Highlights from The London Review of Books (February 24th, 2022) by Various Authors Last read on March 15, 2022
Highlights from this book
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A study by the University of Swansea in 2018 found that one in sevens tudents in the UK admitted to using an essay mill. The government has recently pledged to make essay-writing services illegal, but that won't stop operations based overseas.
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The use of Turnitin for these purposes (detecting plagiarism) isn't uncontroversial. For one thing, it is a form of digital surveillance, which further mechanises the process of evaluation and risks weakening the trust between students and teachers. It can also mislead students into thinking that palgiarism is defined in quantitative terms: so long as you're below a particular threshold, anything goes.
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I have heard plenty of dubious excuses for acts of plagiarism during these hearings. But there is one recurring explanation which, it seems to me, deserves more thoughtful consideration: 'I took too many notes.' It isn't just students who are familiar with information overload, one of whose effects is to morph authorship into a desperate form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was concieved as the product of transitions between spaces -- library, lecture hall, seminar room, study -- linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interfact with screen and keyboard, and everything dissolves into a unitary flow of 'content', the identity of the author -- as distinct from the texts they have read -- becomes harder to delineate.
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For some years now, it's been noticeable how many students arrive at university feeling that every interaction is a test they might fail. They are anxious. Writing seems fraught with risk, a highly complicated task that can be executed correctly or not.
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It wasn't merely the emphasis on obscure grammatical concepts that worried me, but the treatment of language in wholly syntactical terms, with the aim of distinguishing correct from incorrect usage. This is the way a computer treats language, as a set of symbols that generates commands to be executed, and which either succeeds or fails in that task.
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In a journal article from August 2020, 'Learning under Lockdown: English Teaching in the Time of Covid-19', John Yandell notes that online classes create wholly closed worlds, where context and intertextuality disappear in favour of constant instruction. In these online environments, reading is informed not by prior reading experiences but by the toolkit that the teacher has provided, and is presented as occurring along a tramline of linear development. Different readings are reducible to better or worse readings: the more closely the student's reading approximates to the already finalised teacher's reading, the better it is. That, it would appear, is what reading with precision looks like.
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In the utopia sold by the EdTech industry (the companies that provide platforms and software for online learning), pupils are guided and assessed continuously. When one task is completed correctly, the next begins, as in a computer game; meanwhile the platform providers are scraping and analysing data from the actions of millions of children. In this behaviourist set-up, teachers become more like coaches: they assist and motivate individual 'learners', but are no longer so important to the provision of education. And since it is no longer the sole responsibility of teachers or schools to deliver the curriculum, it becomes more centralised – the latest front in a forty-year battle to wrest control from the hands of teachers and local authorities.
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In this vision, the laborious and expensive work of extracting data on literacy via surveys and tests, which produce scores only every few years, might eventually become unnecessary: the data gleaned by EdTech platforms could be combined and crunched instead. Blanket surveillance replaces the need for formal assessment.
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In place of the Victorian distinction between the 'literate' and the 'illiterate', which mapped onto the basic class structure of industrial capitalism, the idea was to place children and adults on a sliding scale of literacy. This coincided with the growing awareness among economists of the value of education in increasing productivity and GDP: workers were reconceived as 'human capital', investment in which would generate future financial returns.
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One of the assumptions here was that people with 'high' levels of literacy must already have acquired the levels below, so that someone who can, say, extract useful information from the markets pages of the Financial Times will definitely be able to follow a recipe, whereas the reverse may not be true. Where all this leaves the ability to get a niche joke or adapt an internet meme is unclear.
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'Reading', according to the OECD, should involve 'understanding', but only in the minimal sense of responding correctly to a question. Confirming Adorno's worst fears of the 'primacy of practical reason', reading is no longer dissociable from the execution of tasks. And, crucially, the 'goals' to be achieved through the ability to read, the 'potential' and 'participation' to be realised, are economic in nature.
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The ideological assumption, taken as read by the OECD or the World Economic Forum, that the benefits of literacy – indeed of education generally – are ultimately to be realised in the marketplace has provoked huge political disruption and psychological pain in the UK over the last ten years. The trebling of university tuition fees in 2012 was justified on the basis that the quality of higher education is commensurate with graduate earnings. The hope, when the new fee regime was introduced, was that a competitive market would spontaneously emerge as different 'providers' of higher education charged different rates according to the 'quality' of what they had to offer.
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And since 2019, with the Treasury increasingly unhappy about the amount of student debt still sitting on the government's balance sheet and the government resorting to 'culture war' at every opportunity, there has been an effort to single out degree programmes that represent 'poor value for money', measured in terms of graduate earnings. Many of these programmes are in the arts and humanities, and are now habitually referred to by Tory politicians and their supporters in the media as 'low-value degrees'.
But if the agenda is to reduce the number of young people studying humanities subjects, and to steer them instead towards STEM subjects, finance and business studies, the rhetoric is superfluous: the tuition fee hike, combined with the growing profile of league tables, had already worked its magic.
