The Isle Is Full of Noises

In 2019 I wrote an article for Deutsche Welle.

It was ostensibly a business story. Banking, tax, money laundering, financial regulation, the European Commission, the IMF. Malta had become rich by inserting itself into flows of capital that were difficult to see clearly and even harder to regulate.

I wrote the article around The Tempest.

“The isle is full of noises.”
“What’s past is prologue.”
“Such stuff as dreams are made on.”
“Our revels now are ended.”

Mark was there. Another editor too, an older, sour-faced newsroom hack whose expression suggested that people might be enjoying themselves unnecessarily.

I remember finding the whole thing very funny.

Malta was an island. Shakespeare had an island. Finance had become a form of enchantment. Money appeared and disappeared through companies, trusts, banks and jurisdictions. Everybody knew something was happening; nobody seemed quite able to say exactly where the thing itself was.

So I put Prospero behind the business pages.

Nobody asked me to.

Looking at the article now, seven years later, the joke feels rather different.

Daphne Caruana Galizia had already been murdered. She had spent years following the money: Panama companies, public contracts, banks, passports, politicians, businessmen. My article mentioned Yorgen Fenech and 17 Black, Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi, Pilatus Bank. I interviewed Caruana Galizia’s sister, Corinne Vella.

At the time it seemed like one more complicated European financial story.

It wasn’t. Or rather, it was, but that category concealed almost everything interesting about it.

This week Fenech was acquitted of involvement in Caruana Galizia’s murder after the longest-running murder trial in Maltese history. The verdict did not answer the question of who ultimately hired the men who killed her. What the trial exposed instead was a landscape of alleged leaks, political connections, compromised institutions and attempts to obstruct the investigation.

Seven years earlier we had been staring through a small opening in the wall.

We could see the money, see the institutions, see that the language of regulation was not adequate to what was happening.

But I was still writing a business article.

That interests me now.

What exactly was I doing?

I was doing journalism. Properly enough. Reports were read. People were interviewed. Allegations were attributed. Responses were included. The piece passed through editors and appeared on the Deutsche Welle website. It’s still there.

But I was also looking at the form through which the story had to pass.

Everything acquired the polite abstraction necessary to enter an international newsroom.

Perhaps that was why I needed Shakespeare. The official language was not quite enough. The island was full of noises.

Lacan’s gaze sits on the page now and smiles at me. Not because psychoanalysis supplies some secret explanation underneath the article. Because I can see myself looking. I was inside the story and outside the form through which I was being asked to describe it.

That was a recurring problem in my working life.

I arrived in journalism late and already primed. Marx, Gramsci, Durkheim, Walter Benjamin. Later Lacan. A PhD from the LSE before I entered a newsroom properly. Four difficult years in London before that: little money, squats around Elephant and Castle, the permanent fear of money running out, academics comfortably installed in hierarchies whose authority often seemed more impressive than their curiosity.

By the time I became a journalist I had acquired the irritating habit of asking not only what happened but what allowed something to appear as an event in the first place.

Who gets called an expert? Whose description arrives already authorised? What disappears when experience is translated into institutional language? Who knows? Who is supposed to know?

This can produce good journalism.

It can also make you a pain in the arse.

Over the years people offered diagnoses. Pivot. Go home. Teach English. Stop being so confrontational. There were rows. Accusations that I had used quotations from other reports too casually. Half-jobbing. Moments when I became more interested in the machinery producing the story than in simply finishing it.

Some of those criticisms were right.

It would be comforting now to make myself the misunderstood intellectual surrounded by unimaginative hacks. It would also be bullshit. Sometimes an editor needs 700 accurate words by four o’clock and does not require Gramsci. Sometimes the sour-faced old hack has a point.

But Malta shows the other side. I was being paid to produce a commodity called journalism. I produced it. Yet something kept leaking through: the joke, Shakespeare, the structure beneath the event, the suspicion that the categories themselves were doing ideological work.

And beneath that, something larger.

Money.

Not money as numbers but money as movement. Money crossing borders that people could not. Money entering shell companies, property, political parties, consultancies and banks. Money acquiring passports. Money disappearing into jurisdictions and returning clean.

This was one of my first close encounters with the modern world of dirty money.

