‘chaos’, ‘pristine’, ‘pointed’; these do not even begin to be stable but are, as the most general co-ordinates of human experience, only the thinnest pylons above a flood, of human desire, or life. Pylons; they are stilts and electric nodes both, they dissolve in two directions.

Jannis Kounellis was neither a formalist nor a surrealist, but a painter. What was a painter? ‘Painting’ – says Jannis Kounellis – ‘is the construction of images and doesn’t refer to a … technique’. A painter: someone who thought, seriously, that things should have two sorts of freedom. First they should be free from materiality. Second things should be free from ideas. That is, a painting should engage neither the body nor the spirit. Or, the painters thought, the body should appear only as spirit – the matter of the paint becomes form. And the spirit only as the body – no associational technique, only what is immanent in the picture-plane.

Look at this:

A wonderful painting. One must be careful to look at the bell-ness of bells in this painting, and the wood-ness of wood; but not to consider such things separately, as symbolic-material objects or values, as elements reacting. This is the third way not to be a painter – to be a poet. Kounellis sometimes claimed to be John Donne:

…my work is not surrealistic, the effect is theatrical, it is Baroque … [it has] that kind of dramatic artifice.

With some of his paintings this can seem very plausible.

The sacks contain different-coloured beans and pulses, and relate, allegedly, to the port of Piraeus where he was born. They are – maybe – the poetry of trade, the humanist materiality of the simple things we all eat.

I am unconvinced. You need to return to Bells to see the point. You need to ask, if this is a painting, what is the paint? The bells, the wood, the ropes, the iron. Sort of. More like – the bells, insofar as they are bells, insofar as they are made of brass and their weightiness is the weightiness of some culture that knew how to make bells, or valued their making, or valued the filigree on them, insofar as bells toll, toll for thee, insofar as bells are religion, or bells are holy days, holidays, insofar as the bells are dark and deep yellow, insofar as they are deep-bottomed and strong and you are determined to embrace them. It is not that bells come into the painting, one must not allow ‘bells’ to enter the painting, it would be too quick, it would not allow the totality of themselves to enter. Bells when we see them are not bells, they are dead things. And neither are Kounellis’ bells bells, for they are mere form, on a painting, but the material of the form is the real bell, they have passed through being a bell with all the deposits that implies in order to reach this state of participation in form. This is a painting whose material or method is the overwriting of what is not painting into painting itself.

What is the aim? The emancipation of objects. The quiet Utopia. The world after the humans have died and the inanimate beings of the world have gotten together and all their secret wishes have been gratified. In Kounellis’s work you can find a calm which is beyond any calm of a person and is in the passages between objects as they rub up against each other. It reminds me of Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein; another painter. For most modernism took some familiar material in and gave something new, some new form, out, forced its audience into new relationships. The Waste Land. Some other modernisms put new things in to forms which were much too old for them, so you could have the same relation you always did. It was cleverer possibly or at least more useful, for instead of dreaming that the artist must invent new forms, to keep up the pace, it suspected that reality is already made up of forms, and that no artist could keep up with them, they changed so fast. Gertrude Stein was the greatest of these modernists, since the audacity of her project was the greatest: she took language and made it painting, which is harder than almost anyone suspects. Nevertheless the same intellectual calm reigns behind the objects on the invisible and non-locatable surface of the paintings in Jannis Kounellis’s work at the Tate Modern, as you may see yourself.

3.

It is a beautiful day today. The wind has gotten into everything, even the air. The whole air is made of wind. 

I am the type of snob who will tell you that the ultraflat marshland on the coast around Aldborough is the most beautiful landscape in Britain. But that is only the obverse of the old conventions of the picturesque and is not unusual or interesting any more. Sometimes I am surprised that there has never been a systematic modernist weather. An approach to the climactic facts from a purely aesthetic point of view, as if we were not in them. Or, since our being within the weather would be the material of such a sensibility, which would take as its fabric (not its goal) sensations of discomfort, elation, oneness, lucidity, and so on, an approach to being bodily within the world from the point of view of not being in it. 

Sometimes I think like this of the paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, whose writing I have read little of. I am told that in his writing Tagore was a modernist who pretended to be a sickly Romantic, and pretended well enough to fool all his critics and most of his followers. This is certainly a good description of his paintings. When I think of the possible destinies of the surprise in Modernist aesthetics, sometimes I think of these paintings. 

The Bengal School of painting, the current which is said to have revived Indian art, to have made it fit for the modern world, and in which Tagore was nominally a member, has never managed to interest me. Maybe it will some day – some individual artists do, but not the movement. It has too often condemned itself as arty. For instance, this painting by Abanindaranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s nephew:

It is hard not to feel that art has been smeared all over the canvas. There is no escape here from the regime of art. This is unfair as a representation of Abanindranath’s work as a whole; he could be exquisitely meditative, and something other than just art could emerge from inside that quietness. But although Abanindranath was a professional and Rabindranath only started painting after he was eighty, and although the nephew’s draftsmanship was much better than his uncle’s, it is Rabindranath’s pictures that usually astonish me. 

They look supremely arty. For instance, they look whimsical, like this: 

Super-solemn, with a tired cult of Woman: 

Literary, wilful:

I am not sure it is possible to see on a computer screen. Yet truly there is no interior decoration here, but you will notice it at first only by looking at a single mark. A single mark, which has that internal propulsion called intelligence. ‘Intelligence’ is the name of that quality which explicitly and on its surface represents the tension of opposites or the integration of disparate sources and performs such tension or integration with a local, tactical consciousness of its own bravura. It is the production of effects of that skill which is not technique; it is close to what was once called the making of felicities. William Carlos Williams, in his ‘Introduction’ to The Wedge, said:

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words

The paintings of Rabindranath Tagore look like they are a collection of an indefinite number of attempts towards such a machine which adds up to the provision of an opportunity for the eye to rove over a complex, variegated and enjoyable picture-plane. They are constructed, in their large-scale formal properties, from Indian, Japanese, Chinese, European, African and Polynesian cultural materials and it is part of the pleasure to see the joins and the places between the joins.

That is what they look like. They also have an effect of internal illumination, from behind. That is an effect, of the pigments. It is also what holds them together. William Carlos Williams also said

The making of poetry is no more an evidence of frustration than is the work of Henry Kaiser or Timoshenko. It’s the war, the driving forward of desire to a complex end.

Machine and the war. The war, the Second World War, was fought with machines, but it is not itself a machine, it had no design. It was not a chaos either, it had historical patterns and was an effect in part of human intentions. Perhaps what Williams is saying is that poetry, by which he means art in general, since he was a Modernist, is a war machine, a machine for producing war, a machine whose internal processes are themselves war. That is something like a machine with no purpose, a cancellation of the utilitarian, which is what some people have thought art is; but really it’s the reverse, a machine for everything, a subsumption of the purposeful, a mockery of it, its apotheosis. In the gentlest possible way that is what Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings are.

Truly, they have no intelligence. You need to accept their background illumination to see that absence of consciousness underneath consciousness. That background is the imaginary core out from which, in imagination, a drive, a propulsion, a war of forms spirals. There is in each painting a disturbance of the silting of forms in Tagore’s mind, their spikes and twists and eccentric curves shatter the underlying material, which is familiar. They are thus incomplete and serial. Yet their illumination, which is the energy which fictively propels this endless outward motion, is also the force which gives each painting its apparently placid rotundity, which makes of it a single emblem. Into these emblems of an unknown religion, maybe Tagore’s own semi-Deistic bhakti-humanist Hinduism, any war of directions, layers, colours, angles amongst the marks on the paper can subside. And then rise again.

Modernism was, among other things, the belief in the permanent surprise of art. And it is easy to be unsurprised by everything, and to be unsurprised even by that. As I said, if I think of the destinations of surprise, I sometimes think of Tagore’s paintings. For here is the dichotomy we have inherited: an art which, by its disjunctions, refers ultimately back to the unified mind which can overcome the disjunctions and of which they are the projection; an art whose false objecthood is inadequate to the disjunctions we experience. Alternatively: an art that is a machine for mental form; an art that is form. The only permanent surprise would be in some art that could at all moments be both, by constantly overcoming the other term, an endless depth, an endless alternation between consciousness and its opposite which was also interpretable as the endless deepening of consciousness, its immanent coming to terms with itself, so finally no question of depth, of layers, could be decided or even asked. This is what Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings are.

Recently I have been very idle. However, I have been thinking a lot - too much really - about many disconnected subjects, for a long time, and wanting to do many things without finding the wherewithal to do them. What follows, then, isn’t in any way complete, and it’s much more a prospectus for what I want to do - in terms of political thinking - than an account of anything I have done, but I hope it is interesting1. Please do tell me what you think, as detailed and as harsh as you like. I’ve added an autocommentary listing some potential inadequacies of this project, both objectively and in terms of the personal deficiencies which might hinder me from doing it. 

The rubric I have come up with for what I want to do is ‘the report on the balance of forces’. To say what this means, it would be useful to explain how I thought of something like it, in the context where it first emerged, which was immigration and refugee rights. I was - as the last installment of this very irregular substack indicates - not only incensed at the notion that the government would deport asylum seekers to Rwanda but almost physically sickened, a nausea that continues whenever I think about the topic. This nausea is not just an expression of a moral horror at this idea, but a sense that it was and is impossible to resist. Practically and immediately, because the government thinks it electorally necessary and the opposition does not want to risk anything by seriously opposing it, but at a deeper level, because the logic of asylum and immigration policy, and its representation in public discourse, which is accepted by almost all parties in political life, removes the ground on which one might try to oppose it. 

This is not mainly a matter of political reaction: explicit bigotry, fearmongering about immigrants being criminals or taking up NHS places. It is much more significantly about the logic that underlies that attitude, or rather makes it representable, gives it a place among the relevant considerations, which is the assumed power of the state to take over entirely the lives of certain persons, on the grounds that they have moved or wish to move over its borders: the power to transport them, to detain them or impose other restrictions on civil liberty, to control who they can live with, to restrict their access to state provision - and to do this, most crucially, on the basis of what is good for it, perhaps for its people, exclusively. What was most forcibly impressed on me was the complete impossibility of arguing for immigration because it was good for the immigrants. 

