Two Steps Back: a Critique of Today, a Dismissal of the Past and a Eulogy for the Future, as Presided over by Mark E. Smith and The Fall
“I had come to loathe my
husband, Mr Harlax. I mean, physically,
be revolted by him. I could look at him
and think only of the functions.”
-
Artemis ‘81
Différance
is the funeral held for the meta-narrative.
Memorex. Manufacturer of computer peripherals and
recordable media. Established in 1961,
Memorex were synonymous during the 1980s with home recording.
Kraken. Legendary squid-like sea creature said to
wrap its tentacles, once disturbed, around vessels and drag them to the bottom
of the ocean.
The
time of year I remember most distinctly from my childhood were those strange
weeks when the nights drew in.
Halloween, Bonfire Night…the cheap masks at the shop at the end of the
twitchel (because that’s what they were called in North Nottinghamshire), the
divine aroma of potatoes being charred on the backyard fire which, in our age
of ultra-safety, would never be bureaucratically tolerated. Those cold, dark evenings carried their own
gothic magic as a child. One could quite
easily imagine Spring-Heeled Jack
bounding from the council estate roofs and the bizarrely-gnarled trees in the
woods actually being science fiction organisms.
Renowned as one of the most haunted villages in England, the remains of
an old Roman garrison sat atop the clay hill which hamletted the village on all
sides. There was always a spectral
threat on the lips of our parents, and all of this has indelibly left a
quasi-Victorian gothic impression on my recollections of the early eighties.
To
begin, then, with the problematic word. When
we say “haunting,” we are tacitly referring to the ineffable: concepts which,
when attempted to give form to or study, vaporise. Something altogether apart from philosophical
immanence, this is the run-out groove which carries the fading analogue
vibrations of our specific pasts, and if words such as “haunting,” “ghosts,”
“spectres,” (ad nauseum) are to
characterise memory this is only because these terms serve best to outline a
difference which cannot be described in binaries. We may, if we are so inclined, steer off
track and cite Bergson at this point though it serves just as well to propose
that memories are recalled in units, rather than successive elements of
time. Were we to recall perfectly our
entire lives in reverse beginning with the absolute present then we would
doubtless pick up on subtle ideological or cosmetic shifts in our
environs. We would, however in all
probability miss the greater shifts and distinctions, but given that this kind
of recollection is impossible, we instead focus on the event. These events, as unitary measures, are
themselves “haunted,” as it were, by dead elements (be they cars which are no
longer on the road, a foodstuff no longer manufactured or a television
programme that nobody else remembers being aired). We may then say that we are haunted by the
event, or even the unit.
This
is hinted at by Derrida, yet made explicit by the 21st Century
permutation of Hauntology. Our factually
oblique and rose-tinted recollections of the past coupled with the present
conundrum of “already been done” has
suspended Western culture in a temporal loop.
“Two Steps Back,” in fact. The
time-locked cultural blockage of an age after Postmodernism has rendered the
“new” profoundly spectral: we are watching, listening and responding to
ghosts. These ghosts are the spectres of
Modernism and pre-Modernism, the last cultural epochs where technological and
biological growth were anywhere near in tandem with one another. Indeed, the “new” is necessarily enshrouded
with quotation marks – even visually, the word is spectral. Unknown to me in the 1980s, the literal ghosts
alluded to in local folklore were in fact the unconscious parental responses to
a time which made more harmonious sense, when there were less technological
leaps to bemoan.
Différance
is the individuation between biological memory, political memory, cultural
memory…it is how Proust’s memories distinguish themselves between Dostoyevsky’s,
how Beckett’s memories are internalised whereas Joyce’s remain
geographical. Escape from Marienbad,
indeed. Différance is the temporal
linguistic rift rent by dromology. Différance is the colloquial vapour trails
left hanging in the air in the wake of cultural imperialism.
Différance
is the family unit with lost unity.
Derrida
likened the spectre of Marx (that phantasmagorical after-image which has
haunted capitalism for over a century) to Hamlet’s father: literally and
etymologically the root spectre at the feast.
