1Content Provider, comedian Stewart Lee’s live show first previewed in late 2016, begins with a quandary. After a month’s work on the show, conceived as “two hours on the notion of the individual in a digitised free-market economy”, the Brexit referendum happened, “and there seemed to be an assumption everywhere that I should’ve written some jokes about Brexit”. Lee continues:
Now I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, ’cos I was trying to write a show that I could keep on the road for eighteen months, and as I didn’t know how Brexit was going to pan out, I didn’t write any jokes about it in case I couldn’t use them in the show and monetise the work I’ve done. Right. So I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, ’cos I didn’t see the point of committing to a course of action for which there’s no logical or financial justification. (Lee 2019, 296)
Content Provider ironises on the commercial viability of writing topical material at a time of political upheaval; and it is certainly arguable that the three-year machinations following the Brexit vote – the theatrics of its negotiations and brinkmanship, with its shifting ascendancies and allegiances – constituted something novel in the panorama of British politics, culminating in the murder of an MP, the prorogation of parliament and the 2019 general election. “How did the British become so excitable?”, asked Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal, remarking “how untethered from its age-old traits of stability, continuity and moderation the country has come to be”.1 And yet how distant does this national melodrama now appear? It is perhaps not only the relentlessness of the news cycle that has shifted perspectives on Brexit and the ways in which its stalling absorbed and further polarised the country. The Covid-19 pandemic, which began its sweep across the globe days after Brexit became a legal reality, inherited its mantle of political instability and threw into even sharper relief its more paltry and parochial tones. Though Brexit and Covid-19 are discrete and very different phenomena, their temporal contiguity2 has allowed for their conflation at the national level, for the disruptions occasioned by one to be expediently attributed to the other,3 even for a certain continuity in political and cultural self-positioning to be outlined.4 If it took two general elections and three prime ministers to “get Brexit done”, and will take longer to “make Brexit work”,5 the Covid-19 pandemic appears further still from resolution: as new variants emerge and immune responses are primed, cabinets are reshuffled and ministers and spokespersons made to resign. The speculative nature of the remarks that follow thus reflects the unfolding nature of the crisis from which they issue.
- 6 “To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism i (...)
2One of the continuities that may be established between Brexit and Covid-19 in the British political landscape is in the grounds both crises provide for interrogating how the country sees itself, from within and in relation to the rest of the world: opportunities of self-apperception that can be productively illuminated by notions of utopia and dystopia. It is often pointed out that Thomas More’s utopian thought emerged in response to the society in which he lived, that “The ‘I’ of the work”, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, “is a man tied in a hundred ways to his particular time and place” (2012, 33). Of course, the imagined existence of the utopian serves also as an act of contestation: it may function “as a reproach to a corrupt social order, it may signal the limitations of the usual accommodation to power and property, it may expose the process whereby the established order of things lays claim to reality itself and denies the possibility of alternatives” (Greenblatt 2012, 54). By that same token, its dystopian obverse is equally anchored in circumstantial reality, both imaginary places that “exist tantalisingly (or frighteningly) on the edge of possibility, somewhere just beyond the boundary of the real” (Kumar 1991, 1). Such is the proximity of the two concepts that many scholars have pointed out the porosity of boundaries between them, most commonly in the admonishment that every utopia, tending towards the totalitarian, is one step removed from dystopia. But dystopia is also not without its utopian possibilities, such that cultural depictions of dystopia, as Mark Fisher has observed, may be “exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living” (2009, 2). This essay explores the relationship between Covid and culture, questioning the ways in which representations grouped under the broad umbrella of the dystopian have shaped the understanding of and response to the crisis, and then probing the political implications of the dystopian imaginary, used primarily as a lens onto a specific political culture and its “dystopian” denial of the possibility of alternatives. Indeed, contextualising the British government’s handling of the pandemic within a decade of Conservative governance, the essay frames Covid-19 as a crisis in and of neoliberalism; in so doing, it follows Wendy Brown in considering neoliberalism as a “governing rationality”, a cultural architecture or regime, rather than simply a stage of capitalism or set of policies.6 Its final sections trace the cultural import of this form of politics, reflecting on the work we ask of culture in a time of crisis and the political uses of dystopia therein. The essay thus works with three meanings of “culture”: cultural products or objects that help us understand or decrypt reality; the idea of a dominant political culture, which in turn weaponises “culture” for political capital; and culture in the Gramscian sense in which a society propagates its norms and values.
3Why speak of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of dystopia? It is a concept used abundantly and often hazily, acting as shorthand for several things: the repression and tyranny of government, totalitarianism, censorship and surveillance, great suffering and injustice, existential threat and the post-apocalyptic. The disagreement that Ruth Levitas points out “about the boundaries of utopia, not just as regards the line between the literary and the political but on the inclusion or exclusion of satires and dystopias” (Levitas 2010, 13) is just as applicable to dystopia itself. In its malleability, which certainly partly accounts for its popularity, the concept captures something pervasive about our contemporary condition, perceived in relation to a future that has exacerbated and normalised its more harrowing aspects. Rather than offer a prescriptive definition, I use dystopia here precisely as a loose category – as a genre, type of thought or broad cultural imaginary, which differs from the anti-utopian, conceived as a criticism of utopian thought per se, but blurs the distinction between the dystopian and post-apocalyptic – to probe how these tropes, also by virtue of their ubiquity, have helped conceptualise the Covid-19 crisis.
