A spring that never comes
Landscape and climate change
I had an essay come out last week from Effects Journal, ‘Ruins in Reverse’ (the title is from Robert Smithson), centred on two small landscapes by Nicolas Poussin in the National Gallery’s collection. It’s a bit different, formally, from other things I’ve published even on painting, so would be grateful for any readers of this newsletter taking a look. I just wanted briefly to add a few notes here that might be of interest.
I worked on the piece over a fairly long period—the opening section was written in the summer of 2019, the bulk of the rest the next summer in lockdown, the whole revised since then—and it drew in a lot of things I’d been thinking about over the past few years, but didn’t want to have them accumulate additively as riffs or tick-box references (a habit I’ve made fun of on here in the past). It has some commonalities with the more strictly theoretical essay on ecology I published in New Socialist in October 2021, particularly regarding the links between images of abundant freedom and models of nature—Arcadia or The Land of Cockaigne forms in that sense a “dialectical image” to be recovered from the early modern class struggle, rather than flatly and simply (as in Raymond Williams’ account in the early chapters of The Country and the City) one in service of present hierarchical power. I think in that sense it’s also relevant to the question of ecosocialism’s political imagination: particularly within the academy, left-wing ecologists often seem to be either engaged in pissing contests about how unsullied their perspective is by anthropocentrism/colonialism/the bad version of gender or moaning about how other ecosocialists don’t want the average Joe to have Beyond Burgers and a hydrogen car, neither of which is really very compelling to those who might make up a nascent historical bloc for climate action. By contrast the question of what’s at stake in an ecological disaster that’s already started is directly related to visions of freedom and “the good life”, or “[t]he common wealth that Arcadia promises, a life without scarcity” (one that I think is entirely compatible with an orientation towards degrowth).
Two other texts were floating in the background, although never directly referenced. The first was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969). Aside from being absolutely gorgeous, it makes fascinating and intense play with the idea, and presence, of different forms of time at work within the same text. For the ancient Greeks, the world of myth was separated from them absolutely by time: it was lost to classical Athens, but the film flashes back to it shortly after starting, showing Jason’s origin story with the centaur Chiron, and Medea’s origins in Colchis, overseeing human sacrifice, act as a metonym for it. The disenchanted world of classical Greece is in turn displaced into the world of political corruption, consumerism and petit-bourgeois aesthetics of post-war Italy—the presence of Maria Callas, denizen of European scandal sheets and an artist beloved by the sub-middlebrow, cements the move. Elegy is introduced and at the same moment ironised. It mourns the age when the gods directly touched mortal lives (The great god Pan is dead…), while imaging how the deeper substance of blood and horror from which it sprang persists in the degraded form of gesellschaft. It congeals into kitsch, like the insistent breath of nature that Adorno detects in the trees of Alpine hotel lobby paintings. The other was Daniéle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s 1970 adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s Othon, a real shock of an experience when I first saw it. The actors, clad in recreations of Roman costume, rattle off enormous blocks of text (the English subtitles, prepared by Straub himself, deliberately miss about a third of it) while the Roman sun pours down and traffic noise blasts up from the streets below. In his comments on the film for its first broadcast on West German TV, Straub emphasised not only the anachronistic elements—the “very compressed yet simple, very modern and yet alien language”, the movement between Roman ruins and 17th-century villas—but the film’s direct relation to the post-war world: on the Palatine Hill, where “Rome was founded and here soon lived the rich, the powerful and the rules of the Roman Empire”, there remains “a cave where resistance fighters hid weapons by day during the last war” for use against fascists. It’s one of the most remarkable films of the 70s, and on a level with Tout va Bien or Oshima’s The Ceremony as a film that uses its (slight or great) distance from the present for an acute political articulation. (I’d probably also mention Fellini’s Satyricon here—which Jameson invokes as one of the most successful postmodern films—if I’d seen it, but I haven’t.)
The text is insistent (though perhaps not very loudly) on imbricating climate change, secular crisis and the increasing authoritarianism of the advanced capitalist states. One passage that stood out in my recent reading, in relation to that, was from Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (I’m currently writing something about it):
Nature is absent, by and large, from this world. … Beneath the model town, unspeakable traces, tainted soil, spoiled dreams. Nowhere here do we detect any hint of the utopian prospect of beneath the paving stones the beach. …
Bright gaudy colours of the new consumer landscape: somewhere between Pontormo and a Christmas shop window. His films reproduce this aesthetic of being right on the edge of not very tasteful at all. The huge Poussin mural in Petra von Kant. Art as easy listening décor. Inner states made exterior in a wilderness of mirrors.
This was an implication of the enragé phrase I’d always missed: not just the promise, through the levering-up of hurled cobbles, of a leisure otherwise parcelled into a few days of commodified time, but that of a potential reconciliation with nature—one that Situationist theory was quite focused on, particular in early texts like ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’. It isn’t a coincidence that the militant environmental movement emerged out of that pivotal period of struggle of which ‘67-May ‘68 was the pivot. The promise of the anti-systemic movements articulated by Marcuse in Eros & Civilisation and An Essay on Liberation—that an end to unfreedom would also be the end of artificial scarcity—appear in our present not just as unthinkable but as imaging a greater creativity, contrast and nuance than what appears in its light as a muted, flattened present. (This is also what’s known as “capitalist realism”.) What is at stake in social struggle, then, is not just the serviceable goods described by people like Alyssa Battistoni (what I described elsewhere as “turbo-WPA municipalism”) but freedom’s concrete flourishing in a nature that co-produces a mutable, “luxurious” human happiness. (I’d also bring in some of the treatment of Donald Judd’s sculpture in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 in this connection… but this newsletter’s already too long….)