Post… (The Project, in some senses)

This blog will cover research updates, responses  fragments and the rest.  Before commencing, I’d like to start a sense of my project…

Essentially, it’s looking to establish the presence within British novels (post-2008)  of working-class consciousness, voice, practices, and practices to come — or, in summary, praxis — congruent with autonomy (specifically understood through ‘hauntology’). It sees actions as forms of self-expression sensible of antagonisms and phenomena (populism; crisis; Capitalist Realism) in the present moment. It therefore looks to understand hauntological subjectivity in the context of existing  sociological accounts of place, speech and mobilization and the work of Mark Fisher on hauntology and (in his late work) politics of joy, to evaluate the current working-class landscape and map exclusions as well as continuities and homologies, positing a model of reading which incorporates insights, and to read oppositional practices within contemporary texts in their embodied, historicised dimension with regards to literary form as well as the indexical presence of practices – together forming what we’d call ‘style’.

As context, we can say that in the last twenty years, Britain has experienced a number of social and cultural factors that have foregrounded issues of class, such as precarious working conditions, austerity policies, class-based demographics around Brexit, and new configurations of class, region and identity with regards to atomization, aspiration, resistance and  the rest.  Evidence suggests that new political movements have partially emerged (Gilbert 2017, Plan C and versions of Fisher’s Acid Politics), referring to radical democracy, new visions of work and alternative projects of renewal within deindustrial areas, drawing upon  revisions of post’68 ( for instance Marcusean) politics of collective wanting in a response to ‘Capitalist Realism’ (Fisher 2009). Bearing this in mind, it perceives a revival of late sixties politics in relation to class ( Wilkinson 2018), the recent publication of Fisher’s posthumous K-Punk collection (2019) with its ‘Introduction to Acid Communism’, ongoing work by the Plan C collective, recent post-Marcusean and autonomist-inflected acid politics of Graham Jones (2019),  strands in Owen Hatherley’s work on Militant Modernism (2011) and Lynne Segal’s (2017) survey of Radical Joy. Alongside this, we have fractal developments and networks of intellectual and social conservatism against which which such new materialist  leftism has evolved, as well as a postmodern conservatism found within rightwing Gramsician subcultures ( right-Nietzscheanism; nihilism) connected in a subterranean way to populism as well as (after Zizek) obscene masters. Elsewhere longer-term resistant practices of autonomism or Rancierean Dissensus continue, as expressed by Tyler and upon commemoration of place alongside negotiation of trauma in the form of ‘social hauntings’ collaborative work has grown, notably Geoff Bright and Manchester Met. There’s  been recent interest in examining the representation and construction of working-class identities and subjectivities in a range of cultural sites (Skeggs 2011, Tyler 2013).   Conversely, working-class subjects have been represented in media discourse and (still) much mainstream sociology as either frozen, aspirational in an individualistic sense or frankly atavistic.

It confronts how it becomes difficult to speak of class – rather, infinitesimal  types of class,  partly because that subject which seeks to move from under class-names is composed not only of aspects (from history to psychoanalysis to habits of speech to contradictions in production to collective mobilizations across the lines of place) but also because of institutions of formation and repression ( from benefit agencies, to institutions of artistic and symbolic capital, to media readerships) , the internalization of which pressures  function at the level of symbolic and fantasy-real symbolic expressions and the fantasy of the staging of the symbolic self in relation to what retroactively become reasserted as ’agency’ or ‘for’ class, for history, for Britishness and so forth. These too are equally myriad. In this sense class functions as a master narrative, the contradiction as such, although naturally it intersects with race that ‘most efficient method’ of controlling population, for exerting and bolstering power and functionally segmenting persons.  This  crowd of determinative influences as well as versions could invoke a lifetime of study; to limit things, ongoing research, then, looks at practices depicted within literature through the lens of attribution, irony, ‘realism’ and other matters of form in relation to paratextual, intertextual and external ‘prefigurative and ‘refigurative’ influences specifically through ‘media’ and events- including mechanisms of screening, of the incident, of the community, of recapitulated regional unevenness and other contributors to structure of feeling.

