KEEP ME RUNNING, RUNNING SCARED [366]

My mother said I shouldn’t write about politics, for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention. But what if politics is all anyone is talking about, again, because it is all we are given to talk about, again?

The extremely short version of the last week is this: Liz Truss, the fourth Prime Minister since this website began in May 2016, resigned on Thursday 20th October, having only become leader on Tuesday 6th September. In that time, her free-market, low-tax, high-growth economic policy was trashed both by the world markets, leading to higher interest rates, a weaker Pound and higher government borrowing costs, and by the replacement Chancellor of the Exchequer appointed by Truss, the rejection of her policy making her position untenable.

I had already decided I had written enough about Liz Truss by the time she became Prime Minister, like that matters much now: when she mischaracterised postmodernist philosophy as having no space for evidence [link]; when that speech began my own series on postmodernism’s continued relevance [link], how another speech railed against “ludicrous debates about language, statues and pronouns” [link]; and questioning what the “post-Elizabethan age” will be under King Charles III and a Prime Minister Truss [link].

I am tired of being told we are living in unprecedented times. Boris Johnson was still Prime Minister as late as July, when anxiety already running high over the cost of living and energy prices, but the Conservative Party since then appear to have expended more energy on keeping itself together. Even if the current week-long leadership contest is a recognition that two months was too long for the last one, especially when it didn’t produce a satisfactory result, the course of events are still up in the air: either one person gets more than one hundred MPs supporting them to be a candidate by 14:00 on Monday 24th October, making them Prime minister immediately, or we could have as many as three candidates, who then need to be voted on by the same Party members that elected Liz Truss.

This doesn’t reduce the outrage at having to go through the process again. In order just to follow the news, which feels like it is changing with every moment, you are reduced to the “doomscrolling” of live news feeds reporting every event as it breaks, watching the government being contradicted in real time on Thursday 21st October: everything is fine; Truss has called a meeting; no speech is planned; they’ve got the lectern out....

I had already reduced the amount of news I watch on television by the time Boris Johnson resigned as Prime minister in July 2022, although that was easy in the week of this event as my TV had broken [link], but the continued rumbling of unease about, well, the national situation, has not subsided despite trying not to take as much notice of it. I don’t know how long it can go on, or when it will end.

The Conservative Party assume they can keep thinking they can fix their own mistakes, and Boris Johnson, having flown back from his third holiday since being thrown out, appears to think his old job is his for the taking again, without acknowledging that he is Boris Johnson, and that name comes with baggage.

Even as I write, I am sure this won’t be the end of it. We can’t guarantee at this point that whoever is elected as the next Prime Minister can hold their party together, only because that questions was not answered by the last PM.

My objections to the Conservative Party right now are moral, not ideological, resulting from the situation they have created. These people are not my betters, and they do not command my respect. This isn’t even about wanting another party in charge, this is just about wanting stability, and if they cannot do that, then they need to give the people the chance to decide who can.

DO I REALLY FEEL THE WAY I FEEL? [359]

[See above for my video, which uses the below script.]

Coming up, I tell you what this is, what this is, and what this is, and explain why the answers don’t really matter.

[Opening titles: 359. Walking in Memphis Furniture, or “Do I Really Feel the Way I Feel?”]

Hello there. “Memphis” is the name of a group of international designers that ran from 1980 to 1988, led by Italian architect and Olivetti typewriter designer Ettore Sottsass. The group existed to question the functional nature of modern design. I am not here to explain and analyse the history and philosophy of this group, or to analyse their work in detail. I only want to share with you how wonderfully overwhelming it all is.

In June 2021, I took a trip to the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes to view “Memphis: Plastic Field”, a touring exhibition that gathered over a hundred and sixty examples of furniture, textiles and glassware from across the group’s timeline. I am grateful to the gallery for letting me take pictures, letting me walk through the exhibition twice, and dressing the galleries in high-contrast black and white, like the exhibits needed help to be seen. To be clear, these are not intended to be works of art, even though they are: they are tables, chairs, bookshelves, lights and glasses, and were made to be used as such. It just so happened that the colours and designs that permeated the rest of the 1980s also came from everything you see.

The first time I saw an item of Memphis furniture was in Minnie Mouse’s first TV special, “Disney’s Totally Minnie”, from 1988, where one of their chairs is shown in a suitably multi-coloured room. The curved shape of the chair had been burned into my mind since I was five or six years old, and there it was, just sitting there in front of me. Called the “Bel Air” to fit a scheme of using international hotels for names, it had presence, it had status – it was a postmodern throne.

Even before the “Bel Air”, colours and patterns like those used by Memphis had been splashed through the opening titles of the Channel 4 music show “The Tube” from 1984. I saw this on Friday evenings when I was about two years old, as the word and numbers game “Countdown” was on from Monday to Thursday, and I guess that what impressionable small children need is colours and movement, so I got the best there was. I kept asking my mother to draw the “Tube” logo until she asked me to do it, which I apparently did first time. What I don’t get is why I kept asking for the “Tube” logo to be drawn, when this [Channel 4 ident] was the logo for the channel it played on – some things we’ll never know.

In a moment, I will go further into why Memphis design continues to matter today, and provide the answers to the opening quiz, following this short break. [Advertisements for Weetabix, Warninks advocaat and Kitekat cat food.]

Welcome back, and it’s time to confirm what those Memphis items were from the beginning of the video: the first item was a teapot, the second was not a plate but an ashtray, and the bird-looking sculpture was a lamp... and yet, the fact these items had any sort of intended use really isn’t the point. 

As I mentioned earlier, the Memphis group questioned the functional nature of design, and that included the nature of an item existing only for its intended use, and any need to be practical for that use – once liberated from those needs, a designer can begin to play. Take, for example, the Tawaraya bed, or sofa, or Japanese tatami mat, or boxing ring, depending on what you needed in that moment.

My family’s living room and kitchen in the 1980s was defined by wood, by pine, and by a child’s teeth marks in pine, but the construction of Memphis furniture was new, and prescient, using the brand new medium density fibreboard – MDF – and it was possible to laminate it with coloured or patterned surfaces - anything other than simulated woodgrain. 

