Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema: Country, Land, People [1st ed.] 9783030596453, 9783030596460

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Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema Country, Land, People Paul Dave

Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema

Paul Dave

Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema Country, Land, People

Paul Dave York, North Yorkshire, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-59645-3 ISBN 978-3-030-59646-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59646-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by eStudioCalamar Cover image: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Anne, Gabriel and Jesse

Acknowledgements

I would like to record my gratitude to colleagues, students and friends from the University of East London and Teesside University for their many acts of support, encouragement and comradeship. In particular I would like to thank David Ellis Butler, Rachel Carroll, Jenna Clake, Christine Clegg, Madeline Clements, Jill Daniels, Jane Ford, Ultan Gillen, Paul Gormley, Samm Haillay, Warren Harrison, Rob Hawkes, Hilary Jenkins, Lucy Jolly, Mike Kirkup, Ben Lamb, Jill Morgan, Sophie Nichols, Elena Papadaki, Biddy Peppin, Anat Pick, Gerda Roper, Ash Sharma, Andrew Stephenson, Natasha Vall, Valentina Vitali and Ben Young. The book’s slow gestation was also greatly assisted by the support of George Barber, Steve Hall, Esther Leslie, Ewa Mazierska, Jacob Seagrave, Graham Shulman, Mike Wayne and Simon Winlow. I am particularly grateful to Ian Macdonald for allowing the reproduction of his photograph of Cote Hill Island. Some of the ideas developed in the book first emerged out of the floating extra-mural symposia convened with my old friend Steve Beard many years ago. The late Mike O’Pray who I first spoke to about this project in its current form offered advice, guidance and companionship. He is keenly missed. My parents, Brenda Dave and Shivraj Dave, and my brother Amrit gave unstinting support, as always. Julia, Anne, Gabriel and Jesse lived these ideas, arguments and films with me through many joyful years, without them, none of the following.

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Contents

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Introduction

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Conservative Romanticism and the Country: Powell and Pressburger

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Restitutionist Romanticism: Searching for Lost Lands

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Romantic Revolutionary Historiography: The People and the Commons

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Cote Hill Island Equinox, Flood Tide, Greatham Creek Ruined Posts at Greatham Creek

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter offers definitions of romanticism and historical materialism that underpin the book’s argument. Using Lowy and Sayre’s typology of romantic cultural politics, I focus on three key forms of romanticism: conservative, restitutionist and revolutionary and seek to show their relevance to contemporary British political crises such as Brexit and the emergence of English nationalism (Lowy and Sayre 2002). I also seek to demonstrate the defining characteristics of Political Marxism as a distinctive approach to historical materialism and the interpretation of culture. Developing the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood (1991) on the English ‘pristine culture of capitalism’ in relation to Fredric Jameson’s thesis of ‘cultural revolution’ (1981) I attempt to show the utility of a Politically Marxist approach, with its focus on class struggle, to the English culture of class. I argue against the neglect of English class history—a theme I trace from the 1960s to the present and explore in the work of Alex Niven (2019), taking up the latter’s use of the work of Mark Fisher (2016) on the ‘eerie’ to argue for the continuing significance of the problem of class agency. Keywords Romanticism · Historical materialism · Political marxism · Cultural revolution · Eerie

© The Author(s) 2020 P. Dave, Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59646-0_1

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This book stages an encounter between romanticism in post-war and contemporary cinema and trends in historical materialism associated with revolutionary romantic historiography. Focused primarily on British cinema and examples of Hollywood cinema with significant relationships to British and English culture and history, it is loosely configured around three key emblematic motifs—country, land, people—that are simultaneously core values and rallying cries of distinctive varieties of conservative, restitutionist and revolutionary romanticism and the range of opposed political orientations they generate, from conservative nationalism to radical internationalism. Texts drawn on include Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film The Elusive Pimpernel (1950), a short poetic documentary, The Creek (2018) made to commemorate an abandoned estuarial commons in the north east of England, the literary texts of J. R. R. Tolkien, alongside their contemporary filmic adaptations by Peter Jackson, and the Pirates of the Caribbean (hereafter POC ) franchise. Popular cultural genres—like the blockbuster—provide subtle means with which to follow the twisted threads of capitalism, class and nation in the labyrinth of history. The promptings of the imaginative freedoms of such films can enable a political task associated with historical materialism—the process of re-narrativising from below the class struggles that have been de-narrativised from above. Both strategies of history telling are related to romanticism. The official, national narratives of conservative romanticism have often wiped clean the traces of the heterogeneous many who struggled against the capitalist class. Revolutionary romanticism labours from below to put back together what has been dismembered or never recorded, and it needs to be open to a wide range of cultural materials to have any chance of achieving this task. Historical materialism of the type essayed here has been missing from British film studies which even in the moment of its post-1990s ‘historical turn’ has remained focused on historical contextualisation largely confined to the moment of production, exhibition or reception of a film or film cycle (Spicer 2004). In seeking to combine textual and contextual analysis, my approach has been to attempt to establish a historically longer view of the national culture which historical materialism is able to pick up with its attention to patterns of evolving class relationships. Ultimately, the book seeks to establish the continuing relevance of the revolutionary romantic critique of capitalist modernity to the representation in film of pressing contemporary political concerns such as the fate of the proletariat, populism, Brexit post-nationalism, ecocide and the Anthropocene.

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Romanticism, historical materialism, capitalism. Each of the three elements at the centre of this study are controversial and difficult to define. Romanticism is famously elusive, especially in its cultural politics. As Terry Eagleton puts it: ‘If the movement contains some of the most fervent advocates of the French Revolution it also contains some of its most rabid antagonists’ (Eagleton 2014, p. 111). The diversity of romantic cultural politics has of course been leapt on by nominalists and anti-essentialists as evidence that romanticism only exists in the disconnected plural—romanticisms —not the grand singular. My own starting point is Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre’s unifying definition of European romanticism as ‘a vast cultural movement of protest against modern industry and capitalist society in the name of pre-modern (as pre-capitalist) values’ (Lowy and Sayre 2002, p. 17). From this definition Lowy and Sayre generate a typology of romantic cultural politics which includes the following categories: restitutionist, conservative, fascistic, resigned, reformist and revolutionary and/or utopian (Lowy and Sayre 2002, p. 58). This diversity demonstrates romanticism’s conflicting views on the problem of capitalism. Hazy conservative romantic nostalgia, in all its ahistorical complacency and its strong repression of the horrors of the past, for instance, is a world away from a revolutionary romanticism traumatised by the defeated past and seeking to redeem its struggles in social conditions whose continuities with that past are keenly recognised. Which brings us to capitalism. Given that the concept is itself subject to considerable repression—its most thorough critical account being given in the often unwelcome form of that bearer of bourgeois bad news, Marxism—it is not surprising that it too proves elusive. For the conservative or liberal romantic, capitalism as a foundational modern social form is either contained and misrecognized in the restricted incarnation of its own most obviously noxious effects, which can then be vigorously deprecated whilst leaving the causal structures responsible for them unaddressed, or, alternatively it is idealised and sanitised in some ahistorical formulation. For instance, capitalism as commercialisation—or the activity of buying and selling in markets—in which case, any problems are abuses of a system whose metabolism matches that of civilization itself and is therefore untranscendable. The problem of such vague or evasive definitions of capitalism for any revolutionary romanticism is that if capitalism is weakly grasped in its historical specificity then the desire to overcome it through the inspiration of pre-capitalist examples is stymied. And here, historical materialism is vital for it was devised to establish the originality and historical difference of capitalism. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that there aren’t

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problems of definition here too. For historical materialists often strenuously disagree on the essentials of the approach they share. Specifically, the mechanism of historical change, of the movement between modes of production, has been an object of dispute. In adopting the historical materialism associated with Political Marxism this study differentiates itself from those pursuing a more classical productive force determinism. For instance, the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood favours an emphasis on class relations and struggle as the mechanisms by which historical change occurs. In this way her work demonstrates a key advantage over other varieties of historical materialism as it provides a radically historicist approach to capitalism. That is to say, Political Marxism seeks to draw out the historical novelty of capitalism, and it does this by viewing the problem of historical change (the transition between the feudal and capitalist modes of production for instance) in such a way as to avoid question begging assumptions like the idea that the object whose emergence needs to be explained—capitalism—somehow pre-exists itself, lurking in the interstices of feudalism, waiting for obstacles to its flourishing to fall away. This makes for immense challenges in terms of historical accounting as one can no longer assume, as productive force determinism does, that something akin to capitalism, understood ultimately as a transhistorical motivation for the development of productivity, simply waits for the conditions in which it can ripen, as it is supposed to have done during the feudal period through trade and urban development. Such assumptions relieve one of the difficulty of accounting for the complexity of historical change—the reasons why, for instance, classes abandon old ways of living and adopt other modes of reproducing themselves that might appear far inferior in a number of ways. The feudal peasantry’s adoption of capitalism is one such area of uncertainty. But equally, because transhistorical productive force determinism allows one to fall back on the idea of an underlying pressure, manifesting itself everywhere to different degrees, and moving towards a single outcome, it fails to bring into sufficiently sharp relief nationally specific starting points in the balance of power between different classes in their conflictual social relations with one another. Such comparisons provide more compelling accounts of the differences in the development of capitalism across eastern and western Europe, as well as giving us an explanation for the vigour and precociousness of capitalism in England and therefore ultimately help to provide perspectives in our Brexit moment on the political configuration of what I refer to below as the end of British history (Brenner 2007).

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Political Marxism and Historical Agency A crucial advantage of the historical materialism of Political Marxism in the study of romantic culture is that its model of historical change provides more space for the agency of those who in other models of historical materialism tend to get neglected in the grand movement of epochs. Indeed, Political Marxists have explicitly recognised a debt to the ‘history from below’ or class struggle approach to history pioneered by British Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm (Wood 1991). To draw on another of the book’s central terms—people—debates in the post-war New Left often concerned what was claimed to be the problematic populism of historians like Thompson. Some felt this diluted the necessary attention to class as the proper focus of historical agency (Matthews 2014). Nevertheless radical populism, in the sense of the convening and sustaining of progressive class alliances, an element of struggle recognised as decisive in the history of revolutionary romanticism, remains important, particularly in the contemporary context of Brexit. Which is to say, the automatic association of populism with a regressive nationalism is something that revolutionary romantic historical materialism would reject, especially, for instance, in the case of Peter Linebaugh whose historiography is central to Chapter 4. An important point to make here is that Political Marxism allows us to become familiar with a broader understanding of class than the productive force determinist models do, focused as they are on stadial conceptions of historical development or the grand sequential march of the modes of production, synchronised to clearly delimited class agents acting in accordance with their revolutionary briefs. Because Political Marxism focuses on social relationships and does not subscribe to any such deterministic conceptions of class identity and agency, it is capable of showing how class identities are formed and transformed in the process of class struggle. In other words, it offers us an account of the past in which connections between class fragments and traffic between class identities undergoing transformation in struggle set the stage for processes of class antagonism and alliance in the arena of capitalist social relations. Linebaugh’s historical work is structured around the drama of these moments of alliance, transformation and the broadening of class identities. This is a hopeful, romantic revolutionary logic which is expressed in his recent history of the Atlantic commons Red Round Globe Hot Burning (hereafter, RRGHB) in terms of the agency of ‘humanity’, the latter being

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understood as a supra-nationalist revolutionary populism rather than a sentimental liberal humanist universalism (Linebaugh 2019). But given this internationalism of the romantic revolutionary tradition (Atlanticism in Linebaugh’s case), why the more limited focus here on Englishness and Britishness? The answer lies in their historical connection to the development of capitalism. Romanticism is typically tied to the rise of modern nationalisms, along with the associated political (French) and economic (British) ferment of the Dual Revolution. However, in the British case, it has been argued that popular nationalism was checked by the ‘early’ bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century and the late eighteenth-century counter-revolutionary response to the French Revolution which sealed a top-down rather than bottom-up nationalism, one imposed by an aristocratic ruling class and submitted to by a spineless bourgeoisie and an isolated working class. Once again, disputes in historical materialism intervene here. Much of the above account is drawn from the influential historical materialist metanarrative supplied in the 1960s by New Left intellectuals Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn (Anderson 1992). It has been criticised by Political Marxists such as Wood as a stadialist, a priori model of the march of the classes. Wood locates Anderson and Nairn’s work in what she calls the ‘bourgeois paradigm’ (Wood 1991). To use classic historical materialist conceptual terminology, in the bourgeois paradigm, the base and superstructure of a mode of production are synchronised. Thus if the aristocracy is the dominant exploiting class of feudalism, it generates, from its secure base in the productive activity of the mode of production, a distinctive superstructure of state forms, culture and ideology. According to the bourgeois paradigm, the capitalist mode of production is supposed to be organised around the dominance of the bourgeoisie—the capitalist class—which in turn determines the superstructural instances of state, culture and ideology. The problem with this model in the British case is simple—where there should be synchrony between appointed class, base and superstructure, there is not. In England capitalism took off in the rural domain under the control of aristocratic landowners who were transformed into a capitalist class. According to the bourgeois paradigm of historical development, this was abnormal, especially as it left political power with the ancien regime down through the nineteenth century, despite the emergence of a significant northern, urban, industrialising bourgeoisie. Political Marxism, with its lack of prescriptiveness about class identity and historical change, and its radical historicisation of capitalism, is not at all discomfited by these

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English differences. It is the organisation of the classes in terms of who produces and who appropriates the surplus (i.e. the relations of exploitation) which is critical in ultimately determining forms of class identity, and one cannot allow one’s historical assessment of the development of a mode of production to be tied to fixed assumptions about different classes’ essential identities. In other words, classes reveal their presence in what they do, not how they seem to be, or how they are supposed to act. Likewise, if we are inclined to look for something called capitalism only in urban contexts and under the supervision of the bourgeoisie, then the English case is a puzzling one, perhaps even an example of defective capitalist development. For the Political Marxist, however, these habits reveal limiting presumptions about what capitalism is and who superintends its development, and perhaps most damaging of all, they indicate a reliance on a dehistoricising capitalist teleology which conceals the shocking historical novelty of capitalism as a mode of production. Such shock remains critical in galvanising efforts to overcome capitalism’s apparent naturalisation.

An English Cultural Revolution The focus on England then is guided by the Political Marxist thesis that it was here that capitalism originated, making it the cradle of what Wood calls the ‘pristine culture of capitalism’ (Wood 1991). By taking this culture in all its peculiarity as a response to the historical impact of capitalism, we can provide an account of English romanticism which attends more closely to its national specificity. It is useful here to draw on Fredric Jameson’s concept of ‘cultural revolution’ (Jameson 1981, pp. 95–98). Jameson’s approach to historical materialism adapts Marx’s concept of the mode of production treating it as a heuristic device enabling the examination of actually existing societies (‘social formations’) which are unique, complex structures in which different modes of production coexist and antagonistically interact with one another. Applying Ernst Bloch’s idea of ‘nonsynchronous development’ to the different levels of any given social formation allows one to account for its structure/system (its culture) as well as the process of development that animates it (revolution) (Jameson 1981, p. 97). Jameson understands revolution as social struggle, not just punctual upheaval but ongoing change in which elements of the historical process from earlier and future social strata are drawn together in a ‘field of force’ which is heterotemporal hence metasynchronous (Jameson

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1981, p. 98). Examples of cultural revolution then would be the Industrial and the French Revolutions, understood as transitional processes of change in which feudal social relations became capitalist ones. Jameson subsumes these revolutions into what he calls the ‘bourgeois cultural revolution’ in which the values and discourses, the habits and daily space of the ancien regime were systematically dismantled so that in their place could be set the new conceptualities, habits and life forms, and value systems of a capitalist market society. (Jameson 1981, p. 96)

Thus, modes of production are accompanied by cultural revolutions specific to them, however, the systemic cultural dominant must be understood as engaged in a constant struggle for the perpetuation and reproduction of its dominance…accompanied at all moments by the systemic or structural antagonism of those older and newer modes of production that resist assimilation or seek deliverance from it. (Jameson 1981, p. 97)

Romanticism, with its backwards-looking pre-capitalist inspiration, operating within the modern moment of the Dual Revolution, would be located at the heart of the struggles contained, metasynchronously, within the capitalist cultural revolution. However, my argument here is that the English pristine culture of capitalism has its own specific inflection of the dynamic described by Jameson, one which requires us to further elaborate his account of the ‘bourgeois cultural revolution’. Thus, the first thing to note about what we might call the English cultural revolution is that it is a response to a mode of production which has traumatic social change at its core. England possessed none of the protections which mitigated the slower emergence of capitalist social relations elsewhere. In France, for instance, peasants controlled their means of production (land) and remained a significant social presence into the twentieth century. In England, peasant freehold was lost early on, and with it gone the freedom of those seeking to remain outside capitalist social relations of wage labour was precarious, eventually becoming impossible with the extension of the capitalist system to every corner of the land through the nineteenthcentury enclosures. The English pristine culture of capitalism then is not

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just the expression of another social formation in a state of metasynchronic struggle. It is that, but it is also closer, as one would imagine a ‘pristine’ culture would be, to the fundamental social mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, including the extreme exposure of the working poor, and the intense relations of cut-throat competition amongst a ruling class relying purely on market relations to reproduce themselves. Such comparative views of national cultures undergoing the transition to capitalism are helpful in establishing explanations of their position on the spectrum of romantic cultural politics. For instance, in the English cultural revolution, romantic popular nationalism is less in evidence than it has been elsewhere in the modern period. This has been linked to the predominance within Englishness of a conservative romanticism which offers a highly restricted, controlled space for nationalism as the expression of popular sovereignty. The cry of the ‘people’ in the name of the liberation of the nation, although present in English romanticism, and invoked only recently (Jeremy Corbyn quoting Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy in 2017), nevertheless remains an unfamiliar combination. Conservative romanticism, as a central element of the English cultural revolution, has indeed presided over the consolidation of the ‘value systems of a capitalist market society’, however, this has been achieved by naturalising capitalism to the extent that the dominant culture can venerate it as a ‘traditional’ social form best left to the safekeeping of the established ruling elite. This fetishistic emphasis, since the late eighteenth century, on English traditions—the fixed past, the indisputable always already known ‘heritage’ of England—is profoundly anachronistic. That is, this supposedly stable past is in reality an ever-renewed, updated projection of the permanent agitation of the novel historical rhythms of capitalism. The timelessness of old England is the desperately required counterbalance to the tyranny of time which is the capitalist norm. This means that British conservative romanticism is a profoundly unstable culture, internally twisted, despite the impressive, almost supernatural confidence with which its ruling class advocates style themselves. The famous English cultural and social archaism (its pre-modern, ‘feudal’, ‘hallowed’ traditions) central to conservative romanticism somehow coexists with the most modern aspects of what Karl Polanyi called the capitalist Great Transformation (Polanyi 2002). The national narratives subtending conservative romanticism seek then to sustain the idea of a changeless,

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known past, its difference sealed, its reverberations exhausted. This chronism gives us L. P. Hartley’s famous view in his novel The Go-Between (1953) of the past as ‘a foreign country’ (Hartley 2015). But in many ways, in the English case, this is illusion or wishful thinking. We must not assume that this is a culture stuck fast in the past—the mistaken impression created if one follows the stadial cues of the bourgeois paradigm. Furthermore, the ‘visibility’ of the underlying class struggles of Englishness, is not, as it is in Jameson’s general model of cultural revolution, temporary or punctual, occasionally surfacing (Jameson 1981, p. 97). Instead there is an ongoing distortion of English ruling class equipoise which conservative romanticism, with its aura of oligarchic stability, cannot fully contain and whose deep societal stresses everyday Englishness is shot through with. The films of Patrick Keiller are particularly adept at picking this up, but we will find it in Powell and Pressburger’s films too which on many levels offer an anatomy of the culture of the ruling class. If England is the location of the pristine culture of capitalism, then this earliness might help to expose some of the essential features of the capitalist mode of production, including its peculiar relationship to its own cultural revolution. The capitalist mode of production is the moment when the very dynamic of cultural revolution itself, a dynamic common to all modes of production, becomes apparent. This extrusion of metasynchronic cultural revolution is a result of that inherent destabilising of social relations that accompanies capitalism. In other words, the capitalist cultural revolution is one which from the very start is not heading towards any social stability. Such raw restlessness makes it the first cultural revolution which acts as its own counter-revolution. That is to say, it is necessarily and paradoxically an anti-capitalist cultural revolution in the sense that capitalism renders the ruling class ambivalent about the means of its own supremacy. It is, therefore, a cultural revolution in which romanticism, in Lowy and Sayre’s understanding, is not optional, not a transitional moment in history, but an ongoing necessity. Or rather, it is a cultural revolution which is perpetually internally conflicted and without any means of effectively concealing this fact. This is the historic challenge and achievement of Englishness—and this is why Jameson’s account of what he calls ‘bourgeois cultural revolution’ needs amending—note the pairing of appropriate class agent and mode of production which betrays the background assumptions of the bourgeois paradigm’s determinist stadialism, in contradiction with the model of cultural revolution itself which skillfully avoids this problem.

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What Jameson’s account suggests is that cultural revolution itself is a functional adaptation of a society to its dominant mode of production. Of course, this must be the case to the extent of being a tendency, however, what is missing, in the case of the capitalist mode of production, is its defining problem. To take Jameson’s own terms, the ‘habits and life forms’ that might suit the socially, culturally and ecologically annihilating ‘value systems of a capitalist market society’ (e.g. profit, accumulation, competition), values that refuse to offer foundational stability, are ones that are hard to imagine and aim at let alone achieve over the long term. In such circumstances, the capitalist cultural revolution must remain constitutively unstable.

A British End of History? Out of the English Revolution (1649) emerged the British imperial state which now appears to be undergoing its long-delayed, often threatened ‘break-up’. If the British multinational, imperial state, in the context of decolonization, deindustrialization, devolution and independence and global competition, is reconfiguring its internal and external geopolitical relations, then the multiple break-ups of the Brexit moment (potentially of the ‘united’ Kingdom and actually with the European Union) offer a glimpse into the ‘end of history’. According to the interpretation of Hegel’s end of history thesis proposed by Todd McGowan our freedom lies in recognising authority’s unavoidable contradictions which signal not the end of politics but its authentic emergence (McGowan 2019, p. 152). McGowan is using the Science of Logic (1812) rather than the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) as his guide—the difference being the former advocates the principle of freedom through contradiction, whilst the latter the idea that history comes to an end only when society is no longer self-divided or contradictory (McGowan 2019). In the context of Brexit, the British state has lost its apparent substantiality as a self-identical entity lying outside all contradiction. Thus, in what we might call a Brexit interregnum (2016–2019), the British state’s institutional coherence and the legitimacy subtending its authority diminished dramatically, allowing for the emergence of the dissenting voices of ‘the people’ which had then to be urgently stage-managed and channelled into older, nostalgic imperial nation-state forms. Crucially, Brexit became dependent on the reassurance of the glorious continuity of the ‘country’ that this state has historically depended on. As we will see, the problem with this strategy is

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that it is by no means clear that a peoples’ England, as opposed to the UK (Britain), has any clearly agreed or understood traditions or even dependable affective content. This drawback is also an advantage for the political Left, and must be considered part of the enabling context of this study itself. The challenge then of a British ‘end of history’—the moment when established political authority appears contradictory, unsure of itself and its own invented ‘traditions’—is that it represents that possibility of political freedom consequent upon the delegitimation of exposed authorities and its notorious ‘folklore from above’ (Nairn 2011). To put this situation in the political demotic of the hour: if the authorised past of the British state slips then the ‘country’ that it projects and that one is supposed to be ‘getting back’ through Brexit starts to evanesce. Whilst conservative romanticism attempts to reground this ‘lost’ country in need of its Brexit retrieval with compulsory neo-imperial triumphalism and totaste-xenophobia, revolutionary romantic historiography—and as we will see, some forms of mainstream popular cinema—turns the old ‘country’ foreign in a sense more troubling than perhaps the Hartley metaphor intended. A newly liberated past becomes the material of the revolutionary romantic history of figures like Linebaugh as they redraw the maps of that ‘old country’ and demonstrate how it contains ‘foreign lands’ and how the latter complicate the hallowed boundaries of the former. (Linebaugh uses a Blakean Atlantic poetic topography in RRGHB.) The time-space of the British state-nation is undergoing a warping, and romantic conservatism is passing through another ‘darkest hour’. It seems entirely appropriate therefore that the Prime Minister elected in 2019 should be a neo-Churchillian, and that the form of history he prefers is classic ruling class conservative romanticism, as betrayed in the subtitle of his book on the Churchill cult: How One Man Made History (2014). Which is to say, romantic conservatism wants desperately to close off the possibility of the British end of history and return to an ‘old country’ that never was and to a past that didn’t happen that way, all of which is challenged by revolutionary romanticism’s ability to throw what Linebaugh calls, once again citing Blake, a sceptical ‘Satanic’ light on the history from above of the British state (Linebaugh 2019, p. 303). Chronistically sealed, finished and ‘enclosed’ pasts, defensive heritable possessions of a particular, delimited people, face off against the ‘unenclosed’ pasts, unfinished, often unrecognisable in dramatis personae and location, spread out across multiple lands, mixing people, nations, ethnicities, generations, genders,

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melding together in the heat of struggle against the British state a diverse, planetary labouring class along with radical fragments of ruling class renegades, united in anti-capitalist values. We will see this dynamic clearly not just in Linebaugh, but also in Hollywood’s POC saga in Chapter 4. It is to be remembered here that the British working class have long preferred Hollywood to their own national cinema, and that this cannot be put down simply to the weight of marketing and expensive production values, rather, it is conventionally, and correctly I believe, ascribed to the shortcomings of a class-bound native cinema, one often tone deaf when dealing with popular genres. Ruling class disunity and ruling class performances of authority along with their relationship to revolution, capitalism and romanticism form an integral theme of this book, particularly in Chapters 2 and 3. The Brexit Interregnum offered some striking political examples of this class’s adaptability which can be compared suggestively with the cinematic representations of the performance of power and authority studied in Chapter 2. Take Boris Johnson’s spectacularly histrionic demonstration of the traditional liberal conception of power as a negative limit, and freedom as its transgression. Casting off all restraint, revelling in the breaking of ‘unwritten rules’ (the tacit protocols of a class so secure it has not up to this point been required to formalise them), Johnson presents himself as an authentic maverick. Part of this act is to assert the inauthenticity of the social rules which contemporary social liberalism has invested in and which the political Right identify under the hostile rubric of ‘political correctness’. In this way he seeks to evoke the impressive aura of a public figure placing the private self under no public constraint. Such libertarian transgression is not historically original. In Johnson’s case it represents a mixing of neoliberal ideologies of unencumbered, aggressive individualism and traditional ruling class mayhem whose backstory in elite Englishness has been provided through film texts such as The Riot Club (2014). Johnson’s membership of elite sociopathic groups such as the Bullingdon Club, which is the subject matter of The Riot Club, is on public record. However, unlike that other ex-member David Cameron, who attempted to borrow from New Labour’s social liberal softening of Thatcherism, Johnson stands for a full Thatcherite recidivism without apologies, one that also strikingly lacks, as Mike Wayne points out, any ‘uplifting narrative based on social mobility’ (Wayne 2018). Instead, Johnson offers an English class system populism in which static, spectacular qualities of class are key.

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What is historically original in Johnson’s performance of authority, and helps to substantiate the thesis of the threat in the Brexit Interregnum of a British end of history, can be specified more clearly if we compare it to that of fellow Tory party member of the ruling class, Jacob ReesMogg, whose by most accounts execrable history of eminent Victorians was subtitled: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain (2019). A conservative romantic jingo and empire nostalgic, like his Prime Minister, Rees-Mogg is also, unlike his Prime Minister as we will see, willing to ostentatiously reject what Hegel and others have thought of as the principal defining characteristic of modernity: the apparent insubstantiality of pre-modern conceptions of authority in which some individuals are essentially superior to others. Rees-Mogg’s traditional ruling class ‘face’ involves appearing to subscribe to the view that the modern notion of a politically important difference between ascribed and achieved social position can be dissolved in the idea of the inherited merit of the ruling class. In this respect, he belongs not in The Riot Club, but, as his iconographic self-fashioning suggests, in a 1980s heritage film playing a languid toff in possession of all the awesome confidence of an unquestionable personal propriety that belongs to a self-legitimating ruling class, or perhaps in the role of one of the prefects in the adaptation of Julian Mitchell’s Another Country (1984) who are referred to as ‘gods’ by the small boys under them. With his spectacle of class archaism—topper, monocle, tails—Rees-Mogg might be heir to Shelley’s Ozymandias with his ‘sneer of cold command’. Johnson is different. More Hegelian, more publicly acceptable because more a Tory cartoon, or the buffoonish, humanly fallible face of the ruling class. Johnson is modern and the proof is that he embraces his own contradictions and is willing to sacrifice the traditional apotheosis of the authoritarian leader. This makes the Churchill avatar misleading— Johnson is a farcical repetition of the original, closer, as we will see, to Powell and Pressburger’s Sir Percy than to Sir Percy’s heroic and secret alter ego, the Scarlet Pimpernel. Powell and Pressburger, of course, famously gave us the romantic conservative, and semi-farcical vision of Churchill in their The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The qualities of Johnson as a politician, seen clearest during the 2019 election, include abject incoherence and inarticulacy, evasion, amnesia and a paranoid fear of the Left, and cannot help but to impress a sense of his lack of authority’s traditional projected image of confidence. At the same time, there is in Johnson an insouciant will pursued to the point of belligerence. In other words, he has the conviction of the

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contradictions of his class. Here lies a grotesque parody of the potential emancipatory aspect of the Brexit conjuncture. The latter has exposed the multiple impostures and uncertainties of the British state (uncertainties over constitutional principles, rules, procedures, and relationships—for instance, between Parliament, Prime Minister, Speaker, monarch, political party, Member of Parliament, judiciary, and ‘people’). Such an exposure is necessarily destabilising and disorienting—hallowed precedent and ancient custom suddenly shimmers in all its actual insubstantiality. Johnson’s performance mimics and shadows this newly foregrounded ‘making it up as you go along’ quality of the British state, no longer able to rely on the automatic acceptance by loyal ‘subjects’ of its authority, instead provoking incredulity, uncertainty, confusion, impatience and crucially, as a corollary of such deficiencies, a less than welcome sense that the people might as well remake the state. Johnson’s self-conscious arts of display on the political stage are an attempt to distract from the danger that McGowan argues occurs when authority permits its own abjection and the political subject is free to recognise that authority does not exist independently of and above it, but for it and through its own support (McGowan 2019). Johnson goes so far as to bend with the wind here. However, his motive in this is not to endorse any real questioning of the existing political order, but to find the most effective way to exorcise the spectre of freedom lingering in the threatened end of British history. If for Hegel the end of history is not the end of politics, quite the contrary, then Johnson is moving heaven and earth to stop the politics and restart the history. As McGowan argues, the end of history for Hegel is the moment that marks the beginning of political contestation in its most authentic form. It represents the struggle for the ‘form of life most adequate for [our] freedom (McGowan 2019, p. 152). Johnson’s anti-politics presents itself as ‘ultra politics’—under the slogan, ‘getting the job [Brexit] done’. The dangerous content of this political moment is exposed in this traditional British ruling class fear of its own internal antagonism and the invitation this offers for previously silenced voices to be raised in matters of fundamental debate. There was a similar problem in the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution which the ruling class has never forgotten. With the current disunity of the British state (in its political institutions and its internal and external geopolitical relations) there is an unavoidable return of the trauma of history. Indeed, the British state always required the description of ‘united’ to be applied to its restive, divided kingdoms. But that problem of unity was not just the result of the

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logic of internal colonisation applied to the Celtic fringe, but also, in a cryptic sense, referred to the English heart of Britain (the ‘home’ nation), as here absence of popular sovereignty was based on the original exploitation and oppression imposed under the longevity of a tenacious ruling class minority. England in this sense is the ‘nation’ yet to be. It was the first fully capitalist ‘country’ but it is a true latecomer to nationhood in the modern sense. In the light of which we might revise the Brexit slogan of ‘getting our country back’. The British end of history suggests something more significant. Getting rid of our country in the name of a nation to come. At the height of the Interregnum, Brexit turned quickly and unpredictably from a revanchist national project (the Faragean incarnation) to one of British nation-state damage limitation. This involved the forces of the Right targeting the problem of internal division with externalising solutions. This is the classical political movement to neutralise contradiction with opposition. Opposition externalises difference whilst essentialising and unifying the interior, which is why, as McGowan points out, it is a political logic to be found in fascism (McGowan 2019). If the avoidance of politics demands the repression of contradiction, then this explains the haste which those on the Tory right sought to bring Brexit to a conclusion—by pursuing an anti-politics of opposition aimed at external enemies (foreign invaders ) and their internal allies (traitors ). This effectively terminated the possibility of a British end of history, for as McGowan points out, tracing Hegel’s argument, a society actualizes itself (in freedom) when it fails to be self-identical and when it learns to be energised by this contradiction, approaching togetherness ‘through a shared way of being what we are not’ (McGowan 2019). And this brings us to the decisive quality of Johnsonism: the disavowal of the debacle of debunked authority with its ensuing crisis of legitimation through an appeal to a naturalised, self-identical force from below, to an identity that can be what it is without fear of contradiction. The people. Rebranding the Tory party the Peoples’ Party after the election, the ‘people’ supplied the authority lacking in their leader and the party of those supposedly ‘born to lead’. Paradoxically the template for such an identity was ready to hand in the decades-long neoliberal scapegoating of the working class. These vicious class ideologies provide social classifications of those who are believed incapable of being anything other than what they always already are—a degraded ‘underclass’ or residuum. Johnsonian populism sought to transform this neoliberal class ideology.

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Little effort was expended to reverse the negative-demonic conception of such class images, indeed their retention, in the background associations of Johnson’s ‘people’, was to an extent necessary ballast. Johnson fought the election with his own contemptuous account of the working class as ‘underclass’ regularly quoted back to him. This was no hindrance to his brand of populism because at its heart it revives traditional English class ideological tropes (for instance, the patrician/plebeian couplet of Old England). Such ideologies assert that the rough lower levels and the vigorous higher ones meet in an English patriotic potency which pacifies any antagonism between capitalist class and working class, whilst making any alliance between a progressive middle class and the working class inconceivable. As we will see this is the emergent historical matrix featured in Powell and Pressburger’s The Elusive Pimpernel which is set in the period of the French revolution and the English counter-revolution. As we also see, The Elusive Pimpernel shows us this class ideology going awry as soon as the possibility of an autonomous working-class political agency is imagined. From a Hegelian perspective the Brexit denouement was a paradoxical moment when popular sovereignty presented itself as unfreedom. The romantic conservative seduction of Johnsonian populism presented the people to the people as a spontaneous force from below whose role was merely to authorise a traditional image of the class structure of the ‘old country’. A people that comes to believe in itself in this way is a people that feels it knows for itself what it is in fact told by others about its past. Of course, it will be the argument of this book that revolutionary romanticism proposes a very different relation of the people to itself, to the class system, to its putative country and to its past.

Giving up on the English Past? Romanticism as understood here signals a present seeking a historical past for the inspiration needed to escape that present. Which is why this introduction concludes by addressing the problem of England and the past in the present conjuncture. Alex Niven, for one, has proposed that the relationship of England to romanticism is one fraught with dangers (Niven 2019). For him, with the moment of romantic nationalism and democratic modernity missed back in the early eighteenth century, the familiar romantic political discourses of revolution and the retrieval of national pasts need treating with extreme caution. What we are calling

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British romantic conservatism has, for Niven, entirely dominated the national imaginary and cast a dangerous spell over its past. Bad history has driven out the good. Not that there is much good history associated with England. Indeed, Niven holds to the thesis that England ceased to be three hundred years ago with the emergence of the British state, and certainly does not merit resuscitation now. Myth saturated, it is no political project for the present either in the form of the Anglocentric turn originating in the middle-class culture of the Blair years, or in the putative xenophobic and post-imperial delusions of the little Englandism of Brexit. Niven offers Alton Towers, the English Disneyworld, as an ingenious allegory of the problem of England. Located at England’s geographical centre, featuring rollercoaster rides and associated ‘vortical consumerism’, it induces nausea in Niven with its phantasmagoric montages of Dickens and Tolkien (Niven 2019, p. 27). This ‘CGI Englishness’ represents a ‘peculiarly English nightmare’, but not just because of its consumer culture excesses, which are increasingly globally shared, but because at the centre of this centre is another, semi-secret void (Niven 2019, p. 24). There sits an ‘original’ stately home, now ruined, but even in its nineteenth-century incarnation, an example of Pugin’s gothic revivalist medieval fetishism of the kind ‘that has continually suppressed the growth of a positive national identity’ (Niven 2019, p. 26). This derelict house’s history allegorises the problem of English history—its inauthenticity is that of the first capitalist culture: Ever since the early years of the Industrial Revolution, the acquisition and sale, fabrication and destruction of the synthetic past embodied in the commodities of English gothic has been one of the truest, most naked expressions of the capitalist ethic and its rollercoaster ride towards death’ (Niven 2019, pp. 28–29)

This central ruin, asset-stripped by its owners in the 1950s, has become the commodified afterthought to the park’s main attractions. Presented to the public as a walkthrough ‘dark ride’ it offers The Story of the Chained Oak as its theme. In the distant past, the house’s owner, the Earl of Shrewsbury, meets a beggar woman. He spurns her. She curses him. Falling branches of a nearby oak will, she warns him, foretell death in the Earl’s family. He has the oak chained up as a precaution. From this story

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Niven derives three essential facets of Englishness—the notion of a ‘historical curse’; the feeling of confinement, and the notion of hiddenness leading to the sense of a void. These facets are fitted into the New Left historiography of Anderson and Nairn’s 1960s theses on the problems of Britain—i.e. an early aristocratic agrarian capitalism, a failed revolution with a bourgeoisie co-opted into the ancien regimé and a historically becalmed, brutalised working class failing to make its rendezvous with socialism. The resulting unmodern class system of a peculiar capitalism was poisoned by the cultural blowback of empire. The result: a cruel, cramped nation, unfree to its roots and cursed by its history. It is interesting that Niven’s account of this ‘historical curse’ is presented first of all not through Nairn and Anderson’s historical materialism, but as Arthurian myth in which England is believed to have suffered some terrible defeat and has ‘not been allowed to exist since the arrival of a mysterious evil at the start of its history’ (Niven 2019, p. 32). This characteristically English linking of past to future is therefore modelled on the ‘once and future’ structure of Arthurian kingship. Consequently the English believe ‘only a true revival of our authentic past…can cut through the curse’ (Niven 2019, p. 32). A pre-existing national myth complex, one stretching back ‘two millennia’ is provided as the context for the Nairn–Anderson theses. This is significant because it explains Niven’s ambivalence for such ‘Marxist’ history. Thus, whilst he is clearly dependent on recognisably historical materialist accounts of British history, his unease appears occasioned by the problem of their overlap with a conservative romanticism in which mythic elements get concealed. Nairn and Anderson fulfil a dual role here. They help construct a historical narrative which explains why England has ceased to be, its absence, inexistence and void-like characteristics, and to demonstrate at the same time the dangers of taking such history too seriously, or rather, of losing sight of the point at which it blends into myth, becoming an example of the problem it was trying to lay bare. At which point, we might say that the historical curse becomes the curse of history. In support of this case, Niven cites contemporary ‘leftist and avant garde discourse’ that emphasises certain radical moments in English history, especially those of the pre-industrial period, to posit a socialist get-out to the problem of England. This sub-tradition is epitomised [by] E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill [who] focus on the rise of socialism in these islands as a specifically English phenomenon. (Niven 2019, p. 101)

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In ‘antinomian English art’ (Jeremy Dellar, Ben Wheatley) and in ‘radical English narratives like those of the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ referenced in the psychogeography of Iain Sinclair and Partick Keiller, Niven senses and objects to a related ‘simplistic equation of socialism and Englishness’ (Niven 2019, p. 102). Furthermore, contemporary British psychogeography, unlike its 1960s French original, is ‘smothered in foreboding and melancholy, and underpinned by a sometimes exaggerated sense of historical curse bordering on conspiracy theory’ (Niven 2019, p. 32). Equally, the appeal to revered ‘historical revenants’, such as sixteenth-century commoners in Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins (2010), and the peasant poet John Clare in Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison (2006) also tend to restrict the national story of political resistance to the dominant south-eastern corner of these islands. Niven’s critique of the misrepresentation of British counter-cultural and political subversion as specifically ‘English’ is well made. However, any argument that the associated historical ‘sub-tradition’ is of restricted significance is far more problematic if we bring it up to date in a way he has neglected to do. The continued attention to this tradition in the work of historians such as Linebaugh and the politics which emerges from its focus on class struggle is not narrowly English in its ambitions. Indeed, Niven is not the first to note the problematically restricted national horizons of Thompson’s work. Linebaugh himself has long made this a central part of his own Atlantic historical studies. Furthermore, in defence of historians such as Thompson, we need to take heed of the latter’s argument concerning the distorting effect of the Nairn–Anderson theses (Thompson 1978). In particular Nairn and Anderson were notorious for their scathing assessment of the political agency of the working class, and its ability to effect any historical breakthrough, ending up with a peculiar and unconvincing nothing much happening view of English class history. Niven’s account of the development of English history has much to recommend it. For him what ruptured the history of an authentic English state was the post-revolutionary transition into imperialism. At this point, England becomes ‘an inchoate, de-nationalised entity, capable of absorbing other localities tacitly and without accompanying democratic or romantic agitation’ (Niven 2019, p. 38). Another way of putting this would be to say that Niven wants to switch the emphasis away from what has been done to England (a nation forestalled, confiscated, defeated by evil forces), to what England has done to others (the curse it has put

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on the world and itself through the poison of empire which starts with its own oppressive ‘united’ kingdom). And this is an important, easily endorsed and necessary emphasis. But in characterising the Left political discourse of a ruthless ruling class as a paranoid seduction into a regressive and mythic English nationalism, Niven cannot avoid suppressing class struggle history which preoccupies this structure of feeling. And this has its dangers too, for it renders him insufficiently sensitive to the way that contemporary political struggles which take nationalism as their focus are riven with antagonisms of class, if not with fully class conscious struggle in the classic Marxist sense. The weakness then in Niven’s history of England and account of the English national question in the face of the break-up of Britain, is a weakness that is already in his sources. His sense that the problem of England is the legacy of empire and the associated lack of modernity and his neglect of the ongoing, chronic antagonisms of class represents a repetition of central arguments from the tradition of political discourse established in the 1960s by the New Left. Indeed Nairn and Anderson’s ‘modernising’ approach to the national problem are carried through into the 1980s in the New Times Manifesto of that group of post Marxists operating within the Communist Party of Great Britain’s journal, Marxism Today. Niven notes this link and extends its influence, as I think he is right to do, into the first Blair government. New Labour attacked Old Labour’s attachment to class politics, embraced neoliberal economics, and mixed ‘social liberalism’ with a willingness to countenance national and regional devolution in the UK. Niven takes note of the latter, but is less focused, if at all, on these other, critical aspects of New Labour. This means he has no explanation of the collapse of the regional devolution project he sees as crucial to reviving Left fortunes. In 2004, the North East voted against its own regional assembly, and at this point, New Labour shelved the regional project. (And here is that phenomenon that was particularly evident during the Brexit interregnum and that appears inexplicable for some contemporary political perspectives—the working class apparently voting against its own interests.) The warning signs were clear. Indeed, I would argue that what happened in the referendum of 2004 is linked to what happened in the general election of 2019. The class antagonism between a profoundly disillusioned working class which had borne the economic brunt of neoliberalism, and the undisguised vehicle of that assault, New Labour, triggered a search for alternative political forms of

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expression. This was found in the rejection of New Labourite regionalism and the embracing of a provocative nationalism. But, and this is the critical thing to remember, such outcomes were not in origin national questions. Nationalism became the political form in which class conflict was to be played out. We might say then that the curse of history lies not just in the way legitimate, historically documented traumas get rerouted back into national myth structures turning historical claims into bad politics. There is also a curse of history on any politics which fails to engage with the history of class antagonism.

Eerie Agency The two key challenges to any understanding of the national problem in the contemporary moment—class conflict and capitalism—are of course central to the understanding of historical materialism proposed in this book. One useful way of focusing them, adopted in the film analysis in the following chapters, is through the concept of the ‘eerie’ borrowed by Niven from the work of Mark Fisher (Fisher 2016). We might say that for Niven eeriness is the culturally and politically permissible form of the gothic. If the gothic for Niven is generally too closely associated with a romanticism which is seduced by the evil agency of class (aristocratic), the eerie replaces the ‘evil’ of class agency with the ‘enigma’ of capital itself (i.e. an oppressive agency seemingly separated from class). As Fisher puts it, eeriness occurs in ‘spaces where absence becomes a sort of howling presence’ and evinces questions such as What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved?…What kind of agent is acting here? Is there any agent at all? Capital is, at every level, an eerie entity… (Fisher 2016, pp. 41–42)

Concentrating on the eerie enables an anti-capitalist politics without being required to tie it down to a class politics because it creates a fascination around capitalism itself as the primary historical agent. Capitalism and garbled history do indeed go together, conservative romanticism is a clear indication of this, however, Englishness is shot through with an eeriness of class too, despite the apparent cultural obviousness of the English class system and its unquestioned familiarities which suggest a profound lack of eeriness. As we have seen, for many on the New Left the English class system is the sign inaction, not mysterious action. However, it needs to

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be noted that the unchanging, immemorial and over-familiar quality of Englishness is merely an appearance. The relationship of class identity to the class agency emerging out of class understood as a dynamic social relationship rooted in exploitation is one in which the apparently substantial and immobile (class identity) is the shell of the actually generative (class relationship). The disappearance of class agency and the overemphasis on the agency of capitalism needs to be questioned. This disappearance of class agency from below is the enigma of Englishness, endlessly reproduced in cultural and political commentary. Perhaps we might re-purpose Niven’s Alton Towers example here. For as he usefully points out, the eerie can be generated in populated spaces, like Alton Towers, where there are ‘thousands upon thousands of people’ (Niven 2019, p. 42). But rather than viewing this as testament to the powers of capitalism to magnetise the masses with its stimulation of delirious ‘vortical consumerism’, what the reference to the crowds cannot help drawing attention to is that other form of spectral agency—the root of the capitalist commodity’s eeriness—labour (Niven 2019, p. 27). The relationship between class and capitalism here is imagined by Niven as fundamentally passive. Alton Towers’s thousands are the ‘exploited masses’ of capital’s spectral agency (Niven 2019, p. 42). The agency of capital and the problem of the agency of the working class urgently need to be brought back together in ways which illuminate contemporary political anxieties. It is this dynamic, contradictory and crisis-driven entanglement of class and capitalism that is at the heart of the concerns of historical materialism. Finally then, let us return to Linebaugh. If Niven’s Alton Towers allegory has been important to us, this is not just because of its felicitous staging of key aspects of the problem of England, but also because it offers a popular cultural text/experience whose drawback is that it represents capitalism in terms of consumption and a passive mass in which romanticism’s invocation of the past is merely part of the problem, and class struggle necessarily off the agenda. It therefore leaves popular culture in the position of merely illustrating the power of capitalism and romantic conservatism in the English ‘national’ setting. This offers a useful contrast to the approach adopted here. Popular culture’s often ‘arbitrary’ and ‘garbled’ history might well characterise aspects of the films of the POC franchise, which operates as a kind of Hollywood Alton Towers. However, as we will see, Linebaugh’s revolutionary romantic storytelling helps us to demonstrate how the traumas of capitalist history have left deep, if often

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only semi-legible marks in the sensitive wax of popular culture. Historic struggles ending in failure cannot be adequately captured by metaphors of ‘absence’, if the latter is taken as synonymous with the inexistent and negligible, and whilst it is important to recognise the failure to establish a nation rooted in popular sovereignty it is equally important not to give credence to the idea that such a failure is indicative of the immobility of the working class as a historical agent. This is a clear implication of the Nairn–Anderson theses. In contrast, Linebaugh’s work returns to us the struggles from below that extend outwards from the historical defeats of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the defeat of the pirates and of the hero and heroine of RRGHB, Edward and Catherine Despard, all of which he counsels us not to forget. Revolutionary romanticism has the advantage of intensifying our sense of the problem of capitalism and the ongoing need for class politics as a response. The politics of ‘modernisation’ and ‘accelerationist’ narratives of capitalism dispense with the necessity of class struggle, and tend to support this move by giving credence to the idea that conservative romanticism infects not just the politics of the Right, but that of the Left, especially through the lure of frustrated nationalism. Linebaugh reminds us that this is by no means necessarily so. His combination of romanticism, internationalism, anti-capitalism and class struggle is therefore salutary. Like Niven, he too adopts an archipelagoan framework for his history, expanded beyond these islands to a historical and mythopoeic Atlantic. His storytelling establishes the terms on which the historical curse of capitalism has operated and been challenged. It helps to discredit the idea that the difference which it is the historical legacy of romanticism to both blur and sharpen, between capitalist and pre-capitalist social dynamics, is one that we no longer need to bother with.

References Anderson, P. 1992. English Questions. London: Verso. Brenner, R. 2006. The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005. London: Verso. Brenner, R. 2007. Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong. In Marxist History Writing for the Twenty First Century, ed. C. Wickham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eagleton, T. 2014. Culture and the Death of God. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Fisher, M. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books. Hartley, J.L. 2015. The Go-Between. London: Penguin. Jameson, F. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen. Linebaugh, P. 2019. Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. Oakland: University of California Press. Lowy, M., and R. Sayre. 2002. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Matthews, W. 2014. The New Left, National Identity, and the Break-Up of Britain. Chicago: Haymarket. McGowan, T. 2019. Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press. Nairn, T. 2011. The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy. London: Verso. Niven, A. 2019. New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England. London: Repeater Books. Polanyi, K. 2002. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Spicer, A. 2004. ‘Film Studies and the Turn to History’ in Journal of Contemporary History 39 (1): 147–155. Thompson, E.P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory: Or an Orrery of Errors. London: Merlin Press. Wayne, M. 2018. England’s Discontents: Political Cultures and National Identities. London: Pluto Press. Wood, E.M. 1991. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 2

Conservative Romanticism and the Country: Powell and Pressburger

Abstract This chapter offers a discussion of English conservative romantic culture in the form of a case study analysis of Powell and Pressburger’s film, The Elusive Pimpernel (1950). It focuses on the idea of the ‘country’ as the pastoral image of this form of Englishness, and explores the relationship of this idea to the performance of authority associated with the capitalist ruling class mediated in Powell and Pressburger’s film through the reproduction of traditions of counter-revolutionary ruling class heroism. The chapter also explores the relationship of conservative romanticism to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s thesis of the English ‘pristine culture of capitalism’ (Wood 1991), focusing particularly on the problem of working-class political agency through a discussion of Mark’s Fisher’s theorisation of the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’ (Fisher 2016). Overall, the chapter seeks to demonstrate the usefulness of a Political Marxist approach to cultural analysis. Keywords Conservative romanticism · Pimpernel · Weird · Culture of capitalism

Conservative romanticism, on Lowy and Sayre’s terms, is significantly contradictory (Lowy and Sayre 2002). Not truly anti-capitalist; never aiming to restore any past other than the one that has favoured the development of its own national variant of capitalist imperialism and class © The Author(s) 2020 P. Dave, Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59646-0_2

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hierarchy; its values certainly pre-modern but certainly not pre-capitalist; its protest against ‘modern industry’ aimed less at the social damage inflicted on the working class, and more at the putative political and moral corruption that a modernising capitalist ‘affluence’ and its tendency to social levelling has produced; its interest in nature lying largely in the latter’s perceived affinities with the aesthetic promise of a social harmony which receives its most poignant image in a vision of ‘improved’ pastoral Englishness, it constructs the nation as a particular entity (the country), with a distinctive temporality (longevity to the point of timelessness), and in the process it participates in a de-narrativisation from above, a condition in which any resistance to the status quo struggles to frame its own deliberative agency. For these reasons conservative romanticism offers an important framework within which to consider questions of political and historical agency and the political aesthetics of the performance of ruling class authority. This chapter looks at Powell and Pressburger’s The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) (henceforth TEP ) as an example of a romantic conservatism which offers insights into the nature and methods of rule of the world’s first capitalist class and helps us to appreciate the challenges facing the working class caught within this ‘pristine culture of capitalism’ (Wood 1991). Let’s start by setting the tone. Ian Christie’s study of Powell and Pressburger, in a chapter on their wartime films, contains the following joke: ‘They have elected a Labour government and the country will never stand for that (Overheard at Claridge’s)’. (Christie 1985, p. 52).

The Pimpernel Effect The Scarlet Pimpernel, a popular literary creation of Baroness Orczy, is an English aristocrat who rescues French aristocrats from the French revolutionary Terror. He is an early twentieth-century, popular cultural expression of Burkean conservative romanticism. TEP was made in 1950 as the radicalism of the war years was ebbing. In 1951 Churchill and the Tories were back in power. The film is set in 1792, a moment which is foundational for British conservative romanticism, and simultaneously of particular significance to Linebaugh’s revolutionary romantic historiography, particularly his recent history of the Atlantic, Red Round Globe Hot Burning as well as his important early essay on fellow Marxist historians, C. L. R. James and E. P. Thompson which we will return to in Chapter 4 (Linebaugh, 1986, 2019). As Linebaugh reminds us in this essay, Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class starts in January

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1792 with the formation of the London Corresponding Society (henceforth LCS) whose story we will also return to in Chapter 4. Finally, by way of capturing the moment, we might consult Humphrey Jennings’ entries in his utopian romantic history, Pandaemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (Jennings 1985). Jennings died in the year TEP was released. Pandaemonium, published posthumously, overlaps with the approach of the historians in the Communist Party Historians Group, which included Thompson. Like these communist historians Jennings adopts a class struggle perspective on the development of British capitalism and industry. His entries for the early 1790s can help us understand the historical context depicted in TEP. For 1791–1792 Jennings offers an extract from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon scheme in which Bentham recommends his new prison design as one which would have ‘saved the London prisons’. This is a reference to the Gordon Riots of 1780, but Jennings intends us to see the link to the popular insurrections in Paris, appending the following gloss to Bentham’s observations: 1789 - the fall of the Bastille. 1791 - Panopticon, the New Bastille. (Jennings 1985, p. 99)

In other words, revolution in France triggered a counter-revolutionary response from the British ruling class whose focus, aside from the geopolitical concerns of imperial competition with France, was determinedly domestic and class-based. The working class were a political threat because at the same time the revolution in France was inspiring the formation of English Jacobins, such as those associated with the LCS, the ruling capitalist class were driving through the enclosures, not just of the penitentiary, but of land (the commons), hand (labour in factories) and sea (carving up the Atlantic seaboards for imperialist trade and slavery). A massive, historic assault on age-old rhythms of nature and labour was in process. Nature, human and non-human, needed to adapt, which is why it is interesting that for 1791 Jennings also includes an extract from a Hampshire newspaper reporting a case from the Wiltshire summer assizes of August that year. Thomas and Margaret Abree were convicted of gleaning on the estate of Mr Edward Perry of Clarendon Park. The Abrees were spared sentence and what would have been ruinous costs by signing a document in which they confessed the following:

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…we are fully convinced…that no person has a right to leaze [glean] any sort of grain, or to come on any field whatsoever, without the consent of the owner… (Jennings 1985, p. 97)

In the political challenge, at home and abroad, of the French revolution’s levelling doctrines and in the acceleration of capitalist agriculture lies the context of that agile ruling class wonder, the Scarlet Pimpernel, along with the historical matrix of conservative romanticism. TEP establishes a particular relationship between two different types of political action (revolutionary and counter-revolutionary), and two different kinds of class identity (fixed and fluid). Its opening inter-title gives the English counter-revolutionary position, equating revolution with an idealism that ends up in violence. The succeeding image is the symbol of the Terror: the guillotine shot from below, blade descending. English thanatocratic spectacle, which as we will see in Chapter 4, forms an important focus for Linebaugh’s work, is here displaced onto the French revolutionary political other. (Thanatocracy is Linebaugh’s term for the late seventeenth to early nineteenth-century ruling class equation of sovereignty and the death penalty, along with related understanding that property defines the end of government. The result: the Bloody Code.) (Linebaugh 1991, p. 53). Movement in the vertical axis forms a motif in the film representing a spectacular celebration of ruling class agency in which the omnipresence and omnipotence of the aristocratic Pimpernel is thereby associated with the achievement of an aerial point of view. There are several examples in the opening sequences. If the revolutionaries find themselves, as the counter-revolutionary emblem has it, below, looking up at a descending blade of their own fashioning (the Terror), then the ruling class looks down on a world whose meaning is transparent, and which is therefore open to precise and effective intervention. Steep vertical perspective translates traditional social pre-eminence, giving at times an almost abstract topographical composition to the shots in which distances and scales are hard to read, but position and movement are excessively clear. For instance, the sequence following a tumbril on its way to Paris, with its hapless French aristocrats, filmed from elevated architectural vantage points, which become metonymically suggestive of the invisible Pimpernel’s rescue plot. These are representations emphasising the contrast between the envelopment of the terrestrially bound revolutionary crowd and the liberated motion of an omniscient agent whose strategic vision prepares to unwind and frustrate the revolutionary

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will. This English counter-revolutionary voyeurism has its counterpart in an English ruling class exhibitionism. If the former plays out on the vertical plane, the latter does so on the horizontal one. For instance, in the opening section, the galloping League of Gentleman, gallant English rescuers of the French upper class, are captured in the kinetic rush of an extended tracking shot. The opposition of the vertical and horizontal, which suggests the activities of spying and ostentatious escape, is combined in complex and fluctuating patterns around the appearances and disappearances of the central figure of Sir Percy Blakeney, the Regency fop whose secret identity is the Scarlet Pimpernel. Sir Percy is the public, highly visible and comic disguise of the Pimpernel who is the incognito of the private, clandestine, heroic aristocrat that Sir Percy truly is. This ‘character’ is itself a counter-revolutionary emblem, with its own provocative textual tag of doggerel riddling: ‘They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere, Is he in Heaven, Or is he in Hell, That damned elusive Pimpernel’. Let us consider the Pimpernel’s first disguised appearance as a French revolutionary who emerges into view over a high wall, climbing a ladder to get a glimpse of a procession of captured aristocrats. One of a number of Burkean vignettes of the swinish multitude, the Pimpernel forms a grotesque figure disguised in rags, eating and shouting simultaneously through rotten teeth, and baying for the blood of the dignified French aristocrats. This scene’s class depiction is almost its own caricature of English anti-Jacobin caricature (for instance the work of James Gillray). It suggests, however, something other than the debasement of the French revolutionaries who appear most often in mug-shot style compositions. Leering, menacing, stooping, their actions predictable, reflex and herdbased, such static revolutionary identities are the models for the mimicry of the undercover Pimpernel. The following shots show us the driver of the passing tumbril that the Pimpernel has scaled his ladder to see. The driver is a similarly grotesque, malevolent figure with hat, whip and pipe, also munching, spitting and shouting. Here too language passes through a bestial mangling. However, what is being touched on in the similarities of the disguised Pimpernel and the tumbril driver is perhaps more than just counter-revolutionary iconography. It is the status of the image, or rather, what the English ruling class does to the trustworthiness of the image that is ultimately at stake. Audience foreknowledge, carried in the Orczy intertext and prompted by Powell and Pressburger’s intertitles,

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primes us to expect an enigmatic English agency that is metamorphic and undetectable. Therefore, any attention to exaggeration in the depiction of a social figure is likely to activate an anticipatory premonition of a revealed Pimpernel. At the same time, given the use of caricature as a mode of seeing in a social world whose norm is exaggeration, even the frequency of the elevated or aerial perspectives—all triggers for our sense of the presence of the Pimpernel either as the possessing point of view or as an object of the shot—cannot resolve the spectator’s suspicions and uncertainties concerning the identity of any figure featured in close up. In this first view of the Pimpernel what therefore stands out is a mimicry so perfectly adapted to its environment that even what he is not—the tumbril driver—appears to conceivably be what he is. This peculiar effect is emphasised a few scenes later at the conclusion of the League’s rescue of the aristocrats riding in the tumbril. Here, the second appearance of the Pimpernel does indeed present him driving a cart, one which contains the hidden aristocrats he is saving. Thus, even though the two figures are distinct identities, it is hard to shake the impression, created in these early scenes, of a power of duplication and mobility that makes the mere hypothesis of the Pimpernel’s presence undermine the trustworthiness of all images of identity. Wherever we look and whoever we look at, we might be looking at the Pimpernel. The image becomes an index of a ruling class virtuosity, evidence of a narrative agency whose astounding powers baffle all adversaries. We might call the spectacular visual effect thus induced the ‘double-take’. The film is full of these moments when appearances necessitate another look and an ongoing scepticism. On the one hand then, identity has no determining limits or stability, on the other, it is fixed in entirely predictable caricature. The lower classes can never be anything more than what they already are; the English aristocrat is always more than he seems to be. The image that is always an invitation to a double-take expresses the powers of a mimetic virtuosity based in a fundamental grasp of (classed) human nature. The mobility of the ruling class in all dimensions, vertical and horizontal, up to heaven and down to hell, as well as across the grounded everyday, suggests a being in motion for which ‘everywhereness’ is the defining feature. Such omnipresence and vigorous action in all spheres adds an earthbound materialism to the English ruling class which accompanies its disembodied elusive intelligence. The horizontality which is the expression of its animal spirits embodied in chase and adventure, and hence emblematised in English ruling class pastimes such as hunting, also

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expresses itself in the satiated ennui of a culture of excess featured in the lolling upper class bodies in the gambling and bathing scenes. Such representations emphasise a gross ruling class sensuality which emerges from behind the apparently elegant and refined aspects of the culture, rather like the corpulent, blundering Prince Regent who in one scene peeps from under his blindfold at the pick of the ladies during a game of blind man’s bluff at a formal ball. Such groundedness, with all its dysfunctions and calculated distastefulness, is part of the spectacle of ruling class Englishness and its exhibitionist power to dominate the social scene. Sir Percy is the epitome of this process. He is the ‘spineless, useless nincompoop’ (the Prince Regent’s envious judgement) who renders himself hypervisible and anti-heroic, and through the absolutism of the dandy’s taste, stretches social distances, thereby pushing the lower classes into social insignificance whilst increasing his own spectacular and apparently unearned pre-eminence. In an early scene of the Pimpernel imitating a French aristocrat fleeing from a revolutionary mob inside a chateau, the Pimpernel becomes a foppish French version of Sir Percy, alternately astounding and infuriating his pursuers with his provocations, before a rapid costume change places him undetectably in the mob itself. Far from being politically dangerous, his spectacular exposure of ruling class contempt in order to capture his adversaries attention is an aspect of his ruling class power. The more narratively significant political antagonism is between the French revolutionary elite and the Pimpernel. Once again, control of space is critical. Unlike the League, whose restless activity, or dromomania, is an organic expression of its vitality as a ruling class, the image of Citizen Chauvelin, the principal antagonist of the English, tends towards the statuesque. His political intelligence is associated with extreme stillness, which is exaggerated by his minimal gestures. Operating intramurally, from behind desks, and pillars, secreted away in rooms within rooms, and exploiting the help of keys, spies, locked draws and cellars, Chauvelin’s use of ‘intelligence’ suggests an agency dependent on centralised, rational structures whose undetected presence radiates outwards through society. His plots and stratagems are designed to mature and deliver results through patience. The intense stillness of the character is suggestive not just of concentration and thought, but a balance based on multiple points of contact with the outside world, which as a consequence he does not need to go to. It comes to him. He is the embodiment of the revolutionary as sinister disembodied consciousness. Such stationary

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menace in the mise en scene of the character serves, however, to emphasise his ultimate blindness. The special effect cinematography of Powell and Pressburger confirms this. For instance, an extreme close-up subjective point of view shot—Chauvelin’s view of the bottom of a glass he is drinking from, on which is inscribed a taunting message from the Pimpernel—compares unfavourably with the generalised aerial cinematography in the action sequences which are the Pimpernel’s implied subjective point of view. An English synoptic visual field contains and constrains a limited French vision which deludedly thinks itself panoptic. It is Chauvelin’s misfortune to exemplify the fruitless ‘seeking’ quality of revolutionary rationality (‘they seek him here, they seek him there’), teased into a state of hapless perplexity and frustration as the Pimpernel’s doggerel implies. The Pimpernel’s counter-revolutionary ‘everywhereness’ is opposed to revolutionary ‘hereness’ or the locatedness of excessive particularisation. The former suggest a virtuous insertion into an active, benign English world represented at its purest in the simple good-natured vigour of a ruling class in motion. The Pimpernel reduces Chauvelin to a transfixed spectator, a double-taker, not just by his control of space—note his connections to a wide range of forms of locomotion—but his ontological quality of indeterminacy, which more prosaically, is expressed in the pristine culture of capitalism by the figure of ruling class theatricality. The wardrobe is a marked image of Englishness perhaps because of this culture of ruling class metamorphosis, and this in turn might be profitably considered in the context of the historically organic transition of the feudal ruling class into the capitalist ruling class. (We will return to this in a subsequent chapter.) It is interesting that the Pimpernel steps into a wardrobe in one scene to baffle his revolutionary French pursuers. Just as it is not the destination but the control of the means of travel that is important, so it is not the identity but the ability to be free of any particular identity that marks English civilisational superiority. We can explore this slippery quality of ruling class identity through two examples, two double-take moments. The first, when the Pimpernel himself is surprised by Chauvelin’s sudden, unexpected appearance before him at the League’s rendezvous of Mont Saint Michel. His immediate witticism in response is: ‘I suppose you really are you and not me made up to look like you!’ We might rephrase this thus: my metamorphic powers render me strange to myself, to the extent that I am not sure who I am! The humour lies in the logical contradiction implied in the conflict between

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the ‘I’ that supposes and the ‘me’ whose actions might be unknown to any such ‘I’. But put another way, the statement reminds us of the magical, impossible yet omnipotent powers of the Pimpernel and the weakness of Chauvelin. For the Pimpernel not to be himself is a trifling minor confusion in an existence whose norm is changeableness, whereas there is the cheeky suggestion that in his enemy’s case, not to know himself is a potentially fatal weakness. For Chauvelin not to be himself is to be taken over by his enemies in a confiscation of identity. It is the complacency of the superiority—one rooted in a nature which has no fixed essence— that is remarkable here. As Chauvelin puts it to Armand St. Just, brother of Sir Percy’s French wife, Marguerite, as he warns Armand away from counter-revolutionary sympathies: ‘If you stand in the way of the people, nothing can save you. Nothing. Nothing’. The Pimpernel is the English upper class nothing who saves French middle-class revolutionaries from themselves and from identities that are publicly either consistent, focused, serious or rational. Remarkably then, the Pimpernel remains in charge, even when Chauvelin appears to have the upper hand. As metamorph the Pimpernel exposes all Chauvelin’s plots to a state of virtual or imminent collapse. In this respect, the second double-take I wish to consider is one extracted from Chauvelin when Sir Percy returns from his own execution. Captured at Mont Saint Michel by Chauvelin, Sir Percy, admitting his identity as the Pimpernel, accepts Chauvelin’s offer to save his wife Marguerite in exchange for facing the French firing squad. Unknown to Chauvelin, the firing squad consists of members of the League. In response to Chauvelin’s shock as he returns to the room after his supposed execution, the Pimpernel remarks: ‘sink me if you don’t think I’m my own ghost!’ Chauvelin’s double take implies, in Sir Percy’s formulation, a simple comic misperception. The metaphysics of English ruling class identity are reduced at a stroke to a bluff common sense, routing the primitive superstitious conceptualising of the defeated revolutionary. For Sir Percy not to be himself is now ridiculous. The English bouleversement of Chauvelin is complete. Two types of agency: revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. Two different models of identity with two different relationships to agency: fixed identity, ineffective revolutionary agency; mobile identity and effective counter-revolutionary agency. We have seen how this structure eventuates in the text. Let us now use a Politically Marxist historical materialist approach to relate such formal features to the pristine culture of capitalism. English counter-revolutionary agency has an eerie quality.

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Its strangeness is related to the agency of capital, which in the classical political economy of the pristine culture of capitalism is naturalised. A naturalised capitalism is necessarily a social formation given over to obscure processes, one littered with effects where causes are shadowy presences beyond the frame, or riddles within it. Note that Fisher’s list of typical questions provoked by eeriness (‘What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance…What kind of agent is acting here…Is there an agent at all’) is suggestive of the deserted landscapes of primitive accumulation or the process of the forcible separation of labour from the means of the production, specifically, the land (Fisher 2016, p. 11). Later Fisher mentions the eeriness of ‘abandoned villages’ (Fisher 2016, p. 12). This same process is central to Powell and Pressburger’s Hebridean romance I Know Where I’m Going (1945). But we need to be cautious here. The reification of capitalism in a culture hegemonised by political economy is of course profound. However, eerily emptied landscapes of eighteenth-century agrarian capitalism cannot have been mysterious to those who enclosed the commons. Sir Percy’s country house sits in landscaped parkland. Such estates signalled the dual process of agricultural improvement and enclosure. The eeriness that concerns us here then lies in a particular mode of ruling class agency which we can begin to understand through the historically novel differentiation of the spheres of the political and the newly naturalised economy and their consequently distinctive relationship. The advantages and disadvantages of such a split are what help to explain the peculiar characteristics of the English ruling class performance of authority in terms of its sense of permissible or ownable agency. The social surplus can no longer be extorted by means of an appeal to a juridical or corporate privilege in a society running on the principle of the universal freedom offered to buyers and sellers in the capitalist market. In other words, the split between the newly defined economic and the political instance left the ruling class needing to make a show of abdicating coercive political power. Persistently overt political interference in the market was not possible. This has enormous consequences for the political style of the ruling class whose consequences we can trace in TEP. However, where does the historical moment represented by TEP fit into this process of the separation of civil society, or class relationships based on the capitalist market, and politics as associated with the agency of the State itself? The first thing to point out is that the period of the late eighteenth century to around 1832, the period charted by Thompson in

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the emergence of the formation of working-class political consciousness, is one in which what Marx called the ‘formal subsumption’ of labour under capital is in the process of turning into the ‘real subsumption’ of labour under capital (Marx 1976). The former involves the spread of wage labour; the latter, the integration of surplus extraction into the labour process itself and the consequent loss of any residual autonomy for labour as the ‘economy’ becomes a new sphere of self-regulating, disciplined surplus extraction. The Pimpernel myth is historically situated then in the period when the residual attachments of the political to the economic sphere left the ruling class exposed as a political target for a working class increasingly radicalised by the shift from formal to real subsumption. That is to say, the late eighteenth, early nineteenth-century political discourse of Old Corruption (the State as a visibly oppressive ruling class apparatus clearly working in tandem with the savage development of the capitalism of classical political economy) hangs in the air around fabulously wealthy figures such as Sir Percy and the Regency court coterie he belongs to. Sir Percy’s foppish, dissolute public existence marks him out as belonging to a class formation which it is at least possible to disprove of. He is the kind of visible upper class ‘parasite’ that radicals of the era targeted. The decade of the 1790s was particularly dangerous for the capitalist ruling class. The French revolution represented a cautionary indication of the consequences for a ruling class too clearly implicated in the oppression and exploitation that attends the extraction of the social surplus. This was the period in Britain of the Great Transformation, or the political project of classical political economy and laissez-faire economics (Polanyi 2002). But the direction of travel, as David McNally points out, was not one which pursued Adam’s Smith formula of reconciling ‘old ethics’ (i.e. paternalism) with the ‘new economics’ of the market (McNally 1993, p. 60). It was Malthus, not Smith who ultimately pointed to the way things would develop. Take the issue of poor relief and traditional ruling class social paternalism. The latter was now seen as an interference in the market mechanism. The Pimpernel myth translates this older social obligation into the register of nationalism. The objective is to save innocent aristocratic victims from the politics of the revolutionary national competitor rather than to save the domestic, landless starving poor. This is part of a potent ideology, still in existence, in which a putatively English civilization of humane ‘kindliness’ can stand uncontradicted by hungry working class children.

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The development of a ruling class political passivity, its noninterventionism in economic issues, is accompanied by a temporal signature that marks the performative style of its authority: the timelessness of ‘tradition’. This Burkean conservative romantic myth produces what Michael Gardiner calls the ‘non-time’ of Englishness (Gardiner 2012). This is a time in which things don’t happen, because what needs to happen has already taken place (i.e. the installation of a timeless social order). The new ethics of political economy managed to present itself as timelessly natural, whilst simultaneously ‘customary’ social relations such as paternalism which at least recognised the necessity of access to the ‘commons’ for the poor, were abandoned. Poverty and starvation were transformed by Malthus into moral incentives, determined ultimately by nature’s law, and necessary for godly civilisation to flourish. Under the vigorously prosecuted Great Transformation, greed, promiscuity and idleness, characteristics that can be seen in the Regency culture surrounding Sir Percy, are no longer attached to the ruling class but to a labouring class in need of the iron socio-economic discipline preached by political economy. Such a project, in all its massive historical discontinuity, required enormous ongoing political and ideological effort, vigilance and a commitment to chronic social antagonism which was acceptable so long as it did not develop into acute, open class struggle. The latter of course profoundly occupied the English ruling class in this period. The French revolution, initially well received by the middle classes, had produced English Jacobins. It raised the spectre of a juncture being made between the political and the economic, especially in the politicisation of poverty to be found in the work of Tom Paine and Thomas Spence (McNally 1993, p. 71). Hence the necessity for the counterrevolutionary energetics of the ruling class, and this, despite the inbuilt brake to working-class radical politicisation which the real subsumption of labour to capital was progressively effecting. By 1850, and the decline of the Chartist high tide, working-class political struggle was increasingly locked into ‘economic’ forms because this was the reality of its existence as the process of real subsumption bit deeper (Wood 1985). It was therefore less able to shape itself to make fundamental challenges to what was the increasingly disavowed political manipulation of an apparently autonomous ‘economy’. The implications of the installation of capitalist priorities in the production of a socially unsheltered, landless proletariat, taking their chances in the labour market, along with the revolutionary political pressures of

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the time helped to set the parameters of the ruling class political style, rendering it both complex and paradoxical in nature. The appearance, contrary to the reality of the Great Transformation, was of sporadic light touches in social policy directed by the political agency of the state which on the one hand was required to disavow the social problems necessitating any such action, and on the other hand to maintain a containment of what was constant class antagonism. The bifurcation in ruling class authority figures found in Powell and Pressburger’s films (Sir Percy/The Scarlet Pimpernel in TEP; the Glueman/Culpepper in A Canterbury Tale (1944); Clive Candy/Colonel Blimp in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) are the formal means to explore this paradox of vigorous action and simultaneous inaction. Their films operate as an anatomy of the political aesthetics of this ruling class performance and the ‘characters’ are ciphers of this problem. The necessary appearance of a tight circumscription of the political reach of the ruling class, its detachment from civil society, is maintained in the culture by a licenced eccentricity, apparent inefficiency, and if necessary buffoonery. These are forms of political dissociation which are by no means disturbing, even perhaps reassuring, in a context in which they appear to testify, by contrast, to the security of an autonomously functioning market. Whatever the appearances, an unshakeable belief in the solidity of a bizarrely superintended system remains untouched. This is the ideological achievement of the English ruling class—nowhere more apparent than in the present moment. And this brings us back to the Pimpernel’s historical context. The danger of the French revolution threatened the evolving domestic balance of class forces. Although a tiny national presence, the English Jacobins, occupying innovative working-class democratic political institutions like the LCS, were perceived by the ruling class to be a significant threat. The opposition to the revolutionary French could serve, however, to switch the grounds on which the ruling class political reaction was perceived to operate (i.e. according to issues of nation rather than class). But before we look at how this domestic class antagonism manifests itself in TEP — for it is not obvious—we need to consider Wood’s arguments about the relationship of ideologies of nation and class in the pristine culture of capitalism. Historically, Britain has had …a long history of coherence as a national unit, with a unified state power and a confidently united ruling class, long accustomed to imposing its own

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unity even on non-English parts of the multiple ‘United Kingdom’. (Wood 1991, p. 91)

This early history of the state allowed it …to dispense with a strong ideology of nationhood to underwrite the cohesion of the body politic’ (unlike France for instance). In England, the problem was the erosion of traditional principles of inter-class social cohesion (‘traditional solidarities and customary ties’). (Wood 1991, p. 91)

It was pre-capitalist symbolism that carried the hegemonic burden of securing social cohesion, and this symbolism was organised around class in the pre-modern sense in as much as it was status based and hierarchically organised. This was likely to have been the legacy of the combination of ruling class continuity (i.e. its long control of the state), and its internal metamorphosis within the shift from feudal to capitalist modes of production. As the substance of pre-modern, ‘extra-economic’ principles of juridical or corporate inequality were increasingly unavailable with the precocious development of capitalism, an English ideology of class saturated in archaic imagery and an ‘exaggerated and often ludicrous emphasis on matters of style, culture and language’ was adapted organically to deal with the new circumstances (Wood 1991, p. 37). New wine, old bottles. The English ruling class were the original recyclers. This is the process of cultural revolution with its temporal overlaps of nonsynchronously developing modes of production along with the associated pressures and struggles of continuously adapted and changing cultural identities. It is a process which helps us to see the problem of stadialist conceptions of history, such as that found in the bourgeois paradigm, with its tendency to match preconceived, or ‘Platonic’ class essences to modes of production, and to emphasise the onward march of these historically discrete classes, their succession punctuated by revolutionary breaks. In the case of the English capitalist class, however, an ahistorical, detached essential identity is nowhere in evidence. Indeed in a film like Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going (1945) the capitalist class is precisely characterised by its complex and diverse patterns of cultural identity whose unity is to be found in various interlocking social relations to property.

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The Plain Wrong To fully grasp the articulation of ideologies of class and nation in relation to TEP, I have found it useful to cross Fisher’s post-Marxist analysis of the eerie with Wood’s Political Marxist theses on a pristine culture of capitalism. Fisher’s conceptualisation of the eerie or the strange includes a cognate form, the weird. Both the eerie and the weird enable a culture to explore its outside through the experience of the strange. More than this, for Fisher they ‘allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside’ (Fisher 2016, p. 10) The weird is what does not belong, brought, shockingly, into contact with the familiar. The eerie is the experience of the strangeness of the outside which touches, as we have seen, on enigmatic matters of agency. My interest is in attempting to bring these two affects into a symptomatic relationship with one another in the context of a consideration of the problem of class and capitalism in the pristine culture of capitalism. This will involve considering the weird in relation to the problem of agency. Simply put, the weird offers a useful means for exploring how the English culture of class systematically obscures the issue of class agency. Weirdness, we might say, is the sign of the detachment of the agency of the ruling class from capitalism, and equally, the imprint of the unimaginability of any autonomous, revolutionary working-class political agency. Weirdness benefits the capitalist class, whilst burdening the working class. Thus, the ruling class is itself content to manifest as weird or strange, to provoke and sustain a sense of ‘wrongness’, to appear to be ‘outside’ what it is actually inside. The weird in this sense is no danger to a ruling class that has long needed to appear disconnected in its political existence. However, it disables the interests of the working class who are submitted to a very different judgement of the weird in the event of any attempt to change the status quo. On the one hand, weirdness seems gamely eccentric, admirably transgressive, bold, humorously incongruous and strangely wrong, but not thereby provocative of any sense that existing structures might be obsolete and require fundamental change which as Fisher notes is one of the potentially radical benefits of the weird (Fisher 2016, p. 10). Upper class English weird carries the affective force of the new (or the wrong) but ultimately this shock of the new fits with the old background very comfortably and creates no sense of the need for fundamental change. When put like this, one can see how traditional ruling class Englishness and the tactics of neoliberalism—the taste for the iconoclastic and weirdly new within a procrustean

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capitalism—fit so well together. Weirdness here is a reassuring sign of invulnerability to any possibly negative consequence of inconsistency. It is not then just the Pimpernel that does important service, so too does Sir Percy. The ludicrousness and exhibitionism of the dandy, for all his public faults and absurdities, helps to create a distraction. In this sense, the English ideology of the comedy of class is far more powerful than the pathos of English nationalism. But together Sir Percy and the Pimpernel represent the convergence of the ideology of class and nationalism. The former, however, is the senior hegemonic partner. On the other hand, the working class weird is the inappropriate, the plain wrong. And thus, bold working-class attempts to break the political mould collapse immediately into embarrassment, shame, pretentiousness or the ineffectually risible. Let us now return to the question of how domestic class antagonism manifests itself in TEP and consider its relationship to weirdness. The ‘shock’ for the ruling classes of the 1790s was the weirdness of the emergent spectre of working-class revolutionary activity, the target of a vicious tradition of counter-revolutionary satire, for instance, in the caricatures of James Gillray. This is a tradition Powell and Presssburger have little trouble channelling in their representation of revolutionary mob. It is not, however, by means of the visual but through the soundtrack that the film evokes the weirdness of a domestic revolutionary working class. In the first escape sequence, the Pimpernel passes through a French checkpoint. Following the convention whereby an English language film depicting non-English language speaking subjects translates the foreign speaker into its own tongue, Powell and Pressburger’s French soldiers speak English. But more than this, they reproduce sonic English class caricatures. There is no attempt to use English and simultaneously mimic a ‘French’ accent—thereby muffling and obviating the problem of reproducing such a strong sense of class located Englishness. This is done elsewhere in the film, but interestingly involves the French officer class. In the checkpoint scene, French revolutionary soldiers act out their incompetence in English working-class accents. The undoubted weirdness of this scene is not simply the juxtaposition of the English language and French characters, but what it implies—the preposterousness of the idea of a revolutionary Englishness. That this technique generates such a strong impression is further explained when we recall Wood’s point that Britain is certainly not alone among European nations to identify social classes by means of differential sound patterns in their habits of speech.

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But it is perhaps distinctive in the extent to which sound patterns, the conventions of pronunciation, predominate over other linguistic criteria of difference.’ (Wood 1991, p. 82)

In the English class system, the working class is convicted out of its own mouth, and this occurs as soon as it opens its mouth, regardless of any political insight or rhetorical eloquence, let alone any move to action such words might aim at. Despite Fisher’s theorisation of the weird as the perspective of the outside, there remains then an easily overlooked, but well-established aspect to the experience of the weird from the perspective of the inside, in which its shock is only momentarily challenging and quickly consigned to the humorously incongruous. Here the weird is the effect of a cause which has no claim on us and which we have no interest in. Indeed it can arrest the possibility of a speculation that could transform its strangeness into a consideration of its agency. There is no reason why the weird as the eruption of strangeness should be any less an encouragement to think about agency than the eerie. That it is not associated with agency in this way might lead to the speculation that the affect of weirdness is often attached to strange phenomena which have lost their eeriness. This would explain why the experience of the weird is often an isolated phenomenon, something that does not add up to anything more than a shrug once the shock has worn off. In English class culture, the political agency of the working class has long been associated with a fundamental wrongness, which means that the long history of actual working-class political struggle is often rendered weird, its sparse historical evidence not even making it to the threshold of the eerie. There is, nevertheless, a moment of strangeness in TEP that manages to escape the English class culture we have described in the film. During the sequence of Sir Percy’s and the Prince Regent’s race from London to Brighton, a brief scene interrupts the frantic action of galloping horses. The scene begins with a panoramic landscape: a shepherd in the foreground, his flock clustered tightly around him, looks down at the minute racing figures on the road. Given that the vantage is high up and the figure a stock one, one cannot help feeling, for an instant, the presence of the Pimpernel’s impossible powers of impersonation or body switching. This sensation persists until the counter-shot, a close-up reverse angle of the shepherd’s face, when the uncertainty is resolved through the

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shot’s brevity and apparent choric superfluousness in terms of the narrative action. Genuinely anomalous, the shepherd’s face is neither a lower class mug shot (the caricatural composition used for revolutionaries), nor an act of Pimpernel impersonation. Of course, one understands that it is intended to represent a stock figure straight out of conservative romantic pastoralism. And yet the naturalism of the grimacing face, too subtle in its coding for the stylised mise en scene of the film, is only weakly motivated as a rustic chorus on the elite pastimes. There is a weirdness here, especially given the interpolated scene’s abruptness and largely superfluous disconnection from the action. What is weird is that the obvious rightness of the shepherd in the scene has acquired an inexplicable wrongness. But it remains only a faint weirdness which needs rescuing from conservative romantic iconography which threatens to quickly snuff it out, and this can be done if one holds on to the sense of the image of the shepherd as an enigmatic deposit of a hidden history. Here is an authentic outside to the agrarian capitalist pastoral, for it is the iconography of the commons that ghosts this scene, reproduced, for instance, in the early nineteenthcentury landscape painting of the common land found in artists such as John Crome, John Sell Cotman and David Cox (Waites 2012). These artists were responding to the second phase of enclosure after 1790 which was at its peak at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century and which saw the appropriation of commons, heaths and wastes. Their strain of English naturalism looked to recreate the landscape of disappearing, unimproved open fields through an aesthetic which focused on using panoramic perspective to capture an endless expanse in which land and sky were often indistinctly blended, adding to the sheer terrameteorological volume of the scene. At the same time they were interested in the residual figure of the commoner, sometimes featured as independent and defiant (e.g. John Crome’s shepherd boy in View on Mousehold Heath, 1812), and sometimes as an isolated labourer swallowed up in the sprawling dimensions of what was in the process of being hedged into smaller parcels of privately owned land. These unassimilated and conspicuously residual commoners in wide vistas of heathland resist the pastoral conventions of idealised labour. Part of the strangeness then about Powell and Pressburger’s shepherd, standing isolated except for his sheep in a wide open vista of indistinctly divided land, is that he raises the enigma of disappeared worlds, customs and people, and captures a genuinely puzzling outside looking in perspective. If, therefore, the intended effect was to provide a momentary pseudo-outside to the dazzling unlocatable

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everywhereness of the Pimpernel, to contain the eerie agency of the capitalist ruling class whose restlessness brooks no outside in the comfort of the well-known, stable, timeless social order of the pastoral, then it is an effect which inadvertently backfires, creating an unforeseen weirdness. It needs to be recognised that contemporary cultural theory often seems more entranced by the eerie evidence of capitalism’s agency than it is concerned with picking up on the strangeness of the fragmentary evidence of the history of class struggle. Indeed, Fisher points out that affective strangeness can involve a degree of disengagement. The eerie, for instance, is not necessarily accompanied by distress, horror or terror, it can speak to a certain dissociated calm. By comparison, the affective tone of Linebaugh’s work, and indeed other Marxist figures interested in the history of past class struggle such as Benjamin, does often tend towards distress and horror. The exploration of the affect of terror is a critical part of Linebaugh’s thesis of ruling class thanatocracy which will be explored in Chapter 4 (Linebaugh 2019). The danger in the contemporary moment is that the long history of working-class political agency might remain smothered in a merely bizarre strangeness of plain wrongness that has always been vigorously insisted on by the political Right, but that is increasingly acceded to by the political Left. When the affects of the strange are isolated from the agency of class struggle their political usefulness is weakened. That these affects remain attached to the problem of class struggle can be seen in the very questions Fisher poses to define this strangeness. Indeed, the very same questions are central to Linebaugh’s revolutionary historical materialist romanticism (‘What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved?). For Fisher the enigma of the eerie can be summed up in the chiasmus: why is there ‘something present where there should be nothing’ and why is there ‘nothing present when there should be something’ (Fisher 2016, p. 61). If the first question captures the ‘metaphysics’ of capitalism, the answer to this eerie agency of capital was supplied by Marx’s account of commodity fetishism (Marx 1976). We might suppose that the occulted referent of the second is workingclass revolutionary agency, the absence of which has haunted the Left since the early twentieth century, except now, in the twenty-first century, one begins to feel that this issue of the non-appearance of a revolutionary working class has become a rhetorical question whose answer is presumed to be known—the hopes invested in such an agency were always misplaced. There is a political danger in Fisher’s extension of his

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discussion of the eerie to the new materialist interest in the agency of the immaterial and the inanimate. As Andreas Malm argues, new materialism has a significant tendency to lose any political grasp on the kind of transformative historical agency central to historical materialism. Such theoretical developments are often more preoccupied with finding ways to rebuke or circumvent forms of revolutionary agency formulated in historical materialism in favour of forms of agency—that of Jane Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’ for instance—which are certain to leave us more exposed to the catastrophes induced by fossil capitalism (Malm 2018; Bennett 2010). The contemporary moment is one in which a politics that brings together democratic political forms, class struggle, counter-cultural and multicultural concerns appears theoretically weird, a bringing together of what does not belong together. To that extent, it is interesting to see the outlines of such a convergence in popular cultural texts that operate as a reminder of a lost history. But before we can get to the hopeful figure of the pirate we need to get around the hopeless one of the orc.

References Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Christie, I. 1985. Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. London: Faber. Fisher, M. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books. Gardiner, M. 2012. The Return of England in English Literature. Palgrave: Basingstoke. Jennings, H. 1985. Pandaemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. London: Papermac. Linebaugh, P. 1986. What if C.L.R. James had met E.P. Thompson in 1792? in Buhle, P (ed.), C.L.R. James: His Life and Work. London: Alison and Busby. Linebaugh, P. 1991. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Linebaugh, P. 2019. Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. Oakland: University of California Press. Lowy, M., and R. Sayre. 2002. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Malm, A. 2018. The Progress of the Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. Marx, K. 1976. Capital, Vol 1. London: Pelican.

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McNally, D. 1993. Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso. Polanyi, K. 2002. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Wood, E.M. 1985. The Retreat From Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism. London: Verso. Wood, E.M. 1991. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London: Verso. Waites, I. 2012. Common Land in English Painting 1700–1850. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.

