Cassandra Voices

Author: benpantrey

  • Fear, Class, and Universal Basic Income

    On the April 13 2024, a man stabbed several people in a shopping centre in Sydney. The morning after, I was walking past the Four Courts in Dublin, when a man approached me making a stabbing motion in the air. I fixed my eyes on him as my heart sped up, but it stopped as quickly as it started. Just a gesture of three or four stabs. I saw there was nothing in his hands, but kept my distance as he passed. He didn’t make eye contact or acknowledge me.

    The experience threw me off kilter. For a second I doubted what I’d seen. Why would someone do that? To scare people? But he didn’t even seem to notice me. Was he on the phone, and accompanying his words with thoughtless gestures, inconsiderate of how it might affect passers by? Or was he lost in his thoughts, unaware of the world, and acting out some inner drama? Safe to say, I looked over my shoulder a few times as I walked on.

    The problem of violence, such as the Sydney stabbing, or the shocking attack on Dublin’s Parnell Square last year, involves many factors: trauma, mental illness, addiction, social isolation, inequality… We could pull on any thread and find enough material to make a case for its importance in contributing to such acts.

    For the mainstream media and politicians, however, explanations are simple. These people are “thugs“, “hoodlums“, “scumbags“. Anyone questioning the role society plays may be accused of giving criminals a free pass, and not holding them accountable for their actions.

    After violent attacks like the ones mentioned, the media is normally quick to assure people that the motivation was not “terrorism”. The distinction seems to be this: terrorism is motivated by an ideology, a political position. A terrorist act has meaning. But these other types of attacks, according to the mainstream, have no meaning. The attacker was “schizophrenic”, homeless, jobless. Therefore, the violence has no sense to it. It is merely an outburst of animal savagery into the pure, clean, bright and ordered streets. The blame does not lie in us, but in them – those who cannot raise themselves up high enough to walk among us in our enlightened ways.

    Violence is like a volcanic eruption. It comes from the lower, subterranean levels of the social body. And we happily ignore the tectonic pressures that are pressing down on those in the depths.

    Dublin Riots.

    Within and Without

    How long before supermarkets are only accessible to those who can prove their bourgeois status?

    “QR codes at the ready, please.”

    Matthew struggled to hold his phone steady as the guard scanned the QR.

    “Let us see here…” said the guard, reviewing Matthew’s data. “An annual income of sixty thousand a year… Very good sir, go right ahead.”

    Minister for Justice McEntee’s vision for the future of public safety paves the way admirably for such a future, with her proposals including mass surveillance with Garda body cameras, CCTV, EU-wide biometric databases, and Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). To quote from Deleuze’s prescient ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’:

    Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position — licit or illicit — and effects a universal modulation.

    Our smartphones would be easily integrated into such a system. We could implement it in an afternoon. Of course, some people will complain of the undemocratic aesthetic of such a system, but then when they read the news reports about stabbings, and think of the children, they will put aside their misgivings and gladly walk through the sliding doors with the rest of us. Most of us conformed to a similar QR code system during the pandemic in the name of the public good.

    Instead of radical change, society is on track for a compromise. Instead of asking ourselves why our society causes so much illness, loneliness and violence, we are resolving to create stronger walls between us.

    Europe is already a fortress, a walled garden in the memorable words of Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief. Our world is divided into the lucky few within, and the unlucky masses without. This dichotomy reaches its most absurd form in Gaza, where enemies at Israel’s gate are not outside, but themselves walled in, a city under siege, enclosed by blockades and checkpoint borders, barraged by missiles.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    Golden Tickets

    Western society dangles two tickets into the middle class before the labour force: inheritance and hard work. For many people, however, even the second option is becoming unfeasible. The ladder is being pulled up, and the majority of young people now worry they are going to be left behind.

    Let us step past, however, the despair of the downwardly-mobile middle class, of which much has been already written. What are we to do with those who cannot meet the demands of middle class careerism? If you can’t manage your addictive behaviours (after all, we are all addicts, in one way or another), and you can’t navigate the world of work, what happens to you?

    Those who cannot work are directed to a world of rules, appointments, documents, waiting rooms, lines, interviews, and regular check-ins.

    But what if you don’t have a fixed address? And what if you don’t have a mobile phone? Or what if you can’t keep track of all these requirements?

    If you fail to navigate the Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy, then you have the final frontier; a Diogenes-like existence at street corners, hostels, and cardboard windbreaks. Soup outside the GPO. Spare change. Random assaults by drunken louts who take middle-class disdain for you as permission to inflict pain.

    Stockbrokers, New York, 1966 from United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.03199.

    A Successful Civilisation

    Historically speaking, our civilisation has arrived at a point of absurd wealth. Through industry, the machine, the market, automation, and the outsourcing of backbreaking work to countries with conveniently lax labour laws, we have access to luxuries unimaginable to a mediaeval king. According to the British Fashion Council, we have enough clothes to dress the world for the next six generations. According to the UN, we can feed everybody on the planet. Why then, do we insist on bestowing the fruits of collective human achievement only to those who pass the test of ‘functioning’ in an insane society?

    This hyper complex informational administrative “service” economy is historically unprecedented. And yet we expect everybody to pick up the skills necessary to thrive in it, or we punish them brutally and unsympathetically. We see it as a bare minimum achievement to survive in this strange environment and punish those who can’t live like us with alienation, hunger, and hardship.

    In 2013, eight million 5-centime coins (one per inhabitant) were dumped on the Bundesplatz in Bern to support the 2016 Swiss referendum for a basic income (which was rejected 77%–23%).

    The Case for Universal Basic Income

    I am a proponent of Universal Basic Income (UBI). The idea is simple: give everybody enough money for clothes, food and shelter. The income is different from the dole. Everybody gets it, even if they don’t need it. There’s no need to endure intrusive bureaucratic nosing into how you spend your time in order to qualify for it.

    Most of us dismiss UBI out of hand. But why? Do we fear that a life of safety, satiety and comfort will make us lazy, debased, selfish creatures? It appears to me our current system does a fine enough job at that. If anything, UBI would do the opposite. It would improve morality, because it’s easy to be generous and patient when you are well-fed and comfortable.

    But for all you cynics, to whom I sympathise, let’s put aside the appeal to morality and ask this: Do you really think a basic lifestyle of security and comfort would be enough for most people? I think many people would work simply so they can show off their wealth to others, without needing to be incentivised by fear of ruin. As social animals, our need for status is deeply felt. People will work to signal their vigour, or simply as a way to pass the time and give their life a sense of purpose and meaning.

    And what about jobs that nobody would do for free? At the moment, these are the lowest paying jobs in our economy. We expect the people with the fewest opportunities to resort to them – essentially a kind of slavery. In a better society, the most unpleasant jobs, like cleaning the toilets, would be the best paid. Or maybe we can just build some robots to do that, rather than building robots to make music and art – you know, the stuff that humans actually like doing.

    Anyway, what’s the big deal if people become idle? Let them go for it. Idleness is certainly less harmful than most of the activity that goes on in our civilisation, and earns applause, billions of euros, and occasionally Nobel Peace Prizes.

    Fin Divilly – Songwriter and Performer by Daniele Idini.

    Not just for Artists

    UBI was trialed in Ireland, in a flawed manner, via the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme, which closed in 2022. As the name suggests, a basic income was extended to artists alone. To me, this runs contrary to the most important part of Universal Basic Income: its universality. You shouldn’t need to prove that you are already providing a service to society in order to qualify for it. That’s putting the cart before the horse. UBI is meant to free up people so they can begin to do more valuable things with their time, which should be valuable to society too.

    By granting it only to a certain category of people, it implied that the income was a conditional grant, rather than an unconditional gift. It came across as a transparent deal: we’ll give you money, but we want you to create commodities in return. Rather than challenge the logic of capitalism, opening the way for a new kind of society, it reinforced the existing system.

    I understand that artists were impacted badly by the pandemic, but so were homemakers and carers – are they contributing less to society than professional artists? UBI should be a no-strings-attached gift given in good faith to everybody, not a conditional grant for a cohort of well-respected creatives.

    The flawed thinking behind the BIA scheme was so effective at poisoning the well, and confusing people about the potential of UBI, that it almost feels intentional. A better trial would involve a completely fair lottery, with the name of everyone in the country in the pot. That way, we could see the impact of receiving a UBI on the lives of people from a cross section of Irish society, and all types of socioeconomic backgrounds.

    A lot of people today are stuck doing work they know is meaningless, simply because it pays the bills. The technical term for such an employment, as coined by the late David Graeber, is a “bullshit job”. Far from being a ticket to freedom, bullshit jobs induce a feeling of guilt, low self-worth, and absurdity. Most of us have ideas of what we would like to do if we had more time, if we weren’t constrained by the necessities of earning money for rent, food, and utilities. Ultimately, we are kept in place by a sensation of insecurity. Imagine what we could do if our lives weren’t based on fear.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Michel Houllebecq and the End of History

    Inspired by Michel Houllebecq’s novel Atomised (1998), Ben Pantrey considers the endurance of the Christian idea of the apocalypse in contemporary debates. Note: This article contains plot spoilers for Atomised!

