GILLIAN Clark’s letter to Carol Ann-Duffy says*: “The pre-[Sylvia] Plath generation of British students had studied old dead men and, marvellous as they were/are, they were a scold’s bridle on any idea that women too could be poets. In speaking when she did, Plath fired the wild hearts of the last silenced generation of poets in Britain.” The image then is voices ranked silent until one person opens the door on Harrods Sale Day and the stampede begins. A new era-of-consciousness dawns, in this case for women poets. Sylvia Plath and her peers, Ann-Duffy writes: “[give] back life to us in glittering language”.

This is quite affirming. It’s the intemperate climate not your voice that’s at fault. Tim Stanley’s pre-Obama-re-election reportage ‘Family Guys?: What Sitcoms Say About America’ opens with the thought that America is so boiling and intemperate that nothing can be said due to its rage and therefore it is the Sitcom that speaks into the ‘dark matter’ of unspoken ordinary life. America is doing then what Britain did long ago, and Kierkegaard practiced through works like Either/Or; that is speaking indirectly through Dialogue. In this case situation-comedy. Somebody said Britain and America are separated by the Irony Curtain, but maybe no longer, as America has cried out to Irony to calm its angst.

Wasn’t it the intemperate climate for Dialogue that gave rise to the likes of Guy Fawkes? Silent landscapes produce a few explosive figures with sufficient brass neck to run out from the trenches; usually to die horribly! Maybe one day the management field will re-discover Dialogue, and maybe without embarrassment; possibly in response to the decades of grim monastic silences that were weighed down under social rules of ‘best practice’. Having labelled the social events of ‘office life’ with stultifying mind-bending Americanistic labels, such as Maslow’s brilliant but constipated Self-Actualisation, it is dawning that ordinary language and interaction is a Great Laxative to problem-solving. Those who self-actualised on a Thursday at 4.34pm, could, after coffee walk around with a bit more dignity, and, a few years later, colleagues could say, ‘she has a bit more dignity!’; and it was alright. Ordinary language suffices and maybe always did. But nothing beats a sexy label backed up by research.

The difficulty with ‘office life’ is that FIFO ruled(rules), with apologies to the feint-hearted, for so long (Fit In or F*** Off that is). Extended Dialogue remains a guilty act that few practice under the false consciousness that pithy punchy exchanges communicated commercial value. Ivan Turgenev’s nihilist Bazarov lives within business and does very well, for a time. In response the re-discovered Soviet-Era thinker and literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, offers a treatise that knowledge is not a growing filing-cabinet of categorised concepts, ideas, theories and models, but rather the sum of flowing discourses and this Heteroglossia of meaning trumps any notion of static labelling. The pre-Socratic river of multiple voices within one voice, such as in Dostoyevsky’s writing, represents multiple perspectives and voices; all beyond atomising. The modern world of labelling is monological in Bakhtin’s terms, conveying the single-consciousness, reduced to its one agreed meaning. The river-like flow of Dostoyevsky’s sweating, heaving, stress-ridden characters, who are on the run from themselves, their past, their present, allows a massive liberation. That the self has a polyphony of voices means, like Ann-Duffy’s Plath breaching the dam of female expression, the individual can admit their own voices to themselves. We’ve known all along our work dialect contrasts with our inner monologues, but we would maybe deny the differences. Bakhtin’s thumping insight is that consciousness is the awareness of these interactions between these voices.

Thumping insight number two is that all the labelling and monological language is still a discourse; one of the voices. So we don’t have to throw out Myers Briggs et al but recognise it as part of the polyphonic orchestrated noise flowing round the office stage. Part then of Ann-Duffy’s ‘glittering language’? Importantly it’s ununified but in a constant struggle. The grey-beards of the literature canon are still speaking Ann-Duffy suggests; boring for England.

It’s dawned on me then, and I don’t know at the point of writing if this is true, but I will take the mocking if it is, that Dostoyevsky’s protagonists in The Double are one person. I confess I don’t know. I read it at the start of my PhD studies and put it back on the shelf and having been encouraged at a conference earlier in the year to re-connect with Bahktin pennies are dropping. Mr Golyadkin is one person with two voices? I will check before the end of this blog by googling the question: is Golyadkin the same person?… and the answer is… well I’m not going to even go there, so there. He’ll be what you and I choose him to be. Much more satisfying. Golyadkin’s doppelganger arrives at work to unsettle reality but we can with Bahktin now believe he’s one person and many voices.

