Commonplaces

For Valentine’s day, this poem by Robert Duncan (who I think is unfashionable, though unjustly).

On Friday I was joined by Michael Hardt on Novara to talk about his new book - co-authored with Toni Negri - Assembly. It’s a follow-up to the Empire trilogy and a serious and ambitious intervention. Empire is one of those books which I think suffered from its success; its theses were often broadened out and vulgarised. That’s the fate of any successful book (how Benedict Anderson must have come to hate the phrase ‘imagined communities’) but I think it was especially bad here. I imagine the same will happen here, but the book is very much worth reading, and even though I have some substantial disagreements with parts of it, I was struck by how much I had missed its ambition and brio – it is an attempt to think the current political moment in its totality, from the practical activity of the ‘movement’ (especially, for H&N, the arc of protests and struggles extending from Tunisia to 15M to Occupy, though not exclusively) to the current form of capitalism and emergent forms of cooperation and solidarity. Their ambition is to operate beyond the political per se and enter the ‘hidden abode’ of economic and social need which is its matrix. It’s a good ambition and the book repays careful reading.

It is a less politically theoretical book than the previous work: there is no lengthy digression on Spinozist ‘multitude’, or careful genealogy of the concept of sovereignty. That’s partly because the book rests on the earlier theoretical work, but also because of the different historical moments in which they have been written: Empire, especially, was written as a way of seeking a theoretical articulation of a global political ‘moment’ in its crescendo; the situation now is decidedly more mixed. The theoretical slant of the book is a tussle with Rousseau, especially, although it’s only carried out obliquely, save in chapter 3; I’d have liked to see it pursued a bit more.

But it struck me while reading how different the fruits of ‘Western Marxism’ – which they defend, correctly I think, in a late section of the book – are between intellectual traditions. Their two preferred figures are a little strange –Lukács and the later Merleau-Ponty – but it allowed me to understand their project as part of a line of work which blends Marxism primarily with philosophy, which allows for their systemic ambition, but only briefly dallies with history. This is quite different from another Western Marxism, one strain of which is Anglophone, which blends Marxism with history: think EP Thompson, Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson, or even Peter Linebaugh (the line is certainly heterogeneous). It might have been fruitful to grapple with Anderson’s insight that the secret signature of all Western Marxism is failure, and operate from there. That kind of thinking might have been especially useful in suggesting that H&N proceed from the specific problems of particular moments of struggle (what did people think they were doing? what did they want? what future did they see? what were they struggling against?) rather than allowing them to appear just as examples of broader, overarching arguments. But then that would have been a different book.

There are two specific things I find awkward in the book:

The first is the idea of ‘nonsovereignty’, which I don’t think is ever fully articulated. I suspect H&N have painted themselves into a philosophical corner here. In brief, nonsovereignty is a conceptual polemic against all political conceptions framed around sovereignty, which they see as inevitably (re)producing relations of domination – against this they propose a somewhat murky idea of ‘nonsovereign’ institutions which emerge from the matrix of pre-existing co-operation and sociality coming into self-consciousness. But here things get problematic. Not only does this skirt the historical question – why do so many contemporary movements, right and left, articulate themselves in terms of sovereignty? – but it seems to smuggle in sovereignty under the rubric of nonsovereignty. In other words, nonsovereign institutions are sovereign institutions (i.e., fully autonomous ones which set their own rules, determine their own nature and limits etc) but with sovereignty used for other, non-dominating ends. I think that’s good! I just don’t see the need for the term.

But I understand where it comes from: not only a generalised suspicion of the ‘political’ per se – hence the polemic against the ‘autonomy of the political’ which we argue about a little in the show – but a long commitment to the idea that capitalism produces new, resistant subjects, with resources which surpass capital’s attempts to exploit them. That is what Negri was doing with the baroque figure of the ‘operaio sociale’ decades ago, and it’s the same here. But the theoretical consequences of this orientation cuts off any consideration that political concepts are themselves sites of struggle for meaning – and therefore politics is only conceived of as their total negation.

The second matter I struggle with is related – it is about a ‘resistant subject’ and also about political concepts. In a way it is a minor thing, but also an indicative one. H&N write:

“Migrants, for example, who play such a fundamental role in shaping the contemporary world, who cross borders and nations, deserts and seas, who are forced to live precariously in ghettos and take the most humiliating work in order to survive, who risk the violence of police and anti-immigrant mobs, demonstrate the central connections between the processes of translation and the experience of “commoning”: multitudes of strangers, in transit and staying put, invent new means of communicating with others, new modes of acting together, new sites of encounter and assembly—in short, they constitute a new common without ever losing their singularities.Through processes of translation, the singularities together form a multitude. Migrants are a coming community, poor but rich in languages, pushed down by fatigue but open to physical, linguistic, and social cooperation. Any political subjectivities seeking to take the word with legitimacy today must learn how to speak (and to act, live, and create) like migrants.” (pp.152-3)

Now, on one level, I can appreciate the transvaluation going on here – instead of conceiving of migrants as absolutely wretched, objects of pity at best and hatred at worst, H&N are trying to conceive the migrant as subject, and follow the arc of political potential which therefore emerges. I think that’s valuable as far as it goes, and actually in its own terms, as a gesture against much of predominant discourse, I think it’s fine. It’s also a common move among those influenced by Negri and working on migration, especially Sandro Mezzadra. But there’s something missing here. Most migrants don’t want to be migrants: either they don’t want to have migrated at all, or they want something quite at odds with the way H&N conceive of them here – stability and citizenship. For many, the most fervent hope is that ‘migrant’ is a temporary position. One of the things that’s awkward about the polemical dismissal of the body of concepts emanating from the republican tradition is that H&N lose the ability to operate in this conceptual realm, the realm which frames most political desires articulated by their resistant subjects. It seems to me a more difficult, but more rewarding thing to attempt to think through and beyond those terms, as especially ‘sovereignty’ and ‘citizenship’ are two of the key sites of struggle for the next few decades.

I put this on Facebook yesterday out of the sense that, on balance, ‘Mental Health Awareness’ is a good thing. I now put it here, lightly edited, out of a sense that awareness should be, at least in some way, public-facing. It is unusually personal, and although I don’t like the insipid personalisation of, well, everything, I thought it forgivable in this instance. == It is Mental Health Awareness week. These festivals of mass disclosure are usually a turn-off for me – I don’t think disclosure is an intrinsic good, and the drive for constant public confession of one’s every constant fluctuation can itself be pathological. (I wonder who determines these weeks, whether they’re aware of the paltriness or absurdity of it placed against the immensity of the problem.) Doubtless some of that is an aversion on my part to not appearing in control, to appearing excessive or self-involved, to hatred of pity or condescension – but I’m also convinced, despite the piety of the sentiment, that talking about these things is a prerequisite for them changing.

So: I have a depressive disorder. That phrasing tends to hide a lot of things under a couple of words, so here’s some specificity: what this means in practice these days is that a couple of times a year, for a week or two, I am gripped by the most painful and destructive forms of abjection, hopelessness and worthlessness. These episodes are no longer as destructive as they used to be – I know how to deal with them better – and if you were to see me in the middle of one, you might notice (if you were sharp) that I hadn’t shaved as frequently as I might, or I’m wearing the same jumper twice, or my concentration seems slightly off, but not much more than that. What is happening internally is quite different, and quite wretched. Yet these episodes pass – always, eventually, though each time I never quite believe they will. The rest of the time, I live with the kind of psyche predisposed to those episodes, with those predispositions more or less dominant.