There is little difference between the materials of Memphis furniture and Ikea furniture, other than Memphis being hand-built from the start, and using more ostentatious names like Plaza, Carlton and Bel Air, instead of Billy and Malm. I should make that clear: these Memphis items are not one-off custom builds, but they were available to order out of a catalogue, despite being very expensive. Likewise, intricate glassware items could easily be created by colouring and gluing separate pieces of glass together.

But if this is where furniture could have been headed, why did Ikea, Habitat and Argos continue with woodgrain and white laminate, and why do we persist with magnolia and grey paint? It is one thing for a room to make you feel cosy, but what if you want to feel elated, overwhelmed, challenged? Is furniture meant to do that? Am I supposed to not be hypnotised by my curtains? Can I admire my bedside table? It is all well and good taking the colours and patterns from Memphis and swathe your entire popular culture in it, but in doing so, it removed it from the context in which those colours and patterns originally appeared – it dazzled the public, but they didn’t want to sit on it. It has made Memphis into a moment in history, a period piece, a museum exhibit. That doesn’t feel good enough somehow. 

It has taken me over a year to work out how to present these pictures, because I didn’t want to present another history of something that people don’t do anymore, carefully listing the names and years for future reference, and manoeuvring it into a discussion on the defined historical period of postmodernist design and blah blah blah – other people can do that this time. I remember leaving the MK Gallery feeling like I had been set on fire, like I am never going to witness anything that eye-opening for a long time, and it was all over looking at furniture. That is the important thing for me. Memphis is a hauntology, a vision of a lost future. This is what you could have won. Some things are worth losing your mind over.

Thank you for watching, if you would like to see more videos like this, please like, comment and subscribe, and as ever the nostalgia culture crisis continues at www.leighspence.net, the home of dancing with the gatekeepers.

HE DID THE MASH, IT CAUGHT ON IN A FLASH [284]

Lately, I have been waking up extremely early on Saturday mornings. With the work week done, my mind turns to writing the next “Gatekeepers” article and will already be running through what the next subject will be, or what I should include.

 

This week, it became increasingly obvious what I should be writing. Hasbro has announced their “Mr Potato Head” line of toys will be renamed to simply “Potato Head,” with Mr and Mrs Potato Head as parts of the lines. Instead, this was interpreted as Mr Potato Head itself being made gender-neutral, and Piers Morgan was triggered into his usual Twitter tirade about woke virtual-signalling imbeciles, because “woke” uses fewer characters than “politically correct.” Perhaps everyone should be made to provide their own potato once more.

 

Meanwhile, American Republican politicians Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul – the latter named after Ayn Rand – were both rebuked for comments aimed at transgender people, repeating the usual mischaracterisations and talking points, into which I cannot be bothered to repeat, except to say that Dr Rachel Levine will become United States Assistant Secretary for Health because she proved herself to be supremely qualified for the job, and does not stop being transgender because other people decide they can live in a world that excludes things they don’t like. I wish I could do that; I would be much happier.

 

I had already decided I was going to write that transgender is not postmodern, although I feel like just saying that and leaving it there. I shouldn’t have to explain it any further than that. I don’t need discourse to explain away my own existence as a transgender woman, and if you think you do to make your own life easier, then how am I the one who has problems?

 

Anyway, transgender isn’t postmodern because transgender is older than postmodernism. I also do not need an argument about how “transsexual” became replaced by “transgender,” because it does not preclude its earlier existence. Pointing out logic does not rationalise something out of existence. Even more obviously, I don’t think transgender people that existed before even the coining of the term “postmodernism,” like Albert Cashier, Joseph Lobdell, Billy Tipton, Mark Weston, Lili Elbe, Christine Jorgensen and the Public Universal Friend – put all these names into your nearest search engine – had any problems with reconciling their existence with those of anyone else, let alone what each individual believed at any particular point.

 

And yet, I somehow left out the following from something I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

 

“Gender isn’t constructed, but an individual who desires gender re-assignment surgery is to be unarguably considered a man trapped in a woman’s body (or vice versa). The fact that both of these cannot logically be true, simultaneously, is just ignored (or rationalized away with another appalling post-modern claim: that logic itself – along with the techniques of science – is merely part of the oppressive patriarchal system.)”

 

Somehow, I wrote an entire article about Jordan Peterson a couple of weeks ago without mentioning the above statement, from page 315 of my copy of “12 Rules for Life,” in the section for rule 11, “Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.” (The italics are his.) A few sentences earlier, Peterson talks about the “insane and incomprehensible postmodern insistence” that gender is constructed, and the moral imperative for this is to make all outcomes equitable. Yep, somehow, I just focussed on his misreading of Jacques Derrida.

 

What Peterson wrote does not change anything I have said. Historical precedence overrules present-day ideology, and I can sleep at night. I prefer to take the example of Alan L Hart, a transgender man best known for pioneering the use of X-ray photography in detecting of tuberculosis, saving many lives, who completed his transition in 1917. Three years later, Hart’s surgeon Joshua Allen Gilbert, wrote, “Let him who finds himself a tendency to criticize an to offer some constructive method of dealing with the problem on hand. He will not want for difficulties. The patient and I have done our best with it.”

YOU GOT MORE RABBIT THAN SAINSBURY’S [282]

 

This is going to be a short piece about why the name of Jordan Brent Peterson has barely appeared in my writing of the last five years, and why it probably won’t appear again.

There is certainly no point in my presenting a long analysis of what the Canadian clinical psychologist believes, and what is contained in his 2018 book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” because this has been covered exhaustively elsewhere in reviews, columns and videos. I am not planning to cover his sequel book, “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” when it is published in March 2021, because that would involve having to buy a copy of it.

Most likely, anyone who has also heard his name has already formed their opinion as well, and I am not planning to change anyone’s mind, so I can focus squarely on my own reasons for not wishing to engage with his thinking.

I already own a copy of “12 Rules for Life,” the success of its release meaning I could find a paperback copy in my local supermarket for £2.99, but I tried to read it, and I don’t think it was for me. It states pretty straightforward rules such as “stand up straight with your shoulders back,” and “be precise in your speech,” symbolises order as make and chaos as female, and used lobsters to explain how human social hierarchies are formed. The analysis and reporting of the book were pointing towards addressing a crisis in young men, so I had no reason to look any further.

