Eruditorum Press

Fashionably late capitalism

Jack Graham

About Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

Posts by Jack Graham:

And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 3)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

Links to all previous essays in this series may be found below.

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  1. Succession

As we have seen, the character of Dr. Haynes invokes the evangelical reformers of the English Reformation.  This Reformation was a revolution from above; a top-down change of official ideology in the service of expanding the power and property of the national state and the crown.  It took the form of an ‘enclosing’ of church property, wealth, land, and ideological hegemony by new owners, by the crown, the crown’s state bureaucracy, those sectors of the aristocracy allied with the crown’s project, and those sectors of the rising middle class allied with both.

It is easy to look at Dr Haynes and declare that he had no business ascending to the role of archdeacon because he did so via murder.  But is this correct?  His expectation was that he would be given the post upon the death of Dr Pulteney, and he was right.  All he did was hasten the event.  He achieved his post but the post was always and already his.  How can a world which prizes enterprise and ruthlessness, competition and victory, declare out of the other side of its mouth that it is wrong for him to take the post by force?  By the values of such a civilisation, surely his crimes make him more deserving?  Yes, the church publicly espouses contrary values, publicly despises ambition and cruelty, but then so does Dr Haynes publicly advocate the same worldview.  Is he to be declared unfit for office because he lives by both the ideological claims and the material reality of his institution, his society?

Haynes and his story invoke the spectre of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

It is by no means clear that Macbeth is actually an illegitimate king because he came by his crown by murder.  He is destined to be king.  We know this because the weird sisters see his kingship and its consequences in the future, already written.  And if he achieves the crown of Scotland by deadly competition, so too does Duncan before him, so too does Malcolm after him.  As Richard II says in his own play “they well deserve who know the surest, safest way to get”.

Much as Macbeth is haunted by three witches or weird sisters, so is Haynes haunted by three figures: the carved cat, the carved monk/Death, and the carved Devil.  He does not encounter the Devil explicitly but the Devil character on the stalls is described as having fearsomely long and sharp talons, and Haynes’ facial injuries at his demise are ambiguous: they could be the work of the cat or the clawed Devil – or, in some obscure way, both.  And surely his own crimes would be seen, from within the confines of his own belief system, as diabolical.  Again like Macbeth he is also haunted by women in the sense that Jane Lee’s threat of exposure and blackmail dogs him, his sister’s absence leaves him at the mercy of the supernatural forces in the house, and the entities lurking in the house are repeatedly mistaken for maids moving around.…

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Bourgeois Salvations

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On Protestantism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, and their relation to capitalism.  See also this previous essay.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.

– Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 1, Section 4

But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.

In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried.

– Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

 

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In Behemoth – the first great work of sociological and political analysis of Nazi Germany, published in 1944 – Franz Neumann, a political scientist affiliated with the Frankfurt School, commences a consideration of the roots of German fascism with an account of the ideologies of the revolutionary Protestant movements of Early Modernity.

He writes:

In the periods of religious wars and civil insurrections, the rising middle classes had great need of peace and tranquillity; merchants and industrialists yearned for equality with the clergy and the nobility. As a result, a central secular authority was established and its sovereign power was justified as that of an institution to which men owed not only outward obedience but sincere inner devotion. Charismatic justification of existing authority thus found a place at the beginning of bourgeois society…

 

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The great ideological fault line between Catholicism and Protestantism was always the issue of salvation.  How is one saved?

Martin Luther answered the question of salvation by pioneering a set of five conditions or methods by which one may be saved, sometimes known as ‘the five solas’: sola scriptura (by scripture alone), solus Christus (by Christ alone), sola fide (by faith alone), sola gratia (by grace alone), and soli Deo gloria (by glorification of God alone). …

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Capitalism and the Protestant Reformation

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To say that the protestant Reformation is an expression of the rise of capitalism is not to say that you have capitalist Protestantism on one side, feudal Catholicism on the other.  Protestantism did not (usually) express the ideology of capitalism in a direct way.  It did not enjoy exclusive support from the rising bourgeoisie.  Catholicism did not exclusively express the old ideology of feudalism, or take its support exclusively from old feudal ruling classes and their hangers on.