Indeed, that crucial textual link was made early on by highlighting that
Hamlet was “the Prince of a rotten state,” allegorically that same rotten state
which was to be found in the wake of communism itself, its ectoplasmic remains congealed
in the scattered debris of the Berlin Wall.
1980s Britain, or its working class communities, had more than it’s
share of this rot: alcoholism, redundancy, solvent abuse, domestic violence,
mass unemployability…all of these were to be found, as a child, beneath the
superficial halcyon sheen of the nuclear family.
This
impression is what always returns when one hears The Fall. The oblique, rumbling production on Dragnet, the keyboard trail on Frightened, the choppy vaudeville of City Hobgoblins. And those words…like tapping into
long-forgotten truths which revealed themselves in layers the more one could
discern them. Listening to any Fall
record was worth a dozen trips to the library and provided a far more
comprehensive (albeit labyrinthine) education than one could hope to gain in
those Thatcherite penal colonies we were forced to attend during the week:
instant psychic Cinerama of a world made up of grotesque (ha!) dog-breeders,
phantom stalkers, Disneyland beheadings and strange conjugations of literary
figures. Mark E. Smith saw himself as a
writer above all else, and it is indeed within those wordscapes that one is
ensnared once those primitive, repetitive rhythms and snarling Northern barks
have either enchanted or repelled you. One
reads The Fall as one reads Deleuze – in layers and multiplicity; the libido in
despair, castrated by its own production.
Listen to Room to Live, or Tempo House and you have a Deleuzian
machine absorbing as it creates. One can
almost hear the ideas forming in Smith’s mind just before he contorts them, the
rhythm section in endless repetition as time strangles the pleasure principle.
Once
one hears The Fall (either as a joyous or attritional experience) one is at
once haunted by The Fall: like Marxism, the time between first contact and
present time is rotten with phantoms.
The “ghosting” effect on an old television broadcast is merely the ghost
of multiplicity, information forced down a tube which is continuously caught up
with itself in a cathode Möbius. The
“captured” cultural elements of the past, ensnared by Smith, become distorted
in much the same way as Francis Bacon would pervert his subjects and, like
Bacon, Smith froze his subjects at their most primal as though intuition led
him to their animal state: Terry Waite, Alan Minter, MR James, Lou Reed and
Doug Yule (in an instant fused into the one chimeric state) – all in a state of
“…becoming Fall.” The industrial
landscapes sonically conjured by a superficially grotesque rumble are another
“becoming,” for in that instantly primal cacophony lay not only the bleak
Conservative wasteland of late-70s and early 80s, but also admitted to the
industry of Blake’s Jerusalem – a
bleakness far sootier and rooted in diaspora than anything suggested by
Kraftwerk or Joy Division. Here was (and
is, captured in essentia) an industry transcending political trend: if Marxism
is the spectre haunting Europe (macro), then The Fall conjure the specificity
of a Britain enslaved to a Marxist ontology, or rather the phantom of
differance which manifested itself in a typically Northern blue-collar attitude
which eternally defies translation.
This
was the Britain one would experience if one watched Coronation Street through a
lens in any way similar to Smith’s – the Barlows’ crepuscular killing sprees,
Kevin Webster copulating with Jack Duckworth’s pigeons in the outhouse to
produce a malformed beak/moustache hybrid, all in those lurid cathode reds and
blues of early colour television, yet with shadows darker than a Castiglione
monoprint. And we respond to those
grotesqueries knowing full well that we – the working class with our fathers
risking life and limb daily at the colliery – are the grotesque products of a
perverted society. Smith took the
narrative experimentation of The Velvet Underground and twisted it to his own
vision, throwing in all manner of literary, cultural and political allusion
along with it - the mystical autodidact Roman Totale XVIII his early
prosopopoeial alter-ego emerging from the song lyrics to commandeer the sleeve
notes. So within, so without.