4In its early stages, Covid-19 posed a representational problem for a society saturated by images. The metaphors and analogies at hand, those most readily available to us, were those provided by culture: fictions in the sense of feigning or creating with the imagination. When the UK entered lockdown on March 26th, 2020, BBC News described its opening footage of empty streets as “the sort of scene imagined by science fiction writers after an apocalyptic disaster”. There is an inherent difficulty in portraying, beyond graphs and statistics, the invisible spread of an invisible pathogen; compounded with the very visceral nature of the pathogen’s effects – the asphyxiation of its victims in congested emergency wards – the emptiness of public space could function well as a negative image, the silent aftermath of an absent catastrophe. This expressive emptiness, suitable for the evening news, was at once strange and familiar, encountered in dystopian and disaster films, scenarios of apocalypse and invasion, science fictions. And can we not see the mechanisms of repetition in the panic buying that prepared for lockdown, causing global shortages of goods? This was a chain of thought visited before in one form or another, and dystopia provided a lexicon with which to decipher and speak, however tentatively, the new reality in which we found ourselves. Inviting us to “laugh away the apocalypse”, memes drew on popular dystopias like The Walking Dead, I Am Legend and The Hunger Games.7 In the earliest days of lockdown, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 thriller Contagion jumped from being 270th to second most viewed film in the Warner Brothers catalogue (unable to unseat only Harry Potter),8 and content provider Vulture compiled a listicle of the “79 Best Pandemic Movies to Binge in Quarantine”.9 Sales of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Camus’s La Peste and Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness, a novel published in 1981 about the outbreak of a virus named “Wuhan-400”, rose exponentially.10 Faced with the unknown, a culturally-shaped imaginative disposition anchored our perception of the thing itself.
5This representation by proxy carried over into the language of government, particularly visible in the role played by metaphor in narrativising the crisis. Four days before announcing lockdown, and two weeks after boasting about shaking hands with coronavirus patients during a hospital visit, Boris Johnson promised to “turn the tide of coronavirus in 12 weeks”. He would later liken the virus to “a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger”, heralding “the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor […] the moment when we can press home our advantage”.11 This language suggests a Manichean struggle between opposing forces, attributing anthropomorphic agency to the virus; its infantilising and periphrastic nature reflects an impasse that is surely also linguistic, relying on terms that are codified and easily recognisable (the latter example reaching back to a moral panic around an often racialised crime “epidemic” of the 1970s).12 Though by no means limited to the British response, martial metaphors, which work in similar ways, appealed also as a result of the paradigmatic role that the Second World War, and the Blitz in particular, has played in national self-fashioning: a rhetoric that marries an encroaching existential threat from without with an exemplary display of stoicism and resilience. As a referent it is unequivocal, both just and morally uncomplicated, evoking a threat at once levelling and unifying; to muster such spirit, Johnson spoke of a “fight […] in which every one of us is directly enlisted”. In its versatility, metaphor is especially apt here, serving ostensibly to facilitate understanding, while being constitutively unencumbered from the literally true. As Susan Sontag writes, “[a]buse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one’s actions to the calculus of self‐interest and profitability” (Sontag 1989, 99). As none propounding these metaphors are old enough to have lived through these experiences, it is to cultural mythography, again, that they inevitably point. When, for large sections of the press, Covid-19 was to be “Boris Johnson’s Churchill moment”,13 more than to a historical reality, the return is to cosplay and caricature – with turgid Churchillian tribute, Darkest Hour (2017), for example, still fresh in minds – by a prime minister whose own biography of Churchill has been characterised as “‘One man who made history’ by another who seems just to make it up”.14
6Cultural signifiers shaped the optics and pragmatics of the government’s response. Speaking to LBC, former health secretary Matt Hancock stated that Contagion informed his planning of the vaccine rollout, which alerted him to the “huge row” over the provision of doses after the invention of a serum.15 Though culture can, of course, bring home realities that might otherwise leave us cold, more than the anodyne insight provided by the film itself, of interest here is the comment’s public-facing nature and how it speaks to the curation of an “ordinary” or relatable persona, of a minister who tempers deference to experts with the enjoyment of a popular thriller. As a background for his remote interviews and addresses, Hancock often chose to appear beside a large Damien Hirst portrait of the Queen donated to the government in 2015. If cultural inclinations have long been the cornerstone of our (consumer) identities, the new perspective afforded by the virtual on domesticity and interiors, and the attendant “culture war” around the prominence therein of the Union Jack (of which the Hirst, perhaps, is a close artistic correlative),16 reflected the idea that cultural products should manifest, with staid literality, one’s values and identity, almost as an outgrowth of one’s politics. Culture’s functioning as political signpost also marked Hancock’s replacement, Sajid Javid, whose signalled admiration for Ayn Rand – the American novelist and founder of Objectivism, best remembered for her 1957 work of dystopian fiction Atlas Shrugged and 1942’s The Fountainhead – was scrutinised for clues about changes in the handling of the public health crisis,17 and the direction of the NHS. “It’s about the power of the individual,” Javid praised The Fountainhead in an interview with The Spectator, “[a]bout sticking to your beliefs, against popular opinion. Being that individual that really believes in something and goes for it”.18 One of the novel’s crucial junctures is a courtroom apologia of the individual by its maverick hero, architect Howard Roark:
“From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.
“The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective. […] I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature […] This is the second-hander’s credo now swallowing the world.
“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
“I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
“It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. […] I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.
“I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society” (1993, 682-5).
