Lars Iyer's Blog, page 4

Markku Nivalainen interviews me for 3:AM.

The theme for the inaugural issue of the Journal for Discarded Daydreams comes an extract from My Weil, namely:

The plan is total creative destruction. A Year Zero reset, Jacobin-style. A new financial transaction system to replace the banks: that���s what���s coming. And a new global security system, to manage the transition. Biometric IDs for all. The digitalisation of all interactions. A new transnational governance system, so the Man can satellite-control us from afar like livestock.

More details here.

A cartoonist present at the Journal launch captured the occasion here:

Download Discarded Daydreams Cartoon

Nicholas Dames, editor in chief of Public Books, chooses My Weil as one of his books of the year.

Think Minima Moralia as a stand-up routine. You���ll want to quote whole pages. And then there���s the perfect, groan-inducing title. I���ll admit it: I���m a paid-up member of the underground sodality of Lars Iyer fans. Such groupuscules are, as it happens, the subject of Iyer���s work, particularly the one we call the humanities, fast becoming a semi-covert retreat within the neoliberal academy. In My Weil, the scene is the PhD program in Disaster Studies at the fictional All Saints University, set in a Manchester that has become a fiction to itself���the vintage Happy Mondays shirts selling for fifty quid, the conferences held at the renovated warehouse now called the Tony Wilson Centre. A loose collective of graduate students, including one who���s taken the name Simone Weil (���I wanted to live deliberately,��� she explains), spend their days in a fugue of theory banter, loathing for the Business Studies students who are the targets of their inner monologues, self-loathing, booze and hallucinogens. They���re waiting for the world to end, because what���s the humanities now but a kind of eschatology? More than anything, Iyer asks us to relish it: the abjection, the dead-endedness, and the comic sublimity of philosophizing from within damaged life. Because maybe, just maybe, when there���s finally no hope for the humanities (or humanity), that abjection may show you a way out.

I accept the world ��� the whole world with its stupidity, obliqueness, dead and dry colours ��� only in order to fool this bony witch and make her young again. In the embraces of the Fool and the Buffoon the old world brightens up, becomes young, and its eyes become translucent, depthless.

Alexander Blok, in a letter from 1906

The liveliest and most perceptive children of our time are afflicted by a disease unknown to doctors of the body and of the mind. This disease has an affinity with mental diseases and can be called 'irony'. Its symptoms are fits of exhausting laughter which begin with a devilishly mocking, provocative smile and ends with violence and blasphemy.

I know people that are ready to choke with laughter at the very same time that their mother is dying, they themselves are starving to death and their beloved is betraying them. A man guffaws, and you don't know whether as soon as he leaves you he is going to drink some poison and you wonder if you will ever see him again. And to me this very laughter tells about this person, that he despises everything and abandons everything ��� as if it were nothing at all.

Don't listen to our laughter; listen to the pain in it. Don't believe any of us, but those that are behind us.

Blok, in an article from 1908

Patrick O'Connor interviews me for Thales' Well podcast. 

An imaginary comprises those shared meanings, symbols, values, narrative and representations of the world that we hold at a subconscious level. It���s usually inarticulate and unstructured, being expressed in images and stories rather than in theoretical terms. But it is our imaginary that allows us to make sense of the world in which we live and our place within it, providing an imaginative, narrative context that, in Alison McQueen���s term, emplots our shared lives, allowing otherwise incomprehensive events to make sense as part of a larger story.

My theme is the Gnostic imaginary, where I understand Gnosticism in the terms set forth by twentieth-century philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes (1923-87), as an inward relation to transcendence. Gnosticism, Taubes argues, originates in the early centuries of our common era as the result of thwarted apocalyptic and messianic impulses, and we might understand the Gnostic imaginary (my term, not his) as channelled through human history, both religious and secular. My argument is that we can find Gnostic strategies of inversion in modern literary writing and literary criticism, as they help reckon with a world where meaning is no longer given.

*

In order to understand the Gnostic imaginary, we have to understand the apocalyptic one. And in order to understand that, we will have to take ourselves all the way back to the political crises of ancient Palestine. There was trouble back then. Conquest, foreign rule and pressures of assimilation, as well as exile and deportation, were not supposed to befall the Israelites, God���s chosen people. For they had, after all, entered into a covenant with God, which guaranteed God���s protection so long as they obeyed his law.

The prophets claimed that the sufferings of Israel were evidence of disobedience and would cease once the Israelites returned to God. But this message, the opening of the prophetic imaginary, was no comfort for those Israelites who struggled most assiduously against cultural assimilation: they had it worst of all.

How could God let this happen, if he was in ultimate control of the world? The prophetic imaginary gave way to the apocalyptic one in response to this question. The age of prophets came to an end in the face of worldly suffering, when a new kind of writer and text appeared, using a rich, dense symbolism. The apocalyptic imaginary can be seen at work in the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelations, which are full of cataclysmic imagery of an ambiguous kind, including natural disasters, ravenous beasts, plague and fire. But they are also full of wild messianic hope. That hope lies in apocalypse.

*

Etymologically, and as it is used in the Judeo-Christian tradition, apocalypse means an unveiling or revelation ��� a kind of vision. Cataclysm may well be imminent, but it opens onto a radical future, in which the evil forces of the present will be vanquished. There is promise in the end of the world.

