Stalking

Coming soon...

The post below has been substantially re-fashioned.

Iain Sinclair and the tale of an almost humourless feminist rant

"The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to
vandalise dormant energies by the act of ambulant sign-making."

"... we're on the point of letting the day go...
"It's over, the V has closed its legs"

It was in 1994 that Iain Sinclair and his photographer tramped in and out of London on a mission to uncover its secrets through the ancient art of walking and the practice of 'psychogeography'.

Psychogeography is the cultish tradition in literature and theory that seeks to interrogate place according to its psychologoical secretions - the ambiences and sentiments that ooze from its scarred surfaces. The psychogeographer 'reads' the urban landscape, pressing it into giving up its secret histories.

Sinclair is the self-proclaimed psychogeographer and acclaimed modern myth-creator of London, often lauded as a visionary London prophet in the line of William Blake and Thomas De Qunicey. He is the author of Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge and of Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital and Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out Of Essex'. These last three form concentric circles that attempt to tighten the belt over the sprawling belly of the metropolis and give it definition. On its publication over ten years ago Lights Out for the Territory nearly drowned in praise, critics of all colours scrambling over each other to lick Sinclair's boots, still thick with the muddied dust of the capital.

Employing a little pseudo-psycho-patho-mythology of my own, I read Lights Out only to page 69. Literary lore has it that this is the page on which to sample the wares before buying - the page indelibly marked by generations of book fanciers as the spot to glimpse of the book's most curious energies. 69: a number possessed of its own peculiar symmetries. It is the gravitational centre of any book.

I wanted to love Lights Out, I truly did. But any insights it possesses are obscured by a sulphrous smog of spite that would choke even the most hardened of city-dwellers. The misogyny of the book is rank. It's very difficult to talk about these things without sounding like a humourless blue-stocking, but still: images of rape and sexual conquest abound. This seems to be a deliberate choice, but it's a disappointingly predictable one. The tales Sinclair tells of London in the good-ol' days of yore are of middle-class, mildly eccentric, educated, white men, most of whom ran bookshops.

The natives fare little better. Most Londoners are repellent to Sinclair, unless they number among his bookish mates, drafted into the narrative to prop up the canvas on which Sinclair scrawls long sentences. This supporting cast stands in for the human sensibilities our poet so patently lacks. On the street, where the working classes and other 'ordinary folk' of London are real men and women, and not some brawny intellectual-plaything in shirt-sleeves, they are dismissed by being rendered and interpreted in pathological terms: their humanity is removed; they are mere symptoms of a sick society.

You'd get more warmth from the smouldering butt of a Silk-Cut Ultra under a kicked-in Hackney bus shelter.

Here, for what it's worth, is my 'vision' of Lights Out:

A man in a rain-coat is furiously jacking-off into a time-crusted Houses of Paliament souvenir teatowel, fantasies of raping Margaret Thatcher flashing across the inner membrane of his eyelids.

I always had a hunch that Margaret Thatcher is to trendy lefties what Myra Hindley was to so-called Middle England: the hate figure of threatening female 'other' – the vessel into which male psycho-sexual insecurities are decanted. That Sinclair elsewhere describes Thatcher as a 'wicked witch' is telling. The witch, that haggard symbol of persecuted femininity: the woman hounded to death by society, because, unmarried or influential, she poses a threat to the patriarchal order.

Whatever we may think of Thatcher as a politician, the tenor of polemics against her is disturbing. Sinclair is not alone. Critics of Thatcher have always focused on her femaleness and perceived lack of conventional feminine attributes. The accepted way of describing Cabinet members who had been fired or rebuked by Thatcher was, for example, ‘handbagged’.

With a depressingly Freudian predictability, it is the ‘liberal’ male thinkers who are most vituperatively sexist when it comes to Thatcher. Sinclair describes her as '[t]his wicked witch who focuses all the ill will in society. This is how it comes out of his mouth. I'd suggest that the author is misdiagnosing his own impressions. The symbolism he detects in Thatcher is more suitably characterized by her status as a legitimate hate-figure. For those who have absorbed a soft, politically-correct feminism into their psychological make-up, there is a lack of conceptual vocabulary to deal with their own sexist impulses. It is pure repression. Thatcher’s politics made her an acceptable safety valve for a repressed hatred of womanhood.

