Showing posts with label simon reynolds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simon reynolds. Show all posts

26 Dec 2023

Dermatillomania: On Blogging as an Itch One Simply Has to Scratch

Simon Reynolds 
 
 
Although I don't think of myself as a blogger [1] - and although I don't regularly read any blogs - I appreciated a piece in The Guardian today by Simon Reynolds [2] which offered a nice defence of blogging as a genre ...
 
Whilst conceding that blogging is an outdated format and that many blog posts often go unread, Reynolds nevertheless celebrates the freedom that this type of text allows, enabling the writer to ramble and discuss any subject that captures their interest. 
 
He writes:
 
"Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone." 
 
Continuing: 
 
"A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved [...] Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it's nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created. [...] When blogging, I can meander, take short cuts and trespass in fields where I don't belong. Because I’m not pitching an idea to a publication or presenting my credentials as an authority, I am able to tackle subjects outside my expertise."     
 
You can also discuss topics that are no longer topical: "An old record or TV programme you've stumbled on, or simply remembered  ..." For in an atemporal culture, past, present and future are collapsed and one can even be nostalgic about the latter. 
 
Reynolds also refers to the compulsive nature of blog writing; analogous to an excoriation disorder, or an itch one has to scratch, as he puts it. There's certainly some truth in that - as there is in the idea that long term bloggers have an obsessive character and the fanatic determination to carry on regardless; "I can’t imagine stopping blogging - even once there are just a few of us still standing."
 
I've been posting work on Torpedo the Ark for over ten years, but Reynolds has been blogging for twice as long [3], so I certainly respect him for that, knowing as I do the amount of time and effort that goes into producing content on a regular basis.
 
I also respect Reynolds for the fact that he (like me) would continue writing and publishing posts even if they had no audience at all. For amassing followers and forming some kind of community isn't what it's about; "connectivity was only ever part of the appeal".     
 
Nor is generating an income from one's work a real concern: 
 
"Freedom and doing it for free go together. I've resisted the idea of going the Substack or newsletter route. If I were to become conscious of having a subscriber base, I'd start trying to please them. And blogging should be the opposite of work." 
 
Precisely ... Well said that man!
 
 
Notes
 
[1] See 'Post 2000: From Journal to Mémoire' (4 Jan 2023), wherein I explain how I view Torpedo the Ark (it's not a blog) and myself as a writer (I'm not a blogger): click here.   
 
[2] Simon Reynolds, 'I'll never stop blogging: it's an itch I have to scratch - and I don’t care if it's an outdated format', The Guardian (26 Dec 2023): click here. All quotes in the above post are from this article. 
 
[3] Torpedo the Ark began in November 2012. Reynolds began his blogging career in 2002, having  operated a website for about six years prior to that date. He posts work today across several blogs, but his primary outlet is blissblog, the motto of which - My brain thinks blog-like - is one I wish I'd thought of.  
 
 

17 Nov 2023

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 4: The Stain of Place

Laura Oldfield Ford Ferrier Estate (2010)
 
 
I.
 
Many years before Laura Oldfield Ford published her Savage Messiah [a], the Specials had already famously declared that London - like many other cities across the UK - was coming like a ghost town [b]. And I'm surprised, as a matter of fact, that Mark Fisher didn't mention this in his introduction to Ford's work. 
 
But then, having said that, I suppose it could be argued that whereas the Specials were bemoaning the state of the country - the poverty, unemployment, crime, and shut-up shops they witnessed in city after city as they toured the UK - Ford was more concerned by the loss of character and the displacement of long-time residents as working-class areas were redeveloped
 
In a nutshell: the Specials hated to see neighbourhoods run down and Ford hated to see them done up. Who really has the best interests of the poor and dispossessed at heart is debatable. But, according to Fisher, it is Ford who is a kind of medium through whom ghostly voices speak:
 
"The [...] voices she speaks in - and which speak through her - are those of the officially defeated: the punks, squatters, ravers, football hooligans and militants left behind by a history which has ruthlessly photoshopped them out of its finance-friendly SimCity." [184] [c] 
 
If these are the people that Ford and Fisher choose to romanticise on the one hand, on the other are those they deem the enemy: young professionals who sit outside Starbucks sipping coffee and "'gently conversing in sympathetic tones'" [185]; those who advocate neoliberal modernisation, which, in practice makes London "safe for the super-rich" [185]
 
At the risk of being accused of being a middle-class wanker or a class-traitor, I have to say that this reading of things in such stark terms strikes me as a little simplistic. I don't particularly like the way in which East London is being gentrified, but don't really see the aesthetic appeal of abandoned factories and slums. 
 
