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I came across Robert McRuer’s ‘crip’ theory in 2015. At the time, I was preparing to write up my experience of touring India with a dramatic monologue that I had written, in verse, on life with my disabled son, Nihal, who died in 2001, and to dramatise our struggles for inclusion. The American theorist’s bold attempt to reclaim this highly charged word ‘crip’ felt at once startling and provocative. Disability politics had always felt challenging to me, never fitting comfortably with my experience: while my son was alive, I’d tended to stay clear of it.

Of course, the first step towards winding back long-held prejudices against disabled people would be to promote positive images of them, to uncover the history of their contributions to society and culture, and re-assert their universal human right to exist: any means, in short, to help them become more visible. In 2010, the political activist and trade unionist Richard Rieser set up UK Disability History Month to do exactly that, on the model of black and LGBT movements. But this is where the similarity with other marginalised groups ends, or ought to. Whereas one’s sex, race or sexual orientation become defined as ‘handicaps’ under systems of patriarchy, racism or heterosexism, impairment is a ‘handicap’ not merely because of disablism, but because it compromises the individuals who bear them, causing pain and suffering. This is irrespective of how far society evolves in its attitudes, or how far technology is effective in closing that gap.

This is not to promote the suffering-helpless-victims-deserving-of-charity narrative. That narrative is something the disability movement has long rejected in displacing the medical model of disability in favour of a social model, so that instead of seeing disability as an individual problem to be ‘cured’ and ‘treated’, the problem is recast in terms of how society and the physical environment have been structured. Thus, if wheelchair users cannot attend a meeting, it’s not because they are in wheelchairs but because no ramps have been provided.

The social model of disability emerged from the deliberations of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS). Pointedly, it distinguishes between disability and impairment: the first imposed by society as a form of exclusion, the second characterised by physical limitations. Since the UPIAS was mostly made up of individuals with spinal injuries, no attention was paid to mental health issues or learning difficulties. Still, as the disability activist Tom Shakespeare points out, the social model helped to improve self-esteem and build a positive collective identity in disabled people, while ‘in traditional accounts of disability, people with impairments feel that they are at fault.’

Coming up with a workable definition of impairment has itself been (and continues to be) a hot topic. Since the UK government has to arbitrate on matters of disability, perhaps it is best to quote their definition: ‘You’re disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a “substantial” and “long-term” adverse effect on your ability “to carry out normal day-to-day activities”.’ But the difficulties of categorisation are implicit in the long list of conditions. As Vic Finkelstein, a disability-rights activist who developed the social model of disability, put it in a paper he presented at an academic conference in 2001: ‘What was paramount was our focus on the need to change the disabling society rather than make us fit for society.’

Yet what about being fit for your own sake, as well as fit for society? In my son’s case we campaigned on both fronts. We battled for schools to admit him which entailed them doing a lot more to become accessible than simply providing ramps; they had to formulate and implement policies of inclusion and jumpstart a clear change in attitudes. At the same time, on the advice of doctors, we experimented with Botox to make his eating more efficient and his muscles less stiff and painful. Nihal underwent operations to prevent his hips becoming dislocated; he wore a variety of splints and braces. In his case, the line between chasing a ‘cure’ or improving his daily wellbeing was often blurred.

Now here was McRuer attempting to go further than the social model of disability by standing in permanent challenge to the assumptions of able-bodiedness: using a demeaning word for disabled people, ‘crip’, not cleaning it up, but holding it up as a mirror to the inadequacies of the notion of able-bodiedness. Riding on the coat-tails of queer theory to share its radical stardust, McRuer argues that, as norms, heterosexuality and able-bodiedness are invisible non-identities, and that queerness and disability can become desirable as visible identities of resistance. But do resistant identities such as ‘crip’ and ‘queer’ limit or expand the potential of the politics of transgression? More: does the act of transgression go far enough to change the material realities of these groups? While a politics that draws it sustenance from identity might initially be empowering, does it take you down a cul-de-sac or along wide, open roads?

At one level, the word ‘crip’ can be used the way I might use ‘wog’, to describe myself and shock outsiders who gasp at the political incorrectness of it. That they could never use the term, or challenge my badge-wearing use of it, gives me a certain degree of perverse pleasure. But I have no desire to reclaim ‘wog’ because the work required to transform racist institutions feels more pressing than reclaiming language, which in any case shakes off its baggage of prejudice and hate once society moves on.

I am grateful to Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford, for pointing out that there are two kinds of reclamation: the kind that makes ‘a currently negative and offensive word neutral in all contexts and for all language users’; and the kind that involves ‘taking a negative and offensive word and using it with a positive meaning, as a symbol of identity and badge of radical in-group membership’. The first category includes descriptors such as ‘black’ and ‘woman’ – both previously pejorative terms that have acquired preferential status. The second includes words such as ‘crip’ and ‘queer’ that would lose all their transgressive power if defanged. ‘Black’ and ‘woman’ have become descriptions whereas ‘queer’ and ‘crip’ are provocations. Their proponents wish them to remain so.

