Eruditorum Press

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post-industrialism

More Trouble

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There’s a play called Sir Thomas More.  It is never performed, despite having bits in it written by Shakespeare.  Every Shakespeare play is performed.  Even the rubbish ones.  Except Sir Thomas More.  Sir Thomas More is never performed, ever.  Not any more.

Why?

Actually, in academia and the theatre world, it is well known how the play spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in its wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in Sir Thomas More, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

Basically, anyone who has ever seen Sir Thomas More performed has gone insane.  (I’m not sure how the actors managed to stage it, but there you go.  Perhaps actors are immune for some reason.)

But it’s worse than that.  Anyone who has even read the whole thing in its entirety has gone insane.

There are asylums stuffed with academics, Shakespeare scholars, students of Early Modern drama… all slavering and gibbering and banging their heads against their rubber-padded walls, chewing off their own fingers, sitting in their own faeces and happily eating it, because of this play.  There are multiple known cases of people slaughtered (usually with screwdrivers for some unfathomable reason) by people who have seen or read Sir Thomas More and immediately gone on wild-eyed killing sprees.

Most people, of course, have only read the Shakespeare bits.  Because no other dramatist of his time was any good at all.  But even reading a part of this play can drive one partially insane.  For instance, there are many who will attempt to claim that Shakespeare’s scenes in the play constitute a message of humanistic tolerance for refugees.  In the scene, More attempts to reason with a xenophobic crowd who are hellbent on driving back some asylum seekers.  More asks the crowd to imagine themselves in the position of the refugees and… shit I nearly did it myself there.  This insanity in insidious.  The mere iteration of the intact Shakespearean contribution integrated into the play instantly insinuates itself into my interiority and instigates incipient irrationality which instantiates itself into the imagination and iii iiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…….

Sorry.  I’m back now.

Yeah, as I was saying.  Otherwise sensible people will i-i-imagine that Shakespeare is making a humanistic plea for tolerance of strangers, which can then be adopted sentimentally by modern liberals.  Actually, what he’s doing is demonstrating the shit ignorance and fuck selfishness of ordinary people, the mob, who need to be lectured on basic Christian morals by Sir Thomas fucking More… who was, in the real world, a religious bigot and fanatic who persecuted and tortured people he disagreed with. …

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Red Kangs Are Best

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I very much enjoyed the latest episode of the Pex Lives? Podcast, which looks at ‘Paradise Towers’.  During it, Kevin and James’ guest Jane (of achairforjane? and many fascinating comments – and an amazing guest post on Lost – at Phil Sandifer’s blog) suggests a Marxist reading of the story in which the Rezzies are the consumerist bourgeois who ascend a few levels via the system which later consumes them.  Totally valid and satisfying reading.  (And I’m grateful for the lovely shout-out, as always.)

I think, however, that it illuminates a certain interesting ambiguity about what constitutes a  ‘Marxist reading’ or a ‘Marxist analysis’.  I know Jane and the Pex Lives boys already know this, so this isn’t in any way meant as a criticism of any of them, but I think a ‘Marxist analysis’ would really have to constitute more than finding some way in which aspects of the narrative function as an allegory of some aspect of the class struggle.  I hold my hands up: that’s often what I do here, and it doesn’t really cut the mustard.

To do that is to bring Marxist categories to a text, but still to treat a text as something that exists somehow outside its own origins and function within the forces of production.  A more proper sense of the term ‘Marxist analysis’ would be to critically evaluate the story in the light of the circumstances of its production – in individual terms, in terms of material/technical circumstances, in terms of the overall system of capitalist cultural production, and then also in terms of broader Marxist categories like ‘the culture industries’ or ‘ideology’ or ‘hegemony’ (with different Marxists probably stressing this or that aspect over another).  I personally would want to argue that a proper Marxist analysis of a text, or any artifact of cultural production, would also focus at least as much upon the social circumstances of its consumption, circulation, distribution, exchange, commodification and financialisation.  For my money, too many Marxist critics (of lots of things including – but also beyond – texts) have overstressed the node of production, which is only one node in the circuit of capital.

I’m often said (by people who kindly link to me on social media, for instance) to have written a ‘Marxist reading’ or ‘Marxist analysis’ of this or that.  This makes me more than a little uneasy, to be honest, because I’m not usually anything like as rigorous and scholarly as I would need to be to meet even my own standards for such a thing.  Generally I just react to texts in a very individual way, with my Marxist views inevitably forming the backbone of my response.

I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative.  Ye gods, I hope not.  I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact.  One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age.…

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“I have in my hand a piece of paper,” says Mr Stevens, CEO of Global Chemicals, echoing Chamberlain in unconscious admission that his promises of a profitable truce in the class war will turn out to be worthless, “which will mean a great deal to all of you. Wealth in our time!”

The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.

“When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year…” Stevens begins.

“It were a shame, that was!” heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.

“No, my friends,” says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, “we must not be bitter. We must face the facts.”

Note the ‘we’; the most abused word in political discourse.  As in ‘we’re all in this together’.

“Coal is a dying industry,” asserts Stevens.

The miners shout “Rubbish! Rubbish!”

When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish.  Mining was always subsidised.  

“Oil is our future now and the government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans, they have promised us money for future expansion!”  So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people’s jobs.  “I have it here in black and white!”

There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots.  The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob – a trope that goes back a long way.

“Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!”  The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.

In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene.  Miners were powerful and militant in 1973.  They were unionised and they were winning.  They weren’t sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.

In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient.  By the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in ’74 (the year after this story was broadcast).  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism.