The section where Peterson completely lost me is on age 306 of the paperback edition, titled “Postmodernism and the Long Arm of Marx.” I had never encountered Marxism being mentioned alongside postmodernism up to then, and even though he mentions that key postmodernist figure Jacques Derrida referred to his ideas as a radicalised form of Marxism, he wasn’t precise enough.

Derrida referred to his signature “deconstruction,” understanding the relationship between text and meaning, as being a radicalised form of the spirit of Marxism. Derrida’s book “Spectres of Marx” (1993) is about how the ideas of Marxism persist almost like a ghost, haunting Western society from beyond the grave. Derrida coined the term “hauntologie” in this book, pronounced the same in French as ontology, the study of existence, being and reality, and hauntology is now used as a shorthand for when a culture cannot escape its own past.

However, Peterson has created the term “postmodern neo-Marxists,” and is popular enough to make that term stick among those that take his own words as gospel. I’m not sure why he spent as long as he did on it in the book as he did – Derrida said he didn’t like “de facto” Marxism, as in Communism, but Peterson goes on about how postmodernism is someway of resurrecting Marxism, and... isn’t one of Peterson’s rules “pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”? This culminated in a debate against the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, titled “Happiness: Marxism vs. Capitalism,” where Žižek requested the names of the “cultural Marxists” Peterson had been talking about, there were no names.

The Jordan Peterson industry means there is now an ecosystem of books, videos and online content to which you can subscribe, which makes me think of Ayn Rand, another person I have little time for. There is also no shortage of people who could defend and explain his writing to me, which also makes me think of Ayn Rand. Even among professors of the University of Toronto, I would take Marshall McLuhan over Jordan Peterson.

NO MORE FREE STEPS TO HEAVEN [278]

From the notes I made in 2002, I can see that the first place I came across postmodernism that delineated its concepts most easily for me to dive into them was a book by Tim Woods, “Beginning Postmodernism,” published by Manchester University Press, a second edition of which has been published since I first read it. As dry as most academic books can be, for such a book to write about its subject in a way that makes you feel excited about it is extremely valuable. It was certainly enough for me two write ten A4 pages of notes from it, since rendered moot by my actually buying a copy of the book – I can only assume the original library copy was once I was able to take home.

The notes I made start by explaining that postmodernism is:

“a knowing modernism, a self-reflexive modernism, a knowing modernism that doesn’t agonise about itself. Postmodernism does what modernism does, only in a celebratory way, rather than repentant way. Thus, instead of lamenting the loss of the past, the fragmentation of existence and the collapse of selfhood, postmodernism embraces these characteristics as a new form of social existence and behaviour. The difference between modernism and postmodernism is therefore best seen as a difference in mood or attitude, rather than a chronological difference, or a different set of aesthetic practices.”

That is the kind of introduction you want. Modernism was never replaced by postmodernism, and the impulses to find new ways of explaining how we see the world, and creating new forms in art and society, is true of both movements. Even a modernist group that Dada, that you would think would match postmodernism on mood and attitude, is actually separated from it by its earnestness to abandon the modes of thinking that led society to world war, instead of playing about with them.

My notes contain lots of lists, with Woods creating many summaries of the key characteristic in postmodern forms of thought, economics, architecture, visual design, music, television and film. For example, the list for film talks about pastiche of other genres and styles, alluding to particular scenes and cinematic styles from other films; a flattening of history, presenting the past in the present; self-reflexivity of technique; and celebrating the collapse of distinction between high and low cultural styles, with “Pulp Fiction,” a major Hollywood film aiming to evoke pulpy crime novels, being used as the example. It helped that, during my film degree, we were shown a Jean-Luc Godard film from 1967, “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” that often abandons its narrative to talk about consumerism, and has characters addressing themselves directly to the camera. I enjoyed it a lot.

A thought my mind always replays is how I am glad I discovered postmodernism when I did, because it has helped explain how the world, and particularly politics, has developed in the years since. The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the source of the predominant postmodernist stance of an incredulity towards metanarratives, has his own list made by Woods – in particular, Woods says that postmodernism, according to Lyotard, “does not seek to give reality, but to invent allusions to the inconceivable which cannot be presented. In this respect, there is something theological in his concept of representational art.”

I can see I also made this note from Joseph Natoli’s book “A Primer to Postmodernity”:

“We are responding to a world that is in the process of breaking out of our certitude of knowing, out of the reality box that we have built for ourselves and called it Reality. A lot of formerly closeted people are now out of the closet; or you can say that the camouflage screen, the barrier curtain is down. We’ve got a hunger now to hear everyone’s story at the same time that we paradoxically want to put a gag on everyone but our own buddies. We’re split between two vastly different ways of dealing with the world. But in actions, in how we go about constructing our realities, we are less and less attached to the ‘old order’ of knowing, feeling, perceiving, and more and more attached to exploring as many other realities as we can bring into being.”

“A Primer to Postmodernity” was published in 1997. I also now have a copy of this book, and I can see the above passage was preceded by the author hearing from people that want things to be like the “good old days,” and wanting what we know to be grounded, when it cannot be. After the passage, Natoli then says that his book can only be a “primer” for people to do their part on the ongoing creation of culture. Later, he explains that one viewpoint held by postmodernists is that a gap exists between the world and how we understand it, even if there is not one between ourselves and the world: multiple realities can exist, and while they do not battle for supremacy, they can fade in and out of significance. A later chapter is titled “Moving Across the Profound Surface of a Postmodern Life.”

I don’t treat postmodernism as a religion, but I can see why it may look like that. When coming across something new influences your view of the world, it is great when it is a view that does not insist on someone being wrong as a result, but if you know you are right, you will be able to prove that most easily. What it has never meant is that you can say what you like – if something is not valid, it will go away.

DON’T FORGET YOUR BOOKS [277]

Childhood is meant to the happiest time of your life. I believe mine should always be ahead of me, but the time I spent working for my degree in film studies, from 2001 to 2004, is definitely up there. I was more aware of the world than in childhood, but still without the responsibility – everywhere was open, especially my mind. The person I am today was formed then – curious, sceptic, and voracious for knowledge. I just need to feel like I need to know more about, well, anything and everything - I may have the degree, but the research never stopped.