Some people are the wretched of the earth, they are cast out and no one cares about them, they are not the subjects of their own destiny - others are said to be the subjects and are not, and some are said not to be and are. Everyone knows that. However, what thinking about the immigration bills the government has introduced has, I feel, taught me, is that the prematurely universalist assumptions implicit in this way of stating this fundamental scandal are in a sense untrue. In another sense, of course, they are perfectly correct. We, looking at the world, would come to this conclusion, and we would be right. And from this position, we could argue that, for instance, even if there were some very small loss to some in the rich parts of the world from immigration, this would be massively outweighed in moral importance by the benefit to immigrants from poorer nations whose lives are usually dramatically improved. Even allowing for the greatest possible permissible moral bias towards those nearer us, I think this is in fact obvious. 

Nevertheless, such a mere argument would be useless, a political irrelevance, most obviously because prospective migrants do not vote, only those already in the country do. The universal moral community it invokes does not in fact exist. And this has two significant consequences. The first is this: faced with this fragmentation of the moral community, even the demand of righteousness, in this case the claim of the immigrant or refugee, somehow fragments. If it cannot be seen from the perspective of universal justice, it turns into a kind of force, a value, a dimension of life, which is denied, or reduced, or constricted, a constriction which makes for a scandal. That value, in this case, is something close to the value of life itself - the force of the human ability to have a life, to not have it interrupted for no reason that is not arbitrary within the scheme of that life. It is not a question of ‘whether it is fair that care workers should be able to bring in dependents?’. The answer to that question depends on the community being invoked as its subject. Rather it is ‘is it not a scandal, that a person should move somewhere for a good reason and be unable to see their parents? Is this not an affront to what a human life should involve? Is this not a hideous degradation and stunting of our actual capacities?’.

(This concept of a scandal is important for understanding the philosophical relationship of Marxism in particular, but also other far left movements, to more liberal but nevertheless left-wing theories of fairness, justice, or liberty. Rawls, it has often been observed, is in what his Theory of Justice demands no anodyne defender of the post-war status quo but, as he said explicitly, either a socialist or an exponent of the mysterious idea of a ‘property-owning democracy’ ; but if Marxists and most of the left maintain their distance from him and the rest of the liberal analytic tradition of political philosophy, it is because of a more-or-less choate appreciation that their fundamental grievance is not that the world is unfair or unequal, but that a scandal exists, that human productive powers are enough to secure sufficiency and more for everyone, and yet so many starve. This is also - I think, though this is tentative - distinct from any ideal of freedom, despite its obvious indebtedness to German Romantic and Hegelian ideas. Marx is not attempting to maximise the amount of self-realisation in the world; he does not have the overall view that implies. He is motivated by the scandal, that human potentiality is so inadequately met by the real world, and is determined to support those forces which might secure its increase. The quick way to say this is that it is not a matter of a moral design for a society but a political programme for its improvement; no moral community exists, but a class does, the proletariat, which will destroy this scandal. The challenge is to understand this and use it without accepting everything wrong with Marxism, particularly its radicalisation of this anti-moralism and its relative determinism.) 

In immigration the moral and the political, liberal arguments you might make, the policy outcome, and the political process of making it reality, are if not quite indissoluble then necessarily intertwined. For the very possibility of the argument being made depends on some forces, implicitly political, being given representation. The space of what counts in argument must be changed, and this is the site of political struggle. It requires movements, logics, institutions, it demands an actual, material structure to change the representational one, as well as, to a letter extent, the other way around. In the case of immigration, this change is very difficult - and thus why it fascinates and appalls me, and why it has crucified the left for a decade. It is here that the idea of a ‘report on the balance of forces’ took hold of me. The idea is of an analysis of what can be said, and who it can be said to, what the political potentialities and vectors are, with the constant aim of changing it, of identifying where it can be expanded or influenced. How can some force be constructed and counterposed to, say, those which support the bureaucratic state in holding over migrants rights to their whole lives? 

This would be simultaneously a sociology of administrative and political knowledge, a study of contemporary political economy, and a document of aggressively reformist moral philosophy. It would seek to expand the moral circle, but rather than (as with Peter Singer, with Effective Altruism) assuming it is already expanded, showing how it actually can be. In saying this, some potential intellectual resources suggest themselves. The most obvious theoretical one is perhaps Michel Foucault in some moods – what you might call left-constructivist Foucault2. Hannah Arendt too, for the same sort of reasons. Another, less obvious, is Theodore Adorno – the Adorno of ‘no true life in the false life’, of a mordant awareness of the fissures in moral philosophy in a contradictory world, of the necessity to write only a Minima Moralia. I also find some resources in literary criticism, which is after all what I’m supposed to be reading, especially in the work of Fredric Jameson and some of those influenced by him, such as Lisa Kornbluh, Timothy Bewes and, especially, Sianne Ngai. Jameson and his followers suggest a model of the right kind of scale to be thinking at, roughly in the middle between the minute obsessions of anarchistic or prefigurative politics, an obsession which merely replicates a thin, ignorant, ahistorical general culture, and dreams of total, unrealisable, victory, which is an imaginary compensation for it. Aesthetically, this means thinking in terms of what Franco Moretti has recently called ‘patches’ of form, or in, as Ngai does, ‘aesthetic categories’, simultaneously flexible and much more structured and ramified than almost all other contemporary critical categories both in and out of the university. Perhaps this can be an inspiration for the creation of more complex ‘cognitive maps’ for the political and economic realm itself. Anyway, those were my influences. 

At the practical end: maybe the fairly recent resurgence of the idea of ‘political economy’, as manifested in things like the online magazine Phenomenal World or the Marxist Salvage, is encouraging. Maybe the most interesting influences, since they span both theoretical and practical even more thoroughly than the others, are the following: first, Karl Polanyi. For he has the same sense of politics as the collision of forces as I want, whilst insisting, unlike Marx, on the primacy of the political or the social, on the possibility of creating political forces, movements, parties, campaigns, ultimately logics which constrain the whole political world, which might alter the world for the better. He also has some unhelpfully naive communitarian tendencies; some of Polanyi’s epigones, like the sociologist Fred Block, interest me due to their relative distance from this. Secondly, Angela Davies, Mariame Kaba and other thinkers who have used concepts of abolition or ‘non-reformist reforms’, concepts which are perhaps very close to those advocated here. I was greatly influenced by a book called Abolish Borders Now, by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha, in thinking about these questions. If this perspective has a fault it is that sometimes the political and economic forces marshalled against abolition are underestimated, leading, as in that book, to utopianism even when an attempt is explicitly made to avoid it. That this can be sometimes accompanied by its obverse, a failure to make sufficient immediate demands, makes things worse - nevertheless, maybe in many cases all I am calling for here is for more immediate political and economic analysis to be joined to programmes of abolition. Please do suggest as many others as you can think of. 

Immigration is one topic, albeit an important one, because of the electoral vulnerability of the left to it and our inability to represent the interests of those it most effects - which, as is I hope clear, are actually the same issue, or at least have to be solved together. I would like to think about other areas that are ‘pressure points’ for the left now, according to my own slightly idiosyncratic criteria: these include mental health, education, and the family. These are all areas where the left needs to create counterinstitutions, protection and weapon against an unfettered market or state violence. Despite right-wing fantasies of ultra-woke universities and so on, it has not succeeded in that goal; it has managed to create tiny and precarious heterotopias which are often undermined their larger position and are full of people alienated in different ways from each other, not resilient institutions which can wield collective power.

Some deficiencies: objectively, the danger is on the one side of focusing on a single issue and thus exaggerating how hopeful we should be about it without some larger change; on the other, of falling into a determinism. Thus on immigration, some would argue that no remotely acceptable change could occur without dismantling the capitalist nation-state, and others would say that serious reforms can be performed with little political cost. Obviously neither of these can be ruled out a priori, and that there is a risk that the middle path the ‘report on the balance of forces’ attempts is less open-mindedness than a prejudging of this issue. That, however, is true one way or another however you go about it. A real openness to all historical or general explanations and theories is needed. Marx and Polanyi and Arendt and more empirical thinkers too…

In terms of my own inadequacies: largely, my endless ignorance. I am doing English, and I want to read everything from the economics of labour flows to the Foucauldian theory of the production of medical categorisation. My knowledge of sociology, political science, anthropology, is extremely deficient, and so I understand neither the knowledge these disciplines produce nor, in any precise way, their disciplinary functions. This sort of synthesis would be difficult for a person much more capable of doing anything than I. Also, it has to be said that in principle this is hard, because it demands a constant reflection on whether any synthesis of disciplines, and between the theoretical and practical, is real or false, on whether you have not either betrayed your theoretical motivation or suggested something impossible. Any helpful ideas in this respect would be greatly appreciated. 

On the BBC today are two contrasting political spectacles. The first is at the Covid inquiry, where Boris Johnson is soberly answering Hugh Keith’s questions. It looks like political downfall, a reckoning for lying, for destroying the credibility of our public institutions. The second is of Rishi Sunak talking about fairness, stopping the queue-jumpers, standing up for ordinary decent people concerned about their public services, and the political and legal commentary on it. 

Except, of course, that Rishi is the proto-fascist, not Boris. I use the term to shock; we need shocking. There have been constitutional outrages in recent British history which were, in some ways, worse than the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill the Government just published, which attacked even older liberties and were more likely to go into effect: New Labour’s brief policy of indefinite detention under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, for instance. But this draft bill is still the most flagrant violation of the domestic rule of law by any government for, say, fifty years. First, because it is in open defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights, without even the pretext of a ‘public emergency’ allowing ‘derogation’. To disapply the Human Rights Act in a single case simply because you do not like it is extraordinary - as is disputing the European Court’s power to issue ‘Section 39’ temporary injunctions, which are surely a necessary part of any court’s inherent powers. The idea of a court which can only act after the wrongs it concerns itself with have been performed is ridiculous. Second, and worse, is to have overturned by legislation a judgement of fact that the highest court in the country made less than a month ago. A crucial point in everything concerning the Rwanda policy is that the Supreme Court only invoked the ECHR on a matter of procedure; the convention requires it to determine, independently of the government assessment, whether Rwanda was in fact a safe country. The need to settle the question of safety itself, the need for someone to decide on it, was created by the Refugee Convention; to overrule the court (even on the basis that it should not have the power to make such an assessment) is to say that its assessment could simply be declared wrong, as if Parliament could decide that black was white and up was down. 

