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The spread of the Omicron variant this winter was met with renewed calls for the UK Government to fund the arts and culture through the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic and beyond. ‘We are in crisis mode’, Nicolas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme. ‘We need to see short-term finance, we need to see loans, we need to see VAT looked at again, we need to see business rates looked at again’. Meanwhile, both the BBC and Guardian have been running major series, titled Rethink and Reconstruction After Covid respectively, to explore how society should change in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In the first part of 'Defund Culture' I cast a fresh eye on how the ‘culture wars’ can help to explain the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the current Conservative administration when it comes to supporting the arts. In part 2 I then argue that, if we really want to rethink the future of society post-pandemic with a view to building back better with a new antiracist, anticlassist, antiheteropatriarchal normal, rather than defending existing models of state funding of the arts, the way in which we should respond to the crisis in the creative industries is actually by defunding culture and many of its major institutions.

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe. In A Stubborn Fury, Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much literature in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Hall does so by playfully rewriting two of the most acclaimed contributions to these media genres of recent times. One is that of England’s foremost avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy – especially the importance he attaches to European modernism and antihumanist theory. The other is that of the celebrated French memoirists Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis and their attempt to reinvent the antihumanist philosophical tradition by producing a theory that speaks about class and intersectionality, yet generates the excitement of a Kendrick Lamar concert. Experimentally ‘pirating’ McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, A Stubborn Fury addresses that most urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors?

This is an extended ‘author’s cut’ of a chapter that was first published as Gary Hall ‘Postdigital Politics’, in Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder, eds, Aesthetics of the Commons (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2021) https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/postdigital-politics-6925 --- In ‘Postdigital Politics’ I examine our contemporary postdigital political conjuncture. This conjuncture, I argue, springs from the crisis of representative democracy we are currently experiencing and involves a shift to more direct forms of democracy via postdigital communications. The latter is evident in the decentralised manner in which movements such as the Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter operate. I analyse how the traditional political opposition between ‘left’ and ‘right’ has been overlaid in many places around the world by that between populist nativism and elitist internationalism. I also discuss the way in which populist right-wing politicians (e.g., Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro) have used the possibilities created by postdigital media technologies to create a new model of political communications, one that is capable of overcoming the apparent disconnect between professional politicians and ‘the people’. By way of response, I offer some suggestions as to how those of us who position ourselves on the left of the political spectrum can resist this political takeover by the populist authoritarian right. In other words, I show how the new postdigital communications can be used for more progressive purposes that are attuned to today’s changed political landscape. Among the illustrative examples provided will be some of the grassroots, bottom-up projects for the production of free resources, technical infrastructures and the commons that myself and some of those I collaborate with have developed over the last twenty years. Those projects include, but are not limited to: the open access journal Culture Machine (http://culturemachine.net); the publishing house Open Humanities Press (www.openhumanitiespress.org); the online publishing experiments Liquid Books (http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/) and Living Books About Life (http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/); the Radical Open Access Collective (http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk); the Mandela27 DIY Exhibition (https://www.mandela27.com); the video-book after.video (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/after-video); COPIM (https://copim.pubpub.org/); and the Public Library: Memory of the World project (https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2015/05/27/repertorium_public_library). By way of theoretical framing, I examine the particular mode of postdigital politics that underpins these initiatives. I will also foreground a number of operative concepts that help to shape them, with a special focus on anti-bourgeois theory.