What is a library...

...and where should it be housed?
It is not for nothing that the libraries at Occupy camps and sites raise such questions. Judging from the images of Occupy libraries on Flickr, the housing of books can take many forms, from Toronto's yurt to the volumes packed into plastic boxes on long trestle tables in New York. Occupy London at St Paul's deploys Starbucks branding - 'Starbooks,' inevitably, though still amusingly - presumably as a two-fingered salute to a media industry intent on exposing the smallest cracks in the edifice of protest when they report on the paradox of protesters holding meetings in a nearby branch of Starbucks.

In a sense it doesn't matter much where a library is housed. The more unlikely of places the better! Libraries as buildings create a sense of separation of life from knowledge: this is where knowledge is sought, that is where you are meant to stop thinking in creative and intellectual - or indeed in all - ways.

We can't do away with library buildings: they keep old and homeless people (sometimes the homeless elderly) warm for a few hours as they read newspapers and books, chat to other people, feel in company and so less isolated and lonely. Libraries are also good for teenagers seeking relative peace from rowdy homes where there is a lack of private space for study. Clearly libraries in most cases need to be housed in buildings. But there is too much separation within life, far too much compartmentalisation of this from that. The life of the mind, the imagination, and dreams have their place. Sadly, there's more places where all three of these things don't go on than do. Neoliberalism again.


What is its function?
Not all of the books in Occupy libraries are what you would call the movement's textbooks, if it could be said to have any. Think of a library hosted by protesters and what pops up in your head? The collected works of Marx and Engels? Klein's Shock Doctrine? Holloway's Crack Capitalism? Recent editions of the New Left Review? Ginsberg's Howl? Perhaps. But what you do see in the pictures on Flickr are biographies of the 'enemies': Dubya, Palin et al... You think: are these sarcastic additions donated by right-wingers keen to make their own fingered gestures at a movement they deplore? Maybe some city boys have clubbed together to buy these memoirs of Republican nasties. Why not? What's wasting twenty five quid to them? Or - shock horror! - anti-capitalists really do want to understand the world beyond their idea of things, which means they want to be informed about the enemy through their ever-so soi-disant mutterings.

The library is a hub where knowledge and dreams are born. It can be anywhere. It can be nowhere. Hold on: it is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously! No fines involved.

What is knowledge?
This is not a philosophical question. It could be; it's just that I'm not posing it as such. Reason being: the exciting thing about these libraries is their randomness. There is no chief librarian vigorously thumbing publishers' catalogues which tell libraries what they should have on their shelves. No, Occupy libraries appear to prefer a different kind of systematicity. As in, the system comes afterwards, once the title is picked up and is engaged by a reader whose desire is to engage another reader, provoking a potentially infinite chain of recommendation that literally conveys knowledge one-to-one or in some other configuration of readers and thinkers. Knowledge is not so much disseminated as embodied by a process which sweeps up engaged readers who become agents of change as a result of what they have or have not read (this latter can be as much of an active choice as the former).

Knowledge is what you made of the exchange? Knowledge is what you make of the book (which might involve you cutting it up and rearranging the paragraphs according to your whimsical or portentous desires)?

Why library?
Simple answer: it's a form that works. A collection of books and other materials for enlightenment and pleasure in one space. This government (not to mention the efforts of the last) is keen on devaluing libraries not because people don't visit them but because they are said to fail the economic utility that determines all value in this wretched f*&^%$g neoliberal world. All talk of communities running their libraries in some Big Society love-in is mendacious, colluding with neoliberalism. This fundamentally undermines what is meant by the library as an institution and its role as an incubator of dreams and facilitator of knowledge. That government policy on the provision of libraries goes hand in hand with worsening social and economic conditions in those very communities means the library somehow loses its purpose, becoming yet another space of entertainment that is the end result of neoliberal and capitalist notions of aesthetic pleasure: in fact, the aesthetic is merely an adjunct to the accumulation of capital.

Occupy libraries overturn such insidious manipulations of the idea of the library by hosting processes of knowledge and book exchange in the context of a gift economy one of whose endpoints is, without a shadow of a doubt, humanisation, and to feed the soul and mind in the interests of democratic change. Intentionally or not, Occupy libraries are tapping into the broader debate about the place and value of libraries in our communities by removing knowledge and pleasure from the cycle of capitalist exchange. It's as if there's a dialogue between Occupy libraries and the campaigns against local library closures, and the one is saying to the other: continue to fight to save the dreams and intellects within your communities! The dreams and intellects! Dreams and intellects are stronger than arguments about utility determined by checks and balances, by how much money is made by this or that library as they buy more DVDs and computers and install a branch of a coffee chain where the European literature section used to be (remember we're selling off all European literature titles to fund the new and exciting changes!). And so, just as Occupy sites have installed libraries and universities as a matter of course, placing reading and discussion at the centre of what is entailed by the commons and democratic life, it is there for all to see that wherever neoliberalism treads, the denial of free access to knowledge follows (the rise in tuition fees is yet another node in this particular network).

