...mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita...

a.k.a, recent reading, as follows:

Victorian

Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Aurora Floyd (1862-3)
Classic Victorian sensation fiction – I actually enjoyed it more than the one for which Braddon is now best-remembered, Lady Audley's Secret. The plot centres around bigamy (it's also a canonical work in the 'Victorian bigamy novel') and so, as you can imagine, is of interest on all kinds of levels, but gender and sexuality especially.

Margaret Oliphant – Miss Marjoribanks (1866)
A delightful tale (part of the Chronicles of Carlingford) which bears resemblance to Trollope's slightly preceding Barsetshire Chronicles, of which I'm also a fan. Lucilla, our heroine, is determined to behave sensibly, and also to resolve the lives of everyone around her. Here there are echoes of Austen's Emma (1815), but unlike Emma Woodhouse, Lucilla's management is not wholly unsuccessful. Subversive to an interesting degree yet still moralistic in the classic Victorian mold. I must read the rest of the Carlingford novels.

George & Weedon Grossmith – Diary of a Nobody (1892)
For someone who's got a Victoriana obsession and also a research interest in the rise of the modern bourgeoisie, Diary of a Nobody is perfect. Of course, it's funny, and also a nice counterpoint to more 'serious' Victorian novels (see above) which are yours truly's usual diet.


Assorted Novels

Elizabeth Bowen – The Death of the Heart (1938)
These days I'm not much into 'writerly' writers but I'll gladly make an exception for Bowen, who I hadn't previously read. Her modernist prose makes you want to use clichés like 'crystalline,' and I'm also always a fan of the English novel of manners. In some ways she reminds me of Janet Malcolm (or vice versa) in that both have an exquisite sense of human frailty, but they also like to slyly slip the knife in.

Cornell Woolrich – Rendezvous In Black (1948)
Compared to Chandler and Hammett, Woolrich these days tends to be forgotten as an important noir figure, but the films based on his works are still remembered – Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, Night Has A Thousand Eyes (one of my favourite titles) among others. Actually, though, his work is much darker, less procedural-driven and even more psychological than the aforementioned, full of dread. Rendezvous In Black is a revenge narrative following a man whose fiancée has been killed (bizarrely) in an accident with a low-flying plane and an empty liquor bottle. I have two other novels of his waiting, but I'm worried that it'll be too traumatic a reading experience…

Shirley Jackson – The Sundial (1958)
I'm a huge fan of Jackson's fiction, especially the stories other than 'The Lottery' (which is over-proscribed) - and of the great novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived In The Castle (1962). I've been slowly making my way through her lesser known work, which I find uneven. In The Sundial, as in We Have Always…, we find ourselves in a crumbling mansion on the outskirts of a village, both filled with eccentric characters. Aunt Fanny has a vision, delivered by her dead father, of an impending apocalypse, and preparations begin. I didn't warm to this novel though it was interesting, and in some ways could be seen as a test run for some of the themes of We Have Always… I wonder, too, if there is an influence on Stephen King's The Shining (King wrote about The Haunting of Hill House at length in Danse Macabre), particularly in scenes set in mazes.

J. G. Ballard – The Drowned World (1962)
It's impossible not to recognise in Ballard one of the twentieth century's great prophets – which is why I'll reiterate. The Drowned World, an early novella, tells the story of a dystopian Earth on which the ice caps have melted, the seas risen, and the entire planet become tropical. The slow impact of this on the psyche of the survivors – the opaque excursions into psycho-evolutionary biology – along with the tropical/aquatic gothic setting make this a fascinating and prescient piece, if not always compelling.

J. G. Ballard – Crash (1973)
Again, although Crash's reputation preceded it, it didn't do anything to dint the pleasure of reading the work. Like a lot of Cultural Studies and pop culture research people, I find that 'body horror' area/era particularly interesting in which the body-machine complex starts to be overtly represented in forms both erotic and monstrous (note to self: Men, Women and Chainsaws is still waiting to be read). Ballard, Burroughs, Cronenberg, Lynch, and so on. I'm ashamed to admit that Crash (and Dead Ringers) are the two Cronenberg films I've yet to see, but I'm glad to have read the book first – and, like a few other of the works I describe here, it is every bit as stunning as one has heard. And amazing to imagine that it was written in 1973. The blank erotics and stark futurity, the sharp vision of the city and technology, the mutual violation and traumatic inseparability of body and machine and body-as-machine… it's all there. See also Mark Seltzer (thanks again for the recommendation Dr Swan) and also, of course, Donna Haraway.

