Rev Left Radio - John Berger and Marxist Art Criticism

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Jon Greenaway (aka The LitCritGuy) returns to the show to discuss the life and work of John Berger and the world of Marxist art criticism. Follow Jon here: https://twitter.com/TheLitCritGuy Check out his podcast Horror Vanguard here: https://www.patreon.com/horrorvanguard Support Jon here: https://www.patreon.com/TheLitCritGuy Music throughout the episode from the album "I Send you Cadium Red" by John Berger and Gavin Bryars ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

My political views are an intrinsic part of my view of the truth and of how I see life. The label Marxist, which was put on you, I mean, do you see that in any way helpful? I have claimed myself to be a Marxist. I mean, it's not something that I deny. And what I mean by that is that my reading of Marx from a very early age helped me enormously to understand history. therefore to understand where we are in history, and therefore to understand what we have to envisage as a future thinking about human dignity and justice.

In that sense, is it still helpful today? If we look at what is happening to the world and the decisions being taken every day, and all those decisions really made in the name of one priority, that priority of increasing, ever-increasing profit. At that moment, Marx doesn't seem quite so obsolete, does he? In your heart, you're a storyteller, aren't you? That's what you are.

Yes, I completely agree with you. I mean, I feel that I'm a storyteller. That's all. That's all, storyteller. But the trouble with storytellers is they can be seen as very dangerous. Well, dangerous to what and to whom? That's the question. If I am dangerous to those who run the new economic order, I'm proud of that. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Rev Left Radio.

Today we have back on the show for, I don't know, the fourth, fifth, six times. my good friend John, aka the Lickrit Guy, this time to talk about the work of British Marxist art critic and polymath John Berger. As we mentioned in the episode, Berger is somebody who might be well known throughout Europe and the Middle East, but is not so much well known here in North America and in the States specifically. We hope to correct that a little bit with this episode. But yeah, just a fascinating figure and life and an important Marxist thinker that we should all sort of pay homage to and learn from. So this is a really interesting conversation with a great friend of mine and of RevLefts,

and I think you will all enjoy it. As always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can join us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. We are 100% listener funded. Always have been, always will be. It's how me and producer Dave feed our children and pay our bills, and it means the absolute world to us. And in exchange for your support on Patreon, you get access to bonus monthly content. Just this last month, for example, I interviewed my 14-year-old niece and 12-year-old daughter

on feminism, on what is like to be a child, you know, a preteen, a teenager in today's world, and just got a really interesting perspective from a point of view that you almost never hear from unless you have a preteen girl in your life and I really am proud of that and the patrons really seem to love it so that's just what's the most recent but every month we try to do something unique and different and give back to those who give so generously to us

so without further ado here's my discussion on the life and work of John Berger with John aka the Lit Crit Guy co-host of Horror Vanguard and friend of mine enjoy Hey everybody my name is John on the internet I go by The Lit Crit guy. I have been lucky enough to come on Reble Left a few times before. We've covered a whole host of

really interesting conversation. So I'm a writer and a teacher from the North of England. I'm a Marxist. I'm the co-host of the Gothic Marxist podcast Horror Vanguard, where we talk about horror movies, leftist politics and cultural theory. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts from and support us on Patreon. to get access to a whole bunch of bonus episodes. But my background is in talking about culture and how it intersects with politics and how we can think around the material history

and practices of culture to work towards kind of revolutionary politics. Yeah, absolutely. And if you are new to Rev. Left or you haven't heard the multiple discussions we've had with John, I encourage you to go back and look at them because every single one has been a fact. fascinating deep dive into really interesting topics, as this one will be as well. And also,

if you haven't subscribed to and listen to Horror Vanguard, highly, highly, highly recommend. It's good to have you back. It's been a long time. When was the last time, it has to be over a year, right? Yeah, it's got to be over a year. I think it's back when we did the episode on Frederick Jameson and postmodernism. So that's way, way back in the day. That's a real deep cut. Yeah, it is. And since then, I've got to talk to Kim Stanley Robinson, the sci-fi author, whose mentor was Jameson. And that was really interesting to hear his take on Jameson and how much of a mentor and friend that Jameson was to Kim Stanley Robinson. So check that episode out as well if you're interested in any of that. But yeah, we have to have you on at least once a year. And I'm going to maintain that as long as Rev Left exists. But today, we are talking about John Berger. Is that the correct way to say his name? yeah yeah that's right perfect so this is somebody who i actually hadn't heard about him before we started recording we talked about how you know he has he has a much more sort of influence and impact perhaps in europe and throughout that region but is not as well known in the u.s for you know some interesting

reasons or reasons that we might not be able to put our finger on so i think a lot of people in the u.s might not know about them or if they've heard of them might not know much more than that so first and foremost, who was John Berger? What were his politics? And why should folks on the left know about him? Okay. Yeah. So, John Berger is probably in my opinion, one of the most interesting Marxist writers of the 20th century. So he was born between the wars. He was also a soldier in in World War II, where he spent his time with working class recruits, often writing their letters home for them as many of them were illiterate. He considered himself a storyteller that was principally how he identified, but his politics were also very committed to Marxist

revolutionary politics for a huge stretch of his writing. He was an art critic and a reviewer. He was a translator. Him and his partners translated a lot of particularly German philosophy and Marxism into English for the first time. He was also a novelist, a playwright, a filmmaker, and he was responsible, I think, for kind of transforming how people think about the relationship of the individual and culture to the art that's produced within it. If you've never seen it, I can't recommend starting with his 1972 television series Ways of Seeing Enough.

