the old is dying and the new cannot be born (nancy fraser)

This is a short but insightful treatise on the vacuum that is opening up in political culture with the waning of neo-liberalism and the failure of either the right or the left to find a new “hegemony” which can replace it. Hegemony being, as the author explains, a Gramscian term which suggests a political/ philosophical worldview which can shape the way political society both acts and sees itself. Nancy Fraser highlights the way in which much of the liberalism in neo-liberalism has been, if you like, window dressing which has covered up the failures of a Capital/ Finance system which supposedly keeps the wheels running (and disproportionately rewards those who oil these wheels) to address key issues of inequality in society. Liberal gains are all well and good but they shouldn’t hide the fact that the working class is getting proportionately poorer, and society is becoming increasingly unjust, even if certain freedoms have been secured. She is great on how Trump manipulated this situation to stoke a culture war which was all about getting him elected and nothing to do with addressing wealth divisions and inequality. This is a short book with an appended interview with Bhaskar Sunkara, but it’s full of really valuable insights, including the complex and dangerous process of trying to find a new hegemony (or vaccine). Referring to what might emerge which will succeed in helping to create the kind of plausible society which the New Deal offered before its hegemony was eroded she says: “What we don’t know yet is whether some new, yet-to-be invented form of capitalism could satisfy those imperatives—or whether the only possible solution is a postcapitalist society, whether we want to call it socialist or something else. Maybe more important than knowing that for sure right now is knowing what the new rules of the road should be for a political economy that is both pro-working-class and globalized. Ours is a world that cannot and must not go back to distinct national economies. That way lies competing protectionisms, militarization, and world war.”

middlemarch (eliot)

Here is my earliest memory of Middlemarch. I was about 17. At boarding school. My parents owned a flat in a Georgian house which was within walking distance of the school. They didn’t live there. They lived in the Ruhr Valley. In my final year at school, I would spend a lot of time at the house. Mostly in the middle of the night, when I and a few friends would sneak out of the confines of school. We would sit around in he living room with its plush gold coloured carpet and heavy curtains. It was not a place of great partying. It was a place to escape from the school, feel independent. Hang out. I remember a boy called Frank Skelton, (his real name was Mark), an idiosyncratic individual with a curious worldview, who was always reading Middlemarch. He could never read more than five pages without it sending him to sleep. He would, I imagine, doze on the carpet, the penguin classic version open at the page he had reached. If our final school year had lasted another ten years I suppose he might have got to the end. 

I don’t remember reading the novel myself. I might have done. There was one passage, which is the passage where Ladislaw is lying on the carpet in front of the fire in Lydgate and Rosemary’s parlour, which I recognised with an absolute clarity. But it might have been that Frank had reached this page and read it to us, as we lay on the carpet, just as the Victorian Ladislaw did. The simple pleasures of life. 

“He was given to stretch himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt to be discovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such an irregularity was likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously mixed blood and general laxity.”

I also remembered, as I made my way through Eliot’s epic during the Pandemic, that it reminded me of reading War and Peace, which I did whilst travelling across Latin America, on trains and buses in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, finishing it around the time of the Uruguayan election in 2004.. Great books deserve a great backdrop. Middlemarch is undoubtably a great book, although I can understand some of the critical ambivalence that it provoked before it gained the unimpeachable place in the cannon that it now enjoys. There are elements of Middlemarch that feel like a high-end telenovela. It’s quietly turbulent, with cliffhanger chapter endings. The characters are mostly middle or upper class, struggling with what we might now call “first world” problems. Broken hearts, failed marriages, frustrated dreams of glory. Yet perhaps it is the very normality of these problems which lends the novel its glory. The worthy, headstrong Dorothea is a template for a new kind of woman, a gateway to feminism. Ladislaw and Lydgate, the two principle male characters, struggle with the ethical dimension of ‘money/ status’ versus ‘honour’.

