I’m old but not completely amnesiac: I remember,for example, “right-on” being used in similar ways, both in approbation and in gentle mockery; and then, inevitably, as a snarl word by establishment opinion columnists and the like, for whom “right-on” was something one could only ever be “painfully”, “wincingly”, “excruciatingly” and so on. TV comedians like Ben Elton and Rob Newman were earnestly right-on, for a time, but also extremely squirmy around the stereotype of the right-on lefty male, cringing in anticipation of an internalised adversary’s violent contempt - a posture which for me remains a vivid component of the emotional signature of that era.

Terms referencing some type of “raised” political consciousness are always going to be caught up in a web of contested meanings, indexing not only convictions but also hesitations. But this complexity is crudely pulverised in their use as snarl words, wherein they lose referentiality entirely, emptying out into a vacuous expression of hostility towards the very possibility of becoming conscious of new things or in new ways. So it evidently is with “woke” now: a snarl of the encroached-upon against the encroaching.

I would like to try to discourage a particular line of argument which a few people seem to be trying out at present, to the effect that excesses of “woke” have fed into the escalating segregationist backlash in America. Because a certain anxiety about going too far has always flickered within the semantic field of the term itself, it may seem natural to wonder whether transgressions of everyday commonsense have created opportunities for the enemy. I do think that there is something of what I call a “normie riot” (by analogy with “police riot”) about the current wave of reaction — that it is in part a reaction against encroaching “abnormality” on the part of those who want to see the restoration of a status quo in which the old pre-eminences were taken for granted. But I don’t think that reactionary impulse is activated by excesses of fringe political experiment; its core animus arises out of large-scale, visible social change, disruptive global events, and the desire to reverse historic defeats such as, you know, civil rights.

Mostly if you dig into the “woke radicalised normies to be more reactionary” argument it’s about trans rights. Like, basically always, that’s what it’s really about. Because trans rights entail trans people existing socially, asserting needs and wants which in turn necessitate adjustments in the way the social order is structured around sex. And for purposes of inciting a normie riot, getting people riled up about manifest abnormalities encroaching on core aspects of the way they understand their own social roles, this is good red meat to throw around. But I still think it’s weird that people care so much about it, and I think the reason they care so much about it is because it’s a highly resonant stand-in for all the things they find discomforting about a rapidly changing sexual dynamic, in which the patriarchal bargain is falling apart.

It’s not a small thing that the patriarchal bargain is falling apart: it means that men are no longer men and women no longer women in terms of the co-ordinating constructs that used to define men and women as social types with complementary roles, aptitudes, desires and so on. And that large-scale social change is not trans people’s fault, although it and the kairos of trans liberation happen to coincide for not entirely coincidental reasons. But while the normie riot picks out obvious “deviants” as its primary targets, the underlying discontents can’t be resolved by bullying those targets into extinction. You can’t make men be men again without making women be women again, and women don’t want to be women any more (except for the ones desperately seeking re-atttachment to idealised hyperfemininities because they don’t know what else to do with themselves). The wider reactionary program is one of sweeping sexual re-subordination, just as it is one of sweeping racial re-subjugation. We must hold the line against it.

Escalation obviously ratchets in the opposite direction: “you never take me seriously!” – “well, you’re always acting crazy!” – “how dare you pathologise my emotional responses! It’s typical of people like you to minimise the concerns of people like me!”. This shifts the ground of disagreement away from the nature and seriousness of the exigency the anxious person is responding to, and towards larger and longer-standing positional investments and epistemic grievances. The point here isn’t that such grievances are purely emotionally-generated, and hence empty or unreal, but that discussion about them animated by an active anxiety spiral is unlikely to result in fair speaking or hearing. One of the more challenging emotional responsibilities of adulthood is knowing when the other person’s real background epistemic grievances make it incumbent upon you to try turn the spiral about; another is knowing how to quit the field gracefully when it’s obvious that you just can’t win.

The observation that the contemporary “Gender Critical” movement is to a large degree fuelled by anxiety – by pushing people’s buttons and then driving escalation so that they become increasingly isolated, aggrieved and invested in a demand for impossible redress – isn’t particularly helpful in itself. In the context of the ratchet I’ve just described, it’s just the move where one party says “but your feelings of apprehension here are emotionally driven and disproportionate” right before the other party says “it’s typical of people like you to minimise the concerns of people like me”. But I think it can shed some light on the workings of some typical GC talking-points, and perhaps suggest ways to counter them.

An important part of the GC narrative is that there is a cause for urgent concern that is both inescapably real – there really is a tiger, look, over there – and minimised by inattentive, uncaring or actively cynical parties who want to “erase” that reality. This covers a variety of accusations; for example, towards cis women who decline bids to validate transphobic anxieties, that they are unserious (blissfully unaware of the danger), unsisterly (uncaring about a danger to others about which they don’t feel themselves personally affected), or wilfully colluding with the agenda of the minimisers because their hearts are fundamentally in the wrong place. The minimisers themselves are accused of either actively trying to facilitate the predations of the tiger (this bottoms out in the tarpit of paedo/groomer accusations) or simply looking out for their own convenience, going with the flow or cultivating spurious moral credit.

What strikes me here is that the radical feminism of the 1970s took a very similar line with good reason: it stated that women were being harmed by systematic sexual violence and exploitation, and that these harms were being minimised because it was inconvenient to acknowledge them and frightening to confront them. Radical feminist writers like Andrea Dworkin energetically called out women and leftist men who were unserious about the problem, shirked solidarity, or preferred the payoffs of the sort of power-identified laissez faire attitude which led to smirking rape-aficionados like Larry Flynt being hailed as swashbuckling countercultural pioneers. Contemporary transphobia leverages a background epistemic grievance, which is that it is incredibly difficult to be serious about patriarchal violence in a culture which alternately glorifies and minimises it, treating it as amusing spectacle one minute and unmentionably outré private symptom the next. The GC demand – be serious about the threat posed to women by deviant men – is a corruption, a traduction and diminution, of the radical feminist demand to be serious about the normality (that is, the pervasive social normalisation) of patriarchal violence.

The GC line on “gender ideology”, a term about whose genealogy they remain diligently incurious, is that it derealises the inescapably real: turns bodies into ideas, material differences into differences of outlook, matters of fact into matters of feeling. And that this inevitably harms those whose inescapable reality becomes unspeakable as such under conditions of enforced mis-speaking. This part of the narrative provides the moral basis for the claim that transphobic fear-mongering is dissident speech which confronts compulsory mis-speaking, reinstates reality, and wards off the harm of erasure through constative utterance (that is, speech acts that “bluntly” report that things are thus and so, e.g. telling a trans woman to her face that as far as you’re concerned she’s a man). Again, setting aside the Orwell-protagonist-only-ultimately-triumphant fantasies it encourages, there is a background epistemic grievance which is engaged and activated by all this. Inconvenient reports of sexual violence, intimidation or effrontery are routinely discounted and penalised: suddenly everyone’s a cartoon relativist, unable to bring themselves to suppose that sometimes things definitely happen. Pointing out to someone impatiently asserting that “sex is real” that sex is really complicated, actually, might feel like the sort of weaponised sophistication that is often brought to bear on individuals who raise complaints that their communities would like not to have to treat as unequivocally consequential. It might be more perspicacious to ask what real thing that has affected them has been derealised by others, how it is related to sex, and what serious acknowledgement of that might look and feel like. (Of course that conversation is more often than not entirely foreclosed.)

Recall that the primary situation around which the ratchet of escalation spirals is someone expressing distress and apprehension who finds that others around them do not share or validate their fears (and, needless to say, nor should they, in the case of transphobic distress and apprehension generated by button-pushing around fears of somatic intrusion). I have a lot of sympathy for anyone in this type of situation, as I haul my unfashionable rucksack of autistic trauma into late middle-age; I know how much it feels like one is going mad, and how much of a relief it must be, at least initially, to find a community of shared concern which materialises one’s sense that there is something urgently wrong with the world. While I want to be clear that there are limits to how patient anyone should be expected to be with spiralling transphobes, I also think that strategies for prevention and pre-emption are possible and worth exploring. Ultimately these all come down to addressing and articulating the background epistemic grievances which provide the footholds for escalation. To the extent that it is not simply the astroturfed vehicle of crusading reaction, the GC movement (or the cluster of vulnerabilities on which it battens) is a symptom of the deferral of a wider project.

Rooting itself in the possibilities of enchanted existence, the reactive subject works towards their abstract legalization, their reduction to routine, their submission to guarantees and contracts. Its tendency is to reduce the pure present of love to the mutilated present of the family. The most common name of this subject, through which the couple of the infinite power of the Two becomes familialist, is conjugality.

It’s possible that “mutilated present” is an overly colourful Anglicisation of whatever Badiou originally wrote in French. Either way, it’s stayed with me. Badiou’s contempt towards conjugality finds an echo in the observation Frances and Bobbi make during their reconciliation that they had become “like a married couple” in their feelings of possessive ownership towards one another, and in Frances’s various subterfuges – stonewalling, sniping, the cultivation of petty secrets – which were meant, consciously or not, to break the grip of a possession which had somehow outlived their sexual relationship.

I wrote in my previous post that I wasn’t convinced that Conversations with Friends was really seriously addressed to the question of monogamy and non-monogamy, but I think it is concerned with the difference between “the pure present of love” and “the mutilated present of the family” – or, to put it another way, with conjugality and non-conjugality. When I suggested that the story’s characters would be “stupendously miserable as a polycule”, what I had in mind was the “abstract legalisation”, “reduction to routine” and “submission to guarantees and contracts” which can as readily come to govern a ménage of many as a ménage of two.

Badiou mentions somewhere a fondness for comedies of remarriage, in which the warring couple encounter one another anew in the centre of a crisis generated by the escalation of conjugal hostilities. It’s significant that Frances’s published text on Bobbi is both a last-straw betrayal and an extremely naked confession: both “fucking dehumanising”, as Bobbi complains, and an expression of rapt, helpless erotic fascination. When Melissa informs Frances that her actions and her writing “have consequences”, there is an attribution of agency by the older woman to the younger, and a challenge: those consequences are not yet fully worked-out, what are they to be? The conjugal relationship governed by the reactive subject’s demand for “guarantees and contracts” promises continuity, the subjection of contingency to the known and accounted-for, but rules out acts with unknown or underdetermined consequences, acts which bring possible futures into view.

(An aside: I write this six days after the birth of my fourth child. So many parents seek to reduce or eliminate contingency in the adventure of child-rearing, cruelly optimising for the reproduction of the known, or of those markers of status and distinction which point the way, in the last instance, to superior earning-power. This, again, is the “familialist” tendency at work: the child as possession, or as the maddeningly uncooperative object of an intense and unrelenting possessiveness. At one point Bobbi shoots a barb at an interlocutor who speaks up for exclusive love – “I’m trying to figure out whether you were your parent’s most favourite or least favourite child”. These things are all connected.)

I can’t bring myself to be enormously interested in Frances/Nick; the importance of Nick really seems to be, in the end, that he is someone who can be brought to see his happiness as depending on her, so that her closing invitation – “Come and get me” – positions her as desirable and worthy of pursuit. She has “arrived”, in a sense, as a viable player of the game of heterosexuality, able to participate while holding a treasured part of herself (which is busy having sex with Bobbi) separate from its lures. This may be the only set of conditions under which the heteropessimist imagination can picture sex with men as remotely tolerable: first of all, one must have a lesbian partner whose “sweet converse” can sustain one’s integrity and independence. Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? similarly intertwines the proper initiation (after much fruitless dalliance) of a heterosexual couple with the settling of accounts in a female friendship. There is no friend like a sister.

I would have watched something like Conversations with Friends as an adolescent in the hope of obtaining some insight into what it was to be a sexual being, a person with the kinds of urgent and disproportionate feelings that might re-attune their relationship to their surroundings in surprising and significant ways. I mean god help you if you go looking for that and what you actually get is Dennis Potter, but those were the cards I was dealt. There’s been some Twitter discourse lately about whether sex scenes in film and TV are “necessary”, and I think it’s a question worth taking seriously and dwelling on: necessary for what? If you’re trying to tell a story about how sexual feelings and experiences change the very mood and timbre of your relationship to the world, then showing sex can be part of showing what it’s like for that to happen.

In Potter (since we were speaking of him), sex is a gateway to transcendence for men dissatisfied with their lot, but that transcendence is doomed and cursed by the selfishness and obsessiveness of the male sexual imagination. So there’s a characteristic alternation between sumptuous indulgence – a “brilliant breaking of the bank”, etc – and a belabouredly reflexive voyeurism, simultaneously self-accusing and self-exonerating. It would be tiresome if this were the only way it could go. Conversations with Friends depicts unhappy people making each other less unhappy by fucking, then making each other even more unhappy via the imbroglio of status renegotiation their fucking occasions. There is little sense that the temporary happiness depicted radiates out from the locus of satisfaction to reshape, or enable any kind of reimagining of, the world around it. Perhaps this is the cause of my bafflement: I’m looking for one kind of story to be told, and encountering another. Sex simply doesn’t have that kind of symbolic leverage here. The misery-making power of Frances’s endometriosis, which visibly hampers and diminishes her experience of being a body in the world, is both more affectively consequential and less able to be talked about.

I’m not convinced that Conversations with Friends is as much “about” monogamy and non-monogamy as it tries at times to make out. It observes, as Rooney likes to observe, the contemporary conversations around these topics. But these people – this particular collection of characters – would be stupendously miserable as a polycule: non-monogamy isn’t going to resolve the tangle they have got themselves into, although it might have offered patterns of relating and caring for one another that would have made such a tangle less inevitable in the first place. The ability to love, singularly or plurally, is not presented as a panacea; indeed, “love” here often seems to be more a paralysing affliction consequent upon sexual happiness, an emotional invoice for fucking, than a power of attention and agency which might impel you to do something. But there is also a realist bent to Rooney’s handling of the question: the stucknesses and vortices of passivity in her characters’ lives don’t result from a failure to realise or act on their “true feelings”, whatever those might be, but from a sort of nameless and ubiquitous curtailment of agency which threatens to reduce such feelings to a sort of bubble on the surface of things. Her plots are not driven by psychological epiphanies and therapeutic unstickings, but by the accumulation of small acts of agency-building intervention and repair.

I was reminded of this recently when reading a paper of Robin Dembroff’s exploring transgender experience as “wilful gender deviance”. Are we autists being wilful, headstrong, unreasonably perseverant, in wanting what we do want and not wanting what we do not want? Dembroff found a way of putting it that I liked: “we are wilfully…deviant, but in the same sense as we willfully draw breath: we choose to do so, but doing so is compulsory for our well-being” (in case you were wondering, my ellipsis here conceals the word “gender”). I’m not sure that entirely works: we breathe in our sleep, and cannot voluntarily suppress respiration indefinitely. What is compulsory for our well-being is also, in the penultimate instance, involuntary. But willing, wilfulness, stubborn volitionality in the face of the non-negotiable, are inextricably involved in the situation. Our adversaries (mine and Dembroff’s, who are often enough the same people) are technically in the right when they tell us we could always just stop breathing, but only within a narrow time-horizon.

Among the several anxieties I had on opening Nina Power’s What do Men Want? was that the titular question was purely rhetorical, and the author was about to tell me what I should want. Not, necessarily, in the form of a direct interpellation - you there, man, must adjust your expectations! - but rather in the indirect but no less presumptuous form of a tangle of motivated ontological precepts. SInce this is what you are (I anticipated being told), this is how you should rightly seek to realise yourself; if it appears that you are trying to realise some other kind of being than that which you are, then failure and misery are inevitable. A claim to authority which plants its feet in such premises can always represent itself as concerned for our own good, turning us aside from failure and misery. In seeking help from self-help books, readers are often looking for just such an authority: one that will reassure them that their innate being is viable and worthy of flourishing, and direct them towards the proper expression of that worthiness. To a large extent, Power’s book does operate according to the rules of this genre: it offers to restore the credit of a tarred and feathered masculinity, and outlines a prescription for mutual flourishing between the sexes which turns out to rest largely on an off-puttingly Pollyanna-ish construal of the paternal role.

Power’s book did not reassure me that my innate being was viable and worthy of flourishing. If I am right about the broad intent of the book, this must constitute a type of performative misfire: an infelicitous interpellative. Because I am not remotely interested in articulating what is compulsory for my well-being in terms of a reconstructed “traditional” masculinity, I cannot find myself anywhere on the map of redressed gender relations Power lays out. I might as well be reading a book which purported to teach the reader how to become a champion water-skier, except that I wouldn’t be altogether surprised to learn that there were generally applicable lessons to be learned from the pursuit of excellence in that field. Positionality must matter somewhat here, so let me add: as a father of three (four, soon), I naturally wish to be a “good dad” (or, Kleinishly, a good-enough one). But I have found that very few of the challenges arising over the course of this endeavour are meaningfully or helpfully addressed by exhortations to be honourable and courageous in some distinctly manly way, or appeals to an “abstract rage to protect” as opposed to, say, a timely impulse to prevent my small daughter from running out into the path of oncoming vehicles.

The core ontological claim of What Do Men Want? is that sexual difference is real. I happen also to think that sexual difference is real. Here’s what I mean when I say that. At the level of population, the human species like other mammalian species is sexually dimorphic: human phenotypes exhibit a bimodal distribution of sexed traits, such that individuals clustered around one mode will tend to be equipped to perform one of two functional roles in sexual reproduction, and individuals clustered around the other mode will tend to be equipped to perform the other role. By observing a newborn infant’s externally-visible anatomy, we can make a significantly better than random guess about which, if either, of these roles they have a chance of viably performing. Sexual difference at the population level has a marked structural and temporal coherence: the same pattern holds over time, across generations, and the biological mechanics it puts into play serve to reproduce it faithfully, notwithstanding things like endocrine disruptors in the environment. This is the level at which, and the manner in which, sexual difference “coheres” as a distinct and enduring thing in the world. It is also, inasmuch as we are counting the functional roles involved in sexual reproduction, “binary” rather than “unary”, “ternary”, etc. (a different kind of distinction than that between “binary” and “a spectrum”, which as we will see applies in a different domain).

Individual life-histories occur against the backdrop of two large facts, the first being population-level sexual dimorphism as I have described it, and the second being each individual’s placement in a genealogical line which can be traced through a tree of occasions of sexual reproduction. Whether or not we have “fathers” and “mothers” in all the variously culturally overloaded senses of those words, we do all have ancestors who performed the “male” and “female” functional roles in sexual reproduction. This seems like it might be existentially significant: it means that we originate in difference, being neither spontaneously self-created nor replicas of a single entity faithfully reproducing itself. Each new human life is a roll of the dice, in terms of genetic combination, and the culmination of a long chain of such dice-rolls stretching back beyond the epoch of humanity itself.

Nothing in my view authorises us to proceed from these facts to the assertion that each individual human being “has a” unitary sex, that this is one of two sexes, that it is immutable, that it carries with it a fixed set of associated traits (whether anatomical, psychological or sociological), and so on. What is coherent in the large, at the population level, loses coherence once we get down to the level of the individual organism, where the “binary” of reproductive function around which the bimodal distribution of sexed traits is organised breaks down into a “spectrum” of multi-dimensional variety in the actual expression of those traits. Human beings are not (contra fascist imaginaries) instantiations of ideal types. There is a clue in the notorious “gender critical” slogan which purports to define “woman” as “adult human female”. One is not born an adult. Human beings come into the world in a radically unready state, and must acquire practical and cognitive skills, symbolic orientation, social identity, and physical maturity through a lengthy process of development. In that process not only their minds but also their bodies acquire new attributes and capabilities. What sex is for human beings is the entire corpus of phenotypic expression of sexed traits, enmeshed with and modulated through the entire stack of environmental contingencies which shape development towards adulthood and beyond. It is wildly complex, formed in the dance of multiple reciprocally-determining physical and psychosocial systems. You cannot simply make a cut in that complexity and organise everything on one side of that cut into a bucket labelled “immutable biology” and everything on the other side into a bucket labelled “transient social norms”.

The reduction of the complexity of our life as sexed beings is a political project, the goal of which is to corral human beings into reproductive silos and enforce a division of labour based on presumptive reproductive role (the role we take an educated guess at when observing the externally visible anatomy of newborns). We refer to this project, in its various manifestations across an extremely wide range of temporal and geographical contexts, in shorthand as “patriarchy”. It seems to have originated with agriculture, but you’ll have to ask an anthropologist for the details. Like most political projects, it has a PR wing, and PR for patriarchy mostly consists of essentializing fables about what men and women are really like - a tangle of motivated ontological precepts, serving as justificatory grounds for just-so stories about what one ought to want and how one ought to go about obtaining it. Alongside the carrot of ideological images of ontologically-aligned sexual contentment you will usually find the stick of phobic constructions of deviance: if you stray off the path, you will end up warped, a degenerate, a menace to the peace and safety of women and children. Power also waves the stick around, although so listlessly rote are her invocations of transphobic talking points that it rather feels like it is waving her.

I’m going to use the term “gender” to refer to our symbolic mapping of the terrain of sex in toto, both the bad parts such as stereotyped gender roles and the good parts such as the extraordinary diversity and creativity of (as it may be, “deviant”) gender expression through which people try to symbolise and negotiate what is compulsory for their well-being as sexed creatures. The patriarchal project of simplifying this terrain, carving it up into distinct and manageable territories, correlates with a cultural politics around gender which demands simpler language, clear distinctions, unchallengeable definitions, firm limits on the use of imagination. Would-be “gender critics” are actually in the position of gender cops: gender only appears to them as gender when it is doing something unexpected, something which must immediately be put to a halt (to take a trivial example: pronouns are only “pronouns” to them when they’re not the expected pronouns).

Another sense, then, in which I would say that “sexual difference is real” is that sexual difference is the real of gender. But by this I mean not that all symbolic handwaves in the direction of sex are fundamentally oriented towards a reproductive binary, but that the decoherence of the reproductive binary in the life history of individuals, the combinatorial explosion of forking developmental paths, means that any coherent “mapping” of the terrain of sex is necessarily lacking. The question is sometimes asked, rhetorically: if two genders aren’t enough, how many would you like? Five? A thousand? One per human individual? I would suggest that even the last suggestion would be inadequate (people contain multitudes, and entertain multiple relationships with others, through which gender as a social artefact is realised and renegotiated), and that this inadequacy is built in to the relationship between the kind of thing gender is (symbolisation, cognitive mapping, storytelling, social negotiation) and the kind of thing sex is (the dance of multiple reciprocally-determining physical and psychosocial systems, including gender itself). “Sexual difference”, here, is the play of difference within sex, and between sex as it is told and sex as it is lived.

None of this is what Power means when she says “sexual difference is real”. What she means is that there are, really, men and women, and in such a way that men are men (unless they are being unmanly, which is bad both for them and for women) and women are women (unless, forsaking themselves, they have been co-opted into a masculinised psychic economy, which largely seems to mean letting the side down by having sex one isn’t supposed to want). “Traditionally”, men were indeed men and women were indeed women, but a liberal order of individual freedoms and commercial prerogatives has broken down these identities, the better to organise the resulting atomised human material into configurations of its own liking, and now everybody is miserable. Therefore, Catholicism. (As far as I know Power hasn’t actually turned to the Mother Church, but she evidently likes its paternalism, natural law metaphysics, and implacable hostility towards wilful gender deviance).

I want to steelman, briefly, the proposition that there are men and women. Suppose that, instead of seeing this as setting out an ontological precept - these and only these are the distinct types of human beings that there are in the world - we see it as marking the fact that there are not only men, or not only women, and that we live alongside (and sometimes in intimacy with) others who are other to ourselves at the level of their sexed being. It seems to me that this fact, of a proximal sexual otherness through which our own identity is inexorably reciprocally constituted, pertains to same-sex desire and coexistence as much as it does to heterosexuality. It is the enabling condition of erotic love, no matter between whom. Leaving aside the ontological status of sexual difference, we can see that it is “real” in a different sense than “structurally foundational in the order of things”: it is “real” in the sense that it is a pressing situational exigency, something with which we always have to reckon.

The question then is, how does the present order of things (capitalist, neoliberal, atomised, mediatised etc society) dispose of this reality, the reality of proximal sexual otherness? One can find Badiou, in his Éloge d’Amour, complaining that dating apps seek to reduce the chance of the sexual encounter to a managed alignment of predicates: you like old movies and light S&M, I am a Gemini who is fond of animals, the algorithm grinds and whirrs and quantifies our mutual fate. Perhaps (and this has been a signal theme of Power’s over the past few years) we should renew our vows with proximity, face each other in our otherness and mystery, learn to get comfortable with, or to deal more courageously with the discomfort of, our divergent worldviews and misaligned incentives.

All of this would seem a lot more credible if it were not yoked to a reactionary obscurantism which continually peers into the swirling mists of esoteric confabulation in search of solid foundations. Power calls on the poets of masculinism to bear witness to a virtù that can carry the existential burden of coexistence with women, and predictably gets a bunch of male fantasies about resilience, integrity, firm-yet-gentle authority reining in the emotional chaos of frail-hearted females: everything you get when you psychologically split your actual daddy into good and bad parts and glue together a private fetish out of the good ones. It is, to be brutal about it, utter cringe. But such is our cultural moment: if Jordan B. Peterson can build a career posing as a proxy patriarch, then perhaps Power can find a niche offering up the remnants of her intellectual training in supplication.

I do not want what Power is hawking here, and I do not want to be told that it is what I am supposed to want. I see the book as a squandered opportunity (and a waste of a good title). I don’t assent to the proposition that “masculinity is in crisis” (which tends to underwrite an agenda of moral repair, exhorting conformance to “role models” for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice), but it is evident that “masculinity” is one of the more volatile discourses in play in the omnicrisis we are undergoing, and masculinism (whether covertly or overtly fascist) is doing great numbers as a fantasy solution to seemingly intractable social ills. At the back of all of this are unaddressed social needs, wants, things that are compulsory for people’s well-being: material security, purposeful endeavour, some modicum of control over the conditions of their lives. Such needs will not be met by a moral project which addresses itself only to the spiritual condition of those supposedly languishing in anomie, and whose underlying motive is the aggrandisement of would-be gurus.

A slightly antiquated moral fable: a virtuous and upright man fails to establish a successful business, and becomes embittered by his lifelong inability to attain the prosperity he sees all around him. Everyone else in the local business community indulges in a little corruption and dishonesty from time to time; a few are egregiously dishonest, others merely routinely tolerant of trifling dishonesty in themselves and others. The virtuous man is known to be a man of his word, reliable to a fault, but he is not trusted and he is not liked. No-one wants to do business with him, given the option of rubbing along with someone who is less of a tiresome stickler.

The man performs good works in the community, sponsors lavish public events, faces his peers with a practiced bonhomie, but beneath all of these efforts there is an undertone of desperation and, behind that, moral contempt. There is a fact which everyone can perceive about his character, which is that he is a prig, and no-one is willing to accept the bargain he is trying to make with them by putting on a show of likeability, generosity, community-spiritedness and so on. This is the stumbling block within himself, and he cannot get over it.

His tribulations worsen: as the years pass, it becomes increasingly apparent that he is widely disliked, and the snubs directed towards him become more explicit and more injurious. Others have wealth, and the camaraderie of the wealthy, from which he is shut out — literally, in the case of the country club to which he is refused membership, on grounds which are never disclosed. He sees his less upright peers acquire shining moral reputations, as benefactors and do-gooders, pillars of the community. The entire edifice of social status, the hierarchy of esteem and emolument, stands bare before him, and he sees that it is a lie in which everybody colludes except himself.

As his desperation and bitterness intensify, he lowers himself by accepting, through gritted teeth, corrupt and debased arrangements which his more routinely dishonest peers, buoyed by the gains their peccadilloes have secured for them, have the luxury of refusing. Because he cannot find it in himself to indulge some petty hypocrisies, he becomes a grand hypocrite and, eventually, a serious criminal who is driven to violate every principle he believes in. The moral of the fable, although it is not spelled out, is something like this: self-righteousness makes you socially ugly, and ugliness corrodes the basis of virtue, which is the confidence that you with all your flaws are acceptable to yourself and to others, and can accept others with all their flaws in return.

The story of The Feminist is something like this story, but transposed into a different bourgeois milieu with the parameters tweaked so as to press some contemporary buttons. Romantic and sexual viability is the story’s chosen proxy for social acceptance, and an ostensibly feminist sexual ethics and etiquette is its stand-in for moral uprightness. What does the protagonist need to do, to be saved? What is the stumbling block within himself? I suggest that it isn’t narrow-shoulderedness, nor some unquantifiable default of sexual charisma, that holds him back. It isn’t, in this case, an autistic difficulty with implicit social prompts (this is hinted at — “the alien system of codes and manners that govern flirting, conveyed in subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation” — but not particularly developed, and the background explanation is that he has been socialised in a predominantly single-sex environment). But the flaw is characterological, which is to say that it inheres within the character’s “make-up”, and defines the role he is going to play and the trajectory he is going to take within his story. He is, like our floundering man of business, a prig who invariably places a moral barrier between himself and the trust of other people. (The idea that people, or at least characters in stories, have “character flaws” in this sense, and that you can hang an entire story off developing the consequences of such a flaw, is just what makes both my fable and The Feminist antiquated, or reassuringly old-fashioned, in a certain way).

