Surplus Culture

on literary festivals, living wrong life, and the aesthetics of biting the hand that feeds you.

For a reasonably literary man, I have been to relatively few literary festivals. Off the top of my head, I can think of one, held in a church in De Beauvoir Town, north-east London, in 2019. It was fine. I was there to see a friend of mine read poems; he read well. Other people read more or less well from their work. I zoned out through the bits where the writers talked about what their work meant for society or vice versa.

I have barely thought about literary festivals since then. But in the last few weeks, I have been reading about them, chatting to the writers I know who do have to attend them, largely involuntarily thanks to the takemongering of journalists and writers who seem very angry about cancelled funding for literary festivals. Mostly I have been surprised that a lot of purportedly literary people seem not to appreciate the beauty of a symbolic gesture.

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For anyone who is unaware, the UK media has run an implausible number of stories about the hedge fund/asset management firm Baillie Gifford and its sponsorship, now withdrawn, of a lot of “literary events”. A brief summary:

Thanks to a campaigning group, Fossil Free Books, various writers pulled out of Hay Festival and the Edinburgh Book Festival, citing the fund’s investments in fossil fuels and the arms trade, especially in businesses involved in Israel’s butchery in Gaza. As a result, these festivals cut ties with Baillie Gifford, and then Baillie Gifford cut ties with literature, preferring to push rather than wait for others to jump.

Now a lot of people, perhaps those who depend on such festivals to sell more books, or those who just love pontificating on panels in front of Guardian readers, are angry at the campaign. They say that it has achieved nothing except devastating the arts ecosystem of the country. Baillie Gifford is not exceptionally steeped in oil or blood, by the standards of asset management firms (it’s merely in the top 50); indeed, its investments in fossil fuels and arms are below baseline. The writers who led the campaign are hypocrites, who sell their books on Amazon, use Google, and presumably use fossil fuels, own iphones, have eaten Sabra hummus, etc. What is the point, they say, of demanding this moral purity when it is impossible to achieve? Treat every man according to his desert and who shall ‘scape whipping? Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

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Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good is a common enough statement of liberal principle. I seem to remember it being said a fair number of times, by Barack Obama, who killed a below-baseline number of children for a US president. Of course, the perfect: not being complicit in burning the planet—or selling weapons to nations engaged in genocidal massacres—is largely unachievable “under capitalism”, because if you have a pension, you are funding that stuff. So what is the point in ruining a nice weekend of spoken word and Richard Osman signings? Why should you make everyone feel bad?

Well, as far as I’m concerned one of the legitimate aims of serious literature is making everyone feel bad. And I think the beauty of this gesture, the beauty of this biting of the hand that feeds it is important, and it ought to be acknowledged. Making everyone defensively point out that their pension has a little dried blood on it seems like a classic example, to me of, making the stone stoney.

Even if the campaigners themselves seem to be backpedalling and talking about failures to leverage the relationship in the correct way. It is not a failure. We’re talking about “the arts”, so really, we ought to be talking aesthetically.

Those who oppose the boycott and are angry at the loss of Baillie Gifford funding seem to think that they are the ones standing up for art for art’s sake, and that their opponents are philistines who would wreck art by politicising it. But they are the ones who are speaking in pragmatic, and let’s be blunt, philistine terms. They’re the ones talking about the real world. They’re the ones talking about money. Without Baillie Gifford, the literary festival would cease to exist, perhaps. Very well then. What of it? What does that have to do with literature?

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To understand that question, and then to see how the gesture might acquire beauty in a certain light, we need to know a little of the context. According to Millicent Weber’s recent book on the topic, the UK literary festival in its current form traces its origins back to 1949, when the Cheltenham Literary Festival was set up. But it really solidifies in the 80s, further massing in the 2000s. Every historic market town, new town and even some former pit villages now have their own literary festival, and it’s a good thing too, I’m sure.

