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