On this line of a Double perspective my brother left home before I was born, but, our voices are similar and tend to move up and down the same abstract scale. He uses language with a number of dialects and constructions of voice; having been a Fleet Street journalist and servant of Murdoch across the world through his career, this is his stock-in-trade. He referred to me recently as a ‘self-confessed Little Englander’ as part of an inter-blog^ exchange on the merits of London and Paris. Such images and constructions act as devices for Dialogue, sharpening the consciousness. Few are brave enough to construct and position other interlocutors; such is the courage of the writer to risk speaking and flush out the hidden. Constructing selves in literary form at times better exposes the voices. We create new voices of others so our own voice can be heard; a kind of Qualitative Easing of our lives by increasing words into the ‘life cycle’.

This then is the criticism of Duffy, that Plath wasn’t a pivotal unblocking voice; but rather we’re constructing Plath now to carry this mantle so she suits our current politics. Plath lives again as a result finding new adherents and new value. Such is the nature of discourse and its speed we can only construct history now for our ‘now-purpose’. My brother constructs me and vice versa and it’s satisfying and possibly far more liberating to ‘create’ new selves for the sake of better Dialogue.

In Theory Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power

http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue_ten/faurholt.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroglossia

http://kar.kent.ac.uk/24891/1/Web_Version.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nqbvc

*Guardian Review Section: 3/11/12 (p. 14)

^David Gibbs’ blog: http://platoscafe.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/a-tale-of-two-cities-2/

IS Britain becoming socially and intellectually conservative? It’s a confusing picture. David Swartz suggests that in the 60s and 70s you could be on the religious right in America but be ‘anti-war, internationalist and pro-government intervention on poverty’. Such a careful and then commonly nuanced position has now been swept up into a more hard-line dichotomy of left and right politically, socially and ethically.

Polarisation of this kind does seem the present mood in Britain. It’s too exhausting to explain a worldview that is a mélange of contradictions and only fits ‘Other’ in a government checklist. Our distinctives can’t be indistinct. Fewer spaces deny the clock or Chairperson who demands you ‘get to the point’ and position yourself neatly nor um and er your way to any nugget of wisdom in your bowels. Swartz reminds of Richard John Neuhaus’ The Naked Public Square’s exclusion of language from the ‘civic sphere’. Then it was religion, now, maybe intellectualism?

The most populace public sphere, social networks, don’t do ‘vague or fragile’ well either? A Boris-Johnson-Paroxysm of contempt and scowling at the non-strident makes Facebook-Debate an oxymoron. A colleague recently pointed out that the further East you go Facebook interlocutors spar for intellectual supremacy whereas here someone suggested Facebook is the new Toilet Door for the Internet Generation.

Taysir Nashif writes, maybe with a disappointing lack of irony: “Intellectual conservatism is a uniform line of thinking… less compatible with creativity and open-mindedness”. Is this though the fruit of institutionalised Britain. Nashif adds: “Institutions… restrict intellectual freedom.” Under the EU, UK, BBC, Tesco, UN and NATO we’ve settled into a risk-averse stream that rejects all major change. Maybe a complex society is best left to what Karl Popper called ‘piecemeal social engineering’. Or what Kieron O’Hara terms “dogmatic rationalism of the free market” (remembering a certain woman PM).

Michael Williams writes: “We have to accept the irreducible contingency of our investigations and argumentative resources”. Whoa! Sorry about that. You may not have the same positive reaction to this paraphrase of writer Richard Rorty. Basically: ‘You’re stuck with your supermarket basket of bread and milk and can’t fit in anymore’. But if you’re guffawing at the sheer blinding obviousness of ‘our brains our finite’ then just hold on. No-one says this in education. Well, not to me. And I don’t say it to students really. Generally I keep piling on.

Rorty terms this ‘coming-to-terms’ as ethnocentric: our worldview is likely shaped far more by our journey than we’d maybe wish to admit. This maybe axiomatic but it’s worth re-iterating because I’d argue there is a fairly violent reaction to this assertion. It should matter to scholars as as a modern society I think it’s yet another big elephant in the room. It is the big block to a questioning culture. In fact I’d go as far to say that modern conservative Britain as we know it is increasingly horrified by The Question as questions point to our limitation or unwillingness to stand outside ‘our journey’.