The appeal of the radical libertarianism of Rand’s Objectivism – described by the scholar of dystopia Gregory Claeys as a “philosophy of extreme egoism”, where “All groups crush the individual, and only egotism and cooperation based solely upon self-interest can ever be justified” (Claeys 2017, 346) – appears dispiritingly direct here, a kind of cultural determinism, for a health secretary who served as business secretary and senior advisor on JP Morgan’s advisory council, and was a managing director at Deutsche Bank during the 2008 financial crisis. After contracting and recovering from Covid-19, Javid tweeted that it was time to stop “cowering” to the virus, signalling a laissez-faire change of tack that would eventually lead to the repealing of all regulations and mandated self-isolation. On his watch, the Health and Care Bill, which alters the NHS in favour of private companies and eases the way to privatisation, has passed its second reading in the House of Commons.19
7If dystopia figured as a predominantly aesthetic category in the early stages of the pandemic – with images of tides and wars, invasion and apocalypse – it was soon evoked in an overtly political sense.20 Indeed, if the virus may be portrayed as an act of God or aberration, an embodiment of pure contingency, the response to it is inevitably political, as police tactics to enforce lockdown measures, for example, were accused of forging “a dystopian sense of society”.21 The United Kingdom, a country with an eighty-seat Conservative majority, was described by a member of that majority as “a public health socialist state”, while another accused Johnson of “creating a miserable dystopia”.22 Writing in The Telegraph of Australia’s far more stringent restrictions and border policy, author Megan Goldin lamented that “Zero-Covid has transformed Melbourne into a RoboCop-style dystopia”, enumerating the “alarming similarities with the totalitarian regime from Nineteen Eighty-Four”.23 In the United States, the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, spoke out against “a Faucian dystopia in which we’re governed by the whims of bureaucratic authorities who care little for our freedom, little for our aspirations and little for our happiness. No more. We can’t let it happen going forward”.24 Dystopia here means excessive interference of government, in a populist pitting of the treacherous coercions of out-of-touch elites against the quintessentially American pursuits of “freedom”, “aspirations” and “happiness”. The hyperbole of a politics with which one disagrees, dystopia in these examples is a largely contentless category, a rallying cry to signal the end of debate. For how can one reform dystopia? It calls instead for the resistance of the heroic individual. But these evocations of dystopia advance a very narrow view of freedom, one which misses the collective nature of responsibility and elides how connected we all are in epidemiological terms. Indeed, although the prophylaxis with which we now face daily life – masks, disinfectant, vaccination attested by QR code – and the way in which this has been so rapidly normalised might have the trappings of a new dystopia, I would argue that it is not in the restrictions imposed across the globe, implemented as a last resort to curb the propagation of the coronavirus due to inadequate planning and failure to act on those plans,25 that the dystopian nature of the Covid-19 pandemic lies, but rather in the ruthlessness of the political culture of neoliberalism that it has further exposed.
8Specifically, the relationship between dystopia and Covid-19 might be usefully construed here as a lens through which to consider the British government’s egregious mishandling of the pandemic, and the continuity of this response, for all of Covid-19’s exceptionality, with the politics of the decade that precedes it. We might, that is, see the failures of this response as a failure of the neoliberal state, with the comparatively high death tolls of countries like the United Kingdom and the United States an indictment of Anglo-American capitalism. One way to understand the mismanagement of the pandemic, in other words, is as the conclusive act of a decade of cuts and systematic and ideological underfunding of public services: a period of austerity which a study in the British Medical Journal has linked to 120,000 extra deaths in England.26 Emblematic, in this sense, is the role of “herd immunity” in the government’s initial pandemic response, a policy whose planning and support betrayed a form of epidemiological exceptionalism, and implied an effective culling of those considered medically compromised or whose deaths could be considered “collateral”. Although the policy was abandoned and then, with its echoes of the language of eugenics, entirely disavowed, the temporising before calling for a lockdown is estimated to have cost more than 20,000 lives.27 The unpredictable and volatile nature of the events of February and March 2020, with which the government has sought to mitigate its failings, no longer held by that winter, and the delaying of the second and third lockdowns – with the alleged resolve to “let the bodies pile up in their thousands”28 rather than close down the economy again – gave the UK the world’s highest death rate in the month of January 2021. This ethos has repeatedly re-emerged, in the rhetoric of “Freedom Day”, for example, the aptly named dropping of all restrictions in July 2021; and there has been an overarching failure to adequately protect the vulnerable, with those at risk invited to consider shopping at a “quieter time of day”,29 statutory sick pay stuck, among the lowest in Europe, at £96 per week, and those affected by long forms of the disease struggling to receive adequate medical care. In England, the rate of avoidable mortality was four times higher for those living in deprived areas, with a mortality risk that was higher still for those from ethnic minorities.
9The idea these facts might simply reflect libertarianism at work, a shrinking of government, is belied by concurrent shows of authoritarianism, as Covid-19 legislation was invoked to violently disrupt a peaceful vigil marking the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a police officer, or in a Policing Bill that prohibits public demonstration that causes nuisance or annoyance, or the Nationality and Borders Bill, which strengthens the government’s powers to strip millions of British citizens of their citizenship.30 Though the erosions of political freedoms and escalation of nativist rhetoric and policy were abetted by the state of exception provided by the pandemic, the case could be made – judging by the Conservative’s record on Windrush, the hostile environment and criminalisation of asylum seeking, the cutting of disability benefits, and clamping down on protests – that it has simply expedited advancement on the intended trajectory. In “State and Civil Society”, Antonio Gramsci writes:
The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be very numerous or highly trained. (1971, 210-11)
Brexit and Covid-19 have provided opportunities for personnel changes in the ruling class, for internecine renegotiations of power; in many respects however, despite the spending required to face the pandemic and roll out the furlough scheme and then a vaccine, the handling of the crisis has been a coronation of the status quo. In recent months, the government has voted against providing free school meals before being forced into a U-Turn by footballer Marcus Rashford, voted to repeal a £20 uplift in Universal Credit, and voted to dump raw sewage into Britain’s rivers and waterways.31 That Johnson’s cabinet should include four of the five authors of 2012’s Britannia Unchained – Truss, Raab, Patel, Kwarteng and Skidmore – is no accident. Written in the throes of austerity, the book offers a dystopian blueprint for Britain, castigating British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music” (2012, 61), and countering the country’s “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation” with neoliberal prescriptions.