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One consequence of all this is that studying the humanities may become a luxury reserved for those who can fall back on the cultural and financial advantages of their class position. (This effect has already been noticed among young people going into acting, where the results are more visible to the public than they are in academia or heritage organisations.) Yet, given the changing class composition of the UK over the past thirty years, it's not clear that contemporary elites have any more sympathy for the humanities than the Conservative Party does. A friend of mine recently attended an open day at a well-known London private school, and noticed that while there was a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers, nobody was waiting to speak to the English teacher. When she asked what was going on, she was told: 'I'm afraid parents here are very ambitious.' Parents at such schools, where fees have tripled in real terms since the early 1980s, tend to work in financial and business services themselves, and spend their own days profitably manipulating and analysing numbers on screens. When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.
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Leaving aside the strategic political use of terms such as 'woke' and 'cancel culture', it would be hard to deny that we live in an age of heightened anxiety over the words we use, in particular the labels we apply to people. This has benefits: it can help to bring discriminatory practices to light, potentially leading to institutional reform. It can also lead to fruitless, distracting public arguments, such as the one that rumbled on for weeks over Angela Rayner's description of Conservatives as 'scum'.
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Visit any actual school or university today (as opposed to the imaginary ones described in the Daily Mail or the speeches of Conservative ministers) and you will find highly disciplined, hierarchical institutions, focused on metrics, performance evaluations, 'behaviour' and quantifiable 'learning outcomes'. Andreas Schleicher is winning, not Michel Foucault. If young people today worry about using the 'wrong' words, it isn't because of the persistence of the leftist cultural power of forty years ago, but – on the contrary – because of the barrage of initiatives and technologies dedicated to reversing that power. The ideology of measurable literacy, combined with a digital net that has captured social and educational life, leaves young people ill at ease with the language they use and fearful of what might happen should they trip up.
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Few people remember Brezhnev kindly. At best, he is a pathetic figure with bushy eyebrows stumbling across the international scene, jovial but almost incoherent under the weight of tranquillisers, vodka and oncoming dementia. At worst, he is the man who unleashed the Warsaw Pact armies to overthrow the Prague Spring in 1968, who destabilised half the world by sending Russian forces into Afghanistan in 1979, who devised the Brezhnev Doctrine licensing communist states to use armed force against any nation threatening to leave the 'socialist camp'. Susanne Schattenberg sets out to correct and sometimes reverse these impressions. 'I expected to be working on a Stalinist, a hardliner, an architect of domestic and foreign policies of repression,' she writes in the introduction to this book. But 'instead of a Cold Warrior, I was faced with a man who passionately fought for peace and ruined his health in the process. Instead of a dogmatic ideologue, a heart-throb who loved fast cars and liked to crack jokes.' A heart-throb? She adds, disarmingly: 'I will not escape accusations of being something of a Brezhnev apologist.'
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He headed the Soviet Union, as leader of the Communist Party, from 1964 until his death in 1982. Before that, he had served as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet for several years. But no insatiable lust for power, no gift for intrigue, lay behind Brezhnev's ascent. The point was that nobody in the highest echelons of the party was afraid of him. Many quite liked him and admired his hard work, though some thought he was a bit of a nincompoop. His great selling point was that he wasn't Stalin or Khrushchev. Brezhnev, his colleagues assumed, wouldn't have them shot or send their families to Siberia. And unlike Khrushchev, Stalin's ebullient successor, he wouldn't suddenly fire them in a drunken rage or set them impossible targets in titanic, half-baked projects. He was someone the supreme nomenklatura – the Politburo members and the secretaries of the Central Committee – felt they could control and restrain if necessary.
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Schattenberg defines him in the late 1930s as 'a rather normal example of the new type of engineer', somebody who was less interested in creating a new society than in getting back to a '"good" life in which one did not have to worry about where one's next meal was coming from and had time for hunting or sleigh rides'.
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What attracted so many people to Brezhnev,' wrote Roy Medvedev, later a dissident who had no reason to like him, 'was his softness, the lack of the usual hardness and cruelty associated with party bosses of the time, a kindness that sometimes also came at the expense of business.' He detested the old Bolshevik management style of yelling and threatening, and where possible avoided punishing individuals.
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Then, at a party congress in Moscow, Stalin noticed him. He liked Brezhnev's looks, tall and well-dressed: 'What a handsome Moldavian!' Always impressed by appearances, Stalin made him a candidate member of the Presidium, the supreme party body
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What Stalin and Khrushchev had achieved with terror and humiliation, Brezhnev pushed through with his joviality and conviviality.' His reign, which would last for almost twenty years, is often dismissed today as 'the era of stagnation'. And yet the 1970s, especially, brought a turn towards consumers – small private cars, better housing and pensions – throughout the Soviet bloc. As Schattenberg puts it, 'for the first time in its entire history, Soviet power said to the people, “Relax” and did not demand enthusiasm from them.'
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Brezhnev quite clearly considered Dubček his protégé.' In other words, he saw the Czechoslovak reform movement in narrow Soviet terms: as a cadre problem to be solved by a reshuffle of personalities, some cautious policy changes and the restoration of trust between Prague and Moscow. When it became clear that Dubček and his allies were proposing rights to free expression and political diversity, Brezhnev was baffled. Again, he 'simply did not understand' what they were on about. When he finally saw they were serious, he was appalled at the breach of trust and friendship by Dubček – 'his Sasha' – rather than by the political challenge.
