‘That’s where money don’t matter
In the future
Material things, they don’t matter
In the future
I travel in a time machine, I’m in the future’
Wiley, ‘Ice Rink’ (2003)
So what, you might have the right to ask, is all this for? An aesthetic Ostalgie, only this time for a past that never even came into existence? An art-historical drift through the past for the edification of those of us lucky enough to be at a safe historical distance?
A possible conclusion, and one that I want to avoid, is that this is all we can do now – sift through past battles, past styles, make out of them some sort of composite, fashionable for a fortnight or two. Journey through the picturesque ruins, enjoy the naivete and idealism of the recent past, then return refreshed to a world without politics, a world without what used to be called a counter-culture. Because really, that (tainted as it is by association with the late 1960s to the point where it now evokes a sort of Easy Rider flag-and-dick-waving rather than any real attempt at counter-hegemony) is what this book is essentially about. Not the idea that possessing the right clothes and the right books makes you a political initiate, but rather Modernism itself as counter-culture, drawing on sexual politics, industrial aesthetics, critical theory, a new urbanism, in order to suggest – ‘as a tradition and as a vision’ – the possible outlines of a world after capitalism.
For Jean Baudrillard, writing in 1971 when something called a counter-culture still vaguely existed, such an attempt was misbegotten from the outset. In a piece for the architectural journal Utopie, ‘Requiem for the Media’, he mocked the idea that the mass media have some kind of democratic, socialist teleology inherent in them – a ‘potentiality’, as Brechtians might put it – which are exactly the terms of these essays. Baudrillard’s attack centres on the contention that a reversed media would essentially exist on the same terms as its capitalist competitor. This would automatically neutralise any critical efficacy that it might have, slotting it right back into the spectacle – this is the folly that ‘content’ can be changed without changing form, already familiar to Marxist Modernists like Hanns Eisler or Karel Teige. Yet even they imagined that mass songs or minimum dwellings could be counter-cultural. On the contrary, a real revolutionary aesthetic strategy would be an immediate, urbanist one, based on a form in which response, as opposed to reversal, would break the rules altogether. Pace Mayakovsky, the squares should be our palettes, the streets our brushes:
‘Walls and words, silk-screen posters, and hand-printed flyers were the true revolutionary media in May (1968), the streets where speech started and was exchanged: everything that is an immediate inscription, given and exchanged, speech and response, moving in the same time and in the same place, reciprocal and antagonistic. The street is in this sense the alternative and subversive form of all the mass media because it is not, like them, an objectified support for messages without response, a distant transit network. It is the cleared space of the symbolic exchange of ephemeral and mortal speech, speech that is not reflected on the Platonic screen of the media. Institutionalised by reproduction, spectacularised by the media, it burst.’180
With this comes the truism that the revolution itself doesn’t throw up a revolutionary art, and accordingly it is the aesthetics of 1927 rather than 1917 which are central to this book. It’s arguable, of course, that the new models – those which produce such overwhelming inanity today – have far more possibility for response than did television or film. But just as xeroxing would be limited by the Xerox company, the terms of our response might be circumscribed by Blogger or Murdoch’s MySpace, although whether this applies to, say, Open Access software is a moot point. Baudrillard’s dismissal of the possibility of a ‘revolutionary’ mediation strikes at the heart of any counter-cultural ambitions. Nonetheless, these essays are written in the belief that, while technology is not neutral, it can prefigure redemption through reproduction. Meanwhile, the claim that democratising the reproductive technologies, each participant of the Lehrstücke having their own apparatus, inevitably results in banality (‘if each of us possessed our own walkie-talkie or Kodak, and made his or her own films, we know what would result: personalised amateurism, the equivalent of Sunday bricolage on the periphery of the system‘181) would suggest that Baudrillard had never listened to London pirate radio.
‘Full of fictitious concern for the calamity that a realised utopia could inflict on mankind, he refuses to take note of the real and far more urgent calamity that prevents the utopia from being realised. It is idle to bemoan what will become of men when hunger and distress have disappeared from the world’. Theodor Adorno, ‘Aldous Huxley and Utopia’182
This is all very well – but who is this for? Left Modernism was intended not just to be tendentious, but to produce effects, to do stuff. Not as a substitute for political action, but as a component of it. This isn’t a book of political strategy, and isn’t about to offer a solution to the grim state of the British left: but it does try to bring together certain strands, certain ideas which ought to be useful to it should it finally reconstitute or become something new entirely.
To briefly turn to autobiography again, hopefully not as self-indulgence but as illustration, the interest in Modernism exhibited here comes from a few sources. The buildings of the 1960s, dotted around my home town; my Dad’s book collection, with its Orwell, Sartre and books on Marxism and working class history; and a teenhood obsessed with the music press, particularly the Melody Maker, wherein mass-produced popculture might be discussed and dissected, by the likes of Simon Reynolds, Neil Kulkarni or Taylor Parkes, with the political and theoretical seriousness (if none of the ponderous prose) usually reserved for the novel and the occasional art-house film. I went from there to books by Jon Savage, Greil Marcus, with their recondite historical references and re-imaginings of the familiar past in apocalyptic, revolutionary terms. I would have had a political bent anyway for one reason or another, but these were the reasons why I ended up thinking that a new society ought not to resemble the old.