Weber’s book helpfully conjoins the rise of these events to “creative-industries focused public policy”. You could, if you wanted to, connect this “creative-industries focused public policy” to the fate of the economy at large. If the political conjuncture we often call neoliberalism has tended to go hand in hand with deindustrialisation in the global imperial core, it has also tended, in the core nations, to elevate the arts worker as the ideal economic subject, the entrepreneur of themselves par excellence. They are not simply a rebel against obsolete Fordist discipline, but rather embody the ideal of autonomy within work, and the cognitive skills needed to succeed in a changing economy. Steve Jobs was an artist. Sandwich artists are artists. All workers are artists now.

There’s quite a lot of scholarly literature on this topic, some of it interesting, but maybe all you need to understand is the film Billy Elliot. At the height of New Labour optimism, the story of a miner’s son who wants to be a ballet dancer, who escapes the fate of the other villagers in his county by becoming an arts worker, moved millions to tears, and perhaps it even generated some actual social mobility, as British film and other arts sectors became a major force in the UK economy. I’m sure economically, it’s not exactly true that we put aside making things and started making art, about the redemptive power of art in the face of deindustrialisation no less, but it feels that way. Towns that deindustrialised became cultural hubs or at least benefited from a boom in student housing. Liverpool became a City of Culture, and so on.

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A comparison that might be worth considering is the Italian renaissance. According to the historian of capitalism Giovanni Arrighi, the expenditure on artworks by the Medici was part of a response to the deindustrialisation of Florence. As it became more productive to invest finance capital from Florence elsewhere, rather than in the local wool trade, Florence started to deindustrialise in the 14^th century, outsourcing wool production to cheaper areas, like England.

Florence then saw revolutions and urprisings among its cloth workers who wanted to protect their status. So when the Medici took state power in the 15^th century, they began to shore up their position by reinvesting their surplus not into more accumulation, but into art. In a sense, masterpieces at home were the cost of doing business abroad:

In the early 1470s, when Lorenzo de' Medici sat down to figure out the principal expenditures made by his family between 1434 and 1471, he did not even bother to distinguish the disbursements for architectural and artistic commissions from those for charity and taxes. All were lumped together because all served the one end - the grandeur of his house and its power in the state. Far from regretting the astounding total (663,755 gold florins), he concluded: "I think it casts a brilliant light on our estate and it seems to me that the monies were well spent and I am very pleased with this."

Arrighi again:

If the plowing back of the huge profits of the House of Medici in the expansion of its financial, commercial, and industrial operations would have been bad business policy, the seemingly "unproductive" expenditure of a large proportion of these profits in pomp and display was in fact good business policy - quite apart from the aesthetic pleasure and other benefits that it gave the Medici family. For big business in general and high finance in particular were involved in state-making functions to a far greater extent than in later epochs.

Arrighi’s interest is in the development of the finance system, and its relationship to the state and the global world system, but it strikes me as telling that a kind of creative industries approach, emerged in Britain and around the world in parallel with deindustrialisation.

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So where is our renaissance? I don’t know, man. Some recent cultural product has been pretty good. But it seems fairly clear to me, looking at Britain, that “creative-industries focused public policy” has now failed and is widely considered a failure on economic terms by those in charge of the capital. Those who defend “the arts”, and note that “the arts” constitutes a larger portion of the economy than oil and gas, for example, are the voices of the past. The new industrial strategy that our incoming government claims to want doesn’t really have much to do with the arts, for example, and probably has more to do with oil and gas, whereas their Labour predecessors put “culture” at the centre of their vision for the future.

Taking a cursory glance at social media and the like, too, the worker as artist, finding their passion, demonstrating cognitive skills etc, seems to me to have given way to a kind of nihilistic hustle culture. Make enough money from crypto or dropshipping or whatever to tell people to fuck off.

At the same time, literature specifically has declined in its value to the public. There are more lit festivals than ever, but is literary fiction central to “culture”? Is poetry? The next prime minister, Keir Starmer claims, (mendaciously) not to have a favourite novel. The importance of the idea of culture remains a kind of liberal article of faith, but literature, not so much. Most literary festivals are, after all, about middling nonfiction more than imaginative works, which is why columnists are so keen to defend them. The fact that the hedge fund thought it preferable to drop the whole business rather than lose the optimal rate of interest on what they are right, by their own standards, to call piddling sums (a mere £300million invested in companies with “problematic operations in the occupied territories”), to avoid any aggro speaks to a problem that literature has. It’s a problem, I think, to do with the way its much ballyhooed autonomy from social and economic purposes has been misunderstood.

