tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43124440578169836742024-03-12T17:10:41.798-07:00a drawing sympathyJoehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-9254237652226097092017-05-10T05:04:00.000-07:002017-05-10T05:04:28.612-07:00The Superheroisation of Politics & the 'Rule of Cool'<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i>This was written a few months back, the week after Justin Trudeau met with Trump and 'defied' him with a handshake, or something. I wrote it for a certain publication, but they didn't get round to using it for whatever reason, so I thought I'd post it here as it has a few potentially useful ideas in it given we're thinking about the 'militant centre' this week. </i></div>
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Earlier this week I was killing
time on Twitter between more useful and rewarding tasks. It was the day of the
meeting between Donald Trump and the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, an
event much of the English-speaking media chose to portray as an encounter of incontrovertible
opposites. The likes of the <i>Guardian </i>and
the <i>New York Times </i>have spent no
little energy over the last few months casting Trudeau as Continuity Obama, a
youngish, copiously photogenic politician who no doubt possesses a This Is What
A Feminist Looks Like t-shirt and all the important HBO box sets. For many,
he’s been the sticking plaster on post-Barack, post-Brexit, melancholia, so it
was no surprise when I found myself watching social media light up with images
of the mooted saviour of bruised latter-day liberalism facing down Trump as the
latter attempted his signature, pecking-order-asserting handshake. Instantaneously,
Trudeau was declared to have struck a crucial, tide-turning blow for his cause
by refusing to allow the man his fans regard as his natural nemesis get one
over him.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A liberal penchant for perceiving
isolated, largely trivial events as decisive political watersheds, and for
miscasting the mediocre and cynical – Trudeau’s attic surely contains a
parched, withered portrait of Tony Blair – into noble moral cavaliers is
increasingly obvious. Whether it’s in the shape of responses to
Trump-‘eviscerating’ TV anchors like Trevor Noah and Jon Stewart, or to those
fighting, in their own peculiar and passive-aggressive ways, for the
maintenance of Blair- or Obama-era norms, there’s no scarcity of willingness to
make a fetish of the deeply average. Nick Clegg and Tim Farron have been
transformed into anti-Brexit partisans, David Miliband is stylised as a New Labour
Aragorn biding his time in Transatlantic exile, and Hillary Clinton continues to
be represented as Joan of Arc-cum-Boadicea-cum-Daenerys. In every case, there’s
a narrative which looks to confect messianic significance from the merely
gestural.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Such stories about politics belie
a mistaken faith in reality’s amenability to cinematic punctuality. In the
kinds of films which give <a href="https://medium.com/@Poundstoremike/harry-potter-and-the-death-of-the-west-ba06b5ba159#.hvchphgjy">liberal
metaphor its vehicles</a> in these pernicious times, no events are allowed to
wilt out of significance, nothing can be superfluous. Where life scuds with
detritus, modern Hollywood places any given event upon a solitary axis reaching
between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Undoubtedly, it frequently works between those poles:
all modern superheroes must be compromised, grittified, suspended in grey
edginess for their authenticity’s sake. But everything must also <i>mean</i>, must have a point, must occur at
precisely the right moment to be recuperated into an emphatic structure of
cause and consequence. What follows, if you’re using this as a lens through
which to make sense of political reality, is that the merest utterance by HRC,
or Trudeau, or some specious nonentity like Farron, gets imbued with the
frisson of urgency. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Interpreting the news as if it were
a film is to read the world wishfully according to what the problematic, but
addictive, and frequently useful, pop culture wiki TV Tropes calls <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool">‘The Rule of Cool’</a>.
TVT defines this law as the one governing the inclusion of the more bombastic
or spectacular aspects of works of fiction, those scenes or actions which find
their way into films or novels or TV shows for no reason other than that they
are striking. To take an example, it’s unlikely that a real-life James Bond
would need to ski-jump from a mountain in order to complete his mission, but
it’s impressive on camera, and so the writers find a way of making such a
ski-jump necessary to the plot. Consequently, (popular) culture is full of inane
lights and tinsel which don’t really stand up to intellectual scrutiny, but
feel important thanks to their sheer explosive chutzpah. As this is normalised,
culture becomes a splurge of napalm, spaceships, Batcaves, uplifting speeches,
ghostly buccaneers, stunty audacity, Marlboro-voiced rebels in fedoras and trenchcoats
machine-gunning from both hands; subsequently, we start to look for two-dimensional
cool everywhere. Then we stop asking what ‘cool’ even is, and then we enter
‘Jedi’ on the ‘religion’ section of the census, or get excited about Speak Like
A Pirate Day. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Plenty has been written, not least academically, about the
commodification of cool, especially the racialised aspects of that
commodification, since the 1950s and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Negro">Norman Mailer’s invention
of the white hipster</a>. By contrast, little has been said about the palliation
of the notion so that it becomes interchangeable with a generic impressiveness.
Perhaps we can peek back at the nineties if we’re looking for a decade which
can bear the responsibility of forcing upon us this ideology of context-free
coolness, or ‘coolness’. The era gave us Quentin Tarantino’s improbably
sharp-suited murderers and their Royales with cheese, the totally unnecessary
resuscitation of <i>Star Wars</i>, the
beginnings –in games like <i>Doom </i>– of a
thirst for guiltless ultraviolence that would lead to the sprawling, networked
killing zones of <i>Call of Duty </i>and its
analogues. In an almost demonstratively apolitical decade, it was pretty much
encouraged to elide the impressive with the interesting, the correct and the
valuable. This has morphed more recently into a general nerdification of
culture, by which every second release at the cinema is another superhero
movie, by which the completely Rule-of-Cool-dictated <i>Sherlock </i>and <i>Doctor Who </i>are
contemporary Britain’s most cherished, and most gratingly thoughtless and
infantile, television shows, by which politicians are constantly reimagined as
Spiderman or Voldemort.</div>
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Pointedly, the Rule of Cool also played no small part in the
composition of a fundamental aspect of Donald Trump’s ideological coalition. Call
them the alt-right, MRAs, or whatever, the newly prominent nerd-Nazis seemed to
be galvanised into their allegiance with Trump by the threat supposedly posed
to their consequence-free safe spaces by political content. Gamergate was an outbreak
of wailing misogyny without any doubt, but it was also driven by a connected
anxiety about how games operating in a zone of supposedly ‘unpolitical’ cool
might be held up to political scrutiny. Politics was therefore experienced as
an illegitimate intrusion on dank bedroom escapism, as it was on the world of
bro comedy – ‘it’s funny, so it can’t be political!’ – when <i>Ghostbusters </i>got remade with an
all-female cast. Looking at the online self-presentation of the alt-right – wan
boys in fedoras threatening to cut their foe down, Sherlock-style, with
dizzying ‘facts and logic’ – the imprint of the Rule is absolutely clear. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The culty satirical Twitter account Simon Hedges, which
parodies the tropes of Blairite journalism, recently hit the nail on the head
of this weird link between notionally opposed political tribes when its
Partridgesque protagonist described <a href="https://twitter.com/orwell_fan/status/755691043614515200">‘geeking out’</a>
with the new right’s shit-stirrer <i>du jour
</i>Milo Yiannopolous ‘over our favourite comics and video games’. Without
wanting to over-explain a pretty good joke, the point is that some fundamental aspects
of contemporary politics are dominated by a conflict between two groups who
define themselves through their opposition to cultural seriousness and believe
that the ‘cool’ should just be left to do what it wants. A difference perhaps
lies in the fact that liberals see in this version of cool a mirage of how
things can be brought back to a state they regard as ‘normal’, whereas the
alt-right are willing to go to any length to insist that this cool stays
separate from politics. The former group are made passive by their reliance on
heroic intervention; the latter are activated, made militant, in defence of
consequence-free alt-realities. In either case, though, there’s a wilful
self-infantilisation involved: either you’re insisting that the good guys will
Gandalf onto the scene and sort everything out, or that playtime should extend
indefinitely so long as you find it fun. At such a historical juncture, then,
it makes sense, if you’re looking for some meaningful alternative beyond this
compromised opposition, which looks increasingly like a narcissism of small differences,
to stop accepting the Rule of Cool and to admit that it’s a form of bad faith,
an escapism that can no longer be afforded. <o:p></o:p></div>
Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-19429911536215231302016-07-13T11:57:00.000-07:002016-07-16T12:25:33.159-07:00Non-Linear BorefareThis won't be very long, or good, but it's an attempt to say something rather than nothing in the face of a nagging sense, which is seemingly not exclusively mine, that much of what is happening around the Labour Party at the moment grinds one down to infuriated silence. In fact, what I want to talk about here are the strategies for producing that inability to speak, that incapacitation.<br />
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Perhaps, though, 'strategy' is to some extent a misnomer. It's even possible that 'part' of the 'strategy' is to draw attempts to name it as such, attempts which can then be dismissed as egregious conspiracy theorising. The <i>Corbynistas</i> dreaming up conspiracies behind their laptops; the <i>hard left </i>caught in the ecstasy of their paranoia; the <i>Trots </i>twitching about the CIA. Prefabbed tropes perhaps, and we can recognise them as such when they're framed as starkly as this, but there's a form of truth there - the expectation of some kind of simple, yet obscure, causality which would produce a tidy explanation is naive in several ways. Ideology wants nothing less than for you to go looking for the individuals pulling the strings.<br />