In The Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell claimed, convincingly, that the failure of an idea so self-evidently sensible as Socialism to make real inroads into British society – to put it in terms he would have loathed, to become counter-hegemonic – was at root a failure of propaganda. Socialism was associated with the following two tendencies, which sound rather mutually exclusive. First, the back-to-nature ‘prig’s paradise’ of the garden cities, ‘sandal wearers’, faddists and ruralists; and second, an H.G Wells-like science fiction machine utopianism, which often tied in with the techno-romanticism of the ‘cult of Russia’, all those Constructivist photos of glittering tractors and the Dnieper dam. Both of these are considered to be essentially alien to the British worker, and the part of the middle-classes disaffected enough to be won to the cause. The ordinary British proletarian, for Orwell, is essentially conservative, wanting little more out of life than a comfy chair, the kids playing in the corner, the dog lying by the coal fire, the wife sewing and the paper with the racing finals: a ‘perfect symmetry…on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range’, etc. That might still be true, here and there (albeit replacing the hearth with the TV), and it would be silly to object to comfy chairs and familial warmth out of principle. Yet Modernist socialists were, supposedly, bent on wiping all this out. ‘Hardly one of the things I have written about will still be there…it is hardly likely that Father will be a rough man with enlarged hands…there won’t be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of rubber, glass and steel…And there won’t be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way.’183 Stop for a moment, though, and think of what constituted so much of working class culture, even in 1936: the ‘canned’ music he despised, resorts like Blackpool with their shiny concrete picture palaces, iron towers and neon lights. An allegedly simple, hidebound and placid people were quite prepared to explore a Modernist environment, if it were dedicated to pleasure rather than worthy edification.
Over 70 years later, if we look at the art forms thrown up by sections of the class Orwell idealised, what are they actually like? Just before writing this I watched a DVD of New Order playing in Brussels in 1981. These three men and one woman, all from working class backgrounds in post-industrial, council-estate Manchester – the grandchildren of those sturdy Wigan men reading the racing pages – were playing music which would have astonished and mortified Orwell, what with its blocks of overwhelming electronic sound, unnatural bass rumbles and technocratic shimmers. A retort might be that all this is just a reflection of the environment, and that in a better world someone like Dizzee Rascal or Ruff Sqwad wouldn’t be making sharp, angular, brutal noises via pirated computer programs but whittling sticks or sitting round the fire wassailing. This is a reductio ad absurdum. But if ordinary people are so hostile to new forms, new noises and new shapes, then how did the last forty years of all kinds of jarring, avant-garde street music manage to happen? Were the teds, the mods (Modernists, as they were originally known), glam rockers, punks, junglists, even the kids in provincial towns getting wrecked on Saturday nights to the ludicrously simple and artificial hard house or happy hardcore, all somehow class traitors?
These cultures aren’t necessarily revolutionary, or even counter-cultural in the mildest sense. The Baudrillard of 1971 might well have regarded them as a mere distraction, a safety valve, and in many ways they are. Yet isn’t it possible to imagine that a new left would want to base a new appeal, a propagandistic force, on these kinds of new desires and forms, rather than on Hovis advert sentiment, or an interminable wait for the cataclysmic event where all this insurrectionary spontaneity could burst out? All of the art forms written about in this book share one thing – they placed themselves in the everyday, whether in the form of immersive architectural or cinematic space or the reform of Byt itself. All of them tried to step outside of the ‘Platonic screen’ in its many forms: the place they always wanted to be was out in the streets.
What we might just get instead is the appropriation of any aesthetic revolt by the Right, as for instance in much Hip Hop’s current role as capitalism’s glossily brutal advertising service.184 The most famous example of this has always been the Italian Futurists, the Fascist Modernists par excellence. Yet even here a little digging in the history of cultural politics reminds us that things could have been different. Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1922 that ‘before the war, Futurism was very popular with workers. During the numerous Futurist art events, in the theatres of the largest Italian cities workers took the Futurists’ side, and defended them against the attacks of the bourgeois and semi-bourgeois youth, who often came to blows with them.’185 He went on to suggest that an Italian Proletcult (‘Proletarian Culture’) movement absorb the best elements of Futurism. The Italian Socialist Party wasn’t nearly so keen, and the possibility of a working class futurism disappeared, with the Futurists themselves yoking their work to Fascism.
Futurism would seem a rather peculiar ambition today. If there is one thing about which we can be absolutely certain, it’s that the world as we know it is not going to last. As stock markets crash and ice caps melt, the future is something faced with trepidation – perhaps one explanation for Britain’s nostalgia. There is always the possibility of another outcome, where this system based on destruction, injustice and barbarism can finally be given its long overdue burial. The dormant Socialist Modernism can, if nothing else, offer spectral blueprints for such a future.