Political movements use words such as ‘crip’ or ‘queer’ to re-examine society’s deeply problematic relationship with the ‘other’. Then, this becomes a politics of transgression rooted in identity. As Cameron explains (via an email interview), it’s transgressive ‘because the meaning of the gesture actually depends on the word continuing to be negative for normies, which allows it to retain some shock value: the in-group meaning riffs off the mainstream negative meaning, and this kind of reclaiming usually entails that only in-group members and close allies can use the word in question without giving offence.’

In order to remain transgressive, these identities must embrace marginalisation

In the gay community, there are pockets of resistance to the use of ‘queer’ as an identity, although it is hard to estimate the size of it. Cameron reminds us that the movement to reclaim ‘queer’ has been going on for 30 years, and wonders whether ‘its older use as a homophobic slur will ever be completely superseded’. Below-the-line discussions on the use of ‘queer’ reveal varied and inevitably heated views. Some find it a harmful term because of its long history of abuse against gay men, although the general consensus is that it is ‘important to have a word that encompasses all non-straight, non-cisgender identities. So far, the word that’s caught on is “queer”. It is clearly not favoured by everyone, but no one who objects to it … suggested a similar all-encompassing term.’ It is precisely this ‘all-encompassing’ aspect of ‘queer’ that led the journalist Jenna Wortham in The New York Times Magazine to ask: ‘When Everyone Can Be ‘Queer’, Is Anyone?’ (2016).

Wortham argued that ‘“queer” has come to serve as a linguistic catch-all for this broadening spectrum of identities’, so much so that it can be claimed by anyone identifying as non-heteronormative. She has a point. Facebook users can now write their own gender description but as many as 71 gender and sexuality options have been counted in the past. A recent coinage currently doing the rounds is ‘sapiosexual’, meaning that the person is attracted to intelligence before gender. Queer politics has evolved almost unrecognisably since the Queer Nation Manifesto was handed out at the Pride march in New York City in 1990, addressed to ‘brothers and sisters’ – a gender binary that today would seem inconsistent with a ‘queer’ identity.

Hugh Ryan, founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, worries that the catch-all phenomenon that Wortham identifies effectively depoliticises the word. As he put it in the article ‘Why Everyone Can’t Be Queer’ (2016) for Slate magazine, ‘Queer is the battle cry of deviancy,’ and, therefore, by definition exclusive. He goes on to say: ‘When we remove the focus on stigmatisation from the word queer, we evacuate it of the only thing that made it a coherent identity in the first place.’ According to Ryan, there might come a time when gay men and lesbians will no longer be considered deviant and would, therefore, no longer be queer. In Crip Theory (2006), McRuer, quoting the American theorist David Halperin, likewise argues that the coherence of the term ‘crip’ relies on its ‘positionality’, the way it functions ‘oppositionally and relationally … as a resistance to the norm’ (ironically setting up the very binary that both theories disdain). This contestation and tension is central to retaining the political power of the word. In order to remain transgressive, these identities must embrace marginalisation.

Of course, newly politicised movements often struggle with the conflicts inherent between marginalisation and mainstreaming. There is a sense of strength in numbers: the larger the group that is disempowered, the stronger the argument for rights; the more significance they have as a vote bank, and the more muscle they can exercise as a consumer group. Indeed, there are commentators who take the line that ‘we’re all disabled’, because the perfect body is a myth; because, over time, ageing is likely to disable most of us, and because the line between illness and disability can be blurred, often deliberately so, by some disability activists. However, an argument that promotes acceptance on the basis of universality must then relinquish its status and pride in being ‘other’.

Of the two terms, ‘queer’ has the longer history, having first been adopted in the 1970s; ‘crip’ theory came along in the 1990s. Queer has been the more theorised and given the stamp of respectability (although respectability is death to transgressive identities) by heavyweights such as the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. McRuer extends Butler’s argument about the performative character of heterosexuality (the norm that requires constant repetition to shore up its unstable hegemony), to argue that able-bodiedness is also a performance. There is some validity to his notion of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ – a term he adapts from Adrienne Rich’s critique of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ – ‘through which lesbian experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible’.

For McRuer, compulsory able-bodiedness ‘repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be more like me?’ This might explain why a deaf person chooses to wear an almost invisible hearing aid because it enables them to pass as hearing. It is an attempt to perform able-bodiedness. For a range of disabilities, however, it is not possible to pass or perform able-bodiedness, regardless of societal compulsion.

McRuer complains that most people, primed by the rise of queer movements, now agree that ‘ways of being heterosexual are culturally produced and culturally variable’, but they will not extend that same understanding to able-bodiedness. I am one of them. He attacks Norah Vincent, a lesbian journalist, for writing in Salon in 1999: ‘it’s hard to deny that something called normalcy exists. The human body is a machine, after all – one that has evolved functional parts … This is science, not culture.’ Although I might substitute the word ‘normalcy’ with ‘biology’, it’s hard to quibble with the basic truth of Vincent’s statement. McRuer’s attack on her is reminiscent of the attacks by some trans activists on feminists who argue that there are important biological factors that underpin the claim of women as a separate sex.