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Instead, the <i>dispersal </i>of causality, or even its disintegration, characterises our particular phase of late modernity. Think of Adam Curtis' <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyop0d30UqQ">metaparanoiac discussion</a> of Vladislav Surkov's 'non-linear warfare', which 'import(s) ideas from conceptual art into politics'. Now, whether you think Curtis is an inspired, if unconventional, cultural and political thinker, or a better-paid version of the worst stoner you ever met at university - and the truth is probably a mixture of 'both' and 'somewhere in between' - this notion of non-linearity, of a politics-by-other-means-by-other-means which disarms its opponents through depriving them of reliable concepts with which to respond, seems useful to me. (I think here also of Sianne Ngai's <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674024090">brilliant writing</a> on modern conceptual art's deployment of minor affects - stupidity, envy, irritation - to frustrate our capacity to respond aesthetically or experience interpretative catharsis. What Ngai identifies as the 'stuplime' in Stein, Beckett and various points since is perhaps the foremost political affect of the 2010s.)<br />
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Now, there's obviously some distance between Putin's deck of techniques - stretching the concept of plausible deniability into psychedelic territory, creating situations (i.e. the murder of Alexander Litvinenko) which make diplomatic response more or less impossible - and those possessed by the chancers who make up the PLP rebellion and who fill the column inches in the nominally 'left' media. Nevertheless, we're often talking about people who have bathed in the reflected glow of Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson - or, indeed, actually <i>are </i>Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson - and it seems reasonable to assume that they've realised that because traditional spin no longer really washes, because everyone thinks everything is spin anyway, a new and more complex PR is required. Now, the aim is seemingly not to lie successfully, but to lie with such monumental transparency and such flamboyant non-conviction that the reality of those you oppose starts to unravel. <i>Why</i>, one wonders, hearing yet another political columnist insist that Jeremy Corbyn's diet, and his followers' <i>alleged </i>diets, renders him and them unsuitable for government, <i>would anybody think this is true? </i><br />
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These are rhetorics not of deceit but of cumulative irritation. Twitter gives us Corbyn supporters as 'Momentum millionaires' (I personally feel lucky just to be able to pay twenty five quid to vote in the leadership election), a constant denial that Corbyn's supporters live anywhere but Islington or Brighton (fair cop there in this case, but clearly ridiculous more generally), the soft anti-Corbyn concern-trolling of the 'unelectable' sort, pantomimic outrage at John McDonnell swearing, various celebrities talking over our heads, albeit very and arguably unnecessarily visibly, about how the 'hard left' are 'out of touch with real working-class people'. Take those for a small-plate version of what's going on. For the main course, you could look at the systematic efforts to construct an image of Corbyn's support as misogynistic or anti-semitic, or - most did-they-really-do-that of all - the erasure of the political specifics of the horrible, horrible murder of Jo Cox in an incredibly spurious show of being frightened by 'Momentum thugs'.<br />
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There's probably plenty to be added here but all I really want to suggest is that this strikes me as a very wilful performance of stupidity which is expedient politically in the same way that Boris Johnson's (sorry) 'buffoonery' used to be. It riles, but also implicitly suggests that it is unanswerable, producing a feeling either of complete demotivation (what's the point in saying anything back to this?) or inchoate fury. We're caught in the trap of not knowing who believes what they say, of being unclear just how much this is an attempt to grind gears, and it's consequently difficult to frame a useful and coherent response. Regardless, this is a sophisticated act of reality management which (probably) lacks obvious evil geniuses: there is something weirdly organic about the growth of this form of verbal attrition. Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-47203882495503771352016-07-07T12:17:00.000-07:002016-07-07T12:20:57.295-07:00Language Without Apertures<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">This article
appeared in <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/how-not-to-write-fourteen-tips-for-aspiring-humanities-academics"><i>Times Higher Education</i></a> today. It’s whipped up some
dust on Twitter already, and rightly so, but I feel almost thankful for its
existence in as much as its glibnesses - many of which, to use the week’s
fashionable term, were probably not executed in bad faith – serve as an
incentive to try and pull together a couple of nagging thoughts about widespread
attitudes to so-called ‘pretentiousness’, the conception of academia in the
public imagination, and the increasing purchase anti-critique holds within the
Humanities. Ultimately, I think, these strands resolve as a problem of
authenticity or, more precisely, the question of what kinds of intellectual
work can be authentic or relevant. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Undoubtedly,
the main problem with the article is one that some non-academic readers might
not immediately detect, namely its repeated deployment of tropes from (amongst others)
postcolonial and feminist critique to index pretentiousness and ‘unintelligible’
academic writing. One only need browse <i>Private Eye</i>’s miserable, petty,
drunk-at-lunchtime-alone-off-Frith-Street Pseuds’ Corner to figure out that the
figure of the ‘Pseud’ is a politically loaded one. In that case, the 'Pseud' uses
an intellectualised, put-on language which doesn’t conform to a certain,
institutionally approved model of intelligence (i.e. being able to quote
Tacitus and Pope in quick succession, then being hailed by the two other public
schoolboys at the bar as a 'genius’).
Here, the spite seems to be directed more forcefully towards radical critique,
but it’s certainly working to similar standards of establishment he’s-a-clever-chappishness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">What bothers
me specifically, I think, is how the resistance to critique has for so long
passed itself off as a form of non-duped perspicacity in British intellectual
culture. I suppose my academic background would lead me to home in on Larkin
and Kingsley Amis, amongst others of their era, as being particularly guilty of
staging their own pig-headedness as clarity, and The Movement’s self-satisfied
antimodernist plainspeak was certainly what gave Orwell’s horrible <a href="https://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDLPS579/HonorsOrwellPoliticsEnglishLanguage.pdf">‘Politicsand the English Language’</a> an aesthetic of sorts. Since the immediate postwar,
one might expect this know-what-you-like-and-like-what-you-know attitude to
have ebbed as cultural trends typically do, but it never really has. Blame the
dynastic nature of British hard-bollocked reality, perhaps, with Martin Amis
replacing Kingsley and bringing the likes of Hitchens and Craig Raine along for
the ride, and with Don Paterson and some other Faber poets following in turn.
Regardless, we’ve continually been sold the lie <i>by a cultural elite </i>that thinking critically is somehow elitist and
worthy of reproach. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">No doubt the
hegemony of docile intellect is over-determined. I’m not claiming that the Big
Establishment is sitting chuckling behind decades of writing, criticism and
culture, wearing Amises K and M, and their strange acolytes, as glove puppets.
The legacy of practical criticism plays a part, as does the ongoing need of
Oxford’s English Department to have a USP when you can study up-to-the-minute takes
on theory at Sussex or UCL. Perhaps the complex causes of this attitude are
what make it so deep-rooted, distributing the work of institutionalising a
particular, non-critical way of ‘being intellectual’ across multiple,
semi-autonomous actors. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">With this in
mind, this question of intelligibility and academic authenticity posits a ‘better’
language which is, so the story goes, presently crowded out by the impenetrable
style of the critical elite. For the purpose of full disclosure, I admit that,
in the first year of my PhD, now somehow over a decade ago, I occasionally made
noises about the unearned verboseness of academic discourse. It was only when I
got a new supervisor, who pointed out to me that my own, non-duped writing was
ten times less penetrable and ten times more insufferably stylised than Derrida’s
or Lacan’s, that I started to accept that it wasn’t academia that had
the problem. As such, I can
extend a little generosity of the they-know-not-what-they-do sort. Beyond that,
perhaps it’s important to celebrate precisely the things Zachary Foster attempts
to hold to account. It’s interesting that Foster’s attempts to enumerate the
flaws of critique’s style almost run out
of space, as though he can’t quite pin down what this style is. I do believe
that there exist certain reifications of critique’s language (my own repeated
use of ‘certain’ being but one example), but surely the real usefulness of the
idiom is its flexibility, its adaptability, its dialectical dexterity? In fact,
surely the maximalism of critique, which seeks constantly to retool and expand
language in the interests of conceptual precision – and this is the real
function of the style, rather than the need to assert spurious intellectual
authority – is itself a form of accessibility? My increased confidence as an
academic writer coincided with my realisation that, very often, theory
consisted of the admission that thought happened in language, and as such was
subservient to it, but that attempts to think necessarily reshaped a
constitutively inadequate language. Bottom-of-the-barrel Saussure, perhaps, but
an enabling experience in how it pointed to the fact that only an extensively
malleable language could be a truly critical one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">To grasp
what this means, we have to try and conceive of what the phantom ‘better’
language might look like. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that all these
post-Orwellians have even less interest in their hero in prescription, instead
focusing on stretching the list of prohibitions. The insinuation seems to be
that the language we should be using is self-evident, and does not need to be
described: it is merely common sense in its verbal form. ‘Intelligence’, as
such, is imagined as non-creative, non-associative, neophobic. It knows about
things, and can describe them, but it never bridles in frustration at the lack
of a word or larger verbal structure to pinpoint, and critically estrange, that of which we’ve
always been aware but to which we’ve failed to pay adequate attention.
