Category: Literature

What was Cinema?

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The outrage on Twitter after Martin Scorsese declared that Marvel movies are not “cinema” has been predictably cringe but interesting nonetheless. It begs the question: “What is cinema?” Or maybe, “What was it?” Does anyone make “cinema” anymore?

On closer inspection, Scorsese’s comments seem quite innocuous:

I don’t see [Marvel movies]. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.

But there are still many people who loudly disagree. Indeed, his definition of Cinema is so vague that it is easily ridiculed but I’d like to unpack it all the same.

In the innumerable replies to articles about Scorsese’s statement that I saw online, discussions turned to the more generic issue of “What is art?” Anything anyone makes is art, said the many to the few — that’s the only valid democratic response. Examples were given along the lines of: “Whether someone paints pictures or makes big buildings or kooky spoon sculptures, it’s all art.” But I don’t think that’s true.

This great melting pot of cultural oneness does nothing but turn all art the colour of pathetic liberal beige and, many years ago, it was once my one-man shitpost mission to point this out at every opportunity. Even today, I’d love to see any posing of the question “What is art?” that isn’t wholly flaccid and inconsequential, whether it is uttered by keyboard critics or big art institutions on an embarrassingly banal public engagement kick. Submissions in my inbox!

Below are two instances I came across way back in 2013. One is from a fight I got into with the social media intern at London’s ICA when they did the whole “Ooo, but is it art though?” thing as a lazy and patronising way to stoke audience engagement, encouraging a criticality wholly without teeth. (I wiped my old Twitter account ages ago so my original tweets are lost to the ether but you get the idea.)

This irritation came from the fact that the ICA were not alone in this practice that was already tired and not in any way “new”.

I remember I was also living in Hull at that time, probably picking that fight with their poor social media intern on the same day I discovered that Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery had installed this inane monstrosity in their main gallery, reducing sociocultural engagement to the level of picking a local charity to donate to when you finishing your big boujie Waitrose shop.

Detached, banal and pointless.

My issue is that saying everything is art is as useful as saying nothing is art, and arguing the point doesn’t produce anything of critical value for anyone. Instead, if we want to take Scorsese seriously, or Marvel seriously for that matter, what constitutes art does not come down to a question of aesthetics or form or some vague notion of validity but down to a question of purpose.

This too is vague and so I want to make clear that this is not an attempt to tread that other tired floor that has already stalked literature for many decades. Scorsese’s comments are about 40 years too late to provoke a conversation about “high and low” cinema. The real question today is: When does “art” become nothing more than a “product”?

This is a question that has already been asked of Joker but it betrays a cynicism that sticks in its critics’ own collective maw.

If this is true of Joker or the MCU, isn’t it true of all films today?

This is a difficult question to ask because capital is so deeply entwined with all forms of production but this is already a question entangled up with how Scorsese’s comments have so far been discussed in the media. As the Metro put: “Martin Scorsese claims Marvel films are ‘not cinema’ — despite Avengers: Endgame becoming highest grossing film in history.” But what do either of those two statements have to do with each other? Everything or nothing at all?

I was reminded of Marcuse’s comments on these issues in his book One Dimensional Man. For him — speaking of literature instead of cinema but in a way that is nonetheless still relevant for us here — literature is defined for him by an “estrangement-effect” — an internal principle of alienation that refutes and “refuses” to comply with normative and populist aesthetics so as to conjure up another world. He writes:

The “estrangement-effect” is not superimposed on literature. It is rather literature’s own answer to the threat of total behaviorism — the attempt to rescue the rationality of the negative. In this attempt, the great “conservative” of literature joins forces with the radical activist. […] They speak of that which, though absent, haunts the established universe of discourse and behavior as its most tabooed possibility — neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor evil but simply “le bonheur.” Thus the poetic language speaks of that which is of this world, which is visible, tangible, audible in man and nature — and of that which is not seen, not touched, not heard.

It is in this sense that “the truly avant-garde works of literature communicate the break with communication.” He continues: “With Rimbaud, and then with dadaism and surrealism, literature rejects the very structure of discourse which, throughout the history of culture, has linked artistic and ordinary language.”

It’s an interesting way of framing the matter because, turning to Scorsese’s comment that Avengers: Endgame doesn’t really communicate on a human level, this concluding chapter of the latest saga from the MCU becomes avant-garde cinema par excellence.

It is also interesting for this to come full circle in this way. After all, for all of Marcuse’s insightfulness, he too was terrified of pop as that genre tailor-made for capitalism’s inherent expansionism. Marcuse warns explicitly of capitalism’s tentacular spread and its “efforts to recapture the Great Refusal”, leading to avant-garde artists suffering “the fate of being absorbed by what they refute. “

Mark Fisher writes about Marcuse’s Great Refusal in his introduction to Acid Communism, noting instead how Marcuse’s mourning over “the popularisation of the avant-garde” was not borne of “anxieties that the democratisation of culture would corrupt the purity of art, but because the absorption of art into the administered spaces of capitalist commerce would gloss over its incompatibility with capitalist culture.” And Mark mourned this often and explicitly, albeit extending Marcuse’s critiques, repeatedly calling for the return of a “popular modernism”, defined for him by an experimentation that crosses boundaries of high and low, where punks who can’t play their instruments enter into the same space as jazz masters who want to push beyond the modes of expression they know so well. Mark mourned the loss of this kind of cultural horseshoe theory, where there was a gap between these two points of high and low where things could still escape into the radically new. The question of whether something is or isn’t art, is or isn’t music, is or isn’t cinema, seeks nothing more than to close this gap and trap us all within an ultimate discourse. To ask that question is to try to reel things back in rather than allow them to flow outwards.

This is what Scorsese fails to grasp but also, in his own self-defensive pretension, he embarrassingly ignores his own complicity in this same cycle. (And who isn’t complicit?) Not only does the latest Joker movie heavily ape Scorsese’s own film, Taxi Driver, but Scorsese’s last film to garner widespread attention was The Wolf of Wall Street — his award-winning account of capitalist decadence and financial crime that paints as punk the very value system he is now decrying. At the time, it seemed like Scorsese’s intention was to capture the alienating immoral and decadent spirit of the heyday of early market capitalist excess, making something new out of the finished spectacle, but he failed because he was already so wrapped up in the mechanisms he was trying to refute. His latest comments do nothing to assuage this. It only demonstrates how out of touch he is — not with “cinema” or “Hollywood” per se but with his own place within its past and present.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a fitting last hurrah for Scorsese in this regard. We might ask ourselves if the film alienates in that way that great cinema, following Marcuse, perhaps should? Scorsese and the film’s star Leonardo DiCaprio may have argued that it was “punk rock” but no one seemed capable of swallowing that suggestion without gagging. My memory is that Scorsese even faced off accusations of romanticising the excess he depicted.

Michael Laurence has written an interesting essay on The Wolf of Wall Street and the uneasy complicity of any anti-capitalist ethics. One passage in particular, which begins with a Mark Fisher quotation, sticks out here:

“So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.” Yet we do not even need to go that far for ideology to work. We do not need to disavow capitalism as a totality. All we really need to do is believe that the excesses of capitalism are bad, that the few predators at the top of the food chain are evil, that the cold corporate monsters ought to be put behind bars, that the big banks are the real problem, and that greed is not good, so that we can continue to participate in a much more humane, morally acceptable, and less greedy capitalism. Of course, no such thing exists. Even more, the belief that it does exist effectively works to preclude from consciousness the existing structural violence of capitalism: that ever-present and largely invisible violence which proceeds by structuring fields of possible being and experience while discharging modes of being and thinking that cannot be absorbed into its circuitry.