Sometimes, people argue that mental illness should be no more invested with significance than a broken leg or a flapping atrial valve, subject to the same kinds of treatment and recovery. I think treatment is good, but also crude, that our understanding of the psyche is still primitive. Without severing physical and mental conditions (the two exist for many people in a kind of circuit), the internal geography of depression - at least - is bewildering, shifting, corrosive, and at the same time without the novelty any of those things suggest. It is terrifying but also boring. It transforms one’s successes into failures, or achievements in charlatanism. One is convinced of one’s own talentlessness, loathsomeness, unworthiness. Kindness is undeserved, or marred by suspicion, at the same time a merciless and ridiculous lability obtains. Description could multiply endlessly: its states of non-action, bound in secret knots with excess, overwork, intensity. Its cynicism. Its insomniac wakefulness. You will note I use the neutral third person – just to talk about the state has a kind of miasma, it requires careful handling.

This is on my mind because I have recently come out of just such an episode.

I struggled for a long time against making ‘depression’ any part of my self-conception, still less my ‘identity’. It is so debilitating and so humiliating that the thought of being defined by it in any way appalls me. I’ve made more peace with it than I once thought I might – in part because I understand just how deep a part of me it is – but my hostility remains. I think the internet is bad for this stuff, both in the rewards it gives to maladaptive coping strategies, and its barrage of images and outrages, tempests and diverting mini-catharses.

‘Mental health is political’. Like most righteous clichés, it is both true and vacuous. It is political insofar as it is in substantial part an effect of our social structure and collective choices; it is political insofar as its treatment, reception and ‘mentionability’ are matters of contestation; assertion of its political nature matters insofar as it denaturalises and socialises what can too often be made a matter of personal culpability. The question is where one goes next: like most of these political clichés, it is both a challenge to the definition of the political (‘it’s bigger than you think’), and the protasis for a syllogism ending ‘that’s why we need socialism’. True, as far as it goes, but insufficient.

(There is a real scission between the serious left-wing work done on mental health, psychiatry and the connections between politics and the psyche and some of what passes for a ‘politics of mental health’ on the internet, especially where the latter is a cobbled-together synthesis of ‘self-care’ – a term now so far wrenched from its roots – with freedom from criticism, praise of cruelty and brutality and the practice thereof, a politics of credulous validation – none of which gets at the difficulty of it, the danger of it, the terrible fact that we so rarely know what the right thing is or what’s good for us… But that’s a digression.)

However social its roots or common its injuries, depression builds its alphabet out of our personal wounds; its canon is unique. I can’t give the kind of tips you might put on an inspirational Instagram account, or the nostrums you might get in an NHS So You Have Depression pamphlet. If I tell you some poetry, walking, nature, eating well helps sometimes, well, it’s true, even if it feels sometimes like tapdancing over the abyss. (And it’s only when talking about reading materials for depressives we use the absurd criterion ‘helpful’, as if our critical measure of what literature can do to us should be in tones of therapeutic beige.) I hate the literature of the self, for the most part – even that Kay Redfield Jamison stuff, once trendy, doesn’t sit well with me – but the way Freud and Klein think about the question (i.e. the big question – why does something that should seek pleasure seem to seek out pain?) useful, even if their conclusions are less so. Otherwise, the explorations I like are what you might expect: the wound of Philoctetes; Job, Ecclesiastes, Jonah; the agonised saints; Burton’s Anatomy, and much of the literature of the great period of melancholy in English, surrounded by political upheaval, intellectual and spiritual catastrophe. Especially this latter is marked by a sense that the soul and the mind have depths and capacities which can be truly monstrous, or which might overcome the narrow brightness of conscious reason. Recently I have been reading Marsilio Ficino, the great Florentine Platonist, classicist, homosexual and melancholic. He casts things in astrological terms – his alphabet – and talks about Saturn and the contemplative, the great and dangerous malefic. What is so sweet about him is that he warns of the dangers of melancholy from the inside – fully Saturnine – commends the wearing of bright colours, music, Sunny and Jupiterian things, while also knowing how deeply (and perhaps permanently) the mark of Saturn sits with him. It is something from another age, and yet not so much, not at all.

“I’m not sure: critical theory originally sought to integrate theory with praxis. But what did that mean exactly? For some of the Frankfurt School, it entailed  a commitment to emancipation inseparable from painful and difficult historical analysis – praxis as the pursuit of philosophy by other means. Marx had said, famously, that hitherto philosophers had sought only to understand the world: now they were to change it too. But, if anything, this effort to change the world itself required an even greater effort of understanding. To change in the direction of emancipation meant above all that one had to understand the ideological conditions that prevented change. Whatever we may now think of the Frankfurt School, its sustained analysis of the historical conditions which prevented change had to be respected. Arguably, those who now completely reject Marxism have abandoned not only any serious intention of changing but also the serious commitment to understanding. Certainly an aspect of the tradition of cultural critique has been lost: the effort to understand the historical real as we inherit it – in Marx’s words, those historical conditions are those we don’t choose and which profoundly affect the choices we do make.

Let me be more specific. There is a particular model of social struggle that has been influential in recent theory. Very briefly, it concentrates on the instabilities within the dominant, identifying, for instance, ways in which the marginal is subversive of the dominant, especially at those points where the dominant is already rendered unstable by the contradictions intrinsic to it and that include the fact (disavowed by the dominant yet apparent within the subordinate) that the two are connected in complex ways. If this model originates with Hegel, its modern form has been deeply influenced by, among other movements, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. It’s because I’ve been influenced by this account of social struggle and have remained persuaded by it that I can’t subscribe to what I regard as a wishful theoretical deployment of it, and which is most pronounced in some strands of postmodernism. Bits and pieces from all sorts of different theoretical sources are expertly spliced together, often with the aim of demonstrating a repressive dominant always allegedly on the edge of its own ruin and about the precipitated over the edge by the marginal, the other, or the different. The marginal is first appropriated then theoretically reworked as radical, subversive, avant-garde or whatever.

The result of such theoretical reworking is not so much a demonstration of the intrinsic instability of the social order or its effective subversion by forces within or adjacent to it, but an abstract, highly wrought re-presentation of it – a theoretical narrative whose plausibility is often in inverse proportion to the degree to which it makes its proponents feel better. To that extent, wishful theory is also feel-good theory. It is also a theory in which human freedom is emphatically denied, only to be endlessly replayed in intellectual fantasies of subversion. And this same ‘sublimation’ of freedom is apparent in the way that so much theoretical denial of freedom is strangely written from a masterful, omniscient subject position. The contrived narratives of wishful theory insulate their adherents from social reality by filtering it, and this in the very act of fantasising its subversion from within the academy. So much so that in some contemporary theory, the very concept of subversion has become a form of disavowal. Theory is deployed in a way that is usually self-exonerating, hardly at all in a way that is self-questioning. This kind of theory can be so quickly updated because it is so tenuously connected with the real. Drop this bit of theory, splice in that, and the whole thing can be updated to correspond to intellectual fashion. What is disappearing from theory is the intellectual commitment to engage with the cultural real in all its stubborn contingency, surprising complexity and, in Brecht’s phrase, terrible contradictions – that which makes change necessary but which also makes it terribly difficult and likely to exact a terrible cost. Nor does the skepticism about such theory imply a disregard for that which is so often its subject – the marginal, otherness, difference; on the contrary, I believe that such skepticism is now the precondition for a more thoughtful (but not necessarily uncritical) encounter with them.

