Surveillance Culture, George Orwell and So on Ad Infinitum

Yesterday I was waiting for Jenny to return from Budapest; I'd gone to meet her at Norwich Station. Because the conductor gave her the wrong arrival time, I ended up having to wait for quite a while. I'm an inveterate reader, and one of my favourite things to do when I have to kill time in stations is to go and look at the big connection maps showing the many (well, not that many, come to think of it) ways in which you can traverse the UK. Next to one of these maps was a big sign that said 'Dodgers' at the top - I knew instantly what it pertained to, but was shocked by the content. Apparently, due to 'National Express East Anglia's Commitment to Fare Collection' ('commitment to fare collection'? They're a business! Maybe humans should start publicising their 'commitments to breathing', and the Pope should come clean about his 'commitment to Catholicism'), said 'Train Operators' (aka 'Train-, but more frequently bus-, based beneficiaries of catastrophic privatization policy') will be operating a new iniative by which passengers will be able to anonymously inform on fellow passengers they suspect of not having paid their 'full fare'. Yes, the 'full fare' - that old fella who got mixed up at Diss and had to stay on until Stowmarket is going to PAY!

Of course, the snitch-system will be operated by text, which I suspect is less because it's a conveniently impersonal method of communication and more because businesses love taking advantage of popular neophilia. If a text is involved- so their rationale about our rationale goes - then informing on a fare-dodger will be a little bit like X Factor. Maybe they could go all out and call it Strictly Come the Transport Police Will be Waiting at the Next Station or Britain's Got Ticket Machines Installed at all Stations Now, You Will Not be Allowed to Buy Tickets Onboard Our Services and hire celebrity conductors ('Is the chav in seat 23B fare-dodging? Text Brian Harvey now on 602002!')

Seriously though, what kind of paranoid, Daily Mail-reading anti-human would even contemplate 'texting' to confess their suspicions about the provenance of another passenger's ticketing arrangements? (Clue: the answer might be in the question.) Who makes rail travel in this country such a chore- fare-dodgers or the train operators themselves? It would be sensible enough to install automatic barriers, or just to do something radically practical like, ooh, I don't know, having a conductor on the train in the first place. The jargonistic language ('a commitment to fare collection') is a cynical deployment of a vocabulary which we automatically, unquestioningly associate with the idiom of Customer Service: when we hear about a company's 'commitment' to a policy, it's usually to do with them 'sourcing the best local produce' (lies) or keeping bills at a minimum (Pinnochian lies). So, as soon as we hear a phrase like that, we assume that it's a gesture made in the favour of the customer. Utter cynicism, utter manipulation.

I don't need to wave statistics around to prove that the hike in train fares in the last decade has been astronomical, but I can tell you - with a completely straight face - that a discounted ticket in this country costs two to two and a half times the price of a full-fare, bought on the day one on the FS network in Italy. I can also tell you that the Italian network charges pro rata, which means that you pay for the distance you've travelled rather than for where you've travelled. It is, for instance, cheaper to travel to Barrow-on-Humber than Hull from Scarborough, in spite of the fact that you would have to pass through Paragon Station on your journey and that the former station is an extra thirty (or more) miles further away on the other side of the Humber. I read a year or so back that, as it is cheaper to get a ticket to Berwick-upon-Tweed from Darlington than it is to buy one to Newcastle, GNER (as it was at the time) had ticket inspectors on the platforms at Newcastle with the ludicrous task of sending people back onto trains as they had paid the lower rate to get to a station fifty miles further away. Let's try another one: unless you ask specifically, or you have a friendly ticket vendor (not uncommon, thankfully), you will not be offered the cheapest fare to your destination because the cheaper fares inevitably involve the sale of multiple tickets, and the 'commitment' to providing the lowest fare extends only as far as absolute literalness (ie, typing 'Norwich- Bristol' into the ticketing computer rather than 'Norwich - London, London- Didcot, Didcot - Bristol). It isn't expensive to travel by rail in the UK, it is a systematic rip-off exacted upon a captive market who are simultaneously being cajoled by the government into utilising greener - ie, public, ie, rail-based - modes of transport. They can talk all they like about building Maglev lines that will connect London and Newcastle in an hour and twenty minutes, but how much would the fare cost? By today's standard, an on the day ticket would be in excess of three hundred and fifty quid. And there would still be rail replacement services (aka requisitioned school buses built in 1936) at weekends.