if you want to change how you think about the entirety of, you know, Western art tradition. So kind of really, he then left England, he left England and spent a huge amount of his life living in rural France, in a farming village, as he put it, living among the peasantry and the rural poor. And that's the area out of a lot of, that's the kind of area that a lot of his politics and a lot of his writing emerges from. So he lived as a kind of European rather than English writer. That's how he identified. He was a kind of internationalist. And as you pointed out, he's not incredibly well known in the States, which I think is a real shame, but he's incredibly well known across Turkey, lots of the Middle East, lots of Europe, and draws from a kind of really

diverse range of influences and ideas to create a distinctively kind of Marxist body of work. Yeah, absolutely. And something I learned during prep for this and something I think you alluded to a little bit there, giving all of his, the things that he does, is just how wide-ranging his interests are, like just how wide-ranging his scope is to, to analyze and think about things. And can you talk a little bit about that before we move on? Just the amount of different things that he talked about? It's absolutely, it's absolutely incredible, the range of stuff that he covers. So he wrote novels. He, um, he wrote works of, uh, political or aesthetic theory. He wrote about great artists, uh, going over 400 years. He wrote plays. Um, he, uh, translated

poetry and wrote his own poetry. So, um, as I put it before we started recording, he was, he was what we might kind of think of as a polymath. He was interested in a huge amount of, of, of stuff, uh, you know, landscapes, to philosophy, to revolutionary movements in Latin America, to solidarity with Palestinians. So, as he put it, to be a polymath is to be interested in everything and nothing else. So he tried to encompass an incredibly broad range of experiences in his work and writing. Yeah, I love that. And, you know, by no means am I to the degree that he was, but I really tried to foster within myself, an ongoing deep sense of learning about as much as I can and have these little periods of time, weeks or months where I get fascinated by a certain topic, and then weave that

into my overall analysis and understanding of the world. And I think all Marxists specifically, but people more broadly should attempt to at least be a lifelong learner and to continue opening up these new spheres of interest for yourself, which you can consciously do and you can consciously cultivate, I think it's really important to be a well-rounded human being in general. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is what makes his work so interesting, is that it's been incredibly widely received. So, you know, back in the 50s and 60s, he was involved in, like, artistic debates over things like Soviet realism. He's made books on migrants and displaced people. He's made photojournalistic studies of doctors in how they work with patients. And I think it's

important to see, you know, if we want to have a kind of broad conception, you know, the Jamesonian word we use is totality, right? If we want to try and understand kind of the unified whole of human consciousness and existence and how we might salvage that from the kind of sledgehammer that is capitalist alienation, I think having that kind of polymatic interest, and being, being humble. You know, he described himself as a storyteller. He was there to kind of pass on the stories and ideas and things that he'd found elsewhere.

It requires a kind of intellectual humility that I think is super important for anyone who's interested in kind of radical or revolutionary politics to try and pursue. Absolutely. I like the idea of that Jamesonian dialectical totality. I think that's really, really important. John, I think about the patch of light on the wall, and how you painted it yellow. I also think of Alice in her cradle. The yellow you painted is like a name you gave the light.

no no color represents light and light would vote for none or maybe it would vote for black because black by opposition really makes one imagine light

however the yellow is a beautiful name high up there on the wall behind black there's light but doesn't something equivalent happen always with colour? Isn't the colour always behind what we see?

On the far side? It's as if all the colours, and particularly the pure ones, are waiting to undress or be undressed. Maybe the colour gold is special, associated with magic and sacred, because it's the exception. What is on the other side of the other side? of the gold is the same as what is on this side.

Gold is naked from the start, the only one. Let's go ahead and move on. Obviously, a huge element of his work is art criticism, and obviously the term sort of speaks for itself, but for those who only have a vague or hazy idea of what exactly that is. Can you talk a little bit about what art criticism is before we get into Marxist art criticism?

Yeah, totally. So there are generally two ways that things get talked about, right? And when we talk about art, we don't necessarily have to be talking about the stuff you might see in a gallery, you know, the stuff that's old or, you know, done by the painter's names

that we might learn in school. But generally, there are two ways that this kind of thing is talked about. So especially online, you get what I call kind of taxonomic criticism where the sort of function of the writing is to ascertain whether something is good or bad. You know, you maybe like look up some reviews of that movie that you're going to go and see and from that you decide whether it's going to be worth spending your money on. That's one type. And then a second type is probably what we might call kind of more traditional or kind of classical criticism where we talk about the reasons.