CHAPTER 3

Restitutionist Romanticism: Searching for Lost Lands

Abstract This chapter discusses the problems encountered by ‘restitutionist romanticism’ which is understood in Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre’s terms as a form of romanticism which seeks to restore a precapitalist past (Lowy and Sayre 2002). It looks at the literary work of J. R. R. Tolkien, specifically The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) and The Hobbit (1937) along with the film adaptations of these works by Peter Jackson (2001–2014). In Tolkien’s novels I seek to demonstrate the difficulties that restitutionist romanticism has in establishing the historical difference of a pre-capitalist past in the face of his seduction by a conservative romanticism which systematically conceals the origins of capitalism. In Jackson’s adaptations I am particularly concerned with developing Kristin Whissel’s work on the political aesthetics of digital special effects in order to explore the relationship of Hollywood spectacle to conceptions of historical change and rupture, particularly those referred to under the rubric of the Anthropocene (Whissel 2014). Here restitutionist romanticism appears to be responding to survivalist fears triggered by global capitalism. Keywords Restitutionist romanticism · Tolkien · New verticality · Digital multitude · Anthropocene

© The Author(s) 2020 P. Dave, Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59646-0_3

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With conservative romanticism the journey back to the pre-capitalist past never arrives at its destination because, ultimately, it is content with a present it never truly leaves. Restitutionist romanticism earnestly desires to bring back the pre-capitalist past and thinks itself profoundly discontented with the present, but to realise its quest it needs to understand what has been lost. One piece of textual evidence, and one biographical anecdote sum up this predicament in the life and work of J. R. R. Tolkien. Here is the first line of his last book, Smith of Wootton Major (1967): ‘There was a village once, not very long ago for those with long memories, and not very far away for those with long legs’ (Tolkien 2015, p. 3). The assertion is of a past that is reachable, for those who memorialise it and have will enough to return there. But despite this assertion the destination might be unreachable because of an unexpected, unguarded against detour. For instance, consider the role Sarebole Mill played in Tolkien’s life. This spot was associated with the pastoral idyll of a Warwickshire turn of the century childhood, and Tolkien used his memory of the place for his depiction of Hobbiton in The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) (henceforth LOR). Despite the mill’s use as a mill in his boyhood, its history stretched back to the Industrial Revolution when it had been occupied by pioneering industrialist Matthew Boulton who manufactured steel there. The leafy Shire suddenly flashes, confusingly, with the fires of Mordor and the fallen Isengard. The romantic restitutionist questing for a pre-capitalist past finds itself lost in a history of its own backyard it barely knows. Despite its opposition then to the present, romantic restitutionism can end up in an enchanted country of a conservative nature, not the lost lands it set out for. Fundamentally, restitutionist romanticism is trapped because whilst its sympathies are often for the subordinate, its perspective is that of the ruling class. It is a form of romanticism that struggles to understand both the present catastrophe it is fleeing, and the past whose return it wishes. But conceptually and imaginatively, the challenge facing restitutionism is intense. How does one evoke the ‘pre-capitalist’ past when capitalism denies its own temporally bounded systemic existence? Political Marxism is helpful here: We insist that capitalism as a historically specific social system - as opposed to a universal phenomenon anchored in human nature that manifests itself in a more or less repressed form - does actually exist. (Lafrance and Post 2019, p. 25)

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Restitutionism often imagines the pre-capitalist past as medieval, but the latter is by no means immune to misrepresentation precisely as an embryonic capitalism. The so-called ‘transition debate’ of the 1950s between Marxist historians Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy, and the related ‘Brenner debate’ of the 1970s and 1980s are significant in this respect as they help to clarify the process whereby capitalism developed in the late medieval period into its original ‘agrarian’ form (Dimmock 2014). The work of Wood further helps to explain how this English capitalism developed in the shell of older social and cultural forms (Wood 1999). Taken together, this gives us a historical materialist framework for the explanation of restitutionist romantic confusions—the mixing of old and new in the ‘pristine culture of capitalism’ makes it easy to misidentify the pre-capitalist feudal moment with its successor, early English capitalism (Wood 1991). There remains, however, the issue of whether or not a restitutionist romantic focus on the past is in itself problematic—is it not simply captured by nostalgic delusion leading to reactionary political dead-ends? Here a theoretical defence of a backwards gaze is needed. Ian Baucom, for instance, identifies an important tradition of Marxist historicism (Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson) which provides a counterdiscourse of modernity in which time does not simply pass or progress but accumulates (Baucom 2005). In this redemptive historicism in which the past is not finished and the present and past themselves never discrete or isolated, the present recognises itself in the past, and the past is awakened in the present. The recognition/awakening dialectic is therefore suffused with redemptive hope for a future that might be different from the capitalist present, a future which has realised some of the up till now defeated struggles of the past (Baucom 2005, p. 30).

Middle Earth and the Ruling Class Both Tolkien’s texts and Peter Jackson’s film adaptations—The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), The Return of the King (2003), The Unexpected Journey (2012), The Desolation of Smaug (2013) and The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)—convey a strong impression of civilisational decline and posthumousness. But there are important conjunctural differences behind this shared narrative. Whilst both seek answers to the political problem of the capitalist ruling class— its destructiveness—Tolkien’s vision is coloured by the political fears of

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the early twentieth century, Jackson’s by those of the early twenty-first. Thus, Tolkien’s medievalism idealises the same lordly class which is seen as constitutively unable to desist from wreaking social havoc. History’s movement becomes tragic, involving as it does the decline and diaspora of the higher ‘races’. Jackson’s adaptations in part resist this drift by reversing the textual sequence. He ends the Middle Earth story with the more optimistic first instalment, The Hobbit . The landscapes of Jackson’s films contrast negatively the vertical monumentalism of lordly civilisations with the pastoral attractiveness of earth-bound hobbit dwellings, appearing to seek out peasants without castles, or an idyll of small producers. However, his imagined Shire and the utopia of the elusive pre-capitalist past, remain stuck in the idiom of Tolkien’s conservative romantic ‘merriness’, or the reproduction of an idealised English agrarian capitalism, in which the Bagginses are bourgeois ‘squires’, their gardeners loyal retainers and all social disruption comes as an evil from beyond the country’s borders. In reproducing Tolkien’s conservative romantic vision, Jackson compounds it with a contemporary image of Celtic kitsch. The films are all saturated greens along with fiddles and pipes on the soundtrack, reproducing, seemingly uncritically, the signature of British multinational state imperialism. The view from below and the periphery is in reality a view from above and the centre. However, one key aspect of the literary texts is absent in Jackson’s adaptation—their class politics as expressed for instance at the end of The Return of the King which appears to elide communism with capitalism (Landa 1998). (When Frodo returns to the Shire he finds it overrun by a regime of sinister and tyrannical lower class hobbits.) This is an important difference. The twentieth-century concern with the potential of class struggle to take a revolutionary turn has been lost in the twenty-first century. It is this fear of a revolt from below which renders Tolkien’s restitutionist romantic ideals susceptible to the conservative romantic resolutions, whereas the absence of a ruling class fear of the social depths frees Jackson’s adaptations to explore the more pressing contemporary problem that Mike Davis refers to as the ‘civilisational crisis of capitalism’ and its expression in the form of the ‘anthropocene’ (Davis 2018, p. xxii). With Jackson, an apparently strong restitutionist desire for a return to a pre-capitalist past is driven by a palpable fear of contemporary global capitalism. However, as already pointed out, Jackson chooses to end the story with The Hobbit . The latter’s hopeful allegory of capital reformed and ruling classes reconciled therefore closes the saga. In Tolkien’s story,

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which Jackson stays close to, Bilbo’s renunciation of the Arkenstone, a fabulous jewel casting a spell akin to ‘dragon sickness’ (i.e. possession by rather than possession of private property), helps to avert bloodshed between dwarves and elves (noble races). As Ishay Landa points out, the book operates in this sense as an allegory of the dilemma of twentiethcentury capitalist imperialism (Landa 1998). As a purely moral issue, hinging on Bilbo’s decision, the threat of competitive annihilation can be tamed. No longer structurally endemic but contingent, and therefore open to simplistic or voluntaristic conceptions of historical agency, the problem is responsive to the exemplary actions of heroic individuals. Fellowship of the ruling class remains possible. Tolkien’s resitutionism, as it emerges in LOR, is steadier in its focus than Jackson’s, for despite his political distaste for anything but conservative political arrangements, Tolkien makes Bilbo’s heroic renunciation of The Hobbit inconceivable as a resolution of the problem of the ‘One Ring’. The latter distils the monopolising logic of capital accumulation and all its associated uncontrollability. Allegorically, it indicates that the structural antagonisms of the ruling class itself threaten civilisation. And this political problem of intra-ruling class conflict, presented as the theme of ‘fellowship’, preoccupies Tolkien as irresolvable. We can explore this problem with the help of a Political Marxist optic. If restitutionist romanticism seeks inspiration in the medieval period, what aspects of feudalism are attractive to it? The most important point of contrast between capitalism and feudalism is that the latter does not attempt to separate the economic and political. Surplus extraction by the lordly class is grounded in socio-political coercive power, whilst the peasantry’s relative autonomy and power to resist is grounded in certain norms and customs which capitalism deems irrationally ‘uneconomic’. However, lordly power was affected not just by the securing of its predominance in inter-class relations with the peasantry. There were also horizontal, or intra-ruling class relations to consider. Competition amongst lords for peasants was endemic. According to Brenner this was the lordly class’s ‘Achilles Heel’ (Brenner 2007, p. 91). The solution came in the formation of lordly communities and state building. The English ruling class were favoured by a unique combination of advantages in the context of the late feudal crisis which began towards the end of the thirteenth century. When the secular tendencies of the mode of production such as overpopulation and limited productive capacity combined with contingent shocks of bad weather, famine and epidemics, the ensuing demographic crisis of a

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significantly reduced peasantry led to falling lordly revenues (Dimmock 2014). Owning a large part of the best land and enjoying relative internal cohesion as a class, a unity expressed in its collective compliance with a powerful central state, the lordly class possessed the means to offset their increasing weakness in the context of further competition for reduced numbers of peasants. Control of the land and the maintenance of solidarity mediated through the state enabled it to exit the feudal crisis through its metamorphosis into a capitalist ruling class. That is to say, in response to falling revenue, the lordly class leased large landholdings to substantial peasants (an emerging yeomanry) at competitive market rates, at the same time as it opportunistically exploited its political and juridical power, rooted in its complex relationship to a strong state, to separate the bulk of the peasantry from ownership of the land. Previously secure peasant copyhold possession of their holdings was in this way lost. There ensued a further engrossment of land and an enclosure of commons leaving the landless peasantry no option but to enter the labour market. At which point capitalist agriculture, with its triad of capitalist landlord, tenant farmer and landless labourer, was established. With the capitalist mode of production political domination is visibly separated from a socially disembedded ‘economy’, but this process has disadvantages as well as advantages for the ruling class. It is a challenge to stay in control of a system whose constant development of the forces of production give it a unique historical dynamism that is necessarily socially destabilising. No obvious cushioning is available: ‘no political direction, communal deliberation, custom or religious obligation’ is available to contain and limit such forces (Wood 1995, p. 29). Romantic conservatism’s medievalism projects a pacified image of social relations drawn from an idealised feudalism in order to deal with the endless agitation of capitalist social relations. The sense of fellowship, a social unity of and between the classes, which is impossible under such relations, is at least glimpsed in its apparent feudal afterimage. And in the English case, there is the added support of the historical continuity of the ruling class. The organic transition of that class out of feudalism and into capitalism helps to sustain conservative romantic myths about the nation prospering under the stewardship of an ancient ruling order whose virtuous longevity diverts attention from the brutal disjunctures and bloody, hard-faced opportunism of its actual historical record. Restitutionist romanticism, on the other hand, seeks to isolate the authentically pre-capitalist aspects of feudalism. Even though it is prone to idealise ruling class paternalism

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it remains interested, in a way inconceivable for romantic conservatism, in peasant resistance to the ‘economic’ imperatives of capitalism. It is here that is found the origin of restitutionism’s interest in a culture of custom, rather than ruling class ‘tradition’, an appreciation of the moral economy of complex collective cultures, and an ethically sensitive relationship to nature appalled by the ecocidal indifference of capitalism. This is, of course, the romantic medievalism seen in the socialism of William Morris whose work lurks in the background of the Oxford medievalism of Tolkien and his fellow literary colleagues, the whimsically named Inklings (Carpenter 2006). Tolkien’s contradictions are summed up then in this complex romantic medievalism, caught in the confluence of restitutionist and conservative approaches to anti-capitalism, and some of his most interesting literary inventions, the characterisations of dwarves and hobbits, for instance, are clearly intended as symbolic resolutions of these contradictions. Take The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again. It can be read, against the grain, as expressing a dissatisfaction with romantic conservatism. With Bilbo’s return to the Shire (the ‘back again’ of the novel’s subtitle), we discover that avaricious hobbits, related to him by birth, have stripped him of social personhood and are competing to appropriate Bag End and his possessions. All this on the strength of a social suspicion for anything challenging the status quo. Immovability in space signals social propriety; therefore movement in space, the journeying to the ‘there’ of the subtitle, is socially improper. In such a world even temporary displacement of an individual is grounds for suspicion. Bilbo’s long absence from his place of abode is fatal. The auction of his domestic effects is pure Englishness— the commodification of every last scrap of every single asset. It is the turning out of the English pocket, or the demonstration that the space in which the possessive individual believes themselves most at home is ultimately no more than the last item on the inventory of sale. Likewise the social disorder captured by the appropriation of goods (an eviction scene) gives the lie to the myth of social tranquility found in conservative romantic English pastoral idealism. Compare the beginning of the book. Here, the Bilbo inexperienced in ‘adventures’, a prejudiced, weakly social, grasping bourgeois individual, unwilling to share either his space or his food, encounters the dwarf collective. Dwarves for Tolkien are themselves contradictory class subjects, evocative of both the chivalric lordly class (the pride of Thorin Oakenshield), and the peasantry (those of the company without patronymic who are concerned primarily with survival

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and feasting). These dwarves are also familiar with what Linebaugh refers to as the commons in labour—the Irish ‘meitheal’, that form of collective, cooperative labour which is designed to assist unfortunate individuals in times of need (Linebaugh 2019, p. 200). Consider the cleaning up scene after the party in which dwarves calm the agitated bourgeois domesticity of Bilbo and teach him what can be achieved in collective acts of labour. There is an element of the proletarian dwarves of Disney here. Ultimately the theme of fellowship in LOR is an exploration of the unravelling of the romantic conservative solution to capitalist disorder. The One Ring destroys existing social relations of authority, hierarchy and unity, it even corrodes kinship relations and renders ‘individualism’ tenuous—the motif of the double indicates how the structure of the self becomes auto-mutilating under its influence (e.g. Gollum/Smeagol). There appear to be no existing resources with which the socially destructive powers of the One Ring can be resisted. Indeed, one of the agents of the One Ring’s eventual defeat, the ghostly ‘oathbreakers’ who are redeemed by honouring a pledge to assist Aragon in the battle against Sauron’s armies, might be viewed as a representation of a desperate attempt to turn the problem (the absence of grounds for fellowship in the annihilating, competitive world of the One Ring) into a solution which only serves to further underline the problem. The very structure of the self under capitalism is that of a compulsive oathbreaker. This difficulty helps explain the apparent paradox of the title of the first volume of the LOR—The Fellowship of the Ring —which brings together two mutually exclusive principles. For how can there be a fellowship of the ring? Indeed, the question that the narrative seeks to answer is: can there even be a fellowship against the ring? The destruction of the principle of private property is an impossible proposition for the capitalist ruling class. The title appears then to be a bald assertion of compatibility between fellowship and the ring, and as such gestures to what must be only an ideological resolution of the ‘social’ problem of capitalism. On reflection, however, there are grounds for this ideological act of reconciliation. If we direct our attention to the backstory of the One Ring we note that there was a time when it was part of a functioning system of rings. And even though we are told that the evil Sauron fashioned a single ring to dominate the others, those belonging to the other ‘races’ of Middle Earth, thereby making his One Ring the agent of doom for the system of rings, it remains the case that in this system, all ultimately stand or fall together. The fellowship of the ‘races’ and their associated rings cannot survive the defeat of

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the One Ring. Nation, race, lordly authority, the geopolitics of Middle Earth, are clearly bathed in the glow of what we might recognise as a romantic conservative power structure. And this would explain Tolkien’s elegiacs. A world is ending, regardless of the defeat of the One Ring. An elvish, master-race diaspora is in process and the atmosphere of final partings and farewells dominates the novel’s conclusion. A nostalgia, both racist and elitist, is then part of the ‘fellowship’ which is therefore impossible to describe as entirely ‘against’ the One Ring. Ironically perhaps, it is indeed better described as a fellowship of the ring. The title then encodes the deepest levels of Tolkien’s ideological knot of conservative and restitutionist romantic impulses that cannot avail themselves of revolutionary solutions. The more narratively consistent Fellowship Against the Ring implies a social opposed to the ring system which is just not available to an imagination seeking change from above. Indeed, a fellowship against the ring, in as much as it might conceivably have to come from outside the system of the lordly rings, might originate from below. This is something that Tolkien’s residual romantic conservatism struggles to countenance, and which consequently disturbs the sustained focus of his restitutionist romantic hostility to capitalism. The composite figure of the ‘hobbit’—heroic, but non-chivalric; diminutive in stature, but mighty in courage; touched by the earth, but not base; bourgeois and noble—is, like the similarly complex, indeterminate figure of the dwarf, an attempted resolution to the problem. And this is the reason why, in the end, the fellowship of the hobbits has to be detached from the company of the noble races and make the final confrontation with the ring alone. The same explanation helps us understand the Gollum/Smeagol character. This double shows us both the necessity and impossibility of a fellowship against the ring. For Gollum/Smeagol joins the two remaining hobbits, Frodo and Sam, as the original noble members of the fellowship part company with them. In other words, the fellowship is reduced to its core contradiction with Gollum/Smeagol (which is itself a double of Frodo under the corrupting influence of the ring). Smeagol seeks a redemptive fellowship with Frodo against the ring. But this proves impossible to sustain, to the point that the apparent rejection of the ring by Smeagol simply becomes the means of pursuing its preservation as private property at all costs. Like Smeagol, the capitalist ruling class, despite recognising the need for a solution to the problem of the ring—its ruthless and unlimited social and natural exterminism—is prepared to fight

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like Gollum on the very edge of the abyss of the fiery Mount Doom to hang on to its ‘precious’. The conjunctural difference between Jackson’s films and Tolkien’s texts can be summed up thus: all classes recognised in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century the need for or imminent possibility of systemic social change. This is the reason for the melancholy conservatism of Tolkien’s conclusion to LOR in the subdued sense of partings and departures into uncertain futures. Indeed, the Shire itself is defiled by what appears to be a caricature of communism in Frodo’s absence, even though the latter leaves Bag End (the ancestral home) in the hands of a conservative romantic myth. (Sam Gamgee, the original servant-gardener, takes possession, with all communist hobbits routed.) Here is the critical contrast with the Jackson films in which the fear of the revolutionary lower classes has significantly diminished. None of the Shire’s problems make it into the films. However, the fear of the revolution from below in Jackson’s films has been replaced by an equally profound anxiety—that provoked by capitalism itself as the most ‘uncontrollable’ of the historical modes of production at the moment of its historical triumph. The spectacle of Gollum/Smeagol wrestling with himself above the abyss, impossible to talk down from the precipice’s edge, and falling backwards into the chasm, a beatific expression fixed on the ring as he descends, incapable of anything but indifference to everything else, including his own existence, epitomises this danger of a capitalist class wrestling the problem of capital on its own, without its historic class antagonist. The scene gives us a spectacular example of what film historian Kristen Whissel has called the digital effects emblem of ‘New Verticality’ to which we now turn (Whissel 2014).

Global Capital and the Anthropocene Eric Hobsbawn speculated in his history of the short twentieth century— the period between the outbreak of WWI and the end of the Soviet Union—that without the counterbalance of communism, the Cold War victory of capitalism might prove problematic (Hobsbawm 1994). And indeed, increasingly that victory has seemed pyrrhic. In particular, longterm falling rates of profit and a global expansion of surplus populations have both expressed and exacerbated the structural insecurities of capitalism (Brown 2018). This is the state of affairs that Jackson’s films can be seen responding to. I will discuss the aesthetic form of this response in

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terms of two of Whissel’s digital special effects emblems, ‘New Verticality’ and the ‘Digital Multitude’ (Whissel 2014, p. 59). I will also attempt to relate a discussion of aerial landscape cinematography to these emblematic forms. Cumulatively, these aesthetic features mediate the thesis of the ‘Anthropocene’. The latter has become, as Andreas Malm argues, a central focus for what appears to be the era’s political unconscious— climate change (Malm 2018, p. 14). For Malm, the Anthropocene allows us to explore the interlinked problems of fossil capital, historical agency and global catastrophe. New Verticality is described by Whissel as an emblem common to a range of contemporary blockbusters locating characters and narrative events within spaces stretching from dizzy heights to abysmal depths (Whissel 2014). There are many such examples in Jacksons’ films, for instance Gandalf’s imprisonment in the tower at Isengard and his plunge into the deeps of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring ; and the view from the battlements of Minis Tirith, and from the precipices of Mount Doom in The Return of the King . The Digital Multitude refers to the frequency of the image of ‘being overwhelmed by numbers, of being besieged by a (digital) aggregate in which the multiple is one’ (Whissel 2014, p. 59). Typically, in Jackson’s adaptations this effects emblem manifests in the digitised massed armies of orcs and other grotesque agents of Middle Earth threatening to annihilate small groups of the virtuous and besieged. In order to understand the ideological relationship between these two emblems of verticality and multitudinousness—unremarked on by Whissel—it is necessary to consider the problem of historical agency. For Perry Anderson, when modern human collectives began pursuing projects of self and social transformation they initiated ‘a new kind of history, founded on an unprecedented form of agency’ (Anderson 1976, p. 20). He has in mind the efforts of modern labour movements and the revolutionary upheaval of Russia in 1917. This kind of agency is unprecedented because it is not simply the everyday agency of social and self-reproduction. If the notion of agency is ‘conscious goal-directed activity’, then the private goals of personal projects are not historical in the revolutionary sense as they are ‘inscribed within existing social relations and typically reproduce them’ (Anderson 1976, p. 19). There have been collective or individual projects that are public and which rather than representing a ‘molecular sample of social relations’ demonstrate ‘will and action’ as significant ‘causal sequences’ (Anderson 1976, p. 19). However,

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the latter are largely ‘not aimed to transform social relations as such— to create new societies or master old ones’, and the goals pursued have been ‘inserted within a known structural framework, taken for granted by the actors’ (Anderson 1976, pp. 19–20). None of this might have been necessary to detail if it wasn’t for the contemporary sense of a disappearance of the central agent associated with Anderson’s concept of historical agency, the proletariat. It is a disappearance that has its context in the victory of neoliberal capitalism over organised labour and the collapse of twentieth-century communism. This weakening of our collective sense of the possibility or plausibility of historical agency can also be seen in theoretical developments such as new materialism which in giving ‘agency’ to things blurs the difference between the non-intentional autonomy of the natural world and human conscious, self-reflective historical agency. As Malm argues, such a move represents a deepening capitulation to the alienation induced by capitalism—humans are swallowed up in a universal ‘thing-power’ (Malm 2018, p. 218). How does the issue of historical agency enter into our two digital effects emblems? New Verticality is most frequently characterised by the spectacle of frenetic and exhilarating activity. This can be passive or active—falling or leaping upwards. It is often organised around precipice space and is necessarily therefore restricted to individuals, or very small groups exposed to the sublime terrors of extreme ascent and descent. These pleasures mark out a field of action which enables the exploration of the polarised social environments of neoliberalism: from the heights of power and privilege to the depths of anonymous misery and individual annihilation. A good example is the film Limitless (2011). The ‘buzz’ of verticality is the activity itself. Bi-directional motion dominates, thus characters are not restricted to one extreme or the other of a polarised social—or even any fixed task or goal that might be associated symbolically with such locations. This is not to say that the emblem does not fit into individual films’ goal-directed narrative action. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that blockbuster narratives are ideally constructed as franchised meta-narratives and are adapted to a process of sequelisation and prequelisation in seemingly endless iterations. As such, the stakes of any given narrative are pretexts, disposable, quickly forgotten, or reconfigured in the endlessness of agitated action which is central to the blockbuster aesthetic. For Whissel New Verticality evokes the ‘individual’s relationship to powerful historical forces’ (Whissel 2014, p. 27). Vertical movements stand for the rupture of historical continuity in the spectacle

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of dynamic action which ‘radically changes the course of events’ (Whissel 2014, p. 27). But we need to consider carefully the understanding of history and agency underlying such statements. Whilst New Verticality emblematically stages rupture, this occurs in textual systems in which the dynamic polarised field appears metastable. The social environments represented often seem to capture neoliberal realities, as Whissel argues. However, in this regard one needs to remember that revolutionary historical agency is something alien to such societies in which ‘capitalist realism’ has become the norm (Fisher 2009). By contrast Whissel argues that New Verticality is an ‘emblematic expression of a desire to change the course of history, to precipitate a new future’ (Whissel 2014, p. 45). This is certainly a defensible reading. However, as she also demonstrates in key examples, like The Matrix (1999), such films often end inconclusively. Perhaps then the exhilaration of the simultaneity of bi-directional motion is symptomatic of not so much a desire for breakthrough into another world, but of an experience of contained, if dynamic and erratic, social and political energy. The overall sense of balance, a lack of decisive outcomes, the ongoing tension between ‘polarised forces’ are marked (Whissel 2014, p. 47). What appears on the surface to be zero-sum conflict, punctuated by vertical movements, the agon of winners and losers upon which the course of history rests, turns out to be less than decisive. Not so much last battles and more endless ones in which positions of defeat and victory are infinitely exchangeable and therefore never final. This synchronic logic emblematises the repetition of acts of disruption in a world which itself never changes. Diachronic succession is undermined in favour of an eternal see-saw of polar extremes, an oscillation which acquires a circularity, ‘revolution’ precisely in the pre-modern political sense. Here endings without an end become the dispiriting, demoralising truth of the exhilarating spectacle. This paradoxical sense of permanence projected by an emblem so invested in dynamic movement helps us to see something about our neoliberal era in terms of the transformation of the idea of historical agency defined in Anderson’s terms. And that is, the sense of change and rupture, once associated unproblematically with such an idea, is now to be understood very differently. As forms of permanent agitation, the energies of New Verticality are expressive of neoliberal work regimes and lifestyles. Ours is an era in which volatilities, reversals and sudden changes of direction are routine experiences. From the micro to the macro level of the socio-economic and political order such experiences coexist with a sense of fixed horizons.

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And this inversely proportional relationship between frenetic activity (a newly developed category of agency) and history (in the modern sense of transformative action) allows us to understand the relationship between New Verticality and the Digital Multitude. That is to say, the horizontality of the Digital multitude, such as we see in the massed ranks of orcs and uruk hai that blot out the horizon line in Jackson’s recreations of Tolkien’s battle scenes, is not the horizontality of the modern mass or crowd, as described for instance in the anthropology of Elias Canetti, or the political theorisation of Jodi Dean, where the emphasis is on the crowd effect as a fundamental experience of equality and solidarity that raises the intense anticipation of the possibility of systemic transformation (Canetti 1962; Dean 2016). It is as if New Verticality has appropriated the intoxicating energy of the experience of modernity, transforming in the process those whose very being once seemed to lie outside and challenge the vertical axis. The modern ‘crowd’ has become the pre-modern ‘horde’. As Jeffrey Schnapp puts it: Premodern multitudes [have] long been imagined as elemental hordes to be shaped and subjugated from on high. Modern multitudes were instead the volatile protagonists of a volatile era, leaders themselves as well as breeding grounds for new forms of leadership and individualism. (Schnapp 2006, p. 3)

The orc armies of Jackson’s films are hordes in the sense that their masses are seen as malleable products of external powers, the evil Sauron and Saruman who raise and direct these armies from the summits of their two towers. Modern crowds, of which those of the Russian revolution are paradigmatic, acquire historical agency (in relationship with the political party). In displacing horizontality as the ‘cinematic being-in-the-world’— Whissel dates this to the early 90s, the period of the entrenchment of neoliberal regimes—New Verticality signals the eclipse of the modern revolutionary conception of history and projects a horde as the accompaniment of its fall (Whissel 2014, p. 28). But the Digital Multitude emblematises this regression in historical agency not just in its instrumental manipulability. There is also a parody here of the older idea of the force of past and subsequently occluded defeats of the proletariat whose unrealised ideals gather intensity and strength over time, until their moment arrives in a decisive act of confrontation with the powers of oppression. For the imminence of the overwhelming threat

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and disaster projected by the Digital Multitude is always anti-climatic. The old order is providentially saved, the multitude swept away, the horizon cleared. Last-minute rescue and survival intervenes, and what was ‘too late’—hope for the ruling order—becomes transformed into timely rescue. Both Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit adaptations are constructed dramatically around such appearances and disappearances of the multitude. In other words, the Digital Multitude, just like New Verticality, signals the persistence of the old regime as much as its inexorable surpassing or defeat. And here it is useful to consider the concept of the Anthropocene which itself represents a knot of many contradictions including those of opposed assessments of historical agency and change, alongside the problem of the relationship of the category of universal humanity to class and capitalism. The Anthropocene’s emergence as a category represents a recognition of the prodigious and enduring agency of humans in relation to the planet’s ecosystems, but at the same time, it hangs over humanity like an ironic notification of a future anterior in which we have been reduced to a geological residue, a future fossil, one tragically signifying the degree to which we have become our own global civilisation’s hapless victims. This aspect of the Anthropocene is nevertheless concealed or disavowed through a fetishistic celebration of that same global civilisation of fossil capitalism. Buried within it, then, the Anthropocene sums up both an expansion of the power of human agency and its simultaneous contraction as evidenced in the debility of the political will and means to alter direction in the light of global warming. Not just effecting, but even imagining historical change in such circumstances becomes an irresolvable problem. Mainstream film explores the dilemma signalled by the Anthropocene in disaster genres and the spectacle of crashing civilisations. Even though disaster spectacle is ultimately a spectacle of effects rather than causes, such genres help to expose the pretensions of ostensibly universal progressive narratives of historical development found in stadial conceptions of history. In other words, Hollywood disaster spectacle suggests universal apocalypse but limited, socially selective survival. And this, of course, is one important political critique of the Anthropocene—that its apparent universalism conceals causal responsibilities for the catastrophes of a warming world and the unevenness and injustice of the suffering such disasters bring about (Clarke 2011). The Anthropocene allows us to reflect then on a stadialism giving way to a stalled, infernal and infinite

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repetition of the capitalist mode of production which is nowhere more apparent than in neoliberal environmentalism. And here we find a peculiar analogy to the kind of activity we picked up in the contemporary over-exposure of the New Verticality emblem. As Robert Fletcher argues, neoliberal environmentalism is profoundly invested in the eco-catastrophe it superficially appears to address (Fletcher 2018). This can be explained through the pseudo-agency mapped in the Lacanian concepts of drive and disavowal. Neoliberal environmentalism, defined as the promotion of capitalist market mechanisms as solutions for what is recognised to be the problem created by capitalism, claims to want to address the ecocrisis, and at the same time carry on as usual. Domestic recycling is a fitting emblem of this circularity whereby some action is taken in recognition of a problem precisely in order to carry on the largely unconscious complicit attachment to the problem. Such disavowal helps to produce a situation characterised by the stalled psychic economy of the drive. For Lacan, the drive moves away from the lost object of desire to attach itself to the experience of this loss itself, in other words, it is addicted to failure. Here it is failure to achieve the apparent object of desire (saving the planet) that becomes the perverse object of desire, and this leads to a destructive repetition of ‘futile behaviour’ and a disavowal of the negative effects of that behaviour (Fletcher 2018, p. 60). For Žižek, capitalism operates on the level of desire within consumer culture to constantly produce commodities for the satisfaction of new, excessive, and perverse desires, and on the more profound, systemic level of the drive, to keep us attached to a process which manifestly fails to provide satisfaction, thereby securing the ‘circular drive to accumulate for the sake of accumulation’ in a situation in which on some level we recognise the eco and social catastrophes emerging out of this logic (Fletcher 2018, p. 61). This explains how we can continue to fail to act effectively. Such psychic scenarios appear to have relevance to the pseudo-historical agency of New Verticality whose frenetic and exhilarating action only appears to signal breaks in the historical continuum and in actuality coexists with a world which remains unchanged. Working as a motor for a lethal status quo, the wild oscillations of disavowal and the drive, create an enjoyment that is an accomplice to catastrophe. Take a typical example of this phenomenon: the blockbuster Geostorm (2017). An orbiting planetary network of satellites, coordinated by an international space station which is run by the US, but which is due to be handed over to the international community, controls the