Third, and worst of all, the Bill disapplies the Refugee Conventions, makes them inapplicable in domestic litigation around whether Rwanda is in general a safe country. This is quite unforgivable. The ‘international legal order’ is a cracked and rickety thing set up by superpowers for superpowers and whose power is, of course, utterly insignificant where it matters; nevertheless, of its many well-intentioned and dead provisions the principles of the Refugee Conventions are perhaps less nominally dead than others. They are also the most fundamental international instruments of all, much more so than the UN Charter, because they try to guarantee that no one should be a person without rights, a non-person, what Hannah Arendt called one made into the ‘scum of the earth’. They are the most minimal commitment, and also the most necessary, to the idea that no one should be that after so many were, in concentration camps and killing fields. 

The great disappointment of the litigation around the previous Rwanda scheme was that no court acknowledged what ought to be the fundamental reason for its illegality - that the Refugee Convention does not permit the offloading of asylum seekers at all. I think it is clear, if implicit, that it does not, since nothing in the convention makes sense if it does, and its basic principle is that asylum seekers must have their claims investigated wherever they are and however they got there. This principle is as good as sacred, and ought to be defended at all costs; you need such a principle to prevent endless shunting, endless rounds of it’s someone else’s problem, which as Arendt said was why refugees between the wars so rarely received help (this is also why irregularly arriving asylum-seekers are not ‘queue-jumpers’; they are the queue). The courts did not see this, but now the government has disapplied the Refugee Conventions explicitly anyway. 

You would know little of this from the coverage on the BBC, or the newspapers, and even less of its real significance. This policy has been subsumed into regular politics – what will Braverman do, what will Starmer do, what will the electorate do – so that its true implications are covered up. As I write, the only story about the Rwanda plan on the  BBC News homepage has the headline ‘Get behind my Rwanda plan, Sunak tells Tories’; as if the only thing one could possibly be concerned about is that the plan does not go far enough. That some members of the Tory party are worried about this is terrifying; it is more terrifying that the BBC does not realise how bizarre and dangerous this is. The Guardian is similar; it simply reports that Sunak thinks the bill will avoid legal challenge. 

Why is our political class so supine? I think the broad answer is obvious; they are in thrall to a centrist vision of politics as divided between grown-ups and crazies which was always ludicrous but now has prevented them from understanding even the most basic contours of political reality. After all, Sunak’s government has not just been extreme on this; the Public Order Act, the minimum service requirements, the blocking of the Scottish self-identification act, and the recent tax cuts, which imply an even sharper austerity than Cameron and Osbourne imposed, have all made this government by far the most constitutionally irresponsible, intellectually bankrupt, and economically foolish in my life-time – though Liz Truss would have been if she had had the chance. Yet journalists seem incapable of understanding that a nice man from Goldman Sachs can be much more extreme, more right-wing, crazier than Boris Johnson, whose main constitutional outrage was to prorogue Parliament a bit early. 

A contrast with America is revealing. One of the more remarkable things in recent American politics has been how an analysis of fascism, and of what to do about it, traditionally found on the left, has made its way into the sleepy centre and influenced both policy and comment. This analysis has two parts; the first, traditional, even hackneyed part, is about how strong fascism, or right-wing authoritarianism, is. Fascism is capitalism radicalised; classically it was Fordism radicalised, now neoliberalism. It is the product of the dislocations capitalism produces, its failures to bring everyone with it; it takes a shattered society and fuses it into a spurious unity where each member has a direct relation to the Fuhrer. Thus the only way to fully defeat it is, firstly, no cooperation of any kind, always remember who they are – no one wants to be the KPD – and secondly, counter-attack by undoing the social breakages capitalism produces. Invest, redistribute, energise the economy, support the labour movement – the Inflation Reduction Act is, amongst many other things, an almost too classical anti-fascist strategy. 

That’s the first bit. For the most part, the American centre adheres to that well; no one treats Trump as if he were any other candidate any more, and no one treats any of the other Republican candidates like that either. Occasionally CNN goes mad and invites him to a town hall, but it’s only CNN. We need much more of that, naturally, we need to remember that this is crazy, or rather we need to realise that this is crazy and then act accordingly. But we also need the second part, which is less well understood, which is that the new fascists are weak. That is in fact what distinguishes them from the old fascists, why you might call them neo-fascists, or, as I would like to say, proto-fascists, though that doesn’t mean they’ll become real fascists any time soon. The real, old-time fascists had fake labour organisations and writer’s unions, massive holiday camps, their own churches, and, most importantly, their own paramilitary organisations. The insistence by left-wing observers on fascism’s connection to atomisation has obscured how little early twentieth-century society was atomised compared to early twenty-first society. Those fascists had enormous powers to mobilise. By comparison these ones are pathetic; all the militias may be scary, but they’re not the SA. The new fascists have an army of Reddit users, not an actual army. And this applies to national politics as well; they do not have the power to overwhelm public institutions. As Corey Robin argued, Trump’s ascent to the White House was a ‘constitutional coup’, not a populist revolution; it was a matter of the Electoral College and the outsized power of the Senate. His main legacy was the result of another constitutional quirk: the power to appoint federal judges. 

These are, furthermore, all powers the ‘mainstream’ Republican party had been using in a counter-majoritarian fashion for about two decades. Such is true of Sunak, unelected and unpopular, swinging desperately between the right of his party and his liberal ‘Blue Wall’ voters. This weakness also explains why the usual gap between anti-elite rhetoric and pro-elite policy is so large, why both Trump and Sunak have made fiscally ridiculous and, for their parties, utterly conventional tax cuts; they are both essentially products of reactionary and anti-majoritarian forces within their constitutions, not revolts against them. Nevertheless, this weakness should not blind us, as it does to so many left-wing commentators in the UK, into dismissing the Rwanda plan or other damaging policies as electioneering nonsense which will be swept away with a new government– and not just because Kier Starmer will surely keep the Public Order Act and will be damaged by Hunt’s tax cuts. For in a sense it is precisely in their weakness that their strength lies. Precisely because their forces are atomised and feed on atomisation, because they must commandeer the usual constitutional channels rather than forcibly overwhelming them, these new authoritarians have the potential to be more permanent than the original fascists ever were – there’s no central organisation to smash, but many cells, hubs of activity, the Common Sense Group and the Guido Fawkes blog, GB News and UnHerd, Policy Exchange and the Telegraph, a flexible web which is constantly growing, changing, repairing itself, ready to throw up new leaders, new ‘ideas’, new miserable stratagems. Samuel Moyn has written of the strange complementarity between the dream of making war less harmful, the dream of humanitarian law, and the liberal post-9/11 idea of the ‘forever war’, of a War on Terror with an infinitely expandable geographical and temporal reach. A similar dynamic applies to the struggle against domestic reaction – that they do less immediate harm means that they can survive longer and insinuate themselves more easily – only we really do have to fight this one. 

That’s why, also, their activity should be called ‘proto-fascist’ – because it is always threatening to become the real thing but never quite does; it is in a state of suspended animation. Indeed if, as in this article, the word ‘fascism’ now always seems stuck between an analytical term (analysing what?), a mere historical denominator, and a cheap insult, it is precisely because right-wing authoritarianism today is constantly about to be fascist, flirting with fascism, on the way to fascism, and never the full-blooded thing – and this is its essence, not a temporary stage. Thus, ‘proto-fascism’ – or post-fascism, indifferently.

We in Britain must adopt this twin way of thinking of the enemy as both strong and weak, and, most of all, strong because weak. What would this entail? I think this: we must crush them, and (because), we can. The public is more sympathetic to immigrants than ever before – more socially liberal in general. It is more economically left-wing too. We can win, properly, and we should. Because if we do not, if we think only that they are weak, we will realise at some point – not the next election, maybe not the one after that, but some day – that they are strong too. And it is not just a matter of repealing the Rwanda policy, or any other policy; it’s a question of how you do it, whether Starmer sternly admonishes us that the Conservative immigration policy is unworkable or if he joyfully proclaims that he has undone the authoritarian corruption of our political institutions. To fight against proto-fascism requires and justifies a very different cast of mind than just beating the Tories one more time (though of course, as in America, it also licences a lot of self-importance). Starmer won’t do anything like this – having strangled his party, he has no Progressive Congressional Caucus to drag him towards it – but he should, and when he does not, anyone who cares about British democracy should scream at him that he must. Meanwhile, everyone else must understand what is being done, and increase the seriousness of their response accordingly.   

I must be the last person in Britain to see Brief Encounter; I only watched it in full yesterday, though many of its scenes were already familiar to me, even if I can’t think where from. Anyhow, I apologise if what I say seems utterly obvious, or has already been said a hundred times. At any rate, it seems that if it has it has not been sufficiently noticed, because reviews and retrospective articles still talk of it as a document of English ‘stiff upper lip’ repression – often wondering how relevant it can be in a less ‘uptight’ age. Of course this is not exactly wrong, but what I found so fascinating about the film was how completely David Lean’s camera-work, and especially Celia Johnson’s acting, show that the idea of the ‘stiff upper lip’ is based on a false understanding of how the suppression of the emotions usually works.