why we place value judgments on certain works of art, the standards of what those value judgments are. And a lot of this gets turned into questions of kind of canon. You know, in literature, we're talking about quote-unquote classic literature. It's stuff that has been given a kind of critical significance by virtue of a certain quality. So criticism is not just the kind of taxonomy where we go, like is this is is is is thing good or bad but it's all uh but it can also be a kind of broader

category where we go right what are the qualities of a given objects or art piece what are the what's the significance of it in essence what does this thing kind of mean that's what those are kind of two two i think of the sort of common sense uh understandings of the term like art criticism absolutely and then of course there is as there is with film theory and many other things, a Marxist version of this. So can you talk about the Marxist art criticism, sort of why it's important, and, you know, also what Berger's specific contributions to Marxist art criticism were? So Marxism isn't interested in these kind of like idealized discussions about canon, you know, but it's interested in the kind of material and historical questions of

how is, how does meaning emerge from given art? And what function does art kind of serve. So a really great quote from Berger that I love is from an old television appearance of him when he was kind of at the height of his fame. And he said, the ranking of artists in an order of merit seems to me to be an idle game. What matters are the questions that art answers. Right, that's what's important. What is the relationship between the historical and social conditions in which we live and the art that's produced. How do those two things interact? And what should the function of art be if we want to understand things kind of materially? So when Berger first emerged, the big kind of art debate was between two sides. Modernism

on the one hand and social or even Soviet realism on the other hand. And so the kind of traditional art establishment would say that actually modernism, which was often very abstract, quite difficult, often opaque in its meaning was the product of kind of liberal democratic capitalism. And Soviet or social realism was an expression of a kind of totalitarian aesthetic that wanted everybody to look the same. And Burgess point was actually, for the vast majority of working people, art has no kind of significance. And that's not the failure of those working people, it's the failure of art to speak meaningfully to them. And he said, actually, social realism, what in Britain was called the kitchen sink painters, or, and, you know, what in the

Soviet Union was called Soviet realism, was answering a specific need for artists to be connected to the wider body of people. So I hope that kind of like offers some kind of potential ways into thinking about what, what is, and how could we expand that to start thinking, not just about visual art or visual media, but culture generally, I think, is a really interesting way to go. Yeah, absolutely. What are some, like, examples for people out there of, like, obvious forms of, like, modern art for people to sort of get more of a bearing with regards to that specifically? So, obviously, the big innovation, this is a really kind of obvious Marxist point, which is technology and the totality of a, society will impact upon the kinds of art that get made. And the big technological leap forward in terms of, particularly in terms of realism, was the camera and then later the movie camera,

right? So if we're talking about visual art, we're probably not talking about painting anymore. And it's not a surprise that contemporary painting has increasingly gone into very abstract directions. So what we have increasingly are things like installation art or we have things like sculpture, but really, really contemporary forms of art. We're talking about photography, talking about film, talking about sound or music installations, because the technology by which we create art, by which art becomes integrated into the totality of social practice has moved forward. So we shouldn't be trying to think about this only in terms of how does this help us understand the past. But, but how does this help us understand

the images that we're surrounded by every day. One of the points that Berger makes in ways of seeing is advertising, right? The majority of the techniques of classical visual arts, or what he calls European oil painting, which has a very specific historical emergence and decline, have fed over into advertising. So if you don't have a kind of critical understanding and an ability to engage with,

the visual language that we're surrounded by all the time, you become, it's very easy for you to slip into the role of just being a passive consumer. Absolutely. And you mentioned right there ways of seeing, and you mentioned it earlier in this episode as well, and that's one of the things I watched. It's free on online, a four-part BBC series. Can you just tell us about what that is and why it's so valuable and sort of some of the main themes and arguments of that piece? Yeah. So a lot of it is very heavily influenced. by Walter Venomian's essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, right?

It was a four-part television series that Berger made for the BBC in the early 70s, and it basically seeks to get rid of the idea that art is this a historical and eternal category of, quote-unquote, aesthetic beauty. Rather, he talks about art is bound up. This tradition of art

bound up within questions of land ownership, within questions of wealth, and within questions of patriarchy, colonialism. So he talks about art in material terms, right? It's about instead of treating it as this kind of rarefied image that has to be protected and shuffled away into a gallery where they can be traded around like a commodity among the ultra rich, or you have to pay a huge amount of money in order to gain access to them. Images have proliferated technologically and have been spread all across our kind of daily existence. So what we need is that we need a material understanding of them. You know, the really famous example he uses is of Holbein's picture the ambassadors, which comes up in the show. And he talks about this, not in terms of like,

it's a great example of portraiture, but he talks about it in terms of an exhibition of political, patriarchal, colonialist wealth. And this is why actually Berger always said that paying attention to kind of classical art is important, because that tradition is how the kind of capitalist bourgeois classes of centuries past have understood themselves, right? Painting became a possession that you could own, and what it reflected back to you was yourself. This is why Berger has a really good point.

in the book of Ways of Seeing about the gold, the guilt frames that these pictures were often put within. So you link your kind of aesthetic tastes as a demonstration of wealth. So what it's really, really good for is kind of stripping away this mystification, this idealization of aesthetics and art generally into a kind of mystified category that we need experts to come and explain to us. There's a great moment in the show where he just sits down with a bunch of children and asks them what they think art means.