Williams quotes Hume saying: “[scepticism is] a malady, which can never be cured” possibly meaning many now won’t go near carriers of the questioning disease. So, a mini-thesis: a modern world built on scepticism is increasingly resistant to questions because it challenges our worldviews. We are increasingly anxious creatures so scepticism is the enemy to peace.

Is this the real reason Britain is a  more socially conservative society? From Rorty we get our support via pragmatism, and in my unhumble view, it appears to support, maybe unwittingly, an End of Inquiry. Hume, suggests Williams, puts sceptics on the naughty step because of their lack of common sense. But a common sense obsessed community isn’t overly challenging is it?

Williams: “Every aspect of common life works against taking scepticism seriously” and the lonely sceptic misses the benefits of common life’s friends: “social, practical, perceptually responsive and emotionally engaged”. Basically ask questions pal and we’re off.  No leader in an institution then wants a hand up on the back row.

I like these links. You may not! But it does answer why we are a divided society. The quest for peace, and keeping your mates, is stopping questioning some might say. But Nashif warns: “Many social institutions cause growth of bias, partiality, prejudice, bigotry, narrow mindedness and attention to trivialities.”  These biases maybe the root of ‘corruption’. And he adds omens on the consequences for social justice and loss of self in these rational structures.

I recall a colleague who worked for the local government planning office who enigmatically mentioned he wrote the Minutes of all meetings before the meeting itself. Good pragmatism, common sense, rationalist? Or socially and intellectually conservative? And where does this leave leadership?

KARL Rossman lands shame-faced and exiled on the shores of the US, hotfoot from Europe and his sketchy past, to scratch a new existence in Kafka’s 1926 America. Being an intelligent mannered youth in unfamiliar territory means he feels the horror of his vulnerability but remains overawed by his streetlevel encounters. The scale of American Freedom and Possibility consume Karl’s sensibilities. He neither finds his voice nor outwits the Job’s Comforters who track his progress; and who look to him as their own meal ticket. But we suspect Karl felt alive. The sinister side of free-market America fosters a sacred form of potential self-emancipation. The sacred and sinister hover side-by-side in Western culture.

Aldous Huxley talked of L.A. as a City of Dreadful Joy. A land built on risky impermanance, ready to upsticks to follow the market. Horrifying but exhilarating; far from European classical patterns of existence and frozen hierarchies blocking social mobility. America is built on individuals finding their voice amongst gauche cultural icons that don’t have any snob-value nor heritage to intimidate or learn. Only in America would a James Holmes, 24, a neuroscience PhD student, walk-in to a midnight showing of a new Batman movie, dressed as The Joker, to exercise his franchise to carry arms. A dreadful life imitation of popular-art. The closest and worst sacred-sinister encounter.

I’ve always admired America’s contempt for European worldviews. Europe after the war, re-built on American loans, conditional on absorbing American Foreign Policy, served to super-charge the American Economy; allowing Levi Jeans to be the key weapon that crumbled the Berlin Wall. Europe has fought back with Integration. Alain Badiou offers a worldview termed ‘didactico-romanticism’, a typical French Philosophical mouthful, meant to expose the overblown art of Hollywood or life imposed by popular culture. This schema has found purchase in the UK where there is little explicitly offered alternative to the stuffy classicism of European high-aesthetics. The sickly-sugary romanticism of a synthetic-life led through multimedia remains overwhelmingly compelling. It’s between these poles of existence that Karl sought his transcendence.

In late-modernity we are searching for meaningful ways to exist that don’t obey ‘didactico-romantic’ laws of popular-culture (and speaking only in what SørenKierkegaard termed abstract language and avoiding personalising ourselves with the dangerous word “I”). Alternatively, we wish to avoid throwing ourselves out of ‘real’-community into the pompous classical world of snobby high-aesthetics, behaving like ornaments. How would Karl have managed that journey between these low and high roads? Could he have found Peace on a separate hidden path, maybe one that’s rarely beaten down as few want or know how to travel it, preferring to skip between the two roads alternately.