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According to Schattenberg, Brezhnev had almost nothing to do with the calamitous decision in December 1979 to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan. He was drugged and out of it: the troika running foreign policy kept him informed but concluded that he didn't grasp what was going on or understand the papers they made him sign. The Politburo apparently assumed that it would be a repeat of Czechoslovakia 1968: a quick invasion, no serious resistance, and a replacement of cadres. Instead they found themselves in a merciless nine-year war that would cost more than fourteen thousand Russian lives alone and destroy much of the Soviet system's remaining credibility at home.
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Brought up within the party system, he could not imagine radical reform that went beyond what had happened after Stalin's death: the party had ceased to be the instrument of mass murder and of the lawless deportation of millions. So he tried, earnestly but without much success, to make the Soviet peoples safer, happier and better off. There was, perhaps, a chance to transform the USSR's governance in his first years of leadership. But such heresy was inconceivable to a 'homo sovieticus' like Leonid Ilyich. By the time Gorbachev set out to grapple with the monstrous faults in the political structure, only four years after Brezhnev's death, it was too late.
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A special operative can find himself being played by Mark Wahlberg in a big budget movie, as Marcus Luttrell did in the 2013 adaptation of his memoir, Lone Survivor, so secret military actions aren't something you want to keep quiet about. As one serving SEAL told the Washington Post in 2011, neatly encapsulating the contradiction, 'we're the dark matter. We're the force that orders the universe but can't be seen.'
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Recently, however, a wave of newly retired special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men into messy wars makes them uniquely qualified to offer 'Battle-Tested Strategies for Creating Successful Organisations and Inspiring Extraordinary Results', as the subtitle of one such manual puts it. Arguably the most successful current practitioner of the genre is the retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal, who has never been shy about using his own achievements to show how a leader gets things done.
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In his time at JSOC, McChrystal brought its fractious army and navy components closer together, better aligned it with the CIA and NSA, and introduced modern methods and information technology into a world that prized what the Bush-era euphemism called 'kinetic military action' – i.e. killing – over language skills, local intelligence and analytic capabilities. Whether any actual change resulted from McChrystal's efforts is doubtful, however, given the number of civilians killed by JSOC and the vast number of Iraqis who turned against the invading forces.
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Many in JSOC never forgave the Obama administration for this slight against a commander they adored. McChrystal's self-mythologising – ten-mile daily runs, single daily meal, beer and bonding sessions with his subordinates – was admired by those in special operations, who had little respect for lesser mortals with four stars on their epaulettes. The regular military, however, did not worship McChrystal, or the rules of engagement he applied in Afghanistan. His preference for deploying small covert teams away from prying eyes clashed with the expansive boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency operations that could be scrutinised by reporters, Pentagon higher-ups, politicians and Nato allies. McChrystal's methods weren't popular with the people of Afghanistan either: civilians were captured and killed, villages and livelihoods destroyed, and the US pursued close relationships with the kleptocrats and warlords who had milked the country dry.
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The US corporate world has long adored 'how to succeed' manuals.
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But even more enticing than the life lessons of corporate executives are war manuals redeployed as business handbooks.
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As an unnamed Deutsche Bank executive told the Washington Post, 'senior management is much more likely to listen to military commanders because they're cool and they've killed people than to a McKinsey guy in a pinstripe suit.'
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In an acute diagnosis of the power elite in the mid-20th century, the sociologist C. Wright Mills described US military men as 'the warlords [who] along with fellow travellers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large'. Military men and diplomats now serve on the boards of companies whose business they know nothing about, and are given direct access to the training grounds of the captains of industry and politics.
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Military whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning languished in prison, or died in abjection in care homes, devastated and demeaned like Ian Fishback. And the men who led them went on to be feted in classrooms and boardrooms, to preside over universities, publish bestsellers, collect starry-eyed puff pieces in the business sections of newspapers and star as the dark and brooding heroes of motivational war fiction.
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MacLeish was critical of Yeats's later work: it hadn't taken up the challenge of the times and addressed 'the social and political and economic structure of the postwar world' as it ought to have done. Yeats was unimpressed by the assumption that 'the right public material' should be 'politics', as he wrote to his friend Dorothy Wellesley, copying out for her his nettled response to MacLeish's criticism, a deft little poem titled 'Politics', which contrasted the conversation of expert men chewing over the perilous state of contemporary Europe with the vision of 'a girl' standing across the room.
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Maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms;
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.
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'In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.' Well, if so, then so much the worse for 'our time', seems the gist of Yeats's response.
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Politics is 'participation in the state, zeal and passion for the state'. 'Not only do I disagree that human destiny should be absorbed in state and society,' Mann countered, 'I even find this opinion repulsively inhuman.'
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A properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
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'Let the world know me,' he wrote in his diary, 'but only when everyone's dead.'
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Perhaps unsurprisingly Mann greatly admired Freud, less as the advocate of emancipatory self-acquaintance than as the thinker who recognised that 'civilisation is only possible under the pressure of certain prohibitions,' and who understood that 'sublimation and repression' were crucial elements in the making of culture. He could hardly have found an account closer to his heart.
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That he did not commit forbidden acts was no doubt partly down to timidity, but it was also the product of a tenacious romanticism which led him intuitively to feel that the most precious experiences were those that avoided the vulgar trap of something actually happening. ('Heard melodies are sweet,' as Keats observed, 'but those unheard/Are sweeter.')