10Proper to the neoliberal statecraft that characterised the pandemic response is the alacrity with which crisis has been turned into opportunity.32 Rather than an ideological unwillingness to spend, it has revealed in whose interests the government is willing to do so. We have seen the conferment to private-sector companies with no public health expertise of lucrative contracts, a distribution of profit among friends, allies and donors.33 In total, about £10 billion has been spent on unusable, overpriced or expired PPE (Personal protective equipment).34 Euphemisms like “chumocracy” and “sleaze” fail to depict the deficit of democracy on which these practices are based; indeed, for all the fetishisation of the free market, this procurement bespeaks not ruthless liberalism but corruption, with the health secretary joking about having “never heard of” a former neighbour who, with no prior experience in medical supplies, received a contract to produce test tubes, at least 8 million of which had to be recalled.35 In another exemplary case, as Gabriel Pogrund reported in The Sunday Times, “[a] former Conservative councillor received a £120 million government contract for face shields whose quality is so doubtful that fewer than 1 in 400 have been used, meaning each one has so far cost the equivalent of £423”.36 The justification for the lack of tender – that corners needed cutting in order to save lives – was neither legal37 nor credible: the business in question had recorded heavy losses in recent years, while another did not exist seven weeks prior to it being awarded a £122 million PPE contract.38 What is presented as the exception in fact reveals the norm: the pandemic has provided an opportunity to body out the “total bureaucratization” described by David Graeber as a process of “fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profits” (2015, 17). As Graeber points out, total deregulation conversely leads to a multiplication of red tape, aptly illustrated by the post-Brexit reality of the phantasm of “taking back control”. There is no better example here than the Test and Trace infrastructure, which was outsourced to the private sector – Serco received almost £50 million per month from the Department of Health, at a total cost of over £37 billion – and which according to the spending watchdog “failed its main objective”, to reduce Covid transmission.
11With failures so momentous and documented, perhaps the most crucial pandemic fiction was that told to the public. Besides contracting to companies like Serco, Deloitte and Palantir, the government enlisted the aid of corporate storytelling, paying out millions to consultancy firms.39 What can these sums of money buy? McKinsey & Company, for example, counselled on the “vision, purpose and narrative” of a new public health authority after the scrapping of Public Health England for its handling of the pandemic.40 McKinsey’s prospectus entitled Rethinking Resilience: Ten Priorities for Governments, which explains that “Due to the pandemic, governments are under increased pressure to act quickly and at scale. By reimagining how they work, they can create resilient societies and public services for the next normal”, singles out key objectives: “Shaping more resilient societies. Building more resilient governments. Revitalizing the core capabilities of the public sector”. To achieve this “resilience”, governments should “Manage sovereign balance sheets with an investor mindset” and “Foster new forms of partnership with the private sector”, use automation to “strengthen public-service productivity”, “Unleash a learning revolution” and “reimagine healthcare”: effectively, run a country as if it were a corporation, increase outsourcing, redundancies and precarity, boost remote learning and restrict access to doctors, by “Encouraging telehealth as the default initial treatment option”.41 Considering the limitless disruptive optimisation that Rethinking Resilience promises, and the reliance of embattled governments on this “reimagining”, “revitalising” and “rethinking” during the pandemic, one realises that it is in fact immaterial that the provision of this alliterative bounty delivers very little of a tangible nature. Even more important here than a roadmap for chipping away at the last vestiges of social democracy is that a fictionalised narrative of crisis management may take the place of actual crisis management, that a “vision, purpose and narrative” may unbridle from the concrete, the compassionate, the factual. In this fictive pandemic, discharging elderly patients from hospitals into care homes without prior testing becomes “throwing a protective shield” around care homes; the “Eat Out To Help Out” scheme, launched to encourage diners back into restaurants in summer 2020, leads to no rises in Covid infections;42 “herd immunity” was never government strategy; Britain’s Test and Trace infrastructure is “world-beating”,43 and the unlawful attribution of government contracts is the establishment of a “VIP lane”. In short, in the confection of this alternative version of events, the government, in Johnson’s words, “did everything we could”. The reality on which these falsehoods are grafted is ever-shifting, such that each U-turn or contradiction is motivated by the “changing” of “the science”, and gravity is gauged by the nebulous parameter of the degree to which the NHS is “overwhelmed”.44 Shifting the onus of care, it is no longer the health service that is expected to provide adequate care for the populace, but the populace that is called upon to “protect” a decimated NHS.
12In “On Lying in Politics”, Hannah Arendt observes:
The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.
- 45 I am thinking, for example, of journalists like Lewis Goodall and Owen Jones, Gabriel Pogrund in Th (...)
- 46 “The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact” of Covid, ITV’s Robert Peston wro (...)
- 47 When details of Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle emerged, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg tweet (...)
- 48 https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1455863537394405379?s=20 See also Jayne Merrick of the i, who (...)
- 49 https://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Who-Owns-the-UK-Media_final2.pdf
- 50 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/23/evening-standard-and-independent-unable-to-rebut-conc (...)
- 51 https://www.newstatesman.com/author/bae-systems, https://www.newstatesman.com/wp-content/uploads/si (...)
- 52 To provide just a few examples, the prime minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, was invited as a gues (...)
- 53 https://www.itv.com/news/2021-12-07/no-10-staff-joke-in-leaked-recording-about-christmas-party-they (...)
- 54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU In 2014, Marr launched his novel Head of State at 10 Do (...)
