land of fiction

July 19, 2015

Variant Iterations

Jack Graham economics, fiction, land of fiction, the doctor and felix, to be continued 4

“I can’t think why you would want to spend so much time here Doctor,” said Felix, “it seems a very odd place to choose as a regular holiday destination.”

“I think it’s rather pleasant,” said the Doctor brightly, “especially since we cleared out the former management.”

“The former management?” asked Felix.

“Oh, Drumlins Westmore tried to enclose this place a little while ago,” said the Doctor.

“Drumlins Westmore? Sounds like a British general. General Sir George Drumlins-Westmore OBE.”

“Ha! No, it’s a corporation. The Drumlins Westmore Interplanetary News and Entertainment Media Group. Or something like that. There’s probably an Inc in there too somewhere. They set up a department on one of their office worlds devoted entirely to fiction. Hired loads of struggling wannabe authors. Lured them in with promises of agents and publishing contracts and regular meals.”

“You mean they started publishing novels? They created a sort of novel factory?”

“No, they didn’t publish anything. They got the writers to spend all day writing stories featuring brilliant, dynamic, hyper-capable, unbeatable employees of the Drumlins Westmore Corporation. Heroic corporate accountants and lawyers and lobbyists and marketing executives. Capitalist atlases who never faltered in their noble determination to cure all of society’s ills by privatising everything… into the hands of Drumlins Westmore, naturally. The writers took to it with depressing ease and speed. As a rule, the more principled a writer, the quicker they accomodated themselves to the work. You should’ve heard the byzantine self-justifications I had to listen to. Anyway, the fictional Drumlins Westmore employees from the stories all appeared here as a matter of course. And, also as a matter of course, they immediately set about taking over. It worked too. Effectively, Drumlins Westmore pulled off a hostile takeover of the Land of Fiction.”

“But that’s all over now?” asked Felix.

“Oh yes,” laughed the Doctor, grinning so widely Felix thought her head was about to split in two, “we couldn’t be having that sort of thing now could we?”

They walked and the Doctor expounded.

“It’s the people you meet here, you see. That’s why I keep coming back. That and a strange feeling I get… a feeling of coming home. But in a good way.”

“It doesn’t seem entirely safe here,” said Felix, “even without those Drumlins and Westmore gentlemen.”

Felix looked around warily, as if expecting a corporate accountant or a marketing executive to leap out at him and attack.

He was still somewhat on edge after half an hour of hiding behind a rock from a platoon of huge robotic tripods. He and the Doctor had spied them in the far distance. The Doctor had insisted they duck out of sight, just in case. Even so, she had leaned around the rocks and spied on the things with her telescope. Felix had taken a turn. Through the telescope he saw them, metallic tendrils flailing from the bulbous bodies suspended at the tops of their tall and jointed legs. They were lumbering towards a far-off cluster of settlements connected by rivers, backed by gorges, and interspersed with farmland filled with grazing sheep.…

February 7, 2015

Red Kangs Are Best

Jack Graham 80s, class, criticism, dialectical materialism, dialectics, jane, josh marsfelder, land of fiction, marxism, Me Elsewhere, middle classes, neoliberalism, paradise towers, pex lives podcast, philosophy, police, post-industrialism, postmodernism, reductionism, stalinism, state capitalism, thatcherism, time monster, too many tags? 2

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.…