Scorsese seems to encapsulate this entirely. He knows capitalism is bad and he even made a film about how bad it once got but it is a pious punch that fails to land when we consider it cost $100million to make and became Scorsese’s highest grossing film ever, raking in almost $400million worldwide at the box office. This isn’t just a cheap shot to call Scorsese a sell-out, however. What is more important is our consideration that he was once associated with the Hollywood Brat Pack — Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — who arguably gave us the cinematic world of pop blockbusters he is now decrying. Scorsese isn’t a sell-out. He’s a Dr. Frankenstein denying his own bastard paternity.

To return to the question I initially wanted to ask, “What was cinema?”, considering all of the above, I should take the opportunity to nod to that book which is making me consider everything in the past tense at the moment: Leslie Fiedler’s What Was Literature?

Fiedler’s book is great because it is not a cynical dismissal of a time gone by but rather a consideration of how we ended up in this mess of static capitalist hauntography and how he, as a self-described “crypto-pop critic”, has inadvertently helped bring it all about by trying to erase elitism from the field of criticism that he inadvertently fell into, by way of his own subversive acts of criticisms later becoming pop cultural reference points in their own right.

He too was subsumed within the system he had initially set out to refuse.

As he wrestles with how this all happened, he finds the obvious common denominator: money.

He writes:

money, (the one fiction of universal currency) is the only, and indeed always remains the most reliable token that one has in fact touched, moved, shared one’s most private fantasies with the faceless, nameless “you” to whom the writer’s all-too-familiar “I” longs to be joined in mutual pleasure. “I stop somewhere waiting for you” is a sentence not just from Walt Whitman’s but from every writer’s love letter to the world. It is only when the first royalty check arrives in the mail (an answer as palpable as a poem) that the writer begins to suspect that the “you” he has invented in his lonely chamber, in order to begin writing at all, is real, and that therefore his “I” (not the “I” to which like everyone else he is born, but that fictive “I” which he, in order to be a writer, must create simultaneously with the “you”) is somehow real too.

But this means, as all writers know, though most of us (including me) find it hard to confess, that literature, the literary work, remains incomplete until it has passed from the desk to the marketplace; which is to say, until it has been packaged, huckstered, hyped and sold. Moreover, writers themselves (as they are also aware) are reluctant virgins, crying to the world, “Love me! Love me!” until, as the revealing phrase of the trade has it, they have “sold their first piece.”

It is money that exists as the great fuel for the engine of cultural paradox and the sort of elitist cultural cannibalism that Scorsese demonstrates here anew but unchanged.

This cultural warfare may seem at first glance a struggle of the poor against the rich, the failed against the successful. But the situation is more complex than this, since, in terms of culture rather than economics, art novelists and their audience, “fit thought few,” constitute a privileged, educationally advantaged minority, while popular novelists and their mass readership remain a despised lumpen majority, whose cultural insecurity is further shaken when their kids learn in school to question their taste.

Through turns of autobiography and critical self-reflection, considerations of banned books and banned comics, Fiedler very gradually builds towards the necessity of his title’s past tense, which denotes a settling of cultural conflicts by way of the academy. Literature turned from a present concern to a past one as soon as the latest slue of new works have been adopted by curriculums. Literature, then, like an ouroboros, is defined by that which is taught as such — which is to say, literature is determined by literary studies. What is taught is what is literature is what is taught. Nothing is new until it is past.

Within that closed definitional circle, we perform the rituals by which we cast out unworthy pretenders to our ranks and induct true initiates, guardians of the “standards” by which all song and story are presumably to be judged.

Fiedler made this claim decades ago but still we are yet to learn from it and Scorcese’s comments demonstrate this all too depressingly, but so do the actions of those pop lovers now attempting to begin academic careers, raising discussions of the popular to the s. What is cinema is what is taught on film studies courses is what is cinema. Very soon the same will true of “graphic novels” and video games. It’s already starting to happen. And these courses for the new pulp media already seem as lifeless as their earlier High Art counterparts. Cultural critique ignores its own potential for cultural production and renders itself hardened but impotent. (It would be interesting to consider to what extent this is likewise true of an academic study of “politics” today.)

As such, it is not only Scorsese who is at fault here, deeming the MCU to be insufficient when placed before a canonical capital-c Cinema. The defenders of the MCU are just as clueless, showing how the MCU is inspired by or dealing with the same issues as the tragedies and dramas of antiquity. They place their works within the same standards, inflating what they have to hand to fill in the gaps. Rather than levelling the playing field, they try to raise themselves to the same standard, only diluting what they once had. Nobody wins. Pop cultural studies appear hollow whilst high art studies appear bitter. Communication falters. Nothing new emerges.

Fiedler had already witnessed this happening way back when, skewering Scorsese and the standards of contemporary cultural studies departments from beyond the grave, noting how

in recent years [there have been] attempts by academic critics of cinema (they do not like to say “movies”) to kidnap that vulgar form for classroom analysis, even to “teach” how to read it properly. But such cinéastes merely repeat — in a kind of unwitting parody — the old errors of literary criticism: on the one hand, losing sight, in the midst of jargonizing about “montage”, “tracking shots” and “auteur theory,” of the fact that movies tell stories and embody myths, and on the other, making untenable distinctions between “box-office trash” and “art films,” which turn out to be more often than not “experimental” and “non-narrative.”

To stop myself typing out the entirely of Fiedler’s book, I will stop here and simply defer to his partial part-one conclusion.

His is not an attempt to forestall judgement or kill criticism, which he writes is a drive as old and powerful and human as the stories and songs that brought it into existence, but rather to build a new criticism that eschews the hierarchical judgements of capitalist competition. It is to do away with the pre-judgements of prejudice, category and elitism.

Once we have made ekstasis rather than instruction and delight our chief evaluative criterion, we will be well on our way to abandoning all formalist, elitist, methodological criticism, and will have started to invent an eclectic, amateur, neo-Romantic, populist one that will be enable us to read what was once popular literature not as popular but as literature, even as it enables us to read what was once High Literature not as high but as literature. By the same token, we will find ourselves speaking less of theme and purport, structure and texture, signified and signifier, metaphor and metonymy, and more of myth, fable, archetype, fantasy, magic and wonder. Even more important, we will be speaking for ourselves, as ourselves, rather than ex cathedra in the name of some “tradition.”

The key to this — under-acknowledged in his own conclusions — is the acknowledgement that all that is solid melts into air. Accepting this allows us to critique culture without ignoring its biggest driver: capital. It allows us to view these pointless battles between high and low as nothing more than echoes of capitalism’s internal dynamics of class struggle. To sidestep this, wholly aware of its impotence, is to imagine a criticism that can assist in the building towards something new.

Criticism can build worlds as well as the fictions it considers, if used correctly.

This has already been happening. This was the strength of the early cultural blogosphere and remains its strength today, alebit in a few instances. It would be a shame to lose sight of that. We had a good thing going. And there are still potentials yet unreached.

Knole III

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I’m exhausted today. I think the last few weeks have caught up with me and I’m feeling early symptoms of burn-out. Thankfully, this week, life is expected to get somewhat back to normal. I’ll have two days off work for life admin and blogging, meaning I’ll finally get to tackle the drafts languishing unfinished that I’ve been desperate to give some attention to this past week.

