[This written interview was the basis of the recent interview/ profile in The Morning Star. Here it is in full:]
You’re one of the few contemporary writers who can make me laugh on the 0630 bus. From your perspective, what’s the attraction of a comic approach and where is the humour coming from?
Is the comedy a (Beckettian) coping mechanism? A provocation? The only viable means of critiquing the devastating impact of C21st capitalism?
The novels are supposed to be fresh and funny: that first of all. Laughter is important – it’s necessary to breathe. ‘Everything I've written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, of suffocation. It wasn't from inspiration, as they say. It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe’: that’s E.M. Cioran in an interview. For me, that getting-free involves laughter: laughing at the Man. Laughing at the madness. Laughing at the po-faced and humourless absurdity that is all around us.
The attraction of comedy: it allows some freedom, and perhaps might grant freedom in turn. A way of diagnosing what’s happening to us, but not being crushed by it. Perhaps it might be the beginning of a critique, which is only possible if we can find others to laugh with.
In My Weil (and throughout your fiction) there seems to be a genuine and deep-seated sense of despair below the erudite wit and sharp observations. Do you believe we’re doomed? If so, why? If not, what do you believe will save us?
Definitely despair. About what? Numerous disasters on the horizon; perhaps as disastrous are the means meant to solve them.
Problem: ecosystem collapse, soil microbiology exhaustion, insect biomass erosion. Solution: the seizure and financialisation of the global commons; nature valued as a natural asset which can then be managed, controlled and, of course, profited upon.
Problem: inequality. Solution: human capital investment, which is to say, opening a new futures market by betting on the life-outcomes of prisoners, refugees and welfare recipients.
Problem: the financial crisis, unpayable debt (53 trillion dollars worldwide and counting; 31 trillion dollars in the US alone.) Solution: the Going Direct Reset initiative, as agreed to by the Federal Reserve and the big asset management corporations at Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2019. This will see the replacement of currencies with the Central Bank Digital Currency, allowing complete control over every transaction, cutting off the wealth of deplorables. Tyrants of the past only dreamed of such power ...
Are we doomed? Not if we awaken to what’s happening. What will save us? Human unmanageability, perhaps. It’s just such unmanageability that is shown in my characters’ laughter, in their friendship. Internal struggles between various factions of the powers-that-shouldn’t-be, perhaps … Something contingent, miraculous, perhaps …
My reading of Spurious, Exodus and Dogma is that there’s a focus on individual despair. In My Weil there is a collegiate spirit, but it’s mired in chaotic inertia. To what extent does this reflect an implicit rejection of the possibility of intelligent and impactful collective action?
The characters in My Weil consider various possibilities for collective action. There’s becoming lumpenproletariat – living like the raggle-taggle of criminal-types, unmanageable déclassés that Marx wrote about, who keep to the shadows. There’s becoming apocalyptic – gathering like the early Christians awaiting the Second Coming; only this time, they’re waiting for an incoming, shattering transcendence that would explode the present order of the world. There’s secession – going under the state, on the model of villages in Alpine valleys that that have their own currency, that keep low-tech – using mechanics, not electronics; or those parts of Mexico that just do their own thing, regardless of central government decree.
My characters have little faith in present institutions. My question would be whether and how we might make them more accountable, transparent and democratic. My characters are tired of all that. They say they only want to let the present world go down. I’m not sure I’d take them at their word. Perhaps we can see a viable form of collective action – or rather, collective inaction – in their common drifting, their vagueness, their abandonment of proper ends.
I’ve seen reviews of your work in which it’s suggested characters are secondary to ideas and comic situations. I don’t accept this. The dialogue fizzes and – while your characters knock lumps out of each other, with serious discussion lurching into banter and then drifting into invective – you give some serious consideration to the themes of friendship and intellectual affiliation. In terms of the Disaster Studies PhD candidates in My Weil, is this driven by a fascination with these types of personal/professional relationship, or is it rooted in the sentiment reflected in an David Bowie song: “While troubles are rising we’d rather be scared together than alone”?