And what of the instabilities in the dominant? Those who pretend that deconstruction is only about the undecidability of texts or about reducing everything to the status of a text are just wrong. But in the context of literary criticism, a certain use of it has encouraged a tendency to move too quickly from spotting a tension, an instability or inconsistency in dominant formations to speculating that here the text and the culture being represented by the text were in crisis. We discern an instability or a contradiction in gender domination, sexual difference, or masculinity – but so what? I mean, what follows, exactly? That is especially so if we always bear in mind the materialist commonplace that dominant ideologies not only mask contradictions and instabilities but also mobilise them and that it is when ideology is pushed nearly to incoherence that such instabilities and contradictions may be most brutally and effectively mobilised. What price then is some local disruption within sexual difference – whose frisson is this anyway? One of the wishful aspects of some queer theory was the assumption (hope?) that heterosexual masculinity is so riven with contradictions and insecurities it will any day now collapse into itself or, better still, collapse into the homosexuality that is its constitutive repression. Dream on.

ONE. I always think I won’t cry at the end. I always cry at the end. Aristotle calls this katharsis, a technical term which is partly literary and partly scientific, but also wholly mysterious. It describes the purging of negative emotions, which for Aristotle seem to build up in the same way as a static charge or a coiling spring. That some sort of release happens at the end of a tragedy is inarguable, what is mysterious is how and why it should happen, and why we find it pleasurable. Most answers to this question have been unconvincing, especially when they rely on packing tragedy into a moral corset, insisting it has this-or-that lesson to teach us; that there is in other words some justification for what’s happening on stage, provided the audience is sharp enough to appreciate it.

TWO. Lear gives even the most adept of moralists difficulties. Schlegel said it ‘exhausted the science of human compassion’; Coleridge thought it sublime but unplayable. In 1680, Nahum Tate wrote a version in which Cordelia lives and marries Edgar. It played to the exclusion of the earlier version for the 150 years following in English theatres, to wild enthusiasm from its audiences. Even so recent and great a critic as AC Bradley, while deploring Tate’s sentimental vandalism, nonetheless thought there was something wrong or excessive or unjust in Lear, which makes it difficult to endure (it might be that a fantasy of happiness, however diminished, is dangled in front of us and then blighted, or that on top of everything preceding it). I used to roll my eyes at the late Victorian critics for their apparent critical naïveté, but even if I chafe at their conclusions, they take the plays (and, yes, their characters) seriously, as pieces of art capable of great and maybe dangerous effects, rather than as illustrative pretexts or raw material in which to rummage for confirmation of the latest critical doctrine.

THREE. Comparators: on the one hand, Beckett. On the other, Aeschylus or Euripides. One does not really relish reading them - if I have to write or talk about any of those texts, I always put off reading them again until the last possible minute, with the faint vertiginous unease which accompanies rapid changes of state like flying, or falling. Like Beckett, Lear is in places genuinely funny. In the theatre last night, though, the laughter sometimes came in the wrong places, and not quite laughter but a kind of nervous giggling expulsion. Various theories of tragedy might lead you to expect this, as a kind of audience self-preservation. It surprised me, but especially in that it didn’t actually detract from the play, as you might think it would. I suppose we even laugh while grieving.

FOUR: Stanley Cavell’s essay on Lear, The Avoidance of Love, remains the piece of literary critical work I would give to someone who wanted an example of how wide and strange and far-reaching and important literary criticism can be. It’s funny, therefore, that it wasn’t written by a professional critic.

FIVE: One of the major difficulties in reconciling different texts of Lear is a speech given by Kent in which the political action of the play is made either to look primarily like a civil war or a threat of invasion from France and Cordelia. Maybe it’s just where I am at the moment, maybe just where the world is, but I felt more strongly in this version the political anxieties of the play, and how rooted it is in a sense of the degeneration of a state. By these lights, it matters that Lear is not just an old man maltreated by his family, but a foolish and vain king tearing the state in two and abandoning his responsibilities. The deftest treatments of the play make Regan and Goneril a touch sympathetic because they are not just monstrous and ungrateful daughters (although they are that) but because they are also dealing with a political aberration. As in many of Shakespeare’s political plays, the state is severely sick, but here more than most are we confronted with the vain imposture of authority, the bare fork’d thing behind the crown. Lear compares authority to a barking dog, but it would be foolish to say that we’re to take his statement here, while he’s dissolving in madness, as an end or a sufficient answer to the question. Nonetheless, the sense of arbitrariness and cruelty which permeates Lear’s speech is hard to escape. At the end of the play, Edgar is told he now has to sustain the “gor’d state” – not rule, simply, but sustain, with the possibility of its knitting together again quite uncertain.

SIX: Edgar’s strange exercise with his father on the fake clifftop: are we to think this an example of the play’s cruelty? It is certainly strange. After all, the most effective therapy for his father would be simply to reveal his identity, but he chooses not to do so, and constructs a kind of theatrical miracle of the sort the later Shakespeare find fascinating, and to which he returns again and again. It is (but is not only) a way of staging this question: can tragedy teach us something? Can it cure us of a malady? Can the fake produce something real? The play doesn’t offer a comforting or a clear answer; in any case, the actual revelation of his son’s identity and Gloucester’s death takes place offstage, it is reported only in a couple of lines.

SEVEN: Peter Brook complains somewhere that actors often don’t grasp their craft very well, that in comparison to musicians - where your local piano teacher might be able to sight-read Scriabin fluently - the skillset of even celebrated actors is often much more limited. In Shakespeare this lack can sometimes be acute, with the textures and subtleties of the writing effaced under a kind of gulping hysteria, which interrupts each line with pangs and pauses. This was mostly absent here. Sher’s Lear seemed for most of the play at one remove from the cast around him, right until that final and terrible death scene, where the structured physical distance between him and Cordelia in the opening scene is collapsed. Oliver Johnstone’s Edgar came the closest to the protean and negating Poor Tom I’ve yet seen on stage; I always if this might be the hardest Shakespearean role to actually pull off.

I don't think anyone can really suggest Corbyn is doing a brilliant job in parliament. That matters more to politicians and political commentators than it impinges on general popular perception, but that's not to say it's unimportant. The apparatus of the party shares a lot of responsibility for how dysfunctional it has become; it was stupid and irresponsible for the right to launch a civil war in the wake of the vote, and now that Corbyn hasn’t blinked it’s difficult to see a way out of it. It will nevertheless be very hard for Team Corbyn to function in parliament, especially if the whips go. Corbynites new to parliamentary process shouldn’t underestimate the impact of that.