Why library? We can't do without them.

What is the order of things?
When people refer to their libraries it is never known what they mean. Beyond those individuals who ironically name what is merely a stack of books something grander by far, you are inclined to think that what is being referred to is a substantial collection that has been acquired and archived with the idea of systematising a body of related works and/or the passions and interests of the collector. All of which makes me think: why can't a stack of books collected in this way be a library? Is it not a more meaningful concept of library? If my stack of books represents a bout of research or sustained curiosity, I would consider this not merely an archive but a library to which others might benefit, gaining access to a living embodiment of a thought process or moment in history. In other words, much like the libraries of the Occupy movement, this 'library' is not determined by the amount of books and their expense but by the extent to which it embodies or even crystallises a continuing history. To put it another way, such a library distances itself from the bourgeois concept of a room in which feigned intellectual tastes collide with the acquisitiveness of the privileged.


The artist and producer Lorena Rivero de Beer wrote recently on Mute about the process of cataloguing the Free University of Liverpool's library. This library consists of donations made to the University by colleagues, friends, associates, the like-minded and the participants themselves. It is another example of a gift economy in which the gift will go on giving. Lorena's article includes a photograph of participants surrounding a table of around 500 books and 'intuitively cataloguing the Free University of Liverpool Library'. Intuition and desire were at the centre of this cataloguing process, which jettisoned preconceived notions of category, genre, discipline, publisher, or even theme. This playful and loose classification was 'aimed at revealing the power hidden in disciplinary divisions and also to reflect on the subjective positions through which they are made'. They were personalising the library, ordering it through the interlocking desires of the collective as a result of discussion and reflection. Like the Occupy libraries, the Free University of Liverpool's motley collection of books - to which all are invited to access and enjoy - is not aimed at increasing knowledge in the service of capitalist production and accumulation. No, it is far more important than that: it is humanised and humanising, both of which qualities a library must embody if it is to earn its name.

On poppies, mourning, and nationhood

The two minute silence was an hour ago. At the risk of sounding indulgent (emotion is always a risk, the risk of offending by projecting the self beyond all others), the mere mention of the two minute silence forces an intense sadness to well up inside me and on occasion overflow almost instantaneously with a momentary sob. Detecting the risk of self-indulgence, I quickly suppress this incongruous emotion: incongruous because none of my family has died in any of the wars commemorated by this annual ritual. While it is true that most of my work as an academic has concentrated on war and genocide, thankfully there is no direct link between me and the catastrophe of war deaths. Clearly my response is to the idea of mass death and the sheer loss of humanity constituted by it. The two minute silence compounds this recognition, a recognition that is likely never to go away since empathy is constitutive of my humanity in the first place and so the thought of people losing their lives burrows into my mind as a psychic injury.

Consider the consequences of this psychic process extending to whole nations. This year’s poppy campaign in the UK has focalised this issue. I am uncertain whether my attitudes have shifted and therefore notice particular things more than I might have done in the past, but to me there has been a muddying of nationalism – or specifically, national pride – and the ritual of remembrance enacted by the poppy campaign. And then there was FIFA’s decision to ban England’s football players from wearing poppies on their black armbands during a forthcoming match in Spain. Needless to say that there was a hailstorm of protest, inevitably leading all the way to the Prime Minister and the Duke of Cambridge, the latter holding the post of Chair of FIFA. My thoughts have been mixed over this affair: one minute I think it is much ado about nothing, and that the players wearing poppies sewn into the black armbands does not in any way symbolise religious or political allegiance; the next minute I think there is more at stake here, namely what happens when nations are told – implicitly or otherwise – that they cannot ritualise collective mourning. Decisions such as FIFA’s are an affront not so much to the dignity of remembrance but to the way in which national mourning is bound up with national pride. For it is true that what is being ritualised is the loss of life to a specific cause; footballers do not, after all, mourn AIDS victims on their kit, and so their recognition of Remembrance Day is in some sense an assertion of national identity. This is the way we fought, won, and lost in drastic numbers. Their sacrifice is not only individual but collective, made in the name of a nation that responded to a geopolitical situation in the way that it did. In this light, it is easier to understand why FIFA viewed the wearing of poppies as political expression. Protestors claimed that the poppy is a universal symbol of memory and remembrance. But do all nations deploy the poppy in rituals of mourning and remembrance? And what if the other team England happened to be playing was Germany? What then?