Nor, as a matter of fact, do I very much care for brutalist architecture and "'a virulent black ecomomy of scavengers, peddlers and shoplifters'" [185] - i.e., the kind of people who "could not be regenerated, even if they wanted to be" [189].
 
 
II. 
 
Ford studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and did her Masters at the Royal College of Art. For her graduation show at the latter in 2007, she exhibited a four-section painting depicting herself in each panel against a scene of urban chaos and one wonders if she regrets the passing of old London primarily because it deprives her of an aesthetic backdrop.

I suspect she's precisely the kind of bourgeois anarchist that Rotten railed against; friends with and celebrated by all the usual suspects, including Fisher, who, like Ford, also fantasises (in a quasi-erotic manner) about a punk London full of "spaces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted" [186] in which one could drift and daydream; "a labyrinth of side streets and spaces resistant to the process of gentrification" [187].  

And she is precisely the kind of figure whom Jarvis Cocker so brilliantly skewers as a class tourist i.e., one who wants to live like common people and do whatever common people do; one who thinks that poor is cool, but who will never fail like common people or understand how it feels to live a life with no meaning or control [d].
 
For when not drifting round city streets mapping the psychic contours of the city or taking part in a protest - for she's an activist as well as an artist - the author of Savage Messiah is arranging her latest exhibition at a posh gallery or lecturing across the UK and internationally on issues surrounding urbanism, architecture, and memory. 
 
Her life, in other words, is full of meaning and purpose and she's very much in complete control of her own professional destiny (even if she tells us her existence is precarious).  

 
III.

Ironically, if you take Fisher's word for it, then Savage Messiah was written precisely for someone like me; "born too late for punk but whose expectations were raised by its incendiary afterglow" [189]
 
But, for much the same reason I hated Crass [e], Ford's work is really not my cup of tea ... 
 
Certainly not in its radical politics, although I am rather drawn to the hauntological aspects; to the fact that it is imbued with a sense of mourning and that it stains London "with particularly intense moments of time" [191] [f].   
 
At it's best - when it "invites us to see the contours of another world in the gaps and cracks" [192] of an urban landscape - then Savage Messiah is inspiring. 
 
But, at its worst - when Ford keeps banging on about the need to forge collective resistance to the occupying powers of neoliberalism and suggests that the truth is to be found "'in the burnt out shopping arcades [and] the boarded up precincts'" [192] - then Savage Messiah bores us to tears.   
 
 
IV.
 
In a k-punk post date 4 March 2006, Fisher tries to foist another neologism on us: nomadalgia ... i.e., the sense of unease induced by anonymous environments that are more or less the same the world over. These spaces are uncanny only in their power to replicate sameness.
 
In other words, nomadalgia is a form of travel sickness born of what Byung-Chul Han terms hyperculture [g].

The problem is, nomadalgia is such a clumsy-sounding term and I really can't imagine anyone ever using it other, perhaps, than hardcore members of the Fisherati [h]


V.

We've almost reached the end of Fisher's book. 
 
In fact, I've nothing to say about Chris Petit's Content (2010); or Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald) (2011); or Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010); or John Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs (1986); or Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins (2010) ... 
 
I've not seen any of these films and, if I'm being completely honest, I don't particularly want to (although the inhuman eco-alien perspective of the latter sounds interesting and, if forced to watch one of the above films I'd choose Keiller's, as I'm all for a little biophilia and a "dark Deleuzean communion with Nature" [228]). 
 
Also, I'm getting a little tired of Fisher's lazy and predictable ideological take on everything: capitalism is evil and therefore anything which frustrates it - strikes, riots, financial crises - have to be for the good. In an Afterword, Simon Reynold's acknowledges that Fisher had allowed his political thinking to settle into "a compassionate and anguished Leftism" [246] - i.e. all too humanist for my tastes.
 
Thus, there are surely questions about hauntology's durability as an aesthetic and philosophy - as there are about the political importance of Fisher's (unfinished) book on Acid Communism, intended as a joyful - even vital - alternative to capitalist realism (i.e., a sort of fantasy philosophy inspired by hippie ideals of community and caring for one another). 

"We can barely guess where he would have taken Acid Communism if he'd lived to pursue its ideas" [249], says Reynolds. 
 