Music
has been something which comes and goes in my life, with precious few
exceptions. When I wanted to put
together a band at the age of twelve, I was too young to do so to any extent
other than drafting in school friends to help create an undisciplined cacophony
in the spare room. It was, for them,
something to stave off boredom and nothing more. For me, it quickly became the case that I
could entertain myself more effectively by making a cheap guitar and amplifier
sound like something other than a cheap guitar and amplifier: hiding the amp
under a pillow with the bass turned all the way up sounded like the atonal hum
of a building site, whilst striking the strings with metallic objects made for
the sounds of cinematic stabbing (reflecting the potentially lethal act of
striking electric guitar strings with metallic objects in the first
place). I made no further attempt to
form a band until in my early twenties, when any chance of finding like-minded
individuals had been scuppered by the lumpen musical ideals left in the wake of
a withered Brit Pop: young musicians wanted to sound like solo Paul Wellers and
already-existing bands stank of being fully endorsed by their parents, who were
probably in bands which emulated Paul Weller in 1983. There was nowhere to be found the kind of person
who wanted to create the kind of sonic experimentation I needed to make. The Velvet Underground’s currency – which has
always been in fluctuation in the eyes of the mainstream – was at an ebb. Such is the way with being out-of-synch with
things: always one paradigm shift from having a real chance at something
special. In hindsight, of course, I
count my blessings for the music business is among the vilest of industries,
and I then lacked the sheer bloody-mindedness to persist at all costs like Mark
E. Smith always has. More than this, I
lacked the discipline to maintain a single sound throughout anything
approaching a career, much less stick to so singular a discipline as music. This is why the likes of Smith, Billy
Childish and other counter-culture luminaries who doggedly refuse to attenuate
themselves to anything as crass as a marketable sound have to formulate their
own economies – and not just financial economies.
Shane
Meadows’ 1999 drama A Room for Romeo
Brass was filmed in the same village alluded to in the first
paragraph. Shot nine years after I left
the village, there is a marked difference in the landscape of my childhood and
that recreated on the screen, a difference which went beyond
representation. Seeing the village in
Meadows’ film, I felt no nostalgia, no sudden desire to return there. Indeed, aside from the novelty of recognition,
there was nothing to link the me in
the present to the me who recalled
playing in the exact locations now being used as a stage for Paddy
Considine. Partially, this can be
attributed to simple displacement and the passage of time, but more crucially
the topography had altered to such an extent over those nine short years that
my very conception of the village had become the recollection of a ghost, or at
the very least an erasure. My childhood
existed only in my memory, and no amount of old photographs (of which there are
very few) could ever amount to anything more than a multiplicity of
reflection. Time is no longer a thing
which can be measured by temporality alone – of all the images and zeitgeists
left to us by the Twentieth Century, a sense of echoing pastiche is likely the
dominant sensation which has only increased with massive exponentiality to the
present day. Which decade is this year
in the 1990s emulating? To what extent
do the purveyors of culture in 2012 understand the forms and aesthetics they
are aping from 1969?
I
have, since an age too far back in my memory to place with any exactitude, been
in a state of mourning. This is no silly
Freudian claim of being desirous of a return to the womb: personally, I
frequently refer to that oft-repeated Smiths lyric whenever I encounter Freud –
“it says nothing to me about my life.” The mourning I claim is the mourning for a
childhood half received, or indeed a deferral of childhood which was felt just
as (if not more than) keenly during my infancy.
Betraying the above claim, I must nonetheless turn to Freud for his
unheimlich to describe that jarring notion as a child that there was always
something wrong, something awry or missing.
Unheimlich is perversely the
most fitting term for my domestic childhood situation, for the home was
sporadically and decidedly unhomely.
Growing up with alcoholism from an extremely early age means that there
has been no chance for the child to know anything other than a home run through
with alcoholism, and that home being in a relatively (by today’s standards)
tight-knit community means that any social comparisons must be drawn from other
homes which are in some way complicit with alcoholism (few could have not known
that our house was the one with the parent who lapsed wildly into stupors
lasting days and, sometimes, weeks. Yet
very little was ever done to circumvent the vicious circle of dependency: in
fact, the reverse was so often the case).
In such circumstances, one lives in a microcosm of Other: there is
nothing wrong with this picture…and everyone who knows precisely what is not
wrong with the picture knows how to mind their own business about what is not
wrong – at least until their front door is closed.