I had never before properly examined why I became interested in postmodernism and postmodernity during this febrile time but, fortunately, my degree notes and other things from the time have all been splendidly preserved. I have four lever-arch folders for my degree notes, and another one for all the other subjects I picked up along the way, along with a further wire-bound notebook. I did not realise I essentially had two projects on the go at the same time.

The earliest notes I have on postmodernism date from May 2002, and at that time, with the World Wide Web still relatively empty in comparison to today, libraries were still the place to find your primary and secondary resources – it took until my third and final year of my degree before I wrote an essay that used a website as a reference. The sections for both film and postmodernism were on the same floor, but the photocopiers were on a different floor – I only remember this because a number of books I used at the time, but have bought second-hand cheaply since, were not to be removed from the premises, so there was a lot of note-taking and photocopying to be done.

The books on postmodernism were on the same floor in the library, but their setting was a little more dramatic – they were in a separate room, accessed through a set of double doors, with a couple of steps down to the floor – it felt a bit like a mismatched extension to the existing building. Among the sections in this room were the books on “Philosophical Systems,” which is category 140 in the Dewey Decimal System for filing library books. I was looking into Buddhism a bit at the time, not that I have kept up with it much – Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that, unlike Christianity, Buddhism doesn’t promise anything, but at least it keeps that promise.

Further on through the shelves, you get to category 149.9, “Other Philosophic Systems,” where Postmodernism is placed. It looks like I started with Buddhism, and carried on down the line, because I apparently have notes on cultural identity in cyberspace, and on “post-humanity” – somehow, I hadn’t watched “Blade Runner” yet. From there, I made a huge number of notes, copying whole passages out of books, and doing a largely good job of citing my sources to myself, which made finding the books themselves years later very easily.

So, I put myself in the right place to come across the right books, but at the same time, I have to consider that I was there primarily to look at the modernist art form of film, requiring me to learn how reality is constructed by art, and how art constructs reality. This focus is then turbocharged by postmodernist thought that exists to play about with what I am learning in those film classes. I gave myself an awful lot of homework, which I will look at next time.

AND YOU MAY ASK YOURSELF [276]

Memphis “Big Sur” sofa by Peter Shire

Judging from what I have read, we already appear to know how the year 2021 will unfold. A new normal is coming, and when it is unlocked, we must be ready to make up for lost time, and to take up new opportunities. As we breathe out, politics and economics can settle, as the United States gains a president that wants to do the job, and the United Kingdom trades from outside the European single market for the first time since 1973. With these long-standing conundrums solved for now, and with shops back open, the indignant heat of social media may simmer down. Why make your own New Year’s resolutions when the whole world is changing?

This year could be the latest chapter of renaissance and progress. Especially after a year blighted by disease, it is natural to embrace this hope - it is the grand narrative we all share. But for someone that has written as much as I have about postmodernism – the broad artistic social and philosophical movement that, among a large number of things, is meant to be distrustful of grand narratives – why am I thinking about the coming year in this way?

Nothing says that someone who deals in scepticism and irony can’t also be an optimist. It pays to have all your discursive tools to hand, and have a full understanding of them, but giving yourself time off from work is also nice. You can try to live your life via philosophical concepts of criticism made to use in cultural and textual analysis – Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” concept is not intended to help you read a book written by someone whose views you don’t like, unless you plan to judge only the text, and nothing else.

However, I plan to spend some time looking further into the concepts of postmodernism, in something I will be calling “Postmodernism 2021.” I have been looking into this rabbit hole for close to twenty years, with time for breaks. There is something attractive to deconstructing ideas to find new connections, or to play with different ideas and smash them together, whether that is by looking at a skyscraper that was built to resemble a grandfather clock, new music that evokes nostalgia for the 1980s, or blending genres together in a science fiction novel.

As I understand it, we are largely supposed to have moved on from postmodernity into a sort of modernity powered by the internet. But when you have people like Jordan Peterson, talking about “postmodern neo-Marxists,” and the UK Government’s Minister of Equalities, Liz Truss, blaming postmodernist thought for dominating debates on equality, in a speech made in December 2020, it is clear that postmodernism, or at least the concepts that exist at one end of a movement that has influenced art, is still very vital.

The most egregious part of Truss’s speech, later removed from the Government’s online record of it, having been placed under the title “The Failed Ideas of the Left,” read: “These ideas have their roots in post-modernist philosophy — pioneered by [Michel] Foucault — that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours. In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view — truth and morality are all relative.” Foucault’s 1966 book “The Order to Things” looked at how truth is constructed, and how this has differed through history, but that does not mean the same as “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

With May 2021 marking five years of Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers, I will use the time until then to take stock of what postmodernism means to me, what it means to how I see the world, and how a movement most relevant in the 1980s and 90s continues to be so today.

As I work out where to start, I shall provide links to when I first talked about postmodernism and postmodernity back in January 2017 [link], my first touch upon its being used to blame for “alternative facts” [link], a look at the key concept of nostalgia [link], the fact that poststructuralism means you can’t say what you like [link], my trying to explain the concept of hauntology [link], and my walk around Manchester’s Trafford Centre, a shopping mall engaged entirely in postmodern architecture [link].

I'M SO TIRED, MY MIND IS ON THE BLINK [275]

Autopsies of 2020 were complete long before the year’s end. Only war could have made it worse, then I remembered it began with the United States and Iran on the verge of open conflict, after a drone strike killed an Iranian general.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 has been detrimental to the extent the United Nations Development Programme, on Tuesday 15^th December, said it threatened human progress, publishing a report detailing how a global lurch from one crisis to the next could reverse gains in health, education and social freedoms. There is nowhere left for us to go but upwards.

The signs are good. The United States will soon have a President who favours diplomacy over disruption, and while on its way out of the European Union, the United Kingdom has somehow managed to make a deal with the union on trade that was achieved using negotiation and compromise – the protectionism, nationalism and sovereignty ingrained in politics in the last few years has made the announcement of the Brexit deal more of a surprise than it really should have been.

