http://macbethprojeto.co.uk/cycle-6/
A project that I have been very excited to take part in my role as Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire: Centre for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts.
The project explores new performance practices via Zoom Digital Theatre in a collaboration with Brazilian Company http://satyros.com.br/os-satyros/
Trailer for Macbeth: Os Satyros & CIPA
Recorded version of the LIVE Zoom Digital Theatre Performance of Macbeth
Please look, listen and share. Some amazing sets to share on this new listening project.
www.lookatyoursoul.org
I’ve been working on creating this site, with Kristen Neilson, over the past few months - and we are finally ready to set it free!!
Look At Your Soul is an active listening platform. As some of you will know - I have collected and danced to rare northern soul and funk 45s for most of my life. The music has had an incredible, positive, and deep impact on my ‘life’, it has been ‘life’ giving. It was responsible for starting me along a ‘life’ long path of dancing and movement that began at the age of 15, when I went to my first all nighter, and danced.
Following the terrible murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery earlier this year - I found myself having challenging discussions about racism in the UK, and it became clear to me that we all have a duty to actively fight against this in our everyday lives.
Kristen and I got talking online (we hadn’t ever met before) about how some aspects of the UK rare and Northern Soul scene are blatantly racist - and shared stories of what we had witnessed over the years.
This is an underground scene which is based ENTIRELY around a love of rare Black American soul records from the 60s and 70s.
So you see the sad irony.
So we got our heads together and decided to do something - our small contribution to opening up a conversation, actively listening to these records again with these issues in mind, asking rare soul collectors from across the globe (of which there are a few!) to revisit their music, revisit their records and the artists, to create a set of “Soul With a Message” to share on our platform.
This is just the beginning and I am excited to see how this will develop over the next few months/years!
First incredible set is by collector, Dj and music historian Tommy Sovik (Norway)
Thanks to Sarah Raine, Tim Wall and Liam Quinn for the inspiring talks and support for the project!
Soul With A Message (SWAM) - a term coined by music historian Tommy Sovik (Norway)
Great to have the film we made at the beginning of lockdown - ‘(dis)integration’ - selected as one of the final 64 (from over 400 entries, from 22 countries) to be shown as part of the:
En cuarentena’ de la Soria International Short Film Festival (SOIFF)
They will be screened via Vimeo between November 12 -22nd
Director/ Choreodramaturg: me @industryart
Dance Artist: @killthekat_
DOP: @robbakerashton
Editor: @alice_underwood_films
Soundscape: @icyaudiovisual
You can watch (dis)integration below:
“Free, white, and 21” appeared in dozens of movies in the ‘30s and ‘40s, a proud assertion that positioned white privilege as the ultimate argument-stopper. It was a catchphrase of the decade, as blandly ubiquitous as any modern meme: a way for white America to check its own privilege and feel exhilarated rather than finding fault.
Doctoral Research in Performing Arts at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
AHRC Midlands4Cities PhD funding for UK and International applicants
The AHRC-funded Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M4C) brings together eight leading universities across the Midlands to support the professional and personal development of the next generation of arts and humanities doctoral researchers. M4C is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University, University of Warwick, Coventry University, University of Leicester, De Montfort University, Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.
M4C is awarding up to 89 doctoral studentships for UK and International applicants for 2021 entry through an open competition and 21 Collaborative Doctoral Awards (CDA) through a linked competition with a range of partner organisations in the cultural, creative and heritage sector.
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire at Birmingham City University is inviting applications from students whose research interests connect with our field of expertise in Interdisciplinary Performing Arts Research, including:
· The contemporary actor
· Histories of actor training
· Interdisciplinary and multimedia performance
· Theatre making and devising
· Dance performance making
· Choreographic practices
· Embodiment studies
· Eco-somatics
· Ecology and performance
· Spirituality, spiritual traditions and performance
· Applied theatre and performance
· Contemporary drama
· Theatre and politics
· Spatial dramaturgies
Research supervision is led by Professor Aleksandar Dundjerović, with Dr. Polly Hudson, Dr. Paola Botham and Dr. Gareth Somers.
Information on our interdisciplinary Performance Research Hub, part of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts, CIPA, can be found here:
https://www.bcu.ac.uk/conservatoire/research/clusters-and-specialisms/performance-research-hub.
To develop an application for doctoral study at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, please download the expression of interest form, which can be found at http://www.bcu.ac.uk/research/midlands4cities. This form, and any queries, should be sent to m4c@bcu.ac.uk by 30 November 2020.
The deadline for M4C funding applications is 13 January 2021 (noon), by which time applicants must have applied for a place to study and have ensured that two academic references are submitted using the Midlands4Cities online reference form.
For full details of eligibility, funding, research supervision areas and CDA projects, and for dates of our November application writing workshops, please visit: https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/ or contact enquiries@midlands4cities.ac.uk.
The CUT collective - a colony under lockdown
Choreodramaturg - Paul Sadot
Dancers:
Kat Collings
Lisa Rowley
Connor Scott
Riley Wolf
Joshua Nash
Christina Dionysopoulou
First Edited - Alice Underwood Films (June 2020) then adapted and disrupted by Paul Sadot (October 2020)
Do any/many White celebrities use their Hollywood status for such overt political gestures, to stand up and be counted, nowadays? Or do they just make vapid, insincere and self promoting videos of ‘we are all in this together’ from their luxury homes, like the ones we have had to endure during COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter?
More about the story here:
https://www.businessinsider.com/marlon-brando-rejected-godfather-oscar-2017-2?r=US&IR=T
I am very excited to have this book land today. Already, I can sense parallels with what is happening in the UK, particularly in a rapidly gentrifying London where engineered culture is replacing the authentic culture it is evicting: Invoking cultural capital as a smokescreen.
“Summers also analyses how blackness - as a representation of diversity - is marketed to sell a progressive, “cool”, and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban centre”
‘Considering tightly controlled funding strategies, the apparent openness of the mainstream arts establishment to the cultural differences and new identities represented through Hip Hop Dance Theatre appears questionable. I suggest that developing the East Bank in London is less a process aimed at protecting cultural differences than one of assimilation, which serves the mainstream arts establishment’s imperial purposes, or ‘the cultivation of a self-promoting and self-interested narrative of the metropolis as benignly tolerant of difference’ (Harvie, 2005: 16). This notion seems prescient in relation to arguments over access, supervision and displacement implicated in the East Bank development. I believe the cultural district itself, while purported by the architects to ‘intensify the urban grain and make the stadium and park feel more special’ (Bevan, 2016), will remain an exclusive landmark of London’s elite, including its elite artistic institutions (Sadot, 2019).’
‘Increasingly, today’s cultural tourists are looking for more than just the tickbox attractions. They’re after genuine experiences that are memorable and ‘brag-able’. More and more often, they’re looking to experience distinctive, ‘local’ culture, too. Destinations like Amsterdam, Paris and New York have already recognised the pull of the ‘local’ as a distinctive tourism experience’ ( Bernard Donoghue, Chief Executive of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA), London).
Perhaps it would be a good idea to ask all students who are about to enter any Dance course or degree that offers Hip Hop or so called ‘Urban’ (whatever that is?), to watch these before they learn a step.
There are, of course, many great documentaries around the subject so take your pick. But take responsibility for instigating and continuing the sociopolitical and historical discourse that underpins the dance if you are teaching it.
Made at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown.
Exploring how we could gather together and move. Using various media platforms to mediate and develop choreography and breathe together as a working ensemble.
Massive respect and thanks to all the talented and soulful people involved.
Dancers: .
@christina_dionysopoulou
@joshua.vendetta.nash
@mangorowley
@connorjs13
@killthekat_
@rileywxlf
@efarnellwatson .
Esmee Orgles
Editor: @alice_underwood_films .
Music: @icyaudiovisual .
Movement Director/Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot represented by Industry Art
https://davidjubb.blog/2020/04/25/time-to-change/ link to original article
I’m stuck in bed with a knackered shoulder. I’ve been experiencing a series of pitiful lockdown injuries. The first was a black-eye when one of my kids head-butted me. The second was a back injury after emptying a potty. And this week I woke up with a frozen shoulder so I can’t lift my right arm. I’m afraid my main contribution to the worldwide COVID-19 effort has been to prop up the flagging sales of Ibruprofen. This sorry state of affairs has reached rock bottom by being bed bound for two days. My partner is now trying to do her day job and look after our kids (my job) at the same time. Despite my guilt I won’t pretend there hasn’t been an upside; I have experienced relative quiet for a couple of days. I love my kids and all that but being tanked up on max strength painkillers, laying down in a quiet room and catching up with events outside this house has its perks.
I have been reading about the inspirational work of some cultural organisations during the COVID-19 crisis; such as Slung Low and Holbeck in Leeds and Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol. I have also spent time thinking a bit about my old job in Battersea and how challenging it must be to run a venue right now. When Battersea’s Grand Hall burnt down in 2015 we had insurance, we had the other half of the building to do stuff in and as far as I am aware we were the only theatre which burnt down that year. In other words we were inundated with masses of generous support from our local community, artists and other cultural organisations. But the crisis still threatened our existence. God knows what it would have been like if every cultural building in the country had burnt down at the same moment and simultaneously the rest of the world had shutdown.
I feel for people in venues; especially those who rely on a huge portion of income from ticket sales and live events. It will be very stressful to work out how to keep going; inventing new survival plans day to day and trying to do the right thing by everyone. The reality is that it’s worse for thousands of artists and freelancers who find themselves in an even more precarious position with no fallback, no regular funding and no physical resource to work with.
In thinking about all these challenges, I thought I would share a few thoughts, to contribute to the conversation about the future. I’m aware that because I don’t currently work in the cultural sector, it’s easy to guff-off about its future. And it’s potentially bloody insensitive when artists, producers and organisations are having to deal with the fallout. Many will be facing hardship and making difficult decisions. But I am going to write this on the assumption that maybe a bit of distance from the sector could be useful at this moment. If it’s not and it’s just bloody annoying, then do yourself a favour and stop reading now.
My thoughts on the future are based on some assumptions about COVID-19; I will be clear about these. Most scientists and commentators seem to suggest that a vaccine for the world’s population is, at best, 18 months away. At worst there might not be a reliable vaccine and we will have to depend on better treatments to ensure better outcomes from the disease. So I am assuming COVID-19 is here to stay for a few years. I also assume that social distancing in various forms is here to stay until we have a vaccine or treatment. The social distancing models created by scientists at Harvard (Figure 6, page 17) and Imperial (Figure 4, page 12) show that phases of distancing may be required until 2022 or beyond to control the virus’s spread. And regardless of these models, I assume that the UK government will continue to enforce various methods of social distancing until a time when we have a vaccine or treatment to avoid our National Health Service becoming overwhelmed. Finally, I assume that public performances in crowded venues are likely to be one of the last activities which are given permission to go ahead after any period of social distancing. And by turn, they are likely to be one of the first activities to be restricted in any future shutdowns. In other words, I am assuming that it’s going to be precarious and difficult to run public culture programmes for the next few years.