Being scared together: yes, that’s the thing. Despairing together. Sharing such moods, being humorous about them, comically exaggerating them, ringing changes upon them, which means they’re no longer solely negative. Things might seem hopeless, but hope is there in our capacity to talk. We might think that we that we can’t do much about the disasters ahead of us – about neuroweaponry or weather warfare, about education capture and health capture, about destabilisation agendas, about transhumanism, but we can discuss and diagnose them. Laughing together at their folly, shaking our heads together at their evil, we needn’t be merely passive victims.
To what extent is the rejection of plot in your six novels tied into your apparent fatalism about the future (of academia, of our culture, of humanity)?
No fatalism from me. And there is some plot, at least in the last three novels. The end of Nietzsche and the Burbs sees its characters high as kites, full of wild plans. They’re together, joyful, engaged in what anthropologist Victor Turner has called ‘communitas’: a radically egalitarian, non-hierarchical community of associative friendship.
Communitas, Turner explains, can never last; its liberatory joy must inevitably give way to a restoration of order, of the ‘societas’ of familiar social bonds and roles, the usual hierarchies. The question my characters begin to ask concern the relation between the joy of communitas and the societas to which they have to return.
In My Weil, my characters, equipped with their studies in philosophy, are better able to consider this question. True, they don’t formulate it as such, but they’re constantly thinking about ways of escaping the system. The opposite of fatalism!
Focussing on your satirical take on academia. It’s particularly sharp in My Weil: how much of an exaggeration is Professor Bollocks and the notion of ‘accountability buddies’? Is it really getting worse? [I’m particularly interested in this because, in the 1980s, under the Thatcher government, I worked in an Alvey-funded AI project – each of the research teams in receipt of his funding was monitored by a figure called an “industrial uncle” (sic). I wonder if that was when the Bollocks began in earnest?]
An ‘industrial uncle’: wonderful! – I’ll borrow that. Nothing of the novel is exaggerated. The language of management theory has colonised the university. Expressions like ‘best practice’ and ‘seedcorn funding’, used without irony ... No one laughs or rolls their eyes ... Everything, taken straight.
In academia, at all levels: the emphasis upon self-motivation, self-directed action, self-management. The student, the academic as a self-initiating entrepreneur, realising themselves as a piece of human capital; as an economically significant commodity ... Management is the task, distributing resources, actions, practices to make them more efficient, more productive. As if every problem that counts could be solved through administrative power – through correct implementation of the system.
The logic here is technological – it reflects the deepening of the technological system so well diagnosed by Jacques Ellul. Systematisation, schematisation, tabulation, bureaucratisation, qualification, rationalisation, mechanisation, standardisation, materialism and scientism: that’s what’s at work. The bollocks began long ago. To make it worse, this process of stripping away meaning, comradeship, a sense of the absurd is accompanied by the grotesque parodying of the same notions that this process hollows out: to the university as your ‘family’, to your fellow students as potential ‘buddies’, etc.
My characters, in response, cultivate counter-techniques of failure and ineffectiveness, of wandering and vagueness and of displacing ends from means. They aim at a deliberate incompetence, in which not finishing your PhD dissertation is more of a sign of honour than completing it on time; in which failure is a better sign of scholarly integrity than system-rewarded success. And they laugh – they have fun, which is pretty much forbidden in these over-serious times.
I’d argue that all six of your novels are literary fiction / new weird hybrid – based on the criteria of “[exploring] the boundaries of reality of reality and experience through philosophical speculation” (Jason Sanford, 2009). This is notable in My Weil, particularly in the supernatural (maybe?) sequences set in the Ees. [Would you be happy with the label critical realism?] Did this approach an emergent property of the subject matter, or is it a style of writing you particularly enjoy?
The Ees, a scrap of woodland in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester – meant to resemble the Zone from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker – permits the wandering and vagueness, the displacement of ends from means to which I have referred. It’s about dis-activation, which is why it’s full of all kinds of junk.
As such, the Ees is an embodiment of the students’ relationship to their PhD dissertations and, more broadly, to study. It allows them to be stupid, ignorant, disoriented – but in a positive sense. In an antidote-to-Professor-Bollocks kind of sense.