The idea of the ‘stiff upper lip’, and the gestural rhetoric of shaking, trembling, desperate eyes and stolen glances which usually goes along with it, posits that the emotional turmoil of the repressed person is quite fully-formed and psychically available, but covered over by a regard for propriety, a fear of losing control. The lip is said to be stiff because it is always on the verge of wobbling, of breaking cover. The model is of a vast country of the unconscious, all ready to be expressed, if only there did not exist some strange blockage, experienced as essentially foreign to the self. But this is the wrong way around. For the experience of such repression is that, in almost every instance, one simply does not have the means to articulate the territory of the unconscious, that what one wants can take no form other than the sorts of self-conscious fantasy that Laura has on the train back to Ketchworth after one of her meetings with Alec – going to the opera at Paris, kissing on a Venetian gondola, standing on a moonlit beach, dreams which wear their unreality on their face – or the essentially mute avowals like those Alec offers her and which she reciprocates in their first acknowledgement of their feelings: ‘I love you’. That remark contains everything, and thus, for people such as them, nothing at all. The space in-between the emptiness of ‘I love you’ and the self-consciously too determinate, too perfect content of Laura’s dreams, the space of genuine wanting, is absent, not suppressed.

There is not a block on expressing something already there, a block foreign to the self. Instead, the predominant energies of the self are devoted to maintaining control, to finding ways to pass the time or keep the conversation going – and they always succeed. The stillness of Johnson’s acting, how her slump into despair is identical to her return to the modest gravity expected of the wife, is an index of this. The stiff upper lip suggests that violent emotion is always threatening to break out under self-control, but she shows that the problem is more that the control is always threatening to break out under the violent emotion. It always wins, because it is by far the more active part of the self, the part with the real imagination. The super-ego is delirious and clever; the id is ungainly and full of the most embarrassing cliché. Listen, for instance, to the ‘brightness’ of tone, the sense of solid practicality, in the lovers’ voices as they walk through the station after they have agreed that they must stop seeing each other, a scene which ends with Laura crying into Alec’s hands. ‘Brightness’, not brightness – it is a recapitulation of what they remember brightness ought to be, a remembering of how conversation is supposed to work, and it is this desperate resourcefulness, this sense of successfully playing a skilful game, which gives the scene its power.

Thus the fear of people like Laura and Alec of the ‘return of the repressed’ is present only on a deeper and less conscious level than the vulgar idea of repression would have us think. For in fact, the most psychically available fear is precisely that one cannot break down, that one always wins the battle against oneself. Of course Laura does have break-downs, outbursts – but they are always immediately followed by return to a complete quietness of demeanour, a perfect control. This is especially true of her attempted suicide, which takes place, according to her narration, without any thoughts at all. This is quite plausible, because the effect of this delirious super-ego’s constant busyness, its capacity and desire to always get along, is to prevent generalised ‘feeling’ from congealing into thought, about what precisely Laura feels for Alec for instance. This means that instead of the permanent mental presence of one’s emotions as a judgement, or attempts at judgement, of the situation, one has only the alternation of different moods. Given that these moods do not have sufficient form to pretend to evaluability according to correctness, one is no better than the other, they cannot be seriously thought about at once or compared, and thus inevitably the antecedently stronger, more psychically grounded moods, which lead to conformity to one’s situation, can always replace those which would demand a change.

This is not only more accurate psychologically, it is more productive politically, if we are interested in the politics of those desires which some oppressive aspect of society prevents us from realising. Brief Encounter has often been criticised for ultimately acceding to oppressive and patriarchal standards – for the failure of the couple to consummate their relationship, for Laura’s return to her husband Fred, for drawing a sharp distinction between the primmness of the middle-class central characters and the bawdy working-class, not so much in terms of their virtue but their psychological interest, their capacity to be the subject of a serious film. Laura and Alec are people; Albert and Myrtle are barely caricatures. And of course the answer to the question ‘why do Laura and Alec not have sex?’ is that the conventional middle-class sensibility of the time would not allow it. But what is striking is that the answers to such questions within the terms of the film, in terms of the motivations of the characters or the genuine aesthetic unity of the picture, are very thin. There isn’t, really, a reason they don’t have sex – they just happen not to. If they hadn’t been interrupted by Alec’s old friend Dr Stephen Lynn returning early to his flat, maybe they would have.

They didn’t. Moreover, it is impossible to tell what they might have done; indeed, the category of what might be or what they might do is almost entirely occluded in favour of what happens in fact. This is another way of saying that the lovers prevent themselves from thinking – they do not decide, imagine alternative possibilities, they create for themselves no centre of judgement from which they might do so and from which we, the audience, might in turn infer the possibilities available to them given their characters and circumstances. They do not truly have characters to begin with.

And this is in its way a more effective demonstration of the power of oppressive categories than a pair of lovers in conscious revolt against such categories would be. For it shows how the rules enforced on us may be rendered invisible, that the tracks they lay down for our lives may seem to be ‘just what happens’, because by destroying the power of thought they force a reflexive reliance on themselves, a falling-back onto the ordinary course of things which always just happens to be what the most oppressive structures dictate. Given the tale is told for us from their point of view, the reasons for this alignment are hidden from the audience as well. But, on reflection, away from the film, we will realise that such structures in fact determine the action.

In other words, Brief Encounter is most adequately interpreted as a translation into an apparently conventional English idiom of Brecht’s epic theatre. The actor’s distance from her own emotion is used to convey the determination of psychology not by the depths of the unconscious but by the ludicrous shallows of a absurd society. Of course, the difference, which means that Brief Encounter is permanently on the telly and Brecht remains a very niche interest, is that there are no didactic breaks in the action of Brief Encounter which force the detached reflection on the relationship of that action to the larger society which is, nevertheless, implicit in the film. Yet perhaps this is the film’s canniness – a brilliant form of entryism, a device to make itself more palatable whilst smuggling in the truly radical? Perhaps not. And yet – in its very refusal of didacticism or consciousness of its artificiality, it is a more effective witness than Brecht’s plays to the utter silence that may spread over the minds of those who make the first stirrings towards thinking their way out of their circumstances; not attempts to think beyond oppressive structures but evidence of the immense difficulty of doing so. In a time when everyone on the cultural left advertises their having left the categories of racism, sexism, heteronormativity or capitalism behind, and barely anyone makes the radical departures in thought which this would, it might seem, require, this evidence may well be salutary.

the end of the introduction to his travelogue In An Antique Land, the novelist Amitav Ghosh writes that although he knew, at the beginning of his journey, ‘nothing’ about the ostensible reason for his being in the Egyptian villages of Laṭaîfa and Nashâwy – nothing, that is, about an Indian slave of a twelfth century Jewish Tunisian merchant who ended up living in Mangalore, in Karnataka – the existence of this person gave him ‘a right to be there, a sense of entitlement’. It is important to Ghosh that he is following this character’s steps, although the sources cannot tell us anything which might give him a ‘properly human, individual’ life. This paradox provides a model for the treatment of all the people in his book, in Egypt and in Mangalore, even Ghosh himself, for whom Ghosh wishes to provide a sense of entitlement, a right to be wherever, or whoever, they are, despite their opacity or the impossibility of knowing them. He wants to construct a way of relating to foreign-ness which understands people by admitting they cannot be understood. Which might escape the traditional use of the opacity of others by imperialism or communalism, which calls its objects inscrutable Orientals or treacherous Muslims or simply mad, as a prelude to denying them a sense of entitlement to be where they are. Or which says that it knows them all too well, and understands what’s good for them or what’s wrong with them.

The tale of the slave fills part of the book, along with the tale of his master, Abraham ben Yiju, and that of Khalaf ibn Ishaq, another twelfth century Jewish merchant living in Aden, two of whose letters to ben Yiju contain the only mentions of the slave; other sections are taken up with accounts of the people Ghosh met in Egypt, whom he attempts to see, in some sense, on their own terms. He also tells the story of the discovery of the letters, a model for a knowing of other people Ghosh is anxious to avoid. Khalaf’s letters were deposited in the genizah, the store-house, of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, because they contained the name of God and could not be simply disposed of; unlike genizahs of other synagogues these documents were never taken out for burial, and survived until the nineteenth century. They could thus easily be stolen by European scholars, who became very annoyed at the peculiarities of the local population, at the ‘scoundrel beadles’ who, as Ghosh says, helped them sort out its contents, at the men and women who outrageously made ‘claims on my liberality’ for ‘the glory of the next meal’ at the same time as those scholars appropriated the records of their community without any recompense. The man who made those remarks, Solomon Schechter, was a scholar at Cambridge; the Taylor-Schechter Collection there is the largest group of Cairo Genizah documents in the world.

Ghosh wants to understand people in a way which does not feel like robbing them – he wants to leave them as they are. In one of the most interesting episodes Ustaz Mustafa, a puritanical Alexandria-educated teacher, suddenly asks Ghosh if he is a ‘shiyu’eyya’, a word which could mean ‘atheist’, ‘communist’ or even ‘adulterer’. Mustafa is dismissive of Ghosh’s ‘Hinduki’ faith and tries to convert him, but when he suddenly wonders if Ghosh’s father would be upset if he changed his religion, and Ghosh says he might well be, ‘the heart went out of his efforts to convert me…it went against his deepest instincts to urge a man to turn against his father’. It is not so much the redemptive arc given to Ustaz Mustafa’s story that is significant but the gently detached way it is told; we are given Mustafa’s actions and words, not his consciousness, except in the schematic terms of ‘the rival moralities of religion and kinship’ coming to a ‘standstill within him’. This external perspective seems a failure of understanding, but this very failure to assume an inquisitorial stance, or interrogate Ustaz Mustafa about what exactly he thinks of his Indian interlocutor; this lack of confidence that the matter is resolved, only that it has come to a ‘standstill’; this bespeaks a fuller understanding than the merely psychological, one which allows people to speak in their own terms, but which neither takes them entirely at face value nor probes their unknowable thoughts to make a final judgement of good and evil. This attitude then is extended backwards, into a past of Indian Ocean exchange and into the largely opaque world of ben Yiju, his slave, his wife (also from India). Ghosh looks for their traces, in the archive and in modern Mangalore, where he visits Tulu cults to catch the echo of the thought-world ben Yiju moved in – but the faintness of what remains compels him to the same careful ironic attitude of unknowing.  

