With the closure of Welly Club and Polar Bear we're losing 2 pillars of Hull's live music scene – literally generations of Hull gig-goers have seen their 1st gigs at these historic venues. Enjoyed so many nights at both incl. with @steve_lamacq at The Sesh in 2016 pic.twitter.com/W1nZl3FvE6
— BBC Music Introducing Humberside (@BBCIntroHumber) July 16, 2020
The announced closure of Hull venues The Polar Bear and Welly, presumably due to loss of revenue during the Covid-19 pandemic, is truly heartbreaking. I’m sorry to say that it has been years since I’ve been to either — I don’t get up to Hull nearly as much as I’d like anymore — but they both defined so much of my teenage years and mid-20s.
Welly was the first club I ever went to. First to their under-18s nights and then numerous times afterwards as “an adult”. It went through a lot of changes over those years — first as a haven for emo kids, scene kids, drum’n’bass kids, goths, punks, and then it was eventually just the go-to student venue.
I remember the first time I was there I was 16 and someone put a cigarette out on my arm in a mosh pit. One of those lung-ruining nights before the smoking ban in 2007. This gurning girl just turned to me and said, “Err ner, ‘ave put me ciggie out on yur aaarm.” To which I said, “Yes,” and then she just walked away — a fond memory, for some reason. The mosh pits in there used to be rough too. It was a weird vibe when these men, that were evidently a lot older than the target clientele, would show up and start swinging fists. They were oddly part of the fabric though. There was a sense of danger at those nights (evenings, really) that was all part of the charm.
I don’t remember any of the songs they used to play in there. A lot of chart stuff. A lot of pop punk. Occasionally, they used to throw out “Out of Space” by the Prodigy and that would always drive me mental. As rare an occasion as this was, it always makes me think of Welly.
I was also in Welly the night that Michael Jackson died. I was stood at the bar leading out to the smoking area when the news filtered around from person to person to person. It was surreal watching the information travel through the throng. Once it eventually reached whoever was on the decks they didn’t play anything but Jackson tunes all night. That was special. (I’m not sure it would have the same effect now, child abuse allegations considered, but it was back then.)
I had a few birthdays in there too. I can’t remember which ones… I’m pretty sure I turned twenty-three in there, along with a couple of ages either side of that. One year, we were stood in the queue for hours on Boxing Day. My friends Will and Louis decided to do a very conspicuous piss each against a nearby wall and got caught by the bouncers who threw them out. I thought that was a birthday ruined. Instead we just had another hour in the queue. He’d forgotten about them by then.
There was also the night we went and then had a house party afterwards somewhere on Princes Avenue. I’d gone back a bit earlier with some friends and a few of us kept drinking quietly in the living room. Someone had loudly advertised the party at closing time, however, and I’ll never forget the sight of a few hundred people trying to pile into this tiny flat above a kebab shop. That night, the lads who ran the local indian took over the streets at sunrise and started a cricket tournament in the middle of the road at 5am. We cheered them on from the roof. That was the last time I went to Welly and didn’t feel old as fuck.
The Polar Bear, by comparison, hardly feels like it has been open long at all. When the Sesh moved there from Linnet & Lark, and when my friend Dan started working there, I’m pretty sure I went every Tuesday whilst I lived in Hull from 2013-14 and again in 2016.
The last time I was there was in March 2017, I think. I saw a Blackest Ever Black DJ set as part of the COUM Transmissions retrospective events. That was special too.
Too many memories. Below are some photos taken at various points over the last five years or so — mostly in the Polar Bear but the last one is from a night at the Welly.
Best wishes to the owners and events organisers. I hope this isn’t really the end. I’m sure those involved will find other ways to keep Hull interesting. I daren’t think about what that city will become if they don’t. So much time and energy has been spent building up Hull’s music scene to be something that the whole city can be genuinely proud of and the team at the Polar Bear have been a massive part of that. This could be a major set back, not just in terms of culture but also for morale. It’s not a city that deserves it.
I had such a lovely evening yesterday. The wonderful Natasha Eves has moved just down the road from me and, after a few months of strange isolation in the big city, surrounded by people but talking to no one, a developing weekly habit of going round for dinner and drinks has been much welcomed.
Last night we ate enchiladas and talked about music for hours and hours. I was reminded of a brief obsession everyone had in 2017 with GALA’s “Free From Desire” — an anthem for Acid Communism if ever there was one, and particularly Fisher’s Lyotardian left-accelerationist version, where “breaking free from desire … doesn’t mean to withdraw from our capacity to desire but to let go of the distinction of what is the pleasure in desire and in suffering”; an trip beyond the pleasure principle.
This feels like an oddly prescient suggestion at present. As my social life slowly starts to recover, it is interesting to hear what people want to do next. No one I know seems to want to go back to the pre-lockdown lifestyles. People are taking up new habits and hobbies — some of which they never previously enjoyed; others that they enjoy but feel guilty about enjoying. I certainly feel strange, considering all I’ve written about community in recent years, being driven by a desire to go live a quiet life somewhere else.
In light of a life under lockdown in a densely populated city like London, I am aware this desire is driven by a slightly intensified misanthropic tendency. At the same time, I want to recalibrate my communities and find the joy in them again — rediscover community freed from desire.
We drove out to the south coast to eat ice cream and read on the beach. It was busy and we were still not used to crowds.
Arriving at Birling Gap and Beachy Head felt like ticking off another spot on my Throbbing Gristle map of Great Britain. Poorly recreating an album cover made me very aware of coastal erosion. The beautiful scenery nevertheless felt wholly detached from this spot’s notoriety as a suicide hot spot, just as it does on the cover of 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
I sat in the brush, getting bitten by ants, reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian — “not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”
Stray thoughts and observations entered my mind to make up for the gap. Peri-glacial deposits resembled malformed vertebrae down on the shoreline. A Spitfire flew overhead out of time. Burnt-back heather spiralled charred. New growth now rises. We parked for free with our National Trust membership cards. I’m pretty sure there used to be a house here.
I’ve recently started an online English language course so that I can become a certified proofreader, in the hope that I can stabilise my current freelance existence, escaping this awful city and living a writer’s life cheaply. (Please help me, I keep writing thousands of words on a blog for free but struggle to pay my rent. Please someone tell me what am I doing wrong?) It turns out that the course is a lot more intense than I anticipated.
I imagined my main struggle would be learning all the BSI marks, but as I try to get to grips with the technical nomenclature and rules around grammar, it is clear that I had a lot more to worry about.
It’s leading to a very strange sort of writer’s block. (Again, no one really notices my writer’s blocks except me — they’re more diarrhetic than constipated; not full forms that are stuck in production but an overflowing of formlessness. A lovely metaphor, I know; you’re welcome.) Every sentence I write at the moment feels ill-formed and awkward in this way, as I try to internalise and learn as much technical grammar as I can — a lot of which reads terribly, to my eyes, even if it is technically correct.