But, unfortunately, I think we can. For "confronted by a world  run amok with the competing delusions and [...] fantasies of right-wing Hyperstition" [250-51], Fisher might have returned to an old idea of truth to provide him with a foundation; who knows, he may even have ended up at the foot of the Cross! [i].


Notes

[a] Laura Oldfield Ford (aka Laura Grace Ford) is a British artist and author (born in the magical year of 1973). Her work explores political themes in the context of British urban spaces. Her zine Savage Messiah (2005-09) examined the changing character of London during this period. It was later published in book form (Verso, 2011), with an introduction by Mark Fisher.
 
[b] The number one single 'Ghost Town' by the Specials was released in June 1981. To me, evoking as it did themes of urban decay and inner-city violence, it was the last great punk single. 
     Although the Specials were from Coventry and residents of the latter assumed that the group were referring to their home town - angrily rejecting the song's characterisation of the city as being in a state of terminal decline - the video for the song, directed by Barney Bubbles, was actually shot in East London and ends with the band standing on the banks of the River Thames at low tide: click here to play on YouTube.   

[c] Mark Fisher, '"Always Yearning for the Time that Just Eluded Us" - Introduction to Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011)', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (ZeroBooks, 2022), p. 184. 
      Future page references to this edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the post. 

[d] Jarvis Cocker is the lead vocalist and lyricist with the Britpop band Pulp. Their hit single 'Common People' was released from the album Different Class (Island Records) in May 1995. The song is a critique of those who ascribe authenticity to working-class culture (and I'm pretty sure Mark Fisher would also disdain such an idea - but may be wrong about that). 
      Click here to play on YouTube and watch the video directed by Pedro Romhanyi, featuring the actress Sadie Frost as the unnamed art student from Greece with "a thirst for knowledge" and a desire to experience real life. And click here to read a post dated 2 October 2018 in which I discuss 'Common People' (and it's brilliant interpretation by William Shatner).   

[e] Crass were an English art collective and punk band from Essex. Formed in 1977, they promoted anarchism as a political ideology, an aesthetic, and an alternative way of life. Dressed in black military-surplus style clothing, they were, for me, the anithesis of the Sex Pistols.
      Mark Fisher in his introduction to Savage Messiah notes how Ford's work is reminiscent of Gee Vaucher's work for Crass. 
 
[f] Fisher returns to this idea of staining in a later piece included in Ghosts of My Life on Mark Gee's film Patience (After Sebald) (2011). He writes of how Thomas Hardy stained the landscape of Wessex with his passions - just as the Brontë sisters stained Yorkshire. I can't help wishing Fisher had said rather more about this intriguing idea, one that reminds me of something D. H. Lawrence writes about the way in which the living souls of men and women subtly impregnate their material environment; see his essay on Edgar Allan Poe in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). 
 
[g] See the post dated 30 Jan 2022 entitled 'Travels in Hyperculture with Byung-Chul Han', click here.

[h] Another neologism - this time coined by Fisher's pal and comrade-in-arms, Simon Reynolds; see 'Spectres of Mark: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Fisherati', Afterword to Ghosts of My Life ... pp. 233-252.

[i] Obviously, I'm just speculating here about Fisher's direction of travel. Although, in 2013, he did admit that, like many other thinkers, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Marx, he sometimes struggled with his atheism, saying: "It's all very well professing a lack of belief in God, but it's much harder to give up the habits of thought which assume providence, divine justice and a secure distinction between good and evil." It can be difficult to recall that such moral ideas "are not written into the universe, but exist only in ourselves, in relation to our desires and interests".  
      See Mark Fisher, 'Beyond good and evil: Breaking Bad' in the New Humanist magazine (18 Dec. 2013): click here to read online. 
 
Bonus: click here to enjoy a ten minute drift with Laura Oldfield Ford ... Part of the exhibition entitled There is a place, at the New Art Gallery Walsall (Jan- April 2012).


11 Nov 2023

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 1: Lost Futures

Zero Books (second edition, 2022)
 
 
For some reason, the spectral figure of Mark Fisher continues to haunt my imagination [a]
 
And, what's more, his name continues to crop up in conversation. Just the other night, for example, a young woman asked me if I had read his 2014 essay collection Ghosts of My Life and I had to rather shamefully admit I hadn't. 
 
So, at Mariam's insistence that I really should do so - and despite certain reservations [b] - here goes. 
 
But, note at the outset, what follows is not an attempt at a review (still less an overview). 
 