Where people like Foster suggest that ‘academic’ language is impenetrable, it seems
to me that the language which they fantasise about a resurgence of is a
genuinely elitist idiom of already-knowing, rather than one of making. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Zadie Smith’s
interesting but bad novel <i>On Beauty</i> offers a signal example of the framing of
critique’s language in the form of its protagonist Howard Belsey, one of those nefarious
poststructuralist shaggers that were a cliché even before Malcolm Bradbury
stopped writing about them. Belsey – seemingly named for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Belsey">Catherine Belsey</a>, and perhaps, I sometimes wonder, for Howard Caygill as well –
undermines the confidence of his Art History students by turning a class on
Rembrandt into a Benjaminesque treatise on the barbarous origins of aesthetic
objects, and upsets his wife by sending an email to family friends accounting
for 9/11 in Baudrillard’s terms. The novel comes down hard on Belsey’s
theoretical inhumanity, while appearing to gesture in the direction of a poorly
defined intuition as the most useful form of aesthetic response. Again,
critique is framed as impenetrability, only here it’s conceived of as an
intellectualising get-out clause in the face of ethical judgement. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">The kinds of
authentic, intuitive encounters with artworks Smith – whose caricatures of
Marxist and poststructuralist thought make her appear less well-read than she
is – appears to endorse are also danced around by (relatively) recent moves to
write criticism post-critically. These are sometimes useful and interesting
(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay on ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’;
Isobel Armstrong’s <i>The Radical Aesthetic</i>) and sometimes very strange indeed
(Rita Felski’s repetitive and rushed <i>The Limits of Critique</i>). At their best,
they, as Sedgwick’s title suggests, fight for ways or redeeming or repurposing
problematic texts; at their worst, they seem to repeat the assertion that critique
is some form of elite gag, in both senses of that word. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Some people
who read articles like Foster’s are simply having prejudices reconfirmed, and
will continue their minatory hover over the Guardian’s message boards to tell
us we’re going to Pseuds’ Corner, or In The Sea. However, this kind of
discourse also primes students to enter university classrooms in anticipation
of a windowless non-conversation which will exclude them until they graduate. I’ve
taught theory courses for eight or nine years now, and it’s always appeared to
me that the preceding myth of theory is what makes an admittedly complex
subject prohibitively difficult. Instead of finding ways to participate in the
conversation made possible by critique, a conversation which is accepting of
linguistic adventure and misadventure, cowed students hang back in anticipation
of the arrival of a ‘plain’ language which will rescue them and gee them on to
a First. However, this language is that learned from birth and refined in the
debating societies of private schools, a language which really is without
apertures.</span><span style="font-family: "cambria" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-83519587005020282582015-06-04T09:15:00.000-07:002015-06-04T23:43:36.671-07:00'Romantic and earnest, rather than laced with irony'Earlier this year, I, to a degree accidentally, eavesdropped on a conversation that pissed me off at the time and has continued to gnaw subsequently. Two men - young middle-aged, <i>Guardian</i>-grade middle-class men, the kinds of Dadley Wigginses you'd suspect of having discovered bicycles circa September 2012 - were having a chat about a forthcoming beer festival in Lewes. Having once, again to a degree accidentally, ended up at a beer festival in Lewes, I started listening, wondering if I could chip in with some lairy Falstaffisms. Before I could make my contribution, the talk took a kink with which I'm becoming overfamiliar: 'I don't think I'll be going this year...too many young people with beards and tattoos...only going because beer is cool.' The emphasis there is as spoken. <br />
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This in itself isn't what I want to unpick here: rather, it's an attempt to give some indication of the overall climate of the quasi-moral panic about 'hipsters' in the mainstream media over the last eighteen months. At this point, it's worth going full disclosure and stating that I feel like pieces I wrote played their own small part in this incredibly fucking tedious discussion, even though, in my defence, it wasn't really 'hipsters' as such that I was trying to critique in pieces such as <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/07603-2011british-politics-folk-music">this</a> and <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/08111-michel-houellebecq-robert-montgomery-opinion">this</a>. Rather, it was the cult of the organic, acoustic and spontaneous that <a href="http://thefantastichope.blogspot.co.uk/">Alex Niven</a> had spotted in his (brilliant and still wildly under-read) <i>Folk Opposition</i>, a text which did much of the key early work in figuring out the ideological dimensions of Cameron's Britain. Back then, I'd have tended to draw a fault line between the bearded ham enthusiasts of Borough Market and hipsters who, after all, I envisioned as the constituency of those articles. Indeed, although I've certainly used the term pejoratively myself, I'm pretty sure I'm a 'hipster' by my own relatively trad description: I listen to drone music and glitchy electronica (and, of course, mainstream pop), I read archly nihilistic American and European fiction, I'm a 'cultural professional', I quote Žižek with relative confidence. I am an archetypal <i>Quietus </i>reader as much as an archetypal <i>Quietus </i>writer, in other words.<br />
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What's the difference between the trad hipsters and the 'hipsters' of contemporary media discourse? The ones you're supposed to be able to identify because they've got facial hair like Matthew Arnold and sleeve tattoos like Popeye, the ones who know what they're roasting this week and where they'll be drinking the next? For a start, I'd suggest that it's largely because the group of people the <i>Independent </i>seems to think are hipsters are really quite impressively un-hip, in as much as - to the best of my understanding - they spend their ITunes vouchers on Bon Iver and Mumford and Sons and Jamie XX and other stuff that, honestly, I'd turn down the opportunity to listen to even if the only alternative was to live out the rest of my days in a universe where Shed Seven were the only band ever to have existed. I rarely see the bring-a-typewriter-to-the-cafe set with a novel by Ben Lerner or Houellebecq or Thomas Bernhard: instead, it's always something with all the outward significations of bookishness <i>in the eyes of the mainstream media</i>, Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald being apparent favourites. Amongst these people, I see very little of the taste or the traits - the nihilism, the cynicism or the restless obscurantism - that I'd have associated with hipsters of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xG4oFny2Pk">James Murphy vintage</a>. </div>
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What's interesting is the way that the beards-and-tattoos have come, through a series of weird conflations, to be associated with 'hipness'. Think once again of the Hipster Policeman meme. One of its incarnations was printed with text which said something like 'My favourite music? You wouldn't know it', bringing together the beard (and what name can this group have other than 'beards'?) and the notion of (annoyingly) rarefied taste. (The best bit in the story, I thought, was when the papers revealed that the HP was not a hipster, but a biker, which somehow redeemed him in the estimations of The Men In The Rugby And Cricket Clubs.) There's also that strange idea that the beards are defined by their 'postmodern irony' (millions of newspaper articles <i>passim</i>), once again positioning them in the lineage of hipsters going right back to <a href="http://www.dhs.fjanosco.net/Documents/TheWhiteNegro.pdf">Norman Mailer's racist essay</a> on the subject. I'm just so confused! I have this image of facially hirsute Factory Floor fans watching <i>Raccoons</i>! While drinking CRAFT BEER! In Berghain! While listening to Scatman John on, er, steam-powered Walkmans!</div>
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The point is that the media has singularly failed to come up with an accurately expressive term for a cultural (or perhaps sub-cultural, I just don't know any more) group who are in many senses <i>anti</i>-hipsters. Provenance-obsessed, their focus seems to bend to the will of affective capitalism: where hipsters disavow(ed), the anti-hipster deals in capital-P Passion and intricate, over-focused knowledge. There is no space for magpie dilettantism in this culture. Once you've decided (for example) to brew, brewing is your whole existence, lived and breathed. You can't be out dancing every night, reading John Ashbery for breakfast and spending the afternoons watching Pasolini if there's brewing to do. Where the hipster could be seen as a hard-working rejection of the Protestant work ethic, the anti-hipster embraces it in all its artisanal majesty; that is to say that the beard is a true marker of entrepreneurship.</div>
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This, I think, is where things become confusing. The hegemonic principle in Cameron's England, and perhaps in all previous instantiations of England going back to the Civil War (with occasional happy if ineffective lapses), is that entrepreneurship is a thing to be applauded. Capital's avatar - the hardworking aspirant driven by Passion and knowledge - cannot be besmirched. However, Capital finds itself in something of a quandary here as it also needs a scapegoat for covering up some of its less ruddy-faced mechanics. One of the pleasing turns in the intensifying conversation about gentrification of late is that we can no longer blame this complex process of social cleansing and upwards capital transfer on 'consumption preferences': the economic and demographic transformation of Brixton does not happen because some twentysomethings decide they like pizzas cooked in woodfired ovens. However, given the rising anger about gentrification, there's a desperation to produce a narrative which leads away from the deep finance and the ideologically primed deregulation which powers the phenomenon. </div>
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As a result, the cultural arm of neoliberalism - your <i>Time Outs</i>, your <i>Evening Standards</i>, your <i>Guardian Guides </i>- have to pull off the complex trick of keeping their entrepreneurial anti-hipster audience onside and blaming someone or something <i>other than neoliberalism </i>for gentrification. Enter the hipster. In the pages of <i>Time Out</i>, the hipster is the idiot with the beard and the tattoo and the craft beer who is <i>not </i>the idiot with the beard and the tattoo and the craft beer reading the article. Why is this? One answer might be 'journalistic laziness', but I think that's too meek. A scapegoat needs to be <i>visible</i>, or at least <i>visualisable</i>, and, as such, someone who has a lot of Rapoon records and goes to poetry nights isn't really a plausible villain. However, there are a lot of people with beards and tattoos drinking craft beer and eating pulled pork in inner London (and Brighton, and Bristol, and Manchester) at the moment: <i>we know what they look like</i>. The trick is to give these visual signifiers some behavioural characteristics which don't really match, to overlay them with Nathan Barley-style flippancy and 'postmodern irony' and all of that stuff, which only exists in the vaguest of ways. What it means, then, that the 'hipster' is always someone else, the next person, not the heroic entrepreneur who is actually the reader of the <i>Evening Standard</i>'s streetfood reviews.</div>
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This all came to me when I was reading an interview in the reliably despicable <i>Shortlist </i>with the almost infinitely maligned Alan Keery, one of the twins who runs the Cereal Cafe in Shoreditch. The discussion around the Cereal Cafe has been almost heroic in its point-missing: if ever there was a tale of structure and symptom being confused, this was it - although, in some mad Baudrillardian twist, the structure now seems to be doing a competent job of absorbing the symptom, with the venture now apparently to be franchised to Dubai. Anyway, the interview revolved largely around Hamish MacBain machine-gunning classic tropes of broadsheet hipster analysis at Keery and finding out that they were bouncing off. Keery, it turned out, wasn't particularly middle-class (I'm hardly shocked to find that a pair of lads called Gary and Alan Keery from Belfast turn out not to fit the model of the Gap Yah bourgeoisie), and - more interestingly in terms of when you see a big fuck-off crack open up in ideology - was not even in it for the bantz. 'Thick beard aside,' writes MacBain, 'Alan [...] does not seem like a hipster. His love for cereal seems romantic and earnest, rather than laced with irony.' Hot news: business owner did not open business for a joke. </div>
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What this apparent aside does, ideologically, is charge the whole idea of anti-hipster authenticity with goodness (it is clearly opposed to the shadowy 'intolerable hipster douchebags' mentioned earlier in the piece). Being in it for the Passion is admirable: it sets you apart (as if Passion was not the #1 marketing trope in contemporary UK culture). This is not about hipster disavowal; this is about full-blooded commitment to the cause of Cereal (or Crisps, or Burgers, or Dog Food) and who are you or I to complain? It isn't business, either in its small or large incarnation, that does gentrification: it's that hipster <i>objet petit a</i>, who always left the Cereal Cafe just before you got there, leaving a trail of socioeconomic chaos in its wake.<br />
