Sphinx

If you’re ever short of a case study in the anxiety of influence, turn to the new BBC Civilisations series. It’s a programme which, in important ways, makes very little sense unless you’ve seen the original, while simultaneously doing its utmost to telegraph a wish to distance itself from much of what was supposed to be great the first time around. It’s a reboot made not by fans – which brings its own problems, of course – but by people who want to cash in on the cultural capital of the brand while at the same time claiming superiority. Basically, it’s the American remake of Inspector Spacetime, only with pretensions.

What do they mean by ‘civilisation’? We aren’t told – but it’s made very clear that it’s not the same as Kenneth Clark’s version, in the programme’s insistence not only on broadening its scope well beyond Europe, signalled by the shift into the plural, but also pushing far back into the past, to periods where pretty well nobody would think to use the term ‘civilisation’ unprompted. Okay, message received, this is about the innate creativity of all Homo sapiens (sorry, Homo neanderthalensis, you don’t get to play) rather than a privileged subset, ‘cos we don’t believe in that racist and essentialising vision any more – but then why is the programme just about art (including claiming some things as ‘art’, in modern terms, that could be plausibly interpreted quite differently) and not also about technology or social organisation or religion or any other manifestation of human creativity? Because art is what Clark talked about, and the programme doesn’t have a better idea.

In other words, the original, problematic conception of ‘civilisation’ is simultaneously critiqued (moving away from any distinction between civilisation and barbarism – other than the opening shots of ISIS destroying ancient artefacts and their guardians – in favour of an “all humans are differently amazing” approach) and accepted without question (what matters is art, as we moderns understand it). It’s only the failure to discuss what the programme actually means by its own title that prevents the whole thing from collapsing into incoherence from the beginning. And Clark’s narrative of the eventual triumph of European Genius may be pernicious and presumptive in numerous ways, but at least it told a coherent story in its own terms; Civilisations is so desperate to avoid Eurocentricism that it flattens everything out into a largely timeless, placeless panorama of creativity that nevertheless persistently hints at some sort of narrative (“the earliest depiction of battle that must reflect stories of heroic warriors, centuries before Homer” – how many unexamined assumptions can you spot, children?) without ever developing or explaining it. A history of art that not only refuses to historicise the idea of ‘art’ but also declines to admit that this is actually what it is.

It’s all too much of a “well I wouldn’t start from here if I were you” situation. It’s easy to imagine a panoramic account of human history, doing an Attenborough (as at least one reviewer has suggested, clearly that’s the key model here in documentary-making terms) – but then you’d call it something like Cultures, or The Story of Us, or Humans, rather than adopting the implicit narrowness and value judgements of Civilisations. It’s even easier to imagine an account of human creativity through the ages, looking at a series of amazing objects – because Neil McGregor has already done it, with a structure that cleverly side-stepped questions of ‘development’ or ‘influence’, whereas Civilisations, as a consequence of dealing with multiple objects in a single programme, can’t help implying the existence of some sort of theory of how they are connected, without having the courage to make it explicit (or, more likely, without actually having a coherent idea). They want to imitate Civilisation, and surpass it, and do something different, and disassociate themselves from it altogether.

My guess is that the programme-makers, writers and presenters don’t really believe in ‘civilisation’ as a useful concept, and may even go further in recognising how problematic it actually is; but, rather than pursuing that thought – which could have made for something really interesting and provocative, either a thorough-going critique of human claims to be ‘civilised’ (actually, what does a miniature representation of war say about either its makers or us, celebrating its aesthetic qualities?) or an arty I’m Not There search for civilisation, as something that might indeed be considered a good idea in principle – they stick with a fuzzy, but extremely dramatic and portentous, notion of Something, which is mostly, for reasons they either can’t or won’t articulate, about Art, which is Good, and so smashing it is Bad.

In the original series, as well as the assumed unity of Civilisation in contrast to barbarism, there was a strong sense of an implicit ‘our’ – Clark strongly identified with most if not all of what he discussed, and understood his task as one of identifying what needs to be celebrated and preserved. Yes, it’s a very Eurocentric ‘our’, just as his concept of what constitutes ‘civilisation’ was – but at least he had a clear idea of what he thought. Civilisations is, again, much more equivocating and evasive. The immediate association of the title for me was Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations; and even if the programme makers aren’t thinking in those terms (though it’s difficult to avoid such associations during Schama’s discussion of the vandalism of Palmyra), the question of identification or ownership can’t be ducked – are these Our (i.e. humans’) Civilisations, or Our (i.e. enlightened liberals like Simon, Mary and David) Civilisations – or Our Civilisation and Theirs?

How far can ‘we’ appropriate the past as an extension of ourselves – rather than emphasising its strangeness and the fact that, as Walter Benjamin argued, “every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism“ (that lovely little Mycenaean depiction of violent death)? What is all this talk of ‘civilisation’ if not an attempt at disowning, in the words of Professor June Bauer, “the shrieking, blood-drenched, sister-raping beast from which we all sprang”? These are all legitimate, indeed vital, debates, and my point is not that we shouldn’t discuss the fabulousness of past objects and the magnificent creativity of their producers without a ritual invocation of their parallel ghastliness; rather, these are the sorts of issues that ought to be front and centre in any series on the topic that actually knew what it’s doing. Maybe things will get better in later episodes, but for the moment we are firmly in the territory of the Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman Avengers…