When
an infant encounters an adult who is drunk, the first instinct is to think of
the adult as “unwell,” which is conveniently confirmed by other adults and
becomes the official euphemism. “Unwell” also means “absent” in such cases,
even if the unwell person is in the same room, because the sober parent has
been purged of all parental virtues, such as responsibility, kindness,
indulgence or accommodation. The entire
architecture of home life is dismantled to such an extent that the very state
of childhood is placed in suspension. If
a parent is too drunk to collect their child from nursery, then that child
ceases being a child in the eyes of nursery staff and becomes a problem. If a child is not in school because of
parental alcoholism, then that child is now a “case.”
But
what is perhaps the most destructive of all are those periods when the parent
is sober: life is less complicated, certainly, and the parent/child bond is
soldered together once more, but there is always the dread – which can occur at
any time, with or without warning or cause – that the unwell will return,
rendering the moments of sobriety something to fear just as much as the periods
of chaos. This, then, is the mourning I
have felt since infancy. Petite morts in
the most literal sense: mourning the death of the home, the death of a childhood
being allowed to live itself out, the small, staggered death of a parent.
I
was six years old in 1984, the year forever burned into scholarly discourse as
the official death of the blue-collar worker in Great Britain. My father worked in the mines, though ours
was a colliery which outlasted many others in Nottinghamshire. Although Calverton Colliery almost survived
the century due to private finance (the office block was the last structure to
be demolished in March, 2000), redundancy hit our household in 1987-1988. The Calverton in A Room for Romeo Brass is the neoliberal perversion of industry:
Vicky McClure’s character works in a fashion outlet in St. Wilfred’s Square,
which was formerly a chemist; Considine’s Morrell is unemployed, friendless and
entirely disconnected from both morality and self, a parody of identity tripping
over itself to fill in the cracks left over from a patchy education and a
(tacitly) fractured home life. This is a
society very much in the process of restructuring itself, redefining its
identity by drawing from its immediate past, its discordant present and its
bleak future. Almost twenty years on and
that future is not so much bleak as eerie: children no longer play in the
streets (an ostensibly glib statement at first glance, but no less true for
it). For children in 2018, socialising
has become compartmentalised into school, after-school clubs and birthday
parties. The common ground of having
parents who worked within a location-specific industry is gone, and in its
place are streets full of adults who are too busy keeping their heads above
water with insufficient McWages to integrate with others on the street – often
because those others command higher wages for less effort, but perhaps more
often because there is little understanding of what the other’s job actually entails.
What once unified communities has alienated it. Mark Fisher adroitly pointed to this
diasporic labour culture as both cause and symptom of depression in his
excellent essay Good for Nothing. The working-class curse of being made to feel
inadequate for professional jobs, whilst feeling inferior (or at the very
least, fraudulent) in office or factory work:
“…because I was
overeducated and useless, taking the job of someone who needed and deserved it
more than I did. Even when I was on a psychiatric ward, I felt I was not really
depressed—I was only simulating the condition in order to avoid work, or in the
infernally paradoxical logic of depression, I was simulating it in order to
conceal the fact that I was not capable of working, and that there was no place
at all for me in society.”
It
is only natural that this phenomenon trickles down to our children. As displaced as we are in our present
economy, this can be nothing compared to a child who feels no tangible
connection to a world both virtual and indifferent. We recognise ourselves (or partial vestiges
of ourselves) in our immediate culture and react to this accordingly, yet when
our immediate culture is purely virtual (such as is the case when a child’s
daily routine consists of school-dinner-bathtime-device, as opposed to a routine from the late Twentieth Century
which was more akin to school-play-play-dinner-play-bathtime-bed), psychic
well-being suffers just as surely as physical well-being suffers from vitamin
deficiency. Children identify with –
and, terrifyingly, become - nebulous,
uncanny forms in video games: forms which have nondescript facial
characteristics, limited movement and lifespans with no value. They are both Geppetto and Pinocchio with no
reference to a higher meaning. Small
wonder, then, that they struggle to place any real value to the social
realm. The mirror stage ceases to
function when the mirror ceases to reflect.