The questions it raises intersect with broader concerns, figured within papers and conferences, relating to the formation of labour time in relation to the body, the autonomy of community,  the decomposition of internal class identification as well as the spaces for a variant of Marxist cosmopolitanism  (for instance Achcar 2016 in relation to Marx’s own legacy ) through new patterns of migration, and the new-old aesthetics           (irrealism, hauntology) particularly pronounced in the present which articulate this new spectral identity (of class, workplace, institutional placed memory). Therefore, we have the history of resistance through ritual, consumption  and  the mundane compared to difference; the acceleration of processes against heterotopic germination and umwelt separations, the  history of autonomism, the immediate reflection of voice against the manipulation of desire through what Marcuse termed repressive desublimation, as well as what I would describe (reading those working after Derrida, for instance) as an attack upon the shibboleths of the ‘subject’ at all as an epiphenomenal historical construction.

That is, transcending particularity with what are held to be transcendent virtues exposed to post-Nietzschean critique; warding off descending into sheer power and the domain of online forums touting supremacy and post-truth cynicism (rather than Kynicism], the destitution of such values is sublated and they re-emerge dialectically as a post-subject ethics. That is, the solidarity of all those who are named against names, destroying  accrued systems of distinction and essence, reclaiming these within a system of  assent which has faced the (existential) vortex of freedom. This too confronts the sharp end of the real – a shape which is the disposition of actual elements structured by the abstract form to which we refer, the category ‘shape’ as property in turn of this ‘real’ which has no shape nor substance without being an actor or acted upon.

The content appearing here will therefore form part of a  larger research project, looking at the emergence of working-class through the revival of thinking, creative acts and politics, or a general praxis, of ‘acid’ ,a  subjectivity grounded within the insights of the hauntological, with antecedents in Marcuse, in Lefebvrian notions of the everyday,  the SI, Heller, and specific and ‘everyday ‘practices’. In doing so the study intersects with long-standing work done on multifaceted subjectivities (fusing ‘idealist’ and ‘matter’ across ‘space’ and ‘time’, to be quasi-Kantian), on recurrences within subcultures, changes in literary representation (the constitution of the ‘real’ and the mimetic) as manifestations of reconciliation and insurrection within and through form in relation to social antagonisms.   Tracing literary trajectories to see continuities of underground or counter-traditions, it also sees recurring and novel as well as epiphenomenal needs for the curation of memory and the institution of ways of seeing counter to the value-making of capital and capital’s production of homo economicus. 

A literary study, it takes up recent work on gendered ‘shame’ in working-class literature by Hubble and Clarke (2018) and their call to expand enquiry into the working-class voice as well as work on struggles against deindustrialization (O’Brien 2019) within working-class literatures. There, it sees nevertheless further scope for writing on dissensus and new forms of mobilization as well as the presence of radical practices relating to psychogeography and autonomism leading up to present day responses to austerity and ‘class names. It also follows in, whilst in some measure contesting, Del Valle Alcala’s 2016 designation of 21st Century working-class literary resistance through an autonomist lens as invariably ‘exhausted’ or, reduced to zero-level refusal, Scott (2009) on the demotic novel, together with taking up Sonit Perera’s (2014, 2018) Spivakian-Williamsian reading of international working-class literature. It looks to countertexts within the  seam of the tradition: Berg  and Day of the Sardine,  discussed in yesterday’s Guardian (21.2.20), as well as  Sommerfield, Hanley, and all those figures present at the margins although coming back to prominence in foreshadowing, forming retroactive continuity with today’s working-class  milieu (for instance Nick Hubble on Zadie Smith’s metamodernism in novels about class in relation to Sommerfield 2015), continuing the work of excavating formal radicalism within the realist, beyond political apologetics in the rudimentary sense, which Nick Bentley’s 2005 readings of Lyotard as well as Batailles, and Deleuze in relation to the 50s British Novel.

 More broadly in terms of responses to the moment, it situates itself within, as the concerns of O’Gorman and Eaglestone’s 2019 collection on Contemporary Literature bear out or catalogued in Rudrum and Stavris 2015 on the new hyphens , the ‘hyper’ and ‘posts’ and ‘metas’ of after-postmodernism, a theorised uncertainty about the present categorised as ‘metamodernism’ or varieties of post-post-modernism, and the associated search for a democratic project, in light of those processes Fisher (2009) described as capitalist realism’s ‘foreclosure of the future’  from which, nevertheless, historical symptoms are present if not recognized. It takes up E.P. Thompson’s classic formulation of working-class as historical subject alongside Marx as ‘agents of history’ in relation to the realist form in the light of Jameson’s 2015 post- Lukacsian dialectical reading of ‘realism’ as ‘affect’ and ‘telling’  and Jameson’s subsequent refinement of this to incorporate ‘marxismo’ or ‘historicity’ ( as discussed by Parker (2015): causation (why did this happen?), demand (the pressing needs of the situation), and persuasion’)  as a process of ‘wavering’ or dialectic.   It also follows in its depiction of subjects the Warwick Research Group’s (2015) formulation of irrealism linked to materialist literary mode of combined and uneven development, as well as the potential congruence between Scottish criticism’s ( Gardiner 2006) developed versions of mobile resistance and refusal and the under-explored regional English varieties.