******

So, what are the psychological impressions this textual space gives up? The undercurrent of Lights Out is threatening indeed; but it is not the threat of urban decay in the denuded city: it is the threat of a hardening reactionary that misaligns societal ills with the paltry gains of gender politics, and of an intellectual elite that feels itself so defeated by contemporary society that it has turned snarling on its people.


Sinclair's 'born-again flaneur' is not a radical seer, but a stalker: as the stalker is to his victim, the born-again flaneur erases the city that is, not by pursuing and demystifying it but, flexing his own mystical powers, he evacuates the victim’s identity, transforming her into a vessel for his fantasy. He doesn't want to explain London: He wants to ravish it. The body of the city, identified from the outset as female, is to be reclaimed as the great canvas on which maleness will be expressed, tattooed and measured out in size-nine strides.

The geography of Sinclair's own psychology seems to invite further study. Steeped as it is in the Ripper mythos, the unwitting psychological portrait of Lights Out is not of London so much as of a cadaverous masculinity, bloating itself on a fabricated account of the past.

On second thoughts, perhaps it's not such an inaccurate portrait of London after all...

Henry Miller & reflections on accuracy

It has come to my attention, meandering through Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, that grammar is not what it once was. Sousing and screwing his way around Paris in the thirties, Miller’s life is given shape by the punctuating force of the comma, the quiescent lull of the semi-colon - that aparatus of punctuation that halts breathing just long enough to make you wonder whether the sentence died when you weren’t looking.

As a freelance copywriter and copy editor, this frightens me somewhat. I am always missing not just semi-colons but commas. Sometimes my sentences hurtle into the abyss - the full-stops were not delivered on time, so casualties will ensue! In the age of digital correction, spell-check squats in the corner of the editor’s mind, inducing an arrestive fear of error. What if my semi-colon should be a comma, and what if that full-stop should be a colon? ‘Fragment, conider revising.’ But it’s meant to be a fragment, that’s the point. Isn’t it? Is it? F*** I don’t know any more.

If spell-check is one source of the editor’s existential angst, then another is international English. I spent the last year editing the news website for an international institution. I was the only native speaker. The writers were not (yet) expert users of English. My own writing has become as fractured as the geographical continuity of the English-speaking wor(l)d. I start a sentence and I haven’t a clue where it will end up. (It’s usually somewhere about three paragraphs down, hurled into a burial pit of subclauses). Apostrophes intrude, and I know it was not I that put them there!

Indeed, things get so bad sometimes, that it seems as if the deus ex machina of linguistic associations has put paid to discursive, progressive argument. That pause (you know, the one two paras down, three sentences in… ?) seems to tell me something more about the image with which I close than the sentence out of which the image is constructed. And all the image seems really to be, is a transsubstantiation into words of a certain aesthetic that somehow defines the topic, although probably, if you read it, it would just sound bad.

For Miller, punctuation was certainty. He wasn’t even proud that he rarely missed a semi-colon; his bread depended on it. No matter what absurdities went on in the world, for the proofreader at least, they were liquidated in punctuation: the chaos of the world’s wars, murders, disasters, stock market figures is channelled into a tidy canal, making its way through the locks of language - quotation marks, question marks, colons, semi-colons, commas, full-points, brackets (round and square), and so on.

Now though, punctuation itself has gone haywire in the face of a world it struggles to comprehend. Jiving ampersands and leaping apostrophes express the terror of a language no longer able to put the brakes on life. The water level is rising and the dams have burst. How many people do you know who know how to punctuate correctly? Not many, I’ll warrant. I’m one of the best I know, and I know that I get it wrong ALL THE TIME. Often, it doesn’t even seem like there are any rules any more, even though I know that they are lying around somewhere, probably stuffed under the bed of a teenager in Chertsey, front cover torn off and long lost, back cover dangling like an arm with a spiral fracture.

