Start the Week

08/11/2010

Andrew Marr talks to the Swedish poet, Lars Gustafsson about whether writers have a responsibility to challenge the establishment. Gillian Tett, the award-winning Financial Times journalist, who predicted the financial crash, does her own challenging of the status quo. The writer Patrick Wilcken describes the great intellectual Claude Levi-Strauss, as 'the poet in the laboratory' in a new biography. And Ed Vulliamy reports, in almost anthropological detail, on the lives of those caught up in the war of drugs, gangs and guns on the US-Mexican border. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 41m
Broadcast on:: 08 Nov 2010
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, and the human zoo is open for business after a weekend when the death of one of Mexico's drug barons was announced. It took a mere 150 marines, three helicopters and 17 armoured vehicles to get him. We will be walking along the most dangerous border in the world, what the journalist Edvili army calls Amexica, crossed by a million people a day. You could call the army's journey a kind of anthropology of the drug trade, and we'll be talking too about one of the great savanthe topology, Claude Levi's Strauss, and the lure of deep or hidden structures with Patrick Wilken. He calls Levi's Strauss the poet in the laboratory, and we will conclude with a real poet, the Swede, Lars Gustavsson, making his case for the subversive poet. So, with luck, you will have gathered that we're going to be talking about what's valuable, about mania, about power, and all of that leads me to my first guest today, one-time anthropologist Gillian Tett, now the FT's U.S. managing editor. Her newspaper's front page this morning reports the head of the World Bank calling for a debate about whether the world should return to the gold standard. We are, of course, in the middle of a mania for gold, a gold bug. Gillian, why is this? Well, I think the last few years have not just produced a financial crisis in terms of banks collapsing and markets being shaken, but it's also been a crisis of faith because people have begun to question, if not lose faith, in many of the core talents of modern finance, and they've realised that the things that used to look so permanent and impressive, like currencies, like banks themselves, might not be that way. So, in some ways, it's a period of back-to-basics, it's a revolt against cyber-finance, against Star Trek finance, and all these clever financial innovations that used to look so impressive. So, the rise in the gold price up to $1,364, announced now tri-owns, is a sort of index of pessimism? It isn't index of pessimism. I mean, the immediate explanation that economists like to give for why this is happening is that people are becoming concerned about inflation, and gold is regarded as a hedge against inflation, and at a time when we just had the US Federal Reserve inject more money into the economy with quantitative easing, all these extraordinary experiments, people look at gold as a store of value. But I think there is something else going on here, which is, as I said before, a reaction against cyber-finance, a feeling that people are losing faith in governments. A sort of gut feeling about what value is? Is it simply a blipping digital dot on a computer screen? Are my savings real? Well, that's the kind of thing that people have started to question, and in essence, what gold is, is a store of value that does not depend on a central bank, and money in some ways is the ultimate derivative, and that is, value derives from a central bank, if there is no gold standard. And what we've seen, interestingly enough, in the last few days, is people like Robert Zolik, they head of the World Bank, saying, well, perhaps we should be returning to a world where there is some core underpinning of value, of currencies. This is wonderfully reactionary, isn't it? In his grand new world, where everything was going to be digital and virtual, we're scrabbling back to gold. It's fascinating. I mean, if you go back three or four years, there was this tremendously strong feeling amongst economists, and bankers, and policymakers, that we lived in this brave new world of innovation, globalisation, capitalism, where we had these wonderful computers that could link us all together, and money could wither around the world as quickly as anything. And the idea that something as old-fashioned as gold, which has been around for centuries, millennium, could ever come back into fashion again, was completely off the radar screen. Which is why Gordon Brown sold so much of the British gold reserves at the time, of course. Absolutely. I mean, the last couple of years have really been about the once unimaginable things coming to pass. And gold is an extraordinary indication of just what a big cognitive shift we've had. Now, this starts, in that sense, from the streets, from the bottom. It's the instinctive feeling. But we've talked about a gold mania or a gold bug. You've been in some of these gold conferences, conferences about buying gold, and there's a sort of religious revivalist fervour about them, it seems. Well, one of the things that I've often felt working as a financial journalist, and as someone who trained as an anthropologist, was that certainly three or four years ago, when I told people in the markets of an anthropologist, they'd look at me as if I was completely mad. I mean, there was a feeling that the only degree that used to matter were in economics or astrophysics, because finance was all about numbers. But the roots of the word credit, the Latin, come from the mean credera, I believe, which is fundamentally