The poppy campaign is a solid British institution and has good intentions: volunteers invite you to select a poppy from their tray and ask that you leave a donation at your discretion. The money raised from this process goes towards the care of those injured by conflicts past and present. What kind of empathy denies the moral or ethical import of this process? But as my politics have shifted in recent years and I cannot resist the deconstruction of ‘campaigns’ and ‘moral crusades’, this year I am viewing the poppy campaign in a different light, particularly as a discursive practice whose undertow has itself shifted as a result of contemporary ideologies of nationhood on the right and in some respects, albeit in residual form, in certain quarters of the left. It saddens me that the trestle tables set out in the name of the poppy campaign on city streets bear an unfortunate resemblance to those arrayed in the dubious name of the British National Party. How can I navigate this Union Jack-bedecked territory without betraying my convictions as an anti-nationalist and anti-fascist tout court? What difficulties confront me as I walk past a table campaigning in some related form to the official poppy campaign but in which the political ideologies pertaining to race, immigration, sexuality, gender, and capitalism are somehow dovetailed by a Union Jack symbolism acting potentially in bad faith.

I am aware that all of the above could be viewed as self-indulgent. They sacrificed their lives so that you could write this stuff, some might say. It is not difficult to donate to the poppy campaign without abandoning your own bloody politics, some might say with rightful indignation.

I write out of sorrow: that the poppy is being co-opted, exploited, and besmirched symbolically by defensive notions of national pride. Above all else, I am writing this post out of a concern to raise the issue of mourning, melancholia, and nationalism. As Freud explained, insufficient and blocked mourning fails to return the patient to their lives and to society. The result of blocked mourning is interminable melancholia, by which the lost object, the cause of mourning, is internalised by the patient’s ego. This is a disastrous manoeuvre because the lost object and affect of grief are then locked inside the subject, barring the return to reality and to stable health. A number of escape routes are posed as the solution to melancholia: Freud mentions hysteria as one such exit to unleash locked grief and release the subject from their apparently intractable situation. Considering melancholia as a form of repression, on the other hand, means that aggression and destructive impulses could be seized upon by the melancholic in order to relieve their insurmountable feelings of dejection and self-loathing, to give expression to their libidinous energy. It is not difficult to view this psychic economy as underlining the fate of nationhood in its confrontation with mourning. FIFA’s decision is one possible action amongst many that represses national mourning, paving the way for an aggressive or defensive reaction that becomes the default psychic character of the nation’s ego. Meddling with mourning is a dangerous operation with potentially destructive effects. 

Dear Mr Bevin

The rhetoric of the cut. The shock of contrast and the leap in time.

I realised more about where we're heading as I watched a short video in which the Guardian interviewed three people about their views on Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill. They represented the past, present, and future. While strictly true in terms of their respective stages of professional development, their political stance - nay, their conscience - muddied the tenses: the GP works presently, he is bucking up for a roaring trade in his consortium. But his support for the so-called radical reforms are throwing us back in time. Campaigning against the so-called radical reforms, the retired nurse projected us into the future with hope through conscience past as she recalled the first days of the NHS. The UCL medical student has also been campaigning, embodying the future through hope as well.

Aneurin Bevin had been down the mines and so knew why a National Health Service was a good thing. He claimed a National Health Service paved the way to true socialism, blocking the way to greed and self-interest. Having barely come to terms with one of the most disastrous conflicts the world has even seen, Britain came up with the NHS. What does our time fish out of its crisis? Reforms that consolidate the greed and messiness of competition that caused the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Marx was right: capitalism thrives on crises; this is its revolutionary character. Now it can thrive on the sick.

But it's the cuts in the short film. I can't remember the exact sequence, but a new sequence has formed itself in my own mind: Aneurin Bevin in the foreground, heavy industry in the background; David Cameron's porcine seriousness in the foreground, Lansley's porcine indifference a little further in.

Mr Aneurin Bevin, I'm so sorry.