That attitude is conducive to a certain political dream; of an unselfconscious pre-modern un-arrogant cosmopolitanism. It is a familiar dream in South Asia; it is beloved of some Nehruvians (and also some post-colonial critics) who think of pre-colonial India as a paradise of inter-religious tolerance, full of effortless syncretism and rich cultural exchange, before fixed and opposed religious identities were created by the British. What menaces this dream is not just the imperialism or communalism’s crude refusal to know; it is also our own need to, sometimes, know exactly what is going on, and to say that it is wicked or stupid. We need to say that the plunder of colonised countries represented by Solomon Schechter’s appropriation of the Genizah was wrong; we need also to say that characters such as Ghosh’s first host, Abu-‘Ali, who is liked by ‘nobody in Laṭaîfa…not even, possibly, his own wife and children’, and who spends all day lying idle on a divan shouting at his family and passers-by, is annoying. Allow people too much opacity and they’ll do anything; it is no accident that the first chapter starts with a bravura display of knowing about Abu-‘Ali, an inventory of his misdeeds sourced from the whole village. 

We need to do this, also, whilst remembering that the relationship between Abu-‘Ali and the good Shaikh Musa had ‘complexities…that I did not understand’; that Solomon Schechter, born an impoverished Romanian Hasid, thought he was saving crucial documents of his people; we need to not fall into the trap Ghosh does in a confrontation with the irascible Imam Ibrahim over Hindu burning of the dead – which all the villagers find abhorrent, barbaric – when he ends up shouting that India, just like the West, just like Egypt, has ‘guns and tanks and bombs’ and is thus a civilised nation. Nor should we forget that pre-modern societies could be violent and exclusionary; Ghosh sometimes does forget, particularly in his discussion of the Pacific slave trade, which if not as awful as the Atlantic trade was hardly all sunshine. But if Ghosh has any sort of solution to the problem of how to allow a measure of unknowing which does not leave you unable to say anything at all, it comes quite early on in the book, after a terrifying passage about Ghosh as a child of Indian diplomats in what was then East Pakistan, sheltering with other Hindus in the diplomatic compound during a religious riot, and then hearing about riots in Calcutta, ‘similar in every respect except that there it was Muslims who had been attacked by Hindus’. But, he says:

‘Equally, in both cities – and this must be said, it must always be said, for it is the incantation that redeems our sanity – in both Dhaka and Calcutta, there were exactly mirrored stories of Hindus and Muslims coming to each others’ rescue, so that many more people were saved than killed.’ 

In the irony of the first half of that sentence, and the relief of the second; in the awareness that our knowing and unknowing of certain people, is as much defence mechanism as respect for others; in the acknowledgement that those thousands of unknown stories of Hindus and Muslims rescuing each other are both true and a fantasy, though a necessary one; in this delicately negotiated understanding is Ghosh’s best prescription for living with other people, known and unknown. 

Halfway through No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood’s recent fragmentary novel about, loosely speaking, ‘the Internet’, the nameless protagonist contemplates writing about the internet herself, but decides against it: ‘all writing about the portal [Lockwood’s name for the online world] so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement’. I think we all recognise the sort of writing about ‘online’ this describes – censorious and misnamed think-pieces which panic over what Facebook is doing to us but make no effort to understand why we use it or how it feels to do so; pieces whose impossibly urgent tone is a product of the same shortening of temporal perspective they decry and whose smugness is, as Lockwood suggests, slightly masturbatory. In other fragments, Lockwood sends up this type of writing in detail; ‘Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??’.

Lockwood’s novel, and her poetry, criticism, and surrealist Twitter account are all an attempt to avoid that kind of writing and to think about our experience of being online in some more interesting and, perhaps more importantly, fun way – that the internet is fun, intoxicatingly, dangerously fun, is one of her most vital points. In thinking about this attempt, and what it might open up for the rest of us, it is important not to assume that being on the internet is like one thing, as if it were not the essence of its effect on our lives that it is everything and anything, is the digitised manuscripts of the British library and is Wattpad, is places for talking about insurrection against tyranny and about Dungeons and Dragons, is slightly viral videos of lectures on Assyrian demonology and is seriously viral videos of cats. Nor would it do to assume that the second terms in those rather white-intellectual-on-the-blues pairings are more trivial than the first or that those who consume the first somehow do not have lives as significant as those that consume the second, or indeed that they are not often the same people. But it is possible, I think, to find a rubric for thinking about what Lockwood is doing in her novel and elsewhere, which is expansive enough to encompass a great deal about how being online is different to life lived elsewhere, and how it is the same. That rubric, or mode of apprehension, is ‘texture’.

What I mean by ‘texture’ is best explained with an example from the visual arts, one not coincidentally from the high Pop Art of the ‘60s and ‘70s; a lot of art which thinks about popular culture makes use of this concept, although the arrival of the internet makes it more important than ever. The object I’ll discuss is Claes Oldenberg’s Two Cheeseburgers, with Everything, from 1962 (now in MoMa), which you can see, appropriately, online, because copyright prevents reproduction here. Oldenberg’s ‘subject’ in this piece is, obviously enough, the folly of American consumerism, its promise of complete and permanent satisfaction (with Everything), its mad sugar-rush abundance. But the way he thinks about it is much more subtle than such a blank condemnation, or Warhol’s blank acceptance. It relies on an implicit negotiation between the eye and the hand, which longs – at least mine does – to caress the surfaces of the cheeseburger, at once alluringly smooth, shiny, and invitingly impasted, squishy, and which cannot do so; the cheeseburgers are behind a museum cordon. It’s not just the hand, though; the mouth wants desperately to get itself around these grotesquely oversized sandwiches; the skin, bizarrely, wants to roll in them, to luxuriate in their softness, their crumpling. The eye both abets and frustrates these longings; it insists that these cheeseburgers are not real, they are made of cloth not meat and bread, and is repulsed by the over-squishiness and over-shininess of the two forms, which seem to pull it in and repel it at the same time. I don’t think it is too fantastical to say that its disgust, which I feel very viscerally, is in part a reaction precisely to the pleasure that the eye anticipates the skin would obtain; rolling in them would be to experience too much pleasure, would jeopardise, with its excessive materiality, the integrity of the body the eye seeks jealously to protect.

This play of anticipation and response between the eye and the hand, the mouth, the skin, is what I call ‘texture’. The most important fact about the play I have described is that it is not a distanced or merely formal interchange but an exchange of desire and the blocking of desire; the acknowledgement of that wanting is what makes Oldenberg’s critique of or comment on American pop culture nuanced and detailed rather than simply condemnatory. It is alive to the way our ‘base’ and disorderly impulses undermine the careful distance we, as sophisticated and ironical people, construct between ourselves and the culture which surrounds us. Most importantly, it can, by exploring various relationships between the eye and the skin of the sculpture, and their relationship to the play of texture in the object which the sculpture represents, show how various are the ways we want and think about these objects and about what they represent, and shatter the snobbery of left and right which asserts that we are all simply duped by a ‘society of spectacle’ or a world bereft of traditional values. That does not mean that we live in a paradisiacal affluent society; it just means that, whatever world we live in, we are still human beings.

Texture in this sense, the dynamism of wanting, suffuses Lockwood’s novel, but the relations between eye and hand in the ‘portal’ are almost the opposite of Oldenberg’s – or at least they are in the particular meme-infested, stupid-joke-obsessed, image-vomiting subsector of the portal Lockwood’s narrator inhabits, a world of ‘a post that said simply, Can a dog be twins?’ and videos of ‘a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg’. Instead of, as with the squishy cheeseburgers, the eye frustrating the longings of the hand, the eye attempts to counterfeit tactility, to create immediate access where there is none, and ends up with a bizarre hyper-immediacy, an ‘avalanche of details’ somehow more real than life itself. The eye is ‘zoomed in on the grain’, as if by revelling in every detail – in a manner at once ‘Jane  Austen…pale violet shadings of tone’ and violently dislocated, with the absurd gaps between words of the ‘new sense of humor’, of phrases like ‘grisly british witch pits’ or ‘pants burn leg wound’ – one could finally touch all those absent objects and people and ideas. Yet zooming in on the ‘warm grain’ of the world is not like touching it at all; touch comprehends objects all at once, whereas zooming in forces you to see the unspeakable variousness of even the most apparently smooth, unified things, so that the world ends up looking like ‘the coldness of the moon’, like the outer-space landscape one sees on snooker-balls or sheets of paper placed under the microscope. The language of this book, with its sudden shifts into a figuration which, despite its lushness, very rarely seems to be imaginatively inhabitable, or which is vivid but somehow fragile, always ready to be displaced by the next metaphor, replicates this strange combination of intensity and distance, and produces a peculiarly suppressed sort of wanting, a desire for everything which becomes a desire for nothing. It may be experienced as being ‘blissed’ by images of ‘breakfasts in Patagonia’ and ‘ghostly pale women posting pictures of their bruises’; equally it might be a ‘haze’ in which the ‘fast river of her mind’ obliterates all distinctions and leaves only a restless apathy in which nothing seems touchable or worth touching.