a social construct. So for far too long, people have forgotten that actually finance and markets and banks is about faith, it is about a social construct, and in a sense, social patterns really matter. And so describe to us some of those meetings that you attended when you were sort of chairing discussions about gold. Well, the thing that's fascinating about gold is that it does unleash a degree of emotion amongst investors, which you just don't see when you're talking about things like, you know, FTSE shares or anything like that. You know, it really is a sense of emotion, and I have been at various gold investment conferences recently, and it was like a revivalist meeting sometimes. I was cheered and booed from when I was up on the platform, which you don't get at a normal ETF conference. And we see in almost every high street, in shopping centers, up and down the country, there's little stalls where people are trying to buy your gold off, you know, give us your wedding ring, give us, give us, and we'll pay you for it. And it does feel a bit like a bubble. It does feel like things are getting out of control at the moment. So I suppose a lot of people listening will be thinking, well, yeah, but in the end, should I be buying gold or selling it? Well, like any investment trend, there is a sense of enthusiasm getting ahead of itself. And on top of the fact that you have macroeconomic reasons for people looking at gold right now, you do also have Chinese and Indians buying gold for jewelry reasons. And, you know, if you believe that the emerging markets are growing right now and going to provide much of the growth, that's another reason to jump on it. You know, like any invest in trends, any investment mania, it probably will end at some point. I think that point is probably somewhere away. There are other bubbles right now in the financial markets. I think the bond market is probably bubble, the US Treasury bond market. And frankly, I'm far more concerned about that in the short term than I am about gold per se. Patrick will be talking about Levi's trials later on, but this is classic anthropologists material. You don't have to go off to the jungles of Brazil to study the human beasts, do you? Yes, I mean, I think that I was going to ask if after the financial crisis, this kind of anthropological thinking is returning to economics, because it seems like classical economic theories spectacularly failed to predict the crash. And are not really equipped to analyze where we are today. Well, certainly at the moment, there is a sense that classic economics has lost some of its luster. They were almost like a priesthood, an intellectual priesthood which dominated thinking three or four years ago. And people like George Soros even, the great speculator hedge fund guru, is now funding an institute called INET, which is trying to promote alternative ways of economic thinking. The problem is that although there is some rethink going on at the margins at the end of the day, that economic priesthood is still pretty powerful and pretty dominant. Ed Viliami, for those of us who never really held much faith in the pretensions of cyber wealth or indeed in the banks, one of the most worrying things in what Gillian's work has come up with seemed to me this point you made, but who saw good old gold as somehow a bedrock upon which the central banks could fall, almost as a safety net, when the bankers had looted everything else, which they seemed to have done, including most people's savings, is that what you set at one point in your work was that the majority of the gold stocks are now held not by the central banks, but by private investors. So does this mean that the bankers in whom I never had any faith anymore than I did in all this cyber nonsense actually now have control of the safety net, that the central banks have a golden brown having sold off all our gold at bargain basement prices, just when the Americans I gather see it as something of a very last resort they're not going to do. Have the private investors now got hold of the safety net as well as the high wire as it were? Well I wouldn't put it that way actually central banks still have a lot of gold and one of the very interesting things right now is that Asian central banks are particularly keen to try and divers find a gold right now, partly as an expression of concern about the US dollar and the fact they're losing faith in the American government to maintain the value of that dollar and also to pay back all its debts in the form of the treasury bonds. So you've still got an awful lot of central bank players involved in the market but what you do have right now is a lot of investors buying gold through something called exchange rate of funds which are actually another form of innovation. Yeah and what about very uninvasion centric people from the brick countries from India and China coming into the market because if you're looking at where people are searching for value you would think that the newly rich Chinese middle class, the newly rich Indian middle class will also be searching for something traditional and solid and they'll be going for gold as well. Well Indian and Chinese consumers have long been big source of demand for gold jewelry and on one hand some of them are saying I gather that in fact as the price goes up they think it's not worth buying gold per se but insofar as India and China are getting wealthier that's fueling the trend as well. It's quite fascinating to listen and I try to understand is this a return from cyberspace? You could of course claim that the modern information and technology has turned also banking into an imaginary