“Under normal circumstances”, Arendt writes, “the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough” (Arendt 1972, 6-7). The speaking of mendacities into “truth” – the repeating of misinformation to the point that it becomes widely accredited – is a stalwart of contemporary political discourse. As the spectacle of politics comes to replace politics itself, this perversion of the speech act has increasingly debased the public sphere. In the choreographies of the daily media round, ministers and MPs bloviate, repeat mantras and non-sequiturs, a “word-mongering” (John Berger’s phrase) that performs loyalty for the purpose of self-advancement. It is important to ask how this pandemic fiction has been promoted by a media which, with several notable exceptions,45 has often failed to adequately hold the government to account. Consider the manufacturing of consent around “herd immunity”,46 when the majority of the scientific community, the WHO, and foreign outlets from La Repubblica to The New York Times counselled against it; the portrayal of governmental breaches of lockdown rules as “within guidelines”;47 or the dismissal of Conservative MP Owen Paterson’s 30-day suspension for lobbying for private companies, including contracts to Covid test provider Randox worth £500 million, as “a proper Westminster village story”.48 Dystopian fictions accustom us to look to the press as a bellwether of tyranny. “In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State”, reads Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited. “In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite” (1965, 35). Though references to “the Power Elite” have aged poorly in the age of populist politics – where the war on “elites” is often fabricated and amplified by those who hold power – the pandemic has shed light on the power structures and ownership models that underpin British media. With three quarters of British newspapers owned by Conservative-backing millionaires or billionaires,49 others part-owned by foreign states,50 nominally oppositional outlets teaming up with BAE Systems,51 and the BBC forced to genuflect to the government under constant threat of revocation of the licence fee,52 this makes for an obsequious and homogeneous media landscape, one which shares physical proximity and very porous boundaries with the nerve centres of politics. Should it be utopian that the Director-General of the state broadcaster not have previously served as deputy chairman of a branch of the Conservative party? Or that an appointee to the BBC’s board, to arbitrate on “impartiality”, should not have served as Director of Communications for Theresa May, from whom he received a knighthood? Illustrative, among many, are the professional arcs of Boris Johnson, who began his career as a journalist before being sacked for fabricating quotes, and Allegra Stratton, who went from BBC to ITV, to spokesperson for Rishi Sunak and then Boris Johnson; when Stratton was made to resign for a rule-breaking Downing Street “fictional party”,53 she was defended in the pages of The Spectator by its political editor, James Forsyth, who is Stratton’s husband and Sunak’s best friend. This is not to put forward a view of the media based on self-censorship but rather, as Noam Chomsky once told Andrew Marr, on self-perpetuation: “I don’t say you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”54
13Why characterise this, though, as a “neoliberal dystopia”? By and large, mainstream culture has ceased to portray capitalism – particularly work under capitalism – as dystopian, in a way that might have been more prevalent in 19th and early-20th century works, from Marx and Dickens to Chaplin and Fritz Lang, with critical portrayals of automation, industrialisation and the alienation of the production line. One reason, to take each term at a time, is an expedient one. As mentioned above, it has been easy to displace onto Covid the blame for government failings; to speak of the state’s response as blandly dystopian, incentivising degradation, is one way of underlining its continuity. The characteristics of the modus operandi I have been describing – serving the interests of the wealthy, deregulating, increasing inequality, debt and reliance on charities and food banks, widening the gap between state and private resources (in healthcare, for example, and education), eroding the social safety net and the power of organised labour, advocating technocratic solutions and flattening political dissent – are all tenets of neoliberalism, which was conceived, as David Harvey has argued, as a project to restore class power in the wake of the economic and social turmoil of the seventies and post-war social democratic advances. “For those left or cast outside the market system,” Harvey writes, “there is little to be expected from neoliberalization except poverty, hunger, disease, and despair” (2007, 185). It was Mark Fisher who coined the phrase “boring dystopia”, to denote the “bland, mildly coercive signs that abound in late-stage capitalist society, which foster a vague sense of isolation or unease”. This is a normative sort of dystopia, which does not brandish its totalitarian or repressive impulses as a badge of honour, but depends on the passive or acquiescent consent of those more inured and desensitised to its depredations. In some sense, the very premise of the gig economy, and the way its labour model – based on outsourcing, zero-hour contracts and the pitting of monadic self-employed “entrepreneurs” against one another – is sweeping through society, has dystopian traits. As well as locating the pandemic response within a context and political culture, in its semantic hollowing out “dystopia” reflects something of the depletion of our “resources for caring” under neoliberalism,55 and harnesses the term precisely for its apparently excessive baggage.
14But “dystopia” is useful here also in another sense, one associated with the pervasive lack of discursive alternatives. “People have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them”, Stuart Hall says in a 1983 lecture. “These futures may not be real; if you try to concretise them immediately, you may find there is nothing there. But what is there, what is real, is the possibility of being someone else, of being in some other social space from the one in which you have already been placed” (Hall 2016, 205). More than its epidemiological datum, it is the loss of impulses and discourses challenging the status quo that marks the truly dystopian aspect of the Covid-19 crisis. For if a state of mind “is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs… that type of orientation which transcends reality and which at the same time breaks the bonds of the existing order” (Mannheim 1979, 173), we might consider a state of mind dystopian when it cleaves to that state of reality so doggedly as to strengthen those very bonds. In this sense, it is damning that the government’s mishandling of the pandemic has gone largely unchallenged by the opposition. The role of culture is integral to the establishment of a shared “common sense”, defining what is considered politically viable or beyond the pale. In this “dystopian” reconfiguration of the real, Covid becomes an issue pertaining to culture rather than public health, and criticism of policy is “playing politics”, a polarised position in a culture war of which Covid-19 is another battlefield. The meaning of “culture” here borders on the anthropological, denoting the often-unspoken assumptions, traditions and leanings that make up and anchor identity, the “place” where the subject is invented. To avoid pursuing “opposition for opposition’s sake”,56 or running the risk of appearing excessively “ideological”, the Labour party has avoided attempting to shape the discourse – on the mishandling of the pandemic, but also in articulating any sort of alternative vision for the country, on issues of public ownership, immigration and taxation, for example, even opposing a proposed rise in corporation tax. On Covid, as one Conservative MP put it, “Labour have failed in their constitutional duty to hold Govt to account, or ask them any difficult questions”,57 effectively reducing the difference between the principal parties to trivial details – questions of timing and competence, decency and communication strategy58 – with a stultifying adherence to a linguistic terrain amenable to government (“I wouldn’t say I’m woke. I’m not woke but I’m not anti-woke either”).59 The constant deferral to the calculus of power winning elides the fact that a salutary democratic process hinges on the public acknowledgement of such gross failures of the state. Surely one sinister correlative of the broadening of the “tissue of falsehood”, and its lack of a robust counter-narrative, is the proliferation of conspiracy theories during the pandemic. It is a point, often made, that Arendt puts well: “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world […] is being destroyed”, engendering “a peculiar kind of cynicism – an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established” (1993, 257). If capitalism thrives under “conspiratorial” conditions, relying on the exclusion of a disengaged populace from knowledge of its workings, the flourishing of conspiracy theories may be seen as the frenzied narrativisation of an alternative, an attempt to ascribe sense – be it often farfetched, bizarre, instrumentalised or racist – where there no longer seems to be one.