And it's about helping people make the connection that actually visual media is not this a historical category, but is intricately bound up within the historical development of capitalism itself. You know something that I thought about when you were talking about that? And I haven't done too much deep diving into this,

but I've heard that like modern art, especially abstract expressionism, was clandestinely funded and promoted by the CIA, especially during the Cold War. Do you know anything about that? Yeah, there's some super interesting stuff on, I think it's called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was, the CIA were interested in kind of creating an anti-Soviet left, basically.

You know, it was fine to be left-wing, and they'd even help propagate various journals across the world that, you know, would publish notable figures and writers and artists, but they would, they're kind of trying to create a kind of wedge issue here. Whether that's the case with expressionist and very abstract art is an interesting one because Berger actually changes his mind on a lot of modernist art, but precisely because of the influence of Picasso and Cubism. And he says, actually, just because, and it got him into trouble,

even with figures in Russia, they thought he was harboring dangerous liberal sympathies. But he was like, actually, it's expressing something that's true as well. And it has to be incorporated into a Marxist understanding of culture. So it's true. There are almost certainly kind of documented historical links going on here. But I also think it's important to point out that art is not something that is given to us. The meaning and use of art is something that can be constructed. and by those who view it or those who engage with it.

So, yes, that's absolutely part of it. And I think it would be kind of naive to sort of dismiss that. But I also think, given the nature of what it means to interpret art, there's potentially scope for it to be recuperated as well. What do you think about it? Yeah, no, I think that's more or less true about the ability for it to be recuperated. I think it is a historical fact that there was like funding of people like Jackson Pollock, for example, by the CIA. And it was this concerted effort in the realm of art to fight against Soviet realism and anything on any cultural front that could be a sort of an advancement of socialism, Marxism, et cetera.

So as I say, I don't know much about it and I don't know much about the art world more broadly. but I always thought that that was an interesting thing to think about and to sort of see all the ways and all the fronts on which the CIA was fighting the Cold War. Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's a whole episode that you could do on like the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Like the Paris Review, which is still an established literary magazine, was basically founded by OSS-CIA spooks. So, like, but I also think Berger's, Berger was very committed to social realism for a very long time. And his interest then kind of moved to cubism because cubism was an exploration of not just space, but of time and space experience simultaneously. And he writes a little bit on more contemporary artists, but a lot of his interest that then returns into kind of what we might quote. kind of canonical artists. But that exploration of space and time

and the experience that that renders into consciousness because the two big influences for him were Van Gogh and Picasso. Those were the kind of two artists that he writes about extensively. And I think it is really important to flag up that, again, especially in Western Europe, especially in North America's, like there was definite political significance right to the struggle over art

which is why it's important to not just dismiss it and not be like well what does this have to do with anything you know if your class enemies take it seriously then we should too exactly exactly and recently with the with the whole Cuba situation going on I think it's been pretty well detailed that sort of branches of the CIA

or you know related agencies like USAID and the NED have cultivated sort of a cultural network of artists and musicians and rappers and maybe even social media influencers to help push the sort of SOS Cuba the latest attempt to destabilize that country as well so it's not something merely in the past it's something that is very clearly an ongoing a feature which means that it must have some efficacy you know yeah absolutely absolutely and that actually means that um having it having an explicit Marxist understanding of the role and function of culture, not as this idealized thing,

or not even as this de-libidinized apolitical kind of force for good, but understanding how artistic expression is married to like material forces of production and political and class struggle is vitally important. Which is why revolutionaries have a role to play in the production of art and culture. You know, revolutionary musicians. artists, novelists, that whole runs the gamut of anything under the umbrella of art. That is a front in the battle as well. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. The 1st of March, 1997.

Red is not usually innocent, but the red you sent me is. it's the red of childhood a pretend red or the red of young eyelids shut tight the red you saw when you did that as I look at it

I wonder what will happen when it grows older maybe it won't be red anymore my guess is that maybe it will become black whereas this far from innocent red

was maybe when it was young, white, white, with a touch of green, like apple blossom when it unfolds. Now, it's the heaviest red in the world. No bird could fly near it. Perhaps my favourite red is Caravaggio's. He uses it in painting after painting. The death of the virgin in the Louvre, for example. The red by which you swear to love forever, the red whose father is the knife, the red which Nagib Mahfuz was thinking about in Cairo when he wrote. The beloved may absent herself from existence, but love does not.

Could it be that red is the one colour that is continually asking for a body? Give my special love at this moment to Genevieve. So let's go ahead and talk about the sort of polymathic dimensions of Berger's, and his interests that we've mentioned a few times. What were some of Burgers' other works and other topics, social issues, questions, et cetera, that interested him and that he focused his mind on? Well, I think there's so many that we can talk about, but there's just a couple that I think are really worth flagging up. What I think is probably his best book and his most important book,

is a book called a seventh man. So a seventh man is a, it's very, it's quite odd. It's a combination of fiction and theory interspersed with photographs. So he collaborated hugely throughout his, his career. And one of the most important people that he collaborated with was Gene Moyer, who was a photographer. So a seventh man is about the role and, importance of migrant labor to the European capitalist system. And it follows, usually people from rural Turkey or North Africa going to, for seasonal work in Germany or Switzerland or France, northern Italy, what was called the gas arbiter, the seasonal work program that a lot of these European economies depended upon.