Fare thee well

An odd form of sadness welled up inside me as I glanced the pictures of NYC's new model of yellow cab. What didn't help were the images the Guardian had assembled from the archives of history and cinema, including one of a driver leaning against his cab during a strike through to De Niro's menacing anti-hero. But where were the images from Woody Allen's films? Some of the most memorable scenes are set inside the tatty interiors of the instantly recognisable yellow cab. One of my favourite lines uttered on screen from within these cabs occurs during a scene in which Allen plays a professor of creative writing whose attempt to woo a young female student is intermittently stalled (pardon the pun) by his usual habit of checking the rising fare: 'You're so beautiful I can hardly keep my eyes on the meter.'

Looking at the supersize Nissan model NYC has chosen just doesn't cut the cinematic mustard for me. It's difficult to imagine these SUV-like vehicles cruising across the big screen with anything like the rough'n'ready grace of the old beauties. Accompanying this likely loss to cinema is the sadness I feel for my friend whose first visit to NYC sometime in the future will have an old model-shaped hole at its centre. At the root of this melancholy is the idea of NYC's attachment to cinema - after all, the city is imagined as a cinematic reality before it becomes an actual one. The disappearance of formerly indelible markers of mediated reality such as the yellow cab pierce through the meaning of New York. It is hard to resist the thought that NYC is changing too fast at the behest of officialdom rather than as a result of the city's protean nature.

Boy George is the voice is absolute reason

Boy George is right: these things come round in cycles. And they come round regardless of the usual excuse of recession, economic depression, straitened times, etc.

Why is the West End now a pressure point for violence against gays and lesbians? The main reason would be that Soho filters into Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. Why do those perpetrating violence wait for the denizens of Soho to reach world-famous public spaces before they viciously attack them? Is not the fact that the violence goes on in these public spaces a worrying signal that thugs are so hellbent on destruction that they will risk public exposure to fulfill their murderous intentions?

Boy George is right: why can't the Met assemble CCTV evidence against the attackers? The attack on Philip Sallon took place in an area under heavy surveillance as a result of terrorism and general crime. The Met does not think the attack was a homophobic crime, but it was unquestionably an attack against a person who looked different, and in the mind of the thug, difference usually equates to 'queer'. This would be difficult to prove in a court of law without concrete evidence, but in the wider world it makes perfect sense. Still, perfect sense is useless in a court of law. The suggestion that Philip Sallon was attacked like any other individual for being merely an individual within range of thuggish impulses is therefore disingenuous. Still, the need for concrete evidence will emerge, and if not from the CCTV system that just so happened to be without range, hopefully it will come from the victim himself, once he is ready.

The viciousness of the attack is consistent with the intended aim of causing irreparable damage to someone the attacker considers beyond mercy. Such an attack does not increase in physical viciousness because of circumstance; the viciousness is rooted in the homophobic animus of the thug, an animus upon which the thug can call without much premeditation when fulfilling his/her murderous impulse. The act is premeditated, it simply lacks an object. Once the object is located, the premeditation is let loose on the victim. By such a point, the premeditation has been dwelt upon, shored up by adrenalin. It is on the verge. Then the inevitable.

Boy George fears, like all of us should, for people who are different. I fear too that all too often public discourse about difference rotates the need to assimilate as the best possible solution for such crimes. The thug gets off twice: s/he pursues the attack and attacks, or s/he does not because their object is invisible, or as queer theory would say, illegible. The more this line of supposed reasoning is pursued the more we live in a society in which we half-sanction the actions of murderous bullies and thugs. The civilised are made to accommodate the crimes of the wild, if only for a peaceful life. All the while self-expression and self-determination suffer. Same old same old. It happens to goths, it happens to rape victims, it happens to women generally, it happens to gays and lesbians and trans people.

After Sebald

At Snape Maltings last weekend Artevent's The Re-Enchantment programme reached a rich and perplexing stage in its sober exploration of people and place, landscape and memory. After Sebald: Place and Re-Enchantment took the work of W. G. Sebald as a departure point for reflecting on these themes in East Anglia, the very landscape represented in his most widely known text The Rings of Saturn. Those gathered for the weekend seemed to be there in some sort of pilgrimage, or as the original German subtitle of The Rings of Saturn has it, Eine Englische Wollfahrt, an English pilgrimage. As with all pilgrimages, the wayfarer treads its weary way in the spectral presence of a revered figure, and so it was that we assembled to think about Sebald, his work, and the canon of writing that preceded or was influenced by him. But behind the title of After Sebald lies a peculiar form of retrospection, as if any thinking about people and place was always Sebaldian. The Re-Enchantment is mindful of the sense in which Sebald's work has changed the way we think about ourselves and our surroundings.