I’d thought about spending this Sunday doing that as well but instead we elected to get out of London for a few hours and once again venture out for a Sunday stroll around Knole. We’ve been there a few times now, and every time we do the same thing — walk through the winding valley, looking out for deer, before I have a quick look around the bookshop and we head back.

I’d never bought anything in there before but my interest in Virginia Woolf has been growing more and more in recent weeks as I make my way through her short stories, The Waves and, most recently, Mrs Dalloway. So, I decided to pick up Hermione Lee’s Woolf biography and, despite its intimidating size, it’s already proven to be a really insightful and inspiring read.

The very first chapter begins with an almost self-reflexive look at the form of ‘biography’ and Woolf’s own diaristic thoughts on autobiography. I thought I’d copy out one whole page in full because it’s made me feel vindicated in how I write about myself on this blog and how I choose to use it more generally as a public notebook and diary. Woolf is (unsurprisingly) infinitely more eloquent in talking about the same problems as I recently wrestled with in my post on being fated to a problem, and I love how Lee explores Woolf’s ‘writing self’ and her ‘myself’ as these strangely entangled but distinct ontological modes.

I’ve written about Woolf briefly for an upcoming essay to be published in a journal / collection thing but I think there’s something more long-form brewing too. We’ll see how I get on with the rest of Lee’s mammoth biography…

Virginia Woolf was an autobiographer who never published an autobiography; she was an egotist who loathed egotism. It’s one of the words she most often uses, whether she is writing about herself or other people. Many of the letters she writes contain apologies — not always entirely sincere — for their egotism. And yet, ‘How I interest myself!’ she will say, happily, to herself. She is always trying to work out what happens to that ‘myself’ — the ‘damned egotistical self’ — when it is alone, when it is with other people, when it is contented, excited, anxious, ill, when it is asleep or eating or walking, when it is writing. ‘Sydney comes & I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered & various & gregarious.’ ‘I meet somebody who says “you’re this or that”, and I don’t want to be anything when I’m writing.’

What does ‘not being anything’ mean? Perhaps it is being more concentrated, less externalised: ‘I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing; now I have forgotten what seemed so profound.’

She knows that the process of trying to explain the relation between ‘myself’ and the writing self risks being just self-absorbed, rather than profound. But she must take herself seriously: she is like a singer attending to the state of her vocal cords. ‘Myself’, for the writing self, is both material and instrument. Not for nothing did Freud, on the only occasion when they met, in 1939, give her a narcissus.

Egotism is often the subject of the diary. She is much concerned with how she writes it, and what it’s for. And its uses vary: it is a ‘barometer’ of her feelings, a storehouse of memories, a record of events and encounters, a practice-ground for writing, a commentary on work in progress, and a sedative for agitation, anger, or apprehension. In the mid-1920s, she has a self-conscious debate with herself about whether it is a diary of facts, or a diary of ‘the soul’. (At the same time she is working out how much the ‘damned egotistical self’ should get into her fiction.) She seems to have promised herself that the diary would be about ‘life’ rather than ‘the soul’ — perhaps as a way of keeping ‘egotism’ under control: ‘Did I not banish the soul when I began? What happens is, as usual, that I’m going to write about the soul, & life breaks in.’ Later she will ‘cancel that vow against soul description’: she wants to describe ‘the violent moods of my soul’. But then, ‘How describe them?’ It is difficult to ‘write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.’

Criticism After Gaming: Notes on Pewdiepie, Cancel Culture and Reactionary Aesthetics

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Is anyone else confused by the latest Pewdiepie drama? (Does anyone even care?) 

I have a long draft from 2018 on the topic of Pewdiepie lurking somewhere in the bowels of my WordPress account. I watch his videos a lot and I’ve talked about him a couple of times on the blog before — most extensively in the second part of my “All Roads Lead to Alienation” series. 

Controversies aside, I’ve long admired Felix Kjellberg’s transparency about his mental health issues and I find him to be an interesting weathervane for the shifting hot air of online subcultures. Any insights that might be drawn from this, however, are often lost to his unfortunate nature as a pretty stereotypical Scandinavian millennial who lacks any rigorous media training, coupled with a naive perception of his own whiteness that, from experience, seems to be pretty common amongst Northern Europeans. (Not that this excuses his worst outbursts but it seems to be a bigger issue than just him.) 

Beyond this, I think his strange position — as the world’s most popular YouTuber who is nonetheless seen as the figurehead for an otherwise marginal fanbase — says something interesting about our online spaces (although what exactly is being said is hardly clear from the outside). His relatable nature seems to come from the fact he is a product of early 21st century online cultures instead of being the kind of movement leader he is often heralded as being given the size of his audience. 

This is to suggest that, although he is regularly mentioned in the same breath as Infowars and Breitbart Media, it seems to me like he has more been influenced by a broader Silicon Valley neo-neoliberalism rather than spreading an ideology of his own. As far as I can tell, this is because he’s online, echoing a worldview that I do not share but one which is incredibly prevalent outside of mainstream discourses, and there are likewise many other cultural pies that suffer from the same issues in which he has his pewdie fingers. I feel like his latest controversy epitomises this.

After reaching a mind-boggling 100 million subscribers, Kjellberg made a video unboxing an award sent to him by YouTube, during which he committed to donate $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League as a (somewhat fleeting) gesture of goodwill following his previous controversies, during which he has been adopted as a meme by alt-right and white supremacist figures, as well as more personal accusations of anti-semitism. 

Soon after this video went up, there was apparently an enormous fan backlash and, in a follow-up video, Kjellberg decided to rescind his gesture, saying he would donate the money somewhere else.

I didn’t see any of this backlash personally. (That’s an alien part of Twitter and Reddit to me and the part I’m in is weird enough without heading over there.) All I saw were the videos themselves. But my girlfriend and I nonetheless spent much of this morning trying to figure out what was going on after even she became aware of there being some sort of controversy brewing when the story reached the front pages of a lot of national news websites (such as The Guardian and the BBC).

Knowing I watch his videos, she messaged me to see if I knew what the problem was — was the controversy that he was donating to the ADL in the first place, with their history of equating antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel and other dubious political stances? Or was it that he cowed to the pressure of his supposedly alt-right fans? 

What’s interesting to me is that it seems to be a mixture of both and I see this tension are being central to his online existence. It likewise seems to be a sticky situation that only he occupies.

This is part of the reason why I find myself following Pewdiepie’s content so closely. His high profile under the YouTube spotlight means he often appears caught in the middle of our contemporary culture wars. He’s not a part of LeftTube, nor is he explicitly a part of YouTube’s extremism problem. His personal politics certainly seem to lean to the right but he also seems to be at the mercy of both left- and right-wing cancel cultures, and the latter is a form of cancel culture that few in the media seem to fully understand the dynamics and concerns of. Controversies such as this make that explicitly clear, illuminating a broad cultural crisis that is seldom acknowledged.

First, perhaps we need a quick gaming culture recap… The current toxicity of gaming culture seems to be a result of the long shadow left by #GamerGate, the ultimate cultural backlash of the 2010s, and this has routinely been a topic that mainstream news outlets have dedicated summative essays to, trying to explain the controversy to non-gamers. It will never not be strange to me how a billion dollar industry can still be considered to be so politically niche.