    Atomic Particles 

    Last week, I was in the magazine office, where I picked up a copy of Michel Houllebecq’s book Interventions 2020, which is a collection of short essays. I was instantly struck by the humour, the choice of topics, and the easy-to-read-but-thoughtful analysis of contemporary society. I was shocked.

    “I thought Houllebecq’s books were all about whining about women and immigrants.” I said to the magazine editor.

    “No, of course not. He’s a great writer.” he replied.

    A few days later, I started reading Atomised.

    That book is also extremely readable. In fact it’s the most engaging book I’ve read by a living author. His description of modern life, and the meaningless existence elevated to an ideal in our society, is right on point. The situations he depicts are funny, grotesque, or just plain depressing, but he never wallows. There is a good balance between ideas and plot.

    Miniatur Wunderland.

    Miniatur Wunderland

    More than anything, I was struck by how Houellebeca’s vision matched an idea that had been pressing upon me for some time. In January 2020, I visited Hamburg, and went to an exhibition called the ‘Miniatur Wunderland’.

    It was a building with floor upon floor of model railways in different settings: famous cities, woodlands, desserts, mountains and so on. A miniature model of Hamburg itself was there, with its red light street, the Reeperbahn, where model women posed in red-lit windows, and model men with beer bellies gathered.

    Although constructed from wood, acrylic, steel and plaster, this world was a moving world. Trains and trams shuttled to and fro, aeroplanes took off, and ambulances raced through intersections with their blue lights flashing. I was amazed by the amount of detail that went into this work. They were like Brueghel paintings, with little stories and humorous incidents everywhere you looked: a man falling off a ladder; a love affair; a protest.

    It didn’t happen immediately, but as the years passed, the vision of life suggested by the Miniatur Wunderland wormed its way into my thinking. Standing in the street, I would start wondering how it would look if I was staring down from the sky. How would I perceive the world if I had nothing at stake? If all I was bringing to bear on it was my own curiosity?

    The downside of comparing the world to a model is that it makes everything seem flat and mechanistic. It denies the one real truth of life – subjectivity – and puts in its place a deterministic universe, full of cause-and-effect situations and atoms endlessly shuttling to and fro. There is no space for inner truth, no space for change. Only matter in a void. A big round ball of Being.

    But, since the age of Lucretius this has been exactly the view underpinning the development of scientific thought, and worked out in capitalist economics. Atomistic, materialistic, deterministic. One apple is equivalent to another. Through the medium of money, the variety and uniqueness of physical reality is squashed into a flat virtuality.

    One day Banzan was walking through a market. He overheard a customer say to the butcher, “Give me the best piece of meat you have.” “Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find any piece of meat that is not the best.” At these words, Banzan was enlightened. (Zen Koan)

    The notion of a commodity with a fixed price (your used copy of a book is worth the same as another person’s used copy of a book in the same condition) ignores the sentimental value of an object.

    ‘Sentimental value’, by which we deem everything that belongs to the domain of actual lived and meaningful experience, is excluded from the reckonings of the marketplace. All the worse, then, that our entire society has become a marketplace, where individuals compete for status: monetary, cultural and sexual. It is this last arena that most fascinates Houellebecq.

    Miniatur Wunderland.

    Love is an anomaly…

    In Atomised, Houellebecq satirises the dominant ideological model of society, exposing it as spiritually barren, dominated by selfishness, exploitation and ruthless competition in every sphere of life. Love is an anomaly, and quickly snuffed out in a cold world.

    The novel loosely follows the story of two brothers: Michel and Bruno. Their parents are divorced, and they grew up with very different childhoods.

    Michel was fascinated by the natural world, and in his adolescence met by chance with a beautiful girl who loved him in an almost spiritual way, but was met by coldness on his side.

    Bruno, meanwhile, was bullied mercilessly, had no success with girls, and cared more for literature.

    In their adult life, their paths diverge widely. Michel has no desire for life, he drifts onwards, pulled only by his own curiosity to understand the world scientifically. He ignores romantic opportunities, and eventually commits suicide after putting his scientific insights down on paper.

    Bruno, meanwhile, is a sex addict. He pursues sex relentlessly, seeking a validation that no experience can ever provide. No matter the sexual pleasure, or how many orgies he participates in or taboos he breaks, he cannot develop a sense of wholeness. He is always frustrated. This frustration is expressed in his misogynistic and racist articles that nobody wants to publish.

    There isn’t a plot, per se. The main interest lies in the various hijinks Bruno gets up to, and in the bits of social commentary Houellebecq the narrator includes along the way. When describing the protagonists’ father attending school, for examples, the narrator says:

    “Martin’s teacher was keenly aware that there was more to his job than spoon-feeding elementary facts and figures to every untrained citizen. His task was to seek out the qualities that allowed a child to join the elite…” (p. 18)

    Here, Houellebecq is able to bring social critique into his narrative quite effectively, posing provocative interpretations of the role of schooling to the reader. In general, novels act as great mediums for this. The all-knowing tone typical of a novel’s narration, and the fact that they are consumed in private, allows for a direct, and didactic engagement with the minds of readers. The length allows the author to present a totalising view of life all in one go, unlike an article that can only sketch at a perspective.

    Miniatur Wunderland.

    New Age Society

    The most damning portrayal of contemporary society arrives in a part of the novel where Bruno attends a festival-cum-self-help-weekend. Houellebecq’s description of the activities at this event could be seen as a a damning assessment of New Age Society as a whole:

    “All around him human beings were living, breathing, striving for pleasure or trying to develop their personal potential. On every floor, human beings were improving, or trying to improve, their social, sexual or professional skills or find their place within the cosmos.” (p. 100)

    Obviously, Houellebecq is not impressed.

    The prime example of Houllebecq’s critique of this self-help 60s-influenced culture is in Michel and Bruno’s mother, who abandons her children in favour of an endless quest of self-discovery and spiritual development.

    Atomised is a bitter and satirical portrait of the modern world where only isolated instances of illogical love redeem a landscape that is otherwise cold, selfish, brutal and crude. Death haunts every moment, with the decaying of our bodies, the shocking cruelties of fate, and our obsession with sex: the one means of delaying the extinction of the species.

    It’s definitely a cynical point of view that Houellebecq promotes, but it’s hard to argue against, and really isn’t so different to that expressed in such popular fiction as The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008). Here, too, society is depicted as a ruthless arena of competition. A zero-sum game where those in the lower rungs of society desperately vie to join the elite in a viciously enforced hierarchy.

    Miniatur Wunderland.

    Sci-fi Twist

    The final pages of Atomised turns the book on its head, adding an unexpected sci-fi twist. Michel, who has spent his life devoid of romance, devises a way to allow humans to propagate without the need for sex.

    It will all be done in a lab from now on, as with Dolly the sheep, and this lab-based reproduction will allow for genetic modification to create healthier humans that won’t develop crippling conditions like cancer, dementia, cystic fibrosis etc.

    In hindsight, our age of sexual competition, desperate consumerism, and widespread anxiety and paranoia seem rather laughable and superficial. Everything will be settled in peace by a race of sexless, immortal post-humans.

    What do we make of the idea that we are at the cusp of a vast historical shift? The start of a new Millennium, paired with vast strides in technological innovation, certainly put this idea in many people’s minds. This apocalyptic notion manifested first as a fear of the Y2K bug – that computers worldwide would crash at the start of the new Millennium due to dating difficulties, wreaking havoc in the world of finance, medicine and transport.

    Next, there was murmuring over the date 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, after the Western calendar had ceased to be a problem. This, of course, passed without a hitch. Now we project our apocalyptic fears onto the climate, or on advancements in AI.

    Terence McKenna introduced the doomsday date of 2012 into mass culture. He was vague about what exactly would happen, but believed it would be something new and unexpected. His listeners, high on the drug of Christianity, took this to mean apocalypse.

    Shows like Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirror’ explore the idea of human minds being uploaded into virtual reality when our bodies expire, where we can live in an Eden of our own construction. Is this what Christians meant when they thought of history as a long journey starting and ending in paradise?

    Michel Houellebecq in 2008.

    Edenic State

    The paradisal state of Eden is that of ignorance: paradise was lost once humanity became self-conscious. In our hedonistic pursuits, I wonder, do we strive for that same unselfconsciousness we have lost?

    It is clear that we see our faculty of reason as something of a curse, even if it does bring us closer to the state of angels. Gnostics lament that nature didn’t bring us one step closer: let us keep our psyche, but free ourselves from the physical body. Let us be like angels!

    With this context, we see how Western science has really been a gnostic dream, with the destruction of physical reality (ecological collapse) and the ascension to pure spirit (cyberspace) its logical goal. We haven’t reached this impasse by accident, but by design.

    Only by recognising and consciously rejecting the gnostic message can we take control of our situation. That involves acceptance of the body, and a rebellion against the tyranny of the mind.