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Once upon a time –the 90s—we might say, the artist’s autonomy, alleged openness to new experiences, etc, made them a role model for the industries of the future. The writer of literary fiction in particular embodied self-mastery in a way that also seemed inherently connected to the values of liberal pluralism and tolerance etc, while also trading on the general prestige afforded by working in a high-cultural tradition. Writers sought to understand the other, rather than subdue the world to any particular ideological vision. It was this sort of general valueyness (empathy, tolerance, etc) which was talked up by festivals, who tried to attract funding by speaking of this in the language of its economic usefulness. It worked. That’s why companies funded the festivals. Don’t take my word for it, ask Baillie Gifford:

We’re deeply curious about the world. To find companies with the greatest chance of growth over the next five years and beyond, we read widely and are constantly hunting for new ideas. That often leads to conversations with authors that help shape our theories about how the world might change. To share this passion with you, we sponsor many of the UK’s leading book festivals. 

Or their statement on ending their “collaboration” as a result of the protests:

Our collaboration with the Edinburgh International Book Festival, spanning decades, was rooted in our shared interest in making Edinburgh a thriving and culturally vibrant place to live and work…

Literature, at least the kind found in sponsored festivals, is not in conflict with asset management, but embodies all of the values that a good asset manager needs. It makes you smarter, and better able to see what others are thinking. Better able to be part of a diverse workforce. It can contribute to stock picking, futurology, and even gentrification. Who doesn’t want to live near a literary festival in a thriving, culturally vibrant place?

But I wonder if the conflation of literature, and the arts more generally, with the ideal worker of the neoliberal era, hasn’t doomed a lot of even our best cultural production not to survive deindustrialisation. The Medici valued art because it could glorify them by bringing them closer to god, not because it gave them skills that they thought they already had anyway. Literature as a kind of indirect value generating discourse was always going to fall short, if you ask me, of Dante or Michelangelo. The autonomy art acquired, perhaps starting with the Florentine renaissance, might well have proved to be its undoing now. Culture, at least the ‘high’ kind now claims to produce value, but that value is not something absolute, like the moral law; its merely a personal quality that might one day be realised in economic value.

But if “creativity” and autonomy are not the unique purview of the high-cultural writer or their tradition, then, perhaps literature does not add much value. Indeed, because serious literature is obviously commercially low value at present, in need of sponsorship, charity, it seems as if perhaps whatever it was for is a thing of the past, like altarpiece painting.

And for the right-wing reader, this is also what makes such work easily coopted by activist types. That’s the problem with it. It is free of the discipline of the market.  Without this discipline, activists can dominate. They then bite the hand that feeds them, and the hedge fund puts them out in the garden for the night to think about what they’ve done. It’s a sad day for art’s sake.

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A lot of writers would probably bristle at the idea that literary activists are biting the hand that feeds them. Coming out of the frothing mouths of reactionary columnists it does of course sound reactionary. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, otherwise you’ll have to get a real job.

Instead, writers who want to do politics within the world of books often think of themselves as workers in the creative sector, labouring to produce wealth that is extracted by owners. They are the hands that feed. They form unions of poets and the like, in spite of the fact that no one actually wants to buy the goods they make. Richard Osman makes money, sure. But John Milton was an “unproductive worker”, and so are many people reading this who have published books, myself included.

I think the failure of this piece of literary activism to achieve its pragmatic ends is telling about the status of writing work. The writers behind Fossil Free Books were apparently hoping to leverage their work, its value, to influence the hedge fund. But because serious writing is pretty much worthless, they don’t really have a way of doing that in the way that workers can, through unions and the withdrawal of labour. Perhaps in a time when the cultural industries were seen as the future, they might have succeeded. Perhaps. But really, it was always going to be unlikely that Baillie Gifford would consider “conversations with authors that help shape our theories about how the world might change” to be worth £300 million of business in the occupied territories, no matter how small a portion of their portfolio that is.