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Earth’s weather systems and protects its populations. The full majesty of the civilisation of fossil capitalism is on display here—rocketry, space technology, geoengineering along with its controlling political elites. So it is no surprise when this grand system becomes weaponised and threatens a geostorm, the very thing it is designed to prevent. The terms of this scenario lay bare the paradox of neoliberal environmentalism. The structural causes of the warming world are offered as its solution. However, at the same time we are encouraged to recognise this suicidal contradiction of the civilisation of fossil capitalism, it is disavowed. Thus, the dangers of the system which is designed to provide human safety are associated with a malfunctioning agent—a rogue White House chief of staff—whose dispatch restores the system to its proper functioning. In this way the film demonstrates how disaster spectacle exists in a strange temporality. With it we always emerge in a time before the catastrophe we are actually in because it is ‘never too late’ to rescue ourselves. What this ‘never too late’ achieves is the suspension of purposive action by sending us back to the beginning of our predicament, or the time before we recognise that we are entangled in its consequences as the very precondition of purposive action. In other words, we are delivered up to the circular or stalled time of disavowal. Another way of putting this is to say that the galvanising ‘too late’ of the crisis of the warming world becomes the paradoxically demotivating ‘never too late’ of environmental neoliberalism. For as earth scientists repeatedly remind us, remedial action now needs to recognise that it takes place in the context of unfolding disasters it cannot resolve, only mitigate. And of course what the ‘never too late’ protects from scrutiny is the system—fossil capital—that is the causal mechanism of catastrophe. In this way, always apparently beyond the reach of a disaster we have come to inhabit, we enjoy its spectacle, as we continue to bring it down on ourselves. We have to go to the eco-Marxism of Kim Stanley Robinson to see our way around this problem. In his novel Aurora (2015) the narrative appears premised on a similar disavowal of the planetary dilemma. The solution to a warming world is to migrate to another solar system with the assistance of advanced technology. The narrative then confronts the science fiction techno-fantasy with the banality of natural necessity. The immunological incompatibility of the human refugees with their new home spells disaster for interstellar migration. The idea of refractory nature is important because it is a large part of what is disavowed in neoliberal environmentalism. As Malm reminds us, it is our inability to

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control the disproportionate natural feedback mechanisms of the warming world which remains our dilemma regardless of any ingenious actions we take to save ourselves. Thus, rather than build his narrative around the reified technological fix, Robinson reverses the narrative, sending a spaceship of human refugees back to Earth. This is a different return to the beginning than that which we find in the ‘never too late’ of disaster spectacle. Robinson’s voyagers suggest, in their action of return, that it is too late to start again with a fresh new world which even now remains capitalism’s enduring vision of the promise of nature. They have returned to the contradictions and consequent struggles of life in a warming world, but in this return to their starting point, they are no longer captured by the looped and paralytic pleasures of disavowal. To return to Jackson’s films, the Digital Multitude, as Whissel describes it, carries the temporal signature of the predicament of the warming world. That is to say, as Malm argues, fossil capital’s effects have been subject to historical occultation up until relatively recently, and now they are cascading down on the global ecosphere with the suddenness of a remorseless and overwhelming force containing all the might of nature’s turbulent feedback. This process of slow development followed by the sudden appearance of the signs of imminent apocalypse describes the lifecycle of the Digital Multitude. As Gandalf says looking out from Minas Tirith and in expectation of the arrival of the orc armies: ‘this is not the weather of the world’. The apocalypse represented by the Digital Multitude can be further explored through Jameson’s famous statement about the impossibility of imaging the end of capitalism, in comparison to the ease with which we can imagine the end of the world (Jameson 1992). The emblem suggests the terms of a more detailed specification of this peculiar situation, but it involves putting the two apparently dissociated acts of imagination into a dialectical relationship, which was surely the unstated intention of Jameson’s paradox. For how can one imagine any end of the world that would not involve the end of capitalism? The answer lies in an unconscious investment in the imagination of capital’s impossible agency. Impossible because capitalism seeks to imagine itself able to outlive the forces whose powers it appropriates, whose very existence it depends on, and which it is prepared to abandon to destruction. Those forces are labour and nature. There is disavowal here. We all know, as Jameson’s statement makes clear, that we are heading towards destruction, yet we persist in our attachment to a fundamental belief in the salvational powers of the agent of destruction itself. There is also a sense

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of Lacan’s drive. Although it is not stated explicitly in Jameson’s observation, there is a secret enjoyment linking the spectacle of disaster to our ongoing commitment to the capitalist system. The endless end of the world is fun as well as hellish. What is also notable about Jameson’s formula is that it precludes any new desires or fantasies that might help to detach us from our fascination with the end of the world, and reattach us to a world other than that of capitalist imperialism. In other words, Jameson is describing the nightmare situation in which authentic historical agency is lost. The inability to imagine capitalism’s end might then be reformulated as the inability to imagine its end as described in classical Marxism. The challenge of the Anthropocene, however, can help to spur the re-grounding of authentic historical agency by forcing a recognition of nature’s autonomous powers. It is the eeriness of a nature which we struggle to anticipate and conceptualise which wraps up human history in the feedback loops of its necessities. To recognise this force of nature as part of the moment we call Anthropocenic, helps to break the attachment to the phantom agency of capitalism, an agency which as Jameson indicates somehow convinces us of its ability to outlast even the apocalypse. By contrast the recognition of the ‘too late’ of an autonomous natural necessity and its by now unregulatable blowback in our warming world, can become the means by which the old fantasies of fossil’s capital’s salvational omnipotence can be surpassed. Finally, it is important to consider the contribution of aerial landscape cinematography to these problems of capitalism, apocalypse and the Anthropocene. Much of the action in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies involves journeying and pursuit across panoramically composed landscapes in which a high altitude perspective gives us geohistorical spectacle as a kind of homogenised temporal abyss in which we sense sentient, creatural significance slipping into insignificance. Such cinematography suggests a deep ecology perspective for which the Anthropocene is perhaps ironically named because nature in the geohistorical sense so far exceeds human time, even in terms of the latter’s geological manifestation. Indeed, as we have noted, the Anthropocene marks a future disappearance as much as a geological appearance for the anthropos. But more insistently there is an element of restitutionist romanticism in this aerial cinematography which betrays a significant contemporary development in the use of the romantic trope of pre-capitalist nature. If restitutionism once sought to go back before capitalism, to what was associated with an idea of a changeless, ever

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pristine nature, such a move, in the context of what Malm calls ‘historicised nature’ is unconvincing (Malm 2018, p. 72). Historicised nature gives us a complex, interconnected field of human agency and nature’s autonomous action and reaction. Thus, the more humans have historically shaped nature, the more intensely has nature come to affect their lives. This paradox, which is the lesson of the warming world of fossil capitalism, leaves the option for the mythical pastoral synchronisation of the human and the natural out of the question for any contemporary restitutionist romantic anti-capitalism. But this is a temptation that Jackson’s films find hard to resist. The location shooting in New Zealand appears to be exploiting the idea that distance in space represents distance in time in order to evoke a landscape image of pre-capitalist nature. That is to say, New Zealand’s relative geographic peripherality is being used to escape to a place where capitalism’s despoliations cannot reach and a landscape that allows us to settle into the security of the deep past, like nestling fossils of ourselves. At the same time this restitutionist impulse is mixed with a very different, conservative romantic survivalism, figured by the little platoons of the racially ‘elect’ making their journeys of escape and resistance in the immensity of the empty landscape caught in the aerial cinematography. And this is ironic as neoliberal ideologues and plutocrats have had the same idea about the New Zealand wild, purchasing large tracts of it as potential bunker space. The belief in freedom as the utopianism of global enclaves shielded from fossil capitalism’s many disasters only strengthens the latter’s global grip. The Anthropocene, understood as a salutary thought experiment of a world in which the change the human represents is a change the human cannot survive, although preferable to fantasies of romantic conservative survivalism, is also problematic because it conceals through a false universalism that exterminist—ecocidal and genocidal—tendency in capitalism which certainly can imagine a world without ‘us’ but not a world without ‘itself’. In other words, there is an aspect of the Anthropocenic imagination, annexed to neoliberal environmentalism, which brings up to date a traditional Malthusianism in which excess populations are dealt with by nature’s impartial hand, which, locking them out of the great feast they cannot contribute to through their own failings of indigence and excessive fertility, consigns them to inexistence. As Malthus puts it, such folk have ‘no business to be where they [are]’ (Malthus in McNally 1993, p. 88). The ‘end’ imagined in the Anthropocenic turn of the neoliberal imagination is the end of the twentieth-century idea of universal social progress,

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of the masses of modernity, and not the end of capitalism, particularly given the existence of plutocratic survivalism. The emptiness then of the landscape in Jackson’s films, both prior to the emergence of the Digital Multitude and after its disappearance, is a political sign in need of decipherment. For the problem represented by this multitude, which is ultimately an emblem for the surplus populations of late capital, or the product of what Marx referred to as ‘the general law of capitalist accumulation’, cannot be easily dovetailed into what might be called an anthropocenic pastoral (Marx 1976). The emptiness of the later reprises the pastoral of early English capitalism in which the improved landscape represented the aesthetic form of the synchronised laws of nature and the market whose achievement was to disappear all traces of those with no business to be in the scene. However, in the era of late capitalism there is always the uneasy feeling that the empty scene heralds the imminent importunate arrival rather than easy or providential dismissal. And to this extent the polyvalence of the Digital Multitude’s peculiar temporal signature (occulted past, eruptive present) also suggests Linebaugh and Rediker’s revolutionary romantic synchronicity of nature and labour and their Atlantic long wave (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). The opening to The Many Headed Hydra notes that waves breaking at Land’s End travel from as far away as Newfoundland, Florida and the West Indies (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). The power of such waves resides in the relationship between their originating wind speed and duration and the length of their fetch or the distance they travel from their origin. The longer the fetch the more powerful the wave. However, and crucially, such waves are only visible when they break. As mid-Atlantic swells they are largely invisible on the surface until they make landfall. Linebaugh and Rediker correlate these Atlantic long waves with the political aspirations of their historical project. Their message is that it needs to be remembered that the often apparently puny and transatlantically dispersed efforts to challenge the imperial capitalist order behind the long bloody history they have documented, may still be passing through a period of indiscernibility, even now, akin to an Atlantic long wave. The redemptive, hopeful poetico-political guiding structures provided by Linebaugh and Rediker in their Atlantic long wave are shadowed by the more disturbing temporal rhythms of delay and overwhelming arrival that characterise the profoundly intertwined natural and human interactions of the history of fossil capital as it eventuates in the warming world of the Anthropocene. Equally, as Malm argues, it is important to avoid

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what Anderson refers to as the ‘romanticisation of proletariat revolt’ that might be inferred from the poetic synchronisation of labour and nature in the Atlantic long wave: Major blowbacks happen in specific historical conjunctures, when the displaced and condensed contradictions come to the fore in explosive unity, for labour as for nature - but these two, needless to say, follow their own rhythms, with no tendency to synchronicity. If the conjuncture of the 1960s and 1970s was characterised by the flare-up of labour, we seem to be heading deeper into one determined by the turbulence of nature. (Malm 2018, pp. 206–207)

With this warning noted, it remains the case that the empty space and clear horizon, and the full space and dark horizon remain connected. Clamouring excess bodies cannot ultimately be economically resolved (and aesthetically pacified) through the magic of the market, and the storms of a warming world cannot be outmanoeuvred by any geoengineered machine.

References Anderson, P. 1976. Arguments Within English Marxism. London: Verso. Baucom, I. 2005. Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Duke: Durham. Brown, N. 2018. Postmodernism, Not Yet: Towards a New Periodisation. Radical Philosophy, no. 2.01. Brenner, R. 2007. Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong. In Marxist History Writing for the Twenty First Century, ed. C. Wickham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Canetti, E. 1962. Crowds and Power. London: Gollanz. Carpenter, H. 2006. The Inklings; C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. London: HarperCollins. Clarke, N. 2011. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage. Davis, M. 2018. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory. London: Verso. Dean, J. 2016. Crowds and Party. London: Verso. Dimmock, S. 2014. The Origins of Capitalism in England 1400–1600. Brill: Leiden. Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books.

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Fletcher, R. 2018. Beyond the End of the World: Breaking Attachment to a Dying Planet. In Psychoanalysis and the Global, ed. I. Kapoor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Hobsbawm, E. 1994. The Short Twentieth Century: 1914–1991. London: Vintage. Jameson, F. 1992. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia Press. Lafrance, X., and C. Post. 2019. Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Landa, I. 1998. Slaves of the Ring: Tolkien’s Political Unconscious. Historical Materialism 10 (4): 13–33. Linebaugh, P. 2019. Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. Oakland: University of California Press. Linebaugh, P., and M. Rediker. 2000. The Many Headed Hydra; Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press. Lowy, M., and R. Sayre. 2002. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Malm, A. 2018. The Progress of the Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. Marx, K. 1976. Capital, Vol 1. London: Pelican. McNally, D. 1993. Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique, London: Verso. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1995. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins. Tolkien, J.R.R. 2015. Smith of Wootton Major. London: HarperCollins. Robinson, K.S. 2015. Aurora. New York: Orbit. Schnapp, J.T. 2006. Crowds. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Whissel, K. 2014. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Wood, E.M. 1991. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. London: Verso. Wood, E.M. 1995. Democracy Against Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, E.M. 1999. The Origin of Capitalism. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 4

Romantic Revolutionary Historiography: The People and the Commons

Abstract This chapter looks at revolutionary romantic historiography in the work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Reducer (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000; Linebaugh 2019). In particular it seeks to demonstrate the way Linebaugh develops the concept of the ‘commons’ as a means to construct his revolutionary histories from below. In order to illustrate the characteristic Atlantic history opened up by Linebaugh’s perspective of the commons I consider the political aesthetics of landscape in relation to classical political economy and in terms of revolutionary romantic historiography. I also explore the relation of Linebaugh’s study of the revolutionary Atlantic world Red Round Globe Hot Burning (2018) to Walter Benjamin’s account of the ‘storyteller’ (Benjamin 1982) as well as the relationship of Linebaugh and Rediker’s histories of the Atlantic to the Hollywood blockbuster series Pirates of the Carribean, focusing on Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and At World’s End (2007). The chapter ends with a discussion of Warren Harrison’s documentary The Creek (2018) which focuses on an abandoned estuarial commons in the north east of England. I show how the film helps us to conceptualise the psychic economy of the commoner in terms that contrast with the psychic economy of capitalism as described by Todd McGowan (McGowan 2016). Keywords Revolutionary romanticism · Linebaugh · Storyteller · Commons · Pirates · Atlantic

© The Author(s) 2020 P. Dave, Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59646-0_4

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If you can narrate, you have either won or given yourself a fighting chance. If you can’t, you’ve lost. (Hartley 2018)

The ominousness of Jackson’s massed orcs is immediately dispelled when they move from the visual to the acoustic. Speaking the idiom of nineteenth-century cockney they suggest the comic impossibility of working-class political collectives endowed with historical agency There has been no change here, from Powell and Pressburger’s English revolutionary half-wits to Jackson’s twenty-first-century updating of Tolkien’s Burkean conservative romanticism. Jackson’s condensation of debased labour and tempestuous nature, the digitally multiplying roiling masses of dark bodies, is an image composed from above, from the vertical rock faces of the fortresses of civilisation. This multitude’s defeat represents the impossible emancipation that the capitalist class has always sought from the twin sources of its borrowed powers. The pirates of the Pirates of the Carribean series (henceforth POC ), however, suggest the terms of a revolutionary project that involves seeking the liberation of an international proletariat and a debased nature from a thanatocratic imperial capitalism. Linebaugh’s historiography can be seen to make a contribution to such a project, and we will explore his innovations as a historian before considering the ways in which his work, and that of his collaborator and historian of the Atlantic maritime world, Marcus Rediker, helps to resuscitate the revolutionary romantic challenge residing in the popular cultural afterimages of this history (Rediker 2014).

The Commons and the Anthropocene An important part of the contemporary strain of revolutionary romanticism represented by the work of Linebaugh and Rediker is that it insists on expanding the temporal and spatial frameworks within which the history of nations and classes is located. In redeeming anti-capitalist struggles of the past and in connecting the sites of such struggle in ways that previous historians have failed to do, Linebaugh and Rediker attempt to find ways to realise the promise of modernity along with the freedoms of authentic popular sovereignty and substantive equality that capitalist modernity has frustrated. The key concept Linebaugh has used to focus this strain of revolutionary romanticism is that of the commons . In Red Round Globe Hot Burning (henceforth RRGHB) he brings the commons into alignment with a neocatastrophist geohistory of

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the Anthropocene (Linebaugh 2019). As Jeremy Davies argues, it is only recently that geohistory, itself a product of the romantic and revolutionary late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries, has seen a displacement of a gradualist model of change by one dependent not just on ‘slow, continuous processes’ but equally on cataclysmic change (Davies 2016, p. 29). Such a reconceptualisation is an important challenge to conservative romantic models of organic gradualism with their preference for ‘slow physical process, like sedimentation and erosion’ (Davies 2016, p. 29). Change for the gradualist—fluctuations in planetary temperatures for instance—disappears into a geological past understood as a ‘limitless repository of the natural’ (Davies 2016, p. 24). This view creates an image of ‘ageless harmony’ in which all fluctuations are evened out in the ‘beautiful, organic wholeness of planetary deep time’ (Davies 2016, p. 25). The neocatastrophist turn in earth sciences, however, maintains that geohistory is more than a description of ‘stable natural processes endlessly reproducing themselves, but a field of action dense with contingent success and catastrophes’ (Davies 2016, p. 26). Davies characterises this geohistory in terms of its ‘drama’ and ‘epic adventure’ (Davies 2016, p. 28). It forms an ‘immense and circumstantial pageant’ punctuated by catastrophic events such as the Chicxulub bolide that wiped out the dinosaurs (Davies 2016, p. 28). For Davies, the ‘anthropocene’ belongs in this neocatastrophist frame. Before we discuss the relationship of the commons and the Anthropocene in Linebaugh’s work we need to explore the concept of the commons in more detail. We can begin by noting the differences between land, country and commons. In its pre-modern, folkloric senses, the ‘land’ suggests different emphases to the territorially bounded nationstate, supplying an impression of that which always strains or outruns the borders of defensive modern polities (This is part of the fascinating tension underlying Jacquetta Hawkes’s post-war neo-romantic vision of the nation in her book, A Land.) (Hawkes 2012). Which is not to say the word doesn’t contain ambiguities. ‘Land’, like ‘country’, is often used in the figurative sense of nation and has meanings cognate with people (our ‘land’ or ‘homeland’ being the space of the national gens ). Nevertheless, land also lends itself to configurations that do not fit with the limited temporal, spatial and geopolitical perspectives of such romantic conservative nationalisms. The concept of the ‘commons’ acts as a bridge here. In their work on the history of the Atlantic, Linebaugh and Rediker demonstrate the existence of a commons throughout the Atlantic world. Indeed,

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the idea of the integrated domain of land and sea—the terraqueous — becomes a critical addition to their internationalist revolutionary romantic historiography of the Atlantic. The commons finds its antithesis in land understood in the romantic conservative sense as capitalist property within a capitalist market where it is an absolute possession of its individual owner—to be marked or fenced off for exclusive use. The enclosure of the commons forms the history of the disappearance of this land into the capitalist national market. With market and nation themselves becoming coterminous in the romantic conservative category of the country, the latter is revealed as the subordination of land to capitalist logics of engrossment and ‘improvement’. This is something made abundantly clear in the English culture of the pastoral. However, at the same time, the country as countryside is the aesthetic form which superficially separates land as nature from the urban domain, helping to create the illusion that capitalism truly exists in some extra-pastoral beyond, kept out by safe boundaries. Of course this is to confuse the actual historical sequence in which English capitalism developed in the agricultural domain. Such confusions are part of the de-narrativisation of the land from above. As commons the land came to those who worked it in a form indissociable from the collectively transmitted customs that prescribed its uses. Despite the emphasis on ‘tradition’ conservative romanticism belongs to the culture which extinguished such customs, a process which can be related to the stopped paths and rights of access whose ghostly presence in poetry (John Clare, William Blake, Oliver Goldsmith) and in painting (John Constable, David Cox, John Crome), for instance, suggest the traces of the toing and froing of the itinerant experience of labour which forms the basis of a precapitalist storytelling. Instead, conservative romanticism steeps the land in an uchronic past—an idealised fictive ‘merrie’ England handed down from above. In this way the historical novelty of capitalism is concealed in the very space of its emergence. This provides a compelling explanation for the peculiarly English cultural phenomenon of the conjoined eerie and merrie in the countryside, or that generic entwining of the gothic and the pastoral discussed by Michael Gardiner as a notable aspect of British literature (Gardiner 2012). In film its locus classicus is Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944). So, to return to our earlier point, why does Linebaugh’s historical conception of the commons seek out the neocatastrophist turn in earth sciences? The answer is complicated. On a most general level,

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the commons offers a ground for the revolutionary agency necessary for a struggle against capitalism by directing us to fundamentals. Thus, as a practice of subsistence commoning provides a ‘firm ground’ for a collective based in the solidarity of labour and the sharing of resources (Linebaugh 2014, p. 3). In this way the commons are ‘primary to human life’ (Linebaugh 2014, p. 13). This makes them omnipresent in space and time. They are planetary and to be found ‘emerging from the darkness of centuries past’ (Linebaugh 2014, p. 16). Or as he puts, with some irony: ‘The commons is old and it is all over’ (Linebaugh 2014, p. 11). The historic ground of subsistence gives us the ‘firm ground’ we need to even cry out in response to the contemporary capitalist order: ‘Stop, thief!’ (Linebaugh 2014, p. 3). Despite its contemporary global omnipresence, capitalism is not rooted in human solidarity, supports increasingly less of the global population and lacks the depth of the commons’ historical roots. The capitalist class is driven by the fantasy of ‘eternal existence’ not subsistence (Linebaugh 2014, p. 3). If the commons emerges out of the dark of the past to aid those struggling in the warming world it is because it remains closely aligned as culture and social form to the elements, or to the ‘historic substances of subsistence’: water, air, earth and fire (Linebaugh 2014, p. 14). Its closeness to nature in this stripped back, elemental sense gives it a significant link to the geohistorical concept of the Anthropocene, as the perspective of the commons is accordingly sensitive to the volatility of a nature which the neocatastrophist Anthropocene is designed to capture. It is precisely this volatility which fossil capitalism fails to register, except as a spur to further exploitation. Linebaugh concludes his essay on Shelley and the Luddites thus: The only effective antagonist [to capitalist imperialism] must be the world’s commoners with sufficient imagination to see in volcanic eruption, earthquake, and the comet’s path the auguries of planetary change and the remodelling of the earth’s nations and governments. (Linebaugh 2014, pp. 106–107)

It is this political imagination, attuned as it is to the signs of the perturbations of nature’s interconnected systems and aware of their potential significance for human societies, touching on both these societies’ everyday reproductive forms of agency and their need to be ready, if necessary, to pursue self-conscious systemic change, that characterises the perspective of the commons adopted by Linebaugh. It would be a mistake

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to view this as merely revolutionary romantic rhetoric, for it gestures to a complex exchange. In its increasingly close and extensive enmeshing with human societies, nature draws attention, in the spectacle of its autonomous, unforeseen actions and reactions, to the frequent absence of urgently needed political responses. For revolutionary romanticism, the perspective of the commons supplies the guidance for the elaboration of a hopeful political agency. Nature’s convulsions need to be carefully watched for signs presaging necessary adjustment in human worlds. The ‘imagination’ referred to by Linebaugh helps to indicate the scale of the challenge. For instance, such acts of imagination need to be sufficiently robust to overcome the dominant neoliberal environmentalist disavowal of the multiple and ongoing human catastrophes of the warming world. Natural catastrophe becomes the form, in the Anthropocene, in which history stalks the planetary stage. As Malm argues, fossil capital’s past is caught up, amplified and brought crashing down on contemporary humanity in nature’s climate cycles. For Linebaugh, folk and popular culture offers counsel here. Thus, the mythic narratives of the commons are full of this conversion of human action into fatal sequences taken up and driven on by natural necessity. Tolkien is echoing this vision when he imagines fire breathing guardian dragons being woken by tiptoeing thieves (The Hobbit of course referencing Old English and Norse intertexts such as Beowulf). Similarly Linebaugh draws our attention to the ‘poiesis of the Luddites’ seen in their acts of sabotage and their use of the form of the epistolary threat in which they warn of the apocalyptic consequences of the capitalist class’s promotion of ‘Machinery hurtful to Commonality’. He also cites Japanese popular culture’s response to the H-Bomb detonations on Bikini Atoll in 1954 which inspired the fearsome Godzilla (Linebaugh 2014, pp. 84, 106). There is no necessary proportionate relation between human material agency and its effects in a material world, and this instability requires ongoing practices of caution, foresight, courage and careful mitigation to avoid runaway sequences of disastrous, unintended effects. Similar patterns of response to such situations are to be found structuring the narratives of the fairy and folk tales that have long circulated in the commons. We can contrast such cultural forms with the agrarian capitalist pastoral in which nature has lost its autonomy and is entirely malleable, pacified and appropriated, an emblem of capitalism’s dependable plenty attendant on its ‘improvement’ (enclosure). The pastoral records the disappearance of the material frictions of nature and the insubordinate and subjective excess of labour. In

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comparison, the parables of the commoners draw attention to what Karl Polanyi referred to as the dangerous ‘fictions’ of the capitalist commodification of the elements of subsistence (Polanyi 2002, p. 76). Linebaugh, for instance, quotes the story of Tecumseh (1768–1813), the Shawnee leader of the Iroquois confederacy, for whom Indian lands were ‘common property of the whole’, and who exclaimed to future President of the U.S., Governor Harrison of Indiana: ‘Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?’ (Linebaugh 2014, p. 93). Likewise, Linebaugh exposes the pastoral to the withering nursery rhyme quatrain: The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But lets the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose.

Implicit in this witty reversal of the relationship of criminality and the law is the sense of the commons, emerging from its pastoral concealment, as the missing or stolen ‘ground’ on which a ‘world’ stands or falls. There is then in the culture of the commons not only a sense of holism—it cannot be reduced to the political vacuousness of the claim that everything is interconnected—but a perception of class antagonisms and conflicts that lie at the heart of the ramifying social relations of capitalism. And as the quatrain makes clear, this properly dialectical sense—of reversal, defamiliarisation, and totalisation—is accompanied by the sharp identification of the process by which causal agency disappears from view. For the greater theft of the means of production creates effects (petty theft) which act to disorder the causal sequence (the ‘thief’ on the common would be no such thing if the common had not been appropriated). This aspect of the culture of the commons is, for Linebaugh, of particular contemporary relevance. It represents an epistemological realism which can be contrasted with positions, theoretical and political, that have been brought into focus by the cognate debates around the Anthropocene. To be able to attribute causal agency in circumstances in which the confusions and complexities in which those causal actions unfold block such attributions, is a politically crucial advantage. In this respect, as Malm argues, both the loss of the concept of nature (philosophical constructionist which renders human agency overinflated, seemingly constructing or building everything it merely affects), and the expansion of agency

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to the level of things and the demotion of human agency to merely that of one such thing (‘new materialism’) is politically disastrous (Malm 2018, pp. 78–118). By contrast the perspective of the commons has the signal advantage of maintaining a clear conceptual division between nature and society. Across this division, the encounter of human and natural is staged in terms of a drama whereby the mythic forces of nature translate human actions and history and thereby help to magnify the focus on significant causal structures. This is particularly apparent in the way that mythic narratives emphasise the relationship between the disproportionate outcomes that may result from the slightest of human actions and the way this disproportion owes its implacable quality to the autonomousness of nature’s own underlying mechanisms. The upshot is an awareness in the culture of the commons of the need for a clear focus on significant causal structures if transformative responses are to retain the hopefulness of possible success or effective political agency. Such transformative agency also relies on the acute sense of its own limits in the face of irreducible natural necessities, and this distinguishes it from the manic activity and ineffectual results of grandiose models of human agency which have lost all sight of nature’s autonomy. Recall Hollywood’s Geostorm. Linebaugh shows us that as capital has sought to emancipate itself from nature’s limits as manifest in the latter’s finite resources and the periodicities in its contingent rhythms of energy transfer (for instance, solar and wave as opposed to fossil energy), so its destructiveness has historically been characterised from the perspective of the commons and from dissident movements like romanticism in terms of the landscape and mythology of the infernal. The protective cultural taboos, superstitions and prohibitions ranged against the impossible project of capitalism to subsume nature and labour into itself and present itself as the motive force of all it appropriates, have all drawn attention to the hellish fate of such undertakings (This is also a major theme in Jennings Pandaemonium.) (Jennings 1985). Out of such a landscape of human disasters sealed in natural catastrophes and expressed in the mythology of damnation, the culture of the commons has built its own mythology of resistant forces—whether monstrous, supernatural or superhuman. Thus, Linebaugh makes much of the ‘pantheon of mythological avatars of the history of the common people’ which includes the Luddites hammer-wielding, machine-breaking insurrectionary Ned Ludd, along with the Irish Captains Firebrand, Slasher and Knockabout (Linebaugh 2014, p. 92). Such figures are posed against Milton’s infernal

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trio from Paradise Lost (1667): Moloch (war), Belial (ideology) and Mammon (capital), architects of the interlocking machines of capitalist imperialism (Linebaugh 1991). Like Jennings before him, Linebaugh also notes the importance of Francis Bacon and the Royal Society, along with its struggle against the ‘many headed hydra’ of the Atlantic commons (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). Jennings’ history intersects not just with Linebaugh but also with Malm’s. Jennings also references Milton’s Moloch, Belial and Mammon and follows the logic of class struggle stretching out in time from the post-revolutionary 1660s, in which scientific invention and technological sophistication, understood as developments of society’s productive forces, are seen as indissociable from an infernal devastation of nature and a violent disciplining of labour. Jennings also refers to the expropriation of ‘‘poetry’, finalised, he argues, by 1750, and by which he covers much of the pre-capitalist culture of the commons’ interest in natural ‘everyday facts and necessities’, the cosmos, and animism (Jennings 1985, p. xxxvii). In his account of the history of the machinery of transportation, the rifling of the bowels of the earth, and the poisoning of the air, Jennings gives us a vision of fossil capital, in which, as with Malm, it is impossible to miss the importance of class struggle to the direction of the development of technology, and the associated drive for unlimited accumulation of capital (Malm 2016). For instance, he draws attention to the efforts put into perpetual motion machines in the capitalist class’s ‘Observations and Reports’ on the application of science and technology between 1660 and 1729 (Jennings 1985). The pursuit of a machine of perpetual motion is perhaps the clearest example of capitalism’s possession by the drive for infinite accumulation. Thus, taking the commons as a focus for the history of the struggles attendant on the capitalist mode of production is a means of restoring a sense of the revolutionary historical agency that the victory of capitalism has supposedly buried with the industrial proletariat. In aligning the commons and the Anthropocene, Linebaugh is doing more than making poetic analogies (the ‘red round globe hot burning’ of Blake as both the warming planet and the incendiary light of the revolutionary Orc). Rather he is taking stock of the way a different model of labour and a different relationship to nature are to be found in the traditions of the commons than are to be found under capitalism, and how this difference is critical in any response to the current crises of fossil capitalism.