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Fellow admirers will deduce from my account that The Magician is a sort of companion volume to The Master (2004), Tóibín's celebrated novel about Henry James, and a book similarly preoccupied by the thought that what might normally be construed as psychological damage can turn out to be just what a novelist needs.
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The great works of Yeats, with whom I began, are all about a lonely romanticism finding itself forced to enter the public world of 'what's difficult', and finding that one way of attempting the task was to become a man of masks.
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I sometimes wonder whether Latin would have been more useful to me than typing, but I do quite like the latter. There is something satisfying about the exercise of that kind of muscle memory.
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What does any of this have to do with Virginia Woolf? Only typing. I typed Mrs Dalloway from beginning to end. There is something surprisingly intimate about entering text in this way. I knew that by typing up the novel I would refamiliarise myself with it. I didn't anticipate that I would learn something about the minutiae of Woolf's style, and in particular her often eccentric use of commas, semicolons and other punctuation marks.
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The element of anticipation is important here, because typing, which relies on muscle memory, is in many ways about anticipation, it is the expression of anticipation. Even as I type the word 'anticipation', my fingers prepare themselves for the falling into place of that concluding 'tion' which, after years of entering such words, falls trippingly from the fingers. As my partner pointed out to me, 'language is a kind of music and typing is a way of playing it.'
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The struggle for sovereignty against shape-shifting imperialisms naturally takes many forms. What Malians want is 'libération' – a popular word among supporters of Goïta's junta – not just from jihadists but from Western high-handedness. What Burkinabes want is completion of the reforms that began eight years ago.
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Last October, the Parti pour le Développement et le Changement left the ruling coalition, citing the government's 'lack of response' to the jihadist challenge. The party's founder, Saran Sérémé, spelled out its grievance: 'People feel abandoned when they see officials on television strutting about in shopping malls, at gala receptions, making speeches, when they [the people] are under the yoke of jihadists.'
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Between them they formulated the plan for Mali's long 'transition', which involves seeking Russian assistance in the fight against the jihadists. Goïta, like many Malian army officers, was trained in Russia, and the army is familiar with Russian military equipment. Goïta and Maïga made Russian involvement more attractive to the public by hyping up grievances, legitimate and spurious, against the French. They relied in part on the propaganda skills of Russian operatives, and when the French tried to compete the result was lacklustre at best.
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In Mali, the Russian intervention, though secretive, appears to involve not just Wagner but state forces too. Success here would seriously compromise French influence in West Africa at large, which may explain the overexcited interventions by French officials, including Macron and the minister of foreign affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who called Goïta's coup 'illégitime'. Last month France's ambassador was expelled from Mali and sent back to Paris with a diplomatic note: it wasn't usual, the note said, for a state to retain an ambassador in a country whose government it refused to acknowledge. This put Macron in an impossible position. He can't recognise the junta without lending it legitimacy, but not doing so means he can't realistically object to Russian involvement. Under these circumstances, a French military presence in Mali becomes a political absurdity.
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Mali, they suggested, was now at the mercy of a foreign power. Given France's history in Mali, the hypocrisy is pretty brazen. But the Malian ambassador I spoke to was just as cynical about the Russians: 'Emergency military interventions based on geopolitical considerations have never brought lasting stability and security to a country.' Russian assistance comes at a price, and it may be higher than that exacted by the French. The countries of West Africa can, in theory, influence French policy through lobbying, media campaigns and the demands of civil society, even if they rarely manage this in practice. Russian foreign policy is not sensitive to pressures of this kind.
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Mexico City, in the words of the critic Carlos Monsiváis, is 'above all, too many people'. In Los rituales del caos (1995), Monsiváis summed up the 'multitudes surrounding multitudes': the swarms of cars, the street pedlars and fire eaters encircling them at traffic lights, the massed congregants at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the millions of passengers crammed daily into the Metro. Any attempt at a coherent portrait of this teeming excess seems doomed to failure. There are too many people with too many stories, too many sights, sounds, smells, too many historical epochs mingled together, too many possible books to write.
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The book's kaleidoscopic form reflects 'the juxtapositions the cityscape entails – the tyre shop opposite the colonial church, the corporate skyscraper next to the taco stand'.
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In a 1917 poem, Alfonso Reyes imagined the area as 'the most transparent region of the air', a phrase that would be met with grim, smog-choked laughter by its current inhabitants. As Villoro observes, Reyes himself was expressing alarm at the frantic pace of urbanisation as early as 1940: 'What have you done to my high metaphysical valley?' The days when the white peaks of Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl formed a constant backdrop to the city's south-east are long gone. In fact, they are now so rarely seen that when they are visible residents may say: 'The volcanoes came out' – as if the mountains had 'decided one day to take a look at us'. 'On those rare, clear days,' according to Villoro, 'we're a bit better.' Moods are lifted and morals improved simply by the 'possibility of a horizon'.
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For Villoro, life in 'Chilangopolis' involves a simultaneous awareness and denial of impending disaster. 'Our version of the magazine Popular Mechanics would have to be called Popular Apocalypse and be dedicated to earthquakes, landslides, volcanic activity, water shortages, pollution, theft of cash machines, pirate taxis, and other tragedies.' Yet 'we believe that no harm can come to us,' thanks to a 'strange collective delusion' that the worst has already happened. The feeling that you're already living 'beyond the apocalypse' may seem a meagre source of comfort, but it makes for excellent dark humour. For Villoro, it also offers an existential alibi: it means 'we're the result, not the cause of the evils.'