METHODS

Critically, this study posits an expanded empirical sense of ‘Hauntology’  a modal site or assemblage of pertinent (to this project and to the present) ‘cultural critique’, with its literary critical mode. This formulation responds to Fisher’s (2006-2017)  formulation of hauntology in the context of that Capitalist Realism (2009) which constitutes production of the ‘same’, an absence of real historical agency on the part of the subject and the mobilization of affect into forms of coercive desublimation as well as ‘precarious’ labour; the latter is answered by an oppositional ethics of hauntology relating to place and language, the ‘work of the negative’ through reviving Walter Benjamin’s ‘hand-break of history’, and discovery of historical echoes and ‘lost-times’ in addition to psychoanalytically-constituted recognition of ‘incompleteness’ – transcendent and contingent – set against capitalist dreamwork in Fisher.  It sees here a Blochean ‘future-time’ and Benjaminian ‘tiger’s leap’, which is not predestined or determinist but agential, in a way which demands archaeologies of ‘virtual’ past possibilities, an ‘untimely’ confrontation with half- realized things (Benjamin 2006) within ruins or foreclosure, or (as my 2017 piece) Zizek’s glossing in The  Parallax View (2006) of Fichte’s anstoss (obstacle) that instigates sublation. The “tiger’s leap into the past” dialectically sublated into victory in the new ‘ontology of ‘not yet being’ that is ‘concrete’ in the  Hegelian sense – Dieu Neue Zeit- the New Time-  or the latencies of ‘material reality and human intervention’ , the  “Ontology of Not-Yet Being” in which community is visible in ghostly forms. In using hauntology as assemblage it also follows David Punter’s theory of matter as the most ‘realist’ (2000, 2007) form as well as his work on the postcolonial hauntological. This model offers grounds for a critique of dominant language relating to ‘working class desire’ whether reactionary populism or atomised ‘personalist’ versions of aspiration.

 In turn the study  will read within its literatures  a positive political-social project in the form of that Post-Marcusean Acid Communism or Politics (2019)  (Fisher’s incomplete final project) of oppositional joy or ‘health’ premised upon changing consciousness and altering large-scale material structures through praxis as being emergent in asynchronic traces, practices and institutions  although not fully realized. This expands upon my previous post-Williamsian reading of the residual and emergent in class communities. This study reads hauntology as immanent to such positivised potentiated politics of health in their recasting of the questions of desire and collectivity  ( acknowledgement of accelerationist notions of ‘joy’ and its traversal of these towards collectivity) as a humanist-Marxism, situating the ‘future’ as political again within the ‘commons’ (Hatherley 2011) of estates, hinterlands and deindustrialised zones, linked to parrhesia or truth-speech post Foucault and  the minor-speech of Deleuze and ‘autonomism’ discussed by Skeggs (2011), through to gender relations and inclusion of migrants, new work and dissensus against abjection, seeing such subjectivity as an encounter with alternative historical inheritance, a site of possibilities precipitated but not completely determined by conditions of present negativity. 

Approaching class in its fullness, and in relation to existing discussions within the ecosphere of papers, conferences, community projects, media imaginaries, critical formulations,  it hopes to approach the richness of work as a linguistic, cultural, and historical concept, but also by current conjunctures that are profoundly changing work and its worlds. Histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labour, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes have determined who counts as a worker, where utopian or dystopian, or heterotopian  notions of a postwork society question, whether it constitutes ‘crisis’ or not? It looks at questions of play, anti-work; manual and intellectual workers and shades of collars.. It sses Cities of ‘dreams and imagined spaces within literature determined nevertheless by social constructs; of the uncanny; our culturally inherited, including long-culture and contingent selves.

