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It appears counterintuitive to argue that the Shelby family, head of a criminal empire, should be the only paradigm left in a world “emptied of normative authority” (Shuster 6) when the diegetic world of Peaky Blinders abounds with groups and institutions that claim such authority. In doing so, these organisations all draw on a particular promise of salvation, namely that of community. While the IRA ultimately resorts to the potent common bond of a desired independent Irish nation, the Communist movement promotes an international community of the ‘workers of the world’. Needless to say, the English nation, represented by the King, in whose name the First World War was fought, could be worth dying for only as a community. The church, in Peaky Blinders personified by Father Hughes (Paddy Considine), similarly provides for lost souls a community of believers. The police, finally, gain their authority to a significant degree from a deliberate mission to protect community.

The world of Peaky Blinders witnesses the consistent failure of the institutions traditionally providing orientation and guidance. In the Shelbys’ Birmingham, the police are on the payroll of the Peaky Blinders, taking orders from the gang. Tommy’s major opponent in series one and two, Chief Inspector (later Major) Chester Campbell (Sam Neill), sent from Belfast to retrieve the stolen guns and, self-appointedly and in a fit of Victorian rhetoric, to cleanse the city of its “puss of […] corruption” (S1/E1, 00:29), is an exception. Yet, his double standards thwart any pretension of moral superiority – in the course of two series, he has intercourse with prostitutes, rapes Polly (S2/E5) and willingly condones the death of his opponents. The Irish priest Father Hughes, who stars as one of Tommy’s adversaries in series three, is a busy figure of ‘The Odd Fellows’, a right-wing secret organisation with members of high social standing, and an operative of a conspiracy that licenses blackmail and murder. Moreover, Michael reveals that “when he was with the parish”, “in the care of the holy fathers” (S3/E5, 00:53, my emphasis), he suffered under Father Hughes’ child abuse (00:02). A strategic burning of the King’s picture, bought from every household in Small Heath, illustrates the Peaky Blinders’ and population’s fading loyalty to the head of state (S1/E2, 00:12), which is further diminished by the information that upon his return from the war, Thomas “[t]hrew” the medals he won for gallantry “in the [river] Cut” (S1/E6, 00:28), as did other returned soldiers (S2/E3, 00:10). The “normative breakdown” (Shuster 6) of the above institutions is apparent. What is more, their promise of community is exposed as a fraud. The same eventually holds true for the IRA and the Communist movement, gaining momentum at a historical point in time when the processes of modernity render community an auspicious alternative. As has been shown above, such an opposition is flawed. Any recourse to community as a promise of salvation is based on the illusion of an ideal pre-modern community to be recovered. Such a community is a feeble cure, and, moreover, potentially dangerous due to the rigid normativity and potentially totalitarian scope it entails. The Peaky Blinders offer no such promise.

Admittedly, though, Thomas Shelby is stylised as a saviour. Major Campbell forcedly recruits him to work for the British government with the words: “You’ve been chosen, Mr Shelby […].” (S2/E4, 00:05) This is already conveyed by the show’s introduction. The whole sequence lacks the social realism its setting suggests because it foregoes the mode’s sense of despair and contingency. Thomas Shelby, with his detached attitude and stylish dress, is at the centre of attention, and it is he who holds this world together; all its elements relate to him. This, finally, is the reason why Peaky Blinders is not about the working class. It is about the man on whom this community relies, who, as a representative of Small Heath’s working class community, maintains it. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand” in turn declares Thomas as such: “he’s a god, he’s a man/ he’s a ghost, he’s a guru”. The bartender whom Thomas has dispossessed of the Garrison aptly puts it as follows: “Everybody round here – they want you to win […] you’re bad men, but you’re our bad men […].” (S1/E6, 00:33, my emphasis) Crucially, however, Tommy’s status does not rest on the promise of anything; rather, the Peaky Blinders trade the absence of liability. Placing themselves above society’s rules like “ghost[s]”, they are founded on non-normativity.

Community, then, no longer serves as the promise of salvation. The community of the family, conflated with business, is invaded by a rationale of profit. This does not preclude the possibility of community, but it warns of the pitfalls of community exploited. What Peaky Blinders pictures instead is an open, almost paradoxical community exempt from the normativity a conceptualisation of community hardly ever escapes. Thomas is profoundly distrustful towards ‘grand narratives’ of community. When asked by Grace whether he “ha[s] sympathies” with the IRA men who purposed to buy the stolen guns, Thomas replies: “I have no sympathies of any description […].” (S1/E3, 00:05) Thomas’ alliances thus shift according to the benefits they offer, regardless of allegiance. The burning of the King’s picture is a case in point.1 Thomas does not profess loyalty to any larger community; what matters to him is the experienced community of war comradeship and his family, the latter often equated with the former.

