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.

Facing a Self-Effacing Death

Rarely does an exhibition catch my attention enough for me to visit it twice. But Death: A Self Portrait at the Wellcome Collection was so fascinating that I had to return. I don’t think I have ever been to an exhibition that manages to linger in the mind; it possesses a haunting quality befitting its subject matter. It is an exhibition where we are the subjects: in the emptiness of its many skulls and skeletons, the exhibition looks back at you – perhaps it is for this reason that I found it so fascinating.

It is a relatively small exhibition, but there is such a diverse range of objects from throughout history and across the world – artistic and otherwise – that the exhibition leads you in a variety of different directions. You are not given a sense of exactly what death is, and instead you are left confused and bewildered by the multiplicity of ways that death has been represented and understood. It disrupts your perspective, interrupting your line of thought whenever you think one begins to form in your mind. The fine lines of the portrait work against the image they are supposed to create.

Each room of the exhibition takes a different approach to death, presenting us with a different way into its subject matter. This ranged from the focus on memento mori in the first room, ‘Contemplating Death’, to images of war in ‘Violent death’, to images and artworks suggestive of the link between death and eroticism, in ‘Death and Thanatos.’ However, it was not so much the distinctiveness of each room that was so memorable, but rather the way that even within these rooms there was such a wide range of objects that individually each exhibit pulled at the seams of the neat titles designed to hold together the exhibition’s narrative or line of argument.

It is certain individual exhibits rather than the overarching movement of the exhibition that remains in my mind. I remember, for example, quite vividly two exhibits at the very beginning, in the ‘Contemplating Death’ room. The first of these was Adriaen van Utrecht’s Vanitas Still Life with a Bouquet and A Skull (according to the accompanying literature, this was the first piece in Richard Harris’ (the antique collector after whom the collection is named) collection), while the second was a photograph by the American photographer Irving Penn. There are more than three hundred years separating both pieces, but the similarities are clear. Of course, at the most obvious level both feature skulls as their centrepiece. This creates an empty stillness in both images that hollows out both the painting and the photograph, producing an effect not dissimilar to looking into an abyss. I was reminded of Nietzche’s words that if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you. What particularly fascinated me about both though was the strangeness of the respective compositions, which seemed to resist understanding. It was as though both harboured a story, but this story was impenetrable and incomprehensible. This resistance to narrative or simple conception in both Utrecht’s painting and Penn’s photograph seem to me like good metonyms for the exhibition itself.

Image taken from http://tinyurl.com/cdmpsymII

Image taken from http://heathenharvest.org/2013/01/08/the-futility-of-all-an-introduction-to-vanitas-art/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elsewhere in the exhibition was a large plasticine skull (by the Argentinian Mondongo Collective) that was made out of lots of different images, such as buildings and books. This was striking both because of its sheer size and its intricate detail – the small plasticine books used in the skull, for example, were incredibly detailed reconstructions of famous cover designs. There was a certain joyous quality to the image/sculpture, in the way it was constructed out of a wide variety of objects. The soft pliability of its material also seemed humorous (plasticine usually associated with child’s play) and at odds with its subject matter, but it also made an interesting point –  that the image of death that we experience in culture and our everyday lives is one that is being made and remade all the time. Within the humour of it, however, the piece might also be seen as a memento mori, a reminder that death and decay does not only encroach on our own individual lives, but also on entire cultures.

Image taken from http://tinyurl.com/cdavjhl

 

One of the most interesting ‘mini collections’ in the exhibition was a collection of random photographs, all of which related to death, all featuring skeletons or skulls in some way. As the writing accompanying the photographs pointed out, these photos were by far the least valuable items in the collection (money-wise), but they were nevertheless one of the most intriguing features of the collection. These were photographs of everyday life, of family, work or friends. I remember one of a group of about four men gathered around a table, all looking somberly into the camera, while on the table, at the very centre of the picture, was a skull looking in the same direction as the men. The image was so strange that it was darkly humorous, leaving you at a complete loss to explain it. Humour was a feature of all these photographs, and suggested the comical way we regard death in daily life (perhaps more so in daily life than in artistic or cultural life). Against this, however, the photographs were also decidedly eerie. For all the humour that each respective moment contained, the photographs themselves all referred to death in the way that they all spoke of a lost past. You looked at the photographs seeing people who were now dead, the photographic form attesting to the insistent reality of both death and loss.

As a self portrait, Death: A self Portrait was one where the subject’s face could hardly be properly made out. It was an image that is nothing more than many other images, not totally unlike the Mondongo skull. But the very difficulty of making out the image of death was the most satisfying thing about the exhibition. Moreover, if an exhibition has the power to haunt in a way that the dead do in fiction and movies, then this is evidence of how powerful and impressive it was. I will leave the last words to Richard Harris himself.

(Death: A Self-Portrait runs until 24^th February 2013 at the Wellcome Collection)

Django Unchained: Cinema and Historical Representation

Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained has provoked some controversy following its recent release. As one might expect from a Tarantino film, much of the criticism largely centres upon the brutal and bloody violence of the film, as well as its strong language. This might not be surprising, yet what makes such criticism particularly intriguing is the fact that everything that ordinarily makes Tarantino’s films problematic for people is magnified because of its historical setting – American slavery in the years immediately prior to the Civil War. For critics of the film, Tarantino’s flippant and heavily stylised form of filmmaking trivialises historical trauma, mistreating something that deserves respect and sincerity. This was precisely director Spike Lee’s point when he wrote on Twitter that: “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western: it was a holocaust.” For Lee, the film is “disrespectful to my ancestors.” However, it is precisely the provocative nature of the film, and the discomfort that its apparent flippancy might cause in its audience that makes the film so intriguing, and makes it a film that has some value beyond being an entertaining winter blockbuster, as it forces us to reflect precisely on the horrors of history, and moreover, the way we understand and represent it.

This juxtaposition of “Serious Historical Issues” alongside the flippant is nothing new. In his last film, Inglourious Basterds (2009), Tarantino approaches the horror of World War II with a similar reckless abandon. It might be said that in both films there is a certain opposition set up between history as real, lived experience (of suffering and trauma), which is encapsulated in the friction between filmic style and subject matter (a disjunction between form and content). Yet this dialectic is particularly pronounced in Django, which makes it a more successful, and more interesting film. With Inglourious Basterds, the horror of the Holocaust was a spectral backdrop; although it was clearly signalled in the explicit Jewish identity of the ‘Basterds,’ it nevertheless remained something at the periphery of the film. After the wonderful opening of the film, featuring the long conversation between SS man Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer hiding Jews beneath his floorboards, we come to forget the persecution that was an essential part of the historical moment the film was representing. Only in that incredible scene when Shoshana eats apple strudel with Landa do we sense the fear and persecution of occupied France, in a way that the film’s opening tried to portray. However, even in this instance the whole terrifying breadth of persecution is reduced to what would seem to be a personal rivalry between the fearful Shoshana and the terrifying Landa. The suffering of the Jewish people and the nature of their persecution is marginalized and downsized.

By contrast, throughout Django, the persecution suffered by black people in nineteenth century United States is persistent throughout. Although the similarity between Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained is clear in that the persecuted becomes the hero, in Inglourious, the Basterds themselves seem to be almost untouched by persecution (not to mention that they are American, rather than European, Jews). By contrast in Django, the racist milieu occupied by Django is quite clearly stated throughout. In an early scene in which Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz, again) enter a Texas town to collect a deputy who has a bounty on his head, Schultz’s unorthodox methods lead to a quite palpable look of fear on Django’s face, who isn’t quite sure whether the dentist is deranged or simply stupid. Watching the film, one isn’t quite sure what is going to happen. By putting the audience in this position, the film asserts, quite clearly, the sense of persecution and fear experienced by Django, and indeed, all black people. The humour of the scene, encapsulated in Schultz’s apparent recklessness, is not simply an instance of the flippancy that is characteristic of Tarantino’s filmmaking (although it is to a certain extent), but rather, that humour underlines a point about the oppressive and violent atmosphere of the U.S. south for a black man like Django.

The very visibility of violence throughout, and the fact that that violence has a clear aim – that it is clearly racist –  is what makes the film more successful than Inglourious Basterds (not to mention the coherence of the story itself).  The problem that is raised by the criticisms of the film – and by extension the film itself – is about representation. To return to Spike Lee’s comments, the implication if his words is that there is a right way and a wrong way to represent American slavery. He does not say that slavery cannot be represented in film, but rather that the violence of Leone-esque westerns is not the way. The question, then, is about legitimacy – what sort of film is legitimate in the way that it portrays slavery? What would constitute the right way?

An interesting parallel to the debate surrounding Django Unchained is a film like Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s film, given its canonisation within Hollywood filmmaking and the awards bestowed upon it (not to mention the fact that it has been considered “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress), would appear to be an example of the ‘correct’ way to represent historical trauma. In its cinematography, for example, there is something very elegant – cinematographer Janusz Kaminski himself used reference points such as Italian neo-realism and German expressionism as reference points when talking about the film, and also stating that the cinematography was supposed to give the film a timeless quality, so that anyone watching it would “not have a sense of when it was made.” (Presumably the audience have no knowledge of German expressionism or Italian neo-realism.)

The implications of this are that the correct way to represent something ‘Serious’ is to do it in a way that seems timeless, to conceal its construction and its very artificiality, and the fact that it is rooted within a specific cultural and historical moment. It is this that Django Unchained certainly does not do. When Spike Lee invokes Leone’s name in his critical tweet, what he is doing is saying it can’t be done like this, slavery is something that exceeds the boundaries of representation – it needs and deserves more than a violent spaghetti western.

One might say that Spielberg’s response to historical trauma is more skilled, sensitive and nuanced than Tarantino’s. It might seem as though Spielberg is trying to meet the demands of his subject matter, while Tarantino simply rides roughshod over his. However, the problem here is that a film like Schindler’s List, in working so hard to ensure that everything is done so properly – so elegantly – actually undermines the trauma of the subject matter. There is no friction here between form and content; everything just works so effortlessly leaving the audience, in a position where the film merely presents us with what we expect to see. By this, I mean that the film, in trying to represent its (distressing) subject matter as elegantly as possible, fails to highlight that very difficulty of representation, and instead glosses over what makes it most distressing. Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, a nine hour documentary film perhaps best demonstrates this when he dismissed Spielberg’s film for being ‘a kitschy melodrama.’ Lanzmann’s invocation of kitsch is particularly telling, particularly when thought about alongside Milan Kundera’s frequently quoted definition of kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being – ‘Kistch is the absolute denial of shit.’ Kundera’s exploration of kitsch is perhaps worth looking into a bit further –

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice, to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

It is a certain type of self-reflection that produces kitsch. In the case of Schindler’s List, it is that reflection whereby we are allowed to congratulate ourselves for feeling moved at the plight of the Jews, the moment we wonder at how far Hollywood has come when it can produce such a ‘Serious’ and ‘Important’ film. Indeed, as if to confirm this fact, one only needs to look at the amount of Awards the film has been been awarded, for what are cinematic awards – not least the Oscars – if not a clear exhibition of Hollywood (perhaps American) self-congratulation.

Django Unchained might well have this element of reflexivity, yet this is not kitsch. Tarantino is often written about as being kitsch, yet the referentiality and the affection for trash and pulp culture is certainly not kitsch. It is instead the inverse of kitsch, a means of embracing shit rather than denying it, a way of bringing to light that which is excluded, that which resists representation. If Django Unchained contains a disturbing friction between form and content, between its flippant cinematic style and its ‘serious’ subject matter, then this is precisely a gesture towards ‘shit’ and towards what we might call the remainder. It is in this sense that the film draws us to the way that historical trauma evades articulation or representation, and, moreover, the way that representation also necessarily marginalises or leaves something out. What is so stunning about the ending of the film, for example, is that it works to create an image of slavery that is completely untruthful and this untruth becomes ironic, a means of recognising the very difficulty of confronting the ‘truth’ of slavery from our present position in history. Indeed, the ending of Django shares much in common with Inglourious Basterds, not least in terms of the sheer expansiveness of what happens on screen. Yet the brilliance of Django is that this final scene – or rather, this final explosive moment – is placed alongside that relentless violence and atmosphere of intense racism, making it weirdly victorious but also ironic. The moment of vengeance (a perverse sort of redemption) is speech marked, painfully aware of what it conceals. This is distinct from Schindler’s List, where the redemptive ending, with the real-life people represented in the film are shown alongside the actors visiting Oskar Schindler’s grave in Israel. Such an ending is an attempt to justify the film, a supplement that is supposed to confirm the redemptive power of Schindler’s story, almost as though it is a defense against anyone wishing to criticise the film.

Django Unchained offers us a chance to think about history and how it is represented. Although it may seem crass, it is this willingness to provoke and unsettle that makes the film perhaps more significant than its influences would suggest. Indeed, in some ways the B-Movie roots of the film, fragments of might be called ‘low’ or trash culture, is a form that, for all its antagonism with its subject matter, actually mirrors it. By this I mean that both form and subject matter, marginalised from mainstream Hollywood films, comes together in an unsettling and provocative return of the repressed. This return of the repressed is powerful as it interrupts our expectations, turning us back to critically reflect on the horrors of history and the limits of its representation.

Poem: Time Forgets Itself

Time forgets itself.

It hears its humming between objects,

Fears its gestures;

Its inimicable inability to return.

Time fears itself:

Retreats sullen like a dog

Like a myth

Hidden within a cavity,

That space between the wall and the bookcase.

 

Time’s gestures cannot be seen,

Only its faint outlines in the damp corners of our homes,

In the fine lines of our hands.

It knows pain as it does affection –

Repetition as it does affliction;

A silent narrative

By which we measure decay, bodies burning.

The sighing witchcraft of modern material

And ancient Memory.

 

Time does not see me.

Blind bastard of history-

Not wise but childish.

 

It cannot see me nor wishes to see me.

 

Time is a cobweb, a string of steel;

A weaving, a structure that foreshadows

Death,

Hung up in the space between the wall and the bookcase.

Thoughts on the London Underground (Part 1)

‘People of today take the railways for granted as they take the sea and the sky; they were born into a railway world, and they expect to die in one’ – H.G. Wells

As the London Underground recently reached its 150^th birthday, the 9^th of January marking the first underground journey between Paddington and Farringdon, it is time for a reappraisal of an transit system so entrenched in the daily lives of Londoners that it has sunk into the background of everyday life. One’s experience of the underground is imbued with a sort of weird mix of pathos and bathos; a journey on the underground, it seems, is, at least for those who live and work in London, the zero point of humdrum against which the more exciting moments of life is now measured against. As someone who doesn’t live in London perhaps I am able to have a slightly different perspective, not having to rely on the system on a daily basis, and not associating it with the drudgery of work. As a visitor to the city, I have come to view the underground somewhat romantically, loving its urbanity and its simplicity, not to mention its history. Perhaps I also find something strangely attractive in its everydayness, and the way that that very everydayness or banality contains such an intriguing history, that something so apparently meaningless could seem to be so drenched in meaning. Of course, it should also be noted that whenever I have used the tube, it has been to visit friends, or to explore the city like some wannabe flaneur, rather than a weary eyed commuter. Having said that, there are plenty of people I know who do not live in London who regard the Underground with a similar distaste as those who use it every day. For these people, its perceived dirtiness and the claustrophobic quality of its environment is a metonym for the city itself.

The Underground could hardly be said to be perfect. It might well be true, as many people claim, that in comparison with other urban transit systems, the Underground, in terms of quality, comfort and price ranks fairly poorly. However, this does not mean that its value is immense, and I do not simply mean its value to tourists and commuters but also its cultural and experiential influence, something which has largely been ignored. Recently travelling from Paddington to Victoria on the District line, one of the older lines of the system, I tried to imagine the experience of excitement and wonder of those travelling between Paddington and Farringdon in 1863, moving only through darkness, only to arrive in dimly lit stations hidden beneath the surface of the city. Unlike the trains of today, the earliest trains used beneath London were steam powered, meaning that the train would have been moving through a tube leaving behind a poisonous zephyr (smelling and tasting of sulphur) caught within the tube in which it moved, an even more strange experience for those inside the carriages. For those people who took the first train journeys in the earliest years of the underground, it is probably safe to say that the experience would have been incredibly novel, if not also frightening and probably even disgusting. What is most interesting about the novelty of the Underground in its infancy is the way in which it would have been seen, represented and talked about in so many different ways. In Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2010), David Welsh writes;

It was a sensation from the first day of construction, triggering outraged opposition, mockery and disbelief at the notion of running a steam train under the streets of the capital. It opened up a subsurface world that had hitherto been populated by sewers, water and gas pipes, the electric telegraph, plague pits and crypts, giving London an underworld whose only equivalent seemed to be the Parisian catacombs.

The novelty of the underground was as much a threat as it was something exciting and pleasurable. It was situated, in the popular imagination at least, between the absolutely modern and something much older, residing somewhere in medieval theology or ancient myths. Welsh sees the association between this decidedly modern infrastructure and the ancient and mythical (contemporary writers using the language of the underworld, there reference points including Hades and the Styx) as a defensive strategy: ‘the ways in which the most modern of Victorian enterprises became embedded in layers of classical myth may have offered a vocabulary that deflected the shattering impact of modernity.’ Around the underground there merged clustered both the grueling reality of nineteenth century capitalist modernity, and also a certain respite from it, a world that was distinctly other.

If the underground was then shocking and exhilarating, perhaps a metaphor of a historical moment that did not know whether to look backwards or forwards, today it is nothing more than a resource – if it ‘means’ anything at all, then that meaning is empty, something easily used by ad men perhaps, able to suggest vague signifiers of urbanity or Britishness. For Welsh ‘the tube is a pervasive cultural metaphor, seen by some as representing the postmodern condition through its identification as a place where people’s lives intersect, relationships are formed and the urban world defined.’ This is perhaps overstatement of the tube’s signifying power, at least in relation to our everyday lives and mainstream popular culture. Although the metaphorical power of the tube might be used by writers of fiction for various purposes, it is unlikely that, even if we are to regard the tube as all of those things, as Welsh describes, this metaphorical power is largely disavowed, or just simply forgotten.

However, the beauty of the tube, and its brilliance as a signifier of modernity, another reality that makes the reality of life in London possible, both practically and imaginatively, is worth remembering. Indeed, adding to its power as a metaphor or signifier, one need only think to the role the Underground played during the Blitz to see how the Underground has a special significance within the history of the city that goes beyond the purely symbolic and the official. In this case the underground’s meaning became bound up with the bodies of Londoners, the lives of those who would have been lost to German bombs. Here the subterranean darkness and dirt that one might usually associate with the underground and its stations becomes paradoxically a subterranean refuge.

Of course it is difficult, and perhaps just daft to look at the world with dazed child like wonder everyday. Indeed, the celebrations marking the Underground’s anniversary have been well publicised, so one can hardly claim that the Tube’s history is completely forgotten and disregarded. Even as I write, I have just seen that there has been a tube related £2 coin produced as a further way to mark the anniversary (they look quite pretty, as coins go). However, this is not to say that we can’t look at the tube with a certain detachment and to be perceptive to its sheer strangeness. The tube has a history that cannot be separated from our vision and understanding of London, even our conception of the modern city in general. No major city would be possible without a functioning transit system – and for the most part, such transit systems run beneath street level. We are the very people that H.G. Wells is writing about in the quote above – people who take the railways for granted. Yet there is also something even more interesting at play in his words, when read from our own perspective; his words seem somehow quaint, and if they somehow prophesy twenty first century urban life, life that is completely dependent on the restless invention of technology while at the same time being completely oblivious to such a fact, they are clearly not a part of that world. For to speak with such enchantment about disenchantment locates Wells and the historical moment from which he writes in a decidedly different world from our own, a world in which disenchantment cannot be articulated without being tinged with bathos or ennui.

Write What you Don’t Know

The phrase ‘write what you know’ is heard so often that it has become little more than a platitude. This isn’t to say that it is necessarily bad advice; as trite as it may sound there is surely some wisdom in telling someone faced with a blank piece of paper (or word document) to write what you know. However, there’s a danger, like any advice or rule, that one forgets that advice is often there to be ignored and rules there to be broken.

    The author Nathan Englander talks about this idea of ‘writing what you know’ in an interview for bigthink.com. For Englander, ‘write what you know’ is the ‘most misunderstood piece of good advice ever.’ Englander explains how growing up in suburban New York the idea of writing what you know frightened him. For Englander, this idea was a straitjacket, something that separated him from the world of letters and creative writing. Stuck in suburban New York, the idea of writing what you knew seemed impossible, or at least to Englander’s young mind, to a rather banal, and ultimately pointless sort of writing. Of course, as Englander notes, this isn’t what is meant by the phrase. A writer isn’t obliged to write in some vaguely autobiographical fashion (although of course they can; Bukowski forged a pretty successful career out of it) but instead, Englander claims, when someone tells you to ‘write what you know’, what they really mean is that your writing should have its origins in an immediate emotional and empathetic sense.

 

    This might be patently obvious when talking about fiction, as Englander is. Fiction is, by definition, writing what you don’t know, writing something that didn’t happen; the fiction writer ‘makes something up.’ However, the problem with the idea of ‘writing what you know’ becomes more pronounced when it infiltrates into other kinds of writing, becoming the predominant idea of what writing is and what it is for. In journalism, for example, there is the increasing emergence of writers and who place themselves at the centre of their work. Of course, many might be quick to point out that this is nothing new, something to which the emergence of gonzo and New Journalism, in the sixties and seventies testifies. And, moreover, I do not wish to simply suggest that such strategies for writing in a journalistic context are heretical, somehow indicative of the increasing decline of western civilization. I am not arguing for some return to objectivity – indeed the dismantling of the notion of objectivity in an area such as journalism was something liberating, part of the zeitgeist that sought to disrupt traditional authorities, rendering writing and information something that is more free, maybe even more democratic. The only problem is when this liberation is surrendered in favour of the inane and the narcissistic. Writing with an acute sense of one’s position as a writer, of the impossibility of objectivity is something worth holding on to, not only ethically, but also because it makes for interesting writing, and promotes certain individuality on the part of the writer. However, this can mutate into something else, whereby the injunction to ‘write what you know’ becomes more like an injunction to narcissism and self-obsession rather than useful advice to a writer.

   The increasingly self-regarding nature of writing, or more specifically perhaps we should say the increasing visibility of narcissistic writing, that lamely fetishises the ‘write what you know’ dictum – could be linked to the internet.  Social media creates a platform from which anyone can speak on any subject, imploring people to speak or to ‘share.’ This is not intrinsically A Bad Thing, but it would seem that that subject is all too frequently themselves. Can we conclude from this that when people are left to their own devices (in all senses of the term), they will inevitably fall into an extroverted form of navel-gazing? Perhaps. But what is more interesting is the paradox that people choose to write about themselves all the while doing using a tool which gives them a whole wealth of information at our disposal. A good question to ask would be whether there are fewer polymaths now, with the vast territories of information sprawling across the weird space of the net, than there were centuries ago, when information was compressed tightly within universities and libraries, accessible only to a select few? In a time when it is so easy to find things you don’t know, it would seem that the most popular things on the internet are ways of interacting with what is familiar, or creating a sense of familiarity in our online world. 

   The site ThoughtCatalog, a ‘webjournal’ aimed at angsty late teen and twentysomethings, is almost an exercise in creating a website that revolves around narcissism. Its articles are often about the writer’s personal experiences and feelings – relationship woes etc., or are sometimes pieces that are aimed at the reader – ‘What your Internet Browser Says About You.’ In fact, these articles that are aimed directly at the reader, with the third person pronoun in their title are often the most insidious, as they try to establish and forge a certain demographic in its own image, as if to ensure that the reader leaves the article thinking ‘yes, that’s me!’ Perhaps I am being somewhat cynical here – after all, the writers for ThoughtCatalog aren’t ad men, but are people not dissimilar to me – people just wanting to write and find some sense of identity for themselves. Yet what is so strange and unsettling is that there is this similarity between the articles on ThoughtCatalog and marketing/SEO type copy, which does little to make the reader think about a specific issue, but is instead simply trying to get the reader’s attention. A large proportion of its comments are variations on ‘wow I can really relate to this right now.’  Writing that is ‘relatable’ is not necessarily bad, but when it is the raison d’etre of your webjournal, there is a problem. Time Magazine featured a very good piece on ThoughtCatalog, which has given me a lot of my material here, but in particular there is a particularly good quote, from Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan. Nolan notes that ‘writing about something ten million other people have experienced isn’t just irritating but dangerous, because it promotes the idea that the only way to build a career is to write about yourself.’ (A more recent article by Nolan seeks to underline his point further) The implication would seem to be, perhaps, that one should not write what one knows, but instead one should try and look farther afield, challenging oneself and one’s readers. Get out of your comfort zone and all that.