There’s some truth to that picture, but only at the extremes (where, as Bakunin said, we see things more clearly).  Calvin’s Doctrine of the Elect is almost suspiciously perfect in how it provides a justificatory ideology for capitalism.  (We shall be coming back to this in later parts of the M.R. James series, for which this post is a kind of parenthetical theoretical bookmark.)

Overall, however, that wasn’t how it worked.  Catholicism, in many ways, embraced rising commodification, despite being as based in the power of landed property as any feudal aristocracy.  Rothbard and Hayek claimed to see prefigurations of their own libertarian free market ideology in the writings of the Salamancan scholastics (this is still an idea that libertarians are obsessed with).  Protestantism caught fire partly because it expressed popular disillusion with the very marketisation of religion – the selling of indulgences, the buying of private masses and prayers, the profitability of episcopal sees, etc – that was increasingly seen in the Catholic Church.

Rather, what we see is a very slow and gradual breakdown of feudal economic stability, and the slow accumulation of wealth and power in new and rising sectors, as a result of rising forms of trade and production, which leads to the growth of increasingly wealthy and powerful middle classes, to political controversy and struggle between classes, and thus to centuries of instability and of ideological squabbling over how to make sense of the mixed-up world.  A huge part of the instability is caused by the mixture of capitalist and feudal methods.  Increasingly marketised, feudal society found its production methods lagging behind its consumption and investment needs.  Exacerbated by the insatiable appetites of ruling classes for both conquest and luxury, this was the root cause of multiple interlocking crises which rocked the world of the late middle ages, only accelerating the instability which further accelerated the economic reconstruction.  At the ideological level, both Catholicism and Protestantism are trying to understand the instability and reconstruction.  They come to be the two great camps in the realignments and renegotiations of religious ideology because of two material expressions of the rising bourgeois system: the revolutions in communication and in government.

A glib answer to the question ‘Why does Protestantism happen?’ would be ‘the printing press’.  But this begs the question: why does the printing press happen?  It is both cause and result of the development of technical processes, the slow build-up of new technologies within feudalism, and thus of the growth of literate publics who want to read.  This rise of literacy and political involvement is an expression of class struggle, itself partly stemming from – and reciprocally causing – the growth of new classes as a result of that slow accumulation of change. …

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 2)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark.  Here is Part 1 of this essay.  It really is one continuous and continuing piece.

I had no heart to post this last week.  But that was last week.

 

4. Just what kind of Anglican churchman is Dr John Benwell Haynes?

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We will start with the most basic trait of the story’s main character: his name.  It is hard to believe that M.R. James used this name without referential intent, since it takes us right back into the heart of the early English Reformation.

Simon Haynes, sometimes Heynes, (c.1495-1552), was, writes Professor Alec Ryrie in The Gospel and Henry VIII – Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, “one of the most well connected evangelicals of the period.”

Simon Haynes attended Queens’ College, Cambridge; the same college where Erasmus studied during his time in England.  Erasmus would have been there at the same time as Haynes, so it seems likely they met.  Erasmus of Rotterdam was not a Protestant – he remained a Catholic and originally refused to take sides in the Luther / anti-Luther debate, eventually coming down against Luther – but his humanist critiques and satires paved the way for reformist, eventually Protestant ideas.  And it is difficult to argue that his 1516 publication of a translation of the New Testament into Latin and Greek had no influence on the Reformation, which began almost immediately afterwards.  1516 was the same year Erasmus left Queens’ College, and in which Haynes graduated and was made a fellow.  After taking holy orders, he continued to rise through the college positions, eventually becoming president (same thing as ‘master’ in most colleges).

In 1533, Haynes was one of the delegates to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s special court at Dunstable Priory, which was tasked with judging the arguments Henry VIII was putting forward for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  Unsurprisingly, Henry’s archbishop and his panel agreed with Henry’s position, and Cranmer declared the marriage annulled.  The following year, Haynes teamed up with Bishop John Skip (or Skypp) – chaplain of now-Queen Anne Boleyn – to preach against papal supremacy at Cambridge.  Haynes then served as an ambassador to France alongside Christopher Mount (or Mont), as an agent of evangelical reformer – and first architect of the English Reformation – Thomas Cromwell.  Their secret mission was to establish lines of communication with Martin Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon, and possibly persuade him to come to England.  As Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Haynes attended the baptism of the baby who would later be crowned Edward VI and oversee the most ideologically and governmentally thoroughgoing phase of England’s Protestant Reformation.  In combination with the arch-persecutor of English Catholics (and future backslider) Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, Haynes accused Sir Thomas Wyatt (Ambassador to Spain, poet, and rumoured lover – or at least adorer – of Anne Boleyn) of unlawful contact with the English Cardinal Reginald Pole. …

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 1)

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On ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

 

  1. Introduction

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was one of the stories that M.R. James wrote in order to perform for his friends and guests at the famous Christmas meetings of the Chit-Chat Club.  It was subsequently published in Contemporary Review in 1910, and then republished in a book entitled More Ghost Stories (a sequel to his first published volume of stories Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) in 1911.  In an introduction, James describes the fictional Barchester Cathedral as “a blend of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford”, and is clearly also riffing on the Barchester of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels.  James was a reader of contemporary fiction.

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was adapted for television by the BBC in 1971.  Under the slightly truncated title ‘The Stalls of Barchester’, this adaptation inaugurated the famous strand of TV films known as the A Ghost Story for Christmas series.

The story was also adapted for television in 2000 by BBC Scotland as one episode of the four part series Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

 

  1. The Story (including total spoileration)

‘The Stalls of Barchester’ is a murder mystery without a mystery and a ghost story without a ghost.

There follows a necessary recitation of the plot.  I strongly urge the reader to experience the story for themselves first.

In the early 19th century, Dr John Benwell Haynes, the unmarried and widely admired precentor of Barchester Cathedral, succeeds to the post of archdeacon after the death of the extremely elderly archdeacon Pulteney.  Pulteney has died in a fall down the stairs, reportedly as a result of a stair rod being left under the carpet by an inefficient maid servant, Jane Lee.  Lee, we hear, has been dismissed.  In contrast to the deaf and senile Pulteney, Haynes is a zealous and efficient administrator.  A big part of his job seems to be to get the tenants on diocese-owned land to start paying their rents again, something the late archdeacon Pulteney permitted to lapse for years (may the angels guard his grave).  It takes Haynes three years to put the affairs of the cathedral and diocese to rights again.  Once this is achieved, things start to go badly for him.

One evening, during prayers in the cathedral, Haynes is touching “an exquisitely modelled figure of a cat” on his choir stall and, instead of wood, feels fur and a living body under his fingers.  On another occasion, he is touching another carved figure – an ambiguous character with a mutilated face and a noose around its neck, cowled like “a monk, or ‘friar of orders grey’”, who seems to represent Death himself – and feels the dank fabric of its robes.

These quotations come from Haynes himself.  James gives us sections from a letter Haynes drafts (but apparently never sends) to Sylvanus Urban, some time before his supernatural experiences begin.  Sylvanus Urban was the pen name of Edward Cave (1691-1754), the founder, editor, and publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine (he thus coined the term ‘magazine’ to refer to a printed periodical). …

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Uncommon Prayer-Books

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(Also: The Crack Down the Spine, Part 2)

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In the last essay, I remarked upon a paradox: M.R. James is thought of as ‘the father of the modern British ghost story’ (etc. etc.) and yet rarely wrote about ghosts as such.  This is not a particularly original observation but it is one that remains, perhaps, under-theorised – something I hope to address.  As also intimated last time, James is a fanatically material writer.  His ghosts are not ghosts but – as we will see in the next essay – cats and carvings, monks and stair carpets, and many other material things besides.

This is not actually as puzzling as it might seem at first glance. In fact, the ‘ghost story’ as we know it does not restrict itself to stories about spectral figures of the dead.  While we separate the uncanny story into various subsections based on content and/or tone – the vampire story, the Weird tale, etc – we also use the term ‘ghost story’ as an umbrella term.  And this is a paradox which goes back to the start of the modern ghost story, itself an inherently modern category as we have already seen in the previous ‘Crack Down the Spine’ essay.

A story about a ghost is simply that: a story with a ghost in it.  A Ghost Story is an example of a particular literary form, which may encompass many more kinds of entities than simple spectres of dead souls.

In the anthologies I read as a young child in my grandparents’ spare room at night, anthologies entitled as collections of Ghost Stories, I found stories featuring not just ghosts but also vampires and werewolves and curses, incomprehensible creatures, inkblots on the fabric of reality, predatory feelings and impressions…  The Ghost Story is a form tending into a genre.  It is a particular kind of expression of a particular class of social feelings, generated by the anxiety, alienation, and vertigo of the modern world.  There is a crack down the spine of the history of the ghost story.  It is a crack which separates the modern Ghost Story from the perennial story about the ghost, to the point of making it debatable whether we are actually talking about one continuous phenomena.  The crack is, of course, modernity.

Just as capitalism adapted phenomena which pre-dated its triumph – such as the nation state – to its own purposes, and in so doing altered it qualitatively as well as quantitatively, to the point where the phenomena are linked by little more than a continuity of terminology, so too did it do this to the story of the supernatural irruption and the uncanny presence.

Long before the Ghost Story there were stories about ghosts.  Pliny tells of a stoic philosopher who moves into a house haunted by a proper chain-rattling spectre which can only be laid (i.e. put to rest) when the phantom’s corpse is discovered and properly buried.  And such stories go back all the way through antiquity, and further back still.  …

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An Evening’s Entertainment

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On Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee (2000, BBC Scotland)

This essay is intended as a light introduction to a series on the ghost story writer M.R. James, some of his stories, and their television adaptations, as well as some related texts and phenomena, which I hope to post fairly regularly over the next few months.

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In 2000, on four evenings over the Christmas period, BBC2 aired a series of half-hour programmes entitled Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

In a previous essay, I wrote a little about my childhood introduction to ghost stories.  I’ve spoken on podcasts about my near-lifelong love of Hammer films.  It will be no surprise then that 24-year-old me tuned in to this series, and recorded the episodes on a home VHS recorder.

Three of the episodes have long been available on the various versions of the BFI DVD/blu-ray box-set of television Ghost Stories for Christmas, whereas one – ‘The Ash Tree’ – was never released owing to rights issues over music used in it.  The BBC – with its special rights arrangements – used part of the musical score by Howard Shore for the 1986 film The Name of the Rose in the background of the Ash Tree episode, which subsequently made it impossible to release commercially.  The episode has since been repeated – for the first time in years – on BBC Four, as part of the resurrection of the whole idea of British television ghost stories at Christmas which began in the mid-aughts.  For a while, however, the only way people could see the Ash Tree episode of the Christopher Lee Christmas Ghost Stories was the rip of my own old VHS recording which I uploaded to YouTube.

While I was already enamoured with ghost stories and Horror in general, it was this 2000 series which began my fascination with the work of M.R. James.  With respect, I am not so interested in the man, except insofar as his life illuminates his work.  (L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle misquotes Flaubert in ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’.)  But this television series was a quiet revelation to me.  A slow revelation too, as it only gradually dawned on me how great it was, and how great was its source material.

These episodes are the greatest screen adaptations of the work of M.R. James.  That is a bit of a claim, given the love and esteem in which the 1970s Lawrence Gordon Clark films are held.  Before I (sort of) defend it, let me talk around the issue a little.

As mentioned above, in the early aughts the BBC suddenly decided to remember its old tradition of adapting ghost stories – most famously the work of M.R. James – for Christmas dramas, and to resurrect the tradition.  (The early aughts were, of course, famously the moment when the BBC resurrected one of its other vintage series, with great success.)  The resurrected Christmas ghost story drama genre soon came under the stewardship of Mark Gatiss, and he also presented a documentary about M.R.…

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“The Earth Hath Bubbles as the Water Has” – On ‘Don’t Look Now!’ (1973)

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The ideas in this essay were developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea.  It is respectfully – perhaps presumptuously – dedicated to Frederic Jameson.

 

“And so, no more than the seasons to its unflowering inlets of the sea, do modern years bring any change to the gothic city… I wished to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings…” – Marcel Proust, The Captive

 

  1. You Can Skip This Bit

Criticism is the art of reading in public. There is precious little value to such an activity if it is not itself creative.  Wilde called criticism “a creation within a creation”.  But, as with all creativity, it produces better results if it is kept within certain limits, if it is a game with a particular context, social objective, and self-imposed rules.  That – as Wittgenstein illuminated – is how language, and hence meaning, itself works.  Meaning cannot exist outside of such a game anymore than a mind can exist outside of a body.

The purpose of the game of criticism is to approach the text not only with oneself (as a reader) but also with itself.  It is to interrogate a text with its own textness, its own form and content, but also its own social embeddedness, its producedness, its own material and social history.  If a text ‘says’ certain things, it is the job of criticism to suggest why, to base such suggestions not only on the text’s material self but also upon the social selves that made it, and their social and historical positioning.