    Am I calling for a plunge into the irrational? After the horrors of the twentieth century, Western man has an understandable fear of the irrational. But remember it was distorted Reason that led to the horrors propagated under Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.

    No ‘primitive’ society could have arranged the Holocaust. No, this horror was the dark face of civilisation and a perverse ‘rationality‘. The ‘greater good’: the cold inhumanity of reason. This is what comes of rejecting emotion and feeling, of being out of touch with the messages of the body, our one tangible link with Nature.

    Although we call ourselves a secular society, Christianity still lurks in the shadows of our thinking. Take, for instance, the apocalyptic tone that inevitably attends discussions around climate change or Artificial Intelligence. World leaders packed two by two in Bezos’s Ark. A just reward for our sins. Mr Beast healing the sick. It’s all a bit hellfire and brimstone.

    I’m not saying these areas won’t pose issues in the future, but I think it’s concerning that we always think in black and white: either it’s business as usual or it’s the apocalypse. This blindsides us from acting and reacting in the face of more subtle forms of change. This is, after all, the most likely result of our ecological challenge: the Earth will become slowly more inhospitable. Can we train our eyes on this without jumping to hyperbole?

    This obsession with apocalypse is of course a remnant of Christianity. For Christians, history is linear and has a clear end point: the Day of Judgement, or the Return of Christ. Everything we do until then is fleeting, and only relevant insofar as it affects the judgement that will be meted out to us (unless you’re a Calvinist, in which case there is no relevance whatsoever to these happenings on Earth).

    Christianity has the concept of an End of History built into it, in contrast to cultures that see time as cyclical, just like the seasons of a year or the passing of generations.

    The end of history, or civilisation, does not mean the end of life on this planet, nor even human life necessarily. But it does mean the end of “progress” as we have previously considered it. Our buildings will not always grow taller. Our phones will not always become more sophisticated. Our food will not get more processed. Is that so bad? To live closer to the Earth and to one another?

    For Houellebecq, the end of history means the end of sex as a means of reproduction. And this he considers a form of liberation. The Buddha would agree. He said all desire is suffering. Yet, there’s such a thing as enjoyable suffering. What kind of music would Houellebecq’s post-humans make?

    Another day ends. Throughout the building, lights are flicked off. Conversations slow to a light murmuring, and then drop off completely. At what cost will we keep living in Wunderland?

    Feature Image: Miniatur Wunderland

  • Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob

    In a quiet room, two men smoke hashish and discuss the inevitability of the Apocalypse. All the signs are apparent: unusual weather conditions, social unrest, unendurable suffering caused by poverty and war. Searching for a loophole, they weave theories of increasing complexity, involving Messiahs, the reversing of the Old Laws, and the triumph of the Feminine spirit. After a few more puffs, however, the older man’s ability to speak fails to keep pace with the increasing abstraction of his thoughts. He falls into a reverie, or perhaps merely sleep. Only he can tell which. The other man stays awake, watching his ideas play out in all their baroque intricacy and intensity, until he, too, is overcome by tiredness. The solution to the Apocalypse will have to wait for another day.

    Welcome to eighteenth century Poland, as imagined in Olga Tokarczuk’s recently translated novel The Books of Jacob. A work of historical fiction, it straddles genres. On one hand, the book is the fruit of painstaking historical research, with Tokarczuk claiming to have worked seven years on the text. On the other, the novel’s ability to engage relies on the way it imaginatively enters its historical personages lives, and weaves compelling characters, relationships, and plots from the gaps in the historical record. The reader is told this in one clause of the book’s stylishly verbose title:

    The Books of Jacob 

    Or

     A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects.

    Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing from a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person.

    That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment.

    The novel was originally published in 2014, and has been considered Tokarczuk’s masterpiece. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, and in November 2021, an English translation by Jennifer Croft was published by Fitzcarraldo. Croft had previously translated another of Tokarczuk’s books, Flights, for which they shared the winning of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.

    Olga Tokarczuk in 2019.

    Summary

    The book follows the emergence, peregrinations and eventual dissolution of a religious sect built around a charismatic leader by the name of Jacob Frank. The sect was composed mainly of Jews, mostly Polish in nationality, who broke from the mainstream Jewish community. They believed earnestly that the end was nigh, and Jacob Frank was the Messiah. Frank’s teachings consisted of homely expositions of esoteric Kabbalist theories, involving such things as a Trinity of four parts, and the notion that God created the world without being aware he was doing it.

    Frank led his followers into new territory not just in the world of ideas, but also in respect of their place in European society. As Jews in Poland, they were barred from owning property, taking noble titles, and were perpetually subjected to suspicion and animosity, especially in times of social unrest caused by wars and famines. Frank convinced his followers that it was necessary for them to be baptised as Catholics. A barrowload of theological argumentation was provided to justify this move, and the group maintained many aspects of their culture even after their conversion, including unique clothing, refusal to eat pork, and a preference for marrying within the group. The cynical question can’t be dismissed: to what extent was the sect’s religion a front for a social movement?

    Jewish wedding with klezmer band in a shtetl in Russia, painting by Isaak Asknaziy, 1893.

    Musings on Contemporary Applications

    Many commentators on this novel have noted that it speaks directly to our time, but few have been more specific in saying how. Marcel Theroux’s excellent review for The Guardian, for example, ends without developing the tantalising suggestion that the book, “which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.” In the rest of this article, I would like to step away from the act of reviewing this book, and instead reflect on parallels with our current time.

    I propose three areas of comparison.

    1. The Nation State in Peril
    2. Popular Apocalyptic Sentiment
    3. Cults of Personality
    Administrative division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1789.

    The Nation State in Peril

    The Poland depicted in this novel is not the Poland of today, either in its geographical delineations nor, in many aspects, its culture. But the idea of such a nation stretches back to the eighteenth century.  

    In general those claiming to represent any nation like for its subjects to be obedient, to document themselves clearly for the State’s convenience, and to stay in one place. For these reasons perhaps the Irish state has long struggled to accommodate the Irish Travelling Community.

    This novel could be read as a meditation on the relationship between the nation and that which is ‘foreign’. After all, Jacob Frank’s last name is not a ‘real’ last name at all, but was a generic title applied to foreigners. Thus, Jacob Frank could be translated to ‘Jacob the Foreigner’. The group exists in a strange tension with Poland. Jacob doesn’t speak Polish, but still amasses a following in the country through his physical bearing, his charisma, and the compelling nature of his ideas in translation. Emerging from the Jewish community, and with theological ties to schools of thought widespread in the Middle East, the sect is both native and foreign at the same time. It comes from without, but gathers momentum because it speaks to a dissatisfaction within Polish society.

    Over the course of the book, the group ‘settles’ into a mode of being comfortable for the state. They stop being nomadic, they get baptised into the dominant religion, and they change their Jewish names to Catholic Polish ones. Jacob Frank tells his followers, “Everyone who seeks salvation must do three things: change his place of residence, change his name, and change his deeds.”(p. 229). Rather than solidifying the order of the nation state, as this action appears to do on the surface, it actually undermines the concept of nation by highlighting the fluidity of such markers of identity as one’s name, place of residence, religion etc.

    By definition, arising from the establishment of settled agriculture, a nation is opposed to nomadic forms of human culture. Nation states also tend to dislike groups with distinct languages or scripts. To be considered a good citizen, you should have one name, spelled one way, using no funny symbols, and you should never dare to change this. 

    The granting of land to the Frankists was not just to the sect’s interest, but was also greatly in that of the State’s. If the group held land, they would stop travelling around the country riling people up and gathering more converts. Moreover, it would be easier to keep an eye on them.

    As a member of a dominant religion, you conformed publicly with the society at large. You had your job, your Polish name, and  attended church. But in your own home, and in your smaller communal meetings, you discussed your true spiritual beliefs and worshipped in your own way.

    The freedom to practice one’s religion privately, without persecution or suppression by the state, is one which was hard won over the large few centuries. But in Jacob’s time, it was a primary issue, connected to what it means to live as an individual on a day to day basis.

    Reading the novel, I found my mind turning to the tension between private and public existence in our time. It seems to me that the division between public and private that may have existed in the eighteenth century is slowly being eroded in our own times. After all, surveillance is no longer something that happens in the street, but has now intruded into every facet of private life. Citizens keep voice-commanded devices in their bedrooms, their kitchens. We each carry around devices with camera that face both outwards to the world, and back at our faces, with microphones that record the words we speak. Our phones, without which modern life is difficult to manage (how will you get a job, stay in contact with friends, pay for your visits to the cafe?), have become an instrument of power that destroys the fragile barrier between public and private life. Without this barrier, will the possibility of quietly practicing non-dominant ways of life (religion, community, culture) be permitted for long? 

    In Catholic Poland of the eighteenth century, the Church and the state were intertwined. In Neoliberal Ireland of the twenty first century, the state is intwined with the interest of corporations.

    But the corporations have an edge. It is to companies like Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Google and Amazon that the vast majority of surveillance capitalism belongs, not the state. Google knows where I go on a day to day basis, what I buy, what music I listen to and what blogs I read, much more intimately than the state does. What does it mean for a non-elected body to have such power in a nation? Is it comparable to the power the Church had over the kingdoms of Medieval Europe? If Google ordered it, would Ireland join a Crusade?

    Viktor Vasnetsov (1848-1926), the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

    Popular Apocalyptic Sentiment

    It was reasonable for Europeans to feel apocalyptic two hundred years ago. There was terrible wealth disparity, with peasants and kings living side by side, social unrest, culminating in the French Revolution and a succession of natural disasters, like the Lisbon earthquake.

    It is fair to say that there is similar apocalyptic sentiment around today. Although the average standard of living is higher now than the average eighteenth century Polish peasant, the extent of wealth inequality has become absurd. In a globalised society sweat shop workers produce iPhones for the satisfaction of wealthy consumers who fantasise about building mansions on Mars, while the planet shudders under the weight of our cumulative impact.

    Natural disasters will always happen, but it is interesting to note our increasingly panicked reactions. Words like hellish and apocalyptic are bandied about when we see forests burn, amidst an increasingly sense that we are to blame. If we contrast this with an event like the Lisbon Earthquake, the reaction it evoked for many was to question the Divine plan. How could God allow such awful things to happen to Europeans?

    The Frankists believed that in the end times, the Messiah would come, and when this happened, all the old laws would be reversed and thrown away. It was this logic that allowed Frank’s followers to change their Jewish names, ignore all the rules for living laid out in the Talmud, and experiment with bizarre new (or, perhaps, archaic) modes of sexual behaviour. What changes in our culture will we see when a large enough percentage of the population truly accepts the possibility of apocalypse?

    North Korean poster featuring Kim Il-Sung.

    Cults of Personality

    Jacob is not the most intelligent character in this book. At the same time, he often downplayed his intelligence, calling himself a ‘simpleton’. The intellectual backbone of the Frankists were a group of older characters, deeply versed in Jewish scripture and Kabbalah. In their nightly discussions, they would provide the raw material to Jacob, who would then draw from this wisdom in his actions and speeches to the rest of the followers. 

    What Jacob had was charisma, above all else. He was like a magnet, drawing people to him through an invisible force. Without Jacob, the group had no coherent identity: a group of Jews who had forsaken their birth names, the teachings of the Talmud, and their homelands. The teachings of the group, too, had no unity apart from Jacob. It was, in effect, a cult of personality.

    There is an interesting passage near the end of the novel. In this scene, the stories of Jacob’s life are being recorded. Being old, and the revered head of a movement, the stories have become increasingly mythic in nature. But what strikes one observer is that the story of the Frankists as a group, and the story of Jacob’s individual life are intertwined.

    …the Lord tells his tales, and he and Jakubowski write them down, until out of these stories Jacob’s life starts to emerge – a life that is simultaneously the life of this ‘us’. (p. 86)

    Normally, we think of individualism and group-based living as being diametrically opposed. But here, they’re interdependent. But what does it mean for an individual to represent a group?

    People are always more persuasive than ideas. And it’s interesting how a charismatic personality can stimulate interest in esoteric ideas among people who would never have dreamed of engaging with such ideas otherwise. Just look at how many young men are now reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Carl Jung, and Dostoyevsky because of the viral popularity of Jordan Peterson. Or how many hipsters are reading Hegel because they like Zizek.

    This is not to be critical of reading Jung or Hegel, or to mock people for reading outside their comfort zone, but it is  notable that they mostly read Jung in the context of Jordan Peterson, or Hegel in reference to Slavoj Zizek. And these personalised forays into philosophy or psychology come with ideological baggage. 

    Slavoj Žižek, ©Basso CANNARSA Opale/Alamy Stock Photo

    A Peterson fan is likely to read Jung to find proof of the mystical solidity of the division between the Masculine and Feminine spirit, or the impenetrable irrefutability of biological determinism. A fan of Zizek will read Hegel, and, in all likelihood, understand very little, but will at least be more impressed and willing to listen to Zizek the next time they hear him speak, because clearly he understands things they do not…

    All this reference to authority has something medieval about it. In the Middle Ages, it was enough to say that Aquinas wrote something to take it for granted that it was true. There was a finite list of ‘authorities’ that you could quote with impunity. And it was considered appropriate to defer to such authorities than try to prove the truth of something by original argumentation.

    The scientific method broke with this, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. No, it said, we can’t take any ‘obvious’, ‘common sense’ truth for granted. We can’t hold anything true on the grounds of ‘authority’, because we no longer trust these powerful institutions like the Church and the State to tell us what is true and what isn’t. Let’s give power to the people! 

    A philosopher like Habermas would argue that this striving for objectivity, atomised and isolated from the rest of human knowledge, is fruitless. Truth arises as part of a conversation.

    In our own times, with information so freely available, but also requiring some conscious effort to sort the chaff from the grain, there has been an explosion of cults of personality. With its ability to present the human face in motion and voice in high definition, the internet, more so than even the radio (which had such a devastating role in boosting dictators in the twentieth century), allows for the easy transmission of charismatic personalities. 

    You could argue that this is the bookish side of the larger celebrity culture, but it’s worth paying attention to this phenomenon when you consider the extent to which popular discourse is driven by these popular thinkers, such as:

    •  Jordan Peterson
    • Slavoj Zizek
    • Sam Harris
    • Ben Shapiro
    • Christopher Hitchens

    Note: Having a cult of personality isn’t necessarily a damning judgment on the individual in question. It just seems to be the way the internet works at present.

    Note 2: Isn’t it interesting that all these people are male?

    Jordan Peterson. Image by Gage Skidmore.

    Many of these popular thinkers are not true intellectuals. They often speak in vague statements. They contradict themselves etc. But this may be part of the charm. In The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk describes the effect Jacob has on crowds:

    …he makes quite the ruckus, with his strange gestures and the odd things that come out of his mouth. He speaks so enigmatically that it’s hard to figure out what he means. That’s why people stay together for a long time after he leaves, trying to interpret for themselves and one another the words of this Frank, this foreigner. What did he say? In some sense, each can only understand it all as best as he can, in his own way. (pp. 639-638)

    This doesn’t sound dissimilar from the comments section on a Jordan Peterson lecture.

    These figures mostly appeal on the level of personality. Their fans don’t care if they are not the most intellectually sophisticated thinker in the academy. They’re engaged more on the level of watching somebody they like and admire, such as a friend, grapple with issues that they feel effect them. And of course, this being a cult of personality, they identify with these figures. Ben Shapiro is a knight, a hero, valiantly slaying the libs for ‘our’ sake. These figures gain support and popularity by virtue of being ‘on our side’. Even if they don’t identify with the group, they can win support by scoring argumentative points against one of the group’s enemies. Thus, Jordan Peterson was admired by many neofascists, despite his denouncement of that viewpoint, because he criticised the culture of ‘wokeness’ on so many occasions. 

    Perhaps these popular figures are tapping into the archetype of the prophet? A figure who speaks enigmatically but urgently, calling for us to change our ways before it’s too late. In a neoliberal system that seems impervious to innovation unless it is in order to exploit the planet and human beings more brutally; it’s thus understandable that there’s a thirst for a powerful voice of urgency among young people. This is what the movie Don’t Look Up primarily conveys: a sense of powerlessness, of not being heard when the apocalypse is so painstakingly obvious.

    Lay It to Rest, Lad

    In a room bothered by the noise of traffic, two men quietly smoke hashish. They speak of the imminent apocalypse. All the signs are there: natural disasters, odd weather conditions, vast wealth inequality, the strong preying on the weak. They weave intricate theories, drawing from the half-baked ideas of internet grifters. The sun sets, but the light of the screens stay on. Sleep will not come soon.

    Featured Image: Hendrick ter Brugghen, Esau Selling His Birthright, c. 1627.

  • Ciarán O’Rourke: Breaking the Cycle

    One Big Union is a self-published collection of essays by Irish poet Ciarán O’Rourke. The essays, many of which have been previously published in such outlets as Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Marxist Review, and indeed, Cassandra Voices herself, are a mix of literary criticism, political theory, and personal writing.

    The book’s introduction locates itself in the burgeoning genre of pandemic writing. Thus he writes:

    Between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021, a period of cascading social and ecological crises, I found myself returning to the work of a number of poets, artists, and political firebrands, with a fresh sense of discovery and gratitude. This miscellany of essays is the result.

    In essence, this book is a polished version of a reading diary, with O’Rourke responding to the artists he was confined with over quarantine. As such, it’s an intensely personal and vulnerable work, even when the directly autobiographical material is minimal. 

    You finish the book with the impression that Percy Bysshe Shelley plays a leading role in O’Rourke’s inner life ; that Irishness is something O’Rourke feels strongly attached to; and that he is passionately devoted to left-wing political ideals, even though he finds the atmosphere of devoted Communist organisations mentally stultifying. 

    This is a lot to know about a relative stranger, and it’s a testament to O’Rourke’s ability as a writer that this distinct, personal voice is present throughout, even in moments when the subject matter veers into academic territory.