And when Stevens says “oil is the future” he’s only telling part of the truth.  The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure.  Stevens is an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc.  This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism… which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973.…

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You’ll Go Blind

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I just rewatched a Channel 4 documentary series I originally saw first time round back in 1999.  Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation.  I remembered it as fascinating, and it certainly was… but not for the reasons I remembered.  Watched now, it’s fascinating for its intense and suffocating provincialism.  I refer to a provincialism of time and cultural moment.  To be cruder: the series reeks of the stale atmopshere of the 90s.  I don’t just mean that it’s dated.

After two decent episodes dealing with the Victorian creation of the concept of pornography (i.e. as a closed-off anteroom of culture, only to be studied… and perhaps enjoyed… by responsible, educated males) in the wake of the unearthing of Pompeii, and the revolutionary porn writing of the Enlightenment, the series starts dwelling on 20th century visual forms, from the photograph to the internet.

The last episodes are particularly mired in the stagnant and repellent atmosphere of their era.  All the hallmarks of the late-90s intellectual milieu (during which I endured acres of trendy theory at University) are there.  The social and political cynicism masquerading as consumerist utopianism.  Utopianism itself stripped of all noble and liberationist inflections and fused with a kind of gleeful dystopianism, reflecting the way that the post-Cold War intellectual landscape, with its End of History vibe, saw the future horrors and joys of unfettered capitalism as being equally inevitable… and then celebrated this with a knowingly sick grin of elitest contempt.  The countdown to an apocalypse of banality and boredom that was supposedly hiding just around the millenium.  The dyspeptic, misanthropic celebration of supposedly new and bleeding edge trends that are (perpetually) said to be just about to change/destroy social life irrevocably.  The putative change to a post-industrial economy, the putative unravelling of social life and the rise of the ubiquitous selfish individual (phenomena that, in as much as they were real, were not actually new).

The series is stuffed with comment from entrepreneurs or capitalists (without the word or topic ‘capitalism’ ever being properly mentioned), or from ‘social critics’ who generalise about what ‘we’ are becoming (with ‘we’ implicitly standing for all humanity while actually referring to a tiny sliver of the urban upper middle classes in the developed West).  It’s enormously telling that, in the midst of scads and scads of pontificating about the meaning of things from the P.O.V of the producer or the consumer, there is hardly any attention paid to the P.O.V of the worker, of the… if you’ll pardon me… working stiffs getting screwed.  Anyone who has read Eric Schlosser’s excellent Reefer Madness will know what this TV series left out.  At one point, a theorist is talking about how internet porn (which is solitary, private and interactive) takes the ‘imposition’ out of the equation… even as the camera shows a semi-naked woman gyrating around on a bed, being given orders by paying customers who are watching her on their monitors.  Nobody’s ‘imposing’ on her then.  I guess she’s economically independent but does that job purely for the lulz. …

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Cottage Industry vs. the Spectacular Tentacular Draculas

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According to Miles and Wood, Barry Letts’ eco views were very much influnced (as were many people’s) by a text called Blueprint for Survival, co-written by Edward Goldsmith (now deceased) and published in the magazine he founded, The Ecologist, in 1972.  It was supported by many scientists and was subsequently released in book form to became a best-seller.  Miles and Wood identify it as the real-world model for Sir Charles Grover’s Last Chance for Man in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’.  There is indeed something of Goldsmith’s politics (small-c conservative; anti-industrial society) in the fictional Grover, who is simultaneously an eco-radical and an establishment elitist who wishes to turn the clock back (literally) to a kind of enlightened feudalism.  George Monbiot has described Goldsmith’s politics as “a curious mixture of radical and reactionary”, saying that he “has advocated the enforced separation of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, on the grounds that they constitute ‘distinct ethnic groups’ and are thus culturally incapable of co-habitation”.  According to Monbiot, Goldsmith

assumes that culture is a rigid, immutable thing: that different communities can live only within the boxes nature has assigned to them. Confusing, for example, Protestantism and unionism, he fails to understand the political forces which cause splits within communities and associations between them. He fails too to see the external manipulation which first defines ethnicity inflexibly, then drives the newly separated peoples to fight.

Now, I’m not attributing similar views to Barry Letts or Robert Sloman.  However, there is something of Goldsmith’s hankerings for the regional and the anti-industrial in ‘The Green Death’.  The very separateness of Wales and the Welsh tells us something.  The resolutely English characters – even the Doctor is English really, and this has never been plainer than in ‘Green Death’ – become strangers in a strange land.

Making the workers Welsh seems like a way of quaintifying them, since quaintness was the deadly stigma that mainstream British (i.e. metropolitan English) media culture foisted upon Wales… at least before substituting constant nasty jokes about shagging sheep and Splott (i.e. standard jokes based on stereotypes about rural people and working class communities).  Welshness is a way of ‘othering’ them, of segregating them, of making them a separate community.  The Welsh working class is depicted as a subculture within British society, rather than, say, one of the most significant layers of the majority class in the country… which Welsh mineworkers certainly were at the time.

There’s no reason for ‘The Green Death’ to take place in Wales but that Letts and Sloman want the story to centre on a mine (and going to Wales is cheaper than going further north).  But why do they want the story to centre on a mine?  They’re not interested in miners.  It seems as though they feel the need to situate industry and industrial disputes somewhere regional, somewhere definitely apart from the ‘middle England’ that aliens are always invading in the Letts version of the late 20th century… but why give the story a backdrop of industry and industrial disputes anyway? …

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