Of course, this assumption could be wrong. Maybe like SARS, the current Coronavirus will choose a moment later this year to sling its hook and disappear without trace. Yes please. But on the basis of the evidence to date, I think the above assumptions provide a plausible planning scenario for our sector. It’s a very tough picture for anyone whose work is about bringing people together. Not just for those in culture but for people who work across the third sector, in sport, hospitality, events, catering and so on. Of course, if it’s hard for us, then we just have to imagine the next few years working in care homes or working for the NHS. That’s a whole different level of challenge.
Whichever way we look at it, the cultural sector is likely to experience a major upheaval over the coming few years. Alongside the difficulties of bringing people together, public and private funding streams are likely to reduce. The future of the government’s furlough, self-employment income and loan schemes is unclear. The likely consequence of COVID-19 will be that the cultural sector contracts; with some organisations going bust while some artists and freelancers are forced to seek work in other sectors. Every organisation and every freelancer who ceases to trade will be a tragedy. We must work together to seek out support from government; and we must look out for each other as things become more challenging in the coming months and years. But despite hardship for collaborators and friends, we should not shy away from conversations about how we adapt and change. Because if we do not have these conversations openly now; then the long-term future of the sector might simply be about those with the deepest pockets and those, in this moment, who the government chooses to support.
I’m not deliberately trying to paint a bleak picture; I think it’s actually helpful to face the worst of what might happen so that we can proactively and openly debate what we do about it. We need to imagine our way out of this, to transform our sector and give ourselves the best chance of a future. Most importantly we need to make a positive contribution to communities across the country. And we need to do all this in such a way that we end up with a better way of working beyond COVID-19.
In other words, as tough as things feel right now; we should see this as an opportunity for us to work together to make the funded cultural sector better. Because let’s be honest, it really needs to be better. Let’s have more honest conversations about what is not right with the way that we work; so that as we adapt to survive, we end up surviving in a form that puts us in the best possible shape for the future.
I think there are some key issues which we have collectively failed to meaningfully address; represented by the following questions…
How does the cultural sector value communities? Do our communities have agency or command over the resources of our sector?
How do we value artists in our country? Who can actually afford to be an artist here?
How far have we come on inclusion? Who gets to feel comfortable or excited when they enter one of our national cultural institutions?
Our collective progress on inclusion has been poor. I think if we’re honest about the state of subsidised culture in this country, then we would, if we could, do it differently.
Of course there are inspiring practitioners, projects and venues leading exceptional work. But this is the problem; this work is too often the exception. I was reminded of this when I was reading about Slung Low and Knowle West Media Centre. This work and these companies tend to sit on the periphery of the cultural sector; while the centre, which commands most of the resource and attention, rolls on. I am tired of waiting for every round of Arts Council England regular funding, every three or four years, to deliver change. The reality in our sector is that the pace of change on inclusion and equality is glacial. The latest Arts Council strategy, Let’s Create, is a fantastic direction which signals the potential for real change. But I increasingly worry that great examples of more progressive cultural practice in our sector (which often receive tiny amounts of the overall allocation of public funds) are used by funders to make things appear rosier than they actually are. I am not convinced that there is an appetite to tackle the core of our sector. On the evidence of the last couple of decades, it is reasonable to assume that it’s a high risk strategy to wait for Arts Council to lead significant change.
The current cycle of regular Arts Council funding runs from 2018 to 2022. There are around 840 National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) and the top five of those organisations currently receive 21% of the total pot; over £345 million in a four year period. The top 50 NPOs receive just under 50% of the total; over £812 million in four years. The top 50 NPOs are largely made up of venues, museums, orchestras and big producing companies; it’s the same for the top 150. Only one of the top 50 organisations is led by a practitioner who founded the company (and that comes in at number 49 and is the charitable arm of a profit-making company.)
Obviously this is a very crude and reductive way to look at the distribution of Arts Council England funds. NPOs are only one aspect of its funding, let alone local authority and other aspects of the funding ecology. And the last thing we need right now, in a time of crisis, is to turn in on ourselves. We need to do exactly the opposite. But what is useful about reviewing the Arts Council’s NPO portfolio during this COVID-19 crisis is that it reminds us of the kind of organisations which demand the greatest subsidy. They tend to be long-standing institutions which are either buildings (venues, museums etc.) or production companies (orchestras, dance, theatre, etc.) Because of the restrictions on public programmes, many of these will struggle for survival; unless the government steps in with a rescue package which I hope is forthcoming.
But while lobbying for government support, I think we also need to grasp the nettle of changing our sector for ourselves. This is the time to have that debate and to devise fundamental structural change across our sector. I think it is time to fund independent artists and communities more than we fund cultural venues and major production companies. Over the next few years venues and production companies will find it difficult to operate in any kind of financially sustainable way. We have a choice to make as to whether we do everything we can to sustain these giants of the sector; or whether we take opportunities as they come to invest more public funds directly with artists and communities. I think we should do the latter because we are much more likely to support creativity and innovation that reaches inside communities in this moment. This is a time when the most important thing we can do is to support communities and help everyone to play their part in imagining the future. By investing more directly in artists and communities we would be more likely to address the needs of communities during the time of COVID-19. This would include getting behind the people who are working to tackle the current crisis: tangible community projects; devising creative solutions; providing opportunities for reflection and hope.
I think this could mark a long-term change of direction for the way we distribute funds in the cultural sector. I suggest this as a producer who absolutely loves cultural venues. My heart beats faster when I walk in to a well-used community and cultural venue. But I think our sector has got its priorities wrong. For too long buildings and big production companies have commanded the lion’s share of our sector’s resource and its public narrative. Over time, Arts Council has sought to improve the way the sector goes about including everyone. But, as a whole, we are failing at this fundamental challenge. And now it’s time for a change of direction.
Directing more regular funding at artists and communities would be a more positive approach in the short- and long-term; so there are salaried artists and community members who lead our sector across the country. In return for their funding they could be required to form and lead regional and national networks; modern-day creative guilds and unions; designed to help share learning, innovative approaches and exciting new projects across the country. We could then provide small pots of funding to buildings across the country to contribute to their core running costs on the proviso that they act as creative hubs, serving their communities in multiple ways. No longer would these buildings be producing houses which control the direction and narrative of the cultural sector, they would be serving houses that support the creativity of their community. Museum buildings could be supported to care for their collections but communities and artists would be able to set the direction for how they are used, shared and developed. If we take this approach I think we would see a growth in the number of participation specialists who start to lead our cultural buildings, rather than a predominance of those with a primary passion for production. A strong Arts Council would be needed to lead this model; and to provide project funds which could be accessed by artists and communities to create new work, often in partnership with the national network of community venues.
I think this kind of structural shift is necessary; to change the balance of power. One thing I learnt in Battersea was that unless you change the structure, it is very hard for change to be sustained. Because the old structure works like elastic, and after all the hard work by everyone to make change happen, the prior structure just starts to pull everyone back to where they started. I think this is one of the main reasons why the sector has failed to embrace real change on inclusion; everyone says they want to do it; but the existing structure just keeps pulling everyone back to a resource heavy, industrial production model. However, if we create a more balanced structure then we enable real change. I think this change of structure would ensure that funded cultural buildings will creatively serve their communities as their primary purpose. Holbeck in Leeds and Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol will be the majority not the minority. I also think this change of structure will empower artists and communities, who are the real changemakers. We will have a renaissance of creative and community invention, artists will have more resources to make and share more work, and the structure of and relationships in our sector will be more inclusive and open. It will, of course, also empower producers to run great community and cultural buildings, inspired by the ideas of the artists and communities who they serve.
I spent a lot of time at Battersea Arts Centre arguing that our organisation should receive more regular funding from Arts Council so that we could produce more work, be more in control of our destiny and offer an alternative to the kind of work produced by major producing houses. It took me a decade to realise that this was a fool’s errand. The thing that enabled Battersea Arts Centre to be more artist and community centred, than a lot of larger producing houses, was because we relied on those artists and our community to survive. By working in partnership on almost everything we did, we developed shared creative processes and benefited hugely from the creative inspiration of artists and community members. I sometimes wonder how much further we could have gone as a community and artist centred venue if I had spent more time celebrating that fact; and stopped chasing the idea of always producing more work.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/adam-shatz/shipwrecked
Vol. 42 No. 8 · 16 April 2020
Adam Shatz on Covid-19 in America
I have lost count of the days since I went into quarantine, after losing my sense of smell. Camus writes that in a plague there’s ‘nothing to do but mark time’ but marking time is harder than it sounds. Is it Monday or Tuesday? (Does it matter?).
Lately the most reliable method of counting the passage of time has been not in days or weeks but in deaths. In New York City, more than seven thousand people have died, more than twice as many as were killed in the 11 September attacks.
Most of my friends aren’t leaving their flats. Since recovering my sense of smell, I’ve been taking a walk each morning. The other day I sat in an empty park near the Brooklyn Navy Yard when a city worker came up to tell me it was closing immediately. The next day a makeshift fence surrounded it. ‘Baudelaire loved solitude,’ Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘but he wanted it in a crowd.’ Today any area that might attract a crowd has shut down and Governor Cuomo frowns on walks. You can still find ‘crowds’, but they’re made up of people you already know but can’t risk seeing ‘in real life’, brought to you by Zoom or FaceTime.
This is my second experience of quarantine this year. In late December I visited Beirut. Shortly after my arrival, the US government assassinated Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike at Baghdad airport. American citizens in the Middle East were advised to leave; taxi drivers warned me to conceal my American identity. I spent most of my time reading, writing and cooking – pretty much what I’m doing now. Among the books I read was an essay by Amin Maalouf, Le Naufrage des civilisations (‘The Shipwreck of Civilisations’), published in 2019. Maalouf is a Lebanese-Christian novelist who, for the last two decades, has been warning of the threat posed by ‘identitarian’ political movements. Le Naufrage is both an elegy for the Levant in which he grew up, and a reflection on the violent fragmentation and political malaise of globalised capitalism. It begins:
I was born healthy in the arms of a dying civilisation, and throughout my existence, I have had the feeling of surviving ... while so many things around me were falling apart; like characters in a film who are crossing streets where all the walls are crumbling, and who come out somehow unscathed, shaking the dust off their clothes, while behind them the entire city is no more than a pile of rubble.
New York City today isn’t a pile of rubble but its emptiness is still shocking. Even more shocking – though not surprising if you know anything about the state of healthcare in the US – are the images of overburdened hospitals without enough ventilators and surgical masks, and the tent hospital set up in Central Park by Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief organisation headed by a fundamentalist preacher. As Trump and Jared Kushner ‘manage’ the response, many of us have the sense that we’ve reached a point of historical rupture: any talk of returning to ‘normality’ feels not only risible but irresponsible. Of course, we still try our best to feign normality: ‘meetings’ and ‘parties’ provide ephemeral relief from confinement. So do Cuomo’s daily briefings: lucid, sombre presentations of the facts that counter the hallucinatory ravings of Trump’s press conferences (and make otherwise sensible people forget that, while clamouring for federal relief, Cuomo passed a budget that included $400 million in cuts to New York hospitals).
At the same time, I wonder if the real winner of the ‘war’ against the pandemic won’t be the ‘virtual life’. The moguls of social media have never been averse to keeping us indoors; and neither have authoritarian leaders. When Bill Gates suggested that large public gatherings may be wiped out for the foreseeable future, Viktor Orbán, Binyamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi must have been smiling. ‘We heard the sirens of the Palestinian security forces wailing away,’ a friend in Ramallah wrote to me, ‘and I thought they must be having a kick out of enforcing curfew (which was just starting) after they suffered from Israeli-imposed curfews. Yet it seems the right thing to do.’ Even if it weren’t, who now would dare go to the barricades?
Bill Withers died at the end of March aged 81. His best-known song, ‘Lean on Me’, had become an anthem for healthcare workers treating Covid-19 victims. After his death was announced, a version performed by a doctor in New Haven did the rounds on social media. But one question those of us who live alone have had is ‘lean on who?’ Certainly not your neighbour, much less your parent. Touching is now taboo. Two people I knew have died: Maurice Berger, an art critic, curator and civil rights activist; and Michael Sorkin, the radical architect and critic. A friend at the Whitney told me of a staff member in his late forties, a father of two, who had died of the virus.
The pain of social distancing and isolation isn’t negligible, but neither is it lethal, and in America ‘sheltering in place’ counts as a privilege, even a luxury. For those working on the frontlines in hospitals, or delivering food, or performing any of the essential jobs that the ruling elites hardly noticed before, every day is an endless confrontation with the risk of contagion. Many of them are still riding the subway because they have no other way of getting to work. At 7 p.m. we open our windows and applaud them.
In an interview on the television show Soul! in 1971, Withers was asked why he’d said his former job installing toilets on commercial aircraft was a ‘more revolutionary act’ than singing. ‘A guy that picks up garbage,’ he replied, ‘is needed more than a guy that plays baseball. He doesn’t receive as much notoriety, but I would rather see my garbage gone than see some cat hit a ball 500 feet. And I would much rather not sing for a month than not go to the bathroom for a month.’
I like to think Marx would have approved of this downhome explanation of the labour theory of value, and the last few weeks have provided an unusually cogent demonstration of its force. (They’ve also provoked a backlash against celebrities who have posted photographs of themselves trapped in their Hollywood mansions.) But there is another dimension of Marx’s thought that helps illuminate the Covid-19 crisis: his awareness of capitalism’s environmental hazards. ‘Man lives from nature,’ he wrote, ‘and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.’ ‘Let us not flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest of nature,’ Engels warned in Dialectics of Nature. ‘For each such conquest takes its revenge on us.’
It would be a mistake to call Covid-19 nature’s revenge, except as a metaphor. As Susan Sontag argued, illness has no ‘meaning’, and interpreting it runs the risk of stigmatising its carriers – particularly if they can be depicted as in some way ‘other’: foreign, sexually ‘deviant’, non-white. Trump’s fulminations against the ‘Chinese virus’ have provoked hate crimes against Asian-Americans. A group of young Orthodox Jews coughed in the face of a young Muslim police officer, who now has the virus.
While the illness may be meaningless, the violence it has unleashed, and the patterns of its infection, could hardly be more meaningful. The elderly are especially vulnerable, but so are the poor, and people of colour. African-Americans and Latinos, already victims of America’s medical apartheid, are dying at an alarming rate; the New York Times columnist Charles Blow has described the virus as a ‘brother killer’. The fact that it has struck the United States with such shattering force is evidence not only of the denial, mismanagement and sheer amateurishness with which the Trump administration has responded to the crisis, but of the country’s infrastructural decay. America increasingly looks like a failed state.
I spoke to a friend from Pakistan who told me that her mother in Karachi, no stranger to America’s behaviour abroad, has been shocked by the images coming from hospitals in the US. She’s not alone. The ravaged state of our healthcare system, the gutting of federal government, is hardly news to us, but it’s startling to many abroad that the world’s most powerful country has proved more vulnerable to the virus than any other. It may not be a ‘paper tiger’, as Mao said, but it has been far less effective than South Korea, Taiwan or Germany – or even Spain or Italy – in confronting the virus. While Trump was threatening to provoke a war with Iran in early January, he was warned of the danger posed by the coronavirus, and chose to ignore the information. America’s Covid-19 crisis is in part self-inflicted, like the other humiliations it has suffered since 11 September: the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, the
Trump presidency.
The death toll will be further increased by the erosion of public trust, fuelled not only by extreme right-wing hucksters such as Alex Jones but also by Trump, who has been praising the untested ‘miracle’ cure of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (which turns out to be manufactured by a company in which he invests). No more embarrassed by incoherence than its beloved president, Fox News has promoted both the idea that Covid-19 is a plot (by the Chinese, or George Soros, or the Democrats, or all of them together) and the idea that it’s no worse than the flu. Religious fundamentalists have joined the chorus of sceptics, dismissing the need for social distancing. An Evangelical woman interviewed on CNN said she had no hesitation attending services because she’s ‘soaked in the blood of Jesus’. An ultra-Orthodox man said he felt protected by his shofar.
A global crisis ought to elicit a co-ordinated, global response. But such co-ordination has become unthinkable with the revival of authoritarian nationalist rule, which Washington has helped foster, and so each country has suffered, and tended to its victims, largely on its own. Covid-19 arrives at a moment when the ‘global village’ is a financial reality, but the faith that underpinned (or sanitised) it has crumbled. The interdependence of the village is a fact, but so are the cruel and immense disparities that allow it to run. The village’s ‘liberal’ features, such as elections and a free press, are mostly a privilege – a vanishing one – of those who happen to live in Western Europe and North America. Now half the village is indoors, the skies are empty of aircraft and clearer than ever, and the entire system is ‘on pause’.
Rafael Gómez Nieto, the only surviving member of La Nueve, a unit of France’s Second Armoured Division that helped liberate Paris, died of Covid-19 on 31 March, at the age of 99. A Spanish Republican, he said he volunteered for La Nueve because he ‘wanted to fight for the good of humanity’. How quaint such sentiments have come to sound. ‘The sorry paradox of this century,’ Maalouf writes in Le Naufrage, is that ‘for the first time in history we have the means to rid the human species of all the plagues that assail it and to lead it serenely towards an era of freedom, progress ... planetary solidarity and shared prosperity; and here we are, however, launched at full speed in the opposite direction.’
For much of the 20th century, left-wing movements of varying stripes – communist, socialist, social democratic, Third Worldist – promoted visions of international solidarity. But, as Maalouf suggests, globalisation has been ‘accompanied by the weakening of all the movements and doctrines that fight for the same universality’. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, no movement has emerged with a project for transforming society along egalitarian lines – no ‘moral equivalent’ of proletarian internationalism. Even social democracy, a moderate attempt to combine the market with social protections, was ‘contaminated’ by communism’s failure, the principle of equality itself devalued. The state, which ‘possesses a subtle, elusive and yet irreplaceable role’, became an object of corrosive distrust, not just among conservatives but among liberals who embraced the market and came to rationalise the disparities it produces. The world, Maalouf writes, is à la dérive, ‘adrift’, its inhabitants déboussolés, ‘deprived of a compass’, and increasingly susceptible to various kinds of ‘magical thinking’, from religious fundamentalism to faith in the ‘invisible hand’. ‘We think we are advancing, when in fact we’re drifting.’
How did we come to lose the compass? When did the ship begin to sail off course? Maalouf places emphasis on 1979, the ‘year of the great turnaround’, when Thatcher and Reagan declared war on social democracy and the welfare state, Khomeini came to power in Iran, Deng Xiaoping opened China to the market, and the Soviet Union launched its ruinous invasion of Afghanistan. Disparate as these events were, Maalouf believes they all form parts of the same historical shift, as free-market ideology and religious fundamentalism not only prevailed over communism, but led to the weakening of social democracy, secularism and other universalist ideals. (Maalouf imagines the end of the Cold War as a boxing match between the US and the Soviet Union, refereed by China, which finally declared the US the victor by itself embracing capitalism.) ‘Conservatism became revolutionary’ while the left became conservative, forced to defend the gains of the past. The result today is clear: a ‘world in decomposition’ in which ‘most . . . have ceased to believe in a future of progress
and prosperity.’
Maalouf isn’t the first to make this argument. But he grounds his analysis in a remembrance of the Middle East he knew as a child. For Middle Easterners of his generation, the loss of a world is nothing new. And in Le Naufrage, he suggests that what the world is now experiencing – the hardening of differences into rigid, antagonistic identities; the spread of religious fundamentalism and conspiracy theory; the intensification of distrust, fear and surveillance; the unravelling of social safety nets – is something that the people of the Levant know all too well. He pays generous, elegiac tribute to the Levantine model of multiculturalism, in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived side by side, respecting one another’s differences. Eclipsed, and then buried, by nationalist passions (pan-Arabism, Zionism), it was a fragile experiment, and Maalouf knows that he risks sounding nostalgic. Still, he insists that it might have worked, and that it might have provided a model for the rest of us.