Disability, unlike the queer demographic, cannot be exploited by or absorbed into corporate capitalism

Although heterosexuality can be seen as a cultural construct, able-bodiedness has a hard material reality: there is a connection between form and function. The fashion to disregard biology has been taken to absurd extremes. What began as a necessary critique of the way that social constructs justified their oppressive power on the basis of biology has led to the argument that everything is a social construct – even sex and an able body. To me, the idea of performative identities also suggests choice, even if ‘chosen’ under social pressure, and, while sexuality could be (at least in part) subject to choice, disability is not (usually). When McRuer decided to ‘come out crip’ at an AIDS conference, self-identifying as HIV-positive when he was not, he was performing disability, ie adopting an identity not based in the reality of impairment.

McRuer argues that ‘orderly, coherent (or managed) identities’ are the essence of neoliberalism, and that resisting them must be expressed through embracing the disorderly identities of queerness and disability. He argues that neoliberalism demands compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality. While I agree that disability is a net loss for neoliberalism, this is not true of ‘queer’ and the multiple ‘other’ identities of LGBT+ communities that provide commercial opportunities for new markets. It was, after all, a Conservative government that legalised gay marriage in the UK. As Deborah Cameron told me: ‘I’d say middle-class gay men have been seen as a desirable market for decades, and now LGBT people can marry and have families there’s even more money to be made from anything from gay wedding/anniversary cards to the exploitation of women in the global South as surrogates for gay couples.’ Wortham makes a similar point: ‘Increased acceptance of queerness has only led to increased commodification. Every June, the month of most gay-pride celebrations, companies like Netflix, McDonald’s, Apple, Salesforce and Walmart spend tremendous amounts of money to include their branded floats in the parades.’

Disability cannot be similarly commodified, not least because the equipment needed by disabled people can be so bespoke that there are no economies of scale. It is precisely because disability, unlike the queer demographic, cannot be exploited by or absorbed into corporate capitalism (with the notable exception of some sectors such as mental health, where the rise of antidepressant medication has meant huge profits for Big Pharma) that McRuer believes that ‘cripping that future’ – that is, imagining a world in which disability is both ‘possible and desirable’ – might be a useful political strategy to oppose corporate capitalism and globalisation.

Coalescing around a particular group identity can feel liberating. It attracts attention to your cause, and ensures that you’re not an adjunct to someone else’s. It validates your subversion of mainstream narratives, and authenticates your point of view. Speaking on your own behalf can be deeply empowering, just as belonging to a community of people making the same demands is hugely uplifting. The slogan ‘nothing about us without us’ became widely adopted by the disability movement. Southall Black Sisters (SBS), an activist and support group in West London for women escaping violence, has been my political home for 30 years. Our internal debates have fine-tuned my political understandings and given me the confidence that comes from knowing that I am not alone in my particular critique of society.

Along with agitating for better representation, the drive to acknowledge social diversity and to campaign for the equality of disempowered minorities are important political aims. The first Disability Pride Day was celebrated in Boston in 1990, with disability parades held across the US since then. In the UK, the first Disability Pride march was in Brighton in 2016. For many disabled activists, choosing to parade their disability rather than hide allows them to counter the shame they’ve been made to feel and the discrimination they’ve faced. Today, the neurodiversity movement is thriving, with many activists on the autistic spectrum positively identifying as ‘Aspies’. At the extreme end of re-framing one’s identity, Zainab Al-Eqabi, an Iraqi woman with an artificial leg, delivered a TEDx talk in 2014 which she said: ‘I have a huge love for my disability … It is the best thing that has ever happened to me.’

But not all disability activists are comfortable embracing this identity as a political statement. Tom Shakespeare wrote in 2010:

it is harder to celebrate disability than it is to celebrate Blackness, or Gay Pride, or being a woman. ‘Disability pride’ is problematic, because disability is difficult to recuperate as a concept, as it refers either to limitation and incapacity, or else to oppression and exclusion, or else to both dimensions.

Here we come up against the limitations of identity politics: to wit, sharing an experience is no guarantee of coming to the same political demands.

This is exactly the problem with reading ‘crip’ through ‘queerness’. It obscures important differences. Attempting to bolster your own political case by drawing parallels with other minorities can become untenable because different histories of discrimination and different material realities are in play. There was the case in 2002 of the deaf lesbian couple in the US who chose a deaf donor in order to have a deaf child because, as they told The Washington Post, they saw deafness as a cultural identity, not a disability. Defending their decision to choose a deaf donor, they drew on an analogy with race, positing a hypothetical couple’s right to choose a black donor, regardless of the difficulties that child might face in a racist society. In my view, that is not a comparison that holds water. A deaf child will always face significant challenges in being part of mainstream culture, apart from missing out on the sheer joy of music or birdsong, while a far less racist society is something that we can strive to achieve. It also suggests that hearing children will reject their parents’ culture – a fear that could stop migrants from having children – but I have seen such children happily negotiating both worlds.