Lew McCreary – The Minus Man (1991)
I have a long-neglected sideline interest in serial killers, and Mark Seltzer's eponymous work brought a number of references to my attention, including this novel. Generally, I tend to find serial killers a tiresome subject for fiction (particularly as they are now so implicated in crime fiction and television, and don't require a motive, hence obviating the plot work that writers would otherwise have to put in), but The Minus Man (Lydia Lunch has also named a song on her most recent studio album after the phrase) is much more of a psychological work (and, unlike my favourite serial killer novel, Joyce Carol Oates' Zombie, or Dexter, that other tale of a killer hero, uninterested in satisfying gruesome voyeuristic fantasies). While the controversy around the novel (which was also filmed) centred around the sympathy that the reader feels for Vann Siegert, the serial killer from whose perspective the story is told, in fact this seems like a ridiculous over-simplification; in straightforward prose, McCreary sets out a cold but very human psychological study of the killer as a human inhabiting a lifeworld which happens to include the compulsion to destroy others. A work which, as Seltzer pointed out, is thought-provoking both in terms of its original approach to its content, and when considered as a symptom of the violence and trauma at – and reflexively considered to be at – the heart of the modern social-technological complex.


Assorted Non-Fiction

Jessica Mitford – The American Way of Death Revisited (1998)
As is evident elsewhere, although death has been an ongoing theme – as it is for all of us – my recent Death Studies sojourn has been the locus around which various reading has centred in recent times. Mitford's revised version of her classic work takes us through the usual hideous juxtaposition of the biological and the consumer banal (as well as the institutionalisation of capitalist profit-making on the backs of the bereaved). Little of the older material will be news to anyone who's read Waugh's classic, The Loved One – but what rankles and intrigues is the extent to which, despite her original revelation, the deeply cynical corporatisation of the funeral industry has continued unabated. As with any good piece of muckraking – and Mitford's up there with the best – the indignation and disgust flow unabated (to take just one of myriad examples, the fashion for expensive 'double coffins' in which the outer layer is intended to be impenetrable by the elements - causing a build-up of gas inside the coffin due to anaerobic bacterial decay and leading to explosions - the solution being 'burping coffins,' which vent the gas so as to avoid the former, and presumably greater, indignity).

Simon Reynolds – Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past (2011)
There's so much that could be said about this book, but that will have to await a more thorough review. I loved Reynolds' work on post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again, but this one is a bit more personal, also more theoretical and coming from a position of critique, which is interesting but at times fails to gel or seems a little like a mid-life crisis. What I will note here, which others have before me, is that the irony is that Reynolds' thesis - that we now create music which does not attempt to be new, and that this is a bad thing - actually looks back to the time when music saw itself as new (Reynolds thinks '65 was the turning point) as an original golden age. Definitely worth reading - both enraging and engaging.

Scott Carney – The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers (2011)
This book is as gruesome as the title sounds, but it's necessary reading for anyone interested in necro- or thanatocapitalism and the reification of the human body on the unequal playing field of the global 'free market' – while not being as heavy a read as any of that sounds (it's written in an easy journalistic style). Carney's interest in the area began when one of his students, on a group tour to India, committed suicide and he was in the position to supervise the treatment and return of the body. From that point, he explores the various areas mentioned in the subtitle, including the fascinating nexus between holy or ritual head-shaving and the hair industry. For those who enjoyed Mary Roach's Stiff, there are many more interesting explorations to be had into the 'afterlife' of the human – or human biological material. Particularly recommended for the Death Studies cohort (Tim and Pia – also Meredith, you may find this one interesting if you haven't seen it already).

Jon Ronson – The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (2011)
I'd really enjoyed Jon Ronson's Them, and so I had high hopes for The Psychopath Test, particularly since, as you're now aware, it deals with a subject I have a deep interest in. But although, as always, Ronson uncovers various near-unbelievable histories and anecodotes, and employs his typical and typically entertaining strategic deployment of his own awkwardness and his unique style of reported dialogue, I found the book a little all over the place. Ronson isn't quite sure what he's interested in (Psychopathology itself, as a concept and as manifest? The 'madness industry' and its pernicious allies in other state and corporate institutions? Institutions and their impact on mental health?) and there is a particularly problematic chapter in which he interviews a former Tonton Macoute, trying to apply his new knowledge of psychopathy checklists – whereas those of us who know much about the area of organised mass violence know that it's precisely necessary not to employ sadists or psychopaths as violence workers because they're too unreliable and anti-systemic - you would think a book on psychopathy, even if not an academic work as such, might pay attention to this kind of thing. Still, all in all a lot of fun.


India

Rohinton Mistry – A Fine Balance (1996)
Just as good as I'd always heard it was – a Dickensian (I'm not always a huge fan of Dickens, but that's another conversation), addictive narrative set during the massive upheaval of Indira Gandhi's Emergency. In terms of other great recent English-language novels of India, I didn't love it as much as A Suitable Boy, but although Mistry's writing is less exquisitely fine-tuned than Vikram Seth's, the story itself grows powerful very early on.

Gita Mehta – Karma Cola (1979)
A good corrective to the neo-orientalist New Age view of India as a source of wisdom, particularly prevalent in the '60s and '70s – there are some great anecdotes of gurus and devotees, and the intermesh with capitalism, but I found Mehta's 'flip' style to be a bit casual and offputting.

