Part 7 (2/2)

London and Robinson in s.p.a.ce were made in the s.p.a.ce between two political non-events, the general elections of 1992 and 1997. 1992 was the year when change was supposed to come the end of Tory rule was widely expected, not least by the Conservative Party itself, yet John Major was re-elected. 1997 saw the longantic.i.p.ated change finally arrive, but it turned out to be no kind of change at all. Far from ending the neoliberal culture that Keiller anatomised, Tony Blair's government would consolidate it. Robinson in s.p.a.ce, largely a.s.sembled in the dying days of the Major government, was made too early for it to properly register this. Yet its focus on the ba.n.a.l, Ballardian infrastructure of British postFordist capitalism made it a deeply prophetic film. The England of Robinson in s.p.a.ce was still the England presided over by Gordon Brown a decade later.

The traumatic event which reverberates through Robinson in Ruins is the financial crisis of 2008. It's still too early to properly a.s.sess the implications of this crisis, but Robinson in Ruins shares with Chris Pet.i.t's Content a film with which it has many preoccupations in common the tentative sense that a historical sequence which began in 1979 ended in 2008. The 'ruins' which Robinson walks through here are partly the new ruins of a neoliberal culture that has not yet accepted its own demise, and which, for the moment, continues with the same old gestures like a zombie that does not know that it is dead. Citing Fredric Jameson's observation in The Seeds of Time that 'it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations', Robinson nevertheless dares to hope, if only for a moment, that the so-called credit crunch is something more than one of the crises by which capitalism periodically renews itself.

Perhaps strangely, it is the 'thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and nature' that seem to give Robinson some grounds for hope, and the most evident difference between Robinson in Ruins and the previous films is the emergence of a radical Green perspective. In part, Keiller's turn towards Green themes reflects changes in mainstream political culture. At the time of the previous two Robinson films, Green politics could still appear to be a fringe concern. In the last decade or so, however, anxieties about global warming in particular have come into the very centre of culture. Now, every corporation, no matter how exploitative, is required to present itself as Green. The emergence of ecological concerns gives Keiller's treatment of landscape a properly dialectical poise. In the opposition between capital and ecology, we confront what are in effect two totalities. Keiller shows that capitalism in principle at least saturates everything (especially in England, a claustrophobic country that long ago enclosed most of its common land, there is no landscape outside politics); there is nothing intrinsically resistant to capital's drive to commoditisation, certainly not in the 'natural world'. Keiller demonstrates this with a long excursus on how the prices of weight increased in the immediate wake of the 2008 crisis. Yet from the equally inhuman perspective of a radical ecology, capital, for all that it may burn out the human environment and take large swathes of the nonhuman world with it, is still a merely local episode.

Environmental catastrophe provides what a political unconscious totally colonised by neoliberalism cannot: an image of life after capitalism. Still, this life may not be a human life, and there is the feeling that, like the narrator's father in Margaret Atwood's coldly visionary novel Surfacing, Robinson may have headed off into some kind of dark Deleuzean communion with Nature. As with Surfacing, Robinson in Ruins begins with a disappearance: Robinson's own. Paul Scofield having died in 2010, the narration is no longer handled by Robinson's friend, but by Vanessa Redgrave, playing the head of a group seeking to reconstruct Robinson's thinking from notes and films recovered from the caravan where he was last known to live. If the Redgrave narration doesn't quite work, then that is partly because there is a feeling that Keiller has slightly tired of the Robinson fiction, or it has ceased to serve much of a function for him. For what seems like large parts of the film, the Robinson framing narrative disappears from view, to the extent that it can be something of a jolt when Robinson is mentioned again. Lacking Paul Scofield's sardonic insouciance, Redgrave's narrative is often oddly tentative, her emphasis not quite mustering Scofield's a.s.sured mastery of Keiller's tone.