Some disability scholars, such as Kirstin Marie Bone of the University of Alabama, have also criticised crip theory for positioning itself as a subset of queer politics, thereby further silencing disabled voices. The same might be said about the erasure of lesbians, as a category, under the broader label of ‘queer’. Even lesbians who identify as queer because trend-conscious activism or even internalised homophobia have led them to see lesbians as ‘unfashionable, uncultured homebodies’ complain that ‘in [Washington] DC, as in most places, queer parties that get labelled without a gender often default to gay men’, as Christina Cauterucci wrote in Slate in 2016.

Queer activists and scholars often fail to support Asian women’s internal battles against religious conservatism

Crip defaults to physical disability in just the same way. People with physical disabilities have been ‘at the top of the disability hierarchy’, according to activists such as Mark Sherry, a sociologist at the University of Toledo in Ohio. They’ve been the main drivers of change – which accounts for the wheelchair becoming the universal symbol of accessibility. Nor does ‘crip’ tackle the vulnerability of disabled women to sexual abuse or violence, or the problems faced by black, Asian and minority-ethnic disabled people in relation to immigration policies, police racism and the like. That’s why Sherry believes that most disabled people reject ‘crip’: because it ‘masks enormous embodied, classed, gendered, sexualised, racialised privilege’ and doesn’t speak to their lived reality.

There is a similar disconnect between ‘queer’ and the communities that lay claim to the label by virtue of not being white, middle-class, heteronormative cis-men. This bête noir draws all the fire, while regressive trends and power imbalances among disempowered minorities go unchallenged. It explains why queer activists and scholars often fail to support Asian women’s internal battles against religious conservatism: because ‘Muslims’ are a besieged minority.

Earlier this year, the Parkfield Community School in Birmingham faced months of noisy protests outside its gates from Muslim parents opposed to the teaching of an LGBT equality agenda. The protests were orchestrated by individuals involved with StopRSE, a campaign set up to oppose the relationship education due to become compulsory in UK primary schools and the sex education due to become compulsory in secondary schools in 2020. This June, SBS attended a meeting organised to express solidarity with the embattled school head. Yet solidarity failed to arrive from those quarters where it might be most expected. A letter from LGBT+ supporters published in the Independent newspaper in September argued that they could not support the school in question – despite supporting relationship and sex-education (RSE) teaching in general – because ‘the wider embrace of LGBT+-inclusive RSE as the poster-child for the implementation of “Fundamental British Values” suggests a colonial “civilising” attitude towards Muslim communities, and contributes to a harmful and inaccurate stereotype of an uncivilised and intolerant Muslim culture’. The letter failed to notice that the protests against sex-ed teaching were orchestrated by Islamic fundamentalists using those very Muslim parents to further their own deeply regressive agenda.

A politics of transgression, rooted in identity politics, with virtually no reference to class, no real analysis of power, and no attempt to differentiate between discrimination and exploitation is bound to be limiting. Besides, collapsing radical politics into a struggle for self-identification is a form of rebellion that slips easily into the folds of neoliberalism. The flattening effect is succinctly illustrated by Amandla Stenberg, The Hunger Games (2012) actor who came out as bisexual in 2016, telling reporters: ‘I definitely believe in the concept of rebellion through selfhood, and rebellion through embracing your true identity, no matter what you’re being told.’ Rebellion here is reduced to reshaping your individual self as an act of transgression, rather than looking at transformation of institutional structures.

In her essay ‘Globalising Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics’ (1995), the sociologist Frances Fox Piven at the City University of New York goes directly to the central flaw in identity politics:

Class politics, at least in principle, promotes vertical cleavages, mobilising people around axes which broadly correspond to hierarchies of power, and which promote challenges to these hierarchies. By contrast, identity politics fosters lateral cleavages which are unlikely to reflect fundamental conflicts over societal power and resources and, indeed, may seal popular allegiance to the ruling classes that exploit them.

Even where there is an attempt to open up the cul-de-sac of identity politics through intersectionality or fluidity of borders, the reference point remains ‘identity’.

Solutions for solidarity politics don’t have to be found within the narrow confines of identity. If outsider clout is what queer and crip activists are seeking, the question that follows is whether they are putting this clout to any transformative effect. In her essay ‘Trapped Behind the Glass’ (2017), Bone would argue not. Since crip theory first emerged, she says, ‘there have been few major legal advances since the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 – the most significant being the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010, which protected those with pre-existing conditions and removed healthcare caps.’ Back in the 1960s, when women won the right to abortion in the UK, it was seen as transgressive, as a threat of family life, and it led to a change of women’s material reality. Today, such a campaign would likely get bogged down in discussions of whether or not it was trans-exclusionary.