The apocalyptic visions recounted in the books of Daniel or Revelations dramatize God���s temporary abandonment of control of the forces of evil and his return to reassert his dominion, fulfilling his promises. The faithful can look forward to the coming vindication of the persecuted, to the divine redemption that brings an end to suffering and death.

The apocalyptic imaginary thus makes sense of present persecution. Suffering has an explanation; it happens for a reason. And valediction will not be far away: havoc will be wreaked upon the persecutors and the Messiah will triumph over the worldly order ��� over politics, history, over all human institutions and practices. The dualism between God and the world once the kingdom of God opens.

But what happens when the putative Messiah actually arrives and fails? What, when Jesus the Christ is nailed to the cross, leaving the worldly order apparently unaltered? Taubes argues that Jewish messianic logic plays out through an inward turn: the opening of introspective conscience, of the domain of faith. Spiritual fulfilment which was supposed to happen with apocalypse is interiorised with Paul, taking place in the human soul. For Taubes, Paul���s antinomianism sees him open an inward messianic realm of freedom, of faith, which not only suspends the Mosaic law, the legal framework of the Roman Empire but also the Hellenistic metaphysics of law, which is to say, general sense of worldly order and structure. Paul rejects all earthly, lawful, orderly authority in the name of faith.

For Nietzsche, this is a despicable move. The apostle is a nihilist! The Pauline revolution expresses a ���a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the ���lowly��� lowers���. Paul nihilistically devalues the noble and the beautiful; more: he repudiates their very source. For Nietzsche, Paul and his followers hate this world because they fear it, longing instead for a world beyond.

Taubes embraces Nietzsche���s charge against Paul. Yes, the apostle is a nihilist. And who wouldn���t be when the Roman empire, with all its might and glory, crucified your Messiah? When Rome found your taking of the love of the neighbour as your guiding principle, your regard for persons regarded as outcasts, as refuse, as far as possible from the imperial cult?

So how are these nihilists, the Pauline believers, to live? What does what Nietzsche called ���holy anarchism��� look like?

Paul���s answer is found in his notion of ���as though not��� (h��s m��), in which the meaning of worldly relations and actions is rethought:

The appointed time has grown short. From now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties. (1 Corinthians 7:29, my emphasis)

The world decays; the form of the world is passing. The Messiah was nailed to the cross, but he rose, and he will return.

How are the addressees of Paul���s letter to endure the corrupt and fallen world? Not by rising up against it, because it���s going to collapse anyway. In Taubes���s words, ���There���s no point in raising a finger [���] Sure it���s evil, but��� what are you going to do?��� The messianic community has to stay alert! be vigilant!, watch for the revelation of signs of the coming of the Kingdom ��� but to be quiet for now.

*

Taubes brings Paul very close to what he calls called Gnosticism, a contentious category to say the least. There are questions as to whether there was ever really a body of work that could be called Gnostic, whether it is not some phantasmic retro-projection of twentieth-century thinkers pondering the evil of their time. Nonetheless, a general characterisation of what these thinkers took Gnosticism to be is useful. In Hans Jonas���s vastly influential Heideggerian reconstruction, we can see a clear parallel between the Gnostic imagination and its prophetic and apocalyptic forebears: the strong sense of the dualism of human and divine realms. But the Gnostics reject the apocalyptic idea that this dualism can be resolved. Human history is not, in fact, about to come to an end, which is the problem. It all goes on forever.

We inhabit this world as strangers, in perpetual alienation. The true god is remote. The cosmos ��� the world we see around us ��� is the work of the demiurge, a wicked deceiver god. We have to remember that this world is not our home: to commune with the true God, who we can know only in his absence. What is called gnosis, knowledge ��� from which Gnosticism gets its name ��� is what we might understand as faith, which holds open the relation to the true god, helping the Gnostic to live against the grain of the fallen domain.

*

The parallels between the apostle Paul and the Gnostics become clear in Taubes���s reading of his Letters.

For Paul, like the Gnostics, the cosmos is ruled by demonic powers; Satan is the prince of this world. For Paul, like the Gnostics, the aim is to achieve a kind of gnosis, or knowledge, that allows you to hold yourself back from full participation in the world, which remains ruled by the wicked ���powers and principalities���. For Paul, like the Gnostics, very little can be said about God. As Taubes writes:

The negative statements about God���unrecognizable, unnameable, unrepeatable, incomprehensible, without form, without bounds, and even nonexistent���all orchestrate the . . . Gnostic proposition that God is essentially contrary to the world.

This suggests that Paul���s faith is a relation to an empty transcendence, lacking determinate content and contesting at every turn the works that support the order of the world. God is what Hans Jonas called the ���nothing of the world���, understood as the antithesis of worldly power.

*

If Jonas is one important source for Taubes���s notion of Gnosticism, Gershom Scholem is another.

As Willem Styfhals shows, a scholar to whom I am indebted here (this essay is really just notes in his margins), Scholem regards the event we know as the ���death of God��� ��� generalised disenchantment, the rise of secularism, etc. ��� does not mean the end of messianism. Indeed, the true content of religious messianism reveals itself only as religious traditions lose their authority in secular modernity. The disenchanted world is alive with religious energies, even they are usually in disguised form, unavowed and displaced. Indeed we might understand the death of God, disenchantment, secularism, even modernity itself as a religious phenomenon ��� a moment in the history of religion.