In tracking the historical development of capitalism in England, and the sites of struggle against it, Robinson in Ruins shows a sensitivity to the way that landscape silently registers (and engenders) politics that echoes the concerns of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. As in Straub-Huillet's films, Robinson in Ruins returns to landscapes where antagonism and martyrdom once took place: Greenham Common, the woodland where Professor David Kelly committed suicide.

Keiller's decision to retain film rather than switch to a digital medium carries more charge now than it did when he used a cine camera for London and Robinson in s.p.a.ce. In many ways, even in 1997, we had yet to really enter the digital realm; now, with cybers.p.a.ce available on every smartphone handset, we are never outside it. The return to film made him appreciate the materiality of the medium in a new way. 'Compared with videotape,' Keiller has written, 'film stock is expensive to purchase and process, and the camera's magazine holds only 122m of stock, just over 4 minutes at 25fps. Film hence tends to involve a greater commitment to an image before starting to turn the camera, and there is pressure to stop as soon as possible, both to limit expenditure and to avoid running out of loaded film. Results are visible only after processing, which, in this case, was usually several days later, by which time some subjects were no longer available and others had changed, so as to rule out the possibility of a retake. I began to wonder why I had never noticed these difficulties before, or whether I had simply forgotten them. Another problem was that, with computer editing, it is no longer usual to make a print to edit. Instead, camera rolls are transferred to video after processing, so that the footage is never seen at its best until the end of the production process. This hybridity of photographic and digital media so emphasises the value of the material, mineral characteristics of film that one begins to reimagine cinematography as a variety of stone-carving.'

When we hear early on in the film that Robinson has made contact with a series of 'nonhuman intelligences', we initially suspect that he has finally succ.u.mbed to madness. Yet the 'nonhuman intelligences' turn out not to be the extra-terrestrials of a florid pulp science fiction-inspired psychosis, but the intra-terrestrial lifeforms that an ecological awareness reveals growing with a silent stubbornness that matches the brute tenacity of capitalism. In one of the many slow spirals that typify Keiller's approach in Robinson in Ruins, the lichen that his camera lingers on in an early shot, apparently for merely picturesque effect, will eventually come to take centre stage in the film's narrative. Lichen, Robinson comes to realise, is already the dominant lifeform on large areas of the planet. Inspired by the work of American biologist Lynn Margulis, Robinson confesses to a growing feeling of 'biophilia', which Keiller seems to share. While his camera lingers tenderly on wildflowers, the film's verbal narrative is suspended, projecting us for a few long moments into this world without humans. These moments, these unnarrativised surveys of a nonhuman landscape, are like Keiller's version of the famous 'Straubian shot', the cut-aways to depopulated landscapes in Straub and Huillet's films. Robinson is drawn to Margulis because she rejects the a.n.a.logies between capitalism and the biological that are so often used to naturalise capitalist economic relations. Instead of the ruthless compet.i.tion which social Darwinians find in nature, Margulis discovers organisms engaging in co-operative strategies. When Keiller turns his camera on these 'nonhuman intelligences', these mute heralds of a future without humanity, I'm reminded of the black orchids in Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge Of Darkness, those harbingers of an ecology that is readying to take revenge on a humanity that thoughtlessly disdained it. Kennedy Martin's inspiration was the anti-humanist ecology of James Lovelock, and Lovelock's apocalyptic message seems to haunt Robinson in Ruins too. Keiller finds extinction looming everywhere species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the s.p.a.ces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Bra.s.sier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art. But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson's touchstones, Fredric Jameson, noted. '[A]s organisms of a particular life span,' Jameson writes in his essay 'Actually Existing Marxism', we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political att.i.tudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future. (Valences of the Dialectic, Verso, 2010, pp369-70) Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable futures.

Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public s.p.a.ces both physical and cultural are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who rea.s.sure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpa.s.sive stupor. The informal censors.h.i.+p internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a ba.n.a.l conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist is not only possible: it is already flouris.h.i.+ng, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called ma.s.s media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publis.h.i.+ng as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.

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