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Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-54079373707024489252012-03-04T05:21:00.004-08:002012-03-04T06:21:33.743-08:00Big Society Microcosm #2 - Pret a MangerDespatches from self-aggrandisingly 'green' sandwich chains:<br /><br />On a coffee cup:<br /><br /><em><blockquote><em>A mastery of dribble tests, button-holed cremas, milk frothing, steaming and stretching is absolutely fundamental to graduating as a Pret Barista. It takes about 12 weeks to create a perfect Pret coffee. Time well spent (we think).</em><br /></blockquote></em><br />Or, as a late-period <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jh-prynne">J.H. Prynne</a> poem:<br /><blockquote><br /><em>A mastery of dribble</em><br /><em>tests, button-holed</em><br /><em>cremas, milk frothing, </em><br /><em>steaming and stretching</em><br /><em>is absolutely fundamental.</em><br /></blockquote><br />Etc etc. Practical criticism time: why is that parenthesised 'we think' so enraging? Qualifications of this nature seem rather common at the moment. They mean something like 'actually, the thing we said before the parenthesis was aggressively meant, but we want to remind you that it's <em>your </em>opinion that counts, whatever we believe, because, hey, everything's <em>subjective</em>, right?'<br /><br />WE! ARE! YOUR FRIENDS! YOU'LL! NEVER! BE ALONE AGAIN!<br /><br />And, once a bond of trust has been established between company and customer, we can get onto workplace politics. Pret's manifesto on napkins, printed - conveniently enough - <em>on napkins</em>:<br /><br /><em><blockquote><em>This napkin is made from 100% recycled stock (Pret's sustainability department is militant, we're making headway). If Pret staff get all serviette-ish and hand you huge bunches of napkins (which you don't need or want) please give them the evil eye. Waste not want not. </em></blockquote></em><br />Ready to explode yet? It's an interesting use of the word 'militant', isn't it? I mean, I suspect they aren't proclaiming their affiliation to Militant Tendency or the Naxalites or Sendero Luminoso or whoever. And that faux-chummy 'evil eye', when what they actually mean is 'give our staff a load of shit if they hand you one too many napkins' and 'criticise the individual, not the brand', just as NPower and so on ring themselves with a palisade of low-paid telephone operatives...<br /><br />Wikipedia:<br /><br /><em><blockquote><em>In 1998, [Pret a Manger] employed 1,400 people, of whom 19% were from the UK and 60% from other European Union countries, mainly in Eastern Europe.</em></blockquote></em><br />John Berger, <em>A Seventh Man</em>:<br /><br /><em><blockquote><em>A migrant's experience of capitalism, because he is exploited in every field, becomes, if he is politically aware of it at all, a very unified experience. In his life he is brought face to face, always negatively, with the unity of the entire system. </em></blockquote></em>Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-83093317586835356642012-02-29T14:28:00.004-08:002012-03-04T06:19:51.702-08:00Big Society Microcosm #1 - The British LibraryIt seems a while - it <em>is </em>a while, now I check - since I wrote <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/impossible-situations/">this piece on Andy Beckett's excellent history of the seventies</a> for <em>3AM</em>. As austerity/ Big Society bed themselves in further and further, it's interesting to note the ways in which an increasing variety of specific locations are beginning, structurally if not visually, to resemble the ideological microcosms (oil rigs; Saltley Gate) Beckett identified in the Heath-Callaghan years. Today I was handed a leaflet by a member of <a href="http://www.pcs.org.uk/">PCS</a> outside the British Library, where I've spent a fair bit of time over the last four or five months. I hadn't realised that staff cuts <a href="http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/news_and_events/pcs_comment/index.cfm/id/0351E894-C266-4623-82773466894E8D26">have been and continue to be made</a> at the BL, although such a situation is obviously absolutely harmonious with a world in which Jeremy Hunt - to whom the PCS advise protesting - can be the Secretary of State for Culture.<br /><br />My observations suggest that the staff at the BL, particularly those who work in the reading rooms, are asked to put up with an unpleasant amount of rudeness, some of which is no doubt the venting of frustrations at a slightly absurd cataloguing and delivery system. The work is clearly difficult; the Mac-wielders (themselves symptomatic) who drift into the Humanities reading rooms to read two sentences of lecturer-prescribed Zizek and mess around on Facebook often make frustrating 'customers'. Immediately, there's an <em>incommunicado </em>between workers - particularly the security staff, I think - and a nominally liberal or leftish constituency of users, many of whom seem to be projecting a cultivated image of <em>bookishness</em>. I'm not sure if it was while I was living abroad that 'moderately dissident intellectual' became an off-the-peg look, and I know that going on about h*****s is basically the mark of the prematurely grumpy thirtysomething, but styling oneself after late-period (broke and tubercular) Orwell really seems to mark a new phase in the history of appropriation.<br /><br />Anyhow, efforts to inhabit a vaguely-defined mid-twentieth-century thinkerishness are matched, with stunning predictability, by the BL's catering outlets, which are outsourced to <a href="http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/news_and_events/pcs_comment/index.cfm/id/0351E894-C266-4623-82773466894E8D26">Peyton and Byrne</a>. Many people will already be aware of this, but P&B is a company dreamt up by a scriptwriter working on a satire of The Cameron Years twenty years from now, only it's somehow broken loose from its fictional moorings and travelled back in time as its owners thought we all needed a real-time encapsulation on the absolute cultural and political moribundity of the coalition years. It is <em>echt </em>Big Society in the same way as the pub in <em>Goodnight Sweetheart </em>was <em>echt </em>Myth of the Blitz, from the chummy 'X & Y'-formula name - a branding essential at the moment - to its gourmet fairy cakes and (of course) KC&CO font. <em>This is what people who like books like to eat. People who like books like tea and cake. Books and tea and cake are bedfellows</em>.<br /><br />So, a downsized staff with concomitantly increased workplace stress levels catering to a politically-confused generation of depressive-hedonic studes while several outlets of a thirties-themed 'artisan' cafe rake in the profits that come with a semi-captive audience? That's Britain's 'intellectual heartbeat' in 2012. Please write to Jeremy Hunt about this, as if he'll pay any attention whatsoever.Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-31843964931558853172012-01-20T05:05:00.000-08:002012-01-20T07:50:40.764-08:00How the Schools are Killing CREATIVITY!!!(With apologies to Sir Ken Robinson, who shall not be referred to again in this piece)<br /><br />It seems that Philip Hensher, one of those literary butterflies who seem to get an awful lot of press work without ever demonstrating a tremendous capacity for critical insight, has provoked what <span style="font-style: italic;">Private Eye </span>might call a 'stir' with <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/7516363/mavericks-need-not-apply.thtml">this rather scathing (and unpleasantly personal) review</a> of the new UEA anthology. As assessments go, it's very much in the Christopher Hitchens tradition of using its subject predominantly as the occasion for a discussion of something to which it is linked only tenuously; this 'something', <a href="http://londonersdiary.standard.co.uk/2012/01/novelists-row-over-creative-writing-boom.html">according to Giles Foden</a>, is propelled by Hensher's bitterness over his failure to secure a chair in Creative Writing at UEA. Funnily enough, the review failed to mention this.<br /><br />I spent a year as a faculty member in UEA's School of Literature and Creative Writing, and I suspect my suspicions about the merits of CW as a discipline were fairly obvious. During my interview for that position, I discussed what I saw as an increasing division between the critical and creative missions within the School, and argued that CW students and staff were endowed with a glamour that risked making the traditional activities of a Literature department look like donkey work. One of the main drawbacks of the proliferation of CW courses in UK universities has been to occlude the fact that criticism is <span style="font-style: italic;">in itself </span>a creative discipline which draws on the same faculties of linguistic deftness and associative confidence that a poet or novelist requires to be successful. Indeed, coming to the work of close-readers like Christine Brooke-Rose, J. Hillis Miller, Maud Ellmann, or Margery Perloff (not to mention the scalpel-sharp analyses of poet-critics like J.H. Prynne and Keston Sutherland) is frequently more invigoratingly unsettling than going over the latest collection by a Bridport Prize hopeful whose verse allegedly 'reveals the magic of the everyday', or one more post-Sebaldian traipse through English marginalia.<br /><br />The latter-day lionisation of creative practice as an academic discipline is also ideologically inflected in ways which strike me as not particularly subtle. By driving a wedge between 'criticism' and 'creativity', the academy implies that the critical thinker somehow <span style="font-style: italic;">lacks </span>creative flair. In an age where every TV commercial seems to want to liberate our inner Picasso, and in which the inability to do that is portrayed as an ultimately limiting sense of self-doubt brought on by the critical superego (equated in Big Society's cultural logic, of course, with the alleged paternalism of big government), to 'lack creativity' is to suffer stigmatisation. What would be genuinely empowering, I think, would be a kind of left-Reithian approach to the teaching of literature which demanded that a large volume of reading be undertaken in order to bequeath a sturdy knowledge base from which further creative or critical (I'll repeat: the distinction isn't mine) projects could embark. Instead, there's an implicit message that degree courses which place a heavy emphasis on the creative can be flown through with only the briefest of dalliances with an extant body of work. The message of CW, on at least one level, is 'because you're worth it': there's a pandering to neoliberal subjectivity which nurtures a fantasy of the 'individual' whose experiences <span style="font-style: italic;">deserve to be expressed <span style="font-style: italic;">because they are more significant than social, collective experience</span></span>. Personal experience is divorced from a social epistemology: I think György Lukács<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span>was wrong in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Lukacs#.E2.80.9CRealism_in_the_Balance.E2.80.9D_.281938.29.E2.80.94Luk.C3.A1cs.E2.80.99_defence_of_literary_realism">his assessment of modernism</a>, but his claims about its asociality could be transposed correctly for a study of the ideology of CW. (What I'm trying to say about the contemporary love of creativity is perhaps better expressed by Mark Fisher in <a href="http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_privatisation_of_stress">this essay on psychotherapy</a>.) <span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br /><br />Returning to Hensher, then, I think his opening points make room for a broader discussion of the usefulness of CW courses in general, but don't pursue that path. UEA has, historically, probably done more than its competitors to ensure that transactions between the critical and creative maintain a certain fluidity - hence Angela Carter, Lorna Sage, Sebald, Vic Sage and a litany of others - and it seems to me that extra-institutional pressures are the predominant explanation for the increasing separation of the disciplines there. These forces have been generated by the determination of competing institutions to chase the quick buck with more straightforwardly 'creative' courses, something which Hensher clearly has no intention of acknowledging. What might have been an opportunity to have a serious conversation about the role of the market in undermining both components of the type of literary education being talked about is lost amidst snide claims about the merits of individual writers.Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-82743706158606612752012-01-12T15:26:00.000-08:002012-01-12T17:26:40.544-08:00Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom (Pt 1)I first read Thomson two years ago, when I finally picked up the copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Insult </span>I bought on an Amazon recommendation while purchasing some Chris Paling novels right at the beginning of my PhD. Along with Paling, he's a novelist about whom I've been meaning to set down some thoughts about for some time, but never quite got round to it. Having just completed<span style="font-style: italic;"> Divided Kingdom</span>, now seems as good a time as any, although I'm still nowhere near sure that what I have to say is particularly coherent.<br /><br /><a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41ztmZl-uDL._SL500_AA300_.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 300px;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41ztmZl-uDL._SL500_AA300_.