Of course integration under the EU offered not just a market counterweight to the US but attempts a cultural alternative to America’s low-aesthetics. A commonwealth of former crusty and guilty nations offering a re-born liberal and non-aggressive pact slowing any Rise and Rise of China and easing the West out from under American hegemony. Driven by France and Germany Europe has recovered post-war to offer a serious new worldview that Karl might have grabbed. The UK positioned itself to slide effortlessly into European progressiveness if the EU took off. Exposure to our own Continent through travel shocked even the hardened Imperialist into a realisation that our Victorian values were a lazy-simplicism and looking strongly-drawn, a meat-and-two-veg position, hopefully dying with our parents’ generation. The enlightened post-war Europe appeared to have embraced free-markets but constrained within a socialist-capitalist Hybrid Experiment headed by the German and French economies; still a tempting vision despite the current meltdown, as Hayekian Free-Markets were at the root of the banking scandals and possibly behind the Eurozone debacle.

The sacred-sinister proximity is still closest in the unabated free-markets, and widening then in the liberalising-secular European Integration. The latter being the same direction that Karl seemed to be moving in as he sat on the balcony outside Brunelda’s apartment, momentarily trapped. His only option was to ‘create’ himself outside, or even in the face of a sinister contexts. He’s responding to Kierkegaard’s appeal to be responsible to himself for his character, life and outlook. His suggestion is that modernity forces the individual to speak only like a ventriloquist’s dummy; in The Present Age he wrote: “In fact there are handbooks for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything.” Karl took a job with The Oklahoma Theatre. To be part of an explicit staged performance being a possible honest choice, like turning to liturgy in church; better maybe to knowingly borrow our words than unwittingly serving a hidden ‘didactico-romantic’ script.

“WHAT is actually morally reprehensible is, namely, the resting upon one’s possessions and the enjoyment of wealth.” In a nutshell Max Weber scribes the kernel of good capitalism. For Calvin wealth accumulation is fine, good, if not Godly, but sitting back to count it is an abomination. And our brand of capitalism was fine tuned in the Scottish Enlightenment and excess was restrained for us by the ascetic disciplines of a life well-led. What has this got to do with research methodology?

The current movement in social science is the validation of reflexive methodologies. That is the legitimacy politically of the individual to represent themselves freely as possible from the filtering of societal politics. As all students of research will know they’re confronted with the dilemma of positioning themselves on the continuum of truth. For we can now use this word ‘truth’. Which is the truth that our research will plump for we ask? A strange suggestion. The problem is we are unlikely to know what we mean by the word truth. It remains arbitrary. But more so it’s politicised and up for grabs like a rugby ball.

If we head towards a post-positivistic worldview where ‘truth’ isn’t rooted in a determined real world that governs us and our being then where do we end up? We may end up cutting all our ligaments to our social world, its meaning, and in the arms of Sartrean existentialism, alone in our world; a false freedom of a neuroscientific future that explains our consciousness and/or subjective idealism. The Holy Grail politically then for social science is freedom of expression in a political determined modern world.

Hence, capitalism. Research under capitalism is determined, I’d argue. There is no post-modern social science in the West. It’s an illusion as the market intervenes at the moment of true expression. So the reflexive progressive social scientist states what pragmatically will be acceptable in their ‘moment of truth’. Hence, Max Weber. All good activity must be productive. And being productive can’t be truthful. Research then can’t be truthful? Not in a modern world. It’s expedient. Not that that’s a bad thing entirely, however. But ‘the good’ is in acknowledging this in a big grown up way. There’s an artfulness then available for the poor PhD student grappling with the promise of reflexivity.

If we’re disappointed at this point remember that scientific truth is expedient. As it fails to remind ‘the people’ that science doesn’t study the real. It only interprets phenomena. The suggestion that phenomena is real is a neat sleight of hand. If the phenomena fits don’t knock it. Agree. But we’re not being truthful if we imply, as classical empiricists do, that the sensible is real. It’s not. It stands to reason. It’s only capitalism that wants phenomena to be real truth in the same way capitalism doesn’t want individual free expression to be truth.

Hence, the politics of the ‘good life’ and capitalism’s prescription for us. But, true creativity sits outside of productivity, in idleness. Something comes out of Nothing. You need Nothing to be creative. The entrepreneur, probably this expedient world’s greatest ‘artist’, creates something from nothing and takes the ultimate risk, that is their whole self, and puts it on the line. But the entrepreneur doesn’t conform to capitalism and its prescriptions but rather ignores it. Whereas the rest conform to the underlying message of the ‘good life’, consuming not creating. As existentialist writer Paul Tillich puts it, ‘protestants are the worst conformists’.