We are now (and have been for some time) in an age of mass childhood
dysfunction which has increased at such exponential speed that psychologists,
behaviourists, therapists (et al) can no longer sufficiently account for
it. This is because the accounting must
come from fields outside of Freudian specificity: the social sciences (as
evidenced by Fisher) are where the answers are to be found, and from a
sociological perspective they are to be found relatively easily. We need only refer to Foucault and thereby
note the homogenisation of the state apparatus (the school being modelled on
the prison, for example) to see the link between this and a gaming platform
such as Roblox, which takes this model to the nth degree. Players create and interact in virtual
cell-like buildings, which can vary between prisons, schools, houses, pizzerias
or indeed any simulacrum of our reality.
Very little distinguishes these artifices aside from superficial décor,
and the tasks each player performs is largely standardised and based on
production / consumption. The neoliberal
ideal supplied (as only the neoliberal ideology would be allowed to) as
plaything for a standardised socialising.
If any suggestion had been made to me (and, I imagine, any other child)
in the 1980s that performing perfunctory tasks in order to achieve virtual
(i.e. non-existent) rewards could in any way be passed off as entertainment or –
even more scandalously – playtime, this would have been dismissed as some
species of Stalinism: a tin-pot attempt at coercing child labour masquerading
as fun. Platforms such as Roblox offer
no conduits for the superego to develop, and creativity is limited to the basic
additions the child can make to their domains.
This is the very business school one imagines when listening to The Birmingham School of Business School
from the 1992 album Code:Selfish:
Weave a web so
magnificent
Disguise in the art of
conceit
….
Deposits prisoner
robotics
Home to their wives
Stepford
Case-carrying
Business School
At
the expense of all else the neoliberal worldview must emulate itself, asserting
its financial and political dominance in self-replication, deceit and a means
to an end mentality (the end of which must ever be kept out of sight and
grasp).
I
was twenty-five when my mother died, just one week after her sixtieth
birthday. Those small, staggered periods
of mourning I had undergone all throughout my life until that point returned,
massively intensified and furiously indignant at the torment I had lived
through. To have my mother’s death
played out in front of me so many countless times, whereby the person who
should have been a constant in my life mockingly replaced by something so
animalistic finally and so swiftly taken from me at a point in my own life when
I should have been adjusting and reacting to the vicissitudes of my own
adulthood felt like the most vicious betrayal of all. Depression had been a factor in my life since
the age of twelve (if I have to give an age to the time when it was finally
recognised that the sense of “wrongness” at home had finally been absorbed by
my own psyche to become an unwellness in its own right), and by the time of my
mother’s death I had already made no less than six attempts at my own
life. Any attempts at academia up to
that point were offset or sabotaged by personal feelings of insufficiency and I
had tellingly fallen into catering - a vocation frequently associated with
verbal abuse and physical suffering. All
relationships I had were a priori doomed to failure, though that only served to
exacerbate the pain when this inevitably became the case. Again, the protracted mourning period playing
itself out.
A
Memorex, then, for the Krakens. These
memories remain buried, submerged beneath countless quotidian events waiting to
be re-activated by sensory stimuli. The
stimuli, though, must be of the time of
the memory in order to function. The
Memorex must be a pure recording.