When I first read Le Naufrage, this seemed a leap to me, if not an act of magical thinking. Yet as I re-read the book last week, after one of my solitary walks on Brooklyn’s abandoned streets, I found myself even more struck by the pertinence – or the allegorical resonance – of Maalouf ’s arguments. The Levant’s loss was the world’s loss, and what we’re witnessing today reveals a comparable logic of disintegration, in which national, ethnic and religious differences are being ‘tribalised’ on a planetary scale. The United States, which long claimed to be the ‘captain’ of the ship, has embraced this logic of disintegration without a compass under the banner of ‘make America great again’. In Maalouf ’s portrait, the world in which Covid-19 made its calamitous appearance is disoriented and dangerously unequal, fragmented into identity-based groups, at war with one another yet all beholden to the market. ‘I hardly dare imagine,’ he writes, ‘what the behaviour of our contemporaries would be if our cities were struck tomorrow by massive attacks involving non-conventional weapons – bacteriological, chemical or nuclear.’ He no longer has to imagine.
https://wakeinalarm.blog/2020/04/09/art-and-culture-after-covid-19/
One of the best articles I have read about the situation in which Arts and Culture exists and where it might be post COVID-19.
Art and Culture After Covid-19
‘The Experience of our generation: That Capitalism will die no natural death.’
Walter Benjamin, 1935
Business as Usual?
All around we hear ‘let’s not go back to business as usual, after this crisis we must do things differently’. A ‘people’s war’, there is talk of 1945, Beverage and Attlee, Curtin and Chifley, popular sacrifice making it impossible that we go back to what was before. We hear that ‘we are all in this together’, with Churchillian overtones from national leaders, though the absence of the US and Russia from the new global wartime coalition is telling. But underneath the war rhetoric, humanity united in the face of a common enemy, is a sense of deep systemic crisis, putting us more in mind of the Great Depression and the geopolitical catastrophe that followed. Business as Usual, the enemy vanquished, let’s get back to normal: if this is a systemic crisis, then C-19 is more than a test of our defences, it says something much more fundamental about who we are and where we are going.
Unlike the Spanish Flu, which appeared as a gratuitous death-bringer in an age already awash with slaughter and destruction, C-19 is much more central to this systemic crisis. There is evidence that the growing frequency of cross-species viral mutation is closely correlated to intensive farming and concentrated population growth, as well as the specific socio-economic and environmental disruptions which have led, in this case, to the intensification of the hunting and storing of wild animals in South China ‘wet markets’. Intensified agribusiness, rapid urbanisation, accelerated interconnectedness of global mobility. This is the revenge of Gaia, a reminder of our dependency on aterrestrial life-support system that is not ours simply to ‘master’; this is a dress rehearsal for the challenges of climate change to come, a shot across the bow. The systemic crisis comes from the sense that it is the capacity of a whole social system that is being probed, and that the enemy is within.
The crisis has highlighted a general reduction of the state’s own capacity for action, along with the public services it provides – a reduction damaging in the Global North but catastrophic in states of the Global South, systematically dismantled in the 1990s. The ‘small state’ thinking of Neoliberalism is dead, we are told. At the same time, ‘bringing the state back in’ is also the ‘rediscovery of the social’. Boris Johnson, like Scott Morrison, announcing unprecedented stimulus/ survival packages, burns 40 years of economic orthodoxy – ‘there is no alternative’, ‘there is no magic money tree’ – announcing that, after all, ‘there is such a thing as society’, thereby bringing to a close the period opened by Thatcher and Reagan in 1979-81. But though the Right squeal ‘socialism’ – as they did during the New Deal and WWII – this is no reason to take it at face value. The return of the state is not necessarily socialism, nor even
Keynesianism. Similar squeals also accompanied the bank bailouts that began in 2008, though not for long. Then, the state also came roaring back in, the ‘free market’ now revealed as utterly dependent on it: but the result was a new accommodation between neoliberal financialisation, rising inequality and the state. Not only did things not get better, they got worse. Whatever is happening now with the renationalised private hospitals, or airlines, or other ‘essential services’; with the underwriting, via employers, of wages and income; with the eviction freezes, free childcare and expanded payments from Centrelink (itself undergoing some kind of re-nationalisation) – these need careful scrutiny. This frantic action by states, whose capacity to act has been compromised, might be delivered by emergency de-commodification – a ‘holiday for exchange value’ – but is likely to be skewed in its targeting and, through the corporate agents with which it works, entrench us more deeply in a malfunctioning Business as Usual.
So too, though we hear stories of human solidarity, rather than the Zombie apocalypse we constantly watch on Netflix, the ‘return of the social’ comes after 40 years of arguing that this very ‘social’ – give or take the residual, grimly administered ‘safety net’ – was nothing but competitive market individualism. Old habits die hard, especially when the economic, cultural, institutional and administrative fabric of that ‘social’ has not so much been allowed to go threadbare but woven around other principles. It is not at all clear that we know what this ‘social’ actually means anymore – or who is included in it, some leaders (think Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán) tempted to set ‘the base’ against those ‘others’ suspected of bringing infection. After all, ‘social’ media is a highly ambiguous term, built on a networked view of society not just analogous to the cybernetic ‘information processing’ model of Hayek’s neoliberal market, but now, as ‘platform’ or ‘surveillance’ capitalism, deeply enmeshed with it. In fact, since the shock of 2008, and the social discontent (amongst non-bankers) to which it gave rise, the neoliberal state has seen government as a kind of ‘platform’, where ‘nudges’, Big Data and algorithmic predictions are now the stuff of public administration.
Before celebrating the return of state and social as a version of Polanyi’s ‘double movement’, a re-assertion of the human and the social against the fictitious and abstract ‘market’, we should also remember that in his account we first had to go through the fires of totalitarian Communism and Fascism, and of world war, before we got to 1945. Since 2008, (financial) markets and the state have had a partial reconciliation (or interpenetration), and the post-austerity shift to ‘populism’ has brought back the ‘social nation’, the new Right flirting with nationalisation and protection of ‘our’ environment. If the social has crept back in then, any ‘left’ political consequences have been strongly policed. The Right have not only ramped up the culture wars, setting a popular nation against metro-cosmopolitan elites, stridently denouncing ‘globalisation’ along with any accommodation with Communist (now no longer ‘transitional’) China. As in the McCarthy era, an attack on an external Communist threat serves to sever any resonances between that project (however degraded, or distorted) and transformative politics at home. Expect calls for the repatriation of manufacturing, a National Capitalism to combat the global export of Communist State Capitalism that has been going on, ‘under our noses’, for a couple of decades. Underneath this rhetoric, and impelled by the viral emergency, the re-tooling of social governance around surveillance, big data and algorithmic nudge – the social stripped of any sense of effective participatory democracy – is likely to go on apace (in both systems), if left unchecked.
Responses to the crisis will be, inevitably, contested and multiple – strong state intervention, laissez-faire (‘let it rip’), decommodification, mutual aid all in the mix. States will learn things, ready for the next time, but how far this learning will go beyond enhanced crisis capability to address systemic issues, is an open question. Rather than waiting for neoliberal capitalism to die its natural death, state and society marching back in after markets and individuals, we need to think very clearly and urgently about what is systemic in this crisis and what needs to change at the end of it. This is not just about what it needs to survive this crisis, nor only how it might re-think the principles of its organisation, but also what value does it represent for society and how might this be articulated. This systemic reckoning also demands we address how far art and culture have been deeply entangled with the system-in-crisis.
Art and Culture?
It is perfectly understandable that the first response of the arts and cultural sector has been to seek state protection for its livelihood – income for the part-timers, casuals, recently laid-off and self-employed – and to secure on-going organisational capacity and business viability for the bigger companies and ‘sector organisers’. Arts and cultural events and venues were amongst the first to be cancelled and closed, and no doubt, will be amongst the last to re-open. Other forms of cultural production – film and TV, regional newspapers – have been suspended along with the rest of ‘non-essential’ services. The sector has been the hardest hit; arts and cultural workers are in dire need – bare life – and need support immediately and until the ‘recovery’ is well underway. This has been forthcoming (to various extents) in Australia, UK and across Europe. In Germany – at Federal and state (Länder) level – support has been made explicitly for arts and culture, ‘essential to our democracy’, at a time when their ‘creative courage’ is needed, artists being ‘indispensable’ and ‘vital, especially now’. Australia cut their funding. For the rest support for cultural workers seems to be delivered primarily as part of a general package for similarly affected workers. We can’t yet give an assessment of how successful these various schemes are for the cultural sector, and they need to be closely monitored as they too will affect the post-virus landscape. What we can say, if anyone was still under any illusion, is that the widespread impact of the emergency on arts and cultural workers has shown them neck-deep in the precarity of the ‘gig economy’. After the crisis, many are asking if getting back to Business as Usual is what we need – especially as this crisis comes at the end of a long period of declining income and conditions.
Lead organisations from the cultural sector have made a case for immediate need – as with any group of vulnerable people –and for the wider importance of the sector. In some cases, this was a re-application of the arguments from the last twenty years – “the sector is worth $xxx billion, compared to that one which is only worth $xx billion, and thus we are deserving of support as an important industry”. This argument, given decades of funding cuts, has failed to make any impact on most governments up until now; let’s hope this time it will fare better. Perhaps there will be a ‘creative industries’ argument, that the sector will be vital for our economic recovery; after the 2008 crisis we heard a lot about how the creative industries had proved to be amongst the most resilient sectors, leading the rebound. I suspect that this time, ‘not going back to business as usual’ would have to mean that the accelerating precarity of the cultural sector – AKA ‘resilience’ – must be reversed. This would involve a whole set of new labour regulations – applicable to the ‘gig economy’ generally – and maybe a Universal Basic Income. But must we accept the inevitability of the ‘gig economy’, with its intensification of anxiety and fragmentation of work, and the complicity of the arts and cultural organisations, who have promoted and normalised it? As Bruno Latoursuggests, once we begin to ask questions about how we might fix the things we think are broken, we get into the kind of radical territory of the New Deal and post-1945 settlement. Maybe more so....
The demands for immediate support, and the recognition of cultural workers’ shared material condition of precarity with other workers, previously marginalised and dismissed as ‘low-skilled’, is important. Health and aged care, cleaners, transport workers, farm labourers, supermarket shelf-stackers, delivery riders, all are now recognised as indispensable, at least for the duration of the silence left by the suspension of the rat race and its ‘bullshit jobs’. But there are important caveats, as there always have been when ‘creatives’ are lumped into the general ‘precariat’, the self- employed illustrator with the hotel cleaner. Any effective sense of a shared fate, one which might help the arts and culture sector re-position itself after C-19, needs to register the differences as well as the similarities.