I can’t remember if I’ve ever written about this on the blog here before but #GamerGate was something I fell foul of back in 2014 when it first exploded. On an old personal Twitter account, I made the mistake of criticising many of the women who were expressing pro-#GamerGate opinions on the hashtag by using the hashtag myself and throwing into the fray some sort of half-baked 140-character missive about the blatant false consciousness of these female #Gamergaters.

The tweet destroyed my mentions for a whole 48 hours, with the subsequent reactionary pile-on leading to a complete shutdown of my social media pages for another week afterwards as I let things blow over. Commenting of female false consciousness was perhaps, more broadly, not a good look, but it was #GamerGaters only who took issue with it, and being targeted caught me completely by surprise.

I didn’t have any sort of platform at that time. I’d simply waded into the hashtag without thinking and managed to successively piss off all the wrong people as the tweet got shared by hundreds across a combined network of thousands upon thousands. I remember at first reading all the responses whilst sat in my car under the Humber Bridge — a frequent hangout spot when I was living in Hull between 2014 and 2016 and with a very difficult situation at home. I counted the rapid-fire notifications with incredulity as I was hit with literally hundreds of replies a minute. The onslaught lasted for hours. It was terrifying and induced repetitive panic attacks for days. I had to completely unplug to get away from it. No phone or laptop. I almost threw the former straight into the River Humber. I went into complete digital isolation.

In hindsight, it was a telling experience. Here was a broadly reactionary cause that was emboldened by using the same pile-on tactics that the left have now become most infamous for and, after later experiencing it on the other side of the political divide, it is clear to me that this is a contemporaneous and generational issue rather than a fault in any singular political movement — a symptom of rampant neoliberalism with its risk-adverse politics of individualism. As such, it seems to be a dynamic that has defined all of politics over the last five or so years, despite its predominant association with the left. 

This is worth emphasising, I think, and paying closer attention to it. There is a sense that, in some corners of the internet, this latest Pewdiepie drama is a damned-if-he-does-damned-if-he-doesn’t scenario, straddling both sides of the political divide, as well as the divide between gamer culture and its outside.

That’s not to say Kjellberg’s “gamer” fanbase isn’t something of a pressure pot for certain types of politics — it evidently is — but that is precisely why it is interesting to me. The question is: why? And the answer, I think, is not because of online echo chambers and the rise of the an online right. It is symptomatic of a broader cultural — and even aesthetic — moment that should concern us all. 

Here is an industry where a broadly reactionary fanbase has the sort of clout that the left has with other mediums. And what is interesting is that this is compartmentalised as an alt-right issue by the wider media when, in fact, gaming seems to have just been mutated by a broader cultural industry at large. 

When Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and the rest of the early ’00s blogosphere were in the midst of their hauntological moment, for instance, they were considering the ways in which old and established mediums were mutating due to the feedback loop of late capitalist cultural production. Reynolds’ book Retromania, in particular, explored the ouroboros of 21st century music cultures that were endlessly recycling themselves. However, whilst this is where much of the discussion remains, the same cannibalistic dynamics can be seen at play in cinema and visual art as well.

But gaming seems to have been overlooked throughout these discussions because, rather than suffering from slip into retromania, it instead came of age in that moment. This is to say that the gaming industry has internalised a broader cultural retromania to a far more insidious extent, making it the cybergothic industry par excellence today with its accelerative attitude towards technological innovation but with a largely reactionary view of its own broader cultural development.

I think a large part of this has to do with the gaming industry’s own attempts to critically legitimise itself through a development of its own modes of criticism — and this was the central focus of the #GamerGate controversy, lest we forget. This is important because criticism is — and always has been — political, but the gaming industry’s rushed attempts to give itself critical legitimacy have led to a general naivety about criticism’s role in their own culture. This, again, is due to the time in which gamers and their medium came of age — at a time when everyone was becoming a critic and criticism itself had supposedly been de-rigorised and democratised, for better and for worse.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this, video game criticism and journalism still have a long, long way to go in terms of their cultural standing and, like the industry itself, it finds itself speeding ahead as it tries to retroactively apply outdated critical standards to its own development in order to legitimise itself. (It is a critical forestalling that we’ve seen before — I have a whole other theory about this, for another time, exploring how photography went through a similar in-grown period of critical development which has only worsened its internal elitism today as an art form.)

To explain what I think the impact of this is, I want to foreshadow a future post I have in the works, returning to my current favourite literary critic Leslie Fiedler. 

I recently discovered the YouTube archive of the long-running political talk show, Firing Line with William F. Buckley, Jr., on which Fiedler appeared in the 1970s. It’s a brilliant conversation that Buckley and Fiedler have, and at one point Fiedler even echoes a kind of proto-K-Punk perspective on popular modernism and the divide between high and low cultures, noting how the very emergence of this divide can be documented in tandem to the emergence of literary criticism as a whole.

Fiedler explains that it was in the middle of the eighteenth century that literary criticism first began to “assume its dominance”, at that time when

class had assumed social and economic power that was culturally insecure, and the new middle class, the new bourgeoisie, wanted people to write dictionaries to tell them how to spell words, etiquette books to tell them which fork to pick up, grammar books to tell them they weren’t supposed to say ain’t anymore, and critical books to tell them whether it was okay to read novels to begin with and, if so, which novels were more okay than others.

Those people were sent off to school to study the classics but then came back to talk to their masters about what they should read of current literature, especially to talk about the form that was invented at that moment in the middle of the eighteenth century — what has become the dominant literary form — the novel. And then, after a while, what happened was the people who were entrusted with writing guidebooks … began to get very high and mighty about what they were doing…

Critics were getting high on their own perceived authority but, at the same time, much of society was also ignoring their critical appraisals and indictments. Fiedler highlights, for instance, the persistent popularity of pornography, explaining how literary pornography has always been popular with all socioeconomic classes but always read privately and shamefully — the first (and still our biggest) guilty pleasure.

Later, moving forwards to the 20th century, Fiedler describes how the centrality of the university and pedagogic institutions more generally perpetuated the bourgeois elitism of criticism — an issue he, notably, also points out as prevalent in academic Marxism. He notes that

the determination of what was literature got turned into the question of what is taught in classes is literature — literature is what is taught in classes in literature — what is taught in classes in literature? Literature. It’s a perfectly circular definition which gets you no place.

What interests Fiedler about this is the extent to which this capture of criticism by the academy has made it easier to ignore so that quote-unquote “trash” that is critically maligned nonetheless persists and becomes a major cultural reference point for people. He continues:

If [Fiedler’s students] say to me as a critic: ‘Why do you think Dracula survived although it doesn’t come up to specifications in terms of its language and form and so forth?’ …

Certain books, which may be pretty low on instruction and don’t even ‘delight’ in the ordinary sense of the word… Some of those books may do something else to you, which is to say they may touch that essential archetypal mythological material which is in all of our minds and which is the one thing that keeps us together. This is a populist line I’m giving you…

Sometimes it seems that … all our conscious ideas separate us. You and I, if we discussed many things about politics for instance, might find we disagree but if we were to swap nightmare stories I bet we would discover that there are places where we live in the same region.

It is in this sense that horror and the gothic, in their ostensibly pulp modes, persist within our cultural imaginations despite their distance from contemporary critical trends. Horror movies occupy the same existence — critically trash but culturally central. Such is pop culture more broadly and such is gaming culture most explicitly today.