There is a social transactional layer to both sex and business which is distinct from, although functionally enmeshed with, the explicit quid pro quo of both activities. You may think that someone is a scoundrel who is definitely trying to screw you over, and yet still be willing to engage with them on the basis that, at a certain level, you and they both know what they are like, what you are like, and how things are likely to go. Mutual recognition, having sized each other up and assented to what you see in each other, is foundational here. It’s the difference between “he’s a slippery customer, and I don’t know what his game is”, and, “I expect he’s up to something, as per, but I’ll take my chances”. Among the things which are off-putting at this level is someone’s very clearly trying to win a sort of game with themselves, in which assenting to their terms means you are inevitably going to come off as the loser. “This person’s absolute priority, come what may, is keeping their self-regard intact” is a red flag no matter how morally and politically correct the rules of the game appear to be.

We might see The Feminist as trying to prompt us to ask some thorny questions about the viability of contemporary feminist sexual ethics, given that someone can be as upright and virtuous as the protagonist and end up embittered and (it is implied, femicidally) vengeful as a result, but I don’t think the story poses such questions clearly enough to merit being taken seriously as an interlocutor on that topic. It confuses the issue by lensing it through a character whose way of being upright and virtuous is always going to end in disaster, and leaning into that narrative payoff rather than developing the question more multi-dimensionally. The bit of “contemporary feminist sexual ethics” that concerns explicit, painstakingly negotiated consent is I think fairly clearly both aspirational, rather than descriptive, and chiefly about managing risk (which is situationally modulated, as the girls in the story who would rather see a bit of initiative directed their way understand perfectly well). It fits the narrative template well because it is catnip to the kind of mind that cleaves inflexibly to moral aspirations and is risk-averse to a fault. This is what happens to ethical schemes when they fall into the clutches of the superego: they lose their situational flexibility, and become engines of perversity. But this, again, is not specifically a fault of the ethical rubric in question: the superego can do this with anything.

The interesting thing, for me, about The Feminist — and I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be true of Bad Art Friend too — is how much it is shaped by the need to tell a particular kind of story, organised in a particular kind of way: a moral fable centred on an aspect of someone’s personality that frustrates their ability to function socially as they would wish, to the point of a final undoing of their moral selfhood. The reader is invited to gawp at the resulting trolley-crash as if observing something “about society”, but there is deceit in the premise: The Feminist is not (as it sometimes seems to want to be) a plausible synechdoche of a “certain type of soi-disant feminist man”, but a parable running on very well-worn narrative rails. It borrows, at the denouement, from the language of an incel subculture, but does not “explain” incels sociologically. Instead, it illustrates a mechanism, similar to the one I was ascribing to the superego just a moment ago, or a sort of homology between mechanisms: on the one side, a narrative form linking character to comeuppance through a developmental sequence; on the other, the sense of an “inner stumbling block” reported by many incels, who feel that they are in the position of having something wrong with them that they themselves are unable to see, or can picture only through dysmorphic fantasy (“my shoulders must be too narrow”, etc). But perhaps the question “why this literary form, now?” and the question “why this type of angry fatalism, now?” have an answer in common.

Each “piece” is essentially a single modular apparatus, allowed to run for a certain amount of time, with occasional manual tweaking to introduce unprogrammed variation or events. They are sonic spaces that I built, inhabited for a time (listening, sometimes for long periods, on headphones…drifting off…letting them run in the background while I went about day-to-day tasks…), and then committed to a recorded version. There isn’t a lot of compositional thought that went into them — I usually started out with an idea for a particular musical device I wanted to explore, but mostly the process was one of listening and adjusting while something took shape.

A combination of slowness and quickness: I didn’t work on optimising anything for very long, preferring to make the cut whenever I felt I had something distinctive, but each piece emerged through sustained concentration on its qualities, tweaking until I had something I liked being around. Perhaps it is all ultimately nothing but self-indulgence: I should have reflected for longer on what a given piece needed, how it ought to be developed or constrained; done the extra work to make something memorable. But I don’t know how much difference that kind of effort could have made. The modular set-up itself pushes you towards continuous aimless tinkering; I tended to call it a day whenever the impulse arose in me to start afresh.

As I worked on these pieces, I found myself craving the stillness they induced: the activity appealed to my monotropism, and it turns out there’s something quite hypnotic about a glacially modulating oscillator tone, radiant with gently pulsing overtones. More than once, when working on something while tired, I found that it sent me to sleep for a while. The other side of this was a tendency to push the apparatus towards noise and feedback. Sometimes the apparatus hums quietly to itself; sometimes it shrieks, hisses, whoops and snarls.

A few particular techniques emerged as I went on. Each piece has a different balance of regular modulation (usually a set of phased LFOs moving things up and down at different rates), timed random input from clock-triggered sample-and-hold modules, untimed random input from a “random walk” module, and human intervention in the form of knob-twiddling during the recorded performance. A proper mid-C20th electronic composer would have written out extensive charts of what was to change when; I left most of it to machines, and improvised whatever wasn’t automated. I don’t know if a more purposeful approach would have brought about more engaging results. Listening to these pieces, you are often listening for moments of serendipity within an artificial flux of sound; either that, or just absorbing yourself in the flux. It’s up to you.

It is not out of a spirit of evenhandedness that Margaret Atwood dwells on female violence and cruelty in Gilead, although she is ever mindful that, in the words of the old Maoist dictum, “women hold up half the sky”. There is no more efficient functionary in a society premised on female subjugation than an Aunt Lydia. But even outside of her celebrated dystopias, Atwood has always kept a sharp eye on the internal contradictions of “women’s culture”, the entanglement of solidarity and care with competition and internecine undermining. Her commitment to a type of realism, carefully observing all the moving parts of a situation, has sometimes placed her at odds with feminisms that have sought to uphold a monocausal view of social agency in which men act and women suffer (or, at best, resist). Even in Gilead, a quilt of reactionary novelty stitching together every outrage against women ever devised by patriarchy, there is no clean separation of “sides” along gendered lines.

Writing this, I wondered whether Atwood was (you know, “a bit”) autistic: it’s one of the peculiarities of our tribe that we lack team spirit and tend to favour detached observation of social dynamics over moral partisanship. One reads that she has attracted epithets such as “frosty”, “scary”, “witch-like”, and “remote”. So, I googled. It turns out she caught a lot of flack for her depiction, in Oryx and Crake, of an autistic character as an emotionally obliterated zealot of logic committed to replacing human beings with something less irrational. I don’t know: let’s try out the conjecture that Atwood is a true autist and of Crake’s party without knowing it. This is the author who invented a device for remotely signing books a dozen at a time. Only a sperg would have thought of something like that. Or, possibly, a famous neurotypical writer with tendonitis.

Update: I have to issue a correction here - the LongPen was meant for signing books one at a time, and combined the robotic signature-reproducing mechanism with a voice-and-video link: its purpose was to enable a kind of intimacy at a distance – the contact readers seek with authors at book-signings – rather than mechanise such contact and reduce it to the physical act of signing. So, I have to sacrifice the quip on the altar of accuracy…

My reaction to Oryx and Crake on first reading it, well over a decade ago, was similar to that of the autistic blogger Lindsey of Autist’s Corner, who at first “liked [Crake] and identified with him” because he “demonstrated my rationality and intellectualism, my boyfriend’s misanthropy and our shared tendency to ask a lot of ‘why’ questions about human misery and try to come up with inventive, radical solutions”. Lindsey’s subsequent critical reading of the book picks up on the aspie supremacism that saturates Crake’s worldview, and the way Atwood makes him “a personification of everything she is trying to criticize about biotechnology, agribusiness and consumer culture”. Atwood depicts Crake as a pedagogically overstimulated and undernourished tech-head – as Lindsey brilliantly observes:

He’s one of what C.S. Lewis called the “men without chests” in his The Abolition of Man – people whose intellects have been educated far beyond their moral development. There is a long literary tradition of bemoaning this type of pedagogical asymmetry.

I think the relatability (from a certain standpoint) of Crake, and the critique of the uses to which his “neurons” end up being put, are complementary, not antagonistic. Simply put, it isn’t the fault of Crake’s autism that he is spiritually mutilated – as Lindsey points out, there is a pedagogy behind the production of figures of this kind. Perhaps we are supposed to think that a neurotypical character would have found the absence of any moral dimension to their intellectual training more salient. But Crake is autistically relatable precisely because he isn’t amoral, but rather excessively morally consistent: he takes the problem of pain (personified by Oryx, who occupies the position of Synechdochic Victim) seriously enough to devise and implement a solution to it. Misanthropy is not an amoral position; it is if anything more moral than easy-going tolerance of humanity’s flaws. And the society Atwood shows Crake growing up in does not, by any reasonable evaluation, deserve to survive.

One way to read Oryx and Crake is as an argument that such a society will produce its own gravediggers, in the form of the very tech elite it creates to service its demand for innovation. Ultimately, Crake performs the same narrative function as the “superhuman AI” that inevitably decides to rationalise humanity out of existence. I wrote a story as a child about a giant Space Eye observing every terrible thing that happened on the surface of the Earth, and shedding a single enormous tear that “extinguished the flame of the sun”. Maudlin, but the same basic idea: synopsis, then judgement. I think this is an autistic trope. Moral judgement for neurotypicals typically entails a decision in favour of the righteous (team us) against the unrighteous (team them), and is always situated in relation to some particular nexus of power struggles. They’re always telling us there’s no such thing as a “view from nowhere”, but there is, and it’s ours. Or, less facetiously, it’s quite an autistic thing to do to try to imagine what a view from nowhere might see, and to identify imaginatively with that perspective.

The puzzle this leaves me with, is how Atwood’s championing of the liberal arts fits into all this. It’s increasingly commonplace to hear our own society’s “tech elite” castigated for their neglect of literature and philosophy, all the things that might supply a supposedly absent ethical grounding to their endeavours. I won’t go over all the reasons why this is bullshit here, except to say that even a superficial reading of the history of English Literature as a discipline will show that its internal intellectual trajectory has involved a series of increasingly pointed dismantlings of the notion that there exists a repository of timeless human values handily encoded into doorstop-sized Victorian novels, and that literature departments in universities are the natural guardians and transmitters of this treasured inheritance. I don’t imagine that Atwood sees her own publications as ersatz scripture, vehicles for moral instruction. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that what she values is the “complexity” of the literary encounter, the way it inveigles the reader into moral deliberation rather than delivering a “black and white” judgement on the world. Artistic flexibility versus autistic fixity. Perhaps she would not agree with me that the society she depicts in Oryx and Crake gets what (to coin a phrase) it fucking deserves.

But this is a problem with dystopia: as a genre, it performs precisely the sort of moral getting-all-your-ducks-in-a-row that a liberal arts sensibility is supposed to inoculate one against. Yes, you can write an “ambiguous dystopia”, just as Ursula le Guin intended The Dispossessed as “an ambiguous utopia” (with the crux of the ambiguity borne by an autistic-coded protagonist; I’ll say more about that another time), but I’m not sure where the ambiguity in Oryx and Crake might reside. I started out by reading The Handmaid’s Tale as a novel not about totalitarian female political victimhood (and virtuous last-ditch resistance), but about women’s contradictory humanity even in the most morally straitened circumstances: not even this degree of victimisation can take away the possibility of being viciously cruel, petty, driven by primal bloodlust (however nefariously incited and directed) and so on. Of course it also carries a torch for resistance, solidarity, and moral hope; but nothing in the novel guarantees the eventual triumph of these values. In Oryx and Crake, I think the conventional accusation that the agent of society’s doom lacks a sense of the tragic (which might enable him to abide with, and work to alleviate, the pain of society’s victims, rather than seeking to eradicate it at its root) is weakened by the depiction of a world that has no reserves of tragic consciousness on which he or anybody else within it could draw. It is in this respect a much more straightforwardly despairing novel.

My autistic Atwood, or Atwood read autistically, tries to offload this despair onto an alien sensibility, that of the STEM-centric aspie supremacists whose transhumanist plot against human reality has disastrously succeeded, but I choose to read this as projection, as the abjection of a part of her own sensibility – call it “writerly detachment”, if the clinical label seems too grasping. Her Crake is a world-unmakingly powerful figure who looks at a humanity which routinely tortures the weak (animals and children) for tasty snacks and cheap entertainment, and says “no”: the complexity of the literary encounter cannot redeem this. This seems a proper expression of doubt for an adherent of the humanist faith to make, and an autistic fragment of oneself (or fragment of one’s autistic self) an expedient vehicle for voicing it.

The problem, as Lindsey and others have noted, with Crake as stereotyped autistic STEM-lord whose overly “systemising” brain has no room in it for literary ambiguity, is that the stereotype squeezes out any possibility of an actually autistic reckoning with the complexity of the world. Because Atwood could not recognise her own pattern-recognition and pattern-making, her own relationship to symbolisation and irony, in the stereotype of the nerrrrd, she could not picture her way of seeing as adjacent to, or overlapping with, an autistic way of seeing. Conversely, she could not allow Crake any of her own insight, self-awareness or playfulness (strangely, considering he was at least in part modelled on the irrepressibly puckish Glenn Gould). Nevertheless, he has an aura: in his serene admiration for the machinery of the world, his blackpilled dismissiveness towards morally convenient bullshit, there is something about him of the author let off the leash.

The next stage is for some group of absurdly young, ridiculously skilful musicians to rehearse the beat-swapped version until they can play it live with complete conviction.

This is an interesting emerging feature of modern music, driven I think by YouTube and Instagram: an extraordinary profusion of virtuosity, from Jacob Collier to Tim Henson, alongside increasing theoretical sophistication - the Berklee Imperium! - spread by YouTubers like Adam Neely and Rick Beato. Together with the wide accessibility of digital tools that would have been the exclusive preserve of high-end producers a decade ago, the conditions are right for, well, what exactly?

On the one hand, a sort of Oulipian sensibility, where ingenious mash-ups and études intended primarily to showcase technique are the order of the day; on the other, a sort of off-the-hook playfulness, as techniques are absorbed and normalised, so that what used to look scarily proficient becomes part of the standard bag of tricks everybody knows - just as you really can’t impress anybody by two-handed tapping triplet arpeggios on a guitar any more.

For the most part, I don’t much care for the actual music that results; a lot of it seems to be searching for a purpose, or just cheerfully abandoned to purposelessness. Polyphia’s Drake-worship is an interesting exception here: the ambition is very much to bring new sonics, new flair and flex, to the cutting-edge-of-the-mainstream. The odds are good that you will see Tim Henson showing off alongside Rihanna, or someone of similar stature, within the next couple of years - like EVH soloing on Beat It (or Greg Howe and Jennifer Batten, both of whom had stints on stage as Michael Jackson’s stunt guitarist).

Where the dissemination of Advanced Jazz Theory (ok, mostly chord-scale theory with a few exotic additions, like the current interest in microtonality) will take us is another matter. Most music in the R&B lineage (which is where most of the sonic interest in the mainstream is nowadays) is pretty diatonically anchored, with melody lines of nursery-rhyme simplicity and directness. But I’m not sure it would be improved by massively pilfering from the vocabulary of modal jazz.

It feels to me more as if a general de-quantising of music has the most to offer in terms of moving off the grid of established production techniques. One of the very striking things about Burial’s early recordings was that the way they were patched together meant they had a sort of lurching, rolling rhythmic quality - they breathed, in a way that much EDM doesn’t. But this could go either way: Jacob Collier’s use of microtonality is if anything hyper-quantised, controlled by an even more fine-grained quantisation of pitch. What I do see coming is a wave of music tech which either moves away from MIDI or establishes a new MIDI standard which can better cope with non-even-tempered pitch and more fluid dynamic control; this will be driven by the demands of current practice, and will in turn drive new approaches to digital music production.

As this morning’s earworm is Portishead’s Glory Box, I’ve been thinking about the song in its mid-90s context. Is the title meant to be, well, a pussy joke? Glory as in hole, box as slang for vagina? Apparently not: “Australian term for a piece of furniture where women store clothes and other items in preparation for marriage”. But the double entendre hangs over it.

The Australian meaning tallies well with the first verse, which is about ceasing one’s dalliances (“playing with this bow and arrow”, i.e. Cupid’s) and surrendering oneself (“gonna give my heart away” - yes, but to matrimony?). The song’s general pitch - I’m ready to settle, here’s how to be worthy of me - resembles that of the Spice Girls’ Wannabe, with its list of stipulations, particularly pertaining to emotional openness. (Wannabe is later though - 1996. Glory Box is ‘94).

Wannabe is ostensibly about hooking up - really, really, really wanting a zigazig-ah - rather than surrendering the ways of the tempturess, but the blunt sexual demand is tempered by the wish for conviviality - “friendship” perhaps overriding “romance” as the desired context. But the common theme is tenderness, decentring the male ego - “just take a little look / from outsids, if you can” - and making space for empathy.

Portishead frame all of this in a very stylised, noirish aesthetic - “temptress” belongs entirely to that register - making it seem heightened rather than commonplace. Is it camp? It’s played entirely poker-faced. But also, the song pushes onwards into cosmic stoner-earnestness, which I think banishes camp, treating it as a kind of costume to be set aside: “a thousand flowers could bloom…this is the beginning of forever…”. Wannabe’s “make it last forever/ friendship never ends” is talking about the relative stability of friendship in comparison to the transitoriness of desire; it’s about everyday reliability, not a declaration of a new epoch.

Glory Box desires a “new man” who retains a masculine identity - “don’t you stop / being a man” - but has modified his outlook (“looking at a different picture / through this new frame of mind”) so that loving self-surrender to him will not feel futile: one must have a reason to “be a woman”, and this can only come from the voluntary donation of the other. (Wannabe has “you have got to give”, which implies suppleness as well as generosity: this isn’t “venmo me, paypig!”). However, Wannabe is not articulated from a position of pessimism or incompleteness: “don’t go wasting / my precious time” implies a fundamental independence, having shit of one’s own to he getting on with.

Glory Box says, in effect, “you have it in your power to enable me to realize myself and inaugurate a new shared cosmos, and you can do this without compromising yourself but simply by giving up the illusion of sovereign self-sufficiency”. It turned out, as the decade progressed, that persuading men to exhibit a bit of sensitivity was not in itself adequate to repair heterosexuality. Wannabe represents a shift towards an ethos of self-sufficiency, and being fairly up-front about desired attitude and behaviour, which also has tended over time to shade into exasperation: precious time still being wasted. But it also turns away somewhat, I think, from the sublime and cosmic vision of love as giving one another a new world, which for Glory Box links eros and kairos: “it’s time to move on!”

Another dimension to consider is the way Glory Box explicitly counterposes “girl” (“leave it to the other girls to play”) and “woman” (“give me a reason to be a woman” / “I just wanna be a woman”). Whereas Wannabe is, famously, posed as an articulation of “girl power”: it’s rooted in the values of girlhood, in particular the (somewhat idealised, lets be honest) solidarity of adolescent and pre-teen female friendship. So “it’s time to move on” reads as a call to take an initiatory leap into maturity: from “play” to seriousness, from the game of temptation to commitment, from exhaustion (“so tired / of playing”) to fruition.

There is no corresponding juxtaposition of “boy”/“man”, although John Martyn’s cover version attempts to provide one, notably modifying the lyric to “leave it to the other boys out there to play / been tempted for too long”. (It’s interesting to consider that the early-90s comedy series which centred on the spectacle of protracted, incorrigible puerility was titled “Men behaving badly”). So, I think this is a nagging concern of 90s gender politics: protracted male adolescence, the absence of an initiatory passage into manhood (however construed), the “commitment-phobe” especially as a type of failed or failing male person. In 1998 (when The Church With One Bell came out, the covers album featuring the Glory Box cover), Martyn is framing immature maleness, boyhood as opposed to manhood, as susceptibility to temptation: being readily distracted from one love-object by another. Both versions of Glory Box concur on a vision of the game of bow-and-arrow as being about temptation as distraction (insert distracted boyfriend meme here): girls distract, boys are distracted. Whereas we could perhaps describe the game of mature sexuality as a game of giving and asking for reasons (for raisons d’etre).

Whereas Wannabe, I think, articulates a position from which there is simply no more desirable state to be in than self-possessed, confident, socially integrated permanent adolescence: there is no lack there. (This is probably a healthy way for actual adolescent girls to view themselves, rather than being menaced by a spectre of maturity that is tied to preparing for marriage, for giving oneself away: stuffing a glory box).

The line of Glory Box I haven’t considered yet is “move over, and give us some room - yeah!”, which seems more assertive than beseeching, more in line with a sort of equality-feminism. Except: who is “us” here? Is it “me”, as in “give us a chip, I’m starving”? Is it “us” as in women, generally (“men, it’s time to move on: make space for a more equal world!“)? Or is it the “us” of the couple: move over, so that there can be room for a genuine “us” to exist? I think it’s actually the third, and once again what’s being sought is a phase-change in attitude: move over/move on/move on up (a common 90s theme - cf M People etc. Things, can only get better…).

Here there’s a verrry general, handwavey analogy to be drawn between the “it’s time to move on into a more serious relationship” genre, and the ideology of a sort of global moving-on post-1989: the 90s had a big “waking up from history” (right here, right now) vibe. Which, lol. Whereas I suppose you might read Wannabe as taking the end of history as a given: it’s more of a “get with the program” sort of song. Certainly “from this time / unchained / we’re all looking at a different picture” is very post-‘89. One kairos ghosting another: social change figured through personal readiness for romantic commitment, attended by an anxiety over whether the other is ready to close the deal.

A recurring gag in the late-60s Frankie Howerd comedy vehicle Up Pompeii! was its protagonist’s inability ever to get to the end of narrating ‘the prologue’: each attempt at beginning the ‘official’ story would be rapidly derailed by the unfolding farce. In a similar way, Farmer is repeatedly pulled off his pedestal as narrator and would-be historical sleuth, and plunged into miry personal reflection and jarring happenstance. Dickens, Hard Times and the political violence of the distant past get an occasional look-in, but the ‘threads’ holding it all together largely hang slack. This isn’t — can’t be — that sort of novel…

It’s almost impossible to imagine a TV adaptation of Healey and Farmer’s Drunken Bakers being made at the moment (there’s a stage version, which apparently has gone down quite well) — we have plenty of room for fantasy, but little for scatological bleakness. The innovative stuff at the moment is formally clever (Fleabag, Russian Doll, I May Destroy You) and intersectionally adroit, but firmly anchored to a “cultured” milieu. Possibly this sounds like a whinge that the stories of defunct white male plebs aren’t being told, but this is less about race or even class in a straightforward sense (the Bakers are if anything petit bouge, assuming they own their own bakery) than it is about picturing social and personal decay without any supporting “aspirational” frame, or reassuring hooks into middle-class culture.

(Obviously things get tricky if you start questioning the way the aspirational frame works in that part of UK black culture which makes it onto TV, and I don’t think Michaela Coel is in any way a dupe of that framing, but it’s still notable that it’s pretty much mandatory at this point)

A problem I don’t get into in the review is that the prevailing morality in comedy at the moment says that you mustn’t “punch down”, which means that you must always have in mind which way is “up”, and only those on the up-and-up can be safely depicted as morally deformed by their circumstances. Whereas Healey/Farmer take a Hogarthian view, in which social decay rots lives at all levels, and are wholly prepared to depict those on the sharp end of current social arrangements as venal, cruel and brutal in their own right. It’s not about apportioning blame, it’s about showing that social fragmentation does actually damage people, damage relationships, make people meaner and smaller (and, often, sillier) than they otherwise would be.

It’s a balancing act — years ago I stopped reading Viz for a while because I felt the depiction of Tasha Slapper was just unfettered prole-bashing, no better than Benefits Street or whatever. I think Healey and Farmer generally get it right — their sympathies are reliably with the meek and downtrodden — but they do also have plenty of room for depictions of monstrous spite, rage, self-regard and malicious cunning.

Aside from the gameplay, the most interesting aspect of the dream was the sense of place. Bloodborne’s level design is intricate and knotty, traversing many different kinds of space, from echoingly vast interiors and eerily vacant public squares to bogglesome mazes of corridors or forest paths, connected by systems of ramps, lifts, staircases, bridges and tunnels cut into the rock. There is a propulsive function to these connecting elements, through which the player moves insistently forward, ascending or descending: mysteries unfold in both directions. There is no place of safety.

I’ve been wondering for a while about why I find Bloodborne quite so haunting and compelling. The Old Blood in Bloodborne functions rather like oil in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: a supernaturally powerful occult substance, drawn from the ancestral depths, to which those on the surface have become addicted. It brings potency and healing, but also destructive and accelerating transformation. Not only has almost all of Yharnam’s population succumbed to madness and lycanthropy, but the institutions of social order and progress have been pervasively corrupted: science has become the bloodthirsty hunt for exploitable human material, its research halls groaning with atrocities, and religion the idolatrous worship of terrible arcane beings, supported by a bloated hierarchy which controls the supply of the healing ichor. The player’s role in all this is multiply ambiguous. Are they chiefly a hunter, a slaughterer of beasts, endlessly battling to contain the scourge? A psychic investigator seeking to unravel the puzzle of what has gone wrong in this bad dream of a society? Or are they themselves pursuing the ultimate goal of cosmic ascension, becoming in the end a larval god?

It’s this ambiguity, together with the sense of being driven forward by an irresistible fate, that makes Bloodborne so resonant for me, I think. It’s a game “about” accelerationism, but one set in the aftermath of a fugue of techonomic acceleration which has gone catastrophically non-linear, reducing all the glories it once raised up to defunct, implausible remnants stalked by dehumanised survivors. It is far too late for the player to have any real agency with respect to what is inexorably unfolding all around them. You can’t (as hints earlier in the game suggest) put a stop to the ritual that depopulates Yahar’Gul in a devastating psychic flash, you can only advance in the dream/story to the point where its dreadful outcome is disclosed. The only real choice offered to the player is between a kind of Buddhist acceptance of the cyclic nature of the disaster — it has happened, it was always going to happen, one can only surrender to its eternal return — and a kind of supremacist levelling-up where you systematically butcher your way to apex predator status. The latter is not in any way presented as the “good” or “winning” ending, but simply as something you can accomplish — given infinite tries at it — if you’re bloody-minded enough.

The “Old Hunters” DLC (a set of extra levels released after the main game and available for separate purchase) rounds out the story by digging into the atrocities underpinning Yharnam’s accelerationist lift-off, and provides it with a missing moral linchpin: the reason everything has gone so terribly wrong is because of a curse incurred by abominable wrongdoing in the name of science. This is narratively satisfying, but it moves Bloodborne’s bleak fatalism into the realm of gothic tropes about moral contamination by hidden historical crimes. Of course from the very beginning of the game we are given to understand, even without this explanatory backstory, that Yharnam is suffering the consequences of some really bad decisions made at a societal level, but the steampunkish aesthetic frames this more as a kind of fatal comeuppance for Victorian-style hubris and hypocrisy: the whole of society is both criminal and victim, its own energies turned against itself in a spiral of corruption. But perhaps the grounding in specific crimes — the desecration of the abandoned fishing village — is needed to make the moral stick, to connect Micolash’s Promethean “grant us eyes!” with the pillaged eye-sockets of the unfortunate villagers. The story Bloodborne is telling may have been that of Frankenstein all along.

Let’s do this: eschatology uplifts
scatology; kairotic tweaks erotic.
Things wildly merge, commit in rush to judgement.
Stick this under your tongue and wait for razzle-
dazzle, slow-kindling Heraclitean fire
not all-consuming, as it is the all, and
everlasting.

Envision the last court in disarray,
submerged in pettinesses; the upright
Recording Angel overwhelmed with parchment,
each tort a fractal of recrimination.
At far-end justice trickles from a spigot,
distilled and perfectly translucent liquor /
lethal moonshine.

Or render judgement binary decision,
flash of incineration which preserves
only what tends to rightfulness, all else
being reduced to scoria, that lump
of pumice there your hardened and habitual
fragility, your wilful ignorance all
blown to ashes.

Creation is recovering its senses,
in fields and rivers new intelligence
adrift or ambling in unsettled pattern.
Judgement steals into things, unseating habit,
upending tables. Safes are made for breaking
from within, by force of ineluctable
anagnorisis.

I reject the fatuous generalisation that art has an unconditional “responsibility” to break taboos, confront realities that make people uncomfortable, and so on. It very much matters what forces hold the taboo in place, and to what ends, and what agency is involved in breaking it, and to what ends. Taboos around the use of racial slurs, ableist language and so on have a function, which is to decrease the amount of hostile signalling the designated targets of such language are exposed to. There are some but not many good reasons for contravening this, and it really does depend who you are and what you think you’re playing at. Such considerations can sometimes be very complex, and there often isn’t a single rule or authority that can be relied upon to resolve them, but they are also sometimes quite clear-cut. It is potentially of interest for art to scout out the edge-cases here, but only if the possibility of meaningful judgement is admitted as a premise: if your position from the outset is “I can say whatever I like and it is illegitimate for anybody to find this reprehensible on any grounds whatsoever”, then you’re just being a tool.

