2010: A Manifesto

OUR time is one of fragmentation and flux, of shifting cultures on sinking sands. Microcultures amidst the macro, pockets of society break from the mainstream and are bound together momentarily in acts of self-definition. Yet all too often the initial spark fails to catch: many burn out almost instantaneously, whilst others are swallowed by the Market Machine, fading out as they become assimilated into the mainstream. Few run the course long enough to develop the intensity of that original moment into a healthy and perdurable culture, and of those that do, most remain trapped in closed pockets of a substratum, subsisting, yet never quite with the same energy and focus which defined that original spark.

At the other end of the scale are the high windows and ivory towers of the Old Guard: global villages whose doors are barred to all but a privileged few, inhabited by sages who conjure meaning from nothing and nothing from meaning, élites caught in a discourse whose self-referentiality speaks to neither man nor beast. It is they who guard the imperial citadel: centuries upon centuries of knowledge and tradition, its constructions abound ever more in sophistry and trickery, concealing that at their heart lies not a hearth, but a void, one which consumes the Other with a relentless energy and destroys it, incorporating it into the Same. These are the mountain dwellers, those who live in the clouds, where the air is sheer and thin, and the earth rocky and dry.

Both landscapes may be idealized representations from a world in which societies, cultures and the interactions between them grow ever more complex, but both should be immediately recognizable. They represent the two extremes of a cleft which firmly divides our current modes of expression. Bluntly put, the choice is between the underground or the clouds—never shall the twain meet. The former holds a monopoly on the immediacy and creative energy which imbue force and impact, the latter on the knowledge and consciousness that provide depth. At best, interaction between the two is limited, at worst they remain immiscible, like oil and water. Seldom do they feed of each other sufficiently to allow something both profound and vibrant to emerge from the space in between.

Such endeavours are often designated by the term art. Yet art itself was an invention of a society which saw the compartmentalization of our modes of expression. It is hard for us to imagine a time when no distinction was made between say, literature and cosmology, or visual art and cartography, and it is harder still to imagine a mode of expression in which such designations were entirely meaningless, in which erudition and imagination were two parts of an essential synergy. The highly structured world in which we live separates knowledge and creativity and confines their operation to neatly categorized pockets. Perhaps we may have begun the process of challenging and dismantling these structures but they continue to persist and to govern the creative and intellectual landscape of our times.

Might we then talk of reclaiming this lost space, a space in which creative expression exists in its purest form: not as an act of conformance to the dictates of subculture or academy, but as the product of an essential drive to express and share our interpretations of the world in which we live with others around us?

THERE are few who would dispute the richness of Edinburgh’s heritage, and yet there are those who would see the city reduced to nothing more than a shrine to its past achievements, its streets turned into those of a living museum. It is telling that in the introduction to last year’s Edinburgh International Festival programme—and here we’ll say nothing of the toile which graced the programme’s covers, a masterful exercise in that particularly Scottish form of humour, taking the piss, which said more about the state of contemporary Edinburgh than all the slick marketing and neatly manicured PR put together—seemed to describe a city which existed solely in the past tense (the fabled golden age of the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment, the continuing resonance of our diaspora, etc.). The suggestion that this much-eulogized fusion of intellect and creativity lives on to the present day, never mind into the future, was nowhere to be found; nor was any hint of a serious desire that it should do so. Whilst Edinburgh has shut her eyes and basked serenely in the fading sunset of her past glories, the world has moved swiftly on.

All this city bleeds is damn history. So wrote the late Colin Mackay in 1989, a talented writer whose death is all the more tragic given that his work has slipped into obscurity. They describe Edinburgh in the dead of night, flotsam and jetsam lingering in the deserted streets; a city of ghosts and statues, a city from which the vibrancy of other world cities is markedly absent. There is something resonant about his description: for all her class and splendour, Edinburgh seems stifled by the weight of her past. The city is dominated by a meek conservatism, one to which the rawness, imagination and energy that characterizes the urban environments of cities such as London, Buenos Aires, Paris, Barcelona, and New York is something wholly foreign. It was not through a contrived exercise in bourgeoisie urban planning that the labyrinthine streets and closes of Edinburgh’s Old Town came about: they were a product of density and pressure, of a sheer necessity to compress so much into such a small area; they were not the products of complacency and absorption in the past but of a living and breathing society immersed one hundred percent in the present.

THESE are turbulent times: we are constantly reminded of impending global catastrophes; closer to home we see a country brought to the brink of collapse by a shallow breed of individualistic, debt-fuelled consumerism which has engendered a culture of profligacy and superficiality, we see a political system illegitimized by the apathy of a disenfranchised electorate, one in which the vacuum of ideas and imagination has allowed even the most die-hard fascists to enter the political arena; and here in Edinburgh we see a city paralyzed by inertia and crumbling under the weight of its past, run by the same sticky-fingered coterie who would see its streets turned into those of a living museum.

This is the world into which The Radgeworks is born, a time in which both Edinburgh and the small nation of which it is capital cry out for reinvention, for a sweeping away of a staid Old Guard and its replacement by something new, something with the creativity and energy to lead us through the twenty-first century. What role we shall play in this process, it is too early to say; what our endeavours will achieve throughout the lifespan of our project, we do not yet know.

Some twenty-six years ago, Alasdair Gray incited Scots to work as if we lived in the early days of a better nation. Perhaps he was premature: the challenge faced by the current generation is in laying the foundations upon which this better nation might be built, in sowing the seeds so that once again something might flourish. This is the starting point from which we set out and this is the landscape in which we shall operate.
We hope you will enjoy our work. We hope too that you will support us in our endeavours and wish us the very best of success.

Edinburgh, January 2010.