Lawyers, accountants, corporate vehicles, respectable offices.

The extraordinary thing about dirty money is how clean everything around it can look.

And that returns me to Marx.

Whatever one now makes of the labour theory of value as an explanation of prices, Marx’s account of labour is much larger and more disturbing.

The young Marx begins with a simple fact: the worker makes something and loses it.

You build the table; somebody else owns the table. You assemble the car; you cannot afford the car. You build the house; somebody else holds the title deed. You write the article; it enters the archive, website, brand and institutional memory of the organisation that paid you to produce it.

Your name may remain attached.

The product does not remain yours.

Marx calls this alienation from the product. Human activity becomes objectified in things which then confront their makers as somebody else’s property. The more the worker produces, the larger the external world over which the worker has no control.

But alienation does not stop at the product. The activity itself belongs elsewhere. Under wage labour I sell somebody the right to use my capacity to work for a period of time. The purpose, rhythm and conditions of the activity are no longer entirely mine.

Then comes alienation from what Marx called species-being: our capacity to make, imagine and transform the world consciously rather than merely reproduce ourselves within it. Work can contain pleasure and creativity, of course. The point is not that every carpenter hates wood or every journalist hates words. It is that creative activity is subordinated to an external purpose.

And finally we become alienated from one another. Colleague becomes competitor, manager, client, subordinate, supplier. Human relations appear as contracts, wages, prices and property.

Product. Activity. Creative capacity. Other people.

The things we make leave us.

Which makes The Tempest look rather different too.

Prospero is not simply a magician.

He owns the apparatus.

Or, more precisely, he has seized control of it.

The island was already inhabited. Caliban tells him so plainly: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother.”

Prospero arrives, establishes authority, names, educates, disciplines and commands. Caliban gathers wood. He performs the ugly, physical work on which Prospero’s beautiful world depends.

Caliban knows the island better than Prospero. He knows its springs, fertile places and barren places. His knowledge is useful. His labour is essential. Neither gives him control.

Prospero calls him savage.

Caliban calls himself dispossessed.

There is Marx before Marx.

The worker is necessary and degraded at the same time. Labour produces the world but does not own it.

And then there is Ariel.

Ariel is harder.

If Caliban is material labour, Ariel is something closer to the modern knowledge worker: invisible, mobile, highly skilled and almost infinitely adaptable.

Ariel produces effects.

Weather. Music. Information. Surveillance. Spectacle.

Ariel appears everywhere and seems to leave no trace of having worked at all.

Prospero says: do this.

Ariel does it.

Then asks for freedom.

Calling Ariel simply “the superstructure” would make the allegory too neat, but there is something of ideology in the work Ariel performs. Ariel creates atmosphere. Makes power appear magical. Controls what others hear and see. Produces the conditions in which Prospero’s authority can operate without always appearing as force.

Caliban carries the wood.

Ariel makes the noises.

Prospero gets the island.

That is already a reasonably good theory of political economy.

And Prospero possesses something else: the book.

His knowledge is power because it is organised into an apparatus of command. He does not merely know things. His knowledge enables him to direct the activity of others.

That leads from Marx to Walter Benjamin.

In The Author as Producer, Benjamin asked writers to stop thinking only about whether their work contained the correct political opinions. The more interesting question was where the writer stood inside the apparatus of production.

A writer can denounce capitalism all afternoon while supplying perfectly usable commodities to the existing machinery.

The content can be radical.

The apparatus remains untouched.

Journalism likes to imagine the journalist as an independent consciousness observing the world.

But the journalist sits inside a machine: deadlines, formats, editors, legal checks, word counts, headlines, access, budgets, metrics, algorithms.

The story does not simply enter the newsroom.

The newsroom produces the form in which the world becomes a story.

That was what I was half watching in Malta.

I was writing the article.

I was also watching the machine turn Malta into an article.

And perhaps The Tempest was my small act of interference.

Prospero behind the business pages.

Caliban carrying material nobody wanted to look at for too long.

Ariel moving invisibly through the text, producing an atmosphere the official language could not quite contain.

Benjamin’s other famous argument concerned mechanical reproduction. Reproduction changes not simply the distribution of cultural objects but their character. Copies proliferate. Distance disappears. The singular object loses its aura.