As a long-maligned medium that nonetheless attracts and is popular with millions, gaming culture has attempted to develop its critical thinking in reverse and, as a result, has dragged along much of the reactionary thought that defines criticism historically, albeit inverting it in apparently counter-intuitive ways. It has led to a kind of inverse elitism where academicism and capital-C criticism are blocked from having too much of an impact on the medium itself, and it is in this rock and a hard place that the main figureheads of gaming popularity like Pewdiepie find themselves, caught between a reactionary fanbase and an old-style critical media discourse. 

What needs to be considered in more detail is the way in which a reactionary culture — common to the “fanbases” of countless mediums — is conflated with a reactionary politics. This is more obvious to us now with the popular genres of yesteryear. I’m reminded, for instance, of Noel Gallagher’s recent trashing of Jeremy Corbyn and his nostalgia for Britpop’s tandem ascension with New Labour.

With gaming culture, the Venn diagram between reactionary culture and politics seems to reveal a considerable overlap, but the two are not mutually exclusive. We should pay closer attention to the ways in which seemingly innocuous aesthetic nostalgia is wrapped up with the rise in reactionary politics because there is a sense in which those critical institutions attempting to hold Pewdiepie to account are more responsible for the present situation than they are dare themselves to be aware of. The gap into which he falls is a more of a direct result of a persistent subcultural retromania than any alt-right movement grown in a vacuum.

This isn’t to shift responsibility but I think a more nuanced awareness of where these issues have arisen from will give us a far better chance of combatting their increased presence. Clambering around the surface of impotently spherical definitions of our cultural trends and warring cancel cultures is not going to get us anywhere.

XG on the Wyrd Signal Podcast

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I had the best time hanging out with Lucy and Sean the other week to record an episode of their Wyrd Signal podcast.

It was recorded in Lucy’s amazing flat on a swelteringly hot August Sunday but it was an appropriately Bacchanalian affair with copious amounts of wine, berries and cigarettes.

As you can see from the timestamp above, we talked for hours about the sprawling mythos of Hannibal Lecter, serial killing in general and the strange relationships we have to these things through culture and queerness.

Give it a listen and go and support Sean and Lucy’s excellent podcast over on Patreon.

Lowestoft

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I’d never realised quite how mean-spirited W.G. Sebald’s description of Lowestoft is in The Rings of Saturn, probably because I’d never set foot there myself before today.

He writes, in one of his trademark elongated Germanic passages:

The last time I had been in Lowestoft was perhaps fifteen years ago, on a June day that I spent on the beach with two children, and I thought I remembered a town that had become something of a backwater but was nonetheless very pleasant; so now, as I walked into Lowestoft, it seemed incomprehensible to me that in such a relatively short period of time the place could have become so run down. Of course I was aware that this decline had been irreversible ever since the economic crises and depressions of the Thirties; but around 1975, when they were constructing the rigs for the North Sea, there were hopes that things might change for the better, hopes that were steadily inflated during the hardline capitalist years of Baroness Thatcher, till in due course they collapse in a fever of speculation. The damage spread slowly at first, smouldering underground, and then caught like wildfire. The wharves and factories closed down one after the other, until all that might be said for Lowestoft was that it occupied the easternmost point in the British Isles. Nowadays, in some of the streets almost every other house is up for sale; factory owners, shopkeepers and private individuals are sliding ever deeper into debt; week in, week out, some bankrupt or unemployed person hangs himself; nearly a quarter of the population is now practically illiterate; and there is no sign of an end to the encroaching misery. Although I knew all of this, I was unprepared for the feeling of wretchedness that instantly seize hold of me in Lowestoft, for it is one thing to read about unemployment blackspots in the newspapers and quite another to walk, on a cheerless evening, past rows of run-down houses with mean little front gardens; and, having reached the town centre, to find nothing but amusement arcades, bingo halls, betting shops, video stores, pubs that emit a sour reek of beer from their dark doorways, cheap markets, and seedy bed-and-breakfast establishments with names like Ocean Dawn, Beachcomber, Balmoral, or Layla Lorraine.

He’s not wrong exactly. Walking down the high street, I’ve never seen so many mobility scooters and children smoking before (and I’m from Hull, lest we forget). In many ways Lowestoft seems to have gotten worse than it was when Sebald described it, but it must be said that Lowestoft is not remarkable in its decline; it is not as singular in its hellishness as the man himself makes out.

Reading the book now, I’m reminded of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida — a book whose author likewise struggles to pass comment on life under the influence of his own melancholy. That book was written by Barthes under the shadow of the death of his mother, seemingly with little self-awareness for how far this shadow has spread into his own analyses. With Sebald’s novel beginning with the writer in a hospital bed in Norfolk, waxing lyrical about death and anatomical procedures, I find it hard not to read an anger at his own encroaching decrepitness being projected onto the faltering seaside city. Not that this is much of an insight — the symbolism is hardly subtle throughout.

This is most apparent in Sebald’s Lowestoft when he walks past Lowestoft Central station, “which had not been refurbished since it was built in the nineteenth century”. He notes “a black hearse decked out with wreaths” passing him by. The chapter also ends with a photo of the hearse in question. My vision of Lowestoft Central was somewhat different — there was far much more life in it.

I was further reminded of the comments made in the film Patience (After Sebald) in which one of the film’s Sebald fans — who has done what I’m doing this week, haphazardly following Sebald’s footsteps — comments that when they arrived at Lowestoft they half-hoped to find squalor and misery under overcast clouds but instead found children playing in the fountain by the pier and felt that they were all having too much fun. It’s almost as if patience was precisely what Sebald was lacking — too melancholic to stop and see the life in what is around him; too trapped inside his own depressive perspective.

It must be said that, today, Lowestoft seems like two towns attached at the hip. Pulling into the both oddly and aptly named car park, Battery Green, we walked the length of the high street on a bright but chilly day, dropping into charity shops and a Gregg’s and a Waterstone’s before we eventually crossed the port estuary onto the rather lovely promenade. The high street was evidently the town’s major artery but we seemed to be the only tourists to wander that far to the town’s north.

I didn’t mind any of it. It was all very familiar. In fact, I was reminded quite explicitly of Sunderland as we walked Lowestoft’s streets, where I spent a lot of time as a child, heading from its toughened bowels to the quaintness of its seafront. This tale-of-two-cities vibe is common to a lot of east coast towns and cities in the UK, with generations of new money and old industry warring uncomfortably against each other and the towns themselves becoming patchwork places of stark inequality. There’s none of that in Sebald. For all its “realism”, there’s no social realism to speak of. It’s all too trapped inside his own head.

After Mark Fisher died, I remember The Rings of Saturn coming up in conversation with Kodwo Eshun who said Mark hated it. I can see why now. It is less a book of Sebald being impacted by the landscape around him, letting the Outside in, but rather pulling himself out across it, his melancholic continental sensibility being a grotesque skin stretched across the coast, and he beats himself like a drum along its shores. I still like the horror of his adventure but clearly it is a mistake to go looking for Sebald’s Suffolk. It doesn’t exist beyond the pages of his book.

For what it’s worth, my favourite thing about the town was the local Wetherspoon’s, busy for a Monday, named The Joseph Conrad. Opposite Lowestoft Central, I thought about Sebald starting his journey here. As far as he is concerned, it seems that his is a journey out of the heart of darkness, into the bourgeois tranquility of the Suffolk countryside, albeit stalked by death wherever he goes.

