Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Bringing It All Back Home

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The old adage says you can’t go home again. Like most such remarks, it’s about half true. I spent a lot of my twenties in the British left-wing world, at the kind of event I was at today. It was called Up The Anti, a discussion of where to go next after Occupy and all that.

The old patterns were very much in evidence: a plethora of small parties and groups claiming allegiance to Trotsky and other revolutionary legacies; a very serious focus on the issues; some under-representation of women and people of color on panels; unco-operatively designed rooms with steep rakes and fixed desks.

And despite all that being true today, the panel organized by the Occupied Times and Strike Debt UK had a familiar energized feel of the beginning of a movement. We began with David Graeber doing his usual, excellent introduction to debt as a political and historical topic. He has a great knack of making you feel smart as you listen to him and he won the audience over to the idea of debt as an activist issue.

I went next and had the simple pleasure of describing all that Strike Debt has been up to from the first debt assemblies via the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual and the direct action days to the Rolling Jubilee. I gave it a lot of “jubilant” energy, plussing it up as we say. So when I announced that the fund has raised enough money to abolish $10 million in debt (ok, almost), I was surprised to be interrupted by applause, very un-English.

I think I benefited from not reading as English to the audience, at least in the sense that I don’t have a place in the complex intra-left debates. I don’t carry any of the baggage of Occupy London, which several people suggested had left some difficult legacies, although I don’t myself know directly about that. And the Jubilee is just a win, and we all need wins from time to time.

There was a great presentation that followed about Third World debt and we went into breakouts. The direct action breakout that I joined was clearly interested in doing a Jubilee in the UK, although some people pointed out differences in the credit laws that make it much more difficult. There were other good ideas about working with community groups, looking ahead to housing benefit cuts and so on. It was all a bit vague and suggested the need for a lot of research.

It was all so familiar from only six months ago, when we decided to do something similar in New York. If people keep coming, talking, researching and doing actions, Strike Debt UK will find its own way to engage the debt system. I got a contact buzz off the activists. It seems that to go home, you have to go differently than when you were first there. Then it works.

For The Eight-Hour Digital Day

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In order to talk about militant research, as I have been doing, it’s necessary to sometimes do some actual research. Like most people my normal problem with this is finding time to do any. Having this research leave, I’ve also found that research in the era of the digital library is not as simple as we are often told.

Supposedly, search engines and other tools make it easy to find whatever you need. It’s true, for example, that when I was asked yesterday whether there was a secondary debt market in the UK, it only took a little Googling to get an answer. But that was about as far as I could go. Given that I could already guess that there must be such a market, arguably I’d made no progress at all.

This is the point that you need to hit the books. And that’s harder than it used to be, ironically. The British Library, long my exemplar of a research library, has been opened to a much wider range of readers, including undergraduate students. The result is a much greater demand on the resources. Consequently, many books have been shipped out to the North of England and are available at what they call “two plus” days notice. It turns out that this means at least two (business) days but potentially more if that’s what happens, which, in my admittedly limited recent experience, it always seems to do. Or at the Natural History Museum Library, all materials must be ordered at least 24 hours in advance, so if you want to pursue a lead, it has to be at that time distance.

So what? For me, it’s not a disaster, it just means that I get less done in the time I have to do research. But for the young researchers I have been talking to here and elsewhere, time is of the essence. Funding is limited and departments pressure doctoral students to finish their dissertations within tight time frames. Of course, they are likely to also be teaching in that time.

So completing a research project, whether you are under intense time pressure or not, has become far harder than it used to be. And so you have odd situations, such as the national discussion on the Levenson report in the UK, which is 2000 pages long. It was released yesterday and no one can possibly have read it yet. But the national parties all have positions and are busy fighting each other over it.

Radical demands since the early nineteenth century centered around shortening the working day. In the 1960s, it was common to speculate that a four-hour working day would become standard because machines would do all the work. Instead, our digital machines have demanded far more work from us at all hours of the day and night.

I think we need to start calling for an eight-hour digital day. By this I mean that we should only have online and email access eight hours a day, except in cases of emergency. It’s been shown that keeping Google/FB and everything else “always on” consumes enormous amounts of electricity, as well as generating extra emissions from the back-up generators that are run just in case. With the machines off, we could make a real contribution to reducing emissions and we could reclaim time for ourselves to live a life, not a loan.