Whilst I’m pursuing this course for purely practical reasons, it is also leading to an odd shift in my thinking about philosophy. It’s illuminating Derrida for me, for example, in ways that are denuding both for the better and for the worse.
As I embark on a section about verbs and their functionality, I read the words: “the verb ‘to be’ is the most irregular verb at all” — a sentence that seems to contain an inadvertent profundity; an exaggeration of Derridean banality, uttered in all seriousness.
Nevertheless, it is an odd truism. It is also a useful fact to consciously acknowledge. The majority of sentences use it in some form. As a result, it transforms linguistics into a grammatology quite explicitly, as if all writing were structured by the very grammar of ontology. Now I can’t stop reading sentences and picking out the subject-object constructions, lingering over the innate correlationism of the English language. It doesn’t make me like Derrida, however; it makes me feel a philosophical pomophobia all the more intensely.
But I am also enjoying this return back to (online) school. I’m enjoying the challenge. Technical grammar is fucking difficult. On the one hand, it is a case of learning by rote the names and functions of the constituent parts of sentences (so that I might be better at understanding what writers are doing and where they have gone wrong); on the other, for someone like me at least, with no other formal linguistic training (apart from an A Level in English Literature), it means gradually unpicking all the habits of unthought I’ve accumulated over the last three decades.
I had my first taste of this whilst going through the preparatory process for Egress. I’m still trying to train myself out of my grammatical complacency. This time, however, it feels even more brutal. Since this activity is not in the service of any final, almost-finished project of my own, my self-reflections devolved into pure linguistic masochism instead.
I was interviewed about my book again today. I’d planned to head to this magazine’s offices in Central London to record a podcast but Covid-19 scuppered that almost as soon as we’d organised it. We had a chat over Skype instead and it was really lovely.
Towards the end we were talking about how the stakes of community described in my book have once again changed shape under the current crisis. In Egress, these shifts and changes are documented in real time and, although the book feels like a time capsule now, in my mind, these stakes nonetheless continue to keep shifting and changing every day.
At the end of our conversation, I half-rehearsed an argument in an essay I’ve just finished on D.H. Lawrence and how there’s this sense in his final works — Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Apocalypse — of a kind of individual-collectivity emerging; a kind of new, diagonal relation that escapes both the enforced and restrictive collectivity of the proletariat versus the aristocratic individuality of the bourgeoisie.
It’s what Bataille calls “the community of lovers”. (I’m still so shocked Bataille never wrote on Lawrence — to my knowledge?)
I’m feeling the presence of this Bataillean community quite explicitly under quarantine. With my girlfriend ill, I’ve found myself relating to her in this subtly different way, now that our relationship is devoid of the workaday pressures of wage labour that keep us in a kind of orbit around each other. There’s a new syzygy emerging at the moment instead, of a kind that is typically obstructed.
The distinct pleasure of this relation was thrown into relief when a notification popped up on my phone announcing the death of Bill Withers. I was grateful, in a strange sort of way, that the announcement was not appended by that now-familiar adage: “due to complications caused by Covid-19.”
Bill featured on a lot of the old mixtapes I used to make for my girlfriend when we first met. I ended up listening to all my old favourites when I heard the news.
The drum break that opens Kissing My Love, followed by that wah-wah guitar, is maybe the most perfect Withers number for me — where the instrumentation is as seductive as his voice is.
And then there’s the way he commands the audience at Carnegie Hall on his live album. You can feel him palpably in the air: how the crowd hangs off his every word and how he seems to seduce them with every anecdote. By the time he’s ready to sing another song, they’re in the palm of his hand, and it’s not like he even needs to butter them up. It is electrifying and it is sexy as fuck.
But it’s not sexy in this sort of one-dimensional way. It’s sensual. It has a sort of embodied power. It really gets inside you, but not just in the cliched sense that it “gets in your soul”. Turn that baritone up loud enough and it even makes your organs vibrate.
I was thinking about Withers’ music like this when I put it on because I’ve spent much of the last week copyediting a book that’s coming out soon on Repeater. It’s not my place to say anything about it — it’s called You’re History: keep an eye out for it in the coming months because you should absolutely buy it — but reading it really resonated with this listening session.
It’s a book about women in pop music — some of the biggest and most ubiquitous names in pop, in fact — but it deals with their music in a way that focuses on how it feels rather than merely what it’s saying. The book considers the ways that some of the biggest (and even most derided) pop songs have jarring word plays and seem to linguistically express themselves in a way that looks moronic when seen written down. But that’s the fault of how critical faculties, not the songs themselves. These songs are overlooked because we are obsessed with a style of music journalism that is bizarrely obsessed with lyricism over musicality. Instead, You’re History is a book that explores not what words mean but how sounds feel — particularly the sounds of words or, more abstractly, vocalisations — and how the music itself functions, sensually, beyond the rigid hermeneutics of our present Genius.com era.
It’s the sort of sonic analysis that makes the videos on Genius‘ YouTube channel all too easy to ridicule. Their video on The Backpack Kid’s “Flossin'”, for instance, is comical and absurd because its lyrical content is analysed despite their supposedly abject emptiness but, as becomes clear, what makes the song a hit is its embodied quality — its not a poem set to music but a functional accompaniment to a dance move. In that sense, it’s the dance move that is the hit rather than the song — and this is how the Backpack Kid unabashedly frames the song himself when describing how it came to exist.
So, understood from this position — from the perspective of the song’s intended function — it is Genius that looks utterly one-dimensional and lacking rather than the song itself. It’s blinkers are used to comic effect but it’s still blinkered, reflecting the priorities of an industry at large and the priorities it wrongly impresses upon the listening public.
The book considers plenty of songs that are far, far less contentious than this — the above is more useful for demonstrating Genius‘s own straitjacket than anything else — but they are songs that are nonetheless ubiquitous and supposedly lyrically vapid or absurd. (There’s an in depth analysis of Tom Tom Club’s Wordy Rappinghood, for instance, which is just sublime and had me reaching for my copy of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense — the author indirectly articulates that book’s savouring of irrationality in a way that had me grinning from ear to ear.)
At one point, in order to further bolster why the book is written in this way, the author quotes an essay by Mike Powell for Pitchfork on the value of this kind of music criticism. (Not that the book needs to defend itself but appearing, as it does, some way into the book, the quotation serves to drive home just how invigorating and how largely absent this kind of writing is from the canon of music writing.) Powell writes:
Ultimately the way we talk about music doesn’t come down to prescribed terms, but associations, poetics, and the way language has the potential to open music up rather than shut it down. I remember a friend once telling me that a song sounded like braids to her, as in hair. This wasn’t just an unusual thing to say about music, but an observation that tapped into this particular song’s dense, overlapping rhythmic structure without deferring to words like “syncopation” or “staccato.” A few more riffs on the braid metaphor and you’d have what I’d call an insight: A statement that takes something you thought you already understood and makes you see it in a new way.
