Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Four

 

Image via the Acid Horizon 

YouTube channel [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Okay, Lecture Four of Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire [b] - 'Union Power and Soul Power' - a little bit of American labour history (do try and stay awake at the back). 

 

Have y'all done your preliminary reading since I published the post on Lecture Three, the key text being Jefferson Cowie's book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010), particularly the chapter 'Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class' (pp. 23-75)?

 

Well, don't worry, neither have I; but I'm confident Fisher will bring us all up to speed ... [c]  

 

 

II.  

 

How does group consciousness practically develop in the historical moment? And what might we learn with reference to our own time?

 

These are the questions Fisher wishes to address here. Along with: why did it all fail; why was there no working class revolution in the US in the late 1960s / early '70s? 

 

Or to put it another way, why did Nixon win - and win big - in '72 and why have the neoliberal Right in the shape of the Republican Party continued to win, often with popular working-class support (think Reagan and Trump, for example)?   

 

I think the answer is pretty clear - though not one the Left will ever concede; as a rule, working class people do not like countercultural hippies and radical activists who want to destroy the American way of life - liberty, the pursuit of happiness, apple pie, etc. They don't want "unprecedented ferment" and "diverse leftism" (154). 

 

Some left-wing commentators say this makes certain elements of the working class reactionary and resentful (deplorable as Hillary Clinton would say). Today, young white working class males are invariably demonised as racist and misogynistic. 

 

To be fair to Fisher, however, he never bought into this. Indeed, he frequently pushed back against condescending stereotypes and rejected broad, pejorative characterisations - such as the term chav - arguing that left-leaning intellectuals needed to empathise a little more and moralise less [d]. 

 

Having said that, he does not deny working-class resentment as the "driving force of reaction" (156) in the 1970s and after, defining the term as "a form of anti-solidarity" and "anti-consciousness" (156) that keeps people divided.  

 

 

III.     

 

The idea that there's no class system now - that we're all either middle-class or, in Lawrence's view, one vast proletariat that has become quite literally robotic [e] - is interesting and worth looking at a little more closely. 

 

Technically speaking, Fisher is right that we can't all belong to the middle - "That is an impossible typology" (157). He's amused, however, by the doubleness of the idea: 

 

"It's both disavowing class at the same time as it's assuring the impossibility of completely overcoming it. Because if we're all in the middle class then, really, there is no such thing as class struggle anymore. But hold on! We're still talking about class [...] we still have to use the term class but in the very attempt to eliminate the concept." (157) 

 

That's true, I suppose, but doesn't really say a great deal and I feel as if Fisher has forgotten his Deleuze and Guattari from back in the day when Anti-Oedipus was his main point of reference. If one turns to the section titled 'Capitalist Representation' in chapter 4, one finds a detailed explanation of how a simple idea of class no longer cuts the conceptual mustard:

 

"That the State is entirely in the service of the so-called ruling class is an obvious practical fact, but a fact that does not reveal its theoretical foundation [...] from the viewpoint of the capitalist axiomatic there is only one class, a class with a universal vocation, the bourgeoisie. [...] This proposition contains something other than an ideological blindness or denial. Classes are the negative of castes and statuses; classes are orders, castes, and statuses that have been decoded." [f]

 

What I think that means is that there is no fundamental difference between the banker, the baker, and the candlestick maker; they are subjugated as functionaries into one and the same flow of capital. And ultimately, only the bourgeoisie remains as the decoding and decoded class. Deleuze and Guattari continue (and I'm quoting several paragraphs at some length here as it seems to me important): 

 

"The generalized slavery of the despotic State at least implied the existence of masters [...] But the bourgeois field of immanence [...] institutes an unrivaled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves [...] The bourgeois sets the example [...] more utterly enslaved than the lowest slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine." [g]  

 

"It will be said that there is nonetheless a class that rules and a class that is ruled [...] the distinction between the flow of financing and the flow of income in wages. But this is only partially true, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two [...] and integrates them both in the continually expanded reproduction of its limits. So that the bourgeoisie is justified in saying, not in terms of ideology, but in the very organization of its axiomatic: there is only one machine, that of the great mutant decoded flow [...] and one class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the class that decodes the castes and the statuses [...]" [h]     

"In short, the theoretical opposition is not between two classes, for it is the very notion of class, insofar as it designates the 'negative' of codes, that implies there is only one class. The theoretical opposition lies elsewhere: it is between [...] the class and those who are outside the class [les hors-classe]. Between the servants of the machine, and those who sabotage its cogs and wheels. [...] If you will: between the capitalists and the schizos [...] at the level of decoding [and desire], in their basic antagonism at the level of the axiomatic [...] [i] 

 

 

IV.

 

Now, I've no idea why Fisher - who must know this material intimately - didn't bother to refer to it and discuss it with his students. By his own admission in week one, although not on the official reading list, Deleuze and Guattari remained the spectres behind the course - so why not summon them here?

 

Perhaps he simply felt it was time to move on with his thinking; to find more practical points of reference and prioritise different conceptual frameworks - more socio-historical and a little less theoretically sophisticated. 

 

In his late work, as he formulated his ideas around acid communism, Fisher seems keener to figure out the material reasons why the liberatory potential of the late-60s and early-70s collapsed rather than re-engage with the philosophical abstractions of poststructuralism. 

 

And so, if for strategic (and pragmatic) reasons only, Fisher remains committed to the idea of class: class struggle, class solidarity, and the raising of class consciousness - regardless of what Messrs. Deleuze and Guattari write [j]. 

 

Though Fisher also wants to tie class to other things, such as race and gender, and promote the possibility of "an intersectional class politics" (158). Class structures may no longer really exist thanks to the capitalist axiomatic doing away with all traditional social and cultural codes and forms, but it can be reproduced in order to create a little unity and solidarity. 

 

Ironically then, it's communism - not capitalism - that wants to keep class in place; for class "goes against the actual dominant tendencies" (159) of capitalism: to decodify and deterritorialise and to ensure all that is solid melts into air [k].     

  

 

V. 

