Category Archives: culture

policing perception: weird fiction, the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the warped borders of the real

There’s a moment in the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 movie the Matrix where Keanu Reeve’s elegantly blank Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice. In the movie, such moments are signals that the nefarious Agents are about to emerge into Neo’s simulated reality and give him the mother of all cardio workouts.

Woah! Déjà vu, dude.

But what if something similar were to happen to you?

Perhaps you have a similar moment of déjà vu, notice that roses now seem to smell like freesias or that the sky suddenly looks a bit purple. Everyone you tell about this discovery, however, insists that everything is the “same as it ever was” (in the words of the old song). Roses smell as sweet. The sky is the same old blue.

Perhaps after a while, you might accept that it’s your perception that is at fault, shrug a little and decide to get on with the gardening. But at the back of your mind there might be a nagging doubt. Perhaps you were never supposed to notice the difference.

This is the terrain of the weird. Not quite full blown fantasy, but the quiet unease that things might not be quite right. A sense that the ground beneath your trainers might be a little less solid than you previously thought.

Few books map out this territory more ingeniously than The City & the City by China Miéville or The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson. Both of these novels deal in epistemic slippage, the boundaries of what is knowable and what is known, (what Miéville himself has referred to as “sublime backwash”). Each exists though at the polar opposite of the other. Where Miéville presents us with a world where the epistemological structure is brutally policed, Hope Hodgson describes a universe where there is absolutely and gloriously no epistemological structure whatso-fucking-ever.

In Miéville’s murder mystery, Inspector Borlú a policeman from the city of Besźel investigates a murder that requires him to work with a partner in the twin city of UI Qoma. Nothing too odd there you might think, except for the fact that the two cities share much of the same physical space. In order to maintain the illusions of separateness and sovereignty, citizens of one city must “unsee” anything pertaining to the other, ignoring people, buildings and even events that occur right in front of them. Failure to do so results in an intervention from the shadowy and terrifying force known as Breach.

Treated with a near mythical dread, Breach, disappear any violators or evidence of transgression, maintaining the ideal of separateness. They have an almost supernatural ability to detect and punish any infractions and in many ways function much like the Agents in the Matrix. They’re spectral, terrifying antagonists who are rarely perceived and cannot be beaten. Only they have access to the duality of the world as it is and as it is perceived.

One of the brilliant things about the novel is that crossing between the cities is a bureaucratic activity. Visitors must queue up to pass through a universal access point, Cupola Hall, filling out forms and editing their perceptions as they go. (Imagine entering Narnia via passport control.) Breach, then, isn’t just a surveillance force, it’s the living embodiment of the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the period between the rise of print and the digital age, when truth was shaped by centralised, text-based notions of authority.

Now, let’s flip this on its head.

Never fails.

In House on the Borderlands, if there is an equivalent of Breach they’re all out for coffee and donuts. Within the book’s framing narrative, an old man dwells in a remote house that seems to be perched precariously on the edge of space and time itself. Violent swine-things emerge from the wilderness and attack him (and his dog!). A pit opens into infinity. The house falls into disrepair as does reality itself. Time speeds up and slows down and the old man sees the solar system wither and die, meeting with the spirit form of his lost love in the process. (Clearly, the cosmic horror equivalent of drunk-texting your ex).

Here is a world without perceptual control. Consequently, the old man witnesses everything, including the heat-death of the Universe and it does him in. There’s no central authority to frame events, no system to structure reality, everything is in a state of turmoil and collapse.

It’s easy enough to see the connection here. Both novels dramatise the opposite ends of the epistemic spectrum. In The City & the City Borlú experiences the effect of a suffocating truth apparatus: ultimately you-can-only-see-what-you’re-allowed-to. In The House on the Borderlands we get a peek at what happens when no-one is in charge, not even reality itself.

It’s fair to say that we’re somewhere in the middle of these two extremes right now, that the five hundred years or so since the invention of print has been the equivalent of sleeping on Borlú’s sofa: uncomfortable, but still governed by house rules. We got verifiable truth, experts and certified sources. (A Breach of sorts also, perhaps). But it’s hard not to feel that that period is coming to an end, that while we were sleeping the internet and digital culture pushed our bed into the old man’s house on the edge of the abyss.

What is clear here is that command of the truth equates to political power. Breach wouldn’t be able to exert its control without the compliance of the citizenry of Besźel and UI Qoma. In the House on the Borderlands human history (and, ergo, all politics) is vapourised against the sheer scale of cosmic time.

