Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit

Chapter 5:

• (playing off ‘the whole word’s a stage idea?)
• Revolutions and political change happen in people’s minds and imaginations – ‘politics arises out of the spread of ideas and the shaping of imaginations’
• This ‘means that symbolic and cultural acts have real political power. And it means that the changes that count take place not merely onstage as action but in the minds of those who are again and again pictured only as audience or bystanders’
• ‘belief can be more effective than violence’
• ‘Violence is the power of the state; imagination and nonviolence the power of civil society’
• E.g. the abolition of slavery – ‘In five decades antislavery sentiments went from being radical to being the status quo.’ – also the importance of the use of empathy and imagination as ‘the atrocities were mostly out of sight of the audience’
• Also shifts in views and rights of homosexuals and the disabled over the past few decades
• The big legal decisions may appear to be where change begins/is made but it is really only where it ends up – change is made from the margins to the centre
• How does this change spread? Stories spreading stealthily but like fire – ‘Just as fashions are more likely to originate in the street with poor nonwhite kids, so are new stories likely to start in the marginal zones, with visionaries, radicals, obscure researchers, the young, the poor – the discounted, who count anyway.’
• Marginalising people minimises them as threats, makes them appear as some rowdy outsiders group disrupting the status quo, rather than actually questioning the status quo and why some may want to change it
• Earth First! Group hanging a vast sheet with a crack on it down a dam – a fictional yet physical way of proposing something, making the ‘never seem quite so eternal and immutable again’
• (referring to ‘people in the centre’ changing their ideas): ‘Their amnesia is necessary to their sense of legitimacy in a society they would rather not acknowledge is in constant change.’
• (note on her writing style: introduces a metaphoric concept such as e.g. the world as a stage/theatre, then delves into this, unpicks some (often narrative) examples, and then cycles back round at the end to the initial metaphor, adding what we’ve learnt along the way as the cherry on the cake)
• Similar to the idea of black lives matter – it’s an idea, not led by a single figurehead, so is harder for authorities to target and take down (from 13^th I think?)
• Relating this to the present moment: we’re arguably in dark times, in which the masses are becoming isolated but may well all be feeling similar ways – social media only helps these stories with potential for change to grow, and so when this is all over perhaps some serious re-evaluation will have gone on? It seems quite a hopeful/inspiring message of the power of the people
• In relation to my own work? Stone as an irrefutable/immovable material, or at least it seems that way to us – links to the idea that ideas that once seemed immovable can soon be moved, incrementally, like erosion making its way to a landslide?

Is there power in creative practice? What is this? Can it initiate change? How?

• Link to simon’s lecture – a way of thinking outside of (in his example) capitalism, and this way plant a seed of change/a way of seeing outside of the default
• In smaller ways, simply finding fun in creativity, with no other gain other than this, is still a way outside of capitalism – we saw this in lockdown #1
• ‘stories sneak in while no one is watching’

Do you think all artists occupy the ‘edges’ ?

• Maybe?? It seems only a small minority gain the big bucks and maybe in this way make it to the centre as money=power in our current system lol
• How much political power do they wield? If change truly starts in the mind then in this way art is very powerful
• The influence of social media in this? / online – easier to access art, bringing it more to the people? – kind of highlights the many different levels of the art world, the ‘out-there’/more radical types, those with their foot in the door of art establishments, and then the higher up this gets the more heavily money is involved, as well as also ‘outsider’ artists