Resistance

I have been thinking about the role of art in resistance.

It’s the May Day weekend and I’m going to the march in Glasgow tomorrow. Last night I saw a play at the Tron Theatre about the Lee Jeans sit-in. It was amazing, but it also made me wonder about where we are now.

I grew up in the eighties and, for better or worse, there was an enemy. It felt like a real moment of cohesive resistance. The Tories were a target: visible, hateable, and easy to gather against. I don’t want to romanticise that period, because it was brutal for a lot of people, but there was at least a sense of where the pressure was coming from. There was something to point at. Something to resist.

I wonder where that is today.

Where is the resistance now? Where are the poll tax riots? What does resistance even look like at this point? Can I see it? Should I be able to see it? Or am I looking for an old form of resistance that doesn’t quite fit the present?

I’m in my fifties now. I’m reasonably financially secure, or as secure as anybody can be. I have a good life at the moment, but I don’t think my history will ever allow that to feel entirely stable. There’s always a part of me waiting for the floor to give way. That probably comes from growing up when I did, with the Cold War in the background and leaflets coming through the door telling us what to do if the bombs fell. I don’t think that kind of fear ever fully leaves you. It just changes shape.

So, who, or what, do you resist these days?

We live in a world where the Man has somehow found a way of portraying himself as the insurgent. Power dresses itself up as rebellion. Billionaires talk like outsiders. Reactionary politics borrows the language of disruption, freedom and anti-establishment rage. It makes resistance harder to locate, because the old signs have been scrambled. The people doing the damage often present themselves as the ones fighting back.

I think I always imagined that the arts would step up in difficult times. I’m not sure why. Maybe that was naïve, or maybe it came from growing up with a sense that art, music, theatre, books and film were all part of a wider argument about the world. Culture felt connected to opposition. It felt as though artists had some role in naming what was happening, or refusing it, or making it visible.

It doesn’t always feel like that now. I’m not sure whether that’s because art has changed, or because I have changed, or because resistance has become harder to recognise. Maybe it is happening all around me and I’m just not seeing it. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. Maybe resistance is smaller now, more dispersed, more local, more fragile. Maybe it happens in acts of care, in refusal, in teaching, in keeping certain kinds of attention alive.

But then where does art fit into this? Is art even a sensible form of resistance? Can painting resist anything? Can writing? Can a letter?

On Thursday we had a great session with Rebecca Fortnum, where we considered correspondence as a research tool. We had ten minutes to write a letter, and I wrote one to the author Ray Bradbury:

Dear Mr Bradbury,

I am writing to you looking for a little hope.

You don’t know me, of course, but you have given me a great deal throughout my life. Your writing taught me, as a young man, about the value of friendship, imagination, and collective spirit. These are qualities I fear are much needed in the world at the moment. Things are not, let’s say, going particularly well.

You once wrote that “people ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.” Well, we seem to be living in a future that somebody should have, or could have, prevented. I don’t think you would like it here.

I am not going to bore you with everything I think is wrong. There are plenty of people around who seem to think everything is peachy. But suffice to say, technology is not being managed particularly well these days. You saw a version of this coming, and you were very good at making me feel better about it. You made me believe that although bad things would still happen, people would still care about each other, and that there are some qualities of humanity that remain fundamental.

I could do with some of that reassurance now.

Yours in hope

It was only ten minutes of work, but weirdly it has sat with me in the days since. Perhaps because it came out before I had time to organise it properly. It wasn’t a polished piece of writing, but it revealed something that I hadn’t quite admitted to myself.

I think that I am worried.

Not just irritated, or politically frustrated, or disappointed in the usual way. I mean anxious in a way I haven’t really experienced since childhood, when the possibility of catastrophe felt both abstract and completely real. There is a similar atmosphere now, although the threats are different and more dispersed. Climate, technology, war, inequality, the hollowing out of public life, the strange unreality of so much contemporary politics. It’s hard to know where to put the fear, which maybe makes it harder to act on.

I do want to resist. I just don’t know how.

Maybe that is where the work has to begin. Not with a confident claim that art is resistance, but with a more uncertain question about what forms resistance can still take. Perhaps art’s role is not necessarily to overthrow anything directly, but to keep open a space in which things can still be felt, questioned, remembered and imagined otherwise. That might sound modest, but maybe it matters. Maybe making, writing, painting, corresponding, marching, teaching and paying attention could or should be part of an answer.

I don’t want to overstate what art can do but I also don’t want to dismiss it. At the very least, I think that art can resist the narrowing of thought; It can refuse the version of reality handed down by power. It can hold onto ambiguity when everything else is being flattened into slogans, data, markets or spectacle. I would like to think that it can make visible the fact that other futures were possible, and perhaps still are.

That really doesn’t feel like enough given everything that’s going on, but maybe it’s somewhere to start.