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Collectively negotiated labour, operating under the social norm of subsistence not the accumulation of profit, maintains an attentive relationship to nature’s resources, seeking to maintain over the long term their diversity and fecundity. Liberation of labour, liberation of nature!

The Commons, the Country and Class Perspectives One way to further focus some of the symptomatic differences between land as commons and land as country is through a study of the political aesthetics of landscape. As a genre in painting and a set of conventions in the visual arts and literature more generally, landscape has operated as a highly sensitive instrument in picking up class conflict and change, particularly so in its mediation of capitalism within British culture. In particular we can track the emotional and affective tones that landscape triggers through different class perspectives. Thus, emptiness of the landscape in pastoral visions of the country is pleasurably gratifying, signifying as it does the clearing from the scene of the eyesore of landless labour, but is painful for the same capitalist class when experienced on the commons. Here there is an often repeated complaint in the topographical literature of the eighteenth-century improvers, and in the aesthetic theory of the time, of the optical strain in unimproved ‘wastes’, which is connected to a social fear the ruling propertied class have for the indistinct social presence of the landless, especially when it becomes increasingly necessary for the latter to retreat into the ever-shrinking commons for survival (Waites 2012, p. 91). By contrast, however, the pastoral utopia of the countryside of agricultural capitalism offers the ruling class a form of gratifying plenitude as witnessed in the riches of its productivity, in the adornments of its traditions, and its social and natural unity and balance. One only has to recall as an example Gainsborough’s iconic mideighteenth-century portrait/landscape view, Mr and Mrs Andrews. But equally, from the ruling class perspective, if the pastoral country is both pleasantly empty of lower class threat and full of ruling class gratifications, so the commons is not just empty in the sense of a representing a space harbouring concealed class threats and danger, it is also full in that corporeal sense so repulsive to ruling class sensibilities, which is to say from the perspective of the country, the commons are imagined to have a sinister teeming quality. ‘Nurseries of idleness’ on land, ‘nests’ of piratical ‘rogues’ in the Atlantic archipelagos, in the judgement of classical political economy the newly constructed landless proletariat subsisted

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within obscure ‘breeding grounds’, refractory to ‘industriousness’ and potentially obscurely massing and congregating in a challenge to the very foundations of civilisation (McNally 1993). This is the Malthusian gothic of a nature burdened by promiscuous, indigent, ever-hungry and starving multitudes. A landscape full of threatening menace on the one hand, and of sweetness and light on the other. The crossing of the gothic and the pastoral then is a feature of a culture emerging out of a long gestated dynamic of mutual class antagonism and repulsion. If we now reverse the view—which is harder to do, as we are appealing to classed experiences of nature and labour whose political struggles and manifestations were historically defeated—we can apply the same range of positive and negative feelings through the spatial motifs of full and empty in order to distinguish the commons from its dominant antagonist, the country. For Linebaugh, both in his histories of the Atlantic commons and his explorations of their contemporary manifestations, the following characteristics emerge. Commoners on the commons prized collective sufficiency along with the proportionality and mutual beneficence of symbiotic rather than competitive relationships between natural and human worlds. The commons also displayed a complex social unity in which the often rigid gender hierarchies of patriarchal capitalist societies were destabilised—historically, the commons have not been ‘exclusively male’ and ‘decision-making and responsibility’ has belonged to women (Linebaugh 2014, p. 17). Finally, the commons were associated with a utopian freedom of movement and social encounter. This sense of locomotive freedom can be contrasted with the negative freedom of the socially unencumbered to remain isolated and undisturbed by the importunate—the pastoral topos of the hortus conclusus of gentlemanly retirement seen for instance in Andrew Marvell’s poem on the retired Lord Fairfax, General of the New Model Army, Upon Appleton House (1651) (Holstun 2000, pp. 367–434). Many of these features of the commons are emphasised in Linebaugh’s histories from below, presenting us with what James Holstun refers to as a picaresque ‘plebeian georgic’ (Linebaugh 1991; Holstun 2000, p. 418). For Holstun, the pastoral country house poem tends to close in on a self-satisfied present and imagine the future as an endless replication of that present (Holstun 2000, p. 420). By contrast, the Diggers, those communist revolutionaries of the Civil War, refer us in their pamphlets to an expectant hortus inconclusus ‘in which the earth is never a contemplative landscape but a site of communal praxis’ and the future is to be struggled into through

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necessary class conflict (Holstun 2000, p. 420). Here is the world of pain that the commons knows, the dark side of a landscape created as the countryside cuts into the commons. This is the experience, as Raymond Williams movingly describes it, of the intimidating facades of the Big House in the landscaped parks with their walls, fences, and gates facilitating the exercise of faceless but brutal class power (Williams 1973). But it is also, as Linebaugh and Rediker demonstrate, the experience of a landscape characterised by thanatocratic spectacle—the body hanging in chains; the burnt or roofless dwellings (the Clearances), and of course the starving and emaciated flitting through a world that has no place for them (e.g. the nineteenth-century poor undergoing the transition to industrialised capitalism, but also colonial populations, especially in Ireland and India undergoing laissez-faire famines) (Davis 2000). The proletariat in Britain during this period felt keenly the consequences of the arguments articulated by conservative romantics like Burke who in the context of a discussion of poor relief and the fate of landless agricultural proletarians, forced into hungry and precarious mobility by the demands of the industrialising labour market after the repeal of the Settlement Act in 1834, remarked: We, the people, ought to be made sensible, that it is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the Divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer, or which hangs over us. (Burke cited in Keiller 2012)

Note the ironic use of the romantic revolutionary idiom (We, the people…), and the argument that the laws of the market are the laws of nature which determine the limits of historical change. In our own time of austerity economics, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose! We might say then that the conservative romantic vision of the land reveals its kinship to classical political economy in its movement between two extremes: everything (improved land) and nothing (unimproved commons). The process of the enclosure of the commons—the transition to a culture of universal private property—is the journey towards that everything and becomes a defining characteristic of Englishness, one which helps to historically justify the loss of a relatively autonomous peasantry. As both a natural resource and a socio-political ethic, the commons encourages an attentiveness towards diversity and the freedoms

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of sufficiency rather than the gratfications of repletion. In other words, Linebaugh’s account of the commons stresses a something which avoids the seductive and catastrophic capitalist polarity of everything or nothing. We return to this delicate sense of a something shortly in a discussion of Warren Harrison’s documentary on the abandoned estuarial commons of Greatham Creek in the north east of England, The Creek (henceforth, TC ). Fundamentally, the commons resists the idea of land as a commodity, indeed, the commons allows us, by stepping to one side of the framework of the capitalist mode of production, to register the shock of such an idea. As Polanyi argued, land is a fictional commodity, a dangerous one ‘annihilating the human and natural substance of society’ (Polanyi 2002, p. 3). By contrast, the commons grounds a society based on collectively negotiated uses of the land and it therefore protects its ‘human and natural substance’ from the abuses inherent in the exclusive private possession of something so universally valuable. The commons point to the mutually agreed knowledge of ‘the world’. In the words of the claim made by an unknown Suffolk labourer testifying in an eighteenth-century court regarding a dispute over common rights: ‘everybody in the world may cut rushes on the common’ (Ian Waites 2012, p. 100). We might compare the forced admission of guilt made by the commoning Abrees, noted by Jennings and cited earlier, with this incredulous Suffolk commoner. The assumption of the latter is, as Waites puts it, is of a ‘communability and sociability’ that ‘appeared to know no bounds’. Indeed, in the poetry of John Clare, the only boundary in a pre-enclosure landscape is ‘the bondage of the circling sky’, and ‘nature’s wide and common sky/Cheers everything that lives’ (Waites 2012, p. 109).

The Historian as Revolutionary Romantic Storyteller The Anthropocene coincides with a moment when historical change becomes enigmatic and unrelated to the logic of our lives. Change is thereby referred to exogenous rather than endogenous causes, and as such, it is no longer immanent to our social system, rather it is felt to be an external and imminent threat, perceived as essentially accidental and to be passively endured. We await the impact of the geostorm rather than intervene to alter the structure of causes. And in this respect, as we will see, Linebaugh’s historiographic innovations are significant as they

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seek, by a reworking of the approach and techniques of history from below, to recover a ‘sense of historical choice’, of historically taken, missed or rejected alternatives and the possibilities such alternatives have represented for systematic change (Linebaugh 1997, p. 194). We can enter this re-visioning of the tradition of history from below by careful consideration of RRGHB’s unusually long title which includes the subtitle: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. The book’s main title, Red Round Globe Hot Burning is a quote from Blake’s The Song of Los (1795). The cover illustration is Plate 8 of the poem and shows Los leaning on his hammer, paused in his labours over the red globe. The title, cover and long subtitle together form an emblematic assemblage which will take some time to elucidate. The image of the red globe—of fire and blood—has a symbolic role in Blake’s illuminated texts, which are themselves evocative of the Renaissance tradition of the emblem form whose allegorical word and image designs were shaped for didactic, ruminative purposes. Linebaugh adapts Blake’s usage of such figurative devices to project a sense of his own project and role as revolutionary romantic historiographer. That is to say, just as Blake uses Los and his globe of fire to signal the imaginative struggles of the poet/blacksmith to forge a redeemed form for a humanity fallen into the shadows of empire and capital, so Linebaugh seeks to gather up and work on the resources of the revolutionary past in order to help redeem its defeated agents’ hopes. The link between Blake’s poetic mythology and Linebaugh’s emblematology can be further clarified when we recall that Los’s globe of fire is also, more prosaically in Blake’s work, a figure for the London watchman’s lantern, where it features in the frontispiece of the visionary Jerusalem (1806). Here, the inscription around the image of a nightwatchman entering a darkened doorway describes the figure as Los as entering ‘the Door of Death for Albion’s sake inspired’. ‘Albion’, the object of this redemptive struggle, needs to be understood not as some pure expression of limited Englishness, but as a universal figure of fallen humanity. Most often in Blake’s work, Albion’s fate is tied to an Atlantic wide context. The entrance of the historian into the underworld, for the sake of defeated generations, is a refrain maintained throughout RRGHB. Prophecy, poetry, revolution, proletarian craft are then the methodological reference points for Linebaugh’s historical project. Linebaugh deals with an analogous problem in the realm of historiography to the one facing Whissel in the realm of film studies. Just

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as Whissel seeks to hang on to a sense of historical pertinence and aesthetic coherence in the blockbuster form in terms of her interest in digitalised emblematic spectacle, so pertinence and coherence are issues for Linebaugh as a historical materialist aligned to revolutionary romanticism. That is to say, the histories of those defeated in the class struggle are often seen as unfortunate footnotes to processes of historical development (i.e. not integrated parts of the historical narrative), or as gruesome, fragmentary spectacle (i.e. the background colour of bloody Old England). Linebaugh finds ways to deepen our apprehension of the history of capitalist thanatocracy in terms of its complex historical meanings rooted in struggles over the criminalisation of custom; the nature of the wage; the boundaries of property; ruling class fears of proletariat solidarity, and past and present attempts to underscore, by means of state-sanctioned violence, divisions in the international and complex but at key times convergent identities of the proletariat. What is for some the merely episodic, grotesquely colourful and meaninglessly repetitive history of ‘criminality’ and its suppression, finds an explanatory coherence and pressing contemporary relevance for Linebaugh in the larger and ongoing narrative of class struggle. But Linebaugh has to navigate the kinds of problems posed to Left historians not just by those in the discipline who are as transparently politically on the Right as he is on the Left, but also by sympathetic Left critics. For instance, there is the problem of the danger of falling into a sentimental populism, spontaneously unifying the struggles of the oppressed. Many on the Left have voiced this concern not just in relation to Linebaugh’s work, but with the tradition represented by the British Marxist Historians. An intriguing example of such scepticism is provided by Jacques Rancière’s otherwise aligned efforts at history from below, seen for instance in his insistence on the historical significance of exceptional figures. Thus, his archival work has unearthed the presence of what he calls ‘perverted proletarians’ whose historical existence has been overlooked because their profiles do not conform to naive, sentimentalising presumptions about a spontaneous unity of the oppressed. Instead, these figures demonstrate, for Rancière, the importance of avoiding assumptions about proletarian political ‘interests’ and identities (Rancière 2012, p. 15). On the Right, ‘revisionist’ historians have conducted an energetic push back against history from below through a variety of interlocking strategies such as foreshortened periodisation preventing the perception of any longue durèe; taboos on anachronism and the associated fetish on chronism; capitalist stadialism;

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and the geopolitical restrictions fostered by limited nationalist perspectives. The cumulative effect of such strategies is de-narrativisation from above or the rendering of history from below as an episodic, far-fetched freak show in which evidence of revolutionary agency is transformed into the sorry story of the acts of unrepresentative individual malcontents, or is simply discounted as the illusory wish fulfilment of Left radicals (Holstun 2000). At the heart of Linebaugh’s response to these challenges lies a series of transgressions of disciplinary norms. On the simplest level this involves insisting on the importance of all in the historical account—as opposed to turning away from the ‘criminal stratum’ as intrinsically unnoteworthy. But just as important is the methodological innovation of mobilising speculation and counterfactuality, strengthening our sense of the past’s ‘turning points’ or moments of struggle which have to be recognised regardless of outcome. As he puts it: the ‘historical materialism of determinism’ needs fortifying with the neglected ‘historical materialism of revolutionary change’ (Linebaugh 1997, p. 192). In this way Linebaugh’s work moves into the territory described by Walter Benjamin as that belonging to the storyteller (Benjamin 1982). We can now return to the sub-title of Linebaugh’s book which begins with the apparently archaic, and historiographically unconventional aspiration: ‘A Tale…’ What is a storyteller according to Benjamin, and how might Linebaugh be a storytelling historian? And how might such a role be linked to the project to revive a sense of historical agency, struggle, choice and possible change? For Benjamin the storyteller’s origins lie in historiography and epic or rather in the archaic memorialising activities of specific groups and communities. What the storyteller offers is ‘counsel’, the communication of ‘experience’ between individuals and collectives, across space and time (Benjamin 1982, p. 86). The storyteller gathers up and passes on, in vivid, often suggestive forms, tales whose experiential content lies in plebeian and proletarian struggles. These are the struggles endured and recounted in local sites of productive and reproductive labour as the tradition and lore of place. They are also accounts of experiences which have come from afar, not just in space, across the distances of an international division of labour, but also in time. Storytelling helps to strengthen this extensive culture of the ‘people’ from which it emerges and to which it always returns for inspiration (Benjamin 1982, p. 101). It does this, Benjamin argues, through the authority it acquires as a result of its relationship to a confrontation with death, one characterised by the belief in

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the ‘idea of eternity’ understood as a confidence in the ongoing nature of the struggle of working lives, or as a quality of endurance which relativises all individual defeat and disappearance (Benjamin 1982, p. 93). Benjamin’s text is worth quoting here. After citing the commonplace belief that an individual’s life shapes itself into a transmissible form at the moment of death he adds: Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end…suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. (Benjamin 1982, p. 94)

This passage finds a peculiarly powerful resonance within the full sweep of Linebaugh’s work, from his early ‘The Tyburn Riots against the Surgeons’ (1975) to RRGHB (Linebaugh 1975). In an earlier version of the ‘Storyteller’ essay, Benjamin observed: ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ (Dolbear, Leslie and Truskolaski cited in Benjamin 2016, p. xi). If this is a cultural practice which is disappearing for Benjamin in the early twentieth century with the privatisation of death, then Linebaugh seeks to revive it. But he does so in a literal sense, drawing as close as he can to the ‘last words’ of the victims of capitalist and imperialist thanatocracy. This was a feature of his study of eighteenth-century crime and civil society, The London Hanged, and is insistently foregrounded in RRGHB (Linebaugh 1991). Taking Thompson’s famous statement of intent in The Making of the English Working Class to rescue working-class figures from the ‘condescension of posterity’, Linebaugh sets himself the task of rescuing such figures who found their way onto the scaffold from something far stronger than posterity’s condescension—its contempt and aversion. We might say then that Linebaugh is a storytelling historian who works, reworks, turns-over and refashions—there is a degree of both rhetorical craft and ritual repetition in the writing—the scantily recorded experiences of the ‘examples’ made by the state in the ongoing narrative of class struggle. This is a struggle which was centred on the changing nature of the meaning of property as it finally moved away from collective and customary to individualised and privatised forms, and on the organisation of the labour process as capitalism moved from formal to real subsumption of labour by capital. Labour needed to be disciplined

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afresh for the so-called Industrial Revolution to gather steam. As he puts it in The London Hanged, the scaffold was where the truth of this ‘drama’ was rendered not just in bloody acts, but through the ‘dying words’ of the victims (Linebaugh 1991). In contradistinction to the accounts of other historians of this period, Linebaugh refuses to consign the victims to the ‘dustheap of time’ or to assume that these examples all taught the same lesson to stupid, brutalised, carnivalised onlookers (Linebaugh 1991, p. xxi). Searching out the traces of the biographies of the condemned, Linebaugh piles up micro-narratives of suffering and struggle. In the process the scaffold backstories break out of their confinement as ‘spectacle’ (bloody old England) to assume the form of complex tales touching on common conditions and struggles. The stage of death is revealed to exist as a node in an enormous network of other interconnected stories. The controlling metaphors of this process in RRGHB are the mycelium and the underground. Linebaugh persistently mixes up the senses of natural and earth sciences and human culture here. Geohistorical undergrounds, political undergrounds, microbial undergrounds all overlap in figurative mutual reflection. As with Benjamin’s description of storytelling, the eruptive interconnectivity of Linebaugh’s prose renders it structurally similar to the architectonics of the fairy story whose situations of overwhelming oppression and tyrannous authority are turned by the practical collaborations of the powerless rendered strong through magical alliances and helpers, including the solidarity of the natural world. Such historical storytelling is the antidote to what Benjamin calls the ‘nightmare’ quality of myth, a nightmare no more evident than in the record of the sanctioned culture of British imperial capitalism (Benjamin 1982, p. 102). As storyteller, Linebaugh’s practice echoes Benjamin’s account of Leskov whose tales also display a kinship with fairy stories. In particular both share, along with Benjamin himself, an interest in the doctrine of apokatastasis or the belief that all souls go to heaven. In other words, in refusing to give up on the historical significance of the condemned—all are worthy of the historian’s attention, including the condemned criminal in the exalted sphere of the political—Linebaugh’s redemptive historiography aims for resurrection as disenchantment (Benjamin 1982, p. 103). By bringing back the words and lives of the condemned from oblivion, he seeks to dispel the baleful myth, spectacle, and bad magic of British class mythology. The quality of Linebaugh as storyteller which is perhaps most pertinent in this epic effort is his conscious adoption of the role

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of mediator, and this explains the figure of the ‘crossroads’ in RRGHB’s subtitle. This clue to the book’s project is significant on a number of levels. The crossroads is a space of convergence. It marks the site of collective rendezvous, of the potential alliance of the dispersed, and the fortuitous encounter, but equally it stands for conflict and the collision of contradictory forces. In this respect the listed couplets of the subtitle (commons/closure; love/terror; race/class; Kate/Ned) all operate within the crossroads force-field and are indicative of the range of experience forming the storyteller historian’s subject matter. Let us break this down. As a liminal site on communication networks, crossroads were often places for executions, places where the thanatocratic state enacted its rituals of terror. As painstakingly mapped by Linebaugh, the objective of such rituals was clearly to enforce antagonistic division, within the labouring poor and between the labouring poor and the possessing classes. Thus commons in the subtitle refers to those social and natural worlds which needed to be extinguished to keep such divisions operative. For instance, intra-working-class competition for a livelihood in the labour market could only be fully ensured if the resources of the commons were no longer available. Equally, with such resources still accessible the working class could not be relied on to prefer new labour processes to older ones as the commons gave greater latitude to the freedoms consequent on a margin of subsistence. Closure in the subtitle records this loss. It is a term that generalises the logic of enclosure of the means of production and livelihood which Linebaugh tracks in its manifold forms as the accompaniment of capitalist development—throughout urban space, in workshops, factories, docks, streets; across the land; and between ‘races’, genders and nations. It also refers to narratology and the cultural project of denarrativisation from above. Closure is the end of the storyteller’s mode of companionate narrativisation from below. That is to say, at the heart of the storyteller’s vocation is the compulsion to resist the abridgement or interruption of the meta-tale constituted by the tradition of storytelling itself. Benjamin describes this in terms of the ‘chain of tradition’, an aspect of storytelling’s fundamentally epic art (Benjamin 1982, p. 98). Ultimately, stories form a ‘web’: One ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the Oriental ones, have…readily shown. In each of them there is a Scheherazade who thinks of a fresh story whenever her tale comes to a stop. (Benjamin 1982, p. 98)

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This is an accurate description of both the frequent compulsion of the storyteller-victim on the scaffold, and of Linebaugh as storytelling historian. The ongoing class struggle is an ongoing act of storytelling. The pressure to continue, the avoidance of the ‘end’, becomes a feature of the craft itself. As Benjamin points out, the question the listener/reader is constantly considering, is, how is this story to continue? And of course, Linebaugh’s arena of historical inquiry—capital punishment—poses the graphic pathos of such a question. Love plays a part here. For Benjamin, the qualities of endurance celebrated by storytelling and embodied in the practice’s art of remembrance, are primarily those of cheerfulness (Ubermut ), cunning (Untermut ) and courage (Mut ) (Benjamin 1982, p. 102). Linebaugh adds the political virtue of love to his tale’s courageous couple: Kate a black woman in London fighting for her white revolutionary husband’s life against the state apparatus at its highest and lowest levels; Ned an Irishman born into the possessing classes and distinguishing himself through his bravery and skills as an engineer amongst the English officer class in the colonies, fighting against the local colonials’ abuses of indigenous people as Superintendent of British Honduras. Recalled to London he organises a revolutionary underground to overthrow what he has seen throughout the Atlantic world—the oppression of empire. Kate and Ned oppose love to terror. This is a love aligned by Linebaugh with the classical idea of ‘agape’ (‘the creative and redemptive love of justice’) which he sees as akin to the love of commoning embodied in the notion of ‘the production of ourselves as a collective subject’, a definition he borrows from feminist historian Silvia Frederici (Frederici cited in Linebaugh 2019, p. 5). If the mainstream British romantics remained stuck in bourgeois ‘philia’ (the extravagances and vicissitudes of friendship as the drama of the social circles of the romantic poets), then Ned and Kate are revolutionary romantics in taking the route through the Atlantic commons, to agape, the collective subject apostrophised by Ned on the scaffold as the ‘human race’ for whom he was prepared to die. Love also figures as an inspiration in Blake’s The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), an allegory of ‘transatlantic oppression’ in which the spurning of the raped slave woman Oothoon by her lover is a spurning of collective pan Atlantic liberation (Linebaugh 2019, p. 220). Love in this sense is counterposed to the Burkean horrors of romantic conservatism and classical political economy. Linebaugh’s tale contains a significant emphasis on the efforts of women—in particular the wives of executed revolutionaries, in tending

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to the corpses of their husbands, as a counterbalance to the ruthless corporeal discipline of the arithmetic of political economy or ektrophe, that is: the calculated, mercenary breeding and the political science of reproduction. Population policy and property management became its foundations. Ektrophe stands in for the Malthusian purpose and manner of calculations of life and death. (Linebaugh 2019, p. 222).

The fragmented, divided body, emblematic of terror’s work on the scaffold, is transfigured through the power of love as defined and evidenced by Linebaugh in the memorial tending of these partners. Love resists closure. It seeks to overcome the divisions, fostered by a campaign of terror, between races and between race and class. Victim and community are re-knit in the storytelling which Linebaugh uncovers. Indeed, he starts the book by miming the memorial activity of these women with a ‘quest’ for the remains of the historically disappeared Kate. The book concludes with an Irish ‘ghost story from famine times that recollects the revolutionary times of Despard’s era of the ’98’, and an animal story from the Great Lakes of North America, retold in Dublin in 1802 (Linebaugh 2019, p. 14). The latter is recounted by an Indian chief, Little Turtle, fighting the racist and genocidal America of Jefferson, through the medium of an Irish interpreter raised as a boy by the Miami Indians, to another Irishman disgusted with the violent colonial dependency of the relationship between Ireland and England. The tale of The Red Crested Bird and the Black Duck. It is a story of an alliance between a native of the New World and the disinherited of the Old World against the imperial master. It ends in death, and the mutilation of the disinherited younger son, but equally, it is a story of magical ‘transformation and continuity’ with the defeated metamorphosing across species boundaries (Linebaugh 2019, p. 403). As Linebaugh puts it: an older cultural form (the animal tale) acquires ‘a magical political realism as an allegory of survival by transformation’ (Linebaugh 2019, p. 405). Or as he records more starkly in the book’s final chapter: ‘The story of Despard and the commons did not come to an end with his execution in 1803’ (Linebaugh 2019, p. 421). The crossroads is of course temporal as well as spatial—a haunted switching point in time. The tale the storyteller tells finds its way around the exclusionary limits and antagonisms of the capitalist imperial order, including those boundaries of the forcibly ‘united’ nations (UK

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and US) that formed the backbone of that order, and that inculcated the antagonisms that set ‘races’ and classes apart. In sum, Linebaugh as storyteller works the crossroads, as a mediator of times and places, as a figure who keeps the story going. In borrowing the freedoms of the storyteller he adapts the latter’s epic sweep which, as Benjamin put it, traverses the ‘whole created world’ from the ‘abyss of the inanimate’ to the historical world of the present (Benjamin 1982, p. 104). This epic range of the storyteller observed by Benjamin in Leskov, is figured in the crossroads condensation of dimensions: above/below, far away/close up, expanded/contracted. It is this range which gives the storytellers’ tales their miraculous, magical quality and it is the expression of the epic truth of history as a totalising project. What are ‘tall tales’ when viewed from above are defended by the storytelling historian with the tenacity of the epic perspective. Indeed, the storytelling historian like Linebaugh pursues what often seems the most contingent historical detail to the point that it persistently rejoins this larger, all-encompassing picture. As Linebaugh puts it in RRGHB, miming an eighteenth-century Irish storyteller’s formulaic conclusion to his miraculous tales: ‘And that’s true, anyhow!’ (Linebaugh 2019, pp. 116–120). In an early essay, which in some ways contains in nuce his development as a storyteller historian, Linebaugh demonstrates how his approach to historiography through counterfactual speculation and the magnification of the moment paths might have crossed—those critical turning points or ‘junctures’ whose outcomes are so often disappointments—helps to guide the radical storytelling of the present (Linebaugh 1986). Such junctures are moments pregnant with the forces of revolutionary change which might have been ‘missed’ in a double sense. Firstly, the missed rendezvous, or the failure of a key revolutionary alliance to take place. Secondly, such junctures go missing from the historical record in which the narratives of failed revolutionary struggle are rendered imperceptible. Of course such absences do not mean that the ruling classes of the past were oblivious of the threat posed by such junctures. Far from it. Failures in revolutionary solidarity are the product of the struggle between the classes. This is the symbolic significance of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 in Linebaugh’s work (Linebaugh 2014, pp. 97–104). Following the murder of two households in Wapping, John Williams, an Irish sailor, was wrongly accused and committed suicide in prison. His body was paraded by the state through the neighbourhood and buried with a stake through the heart at the crossroads of New Road and Cannon

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Street Road. Here the crossroads as execution site is the figure for a historical turning point, it marks the point in time in which the ‘revolutionary actualisation’ of an intersection of a multiethnic, terraqueous proletariat of London was prevented through ‘terror, xenophobia and criminalisation’ (Linebaugh 2014, p. 98). ‘Many roads’ were subsequently ‘not taken’, as the divisions of race, ethnicity and nation bit into popular political culture (Linebaugh 2014, p. 98). And such divisions even found their way into the work of those later historians determined to overcome such obstacles to proletarian internationalism (in particular Thompson). As a self-conscious storytelling historian Linebaugh takes his inspiration from historical figures like Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the revolutionary slaves of Haiti. Like the latter, Linebaugh seeks and makes ‘openings everywhere’, uncovering junctures missed, re-arming them so their squandered potential might be redeemed (Linebaugh 1986, p. 217). (We will return to the Haitian revolution shortly.) This early essay is in a collection dedicated to the historian of the Atlantic C. L. R. James, and is entitled: ‘What If C.L.R. James Had Met E.P. Thompson in 1792?’ For Linebaugh, James and Thompson are historians of the often sundered experience of the Atlantic. On one side the African masses on the plantations who ‘were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at that time’, on the other, the working class of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ and between them those revolutionary mediators—‘mariners, renegades, castaways’, sailors, the first true ‘workers of the world’ (Linebaugh 1986, p. 212). How might we characterise Linebaugh’s method here? It has three key characteristics. Firstly, the retelling of the story, which in an important sense is a first telling. Secondly, the impossible identification of the historian as a contemporary of their subject—let’s call it identificatory anachronism. Thirdly, as a corollary of the second, the insistence on the importance of the historical continuity of the struggles of the oppressed, regardless of the necessity of recognising the discontinuity involved in defeats, loss and missed junctures. This is important because an attention devoted exclusively to the latter results in an inability to see the connections that were made and which disappeared in the record. Anne Janowitz, for instance, demonstrates how the missed juncture between romantic poets and radical workers in the early nineteenth century that obsesses Thompson might render us unobservant of those who did indeed qualify as both, such as Thomas Spence, George Dyer, Allen Davenport, and Ernest Jones (Janowitz 1998).