As a community, the Shelby family resists easy classification. Tradition, replaced (or artificially erected) by business calculations, is no determinant in their case. Their identity is, in fact, under-determined; the Shelbys are defined more by what they are not than by what they are. Common identity categories do not apply. They are not part of the working class; they are not religious,2 and they are not English. The Shelby siblings lack both mother and father, and the exact origins of the Shelby family, apart from their denomination as ‘Gypsy’, remain obscure. The audience learns that on Thomas’ “mother’s side, [they] are kin” to the Romani Lee family (S1/E4, 00:12). Thomas, Polly, and the other family members furthermore speak Romani. “Their granddad was a King”, the second episode of series one reveals, “but [Thomas’] mother was a Diddicoy whore” (00:03). Of their father’s side little is known except that Arthur Shelby Senior and his sister Polly are presumably of Irish and ‘Gypsy’ origins, too; they might thus descend from Irish Travellers, although Polly speaks Romani. Polly instructs Michael in series four that his “grandmother was a Gypsy princess. Name of Birdy Boswell” (E5 00:21), which possibly relates them to Madame Boswell, a ‘Gypsy’ sage Thomas sees in Wales (S3/E3). All this renders the family a “Diddicoy razor gang” (S1/E2, 00:53), ‘diddicoy’ being a pejorative term that denotes a non-purely Romani descent (see Long 173). This intricate line of ancestry all the more defies definition of the Shelby family in terms of an essential identity.

Quite the opposite, and in contrast to all other groups in Peaky Blinders which invoke an ideal of community, that is, Royalists, the IRA, and Communists, the Shelbys are conceived through non-identity. Thereby, the family exemplifies a re-conception of community commenced by the French Collège de Sociologie in the 1930s. The Collège was founded in 1937, at a time when fascism had perverted the ‘cure’ of community in Italy, Germany, and Spain. Advocating a ‘sacred sociology’ (Moebius 13), their work, in particular that of Georges Bataille, focuses not on what determines and confines communities, but, inspired by Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion (see Gertenbach et al. 155), on ritual-sacral processes of communitarisation. The aim of this ‘sacred sociology’, according to Stephan Moebius, was to “study and revive the vital elements of communal ties such as collective experiences and effervescences – initiated by rituals, festivities, or games – in modern society” (13, my translation). While such communitarisation is conceived as an antidote to modern atomisation (see ibid. 14), Bataille deems any attempt to restore a ‘lost’ community hazardous (see Gertenbach et al. 157-8). As Moebius puts it, “[a]gainst a reanimation of traditional, communitarian values and a consolidation of the social order, the Collège opts for the creation of new values qua elective communities, which transcend the social order” (151, my translation). This moment of transgression is captured in Bataille’s emphasis on the ‘ecstatic’ of communities, which thus transcend themselves as closed formations, invalidating a conception of community based on identity and homogeneity (see Gertenbach et al. 157).3

In a deconstructionist vein, Jean Luc Nancy picked up on Bataille’s thoughts to reformulate community as an, in Heidegger’s terms, ontological ‘Mit-Sein’, a ‘being-in-common’ that precedes any articulation of community (see Gertenbach et al. 160-2). Such articulation cannot escape normativity; it produces a conception of community that is afflicted with expectations and presuppositions (see ibid. 164). As Nancy asserts in The Inoperative Community,

the thinking of community as essence […] assigns to community a common being, whereas community is a matter of something quite different, namely, of existence inasmuch as it is in common, but without letting itself be absorbed into a common substance. Being in common has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. (xxxviii)

While there is the risk that Nancy’s theory of community deconstructs the concept up to the point of non-applicability, it exposes and revokes the normativity of community in a manner analogous to Peaky Blinders’ assessment of community. As ‘Gypsies’, the Shelbys revise “the lack of representation of such figures in the media” (Long 173), normally obliterated as society’s other. Their “liminal status” (ibid.), though, is maintained, emblematic of the community they form.

Tommy’s ‘Gypsy’ heritage is stylised as a pastoral, enchanted alternative to the ills of modernity, rendering Tommy a ‘wanderer’ between seemingly apart worlds. In particular, a natural connection with horses is repeatedly spotlighted by the show as representative of a harmonically pre-modern,4 organic way of life as practiced by the Shelbys’ ‘Gypsy’ kinship and set in sharp contrast to Peaky Blinders’ urban setting. As if to illustrate this – stereotypically flawed – opposition, Curly, a character of presumably ‘Gypsy’ origins who works in the scrap yard of Thomas’ uncle Charlie, bemoans that there is “[n]o heart in motor cars. I can’t talk to them” (S1/E3, 00:38). When Thomas’ family and business are under attack towards the end of series two, Esme prompts him to “[i]magine riding away […]. Living the real life, you know? Your Gypsy half is the stronger. You just want to ride away. France is the new place for us, they say” (E5, 00:17).

