Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  An interlocking world system of imperialism; opposed to it, a socialist international; the founding of modern physics, physiology and sociology; the increasing use of electricity, the invention of radio and the cinema; the beginnings of mass production; the publishing of mass-circulation newspapers; the new structural possibilities offered by the availability of steel and aluminium; the rapid development of chemical industries and the production of synthetic materials; the appearance of the motor-car and the aeroplane: what did all this mean?

  The question may seem so vast that it leads to despair. Yet there are rare historical moments to which such a question can perhaps be applied. These are moments of convergence, when numerous developments enter a period of similar qualitative change, before diverging into a multiplicity of new terms. Few of those who live through such a moment can grasp the full significance of the qualitative change taking place; but everybody is aware of the times changing: the future, instead of offering continuity, appears to advance towards them.

  This was surely the case in Europe from about 1900 to 1914 – although one must remember, when studying the evidence, that the reaction of many people to their own awareness of change is to pretend to ignore it.

  Apollinaire, who was the greatest and most representative poet of the Cubist movement, repeatedly refers to the future in his poetry.

  Where my youth fell

  You see the flame of the future

  You must know that I speak today

  To tell the whole world

  That the art of prophecy is born at last.

  The developments which converged at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe changed the meaning of both time and space. All, in different ways, some inhuman and others full of promise, offered a liberation from the immediate, from the rigid distinction between absence and presence. The concept of the field, first put forward by Faraday when wrestling with the problem – as defined in traditional terms – of ‘action at a distance’, entered now, unacknowledged, into all modes of planning and calculation and even into many modes of feeling. There was a startling extension through time and space of human power and knowledge. For the first time the world, as a totality, ceased to be an abstraction and became realizable.

  If Apollinaire was the greatest Cubist poet, Blaise Cendrars was the first. His poem ‘Les Pâques à New York’ (1912) had a profound influence on Apollinaire and demonstrated to him how radically one could break with tradition. The three major poems of Cendrars at this time were all concerned with travelling – but travelling in a new sense across a realizable globe. In ‘Le Panama ou Les Aventures de Mes Sept Oncles’ he writes:

  Poetry dates from today

  The milky way round my neck

  The two hemispheres on my eyes

  At full speed

  There are no more breakdowns

  If I had the time to save a little money I’d

  be flying in the air show

  I have reserved my seat in the first train through

  the tunnel under the Channel

  I am the first pilot to cross the Atlantic solo

  900 millions

  The 900 millions probably refers to the then estimated population of the world.

  It is important to see how philosophically far-reaching were the consequences of this change and why it can be termed qualitative. It was not merely a question of faster transport, quicker messages, a more complex scientific vocabulary, larger accumulations of capital, wider markets, international organizations, etc. The process of the secularization of the world was at last complete. Arguments against the existence of God had achieved little. But now man was able to extend himself indefinitely beyond the immediate: he took over the territory in space and time where God had been presumed to exist.

  ‘Zone’, the poem that Apollinaire wrote under the immediate influence of Cendrars, contains the following lines:

  Christ pupil of the eye

  Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows how

  This century changed into a bird ascends like Jesus

  Devils in pits raise their heads to watch it

  They say it’s imitating Simon Magus of Judea

  If it can fly, we’ll call it the fly one

  Angels swing past its trapeze

  Icarus Enoch Elias Apollonius of Tyana

  Hover round the first aeroplane

  Dispersing at times to let through the priests

  As they bear the Holy Eucharist

  Forever ascending and raising the Host …3

  The second consequence concerned the relation of the self to the secularized world. There was no longer any essential discontinuity between the individual and the general. The invisible and the multiple no longer intervened between each individual and the world. It was becoming more and more difficult to think in terms of having been placed in the world. A man was part of the world and indivisible from it. In an entirely original sense, which remains at the basis of modern consciousness, a man was the world which he inherited.

  Again, Apollinaire expresses this:

  I have known since then the bouquet of the world

  I am drunk from having drunk the universe whole.

  All the previous spiritual problems of religion and morality would now be increasingly concentrated in a man’s choice of attitude to the existing state of the world considered as his own existing state.

  It is now only against the world, within his own consciousness, that he can measure his stature. He is enhanced or diminished according to how he acts towards the enhancement or diminishment of the world. His self apart from the world, his self wrenched from its global context – the sum of all existing social contexts – is a mere biological accident. The secularization of the world exacts its price as well as offering the privilege of a choice, clearer than any other in history.

  Apollinaire:

  I am everywhere or rather I start to be everywhere

  It is I who am starting this thing of the centuries to come.