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Linebaugh’s essay on James proposes its speculative exercise in the title, and in answering his own ‘what if’ question sends his two historians back in time to become versions of their own historical subjects (identificatory anachronism). The point of such time travelling is to teach them and us something (through the retelling) about the connections that were in existence in 1792 which have been subsequently largely effaced (the underground continuities). We discover that the question points to the presence of a hidden storyteller already on the stage (Olaudah Equiano) who is, as Linebaugh points out, an absent presence at the beginning of Thompson’s seminal, The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson’s book opens at The Bell, a public house off the Strand in January 1792 and the meeting there which marked the founding of the London Corresponding Society, the ‘first strictly working class political organisation’ (Linebaugh 1986, p. 213). Equiano, Afro-American and ex-slave, was there, collaborating and living with that other founding member and chronicler of the London Corresponding Society, Thomas Hardy. (Equiano was also living with Lydia Hardy, Thomas’s wife, whose role as a revolutionary proletarian is missed in Linebaugh’s first version of this story but recognised in retelling to be found in The Many Headed Hydra.) The alliance of the two is the alliance, at this moment, of abolitionism and parliamentary reform which was to be subsequently suppressed by Hardy himself who came to fear that his main objective of parliamentary reform might be sidetracked by abolitionism. The suppression of Equiano at this critical moment, is then reproduced in the work of the historiographic tradition whose divided parts are represented here by Thompson and James. Two figures who, as Linebaugh puts it, were, at the time they were writing: Burning for the future and searching for a fulcrum that was neither Stalinist or liberal…[they] both returned to the 1790s, the last great world-wide crisis, to analyse the movement of the workers of the world. (Linebaugh 1986, p. 218)

In other words, they were looking in the right place—their confidence in the tutelary return of the revolutionary past’s relevance to their present was not misplaced. In Siegfried Kracauer’s terms, Linebaugh constructs a hopeful history in which the ‘main thing is that the ending does not mark the end’ (Kracauer 1960, p. 269). That is to say, Linebaugh is insistent that the

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struggles of the past remain vital and related to those of the present. This is critical in separating out revolutionary romanticism from its siblings. In the C. L. R. James essay, the speculative method seeks to give life to the drama of the past, allowing it to intervene in the present. The essay’s ending is an introduction: Neither of them [James or Thompson], as far as I know, saw Equiano sitting in the back of the room at ‘The Bell’, ready to pass his experience on: “Brother Thompson, may I present Brother James. (Linebaugh 1986, p. 218)

Note the shifter pronoun acting as mediator and pivot here. The ‘I’ is Linebaugh, but it is also the anonymous storyteller, another sibling, who accompanies and instructs the earlier generation that taught him, as he moves them back in time to confront what has been missed, socialising his sources. The past reaches forward to grip the present in a handshake that makes good a long-postponed greeting, as it does, a possible future opens up once again. Re-narrativisation from below then, involving retelling, anachronistic identification and an asserted if complex continuity. As we can see in this example, the retelling is necessary because there are stories within the accepted account which have yet to be told. But retelling itself needs fortifying, it struggles with the nightmare of de-narrativisation from above. The weight of the received narratives of ‘tradition’ are guarded by a ‘revisionism’ that blocks any retelling as fanciful and irrelevant. Re-telling acquires its energies through its presumption of what Jameson calls the ‘unity of a single great collective story’, as it is in the context of that presumption that the ‘original urgency’ of the past for the present is grounded along with our identification with it (Jameson 1981, p. 19).

Pirates Linebaugh and Whissel both demonstrate the pertinence and significance of the ‘spectacle’ of history (thanatocratic or emblematic) in ways which have been neglected in their disciplines. Whissel’s account draws attention to the problem of historical change in the globally capitalist present, as does Linebaugh’s revolutionary romanticism, with its focus on the ongoing struggle between the commons and capitalism. This concluding section will therefore attempt two tasks. To provide an

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example of the relevance of a revolutionary romantic historical materialism applied to a contemporary blockbuster, the Pirates of the Carribean franchise (POC ), and finally to explore a film—(TC )—which documents the residual commons in the north east of England, demonstrating how the perspective of the commons can give a sketch of a psychic life insulated from the psychic consequences of capitalism, and thereby fortify the effort to imagine the fundamental historical change aimed at by revolutionary romantic historical materialism. If POC shows us a capitalist imperialist hell, TC loosens its grip. Blockbuster myth and fairy tale on the one hand, and a georgic pastoral on the other, combine to point the way. POC is keyed in its narrative rhythms and spectacle to a global capitalist neocatastrophist Anthropocene, taking autonomous nature’s response to human history and translating it into the drama of woken monsters, broken taboos, and curses suffered, its sequelised narratives capturing the crises of global capitalism through paradox and aporia. And at the same time, like the optimistic fairy story, POC manages to contest the hellish, repetitive time of myth in which no change is possible. These films show the immanent emergence of decisive action out of everyday agency, through courage and consciously chosen alliances with others, natural and human, in taking on giants, bullies and monsters in all forms. And at last, when the explosions, shouts, death gasps and crashing skies of Hollywood have fallen silent, the commons emerges again, oddly dyssynchronous. TC demonstrates the existence of different times in a single historical moment, reaching down into the habits, rhythms and making-do of a life only weakly captured, even in the moment of capitalism’s global maturity, by the latter’s psychic logic and horizons. By fortuitous coincidence, TC features an estuarial commons, based originally around salmon fishermen. And its location in the north of England allows us to return to the English national question and the thesis of a contemporary end of British history. In the traditions of the nineteenth-century republican Left, the north, with its radical industrial proletariat driving it on, seemed like it might summon the resolve to liberate the first British colony, England. Both POC and TC are then Jonah stories. Tom Paine, himself once a sailor, likened the British Empire to Jonah’s whale. England’s fabled island history has unfolded in the belly of the beast. Many of the Atlantic pirates of the early eighteenth century came originally from English ports, but once on the Atlantic they styled themselves expatriated ‘villains of all nations’. So too, commoners have a tradition of claiming the whole world as their witness. Take the example of the Suffolk labourer, cited earlier,

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who in defence of gleaning on the commons at the time of the enclosures appealed to the knowledge of the ‘whole world’ as justification. In other words, there are worlds within nations waiting to be disgorged. The commons of Greatham Creek, as we will see, have been appealed to as evidence of other Englands, of islands within islands. Or as Linebaugh puts it, citing Coleridge’s argument in Religious Musings (1796) the commons are the ‘vast Family of Love/Rais’d from the common earth by common toil…’ to whom ‘the kingdoms of the world’ belong (Linebaugh 2014, p. 20). If, as Rediker argues, there is an ‘assumption’ that only ‘landed spaces on the earth’s surface are real’, such ‘terracentric’ views of the world were strengthened by emergence of modern nation states in the late eighteenth century which linked sovereignty to specific ethnically and civically defined ‘peoples’, attaching them to ‘their land, their soil’ (Rediker 2014, p. 2). Simultaneously, romanticism evacuated the oceans of real ships and sailors and substituted a wild sublime environment full of imaginary figures. Such romantic terracentrism is a particularly problematic foundation for certain types of Englishness. As Rediker says, island nations are susceptible to articulations of more intensely felt identity than nations whose mundane reality is that encountered in the arbitrarily settled borders of their equally humdrum neighbours as opposed to the sublime irrealities of the circumambient oceans. (As we will see, in rescuing a disappearing commons TC raises the challenge of reimagining an older terracentric nationalism.) Rediker’s counter to such terracentricism lies in a maritime history from below that illuminates both the missing ‘oceanic commons’ (to which the pirates’ story belongs) and the struggle to make the seas safe ‘for private property’, in the process revealing anomalous historical facts, such as the one that tells us that more than half of the eighteenth-century British navy was not ‘British’. Despite appearances and many political problems of its own, notably its egregious representations of ‘primitive’ cannibalism straight out of nineteenth-century popular imperialist romance, along with much in the way of regressive gender representation, POC fitfully evokes these struggles between capitalism and oceanic commoners, demonstrating that popular culture, despite it own sublime irrealities, like the sea is not without history. The films in the POC series offer a complex allegory of the relations of capitalism to labour, nature and revolution. I will concentrate on Dead Man’s Chest (2006) (henceforth DMC ) and At World’s End (2007) (henceforth AWE), which as second and third in the series are connected

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by a single narrative. As Rediker’s histories of the eighteenth-century Atlantic make clear, the figure of the sailor/pirate was at the centre of the economic and political upheavals of modernity (Rediker 1987). The deepsea sailing ship was the means of the creation of the world market and of the projection of imperial power. The former depended on both free wage labour, of which the maritime proletariat was a pioneer, and slave labour which was transported in this fearsome technology out of Africa. The division of labour of the transoceanic capitalist economy created connections amongst diverse bodies of workers and slaves who developed their own forms of resistant cooperation, thereby giving us the runaway, striker, pirate and urban insurrectionist. The ironies of freedom in this Atlantic world were particularly acute. Free landless labour was free to roam, and the creation and celebration of a picaresque culture is a central aspect of the process of proletarianisation seen clearly in maritime culture. But it was also free to starve if unwilling to work for a wage. The hungry ship’s crew’s dependence on their employer was total in this respect and struggles over food on board demonstrated how the freedom of the wage was often insufficient to guarantee belly timber. Equally, the increasingly disciplined control of the labour process meant that on board ship labour was subject to a brutalised supervision and exploitation prefigurative of the industrial factory, itself an invention of the colonising project. The maiming of the sailor’s body within the cogs of this machine became an indelible part of the image of the pirate (peg leg, one eye, shattered old age). As Rediker puts it, in this way the sailor found himself in that position of apparent hopelessness, captured by the expression ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’ (Rediker 1987). ‘Captain Death’ and the seaman’s actual captain ‘were all too often one and the same’ (Redkiker 1987, p. 194). The devil then sat at the captain’s table, and the ‘uncontrollable vicissitudes’ of deep blue sea and weather meant the individual sailor recognised that survival depended on his shipmates. The freedom of a sailor to sign on was a freedom delivering him into a floating prison with no exit. Class struggle on the ship was therefore open and naked. The pirate took that struggle to the point of mutiny, in the process making history through the elaboration of a fiercely egalitarian and libertarian culture. It was therefore not just the economic threat to Atlantic trade that made the British state determined to exterminate the pirates in their heyday which ran from 1716 to 1726. POC is constructed within established libertarian popular cultural conventions long associated with the figure of the pirate. This explains

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The Rolling Stones involvement, with Keith Richards playing a cameo as Jack Sparrow’s father in AWE. But the films also display a more precise historical grasp of the world of maritime labour and imperial capitalism of the early eighteenth century. That past is crossed, self-consciously, with the politics of the present. For instance, the collective executions in the opening scenes of AWE are justified by the decree of a ‘state of emergency’ and the suspension of political rights which seems intended to make the analogy between the war on the pirates by the British state and the contemporary ‘war on terror’ of the US and its allies. In the East India Company’s relationship to the state (the latter licencing the former’s brutalities), the film states succinctly the enabling historical context of much of the imperial project and a continuity that extends over centuries—the state-sanctioned determination to use violent means to ensure profitable business. At the same time, the films in general, and AWE specifically, evince an interest in the strange weather of the warming world, thus nature is allegorised as a mythic force whose convulsions threaten disaster. If we consider the characters of Davy Jones (captain of the Flying Dutchman), Tia Dalma/Calypso (voodoo priestess and goddess of the sea), and Lord Beckett, governor of the East India Company, alongside pirate captains Jack Sparrow and Hector Barbosa, and Bootstrap Turner, crewman on the Flying Dutchman, we have sufficient means to elicit the outlines of the two films’ complex allegory. In the following synopsis I am attending exclusively to those aspects of the narrative of DMC and AWE that are relevant to my themes. Davy Jones, originally a seaman in love with Calypso is entrusted by her to ferry souls of those dying at sea to the afterlife. Calypso sets the terms of their relationship: one day together in ten years of service for Davy Jones. When Calypso fails to appear on the appointed day, Jones, believing her unfaithful, convinces the pirates that binding her in human form (as Tia Dalma) will give them control of the seas. This they do. Despairing at his own act of betrayal, Jones cuts out his own heart, placing it in his ‘locker’. Subsequently, his cruelty as captain of the Flying Dutchman is encapsulated in the corruption of Calypso’s task. Instead of operating a ferry for lost souls, Jones press gangs dying sailors into his damned crew, reprieving them from death in exchange for one hundred years of labour on board. Although referenced in DMC, the above is backstory, including Jones’ deal with Jack Sparrow to raise the latter’s ship from the depths and allow him to remain captain for thirteen years in exchange for one hundred years of service on the Flying

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Dutchman. At the end of DMC Sparrow is swallowed by the Kraken, a monster Jones uses to destroy shipping. He is rescued by his shipmates from Davy Jones locker in AWE. Lord Beckett, as governor of the East India Company, is concerned solely with obtaining control of Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman in order to destroy the pirates and to acquire complete control of the seas. In AWE, when Calypso is liberated by the pirates she summons a mighty storm in which Beckett’s fleet is destroyed. The pirates survive. As this synopsis insistently illustrates capitalism is built around contractual exchange. What it also illustrates is the degree to which such exchange is freely chosen. In the process of seeking to bribe and coerce those who might help him to acquire Davy Jones’s ‘locker’, Lord Beckett remarks: ‘every man has a price he will willingly accept. Even for what he hopes never to sell’. The afterthought reveals all. Between the willingness to sell one’s labour and the hope not to have to enter the market lies the historical contradiction of labour in the capitalist labour market. The reluctant transformation of labour into wages required either coercion or the threat of death that would result from refusal once labour was separated from the means of production. The price referred to by Beckett then is established by breaking the resistance of the seller to the sale. As Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers argued, what prevented them from digging the commons at St George’s Hill in 1649 and sustaining themselves on the land—a political gesture designed to signal a turn in the English Revolution towards a small holding democracy in which labour’s hold on the means of production might be secured—was ‘club law’ which, organised by the local squirearchy, drove them off the commons and back into the status of landless labour contracting for wages (Holstun 2000, p. 406). The Flying Dutchman under Jones makes this precondition of the choice that is no choice explicit. Illusions then are not central to this act of exchange. There is less irony than grisly predictability in the fact that the imminent death evaded by Jones’ bargain of the wage becomes the living death of the labour on his ship. The scenes of Jones’s crew at work create an impression of the brutality of the seaman’s working life. Furthermore, it is well documented that many of those working as sailors were originally kidnapped or press ganged, and frequently had pay withheld or deducted. The contract of signing on was often no more than a fiction disguising a form of imprisonment. But POC’s representation of a thanatocratic capitalism is not limited to the experience of labour. There is emphasis too on the more straightforward exercise of thanatopolitical

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reason: juridical terror. Both films feature execution scenes and bodies hanging in chains. The adaptation of the Flying Dutchman myth also references slavery. This aspect of Atlantic history is evasively captured in AWE with a shot of bodies floating in the water and it is also the significance of the relationship of the Flying Dutchman and Calypso, who in DMC appears in her human form as voodoo priestess Tia Dalma. The ferrying of souls is a euphemism for the transportation of slaves. Their abandonment to the sea, which occurs under Jones’s captaincy, is a narratively muffled reference to the deathly nature of the trade in human commodities. But it is important to note that the agency of capitalism (Jones comes to work for Beckett) is the common point of reference for the destruction of the lives and bodies of the sailors, and for the trade in slaves which flickers, unfocused, in the background of POC. In terms of the struggle against this empire of death, the two films ponder what becomes the riddle of revolution. This is expressed as the search for deliverance from Davy Jones Locker. Thus, as Jack Sparrow puts it when trying to exit the Locker: ‘You have to be lost to find a place as can’t be found’. Similarly, when reviewing the navigational charts of the locker, it is the legend ‘Up is Down’ that offers Sparrow the clue to exiting the purgatory of Jones’s realm. The ability to reverse directions is mapped onto the willingness to swap elements, for on-board ship reversal on the vertical axis is to pass from air into water. The problem of revolution, of change in a world locked into hellish and deadly circuits and cursed repetitions is one which demands a seemingly impossible, counterintuitive transgression of the means of survival. Likewise, consider the predicament of Bootstrap Turner. The name of this sailor trapped on the Flying Dutchman is itself emblematic of the impossibility of the solution capital advises labour to adopt in the context of a world ruled by capital, i.e. the well-known, mockingly hollow neoliberal adage of labour’s social self-levitation. (Although the ‘world turned upside down’ motif suggested in the name counters this with a memory of the revolutionary emblem common to many who were exiled after the failures of the English revolution to the ‘Atlantic Mountains’.) These paradoxical preconditions for the negotiation of the narrative obstacles blocking the pirates are akin to the impossible fates of fairy tale characters facing tasks of liberation that seem necessarily doomed to failure. Ultimately, it is the relationship of the pirates to Calypso upon which deliverance depends. And with this character, whose name in the Greek means the concealed or hidden, it is possible to open up the films to a

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more complex allegory, one which simultaneously allows us to discuss debates in Marxist historiography. Political Marxists Samuel Knafo and Benno Teschke have argued that the single most important aspect of historical materialism is the focus on agency as this avoids the traps of deterministic models of historical development and the reification of the agency of capital itself found in those historical accounts which are overly reliant on the ‘structural’ laws of capitalism as a system (Knafo and Teschke 2017). In the latter the ‘making’ of history by people is reduced to the to be expected illustrations of historical laws generated by social structures. POC, in the figure of Tia Dalma/Calypso, allows us to explore this issue of agency as she points not just to slavery but to voodoo and thereby to Haiti and the revolution of 1791, an event which although occurring at the other end of the eighteenth century to the heyday of the pirates nevertheless belongs to the same the complex Atlantic history of class struggle. Susan Buck Morss’ work on the Haitian revolution as the missing event and inspiration in western philosophies of freedom overlaps with the historical efforts of Linebaugh and Rediker and can help us here (Buck Morss 2009). What Buck Morss shares with the latter is an insistence on reinstating the historical agency of the slaves of Haiti rather than viewing them as simply history’s ‘victims’ (Buck Morss 2009, p. 80). Indeed Buck Morss notes the convergence between Linebaugh and Rediker’s work and her own, albeit with the caveat that she sees them as challenging Marxist orthodoxies (i.e. their conception of the proletariat as pre-industrial and Atlantic in scope; their emphasis on women leaders; their concern with race as much as class and their aversion to vanguard politics) (Buck Morss 2009, p. 108). Whilst I would agree that Linebaugh and Rediker challenge Marxist orthodoxies, their work is clearly compatible with the agent focused radical historicism of the Political Marxism described by Knafo and Teschke. What is interesting in the case of POC and Calypso is that Buck Morss‘ discussion of the example of Haiti confirms the importance of the need to avoid the rigid generic framing of specific historical actors in terms of preestablished categories of historical explanation (race, nation, class). Such categories pre-determine how our historical accounts are constructed, diminishing the significance of the input of such historical actors. Instead, Buck Morss outlines some useful concepts to guide historical exploration such as ‘porosity’, or that quality of enquiry into the past which seeks out ‘connective pathways’ for historical facts that undermine and destabilise pre-existing paradigms of knowledge (Buck Morss 2009, p. 13). By

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escaping the gravitational pull of such paradigms she is able to show how, in the struggle against the inhuman practices and conditions of Atlantic capitalist imperialism, unique challenges to older forms of belonging occurred, splitting off groups and individuals from previous cultural identities and establishing original, syncretic cultural forms within which new solidarities were formed. Voodoo, originating in Africa and implicated in the indigenous slave trade, was transformed in the crucible of the Haitian revolution, playing a central part in the slave insurgency. Such reinvention of historical and cultural traditions expressed the struggles of those whose ‘mutual recognition was unprecedented’ and who were attempting to invest meaning in their new world and alliances (African slaves originated in very diverse cultures) (Buck Morss 2009, p. 114). Thus, the star-based navigation of the journey such slaves took—from African home to coast, through the middle passage, to destinations such as Haiti—fed into the ‘cosmological speculation’ of voodoo (Buck Morss 2009, p. 114). In an echo of the theme of the aspiration to give witness to a universal humanity that Linebaugh emphasises in the historical struggles covered in RRGHB, Buck Morss identifies an Atlantic wide interest in the imagery of a common humanity, stretching from the emblems of Freemasonry to the cosmograms of voodoo. What established the difference in this emergent Atlantic culture of images lay in the ‘pulverisation of political and social frameworks’ that the slaves had experienced. (Freemasonry tended to seek common forms of communication and orientation for the powerful if culturally heterogeneous who needed to collaborate in trade and politics in the wider Atlantic world.) Haitian voodoo, Buck Morss observes, approximates to Benjamin’s ‘allegorical’ perception in its emphasis on the transience and fungibility of meaning for those whose sense of history and culture had been through catastrophic breakdown and rupture. There are interesting resonances with this cultural history of the Atlantic and the subplot configured around Tia Dalma/Calpyso. The emphasis on cosmological speculation, including complex allegorical emblems and maps that configure multiple dimensions as well as cultural traditions; the persistent sense of characters entering new, uncharted realms; ideas of falling off the ‘edge of the world’ and the emphasis in the complex narratives of the syncretic reworking of myth, provides a

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context of meaning systems that are porous, full of enigmatic correspondences and surprising connections. It is perhaps significant that much of the narrative attached to Tia Dalma/Calypso is itself ‘backstory’, i.e. it is allusive by definition. One might say she represents an anomalous ‘connective pathway’, a representation of the porousness of the social space of the revolutionary Atlantic, joining the ‘motley’ crews of pirate collectives (that of course contained many runaway slaves), slaves of the middle passage and operating as a proleptic figure of the revolutionary slaves of Haiti. However, we need to recognise that as well as representing an enigmatic complication of the generic category of the historical agent (in terms of the relation of gender and race to traditional western narratives of political emancipation), the character also stands for a traditional Hollywood racist stereotype of black woman as force of nature. On a further level, the allegorical use of Calypso as goddess of the sea suggests that the pirates‘ interests are best served by the liberation of nature. Participating in the enslavement of nature is siding with capitalism’s disparagement of the material world. Capitalism maintains a colonial relationship to nature, as Malm puts it, citing Ernst Bloch (Malm 2018, p. 211). It pursues an association which is ‘more domination than friendship, more of the slave driver and the East India Company than a bosom friend’ (Malm 2018, p. 211). It is Captain Barbosa who argues that it is not in the pirates’ interests to have sought to dominate Calypso as such acts of subjugation generate spirals of power whose repercussions only advantage the already powerful. This is, as he puts it, to ‘open the door to Beckett’ and his domination of the seas via his control Davy Jones and his empire of death. Jones’s relation to Tia Dalma/Calypso is significant for behind it lies not just the subjugation of nature, and the consequent corruption of the miracles of collective labour represented by Jack Tar, but also the historic divisions within the Atlantic proletariat based on race. Jones is not just his brother Tar’s jailor, but also violent patriarchal slaver, wielding the fearsome machinery of the deep-sea sailing ship in the bloody manner of the North American slave plantations. But the liberation of Tia Dalma/Calypso which leads to the death of Jones and the victory of the pirates against a suicidally mesmerised Lord Beckett, is not the liberation of a nature which can join with the revolutionary Atlantic. The maelstrom and tempest that follows Calypso’s release by definition threatens all, not just the object of her vengeance, Davy Jones. Malm’s discussion of the politics of the theory of the Anthropocene seems relevant here. He argues that ‘the liberation of nature

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cannot be the work of nature itself (at least not if it is to accord with that of humanity)’ (Malm 2018, p. 212). And, citing Marcuse, he adds: ‘liberation is the possible plan and intention of human beings, brought to bear upon nature’ (Marcuse in Malm 2018, p. 212). Tia Dalma/Calypso as Nature may need the pirates to intervene to break the system she is enmeshed in. But equally, this does not mean that she has nothing to add to the process of human liberation. As Marcuse puts it, nature is ‘susceptible to such an undertaking’ as there are ‘forces in nature which have been distorted and suppressed…which could support…the liberation of man (sic)’ (Marcuse cited in Malm 2018, p. 212). These forces are what he calls ‘chance’ and ‘blind freedom’, or what Malm describes as nature’s autonomy which is distinct from human agency (Malm 2018, p. 212). Such autonomous forces of nature can be understood as manifestations of an authentically irreducible eeriness which calls humanity to exercise its agency to liberate labour and nature, and in doing so to recognise the limits of any such agency. And in this undertaking, the eeriness of nature counsels against seeking a destructive and ultimately impossible emancipation from the motive powers of the human world that lie in the conjunction of labour’s might and nature’s gifts. The desperate desire to achieve freedom from what he enslaves, from the motive powers he lives off, the sea and the sailor, is what Lord Beckett seeks in his pursuit of the heart of Davy Jones and control of the Flying Dutchman. The ship that is always at sea, never in port, is of course, the mythical expression of the perpetual motion machines which have haunted the fantasies of the capitalist class. Such myths colour those accounts of history that minimise the efforts of history’s agents, rendering them merely illustrative of determining structural forces. Such accounts give indirect support to the reified idea that capitalism is a system with its own quasi-automatic historical agency (Knafo and Teschke 2017). In this regard, if we return to Jackson’s orcs for a moment, the latter represent the industrial proletariat as conservative romanticism sees it, lacking in powers of self-making or historical agency, and therefore no force for universal liberation as Marx believed, but merely an unpleasant by-product of capitalism. Thus, it is significant that the conception and parturition of Jackson’s orcs and the even more repulsive uruk hais is managed by their masters. Here is that conjuring trick whereby capital presents what it parasites—the proletariat—as its

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own motive force and creation. Pirates, however, operated at the heart of the emerging myths of Atlantic capitalism, their maimed and sunburnt bodies ‘scarce living pulleys of a dead machine’ as Shelley described labour’s fate in his revolutionary romantic poem Queen Mab (1813). Their monstrosity is different to that of orcs. Popular culture typically expresses it in terms of an attractive antinomianism. In this way, popular culture has preserved the pirates from being represented merely as the residue of capital’s magic. If largely treated in established histories as the ‘waste’ of the Atlantic system, in the same way as nature is increasingly viewed by capitalism as largely the problem of its own waste, the pirates’ fight is directed at the heart of the capitalist machine. Their quarrel was never with nature whose autonomy they recognised along with the lesson it teaches universal humanity—our collective efforts are mandated by the simple fact that we are all in the same boat, even if some of us have cornered the lifeboats.

The Critical Something: A Weather Eye on the Horizon When watching TC, much of which consists of footage of passing weather formations, busy wildlife and all the randomly captured traces of the living ecosystem of Greatham Creek, one cannot help but be reminded of Malm’s description of the importance of the liberation of nature. Borrowing from Marcuse, he refers to nature’s ‘blind freedom’ (Marcuse in Malm 2018, p. 212). As Malm puts it this freedom ‘blows with every wind and falls with every ray of sunlight’ and ‘Free humans pin their future on such forces’ (Malm 2018, p. 212). The description of nature here is not just poetically and politically rousing. It converges with something of the importance sensed in the cinema machine, as experienced at its inception, through its ability, as described by Siegfried Kracauer, to act as a means of recording and revealing the material world. Kracauer cites one of Lumiere’s cameramen, Felix Mesguich, who is reported as saying that cinema ‘is the dynamism of life, of nature and its manifestations, of the crowd and its eddies…Its lens opens onto the world’ (Kracauer 1960, p. 31). This is a machine then which far exceeds in its liberatory potential the infernal machines of the capitalist past, and like many before him Harrison’s use of the camera reflects this.

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TC is a documentary taking as its subject the history of a small community of salmon fishermen’s huts, cabins and boathouses which from the early twentieth century until the early 1980s were located at Greatham Creek, an intertidal salt marsh in the industrial north east of England. ‘The creek’, as it is known to those interviewees in the film who are remembering their time there, is an estuarial commons. The film helps us understand Linebaugh’s arguments about the contemporary persistence and the political, ecological, economic, cultural and social relevance of what one interviewee refers to as the commons ability to remain a marker of a dyssynchronous historical present, ‘jumping out of the past’ as it does. This phrase is Ian Macdonald’s and he uses it to describe his wellknown 1974 photograph, Cote Hill Island Equinox Flood Tide, Greatham Creek, which formed the creative nucleus of Harrison’s film, itself a long meditated response to this photograph and the disbanded community it evoked. The film is relatively straightforward in its aesthetic. Off-site interviews with members of the community are intercut with location shooting around the deserted and ruined settlement. This contemporary material is combined with community’s own photographic records of the creek that display the closeness of personal, familial and communal witnessing, alongside the more composed, reflective and distant professional images of Macdonald whose interest began in the late 1960s. Harrison includes not just a collection of Macdonald’s own black and white large format stills, but also movie footage from the 1980s related to local television features on the site and Macdonald’s work there (Fig. 4.1). I will argue that TC needs to be seen in terms of three interrelated, emically identified concepts: nothingness, everything and something. As we will see these concepts, elaborated by the interviewees, allow us to differentiate both the socio-economic and psychic aspects of the principal contradiction in the film between the life of the commons and that of capitalism without the commons. The film starts with two summarising comments from the interviewees in response to an unheard question which seems to have been something like: What was it [the creek] like? The first is a re-statement of the material basis of the subsistence commons: Sea, land, and sky, and that was it…

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Fig. 4.1 Cote Hill Island Equinox, Flood Tide, Greatham Creek

The second simply sums up the experience thus: You felt as if you had something when before you had nothing.

At the film’s end an interviewee closes these reflections on the Greatham commons with a similar, but actually, as we will see, subtly different statement: For somebody who had nothing, we had everything.

How then are we to understand these nothings, everythings and somethings? The principles here are of scarcity, excess and sufficiency. The first two are the structural poles of classical political economy and remain central to the contemporary ideologies of capitalism. The third is a value central to commoning. Let us consider this value and its practical forms.

