First, a bit of comedy: This entry will be the 6th time your correspondent has tried to write over the last months. The desktop of my old Windows 7 Acer Aspire One is a hilarious boneyard of critical thinking - labelled in a haphazard way: 'failed post #1', 'failed post June' and so on. I don't know yet why I am keeping these attempts - I guess they are kind of a marker of a wasted year, spent stück in Australia, where I was by chance when the pandemic began in earnest, and where I am strangely forbidden by government from leaving the country. So I'm a correspondent in 'in-ile' rather than exile, under a weird type of arrest - one that is not compatible at all with the high value I put on human mobility (as distinct from luxury travel) and the right to building one's life the way one chooses as fundamental, even if contingent.
I don't want to spend much time on writer's problems here. After all, difficulties are pretty much everywhere today at various extremes, and talking about 'writer's block' is normally boring for everyone except the writer (and their poor drinking buddies). But central to my specific difficulties on this platform lately will be problems shared by many other projects, from restaurants to cinemas to workplaces to educational institutions to informal assemblies. As I've accrued this garden of written kept-trash, I've been thinking about specifically what is making it so 'impossible' to write. After all, there is not a shortage of things to write about, as the pandemic collides theory, economics, and culture into a kind of cocktail of shock.
The specific problem I have can be said simply and dramatically: culture is gone. What I mean by this is, let me flag it, a type of generalised culture - one of physical coming-together, one that indicates a specific, intimate, some might say old-school, form of community. It's a site where change might happen, where we might meet people, in a kind of human way, without the excessive language and classification (admittedly a type of freedom for some) of distanced communication. While the problems of artists - especially financial - have been documented by media, they do little to encapsulate the meteoric problem of the destruction of culture and of its transformative properties, and just what the effect of this will be. There are various book-burning metaphors for this, from the Nazis to Pol Pot, but none that really captures the large-scale pyrotechnics I observe happening today, and the daunting prospective workload of moving forward that it indicates.
This destruction of culture is marked by a unique feeling of sadness, particularly from artists, at cancelled events - which has happened so much that it's now become a numb admission of defeat, like Lemmings off a cliff. It would be easy to dismiss these feelings as secondary to the physical deaths of 2 million people in the health crisis worldwide - to me, this only heightens its significance. Unlike the health crisis, the massive destruction of culture has gone largely undocumented. Why?
Well, from this viewpoint in Australia at least, that's easy to answer. It is to the advantage of certain interests who would rather see culture either disappear entirely, or shift to formats where it can be carefully surveilled, policed, and monetised, or be drip-fed as bread and circuses to an 'entertained' audience. This process is not new, but has been massively accelerated in the pandemic. Further to this has been a censoring of critique, and individuals policing each other has been the saddest phenomenon to witness over the panopticon of the pandemic: as though asking questions suddenly became equal to conspiracy theory, and it logically follows that standing apart from the latest consensus is an invitation for social punishment. As a direct result of that context, opposition and resistance - previously the realm of collectives, communities, and cultures - becomes, temporarily I hope, the domain of conspiracy theorists of the far right, for whom these circumstances are a perfect opportunity.
So my 'writer's block', or whatever, is caused by a much more ominous apprehension: there may soon be nothing to write about. This realisation is not without happiness on a personal level - of how much critical work depends on a real and dynamic dialogue with this culture of intimacy, so much that it literally cannot survive without it. It's not without fear, but not driven by it either - more the outlining of an imperative to think deeply, critically, at this moment, about what has been lost. In what way is this situation training us? In what invisible ways are we becoming blunted? To what loss do those feelings of frustration, of anger, bottled up and with no outlet, really point?
The decline of this specific strand of culture is not new. In Australia - supposedly a paradise - the ripping-up of public funding for the arts, rapid centralisation of media organisations following policy overhaul, and removal of rights to demonstration have been severe, in line with an ideology that has seen 20 out of 26 years of right-wing government bent on a particular version of wealth-creation. Referred to as the 'culture wars', this is really a type of propagandic violence arising from a place of apathy and self-satisfaction in the public and the result of a 'booming' economy. In this context, it can be difficult to think deeply about both culture and criticism: what it means to us, how we can support it. Culture is one aspect of human wealth that does not just exist de facto - it is created by people working together in solidarity: from workplaces, to education, to art, to the streets, from which a particular type of being together can emerge.
Don't I have more to say about this? Yes. But as I have pointed out, the context is too censored, and too filled with noise - so at the moment I can only mark the time with its identification, and the expression of a particular special, specific, and even romantic sadness, that so much beauty in the world is dying.
Does that sound like a negative and over-dramatic throwback? Sure. Are there comforting answers available to these questions? Yes, there are a lot, and over the last months I have become much better at guitar, as I play imaginary duets with (temporarily) my drummer-neighbour. But the tragedy should be, I claim, acknowledged and articulated with energy all the same: to look around ourselves at opportunities to adapt and rebuild in small but imperative ways, even as it may feel the world is falling down around us.
At the time where planning and strategy are no longer possible - that is exactly the time to really think.
No comments:
Post a Comment