I’m still hoping for such a journey myself, in the direction originally intended, finding some non-Euclidean environ at the end of the river Blyth. As much as I have failed to find Sebald’s Suffolk so far this week, I’m yet to find Mark Fisher’s either. I should instead be trying to describe a new kind of Xenogothic eerie perhaps: something that emerges from the failure of Sebald’s absence and the failure of Mark’s presence…

Bloomsday

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James Joyce has been in the news over here in the UK a surprising amount over the last few days. Today — 16 June 2019 — is, of course, Bloomsday, and whilst it’s not uncommon for there to be some press coverage talking about the festivities that take place in Dublin this time every year, the main reason was that Jeremy Corbyn came out and said it was his favourite book.

This isn’t all that surprising — I remember Stephen Fry making a fuss about it a few years back and that surely renders its critical acclaim mainstream amongst the British public — but it was Corbyn’s somewhat endearing acknowledgement of its difficulty that had most people talking.

In an interview with Corbyn for The Guardian, Peter Carty writes:

He says, like many people, at first he found the book “incomprehensible”. But then “you stop trying to focus on the narrative and start just enjoying the vignettes”. Back then he didn’t tackle it from start to finish, and that is not the way he has read it since, instead regularly just dipping into passages. It is an approach he recommends to first time readers today: “Read a little bit at a time and think about it and then move on, but don’t beat yourself up if you don’t understand it.”

A lot of people think Corbyn should be cancelled for this shameful toe-dipping approach but, as someone pointed out earlier, this is also the oft-recommended approach for first-time readers of A Thousand Plateaus, which perhaps isn’t a total coincidence…

Carty continues:

[A]s Bloomsday approaches [Corbyn] urges more people to read the novel that, among many other things, captures a society going about its business in uneasy times.

“Joyce references and richly describes what’s happening in the street,” he says. “So somebody is holding forth about a big political issue and then the refuse cart goes by. Whenever there is a big political issue on, I walk around the streets in my area. We might be totally obsessed with Brexit or some other issue but many people are not. Their daily lives are more important. Politicians should never forget that people have lives to lead and they often have dreams they don’t talk about.”

I’m not writing this post just to highlight that Corbyn likes a particular book, however. In fact, today being Bloomsday ended up being quite serendipitous for a completely different reason in the XG Discord.

We held the first session of our Difference & Repetition reading group earlier this afternoon — it was this afternoon for me, anyway; coordinating timezones ain’t easy — and at one point we spent a short time talking about Joyce’s works in the context of Deleuze’s doctoral thesis.

I’m not just going to parrot everything we talked about — if you’d like access to that discussion or if you’d like to join in with future ones, sign up to the Patreon! — but what struck me and others was how Corbyn’s comments resonated with Deleuze’s own.

In the first chapter of Difference & Repetition, Deleuze describes one of his most central concepts: “transcendental empiricism”. In a lengthy passage I’ll quote a considerable chunk of, he writes:

Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. It is in difference that movement is produced as an “effect”, that phenomena flash their meaning like signs. The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism. This empiricism teaches us a strange “reason”, that of the multiple, chaos and difference (nomadic distributions, crowned anarchies). It is always differences which resemble one another, which are analogous, opposed or identical: difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing. Each difference passes through all the others; it must “will” itself or find itself through all the others. That is why eternal return does not appear second or come after, but is already present in every metamorphosis, contemporaneous with that which it causes to return. Eternal return relates to a world of differences implicated one in the other, to a complicated, properly chaotic world without identity. Joyce presented the vicus of recirculation as causing a chaosmos to turn; and Nietzsche had already said that chaos and eternal return were not two distinct things but a single and same affirmation. The world is neither finite or infinite as representation would have it: it is completed and unlimited. Eternal return is the unlimited of the finished itself, the univocal being which is said of difference.

Whilst Deleuze’s prose might be most Joycean in its difficulty — and here he is referencing Finnegan’s Wake rather than Ulysses — we might also argue that the lesson contained within — distilled by Corbyn — is nonetheless the same.

A politician out for a walk … A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.

Knole

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A few weekends ago we drove over to Knole. Deer are, like, my favourite animal and apparently they had loads of them. We discovered in the process that Knole was also a home / romantic getaway for everyone’s favourite literary lesbians: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

It was a short visit. We got caught right underneath a thunder storm and all the deer shat themselves and stampeded so we went home. Cool place though.

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker

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Kathy Acker is someone I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I have long known of her work, her reputation, but I’ve only ever read short pieces or heard about her by proxy.

If I’m honest, I’ve always associated her with a certain American intellectual tradition of writing that wanted to ride the transgression wave over the Atlantic from France but in a way that felt largely performative and ineffectual…

The Semiotext(e) crowd. Enamoured by the French but too American to immerse themselves fully in that otherness — that internal otherness.

And yet, here, today, wandering around the retrospective of Acker’s work at London’s ICA, I am fascinated to discover I could not have been more wrong and more right.

Upstairs, in the final room of the exhibition, there is a vitrine which shows off an interview with Acker in On Our Backs, a magazine for the “Adventurous Lesbian”, in which Acker recalls her first foray into trying to get her work published.

Working as a stripper, travelling from club to club with a car full of girls, she writes down all their stories, retelling each one in the first person so as to appear less like “a sociologist”. Sending them to a prose magazine editor on the recommendation of some friends, she eventually receives a response that declares she “should be in an insane asylum!”

It was this, says Acker, that began her fascination with schizophrenia and the literary power of “I”.

This interview is the last thing read in the exhibition, buried in the last room, but I already felt that fascination. Not just in reading Acker’s “I” but feeling it resonate with the dreams I’ve long had for my own.

In the first room of the exhibition, she tells the story of her life. Dates chronicle a beginning of teenage angst cut up with diary entries from 1777 recalling her imprisonment in Vincennes. A Sadeian woman indeed. Not that this biographical fragment is cited with any reference made to its source. No, because she is de Sade.

And I’m shocked. Here I am reading Kathy Acker for what feels like the first time on the walls of a gallery space but I already know her. She’s the embodiment of my own bookshelf. Every which way I look I see cuttings from Bataille, Deleuze, Iriguray, Blanchot, Burroughs, Kristeva, Quin.

But Bataille more than anyone. He reverberates out of the walls and yet is also so buried. Because everything is Acker. Pointing to the men and women that lie in her literary wake says nothing of their obliteration at the hands of her “I”.

I think about Nick Land’s Thirst for Annihilation:

For it is remarkable how degraded a discourse can become when it is marked by the obsessive reiteration of the abstract ego, mixing arrogance with pallid humility. The chronic whine that results — something akin to a degenerated reverberation from Dostoyevsky’s underground man — is the insistence of a humanity that has become an unbearable indignity. ‘I’ am (alone), as the tasteless exhibition of an engogenous torment, as the betrayal of communication, as a festering wound, in which the monadic knitting of the flesh loses itself in a mess of pus and scabs, etc. etc. … (You yawn of course, but I continue.)

There is a video upstairs which shows Acker along with a host of other women discussing a new trend for tattoos, branding and scarification amongst women. Women who seem, on the surface, to be “respectable” and “normal”, hiding histories of abuse and mistreatment and malignment. Perhaps they have already learned to self-harm in order to cope. And yet here, ritualised communal exercises in pain and healing demonstrate a powerful reclaiming of their narratives. It is the epitome of a Freudian expedition beyond the pleasure principle through communication with your fellow woman.