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Like any personal portrait of a city, Horizontal Vertigo evokes the present and recollects the past. Time and space can be collapsed into a narrative with at once personal and collective meanings.
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in presenting his own memories of the city, and episodes from his childhood, Villoro wants to avoid nostalgia: 'I'm not idealising what has disappeared, but I do have to make note of an unquestionable fact: the city in those days was so different that it's almost shocking that it has the same name.'
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'That city ended. That country is finished. There is no memory of the Mexico of those years. And nobody cares – who could feel nostalgia for that horror?' The apocalypse has already happened.
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Five hundred years before the hoard was deposited, at the time the Romans abandoned the island, Britain was about as linguistically homogeneous as it has ever been. From one end to the other, people spoke dialects of Early British, a P-Celtic language. Its southern dialects survived to become Welsh, Cornish and Breton, while its northern dialects vanished as living languages but left enough traces for philologists to form some idea of them. This linguistic unity came to an end in the fifth century, after the Roman departure from Britain, with the arrival from the east of incomers speaking Old English (Anglo-Saxon), and from the west of people speaking Irish Gaelic, a Q-Celtic language. (Fifteen hundred years ago the two branches of Celtic seem to have been about as mutually comprehensible as modern Dutch and modern German.) The Anglo-Saxon incomers initially settled along the coasts of eastern England, the Irish speakers especially in western Scotland, where they founded the kingdom of Dál Riata. This left its mark on Galloway, which at the time of the hoard was perhaps the most linguistically and ethnically mixed part of Britain.
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The name Galloway itself is thought to derive from Irish gall-gaedhíl, literally 'foreigner Gaels'. These were probably – at this place and time everything has to be qualified – linguistically and ethnically Irish, but they had 'gone Scandinavian', rejecting Christianity and adopting a pirate lifestyle. Unsurprisingly, everybody hated them. One Irish chronicler writes that bad as the Vikings were, the gall-gaedhíl were worse.
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As for the question of why it was buried, it's often thought that hoards were a product of instability and insecurity. The massive Cuerdale Hoard, for instance, with its thousands of coins giving a date of 903-10, is believed by some to be the war chest of a Viking group that retreated to York after the expulsion of the Vikings from Dublin in 902. It's a bad sign if a hoard had a sole depositor who never retrieved it, worse if there were several depositors, and very bad indeed if no one from a whole warband (or pirate crew, in later years) survived to come back for it. Since instability and insecurity were the norm in Viking Age Galloway, however, this doesn't help narrow things down.
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It's been said that Vikings decorated everything with a surface, themselves included, and this is true even of the smallest items, such as the tongues of four beast-heads tying together two ribbon arm-rings to make the largest of the double arm-rings. Then there's the Anglo-Saxon cross, the brooches and arm-rings that must once have declared the wearers' status to the world, and the golden bird-pin. The bird has a long neck and appears to be standing on one long leg. It looks for all the world like a flamingo. But surely no one from ninth-century north-west Europe can ever have seen a flamingo?
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Large thermonuclear bombs are a thousand times more powerful than the first nuclear weapons. One will destroy a few square miles of city, the other hundreds. The first victims are killed by the sheer force and heat of the blast wave. Its diffraction causes the entire human body to be compressed, resulting in embolisms in the arteries and crushing the lungs and heart. Then there is the thermal pulse, which causes flash burns on exposed skin. A large proportion of the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed by the heat. A smaller number were trapped in rubble and burned to death. Along with the blast and heat there is ionising radiation, which creates defects in individual atoms, morphs the blood and bone marrow, breaks chromosomes and irreparably damages cells. Victims vomit, and suffer ataxia and delirium. Less is known about longer lasting nuclear fallout. Marshall Islanders subjected to fallout in 1954 suffered 'beta-burns' within 24 hours and nuclear testing rendered their atolls uninhabitable.
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The usual fate of revolutionary weapons is for their startling effects to be quickly nullified, or at least blunted, either by the invention of countermeasures or by everyone acquiring them. But effective defences against thermonuclear weapons have been hard to come by. Instead, their very power has constrained their use. War has always been destructive for the losers. It's sometimes destructive for the victors too: the Soviet Union lost 13 per cent of its population in the Second World War.
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Nuclear weapons haven't been used in war since 1945, but there have been many close calls. In 1956, a B-47 bomber disappeared over the Mediterranean with two nuclear weapons on board. It was never found. In 1960, US nuclear early warning systems were accidentally triggered by the moon. The same happened with flocks of migrating geese. In 1966, a B-52 crashed mid-air and dropped three thermonuclear bombs on a Spanish village (the cores didn't detonate). These are the accidents. The times when intentional nuclear war seemed imminent are better known. Countries with nuclear weapons often claim that only their head of state or government can order their use, but in practice states recognise that this would make them vulnerable: what if the national leader is dead? Most have allowed some delegation, so that in extremis subordinates or military commanders can order nuclear strikes.