Our inability to punctuate these days is not so much the fault of falling educational standards, but the senselessness of any attempts to impose the order punctuation connotes. Impose order - what? On this? [Centuries of laughter bellow up from the bubbling intestines of Mother Earth.]

So, there's nothing to lose: Go on, put a full-stop in the middle of a sentence, interrogate your exclamation and punctuate your speech with thought.

'Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.'

- Bertolt Brecht: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

On postmodernism

I was wondering about the contemporary art scene in Paris: Just a hunch this, but is it (not) rather feeble - big gallery stuff and precious art school posturing - little in the way of democratized art presentations, collectives etc.?

I stand arms spread, heart wide open to correction, for it was some years ago that I was there and I wasn't exactly immersed in the scene, but it seems to be rather different to London or Berlin or New York in that way. In London and Berlin (and from what I've heard, several cities in the States also) you cannot escape contemporary art - underground collectives are actually rather visible, which is to be celebrated (although, in London at least, it has become sadly difficult to distinguish their activities from the work of guerilla advertisers). Not so in Paris : Paris is strangled by the dream of its own history, suffocated by a cultural inheritance that its fetishizers hope to recapture, but the rainbow doesn't end: it is a mirage.

And Berlin? It's pretty amazing how democratic the art scene here is - it seems that if people are prepared to do interesting things, then they will find an audience for it. That's not to say that a some of that interest isn't disingenuous and some of the art, misguided. Opportunities abound, certainly, but I guess the problem is whether or not there's a real audience - an audience that listens. (Audience: ORIGIN Latin audientia, from audire ‘hear’.)

Berlin art is ambient. It suffuses the place, but there's an awkward feeling that it might just be a little self-reflexive, self-congratulating and self-generating: (Ambient: ORIGIN Latin, from ambire ‘go round’.) It stalks the city in circuitous paths, but returns always to itself. It is utopian, occupying the 'no-place' of the imagination. I doubt how deeply it penetrates into the steel and glass edifices of Potsdamer Platz (daily more like the Manhattan Island of central Europe) and the sex clubs by the Ostbahnhof and Janowitzbruecke, where there's a scat night four times a year; naked group sex parties twice a week; anal, deepthroat and fisting every third week of the month; bondage once a fortnight; and piss parties weekly.

A new magazine launches tonight in Berlin - Utopia: http://www.utopiamagazine.org. I was going to go, but I couldn't be bothered, and... well, now it's too late. Again, tonight, the same night, a contemporary art festival opens: New Life Berlin: http://www.wooloo.org. I didn't go to that either - It was at 6pm and I was sleeping.

Still, the vocabulary is illuminating.

But I wonder, is contemporary art disappearing into the abject utopia of the text? With the anguished cry of the wounded animal, art retreats in horror from the modern world into the space of its own moribund imagination and curls up there: In its love affair with interpreting its own history it binds itself to death. If it is not careful, it will die - not of exposure, but enclosure. Shivering and malnourished, it swallows its own tail, before chewing off its hind legs and fore-paws, until, deformed and disease-ridden, it dies finally of starvation. Except that it won't die, because it is already its own ghost. It is un-dead, still living off the corpse of avant-garde theories of the 1920s and 30s, their impact decimated by the crises of that time: all that Baudrillard et. al. did was to lead them to pasture in a climate more hospitable to their reception.

This is the crisis of postmodernism (which I do not capitalize, because in its nature it refutes uniqueness): that we are caught in a cultural moment which does not exist; it is pure text - the dys(u)topia of the modern imagination. We never escaped modernism. We're still there. Postmodernity is not the process of casting off the shackles of the grand narratives of nineteenth century historicism and exploding totalities. It is the state of dreaming itself.

N.B. For the origin of text as utopia, see Louis Marin's Utopiques

Refracting differentiallly.

Leibniz is the new guru of cyberspace. So comments David Harvey in Spaces of Global Capitalism. Who'd have thought that this dour German polymath would become the posterboy of postmodernism, that he who extolled this universe as the best that could have been made would be devoured and spewed up by junked-up, world-sick Generation X-ers.

The world must be a monad after all.