I think National Express are trying to imply that fare dodgers cause the exorbitant prices. I'll leave you to be the judge of whether or not that is the case.

'It Could Only Happen up North' pt. II

Today's story is from Middlesbrough's Evening Gazette. I don't know why this happens so frequently - all over the world, and particularly in James Bond films - but I do know that it's absolute manna for the editors of local newspapers because it gives them a) a story in which there was a big accident but no-one died, b) a great photo op, and c) the chance to run editorials about shortcomings in the local infrastructure/ laxity in the bus driver training centre.

Anyway, I thought this bit was great:

“People were shouting, a girl was coming down the stairs looking awful. I didn’t think anybody would get off that top deck alive.
“My neck was hurting a bit but the paramedics gave me some ibuprofen.”

That rhetorical swing from major to minor keys, from death and derring-do on the A19 Stockton by-pass to a minor scrape at a coffee morning: that is incredibly northern. I'm still wondering if the Gazette's interviewee was Mrs Brady of Viz fame...

* Being a generous sort, I've neglected to point out that the bus was a rail-replacement service (DUC makes mano cornuta signs) which was only operating because signalling cables had been stolen in the Hartlepool area. Except I've mentioned it now. What would you want with signalling cables? Either someone has got a to-scale railway in their back garden (not overly likely in Seaton Carew), or some eco-anarchists are redressing the scars of the Beeching disaster by building a network of secret lines across the UK (or Fantastic Mr Fox has realised the benefits of an integrated transport system).

Sons & Daughters - 'This Gift'

A while ago, I left a post declaring this to be my favourite single - and, indeed, song - of 2008 so far. I've now found a video for it, and it almost does the tune justice - I'm not usually a huge fan of 'live performance' vids, but this one works. Take note, all you Minibertines: this is what it's supposed to be like.

On another note, I'm glad to see S&D rigorously maintaining the historical links between the west coast of Scotland (where they're from) and C&W. And they're nice people as well: they once came down to Sonic after a show and danced with everyone instead of piously going back to their hotel room (this is the unglamorous reality of the touring indie band, in my experience: a couple of cans of warm Red Stripe after the show, then the manager bundles everyone into the van so they can go and eat Pot Noodles in a Travelodge.)

Eeh!

I was going to title this post 'aah-mer' or 'aah-murr' or 'ah-mer' in honour of the phrase one employed to express surprise or shock at another's misdeed when I was at Abbey Infants in Darlington back in 1985. However, Google don't seem to have any of these spellings listed, so I now suspect that it might have been a fragment of my imagination.

Anyway, there's a lot of talk about the over-hasty 'adultification' of children these days. I was beginning to suspect that the phenomenon of the preternaturally pious child was a thing of the past, until I read this excellent story...

Seriously, that could only happen in Yorkshire.

The Vamp

Ah, another idea for an occasional series. This one is called 'Concepts for Discussing Narratology that Originate in Pop Performance'.

Actually, the vamp might be the only one I can think of. You'll know the vamp if you've seen Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line: at the start of the movie, Cash's band get up on stage and begin playing the intro to 'Cocaine Blues' as the man himself (played by Joaquin Phoenix) ruminates in a backroom and meaningfully plays with a circular saw. This is a vamp. Obviously, it's a pretty long one as the film opens in media res with the vamp and cuts away to the life story before Phoenix emerges on stage (we finally see this happen about an hour and a half in; it's pretty cool.) Anyway, in less extreme cases- and in the one I've just outlined, the vamp is being used with a high degree of narratival self-consciousness anyway- the technique is just a way of building tension before the centrepiece of the performance comes on stage. The Fall do good vamps, playing for four of five (or twenty-five, on a bad day) minutes before Mark E. Smith appears to harangue the audience.

Anyway, it's a slightly harder concept to apply to written fiction. In film, there are a number of good ones. Of course, we all know from the promotional materials that, at some stage in Batman Begins, Christian Bale will become the caped crusader himself. That doesn't stop it being exciting when he's revealed in all his rubbery glory. You get it in the pre-credit sequences in Bond films too - You Only Live Twice is a prime example. In terms of words on the page, the best example I can think of right now is 'The Adventure of the Empty House', which is the Sherlock Holmes story in which the missing-presumed-dead hero does not unmask himself to Watson until halfway through the story.

Anyway, I'm trying to collect literary vamps. Let me know if you can think of any good ones.

J

Degree Grades in 'Arbitrary' Shocker

There's an article on the BBC website here. Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. I particularly liked the line about the difficulty of having to shoehorn students of a multitude of differing abilities into the 2:1 and 2:2 spectrum, although they failed to mention that this occurs because we're not really allowed to award a 3rd or lower unless an essay is handed in at 15% of the wordcount, written in pidgin Mongolian, and addended with various besmirchments upon the character of the dean of humanities. As most British universities grade on a percentile basis, whilst only effectively employing the 50-75% range, wasn't this bound to happen at some point? I frequently find myself in the ludicrous situation of being able to put only 17 or 18 percentile-pointed marks between two essays when one of them is manifestly more than twice as good as the other. Could it be anything to do with the corporate-mindedness induced by tuition fees, by any chance?

More of this over the week, undoubtedly.

Poetry 'V' Novels?

One of the things that periodically frustrates, and even saddens, me as a university teacher is a problem that arises, without fail, when we come to discuss the notion of 'experimentalism' in literature. I know that this is a very broad topic, but, as my teaching work is allocated on a) the proximity and co-extensivity of my period of expertise to and with modernism and b) my ongoing interest in the (dialectical) relationship between 'real' history and 'autonomous' formalism, it is a question that can't help but arise in my classes. Invariably, students are a conservative - with a small 'c' - bunch. As a result of the English curriculum taught in all British secondary schools, their readerly mindset privileges content over form to an almost ridiculous extent, and they come to university with notions about the desirability of accessibility (in a very narrow sense) which would make Karl Radek look like Derek Attridge.* Politically, they are almost all (Blairite) consensus-liberals, for whom a good work is to be judged by its contribution to the maintenance of that consensus. This upkeep happens on a virtually pure level of thematics: if the text advances a superficially 'progressive' argument, it is 'good'. For example, Heart of Darkness is 'good' if the class judges it to critical of colonialism, a judgement which is made entirely through a reading of one or two asides Marlow casts in his time at the Inner Station. There's no attempt to intellect a formal anti-colonialism/ anti-racism in the text, even in the most basic terms (such as a reading of the ambiguity or irony that arises in Conrad's employment of framing devices.) The Waste Land is 'good' when dead men losing their bones in and alleys and references to a disenfranchised European aristocracy can be reconstituted into an unambiguous anti-war rhetoric. Until such clearly-delineated arguments can be salvaged from texts like these, they remain - to most of the students - 'pretentious', 'elitist' and 'unreadable'. If you don't believe me, I have the course evaluation forms to prove it.

So when you want the students to define what 'experimental' writing might be, it tends to come down to thematics as well, however closely linked the content might be to its formal articulation. As soon as Woolf becomes biographically ascertained as a feminist, she becomes appealing: Mrs Dalloway is anti-war (yay!), pro-woman (double yay!), which means that the 'pretentiousness' (boo!) that it initially presented becomes irrelevant. The experiment in Woolf is entirely a matter of the political opinion that a few biographical details allow the students to read into the text. Moving through the 20th century, we have Burroughs, who is 'experimental' because his works depict drug use, and Ballard, whose works are 'experimental' because they portray a reasonable amount of transgressive sexuality and a hefty dose of shopping malls and car lots. The plurality and inclusiveness that seem to be indicated by the thematic decisions a writer makes are seen as attempts to subvert the literary norm. There is virtually no understanding of a politics of form, particularly as it is applied to fiction. My suspicion - which some of my more interested students have confirmed - is that the secondary curriculum insists that the very notion of such a politics is oxymoronic. Secondary schools have been coerced by Blairite pseudo-egalitarians to teach literature only according to an index of 'relevance' that the texts can be seen to produce after the fact. Friends of mine who teach English in schools confess their frustrations at the suggestion that Shakespeare be taught via hip hop lyrics* and that Charlotte Bronte be reduced to Chick Lit avant la lettre.

For what it's worth, I believe this policy more or less represents educational suicide.