   Taking aim at ThoughtCatalog might be a little easy, and perhaps the site is just symptomatic of a general introspection of youth, a group of people who face anxieties about the future and feel as though they are in a continual state of transition. And of course, as I’ve already tried to assert, being able to write about yourself and your experiences can be a liberating thing. The problem is when one fails to realise the problems that writing about yourself raises, and all that remains is a pointless and aimless narcissism.

    However, although it would seem that writing what you know is something that pervades non-fiction writing, as the example of Thoughtcatalog, as well as countless personal blogs, and even columns in widely read newspapers, attests to, we might also turn back to where we started, and question whether the problem of writing what you know is something that is in fiction writing. I am thinking here particularly of film and television, most notably HBO’s critically acclaimed series Girls. The series focuses on the life of a twentysomething (always the twentysomethings it seems…) and her friend as she tries to navigate her post-college life in New York. Clearly the series has autobiographical elements, and was based on the experiences of the show’s creator Lena Dunham. Although the show has garnered a great deal of praise, it has also come in for a lot of criticism, particularly concerning the particularly ‘white’ make up of the cast. Dunham hasn’t dismissed such criticism, but has merely said that the ethnic make up of her show isn’t something she noticed. Effectively her defence was that she was writing what she knew – the predominantly white, middle class Manhattan world that she had grown up in.

 

 

    I view these criticisms in two ways – on the one hand, criticising Dunham for an underrepresentation of other ethnicities seemed misplaced. Surely she has a perfect right to write her own experiences? If there is a marginalisation of ethnic minorities on US television that is not Dunham’s fault, but rather the wider television culture, the responsibility lying with network executives rather than a young writer. The New Yorker’s theatre critic Hilton Als makes an interesting point that bears further consideration, when he asks: ‘isn’t Dunham doing women of color a favour by not trying to insert them into her world where ideas about child-rearing, let alone man and class aspirations tend to be different?’ Notwithstanding the point about the cultural differences between black and white women (although the differences between the US and the UK might be important here), Als point seems to largely be about shoehorning in black characters, about lazy tokenism. This lazy tokenism, I would argue (and, I think, Als would too) is not representational or empowering but reductive and ultimately pointless.

   However, my second view on these criticisms largely stems from Dunham’s response to them, and the general point that I’m trying to make (and have been slowly winding my way around). Although on the one hand I’d want to defend Dunham’s write to write precisely what she knows, to articulate and express her experiences, however privileged or ‘white’ they might be, on the other hand I’d want to ask why she would write what she knows. After all, shouldn’t writing stories involve some sort of imagination or creation, a willingness to engage with something alien or unknown? Shoehorning black characters into your TV show certainly isn’t this, but then writing a vaguely autobiographical script about how difficult life was when you left college was isn’t stretching your imagination or creative skills either. It would be great to see Dunham put her obvious talent to the test and stretch herself (I don’t mean writing an episode of Game of Thrones. Although…)

    Perhaps the best advice to a writer isn’t write what you know, but instead write what you don’t know. This doesn’t mean that ill-informed writing on any old subject is to be encouraged, but rather that when writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, there is much to be said for trying to focus on the strange and the difficult, for finding something new and novel. And this isn’t to say that one can’t write well and write what you know; only that if you are writing what you know, that ‘what you know’ should be held under question and interrogation, treated as if you don’t know it, made to appear strange, not something self-evident. Ultimately, writing should be uncomfortable.