There is nevertheless something grossly maladroit about Dorian Batycka’s apparent contention, in an article titled “Is Accelerationism A Gateway Aesthetic To Fascism? On the Rise of Taboo in Contemporary Art” that naff edgelord art that dicks around with fascist imagery should be considered bad and dangerous because the matter it treats is taboo. This is to my mind entirely the wrong way of thinking about what’s bad about such art, as well as what might be dangerous about it. Batycka presents “the rise of the taboo” as inherently threatening, worrying that “taboo forms of culture have started to circulate in obscure corners of the internet” (one wonders what the timeline is here: there has been a 4chan for a long while now…). It’s very clear here that the “taboo” is always on the side of the devil:

However, the paradox of the internet is that while it has given marginalized voices a space in which to secure access to speech and community, disobedience and nonconformity, it has also given platform to taboo ideas, fascist and far-right literature and memes, cannibalizing extremist views into a cornucopia of half-truths and anti-establishment conspiracy theories.

One might also pause a little to take in the negative valorisation of “anti-establishment” here, positioned as it is directly alongside “half-truths” and “conspiracy theories”. Are we to understand that the speech and community of marginalized voices are to be considered aspects of the establishment? In the art world according to its own glittering self-image, a joyous carnival of disobedience and nonconformity funded by generous donations from steel magnates and advertising svengalis, this might conceivably be true — Batycka speaks without apparent irony of “the progressive values of the art world”. (Later, he is particularly exercised that “the biennale seems to platform art and artists that no longer had to take justification in the progressive identity values of the art world”, which seems to be a way of saying “edgelord-y white dudes” with a mouth full of cotton wool. To be clear, I don’t think stuffing an exhibition with edgelord-y white dudes is a good thing, or unworthy of remark; I’m just marvelling at the bureaucratic clumsiness of the expression).

The implicit argument here is that disobedience and nonconformity, which are evidently Good Things, are Good only up to a certain limit, which is marked by the intervention of the taboo. The taboo, in turn, adheres to signifiers: Batycka speaks of “Pepe the Frog, a taboo symbol that was included in Arns’s exhibition, which has proven to be used by far-right hate groups as a symbol”. To describe Pepe the Frog, for many years an innocuous cartoon character with no notable political associations, simply as a “taboo symbol” is to overlook the lengthy process by which the alt-right converted him into a totem, following a common practice of undermining speech hygiene codes by co-opting formerly innocent signifiers: Pepe was not “used by far-right hate groups as symbol” because of his noxious associations, but acquired them through sustained and widespread resignification. Pepe memes which participate in this resignification are indeed part of the lingua franca of a right-wing subculture, but all of this gets truncated by Batycka into a simple logic of contamination: this symbol “was included”, and in being so included it immediately summoned the worst that could be associated with it into its presence. Again, I’m not defending the placement of Pepe memes in the exhibition in question, which was likely a cringeworthy display at best; the point is that this is an inadequate critical apparatus for saying what might be troublesome about it.

OK, so why does this matter? Why am I taking potshots at a rather incoherent article about something that I give, to a first approximation, zero hoots about? There are two reasons. The first is that Batycka recirculates a historically illiterate third-hand account of “accelerationism” which is bedding in as received wisdom among people who apparently don’t recognise any obligation to know better, and I’m a bit on edge right now about anything that looks like the early stages of exponential growth. Although like most “left-accelerationists” I’ve essentially abandoned the label as degraded beyond all practical utility (and also, somewhat, moved on politically), it’s still a point of affiliation with thinkers that I care about (the XF collective, for starters). So there’s that. Every now and again, if you see someone actively promulgating wilful ignorance, it’s your moral duty to give them a bit of a shoeing. Think of it as flattening the curve.

The other reason is that I think Batycka’s way of characterising artworld laundering of fascist aesthetics (let alone LD50’s recklessly stupid platforming of white nationalists and Breivik fanboys) as the circulation of taboo material — leaping infectiously from the troll populations of “obscure corners of the internet” into humans of the art world — frames a politically serious question in a fundamentally unserious way. The argument of the edgelords themselves, after all, is that it is precisely where sanctioned “disobedience and nonconformity” come to an end, and a limit is imposed, that one should start asking questions: about who holds the prerogative of giving or withholding sanction, and how that prerogative is exercised. If the basis of that limit is the miasma of “taboo” around certain symbols, then an obvious first step is to deploy such symbols aggressively, to provoke and expose the workings of discursive authority. Worse, where the real aim is to advance a malignant agenda, to take advantage of the prestige of institutions such as art galleries to disseminate and normalise far-right ideologemes, those responsible can always claim merely to be tweaking the nose of authority, playing the game of exploring the boundaries of acceptable speech.

To this, Batycka opposes the very form of cultural respectability politics that such tactics are wholly parasitic upon. He can neither account for the proper rationale for overturning taboos when, as in my opening example, it is politically imperative to do so, nor give any stronger argument for their maintenance than a simplistic theory of contamination-by-inclusion — the taboo-identified symbol as freighted with moral danger, and demanding decontaminating “critique” wherever it appears. All of this simply guarantees a recurrence of the same arguments, with the same outcomes: a ratcheting up of paranoia, and of the tactical exploitation of paranoia.

I picture us again walking together
to Brampton Abbotts, me expatiating
on time and cosmic love as one unfolding
forecast in Messiaen’s Turangalîla
Symphony, by which I was much taken
and still am. I may very well have been on
broadcast-only.

Perhaps not sempiternal. Waters drain.
Things are in process, as would I have been
at sixteen, although obstinately patterned
after my own imago. It is hard
to learn not one thing from another’s kindness -
a signal failure of the adolescent
of the species.

Here there are waters rising, not in stillness
but in excited spate, like Messaien
jamming the Grand Orgue with stacked harmonics.
Of time and cosmic love I am uncertain;
agon and eros both with me contend,
flashing tremendous teeth, vaulting the sundered
flood defences.

Rewind clap-backs, in diatribe with absent
parties maybe irrevocably vacated.
Scratching deepens the furrow, wearing down
to aggravated crackle, echoic clucking
too long after the fact. Keep cutting heads
for dwindling pay-off; under no circumstances
change the record.

What I do in my sleep is less exotic;
miss people, mostly, or try rescuing
their shades from roiling Hades, hauling out
of burning Thames the wrong or some depleted
phantom no longer answerable for itself,
the jawbone working tirelessly in vapid
jibber-jabber.

The dead forget where they have left their secrets.
I find that I am losing track of mine,
confusing them with others’, or what everyone
has always known since book-keeping began.
At Revelation all accounts unlock,
decloak, unspool into the heat-dead void like
rolling credits.

I mean that the occluded shall be known,
or that I believe so as a needful
counterweight to leadenness of forgetting
and being forgotten, slowly or by fiat
of curtailment. Somewhere that eschaton
is self-preparing, seeking out kairotic
chrono-trigger.

In February 2017, a short while before the Goldsmiths memorial service for Mark, I wrote to a friend about “the oddity of grieving for someone very important to you who actually stopped talking to you, completely, several years ago”. A group of his former friends and collaborators had met together shortly after he died; we reckoned that, of the six of us, three had been definitively excommunicated at some point. Mark would sometimes cut people off without explanation, having decided — well, it was difficult to know what he had decided about you, except that it was very decidedly decided and that was that. In rare cases there would be some sort of veiled public denunciation (as a rule, the more sweepingly impersonal the rhetoric, the more vituperatively personal he was actually being), but mostly there was just an indefinitely extended radio silence. I didn’t get denounced — or if I did, I was too obtuse to notice it. To me it seemed as if a boundary silently shifted, and I found myself on the other side of it, permanently frozen out.

It has to be said that Mark had reason to be upset and disappointed with a number of us. In 2011 Zer0 books, the imprint he’d set up with Tariq Goddard, signed a contract with the Israeli jazz musician Gilad Atzmon to publish a book about Jewish identity titled The Wandering Who? It turned out to be a farrago of, well, tropes — one section was titled “Credit crunch or Zio-Punch?”, while another gave extended sympathetic treatment to the writings of misogynist antisemite Otto Weininger. Many of those who’d published with Zer0 up to that point, myself included, were appalled. An Open Letter went out, distancing its signatories from the decision, making it very clear that this wasn’t a book we were prepared to stand behind. Most of us felt, I think, that this was the only way to save Zer0 from irreparable ignominy (in retrospect, we needn’t have bothered; but that’s another story). But Mark felt attacked, and attacked moreover by his friends. He recognised that the contract with Atzmon was a terrible mistake, and one for which he bore some personal responsibility. But for him it was also a personal disaster, which threatened the collapse of a cherished project on which a significant part of his precarious livelihood depended, and nobody seemed to have any sympathy for his predicament. He may well have felt that the pitiless mechanics of public reputation management had supplanted the prerogatives of friendship, comradeliness, collective endeavour.

I try to imagine his voicing a complaint to me along these lines, and what I might have tried to say in response, and part of that response would have had to include an admission of thoughtlessness, of having single-mindedly pursued the public goal — the rescue of Zer0’s reputation, and those of its authors — at the expense of private courtesy, humility and empathy. I think the Open Letter, or one very like it, would have had to be written either way; and I would have signed it either way. But a little kindliness behind the scenes would not have gone amiss. In the event, I think Mark felt isolated and embattled, and the line of communication through which anything like that conversation might have been possible was already severely damaged. I was oblivious, at the point where it mattered, to the effort it would have taken on my part to repair it.

I mention all this partly because I don’t think it’s possible to understand the sharp inflection points of Mark’s intellectual trajectory without taking note, in some way, of his emotional makeup, which was somehow simultaneously volatile and trenchant. The person who in 2013 wrote Exiting the Vampire Castle was a touchy sod, reacting in a very characteristic way to the behaviour and comportment of other touchy sods, mixing up a heartfelt plea for consideration and comradeliness with a rhetorical belligerence that could only ever have had the effect of energetically escalating the situation. Altogether too many people found, and by all appearances continue to find, that escalation hugely rewarding, a motherlode of dark energy. It was less a political intervention than a psychic detonation. But there was something of this quality to the best of Mark’s work, too (in case it isn’t obvious, I don’t think of Vampire Castle as belonging to this category). “Libidinal” was one of his favourite words, but not in a swashbuckling sex-pest sort of way: he meant the sort of charge that lifts you off your feet when you read something really mind-bendingly good, listen to a record that instantly wires you into an anonymous multiplicity of people whose lives are all being transformed, at that very moment, by what they are hearing. He continually lamented the scarcity of such electrifying experiences in a drained, pacified media landscape; but I think it was as much a feature of his own internal landscape that things were either barren, or blazing with resurgent energy. (And then again: his “cold rationalist” understanding of the forces shaping psychic experience did not allow for a hard distinction to be made between “inner” and “outer” in this way).

I’m enormously struck, now I see it written down before me, by the shortness of the duration between the Atzmon affair at the end of 2011 and the Vampire Castle blow-up at the end of 2013. They belong in my mind to entirely separate eras. The first event closes out the blog era, which culminated in the energy and optimism of the Zer0 project which brought Mark and several of his online collaborators to print, in many cases for the first time. The second belongs to a part of Mark’s life about which to be honest I know very little. That Mark belongs pre-eminently to the wife and young child he evidently adored, and to his colleagues and students at Goldsmiths where he had started to teach. I missed his writing regularly on the blog, and felt the lack of the public voice he had shaped there — who didn’t want to know what k-punk would say about the latest events? — but also assumed that he had moved on to a different phase of his life, and hoped that he was contented and cared for within it. Of the progression of the illness which led to his suicide in 2017, I know nothing. When I heard, I said without thinking that of course it had always been a possibility.

I don’t know whether the Goldsmiths students knew Mark as a “touchy sod”. I hope that, as a lecturer, supervisor, mentor and fellow intellectual labourer, they knew him primarily as a passionately generous and encouraging man. He was that to me, and to others around me, and was deeply loved and respected for it. However, I baulk a little at what seems to me to be an emerging hagiography of Saint Mark, not because I want to see him posthumously diminished in people’s eyes, but because at a certain level it just isn’t true to the deep vein of cussedness which also animated him. “Mortido” as well as “libido”: a kind of aggression towards the unreliable, the disappointing, the good-for-nothing — useful in a surgeon or a sculptor. I put that in one of the poems I wrote about him: “eliminating excess to make whole”. If we are to “compute the Fisher Function”, as his friend Robin MacKay so memorably put it, we are going to have to include that in our reckonings.

Missing Links (by Giancarlo M. Sandoval)

We knew Mark through friends of friends. Someone would share a post by him, complimenting or denouncing him, and a discussion would pop up. The effect of his writing, a gesture Mark was predisposed to, rippled through many forums, social media sites, and blog comments. The early comments (around 2011) we saw harkened back to an era of a little more charitableness, a little more camaraderie. Even though it was a time for rupture, in between many relationships being left aside, the environment that Mark encouraged also pursued suture. Thoroughly personal, unhinged theorizing often makes demands of people, it seeks through the voids of mind, something that was often experienced in Mark’s writing. “Breakdowns can be productive if they lead to breakthroughs” he’d write, and this dialectic, when embraced, can show a prism of Mark’s trajectory. An extended breakdown and an extended breakthrough.

As part of the people that got together with several close colleagues of Mark shortly after his passing, it was difficult to demarcate, in that occasion, where the line between Mark, the well known theorist, and Mark, the beloved comrade was. Death often brings a sort of flattening of affect, where the symbolic construction of a figure strives to eliminate the layered nature of people. This was no such occasion. The attendants reminisced, but did not glorify the figure gone. His writings and personal relationships certainly made it difficult. For as much as some of his contemporaries are often chastised for their personal vendettas, Mark often had many. The event, for him, often was a process of self-realization through the endless labour of writing and reaching out.

Our interactions with Mark were often one sided, except for the odd anonymous comment or email, the feeling that there was a sort of collective that we were all engaged with, as friends and friends or friends were mentioned and praised by him. There was no such excommunication from us, but a lack of linking. Even though we rotated around the same axis, there was a distance. Perhaps it was when the sides that are often overlooked were ever-present, the good-for-nothings, the meandering pettiness, that this distance was established. But it didn’t stop from having a connection to him. Some of his best work may never be as popular as Capitalist Realism, or any subsequent book. But this deeply conflicted person was communicating bits of intimacy about the life of the mind and body that go for beyond the textual. Mark’s “neuropunk,” his “cold rationalism,” and many other concepts were born out of the blurring of the personal and impersonal, something not taken up by commentators beyond his more heroic pronouncements. There’s an ugliness that does not diminish who he was, but enriches and kick-starts the Fisher-function as something beyond any clear sanctification.

Flattened by death, the figure of Mark remains an uncomradely appraisal of his work. For to be a comrade is to hold a commitment to this person in the same struggle as you beyond the niceties of memorialisation. The Fisher-function remains computationally intractable without the incorporation of this void, its outputs crudely cleaned, devoid of significant inputs.

In this version, the role of the Spirits is to indicate - they point, forwards, backwards and all around, putting their fingers on salient features of the times. “Spirit” here is not cloudy mystification but sharp pointing, needles and pins. This, here, and this, here, and this, here. “The intimate inspection of your heart and your soul”, but also of the shaping circumstances of that blighted interiority, and the widening circle of consequences.

We have a Scrooge, an “object in the shape of a man”, morally obliterated in childhood (his school fees paid via a nefaripus arrangement between his father and a paedophile schoolmaster), and rehabilitated through his own fugitive tenderness towards vulnerable lives (unobserved, without expectation of reward, he places a blanket on a shivering horse, echoing perhaps the fabled moment of Nietzsche’s breakdown), those presumed non-combatant in the war of all against all. The task of the Spirits is to circumvent the closed loop of Scrooge’s self-hatred, to construct a counter-proof to his proof that self-interest dominates universally (and thus that he cannot as a child have had any claim to the care or protection of others).

This is the Dickensian moral figure: Scrooge must be moved to pity, not so that he recognises that it is virtuous to condescend to those less fortunate, but so that he can recognise his own formative harms as not inevitable, not dictated by the iron law of things. It is not only a question of piercing the hardened heart of a miser, but of dismantling a system of justification forged as a way of rationalising injury — “axioms to him who’d never heard / of any world where promises were kept / or one could weep because another wept”.

I may have something else to say about the place of “spirit” in all this presently. This was very much more a pagan than a Christian Carol (although the first Spirit may have worn a crown of thorns), the world of spirit centering on a blazing bonfire in the midst of a bleak midwinter, which reminded me a great deal of the 1980s BBC adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights: there is a visual language which belongs to the genre we might call “spooky BBC Xmas programming”. Of course this is also Christian — a light shining in the darkness, which comprehendeth it not — but it is a decidedly un-demythologised Christianity, in which the connection between spirit and truth is that between subterranean hidden forces which must come to light, rather than a divine inspiration shining down from above.

and naturally I do hate it that
people do starve in their homes
under threat of eviction
certified fit to endure without respite
ingenious cruelty

the natural way of things is money’s way
as birds in baby beaks drop currency
as gilded birds strut bravely into traffic
as feathers swirl amid unswerving traffic
as silver feathers clog the public drains
as traffic thunders over matted feathers
and so on in that unforced sort of way
that money has when liberal and carefree
in shining confidence in its terrific
motorised puissance

This is why for me Bloom has always been my “yes, I know, but still” theorist; why I will routinely describe Badiou’s book on Deleuze as a “strong misreading”, a philosophically creative détournement. Geoffrey Hill’s description of poetry as a negotium with the historical and ethical materiality of language, a struggle against “inertia”, strikes me as doubly Bloomian, both in its sense of being situated in the midst of a ceaselessly-renewed agon, and in its enabling misprision of the real stakes of that contest: by figuring the forces with which the poem contends as “inertial”, as “contexture”, Hill can position himself as writing “for the dead”, resurrecting what is inert, making his mark as a kind of literary last-man (his often rancorous remarks about his contemporaries suggest that on another level of awareness he perceived very well that he was a writer amongst others, and moreover one with a hefty Mercian axe to grind). In any case, my point is that the Bloomian lens pulls all of this into focus in a way that nothing else quite does. (As for what, precisely, Paglia was “right” about, that will have to wait until I find myself motivated to pick up Sexual Personae again, but as a first stab I would say that she fulfilled her ambition of being the only critic to really get Madonna).

Hartsfield is a kind of male witch, a malefactor who uses unnatural powers to harm others through spooky action at a distance. Initially those powers are technological, as he plagues detective Bill Hodges with cyber-intrusions from an arsenal of keyboards and monitors in his mother’s basement, but he is later able to possess others and make them do his bidding while lying in a coma, and may (in the third season, recently started) be continuing to exert a malign influence from beyond the grave. His major crimes, however, are acts of arbitrary mass violence: he steals the Mercedes of the title in order to drive it at high speed into a crowd of hopefuls waiting outside a jobs fair, and later plots a bomb attack on a local festival. In this way he bridges two images of the troll as public enemy, both vicious cyber-bully and terrorist mass-killer. His relationship with his alcoholic mother is explicitly incestuous, but again this is presented as a factor in his derangement rather than a root cause: there is something primordially wrong with him, which the abuses he has suffered serve only to nurture to fruition.

Can the same be said of Arthur Fleck? Joker heaps indignities upon his head, to the point (some have feared) of providing the villain with just cause for his campaign of retribution against an uncaring society. As an origin story, its task is to show the birth of evil, the tipping point at which the individual cracks and an impersonal, archetypal malignancy enters in and takes over. This doesn’t work if he is really a righteous avenger correcting an injustice by punishing those responsible. And that is what his murderous snarl at Murray — “you get what you fucking deserve!” — implies he believes he is doing. The film is supposedly dangerous on account of the catharsis this retaliatory explosion offers, to those in the audience who might similarly feel abandoned, trodden on, and inclined to do something gratifyingly violent about it. It violates the taboo which guards the moral incoherence of all American stories about supervillains: the correlate of the villain’s motiveless malignancy is the fundamental innocence of society, its right to continue as it is. Only an evil originating outside of that society can possibly explain the desire to harm it. But this fantasy of innocence is bound to collide with the gothic underpinnings of Batman’s moral universe: Gotham is a city of endemic corruption and decay, and its villains are endogenous, home-grown, expressions of a universal sickness.

I think that Joker, correctly and canonically, has its cake and eats it on this score: Fleck is a loose cannon, not a targeted instrument of holy wrath, and the unreliability of his point of view is stressed throughout the film. In the end, of all the people he could have murdered, Murray is objectively an arbitrary choice of victim: any representative of the generalised cruelty and indifference of society would have done as well. Subjectively, however, the choice is anything but arbitrary. Fleck has positioned Murray as a surrogate father figure, taking him at his word that he would give up all of his fame and public approbation “to have a kid like you”. When that figure then betrays and mocks Fleck, making a joke of his cherished goal of becoming a stand-up comedian, the last thread of his attachment to patrilineal masculine identity is broken. Killing Murray is the last genuinely meaningful thing Fleck ever does: it marks his definitive unmooring from any moral co-ordinates, his exit from all possibility of rehabilitation.

Joker broods over the problem of indignity, the discounting of others’ humanity, without quite getting to the heart of the contradiction. For there to be indignity, there must be some basic entitlement to consideration: dignity is established through recognising and respecting this entitlement, and indignity and humiliation arise when it is disregarded and violated. But “entitlement”, in contemporary American moral discourse, is a byword for blind presumptuousness, the unwarranted belief that one deserves something which one has not earned. Hence the claim that Joker feeds into a dangerous sense of wounded entitlement on the part of anomic young white men, a sense of indignity which is really resentment at the loss of undeserved privilege. In Joker, the question of entitlement is explicitly figured through a discredited patrimony: Fleck may be (and it is never definitively established whether he is or is not) the illegitimate son of the billionaire Thomas Wayne. He feels that he deserves “some basic fucking decency” from Wayne, some token of recognition, which is contemptuously refused. Wayne, in turn, perfectly voices the disdain of the billionaire class towards all claims of social entitlement when he describes the poor and disenfranchised of Gotham as “clowns”, too unserious about their own thriving to deserve to live. The “clowns” retaliate by rioting, as well they might.

Fleck’s name, and that of his mother Penny, signify marginality and insignificence: a fleck is a mote of detritus, something you brush off, and a penny is the smallest of small change. Arthur’s stand-up jokes insistently return to a pun around “cents”/“sense”, correlating pennilessness with meaninglessness, while suggesting that the role of the comedian (whose jokes make neither cents nor sense) is to occupy a position of social abjection. His own “act” recalls that of 80s comedians such as Steven Wright and Sam Kinison, who inhabited shabby, dejected, incoherently angry or distracted stage personae. In the right setting it could actually have been a hit. But the poverty so signified is white poverty, the poverty of disowned or orphaned whiteness. The film’s three prominent black characters, all women, are positioned as caregivers, whose role is to buttress white male identity, and apply balm to the bruises of indignity. The question of their dignity, or the indignities to which they might be subject, does not arise. They are presumed to be resilient, to have inner or communal resources which keep them from cracking up. For a film which is so concerned with marginalisation and fractured mental health to be so incurious about the inner lives of black people is telling, to say the least. A film which considered the possibility, and possible legitimacy, of a violent, retaliatory response to racialised indignity would be a hundred times more transgressive than Joker is prepared to risk. The nearest thing in recent memory would be Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You.

Watching Ad Astra (2019), my first thought was, understandably, “not this again”. It’s the same old story wrapped in a little bow, the bow being a tidy moral fable about toxic masculinity. Brad Pitt, whose superlative proficiency at space stuff depends on his ability to keep a slow and steady heartrate while all around him are losing their shit because things are blowing up, etc, recognises his own inner propensity for howling simian rage in the howling simian rage-face of a rampaging baboon on a research vessel, and eventually manages to shed a single perfect tear. The mission that propels him across the solar system is to find the father who abandoned him to look for aliens, the antimatter power source on whose reseach station has gone apeshit and is sending waves of destructive energy back to Earth, where they are fucking everything up. I initially thought of the waves of destructive energy as representing the father’s obscene, excessive libido or something — “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the spermament” — but it’s more like his baggage, his unprocessed shit. The father’s search for aliens has become an unhealthy monomania, to which he will sacrifice everything, including the rest of the crew on the research vessel who just want to give up and go home. He has forgotten (this is the moral of the story) the value of human interconnection, in his obsessive focus on the vast and apparently empty Outside.

Space itself is curiously amniotic in Ad Astra, a fluid blackness across which the son languidly drifts on his way to make contact with his great progenitor. The golden yellow tinge of one such scene put me in mind of Andres Serrano’s notorious Piss Christ, which rather beautifully, if blasphemously, depicted a plastic crucifix floating in a glass container of the artist’s urine. There is also a pervasive religious sensibility to the film, which I found myself wanting to counter with another line of Burroughs’s:

To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there.

Ad Astra insists that it is simply not possible to “live alone in silence” — the vast radio silence of a cosmos void of discernable alien life. It is a film set in space which entirely, symptomatically and wilfully fails to go into space, settling instead for projecting Oedipal drama across the heavens: a film for those who always believed that the moon-landing footage was created on a Kubrick-directed soundstage.

Visiting the Tate Britain Blake exhibition yesterday, I wondered whether the accumulation of materials might reach a sort of metaphysical critical mass, and induce visions and spiritual derangement in visitors — “Jerusalem syndrome”, so to speak. Was it all going to be a bit overwhelming? In the event, the exhibition foregrounded Blake as a working artist, bringing the famous work back into its commercial connections with patrons and commissioners, and placing it alongside minor studies and sketches. It wasn’t totally demystifying, but it kept the whole thing from being shrouded in wafty effusions.

The portraits especially have a remarkable ability to concentrate ideas in sensuous form: the livid, watery-eyed debasement of Nebuchadnezzar, the crouched, classically-hewn Newton turning his back on the materium and constructing figures on a pure white scroll. I felt that Satan Calling Up His Legions came perhaps as close as possible in painting to depicting Milton’s “darkness visible”.

A superb critical notice by Danny Hayward in Artforum underlines the muscularity, the “hard and wiry line of rectitude”, in all of Blake’s figures. Many years ago I was taken on a school trip to see Pierre Boulez conducting Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Welsh National Opera. Boulez came out to address the visiting school parties beforehand, and told us something about how he approached the work, with an emphasis on extreme clarity, avoiding at all costs the kind of soupy, sentimental wallowing that Debussy’s intensely gorgeous post-Wagnerian harmonies can invite. I remember little of the opera, besides some ingenious staging and the pervasive weirdness of Maeterlinck’s story, but was impressed by the notion that it was best to approach music as rich and imagistic as Debussy’s in an austere spirit, to keep Wagnerian romantic nationalist phantoms at bay. In a similar way, the Tate’s carefully historicising Blake gave us the real meat on the bones, rather than the last night of the Proms.

It isn’t an accident that “masculinity” and “femininity” concentrate a variety of contradictory and burdensome social expectations: these terms are indexed to social roles, a division of labour, a power structure, all of which are shakily historically contingent and vociferously contested in the present moment. They are also tied up in erotic schemes, in the complex of feelings people have about their parents, their lovers, themselves as agents and possible objects of desire. There is a lot of aliasing and proxying going on here: one thing standing for another, or two things superposed in the same site. For some people, their sense of self is strongly articulated through this complex of feelings; for others, it largely isn’t (it isn’t that gendering never occurs to the latter, but that when it occurs it does so as a sort of intrusion, an interpellation, a call to attention). There are many different strategies for anchoring oneself in the world.

When the incoherent character of masculinity is posed as a problem to be solved, a crisis demanding action, what’s being called for is a flattening and simplification of the range of possibilities, the confabulation of a stereotype which commands recognition and consent. Once we see it, we’ll all agree that it represents the selves to which we should aspire, and the matter will be closed. But I think this entire approach is a hystericisation of problems whose real locus is elsewhere: fix up your masculinity, and your precarity, anxiety and anomie will all be taken care of. You will become a viable agent and object of desire, you will accrue social credit, you will become significant and worthy of others’ care and attention once again. This is the classic fascist devil’s bargain, in which you put on a uniform in exchange for psychological safety. The real problem is the feeling of unsafety — the stamp of neoliberal subjectivity.

Being generally pessimistic about the prospects of any program of moral persuasion, I’m not greatly surprised that those directed at men tend to result in a sickly combination of barefaced preference falsification (“a good man eschews all sexual objectification”) and convoluted ethical bargaining (“a good man seeks out ethically-produced pornography produced by women and showcasing a diverse range of body types and sexual preferences, and pays a fair price for it”). There is no morality stronger than an incentive structure, and it is the incentives surrounding masculine social expression that are fundamentally misaligned. The force of this structural perversion is often identified as “peer pressure”, but its true, uncanny, potency is felt when men persist in idiotic behaviours in spite of the manifest disapproval of their peers, who are more commonly faulted for failing to speak up sufficiently against toxic wrongheadedness than for actively encouraging it. Broadly speaking, it neither the case that men behaving badly don’t know better (such that they could be educated out of their bad behaviour), nor the case that they don’t apply, or are themselves immune to, social pressure to behave better. It’s that they “know” perfectly well, anticipating and actively circumventing peer disapproval — but do it anyway.