Yet the situation is more complex than this; there is more cause for hope, and also for despair. Unlike in Oldenberg, there is a third term in Lockwood’s novel, other than the eye or hand: the body as a whole. Both the eye and the hand go to meet the object, want in their different ways to perceive it (as do the other sense organs, the mouth, the skin – I have included those in the hand). But there is also the body, which does not seek to gaze or grasp at the object, but is simply there, and is affected by the object without noticing. Lockwood can include the body, in this sense, because she is writing a novel rather than creating a sculpture; she can detail what happens in the body of her character rather than merely provoking some bodily reaction in the real spectator as Oldenberg’s sculpture does – but the addition of the body is not just a matter of medium. The body as separate from the hand and eye, the body precisely separate from the object, is crucial for understanding the internet as it was not, quite, for understanding the culture Pop Art dealt with; now the objects of our gaze and frustrated touch are more absent than the Pop Artists could have imagined. Oldenberg’s cheeseburgers may not have been made of real meat, but they were really there, in the gallery; the products on advertising hoardings may have been remote and fantastic, but the hoardings were really on the roadside. Now even our advertising is virtual. And the computer screen seems transparent, it feels like we are interacting not with it but whatever is on it, although the screen, finally, is what is really there, right in front of us, and since we do not usually try to reach out for it it affects us almost directly, without our noticing, in strange movements within the body; how we cannot sleep for staring at its white light, how we feel a curious rasping heaviness in the stomach, in the back of the throat, after flicking mindlessly for too long through its trash. After a few hours online it can feel as if the only thing gained is these brute physiological reactions, that the eye and the hand have come up with nothing. That all that is left is how 'something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness’; how the suicide of a war criminal in the Hague might be ‘the funniest thing we had ever seen in our lives’, how his death’s ‘poison, catchy, sang through our veins’; or how all one might feel in response to being recognised on the street is

Sad!

Sad!

Sad!

Sad!

One way of looking at this process is that it is the final reduction of the complexity the eye and hand can provide into the crudities of brute bodily response – all articulacy vanishes, to be replaced with ‘Sad!’ four times over, or the migraines of the revolution. Another view is that this is the beginning of redemption from the hideous distance the internet can sometimes enforce, that it is the start of a process of bodily involvement which may end up allowing you, for a few moments, to ‘feel along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let you out’ – or that the internet’s immediate download of reactions to everything into your body is immediacy such as was never seen before. Of course this sensitivity is intense but crude, of course it ‘blazed like the new California’, always on fire, of course it is contaminated by irony; these are just the defence mechanisms necessary to be alive to everything at once, to recognise the visceral force of desire in all its manifestations.

But the other side of that recognition is the inability to do anything about any particular desire, so caught up are you in jumping from one to the other. Similarly, if the advantage of texture as a literary mode is that it can dive into the cooperative and agonistic exchanges between eye and hand and body, that is also its disadvantage; because such exchanges never stop or reach an obvious resolution, it is easy to change them – change the object, the world, you are thinking about – but hard to make them develop. That is one reason for the novel being so fragmentary, and why the fragments in the first part of the book sometimes seem not to be endlessly circling around the same concerns. The second part of the novel concerns the birth of a niece to the protagonist, modelled on Lockwood’s own niece, with very severe Proteus disease. Proteus disease causes abnormal growth, and can be associated, as it is in this novel, with severe neurological conditions – as a doctor describes it in the novel, ‘the neurone all migrated into isolated pods, where they will never talk to each other’. It must have been harrowing to live through the six months and a day the baby lived – certainly this part of the novel is often deeply moving, and beautiful – so I hope it is not too callous to say that Lockwood the writer, as opposed to the person, seems to have taken her short life as a great stroke of luck. For the baby, as Lockwood puts it, lives ‘in the senses’; she is ‘the self, but more, like a sponge’, with ‘a ripple along the skin wherever she was touched’; that is, the baby lives in the real world of the body, without the anticipations or blockages of the eye, of cognition, and she drags everyone into the real world after her – the real world of panicking about if you can get an abortion in America, of deciding not to, of holding the baby, like a ‘soft pink machete’, slicing her way through to the heart of things, in your arms, in watching her die on the day after her six-month birthday, her dead lips ‘the gentle colour of fingertips in winter’. Everything about her is small, pink, frail, and infinitely sensitive, and the whole world of Lockwood’s descriptions follows her in that, almost obliterating the tensions of the first half, so the narrator, though she remembers ‘the peculiar onrushing pain of the portal’, finds the ‘previous unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone’ – she’s out of the world of dreams and into something all too beautifully real. Well, not quite out of it; she still sits by the baby on its last day and looks at Jason Mamoa memes; she prays that the baby would show us ‘how to blast off and leave – how we could fly, touch down, pick flowers in other places’ – but then, like St Augustine, asks ‘but please, not yet, we liked it here’.

Yet if the voice retains some ambivalence, or still is half-captured by the endlessly ironic world outside the baby’s mind, it is nevertheless true that the subtleties of the first half of the novel are lost here somewhat, that instead of the interplay between eye and skin and body, the terms are polarised, the first cast down as entirely fake, the second and in particular third held up as all that is vital in the world. For me, therefore – and this may sound brutal, because of course such births, such worries, such beauties are real, they do exist – the end of Lockwood’s novel is unsatisfying, in that it holds up in the baby an ideal of full presence in the world and of endless possibility (the final sentence has a picture of the baby ‘opening her mouth, about to speak, about to say anything’) which not only none of the rest of us can follow but, more importantly, none of us would in the end want to follow. We are not just trapped in our distance, in the repulsion of the eye; we value it and we need it for critical thought to be possible. Our problem is not a choice between good and evil, but between good and good, which is why it is something like a tragedy. How do we live lives we can recognise as real, whilst retaining the powers of the internet to remove ourselves from who we are, to create in ourselves new things?

It’s not enough like a tragedy, it’s too pathetic, in the modern sense, for that, and it has no resolution. The dramatic pivot to one pole of the opposition Lockwood’s book attempts is really just a recognition of the lack of any more satisfying ending, of the interminability of the exchanges of texture. I do not have any better ideas for how to break through, to a relation at once more controlled and more truly, benignly unpredictable with the mass of images and words and thoughts and emotions and jokes written entirely in emojis now at our disposal; the highest compliment we can pay Lockwood is that no other anatomist of this strange world is likely to either. She provides a language and draws our attention to the bodily, to the odd transactions between the eyes and the viscera, the internet creates – but she does not give us solutions and probably no one can. No one talks about this better than she does.

I’ve been working on this for ever, and it could be still expanded and improved quite a bit, but I just wanted to publish something on this dormant site. It’s a tribute/poison-pen letter to Cambridge at the end of my first year. Sorry about my terrible photographs.

I remember climbing the wide, narrow steps of Harvey Court, where there is a good café and accommodation for students at Gonville and Caius, and finding the world had utterly changed. It was one of those days when people say that the rain washes everything clean, though that never happens in Cambridge – except here, on Sir Leslie Martin’s quiet raised court. The rain had seeped into the yellow stock bricks and made them darker and more iridescent, so to come up to that small expanse, bare of anything but an odd protruding skylight – and, since it is on the roof, it is always a surprise to find anything here at all, this is not where a courtyard should be in Cambridge – was to enter a kingdom of yellow light, very gentle, very exact. The strange pillars to the left, only a couple of bricks wide and a metre long, moved in and out of the light, and the wooden casements basked in it, silently contented. Here, no melodrama was possible and anguish was absurd; light comes from every surface, but it does not reflect yourself back at you,  just leads you on a short, not excessively playful dance, through columns, into a recessed doorway, up to an inadequate sculpture of a skylight, and in between the cracks of the bricks, into their endless, meaningless variations. It was the very ideal of peace, peace which was not emptiness but very close to it, some slight touches of thought on the void, to reassure you, to keep your interest.

I think it was like that, anyway. I may have made this up, I can’t remember: that’s true of all the descriptions of buildings in this essay. I like what I say I like, of course, and don’t like what I say I don’t, mostly, and it’s true, generally speaking, that Harvey Court is an almost non-existent building, that its deviations from some imaginary mean for a yellow-brick mid-century English modernist educational structure are so noticeable precisely because they are so tiny, but I have no real recollection of specific moments. I don’t think that matters though, it’s just a way of drawing attention to the basic paradox of writing about architecture; we see a building, we love or hate it in a few seconds, and then we live there and forget all about it, and we never know what it did to us, what possibilities it opened and destroyed, what moods it assisted or altered, what vistas, literal or metaphorical, we saw only because it was there. All buildings are mysterious, as mysterious as our lives while we are living them, which is not surprising since they do so much to make our lives when we are living them, and sometimes after that as well (Cambridge has no good crematoria). 

This essay is about modernism in Cambridge, and modernism all over the world, and very good it is going to be as well, but it is hobbled by this basic fact, that I know nothing about any modernist building in Cambridge, or any other building anywhere. I can’t remember what they were like, because I don’t remember what they were like when they weren’t there, and so I have nothing to compare them to. But broadly speaking, what I feel is this: that if there were no modernist buildings in Cambridge I would surely have died, or done a runner or bunked off, a long time ago, that I simply could not abide living in a place without any evidence of the twentieth century. That there are times when I think to myself that if I don’t see some glass and concrete in the next five seconds I am going to scream. That I often feel that I would like to smash King’s College Chapel and replace it with a housing estate by Berthold Lubetkin. That I am becoming a sort of East Anglian Italian Futurist, with a particular animus against flowering hedges. 

The problem is that the pre-twentieth-century buildings of Cambridge, although they are very beautiful, are also insufferable. They are insufferable because they are so light and flighty and ready to go home, and they have stood for hundreds of years. They are permanently picturesque, and their indifference to anything which goes on within them – great experiments, furious intellectual arguments, sex – proclaims the triumph of the insubstantial and the endlessness of the unreal; they are the physical embodiment of māyā, the fact that the world is a delusion. More precisely: they are the greatest English examples of what the early Modernist architects called ‘façadism’ – and England is the most façadist of architectural cultures. Almost every pre-modernist college building is just a big box, the plan extraordinarily elementary. A courtyard, and then another, and then another: rectangles on all sides. So it’s what you do with the frontage that counts, whether that’s grand and manorial, like St John’s, or twee like Corpus Christi, or expansive and discreetly classical like Trinity, or charming in a silly, hack-ish Victorian way like Sidney Sussex, or overdecorated like Caius. 

The modernists thought of façadism as wrong, morally wrong, because it was dishonest. That’s obvious rubbish – there is no reason architecture need be honest. But there is a danger with façadism, more aesthetic than moral, though at the border of the two: if you walk into Second Court at St John’s from First, the whole court is imprinted instantly on your retina – and from that moment it never changes, except when you turn around to look at the wall behind you. Once you have those two views, you have everything, because all the invention has gone into making an image, or four images, and all you can do is see them. You can move around as much as you like, go from the centre of the court to the corner by the Buttery, and the only novelty will be how much of Gilbert Scott’s church spire – a masterpiece of façadism which I find outrageously clumsy on some days and pleasantly sinewy on others – comes into vision. The court is impassive, it does not care that you live in it or walk through it, it just wants to be looked at. And thus it savagely cleaves public and private, the internal and external environment; the architecture’s lack of response forces you inside your head. It is an architecture for daydreaming in, or for waking nightmares.  

 Second Court is extreme – the barest court in Cambridge – but is for that reason exemplary. Nor are the ‘prettier’ college buildings, or the non-university churches, any different; they too declare themselves straight away, demand you recognise their cuteness as soon as you come in. Almost all the pre-modern buildings of Cambridge submit to only one interpretation. King’s College Chapel is the great exception; its riches really are inexhaustible, and the view from the other side of First Court of a wall of glass like a Mies skyscraper, or up to the perfect fan vaulting, or along the stained glass held in Perpendicular suspension, presents images to stupefy and ever-ramifying incident. The Wren library has similar depth. But walk round Robinson and watch the skyline, the friendly turrets in their equable rhythms, the staircases and the bridges, the cut-away rooms, the diagonal brick mouldings. Go to the lavatory with its diagonal door cut into diagonal brick. Watch a formal in the diagonally-roofed hall, on the balcony, dark and low-ceilinged. And go down that long ramp with those ubiquitous mouldings on each side of you and see the enveloping sweep of the college, rising and falling tastefully – this is still Cambridge, it still itches to please. Best of all, there are no courtyards anywhere, the garden opens onto marooned Victorian houses, and inside the fortress the ‘courts’ are irregular patches of weird brick ground, almost blinding on a sunny day, and full of dips and dives and odd perspectives, at one moment the bare obverse of the chapel’s roiling stained glass, a gash in the sheer brick wall; the next a homely neo-vernacular arrangement of verticals and upright windows and potted plants, like a late-70s housing estate; the next a bridge which pursues you down to the ground and into the corridor, hems you in with the ziggurats on each side, suddenly leaps to all the majesty of Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road Estate in Camden – is, like that great building, at once utterly solid and looks ready to slide down on you at any moment, a red-brick avalanche.

Robinson is not perfect; a friend tells me that due to funding diminished by  inflation it was built in such a rush that the architects did not design an interior for their megastructure before building started, and forgot to include a toilet next to the Hall. Once this was discovered, it required putting a long and winding corridor through the middle of the building, which messed everything else up. You can tell: the ceilings are too low and the spaces too narrow. Also, the diagonal moulding sometimes seems a bit cute; you wish they had been less fawning. But there are regular jolts of happiness here, and they are genuinely architectural, not borrowed from painting or sculpture – they are the result of moving through a building, seeing it differently, and for different reasons, hurrying or stopping, under different skies, going to or from, with or without others, in a word living in it, a fulfilment of Le Corbusier’s dictum which is said to have started modern architecture, Une maison est une machine-à-habiter (A house is a machine for living in) which always seems to me more ambiguous than it is given credit for, given how much it is to habiter, how complex, how un-mechanical, a machine for doing that would have to be. Even more ambiguous in English, for living includes vivre, leading a life, for which a house, or a home, is also a machine, if where you vivre can be a machine. 

The odd thing is that a college was supposed to be a machine-à-habiter or à-vivre, and much of the inspiration for modern architecture in Britain, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, among the welfare-state builders and heroic Brutalists, was found in Oxford and Cambridge courts: the quads of a Festival-of-Britain housing estate, the picturesque juxtapositions of a Brutalist megastructure. Fellows and, especially, students, are supposed to be people with nothing to do but live, to be coming together and apart freely, doing work which somehow is not work, is unalienated. And their architecture is supposed to reflect this – prettiness, seclusion, the lawns rolling over the eccentricities of the occupants, bringing irascible historians and hip English lecturers and dour particle physicists together briefly, at hall or in the common room, or just giving them somewhere to live, somewhere to protect them from the world. The facelessness, the passivity, is the price paid for the freedom of the inhabitants to be left to their mad intellectual and personal schemes. You can see the influence of the college particularly in the more intellectual, restrained, British modernists – Denys Lasdun, for instance, (a hero of mine) in the University of East Anglia, or even here, at New Court in Christ’s (‘the typewriter’). Not that the building, with its stepped-back rows of rooms – the windows are always larger than you remember, it is a more generous building than it first appears –  is formally anything like a college, but it shares the same spirit, or what the spirit of a college was supposed to be. The individual decently contained, allowed their expressivity, but slotted neatly into an impermanent community, open to the world and yet with their own garden.

Except I am never convinced that the college worked as it was meant to; that image-problem gets at it. They are too romantic to be truly liberating: they are self-centred buildings. You need some other understanding of architectural space to allow those who have too much time on their hands to find sufficient support in their environments, so they won’t start blooming inwardly, malice turned against themselves. So the modernists abstracted not the set-pieces but the straggling, unpictorial bits, like the door onto the  arcade at Cloister Court in Queens’, under the half-timbered east range, or the smoking area outside Sidney Sussex where you can see the Garden Building looming placidly above you, and the master’s lawn on the other side, or the forecourt in front of the Buttery at St. John’s, on one side the chapel lantern playing against the blank chimneys of Trinity, the rhythmic brick gables at the back of Great Court, on the other, tripartite dark brick chimneys of Second Court at John’s, carrying up over the wooden ground-hugging cafeteria so that the space above it seems suddenly vast. They took these spaces, which require and reward your constant interest, your noticing of juxtapositions, your moving round to get a better view, which need you to throw yourself into the building – and they wrapped them round the whole structure, made buildings continually interesting, wanting and inviting participation. Like the Cripps Buildings at Queens’ or, especially, John’s, both by Powell and Moya – the latter is perhaps the most masterly modernist structure in Cambridge, with those sloping articulated window-frames, the perfect bounce of the wide white columns as you walk through – especially in the sunken area by the river, where they first bunch and then expand out, opening up the view – with the haunting, weird roof structures, mixtures of industrial flue and space-ship, and, most of all, the staircases. I have lived here for a year and have not gotten over the exhilaration of those staircases, delicately stepping up, without supports, into the belly of the building, crossing gently, light pouring in from the window. Cripps at Queens’ too, despite its slightly ungainly exterior, has lovely interior courtyard staircases, a fine high hall, an odd curving bar, is full of God in the details. 

These buildings allow a person to expand into their surroundings, to see themselves and reality match up. They are also ostentatiously humane, studiously in-keeping, bowing down to the older buildings they face even as they occasionally (the rocky mass of the St. John’s Cripps from the car park) discreetly show them the finger. After a while, such virtue gets a little boring – more than that, seems an inadequate response to everything that’s so irritating about Cambridge and its architecture, Philistinism and cuteness and self-obsession and nostalgia and perpetuation of the most ludicrous traditions, in a word Englishness, everything that makes me want to get out, out, out. You need stronger stuff, need something with all the power of the modern, all its bearing down on you to crush you, to thrill you, to break you open. There’s some of that here – James Stirling’s History Faculty, perhaps, which Owen Hatherley described as a massive ‘fuck you’ to Hugh Casson’s ultra-polite Raised Faculty Building. And yes, the History Faculty is dramatic, yes it looks great in the photos, yes the library, so soft and white, is the most memorable space in Cambridge; but as Hatherley also says, Stirling’s buildings all look smaller in reality than in the pictures, and in fact, you notice if you go over and over, the strength of the building is in the odd little places round the back, where the wings meet the protruding glass at the front and extravagant, functionally dubious staircases run up and down excitably; it’s as English as cream tea, as the worst cancer survival rates in Europe.

What else is there? Churchill? Lovely, my favourite college, those two brick pylons flanking the door, the concrete blanks on the Margaret Thatcher archive (form very much an improvement on function, though I suppose it’s some consolation that she would certainly have hated it), the shallow concrete vaults high above, crossed by massive beams, the seriousness of the whole thing, its uncompromising concern for space and air and good views and good sculpture and irregular, interesting courts and façades. It’s very apparent when set against the disastrous sub-Po-Mo additions by the fields, though it does seem to have rubbed off on the delicate Japanese-style Cowan Court. And yet…too ‘50s, too staid, no swagger, just all the resources of humanity the twentieth century had to offer – we are not out of England yet. The top-heavy David Attenborough building, at the New Museums site, with its black-clad grain silo on ultra-slim poles, hulking and flamboyant lit up at night? Yes, but it too is precise, finicky, clever, in the arrangement of the terraces, in how it squeezes in the Zoological Museum. That bare green thing in the New Museums Site, the former Pharmacy Building apparently? Yes, totally unEnglish – a terrible copy of Peter Behrens. I have sometimes been reduced to making a special trip. 

Really it is about England, about being English. Not British – I have nothing to do with Scotland – unusual for non-white people. At the end of the year I climbed the St John’s chapel tower and looked at the grey horizon and thought of England – and isn’t it appropriate, that that phrase means that what should be a pleasure is often, actually, a bore? That thinking of England should be thinking about disappointment and irritation and the loss of innocence. But I thought of England and its density, thought of a clipped German Jew, converted to Lutheranism, driven round it by his wife, stopping, getting out, inspecting churches and factories and municipal centres, delivering his judgement, the whole place in Nikolaus Pevsner’s little books, complicated, various, interesting, manageable. He lived here once, in New Court, with an octagonal bathroom. 

