Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. This is why they insist upon their identity being recognized, insist upon their continuity — their links with their dead and the unborn.

  If the ‘return’ to religion is in part a protest against the heartlessness of the materialist systems, the resurgence of nationalism is in part a protest against the anonymity of those systems, their reduction of everything and everybody to statistics and ephemerality.

  Democracy is a political demand. But it is something more. It is a moral demand for the individual right to decide by what criteria an action is called right or wrong. Democracy was born of the principle of conscience. Not, as the free market would today have us believe, from the principle of choice which — if it is a principle at all — is a relatively trivial one.

  The spiritual, marginalized, driven into the corners, is beginning to reclaim its lost terrain. Above all, this is happening in people’s minds. The old reasoning, the old common sense, even old forms of courage have been abandoned, and unfamiliar recognitions and hopes, long banished to the peripheries, are returning to claim their own. This is where the happiness behind the faces in the photos starts. But it does not end there.

  A reunion has occurred. The separated are meeting — those separated by frontiers and by centuries. Throughout the period which is ending, daily life, with all its harshness, was continually justified by promises of a radiant future. The promise of the new Communist man for whom the living were ceaselessly sacrificed. The promise of science forever rolling back the frontiers of ignorance and prejudice. More recently, the promise of credit cards buying the next instant happiness.

  This excessive need of a radiant future separated the present from all past epochs and past experience. Those who had lived before were further away than they had ever been in history. Their lives became remote from the unique exception of the present. Thus for two centuries the future ‘promise’ of history assured an unprecedented solitude for the living.

  Today the living are remeeting the dead, even the dead of long ago, sharing their pain and their hope. And, curiously, this too is part of the happiness behind the faces in the photos.

  How long can this moment last? All the imaginable dangers of history are waiting in the wings — bigotry, fanaticism, racism. The colossal economic difficulties of ongoing everyday survival are, in theory, going to be solved by the free market. With such a market comes the risk of new ravenous appetites for money, and with their voraciousness jungle law. But nothing is finally determined. The soul and the operator have come out of hiding together.

  1990

  The Third Week of August, 1991

  In 1958 when Nazim Hikmet, after being imprisoned for many years as a communist in Turkey, was living as an exile in Moscow, he wrote a poem for my friend, the Turkish painter and poet, Abidine Dino.

  These men Dino

  grasping rags of torn light in their hands

  where are they going Dino

  these men in the depth of the darkness?

  You and I also Dino

  we are among them

  we too Dino we too have seen

  a sky which was blue.

  The poem was inspired by a painting of Dino’s which I have never seen but can imagine a little. Abidine is a visionary painter, inspired in his turn by traditions which come from the wandering Sufis.

  Nazim Hikmet’s poem comes to me tonight after watching the news on TV. Like everybody else I have been watching for a week. Tonight in Moscow the crowds in the Lubyanka Square were living a moment which not a single one of them will ever forget. The gigantic statue of Felix Dzerjinski outside the notorious KGB building was being dismantled. Known as Iron Felix, he was the founder in 1918 of the Cheka, the political police who were the precursors of the KGB. A crane lifted the bronze figure off its pedestal. What the word Lubyanka meant until tonight — but, in another sense, forever — Anna Akhmatova has conveyed. The statue, in mid-air and horizontal, was slowly manoeuvred away. It will join others.

  Castings and carvings, Marx, Engels, Kalinin, Sverdlov are falling everywhere. Overturned, they all look like wrecks, like write-offs. Yet they weren’t involved in a road or air accident: they were idols which justified or demanded, over the years, sacrifice after sacrifice. That they now look, when horizontal and suspended from a cable, like write-offs is the result of their aesthetic style and iconography.

  Among monumental sculptures only certain Crucifixions would remain meaningful when suspended horizontally in mid-air. The Crucifixion happened on a tree that had already been felled and the figure on the cross, if carved truthfully, was a man humiliated and suffering. By contrast idols, when set up as sculptures, have to remain vertical.

  Despite the Eastern European example of 1989, the speed of events took everyone by surprise. After the putsch — which apparently the CIA did not foresee — the newly acquired will-power of Russian civil society must have surprised even those it was motivating. The pace in the third week of August was no longer that of an historical process but of a sudden resurgence of nature. It resembled fire, wind, or desire. Not only statues fell, but also institutions, citadels, networks, files, arsenals. ‘All fall down,’ as the English nursery rhyme says.

  The organic nature of the energy involved was confirmed by the unforeseeable yet crucial participation of the young. What happened in Parliament Square on Wednesday, August 21 was the birth of a generation. And Gorbachev aged overnight.