In the meantime, we hear that cultural workers, like these other devalued workers, also need better recognition and acknowledgement. ‘We in the cultural sector produce all those things – books, games, TV shows, music, streaming entertainment – that make life in and out of quarantine bearable, enjoyable; but we also provide a sense of belonging, of human connection, of social cohesion that will be crucial for a time after neoliberal competitive individualism’. This social indispensability certainly means ‘decent wages and conditions’, and, as with Health for example, the state needs to reverse its ongoing funding cuts to culture. These cuts, as to Health, were symptomatic of the hollowing out of the state whose deleterious consequences we are now facing. In these claims culture is not just a victim of small state austerity, it also needs to be an essential part of any expanded ‘social state’ provision of collective services whose post- emergency retention, for many, would be the most beneficial outcome of the crisis. Not Business as Usual for arts and culture would require a restoration and expansion of state funding for culture and, necessarily, a renewed acknowledgement, by government, of art and culture’s importance for any liveable post-virus society.
Trouble Ahead
Well, before we get to this, let me suggest that the cultural sector is not yet in any place to make these sorts of claims, on public funding or on a reinvigorated social purpose, until it has come to terms with its own complicities with the last twenty-five years of neoliberalism.
Let me start – more or less at random – with an Open Letter to the EU from Culture Action Europe, which argues that the EU emergency funding package should, under the ‘Cohesion and Values’ heading, be extended to arts and culture:
Culture is the foundation of who we are as human beings. It grounds our collective life, binding us together, nurturing our feeling of belonging. Without the explicit recognition of the European project’s cultural dimension, the future of the European Union as a common endeavour is difficult to imagine.
This is laudable of course, but its claims are weakened if we acknowledge the current situation of Europe, where ‘cultures of belonging’ have also gone in a ‘blood and soil’ direction, and where the ‘culture of belonging’ to Europe and its ‘project’ is itself deeply compromised. Compromised, that is, by the EU’s capture by the neoliberal project, one whose link to rising inequalities within and between member states is clear now for all to see – despite its other valuable progressive social, democratic and environmental aspects. In short, to what, and in what ways, are we being asked to belong? This applies equally to calls for a national belonging: is it about social solidarity, or putting our collective backs into a national economic recovery, or maybe keeping the borders closed?
The call for a re-invigoration of culture’s role is also compromised by the ways in which many in the cultural or ‘creative’ sector, especially at the leadership levels, whilst acknowledging the growing inequalities all around them, have failed to acknowledge how these inequalities are actually deeply entangled in their idea of ‘culture’. We have witnessed the shocked disbelief of many urban, educated ‘creatives’ – the majority of whom are by no means rich – when their compatriots or co-Europeans embrace blood and soil nationalism, and seek out other ‘retrograde’ ‘populist’ forms of cultural belonging. What we have seen, since 2008 certainly, but starting well before that in the 1980s, is a growing divergence, on multiple registers, between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The ‘cultural and creative sector’ may identify with the latter – ethically, politically, and sometimes materially through its own participation in precarious labour – but in significant ways it is aligned with the former.
This is not an argument about the ‘elitism’ of the arts, nor of the lack of representation – women, ethnic minorities, working class – within them, to be rectified by various forms of ‘positive discrimination’ and diversity programmes. I am suggesting that what the cultural sector sees as universal – the possibilities opened up by culture and creativity – is in fact highly circumscribed by class chances (intertwined with gender, ethnicity and regionality). That is, it is no longer so much a question of the content of culture being ‘elitist’ – those battles fought by Cultural Studies, by Bourdieusians, by pop culture warriors – but that the chances of participating in cultural production or creative labour as a viable career path, is now closely circumscribed by class, as refracted above all through education.
Over the last thirty years the primary policy justification for the cultural sector has become an economic one. Beginning with ‘arts impact’ studies in the 1980s, then its identification as ‘growth sector’ in the 1990s, culminating in its systematic integration as catalytic economic driver within a wider ‘creative economy’ – culture, in the form of the ‘creative industries’, sought to move itself away from the periphery of ‘the arts’ and towards the powerful centres of economic development and innovation. This happened in Europe and Australia, extended across Africa and Asia, and is revving up in South America. ‘Creative economy’ is now used by international agencies such as UNESCO and UNCTAD, as well as diplomatic agencies such as the British Council and the Goethe Institute, as the main legitimating discourse for the adoption of ‘modern’ cultural policies by governments, and ‘creative cities’, across the globe.
Clearly there are other strands, some older, some emergent, that weave their way through this, but it is indisputable that ‘creative industries’ or ‘creative economy’ has become the central organising concept for contemporary cultural policy in many areas of Global North and Global South. It is not as simple as ‘economic impact’ and ‘multipliers’, a line used by arts organisations from the 1980s. It is rooted in claims for a more epochal shift, where the practice of symbolic creation, of meaning-making, was to be part of a wider transition from an industrial Fordist to a Post-industrial economy. The transformative potential of art and culture no longer lay in its complex symbolic, meaning-making function but, rather, in the possibilities it held out for meaningful work and the realisation of individual creative potential in a post-industrial world. This was set within an ‘imaginary’ of creative social (though mostly metropolitan) transformation which validated the aspirations of educated young people, able to identify themselves with a viable and desirable future. This creative transformation would be, in turn, be recouped by government gaining a ‘key economic driver’, expressed variously in increased GDP, innovation, soft power, development, modernisation, progress and so on.
This creative ‘imaginary’, I would suggest, was running out of steam even before the C- 19 crisis. It was an aspirational future, an economically framed historical narrative of transition from one form of production (industry, mass, material) to another (information, knowledge, individuated, immaterial). In this there would be winners and losers, people inevitably left behind as others – the educated young especially – made the transition to the new economy. The ‘cultural and creative industries’, if I may use that term, overwhelmingly employ educated people, at higher rates than other industries. Since the arrival of digitalisation this has accelerated, the sector has been staging its own internal de-industrialisation, losing huge swathes of ‘blue collar’ jobs in printing, publishing, textiles, ceramics, and the wholesale, retail and distribution of physical ‘creative goods’. The famous 1998 definition of creative industries, as those based on ‘individual creativity, skill and talent’, with a ‘potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’, worked to combine the heroic struggle of the avant-garde artist with the amoral ‘creative destruction’ of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur. The creativity mythos effected a trade- off between individual creative fulfilment and collective social justice.
This is the story told by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, who chart the emergence of ‘creative capitalism’ in the growing separation between the younger white-collar workers looking for ‘quality of work/ life’ and the blue-collar workers seeking better pay and condition in the older trade union manner. The ways in which the former, over the 1970s, became re-attached to a new form of creative capitalism, whilst the organized working class was systematically marginalized, is a complex one, but the rise of the ‘creative economy’ is clearly entangled with it. This story re-appears in Richard Florida, who blithely consigns the industrial working class to economic, social and cultural irrelevance. Thomas Picketty’s new book charts the consequences in detail. The parties of the Left become the parties of the educated (‘Brahmins’), those of the Right of the (educated) wealthy (‘Merchants’). Left outside, disenchanted, are the (disorganized) working class. The acceptance by Brahmins and Merchants of an educational meritocracy, and the abandonment of redistributive policies as futile or undesirable, has had deleterious political consequences, as we know. The ‘creative industries’ are set deep within this ideological formation.
This has not served ‘creatives’ well. The transformative potential of the creative economy gave way to new forms of exploitation and labour discipline; the financialisation of the ‘new’ economy meant public services that used to be free or state subsidised – health, education, social insurance – were now transmuted into private debt. Public housing shrank, gentrification ripped through urban real estate, above all in ‘creative’ cities, and younger people were locked out of the housing market. Young (and not so young) creatives (along with their educated peers) have increasingly resembled the losers, the uneducated precariat, stuck endlessly in low paid work rather than temporarily paying their dues in Bohemia. It is less and less likely that they will join the ‘progressive’ middle aged, middle class (“Gen X”) who benefitted so much from the ‘third way’ social democracy of the 1990s – let alone the now infamous “Boomers”. Piketty’s work points to some of the baleful consequences of this age of galloping inequality, within and between countries and regions. But already we can see how precarity drives cultural workers into the bigger cities, a necessity in order to make a living across multiple employments, pushing up rents and pushing out the older ‘blue collar’ workers to the urban outskirts. Inequalities explode within and between cities, between cities and countryside, between region and region (take a look at the Brexit map).
How this will play out in this crisis nobody knows, though already the armature of inequality is showing through the skin of ‘we are all in this together’. What seems clear is that it will accelerate further the exit of cultural workers from the ‘creative imaginary’, its promises now hollowed out further. Though it still appeals to aspirations to self- fulfilment within an imagined global modern, the dissonant juxtaposition of this imaginary with deepening inequality and ecological catastrophe is becoming difficult to ignore. If this crisis really means Not Business as Usual, with some form of a return of ‘state’ and ‘social’ focused on social justice, solidarity and re-embedded markets then, possibly, we might emerge with a different configuration of culture and society. But for this to happen it will take more than just saying ‘see, you need culture now’; what that need for ‘culture’ actually is no longer seems clear, and the growing discontent amongst those inside and outside the creative imaginary currently finds no collective articulation.
The legacy of this last 30 years will be hard to shake off. A full recognition of, and accounting for, the entanglement of the creative imaginary with exacerbated global inequalities will be difficult.
In the last two decades governments and cultural agencies in both Global North and South have presented creative economy as vision for equitable and sustainable growth and development. It has not been that; there is little evidence, outside of China and South Korea, of any creative economy shift to the Global South, and non to suggest that this new ‘economic’ driver is less – rather than more – inequitable and exclusionary. The creative economy discourse has become increasingly self-serving as cultural agencies refuse to register any of the downsides for fear of getting thrown out of the meeting room, not allowed back to the top table. The desperate bid to promote culture through its direct association with economic development – jobs, exports, innovation, branding – has had a corrupting effect on those international agencies. Its altruistic illusions of culture being a universal ‘good’, able to deliver greater equality, social mobility, gender equity and sustainability, have shielded the promotors of the global ‘creative class’ from acknowledging their complicity with ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ – its investment in an educational meritocracy of ‘talent’, its caving in to an economy-centred vision of human progress, its lip-service to the disenfranchisement of those left outside – the rural migrants, the old and the new working classes, the vast precariat. Always presenting itself as the ‘clean’, sustainable development option – what resource is more ubiquitous, inexhaustible and cheap than human creativity? – creative economy’s association with unsustainable urbanisation, gentrification, resource extraction (‘no copper, no digital’), the diffusion of the languages of entrepreneurial self- improvement and of endless, insatiable consumption – this is all firmly locked away in the attic.
