I had intended this newsletter to be simply share some things I’ve found interesting or useful to read recently. But the news – specifically our ruling party’s conference and the terrifying tendency to tackle frothed up chimerical ideas such as woke science or a war on motorists with brutal dog-whistle policies – made me think about the connection between two very different articles I’d bookmarked for sharing.
How to Build A Movement
I was going to draw attention to the transcript of a talk given by academic Jenny Hughes, and Common Wealth’s Rhiannon White and Ffion Wyn Morris on How To Build A Movement – A Talk On Class & The Arts. In the piece, the three expand on a series of shared phrases, including “Our lived experience is an asset”. This underlines, amongst other things, that when thinking about assets and capitals as I suggested in my last post, it is important to avoid being drawn into a narrowly economic way of defining what you have at your disposal.
I was also going to point you at an older essay by Jeremy Harding about the poet George Oppen in the London Review of Book I came across recently.)
I use a line from Oppen’s first book Discrete Series as an epigraph for the title sequence in my forthcoming collection, The Infinite Town: “Of the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century” For me, this line suggests the way in which even the most personal things – like bereavement or love, say – are interwoven with the social fabric of the time. (“Weather-swept” is also a hint at the climate emergency themes of the collection.)
Oppen was part of the Objectivist poetry movement, and co-founded the press from which it took its name. (Bloodaxe Books’ landmark anthology, edited by Andrew McAllister, remains a great place to start if you want to find out more.) A communist, Oppen gave up writing for 27 years whilst he fought in the War and became a social worker, before leaving the US to escape McCarthyite harassment. Harding quotes another poem which forms a connection between US poets of the last century and the women of Common Wealth:
“The self is no mystery, the mystery is
That there is something for us to stand on.
We want to be here.
The act of being, the act of being
More than oneself.”
Being more than oneself
Being more than oneself sometimes feels the missing element to many current arts advocacy arguments. Rhiannon White describes Common Wealth as part of building a movement. She goes on to place this in the situation of many communities in our fraying lands:
“Imagine if our communities had time, energy, resources and access to opportunities – in abundance. That we didn’t have to worry about money, health, food, violence, feeling used, under-resourced. … Imagine if we were nourished, in every sense of the word. That education works in our favour – and we taught life. If there were youth centres, community centres, food, places to sleep, houses without damp, caring duties were supported & we felt valued. If our elders weren’t isolated and lonely – and our young people weren’t bored & without purpose but connected & enjoying their time together.”
The context is the connection, the background Sunak and Braverman, even Mordaunt’s bizarre ‘AI-spoken word night at the Monday Club’ speech. The conclusion I find myself reaching as we formulate, yet again, arguments for more conducive cultural policy and try to “make the case for culture” is an awkward one.
Cultural Policy
The dilemma is this. To influence you need to find some shared ground, purpose or values – such as people earning a living, or places being liveable. But how do you do that with those whose beliefs are, at best, counter to the evidence of what culture can do imaginatively and socially, and at worst actually dangerous to people. (Note the increase in attacks on trans people and hate crimes more broadly for evidence that this talk costs lives.) When they make Lee Anderson Culture Minister next year, for the electioneering culture war lols, what will we say?
What we are experiencing is not normal government. The sector can no longer expect – or simply accept, were we to get it - functional cultural policy from the same government that is simultaneously actively making the UK a hostile environment for perfectly legal asylum seekers, trans people, disabled people, the unemployed, young people, people of colour, anyone who needs to travel or use a public service and even the actual environment.
We need to respect and work with elected politicians, when they respect democracy’s historic norms and procedures, which this gang do not. They are as careless with power and policy as squabbling children playing pass-the-parcel. The sector needs to work together in and on mutual aid, for those working in it and for those in its wider communities. (As many are, of course.) And we need to be opportunistic at times, not letting perfection prevent the good - I’m not suggesting idealism, that last refuge of the powerless.
The issues being dealt with by Common Wealth share DNA with those people were facing almost a century ago. This not news. The Unconservative Tories’ divide and conquer tactics, the flailing attacks on woke science, toilets anyone can use, the ability to walk to the shops or to breathe in, are certainly not new, though they may be breaking new ground for absurdism in how they are being promoted.
We urgently need an alternative cultural policy that contains and connects to the issues of poverty, exclusion, education, human rights, climate emergency et al inside and beyond the cultural sector, if we are not to be simply “playing the lute in a time of injustice”, as Oppen’s Objectivist colleague Carl Rakosi put it.
It is too much to ask, but I can’t help but ask it. The sector faces a cluster of existential crises, from funding to staffing to the cost of living, but to be here, we need to be more than ourselves.
(I acknowledge there are different dimensions to this discussion across the nations that currently form the United Kingdom, and significant current issues in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland where cultural policy is to large degree devolved. But my focus here is the current UK government.)
Practice
If you want think about the operating context you could do a PESTLE analysis. Or you could try my slightly more cultural variation: RESPECT. (I may have been vegan for 20 years, but I never said I wasn’t cheesy.)
This invites you to consider the world around you through seven lenses: Regulation, Economics, Social, Political, Environment, Cultural and Technological. You can then map themes at local, regional/city, national and global levels - and see where you are on the admittedly arbitrary and binary spectrum of terror and excitement.
One More Thing
The great film maker Terence Davies has died, at the age of 77. There are obvious ironies in my loving some of his films because they bring to life family photos of my mum, dad, grandparents and others, taken before I was born. Working class life in North West England (Davies grew up in Liverpool, me in Preston later) and its complexities, pleasures, pains and pub sing-songs, has never been so arty and sentimental, so beautiful and brutally stark.
The weddings look like my parents’ wedding photos. The songs they sing are songs my family sang at parties. His films recreate memories I never quite had, but carry anyway. I’m not sure that’s true of any other filmmakers. His films could be gloriously miserable as well as astonishingly beautiful, and he was happy to lean into that. He also sides with the women and children, which differentiates him from the contemporaneous kitchen sink school.
The clip below, from his masterpiece Distance Voices, Still Lives, demonstrates his ability to use music to enthralling effect, especially pre-rock and roll popular song. Michael Koresy’s obituary for the BFI describes his films as musicals, which is how I think of them, even a documentary collage such as Of Time and The City. He’s been described as a poet in film, and for once, I might agree.