  As soon as more than one man says this, or feels it, or aspires towards feeling it – and one must remember that the notion and the feeling are the consequence of numerous material developments impinging upon millions of lives – as soon as this happens, the unity of the world has been proposed.

  The term ‘unity of the world’ can acquire a dangerously utopian aura. But only if it is thought to be politically applicable to the world as it is. A sine qua non for the unity of the world is the end of exploitation. The evasion of this fact is what renders the term utopian.

  Meanwhile the term has other significations. In many respects (the Declaration of Human Rights, military strategy, communications, etc.) the world since 1900 has been treated as a single unit. The unity of the world has received de facto recognition.

  Today we know that the world should be unified, just as we know that all men should have equal rights. Insofar as a man denies this or acquiesces in its denial, he denies the unity of his own self. Hence the profound psychological sickness of the imperialist countries, hence the corruption implicit in so much of their learning – when knowledge is used to deny knowledge.

  At the moment of Cubism, no denials were necessary. It was a moment of prophecy, but prophecy as the basis of a transformation that had actually begun.

  Apollinaire:

  Already I hear the shrill sound of the friend’s voice to come

  Who walks with you in Europe

  Whilst never leaving America …

  I do not wish to suggest a general period of ebullient optimism. It was a period of poverty, exploitation, fear and desperation. The majority could only be concerned with the means of their survival, and millions did not survive. But for those who asked questions, there were new positive answers whose authenticity seemed to be guaranteed by the existence of new forces.

  The socialist movements in Europe (with the exception of that in Germany and sections of the trade-union movement in the United States) were convinced that they were on the ev
e of revolution and that the revolution would spread to become a world revolution. This belief was shared even by those who disagreed about the political means necessary – by syndicalists, parliamentarians, communists and anarchists.

  A particular kind of suffering was coming to an end: the suffering of hopelessness and defeat. People now believed, if not for themselves then for the future, in victory. The belief was often strongest where the conditions were worst. Everyone who was exploited or downtrodden and who had the strength left to ask about the purpose of his miserable life was able to hear in answer the echo of declarations like that of Lucheni, the Italian anarchist who stabbed the Empress of Austria in 1898: ‘The hour is not far distant when a new sun will shine upon all men alike’; or like that of Kalyaev in 1905 who, on being sentenced to death for the assassination of the Governor-General of Moscow, told the court ‘to learn to look the advancing revolution straight in the eye’.

  An end was in sight. The limitless, which until now had always reminded men of the unattainability of their hopes, became suddenly an encouragement. The world became a starting point.

  The small circle of Cubist painters and writers were not directly involved in politics. They did not think in political terms. Yet they were concerned with a revolutionary transformation of the world. How was this possible? Again we find the answer in the historical timing of the Cubist movement. It was not then essential for a man’s intellectual integrity to make a political choice. Many developments, as they converged to undergo an equivalent qualitative change, appeared to promise a transformed world. The promise was an overall one.

  ‘All is possible,’ wrote André Salmon, another Cubist poet, ‘everything is realizable everywhere and with everything.’

  Imperialism had begun the process of unifying the world. Mass production promised eventually a world of plenty. Mass-circulation newspapers promised informed democracy. The aeroplane promised to make the dream of Icarus real. The terrible contradictions born of the convergence were not yet clear. They became evident in 1914 and they were first politically polarized by the Russian Revolution of 1917. El Lissitzky, one of the great innovators of Russian revolutionary art until this art was suppressed, implies in a biographical note how the moment of political choice came from the conditions of the Cubist moment:

  The Film of El’s Life till 19264

  BIRTH: My generation was born

  a few dozen years

  before the Great October Revolution.

  ANCESTORS: A few centuries ago our ancestors had the luck

  to make the great voyages of discovery.

  WE: We, the grandchildren of Columbus,

  are creating the epoch of the most glorious inventions.

  They have made our globe very small,

  but have

  expanded our space

  and intensified our time.

  SENSATIONS: My life is accompanied

  by unprecedented sensations.

  Barely five years old I had the rubber leads

  of Edison’s phonograph stuck in my ears.

  Eight years,

  and I was chasing after the first electric tram in Smolensk,

  the diabolical force

  which drove the peasant horses out of the town.

  COMPRESSION OF MATTER: The steam engine rocked my cradle.

  In the meantime it has gone the way of all ichthyosauruses.

  Machines are ceasing

  to have fat bellies full of intestines.

  Already we have the compressed skulls

  of dynamos with their electric brains.

  Matter and mind

  are directly transmitted through crankshafts

  and thus made to work.

  Gravity and inertia are being overcome.