So what? Well the point is the ‘good life’ isn’t the good life. Good capitalism and productivity is a ‘romantic formalism’. The entrepreneur ignores it, so should we existentially, but the researcher must take account of it carefully. Social science Truth should be spoken reflexively and in the context of capitalism’s complex context. That just like science has to reports its truths according to the ‘good life’ social science has to reveal explicitly the links between capitalism and the voice of the individual.

Good Capitalism then is good conformism and consumerism. So social science truth then and its artfulness is in irony. That is to speak the truth about the social world involves exposing the conformism and consumerism within its own rhetoric. Empiricists can’t be reflexive as physics doesn’t wake up in the morning and say ‘I feel’. But social science can pour scorn on itself, wake up, and change direction.

In essence capitalism’s prescription is one of romantic formalism, affirming the good life as an ascetic journey of work for itself. Research can conform to supporting this unreflective message without batting an eyelid. The problem then is saying this in our methodologies. Inserting the dissensus voice that acknowledges the residual positivism in the Western context and exposes it to the reader. Or what Badiou terms the ‘contrapuntal and rhythmic force’ of Bartók. The music sways but questions.

So what of these dichotomies then? Positivism or Interpretivism, Anglo-Saxonism or Continentalism, Sex or Love, Science or Art. Because fundamentally these are running through research methodologies all the time as discourses. Badiou suggests we should put an ‘end to all ends’ and choose to affirm. I interpret this here as affirming the presence of these dichotomies in our research discourse and that we should avoid positioning starkly on continuums. Propose them as ironies, present pragmatically in ‘us’. Calvin then is the Didactic, Capitalism the Romantic and Science the Classical. The social scientist then can be the Affirmer.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us…

Eliot goes on to offer his barren images in The Waste Land, 1922. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the motifs feel familiar. They pop-up elsewhere as early 20th century themes from Orwell to Huxley to Kafka. Conrad’s Marlow journeys deep into the interior of Imperial European Africa and discovers Kurtz is at the heart of Empire, and he’s not the noble figure from our European Belle Époque. Eliot’s Gerontion talks of the dry month. The seasons and landscape are dry or wet, decaying or budding.  Nature’s cycle pepper Eliot’s work. Bones, stones and deserts in the ‘heart of your brother’, ‘in the tube-train next to you’ (Choruses from ‘The Rock’, 1934) suggest the tensions in political seasons around faltering industries, new uncertainties of ‘our’ place in the world.

Marlow’s journey into the interior was repeated by Orwell’s descent into the mines. This was pre-welfare-state world, a world of ‘irregular labour, which is not pleasant’ (The Rock). Heavy industries couldn’t bend their die-caste-moulds or die-caste-working-practices to a free-market. The shift is then of Greatness slipping. The Rock on which Greatness was built were certainties of economy and the sacred. Work in the week; church on Sunday. The slip was fostered by a realisation that ‘there is no life that is not in community’ (The Rock).

Eliot reveals then that April is coming but it’s quite different from our expectation. The winter months forced us into community. The ease of regular living meant we avoided each other ‘in the tube-train’ but there is in fact a quality in austere winters. It’s suggested it will be missed if we don’t see the barren landscape in its healthy bleakness as a useful necessary decay. Industries and economies and churches need to ‘forever build, decay and restore’ he seems to implore. The Rock suggests truly ‘Daring enterprise’ builds community and economy but Eliot seems to be after a harmony in building, a rhythm of activity.

IT is the library. Libraries were places of terror. Guarded by the austere and severe. The creaky floorboard was feared. Now metamorphosed into metroland ‘places to be’. Libraries have broken up their straight lines. There are little snugs, hang-outs, back-alleys, mazes, cul-de-sacs, booth-ala-record-shop. Surreal levels. Stairs and lifts to hidden floors. Is Floor 2 up or down? Does it matter as getting lost is fun. Snatched conversations in the lift. Polite door holding. After you. Places of intrigue and espionage, where le Carré passes secrets. Love and liaison. Healthy punishment for errant returns. Leather and wood. Dust and slow fire. Elegant bureaucracy. Calm.