The danger, of course, is if you bring class back - particularly in an intersectional form - you reify it and it becomes identitarian - that is to say, "defined not by its consciousness or by its agency but by particular identity characteristics that are prescribed to it" (160). 

 

Fisher wants class back in the picture. And he wants intersectionality. But he doesn't want identitarianism. The question is: can he have the first two things without the third today, when everyone is obsessed by identity politics? I doubt it. And he seems a little naive in hoping that people will see that class consciousness is all about working people recognising they share a common position and have common interests "in spite of whatever cultural, personal, subjective qualities"(161) they possess. 

 

For Fisher, it isn't that class is "more important than those other forms of identification or forms of struggle" (160), it's just that "when class is no longer there [...] the given picture is necessarily incomplete" (160) and everything is fatally distorted. 

 

But, for my next door neighbour, being a Muslim matters more - way more - than anything else; including acid communism. Fisher might say that this shows a concern only with his present and his past [l] - that my neighbour lacks a form of consciousness that is "different from identity" (165) and which is about the subject's future becoming as it has a transformative dimension and has hyperstitional effects. 

 

Unfortunately, my neighbour - newly arrived from Pakistan with his wife, parents, children, and brother - probably wouldn't understand wtf Fisher was talking about and would care even less. He just wants to extend his kitchen and perform his obligatory daily prayers (Salah - the second pillar of Islam). 

 

What is more, I suspect that if you were to ask him what needs to be done to resolve the crucial antagonisms that divide society he would doubtless argue for the imposition of Sharia - again, I'm pretty sure he'd not call for acid communism. 

  

 

VI. 

   

Fisher closes Lecture Four with a series of what ifs ... 

 

"What if "countervailing forces hadn't managed to assert themselves in the Seventies?" (170) What if a "new alliance of workers, the counterculture, etc., had come together in a sustained way?" (170) What if neoliberalism hadn't triumphed and everyone had demanded the abolition of work?    

  

To me, this is pretty desperate stuff - but Fisher feels these are some of the key questions of our age and which open up a vision of the future and a "potential route into postcapitalism" (170). 

 

Does anybody remember the scene in an episode of The Inbetweeners [S2/E3] when Will, exasperated by the views and behaviour of French exchange student Patrice, launches into an anti-French rant? Challenged by Simon on its racist content, Will exclaims: "He's made me racist!"

 

Well, that's kind of how I feel when reading Fisher at times: I don't want to be cynical - but he's made me cynical! 

 

"What if there was no 1973? What if there was no recession?" (170) What if we could turn back time and reverse the conditions of the late 1960s and early '70s into the current moment? Arrgh! So many hypotheticals on one page! 

 

Posing such questions is not a sign of resistance - more a sign of political hopelessness and philosophical exhaustion. Fisher has nothing else to say other than what if and nowhere else to go other than yesterday; no wonder he suddenly starts listening to The Beatles when all his troubles seemed so far away.   

 

 

VII. 

      

Actually, Fisher does have one additional point to make in Lecture Four - and it concerns aesthetics ... 

 

Fisher thinks that what carried the revolutionary forces along and sustained the necessary conditions for change was the counterculture; "and the counterculture the was primarily driven through music" (171). It was pop music - as much as politics - that offered the "vision of a liberated world" (171) [m]. 

 

As Dewey Finn taught his students at Horace Green: One great rock show can change the world! [n] 

 

Or as Fisher puts it, music feeds into the revolutionary struggle, man; and the revolutionary struggle feeds into the music, creating a "positive feedback loop" (171) and a "vector for the dynamics of transformation of the social world" (171) - which is nice, but nowhere as catchy and explains why his career as a Hollywood script writer never really took off. 

 

For Fisher, culture leads the way; "in lots of ways" (172) and the counterculture is "not just a counter-politics; it's a range of forms of cultural expression" (172) that allowed us "to imagine a completely transformed world" (173) in an act of performative anticipation. 

 

As Miss Brodie would say, in her best Edinburgh voice: For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. [o]   

 

But for those like me, made cynical - and yes, even a little irritated by Fisher's utopianism - this is just tiresome. Particularly as he knows as well as I do what happened: 

 

"It failed. It went wrong. There were moments of rupture. There were glimmers. There was a sense of something that could have been different. But it didn't work out that way." (172)

 

And rock 'n' roll rebellion - whether led by hippies wearing Afghan coats or punks in their leather jackets - was just as commodifiable as anything else.  

 

Nevertheless, we are, I suppose, encouraged to try again (for if at first you don't succeed ...) - to desire anew and find our mojo once more (or transformational libido as Fisher calls it). And that means turning to Jean-François Lyotard and falling back into French theory ... 

 

See you for Lecture Five ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This podcast from the Acid Archives - Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher (Full Episode) - was uploaded to the Acid Horizon YouTube channel in December 2022, but first put out in September 2020. Matt Colquhoun guest stars. Those who would like to listen can click here.  

 

[b] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references to this book will be given directly in the post.   

 

[c] Amusingly, when Fisher asked his class to share their responses to Cowie's book he was met with silence, which tells us either they were naturally reticent, or that quite a few of them hadn't read it either.   

 

[d] See, for example, his important essay 'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013), which can be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 659-667. 

      I believe that Fisher got a lot of shit from some readers for this text, in which, amongst other things, he champions Russell Brand and sticks up for Owen Jones. It can be read online here. See also my post on Torpedo the Ark (30 Sept 2023) in which I discuss this essay. And readers who are interested might like to also check out Em Colquhoun's xenogothic website where they have mounted a spirited defence of the piece on several occasions. 

 

[e] In the second version of his final novel, Lawrence writes: 

      "There was no longer any such thing as class. The world was one vast proletariat. Everything else had gone. The true working class was gone, as much as the honourable bourgeoisie, or the proud aristocracy [...] a vast homogeneous proletariat made up the whole of humanity." 

      See The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 492.   

 

[f] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press Ltd., 1984), pp. 253-254.  

 

[g] Ibid., p. 254.  

 

[h] Ibid.

 

[i] Ibid., p. 255.