 Class, space and place (gentrification, ‘white flight’, slums, ghettos, hostile architecture to prevent sleeping rough on benches , and processes by which spaces and places acquire particular connotations and meanings in the human imagination.  Looking at Previous visions, like James’s preface to The Black Jacobins,  it asks how we might use our own “practised vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions, as well as questions of the insurrectionary pertaining to form: competing socialist claims on local and global scales, in form as well as content.  

On borders, if class is a border  then what limits or potentialities are created by the institution of borders?  Thresholds, after all, are paradoxical spaces where meanings connect or collide. It sees the sheer number of conferences concerned with nostalgia’s usages, from action-propelling ones to those which paralyze us, bringing despair and utter dejection indicating ongoing structures of feeling: class as nostalgia occurs in the radical myriad sense of nostalgia, where application transforms the object and its  designator] as conceptual and phenomenological, as well as nostalgia and post-memory. It reads those narratives of precarity which have resonated widely and provided explanatory narratives for critically reflecting upon the impact of global capitalism on everyday life ( Lazzarato, Dorre, Lorey, Standing) into becoming-precarious, tensions between sociological and literary precarity narratives, literary figurations of ‘new realism’) and  fragmentation in relation to the broader working-class subject. 

Looking at psychoanalytical and affective space and politics of place, it observes too the re-emergence (as with Cultural Politics) of  Guattarian senses in which “each individual assumes mechanisms of control, repression, and modelization of the dominant order” (2009) as between sign and sinthrome signification in the social order, roles of moulding to prefabricated representations relations of antagonisms and consciousness (Lazzarato, 2014) as well as the double-edged transformation  (the accelerated occupation of subject as relay) hybrid entity, at once subject and object, a component of a more-than human assemblage that is exposed to “a whole set of techno-scientific, macrosocial and microsocial, and mass media procedures of subjection’ beyond normal capital extraction. Here is the  individuality of class composition, relation compositions of the ‘unity’ which is not indivisible but alters its composition and thus divides its own nature, following significantly starts from the social, is something always shared within an “endangered sociality in which, in Raunig  on traversal vulnerability parts with the collective [ for instance in the implementation of a regime of the biopolitical, or the ecological catastrophe which changes the state of the collective); from immance to usage and becoming – subjectivity as an intensive and differential operation in a ‘singular subsistence”, without presupposing a given essence’ accommodating pragmatism. 

In this regard it considers Abstract flows, including emotion: motile and contagious, it travels and circulates within and across (non/human) bodies and (non-)places, and how these might be thought in terms of the class political, impacted upon [ala biopolitics] people, ideas, images and civic structures being actively on the move.  Like with ordinary life transformed into (or uncovered as) labour, it must examine neoliberal ‘biopower’ after Foucault as that where political presence is no longer an additional capacity for being human but rather, an essence of life itself; a self-reflexive project that identifies the human as ‘just’ political subject. Likewise, those conditions of unbearability Berlant write of  Sex, or the Unbearable, encountering the unbearable “unleashes the energy that allows for the possibility of change.

Conversely, other texts on class consider constant incapability of controlling one’s own subject body —move beyond the socially accepted and hence producing  an ambivalent laughter. They reveal the presence of the Real in everyday life, particularly those of the working-class subject, this real of the lack against the plenitude and machinery of Lazzarato-Deleuzeanism as a frame.