But noticing that shit-gets-strange is not the same as deciding that the moon landings were faked, or that JFK was an alien. Engaging with the weird isn’t a call to relativism or an embrace of conspiratorial thinking.

There is a philosophical and moral distinction, I think, between questioning the framework and denying reality itself. While the weird draws attention to how things fit together (or not) and why, it is not an invitation to retreat from the rational. Rather, it should encourage us to ask how the rules around truth are made, who enforces them and what happens when they falter.

In world where politicised digital culture exhorts us to pick a side, the blue pill or red pill perhaps instead we should be asking: where did these pills come from? And who’s interest does it serve to keep us squabbling?

Or as Tony Benn once pithily framed it :

  • what power have you got?
  • where did you get it from?
  • in whose interests do you exercise it?
  • to whom are you accountable?
  • and how can we get rid of you?

If “doing your own research” simply means finding other people on the internet who already agree with you then I humbly submit you’re doing it wrong. Each one of those bits of confirmation bias edges us closer to the old man’s pit and the swine-things.

So we carry on watching the sky. And if it seems a bit too purple, maybe we don’t insist it’s blue out of habit or call it green out of spite. We just keep looking, keep asking and perhaps resist the pressure to unsee.

playlist

My fantasy debut: The Lighthouse at the End of the World from Titan books is available for preorder now.

fac 40: temptation by joy division: released 09.09.82

the cover of fac 40: temptation

Today marks the forty-second anniversary of Joy Division’s genre defying brutalist ur-techno torch song.

Released two years after the departure of drummer Stephen Morris and the hasty drafting in of Manchester scene-stealer and A Certain Ratio stalwart Donald Johnson, this single was the first to sketch out the path that they were to follow over the next decade, from purveyors of icy post-punk to stream of consciousness disco-dipshits.

Fac 40 was the first artifact that showed how the technicians at the heart of this tight-lipped foursome could bend their obsessions with early Kraftwerk, Philadelphia disco and the burgeoning NY club scene into shapes that fit with their own post-industrial motorik aesthetic.

Their first American tour, infamous in some respects because of its effects on frontman Curtis’s health was where the proverbial boys-in-long-coats loosened their skinny ties and learned to feel the groove.

To hear (then) freshly minted keyboard and guitar wizard Bernard Sumner tell it: “when we were in the US that first time … it was like we dropped into this parallel universe where it was okay to have fun. Where it was okay to stay up all night dancing and just messing about”

Curtis has said much the same: “People always think of us as this urban decay, punk outfit, but I was always into new things. I don’t care about genres, I’m into what I’m into. Like, I was at Paradise Garage one night with Barney and it was as though we could feel the ground shifting under our feet; not just the sound of something new; but the sense that there were new ways of being yourself out there, just waiting for us to find them.

As soon as we got back off tour we tried to accent more of that rhythmic side that was at the heart of what we did. With Stephen gone it gave us the freedom to experiment more and Temptation came out of that. You can hear some of Donald’s influence in there too: he was a crucial part of the way our sound started evolving.”

Bass player Peter Hook characterises the change of direction in less existential terms: “at the back of my mind was the thought that if we made dance records we’d probably cop off with more women.”

This aside, it’s difficult to say which were behind the abrupt volte-face in both the tone and concerns of Curtis’s lyrics. Gone is the existential doom and stasis of their third album Paradise. The clouds are clearing, the sun coming up. This is the sound of a heartbroken J.G. Ballard being driven to an all-nighter by Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider.

Surprisingly, Curtis himself revealed some of the reasons behind these changes: “that first tour. Leaving behind England, and I suppose more specifically, Manchester, gave me some space. It gave me the time I needed to sort out some difficult bits of my personal life. I was in a bad place. Ultimately, it took years.”

Joy Division’s subsequent movements are well documented elsewhere. The hop from Temptation to the joyous euro-disco of 1983’s The Terminal Beach was not far. The latter saw Joy Division dominate not only the UK charts but also TV screens. Their quixotic and electric (in all senses of the word) live performances on TOTP, transforming Curtis into an unconventional teen heart-throb who graced the cover of Smash Hits multiple times.

Temptation was the track that hinted that all this was coming to pass, prefiguring the Madchester gold rush (a cultural moment which, despite ushering in, the band always viewed with the avuncular amusement of disco dad royalty). Meanwhile The Terminal Beach’s success bankrolled everything from Factory Records’ journey from marxist agitprop upstart to hegemonic multi-media brand and the Happy Monday’s tragedy tinged fourth album Stop Me and Buy Me One.

Was something lost in all this success? Perhaps.

For all those old post-punks screaming sell-out, one need look no further than the fact that Joy Division mk II (now consisting of Sumner and Curtis and assorted session musicians) are now on constant tour, converted into animatronic versions of their twenty-year-old selves, grinding out pitch-perfect versions of Love Will Tear Us Apart three times a week.

But as one-time Factory boss turned BBC Director General Anthony H. Wilson says of his protégés, “Success is its own prison, darling, but art is always art.”

manilow magic

I think my fascination with weird spaces began as an introverted, book-licking kid, reading about the Bermuda Triangle in the pages of Unexplained magazine. Today, the Triangle might be more famous for the cheese deluxe of the Barry Manilow song, but back then it was a terrifying region where the certainties of Cartesian space and time seemed to falter, with planes, boats, and people entering it only to vanish mysteriously. (Most notably, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind even hinted cheekily at their fate.)

Francois Truffaut shuts his eyes and thinks of the cheque in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind

As I grew older, I discovered these haunted landscapes in the pages of the “old weird” e.g. Machen’s The White People, Blackwood’s The Willows, and later, the deeply ambiguous Québécois outback of Atwood’s Surfacing. These uncertain, liminal spaces got under my skin, needling away, stinging like a hangnail.

This obsession only intensified when I came across Vandermeer’s Annihilation and the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. In both of these novels, the weird landscape is the driver of the narrative. Roadside Picnic, set in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, explores the aftermath of an alien visit that has left behind mysterious “Zones” filled with gravitational anomalies, toxic hazards, and sinister locales where the shadows “look wrong”.

In the face of the economic exigencies of the late-period Soviet Union, human “Stalkers” sneak into these zones to make off with little-understood, abandoned technology to sell for mis-use on the black market. Red Schuhart, the novel’s hard-bitten protagonist, likens their actions to “children playing with matches in a house on fire. The Zone is the fire, and we’re too blind to see the danger.”

The Strugatskys’ Zone is an eruption into human reality, of what Lovecraft (everybody’s favourite tomb-faced, racist bell-end) would have called “the outside”. Consequently, the novel is much less about aliens than it is about the limits of human knowledge and subsequently the human condition.

Similarly, in Vandermeer’s Annihilation, Area X is a weird space that infiltrates human power structures, replacing them with a mycological plane reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs”. As its protagonist (known only as the Biologist) discovers, Area X is a place where the human experience is interrogated, undermined, and ultimately transformed.

What keeps me coming back to these books is their conjuring of non-human presence as absence, evoking Mark Fisher’s definition of the eerie as, “the sensation of … something present where there should be nothing.” In Roadside Picnic, this absence is the unresolved mystery of the aliens’ purpose. Some believe that Earth was just a stopover, humanity unnoticed, while others think the aliens never left, still lurking invisibly in the Zone: the mutations in Stalkers’ children hinting at, perhaps, a slow-motion genetic invasion.

Similarly, Vandermeer’s Area X is a metaphor for the climate crisis, a rebellion against humanity and capitalism by a Gaian hyper-entity. The Biologist’s journey through Area X, where the landscape observes her as much as she observes it, suggesting a move beyond the human towards a type of becoming-animal futurity.

These books resonate now more than ever, I think, because the early 21st century is a profoundly weird and eerie space. The climate crisis, flame-throwing cyber-dogs and generative AI have woven a sense of the uncanny, of presence-where-we-know-there-is-only-absence, into the texture of everyday life. The Bermuda Triangle, the Zone, and Area X have swallowed the world, making our sense of the human feel contingent and in urgent need of reinvention.

The Maz-master is a man at ease with his uncanny carpet choices

As Bazzer the Mazzer once sang,

“Bermuda Triangle, makes people disappear.

Bermuda Triangle, don’t go too near.”

High on hauntology: brexit

Hauntology is a type of cultural archaeology these days, given that its moment has almost certainly passed. It’s perhaps unfairly characterised as the whining sound emitted by Gen-Xers as our brief moment of cultural hegemony (comic book movies/post-modernism) is squeezed between the more demographically generous buttocks of millennials and baby boomers.

But then we were always the forgotten generation. The latchkey, step-parented kids who watched too much TV, stayed up too late, ate too much junk food, and swallowed way too many drugs.