Identity politics might be the starting point of radical politics but it must not be the end point. It can be the trigger but not the goal. Much of queer and crip theory insists on its marginal status as part of its subversive appeal. But subversion to what end, if not to change the system? Therein lies the fatal contradiction: any reduction in inequality (and total equality is possible only with system change) and any increase in social inclusion would undermine the marginal status to which these theorists are so wedded.

The politics of transgression uses shock to question our values and beliefs. But because it registers low on the Richter scale of societal transformation, it effects minor damage that requires redecoration, not the landslide change that demands complete rebuilding.

At the start of the first TV episode of Ways of Seeing, John Berger takes a scalpel to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. The opening beat of the programme is the audio of the incision – the blade’s rough abrasion on canvas – before the soundtrack settles into voiceover. ‘This is the first of four programmes,’ Berger says, ‘in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting. That tradition which was born about 1400, died about 1900.’

Ways of Seeing first aired on Sunday evenings on BBC2 at the start of 1972. It attracted few initial viewers but, through rebroadcasts and word of mouth, the show gathered steam. By the end of 1972, it had gone viral. People in London and New York argued about Berger’s ideas. When Penguin commissioned a paperback adaptation, the first two print runs sold out in months. Regularly assigned in art schools and introductory art history courses, Berger’s project has never really waned in popularity. That first episode now has close to 1.4 million views on YouTube, and the paperback regularly sits atop Amazon’s Media Studies bestseller list.

For decades, Berger’s name has been shorthand for the series, which has been shorthand for a certain style of combative, materialist art criticism. Often presented as a riposte to Sir Kenneth Clark’s TV series Civilisation (1969) – Berger himself spoke of it as a ‘partial, polemical reply’ – the show attacked Clark’s school of connoisseurship ‘with a razor’. Suave, moneyed, knighted at 35, Clark was the embodiment of the high-cultural mandarin: art existed for the pleasures it afforded those refined enough to feel them. Berger was a self-styled outsider: he had run away from boarding school as a teenager, and left England for France in his 30s. Art was best, he said, when it was born of struggle and inspired belief. At its worst, it was little more than a luxury good. The difference extended to the very mode of aesthetic response – appreciation or critique? This is the significance behind the act of vandalism that opens Ways of Seeing. Viewers soon learn that the painting Berger cut was a facsimile, but the metaphor of the scalpel is plain: to question is to dissect. It is to cut past the scrim of beauty, and reveal more fundamental anatomies: capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, mimetic desire.

It is a move that has only grown in ubiquity ever since. The feminist art historian Griselda Pollock remembers the ‘moment’ of Berger’s appearance – 1972 – as a primal scene of method. After the show, scholars began to turn away from connoisseurship toward what Pollock has called the ‘analysis of power and the deconstruction of classed, raced, and gendered meanings’. Ways of Seeing became an urtext of critique, a work that captured young imaginations, and changed the way that people saw and understood the world. Close to 50 years on, Pollock’s description still applies to most of the work done by humanities scholars and, more and more, mainstream cultural journalism too. From the arts and culture pages of The Guardian or The New York Times to the latest hot takes on Twitter, what criticism has come to mean is what Berger pioneered. In an age of open media, the implications are vast. If the internet has made all of us critics, that means we are all now foot soldiers in a culture war: self-armed semioticians and practiced deconstructors of political signification.

As is the case with most viral content, nobody expected Ways of Seeing to travel so widely, least of all its authors. Kept to a tight budget, the show was filmed in a rented electrical goods warehouse in Ealing, a west London suburb. Berger worked on his voiceover at his parents’ apartment on Hallam Street, in the imposing shadow of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. After the series aired, the arrangement of the book was anything but streamlined. Berger worked with his creative partners (Mike Dibb, Richard Hollis and Sven Blomberg) in a manner more closely resembling the bricolage of a zine than the strategic making of a bestseller. It was a principled if madcap route to fame, part of a broader revolutionary mood. Later that same year, on receiving the Booker Prize for his novel G. (1972) – a sexual bildungsroman set in prewar Europe – Berger announced on stage that he was sharing half the prize money with the London-based Black Panthers. Of course, fame can be secretly coveted only for the privilege to cast it off afterwards. But the one-two punch of Ways of Seeing and the Booker scandal were decisive. Taken together, they turned Berger into a star.

Like beauty, provocation can hide as much as it reveals. Time brings new colour to old materials, and what makes Ways of Seeing so enduring might not be the same as what made it so electrically influential when it first appeared. We are now more aware of the fissures in the show, in its slight hesitations and indecisions, and in the hedges to what was otherwise such a freight train of an argument. The pictorial tradition of the female nude, Berger argues throughout the second episode, was not a celebration of humanist virtue but a fantasy of the acquisitive ‘male gaze’ (the term was coined a year later by Laura Mulvey). But then, as if in a footnote, he adds a hushed caveat, noting the ‘few exceptional nudes’ that were expressions of the painter’s love. There are similar equivocations at the end of nearly every episode. What of the masters of the tradition? What of its rebels? What of the mystery – beyond the ideology – of art? What of those anonymous works not held in any museum but exchanged between friends and partners? And what of the most modern art form of all – the art that comes to us on a screen?