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In the immediate postwar period, US military theorists were impressed by the power of what Kaplan called the 'absolute weapon', but they saw it principally as an advance on the proven techniques of incendiary bombing. Bernard Brodie, an academic at Yale and then the RAND corporation, described the implications of nuclear weapons in 1946: there can be no winners in the conventional sense, and the advantage is in the threat rather than the execution. In order to deter attack, all you have to do is show that if you're hit you will hit back. When a state lets it be known that it has the capacity to carry out a second-strike retaliation it's almost unthinkable that it would be subjected to nuclear attack in the first place.
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Kaufmann argued that threatening to respond to minor aggression with total nuclear war was an ineffective bluff. The US was saddling itself with a choice between 'the immeasurable horrors of atomic war' and loss of prestige if its bluff were called. A nuclear response to non-nuclear aggression far from the homeland was like 'a sparrow hunt with a cannon'. Practical maintenance of America's imperial and quasi-imperial positions required conventional military forces and alliances in Germany, Taiwan and South Korea.
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There were other ways of waging 'limited war'. In 1957, Henry Kissinger argued for smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. Kaufmann and others pulled his argument apart by showing how easily the use of small nuclear weapons on the battlefield would escalate to full thermonuclear exchange. But this wasn't enough to stop the generals from deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. There are still around a hundred American nuclear bombs in bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.
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Fear of a general thermonuclear war was at its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but we now know that this was the period of US total nuclear dominance. At the time, American intelligence estimates exaggerated the number of Soviet ICBMs by a factor of ten (the mythical 'missile gap'), and greatly exaggerated the number of Soviet warheads and Soviet bombers – which in any case couldn't have reached the US without refuelling in vulnerable Arctic bases. In fact, until the mid 1960s, the Soviet Union wouldn't have been able to survive an American nuclear attack, and couldn't be confident in its capacity to launch a large second-strike retaliation.
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All nuclear strategy contains an element of madness, which Kahn seemed to personify. Much of the science of nuclear deterrence was, and still is, a matter of bluster.
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Kahn's analysis wasn't of the highest quality – there he sat, considering World War Eight (in 1973) – but he did make one useful contribution. He conceived the thought experiment 0f the 'doomsday machine', a device that would destroy the entire world population if any nuclear weapon were used. Although it would mean perfect deterrence, he argued that – because of the risk of accident – to build such a machine would be a great mistake. Kahn didn't know it at the time, but as Daniel Ellsberg later revealed, the 'doomsday machine' was only a slight extension of US nuclear designs.
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Politicians gave instructions on how nuclear war should be fought, and the generals in Omaha ignored them. In the event of a crisis, the US president would be given a binder, the 'Black Book', containing four or five options for nuclear war. Even the most restrained option would involve hundreds of strikes. The full details – which weapons would be used on which targets – were contained in the 'Blue Book', which no president or civilian leader was allowed to see until 1989.
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After 1991 it was no longer possible to pretend that Moscow was a serious competitor to American global power. But US missiles were still pointed at Russian cities, obscure factories and fields that might serve as improvised airstrips.
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Advocating non-proliferation is a common hobby for retired American officials with time on their hands and a less than clean conscience. Were the US actually committed to limiting nuclear weapons, it would at the very least have to declare a 'no first use' policy for its own nuclear arsenal. The Soviet Union, China and India have all made such a pledge in the past (Britain and France have not). Kaplan takes seriously Obama's professed desire for 'a world without nuclear weapons', but the Obama administration refused to declare no first use. Its successes on nuclear matters – the Iran nuclear deal and the new START arms reduction treaty with Russia, signed in 2010 – were overshadowed by its commitments to build the next generation of US nuclear weapons systems. In many respects Obama was a continuity president in matters of imperial management.
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Ellsberg argued that every US president has used nuclear weapons 'in the precise way that a gun is used when it is pointed at someone in a confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled'. Eisenhower threatened to use them in the Korean War and against China. Kennedy came close during the Cuban crisis. In 1969, Nixon threatened to use them in Vietnam. George H.W. Bush threatened Iraq with 'nuclear retaliation'. The fact that none of these threats was carried out doesn't mean they weren't significant.
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As Kaplan says, discussion of US nuclear weapons describes them as a deterrent, but 'American policy has always been to strike first pre-emptively.'
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The balance of power among nuclear states has fluctuated. The US has sought nuclear superiority over other states at all times, and has threatened to use nuclear weapons with dull regularity. It has no sustained appetite for arms control treaties and its war plans have included genocidal first strikes.
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In March, the UK committed to increasing its nuclear stockpile by 40 per cent, reversing four decades of reduction.
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China is the only thermonuclear power committed to a policy of no first use.
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The most dangerous moment of the Cold War was in the early 1960s, when an aggressive and overwhelmingly dominant nuclear power saw itself in competition with an adversary that didn't have equivalent nuclear forces. The US and China may be approaching a similar point.
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There is a widespread belief that nuclear weapons can be thanked for the fact that there has been no total war between major powers since 1945. In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press suggest that these grand claims are mistaken. There have indeed been no large-scale wars, but in all other respects international politics resemble the pre-nuclear age. States with nuclear weapons don't act as if they are immune from external attack, and they still engage in reckless expeditionary wars and sometimes scuffles with one another. The main argument Lieber and Press put forward is that this is not just a legacy of old behaviour but a consequence of the nature of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are too powerful for most conceivable scenarios: in Edward Luttwak's unimproved-on phrase, they 'exceed the culminating point of military utility'. The only benefit they have had for the states that possess them is protection against all-out conquest of the homeland. But conventional armies are still required. Lieber and Press show that stalemate between nuclear powers doesn't happen automatically. It takes effort to build and maintain a nuclear force that can survive a first strike and retaliate. Once states have reached stalemate with second-strike forces – the Soviet Union in the 1960s, China now – they must monitor their adversaries for signs of technological breakthrough that might allow for an attack that would disarm them.