So little criticism does this. Not just music criticism but criticism of all kinds. It’s the drudgery of what now passes for “Cultural Studies”. Insightful writing should, instead, be a mode of cultural production in its own right, in the sense that it affects you directly rather than simply ordering and describing a cultural artefact based on standardised opinions and technical understandings.
Writing biologies instead of biographies of music was meant to be a sly condensation of an argument made in my Quietus essay — “we can understand the difference between hauntology and hauntography as being similar to the difference between biology and biography — one orders and describes the events of a life after the fact; the other is a study of life as it is lived, and all the mechanisms and relations that make it possible” — and this forthcoming book from Repeater has given me an example to point to now that I only wish I’d had at my disposal a few months ago.
All of these seemingly disparate threads come back together for me, forming a braid of their own, when reading D.H. Lawrence under corona quarantine. The function of his writing and the unbound eroticism therein is precisely an attempt to unearth the radical insights of feeling and sensuality in this way — what he refers to explicitly as “tenderness”.
Lacking the textural properties of music, Lawrence uses sex to pull all our focus into how desire feels, but it is simply a means to an end. His writing just as often asks us to think about how relationships feel — both romantic and familial — or how the structures under which we live feel. Desire is not only projected onto an object of desire but is embodied — desire and its lack constitute a tethering, and it is the tethering that Lawrence holds firmly in his grasp. When thinking about the subject-object relation, it is the hyphen that Lawrence stimulates.
I’m particularly enchanted by Mellors’ sensual frustrations in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance. In a scene that almost feels comic — it’s the sort of moment of internal tension usually only sated by an angry-dance montage in the movies — Lawrence attempts to describe Mellors’ politically erotic experience of being overcome by a sort of thwarted sexual energy. He’s not horny, exactly — it’s like he feels claustrophobic in his own skin, but he is only made aware of his own interiority in this way because of his capture of capitalist forces. Lawrence writes:
Driven by desire, and by dead of the malevolent Thing outside, he made his round in the wood, slowly, softly. He loved the darkness and folded himself into it. It fitted the turgidity of his desire which, in spite of all, was like a riches: the stirring restlessness of his penis, the stirring fire of his loins! Oh, if only there were other men to be with, to fight that sparkling-electric Thing outside there, to preserve the tenderness of life, the tenderness of women, and the natural riches of desire. If only there were men to fight side by side with! But the men were all outside there, glorifying in the Thing, triumphing or being trodden down in the rush of mechanised greed or of greedy mechanism.
Mellors doesn’t just want to fuck — he wants to fuck up capitalism!
This is how most of Twitter seems to feel right now. Two kinds of tweet jostle for position — “Bring down capitalism!”; “I just want to fuck!”
For Lawrence, these two sentiments aren’t so distinct from one another. This was the function of his writing — a celebration of fucking in all its guises, from sex and violence to revolution and destruction. No dichotomies, no dialectics — just an ever-complicating web of desires.
That’s what I’m really aware of right now under quarantine. The tether between myself and my girlfriend but also the newly strained nature of the tether between myself and everyone else. It’s not one-dimensionally sexual but a sensual complexity. The overbearing cloud of illness drives this home even more. Every hour or so, I pop my head round the bedroom door and ask my girlfriend, “How are you feeling?” I find myself asking this of other people too. Not just “how are you” but how do you feel under the present circumstances — and what is being felt, in every single instance, is the new tension of this tether; the embodied connection between self and other.
It is a tether strummed by other forces the rest of the time but, with those forces abated for the time being, other sensations are emerging. I feel like a spider on a web in a sheltered alcove, each strand connected to someone else in my midst. The slightest breeze will overwhelmingly disturb my present existence. Without such a breeze, however, other tremors are felt even more intensely — tremors from other possible worlds.
An empty day. Blissful, even. I read or wrote for all of it.
Tuesday 31 March 2020
I called the NHS hotline on 111 this evening. My girlfriend has had her dry cough for a week but that’s not what’s worrying me. After two days of it seemingly receding, her fever came back — and hard.
The nurse’s advice on the end of the phone was simply to take paracetamol, which was slightly anticlimactic. As I relayed her symptoms she said, “Yep, that sounds like Covid.” I could sense the adding of a line to a tally on the desk in front of her and a sudden urgency to get onto the next call.
It’s not that I wanted an air ambulance sent to whisk her to the field hospital at the Excel Centre but, to my mind, a fever this high that lasted this long would be more of a cause for concern under normal circumstances.
I suppose these are not normal circumstances.
It was good to have some sort of confirmation though. It’s also slightly surreal that this crisis has hit home like this. We’ve been sensible and disciplined, and anxious about the virus sooner than most people we knew. We haven’t left the house in over a week regardless of symptoms. In truth, we didn’t expect to get it but feared more for others than ourselves. And now it’s in here with us.
It’s still the boredom that is overwhelming. I’m keeping myself occupied but she doesn’t have the energy to open her eyes to watch TV. I’ve been reading Jane Eyre to her instead. I think we’re both enjoying it. I’ve read it before but not out loud. Out loud the poetry of it sings, and the existential turmoil of this young child in the opening chapters is so lucid and beautiful and witty. I’m left wanting to re-read all the classics out into the air. We might have the time on our hands to do so.
It feels like a miracle right now that I don’t have it too. If we both caught it simultaneously I think we’d waste away into nothing. Already the fridge is empty. We’d planned a trip to the shop tomorrow but I’m not sure that’s on the cards anymore. We’ll need to figure out a workaround.
Wednesday 1 April 2020
April’s fools are suddenly everywhere.
I wake up groggily to the blaring sound of our fire alarm. My girlfriend was already up and ready to go. I was less convinced and panicked by the situation. I work from home a lot. I am used to the false alarms.
The alarm was shut off before we made it through the front door, much to her frustration. A message later went around the building’s WhatsApp group that explained some plumbers had set it off.
I was surprised to hear plumbers were even allowed in the building but that was when I caught a glimpse of the developing hysteria. A plumbing issue can’t wait. Nevertheless, I felt afraid for those two men on the job. They were working on our floor just a few doors down. I felt like maybe we should put quarantine tape on the front door or something, just to warn the neighbours. It’s stupid, really, but I had these thoughts regardless.
With it being so early in the morning, and with nowhere to be, I decided to go back to bed. Once horizontal, I picked up my phone only to find a text from a man saying he was in the area to carry out some pre-booked energy efficiency testing. It was something the landlord arranged a few weeks back. We’d forgotten about it — him included when I text him to ask about it — and we were all very surprised to hear that the tester still planned to go ahead with the testing. Plumbing is one thing but I don’t think checking the efficiency of our flat’s insulation is all that pressing. I text him back saying so.
“We are still working under the current safety guidelines,” was the response.
The next thing I knew he was calling us from inside the building. “What’s your flat number?” he kept asking. I told him my girlfriend was sick with the virus and that it was unlikely he had enough PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) to put our minds at ease.
“So you’re cancelling?”