As much as Simon Reynolds might (reasonably) reject this as a “lazy” analysis in Ghosts of My Life, hauntology, at least in its Fisherian incarnation, does have something of the quality of an old man declaring war on the moon. If nothing else, the emergence of Grime and UK Drill rebutted Fisher’s notion that Jungle was the last revolutionary pop music pretty much at the very moment that he was asserting it.

But while the hauntological cultural moment may have passed, daily struggles with the consequences of Brexit seem to suggest that we are very much living at its political apex.

This is because if there was one cultural frame for the whole Brexit project, it was the one of a Britain isolated from a fascist Europe, fighting as the plucky underdog and winning the Second World War single-handedly.

Indeed (and as Rafael Behr has pointed out), to listen to Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Paul Dacre, and Boris Johnson, one could be mistaken in thinking that it was they who stormed the beaches on D-Day, completed years of national service, or presided over the sunset of the Raj in India… except… they are, of course, too young to have done any of this.

Enough said.

In place of lived experiences of WWII, these ontological jokers draw on a national ur-myth whose foundational canon would have been served up regularly during their long summer respites from the Winchester College bullies: Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and countless 1970s WWII action movies. (Although Farage has more in common with Basil Fawlty in “The Germans”).

All of these gesture towards a Britain that never existed. A cosy “cor-blimey guv” Albion of officers and men, where the little people knew their places. A Blighty standing toe-to-toe “alone” against Fascism which had yet to suffer post-war decline or post-imperial embarrassment. (Dog whistle alert: is it possible that part of this myth’s appeal is the sense that this Britain was so much whiter?)

Come along now, chaps.

There is something decidedly hauntological about all of this. The way in which a phantasmal and retrospective political and cultural movement has choked the life out of the pro-European futures articulated in the political and musical ground zero of post-punk (Empires and Dance, Europe After the Rain, Europa and the Pirate Twins); an insistence that the only way forward is a ghoulish simulacrum of Britain’s finest hour. It’s hard not to see echoes of Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that the only way forwards is backwards.

It is worth remembering perhaps, the Conservative Party’s original antipathy for the EU has its roots in a deep suspicion of the demands of the European Social Chapter and a fear that this was introducing “socialism through the back door”. (Reverse echoes of Truss’s paranoid anxieties of invisible supra-sovereign forces working to undermine a national government?)

Allying this dislike to the screen memory of a Greater Britain, spitfires over Dover, Rule Britannia, and the “good” empire, resulted in a toxically hallucinogenic brew that the Conservative Party was forced to ingest as some sort of ayahuascan post-imperial hangover cure.

JRM has some really good shit.

Watch high priest Rees-Mogg’s eyes rotate behind his wire-rimmed spectacles like that snake from The Jungle Book. Witness lonely Gove’s cocaine jitterbug or Truss’s dead-eyed X-Files-lite rants about the deep state.

Retro’s opioid hit is, of course, that it gives the comfort of what we’ve known before, a Freudian return to the womb/nanny, along with a convenient yardstick that renders all other political practices inadequate by comparison.

It created a subjective/objective purity test where outspoken beliefs in Brexit dividends were more important than any rational concerns rooted in its evidential costs. A position which provided the pretext for Johnson to purge his party of anyone other than the faithful.

Like HAL9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, the delicious cognitive dissonance from this hauntological hit caused a psychic crisis which sent our ruling elite scurrying for higher and higher doses of post-truth (e.g. legislating to make Rwanda a safe country, an obsession with getting out from under “the yoke” of the European Court of Justice.) It’s monkey which they have, as yet, been unable to shake off.

“Open a trade border in the Irish Sea, HAL” “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that”

The predictable paranoid comedown from all of this has meant the right have already started on the betrayal narratives: Brexit wasn’t done properly or has been sabotaged by fifth columnists/deep state forces. Ignoring, of course, that the Brexit that they espoused was a construct that would never have been achievable in any of the political contexts from which the UK was starting.

Is there any escape from this toxic nostalgia? Currently, it is hard not to agree with Fisher’s grim analysis that we are trapped within a mirrored box of our own making. As time passes and the veterans and survivors of World War II are gathered up, all we see are reflections of reflections.

To paraphrase Orwell’s O’Brien: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine Nigel Farage driving around in a jeep on the beaches of Normandy forever”. Perhaps, all we can do is hope that as the hauntological cultural moment has passed, then perhaps soon its political variant will do the same.