 

[j] Actually, Deleuze and Guattari would support him in this as a matter of praxis. The task, they write, of any revolutionary socialist movement is to organise a "bipolarity of the social field, a bipolarity of classes" and to both embody the idea of class interest in consciousness and actualise it in an organised political party "suited to the task of conquering the State apparatus" (Anti-Oedipus, 255). 

       

[k] This phrase - 'all that is solid melts into air' - is famously found in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848). 

      Funnily enough, this was Nietzsche's main gripe against capitalism too; that it made society and culture impossible. From his earliest writings, such as 'The Greek State' (1871/72), Nietzsche argued that capitalism undermined the 'internally sturdy and sensitive bonds' that existed between rulers and ruled in noble society. This essay can be found in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 176-186.

          Readers might like to note that I examined Nietzsche's critique of capitalism in my doctoral thesis, Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000), written during the same late-90s period in the philosophy department from which Fisher himself emerged.

 

[l] Fisher says that if minority race and religious groups understand themselves only by the features which they already possess, this is a form of reification: "You are already what you identify with." (167)

      Unfortunately, it's not these features - as positive as they may be - that define a people as a revolutionary class: "It's their structural and antagonistic position and the potential for transformation that occurs once consciousness develops that makes them potentially revolutionary agents." (167) 

      This, I think, explains why it is the radical Left likes to flirt with Islamists and secure the Muslim vote; it sincerely believes that one day the Muslims will see that their best interests are not served by Muhammad but by Marx. It's a fantasy, of course, and - ironically, one might even say a form of false consciousness.   

 

[m] So you see, my remark about The Beatles with which I closed section VI wasn't just inserted to be humorous or to take a pop at Fisher for the sake of it.    

 

[n] As I'm sure most readers will know, this line is from the film School of Rock (dir. Richard Linklater, 2003), starring Jack Black as Dewey Finn.  

 

[o] As I'm sure most readers will know, this is a line from Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Macmillan, 1961).  

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Three can be read here. 

 

 

Musical bonus: The Beatles, 'Revolution', B-side of 'Hey Jude', a single release from 1968: click here.

 

  

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: On the East Midlands Accent Vs the Oxford Voice

Ay up, me duck! Three famous East Midlanders: 

Jason Williamson, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Fisher  

 

 

Thanks to books such as Capitalist Realism (2009) and his influential k-punk blog (2003-16), Mark Fisher remains a prominent voice in cultural criticism and political theory. 

 

However, born in Leicester and raised in Loughborough as he was, that voice comes with a distinctive East Midlands twang; an accent which, by his own admission, lacks "urban glamour, lilting lyricism or rustic romanticism" and is "one of the most unloved in the UK" [a]. 

 

I'm not sure that's entirely fair or accurate - as a Lawrence scholar, I've been to Eastwood on numerous occasions and have always found the local accent (and use of terms drawn from dialect) rather lovely on the ear. However, Fisher insists that the East Midlands accent is "heard so rarely in popular media that it isn't recognised enough even to be disdained" (361). 

 

I can believe also that within snobby academic circles where the Oxford Voice [b] prevails, he was regarded as having some sort of speech impediment and advised to "suppress the lazy Leicestershire consonants and articulate [his] speech in something closer to so-called received pronunciation" (361). 

Something which, with a certain degree of shame, he did - unlike vocalist with the post-punk duo Sleaford Mods Jason Williamson, who makes "no such accommodation to metropolitan manners" and remains "disgusted at those who speak in fake accents" (361). 

  

Interestingly, although the appeal to the local (and authentic) is "usually smug and reactionary" (361), Fisher argues that's not the case when it comes to the question of accent. Because the English ruling class speak "in more or less the same accent wherever they come from" (361) - The Oxford Voice - the determination to retain a regional accent is therefore "a challenge to the machineries of class subordination - a refusal to be marked as inferior" (361).

 

A bit like Lawrence rubbing his readers' noses in hardcore East Midlands dialect and profanity in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - "'Tha'rt good cunt, though, aren't ter? Best bit o' cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha'rt willin'!'" [c] - Williamson obliges listeners to "adjust to his accent, idiolect and references" (362). 

 

Obscenities course through his rhymes as freely they do the speech of Oliver Mellors:

 

"If Williamson's anger often seems intransitive - his fuck offs are sheer explosions of exasperation, directed at no one in particular, or at everyone - it's underscored by a class consciousness painfully aware that there is nothing which could transform disaffection into political action." (363) 

 

I'll end this post with the same question that Fisher ends his piece: Who will make contact with the anger and frustration that Williamson (like Mellors before him) articulates - and who can convert such into a new political project? [d] 

 

    

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 361. Future page references will be given directly in the post. 

     Fisher's review of the Sleaford Mods' album Divide and Exit (2014) and singles collection Chubbed Up (2014) originally appeared in The Wire, Issue 362 (April 2014), p. 58. It can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[b] The 'Oxford Voice' is a term coined by D. H. Lawrence to satirise the upper-class English accent that is often known as RP. In a poem of that title found in Pansies (1929), Lawrence mocks it as "so seductively superior". It can be found in Vol. 1 of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (2013), p. 376.  

      Stephen Fry reads Lawrence's verse - in his best Oxford Voice - on The Show People Podcast with ‪Andrew Keates‬, recorded live at The Two Brewers, Clapham, on 12 June 2025: click here. 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 177. This is Oliver Mellors addressing Connie. For a discussion of the use of dialect as erotico-elementary language in D. H. Lawrence, see the post published on 3 December 2020: click here. 

 

[d] This question seems particularly pertinent today of all days when local elections are being held across England, Scotland and Wales and the two traditional parties - Labour and the Conservatives - are both predicted to do badly, whilst Reform UK and the Green Party are set to make significant gains.     

 

  

Readers who are interested in this post might like to check out the East Midlands Voices project at Nottingham Trent University (headed by Professor Natalie Braber, who teaches linguistics in the School of Social Sciences): click here.  

 

Musical bonus: Sleaford Mods, 'Jobseeker': click here. Originally released as a single in 2013, it also features on the compilation album All That Glue (Rough Trade, 2020) and seems to have been a favourite of Fisher's. 