15During the pandemic, the forced closure of cultural venues and arts establishments, and the attendant necessity of government support, has renewed scrutiny on the arts, their value and how they are funded. At a time like this, despite the lip service paid to the excellence of “great British content”,60 the arts clearly constitute a problem: one tone-deaf government campaign, featuring a ballerina soon to alight on an interest in cyber-security, invited artists to “Rethink. Reskill. Reboot”.61 “We are asked to define the relation of the arts to economics, we are asked what position the arts hold in the ideal republic,” wrote Ezra Pound in 1913, “And it is obviously the opinion of many people […] that the arts had better not exist at all” (1954, 41). But this was also a moment in which many sought solace in the arts, supporting artists and venues, protesting closures and signing petitions; a moment that made us acutely aware of how imbricated with art our solitude is, how we count on it to compose our selves. The night before lockdown came into effect, I walked down a barren Avenue de la République listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen – an experience, in retrospect, I was trying to render aesthetic, casting out for a form that could speak to the portentous and as yet featureless nature of what was happening. “This world is beautiful / Held within its stars / I keep it in my heart.” Cataclysm has long been a source of aesthetic fascination; what work was expected of culture in its throes?
16I proposed, above, that culture helped shape our early understanding of the pandemic, with certain cultural products singled out to diffract our experiences. Those of us fortunate enough to be able to do our jobs remotely might have drawn analogies between the long days spent online and the “Fifteen Million Merits” episode of Black Mirror, where humanity, confined indoors, inhabits an entirely simulated world; on learning that it was initially equipped with an attendance-tracking function, we might have likened Zoom, the software that aggregated activities from teaching and socialising to yoga classes and funerals, to the Orwellian telescreen that broadcasts as it simultaneously surveils.62 1984 was evoked paradigmatically, to describe the restrictions and the prurient reporting of their infraction to the authorities tasked with enforcing them. The home office’s proposal to deploy wave machines and warships to stop asylum seekers crossing the Channel conjured Winston’s diary entry for April 4th, 1984, about “a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean” (Orwell 2000, 10-11).63 In themselves, these apparently meaningful collisions of fiction and reality are unexceptional. We might think of the flickers of recognition they occasion – whether these originate in Black Mirror or 28 Days Later, The Matrix or La Peste – as a reversal of Freud’s idea of the unheimlich: not as something familiar that has become estranged, uncanny, but rather as something known that softens the real’s disquieting blow. Against the event that makes the familiar unrecognisable – the city centre, for example, emptied of human life – the familiar that makes recognisable the event. But if a work has proven even startlingly prescient, this tells us nothing of its intrinsic value; indeed, this strikes me as a singularly unambitious demand to make of culture.
17Another expectation of culture is that it should soothe in times of crisis, offering “calming words in the midst of chaos”.64 An NPR article, entitled “Poetry Provides Comfort — Through The Pandemic And Beyond”, claims poetry “can guide us when it gets difficult to manage the intensity of what we’re feeling”.65 Besides this provision of emotional containment, or articulation of affects difficult to express, culture’s merit rested in its capacity for evasion. “Books had a real moment,” a publishing director at Viking told The Guardian, “They were immediate, they were accessible. We all wanted to escape into different stories”.66 Though comprehensible in the circumstances, to reduce culture to comfort is to do it disservice, to make of it another tool of self-care, alongside Pilates or mindfulness, a conception both utilitarian and highly individualised. With bars and stadiums, clubs and concert halls, cinemas and theatres closed, and with the introduction of a curfew restricting movement in several countries to getting to work and back, culture’s “calming” or “caring” effects come to resemble the sedating role of subscription television as the algorithmically tailored nightly evasion of the neoliberal subject. But casting culture as a flight from reality abdicates its sense-making potential, its capacity to produce meaning within the crisis, rather than divert attentions from it. Interviewed by The Guardian, classicist Mary Beard says:
The arts make us feel better, people said – and I’m sure they do. But I also think this is a dangerous line to follow. The real reason we needed the arts was because we needed to understand what we were going through. I’m not going to sit here and say, what do we need more: a vaccine or the arts? That’s a false equivalence. But crises are recovered from by people learning about them. What did we feel and why? If we want to look at plagues and pandemics, well, western literature in the form of The Iliad starts with a plague! The arts are essential and that’s what we must fight for.67 (original emphasis)
- 68 Casting Covid-19 as a vindication of his work, Giorgio Agamben has written of “the invention of an (...)