Modernity is supposed to be the moment when religious claims and systems of authority reveal themselves to be human-all-too-human fictions that lack divine legitimation. Religion is supposed to wither away. But this itself, for Scholem, can be understood as a religious claim: the very groundlessness, the very contentlessness of the messianic call is what makes it religious. Modernity, on this account, might be understood as the fulfilment of messianic thinking. The relation to the divine can now be revealed in its contentlessness as an empty transcendence. And when that happens, a whole theological vocabulary put itself out of use, ready for new appropriations outside traditional religious practice.

*

Reading Styfhals���s study of Gnosticism in postwar German thought, literary critic Stephen Mitchelmore, who publishes his work at his blog, This Space, writes with surprise how words like apocalypse, messianism, transcendence and eternity, which he thought meant little to him, bear a ���charge of significance���. Literature, Mitchelmore argues, ���marks the place where religious thinking recurs in a culture where it has otherwise withdrawn, in this case as anachronistic, and yet cannot be repressed���.

Mitchelmore reminds us how Scholem finds the ���nothingness of revelation��� [das Nichts der Offenbarung] that is also the ���revelation of nothingness��� in the work of Kafka, and how Jacob Taubes makes similar arguments with respect to the Surrealists. Might we also include Blanchot���s ���primal scene��� in these terms ��� that fragment of The Writing of the Disaster where a young child looks up to the ordinary sky and sees:

the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein ��� so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.

Can Blanchot���s ���nothing beyond��� be read in a similar way: not as an atheistic rejection of transcendence, but as a vertiginous gnosis of the beyond as nothingness? Can his literary practice an engagement with ���empty transcendence���? I���ll leave this question open.

But there is one author of particular importance to Mitchelmore: Thomas Bernhard (1931-89), a near contemporary of Taubes, who also grew up in Austria, and who likewise wrote in the wake of the Second World War.

*

The fiction for which Bernhard is known consists of wildly hyperbolic, virtuosic rants by Geistesmenschen, intellectual men, engaged in obsessive artistic, philosophical or musical projects. Typically written in a single unending paragraph in musical, fugue-like prose, his novels are without description or direct speech, his narrators frequently taking up and performing grammatical variations on notable words or phrases. It all takes place, as the critic Michael Hofmann notes, ���at a pitch where you don���t know if it���s wildness or control or somehow both���.

The fulminations of Bernhard���s narrators are full of inconsistency and resentment, revelling in varieties of often self-inflicted despair. They rail against post-war Austrian narrow-mindedness and ignorance. For this reason, Bernhard is often read rather quickly as a satirist, a scourge of Austrian life.

Hofmann, writing in the London Review of Books praises Bernhard���s novels as ���sculptures of opinion, rather than contraptions assembled from character interactions���; each book ���is a curved, seamless rant���. Hofmann fantasises that Bernhard could have added running heads on the pages of his work for the subject of each of his rants, e.g. ������children���s education���, ���the Catholic Church���, ���the Austrian state���, ���Heidegger���, ���Mahler���, ���sentimental regard for the working classes������, etc.

But in a letter to the London Review of Books, writer David Auerbach objects that Hofmann misses out on what is significant about Bernhard���s novels, merely confirming the stereotype of the Austrian as the nest-besmircher who hates his country and its people. Sure, there might be ranting in Bernhard���s work, but it is ���never ranting for its own sake and the rants are never to be taken completely at face-value, no matter how appealing or justified the target���. As such, Hofmann is wrong to claim that Bernhard���s texts are ���sculptures of opinion���, each ���a curved seamless rant���. Auerbach maintains that the ���seams show, constantly���, particularly in ���the constant lurch into the histrionic and the lack of proportion��� in Bernhard���s writing; ���the way in which a Bernhard narrator will go from attacking Nazis to, say, attacking cheese���.

Auerbach���s point is that Bernhard���s narrators are not there merely to call out and satirise the hypocrisies of Austria. They inveigle against pretty much everything ��� including themselves. Satire depends on old norms, on stable, dependable and authoritative values ��� on a shared sense of what is just and unjust, and of the position from which to make judgement. Bernhard���s narrators are deprived of this position, being implicated in their rhetoric, opening displaying their own weaknesses and resentments, their confused desires and foibles. As critic Gabriel Josipovici remarks, ���for them there���s no escape, no position of invulnerability from which one can criticise others���.

*

Bernhard simply does not do standard craft-of-the-novel stuff. His famous periscopic narrative technique, where, as W.G. Sebald notes, Bernhard���s fiction is always at least one remove from what is supposed to have happened, supplanting sureness of plot, character and dialogue, which secure the verisimilitude upon which more conventional novelists depend.

Bernhard���s torrents of words, monomaniacal intense, give expression to a free-wheeling negativity that carries the familiar furniture of fiction-writing away ��� most elements of plot, character interaction, dialogue ��� in order to foreground the unruly voice of the narrator, forever teetering on the edge of chaos. The excesses of Bernhard���s style ��� one translator professes to find his allegedly arbitrary use of italics to be simply embarrassing, rendering fewer than half of them into English ��� are inseparable from what he has to say.

*

But what is it that Bernhard has to say? For Josipovici, Bernhard���s style evolved in the attempt to talk of what mattered to him:

the cleansing of language of its banalities; the articulation of complex and confused desires and resentments; the guilt and pain of our memories of what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945.

