Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

 
Fantastic Journal has an interesting article on Terminal Five and the modern airport:

"The contemporary airport is probably the perfect architectural encapsulation of the strange complexities and iniquities of modern (western) life. They are glossy and expensive playgrounds offering endless diversions that never mask the ennui of actually being there. They are also highly policed, security-obsessed environments where the people in them are both flattered as consumers and treated as potential lunatics at the same time.

Airports are the quintessential contemporary building type, the symbolic target for terrorists and the rallying point for environmentalists. They are the manifestation of our desires and the focus of our fears. Spatially they are highly complex, a warren of labyrinthine corridors, border controls and security tape. Terminal 5 - like Foster's Stanstead - strives to transcend the reality of endless queues and sock shops, harking back to the grand spaces of Victorian railway sheds, but the grim realities of immigration control always brings such flights of fancy back down to earth... Airplane travel today is a weird echo of 1950's Service-with-a-Smile faux-luxury combined with the degrading intrusiveness of contemporary security arrangements. It's hard to equate the optimism of vintage BAOC adverts with the humiliation of thousands of people being forced to take their toothpaste through security in a clear plastic bag."


In a lot of respects, I rather liked Terminal Five. Victorians looking at the Crystal Palace or St Pancras Station must have felt the way I did when looking at it. That sort of gleaming futurism is rather uncommon in Britain. With that said, my main recollection of it was the contrast between the gleaming high-tech character of the building and the rather generic anonymity of the building interior; the effect of the contrast is rather bathetic. Terminal Five is in short, the perfect representation of what Marc Auge called the 'non-place:'

"Auge laments the rise of spaces like airports and freeways and rest areas that are decoupled from the world around them, places that could be anywhere and everywhere, but are actually nowhere. For Auge, these spaces seem to signal the end of borders, of locality, and of the old sense of identity rooted in place and time. The non-places are devoid of relationships and have 'no room for history unless it has been transformed into an element of spectacle.'"

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posted by Richard 3:40 pm

Saturday, November 21, 2009

 
A glancing reference in a somewhat recursive Zadie Smith essay on essays, drew my attention to David Shield's Reality Hunger:

"Standard operating procedure for fiction writers is to disavow any but the most insignificant link between the life lived and the novel written; similarly, for non-fiction writers, the main impulse is to insist upon the unassailable verisimilitude of the book they've produced. I've written three books of fiction and twice as many books of non-fiction, and whenever I'm discussing the supposed reality of a work of non-fiction I've written, I inevitably (and rapidly) move the conversation over to a contemplation of the ways in which I've fudged facts, exaggerated my emotions, cast myself as a symbolic figure, and invented freely. So, too, whenever anyone asks me about the origins of a work of fiction, I always forget to say, 'I made it all up,' and instead start talking about, for lack of a better term, real life. Why can't I get my stories straight? Why do I so resist generic boundaries, and why am I so drawn to generic fissures? Why do I always seem to want to fold one form into another?

I have a very vivid memory of being assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath as a junior in high school and playing hooky from my homework to read Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. Steinbeck’s humorlessness, sentimentality, and sledgehammer symbolism hardly had a chance against Hunter Thompson’s comedy, nihilism, and free association. I loved how easily Fear and Loathing mixed reportage or pseudo-reportage with glimmers of memoir.

I wanted to write a book whose loyalty wasn't just to art but to life, my life. I wanted to be part of the process, part of the problem. For quite a while I wrote in a fairly traditional manner - two linear, realistic novels and dozens of conventionally plotted stories. I’m not a big believer in major epiphanies, especially those that occur in the shower, but I had one, about fifteen years ago, and it occurred in the shower: I had the sudden intuition that I could take various fragments of things, aborted stories, outtakes from novels, journal entries, litcrit and build a story out of them. I really had no idea what the story would be about; I just knew I needed to see what it would look like to set certain shards in juxtaposition to other shards. Now I have trouble working any other way, but I can't emphasize enough how strange it felt at the time, working in this modal mode.

I'm hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real, knowing full well how invented such representations are. I'm bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters. I want to explore my own damn, doomed character. I want to cut to the absolute bone. Everything else seems like so much gimmickry. For me, anyway, the fictional construct rarely takes you deeper into the material that you want to explore. Instead, it takes you deeper into the fictional construct, into the technology of narrative, of plot, of place, of scene, of characters. In most novels I read, the narrative completely overwhelms whatever it was the writer supposedly set out to explore in the first place.
"


I tend to agree with Smith that Shields partly refutes his own argument, by noting the fantastical character of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as opposed to the sober realism of The Grapes of Wrath; it can often be the case that the more a writer adheres to autobiography, the more fantastical the narration becomes. Witness Huysmans and DeQuincey as obvious exmaples. One might also note that the division Shields draws between etoliated artifice and the crudity of raw experience is surely a false one; as John Bayley's The Uses of Division : Unity and Disharmony in Literature was at pains to point out, the most interesting work of many realist writers is often their more fragmented and inchoate. For me, writers like Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy are great precisely because of how untidy their novels often are. With all of that said though, in the end I probably sympathise more with Shields than with Smith. From Isherwood and Pessoa onwards to Coetzee and Sebald, writing that defies the division of reality and invention has become a hallmark of the age. Equally, it's difficult not to notice that if our age has any genre it has obsessively explored, it would have to be biography, even those of people who are still living and have done apparently little to merit the attention. Put simply, we live in an age where experience is a heavily circumsribed or heavily mediated concept. I recall an interview with Slavoj Zizek on this subject:

"In my work, I place strong emphasis on what is usually referred to as the virtualisation or digitalisation of our environment... But still, 30 percent of us live in a digitalised universe that is artificially constructed, manipulated and no longer some natural or traditional one. At all levels of our life we seem to live more and more with the thing deprived of its substance... Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du reel', the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.

I think this may be what defined the twentieth century, which really began with the First World War. We all remember the war reports by Ernst Junger, in which he praises this eye-to-eye combat experience as the authentic one. Or at the level of sex, the archetypal film of the twentieth century would be Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida (In The Realm Of The Senses), where the idea again is that you become truly radical, and go to the end in a sexual encounter, when you practically torture each other to death. There must be extreme violence for that encounter to be authentic.

Another emblematic figure in this sense to me is the so-called 'cutter'- a widespread pathological phenomenon in the USA. There are two million of them, mostly women, but also men, who cut themselves with razors. Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide. It's simply that they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: it's only through this pain and when you feel warm blood that you feel reconnected again. So I think that this tension is the background against which one should appreciate the effect of the act."

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posted by Richard 6:01 pm

Monday, August 31, 2009

 
As I read this article, I realised that it reminded me of a certain contemporary figure:

"The West, it seems, is living through a golden age of civilisational anxiety, marked by endless agonising about the uncertain future... The sum of these fears – or their apotheosis – is the belief that civilisation is fated to decline, to be subdued from without or collapse from within. This too, is not a new idea. History, it is true, has often been narrated as a Whiggish tale of continual progress... But this uplifting Enlightenment sentiment has always been opposed by a darker view, one that stresses the cycles of history, the tendency for what has risen to fall again – a physics of decline with its own martial undertones, including the unmistakable implication that the West, fat and happy with the fruits of its technological and cultural sophistication, is blithely tottering on the brink of oblivion.

Few thinkers savaged Europe's faith in progress with the ferocity of Friedrich Nietzsche, who thought that anything called 'progress' was a mere illusion – if there was even such a thing, he suggested, its flowering could only give way to dissolution. Nietzsche’s ideas were carried into the 20th century by Oswald Spengler, whose book The Decline of the West became the ur-text of declinism in the 1920s. About history, Spengler concluded: "I see no progress, no goal no path for humanity." Spengler’s pessimism squared nicely with the gloomy mood of Europe after the First World War. If his book appears now as a curious artefact of its time, it helped to establish a template of decline – and a rhetoric to evoke its inevitability – that endures today, a kind of civilisational pessimism that exists at all points among the ideological spectrum; the declinists of the left and right obsess over very different threats, but the essential dynamic transcends politics."


If the current recession can be described as a counterpart to the great depression, it's hardly surprising that writers might respond to the times in a similar fashion to what is described above, which was why I found myself wondering whether John Gray might not count as our modern Spengler. Gray is in many ways the perfect embodiment of the spirit of our times; a self-styled contrarian whose arguments actually reflect an essentially mainstream view. Having had to live under a 'third way' government without any idea of political narrative and whose pragmatic approach to government resulted in little more than inconsistency, I do grow slightly weary of Gray tilting at windmills of Enlightenment political thinking. There were a couple of reasons why Gray came to mind when I read the above piece, of which this and this were the first:

"It is not surprising that Enlightenment thinking has become fashionable again: in uncertain times, people turn to the security promised by faith... liberal values are certainly at risk, but it is silly to look to the Enlightenment to safeguard them. It was a hugely complex movement, and some of its most influential thinkers were enemies of liberalism. Karl Marx allowed liberal values only a transitional role in human development, while Auguste Comte, founder of the influential positivist movement, rejected ideals of toleration and equality. Yet this was not simply a battle of ideas. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the anti-liberal strand of Enlightenment thinking gave birth to the 'scientific racism' that would be adopted by the Nazis. This ideology can be traced back to Kant's lectures on anthropology, published in 1798, in which he maintained, for instance, that Africans are inherently disposed to slavery. As an intellectual movement, the Enlightenment has always had a distinctly seamy side. In its political incarnation, it was one of the factors that shaped modern-day terror. Right-thinking French philosophes campaigned for the prohibition of torture, but their ideas also gave birth to the Jacobin Terror that followed the French revolution...