No coincidence that the character most strongly linked to the Ees is least committed to finishing his dissertation. In all things, romance included, my protagonist Johnny’s aim is to stay with potential without submitting it to an purpose, without actualising it in any course of action. And in the end, the Ees seems to ‘reward’ Johnny by letting him dwell permanently in the suspension of development.
Why Manchester? What fascinates you about the music and culture of that city in the 1980s?
The Manchester I discovered when I moved there in 1989 still had areas that were like the Ees of the my novel: unproductive areas, temporary autonomous zones such as the Hulme Crescents, an edgy zone of low-rise, system-built flats. They’re described an excellent recent article in The Guardian, and which I’ve tried to write about in my own way. It was from such places that so much great mancunian culture came.
Manchester was regenerated in the ‘90s. Investors and financiers, gentrifiers and speculators, transformed the cityscape with statement architecture, with steel-balconied warehouse conversions: monuments to cheap credit. My characters dream of battering back the mancunian regenerators, of re-opening the figurative cracks and the crevices where you used to be able live unnoticed and unbothered on government benefits. Only the Ees is left to them of that world now – the Ees and the great mancunian music to which they still listen.
What attracts you to the philosophers featured in your second (loose) trilogy, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Weil?
All of them I regarded as philosophical ‘enemies’ – thinkers who were, I thought, were remote from my own philosophical allegiances and concerns, but with whose work I nevertheless wanted to spend time. And I’m glad I did. You sharpen your thought by working with what you’re against …
You’ve written two books on Maurice Blanchot – is he a thinker you believe can have a transformative impact on life in the C21st? Why?
Blanchot’s a subterranean influence on so many thinkers – think of Marcuse’s notion of refusal, for example. Currents from his thought run everywhere.
What led you from philosophy to creative writing? What can fiction achieve that philosophy can’t?
- M. Cioran says regarding his own break with philosophy: ‘I realised that in moments of great despair philosophy is no help at all, and offers absolutely no answers. So I turned to poetry and literature, where I found no answers either, but states of mind analogous to my own’.
I don’t quite agree: philosophy helps in diagnosing the causes of despair, and thereby achieving some distance from the horror. Philosophy is about self-knowledge, but this is not about our inner selves so much as learning about how our inner selves are constituted. It is in this way that philosophy can provide answers about the sources of despair – about the sources of joy, too; about the meaning of friendship, about Turner’s notion of communitas and its relationship with societas.
But I agree with Cioran about poetry and literature, which can embody despair so directly, making it tangible, real. And I admit that sometimes philosophy is of no help. I want company. Thank goodness for Dostoevsky, for Mann, for Beckett, for Duras, for Blanchot, for Lispector, for Cixous and the others. For Bernhard above all! No doubt they’ll ban him soon …
In My Weil, Marcie veers from enthused earnestness to heartbreaking cynicism to naïve absurdity. Is this a satirical take on the trials and tribulations of writing a doctorate or a metaphor for the competing identities of higher education?
Although they have each other, my characters become increasingly deranged by what they fear. They know so much about what’s going on – about, say, the dangers of surveillance: behaviour tracking, compliance tracking, predictive analytics (‘pre-crime’), warning us when and where lawbreaking will emerge; even prescriptive analytics: programmes to prevent the possibility of that emergence, sending in robot dogs and supersoldiers to where our masters think a rebellion might break out; locking down the population of a troublesome district just in case …
Marcie’s Vision, capital ‘V’ – you’ll have to read the novel for context – shows her even more. She discerns the coming internal surveillance, too: synthetic biology that could see so-called ‘electroceuticals’ introduced into the bloodstream, keeping an eye on our insides. She senses the possibility of the live-editing of our DNA – of the so-called improvement of the human genome to make us more compliant, more useful. Just right for when attention turns from the enemy without to the enemy within, treating us all as potential threats to be neutralised in advance.
There’s more, much more, that Marcie sees. It’s unbearable. All she can hope for is human unmanageability, which she understands as the capacity to love …
Nothing satirical intended with my depiction of Marcie, who tries to revive a myth of sorts, the story of the Antichrist, to give her a sense that something might be done, to inflate the issue to the level of the cosmos …