It would be wonderful to have a media-friendly Corbynalike who shares (at least) his domestic policy positions, possesses political-process competence, and is perhaps unencumbered by the bunkerish mentality of Milne et al. (I’d also like a unicorn and several million dollars in cash.) Had she not lost her seat to the SNP in 2015, Katy Clark would have been the natural choice here. For now, that’s just not possible. The golpisti make a lot of electability, but that’s not the only calculus at work here, as is obvious in the selection of Angela Eagle as the replacement candidate. Electability arguments proceed on two vectors: one, charisma and telegenic power - Eagle, while perfectly competent, doesn’t possess these. Two, the ability to ‘reach’ voters beyond Labour’s core, or to those disaffected Labour voters dropping off left and right or simply to abstention. It’s unclear anyone in the party can do this.

This conflict is also about whether socialism of Corbyn’s (or indeed, any) kind has a place in mainstream politics and within the Labour Party. That there is no young, competent left candidate is partly an artefact of British political life, and partly because of the left’s atrophy within Labour for decades, but it is hard to imagine that even if there were they would be allowed anywhere near the ballot. If Corbyn, for all his frustrating qualities, is removed from office now, it is hard to see how the party doesn’t take a sharp rightward turn on migration, economic policy and internal democracy. (The assumption is that Corbyn leaving decapitates Momentum, but that is also questionable.)

Two broader issues working here: anxiety about Labour’s fragmenting base and declining vote share in its traditional heartlands; a changing relationship between the party’s elected politicians and its membership. The instinct of many of Labour’s politicians is a kind of neo-corporatism, where government balances the interests of capital, labour and the state, a political strategy which requires a certain insulation from their electoral base and degree of political autonomy. This is why MPs often trot out their Burke when they decide to ignore their constituents (they rarely mention Burke was not long after tossed out of his seat by Bristol’s electors). Disquiet about distance and lack of accountability, a sense that the PLP do not reflect the desires and political direction of the membership, and a departure from the ‘common sense’ of the functioning of representative democracy, means the trust that undergirds that relationship is very heavily eroded. On that, either the base changes or the PLP does.

Many Corbynites talk about deselection/reselection as if it’s an easy option. Not only is it (at the moment) a very complex and obstructed process, it seems obvious to me that at least some deselected MPs would not leave quietly. A number would fight their seat independently or as some SDP mk.ii candidate, either formally or informally a split from Labour. Who wins those seats in that eventuality is an open question, but it will probably be neither. That probably spells the end for the party as it currently exists – and it is, in fact, unclear which way the major unions go in that case.

In the meantime, we are in the midst of an enormous constitutional crisis, heading into a very deep recession and Boris is on his way to the Tory leadership. In the view from 30,000 feet, it is hard not to see the travails of the Labour Party and the deadlock over the implications of the plebiscite as reflecting some of the same problems of the relationship between people, democracy and state.

Last night I joked to a friend that it would take 24 hours for the usual suspects to come out with ‘actually, the Panama papers are bad’ hot takes. As it goes, I actually significantly underestimated the reflexes of the auto-reaction machine.

Quite a lot of this stuff can be ignored when it takes the form of ‘Putin is a poor, victimised anti-imperialist hero’ or ‘all the media are secret CIA stooges’ etc. There are reasonable questions to ask along the lines of focus and frameworks in reporting, of course, but making this story about the media reporting it is an error. (Tangentially, I suspect there is some stuff coming on people in American public life, but a dearth of Americans in the disclosures thus far might have plausible explanations, given both the transparency deal between Panama and the IRS, and the USA’s own lax approaches to corporate taxation, Delaware &c.) It is worth remembering there is apparently a lot more coming in general, not least the full list of companies and individuals promised by the ICIJ in May.

The more interesting objections take the following positions: it’s a non-story, really, ‘rich people keep money in banks’ and people already know everyone is corrupt; it’s not a non-story, but detracts from ‘real’ politics or is a highly reified spectacle with little chance of meaningful impact; taxation is not an automatic good, and any linking of these stories to austerity obscures the political choices involved in the latter; relatedly, concern about the distribution of wealth is not the same as, nor is even necessarily allied to, a concern with ending the exploitation on which wealth depends. I think all of these misread the significance of the leak: the story isn’t ‘rich people put their money in banks’ but legal corruption on a global scale, uniting public and private sectors, and mediated through banks, law firms and financial statelets. It unites wealth extraction in the global south with the insulated private fortunes of the ultimate beneficiaries of that process here. And though certainly austerity is a political choice, any major expansion of social provision (rather than simply stanching the wounds) will require greater revenue: here is one place to look. The ability to link grotesque detail to major policy is politically potent, and so many of these stories offer the opportunity to tackle obdurate public lies. Obscene property prices will magically fund social housing? Here is a king – an actual king – dodging any contribution to that process by owning his luxury houses through a legal fiction. Political scandals are not given, they are made.

Last Friday, Aaron and I were joined by Lindsey German and Marina Prentoulis to discuss the EU and the forthcoming referendum. You can listen to the discussion here:

My thinking has not changed significantly from that outlined at the end of this essay, which takes in a number of the broader dynamics in Europe at the moment:

“On virtually every significant matter, the British political establishment and state agree with their European counterparts, and it is because of such agreement that very minimal political choice exists in this referendum – between a British state and an ECB-led Europe committed to the same political vision with some cosmetic differences. The section of the left in the UK advocating for exit (‘lexit’) suggests that to remain would be to reconfirm British adherence to the neoliberal direction of the Union since Maastricht. But to look at the vote as a plebiscite on neoliberalism requires that the two options be clear and distinct: either neoliberal membership or anti-neoliberal exit. Instead, we are offered continuing membership in a neoliberal project, or an exit predicated on neoliberal arguments, offering ‘freedoms’ keyed to business deregulation, and tied to a range of other reactionary measures, especially on migration. In this context, it is fatuous to imagine a constellation of minoritarian left-wing groups will be able to fundamentally change the political orientation of an exit, still more ludicrous to imagine it will act as a ‘red flare’ of hope from the north to the Mediterranean left to follow in Britain’s wake. Neither option is in itself ‘anti-neoliberal’, nor can they be made so by wishing.”

That is not to say that I find particularly convincing any case made for a transformation of the European institutions, or the various hand-waving solutions around democratisation – as I outline in the essay, democratisation sounds simple, but simple translation of national parliamentary models to a grander scale runs into problems. This difficulty is what gives plausibility to many of the anti-democratic fictions propagated by EU theorists and technocrats (‘collusive’ or ‘nonmajoritarian’ democracy being their names.) But I think it should also be understood in a wider context of shifts in the role and nature of the state and its institutions over the past half-century, shifts that are not easily reversible by regress to any isolated national model. Any democratic settlement in Europe would need at the very least to address the disaggregation and depoliticisation of economic policy from the ‘contestable’ into the merely ‘technical’ zone of governance. (Peter Mair’s chapter on the EU in Ruling the Void remains perceptive on these shifts.)

Some brief thoughts below, initially in the form of a Facebook post, but I thought they might have some limited broader use here. Apologies for adding to the morass of comment: This morning I am mostly contemplating what it means to have a leader of the opposition – and almost certainly a shadow chancellor – who was extensively spied on by the SDS in the 1990s, for political activity. (That being one reason, presumably having been focus-group tested, the conservatives are falling over each other to attach the word 'security' to every other sentence.)