The lesson I learnt from 2020 is that the truth is bigger than you are. This has come from the overwhelming number of times that opinions have had to change in the world due to uncovered, emerging and overriding opinion. You cannot ignore coronavirus, you cannot dispel climate change, and you cannot decide that evidence for either doesn’t exist just because you don’t personally believe it, or that a conspiracy theory puts those facts in a more acceptable order. You cannot wish away disease and death. (I am doing my best not to mention Donald Trump, but after all the rubbish he talked about coronavirus, I was just waiting for him  to contract it himself, and he did.)

In an already notorious speech given by Liz Truss, Minister for Women and Equalities on Thursday 17^th December, she mischaracterised postmodernist philosophy as having led, in the 1980s, to Leeds City Council prioritising equality legislation in schools over learning to read and write: “These ideas have their roots in post-modernist philosophy – pioneered by [Michel] Foucault – that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours. In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view – truth and morality are all relative.”

Did Liz Truss intend to take what sounded like the truth, and present it as fact?

I describe myself is a postmodernist, because ideas about “grand narratives,” deconstruction and relativism prove useful in my processes for understanding the world, especially when it comes to writing about different subjects, but I don’t get out of bed in the morning because I feel like it. If I don’t do it, I won’t achieve anything, and I know this to be objectively true, even if saying this makes it sound like I had given something so obvious even a moment’s thought. My understanding of coronavirus has been shaped by the Government’s representation of scientific evidence, and I have taken their word on it because the information provided – the evidence - has proven to be reliable enough to prevent death. I have objectively chosen to live. No-one chooses to live on edge either.

I am tired of 2020 as you are. See you in 2021.

COMMAND ME TO BE WELL [181]

If you are constantly told you have something wrong with you, you will start to believe it. No-one has enough self-preservation to prevent such an insidious thought from infesting their mind. Treatment for mental health is so important, and a stiff upper lip is only a sticking plaster.

This is why the idea of a Pride Month every June has become so important. People who were given no place in society, who were imprisoned if they did not live in darkness, have the right to celebrate their lives with primary colours, and remember those unable to join in.

I don’t care if businesses use rainbows in Pride Month to get the LGBTQ community to spend their money – if they didn’t think they were valid as human beings, then why appeal to them as consumers? It has become good business sense. Having said that, why take the banners down come July 1^st – they should put their mouth where their money is.

This Pride Month, on Monday 10^th June the Roman Catholic church waded unannounced into the festivities with a tract titled, “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.” Apart from proving that the secret of comedy really is timing, the document, from the Congregation for Catholic Education, mainly deals with how to approach the subject of gender identity in education, but starts by decrying gender theory,  and questions the intentions of transgender people to the point of implying they don’t really exist – it turns out they are misguided, and are just being “provocative.”

It should be clear that what I am going to do is let the text speak for itself. I was supposed to have done this a week ago, but I stopped myself. I wanted to choose my words carefully, even if the tract I was writing about did not. I am not going to denigrate someone’s beliefs, especially if they are held and practised sincerely, but if it turns out I don’t exist because of those beliefs, I have a right to reply, even if only to repeat those words back to where they came from.

It is hardly controversial for the Catholic church to state this – anything that threatens the traditional family unit, and the order of creation, was always going to get short shrift from them. In fact, the 19^thparagraph of the tract – for reference, all the paragraphs were numbered – talks about how:

“...the view of both sexuality identity and the family become subject to the same ‘liquidity’ and ‘fluidity’ that characterize other aspects of post-modern culture, often founded on nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants, or momentary desires provoked by emotional impulses and the will of the individual, as opposed to anything based on the truths of existence.”

I didn’t know that King Henry VIII wanting a divorce meant the Church of England was founded in 1534 on postmodern principles.

Most reporting of the tract in the following week were based on this passage, while paragraph number 25, which mentioned the word “provocative,” in reference to the “display” of trans non-binary or intersex identities “against so-called ‘traditional frameworks’”:

“Similar theories aim to annihilate the concept of ‘nature’, (that is, everything we have been given as a pre-existing foundation of our being and action in the world), while at the same time implicitly reaffirming its existence.”

I thought more would have been made of when paragraphs 17  and 18 start talking about “the values of femininity,” how women have “a unique understanding of reality,” possessing “a capacity to endure adversity and ‘to keep life going even in extreme situations,’” while their “’capacity for the other’ favours a more realistic and mature reading of evolving situations, so that ‘a sense and a respect for what is concrete develop[s] in her, opposed to abstractions which are so often fatal for the existence of individuals and society,” such as when they are being patronised.

It has been nearly two weeks since the Catholic church released their document on gender identity,  and the initial furore over its publishing died down pretty quickly – it didn’t say anything that they weren’t expected to say, and its existence as a technical document on how to approach the subject in education is actually rather sound – paragraph 49 states that “Catholic educators need to be sufficiently prepared regarding the intricacies of the various questions that gender theory brings up,” while being fully informed about current and proposed legislation, consult with people who are qualified in the area, and for there to be a balanced dialogue on the subject.

If I was to see a balanced debate on transgender rights, I would be amazed. Yells of transphobia, of stifling debate and free speech, and any calls for increased rights for transgender people becoming an attack on women’s spaces, as if there weren’t already rules to deal with that, permeate social media. I really shouldn’t need to look at this, but it serves to know what you are up against, especially from those who feel they need to let you know what is going on their heads.

All I know is, as a transgender woman, or as a woman, or as Leigh Spence, my existence is not in question, thank you very much.

MY FEET HAVE COME LOOSE FROM THEIR MOORINGS [138]

Words, don’t fail me now.

My intention here is to confirm that poststructuralism doesn’t mean you can say what you like. That is an easy thing to type.

To say I have spent hours trying to work out how to describe “poststructuralism” really does not describe how exasperating the whole experience has been. It really should be so easy, but trying to condense an entire school of thought into a small space risks missing the point of it entirely. Expect only bullet points here, but enough to suggest further reading.