In retrospect, Ways of Seeing was not only about painting but also television. More specifically, it was about painting-as-seen-on-television, which is to say it was about the transition from one medium to another, one tradition to another, maybe even one epoch to another. In short, it was about the severing of roots. Just after Berger cuts out the head of Venus from the Botticelli, we see her cropped portrait run through an industrial printer, multiplied ad infinitum and set in motion along the circuits of mass exchange. The movement finds its outward echo in the following shot: the silhouette of a television monitor against a blue screen.

From the oil painting to the printing press to the cathode-ray tube of TV: beyond the simple aggression of a razor, the opening of Ways of Seeing presents a filmic reenactment of the argument of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). (One of the chief legacies of the show was helping to launch Benjamin to the front of the critical canon.) Writing during the terrifying onrush of fascism, Benjamin saw the crisis of European liberalism as, in part, a result of the emergence of new media. The advent of photography, the phonograph and other machines of automated replication had produced a more disturbing change in social consciousness than others had recognised. The CliffsNotes version of the essay focuses on Benjamin’s notion of the aura, the idea that reproduction severs artworks from their anchors in space and time, that facsimiles lack something that originals possess. But this was only half of his argument. Benjamin was just as interested in the entire network of mass mediation (as a replacement of art) and the new, seemingly unanchored artform of film. These, he believed, were part of a broader shift that meant nothing less than ‘the shattering of tradition’ and the ‘liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage’. As new forms of technological culture replaced the old – and the argument will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention in the past several years to discussion of the internet – civilisation moved into a halfway house of mediation, susceptible to new modes of political adventurism and mass behaviour.

Benjamin’s essential concept of remediation has come to denote the process by which an older medium is represented in, or mimicked by, a newer one (as well as the inverse). The yellow sticky notes on your laptop or the painting app on your phone are common examples. Ways of Seeing was itself one of the most ambitious, self-reflexive projects of remediation of the entire postwar period. Building on André Malraux’s concept of a ‘museum without walls’, Berger built a museum of the airwaves. He presented at an often dizzying pace: Botticelli, Leonardo, van Eyck, Bruegel, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Goya, Hals (all in the first episode). Berger was bringing painting into what Raymond Williams called ‘an irresponsible flow of images’ characteristic of television. It was an early harbinger of the waterfall scroll of Instagram or Google Images.

Remediation has been theorised by contemporary scholars in relation to adaptation, translation, perspective, realism, transparency, sampling, recyclage and the user interface. For Berger, it was always connected to something more fundamentally human: the experience of migration. What does it mean to be uprooted, removed from an original source, and placed into new surroundings? And what does such an otherwise intimate experience reveal of the creative-destructive engines of modernity?

Berger’s best essays convey a miraculous gratitude that the world comes into view at all

At the start of the 20th century, a number of Central European critics raised these questions with special force. From the Leftist philosopher Georg Lukács (who spoke of the modern era as one of ‘transcendental homelessness’) and his friends Béla Balázs and Karl Mannheim, to the Heidelberg circle around Max Weber, including Ernst Bloch, to Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School, the generation coming of age amid the crises of fin-de-siècle Europe excelled at feeling (and analysing) the disorienting, everyday effects of capitalist progress: alienation, solitude, fragmentation, a sense of spiritual orphaning. (The style also captured the imaginations of many on the Right, including Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade.)

Born a generation later, Berger became perhaps the most important critic to extend their intellectual project into the postwar English-speaking world, and then into the postmodern era of high globalisation. He worked within what might be called a ‘warm current’ of the European Left: an anticapitalist humanism less interested in structural analyses of exploitation (though Ways of Seeing had its dose of structuralism) than in ground-level questions of meaning and experience. In a modern world that Weber described as disenchanted, the qualitative virtues of traditional societies had been replaced by a ‘machine mentality’ whose metrics of self-advancement had to be expressed in numerical terms – money, productivity, efficiency. This was part of a larger desire to reduce all of nature to figures and formulae, eliminating the first-hand power of the senses: the visible and the audible, the palpable and the ineffable.

On a formal level, Berger was obsessed by the arts of sight: drawing, painting, photography, cinema. He often wrote about appearances directly, conjuring small physical presences as few others could: the way that a lizard shimmies as it moves, the warmth of grass in the sun, the ‘red of young eyelids shut tight’. His best essays convey a miraculous gratitude that the world comes into view at all. Berger was anything but pedantic. He was friends with academics, including famous ones, but his style was anathema to the learned and world-weary. The renowned literary critic Frank Kermode once wrote to Berger remembering a stay in his ‘peculiar paradise’ in the Vaucluse in southeastern France, so different from the ‘low morale’ and ‘vanity’ of Cambridge.