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Nuclear strategists systematically underestimate the chances of nuclear accident: it has no place in the logic of strategy. But there have been too many close calls for accidental use to be discounted. The stakes may be anthropogenic extirpation.
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The stronger argument against abolition is practical. Nuclear weapons can be renounced but nuclear capability can't: our energy needs won't allow it. And once you have that capability, the silos can always be refilled. When the only rule is the rule of force, agreements between states are always provisional.
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Until recently, a rematch between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in April's presidential election looked inevitable, with polls predicting a comfortable Macron victory, albeit narrower than in 2017, when he won 66 per cent of the vote. But then, last summer, a new candidate emerged, as it became clear that the right-wing writer and commentator Éric Zemmour had presidential ambitions.
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There were many more young people – most of them men (and many maskless) – at Zemmour's rally than you see at meetings held by the established political parties. Almost all of them were white and looked like they came from Paris's posher areas. They were not the progeny of the gilets jaunes or working-class Le Pen voters in the dying mill towns of northern France. Many of them would have received their political baptism in La Manif pour tous, which led the opposition to gay marriage legislation in 2013, taking the entire political class by surprise.
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He is often described as 'extrême droite', but there are clear differences between him and the Le Pen family and their Rassemblement National (RN). For one thing, he is not a career politician. He has never run for election or had a government job, he has never been a card-carrying member of a political party or engaged in political militancy. He enters the race without the baggage of a far-right or lepeniste past.
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Zemmour is a declinist, in the French tradition that goes back to the 18th century, but his account is an idiosyncratic one. It does not begin with the storming of the Bastille, but with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years' War and enshrined the global primacy of England (Zemmour rarely calls it Great Britain, and never the United Kingdom). For him, the Treaty of Paris led to the continental supremacy of Prussia, and then to a unified Germany.
Napoleon tried to restore France's glory but overreached by extending its continental empire beyond its 'natural' borders, which, Zemmour writes in Mélancolie française (2010), encompass Belgium, Luxembourg, the German Rhineland and northwestern Italy. The consequence of his hubris was the defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a huge tragedy, since France had been the 'beating heart of Europe, and thus of the world, for a thousand years'. Unlike many on the far right, Zemmour isn't a nostalgist for colonialism. The English got the best parts of the world, as he sees it, while France's colonial conquests yielded little of value apart from soldiers to fight its wars. Worse, colonial rule led to the arrival, or counter-colonisation, of immigrants from France's empire, most of them Muslims – the source of most of France's woes.
There was, he believes, a final effort to rescue France in the mid 20th century, with the creation of the Fifth Republic by Charles de Gaulle, his hero and model – another thing that sets him apart from the Le Pen dynasty and others on the French right, who see de Gaulle as the man who surrendered to the FLN and 'lost' Algeria. But it was too late: France was already 'withdrawing quietly from History'.
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For Zemmour, the real culprits are the French elites, left and right, who sold France out to globalisation, economic liberalism and multiculturalism.
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Zemmour's nostalgia for the PCF and its relationship with the old white working class clearly sets him apart from extrême droite of the FN/RN, which would never have anything good to say about 'socialo-communistes'. But Zemmour, unlike the RN, doesn't have a significant working-class following; his appeal is much stronger among the social classes viscerally hostile to the left, especially conservative middle-class Catholics.
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The terrorist incidents of the last decade – Mohammed Merah's killing of seven people, including three children, in 2012; the attacks by al-Qaida and IS in 2015; the beheading of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty in 2020 – have stoked fears of Islam, and the French mainstream has fanned the flames, making the country's Muslim citizens even more vulnerable. Macron and his education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, for example, have launched a campaign against 'Islamic separatism', though there is no movement that advocates Sharia law or 'separating' from the Republic. The notion – held almost universally on the right and shared by a good part of the left – that political Islam poses a challenge, even a threat, to the French Republic is a figment of the collective imagination.
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Zemmour makes it clear that he doesn't believe Islam can be modernised. What place, then, can Muslims have in his France? He offers them the possibility of 'assimilation' into the French nation, which, at minimum, would oblige them to make their religious practice private (as if the great majority don't already do this), 'a simple spirituality, ahistorical and apolitical', as Napoleon demanded of Judaism.
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But for Islam to be relegated to the private sphere is, Zemmour informs us, 'vehemently rejected by 99 per cent of Muslims'. So much for assimilation. He sums up his conception of assimilation with the shopworn proverb, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.' In France today, this means two big things: a ban on the wearing of the hijab or headscarf in public, and the legal obligation of parents to give their child a French first name.
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What 'Anglo-Saxons' call ethnic identity was effaced in the name of greater social harmony. For someone who thinks France's decline began in 1763, his account of his childhood is nostalgic, evoking a country where everyone got along just fine.