Troubled footsteps
The weekend began on Friday evening with the world premiere of Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald). I am new to Gee's work; he has made films about David Bowie's time in Berlin (another icon, a different landscape) and Joy Division (another depressive melancholic). The film about Sebald echoed the structural and tonal qualities of his work, exploring Sebald through interviews with those who knew or write about him. Its focus was The Rings of Saturn, and so inevitably the film's structure traced the walking tour of this text. But in no way was it literal or slavishly mimetic, one of its most fascinating - and perhaps Sebaldian - qualities being its questioning of the possibility of retracing footsteps. It appears the film was guided under the premise that no journey can be repeated, that all who retrace the footsteps of others are grasping for authenticity where empirically it cannot exist. The unstoppably eloquent Robert Macfarlane put this honestly and beautifully in the film when he spoke of his own attempts to repeat the narrator's East Anglian walks. Arriving in one seaside town he found the weather to be anti-Sebaldian: it was bright and sunny and the children were bathing in the fountains and pools. Macfarlane was surrounded by joy. It was difficult and curmudgeonly to shake it off, and so he concluded that it was impossible to make his own walk conform to the idea of the walk. Authenticity is what it is as it happens. Gee's film shows literal footsteps as a box within the film's frame, as if to say this is as close we can ever get to the narrator's own journey: a pair of boots and a stretch of tarmac. That this is tarmac in East Anglia is verification enough.

Gee's film closes the gap between his own work and that of his subject's by optimising his own cinematic aesthetic. Sebald's multi-layered phototextuality is realised by Gee in a film that has the look of a palimpsest, with dissolves between background and foreground, juxtapositions of original footage and Sebald's text in relentless focus, and instances of often ironic misfit between the interviewee and the images on screen. Dan Gretton's comments on the section from The Rings of Saturn which refers to the massacres perpetrated by the Croatian Ustasha are followed by a lingering close-up of the disturbing image from page 97 of "Serbs, Jews and Bosnians, once rounded up, [were] hanged in rows like crows or magpies". Gee focuses on the image until it blurs into an undifferentiated mass of black and white. Given earlier commentary about Sebald's photographic procedures, this moment to me constituted the kind of ethical trespass that Sebald avoided in his own work. What does it mean to render images in this way, to deny the photographic subject its prior particularity? It doubly reinforces the tautology of all images in that having died once, the subject dies again and once more through a further act of representation. Perhaps this wasn't a moment of insensitive trespass, though, for with this cinematic technique Gee could be making a point about photography and oblivion, much in the same way Sebald attempted to do with the photographic images that he made hazy on his department's photocopier at the University of East Anglia.

It would be wrong to concentrate on this moment against the otherwise substantial and thoughtful homage to Sebald's work that the film pays. And the film is certainly full of details that seasoned readers will find tantalising, such as insights into Sebald's relationship with his publishers and the unerringly wry manner of his response to the demands of modern publishing. One delightful moment is his publisher's anecdote of asking Sebald into which category he would like his genre-defying books to reside. Sebald mentions three categories, his publisher quipping that there would have to be a copy in each of those sections in the bookstore. We also learn of recent scholarship from Barbara Hui, whose doctoral work has expanded into 'litmapping', The Rings of Saturn forming Hui's first attempt to use online resources to visually and digitally connect texts with geography. Gee shows Hui's Sebald litmap in action, suggesting a metaphor for the film's habit of forging connections between differing media and references as a critical and poetic homage.

The discussion between Macfarlane and Gee after the film was a constructive feed into the following day's symposium, exploring as it did questions of authenticity and the journey. Some of these questions were practical in that both Gee's and Macfarlane's attempts to retrace the narrator's footsteps in East Anglia foundered on the possibility of making the journey that the text outlines. Did the narrator thread seamlessly through Norfolk and Suffolk or did he make a number of journeys which the text implies as a fluid trajectory? In fact were the journeys made at all or were they, as Macfarlane suggested, journeys thought into existence?

Footsteps in thought only
We emerged into the darkness of Snape after the film to return in daylight the following day for the symposium. And much light was shed on the themes in hand. Still, a number of problematic moments threatened to steer the event off course, but not, unlike in Sebald, in a good way. After a heartfelt introduction from Sebald's friend Stephen Watt, there followed three main presentations by Rachel Lichtenstein, Richard Maybe, and Alexandra Harris, ending with a short and inspirational burst from Dan Gretton. In between Robert Macfarlane introduced and presented his extraordinary BBC film on the wildness of Essex, based on the sections on that county from his book The Wild Places.