space and this seemingly conservative return to gold. I see similarities to some other phenomena in the world. The new nationalism which cannot be entirely explained by the decay of the well first aid because you see them also in states which never were well first aid. I think many parts of society today are grappling for central meaning and tangibility and the thing about the finance in the last few years was that it did move into a realm which was so esoteric and so complex that it was well beyond the ability of most people to understand and there was a feeling of lost control that our lives have been taken over by these amorphous globalised esoteric disembodied forces. I call it Star Trek finance if you like that we just don't understand and the thing about gold is you can touch it you can feel it you measure it and you don't need a PhD in astrophysics to understand it. Well let's move to another commodity that creates a sense of mania around it and which indeed is flourishing I suppose around the world and that's drugs. Edward Iami has been travelling along the very long border between America and the United States I should say in Mexico a mexica he calls it was borderline area must be one of the most dangerous places probably in the world just in terms of the amount of assassinations, killings, kidnappings, beheadings and so on going across as well as a million people a day I think crossing this border. To start with we should explain there's a sort of an alternative geography that you show in your book which is the territory is not controlled by states but controlled by the rival drug cartels. Controlled by the rival drug cartels Andrew absolutely that's the thumbnail headline sketch of what's going on if you like this is a war quote in shorthand between narco cartels fighting for the smuggling routes for drugs into the USA that's where it started and that is the bedrock headline reason but as one unpeels away the many layers of this nightmare along the US-Mexican border it becomes so much more complex than that in quite frightening ways most people are now dying and 47 of them died in a gun battle as you mentioned in your opening remarks just on friday as well as the Antonio Carter and his Guillain. I think for the domestic plaza turf in northern Mexico itself for where the river runs through people will drink and one of the many many sideshow wars in this principle war between cartels is the catastrophic levels of addiction to hard drugs in northern Mexico itself. There are all sorts of riptides beneath this but as you as you suggest this is a land of such dichotomy this border is needs must harsh it's now fenced by six along 600 miles of it it's border patrol its national guard until the idea was proved so ridiculous it was a sensors and laser front it but also as you say a million people cross it every day to shop to go to school to work families live astride it as well as alongside it it's one of these great problem is sort of opposites dichotomies in the modern supposedly globalized world where you have a frontier that's a stockade and a fortress across which a million people cross every day it's also the busiest commercial border in the world and it struck me another connection with what Gillian Tech was talking about is the the belief that you can fix things technically that if you only have better and better technology in more and more sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance and all the rest of it then that you can you can deal with what is in effect a problem about human psychology addiction hope optimism you know fear lust you can't deal with those things with the best technology that the CIA can produce well and as and and in the organization of society as Gillian has has suggested too I mean the and the way people as we're going to talk about with clone which they've used trials later on that the way people behave which is so crucial yes we're talking about two commodities that seem to have a sort of bedrock value gold and stuff that you know fries the brains of the young and goes into the but the noses of the rich tragically but yes how people how does this and you know we we we've had every time the mexican army pours in more soldiers the violence gets worse almost like a Newtonian reaction and counter reaction and a lot of the a lot of the the drug cartel hard men the killers that are ex-military people themselves who come straight from the the mexican or or indeed some american forces particularly in the case of i think the most cogent terrifying cartel of all the zettas who are the military wing of the golf cartel who i think probably have this sort of a very frightening insurgent trump card and all this but i mean talking of the anthropology of it if you like um since this is our sort of riptide this morning is this that that so much of this is is couched in paramilitary language of cartel against cartel as though this was a sort of you know an 18th century battlefield but really it's about and this was the the most terrifying thing of all it is about the aftermath for instance and this again gets us back to our theme of factories collecting huge numbers of of people come to work in these as Paulings assembly sweatshop plants along the border called the mojila dot and then deciding that they're going off to asia never mind who they leave behind i.e. shanty towns full of people with nothing to do but in a drug trade there are plenty of jobs going dealing cutting killing way by a addiction becomes an activity in the market and also the way people behave just in pursuit of why they're doing this and it you know i spoke to people in some of the most terrifying