The easiest analogy that has come to mind is “fake news.” This phrase feeds into the so-called “postmodern” landscape of truth and facts not counting for anything anymore, or at least that is how I have seen “postmodern” used in this loose way: are they talking about everything that reacted to modernism, good or bad, from philosophy to art, or is it just the bits that relate to your hatred of a particular term? From there, is “fake news” meant to mean, “news that is deliberately incorrect,” or “news I don’t like”? Once you hear Don Backslide saying this is why he “invented” the word “fake” in a news interview, inspiring incredulity, there becomes a disconnect in the use of language.

This is the problem I have with trying to give a short answer to “poststructuralism,” about whether it is a reaction to structuralist thought, or a number of different things that have been grouped together by topic or time period. Structuralism is usually boiled down to the study of how language interconnects: the definition of a word depends on the definition of other words, building an ever-growing web, finding that which is universal.

Therefore, poststructuralism must take that and break it, to find out what is different, and that difference comes from different language systems, i.e. the different systems that allow us to access information, be they words, images or symbols. Nothing is as transparent as just simply meaning what they say, because a lot of agreement is needed for that to be the case.

This is where I can recommend a list of French writers, as poststructuralism is also known as the “French school”: you have Roland Barthes on the “death of the author,” as the use of “I” shifts from reader to reader; you have Claude Lévi-Strauss looking at anthropology and custom; Michel Foucault, looking at reason, truth and knowledge, and the power that has control over what those mean; Jacques Derrida, deconstructing meaning, seeing how the “other” invades the notion of the “self,” of objectivity always being subject to something; and Jean-François Lyotard’s incredulity to “grand narratives” that explain everything about the world, used as a way of defining postmodernism.

The reason you cannot say what you like is because, at some basic level, you have to agree on some level of understanding before you can say anything to anyone ever again. At least, that is my understanding of it: I have been looking at postmodern and poststructuralist theory on and off for fifteen years now, and I find it as brilliantly frustrating as ever – just don’t live your life by it, or expect everyone else to follow.

FOR WHAT I’VE HAD IS WHAT I’LL NEVER GET [104]

It turns out that, when I was writing about dead shopping malls last week, and about vaporwave music before that, I actually wanted to talk about nostalgia, so I shall. Nostalgia formed the critical base for both subjects, and once I ended a thousand-word discussion on shopping malls by saying I wasn’t sure what lessons to take from them, it wouldn’t be long before someone said it would be nice to read a follow-up as my thoughts about them develop.

That person was my sister Layla, of Richee & Layla at His and Hers Reviews, and they made a podcast (sadly no longer available) reviewing Steven Spielberg’s latest film, an adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel “Ready Player One.” The film’s story is built around OASIS, a virtual reality environment in which people learn, work and play. This world is constructed out of all the popular culture artefacts you can imagine, and the quest taken in the film is based on finding “Easter eggs” hidden by the world’s creator, inviting people to “like” what he likes.

In the podcast, Layla said that “Ready Player One” will live beyond its time in the cinema because the idea of nostalgia is so big. This is not just historic nostalgia for the 1980s – “Back to the Future,” “The Shining,” Atari computer games, “Doom” and so on – but also the vicarious nostalgia of longing for the past, by living through the past of someone else. In “Ready Player One,” characters are being told that something is nostalgic, and that you must like it because it is nostalgic, “and if you are not nostalgic for it, you are a fucking monster” - my sister also brought up the notion of “ruining your childhood,” if the object of nostalgia is not how you personally remembered it.

Nostalgia used to be a diagnosable condition, like depression: it was first outlined by Johannes Hofer in 1688, referring to the state of Swiss mercenaries located in less mountainous areas, in France and Italy, than where they came from, and was known as “the Swiss disease,” in the same way that syphilis used to be the disease other countries called their enemies. The word “nostalgia” came from Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain,” and was originally translated into English as “homesickness.” Medical studies of nostalgia had stopped in the 1870s, by which point soldiers in the American Civil War were diagnosed with it. Psychological studies, however, are obviously still ongoing.

The nostalgia I believe was awoken in me by listening to the ghostly echoes of vaporwave, and in walking through an empty shopping mall, are evoked by the same type of memories “Ready Player One” wants to create – memories for when music, film, TV, and architecture were done that way, because things were better then. I talked about the safe spaces that shopping malls create, and vaporwave makes new connections by cutting up the music of the 1980s. However, these subjects are using that nostalgia to criticise the end of the consumer society, which created the conditions in which vaporwave and dead malls now exist. If the good times evoked by nostalgia for 1980s music and shopping malls had been real, I would not have vaporwave, I would not have made a video about a dead mall near where I live, and I would not be writing about it here.

I had not known what lesson to take from looking at dead shopping malls, but I realise that the nostalgia evoked by them, and by vaporwave, is for something that may not have existed but more of a vision that did not happen to me – I was six years old when 1990 came around, so the 1980s remains an interest because it is on the edge of what I can remember. Like any good postmodernist, I am looking for what references I can bring forward and cobble together to give meaning to the present day, but when you are looking at what happened within your own lifetime, you will always pick the good times first.

THERE’S A MAGICAL PLACE, WE’RE ON OUR WAY THERE [103]

Forest Fair Village, Cincinatti, Ohio

It turns out that, when I was writing about vaporwave music a couple of weeks ago, I actually wanted to talk about shopping malls, so I shall.

It has been a torrid time for retail businesses in both the UK and the US, as familiar brands bind us together. I have walked past the Toys R Us store from where thirty years of our family’s toys have come, but I did not have the courage to enter, let alone face the staff that are losing their jobs. My ears were pierced in Claire’s Accessories, and while it has entered into chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US, the UK side may yet file for administration, joining the electronics shop Maplin. Carpetright, fashion chains New Look and Select, and restaurants Jamie’s Italian and Prezzo, have all entered into Company Voluntary Agreements, closing branches to make themselves solvent again, with Prezzo closing its Chimichanga tex-mex chain, one of my favourite restaurants, in its entirety. Then, there are businesses that are doing relatively fine, but still have to adapt – my mother has just helped close the high street department store she worked in for the last eleven-plus years, with its replacement, a food-only store, being based out of town.

Clearly, location is everything, and where we shop is more likely to have an address ending .com, or .co.uk, rather than PO1 1EA. The spaces left behind by this shift have, unexpectedly, become a place for contemplation, as I found out one day.

I have no idea what I viewed on YouTube for “Dead Mall Series,” by American filmmaker Dan Bell, to be recommended to me, but I was transfixed from the first video. Each set-up is similar – a first-person walk around a shopping mall, often built in the 1970s or 80s to redevelop former industrial areas. You see the postmodernist appropriation of natural surroundings – marble courtyards, skylights, palm trees and fountains, all garnish for the air-conditioned racecourse of shop fronts, still identifiable long after the business, and customers, left. The effect is alienating and bizarre - some malls once housed over a hundred stores, and are now down to its last few, variously down to larger “anchor” stores leaving, competition from other malls, the rise of online shopping, and crime and neglect, as mortgages and taxes on the mall are unable to be paid. You see where the malls have changed for the worse – plants removed, fountains turned off, whitewash on the walls, or even fake walls put up to repurpose shops as offices, gyms, or even just to make spaces that may never be filled again.

Randall Park Mall, North Randall Ohio - now demolished

The most extreme example of a “dead mall” known to most people was the Dixie Square Mall, based in Harvey, Illinois, which closed in 1978 after just twelve years, in time for it to be used in a chase scene for the film “The Blues Brothers” (1980). However, it took until 2012 to be demolished, during which time around ten proposals to reuse the space came and went, before crime and vandalism turned it into a derelict ruin. As of 2018, the land is a brownfield site, still waiting to be reused.

In “Dead Mall Series,” and other YouTube-based series like “Ace’s Adventures,” and “Retail Archaeology,” the use of vaporwave music heightened the nostalgia for a mode of living that was dying out, as if this whole capitalism thing wasn’t working out. Going to the mall was once something you could do all day, as restaurants and cinemas often formed part of the same complex. The mall security ensured you had a safe space to hang out, but once fortunes change, there is less reason to keep you there, and less reason for mall owners to keep trying. This is why you see many videos about the same malls appearing, such as for the Forest Fair Village in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania – these are cavernous spaces that are almost abandoned, but can be freely explored, because they remain open, even if the plants have died, the roof leaks, and the lights are  going out.

For me, these grand spaces are fascinating. The postmodern architecture and aesthetics of shopping malls and vaporwave feed off each other, that area of thought and practice is now coloured turquoise, salmon pink and grey for me, matching the floor tiles and fixtures of many American malls. The stillness of walking through a place that is meant to be buzzing recreates that lost energy in yourself – you wonder what had been made of this space, and what could still be done, but the sadness moves from feeling the lost prestige of times past, to the acknowledgement that buildings that lose all purpose will inevitably be demolished.

Malls in the UK are often smaller, and built around the back of existing high streets, so the experience of walking off a busy street into a scene of desolation is very jarring indeed. Last year, I made a video about The Bridge Shopping Centre, a small mall built in Portsmouth in 1989, which backs onto a supermarket. Last year, I made my own video, walking through what had now become a corridor to the supermarket. Since then, two more shops have closed, a pet shop and jewellery store, with barriers preventing you from walking past the pet shop - there is little incentive for anyone to consider opening a store there. A time capsule was buried when the mall opened in 1989, and it may not be too long before it gets dug up.

I am not sure what lessons I am supposed to take from dead shopping malls, except to treat their insides like a desolate art gallery while they still remain. Our lives no longer see malls as leisure in the way we once did - creating your own nostalgic entertainment through them may be their last possible use. Vaporwave quotes the alienating, desolate feeling of a dead shopping mall as much as the malls themselves tried to take cues the outside world, creating a safe, enclosed space. Maybe I am nostalgic for something that was never really there, but wanted to be there, thinking it would always be there. Maybe that is the power of retail, and why I couldn’t step into Toys R Us one last time.

Bargate Shopping Centre,  Southampton, UK - currently being demolished

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD [101]

It is hard to talk about the genre of music known as vaporwave without understanding its intention. A bit like punk, vaporwave subverts the 1980s consumerist society by cutting up the music and images of the decade, and representing it as an ironic form of nostalgia, and yes, I am still talking about music.

The name “vaporwave” comes from two sources – “vaporware” is a term given to computer software that is announced, but never appears, while it also evocates “waves of vapour,” a term from Karl Marx denoting old ideas and conventions being swept away before they can solidify. It is not a bad way of describing a genre that popped up as a meme, on the social media site Tumblr in 2010, but its having lasted longer than the original burst of punk in the 1970s means the nostalgia for the failed promises of a 1980s consumer society clearly speaks a lot to people.

What does vaporwave do? Just as the postmodern practices of sampling, cutting and pasting, and nostalgia came to the fore in the 1980s, vaporwave takes what that decade gave us and cuts it up again, finding more connections. Most often, a passage in a song is slowed down and looped, partially for the disorientating and alienating effect, but also to focus on particular lyrics or melodies. A major example of this is the song “Computing of Lisa Frank 420 / / Contemporary,” by Macintosh Plus (aka Vektroid, both aliases of the DJ Ramona Xavier) – its original title is in Japanese, a country also borrowed for vaporwave iconography – by cutting up a 1984 Diana Ross album track, “It’s Your Move,” a slick three-minute song becomes a seven-minute brooding dirge, highlighting the refrain of “it’s all in your head.” It could be said to be post-music too, as little or no original music is composed for vaporwave, unless you are trying to recreate the effect by writing an original piece.

For the record, the albums to listen for the beginning of vaporwave are “Eccojams Vol.1” by Chuck Person, the cover of which cuts up the cover for the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis game “Ecco the Dolphin”; “Far Side Virtual” by James Ferraro; and Macintosh Plus’s “Floral Shoppe,” which has an album cover that sums up the visual aesthetics – sorry, I mean A E S T H E T I C S – of vaporwave: a playful mix of pastel and fluorescent colours, cityscapes, patterns, along  with Roman busts and columns. For good results, the art should look like it was slightly unplanned, resulting from a glitch, found and revered, just like the music.