Stephen Watts' poem in homage to his friend 'Max' followed a short introduction in which he spoke about their plans to walk from Watts' ancestral home in Switzerland to Sebald's in Wertach. I expect a number of people sighed internally at the unhappy thought of this unmade journey, and the book which would have resulted from it, now not possible. Watts reticently mentioned that since Sebald's death, he has not attempted the journey on his own.

The East End: a multi-lingual palimpsest
Rachel Lichtenstein gave a tour of her most recent books and a taster of two books forthcoming in her series on three London thoroughfares for Hamish Hamilton (Brick Lane was published two years ago, with Portobello Road and Hatton Garden remaining). It considered sense of place through a seamless blend of images from her work, autobiographical reflections, and encounters with people in their places (including Stephen Watts and Professor Bill Fishman, expert on the Jewish East End). It was a melancholy pleasure indeed to learn again (the lesson never resides) of the disappearance and displacement of the Jewish East End with its famous Yiddish theatres and legendary poets of the 'University of the Ghetto'. Lichtenstein's own personal exploration of the East End, inspired as it was by her family history, emphasised how landscapes exist in the spectral presence of other, more geographically distant landscapes. The immigrant's melancholic yearning for home in the context of their adopted home place translates the latter in the image of the former. The Jewish East End became indistinguishable from the East European shtetl from whence the immigrant came, a blurring of geography through the mental landscapes of cultural belonging.

Lichtenstein's range extends beyond her Jewish roots to engage with other communities, a truly cosmopolitan attitude that speaks deeply and movingly of a common humanity against a background of cultural difference. For Lichtenstein, Spitalfields' rich history of immigration is embodied by the constantly shifting use of one building on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street: the eighteenth century building currently housing the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid was previously a synagogue, and prior to that a protestant chapel for the Huguenots who fled Catholic France. Common humanity is discerned in the image she evoked of Muslim men and Orthodox Jews emerging in different eras out of the same portals, dressed in similar white robes on holy days.

On not reading the text
Richard Mabey has written over thirty books on landscape and nature, writes columns for the BBC's Wildlife magazine, and lives in Suffolk. Mabey had much to contribute on the weekend's theme of exploring our relationships to place, but his defensive opening gambit, in which he announced that he would be some sort of devil's advocate, resulted in a myopic and confused argument. In rigidly prescriptive terms Mabey argued - demanded, actually - that writing about landscape should adopt a scientific mode and language. He attacked Sebald for obsessively practicing pathetic fallacy, a literary technique that, as Mabey contended, threatens the very landscape it seeks to describe by sublating nature and placing the human as both its subject and object. Nineteenth-century sentimentality was disastrous in that landscape ceased to exist independently of the human gaze. The specious anthropomorphism of pathetic fallacy cut short rigorous scientific analysis, causing a solipsistic imbalance towards the human. Thus, the historical and ecological inaccuracies of the Dunwich Heath passage from the The Rings of Saturn prove that Sebald and his ilk fail to write with any level of adequacy about nature and landscape.

Mabey's draconian tirade against Sebald and pathetic fallacy was a perfect example of not reading the text. His mistake was double: he elided the author and the narrator, and the text's literariness with an assumed ecological register. Highly selective quotations from the text committed the further critical error of failing to account for context, which can only be be expected from one who refuses to accept that text's literary operations. Sebald's more astute readers will be amused that Mabey glossed over The Rings of Saturn's breathtakingly fugal opening chapter, in which references to Jorge Luis Borges and Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen jostle with the genre-defying seventeenth-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne to suggest the text's shape-shifting unreliability. But perhaps even more notable in this regard is the absolutely crucial passage in which the narrator critiques the scientific values of the Enlightenment through the perspectival distortions of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson. Such passages combined offer an allegory of reading, alerting the reader to the text's premise of unreliability amidst unwavering empathy. On top of all this, Sebald's avowed interests in metaphysics and phenomenology clearly direct his readers away from expectations of empirical veracity. In an interview with Michael Silverblatt, Sebald cited the fog in Bleak House and Woolf's 'The Death of the Moth' to suggest ways in which time and space coalesce in literary constructs. And so what we come to realise is that Sebald's metaphysical predisposition and immanent critique of Enlightenment values question empiricism overall. Mabey would have done well to contextualise Sebald in this way, both to save the audience from unwanted critical solecism but also to level with Sebald as a writer who never professed to writing works of ecology.