ANALYSIS

Judgement in this sense derives from a dialectic of scrupulous empiricism or cultural archaeology and ‘radical’ empiricism ( Farke 2019 on Fisher) of unconscious or ghostly ‘traces’ of past and an orientation to come readable  through Fisher’s influences Zizek and Deleuze as ‘virtuality. Indeed, I see what we think of as Self here as being dialectic of negativity, distinguishing ‘repression’ (like residuality, history and the function of the ‘state’)  from ‘excess repression’ following Marcuse’s initial critique of ‘repressive desublimation’ and Fisher’s own critique of accelerationism (the withering of class, as Noys 2013 also discusses). It thus maps residual and active (conscious and unconscious, immanent and apparent)  ‘flatcapping’, described within sociologists of ‘social hauntings (Bright 2018) and ‘affective circuits’ ( McKenzie 2011) alike, together with Edensor (2006) on the ‘urban haunt’ as a site of invention, as quotidian and as Benjaminian constellation of past-future traces, Collier and Bonnett on radical-nostalgia and mythico-Marxism theories and practices  in Richardson’s collection (2017) on psychogeography, and working-class parrhesia (Doran 2015) as well as the erstwhile plan C-er and Fisher associate Murphy (2018) on parrhesia and ‘unwelt’ spaces (forms of heterotopia] and the Kyncist approach to virtue in relation to Lacan and especially Deleuze, bearing in mind that resistant earthy embodied language Featherstone (2013)  and Charlesworth as forms of what has become ever more predominantly categorized as Rancierian resistance, may also be deemed inscrutable, appear pessimistic, linking this to working-class subjectivity “a relationship, not a thing” (11) after Thompson, seeing anti-personalist autonomist reading of circuits of affect by Skeggs, as well as Subjectivity 2015  editorial (Walkerdine et al), a view of the working-class body which overcomes interiority and exteriority which makes its way into politics, along with that unity – the  concrete universal between selves. In its finitude and, as with Benjaminian history of failures, such envisioning of Blochean ‘time to come’ comes under the real what Featherstone takes up in his planet utopia,  for me, as ‘the Deleuzo- Guattarian notion of the minor utopia, would recognise the ecological limits, vulnerabilities, and fragilities of Humanity. 

  It looks at Jappe’s 2009 analysis of excess, like Baumann, like the  Homo sacer, and like the Rancierean waste, other, as well as the ‘personhood’ symbolic waste in the Ranciere and Bourdeiuan-influenced work of Tyler:  more, his challenge to resistance where there are no forces created “behind capital’s back” that will eventually abolish it, nor any “dialectical” reversal, nor any cunning of reason, requiring instead effective agency. Thus working-class injuries will be recorded, including what Featherstone describes in surveying  Northern Britain as those tendencies as antagonisms which permit resistance in the sense of refusal, of symptom and of opening towards a future, made clear within sociological accounts, drawing here on Loveday, Walkerdine, Featherstone, will also have attention drawn to them.  

As a literary study it will  examine literary versions of working-class subjectivity as predicated upon a history which includes potentiality, evidenced in mimesis,  on the part of narrative ideology mirroring Jameson’s 2015 dialectic, post Lukacs, Realism in the Balance’ (1938) of ‘ affect’ – immediacy and phenomenology and ‘telling’ alienated and abstract – expressed through ‘wavering’ in which  designation of knowledge to character or participation within a narrative act is potentially a recovery of that elided by the dominant,  an echo of practice lost to overt social consciousness and a possible future. What I see is the appearance in narratives of actions- relationships, internal thoughts, and potential actions, given literature’s ability to move between perspectives, between time-frames to blur  authorial authority and character authority, which comment upon how subjects see themselves as well as those external processes by which they are fashioned.

In literary studies we have held debates around agency- within the text and in our critical language-linking this to  academic discourse and its part in representing culture to itself as part of a large intellectual-social matrix. Recent experiments in the novel, histories as alternative histories of trajectories and critical assemblages relating to narrative, building upon ambiguity after postmodernism but also traditional forms of ‘ambiguity and irony’,  Empson as well as Hutcheon, into Zara Dinnen’s recent collection, along with Jameson  on realism, have produced taxonomies as well as descriptors for wavering’. Building upon my work on the Williamsian residual and emergent in relation to Zizek ‘s virtual real in 2017 (in relation to Lionel Asbo) what appear  deadlocks of action or sensibility in texts will be seen as broken by irrealism,  allusion, formal aporia, virtual spaces overlapping, the undesignatability of speaker, drawing upon Warhol (2018) on the ‘sayable’ and ‘unsayable’ in narratology; Hodgson’s 2019 discussion of art in  Eaglestone’s 2019 collection on Contemporary Literature in relation to the Experimental Novel, a deep and abiding need for the real is ill-served by mainstream fiction’s ‘pretense [ sic] of actuality.  As discussed, it will consequently challenge Scott’s reading of power in the demotic novel (2009, 2011) which characterises sophisticated discourse as ‘art-speech’ or authorial control to recover ‘past’ and ‘present’ working-class autonomy, combining poetics with sociological accounts of ‘flatcapping’ and verbal irony.  To articulate this poetics it will also draw upon Hartley’s (2018) post-Jamesonian and Williamsian theory of literary style as ideology with its Mimesis 1-2-3 prefigurative- figurative-refigurative schemata, including his refigurative category ‘3.5’ of ‘redeemed’ or utopian language, read by my study in terms of Acid potentiality. Here  in relating form to politics, the use of Hartley is akin to in broad homology to Levine’s recent disquisition on forms – the formation of that tentative link  between the recent trend toward aesthetic or “surface” priorities in literary criticism and materialism’s historical insistence on the text’s position in social and political life detected in responses to her work. 

