Steve_Bamlett_blog

What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?

I am never confident that writing of any kind changes things except in rare cases to change the ways writing itself is practiced. Nevertheless it’s clear that often very unambitious writing can often feel that it has the intention to change things by exposing the reality of a world in crisis or proposing some strategy aimed at creating change. Most of this does not rise above rhetoric or wishful daydream. And this in part because writing is an activity that makes you conscious of its own limitations.

What writing may do though is change the way we framework an issue – and not just in the ways and means of language. When E. M. Forster said ‘ only connect ‘, he was referring not just to the reframing of how we build human relationships but how we connect perception and thought to the embodied visceral and emotional and to the springs of motivation to act rather than just passively feel.

Thus it is not enough to experience a catharsis of our emotion and remain in balance as Aristotle required of great tragedy. We must, like Lear, ‘expose ourselves to feel as wretches feel that we shake the superflux to them and show the Heavens more just’. I take it Lear is using ‘the Heavens’ ironically here in his ‘madness’, for he knows that if those with surplus of power, entitlement, and wealth do something to ‘shake’ the system, then the ‘Heavens’ will need act no further for justice is IN the power of humans if they have the desire and will. That Lear dies in the process of enlightenment should not be the aim of this great tragedy, nor hold its radicalism in institutional chains in academic libraries.

And Shakespeare can write to change the desire and will of people but only if they are open to hear, see and sense in other ways what is said. Writing can only engage with those as already willing to be thus engaged and hence its ultimate limitation as a lever for change. Reading is resistable and is resisted in so many ways. Some are denied the education that is the portal to reading and to the improvement of reading method, others are educated only to see writing as a primary tool of working in the status quo and some read as if reading were an end in itself, or worse a thing whose aim for them is the increase of their status in the academies of our time.

The latter are often the true enemy of reading in the interests of real change for their purpose is to sustain an elite not to connect beyond it. Only when we do the latter can we change the reasons elites too often exist in the first place – to sustain false distinctions of status. Elites can form the intellectual dynamic for change as the subtle social analysis of Antonio Gramsci showed us, but even Marxist academics often prefer to sustain academic distinction rather than aim for its eventual withering as a temporary tool for change.

Institutional longevity is the enemy of the desire and will to change. To get to those levers, words must aim for connecting and building changeful democratic structures not aim to appear grand and sustain formal representation of the interests of the status quo. Our politics today are unfriendly to such aims but writing must not be a slave to the current belief in realpolitik and pragmatics but engage emotion and the will. Thus far only fascism has done this and applied the imperatives of Nietzsche. Gramsci died in fascist prisons and his political traditions are quiescent today.

Yet, there has to be hope of democratic Renaissance. The world demands huge changes. However small each change we make may be, the changes required are, when seen together, as massive as they could be. To roll them like a stone up a hill requires a desire and will as strong, and stronger, than the forces which enchained Sisyphus to the will of a tyrant God, for we must enchain ourselves to the diversity of a people united in their love of each other’s differences. And that is some task.

With love

Steve

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