William Dalrymple – The Age of Kali (1998)
Edward Luce – In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (2007)
I'd already read, and mostly enjoyed, Dalrymple's book on practitioners of different spiritual traditions in India, Nine Lives. But reading Western travel literature on India is difficult in that the writers often haven't caught up with post-colonialism, and that's unfortunately the case both for Dalrymple, who at times appears something of an imperialist nostalgic (I'm also finding that in the work of his I'm presently reading on Delhi, City of Djinns); and for Luce, bureau chief for the Financial Times in South Asia (and now Washington), who is too sympathetic to anti-statist freemarketism for my tastes (not saying that there aren't any problems with the Indian state as such). Nonetheless, Dalrymple's descriptions are gorgeous (and his encounters with Benazir Bhutto particularly stick in the memory), while Luce had access to some very interesting people and the anecdotes, situations and interviews he lays out are both hilarious and chilling, the latter particularly in relation to Partition and inter-communal violence (again, a theme of City of Djinns). I now intend to read some specific Partition histories, which I think may also be helpful for my mass violence research…

Anika - Anika (2010)

Do we live in a post-modern age of recombination? Apparently so, judging from a recent review which unfavourably contrasted one fresh-minted album with another – the failing of the first in contrast to the second was that, using the same set of influences, the musicians hadn’t managing to do anything which one might appreciate. But perhaps there’s nothing really so post-modern about recombination as an activity – it’s more that it’s now the acceptable face of a dominant paradigm. So for those of filled with ‘satiable cultural curiosity our task becomes not so much to distinguish, even in passing, what is original from what is unoriginal (or to distinguish between pleasurable and unpleasurable unoriginality), but to ask about process – about how recombinations take place, not only about the materials from which they are formed.

Unlike other new music where enjoyment lies in the faithfulness of its recreation, Anika assumes the work of recombination seriously, taking as its main elements a Nico-esque chanteuse; dry, dubby drum & bass (as in, the instruments, not the genre) employed with organic synth touches and an emphatic No Wave sensibility; and covers of sixties and seventies classics from Twinkle’s Terry to Bob Dylan’s Masters of War (plus a few originals, and a much-appreciated inclusion of a dub version of the latter). These elements turn out to be a much more likely match than one might consider – turning out pieces which, far from multi-genre novelty tracks, add a gravitas to the originals, and a sense of nihilism, of the end of history as farce not as triumph.

Of course, as a fan of dub reggae, no wave, Nico, and sixties pop, I’m biased, but this was far from an album I had ever previously envisaged (in contrast, say, to synthabilly, which I’m still waiting for – with the possible exception of the ill-fated Silicon Teens). We might speculate that the glue holding all of this together is the Beak production (Geoff Barrow of Portishead) and – although the connection isn’t immediately obvious – in the use of dub influences, in a certain sweetness (more usually provided by a creamy soulful voice, but here by the nature of many of the songs themselves), and in the adoption of the depressive position so in evidence upon Portishead’s self-titled album, we see a dark development of the signature elements of triphop – not in the more well-known dubstep direction spearheaded by the likes of Burial, but into something in quite a different tradition.

But while we’re with tradition and points of comparison, Nico’s criminally under-rated, John Cale-produced masterpiece Camera Obscura must be mentioned; and speaking of criminally under-rated work, for those who like any of the combinations of names and styles mentioned here, if you don't know them already Sally Strobelight and Judy Nylon are both points of reference. Finally, the darkness lurking behind renditions of folk-pop songs more usually associated with girlish wistfulness may evidence the skeleton of Shirley Collins lying unquietly in the closet.

There is a sense here of the dark side of the decades of socio-cultural rebellion, of the burn-outs that they would leave behind, of their failures and co-optation; echoes, also, of contemporary events, as in the moving soldier’s testament on Iraq which is sampled in the closing moments of Masters of War (and anti-systemic politics are also in evidence, though never heavy-handed, in the two originals). But we also experience a personal ennui, a more interior feeling of end times, in covers such as ‘End of the World,’ ‘Sadness Hides The Sun’ and ‘I Go To Sleep’ (made popular by Skeeter Davis, Greta Ann, and The Kinks respectively). There is a sense, too, of the crumbling saudade, the feeling of social claustrophobia but also of the dissatisfactoriness of the possibilities of empowerment, inherent in the British kitchen sink realism milieu, so beloved of Morrissey (another Twinkle fan).

The choice of covers (which also includes Yoko Ono’s ‘Yang Yang’) is inspired here – rather than songs which were brilliant but have become culturally ubiquitous (‘Tainted Love’ or ‘Hallelujah’), the choices on Anika are defamiliarising not only in performance, but also in selection. We are in territory which is purposefully but defiantly Unheimliche. Indeed, as with Nico, dislocation and liminality are very much the appropriate tropes: upon entering the environs of Anika, we find we are trapped in a desolate ennui which at the same time is both angry and melancholy – a landscape which is found not only internally, as is so often the case with much pop music, but in which particular constellations of internal emotions and external socio-political conditions reflect each other.

Susan Hill - The Woman In Black (1983)

I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss Susan Hill, given the strong feelings I have for the classical English supernatural tale as manifest from the Victorian era through to the first few decades of the Twentieth century. Perhaps it’s because I have a general dislike for pastiche in literature (if not in other genres) and, in the postmodern age in particular, I tend to find it an excuse for failing to make up an original plot and/or use an original style (while the often anachronistic attempt at adoption often merely puts the skill of the writer being pastiched into an even more flattering light). None of these faults, however, are to be found in Hill’s ghostly novella.