What Carolyn Lesjak locates, in that key Jamesonian praxis cognitive mapping, or  cognitive mapping of realist forms. Likewise Mathias Nilges, the novel-form disrupts the all-encompassing nature of the neoliberal contemporary, providing a means for unmasking its universalizing logic.  Cultural obscurity and marginality, those processes discussed in Post-Gramscian sense by Williams, gives rise to forces different  tentative forms of habit around the body as that which commemorates and is collectively commemorated and resultant art; Rhetorics of art formulated by cultural geographic sites, encapsulations of space by the procedural conventions and the  already openness, driftingness of language which is accentuated by authorial stylistics or an ideology akin to the ‘derive;’ and its successors. The contested ’in common’ fungibility drawing upon here on Ranciere as much as Foucault in the Order of Things, and upon ‘common’ understandings of forms as heterogeneous and yet linked into a politics which, in part, seeks to make the subject properly heterogeneous together, in boundedness of cases and classes as such and the plurality within that class whose repression ‘of such characteristics’ is a  metapolitical struggle; form is seeing politics: politics of form as distribution and arrangement, of things in their proper place.

Sociology will be read here as  primarily prefigurative, describing social practices (political)  regionally and intersectionally and social states, having examined underlying premises (the ontology of the body in space) and methodology (heterogeneous forms). Confronting a crisis in knowledge which has led to conspiratorial or to slogans, I propose that , drawing upon the insights of  E Gardiner after Lefebvre and Certeau as well as new conceptualizations of ‘desire’, a model appears mappable and explicable through literature’s particularities as these are adopted within literary framework readings, where alienation occurs , desire is channelled into obfuscatory and unproductive streams, but that acts occur (empirically) as well as tendencies, potentialities or ‘emergences’ using  Williams, which avoid fetishization of fluidity or elision of class in later-cultural studies or even De Certeau’s relative lassitude around consumer culture. Gramsci’s  conscious, intelligent protagonist; everyone had to master culture, the greatest ally of action.

PROJECT STRUCTURE

Broadly speaking, I’m going to be looking at several key areas, with chapters currently covering

An overview of sociological constructions of the working class subject and present social imaginaries, review hauntology and current criticism around literary representations of the working-class.

1.Identities/subjectivities: I’ll be looking at  ways in which working-class subjectivities havebeen constructed/defined previously in general critical practice and sociology

2. Hauntology: this examines the history of the concept and its analogues within Leftist thought – Marx-Freud-Benjamin-Bloch Derrida-Fisher, along with thirdspace theories of placehood practice from Lefebvre to Edensor’s accounts of ruin practice.

Bodies – ghosts

Place

History/time

3. Agency: formulating ‘Acid’ politics after hauntology as its positivisation,  the section then examines accounts of working-class representation/writing — voice(s) – narratives of resistance – and questions of form and mode (realism, modernism, post-[post]modernism) to propose altered readings of working-class agency within literature: 

then: 

1.       Homelessness in Ross Raisin’s Waterline (2010) and Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010)
2.       The Politics of the Everyday in Lisa Blower’s Sitting Ducks (2016) and Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017).
3.       Acid Politics in Richard Millward’s Ten-Story Love Song (2009) and Anthony Cartwright’s Iron Towns (2016) and Niall Griffiths’s Broken Ghost (2019)
4.       Agency and working-class self-authorship in Neil Campbell’s Zero Hours (2017) and G.W. Brown’s Ironopolis (2018)
5.       Class Mobilities in Jessica Andrew’s Saltwater (2019), Irvine Welsh’s The Blade Artist (2016) and James Kelman’s The Dirt Road (2016)

Texts have been selected to cover five topic areas, with settings ranging  across London, Wales, Scotland, the Midlands and the North, encompassing small towns, cities and borderlands. Their subjects are variously traditional and precarious workers, students, unemployed and retired. They are variously ‘traditional’ working-class (Gest), second-generational migrant and diasporic working-class. Texts feature an array of cultural practices (from centres to walking)  as well as events (elections, Brexit), on the axis of education and gender; they deploy more or less realist forms with frequent detours into the ghostly or irrealist. The selection includes who are new and writers who are established in having critical literature around them, particularly Welsh and Kelman, and writers with some critical attention McGregor, with some existing academic literature to refer to in the form of articles.

