Writing to John Trusler in 1799, William Blake anticipated John Berger's Ways of Seeing by almost two centuries with a celebration of multiple perspectives in the field of vision. It is not with but through the eye that we see, and what we see depends entirely on how we look: "What to others a trifle appears/ Fills me full of smiles or tears,/ For double the vision my Eyes do see/ And a double vision is always with me." His vision, in fact, was not just two- or three- but "fourfold", while as for the alternative: "May God us keep/ From Single vision and Newton's sleep."
The Shape of a Pocket is a book about ways of seeing, and one whose affinities with the Romantic poet extend into politically revolutionary views as well as artistic ones.
"Today, to try to paint the existent is an act of resistance instigating hope", Berger writes. In the contemporary realm of simulacra, the visual has undergone a profound disembodiment that Berger finds tantamount to enslavement. What he looks for in vain in our TV culture is any degree of necessity: "Necessity produces both tragedy and comedy. It is what you kiss or bang your head against." Try kissing or banging your ahead against an MTV video. Somebody must like it though: at one point Berger mentions that a third of all women in prison in the UK are there for non-payment of television licence fees.
Berger eulogizes those who honour rather than colonise the visual. A key term is "likeness": "an emptiness, a space . . . a likeness is something left behind invisibly", an object with "missing parts included", in Beckett's phrase. Of Degas, he notes with pleasure that his epitaph was simply Il aimait beaucoup le dessin, ("he liked drawing a lot").
Of the 74 Degas bronze sculptures in existence today, only one was cast before his death. Fixity was his pet hate, he said - something of a disadvantage for a would-be sculptor.
An artist at a far remove from Degas when it came to solid materiality was Brancusi; in 1927 US customs' officials imposed a tax on a Brancusi sculpture entering the country, refusing to believe it was not an industrial utensil. For Berger it's an understandable error, given his fondness for heavy objects on which to practise his transformations.
"Utterly", "miraculously" transformed: postmodernists can expect to be scandalised by Berger's unapologetic faith in art as a mystic force. Mystic, but in a very rooted way: of Van Gogh he writes: "I can think of no other European painter whose work expressed such a stripped respect for everyday things without elevating them, in some way, without referring to salvation by way of an ideal which the things embody or serve." Looking at Raymond Mason's fresco, Departure of Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris, painted to mark the closure of the market in Les Halles in 1969, Berger calls it the one piece of sacred art he knows that celebrates the sort of people who might wander into the church off the street.
References to Gramsci and Pasolini spell out Berger's leftist idealism, while one of the book's chapters is a correspondence between Berger and the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. Pockets don't normally hold very much, but one thing they do hold is change. In a chapter on the Chauvet cave paintings in France, Berger muses on teaching a cow to walk a tightrope. An unlikely prospect, perhaps, but only one of the many transformative images the reader will take away from this small, defiant manifesto 'Against the Great Defeat of the World'.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic