Austerity Always Works

The recent budget (Wednesday 20th March) was inevitably met with anger and dismay; arguments fell on deaf ears unwilling to listen and insults were hurled at Osborne. The chancellor’s decision to make himself available to his critics via Twitter facilitated this process quite wonderfully. However, there was nothing particularly remarkable about this budget. In terms of stories, Osborne played it safe. There were no attacks on pensioners; pasties were left well alone. In many ways, it might be said that there were aspects of the budget that played to the crowd; cutting fuel tax and the duty to be paid on beer, for example, will surely have widespread appeal.

The key point, however, is that life continues as it always has done – for many it gets worse. Yesterday’s budget may not afford the press the big headlines that it would have liked, but the very absence of these big stories should in fact be more shocking, particularly to anyone who considers themselves of the left. It is the feeling that things simply pass by – that life goes on –  that is dangerous. For the violence wrought by the economic decisions made by Osborne nevertheless goes on; it is still felt by the most vulnerable, only it cannot be attached to a larger story. There is nothing on which to pin the feeling of desperation experienced by the poorest – and even those not quite so poor – in society. It recedes into the backdrop of British life. It is the tinnitus of social decay.

Walter Benjamin once wrote somewhere that it is the continuation of life as it is, rather than its end that is the real catastrophe. This is the catastrophe of the present moment – the budget is ultimately insignificant, for things will continue as they did before.

The problem for those on the left is how this state of affairs can be changed. This is not a simple problem of course, and it is made worse by the fact that in the current situation, austerity always works. When I say this I obviously do not mean that the economic doctrine currently be pursued by the British government – and many other government around the world – is the only possible course of strategy to save us from an economic disaster. After all, we are already in that disaster, and figures suggest that the economic situation is growing even worse. What I mean is that austerity will always work because those responsible for implementing it, even those responsible for talking about it and discussing it in Think Tanks and the media, never feel the effects of it. Austerity will always work precisely because their lives always work; the immediate world around them functions properly. The signs of economic distress and human struggle are beyond their field of vision; at the very least it is something peripheral.

It goes on; austerity continues. Nothing in the current discourse is able to count against austerity. Even those on the centre-left, including those in the upper-echelons of the Labour party have no real argument against austerity. The debate is focussed on the nuances of policy, the details of how to tax, where to cut, and where to spend. This is not to say that there is no value to debating these nuances, and it perhaps betrays my lack economic knowledge that I should be sceptical about the debate being situated in such a way. But the current political predilection for the minutiae of policy is an ideological smokescreen that hides the fact that austerity has its hegemonic grip on political life and there is little chance of anyone twisting its fingers.

If austerity is always working, this is nothing to do with economics. Instead, it signals a failure within our democracy. For those responsible for austerity are those with political control; they have power but they do not feel its consequences. The voices of those who are directly experience the struggles forced on them by austerity are largely absent from the political agenda. Indeed, the narrative largely seems to be one in which economic struggle is merely a fact of our lives in 2013. Economic struggle becomes an add-on, a side piece. They are small, personal stories: a footnote in the grand narrative of British and global politics.

Yet these stories underline the fact that austerity doesn’t work. The catastrophe of continuation is perhaps inevitable –  what is needed is an articulation of the violence of austerity to come together, to unsettle the comfort of the hegemony.

Wrong Life Lived Rightly: Encounters with The Little Book of Confidence

There is something both slightly embarrassing and unsettling about the decidedly modern doctrine of self-help. Needing help and support certainly shouldn’t be regarded as a weakness, yet the self-help phenomenon, as its name implies, places its onus on you – the individual. It is a deeply ideological phenomenon that attempts to hide its ideology in its abrasive positivity (literal positivity rather than philosophical). In Minima Moralia Theodor Adorno writes that ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly.’ Self-help is a doctrine that attempt to do precisely this. In self-help ‘wrong life’ is unimportant; what is crucial is the living, the acting and the doing. It is about a successful adaptation to one’s environment. I am reminded of something else Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia: ‘no science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind.’ Self-help is the precise opposite of Adorno’s imagined science. Rather than looking at how these ‘deformations’ take place, the purveyors of self-help are responsible for the engineering that makes it possible.

Unsurprisingly, self-help is big business. In a book called Self Help inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life, Micki McGee writes that ‘the self-improvement industry, inclusive of books, seminars, audio and visual products, and personal coaching [was] said to contribute a 2.48 billion dollars-a-year industry.’ However much self-help seems disturbing, or just plain irritating, it nevertheless occupies a large part of western life and so cannot simply be ignored.

Ordinarily I might have tried to ignore it, but recently these thoughts about self-help have begun to resurface. What is more, they have surfaced in an intriguing and unsettling way. This is because a book called The Little Book of Confidence came into my possession. This is a book written by Susan Jeffers, one of the most famous and successful self-help writers. Her book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, according to this Daily Mail article, has sold fifteen million copies in 100 countries.

My reaction to the book was initially one of derision; I found this pocket-sized book laughable. Its promise to ‘transform your fears into confidence, energy – and love’ appeared to me to be naive and silly. It was all a bit too shiny happy people – as demonstrated by the cover illustration of a stick drawing of a figure with lines radiating from its simply sketched body – supposedly a shiny, happy person.

However, as I flicked through the book, each page a ‘capsule’ (as Jeffers herself puts it) of positive thinking, my initial cynicism mutated into a curiosity. These capsules, or aphorisms, of positive thinking began to envelop me. What had at first seemed glib and hollow began to take on a weird and unsettling resonance. Glancing through the book was like the moment a lame and insipid pop song comes on the radio, only to surprise you by having an unexpected and slightly embarrassing emotional resonance. In one of the most interesting of these ‘capsules,’ Jeffers notes how positive thinking is sometimes met with a certain cynicism: ‘Some people make fun of positive thinking. Why would they prefer to look at the gloom instead of the light? Thinking positively transforms your experience of life… for the better. It makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Reading this placed me in a position of rather uncomfortable self-awareness. The ironical detachment, with which I was reading, became implicated and implicitly referred to by the book. It seemed to me as if the point Jeffers was making was that this very detachment, this cynicism is part of the problem – your problem. The rhetorical question at the end of the section – ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it’ – is incredibly ambivalent. With what sort of tone is this meant? The friendliness and intimacy of the book, announced from the very outset, was no longer quite so stable, no longer quite so laughably obvious and unsubtle. For the tone of this final rhetorical flourish seemed to me to be accusing and sarcastic. I felt as though I was being goaded, as if this tiny book that I had initially dismissed was having its own back, twisting my cynicism and throwing it back into my face. Perhaps Jeffers never intended to throw anything back in my face, but it struck me how this little book of positivity could have such an effect on me. It created an instance of cognitive dissonance; I wanted to dismiss the book, but I was also faced with the terrifying fact that these positive insights might in fact be beneficial to me.  

This cognitive dissonance was related, furthermore, to a feeling of embarrassment. I felt I had been caught out; my understanding of the world – of myself and this ludicrous book – had been ‘shown up’. I am reminded of a remark made by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: ‘We are humiliated not by our acts but by our ideals.’ We might easily replace Phillips’ humiliation with embarrassment, but the result is surely the same. What is crucial is that it is our conceptual understanding of ourselves and our realities that emerges in embarrassment, rather than certain actions or specific physical incidents. If it seems that actions are embarrassing or humiliating, it is because of how these acts fit within our conceptual understanding. Jeffers book, then, elicits embarrassment because it does something to our ideals – something happens in the way we see the word (I know I am using ideals and conceptual thinking a little too interchangeably, but our concepts that delineate and produce our reality always contain certain kinds of ideals or wishes within them), upsetting the stability of our ideals and subsequently making us feel rather uncomfortable. The book knows you too well; more, perhaps, than you know yourself.

Yet if the book has unsettled me because it speaks to my sense of personal lack, it is more interesting for the fact that its very existence is testimony to a more general lack in contemporary life. ‘Know your presence makes a difference in all areas of your life. If you don’t understand that your life really does make a difference, act as if you do make a difference.’ Perhaps positive epithets like this are useful. Yet what are intriguing are not the epithets themselves, but rather that such positive rhetoric should be printed and made into the subject of a book. For life is always lived in lack and deficiency – we, after all, would be nothing without desire. Yet Jeffers’ book speaks of something more fundamental – an inability to face the problem of lack directly. Politics or philosophy were once the tools through which we engaged with the deficiency or lack that characterises human life; it seems that these tools have become impotent, leaving open a space with plenty of room for a book like The Little Book of Confidence.

Jeffers’ book might well be trying to tell us how to live wrong life rightly; yet Jeffers book seems to be asking an unsettling question – can wrong life be transformed by living rightly? I think Adorno would have dismissed the question out of hand. However, I’m not so sure. I’ll remain cynical about self-help, yet at the same time I’ll have to live with the uncomfortable feeling that Jeffers might just have me down more than I’d like.

Poem: Sorry Egg/Unhappy Dog

Some breathless evening

Some knots in the brain slipped

In desperation towards the carpet, sinking beneath

The surface of the bed.

 

Your head rests in air, slants

Sideways,

Sorry egg /Unhappy dog.

The day deserted you

(Again); that power of restless timewasting

These seconds that never

Quite return to their proper place.

– Seconds failing to count

Your heartbeat; time lost, become

Boring.

 

Record this evening. Record those sad breaths those

Staccato groans that no one hears.

I don’t believe in the night,

I know it does not care as I sink through

Its sexless hands,

Its heat taunting my skin –

Making me itch,

Making me bleed tiny drops of blood from my

Leg

On the bedsheet.

Weird Terrains and Smooth Spaces: Opinions and Changing Tastes in Pop Music

Being an opinionated arse when I was younger (ok, perhaps I still am) I remember repeatedly being told, in response to whatever opinion or derisory comment expunged from my mouth, that ‘everyone has an opinion.’ As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t really argue with this, which was probably the point of saying it, but even so, it was nevertheless a remarkably glib, even trite, thing to say. Looking back, it was perhaps so inane that it wasn’t really worth trying to respond to at all.

But this problem still bothers me – why do we like what we like? Linked to this question are all sorts of questions about aesthetic judgement, and quality, the relationship between the objective (‘facts’) and the subjective (opinions). This is very difficult to pick apart, and there are trillions of words devoted to these questions. But what interests me is that very first question, which exists even prior to our respective cultural understandings – why do we like what we like? The first conclusion one might arrive at is that questions of taste are intricately related to our environment, our upbringing, relationships with our parents and our friends. Although there is certainly a lot of truth in this, this isn’t quite a satisfactory answer.  There is such a wide range of experiences that while it may be true that it is a variety of aspects of our upbringing that ‘give’ us certain music tastes, the precise affects of our environment and how we respond to it cannot be easily described or predicted. The difficulty of trying to understand questions of taste and judgement might have been around long before pop culture was even a twinkle in its mother’s eye, yet it seems that this difficulty, particularly when talking about pop music, is more pronounced than it has ever been before.

If we take the problem of parents, at a most basic level there are two different experiences. One is where parents become educators, somehow bequeathing their music tastes to their children. On the other hand, meanwhile, there is  the reverse scenario, where one rebels against their parents tastes. These two experiences might be roughly placed historically, with youthful rebellion being characteristic of the early years of popular culture and the benevolent inheritance of cultural tastes being something that has recently become the norm, as popular culture becomes the hegemonic cultural form of modern life.

If this is true then it might explain the continued lament of the decline of popular culture, regarded as becoming increasingly asinine. As pop culture becomes less rebellious, we are left with our parents’ music, always turning back and afraid to look forward. Although there might well be some truth in this idea, it seems wrong and reductive to simply accuse modern musicians of being more timid and less adventurous and exciting than they used to be. If there has been some kind of degradation in pop music, perhaps it is most likely to be related to the way in which we access and consume music. The increased accessibility of music as a result of the internet has lead to a situation in which productivity and creative experimentation has withdrawn into a world of exploration and curation. The weird terrain of pop music of the past made it easy to know exactly where one stood. In a world like this it was easier to understand exactly why you liked what you liked. The signifiers of pop music were more explicit, making it easier to position yourself against your parents (with their fusty Jim Reeves perhaps) or even against those people you didn’t like. The rivalry between mods and rockers is a good example of this; this was a rivalry located in the very early years of pop music and youth culture – one would be very hard pressed to think of a rivalry like this today. Indeed, the very idea of a subculture has all but become extinct. Genres and styles no longer occupy discrete spaces; different people in different clothes no longer assemble in groups looking at each other with distaste and suspicion. Today, the figure of a punk in the street seems strangely quaint, a reminder of a past when what we liked had clear ramifications, even rationalisations. To be a punk was to take up an agonistic position within pop culture, or within society in general; today it is an expression of nostalgia.

The experience of music today is one of unparalleled freedom, although with this freedom there is surely a certain anxiety about listening to music. One is no longer required to commit, indeed, one is encourages to be musically promiscuous, to find new outlets for their musical peccadilloes and proclivities. Like the avid user of pornography who finds himself aroused by something his vanilla tastes ten minutes earlier would have balked at, the music listener today might find herself wandering far from her charming but familiar alt-rock loves of her early teens, and into some orgiastic world of avant-jazz. This is certainly not a bad thing, but we are left with a situation where we listen without coordinates or context. Of course, one can always read up on pub rock or be-bop in a matter of seconds thanks to Wikipedia, yet while this gives context to the music we listen to, it is difficult to really get a sense of the context of our own listening, how our tastes have been shaped, and why we should be listening to what we are listening to at any given moment.

While the internet might facilitate many opinionated arses every minute of the day, these opinions are shapeless, because they lack the clear definitions and systems of identification were once essential to pop music and pop culture. Now they have been forgotten, or reduced to the status of relic, nostalgic bric-a-brac that no one is interested in piecing together.

Poem: Reemergence

This is a poem that I recently found that I must have written some time ago. I imagine I wrote it when I went to New York with my family in 2011, but I can’t actually remember writing it at all. Its context eludes me, which heightens rather than diminishes my interest in it.

 

Imperfect silence, disturbed

By the turbulence of New York

Earth,

Its subtle violence a murmur,

Disconsolate mumble of abandonment.

 

The moon is lost, it gives way

To street lights,

Abdicating its celestial power to let

Us see

Itself in its own true light,

False and beautiful,

Shimmering orange like a harvest,

Scattered and intermittent.

 

But the moon returns,

Stumbling behind and

Between

The silhouettes of its own creation.

The Problem with Humanism (and A.C. Grayling)

The former Professor of philosophy at Birkbeck and founder of the New College for the Humanities, A.C. Grayling, recently wrote an article in the Guardian on the topic of Humanism. The article trod a well torn path that is becoming familiar in public discourse, taking up a position, alongside his New College chum Richard Dawkins, against religion: ‘(Religions) create division and conflict, they impose unliveable moralities of denial and limitation and they demand that we think of our ancestors did, thousands of years ago.’ I am not particularly interested in his arguments about religion; they are, as demonstrated in the example above, rather facile, glib generalities that a Professor of Philosophy shouldn’t find particularly remarkable or fascinating. It is Grayling’s Humanism that is intrigues and troubles me. It is a sign of intellectual malaise that such ideas hold such credence, and they need to be challenged. Humanism is not an inherently ‘Bad Idea’, but it becomes an intellectual crutch on which critical thought can rest easily; Humanism, specifically the version outlined by Grayling in his article, leads us up the garden path to be screw us just as religion has done before, albeit a little more gently and rationally.

Humanism, the article suggests, is a supplement for religion, something which can take its place in our apparently post-religious modern existence. ‘The cry raised by defenders of religion is: but what would you put in its place as a view of the world by which we can live? The answer is: something far better, deeper, kinder and warmer – and far more rational – namely, humanism’ Grayling’s point here seems so commonsensical that it is almost impossible to disagree with. He makes himself appear so reasonable that even the most ardent extremists will soon be taking out loans to pay their fees at the New College. The first problem that we might ask Grayling is obvious – why do we need something to take the place of religion at all? If we no longer need religion, why do we need anything? The content of ‘religion’ may have changed, but the implication of Grayling’s argument is that its formal aspects are indispensable. If its formal aspects are indeed indispensable, this suggests that there is something within the field of religion that we cannot do without (I’m not saying there is, but Grayling doesn’t seem to have countenanced this at all). This leads to a further problem – Grayling leads us to the brilliance of humanism precisely because he knows what religion is. One only needs to note the line I quoted at the beginning of this to see that Grayling feels he has the measure of religion. Yet more telling is the way he uses comparative adjectives before introducing dramatically unveiling humanism. It is ‘better, deeper, kinder and warmer.’ Grayling lets such words stand for themselves, as though it is self-evident that religion lacks these things. This is a clear example of the way Grayling’s rhetoric betrays the paucity of his thought. What do these words mean? They are certainly not meaningless, but it is not enough to assume that we know what Grayling is talking about.

Indeed, the use of these words not only demonstrates the lack of critical awareness in Grayling’s philosophy, but it is an expression of the very humanism he espouses. The comparative words he uses here are supposedly ‘human’ words. Grayling expects us to understand them precisely because to do so is to belong to the ‘human community.’ One should simply know what such things are, just as one simply ‘knows’ what it is to be a human. The problem with this is that Grayling sets himself up as an arbiter of what is human. Our ability to understand and recognise what he means is a marker of our own humanity. Grayling’s humanity is axiomatic, as is his use of words, as he seems to be capable of having easy access to their meanings.

According to Grayling, furthermore, humanism is adaptable in a way that religion is not. It is valuable and useful precisely because ‘it is not a doctrine or a set of rules; it is a starting point, its founding idea being that ethics must be based on the facts of human experience.’ Exactly what these ‘facts of human experience’ are is not clear. Presumably it is self-evident and can be easily discerned by using our reason. The idea that human experience can be expressed in facts, something that can be taxonomised, delineated and organised reduces it in a way that satisfies the proclivities of a modern empiricist. Human experience becomes something that is simply there, something that can be observed and rationalised: it can be understood, just as we understand the cell structure of a plant or sickle cell anaemia. For Grayling, such a reduction is fantastic, because it subsequently allows us a way of constructing ethical principles that ‘fit’ with the facts of human experience. Not only has he forgotten that you can’t move from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’, but he has also failed to recognise that one of the facts of human experience is religious experience.

The brilliance of humanism, then, is that it ‘fits’ human life better. It is understanding and flexible in a way that the rigid rules and teachings of religion are not. The crucial point is that it is not focussed on any spiritual or supernatural dimension, but is instead tailor made for what Grayling refers to as ‘the human condition’:

 The foundation of a humanist ethic is that it has to start from our best understanding of human nature and the human condition. The “human condition” is somewhat easier to describe than “human nature”, that complex thing which literature, psychology, philosophy and individual experience all struggle to understand. Whereas a study of history and a thoughtful reading of literature together offer abundant insights into the human condition, the sheer diversity in human nature makes the task of understanding it a work that could demand whole lifetimes as we seek to make sense of ourselves and others, especially the others we care about.

Although Grayling writes that it is easier to describe than human nature, it appears that it isn’t actually that easy to define. He never really faces the problem of ‘the human condition’ here, naming it only as some vague complex thing that seems to lie within the endeavours of art and philosophy. It is a lazy phrase that is an ideological backdrop to a form of thought that is incapable or of addressing an existence where ‘meaning’ is nothing more than a vague mirage through which we experience life rather than the thing that allows us to experience ‘life’ at all. It is a phrase that takes its power from its sincerity; it is a vague gesture at profundity that defaces human experience by believing it can speak on behalf of everyone. The ‘human condition’ is not unlike a Platonic Form, a perfected ‘Idea’ of human life to which all our lives are supposed to refer. It is almost religious, and while it may not be supernatural, it is certainly metaphysical. As a result, human experience and human life has a new authority. Yet in attempting to exalt human life, it in fact devalues it.

However, the most troubling aspect of Grayling’s argument comes later. Ideas such as the human condition and human nature may be problematic, and indeed not particularly useful either, yet it is this key assumption of humanism that highlights its dangers philosophically and politically:

An important assumption that humanism makes is that people are, or at least can be, self-creating and self-determining. But, in many cases, the burden of history and society makes self-creation impossible. This certainly happens when people are trapped in a religious tradition which tells them what to think and how to behave, and refuses to allow them freedom.

The assumption that people are ‘self-creating and self-determining’ has grave political implications. What does this mean for those who are living in poverty, for example? Such people clearly cannot be ‘self-creating’ or self-determining, but the implication is that their poverty is of their own making.  This is not only true of the poor, but is equally true for anyone chained to their job, trying to provide for their family, trying to pay bills and mortgages. This assumption also has implications for the way that we understand and relate to one another. In the effort to place emphasis on self-determination, the importance of interactivity and interdependence in human society become secondary, always after the fact of human agency. Indeed, this is not to say that humanists, or Grayling himself, would deny the importance of society, but rather that this assumption that lies behind it suggests a specific way of looking at the world that places emphasis on individuals, rather than the systems and structures in which they operate and interact. Indeed, the importance of structure and ideology in human life looks as though it is going to be touched on when Grayling writes of how ‘the burden of history and society makes self-creation impossible.’ This could have been the greatest insight of the article but it is put aside and dismissed. It is telling that this burden is regarded by Grayling as religion itself; his point seems to be that humanistic freedom would be possible if only we could rid ourselves of this illusionistic veil of religion.

It is almost impossible to disagree with humanism. It is designed to be all encompassing, a celebration of humanity – if you are against humanism you are likely to be called a misanthrope, seen as lacking basic compassion and belief in the power of human freedom. Yet because its assumptions are based on human freedom and self-determination – self-determination is an integral part of what it means to be human for a humanist like Grayling – that part of humanity that does not have freedom (isn’t that everyone?) becomes marginalised. Humanist reason either does not have the capacity or else does not have the willingness to approach that which is situated outside of its gaze. Perhaps it is time to go back to the drawing board.

Poem: The gift of Rupture

The old covenant brings a new decay,

Soft wounds that sing like children –

Like mirrors,

Reflecting an innocence you longed to lose.

 

Things remain lost,

Or at least

Hidden:

Their slim features descending upon the world,

Slowly bringing it into focus,

Bringing it to bear on the matter at hand.

It is within reach, although

It is nothing more than a mirage,

An empty casket of murmuring

 

Life;

Life yet to be lived,

Given freely and

Abandoned.

 

It grows and conceals the monstrosity

Neatly packaged,

Whirring like death –

Engine of imagination.

 

Let it break.

Let its seams tear, let them give

The gift of rupture.

It falls apart

Like the structure of a face, or

The torn pages of transcripted love

Scattered like ashes and

Promising nothing but hope.

Black Mirror: Technology, Media and the Manipulation of Memory

The first two episodes of the second series of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, as a number of critics noted, were distinctly different from one another. Where the opening episode, Be Right Back, was melancholic and elegiac, the following episode, White Bear, was violent and scathing. However, despite these overt differences in terms of tone and style there was nevertheless an intriguing point of similarity in the way that the problem of memory and how it is used and abused by modern technology and media was placed at the forefront of both episodes. Both episodes portrayed lives and societies where technology and media radically effect the way that memory and loss is experienced and understood. Memory’s importance in relation to our identity and our desires is manipulated by the technology used to experience it. Yet even more significant, and ultimately horrifying, is the way that the relationship between memory and justice, memory and redemption, becomes problematic in both episodes. If memory or remembrance ordinarily hints at some form of redemption, possessing something akin to wisdom or insight, in these two episodes this promise is laid to rest by the way that memory becomes perverse or grotesque in the hands of certain technology and media. Subsequently, we are left with pessimistic visions at the ending of both Be Right Back and White Bear, the future marked by the perversion of loss, trapped in the glare of grotesque and monstrous memories.

In White Bear, the public memory of the murder of a young girl is played out through the performed persecution of the woman, Victoria Skillane (Lenora Critchlow), involved in her murder. Be Right Back, meanwhile, begins with a sense of personal injustice, as a young woman’s boyfriend is killed in a car accident. In both episodes, then, memory becomes a way of reclaiming something that has been lost. Yet the way that memory is used to reclaim the past, to redeem us of the injustice that appears to be located at its heart, is not shown to be liberating, but instead self-defeating. In both cases what we are left with is a compulsion to repeat and an inability to ever move beyond the past. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the real horror of both episodes emerges in their final moments. Like a satirical punchline, the stories leave the viewer in a real state of discomfort after the final credits have rolled.

At the end of Be Right Back, for example, we learn that Martha (Hayley Atwell) has kept the robotic replica of her boyfriend Ash in her attic. The future (Martha’s future) literally contains a mark of the past, Martha possessing a strange trophy of her loss and grief. This point a might seem unremarkable and glib, yet it seems to play against the digital world with which the story begins. Where we begin with a clean digital world, everything in its right place in cyberspace, we end with a real material burden, literally taking up space in Martha’s home. Despite the clear indications of futuristic technologies, which suggest the episode is clearly in the science fiction genre, there is a real return to the past in terms of the storytelling, the robotic replica of Ash a modern version of Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre.  The technology that enables Martha to relive her life with her boyfriend gradually emerges, rupturing the illusion that it was supposed to produce: that her loss was not real. It is not simply that this robotic replica is monstrous, but also that the technology itself has become monstrous, exceeding the boundaries of the digital world, software becoming hardware.

Meanwhile, in White Bear, the episode’s climax upends what we have been watching for the previous forty minutes. The terrifying thrills and persistent threat of violence that relentlessly follows Victoria dissolves into the banality that what we have been watching was nothing more than a television show. The real stroke of genius in the episode is playing the entire set up and construction of the episode over the closing credits, the episode repeated, revealing the illusion that had initially captivated the viewer. Just as the technology that is able to produce a robotic replica of Ash reveals itself through its deficiencies, the tiny details that mark it as a fraudulent copy of Ash rather than the real deal, here the construction of the television programme is revealed at the end, the very thing that captivated us as a Good TV Thriller, emerging as distasteful and completely perverse. Yet whereas Martha’s future is left suspended, albeit burdened with her robot boyfriend, the future of Victoria, and by implication, the viewer, is even more bleak. As Victoria is placed back into the room where the episode began, there is a suggestion that everything is about to begin again; her punishment is nothing more than a continual repetition of the same.

Yet what is more striking, and indeed bleak, is that this repetition involves the viewer too. The implication is that not only is Victoria locked in these cyclical repetitions, but that we are too. The viewer is thus placed in disturbing positions, inculcated in the perversity of the show in the very act of watching it. For much of the episode the viewer must identify with Victoria. Her confusion is our confusion as she awakens in an unknown room, and finds herself pursued by what appear to be masked maniacs. Only on the final reveal, however, do we realise that not only have we been led to identify with a child killer, but we have also been voyeuristically involved with her punishment. We become involved in the very process of producing public memory (and, indeed, implementing punishment), but this is not an active involvement, but rather one that we must passively sit and watch, dumb witnesses to justice and the correction of the past.

This emphasis on witnessing in relation to memory and technology is absolutely key here. It can also be seen in Be Right Back. Note, for example, the way that the technology used by Martha to ‘retrieve’ Ash continually changes along with her own increasing desire to recreate their life in a way that is more and more ‘real,’ for the simulation of her boyfriend to become increasingly more life-like. What begins with email exchanges between the ‘Ash’ created by software (which has ‘recreated’ him using the traces of his online life), moves on to telephone calls, ending finally with a material reproduction of her deceased boyfriend. It seems that the true supplement to her loss is to bear witness to the presence of her boyfriend, to see him and to touch him, even to fuck him again. Just as White Bear portrays a world where we need to bear witness to Victoria’s punishment, to see a past relived, albeit inflicted on another, Be Right Back portrays a life whereby loss transmutes into a need to relive, to repeat.

It is not so much that memory is mutated by the media and technologies present in these episodes of Black Mirror, but rather that it has left it insufficient, that memory is no longer enough; we are called upon to desire more, to retrieve the losses experienced either individually or as a society. It is this need to retrieve and repeat our losses that is shown to be destructive, marking our future as always-already lost.