John Berger on Political Affects: 

Visual Culture as Commitment, Resistance, or Loss

Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Durham University

In “Islington,” one of the stories in Here is where we meet (2005), John Berger visits an old friend’s house in the London borough of the same name. On one hand, this experience elicits an affective return to Berger’s years as an art student during World War II and, centrally, his memories of youthful erotic encounters. On the other, as the friends remember together, the history of the Islington house, dating back to the 1840s, unfolds in unexpected ways, prompting Berger’s reflections around the emergence of various systems of mnemonic classification. These systems involve the risk of irreparable loss and oblivion, the hope of aesthetic and affective recovery, and the possibility of political empathy and recognition.

Deployed as a double exercise in attentiveness and remembrance, Berger’s curious textual collages of historical and biographical places, objects, memories, and periods in “Islington” contain a series of principles for collaboration. They coalesce around composite spaces of generous exchange and potential loss that include the art student’s room, garden, workroom, and a set of metal drawers “designed for storing architectural plans” but containing sketches, watercolors, and drawings.

My presentation reconstructs Berger’s mnemonic paths in “Islington” by considering a series of images that are evoked or cited in the text. I will comment on how, in “Islington” and other texts, Berger summons political affects through textual and visual assemblages of international solidarity and friendship, instances of political violence and resistance, and examples of social and cultural activism. I will suggest that Berger’s aesthetico-political praxis calls for a contemporary visual culture of disinterested encounter, committed collaboration, and creative defiance. This demanding vision requires an individual and collective awareness of vulnerability, precarity, and loss; but one that would remain grounded in the fragile material conditions and available possibilities for thoughtful activist mobilization in the decaying, neoliberal, planetary present.

Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Professor of Hispanic and Visual Culture Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (MLAC) at Durham: My research interests include visual, gender / queer and race theories of the Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean, with a specific focus on islands and archipelagos, post-creolizing processes, and Global South ecologies and environmental politics. I am particularly interested in discourses of Atlantic space, encompassing connections across the Global South that involve the Afro-Caribbean, the Americas and the Canary Islands.