places in northern mexico and they said it's to do with getting this mobile phone application to have that SUV which gets you that chica which is you know you can't wear the t-shirt you wore last year i thought at first that's banal but actually it explains a terrifying amount of what's going on in terms of the killings simple old-fashioned consumerist materialism at the bottom level you this is a report from the front line and and and a horrifying one but what did you conclude should be done what what what lessons do you bring away from the front line when it may sound naive it may sound sort of blindly optimistic and there is no room for optimism at the moment this is this is a murderous abyss we're going into and the bottom is not yet in sight let's say that first but um i think the the as ever with wars and i've covered enough of them the the courage and goodness and bravery of the decent people is so much more interesting than the than you know one hander called the banality of evil and there are priests working all they can to face absolute churches fighting quite hard absolutely and and the reform past orders it is a male war in many ways and strong women organized and in the home of the bedrock such sort of columns of opposition um this will come from below the answer to this if if there is one will come from below yes the united states has to defend its border no one's going to argue with that americans are going to carry on keep taking drugs so europeans it will come from the mexican people in that area deciding they don't want to live in this way and you know it will come from the churches the media is very very illadese with the potency and potency of religion in these places they don't understand they don't want it to be that way they'll fit their worldview it'll come from them too and does it make you angry um to see the sort of glamorization of the drug culture in the west and the and the sort of trendy uh coke sniffing sort of london's scene when when you see what happens to get the drugs there well i don't bang the drum in the book i mean it's the book of faces and places it's meant to be a sort of rollicking voyage along the border but um in the back of my mind yes always we had this sort of ethical consumerist idea these days you know and how how ethical is my frappuccino and how well you know who who made my prime art blouse but drugs is weirdly exempt from this you know how many lives how many lives just went up the supermodels nose no one really in those glitter arty um nights in london new york in los angeles talks about drugs in that way and that offends me yes patrick i just wondered um because i've worked a lot in brazil um and there has been some discussions in brazil about legalization of drugs and whether that was something that that was being discussed by by politicians in mexico in brazil um no less than fenando riki kadorso who was the ex president of the country uh recently talked about um the possibility of legalization and the fact that um that the the toll the social toll of the drugs um was such it was so high that that that was one possible route to towards dealing with the situation well journalism is funny you know it's a bit it's like columbus you go looking for indian you find america and then i think i sort of set off vaguely with this idea that's sort of prevalent um in liberal circumstance you know just add instant legalization or go away i've changed my mind i have to say um i think there's a misunderstanding of why people take drugs and i most people don't take drugs to make the grateful dead sound better or feel horny or whatever they take drugs because they're utterly miserable um and mexico's the sharp end of what a post industrial society looks like um i think that if uh you can go down to to boots and buy a brand of crystal meth it's regulated that fries your brain seventy percent for five pounds a hit what's to stop the cartels marketing a brand of crystal meth that fries your brains ninety nine percent and it goes two pounds a hit um i think i think you know and this this is not just mexico this is south whales this is teaside time side why do people take drugs because it's awful miserable and i think if you do sell drugs in boots people will go out and buy it even more than they do now do you intend to agree with that um well i would do but um i was going to say i know we're going to talk about levies drowson in it which patrick has been looking at but um one of the anthropologists that influenced me greatly was a frenchman called pf board u who used to argue that it's not so much what people talk about that matters is what they don't talk about it's a social silences that are key to reproducing structures and i think one of the reasons why ed's work is so fascinating is because he really does expose a social silence not just in the sense of the celebrity is not talking about the cost of their own drugs and such or anybody else but also there's incredible gaping open wound between america and mexico and the underbelly that is there you know within the american superpower there is a passage in vulteis candid where the travelers arrive i think it was an innocent or something like that at the time of the big rebellions and and they are seeing a black man who is mutilated badly mutilated and as a punishment for having tried to escape the slave and then somebody i for the warden who says to professor panglos and candid well this is the price you pay for eating sugar in europe of course reading your taste wonderful texts and fries and eggs i thought of that there are prices at which we eat which we look away from a lot of the time we haven't we haven't even