Thirty years of chasing neoliberalism’s tail has left the established voices of the cultural sector mute. Their self-positioning as willing servants of culture as economic development, modesty ensured via the fig-leaf of ‘sustainability’, has left them unable to articulate anything like a critical purchase on the current global situation. Without this reckoning, avoiding Business as Usual will be impossible. If the ‘return of the state’ or the ‘social’ is to mean simply more funding for arts and culture (itself still a distant hope), then all this will simply continue unabated, feeding resentment of the ‘metropolitan elites’ and the growing disaffections of the ‘age of anger’ which now apply as much to the ‘creative precariat’ as they do to the uneducated excluded.
Learning to Speak Again
It might come as a surprise, to somebody who has not had a steady salary for a decade nor managed to earn more than $40k a year in that time, to be told they are ‘complicit’. In many of the most socially devasted areas of our cities, towns and rural areas, the shoe-string funded arts and cultural projects, barely surviving cinemas, struggling book shops, occasionally functioning music venues, underfunded local museums and galleries – these represent some of the few signs of hope and life. In the last decade the shift to non-commodified production and exchange, mutual aid, co-operatives, socially embedded cultural projects have gone on apace; it is just that these register as the ‘not- for-profit’ part of the creative economy ‘ecosystem’. These everyday life-worlds make up the ‘social factory’; or the ‘dark matter’ of local art practice sustaining the glittering art world; or act as an assemblage of non-commodified labour, integrated nonetheless into capital’s global supply chains, like the Matsutake mushroom pickers at the ‘end of the world’. That all this might, in fact, represent something very different from the organising narrative of the creative economy, built on a different organising principle, a different way of seeing the future, is barely registered by cultural sector leaders. Whilst this sector represents the most vulnerable workers who require urgent support, in seeking ‘creative justice’ we might also look for the beginnings of a different way of organising arts and culture outside the imaginary of ‘creative economy’.
Calls now for a return to social values, with culture as its ‘heart’, ignore how deeply the cultural sector has absorbed the language of neoliberalism. The ‘creative economy’ was always about horizontal networks, the state ‘getting out of the way’, albeit after it had invested heavily in research and capacity-building. It was about entrepreneurship plus markets, set within a distributed social innovation system. The consequences of such ‘network sociality’ have been well documented. The reality of the creative industries – winner takes all, supply chain domination, platform oligopolies, massive financialisation, aggressive free trade and Intellectual property legislation – was something very different, as were the actually existing ‘big industry’ policies of countries such as China and South Korea, the US and Japan. The less industrialised arts and cultural sector developed its own economic impacts, as ‘core R&D’, generators of tourism and essential to city branding. They also had a ‘social impact’ which, suitably metricised, justified state subsidy framed as ‘market failure’. Not a failure of the market per se but rather culture’s failure in the market. The positioning of art and culture as ‘welfare’ worked to cow its leaders, as they, along with all those who took hand-outs, were reminded that their dependency on benefits would only be tolerated by taxpayers if they showed themselves to be deserving. In accepting this mendicant position, and the need to fill in the ever-expanding forms detailing how money was spent and with what results, they also accepted the right of a certain kind of economic theory to define not just ‘the economy’ but also the whole purpose of public administration, and indeed, society as a whole.
The period since 2008 has accelerated critiques of neoliberalism, about which we now know much more. We also know that it stubbornly persists. In Australia, even though the Rudd government bought in a stimulus package after 2008, heralded as a ‘return to Keynesianism’, it was vehemently attacked by the opposition Coalition, who attempted, when in power, to bring in the ‘austerity’ that was sweeping the UK and EU. This stimulus did little to change the basic acceptance of (soft) neoliberal orthodoxy within the Australian Labor Party. The massive spending in this crisis, completely dwarfing that of the ALP (and of 2008 globally) is not a return to Keynesianism but something else, about which little is known, and which will require considerable parlaying. What seems clear, is that, outside the secure firewalls of the current emergency, the basic settings of economic rationality, as established at the heart of treasury and economic development departments across the globe, remain locked firmly in place. It is the market not the state which delivers efficient growth, and all values are, ultimately, expressible as a numeric economic value.
So too, the language of public administration has been re-written in these market and metric fixated terms by the New Public Management of the 1980s, which in turn had roots in the cybernetics and logistics of the ‘military-industrial complex’ (remember that?). The cultural sector finds it difficult to see beyond this, thoroughly internalising its position as welfare recipient whose value-for-money must be accounted for to taxpayers in a set of metrics. In this logic, as Terry Flew writes, it is its economic contribution that ‘demonstrates the social license to operate of the cultural sector’. The reality of the massive on-going transfer of state revenue to banks, hedge-funds, mining, real estate, airlines and so on, is completely ignored in this kind of account. More damagingly, the memory of an older form of public administration, based on need and
damagingly, the memory of an older form of public administration, based on need and
addressed through a professional public service corps responsible to indicators of success set by its substantive value-laden assessment of that need – this has evaporated. The history of how this economic rationality utterly transformed public administration – its ethos and that of the polity it served – is retrieved only with difficulty from the recesses of a collective amnesia.
If the state and society are to come back, along with a re-invigorated role for culture within these, then a lot un-forgetting needs to take place, and not just at the abstract theoretical level either; our everyday language is sodden with the common sense of economic rationality. We may point out how ‘efficiencies’ in public administration have hollowed out the state’s capacity to act efficiency in this emergency, but still economists stubbornly claim the high ground of ‘hard’ rationality. Prioritising saving lives is ‘sentimental’, economists must think with the head not the heart: when this is over the efficiencies must begin again. Choice of lives and livelihoods is indeed very hard, but that hard choice rests squarely on ground of a shared political ethics not sub-contracted to the death-rattle calculations of our economist-actuaries.
The ‘social’ which we hope to bring back has also lost much of its capacity under the onslaught of this economic common sense. When we have been told that acting rationally means taking individual responsibility for our own life choices, maximising our opportunities whilst the market aggregates this into statistically expressed ‘social outcomes’; and that public administration must use informational levers (‘signals’, ‘nudges’) built around the rationally optimising individual; then it is difficult to ask people to self-isolate, and take a significant cut in income in order to save, not themselves – “it’s not a plague for God’s sake, calm down” – but somebody else, over there, with whom they have little connection. Altruism is a social capacity. There is no need to idealise or mystify, but the capacity of many Asian countries to act with collective solidarity in this emergency is something to be taken seriously. Especially when the global hegemon has gone AWOL: for, propaganda aside, this is the first global crisis since 1945 that is being faced outside any US attempts at leadership.
Culture’s ever-growing reliance on economic impacts, and the social metrics that accompany this, has not only undermined its sense of its own value but has blinded it to the fact that the values culture claims to stand for are at best surplus to requirements and at worse, threats to be contained. ‘Culture employs more than agriculture, as much as construction; music adds millions to the economy, the tourism industry is unthinkable without art’: the failure of these arguments to cut through, then and now, should indicate that the burial of art and culture under a mountain of metrics is not just part of the collateral damage from New Public Management. It is purposefully punitive. Culture must be (seen to be) put to work in the creative economy, its residual values eradicated or de-fanged (or taped to the wall of an art gallery). Neoliberalism is not (just) some outbreak of hyper-instrumental rationality, spread by ‘bean counters’: it is part of a long counter-revolution set in motion at the end of the 1960s against the culture of that epoch. Culture must be made to pay for the temerity it had to challenge – however symbolically – the fundamental values of a modern capitalist society. For those parts of culture than cannot be moved wholesale to commercial distribution, where the only ‘intrinsic value’ that matters is that which results in a purchase, there is a long slow death by reporting, that expands in inverse proportion to the amount of funding.
The success with which economic rationality has colonised ‘common sense’ can be in the way evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience replaced sociology and psychoanalysis in the popular imagination. The ‘selfish gene’ responds to informational signals, from which the ‘blind watchmaker’ constructs the edifice of creation. Networks of individual neurones, responding to electrical signals, produce a subject with a set of behaviours, responding to external (or in the case of drugs, artificial internal) stimuli. ‘One day’, Matt Ridley promises, thinking of Romeo and Juliet, ‘some scientist will know exactly how the brain of a young man becomes obsessed by the image of a particular young woman, molecule by molecule’. Enter art as serotonin. And the promise of Big Data, after all, is that it allows us to go ‘below’ culture, directly accessing the real, aggregating its vast data outputs through computational power rather than a wet-wear based symbolic system. Culture is not needed in a world of algorithmic governance.
As with universities, reporting to metrics is not about ‘bean-counting’ but control. They dissolve any form of participatory democracy – collegiality, peer-review – and replace crucial occasions for substantive judgement by robo-scheduled data input. Art and cultural workers, taking the money, are bound by contracted deliverables not the mutual trust of partnership. In the face of such an onslaught art and culture diligently offers up its metrics as down-payment on its social license to operate, though it continues to clutch an ‘intrinsic value’ like an orphan with a crumpled photo of her parents. That this ‘intrinsic’ value is precisely its social, its human value, rather some residual self- indulgence, barely rates a mention.
Others have valiantly tried to add ‘cultural value’ as a ‘fourth pillar’ of development (economic, social, environmental) or adapting the ‘triple bottom line’ (the phrase is telling), adding culture to economic, social and environmental outcomes. What these ignore is that art and culture’s job has always been to give meaning to the world, a world that includes within it what we call the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’. It makes no sense to identify ‘economic’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ outcomes unless you have already previously separated the world into these distinct categories. The ‘four pillars’, as viewed from government, are grotesquely asymmetrical, the pathetic stump of culture overshadowed by the tower of economy. In fact, buried inside the black box of ‘intrinsic value’ culture’s ongoing challenge is that to organise the world in terms of the absolute priority of individual and collective economic advantage is a disaster. It is culture’s job to protest that the sheer preponderance of ‘economy’ can only lead us to a catastrophic social and environmental nihilism. It is art’s job – along with the other natural, social and human sciences – to help articulate how we might inhabit the world in a manner that might promote human thriving not its extermination.
From Not Business as Usual to Another World is Possible
Not Business as Usual, where culture regains its role in a post-neoliberal state and society, cannot just be about more funding. It is also about how this funding is allocated and distributed, along with a clearer articulation of the grounds on which that funding is given and for what purpose. This is crucial, for without it more funding will come with more metrics, expanded ‘dashboards’, more triple bottom line KPIs.
We must think how we organise the economy of culture – how public funding is given (the conditions of acceptance, reporting and judgement), but also how commercial and state agencies produce cultural goods and services. Crucially important is to start the long haul back from a default system in which advertising and marketing not only represent the main source of employment for cultural workers – what a crying waste of creative time and energy – and the only socially acceptable form of funding for some of the most crucial parts of our political, social and cultural life. We are currently living with the disastrous consequences of giving over the public sphere wholesale to private sector companies – not just the late evolved forms of FAANG but also older reptilians, such as News Corps. Just thinking how to organise all this, outside of ‘let the market decide’, will be a huge challenge. Not many in government have this capacity, and the accumulated knowledge of public broadcasting and cultural administration have been allowed to dissipate.