AI takes that problem somewhere Benjamin could hardly have imagined.

Journalism can now be disassembled into component actions: summarise this, translate that, find three sources, extract five quotations, produce six headlines, give me the background, rewrite this press release, make it 600 words.

For most of my career these were not separate tasks.

Together they constituted a professional identity.

A journalist knew how to do them.

Harry Braverman described what happens next. Capital repeatedly takes skilled activity apart. The worker once controls a complete process. Management studies it, separates it into stages and transfers knowledge into systems, procedures and machinery.

Braverman called this the separation of conception from execution.

The process survives.

The worker’s possession of the process does not.

Now it is happening to symbolic labour.

Translation can be detached from translators. Research from researchers. Copy-editing from editors. Coding from programmers. Drafting from lawyers. Writing from writers.

AI is an extraordinary instrument of decomposition because it takes capacities once bundled inside human beings and turns them into callable functions.

Caliban again.

The knowledge of the island is extracted from the person who knows the island.

And Ariel too.

Invisible labour, infinitely summonable.

Translate this.

Summarise that.

Bring me the news.

Make music.

Create the storm.

The educated middle classes are discovering something industrial workers discovered long ago.

Skill is not property.

A profession is not property.

Knowledge is not property.

Anything that can be formalised can potentially be extracted, replicated and reorganised elsewhere.

We thought education protected us from deskilling.

Then the machine read the books.

The disturbing possibility is that a person can become more intellectually productive while becoming less economically valuable to the institutions that previously bought that person’s skills.

That is close to my own experience.

My market value as a conventional journalist has become more precarious at almost exactly the moment when I feel intellectually most productive.

The material pours out. Books. Essays. England. Poland. Money. Houses. Borders. Journalism. Fathers. Football. Marx. Benjamin. Lacan.

Some of the skills through which I once earned money are becoming cheaper.

The thinking feels richer.

Price and value have separated.

And Benjamin would ask the more uncomfortable question: what is the apparatus now?

AI does not simply replace the writer. It changes the conditions under which writing exists. The machine can imitate style, summarise archives, reorganise notes, suggest structures and produce competent prose.

Where does my labour end?

Where does the machine begin?

Who produced the sentence?

Who owns it?

Whose accumulated linguistic labour sits inside the machine?

The old Marxist question returns in a different form.

The product confronts the producer as an alien power.

Only now the product may be language itself.

That is perhaps why the last five years in Poland increasingly look like a small case study rather than simply a difficult period in a career.

Freelance journalism. Teaching. Books. Applications. Invoices. Rejected pitches. Accepted pitches. Work that paid well. Work that paid badly. Work that paid nothing. Work that mattered enormously. Work I cannot remember writing.

The categories no longer align: labour, work, value, price, profession, creation, ownership.

Yesterday I was thinking about selling a house.

The parallel is difficult to miss.

We say my house. My career. My article. My idea.

The possessive pronoun does an enormous amount of work.

But what exactly do we possess?

The house can be sold. The career can disappear. The article passes into somebody else’s archive. The quotation belonged to Shakespeare before I placed it in Deutsche Welle. The language belonged to nobody. Even the thought arrives from somewhere.

Marx understood how readily human activity becomes separated from the human being who performed it.

We make things.

They leave.

They circulate and acquire prices.

Sometimes they return and we barely recognise them.

Which takes me back to Malta.

I thought I was writing a business article.

I was.

But I was also looking through a crack in the wall at a world in which money had become extraordinarily mobile, institutions increasingly ceremonial and knowledge fragmented between people who possessed only part of the story.

Caruana Galizia followed those fragments until somebody killed her.

I arranged Shakespeare quotations around them.

The difference matters.

It should.

But the article tells me something about labour that I could not see then.

Deutsche Welle bought the story. The story left me and entered its archive.

Seven years passed.

Then it came back.

And there I was again: Malta, money, Shakespeare, a sour-faced editor, a murdered journalist, the strange pleasure of making something inside something else.

What was I doing?

Working, certainly.

But labour has never been identical with work.

Labour was the part that could be purchased.

The other thing was harder to name.

Caliban knew the island.

Ariel made it sing.

Prospero owned the book.

And the part I remember is still the part nobody asked me to do.

Prospero was not in the job description.