Recently, this tendency has begun to manifest itself in novels themselves. The 'Granta Generation', or at least some of its members and affiliates, are the first identifiable genus of writers to have had their academic groundings in post-structuralist thought and continential philosophy tempered by the consensus-reinforcing discourses of 'accessibility' and 'relevance'. Having gone through university reading Borges, Nabokov, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe Grillet, they're aware of the aesthetic and even ontological reasons for employing modernist and (more commonly) post-modernist narrative techniques. They're also more acutely aware of the fact that the people who review their books and evaluate them on the panels of literary prizes have had a similar schooling in the ways of High Modernism, and that these people are likely to place a premium on whether or not their novel makes its obligatory formal concessions. As a result, the big challenge for the Granta school is managing to slip their self-obsessed - how many of their novels don't employ a romantically-differentiated protagonist with an admirably hip appreciation of music, art and literature? - realist works through the mesh of formal demands impressed on them during an English degree's Pyrrhic triumph?

Since around 1980, one big get-out on this front has been Magical Realism, a formal approach that had a genuine political relevance in the turbulent post-1945 history of South America, but has now been softened in order to let authors masquerade their faux-naive whimsy as an authentic challenge to ideological norms. Similarly, a Vonnegutian self-reflexivity has consistently emerged in novels which are, on every other possible count, works of unquestioning realism (hello, Martin Amis). I mean, how many people read London Fields because it foregrounds its own fictionality as opposed to the fact that it presents a vaguely edgy universe of spivs, books, sex and big money? In other words, the forms which were supposed to carry that 'politics of form' have been recuperated by ideology - yes, I know that this is a not a new point - by an ice cream-soft post-modernism in which estrangement devices function as nothing more than cynical acknowledgements that some people genuinely believe that structures in themselves can articulate an ethics. Socially, I've called this bacchanal of mediation the 'literature of caveat' before, but I'd never realised how nice the phrase looked written down.

I wouldn't like anyone to mistake what I'm saying here for an argument that is completely resistant to any fiction which can be read without an enormous amount of mental outlay. I'm one of the biggest Sherlock Holmes geeks I know, I contemplate joining M.R. James fan clubs, I love the visceral readability of Irvine Welsh and John King and David Peace. Furthermore, this isn't against realism per se: Zola was the stimulant that carried me over the finish line of my own A-levels; I love the Brontes, David Storey and James Kelman. I don't think the world would be much fun if all books were like Finnegan's Wake or Watt or Blood and Guts in High School or Project for a Revolution in New York. I'd much rather read Patrick Hamilton that Mark Z Danielewski; I prefer Elizabeth Taylor to Marguerite Duras. What I would say is that my attraction to realism is something that has perhaps developed out of an ongoing exasperation with the disarming of modernist and post-modernist formal technique through its application in a spirit of bad faith. I'd rather have Peace's rush-and-cut Pennine poetics than Yann Martel or even John Banville any day of the week.

This week, I've been reading a lot on contemporary poetics for a mixture of reasons: thesis work, general interest, a need to see how my own poetry fits into the ideological debates and schisms that have characterised the poetry scene in Britain since the 1960s. It was refreshing, given how jaded I feel by the prospects for the novel (I think Party Going by Henry Green is more radical than any English-language novel with a comparable audience from at least the last twenty years), to have my suspicions that the appetite for innovative practice in poetry is still thriving beneath the twin surfaces of sixth from and the Guardian Review confirmed. I mean, I read Prynne and Lee Harwood and the more recent Barque Press stuff and whatever Jacket is currently offering, so I know it exists, but I hadn't read much of the critical debate around it. It's wonderful to see a (relatively well-known) literary avant-garde so hostile to the consensus poetics foisted on us by school - where the primacy of Hughes, Plath, Larkin, Tony Harrison et al goes more or less uncontested - and the liberal media's reluctance to acknowledge the existence of anything more complex than Don Paterson and John Burnside. That this underground poetics has achieved some of its ends without feeling the need to appeal to a base, patronising notion of relevance - and, anyway, we'll leave the rapping to a 'pioneer' like Andrew Motion, a man who perhaps epitomises everything that is sick about English writing today - is particularly edifying.

The energy of the small press/ avant-garde scene has, undoubtedly, been underpinned by the apparent paradox of the marginality of poetry when it is compared to fiction. Even the big names of British poetry - let's say Paterson, Burnside, Paul Muldoon and Hugo Williams - don't sell that many copies. They make a living as poets by touring and reading, and often supplement it by lending their services to the ever-expanding ranks of university creative writing programmes. Poets, unsurprisingly, don't sell film rights (though I wouldn't be surprised if Paterson managed to wangle himself a detail somehow). Our experimental poets, then, are virtually all employed elsewhere, commonly as academics, but frequently in less obvious fields. They work on the margins of the margins, and the need to please mainstream publishers/ TLS reviewers is, to put it mildly, a secondary or tertiary concern for them. By contrast - as Adrian Mole finds out when hawking Lo, the Flat Hills of My Homeland - experimental novels in the modernist continuum (as opposed to the transgressive/ sci-fi stuff in the Stuart Home orbit) are almost entirely suffocated. When something weird that's too unmistakably brilliant to be ignored appears (my argument for this is Sebald, though I know his work is not to everybody's taste), its challenging formal devices are rapidly disseminated into the works of writers who are much, much more concerned about the signings and the film deal than they are with the technical and political niceties of what they're handling. If you don't believe me, go to Waterstones and look for post-Sebaldian novels. You'll recognise them from the blurb's manic insistence of the acuteness of the author's rendering of the 'problems of memory', or some such jargon, which will be tied into a given 'traumatic event'. I can guarantee for starters that none of these works will do justice to Sebald's legacy, particularly because they a) manifest no sense of humour whatsoever and b) trade a genuine historiographical motive for what Karl memorably once described as a sense of the 'vaguely spooky'. Recently, I noticed a novel called The Angel of History, which is a fictionalization of the last days of the life of Walter Benjamin, the philosopher-historiographer whose thought echoes through Sebald's novels. Somehow, a circle is closed and a little part of the soul of fiction is gone with it.

I don't have a conclusion for this - it's more an attempt to get down some thoughts which have had a hornet-like presence in my head for at least the last six or seven years and probably longer. Now and again, I come upon little pieces of writing that ventriloquise the hornets: as my Mum once said upon my rather earnest attempts to explain Saussure or Bakhtin (I forget which), 'I've always thought that but I'd never have put it that way'. You get to a point in your line of work or whatever you want to call it when you've earnt enough stripes for the things that were once piddling or whimsical concerns to become career-defining issues. For me, the hostility to 'difficulty', and the endless bullshit pumped out in the name of realism, is that particular problem. There is more that I could say about this, and will at some other point, but if you've read this far then you deserve a cup of tea or a pint. Thanks for reading, if you were.

J

* Radek was a leading proponent of Socialist Realism, a particularly odious piece of Bolshevik cultural proscriptivity which (effectively) insisted that working-class intellectual horizons should be set more or less at the already-known and frequently encountered. This thinking bequeaths Big Brother and Road Test my Girlfriend, or whatever that program with that troglodyte from Hollyoakes is called. As with most Stalinist principles, Radek's idea translated exceptionally well into conservative ideology. Attridge is a contemporary literary critic whose specialises in so-called 'difficult' works and linguistics. Thinking about Radek has reminded me of my favourite moment in George Orwell, although I can't remember which book this particular vignette is in. Orwell describes a Left political meeting in the 1930s in which a very middle-class commissar, up from London, was addressing a group of miners. The commissar, presumably revelling in a puffed-up sense of intellectual authority, took the opportunity to denounce the works of Shakespeare for the 'bourgeois ideology' they supposedly contained. Presumably, in the commissar's head at least, the miners should have been reading Gorky or James Barke (though the latter's tendency towards modernist wordplay might have made him persona non grata too). At this point, two of the miners took it upon themselves to stand up and defend Shakespeare (and his politics) in minute textual detail, completely humiliating the speaker in the process.

** Better, surely, to teach hip hop on its own merits rather than as a medium which was potentialised by a 16th century plawright. Which it frankly fucking wasn't. Sorry to lose the measured tone here, but the double-relegation that happens in this case - Shakespeare is presented as being as 'interesting' and 'accessible' as Chuck D, whilst Chuck D's own talents are institutionally authenticated only by their supposed comparability to Shakespeare - is insensitive (maybe 'imbecilic' would be a better term) in so many ways.