Critic Stephen Dowden claims Bernard is seeking what Paul Celan called a Gegenwort, a counterword, to let him write ���against exhausted narrative ploys and poetic forms, against inherited cultural complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century���. The familiar techniques of novelistic craft ��� well developed characters, involved and complex plot, rich description etc. ��� only deepen this complicity. The ���structural certainties��� of conventional novels reassure us that reality remains just as it always was before. Dowden: ���if the novel had not changed much after the catastrophe, then it must mean that the world, despite everything that has happened, was still pretty much the same too���. Stories will always need to be told.

But as Bernhard says on the occasion of winning one of many literary prizes, ���the time for tales is over, the tales of cities and the tales of States and all the scientific tales ��� the universe itself is no longer a tale. Europe, the most beautiful Europe, is dead ��� that is the truth.��� Europe is dead ��� the European dream is over. And storytelling is over, too, if it isn���t to simply perpetuate tired old dreams.

What then, when all the theodicies and their secular offshoots have run aground, when there is no apocalypse to bring about the promise of renewal? What then?

*

Thomas Bernhard keeps the faith.

His narrators lack the reassurance of old norms, of stable, dependable and authoritative values. They lack, furthermore, a safe position from which they can judge the world around them, coherent only in collapse, at the edge of chaos. They implicate themselves in their own rhetoric, wildly protesting against everything and nothing, from Nazism and the Austrian Catholic church to ��� cheese.

But they keep the faith ��� their version of the ���obligation to express��� which Beckett professes in his dialogue with Georges Duthuit. ���The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express���, says Beckett. I wonder whether this can be reread as follows: nothing to say in this world, nothing to express in this world, no means of expression in this world ��� nothing, except the obligation of the counterword, the questioning of what is and what is not complicit with the horrors.

In Beckett���s case, this means new literary figurations of selfhood, the progressive abandonment of traditional plot. In the fiction of Blanchot, Camus and Duras and the literary criticism of Barthes, as Daniel Just has recently argued, we find narrative exhaustion, destituted personhood, and a new emphasis on interpersonal connectedness. They keep the faith too, albeit in a different key. Bernhard���s literary antinomianism is different.

Mitchelmore quotes a famous passage from the third of Bernhard���s autobiographies. Fifteen year old young Bernhard, just out of the most miserable school experience in literature and looking for a job, decides to head ���in the opposite direction��� [die entgegengesetzte Richtung].

I knew why I had made the woman at the labour exchange take out dozens of cards from her card-index: it was because I wanted to go in the opposite direction. This was the phrase I had repeated to myself over and over again on my way to the labour exchange. Again and again I had used the phrase in the opposite direction. The woman did not understand what I meant, for I actually told her that I wanted to go in the opposite direction. She probably thought I was out of my mind, for I used the phrase to her several times. How can she possibly understand me, I thought, when she knows nothing about me, not the slightest thing? Driven to desperation by me and her card-index, she offered me a number of apprenticeships , but none of them was in the opposite direction and I had to turn them down. I did not just want to go in a different direction - it had to be the opposite direction, a compromise being no longer possible. So the woman had to go on taking cards out of her card-index and I had to go on rejecting the addresses on the cards , because I refused to compromise: I wanted to go in the opposite direction, not just a different one.

And so on, over the next few pages.

The repetition of the phrase, Mitchelmore comments opens ���a void in language���. ���This may be the reason why Bernhard was unable to explain what he meant to the official at the labour exchange���, he explains. ���The words become a void in which the infinite drops into the finite���.

How should we understand Mitchelmore���s claim? We could read it in Blanchotian terms, as a suggestion that the repetition of the phrase, ���in the opposite direction��� has made it lose its denotative power. Its referentiality, its power of description, its power to show or tell.

Perhaps. I hear in it an echo of Paul���s ���as though not��� ��� a suspension of relations to the world in view of the coming messiah. Except that there is no messiah coming for Bernhard. There���s no hope at all, or so it seems.

*

In his autobiography, Bernhard recounts how he catches a terminal lung disease after heading in the opposite direction. He ends up in a sanatorium, his illness destroys what chances he has to become a singer. He recalls the death of his beloved grandfather, of his mother. And all this follows his account of his horrific schooling in wartime Salzburg, the town under constant aerial bombardment.

But there are moments of freedom in the span of his life. One of them, in the last published volume, recounts a cycling trip taken on a borrowed bike. Bernhard is eight years old. He���s off to see his aunt in Salzburg, a trip of twenty-two miles ��� a forbidden journey! An exhausting journey! And he can���t even reach the pedals whilst siting on the saddle! He worries about being punished, but he hopes his audacity will be so admired that his offence will be forgiven.

The eight-year-old grows weary. One of his stockings is torn and covered in oil. His bike-chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It���s dark, and there are several miles to go ��� For a while, cycling, he stood up into the wind like the protagonist of Kafka���s fragment ���If one were only an Indian���, as if ���on a racing horse, leaning against the wind���. His silver-painted bike becomes a steed without spurs, without reins ���

And then there���s the passage which recounts the famous opposite direction. In The Cellar, Bernhard made the woman at the labour exchange find a job that really was in the opposite direction. He headed off, to her horror, to become a grocer���s apprentice in a freezing cellar in a rough part of town.

And its here we might see some intriguing parallels with Paul of Tarsus.

The apostle Paul transvalues the ugliness of death on the Cross into a symbol of triumph. Bernhard transmutes values of sober investment in the future, pursuance of a recommended career, etc. into comically perverse defiance. Paul celebrates what Taubes calls ���a subterranean society, a little but Jewish, a little Gentile, nobody knows, what sort of lowlifes are these anyway���. Bernhard goes out among the working-class of as an antidote to stifling hypocrisies of middle-class Salzburg.