I share Beard’s qualms with this kind of argument, as well as the conviction that literature can offer insight into our experiences, that the past shapes the future and to forget compels us to repeat. But can The Iliad really accrete our understanding of Covid-19? The arts are not hermeneutics, illuminating the world according to our disciplinary specialism.68 It is comprehensible that, as we spent countless hours behind screens, atomised and disempowered, the collective experience of culture a void in our lives, many attempted to gauge the size of that void, to prove the value of the arts to ensure their survival. But understandable calls to “lift the lockdown on culture”, before the vaccine roll out, or the establishment of a comprehensive mask and tracing policy, rowed against the fundamental epidemiological datum – that in times of life and death, the arts really are secondary. The dichotomy Beard rejects is not as false as it appears. Perhaps the suggestion that culture is as important as the air we breathe or the food we eat – on étouffe sous nos masques; culture, nourriture essentielle – always sells us short, groping for a meaningful measure; perhaps the problem stems from the desire to attribute a concrete value to culture, to derive from its “lessons” a cookbook of the future, when it is worth acknowledging the uselessness that accounts for why it is needed. Otherwise, we underwrite a transactional or monetised view of culture as content provision, an idea that every pound that goes in should yield a quantifiable return. Whether it does or not is beside the point; any attempt to quantify the value of arts in our society is to compete on the terms of neoliberalism, with its discourse around how to make the arts more nimble, agile, resilient – codewords, often, for further cuts in funding, opportunities and support.
18If the dystopian enjoyed an already prominent place in contemporary culture, Covid-19 has given it a newfound salience. “Some readers want to escape from their fears,” the Seattle Public library justified its “Contagion: Pandemics in Dystopian Lit” reading list of April 2020, “while others rush headlong into what scares them”.69 As per the “resonances”, described above, between reality and certain dystopias, the pandemic invigorated the conversation around their timeliness and pertinence. In May 2021, for example, The New York Times published an interview with the Black Mirror creator entitled “Charlie Brooker Saw All This Coming”, while an article in BBC Culture suggested that 1999’s The Matrix “predicted life in 2021”, and a Netflix series was said to have “predicted the pandemic”.70 In providing a cultural precedent, the value of dystopia appears intrinsically linked to its cautionary function, its ability to “hold up a mirror” to our present and act as “a bleak warning”, as Matthew d’Ancona writes of The Handmaid’s Tale: a “disturbing text for our times” which “did more than a thousand news bulletins to capture all that was most toxic about the new populist right”.71 In so doing, dystopia furnishes the sort of foresight that, with a moralising view, turns authors into prophets to be heeded, “dystopian fables as prophecies more than fiction”.72
19I would submit, however, that dystopian culture is no longer as exploratory or oppositional as it might seem. As a concept, clearly, it remains seductive, but its warning function has long been absorbed and commodified by the system it sets out to critique, participating frictionlessly within it. For all but those who seek actively to ignore it, or counsel a patience and moderation that amounts largely to the same thing, the data is there and abundant – on global heating, for example, on inequality, on economic, social, gender-based and racial oppression; we have long been forewarned, in ways more scientific and indisputable than cultural depictions can adduce. In the cultural economy I have been describing, dystopia risks providing little more than gratification of the cultural choices of the concerned consumer. Its innocuousness reflects in the usage of the word. Alongside the examples given above, in the past few months alone, the term has been applied to things as diverse as Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse,73 the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence,74 the #MeToo movement,75 the Netflix series Emily in Paris,76 the Teletubbies,77 and “dystopia-core” which, alongside “avant apocalypse”, is “the new pandemic-era punk look”.78 Dystopia is a word that is politically vacuous, emptied out to the degree that it “has now no meaning”, to misquote Orwell, “except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’” (Orwell 2021, 23). Politically, it has long been used to denote what we are not: the repoussoir that intimates that ours is the best of all possible worlds, that all else, with the exemption of our allies and clients, is totalitarian or illiberal. Dystopian is all that didn’t end with the end of history, the residue of the neoliberal settlement. As an idea, it is consolatory: we may not be perfect, but we are not like them. But once the “end of history” triumphalism has ebbed, and we have rested enough on the laurels of never having had it so good,79 this is what that lack of alternative looks like.
20The recrudescent interest in dystopia, its evident viability as commercial form, is surely a sign of the times. In my time in the classroom, I have been struck by the popularity, alongside blockbusters and superhero films, of dystopian fictions amongst my students. For those under a certain age, there is perhaps something about the nature of dystopia that speaks to the precarity that has always defined their experience of the world, where it’s easier to imagine the end of the world, in H. Bruce Franklin’s phrase on J. G. Ballard, than the end of capitalism. Without future, there is only catastrophe;80 “Who wasn’t preparing for the end of the world?”, wonders Dorothy, adjunct professor of English and protagonist of Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021, 217). Haunted by the spectre of environmental collapse, ours is a culture weaned on discourses of its own precarious transience, which demands the daily repression of that knowledge in order to function. Culture, in this, has a curious role, acting as libidinal theatre in which the spectacle plays out. Depictions of apocalyptic eventuation allow us to experience vertigo with the safety guardrail, afford the release of a vicarious participation in our own destruction, while dystopian fictions offer up post-apocalypse without the apocalyptic event. The attraction, with the latter, is in the mundanity of the inevitable. If post-modernism was the culture of late capitalism, perhaps dystopia is the culture most befitting whatever it is we’re living now, this more advanced and deregulated stage of predatory capitalism, where cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris acquires Vectura, a company that makes asthma inhalers; where the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma and global patrons of the arts, after making more than 10 billion in profits from the painkiller OxyContin, move into the “attractive market” of addiction recovery, patenting a drug to treat the epidemic of opioid dependence they have contributed to creating, which has made overdose the primary cause of accidental death in the United States;81 where nearly fifteen thousand “ghost flights” – passengerless flights operated by commercial airlines – have departed since the beginning of the pandemic.82 We might question, perhaps, the aesthetic allure to which we are susceptible in contemplating the dystopian, how the distance it necessarily implies may function as a comforting, purgatory one. Culture, in this sense, becomes another instrument in the acceptance that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009, 2). For what kinds of culture can such a system produce, as generations enter adulthood with limited prospects or access to home ownership or social housing, and burdened with debt if they wish to go to university? In recent years, funding for arts and design courses – including art, music, dance, design, drama, media studies and journalism – has been halved, as humanities and social science departments face a wave of closures.83 Stewart Lee has pointed out the hypocrisy underlying the official celebrations to mark the fortieth anniversary of punk by a government that had contributed more than any other to eradicating the material conditions for such subcultures to emerge, for an art able to imagine alternatives.