Think of this more as an attempt to occupy the space of thinking that Fisher opens up and to engage with some of the ideas encountered, moving from text-to-text but not stopping where the material is outside my field of knowledge or experience, or simply void of any interest. I won't, for example, be saying much - if anything - about the various genres of dance music, such as Jungle, that seem to so excite Fisher's imagination [c].    
 
Note that all page references to (the second edition) of Fisher's book are given directly in the text.
 
 
I.
 
Many people talk about the cancellation of the future, but I admire Fisher for being the one who (like the Italian Marxist Franco Beradi) emphasises the slowness of this process. 
 
It's something that (gradually but relentlessly) creeps up on us (like old age): one day everything seems fine and there's plenty to look forward to, the next ... Suddenly, all we are left with is the past - or more precisely, our memory of the past and even this dims over time. 
 
Luckily, we have photographs and videos and thanks to YouTube it seems that everything we ever watched or listened to is made available: "In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost." [2]
 
 
II.
 
It's clever how Fisher (retrospectively) reads Sapphire & Steel in relation to the work of Harold Pinter and John Le Carré. But I remember how, at the time - the series ran from 1979 to 1982 - my friend and I would often laugh at it's absurdity and pretension. 
 
Now, however, I'd view this pair of interdimensional operatives whose job it is to repair breaks in time so as to ensure temporal continuity with a good deal of philosophical hostility. For what are they if not defenders of the myth of progress (i.e., linear development) and ideals of smoothness, purity, and temporal good order ...?
 
Personally, I quite like anachronisms and chronological inconsistencies. It's not these things which lead to stasis - on the contrary, things which puncture equilibrium also keep things moving. 
 
Without wishing to completely destabilise the Western concept of time, I'm happy to celebrate its periodic disturbance; to allow for a certain chaos (or openness); for untimely events that produce divergent becomings; for lines of flight which produce wild disruptions.
 
I say this as a reader of Deleuze, but also as a reader of Lawrence who writes in Apocalypse: "Our idea of time as a continuity, as an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly" [d].
 
Hopefully I've not misunderstood what Fisher is arguing, but I get the impression that, like Sapphire and Steel, he wants to straighten everything out and prevent cultural time folding back on itself, so that we might once again be able to make a clear distinction between past and present (and we'll all know what's what and when and where we are).
 
 
III.
 
Fisher likes to use a term borrowed from his pal Simon Reynolds - dyschronia - to describe the "current crisis of cultural temporality" [14] as he experiences it. 
 
And, to be fair, it's a nice term - one that can be added to all those other dys- terms which people seem to like using today (from dyslexia and dysmorphia to dysphoria and dystopia). I even referred to the concept myself in a recent post on the Beatles [click here].        
 
But I can't quite get as worked up about it as Mr Fisher, who at one point cries out: "Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk?" [9] A passionate cri de coeur no doubt, but one that made me almost spit my tea. For this may be a question concerning the time in which we live, but it's hardly a question for the ages. 
 
Although, having said that, perhaps Fisher has a point when he asserts that the fate that has befallen popular music is "in many ways paradigmatic of the fate of [wider] culture under post-Fordist capitalism" [16].
 
 
IV.

Despite appropriating his term hauntology, Fisher claims to find Derrida a "frustrating thinker" [16] and he makes clear his hostility to deconstruction: 
 
"As soon as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy, which [...] made a lawyerly virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice - Heidegger's priestly opacity, literary theory's emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation - into quasi-theological imperatives." [16-17]  
 
So what's not to love? 
 
Well, to be fair, I share some of Fisher's frustration when it comes to Derrida and I've never read his work with the same kind of pleasure or excitement as that of his contemporaries, such as Deleuze. 
 
Over the years, however, my appreciation of Derrida and Derridean concepts, such as différance and hauntology, has increased and I think his main point that nothing enjoys a purely positive existence - that presence requires absence; that being rests on non-being - is absolutely crucial. 
 
And I'm pretty certain that Fisher - indebted as he is to Derrida - would be more generous to him were it not for the fact that the latter's not quite lycanthropic enough for those influenced by Nick Land [e]

Anyway, Fisher asks the question that many readers have probably asked themselves: "Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is just a figure of speech?" [18]
 
He answers by saying: 
 
"The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing." [18]
 
That's a nice (easily understood) definition and I agree with Fisher that many of the great thinkers of modernity - not least of all Marx and Freud - "discovered different modes of this spectral causality" [19]
 
As did Nietzsche, of course, when he spoke of posthumous individuals ...
 