  The triumph and drama of Gorbachev is astounding. We can see now that he, with his advisers, calculated many years ago — well before he acquired power — that there was no real chance of bringing about any changes in the Soviet state apparatus until a potential civil society had been created at home and the Soviet satellites had been dismantled abroad. Hence, first glasnost. And then, later, the road to the Red Square in Moscow, which had to begin in Berlin. The irony of it having to be like this — after the heroic advance of the Red Army in the opposite direction in 1944 — must have struck him many times.

  His calculations were proved correct, and consequently something happened on a scale which has no parallel in history. Never before has such a massive power system been dismantled in such a short time with so little loss of life. The face of Europe utterly transformed, and almost everybody sleeping in his usual bed every night. This is why I quoted from a nursery rhyme.

  Hans Magnus Enzensberger has named Gorbachev a genius of withdrawal, the great master of retreat. He is right. But the conception, the carrying out, and the success of the great withdrawal depended on one thing, which is the axis of the man’s drama.

  Gorbachev believed in the possibility and the desirability of reforming the Communist Party. If he hadn’t believed this, he could never have gained the necessary power, convinced his comrades, intimidated his opponents, or moved with the visionary power that he did.

  He might have written a book of political theory, but the immense transformations we have lived through during the past five years would not have taken place in the way they have. Probably the economic collapse of the USSR would eventually have provoked very violent and desperate confrontations.

  Gorbachev is a man, formed within the Communist Party, who undertook to change his party and its role in the world. He failed to imagine only one thing: that, due to all the other changes he’d brought about or stage-managed, the CPSU would overnight be declared illegal.

  At the end of the third week of August, he turns to the audience, which is a world set free, and at the same instant he finds himself empty-handed.

  I thought of Hikmet’s poem because it refers to another but similar paradox and drama. It is small, a postcard of a poem, suffused with sadness and, differently — as with so many of Hikmet’s poems — with pity. Applied to a poem, the word pity presents no problems. In life
, during modern times, the notion of pity became suspect. Unfortunately there was thought to be an insult in it.

  Its opposite, pitilessness, remained terrible and simple. The idols are being torn down because they embodied pitilessness. The party is being banned for the same reason. No appeal can be made to the pitiless. And the iconoclasm of this moment is the revenge of those who learned that it was hopeless to appeal.

  Yet, in the beginning, communists became communists because moved by pity, Marx included. He wrote into what he saw as the laws of history the salvation of the pitiful. Nothing less. Gradually these laws were used to make ever wider and dogmatic generalisations so that they finally became lies, as all generalisations which become dogma are bound to do. The reality of the living was obscured by the writing of these laws, and whenever this happens evil reigns.

  The communism, today certified as dead, represented at one and the same time an ardent hope born of pity and a pitiless practice.

  These men … ‘grasping rags of torn light in their hands’.

  What then is pity? Simone Weil defined it better than anyone else I know. It ’consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly, “why am I being hurt?” harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.’

  I don’t believe other statues in bronze will take the place of the write-offs in Russian cities. The nightmare of the merciless fallen idols there has already been replaced by a dream. The free market carries with it the right to dream. We are here, as the French magazine Marie Claire so succinctly put it, we are here to offer names to your longings. Russian longings, after so much hardship, are intense. The world network of media exchanges seems to answer, more consistently at this moment than any other proposal, many of their longings. The statues are being replaced by far more volatile images, which are working like a screen on to which is being projected a preview of the future. What lies behind the screen is contradictory.

  On one hand, the Gulf war showed how politicians have reason to fear the media; or, rather, have reason to fear public reaction to what the media may show. Satellite transmission has given the world a new meaning for the term ‘moment of truth’. (Like the moment in Parliament Square when a soldier in a Red Army tank threw in his lot with the unarmoured crowd.)

  On the other hand, the Gulf war showed — as did events in Romania last year — that a scenario of lies can be written for the media which will then transmit it, with excitement, commentary, analysis, etc., as if it was the truth.

  Perhaps, as was the case with the statues, the essential nature of the media network is most clearly revealed by its aesthetic and iconography. These are not stamped on everything which passes — sometimes dispatches come from life itself — but they are dominant and they fashion a style not only of presentation but also of perception.

  It is a style of winners and would-be winners, not of conquerors, not really of supermen, but simply of those who do well and succeed because they have come to believe that success is natural. (Sport is a significant field for this style, since it allows for winners who can temporarily lose whilst remaining winners.)

  Like all aesthetics, this one entails an anaesthetic: a numbed area without feeling. The winning aesthetic excludes experience of loss, defeat, affliction, except insofar as those suffering these ills may be presented as exceptions requiring the aid of winners. The anaesthetic protects from any assertion or evidence or cry which shows life as a site of hopes forever deferred. And it does this despite the fact that such a vision of life remains the experience of the majority of people in the world today.