 

 

On the Three Simons: Messrs. Armitage, Critchley, and Reynolds

The Three Simons: Messrs. Armitage, Critchley & Reynolds 

(SA/2026) 

 

 

I. 

 

I'm guessing that Simon was a very popular name for boys in the UK during the 1960s [1]. Perhaps not as popular as it was during the first century AD in Roman Judea, but popular all the same. 

 

In any event, there are three Simons of increasing interest to me, each born in the early sixties and each characterised by a specific late-twentieth-century British sensibility: they are the poet Simon Armitage; the philosopher Simon Critchley; and the music critic Simon Reynolds [2].  

 

I don't know what these three figures think of one another or whether they have ever met socially, but one assumes they must have crossed paths or shared a stage in a professional capacity at some point. But perhaps not [3]. 

 

Either way, I thought it would be nice to bring them together here and briefly note one or two of the parallels between them, whilst remaining aware of the fact that their fundamental modes of inquiry are distinct.    

 

 

II.

 

The first thing to say is that each of the above are adept at translating complex aesthetic and metaphysical concerns into accessible (though always cleverly crafted) text. 

 

Perhaps it's a post-punk thing - or possibly a working-class thing [4] - but all three Simons, whilst capable of scaling the icy heights, always seem happiest when descending back into a world where cabbages grow in the dark earth. 

 

Armitage, as a poet, is particularly skilled at finding meaning and beauty in the mundane with linguistic precision. But Critchley and Reynolds are also very good at mixing critical theory with references to popular culture moving from Derrida to David Bowie and back again in order to conceptualise (and deconstruct) political and socio-cultural trends.     

 

 

III. 

 

Another thing which, as a thanatologist, one can't help noticing, is that the three Simons seem to be  fascinated by death and related issues to do with memory, mortality, and loss. 

 

This is particularly true of Critchley and Armitage, with the former adopting the Heideggerian position that thinking the thought of death is essential to guarantee an authentic human life and the latter recently publishing a collection of poems entitled New Cemetery (2025), wherein he uses moths as an indicator species to comment on death in nature and the threat of mass extinction due to environmental breakdown.

 

But Reynolds too is thanatologically inclined, utilising Derrida's concept of hauntology to explore spectral presence and what he terms retromania (i.e., a culture's fixation with its own immediate past leading to a form of stasis or living death). He has a particular concern with suicide, both as a mental health issue and as something around which there is an entire mythology, referencing the cases of Ian Curtis and his friend Mark Fisher.   

 

 

IV. 

 

Politically, all three Simons can best be described as left-leaning, although they occupy different positions within this broad cataegorisation. 

 

One might have imagined that Critchley's tragic pessimism would have inclined him in an opposite direction, but, no, he's a radical leftist advocating for a form of ethical anarchism and a politics of resistance to the established order (not that this prevents him from holding a highly prestigious and well-paid named professorship at a private institution). 

 

Similarly, Simon Reynolds frequently engages with post-Marxist (and poststructuralist) thought in order to critique neoliberalism's stifling effect on culture and our ability to even imagine an alternative (non-capitalist) future. At the same time he has established a long and successful career on the back of this critique and built a nice family life in South Pasadena, California, so must surely concede there are some advantages to a free market economy ...?

 

As for Simon Armitage, despite accepting the role of Poet Laureate and thus having the seal of royal approval stamped on his work, he likes to think of poetry as inherently radical and, in some sense, offering a form of dissent to the powers that be. If wary of being too overtly political, he nevertheless attempts to articulate the concerns of the poor and marginalised (and, indeed, of wildlife). 

 

   

V. 

 

Finally, I'd like to touch on the inclination all three Simons have towards concepts that might be described as spiritual or transcendent (if in a secular or non-religious context) ... 

 

I would certainly endorse Armitage's belief that poetry is a way of inventing meaning in a meaningless world and, perhaps more importantly, ritualising events and giving ordinary objects back their magic and mystery. Ultimately, and to his credit, Armitage rejects spirituality and consistently describes himself and his work as down to earth. 

 

I'm happy also, like Reynolds, to regard music and dance as powerful expressions of our inherently religious or creative nature. This will to euphoria - which should not be confused with ecstasy [5] - is, says Lawrence, our prime motivity. Unfortunately, Reynolds, like many others associated with rave culture, does seem to conflate the two terms euphoria and ecstasy and then conceive of the latter in relation to the synthetic psychoactive drug of that name [6].  

 

As for Critchley, he directly explores those intense feelings that lift us out of ourselves in his book Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy (2024) and openly discusses the building of an atheist utopia on the basis of mystical anarchism and new forms of consciousness - all of which makes me fearful of the direction he's dragging philosophy. 

 

The mystical Professor Critchley ... where he leads I cannot follow. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For those who just have to know the facts: the name Simon experienced a significant rise in popularity  between 1955 and 1965 as part of a wider trend for traditional names with a biblical ring. 

      In the early 1970s, Simon even briefly broke into the top ten of British boy's names, but then rapidly went out of favour; its sharp decline in popularity continuing in the 21st century; it is presently ranked outside the top 500 with only a handful of newborn baby boys being given the name (compared to the 1000s of Muhammads and Olivers). 

 

[2] I'm assuming that most readers will know of the three Simons and have some familiarity with their work, or can quickly google details if not. However, for those who might appreciate a quick line or two of biographical information right here, right now ...

      Simon Armitage was born in Huddersfield, in May 1963, and is a celebrated English poet, playwright, and novelist who currently serves as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and holds a post as a Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His debut collection - Zoom! (1989) - brought him immediate fame (although he wasn't able to become a full-time professional writer until 1994). Armitage is rightly-celebrated for his darkly humorous and often northern-inflected style that blends colloquial accessibility with formal precision. His most recent work has focused heavily on the natural world and the human experience within it. His influences include Philip Larkin and W. H. Auden. His official website can be accessed by clicking here.  

