John Berger's Anti-Utopian Politics of Survivalism
2009; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1836-6600
Autores Tópico(s)Political Economy and Marxism
ResumoUtopianism in political theory and literature provides a context to a discussion on the Marxist writing of John Berger on politics and literature. The role of aesthetics in John Berger's writing and criticism is considered with special reference to his longstanding work on the politics of peasant survivalism. This is most evident in volume one of his imaginative trilogy of peasant culture in modern times, Into their Labours. The utopian impulse can lead to disillusionment. It can be contrasted with the less ambitious but more realisable politics of survivalism. By survivalism I have in mind not the epic quest for inevitable ideological certainty, but rather the modest desire to plan a political rearguard action to preserve our present benefits, material, democratic, and cultural, against those who argue for their diminution or destruction. This can itself be a radical agenda when these benefits are under threat by the intrusions of increasingly authoritarian states. In this regard, I will consider the anti-utopian and survivalist politics of John Berger. This will include some brief contextualisation of Berger's long-lasting writing concerns, before I make more specific reference to one of his most original works on the politics of peasant survivalism included in his imaginative trilogy of peasant culture in modern times, Into their Labours (1992). I refer to volume one, Pig Earth. This work operates as a novel but is structured almost as a series of short stories and includes a final historical afterword. Berger is perhaps best known for his pioneering work, more than four decades ago, on the social function and historical context of painting. Although Berger has continued to write on painting and culture, his search for realism in art moved also into the arena of writing imaginative literature, as well as into joint-projects in film and photographic documentary, particularly in projects dealing with themes of exile migration, and exploitation. For example, Berger's recent work, the essays, Hold Everything Dear (2007) is a protest from a longstanding, eminent critic of American abuses of power. And it is a literary and political appeal to the idea of survivalism. In these musings of poetry, art, and documentation of human endurance, especially in the Middle East, Berger discusses what he calls the guerrilla tactics of political resistance (2007: 1), particularly the ways that the poor, while not overcoming their oppressors, can maintain some vestiges of freedom. Berger's long interest in the victims of progress, those dispossessed by economic and political change, looks particularly at migrants and refugees whom he depicts as the casualties of neoliberal, global, and nationalist utopianism. Aesthetics and political ideology have long been Berger's central intellectual concerns. He has developed these into a political theory based particularly on the rural environment as a place for human resistance and survivalism, based on what he believes to be peasant values. Berger's aesthetics link the world of nature as he perceives it with his positional politics. Nature is one that includes human beings. The place of humans, however, is integral and spiritual. Work is sacred. It is far from being the damaged and exploited instrument of human commodification that he associates with industrialisation and capitalism. The environment is natural, for Berger, when it is in harmony with humans realising their unalienated potential, not in terms of a Marxist epic resolution, but in terms of living as part of a landscape. This has interior and exterior aesthetic arrangements in which households and other interiors are in balance with the exterior environment of arable land, pastures, and the mountainsides which frame the alpine peasant ways of life. This is an aesthetic of peasant work, of environment and community, all of which he believes to be endangered in modern times. In several essays in his 1985 book, The White Bird, Berger makes it very clear that for him art is not simply ideology. …
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