got on to the the sort of migration side of it i was in mexico recently and somebody said to me said well it's very simple they took california from us and we're taking it back again uh so there's that side to the border too but um well you mentioned uh as you mentioned vulteis let's move to another great french intellectual claud leaver stress we've talked about him already but patrick wilkins biography of him is called the poet in the laboratory and the the running thread through his life is the search for hidden structures hidden harmonies underneath everything um and there's a wonderful early part of your book when he's he's working with the british regiment at the beginning of the second world war and he goes off looking at the structures of leaves um it's it's uh it is a story of a poet rather than a scientist at the end i felt i think towards the end yes i think that when as a young man um he saw himself he i mean he grew up um in in a very artistic environment um his father was a portrait painter um he described uh that the the family home was strewn with easels and and darkroom books and and um he was fascinated by the arts throughout his his long life um but i think at the beginning of his career he he started with really real scientific um pretensions when he met when he was in exile from nazi europe he met uh roman jackerson who was um a famous linguist russian linguist at that and and he sought levistraus it was a sort of uh a historic moment in the humanities levistraus saw um his opportunity to import concepts from linguistics which seemed to be um the only discipline that the humanities that was really making headway that was really um had a pretension to be to being scientific to producing models um to perfecting models of deep structures of languages and his inspiration was to draw from linguistics and um import those ideas into the study of culture but i think as his work um evolved it became more much more interpretive poetic his late work on myth um was a kind of almost a literature in itself a sort of scholarly literature i'm very interested in the period before the second world war as well when he goes off to brazil to do his famous field work because it seems to me this is a very interesting time in in european cultural history and in french particularly cultural history where the ideas of empire are crumbling and withdrawing and there's a desperation to find truths of different kinds amongst primitive people whether it's bicasso and brat going off and sort of looting anthropology museums for for some of their images or it's anthropologist heading out in his case to brazil um so to what extent is this is this a moment in in european culture not simply one anthropologist with his pith helmet heading off up the amazon i think yes you're you're right it was his timing was was very good um i think um when he went to brazil the the age of empire was starting to unravel when he published um tristro bic which was his famous memoir um of his trip to brazil um the the french empire was was on its on its knees and i think there was not only were these um indigenous groups that he he wrote about emerging from beneath the cloak of of um colonial prejudice um but there was a sense um that that um that the the european age um was ending and that there was more global universal truths that that could be um could be discovered through anthropology i think it was a historic moment in anthropology because it was the the time when the first real really professional ethnographies were being produced and for the first time in human history we had very good data about what other cultures were like and what their how their cultural institutions were organized and so he starts to build up this enormously complex uh theory of struck the underlying structures of human societies and what they mean it's almost mathematical in in the way it's set out and he then comes back to to post-war fronts and again ask is this probably the last moment when you have a group of intellectuals um who are not based on what we would call hard science they're not Darwinians you know they're not they're not physicists the people who have that kind of intellectual leadership in in ideas these days tend to come from a science background but these are people still with the sort of as it were the liberal humanity background searching for the deepest truths yes i think that um that levy Strauss throughout his life he took a great interest in in science but he was a kind of amateur scientist and even in his use to use of linguistics he drew certain certain principles but didn't really apply them in a very thorough going way and he did um he was on this quest of a total theory that ultimately um he thought revealed the the kind of universal laws of the mind from a very um literary perspective jillian tett anthropologist yourself um i was going to say that one of the things that's fascinating about levy Strauss he is very much a function of his time and indicates a wider trend which was that when he was doing his field work there was a dominant presumption in anthropology that what westerners did was to go out and study more primitive people and they ended up in jungles they ended up in remote parts of the world there was this idea that they had a right to go and look at what's the primitive and i mean bring that in quotations people's did and then they tried to prove that in fact other cultures had a validity and um importance that was universal in a sense increasingly though now the trend is for anthropologists to look at their own societies at western society and to learn the lens back on themselves and to try and look for