Considering Taylor Swift has produced 2 albums this year, your correspondent hasn't been nearly as outwardly productive as I would have maybe liked.
Like many, the beginning of the pandemic brought together a lot of threads of my work, as a crisis that created a long-awaited universal narrative, and forced actual collective, public responses. For once, we couldn't ignore other people on the street. For once, what happened to people in Indonesia, in Taiwan, in Russia, in Djibouti - whatever 'other' country - affected 'us', not only on an abstract level of ethics, but directly. Protective bubbles were suddenly burst, and the outside entered in.
It didn't last long. Soon, the usual war for resources began, the game of blaming, the restoration of conceivable hierarchies based on gender, class, and race. But narratives remained and remain confused, with the state of shock likely to stretch well past the pandemic event itself.
Although I have been outwardly pretty dormant this year, inwardly I have been asking myself deeply the same question, almost like a mantra: What is the role of 'culture' in this state of shock? As I mentioned in earlier writing, culture has been thrown under the bus in many contexts, in a way that has never happened before. Whilst military actions, stock markets, sports, and ski holidays have continued over the pandemic, culture - with its associated rituals of assembly, togetherness, inclusion, and community - has been largely abandoned, in an unprecedented way. Even during World Wars, culture was adapted: theatre artists took to underground cabaret stages, radio dramas, reading stories to each other. Now the constant glow of the Netflix stream seems our only guiding light.
Criticism, and especially theatre criticism, which this writing platform is about, might seem like a strange place to go for answers to these questions. But the discourse around aesthetic objects - plays, art, music - ideally prepares us well for crises such as the pandemic. For one, it ensures that we keep our calm and our focus, that we are not distracted by fear, or panic, that we continue to notice important things even under immense pressure. Complex discourses that acknowledge nuanced international contexts provide vital immunisation against jingoist nationalism and hysterical doublethink that pervade the pandemic and seek to capitalise on anxiety and the need to find comforting, familiar lines. Criticism allows us to see the contradictions in their complexity, that there is at once both one pandemic, and many pandemics: for some, it is a total collapse of the protective forces they trust to keep them safe (borders, military, wealth). For others, whose existence is anyway precarious, it is business as usual: to die by the virus, or from starvation? Does it matter?
Some put the quality of response down to education. But while education plays an important role in allowing analysis, the creation of consciousnesses depends on many other instruments. As the Germany of the 1930's demonstrates, it is perfectly possible for enlightened individuals to turn savage when the conditions are right. Data is often interpreted individually, but pandemic response is dependent on those invisible and unspoken factors: how we relate to each other, how we engage the neighbours, our prejudices, protocols, and shared agreements. In other words, it depends on culture, by which I mean the embedded and uncategorisable assumptions governing everyday existence in a given realm.
There are many questions that can be reasonably asked about the pandemic response on a level of government. Demonstrating against restriction should not be left to the far right and business interest, but as a defense of culture and its associated human rights. What is the point of life, if I cannot sit with my relative as they die? Is there a point to discussing resistance anymore, when meeting personally is impossible? What about love?
Culture has been put under close scrutiny during the pandemic, which has applied a scalpel to it and shaved off not only excess, but cut close to the bone. Selected institutions have been maintained in closed, elite bubbles, accessible to a selected few, but the situations largely resemble T.S.Eliot's waste land: destitute, hollowed-out, if not cacophonous then at least supermassively atonal. Culture is a skeleton of its former self.
With so many people permanently cut off from culture, to say this is a challenging time for cultural leadership is an understatement. Reviving discourse depends on us picking out way through what remains, salvaging connections and tools, and re-assembling a vision of the future from an incoherent mess of fragments. It requires flexibility, nimbleness, and belief in those core qualities that make us human - already fast disappearing, and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
If that sounds bleak, it is. The way forward is together.
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