Much of the state terror in the past century was secular, not religious. Lenin and Mao were avowed disciples of an Enlightenment ideology. Some will object that they misapplied this. And yet it is a feature of the fundamentalist mindset to posit a pristine faith, innocent of complicity in any crime its practitioners have ever committed, and capable – if only it is implemented in its pure, unsullied form – of eradicating practically any evil. This is pretty much what is asserted by those who claim that the solution to the world’s problems is mass conversion to "Enlightenment values"."


There's a great deal I agree with here, such as insistence that communism as an ideology was responsible for the crimes committed under it rather than any abuse of the political theory by its practitioners. Nonetheless, there are two particular aspects of the above that particularly irk me. Firstly, while Gray is certainly correct that communist denialists tend to exculpate their ideology by claiming the cultural revolution as an aberration, he comes quite close to some of Marx's tactics in that last paragraph, suggesting that objections to his ideas represent a covert proof of them. Popper disdained that sort of circular argument in Freud and Marx and would doubtless take a similar view of the above. Even without that, it seems a little disingenuous to cite communism as an Enlightenment project without mentioning that the ideas of pluralism and democracy that opposed it had the same pedigree; those ideas being the ones that provide the normative basis against which Gray himself can critique Kant for racism or Comte for conservatism. More pressingly, it's doubtful that the opponents that Gray is addressing here really exist in any meaningful form; believers in a Marxist or Hegelian conception of progress as a form of historical inevitability must be few and far between. His references to the Euston Manifesto ignore the problem that its signatories were a relatively small group without substantial influence; had they or like-minded individuals not existed recent historical events would have run exactly the same course. For all their references to democracy, it somewhat strains credulity to take the view that the political elites that instigated the Iraq war were especially motivated by ideals of progress rather than by religious faith or simple expediency. Certainly, if that was the case it left precious little trace on the domestic policies of either the British or American governments of that time.

While I tend to agree with Gray on the role of politics as a means of facilitating the co-existence of different groups and ideologies, the denial of any meliorist trend in politics is an essentially conservative or Hobbesian worldview. Susan Nieman's recent articles make this point rather well:

"It is this, the profound demoralisation of the left, that spurs Neiman on in Moral Clarity. ‘The left is where I come from’, she says, ‘but it has been so remiss in the last couple of decades.’ Realism and pragmatism, the watchwords of a left bereft of even a residual utopianism, have been no substitute for a moral vision, she continues. Rather, such realism merely left the way open for politicians of the right, like George W Bush, to seize the moral high ground. So while the then president was wittering on about ‘evil’, and by default ‘good’, the left was left with little more than hard-headed nihilism. As Neiman describes it, value-less and hopeless, the pragmatic left, content to unmask the workings of power, is content also to leave the world as it is. The left has come to see all idealism as tainted, and all talk of morality as an axis-of-evil-style charade. The left now appears to share the outlook of that arch-conservative Edmund Burke: ‘What kind of man would expect heaven and earth to bend to grand theories?’

As the figure whose work not only went beyond the static dualisms of German idealism, but sustained the left for many years, Karl Marx cannot but haunt a reading of a work like Moral Clarity. For he, above all others – including Hegel – sought to go beyond the ossified opposition of the world as it is and the world as it ought to be, by grasping reality as a process in which subject and object form a contradictory unity, in which the ‘ought’ inheres within the ‘is’. Where a dualistic perspective might render the conflicts of society as wrongs to be judged as such, Marx was able to grasp them as wrongs produced – and produced not by the labour of the concept, as with Hegel, but by the labour that produces not just use-values, but exchange value, too; that is, alienating labour, wage-labour. There was not simply a moral reason, there was also an actual reason, an actual possibility to change the world as it is.

In a sense, then, the collapse of not just the ideals but of the political movement underpinning Marx’s revolutionary perspective does seem to return us to a dualistic moment, a historical point in which the social world confronts a solitary individual. So does the dualism of Moral Clarity reflect the contemporary impasse? Neiman is resolute. The direction that Marx and Hegel took, she says, showed an impatience, a desire to force the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ to coincide. That Hegel’s absolute idealism led him rightwards, to make the ‘real rational’, and Marx’s materialism leftwards, is neither here nor there. Both sought to identify how things ought to be with necessity, whether historical or economic. Kantian idealism, however, is, as Neiman tells me, a grown-up idealism. It resists the violent utopianism of youth, but also the cynicism of youthful dreams disappointed. ‘You live with the dualism’, she says. ‘You always keep your eye on your actions and how you want the world to be. But you also need to be bound to a recognition, especially in political life, to the way that things are.’ ... Neiman at her Kantian best does not diminish but rather defends the autonomy of the moral subject. It is all about growing up for Neiman, about teaching people to use their judgment, their reason: ‘The Enlightenment gave reason pride of place, not because it expected absolute certainty, but because it sought a way to live without it.’"

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posted by Richard 12:16 pm

Monday, June 22, 2009

 
A list of real fantasy cities, with China Mieville's choice being London:

"Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It's chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can't quite make sense of, though we know it's there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me."


Mieville's choice is rather different to the other writers. Venice or Prague seem exotic because of their perceived exoticism, London because of its emphatic mundanity. After all, British science fiction tends to prefer to see forests in wardrobes or timeships in Police boxes. With that said, I've have chosen Oxford. From Hardy's Sepulchre College and Trollope's Lazarus College to Sayer's Shrewsbury College and Pullman's Jordan College, it's a city that already exists as a myriad of Calvino's invisible cities.

Update: although Moorcock picks Marrakesh as his city, this piece on London is in a rather similar vein:

"There aren’t many pictures of my childhood London. To get a glimpse of the world I grew up in, I have to give microscopic attention to the backgrounds of English movies made between 1945 and 1955 in the hope of seeing the ruined South Bank in Hue and Cry or the remains of Wapping in Night and the City... London was different up to 1940. In illustrated books, it often seems tranquil and quaint, full of lost churchyards and hidden courts. There were always places where the traffic noise dropped away and you could enjoy a bit of peace. That was before the firestorms blasted the East End into blazing fragments of people and buildings, when so much of that quaint tranquillity became heaps of rubble, tottering walls, fire-blasted windows, cut-aways of people’s private lives, their bathrooms and bedrooms, everything they’d valued, exposed to the hasty curiosity of the survivors.

Then there were the places where London was simply not – a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. These parts of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing survived except the larger 17th- and 18th-century buildings such as Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And, of course, St Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. You had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings themselves were the landmarks you used, like your 18th-century ancestors, to navigate from one place to the other.

Slowly the big brutal blocks of concrete and fake Le Corbusier flats began to dwarf St Paul’s and the Royal Mint, and the familiar trails disappeared, along with the alleys and yards, the little coffee shops and printers. Like an animal driven from its natural environment, I’d turn a corner and run into a newly made cliff. The docks disappeared with astonishing speed. One day the ships were shadows honking out of the smog and the next they were gone."

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posted by Richard 8:16 pm

Sunday, June 21, 2009

 
William Boyd writes on the role of parks in the English novel:

"Angus Wilson (1913-1991), novelist and short story writer, identified what he called an essential dichotomy in the English realistic novel dating back to Samuel Richardson in the 18th century, namely the concepts of "town" and "country" and the opposing values that they imply. The division is an intriguing one, even today, and it is still relatively easy to classify a novelist in one or the other camp. Are you essentially "urban" or are you "rural"? This is not an innocent question, as Wilson infers. To categorise yourself as one or the other is tendentious and provokes a series of unconscious judgments. In his long autobiographical essay, The Wild Garden, Wilson lists some of the antitheses that "town" and "country" respectively embody: progress versus tradition; art versus nature; industry versus the contemplative life; reason versus instinct; strained sensibility versus sturdy common sense, bohemianism versus rootedness, and so on.

Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, in the pantheon of English literature, perhaps best illustrate the split between the "town" writer as opposed to the "country" one. It is a very 19th-century juxtaposition, made particularly acute and particularly obvious as the industrial revolution took its remorseless grip on the nation. Mansfield Park.. It best reflects Angus Wilson's dichotomy of "town" versus "country" in the English novel, with Fanny Price and Mansfield Park - and dull Edmund Bertram - representing all that is solid and worthy of "country" values, set against the witty and louche sophistication of the "town" Crawfords from London.

According to Edmund Burke's treatise of 1756, The Sublime and the Beautiful, the sublime finds its source in anything capable of exciting pain or danger. Beauty, however, consists of anything small, smooth, with an absence of angularity and a brightness of colour. This sounds almost park-like to me, the park providing us with those qualities of beauty we require in our life - in contrast to what the "sublime" city represents with its pain and danger."


Wilson's dichotomies are perhaps slightly disingenuous; in Fielding, Burney and Dickens the transition from the country to the city is essentially a journey from rural virtue to urban vice. Of course, Dickens is perfectly capable of writing of rural vice, as in Nicholas Nickleby but the contrast is still at the centre of his work, even as his descriptions of the city seem to echo Baudelaire's celebration of the urban sublime. The comparison with French literature is revealing; Maupassant and Balzac certainly see the division of town and country as a moral one but are rather more likely to portray it as a contrast of sophistication with dullness. Zola is perhaps slightly less withering in his indictment of rural vice to its urban counterpart, but the difference is one of degree not of kind. Conversely, Johnson might have thought that is a man tires of London he tires of life, but it is difficult to discern it from his depictions of 'the great wen.' While London was the first major industrialised city, writers of that era still tended to denounce or avoid it. The nineteenth century English novel frequently takes rural locations as its setting, from the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy to George Eliot, with the same applying to poets like Tennyson and Hopkins. Writers like Gissing, Orwell and Hamilton could justly be argued to belong to a minority tradition. Crime writers like Christie and Allingham preferred rural settings, even when their subject matter was considerably better described as an urban phenomenon. Even as technology made buildings like the Crystal Palace possible, medieval gothic became the preferred architectural style and the garden city movement arose. What tends to be interesting in the English tradition isn't so much a conflict between town and city, but between the sentimental or pastoral and the romantic. In Lawrence and Forster, the country represents eros and wildness, while in Dickens and Gaskell it represents tradition and the merely picturesque. Eliot, Hardy and the Bronte sisters depict the country in terms of both these categories.

Of course, modern England's agricultural sector is one of the smallest in Europe, as is the percentage of forested land area. Pastoral is not a mode that can be convincingly deployed today, which may be suggestive for the current condition of English literature.

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posted by Richard 3:50 pm

Sunday, June 07, 2009

 
I wrote a while back on the effect of the current recession on right-wing politics. For the sake of entertainment, if nothing else, here's its leftwing counterpart:

"Is it time for a return to communism? And, if so, to which idea of communism must we turn?... 'On the Idea of Communism' was about Alain Badiou's idea of communism. Badiou doggedly kept faith with the concept of communism at a time, after 1989, when it was both pronounced dead and criminalized , identified with the totalitarianism that a triumphalist liberal capitalism defined itself against. The key reference points for Badiou’s anti-statist version of communism are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Jacobins and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The most obvious absence from this list is Karl Marx, and Badiou’s interjection in the closing discussion (see clip below) confirmed that he rejects the idea – fundamental to Marx – that the economic and the political are indivisible. For Badiou, the political must always hold itself at a principled distance from the economic. But is 'communism' the best name for Badiou's egalitarian and emancipatory philosophy? And does the word 'communism' have any further political viability?

An ambiguous spectre hangs over new formulations of Communist theory: a spectre called Marxism. In new Communist theory it cannot be fully discerned whether Marx has finally been put to rest, whether some organ without body of his theory persists; or rather, if his ghost is laughing, distraught, at the inscription of R.I.P. on his headstone, as the gears of global political economy grind on.

Still, there are good reasons for this ambiguity. Unlike Marx’s prophetic vision, the gravedigging of history turned out not to be capitalism digging its own hole, but rather capitalism, and a generation or two of disillusioned post-Marxists, digging the grave for Marxism itself. After all, the Marx of historical materialism appeared to die when capitalism emerged triumphant from the Cold War; the Marx of class struggle as the dialectical-historical motor of change appeared to die with the defeat of working class; and the Marx of revolutionary philosophy appeared to die with the turn to the anti-dialectical forms of 'resistance' propounded by Foucault, Deleuze, Laclau et al. Consequentially, when in recent years the term Communism has been resuscitated by theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, it has been at the expense of a presumed caesura between Marxism and Communism. "


I suppose this makes a pleasant change from attempts to explain that communism as implemented had nothing to do with its Marxist origins, but it's still not especially convincing. From the look of how matters are actually progressing, a resurgence in communism, Marxist or otherwise, is the last thing that we can expect. When I voted in the European elections last week I was somewhat mortified to look at the long list of parties on the ballot paper, a list that was so long the paper had to have a perforated extensions to fit the remaining parties on it. The tendency of parties to dissolve into sectarian factions over points of doctrine is something I tend to associate with the left (Labour, the Liberal Democrats, No2EU and the Socialist Labour Party were all represented) but this paper seemed to suggest that it's become as much of a tendency for the right (quite a long list of nationalist parties like UKIP or the EDP, as well as the unwelcome presence of a christian party as clearly the absence of the religious right was a grave loss for British politics). It's slightly amusing to see both the left and the right campaign against the EU on entirely contradictory and opposed grounds. The BNP were of course present as well, although the content of their election pamphlets was not much different to that of UKIP. The result was a fragmented vote, in which the left-wing share declined as the working class switched to the extreme right and the middle class switched to the Greens, thereby allowing free market parties like the Tories to benefit from a recession caused by excessive free market deregulation. Here's Jonathan Derbyshire's analysis:

"One of the most striking things about the period since 15 September 2008 – the day that Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States – has been the lack of any concerted intellectual response to the financial crisis on the left. A "sort of deathly hush" has descended, when the conditions might have led one to expect increasing "ideological polarisation"... Murdoch recommended that the left rediscover its taste for moral, rather than mechanical, reform, and reach back beyond welfarism and utilitarianism to ideas that could be found in William Morris as well as Marx. This prescription is echoed here... the crisis of neoliberalism is also a crisis of a certain conception of the individual human being – as "financialised subject" or "rational" preference-maximiser."

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posted by Richard 6:46 pm

Sunday, May 24, 2009

 
This article by Stanley Fish on the Terry Eagleton's latest book has already received more attention that it really deserves, but I nonetheless thought that there some points to it that might have been overlooked:

In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, "Reason, Faith and Revolution," the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, "Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?" His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. "What other symbolic form," he queries, "has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?"

Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its "subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life." And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to "a radical transformation of what we say and do."

The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: "A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised."

And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of "the telescope and the microscope" religion "no longer offers an explanation of anything important," Eagleton replies, "But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov."

Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: "[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus." Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else.

"Ditchkins," Eagleton observes, cannot ground his belief "in the value of individual freedom" in scientific observation. It is for him an article of faith, and once in place, it generates facts and reasons and judgments of right and wrong. "Faith and knowledge," Eagleton concludes, are not antithetical but "interwoven." You can’t have one without the other, despite the Satanic claim that you can go it alone by applying your own independent intellect to an unmediated reality: "All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior commitment." Meaning, value and truth are not "reducible to the facts themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare account of them." Which is to say that there is no such thing as a bare account of them. (Here, as many have noted, is where religion and postmodernism meet.)

If this is so, the basis for what Eagleton calls "the rejection of religion on the cheap" by contrasting its unsupported (except by faith) assertions with the scientifically grounded assertions of atheism collapses; and we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny...

The religions I know are about nothing but doubt and dissent, and the struggles of faith, the dark night of the soul, feelings of unworthiness, serial backsliding, the abyss of despair. Whether it is the book of Job, the Confessions of St. Augustine, Calvin’s Institutes, Bunyan’s "Grace Abounding to The Chief of Sinners," Kierkegaard’s "Fear and Trembling" and a thousand other texts, the religious life is depicted as one of aspiration within the conviction of frailty. The heart of that life, as Eagleton reminds us, is not a set of propositions about the world (although there is some of that), but an orientation toward perfection by a being that is radically imperfect.


The theory suggested by the likes of Derrida and Barthes and expounded by Eagleton and Fish had its ultimate origins in a critique of the Platonic and Biblical conception of logos, of the word as an inerrant source of truth. The increasing trend throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to regard the word as an unreliable proxy for the concepts it denoted, culminating in Derrida's view of meaning as simply an endless chain of differance, in which one word simply represents another and then another, without any transcendent truth standing behind them. In other words, much of this tradition is explictly anti-religious, denying that holy texts have another capacity to represent anything other than themselves. While the conflict with science is equally evident in the work of Lyotard, I am very far from being persuaded that post-modernism and religion have as much in common as is being suggested above. Certainly, Christian theology is far from being without strains of thought based around the ineffability of the divine, but they hardly account for the majority of the christian tradition. Equally, the description Eagleton proposes of christianity as being akin to a form of art for art's sake, something that does not attempt to describe or prescribe the world, is something that barely seems recognisable to either a contemporary christanity which rarely lets a week slip without a cardinal or bishop somewhere making incursions into secular politics or to a history where the personal aspects of faith have been very far from those that have been most pronounced. Most religions do indeed purport to describe the world, they certainly attempt to prescribe how it should be and they typically do so without much evidence of the doubt Fish rather probably assigns to them above. In any case, this idea of religion as a form of 'non-overlapping magisteria' hardly seems consistent with Eagleton's vision of christianity as a radically transformative ideology, a kind of surrogate for communism. No ideology can dictate how the world should be made anew without some form of denunciation of how it stands at present, and christianity is no different to this. Having long viewed communism as a form of materialistic religion, it hardly surprises me that Eagleton has switched from one totalising ideology to another, although given his dismissal of the liberal ideal of progress as a myth it would be interesting to see how he copes with the problem that the ideal of progress and of history as teleological is a christian concept and one that is particularly evident in some of his current utopianism.

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posted by Richard 7:33 pm

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

 
As I've mentioned before, my suspicion is that this period represents the end of a particular historical period and the decline of many of its economic, political and military assumptions. As a result, seemed to echo a few of those themes:

"For a brief period, it became possible to believe that the West was headed for a condition of permanent peace; that technology, democracy, and globalization were driving a virtuous circle that no atavistic violence could disrupt. This vision never came very close to becoming a reality; the late nineteenth century was, after all, the era of communism and anarchism, imperialism and scientific racism. It is remarkable, then, to consider how many of the greatest writers of the period were exercised by the possibility that reason, progress, and material well-being—in short, the bourgeois order—might destroy the human spirit. The definitive statement of this view was offered by Nietzsche in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra...

No sooner had humanity emerged from a century of hot and cold wars than Fukuyama was resurrecting Nietzsche’s admonition that a world of peace and prosperity would be a world of Last Men. "The life of the last men is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates," he pointed out. "Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the species homo sapiens?" While Fukuyama appreciates the seriousness of the Nietzschean warning, he hears it from the perspective of a partisan, not a foe, of liberalism. The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men—and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue—cannot establish freedom or protect it.

They are victims of the zeitgeist—of "Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century," which Houellebecq describes in the novel’s very first lines as "an age that was miserable and troubled," when "the relationships between . . . contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel." The most destructive agent of this indifference is Bruno and Michel’s mother, Janine, who Houellebecq describes as an early adapter of the hedonistic, materialistic lifestyle that would become routine after the 1960s and the sexual revolution... Bruno and Michel are the prime exhibits in Houellebecq’s programmatic indictment of modern European sexual mores. Starting in the 1960s, he writes, "a ‘youth culture’ based principally on sex and violence" began to drive out the ancient Judeo-Christian culture that valued monogamy, mutual devotion, and self-restraint. The innovative element in Houellebecq’s argument is to link this new hedonism with the triumph of the European welfare state. Freed from all concern about politics and economics, men and women had nothing to occupy themselves with but the pursuit of sensual gratification. But this pursuit quickly developed into a Hobbesian war of all against all, in which the young and attractive are the objects of worship while the ugly and shy, like Bruno, are utterly despised. "Of all worldly goods," Bruno rages, "youth is clearly the most precious, and today we don’t believe in anything but worldly goods.

The Rings of Saturn is not really a novel; there is no plot and no character development. It is, rather, a branching series of stories and memories, one giving rise to the next by no logic except that of free association. In the second chapter, for instance, Sebald starts out remembering a train ride from Norwich to Lowestoft. Along the way he observes that the countryside was once covered with windmills, which have now all disappeared; visits a country house that was an architectural marvel of Victorian England, and is now a crumbling, unvisited museum; walks down a boardwalk that was once a popular holiday destination and is now seedy and abandoned; and remembers a story he once heard about two American pilots who crashed nearby, close to the end of Second World War. In other words, Sebald is drawn to stories of abandonment and loss, to sites where Western civilization seems to have died out, to obsolete technologies and unrecapturable pasts. As the book goes on, he assembles so many of these tales as to become a Scheherazade of destruction. And because Sebald the wanderer almost never encounters another person, he manages to produce the eerie sense that England itself has been abandoned, that he may be the last man left to catalog its ruins."


The article in full makes some rather odd connections with Robert Kagan's analysis of Europe's 'post-historical' condition, which seems a little odd when one considers where America's embrace of power and history has led it and that the present US administration is adopting a mode that is rather more congenial to European sensibilities than someone like Kagan would probably like. As a result, the literary criticism seems somewhat off-key also; Houellebecq is notable for being as scabrous a critic of free market economics as he is of permissive culture (the critique made above could easily have been made of Wells or Huxley and is made to a large extent from the standpoint of a writer who models himself as a futurist), while the critique of Sebald could have been made of any number of romantic writers fascinated by ruin and decay (Hawthorne and Poe amongst them, while Rodenbach and Lampedusa match the above description rather better than Sebald). George Steiner's Bluebeard's Castle explains this well:

"The motif I want to fix on is that of ennui. "Boredom" is not an adequate translation, nor is Langweile except, perhaps, in Schopenhauer's usage; la noia comes much nearer. I have in mind manifold processes of frustration, of cumulative desoeuvrement. Energies eroded to routine as entropy increases. Repeated motion or inactivity, sufficiently prolonged, secrete a poison in the blood, an acid torpor. Febrile lethargy; the drowsy nausea (so precisely described by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria) of a man who misses a step in a dark staircase -- there are many approximate terms and images. Baudelaire's use of &uot;spleen" comes closest...

"Vague epouvante," "humeur farouche" are signals we shall want to keep in mind. What I want to stress here is the fact that a corrosive ennui is as much an element of nineteenth-century culture as was the dynamic optimism of the positivist and the Whig. It was not only, in Eliot's arresting phrase, the souls of housemaids that were damp. A kind of marsh gas of boredom and vacuity thickened at crucial nerve-ends of social and intellectual life. For every text of Benthamite confidence, of proud meliorism, we can find a counterstatement of nervous fatigue. 1851 was the year of the Universal Exhibition, but also of the publication of a group of desolate, autumnal poems, which Baudelaire issued under the significant title Les Limbes. To me the most haunting, prophetic outcry of the nineteenth century is Theophile Gautier's "plutot la barbarie que l'ennui!" If we can come to understand the sources of that perverse longing, of that itch for chaos, we will be nearer to an understanding of our own state and of the relations of our condition to the accusing ideal of the past.

We also lack a history of the future tense (in another context I am trying to show what such a phenomenology of internal grammar would be). But it is clear that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic decades brought on an overwhelming immanence, a deep, emotionally stressed change in the quality of hope. Expectations of progress, of personal and social enfranchisement, which had formerly had a conventional, often allegoric character, as of a millenary horizon, suddenly moved very close. The great metaphor of renewal, of the creation, as by a second coming of secular grace, of a just, rational city for man, took on the urgent drama of concrete possibility. The eternal "tomorrow" of utopian political vision became, as it were, Monday morning. We experience something of this dizzying sense of total possibility when reading the decrees of the Convention and of the Jacobin régime: injustice, superstition, poverty are to be eradicated now, in the next glorious hour. The world is to shed its worn skin a fortnight hence. In the grammar of Saint-Juste the future tense is never more than moments away. If we seek to trace this irruption -- it was that violent -- of dawn into private sensibility, we need look only to Wordsworth's Prelude and to the poetry of Shelley. The crowning statement, perhaps, is to be found in Marx's economic and political manuscripts of 1844. Not since early Christianity had men felt so near to renovation and to the end of night."

What was a gifted man to do after Napoleon? How could organisms bred for the electric air of revolution and imperial epic breathe under the leaden sky of middle-class rule? How was it possible for a young man to hear his father's tales of the Terror and of Austerlitz and to amble down the placid boulevard to the countinghouse?... The generation of 1830 was damned by memories of events, of hopes, in which it had taken no personal part. It nursed within "un fonds d'incurable tristesse et d'incurable ennui." No doubt there was narcissism in this cultivation, the somber complacency of dreamers who, from Goethe to Turgenev, sought to identify with Hamlet. But the void was real, and the sensation of history gone absurdly wrong. Stendhal is the chronicler of genius of this frustration. He had participated in the insane vitality of the Napoleonic era; he conducted the rest of his life in the ironic guise of a man betrayed. It is a terrible thing to be "languissant d'ennui au plus beau moment de la vie, de seize ans jusqu'a vingt" (Mlle. de La Mole's condition before she resolves to love Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le noir). Madness, death are preferable to the interminable Sunday and suet of a bourgeois life-form. How can an intellectual bear to feel within himself something of Bonaparte's genius, something of that demonic strength which led from obscurity to empire, and see before him nothing but the tawdry flatness of bureaucracy? Raskolnikov writes his essay on Napoleon and goes out to kill an old woman. The collapse of revolutionary hopes after 1815, the brutal deceleration of time and radical expectation, left a reservoir of unused, turbulent energies. The romantic generation was jealous of its fathers. The "antiheroes," the spleen-ridden dandies in the world of Stendhal, Musset, Byron, and Pushkin, move through the bourgeois city like condottieri out of work.

It is precisely from the 1830s onward that one can observe the emergence of a characteristic "counterdream" - the vision of the city laid waste, the fantasies of Scythian and Vandal invasion, the Mongol steeds slaking their thirst in the fountains of the Tuileries Gardens. An odd school of painting develops: pictures of London, Paris, or Berlin seen as colossal ruins, famous landmarks burnt, eviscerated, or located in a weird emptiness among charred stumps and dead water. Romantic fantasy anticipates Brecht's vengeful promise that nothing shall remain of the great cities except the wind that blows through them. Exactly a hundred years later, these apocalyptic collages and imaginary drawings of the end of Pompeii were to be our photographs of Warsaw and Dresden. It needs no psychoanalysis to suggest how strong a part of wish-fulfillment there was in these nineteenth-century intimations. Romantic exoticism, that longing for le pays lointain, for "faery lands forlorn," reflected different hurts: ennui, a feeling of impotence in the face of political reaction and philistine rule, a hunger for new colors, new shapes, new possibilities of nervous discovery, to set against the morose proprieties of bourgeois and Victorian modes. It also had its strain of primitivism. If Western culture had gone bad in the teeth, there might be sources of new vision among distant savageries.

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posted by Richard 7:09 pm

Friday, February 20, 2009

 
Every so often I break my rule on avoiding political subjects and publish a political post. I regret to announce that this article has provoked one of them:

"It's very clear we're in the middle of a paradigm shift," he says. "We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal project - just as 30 years ago we saw the end of Keynesianism. We're in a shift of comparable proportions. The interesting question is what comes next." Blond argues that what ought to come next is something he calls communitarian civic conservatism - or "Red Toryism". "The current political consensus", he writes, is "left-liberal in culture and right-liberal in econo­mics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be." However, Blond thinks that Cameron and the Tories are beginning to see their way beyond the impasse. They are right, he says: we do live in a broken society. But it wasn't only the dead hand of the welfare state that caused the bonds and attachments of civil association (the "old mutualism of the working class" and so on) to give way; late-modern capitalism's "perennial gale of creative destruction" (to use Joseph Schumpeter's phrase) has played its part, too....

A central feature of his Toryism is a critique of "liberalism", a term capacious enough in his hands to apply to the cultural libertarianism of the 1960s as well as to the great philosophers of the liberal tradition, such as Locke or Mill. According to Blond, what the post-1968 "politics of desire" shares with those liberal titans, and in fact also with the Thatcherite or neoliberal model of rational economic behaviour, is a certain idea of individual human beings.

In the liberal view, at least as Blond characterises it, the defence of individual freedom, in its most extreme form, demands of each man that "he refuse the dictates of any other". In other words, liberal autonomy entails the repudiation of society, and no vision of the common good can be derived from liberal principles. The atomised dystopia of 21st-century Britain, the "broken society" overseen by a highly centralised bureaucratic state, turns out to have been the historic bequest of Locke and Mill. This is contentious, to say the least. Several commentators, notably the Oxford political theorist Stuart White, have criticised the history of liberalism that underpins the Red Tory thesis. White points out that the fundamental principles of justice articulated in the work of a liberal philosopher such as John Rawls amount to a vision of the "common good", and that for Rawls those principles impose just the sort of civic obligations on citizens that Blond regards as desirable, but to which he thinks liberals are fatally indifferent."


While I suppose it's interesting that conservatives have finally noticed that free market economics tends to dissolve traditional social structures thirty years after the rest of us did, I did find myself chortling at the idea of the current political consensus being 'left liberal on culture.' It seems significantly more likely the precise opposite has been true; social authoritarianism and economic liberalism seems a good description of the current administration. Civil liberties have invariably been construed as stumbling blocks to other policy goals, as with recent news stories relating to the curtailing of freedom of speech in the interests of 'community cohesion.' More specifically, much social policy has been quite explicitly communitarian (Amitai Etzioni surely counts as one of the most prominent intellectuals of the last decade), which accounts for the increasingly Benthamite and coercive character it has taken on. Government policy has been used increasingly as an almost Pavlovian means of determining means of enforcing desired forms of behaviour. Even if economic policy now seems inevitable to swing sharply away from laissez faire economic and back to a planned model, on social policy it looks as if the prospects ahead are essentially for more of the same of what we've had for the last ten years. I'm not looking forward to it much.

Update: a related piece from Richard Posner:

"The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the surge of prosperity worldwide that marked the global triumph of capitalism, the essentially conservative policies, especially in economics, of the Clinton administration, and finally the election and early years of the Bush Administration, marked the apogee of the conservative movement... My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising... And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Kenyes, a conservatives' bête noire."

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posted by Richard 8:59 pm

Saturday, February 07, 2009

 
A somewhat unusual article on Post-Soviet 'Gothic morality:'

"How can we discover the consequences of historical amnesia? How can we employ customary historical methods to measure the impact of absent memory on contemporary Russian society? What kind of sources could reveal for us this hidden work of deformed memory that results in transformations of values, attitudes, customs and social relations? Fiction is a particularly fruitful source for studying historical representations of the Stalinist past. As a genre, it addresses moral and aesthetic dilemmas; describes transformations of values, attitudes, customs and social relations; and provides access to the emotions and to the workings of the individual memory of its protagonists. Post-Soviet fiction, loaded with reminiscences of Soviet terror and atrocities, discloses the connection between suppressed memory and the emergence of new moral norms and social structures.

However post-Soviet fiction differs considerably from realistic prose such as Tolstoy's War and Peace or even Grossman's Life and Fate. It is overwhelmed by all kind of magic and monsters – vampires, witches and werewolves... Over the last three centuries, Enlightenment rationality has boxed dragons and witches into a specific genre – fairy tale. Now we see them becoming the main protagonists of novels and films aimed at adults. The human being, that as an inheritance of the Enlightenment used to be the centre of the anthropocentric universe, has been pushed to the periphery in favour of the non-human. Two highly popular cult novels – Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch and Vadim Panov's Taganski Crossroads – serve as examples. Their success with the Russian reading public is testified by huge print runs and by the fact that they have been turned into movies and computer games. Both novels share features that are typical for the genre in general. Both leave the realities of Russian culture and society almost intact, making them extremely fertile for an analysis of moral and aesthetic developments. Their main protagonists are strikingly similar: rank-and-file administrators, average men on the street, painstakingly portrayed positive heroes with whom the reader fully identifies. In both novels, the plot unfolds in contemporary Moscow.

A simple mental experiment helps to prove this statement. If we remove the vampires, werewolves and witches from these narratives and substitute them with cops, gangsters and their victims, if we parenthesize the witchcraft and the magic, the story would not differ much from a pale description of everyday Russian life. At the heart of gothic morality is a remarkable equality of good and evil, expressed in Night Watch by the opposition between "light" and "dark" vampires. Their methods and goals are explicitly compared and judged to be the same. Nevertheless, light and dark vampires represent not just a metaphor for the notorious convergence of the state and mafia in Russia. The impossibility of distinguishing good from evil – the heroes conclude – makes any attempt to do so a sheer absurdity. The total denial of morality leads to a cult of force. Gothic morality considers murder an everyday routine – who counts (dead) humans? "Life against death, love against hate, and force against force, because force is above morality. It's that simple," concludes the hero of Night Watch... Personal loyalty to the boss is the only principle that the hero of post-Soviet fantasy never betrays. He is always ready to go against his own judgments, betray his inferiors and the norms of his unit to obey his boss's orders."


It's not an overly persuasive argument. It may be true that Lukyanenko does tend to depict the forces of light and dark as being opposed but equivalent, needing to be brought into balance. The two concepts sometimes seem equivalent to good and evil, sometimes not. But in any case, much of the above criticism of Lukyanenko would also apply to the likes of Anne Rice or any number of contemporary horror novelists in any number of other Western countries. I'm also not persuaded that it's such a bad thing to deny the validity of collective projects (or meta-narratives); if anything, that also seems a rather Western attitude. With that said, it is interesting for other reasons. Realist fiction does tend to presume some degree of social homogeneity or stability, in keeping with its status as what Lukacs called the "bourgeois epic," even if ghost stories were a favourite pastime for the writers as produced landmarks of nineteenth century realist fiction. Nontheless, this may be part of why the fantastic is a familiar component of Russian literature (or why South America produced magical realism). Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Gogol all wrote stories quite similar to the above, set in a familiar realist setting and depicting average men on the street. It would have seem more persuasive to me to observe that horror fiction in increasingly post-traditional societies that lack chiastic structures of good and evil to rehabilitate (or emasculate) the monsters they depict. In other words, to foreground the romantic outcast and decenter the damned creature. A novel like Dracula is frequently depicted as an allegory of Victorian anxieties that perhaps lack the same force today:

"According to Nina Auerbach, in "Our Vampires, Ourselves" (1995), Dracula’s crimes are merely symbols of the real-life sociopolitical horrors facing the late Victorians. One was immigration. At the end of the century, Eastern European Jews, in flight from the pogroms, were pouring into Western Europe, thereby threatening to dilute the pure blood of the English, among others. Dracula, too, is an émigré from the East. Stoker spends a lot of words on the subject of blood, and not just when Dracula extracts it. Fully four of the book’s five vampire-hunters have their blood transfused into Lucy’s veins, and this process is recorded with grisly exactitude. (We see the incisions, the hypodermics.) So Stoker may in fact have been thinking of the racial threat. Like other novels of the period, Dracula contains invidious remarks about Jews. They have big noses, they like money—the usual.

At that time, furthermore, people in England were forced, by the scandal of the Oscar Wilde trials (1895), to think about something they hadn’t worried about before: homosexuality. Many scholars have found suggestions of homoeroticism in
Dracula. Auerbach, by contrast, finds the book annoyingly heterosexual. Earlier vampire tales, such as Polidori’s story and Carmilla, made room for the mutability of erotic experience. In those works, sex didn’t have to be man to woman. And it didn’t have to be outright sex—it might just be fervent friendship. As Auerbach sees it, Stoker, spooked by the Wilde case, backed off from this rich ambiguity, thereby impoverishing vampire literature. After him, she says, vampire art became reactionary. This echoes Stephen King’s statement that all horror fiction, by pitting an absolute good against an absolute evil, is "as Republican as a banker in a three-piece suit."

According to some critics, another thing troubling Stoker was the New Woman, that turn-of-the-century avatar of the feminist. Again, there is support for this. The New Woman is referred to dismissively in the book, and the God-ordained difference between the sexes—basically, that women are weak but good, and men are strong but less good—is reiterated with maddening persistence. On the other hand, Mina, the novel’s heroine, and a woman of unquestioned virtue, looks, at times, like a feminist. She works for a living, as a schoolmistress, before her marriage, and the new technology, which should have been daunting to a female, holds no mysteries for her. She’s a whiz as a typist—a standard New Woman profession. Also, she is wise and reasonable—male virtues. Nevertheless, her primary characteristic is a female trait: compassion. (At one point, she even pities Dracula.) Stoker, it seems, had mixed feelings about the New Woman.

Whether or not politics was operating in Stoker’s novel, it is certainly at work in our contemporary vampire literature. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series openly treats vampires as a persecuted minority. Sometimes they are like black people (lynch mobs pursue them), sometimes like homosexuals (rednecks beat them up). Meanwhile, they are trying to go mainstream. Sookie’s Bill has sworn off human blood, or he’s trying; he subsists on a Japanese synthetic. He registers to vote (absentee, because he cannot get around in daylight)... In The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice also seems to regard her undead as an oppressed group. Their suffering is probably, at some level, a story about AIDS. All this is a little confusing morally. How can we have sympathy for the Devil and still regard him as the Devil?"

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posted by Richard 2:16 pm

Sunday, December 28, 2008

 
This article from the Guardian struck me as being far removed the point:

"When the phrase 'Hampstead novel' was used in the 80s, everyone knew exactly what it meant: a middle-class morality novel - probably involving adultery and shallow-masquerading-as-deep. Critics fastened on 'Hampstead' as if the place itself might be a clue to content - as if the postcode was a giveaway. But, actually, the idea of Hampstead may never have had much to do with reality. Professor John Sutherland says the phrase became more an 'idea' than a 'topographical truth' ... What is perhaps most interesting about this slippery mirage of a genre is what it suggests about place itself - and the way it can take hold and have an independent life in a reader's imagination. It was the 'Hampstead novel' tag that first nudged me towards thinking about the way places are used as critical shorthand. I started to wonder about the geography of novels - and whether we still use place as a symbolic key to content...

'Chelsea, Hampstead and St John's Wood have been replaced by Monica Ali's Brick Lane and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, set in Hounslow and on the Heathrow Flight path.' (There may be hope for the Luton novel yet.) Hahn points out that gaps in the A-Z tend to be filled by 'non British writers'. 'Fifty years ago,' he says, "it would have been amazing to read a novel like Monica Ali's from someone with a different background.".. In non fiction, Iain Sinclair made his name writing about such places (no small feat to write compellingly about the M25 as he has done in London Orbital). In fiction, Blake Morrison is one of a growing number of writers attempting to do something comparable. He could hardly be plainer about his allegiance: his most recent novel is called South of the River... Yet although British novelists now spread their nets more widely, there is still a paucity of state-of-the-nation novelists, writers able to move freely across the map and get an aerial view. Hanif Kureishi puts it like this: 'Dickens had a sense of the whole society, from prisoner to home secretary. No writer has that now.'"


It's certainly true that place was an especially important concept in the Victorian novel. George Eliot wrote of how she saw it as nurturing and forming character, making it the basis for the balance of character and society that is the hallmark of the Victorian novel (to the extent that Moretti could construct a series of maps from Dickens and Balzac). In Eliot, Hardy and the Bronte sisters (and DH Lawrence later), the place is typically rural, albeit one being transformed under the impact of an increasingly commercial and industrial society. In others, like Gaskell and Dickens, there is a contrast of urban squallor and vice with rural virtue, following the likes of Fielding. As society became increasingly urbanised (not to mention less homogeneous) these sorts of themes work less well. In contemporary terms, people are more mobile between places, less likely to be influenced by one areas. I often think of a line from Peter Shaffer's play Equus, about how the very concept of place has been eroded in the modern world. Equally, place has become an increasinly homogeneous concept, with most of the population living in suburbs that are invariably designed as to be mutually interchangeable, before travelling to work in offices of glass and steel that come close to being mass manufactured. Contemporary geography is characterised by what Marc Auge calls the unplace; places like supermarkets, motorways, hotels, business parks or airports that are the architecture of transience rather than social stability: "... like the place, the non-place doesn't exist in pure form; it's more likely that new places are generated, relations are reconstructed within. Place and non-place are contrary poles; the place never disappears completely and the non-place is never fully established - they are palimpsests on which the confusing game of identity and relation finds its own reflection over and over."

As such, it seems to me that the writer that best characterises the modern concept of place is JG Ballard:

"One of the things I like about Ballard is how he treats architectural space: highway flyovers, corporate campuses, flooded hotels, suburban home-development projects, abandoned swimming pools, army camps in the desert. He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human. He encodes all this, or hardwires it, into the actual landscapes of his novels. You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It's a 'malfunctioning central nervous system' in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilisation.

Ballardian space is psycho-spatial. His books are full of artificial lakes, highway medians, multi-storey car parks, strangely over-air-conditioned corporate boardrooms – and these all take on a kind of menacing, even confrontational, gleam, as if you’ve just stepped into some kind of unspoken mental challenge. The buildings and cities and landscapes in Ballard’s novels are more like psychological traps built by management consultants – not architects – who then fly overhead in private jets, looking down, checking whether their complicated theories of human cognition have survived the test. Where 'the test' is the world you and I now live in.

Of course, any built environment has a psychological impact on the people who live there. In Super-Cannes, for instance, the book's setting – an office park – is haunted by a kind of 'controlled and supervised madness,' Ballard writes. One of the characters explains, at great length, how the too-perfect and over-manicured landscapes of this new corporate enclave inspire sexual violence and anti-immigrant raids – a rebellion against the boredom of tennis courts and well-mowed lawns. Every artificial landscape is the diagram of a certain psychological state – even if that just means reflecting the dominant aesthetic of the day. But the idea that the built landscape can be read as an 'encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis,' as Ballard writes, crossing generations and countries, just fascinates me.

Space in Ballard’s novels is never deeply textured or deeply described. Instead, you get these abstract non-places – a corporate campus, a media center, a fitness complex. You drive down feeder roads and airport roundabouts and cross-city motorways. You never enter a world of rich, Dickensian details. He's like the anti-Dickens. You don’t walk past churches and bookshops and local bars and farmers' markets and whatever else makes a believable urban setting; you're always out in this weird edge-world of import warehouses and corporate development projects. Sports-car dealerships. The very lack of detail is what makes a setting Ballardian."

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posted by Richard 3:38 pm

Sunday, December 14, 2008

 
This article on Julian of Norwich struck several chords with me:

"I found the place unsettling. For a start there was the cold silence of the empty church and the bare room adjoining it: the site where Julian spent years of her life secluded from society, immersed in hallucinatory visions that she was convinced were sent to her direct from God... In this atmosphere of desperate piety, it wasn't too hard to imagine a 14th Century divine chuntering away to herself about bodily sickness, wounds and the stench of the Fiend... But the bonds of time have been broken. The sign went on to say: "War destroyed the building …" In 1942, a German bomb hit the building where Julian had spent so much of her lonely life as an anchoress. The church I was standing in was a reconstruction.

I felt similarly cut off when I read Julian's writing. There's a saying about writers and intellectuals holding hands across the ages, their linked arms forming a barrier against the cruel incursions of time. It's a lovely and persuasive thought, but it doesn't always hold true. Sometimes writers also push us away: reminding us just how foreign a country the past is – and how differently they do things there. Certainly, Julian's thought processes, even in Elizabeth Spearing's elegant translation in the current Penguin edition, are alien to me... The Christian guardians of her shrine and this website claim that her message is one of hope and love, but to me it seemed one of dread and cruel masochism. Julian begs to be hurt and abased before her God – a God she obsesses over in pages and pages of contorted, twisting theology that neither makes sense nor is, to be blunt, at all interesting - even if she took the daring step of attributing feminine aspects to Him."


I often wonder why people often seem to characterise literature as an atemporal phenomenon that transcends the time and place that produced it and is as readily comprehensible centuries later as it was at the time. The above was essentially my response to the majority of medieval literature and its concern with the extinction of the self in favour of the divine (I particularly recall Eco's description of medieval literature as a place where everything was subordinated to the theocratic). In an age where writing has been primarily interested in the individual consciousness for hundreds of years, the likes of Margery Kempe are not especially congruent with the modern sensibility. Even in the case of Chaucer I always had the sense that his characters were two dimensional replicas of what a character in a more modern work might look like, filtered through a rather narrow set of social and religious concerns that were all he had to hand to create consciousness out of. The only exceptions that I can immediately recall were, rather oddly, Langland (being too heterodox to fit in with conventional religious categories there's a form of inadvertent invididualism to his work) and Malory.

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posted by Richard 2:05 pm

Friday, December 12, 2008

 
It comes as something of a relief to discover that I disagree with this rather pious piece on authenticity by Denis Dutton:

"A forged painting, for example, will not be inauthentic in every respect: a Han van Meegeren forgery of a Vermeer is at one and the same time both a fake Vermeer and an authentic van Meegeren, just as a counterfeit bill may be both a fraudulent token of legal tender but at the same time a genuine piece of paper. The way the authentic/inauthentic distinction sorts out is thus context-dependent to a high degree. Mozart played on a modern grand piano might be termed inauthentic, as opposed to being played on an eighteenth-century forte-piano, even though the notes played are authentically Mozart's. A performance of Shakespeare that is at pains to recreate Elizabethan production practices, values, and accents would be to that extent authentic, but may still be inauthentic with respect to the fact that it uses actresses for the female parts instead of boys, as would have been the case on Shakespeare’s stage. Authenticity of presentation is relevant not only to performing arts. Modern museums, for example, have been criticized for presenting old master paintings in strong lighting conditions which reveal detail, but at the same time give an overall effect that is at odds with how works would have been enjoyed in domestic spaces by their original audiences; cleaning, revarnishing, and strong illumination arguably amount to inauthentic presentation. Religious sculptures created for altars have been said to be inauthentically displayed when presented in a bare space of a modern art gallery....There may be Roman sculptures, copies of older Greek originals, which are in some respects aesthetically better than their older prototypes, as there may be copies by Rembrandt of other Dutch artists that are aesthetically more pleasing than the originals...

With a painting, therefore, there normally exists an original, nominally authen­tic object that can be identified as 'the' original; nothing corresponds to this in music. Even a composer’s own performance of an instrumental score — say, Rachmaninoff playing his piano concertos — cannot fully constrain the interpretive choices of other performers or define for ever 'the' authentic performance... Bach's keyboard writing includes interweaved musical voices which, under the hands of a skilled pianist such as Glenn Gould, can often be revealed more clearly on a modern concert grand than on a harpsichord.

This explains why aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects — to be enjoyed without regard to any notion of their origins — are unsatisfactory. If works of art appealed only to our formal or decorative aesthetic sense, there would indeed be little point in establishing their human contexts by tracing their development, or even in distinguishing them from similarly appealing natural objects — flowers or seashells. But works of art of all societies express and embody both cultural beliefs general to a people and personal character and feeling specific to an individual. Moreover, this fact accounts for a large part, though not all, of our interest in works of art. To deny this would be implicitly to endorse precisely the concept of the eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet, in which Assyrian shards, tropical seashells, a piece of Olmec jade, geodes, netsuke, an Attic oil lamp, bird of paradise feathers, and a Maori patu might lay side by side in indifferent splendour. The propriety of the curiosity cabinet approach to art has been rejected in contemporary thought in favour of a desire to establish provenance and cultural meaning precisely because intra- and inter-cultural relationships among artworks help to constitute their meaning and identity."


It generally seems to me that inauthenticity could possibly be construed as a political or moral issue. I'm not convinced it represents an aesethetic issue, except perhaps as an obstacle to what Shklovsky called ostranenie or defamiliarisation. One might need to understand the historical or biographical context of an artwork in order to fully comprehend it. Nonetheless, contrast is as valid a mode as analysis and museums and galleries descended from the wunderkammer still exist.

To begin with obvious example of art galleries, the question that leaps immediately to mind is that of how works removed from that space become denuded of meaning, as with Duchamp's urinal; remove it from an art gallery and it becomes simply that. The art gallery becomes a place where normal mechanisms of perception are suspended and artistic authenticity becomes situational. The walls of galleries across the world are hung with fakes that are only discernible through the most precise forms of forensic analysis and which will be otherwise all but opaque. At its simplest level, people routinely hang their walls with mass produced replicas of artworks that presumably impart some small fragment of the original. The authenticity of van Meegeren's paintings or Reinhold Vasters's metalwork is of less interest than their merits. It's difficult not to recall Sickert's response to an art collector wishing to determine whether the Sicket painting he had bought was genuine or not. The response was 'No. But none the worse for that.'

In music, the score may not suffice to give an authentic notion of the work; the most obvious example is Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. This is commonly performed with Ravel's orchestration but no such arrangement was supplied by Mussorgsky himself. The result is that hundreds of arrangements exist, from the likes of Stokowski and Toscanini, all of them using widely divergent forms of instrumentation. It's certainly true that the use of period instruments may enable a greater appreciation of Bach and Handel; but I'm afraid I still prefer Stokowski's orchestral of the Toccata and Fugue to more authentic versions. Popular music presents a slightly different question, given that it does produce 'definitive' recordings; nonetheless there are more than enough cover versions in existence to compensate for that.

By the same token, the playing of Shakespeare's plays in the round might offer an insight into their original production, especially if performed with period dress and all male casts. Nonetheless, many modern plays prove to lend themselves rather well to such a format, even if they were never written for it. More generally, Shakespeare wrote at a time when writers still commonly did what the Ancient Greeks had done; write interpretations of mythical and historical narratives that were the common property of all. If Harold Bloom's theory that all writing is based on misreading and rewriting holds, then Chatterton's medieval poems, Walpole's 'Italian story,' Macpherson's Ossian poems or William Henry Ireland's Vortigern seem slightly different to being simple fakes. What Umberto Eco calls "the force of falsity" makes inaccurate ideas influential, tranforming flawed understanding into a creative misprision, as with Coleridge's admiration of Chatterton.

To take another example, a wooden Japanese temple must typically have its building materials renewed once every thirty years. The 'ancient' buildings in a city like Kyoto have in reality been regularly recreated and renewed. The same applies to many 'restored' buildings in the West, where it is dubious whether much of the original is left. To take an obvious example, Dresden's Frauenkirche is built on precise plans to recreate the destroyed original, even down to incorporating much of the original stone (blackened even before the firestorm, it gives the building a rather odd patchwork effect when contrasted with the new stone). Walking around the interior, I found myself wondering how authentic the bright pastel colours were. It is, in Eco's formulation, hyperreal. To elaborate on this point, I rather like this piece by Lisa Jardine in response to the Cutty Sark fire:

"Still, it could, we were reassured, have been much worse. Because of the restoration in progress, half of the ship's timbers had been taken away for treatment. The three 100-foot masts, their sails and rigging, had been removed at the beginning of the project and sent to Chatham's Historic Dockyard for storage. The prow, anchor and ship's wheel, and the complete contents of the below-decks galley and workshops, were also safe, as was the distinctive figurehead... Whatever happens now - and surely the restoration efforts will be redoubled, and the desperately needed extra funding forthcoming - the resulting ship will now conclusively be a replica, simply not the original. But then, wasn't she that already? The masts, everything on deck, many of the deck planks, and the fittings, were remade from scratch the last time the ship was rescued from destruction (by decay and neglect) in the 1950s. The masts, sails and rigging were once again restored, and pieces of the fabric replaced, as part of the celebrations for the Millennium...

In Japan, where wooden buildings have always been terribly vulnerable to the ravages of earthquake and fire, the idea that something is in effect a replica does not carry the same stigma of the inauthentic... Osaka Castle was completed around 1590 by the great military ruler of Osaka, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and is today part of a proud heritage for the residents of Osaka and Japan... Yet this beloved historical landmark is entirely a reproduction. Razed to the ground for the first time in 1615, ravaged by an explosion and fire in 1665, burned to the ground again when it was captured in 1868, heavily bombed in 1945, Osaka Castle was completely rebuilt as a concrete structure in 1932, and its exterior restored to its present splendour in the late 1990s. As our guide book boasted: "There remains no single piece of stone wall from the Toyotomi period."

Later in our trip we took a bus from Kyoto to Kiyomizu-dera (the Clear Water Temple), which like the Cutty Sark and Maritime Greenwich, is a Unesco-designated World Heritage Site. The origins of Kiyomizu-dera can be traced back to 798 AD, when a priest from nearby Nara was instructed by a vision to construct a Buddhist shrine there on an existing Shinto sacred site... Yet here again, the present buildings are nowhere near as old as the history of the shrine suggests. Some of them date from the 17th Century, others have been substantially restored in the 1980s. This last restoration included repainting the exterior of the soaring three-storey pagoda to its original bright reddish-orange. Once again, this causes the Japanese no hint of anxiety - our guide book informed us proudly that "the main temple has been destroyed and rebuilt many times in its centuries of history".

In Europe, by contrast, we have a tendency to disparage or overlook the history of objects which have failed to last, or survive only as replicas, reproductions or recreations. Holbein's paintings, produced for the court of King Henry VIII in the early decades of the 16th Century, receive an enormous amount of attention from art historians and the public alike - as the numbers attending the Holbein in England exhibition at Tate Britain at the end of last year confirmed.

King Henry himself, however, was far less interested in panel paintings than in his fabulous collection of 5,000 tapestries - more time-consuming and expensive to make, more valuable and highly coveted by other European royals, and much more impressive when hung. His tapestries, however, failed to survive the damp English climate - unlike Philip II's fabulous collection of 16th Century woven wall hangings, still in the Prado in Madrid. So tapestries are, on the whole, neglected in discussions of Tudor court culture.

The original Greek version of this philosophical problem of identity and persistence, known as "the ship of Theseus" is particularly apposite here. In his Life of Theseus, Plutarch tells us that the Athenians preserved and revered the ship in which Theseus returned from Crete, after he had rescued Ariadne from the Minotaur. Over time, however, they assiduously replaced rotten planks with new timber, until every plank of the ship had eventually been replaced. So is this still Theseus's ship?"

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posted by Richard 7:36 pm

Monday, December 01, 2008

 
New Scientist recently carried an article on the future of science fiction, featuring interviews with the likes of Margaret Atwood:

"As well as a mere storytelling device, science fiction often articulates our present-day concerns and anxieties - paradoxically, it is often about the here and now rather than the future. As Stephen Baxter points out, H. G. Wells's ground-breaking 1895 novella The Time Machine - famous for popularising the idea of time travel - was more concerned with where Darwinian natural selection was taking the human race than with the actual nuts and bolts of time travel... Science fiction is the literature of change. It is no coincidence that it emerged as a recognisable genre with writers such as Jules Verne in the late 19th century, an era when, for the first time in history, children could expect to grow up in a world radically different from that of their parents.

The single most useful thing I've learned from science fiction is that every present moment, always, is someone else's past and someone else's future. I got that as a child in the 1950s, reading science fiction written in the 1940s; reading it before I actually knew much of anything about the history of the 1940s or, really, about history at all. I literally had to infer the fact of the second world war, reverse-engineering my first personal iteration of 20th-century history out of 1940s science fiction. I grew up in a monoculture - one I found highly problematic - and science fiction afforded me a degree of lifesaving cultural perspective I'd never have had otherwise... I adopted, as a complete no-brainer, J G Ballard's dictum that Earth is the alien planet... I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any "future" I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into "worlds" (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be "the future"."


In a certain sense, science fiction is one of the most realistic genres literature has produced, with novels like We and 1984 speaking to the realities of their time at least as much as Life and Fate or Darkness at Noon. Contrary to the above, Wells was at least as interested in contemporary social divisions as he was excised by natural selection. In an age where technology permeates our everyday lives it hardly seems surprising that many writers have in recent years decided to use the abstraction offered by science fiction as a means of tangentially exploring contemporary reality. Nonetheless, there are perhaps some differences from realist fiction; the essence of much science fiction often rests with the fear and paranoia that is our response to technology as much as with the technology itself, as with The Last Man to Day of the Triffids to The Drowned World (where the notion of events having an especially plausible cause is essentially dispensed with, as much as in The Trial). As Susan Sontag put it "science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster." This piece expands on that theme somewhat:

"In 28 Days Later, an accidentally released supervirus transforms virtually all of Britain into a population of cannibalistic zombies. Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic bestiary of genetically engineered species; among them, in a world half-drowned by rising seas, lives apparently the last surviving human. Michel Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island is narrated by a misanthropic contemporary of ours named Daniel, as well as numbers 24 and 25 of the successive clones made from this not-quite individual. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is another clone novel; it concerns genetic supernumeraries raised for purposes of organ harvesting. And cloning likewise furnishes subject matter for David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, where one of five braided narrative strands takes the form of a Q & A between a normally human historian and an imprisoned rebel 'fabricant,' who—unlike Ishiguro’s clones, with their lamblike passivity—has escaped an underground world of slavery into horrified awareness of the genocidal nature of a 'corpocracy' raised on the blood of clones... In Cormac McCarthy’s fantastically grim The Road, all non-human nature has perished beneath the shuttered skies of a nuclear winter, and social organization as such appears to persist only in the form of roving cannibal gangs; the story follows the efforts of a father and his pre-adolescent son to elude these 'bad guys' (as the father-hero matter-of-factly calls them) while scavenging cans of food for themselves. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men mixes dystopian elements with the apocalyptic premise that no human child has been born for seventeen years, leaving civilization to crumble under the accumulated weight of age and despair; once the world’s unique pregnant woman arrives on the scene, the handsome desperado played by Clive Owen takes up the burden of shepherding mother and child to safety... The Road and I Am Legend have a lot in common. Impressively stylish productions, they are also alike in presupposing a collapse of civilization that happens utterly and all at once rather than by degrees—in the movie the trigger is the supervirus, in the book "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" signaling all-out nuclear war—and both stories set the decency and steadfastness of the solitary hero-father against the sheer evil of a human population otherwise consisting of marauding cannibals...

Each of the more dystopian novels sketched above involves human cloning. It should also be clear that in the current political context the clone novel can hardly fail to suggest a nightmare of perfected neoliberalism. In the clone novel, class society—in what may be a lurid reflection of our distinction between citizens with full legal rights and 'illegal' foreign workers without them—hardens into a strict demarcation of castes... The possibility of love requires the existence of at least two irreplaceable individuals, a condition that can’t quite be met in any of the clone novels. The anxiety dominating each of these books is that a human being might prove perfectly fungible in an emotional and sexual as well as an economic sense, a fear most coherently and angrily expressed by Houllebecq, who may be the living writer best at suggesting the dystopian element in contemporary society. For him the problem lies not only in the liberalized private sector, with its ready disposal of people according to their economic value, but also in sexually liberalized 'private life'...

The diversity of apocalyptic triggers hardly conceals the basic sameness, from work to work, of the apocalypse itself. In almost every case... large-scale social organization, including the state, has disappeared; the cumulative technological capability of century upon century has collapsed to the point that only agricultural know-how, if that, is retained; and the global society we know has shattered into small tribal groups, separate families or couples, and helpless solitary individuals. In such anarchic conditions, without governments to enforce contracts, stable currencies in circulation, or any industrial or transportation infrastructure, capitalism likewise becomes a thing of the past—and yet the contemporary apocalypse, as painted in our collection of movies and novels, illustrates in the most literal fashion possible Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families. The corollary view holds that 'society' is merely the excuse used by tyrannical regimes like the Soviet one to justify the trampling of individual rights—and contemporary apocalyptic works are all but united in stigmatizing any group larger than the family as oppressive and evil. Frequently, collectives are simply occasions for organized cannibalism, as in 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, and The Road. Or bands of survivors are fascists at heart: again, 28 Days Later...

In the neoliberal dystopia a totally commodified world transforms would-be lovers into commodities themselves and in this way destroys the possibility of love. In the neoliberal apocalypse, on the other hand, the wreck of civilization reveals the inherent depravity of mankind (excepting one’s loved ones) and ratifies the truth that the family is a haven in a heartless world. Both the neoliberal dystopia and the neoliberal apocalypse defend love and individuality against the forces threatening to crush them; the difference is that the clone novel sticks up for humanity from the standpoint of an implied or explicit critique of neoliberalism, while the apocalypse narrative (whether in prose or on film) tends to reflect the default creed of neoliberalism, according to which kindness may flourish in private life but the outside world remains now and forever a scene of vicious but inevitable competition... The rub, of course, is that such sci-fi humanism is quickly overcome with another irony, this one unintentional, since it is the hallmark of genre fiction to treat characters instrumentally, putting them through the paces of the plot according to their function as the embodiment of some general psychological or social category and failing or refusing to endow them with the individuality to be found among the livelier inhabitants of the traditional realist novel and, for that matter, the real world.

This is the highly compromised 'individualism' promoted by our collection of futuristic novels: individuality here means escape from the bad collective (cannibals, the corporate state) but does not entail real individuation. Our literary sci-fi novels are bereft of strongly individual characters—the apocalyptic ones even more depopulated than they know, the clone narratives at least bespeaking the anxiety that their characters are redundant—and the ongoing merger of genre fiction (where the reader is accustomed to finding no complex characters) with literature (which no one would think to accuse of being indifferent to individuality) has allowed the liquidation of character to pass virtually unnoticed. "


It's an interesting critique though I'm not sure that I'm fully persuaded; realist fiction embedded in the thisness of contemporary society lacks the ability to consider other political possibilities. In that sense, it represents a curtailed set of assumptions about what constitutes human nature and human society. The elimination of character in a JG Ballard novel represents a statement that human nature is neither fixed nor stable but is instead a set of drives fuelled by our genes and our environment. It is in short, not that far of the sort of conception of human nature that predated the advent of the realist novel (if we substitute Hobbesian notions of the passions for Locke's tabula rasa, for example) and the reason why characters in early novels so often acts inconsistently, with events proceeding from episode to episode rather than in a linear plot sequence.

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posted by Richard 10:13 pm