The Woman In Black – set in the early part of the twentieth century, where cars still vie with pony traps – is told with the classic framing device of the elderly reflection on a terrifying and traumatic event of youth; the occurrence in question is the visit of Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, to lonely Eel Marsh House. The house, with attendant crumbling cemetery, lies on a piece of land far out in the windswept salt marshes, accessible only by a causeway which is periodically covered by the rising tide. Kipps is in the process of going through the papers of Mrs Drablow, the late unlamented inhabitant of Eel Marsh House; but when he sees an emaciated woman in unfashionable black clothes at the funeral (getting only surly hostility from the locals on questioning), and starts to hear strange noises from across the marshes and from the locked room at the end of the passageway, things take a turn for the sanity-destroying.

As that précis indicates, all of the ingredients of the supernatural tale of terror are present here, as are James’ five key features of the English ghost story. Hill herself has indicated that her earlier novels are ‘serious,’ while her latter works, including TWIB and her Serailler detective series, do not fall into this category. Certainly it could not be said that TWIB is an original piece (though we might also say that of many of the ‘classical’ works of supernatural fiction), but it stands as a consummate example of an art which might have been considered lost in the age of torture porn and gritty realism. Indeed, we might ask whether originality is an important demand in genre work. Hill’s writing is fine (in the best sense of that word, and in contrast to the lonely setting), despite the frequent comma splices (but please ignore my soapboxing a pet peeve), rising to more poetic heights in some beautiful descriptions of landscape and atmosphere:

Away to the west, on my right hand, the sun was already beginning to slip down in a great, wintry, golden-red ball which shot arrows of fire and blood-red streaks across the water. To the east, sea and sky had darkened slightly to a uniform, leaden grey. The wind that came suddenly snaking off the estuary was cold.

Am I wrong in thinking that, mood-wise, the echoing spaces and sudden emotional stabs of The Cure circa Seventeen Seconds/Faith/Pornography (that is, in the same period as TWIB was written) would be an appropriate soundtrack? Rosemary Jackson, bringing a feminist analysis to Hill’s work (more on this anon), has suggested ‘coldness’ as its imaginative centre, and the tension between detachment from and desire for life as fundamental. The themes here are the ‘sensational’ passions – possessive love, revenge, fear, memory – refracted in sharp shards through the mirror of the past, a liminal demarcation (reminiscent of James’ own story 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad') which takes form literally in the flat sea surrounding the house, stressing the inaccessibility of the recollected, and the dangers both of the alluring yet treacherous waters of forgetfulness, and those of painful recollection – a double Charybdis which in either case leaves the overcurious subject isolated and, ultimately, suffocated.

In this sense, there is an aspect of the ‘psychological ghost story’ to TWIB, manifest in a not-so-pathetic fallacy, which is heir to works like de Maupassant’s The Horla or even Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (though without that work’s prescient questioning of perception itself) – and we might associate this existential alienation, resolved but never quite forgotten or overcome, with the dislocated temporal position of the narrator, trapped between old certainties and modernist innovations, with the house both as a space of security from the external world (the classic Victorian model), and as manifestation of anxiety - in being, on the one hand, the place par excellence for the determination of (cultural) capital, and, in this case, empty, that is, both void of any audience for such a display, and signifying the growing bourgeois realisation of the ultimate emptiness of the endeavour of wealth accumulation and conspicuous consumption.

On this note, class issues – fluidity and the lack thereof – are central to the landscape here. Class transformation is evident in the narrator’s own trajectory (given in the framing story), and a symbolic moment occurs when he transforms, in the eyes of a friendly but unsophisticated, new-moneyed landowner local, from suave young solicitor to dishevelled and fearful victim of the irrational. Beyond this, the fact that class mores were a determining factor in the events which led to the haunting is made explicit in the text – figuring, in other words, the (equally oceanic) arriviste on a lonesome road (one whose lonesomeness is only exaggerated by the many who tread it yet dare not recognise each other), desiring yet dreading to turn his head to see the ‘frightful fiend’ of class ignominy (a common theme in the sensation novel).

This anxiety – the prevailing mood of both the psychological ghost story, and of modernism itself and those who literarily anticipated its concerns – is also manifest in gender relationships. The narrator here moves in a masculine world of solidity (and reassuring, if undesirable, stolidity) while the appearance of the feminine in the text foreshadows catastrophe and unknowability – whether the unseen Mrs Drablow, the ‘woman in black' herself, or Kipps’ fiancé, Stella, who remains offstage and undescribed virtually throughout. One of M. R. James’ rules for the ghost story is the absence of gratuitous bloodshed and sex, and while this is certainly the case here (and while not wanting to emphasise overmuch the repressive hypothesis), nonetheless the events in question are put in motion by the sexual act (not to mention the absent father) - and the attraction-repulsion between the narrator and the ‘woman in black,’ who is a fallen woman both in the sexual and soteriological sense, who is both punished and who punishes, who is caught textually somewhere between the figure of the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural mother’ – certainly holds a strong sexual charge, the most obvious manifestation of which occurs in his discernment of the traces of beauty in her wasted features. One might ask, is there a scent here of the unnamed ‘wasting disease’ – the highly sexualised consumption, perhaps – as a punishment for sexual and maternal misconduct? It might be drawing too long a bow to recognise here the advent of HIV/AIDS, but it certainly resonates with the historical moment in which the novel was published.