Paul turns his followers inward, interiorising the messianic idea. The young Bernhard, likewise turns to a passionate but groundless inward faith in the opposite direction. Paul���s letters show a command of rhetorical skill, perhaps continuing the Hellenist tradition of homonoia or concord speech, designed to attain unity. What about Bernhard? Isn���t here that this unlikely couple comes apart?

With his passion for underlining, the idiosyncrasies of his use of tense, the complex syntax of his opening sentences, his direct speech within direct speech and reported speech within reported speech, Bernard might appear to be aiming at anything but concord. His work is held together at speed, at an eight-year old���s cyclist���s speed, at the speed of a fifteen-year-old bolting off in the opposite direction, at the speed of a mature narrator of Bernhard leaving the ghastly dinner party of Woodcutters. His work can often seem on the verge of simply falling apart.

Bernhard in an interview: ���what I write can be understood only if one realizes that the musical component comes first and only then what I narrate. Once the former is established, I can begin to describe things and events. The problem lies in the how.��� And he goes on: ���the musical element affords as much satisfaction as playing the cello, in fact more, as my pleasure in the music is compounded by my pleasure in the idea I want to express'  ���

The ideas I want to express: then there is concord after all in Bernhard���s prose: a harmony between the hyperbole of the style and the hyperbole of the subject matter. And this is what we find in the musicality and relentless rhythm of his prose.

There is, of course, a danger to rhythm. Emmanuel Levinas warns us that it can effect ���a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity���. Poetry and music threaten to captivate us, to lull our instincts. We might think here of the music of the prose of Louis-Ferdinand C��line, who, like Bernhard, threw out much of the familiar furniture of the novel. But C��line does not utter a counterword; he only deepens and makes worse our inherited cultural complicity.

���Optimists write badly���, according to Paul Val��ry. Blanchot���s rejoinder: ���But pessimists do not write���. The worse is not, so long as we can say,��� This is the worst���, says Edgar in King Lear. Bernhard sings this is the worst. Bernard renders musical this is the worst. In the dark times, will there be singing?, asks a poem by Brecht. And it answers: ���there will be singing about the dark times���.

Bernhard���s repeated phrase, ���in the opposite direction��� is an intensifier, a force of active nihilation which becomes a rising, an acceleration, even a jubilation. There is the joy of outcycling or outstriding or outrunning the world. There is great joy in his work as it affirms its own virtuosity in hyperbolic invective, as it lets its blunderbuss find some deserving targets. A joy of rhythm, not in the sense of a pulsed beat, but by a dance of language, that Dionysianism that unites death and chaos with both desire and the affirmation of life. A music that creates as it destroys.

I���ll finish with a quotation from the very end of Woodcutters, the protagonist of which has escaped a dreadful dinner party hosted by the artistic couple the Auersbergers in Vienna:

I ran through the streets as though I were running away from a nightmare, running faster and faster toward the Inner City, not knowing why I was running in that direction, since to get home I would have had to go in the opposite direction, but perhaps I did not want to go home. [���]. It was four in the morning, and I was running in the direction of the Inner City when I should have been going home. I went on running, running, running, [���] and as I ran it seemed to me that I was running away from the Auersberger nightmare, and with ever greater energy I ran away from the Auersberger nightmare and toward the Inner City, and as I ran I reflected that the city through which I was running, dreadful though I had always felt it to be and still felt it to be, was still the best city there was, that Vienna, which I found detestable and had always found detestable, was suddenly once again the best city in the world, my own city, my beloved Vienna, and that these people, whom I had always hated and still hated and would go on hating, were still the best people in the world: I hated them, yet found them somehow touching���I hated Vienna, yet found it somehow touching���I cursed these people, yet could not help loving them���I hated Vienna yet could not help loving it. And as I went on running, I thought: I���ve survived this dreadful artistic dinner, just as I���ve survived all the other horrors. I���ll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse, I thought, without knowing what I would write���simply that I would write something about it. And as I went on running I thought: I���ll write something at once, no matter what���I���ll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse at once, now. Now, I thought���at once, I told myself over and over again as I ran through the Inner City���at once, I told myself, now���at once, at once, before it���s too late.

It is worth situating another of Fisher���s arguments concerning The Fall���s popular modernism in this context. Fisher astutely proposes of 1982���s Hex Enduction Hour that:

���[Its] textual expectorations were nothing so genteel as stream of consciousness: they seemed to be gobbets of linguistic detritus ejected direct from the mediatised unconscious, unfiltered by any sort of reflexive subjectivity. Advertising, tabloid headlines, slogans, pre-conscious chatter, overheard speech were masticated into dense schizoglossic tangles��� Hex converts any linguistic content, whether it be polemic, internal dialogue, poetic insight into the hectoring form of advertising copy or the screaming ellipsis of headline-speak. The titles of ���Hip Priest��� and ���Mere Pseud Mag Ed���, as urgent as fresh newsprint, bark out from some Vorticist front page of the mind��� Intent was unreadable. Everything sounded like a citation, embedded discourse, mention rather than use. (Fisher, 2007)

Elsewhere, Fisher refers to Jean Baudrillard���s ���The Ecstasy of Communication��� and ���the schizophrenia of media systems which overwhelm all interiority��� (Fisher, 2006). Though Fisher does not acknowledge it, we seem to be somewhat beyond ���popular modernism��� here and into the territory of the postmodern. If Smith was indeed the archetypal ���schizo��� who could ���no longer produce the limits of his own being��� and was ���only a pure screen, a switching center for networks of influence��� as Baudrillard has it (1983: 133), this does not bode well in terms of the potential of working class weird resistance to the kinds of ���authentocratic��� manipulations theorised by Kennedy. In fact, the absence of ���reflexive subjectivity��� in The Fall���s ���dense schizoglossic tangles��� is directly comparable to the effacement of actual working class voices in current conservative discourse; as Kennedy notes, the ���rhetoric of ���listening��� [is], in reality, a way of talking over people���s heads��� (Kennedy, 2018: 86).

Yet this is a problematic reading in a number of ways. To begin with, an understanding of The Fall���s work through a Baudrillardian prism suffers from an issue common to much postmodernist and post-structuralist theory, which attempts to declare an end to centred subjectivity and agency. Yet it often continues to acknowledge ideology and thus, indirectly, materiality, power relations and the associated agencies and interests of social subjects (in Baudrillard���s terms, ���influence���). Even if we were to treat The Fall���s work as subjectless, a position Jameson at times entertains regarding Wyndham Lewis, it may yet retain a redemptive quality. For Jameson, following the anti-humanist Marxism of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macharey, the explicit and ���obsessive��� reactionary features of Lewis���s work make of it an ���impersonal registering apparatus��� for the ���ugliness��� that continues to lurk beneath ���liberal revisionism���. Lewis���s writing is thus valuable in the sense that it involuntarily exposes ���protofascism��� for what it is in no uncertain terms (Lewis, 1979: 21���22). We could construe the ���schizoglossic tangles��� of Fall lyrics similarly. The same ironic formal distance which acts to cast doubt on Smith as working class spokesperson here allows those lyrics to highlight the obscene reality of the bigotry and misanthropy implicitly laid at the door of an ill-defined and racially homogenised working class ��� and by extension the obscenity and crassness of this ideological alibi on the part of the establishment: ���The Classical��� contains the lines ���where are the obligatory niggers?������ ���there are twelve people in the world/the rest are paste������ whilst the narrator of ���Fortress/Deerpark��� complains ���I had to go round the gay graduates in the toilets��� (1982).

Still, though, the question of agency remains. The consciousness of social groups, their allegiances and antagonisms, may be materially and systemically determined ��� but people make their own history, even if it is not in circumstances of their own choosing. Thus the intent of Fall songs may not always be as ���unreadable��� as Fisher makes out. This is so even on the same LP that he characterises as a ���teeming��� expansive��� culmination of the band���s paratextual, intertextual output, apparently devoid of an author-God.

���Hip Priest���, for instance, is as popular modernist as the rest of Hex Enduction Hour: oblique, fragmented and featuring disorienting perspectival shifts in narration reinforced by the occasional doubling of Smith���s vocal line. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to attribute a biographical significance to the mantric repetition of the line ���he is not appreciated���, accompanied as it is by the singer���s identification of himself as the eponymous hip priest ��� not to mention Smith���s extratextual public reputation as a truculent outsider, which he had already established by the time of the song���s release. ���He���s gonna make an appearance���, Smith declares performatively, before intimating the purpose of this appearance. Drinking ���from small brown bottles since I was so long���, getting his ���last clean dirty shirt out of the wardrobe���, the hip priest may be read as the retort of the working class weird to the attempts of ���the good people���, liberal and conservative alike, to contain, exploit, corral and speak for it. Revelling in excess, disarray and grime, the phrase ���since I was so long��� rather than the more familiar ���so high��� implying a base horizontality in opposition to bourgeois uprightness, the hip priest is the atavistic avatar of working class weird revolt.

Wilkinson, D., (2020) ���Mark E. Smith, Brexit Britain and the Aesthetics and Politics of the Working Class Weird���, Open Library of Humanities 6(2), 11. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.535

Do you blame anyone or anything for you being alive?

Not at all. But I wouldn���t want to inflict it on anyone else . . . I cannot understand having children. Even if the opportunity arose, I would definitely turn it down. No, I don���t blame anyone for bringing me into the world, but I do feel that life is excessively overrated.

So you fell in love with images.

It wasn���t really my fault that images rather than people appealed to me. There were a lot of people about . . . I went to school and briefly to work, I did see people. I lived on a heavily populated council estate. There were people all around. But no one was bothered to penetrate this great wall there was between us. Yes, I was selfish. But I was also, and remain so, the sort of person that not many people want to know. It���s hard to believe!

You were forced to construct your own reality?

Yes. This took me a long time. But more importantly, I think that when someone is not at all popular, for whatever reasons, one tends to develop certain forms of survival. A survival which excludes friends, which excludes social activities. That in a sense is how I organised my life. If you cannot impress people simply by being part of the great fat human race, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you don���t impress people by the way you look, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you are now going to ask is everything I did just a way to gain some form of attention, well that���s not entirely true. It is in a small way, but that���s in the very nature of being alive.

Wanting to be loved?