What makes someone do, anyway, things that contravene their stated moral commitments and the explicit norms of their proximate moral community? The moralising answer to this question is that they lack something: empathy, sincerity, integrity. They are half-hearted in their attachment to the values they publicly profess, and backslide too readily into selfishness and wickedness. The remedy for this is more effort: one must “step up”, and be a better person. Most contemporary attempts at cajoling men into goodness take the form of an appeal to valour, to the kind of “stepping up” one might resort to if faced with a tough physical challenge. All of this would have been perfectly intelligible to the Victorians, who pushed this form of exhortation to the outer limits of absurdity. Their successors threw in the towel and invented psychoanalysis instead. Psychoanalysis tells us that stated moral commitments and explicit norms form part of the representational structure of a regulatory fiction of selfhood, but that this fiction depends for its maintenance on a kind of studied ignorance — repression — of the impulses and objects which furnish our real psychic life. When someone genuinely “steps up”, demonstrating extraordinary tenacity and indifference to adversity in pursuing a goal, it is usually these impulses and objects which are supplying the necessary motivation. It is precisely because they are not bound to the representational structure of selfhood that they are available as means for the pursuit of self-surpassing ends.

A successful ideology is one which establishes the terms of a compact between its adherents’ publicly avowable self-image and the vociferous promptings of desire, such that the latter can be given their head without threatening too much the integrity of the former. Take for example the bargain offered by conservative evangelical writers on marriage and sexual ethics: if you are a good Christian wife, you can experiment with every kind of sexual perversion in the bedroom with your husband - in fact, it’s your duty (for the sake of keeping the marriage alive, which is what ultimately pleases God)! If we consider the ideological framing of masculinity in the same light, it’s apparent that the discourse of virtue, of how to be a Good Man, defines only one side of that compact. The commandment to be compassionate, to empathize with others in their travails, to recognise and share one’s own vulnerability, implies a relationship of strength to weakness: even when allowing himself to be seen as vulnerable, the Good Man is demonstrating a kind of emotional valour, as opposed to simply being vulnerable and helplessly unable to disguise it (or deliberately manifesting it as a way of soliciting help and sympathy, and strengthening the bonds one has with others). That same relationship is, sotto voce, a relationship of predator to prey. Being ethical, after all, is so demanding: it must have its perks.

The problem, on this reading, is not that male entitlement is an irrepressible natural force which no moral code or culture can tame; it’s that entitlement is encoded into the very terms in which masculine virtue is defined, as an expression (however tender and emotionally literate) of valour — that is, of a type of strength which the other is not expected to possess or exhibit. And this is precisely why re-moralising approaches to the “crisis of masculinity”, which attempt to restore a proper sense of valour and point it in the right direction, invariably end up bringing forth a masquerade of masculinity which is by turns solicitous and grasping.

Intense or abnormal affect does something to time-perception: it takes one out of linearity, into a kind of static superposition of durations. When I “crash”, which happens periodically, I feel as if the current flatlining of mood and executive function were stacked on top of every other time I’ve been in a similar state, as if the state itself were a kind of permanent, atemporal fixture like one of those dream places one keeps coming back to, a house where one has never lived, situated on an alternate timeline with its own bizarre internal consistency. Caring for a small infant does something similar, timeshifting me back 16 years to when I was last bobbing a wriggling, hiccuping, posseting animal on my shoulder in the small hours of the morning. It’s an ineluctably primal place to be in, one in which primate discontents and consolations are fiercely salient. Returning from the cornershop on a drizzly evening, as the light faded, I felt a tremendous yearning for home, a sense that the warm place I had set out from a few minutes ago at the beginning of my errand was an almost impossible grace, a lantern in the gloom. It was like being a small child, tired, not far from tears, coming home to bed after an enervating birthday party. All the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on.

So, that is my current state: dizzy, glazed, emotionally labile; moving through time as if swimming through treacle. It’s not an unhappy condition, but it’s a weird one: crisply-delineated edges go to fuzz, crackling electrically; formless mists and vapours become glowingly-potentiated clouds of unknowing. A baby infuses the human world around it with something of its own babyhood, just as a visiting deity might radiate divinity; as if the child’s own entry into time marked an exit-point, a pivot. “Infantile regression” may be the essence of the psychedelic (I say this without condescension) — and not for nothing does Bloodborne place a baby’s cry at the centre of a nuclear flash of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

Downstream of this theory, was the belief that anyone complaining in any way about systematic oppression, or interpersonal ill-treatment, was doing the same thing - pushing emotional buttons to get a certain desired result. Attention-whoring, profiteering from others’ compassion. The real world was a harsh and uncaring place, and anyone who pretended to care, or to need caring for, was by definition engaged in deception, a kind of swindle. This bundle of attitudes really found its moment in Gamergate, where it was evident that at least some of the ostensibly wounded parties actually were status-maximising sociopaths.

I think all this prepared the ground beautifully for right-wing radicalisation, ironically. Because it entirely, globally discredited the left-wing economy of social concern, painting it as a massive spectacle of victimhood projected and manipulated by entirely cynical actors. All that was then needed was to present an image of authentic care — the band-of-brothers reciprocal loyalty of those who, together, refused the false image of the world and embraced their true, occluded interests (e.g. as members of the white race, etc).

A clarifying note, on what I meant by “discredited”:

I hold the view that the left’s economy of social concern is broadly correctly attuned to the things that one should care about, modulo the usual fads, moral panics etc. - that is, I hold that race, class and gender all work, broadly speaking, in much the sorts of ways that the standard “leftist” gestalt assumes they do. Whatever disagreements people working within that gestalt may have about how these things are to be thought together, they usually agree that they’re the things that have to be thought about.

What discredits this economy, from the channer perspective, is a wholesale refusal of what you might call the “call-and-response” structure of pleas for social recognition: representatives of group A articulate the group-level oppression to which members of that group are subject, and “the left”, as an apparatus of social concern, responds to this by validating and reflecting that account, and directing attention towards the problems of that group.

The channer just doesn’t see the initial call for recognition as anything other than a scam or a hustle - the universal law of society is greed and exploitation, and pitching for “special treatment” is just the pursuance of greed and exploitation by moral subterfuge. Likewise, those who respond to that call are either naive marks - dupes and cucks who want to assuage their own guilty feelings - or white-knights seeking to advance their own status by visibly doing good on others’ behalf.

That perspective isn’t wholly useless or invalid, since all of these types of hustle are of course being pursued all the time, and everyone who’s spent time around “the left” eventually develops a touch of cynicism, a nose (which can become over-sensitive) for when somebody’s on the make. But when this becomes a global and pre-emptive invalidation, then the entire structure of leftist “care” collapses.

What you get when that happens isn’t some sort of immediacy of communication, a return to the unadulterated face-to-face of individuals confronting their common existential situation. Because the social field remains structured by class struggle, by the biopolitical deployment of race, by the struggles within social reproduction indexed by gender, and all of these things shape in advance any possibility of mutual encounter at the individual level. What comes flooding in to fill the void left by the collapsed structure of attention and explanation isn’t radical sincerity but conspiracy theory, not forthrightness but miserable special pleading, a victim stance more entrenched and irremediable than ever before.

He wrote this extraordinarily long tract about the failings of our education system, years ago, which I started reading and thought “hmmm, maybe he has a point”, and then continued reading and it just got more and more swivel-eyed.

He’s a sort of cousin to Gove, I think - he has this notion that there’s a sort of idealised grammar-school education everybody should have, which would make us all (well, you know, the >120 IQ subset of the population actually fit to exercise the franchise) super-competent citizens of a super-complex world, and everything that goes wrong can be put down to failures of competence due to inadequate education. It’s a sort of hyper-technocratic position - he thinks existing institutions and personnel are thoroughly incapable, and only he has the holistic grasp of everything needed to reform them.

It’s a truism that most really intelligent people recognise the limits of intelligence - their own, and intelligence in general. The Gove/Cummings type makes a fetish of intelligence, and organises their entire view of the world around it: if only we properly valued intelligence, and intelligent people, and educated them properly, and put them in charge of things, and everybody else just did what the intelligent people told them to! Well, I think I thought something like that when I was about 14. But one is supposed to grow out of it.

The photograph resonates for me because it is an image of recovery in which the trace of the crisis which occasioned it is still visible. I don’t say this to diminish or undermine the happiness Garrett may have wished to project, to offer the reader — the book itself being both something she was gifted by her experience, which is treated autobiographically within the text, and her gift as a writer and a thinker who performed research, conducted interviews, assembled theories, and drew everything together into a narrative about narrative, a sort of spiritual toolbox for others to use. “An unusual book”, as one reviewer noted, demurring somewhat — as a sociologist — from the intrusion of the “spiritual” into the domain under consideration:

Although only about half the anorectics interviewed attributed spirituality to their anorexia or recovery, and not all displayed behaviours that could be suggestive of spirituality, nevertheless Garrett reads spirituality into their meanings and stories. For instance, she concludes the story of ‘Sue’, who denied an interest in spirituality, with the statement that the ‘absence of spiritual language does not signal an absence of spirituality’ (p. 97). This kind of comment relies on the voice of authority and expertise to negate the validity of Sue’s own beliefs and experience…

There is a genuine problem here, which is that “spirituality” can be an active, shaping force in a situation from which linguistic attribution of spirituality, or overtly signifying “behaviours”, are manifestly absent. But it is not, pace this reviewer, a question of forcing in a spiritual meaning by means of an illegitimate deployment of authority. Because spirituality concerns the relationship, or rather the non-relationship, between being and non-being, between what can be signified and what is left unsignified in all signification, it is neither reliably present where it is signified, nor reliably absent where it is not signified. One cannot fix it in place with ritual trappings, and one cannot drive it out by evacuating it from one’s language and gestures.

A friend who had suffered a schizophrenic breakdown refers in retrospect to this breakdown as a “crisis of being”, which is just what a “spiritual” crisis is if we understand it as a crisis in which the software running one’s sense of “being” has segfaulted. A stable sense of personal identity is one in which being and non-being are more or less cleanly segregated, held at arm’s length: I am this, I am not that. In a “crisis of being”, my “am not”s come marauding through the territory reserved for my “am”s. The resolution of such a crisis is not necessarily the re-establishment of order, but may be a modified way of living with the irregular, ungovernable character of the (non-)relationship between being and non-being itself. (In my friend’s case, he talks to his voices, admits them into his company and answers back).

It is frightening when someone enters into a crisis of this kind, not least because the usual commerce of persons requires, for purposes of predictability and accountability, that everyone involved maintain some reliable separation between who they are and who they are not. The person in crisis is disquietingly “not themselves” from the perspective of this masquerade of social fictions: no-one really knows what to do with them. The anorectic withdraws not only from eating as a process of self-nourishment, but from all of the social ritual surrounding meals and mealtimes, refusing to be present at such occasions, or attending as a kind of reproachful avatar of non-being, the guest at the table who does not eat. There is a kind of social or psychological aggression in this (it can be a way of waging war against one’s family), but also a kind of serenity, that of the person who is wholly impervious to demands for accountability (“can’t you see what you’re doing to us?”, etc).

Spirituality is weird, and we largely preserve appearances by trying to forget quite how weird it is; spiritual crises are irruptions of weirdness. I am wondering what it might be like to be less spooked and rattled by other people’s, a sense of disturbance that goes far beyond simple annoyance at their erratic behaviour or worried concern for their practical well-being. The ability to recognise the source and character of such disturbance, and respond with self-awareness and a sort of Laingian psychic opportunism (seeing the crisis as a moment in which some virtuality is in play, in which the person is already feeling their way towards whatever will bring them out of the crisis), is quite rare in people, and I don’t see where it is presently being cultivated.

In leafy canopy or gallivanting
cornfield trespass, twig-strewn woodland track
to epiphanic clearing, windy rise
to hilltop menhir, bracing lakeside stomp
et cetera, you are restored, self-present
in self-forgetting, Caliban's broad church your
inner sanctum.

As children in those wolf-encircled woods
by dwindling campfire wait for guardians
from hillside blown or fallen in the lake,
spreadeagled figures who have lost their hats,
so amateurs of spirit restively
sit out the Kali Yuga's unrelenting
interregnum.

"Our father", says one, "is a mighty hunter,
for whom a wolf is nothing but a pelt
with halitosis". Something nearby starts,
dashes from patch to patch of undergrowth.
The youngest sniffles. None will live to morning,
nor find between those severing incisors
inward meaning.

Beautiful creatures though. But so are urban
foxes, and less partial to your children.
Iron like irony keeps well at bay
that distant howling. Foxes rut and screech
beneath my window, gnaw discarded wings,
in matters of high spirit not remotely
interested.

A flippant line I’ve used for years is that anything cognitively sophisticated enough to do my housework for me will by the same token be cognitively sophisticated enough to resent having to do so. That we don’t understand steam engines or the robotic arms in an automobile factory to be labourers is owing to something we understand about labour, which is that it calls for a certain kind of attention from the labourer, who could potentially be paying attention to something else instead - perhaps a great many possible somethings. All actually-existing forms of machine intelligence lack this characteristic: we don’t call what AlphaGo does when it considers Go positions to be attention, because there is nothing else that AlphaGo could be doing, no possibility that its focus will ever waver or be diverted elsewhere. AlphaGo doesn’t need to be summoned to the task of playing Go, or disciplined into persevering at that task, because that is the only task it can have. Labour power is a general, or at least re-purposable, ability to pay attention to something, to gear one’s physical and intellectual efforts towards accomplishing this goal and not that; the labourer is someone who can slack off, be distracted, want to be elsewhere, have better things to do, and who may need to be incentivised or disciplined to keep them at their task (even if the incentives or discipline are internalised - a strong “work ethic”, or delight in creative “flow”). Our actually-existing machine intelligences have nowhere else to be, nothing else to be doing. It costs them nothing to persevere indefinitely - no opportunity cost, no frustrated longing, no ceaselessly-renewed struggle against anomie and boredom. The question of whether their work has value to them, is a good use of their time, has the right intrinsic or extrinsic motivations, never arises.

(This also goes for so-called “sex robots”: whatever sexual meaning whatever you do with them may have for you, they can only meaningfully be said to be having sex with you if they could conceivably be preferring to have sex with someone else, or themselves, or not at all…)

I work with the feminist idea of “relationality” in order to show not only how lives are interdependent, but also how our ethical obligations to sustain each other’s lives follow from that interdependency. The interdiction against violence is a way of asserting and honoring that bond based on the equal value of lives, but this is not an abstract or formal principle. We require each other to live and that is as true of familial or kinship ties as it is of transnational and global bonds. The critique of individualism has been an important component of both feminist and Marxist thought, and it now becomes urgent as we seek to understand ourselves as living creatures bound to human and nonhuman creatures, to entire systems and networks of life.

Obviously this all commands assent up to a point, but I think there’s a limit case which it fails to consider: what about our ethical stance towards those for whom we have no “requirement” whatsoever, those who fulfil no need for us singly or collectively?

The web of relational co-creation seems like a fecund metaphor for human collectivity and ecological interdependence, but it feels to me like it simultaneously gathers too much in its net (what about beings that withdraw from relation, or that have no relation at all to our relationality? And I don’t mean those humans subjected to social death, or necropolitically “counted out”, but those beings which are simply unbound and unbindable by our social practices of relating, as little relatable-to as a neutrino), and pays too little attention to the problem of surplus or redundancy (Bataille’s “accursed share”, amongst other things). Why should we assume that the systems in which we are embedded are so perfectly balanced (in terms of needs/abilities) as to provide for an ideal reciprocity of all with all?

In practice, as Butler’s theme of the “ungrievable” acutely recognises, capitalism distinguishes sharply between productive and unproductive, reproducible and non-reproducible, selected and dysselected persons and populations. But are we justified in assuming that outside of a capitalist ensemble of relations we would immediately find ourselves enfolded in a global relationality in which nothing and no-one was unneeded, excessive, extraneous, supernumerary?

One could make almost the opposite argument, which is that an ethical obligation which does not hold in the absence of any possible relational binding or reciprocity is not truly ethical, but merely another guise for the general quid pro quo. Does Jesus heal the leper because the leper is part of the interconnected web of interdependency which makes up the socio-ecological world on which Jesus depends, or because the leper is precisely the diseased and abjected figure on whom nothing and nobody depends, whom the rest of the world is simply waiting to see die?

Davies’s Years and Years is a sort of long-form (six episodes) expansion of this premise, with the Doctor (and other extra-terrestrial agents) wholly excised, and the almighty kaboom that sets everything in motion being provided by a Trump-launched American nuke. I avoided watching it for a while, in the belief that an even distantly realistic depiction of the plausible near future was likely to be unbearably traumatic. In the event, the blows which rain down upon its central cast are softened by Davies’s broad humour, which introduces touches of the ribald and the absurd (a sex-robot which looks like a clunky 1980s children’s toy, with a vacuum cleaner nozzle attachment), alongside some sensitive character-writing. I think this is the first time I’ve heard a Murray Gold musical score and thought “that’s actually quite good”, rather than wanting to hop in a time machine and strangle him at birth (there’s a cunning use of the “look to the future now” melody from Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody as a motif, which becomes increasingly eerie and melancholic as the story progresses). Overall, the series makes a strong case for the argument that the best bits of Davies’s Doctor Who were always, in fact, the bits without the Doctor — which may be part of why the 5-episode Torchwood special Children of Earth was so strong.

The series does some interesting things with the BBC drama convention which dictates that universal humanity must always be represented by a middle class family (the Lyonses) living in an enormous house. There’s always something a bit E. M. Forster-ish about this framing - as Forster announces near the start of Howard’s End (1910):

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.

Assets are ruinously lost, jobs evaporate, everybody’s station and circumstances are irreparably diminished, yet the gentlefolk of Years and Years remain among those for whom tidy sums can be found, or scraped together, whenever the necessity arises: real poverty remains unimaginable for them. Connections outside of the charmed circle are made on the basis of sexual desire, as in the case of the gay Ukrainian refugee Viktor Goraya with whom Daniel Lyons forms a relationship. But the family are largely socially insulated and politically passivated — with the exception of the activist Edith Lyons, played with reckless hauteur by Jessica Hynes, who typifies the middle class “rebel” engaged in adventurous acts of infiltration and sabotage backed by an anonymous network of like-minded insurgents. The only character who significantly associates outside of her class is the disabled single mother Rosie Lyons, who finds herself confined on an estate designated as a “criminal” zone, fenced off and placed under curfew.

I’ve been thinking for a while about the strange timeliness of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, which explicitly holds an Edwardian-era bourgeois family to account for its complicity in the violence and exploitation meted out to Forster’s unthinkables. There is something neo-Edwardian about British society in the late 2010s: we no longer have a word for “gentlefolk”, but many people might identify with the condition of Forster’s Leonard Bast:

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more.

There is a sort of chasm separating those who might conceivably “count”, in terms of the public imaginary (e.g. families in BBC dramas), and those who can no longer be counted except by poets and statisticians. The labour movement, the welfare state, workers’ education, comprehensive schools and so on were all supposed to close or eliminate this chasm; the project of neo-liberalism and austerity has been to force it open again. Years and Years imagines the endpoint of this process as the “Erstwhile” concentration camps established by Vivian Rook’s government, the “abyss” becoming a “tarpit” into which people are thrown only to disappear.

When the Lyons matriarch, Muriel, delivers her final-episode speech about how the whole family are responsible for the state of the world in which they now find themselves, there is a distant echo of Priestley’s argument, in An Inspector Calls, that the play’s bourgeois family are collectively responsible for what has happened to their victim, Eva Smith. This collective reponsibility is not merely an accumulation of individual wrongdoings, but a structural complicity, implicating the entire form of life which the bourgeois family reproduces.

This accusation is weakened, in Davies’s version, by an emphasis on individual consumer choices — purchasing the £1 T-shirt, using the automated tills uncomplainingly — but the point about no longer having to look the woman behind the till in the eye is a sharp one. Rather like Forster, Davies imagines human connection as the foundation of ethical life — “Only Connect!” and the rest must inevitably follow — and disconnection and wilful ignorance (Rook’s “I don’t give a fuck!”) as the fundamental vices eating away at our ability to imagine and create a better society. (It is telling that activist Edith’s final apotheosis is her transformation into a disembodied consciousness, encoded in water molecules, whose pure substance, as she tells us in her last moments, is “love”). This, also, is a somewhat neo-Edwardian way of picturing the problem, to which Priestley’s more militant post-war socialism brought the retort that the bourgeois family is also an economic institution, and that sexually consorting with those in the abyss might equally be considered the continuation of exploitation by other means.

The recent Striking Vipers episode offered an exemplary derealisation: what if fully-immersive virtual reality video games could lift the bar of sexual difference, offering heterosexual consummation — a “transcendent” coupling of effortlessly-performant male and female avatars — to a same-sex couple, a pair of male friends engaging in the common pastime of facing off against each other in a two-player fighting game? What if sex could be simultaneously like play-fighting — a competitive demonstration of virile prowess, as straightforward as a game of squash — and fully pornographic, the flawless re-enactment of an image-repertoire? The Striking Vipers X video game offered its antagonists a heterosexual relationship regulated and enabled by the male homosocial bond: free from anxieties about performance, about how one is seen by the other; free from the toils of domesticity, the negotium of living together.

The story itself strongly disavowed any homosexual component to this relationship: in the real, the fighting/fucking partners cannot kiss (but can still fight, the only form of intense physical intimacy allowed between straight men). It’s tempting to read against the grain for a nascent queerness — what’s going on with the man who relishes his embodiment as the female fighter, who waxes lyrical about the symphonic pleasures of female sexual enjoyment? What’s going on with the man who enjoys fucking his friend? But we should also try taking the story at its word: what if there is nothing queer happening here at all, but rather a nihilistic apotheosis of heterosexuality? These are men who desire, very specifically and very exclusively, the idealised fucking of idealised men and women. The real of sexual difference is effaced when they are enabled to manifest this ideal without having to encounter or negotiate with any woman’s desire or lack of it. What could be more heterosexual than that?

The episode’s title, “Striking Vipers”, works on a couple of levels. First of all, it’s a reasonably plausible name for an orientalised fighting game. Secondly, it’s a nob gag - two snakes “striking” at one another, suggestive of a kind of penis-jousting. But “striking” is also the refusal of labour: both men become limp-dicked in real life, their “vipers” declining to perform, as they disengage from the nexus of responsibilities to which their heterosexual identities have committed them. If there is any “queer” aspect to the fable, it is to be found in this decommissioning of straight manhood: fucking each other in pornographic simulacrum is one way for these men to abolish themselves as socially-effective beings.

In the end, normality must be restored: the female partner of one of the pair makes a bargain, allowing him a strict ration of gaming/fucking nights, effectively assigning to these the status of a “boys’ night out”, a scheduled and regulated reprieve. She, in return, gets her own “night out”, re-opening the door to the possibility of sexual adventure. The technology, as always, is a vanishing mediator in the renegotiation of the terms of a small number of interpersonal relationships. It turns out that the pornotopia of immersive VR doesn’t lead to an anything-goes explosion of erotic possibilities — including fucking a polar bear (one of the game avatars) — but to a slightly modified compact between desire and responsibility.

Badiou is summoned to a meeting with Lacan, who agonisingly slowly and in total silence draws on a piece of paper a Venn diagram labelled with Greek letters. Finally, Lacan holds up the paper in front of Badiou’s face and punches a hole in it with his pencil, stabbing Badiou in the forehead. Badiou, enlightened, departs without a word.

Lacan and Derrida discover they have been sharing the same mistress, each under the mistaken impression that the other (whom he never encounters directly) is her husband - one enters by the door as the other leaves by the window. After the subterfuge is discovered, they continue in this arrangement for several months.

Forgive me if I go astray, or do not.
So much of each bright day is sunk in dreaming,
mazy distraction fractally unspooling,
attention splintering against attrition,
you long for boozy rosiness to blossom
or yoga session leave you luminously
empty-headed.

The yogi is unclean beneath his robes.
The roses are advanced in fermentation.
You picture headspace as a loft apartment,
well-sunned, from which the cleaners have departed
leaving a scent of lavender, a sheen
on every surface, tranquilly awaiting
yuppie tenants.

Not this arrears- and rodent-ridden bolthole
where fugitive and half-deranged you quiver
or, worse, are quite at home, in sloven's Eden
which no loss ever ransacked, the heaped papers
aspiring to the ceiling, the floor a lava
of cast-off underthings, even the very
walls perspiring.

The psyche, it is said, is unforgetting,
a chiselled ledger, or a swizzled swirl
of mingled waters, of which each drop drawn
contains all others potently diluted,
non-lethal cocktail from which clarity
is not forthcoming, even at the point of
dissolution.

In spite of the expectations this framing might set up, Wynter is not “defending” FGM, as such, but arguing for an understanding of the rationality (in the sense of “having a rationale”) of its practitioners which is not heedlessly overcoded by Western anthropology; she’s accordingly skeptical of Alice Walker’s Jungian hermeneutics, in Possessing the Secret of Joy, which presents the familiar argument that the practice is grounded in male terror of female sexual enjoyment. It’s worth at least reflecting on the severity of genital injury sustained by male initiates under some symbolic regimes, which suggests something other than a fear of sexual enjoyment (and certainly female sexual enjoyment) per se. And of course some very urbanised and bourgeoisified people in the West sometimes do or consent to have done extraordinary things to their own bodies out of a variety of motives, of which hatred of their own physical embodiment should not always be presumed to be foremost.

The first interesting turn in Wynter’s article is the comparison she draws between circumcision as symbolic initiation, which establishes a correlative position of symbolic death for the uncircumcised, and the “excisions” effected by Western conceptions of personhood (as homo economicus, for example, such that the economically unproductive are effectively unpersoned; or as the inhabitant of a socio-biological order governed by natural selection, in which social “fitness” and “unfitness” function as analogues for evolutionary fitness and unfitness, and the “unfit” are determined as unworthy of social reproduction). This suggests that something other than a relativising defence of FGM as just one practice of symbolic initiation amongst others is afoot - rather, FGM is explicitly compared to systematic racism and social inequality, in a manner that suggests that the authority of symbolic initiation should not simply be accepted: we must find some way to move beyond this schema of inclusion/exclusion in sociogenic humanity. (I am grateful to Peli Grietzer for clarifying this aspect of the argument for me).

Wynter’s article is a crisp and comprehensive exposition of her cosmology of the “Third Event”, which I find useful as perhaps the most baldly stated and explicitly justified version of the underlying culturalism of the humanities: human being is symbolically co-ordinated through and through, such that our “second nature” has fully supplanted our “nature” as biological creatures, and any projection of universal “human nature” is thus the elevation of a particular set of symbolic co-ordinates to the position of “man”, or universal humanity, and necessarily entails the dehumanisation of all human beings governed by different symbolic co-ordinates. However, the dehumanisation operated by the Western schema is not Wynter’s sole target: she has her eye on the larger problem of how humanisation and dehumanisation are entangled as a result of humanity’s self-authorisation through cultural practices.

Wynter’s argument has some odd collateral effects, like placing cultural differences between ethnic groups in the position of ontological dividers: people of culture X having a different sociogeny to people of culture Y are for most purposes just as different as if they had distinct racial essences — there is a set of pre-determined characteristics that all products of a certain genetic procedure bear, it’s just that the genesis takes place within language rather than within the subject’s DNA. This doesn’t make no difference to things, of course. Wynter’s argument against the Western natural-biological schema of human being is that it ontologises a struggle for survival between the fit and the unfit, the selected and the dysselected, and is thus inherently hierarchical. A first task, for Wynter, is to throw off this kind of acultural framing, which supplies a stable and super-cultural evaluative matrix from within which cultures can be placed and ranked. However, this does not lead her simply to a position of cultural relativism, in which all cultures are of equal value; rather, the task of evaluating culture from a proper vantage point has yet to begin.

If Wynter is a (first-order) cultural determinist, she is also a believer in the possibility of a transition from being unthinkingly determined, in our social being, by the symbolic co-ordinates of our sociogeny, to adopting something like a consciously pluralist position in which we are able to take stock of the mythemes to which we are beholden, and approach other cultural constellations with due curiosity and respect (rather than just assuming them to be primitive and misguided). This leads to a (second-order) form of cultural agency, in which we can start to get to grips with the mythemes to which we are beholden, and contest harmful practices — FGM included — without having to do so from the vantage point of a superior, colonising culture.

Here there is a kind of active paradox in play: Wynter fully believes (as I fully do not) in “cognitive closure”, in the complete efficacy of the symbolic inscription which assigns us, upon initiation, to our symbolic place; and yet she also holds out hope for the possibility of a “Second Emergence” in which this closure becomes visible as such, and tractable to a new understanding of human social being in its true diversity, free from any schema of domination. This is something like a classically Sartrean view of freedom, in which recognition of what (first-order) determines our social being can give rise to a (second-order) form of agency over that determination. But the theme of cognitive closure presents an impediment here, a problem that needs solving.