A few months ago I remarked to Aaron that I thought, should Corbyn win, he'd be the victim of a relatively swift palace coup; it was one of those speculations I thought never likely to be tested by reality. That such a thing now seems immediately unlikely is interesting: partly the sheer numbers make it difficult for all but the most rabid to suggest impropriety, partly the sheer mediocrities on offer as replacements. And the right of the party has, I think, recognised a shift in political mood and is waiting to see its duration and extent; its cannier members know that to offer another technocratic balloon-on-a-stick right now would be stupidity. But perhaps wait two years and offer Dan Jarvis – as bland as a boiled potato, but there are dashing photos of him with a gun, and he never said anything nice about bin Laden.

Those now joining the Labour Party and attending CLP meetings for the first time are likely to be surprised at the Party's thoroughly decayed internal democracy, and at the viciousness of power plays within it. I assume there will be significant pressure to 'reform' the voting system within the party so that similar exercises in democracy will not be repeatable. While I think a split is highly unlikely in reality, it will be used as a threat against the party's left (and in fact already is – see whoever was briefing Laura Kuenssberg yesterday.)

For those outside the party, I think this ought also to be a time for reflection. What does it say about the groups and campaigns outside the Labour Party that no such equivalent capture of energy was possible? However frustrating it is, I think it better to recognise that people joining the Labour Party make judgements about political outcomes just as we do: it's clearly not sufficient just to say they have been deceived, or they're foolish, or that they are giving up (or if they *are* giving up, if it is a symptom of giving up, it is good to understand why.) There are strong arguments about the limits of the Labour Party, but they are at their best when conjoined to a specific analysis of its history and of the current moment, rather than when articulated in purely abstract terms.

Two further things: when trying to get a grip on the Corbyn phenomenon, I suggested to a comrade that one way to look at it was as the result of deflected struggles elsewhere; i.e. -- the significant number of people in the Corbyn camp who come from a politically eclectic background, many of whom spent the years since 2008 involved in extraparliamentary political campaigns (most noticeably UKUncut & similar). This move is partly simply pragmatic -- the opportunity was there -- and partly the result of some long frustrations about creating durable political-organisational articulations, a problem compounded by the strange configuration of politics in the UK. I've usually tended to come down on the unconvinced & historically skeptical side of those debates, and have often been annoyed by the way political 'pragmatism' can excuse pretty much any ideological contortion, or the occasionally PollyAnna-ish disposition of the pragmatists. But nor do I think there has been any entirely convincing answer to those debates for the past decade (at the very least), perhaps because some of the taxonomies we're using are beginning to feel obsolete (especially some of the implied contents of categories like 'social movement'.) On a purely personal note, I have to say it is amusing and gratifying to watch those who declared themselves inheritors of the earth – who expected to serve their time as functionaries, then parachute into a safe seat and follow dutifully the crack of the whip – feel like the world has dropped out from beneath their feet.

In terms of obvious mistakes: failing to confront the matter of women shadow ministers head-on was foolish, as was walking along in silence while being asked questions about it. Presumably someone has decided that a relatively combative rather than deferential approach to conventional media is the strategy – but if that's so, why not challenge the question directly? Either in terms of the focus on the so-called 'great offices', the wider make-up of the cabinet or in terms of policy focus. Or even just admit that it's a horrible failure not to appoint a woman. This is one of those areas where I think speech is better than silence.

My twitter account has been suspended, for quoting a line from a poem by Sean Bonney, who I think is one of the best poets writing today. It is not an easy poem by any means, but it is worth reading. I was moved to quote it by the grim sight of Tories twerking at Manchester Pride, but I also worried about the quotation, and its context: quotation, especially from poetry, can so easily wrench things out of their context. (But then, I think, that line’s supposed to be quotable anyway.) Regardless, I followed it up immediately with a link to the whole poem. The few members of LGBTory who saw it didn’t like it – good, it was intended to be upsetting – as I don’t like seeing Tories, who are members of a party that for decades demonised and prosecuted queer people, who even today are a party riddled with homophobes and racists, who even now preside over cuts to services essential for parts of our community who are in appalling circumstances, marching in Pride parades. Ask anyone at AKT or Stonewall Housing what a Conservative government means for LGBT people and you’ll want to spit too. You’ll want to explode with anger.

I admit it’s hard to take a flap about poetry and some thin-skinned Tories seriously, other than as a demonstration of exactly how limited the commitment of conservatives to ‘freedom of speech’ is. Poetry is not usually regarded as a strong weapon; it is rarely now even accorded the power to change minds or wound hearts. Poetry makes nothing happen, though its inutility shouldn’t be occasion for praise. Why the flap, then? It’s worth tracking some of the implications of this little backyard scandal.

VIOLENCE

The poem, and the lines I quoted especially, employ a rhetoric of violence that is uncomfortable to read or hear. (Steve Willey reflected on performing this poem here.) But it is not an unambiguously violent poem: the lament in the stanzas that precede those lines for the ‘dying angles’ of the city, its grappling with the ‘horrific quantity of force we will need to continue even to live’, and the torque of violence and formal restraint in the final stanza itself – these are the context in which the imperative is given. They do not diminish its violence, but nor is its violence entirely separable from them (that’s why I felt it necessary to link the whole thing). Why is it compared to music or drunken speech, and why is simplicity their common factor? All three elude in some way the intractability of sober speech; music in its supersession of discursive meaning, drunkenness in its removal of hesitancy and doubt, and violence by counterposing its brute physicality to language’s endless filiations and ambiguities. They are all moments that (briefly) transcend alienation. Is this justification, is this a moral good? The poem makes those judgements difficult.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there is a difference between violence and violent rhetoric, however distasteful one might find the latter. Bonney’s poem is, the title tells us, After Rimbaud. Rimbaud, after witnessing the semaine sanglante, the week of butchery at the conquest of the Paris Commune, also wrote an extended fantasy of vengeance and violence, which dissolves at its end exclaiming “It’s nothing — I’m here! I’m still here.” That is to say, the fantasies of violence in Rimbaud are undercut by the realisation that hyperbolic vengeance is impossible, and is often an expression of defeat or impotence. Both the justice of his anger – world-encompassing – and the impossibility of its realisation are the themes of his poem; were it otherwise there would be things to do other than write poetry.

Raymond Williams once pointed out that ‘violence’ is a term used primarily to describe the unruliness and dissidence of the governed: that is, force out of place. It has been a consistent feature of dissident writing to point out the moral arbitrariness of these terms, and their use to describe only force not sanctioned by the state. When directed downwards, violence is called ‘restoring order’, ‘restraining’, ‘discipline’ etc. Contestation of this taxonomy is part of Bonney’s poem – Downing Street’s ‘assembly of ghouls’, the ‘euphemism for civil war’ that goes on in the country surrounding us. There is a sense of moral disgust at the equivocations that allow such violence to go unremarked, naturalised, for its architects to remain inculpable. That is the sense that leads to the imperative in the final stanza. It in turn picks up on a vein of thinking about violence that runs through late 20th century communist thought, that sees violence as purgative and foundational, most clearly expressed in Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. It is hard today to fully endorse this line of thinking, even while accepting its strong critiques of pacifism; I’m not sure whether it’s a result my inclination as a reader, but I detect a measure of ambivalence about this doctrine in the poem, too. But key to both Rimbaud’s and Bonney’s poem are that they do not seek to redeem their violence or explain it away – that would diminish both of them, as it would to claim they simply seek non-violence. Instead they operate in the difficult moral and political ground of fury, powerlessness and despair, and do not seek to foreshorten its difficulty by providing an easy way out of it.