Meanwhile, the counter-balancing feminine forces, equally without character – the remembrance of the maternal care of Kipps’ mother and his nurse, the warm asexual figure of his latter-day wife – certainly play into a narrative of the saviour Madonna in contrast to the unnatural whore or the barren hag. But I wouldn’t by any means say that this is a novel in which there lies concealed a misogynist narrative – rather, that these tropes of the supernatural genre, in the hands of a female writer (not that that necessarily counts for mitigation), are played upon and indeed complexified in their emotional import. Indeed, we might read the presence of these ‘silent women,’ and the reasons for their silence, as a statement in itself.

In order to appreciate TWIB, however, it’s not necessary (though it’s certainly enjoyable) to analyse the ways in which this work is a reflection on the sensibilities which shaped the classic ghost story, as filtered through the lens of the early 1980s (a period in which the gothic was once again beginning to take hold of popular culture). In short, what we have here is a worthy heir to James, Le Fanu, Mrs. Gaskell and the other luminaries of the luna-nary canon.

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.

Wilkie Collins - Poor Miss Finch (1872)

While it's one of Collins’ lesser-known works, Poor Miss Finch does not fall into the category of his ‘thesis’ novels, and it remains a work with much to offer the reader. It does not measure up to the heights scaled by some of his other novels, but unlike those pieces, this is a novel which has, not characterisation and intricate plotting, but philosophical, and, specifically, phenomenological exploration as its central strut. Nonetheless, we are not without the sensational, gothic and grotesque aspects which characterise Collins’ work – the double (a recurrent theme), hideous disfigurement, the exurban gothic setting of an isolated house in a remote corner of the country (though accompanied by that staple of Victorian fiction, the picaresque village), and a plot driven by crime, multiplying and improbable coincidence, and a sense of fated doom.

The narrative concerns Lucilla Finch, a young blind woman, and her suitor, the good-natured but weak and quick-tempered Oscar Dubourg, as well as his more worldly twin, Nugent. The story is related by Madame Pratolungo, a companion to Lucilla and a former South American revolutionary – who represents here, along with the eye surgeon Herr Grosse, an example of Collins’ problematic depictions of ‘foreigners’ (we might think of Professor Pesca in The Woman In White), as well as the occasional vehicle of somewhat misogynistic views, but is nonetheless a sympathetic character. Perhaps the most famous aspect of this tale is the treatment Oscar takes for epilepsy – silver nitrate, which turns his skin a metallic blue-grey. The work is subtitled 'A Domestic Story,' and Collins (who, like Dickens, had a highly unorthodox domestic situation, but who, unlike Dickens, was open to the presentation of radical sociosexual moral critique) treats us to a hideous parody of the lower-upper Victorian bourgeois family in the Finch rectory, a former nunnery.

The plot is at times artificially melodramatic, and hence the characters somewhat frustrating, although from a feminist perspective Lucilla is a very atypical Victorian heroine – strong willed and with a definite personality (even if at times more stereotypically irrational and emotionally labile) – but the gothic and melodramatic aspects can also be relished, in the setting (an isolated downland house) and the dénouemont (a wild chase to avert a marriage schemed up under the auspices of deceptive identity, the latter being another characteristic Collins theme).

But unlike many of Collins’ other works, the concern here is not only with identity in terms of appearances which are deceptive because misrecognised (treating here another typical Collins project, the converse characteristics and complex emotional bonds of the double), but also with the way in which identity is created by perception – in particular, in Lucilla’s travail between blindness and sight, and the implications for her character and state of mind. Collins did a great deal of research into blindness for the work, and it was written in a period in which explorations of perception and ontology, with particular reference to blindness, had been budding in the work of philosophers such as Locke, Molyneux, Diderot and Bishop Berkeley (Collins did a great deal of research into the medical aspects of the work, both accounts of blindness and recovered sight, and the treatment of epilepsy with silver nitrate).

In a deeper sense, then, the novel is one which questions deeply-held assumptions about ‘affliction,’ happiness and the human condition, and further, mutual intelligibility – Catherine Peters’ introduction quotes Shaw: ‘do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.’ Peters also notes that Collins’ project, well achieved, was not to show blindness in the typical Victorian sentimental mold, but in the light of human reality – and the sometimes frustrating aspects of Lucilla’s character may be an inevitable outcome of this approach.

Even more so than his better-known novels, this is not a piece without flaws – and those which are characteristic of Collins are the most magnified. But it is also a thought-provoking text and one which is fascinatingly unusual both within Collin’s already outré oeuvre – due to its philosophical concerns – and within the Victorian canon itself.

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.