To be seen, above all else. I wanted to be noticed, and the way I lived and do live has a desperate neurosis about it because of that. All humans need a degree of attention. Some people get it at the right time, when they are thirteen or fourteen, people get loved at the right stages. If this doesn���t happen, if the love isn���t there, you can quite easily just fade away. This could have happened to me easily. Several times I was close to . . . fading away. It doesn���t give me great comfort to talk about it. I do not wish to relive those experiences. But I came close . . . In a sense I always felt that being troubled as a teenager was par for the course. I wasn���t sure that I was dramatically unique. I knew other people who were at the time desperate and suicidal. They despised life and detested all other living people. In a way that made me feel a little bit secure. Because I thought, well, maybe I���m not so intense after all. Of course, I was. I despised practically everything about human life, which does limit one���s weekend activities.

What else was there?

Nothing. Books. Television. Records. Overall, it���s a vast wasteland.

Has the memory of those years been destroyed?

No, not at all. I remember it all in great detail, I seem to remember it every night and re-experience the embarrassment of it. It was horror. The entire school experience, a secondary modern in Stretford called St Mary���s. The horror of it cannot be overemphasised. Every single day was a human nightmare. In every single way that you could possibly want to imagine. Worse . . . the total hatred. The fear and anguish of waking up, of having to get dressed, having to walk down the road, having to walk into assembly, having to do those lessons . . . I���m sure most people at school are very depressed. I seemed to be more depressed than anyone else. I noticed it more.

So how, after all this, did the ���great call��� come?

The great call . . . that sounds very nice. In a sense, it was always there. But I felt by the time I reached 21, 22, 23, that it couldn���t possibly be there. I couldn���t see how it could be in pop music. I was paralysed for a start. I couldn���t move. I couldn���t imagine dancing, and I felt that movement was practically the whole point of the absurd ritual. I could just about imagine singing, but even then I didn���t really know what to do with the microphone and the mike stand. But I had this strange mystical calling. There���s no need to laugh! Once again, because I had such an intense view about taking one���s life, I imagined that this must be my calling, suicide, nothing more spectacular or interesting. I felt that people who eventually took their own lives were not only aware that they would do so in the last hours or weeks or months of their life. They had always been aware of it. They had resigned themselves to suicide many years before they actually did it. In a sense I had, yes.

What stopped you?

I made records. I got the opportunity to make records, and miraculously it all worked.

So has being Morrissey saved your life?

It has been a blessing and a burden. It saved me and pushed me forward into a whole new set of problems.

Problems you seem to quite enjoy.

No I do not! Why do people insist that I scour the world and life searching wilfully for atrocities to punish myself with?

But you always seem to derive pleasure from anxiety.

It was always a very insular pleasure. It was always a matter of walking backwards into one���s bedroom and finding the typewriter and perhaps hearing much more in pop music than was really there. The point is, I had always entertained the idea of making records and just as the door seemed to be closing and I was thinking less and less about it happening, I got the chance. Suddenly those avenues were open and I utilised them.

What did you think would happen?

I felt that it would be either totally embraced or universally despised. In a way, both things happened. I often think that people take me either insultingly lightly or uncomfortably, obsessively, neurotically seriously. I was obsessed with fame, and I couldn���t see anyone in the past in film or music who resembled me. So it was quite different to see a niche of any sort. So when I started to make records, I thought, well, rather than adopt the usual poses I should just be as natural as I possibly could, which of course wasn���t very natural at all. For me to be making records at all was entirely unnatural, so really that was the only way I could be. Unnatural. Which in a sense was my form of rebellion, because rebellion in itself had become quite a tradition, certainly after punk. I didn���t want to follow through those established forms of appearance and rebellion. And by the time I was making records, I was 23, an old, thoughtful 23, so I knew there were certain things that I wanted to do. I was very certain. And I do feel very underrated, by and large, considering what I have achieved.

Was it easy?

Success is never easy. It could have gone hopelessly wrong for me. It never really gelled until the fourth single.

If it hadn���t worked, would you be dead now?

I would certainly be in intensive care.

Paul Morley interviews Morrissey in Blitz in 1988

DURAS: I know hippies, kids well. My son is a sort of kid too. There is an almost irrepressible repulsion against knowledge and culture. They don't read anything. This is something fundamental, something entirely new [...] This is what young people are doing, you know. On the international level they are creating a vacuum.

RIVETTE: If it's an active operation, yes, but isn't there the danger, in fact, that this operation of creating a void, which is something active, may become a purely passive state?

DURAS: They have to go through a passive stage. That's what I think. They're in this stage now.

RIVETTE: Yes, but going through a passive stage is still an activity. If I may make a play on words . . .

DURAS: Yes, but I don't really agree with you there. Because they don't do anything. They excel at not doing anything. Getting to that point is fantastic. Do you know how not to do anything at all? I don't. This is what we lack most . . . They create a void, and all this . . . this recourse to drugs, I think is a . . . It's not at all an alibi, it's a means. I'm certain of that. Do you think so too? They're creating a vacuum, but we can't yet see what is going to replace what was destroyed in them���it's much too early for that.

[...] But even if they're not politically aware, they nonetheless represent a political force.

RIVETTE: That is to say that by their number, they represent something that is a ���gap��� in the system, but can this gap suffice to block the system?

DURAS: No, they represent a question, a question that weighs as heavily as a mountain: What now?

RIVETTE: But can this question block the system? On the contrary, isn't this system powerful enough to finally work its way around it, to isolate it, to make it a sort of abscessed pocket?

DURAS: But if this state of affairs gets worse, it will be a terrible thing. If it gets worse, it's the end of the world . . . If all the young people in the world start doing nothing . . . the world is in danger. So much the better. So much the better.