This must go hand in hand with a new settlement with art and cultural workers, not only refusing the inevitability of the gig economy but also extracting them from their association with ‘creative entrepreneurship’. We must look instead at promoting greater de-commodification, through forms of direct public funding but also co-operatives and community-based enterprises. Why try desperately to call the thousands of underpaid musicians in break-even venues ‘an industry’, when we could see it as a fantastically enlivening collective enterprise, for musicians, venue managers and audiences alike? Rather than paying for music industry masters’ programmes we could facilitate a thriving network of co-operatives and community-owned music venues. So too an increase in cultural funding must come with a new conceptualisation of public funding as accountable not to metrics but to the full range of participatory democracy, from Porto Allegre-style budgeting to peer review based on substantive judgement not generic KPIs – including cultural worker representation on high level decision-making boards (rather than just bankers and lawyers).
Think of the energies such a radical rethinking might release! The chance to reframe the way we think about funding, producing and enjoying culture together, outside the ideology of market efficiencies. To re-embed the economy of culture in the social life of those it serves. And while we are at it, we might want to use the words ‘art’ and ‘culture’ again, giving the term ‘creative’ a well-earned and extended holiday.
This would also help us reset relations with those excluded from the educational meritocracy of the creative industries. There can be no conception of a new equitable social state that does not include strong re-distributive policies; this also means a reassessment of the accelerating credentialism, bringing with it crippling debt, over- qualification and the corruption of the university system that willingly supplies them. Re-investment in ‘technical’ or ‘further’ education not only financially but in social recognition – valuing differently skilled education for those performing crucial social tasks, not underfunded job training for career market losers. For the cultural sector, this might herald a reappraisal of all those making skills which have so rapidly diminished or disappeared, buried under a narrative of progress in which immaterial creation supersedes material making.
We also need to reset our relationship to the ‘audience’, to establish a different language, a new way of talking, that can re-centralise culture’s role in our public life, and articulate how these relate to our collective conception of ‘the good life’. To reframe the public beyond ‘bums-on-seat’ metrics, or digitally enabled audience feedback dashboards. To fundamentally rethink what ‘public’ actually means– more diverse, more active, more adept but also more united than ever before. Something like this happened in 1945; it happened again, more chaotically, in the 1960s and 70s, but rolled back over the course of the 1990s, reduced again to the mass of consumers after the brief frisson on the ‘digital revolution’. Such a reframing did not happen after 2008, social solidarity extending only to the bankers, with culture (and social services) taking a massive hit. I think some kind of reframing of the social will have to happen after this crisis, but which way will it go? To some new post-neoliberal authoritarian ‘Big State’ with an expanded social reach and firmly policed borders, or a social state, operating within an expended democratic participation, whose common values are expressed, amongst others and in appropriate fashion, by art and culture?
In this crisis it is not just the organising narrative of the global hegemon that has absented itself, so too have the routines and infrastructures of everyday life. This is a global experience, involving a dimly imagined community the like of which I do not think we have seen before. Many have tried to call this community into being in the face of global climate catastrophe, to limited avail. Now we are all locked up together, and we all know it.
What words do we use for such a collective experience – neither trauma nor celebration, neither war nor world cup? It is less the spectacular stopped moment of Diana’s funeral, perhaps more the collective, slightly unsettled leisure time of the 1968 general strike in Paris. What words will be used – an interruption, a glitch, a void, an interregnum, a pivot, a birth?
What we have is a momentary [Pause]. For those of us whose time is not overshadowed by hunger, domestic violence, debilitating isolation and precarious anxiety, the question is: what do we do with that time? In the [Pause] brought on by this crisis will we, who are concerned with art and culture, find the time to think and reflect, and then the will to plan and act, in a way that will allow art and culture to come out and take their rightful place in the debates about the future of human society on the planet, our common terrestrial life? For this is what comes next, the virus being just a first global red light – though there are whole rooms, buried or locked away, full of such desperately flashing red lights.
The cultural sector might have jumped last into the new world order that grew apace from 1980; it is currently looking like the last one out too. Political debate is aflame, as are dissident economists, feminists, ecologists, philosophers, and artists and cultural workers too: but, like the global hegemon, the cultural leaders are missing in action, ready for Business as Usual, with a bit more cash to splash around, some new ‘post- virus’ KPIs to add on the end of their funding applications, some more creative economy programmes to mop up the unemployed.
We do not only have to have a [Pause], we can also have a [Reset]. This could be to the default factory settings of Business as Usual; it might brutally delete years of hard work in an unequal ‘now we have to pay for it’ austerity; or it might connect the return of the social state to the need for the systemic reforms exposed so brutally by C-19. Art and culture are there to help show us how another world is possible.
Why should we expend our collective creative labour on keeping afloat the rusted hulk of a catastrophically dysfunctional system, when we could be diving for pearls?
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/03/coronavirus-is-the-end-of-the-end-of-history
A very interesting article about where we are and where we might be…..
In 1989, the American pundit Francis Fukuyama presciently declared the ‘end of history’: the collapse of all existing alternatives to liberalism. That apparently unassailable order has been crumbling for years. Coronavirus is the final nail in its coffin.
The ‘end of history’ had two key features. The first was the market as the dominant organising principle. ‘There is no alternative’, as Margaret Thatcher put it, to market competition. This applied not merely to companies, but also individuals, as they scrambled for employment and advancement, investing in their own ‘human capital’. Public services were increasingly privatised and marketised, with everything from healthcare to higher education subjected to competition, in the name of ‘choice’ and ‘efficiency’.
The second feature was the hollowing out of democracy and the rise of the regulatory state. From the late 1980s, political participation in advanced democracies collapsed. The post-war class compromise, which had enhanced access to decision-making by trade unions and social-democratic parties, was dismantled by the new right, led by Thatcher and Reagan. Unions were crushed while social democrats shifted inexorably to the right. Increasingly feeling that politicians were ‘all the same’ – unresponsive clones, parroting a new neoliberal orthodoxy – people withdrew into private life. Voter turnout sharply declined. Political elites increasingly ruled a void, where the active citizenry had once stood. Particularly in Europe, they took their cues and sought legitimation more through their relationships with one another than with their own electorates.
The state, meanwhile, was fundamentally transformed. Its fundamental purpose shifted from reducing uneven development and redistributing wealth to promoting global competitiveness. Post-war ‘command and control’ systems, where the state intervened directly to pursue particular social and economic goals, were dismantled. In their place arose new independent regulators and quangos, insulated from democratic control. Increasingly – especially in Europe – these agencies networked internationally, locking in neoliberal policy sets, making them even harder to change.
After appearing unassailable for two decades, this order began crumbling with the 2008 global financial crisis. As always under neoliberalism, the state moved to protect capital with a massive bailout, turning a financial crisis into a fiscal one. In Europe, harsh austerity followed, to which rotten social democratic parties simply had no answer. Discontent mounted but found no meaningful outlet. In 2011, riots broke out across British cities; the Occupy movement re-politicised economic questions; the Movement of the Squares swept Spain and Greece; the Arab spring rocked authoritarian regimes across North Africa and the Middle East. Populist parties surged.
Left populists offered a brief glimmer of hope for some, but failed miserably. They capitulated to the European Union’s monetary waterboarding in Greece. They cohabited with discredited centrist parties in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Septuagenarian throwbacks Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn failed to broaden their appeal beyond their millennial socialist base, while facing relentless sabotage from the centrist political parties they relied upon as vehicles. Particularly in Europe, left populists were simply not prepared to break radically from the status quo. Corbyn’s reluctance to embrace Brexit – the form that anti-establishment revolt took in Britain – symbolised the problem.
The coronavirus pandemic is killing off the neoliberal order in a way that the diminished left could not. The ‘free market’ – supposed home to titans of industry and rugged venture capitalists – cannot survive the virus for five minutes. Investors dissolve into hysteria. The fundamental irrationality of markets is exposed as stocks swing wildly from one hour to the next. Asthmatic grandmothers display greater resolve.
Post-Neoliberal Order
he hollowed-out regulatory state is no match for the T virus, either. In northeast Asia, where social bonds
remain stronger and states still take more direct
responsibility for economic and social outcomes, Covid-19 has been effectively contained – for now, at least. By contrast, Europe’s post-sovereign states have been ravaged. The virus is wreaking havoc on societies already devastated by a decade of EU- enforced austerity. From 2011-18, the EU told member-states to cut healthcare spending or outsource services 63 times. The humanitarian disaster unfolding in northern Italy – where incomes have stagnated for 20 years, and coronavirus deaths already exceed China’s – testifies to the political elite’s abandonment of their historic responsibility of providing security to the citizenry. Spain is not far behind. Greece, whose healthcare system has crumbled amid the social crisis caused by Euro-austerity, will surely follow.
The response in the world’s neoliberal heartlands – Britain and the United States – shows most acutely how the neoliberal order is crumbling in response to this public health emergency. In the space of a month, both governments have jettisoned policies considered unchangeable for decades, instead pursuing courses they would have denounced as ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ just days earlier.
In Britain, this began even more the Covid-19 crisis escalated, thanks to the Conservative Party’s emerging post-Thatcherite transformation under Boris Johnson. Randian deficit hawk Sajid Javid was ousted as Chancellor to enable a quasi-Keynesian budget, including increased public spending, investment in infrastructure and a £30bn stimulus.
Unsurprisingly, the wealthy and propertied received the most immediate help, with £350bn in loan guarantees and grants for business and mortgage holidays. But this was swiftly followed by a rent holiday and an extraordinary pledge to pay 80 percent of wages up to £2,500, initially for three months but ultimately for as long as necessary, plus an extra £7bn in welfare spending. The new chancellor, Rishi Sunak, pledged ‘unlimited sums’ of interest-free loans. The Bank of England similarly promised limitless quantities of new money. The total sum pledged already is equivalent to 15 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product. An even more staggering $2tr stimulus is being planned States-side.
As neoliberal orthodoxy is abandoned at breath-taking speed, left- wing ideas, previous considered beyond the pale, are effectively been adopted by right-wing governments. Few may have heard of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): the claim that sovereign, currency-issuing states are never fiscally constrained but can issue money at will, only causing inflation if society’s productive capacities are exceeded. But MMT is now effectively the new orthodoxy.