Cluster - Qua (2009)

As far as krautrock goes, I’m more a fan of the kosmische, the ambient and the motorik moments than of the riotous long-form hippie-era free jams in which the genre had its inception – apart from Cluster, other favourites include Neu! (a band whose full potential is sadly only realised in a few songs), Harmonia, Kraftwerk’s Ralf und Florian, and Manuel Göttsching/Ash Ra Tempel’s New Age of Earth (not to mention the wildly influential E2-E4). But if one was to think that the creative force of this movement, if movement it can be termed, was largely spent by the early eighties, Cluster’s 2009 album Qua (their first in fourteen years) demonstrates that this was not the case universally.

Despite the seminal quality and historical importance of their earlier work, in particular Zuckerzeit and Sowieso, Qua is, I think, Cluster’s finest moment (although After the Heat is a strong contender). This is an album which manifests their finest qualities – a pop melodiousness which is filtered through a lens of experimentation which means that it never manifests in the traditional song form but rather lends a quality of the unheimliche, the familiar residing in the unfamiliar (and/or vice versa) to their work – along with an understated musical sensibility in which the content of the music unfolds itself at the listener’s pleasure, equally amenable to playing the role of Satie’s furniture music (and Satie, for me, is a key reference point for Qua), but also, like the work of the corduroy-suited composer, to serious engagement, a fascination with the intricacies of ambience and minimal (though not necessarily repetitious) sound. On this note, one is reminded of the way in which David Lynch’s early work draws one into the microscopic world of the everyday, and there is a similar cinematic quality here, though without the overtones of melodrama and anxiety which haunt Lynch.

Rather than the more usual lengthy explorations of the krautrock oeuvre, the pieces on Qua tend to be short (with the exception of the stunning 'Gissander,' which clocks in at just under seven minutes), and in this they bring to mind found objects, whose purpose remains indeterminate and mysterious, but also not a question of importance. In these electronic explorations, there is nothing resembling a hook as such – this is music which dissolves as one listens to it. I’m reminded of the cover, and indeed the mood, of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (a work concerned with scale and texture) – a photograph by artist Judith Scott – or of Foucault’s memorable description of aphasia in the introduction to The Order of Things:

‘when shown various differently coloured skeins of wool on a table top, [they] are consistently unable to arrange them into any coherent patterns … within this simple space in which things are normally arranged and given names, the aphasiacs will create a multiplicity of tiny, fragmented regions in which nameless resemblances agglutinate things into unconnected islets: in one corner, they will place the lightest-coloured skeins, in another the red ones, somewhere else those that are softest in texture, in yet another place the longest, or those that have a tinge of purple or those that have been wound up into a ball. But no sooner have they been adumbrated than all these groupings dissolve again…’

In other words, there is something deconstructive happening here, but also a sense of order inasmuch as that is both implied and denied by objects in a space; and it is in this paradoxically peaceful space of tension – which could also be viewed as the tension between observation and affect, and the in-trinsic directed exploration of spaces in which the two processes coexist parasitically – that Qua locates itself, and into which it draws the listener.

Murrell, Spencer & McFarlane - Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader (1998)

This compilation of works on Rastafari and by Rastas is an excellent example of a sociological work which is nonetheless also 'of' and engaging its subject/s. Rather than a general introduction, this is more a work for someone with a specific interest in depending their knowledge of Rastafari culture generally - though there is an introductory preface, it certainly helps to have some background knowledge of Jamaican history and the development in the 1930s of Rastafari, a belief system centring on the Hebrew Bible and the worship of Haile Selassie I, from its roots in the Jamaican slums to the international spread of reggae and (shallow) knowledge of Rasta culture. As such, the work is divided into four sections: ideology and culture, roots and history, music and film; and theology and hermeneutics.

Some of the strongest, most interesting analysis comes in the early stages of the book, in essays on the Rasta use of language to reclaim English from the Babylonian masters (whites who controlled, and control, the system) - a notable example is in the firt-person joint singular-plural term 'I'n'I' referring both to the individual and his/her connectedness to others and to Jah Rastafari - and on the personal experiences, generalities and specificities of gendered life as a Rastawoman, and of how this has evolved over time, as women negotiated 'outsider' to 'insider' statuses (or failed to do so) under various conditions, particularly as this relates to periods of socio-economic change, as Rasta moved from its heavily patriarchal working-class roots, into the emerging Jamaican middle classes as traditional Western (and therefore also, Westernised) culture was undergoing a huge series of shocks (in the '60s and '70s). Overall, one of the work's strongest points is the use of modern non-Rasta and Rasta academic voices, the voices of non-academic adherents, and the reflections of long-term researchers to allow the material to speak without a unifying voice and representing a diversity of perspectives, both from the 'inside' and the 'outside'.

Material dealing with the historical development of Rasta from one poor, Christian-based theological cult among many in 1930s Jamaica, and particularly its relationship and the Jamaican relationship with Africa, with pan-Africanists, and with African leaders (most notably, of course, Haile Selassie I) is also of real interest, as is the history of the development of Rasta (sub)cultures in diasporic communities and in majority-non-black countries. Equally fascinating is the story of how this 'cult' came to be the foremost known manifestation of a nation, to have a hugely disproportionate influence on world music, and to shape politics and artistic culture within that nation itself.