patterns um in western society too even in the most sophisticated corner of the western society what people think are sophisticated corners well from that perspective i think um you know levy Strauss was did have a very classical approach to anthropology that he drew on russo and he said that um you know we have to go to the furthest corners of the world um to have that purchase to have leverage um on um our vision of of culture and he he also thought in a very almost nostalgic way that um that the kind of secrets the keys to understanding humanity in the human mind would be revealed um in these very um low-tech cultures that were as far removed from the western reality as possible last i remember when um Tristetropic and mittuller she uh started to be known in sweden i should say some ten years after tistropic came nineteen four fifty five fifty five oh the fits value well i think most of the readers were young poets like me it had uh clearly just dropping we should say was it was the semi memoir um you know it it wasn't it wasn't part of the main anthropological work that he did and yet he became better known for that than anything else yes i'm surprised in ever got a literary Nobel Prize he might have been so that much better than many others and uh any any how it was read but um and um we all felt a relief um which you mentioned in your book the relief to to get out of the cage over sample size as existentially yes i think he was this key um bridging figure and he did break the sort of mystique of of Jean-Paul Sartre and um and he shifted he's he shifted the gear philosophically before it was a more introspective kind of you and he was he was very much against Sartre and yet he was part of that same sort of Parisian intellectual world um most of which has faded i mean in terms of its its part did does leave a Streis matter now do you think i think he he does matter um i mean you know Sartre matters as a novelist but whether he matters as a philosopher he's much more open to doubt so i ask the same question about i i think he he laid foundations i mean clearly he was writing in a different age much of his work was produced half a century ago but he did lay certain foundations particularly in cognitive anthropology which is a work in progress but the the actual principle that um that that that the structure of the mind might be reflected in some ways in the organization of culture is a principle that people are still working on um i think he was iconic of that moment in anthropology and he did um through this shift to the to kind of linguistic models he did influence uh humanities around the world some might say um influenced in a negative way but through the successes to levy Strauss Roland Bart, Jacques Lacan, and um Michel Foucault who all paid their dues to levy Strauss and all thought there were underlying structures which could be revealed there was a there was something quite we we were talking about religion earlier on there was something religious about this uh so he found he found a sort of gold um something surely or did he did it vanish was it everness that's the question i don't i don't i don't think it has a tool vanish i mean one of the things i love it's a basic point when everyone reads a book by or about people that generation i mean just a narrative quite about from the ideas levy Strauss on this boat uh for weeks at sea discussing surrealism with Andre Breton all of them in flight from the third Reich they come back to France or wherever in other cases Austria Germany wherever and this into this cauldron of ideas and they're wrestling with it they take their ideas seriously um and I think they do live on when you talk to intelligent students nowadays they are they do all carry a bit of sartre camu levy Strauss yes uh but i'm very interested in this idea that they're such wonderful narratives these lives and you know the next five years we'll see these memories disappear people that Patrick will not be able to discuss that experience with Levi's trials and um it's a priceless he did live to a hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred just shy of his own first birthday but i would also say that in France he definitely lived on and he remains a national figure but then the french have a tradition of of venerating their intellectuals i'm very interested in this notion that people who set out to be scientists as it were in the social science very often people in exile moving around well i think of Karl Marx we you know are then redefined as as poets or you know fictional writers Francis Wien wrote that book about Karl Marx saying really he's a great Victorian novelist and just the same way that people say they live in structure really he's a poet i think the key issue is actually that they tend to be more polyglots and they have a breadth of vision and training which goes beyond the way that a lot of academics are trained to operate today i mean there's increasing tendency towards siloization towards people operating in silos or in tunnels and the thing that did mark out that french intellectual school was simply the fact that they move between disciplines i mean Ernest Gellner my old supervisor who was professor at Cambridge had complete philosophy and social anthropology and all kinds of disciplines and it's very hard very hard to do now yeah yeah well let's let's move on from um from one kind of poetry to um more conventional poetry i suppose um Robert Lars Kristofferson um you were talking at Aldebra uh poetry festival at the weekend about the writer's responsibility to challenge the establishment um your poetry is not overtly political most of the time is it last no i