Debt: The Next UK Jubilee Won’t Be Royal

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So today I tried the debt meme in London at Goldsmiths College. I’m starting to get a feel for how this goes. There’s an academic constituency that sees themselves as representing “theory,” who tend to be skeptical. There’s a cultural studies crowd, who are intrigued but concerned it might be a bit much. And then there are the younger people, who get it, and who want to put it into action, wherever they happen to be.

There’s no doubt that debt is a major unspoken issue in the UK. Even the laissez-faire government has been prompted to rein in payday loans that charged an insane 1700% interest. The charity StepChange reports that 17% of its clients are using payday loans in 2012, nearly doubled in the last three years. UK debt is currently nearly 500% of GDP, despite recession,  if you count personal, company and national debt.

The chart from StepChange’s recently published report shows how much difficulty lower income households in the UK find themselves in.

Large and increasing numbers of people are behind on rent, fuel bills and council tax (the UK version of property tax). Credit card debt is up, with households owing £8000 ($12,000) on average. Step Change show that a lot of people are using “the plastic safety net,” paying bills by credit cards. And students are now looking at £9000 ($13,500) annual tuition bills, up from only £3000 two years ago.

So debt refusal, debt abolition and the Rolling Jubilee were ideas that clearly sparked a lot of interest. It’s a much greater step here than in the US in some ways because people still believe in government and the social contract, even after thirty-five years of neo-liberalism, known here as Thatcherism.

Perhaps the comedy of errors around the media crisis will change some minds. When the tabloids were caught hacking people’s phones, especially that of the murdered teenager Milly Dowler, there was outrage. Wait for the official report, government said. Now the report is out. The Conservative plurality that dominates the government has, in US parlance, punted. Too soon to act, too rash, all the predictable and predicted hogwash.

The crisis is above all a crisis of authority. Media-backed government has rammed through the socio-economic transformation of Thatcherism in a seemingly unchallengeable alliance. If the public start to see the relationship as being as not only corrupt, but blatantly refusing the process of reform, then more radical options will start to seem necessary.

Switching back to debt, is a UK Rolling Jubilee possible? Just as you would expect, there is a secondary debt market but it’s clubby and less open than in the US. Here

impaired loans have either been handled in-house by banks or sold on to specialised debt collection agencies. So-called distressed debt funds have also started to snap up defaulted UK consumer loans, attracted by the country’s relatively stable, transparent and creditor-friendly legal code.

At the same time, there’s also consumer protection and charities like Step Change. But the Financial Times article quoted above worried that the secondary market was getting overextended. Sounds like it’s time for a Jubilee.

Three Years to the Spanish Revolution

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So today I made a major mistake. I left Barcelona. I am aware that I am romanticizing the city, but romanticism has a radical genealogy and is not to be confused with sentimentality. This morning I wandered around the city streets and headed for the site of the CNT headquarters during the Spanish Civil War. It’s now a bookshop, which in properly anarchist fashion, was not open when I visited in contradiction to its posted hours.

Barcelona still has the small bars and restaurants that are so enticing to those of us who grew up in dull Northern cities. Paris feels like a museum these days but Barca has the feel of a place that matters. To be involved in the movement in New York has often felt like a marginal activity. In Barcelona, I found my most radical utterances were received as mainstream, not just by activists but by the academics, artists and journalists that I met. Last night one activist said to me that she expected there would be a revolution in Spain within three years. I  believed her.

Whether it wins, that’s another matter, but the reasons for the left shift are not hard to find. Today the European Union yet again bailed out the banks with a 

payment of €37 billion from the euro zone bailout fund to four Spanish banks on the condition that they lay off thousands of employees and close offices as part of their restructuring.

The chief culprit Bankia will lay off 6000 people, and some of the other banks are merging so there will be over 10,000 redundancies to prop up the banks. Needless to say, the chance of any economic recovery took another backwards step today.

“No to Unemployment, No to Evictions”

And the mortgage crisis has got so bad that even the austerity dedicated government has decreed a stop to foreclosures, following a rash of foreclosure-induced suicides. Foreclosures were running at an incredible 500 a day, with a backlog of some 350,000 reported. There were at least eight reported suicides by debt in October and early November, causing angry street protests.

At the same time, Spain is feeling the effects of climate change. I was talking to someone from Seville yesterday, who told me that the summer temperature is regularly 48 degrees C/118F. The entire city becomes nocturnal to compensate. Yesterday in Barcelona, there was a tropical downpour that followed months of drought in the summer. Desertification is an issue across the country. While six per cent of fertile land has already become desert, up to a third of the country is considered under threat.

