paradise towers

February 7, 2015

Red Kangs Are Best

Jack Graham80s, 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.…

October 14, 2014

Build High

Jack Grahamarchitecture, capitalism, fascism, modernism, paradise towers, utopianism1

Some tumblr jottings, curated with pictures.

Modernism. The International Style. Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, etc.

A clean, white world of clean white buildings and glass boxes. Machines for living in. Born of the utopian hopes of early Modernism. Destined to become the opulent apartment blocks and corporate skyscrapers of Chicago capitalism.

Based on a dream of optimised people in an optimised world. You had to be perfect to live in a glass box. And the glass boxes were going to make people better, cleaner, fitter, healthier, more productive, and now this sentence is (tellingly) becoming the lyrics from that Radiohead song. Because that’s where that kind of top-down utopianism ended up; the dream of Modernism became the malaise of late-C20th/C21st modernity.

Prora, the elephantine Strength Through Joy holiday camp. Nazi Butlins.

Whatever the admirable radicalism – and there is much admirable radicalism in Modernism – it culminated in a convergence with the Nazi fantasies of order and hygiene (even as the Modernists were hated and driven out by the Nazis) and, in the end, with the corporate capitalist fantasies of perfect and rational utility. The skyscraper as a machine for doing business in.

In both iterations of the same anti-human and elitist reactionary fantasy, the individual becomes a cog, to be permitted as long as they play their role within the machine, as long as they do not disgrace the gleaming interior of the glass box.

It found its way into another iteration: C20th century elitist reformism, the provision of rational living units for the drones, the erection of housing estates and tower blocks. Look at those 60s constructions – built along the same elitist/top-down/utopian lines as all Modernist architecture – and today they seem like ugly sinkholes (the vile word used to describe them), but at the time they were supposed to be clean, ordered, rational, humane and utopian.

So, in ‘Paradise Towers’, the tower block becomes the once-hopeful/now-decaying symbol of entropic utopianism. Social democracy, with its aesthetic roots in Modernism, falling apart in the neglect and ruin of the dawning neoliberal age. Inside, of course, are trapped the archetypes (in parodic form) of Thatcher’s Britain. Feral kids, Daily Mail readers, the Police.

And the roving, murdering cleaners are clearing up the “human garbage” to make way for the return of Kroagnon’s anti-human and authoritarian vision of cleanliness and order. The dark side of the Modernist dream returns from the gothic basement of repression to take revenge on the last remnants of Modernism’s own light side. The authoritarian variant tries to reconquer the self-defeated social-democratic variant.
And Kroagnon’s shocktroops the cleaners are clean, white constructions in straight lines. They are miniature, mobile buildings in the International Style of high, early Modernism.

They are like Corbusier houses crossbred with Mies skyscrapers, come alive and on the attack.

Corbusier was friendly with a fascist sympathiser, Pierre Winter. They both joined the right-wing Faisceau Party.

Fascism lurks within the utopianism of Modernism, which lurks within the utopianism of social democracy. As Benjamin might say, fascism lurks within the entire C20th.

…

July 9, 2011

The Real McCoy and the Forgotten (Sacrificial) Lambs

Jack Grahambattlefield, delta and the bannermen, feminism, gods, greatest show in the galaxy, happiness patrol, kamelion, modernism, paradise towers, peri, social darwinism, stalinism, survival, thatcherism, the master, turlough3

I continue to round up my Timelash II stuff with these bits ‘n’ bobs about the McCoy years. There will eventually be separate posts on some of the ‘big hitters’ left out below.

Paradise Towers

Very Whoish ideas. Lots of clever use of language, from the street names to the slang which incorporates degenerated formal rules, to the Caretaker lingo full of subsections and codes, etc.

It suffers from ‘Mysterious Planet’ disease in that the production looks good but nothing looks right.

Mel’s apparently monomaniacal fixation upon the swimming pool is decidedly odd. But, if you approach this as children’s television (which is clearly what it thinks it is) then you can enjoy it as a surprisingly sophisticated story about social entropy.

Brings to mind Le Corbusier and his notion of houses as “machines for living in”… which always had a tinge of the authoritarian about it, amidst all the utopianism of early 20th century modernism (which also always had a hidden inner core of mysticism beneath all the pseudo-rational stright lines, etc). The insistence upon a buried notion of virtue (you had to be a certain kind of healthy, high-minded, thin, modern-minded, puritanical person to live in a gleaming white box with glass walls) leads to a kind of disillusion, a bit like the contempt felt by Kroagnon. The modernists (Mies, for example) got chased out by their shadowy reflections in the utopian, mystical, ‘modern’, puritanical Nazi party and ended up creating gigantic monuments to corporate capitalism in Chicago. The cleaners seem to represent the intersection of these ideas, rounding up the “human garbage”, the unwanted elements, the uncontrolled human detritus that ruins the idealistic/totalitarian perfection embodied in the architecture.

I don’t like the ending, with all the antagonistic social groups suddenly realising they don’t hate each other after all and making friends. Even the Daily Maily Rezzies turn out to be mostly nice, with only two of them being murdering cannibals.

Delta and the Bannermen

Dispiriting. So ill judged, so clashing that you can’t even laugh at it.

Loud, multi-coloured, sequin-covered, self-consciously zany, folksy and naff… yet there is something melancholic, even quietly apocalyptic about watching this.

You are watching Doctor Who die. The show that gave us ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ is dying. In a puddle of Diet Coke. It’s like watching George Orwell being kicked to death by Mr Blobby and the Krankies.

This taste malfunction carries over into the heart of the story itself. It’s a story about genocidal racism… set in a holiday camp and starring light entertainers. It’s like the Eichmann trial being held in Toys R Us. It’s like a bright green water pistol filled with orphans’ tears. It’s like being murdered by being force-fed party balloons.

My god, it hurts.

The Happiness Patrol

I just love this story. Last time I put it on, I spent the whole 75 minutes giggling, grinning, cheering and clapping like a loon.

This is a liberal attack on Thatcherism as a psycho-cultural style… but it also notices that Thatcherism’s rhetoric about personal liberty was pure hypocrisy.…