There is more I might say here – about the distinctiveness of this poem in saying things that typical poetry audiences do not want to hear, about its insistence on culpability, about its status as a difficult object, and about the kinds of desire and fragility operating in it – but I think it is enough for now to underline the dual character I’ve been exploring above, that is, its insistence on polarisation and culpability, and the (bridgeable? unbridgeable?) gap between its rhetoric and actual violence. It is unpleasant; it is not a poem about nature and flowers, and it is not a ‘political poem’ that tries to find ten rhymes for ‘Tories are bad’. If it is ‘about’ anything, it is about what it means to continue to be alive in a world ordered such as ours is, without lying to oneself about it.

NEUTRALITY

Why quote it at all? Something snapped in me when I saw a bunch of young conservatives at Manchester Pride. I thought of the occasions where I’d been privy to how these people really behave when they think no-one else is listening, the curled-lip contempt they have for poor people or black people, their mourning for the Empire, or their hatred for ‘weird’ queers or ‘showoff’ faggots or any of the other hundred hatreds that pour off them. I thought of the people I know who have been made homeless, or whose health has gone through the floor under this and the last government. And yes, I thought of section 28, I thought of all the other standard objections, of who founded Pride and what it stood for before it became this. I know the justifications – the claim that ‘pride’ is a neutral value, that the march must be inclusive of all LGBT people – and I know the people these justifications drive away. And it seemed to me that those lines summed up exactly the ambiguous border of anger and despair, seething frustration and impossibility that Pride brings out in me.

It was intemperate, of course, and like other occasions where I’ve spoken passionately or intemperately, I might regret it. (It is precisely that intemperate spasm that the poem captures.) But it also seems to me that impassioned speech, intemperate or polemical, even invective or calumniating speech, is part of a really living public sphere. I don’t like this argument much: I don’t think anger or vituperation gets us anywhere useful when it’s our chief mode of discussion, yet anger also seems necessary when trying to break up a consensual silence in public life. That silence is around responsibility, the idea that some political choices are reprehensible and wrong, that they have material consequences, and that by joining the organisation that enacts them you bear some portion of the blame. This is not a pretty picture – a euphemised civil war – but it is only describing what is actually happening; it is antagonistic, even imperfectly and hyperbolically so, because such is the state of things. It is to say: the consequences of your politics ought to follow you in everyday life. You are not neutral.

To quote the lines that I did is a way of trying to puncture that neutrality; it is a way of saying politics cuts through our identities, and does so painfully, and that to be silent about it is to betray principle. It is both a marker of antagonism and a deep frustration. To capture both sides of that strange position requires poetry. It is not a threat, nor an encouragement; it would be ludicrous to think so. It is perhaps worth saying that I am not someone who thinks of violence as a political solution – it never has been – but that rhetorical violence can bring out some of the otherwise hidden violence under the carapace of neutrality. So it goes. I have more to say about the history of politics and violence, but in another time, and another place.

PUBLIC SPACE

Twitter, of course, is a public space, an unintentional experiment in mass communication in which distinctions of rank and rights to speak are generally levelled. It has had huge issues with abuse and the treatment of women who dare to speak or write in public, including stalking, sexual harassment and murder threats. It has at the same time been hugely beneficial and educational for me and many others; it is typically the first thing I check in the morning. As I remarked above, it is quite an irony that the ‘libertarian’ wing of the Tory party – from which LGBTory largely draws – should seek to put limits on freedom of expression for a little chunk of mildly offensive poetry. Needless to say, the same expectation does not apply to racism, misogyny, class-hatred or the praise of various historical British atrocities when it emanates from them. I suspect part of this suspension is about Twitter trying to tighten its policy on abuse. I’ve complied with their initial demands for deletion, and it remains to be seen whether they’ll allow me back on as a result. It would be a shame if not.

There is a more general question about who gets to speak and what they get to say contained in this; about the kinds of questions or modes of speech are acceptable in public. Personally, I tend to value those freedoms more than many of those I share a politics with; they are ‘bourgeois’ freedoms and unequally applied, yes, but they also contain a real and necessary freedom within them, one that is freedom to express and think, not freedom from criticism or polemic, even when discomfiting. Such a freedom is often subject to constraints, sometimes those constraints are unjust. But beyond this freedom, there is a narrower circle of permissible expression, one that softens the edges of power, one that lights our rulers in a friendly manner, and from their best side. So we get discussions about ‘hard decisions’, ‘political realities’ and ‘national prosperity’ instead of the number of people driven into misery and despair by the government, into homelessness or precarious living, who are failed again and again by services stretched to breaking point until they simply to give up or break down. The people who make these decisions, who support them, are allied to them, want to become them, are dancing in the street. You can find yourself, again, spitting with rage.

Spiky straplines and quotations make for good antagonism; they can also trivialise and debase an argument. I don’t think hatred or violence are solutions to the world in which we live, I think they are a feature of it, a feature of a society debased by inequality and ordered such that baseness and violence are part of it. In such a situation intemperate speech is inevitable; antagonism in a public sphere governed by a narrowing range of acceptable opinions is also, I think, a good thing. But it is also necessary to reflect on the ease with which one might reach for violent rhetoric, about the gap between rhetoric and reality, how tangible and unbridgeable it might make political differences seem, how it might work to reassert those differences in a moment of defeat. Those are all double-edged possibilities; antagonism is never simply pleasant, it is always difficult, it is always beset by the possibility of being overmastered by hatred. That’s why I reached for the Bonney poem; poetry more than most forms can express that complexity without sacrificing a dimension of subjectivity that leaves space for conflicting, unpleasant or uncertain emotions.

Jeremy Corbyn sat down with Novara and gave us an interview. Watch it above, or on the Novara FB page. You can read Aaron’s thoughts from it here. Some tentative thoughts from me below.

1. Aaron's final point is the most difficult, and is a question that has resonances across Europe at the moment. That is: how can you fund the classical model of strong-welfare states without either (a) the domestic growth & explosion in international trade characteristic of post-WW2 Europe, or (b) a hugely crisis-prone finance industry undergirding your state revenue? In Europe specifically, this is also a political question, because the way the EU and its institutions are arranged make it difficult to pull this off – but even without an EU, it's not clear there's any simple answer to this question for 'mature' capitalist economies. This is the difficulty faced by social democrats in Europe at the moment. (For more on the question of Europe, listen to tomorrow's ‪#‎NovaraFM‬.)