The key thing is that we can distinguish in hauntology between the no longer and the not yet:
 
"The first refers to that which is (in actuality) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic 'compulsion to repeat', a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)." [19]
 
 
V.
 
Nodding to both Freud and Derrida, Fisher also provides an excellent definition of (and distinction between) mourning and melancholia:
 
"In Freud's terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawl of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared. For mourning to properly begin, Derrida says in Spectres of Marx, the dead must be conjured away [...]" [22]
 
I think that's true: which is why the dead must bury the dead and the living must live; remembering their loved ones, but also letting them go. The dead can't rest in peace if we won't allow them to do so: and haunting, then, "can be construed as a failed mourning" [22] - a refusal to give up the ghost (and thus the ghost's refusal to be quiet). 
 
For Fisher, what's at stake in 21st-century hauntology is not the loss of a loved one or the disappearance of a particular object, but the vanishing of a certain trajectory that he names popular modernism and which produced such things as public service broadcasting, Penguin paperbacks, and postpunk ... 
 
In a passage that makes clear the aim of his book, Fisher writes:
 
"In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the preset moment was taken up and renewed. Which is to say that [...] the culture which shaped most of my early expectations was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been collected in Ghosts of My Life is about coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist." [22-23]  
 
Perhaps, in a sense, that's also one of the aims of Torpedo the Ark. 
 
Ultimately, it comes down to a refusal to give up; "a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time ..." [24]
 
Of course, as Fisher recognises, this raises the question of nostalgia once more: "is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a [new] name for nostalgia?" [25]
 
Clearly, Fisher doesn't think so and I agree with him that "comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way" [25]. The fact is, the 1970s was a more creative decade - and people were happier - than today; this isn't falsely overestimating (or falsely remembering) the past and readers who weren't alive to experience the '70s will just have to take my word for it [f].  
 
The popular modern culture that was unfolding back then "was by no means a completed project" [26] and it was, admittedly, a time of "casual racism, sexism and homophobia" [26] - not to mention football hooliganism, strikes, blackouts, and flared jeans. But, nevertheless, the decade was, in many respects, "better than neoliberalism wants us to remember it" [25]
 
What is being longed for in Fisher's work (and perhaps also in mine) is not the return to a certain period, but the resumption of an abandoned project (which he calls popular modernism) and the summoning of a lost spirit, although Fisher and I obviously disagree as to the political guise of this spirit - I'm not an acid communist.  

Still, acid communist or not, I can agree with Fisher that the key thing is ultimately about dismantling identities which are for the most part poor fictions: "Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves." [28]
 
 
Notes
 
[a] I have written recently about Mark Fisher and his work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark; see here and here, for example. 
 
[b] I am always a little wary of writers like Fisher who, via unrestrained enthusiasm for certain ideas (often brilliantly expressed) attract a cult following amongst readers who, like Fox Mulder, so want to believe in the existence of truth lying out there (beneath the falsifications of capitalist realism).    
 
[c] This isn't to say that Fisher's analysis of, for example, Rufige Kru's Ghosts of My Life EP (1993) isn't excellent, it's just that I know more (and care more) about the actress Goldie Hawn than I do about Goldie the music producer and DJ. 
 
[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 97. 
      Lawrence continues: "The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge."  

[e] I'm referring here to Nick Land's essay 'Spirit and Teeth', in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Sprit, ed. David Woods, (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.
     The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, (Urbanomic, 2011), pp. 175-201.
 
[f] Readers don't have to take my word for how shit things are in the 21st-century in comparison to the 1970s. Consider this statement from Fisher: "It's clear to me now that the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised - not in the far distant future, but very soon - as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s." [Ghosts, 29] 
      Arguably, things have only got worse - much worse - in the ten years since this was written. 
 
 
Part 2 of this post - The Return of the 70s - can be read by clicking here.
 
Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here  


1 May 2019

Ooh La La La: Katherine Waugh's Fugitive Philosophy

Paul Klee: Angelus Novus (1920) 


I. Kate Loves Marlon

Katherine Waugh describes the impersonal form of writing that she loves best as fugitive in character and I don't have any problem with that, though how it differs from what Deleuze and Guattari term minor literature and/or nomadic philosophy is not quite clear; they too speak of outlaws and those who have the courage to flee.