Acker herself appears strung up in the white cube, literary barbs piercing her flesh, her bookshelf ripping her apart. Jesus wept. But we are nonetheless present for the writing of her disaster.

I think this is the subconscious reason why I have avoided her for so long. Now that we have met, I feel like I have always known her. I’m left wondering what else there is to add? She embodies — fully, wholly, entirely — a spirit that has long been the engine for my own writing.

Acker’s form of schizophrenia is at once hers and all of ours. Or, at least, most specifically, every American’s. It’s what has fascinated me about American history so much over the last year. It is a mentality that feels wedded to the American penchant for culturally absorbing the world.

It is this that Acker embodies, for better and for worse. The American. And now it crashes on the shore of her utter encapsulation.

And where can you possibly go from there? Where can I go? After Kathy Acker?

Apparently, I need to ask Chris Kraus. Perhaps then I’ll reevaluate by default cynicism regarding the Semiotext(e) set.

Notes on a Gothic Adventure in Cornwall

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Way back in October, I spent another week away in Cornwall, although this time with my girlfriend rather than on “deep assignment” at Urbanomic HQ.

For the first half of the week, I was sick with my first cold of the season. The second half of the week, it was my girlfriend’s turn… We got up to lots nonetheless but that dual autumnal burn-out was a very difficult one to get over. It lasted for most of the rest of the year, in fact, and it was so mentally corrosive that I ended up completely forgetting I’d even started this post in the subsequent haze.

As such, it’s a bit of a futile endeavour to try and finish it. I wanted to write about things whilst they were fresh but now it’s almost 6 months ago. Nevertheless, reshaping what was already here will no doubt be useful. I really want to write something long-form on Cornwall at some point and this is not it. I suspect there are far more conversations needed with Robin before something more substantial can coalesce between us but there is certainly something there, waiting for its moment. (There is another Cornwall visit on the cards so we’ll see what happens then.) For now, this is an attempt to write down a couple of things before they fall completely out of my mind-sieve.

Here’s what I (can remember that I) did on my holidays…

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My old post, “Lovers Flight“, on the Yorkshire Gothic and Deleuzean patchwork, has continued bubbling in the background on this blog since I first wrote it. It was the most important post of last year for me. It galvanised something in my thinking — much more than its precursor: “State Decay“, despite that post being considerably more popular — and so I’ve been trying to extend this out into something much more long-form and rigorous, taking in some of the other areas of the UK that share a natural and cultural affinity with the Gothic, but it’s not happened yet. It’s a project that feels so big I think it will have to be book number two. But I really need to finish book number one first…

Daphne Du Maurier has felt like the next literary genius worthy of consideration within this project but linking the Yorkshire and Cornish moors felt like a pretty tenuous leap to make, at first, without enough to justify ignoring their 300-mile disconnection. However, walking through a collector’s fair in St. Ives back in October, I came across a second-hand book stall which was selling about six different editions of a book by Du Maurier herself called Vanishing Cornwall, an exploration of her adopted home that poignantly made the Brontë connection for me. She writes:

The four surviving children, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and the brother Bramwell, had a Cornish mother whom they barely remembered, and a Cornish aunt to instruct them in their most formative years. This heritage played an undoubted part in the development of later genius, and if Emily Bronte, and Wuthering Heights, will always be associated with the Yorkshire moors it must not be forgotten that both her mother and her aunt had on their own doorstep, through childhood and adolescence, the wild moorland scenery, the stories and the legends of West Penwith.

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Whilst I cannot profess to have any Cornish relatives to instil me with a moorland mentality, my mother, whilst she was still lucid, would obsess over Du Maurier’s book Rebecca. (Until last year, I didn’t think Du Maurier was “cool” at all because my Mum liked her so much. How wrong I was!) My main memory of going to Cornwall, as a kid, aside from listening to lots of Limp Bizkit, is going to see “Manderley” — although, in the most wonderfully disorientating fashion, I’ve since realised that this visit has become an oneiric entanglement of fact and fiction. I vividly remember the feeling of seeing “Manderley” in the flesh but the vision of the house in my mind’s eye is very much confused with the images of the place conjured up by Alfred Hitchcock and whoever did the set design for a stage adaptation my Mum dragged me too one time at the Hull New Theatre.

So, as much as I have previously played up a kind of tongue-in-cheek Yorkshire nationalism on this blog, in orbit of the prospect of an independence movement, it must be said that what has stuck me most about my various jaunts around this weird little island is that Yorkshire shares many strong affinities with other counties and countries, that are all rooted in the futile Celtic resistance of English imperialism. (Yes, at “home” as well as abroad.) The attraction of moors and the eerie countryside more generally seems, to me, to be based in a Gothic refusal to conform to a consolidated sense of Englishness. As such, my affirmation of my home’s difference is most important to me because it is a difference shared.

The affinities that Yorkshire shares with other territories around the United Kingdom are precisely rooted in this Hobbesian horror — darkened corners of this kingdom that may not have identified with but nonetheless live in the shadow of leviathan, moulded to its shape over centuries by state oppression and class war. The combined heritages of neglect and, in particular, mining mean these affinities go back a long way. I remember feeling this most intensely in Wales. In fact, many other Yorkshire folk I met whilst I was living in Wales a few years back spoke of a very similar natural affinity to its landscape and cultural identity, and people I’d meet in Wales who’d been to Yorkshire would acknowledge the same thing.

These anti-English, or more broadly anti-imperialist, folk traditions — which is to say, folk traditions that survive today as an indirect but no doubt conscious two fingers up to English cultural erasure — are directly linked to the occult, and this is likewise an attraction I have felt existing between Wales and my Yorkshire home — I lived down the road from the Welsh birthplace of Arthur Machen, for instance — and also to Cornwall.

This is to say that, everywhere I’ve lived — except London, notably — it always felt like class consciousness and an affinity with the occult have gone hand-in-hand and Cornwall is no different. Its history of tin mining collides with its various archaeological sights and the mists of its moors. In Cornwall with Robin, this sense of an occultural weather was felt most prominently as we trekked across moors in thick fog and fine drizzle, in search of a crop of standing stones with only an Ordinance Survey map for guidance, carving out a meandering path, avoiding the map markers for abandoned mine shafts.

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With far less fog on this October trip, our situation was less moored and more marooned. We found the various standing stones and outcrops with ease and, with the sun blaring down on us, we instead elected to spend a lot more of our time along the coast.

However, it is worth noting that, with visibility high, you get a sense of Cornwall’s illusory island mentality when, from some vantage points on the moors, you can see the whole Cornish peninsula stretch out in front of you with the sea encroaching on both sides. At Land’s End, where we spent one of our days, this sensation is heightened further still, with the expanse of the sea in front of you taking on the weight of the whole of this weird little nation as it unfolds for infinity behind you.

You feel like you’re at the absolute ends of the earth, with the land not stopping, transitioning from earth to beach, but petering out as jagged rock, as if the land forgets itself, dissolving into the abyss like everything else.

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A little further round the coast at Lizard Point, the feeling is much the same. Whilst Land’s End is the furthest flung extremity of England, Lizard is its most southernly point. Rather than visit it for this fact alone, it was the first coastal spot on a secret musical sightseeing tour.