You know, Geneva's sewer system was mostly built by migrant labor, people who did not have rights, people who were often hugely exploited, people who were doing it because the global system of capitalism had rendered it necessary for their own personal survival to do so. Berger makes a great point in this in the book that when we talk about underdeveloped countries, we should really be talking about the process of by which they, are underdeveloped. It didn't just happen, right? There are global systemic forces that have pushed these people out of their, out of their villages and homes, into urban centers where they can be forced to do incredibly backbreaking, dangerous work used as a political wedge issue against workers from that country. And as Berger puts it, the migrant sells their in order to live. So he wrote extensively about, as he call it, the rural and the peasants.

And now this is supposed to be a category that kind of disappears, you know, if we take a very teleological and mechanistic view of Marxist history. But he said, actually, you know, the peasantry as a class has kind of been far more persistent than maybe people expected. this is why he wrote about the Zapatistas, he wrote about rural workers in Turkey, he wrote about the struggle for survival in Palestine, he wrote about the kind of act of perception, he wrote an awful lot about history, and he tried to put that into either fiction or art criticism. So I really recommend a seventh man, I think it's an incredibly powerful

book because the images and words kind of work together. It's almost like, reading it is almost like watching, it's like having a book that is also a film at the same time because you get to follow these, as he puts it, it's usually men, even though there's a huge amount to be written from a feminist point of view of the role of women in this process, but it's these men who kind of go off to another country and try and save enough so they can either bring family to them or they can go back with the money that they've saved, but they will almost certainly have to do that year after year after year. So it's like, he covers a whole host of different ranges.

He's written about animals as well quite movingly because, you know, if you live in a very rural peasant community, the environment is a very pressing concern. So environmentalism, history of poetry, history of arts. the relationship between humans and animals, the relationship of people from wildly different cultures brought together by capitalism, workers' rights, revolutionary political movements. There's, you know, he was writing for, since he was in his, he was writing from the point he was in his 20s to when he died in his 90s. So there's this incredibly rich body of work to explore. Yeah. I know one of the books I'm interested in getting, after doing prep for this episode, is the shape of

a pocket, which I believe was a correspondence with subcomadante Marcos of the Zapatistas. So that's incredibly interesting. And I read some quotes about Berger from the book and talking about the book, and it seems incredibly interesting. You mentioned he wrote about animals. I don't know if you've read a lot of his work on that front, but can you talk a little bit more about that? I'm just interested in that aspect of his work.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm actually just going to bring up the essay. short piece called Why Look at Animals and he makes the point that increasingly

people don't really look at animals but the biggest kind of change to that is pets says that actually having a pet is a very modern invention

because it's something that emerges in the 19th century but previously our relationship with animals is much more based on issues of mutual

survival, right? If you're a farmer who raises pigs, he says, you are, you are grateful to look upon the pig and to salt it for the winter after, after the animal has been killed. And he says, actually, those two things have an and between them, not a but. So there is, there is, often, I think human animal relationships gets collapsed down into making an absolute equivocation between humans and animals being relatively the same, or there's this kind of realm of absolute distance and difference between them. And Berger says that we look at animals at the zoo because we don't really see them anymore. They've been removed from the daily sphere of our existence. And that's a shame because it means that we have this kind of humanistic arrogance in how we look at animals. And we can

see them as things for our consumption or our entertainment. When in fact, historically we've always had a much closer relationship with animals than that. So, yeah, here's the quote from the essay. The vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with and depend upon animals. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand is that those two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not a but.

So he said that actually in many ways, we've always lived very closely with animals, but that's diverged. And so we now have a kind of distance from them. And that distance has kind of resulted in a sort of humanist arrogance where we kind of place ourselves above them rather than alongside them. There's another great quote here about zoos. You know, you go to look at the animals, but the animals don't look at you. And he says, you know, if you take your children to the zoo, what do they say?

They go, oh, it's boring. Is it dead? Why isn't it moving? And it's like, because, well, what? you have is you have a simulation of the ways in which we would often look at animals and experience the animal looking back at us. Or we have kind of pets that we can condition to anthropomorphize. And, you know, this is all coming from experience. You know, he's someone who he wasn't just a kind of like anthropologist in the French mountains. You know, he lived

and worked alongside farmers. So he was very familiar with the kind of of like historical and long-term relationship between humans and animals. And it's a very short essay, but I really recommend it because it's immensely thought-provoking. Zoo's realistic animal toys and the widespread commercial diffusion of animal imagery all began as animals started to be withdrawn from daily life. One could suppose that such innovations were compensatory, yet in reality the innovations themselves belonged to the same remorseless movement as was dispersing the animals. The zoos with their theatrical decor for display were in fact

demonstrations of how animals had been rendered absolutely marginal. The realistic toys increased the demand for the new animal puppet, the urban pet. The reproduction of animals in images, as their biological reproduction in birth becomes a rarer and rarer site, was competitively forced to make animals ever more exotic and remote. Everywhere, animals disappear. In zoos, they constitute the living mind. monument to their own disappearance. And he wasn't just kind of grousing about zoos for the sake of it, but showing how our