In addition to which, it’s intriguing to see that Eliot is looking back thirty years, when she wrote this, to a time of great turbulence. “In the hundred to which Middlemarch belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held the most decided views on the subject were women and landholders.” Substitute the Reform Bill for Brexit and Cholera for C-19, railways for modern tech, and you have a world which, although two hundred years away, almost seems as though it could be talking about contemporary Britain. The world of the shires has changed less than we might have imagined. Eliot’s  nuanced understanding of psychology, which feels way ahead of its time, only goes to illustrate that psychology has been doing nothing except playing catch-up. People have always been fucked up, confused, uncertain in the face of a changing world. The fact that Freud & co invented a science to study this doesn’t mean that they invented the problems they sought to address. 

Eliot creates a fictional world wherein these issues are laid bare. Coupled with passages of writing which take the breath away. Her chapters stick to a rigid formula of dialogue and description, both psychological and natural. If one of the aims of writing is to remind us that the heartbeat of a human being has not altered in thousands of years, and those things which affect that heartbeat haven’t either, Middlemarch is a wonderful example of the novel’s capacity to remind of this fact, to permit us to dwell in a society which is so very distant to our own and so very close at the same time. 

malign velocities (benjamin noys)

Has the world accelerated into an inevitable collapse? Did globalisation, the frenzy of hyper-consumerism and hyper-production contain the seeds of its own demise? These questions seemed mildly absurd even six months ago; today they seem urgent, and either utopian or dystopian. Using Nick Land’s outlandish theories about accelarationism as a starting point, this short book essentially refracts notions of progress as mapped out in the twentieth century, ranging from the machine-love ideas of the Italian futurists through Leninist revolutionary ideals to a more nuanced vision of Stalinism than you might normally expect. (Indeed it wouldn’t be hard to present this current epoch as the most Stalinist since Stalin, one which blithely accepts surplus deaths in the tens of thousands as a price that society needs to be prepared to pay for the greater good of the whole.) The book traces a path from these highly ideological worldviews through to the development of neo-liberalism and Chinese commune-capitalism. The political map is redrawn: it’s not so much a case of left against right, as a vision of technological materialist advancement measured against a more pantheistic, anti-progressive agenda, a qualified reclamation of the Luddites. It’s not an easy book to read and at times it feels to the lay reader as though it ties itself in knots as it wrestles with the jargon of post-modernist philosophy, (much as the work of Nick Land himself often verges on the impenetrable), but there’s enough in Malign Velocities to make you rethink the whole course of 20th century history if you’re so inclined, and who knows, as we witness the full, terrifying complexity of 21st history unfold, that might not be such a daft thing to be doing right now. The past has constructed a honey trap, we felt as though we were racing towards a glorious technological future when, right this very minute, it looks as though the only place we were really headed was back towards the pre-globalised future. 

will and testament (w. vigdis hjorth, tr charlotte barslund)

It feels like a mistake to have read up about Vigdis Hjorth upon completing her novel, because in truth the book is far more interesting than the minor scandal which accompanied its publication. The novel is a tale about incest, a curiously Scandinavian theme. The narrator, Bergljot, makes several references to the film Festen, which the novel resembles. A wronged child confronting not just the parent who wronged them but also the familial structure which permits the offender to get away with their crime. In this sense the novel is about more than just incest. It’s about how families create their own myths, their own distortions of the truth, and the power struggles that go with the structure of the family itself. At one point Bergljot says that Festen got it wrong, because the victim is never given the chance in reality to confront their accuser as happens in the film. And the writing is brilliant in the minute way it examines all the ins and outs of Bergljot’s inhibition and the courage she requires in order that she can bring herself to confront her childhood demons, no matter how futile the task of changing the received family history should prove to be. The novel, which also refernces Ibsen, Jelineck and other Nordic poets, manages the trick of being both a difficult read and eminently readable, split up as it is into short sharp sections that keep the narrative moving in spite of Bergljot’s tendency to go round in circles as the prose nags away at a wound which can never heal.