Berger and the Ethics of Writing

78 the minnesota review Peter de Bolla Berger and the Ethics of Writing Benjamin, writing in his essay "The Author as Producer," makes the following point concerning the relations between a writer and the means of production for his work: Before I ask what is a work's position vis-à-vis the production relations of its time, I should like to ask: what is its position within them? This question concerns the function of a work within the literary production relations of its time. In other words it is directly concerned with literary technique. I shall attempt to place these comments against John Berger's writing practice in the following paper by focusing on three unrelated aspects of that practice. The first concerns his association with Writers and Readers, the co-operative publishing house in England, the second his ideas about the uses of photography, and the third concludes with some remarks drawn from his book A Fortunate Man. Although I will organize the argument around Berger's comments on photography, as if they gave us an adequate model for understanding his writing practice, it should be made clear from the outset that Berger is far from a systematic thinker: his priorities are more political than philosophic, his habitual mode of thought more ethical than critical. Consequently , his writing very often teeters dangerously on the edge of simplistic conceptualization as the moralist attempts to universalize his point, and, in so doing, reach as large an audience as possible. For similar reasons his fiction writing occasionally approaches sentimentalism , but, as I hope to demonstrate in the final comments of this paper, the use of simplistic formulations—such as are also found in the early collection of non-fiction essays Permanent Red, where Berger calls for the rather vague "revolutionary change in our whole society"—brings rewards as well as losses. The courting of this danger can best be seen as a refusal to enter or entertain the discourses of contemporary critical or analytical debate, be they in the realm of art theory or criticism, political theory or literary criticism, and will be referred to in the following as Berger's wager, a wager that courts both success and failure, and which necessarily, therefore, opens the possibilities for a new writing practice even as it exposes the banality of such openings. This wager could also be termed his literary technique, which is more an ethics of writing than a style. The citation with which I began refers to a set of problems that have proved to be deeply resistant to change or mastery: those which surface DeBoIIa 79 when the relations of production articulated in the activity of writing and book publishing are addressed. Benjamin suggests that one way of tackling these problems is to see the production relations from the inside, as it were, to see the work of art as within the production process and not as its result. It is useful to begin here since the Writers and Readers cooperative was founded with Benjamin's essay much in mind. In the following I shall be referring to an open letter written by one of the original founders of the co-operative to John Berger, and which was occasioned by the financial and personal break-up of the company. Writers and Readers was founded in 1974 by five writers, Richard and Lisa Appignanesi, Chris Searle, Arnold Wesker and John Berger, and two non-writers, Sian Williams and Glen Thompson. The letter to which I am referring was written by Richard Appignanesi in February 1984 and is basically an appeal to Berger to help salvage something of the original intentions of the co-operative in the re-structuring of the company from co-operative venture to capitalist enterprise. During the course of the letter a brief history of the company is given, including a sketch of Berger's role, along with those played by the other writer members, in the activities of the publishing house. Appignanesi claims that he was the only writer member who "dirtied his hands" on the shop floor, the only participant in the co-operative project to control the means of production, and hence the only writer...