Ways of Seeing has had its impact on the discipline of art history – as both grenade and leveller – even as Berger remained uninterested in the kinds of questions that art historians tend to pose. He was drawn instead to far more religious themes: longing and exile, encounter and estrangement, leave-taking and return. His greatest legacy might lie in the unique ways in which he combined these two spheres – the visual and the existential – both of which have their roots in evolutionary biology. (Visual areas account for a large portion of the cortical surface of the human brain, while the prefrontal cortex deals in memory and those cognitive processes that help to found a coherent self.) Berger was one of the few modern writers to have trafficked so regularly between the world of ideas and the world of things. As he later reflected, it was perhaps his early work in television, with its voiceover and film track, that helped him to synthesise his love of both words and images, thinking and seeing.

‘The way in which human perception is organised,’ Benjamin wrote, ‘is conditioned not only by nature but by history.’ For Berger, the changes to visuality in the 20th century must be understood in relation to the qualitative dimensions of its historical watersheds. Close to 20 years after Ways of Seeing, he wrote of the advent of cinema in relation to the experience of exile. He saw cinema and exile as intertwined, part of an intimate dialogue between presence and absence. To film anything is to safeguard it for the future, and so to foresee its eventual loss. It is to watch a set of moments pass into a separate realm both inside and outside of time. ‘In the sky of cinema,’ Berger wrote, ‘people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.’ The century of film was also a century of transport, emigration, disappearance, uprooting. ‘Painting brings home,’ he concluded. ‘The cinema transports elsewhere.’

That distinction emerges as the heart of Ways of Seeing. As a film about painting, it was the hinge on which the programme was built: between locomotion and stillness, sound and silence, a blue screen and canvas. ‘With the invention of the camera everything changed,’ Berger tells us in the first episode. European painting once gathered the visible world into fixed scenes of static permanence. But film meant ‘we could see things that were not there in front of us’. Appearances entered a state of motion and flux. They began to travel across the world. ‘It was no longer so easy to think of appearances always travelling to a single centre.’

‘A single centre.’ This might be another word for a home – that place, as the poet W H Auden put it in ‘Detective Story’ (1937), ‘where the three or four things/that happen to a man do happen’. For Berger, the need for a home was part of human nature, dating back thousands of years, at least to palaeolithic dwellings and the transition from nomadism to agriculture. In an essay first published as ‘A Home Is not a House’ (1983), curiously prompted by Steven Spielberg’s film ET (1982) and its global popularity, Berger considered more archetypal beginnings. The term ‘home’, he admits, has been long taken over by the moralising of conservatives and xenophobes, both representatives of the ruling class, who have worked to hide its more original meaning. He writes:

Originally home meant the centre of the world – not in a geographical but in an ontological sense … home was the place from which the world could be founded … Without a home at the centre of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home, everything was fragmentation.

Though expressed in straightforward prose, Berger’s essay slaloms through a conceptual minefield, one that has confused (and intimidated) most thinkers on the Left for at least a century. No other baby has been as perpetually thrown out with the bathwater of politics as has the concept of home – perhaps due to its presumed relation to the ‘national question’ or the desire for property. On each of these scores, Berger drew fundamental distinctions. Along with only a handful of postwar critics, most of whom were refugees, he wanted to acknowledge the atavistic pull that an original home can exert. To long for one is not incipient fascism, but a desire perverted by the ideologies of patriotism and patriarchy.

Though aware of the very real contradictions, Berger would have agreed with Edward Said, who wrote in ‘Reflections on Exile’ (1984) of the ‘unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and a true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.’ And yet he would have also agreed with Vilém Flusser, the Czech-Brazilian philosopher, who spoke of the migrant not only as a challenge to the native’s self-centredness but as holding the capacity to enlighten. Flusser, who (like Berger) wrote extensively on both photography and emigration, in ‘The Challenge of the Migrant’ (1985) suggested that the migrant should be seen as a ‘vanguard of the future’, an emissary of a new mystery: not the old mystery of a lost homeland but rather ‘the mystery of living together with others’.

The two groups for whom Berger came to advocate, the Zapatistas and the Palestinians, were both stateless

In Berger’s work, the figure of the foreigner represents promise more than threat. This was true in his first novel, A Painter of Our Time (1958), about a Hungarian émigré in London. It was also true for A Seventh Man (1976), his collaborative account of migrant workers in Europe, and his trilogy of peasant fiction, Into Their Labours (1991). In Flusser’s words, the migrant can be ‘both a window through which those who have been left behind may see the world and the mirror in which they may see themselves, even if in distortion’. Much critical thought has examined those distortions. Said reframes the question, asking how we might ‘surmount the loneliness of exile without falling into the encompassing and thumping language of national pride, collective sentiments, group passions?’ At a political moment that has seen the stunning rise of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán – the list goes on – this might be the million-dollar question of our time.