      Simon Critchley was born in Liverpool, in Feb 1960, and is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, in New York. His work engages in many areas of philosophy, literature, and contemporary culture and he has written over twenty books, including studies of Greek tragedy, David Bowie, Shakespeare, football, and the ethical practice of joy before death. Critchley is a public intellectual in the best sense; reminding us all that in a world shaped by nihilsm we must root our ethics and politics not in the old ideals, but in an acknowledgement of limits and failure and the fact that this is an essentialy tragic age. His philosophical influences include Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Critchley's recent work has taken a somewhat troubling mystical turn as he attempts to attune himself to the silence and find a form of secular transcendence. His official website can be accessed by clicking here. 

      Simon Reynolds was born in London, in June 1963, and is an independent music critic and cultural commentator who has a real knack for identifying trends and inventing new terms to discuss them in. He has published several definitive works on pop history, including, perhaps most famously, Rip It Up and Start Again (2005) - his study of the post-punk era (1978-1984), framing it as a period of avant-garde ambition and political radicalism - and Retromania (2011), a seminal investigation into pop music's zombification in the digital age, due to its obsessive recycling of its own sounds and fashions. Crucially, his work often explores how music intersects with issues of class, race, and gender and he isn't afraid to infuse his journalism with theory drawn from the likes of Derrida and Deleuze. He is a long-time and brilliant blogger: click here to access Blissblog, just one of many sites he maintains.

 

[3] I could find nothing to suggest bonds of friendship between the three Simons, so must conclude that whilst they are contemporaries in British intellectual life, their relationship is, at most, one of mutual awareness rather than close personal acquaintance. 

 

[4] Whilst Reynolds comes from a rather more middle-class background than Armitage and Critchley, he doesn't seem to identify with such. Rather, Reynolds posits the idea of a liminal class existing in the void between the upper-working and lower-middle classes and he seems to place himself here. He credits this liminal class with possessing creative (and radical) energy which results in significant cultural production.

 

[5] See the post 'Euphoria Contra Ecstasy' (26 Nov 2025), where I explain the distinction as I understand it: click here.  

 

[6] Reynolds views the drug ecstasy as integral to rave culture, shaping the sounds and experiences and enabling a form of communal bliss, whilst acknowledging its rather more troubling aspects. See his book Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Routledge, 1999). 

      For a more recent work on the synergistic link between dance music and MDMA (Methylenedioxymethamphetamine), see Kirk Field's Rave New World (Nine Eight Books, 2023). 

 

 

For a follow up to this post on the monstrous creation of a fourth Simon, click here.   

Marking Geoff Dyer's Homework (Part One: I-XII)

Canongate (2025) [a]

 

If I close my eyes I can see it now, that dear old house on Memory Lane ... [b]

 

I.

 

Longtime readers will recall that whilst I might not particularly care for all of his books, or share all of his passions, I have in the past expressed admiration for the English writer Geoff Dyer and recognised that there is even a degree of kinship between us: see, for example, the post dated 19 July 2014: click here. 

 

Dyer has written several books that I would have been proud to have written - not least of all his study of D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997) - though that's not to suggest for one moment that I could've written any of them with the same casual brilliance as the author not only of numerous award-winning works of non-fiction, but four novels to boot. 

 

And now, with publication of a memoir entitled Homework (2025), there's another one to add to this list of books by Dyer that I wish I'd written ...      

 

 

II. 

 

Five years older than me, Dyer and I were basically born into the same world and were shaped by many of the same experiences, games, toys, and comic books [c]. And so it's hard to read and reflect upon this memoir without projecting oneself into it. 

 

That's not something I would normally want to do or encourage, but, on this occasion, I think I'll just surrender to the urge to see this book not only as a window into the soul of the author, but as a looking glass in which I can see my own self reflected (albeit slightly distorted, as in one of those crazy funhouse mirrors). 

 

Apologies in advance if this soon proves wearisome.      

 

 

III. 

 

Dyer was born in 1958, in the historic spa town of Cheltenham - not far from the Cotswolds - which might suggest that he had a posh and privileged upbringing in a Regency townhouse, but, actually, he was the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker living in a two-up, two-down terraced house; so I think that qualifies him as working class (in England, as the book makes clear, class matters a very good deal indeed).  

 

Dyer's early years were characterised by wargames, waterfights, and worn out tennis balls: like Dyer, I remember these things well. 

 

But I don't recall taking the first of these things as seriously as Dyer and his chums seem to have taken their re-enactments of World War II - even if I did have a childish fascination with Nazi Germany, not only dressing my favourite Action Man [d] as a Stormtrooper, but giving pride of place on my bedside dresser to a cast metal model of a Luftwaffe plane - I think it was a Fokke-Wulf - that dropped a single cap-loaded bomb.    

 

Nor do I recall ever wanting to trap and kill birds, or shoot them with an air rifle, as Dyer claims he attempted to do. As a child, I had no qualms about violence inflicted on other children, but hated even the thought of cruelty to animals (with the exception of certain insects; like Dyer, I remember killing ants with boiling water).  

 

 

IV.

 

Dyer's parents, like mine, pinned their hopes on winning the pools or perhaps ERNIE doing them a favour; much the same as people today dream of winning the National Lottery. Of course, those eight score draws never came up and neither did they ever win big on the Premium Bonds. 

 

I don't know about Dyer, but I rather resent how working people have to rely on luck (and prayer); there's something humiliating in checking numbers every week when the odds of winning a significant sum are infinitesimally small. [e] 

    

 

V.

 

Playing cards for pennies with your parents ... Eating John West salmon sandwiches ... Buying sherbert flying saucers ... Carrying around handkerchiefs that were "routinely stiff with yellow snot" [21] ... etc., etc. 

 

Dyer has an almost devilish knack of inserting the right detail, the right turn of phrase, into his text at the right time; which is why he's so admired as a writer and why his publisher can persuade so many famous literary names to provide advance praise for the dustjacket: although my dislike of this smoke-blowing practice remains second only to George Orwell's [f].  

 

 

VI. 

