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Return of the real, part three: The Speculative Turn

the-speculative-turnRenewal and reinvigoration has never been more urgent for the Left, yet with a few exceptions, mostly in Latin America, it is everywhere in retreat and on the defensive. A serious intellectual realignment – while of course not sufficient – is necessary. It is my contention, as I’ve argued in the two previous posts, that we need to move beyond our obsessions with language and semantics, and the critique of ideas. For this to happen we need a radical change in intellectual climate; a change that may, at last, be underway.

The anthology The Speculative Turn (available in paperback or for free download) brings together essays from many different and sometimes opposing materialist and realist positions, that nonetheless reject what speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux has dubbed the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century, ‘correlationism’, in which reality appears, as the introduction puts it, ‘only as the correlate of human thought’. That such philosophy is ill-equipped to understand science may be a problem only for philosophers; that it enables the erosion of public confidence in the very real and dangerous facts that threaten our existence, and undermines the arguments for emancipatory politics and ecological sustainability, is a problem that affects us all: ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 19-01-2011, 13 user comments

Return of the real, part two: ‘Keeping ’em honest’

che_guevara_tshirtIn yesterday’s post, I argued that critique is a double-edged sword: a necessary aspect of political struggle, but one that, in combination with social atomisation and lack of political agency, deepens our alienation and contributes to a cycle of cynicism and bad faith. How then, do we extricate ourselves from this impasse?

Sloterdijk proposes that ideology critique is the heir to a rich satirical tradition dating back to Diogenes, which he calls kynicism, to differentiate from modern cynicism. Kynicism is a form of critique that ‘goes beyond theoretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it’. Rather than constructing counter-arguments to Platonic idealism, Diogenes would respond with lewd physicality, smearing faeces and masturbating in public. His answer to Socrates’ definition of humans as ‘featherless bipeds’ was to bring a plucked chicken to the academy and announce it as a man. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 18-01-2011, 3 user comments

Return of the real, part one: ‘Enlightened false consciousness’

UN-Summit-CancunIn the face of looming environmental catastrophe, we seem unable to resist the temptation to bury our heads in the sand. The feeble results of the Cancún summit last month, in which world leaders yet again kicked the can down the road, were hardly unexpected, but depressing nonetheless. Enormous and powerful interests defend the status quo; equal and opposite political will is required to effect the radical change needed. Climate change deniers have no serious arguments against the overwhelming consensus among climatologists, but all they need to do is to muddy the waters sufficiently to undermine public trust in the science, and thus sap that necessary political will. For any less politicised topic, they would be rightly ignored as cranks and green-inkers. The fact that they are not, and routinely given access to the media in the interests of ‘impartiality’ represents something not only disheartening but deeply unsettling. Clive Hamilton, writing in Overland last year, describes the problem: ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 17-01-2011, 6 user comments

On a literary national myth

68907_goldsmithtrinity1A post from Ireland.

Ireland’s academic ranking has taken a dive in the most recent OECD study on international student performance. Since 2000, the country’s students have dropped from 15th to 25th place in the OECD world ranking for maths, and from 9th to 13th in science. Ireland has never seen itself as particularly strong in maths, and the government has invested significant money in science knowing that it’s an area that needs improving. But it’s the drop in English that has been the most shocking: Irish students have fallen from 5th to 17th place. ... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 23-12-2010, 4 user comments

Haunted tales

‘If it is possible to assess the current state of Australian literature through a reading of four novels published in late September and October 2010,’ says Overland’s new fiction editor and friend of literature everywhere, Jane Gleeson-White, ‘then I’d say Australian fiction is haunted, preoccupied with the past.’

