Mirroring the change ... Paul Muldoon. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
A few years before New Labour came to power I reviewed a collection of academic articles for the Times Literary Supplement. Called The Year's Work in English Studies, it might not have been the raciest stuff, but hidden amid the material were what I now see in retrospect as the secret signs of the Labour revival that Tony Blair would come to lead. Academic literary critics were trying to find a new set of values for the way they looked at books - the general opinion, in even this most left-wing of professions, being that Marxist and traditional socialist critical methods were now cul-de-sacs.
These new values were largely concerned with cultural renewal and inclusivity rather than, as was the case with their predecessors, socio-economic equity and other justice issues. The critics were trying to finds ways of injecting moral vigour and genuineness into postmodernism without losing its brio, freshness and flexibility.
Watching Tony Blair enter Downing Street and the effect of New Labour policies, I have often thought back to The Year's Work in English Studies. In a casual kind of way, as other critical and artistic material passed under my nose during fifteen years as an editor at the TLS and later here at the Guardian, I began looking for more encoded signs of emergent political life.
Poetry, in particular, seemed to bear out the proposal, advanced in Shelley's essay A Defence of Poetry, that poets are the "hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present". It is as if only the finest of the literary arts has a delicate enough antenna for detecting future political conceptions. People often talk politicians either catalysing and sustaining or oppressing and stifling artistic life. Blair to large extent lived it. He embodied it, for better or worse, and often both at the same time.
Sometimes the parallels I perceived between political and cultural life were stark: literary critics got in a pickle about assessing aesthetic value; a few years later and we're all arguing about elitism and measurability in educational standards and arts policy; later still, newspapers debate dumbing down. Sometimes the issues were more subtle: I'd like to read the PhD that unpicked the connections between the notions of limit and boundary in Paul Muldoon's poetry and the development of the peace process in Northern Ireland.
How - in that Northern Irish case - can you make something new when everything comes down with history? We saw how it might be possible this week, with oppositional parties at last being themselves yet double, regarding the other on the same sofa. Muldoon and his mentor Seamus Heaney taught how to do this long ago; but it was Blair's charm that made it happen. He did have a kind of magic, and it was not so far away from duality-leaping possibilities of poetry as might be imagined.
The notion that identity could be something relative rather than essential seems to me the most important cultural phenomenon that has taken place under Blair. You could define it as emergent holism. It is associated with the internet, climate change, immigration and the rise of a network society. It is a large-scale, long-term process we are still undergoing, one that artists from Damien Hirst to Zadie Smith are hurrying to represent.
Who "we" are is one of the issues. Another example of the critic and writer being wise before the event may be found in avant-garde poet Ken Edward's seminal essay "Grasping the Plural", which can be found in Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991 (edited by Denise Riley, Macmillan, 1992).
Originally published in 1985 in Edwards's magazine Reality Studios under the title The We Expression, the essay takes as its starting point Margaret Thatcher's use of the word "we':
In a 1984 interview for BBC1's Panorama with Sir Robin Day, for example, her use of "we" is an aural constant that quite deliberately masks a semantic slippage: at various points it refers quite deliberately to the Conservative Party, the government, Britain, NATO, Europe, Western civilization and, most potently of all, "the ordinary people".
Poor Day is visibly perplexed, "unable in time to analyse the different 'we's by referent".
We all know that perplexity now. The key, and positive, change to the arts that has taken place under Blair - the advent of a fluid sense of identity - has gone hand in hand with the rise of spin: the deliberate use of "semantic slippage' to achieve political and commercial ends or obfuscate moral embarrassments in those fields. Postmodernism, by nature a free-going sort of animal, turns very nasty when harnessed to deliberate ends.
Politics has not suffered alone. Many British media of exchange now operate in quotidian conditions of over-stimulating mendacity and acquisitiveness, where the end of organised effort is getting the most or highest of something rather than telling the truth. This is not Blair's fault, but he is part of it. It should also be said that many of the techniques used in spin came, via advertising and PR, from the literary and artistic worlds.
How have artists themselves responded? The default position for many is a kneejerk return to pre-Blairite (which also means pre-Thatcherite) fixed positions on such issues. This is a shame because there are good things about the fluidity that Blair represented as well as bad: relativity can be a virtue as well as a vice. One senses instinctively that he would rather be a white wizard than a malign enchanter.
This is not the first British government to have used postmodernist effects in its presentation of information to the public, but none has done it quite so knowingly. Will Gordon Brown come through with a new authenticity or will the postmodernist will knock twice?