  1918: In 1918 in Moscow before my eyes

  the short-circuit sparked

  which split the world in

  half.

  This stroke drove our present apart

  like a wedge

  between yesterday and tomorrow.

  My work

  too

  forms part of driving the wedge

  further

  in.

  One belongs here or there:

  there is no middle.

  The Cubist movement ended in France in 1914. With the war a new kind of suffering was born. Men were forced to face for the first time the full horror – not of hell, or damnation, or a lost battle, or famine, or plague – but the full horror of what stood in the way of their own progress. And they were forced to face this in terms of their own responsibility, not in terms of a simple confrontation as between clearly defined enemies.

  The scale of the waste and the irrationality and the degree to which men could be persuaded and forced to deny their own interests led to the belief that there were incomprehensible and blind forces at work. But since these forces could no longer be accommodated by religion, and since there was no ritual by which they could be approached or appeased, each man had to live with them within himself, as best he could. Within him they destroyed his will and confidence.

  On the last page of All Quiet on the Western Front the hero thinks:

  I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.5

  The new kind of suffering which was born in 1914 and has persisted in Western Europe until the present day is an inverted suffering. Men fought within themselves about the meaning of events, identity, hope. This was the negative possibility implicit in the new relation of the self to the world. The life they experienced became a chaos within them. They became lost within themselves.

  Instead of apprehending (in however simple and direct a way) the processes which were rendering their own destinies identical with the world’s, they submitted to the new condition passively. That is to say the world, which was nevertheless indivisibly part of them, reverted in their minds to being the old world which was separate from them and opposed them: it was as though they had been forced to devour God, heaven and hell and live for ever with the fragments inside themselves. It was indeed a new and terrible form of suffering and it coincided with the widespread, deliberate use of false ideological propaganda as a weapon. Such propaganda preserves within people outdated structures of feeling and thinking whilst forcing new experiences upon them. It transforms them into puppets – whilst most of the strain brought about by the transformation remains politically harmless as inevitably incoherent frustration. The only purpose of such propaganda is to make people deny and then abandon the selves which otherwise their own experience would create.

  In ‘La Jolie Rousse’, Apollinaire’s last long poem (he died in 1918), his vision of the future, after his experience of the war, has become a source of suffering as much as of hope. How can he reconcile what he has seen with what he once foresaw? From now on there can be no unpolitical prophecies.

  We are not your enemies

  We want to take over vast strange territories

  Where the flowering mystery waits to be picked

  Where there are fires and colours never yet seen

  A thousand imponderable apparitions

  Which must be given reality

  We wish to explore the vast domain of goodness where everything is silent

  And time can be pursued or brought back

  Pity us who fight continually on the frontiers

  Of the infinite and the future

  Pity for our mistakes pity for our sins.

  The violence of summer is here

  My youth like the spring is dead

  Now, O sun, is the time of scorching Reason

  Laugh then laugh at me

  Men from everywhere and more particularly here

>   For there are so many things I dare not tell you

  So many things you will not let me say

  Have pity on me.

  We can now begin to understand the central paradox of Cubism. The spirit of Cubism was objective. Hence its calm and its comparative anonymity as between artists. Hence also the accuracy of its technical prophecies. I live in a satellite city that has been built during the last five years. The character of the pattern of what I now see out of the window as I write can be traced directly back to the Cubist pictures of 1911 and 1912. Yet the Cubist spirit seems to us today to be curiously distant and disengaged.

  This is because the Cubists took no account of politics as we have since experienced them. In common with even their experienced political contemporaries, they did not imagine and did not foresee the extent, depth and duration of the suffering which would be involved in the political struggle to realize what had so clearly become possible and what has since become imperative.

  The Cubists imagined the world transformed, but not the process of transformation.

  Cubism changed the nature of the relationship between the painted image and reality, and by so doing it expressed a new relationship between man and reality.

  Many writers have pointed out that Cubism marked a break in the history of art comparable to that of the Renaissance in relation to medieval art. That is not to say that Cubism can be equated with the Renaissance. The confidence of the Renaissance lasted for about sixty years (approximately from 1420 to 1480): that of Cubism lasted for about six years. However, the Renaissance remains a point of departure for appreciating Cubism.

  In the early Renaissance the aim of art was to imitate nature. Alberti formulated this view: ‘The function of the painter is to render with lines and colours, on a given panel or wall, the visible surface of any body, so that at a certain distance and from a certain position it appears in relief and just like the body itself.’6

  It was not, of course, as simple as that. There were the mathematical problems of linear perspective which Alberti himself solved. There was the question of choice – that is to say the question of the artist doing justice to nature by choosing to represent what was typical of nature at her best.