I really like these lines about the excitement generated by the "swirling tune of an ice-cream van wending its way through the streets" [23] on a sunny afternoon:

 

"As soon as we heard that innocent ice-cream music there would be a scramble for money, for change, and we - the neighbourhood kids, rarely accompanied by adults - would flock to his open window." [23]

 

"Even now, sixty years later, Keats's line, 'Fled is that music', makes me think not of a nightingale but a gaggle of kids standing, waiting, listening." [23]

 

When I was a child, in the 1970s, there were at least three different ice-cream vans regularly cruising round Harold Hill: Tonibell, Mr Whippy, and - my favourite - Rossi's. Now, there's only one van which visits once a day, in the summer months only, and which rarely attracts any children.

 

And of course, taking along a handful of pennies isn't going to buy you a 99 or even a small wafer today - as that outraged little girl and her twin sister in Burnley discovered to the amusement of the world back in 2024: click here.   

 

 

VII. 

 

I'm so happy Geoff loved conkers: I can't love anyone who doesn't love conkers and appreciate their gleaming quality when they emerge out of their spiky green shells like "the newest things in creation" [26]. 

 

But I have never in all my life heard the words: "Obbly, obbly onk, my first conk / Obbly, obbly ack, my first crack" [27] - is that a Gloucestershire thing?

 

I'm also very pleased to know how much Dyer loved collecting Brook Bond tea cards: me too. Not that I remember learning much from them (not sure I even read the backs); it was possessing images that I loved. 

 

Like Dyer, I do wonder if children still collect things with the same innocence and enthusiasm he and I shared: I'd like to think so, but I doubt it. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

So far, I have only mentioned the things Dyer and I had in common as youngsters. But when it came to our favourite television programmes, an important difference opens up; he was under the spell of the BBC whilst I was very much an ITV watching child.

 

This might seem a relatively minor or insignificant thing, but it isn't. In fact, it helps explain Dyer's smooth class transition via grammar school and Oxford University. Blue Peter and Jackanory pave the way into the bourgeois world [g].   

 

And while we're mentioning differences ... Dyer loved "everything about the undersea world" [53], whereas I hated the thought of putting my head under water even at the local swimming baths - of not being able to breathe - which is the main reason I never learned to swim (that, and my failure to see the point of swimming from one side of a pool to another when one could walk around with less effort and without having to take one's clothes off and get wet. This kind of implacable logic would often put me at odds with parents and teachers; if I couldn't see the sense of doing something, I wouldn't do it).            

 

IX.

 

Not only did I not want to deep sea dive, I didn't want to parachute from a plane either. Perhaps this made me a boring child - one who lacked the spirit of adventure - but, there you go! 

 

This even extended to a dislike of funfairs and here, I'm pleased to say, Geoff and I are on the same page once more: "The din and lurch of lights and noise had the quality of nightmare rather than treat ..." [57]  

 

 

X. 

 

Dyer is right to acknowledge the huge debt his generation (and my generation) owe to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson; without them, the "fantasy and reality of space travel" [59] wouldn't have so permeated childhood in the 1960s and '70s. 

 

Thanks to shows such as Thunderbirds and Space 1999, the future arrived on our TV screens and, whilst it wasn't all that different from today, it was certainly sexier and more silvery. I may not have wanted to voyage to the bottom of the sea, but I wouldn't have minded a trip to Moonbase Alpha to meet Catherine Schell (Maya).    

 

 

XI. 

 

Another important difference between young Dyer and my childhood self: I would never ever have considered joining any organisation such as the Scouts or Boys' Brigade that required one to wear a uniform and acknowledge the authority of either the Church or Crown or both (much to my mother's disappointment, as she had been a proud Brownie). 

 

I may not have had the vocabulary as a six-year-old to articulate my position, but I was a natural born anarchist and atheist and so I find Dyer's willingness to join the Junior Training Corps - a subset of the Church Lads' Brigade - if only so he could march in the streets and go camping in Wales, a bit depressing to be honest. 

 

However, thankfully, he redeems himself by confessing that he soon found it to be "a bit of a bore"; just like many other things "eagerly embraced as a child", including Sunday School, which "after about four weeks" [79], put him off religion for life. 

 

The fact that his dad had no time for the Royals, probably laid the foundation for Dyer's own "subsequent loathing" [79], which has intensified in adulthood.      

 

 

XII. 

 

Eighty pages or so into the book and Dyer takes us out on to his father's allotment. It's one of my favourite parts, particularly these lines in which Dyer reflects on walking with his wife to the allotment many years later, in September 2022:

 

"It was all the same as it had been when I was a kid, just a little more hemmed in by houses. [...] 

      I couldn't remember exactly which plot had been ours. It's possible that the plots had been slightly redrawn, but that didn't matter. The trees, I suppose, were the same trees that had been there when I was a boy. The sky overhead was as it had always been, and there was a strong sense of ... not permanence - that's a quality associated with monuments - but of protected and unchanging continuity. [...]

      What I would like to say, to claim, to believe, is that I felt like the boy I had been, but I didn't; I felt like who I  am now, conscious of a straining for the passage of time to dissolve." [85] [h]

 

That, I think, is a lovely note on which to close the first part of this post ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[a] All page references given in the above post are from this hardback UK edition. 

 

[b] Dyer places this line - then scribbles it out - at the front of Homework beneath a charming black and white photo of himself, dressed in a cowboy suit and probably aged about 4, pretending to push a heavy-looking lawnmower in his front garden.

      As for the colour photo of a grumpy little fella with his parents on a day trip which is reproduced on the book's cover, see pp. 73-78 where Dyer provides a lovely reading of the image (with an almost obligatory nod to Roland Barthes).     

 

[c] Having said that, Dyer is a child of the 1960s; whereas I regard myself more as a child of the 1970s. 

 

[d] Dyer writes at length about Action Man, which he describes as the ultimate toy: see pp. 45-48. Like him, I owned four of these dolls, including the one who could talk. 

 

[e] Funny enough, one of Dyer's aunties won "a quarter or perhaps even half a million quid on the Football Pools" [71] sending shock waves through his entire family. 