In ‘Haunted tales’ (Overland 201), Gleeson-White pulls up a chair next to the fireplace of contemporary Australian fiction, reviewing three first novels, Notorious by Roberta Lowing, Night Street by Kristel Thornell and Utopian Man by Lisa Lang, and Chris Womersley’s second novel, Bereft:

Only one of these four novels, Notorious, also embraces the present. And Night Street and Utopian Man, co-winners of the 2009 Australian/Vogel Literary Award, are derived from the lives of two significant Australian cultural figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entrepreneurial booklover Edward Cole (1832–1918) and Melbourne painter Clarice Beckett (1887–1935). Three of these novels are also, intriguingly, concerned with books and their almost supernatural powers (and Night Street is concerned with the power of art). Here in our relativistic, post-Christian era is fiction as history and the book as an article of faith. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 15-12-2010, 1 user comment

Visible power

A man in chains knows he should have acted sooner for his ability to influence the actions of the state is near its end – Julian Assange, 2006

In 1948, the New Yorker published a short story by Shirley Jackson called ‘The lottery’. It is the story of the public stoning of a woman in a small town in Vermont. The stoning, however, is not the result of any crime committed by the woman. Two male elders are charged with the responsibility of organising a lottery in which all the citizens of the town are compulsorily entered in the full knowledge that one of them will be required to forfeit their life. Jackson infuses the conduct of this strange, democratic ritual with a perfunctory efficiency. The elders are keen to have the matter decided and executed before sunset, as if it were a bothersome town hall meeting that everyone would prefer to do without but was essential to the good governance of the town. It is clear that the townspeople do not know why these stonings take place and Jackson gives no clear indication of motive other than some oblique references to agricultural rituals that may have been observed by the community in years long gone. That one of the presiding elders is the owner of the local coal company suggests that the story is set in the industrial era but the precise time is not specified. It is clear, however, that the ritual has lost whatever meaning or function it may have had but has continued to be conducted as a matter of empty ceremony. Once the lot is drawn the assembled, which includes women and children, set upon the condemned with efficient alacrity. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 13-12-2010, 17 user comments

Theatre review: Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt | Four Larks Theatre | until Saturday 11 December

peer_gynt_fourlarkstheatre_04

On Wednesday night I was lucky enough to share with friends in the experience that is the Four Larks Theatre company. Even a visit to their website gives a sense of how this self-funded young company masters atmosphere. Entering their space is like being stolen by storybook Gypsies.

Four Larks describe themselves as ‘a collective’ and this collab

Written by Clare Strahan on 10-12-2010, 5 user comments

These are Fighting Words

Last week the London chapter of the international writing-school revolution began with the opening of the Ministry of Stories. A few months ago, I went to Dublin and paid a visit to the Irish centre, Fighting Words. Set up by author Roddy Doyle and former director of Amnesty International Ireland, Sean Love, the centre had been open for eighteen months. Unlike the Ministry or the original at 826 Valencia, Fighting Words doesn’t run a pirate or a monster shop. Which is not to say they haven’t been focused on bringing kids into a magical world.

Sean Love’s smile is infectious. The grin spreads as he introduces me to the inner entrances of Fighting Words: two bookshelves which rotate to reveal secret doors, one adult, one child-sized. ‘It’s very Man from UNCLE’ he says, with obvious delight. ... read more

Written by Jennifer Mills on 25-11-2010, 1 user comment

Fiction review: A Book of Endings

'A book of endings'A Book of Endings
Deborah Biancotti
Twelth Planet Press

Among the deleterious effects of the separation of genre from mainstream fiction – a separation that is in many ways a marketing invention – is the marginalisation of various authors. It’s a process that affects the genre writers more than the mainstream ones. Genre is, after all, that embarrassing cousin who is placed at the far end of the dinner table next to the most understanding of relatives, who nod pleasantly, tolerating with good humour the truths we’d rather avoid and which our cousin insists on raising in a slightly too loud voice. Our cousin is always interesting, but not fit for polite, ‘civilised’ company. And yet, all too often, when the dinner comes to an end, we find that the cousin hasn’t actually said anything controversial, hasn’t offended anyone, is in fact, well, not that embarrassing after all. The whole thing was just a family myth, a misconception based on events of years before. The cousin, it appears, has matured. ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 8-11-2010, 5 user comments

