The Invisible Thread

The Invisible Thread

For Michèle Bernstein, and for those walking off the stage

There are those who write history in fire, bold statements, manifestos, movements that burn brightly and leave behind a trace of ash and memory. And then there are those who move differently. Not with fire, but with thread. Quietly, decisively, they stitch through the fabric of a time, holding it together not by dominating the scene, but by refusing to be consumed by it.

Michèle Bernstein was one of those threads.

Though not as frequently quoted as Guy Debord or Raoul Vaneigem, she played a foundational role in the Situationist International. A writer, critic, and strategist of soft refusal, she helped shape the radical imagination of the twentieth century not through doctrine, but through détournement, through fiction, irony, sideways glances. Her novels parodied both the romantic myth of the revolution and the gendered scripts she was expected to follow within it. In this way, she slipped through the spectacle without being fully absorbed by it.

Sometimes I imagine what she would make of our current moment. A moment so deeply entangled in performance and polarity that it’s often hard to distinguish participation from entrapment. Left versus right. Ally versus enemy. Every platform demanding a position, every silence interpreted as complicity, every grief reduced to a slogan or signal.

I imagine her looking out at the endless spectacle, not just in politics, but in culture, in crisis, in our own reflexive online selves...and perhaps murmuring something understated but incisive: they’ve trapped you in the theatre again.

Because what we are witnessing is not simply the failure of discourse. It is the capture of life itself by a machinery of representation. The stage lights are always on. We are constantly aware of ourselves as seen. And in that awareness, something sacred slips away.

The French Situationists once declared: “The revolution is not showing life to people, but making them live.” That sentence has returned to me often. It landed first in my hands like a fragment of theory, but it stayed because it felt like a seed.

What does it mean, in our time, to make someone live, not symbolically, not through ideology, but in the deepest, most embodied sense?

At Magical Farm, I am beginning to understand this question in a new way. We are not staging a revolution, nor are we presenting a perfected image of regenerative life. We are, instead, tending to a slow, earthy Refusal. A Refusal to participate in the performance economy of virtue where meaning is extracted from pain. A Refusal to measure worth in metrics. A Refusal to identify with binary thinking of any kind. 

Here, the revolution doesn’t happen through proclamations. It happens when a child learns to harvest calendula with reverence. When someone learns how to bake bread not for Instagram, but to feed their neighbour. When the practice of growing food, healing land, and caring for one another becomes the language through which transformation occurs. The revolution has a big picture on sight too...by calling out the global corporate elites but not in a binary way, we must image alternatives and not just critique. 

This is not disconnection from the world. It is a different form of engagement, one that steps out of the binary theatre and back into presence.

Bernstein may not have said these words, but her actions suggest she understood this deeply: that to exit the spectacle is not to become passive, but to become real. And that to become real, in a world addicted to representation, is an act of profound subversion. And I would say not just subversion but aligned with Life. Con Viv. 

The invisible thread is not a theory. It is a rhythm. A way of living that resists commodification not through violence, but through rootedness. Through tenderness. Through a thousand unseen acts of care.

This essay is a page-turning for me. A soft mending. A return to the ground beneath the slogans. To the field beyond the fences. I do not know what Bernstein would say about the wars, the binaries, the endless demands of allegiance. But I feel her presence most strongly in the moments I choose to tend rather than react, to nourish rather than debate, to mend rather than proclaim.

She was never trying to be remembered. But in this moment, I remember her, not as a symbol, but as a gesture. A trace of quiet integrity that invites me to live, not perform.

And that, perhaps, is the most revolutionary thread of all.

By Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne