Passage To India: A South Asia Special

Arising as a consequence of recent peregrinations...

Non-Fiction

Gita Mehta – Karma Cola (1979)

No doubt in 1979 an important antidote to Western Orientalism about the 'inherent spirituality' of India, these days it reads like a string of snarky and clichéd anecdotes about the dubious aspects of spirituality in the context of East-meets-West globalisation.


William Dalrymple – The Age of Kali (1998)
– White Mughals (2002)
– The Last Mughal (2006)

Dalrymple is, of course, at heart a colonialist sympathiser – though not of the same unrepentant and black-and-white ilk of, say, a Niall Ferguson, he clearly sees the Raj (at least in the early days) as replete with heroic eccentric humanists (despite a few bad apples), and misses the 'order' and rule of law that he thinks India had under the later period of British rule. Yet he is a wonderful, oldfashioned storyteller and an engaging travel writer. The Age of Kali is a series of essays on various aspects of his reporting from India, some of which now seem a bit dated in their discussion of the unexpected juxtapositions of globalisation (reminiscent of Pico Iyer's Video Night In Kathmandu), but featuring some interesting political moments. Far more engrossing, however, are White Mughals and The Last Mughal – the former dealing with a marriage between the British representative in Hyderabad in the late 1700s to a Mughal princess, and the latter with Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, the Sepoy Rebellion and the siege of Delhi in the mid-1800s. Both are rich and tragic narratives, but for my money the latter is the pick – with its Emperor-esque (Kapuscinski) glimpses of the last days of the Mughal court and of important figures such as Ghalib, and its harrowing tales of the atrocities of the siege, tales which bring to mind J. G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur, but with the addition of the attempt to give various sides of the story (though sadly the perspective of the sepoys themselves, as opposed to the British and the Mughal court, is lacking).


Yasmin Khan – The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2007)

I've long been interested in Partition from my perspective as a genocide studies scholar – and my personal interest in India, on the one hand due to childhood Orientalism and on the other as a Buddhist. Deciding on a specific book about Partition was difficult, but I settled on Khan's. Khan's work is not limited to high politics or the personalities of the leaders involved; she deals both with everyday experience, and with the specific context and events which happened in different areas. Particularly interesting is her analysis of the fluidity of meaning in terms and concepts like swaraj ('self-rule') or 'Pakistan,' and the outcome of this indeterminateness in terms of human suffering. There is a strong sense of the contingency of the fact that partition happened at all. Khan consciously tries to extend analysis beyond the Punjab, usually seen as the 'ground zero' of Partition or the 'place where Partition happened.' In tone and style, it's somewhere between an academic work and a work of popular history. Without having read other books specifically on Partition it's hard to judge what criticisms might be levelled – the kind which always exist around controversial events such as Partition – but for me this seemed like a thorough introduction which had no obvious agenda in relation to nationalism or religion, and which examined the complexities of the situation within a work of manageable length accessible to the non-specialist.


Katherine Boo – Behind The Beautiful Forevers (2012)

Boo tells a New Journalism-style story of Annawadi, a small slum near an airport, following a number of inhabitants. Boo's previous work had been related to quality journalism about poverty in the United States – here, she transfers this interest to Mumbai. Based on years of participant-observation and thorough examination of sources to corroborate her personal interviews and observations, the book is written in novelistic style, except for an afterword in which Boo speaks in her own voice. It's an interesting story, though at times the pace flags, and also an interesting exercise, but one which raises questions about the choice of presentation which are not addressed, reminiscent of those around works like Capote's In Cold Blood – doesn't the presence of the author change events, and shouldn't it be at least acknowledged in the text, rather than given from a 'God's eye view' with an inevitable whiff of colonialism? How are we to know that the claims made on the basis of interviews and documentary corroboration actually stand up if they are not even discussed? Nonetheless, it's a fascinating and admirable work.


Fiction

Bhisham Sahni – Tamas ('Darkness,' 1974)

Sahni's is an emblematic work on Partition, and has been filmed for television (on 1986). The novel is a lightly fictionalised version of his personal experiences as a young man during the events depicted, in Rawalpinid in the Punjab (today, part of Pakistan). It's not an easy novel – not only because of the violence and trauma of the subject matter, but also because it reads as do accounts of real life events, episodic, and dealing with a plethora of characters. The voice is impersonal, the eye jaundiced, and the tale without redemption, as befits the events in question.


Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger (2008)
– Last Man In Tower (2011)

Despite the Booker, I wasn't particularly impressed by White Tiger, a story of the entrepreneurial and murderous rise of village boy Balram Halwai – it was entertaining enough, but lacking urgency in its narrative, somewhat unsophisticated in terms of language (even taking into account the first-person narration), and a little too knowingly clever in tone. Last Man In Tower, however, is another thing altogether – an impressive and deeply moving story (set in Mumbai) of a lone hold-out who refuses to leave a crumbling apartment building to make way for a gleaming new tower block, and the fate that befalls him. Up there with the best of Rohinton Mistry. Speaking of whom…


Rohinton Mistry – Such A Long Journey (1991)
– Family Matters (2002)

Unless and until he publishes further, A Fine Balance will remain Mistry's masterpiece. But his other works are not far behind. As with Mistry's other works, each deals with Parsi families – Such A Long Journey in Mumbai in the 70s, with the backdrop of Indira Gandhi's machinations and the war with Pakistan, while Family Matters is set in the same city 90s. Each display Mistry's talent for baroque Victorian narrative and observation of everyday detail intertwined with the bigger picture of Indian socio-politics. The former was withdrawn from the University of Mumbai's syllabus in 2010 after complaints from the family of Hindu nationalist politician Bal Thackeray – in typical fashion, reading the views experessed by characters as if they were expressed directly by the author.

Charles Dickens - Our Mutual Friend (1865); Hard Times (1854)

As I may have mentioned previously, though a rabid fan of Victoriana I’m not a huge admirer of Dickens (I suspect I’ve been made bitter by his ascendance over his worthier and far more interesting colleague, Wilkie Collins). Having said that, however, his work always makes for worthwhile reading, even when it infuriates. Of course, the Victorian style of the episodic novel doesn’t necessarily lend itself to consistency in writing, and this, to me, is one of Dickens’ biggest flaws. However, my biggest gripes with Dickens are his characterisations, and the didacticism of his politics and sanctimonious moralising. Neither of the two volumes in question here are free of these flaws, but this is by no means to condemn them (as I would, for example, Oliver Twist).

Some of Dickens' works which have some of the most amazing characters and moments – of those I’ve read, I think of Great Expectations, in particular – also have some of the most infuriating (Joe, Magwitch & Wemmick). While Dickens was a progressive for his time, and did excellent work as an advocate for social justice reform in Victorian England, his class and gender politics (particularly disappointing given his own unusual household arrangements) remain highly problematic for the modern reader. In pursuing these prejudices even while critiquing social practices, his novels have a tendency to reify these values into flat characters who are made up of nothing more than idealised and stereotypical values. But at the same time Dickens’ gift for caricature, his sharp social observation, and his occasional prose passages of great beauty and originality, mitigate these tendencies.

How does all of this play out in OMF and HT? The first was my favourite of the pair – probably, indeed, my favourite Dickens (thus far) after Bleak House. HT, in contrast, is more interesting than gripping – but interesting, and unique in Dickens’ oeuvre, it certainly is. Both of these are later works, and it shows – they demonstrate both complexities and stylistics which are absent in earlier novels.

OMF, like Bleak House, takes as its central pole a legal process – in this case, the will of the miser Old Harmon, who made his fortune in the dust trade. Various characters become involved in the horse-trading and identity shifts and concealments which ensue. These include the young John Harmon (and his mysterious doubles), presumed drowned in the Thames (the Thames itself is really the central character of the work, along with, more generally, the dark and noisome city in which it is embedded – of all of Dickens’ works this is perhaps the most a novel of London); Mr Boffin, a working-class dustman to whom the fortune reverts, with unfortunate consequences for his open-handedness (and his contrasting employee, the scheming & unscrupulous Silas Wegg); Bella Wilfer, determined to marry into riches for their own sake, but with a heart of gold which may yet prevail; the Veneerings and the Lammles, odious and opportunistic socio-economic climbers; and Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie, who make their living finding corpses of the drowned in the aforementioned river.

As will be evident from this description, the two central themes here are the instability of riches (and of identity, both in relation to wealth and otherwise), their corrupting effect, and the unfortunate consequences of attempts to cross the class barrier; and decease and decay, both in the deaths, natural and unnatural, which take place over the course of the novel, and in the rubbish which silts the Thames (while at the same time the contrasting symbolism of water as baptism and rebirth is employed), and the dust-heaps on which the contested Harmon fortune was made. These latter, along with other examples such as the trade of Gaffer & Lizzie Hexam and that of Mr Venus the taxidermist, provide the symbolic and actual connection between these two concepts – which we might describe as ‘filthy lucre.’

This is a very dark novel, and I deeply enjoyed the gothic aspects of the plot, which are reinforced by Dickens’ very frequent Biblical allusions (which, of course, tend back to the much-neglected Biblical teachings fulminating against wealth and reflecting on its transitoriness, as part of the transitoriness of the human condition, as well as emphasising another characteristic Dickensian theme present here in spades, the visiting of the sins of the patriarch upon the head of the child). On the religious note, Dickens presents here a character, Mr Riah, who is a kindly and sympathetic Jew who owes a debt of obligation to the rapacious and antisemitic Christian Mr Fledgeby which he pays by serving as a stereotypical front for his moneylending business. This character, it seems, was purposefully created in order to allay the hurt that was felt in regard to the antisemitism perceived in the character of Fagin (and in writing thus, Dickens was charged with creating a one dimensional character of the opposite type, an accusation which contains some justice without being wholly accurate). In Riah’s sometime protégé, the disabled child-woman and dolls’ seamstress Jenny Wren, Dickens has created perhaps his finest character (although I am torn here thinking of Miss Havisham). In the latter part of the novel, as betrayal, passion and murder begin to play an ever greater part in the twisted complexities of the unfolding plot, we move almost into the realm of the sensation novel, a development which I found anything but displeasing.

The novel displays some of the typical faults of Dickens’ work mentioned above. Some characters here, in particular his women, are far too saintly to be believable and the unsatisfactoriness of their saintliness is thrown into sharp contrast by the fascinating minor characters. Dickens’ mixed feelings about class, and its instability in the Victorian milieu, are evident inasmuch as, on the one hand, parvenus are condemned and we are shown how the lower classes will never feel at home in the upper social echelons – indeed, they are gently ridiculed, as in the (nonetheless very sympathetic) character of Mrs Boffin – and that we should admire them for the virtue of rejecting charity, as in the case of Betty Higgs – while on the other, mixed class marriages are admitted as acceptable. There are numerous scenes which appeal to the extremely overblown Victorian sense of sentiment (as Wilde put it, ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”) and the plot itself is impossibly intricate (and, typically for the time, makes liberal use of coincidence) – although inasmuch as it is so, it washes over the reader like the lapping tidal shifts of the Thames – and in being so, it is highly taxing on the suspension of disbelief, as for example in Mr Boffin’s shift from generous spirit to miser and back again.

Stylistically, in the earlier parts of the work, we encounter some of Dickens’ most gorgeous and original passages, descriptive and metaphorical, but as the work progresses descriptions become more stock and the writing more functional – although this may be due, on the one hand, to the pressure of the episodic form, and on the other, to Dickens’ involvement in the Staplehurst Rail Crash during the writing of the novel (he had the manuscript with him in the rail-car), which seems to have caused him a great deal of psychological trauma (criticism of the systems which allow rail crashes to occur makes a brief appearance in the novel).

One of the most relevant concerns for the present moment which OMF gives us is, as part of its examination of the various aspects of the ephemeral nature of wealth, the criticism of market speculation, both literal and as it is found in human relationships (for example, in the newly-prosperous Mr and Mrs Boffin’s search for an appropriate orphan to adopt). HT also deals with concerns which remain highly relevant both in their resemblance and their dissimilarity to the contemporary moment, in its examination of industrialisation and its discontents.

A far less satisfactory novel, but one which remains fascinating for the social moment that it depicts and the ambiguities in the authorial stance, HT, unusually for Dickens, is not set in London. Instead, the action takes place in the fictional Coketown, an industrial mill-town which Dickens partially based upon Preston. Again unusually, the novel is short (originally published episodically, but in shorter sections than his other works) – only 235 pages in my Wordsworth edition (as opposed to the 800-odd of OMF). Dickens apparently wrote the novel in the hope of boosting the sales of his weekly periodical, Household Words, and this was successful, though in the event it was not well received critically. The novel is in essence a didactic critique of the industrial system which had been in the process of transforming Victorian England (Dickens had been horrified by visits to Manchester factories), and at the same time – and here equated with it – of the doctrine of utilitarianism (intertwined with the new science, if such it may be termed, of Political Economy), understood by the authorial voice not as a particular approach to happiness but rather as an inherently exploitative reduction of the human (and hence human dignity) to the level of the unit of labour and the bureaucratic account. In making this critique, Dickens also attacks the laissez-faire capitalism (hypocritically enabled by government at the behest of the rich and powerful, as he notes) which was also a feature of the time and which, though it was a theory and practice which already had a solid history by Victorian times, was transforming with the rise of industrial technology and practices. Another central and related concern is education – Dickens targets education by rote learning, the cramming of facts and figures deprived of meaning or context into the heads of pupils (by teachers who have only recently graduated from such methods themselves, and know no others – such a figure is Bradley Headstone in OMF, and he also comes to grief as does Louisa Gradgrind in HT).

If you think that all of these issues sound extremely contemporary (consider for example the debates of recent decades over the ethics of globalised industrial production and labour conditions, the smashing of labour power by conservative governments, the growth of Kafkaesque bureaucratic-administrative procedures of power and surveillance by governments who claim free markets as an unchallengeable secularised religion, or the ‘culture wars’ over education in areas such as history, literature and language acquisition), you wouldn’t be wrong. In this sense we can see one of the things about the Victorian era which gives it a part of its endless fascination, for me at least – for us (post)moderns, to examine the period is akin to recognising ourselves through a distorted mirror.

Again, however, in taking on his role as social reformer Dickens remains a conservative at heart. The narrative concerns Josiah Bounderby, a ‘self-made man’ (or so we are led to believe) and manufacturer with endless contempt for those who have not managed to raise themselves up by their bootstraps (again, a familiar figure in the modern context, particularly in terms of the strength of the Horatio Alger myth, with its convenient concealment of systemic factors and its equation of wealth with industry & hence morality, in the USA and the Anglophone world more generally). Bounderby is the boss of Gradgrind, a schoolteacher who has brought his own children up to reject all fancy and all emotion and to worship fact and reason. Meanwhile, Mr. Sleary’s travelling circus is set up as the positive antithesis of these exploitative, self-satisfied, cruel and unempathetic figures. In creating a further foil for these, we are given Stephen Blackpool, a downtrodden and deeply moral factory worker, and Rachael, a woman whom he loves but can never marry on account of his previous marriage to a woman now become a violent alcoholic. Dickens takes this opportunity to expound upon the hypocrisy of marriage laws in the era, whereby divorce could only be attained either through annulment or a private bill in parliament, and thus was available solely to the very rich and well-connected – this would change three years after the publication of OMF with the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act.

Like many of Dickens’ other characters, Stephen and Rachael are little more than ciphers of morality, rather than well-rounded characters; Stephen’s despair has more than a whiff of Hardy (and, as in OMF and in Hardy, we find an overt Biblical allusion in the titles of the three volumes – Sowing, Reaping and Garnering). And like those other characters, they are not to be allowed a happy ending but must redeem themselves either through death, or through patient acceptance of suffering as one’s lot. The really interesting aspect of this pair, though, is the way in which they reveal Dickens’ ambivalence about the conditions of labour in England, and their relationship to the class system. On the one hand, the upper classes as well as the up-and-coming bourgeoisie and capitalists – such a feature of the period – are depicted as hypocritical and morally corrupt. As well as Bounderby and Gradgrind, the upper-class James Harthouse, corrupter of marriages, and the influence he exerts upon Tom Gradgrind, exemplifies this – Tom is in many ways a similar character to Charley Hexam in OMF, an upwardly mobile young man who is quite prepared to sacrifice his sister upon the altar of his own socio-economic advancement.

But before we conclude that Dickens’ sympathies lie entirely with the miserable and inequitable conditions of the working classes, we must examine his condemnatory depiction of unions and labour solidarity. Slackbridge, the trade union leader, is painted in extremely unattractive lights as an outsider, a trouble maker, dishonest and on the make; and because of a promise Stephen has made Rachael not to get involved in any politicking related to labour, he is condemned by Slackbridge and cast out by his fellow workers (interestingly, the reason for this promise – the rage Stephen feels over Rachael’s sister past loss of her hand in an industrial accident, and Rachael’s injunction to ‘let such things be, they only lead to hurt’ – was cut from the published text). It has been suggested that in having class harmony as his ultimate social goal, Dickens was unable to provide either a meaningful solution to the workers’ problems, or an optimistic conclusion, and this is seen in his failure to propose any better measures for addressing the concerns he raises than employers choosing to treat their labourers better by seeing that, morally, they should do so.

As well as the character problematics mentioned above, we have here – again as is typical in Dickens – more than one unrealistic change of heart as the events of the novel conclude. Perhaps the most interesting character here, though, and an unusual woman in Dicken’s novels (even if not granted a happy ending) is Louisa Gradgrind, who agrees to a loveless marriage to Bounderby for purely rational reasons, according to her inculcated utilitarianist lights, before almost falling into the arms of a seducer when emotion, or fancy, begin finally to rebel; passing this test of morality, Dickens allows her at least to physically escape her marriage. But her strange façade, and her later, somewhat quixotic alterations, make her one of Dickens’ more interesting characters (a later echo is found in OMF, in the person of Sophronia Lammle).

As in so many cases, Dickens knows what he doesn’t like, but, apart from moral purity and submission to the natural order of society which can be discerned beneath the distortions of inequality – mixed, to be sure, with the more comical aspects of the working class and its pursuits – he is not sure exactly what he does. Where OMF is a novel which displays some of his flaws while giving the reader a final taste of a writer with literary powers in full flight, HT remains, if not socialist, certainly sullen and didactic, but nonetheless one which combines Dickens’ own social commentary with a demonstration of the classic ambivalence of the Victorian reformer; and threads this together with a narrative in a way more successful than, for example, the earlier Oliver Twist. Both of these are late works, drawing on archetypes, suffused with social and personal melancholy, even tragedy (despite lashings of Dickens’ characteristic humour and personal optimism), and opening up panoramic socio-cultural buffets which they are not always able to resolve into digestible morsels. Exactly herein, however, lies not only the frustration of the reader of these works, but also the pleasure.

Matteo Garrone - Gomorra (2008)

This sleek and brutal film, like Roberto Saviano’s book on which it is based, is a work of docu-fiction, but it is only a light transposition of the everyday reality for Neapolitans and their ongoing relationship with the Camorra (while the Sicilian Mafia/Cosa Nostra are the best known, they are not the only Italian criminal organisation; others include the aforementioned, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and the Apulian Sacra Corona Unita). The film traces a number of different individuals through their generally tragic trajectories through the poorer echelons of Neapolitan society (though while much of the ‘action on the ground’ happens on the streets, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Camorra and other similar organizations exist at every level, including the highest, of Italian politics and commerce - in this film this is evident for the world of high fashion in particular, though in a way which can also be considered representative).

In this world of scummy, decaying concrete high-rise projects (Italian criminal organizations have a lengthy history with the construction industry, and concrete in particular), the Camorra are so deeply implicated at all levels of society that the attempt to remain disentangled, or worse, to disentangle oneself, may be impossible, except at the price of one’s life (not to mention the lives of one's family and friends). Rampant poverty and the standard social and economic alienation of urban underclasses only contribute to these patterns. While we are fairly familiar with this kind of narrative from films such as City of God or La Haine and television series like The Wire, it remains shocking to see the scabrous underbelly of an affluent European society revealed when the rest of us are more used to the Tuscany of tourist dreams and the Italian self-image as bella gente (although in Italy the social and racial tensions, sense of doomed inevitability, and corruption which permeate the society depicted here are equally apparent, and equally repellent, in politics and the media). The film itself is both violent and viscerally beautiful, a treat for aficionados of post-industrial decay and tawdry glamour, and anyone who has visited Naples will recognize, if not the scenery, the atmosphere greasy with fear, history and opportunity.

Italian criminal organisations in themselves are a fascinating subject – some of the books that I’d recommend on the topic include Peter Robb’s Midnight In Sicily, Toby Jones’ The Dark Heart of Italy and John Dickie’s indispensible Cosa Nostra, as well as the moving documentary Excellent Cadavers (based on the book of the same name), telling the story of heroic anti-Mafia judges and martyrs Giovanni Falcone & Paolo Borsellino - and I’m about to embark on David Lane’s Into The Heart of the Mafia – and they are important not only as interesting histories in their own right, but in any attempt to understand contemporary and historical Italy – not to mention all countries of Italian immigration, but in particular the USA and various South American nations.

The representation of the Mafia in documentary and fiction itself is worth considering, with all its connections with dietrologia (‘behind-ology,’ the Italian obsession with conspiracies and ulterior motivations for action, one which is hardly surprising given the history of moments and organizations such as the Calvi case, the P2 ‘shadow government,’ and the murderous intrigues of Rightist and Leftist terrorist groups during the anni di piombo, the ‘years of lead’). This sense of shadowy manipulation from behind the scenes is reflected in the Italian giallo (and, perhaps, deflected in the love for the Manichaean Western) – but there have also been (rare) Italian cultural figures (such as Dario Fo) who have more openly addressed the issue - in particular the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia in works such as Il Giorno della Civetta ('Day of the Owl') and Il Contesto (published in English as 'Equal Danger'), which give a sense of the Borgesian, truth-defying mazes within mazes which are encountered when one delves into this subject. But the semi-fictionalised presentation given here - in the emerging Italian tradition of the Unidentified Narrative Object - is a novelty; one, however, which does not impede the seriousness of the topic at hand (Saviano himself has been subject to serious death threats and has been granted a permanent police escort).

Like the film itself, the present Italian situation can be seen as a tragedy garbed in beautiful raiments - particularly while a corrupt and well-connected Berlusconi continues to prosecute his war against the judiciary, the meaningful Left, and the independent media.

John Vaillant – The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

Some time ago, I watched a documentary about the coldest inhabited place on earth, a town in Siberia where, if the generator failed, everyone would die within four hours – where the seasonal melting of the highest permafrost caused by the warmth of buildings gave the architecture skewed, Lovecraftian angles – and where the coffins, due to the same process of thawing and refreezing, would gradually make their way to the surface, re-emerging twenty to twenty-five years after the burial.

The world in which the events John Vaillant describes takes place – a remote region of Siberian Manchuria – is similarly surreal. Trees explode in the cold, as the heat and pressure of the sap bursts the frozen exterior, while flora and fauna of the cold North (deer, wolves, pines) mingle with those of the tropical South (leopards, large and exotic insects, and, the animal in question here, tigers). Indeed, Vaillant suggests that the region was a refugium – an isolated area which remained uncovered by snow and ice during pitiless glacial periods. But this is also an area of flux ethnically, in the mingling between ethnic ‘Russians,’ indigenous people, and Chinese; but, even more shapingly, in the aftermath of perestroika and the frontier-capitalist instability which resulted (Vaillant suggests that there are very numerous parallels between this area and the American frontier, both in terms of this lawlessness, human and natural danger, and in terms of colonialisation and resource exploitation). But although this environment may seem bizarre to ‘we moderns,’ in fact, despite the encroachments of nature in the form of logging, mining, roads and guns, life here is in many ways akin to our ancestral patterns, wherein the forces of nature continually pose an existential threat and where hunting (and not agriculture) forms an important part of most successful survival strategies. In this arena, the danger that tigers (and other wild animals) can pose is not just, as more usually, a convenient justification for humans’ meat-eating habits.

This isn’t to say, though, that human-tiger relationships are such that the killing of the tiger is justified. There is, in this area, a long tradition of what can only be described as ‘honourable’ interaction between the human and the tiger – an uneasy ceasefire, but one which generally holds (it may seem anthropomorphic to refer to honour among tigers, so to speak, but even I, someone who usually considers our understanding of the mental and emotional capabilities of animals to be radically undervalued, was astonished by both the clear laws obtaining between human and tiger and the purposiveness and forethought with which tigers here behave). Vaillant’s tale is a story of the breaking of that covenant by a human, and a feline quest for revenge – one in which the circle of human targets grows ever wider, and no-one is safe.

The story, which begins with this particular tiger’s ferocious and well-planned killing of a poacher, traces both the pre-history and the consequences of this moment, and in doing so brings in not only issues of human and tiger (we might combine these in saying ‘animal’) nature, but also politics, environmentalism, colonialism, spirituality and the relationship with land itself. The hard-bitten, hard-drinking, hard-smoking, suicide-prone, stoic characters (almost all men) who make up the human cast are in some sense familiar Russian figures, but at the same time their relationship to the taiga, the way in which they read it and feel a qualitative relationship with it as an entity, partakes in a spirituality which isn’t confined only to those with indigenous heritage in the area (though obviously it functions in different ways for those who have such heritage). In ‘man vs wild’ tales of this kind I usually tend to feel less sympathy with the human characters than the author intends, but in this case, Vaillant presents not only the plight of the Amur tigers but also the travails of these people trapped in a dying society, with few economic opportunities, caught in a pincer between the corruption of Russia’s new elite and the harshness of their natural circumstances. The tiger itself, meanwhile, is a character sprung from a Greek tragedy, wronged, injured, and with furious calculation lashing out at those whose injury can only bring cyclical retribution.

Given that I’m a sucker both for cats and for nature documentaries (especially those set in extreme environments), I may be the ideal audience for a work of this kind, but certainly there was little to forgive in this book, which is well- and tautly-written, deeply atmospheric and incisive (if we put aside a few regrettable diversions into bio-evolutionary speculation and ruminations on human nature). This is a tale both sorrowful and steeped in what I can only term majesty, a report from a front line tense with dualities – arctic and tropical, socialist and capitalist, spiritual and material, colonialist and indigenous, ‘human’ and ‘natural’ – which are both symbolic and prefigurative of ‘our’ present condition.

Alan J. Pakula - The Parallax View (1974)

I came to this peculiar film from k-punk (with roots in Jameson, Žižek, Kojin Karatani, Joyce, Lacan and Hegel – how’d you like them lucubrations?) Extremely prescient and deeply paranoid, the work, in the unravelling-the-thread theme familiar to the conspiracy thriller, follows reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) as he investigates the assassination of a US senator, slowly becoming aware of the seemingly accidental deaths of witnesses and a conspiracy, taking on increasingly monumental and systemic proportions, behind which lies the hand of the shadowy Parallax Corporation, the depersonalised and a-responsible corporate institution par excellence.

There are some impressive Hitchcockian and schematic setpieces here, which, mingled with the scungy reality of Frady’s life, create a pleasing tension in their depiction of the interaction, central to the Western (post)modern condition, between the captivatingly sheeny surfaces of capitalism and antiseptic bureaucracy (one area, but one only, where Kafka now seems out of date), and the inevitable messiness of human existence (even if that messiness is ripe for colonisation and replication, a process which is currently well underway). The centrepiece is a fantastic, deeply disturbing montage which is shown to Frady during his (apparent) infiltration of the Corporation, featuring stills of political and religious figureheads, violence and trauma, and popular culture (and in this latter, foreshadowing the neo-fascist and neo-conservative tendencies of the present slew of films based on comics, most overtly works such as those involving Frank Miller, but not excluding the more subtle and unintentional reactionism of films like V For Vendetta).

We observe here the way in which the system incorporates rebellion, literally – that is, not only neutralising it, but using rebellion to make itself stronger – or, to paraphrase Žižek on the parallax, however much ‘I’ may want to be an observer of the picture, in being such ‘I’ inevitably find myself within it. While the Parallax Corporation itself can be seen as representing a fear of the growing power and lack of transparency or accountability of corporations – a fear which, in the intervening decades, has proven to be entirely well-founded – the film sees such an organization as inimical to Western democratic politics (in the fact of the assassination), whereas what seems to be the case (a long-term historical connection which was somewhat shifted from view during the period of the Keynesian consensus) is the increasing intertwining of these institutions. But perhaps we could view this assassination – which obviously has deep roots in the killing of Kennedy, Watergate, and even, to draw a somewhat longer bow, Martin Luther King – as a narratorial fear of purposive systemic blowback, that is, the methods which for so long have been employed in subject areas – the colonies – have created apt pupils now re-importing them to their land/s of origin. A further criticism might be that the Corporation’s induction process, whereby it seeks out rare individuals who are psychologically suited to its brutal and secretive practices, also strikes a false note inasmuch as these projects are not, in a sense, the aberrant or perverted underside of contemporary society – they are embodied in every part of it (the system replicating itself in the individual), as has been shown by scholars and practitioners including Zygmunt Bauman, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo (these latter two operating in the decade or so before this film was made, and in some ways addressing the same concerns). In saying this, it should be recognised that these moments of naïveté do not undercut the central cynicism (or perhaps we should say, cynical realism) of the film.

The characteristic American ‘one man standing for justice against the system’ narrative (along with the socio-personal dysfunctionality of that individual, which may be related to his – and it is generally his – stand against ‘society’), often so deeply conservative in its espousal of macho frontier individualism-libertarianism and in the positioning of the rebel as justified and outside the morality of means (and if we look at present conspiracy theories, they seem mostly of the rightist variant), is certainly in evidence here – but it doesn’t carry the aforementioned paradoxical underlying freight to a degree worthy of criticism, apart from its social message (gendered, in particular). However, even the patriarchal gender tropes inherent in the relationship between Frady and Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) are thrown into a new light when Carter’s ‘emotionally hysterical’ revelations are revealed as truth.

The belief in conspiracy (where it is not justified, and it’s worth recalling how many political and corporate operations would have seemed like ‘conspiracy theories’ before their unmasking) is, of course, a response to existential fear (‘Frady’?), a desperate search for meaning, an infusion of symbolic significance and graspable pattern into the warp and weft of mass society (though drawing on premodern and religious superstition – think of the evolution of the medieval antisemitic trope of the Jew as well-poisoner, host-desecrator and killer of Christian children into the modernist Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Foundations of the Nineteenth/Myth of the Twentieth Century).

Indeed, as an aside, those of us who’d consider ourselves scholars with an interest in subversion of the dominant paradigm may well question the meaning of our own activity in this regard – and the use of interpretation as an heuristic which does little more than the task of re-integration (‘contain the rage’) by averting feelings of hopelessness and the maintenance of the structural dynamics of late capitalism is an ever-present problematic in which we are all, to greater and lesser extents, implicated (theory as sublimation of trauma). But, to return to the film itself, the message is not so much ‘you can’t handle the truth,’ as, ‘the truth can’t handle you handling the truth.’ Or, as Lovecraft famously put it, ‘[t]he most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents’ (though, I would add, this ‘mercy,’ which knowingly or unknowingly we grant ourselves, is one whose long-term cost is existentially near-unbearable – a need to escape from amorphous and ill-perceived confines, that vague feeling that something isn’t quite as it should be, which sometimes blossoms and bears bitter fruit). In fact – and this chimes with my personal perspective as a Buddhist, though with a political-systemic rather than individual-psychological interpretation (and, I would add, the second case provides a much more cogent state of solution and method for arriving thereat) – since we are none of us sane (in the sense of accurately comprehending reality; I don’t mean to trivialise mental illness, which is of a different order), insanity is in fact sanity and vice versa. For Frady, as for Lovecraft’s protagonists, the price for apprehending these patterns, for pursuing a separate perspective – a disruptive act inasmuch as it is a reterritorialising reclamation of an agential space outside them – is the incorporation of the space on which the observer stands, in the process of which that observer is disappeared as such (and, in this case, literally). A further disruption lies in the viewer’s role as observer of the film’s unreliable narration – like Frady, we also perform a Sedgwickian paranoid reading, doubting and constantly re-evaluating our own (‘one’s own’ might be more appropriate) interpretation, a dynamic which lends the film its queasy and unsettling mood.

Ultimately, in its conclusion ‘the parallax view’ is deeply pessimistic – the house always wins. Attempts at solidarity are crushed through the use of violence. The view of the near-omnipotent system and its methods of surveillance and action both looks back to the emerging countercultural politics of the 1960s, and forward to the post-disciplinary mechanisms of the contemporary control society. In other words, a parallax which proves paradigmatic.

Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009)

It was with some interest that I embarked upon Mark Fisher (better known as k-punk)’s new work of theory – his widely- and justly-feted pop culture blog being one of the most impressive meldings of theory and cultural analysis online (and one which never strays into inaccessibility), as well as being impressively prescient. His new work deals initially with the title concept, ‘capitalist realism’ – that is, the way in which capitalism installs itself in the psyche, individual and collective, as a ‘least worst,’ naturalised-normative system, one which slavers over the defeated corpses of grand-narrative ideologies; a sterile end to history in which, for the ironically distanced and thereby consenting, apathetic consumer-spectator whose cultural subjectivity is increasingly constituted by pastiche and revivalism, no alternative is imaginable. This term (‘capitalist realism’) is described as an alternative to Frederic Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ – in contrast to the period in which Jameson’s concept was developed, ‘capitalist realism’ would encompass the collapse of political alternatives, the commodification and aestheticization of modernism, and the post-cold war settlement in which the problem faced is not one of colonisation and appropriation per se, but rather of a lack of externality to colonise.

In exploring the capitalist territorialisation of opposition, Fisher does an admirable job of taking to task the ostensible resistance of present-day texts, authors and genres such as V for Vendetta, Frank Miller, Wall-E and gangsta rap (on this note, I hear that Prince of Persia encompasses a plotline in which the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction justifies brutal invasion, even while ‘whitefacing’ the main characters… and is it just me, or were Hollywood anti-Iraq movies all about five years too late?) – as well as taking to task the deceptive realist authenticity of the documentary style (a particular target is Supernanny). And he accomplishes this without undertaking the converse, that is, the all-too-common elite-contrarianist position which would present counter-readings of populist works such as Bruno, Antichrist, Kick-Ass or Life Is Beautiful as radical despite their populism. Texts Fisher lauds as diagnostics of the present malaise include Alfonso Cuarón’s film of P. D. James’ Children of Men; Franz Kafka (who only seems to grow more relevant with the passing of time, and who is delightfully used to analyse the call centre as distilling the political phenomenology of late capitalism); William Gibson’s Neuromancer (in the figure of the debtor-addict as paradigmatic subject in the control society); Michael Mann’s Heat; Mike Judge’s Office Space; Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven (in regard to the dreamwork-esque overwriting of the real, to memory disorder as symbolic of the capitalist destruction of narrative memory combined with a nostalgia for authenticity); Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (a central concept for Slavoj Žižek); and the videodrome-control trinity of Burroughs, Dick and Cronenberg.

Capitalist Realism, like Fisher’s blog, is a deeply engaging (and slim) read – I devoured it in a few days – which is peppered liberally with intriguing offhand concepts (many which I would have liked to see further explored) while never collapsing under the weight of theoretical density. There is some repetition throughout, and in this light the book sometimes reads like a collection of short pieces rather than a coherent or logically-organised whole (and indeed, although structured as numerical chapters, some of this work has appeared separately online). Not quite either a piece of strictly cultural or strictly political-economic analysis, nor one of original theory, this is, rather, a work of synthesis, with cultural texts analysed as examples of the theories of the scholars with whom Fisher is engaged. Neither of the two theorists of whom he makes the most use, Žižek and Jameson, are authors whose work I’ve read extensively, so I can’t say to what extent his arguments build upon their work rather than re-presenting it (having said which, the back cover features a Žižek endorsement).

As far as Fisher’s themes, I was particularly taken by the skewering of the way in which, in direct contradiction to the promises of anti-Stalinism and the supposed streamlined efficiency of the market, sclerotic bureaucracy (as a means of surveillance and auto-surveillance) is a deeply systematised feature of late capitalist society, one with which any reader will be deeply familiar (Fisher’s particular and personal concern, one which I share, is the deeply disquieting progress of this process in the academic sector). The demise of the big Other, he argues, has been greatly exaggerated: rather, the audit is our response to that Other, meaningless data our offering (I would add that the other big Other, so to speak, of the present day is ‘the market,’ comparable to the role of the natural deities in agricultural societies: the question always being, how will the market respond?)

One problematic here, which is becoming a bugbear of mine, is the Lacan – Deleuze & Guattari – Žižek engagement with psychoanalysis (not to mention schizophrenia) as a central heuristic of meaning. While Fisher is not solely indebted to these models, in taking these thinkers as paradigmatic in developing his critique this model is clearly visible throughout. For all the problematising of original Freudian models which has been done by these and other theorists (and for all the mythological beauty of psychoanalysis considered as an artistic system of meaning rather than as a praxis), I can’t help wondering why the employment of or engagement with this discourse is necessary or useful. I find, for example, the use of ‘symbolic castration’ as an explanatory tool to be a real ballbreaker, as is an analysis which damns the subsumption of the ‘paternal’ concept of duty into the ‘maternal’ imperative to enjoy (Fisher’s quotation marks) – and really, if we take the insights of the cultural turn seriously, shouldn’t we recognise that however much we problematise and interrogate these terms, to use ‘castration’ as a signifier of disempowerment (along with the rest of the gendered framework of psychoanalysis) will never be other than reactionary?

In questioning the basis for this model, one wonders about its groundedness – for example, Žižek’s latest work takes the stages of reaction to grief (and death) as a model for historical reaction to the death of capitalism, whereas in fact this ‘stages’ model is completely discredited, existing rather as a popular myth comparable to popular understandings of various Freudian concepts. And, for all the theoretical predecession, with what conceptual justification do we apply psychological processes which were developed in regard to the individual to society or societies as a whole (which are thus defined as single, if internally divided, units)? Indeed, with regard to the application of this problematic in another scenario Fisher explores Žižek’s ‘temptation of the ethical,’ the way in which the system counters critique by deflecting blame onto pathological individuals, rather than the institutions (for example, legally personified corporations) within which they operate – which conveniently cannot be treated as individuals for the purposes of ascription of responsibility.

With regard to the individual and the social unit, I would have liked to see further questioning of the intimate personal relationship within capitalism, which, I would argue, has become a quasi-religious repository of the wished-for transcendence provided neither by labour nor by consumption; but one which is not only futile in achieving this end (hence, the increasing popularity and franchise of marriage paired with serial monogamy in general), but which subsumes the individual into practical and psychological-ideological networks, in particular but by no means solely the family, which only serve to tighten the coils of the system within which we are enmeshed (and how would the heuristic use of psychoanalaytic theories centring on libido, castration and so on fit in here?)

In speaking of psychology, there is also the contention here, popular in contemporary discourse, that the increasing levels of mental illness in affluent societies represents an inherent systemic dysfunctionality, which the system deflects by privatising that illness, by making it a quality of the individual to be treated with commodities like drugs, therapy and ‘positive thinking.’ While I wouldn’t contest that this is the case – that the nature of late capitalist labour, in particular, is implicated in a spreading existential crisis of meaning which is sublimated by the burgeoning self-help industry – at the same time, this is dangerously close to the sixties and seventies view which saw mental illness (which is undeniably related to biological factors, though not reducible to them) as treatable by what Fisher calls ‘effective antagonisms,’ politicised acts, that is, by strength of willpower put into action.

Despite making extensive use of direct quotation, and building on the theories of figures like Žižek, Jameson, Alain Badiou, and Deleuze and Guattari, among others (and, pedantic as always, I could have done without the Americanised spellings), CR is completely free from formal referencing, and contains neither index nor a bibliography, which is frustrating and which seems problematic inasmuch as the desire to engage with the academy surely necessitates a certain capitulation to its formal structures which are, for all the absurdity which they occasionally entail, designed both to facilitate dialogue, and to ensure a certain standard of intellectual attribution – that is, a (neo)modernist ethics with the goals of which this work seems elsewhere to be in sympathy. Incidentally, the book is printed by Zero Publishing, a small anti-capitalist publisher who print their manifesto on the final page – and, while wanting cultural production to provide a livelihood for the creator, one wonders whether market distribution (rather than, for example, free internet distribution) is the best way to achieve anti-capitalist goals.

And this raises a bigger question about theory in general. A major subject for CR and for much of the work upon which it draws is the way in which capitalism devours and territorialises not only that which is external, but ostensibly adversarial forces (Fisher gives not only obvious examples such as the commodification of rebellion, but critiques the recent Paris student uprisings, and, more generally, the carnivalesque oppositional mass movements of recent times). So, while supposedly oppositional cultural products make transgression into a saleable commodity (as noted and exemplified by The Clash), we are all able to function immersed in the realm of capital and its ‘market Stalinist’ bureaucratic structures, and to bolster these structures through our every action, by individualistic disavowal, by Marxist false consciousness or Sartrean bad faith (and here I think also of the concept, from genocide studies, of ‘internal resistance’), which means that we internally tell ourselves that we do not ‘believe’ in bureaucratic administration or growth and consumption as the path to meaningful functionality, freedom or happiness, even as we enforce the structures and pursue the aims which they propose, and act to impose these upon others. But couldn’t the exact same criticism be made of works like these, in themselves?

In other words, to take one example, how has the existence of Žižek’s body of work changed the nature of resistance to the present world-system to make any actually-enacted praxis of resistance more meaningful than it would be had he never written (other than making us get a warm glow inside by reading them)? Despite the subtitle, proposed strategies of resistance in CR are thin on the ground. The final prescription, which could be described as neomodernism (as might Fisher’s position throughout) is an argument for the Left to subordinate the state to the public will (hence resurrecting that concept) – for a progressive return to a grand narrative at least as far as a systemic critique of Capital. However, despite my sympathy with the second part of this equation, the first fails to convince: to what extent is a public will identifiable as something detached from the structural conditions which give rise to majority desires, and isn’t there a certain resemblance here to an unquestioning ideology of ‘democracy’ which fails to recognise the tyranny of the ‘public will’ (if I may be permitted to employ that hoary old chestnut)?

Fisher is hopeful that, although the response to the global financial crisis was undoubtedly a reassertion and strengthening of neoliberal practice, this epsiode has nonetheless discredited the discursive framework in which the system operates: neoliberalism can no longer be ‘an ideological project that has a confident forward momentum’ but one running on ‘inertial, dead defaults.’ In order to take advantage of this moment to occupy political terrain, the Left could, for example, promise to ‘deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy.’ In regard to such strategies in concrete form, as a casual academic I particularly appreciated Fisher’s point that traditional strikes in the educational system are becoming meaningless, whereas a ‘strategic withdrawal of forms of labour which will only be noticed by management,’ a concerted refusal to carry out the endless stream of bureaucratic paper pushing chores demanded by the system, would actually constitute functional resistance (and Fisher seems to be pursuing these ideas 'on the ground' through the medium of conferences). Indeed, one of the pleasures of the book for me was the shock of recognition in Fisher’s grounded analysis of both the bureaucratic neoliberalisation of the post-disciplinary education system from a structural and labour perspective, and the attitude taken by many students (or should that be customers?), the ‘depressive hedonia’ and ‘post-lexianism’ which they live out in relation to their subject position as wired-in consumers of culture (the danger here, of course, is nostalgia for the good old days of patriarchal, hierarchical models of learning which focus solely on content not meaning – but I don’t think negotiating between these positions need be a zero-sum game).

But having said this, ‘offers no solutions’ is in itself, of course, a classic bastion of opposition to change – and indeed, it seems likely that, given the inevitable limitations of discursive horizons in lived experience, an alternative to late capitalism is unimaginable except as we begin to live it, to bring it in to being. In doing so, opening up a dialogue – particularly one which also proves a pleasurable and well-achieved model of the classic erudite, highbrow-lowbrow pleasure of cultural theory – is an act not to be sniffed at.

John Lanchester - Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010)

Knowledge may be power, but sometimes acquiring that knowledge seems too tiresome a task. In this light – and given that my professional life increasingly involves knowledge about global finance and economics – I’ve been attempting to get past the usual click:off response that my brain has in regard to anything about economics, in order to try to actually gain some understanding of the way power structures in the world operate, inseparably intertwined as they are with financial issues.

My first foray into this field was Joseph Heath’s Filthy Lucre: Economics For People Who Hate Capitalism, a slightly misnamed book given that its premise was the debunking of influential economic myths from both the right and the left, but nonetheless an interesting and informative read. My next step into the labyrinth of boring and incomprehensible jargon that is economics – not known as 'the dismal science' without reason – was John Lanchester’s new book (published in the US as I.O.U), which belies that discipline’s often well-earned reputation.

One of my problems with trying to understand these issues, as someone with a background squarely in the humanities and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences, is that even if I look up basic explanations of particular financial instruments (presumably so called because we all get played) on Wikipedia, I have to back up four or five pages in order to understand the concepts behind them. The issue here is that it’s an entirely different discourse, with all kinds of assumed underlying knowledge – I imagine mine is a similar sensation to what an economist would feel reading, say, Can The Subaltern Speak? or The Archaeology of Knowledge (i.e. this is boring, pointless, jargon-filled cobblers). The point regarding postmodernism is one to which I’ll return – but Lanchester’s book is a different story altogether. Lanchester is a novelist – his first book, the delightfully black The Debt To Pleasure (which won the Whitbread) is a particular favourite of mine, but I also enjoyed his others, Fragrant Harbour and Mr. Phillips. So when I heard that he had unexpectedly written a book on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), I thought it might be a good place to continue my conceptual pursuit of Mammon. The book has its genesis in Lanchester’s research for a novel involving aspects of the GFC (and Fragrant Harbour, a novel of Hong Kong, was partially concerned with the human impact of global finance as reflected in that deeply trade-focussed city), and a prescient article which he wrote just before the GFC broke.

Given this background, Lanchester’s is a lucid and blackly humorous introduction to the processes which made the GFC possible, from an outsider’s perspective which doesn’t assume any previous familiarity with – well, anything he talks about, really. I now understand derivatives - options and futures, collateralized debt obligation, credit default swaps, securitization and a host of other nasty acronyms (the book could’ve used an acronym index). And I understand what actually went wrong with the financial system (if one makes the, in my opinion incorrect, assumption that it was somehow right before any of this happened). And basically, it was this: it became entirely postmodern.

The arcane nature and mind-boggling mathematical complexity of economic processes is not just incidental; it’s actually a central part of the reason why a catastrophe like the GFC could occur. It means that insiders all think in the same ideology – the more risk, the more profit; mathematical models can accurately reflect real-world behavior; limitations on particular types of trade and instrument are imposed by clueless outsiders and are there to be bent and broken (Lanchester suggests that an appropriate metaphor would be if the invention of seatbelts were to be taken as indicating that drunken speeding should now become standard practice). The failure of outsiders to understand these processes, combined with an unwarranted trust based on the shared quasi-religion of neoliberal ideology, meant that governments failed to rein in institutions either before or after the crash – a fact which contributed to heedlessness of institutions fully aware that they were too big to fail (indeed, in complete contradiction to the unfettered free market ideology which supposedly guaranteed the success of the global financial structure, the crash itself simply provided what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism,’ a perfect opportunity to transfer more money from the public to the private sector and, despite some sharp but meaningless words, to shore up the lack of accountability of powerful individuals and institutions). This was combined with the arrogance of workers in the sector who are, as Lanchester points out, in immediate touch with proof of their rightness every time they make a successful financial decision, in contrast to most professions, where right or wrong decisions are generally more grey-shaded, less quantifiable. All of these things led to a situation in which those in the industry were completely insulated from any commonsense view of the probabilities and risks with which they were dealing.

But perhaps the most fundamental issue here is the aforementioned fact that finance went post-modern. As new instruments were invented to insure against risk and to ‘leverage’ initial capital into ever bigger sums – which in turn led to incentives to make irrecoverable loans and a drop in the perceived necessity for capital reserves against unfortunate, but now supposedly impossible, market downturns or runs – transactions were no longer attached in any meaningful way to their initial base, while attitude – in terms of bullish projected confidence, optimism and expertise – came to dominate analysis (a trend Barbara Ehrenreich documents in her brilliant work Smile or Die). Thus it was that nobody noticed that it was fundamentally impossible for a complicated system of refracted abstract meaning to transform a myriad of home loans to the destitute into a lasting financial bonanza. In this sense, postmodernist thinking (of which, let it be known, I am by no means a critic) is far from an ivory-tower game of inaccessible and meaningless jargon; rather, it is a reflection of the actual characteristics of the so-called ‘real world’ (if by ‘real’ we mean actually-existing structures of power with massive impacts on global living conditions), and the best tool to use to understand these characteristics.

But the question on everyone’s lips in relation to this situation is: who’s to blame? Those who have an interest in taking the heat off the banks and financial institutions blame politicians or the consumerist public’s insatiable desire for free money and disregard for the future (or, in the most right-wing scenario, China), but the fact is, not one point of this unholy trilogy - a Bermuda triangle into which cash keeps on vanishing - is off the hook. Addicted to consumerist capitalism, the pursuit of happiness through materialism, and lockstep free market ideology, these things are in fact not even separate as such, but facets of the same underlying societal malaise. And while John Lanchester looks mainly at the former, if you’re looking for an introductory explanation to this deplorable state of affairs, there’s no better place to start.

Barbara Ehrenreich - Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World (2009)

Place your hand on your heart and say…
‘I admire rich people!’
‘I bless rich people!’
‘I love rich people!’
‘And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!’

If you find this a chilling statement, you’re not alone. In her new work, Barbara Ehrenreich’s target is ‘positive thinking’ in the United States (although the situations she describes will be familiar, though in some cases somewhat less extreme, to those in other societies). In eviscerating this ideology she traces its inception from a rejection of Calvinist roots in the New Thought of the nineteenth century (here we might think particularly of Transcendentalism and Christian Science) – the first flower of American ‘alternative culture’ – simultaneously arguing that the Calvinist 'predestination' model in which failure is a demonstration of blameworthy unworthiness, and the psyche must be continually examined for signs of ‘sin’ (now under the guise of ‘negativity’) remains the basic form of this discourse. In the present day, positive thinking has become manifest in ‘self-help,’ motivational literature and speaking (both personal and economic), psychology, life coaching, and in relation to physical and mental health and wellbeing. Each of these are evaluated in turn – and, while Susan Sontag’s writing is more high-brow and more spare, the way in which she evaluated a particular ideology across a number of different spheres, pursuing ideas from one intellectual stratum to the next, is a good point of comparison for Ehrenreich’s work here.

Ehrenreich’s starting point is the application of ‘positive thinking’ to illness, and, particularly, cancer – her own experience with breast cancer leads her to question both an ideology which, while seeming helpful or at the least innocuous, in fact leads to the placing of a huge burden on the subject as well as a blame-the-victim mentality (on the part both of fellow subjects – in this case cancer-patients – and non-subjects, each in denial about their ultimate lack of power and control). She also takes this as a starting point to debunk the science of ‘positive thinking’ and demonstrate the way in which dodgy evidence has been spun into the present-day equivalent of unquestionable folk wisdom: ‘research demonstrates.’

But Ehrenreich is not content to leave the issue here. Her next target is the economic sphere, to the individualism of this discourse on the terms of which the poor may be blamed for their poverty (conveniently dovetailing with the Horatio Alger myth), in which circumstance and context are discounted as factors influencing outcomes, in which recklessness is encouraged (optimism can be dangerous, if it leads to underestimation of risk) and which means that, in the post-industrial age of downsizing and the super-CEO, the way to manage a mistreated, unmotivated workforce is not to improve their conditions, but to insist on ‘positivity’ as a necessary aspect of work, no matter how unjust the treatment dished out from above. Meanwhile, the spiritually-framed anti-intellectualism of this discourse (and here again the crossover with New Ageism is apparent) means that celebrity CEOs are encouraged to act, not think, with disastrous consequences for others – and a groupthink mentality is created in which the rule is to shoot the messenger, leading to unforeseen crises from the response of Iraqis to the invasion of their country, to the credit crisis. The capitalist, and, now, neo-liberal ideology of perpetual growth ties in neatly with the ‘positive’ maxim that one should never be satisfied with one’s present circumstances.

According to this hegemonic ideology, criticism of massive and growing economic inequality can be suppressed not externally but internally, as the individual comes to believe that such a view is damaging to their own success – and their optimism leads them to politically reject brakes on conspicuous wealth accumulation as they envisage themselves as the rich-in-waiting. In other words, positive thinking creates a false consciousness (though Ehrenreich doesn’t use the term) which demands the cheerful acceptance of economic subjugation, justifies inequality both for those who enact it and those who are subjected to it, and stymies any recognition of, and hence resistance to, this process.

Christianity, too – at least in some forms – is deeply implicated in this mess. The present-day mega-churches, founded on market principles of determining what the customer wants (not to be lectured about morality or punishment) have jettisoned Biblical theology in favour of a prosperity gospel which sees individual material rewards – right down to praying for a table to be free at a restaurant – as the inevitable outcome of a positive attitude. The connection between religion and commerce is clear here inasmuch as, on the one hand, mega-rich televangelists preach material success as the reward of faith, rather than any otherworldly salvation, while their churches provide ever-growing tithes – while worshippers are encouraged to reject plans for negative outcomes (plans such as saving), and to see gains which might otherwise be recognised as unwarranted or risky (such as loans on little credit) as the God-given result of their positive faith. Furthermore – and here Ehrenreich reveals an interesting divide within US Christianity on the part of those who oppose this popular style of religiosity - ‘God’ becomes a cipher figure whose role is to reward positivity, whereas the primary power to alter reality is put in the hands of the human individual – and although Ehrenreich doesn’t extrapolate this far, here we see a discourse in which the individual in fact becomes their own God, the centre of a universe which they materially alter to suit their own needs (The Secret is a particularly egregious example of this kind of thought, one which Ehrenreich rips into). The question of whether one’s own material success may necessarily be incompatible with another’s is one which does not arise.

Ehrenreich recognises that this discourse cuts across the political spectrum, but it would have been nice to see more connections drawn between positive thinking and the hippie beliefs of the 1960s and ‘70s, ideals which shaped many of the present generation of those in charge, even when they have rejected their political content. The belief in mentality as shaping reality, and in purposeful positivity and optimism as ends in themselves, seem deeply indebted to that era. Another cavil is that for all her debunking of the ‘science’ of positive thinking – junk new-ageism which is pushed by people including Martin Seligman as head of the American Psychological Association (and indeed research into ‘happiness’ and ‘positivity’ is demonstrated as perhaps the major growth area for the lucrative interface between psychologists and corporations, leading Ehrenreich to question as to the difference between a ‘life coach’ or ‘motivational speaker’ and a qualified psychologist) – Ehrenreich fails to address the question of how we actually define ‘happiness’ (or is it ‘success’?) and the concomitant question, vital for scientific empiricism, of whether we can regard experiments in which participants self-report their own ‘happiness’ as reliable, or whether holding ‘positive thinking’ as an ideology in itself means that subjects are unable or unwilling to admit to a lack of happiness, either to themselves or to others.

Throughout, Ehrenreich’s dry writing is a pleasure to read, and this book is one to be devoured over a day or two rather than one to plough through – but she also exercises a cutting insight and a finely honed intellect – more so, I think, than in her earlier works for which she’s best-known, Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. Lack of positivity, she argues, need not mean pessimism and despair – rather, in the best Enlightenment tradition (and this is a work deeply premised on the exercise of reason in the ascertainment of empirical truth, a position with which I’m not always one hundred percent in sympathy, but which is absolutely appropriate as an heuristic here) she suggests that the best approach to life is a realism based on the gathering of knowledge and on critical thinking, one which recognises and plans for both best- and worst-case scenarios. Like her earlier works, Smile Or Die (released in the US as Bright-Sided) is both an expose in the finest American muckraking tradition, and a wake up call.

“It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite impractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is impractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (From Ken Knabb's The Joy of Revolution)


Q (V. Vale): So how do you see yourself regarding all this?

A (Lydia Lunch): Merely as the instigator. Merely as the cattle prod. Instigation can be a fine art in itself! I never claimed to have any answers or solutions to the world situation; I merely report on it as I see it. But a common complaint about me is: "offers no solutions." Just because I call what's going on "disintegration" or "apocalypse now," I'm supposed to provide the salvation?!

You answer the fuckin' question... and answer it for yourself. Politicians offer solutions - they never work. My job is just to question the roots of the madness.

- Angry Women, RE/Search, 1991.

Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine (2007)

In typical fashion, I didn't read Klein's hugely popular No Logo until a few years after it came out, and then wondered why I hadn't done so earlier. So I was avidly awaiting TSD, and I wasn't disappointed.

In this work, Klein takes 'disaster capitalism' in her sights. Like NL, TSD mixes economic and political theory with often-heartrending personal stories of the human reality of those affected and those who have challenged exploitative power; angers and depresses but also gives hope in presenting those who have successfully challenged the systems it criticises; and is compulsively readable.

Klein's argument is that 'disaster capitalism,' the neoliberal, free-market economics which has Milton Friedman as its godfather (and the word is appropriate), cannot be implemented under democratic conditions because the populace understand the way in which it effects a mass transfer of wealth and power to the top of society, while leaving the rest in extreme suffering; those who would implement such a system have learned that it is only implementable in the shocked aftermath either of natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina or the Asian tsunami) or, in even more sinister fashion, in the wake of disasters which are created expressly for, or expressly including, the purpose of implementing such systems (as in the US-backed overthrow of democratic government in South America, or the invasion of Iraq).

Klein convincingly relates this economic 'shock treatment' to the psychological kind developed by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, in which the aim was to completely wipe an individual's mind clean so that an entirely new and desirable structure could take its place. Not only do these two resemble each other metaphorically, writes Klein, but the psychological techniques are used to destroy those who oppose the economic program, from Argentina to Abu Ghraib.

One of the interesting things about this work is the demonstration of the way in which the ideology of neoliberal capitalism becomes unchallengeable, and is understood by its proponents as a universal good (in the same way that, for example, state communism or state fascism demanded the deaths of millions 'for the good of all'). For this reason (among others), the ideology has been adopted by all sides of politics in the two-party systems which go under the name of democracy, so that the old parties of labour are also part of the neoliberal consensus. At the same time, economics itself is completely postmodern inasmuch as wealth and poverty rely entirely on perception; so, for example, a political leader who gives any public sign of failing to follow this ideological consensus will immediately see their national wealth shrink dramatically as 'the global market' responds.

The biggest strength of the book from my own perspective, however, was to give an informative perspective on economics in the world order. As someone with left-liberal politics (and I suspect I'm not alone in this), economics as a subject turns me off. I start to yawn as soon as I see the jargon. But at the same time, I know that economic theory and ideology is a driving force behind the nature of modern states, the global system and the workings of power. This work explained, for example, why 'global aid' and 'reconstruction' has in fact been counterproductive in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and the tsunami-affected countries: the Western 'free market' left to its own devices, will charge the highest price for the lowest level of service as provided by its own cronies (this much is already familiar), transferring wealth out of the affected area and leaving the people who are victims of these events with no role in the reconstruction and reshaping of their own society, let alone the concomitant financial support which such work would provide.

In some ways, then, this book is also a wideranging global economic history of the post-WWII period. Once you've read it, you'll see the fingerprints of this system everywhere... and in itself this knowledge is power.

Errol Morris - Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

I'm not sure what it is about Errol Morris. I'd previously been disappointed in his doco Mr. Death, on US execution technician and Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter, because it was so filmic that it destroyed any sense of reality regarding some very serious events - execution in the United States, and the Shoah. I had the same disappointment with SOP, his documentary on the American torturers at Abu Ghraib. It's very slickly made, but it doesn't really tell us very much in the end, while the technique distances us from the reality of events. As an audience, we're so used to slick filmmaking that, to my mind, in order to have some impact a different technique is necessary. At one point, when one of the soldiers involved was telling of the way in which Iraqi prisoners hated pop music more than hiphop or metal (blasted at deafening volume continuously into their cells) the audience started laughing. And this is an audience who presumably were already sensitive enough to the issue of torture and prisoner abuse to come and see the film in the first place.

There are a number of important issues floating around the film, but none of them really got an in-depth exploration.

The film itself consists mainly of interviews with the soldiers who appear in the notorious photos, as well as with Janis Karpinski, the prison commander of Abu Ghraib at the time of the scandals, since demoted. However, there are no interviews with the two men who seem to have been at the very centre of the abuses, Charles Graner and Ivan 'Chip' Frederick; nor any interviews with the Iraqis themselves. Apparently, Morris attempted to, but could not find any to give testimony to their experiences; but this is simply never mentioned in the film, thereby once again 'disappearing' them as people. This means that, rather than the viewer realising that anyone might act this way in such a situation and that it is created purposefully by a system involving much higher powers, it is still possible to think that these two were sadistic monsters, at least to some extent; and to have no sense of the actual suffering involved in such abuses as 'stress positions,' sexual abuse, drowning short of death, and so forth.

The fact that the abuse situation was purposefully created by higher powers, up to the very top level of the US administration, is certainly foregrounded; but despite the title, the structure of the military, and the involvement of non-military bodies including the CIA and private contractors (that is, 'outsourced' civilian torturers) is not explored in any detail. Nor is there any real investigation of the nature of the military as an institution, the dehumanisation that soldiers themselves go through in order to be able to do what is demanded of them, the fact that the US army recruits from the poor and uneducated because it's the only way these people might have an economic chance in the current state of American class affairs.

What the soldiers themselves have to say is initially interesting; in my view, because of the fact that they have been punished, they have been able to create a narrative which ignores the entirety of their culpability and the human impact of their actions on their victims, given that higher-ups have gone unpunished, as if it must be the responsibility of one or the other only, a narrative in which they themselves are pitiable victims. But they are not particularly articulate or reflective, and after half an hour we have essentially heard what they have to say about the events beyond describing particular incidents, leaving an hour and a half or so which becomes quite repetitive.

Finally, there's an interesting issue about photographs themselves which could be explored. The given narrative about photography is that it has an aura of authenticity, but in fact what it shows is not real. This is the line the participants themselves keep putting to the viewer, unconvincingly. But I came out thinking that what I had seen in the Abu Ghraib photos, unlike many photographs, did in fact truly capture the essence of what had happened; there were no imagic illusions here to be disabused of. The point is made, and it's well-taken, that for reality to exist there must be images; if these images had not existed, then the scandal would not necessarily have been such (think of the relatively low profile of the illegal US 'ghost prisons' in Europe and elsewhere), and those involved were being punished, essentially, not for the actions which took place, but for the existence of the photos and particularly for appearing in them.

None of the information is new to anyone who had a passing acquaintance with the case, including the connection of Rumsfeld, the military cover-ups, and other ways in which the scandal was in no way the action of a few 'bad apples at the bottom of the barrel'. The film may demonstrate that the people involved were not sadistic, inhuman monsters as such, but it doesn't get across the vital point (discussed in detail in Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect) that almost all of us would behave the same way in the same situation. I tend to think, in any case, that these points are likely accepted by people who choose to see the film in the first case. I can't imagine those who think torture is justified, or who think that the torture was the work of a few psychos with no connection to the military as a system or to the Bush administration, would choose to watch this film. Given all of this, in an overall sense, I'd call this film a massive missed opportunity.

R. J. B. Bosworth - Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship 1915-1945 (2005)

'Fascism' is a term which has taken on a life of its own in polemical discourse (if I see the term 'Islamofascism' one more time...) - but, when we think of Fascism (I'd argue) we're thinking of Nazism, rather than fascism in its original and earliest incarnation in Italy. Bosworth's weighty tome (nearly 600 pages) sets out to map the history of Fascist Italy not in terms of 'isms', 'great men', and what is relevant to the more major powers (although all of these are considered), but in terms of the progress of life under fascism, both that of 'ordinary people' and of the fascists themselves (however defined), the way in which an extreme and theoretically all-encompassing ideology wove itself into the lives of Italians, the ways in which people championed, used, were subjected to the control of, and resisted fascism as a force in their lives.

Bosworth (also author of a lauded bio of Mussolini) leans much more toward social than cultural history, and this means that at times the book is hard going (unusually for me, it took me quite a while and a false start to finish it). From external appearances, I had the impression that this work would be much more a cultural history of the lives of 'ordinary Italians' in this period, whereas, in fact, I'd call it a social history of the Italian nation during the Fascist years. The constant flow of factual information can be overwhelming; but once one gets into the 'rhythm' of the work, it has numerous fascinating insights and is not only entirely worthwhile, but a pleasure to read.

Bosworth is very much concerned with dismantling two major stereotypes: that of Italians as 'brava gente' ('good people') who were incapable of Nazi-style brutality, and that of fascism as a movement helmed by madmen holding sway over a propaganda-hypnotised people. In demolishing these, however, Bosworth confirms a number of other common ideas about Italy: that Italian nationalism is not deeply rooted, so that, for the majority, ties to family, to region, to paese, and the ties of the clientelist/recommendation system by which most Italian business is done, outweigh those to nation and to abstract ideals when it comes to action (notwithstanding the small group of highly ideological fascists, very few of whom became leaders); and that cynical and self-serving maintenance of position, influence and comfort, of 'sistemizzazione' (roughly, working out a comfortable place for oneself) were, most of the time, accorded precedence before ideological self-sacrifice.

For the most part, Bosworth does an excellent job of presenting the ambiguities of a time of deep crisis and hideous human misery in Europe in all their complexity. He also has some excellent insights which I haven't seen before spelt out so clearly: for example, the way in which fascism (particularly the Italian version) is not an ideology (the fascists were politicians employing anti-political rhetoric par excellence) but a need for continuous action and continuous revolution. However, I was troubled by his generalities which seemed to suggest (despite his rejection of this concept in many particular episodes he examines) that fascism was 'imposed' on the Italian people and that their inherent response was to resist this artificial, top-down imposition.

Despite this criticism, however, and despite the tweakings and differences in emphasis that I would've liked to see, I would definitely recommend this work. The individual episodes depicted at every level of the social spectrum are absorbing, ranging from the hilarious to the tragic and cruel; while the material Bosworth covers includes a lot of information, particularly on the Second World War and on Italian colonialism in Africa, which has been considered unimportant and passed over in general histories of WWII and of interwar and colonialist Europe. The material about the connections and contradictions between fascism and institutional Catholicism, and fascism and Nazism, are also fascinating in the way in which they tease out the labyrinthine strands of support and resistance, coercion and co-option, striking at preconceptions while not shying away from conclusions about what is particular in a culture. Also much appreciated is the final chapter, which traces the afterlife of fascism and the vexed Italian relationship to a fascist past - especially attempts to rehabilitate fascism through comparison with Nazism, and the rhetoric of Silvio Berlusconi (the populist and right-wing Prime Minister at the time of the book's writing, at whom Bosworth takes a number of swings, while denying the 'neofascist' label with which some have tagged him). Ultimately, this work is both a fascinating historical narrative, and a much-needed corrective to stereotypes and ellipses in the distorted received knowledge of European twentieth-century history.