  The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognises neither pity nor pitilessness.

  1991

  Appendices

  Notes

  The Moment of Cubism

  1. See John Golding, Cubism (London: Faber & Faber, 1959; New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

  2. D. H. Kahnweiler, Cubism (Paris: Editions Braun, 1950).

  3. In the Penguin translation of Apollinaire a misreading of these lines unfortunately reverses the meaning of the poem.

  4. El Lissitzky (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1967), p. 325 (trans. Anya Bo-stock).

  5. E. M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen (London: Putnam & Co., 1929; New York: Mayflower/Dell Paperbacks, 1963).

  6. Quoted in Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1600 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; OUP paperback edn, 1962).

  7. See Arnold Hauser, Mannerism (London: Routledge, 1965; New York: Knopf, 1965); an essential book for anybody concerned with the problematic nature of contemporary art, and its historical roots.

  8. Quoted in Anthony Blunt, op. cit.

  9. Artists on Art, ed. R. J. Goldwate and M. Treves (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945; London: John Murray, 1976).

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), p. 75 (New York: Harper & Row/Torch, 1959).

  13. For a similar analysis of Cubism, written thirty years earlier but unknown to the author at the time of writing, see Max Raphael’s great work The Demands of Art (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 162 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968).

  14. Eddie Wolfram, in Art and Artists, London, September 1966.

  15. Werner Heisenberg, op. cit., p. 172.

  16. W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain (London: Duckworth, 1953; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961), p. 69 (New York: Norton, 1963).

  17. 17. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Routledge, 1964; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 4, 5.

  18. Quoted in Hans Richter, Dada (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966), p. 55 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

  Art and Property Now

  1. Notes pour un Manifeste (Paris: Galerie Denise René, 1955).

  Image of Imperialism

  1. ‘Vietnam must not stand alone’, New Left Review, London, no. 43, 1967.

  2. Saint-just, Discours et Rapports (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1957), p. 66 (trans. by the author).

  3. Ibid., p. 90.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Quoted in Albert Camus, The Rebel (London: Peregrine, 1962), p. 140.

  8. E. ‘Che ’ Guevara, Le Socialisme et l ’homme (Paris: Maspero, 1967), p. 113 (trans. by the author).

  Nude in a Fur Coat

  1. The Success and Failure of Picasso (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

  The Painter in His Studio

  1. Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (London: Faber & Faber, 1952).

  2. Pascal, Pensées (trans. by the author).

  L. S. Lowry

  1. This quotation is from Mervyn Levy’s L. S. Lowry (London: Studio Vista, 1961). Levy establishes the character of the artist very well, but his interpretations of the works are vulgar.

  2. Kenneth Clark, A Tribute to L. S. Lowry (Eccles: Monks Hall Museum, 1964).

  3. L. S. Lowry (London: Arts Council catalogue, 1966).

  4. Mervyn Levy, L. S. Lowry, op. cit.

  5. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Gollancz, 1937).

  Pierre Bonnard

  1. Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1958), p. 168.

  2. Stendhal, De l ’Amour (Paris: Editions de Cluny, 1938), p. 43 (trans. by the author).

  3. Quoted in Pierre Bonnard (London: Royal Academy catalogue, 1966).

  Auguste Rodin

  1. Isadora Duncan, My Life (London: Gollancz, 1966), pp. 99, 100.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955).

  4. Quoted by Denys Sutton, Triumphant Satyr (London: Country Life, 1966).

  Peter Peri

  1. John Berger, A Painter of Our Time (Londo
n: Secker & Warburg, 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

  Victor Serge

  1. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941, ed. and trans. Peter Sedgwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

  2. Victor Serge, Birth of Our Power, trans. Richard Greeman (London: Gollancz, 1968).

  Fernand Léger

  1. John Berger, Corker’s Freedom (London: Methuen, 1964).

  The Sight of a Man

  1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

  2. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit.

  3. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cogg et al. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

  Revolutionary Undoing

  1. Max Raphael, The Demands of Art, trans. Norbert Guterman (London: Routledge, 1968).

  On the Bosphorus

  1. ‘The new dissent: intellectuals, society and the left’, New Society, 23 November 1978.

  The Work of Art

  1. Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class Consciousness (London: Pluto Press, 1978; Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978).

  Mayakovsky

  1. V. V. Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made? (London: Cape, 1970; New York: Grossman, 1970).

  2. This is a literal translation by the authors.

  3. Mayakovsky, op. cit.

  4. Yannis Ritsos, Gestures, trans. Nikos Stangos (London: Cape Goliard, 1971; New York: Grossman, 1970).