Err, yes…
At around three o’clock I started to make a late lunch. We’re moving around so little that we barely have any appetite and the shocking deficiency of snacks in the cupboard meant we were spending more time talking about food and driving ourselves crazy.
There are plenty of people in the local area we could probably call upon to help us out but neither of us has the nerve to collate a list of comfort foods to get us through the boredom. We’ll just keep using up what we’ve got until her symptoms pass.
We’re not struggling yet anyway. I made some pasta and we sat in bed. My girlfriend put on the news which we’d decided to more or less ignore for the past week. The forced updates of social media apps are about as much as we’d like to know at this point
The BBC newsreaders were going through various reports and they all kept talking ominously about … The Peak. Just like that as well. They’d take a slight pause — dramatic but not melodramatic — right before they said the words, which were in themselves also slightly emphasised. The Peak. We are approaching … The Peak. How long is the government estimating it will be before we reach … The Peak. The death toll is rising daily — how bad is … The Peak … going to be? Then they start talking about plateaus. After … The Peak … the death toll will begin to plateau. “Plateau” is said with a little more urgency, with a certain relief. Peaks and plateaus. Plateaus and peaks.
We eat quickly and turn it off.
Despite the media’s dramatics, there is a sense that the government is trying to soothe people’s anxieties in the wrong way. They report on the numbers but with this tone that says, “Hey, you know, things don’t look too bad… Statistically, it’s mostly all fine… People die everyday… Things could be getting better sooner than we thought!”
It’s hard not to witness this and watch activity pick up again outside our window. We watch the frequency of cars passing increase with a certain terror. Some non-essential works are still going ahead without anyone taking the time to figure out the risks. Everyone seems to want to get in our building or into our flat to carry out works that can wait.
I feel like we have had too many close calls today, too many opportunities for the virus in our flat to spread through our building. Everyone seems eager to get back to work or get out of the house, and that’s understandable, but I can’t help but think it’s moronic. Although I don’t blame anyone. It’s like they are been pushed through their front doors by some unconscious kick — the myoclonic jerks of a capitalist system being told to go to sleep. Nevertheless, I wish everyone would stay indoors as stubbornly as we are.
We’ve got the fear today and the fear is real. It’s that same fear that used to emerge on the last day of the summer holidays. The fear that still emerges on a Sunday evening as you stare down the barrel of the week ahead.
“No more miserable Monday mornings” was Mark’s dream for himself and the world at large. In the introduction to Acid Communism, he took up this same phrase to write about the Small Faces’ “Lazy Sunday” — a song through which “the fog and frost of a Monday morning [is] abjured from a sunny Sunday afternoon that does not need to end…”
We’re living through a very long Sunday at the moment and, the longer it goes on, the more monstrous the Monday to follow seems like it will be. Because it isn’t the dream of no work that keeps us in bed but the dream of no illness — or, now, not spreading the illness any further — and that seems like a drive worth listening to.
The lazy Sunday is over. Now we’re back to thinking neurotically about the correct use of soap…
Thursday 2nd April 2020
My Dad is texting us for daily updates now. He’s concerned but it’s nice. We usually only drop each other an email every few months. Today he rang me to see how we were getting on. A mundane gesture but unusual for him. His fear has been real for over a month. I laughed about it at first. I’m not laughing now.
I even had a somewhat wholesome chat with the landlord about how he’s talking this opportunity to potty train his kid (“That’s brave”) before he offered to relax the rent if things were getting tough. It was quite the relief.
I went outside to take the bins out and bumped into the neighbours. I think they’re new. They woke us up at 4am the other week whilst having what I assume was a house-warming party. I went round like a grumpy old boomer and asked them to keep it down. The walls in this building are very well insulated. You wouldn’t know anyone lived around you if it wasn’t for the occasion noise from the corridor passing under the front door. The fact they made enough noise to wake us up was saying something.
They looked pretty sheepish but I smiled and said hello. Everyone is different newly awake at 4am than they are during the day. Water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. Maybe they weren’t sheepish about that though. Maybe they’d heard my girlfriend’s incessant coughing through the walls…
I have had trouble sleeping. The dust in the flat and the pollution and the spring air has been playing havoc with my allergies this past week.
I stay up late and hear the foxes screaming and screeching. They don’t usually make a lot of noise but they are at the moment. It feels like they’re reclaiming the night.
I get up early, around 8am. My nostrils sting in the dry air and I’m awake whether I like it or not. Despite seeing the full day through, I find myself glancing up at the clock at around 5pm every day and not knowing what has happened. I have achieved little but nonetheless been preoccupied. I’m not worried about it. There is no guilt.
My girlfriend has had a fever for four days. We’re fairly convinced that she has the virus. I’m showing no symptoms that couldn’t be explained by my allergies. No fever for me. I look after her but also mostly keep to myself. She had no energy and aches all over. “The muscles even ache when I move my eyes,” she says. There’s little to do other than run the odd bath or get her glasses of water. It’s not like I can pop down to the shop and bring back supplies.
I wonder if I’m immune or if I’ve entered a waiting game now, fated to be struck down by the inevitable. Whatever happens, the result is more or less the same. Following the medical advice, because someone I live with is sick, I can’t leave the flat for 14 days. She can be more mobile seven days after her symptoms stop. At this rate, I’ll suffer the punishment of isolation longer than she will. That seems unfair somehow.
I just want to order a pizza.
Sunday 29 March 2020
Where did the rest of the week go?
I have sunk my time into completing two essays for elsewhere and it is only now, trying to account for those lost days whilst on the other side of them, that I start to feel disorientated.
The days are long but I don’t remember them. They drag and are over before I know it. On the PlaguePod, Robin talks a bit about Michel Tournier’s Friday and I open a random page of my copy of the book to find the journal entries of his initial days on the island. It’s surreal how accurate they are when compared to the present: a mundane equivalent.
Solitude is not a changeless state imposed on me […] It is a corrosive influence which acts on me slowly but ceaselessly, and in one sense purely destructively. […]
I know now that every man carries within himself — and as it were above himself — a fragile and complex framework of habits, responses, reflexes, preoccupations, dreams and associations, formed and constantly transformed by perpetual contact with his fellows. Deprived of its sap this delicate growth withers and dissolves. My fellow-men were the mainstay of my world […] Each day I measure my debt to them by observing the fresh cracks in my personal structure. I know what I would suffer should I lose the use of words, and with all the power of my anguish I seek to combat that final surrender. But my relationship to material things is also undermined by solitude. […]
But my solitude does not only destroy the meaning of things. It undermines them at the very root of their being. More and more do I come to doubt the existence of my senses. I know now that the very earth beneath my feet needs to be trodden by feet other than mine if I am to be sure of its substance. Optical illusions, mirages, hallucinations, waking dreams, imagined sounds, fantasy and delirium … against these aberrations the surest guard is our brother, our neighbour, our friend of our enemy — anyway, God save us, someone!
It was amusing to read this and think about Robin and Simon’s disagreement that J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Enormous Space” could possibly be read as a positive tale. Simon finds no novel reading in it that becomes emancipatory. Robin, perhaps, sees a modern day version of Tournier’s Robinson.
Friday, or the Other Island is, after all, a retelling of Robinson Crusoe but one in which the fatal flaw of that story is sidestepped. As countless critics have noted, the power of Robinson Crusoe is totally dissipated by Robinson’s decision to simply recreate the civilisation he has left behind on the island he now finds himself. It is, in reality, a great failure of the imagination. Friday instead takes seriously the scenario into which Robinson has been thrown and considers the impact of one’s consciousness (and unconsciousness) echoing around itself without the reflective screen of the Other. Then, when the Other is reintroduced, what happens next is all the more mind-bending.
Not that this has much of an impact on our current existences. I felt a bit useless on the PlaguePod on Saturday night because, despite the billed probing into the psychological effects of corona quarantine, I actually feel really great…
Before all this, I was nonetheless trying to articulate the surreality of our present circumstances. I keep thinking about Mark Fisher’s phrase “boring dystopia”, for instance.
Whilst real-life events are enough to bring that to mind, I had in fact spent most of Saturday replaying the first Resident Evil game for the first time in about 20 years. I was taking time to read all the diary entries and documents about the outbreak and the escalation of the crisis. I got really into it. I started to think, if things get really bad here in the real world, will people read this blog and other people’s blogs in the same way? As these darkly humorous documents, brimming with mystery and naivety before the impending disaster wipes all trace of us from the earth, only to be picked over as novel dispatches for the few survivors left standing?
Probably not. It’s all so boring. Like, it is literally boring. The streets outside and the media reports and the news bulletins and the general anxiety felt by all… It’s so familiar, it’s so Hollywood, it’s so dystopian, and yet so fucking boring. Our present moment is so defined by uneventfulness, by pointlessness, by stupidity. There’s no great moment of hubris on the horizon as the bureaucrats realise the world has ended without them. Boris Johnson tests positive and the response is, yeah, well done, you fucking muppet, now what? Go work from home, I guess? Don’t you do that anyway, “part-time prime minister”?
The dystopia is here. We’re living in it and we have been for some time. There’s no point to it. There’s no spectacle. It’s just boring as fuck. So too is the experience of my own adjusting subjectivity. This is no Ballardian adventure into inner space. Time wobbles and dilates but what is the impact? I can suddenly fit more video gaming into my day than I previously thought possible.
But that’s not entirely true. It is having an impact. In fact, I’m very puzzled to tell you that it is having a really positive impact. I’m going through a sort of corona detox. I’ve been forced to let go of all the bad habits that I usually rely on the make it through the day. I’m detoxing on caffeine and refined sugar. The bout of bulimia that had begun to creep back into my life in the last few weeks has been curtailed with immediate effect. I’ve effortlessly fallen into a regulated sleeping pattern. I’m eating better. I’m being more productive and managing my time a lot better. I’ve spent the weekend doing nothing at all, guilt-free.
I felt bad about confessing this, in case it came across as one of those “woah, I’m reborn and am now working much more efficiently” type people. But it’s not that at all. I’m not being “productive” in the sense of using my labour time efficiently. Instead, I feel like I’m putting better vibes out into the world. I’m calmer, happier. The natural expenditures of my existence, uncontaminated by capitalist control, are producing good things.
It made me think about that god-awful eco-fascist bullshit being spread by some members of Extinction Rebellion.
Humans aren’t the disease. Capitalism is. To equate one with the other is to give up on another world before you’ve decided to build it.
If corona has been a cure for anything so far, on a personal level, it has cured me of the workaday anxieties that have defined life in this city for the past three years. I feel like the monkey is off my back. I can’t afford to pay rent but also, I don’t care. Because no one can.
Also, this solitude hasn’t denied me of “the surest guard … of my brother”, as Tournier describes it. It has cleansed the relationships that already exist underneath capitalism’s watchful eye.
I thought being trapped in this shoebox flat with my girlfriend 24/7 would lead to us killing each other, for instance. In fact, I can tell we’re both feeling the benefits. We’re just existing in each other’s company. The days might not be filled with couple’s activities and long talks about the state of the world — especially not since she’s been ill — but I find myself looking at her and smiling in a way I haven’t for a long time, because the monkey is off my back. Economic pressures are not yanking at my hair and trying to divert my attention elsewhere.
I feel at peace because coronavirus has silenced the constant hum of the machine, the tinnitus of capital, that usually accompanies every waking moment of life and which makes me feel ill. It’s only been one week but I feel the healthiest I’ve felt in over four years. My body is going into the sort of recovery mode that I only tend to experience when I go on holiday.
It’s not all silver linings, of course. The virus brings its own terrors. I am still exchanging anxious texts and emails with my extended family but I’ve been surprised to find that those who I assumed would struggle most actually feel the same way I do.
We were particularly worried about one family member, who works as an independent cleaner and who is a precarious worker like so many. If she doesn’t work she doesn’t get paid and she has a son and a dog and a house to keep up with. And yet, she feels the same way I do. There’s nothing she can do. It’s out of her control. So, she’s relaxed into the present circumstances and is putting her feet up. And so she should.
My girlfriend called to me from the bedroom, wondering where I’d disappeared off to so quietly. “Blogging,” was the response. “Of course,” was her reply. I told her about these feelings and she was quick to remind me, “It’s only week one…”
Best to be cautious with your musings in times like these. I’d hate a blogpost to acquire the same energy this tweet now has in six months’ time…
At the end of our road, there are two churches. A Baptist church and a Celestial Church of Christ. The latter has a huge congregation. They wear these pristine white costumes and hats that make them look like bakers for Jesus. Their kids always play football after the service in a disused sports ground opposite our building.
Given this usual hive of activity, it was so surreal to open the front window and hear nothing; to look out and see no bakers.
The streets were so empty and still. They are seldom this quiet, even in the dead of night.
Redeveloping an appreciation for the Beatles' later albums and the carefree atmosphere that came from being chased inside and then becoming full-blown studio dweebs.
I spent the day going through my Dad’s old Beatles records, starting with The White Album. It set a train of thought off that turned into an essay for elsewhere.
Already, every song feels like it’s about quarantine. “Dear Prudence” was like a siren song sung by the coronavirus itself, tempting us out into the park on a day that was perversely beautiful for the apocalypse.
We resisted the urge to go outside. My girlfriend started rearranging furniture in the afternoon instead, kicking up dust and setting off my allergies. I would wheeze through the night for the rest of the week but it was worth it. The flat felt fresh. It immediately mitigated the pressure of being enclosed within the overly familiar.
As the dust clouds loomed, I spent most of the day hiding in our bedroom working on my next book. It is very much in its early stages. I have the trajectory more or less figured out, I just need to write it. However, I’ve also discovered various gaps in my knowledge, and you know what that means — buying books.
At the moment, I’m reading a lot of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Juliet Mitchell. It’s intriguing — and perhaps surprising — to read these women so adamantly defending Freud’s legacy. Whereas the likes of Shulasmith Firestone and Germaine Greer would quite vehemently write against him, to read these other women makes the anti-Freudian feminists feel like they are shadowboxing. Every takedown is a misreading — but of course it is. Nevertheless, it makes Freud’s legacy all the more complicated than history’s intellectual victors would have you believe. Freud was repeatedly mistaken in his writings and concepts, no doubt, but it seems the real failure was that the female Freudians have been so thoroughly written out of history.
This is taking a nascent argument within my book into interesting new depths. Freud himself was Oedipus, in ways he was not aware of, but as in Sophocles’ plays, his daughter Anna (and others — Klein especially) seem to take on the role of Antigone, escorting the beaten man through the wilderness and developing his legacy in ways that are intellectually loyal but theoretically less orthodox. As such, their loyalty makes for a far more interesting transgression than the loudness of his critics.
As a result of this current train of thought, this old tweet feels more and more accurate by the day. It’s likely to be a chapter title.
The other (unsurprising) travesty is that the contributions these women made have been diminished by the sheer volume of the male Freudians, who are been given more credit simply for repeating their earlier discoveries. It has become a very fruitful area of inquiry and one that will likely keep me occupied for much of this lockdown.
Monday 23 March 2020
On Monday I still had to go into work… Or out to work… I picked up a colleague and we drove smoothly through rush hour London without the rush, up to Hampstead Heath where we were scheduled to take a series of photographs as part of some undisclosed architectural project that had the potential to impact on one of London’s many protected viewpoints.
We were anxious to be working under the current conditions and had set out a few restrictions for ourselves. She would handle all the camera equipment today. Usually, I prep lens and other things whilst she takes pictures so that we can take all the photographs we need smoothly and efficiently. Today I was to be the driver and little else. We didn’t want to contaminate anything unnecessarily.
Few other people out that day seemed to share in our anxiety. The Heath was busy. Perhaps not as busy as it was on your average Monday but you certainly wouldn’t have thought there was a pandemic going on.
At one point we were accosted by some stupid woman. We’d taken a series of photographs looking out over the London skyline. She was sat in the foreground of our picture with about ten friends. She waved at us and asked us to delete any photographs she was in. We said we were just trying to do our jobs and we weren’t interested in her. She wasn’t in them anyway. She persisted and asked to see. We said no. We informed her we had every right to take the photographs we had taken, and were doing so precisely to protect this space and its view for others enjoyment. She asked why we didn’t take the photograph somewhere else instead. She was oddly hostile. We told her we needed to take the photographs from the exact spot where we were positioned, above a survey pin in the pavement, placed there by the council. She persisted still, taking our names and the name of the company we worked for and generally being a jobsworth, as we slowly and tactfully revealed to her that he really didn’t know what she was talking about. The temptation was to say, “We’re working — you should be social distancing. Back off.” I doubt that would have gone down very well.
I don’t know why it annoyed me quite so much as it did. She was very irritating but it’s not like these questions and interruptions were unusual for us. I think I had a very low tolerance for stupid that day. Other people’s and my own. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be outside.
Elsewhere in the park, we passed two men trying to negotiate an exchange. One man really wanted to tissue. The other man felt obliged to give one to him, as you would, as if he’d just asked him for the time, but you could see he was struggling to fulfil what would otherwise be a basic act of decency. He didn’t want to do it. It was as if the crisis wasn’t quite over the threshold yet that allowed his Englishness to be sidestepped. The very agony of the situation was already incredibly English. He was stuck in a feedback loop of Englishness and it looked like his head might explore.
That was amusing. Less amusing was the gaggles of meatheads in the outdoor gyms, going on about how the virus would cull the unworthy, as they slathered their hands over those germ farms.
I’d never been a germaphobe previously but I was suddenly desperate for a mask and gloves. I felt vulnerable. We were scheduled to go out again the next day but I didn’t want to.
That night, Boris Johnson made the lockdown official. Frankly, I was relieved. As far as I was concerned, at least in stupid London, the crackdown was necessary. People had no idea what was coming or what had already happened elsewhere.
Tuesday 24 March 2020
I woke to the uncanny sound of birdsong. I didn’t know where I was. It seemed to echo and feedback on itself. I slid back the bedroom door to see my girlfriend sat on the floor by the open window, answering emails, the sparse birdsong of the real world competing with a dawn chorus emanating from her laptop.
London was on lockdown and she was working from home but this did not apply to the builders down the road. Their banging and clanging continued. She was playing birdsong to try and drown them out. It felt like an odd premonition of what our lives would be like in a few weeks or months when the lockdown applied to everyone and the outside became a toxic space.
We still went outside. I had records to post. As successive nations go under lockdown, I’ve noticed that I have been receiving a flurry of Discogs orders from each one. I had two records to post out that day and so we went down to the post office. It’s a busy branch and everyone was queued up outside, two metres apart. It was an odd sight, like a Yeezy fashion show celebrating the British working class. All pyjamas and jogging bottoms, posting parcels or trying to pay their electric bill.
On the way home, we did a few lengths on the abandoned running track. Four lanes, one hundred metres in length, the spongey ground oddly full of potholes. I was newly aware that every building around us was full of people. I’d never felt so surveilled before.
We went home for the last time. We haven’t left since.
Ticking something off the ol’ London bucket list. Today we went to Highgate Cemetery to see the Marx family crypt where both Karl and Eleanor are buried. I’ve wanted to come and visit it since we moved here but it’s quite a trek from the south east… We found the energy today though.
The main takeaway — curtly put by my girlfriend — was, “If I died, and I ended up under a giant bust of your head, I’d be really pissed at you”, which I think is fair enough.
Combining the favourite XG pastime of weekend cemetery visits with a Marxist pilgrimage is a good way to spend a Saturday and it also feels like a good excuse to once again share The Lit Crit Guy’s two-parter on Gothic Marxism, here and here.
The disarticulation of my “Dreamless Pop” post has very quickly been remedied by a confluence of factors.
Bob was nice enough to share the post on Twitter and call it an encapsulation of some sort of position when — I must confess; as is often the case with my blog posts — it was more like an attempt to articulate something that nonetheless remained on the tip of my tongue before it consequently fell out of my head due to this lack of a firm linguistic grasp on it…
Fittingly, Bob’s use of the word “simulacra” was precisely the jolt I needed to better articulate what it is I find so disturbing about Sex Education…
So here goes…
I was watching Sex Education recently, a few days after the previous post had gone up — or half-watching it, I guess, reading a book whilst my girlfriend caught up with the latest season. I had watched the first season with a morbid curiosity but could not stomach the second. This was not entirely — as I thought — because of its content but because of its location also. For all its accusations of rootlessness — part American high school drama, part British college-university romp, part general adolescent situated-identity crisis — I am actually very familiar with its setting.
I am sure I’ve mentioned this before — either on the blog or on Twitter — but Sex Education is filmed on my old university campus in Caerleon, South Wales. It is filmed in a place where I studied for three years and lived for one. It is also the place where I met my long-term girlfriend and countless other friends.
Watching that show is like sticking my head in a waterfall of memories. Forget Proust’s whiff of madeleine cake, it’s more like a snuffed line of simulated nostalgia that violently overrides the actual experience of being there.
Graduation, Caerleon, 2013
We were talking about the series, following a more recent episode, when I asked her how she managed to stomach the show’s wokeness that is laid on so thick. She acknowledged it was often egregious but that it didn’t get too much in the way of the story for her, which she enjoyed regardless — fair enough — but, personally, it makes me cringe, and I realised the other day that the reason I find it so hard to stomach is precisely because it entertains the existence of some impossibly woke academic environment on a campus that has explicitly fallen victim to the worst neoliberal university practices. It is a simulation of wokeness dancing on the grave of those ideals it performs and says it holds so dear. It is, in this sense, precisely a sort of poor-taste simulacra that renders its over-scripted good intentions as little more than apolitical entertainment despite itself.
I should emphasise here that I am not using the term ‘wokeness’ to give scaffolding some liberal conspiracy that seeks to undermine the creative power of political incorrectness. However, as has been explored on this blog before, I do think transgressive arts must continue to carve out a space for themselves in the face of an institutionalised moralism, and most of what thinks of itself as oppositional these days can barely defend such a claim under pressure. This is a far more legitimate critique than the rightist one, I think, because this “wokeness” is a decontextualised band-aid for far deeper structural problems that few people seem capable of separating from the capitalist forces they say they are fighting against.
Custom Sign Found in the Darkrooms, Caerleon, 2011
Sex Education, as a cultural product, is the perfect encapsulation of this. It is a show that cannot go five minutes without tripping over an oddly bureaucratised form of political communication but it does so — oh so tellingly — on a site of great cultural and political loss.
Caerleon campus only exists as a film set for this slab of Netflix wokeness because the listed status of the clock tower has thwarted developers from demolishing it to build a new housing estate. Prior to this thwarting, Caerleon campus was home to the largest photographic dark rooms in Europe where photography was taught for over one hundred years and where countless generations had their tandem artistic and political awakenings.
This was true for me as well. It was a home where I was first politicised, developing both a class consciousness, as I came to understand why I felt Newport, South Wales, was a home-away-from-home and so similar to my actual home of Hull in Yorkshire — short answer: both post-industrial towns on estuaries left to decay and atrophy despite (or, arguably, because of) an established history of radical cultural action — and a wider political consciousness, travelling to London for my first protest march in my first year of university to oppose the trebling of tuition fees that would not effect me personally but would effect countless others after me.
With this burgeoning consciousness emerging from a generally deflated sense of my own political agency, Newport was a place of hope for a radical future, both in terms of politics and culture — with the two being explicitly intertwined as a place where prescribed aesthetics standards were told to go fuck themselves on the daily and where a small town working class consciously “avant garde” community was going from strength to strength, despite persistently butting heads with the local council.
This wasn’t new. It was heartening to learn that this sort of activity was part of a Welsh continuum… And was well-founded in Newport itself as a city… But the slow creep of neoliberalism was well-established also, at least by the time I got there…
Large Format Workshop, Caerleon Studios, 2013
First, the Newport polytechnic — founded in 1840 to educate local workers and tradespeople, and where photography was first taught as a trade as early as 1910 — was transformed into the University of Wales, Newport, following the nationwide culling of polytechnics in the 1990s.
This process brought together a broad family of technical colleges under a single managerial authority, cementing the neoliberal oversight of a prior patchwork of empowering spaces. As time went on, it was revealed — to the surprise of no-one — that those in charge were caught in a spiral of overspending, building new campuses they couldn’t afford and trying to continue to expand beyond their means. Before long, UWN got into trouble, and was eventually gobbled up and consolidated into an even bigger institutional body: the University of South Wales — a Cardiff-based university. (This is a process innocuously documented on the university’s website, of course, with no reference made to the perpetual upheavals that underlined its haggard development.)
This final merger came at a very tense time for the area. It occurred during the final year of my studies in 2013, which was the same year that Newport’s Chartist mural, library and art gallery was controversially demolished to build a garish new shopping centre. These actions, though distinct from one another, nonetheless felt they were both part of the same socio-political process: the broad neoliberalisation of the city and its institutions. It had already happened elsewhere in the city. The polytechnic’s old site in the city centre, for instance, before it was based before the move to Caerleon, had already been transformed into luxury flats during our time there and, following the merger, when the beautiful Caerleon campus was sold off, it felt like that was the final nail in the coffin for a tradition that was far from dead. Its smothering was merely a byproduct of mismanagement by higher-ups.
This really is unbelievable when you consider the university campus on its own merits. In many ways it was outdated, rough around the edges, dysfunctional, relatively isolated from South Wales’ urban centres, but it was ours. It wasn’t some former private school turned fancy institution, as it superficially appears in the series. It was primarily a campus occupied by young people studying either an arts degree or a sports degree, in the orbit of a still proudly working class town. It was a really beautiful place to live and study and that felt all the more important considering how academically maligned the courses taught there were. In fact, the campus was a large part of why I wanted to study there. I’d been to open days in London (Elephant & Castle) and Farnham but immediately felt these campuses were hostile to “someone like me”. Caerleon was different. It felt right and continued to feel right for the three years that followed. (I’m still in touch with the lecturers there.)
When it was reported that the campus had been sold off, it felt like this was partly why. We weren’t allowed to have nice things. The new base in Cardiff’s city centre might be better connected and immersed in local business infrastructures but Caerleon was special precisely because it felt like a haven apart from all that bullshit. It was a place to experiment — and we really did experiment.
This is not to say that a radical political sentiment died with the institution — it certainly wasn’t an institutionalised product — and thankfully many of the lecturers who encouraged this kind of engagement with the world remain on the staff — but I do not think that anyone would deny that decades of growth had been amputated without a second thought. The task became less one of extension and more one of rebuilding, and it was a task that had to be pursued under an intensification of the university’s mechanisms of bureaucratic anti-production.
Metal Recycling Area (Repurposed as our ‘Common Room’), Caerleon, 2013
With all of this in mind, it becomes very difficult not to be wholly cynical of a show like Sex Education, preaching radical but tellingly bougie politics of communication on the piss-soaked grave of a former polytechnic. Its politics are, of course, important, but so is the context in which they are contained and puppeteered. Take, for instance, Sex Education‘s persistent exploration of the politics of interpersonal consent. What becomes of this topic when it is dramatises on a site where the previous occupants were turfed off without any consultation? This may sound a bit too much like a Justin Murphy logic gate but surely if we are to take the show’s dramatic politics seriously we should be able to extend these politics beyond the fictional relationships of individuals and apply it to the very real situated politics of its location and the communities that called it home? Removed from its fictional bubble, the show becomes nothing but a parody of itself.