relationship with animals is constituted historically. And those shifts didn't just happen. They shifted those shifts in that relationship were conditioned through the development of capitalism as an economic force, right? Greater urbanization, greater efficiencies in production, mass production, all resulted in this kind of strange dislocation where humans can very frequently live in a world that seems very removed from the rest of nature that lives alongside it. Absolutely. And I think that shift was represented in philosophy by someone like Rene Descartes, who talks about animals as automaton's

and the famous sort of Cartesian dualism that's more broadly the split between the body and the mind within the human itself. And that separation is also no doubt, at least as some psychological extent played a role in the mass extinction event that is playing out now. And I heard as I was reading a book recently, I think it's called the end of the world or end of worlds about all the mass extinctions that have happened throughout Earth's history, the five main mass extinctions plus the one we're engaged in now. And as of right now, one of the facts that stood out to me is 3% of the animal biomass are constituted by wild animals and 97% of the animal biomass still on earth today are humans, our pets, and our agricultural animals. And I think that, you know,

you cannot separate all of what you said and that reality from the broader reality of ecological collapse, climate change, and the sort of disregard of the health of the natural planet more broadly. I just got back from Mexico and earlier this year I went to the Pacific Northwest and I got chances to be out on the ocean and, you know, kayak with wild dolphins and wild seals. In Mexico, I got to swim with a dolphin, and I saw a sea turtle, a little baby sea turtle making his way to the water, and I actually helped them get into the water. And it's just a fascinating sort of thing. And it really, when you spend time with animals, particularly in the wild, outside of the context of zoos, you just get this deep connection. and love and this profound sense of I'll do anything to protect the the habitat of this animal

and the biosphere more broadly. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's, I think it's this short essay, like I say, you can find it online. Why I look at animals is really, really good and really thought provoking and making you kind of self-reflect and go, you know, what exactly is the relationship that I have with animals? What do I see when I look at them? And maybe more troublingly, what did they see when they look back at me. And I think, like I say, he doesn't collapse things down into an easy dualism and, you know, obviously it's not dismissing things like zoos or conservation habitats out of hand. Sure.

But showing how they serve as kind of a metaphor for how the relationship of, you know, humans and animals historically has been, has shifted into something that's often so far removed. And that is a kind of chasm that's been opened up. But that isn't like just the kind of individual thing, but it has its own historical genealogy. Today I'll try to apply to your blue only with words without a colour. Yeah. Eve Klein's blue is dense. It's the colour of an object, not a space.

It's so densely blue, I'd say, that it accuses. Everything else except the fact of blue has been eliminated. And somehow, Klein feels that this is the spectator's fault. To put it another way, maybe Klein's blue is a paranoid colour, particularly when it's dark. Its pale version is less accusing, but it affords no peace. It nags, nags. There are, I think, erotic blues, but it can't exist. remember them. Can you? The blue of a certain kind of clematis is erotic. Erotic blue, of course, has nothing to do with blue films. The blue of blue films, if it existed.

That would be quite like Klein's blue, the blue of the forbidden. Again, paranoia. Blue is perhaps jewel. perhaps jewel. Blue is perhaps adornment, but blue is also modesty, the robe of the Madonna. And perhaps exactly, it's this play between these two opposites, which makes for the erotic, I don't know. Yes, now I've remembered, the blue of blueberries is sexy. A blue dress ceases to be purely blue when it follows the form of a live body. Blue is a prize, not a public one, an intimate prize.

outrageously and absurdly, I am yours. Oh, you are mine. And no other can judge us. And there's an impromptu by Schubert, which talks exactly about this. and Charlie Parker became bird because he knew about blue. For Genevieve and you with my love. All right, well, let's go ahead and move on, and one of the things that I didn't get a chance to look too deeply into, but that you mentioned in our goings back and forth before we recorded this episode is

Burgers' connections to the British Black Panthers. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so Berger has left, left leaves England, and he leaves England basically under a bit of a cloud. He has been kind of castigated for being a kind of Bolshevik for a very long time, and it's been seen as this kind of like polemical bomb thrower, you know, and he leaves England and he enters an incredibly productive part of his career. For five years, he's working on a novel. The novel is called G. And it wins the Booker Prize.

For people who don't know, the Booker Prize is probably the biggest literary prize in the UK. It's an incredibly high-profile event full of like the intelligentsia and the bourgeois elite of the cultural scene. Berger accepts the prize and gives a speech

where he says that the Booker Prize comes from the Book of Foundation which has had historically long holdings in the Caribbean and that the money is a direct result of the vicious exploitation and enslavement of peoples in the Caribbean and he says that his next project was going to be the book A Seventh Man where he was going to travel around Europe talking with and photographing migrant workers. And he said, you know, to take this money would be to fund art on the back of money that comes from the exploitation of others. So for that

reason, he decides to give it to, he splits the prize money. So he splits, half of it cover his costs to make the next book. And the other half he gives to the revolutionary group with whom he finds his politics in closest alignment, which is the British Black Panthers. And it causes this, like, enormous scandal by the standards of the day. And he says that, you know, someone from the British Black Panthers was there at the ceremony and kept trying to tell him to, like, calm down, you know, chill out, it'd be fine. But he's like, he makes it very clear that he does it as a kind of revolutionary writer. There's someone who, who wants to further the struggle for black liberation. So it's, and it's an incredibly high profile event.