Ti
West’s 2007 film The House of the Devil
goes further than pastiche: it wants you to believe that it was made in the
early 1980s, down to the camera tints, synth-heavy soundtrack, dialogue and
content (devil worshippers here deliberately chosen to harken back to the
Satanic Panic in the wake of the Richard Ramirez killings). Most tellingly, however, is the film’s title
shot. Filling half the screen in garish
yellow, the title reeks of cheap exploitation horror though the inclusion of
the film’s date in Roman numerals gives pause: the tradition of placing the
film’s title with it’s production date directly underneath with All Rights Reserved is something which
died out in the late 1970s, thus creating not only a jarring anachronism but
also – perhaps most poignantly – turning the charade in on itself. What we are left with is not a reference to
the past, but rather an atemporal, half-remembered throwback which forfeits
historical exactitude in favour of nostalgia for a time which never happened as
it exists in collective memory. The House of the Devil is by no means
alone in this stylised misappropriation: It
Follows, Beyond the Black Rainbow,
The Neon Demon, Nightcrawler, Under the Skin
and Amer are but a small selection
from the hundreds of motion pictures made with an eye to providing the viewer
with that most ultra-postmodern thrill of experiencing the past as they have
always remembered it: not factually, but mnemonically via associations and
cultural connection. The danger of this,
of course, is in the potential for collective memory to wipe out the historical
fact. A Twenty-One-year-old watching
these films today has no first-hand experience of 1984, therefore leaving them
with nothing to distinguish between the two oppositions. Reason concludes that the result of this
phenomena will be an entirely muddled collective memory in 40-50 years whereby
the Twentieth Century will eventually be remembered amorphously and
atemporally.
Though
the above may be a peculiarly altermodernist symptom, its eventual effect is,
to all intents and purposes, what one is listening to on And This Day, Hex Enduction
Hour’s cataclysmic denouement. Time
crashes in on the listener all at once, the preceding fifty-three minutes of
the album serving as individual elements while And This Day serves them all up at once.
In
2018, we are still in the process of mourning (a deferred mourning, but a
mourning nonetheless). We mourn the failed promises of modernism while we
adjust constantly to the increasing pressures of a neoliberal world. For the working classes, we mourn ourselves
as we struggle to ward off the demands of abstract capital. Our ongoing mental and psychic collapse is as
much the product of Victorian Dad ideology as it is lagging concentration in an
age of advanced dromology. “Pull your socks
up” is scandalously still being uttered by mental health workers who themselves
cannot ever hope to reach the bottom of the piles of cases stacking up every
day. Those children lucky enough to be
dealt with in timely fashion are furnished with ADHD statements as readily as
birth certificates, while other children less fortunate (mine included) wait
years to be granted a cursory inspection, before an inevitable non-conclusive
conclusion. The fault lies squarely with the parents, so the official party
line of responsibilisation goes.
Parents, however, are sinking under ever-increasing debt just to stay
above water. For the working classes,
the very concept of a meritocracy is not as ludicrous as it is offensive. Perhaps
this penchant (yearning, even) for the relics of the past – albeit reformatted
to fit in with our collective memory – is nothing less than a coping strategy:
there was a time when those in need would be accommodated, when the poor were
dealt with sympathetically rather than with scorn. And as much as we know this to be far from
the truth, it is a falsehood far more comfortable than today’s crushing
truths. Mark E. Smith was the
ever-present rage against the horrors of neoliberalism: fiercely opposed to the
fol-de-rol of social media and distrusting to the end of a system which
streamlines cultural endeavour to fit the device, Smith took The Fall and made
it rougher as the rest of the world became sleeker. The grotesque salmagundi of sound sculpted in
the 1980s, consisting as it did of harsh Germanic repetition, quasi-Jamaican
barked ad-libbing, Velvet Underground drone and a brash form of working class
country music (country and northern, if you will [and he did]) had, over the last decade, become a feral beast of
unrelenting curmudgeonly fury, primed and aimed at any and all facet of a West
so utterly surrendered to the growing weight of capital.
As
amusing as it may be to recall Smith’s innumerable bon mots, jibes and drunken
slurs collected over the decades, it is nonetheless to miss the point - Samuel
Beckett was no less the caustic wit when in his frequent cups and Jackson
Pollock could just as easily clear a dinner party as Smith could a pub. Yes, I frequently return to YouTube for my
regular fix of Smith’s brusque humour in interviews yet, for the proper stuff,
I delve feet-first into Grotesque and
Hex Enduction Hour. These albums weren’t joking. They meant every rancorous syllable. While Morrissey was regaling us with upturned
bicycles and Oscar Wilde throwbacks, Smith gave us the world red in tooth and
claw, only redder and toothier. And
while the former produced countless soundalikes throughout the eighties,
nineties and to this day, nobody has ever managed to sound like The Fall. Quite right, too.
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