Indeed, Waugh even privileges the same authors as Deleuze and Guattari - Nietzsche, Kafka, Artaud ... all the usual suspects. She may have been a subjectless teenage reader, but there's nothing unique about her taste in writers. Or movie stars ...

If saying you like Marlon Brando isn't exactly going out on a limb, describing Sidney Lumet's film Fugitive Kind (1960) as extraordinary - in a positive sense - is admittedly a bold move. Waugh is clearly smitten with the character played by Brando - Valentine Xavier - dressed in his snakeskin jacket. She speaks of his "singular beauty and sexual allure", before quickly adding that what really appeals is the fact that Valentine is "seeking to escape the oppressive subjectification he feels trapped within".

How do we know that this guitar-playing drifter is "seeking to escape the oppressive subjectification he feels trapped within"? Because he tells the older woman he's taken a shine to (played by Anna Magnani) the tragic tale of an apodal bluebird that is destined to forever stay on the wing. Should the poor creature ever attempt to land, it will immediately perish.

That's how Valentine wishes to be understood; as a man who doesn't belong anywhere and must always keep moving. And I guess that's how Waugh also wants to be understood; footloose and footless. Part bluebird - and part angel of history, as Waugh flits from Brando to Benjamin and the latter's obsessive love of a painting by Paul Klee ...     


II. Kate Loves Walter

German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, was, as Waugh reminds us, literally a fugitive. Or, perhaps more accurately speaking, as a Jew in German-occupied Europe, Benjamin was a political refugee. Either way, he died on the run from the Nazis.

Waugh wonders what Benjamin might think of contemporary culture, were he to view it through the eyes of his Angel. Would what he saw make him panic, or fall into picnoleptic hysteria? I don't know. And, to be honest, I had to google the last term too.

Waugh writes of  eyes that cannot see the past, but remain "hypnotized and bedazzled by the virtual luminosities of a history-less present, and possibly, in such a state, not seeing the present (however one defines it) either". And it's a nice idea, nicely expressed, even though it's not her idea; it belongs rather to that philosopher of speed, Paul Virilio.

Not that this really matters ... It's only that later in the essay, Waugh expresses such a love of original writing that ... But I digress (as Waugh herself digresses, though she terms it a divagation). Let's get back to Benjamin ...

What is it that Waugh loves about him? Did he too wear a snakeskin jacket and possess the singular beauty and sexual allure of Marlon Brando as Valentine Xavier? I think it would be pushing it a bit to describe him in such terms. However, he did seek to escape the oppressive subjectification he felt trapped within. Waugh tells us that Benjamin was (amongst other things):

Self-effacing ☑
A lover of pseudonyms ☑
Able to stage his own disappearance in the text ☑
Buried in an anonymous grave ☑

In other words, he ticks all the right boxes for Waugh, who loves a writer who gives nothing away about himself and is able to become-imperceptible, which is the ultimate goal of all becomings. And o' how she longs for such writers to come from out of the future as it were, now that Kafka, Joyce, and all the B-boys, are long dead and buried beneath the weight of (non-fugitive) scholarship and critique.


III. Closing Remarks

Essentially, what Waugh is calling for is a new theoretically-informed criticism which is extreme, absurd, bewildering and, above all, thrilling. She approvingly quotes the music critic Simon Reynolds: "Far from being born of a cold-blooded drive to dissect and demystify, the attraction of critical theory (especially the French kind) was that it set your brain on fire."

I don't agree with that. Au contraire, I think that French critical theory builds upon the Nietzschean teaching that only those who know how to put ideas on ice have earned the right to enter into the heat of debate. Thus, I don't think Waugh would much care for the posts here on Torpedo the Ark where enthusiasm (and what she terms passion) is very much curbed.

Indeed, I suspect she'd think me a narcissistic stylist who trades in bland inanities dressed up as "profundities in 'clever' sentences". And she is quick to remind her readers - with all the snobbery of those who (often secretly) defend genre distinctions and high culture - of Sylvère Lotringer's remark: theory is not synonymous with blogging.

That might be true, but blogging is not synonymous with "the horrors of much online, spontaneous, 'opinionizing' and 'self-expression'" either. Indeed, I would suggest that one can (sometimes) find conceptual intelligence in all kinds of writing, including blogging - and she can put that in her snow globe and shake it!   


See: Katherine Waugh, 'The Fugitive Kind', essay in Fugitive Papers, Issue 2, (Summer 2012), pp. 12-15. 

Note: Katherine Waugh is a curator, writer, and filmmaker based in Ireland.