The third section pays, to my mind, overmuch space on Bob Marley, who has already been represented and discussed ad infinitum elsewhere - more in-depth material on other Jamaican reggae musicians would've been appreciated. Material on the fraught connections between roots reggae and dancehall would also have been appreciated (1998 being, however, before the notorious clash between dancehall musicians and fans, and anti-homophobes, would reach its height). Material on rasta in cinema perhaps takes its subject a little too seriously in the light of negative films (New Jack City, anyone?) which have now completely disappeared from the cultural raidar (not to say that issues of representation are not important and desering of serious consideration).

The final body of material deals with Rasta theology (though there is no formal dogma, Rasta theology draws heavily on the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, and is ambivalent toward Jesus Christ, but accepts Haile Selassie I as a divinely-prophesied Incarnation). Here, some debate takes place between Rasta and Christian positions, while much is made of the relationship between South American liberation theology and Rastafari. Each appropriates the Bible in the voice of 'the sufferers', challenges 'the system' through politics and lifestyle, and recasts the image of God in that of the oppressed, not their oppressors. In doing so, some interesting commentary is made on anti-White prejudice as originally expressed in Rasta, and whether it still exists in the age of 'one love'. While some criticism is made of the misogynistic and racist texts which have become revered Rasta works (most notably Leonard Howell's The Promised Key, overall I would've liked to see more analysis of the way in which the use of the Biblical text can be counter-liberation, particularly in terms of sexuality (an issue this work unfortunately does not address at all) and gender. The question which kept nagging at me, though it's in some ways the classic question of a non-believer, is: if the Bible is to be reinterpreted so as to wipe out imperialist prejudice, who gets to decide what's valid (the prohibitions of Leviticus, for example) and what isn't?

This issue brings us to a final question about the future of Rasta (already looking somewhat different in 2007, with the rise of many 'Rasta' dancehall singers whose idea of the Rasta way of living or 'livity' would seem very different to that of singers of the classic roots era, than in 1998) - in an era of global religious revivalism and of the swelling strength of African Black christian churches, and since the 'disappearance' of Selassie, will Rasta become simply another denomination among many (some organisations seem to be going down this path, creating formal congregations and churches), in which the political and the spiritual are disconnected or yoked together so as to continue that very oppression (as in conservative religion in the U.S.)? Or will it continue to find common cause with 'sufferers' protests against enslavement and 'downpression', and if so, which oppressed groups of the new century will be able to adopt or be comfortable being heard in a Rasta voice?

Indeed, my only complaint (apart from that it would've been nice to see an entire article devoted to ganja - but perhaps this would've seemed like promoting the stereotype) is that many of these articles implicitly celebrate the liberatory nature of Rasta, without also asking what orthodoxies are thus papered over, not only in terms of gender but in terms of theology, sexuality and other issues relating to minorities within a belief system or organisation, however amorphous. For example, what implications does the fact that rasta in Jamaica is a force much closer to the mainstream than it is anywhere else, have for the 'meaning' rasta there as opposed to elsewhere? Will the opening-up of Rasta to women as autonomous individuals (by no means universal) have liberatory consequences for sexual minorities? What will happen to belief systems as they are negotiated between 'cyber' communities of Rastas in the age of the internet, as well as between physically-located individuals and communities? All these questions remain to be answered. This volume, however, does an excellent job at replying to their preliminaries, giving an insider-outsider perspective on Rastafari as a uniquely influential confluence of religion, community, lifestyle and culture.

Mary Douglas - Purity and Danger (1966)

At times I condemn the modern self-helpish propensity to locate the self as both the source of all problems and the source of their solution. There's a narcissism here which I find problematic, and a political propensity to elide the defining impact of external conditions (particularly those outside the immediate family). But at the same time, the issues that we face as individuals are very much issues that are created by the post/modern condition, with its focus on identity, information flows, internal an external surveillance, and distance technologies; and as such, they need to be dealt with at this level. Also, approaching issues either as external (change yourself) or external (change the situation) is not a zero sum equation - rather, what's needed is a recognition that, in order to implement positive change, both these strategies need to be adopted in permeable concert and applied where they're possible - that is, to think outside the defining binary structures of Western (and perhaps human) thought, to exist in the permeable, liminal zones in which one doesn't strive for control in terms of mastery and lack of necessary connection, in which security is maintained by adaptability, not by inflexibility, in which one doesn't fear the contamination of the internal by the external and vice versa - in which one welcomes, in fact, the mingling and dissolving of these binaries.

Mary Douglas, the social anthropologist, has just died at the age of 86. I would highly recommend her book Purity and Danger (1966) to anyone who wants to understand the way in which modern society constructs the boundaries and oppositions which I mention above, and which demonstrates the construction of the dangers of contamination and pollution which maintain them. The work, and Douglas herself, is most famous for her fascinating analysis of the meaning of the prohibitions of Leviticus (which she later rethought, concluding that God cares equally for those creatures which 'man' must abominate); but the work goes far beyond this to demonstrate the way in which 'dirt', and hence pollution, contamination, defilement, is not an objective fact but rather a manifestation of a system in which matter is out of place - and that the fear of contamination is a fear of lack of control, of the inevitable permeability of boundaried and binaried systems into the construction of which huge social and individual labour is put.