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Although <span style="font-style: italic;">Divided Kingdom</span>'s plot isn't particularly relevant to what interests me about it, which connects with<a href="http://adrawingsympathy.blogspot.com/2011/02/lake-como-lower-edmonton-elland-road.html"> these ideas about Adorno, Kafka, and Sara Kane</a>, it's worth sketching in brief. In response to Britain's becoming 'a troubled place [...] obsessed with acquisition and celebrity [...] defined by envy, misery and greed', the government have implemented a 'rearrangement' in which the nation is quartered into red, yellow, blue, and green zones. These regions are populated according to temperament, with citizens of the old state being categorised after psychological assessment as choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, or sanguine. Thomson's narrator is removed from home as a young child and packed off for a new life in the red quarter, the peaceful and unquestioning realm of the sanguine. On becoming an adult, he begins to work for a government agency involved in reclassifying and transporting problem cases. After crossing into the phlegmatic blue quarter for a conference, he finds his way into a mysterious nightclub in which he finds he is capable of recalling his childhood prior to the reorganisation: the experiences he has in this place cause him to embark upon a quest around the four sectors, pursued by secret police, in which he attempts to assert his right to live outside the absurd classificatory system.<br /><br />Critics attempting to pin down Thomson's weird, roving, oneiric prose latch upon all kinds of comparisons. There are elements of Nabokov in his ability to load sentences with intimations of an imminent, yet indiscernible, disaster; his scrupulously-drawn characters have shades of Dickens (and perhaps Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys) about them; there are marked traces of Chandler, Kafka, Ballard, and perhaps Swift. To an already heady and incongruous-seeming mix, I'd add that his narrative structures, in which individuals are deprived of social reassurances as they range desperately across wide geographic canvases, recall William Godwin's <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11323/pg11323.txt"><span style="font-style: italic;">Caleb Williams</span></a>, as well as the late-thirties political allegories of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Warner">Rex Warner</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthven_Todd">Ruthven Todd</a>. His contemporaries, for my money, would be Paling and, at a push, China Miéville, although his novels don't seem quite as committed to the logic of low fantasy as those of the latter.<br /><br />It's not hard to make it through one of Thomson's novels, either. 'Compelling' is a word used frequently when he's under review, and one doesn't struggle to untangle his language, which is never anything but lucid. Nicholas Royle - I presume the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Royle">novelist and critic</a>, rather than the <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/36446">critic and novelist</a>, although I'm happy to be corrected on this - summed up <span style="font-style: italic;">Divided Kingdom</span>'s accessibility (there's no other word for it) in an <span style="font-style: italic;">Independent </span>review which also attempted to get at what its apparently allegorical element was trying to communicate:<br /><br /><blockquote>On one level, <span style="font-style: italic;">Divided Kingdom </span>is a fabulous romp, an epic adventure story of flight and threat, fear and wonder, shipwrecks, espionage and breathless chase-scenes. On another it's a meditation on what it means to cross borders, to be alien, to seek asylum. It's a sly recasting of the nature versus nurture debate and a compelling account of personal development, of an individual's search for his own true temperament and identity.<br /><br /></blockquote>I don't necessarily have an issue with any of these claims: on some level, the novel is a simultaneously existential and political investigation of how one becomes and maintains a 'self'. Yet I feel that, in his attempt to translate allegorical content which is ultimately as accessible as the swashbuckling story which encodes it, Royle fails to demonstrate what the real challenge of <span style="font-style: italic;">Divided Kingdom</span>, and indeed of everything I know of Thomson's work, is. The problem isn't to elucidate a meaning, but to <span style="font-style: italic;">describe an effect</span>, to discuss what it is in the writing that, as Adorno <a href="http://adrawingsympathy.blogspot.com/2011/02/lake-como-lower-edmonton-elland-road.html">said of Kafka's manipulation of toponyms</a>, makes one 'shudder'. Like Warner and Todd, allegorists whose message was overwhelmingly clear, there's a surplus which doesn't seem to dovetail with any of the political or spiritual claims dispensed by the metaphorical structure, and this excess sets off a thrilling form of discomfort.<br /><br />Everyone who was read to as a child is familiar with this feeling, and it often occurs to me that a desire to maintain it is what sets a certain kind of reader off along a trajectory which leads to (amongst others) Kafka, Beckett, Blanchot, and the <span style="font-style: italic;">nouveau roman</span>. It's the experience one has when fiction peels away radically from the real world (or the world of literary realism) yet exerts a demand which prevents one from committing to a project of escapism. The ontological disjointedness suggests the legitimation of a demarcated fantasy world, a safe space in which postulations about truth and identity can be explored to their outer limits; the fact that the relentless rule-switching <span style="font-style: italic;">occurs</span>, however, undermines one's sense of security because its refutation of real-world logic is imposed <span style="font-style: italic;">from </span>the empirical world. Lewis Carroll's fiction, which, like Thomson's, sloughs off allegorical interpretation by dint of its excess of apparently translatable material, is exemplary of what I'm talking about here. I'll quote - experimentally - from Eric Rabkin's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Fantastic in Literature</span>, if only to nominate a critic who I think is interested in emphasising the (perhaps embodied) experience and immediacy of reading over the intellectual activity of deciphering:<br /><br /><blockquote>The fantastic is a direct reversal of ground rules, and therefore is in part determined by those ground rules. The truly irrelevant has nothing to do with ground rules, and therefore can no more be fantastic than it can be realistic. One may define the fantastic in part as 'conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination' only so long as we remember that all imaginations are restrained at least by the perspectives necessary to create a work of narrative art.<br /></blockquote>I need to go back to Rabkin to ascertain what he means by the 'truly irrelevant', but it's a term that lends itself to appropriation in this case. Thomson's writing is absolutely packed with events that gild themselves with the trappings of significance and yet are in no way recuperated into the narrative's structures of meaning. One way of describing this involves a bastardisation of Freud's notion of overdetermination, in which the proliferation of possible ideational content 'behind' or 'underneath' an image threatens to obliterate its capacity to signify. Another might be to say that the accumulation of the non-recuperable persists until it <span style="font-style: italic;">becomes </span>structure, determined negatively.<br /><br />This explanation works for Kafka and Beckett, and perhaps even for Harold Pinter, but when applied to writers who have something to say, either on a psychosocial level (like Henry Green, or Thomson) or a political one (like Warner, Todd, and Thomson again) it seems somewhat jarring. Why <span style="font-style: italic;">arrange </span>an abyss which replicates in negative the coordinates of a determinate argument? Why undercut (what appears to be) a conviction with doubt? My sense for some time has been that Warner and Todd didn't do this on purpose: it was simply a happy accident that they lacked sufficient control as writers of fiction to keep on message, meaning that their readers are presented with texts presenting a challenge far more sophisticated than their authors envisaged. I can't lay the same charge of naivety at Green; Thomson, too, is far too erudite to be a structural savant.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><blockquote></blockquote>Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-75122869500312019252012-01-10T16:49:00.000-08:002012-01-10T18:00:36.949-08:00The Death of the Author......as in the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review--the-man-behind-de-man-the-death-of-the-author--gilbert-adair-heinemann-1399-1542085.html">Gilbert Adair novel</a>, rather than the Barthes essay, although the ramifications of Adair's title are exactly what you'd expect.<br /><br /><a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41JVJWBCCHL._SL500_AA300_.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 300px;" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41JVJWBCCHL._SL500_AA300_.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />I picked this up with a couple of other second-hand books on January 2nd, when I was still pretending that everything was free and easy and that I wasn't worried about work. The motive behind buying something by Adair was that, with the author having recently passed away, I thought it fair to give him another go after having been so critical of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Holy Innocents</span>, which I read a few years ago.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Death of the Author </span>tells the story of Leo Sfax, an emigré professor of literature (with specific interests in Romanticism and literary theory) at a fictitious New England university. Having survived the Occupation in France, he has developed a considerable critical reputation in the United States, initially with an ingenious essay on Mallarmé but more recently with The Theory, an idea which dictates - you're probably way ahead of my conceit now - that authors are not stable entities that can be relied upon as sources of literary significance, but textual constructs who represent only one more deferral of meaning. As the narrative progresses, Sfax's recollections become increasingly candid, albeit without shedding a self-justifying defensiveness familiar to anyone who has read <span style="font-style: italic;">Lolita</span>, and we discover that his wartime activity was based upon the production of articles for a collaborationist newspaper. While none of these pieces were even vaguely intellectually admirable, several were outrightly anti-semitic. When one of Sfax's admiring former graduate students preparing a biography on the esteemed critic, murders begin to shake the previously peaceful academic community.<br /><br />It would be impossible for this snarky novella to be any more transparent about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_de_man">who</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/17/weekinreview/ideas-trends-de-man-affair-critics-attempt-reinterpret-colleague-s-disturbing.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">what</a> is being 'satirised'. Obviously, the affair is given a touch of morbidly comic hyperbole once the killings start, but what precedes the swerve into melodrama follows the contours of the de Man affair pretty faithfully. Now, I'm no longer as strict an adherent to The Theory - The Theory in the novel being fairly identical with a generalised version of the one proposed by de Man in <span style="font-style: italic;">Allegories of Reading</span>, albeit with a twist of Barthes for the purposes of simplification - <a href="http://adrawingsympathy.blogspot.com/2012/01/i-could-have-been-dog.html">as I once was</a>, but <span style="font-style: italic;">The Death of the Author</span> made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. Its Amisian irony failed, to me, to conceal an enraged conviction that, due to the poor judgement of de Man (and, in the context, <span style="font-style: italic;">only </span>de Man) during the Occupation, it is impossible to separate poststructuralist claims about undecidability from fascism. I'm sure that there are those who read the novel differently, perhaps as a more subtle critique of the potential implications of The Theory on our sense of political responsibility, but, if they existed, these nuances were lost on me.<br /><br />This depended on two things. First, the humour lacked gradation. The structure of the joke demanded a knowing recognition of the 'fact' that there were/ are only ever two kinds of theorist, namely the high-handed sophisticates like Sfax/ de Man and Anglophone camp followers converted in the wake of a collective cultural cringe: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Hillis_Miller">J. Hillis Miller</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lentricchia">Frank Lentricchia</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kermode">Frank Kermode</a> are all, I think, implicated in the depictions of the latter. These two caricatures - the nihilistic theoretical libertine and the elbow-patched bandwagon jumper - continue to act as bogeymen in journalistic discussions of theory, which have frequently pandered to (and propagated) chattering class anxieties about its (lack of) 'intelligibility'. Adair's writing plays to the gallery; given the depth of the author's understanding of French literature and culture (he translated Perec's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Disparition"><span style="font-style: italic;">La Disparition</span></a>) this is rather sad, and for him to have played the satire this way indicates a genuine belief that the radical critique of literary meaning owed a debt to some form of totalitarian sentiment.<br /><br />The other thing which caused me to doubt that Adair was willing to give theory the benefit of the doubt on any level was the novel's comprehensive failure to discuss the ethical concerns which dogged poststructuralism from the off. There's a Derrida figure lurking in its pages, but it's a version based entirely on several passages from 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' rather than on the Levinas-influenced philosopher of friendship, responsibility, and hospitality that emerged long before this text was written. In other words, the whole 'project' of theory is reduced to just that: radical thought is elided with right-wing political violence.