Fires, floods and beach erosion are all serious issues and long-term measurements indicate that there is a visible trend. For example,

Spain has lost 90% of its glaciers in the past century, with the remaining ice expected to disappear completely within a few decades, according to the environment ministry. While the Pyrenees were covered by 3,300 hectares of glacier when records began at the end of the 19th century, now only 390 hectares remain.

So Spain exemplifies the climate/debt conundrum. Austerity is causing the economy to shrink. Debt repayment is still demanded from banks, government and private citizens alike. If the economy were to grow sufficiently to make this possible, the climate disaster could only accelerate.

This is a contradiction so acute that the revolution being openly discussed in Spain might seem like the only sensible solution. Perhaps that accounts for the resilience and optimism of the Barcelona activists, despite all the tensions, splits and hardships that exist. Or perhaps it’s harder to break a great city than the neo-liberals think.

Homage to Catalonia

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At the risk of being a cliché, Catalunya is really a remarkable place. I don’t think many other cities could take the kind of battering that has been meted out and retain this kind of spirit and vitality. Perhaps the highlight of my trip was meeting with Catalan debt activists, full of ideas and dynamism on the same day that the newly elected government indicated a swingeing new round of cuts. The Jubilee has rolled across the Atlantic. Watch out.

I had two morning interviews with journalists from La Vanguardia, the leading local newspaper that now publishes in Castilian and Catalan. It feels like a real newspaper, engaged, serious and questioning. My interlocutors were wildly different: a very generous woman interviewing for the magazine, and a guy from the main paper grilling me like a film noir detective, in between telling me the story of his life.

Just as the first interview was all about Occupy/Strike Debt and the second about visual culture, I had two constituencies for the talk I gave later: one from or interesting in the social movements; and one for visual culture. I tried to show that I think they are the same but the academic audience left with some dissatisfaction that my 40 slides did not include enough “images.” I suppose they meant art work and it was true that a talk called “Technologies of Direct Democracy” was not very art-centered.

It reminded me of the early visual culture days, when people would demand to know how I considered my work to be art history, which I didn’t. On one memorable occasion, a well-known author of a modern art textbook insisted I declare that I loved art. I declined.

All of this paled by comparison with a dynamic meeting with debt activists in Barcelona that followed. This group is working on an excellent initiative called : Put A Banker In Jail. When they opened the crowd-sourced funding website, it crashed immediately because so many people were trying to donate. Like the Rolling Jubilee, the donations were mostly small from €3-5 but the intent was very clear: put the banksters in jail. At first 32 were indicted but the process has gone ahead for five leading characters, so that the others can be called as witnesses against them. As in the U.S., defendants can refuse to testify but witnesses cannot. One of the defendants is the head of Bankia Rodrigo Rato. Apparently, the court date is December 24 so with luck we can get a banker in jail for the holidays.

I was able to share some of the Strike Debt ideas, like the debt assembly and the debt burn. Interestingly, in Spain the idea of the jubilee did not resonate in the way that it does in the U.S. because of the history of the African-American church. So when I explained what it was, there was much, shall we say, jubilation. Although also some hesitation about working with the church in  a country where the Catholic church’s record is appalling.

There was a frank recognition that the inventiveness of the movement here is in part a consequence of the mass unemployment that has in particular left younger highly qualified people with nothing to do. At the same time, the slogan “We Don’t We, We Won’t Pay” came not from the movement but from the barrios, where it seems to be simple common sense.

From us in New York, the Catalans want amplification and publicity, which we can do. And to work together on a co-ordinated debt abolition movement. Which could be the start of something massive.

 

 

Debt Colonialism: A View from Barcelona

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I’m in Barcelona for a couple of days, giving talks and interviews and holding discussion for the visual studies program, the Center of Contemporary Culture and with the movement. There’s not much difference between the people involved. It’s distinctly humbling to get up in front of people from 15M and talk about the global justice movement, even as the wheels are turning in the debt crisis.

Yesterday was an election in Catalunya for the state assembly, called by Artur Mas, the head of the CiU nationalist party. His hope was to sweep the board on his nationalist call for independence. Instead he lost ground to a more extreme nationalist group and the left made some small gains. No one seems quite sure what this all means as yet.

Meanwhile from different sides of the world, furious mainstream politicians are starting to use the language of debt colonialism. In Greece, Syriza’s leader Alexis Tspiras named his country a “debt colony.” In Argentina, the finance minister Hernán Lorenzino called the court verdict compelling his country to repay 2002 debts to vulture funds “judicial colonialism.”