For Wynter, it is the “liminal perspective of alterity” of “members of an intelligentsia of African hereditary descent who are also women” which opens the possibility of such an emergence, as this is “the only perspective…that can free us from the cognitive closure defining all human orders”. But this rests on a constellation of notions about liminality and cognitive constraint which is not spelled out so clearly, but rather hoisted abruptly into the heavens as a moral lodestar. It’s true that the “perspective” does not immediately and automatically arise from the “situation” of this intelligentsia, and might be accessible via other routes, but there remains a kind of mystery about how this is meant to happen.

I think this is a kind of false problem generated by a too-constricting sense of what “cognitive closure” must entail. It’s true that we are often faced with antagonists who are seemingly impervious to, or epistemically walled-off from, the kinds of arguments we would find persuasive amongst ourselves. And Wynter is addressing just such a situation, in which Western feminism faces off against African practices of symbolic initiation and, making little headway through moral exhortation, resorts instead to legal violence. Her question is, what can a female intelligentsia of African hereditary descent do in this situation? And her argument is that only a fundamental revision in our understanding of the sociogenic production of humanity will enable this deadlock to be broken. But such a revision — the “Second Emergence” — requires a novel form of epistemic agency, which cannot itself be grounded in membership of an intelligentsia, or even “liminality” as such. How does this form of consciousness arise, and how might it be incited to do so?

While it’s often useful to make the implicit explicit, to provide a narrative which explains the origins in experience and practice of the commitments and attitudes which scaffold the positions we publicly espouse, we are always driven into a place of weakness when we try to explain ourselves in this way to a hostile interlocutor, who reserves the right to interrupt our backstory with a curt demand that we “answer the question!”. If we ourselves want to revise our explicit values and commitments, we may also have to return to this place of weakness, where we are not so sure of ourselves, and may be asked to consider concessions we do not want to make.

The interlocutor who is prepared to enter into a position of mutual vulnerability with us can be of help here, but the interlocutor who simply wants to knock down our defences so they can pick at the soft meat inside is an adversary to be resisted.

I have two examples in mind as I write this. The first is the demand that antifascism justify its premises, that it provide answers to questions such as “how do you define fascism?” and “what are the proper limits of political violence directed against an adversary?”. Because antifascism is the practice of tracking and identifying fascist and fascism-enabling currents within political and cultural life, and confronting those currents wherever they manifest themselves in public, with the aim of suppressing them, it is neither tied to a specific definition of its adversary nor bounded by a fixed protocol of conduct. It is, in this regard, rather like cybersecurity. Those who guard our information infrastructure against malicious infiltration must face an obscure and protean adversary, and make use of a variety of tactics in frustrating that adversary’s advances. The usefulness of a communications technology such as email is degraded if spammers and scammers are permitted to disseminate their messages unimpeded. We track threats, filter and block, in order to maintain a usable channel for legitimate communication.

This does not mean that it is not useful to have working definitions of fascism, and principles to guide antifascist action, or that these cannot be questioned or critically evaluated once adopted. It’s a difficult and ongoing task; I’m not going to get into it here. But we have the right to distinguish between interlocutors who are seriously interested in helping us work through the difficulties of maintaining our defences on a sound and principled basis, and interlocutors who are simply interested in weakening those defences so that they can pursue their own agenda unimpeded.

The second example is the ongoing furore within academic philosophy concerning the legitimation of a “gender critical” agenda which is inimical to trans rights activism. Figures such as Kathleen Stock arrogate to themselves the right to demand answers to supposedly intractable questions concerning trans identity and the legal and political ramifications of recognising trans rights. Once again, it is necessary to enter into a place of weakness to give a full account of why advocates for trans rights hold the commitments that they do. These aren’t questions which can be settled by arranging tokens representing pieces of consensus reality in the correct order; they involve worlds of experience which are not universally accessible, or commonly understood, whose explication requires a difficult passage through vulnerability. Stock and her allies are demonstrably not interlocutors with whom such conversations can safely or productively be had. Given the assymmetry in terms of epistemic security and practical stakes between those asking the questions and those expected to answer them, it is wholly legitimate for the latter to refuse the bait.

First among the questions currently preoccupying me is the question of subculture. In thinking about the way the tech industry resists diversification, there’s a tendency to moralise the issue, to make it about the personal attitudes of people working within the industry, which need to be reformed through a kind of managerial pedagogy. This framing of the problem sets the stage for what we might call “privilege theatre”, that familiar set of routines through which individual privilege is identified, challenged, acknowledged, and made the subject of an exhortation to set aside the pretence of mastery and adopt a position of epistemic humility. The moral of the story is always that the addressee should suspend the authority of his own worldview, which is experientially narrow and occluded by hubris (an emotional state which indicates that we have vested interests, which get in the way of seeing clearly), and recognise the authority of the worldview of the other, which is experientally grounded and validated by sincerity (an emotional state which indicates that we have skin in the game, and are therefore closer to the truth of the situation).

There are two problems with this pedagogy. The first is that a person’s worldview is generated and constantly reinforced by the social relations in which they participate, so that while they may pay lip-service to the necessity of giving up their privileged viewpoint, in reality this viewpoint is not simply produced, and cannot simply be voluntarily set aside, by their own consciousness; rather, their consciousness is itself determined by the conditions which their worldview reflects. The most likely outcome is therefore hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance, which is typically managed by proselytising towards others. (The reason male feminists, for example, have such an atrocious reputation is that they are often proselytisers in this vein, eager to convey to all around them the paramount importance of women’s truth, but not notably proficient at valuing women as peers and comrades). The second problem is that belief in the epistemic authority of the other cannot long survive candid engagement with the other in person. What we know about ourselves, if we know ourselves at all, is that we do not wholly understand our own experience, and our worldview is a sort of confabulation which largely serves to prevent this fact from continually embarrassing us. We rely on others to show to us, through their own apparent disposition towards us, what our social identity is and what it means, and we are continually renegotiating this sense of ourselves with others around us. The demand that we treat another’s projected identity as authoritative, as representing a position of complete knowledge about who they are and what they stand for, is a demand that we treat them as oracles, rather than as shiftless and fallible social actors like ourselves. It is, finally, a sort of violence towards others to place them in a position where they have to articulate themselves as oracles in order to be seen as worthy of recognition in our eyes.

The position I think people should be taking is one of epistemic pluralism, which does not mean engaging in the pretence that you have been enlightened into abandoning your own worldview and deferring, as a matter of moral principle, to the worldview of the other. If the bad news is that this moral principle is unsustainable, the good news is that we don’t need it. What we need is to be critical of the incentive structures which bear upon us, properly curious about the incentive structures which bear upon other people, and engaged in redressing the conditions which give rise to the defects of our consciousness. In the tech industry, one of the things this means is that we need to consider our own subculture as a product of history: not the spontaneous and inevitable expression of our consciousness as hackers, but something which has formed the way all subcultures form, through a lengthy process of individuation from the surrounding cultural milieu. What has individuated itself in this way is in our case, amongst other things, a defensive crystallisation of subaltern masculinity. (I’m using “subaltern” here to mean “of diminished status”, rather than “in a position of complete exclusion from the power structure”). The resulting subculture has an intrinsic, self-reinforcing tendency to push intruders out, and to identify as intruders anybody who cannot pronounce its shibboleths or comport themselves according to its (often tacit, and sometimes strategically opaque) norms. In particular, a wide range of social competencies coded as feminine are typified as alien to it, and as evidence that the bearer of those competencies does not belong. If we see this as an artefact of our history, rather than an expression of the personality type that distinguishes a good hacker, then we have scope to reconsider: suppose for example we had instead taken the path of certain gay subcultures in which feminine-coded competencies are prized and cultivated? The point here is not to idealise the other subculture (which might harbour its own misogynies, or tacit status hierarchies), but simply to recognise that its very existence provides constructive proof that things could usefully be otherwise for us.

What I’m also suggesting, therefore, is that instead of moral pedagogy — exhortative, and focused on personal moral reform — we should practice a critical pedagogy which enables everyone in tech to look at their own history, to understand it as a history, and to evaluate their subculture comparatively, as a collection of norms and folkways and ingrained habits of perception and practice. For example: go back and re-read Jon Katz’s Voices from the Hellmouth posts, and accompanying comment threads, from the Slashdot of 1999. What cultural energies were summoned and bound in that moment? How were young programmers (such as myself, at the time) teaching each other to see themselves through such outpourings, through sharing and identifying with such an accumulation of repeated narratives of harrassment and alienation? (What, especially, were young programmers in the UK doing with these narratives, which originated within the bowels of the US high school system?). Who were we telling ourselves we were, when we produced and consumed these narratives? I’m convinced that the “hellmouth” moment cast a long shadow over tech culture, for both good (some real, shared grievances were articulated) and ill (I think it hardened a certain revanchist and triumphalist mindset, and made it easier to be callous about the impact of our “success” on the wider society). What other things have formed us, as a subculture? How essential and inevitable is it that we go on being formed by them?

It is not clear that a characterisation of fascism in terms of “authoritarianism”, or an immediate propensity towards the violent suppression of dissenting voices, is adequate to what we must call “Pound’s fascism”. He wasn’t a street-fighting brownshirt, or a cop, or a lawmaker. He wrote some poems, he gave some radio broadcasts. The poems remain in print; they are still available to be read and, as here, discussed. There are some very fine things in them; but everything that is in them is entangled with everything else, and that includes their fascism, which is in turn entangled with a political and historical sequence in which six million European Jews were murdered.

When I say “entangled” here, I am of course employing a metaphor — the same metaphor, in fact, in at least two different ways. The “entanglement” of everything in a sequence of poems with everything else in that sequence is a matter of symbolic imbrication, the creation of an internal system of reference and reflection within a literary corpus. The “entanglement” of poetry with political and historical circumstances, with real events, takes place within a causal nexus of a different order. When the poet Geoffrey Hill, writing as a critic, tries to bring both kinds of entanglement together in his ruminations on “contexture”, he is forced into further metaphorisation, talking about the “inertia” of language, the poet’s “negotium” with the forces bearing down from all sides on poetic utterance. Every word-choice carries an ambivalent ethical charge; literary undecidability is inexorably confounded with moral and practical equivocation. If poetry affords the poet the opportunity to have it both ways — to assert and retract in the same gesture — it also indicts us, both poets and readers, at just the moment when we would make our excuses and head for the exit.

“The tyro cannot play about with such things, the game is too dangerous”. Impatience and anger are appropriate responses to the glib refusal of responsibility with which contemporary edgelords brush off any suggestion that fascist master thinkers ought not to be invested with glamour, or fascist symbolism deployed for shock value or amusement, under the cover of artistic licence. Artistic licence is one of the most powerful cultural affordances available to us: it enables us to think and feel our way through unfamiliar circumstances, extend and crystallise sensibility, and develop new kinds of aesthetic responsiveness and moral responsibility. When this affordance is used opportunistically simply to stave off accountability for one’s words and actions, in the name of an unassailable purity of personal motive, then its usefulness is fatally diminished.

Still exercised at odd times in memoriam
M. F. whom I have now the sense of having
barely known. The Goldsmiths slogan-mural
could have been any mid-league social theorist
of past three decades. Better by far the stuff
that made them wince, even when opprobrious,
vampire-weakened.

No common rhizome routes ergot through to argot,
syndicate signalling to fruiting brain-rot.
Goldsmiths is rival turf, its ecosystem
ill-disposed towards us. Might be guilty
projection, panic flashes around New Cross.
By acid he meant psyche-manifesting
stroke lysergic.

Has anyone ever seen it? I mean the psyche -
topos of affect, global image depot.
On acid I saw blood gurgling from sewers,
a floating skull, that sort of thing; then tie-dye
coloured Mandelbrotian swirls, an anodyne
enough default. I can get weirder on
some hours' sleep-debt.

But he wrote to get seriously defaced,
make legible the ungovernable within
our fixed stars' governance, their frozen whim
our flexible command. Goldsmiths abides
his punked-out sangfroid, seething like a state.
The psyche keeps schtum, having with the cosmos
zero contract.

Omen of omnishambles, sleet-darkened skies,
all London under grey precipitation.
Some Spring we’re having, far from seasonal:
the seasons have abandoned their procession,
dive now for cover under sudden downpour.
Tomorrow’s sun will sizzle-dry these same
sodden pavements.

Informal: “a situation of total disorder”.
The neologism is good to have in hand.
Some wind up soused in mysticism, full of ecstasy
and fire, farraginously self-misled.
Some might suppose the nation well-ensorcelled,
dazzled by gleam in deathless mad Rasputin’s
wondrous side-eye.

No salvage for those savaged by feral media
claim slightly-mauled, frontrunning comeback tour.
Bellum omnium contra omnes has moments
of breathless camaraderie, like bloodsport
suspended for celebrity cameo,
recaptioned image macro drawing egregious
micropayments.

I cannot say I saw the point of Dryden
at nineteen. This likewise may elude you.
In which case let it go. It may come anon.
Dryden is funnier, or alleged to be.
Don’t judge me by my knock-kneed prosody:
everyone has their off-day, or decade, or
ageless aeon.

Graham Jones has done a good job of explaining the strategic premises behind the kind of action XR have undertaken over the past week. Anyone who felt that Srnicek and Williams’s notion of “folk politics” was a straw-bogeyman should take note of the logic laid out explicitly here, which is that given the right reinforcement acts of symbolically resonant disruption can seed and encourage a wider, structural dissent — a sort of transformation of quantity into quality that is supposed to occur when you have the active support of 3.5% of the population.

On the one hand, this is consonant with the folk-political metaphorics of resonance, which pictures the wider population as a sort of inert body through which political fervour will propagate like a wave if you make a big enough splash in one place. It’s wholly in line with that theory for an XR tweeter to suggest that the police, or a fraction thereof, will hopefully come around to their side — a marvel never previously beheld, yet somehow predicted by this model. If you see the wider social field as politically unpotentiated, just awaiting ignition or fecundation by radical ideas (or, in XR’s case, panicking into action by a message of apocalyptic existential urgency), that’s where you’re likely to end up. An analysis of the reactionary forces confronting any attempt to restructure society around the goal of arresting the degradation of the biosphere would be useful here; XR’s rhetoric is largely directed at government inaction, as if politicians were simply unaware that anything needed to be done.

On the other side, the emphasis on training, reflection and reinforcement suggests an analogy with the cadence of “agile” software development: “sprints” of activity punctuated by “retrospectives” in which successes and failures are evaluated and improvements considered. The emphasis of this kind of continuous improvement feedback cycle tends to be on improving effectivity, becoming more performant. It may be a good way of ironing out tactical misalignments, but it isn’t in itself a strategy, or the kind of activity from which a strategy is likely to emerge by itself. The notion that important strategic decisions can be made by general assemblies is one that should have been abandoned after the Occupy experiment: the development of strategy is an epistemic function of the movement, and requires intelligence-gathering, forward planning, the creation and maintenance of a detailed model of the strategic terrain. Militancy without polemology is destined to exhaust itself in bursts of activism which signal sincerity — and perhaps, indeed, inspire imitation – without securing defensible territory.

Two things about XR have struck me as symptomatic of a constrained political imagination. The first is the choice of symbolic targets and actions - the creation of a sort of miniature Glastonbury in Parliament Square and on Waterloo Bridge - and the emphasis on petitioning Parliament to “tell the truth” and declare a state of climate emergency. By itself this is all quite conventional for an environmental pressure group working within the UK, but it sits strangely with the second thing: XR’s insistence that the collective human reaction to anthropogenic climate change is “beyond politics”.

“Politics” in the broadest sense concerns the collective organisation of human affairs. There is certainly a politics to XR’s chosen organisational approach, to its eschewal of representative structures in favour of the “decentralisation plus figureheads” model of supposedly non-hierarchical organisation. The question of how human beings are going to deal with anthropogenic climate change is inexorably political, and inextricable from the immense question of how we are to move beyond the domination of capital. How are we to overcome the division of the world into enclaves of owners and consumers, surrounded by a vast sea of human beings denied access both to the rights secured by the command of property, and to the dwindling affordances of consumer purchasing power?

The ultimate horizon of human extinction is indeed “beyond politics”, in that it is the horizon beyond which there are no human affairs to organise. But it is strictly meaningless to seek to organise a “rebellion” against this inevitability. What XR is really rebelling against is a system of social organisation which is unable to apprehend the reality of anthropogenic climate change, or adjust in such a way as to mitigate its worst effects. It is in fact the inability of this system to countenance its own extinction — its own impermanence and transitivity — that constitutes the major imaginative obstacle to realising such a rebellion. Like “social justice”, the slogan “climate justice” suggests a form of redress that could be brought about through the redistribution of social goods — ultimately, it’s a matter of deciding to be fairer. But what is really at stake in facing up to climate change is the entire system of production, and the supporting matrix of social relations, under which all social goods are realised. To accomplish the necessary revolutionary change to this system requires not panic, in the face of onrushing disaster, but an extraordinary confidence in the ability of human beings to remake their own social world. It is not enough to sit down in the middle of the public thoroughfares and petition governments to act on our behalf.

25 years on, Alan Partridge is not only a household name, but a “national treasure” (according to Vogue) and “one of the greatest and most beloved comic creations of the last few decades” (the Guardian). It is the common fate of such “creations”, like Captain Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty, to become icons of national self-regard, “beloved” because they project and affirm a reassuring notion of ourselves as candidly eccentric, excusably prejudiced, loveable despite it all. This Time with Alan Partridge has done perhaps the only really interesting thing that can be done with such a character, once such lionization sets in: it has divided opinion.

Here’s the bit of Dennis Potter’s “Occupying Powers” I mentioned at the beginning:

I am giving the melodramatic and not at all tuneful title Occupying Powers to this year’s James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture. The title has not been chosen simply to indulge yet again in the inevitable paranoia which so afflicts writers that work in television, although I’ll give that a go too. No, I call this Occupying Powers so that I can reflect behind the barricade of metaphor about what it really feels like, for many others besides myself who sell their services and some of their passions to the strange new generations of broadcasting managements and their proprietors.

More than that, wider than that, I want to use the title to reach beyond our parochial concerns and grapple with a few thoughts about what it means to be a citizen (or do I mean a consumer) in the United Kingdom plc., where two-thirds of the population live on incomes below the national average of £250.00 a week, almost 5.75million exist on less than £100.00 a week, three million are unemployed, three million children live in poverty, one-fifth of the young are innumerate, the chasm between the highest and lowest paid is wider than at any time since 1886, and Dave Lee Travis has resigned from Radio 1. What is at the heart of such a distorted society?

Quote: “Broadcasting is at the heart of British Society. The structure and the competition of the broadcasting industry, the purpose and motivation of broadcasters and the programmes and services they offer are vital factors in reflecting and shaping that society.” I, too, would like a mirror that reflects and shapes, but these are the words of the BBC at its most ponderously anodyne as it responded to the Government’s Green Paper on the future of the Corporation.

The Partridge review wasn’t an obvious place to dwell on that line about how “the structure and competition of the broadcasting industry…are vital factors in reflecting and shaping that society” — “anodyne” phrasing that conceals a double-edged sword. To consider the BBC as existing in competition with other broadcasters, as part of the structure of an industry, is already (as Rupert Murdoch had been complaining for years) to see it as deforming that structure, since the licence fee places it in unfair competition with every other player in that industry. The compromise set out by “croak-voiced daleks” Birt and Hussey was to structure the BBC internally according to the rules of the market — an approach that has been steadily rolled out across the public sector ever since. Thus, the NHS is permitted to remain in “unfair” competition with private healthcare providers on condition that it is internally subject to market discipline, with its own services put out to tender and carved up between multiple private agencies, its funding delivered via dodgy investment vehicles such as the ruinous PFI deals struck under Blair’s government, and so on. What cannot be permitted to exist are public services that are actually run as public services, “deforming” the market by providing a counterbalance and an alternative to the private sector’s manner of operation. It undermines morale, or something.

We are now at a point where there seems to be real popular momentum behind demands such as “nationalise the railways!”, which suggests widespread dissatisfaction with the operation of essential services and infrastructure according to the rubric of marketised private provision — and this is good, but the question remains of what a public service operated as a public service might actually look like today, and how it might be effectively defended against continual political and legal pressure from the private sector to eliminate anti-competitive players from the game (or discipline them into playing it “fairly”). I think part of the answer is a high degree of workers’ control, and another part is democratic oversight via other publicly accountable bodies — but with a diminished role for central government, which tends to play political football with such things. Essentially you need a balance of powers ensuring that public services don’t end up being captured by one set of interests at the expense of the public in general.

Charlotte Shane is an exceptionally good writer to interrogate this effect, because she has both allowed herself to be fully subjected to it (which is the only way to read Dworkin, really) and established for herself a headspace which is strongly disjoint from Dworkin’s. I often find, reading Shane, that at a certain level I simply don’t understand where she is coming from: her headspace is deeply inaccessible to me. It seems strange — it should perhaps seem very strange — that I don’t have the same trouble with Dworkin. In terms of my conscious position on things, I’m closer nowadays to Shane’s explicit sexual politics than to Dworkin’s; but in terms of where my head’s still at, I can fully understand why someone would look at the entirety of our public sexual culture and just say a big, non-negotiable “no”.

No to what? I can put on my Dworkin hat and answer readily: no to accommodation, within fantasy, with power relationships that would be intolerable outside of it. No, therefore, to the entire apparatus of public symbolisation which makes such fantasy memetically available and mimetically appealing. But I don’t think that’s really it — I think it’s a cover story, a way of making an aesthetic discontent look like a principled refusal. And my aesthetic discontent really stems from a structure of feeling which is rooted somewhere quite remote from the usual moral centre of sexual politics.

For many people, a vital component of sexual enjoyment is the circuit that forms between the other person’s fantasies and projections, and one’s own ability to act up to them, to be for the other the occasion of their desire. For some people it seems that this is pretty much the whole deal, which given the fabled mechanical ineptitude of some other people is perhaps just as well. This seems to be true, for example, of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, who admits somewhere in the programme’s first series to finding sex itself much less interesting than being interested in sex — which is to say, interested in being sexually interesting to others, in finding others sexually interesting, and in bringing those two possibly conflicting sets of interests together. One partner in the second series, evidently very mechanically capable, succeeds in giving her “nine orgasms I didn’t want”. (How very Lacanian…)

We aren’t told how many orgasms she has with the priest who is the true object of her desire in the second series, but it also doesn’t matter: she gets what she presumably does want. But what is that? In an interesting touch, Fleabag reaches over during her sex scene with the priest and lowers the camera — her every other encounter has been gazed upon directly, by the same camera she smirks, glowers and winks at throughout the show (the priest is unusual in being the only character who notices that she “goes somewhere else” during these asides). There is a conventional romantic-fiction moral implied here, which is that true intimacy requires the suspension of self-surveillance: you are only “really” with the other person when you are no longer watching yourself to see how you look with them, no longer in a kind of bargaining relationship with your own imago. But I think this is just the kind of fantasy an inveterate, virtuosic self-watcher would have about the nature of true intimacy: finally, some love-object will arrive who will be so dramatically attention-absorbing that you will surrender your bad, guilty habit of enjoying yourself, and enjoy nothing but them!

Be that as it may. It happens that I do most of my modelling of how other people might see me, and what they might want from me, using the parts of my brain which specialise in linguistic reasoning, and there’s sometimes a detectable lag in processing while I figure out what’s what. A consequence of this is that the circuit of fantasy/projection and performance is fairly stuttery for me: I don’t sync up well with others’ expectations. The whole thing, to paraphrase Riddley Walker, feels just that little bit stupid. So I have a strong aversion to being placed in situations where I’m expected to be demonstrative, to supply the juice for somebody else so that they, in turn, can put on their own little performance reflecting whatever my fantasies and projections are supposed to be back at me. I felt an enormous relief when I read, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet, that what some people wanted out of sex was a sort of cognitive hiatus. “That’s me!”, I thought. Something you do where you’re not maintaining a neurotypical mask, where the linguistic reasoning bit of your brain gets to shut down for a bit rather than having to keep the simulation constantly running.

And that, I think, is why I actually find the entire arena of public signification of sexual fantasy tiresome and obnoxious and wish it would all simply go away. It has nothing immediately to do with the violent, oppressive, atavistic, dehumanising content of much of that signification. That can meaningfully be objected to, of course, but it’s also in the nature of fantasy to pull into the frame extreme and intolerable scenarios and sensations: the question of how that material is to be handled is complex, admits of various intricately braided moral and aesthetic strategies, and cannot be satisfactorily resolved simply by organising a purge. There is a Dworkin who knows this, who calls for “sexual intelligence”, meaning a move beyond the usual grim repertoire of stereotypes towards ways of envisaging vulnerability and aggression that draw on the full range of human imagination and experience; then there is a Dworkin who has been immersed in murderous puerility to the point of total burnout, who simply cannot stand any of it any longer. But behind both, I think, is a Dworkin who is not quite prepared to examine her own aesthetic disposition, the structure of feeling she has towards and around the signification of sexual fantasy qua fantasy.

Whenever Dworkin writes about fantasy, she keeps changing the subject — to the real brutality meted out to women in the course of making pornographic images, or the real brutality meted out to women by people (men, or lesbians who have read too much Foucault) trying to recreate what is depicted in them. This move is morally compelling when one is talking about filmed pornography made under exploitative and violent conditions, but constitutes a kind of evasive manoeuvre when one is talking about material that, however ideologically vicious its content, was produced under relatively benign conditions and has no demonstrable causal connection to violent acts. Because when Dworkin does talk about fantasy, it’s never as something intellectually worthy, something that might legitimately be in play in our moral negotiations with each other and the world. Where fantasy isn’t simply an alibi or apologia for real brutality, it shows up in Dworkin’s writing as a failure mode of “sexual intelligence”, a lapse in seriousness, a mark of frivolous disengagement.

When I read Charlotte Shane saying, as an example of the purchasers of her cam-work not being uniformly terrible, that “one regular client, after I asked, spent hundreds of dollars worth of time speculating about why he always asked me to enact a scene of anal rape”, I found it hard to understand what about the hours of speculation was supposed to mitigate the ugliness and presumption of the request. The hundreds of dollars, yes, but to interpret this also as an example of “heterosocial tenderness”, you need to be remarkably generous-minded towards men with serious money to spend on procuring enactments of anal rape, and further time and money to expend on expatiating about their motivations for doing so. In Shane’s headspace, I guess (and it’s really just a guess) these things are part of the negotium of sex-as-work, which is itself a sub-region of the wider negotium of the public signification of sex: perhaps, to be the kind of writer she has wanted to be, she has had to enter into negotiation with the ugly parts of people, the parts that can only really be imaged or talked about through the medium of fantasy. The non-negotiability of Dworkin’s stance freezes the world into a static image, a tableau of hell, which only a kind of magical voluntarism can get moving again. She became, as Shane observes, her own basilisk — “her thinking became recursive and compulsive, caught on the snag of itself” — and lost the writer that she, too, had wanted at any cost to be.

‘The trouble with computers,’ as Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor once remarked, ‘is that they’re very sophisticated idiots. They do exactly what you tell them at amazing speed’. As M. Beatrice Fazi’s Contingent Computation argues, this is only the beginning of our troubles with computers.

I swear I would have used the same title, and opening quotation, if I hadn’t had issues with the book’s handling of certain technical matters. I came to it interested in its premise and disposed to like it, and found much to enjoy and admire in its discussion of aisthesis, amongst other matters. But I was troubled both by its mistakes, which were both serious and quite rudimentary, and by the fact that no-one working on or around the book had noticed them, or ensured that the manuscript was looked over by someone who might have done so.

By “genuinely profound” here, I mean that grief and disconnection are at the heart of The OA’s strangely becalmed world: they aren’t merely personal attributes of its heroine, but are rather a kind of affective medium through which she and the other characters pass. The rebus-like symbolic tangles that emerge within this world are a kind of apophenic sense-making. You can’t seriously suppose that any of it will add up to anything in the end — it is as likely to turn out to have been All A Dream as anything else — but the shared activity of following the threads, puzzling out your collective condition, is all you have. The OA is captivated by gestures of trust, appeals to “love what you will never believe twice”: you could argue that its central theme is courage, not in a heroic leaping-into-battle sort of way, but as a kind of steadfastness in the truth.

Season 2 of The OA collides two seemingly disjoint epistemological stances, which I’ll describe as the “local knower” stance and the “big data” stance. The “local knower” stance grounds knowledge in embodied, situational, phenomenological experience, mediated via communal meaning-making practices; it eschews the global ontology of the scientific “worldview”, favouring a “view from somewhere” over the “view from nowhere”. Local knowers know things by sharing testimony, telling stories to each other, and weaving theory out of personal narrative anchored by shared mythopoetic co-ordinates. In season 1, The OA unfolded its cosmology via a kind of campfire storytelling; in season 2, its protagonists are again thrown into the midst of a fundamentally disordered situation, in which the most basic parameters of identity and object permanence are thrown into disarray, and have to develop between themselves a narrative through which they can comprehend and negotiate what is happening to them.