“We can easily identify the several organs, including blood vessels… but their mutual relation inside the body can be grasped only by a sustained effort of the imagination,” offered Michael Polanyi. Polanyi was a polymath who moved between hard science and the mysteries of knowing. Some forms of knowledge are only revealed aesthetically, through sustained use of the imagination.

He gave the example of the subtle depressions left by the presence of former building or village foundations as not ‘knowable’ from up-close when stood in the field above. We’re too close to the parts and the parts obscure the whole. It requires a helicopter trip to see the archaeological remains etched by the sun’s shadows. Too near and the ‘truth’ is lost in disconnected parts. Fly too high and the parts and the connections are lost from view.

I suspect Polanyi would be happy with the suggestion that human beings may only be ‘known’ aesthetically, through their long-structures of life and as a collection of messy parts. You cannot read the story in one go but must connect the chapters through imagination and then form your own whole, as it were. This means a coherent whole is illusory, fleeting and lost without sustained effort.

“…the average lifetime of the largest industrial enterprises is less than forty years, roughly half the lifetime of a human being!… In most companies that fail, there is abundant evidence in advance that the firm is in trouble. This evidence goes unheeded, however, even when individual managers are aware of it,” suggests the ubiquitous Peter Senge. Seeing the parts that are flashing amber and connecting those signs together for the strategic leader appears critical.

Frequently the language of science that Western educated leaders borrow ‘sees’ the world as literal and denotative. It becomes a series of disconnected parts that will require someone with imagination to knit together from the right heights of language. “If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories,” says John Berger. The strategic leader experiences multiple events every minute so the sustained deployment of story and imagination are not just essential but frankly the only way to view a world whizzing past that has no shape. That’s no excuse to buy a company chopper; certainly not this year!

The time not to interrupt my father was late Sunday evening. He stood at his chest of drawers with his transistor, often holding it at an angle. Sometimes he brushed his thick wavy black hair with two brushes, in rather elegant sweeping motions. I suspected this was his most precious hour of the week. He didn’t watch television. He read the paper or dozed when I had the ‘goggle box’ on. His generation loved the wireless, learnt from it, were entertained by it, went to war with it. This hour though was reserved for Alan Keith and Your Hundred Best Tunes. It appeared to be renewal before the week ahead.

Schwarzkopf beat Sutherland. Joan could shatter glass in the next county. Mum loved her strident tone and I fancy she was ‘her’ on Sundays in church. I didn’t appreciate the volume at the time. So like dad Elisabeth wins on music terms (if not on dinner-date terms!) There was nothing snobby about Alan Keith’s choice of music. He played what people wanted to hear. It was ‘easy listening’. It was moderate even mediocre entertainment. But not mediocre in a bad way. It was mediocrity at its best.

Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons noticed this shift in intensity in relationships: “The appearance of mediocrity is often useful… it weakens tautly strung springs [and reminds] them how close they are to mediocrity as well.” I suspect a lot of what’s good now culturally and spiritually is condemned also for its apparent mediocrity but also because of its lack of explicitness. It doesn’t scream its own values. Michael Darlow in The Man and His Work said of the playwright Terence Rattigan: “The power of Rattigan’s best plays comes from the implicit rather than the explicit, from unspoken feelings, buried emotions and hidden truths.” 

Mediocrity and implicitness are mistaken for poor and ‘too-subtle to be understood’, respectively. People are quite clever at drawing conclusions. Michael Hofmann in the introduction to Franz Kafka’s America suggests: “The cult of American speed, scale, novelty, machinery and brutality had entered European consciousness.” Popular culture is an oxymoron. No-one enjoys television. Everyone knows ‘they’re amusing themselves’ until something better appears. TV isn’t art it’s an executive summary of the real thing. What people don’t realise is by spending time with the implicit you see the world differently later; there is the residual effect of text and long-interpretive-structures of classical music. “For the reading of these books [Lear or Emma] seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

In an era of false excellence and faux brilliance there is little market for ‘the good’ or ‘the meaningful’. Public spaces are temples to gauche and people are retreating from them. Some won’t overcome the distaste for Western retailing as people have no love of non-places without cultural significance. The town centre is now as culturally profound as the tarmacadam sliproad at J15 on the M40. The marketed and packaged are non-entities Bauman might say; they have no histories.  My father’s era oiled social interaction with the poetics of lyrical music that had a different form of history. Their historic value emerged at a different pace where there was time to attach cultural significance. The rotation of music products now allows no historic attachments that are truly lyrical, only nostalgic sentiment that is fleeting and disconcerting. We can’t quite locate that emotion or experience. The genius of music downloads is simultaneously allowing access to art but also killing it in equal measure. The texture of the tangible located in time and space attaches meaning artfully. The intangible separates our ability to locate meaning within life. This is why post-modernists refer to the end of history. We are detached from chronology.