But sometimes things get out of hand. Why English, of all things I could have been? So much fantasy, so little self-understanding, so many dreams, urban dreams, rural dreams, imperial dreams, domestic dreams, radical EP Thompson dreams and reactionary Peter Hitchens dreams, no reality anywhere. You will understand if when I pass the Gibbs Building at King’s from the other bank of the river, and I think of that great Scottish architect, trained in Rome, who built on the Strand in London a perfect Roman Baroque church – to see him reduced to this beautiful classical vacuum, this marmoreal stupidity which would not know an idea if one smashed it in the Diocletian window – then it is hard not to think Look what the English do to themselves! Look at how they cosset themselves in their Arcadian wet-dreams, look at them turning their bodies to slurry and their minds to treacle in their fantasy kingdoms. Look at the savagery of the repression, the density of the fortifications, the malice at the outside world. Look, what’s worse, at the indifference. Look at them burrowing in on themselves, look at the old in wooden rooms, maturing resentment like poison wine. Look at young fogeys and bright young things, look at the shy and the fearful, look at that masterpiece of black comedy, the English class system, hatching in their skulls so they hardly notice – by the time they are out of here they will be packaged neatly, jobs lined up for them, ready to be served. Look how pretty it all is. 

Then I have to remind myself. Virtuous cosmopolitan liberalism can also be a device for hiding contempt’s mucus, the hatred is hatred of myself. I am one of the greatest beneficiaries of the English class system in this university, and I too like pretty things, suburban villas, Derbyshire landscapes, magnolia. 

Nikolas Pevsner was fascinated by why we, the British, not only to failed to invent modernism but were and are so resistant to it, although, as Pevsner showed in his book Pioneers of the Modern Movement, so many of its precursors were British – the Victorian engineers, builders of factories and railway stations; Arts and Crafts movement, in particular the plain, well-crafted houses of Charles Voysey; the highly-strung genius of Charles Rennie and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. And despite our inventing industrial capitalism, despite having the largest city in the world, the largest empire – we had modernity but not modernism. In the Introduction to Owen Hatherley’s wonderful Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer, a book I used to read every night before going to bed, a prophylactic against homesickness, against pining for the Barbican, he distinguishes the two: modernity is the random drive of industrial capitalism, which encourages stylistic anarchy, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Classical, Art Nouveau, Indo-Arabian-Moorish-Mongol train stations, Romanesque synagogues, hotels like Flemish town halls; modernism is an artistic reaction to all that, which uses the technology it creates, in the service, for the Marxist Hatherley at least, of a radical egalitarian politics. Modernism means disciplining the wildness of modernity, taking its astonishing materials and fragmented spaces and using them with aesthetic flair and political vision, to create public housing estates and theatres and cultural centres and other structures by which the architectural pleasures could extend to everyone. 

That story explains England well; we liked modernity’s profit-generating power, we had plenty of idiosyncratic architects developing imaginative uses of it, but were always suspicious of the public provision and regulation modernism usually thrived under. Except – and this is Hatherley’s brilliance, in that book and all his work – you could also switch the terms around. ‘Modernity’ can be the endlessly proliferating variety of styles and thoughts, which may or may not link back to tradition, but it can also be the ceaseless expansion of capitalism that breaks links with the past with a speed and thoroughness unlike any social system ever seen before; ‘modernism’ can be the programme of harnessing these energies in the service of social improvement, but it can also be a refined artistic reaction to the homogenising forces of modernity which seeks to respond sensitively to context and function. Modernity is something that releases you, the architect, the inhabitant, to do as you please, and also what crams you into a tiny space, awes you, crushes you. Modernism is the same. What is control, what is liberation, is never clear. 

Really it is about human freedom. Modernism was always about that, more than equality – though it was an egalitarian sort of freedom, the freedom which comes from being genuinely in public. And what you discover about human freedom is that you give in to fantasy as soon as you start talking about it, which is why it’s such an easy target for puritans, why it sometimes seems so laughable and so limited an aim. Look at the poeticising of this article, these descriptions that may match up to nothing in reality. Or rather, I do not know what it would be for them to match up to reality, do not know, as I said, anything about the secret lives of buildings, the lives they have when we are not looking at them, or thinking about them, the lives I would need to know to understand them, and human freedom. All I have is a series of fantasies, projected on the surface of these buildings, fantasies which are sometimes hideous, malicious dreams. Too often, especially this year, in this strange place, this non-existent city. Buildings may support any number of such fantasies, in any order, nor do the fantasies last for long; architecture cannot hide or much mitigate the humiliations of our social world or the more general ills we all bear. Yet – I do believe there is a totality of fantasies, or that the fantasies get into the corners of the buildings, they seep into the bricks, they come to constitute its essence, that some buildings – for me those, pre-eminently, of the twentieth century, which had its hopes and fears and fantasies on a larger scale than any other – receive them with more grace, or impose them with more benign ferocity, than others, that for a moment they may allow you to move more easily, to breathe freely,and that, just very occasionally, this may be a briefly adequate simulacrum, of something called human freedom.          

Welcome to Automatic Writing! This bad-tempered and polemical beginning isn’t indicative of things to come – I wouldn’t want to be this sardonic all the time, and mostly I’ll be writing gentle remarks on art and poetry and South Indian postmodernist architecture. But some things and people can only be tolerated for so long, and they must be exorcised before their disruptions of your consciousness becomes seriously damaging. I’ve been thinking far too much about Jordan Peterson, and this is an attempt to stop that; now our whole society needs to do the same. Anyway, please subscribe!

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Jordan Peterson is very stupid. That much is obvious – sufficiently obvious that I, who have never read any of his books or articles or seen his Youtube videos, and hopefully never will, am sure of it1. The lack of intellectual content in anything he says makes you wonder not just how he became, as Tyler Cowen put it, ‘the most influential public intellectual in the world’, but how he got into university at all. What has not sufficiently been appreciated, however, is the significance of this stupidity for any diagnosis of Peterson’s cultural position. This diagnosis – not critique, there is nothing there to criticise – must I think start with his stupidity. It must explain quite what is so particularly attractive about stupidity, in our cultural moment.

Of course, general and in a sense correct answers can be given: the horrible popularity of transphobia, an anti-feminist backlash by men displaced from their traditional roles, the rise of an authoritarian politics requiring intellectual justification or cover. But these explanations do not do nearly enough explain the total lack of thought in Peterson’s writing. Large forces such as these often produce intellectual mascots who partially embody and partially critique them – often, to their detriment, more the first than the second. Marshall McLuhan, to whom Peterson is sometimes compared, is the paradigm: a man who purported to explain the confusions he all too often exemplified. But McLuhan did have some ideas; if ‘the medium is the message’ is a woefully incomplete thought, without the basic sense that electronic form can easily overwhelm content we would be unable to think about the Internet at all. Peterson offers nothing of the kind, only instructions to toughen up, love the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’, hate ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’ (neither of which exist), supplemented with, of all things, Jungianism. Jungianism! – how could ‘the most influential public intellectual in the world’, in 2023, possibly be a Jungian?

We need, therefore, to begin with the stupidity itself rather than its specific contours. ‘Stupidity’ – the word means, vestigially, not only a lack of intelligence but a failure to sense anything, an imperviousness to any outside stimuli. In this sense, Peterson is not only stupid but recommends stupidity – ‘toughness’, he calls it. And in this he has chanced upon a real ill of our culture, a malaise both personal and political, namely a sort of intensely self-conscious paralysis of the will. For one of the most important facts about those who, from anxiety or misery, fail over and over again to act, to do anything at all, is that those subject to this condition are often intensely aware of it, and of every other quirk of their character, every debilitating idiosyncrasy or moral fault. Inaction devours everything – each plan unfulfilled becomes an instrument of self-reproach, each previous relapse or retreat a reminder of futility – because it is aware of everything, because it knows itself too well, feels every failure, has no stupidity at all. This is as much a political as a personal condition. How many laments for impotence and schemes for victory and puzzled analyses of why power eludes us has the left produced since 1989 (or before)? No one thinks about praxis as much, and no one can do as little. And this is not a paradox but a recognition of the most basic fact about human action, which is that it requires a suspension of a attitude of predicting, of second-guessing, oneself, in favour of decision, and thus can be hobbled by the self-knowledge which makes such prediction inescapable2.

Peterson’s entire doctrine may be summarised without remainder in the words of God in The Life of Brian: ‘Get on with it!’. And whilst in a sense there could be nothing more banal, what you could generously call its wisdom is that at any moment you might revert from playing games with yourself and simply act, deciding what to do rather than enticing or punishing oneself to do it. In a culture which is always aware of itself, always talking about itself, always gathering intelligence on its own activities, the injection of a little stupidity may allow the victims of inaction, the disciples of paralysis, to escape their awful predicament – as long as they are young, white, and male. Peterson’s career and popularity are the wages intelligence pays to stupidity.

Of course, it’s not enough, not nearly enough. It is all very well to say ‘Get on with it! – but get on with what? Clearly his specific recommendations and ‘toughness’ itself are mired in misogyny and a highly retrograde masculinity. More generally, because he is stupid and doesn’t just advise stupidity, he cannot admit the claims of intelligence, of self-knowledge, which remind us that some people have more restrictions on their agency, external and internal, than others, that the agency of one is entangled in the agency of all, and that it is necessary to combine the actions of many, in unpredictable but vital ways, if many of the things which are most important to us may be achieved. His work is better described as ‘idiotic’ than ‘stupid’; the former derives from the Ancient Greek ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs), meaning a private person, one who never acts in political life or takes any interest in it. Peterson explicitly recommends idiocy, in the sixth of his twelve rules for life: ‘Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world’. It is not just that no sensible politics can be derived from idiocy; no full life of any kind can have such little awareness of our dependence, in the innermost marrow of our own ability to act, on the attachments and decisions of others.

But that Peterson is hopelessly inadequate is, as I said at the beginning of this note, obvious. And whilst some parts of the world are hyper-intelligent, ruinously self-aware, it is also obvious that the most powerful and significant parts are very stupid indeed. That, though, means that intelligence must finally develop an ability to act, and that means conceding a little to stupidity, to the fact that analysis must end and decision start, and that this place always looks arbitrary from the perspective of thought. Perhaps politicians and activists still, to some extent, knows this – our understanding of personal life, whose misery powers the appeal of figures such as Peterson, has come to terms with it much less well3. But neither have reckoned with it fully, especially on the left. Our too-persistent political and psychic hells can only be escaped by this difficult but necessary acknowledgement.

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