For many, this type of experiment makes a hard listen without context, and I first came across the genre through its use in series on YouTube like Dead Mall Series, Ace’s Adventures and Retail Archaeology, which have all used vaporwave as backdrops to video tours of deserted American shopping malls, where the shift to shopping online left the shopping meccas of the 1980s and 1990s to become vacant, deserted, and abandoned. With the accompanying vaporwave soundtrack sounding like it may be playing in the mall during the filming – indeed, background music from the Muzak Corporation is also used for vaporwave tracks – it feels like the utopian safe space of the shopping mall, and the aspirational imagery in advertising, were false promises, but that could just be the Marxist side of it.

Where does all of this effort go? For many, vaporwave will feel like a deliberate joke, an attempt to create something that purports to have depth, when it has none. But like any solid postmodern work, all the meaning is on the surface, and that meaning, at least to me, is to make something of the fractured world the 1980s has left us, and rejoice in it.

AND WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE KNOWING [90]

With 2018 now under way, I knew it wouldn’t take too long for someone to say something that makes you want to spit, and it came from, right now, the most likely place: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC.

The news sensation of the moment was Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” a tell-all book whose publication was brought forward once people interviewed for the book it began denying what they were reported as saying, especially about the mental health of self-proclaimed “stable genius” Donald Trump. At a press conference, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, came out with something that made my eyes glass over:

“We’re certainly happy for people who have different opinions, but there’s a difference between different opinions and different facts… And people are entitled to an opinion, but they’re not entitled to their own facts. And we have a problem with people putting out misleading information. Those are very different things.”

…but pieces of information proved to be true are called “facts.” I don’t know if Sanders misspoke, or the meanings of “facts” and “information” were conflated, but she had said something similar before: in October 2017, responding to Senator Bob Corker’s criticisms of the White House, she said he “…is certainly entitled to his own opinion, but he’s not entitled to his own facts.”

What may be a lesson in the dangers of creating your own catchphrases is more about the idea of narratives, and having control of them. Some time ago, I had looked at the postmodernist resistance to “grand narratives,” where a more sceptical, or even mistrusting stance is used to scrutinise who is coming up with the stories that explain everything to us, why they are doing so, why they have chosen those particular facts, and why they left others out.

At the time, I said that while critics of postmodernism take this as meaning people can say what they like, because there can only be interpretations of the truth, a greater understanding of the truth can still be arrived at through the full scrutiny of, well, the facts. At the same time, postmodernism appeared, mostly from the 1970s, as a reaction to the driving force of modernism – there is no need to progress further because we are already where we want to be, able to look across everything and make new connections, instead of seeking to replace things.

Put simply, the events described in the “Fire and Fury” book, and the White House reaction to its contents, are drawing on the same facts. Both sides are now engaged in proving what they are saying is the truth, and we must also make our own judgements based on what both sides say. Rejecting each side out of loyalty, or on knowledge of previous behaviour, is not appropriate either. So long as neither side descends into the depths of conspiracy theory, and we do get some sort of definitive answer after all our effort, we should all be fine.

GIVE US TIME TO WORK IT OUT [37]

I am lucky that my time studying for a degree was before the internet became the place where everybody, and everything, lives. Researching for essays between 2001 and 2004, I had to physically go and look for information, in bookshops and libraries, making copious notes and photocopies, and thinking about what it all means – I am in my thirties, making myself sound old. 

It is not enough knowing where you can go, it’s making sense of what you find. I am still doing that with the world now, let alone all those years ago, and that is how it should be – anyone who thinks they have it all worked out should be checked to see if they are already dead.

What stuck with me since is how the world was interpreted, in the latter half of the last century, as a time of “postmodernity.” Many thinkers, most of them French - Jean-François Lyotard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean Beaudrillard, Walter Truett Anderson, and so on - made their own observations, that have coalesced into a theory, borne out by movements in art and architecture at the time.

I can only be brief when describing what it all means here, because the subject is that big, and my decade-plus-old notes are that numerous. If the following makes you want to look further into the subject, my job is done.

As I understand it, postmodernity reacts against the notion of modernity, which embodied constant change, in the pursuit of progress. However, if everything is constantly changing, there is no need for the idea of progress – we are already there. We will still have new ideas, and new developments, but instead of existing to replace and overcome what came before, they now join the old ideas, bumping the out-there with the outdated, high culture and low culture, in a giant smorgasbord of, well, everything.

Everything bubbles to the surface, and what a surface to pick from. Let’s make a building that looks like a grandfather clock, like the AT&T Building in New York, now owned by Sony. Instead of straight lines and blank walls, let’s add old-style adornments, but make our own versions of them, like the eggcups on top of the former TV-am building in London, made for a breakfast TV company. Let’s collide a dystopian city landscape with 1940s film noir, as in the film “Blade Runner”. Let’s contort the human body, playing with conventions of gender, as Grace Jones, Klaus Nomi and David Bowie did. Let’s paint the Coca-Cola logo on a Han dynasty vase, making it more worthy, and worth more, as Ai Weiwei did.

In this small number of examples, there is a deliberate, ironic mixing of styles – everybody knew what they were doing, and were not just mashing things up in the hope of a nice effect. To achieve this ability of feeling that there are no rules, there is an inherent scepticism, or mistrust, of the existing through lines of history that explain all about everything to everyone, referred to as “grand narratives.” Like looking up quotations for an essay, you have to think about who came up with these narratives, why they did, and the choices they made about what to talk about, and what to leave out.

Critics of postmodernism often take this to mean there is no such thing as the truth, only interpretations, and neither does it mean you are incapable of finding the truth: if it was, you could either say whatever you liked, or nothing at all. If you can put aside the usual attempts to find a rational, objective, absolute truth, and think about how truth and knowledge are constructed out of all the discussions and interpretations that led to it, then you will understand it more than just having it handed to you on a plate.

It is generally agreed that postmodernism was no longer the prevailing view of the world by the time I learned of it, and this is at the expense of progress – when technology starts becoming indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke already saw in his lifetime, we are looking at how the world can become better than it already is. Perhaps, this is out of a need to destroy what makes it bad, whether it be a never-ending war against terrorism in all its forms, or mindlessly-written death threats on Twitter from people that can operate a computer, but don’t know how to boil an egg, even if they know where to look it up.

I will continue looking at postmodernism, seeing what more I can understand from it, but If everyone needs to look up right now, I am quite happy to continue looking across, making sense of where we stand.