(artwork by Caio Wheelhouse)
I shouldnāt have been surprised that as the world altered entirely, Iād be watching from the vantage point of the kitchen. āSecond-Hand Timeā by the Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich collects oral testimonies from ordinary Russian citizens on the fall of the Soviet Union, during Perestroika and Glasnost. A lingering image from this book has stuck in my mind during the past few weeks. āKitchensā explains one testimony, āthatās where Perestroika really took place. In the kitchen you were always among friends. It was where ideas were whipped up from scratch. Fantastical projects concocted.ā
Itās disorientating, everything changing around you whilst youāre unable to engage with that on a physical level, confined mostly to your home. At the start of March, I became quite quickly aware that the pillars of my precarious but cherished income ā writing, cafĆ© work, DJing ā would be the first to vanish. With numb efficiency, I packed a bag and got on the train from Manchester to stay with my parents in Blackburn, and wait for the inevitable announcement of lockdown. I packed my bags with a lot of books, most of them still staring at me untouched. Iād sat in the kitchen, finding pretty simple text resembling a Rubikās Cube. I couldnāt take things in, my mind was sharpening its limits for the future, brokering the terms by which Iād be able to find what comes next tolerable. An empty town square, itās inhabitants dispatched to far-off battles. I got used to this quite quickly; a habitual procrastinator, it can be a good get-out clause suddenly finding everyone telling you that you donāt have to be productive. I learnt to be happy just sitting in the kitchen drinking and listening to music, or making the genuinely psychedelic leap to enjoying music on the tinny stereo in my childhood bedroom.
Going back to culture that you love can be a useful way to begin to re-engage with it ā this worked for me. In despondent moments, Iāve re-read a blog post from the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, one thatās felt uniquely useful and practical at this present moment. Fisher was writing in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 General Election. I was 21, red Labour balloons going flaccid around the feet of me and my housemate in the early hours of a night that felt like the first genuinely traumatic political moment of my lifetime (I didnāt realise then that this would get to be an annual event.)
Mark Fisher was looking to Deleuze and Spinoza for practical roadmaps from this despondency.
āThereās no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons,ā Deleuze writes in āPostscript on Societies of Controlā. He was no doubt thinking of Spinozaās account of hope and fear in the Ethics. āThere is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope,ā Spinoza claimed. He defines hope and fear as follows:
Hope is a joy not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.
Fear is a sorrow not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.
Hope and fear are essentially interchangeable; they are passive affects, which arise from our incapacity to actually act. Like all superstitions, hope is something we call upon when we have nothing else….We donāt need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act.ā
At the moment when positive action can feel least likely, itās more imperative that we imagine a better society, and see what it is in the detritus that can give us confidence to move forward. Once itās safe to do so, socialising and music will return. But how thatās organised will look entirely different. There will be jobs that exist now, that donāt then. Old economic assumptions, only ever just-about functioning, will be over, and whilst this is terrifying itās my suspicion that those who acknowledge this quickly, and look to entirely new ways of operating, will likely have the edge. This isnāt wooly utopianism, but a recognition that the shock has already happened. Lias Saoudi, writing on these pages, touched on this when he suspected, without advocating, that culture āwill return to the folkish for a while, speakeasy-type establishments over a hundred cap, illicit goings-on in the metropolitan backwaters, the odd countryside gurner.ā
Though what weāre facing is unprecedented, many of the questions that the present moment throws up do look a lot like the questions weāve been asking over the last decade. We know how to think about this stuff. What happens to radical culture when thereās no money, what does it do? Listen to John Doranās āNew Weird Britainā, a BBC Radio 4 series that last year documented the novel ways that underground culture in this country has responded to gentrification and austerity. Read Nathalie Olahās āSteal As Much As You Canā, which examines the effects of a culture that marginalises working class voices, whilst also offering a roadmap for working class artists to operate in culture. And watch Jeremy Dellerās āEverybody in the Placeā, his hugely inspiring documentary about acid house. At a moment of maximum despair ā economically humiliated by Thatcherism ā a group of unconnected, enthusiastic amateurs made a positive, utopian intervention in their own culture. Putting on parties in disused buildings, it was quite a strange thing to do, but itās now a canonical part of our culture in this country. Weāre more equipped for what comes next than we might at this moment think.
Fergal Kinney