It is this disparity that I thought of this morning whilst reading Will Davies’ Guardian op-ed on the persistent radicality of the humanities within neoliberal institutions. (The fact that Davies teaches at Goldsmiths probably goes someway towards explaining how he is able to write from an apparent bubble of hope. The historical continuum of HE experimentation that Davies gestures to has long been impotent, broadly speaking. If the government is now lopping off humanities courses, it is less a active culling and more a sign that neoliberalism has decided to stop playing with its already butchered food.)
Interestingly, Davies argues against the political right’s cooption of “a bogey-ideology known as ‘wokeness’, constructed by conservative commentators and ‘free speech’ advocates, [that] now serves as an all-purpose bin into which any form of activism, complaint or critical theory can be thrown.” The problem with this — and the article at large — is subtle. There is no denying that a cross-section of small-c and big-C conservatives in this country despise the persistent influence of the humanities, as Davies argues, but to say that ‘wokeness’ has been constructed by the right is wholly disingenuous. It is a term — both positively and negatively — that has the left’s fingerprints all over it.
This is to say that Davies may be right in fingering the contemporary culprits of educational dismantling but his analysis just feels hollow — a sort of extension of student populism that is about two years too late, and by ignoring the left’s own failure to tackle and preempt current problems, the article reads as nothing more than cheerleading puff piece, preaching to the converted.
(Sidenote: I have more to say on the specifically anti-modernist tendencies — and I do think they are that specific — that Davies points to within the Johnson-Cummings cabinet but I want to save that for another post.)
Void Wallet Contents, 2014
To better articulate what I mean by this, I think it is worth emphasising the fact that Davies deploys a right-wing conception of “wokeness” — now culturally dominant — over a left-wing one.
On the left, “wokeness” has, until recently, referred to a well-established slang term borrowed from African-American political discourses referring to the possession of a kind of raised consciousness. If you’re woke, you’re awake to the banal injustices of a quotidian and marginalised existence. That’s pretty much common knowledge at this point.
The right’s disparaging and cynical use of “wokeness”, however, reveals (at least in negative) a sort of empty and apolitical leftism that has run riot through many of the left’s attempts at political organising in recent years. This is to say that the collapse of “wokeness” as a political contagion — from a call-to-arms to a disparaging and cynical label thrown at moralisers — is as much the fault of the left’s incompetence as it is the right’s penchant for cynical cooption.
Take this Medium post by @scenicpasture on “Apolitical Corbynism” — an excellent post that goes someway towards articulating the two factions that really gave Corbyn his staying power in the UK since 2015: a new politicised youth on the one hand, but also middle class apolitical former Green Party voters on the other. They write:
In the case of Corbyn, he inspired people who previously hadn’t been involved in parliamentary politics and who certainly had no interest in the intricacies of left factions and alliances. That appeal was largely to “graduates without a future”. There’s a big chunk of these people who were very happy attending Occupy, the demonstrations orchestrated by XR, and needless to say were proud to march for a ‘People’s Vote’. Each of these moments were, in their own way, apolitical insofar as they were attempts to ditch the constraints of parliamentary politics and appeal to something ‘beyond’. In XR’s case, this was completely explicit in their calls to establish ‘citizens assemblies’ (which under scrutiny turn out to be panels of wonk NGO experts. The Marxist critique of these forms of politics are well-documented and I won’t rehearse them here, the point for me is that in the absence of anything else they were the only game in town. The generations that attached to these political modalities did so out of the wreckage of the end of history, the failure of New Labour, the failure of social democracy in the 20th century, which occurred inextricably with the collapse of the labour movement and its institutions. Corbynism aspired to rebuilding these things, but was always just aspiring, was always in lieu of them, and therefore was in fact closer in its origins to these forms of apolitical populism than I think has previously been acknowledged.
The merits of this form allowed us to function and work as organisers without the usual baggage, and at its height produced the hysterical joy of the 2017 election. That election feels dream-like in hindsight, precisely because it did seem to actually achieve what apolitical moments always claim to be able to achieve: transcending the parameters of ideology and politics as such. Could such a colossal upheaval have happened without Corbynism’s broad, moralistic appeals to decency, change, standing up for “the many”? I’m not sure. However beneficial, though, it was precisely this strength of apolitical Corbynism that, in part, engineered its downfall. This downfall came chiefly from the despicably vain, juvenile remain campaign, indulged by far too many people who in a state of flailing panic should’ve toughened up and known better. But also, I’d argue through a specific political-cultural tendency that emerged under late-Corbynism; self-flagellation and capitulation. Taken together, these outcomes have now engineered a situation where Keir Starmer is seen by many Corbynistas as the right successor to whatever Corbynism was about. It’s worth emphasising how absurd this is. Starmer is utterly archetypal of everything that Corbyn was supposed to replace. He is a character-less centrist, interchangeable with any prominent man among the liberal professional managerial class. If someone showed you a picture of him and said he’s the head of Save the Children, or an investment bank, or the Liberal Democrats, you’d have no difficulty believing them. His appeal to exhausted, depleted, Corbynistas comes from the same empty, directionless desires of apolitical populism. Just as Occupy never articulated a demand, just as XR was somehow apocalyptic without being antagonistic, just as People’s Vote wished away 17.4 million people; so too Starmer, by looking nice and sounding posh, will alleviate Labour of its existential contradictions.
Sex Education, to me, is the ultimate cultural encapsulation of this. Whilst its script is over-wrought with pseudo-ethical negotiations of contemporary adolescent conflicts, attempting to place it at the vanguard of a new form of “woke” political communication that presents a seemingly utopian high school experience for the temporally displaced left, it is also wholly impotent and removed from the actual political struggles it is indirectly parasitising.
Endnote: Notably, the book I was reading whilst having these thoughts, with Sex Education playing in the background, was Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I don’t have it with me whilst I’m writing this post but it’s introduction and first chapter helped to articulate how this apolitical wokeness is itself a product of neoliberalism’s cultural logics, and that is precisely because of the way that neoliberalism — and neoliberal universities most explicitly — iron out the creases and differences of our political spaces of action.
Niall Gallen hit on this too earlier today when he tweeted:
I think he’s right. I responded:
I was thinking exactly this whilst reading Jameson the other day. The absence of ‘neoliberalism’ from his description of the mechanisms of “late capitalism” at the start of Postmodernism… is telling. [1] Precisely because, as the elephant in the room, he is trying to prise the economic and the cultural apart in order to understand how they affect one another. Neoliberalism emerges as an ideological project for smoothing out [these] discrepancies. [2]
Wokeness was a concept that fell into this trap all too easily — the way that “woke” has been turned into a ironic marketing ploy by the likes of Burger King in recent weeks is a case in point.
If neoliberalism is to be have continued valence as a political term, the left must be capable of seeing its developments and influence from within its own ranks, not just pointing to it when the right gets its way.