You know, he leaves England again and he goes off to travel, but it's still something that is always brought up. This happens in the 70s, and it's a kind of rare moment of like someone from a very traditionally sort of like high cultural mode. You know, he was, you know, on the surface, he's a, he's a kind of, he's a middle class art writer who's written a novel that's gotten a prize from, you know, the middle and upper literary classes, but uses it as an opportunity to talk about colonial. extractive colonialism specifically and to link that explicitly to political struggles that were going on in the country at the time. Yeah, that's fucking awesome.

And you mentioned he leaves England and goes around the continent. You've talked a bit about his work around migrant labor in particular. Do you have anything more to say on that particular topic and specifically can you just talk about more about his travels and where it took him?

Yeah. He kind of creates, I've got the book in my hand, at the moment. It's a genuinely, it's a genuinely incredible piece of, of, you know, of art. And it's, um, there is, there is, uh, some very beautiful and very kind of moving photographs. It shows the kind of degrading tests that companies would, um, perform on people who were willing to submit to migrant work. Uh, so, um, he starts off in, in kind of Turkey and in North Africa where particularly German firms were desperate for workers because there was a labor shortage. But they were useful because they were often very isolated from other workers

in the countries they'd be working in. And they were desperate. They needed the work because of the various kind of systemic structures that had, like I say, as Berger had underdeveloped is an active verb, right? If a country is quote and quote unquote underdeveloped, according to a set of IMF standards, the question we should be asking is underdeveloped by whom and for what reasons, because that takes you into the realm of understanding those individual stories on a kind of global, on the level of the global totality of how capitalism operates as a cross-border phenomenon. It was reissued in 2010, and it was. kind of enormously prescient

and Berger wrote a small forward in the very end of the foreword for the 2010 edition says today the book is being republished and will find new readers amongst them there will be young emigrants who were not born when it was first published they will easily see what has changed

and what has not changed and they will recognize the heroism, self-respect and despair of the protagonists who could have been their parents and this recognition will help sustain them in their moments of panic and at other moments increase their indomitable courage I really can't recommend it enough I think it's a very beautiful piece of work absolutely

burger is often described and I really want to get your thoughts on this specifically is described as a Marxist humanist and we've done episodes on the topic of revolutionary humanism inject a position to the failures and weaknesses of liberal humanism etc. But do you think that term fits Berger? Why or why not? And what are your thoughts on Marxist humanism more broadly? I mean, I'm super sympathetic to it. So, like, it's often used in relationship to Berger because he's someone who writes very movingly about the kind of beauty of the world, you know, the beauty of art, the kind of beauty of human existence. So it's, but it's,

humanism is about the kind of elevation of the human, right? And Berger kind of staunchly resists this. You know, you mentioned before we started recording, like, about the links to Spinoza. Like, his favorite philosopher was Spinoza. He writes a really interesting short book of kind of thoughtful reflections called Bento's sketchbook, which is all about Spinoza, where there's there is this kind of complete rejection of Cartesian dualism, this, this idea that all is, all material. The world is all material, nothing else. So he's not someone, you know, the kind of obvious critique of humanism is Altaxer's critique of humanism. And Altaxel, like Berger, was a big fan and influenced by Spinoza. However, if he's a humanist, he's a humanist for a human that has not yet

come into existence. So it's a humanism for the future, right? Not the idea of like humans now being better than the rest of the world, but the idea that there is the great possibility of transforming the world, and thus the human subjects and human consciousness that lives in it. And in that, I think there's some really interesting links between Berger and the German Marxist philosopher Walter Benemine. So there's this great short article that Berger writes called 12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead. And then I want to follow it with a quote from Benemine. How did the living lie with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves,

living were incomplete. Thus, living and dead were interdependent, always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this independence, with disastrous results for the living who now think of the dead as eliminated. And a quote here from Walter Benetimine, in every era the attempt must be made anew to rest tradition away from a conformism that threatens to overpower it only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins and this enemy has not ceased to be victorious

like the thing that kind of drives a lot of Burgess writing in my opinion is this notion of like what might humans not what are humans but what might humans become what can consciousness experience how might how might the future be different and even if it's a possible future you know even if it's a possible future that is kind of eliminated viciously even at its moment of instantiation there is the glimpse of something on the horizon that is made manifest if only for a second If, you know, if it's the light of a potential future that sparks in the dark present, even if it vanishes. So to say that he's a humanist, I think, is a massive reduction.