 

[f] In his 1936 essay 'In Defence of the Novel', Orwell famously described hyperbolic book blurbs as disgusting tripe; not only exaggerated, but often misleading and a sign of declining integrity amongst those in the world of letters. Readers who wish to do so can read Orwell's essay online by clicking here.  

 

[g] I'm not quite sure how Dyer identifies in terms of class. Perhaps, as the kind of nomadic writer and thinker that he is, he's now without class or, more precisely, one who moves freely outside of class. Interestingly, at one point Dyer speaks of himself as a son of the Gloucestershire peasantry - i.e., a man who has been significantly determined by the fact he is descended from generations of rural labourers. See p. 69.  

 

[h] Readers familiar with Torpedo the Ark might recall some of the posts in which I have spoken about this desire for the passage of time to be rendered meaningless; see, for example, the post 'Temporal Reflections Whilst Sitting in My Back Garden' (11 May 2025): click here. 

 

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

On Jasmine Howard's Granny, My Mother, and the Likely Lasses

Two girls in Newcastle (1970)

Photo by Laszlo Torday 

 

I. 

 

The other day, on a sunny afternoon, as Ray Davies would say, I attended a meeting of the Subcultures Interest Group (SIG), held in a fifth floor room at the London College of Fashion, located, for those who don't know, on the East Bank of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford. 

 

After discussing the graphic design of Dave King - the one who designed the Crass symbol; not the one who designed the Anti-Nazi League logo - and the contents of an upcoming issue of SIG News, there were three short presentations, including one by a canny lass dressed in a vintage outfit called Jasmine Howard; a Fashion Cultures and Histories student, writing her MA dissertation on class and clothing in the North East of England in the mid-late 1960s [1].

 

 

II. 

 

More interested in the women who lived and worked and raised families in the small towns and villages rather than big cities such as Newcastle, Ms Howard argued that her grandmother was not only a long way geographically from Swinging London and its youth-driven cultural revolution, but essentially belonged to a different world from the one inhabited by Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton.

 

And, after looking at a photo of her grandmother on her wedding day in comparison to a London model wearing one of the lastest Mary Quant designs, one has to agree. 

 

But that's not to say that Jasmine's granny didn't look lovely; futuristic minimalism and space-age fashion is all well and good, but there's nothing wrong with looking neat and tidy in a more traditional sense and wearing garments that are a little more down to earth and designed to last. 

 

My own mother, who was from the North East, but moved south after marrying in 1948, never had much money to spend on clothes and wasn't very much interested in fashion. Nevertheless, she always made sure she looked respectable when she left the house; always with makeup and never with bare legs or bare head. 

 

Back then, people would refer to themselves as working class and proud, which, amongst other things, implied they took care of their appearance, but didn't necessarily feel the need to wear silver miniskirts and go-go boots.          

 

 

III.

 

Having said that, as the North East fashion historian Caroline Whitehead [2] reminds us, there were young women (and young men) in the North East during the sixties - certainly in the large cities, but also, I suspect, in the smallest towns and villages - who were bang on trend and keen to keep up with all the latest fashions from London, even if they couldn't afford to buy such and had to make their own outfits or buy cheap knock-off designs by mail order.

 

I can't imagine, for example, that if you were a student at the Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design [3] in the 1960s, you were dressed either like Jasmine's granny or my mother and, if one can judge from the clothes worn by Thelma and all the other likely lasses [4], by the early-mid 1970s many women in the North East were now wearing colourful outfits, often with very short hemlines.    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The two other presentations were made by Nael Ali and Eylem Boz; the former spoke on the symbol of the wolf within black metal; the latter, on the way in which social media and other forms of digital communication transformed emo in the early 21st century. My thoughts on these papers can be read here and here.    

 

[2] Whitehead organised an event celebrating local history month on 1 May, 2010, at Newcastle City Library, which examined the impact that the 1960s had on the North East. She gave an illustrated talk entitled 'The Sixties Revisited: Dedicated Followers of Fashion'. Tony Henderson's article on this event in the Chronicle can be found online by clicking here.

 

[3] Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design was a key institution in the NE region in the 1960s. It eventually merged with other colleges to form Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University).

 

[4] I'm referring here to the female cast of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads (BBC TV 1973-74), led by Brigit Forsyth as Thelma Ferris (née Chambers). See the post dated 2 December 2023: click here. 

From Harold Hill to Hampstead Heath: Walking in the Footsteps of D. H. Lawrence with Catherine Brown

 

Ceramic Blue Plaque erected in 1969 by Greater London Council 

at 1 Byron Villas, Vale of Health, Hampstead, London, NW3 

englishheritage.org.uk

 

 

Hampstead is an affluent residential community in northwest London, long favoured by an assortment of artists, intellectuals, millionaires, and Marxists (i.e., the posh, the privileged, the often pretentious, and the politically radical). 

 

It's not an area I'm familiar with or particularly comfortable in; for whilst it's certainly very lovely, it's a long way from Harold Hill and I don't wanna go to where, where the rich are living.      

 

Nevertheless, putting aside my prejudices as a Clash City Rocker [1], I recently agreed to join a walking tour of Hampstead, led by Dr Catherine Brown; Vice President of the D. H. Lawrence Society, Founder of the Lawrence London Group, and unofficial Queen of the wider Lawrence collective [2].

 

Because Lawrence - a red-bearded poet and novelist who was deeply proud of his working-class roots in an East Midlands mining community - was once, briefly, a resident of Hampstead, there's even an English Heritage blue plaque celebrating the fact. 

 

We might see this as a good thing; a sign of nascent social mobility in the twentieth-century, or the classless nature of the art world; a meritocratic community in which anyone with genius [3] is welcome. Or we might view it as just one more attempt to neutralise Lawrence by assimilating him and his work into the dominant culture that he did so much to counter [4].       

 

Still, the blue plaque was just one of many things to stop and gawp at and hear about on the walking tour. Other highlights included:

 

(i) Hampstead Underground Station, which Lawrence used (but didn't like). Whether he knew it was (and still is) London's deepest tube stop - 192 feet beneath the surface - (or whether he would've cared), I don't know. Designed by architect Leslie Green, it opened in June 1907, just a few months before Lawrence first visited the area.    