<br /><br />That's where the question arises. Did Adair alight on this interpretation via a consideration of de Man's biography or through an unpleasant encounter with the difficulty of his writing? Much of the hostility to theory <span style="font-style: italic;">begins </span>with an insecurity about its impenetrability and then latches onto political, or pseudo-political, justifications. The critiques made by, say, Frederic Jameson of the essentialising relativism that poststructuralism appeared to justify are inspired efforts to resist the reification and commodification of continental theory, but one can't help but feel that the people who laughed hardest and most connivingly with this novel would regard Jameson, or Zizek, or Badiou as latter-day 'totalitarians' of complexity. Even though I share some of Adair's manifest reservations about the openness of The Theory to some shabby uses - after all, it has permitted a certain amount of 'it means what you want it to mean'-type answers in academic essays, the motor of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Death of the Author </span>seemed to be, at root, a semi-populist, moderately anti-intellectual one.Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-75182319326811994712012-01-03T02:47:00.000-08:002012-01-03T08:47:20.261-08:00I Could Have Been a Dog<blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">why do a PhD</span><span style="font-style: italic;">/ when you could be a dog?</span><br /></blockquote><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Julian Stannard<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">It occurred to me during last night's bout of my not-infrequent insomnia that it's now over three years since I passed my PhD viva and that, moreover, since getting through this exam my CV has developed in ways which I wouldn't have expected it to while I was writing my thesis. In fact, it makes me look rather Humbert Humbert-ish: TEFL teacher, postdoctoral fellow, associate/ adjunct tutor, FE tutor, proofreader, ghostwriter, study skills co-ordinator, copywriter, journalist. That's less than a third of a decade's worth of work, although those who know me will be aware about the extent to which these roles have overlapped (the last four items on the list are more or less current). Having had this thought, it further struck me that, in relation to many of my doctoral peers, I've been <span style="font-style: italic;">lucky</span>: I haven't been totally unemployed for longer than a month or so, I've held a faculty-level position, and I've been privileged in that all of the work I've done has been gratifying on some level. Yet a certain discomfort prevails, and I've been racking my brains trying to work it out.<br /><br />To all extents and purposes, my lack of secure academic employment seems to be caused by my rather problematic relationship with research publication. It isn't that I keep on trying and getting rejected - it's that I'm extremely unmotivated by trying in the first place. I have one paper coming out soon and a book chapter in the pipeline (I think); beyond that, I've submitted absolutely nothing to journals, nor have I attempted to publish my (increasingly motheaten) PhD thesis. While in academic employment, I've tended to con myself into thinking that teaching well is enough - and, given the Bartleby-like attitude to research 'obligations' held by some of the more venerable members of Lit departments, it clearly once was - and, while otherwise employed, I've been liable to wonder what the point is of this form of publication altogether.<br /><br />It probably hasn't helped my cause that my political attitude towards my work has altered fundamentally since I completed. When I submitted my PhD proposal in 2003, I was a bushy-tailed advocate of what I now recognise as the worst kind of reterritorialising, American postmodernism. What I saw as 'the political' in literature seemed grey and limiting; I partook instead in an entirely clichéd celebration of lacunae and aporias, a celebration which failed on every level to identify what might be political about non-meaning. I think the fantasy that each text has the capacity to eradicate its own political implications as a facet of its own (highly desirable) quality of infiniteness was a common one among starter postgraduates even as late as the early 2000s; I can only offer as a defence the fact that I briefly discussed an anxiety about this inverted idealism at the beginning of my Introduction. As this detail suggests, it was only during my final year of study - with the Credit Crunch and Cameron looming - that third-hand de Manisms began to look rather unattractive. Since then, I've been carrying a fair old weight of doubt about the general worthwhileness of a project that still carries the traces of these ideas (a project, furthermore, that, in order to lay claim to critical honesty, must incorporate an analysis of what was attractive about third-hand de Manisms in the first place).<br /><br />A second, also political, rationale for failing to make headway with my research lay, or lies, in my unease about the wider project with which I was involved. I'd been encouraged to submit my thesis proposal as part of an exciting effort to get a 'neglected' set of authors 'recognised', a mission statement which, to twenty-two year-old ears, sounded noble if not completely radical. In retrospect, the critical reinvestigation of late modernism in Britain has been, by and large, rather disappointing. On one hand, it has constantly strived to 'rescue' figures from the allegedly tainted grasp of experimental modernism, delivering people as different as Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Sutherland to the safe, tea-and-biscuits world of Englishness Studies. Jed Esty's <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7619.html">A Shrinking Island</a> </span>was a core work for this rather dubious movement, which seems to have garnered some extracurricular impact through <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/interactive/2010/aug/27/romantic-moderns-alexandra-harris">Alexandra Harris' <span style="font-style: italic;">Romantic Moderns</span>,</a> a text which seems to me to offer a striking embodiment of the cultural logic of Big Society. On the other hand, the work of 'rediscovery' seems ultimately to have served in the creation of new markets for publishers, who relish the opportunity to give us 'Vintage Hamilton' or 'Vintage Taylor' with some atrocious parody of Vanessa Bell splashed across the cover. In short, it feels at the moment as if the only way to participate in my field at the moment is as a scorn-pouring naysayer, churlishly refusing such self-regarding 'redefinitions of the canon'. <span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 8);ButtonMouseDown(this);" class="" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link"></span></span><br /><br />All of the above probably gives the impression that I'm rather uneasy with participating <span style="font-style: italic;">at all</span> in Literary Studies in the form it currently takes in UK HE institutions. This is, on some levels, a reasonable assumption; nevertheless, there's still a sense that something rather fundamental is missing as long as I'm <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>participating. I wonder about the extent to which this is to do with the experience at the core of the PhD process, which is a form of training which - I believe actively - seeks to introduce an epistemological break into one's life. The first year of a PhD seems more or less designed to fill the candidate with the conviction that they will be incapable of completing the thesis: thanks to supervisory eyebrow-raising and the occasional glimpse of the exhausted final-year student, the finished article becomes inflected with the sublime qualities of Everest or Mars (the annoying <a href="http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php">PhD Comics </a>contributes to this mythology). To compensate for this, one either quits or sets about an obsessive redressing of their 'ignorance', a process which entails not only learning everything there is to learn about the research topic in question but subjecting every notion - <span style="font-style: italic;">literally </span>incorporating everything from John Berger's views on Picasso to what to have to supper - to critical assault. By the end, you probably have a PhD, but you've also become rather distanced from people who (understandably) want to be able to drink a cup of tea without going through some abstract intellectualisation of the china industry.<br /><br />I want to be critically rigorous: I've accepted it as a kind of double-edged outcome of the initial - not too well thought-out - decision to do a PhD. But, once you encounter any situation in which the ability to slice and splice ideas isn't <span style="font-style: italic;">making money</span>, you're perpetually haunted by the sense that someone is going to turn around and say 'and look where it got <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span>!' I try and explain to my family that I say what I say about <span style="font-style: italic;">Downton Abbey</span> because I've been trained to do it, just as an electrician is trained to spot faulty wiring; however, the instant I lose a financial justification for having had this training is the moment at which I open myself to allegations that my points are entirely 'subjective', that we're 'all entitled to our opinions', and other such commonplaces of essentialised relativism. There's been plenty of discussion about the financially-precarious positions PhD students find themselves in after completing theses; I'd venture that there is a direct correlation between this and a genuinely-precarious sense of identity. I can't find the exact links, but <a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/">K-Punk</a> has written some fine posts over the last few years on the anxiety many feel about performing intellectual work in a society which audits itself on purely financial terms. It's probably this I'm trying to get at: in this climate, how do you rid yourself of doubts about the value of writing critically if the activity is not being financialised in some way? How much good work is strangled by the sludge of 'subjectivity'?<br /><br /><br />Most likely this is all a pep talk to persuade myself to properly pursue a project - not necessarily, or not entirely, academic - this year which goes beyond the short bits of journalism I wrote for the <span style="font-style: italic;">TLS </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Quietus </span>in 2011. Blogging regularly would be a start: I disappointed myself repeatedly by my inarticulacy in the face of subjects that would once have triggered a kind of writing reflex (<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/07603-2011british-politics-folk-music">this <span style="font-style: italic;">Quietus </span>piece</a> was a last-minute attempt to redress this). No promises, though, either to myself or others.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></div>Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-18364618329887799072011-11-06T13:21:00.000-08:002011-11-06T13:23:13.071-08:00Anchorage III<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><u>Anchorage</u><u> iii</u></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><u><span style="text-decoration: none;"><br /></span></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal">See? Major innovations in dock/</p> <p class="MsoNormal">shoal architect/ <span class="mention-latn"><i style=""><span style="color: black;">skål</span></i><span style="color: black;">/<i style=""> </i>with the underbite</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;">you’re the breed, squat angle containment.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;">And I reckon on north-west location and</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;">I reckon those trapped in floe can be christ-</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;">ened: <i style="">he really thinks </i>the gathering whalers </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;">press in, press in like what breaks on Flannan</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;">or in anthrax remission. If the CPO lands</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="mention-latn"><span style="color: black;">on the hemispheric mat? A timer -</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">committed once to the unsealing of</p> <p class="MsoNormal">delicacy, now to the national projekt – </p> <p class="MsoNormal">is fixed into the cliff; below the bars</p> <p class="MsoNormal">on hair-trigger, on demand, on <i style="">something</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">anticipating, most of all, wordbreak. </p>Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-31304445681181748242011-11-04T10:00:00.000-07:002011-11-04T10:03:10.125-07:00Anchorage II<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><u>Anchorage</u><u> ii</u></p> <span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span> <p class="MsoNormal">Z only point seaviews north north east as </p> <p class="MsoNormal">spectrum pilot/ the five-mile inland NDB</p> <p class="MsoNormal">locks coarse awareness of traffic’s actual</p> <p class="MsoNormal">& massive scale. Before the pier read where</p> <p class="MsoNormal">the underwriters were, reet from <i><span style="" lang="DA">Godthåb</span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">to Archangel under the parabolae of a)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">something mythic & 2) able archer arc.