Modernism, but not as you know it
Alexandra Harris recently won the Guardian First Book Award for Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, parts of which she presented for her talk last weekend. Harris revises the avant-garde narrative of modernism in order to foreground the residual romantic relationship to landscape in artists like John Piper and writers like Woolf. In his art Piper moved away from forms of modernist abstraction and sought to give expression for his irrepressible love of the English landscape, which he did in a subtly readjusted modernism that accommodates figurative depiction. It is arguable whether the constant threat of mechanised warfare and advancing modernity renewed the desire for an intimate relationship with landscape, something which is considered to affirm eternal values in a rapidly changing word. Anticipating loss, the terms of engagement resulted in a blend of romanticism and modernism, from paintings and sculpture through to new editions of guidebooks that acted as paeans for the creators to the English countryside. They also sought to revise interest in that landscape within the varying, ephemeral demands of modern desire. This frame of reference from the inter-war years extends to the twenty-first century. Harris recalled her visit to one of the sites in her book, asking us to consider what significance important historical sites such as decommissioned churches can have for future generations.

It would have been fascinating if Harris had opened up her analysis to Sebald, who as we know acknowledged the influence of Woolf's 'The Death of the Moth'. Woolf's narrator minutely details the moth's expiration, and in Sebald's mind this acts as a metaphor for the catastrophe to come. History is present in everything and everywhere. A natural historical specimen takes on world-historical resonance; we alight from one spatio-temporal realm into another.

Future footsteps
For Dan Gretton, Suffolk has always been uncanny. At the beginning of his brief and breathless presentation, he drew an outline of the part of Suffolk around the mouth of the River Ore. As a child he perceived something significant about this landscape, divining its historicity before he possessed the facts to explain his mysterious preoccupation with the place. He exonerated Sebald as much as Mabey decried him. Sebald's ability to penetrate the secret histories of objects and place realised their relation to each as much as their participation in the vast matrix of human relations. Like Gee, Gretton is captivated by the passage from The Rings of Saturn about the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Croatian Ustasha. In archivist mode he visits the Bosanske Krajine Archive in Banja Luka, where, as Sebald's narrator relates, fifty thousand documents are kept detailing the massacres. Gretton finds not one single document. He steers clear of decrying the text's unreliability and views it revelatory of a kind of moral truth that installs a unique methodology for understanding the past. The text that results from ruminations such as this, to be published next year by Granta, seeks to comprehend the phenomenon of the 'desk killer', the figure familiar from the Nazi period whose complicity in genocide was neither direct nor declarative. Like Sebald, Gretton is activated by the thought of previously undetected connections between space and time, attempting to lend coherence in the now to the labyrinthine events of the past.

*

No symposium which takes the work of W. G. Sebald as its focus could end in a truly conclusive way. He did not do conclusions in any conventional sense. Throughout his work the threat of untied ends overshadows his author-narrators to the point of paralysis. If there is such a thing as a Sebaldian ending, it is characterised by the dissipation of the text into the reader's consciousness, passing on to that reader the anxieties attached to inconclusiveness.

Whilst Professor Jon Cook chaired the discussion as amiably and constructively as possible, the panel had the unfortunate task of navigating Richard Mabey's hostility generally to the premise of the event and overwhelmingly to the work of W. G. Sebald. He opined that he was unable to see any quality in The Rings of Saturn that would sway him from his unshakable belief in the evils of pathetic fallacy. He can't be knocked for consistency, but ultimately it is silly and pointless to claim the text lacks any commendable qualities. Mabey waded in on what he thought was the pretentious practice of embedded photography in contemporary fiction. Referring to his Jewish roots, he made the extraordinary claim that even he would not have the temerity to seek to write his family history and the Holocaust, which begs the question of how Holocaust representation is possible if no interlocutor, Jewish or not, is permitted to approach history. All of this threatened the need for civility and respect towards fellow panel members, and given her presentation earlier in the day, clearly if not actually was an implied attack on Rachel Lichtenstein's work.

Robert Macfarlane cleared up what my friend and I had been thinking the whole day, namely that you muddy the critical waters if you elide the author and the narrator, and also that Sebald never intended to write as a naturalist and so cannot be blamed for crimes against that writing tradition. This is blindingly obvious if you actually read the text but matters little if you approach things dogmatically on your own terms. Macfarlane also warned of the inherent dangers of 're-enchantment', reminding us that for a rigorously orchestrated campaign of re-enchantment you need look no further than National Socialism. Perhaps this explains Sebald's ecological unreliability, for if we approach landscape only from the naturalist's perspective, you may end up dehistoricising it. Solipsism lies there, and not in Sebald's work.