Unlike other social theorists, Berger never tried to reason his way through the contradictions of nation-state or the citizen/non-citizen distinction. He preferred instead to disown any affinity at all with state power. The two groups for whom he came to advocate, the Zapatistas and the Palestinians, were both stateless. Perhaps this was a cop-out – but maybe not. In an otherwise sympathetic review of Berger’s From A to X (2008), Ursula K Le Guin pointed to the absence of political complexity in the novel: the allegorical universalism of its revolutionary lovers effectively ‘exonerated [their people] from bigotry and political folly or factionalism’. The charge of sentimentalism was often levelled against his later work.

In 2007, aged 81, Berger published Hold Everything Dear, about the War on Terror and the global migration crisis. In a phone interview with an Australian radio host, he was asked to directly confront the contradiction that immigrants can put pressure on the native poor, making them ‘nervous and even angry’. Berger drew back. ‘I don’t deny the difficulties,’ he said, but he added that the problems were often distorted by the vested interests of the national press, and by cynicism:

You ask me as though I can find a solution. No, I can’t find a solution in theory like that, of course not. The solutions … we’re not really talking about solutions, we’re talking about finding a way to live, to survive, to perhaps discover forms of mutual aid … All that can only happen in practice, in particular situations in the way that people associate or don’t associate in terms of some small project or in defence of some small thing which is in the area where they live. It’s not for somebody talking on the radio abstractly about the world who will find that kind of solution.

The answer reflected Berger’s distrust of theoretical remedies to human problems. Perhaps even more so, it accorded with his respect for practice and social knowledge. He never tried to gain the ear of power. He was more concerned with everyday gestures and decisions: the choices people either make or fail to make in their own lives.

A choice about a way to live presented itself to Berger shortly after he made Ways of Seeing. He was in his late 40s and had achieved an international level of fame. The invitations started coming in. He could have taken a position at a museum or university. He could have entered a world of sinecures and fellowships, residencies and agents, conferences and airports. He turned down almost all of this.

The reasons were historical as well as personal, and might relate, however indirectly, to our own contemporary impasse: our inability to see more than one generation into the future, the dissolving legitimacy of the metropolitan and academic elite, the seeming incapacity to move beyond a politics of negativity and despair. Just as we are hitting the limits of critique as a culture, Berger was hitting them as a writer – and a person. With Ways of Seeing (and his Booker-winning novel G.), he had reached a tipping point that was also a midlife crisis and a fork in the road. ‘I can be only by destroying,’ Lionel Trilling once wrote of a certain modern attitude, ‘I can know myself only by what I shatter.’ But where is there to go when the demolition is complete?

There is a photograph of Berger from the 1973 Frankfurt Book Fair. Taken by Jean Mohr, a lifelong friend, it shows a middle-aged writer, exhausted and detached, lying on the floor as others walk past him in a blur. What was Berger thinking about? What was he longing for? It was at this fair that Berger met a young American, Beverly Bancroft, then an assistant at Penguin Books. Within a year, they were married. Two years later, they had a son. Soon they moved to a small farming village in the foothills of the Alps. The chalet they rented lacked central heating and running water. The outhouse was across the driveway.

The question, he once said, was of ‘continually learning to be embedded in life’

It would be easy to romanticise Berger’s third act as a rural storyteller. Even while haymaking, he was still a renowned writer with famous friends. But it would be just as easy to cynically write it off. Throughout the neoliberal era, most intellectuals have lived in a social world that is urban, cosmopolitan, cutthroat and status-oriented. Berger went someplace very different. He remained politically committed though his conception of the political shifted and enlarged, absorbing a broader sense of history and experience.

The question, he once said, was of ‘continually learning to be embedded in life’. During the 1970s and ’80s, as Ways of Seeing made the rounds in British and American classrooms, Berger was discovering his own need for roots – what Simone Weil called ‘the most important and least recognised need of the human soul’ – even if they were freely chosen and across the English Channel. Embeddedness, in this way, was about the double anchors of community and place. It required, on the one hand, the help of others – not primarily because of their material aid but because ‘they are real and therefore looking at them, being with them, you become real in that moment’ – but it also required an individual openness to the physicality of the world: the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the trees and animals and rain.

How this ontology would map onto urban experience is an open question that Berger never fully answered. How it would map onto digital experience is something we have yet to answer. Yet there is in his late work a kernel of something perhaps visionary. At a time when E M Forster’s humanist mantra – only connect – has come to sound like a slogan for an internet provider, Berger’s more numinous, earthly communions might be the most useful. Ways of Seeing remains the way he came to the attention of millions, and the hinge in his life. His long trajectory after the dividing line of Ways of Seeing still has much, maybe even more, to teach us.

In the conversation with the Australian interviewer, Berger felt compelled, if only for a moment, to leave the sphere of ideas. ‘Now I live here,’ he said of the village where he had settled:

I’m looking out of the window, the sky is grey, it’s got to be about 13 degrees … The hay is getting browner and browner, less and less nutritious, so there will be less and less milk this winter when the cows are fed hay because of the snow outside. So I’m sitting here in front of that window, and now, after all those years, I’m sitting at home …