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">We say ’radio silence’ when really we’re </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">pissed off. More beautiful if cut here –</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">oh, breakdowns need vocabulary, though, </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">and I’ve only bluish flint, the trails and scales</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">of great migrations and strategic geography. <span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">These angles of blue crates stamped for longing</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="DA">and range, their implied sightlines dwindle. </span></p>Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-66373754049695490062011-11-02T10:09:00.000-07:002011-11-02T10:20:52.840-07:00Anchorage I<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><u>Anchorage</u></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><u><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal">S/he couldn’t find a single inelegant</p><p class="MsoNormal">sentence in the fiat – where the burn</p> <p class="MsoNormal">outs the combe is the outmost part</p> <p class="MsoNormal">of the MSA’s leverage; where we find</p> <p class="MsoNormal">lucidity, on the tarmac, you dreem sonar.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Stir at SeaTac?? Antiflash and aluminium</p> <p class="MsoNormal">abstract in the radiopharm, in Nixon’s HUD</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">this journey’s long, cuts continental corners</p> <p class="MsoNormal">through the frigid zone and the cold</p> <p class="MsoNormal">contracts. Screems in dead playgrounds.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Here no-one fucks in the afternoon,</p> <p class="MsoNormal">there’s no rubbish and rime </p> <p class="MsoNormal">even is managed: you’re shocked when <span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">tangerine ripples the blue recording. <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p>Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-18388334906199160622011-05-05T12:01:00.000-07:002011-05-05T12:14:14.009-07:00Collected Articles, 2009-2011As a way of pre-empting a new burst of writing, both journalistic and academic, and in order to make this blog look like it has something on it, here's a set of links to my journo pieces from the last year and a half:<br /><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/challenging-the-left/"><br />Review of Žižek's </a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/challenging-the-left/">First As Tragedy, Then As Farce</a> </span>- <span style="font-style: italic;">3AM</span>, November 2009<br /><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/impossible-situations/"><br />Review of Andy Beckett's <span style="font-style: italic;">When the Light's Went Out</span> </a>- <span style="font-style: italic;">3AM</span>, March 2010<br /><a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/04013-max-schaefer-children-of-the-sun-review"><br />Review of Max Schaefer's </a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/04013-max-schaefer-children-of-the-sun-review">Children of the Sun</a> </span>- <span style="font-style: italic;">Quietus</span>, April 2010<br /><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/breaking-the-ice/"><br />Review of Dominic Fox's </a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/breaking-the-ice/">Cold World</a> </span>- <span style="font-style: italic;">3AM</span>, June 2010<br /><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/is-the-atonal-hexed/"><br />Review of David Stubbs' <span style="font-style: italic;">Fear of Music</span></a> - <span style="font-style: italic;">3AM</span>, July 2010<br /><br /><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/a-challenge-to-poetic-generosity/">Review of Tom Raworth's </a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/a-challenge-to-poetic-generosity/">Windmills in Flames</a> </span>- <span style="font-style: italic;">3AM</span>, July 2010<br /><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/capitalist-realism/"><br />Interview with Mark Fisher/ K-Punk</a> - <span style="font-style: italic;">3AM</span>, July 2010<br /><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-raconteur-against-recuperation/"><br />Review of </a><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-raconteur-against-recuperation/">Žižek's</a><a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-raconteur-against-recuperation/"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Living in the End Times </span></a>- <span style="font-style: italic;">3AM</span>, September 2010<br /><a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/06168-slint-spiderland-anniversary"><br />Anniversary piece on Slint's <span style="font-style: italic;">Spiderland </span></a>- <span style="font-style: italic;">Quietus</span>, April 2011<br /><br />Honestly, the Josipovici piece is <span style="font-style: italic;">on its way</span>, and I'm also really enthused by the idea of writing something on <span style="font-style: italic;">Exile</span>, that not-entirely-successful Paul Abbott thing that's just been on the BBC.Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-68933911429612226182011-04-28T12:21:00.000-07:002011-04-28T12:24:08.680-07:00I stepped out onto the midway...I was looking for the pirate shipI promise I'll put some new stuff here soon - the Josipovici feature remains frustratingly tangled in a welter of thoughts about Kierkegaard and the Italian Alps - but, for now, <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/06168-slint-spiderland-anniversary">here's a link to my <span style="font-style: italic;">Quietus </span>feature on Slint's <span style="font-style: italic;">Spiderland</span></a>. Don't feed the trolls...Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-21817164629711442822011-02-18T01:38:00.000-08:002011-03-04T04:36:24.516-08:00Lake Como, Lower Edmonton, Elland Road<object id="ieooui" classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D"></object><style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style><br /><p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic"></span><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic"></span></p><blockquote><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">All his stories take place in the same spaceless space, and all holes are so tightly plugged that one shudders whenever anything is mentioned that does not fit in, such as Spain and southern France at one point in</span> The Castle</blockquote><p></p><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: right">Adorno, 'Notes on Kafka'<br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: left"><br /><a href="http://mapzone.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/images/didyouknow/empty_space.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 198px; CURSOR: pointer; HEIGHT: 198px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://mapzone.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/images/didyouknow/empty_space.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /></div><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: left"></div><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: left"><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: left">Adorno's discussion of Kafka's geographical, or toponymic, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">affect </span>identifies a complex instance of the modernist uncanny. His description of the 'shudder' experienced by the reader when Kafka's fiction - and, indeed, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Kafkan </span>fiction - inscribes itself into the spatial relationships of the (theoretically) non-literary is something I find to be surprisingly accurate: when, right towards its conclusion and in the form of K's Italian visitor, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Trial </span>admits itself to geography's frame of reference, one can't help but feel a creeping sense of untowardness. Why? An explanation of the mechanics of the situation begins with reference to genre: what one responds to is a redrawing of textual regulations typical of real Fantasy; we're moved by a spontaneous-seeming alteration of what had appeared to have asserted its claim to be the organising linguistic perspective of the novel (that is, a linguistic perspective that can't see outside the hermetically-sealed 'spaceless space' of the Kafkan city). In synchronising ourselves with the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Trial</span>'s elaboration of an entirely immanent topography - its fundamental <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">prozess</span> -which permits no extensions into a social or historical megatext, we learn to forget to believe in the very possibility of these extensions. The ground of the writing is the writing itself, so when 'our' world smuggles itself back into the text it feels as if we've fallen through a trapdoor <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">back to ourselves</span>.<br /><br />That said, I don't think that Adorno's insinuation that the 'shudder' takes place because 'it' - Josef K's persecution; K's insinuation into the rhythm of deferral - is 'happening here' is entirely correct. We are generally sophisticated enough to perceive some sort of ontological difference between place-names in a work of fiction and place-names on the map, however open to problematisation this distinction might be; we're (mostly) aware before reading the novels that the mingling of inexplicable cruelty and officiousness that's the bare truth of Kafka's world is also characteristic of ours. The surprise, in other words, isn't the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Planet of the Apes</span>-style revelation that we were <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">at home all along</span>, but the disestablishment of a literary code which discreetly works as a metonym for the principle of ordering knowledge. The first, 'spaceless' code nominates literariness as what is stably separate, while its sudden citation of a geographically-informed (cultural) code repositions this separateness as a socially-necessary fantasy. It's only in the inversion of image of the stably literary or poetic achieved by its idiomatically-inapt citation of a culture <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">not </span>immanent to it that the work reclaims its autonomy as the space of social critique; that is, it's the shattering of the epistemology of 'spacelessness' it offers to the reader that maintains it as spaceless.<br /><br />This move is one that's fundamental to Beckett's <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Endgame</span>, Pinter's <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Birthday Party</span>, and <a href="http://adrawingsympathy.blogspot.com/2011/02/in-which-mogwai-are-linked-tenuously-to.html">Kane's <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Blasted</span></a>. In <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Endgame</span>, it's only through Nag and Nell that there's any reference to an exterior which, unlike the purely elemental outdoors glimpsed in Hamm's story, is substantiated with human significances:<br /><br /><blockquote>NELL: It was on Lake Como. [<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Pause</span>.] One April afternoon. [<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Pause</span>.] Can you believe it?<br /><br />NAGG: What?<br /><br />NELL: That we once went out rowing on Lake Como. </blockquote><br /><br />The difference between Beckett and Kafka's attitude towards the geographic is that <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Endgame</span> internalises the reader's disbelief at the intrusion of the toponym - never mind if Nagg can, are <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">we </span>able to<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic"> </span>'believe' that this is a world in possession of a Lake Como?<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Xu5vXuUYIbg" frameborder="0" width="640" height="390" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><br /><br />Something similar occurs in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Birthday Party</span>, when Stanley Webber discusses his musical (non-) career:<br /><br /><blockquote>STANLEY. [...] I've played the piano all over the world. All over the country. (<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Pause</span>.) I once gave a concert.<br /><br />MEG. A concert?<br /><br />STANLEY (<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">reflectively</span>). Yes. It was a good one too. They were all there that night. Every single one of them. It was a great success. Yes. A concert. At Lower Edmonton.</blockquote><br /><br /></div><br /><a href="http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/h2/h13419.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 260px; CURSOR: pointer; HEIGHT: 392px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/h2/h13419.jpg" border="0" /></a>Pinter's mechanism enjoys as subtle a difference from Beckett's as Beckett's does from Kafka's. While the spacelessness of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Trial </span>is well-established by the time of Italian visitor's arrival, and <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Endgame </span>- partially by dint of a paratextually-gained sense of how Beckett 'works' - seems to come off the map almost before it has begun, Pinter's disestablishment of the literary only works when this conversation is looked to retrospectively, after the ontologically-troubling arrival of Goldberg and McCann. Stanley and Meg's interchanges are certainly weird and disconcerting, but, paradoxically, the world of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Birthday Party </span>only comes to seem hermetic <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">after </span>it has been violated. <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Blasted </span>follows the example set by Pinter: the Soldier's intrusion into Ian's hotel bedroom establishes it as a hermetic, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">literary</span>, space precisely because he arrives as a deserter from an unnamed war which bears the marks of allegory rather than historicity. The inspecificity of the historical rules of the outside - what is the 'organisation' than Goldberg and McCann work for, and <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">why </span>is there a war in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Blasted</span>? - insists that the precursors of these institutions and events are those things possessed by Kafka's notoriously vague definite articles.