More specifically still in Part 2

Chapter 1

Using sociological accounts of precarious agency, theories of heterotopia and hauntology, this chapter will examine subjectivity within places of physical and symbolic dereliction where history seems to have almost completely abandoned former labouring subjects.  It looks at Ross Raisin’s Waterline (2010) and Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010). Examining notions of homelessness, it  posits three levels within texts; psychological; actual disconnect; and large historical forces. It sees: [a] real disconnect by material conditions and ideology intertwined; [b] a haunting back of historical remainders; and [c] a capacity for historical action, however incomplete or  forms of ‘Dissensus’, that which is survived. The chapter will be divided into voice, body, and history (the ghost). 

Chapter 2

 This chapter looks at the everyday in relation to Lisa Blower’s Sitting Ducks (2016) and Ian Cartwright’s The Cut (2017), both set in deindustrial areas. It draws upon accounts in Kirk and Moran on the working-class quotidian and E Gardiner (2000)  on the radical everyday in relation to Debord, Lefebvre, De Certeau and Heller, as well as upon Skeggs’ autonomism and Mckenzie on gendered class. The chapter will focus on three main areas in relation to everyday hauntology and autonomism within the texts: spectres of the residual and liminal ‘political’ in relation to gender and other categories of exclusion along the lines of the ‘cut’ ; place-bound autonomist speech in relation to political ( traditional and Brexit) fissures; and productive tensions within working-class subjectivity’s place-bound self-articulations (drawing upon Featherstone 2013) in relation to outside and amongst themselves.

Chapter 3

This chapter surveys Richard Milward’s Ten Storey Love Song (2009) , Niall Griffiths’ Broken Ghost (2019) and Cartwright’s Iron Towns (2016). It will read Utopian impulses associated with acts of collective memory  as creativity, alongside (textual) fabulation, in the form of ‘art’, minor speech, psychogeographic wandering and ‘mystic’ experience, set against structural late-capitalist pressures, from economy to institutional interpolation. Readings will be underpinned by reference to psychogeographic practice ( Richardson 2017) and Edensor’s social hauntings as well as the literature of marginal mobility (e.g. Gardiner 2012), Tyler’s work  (2013) on abjection, Fisher’s hauntology and acid politics,and specific ‘acid practices’. It will read: a) instances of residual practice alongside utopian events seemingly integrating individual and community concerns; b) ‘configurations’ which encounter antagonisms or schisms; and c) an emergent acid political aesthetic through a ghostly counter-voice – “a leap in the epoch about to happen”(Griffiths).

 Chapter 4

This Chapter focuses upon  Neil Campbell’s Manchester-set Zero Hours (2017)  as well as GW Brown’s Middlesbrough-set Ironopolis (2018). It examines working class subjects who act as visible or disguised authorial voices and are seen to be reflexive authors of themselves as plural – ethnographers,  historians, and theorists as well as aestheticians – engaging in acts of embellishment, translation, reverie and self-conscious distancing as well as recording. In doing so they form ‘historical’ subjects faithful to their communities. It refers back to sociological discourses of  class voice (i.e Loveday’s flatcapping) along with engaging designation of language codes within Scott’s work and post-Bakhtinian theory. The chapter will be divided into 3 sections: a) the formal, seemingly sovereign ‘I’; b), speaking for the community ‘past’ as a visible ‘writer’; c) finally, speaking for the future.

Chapter 5

It will look at three texts: Jessica Andrews’ Saltwater (2019), James Kelman’s Dirt Road (2016)  and Irvine Welsh’s The Blade Artist (2016); each deals with art as well as emancipatory dislocation and past residues. It asks how are those contemporary subjects who move away (abroad) or seemingly change and transcend classes representable in their classed selves. How do their textual (gendered) bodies, self-reflections, symbolic negotiations and ascribed desires  illuminate the antagonisms and hopes within sites they leave behind and the potential for working class agency? New forms of relations to the collective are found in: a) an intersectional and hauntological ‘way of seeing’; b) transatlantic multiethnic working-class communities united through music and post-capitalist alternative circuits; or c) in a continued oppositional ethics that accompanies autodidact education complicated by residual violent masculinity respectively.