21As Fisher writes, “The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect”, and “[f]rom a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again” (2009, 80-81). Whatever the origin theory that will eventually become the most accredited, it is inarguable that Covid-19 is a product of our economic system, and perhaps its sole hopeful outcome is that it should constitute one such breach in it. One of the contested etymologies of the word “obscene” is from the Latin ob+scenus, “off stage”, where for the Greek dramatists violence occurred.84 For a spell, Covid brought on-stage the violence of our social pact otherwise hidden from view, just far enough away – “beyond the boundary”, like dystopia or climate breakdown – to still dismiss or ignore. Breaching the sightlessness that capitalism exacts, it briefly made “boring dystopia” less boring. It is surely too soon to attempt to appraise how culture may grapple with Covid – will it bring an outpouring of pandemic fictions, spawn its own dystopian subgenre? – but there may yet be something salutary in its representations. Dennis Kelly’s play Together, directed by Stephen Daldry and broadcast on BBC Two in June 2021, was an early example, and there was something cathartic about watching, for the first time, the fictionalisation of painful recent history. But the play shies away from substantial criticism of policy and the plight of the subaltern is little more than foil for the protagonists’ moral principles and self-regard.85 Interestingly, David Hare has complained that the BBC rejected his play, Beat the Devil, which fictionalises his struggle with coronavirus. “The basic difficulty is that everybody is absolutely convinced that nobody wants to know anything about Covid-19”, he told The Guardian. “If you talk to, for instance, people at the BBC, they will just say: ‘Oh, give me drama on any other subject but Covid – people are not interested in Covid.’ There is absolutely no evidence for this”.86 Though I have not seen Hare’s play, there is something to this idea of a concerted diversion of attentions away from the traumatic. Pandemic fictions might yet return us to that interrupted affect, with a response that does not sideline necessary grief or indignation or dilute it with irony. Alongside any lessons we learn, this might afford the opportunity for a profounder public acknowledgement of what has been lost and what we owe the dead.
22But as well as the anguish from which we recoil, in our exigency for restoration – of a previous state, the semblance of normality – we shun the potential inherent in recent experience. “Never before had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down,” writes Adam Tooze (2020), who characterises the shutdown as “a moment of collective agency”. Would it be excessive to find in the collective nature of this agency – the bringing into being, on an almost global scale, of something which did not previously exist – a fundamentally creative essence? It is the exceptional nature of this collective response that exposed a vision of the world, as Graeber puts it, as “something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” (2015, 89). The pandemic has spurred reflection on the nature of work, highlighting the necessity of rethinking what is considered “essential” and the inadequacies of how we value it. Andreas Malm (2020) asks what could be achieved if the state-level interventionism of the Covid-19 response were employed to address the climate crisis. The Covid response has refuted a conception of the populace as rational actors unwilling to accept any sort of sacrifice for the collective, and further exposed the interested fallacy behind the idea that, by waiting for it to be economically profitable to do so, while displacing onto individual behaviour the onus to change, the system of production responsible for climate collapse will be ultimately able to tackle it. These insights are particularly relevant at a time when the tenets of Conservative ideology dictate a Hayekian restoration, one which appears at loggerheads with the current moment in which The Economist writes that “The virus means the big state is back” (March 2020) and heralds “The triumph of big government” (November 2021).87 Already, as a result of Brexit and Covid-19, we are seeing small rises in salaries, with the shortages of goods bringing attention to HGV drivers and the globalised workings of the supply chain.
23It has not taken long for Covid – a metonym of the virus, of the protracted periods of lockdown, or both – to become something of a floating signifier, associated with global warming and zoonotic spillover or gain-of-function research and laboratory leaks; an interference of the state either warranted or unduly; a strengthening or loosening of the bonds of community; a villainous or heroic pharmaceutical industry; a strange hiatus from the business of living or an augury of mass extinction. In a piece in the Financial Times, Arundhati Roy has written of the pandemic as a “portal”:
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.88
- 89 This year, the world’s 2,600-plus billionaires have become $1.6 trillion richer: https://www.forbes (...)
- 90 Aristotle Kallis writes of “a vast and forbidding archipelago of fiercely competing micro-sovereign (...)
Roy’s article was published in April 2020. Since then, the pandemic has made billionaires richer,89 emboldened authoritarianism and the forces of reaction,90 and increased the monopolies of tech giants across the globe. That, with few exceptions, like hampering Donald Trump’s re-election, history has disproven Roy’s claim that Covid has made the mighty kneel only amplifies the urgency of her call to action, in a “new normal” that increasingly resembles a heightened state of denial. If the concept of dystopia is to have value therein, I think, this will be found by turning it back, closer to home, to signify the dearth of emancipatory and imaginative alternatives, and their stifling under the sign of the sensible and the always reasonable.