This blog is devoted to examining today’s British working class literature. What it aims to do here is present  British working-class literature in its present political coordinates,  in para-academic form, engaging with theory and acknowledging ideas but using aphorism and reflective form rather than curated academic forms.

At this moment we are caught in that familiar dialectic of the cataclysmic and the open, with imprecations against class subjects, environment destitution, deindustrialization’s ongoing traumas, a politics which by omission in reference to political economy, disregards or actively works against class interests. Nevertheless a counter politics and poetics has emerged, drawing upon longer-standing currents within literature, cultural studies and political theory. It looks towards the continued valence of Benjaminian and Blochian views of traces and the ‘time to come’, Marcusean politics of joy revised for the present and read in reference to Marcuse’s recuperation of the latent Marx in Heidegger, of the balance of of agency, predestination, self-authoring and possession within the same/difference, repetition/divergence fidelity of the Situationists/Heller, Lefevre, De Certeau and all, following E Gardiner (2000) of traversal.

Working-class is the class that forms (or exposes) history); Zizek describes class as the antagonism that gives rise to everything. This Blog will explore working-class literature as a site of under the surface responses – territories of pleasure, heterotopias, present and future communities of alliance It will draw upon sociological accounts from Beverley Skeggs, Imogen Tyler, Damien Le Bas, Mark Featherstone, Vik Loveday, Val Walkerdine, Ayoor Nayak and Geoff Bright amongst others, as well as experiences from a deindustrial heartland of its own, to translate, co-mingle or produce a radical empiricism, taking Avery Gordon’s (1997) marriage of sociology and literary approaches as a lead as well as the work of Raymond Williams and his interlocutors.

Following Mark Fisher it draws upon the connections between hauntology of the present- the interregnum point of melancholia and potential, capitalist realism and the hauntology which is symptomatic of it and symptomal of its gaps, its failed sutures- and the politics to come, an acid politics of the ‘commons’ which is necessarily ‘haunted’, by past accelerations into dangerous accelerations or full recuperation of joy into capitalist consumerism as well as atomization, one which recognises too that ever-wound, psychoanalytically speaking, like Jean Lyotard’s ‘mad’ working-class destitution, a self-uprootedness core to identity. Asserting Williamsian continuity and inheritance through the agonistics of Williams own emergent and solvency, along with a fidelity to psychoanalysis, it also asserts the break, the X of Slavoj Zizek

It looks to signs of cultural renewal and preservation in the form of social haunting work, the uses of ruins (after Tim Edensor), architecture energies (after Owen Hatherley), place practices of reinscription (following the likes of Alaister Bonnett and Tina Richardson’s 2017 Walking Inside Out) and sites of transition to form heterotopias as microcosms of culture, and unwelts, art-speech and veering speech and the egalitarianism of form. Community workshops, online unwelts, traces and speculations as well as obdurate speech and circuits.

From literature of the Quotidian to accounts of what in terms, after Fisher and Plan C, are Acid practices, it will speak to the officially-recognised, regionally-demarcated and overground literature of class today, from the deindustrial to peripheries and traverses. Using ‘academy’ speech and looser free-form expression it speaks the language of its concepts -of its principles. It maps the question, and questioning, of ‘desire’, ‘democracy’ and ‘voice’ with regards to a heterodox working-class with changes in its constitution set against political rhetoric, ideological capturing, fidelity, paradoxes and dialectics. How do texts depict the disjuncture between authentic convictions related to self-experiences and destruction, using the language of psychoanalysis, the gap which literature accomplishes. Drawing upon Fredric Jameson’s distinction between sense or affect, and ‘destiny’ (2015), the historical subject, within Realism and mimesis, it asks how self-understanding and self-depiction functions alongside insurrection and fidelity (in a Badiouan sense) to class.

Whilst working-class injuries will be recorded, including what Featherstone (2013) describes in surveying  Northern Britain, it also sees tendencies as antagonisms which permit resistance in the sense of refusal, of symptom and of opening towards a future, made clear within sociological accounts. Northern places of defeat (2013), like  Charlesworth’s phenomenology, as regionalised forms of capitalist realism, will be seen in literary accounts as accompanied by ghostly resurrection extending out of Fisher’s social ontology, continued resistance and signs of the  new. More broadly, it will take on these studies of melancholia to detect radical affect rather than simply desperation or foreclosure, detecting in what seem to be affective energies of despair the quality of resistance but also proposing, based on the evidence of present day activities and by literature’s modalities – its speculative conjectural forms – that something new emerges; these emerge necessarily out of place  encounter, echoing the outcomes of contingency and embodiment, the aleatory and inherited- accrued, in its multifariousness.

It’ll draw upon texts from Scotland to Lands End and the Irish, as well as hauntings from abroad, the post-colonial, world-literary circuits, Soja’s poststructural geographies and the ‘unhomely’ in the familiar of hearth sites and modern myths attached to place.  nationalism and the immersion into dreamlogic as well as long-term disavowals and real-world effects of fantasy around retreat ‘cruel nostalgia’ after Berlant,  in Eaglestone (2019) , ‘glorious defeat’ O’Toole (2019), and counter-visions.

 

 

 

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