RIVETTE: Yes, but it's like going out on strike. It has to be really a total, absolute, general strike . . .

DURAS: Yes, precisely, precisely. It's like a strike.

RIVETTE: But it's necessary . . .

DURAS: For there to be Soviets.

[...] By definition���and here Marcuse is right, though I don't agree with him on all points���by definition they are outside the circuit of production. The hippie is a creature who has absolutely no ties with anything. He is not only outside every sort of security, every sort of social welfare, but outside of everything. Of all the means of production, of any sort of definition.

NARBONI: It's precisely at this point that I can no longer follow this sort of negation, this return to zero, because the gravest risk seems to me to be a deviation of a religious type, an almost religious conception of revolution, which to my mind is very dangerous.

DURAS: I don't see the religious side you see. A void is something that you live. There is no religion based on a void. Or, if you will, there is an age-old instinct that impels these young people to go in for almost any sort of mysticism, whether it be Maoism or Hinduism, for the moment, but I think this is an incidental factor. That's all the farther it goes. Or else, you might put it that China is having a great mystico-communist experience; I quite agree. I also believe that they are trying to reach the zero-point; but they are taking a very unusual path to get there. For obviously the cult of personality . . . But it is doubtless necessary to go by way of this axis, this pivot-point: Mao is like a sort of geographical point, perhaps, nothing more. As one says ���Mao's China��� . . . a rallying point . . . Perhaps it's different from what happened in Russia. One hopes so . . .

NARBONI: The idea underlying the principle of destroy is that once a type of real communication between people is re-established . . .

DURAS: An almost physical type, if you will . . .

NARBONI: . . . the revolution will follow. I don't believe this. I don't believe that if people managed to talk to each other, to communicate, this would be enough to necessarily bring about revolution. This seems to me to obscure a fundamental problem, one that doesn't stem from individual, intersubjective relations���that of class struggle.

DURAS: You are right. But is it revolution that has made the revolution? Do you believe in revolutions ordered up from Yalta? And in like manner: is it poetry that made poetry? I don't believe so. I think that all of Europe is a prey to false revolutions. Revolutions against people's will. So then, what will make revolution?

NARBONI: To get back to this idea of a void, of clean hands almost���I really think that this is to fall back into a sort of abstract idea of a rejection of every thing that is almost Christian . . . [...]

DURAS: There's a gap between hope and despair, if you will. Where it's both together. A gap that can't be described yet. I think it escapes description. It is what I call the void, the zero point. Perhaps the word ���void��� is going too far . . . the zero point. The neutral point. Where sensitivity regroups, if you will, and rediscovers itself . . . Anyway: it is said that there are more and more disturbed people. Madmen: mental institutions everywhere are full of them. This to me is profoundly reassuring. It clearly proves that the world is intolerable and that people feel it to be so. It merely proves that people's sensitivity is increasing. And intelligence . . . Do you see? I think that we must turn ourselves around. We must reason backwards now about many things. Everybody is neurotic, of course, because everybody is well aware that the world is intolerable. More and more so. And a place where we can't even breathe. Do you agree with this?

NARBONI: Absolutely. These are precisely the consequences of that state of affairs.

DURAS: But it's a hope that I'm expressing. I hope that there will be more and more madmen: I make this statement with pleasure, with satisfaction. Personally. It proves that the solution is near. The premises of a solution. Because I know that we are very, very far away. But here we touch on the problem of freedom. This very moment. We're on the very edge of it. [...]

These young people don't want to do anything. Anything at all. They want to be bums. I have a son who doesn't want to do anything. He says straight out: I don't want to do anything. He wrote me one day saying: ���Be carefree parents; don't feel responsible for my adolescence any more; I don't want to be a success at anything in my life; that doesn't interest me. I'll never do anything.��� He went off traveling all through North Africa . . . And he was often hungry; he was very thin when he came back. He took responsibility for the whole thing on his own shoulders. A sort of exemplary freedom, that I respect. It would be impossible to force work in an office, or a job as a messenger boy, as a TV assistant on this boy; I don't think I have any right to do that. [...]

Don't get the idea that things were easy for me before I arrived at the point where I said to my son: ���Do what you want to.��� I had to do a fantastic amount of work on myself. Moreover, I believe I wouldn't have written Destroy if I hadn't had this child. He's wild. He's impossible, but he has found something . . . something that's outside of all the rules. A freedom. He enjoys the use of his freedom. He possesses it. This is extremely rare. And I often observe hippies: my son goes around with them, there's a whole group of them . . . What is curious is that when you go from one to the other, you see hardly any difference at all in their relations with adults. It is within the group that they become different, do you see what I mean? They form a sort of common front against us. A friendly one. Not a violent one. But they all turn the same face toward us. When you come right down to it, you can't get to know them. You're going to think that it's because I have this son that I defend hippies: that would be too simple . . . One of his pals slept through the baccalaureat exam. They found him there asleep. Not a word. He didn't write a single word.

Duras interviewed (Destroy, She Said, appendix)

Far from being troubled by your letter I am very touched that you should tell me about your great sorrow. I wish I could find something to comfort you. All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest. Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I���ve been told) already they have blown themselves out. I was always grateful for that humiliating consciousness and it was always there I huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and lowliness. To fly there for me was not to fly far, and I���m not saying this is right for you. But I can���t talk about solace of which I know nothing.

Samuel Beckett, letter to Barbara Bray