2. Corbyn would have been considered quite a middle-of-the-road left Labourite a few decades ago. That he is not now is a testimony to the incredible constriction of political views – and at times the total *absence* of political polarisation – in electoral politics in this country. No wonder, then, he appears like the daystar of liberty for those who've had their head in the filth for so long. Though plainer and more direct than his competitors, he nonetheless gives the occasional politician's answer (one may want to close a detention centre without actually committing to do so). But that is his job, I suppose. But I think there is a more general question about the transformation of political institutions here, that we get hints of in his answers on how a Labour Party under him might govern: a reluctance to move away from the traditional form of politics, a conservatism of form that leaves unanswered broader questions about how we might organise our lives. That is: Corbyn wants more participation in democratic institutions, with which it is hard to disagree, but is less forthcoming on what the issues beyond simple participation might be. It would be useful to press him on what a 'constitutional convention' here would entail.

3. This, I think, is the reason for his weakness over stop-and-search and policing: his answer to it is simply 'more training', which leaves untackled the problem of state institutions in general, and what they might be for. This needn't be so: it would be possible to take a left social-democratic position that says, for instance, the police are a concentration of functions, some of which should be abolished, some of which should be separated into distinct organisations and functions, being at the moment a kind of 'armed social work' that does nothing for the actual problem. This tends to be a frequent weakness in Labour-affiliated thinking about the state, if indeed the state is ever thought about at all.

4. This might connect nicely with what you could call Labour's local problem: that Labour councils are generally dens of corruption and venality, or agents of gatekeeping and social cleansing – especially (but not only) in London. You can answer this (and Corbyn perhaps might) by saying DCLG cuts, of unbelievable severity, force councils into difficult situations in which there are no winners. By reversing such cuts, one might claim, councils will be relieved of their worst aspect. But is this true? Does it even begin to address the question? Is it not also true that state institutions themselves have a overbearing, almost irresistible, logic that is hard to resist and independent of the holder of office? How does one deal with that? And - though wanting to avoid Kremlinology - how would a Corbyn-led Labour Party relate to local government bodies headed by people like Southwark’s dire Peter John?

5. I think it is probably useless to talk (as some anarchists do) as if the Labour Party were a metaphysically & unalterably bad organisation, members of which necessarily support, by joining, war, murder, deportation, exploitation etc. And yet it is true: this is a party that has not only done these things, but continues to support them even in opposition, and whose grandees are *even now* taking to the broadsheet columns to explain why these things are virtues, and electoral boons. I say it is probably useless because it is not a convincing argument to anyone not already convinced, both because of its reliance on a strangely a priori construction, and because it does not feel true to people who are members of the Labour Party. Those are people who have for years felt at odds with their own leadership, or who have felt themselves in struggle against their own party in power, and who very probably have asked themselves, many times, am I in the right party? The right organisation? The answers people find to those questions, either about formal links between historical working class institutions, or about the utter uselessness or impossibility of other political formulations outside it, or even simple despair at action outside of what they know to be insufficient, are better pointers to what we should be doing and arguing than making arch comments about the stupidity or moral standing of those who are part of Labour.

Some very quick thoughts, having looked at Athens’ proposals last night, and as an update of my thoughts on last Friday’s Novara FM. The proposals from last night, were they put into practice, would be a disaster for Greece.

Plenty of people suggesting they are simply a stepping-stone in negotiations, but it seems to me this gambles on there being a secret Tsipras plan that none of us know about. Instead, it really could be that he plans to return and tell everyone – this is the best we could get. This is victory. Pensions slashed, privatisations abounding, VAT soaring, spending gutted. An invitation to 'experts' from other member states to come crawling over the corpse.

It might be - and I think it is - that Tsipras fears the social calamity of banking collapse and exit. My impression from speaking to members of SYRIZA for whom remaining in the Euro is the sine qua non of their politics is that they are convinced that exit would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions, and that the responsibility for empty shelves and voided deposits would be theirs. Perhaps. It's this sentiment that is the reason for no internal 'Plan B' for exit.

But it is also reasonable to say: isn't this worse? It might be that there is unofficial talk around debt relief and restructuring that isn't part of the official deal, so it gets past the hardliners in Germany and the east. But what reason has anyone to trust anything unofficial? Tsipras et al have consistently underestimated the sheer viciousness of the Eurogroup negotiators, assuming they won't let Greece go to the wall, preferring to endure whatever financial turbulence ensues than blink. But this isn't true - as the left within SYRIZA has made clear for a long time, and the upper echelons seem, belatedly, to be realising. Part of the reason for that is pour encourager les autres – Podemos in particular – but part of it is that many of them privately believe Greece should never have accessioned to EMU in the first place. Regardless of motivation, however: there must be a part of calculus that says - in fact, to take this deal and stay in is worse than to stay out. That is what the 'NO' vote meant: that this is not how things ought to be. That the human cost of these decisions can be enough to refuse them, to *have* to refuse them.

To be clear, the political worry here is not that everything in Greece collapses and the fascists take over. That is the spectre that drags itself across Leftists' nightmares, because it is the most familiar of the options. But the a crisis just as severe would be: that it just goes on like this. An administration formerly of the left, or a government of national unity, puts through the agreement as it currently stands, and three years of social strife return, healthcare continues to fall through the floor, people go hungry, pensions (and everyone who depends on them, which isn't just the old) evaporate. And three years down the line, what? More? It's not just dire warnings about the future but the crisis of the present that demands attention.

On last Friday’s show, Aaron, Ash and I had some arguments about ‘fully automated luxury communism’, a slogan I have been skeptical about for a while. I’ve long been open to it as a slogan that tackles head-on the masochistic municipal misery taken for granted by much of the left as the only possible socialist future; I like that it rescues from the history of the workers’ movement a communist optimism and abundance. But I’ve also been skeptical about the concept of ‘luxury’ itself, as well as the apparent oversights in terms of the current global picture and any exploration of how to move from individualised consumption to public affluence. All that’s to say: automation without a social revolution is a nightmare. 

The discussion takes in some of these points: especially on commodities, the law of property, the perils of automation and the usefulness of PR-friendly slogans. It’s worth a listen; I don’t think I’m convinced of it, at least any more than it is an iteration of that same communist optimism that underwrites, for instance, social anarchism or many versions of autonomist marxism. We might also very well have a discussion of whether eudaimonia is necessarily a useful theoretical model for a communist politics, something we didn’t fully argue out on the show (at the risk of boring the audience half to death, I suppose.)  I’ve transcribed (and very lightly edited) some of my opening remarks below; forgive their lightness and off-the-cuff nature, but I hope it gives at least some idea of how I’m thinking about this. 

I’d suggest the show pairs very well with our interview with the excellent Kristin Ross on Communal Luxury and the Paris Commune. * 

I’ve been thinking on and off about this phrase, and as you know, I have my reservations about it. Let me say I think it is, or could be, a good piece of advertising: it’s a goos riposte to the idea that communism will be lived in misery, scarcity, or at the best a kind of austerity predicated on a superhuman forebearance from any kind of excess or private desire. And we will come on to the question of desire. Instead, I think it is right to focus on abundance, or the possibility of abundance, or the central paradox of capitalist development, that in the midst of abundance we produce and enforced scarcity, so much so that lack, want and privation are taken to be natural features of the human condition. The most powerful statement of the communist project will always be to lay a claim to the future, rather than a lost past, or a past off the rails, and – "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.” This, I think, is why FALC has had some traction.