In Jane Austen’s footsteps

Jane Austen's house If any of you read my post about audio books, you may remember I was lying in bed with a virus, enthralled by Ian McEwan’s reading of On Cheshil Beach. Since then, I have been overseas and, much to my surprise, found myself walking along the very same Cheshil Beach in Dorset where the novel’s young, newlywed Florence made her escape from the bridal bed. It was an exhausting trudge through deep shingle for eighteen miles (I only made it for a few of them), but exhilarating, not just because of the view and the weather, but because McEwan’s story has written the place into the literary landscape and universal consciousness. ... read more

Written by Carol Middleton on 8-11-2010, No comments

Partly about Donalds and zombies

Last year, due to a series of personal catastrophes and unheralded disasters, all unrelated and all of which happened at once, I was able to take a year off. What I wanted to do with that year was – well, a whole lot of things, none of which would be interesting to hard-headed Overland readers. The most relevant one, to this discussion, was to write.

... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 1-11-2010, 1 user comment

Non-fiction review – Life on the Edge: The Autobiography of Ralph de Boissière

Life on the Edge: The Autobiography of Ralph de Boissière
Lexicon Trinidad Limited

Crown JewelRalph de Boissière lived for a hundred years and wrote five novels but this autobiography may be the story that de Boissière was always meant to tell. Born in Trinidad in 1907 he migrated to Melbourne in 1948 and lived the rest of his life there working in a variety of mundane day jobs while writing and rewriting his novels. De Boissière did not achieve success as a novelist in either the West Indies or Australia although his two major novels, Crown Jewel and Rum and Coca Cola, were published widely in Eastern Europe. He wanted to describe a society and its people in his novels and he was impressed by the example of Tolstoy and Turgenev but as de Boissière filters his experiences to create his autobiography he does a better job of describing people functioning within their societies in all their unpleasantness, glory and contradiction than most novels ever manage. ... read more

Written by Rhona Hammond on 28-10-2010, 2 user comments

Fiction and politics in the 21C: a reply to Emmett Stinson

Over at Kill Your Darlings, Emmett Stinson has written an essay about two Australian responses to Ted Genoways’ much discussed polemic ‘The Death of Fiction’: Davina Bell’s ‘To My Generation of Precious Snowflakes’ (harvest, Winter 2010) and Jacinda Woodhead’s ‘A response to harvest’ (Overland blog, July 2010). Among other things, Genoways argues that ‘most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues – as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism’. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 25-10-2010, 30 user comments

Post from Tanzania: Reading Abdulrazak Gurnah (and reading the place you’re in)

I’ve always known that reading about an exotic location while you’re actually in that location heightens your experience of any given book. If I hadn’t figured it out on my own, I’m sure the section at the front of each Lonely Planet guide would have tipped me off. Among others, I’ve been lucky enough to read The Quiet American in a cheap hotel in Saigon, The Bus Conductor Hines from my student flat in Glasgow, and the first half of Brother Number One while travelling through Cambodia.

I only read half of Brother Number One because it scared the bejesus out of me – there was something too present about that nation’s history and the knowledge that the Khmer Rouge still had strongholds in the hills of the north. Add that to the way that travelling itself opens up your pores and increases your sensitivity to the world and my imagination went into overdrive. I exchanged my paperback for a copy of Gautama Buddha and finally got some sleep. ... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 14-10-2010, 1 user comment

Sunday epiphanies

Not that I’m a great fan of epiphanies or anything. I’ve read of other people having them though. James Joyce, for example, made them must-have experiences for writers, who have been tiresomely talking about them ever since. Perhaps I’m more interested in epiphanies as breakdowns. Not, I hasten to add, in a nihilistic Sweeney Todd sense, but maybe there have been moments in your life when you realised – I’m guessing – that True Love didn't exist and you understood that you were going to have to invent something a whole lot better. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 12-10-2010, 14 user comments