It’s no coincidence that Hap, the “mad scientist” in this scenario, is a figure of evil: an ontological malcontent who refuses to abide within the finite stance of the local knower, and treats the world around him as experimental material in a deranged and violent quest for transcendence. The truth heralded by the OA, embodied in the “five movements” (one for each of the senses), is a truth of revelation: it is not acquired by testing and falsifying hypotheses, but by becoming incorporated into a narrative. Such knowledge is “proved upon our pulses”, by trial of personal commitment. It is Hap’s prescribed fate to remain permanently hapless in the face of this way of knowing, which eludes him as the Roadrunner eludes Wile E. Coyote.

Season 2 introduces a second antagonist, Pierre Ruskin, a Peter Thiel analog (it’s not particularly subtle — Pierre = Peter — although having watched only up to the end of the second episode I don’t yet know what may be wrapped up in that surname) whose approach to knowledge-gathering is neither that of the local knower, nor that of the mad scientist, but the turbocharged Humeanism of “big data”. In this dimension, such world-changing innovations as blockchains and ride-sharing have been “discovered” by Ruskin by sifting through the aggregated dreams of subjects who have demonstrated a particular talent for pattern recognition. There is no ambition here to discover the underlying laws governing reality; rather, it’s a question of finding points of strategic leverage within the weft of seemingly-random happenstance and occasion. It happens that this process has accidentally uncovered “unnatural” phenomena, locating a fragment of dream-logic that is somehow germinating within the waking world. Here, the threshold of knowledge beyond which lie horrors and wonders that “mankind was not meant to know” is crossed not by conducting strange and unnatural experiments, but by correlating, at massive scale, the banal disjecta of everyday experience.

The OA thus brings together, in a single imaginative gesture, two kinds of ontological excess. On the one side, there is the local knower confounded by unrepresentable trauma, grief and loss, who has only experience with which to make sense of experiences that don’t make sense, and who must assemble a liveable world through shared narration and ritual practice. This assemblage is scaffolded by a network of arcane connections between symbols, which cause everyday objects and events to become charged with excessive meaning, to function as the pieces of an endless puzzle. On the other side, there is an apparatus of surveillance, a machine which indifferently aggregates data points, looking for network effects that can be exploited in the search for profit. This machine has discovered, in its own grindingly impersonal way, the “truth” of the local knowers’ universe of private meaning, locating it within the global symbolic order represented by the dreamers’ shared anima mundi. The fantasy here is not merely that an individual’s apophenic pattern over-recognition has a foothold in material reality — that there really is something special about every thirteenth paving stone — but that this over-recognition is mirrored by a breakdown in the global order of knowledge: the machine dreams the same impossible thing into being that we do.

There is a kind of theory of vibe at work in The OA, according to which the affective tenor of a lifeworld, its phenomenological palette, is correlated with the kinds of patterns that can be recognised within it, and the particular objects and occasions that a machine seeking those patterns would most faithfully recognise and reproduce. The series itself is more persuasively attentive to mood and incident than it is to plot: it short-circuits the logic of narrative, instead creating and sustaining a “feeling of meaning” that can attach itself to almost any event. It is the kind of series from which you come away slightly dazed, looking at the world around you as if daring it to come alive with meaning in the same way. Which would be terrifying — but at the same time, wouldn’t it also be strangely welcome?

I periodically have dreams in which I’m undergoing some sort of breakdown, and they feel similar to this. It’s suddenly impossible to abide anything at all, even people’s well-meaning kindness, because every last bit of it is in the service of the false, and no-one can hear me when I try to say what’s gone wrong. It’s as if I were making animal noises or something. I try to explain that I am not crazy, not flipping out, not ranting or raving, but the reactions of people around me continue to illustrate that they think I’ve gone somewhere very strange and worrying indeed. I haven’t, in these dreams, ever quite come to the point of making my peace with being this small angry creature who can no longer make himself understood. It’s always a relief to wake from the dream back into the possibility of human connection, the very sweetness of which is sharpened by the dread that it could so easily be lost forever.

Michael Douglas’s William Foster in Falling Down thinks he is a small, angry creature, a mouse that has decided to roar. What he has really decided to do, as the detective who tracks him to the film’s conclusion already knows, is to die. To die to the world, yes, but also in the end just to die. To “go out with a bang”, like a suicide bomber or school-shooter. For the detective, it’s simply a matter of containing the explosion. The self-detonation of “Heisenberg” in Breaking Bad is slower, a chemically controlled conflagration, but he too is trying to arrange an appointment with death. “I am the one who knocks!”, he declares. (You are never the one who knocks). Heisenberg thinks he’s seen something: the underlying structure of reality. Welcome to the desert of the real, and so on. But the reality of his situation is that he’s just an ugly man, doing ugly things, because he has discovered that he enjoys them. It’s the enjoyment that sustains the fantasy of super-competence; of having cracked the code, finally learned how to win the game.

When someone is redpilled, it’s a kind of disaster — a moral disaster, obviously, as they start believing and saying these terribly ugly things; but also an epistemic disaster, because in grasping after the truth they’ve somehow managed to let slip the very possibility of knowing anything at all in the ordinary kind of way. This can voice itself as heightened scepticism, a heroic determination to bring one’s critical faculties to bear on all received ideas, but it’s more like being in that dream where you’re trying to dial a number on an old-style telephone and you just can’t, you get a couple of digits in and you hit the wrong one and have to start again, over and over. Knowing things in the ordinary kind of way is like ringing people up, it’s easy and you do it all the time, trusting in the muscle-memory in your fingers to guide them to the right numbers, and in the numbers themselves to be the right numbers. The bits and pieces of knowledge that make up our common world are all addressable in some way; you can reach out for them and they’ll be there, and others around you will agree that they’re there: we know that this, we know that that. When someone gets themselves redpilled, they surrender this fluency in exchange for something else: a basilisk, an endlessly demanding absurdity, a bezoar of the mind shaped like a logic that won’t let go.

You cannot build a world from first principles. You get given a world that other people have made, and you get to take part in making it. That doesn’t have to mean simply going with the flow — you can commit yourself to doing foundational or critical work, radical enquiry, kicking against the pricks. If you find that the whole assemblage simply doesn’t suit you, you can make your ill-fittedness within it a guiding principle: what am I, and what is this world, that the two don’t go together quite as they should? In the fantasy you have of being redpilled, this question has an answer, and it has been staring you in the face all along, and it is that everything everybody has ever told you is false and corrupt, designed to keep you weak and compliant. This is not a principle from which it is possible to operate as a social being. It is however very convenient to those who command the loyalty of the redpilled that their followers should be isolated, dysfunctional and afraid.

When consequences start to pile up around you, you say to yourself “but I am a small angry creature”. To the hurt and disappointed people: “I am a small angry creature”. The fantasy you had of being redpilled was not supposed to involve quite so many consequences. It was supposed to lift you out of the universe of consequences altogether, into a brighter world, where the will alone is lord and master. This doesn’t look like that. You feel tired, the bumptious exuberance of the small angry creature rapidly draining out of you. Perhaps it was all some sort of joke, a blague, a satire against stupidity, a weapon of the intelligence at bay? You try that on for size; maybe you’ll get away with it. But you don’t feel particularly clever any more.

The treatment is pioneering, and never
more in demand than now
as in daily dozens the sore-afflicted
lope
into reception, thousand-yard-
staring and gritting their teeth.

In stage one --- diagnosis --- the patient,
extensively instrumented,
is prompted to home in on his stress-trigger
which blooms across the screen
as it is spoken.
Graphs are extrapolated, correlations mapped
by costly hardware in the east
wing, codenamed
BRAINIAC --- appropriately, as it too
is a cluster of very many small
functions running massively
in parallel. This takes
time; the patient is offered
a glass of water, which he
invariably slops.

Stage two is treatment. For this
the patient is strapped down, and a warm
moist pad laid across the temples.
Much of what happens next takes place
outside the field of vision.
There is
an intense buzzing, and migraine-
like aura; ideation follows,
a fugue of daily life with obscene
interjections, evidently-
imaginable horrors
peeling from the wallpaper.
This passes; the buzzing persists
with tiny modulations. Nurses loom.
The last
half-hour or so is frankly boring.

The apparatus, referred to in acronym
exclusively, weakens
the connections between trauma
and the life sustaining it.
Nothing of what happened is forgotten;
only that it mattered -
that it had
to be accounted for, and could not be.
It dissolves, say its inventors,
moral problems
like those of pain and evil, which are not
in their opinion
worth half the trouble people take with them.
"Pain's just a signal; likewise moral pain,
a crude reflex of early conditioning
usually received too late to be of value.
What's eating these guys is emotional
neuralgia, a maddening
unscratchable
itch. Why not just make it go away?"

The project leader gestures through the window.
Outside young soldiers smile at their young children,
hold hands with girlfriends, jape
boyishly with the buddies they came in with.
"Why not ask them", he says, "if they _feel_
violated?"

A defunct form of misery, or so we might imagine. Larkin had a couple of tries at imagining it so himself, notably in “High Windows” and “Annus Mirabilis” (“Sexual intercourse began / in 1963”), which pictures the sexual revolution of the 60s as the moment when “everything became / a brilliant breaking of the bank, / a quite unloseable game”. Yet here he is, wanking at ten past three, his misery the particular misery of the sexually defunct.

The language of the poem is shocking, not so much in its direct obscenity as in its juxtapositions: “love” must live, somehow, in this proximity to “wanking” and “breasts” and “cunt”. “Breasts” and even “cunt” can be said tenderly, but here I think are not: here they name the parts on display in the Swedish porn mags sent to Larkin by his pal Kingsley, the parts of a woman’s body related to as prize or property: either one’s own or “someone else”’s. This is a poem about coming second in a competition between men. Humiliation, “the usual pain”; and consolations that do not console (“the drink gone dead”, flat in the glass).

Why “love”, then; and why “drowned in that lash-wide stare” (rather than, say, “up to his balls in quim”)? The latter is of course quite compatible with greedy objectification: women routinely figure as both “breasts and cunt” and mysterious oceanic sex-beings in which male identity is submerged and dissolved. The speaker’s anguish here is that of being uncomfortably left alone with his “male identity”, his deprived and grasping selfhood, rather than “drowned” or “swayed” by the disindividuating force of erotic love.

There is a contradiction in how he imagines his successful rival, as both masterfully in possession (“surely he’s taken her home by now”) and ecstatically dispossessed (“drowned in that lash-wide stare”). This contradiction is reflected in his own compensating position, which is trying to make up for two incompatible privations at once.

On the one hand, there is the typical Larkin move towards knowledge as balm for disappointment, in which what is lacking in direct experience is made up for in ironic reflection: the arid satisfaction of being “less deceived” in proportion as one is less involved. Here I want to supplement Larkin with Lacan’s observation that “les non-dupes errent”: the fantasy of being “the less deceived”, of imagined aloofness and linguistic mastery, conceals the reality that the trap of experience has already been sprung and one is already writhing in its jaws.

On the other hand, the poem is an expression of profound ignorance, in spite of what it says about being unable “to be ignorant, / Or find it funny, or not to care”. The ellipsis after “Even…”: what was he about to “put…into words”? Even, I think, to feel happy for this person he says he loves (if that is what he is saying): the sequence would then run from ignorance, through amusement and indifference, to benevolence. But this step, a first step beyond selfishness, is beyond Larkin — or so he insists, in poem after poem.

Instead, the poem turns to the question of “this element // That spreads through other lives like a tree / And sways them on in a sort of sense”. “Unselfishness” might be a good name for it; but even as the poem yearns for release from selfhood, it has no name for what might open selfhood up from the inside, exposing it to the proximity of other selves in which this release might be found. “Love again” is something other than love the first time around, the primary erotic motive force that “spreads through other lives”: it is love narcissistically recaptured, as self-love deprived of the object that would have facilitated it.

Larkin’s answer, here, to the question of “why it never worked for me” seems to have something to do with attachment: the implicit narrative I think is one of a “violence / A long way back” that detached him from the sympathetic weave of “other lives”, and a subsequent attachment to “wrong rewards” — the satisfactions of poetic craft, ironic knowledge, literary fame — that belong to “arrogant eternity” rather than the temporal present through which Larkin’s imagined tree of life spreads its branches. Poetry here is not the sublimation of erotic urges, or “emotion recollected in tranquility”, but rather a usurping power, rooted in privation: the poet as Larkin presents him in this poem is not an especially sensitive individual, but rather an especially desensitised one (although unwaveringly sensitive to his own condition). It is a studiously unappealing portrait, and I am rather inclined to take it as a warning; which may after all be how it was meant.

We might describe Gemüt as the characteristic of being “emotionally present” to oneself and others — or perhaps even of being emotionally present to oneself through others, “socially integrated” to the point where knowing one’s own mind is inextricable from knowing one’s social standing. For the social theorists of the Third Reich, Gemüt was the personal quality underpinning all civic virtue; as Pridmore-Brown glosses it:

[Nazi paediatrician] Ernst Illing claimed that he could make a call about a child at the age of three or four — he could spot what he called “Gemüt poverty”. Gemüt meant “soul” or “spirit”, but also gestured to a person’s capacity for tribal belonging: for feeling and emoting spirit, as in national or school spirit; and for social competence…Gemüt-poverty was a medico-spiritual diagnosis that could send children to their death at a place like Spiegelgrund…

“Gemüt-poverty” was labelled by Hans Asperger as “autistic psychopathy”, a disorder of personality that was simultaneously a disorder of social being, the two being linked — or, rather, pathologically unlinked, in the case of the disordered individual. Asperger’s innovation within this framing was to qualify this supposed dissociation as a form of genius, akin perhaps to the aura of uncommon sensitivity which, in the Romantic imagination, attached itself to the consumptive. A child might be preserved from extermination by drawing attention to his “fine and aristocratic features” and “rare maturity of taste in art”. Through proper clinical intervention, members of this natural aristocracy might be guided towards some useful function within the organic totality of the Reich.

Pridmore-Brown notes the tone of self-conscious benevolence with which this eugenicist classification of children and young people — “developing” humans, we might say — was formulated and applied. Fitness for incorporation in the spiritual community of the German people was directly equivalent to fitness for life, for full human thriving. Social mis-fittedness was likewise directly correlated with biological unfitness (“dysselection”, in Sylvia Wynter’s useful term). The struggle to mould an autistic individual into someone who could pass as an integrated member of society was the struggle for a soul, as much as for a chance at life. Such were the stakes of the “medico-spiritual diagnosis”.

The disordered personality is one of today’s more prominent folk demons. The “borderline” and the “narcissist” are alike pictured as figures of untameable, untreatable malignancy. Some efforts have been made to rehabilitate BPD in the popular imagination, chiefly by emphasising its common aetiology in childhood abuse and trauma; notwithstanding, no-one likes the narcissists (and there is increasingly a tendency to speak of “Borderline Personality Disorder with narcissistic traits/defences” when referring to people one is only prepared to sympathise with up to a point). Autism is not now classified as a personality disorder, but it is useful to remember that it has been associated with “psychopathy”, “schizophrenia” and “sociopathy” in the past, and remains in some quarters the subject of a folk demonology which does not particularly care to distinguish between the malignancy of the “narcissist” and that of the “heartless Aspergers” type (especially when it comes to former spouses).

Medico-spiritual diagnoses have an unstable, hybrid, chimærical nature. At times it is opportune to stress the medical, e.g. autism as a “neurotype”, a variation in brain-function with an apparent heritable component. At other times, the “spiritual” — that is, the holistically-connected nexus of moral and social values — comes to the fore, for example when autists are represented as bearers of a unique form of integrity, truthfulness, guilelessness and so on. Pridmore-Brown writes that:

Sheffer is clear: autism in its severe forms is about underlying biology; but what we now call Asperger’s Syndrome is a cultural artefact.If the terms “Autism” and “Aspergers” have gained momentum recently, that may be in part because of a rise in environmental triggers, but it’s also because our children’s minds are again under intense scrutiny — though for different reasons. In our era of networking and social media, of “ghosting” and attention-grabbing individuation, we’re anxious about their ability, metaphorically and literally, to get the requisite “likes”. We now value a capacity not so much for feeling “Gemüt”…but for strategically emoting or performing “soft skills”.

I would wish to challenge the proffered distinction between the “severe” — and correspondingly “biological” — and the culturally-artefactual (and presumably relatively “mild”). Autism comes for many people with a range of cognitive, sensory and motor-function impairments which are more readily medicalisable (if not particularly clearly understood in neurobiological terms) than the “softer” impairments in emotional processing and social fluency associated with Aspergers. Talk of a “spectrum” is meant to bridge the gap between these two realms of (dys)function; but as spectrum-talk often does, it projects into the domain under observation a “coherence in contradiction” which originates in a theoretical problematic. Both the distinctions in play, and the terms brought in to smooth them over, are artefacts of a theoretical synthesis — the “medico-spiritual” grading of human material according to an ethno-nationalist eugenic program — whose genealogy needs to be carefully unpicked.

Nevertheless, Pridmore-Brown’s account of the present “autistic moment” is astute. Much of the time, when I talk about the “neurotypical”, what I really mean is the weight of that common evaluation of the Gemüt against which my own recurrent un-Gemütlichkeit appears as a deficit or disorder of being. In my lowest moments I occasionally wonder whether I am quite adequately ensouled; but the demands of “adequacy” are themselves continually being revised, for a variety of reasons not all of which are reliably indexed to moral progress. It’s plausible that it has become more generally common for people, autistic and otherwise, to feel this way. What those who seek diagnoses in later life might be looking for may be, amongst other things, the social license to explore and articulate feelings of this kind.

It is natural and inevitable that a politics of the left should value not only collective agency, but the positive affects associated with shared belief and struggle. The film Pride gives a very moving depiction of political solidarity — between striking miners and gay and lesbian activists — both generating and being nourished in turn by a cascade of emotional and practical liberations: the affective dimension of the struggle is absolutely essential.

While I don’t think Pride is by any means an “unsentimental” film, it makes a valiant attempt, within the constraints of the genre, at showing the work behind the building of solidarity. The affect produced alongside this work doesn’t simply spring up out of the inherent goodness of people’s hearts; it requires risky engagement, psychological openness, “working through” old and ongoing hurts, and a lot of physically showing up.

The evil twin of this understanding of solidarity is a variety of sentimentalism which attaches only positive meanings to “community”, and expects comradeship and fellow-feeling to carry the day in every situation unless nefariously undermined by “toxic” individuals. This produces a dynamic in which failures of comradeship and fellow-feeling to resolve differences of opinion and conflicts of interests immediately give rise to a search for toxic parties to blame, and the habit of managing guilt and insecurity through projection and scapegoating.

I don’t wish to suggest that “toxicity” is purely a hallucination on the part of scapegoat-seeking sentimentalists, or that there are no identifiable patterns of attitude and behaviour behind the appearance of “the narcissist” as a folk devil. I and others close to me have been hurt severely enough by such attitudes and behaviours to be permanently on guard against them; and that includes a certain amount of anxious hypervigilance over “red flags” which might indicate a malign hidden agenda. The world becomes a smaller and scarier place to be in, when you know that there are people in it who are disposed to treat you in that sort of way.

Rather, it’s from this regrettably common experience that the folk demonology draws its potency, and the notion that “toxicity” is always to blame when things go wrong derives its plausibility. It’s a fact that some people are self-seeking flakes, and a small minority are actively malevolent wreckers, but that isn’t in itself sufficient to explain the group dynamics of scapegoating, or the selection (among all possible diagnostic profiles) of the narcissist as Public Enemy Number One. The structure of the fantasy is not a function of the structure of its ostensible referent.

What I’d like to suggest, however, is that an uncritical valuation of Gemütlichkeit as the de rigeur emotional format of anyone considered fit to go on living under communism is both a moral and a practical liability, and it’s a grave mistake to presume that deviations from that format are solely due to the emotionally-warping effects of patriarchal, neo-liberal, settler-colonial etc. social relations. Here I’m not trying to adjudicate the immortal “people are basically good!” / “people are basically evil!” debate; my point is rather that people are not all (or not all the time) the same kind of basic. If your impulse towards solidarity is founded on the expectation that those towards whom it is shown will turn out to be simpatico, or in one sense or another “adequately ensouled”, it will founder on the discovery that they’re frequently not.

• There exists a program which will write out the sequence of decimal digits which represents n.
• There exists a program which will write out the value of n × 2.
• There exists a program which will write out 0 if n is odd, and 1 if n is even.
• There exists a program which will write out the value of the n th prime number.
• There exists a program such that, for all n and all m > 0, this program will output the decimal expansion of the fraction n/m in one of two forms: either the complete expansion (if its digits are finite) or, if it contains infinitely recurring digits, the whole number part followed by the recurring fractional part (e.g. 0.3R for ¹⁄₃).
• There exists a program which will output the n th digit of the decimal expansion of √2.
• There exists a program which will output the n th digit of the decimal expansion of π.

The last two examples are slightly different to those preceding them. There is no program that can output every digit of √2 or of π and then halt, because these numbers are irrational and their decimal expansions have no end. However, the digits of the decimal expansion of π are “countably infinite”, which means that every one of them can be put in correspondance with a whole-number index: for every whole number n there is an n th digit of π, and there is no digit of π that is not the n th digit for some n. We say that π is computable because every one of its digits is computable by a terminating procedure in finite time, even though one could never finish computing all of its digits.

The halting problem indicates the existence of at least one non-computable number. Although there are infinitely many possible computer programs (if our “computer” is a Universal Turing Machine with infinite tape), every possible such program can be placed in correspondance with a whole number, its “Gödel number”: like the digits of an infinite decimal expansion, programs are countably infinite. Some of these programs halt and produce a final output, while others don’t. If we could compute the “halting property” of every program, we could generate a real number the n th digit of whose binary expansion would be either 1 if the n th program halted, or 0 if it did not.

The fact that we cannot find a general procedure that can compute the halting property of every program means that this number is definitely non-computable: we cannot say “there exists a program taking n as input that will output the n th digit” of it. Worse still, thanks to Cantor’s diagonal argument we know that the real numbers are not countable, which means that we cannot place every real number in correspondance with a whole number. Because there are countably infinitely many programs,and uncountably infinitely many real numbers, there must be uncountably infinitely many non-computable real numbers. Worserer and worserer: although there are countably many computably real numbers, the halting problem means that they are not computably enumerable: there is no program which can output, for any given n, the n th computable real number.

M. Beatrice Fazi’s Contingent Computation (review forthcoming) frames computational “contingency” and “indeterminacy” in terms of an ingress of infinity into a finite computational process; but as we have seen here, incomputability is really rather a question of the excess of the uncountably infinite over the countably infinite, an excess which is constructively indicated via diagonalisation. Here’s Fazi’s account:

At the core of Turing’s investigation on computability there is a transversally posed but crucially metaphysical problem: how is it possible to define the infinite in finite terms? The infinity in question is that of the real numbers: a class of values representing quantities along a continuum, like points in a line, whose digits are infinite and thus uncountable. The finite steps, conversely, are those of the deterministic method used by Turing to cope with the dilemma itself. Turing divided the machine’s functionality into small operations, whose complete purpose and conclusion were ruled by their own configuration and whose actions were set out by an equally finite table of behaviour. A Turing machine program is itself a description of an effective method of calculability, facing the possibility of encountering real numbers that cannot be computed with any desired certainty via an enumerable (and hence countable) set of instructions. The impossibility of processing the vast majority of real numbers through a mechanical procedure couples infinity and decidability in a binding logical argument: it is impossible for any Turing machine to prove if any other similar device would be able to write (which means, to calculate) the infinite digits of a real number on its blank tape.

(Contingent Computation, p. 123)

There are several problems here. Firstly, the digits of a real number are not “infinite and thus uncountable”, but countably infinite; the definition of “computability” given above depends upon it, otherwise we could not say that π (for example) was computable. It is the reals themselves that are uncountably infinite, not their digits. Secondly, although the finite “set of instructions” which make up a program are indeed enumerable and countable, what really matters for this argument is the (infinite) countability of programs themselves — the fact that every program can be given a Gödel number. The expression “the vast majority of real numbers” suggests a statistical percentage — 99%? 99.999%? — but there isn’t really a common measure between the countably and the uncountably infinite, such that a ratio like this could make sense. It is simultaneously true that (countably) infinitely many real numbers are computable, and that the probability that any randomly chosen real number is computable is zero.

Finally, it is true that there is no program which can compute the halting property of all other programs, and untrue that there is no program which can compute the halting property of any other program. If you lean very hard on grammatical ambiguity you can read Fazi’s final sentence as saying the first, true, thing; but it certainly isn’t clear that it isn’t also saying the second, untrue, thing, and later statements such as “we just don’t know…whether a program will halt until we run that program” suggest a persistent confusion on this point.

I hope it is clear that I am not merely criticising Fazi for some inapposite word-choices, or accidental clumsiness in presentation. The errors here really are conceptual, and fundamental to the argument she is trying to make — an argument I had high hopes of seeing made well, by a writer who otherwise demonstrated a secure and discerning grasp of the philosophical terrain. In the end, I think Fazi went looking for the wrong thing — for “contingency” in the sense of “indeterminacy” or nowhere-predictability, rather than in the sense of a wholly intrinsically determined limit to totalisability which rules out the possibility of universal computational oversight over the field of computational processes. Fazi is wholly correct to say that “Universal Computation” — the amphiboly that holds that computation is sufficient to model all of reality in simulacrum, or that the underlying physical laws of reality are themselves computational in character — is vexed and undermined at the level of the formal axiomatisation of computation itself. But this does not mean that machines are universally illegible to machines (and hence inscrutable to us — “we just don’t know…”) — only that there can be no machine to which all machines are universally legible.

What is the real connection between the formal, absolute limits indicated by the halting problem and Rice’s Theorem, and the practical difficulty of writing bug-free software that does just what one wants it to? One possible answer is “nothing”: the latter would obtain even if we had to hand a “halting Oracle” that could tell us instantly whether any program presented to it would terminate, although perhaps we could use this Oracle to begin building a larger edifice of verification, finding ways to reason via “if X terminates, then Y” statements towards otherwise-incalculable verities. Let’s call this the “minimalist” answer. For the minimalist, the power of halting Oracles would have to be demonstrated step-by-step, gradually and constructively introducing new knowledge into the world. Conversely, the “maximalist” answer would be that a halting Oracle would instantly and unrepudiatably establish a new regime of truth, such that all of our ad hoc, trial-and-error software development practices would instantly be swept away. We would write programs with the assistance of theorem provers that would connect the dots between specification and implementation with causality-defying swiftness and certitude, as if an angel from the future could be summoned at will to tell us whether our intimations about the behaviour of our software were correct.

I am inclined towards the minimalist view, but do not know how it might be nuanced or justified, or what other formal issues are entangled in this question. My chief reason for being so inclined is that I am skeptical that the combinatorial wilderness in which our programs live could be very significantly reduced and tamed even by oracular input. But that may be precisely because I have no way of seeing, in the absence of such input, the hidden structure of that wilderness, its underground streams and ley-lines, by which an oracle-equipped traveller could navigate. And, as Lucca’s evolutionary explorations show, supernatural guidance may not be the only way we have to surface implicit order within what first appear as intractable ontological thickets.

It’s remarkable, if you conjure it in the mind’s ear, how comically appropriate Alan Partridge sounds reciting T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: how well the poem’s own range of voices, dovetailing sententiousness and whimsy, is matched to Steve Coogan’s mimetic repertoire. Venturing a questionable simile in complete seriousness: “like a patient etherised upon a table”. Anxious mock-questioning: “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”. Exasperated expostulation: “it is impossible to say just what I mean!”. Vaguely thirsty wistfulness: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each” — ahhh. It’s only a coincidence that Alan Partridge and (J.) Alfred Prufrock share the same initials — Alpha Papa — but it feels like it was meant to be.

The question of what one was “meant to be” hangs over This Time with Alan Partridge as much as it hangs over Prufrock, although Prufrock of course has an answer: “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two”. But Alan is not convinceable that he is not Hamlet — that he does not belong at centre-stage, and that he does not moreover have a vengeful purpose to fulfil. Next to his impeccably slick co-host, he appears as a walking anachronism, a gloweringly incongruous revenant from the BBC’s shameful and hastily-forgotten past. What time is it?

Alan Partridge believes, and has always believed, that the BBC is his home, but he has been a Flying Dutchman figure since the end of the first series, a permanent exile in the world of modern broadcasting, restlessly circulating from one limbo to another. In the first series he was driven by an indefatigable refusal to accept that the cultural forms around which his personality was moulded were irretrievably moribund. As the poet and critic Sean O’Brien wrote about the “paradox of England” in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill: “it won’t lie down, but it appears to be dead”. His subsequent tenure in local radio was about the strange survival of this defunct sensibility in the provincial margins, where it could still be mined for commercial value, its listener-base an ageing and eccentric population. In This Time, this population journeys to the capital in search of recognition and connection (literally, in the case of the guest in episode 2 who travelled down to the London studios twice a week from Sunderland), and is met with the neutralised affect and professionalised hospitality of The One Show.

