The fuller the Berger archive, the more you should doubt it: home is where two axes cross
What Berger left behind is not a conclusion but a machinery of looking: the fuller the archive, the more you should doubt it; home is where two axes cross; his anti-colonial position never changed across his whole life.
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The archive was donated, but the 1960s stayed in a bomb shelter
Berger gave his archive to the British Library in 2009. When Tom took it on, he found the material was not complete: it is strongest on the manuscripts from after the 1970s, the period when Berger and Beverly were living in the Alps, and almost blank on the 1960s. Tom asked Berger directly why there was nothing from the sixties. The answer was sitting in the bomb shelter of a Geneva apartment — after a partner's death, the early material had been piled up there. Putting the archive in order was therefore not plain cataloguing but a series of trips to fill in the gaps.
— Tom OvertonWhat migration takes away is the crossing point of place and time
The through-line Tom found is Berger's relationship with the dead. Berger wrote about peasant culture and about migration: human society exists along two axes — place is the vertical line, time is the horizontal line, and home is where the two coincide. People driven out by migration lose that crossing point. The remedy he offers is art: language is the only human homeland, and even a reproduced artwork can become a place where people experience home again and connect with generations before them. Tom says he was not especially convinced for a while, and only later realised this may have had to do with the genocide he was watching in real time — in his last years Berger was intensely committed to the Palestinian cause.
— Tom OvertonHe never joined the Party, yet never wavered in opposing empire
Berger called himself a romantic Marxist. He never joined the Party: early on he wanted to and was turned away as too heretical, and once he was famous the Party came to invite him and he refused. During the Hungarian events of 1956 he could argue the Party line better than actual members could; in 1968 he stood with the dissidents. The real constant appears earlier — in the 1950s an editor at the New Statesman made Berger see Britain's role as an empire. From then on he was unconditionally on the side of decolonisation struggles, and in his later years he was firmly against the US-led world order. Empire changed its form over the course of his life; his opposition to empire did not change.
— Tom OvertonThe most crucial author of Ways of Seeing was never credited
Ways of Seeing is usually treated as the opposite of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, but as a young man Berger kept wanting to get Clark to come and see his paintings, and Clark's involvement in wartime art business also shaped the idea that art has a social role. The programme itself was collaborative: Mike Dibb on the images, Richard Hollis on graphic design (he also designed the cover of G), Chris Fox on research — and the most crucial uncredited person was Ana Berger. She supplied Berger with a different translation of Walter Benjamin's argument about mechanical reproduction, and she brought the perspective of the women's liberation movement. In effect Berger updated Benjamin's argument from the age of photography to the age of television.
— Tom OvertonWomen could make these books, and women could burn them
Tom's way of handling the ‘womanizer’ reputation is to talk about responsibility: he knows the people in Berger's life almost as well as he knows Berger, he owes something to every one of them, and at the same time he cannot let the book turn into somebody else's biography. Ana Berger is the most important case — she shaped Berger's intellectual range, and the ideas of women's liberation entered Ways of Seeing through her; without her, Berger could not have brought those ideas onto television. His first wife, for her part, helped him get his first novel finished; the moment the book was done the two of them split up, and she burned a large pile of his manuscripts. A story can be made by women and it can be erased by women.
— Tom OvertonThe biographer has already become part of the archive
Confronted with piles of archive, a person can be fooled into thinking they now hold all the facts. Tom says it was going back to the work that made him understand he had to admit his own point of view. He cannot even be neutral any more — he has interviewed the people around Berger, he spoke to Berger himself, and he has become part of the archive. He points to the almost Montaigne-like way Berger closes Ways of Seeing: "be sceptical of what I say" — which both lowers your guard and concedes his own limits. Traditional biography pretends the author is invisible; this book puts the author back on the table.
— Tom OvertonWho is paying for this is not an expired question
Tom separates out four reasons. First, the openness and generosity running through all of Berger's work, which leaves the reader a place to stand. Second, luck — it caught the moment colour television had just arrived. Third, collaborators like Mike Dibb and Richard Hollis were themselves geniuses. Fourth, it teaches people to put questions to the media environment they are inside. Berger's own starting question back then was very simple: who is paying for this. When you hear ‘this episode is sponsored by…’ today, that question has not expired.
— Tom OvertonRich countries' living standards are built on exploited migrant labour
Tom says that if you were to read only one Berger today, he would pick The Seventh Man, from 1975. The book is about Turkish guest workers who went to Germany, and it argues that the standard of living in wealthy countries rests as a whole on the exploitation of migrant labour; at the time people were already drawing the same structural analogy to different groups within Britain. Tom thinks this line of questioning — where does your standard of living come from — is missing from current discourse, and is a necessary corrective. Set alongside photographer Jean Mohr's pictures, the image-and-text book also demonstrates the power that images and words each have and the other cannot substitute for.
— Tom OvertonIn their own words · checked verbatim
existing on these two axes of the vertical line of place and the horizontal line of time and home being where those two places cant coincide
Tom Overton14:00
language as being the only human home
Tom Overton16:05
He was always on the side of decolonial struggles.
Tom Overton20:33
It is this idea that there is.No neutral way of looking
Shahida Bari31:32
but please be skeptical of it
Tom Overton33:00
who's like who's paying for this
Tom Overton37:00
a book, which I think got younger every time you read it
Tom Overton38:09
Figures
| Berger's lifespan | Died in 2017, aged 90 | 2:05 |
| Archive donation | Given to the British Library in 2009 | 2:05 |
| Ways of Seeing broadcast | 1972 television series | 1:02 |
| The Seventh Man written | 1975 | 38:09 |
Glossary
- Ways of Seeing
- Berger's 1972 television series and the book of the same name: looking has never been a neutral act.
- romantic Marxist
- Berger's own label for his position: artistic imagination, plus a politics of class and anti-colonialism.
- The Seventh Man
- Made with photographer Jean Mohr: Europe's prosperity is built on the exploitation of migrant labour.
- guest workers
- Foreign temporary workers recruited by West Germany after the Second World War; in the book, specifically Turkish workers.
- fourth wall
- The imaginary boundary between stage and audience; in the programme Berger breaks it and addresses the viewer directly.
How to listen
Critics of art and culture and media researchers, long-form creators, and writers thinking about non-fiction biography — this episode is a working sample of archival research and of narration that refuses to be neutral.
The show promo in the first minute and the mid-roll ad break can be fast-forwarded.