Trying to work out Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband's first headline statement on the unions was unsurprising. On the campaign trail he struck a distinctly centrist note when pressed on the unions: as with all his answers (a quality I admired at the time, and still do now) he made sure the audience were aware that if elected, his response to situations would be context-specific rather than ideological. Too much of the old politics was concerned with ideological fixity, which had and continues to have a paralysing effect on strategy, barring progressive solutions rather than enabling them. That union strike action is programmed for the day of the royal wedding is understandable given the strike's purpose in hitting hardest for maximum effect. There really is no perfect time for strike action. Ed Miliband's paradox, however, is to condemn the cuts as his central narrative and castigate the unions when they pose little real threat. What damage can strike action do on a royal wedding bank holiday beyond the sustained damage posed in the long term by the current government? Why placate the royalists? For one thing, it's contemptible that the extra bank holiday the country has been demanding for such a long time has been granted on the occasion of a meaningless marriage. Is Miliband appealing to the hardened royalist, or perhaps those feckless individuals who count the symbolic presence of feudalism as one of the things the country's got going for it? What's certain in the context of all this royal puffery is that it's not critics of public sector reform who need to grow up.

There is a deeper narrative threading its way through the thicket of Ed Miliband's leadership. Talk of the 'squeezed middle' has dominated his overall response to the cuts, whilst reference to the erstwhile working class continues to be elided. 'Squeezed middle' at least implies its target socio-economic group, whereas 'the vulnerable' is the catch-all term embracing other groups. The semantics of class collapses between these two terms, forming, if you like, a capitalist dialectic of the indigent and producer. Whilst the decimation of the national industries prepared the groundwork for the dismantling of the working class, late capitalism abides in a working class tethered to corporate retail power, producers of nothing but profit as a result of low-paid labour that is subsequently devoured by the relentless cycle of consumerism. The spectral working class wobbles over prospects such as lost cause dependency and Tesco. One of the major consequences of this hopeless situation is generalised apathy, where not even the carrot of the freedom to vote can inject an ounce of self-empowerment. This is one reason amongst many why the working class fails to make it to the polling booths. You begin to feel that the problem is not so much located in which type of government exists but rather with the prevailing system. There is no let-up in the daily grind in a society poised for ever more privatisation and increasing supremacy of the profit margin. Meanwhile the Tory-led discourse of people power and decentralisation rings hollower by the day as - to pluck one random example from that rotten Tory oak - we're told that there's money in the pot to support 'free schools' for the affluent but no longer anything at all for the building work of existing schools that desperately need it.

Ed Miliband's task is to navigate these concerns in a way that speaks to the millions of voters lost over the years due to New Labour's increasing deafness to the issues affecting the working class. Should Miliband have expressed more support for the unions? If it is left to the unions to coordinate a dynamic response on the streets to Tory-led austerity, then what of a Labour leader who can't seem to engage with this mass movement? One immediate fear is that his inability to negotiate a healthy relationship with the unions in order to revive the working class roots of Labour's support will only end up confirming that New Labour lives on, slightly adjusted against a background of directionless, hand-wringing apologia about the past. In daydreaming moments unchecked by the realities of parliamentary politics, I have willed Miliband to take the leap and go along with the unions, to gauge the public's response; at least he can do something unusual for politicians these days and claim categorically that he has stood by his word by standing alongside the unions and the workers. He was never going to lead the march on the day, but it was reasonable to expect a change of heart, a principled vote of support.

The thorniest of thorns is the image of the unions: damned if they do and damned if they don't. People - even working class people, which is always counter-intuitive - are polarised on the unions. Miliband's dithering over his relationship with them no doubt comes as a result of the influence of the 'squeezed middle', who trumpet the values of common sense, reason, and public order. Values, in other words, not practiced by the trade unions. Meanwhile the squeezed middle holds sway because they turn up at the polling booths. Perhaps Miliband senses that his legitimacy and prospects recede if their support isn't secured, a situation that has haunted all Labour leaders, if not throughout the party's history then certainly during and since Thatcher. Her overarching plan, which the Tory-led government plans to bring to a rousing conclusion, means that Labour's legitimacy cannot be guaranteed without the very voters who hold the interests of the party's traditional working class supporters at bay.