<br /><br />When audiences of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Birthday Party </span>and <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Blasted </span>realise that the terms were Kafkan all along, they shudder at the recollection of the plays' appeals for a naturalistic extension. When, in Kane's play, Ian and Cate debate the value of going to Elland Road to watch Leeds play on a Saturday afternoon, the dyke of the geographic text bursts: if there's a Lake Como there's a Maggiore, if there's a Lower Edmonton there's a Chingford, and if there's an Elland Road there's a Hillsborough. And yet it's these refusals of a particular kind of hermeticism which give them, via the fracture brought about by the citation, their truly antithetical status.<br /><br /><br /></div></div></blockquote>Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-425183302844558202011-02-16T10:05:00.000-08:002011-02-18T01:38:25.597-08:00In which Mogwai are linked tenuously to Sarah Kane1999's <span style="font-style: italic;">Come On Die Young </span>was the exception that proved the rule that Mogwai are not an 'album band'. That record ordered itself on the principle of a sparseness towards which gravitated such critically-convenient - and frustratingly inspecific - adjectives as 'wintry' and 'autumnal'. In doing so, it achieved something like coherence; the Lanarkshire group's other LPs, by contrast, have tended towards a restlessness which invites suspicion that they lack an aesthetic to navigate by. Couple this to the fact that, particularly as a live act, they are capable of producing moments in which the listener wonders why they ever bother listening to anything else, and you have a band who are unusually difficult to write about. There's a temptation to be impressionistic, but the visuality of the music is, to misquote the vocal sample on 'Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home', wider than <span style="font-style: italic;">individual </span>pictures. The songs often imply that there <span style="font-style: italic;">should </span>be an accompanying image, but we never quite know what it's meant to be. Other attempts to pin down Mogwai's conundrum try to think it out in terms of what else the records sound like, which has led to unsatisfying comparisons to Slint, amongst others. More often, and particularly nowadays, it seems as if reviewers aren't really listening to their output at all: nearly every response to a new Mogwai release focuses on its proximity to, or distance from, the quiet/ loud 'formula' allegedly stamped on all of their early output.<br /><br />The reality is that they've been a band <span style="font-style: italic;">in search </span>of a formula ever since the early EPs, and that they've always struggled to synthesise their influences to a point at which their albums belie the presence of an underpinning idea. <span style="font-style: italic;">Come on Die Young </span>, produced in the isolation of upstate New York by Dave Friedmann, just about managed this by dressing sepulchral instrumentation, played at the geological pace of Codeine or Low, with virtually inaudible samples and electronics. Its bursts of noise - the reverberating wash of 'Ex-Cowboy' and the Iommi-esque riffing in 'Christmas Steps' - responded organically to a context, and the one track to feature singing - the semi-eponymous 'Cody' - used vocals as a kind of how-to guide for the record's audience (the second verse begins 'When I drive alone at night'; one can't help but feel that the song is describing how and where it wants to be heard). Every other Mogwai album has slung together disparate approaches to make something that sounds a little like a primer for a catholically-compiled listen-before-you-die handbook to the forty years of music that preceded it. I owe my appreciation of everything from The Fall to Model 500, from Labradford to Art Ensemble of Chicago, to my having bought <span style="font-style: italic;">Young Team </span>on a whim when I was seventeen, but Mogwai have never come close to seeming vital in the manner that all of those bands have.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_jJgEUpXhDrI/TSTs-vbT7kI/AAAAAAAAASw/P0ELvwj1ovE/s1600/Mogwai-Hardcore-Will-Never-Die-But-You-Will.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 423px; height: 422px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_jJgEUpXhDrI/TSTs-vbT7kI/AAAAAAAAASw/P0ELvwj1ovE/s1600/Mogwai-Hardcore-Will-Never-Die-But-You-Will.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will</span>, their new record, doesn't mark a departure from this trend, but it seems, surprisingly, to have harnessed it as something like a virtue. The stylistic leaps that occur between tracks are no longer apologetic but flamboyant: 'Mexican Grand Prix', a decent enough exercise in motorik drumming and Farfisa, gives way to 'Rano Pano', which would only need a little more fuzz to resemble Earth. 'San Pedro', halfway through, shapes like a superior Screaming Trees in search of a Lanegan vocal, while the subsequent 'Letters to the Metro' returns to the Dirty Threeisms of <span style="font-style: italic;">Come on Die Young</span>. It feels as if variousness has <span style="font-style: italic;">become </span>the formal principle here, in contrast to earlier efforts on which the incongruity of the tracks was a by-product of an attempt to harmonise style. I don't think that this is reducible to well-worn clichés about postmodernist strategies of citation, though: it's more the case that <span style="font-style: italic;">Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will </span>operates as a retrospective investigation of the band's own inability to make an architecturally-sound object of their inspirations. While wary of the current tendency to use 'hauntology' as a justificatory descriptor of works which dip in and out of various pasts - I'm still to be convinced of the merits of the Ghost Box project - it strikes me that Mogwai have reached a point at which their music serves to interpret its own history. The album's obvious points of fracture speak of roads <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>travelled, of colours <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>pinned to masts.<br /><br />If they have indeed reached such a level of self-awareness, Mogwai have produced an incisive comment on the decade which gave birth to them. In Britain, the 1990s, at their best, were all about attempts to marry eclecticism to a rejection of cheap irony: one aspect of millenial thinking was that the preceding hundred years of cultural production needed somehow to be collated and made available for assessment. I was reminded of this in November when I went to see a revival of Sarah Kane's <span style="font-style: italic;">Blasted</span> at the Hammersmith Lyric. Famously, <span style="font-style: italic;">Blasted </span>was hammered by critics on its debut, with many reviewers (not all of them working for the usual suspects) reducing the play to an assemblage of shock tactics in the <span style="font-style: italic;">épater la bourgeoisie </span>tradition. Even more sensitive responses couldn't help but feel that it was something of a mess that resulted from a young writer grappling with the weight of her precedents. Sean Holmes's new take on the play has forced something of a reassessment, with various writers - and there seems to be no small measure of hypocrisy in this - looking to rectify their attacks on Kane.<br /><br />I'd never seen <span style="font-style: italic;">Blasted </span>before, so my own reaction might as well have been to a new play. As I expected, I was rattled by it, particularly after the jerk away from realism it makes once the imposing Aidan Kelly's unnamed soldier bursts into the Leeds hotel room where Ian, a rat-arsed, paranoid journalist, has just raped Cate, his epileptic teenage lover. After this point, the reference points come thick and fast: the soldier's sucking out of Ian's eyes asks us to remember Oedipus and <span style="font-style: italic;">King Lear</span>, while the closing scene sees the protagonist neck-deep in a hole which burrows towards Beckett's <span style="font-style: italic;">Happy Days</span>. One might also point out that the unexpected violation of a narrowly-delimited setting by a character who at least <span style="font-style: italic;">feels </span>ontologically incongruous nods towards Pinter's early work, and that Ian's resentful ranting and multifaceted scheming makes us wonder what might have happened to Jimmy Porter had he grown up to work for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Yorkshire Post</span>. As some find with Pinter, the uneasy mixing of classical unities, historically-aware naturalistic allusions (at one point, Ian and Cate argue about Leeds United's hooligan problems), and late modernist disjunctions makes the audience ask if too much is being attempted.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theatrenorth.co.uk/kk11.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 404px; height: 434px;" src="http://www.theatrenorth.co.uk/kk11.png" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Ian's sub-philosophical diatribes, however, permit a reading of <span style="font-style: italic;">Blasted </span>in which it becomes apparent that Kane was seeking to make a point about what happens when artworks are subjected to reductive, appropriating interpretations. Stuck in his pit, water tipping onto his face from some unseen source, the journalist announces the impossibility of salvation as if he's making the point that's always on the tip of the tongue of Beckett's characters. This proclamation of the non-existence of god seems, for him, to retrospectively justify his earlier behaviour: he's got his head round a (small) portion of Existentialism's argument, but failed to grasp its attendant ethical implications. Kane was perceptive in her understanding that the anti-theology worked out by Existentialism and Absurdism might, in the wrong hands, be perceived as a liberation from ethics, an invitation to perform actions which affirm nothing but the rejection of any principle of consideration. Given the geographical setting of <span style="font-style: italic;">Blasted</span>, and the protagonist's name, it's hard not to see in this evacuation of responsibility a hint of Ian Brady; there's also a veiled critique of the surreptiously nihilistic doctrines of Thatcherism. Kane cites Beckett, but in a two-handed way which demands that his work either <span style="font-style: italic;">maintains </span>or <span style="font-style: italic;">acquires </span>a politics: the play's climax effectively reverses the movement typical of postmodernist quotation by reinstating political or ethical imperatives which seem to be on the verge of departure.<br /><br />We're reaching a stage at which the aesthetics of the nineties are going to come under scrutiny in terms of how they responded to a historical climate which arguably didn't make a lot of sense at the time. <span style="font-style: italic;">Blasted </span>dealt with the Balkan wars by suggesting that they were the decade's political unconscious: in this performance, Kelly's Northern Irish accent is used to imply that the only way that Sarajevo and Srebenica could be interpreted while they were happening was in the unsatisfactory vocabulary of a more proximate example of civil unrest. Kane's work might, then, be thought of as putting up a resistance to failures to think in either historical or political terms which were encouraged by the governments of the era and bolstered 'intellectually' by postmodernism's partialised accounts of Existentialism. Contemporary accounts of hauntology, which seek to repotentialise citational aesthetics for political critiques, might do well to go back to works which might, at the time, have felt like marginal agitprop.Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4312444057816983674.post-77849013535238046982011-02-10T11:57:00.000-08:002011-02-10T13:34:35.288-08:00Coming Soon:Out with the old, and so on. After a year or so off, I'll be working from here - for now, I'll offer ten points to anyone who can correctly guess where the new title comes from.<br /><a href="http://dawdleupcountry.blogspot.com"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Dawdle up Country</span></a>, where I used to blog, now reads like a sponge for PhD anxieties, with a long tail-off trying to decipher life in Hungary. When it's not doing either of those things, it appears to be engaged in a running (and presumably one-sided) battle with the <span style="font-style: italic;">Guardian </span>culture section. I've shifted to this place because I'd like to write more substantially, and more often, about the things I perhaps didn't really feel assertive enough to cover two or three years ago. I don't quite feel that I grasped how useful this form of writing was (and, of course, <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span>) as a precursor to more substantial projects, or, indeed, how it constitutes a project in its own right.<br /><br />While I'm aware of having set myself impossible tasks before, here's a sample of things I hope to have up here soon:<br /><br />- An essay-review on Gabriel Josipovici's <span style="font-style: italic;">Whatever Happened to Modernism</span>, which is currently half-written.<br />- A piece on the BBC's <span style="font-style: italic;">Human Planet</span>.<br />- The song-by-song article on humour in <span style="font-style: italic;">This Nation's Saving Grace </span>that I started composing mentally on my walk home the other evening.<br /><br />Don't let me get away with it, this time.<br /><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]-->Joehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298684974242413628noreply@blogger.com0