Selected Essays of John Berger (94 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8
. Quoted in Anthony Blunt,
op. cit
.

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

10
.
Ibid
.

11
.
Ibid
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3
.
Ibid
., p. 90.

4
.
Ibid
.

5
.
Ibid
.

6
.
Ibid
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2
.
Ibid
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2
. Merleau-Ponty,
op. cit
.

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

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

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

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

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

2
. This is a literal translation by the authors.

3
. Mayakovsky,
op. cit
.

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

1
. Giacomo Leopardi,
Moral Tales
, trans. Patrick Creagh (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

1
. Danilo Dolci,
Sicilian Lives
(New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 171.

2
. José Ortega y Gasset,
Historical Reason
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 187.

Where no prior source is indicated, a piece is assumed to have been first published in book form. Otherwise the pieces were first published — sometimes with different titles, in different versions — as follows.

All pieces first published in the
New Statesman