Neoliberals have been trying to avoid this conclusion ever since the global financial crisis, when vast sums of currency were issued – euphemistically termed ‘quantitative easing’ (QE) – for the banks’ benefit. $4.5tr in the US, over £400bn in Britain, and €1.1tr in the Eurozone – yet inflation remained negligible. Ordinary people noticed this ‘magic money tree’ (as UK former prime minister Theresa May put it) and started to demand that it be shaken for them – ‘people’s QE’.
Now it is been shaken – but by the Right, not the Left. Indeed, right- wing columnists quixotically urge Boris Johnson’s government to ‘embrace socialism immediately to save the liberal free market’. Cheered on my centrists, a Tory minister admits they will end up implementing ‘most of Jeremy Corbyn’s programme’.
And where is all the money coming from? Taxes? Obviously not, as tax income is sharply contracting. The deficit hawks have all flown off. Borrowing, then – but, MMT adherents argue, this is merely an accounting convention. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted in 2009, ‘we simply use a computer to mark up the size of the account’.
Epochal Moment
nother fringe idea, Universal Basic Income (UBI) –A where governments simply give free cash to individuals
– is also having its day. A few months ago, UBI was a
leftfield notion, limited to small-scale trials in peripheral countries like Finland. Now, centrist economists are demanding ‘unlimited compensation’ for lost wages, worldwide. Over 170 British parliamentarians backed UBI before Sunak’s support for incomes which, far from being ‘basic’, exceeds the median wage. Even the Trump administration seems set to ‘write cheques’ to hundreds of millions of Americans, following the advice of such notorious communists as Mitt Romney. ‘Not our UBI,’ the Left protests – but why would it be? It’s being implemented by the Right.
Meanwhile, command-and-control models of governance are being rapidly improvised as the regulatory state proves inadequate for crisis response. China and South Korea’s surveillance and control systems have become models for western states struggling to get ahead of COVID-19. Borders are being sealed, police and armies deployed, workforces mobilised, lockdowns implemented. A British state ill- accustomed to meaningful industrial policy, let alone planning, is now instructing businesses to manufacture 20,000 respirators in a fortnight, using local designs and components. Spain has nationalised private hospitals overnight.
To be clear, none of this is to suggest that these measures will be sufficient or effective – much is coming far too late, and inevitably our hollowed-out health services will be overwhelmed. Nor does it mean that many people, especially the poor, will not suffer – millions have already been laid off while others are forced to work in unsafe conditions. Still less does it mean that right-wing governments have suddenly found socialism – unless ‘disaster socialism’ counts.
Nor is this transformation happening at the same rate everywhere. The deathly rot of European integration is hard to shake off. The European Central Bank, bulwark of the EU’s constitutionalised neoliberalism, was sluggish in announcing QE measures, with its governor even deepening Italy’s agony by implying she would not shore up Rome’s bond yields. EU governments have also been quicker to impose authoritarian social controls than to realise that fiscal, not monetary, stimulus is urgently required. Nonetheless, even the über- austere German government is set to announce a €500bn rescue package, tearing up its ‘fiscal rules’.
We are clearly living through an epochal moment, with parallels to World War II – though not the ‘Blitz spirit’ nonsense being peddled elsewhere. It was WWII that finally ended the Great Depression, thanks to state-led mobilisation and coordination of the economy. Ravaged populations clearly saw through the laissez-faire lies of the 1930s: there was an alternative to the market; the state clearly did have extraordinary powers to meet collective needs and goals. There could be no return to ‘business as usual’. The post-war welfare state was born of this recognition, in the shadow of Stalin’s Soviet regime, which had already proven the power of the state in its own bloody fashion.
Today, the People’s Republic of China casts that shadow. China’s communist regime is authoritarian, brutal and ugly. Contrary to western imaginaries, its governance regime is also highly dysfunctional, riven by internal competition and bureaucratic dislocation – which impeded full recognition of the COVID-19 outbreak and its management. Nonetheless, the regime eventually managed to contain the virus, and many western liberals and leftists now demand Chinese-style lockdowns. Beijing now has sufficient bandwidth to troll western governments and magnanimously dispense assistance to stricken states like Iran and Italy – with tech oligarch Jack Ma even dispatching aid to the United States – while the EU rejects Italian pleas for assistance and even fines Rome for overspending.
Right now, there is widespread hostility to China – boiling over into xenophobia and even appalling racist attacks on ethnic Asians. But this hostility may not last. The US’s utterly shambolic response to Covid-19 will increasingly stand in stark contrast in China’s apparent authoritarian efficiency. And while China dispenses aid, the US isflying testing gear out of Italy and allegedly trying to take over foreign companies researching vaccines, in order to serve ‘Americafirst’. The era of American hegemony is clearly dead and buried. Other Western governments presumably realise that if they cannot successfully manage the pandemic, they will be judged against a despotic regime and found wanting. This is yet another spur to abandon liberal shibboleths wherever necessary.
The Left Blindsided
ll of this is highly disorienting for a Left that has A become increasingly obsessed with ‘#resistance,’
instinctively opposing whatever the Right does while lacking any truly systematic alternative.
The problem is exemplified by acclaimed critical theorist Giorgio Agamben’s Foucauldian ranting against the ‘frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic’, while his countrymen die in droves.
Even mainstream leftist commentators are blindsided. The ink is barely dry on their op-eds – ‘well, okay, the government helped x, but what about y?’ – before yet another, larger aid package is announced. The anti-austerity Left has been exclusively focused on demanding higher government spending for so long, it hardly knows how to respond when it gets it. In Britain’s general election last December, the Labour Party ran on a platform promising adherence to fiscal rules which the Conservative government has torn up. As one Twitter wit put it so nicely, the far-left has been calling for ‘fully automated luxury communism,’ but Boris Johnson has provided ‘quarantine socialism in one country’.
This matters precisely because the old order is dead and the new is being forged piecemeal, day-by-day. Ruling elites do not know how this crisis ends. They are innovating on a daily basis, making it up as they go along. In this sense, everything is up in the air. The future is up for grabs – for good or bad.
In a society and state as dysfunctional as that of the United States, where the hollowing out of welfare and democracy has been deepest, it is easy to envisage an authoritarian trajectory. The rich are already panic-fleeing the cities. The frayed social bonds, deep poverty and widespread gun ownership of many American cities do not mix easily with food shortages and draconian containment measures. It is not fanciful to imagine severe social unrest, requiring the military to restore order. Nor is it clear how the US presidential election will be held on schedule in December, President Trump’s confidence that the virus will ‘go away’ by April notwithstanding.
The UK government’s proposed emergency measures also entail the biggest ever expansion of executive power in peacetime. Liberals are understandably (and rightly) concerned about civil liberties. But the Left should be even more concerned about democracy. In France, a ‘temporary’ state of emergency declared in 2015 was extended six times, then most of the measures were effectively made permanent through a new anti-terrorism bill. As the brutal repression of the gilets jaunes demonstrates, this has routinised despotic behaviour. The Left should not be calling for a national government to help steer an authoritarian state, but championing democratic control.
Indeed, perhaps the most terrible question posed by the pandemic is: how can democracy function when the citizenry cannot? A new order is being improvised primarily by right-wing politicians, while the citizens are stuck indoors, hoarding toilet paper and watching Netflix. Curbing the disease requires social distancing, but shaping the future requires collective action. World War Two birthed an order that favoured workers because they were well-organised through unions and parties. Today, the best our enfeebled unions and social-democratic parties seem to hope for is a new corporatism, which is in fact being created by the Right for its own purposes.
It is not even clear whether our already hollowed-out representative democracies can hold governments to account. Australia has suspended parliamentary sittings until August. The British parliament, already afflicted by the virus, has dispersed for a long recess after waving through a bill granting unprecedented peacetime powers to the executive.
These are urgent questions for the Left, for which there are no immediate or easy answers. But it is clear that democracy should be the focus. The argument should never have been about more or less state intervention in the economy, but in a moment when even that argument has been settled by the right, what now distinguishes the left? It can only be a demand for democratic, popular control over that intervention, to ensure that it serves the interests of workers, rather than simply lining the pockets of owners of capital and property. But for that to be meaningful, it requires the active involvement of the people – not their passive resignation to perpetual quarantine.
This is difficult precisely because the end of history has attenuated our civic and political life, leaving most of us atomised and fearful even before Covid-19 struck. The urgent priority is to ensure that basic democratic functions are maintained or restored as soon as possible – to demonstrate that democratic continuity is not incompatible with public health.
The longer-term task is to reconstitute a sense of collective subjectivity out of this crisis. One glimmer of hope is the thousands of mutual aid groups springing up in response to the crisis. Inspirational organising is happening spontaneously, largely independently of the state and political parties. Through these groups, many people are getting to know their neighbours for the first time and rediscovering the basic practices of solidarity. While their immediate task is just to help people survive the next few months, they could well be the basis of grassroots democratic renewal when the lockdowns are over.
"APB - All Points Between" was a seminal live cinema project created by The Light Surgeons in 2001. It was a feature length performance which circumnavigated the world through a series of capsule narratives and audio visual tracks. Mixing social-political essay with digital art, the project responded to a range of global issues and different personal perspectives. It was also one of the first live digital art projects to respond to the immediate aftermath of 911. It was presented as a multi-screen theatrical performance in Theaters, Galleries and media art festivals. The technical production involved live video mixing, 35mm slides sequences, 16mm film projection and DJing. The performance was commissioned and developed by onedotzero festival and was toured internationally between 2001 and 2003. This is an excerpt from the show known as "A World Of Extortion" and was recorded at the Melkveg and was part of the World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam. It formed the end part of the performance and features a narrative by Robert Allen Weiser, a Venice Beach street philosopher interviewed by The Light Surgeons in 1999. This spoken word was also sampled by longtime collaborators U.N.K.L.E. on the intro track to their album "Back & Forth".
Collaborative Audio Visual Artists: Christopher Thomas Allen Jude Greenaway James Price Robert Rainbow Guest Scratch DJ's: Loop Professor (DSP/Ninja Tune) Raj Patel (Coldcut/Ninja Tune) "APB - All Points Between"
You can read about the project here: https://paul-sadot.squarespace.com/current-research-projects
Robert Allen Weiser…
Visiting Research Fellow in Performing Arts at (CIPA), Birmingham Royal Conservatoire
I am happy to announce my new collaboration/position as:
You can read more about the research centre here:
https://www.bcu.ac.uk/research/-centres-of-excellence/centre-for-interdisciplinary-performative-arts
I look forward to developing exciting, challenging and innovative new research at the centre and to sharing my experiences and discoveries on multiple platforms in the future.
