Anarchy 31/The spontaneous university

293

The spon­tan­eous uni­vers­ity

ALEXANDER TROCCHI

In a recent essay Arnold Wesker, con­cerned pre­cisely with the gulf be­tween art and pup­ular cul­ture and with the pos­si­bil­ity of re­inte­gra­tion refers to the threat­ened strike of 1919 and to a speech of Lloyd George. The strike could have brought down the gov­ern­ment. The Prime Min­is­ter said:

  … you will defeat us. But if you do so have you weighed the conse­quen­ces? The strike will be in defi­ance of the gov­ern­ment of the country and by its very suc­cess will pre­cip­it­ate a con­stitu­tional crisis of the first im­port­ance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the func­tions of the state. Gentle­men have you con­sidered, and if you have, are you ready?

The strikers, as we know, were not ready. Mr. Wesker com­ments:

  The crust has shifted a bit, a num­ber of people have made for­tunes out of the pro­test and some­where a host of Lloyd Georges are grin­ning con­ten­tedly at the situa­tion … All pro­test is al­lowed and smiled upon be­cause it is know that the force—

eco­nomic­ally and cul­tur­ally—

lies in the same dark and secure quar­ters, and this secret know­ledge is the real des­pair of both artist and intel­lec­tual. We are para­lysed by this know­ledge, we pro­test every so often but really the whole cul­tural scene—

par­ticu­larly on the left—

‘is one of awe and in­ef­fec­tual­ity’. I am certain that this was the secret know­ledge that largely ac­coun­ted for the de­cline of the cul­tural activ­ities in the Thir­ties—

no one really knew what to do with the phil­istines. They were om­nipo­tent, friendly, and se­duct­ive. The germ was carried and passed on by the most un­sus­pected; and this same germ will cause, is begin­ning to cause, the de­cline of our new cul­tural up­surge unless … unless a new sys­tem is con­ceived where­by we who are con­cerned can take away, one by one, the secret reins.

Al­though I found Mr. Wesker’s essay in the end dis­ap­point­ing, it did con­firm for me that in England as else­where there are groups of people who are act­ively con­cerned with the prob­lem. As we have seen, the polit­ical-eco­nomic struc­ture of west­ern so­ci­ety is such that the gears of creat­ive intel­li­gence mesh with the gears of power in such a way that, not only is the former pro­hibited from ever ini­tiat­ing any­thing, it can only come into play at the be­hest of forces (vested inter­ests) that are often in prin­ciple anti­path­etic towards it. Mr. Wesker’s ‘Centre 42’ is a prac­tical at­tempt to alter his rela­tion­ship.

  I should like to say at once that I have no funda­mental quar­rel with Mr. Wesker. My main criti­cism of his pro­ject (and I admit my know­ledge of it is very hazy indeed) is that it is lim­ited in char­ac­ter and that this is re­flec­ted in his ana­lysis of the histor­ical back­ground.

294

He takes the 1956 pro­duc­tion of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, for ex­ample, to be the first land­mark in ‘our new cul­tural up­surge’. A seri­ous lack of histor­ical per­spect­ive, the in­sul­arity of his view … these feat­ures are, I am afraid, in­dic­at­ive of a kind of church-bazaar philo­sophy which seems to under­lie the whole pro­ject. Like handi­crafts, art should not be ex­pec­ted to pay. Mr. Wesker calls for a tradi­tion ‘that will not have to rely on finan­cial suc­cess in order to con­tinue’. And so he was led to seek the patron­age of trade unions and has begun to organ­ise a series of cul­tural fest­ivals under their aus­pices. While I have noth­ing against such fest­ivals, the ur­gency of Mr. Wesker’s ori­ginal diag­nosis led me to ex­pect re­com­menda­tions for ac­tion at a far more funda­mental level. Cert­ainly, such a pro­gramme will not carry us very far twoards seiz­ing what he so hap­pily refers to as ‘the secret reins’. I do not think I am being over­cau­tious in as­sert­ing that some­thing far less ped­estrian than an ap­peal to the public-spirited­ness of this or that group will be the im­per­ative of the vast change we have in mind.

  Never­the­less, at one point in what re­mains an in­ter­esting essay, Mr. Wesker quotes Mr. Raymond Williams. Who Mr. Williams is and from what work the quota­tion is taken I am un­fortun­ately ignor­ant. I only wonder how Mr. Wesker can quote the fol­low­ing and then go out and look for patron­age.

  The ques­tion is not who will patron­ise the arts, but what forms are pos­sible in which art­ists will have con­trol of their own means of ex­pres­sion, in such ways that they will have rela­tion in a com­mun­ity rather than to market or a patron.