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Perhaps it’s a little pat to connect such a writerly irrelevance to the claim popular in certain strands of Marxism that the true revolutionary subject is surplus population. Not people exploited by and within the wage system, but people in some sense outside of and at war with it as it recedes from them. Writers in the developed world are not exactly surplus population. Even though there are too many of them, and they mostly fail to produce value. But why else, barring the parsimonious explanation of the woke mind virus, do they even feel inclined towards hand-biting?

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As far as I can tell, the UK literary festival in its current form traces its origins back not to the Cheltenham literary festival, or even to 14^th century Florence, but to the time when the first hunter gatherer tribes collected any kind of surplus. Someone was taken aside, maybe the person with the best memory for words, and excused from the duties of hunting—fed some of the surplus—in order to entertain the others, or to justify the existence of the warrior caste or whatever the peculiar kinship structure was. I’ve always believed that there is a kind of epigenetic memory of this, a trace, the presence of an original sin inside any and all art which distinguishes itself from ordinary human activity, which claims not to be culture in the ordinary sense. It bears the stamp of cowardice, complicity, infantile playing while the real work is done elsewhere. As the miseries of socially reproductive and surplus accumulating labour grew along with the surplus, this primordial guilt inside various play-like activities is what became art. Everybody loves. Everybody suffers and wonders and  admires and fears death; but not everyone is allowed to dwell with these feelings until they find a form to express them, a permission which is dependent on accepting the legitimacy of the distribution of the surplus and the regime necessary to acquire it. I’m not one of those people who believes poetry is not a luxury. Art is surplus. If it wasn’t, if it was necessary, then it wouldn’t be art.

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But the great works of literary art that I’ve always admired, and which I’ve tried to think about on this weblog, are those which bubble into weird shapes due to the force of this guilt or consciousness of art’s failings. I value, personally, those writers who are determined to lose in economic terms, who set themselves against the generation of surplus that permits them to exist, not in any instrumental sense, but in the practice of art itself. Who want to see what art can do other than glorify the surplus.

The protest against Baillie Gifford and its ineffectualness strike me as coming close to this. It isn’t trying to enact social change through the medium of art. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s what creative industries policy wants, and it’s also what Baillie Gifford wanted, at least until it was taken too far. The protest offers us a kind of parodic extension of all this bland value-serving logic. It puts values into conflict, as all good fiction should do, for example. It reflects on its own conditions of possibility, like good modernist art. The various columnists called it virtue signalling, but it seems to me that it signals something else entirely, a hostility to all this art-like stuff, this excess of serviceable culture that people appear to want to gather to discuss tediously in rooms paid for by well-meaning fund managers. Does it not seem especially useless while people are being massacred? Are artists not meant to bang their head against that uselessness? Sure, you can’t do anything. But that’s what poetry does. It makes nothing happen.

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It felt very pointed to me that the last literary festival I attended took place in a church that presumably no longer had a large congregation. At the end of the festival one of the other poets played the church organ unprompted. As if to signal the end of a service. In one conventional telling of the story of Western art, it escaped from the churches. As the surplus spilled into Florence, for example, to keep its population pliant, the painters had so much work that they seemed to have the freedom to imbue their commissions with more of their own visions. They competed with one another in ways that began to leave religion and even the Medici behind. Later we came to value this freedom and space, and call it autonomy. But maybe, over time that value itself comes to be the drag on writers’ freedom. Maybe the valuing of literature, the claim that it ought to be subsidised, that it’s a social good that deserves some of the surplus because its values are the values of a good society, comes to seem identical not to freedom but to subservience. Literature is not that good at being a social good. Maybe real art is whatever refuses to become culture, whatever wastes the surplus for its own sake. It seems to me that the Baillie Gifford protests, by that light, were a work of art.