Countless times I had listened to Brian Eno’s track of the same name, thinking what this place might actually be like. It did not disappoint as a treacherous bit of coast littered with shipwrecks, caves and seals, although the wealth of tourist activity did dilute the mystery somewhat.

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This was the case at a number of other musical spots as well. We went to Logan Rock too, for instance, looking for the Logan Rock Witch but found nothing but a quaint dock and a picturesque sun trap.

However, as is the case with many other popular tourist spots in Cornwall, there is a sense that you would find the atmosphere you were looking for if you were to return at a less sociable hour. It felt like, to see Cornwall properly, when it wasn’t trying to sell itself, you had to see it at night.

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St. Michael’s Mount was another Aphex Twin tourist landmark but this one, at least, retained the wonder of its spectacle. It also had an intriguing and potent Gothic history.

On a wall in the visitor centre, it says:

In medieval times, St Michael was thought to determine whether the souls of the recently dead went to Heaven or Hell.

Holy places on hills and mountains were often dedicated to him as the mediator between God and man, which was the case with St Michael’s Mount. We still honour this tradition.

It is surprising, reading this, that there are no other St Michael’s Mounts in Cornwall. It is a part of the world drenched in the sublime. This is felt in equal amounts of terror and wonder. Indeed, there were times when these coastal settlements felt somewhat like they were trying to harness something not of this world, sometimes against better judgement.

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We visited one hamlet, for instance, that was nothing but a dock and a few cottages. New houses and a caravan park had been recently built not far away but there was a sense that the original settlers here had not wanted to be bothered. They were tucked very much into the landscape.

It felt like Innsmouth, with the harbour only there to keep up a pretence whilst they communed with something from below. Because the harbour didn’t go out to sea. It simply added a further barrier to something from within an already cloistered cove, embedded within an already existing natural frontier. It felt like something untoward was being kept out. But you couldn’t say what.

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We spent a lot of time finding places such as this along the coast. I took hundreds of pictures of them. Too many to fit in this post. One other particularly notable example of this kind of sublime communion, however, was the Minack Theatre — an open-air theatre built over a 50-year period directly into the cliff face.

It was built, originally, to perform Shakespeare on during and after the war. If I remember correctly, one of the first plays performed there was The Tempest and what a perfect play to perform on this coastline of all coastlines.

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Further examples exist inland. There are standing stones and stone circles everywhere. Walking through them, you might feel something pass through you. Everyone seems to be built on the perfect spot where land and sky fold into one another.

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This is something felt more profoundly than anything on this trip. Of course this strip of land is littered with the archaeological detritus of sun worship.

I’m reminded, at every turn, of Bataille’s text The Solar Anus, describing this great entropic churn back to the plane of immanence. The Cornish coast feels attuned to it. It is the land’s end, England’s end, and it knows it. It loves it. Cornwall is born where England comes to die, its corpse tossed around by the tide.

Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground.

Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun.

The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form.

But their polymorphous coitus is a function of uniform terrestrial rotation.

The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.

But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.

The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.

Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water.

The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis.

The sea continuously jerks off.

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Non-Normative Gothic (or, Stuff I Like)

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I get asked for film and TV recommendations a lot on CuriousCat and I’m never really sure what to say. More often than not, I ignore them, because it ultimately feels quite arbitrary.

I watch everything. Or try to. I used to literally watch everything and my threshold for liking things was low. I paid my dues with French New Wave or Polish Slow Cinema or whatever else. My favourite directors were Kie?lowski, Bergman and Lynch but I don’t really want to be the guy who still recommends that stuff at the drop of a hat into his late 20s. (Although, of course, I still think they’re all great.)

If 18-year-old Film Bro me was to give you a list of films that were really influential for me, it would look like this:

— A Short Film About Killing (1988, Krzysztof Kie?lowski)
— The Hour of the Wolf (1968, Ingmar Bergman)
— The Devil Probably (1977, Robert Bresson)
— The Sentinel (1977, Michael Winner)
— The Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme)
— The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)
— Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)
— Possession (1981, Andrzej ?u?awski)
— The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
— INLAND EMPIRE (2006, David Lynch)
— Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
— The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Philip Kaufman)
— Kwaidan (1964, Masaki Kobayashi)
— Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, Mike Nicholls)
—Don’t Look Now (1973, Nicholas Roeg)

I’d still stand by that list, I reckon, but I’m wary of saying it is definitive because I haven’t seen most of these films (except The Thing, which still gets frequent outings) within the last 5 years — 10 years for some. As such, I could just keep going. I’ve seen a lot of films and I’ve liked a lot of films because I was a teenage sponge and there comes a point where a list just becomes redundant because it’s whatever comes to mind first. I don’t want to equate my taste with the effectiveness of my memory. Nowadays, if I watch something and it makes me feel something out of the ordinary, I’ll probably find something to write about it right here.

Beyond this connoisseur-appropriate list, I’ve also really liked The Hunger Games trilogy, Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and David Fincher movies — Zodiac, Alien 3 and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I really like Michael Mann’s Collateral — the first (and only) movie I ever saw on a plane! I like the most recent run of Marvel movies — which have finally found their stride, I think, after a load of money-grabbing. The last three films I saw and really liked were The Favourite, Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

I could have just said all this when an anon asked earlier if I could recommend some “Gothic media essentials” and, whilst I’d otherwise be happy to, it felt like a good opportunity to offer some broader thoughts on tastes and xenogothic media. Because not all these things are recognisably Gothic and making a list doesn’t really do enough in terms of clarifying that I actually think about the Gothic (and why this blog is called Xenogothic).

I like finding the Gothic in all the telly I watch. My view of the Gothic isn’t that normative because I don’t think the Gothic is — or, rather, it shouldn’t be — that normative. At its best, it ruptures itself. The best examples of the Gothic, for me, are often thrillers and murder mysteries rather than horror movies. More often than not, I end up chatting about the latest murder mystery on Netflix than the latest jump-scare-athon. I’m a big fan of Robin Mackay’s writing on yarnwork in this regard and Robin might be the person I talk to about TV and films the most. (In fact, we shared a folk horror kick last year, watching Blood on Satan’s Claw at Urbanomic’s Cornwall HQ.) He once wrote:

The international thriller and the detective story … present us with a localised object or event that stands out from the ground of normality, suggesting forces as yet unaccounted for. At the same time they transform that vision through abrupt shifts in perspective — the ‘plot twists’ that are the stock in trade of such narratives. This continual interrogation appeals in part because it models the predicament of finite, situated cognition and its aspirations toward universal purchase.

Gothic media essentials are, then, a misnomer for me. It’s about rupturing normality, not finding the best examples of a norm. What I’m interested in is being attuned to the weird as we can find it in the here and now, and the now and then. And there are plenty of examples of media that do that, albeit not being readily seen as “Gothic”. “American Horror Story” never quite got my vote, for example, because it felt so invested in heavy-handed genre tropes. I much prefer the neo-baroque of “Hannibal“, for instance, or, most recently, I liked that new adaptation of “The Haunting of Hill House“. Another series I can’t stop thinking about is “Children of the Stones“, particularly for the way that Mark wrote about it on the Hyperstition blog, tapping into a vigilant and militant dysphoria.

I’ve been interested in finding this sort of thing in all kind of films, mostly recently planning to find the American Gothic in Westerns.

Books are the same. (I’ve written about recent likes here.) Games too. (Here.) All media is the same.

Non-normative gothic is the most gothic.