In this latter case, speculative debt buyers have engineered a potential collapse of the national (and perhaps international) economy, just as debt buyers of personal debt ruin individual lives in the pursuit of personal profit after the original lenders have settled. There is late speculation that the EU may finally have agreed some kind of deal on Greek debt. But the process makes Tsipras’s point: the discussion was held in Brussels between France, Germany and the IMF.

Here in Barcelona, activists are in several minds. Some feel frustrated with the constant lack of response from their central government, no matter how dynamic or well-attended their actions become. It’s said that attendance at the legendary neighborhood assemblies is notably down. On the other  hand, there are activist banners hanging in hospitals and doctors’ offices protesting the cuts and entire families from school children to grandparents are reported to have participated in the N14 general strike.

You can’t miss the crisis. There are cranes all over but none of them are working, leaving buildings half-complete. Graffiti and posters are everywhere. For a traveler accustomed to being broke in the Eurozone, prices are notably lower than expected. A light lunch for €5, an express bus from the airport to the city for the same. Museums, galleries and cultural centers are all concerned with the crisis. I’ve written about this many times but, as always, it’s different to be here. It just reinforces the respect that I have had for the resilience of the movement. More to follow.

 

Unfinished Conversations Part Two

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The second remarkable video I saw yesterday in Liverpool, after Unfinished Conversation, was not so celebrated by the Biennial. I had to find it at the end of a dark corridor in the Cunard Building. Unlike the large space in Bluecoat where Unfinished Conversation was showing, there were three chairs available to watch Marat/Sade, Bohnice directed by Althea Thauberger.

As you can see above, it depicted a restaging of Peter Weiss’ 1963 classic play Marat/Sade in an actual asylum in Prague, now capital of the Czech Republic. Weiss’s play reflects on the costs of revolution, the tension between the imagination (represented by the Marquis de Sade) and the needs of the impoverished for rapid change (represented by Jean-Paul Marat). Weiss set his play in the new (as in new in 1791) lunatic asylum of Charenton. The restaging in Bohnice physically resembled it but was an active institution and the audience (shown below) were Czech psychiatric patients.

The context of the performance was the perceived failure of the “Velvet Revolution,” by which the-then Czechoslovakia overturned Soviet-style Communism in 1989. Video of the drama was intercut with interviews with the director of the institution, residents and staff.

The director and some staff had had high hopes in 1989 that now they would be able to create a model, modern institution. Now they had debated whether to even accept the play because it might mitigate the sense of failure around the hospital. As Weiss’s highly stylized play unfolded, we learned that Bohnice houses some highly unusual treatments. It has a program in existential psychiatry, centered on the inevitability of death that seems almost parodically Central European.

It also has an active program in sexology. On the one hand, this seems geared towards an understanding of the workings of desire. On the other, they literally castrate people. With their consent, so they say. Another speaker dryly described how he was part of the EU investigation into whether the hospital was committing acts of torture, including the very act of preventive detention.

One of the staff described his involvement with the 1989 revolution as  a form of delusion. Clearly, he had hoped for so much more.

This bitterness was enhanced by a discussion with a translator who had worked for Havel, Reagan and Mrs Thatcher and was now a patient. His sardonic cynicism seemed very familiar and anything but insane.

Most notably, a woman called Sarka Kapkova, also an inmate, provided a searing critique of the disciplinary apparatus and the pharmacological regime that could have been by a well-versed anti-psychiatry graduate student. She also ventured that it was the post-Soviet “freedom” that had first caused what she nonetheless described as her “illness.” That is to say, the free market had driven her into an insane asylum.

So across this film echo the accumulated discontents of 1789, 1968, 1989 and the present with a seasoning of Kafka to allude to the horrendous mid-twentieth century in Europe. The audience for the play, as presented, watched quietly for the most part. They enjoyed the rendition of the Internationale with which the play began and they liked the music in general. Finally, at the end, a character spoke in Czech and they broke out in relief: someone was saying something they could understand.

Sarka Kapkova and another unnamed resident began to dance in a highly stylized fashion (above). I cannot reduce all this to a simple meaning. It opens up so many wounds and avenues of exploration. The film itself did not end but continued in a permanent loop back past what I take to be the opening title (as above). But perhaps the true beginning is somewhere else. Where we consider what the relations of desire, freedom and revolution might be, should be and can be allowed to be.

Unfinished Conversations

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Today I went back and forth to Liverpool across a storm-swept England to see two video installations at the Liverpool Biennale. Both were extraordinary and created such a set of resonances and memories that I’m going to have to write a full-length piece about it. It’ll still take two days to post. We have said, over and again, that to our friends and families we owe everything. The debt was posted due today.

John Akomfrah, “Unfinished Conversation” 2012

The reason I traveled was to see this film by director John Akomfrah about the life of the British-Caribbean writer and theorist Stuart Hall. That’s Stuart in the middle screen above. To be more exact, while the Biennale lists Akomfrah as the artist, the film itself does not, giving full and widespread credit to the team that put the film together.

It’s a remarkable piece of visualizing theory and history. Shown on three screens simultaneously, the film visualizes, in a sense, what it must have been like to be Stuart Hall in his earlier career. The three screens would be showing personal photographs, filmed interviews from various periods, archive film and photography, news footage and so on. Meanwhile the sound would blend music, often jazz, with Hall’s commentary and radio interviews and other sound, such as the sea or machinery. It was a polyphony, edited so that all the sounds and images reinforced rather than disrupted each other.

I had the thought while watching that the film was like a Ways of Seeing for 2012, so it was resonant to see Mike Dibb, who worked on Berger’s film, acknowledged in the credits.

There were powerfully revelatory moments throughout. It turns out–did I somewhere know this?–that Stuart has Sephardic-Jewish in his family tree. In the film, we see his mother and that lineage is visibly apparent–it’s mine, too, so I’m allowed to say this. Was there some affinity that I had felt, having worked with Hall when I was a young activist and editor on Marxism Today, and always taking his thought to be a lodestone? Perhaps.

Many years later Kathleen, my partner, became close friends with Catherine Hall, Stuart’s wife of many years. To see a set of what I presume are their wedding photographs was very moving in ways that were also very overdetermined. Hall attended the same Oxford college as my father in the same time period. He says in the film that he knew at once that, while he could study there, he

could never be a part of it.

Years later those were my feelings exactly, although not my father’s, who liked it and has remained attached to his college.

Then comes the call across the years. It turns out that Hall was part of a group that opened a radical coffee shop in Oxford in the crisis of 1956. The Soviet invasion of Hungary changed a generation away from orthodox Marxism-Leninism and cultural studies would not have happened as it did without this break. At the same time, Britain and France invaded Egypt over the nationalization of the Suez canal, their last imperial folly.

Sitting in the coffee shop called The Partisan, with its sign designed in impeccable lower-case sans serif font, Hall was interviewed about his views. Time and again, he calmly stressed that he was angry, angry over the invasions, angry over the disregard for young people in Britain, angry that

for fifteen years at least we have been without any kind of moral or political leadership.

Out of that anger came the New Left Review. 

Watching it now, over fifty years later, I felt intensely that we had somehow let this young man down, that it would be entirely possible for another such young man or woman to sit down today and say exactly the same thing. And it is indeed what we have been saying this past year. The spectre that entered the room was this question: will this demand still be unmet in fifty more years from now? Or was leadership perhaps the wrong thing to ask for? Reflecting back on 1956, a moment he felt “defined” him, Hall noted in terms so familiar to us:

Another history is always possible.

The film ends with this caption

For Stuart Hall. In gratitude. And respect.

My eyes filled with tears. In the crowded screening room, I was not alone.

The Curious Vindication of Punk

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In 1977, punk rock said that everything in England was rotten and proposed Anarchy in the UK as a response. Needless to say, then and since punk has been battered from all sides. Either it was all a con manipulated by Malcolm McLaren, or the bands were never that into the politics, or it was all a huge mistake. Only in the wake of the appalling “Jimmy Savile” scandal it turns out that it wasn’t. The punks were right.

If you haven’t had time to follow this, Jimmy Savile was a dreadful mainstream DJ of the glam rock era with dyed platinum hair, a phallic cigar and a “I’m working-class me” overdone Yorkshire accent. The BBC saw him as a “star,” the first of the modern celebrities, who are famous because they are famous. In exchange for his ratings, Savile was allowed to use the BBC for decades as a procurer for the underage teenage girls he desired. He used other TV programs to claim to be a benefactor of the disabled and was allowed special access to hospitals for the disabled and mentally ill, where he carried on his relentless abuse.

More recently, it’s emerged that it wasn’t just him. A tradition in British broadcasting going back to the Second World War gave special license to the entertainment world to abuse and harass, even while the mainstream news continued to speak of the disgrace of the sexual revolution, of queers (a word they might have used in the negative sense), and all forms of transgression.

Janie Jones in the 60s

One name that emerged among all this had a certain resonance for me: Janie Jones. Janie Jones was a singer charged in 1973 with running a prostitution ring for the benefit of BBC radio DJs, who would then play specific songs requested by the industry. In her trial, various Mr Xs and Ys turned up, often involved with underage girls. Jones was the fall-girl and later gave her name to a song on the first album by The Clash. I played that record to death without ever realizing that Janie Jones was a real person.

Now it’s pretty clear who Mr X and Y really were–people like Savile and other lecherous Radio One DJs of the time. There’s a lot of comment in the UK to the effect that, in the words of the feminist Joan Bakewell who was part of the BBC of the period:

What we now find unacceptable was just accepted back then by many people.

Such acceptable things including a primetime TV show called The Black and White Minstrel Show in which white people in blackface performed Jim Crow ballads; an anti-semitism so blatant that the school I attended had a quota on the number of Jewish people allowed because “otherwise,” the headmaster told my mother, “they would take over the school”; and a racism that led to street violence on a daily basis.

Punk refused all of that. It said that it was not in any way acceptable and if that was the future, it preferred no future. It said no to Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all the other abusive dinosaurs of the music industry as symbols of this thorough-going corruption. It was–we were– right.

 

Resonances

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Occupy 2012 has decamped to Europe for a few weeks, from where I’ll be reporting back on the response of the European movement to the crisis and what’s been going on in New York. So have a happy Thanksgiving everyone!

For the present, I’m in London, where I grew up. Most of the city landmarks by which I oriented myself–cafés, clubs, record shops, book shops–are gone now, leaving me to discover a city that resembles the one I knew but feels strangely different. The resonance has changed.

Although there was a passionate student demonstration just yesterday, it feels less tense here than New York. Perhaps because there hasn’t been a devastating hurricane. Or perhaps it’s just because, living downtown as I do in NYC, I feel the resonance of all the past year’s conflicts everywhere I go but don’t get them here.

Tiqqun, the French collective that authored The Coming Insurrection in 2009, suggest that “movements do not spread by contamination,” but by “resonance” between radical moments, and that is certainly what we have seen with the upsurge of popular resistance in recent years.  As I’ve often argued here, feeling those resonances is crucial to building and growing a movement.

However, in academic, let alone journalistic, contexts such an approach is ruled out of court. Academia remains tied to a positivist system of evidence. For example, I write about a Puerto Rican painter called José Campeche, who was the son of an enslaved artist. His father bought his own freedom and Campeche worked for governors and bishops. But when I see influences of African syncretism in his work (meaning that there is a “hidden” but visible reference to African beliefs), I am always asked for “evidence” beyond what is in the image.

So this extraordinary painting of a dis/abled child is described by catalogs as being of scientific interest. Only it’s a full-size oil painting not a black-and-white drawing and the awareness displayed by the child far exceeds what the actual two-year-old might have been expected to display. In Central African belief systems, certain spirits called tohusu can manifest as dis/abled children. This resonance is there in the painting and thousands of enslaved Africans from Kongo had been brought to Puerto Rico around this time, who would also have “seen” it. It seems that inferred influence is allowed only within the confines of the (white) canon.

It seems like a labored way to make the point but that’s what happens: you get drawn into extensive discussion of specific details and lose the wider picture that you are trying to convey. Of course, for academic realism, such a picture can only be built by the accumulation of such building blocks of documented detail.

So it was a pleasure to read Charles Darwin, author of perhaps the most influential history of resonance, The Origin of Species. Darwin points out that the fossil record is incomplete and that it is absolutely impossible to reconstruct the precise genealogy of variation within species. But nonetheless, he noted that the naturalists of his time:

win their prizes by selecting such slight differences, yet they ignore all general arguments and refuse to sum up in their minds.

Darwin was sure of the idea of evolution in 1844 but waited until 1859 to publish it for fear of the critics.

But of course it’s the Origin that we remember, just as a book like Graeber’s Debt will long outlive the nitpick-fest that has followed its publication. So without comparing myself to these two giants, I intend to see what can be learned by resonance over the next few weeks in the expectation that it is the means by which we can countervisualize against the “common sense” of the mainstream.