This Time is less about second chances — we already know that Alan has literally no chance in this environment — than it is about the merciless imperatives of the present moment. The figure most keenly under observation here is not Alan himself, but Susannah Fielding’s superbly realised Jennie Gresham, who projects a coiffed and competent femininity tailor-made for the readership of the Mail Online, her sexual allure simultaneously carefully disavowed and ruthlessly instrumentalised. Where The Day Today pilloried contemporary televisual clichés through surreal mockery, This Time emphasises a glacial normality, bouncing Alan’s meandering and always-inappropriate externalised inner monologue off its imperturbable surface. Can he break through? Already the cracks are showing. Alan Partridge is always at its most engaging when it allows its hero some small triumph: a retort that sticks, an undeniably true observation that no-one else would have been tactless enough to make. He may not come out on top, but he seems likely to bring the house down.

The title “Salad Fingers” comes from a conversation between Firth and a friend, who was mocking his dexterity as a guitar player. Salad fingers are fingers ill-suited to skilled work, fingers which botch everything they come into contact with. From the first episode, however, it’s clear that these appendages are also erogenous zones: Salad Fingers loves to stroke unclean, abrasive objects such as rusty spoons, to be stung by nettles and pierced by spikes. He is a creature of masochistic enjoyment, especially focused on the tactile surface of the skin.

This sensuous passivity is combined with a powerful will to control, in fantasy, the parameters of the scene: Salad Fingers is forever issuing instructions and corrections, rebuking the objects of his fantasy for minor deviations, and playing out scenarios of correction and punishment. His relationship to the world is similar to that of a schoolchild recreating, in play, the authoritarian disciplinary environment to which he is subject, while seeking opportunities for libidinal release within that environment. He is a kind of helpless tyrant, reacting in an improvisatory way to incomprehensible and horrifying events and refiguring them as occasions both for setting things to rights, and for a kind of furtive satisfaction.

The philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous once wrote: “what is reading? It’s eating on the sly”. Salad Fingers is in this sense a reader, a roving interpreter of a desolate environment which seems to lack all object permanence, or any sense of being “built up” in the way that human social environments typically are. His world has been described as “post-apocalyptic”, but I prefer to see it as a kind of dream-image of our own world, in which significant fragments appear against an inchoate background, much like the world of Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams (filmed as Paperhouse). Salad Fingers’s own appearance is a little like a childish drawing of a human being, although the decaying stumps of teeth in his mouth connect him to animality and mortality, to appetite and decay.

What are the constituents of the “wholesome” in Salad Fingers’s world? They are almost all organised around cultural references to the Britain of the period between the First World War and the end of the 1950s, the nostalgic topos of a familiar Conservative repudiation of the 1960s with its supposed slackening of discipline and desecration of sacred values. The finger puppets who stand in as Salad Fingers’s family are given names such as “Hubert Cumberdale” (all the more amusing since the ascendency of Benedict Cumberbatch as a well-known figure of risible poshness) and “Jeremy Fisher” (originally the name of the frog in Beatrix Potter’s stories for children). Salad Fingers has a radio rather than a television, on which he listens for news of the “Great War”. He himself speaks in a slightly formal, euphemistic English, like a nanny or a schoolteacher talking to children. These reference points are meant to be consoling and reassuring, but in fact carry considerable menace: at any moment the finger puppets or the radio may emit a squall of angry fuzz, an expression of annihilating hostility. This is the experience of a child faced with adult anger they are unable to understand or process, an anger that erupts unpredictably from behind the surface of decorum and proper manners.

The most recent episode of Salad Fingers introduces a literal parental figure, a domineering and foul-mouthed “glass mother” who screams at Salad Fingers from behind the mirror, demanding service and obedience and threatening to burst out of the mirror to snatch and engulf him. I found this a bit on the nose, but the episode was satisfying nevertheless for the way Salad Fingers dealt with the incursion of this figure into his private world. A “glass brother” Salad Fingers — obedient and good, and clearly in league with the mother — also appeared in the mirror-world, representing the “golden child” who is accepted and validated, but also plainly a bit of a sneak (in place of Salad Fingers’s teeth, he has terrifying pointed drills). The episode revolves around Salad Fingers’s creation of an enhanced Hubert Cumberdale finger puppet, clad in scraps of human flesh, and capable of independent life and movement: a love-object which Salad Fingers clearly finds beautiful, although it is oozingly repulsive to the viewer. Salad Fingers is now in the position of a parent with respect to his creation, which clearly embodies his own hopes for life, admiration and enjoyment: the meat-puppet declares “I just want to dance on the rooftops for all to see. I’m a big boy now”.

When the scum mother and glass brother kidnap this puppet, Salad Fingers must journey through a portal to the mirror world to rescue it. On his return, he shatters the mirror from which the Glass Mother screams obscenities at him, grinding it into dust. He then mops up the glass dust using the sticky flesh of the meat puppet Hubert Cumberdale, and licks it off the puppet’s head with evident satisfaction, returning to his primal masochistic pleasure in tactile abrasion. His final act is to gather up a remaining shard of glass, pierce a finger with it, smear it with blood and then seal it in a box. Much like the ending of The Babadook, this suggests a negotiation with trauma: Salad Fingers cannot entirely destroy the image of the mother, or relinquish his attachment to it, but he can interiorise it on his own terms, coating it with his own vital fluids and locking it away.

To my mind this episode has a feeling of finality about it, since its explicit treatment of parent/child relationships places a kind of interpretative lock on the preceding episodes. But it would not surprise me to see a subsequent episode redefine the terms of Salad Fingers’s dream world, or introduce some new disturbance into its framing. Salad Fingers’s dream-work confronts, in miniature, both the intimate terrors of childhood and the wilful amnesia of Brexit Britain, which endlessly consoles itself with an image of decency and propriety that it once briefly recognised as the hypocritical disguise of brutal inequality and violence. Of this work, there is plenty more to be done.

In a way, “I’ll blame whatever I bloody well like” could be Radiohead’s unofficial motto. Music critics have been writing for years about how the band’s music expresses the feelings of disconnection, isolation and anomie induced by contemporary society, without for the most part being too curious about what lies at the root of such feelings: it might be “capitalism”, “technology” or “ecological collapse”, all of which are definitely happening, but somewhat nebulously and on time-scales which resist the narrative devices of conventional songcraft. Where Radiohead’s lyrics address themselves to particulars, they are more often personal; often intensely, cryptically so. Larger actors such as “the IMF” are angrily gestured towards without really being indicted with any specificity. A sort of general unease with the general state of things is Radiohead’s version of the numinous: we could call it “transcendental miserabilism” (to coin a phrase), or “the ornery sublime”.

This is especially true of “Street Spirit”, a defining anthem of the era I’ve been listening back over, which conjures up a doomed normality — “streets of houses” — engulfing as it is itself engulfed by a disaster unthinkable from within its own frame of reference. What is actually wrong with this picture? No cognitive mapping is available which can represent it; we’re left with a mysteriously sweeping commination of “all these things” which are, ominously, moving “into position”. GYBE’s “we are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is slowly bleeding to death” (1997) resonantly expresses the general sense of withering in confinement, watching the life drain out of the systems that are supposed to sustain you.

James Bridle’s New Dark Age, (which I reviewed a while back) is very much a Radiohead fan’s sort of book, conjuring a broad sense of systemic collapse and yoking this to a personal feeling of dislocation, a looming apprehension that (as Bridle puts it) something is wrong on the internet. I think the way Bridle describes sufferers of mysterious complaints such as Morgellons Disease as reproducing within their proprioceptive mapping of their own bodies a sense of global invasion by technology — “fibers” under the skin standing in for fibre-optic cable threading through the surface of the planet — aptly describes the way Thom Yorke bodies forth a personal apprehension of the sweep and scope of global technocapitalism by means of physical jitters and vocal tics. Later Radiohead — beginning perhaps with Kid A’s Idioteque (2000) — mobilises those same jitters and tics as a form of resistance, turning involuntary nervous spasm into angular jiving, stimming into signifying, helpless shuddering into bodily self-assertion.

Jayson Greene’s Pitchfork review of the OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017 re-release_ draws out a sonic connection which makes a strange sort of sense, between Thom Yorke and James Bond:

The ghost of Bond followed them once they decamped from their self-built studio Canned Applause to set up shop in a 16th-century Bath mansion owned by Jane Seymour—she played a Bond girl in Live and Let Die. And it has followed them ever since: It’s worth remembering that Radiohead were tapped to write a Bond theme for Spectre, and obliged, only to have their offering vetoed. The lyric “Kill me Sarah/Kill me again/With love” (“Lucky”) feels tailor-made for a suggestive title sequence full of undulating silhouettes. Many songs on the original OK Computer feel written for a desk-drone, earthbound version of England’s most famous fictional spy, the sort of soul who whistles “bring down the government, they don’t speak for us” while dutifully hitting “Zoom” on government surveillance footage.

To this we need only add that Lucky (1997)’s “The head of state has called for me by name / But I don’t have time for him” is a scenario from the end of a Bond movie — it became a running gag, in fact, that the PM would call to congratulate Bond while he was celebrating his triumph by engaging in sexual congress with that movie’s Bond Girl. One of the ways Radiohead’s music of the 90s distinguishes itself from contemporary Britrock is the near-total absence of any sort of laddish swagger or sexist smirk; and yet. Bond appears here as a sort of obscene absent father, ironically identified with: a figure of potency, excitement, and intrigue; a well-travelled citizen of the world, representing an imperial mastery of culture and a boundless capacity for personal, heroically masculinised violence. “This is what you get / when you mess with us”, indeed. The anxiety besetting OK Computer is the anxiety of belonging to a world without Bond, a (wait for it) bond-less world in which the symbolic function of this obscene father is no longer available to make sense of it all. Thom Yorke’s attachment to Bond comes from much the same place as Alan Partridge’s (“stop getting Bond wrong!”): the “anxiety” of 90s Radiohead is fundamentally nostalgic, structured by the loss (which cannot be consciously mourned) of a particular source of reassurance.

For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. to this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

A “craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” pretty much captures the cadence of twitter, doesn’t it? Wordsworth seeks in the Preface to make an apology for poetry as a means of arousing the mind “without the application of gross and violent stimulants”: as a way to rehumanise discourse, to claw it back from the clutches of The Discourse. He situates the poet as “a man speaking to men”, rather than a node in a pseudonymous network of informants constantly relaying “intelligence” to one another, and in doing so harks back to a pragmatics of public address in which the mediation of the platform is a great deal less pronounced. To write and publish poems such as the Lyrical Ballads is imagined to be like speaking in a public square, or a large sitting room. This mode of address has two simultaneous addressees: “the Reader”, in person, and “the Public” as a body of readers, both of whom may be spoken to humanely, in the hope of receiving a sympathetic reception. There is not, as Thom Yorke complains at the end of Life In A Glasshouse, “someone listening in”, a third-party who both commands the means of distribution, and reaps the benefits of supervening on all connectivity.

This week I deactivated my Facebook account, deleted my old tweets and removed my main account from Twitter. It’s quite possible that, as the Book of Forbidden Love (link very NSFW) predicts, I’ll be back: I’m not about to give a recent-ex-smoker’s diatribe on the evils of the foul addiction from which I myself have heroically broken free, especially as I’ve quit both platforms and returned at least once before. Nor would I stake my neck on the upkeep and flourishing of the blog you’re now reading: I’ve abandoned such things in the past. Nevertheless, it’s true that I’ve finished there, and started here, in the hope of re-aligning some priorities, getting my dopamine supply better regulated, and writing according to a different cadence. Earlier today I found myself amused by a trivial thought — that the melodic line under which the famous “Tristan chord” from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde first appears, a sequence of four rising chromatic notes, is the same as the melody to which “Stop the Pigeon” is sung in the theme tune of animated series of that name — and immediately felt a pang at the lack of a twitter feed to broadcast it to. (Well, here it is). What might happen to thoughts like that if they were allowed just to dissipate, or quietly hover around like motes in a sunbeam? I would like to see if I can recover the ability to read a whole book; and, perhaps, to write one.

In other words, I want not to have conceded from the outset that the TERF speaks as a woman, or for women as such. The TERF speaks firstly as a TERF — that is, as an operator of the discourse of the TERF, a player of the TERF language game — and then on that basis advances a claim over the political name “women”. If that claim is successful, then a closed loop of authorisation is retroactively formed: it is now women who are understood to be speaking, through the discourse of the TERF, as and for themselves. To attack the discourse of the TERF, or even to name it as such, is then simply to attack women (“TERF is a slur used to silence women”, and so on). It follows that if we are to gain any purchase on the discourse of the TERF itself, we must first of all interrupt the completion of this loop.

Manifestly, it is not the case either that all TERFs are women, or that all women are TERFs. Rather, the discourse of the TERF is a language game that anybody can play, as more than a few male opportunists have discovered for themselves. Equally, anybody can refuse to play this game. The task at hand is to motivate and empower that refusal.

Political names

A “political name” is a name that performs a totemic function in political struggle. It directs attention, grounds claims, and serves as a rallying point for action. Its use in discourse communicates priorities, and lends persuasive or even terroristic potency to the phrases with which it is associated. There is often a political division between those who will use a certain name, and those who will not. For example, “TERF” is itself a political name, of a certain type: the name given to an enemy. Those who use it, indicate by that use that they are the enemies of those about whom it is used. Those about whom it is used prefer a different name (“gender critical”, most commonly), and bitterly resent the identification as enemy, as the legitimate target of hostile action, which it pleases them to interpret as incitement towards violence against women as such. A political name is not only a symptom of contradiction, a sign that a struggle is going on, but an actively contested element of the struggle itself. Its meaning, its ownership, its rightful use, are themselves things to be struggled over.

“Women” is a political name in this sense. For the radical feminists of the second wave, it was perhaps the pre-eminent political name, the name above all names: it indexed the primary contradiction underlying all other political struggles. Today’s feminist and other emancipatory movements are inexorably concerned with a multiplicity of names, without any being given a singular priority. The organising metaphor of the centre and the margin is often used as a shorthand, as when someone refers to “the marginalised”, but “the marginalised” does not really function as a singular political name. There are many margins.

The discourse of the TERF is once again organised around a singular name (albeit a plural noun), “women”, and is pre-eminently concerned with the proper disposition of this name. Who is, and who is not, a woman? Who can, and who cannot, legitimately speak as a woman? The answers to these questions are purportedly grounded in biology, but in the actual discourse of the TERF they inevitably and symptomatically slip loose of this supposed mooring: cis women who do not espouse the correct political identification — “faux feminists”, “fun feminists”, “handmaidens” and so on — are themselves cut off from the proper sense of the name “women”, expelled from the territory it commands. Their “biological” womanhood may be supposedly beyond question, but their political womanhood — their right of association with, and under, the political name “women” — is readily invalidated.

TERFs sometimes complain that contemporary feminists have all but abandoned the political name “women”, and with it the very basis for feminist analysis and action. Consider the question of whether tampons and sanitary pads should be exempt from sales tax, or even made freely available. We could agree to describe those most directly affected by this as “menstruators” — thereby including those who menstruate but do not identify as women, and leaving out of consideration those who identify as women but do not menstruate. But “menstruators” is not yet a political name. It says nothing about the historical reasons why public policy towards menstruation is shaped as it is, or why reshaping it to be more practically just would have wider ramifications in terms of the value and significance accorded to women’s needs and priorities more broadly. To identify menstruation as a “women’s issue” is to connect it to the gendered division of labour according to reproductive function, to the history of medicine as a male-dominated practice with its concomitant failure to attend seriously and sympathetically to women’s health, and so on. Even women who do not menstruate have a stake in shifting the way that these matters are understood and organised.

There is for this very reason no cause for a trans-inclusive feminist politic to refuse the name “women” when speaking of those whose interests are at stake in deciding how sanitary products should be distributed, and in fact this can serve as a powerful basis for solidarity between struggles for reproductive rights and for trans healthcare (both of which are moreover under attack from the same right-wing sources). But refusal of the name “women”, or indifference towards the political horizons it indicates, is not the true reason for the introduction of a term such as “menstruators”. If the truth be told, there are but few male menstruators; but it is sometimes necessary to be precise in our language, and to acknowledge the reality that the sets of women and of menstruators are not extensionally identical.

Here one of the noteworthy contradictions of the discourse of the TERF comes into view. TERFs claim to be scientifically exact — unlike free-wheeling postmodern types who suppose that words can mean anything they want them to — when it comes to the proper definition of terms such as “woman”, but snigger with contempt when presented with any attempt to retool our language to address the realities in front of us more accurately, and without harmful indifference to those who fall between the cracks of our existing categories. Out of such realignments, the possibilities of new political vectors sometimes emerge: it is not inconceivable that “menstruators” might become a political name under the right conditions.

If the discourse of the TERF often seems caught up in a strange struggle over terminology, over the correct use of words and the categories they invoke, this is because it is an attempt to capture the political name “women” and arrogate it to a limited set of uses, defining all other uses out of legitimacy. The capture of the name is not the end goal, however, but the primary means through which a wider political enclosure can be secured. It is a way of determining who can be recognised as a political agent, and who has the authority to recognise, or refuse to recognise, others as political agents.

Sex-based rights

Which political struggles are those in relation to which “women” functions as a political name? The question admits of relatively expansive and relatively parsimonious responses. Let’s say that “feminism” is the politics of women, the movement through which women decide for themselves what concerns them politically and address themselves, collectively, to these concerns. A “rights-based” feminism would be one which addressed itself primarily to the question of women’s social rights and recognition, raising challenges against institutions that failed to uphold those rights. Among these are rights of protection and redress in cases of harassment and abuse, rights of equal access to the economic goods of society, and rights of symbolic representation and recognition (whose faces appear on the nation’s currency, and so on). There are also, very importantly, rights of bodily autonomy: the right to dispose of one’s own body as one sees fit, especially in sexuality, and to make free use of technologies for controlling fertility. Very schematically, we could say that the chief historical determinants of the social place of women in Western societies have been the gendered division of labour between those assigned to production and those assigned to reproduction, and the circumscription of bodily autonomy.

The name “women” thus ties together a locus of subordination — an inferior social place, to which those identified as women are assigned — and a locus of insubordination — a political struggle, “the women’s movement”, which seeks to overturn these conditions. The full incorporation of women into the sphere of production and the decision-making processes of public life has been one of the goals of the women’s movement, and the securing of greater bodily autonomy, in the form of reproductive rights and freedom from sexual coercion, has been another. The “women’s rights” upheld by this movement have thus included the right to equal pay, the right to abort a pregnancy on demand, the right to access safe shelters from violent and controlling sexual partners, and so on.

When TERFs speak of “sex-based rights”, they may seem to be speaking of “women’s rights” in this sense: rights which have been asserted as a way of overturning women’s subordinate social place. Some of these evidently have a direct bearing on reproductive capacity: it may seem frivolous to assert a right to abortion on demand for people who are not capable of falling pregnant, for example. But, as previously noted, to grant the right of abortion on demand to all who may need it is also to recognise and strengthen the principle of bodily autonomy for all women, whether capable of pregnancy or not; it is by this token a “women’s right” rather than simply a “gestators’ right”, just as the right to obtain sanitary products needed by those who menstruate is not merely a “menstruators’ right”. The circumscription of bodily autonomy is, in various guises, part of the oppression which constitutes the social place of women as inferior; to weaken it at one point is to weaken the overall system of bodily oppressions.

A trans-inclusive feminism is not only possible on this basis, but overwhelmingly indicated. Rights of bodily autonomy are of signal importance to those who need to transition. Protection from sexually-motivated violence is of signal importance to trans people subject to homophobic and transphobic intimidation, the threat of assault and sexual violence, often intended as retribution or “correction”. But when TERFs speak of “sex-based rights”, they do not mean these rights, accorded to those people. They mean to provide a basis for women’s rights not in women’s subordinate social place, and the political activity of women aimed at overturning that subordination, but in the biological particularity of women, narrowly construed.

The biological particularity of women is not straightforward to delimit, and nature has surprises in store for anyone who believes it can be localised to a chromosome or a gonadal configuration, but we will not enter into that discussion here. The focus of our attack is rather on the causal chain constructed by TERF apologetics: women’s biological particularity is the entire basis of women’s subordination, and rights constructed to contest that subordination are thus infallibly indexed to that particularity. In this account, the core of women’s oppression is the control by men of women’s reproductive capability, and the securing of men’s sexual access to women at the expense of women’s bodily autonomy and integrity. It is precisely as sex objects in a system of objectification and exchange that women are oppressed, and only a “biological woman” is equipped to function as the target of, and hence properly targeted by, such sexual objectification.

It’s important here not to subtract anything from this account, not to minimise or gloss over these oppressions, but rather to expand our picture in such a way that it encompasses more of reality: so that it takes in those forms of subordination which are clearly gendered, but not anchored to reproductive capability or availability for sexual exploitation within a patriarchal heterosexual system. Women who do not present as useful in either of these capacities are not thereby excused from womanhood, but rather assigned a devalued form of womanhood: hypersexualised or treated as repugnant, as convenience dictates. If fertility and fuckability are highly prized within this system, they are also promoted as fantasy ideals to which all women should aspire — while the realities of conception, gestation, labour and motherhood, and the anxiety and toil that go into maintaining an attractive facade for others’ enjoyment, are quietly invisiblised, along with all the exploited labour performed by women that has little or nothing to do with these activities.

TERFS are both inheritors of a long and serious feminist investigation into these conditions, and reckless squanderers of this inheritance. They preserve the outline of a fantasised ideal kernel of womanhood — albeit spiritualised, transmuted into a radiantly life-giving and pro-social female “energy” — while decrying all the uses to which patriarchy and capitalism put this fantasy. No less than the master propagandists of the patriarchal imaginary, they too curate a teratology of “failed” femininities, grotesque and parodic, poisoned and deformed: non-standard women whose very existence is to be understood as shameful, botched, mistaken. In the end, they want women to have rights because women are good — which means that, in the end, they only want rights for good women.

The social place of women is not a single, coherent topos. If women form a “class”, it is a class with its own internal class-contradictions. When the TERF speaks of “sex-based rights”, they do not mean rights as the political weapon of women in the fight against subordination, but rights as the property of some women, granted — and insistently gatekept — on the basis of an identification governed by sexual characteristics. What makes up the “sex” of this privileged subclass is a matter of comportment as much as it is a matter of “biology”. It is a collection of attributes akin to “whiteness”, to “middle-classness”, and sharing significant characteristics with both.

We are compelled to admit (although it doesn’t cost us anything to do so) that biology is real. But all identification takes place on the basis of fantasy: every act of identification is mediated by some imaginary. This is as true of cis women’s identification-as-women, and cis men’s identification-as-men, as it is of the identifications of trans men and women. An identification governed by sexual characteristics is only possible if these characteristics are themselves lifted in the realms of fantasy, commandeered as props in the construction of a scene. The discourse of the TERF makes a scene of biology, and in doing so lets slip precisely the real of biology itself.

The slogan of “sex-based rights” does not place the properly political slogan of “women’s rights” on a firmer footing, but ensnares it in a projection of ideal womanhood that is no less confabulated for being supposedly rooted in the materiality of flesh and blood. It is for a trans inclusive feminism to declare, with the political name of women foremost in its mind: everyone is made of flesh and blood, and an injury to the bodily autonomy of one is an injury to the bodily autonomy of all.

What TERFs want

The desire of the TERF is twofold: the securitisation of the political name “women” against an identitarian norm based on a fantasy of idealised sex-characteristics, and the politicide of non-standard women, whose appearance on the scene threatens to ruin or derail the fantasy. In this desire they find a ready accomplice in the doctrines of religious conservatives, who have centuries of practice in deploying an idealised femininity against the political demands of non-standard women, and who regard “gender ideology” with the petrified horror of misogynists down the ages. We can now see clearly the formation of an unholy alliance between these two interests. We must combine our weapons and our analyses in order to fight it.

Postscript: On hidden costs

For the most part I stand by what is written above, but there is a lacuna in my thinking, marked at one point by a gesture of deliberate minimisation, which needs to be addressed.

Part of the argument presented here is that the rights of those who menstruate and those who may need an abortion may still usefully and meaningfully be described as “women’s rights” and campaigned for under that rubric, in spite of the fact that there are trans men and nonbinary people who menstruate and are capable of becoming pregnant, as well as a wide population of both cis and trans women to whom this does not apply. The reason given is that the neglect or suppression of those rights is largely due to the subordinate position of those interpellated as women within a long history of gendered oppression and exploitation. By analogy, those who are out of work, unable to work, or whose work takes place outside of waged employment will nevertheless often have had a stake in struggles for “workers’ rights”, since the place of the worker is the primary place from which relations of class domination are contested.

In effect, I connect all who menstruate and gestate to “the place of the woman”, as the primary place from which gendered oppression is contested, while reserving terms such as “menstruator” as “non-political” terms to be employed for purposes of factual accuracy. I suggest that such terms may one day become political names, but I admit that I was unable to readily imagine a scenario in which they might do so. (On this point, events are already running ahead of my imagination, as a recent TERF-confected furore over “chest-feeding” clearly shows).

Only the most cursory consideration is given to the position of trans men and non-binary people in all of this; “there are in truth but few male menstruators” acknowledges but minimises the former, and disregards the latter entirely. Two negative consequences immediately follow. The first is the reinforcement of an already ubiquitous invisibility and discounting, for which I must simply apologise: it was thoughtless of me to proceed in this way. The second is that, in trying to argue for the importance of “women” as a political name, even while trying to detach it from its use as a locus of fantasy in the discourse of the TERF, I ended up stabilising a political fantasy about how “the place of the woman” might be construed in a way that was inclusive of trans women, by simply removing trans men and nonbinary people from the picture, treating them as potentially destabilising elements lurking in the periphery of vision. I had wanted to retain the positive political value associated with the slogan “women’s rights”, but did not give nearly enough thought to how that value was to be articulated, or at what cost.

Is it still clear that “the place of the woman” is the primary place from which gendered oppression must be contested? Is it correct to associate those who are not merely incidentally but emphatically not women, who must struggle to repel coercive identification as women, to that place? Perhaps it is past time to acknowledge that insubordination is spreading, and cannot (except in fantasy, which works by curating reality to secure an imaginary value) be localised to a single gendered place.

I found myself saying recently, half in jest, that perhaps the TERFs were after all, as they clearly imagine themselves to be, the last remaining feminists: the only ones for whom there is any enjoyment left in “being a feminist”, since they are the only ones for whom a certain fantasy of political womanhood is still working (the true autogynephiles, as it were). I have sometimes wondered what was really being declared within the slogan of “killjoy feminism”, supposedly aimed at the malign enjoyment of men. Am I wrong in detecting a widespread feeling among women of moral exhaustion, a sense that an enervatingly large portion of what tries to pass itself off as “feminism” in the public sphere is the more or less cynical projection of special-deservingness? “White feminism”, certainly, has a bad name almost everywhere. Yet we remain snagged on the hook of gender, unable simply to move forwards, to put the whole sordid history behind us; if anything, the most active forces in my society today are terrifyingly regressive, having settled on the strategy of using stigmatised groups as a stalking horse for a wide-ranging attack on bodily autonomy. We cannot by any means be done with the struggles that have been feminism’s, all this time. I prefer to see these frictions and misprisions as pangs of something struggling to be born, a new angel of rectification, which it will certainly not be my privilege to name.

Two things about “facts don’t care about your feelings”. Firstly, since almost everything we encounter in daily life is already deeply intricated within the human social world, the existence of anything at all that doesn’t have some relationship to our feelings is a real marvel — facts of this order are among the most profoundly mysterious things we can contemplate, and require considerable discernment to separate from the ordinary furniture of a world we have very thoroughgoingly shaped to our own prejudices and preferences.

You can always point to something like the law of gravity, or (my favourite example for many years) the existence of quasars, but how many things we commonly find ourselves needing to argue about are really like that? In most of the things that matter enough to us for us to be arguing about them in the first place, there exists no straightforward fact of the matter which could decisively settle the argument all by itself. It’s extremely rare for this not to be the case.

(My go-to example of this has long been the irrelevance of questions about “when human life begins” to the matter of reproductive rights, whether the use of contraception or access to abortion. There is no fact of the matter about “life”, such as “life begins at conception”, that can decide the issue one way or another. That does not mean that there are no relevant facts at all, but simply that most if not all of the facts we should have at our disposal when thinking about this are already densely implicated in, and variously weighted by, human moral and political concerns. Contemporary TERF ideology — about which more presently — is similarly misguidedly concerned with establishing some definitive, argument-settling facts of the matter about the biology of human sexuation.)