 

(ii) Whitestone Pond, close to where Lawrence saw a German airship over London, in September 1915, an event that obviously captured his imagination. This is how Lawrence describes the incident in a letter: 

 

"Last night when we were coming home the guns broke out, and there was a noise of bombs. Then we saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds; high up, like a bright golden finger, quite small, among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were flashes near the ground - and the shaking noise. It was like Milton - then there was a war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small golden Zeppelin, like a long oval world, high up. It seemed as if the cosmic order were gone, as if there had come a new order, a new heavens above us: and as if the world in anger were trying to revoke it. Then the small long-ovate luminary, the new world in the heavens, disappeared again. 

      I cannot get over it, that the moon is not Queen of the sky by night, and the stars the lesser lights. It seems the Zeppelin is in the zenith of the night, golden like a moon, having taken control of the sky; and the bursting shells are the lesser lights. 

      So it seems our cosmos is burst, burst at last, the stars and moon blown away, the envelope of the sky burst out, and a new cosmos appeared, with a long-ovate, gleaming central luminary, calm and drifting in a glow of light, like a new moon, with its light bursting in flashes on the earth, to burst away the earth also. So it is the end - our world is gone, and we are like dust in the air." [5] 

 

(iii) Various places associated with the short story 'The Last Laugh' (1924), a tale in which Pan appears in Hampstead, with predictably tragic consequences. The story is  an example of what might be termed sardonic paganism; a mocking and malevolent form of queer gothic fiction directed towards a dark god who is always coming, but who never quite arrives or reveals himself. 

      By setting the story in a leafy north London suburb, Lawrence relates his onto-theological vision to everyday experience, whilst, at the same time, demonstrating how the latter unfolds within a wider, inhuman context that is resistant to any kind of moral-rational codification. He thereby attempts to loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present and restore a little primordial wonder to NW3 [6].

 

(iv) Several houses belonging to Lawrence's swell friends, who often provided him and Frieda with refuge when needed. These didn't particularly interest, but Hampstead Heath certainly did and one can see why Lawrence - who mostly hated London and its damp gloom - loved this ancient area of woodland, meadows, and ponds spanning 790 acres. 

Anyway, in closing I'd like to thank Catherine for all her hard work and kindness; I'm sure the handful of Lawrence devotees who turned up on the day - including Nottingham's favourite son and digital pilgrim, James Walker - enjoyed the tour and learnt something new. 

Members of the London Lawrence Group 

   

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring here to (and paraphrasing a line from) a song by The Clash called 'Garageland', the final track to be found on their eponymous debut album (CBS Records, 1977): click here. The song was written in response to a snide remark by middle-class music critic Charles Shaar Murray - precisely the kind of person who lives in Hampstead.  

 

[2] Catherine Brown, 'Lawrence's Hampstead: A Walking Tour'. Full details (and illustrations) can be found on Catherine's excellent website: click here. 

 

[3] Lawrence was deeply suspicious of how the term genius was used by certain people to excuse his lack of finesse and the more problematic aspects of writing. In a short piece written towards the very end of his life, he recounts, for example, Ford Maddox Hueffer's reaction to the manuscript of The White Peacock: "'It's got every fault that an English novel can have. But, you've got GENIUS.'"

      Lawrence notes: "In the early days, they were always telling me I had got genius, as if to console me for not having their incomparable advantages." See 'Myself Revealed', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 178-79. 

[4] Guy Debord famously describes this process of recuperation in La société du spectacle (1967). In brief: all politically radical ideas and/or subversive works of art are eventually defused and then safely incorporated back into mainstream culture, where they can be successfully exploited.   

 

[5] See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press,1981), pp. 389-90. The letter was sent to Lady Ottoline Morrell (9 Sept 1915).

      One suspects that, Lawrence being Lawrence, he also found the phallic shape of the Zepplin particularly striking ... This same event was also described in his 1923 novel Kangaroo; see pp. 215-16 of the Cambridge Edition, ed. Bruce Steele, (1994).

 

[6] See the post dated 15 May 2017 - 'Pan Comes to Hampstead' - click here.

 

 

What if the Shoe Were on the Other Foot?

Photo by Chris Buck for O - Oprah Magazine (May 2017)

chrisbuck.com

 

 

New York based photographer Chris Buck is known for his unconventional portraits of various celebrities and politicians - and celebrity politicians - including Presidents Obama and Trump. His arresting images have appeared in many top publications and he has been involved with a number of high profile commercial campaigns, including the controversial Be Stupid campaign for Diesel. 

 

Like many people, however, I know of him primarily for his pictures in the May 2017 edition of O - The Oprah Magazine, which played with the idea of a reversal of class and race roles, in which whiteness was suddenly disprivileged, at best, if not subject to systemic discrimination in this alternative universe.

 

The photos - which quickly went viral - were for the most part positively received, though, predictably, some found them offensive. Buck claims that his pictures were intended to stimulate questions, but not necessarily provide answers and that he's pleased to know that different people had different reactions:

 

"I want everyone to feel like they can vocalize their feelings about it, whether they’re positive or negative. More talk about this is a good thing. I’d rather people not get upset or offended, but if that’s their reaction then I think that’s totally fair too." *

 

For me, they illustrate something I think we all know at heart: that given the opportunity, everyone is capable of behaving as a cruel, selfish, exploitative arsehole who doesn't give a shit about those who are regarded as inferiors. 

 

In other words, no one is innocent. And those currently oppressed or subject to injustice and violence would behave just as appallingly - if not worse - given the upper hand. Slave morality - for all its fine words - is, let us not forget, a resentment-fuelled desire for revenge; a reactive expression of will to power. 

 

And so, even if the shoe were on the other foot, it would still mean a kick in the face for someone ... Is the solution then that we must all learn to go barefoot (were such a thing possible)?

 

* Note: I'm quoting from an interview with Chris Buck by Jennifer Berry. See: 'The Real Story Behind the O Pics That Have Been All Over Your Feed', Flare, (23 May, 2017): click here.