Nonetheless, I find there are things about it that stick in my craw, and that are worth further examination. I think these are points of relatively minor disagreement, and that we might worthily tinker with them, and see if we can illuminate things a bit more. The first and most obvious is about the word “luxury”. I am quite skeptical about this word. How did you jokingly put it? Cartier for everyone? Yes, perhaps. But I think it is clear that luxury in this sense is about position, access and visibility. As I understand it, one buys a Cartier watch not simply because its mechanisms are well-tuned, but in order to show it off to people; therefore it becomes a sign. What is it a sign of? it is a sign of the social order, that is, I am the kind of person who has access to these things, and an attendant bank balance and the other accompanying privileges. More importantly, YOU are NOT. In a world in which this is not the case – in which everyone has a Cartier watch – it ceases to *be* a Cartier watch, i.e., a luxury item in that way, because it no longer possesses the symbolic weight that it does by its rarity and inaccessibility.

Where does this leave us? I think it tells us two important things, one about the way we live now, and one about desire. The first thing it tells us is that there is a very powerful system operative in our culture around commodities and their relation to human need, and that it doesn’t operate purely by putting “false” desires in people’s heads. That is what a rather crude Leftism suggests, always rushing to tell people that they are stupid or crass or deceived for wanting things. In fact, I think this tells us something instructive about capitalism and desire: that there are certain human desires, such as for security, or comfort, or love, or sexual worth, or esteem, which our culture very strongly co-locates with particular commodities, even commodities that don’t apparently fulfil that need, or only do so in a symbolic way. ‘Luxury’ as a category often partakes both in a hypertrophic fulfilment of these needs (e.g., a superyacht, a very big house, status items) as well as a symbolic fulfilment of others, such as security, esteem, worth, very visibly and in public. It would be a very perverse individual indeed who bought all of these things but kept them hidden in a basement, only to be brought out for his own eyes (though such perversions do exist). Yet we also know that these commodities in general do not fulfil those needs –for worth, esteem, security – and that the commodity may immediately seem disappointing or unfulfilling once it has been acquired, or the *lack* is still there. That is because these needs are social needs that can never be fulfilled adequately through a commodity, but that industrialised society can entangle those needs with commodities very well – the marketing literature is full of this.

This leads us to some other matters about ‘luxury’, because the objection could well be: OK, well I take your point about Cartier watches and brand names, but what about, say, 400-count sheets and well-cut clothes or what have you? Things that are viewed as luxuries because they are more comfortable or efficacious? Surely they should be available to all? Well yes, here I think we can agree, but the point is less about ‘luxury’ than it is about no longer needing to operate on the commodity cycle of planned obsolescence or gradations of quality in a mass market. But this leaves unattacked two questions. One is this question of desire, which in our current period operates largely around what one can arrogate to oneself through a logic of exclusion and exclusivity: how may I acquire this from other people, because only ownership under the law of property can satisfy my needs. I think what we need is a transformation in the way we conceive of the *basic units* of social life, towards, instead, a kind of public profusion outside of the restrictions and limits of the law of property. And I imagine we will return to this question of desire, publicness and private property through the show.

The tower in flames – cathedral, convent, whatever – was the image of disaster for medieval man. Any chronicler worth his salt has his fair share of fires: they were built like tinderboxes, anyway, those old buildings, sometimes strewn with enough dry hay to constitute an unspoken challenge to God. Maybe a monk hurries late for prayers and knocks over some small votive candle; maybe the wind sucks in under the gap in the oak doors, blowing sparks from an unextinguished fire into something fatal. These are messy, ill prepared-for, but calamities basically explicable in their own terms, without any incomprehensible externality at their beginning. Lightning is not. By its nature it is unexpected, judgement from the heavens; who may know when the thunder comes?

Such a disaster might well be understood – by townspeople coming out of their low houses to gawp, by men rushing to-and-fro with water-buckets or sand – in several ways. The first is practical; fire might eat not just the tower, but the whole town, all the cattle, the thatches, the stored grain. Then, with some obscure dread and certainly not in these words, symbolic: if the tower is a visual symbol of authority, both kingly and sacerdotal, around which the rhythm of your life in some way operated – that collapsing clang was the bell that signalled the end of your day, that ruined narthex where you heard the preacher – then you feel something integral to the order of your world, something inside you dislodge as it burns. (This is why the poor of a town sometimes smile into their sleeves even amid the disaster.) Then, perhaps, if you are of that mind, you will also (while the fire burns in your eyes) suspect the mute judgement of lightning is the final term and proof of sin and corruption, now to be rooted out among the people and laid out among the rubble. Repent! Such hunters of sin and indigence rarely begin with themselves. And then, perhaps, if you have your mind turned towards final things, you see in the burning tower something eschatological, the sign or presentiment of a world passing away, maybe even the first tremblings of the final day; for you the disaster was always inevitable and though no angel or pale horse quite seems visible, you think you catch the shudder of a wing or flash of a haunch in the fire.

I have been thinking about Epstein's sculpture Jacob and the Angel for most of the day – in between coughing, hacking, spluttering, trying horribly to ignore how ill I am. A postcard of it is tacked up over the desk where I do most of my work, a perceptive friend's gift. I don't know if they've moved it now, but the sculpture – genuinely colossal – used to stand out of the way by a staircase in the Tate Britain. I used to truant from school and end up leaning against a wall just looking at it, with the kind of attention that can only be given by a teenager with a whole day ahead and the sense that some mystery lay hidden in it, just beyond my thought. In fact, I couldn't stop looking at it: its massive stillness, the sense of power at rest in Jacob's arms. Of course for a teenager, whose mind and body are in a state of perpetual war, within and without, the attraction of the theme is obvious. Still the more so for a gay teenager who does not quite yet know how to reconcile unshakable and overwhelming bodily conviction with the world in which he has grown up; the sense that one thing or the other has to break, and which it is to be is not yet clear. 'I will not let thee go except thou bless me.' The bright crude paintings of the children's Bible that had been a constant part of my childhood never gave to Jacob the gravity of this work: the playground scrap on its pages barely resembled Epstein's sculpture, which captured a moment of strength at its exhaustion, at its limit, of an unexpected sensuousness quite detached from the violent way we had been taught to understand sex. It is hard to describe – to remember with precision and no self-deception – the effect it had on me, the mixed dread and excitement it provoked, the sense that it opened a whole realm to me.

Much later I learned that its contemporary reception was similarly uneasy, something perverse and untoward in its treatment of religious subjects; and in any case, look at it, who could say whether they were wrestling or embracing? The more mercenary of the time realised that a touring exhibition restricted to adults only would only help sales. None of that really touches the work, of course, which must have been a let-down for anyone expecting a cheap thrill. No spectator has access to what really passes between the two figures: we must read it in the knees bearing the weight, the arm dropped in exhaustion, the neck falling back. The word wrestling does not appear in its title. There is a poverty of good paintings of this story; there is Gauguin's which is not about the story at all, and there are the inexpressive pieces which may as well show nothing more than a Friday night street brawl. Only Rembrandt's version shows anything that approaches the desire for consolation – the tenderness and depletion – of Epstein's work. In Rembrandt's version, Jacob's head almost appears to rest like a child on the breast: no such traditional figure is provided as a way to understand the sculpture.