Is a shared world possible?

Can we build a shared world without ideological consensus?

I’ve been asking myself this question a lot recently.

Heightened sensitivity to division has become, I would argue, a defining feature of our contemporary structure of feeling, and certainly of public and political life in the UK.

This fixation on division has emerged and intensified across a series of political and cultural moments and episodes including Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Brexit vote brought division to the forefront of collective consciousness. At core, it was of course a vote to decide where dividing lines should lie between the UK and other countries. It also became about divisions within the UK. Media reporting at the time often focused on rows between families and friends on opposite sides of the remain/leave debate. It emphasised how neither side could understand each other’s position, with remain voters seeing leave voters as uneducated bigots, and leave voters seeing remain voters as privileged and out of touch. Allegedly, it wasn’t just that people couldn’t agree, but that they didn’t even think each other capable of making logical arguments. We came to think of the country as inhabited by groups of people who fundamentally can’t understand each other.

Then COVID-19 seeped into the scene. Beginning as something happening ‘over there’, the pandemic rapidly infiltrated borders, defying imagined geographies of division. But while the virus itself didn’t respect boundaries, governmental reactions to it focused on doubling down on partitions and introducing new ones too. International borders became newly impermeable via strict travel restrictions and nationally, friends, families and communities were divided through the introduction of social distancing between households and “bubbles.” What’s more, an imagined division between those following and those breaking the rules was encouraged in media reporting.

The pandemic also sharpened social divisions along lines of class, race and gender. It was working classes, ethnic minority groups and women who were most exposed to the virus through front line work. It was young black people who were more heavily policed and prosecuted during social distancing restrictions. And it was women who picked up the extra domestic labour from more time spent within the home during lockdown, at the expense of their careers and wellbeing, setting back progression towards gender equality in the UK significantly. As we emerged into the ‘new normal’ our sense of these differences and divisions was heightened.

More recent global and national issues and debates have added to the prominence of division in collective imaginaries too. Russia’s war in Ukraine has made military conflict feel immanent, with the UK media reeling in the racist shock that ‘people like us’ can find themselves in a war zone. Contemporary identity politics in the UK have been defined by division too. Over the past few weeks and months, a debate around trans identities has been raging in the media, revealing a fundamental division not just about how people should live but about how they are allowed to identify and present themselves. At the same time, stark divisions have been exposed between Government and publics. The Sue Gray report’s findings of parties in Downing Street during the height of Covid restrictions have illuminated how the Government imagine themselves as separate from, by virtue of being superior to, the people they govern.

Within these various imaginaries of division, how can we find a way to live together? How can we hope to inhabit shared spaces or to have shared resources when our ways of seeing and experiencing the world are so dramatically different and when we can’t respect each other as equals?

Unexpectedly, I had a conceptual breakthrough in relation to this question last week, at a double launch event for my interactive documentary The Lockdown Game and another i-doc about mutual aid made as part of a project led by Dr Oli Mould. I made The Lockdown Game during spring and summer 2020 with a group of Londoners who recorded their experiences of the early days of the pandemic and co-designed the i-doc at a series of zoom workshops.

When Oli and I first planned the event, we struggled to think about how to frame it, unsure what the connection between our projects was other than that they were both i-docs made about lockdown. But during the event’s panel discussion an important commonality emerged.

On the panel was me, the artist who worked on The Lockdown Game, Jack Scott, Dr Adam Badger from The Mutual Aid project, writers Amardeep S Dhillon and Rachel Shabi and one of my research participants, Nuria.

Nuria, shared her experience of working as part of a group to design the i-doc during the COVID-19 lockdowns. An audience member asked her if there was ever any conflict between group members. Nuria replied that there wasn’t really any conflict, but not because there was no difference in opinions and experiences. She explained how group members’ experiences during covid ranged from attending illegal parties, to washing shopping out of fear of the virus, to shielding for health reasons, to making up their own systems for deciding what was safe or necessary. Nuria said that, in contrast to the divisive picture painted by the media, which focused on rule breakers vs responsible citizens, the group respected each other’s different ways of getting through this intensely challenging period. This was reflected in the i-doc, which was designed in a way that illuminated what was common in their experiences of lockdown while also giving space to what was different.

Later on in the panel discussion, Amardeep spoke about how, while working in mutual aid groups, they had sometimes given assistance to people with highly bigoted views, people who, in many contexts, would likely be abusive towards them personally. For Amardeep, feeling the desire and drive to feed and protect people regardless of their views was an uplifting experience. It was an affirmation of how beautiful it is to have respect and responsibility for other people in times of crisis, in a way that transcends divisions. Mutual aid groups, they suggested, show that while we may not be able to agree ideologically, we can still agree on a process for how to look out for each other and make sure everyone’s needs are met.

In both instances, through the respective processes of making the i-doc and working to provide mutual aid, it was clear that divisions were crossed not by intellectually debating to try and reach ideological consensus but just by doing things together that necessitated producing something shared. By leading with the practicalities of organising something together, be it food distribution or i-doc design, agreements were made in that process about the nature of a shared reality, even if that reality still had space for dissensus.

Having made it, I’m not sure I like this argument entirely. I don’t want to propose that we learn to live with differences when those differences include racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of bigotry. I think it’s dangerous to move attention away from attitudes that manifest and reproduce structural inequalities and injustices. However, maybe it’s when we find ways to work together across divisions, to produce something shared – whether an i-doc or a mutual support system – that we form a space to understand each other, Maybe such spaces can provide an affective infrastructure for compassion and lay the ground work for humans relations founded on respect. Maybe we start by building a shared world and then find a shared ethics within it, rather than the other way around.