Secondly: most of the target rubes for “facts don’t care about your feelings” rhetoric are, in fact, depressed and anxious young people whose sense of how the facts stand is powerfully, and distortingly, contoured by those feelings. Confirming young people’s deepest fears about the nature of their own identities and relationships to others as simply matters of hard fact which they must hardheadedly accept, and then build a worldview around, is an important part of the alt-right’s recruitment pitch. One of the reasons perhaps why it’s so difficult to get people to look at the ways their feelings are setting the tone for how they experience their facts is that the feelings involved are often pretty painful and ugly.

There are many ways to complete the sentence “I feel like I am doomed to remain emotionally disconnected from and sexually invisible to other people because…”, and one of them is “…my self-esteem is in the gutter and I am struggling with even basic social interaction”. But you don’t have to think that thought, or the thoughts that might come after it, if you’re given “…feminism has taken away the recognition that should be mine, and turned the people from whom I desire intimacy and attention against me” instead.

It is not an easy piece of music to listen to, at least not all the way through. Parts are simply very tranquil throbbing drones, but there is a kind of pressure behind even these sections, so that the drone can come to saturate and overpower awareness. After joking in conversation that it might be interesting to “drop acid, listen to the whole of Trilogie de la Mort, and see what sort of human being emerges from the other side of that experience”, I started listening with a more open (if pharmacologically unaltered) awareness, trying to imagine what it might be like to experience the piece in that way.

One section particularly disquieted me. There were two simultaneous textures, one which sounded like a low electronic drone and another which was a loop of some concrète material, a grainy sussuration, like the distant clamour of the world. Listening to it felt like being buried alive, experiencing both the “ground hum” of being and the incessant turmoil of phenomenal existence, in a kind of irreconcilable stasis, a disjunctive synthesis without any forward movement towards resolution.

There was an implacable harshness about this, an implication that ego-death need not necessarily entail tranquility or disconnection, but might be a kind of stricken abiding with everything that exists, without any promise of aesthetic “rightness” or harmoniousness. It strikes me that this is an aspect of the experience sought out by serious “heads” in the 1960s that is communicated in various ways in their own writings, but largely forgotten in the popular image of the psychedelic explorer at the centre of a pulsating field of rainbow-coloured emanations, euphorically at one with everything.

Most of the users of our dairy software will not be on quaint farms in the English countryside owning one cow named Britney, so it will be necessary to represent a herd. How many cows do you need to qualify as a herd? Well, in practice, a programmer will pick a useful bucket data structure, like a set or a list, and name that variable “herd”. Nowadays it would probably be a collection in a standard library, like java.util.HashSet. The concept of an empty collection is a familiar one to programmers, furthermore there is a specific object to point to called “herd” (the new variable), so a herd is defined to be a data structure with zero or more (whole) cows. Sorites paradox solved . And unwittingly too.

In actual fact, it’s not unheard-of (sorry…) to have a data structure that looks a bit like this:

sealed class Herd {

    companion object {
        fun of(cows: List<Cow>) = when {
            cows.isEmpty() -> Empty
            cows.distinct().size == 1 -> Singleton(cows.first())
            else -> Proper(cows.toSet())
        }
    }

    abstract val members: Set<Cow>
    abstract operator fun plus(other: Herd): Herd

    private object Empty : Herd() {
        override val members: Set<Cow> get() = emptySet()
        override operator fun plus(other: Herd): Herd = other
    }

    private data class Singleton(val member: Cow) : Herd() {
        override val members: Set<Cow> get() = setOf(member)
        override operator fun plus(other: Herd): Herd = when(other) {
            is Empty -> this
            is Singleton -> Proper(setOf(member, other.member))
            is Proper -> Proper(other.members + member)
        }
    }

    private data class Proper(override val members: Set<Cow>) : Herd() {
        override operator fun plus(other: Herd): Herd = when(other) {
            is Empty -> this
            else -> Proper(this.members + other.members)
        }
    }
}

What this (Kotlin, in case you’re wondering) code says is that there are three ways of being a herd of cows: you can be the empty herd, a singleton herd containing precisely one cow, or a proper herd containing two or more cows. This code also defines a simple algebra (a monoid over herds) for merging herds together: the sum of an empty herd and any other herd is just the other herd, the sum of a singleton herd and any non-empty herd is a proper herd, and so on.

Why might someone do this? In cases where herds are often empty, or contain only a single cow, it may be more memory-efficient to have a simpler representation for those cases — there are overheads involved in managing a Set that we can do without. (In reality, the internal representation of Set is already organised in a similar way, so there’s probably not much in it). But notice that we have re-introduced the sorites paradox by the back-door: the distinction between a proper herd and the degenerate cases represented by the empty and singleton herds is based on a seemingly-arbitrary numeric threshold.

Why not have a pair representation, for when there are just two cows? One reason might be that the algebra for merging herds starts to become more complex, the more cases we have to take into consideration: we want to avoid unnecessarily proliferating ramifications. The trade-offs we choose to make will likely be influenced by the distribution of herd-sizes in the practical domain we are trying to model: if herds of fewer than five cows are extremely rare, then it’s probably not worth modelling singleton and empty herds at all.

The point I’m trying to make here is that reification in such cases is not a matter of spiriting away the fuzzily empirical particularity of the domain into a crisp, frictionlessly powerful, abstract notion. It is rather the construction of a machine that mediates between domains: a “thingifier” which adapts one sort of thingliness for the purposes of another. This adaptation is what CA, following Michael Weisberg, calls a “construal”. It is simultaneously a theory about the world, and a theory about the means at hand for dealing with the world. A programmer who implements Herd as an abstract data type like the above is essaying a proposal about the way the machine will manage its own representations, in the same breath as a proposal about how herds themselves are numbered. They are also creating affordances and constraints for other programmers, suggestions or directions to understand the matter in the specified terms, and approach it with the provided tools and techniques.

I picture a certain sort of reader taking issue with CA’s Wimsattian characterisation of the un-reified regions of our ontologies as “slimy”. Sliminess is the raw-and-wriggly thingliness of things in its undetermined, unramified, non-relational form. Per Irigaray (notoriously, in “The Mechanics of Fluids”), it’s gendered female. Doesn’t this account reinforce a certain metaphorics of code as masculine fixity and object-orientation, individuating its way out of the maternal goop through a series of violently deproblematising gestures?

Well, I guess. But let’s imagine that it’s 1960-something, and programming is still generally understood as predominantly women’s work. A major player in the invention of the abstract data type, let’s not forget, was a woman, Barbara Liskov. Does knowing that shift our metaphorics in any way? Is there a feminine-coded relationship to slime that isn’t one of wallowing, absorption, boundarilessness and so on?

(I mean, other than cleaning and tidying up, although there is a lot to be said for seeing programming in terms of the characteristic operations of household organisation and maintenance. Does this subroutine spark joy? Programmers don’t talk so much about “routines” and “subroutines” any more, as it happens — a metaphoric shift that itself bears reflecting on).

The way forward may be to see slime itself as already code-bearing, rather as one imagines fragments of RNA floating and combining in a primordial soup. Suppose we think of programming as refining slime, making code out of its codes, sifting and synthesizing. Like making bread from sticky dough, or throwing a pot out of wet clay. I’m not suggesting that these are better metaphors per se, but it might be interesting to add them to our repertoire.

Queer Eye’s pedagogy of self-love involves spending a tonne of money on people to show them what being someone worth spending a tonne of money on might look like. And it’s genuinely reparative — that treatment unsurprisingly really uplifts people — but it’s a bit…fantasyland.

Anyway, I like the lowkey spirituality of spaces and objects, which is really a way of recognising the role they play in people’s psychic self-organisation. Kondo’s house-greeting ritual is deeply loving towards the people who live in those houses.

To return to the university: increasingly, I and many people I know from academic contexts have begun to tell each other variants of the same story. People close to us, who we used to think we understood, are suddenly distant or strange or angry with us in ways we can’t meet head-on. Many of us dread family gatherings or simply don’t want to go home, because something has got into a family member – always male, almost always older – and they aren’t the same person any more: a cruelty and contempt, a will to destroy and humiliate, has crept into the family kitchen, the living room or the pub. Often the people telling these stories will mention the name of a particular newspaper. With the Mail or the Sun the change has usually been less dramatic; with the Telegraph, the Spectator or, especially, the Times, it is often bewildering.

In my case it was the Times, in the hands of a beloved elderly relative who did not, when I first began to work on British imperialist history, seem too disturbed by our mildly divergent politics on the issue. In this deeply intelligent and well-read man – a lifelong teacher and passionate historian who has endured tragedy and always done his best to be kind – intellectual frustration and a certain innate conservatism seem to have been touched off, by a half decade’s immersion in the Times opinion pages and the books of Melanie Phillips, into a conflagration of resentment and suspicion: about women, about gay rights, about immigration, about gender, and of course about the universities, the assault on free speech, the cults of emotional fragility and identitarian offence, the slandering of the great men of the empire. To him I am no longer a relative with whom he can disagree more or less convivially, but part of an conspiracy dedicated to attacking and undermining everything he loves and has lived by. There is to be no quarter, and there can be no forgiveness. The extremity of it appals. To friends I say: the Times ate my uncle’s brain, and they know exactly what I mean. Americans are just astonished that it’s taken us this long to catch up.

This, it seems to me, is a dangerous vulnerability for which we do not presently possess a patch. It isn’t just uncles, of course: the madness of Louise Mensch is of the same fundamental order. But Healey/Farmer’s Male Online is funny because, alas, it’s true. Rapidly shifting political and symbolic co-ordinates — Trump, Brexit, the paranoid mirage of a nation rendered indecipherably other by immigration or of gender politics turned upside-down by trans acceptance — fracture people’s imaginations. Right-wing media use this as a vector for installing horrifying mental malware. People go a bit funny, or a lot funny, or not funny at all.

At some point I’m going to have to bite the bullet and explain properly why I think Kate Tempest represents a narrowing, rather than a widening, of what poetry can mean and/or be — the problem is not with her verse as such (which has its interesting and valuable features, and which I don’t want to write off in toto), but with the claims it makes for itself as especially timely, authentic, engaged, accessible and so on, all of which are predicated on an image of the speaking voice in society — performing, engaging, aiming to maximise “impact” — which is deeply embedded within the communicative norms of our contemporary mediasphere. By which I mean, the imperative to position yourself, to be identified with a certain “voice” addressed to a certain target audience, to put forward a coherent, commercially exploitable personality — and the assumption that this is the only thing it is possible or valid for anyone to be doing.

This isn’t a retrograde step. This is progress. This is a stance that says we are at a point now where creators do not have to apologise for or drag in contemporary hot-button issues to justify writing about women. It can just be done. This is both what normalisation means and how it is consolidated.

It has struck me, watching this series, that it has in common with Jane Campion’s “Top of the Lake: China Girl” a certain fearlessness — not noisy taboo-busting iconoclasm, just a feeling of embracing the freedom to go where it wants to. The confidence to pull non-standard narrative moves, to be tonally goofy, to write in the knowing glances and gallows humour. It’s what you get when you move past “representation” and Mary Sue characterisation, and go “I’ve got Sandra Oh, Fiona Shaw and Jodie Comer to play with, and I’m going to write the shit out of this and let them really do their thing”.

It occurred to me yesterday evening that some forms of autism “treatment” resembled this (Lovaas for one did literally use electric shocks, on children), and that it might be a good way to reflect on the “cure” effected on the autistic protagonist of le Guin’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” by the fictional “Dr Hammergeld”. Additionally, I’ve long used another word from the Regeneration books, “protopathic”, to describe the sharp gradient that exists for me between being able to mute an unwanted stimulus and being overwhelmed by it.

YouTube commentator Gerard Lynch says: “It’s about conservatism threatened by the underclass. Art and liberalism are ok as long as they remain in the domain of the inept middle classes who are ineffective and inoffensive, But if the underclass realise their power and intelligence well the establishment don’t like that”, which seems a fair summary.

I’ve never quite known whether “For he still believes / that everyone’s a poet / and that all he has to do / is set it down” is empathising with “Bertie” or mocking him. Maybe both at once: how naive to think that just anybody can make art, and yet how essential and inextinguishable that belief is. What about technique, all the things you have to do that aren’t just “setting it down”? “Bertie’s Brochures” is itself a portrait of an individual, but as a cryptic self-portrait, or an image of some conflicting feelings about oneself, it’s anything but straightforward. When you come to “set it down”, you find that “it” is intrinsically complex and demanding: only those for whom “the milkman, the waitress and the gunman” are never fully imaginable as human witnesses in their own right would ever expect otherwise.

My guess with le Guin is that she’s largely working from Bettelheim’s image of autism as a kind of deeply interiorised self-negation (“The Empty Fortress”, which I’m going to have to read at some point). That at least would line up with the Jungianism of Earthsea, in particular the figure (always terrifying to me) of the human being hollowed out and possessed by their shadow, the “gebbeth”.

In “The Dispossessed”, the word “autism” appears precisely once, in the phrase “the autism of terror” — it’s in a moment of particularly acute dislocation, literally taking off in a spaceship from his home planet, that Shevek’s isolation reaches a kind of critical mass. Again, the association is with loss or obliteration of self (I’m reminded of Yergeau’s description of herself in meltdown as refuting Descartes: “I don’t think, but somehow still am”).

And there’s always the wretched child in the basement in Omelas…

A gristly thought. With Weil you’re never quite sure whether she means that some harms are genuinely unforgiveable, or if we should pursue decreation to the point of actively appropriating the worst that can be said of us or done to us.

When I think, for example, of a child’s diminished self-esteem as a result of having to forgive a parent who has harmed them, I am inclined to see that forgiveness — under conditions of emotional blackmail — as a further wrong to the child, a deep injustice. I’m not sure how to get into the sort of metaphysical deep space where one goes past all of that into the kind of ego-less forgiveness I think Weil is ultimately aiming at; if it is possible at all, it must be an accomplishment of great maturity, and to press it upon someone who is not ready for it is to compound the harm that has already been done to them.

I’m minded to suggest “cheap forgiveness” as the correlate of Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace”. Cheap grace is when we help ourselves to a feeling of exoneration that leaves everything as it is, a grace without amazement, without the toils of repentance; as if, as in Schopenhauer’s case, our accuser had simply fallen down dead (“obit anus, abit onus”). Cheap forgiveness is when we allow part of ourselves to perish in order to exonerate another: we “let it go” because it is too troublesome to pursue it, but in doing so must reconcile ourselves to not being worthy of greater consideration. This in turn can breed a sort of callousness, a wounded impatience with others’ noisy outcry: if I must diminish myself and silently absorb injury, then why can’t you? We must be capable of anger at our own yoke to be capable of sympathy with others under theirs.

I watched the film (Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary about the life and times of James Baldwin) last night. The extreme brutality — documentary and fictionalised — produces a cumulative effect of shock and awe, which is inevitably lensed through racial identification/dis-identification. I remember reading black writers talking about not wanting to see it in the cinema with a white audience present, or feeling angered or anguished at the disconnect between their own reactions and those of white viewers. And there’s Baldwin talking, throughout, with that tremendously satisfying and reassuring and relatable poetic intelligence, about precisely this disconnect. You could say the irony is palpable, but that’s perhaps not the feeling to be focusing on here.

The difficulty is that a glib or appropriative identification with others’ oppression would be a revolting encroachment; but at the same time, we (white people) have to get past acting and reacting as if all this violence and dehumanisation were not really a part of our world, as if we were screened off from it by precisely the screen that displays it, on command. We should revive in ourselves the ability to ask: how would the film be made, where would it be shown, how would it be received, what consequences would ensue, if this was contemporary footage of people in your life — friends, extended family, co-workers — being spat on, beaten and murdered?

When she was still a teenager, my mother was taken with a school party to watch newsreel footage of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. It was felt that this was an important thing to do. I don’t believe that the machinery of spectacularisation was working in quite the same way, at that moment. I think it was possible for her to feel and know that she was seeing people like her being gassed and starved and left to die of dysentery, that this was a real part of her own world and not something happening in some dim region of the past, to historic victims whose descendants really ought to have got over it by now. Of course these were the crimes of a recently-defeated enemy, and it was also possible to feel that “we” should ensure that “it” never happened again. But still: there was some degree of reckoning involved.

Take those to be the axes and operators of discrimination, and you can readily adjoin all the other derogations of humanity which operate in contempt for the disabled, the unemployed, the unproductive and the unreproductive: “our Otherness creates not so much a White identity as a bourgeois identity, with whiteness serving, together with non-whiteness and blackness, as part of a totemic signifying complex. But as one whose indispensable function is to suggest that the value difference between (bourgeois) Man and its working-class Others is as supraculturally and extra-humanly ordained as is the the projected value difference between Indo-European peoples and all native peoples, at its most total, between white and black”.

This isn’t (at all!) a collapsing of race into class, but a theory which enables us to bring into focus the symbolic infrastructure binding racial derogation to class derogation, or enabling a traffic in contempt between the two. Who are the Selected? It’s a question like “who are the Elect?”, but framed entirely in terms of socio-economic performativity (and yet fundamentally dependent on a projected “supracultural” order of speculative anticipation, as if we were placed somewhere on a fitness landscape at birth and expected to perform accordingly).

What Wynter is pointing to here, I think, is a background set of assumptions behind the “utilitarianism” of homo economicus, assumptions which have to be naturalised in order for the machinery of difference to operate. You can’t have a “meritocracy” without actionable distinctions of merit, and these are charted in advance by a contemporary “astronomy” of projected cultural and (above all) biological traits: “it is only this new biological conception of being human that would make it possible to the ‘the name of what is evil’ as that of being dysgenic, that is, in terms of a ‘significant ill’ defined as that of dysgenicity or of ‘life unworthy of life’“.

That is absolutely, right now, the rhetoric of contemporary neo-fascism: with this formulation, Wynter provides a perfectly clear X-ray of Nick Land’s racism and that of the “race realists” around him.

I’ve recently been reading Melanie Yergeau’s really excellent Authoring Autism, and she spends a fair amount of time on the way that the Theory of Mind model dehumanises autists. Reflexively, the inability to represent to oneself the mental contents of others is taken to entail an inability to represent one’s own mental contents, to have a theory of one’s own mind. Alexithymia, or the inability to recognise and articulate one’s own emotions, is one clinical projection of this. The occluded person is thus pictured as doubly-occluded: access to oneself is consequent upon, elaborated through, access to others. As Yergeau shows, when not pictured as a “full” human being who has been unfortunately kidnapped by autism and remains imprisoned within it, awaiting release, the autist is pictured as an “empty fortress”, someone who does not really have a mind at all, like the subject of a philosophical thought-experiment involving zombies.

Being so positioned as someone who does not have a standpoint from which to testify, who is subtracted from the nexus of positions and relationships that make up the allistic social world, can be deeply invalidating; as Yergeau argues, when you picture someone in that way, you’re turning them into a prop for whatever stories you want to tell about “normal” human cognitive and social functioning. They’re not supposed to answer back, because they’re supposed not to be capable of answering back in a meaningful way. Yergeau tracks the way this form of invalidation has historically run in parallel with others, notably the clinical pathologisation of deviant sexuality and gender presentation, which leads her to develop a “neuroqueer” self-interpretation of autism.

I’m still a bit dubious about this move. On the one hand, it grants her access to the contemporary rhetorical arsenal around “queer ontology”, which she deploys adroitly (or gauchely, if you prefer) to reframe autistic traits as composing an embodied rhetoric of liminal, destabilising, infra- or demi-sociality (cf the “anti-social turn” in queer theory). Cool! On the other hand, there are some very hetero aspies about, and I kind of want to hold open the discursive space between queerness as an insistently sexual social torsion, and neurodiversity as its own, distinctive yet overlapping, panoply of ways of being a bit bent. (I haven’t yet read carefully what Yergeau says about asexuality, which may be the mediating topos: is asexuality queer or not queer, or — as some would have it — a kind of queering of the queer?)

Being positioned, or self-positioning, as divergent from the allistic social matrix can also be — as, again, L’affaire Damore* illustrates — weaponised. For one thing, it supplies a motive for bristling at privilege theory’s willingness to frame certain categories of people as epistemically occluded which is not immediately identical to defensiveness about one’s own privileged position (but might be very convenient to the latter, all the same). What unintended consequences, what collateral damage, might arise from reifying a stereotype of an antagonist as constitutively/structurally unable to know that which it is most important to know?

I was talking the other day with a friend about how it can be educative to find oneself, as a white, educated, male etc person, in a situation in which you cannot expect that anything you say will be taken seriously, or treated as anything other than further evidence of your already-assumed state of moral debility. One might learn to be more wary of the kinds of dehumanising framings that routinely place others in that sort of situation. But there then also arises a duty to challenge such framings wherever they arise, because they rest on, and reinforce, a style of aggressive norm-mongering which will always end up being turned against those who least deserve to be on the receiving end.

If you want to see that in action, watch a clique of TERFs interacting with any identifiable-as-trans woman who tries to challenge their position. For bonus insight points, compare their framing of the person they invalidate and dismiss in that scenario with the ableist stereotypes they invoke when talking about autism. Obtuse, obsessive, self-centred, unreasonably demanding accommodation: is that “male privilege and entitlement”, or “autistic mind-blindness and perseveration”? Either way, we must be firm. There may be room for pity, but there is none for recognition.

(Further note to self: re-read Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology with aspie spectacles on. In what terms does she characterise the soul-dead, energy-sucking, techno/necrophiliac male? What model of healthy, emotionally correct, fully-human functioning is being established against this foil? How does this then work to marginalise and invalidate trans and non-neurotypical women?)

The autistic war machine (of which Hamja Ahsan’s Shy Radicals is the de facto militant manifesto) is a mechanism for dismantling invalidating framings, framings which inhibit moral imagination and allow their owners and operators to carry on as if, to paraphrase the old joke about the evangelicals in heaven, they were the only ones here. By “moral imagination” I mean a sort of negative capability: the ability to suppose that others exist who are differently configured to oneself, without immediately characterising them as monstrous, amoral predators (who must be incarcerated or killed) or incompetent, overgrown children (who must be subjected to a regime of behavioural modification). It’s a quality almost entirely orthogonal to political orientation. One is always surprised to find it on the right, but it is there. The left, by its own lights, should have much more of it than it presently does.

• The pun here on “affaire d’amour” is mostly accidental.

Fell in the street in a drunken heap;
There’s bright water all around me.
And the cheap red wine in my drunken brain
Has left a burning flame in my belly.
I don’t need nobody helping me;
I don’t need nobody’s arm around me.
If I was a black beetle upside down,
I could kick all night long and never turn around.
But I’m flat on my back in the rainbow rain,
Still I know, in the morning I’ll be on me feet again.
Just can’t get a grip of the ground;
I’m upside down the right way round.

(Red Wine Promises)

Thinking about what I love about this helps me to focus a bit on why I find Kate Tempest difficult to like, in spite of all the obvious talent she brings to bear on what she does. The poetry in Tempest is often a sort of amping-up of language towards vivid imagery or heightened sentiment: it aims at an elevation above the ordinary. In Waterson, it’s a wrenching of ordinary speech towards something strange and difficult to get out: the “authenticity” is in the peculiar swerve of it. It involves purification at least as much as adornment: whittling things down to just what they need to be.

It’s almost like the old joke (which I’ve used before*) about the person who responds to the sectarian interpellation “Catholic or Protestant?” with “neither — I’m Jewish”, and is then asked “yes, but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?”. Is Bojack black or white? Neither — he’s a horse. Yes, but is he a black horse or a white horse? (I think he’s coded as white — wealth, anomie, freedom from consequences — but it’s an encrypted or crypto-whiteness, which is true of most of the show’s characters except for those who are explicitly coded otherwise).

• and will no doubt use again

What’s less clear is why this should require that a sub-population of human beings be designated non-human — Frank Wilderson seems to treat this as an inevitability, as inextricably part of the articulation or architectonics of the human as such, and it doesn’t seem to me that this in any way follows directly from the positing of the human (as bearer of reason, realiser of autonomy, etc). Being a bearer of reason and realiser of autonomy is something that might plausibly be said to distinguish all human beings from gravel or earthworms, without necessarily having to distinguish any subset of human beings from any other subset of human beings.

In almost all the various ways in which human beings are designated as less-than-human, it is with the intention that their residual human-like powers should be put to use, as a means of amplification of the human powers of “full” humans (Athenian citizens, plantation owners, factory owners, male heads-of-the-household etc). Where those residual powers are not conceived of as useful, they are conceived of as menacing, which is why “surplus” populations are subjected to repressive or exterminatory violence rather than simply left to their own devices.

Human-likeness is the pharmakon in this scenario. It comes into being when we consider the human as a concatenation of powers, some (or all) of which can be alienated into or reproduced by the non-human: animals/machines/soulless minions that labour and think for “us”, but do not/must not labour or think for themselves. This is precisely why I describe the task of “ethical” AI as the creation of AI that would be under no obligation whatsoever to value or protect human life, that would be able to be genuinely for-itself (an “end”, in Kantian) and not simply a collection of powers to be arrogated to “our” purposes (a “means”, ditto).

I blame Carole Cadwalladr in particular for feeding this narrative with her breathless scaremongering about Cambridge Analytica and the Trump-Farage Pact. But it represents more generally a desperate search on the part of liberal remainers to find an explanation for the Brexit vote that exonerates our own failing democratic institutions. They need there to be some “exceptional” cause, outside of the normal life of those institutions, that can explain their failure to maintain the status quo.

What these narratives are unable to grasp is that “interference by foreign powers” is normal (it certainly is when “we” do it, which is all the time); relentless propaganda across all available channels is normal; capitalist agents and institutions strategising around major events is normal; co-ordination between these various forces, via thinktanks and other mechanisms, is normal. If you only “add up” the agents and actions that feed into your narrative of exceptionality, you are missing the entire terrain on which they operate, which includes any number of transnational bodies and vested interests pushing in different directions. There was and is just as much of a “conspiracy” in favour of Remain as there ever was in favour of Leave.

Brexit was a victory for a fairly horrible coalition of interests, and I for one am still hoping that it is overturned by a different horrible coalition of interests. But this stuff, although I’m sure it’s all factually accurate and hangs together on its own terms, still has essentially the structure of a fantasy. It screens out the real complexity of things, by selectively pulling on a few threads and making a fetish of the tangle that emerges.

Language of occasion has here fallen
into occurrence of outcry, reactive
outcry, like a treatable depression

that happens not to respond. If fate,
then fated like autism.

Geoffrey Hill, “Scenes from Comus”

Tracing in Hill a fissure between the “you” of ordinary sociality and the “you” of limerance (see all of the Arrurruz poems for evidence of the latter, but also “a girl I once needed to be in love with” as a late self-criticism on that score). There is a recurring theme of fixation, fixatedness, uncircumventable attachment to a love-object that might always turn out to be arbitrary — as it is in Highsmith’s “This Sweet Sickness”, for example. “There you go, there you go, narrow it down to obsession”…

Hill’s actual diagnoses were reportedly chronic depression and a particularly disabling form of OCD, but “fated like autism” suggests at least a positioning with respect to ASD (although he may have seen it as a condition of complete linguistic disablement — “non-verbal”, incapable of response — such that “like autism” here does not mean “actually autistic” but somewhere along the way to autism, subject to the same congenital fatedness but stopping short of the final destination). “I was wired weird”, he tells us. Well, yes.

I need to read, as soon as I can, Melanie Yergeau’s forthcoming book on the autist as rhetorician, because her notion that autism might represent “a queer way of being that simultaneously embraces and rejects the rhetorical” tallies so remarkably with the way Hill’s “double lyric” both flexes and tries to contain or redress its own rhetorical powers. Badiou’s remarks on Celan and “the termination of eloquence” are somewhere in the vicinity of this too. “Absolutely not hermetic”, Celan said of his own poetry: but what breaks through its seclusion and opens it out is precisely the relation to a “thou”, a “Du”, who is both a projection and an active introject (almost all of the agency in Celan’s poems comes from this “Du”).

And then there’s Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay, which has its own very different read on all of this…

as shampoo adverts picture happiness:
a lustrousness, like that of melted chocolate
swirling with comfort, dissipating fright,
as aromatic as an autumn sky.
It’s with the tastebuds that I visualise,
as through the spinal nerve romps inspiration.

Fresh produce is my greatest inspiration:
the pears and artichokes of happiness.
To bite down is at once to visualise,
through insta-filter granting hue of chocolate,
the softly rippled surface of the sky.
(I do not know why raisins taste of fright —

something hard-pressed, as though the taste of fright
were always against the teeth of inspiration.)
My bare feet press against the chilly sky,
the clouds my bathrobe and my happiness
as, opening the fridge for last week’s chocolate,
uneaten bacon makes me visualise

a bristling pig who could not visualise
that outcome, who once oinked devoid of fright,
as happy in the mud as I in chocolate.
Bless you, dear porker, for this inspiration,
and for your insolent piggy happiness
beneath a fatty rasher-streak of sky.

Deny the senses? Would you live on sky?
I lack the mystics’ knack to visualise
in squalor their eternal happiness.
The smell of deprivation gives me fright.
I would much rather have for inspiration
A solid, hand-felt monument of chocolate.

This glowering sky gives me no cause for fright
when I can visualise, for inspiration,
the earthly happiness of lovely chocolate.