And it's often a way of going, oh, well, he thought that, you know, there was beauty in the world as well as the kind of endless grinding barbarism of capitalism. But I also think, you know, this idea of if he was a humanist, it's for a human who does not yet kind of live, is maybe, the way that I would try and think about it. Yeah. I really like that framing of being a humanist for a sort of human that hasn't existed yet. And by extension, logically, we can and in some sense must bring into the world through revolutionary transformation, internal and external, I believe. Yeah. So I really like that. And, you know, Walter Benjamin is somebody who we have not gotten to yet on the show, and maybe I could have you back on at some point to,

dive into him and his life and his legacy because he's a massively influential thinker for people on the left and Marxists in particular. I like to end a conversation like this and with a sort of reflective question, which is ultimately what were John Berger's contributions to the left and how has he influenced you personally or perhaps put another way, why are his contributions so important and why should they be valued by the left today? I think one, to understand that art is not just a kind of rarefied practice, but is bound up within our politics. And I think the importance of that for the left goes back to the old textile strike of the early 20th century, where, you know, 20, what, 26,000 workers go out

and strike, and one of them is carrying a sign that says bread, yes, but roses too, which is then later immortalized in the kind of famous IWW song, Bread and Roses, which includes the amazing line, hearts starve, as well as bodies. So the whole point is not simply to reduce our struggle for liberation down to a matter abolishing a system of economics, but actually that touches upon every other aspect of our being. And I think the impact, I think, is how do you look at the world, you know, how do we look at the world? Do we look at it with attentiveness to look and see where we might find, you know, fragments of hope. And hope is not just the kind of fleeting emotive word, but hope is a practice.

It is something that is enacted and something that has lived out. There's a kind of persistence to it. And for Berger, you know, he found it in some of the most remarkable places. He found it in, you know, the face of a doctor. He was desperately trying to keep his rural patients alive. He found it helping with farming in rural France. He found it looking at the incredible achievements of the Zapatistas, Palestinian struggles for liberation.

And he found it looking at the art and in the history of our past. So to look at the world, I mean, it's ways of seeing that he's most known for, but to challenge your own way of seeing is not simply to kind of like think and reduce everything down to what Berger would call the aesthetics of the 19th century, you know, to join in with that taxonomic sorting of like which cultural objects are good and bad or which are on our side of the political divide and which aren't, but to actually think deeper and harder and more dialectically about the things that we encounter. and those things can be things that we encounter in the street. There's a great piece that you write in May 1968 called The Nature of Mass Demonstrations. And he said that protests, mass demonstrations were not simply an appeal to the democratic conscience of the state, but they were a rehearsal for revolution.

The demonstration congregates in public to create its function. And he says, The demonstrators interrupt the regular life of the street they march through or of the open spaces they fill. They cut off those areas, and not yet having the power to occupy them permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatize the power that they still lack. The demonstrator's view of the city surrounding the stage also changes. By demonstrating, they manifest a greater freedom and independence,

a greater creativity, even although the product is only symbolic, than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits, they only modify circumstances by demonstrating they symbolically oppose their very existence to circumstances. So it's like you can dismiss a protest, but like you look at it with care and attention, and it unlocks into something that shows huge amounts of potential. And I think that's the most important thing about Burgess's work. You know, the call to reflect and to challenge our own way of seeing to look more carefully with more attention and with more attention and with more regard and to see where we're looking, where we might find the possibility of a better future. Absolutely. Beautifully said, my friend. What would you recommend to someone who wants to

get into Berger? I know we talked about ways of seeing free online, anything above and beyond that. And then also, can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your wonderful work online? So I was reading about Berger and came across someone who said maybe the best way maybe the best way to find Berger is to just stumble across him one day and you can find so many of his short pieces or you might find an old book somewhere. But if I had to recommend things, I would recommend a seventh man,

which I think is incredibly important, especially in the context of capitalism's endless demand for kind of a liquid pool of labor that it can pull across national borders. I would really recommend his writing from the post-2000s on Palestine, which you can just find by just Googling stuff. And if you love fiction, he writes in the mid-90s, he writes a very beautiful novel called To the Wedding,

which deals with HIV and AIDS. It's an incredible piece of writing. It's maybe one of the best books I've read this year. But there is so much of his work out there. And I think I don't want people to feel like there has to be a reading list. Find his name somewhere and see where it takes you. And yeah, you can find me online at The Liquit Guy. And as I said, I'm also the co-host of Horror Vanguard.

We're on Twitter at Horror Vanguard. And you can find Horror Vanguard if you love spooky movies, spooky theory and the great monster that is communism stalking Europe still. you can find that on any good podcast platform. John, it is always an honor and a pleasure. This has been a fascinating introduction to a thinker and a Marxist who I was unaware of before you said, let's do an episode on him, and I'm thankful to you for that. I'll continue to dive into his work, and I'll probably do something on Patreon where I do a little bit of his reading to continue to advance and introduce him to more Americans

specifically. So thank you so much. Let's not wait another year until we do this again. There's a million topics we can talk about, and I always enjoy it. Quite right. Thank you so much. Your darkness, your darkness in different languages and different degrees.

Well, here's a short passage I was writing the other day. Which has something to do with black? Give my love to Genevieve and the little one. When the sun set, the forest was filled with blackness, not with the color black, but with the mystery, the invitation of black. Blackness is in a black coat. As in black hair. As in a touching you didn't know existed. Although Vika has gone, I hear her voice.

This happens often. King, keep your mouth shut, she says. You don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking about the color black, I say, and about six. And so, you know, the and

the ...and... ...and... ...their... ...you know... ...that... ...and... ...and...

...the... You know,