uh i have certainly made political statements in my life but that has been in the form of essays i um i try to keep politics out of my poetry rather systematically and i have a reason for that uh i see uh poetry uh as an activity as an art if you want which has more degrees of freedom than rhetorics and by degrees of freedom i mean that um uh our knee has lesser degrees of freedom than our shoulder it can in other ways my words be be moved without breaking down in more directions um uh that is an enlighter it's higher up the body frame yes yes and maybe the brain has the highest degree of freedom anyhow um there is an enormous pressure on poetry to become persuasive warning or persuasive and that is always a demand for poetry to become rhetoric and in the moment when it becomes rhetoric it becomes uh flat uh so of course you have an ethical conflict here because um there are really reasons to especially the obstinate in the world but um yes i was going to say most most of the political overtly political poets who got into trouble and whose reputations of suffered as a result were on the hard left if you like i'm thinking of people like Naruda um i'm thinking of humic dermit with his uh adoration for a while of stalin um the poets who who got into trouble tended to be the leftists in other words the right wing poets and people would say maybe is lark in the right wing poet or not i don't know but they they tended to um to be much less overt yes um a Polish poet um invented the the phrase those who took the lift about people like Naruda who wrote these hymns to stalin who kindled the sums of peace over Novayatimblar as the hydrogen bombs uh these people of course um got um embassy refers at the poetry at the poetry festivals in my youth i published fairly earlier 63 and that and um for reasons i shall not go into my poetry was um translated fairly fast and the consequence was that uh young men uh innocent young men i should say was dropped into the circuit of poetry festivals of invitation journeys and this was the time when Padilla was put into prison by Castro this was the time when use of broad scheme had to defend the legitimacy of being a poet at a court of law in leningrad and being sent to ciberia so um and uh a close being rather close to the writers in prison cometi i um i was frightened to see how many poets are um or well is it still many poets are in prison we shall not forget that absolutely around the world and and and you argue that the poet has a duty to challenge the establishment uh i wonder these days what the establishment in that sense is is it uh much more about consumerism is it much more about the way we live than about particular political structures at least in the west uh i think there is a little misunderstanding here i have never claimed that the poet has a duty to um to challenge the powers everybody has that duty it is not a peculiar poetic duty but uh there are other properties of poetry it has an inherent quality being uh being a type of discourse with more dimensions with more freedom than rhetoric than political language it can always without even without intention run into situations where it becomes a subversive it is not on always you yourself we all decide whether you are subversive or not gillion going back to levies trowson pia pordure pia pordure used to say that the way that elites they empower is by not just controlling the means of production money but by controlling our cognitive map i.e. what we don't talk about and what we do talk about and the wonderful thing about poetry is that it forces us almost instinctively to rethink our cognitive map it shakes it a bit yes quite so i quite agree into the army yes absolutely i'm glad it's a direct sequester from that because we've got these two fascinating situations here where uh patrick's written about levies trowson believed that to be intellectually rigorous you had to sort of leave politics in a way communism, goldism and then out yours sir premise is that is that is that the is that the creative act is by definition subversive of apolitical engagement but what interests me coming on from what jillians just said is you're you're you're also well known for your passionate belief in the internet as a liberating force the pirate party in sweden and so on but but in terms of the the control of the way people think the cognitive map as jillians just called it you've taken it for granted that the internet is this liberating force what if that sort of new method of control is actually a debasement of language that the internet is this sort of that that in a way purchase the opposite of blogging and vice versa well how about the internet is the opposite of broadcasting um in broadcasting so characteristic of the preceding century i think of Hitler's speeches and just to not just ask it well we are having a civilized conversation we are not extreme broadcast one speaking to many so-called sort of paradigm in the broadcast in situation um the if there is an inherent liberating quality in the internet and i am slightly inclined to believe that it is because it lacks centers well our center has held for 44 minutes we're just getting going but we've run out of time i'm very sorry thank you to all my guests jillian tett u_s managing editor of the financial times the subversive poet Lars Gustaferson and you can hear a podcast of him at the Aldebrow poetry festival details on our website edville the armies amexica war along the borderline and patrick wilkins biography of claudley vistros the poet in the laboratory are both out now next week gwen ad said william boyd and craig rain more poetry but for now thank you and goodbye