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We can start by noting its relation to a certain freedom. Whether from the perspective of childhood or adulthood, the commoners maintain that life at Greatham Creek offered the experience of a freedom lying in the possibilities it offered to step outside the everyday working world of the twentieth century. During the poverty of the inter-war period when life on the ‘pancrack’ (social security) gave one ‘nowt’, this dearth could be supplemented by the natural resources to hand at the creek: salmon, clams, oysters, crabs, cockles, mussels, winckles, shrimps, samphire, fruit and vegetables from allotments, varieties of fowl, eggs, tinned food from local factory skips, as well as access to industrial by-products common to an industrialised water-way, including shipbuilding timbers, barrels and other flotsam and jetsam which could be salvaged and repurposed to build and maintain the community of houseboats within the marsh. In the period of relative post-war prosperity the creek was less important in supplementing wages, and welfare systems were more robust. At this point, its attraction lay in its ability to sustain an autonomous collective life, one more intense than that possible in the exclusively urban context of wage labour. Interviewees mention the ‘simplicity’ of life at the creek and clearly relish the memory of being able to do things for themselves and remain self-sufficient with the help of its resources. Two events signalled the end of the Greatham commons: the pollution of the creek by the building of a sewage outfall, and the advent in the early 1980s of rapid post-industrialisation which brought in its train vandalism and arson. However, it is also intimated that a post-war generational logic intervened. The commodification of everyday life made the pleasures of the creek seem less significant to younger generations. Macdonald, who Harrison interviews, contextualises the creek in terms of a decline which had begun when he appeared. For him it was a ‘jewel’ of a place, ‘jumping out of the past’. It represented a moment when although people might have ‘lacked money’ they ‘had time’ and the possibility of ‘doing things’ for themselves, for ‘making things’. Macdonald admits to a strongly gendered nostalgia for what he calls this ‘man’s place’, whereas historically, commoning has been a form of social existence in which women have had pre-eminent roles. Macdonald’s view is contradicted by the testimony of many of the women, however, the same women, children at the time, recognise that their mothers worked according to a traditional gendered division of labour. The narrative in which Macdonald embeds his photograph of Cote Hill Island is important in establishing the complexity of the historical

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relations between the creek and the surrounding landscape. (Cote Hill Island is a low promontory with a single dwelling on it that formed, at high tide, a tiny island in the centre of the community.) Macdonald’s photograph is dominated by a storm cloud and in his interpretation this is related to the industrial struggles of the early 1970s and the sense that these were leading somewhere—to the disappearance of industry and the ruination of the creek. Although the social and political forces involved remain unnamed, he refers to the image as a harbinger of our times, ‘times of change’. The presentiment then is of the post-industrial moment, understood as a conclusion to the class struggles of the 1970s (which ended in defeat for industrial, organised labour in the early to mid-1980s). In addition there is a melancholy national allegory carried for Macdonald in the image of the ‘little island’ ‘ragged and falling to bits’, a symbol of England. A welter of feelings about class, nation, and capitalism and an intermixed sense of loss, foreboding and notalgia are evident in Macdonald’s commentary, the political metanarrative of which is by no means easy to disentangle. Mirroring the sense of contradiction and confusion of the time, in some obscure way for Macdonald both the consumer ‘affluence’ and the struggles of industrial labour of the 1970s appear to contribute to the ruination of the north and the nation, inviting or precipitating the ‘storm of change’. Equally, there is a sense of the neoliberal counter-attack to the post-war class unrest and the outline of an alternative narrative of ruination based in post-industrialising anomie and the social and communal breakdown experienced particularly keenly in the north of England. These narratives and moods are held in suspension in the backwash of Macdonald’s retrospections around the image. Unresolved in the film, they accurately sum up related, unfocused contemporary political struggles around class, nation and capitalism. We will return to Macdonald’s little island allegory shortly in the context of a discussion of Brexit, which formed the immediate political context of Harrison’s film. Given his self-effacement as interlocutor and his ethic of prompting reflection rather than engaging in dialogue, Harrison’s own presence in the film is largely felt in the cinematography and editing. Tightly focused on compositional technique and the aesthetic conventions of landscape imagery, Harrison ponders issues of the commons, community, postindustrialisation, nationalism and history. One particular technique stands out—the destabilisation of the conventions associated with the temporal relations between foreground and background, present and past. Simply

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put, the impression that distance in space is distance in time is a convention that can be used in landscape representation to convey an ordering of coexistent times in one space. Thus, through the planes of the image it is possible to suggest both a dyssynchronous historical landscape and a stadially ordered one if, for instance, the background is figured as the past and the foreground the present (Baucom 2005, p. 291). Any such clarity is suspended in TC. It has become a well-established convention in British cinema that representations of northern industrial landscapes suggest the past, indeed Macdonald sees his own image from 1974 as signalling this pastness. In TC, however, it is not possible to determine the temporal status of the horizon, or consequently, to ground any stadial philosophy of history on it. This is because despite the sense of change—registered by Macdonald, and captured in the ruined foreground space where the community of houseboats once stood—the horizon contains no clear visual evidence for change, or of what is known by all to have taken place (deindustrialisation). Thus, as Macdonald talks of the change he sensed in taking his photograph, Harrison cuts in one of his deep focus shots in which although the island has returned to grass and lost its dwellings, any change on the still legible horizon remains indiscernible. The background, throughout the film, is an enigmatic presence, more suggestive perhaps of industrial continuity than rupture, and thereby depriving the ‘post industrial’ moment of any visual signature. It is as if the background scene has dropped out of history (in any progressive or stadial sense), whilst the foreground keeps shifting, by small degrees, as Harrison’s fixed camera positions are moved about the site, shuffling its limited evidence in the present of what once was. The wooden posts forming the substructure of the connected houseboats is given particular emphasis, and they become emblems of this disappeared commons. In this way the film maintains both an unquiet past, urgently felt in the spoken testimony, insistently present in the image, and an apparently indifferent background in which past and present themselves are irrelevant distinctions. In other words, Harrison is careful to ensure that the film does not become an exercise in elegiac nostalgia, and holds the two points of reference, commons and industrial context, in a careful state of tension, braced against one another. In this regard the mise en scene is precisely organised around intersecting vertical line compositions. Pylons, chimneys, towers in the background, rotting wooden posts in the foreground. The latter, are metonymically expressive of departed commoners, impressing themselves into the scene through a shared isomorphism with the industrial

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skyline. Stubborn, despite dilapidation, the posts acquire their presence through differing compositions suggestive of the sentinel, the remnant huddle, and the last stand, in sum, a material fidelity to another world. Harrison makes us feel that not only in some sense has the commons not disappeared, but that it still stands up—for itself. It persists, both as a testified to socio-political ethic and a natural resource, as Linebaugh puts it. Indeed, Harrison captures nature at work. There is clearly regeneration in the poisoned waters, if not on the industrial skyline, and wildlife is recorded doing its thing in the fixed position, long-take cinematography (note the loping, preoccupied fox). In other words, Harrison’s perspective edges us away from Macdonald’s cloudy political narrative, forcing us to reconsider some of the presumptions of northern English history. Ultimately, it is capitalism in the landscape that we are encouraged to think about as much as the abandoned commons. Harrison’s images appear to ask, in the context of post-industrialisation, what is this change which in some sense is no change? (Fig. 4.2). Let’s consider this. A residual commons within a post-industrial landscape, the film considers two afterlives. For it is not just the creek which has been abandoned. It is a well-established sociological maxim that the process of deindustrialisation initiated by neoliberal regimes, both Tory and New Labour, since the late 1970s, have led to a farewell to the

Fig. 4.2 Ruined Posts at Greatham Creek

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working class, at least in the sense understood by Marx. The vanished commoners return in Harrison’s interviews. But the industrial working class’s contemporary existence has to be inferred in the evidence of the image. Its existence is felt to take place far away, on the horizon where we can see smoking chimneys, pylons and cooling towers. Inasmuch as the horizon offers a busy background, this might be assumed to be a scene of post-industrial regeneration. A better understanding, however, would be that what we are witnessing here is a vision of ‘late capital’. The advantage of the latter formulation, if it is understood to indicate that the contradictions of capitalism itself have not been resolved, is that it implies no necessary historical progression (in ways that a phrase like ‘post industrial’ tends to, especially when paired with ‘regeneration’). What then are these contradictions of capitalism? They are those that involve the fate of labour and the social under the imperatives of capitalist competition and accumulation. The pursuit of capitalist profit is a historical process which cannot bring an end to the immiseration and exhaustion of exploited labour, let alone move closer to any dependable, durable social welfare system. Thus, in an era of capitalist political triumphalism the reality of the disposability of the surplus populations necessitated by capitalism’s logic shows no signs of becoming anything but more intractable. In the context of the post-industrial moment, take the innovation of zero-hours contracts—a sinisterly paradoxical phrase which demonstrates the profoundly problematic status of the contract under capitalism, along with its ideology of the freedom of wage labour. With the temporal zero becoming the key symbolic marker of the post-industrial labour market a series of deft realignments are executed. Attention is switched away from the maximum hours worked, a limit which represents the achievement of a historic struggle of labour against the capitalist pursuit of ‘absolute surplus value’ and the literal exhaustion of working lives as the working day was pushed deeper into the night. Instead our attention now settles on the minimum hours of work, the flat zero. But this is a very different kind of limit. Not reparative or restorative, but evocative of the spectre of scarcity. As an apparent gain for labour’s freedom (flexibility, choice of hours, etc.,) zero hours redirects attention to the desired addition of hours above the zero. One yearns for work, not relief from overwork. Not only this, one also needs to consider the dubiousness of an ‘exchange’ in which life, that is to say available time, fitness or a readiness of labour which needs to be daily reproduced, is now offered for a potential zero in return. The capitalist’s response that multiple contracts, or a portfolio

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of jobs are now a possibility for labour, neglects the concomitant reality: overwork and exhaustion as the cumulative hours from different jobs on multiple contracts add up, or abject working poverty as the hours on such contracts remain stubbornly low. And this is to leave to one side how the contract with nothing allows the capitalist to roll back the burden of what the industrial ‘job’ once represented—forms of employee welfare. The reality of the north east of England’s labour market in the post-industrial era is captured by these cruel paradoxes. We know that this is the existing context of the lives of those commoners remembering the creek, and whether more relevant to their family members than themselves given the generational gaps, it affects them all as communities and a class. At the same time the film is piecing together the characteristic socio-cultural relationships of the original creek community, alongside the relationship to the natural environment it flourished in. In order to help generate the contrasts here between the life lost and the life that carries on, we need to return to the distinctions mentioned above between nothing, everything and something as they help to elucidate and differentiate the psychic economies of capitalism and commoning. As we have seen the ‘freedom’ of the creek represented both its supplement to poor wages and insufficient welfare provision and its circumscription of industrial employment whereby it enabled its commoners to find ‘time’ away from the job (as Macdonald puts it), and to develop the satisfactions attendant on acquiring and practising the skills of making-do (in the long tradition of commoning). This is the context of the ‘something’ of commoning. It is based on a margin of substantive freedom that the commons offers and nurtures. Understood merely in terms of economic subsistence the creek was of course less significant in the post-war period, however, in terms of stepping outside the psychic life of capitalism it was and remains critical. This was the ‘Feeling you had something when before you had nothing’. How should this ‘having’ be understood? Clearly it does not refer to property—even though the ‘hole in the ground’ with which the Cote Hill Island dwelling began, was sold. This ‘having’ took place out of reach of the capitalist logic of nothing and everything. The ‘feeling’ of this something maintains itself in distinction then to any ultimate everything, and is not scared of its proximity to nothing which, with the slightest change in the angle of our vision, it might well be seen as—a hole in the ground, a house made of an old lifeboat, a hut, a hovel or a cabin.

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In other words, this is a something that could never be mistaken for the abundance pursued by capitalism. In the psychic economy of capitalism scarcity is the past, what we move away from, abundance is the future and what we move towards. ‘Something’ does not fit into either the maximalist or historical logic of capitalism, and in not fitting in it registers a different psychic economy, of the type Todd McGowan lays out in his psychoanalytic account of capitalism and desire (McGowan 2016). For McGowan, the thing that is something is in part always inadequate— a make-do, a failed object repurposed—but at the same time, it is the actual source of our satisfaction because it directs us to face with courage the reality of the necessary failure and insufficiency we experience in the objects of our desire (McGowan 2016). The commons have always operated on this kind of psychic economy, which is historically related to the ‘stubbornness’ of peasants when viewed from the perspective of ideologies of modernisation. Peasants, in so far as they were able and uncoerced, stood in the way of capitalist ‘improvement’ or ‘development’, preferring the diverse production of the means of subsistence rather than specialised production for the market undertaken for the purpose of capitalist profit and accumulation. Capitalism’s historical impact and longevity then is connected to its ability to parasite the logic of human desire. It takes the disappointment that any given commodity brings when compared to the mythical absolute of flawless satisfaction, and uses that disparity to drive us onwards in the further pursuit of such mythical states. In the process it renders us unconscious of our true satisfaction in the make-do present. All our conscious efforts are keyed to the next commodity, and the full future it will inaugurate, one which will resolve the lack which is the shame of the present moment and the disappointment of the commodity in hand. Commoners and peasants are circuit breakers of this psychic economy. The contentment of the creek interviewees is unanimously agreed on, and at the same time, so are the imperfections, inconveniences, struggles and all the rough and ready necessities of an estuarial commons (including sitting in the houseboats, unable to leave them when unexpectedly high tides backed up by strong winds flooded them). This is enjoyment as we actually experience it in McGowan’s view. If generalised it might set the psychic conditions for real political change. Capitalism’s onward march can never leave us content with the necessarily flawed and partial nature of enjoyment. And it is in its nature to always substitute its circular, infinite motion for any genuine human satisfaction.

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In what sense then does this something of the creek converge with everything as it does in the closing statements of the film? It can do so because this is an everything that manages to detach itself from the everything of capitalism and reattach itself to an everything of the commons, which we can understand in Linebaugh’s sense, as expressed in TC’s opening statement: ‘sea, land, sky, and that was it…’. In other words, the natural elements that capitalism has sought to commodify, reasserted in their autonomy outside that process, and returned to the embrace of a labour that is satisfied with the situation in which all objects of desire fail to live up to the fantasy of ultimate fulfilment, promises a new satisfaction or a different everything. The elements of nature mark a limit or a barrier. They cannot be ‘improved’, although they can be degraded and damaged, and they are sufficient (‘and that was it’). In this recognition, a bold and necessary one in our warming world, we are detached from the ideology of natural scarcity which provides the alibi for enclosure, private property and improvement. As McGowan puts it, for capitalist ideology to function we must believe that nature is in itself ‘nothing’ when it is left unimproved (McGowan 2016). Interestingly, the historical term for this state is a synonym for the commons, i.e. ‘the waste’. The everything at Greatham then would not be recognised as such by capitalism. From the perspective of the commons, however, there can be an everything in proximity to a nature which is not dominated. Of course this is not everything as ‘ultimate’ satisfaction, but it remains no less ‘heavenly’—a word used more than once by interviewees—for that. That the heaven that is possible is not the fantasy of repletion represents a traumatic realisation for the human subject, and capitalism offers us a delusive escape from this pain with the promise to satiate our desire in the future. The commoners of Greatham creek know their everything is no more than something, but as such, more precious than capitalism’s everything. Finally, let us return to the question of England, raised in TC, and reprised throughout this book. Macdonald’s thoughts on the Cote Hill Island photograph suggestively evoke the perplexities of the present as much as they do those of the 1970s. If, as he feels, the island allegorises England, then it might have something to teach us about that nation. The photograph and film it is embedded in give us an England that is ragged, patched, home made, never grand or ‘great’ in the dubious British sense. Understood in this way, England might be recognised as the form in which the enabling disappointment about Britain as a modern nation becomes finally possible or operational. By contrast, we can see that

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the threat of Brexit to its own project lay in its belief in an England as the impossible object of desire. The project of getting the country back, the fulfilment of an original but lost plenitude, threatens to expose the connection between a genuine national ‘satisfaction’ and loss, particularly in the anti-climax of the hollow Johnsonian getting Brexit done. Any future becoming of England would, according to this argument, be dependent on the collapse of British myths of specialness and omnipotence, and this is precisely what Johnsonian Brexit is determined to avoid. As McGowan argues recognising the satisfaction of what is simultaneously seen as disappointing is difficult and traumatic for the subject. By extension, what therefore needs to be avoided in the current politics of nationalism is the evasion of disappointment, as this can only lead back to the sense that if our enjoyment of getting our country back is not what we hoped, this is to be ascribed to others and their ‘excessive enjoyment’ (their capture of our national everything ). In the Brexit period these others have been migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers. Capitalist psychic economy and a dangerous variety of nationalism converge here. Both have the tendency to encourage the belief that what we don’t have, others do. This is the vicious circuit linking scarcity and excess. Within such belief structures envy (at those whose ‘excess’ is felt to be responsible for our scarcity) and the aggression of externalising, scapegoating solutions for what is ultimately the internal problem of necessary disappointment, become a threat to all. Our failure to achieve a mythical national fullness becomes a rage directed at others. The key strategy to ward off the danger of disappointment is to promise a future satisfaction—the common characteristic of both Johnsonian nationalism and capitalism. Johnsonianism will be obliged, now we have our country back, and as an ongoing project, to assure us that we have never quite achieved that feat, but that we can, if only we can deal with those others consuming our greatness (these may well be internal as well as external enemies). Becoming indifferent to the pull of the belief in a mythical future national success matching an equally mythical greatness of the past is the prerequisite of real change, and an end of British history. Macdonald tells of a friend in whose memory the Cote Hill Island photograph has ‘people are all over’ it, despite the fact, as Macdonald adds, that there are no people in it. The scene is empty, the island desolate, and yet, this vision of an island alive with people persists. Those folk of Cote Hill Island, invisible to the photographic plate, but strong in the memory of the image, commoners, always and irredeemably ‘up’ the creek, especially in

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the warming world we share with other global commoners, with their strong sense of community dependent on the labour whose freedom lies outside the priorities of capitalism, they might be a good place to begin any end of British history.

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Linebaugh, P. 1986. What If C.L.R. James Had Met E.P. Thompson in 1792? In C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, ed. P. Buhle. London: Allison and Busby. Linebaugh, P. 1991. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Penguin. Linebaugh, P. 1997. Review of Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery. Historical Materialism 1 (Autumn): 185–196. Linebaugh, P. 2014. Stop, Thief; The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press. Linebaugh, P. 2019. Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. Oakland: University of California Press. Malm, A. 2016. Fossil Capitalism: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. Malm, A. 2018. The Progress of the Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. McGowan, T. 2016. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York: Columbia University Press. McNally, D. 1993. Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso. Polanyi, K. 2002. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Rediker, M. 1987. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seaman, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World 1700–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ranciere, J. 2012. Nights of Labour. London: Verso. Rediker, M. 2014. Outlaws of the Atlantic; Sailors, Pirates and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. Boston: Beacon Press. Waites, I. 2012. Common Land in English Painting 1700–1850. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Williams, R. 1973. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus.

Index

A abolitionism, 96 Abree, M., 29, 85 Abree, T., 29, 85 accelerationism, 24, 30 accumulation, 11, 36, 53, 64, 69, 81, 82, 115, 117 Africa, 100, 105 agape, 92 agency, 5, 17, 20, 22, 23, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 53, 59–64, 66–68, 74, 77–81, 88, 98, 103, 104, 107 agrarian, 19, 36, 44, 51, 52, 78 allegory, 18, 23, 52, 53, 92, 93, 99, 101, 104, 112 Alton Towers, 18, 23 anachronism, 87, 95 Anderson, P., 6, 19, 21, 59–61, 70 anthropocene, 2, 52, 59, 63, 67–69, 75, 77–79, 81, 85, 98, 106 apokatastasis, 90

Atlantic, 5, 12, 20, 24, 28, 29, 69, 70, 74–76, 81–83, 86, 92, 95, 98, 100, 103–106, 108 At World’s End (2007), 99 Aurora (2015), 65 B Bacon, F., 81 Battle of the Five Armies, The (2014), 51 Baucom, I., 51, 113 Benjamin, W., 45, 51, 88–92, 94, 105 Bennett, J., 46 Bentham, J., 29 Blair, T., 18, 21 Blake, W., 12, 76, 81, 86, 92 blockbuster, 2, 59, 60, 64, 87, 98 Boulton, M., 50 Bourgeois Paradigm, 6, 10, 40 Brenner, R., 4, 53 Brexit, 2, 4, 5, 11–18, 21, 112, 119 British Marxist Historians, 5, 87 Brown, N., 58 Buck Morss, S., 104, 105

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Dave, Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59646-0

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124

INDEX

Burke, E., 84 C Calypso/Tia Dalma, 101–104, 106 Canetti, E., 62 Canterbury Tale, A (1944), 39, 76 capitalism, 2–4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 19, 22–24, 28, 29, 34–37, 39–42, 45, 46, 50–58, 60, 63–69, 74, 76–78, 80–82, 84, 89, 90, 97–99, 101–103, 106–110, 112, 114–119 Chartism, 38 Christie, I., 28 chronism, 10, 87 Churchill, W., 12, 14, 28 Clarke, N., 63 class, 2, 4–7, 9, 10, 12–24, 28–46, 50–58, 63, 74, 77–79, 81–84, 87, 89–96, 100, 104, 107, 112, 115, 116 climate change, 59 closure, 91, 93 Coleridge, S.T., 99 colonialism, 84, 92, 93, 106 commodity fetishism, 45 commons, 2, 5, 29, 36, 38, 44, 54, 56, 74–85, 91–93, 97–99, 102, 109–114, 116–118 Communist Party Historians Group, 29 Conservative romanticism, 2, 9, 10, 12, 19, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 50, 74, 76, 107 Constable, J., 76 contradiction, 10, 11, 14–16, 34, 55, 57, 63, 65, 66, 70, 102, 109, 112, 115 Corbyn, J., 9 Cote Hill Island, 111, 116, 118, 119 Cotman, J.S., 44 counterfactual, 88, 94

Country, 10–12, 16, 17, 28, 36, 50, 52, 75, 76, 82, 83, 119 Country house poem, 83 Cox, D., 44, 76 Creek, The (2018), 2, 85, 98, 109 crime, 89 Crome, J., 44, 76 crossroads, 91, 93, 94 cultural revolution, 7–10, 40 culture, 2, 5–7, 9, 10, 18, 23, 24, 28, 33–36, 38–41, 43, 51, 55, 64, 76–84, 88, 90, 95, 99, 100, 105, 108 custom, 15, 44, 53–55, 76, 87

D Davis, M., 52, 75, 84 Dead Man’s Chest (2006), 99 Dean, J., 62 Dellar, J., 20 Desire, 3, 50, 52, 61, 64, 67, 107, 115, 117–119 Desolation of Smaug, The (2013), 51 Despard, C., 24 Despard, E., 93 dialectics, 51, 66, 79 Dickens, C., 18 Diggers, 83, 102 digital multitude, 59, 62, 63, 66, 69 Dimmock, S., 51, 54 disaster movies, 65 Dobb, M., 51 double-take, 32, 34, 35 drive, 64, 67, 81, 117 dwarves, 53, 55, 56

E Eagleton, T., 3 eerie, 22, 23, 35, 41, 43, 45, 46, 76 ektrophe, 93

INDEX

Elusive Pimpernel, The (1950), 2, 17, 28 elves, 53 emblem, 30, 31, 58–61, 64, 66, 69, 78, 86, 103, 105, 113 enclosures, 8, 29, 36, 44, 54, 76, 78, 84, 91, 99, 118 England, 2, 4, 6–10, 16–21, 23, 40, 76, 85, 87, 90, 93, 95, 98, 99, 109, 112, 116, 118, 119 Englishness, 6, 9, 10, 13, 18–20, 22, 23, 28, 33, 34, 38, 41, 42, 55, 84, 86, 99 environmentalism, 64, 65, 68 epic, 75, 88, 90, 91, 94 Equiano, O., 96, 97 F Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001), 51, 56, 57, 59 feudalism, 4, 6, 53, 54 Fisher, M., 22, 36, 41, 43, 45, 61 Fletcher, R., 64 Flying Dutchman, 101–103, 107 forces of production, 54 formal subsumption, 37 fossil capitalism, 46, 63, 65, 68, 77, 81 French Revolution, 3, 6, 8, 17, 30, 31, 33, 37–39, 42 Frodo, 52, 57, 58 G Gainsborough, T., 82 Gandalf, 59, 66 Gardiner, M., 38, 76 Geostorm (2017), 64, 80 Gillray, J., 31, 42 Godzilla, 78 Goldsmith, O., 76 Gollum/Smeagol, 56–58

125

gothic, 18, 22, 76, 83 Greatham Creek, 85, 99, 108, 109, 111, 118

H Haitian revolution, 95, 104, 105 Hardy, L., 96 Hardy, T., 96 Harrison, W., 79, 85, 108, 109, 111–115 Hartley, L.P., 10, 12 Hawkes, J., 75 Hebrides, 36 Hegel, G.W.F., 11, 14–16 Hill, C., 5, 19 Historical materialism, 2–7, 19, 22, 23, 46, 88, 98, 104 historicism, 51, 104 Hobbit, The (1937), 50, 52, 53, 63, 67, 78 Hobsbawm, E., 5, 58 Holstun, J., 83, 84, 88, 102

I I Know Where I’m Going (1945), 36, 40 imperialism, 20, 27, 52, 53, 67, 77, 81, 105 India, 84 Inklings, The, 55

J Jackson, P., 2, 51–53, 58, 59, 62, 63, 66–69, 74, 107 Jacobins, 29, 38, 39 James, C.L.R., 28, 95, 97 Jameson, F., 7, 8, 10, 11, 51, 66, 67, 97 Janowitz, A., 95 Jennings, H., 29, 30, 80, 81, 85

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INDEX

Johnson, B., 13–15, 17 Johnsonism, 16 Jonah, 98

K Keiller, P., 10, 20, 84 Knafo, S., 104 Kracauer, S., 96, 108

L labour, 2, 8, 13, 21, 23, 28, 29, 36–38, 44, 54, 56, 59, 60, 66, 69, 70, 74, 76–78, 80–84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 99–103, 106–108, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 120 Lacan, J., 64, 67 Land, 2, 8, 29, 36, 44, 54, 69, 75, 76, 82, 84, 85, 91, 95, 99, 102, 118 Landa, I., 52, 53 landscape, 36, 43, 44, 52, 59, 67–69, 80, 82–85, 112–114 Leskov, 90, 94 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (1943), 14, 39 Limitless (2011), 60 Linebaugh, P., 5, 6, 12, 13, 20, 23, 24, 28, 30, 45, 56, 69, 74–81, 83–97, 99, 104, 105, 109, 114, 118 London Corresponding Society, 29, 96 Lord of the Rings, The (1954-5), 50, 63, 67 love, 91–93, 101 Lowy, M., 3, 10, 27 Luddites, 77, 78, 80 Ludd, Ned, 80

M Macdonald, I., 109, 111–114, 116, 118, 119 Malm, A., 46, 59, 60, 65, 66, 68–70, 78–81, 106–108 Malthus, T.R., 37, 38, 68 Marcuse, H., 107, 108 Marvel, A., 83 Marxism, 3–6, 50, 67, 104 Matrix, The (1999), 61 Matthews, W., 5 McGowan, T., 11, 15, 16, 117–119 McNally, D., 37, 38, 68, 83 medievalism, 52, 54, 55 merrie, 76 Mesguich, F., 108 methodology, 86, 88 Milton, J., 80, 81 Mitchell, J., 14 mode of production, 6–11, 53, 54, 64, 81, 85 Mogg, J.R., 14 Morris, W., 55 mycelium, 90 myth, 18, 19, 22, 37, 38, 54, 55, 58, 90, 98, 103, 105, 107, 108, 119

N Nairn–Anderson theses, 19, 20, 24 Nairn, T., 6, 12, 19–21 narrative, 2, 9, 13, 19, 20, 24, 32, 44, 51, 56, 59, 60, 63, 65, 66, 78, 80, 87, 89, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106, 111, 112, 114 nature, 28, 29, 32, 35, 38, 39, 50, 55, 65–70, 74, 76–85, 87, 89, 98, 99, 101, 103, 106–108, 114, 117, 118 neocatastrophism, 75, 77, 98 neoliberalism, 21, 41, 60, 65 new materialism, 46, 60, 80

INDEX

127

New Verticality, 58–64 Niven, A., 17–24 nonsynchronicity, 7, 40

proletariat, 2, 38, 60, 62, 70, 74, 81, 82, 84, 87, 95, 98, 100, 104, 106, 107 psychic economy, 64, 116, 117, 119

O orcs, 59, 62, 74, 107, 108 Orczy, Baroness, 28, 31 Oxford medievalism, 55

R race, 43, 57, 91, 93, 95, 104, 106 Ranciere, J., 87 Ratcliffe murders, 94 Rediker, M., 69, 74, 75, 81, 84, 99, 100, 104 regionalism, 22 Restitutionist romanticism, 2, 50–54, 57, 67 Return of the King, The (2003), 51, 52, 59 Revolutionary romanticism, 2, 3, 5, 12, 17, 24, 74, 78, 87, 97 Robinson in Ruins (2010), 20 Romanticism, 2, 3, 5–10, 12, 13, 17, 19, 22–24, 28, 45, 50, 76, 80, 99 Royal Society, 81 Ruling class, 6, 9, 10, 12–16, 21, 28–42, 45, 50–57, 82, 87, 94

P Paine, T., 38, 98 pastoral, 28, 44, 45, 50, 52, 55, 68, 69, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 98 paternalism, 37, 38, 54 peasantry, 4, 53–55, 84 People, 2, 5, 9, 11, 12, 15–17, 23, 35, 44, 75, 80, 84, 88, 92, 99, 104, 111, 119 Phenomenology of Spirit, The (1807), 11 Pirate of the Caribbean (2003-2017), 2 Pirates, 24, 74, 98–104, 106–108 Polanyi, K., 9, 37, 79, 85 Political economy, 36–38, 82, 84, 92, 93, 110 Political Marxism, 4–6, 50, 104 popular culture, 23, 24, 78, 99, 108 populism, 2, 5, 6, 13, 16, 17, 87 Post, C., 50 post-industrial, 111, 114, 115 Powell, M., 2, 10, 14, 17, 28, 31, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42, 44, 74, 76 Pressburger, E., 2, 10, 14, 17, 28, 31, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42, 44, 74, 76 Prince Regent, 33, 43 pristine culture of capitalism, 7, 8, 10, 28, 34, 35, 39, 41, 51 Productive forces, 4, 5, 81

S Sam Gamgee, 57, 58 Sayre, R., 3, 10, 27 Scarlet Pimpernel, 14, 28, 30, 31, 39 Schnapp, J., 62 Shelley, P.B., 9, 14, 77, 108 Sinclair, I., 20 slavery, 29, 103, 104 Smith, A., 37 social formation, 7, 9, 36 spectacle, 14, 30, 33, 58, 60, 61, 63, 65–67, 78, 84, 87, 90, 97, 98 Spence, T., 38, 95 Spicer, A., 2 storyteller, 88–91, 93, 94, 96, 97

128

INDEX

subsumption of labour, 38, 89 surplus population, 58, 69, 115 survivalism, 68, 69 Sweezy, P., 51 T Tecumseh, 79 terracentricism, 99 Teschke, B., 104, 107 thanatocracy, 30, 45, 87, 89 Thompson, E.P., 5, 19, 20, 28, 29, 36, 89, 95–97 tradition, 6, 9, 12, 20, 21, 38, 42, 51, 55, 76, 81, 82, 86–88, 91, 96–98, 105, 116 transition debate, 51 Two Towers, The (2002), 51 U underground, 90, 92

Unexpected Journey, An (2012), 51

V voodoo, 101, 103–105

W Waites, I., 44, 82, 85 Wayne, M., 13 weird, 41–46 Wheatley, B., 20 Whissel, K., 58–62, 66, 86, 87, 97 Williams, R., 84 Winstanley, G., 102 Wood, E.M., 4–7, 28, 38–43, 51, 54

Z zero-hours contract, 115 Žižek, S., 64