Fig. 3: Thomas ‘talks’ to his horse (S1/E2, 00:21).

Thomas’ “Gypsy half” comes forth in a number of scenes: a close-up shows him soothing a shying horse by pulling near his face and whispering into his nostrils in episode two of the first series (see fig. 3); in series two, he asks Curly for “black powder” to cure his wounds (E2, 00:06), and in series three, he consults Madame Boswell after the death of his wife (E3, 00:28). Yet, returned from the war, he is irreversibly embedded in and subject to the fundamentally modern way of life of the city. “I’ve been to France”, he answers Esme (S2/E5, 00:17), referring to the battlefields of the Great War. Rather than offering an escape into pre-modern tradition, this ‘Gypsy’ heritage allows an experience of the ‘sacred’ in the here and now of Thomas’ existence as a creation of modernity. He is acutely aware of his disbelief in curses and nonetheless comforted by Madame Boswell’s (coerced) confirmation that a cursed sapphire caused the death of his wife. His chosen method of solving conflicts, the toss of a coin, is a “sacred” (S4/E3, 00:27) act not because it is based on tradition, but because it creates a ‘sacred’ experience in the sense of the Collège de Sociologie, one which “transcends to social order”.

Fig. 4a (top left): Thomas prompted to “[g]et out of the grave [dug for him], tinker!” (S2/E6, 00:54).

Fig. 4b (bottom left): Arthur attempting to commit suicide (S1/E5, 00:50).Fig. 4c (top right): John, Arthur and Michael at their execution (S4/E1, 00:04).Fig. 4d (bottom right): Polly at her execution (S4/E1, 00:04).

The Romani Lee family in Peaky Blinders still travels the country, professing a (symbolic) sense of non-belonging. Apart from horse wagons, the ‘Gypsy’ means of travel is on the liminal space of the water of rivers and canals, on boat. What is more, the Shelby family, in particular Thomas, are methodically situated between life and death. “It’s in our Gypsy blood. We live somewhere between life and death”, reasons Polly in series four (E6, 00:46). Thomas is declared dead countless times. He narrowly escapes his own grave in the finale of series two (see fig. 4a), and he is resurrected after beaten half to death twice. In episode two of series two, his recovery is effected by a journey back to life on a boat steered by Curly, in turn linking this passage to ‘Gypsy’ ways of life, and in the fifth episode of series three, Thomas’ hospital recovery from a fractured skull is accompanied by David Bowie’s “Lazarus”. Arthur’s suicide attempt in series one fails (see fig. 4b), and his death is faked in series four (E6). He, John, Polly, and Michael have already been escorted to the noose in the first episode of series four when the news reaches them that they have been exonerated (see fig. 4c and fig. 4d).

The list could be continued. What it highlights is the family members’ socially unacknowledged status and, by extension, their non-normativity. As that which the establishment represses, the Shelbys prove that established norms are untenable under the conditions of modernity. The endeavour of grasping the Shelbys by means of an essential conception of identity remains futile; the family embodies the paradox of a community that can only exist if not too insistently articulated (see Bauman 11-2). This is what ‘new television’ has to offer: flawed, open, dysfunctional families. This is all there is in the midst of “normative emptiness” (Shuster 7), and yet, this is something. For the family, Shuster states, maintains the possibility of possibility, that of new life. Hence ‘new television’: “in addition to being novel aesthetic objects these shows are conceptually linked by a genre or mode that explores the ‘newness’ that emerges from human natality, indeed, every human birth” (6). Family, then,

is explored as the site for potential political renewal, albeit in a manner where the contours and parameters of the family stay – perhaps necessarily – amorphous or empty, suggesting that the best hope to be had […] is politically – if not ethically and aesthetically – to cultivate and maintain a conceptual space for novelty [...]. (6-7)

Accordingly, Peaky Blinders highlights the scenes of Ada giving birth to her son, when even Thomas permits to himself show “a heartbeat” (S1/E4, 00:53), and Grace’s announcement of “[a] baby, Thomas” (S2/E6, 00:25). When his secretary Lizzie reveals to Tommy that she is pregnant with his child, he responds: “All this death, Lizzie. Fuck, let’s have some life, right?” (S4/E5, 00:15)