The solution to every riddle is that it is a riddle.  The solution of every puzzle is that it is a puzzle.  A jigsaw puzzle is not the picture which is formed when all the pieces are assembled in a certain ‘correct’ way; a jigsaw puzzle is the entropic mess in the box when you buy it.  Without its fragmentation, it is just a picture.  A maze is not the path which takes you to the centre; it is the obscuring of such a path.  The meaning of a maze is not that straight path; the meaning of a maze is that it is not just a straight path, and yet is nevertheless walked.  The meaning of a jigsaw puzzle is the game whereby assembling it in a certain way gives one the illusion of reversing entropy.  The meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is not a small plastic box with a different primary colour covering each side; the meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is the process of integrating each and every flat plane of colour.  The meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is also the history of consumer capitalism, nostalgia, youth, the semiotics of era, and so on.

We cannot solve a work of art such as the one under consideration here, the film Don’t Look Now! (1973), directed by Nicholas Roeg, based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier which was published in 1971. We cannot decrypt it or decipher it, as it shows us itself, with its own self-interrogations which lead nowhere. …

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IDSG Returns

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Just a quick fly-by to say that IDSG is back.

Here’s the brand new mainline public episode, on The Collapse of the National Justice Party.

And here’s a ‘news brief’ minisode, possibly the first of many episodes of the kind.  This one is on the recent Blood Tribe march through Nashville, Tennessee.

Also on YouTube and Soundcloud.

In other podcast news, George Daniel Lea, Elliot Chapman and myself recently did Ari Aster’s 2018 Horror masterpiece Hereditary.  That’s now up at George’s YouTube channel – my patrons got it a week early.

And the three of us also joined up with Kit Power and James Slater Murphy to honour the passing of Carl Weathers by talking about 1987’s Predator.  At the moment, I think that’s only on my Patreon and Kit’s.…

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IDSG Returns… and Jack Is Now a Comic Book Character

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Hello folks,  just updating you on some new developments.

IDSG is back.  Today, Daniel and I publish our first new episode for quite a while.  It’s a backer-only Patreon bonus episode – but hey, we both only charge a single measly dollar a month for full access! – in which we test our new recording set-ups, chat about our hiatus, our ideas for the future, and… um… the Crying Nazi’s dick.  Here’s the link to my version.  It’s also up on Daniel’s Patreon.  Here’s the free 10 minute trailer.

We fully intend and hope to be back to regularly producing new, public IDSG episodes this month.  (Yesss!!!)

To whet the appetites of the listening many, I have publicly released an old bonus episode of ours, from back in October 2021, in which Daniel and I talked about a really bad Batman vs. Joker movie Christopher Nolan made (before he started making really bad movies about Robert Oppenheimer).

I also have a public bonus episode in the works, forthcoming very soon, in which I talk to Rowan Fortune and Twilight O’Hara about Trans Rights and socialist politics with reference to their brilliant article A Trans* Guide to Cis Solidarity: Beyond Oppression.  Look out for that.

IDSG feed

Daniel’s Patreon and My Patreon.

On the subject of me, I am proud and honoured to be a contributor and character (!) in the brilliant and important new non-fiction graphic novel Who’s Afraid of Degrowth? by Céline Keller.  It’s an accessible but deep tour of the subject of radical degrowth theory and the various ways it is misunderstood or mischaracterised.  It’s a crowdfunded project, and is well worth sending some love.  Give enough and you will be sent a paperback copy but, since the crowdfund met its minimum goal fewer than ten hours after it was announced!, Céline has made the digital copy free to all!

I’m in the book, fully illustrated, in cartoon character form, talking about Caleb Maupin, debunking his Stalinist/conspiratorial dismissal of degrowth theory as ‘Malthusian’ and inherently anti-Marxist.  I cover his NazBol politics and his influences, including Lyndon Larouche and Alexsandr Dugin, etc.  I’m on four pages, much to my surprise, as Céline decided to use most of the material I sent instead of editing me down as I expected.

And on the subject of my writing, I am actively working on future essays along the same lines as my recent ones about In The Mouth of Madness.  Gothic-Marxism, Ghost Stories, Horror movies.  You know me.

Thanks for your continued support.…

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