For me, it's been a foundational text, both in terms of my academic work, and in terms of my understanding of my own self and my relationship to others and to the social, my understanding of desire and fear (each in the broadest sense) as manifestations of my person/ality. And, as I do with foundational texts, I've returned to seeing how central these ideas are to an understanding of those on my own individual level. This kind of work on the self, particularly in tumultuous externally-imposed (or, it might be better to say, unchosen) circumstances, is difficult: it helps to be clearheaded, which, for me at least, has been a struggle in itself, but one in which I've made a lot of progress (having not touched any substance of possible abuse stronger than caffeine and cocoa for, oh, about three months now); it involves taking risks and the fear and psychic discomfort that that entails - but they pay off amply; and (incidentally, since we love binaries so much, why do only trinities feel complete?) it involves the willpower to make change, while at the same time giving up the fantasy of total control. Most of all, it helps to have a hand to hold on that journey (the presence of which inevitably alters and defines its course), a beckoning finger to show where you can choose to be led, a companion in both fear and joy, a safe place when the difficulties seem overwhelming... possibilities are the bastard children of circumstance, but it's what we choose to do with them that relates to and creates both who we are - and who we become.

Essays On Dolls - Heinrich von Kleist, Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke (1994)

This slim volume, in Penguin's Syrens series, collects three essays: von Kleist's On the Marionette Theatre (1810), Baudelaire's The Philosophy of Toys (1853), and Rilke's Dolls: On the wax dolls of Lotte Pritzel (1913/14). It's a remarkable collection, demonstrating the casual yet weighty essay style which in our age has become the realm of the polemicist alone.

von Kleist's conversational, but dense, essay, concerns a master dancer's discussion of marionettes, dolls which are attached to those who manipulate them only by one string placed at the centre of gravity. The joy of these dolls, says the dancer, is that they are unselfconscious, free from affectation, and weightless. Grace (and here we see a confluence of divine grace, and gracefulness), argues Kleist, exists in opposition to thought. In the human form, it can only be reconciled in the inanimate (the soulless), or the divine (the infinite soul).

Baudelaire takes us from a childhood experience in a rich woman's fantasyland of toys, to a discussion of the way in which playing with toys is the first expression of abstraction and imagination (though Baudelaire excludes from this those children who 'merely' recreate adult situations - and here there is a certain misogyny in evidence in his scorn for female children playing at childish women - and also excludes 'men-children' who collect, rather than play with, their toys - a problematic argument, to my mind, since this might be read as a symptom either of anxiety or of possessiveness, but not, certainly, as a lack of creativity). But the ultimate desire of a child is to see the soul of a toy, and for this reason, at some time or another, the child breaks the toy. Just as playing marks the beginning of abstraction and imagination, so the failure to find the soul gives the first sensation of stupor and melancholy. And so, we might conclude, imagination and creativity are inextricably linked with disappointment and melancholy...

Rilke takes us to darker places yet. He begins with an examination of the dolls, made for artistic exhibition to adults, of Lotte Pritzel - these, according to Idris Parry, the editor and translator, were elongated, emaciated figures dressed in weird gauzy costumes suggestive of dance, decadence, and a Beardsley-esque atmosphere of eroticism and melancholy.



This is Rilke's introduction to his argument on the way in which dolls, in contrast to other everyday objects which gain by their integration into human life, are 'gruesome foreign bodies' on which our affection is entirely squandered, dense repositories of forgetfulness, so devoid of imagination that, at an age in which it was impossible to truly interact with other humans but only to lose ourselves in them, they can be used to establish distance between the self and the external world, as they become repositories for split or opposing parts of that self as it expands. But we rage at these creatures, because they do not need us, and we have wasted our affection on them (and the doll's lack of response gives us the lovely thought that silence confers considerable importance in a world where both destiny and God 'have become famous mainly by not speaking to us'). The doll helps the child become used to things; but it also inspires the first bitterness of wasted tenderness. Of all toys, the doll is soulless, or rather the self is uncertain whether the doll's soul resides in the self or in the doll; dolls have a quality of not being present. They are thus kept in existence only by a monumental mental effort combining anxiety and magnanimity, but we can never entirely detach ourselves from this experience of the uncertainty of the other, our desire to create them, our rage at the fact that they will never return what we gave in the spirit of expectations with which we gave it. And these adult dolls of Pritzel's? They are are dolls who have 'entered into all the unrealities of their own lives', have become an unnerving symbol only of the permanent sensuality of the doll, 'into which nothing flows and from which nothing escapes'.

These reflections on creation in our own image essentially concern the constructed nature of the self and the sensual, the physical, the material and its relation to the soul or the spirit. They inform our understanding not only of their subject but of works from Coppelia to Hans Bellmer's Doll, and the perennial fear of dolls and mannequins expressed in films from House of Wax to Child's Play. It's no coincidence that that most of the earliest examples of works of creativity are human forms, or that man made god make man in his own image...