The challenge to create histories outside of consumerism is possible. The avante garde has to be embraced; the contemporary artist and polemicist become the new ligaments between self and time and space. New Mediocrity then becomes the resistance to commodification of experience where we have time to allow lyrical stumbling when sharing between individuals. The tolerance of poor encounters is restored where we have faith in the core ability for human relations to flourish if given time, grace and maybe some mediocrity to loosen people’s taught lives. The coffee shop and bookshop are probably the last ‘places’ for the stranger to become an acquaintance. And the radio remains artful and welcome.

“Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide” confessed Joseph Heller. “And, simply, acting like an arse,” adds Ian Sansom. I read Catch-22 at school. It was my first engagement with polemics and paradox; or at least the first I could understand. Shakespeare enabled me to sit on the front row of class with my head on the desk gazing at my LED watch praying for the lesson to end without an ounce of guilt. Who didn’t want then to beat the livinge dayelightes out of thy boryng Bard?

Heller didn’t match his seminal work again. For him success became his Catch-22. It consumed him. Not unlike businesses or pop-stars whose stellar start obliterates later reflection. John Berger suggested that bankers’ brick-like descent owed much to heady-heights of power and gold-lined-hotel-rooms blinding judgement. Something else is lost in success. What is it though?

Søren Kierkegaard’s writing constantly appeals against this loss of connection to self, ramming home the value of concrete real experience. I am ‘packing’ the 1958 printing of his Journals. It is shedding its acid-soaked brown pages (something paper techies call ‘slow fire’ – maybe because the pages crumble as if in a flame and float free). Before it completely disintegrates Søren offers up a diary entry on the worth of note-keeping as being a flak-jacket against the woo-woo  of success:“…the more I recollect that a writer as spontaneous as Hoffman kept notes and that Lichtenberg recommends it, the more interested I am in discovering why something in itself entirely blameless should become unpleasant and almost revolting to me.”

Yes, well, he’s agonising over the turmoil of writing our thoughts near to when we have them. To twitter or not to twitter, with a small ‘t’. Pressing out our thoughts near to the moment of thinking is dangerous if not profoundly wrong. But, having pondered awhile on this dilemma: “…the aroma of the conceits and moods evaporated.” At this point it’s worth noting K was mocked in the streets for all his peculiarities. An oddbod. He is a tad unusual and maybe this is why his writing leaked so slowly into public consciousness. His truths are still taboo. We like the sedition in his text. He never got to enjoy his stellar position in the literary firmament. Something we suspect he knew would be the case. If we romanticise him we might like to think this was his desire.

He appeals: “…by making frequent notes, to let my thoughts appear with the umbilical cord of their first mood, and to forget as far as possible the use to which they might be put, since in any case I shall never use them by looking up my note-books…”.

The act of writing then is the key, not the poring over the words later on. His desire is for freedom, for knowing self through these records; and he is driven by the fear that these thoughts might never re-occur. He warns against conversation amongst the learned (and maybe successful) who know zillions of facts but have never thought for themselves: “It is almost like a reading from a cookery book when one is hungry”. It would be fair to say such depth cost him his love life. Plus he implies he did make the mistake of laughing at his own jokes (oh dear!). A crime if ever there was one.

“I have just returned from a party which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me – but I went away – and the dash should be as long as the earth’s orbit ————————— and wanted to shoot myself.” Success has this strange ability to make you enjoy it and seek it and then leaves a horrible feeling that you’ve just done something quite wrong. The shame of what though? If you’re not convinced of K’s turn of phrase he eviscerates us, our adoration and endless quoting with the following: “At every step philosophy sloughs a skin into which creep its worthless hangers-on.”

Yours,

Worthless Hanger-On