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He reproaches 'foreign' Jews – those who came in large numbers to France from Eastern Europe from the 1880s on – for their failure to assimilate, explaining the antisemitism of Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Française and one of Zemmour's guiding intellectual influences, as driven by repugnance for the Jews' stubborn attachment to their identity. This attitude, he claims, was quite unlike the racialised antisemitism of the Nazis, and it largely faded away after the war. That he, a Jew, is now the presidential candidate of neo-Maurrasian Catholic traditionalists suggests that he may not be entirely wrong.
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Zemmour regards Israel as a foreign country like any other and never visits it.
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It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They show that France is open to all races and that it has a universal vocation. But on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are first and foremost a European people of the white race.
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He looks at a group of non-white people and, without wanting to know who they are, what they do, essentialises them and sees their presence as a problem, indeed as a threat to France. He judges them not by the content of their character but by the colour of their skin. There is a word for this. Neither Jean-Marie Le Pen nor Donald Trump, to cite two figures to whom Zemmour has been compared, has spoken in public about people of colour in the way Zemmour does regularly.
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He is also a xenophobe, a label one hesitates to affix even to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has visited many countries and speaks English. By contrast, Zemmour, who does not speak English, rarely leaves the Paris area, where he has spent his whole life.
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As for Marine Le Pen, Zemmour's candidacy has achieved the remarkable feat of making her appear almost moderate.
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Zemmour is aware that he is offering a heightened version of what much of France privately thinks. The claim that he is being honest where others are defeated by cowardice, political correctness and 'le wokeisme' is central to his appeal.
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Dual nationals convicted even of minor crimes (presumably including drug offences) would be stripped of French citizenship, and 'national preference' in employment would be implemented.
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In the introduction to Un quinquennat pour rien, Zemmour claims that France's 'civilisational war' with Islam can only be won through a protracted 'cultural revolution', via a modern-day 'Kulturkampf'. A 'state of cultural emergency' must be decreed, which would 'render inoperative all jurisprudence enacted in the name of human rights, to stop the invasion and colonisation of our land, if there is still time'; the rule of law would be suspended 'to protect the nation in peril'. Zemmour has, in true Bonapartist style, promised a referendum immediately after his election to rubberstamp his ability to stop the courts blocking his measures – in effect, to allow him to rule as a dictator.
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Given the fragmentation and weakness of the left, the failure of Macron to create a centrist party worthy of the name, and a Zemmourised LR, there is legitimate cause to worry for the future of France.
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Songlines, also known as Tjukurpa, Dreaming tracks, creation law, are the sung pathways of First Australian ancestors. These invisible tracks were created by the totems, or ancestral beings, of Aboriginal creation myths as they wandered across the continent naming everything they saw and leaving a trail of words and musical notes in their wake. Songlines chart critical sites and resources, linking stories to landscape: they are both map and compass. They provide practical signposts such as the location of rivers and caves – survival knowledge essential to desert life – but also describe the origins of the universe as well as moral codes and their consequences.
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Knowledge of the songs and stories that constitute this collective worldview (known as 'the Dreaming') is a birthright – it can't be acquired or appropriated – and access is restricted according to gender, kinship and place. This means that the artists on show at Songlines, the National Museum of Australia's exhibition of First Australian art, have story rights only to the sections that traverse their bit of Country. (The exhibition is on display at the Box in Plymouth until 27 February before travelling to Paris and Berlin.) A songline might begin in land belonging to one Indigenous group and move through another and another: there are more than four hundred distinct groups and languages. The many collaborative works in the exhibition therefore required 'everyone to know what they can and can't tell ... a precise knowledge of how ... kinship, Country and story fit together'.
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Whether you start the exhibition in Martu Country, the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands or Ngaanyatjarra (NPY) Lands, the same origin narrative emerges: the malefic pursuit of women. (Gallery staff warn visitors about this 'controversial' material.) The Dreaming story of the Seven Sisters, one of the most celebrated songlines, crosses half the continent, from the Central Desert to the West Coast. It describes the Sisters' attempt to escape Wati Nyiru, a shapeshifting sorcerer. His hunt is relentless, but their flight and their courage become part of the Dreaming: the narrative of the story – every plot twist and close shave, even the women's ultimate demise – can be traced on the features of the land and the night sky. They become boulders, dig into caves or dive in waterholes, creating sacred sites recognisable to their descendants. When they fling Wati Nyiru into the air and, defeated, fly up to the firmament, they become the star clusters we know as Orion and the Pleiades.
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The Songlines curators are all First Australians and our encounter with the pieces is unmediated by the usual gallery interface: it was not felt necessary, for instance, to give the songlines legitimacy by invoking the familiar tropes of Greek mythology. First Australian culture is testament to 50,000 years of survival – or as many Indigenous intellectuals refer to it (incorporating a sense of political resistance), 'survivance'.
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Songlines is a triumph, a feat of immersion without condescension or self-abasement, without flattery or false intimacy. This is one of the oldest cosmologies on Earth. The words 'terra nullius' are nowhere to be found at the Box.
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'Fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.'
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'If your writing is going smoothly and you're comfortable writing a few thousand words a day, these are sure signs it's probably bad.'
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'A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.' Naipaul is not a myth to me. Now and then someone tells me they've read him and offers an opinion, and I don't recognise the man they're describing.