    Hole in the Wall Blues

    Perhaps it’s scholarly fatigue, but I must admit I found the moments of personal, autobiographical writing the most compelling parts of the book. 

    In ‘Hole in the Wall Blues’, O’Rourke writes about a topic made timely by the Save the Cobblestone protest – the erosion of Dublin’s cultural geography – in an endearingly personal way.

    The example he uses is the Screen cinema on Townsend street, now a building site for what O’Rourke believes will be a “rental hub”.

    It wasn’t like the Screen cinema was some beautiful location, he argues. No, it was dingy, cheap, and outmoded. But, O’Rourke writes, “just by being there and providing the service it did, this rather run-down space had made the city a home of sorts”. 

    In another essay, ‘Sea Music’, he talks about the strange intimacy that has grown between himself and the other regular bathers at Seapoint. These accounts of his private life made me care about the more abstract essays, helping me, as a reader, trace the thread of emotional necessity behind his discussions of Percy Shelley or Langston Hughes.

    Satisfying Punch

    Although most of these essays are ruminative and introspective, there are a few that pack a satisfying punch. My favourite is ‘Smashing the Mirror’, where O’Rourke excoriates Poetry Ireland’s toothless humility in front of the strong arms of cultural hegemony, exemplified in their partnership with the Dublin office of Facebook for national poetry day in 2017, and their use of a video of Joe Biden giving a merry, public-relations-approved speech about the beauty of Irish poetry for their fundraising campaign in 2019. 

    What does it mean for the institutions of Irish poetry to flatter the centres of power so shamelessly? O’Rourke is excitingly sharp in his rhetorical denouncement:

    The emerald glint in Biden’s eyes, the nostalgic quaver in his voice, is meant to reinforce, for voters at home and lackeys elsewhere, a relation (between lord and vassal, say, or centre and outpost) that each of these circumstances also exemplifies – all under the guise of celebrating Irish poetry. And Poetry Ireland, it seems, is happy to play along: cosying up to power, for the sake of PR, and presumably on the long-term promise of cash.Admission of Bias

    I may be biased when it comes to reviewing this book. In the first year of my English Studies course in Trinity College, Ciarán O’Rourke was working as a teaching assistant while he finished his phD, and I happened to be placed in his Romanticism tutorials. 

    Ciarán was a wonderful teacher, with a gift for generating class discussion. He also had the touch of eccentricity required to deliver a course on Romanticism. At one point he had the whole class stand up and communally recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in early Spring; as if we could hurry the pace of the seasons through the right incantation of the words.

    With that said, I had no idea I was reading my former teacher’s book until after I had read through the collection. From the tone of the writing, and the subjects covered (bathing in Dun Laoghaire, Marxist politics, nineteenth century poets), I had assumed the author was in his fifties or sixties. I imagined a Terry Eagleton type – hip enough to know about Ursula Le Guin, but whose outlook on life has been shaped by figures from a deeper past. Then I looked up some interviews, and, with a jolt, recognised the fresh-faced, tall figure of my Romanticism tutor.

    Critique

    One criticism I have is in relation to the structure of the book. First, it lacks certain features of a professionally published work. There is no publication date. The cover image, by Lewis Hine, is not credited on the back cover, or on one of the first pages, but in the ‘Introduction and Acknowledgements’ section.

    These may seem minor issues, but by failing to follow conventions, it becomes harder to work with, and conveys an attitude of slight carelessness, unbefitting of its important contents.

    My second criticism is of the repetition between essays. As many of the essays were published in different publications, it appears the author was unconcerned at repeating a few key points. When gathered together in a book, however, these repetitions jar on the reader.

    For example, several pieces of information related to Shelley in the essay entitled ‘Shelley’s Revolutionary Year’ are duplicated without development in the title essay ‘One Big Union’, for example. This certainly conveys the extent of Shelley’s psychological importance to the author, but it doesn’t expand on the issue.

    Overall, this is an intriguing collection of essays from a young Irish poet. Those interested in O’Rourke’s poetry will gain insights into his artistic influences, and anyone looking for topical cultural critiques will be well served by some of the later essays in particular. Its main value is as a political statement of purpose for the poet. It also represents an opportunity for those interested to support a promising Irish writer, whose work has been hitherto largely available to readers for free.

    One Big Union is available for purchase through Ciarán O’Rourke’s website, ragpickerpoetry.net

  • Review: Richard Kearney’s Touch

    Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense is a recently published work by Irish philosopher and public intellectual Richard Kearney. The book is the third in the ‘No Limits’ series published by Columbia University Press.

    The blurb and introduction promise a timely meditation on the importance of touch in an age of virtuality. The book, we are told, asks how we are to reconcile the physical with the virtual, our embodied experience with our global connectivity. Unfortunately, however, it contributes little towards answering these questions, spending most of its few pages mulling over the history of philosophy and Western medicine; lingering around the goalposts without registering a direct hit.

    This is disappointing because Kearney has his finger on the pulse of a real undercurrent of dissatisfaction with our mainstream cultural model. Many of us believe that something has gone wrong, so we turn to our writers, artists and public intellectuals to identify the root cause. Is capitalism to blame? The invention of print? The discovery of fire?

    Kearney considers a neglect of touch as a key feature of our cultural predicament. It all began with the Greeks – he suggests – exemplified by Plato’s valorisation of the spiritually pure sense of sight over our beastly sense of touch. Now, we see the unhappy conclusion of such an idea; a culture founded around the image, where life is increasingly lived virtually at the expense of our physical existences.

    This mass sense of disembodiment, caused by engagement with digital technology, Kearney calls excarnation, a term loaded with esoteric theological significance. This aspect to our culture was brought into stark relief during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Thus, most workers and students began working virtually from their own home, as nationwide quarantines were enforced, and social distancing was put in place in supermarkets, restaurants, and other public places. We realised that this was, in a way, the logical next step to the virtualisation of education and work. We just needed one catastrophe to put it in place.

    Worthy Premise

    ‘A civilization that loses touch with flesh’, writes Kearney, ‘loses touch with itself.’ (p. 47). This is a worthy premise to a book, and from this beginning, one can imagine an author moving towards a rich discussion of the effects of ‘excarnation’ on such matters as sex, violence, sport, the prevalence of body dysmorphia, self-harm etc. in our contemporary culture.

    The topic of ‘touch’ is indeed broad, but contemporary writers and cultural critics have gained good mileage with similarly broad topics in the past. An example is Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty (2011), which takes the broad theme of cruelty as a foundation to a wide-ranging discussion on everything from avant-garde performance art, to the tropes of advertising, to the coverage of U.S. war crimes during the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

    This book, however, fails to deliver on its ambitious premise. Instead of diving into an analysis of contemporary culture, it stalls before it starts with two lengthy chapters introducing a glossary of terms, distinctions and concepts that are seldom used later in the book.

    Kearney meanders through etymologies and distinctions, drawing neat moral messages from vague, linguistically questionable associations. The root cause of this may be the unnecessary broadening of an already vague theme. Thus, he writes:

    As I hope I clear by now, when we speak of touch we are not just referring to one of the five senses … we are talking about touch in a more inclusive way, as an embodied manner of being in the world, an existential approach to things that is open and vulnerable, as when skin touches and is touched. (pp.15-16)

    This is a little too sweet to swallow. Even if we accept the Heideggerian mysticality of this passage, it’s obvious that Kearney is widening his subject matter out of manageable proportion.

    Indeed, he draws strongly on Heidegger in his concern with words and their hidden meanings. At times, this can be surprising and intriguing, but at other times, the connections seem banal. He argues:

    But tact is not the same as contact. Being tactful with someone does not always imply immediate physical proximity. One can be tactful, for instance, by practicing discretion in particular circumstances, as one negotiates the right space between oneself and others. (p. 10)

    Handshake

    A baby-steps approach would be justifiable on philosophical grounds if Kearney wasn’t taking flights of fancy elsewhere. At one point, he speaks of the handshake as being the ‘origin of community’(p. 42) without adequately explaining how.

    Indeed, in many cultures bowing or other non-contact gestures are the norm. We turn to the endnotes to find an essay that ‘analyses the first wager of hand-to-hand encounter between Diomedes and Glaucus in Homer’s Iliad and Abraham’s greeting of the strangers at Mamre.’ These literary scenes are certainly interesting, and may indeed point to episodes passed down through folk memory, but to suggest that they represent a historically verifiable moment in human history is unsatisfactory.

    The first chapter is structured around the questionably useful coining of new terms to describe sight, taste, smell and sound being used ‘tactfully’. ‘A person with tactful taste is savvy.’(p. 17), Kearney writes, a person with a good nose has ‘flair’(p. 21), and so on. But when we talk about the ‘tactfulness’ of touch we don’t really mean the sense of touch; remember we mean the metaphorical way of being in the world that touch acts as an analogy for.

    It’s odd to focus on the specifics of each sense when we’ve already established that we aren’t taking the theme of touch literally. In any case, is it still believed that there are only five senses? Isn’t it the case that there are many others beyond those traditional five?

    At this point in my reading, the unanswered questions become overwhelming, and I decided to stop thinking too hard about them. Instead, I focused on the texture of Kearney’s style, clearly influenced by Continental Philosophy. There is a lot of jargon, which is at times hard to follow. On the flipside, it is quite playful, making use of a number of touch-based puns and idioms. There is also a tendency towards moralistic aphorisms, and using words poetically. The following sentences give a flavour:

    Without the transversality of touch, sensibility risks sensationalism: sense without sensitivity, perception without empathy, stimulation without responsibility. (p. 16)

    Savvy is a carnal know-how. (p. 18)

    For if ontogeny repeats phylogeny, it also repeats cosmogony. (p. 20)

    Hearing is tactful when it resonates with what resounds. (p. 27)

    In response to this, however, I am moved to quote Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’

    Visual Culture

    It is popularly acknowledged that we live in a ’visual culture’, and Kearney sees this ‘optocentrism’ as the source of our woes. In his own words, ‘Optical omnipresence trumps tactile contact. Cyber connection and human isolation go hand in glove.(p. 5)’

    But Kearney never specifies exactly what a visual culture is, or what it means to live in one. What does the shortening of our attention spans, our growing inability to read longer texts, or the increasing popularity of podcasts and audiobooks actually mean in a ‘visual culture’? Do these elements suggest a deterioration in our visual faculties? Kearney doesn’t linger on these questions. In his eagerness to champion touch, he fails to determine exactly what it is he is fighting against.

    The second chapter of Touch is even murkier than the first. Kearney embarks on a historical tour of different philosophical considerations of touch, but only discusses two philosophers at any length: Aristotle, and Edmund Husserl. This leaves a gap of some two thousand years in between. Was there nothing to say about the Christian philosophers and touch, or about Descartes’s suspicion that his physical sensations could be a mere dream?

    As someone untrained in philosophy, I found the explanations of Aristotle’s thought particularly difficult to follow. I couldn’t tell where Aristotle’s opinions ended and Kearney’s began, especially since Kearney quotes Aristotle using terms like “tact”, which Kearney had given idiosyncratic definitions for in the previous chapter. Are we to take it that Aristotle aligned with Kearney’s usage of the word?

    At one point, Kearney remarks that Aristotle saw touch as the most foundational sense, since all the other senses rely on it. Food must touch the tongue to be tasted, soundwaves must ‘touch’ the eardrum, and ‘light strikes the iris’(p. 43). But was Aristotle aware that photons were material objects? And are photons actually material objects, if they have no mass, and can act like waves?

    When you start considering this subject at a quantum level, everyday notions of touch break down. After all, when I ’touch’ a table, at a molecular level none of the atoms in my finger are touching the atoms in the table, and I am only feeling the electromagnetic resistance of the table’s atoms.

    Likewise, none of the atoms in my body are ’touching’ each other, but are held in a bond through their orbitals. So, in what sense can you say that light ’touches’ the eye, or sound ’touches’ the ear?

    Odysseus and Polyphemus (1896) by Arnold Böcklin.

    No Central Thrust

    Even if you accept all the concepts, definitions and distinctions found in the philosophical survey, your work won’t be rewarded because Kearney barely mentions them again. Instead, the text turns to medicine. In chapter three, he talks about literary/folkloric/mythological figures like Odysseus and Oedipus who embody a ’wounded healer’ archetype. Then, in chapter four he talks about the importance of physical touch in modern medicine, particularly in psychotherapy.

    At this point, to my mind at least, it became clear that there was no central thrust to this book, and my attempt to follow his train of thought would go unrewarded. Instead, I found a collection of loosely connected rambles through Kearney’s reading, with no development between the chapters.

    The final chapter on popular culture (social media, video games, movies) finally gave me what I had been hoping for – a discussion of touch in contemporary culture – but is, sadly, the least satisfactory of the lot. Kearney is clearly unfamiliar with the details or nuances of internet culture, consistently misusing terms. At one point, he refers to the leaking of Hillary Clinton’s emails as ’revenge porn’ (p. 119), a blunder that reveals a deep unfamiliarity with the expression he is using.

    At another, he disparages the state of internet discourse as infuriatingly simple compared to the Golden Age of communication that existed back in an Edenic past: ’communication is becoming daily more simplified by social media tweets, memes, acronyms, and hash tags – ’What’s up’ being replaced by WhatsApp.’

    Putting aside the cringeworthy final sentence, is it really self-evident that internet communication is more ’simplified’ than print or verbal speech? Couldn’t you argue the opposite – that the increasingly ironic, self-referential, meme-ified soup of internet discourse is actually maddeningly Baroque?

    Avoiding odious comparison, you could speak of internet discourse not as better or worse, simpler or more complex than speech, but just as a new modality which is still in the process of growth, of finding its feet and testing its limits.

    There are plenty of scholars analysing internet culture now. It may seem absurd to study memes, but when you consider their effect on politics, it appears intellectually reckless to dismiss them as simplistic, and unworthy of analysis.

    Grand Theft Auto V.

    Video Games

    The ignorance latent in Kearney’s cultural analysis hits a peak in his discussion of video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V (2013), which he calls ’controversial’. When describing it he first gives an inaccurate description of its contents, speaking of how players can ‘build or destroy cities’ (Is he thinking of SimCity (1989), perhaps?) and ’seduce strippers’ (according to my research on the GTA forum, you can only purchase lap dances from the strippers in the game).

    He gives an inaccurate account of what it feels like to play a game he surely hasn’t played. It’s ’vicarious’ he says. With ’a click of a button, one exits the world of tangible reality and enters a computer-generated universe’. If only GTA V gave one the escape from tangible reality Kearney imagines. Alas, however, technology can only progress so fast.

    After painting this Black Mirror-esque picture of the reality-warping power of the computer game, Kearney exhorts the lost souls of gamers that ‘it is but a simulacrum’, and warns against ’the risk of losing touch’. The only one out of touch here is Kearney himself.

    Apart from GTA V, Kearney lists a number of examples from modern media that deal with the sense of isolation and alienation engendered by digital media, referencing such titles as ‘Her’ (Spike Jonze, 2013), ‘The Truman Show’ (Peter Weir, 1998) and ‘Black Mirror’ (Charlie Brooker, 2011 – present). But all these works communicate much more nuanced and rich critiques of contemporary culture than Kearney is able to muster in this text.

    There are insights and interesting titbits scattered throughout the book, but on the whole it is lacking in a sense of progression, with little development from chapter to chapter, and a cumbersome amount of time is spent advancing distinctions and definitions that are never called into use.

    Columbia University Press claims that the No Limits series ‘brings together creative thinkers who delight in the pleasure of intellectual hunting, wherever the hunt may take them and whatever critical boundaries they have to trample as they go.’ With Touch, we see the weaknesses of this interdisciplinary approach, as the book’s lack of precision and relative naivete provides unsatisfactory responses to important questions in contemporary culture.

    Featured Image: A Missouri National Guardsman looks into a VR training head-mounted display at Fort Leonard Wood in 2015

  • Jack B. Yeats: Painting and Memory

    Often overshadowed by his elder, Nobel laureate, brother W.B., Jack Butler Yeats occupies an exalted position among Irish painters. ‘Jack B. Yeats: Painting & Memory’ is a new exhibition in the National Gallery commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the painter’s birth, and exploring a stylistic evolution that draws on both Irish and British scenes.

    Jack was born on August 29th, 1871 into a marriage of two Irish Protestant families, the Yeatses and the Pollexfens. Whereas the Dublin Yeatses embodied a faded aristocracy, priding themselves on genealogically questionable claims of descent from the Dukes of Ormonde, the Pollexfens were of a more recent vintage, having come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, finding prosperity through their shipping interests.

    Each of the surviving children of moderately successful portrait painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen made significant marks in their respective fields, perhaps compensating for their father’s relative obscurity, and profligacy.

    W.B. emerged as an illustrious poet, anointed by John O’Leary to lead the Celtic Revival, while Jack B. became a successful illustrator and painter from his early twenties, while their sisters, Lilly and Lolly,  set up the Cuala Press and were leading lights in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. All must be counted as important figures in what was an Irish Renaissance of sorts that sought, partly to distinguish and partly to create, an Irish cultural identity distinct from that of England’s.

    Jack’s career sailed independently of his siblings, a state of affairs conditioned by his childhood. The historian R.F. Foster writes that Yeats’s ‘childhood was disrupted by his removal for eight years to Sligo, where he was brought up in close proximity to his grandparents. This probably conditioned his artistic development; it also conferred a certain distance from the rest of the family, particularly his brother.’ (R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, p. 14).

    Later in life, Jack diverged sharply from his brother’s political opinions, holding to an anti-Treaty stance in the Civil War, in contrast to W.B. ‘s support of the 1922 Treaty, and later service to the state as a Senator.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), A Summer Evening, Rosses Point, 1922. Oil on canvas, 23 x 35.5 cm
    Credit Line: Private Collection, Courtesy of Adam’s
    © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Adam’s

    Exhibition

    There is already a room devoted to Jack B. Yeats in the Milltown wing of the National Gallery, available to view with a free general admission ticket. Here, twenty of his paintings are on permanent display.

    The new exhibition features a much larger selection of eighty-four paintings, many of which are on loan from private collections or galleries overseas. As such, it offers a rare chance to view many works that have not been on display in Ireland for some time.

    I had the opportunity to speak with Donal Maguire, co-curator (along with Brendan Rooney) of the exhibition. Donal revealed the rationale for the exhibition’s lay out, including the decision to focus exclusively on his oil paintings, and Jack B. Yeats’s role in forging a national Irish identity in the early twentieth century.

    After rejoining his family as a young adult, Jack enrolled in a number of art schools. The skills he acquired as a draughtsman, allied to natural ability, earned him a decent living through contributions to a number of London magazines.

    At this time the majority of his output was in drawing and watercolour, often depicting the colourful side of everyday life. Country races, market fairs, and circuses feature, depicted predominantly in a realist style. His first exhibition in 1897 won him immediate acclaim from sketches and watercolours, depicting bucolic ‘scenes of racing, boxing, fairgrounds, cider-making, children, and animals.’ (Bruce Arnold, Yeats, Jack Butler, Dictionary of Irish Biography).

    Near the turn of the century, Jack married Mary Cottenham White, who he had met while at art school. The young couple eventually chose to settled down in Ireland. Unfortunately, depictions of equivalent scenes from Irish rural life did not meet with similar success. It was not until the 1920s, after Ireland’s independence brought a greater appetite for articulations of Irish life and characters, that Jack’s career took off.

    Jack began to take a serious interest in oils only after settling down in Ireland. After adopting the medium, however, it became his dominant artistic language. From the 1920s onward, his manner of painting became increasingly tactile and expressionistic, inspired by the Modernist movement. By the end of his life, he was producing vast canvases in oil in a highly idiosyncratic style, with increasing recourse to esoteric subjects from folklore and mythology.

    With such a clearly definable narrative arc to his career, it is common for Jack B. Yeats’s work to be exhibited in a manner that emphasises his development from sketches, to watercolours, through to increasingly expressionist oil paintings. With this exhibition, however, Maguire and Rooney saw an opportunity to take a different tack

    “We decided very early on that the show wouldn’t be hung chronologically”, Donal Maguire informed me. “Exhibitions give you the opportunity to look across a practice and see connections that are twenty, thirty, or forty years apart,” he said.

    The theme of memory was chosen as the central focus of the exhibition. Oil was the material Jack B. Yeats painted with during the final half of his career, and paintings commonly feature scenes drawn from earlier periods in his life, particularly the experience of growing up in Sligo.

    A non-chronological approach to laying out the paintings serves to emphasise the associative, non-linear quality of memory.

    “Memory isn’t a linear thing,” Maguire observed. “It’s relational. You connect things from across different periods of your life. Certain things pop out, or are remembered more strongly than others.”

    In each of the five rooms of the exhibition, works from different decades of Yeats’s life engage in a fascinating conversation with one another. The most striking example is the sequencing of ‘The Barrel Man’ (1912) and ‘Humanity’s Alibi’ (1946). Without the earlier, realist depiction of a rural festivity, involving a man fighting off sticks being aimed at him from the safety of a barrel, the origin of the expressionistic painting of the 1940s, with the headscratcher of a title, would be difficult to fathom.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), The Public Letter Writer, 1953 Oil on board, 35.5 x 53 cm. Credit Line: Private Collection, Courtesy of Adam’s © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Adam’s

    The remarkable ‘The Public Letter Writer’(1953) appears to be an example of what Maguire means by certain memories standing out more than others . He notes that this painting was “painted from a memory fifty years earlier that he never sketched. It was a memory of seeing this person on the street in New York, and fifty years later he decided to return to it.”

    The vagueness of memory is conveyed by the hazy, almost hallucinatory character of the painting. The figure is less a real person than a character from a nightmare. Whereas the expressive depiction of the figure in ‘Humanity’s Alibi’ suggests a memory that has been mulled over beyond the point of reason – overloaded with metaphorical possibilities – the manner of ‘The Public Letter Writer’ is for Maguire suggestive of “a memory which isn’t fully formed.”

    This is achieved through a particular technique according to Maguire:

    He painted with thick paint, but also with very thin paint. It’s the contrast of the two that gives it this interesting effect. You have very thin brushstrokes, or dry brushstrokes, and then suddenly a very thickly applied stroke over it. There’s interesting layers of paint there, that seem very fragile at times, or without much structure, but they’re all held together by an overall picture.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Pilot Sligo River, 1927. Oil on canvas, Unframed: 45.72 x 60.96cm
    Credit Line: Private collection, image courtesy Whytes.com © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021 Image courtesy Whytes.com

    Irishness

    Exhibitions of this sort require years of preparation. Ideally, Maguire told me, a three year lead in is required. It is thus difficult to read topical applications into its staging.

    Before the interview, I had wondered if the exhibition of a quitessentially Irish artist was related to a  drop off in foreign visitors to Dublin since the COVID-19 pandemic. As it happens, it is fortuitous that the National Gallery is giving Irish people a chance for introspection.

    While the theme of memory reflects the preoccupation of the subject in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, it also provokes us to interrogate what role the painter occupies in our cultural memory.

    Jack, B. Yeats now occupies a rarefied position in Irish culture. His works are on the Leaving Cert Art curriculum, just as you’ll find his brother on the English curriculum. This stature was not self-evident in his own lifetime, however.

    Bruce Arnold writes bluntly of Yeats’s career in the 1910s: ‘His work did not sell. From a professional point of view his and Cottie’s decision to settle in Ireland had not been a success.’ Even after critical acclaim in the 1920s, ‘the resources to buy [artwork] were thinly spread in Irish society at the time, particularly those interested in modernism, and Yeats’s work did not sell at all well. His output, substantial during the 1920s, fell off in the following decade, and in a mood of self-doubt he turned to writing.’

    It wasn’t until a successful 1942 exhibition that he came to be regarded as a great Irish artist. Even then, his reputation declined after his death in 1957, until it was revived by a significant National Gallery exhibition in 1971.

    Fifty years on, the artist is still celebrated, but for perhaps different reasons than in the 1940s. We may still appreciate his ground-breaking work that reacted against sentimental nineteenth century depictions of rural life. But attention to curiosities of rural life might still be considered distasteful, even kitsch. Therefore, rather than being charmed by what may now be considered benignly nationalistic, it is the ambiguities within the oeuvre that still speak to us. Here we find the hallucinogenic letter writers; the sinister boatmen who stare the viewer down; the master of ceremonies chalky in the spotlight; an odd cast of characters that seem to stand with one foot in the thick of everyday life, and one foot in the most whimsical of dreams. Insofar as they are alien to us, these figures still have something to say.

    Maguire explains Yeats’s enduring appeal to contemporary Ireland: “People enjoy the expression and experimentation and risk taking that’s in it.”

    It might be this numinous quality that will ensure their longevity. “Yeats allows you to develop your own interpretation, through your own imagination, of what these pictures are about.” Maguire comments.

    In many of Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, “He doesn’t give you a lot of information,” Maguire said, providing only enough information to pique your curiosity. Although “there are little clues to lead you in a particular direction, like with the title, a particular figure, or element in the picture. But there always seems to be some sort of secret there, or something that’s not being fully revealed.”

    Jack B. Yeats, The Master of Ceremonies. Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 46 cm
    Credit Line: On loan from the Hunt Museum, Limerick. Photo © Hunt Museum
    © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021

    Call to Action

    Even among those of us with visual cortexes fried by twenty-first century technologies, Jack B. Yeats’ works allow access to powerful imaginative vistas.

    The use of colour at times astonishes, the character studies are fascinating, and the focus on everyday scenes allows for surprisingly personal moments of connection.

    Maguire urges anyone going to avoid getting:

    too distracted by the imagery of what he’s making, but allow yourself to appreciate how the painting is made as well. Not to be frustrated by, but to enjoy the technique and the brushwork, and the experimentation with the medium. How fragile it can seem, but at the same time very bold and expressive. It’s that material quality that people should really take time to enjoy in his work, because you can really lose yourself in it.

    The exhibition runs until February 6th, 2022. Tickets range in price from €5 up to €17 for an adult weekend ticket. Discounted prices are available for students, jobseekers and pensioners. Tickets are significantly cheaper during the week than on weekends, and there’s even a chance to see the exhibition for free on Mondays between 11am and 2pm, if you can manage to book a slot during that period.

    Featured Image: Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Singing Under the Canopy of Heaven, 1950. Oil on board, Unframed: 22.86 x 35.56cm. Credit Line: Private Collection © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021. Image courtesy Whytes.com.

    Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), Leaving the Far Point, 1946. Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 46 cm
    Credit Line: The Niland Collection. Donated by the artist, 1954. Courtesy of The Model, Home of the Niland Collection. © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London, IVARO Dublin, 2021

  • Where is Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World?

    For Christmas two years ago, my mother bought me a copy of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People (2018). I tried to read it, I really did, but gave up after twenty pages. Looking back now, I can’t remember exactly what it was that turned me off it. I recall saying something along the lines of not liking the dialogue and the way the characters were realised.

    Looking back, I think I disliked the social pressure exerted on me to read and admire Sally Rooney. You see, as a student in Trinity College Dublin, the figure of Sally Rooney loomed large.

    Access to campus was restricted while a TV adaptation of her book was filmed. Her novels lined the windows of nearby book shops. Rave reviews appeared everywhere you looked online. She was the voice of the Irish millennial.

    All of this, rather than encouraging me to embrace her work, raised my hackles and ensured that I would find fault in anything I read by her.

    After laying Normal People aside, my girlfriend read it. After finishing it, she expressed the opinion that it was a good read, but nothing special in literary terms. Then she read reviews of it in well-respected publications, and began to experience a cognitive dissonance so severe I worried about her mental health.

    “What is it I’m not seeing? Why is everybody praising it so highly? Am I not seeing something here?” she beseeched.

    I tried to comfort her. “It’s the world that’s gone mad.” I said, “Your judgement was correct.”

    “But everyone is saying it’s great!”

    “It’s all just marketing! The whole industry is a sham!”.

    Alas, my words offered scant comfort. It wasn’t until she saw some negative reviews in major magazines that she felt consoled.

    ‘A lot of press attention surrounded the publication,’ says a novelist character in Rooney’s new novel, ‘mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the initial coverage.’

    For my girlfriend and me, the negativity was a justification. Maybe our generation’s aesthetic sense hadn’t atrophied after all. There was still hope.

    “Why do you need other people to say something is bad before you can trust in your own judgement?” I asked.

    “Let’s stop talking about this.” she replied.

    After my girlfriend’s near loss of sanity, I resolved to maintain a safe distance from Sally Rooney. The best minds I knew assured me that Sally Rooney’s popularity was a product of marketing, and that her writing was nothing special.

    A New Assignment

    My life went on peacefully, untroubled by the exorcised spirit of Rooney, until two years later an editor challenged me to review Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).

    “I’m afraid to say I’m not a big fan of Sally Rooney”, I said.

    “All the better!” he replied, “She will get enough positive reviews as it is. Write what you really think!”

    I left the office elated at first, but then an inner contrarian bristled. That’s right, I’m a contrarian even among other contrarians. If asked to criticise a mainstream work, I’m inclined to defend it.

    Buying the book in Chapters, I felt immensely self-conscious at the bestsellers shelf. I scanned the shop before taking the blue paperback from the number one slot.

    “If anyone I respect asks why I’m buying it”, I thought, “I’ll tell them I’m writing a review.”

    Returning home, I sat down on the couch with the novel and a pen and notebook on hand. Upon reading the first page, I found an adjective that felt awkward, and I noted this down. On the next, I found a sentence I didn’t like, and then a character description that annoyed me. I noted these down too. Then I realised I wasn’t reading at all.

    I laid aside the notebook and returned to the beginning. Time passed. A few times, I wanted to reach for the notebook, but resisted the impulse, accepting the text for what it was. Slowly, my ego disengaged, and I started to focus on the scenes, the characters, and the structure of the story. The afternoon slipped away.

    On the second afternoon, I became even more deeply engaged. I found some of the ideas expressed by characters exciting. I laughed at parts, enjoying the romantic dynamic between different characters. When I wasn’t reading the book, I looked forward to when I would be again.

    The pace of the novel appeared to slow in the final third however. By the end, I had lost some of the enthusiasm sparked earlier. I still enjoyed it, but believe it doesn’t amount to a substantive whole.

    Summary

    The novel primarily follows two Irish women in their late twenties/early thirties. Eileen works for a low-paying literary magazine, and is terribly jealous of her friend Alice, who is a successful novelist.

    Alice lives in a beautiful house by the sea, has money and time to spare, yet never goes out of her way to visit Eileen. The novel alternates between chapters following Eillen or Alice individually, and chapters composed of email exchanges between the two friends.

    The alternating structure is used very artfully. In the narrative sections, the narrator is extremely remote and impersonal: ‘He was wearing a black zip-up, with the zip pulled right up, and occasionally he tucked his chin under the raised collar, evidently cold.’ (p.216)

    This is a very roundabout way of telling us a character is cold, but it maintains the sense of the narrator’s detachment. This technique is characteristic of Beautiful World, Where Are You. In the narrative sections, we watch the characters keenly, with an interested gaze, but we’re barred from access to their minds; nor does the narrator offer insights into the characters. Thus, for example:

    The waitress from behind the bar had come out to mop down the empty tables with a cloth. The woman named Alice watched her for a few seconds and then looked at the man again. (p. 6)

    Or,

    When Felix saw Alice approaching, he stood up, greeted her, touched her waist, and asked what she would like to drink.” (p. 214)

    There’s a clinical coldness to the narrator, but while fulfilling the role of a dispassionate eye, the descriptions of actions remain vague. It lacks, therefore, a truly realist attention to detail.

    The rationale for this style seems to receive its most explicit justification around the midpoint, where the narrator says:

    Their conversation seemed to have had some effect on them both, but it was impossible to decipher the nature of the effect, its meaning, how it felt to them at that moment, whether it was something shared between them or something about which they felt differently. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves, and these were questions without fixed answers, and the work of making meaning was still going on.(p. 126)

    I am bound to ask: if a realist novel doesn’t offer readers insights into their lives then what is its purpose? Are the experiences of Dublin millennials really so profound that they can’t be explained in words?

    The coldness in the narrative chapters emphasises the emotional warmth of the email correspondence between Eileen and Alice. The end of chapter five, for example, shows us an Alice aloof and withdrawn in conversation; whereas the next chapter opens with a forthright Alice telling Eileen: ‘Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way.’

    The emails allow floodgates to open kept firmly closed through the narrative chapters. In there, Alice and Eileen share their worries, hopes, and undergraduate analyses of our current predicament.

    This is my favourite part of the book by far. Why? Because the opinions expressed by the characters show conspicuous self-awareness on Rooney’s part of her place in contemporary culture, and the role her novels play.

    The contemporary novel is irrelevant (pp. 94 – 95); the cult of the author is philosophically groundless and dangerous but is maintained by marketing hacks (p. 55); the oppressor/victim complex in online discourse is more theological than political (p. 74); beauty died in 1976 (p. 75). These are ideas we can agree on, and I am glad to hear them voiced in a mainstream novel.

    Ruthless Self-Examination

    Beautiful World, Where Are You doesn’t need to be critiqued. It does that for you. At one point, the millenial novelist Alice laments her public image:

    I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe she is me.(p. 55)

    The ruthless self-examination offers Rooney salvation from her cultural sins. No longer do we need to critique her. She is doing it for us.

    Now, you could view this cynically in two ways. First, consider Theodor Adorno’s idea that the culture industry actually feeds off its own critics.

    Thus Punk came along and rails against Popular music, and then became the new Popular music. In a postmodern turn, the more you look into the myth of Punk, the more produced and insincere it seems.

    The Sex Pistols were a punk-look-alike band, a few handpicked chaps that fitted the image of a Punk band, not a real group of rag-tag lads from the street as in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. Nirvana is a similar case. We’re sick of hair metal, let’s make music rock again, and then you’re on the front cover of Rolling Stone. The more you rebel against the industry, the more you’re playing into the angry rocker cliche. There’s no way out.

    Top of the Food Chain

    So, Sally Rooney’s novel can complain about how banal contemporary novels are, how useless and privileged its author is for spending her life writing such things, and through that self-critique, she secures her position at the top of the millennial novelist hierarchy.

    Slavoj Žižek has discussed at length the role played by guilt and self-deprecation in our current discourse, evident in its most extreme form on Twitter.

    If we are guilty of all the ills in the world, then we become, paradoxically, important. It all centres around us. Thus, Alice writes of going to a Dublin shop and thinking:

    of all the rest of the human population – most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty – who have never seen or entered such a shop. And thus, this is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! (p. 17)

    She is highlighting her sense of guilt, and therefore her virtue, but it also reveals an arrogance. We are at the very top; we must be generous; we must be humble; we must be self-deprecating. Why? Because we are important.

    Žižek refers to a marketing ploy used by Starbucks to sell their coffee The chain acknowledges it is more expensive than competitors, but every 10 cent goes to starving children in a far off country.

    Therefore, to assuage your guilt about commodifying the planet to the detriment of the developing world, simply buy this particular commodity.

    Likewise, if you feel defeated by the state of the contemporary novel, read a contemporary novel that complains about this too. It may be banal, but at least it will be ‘relatable’, and can we ask for anything more?

    This is really the key issue. Rooney can articulate what is wrong with the contemporary novel, but can’t seem to write any differently for all that self-critique. The same dross is dished out, but now it’s served with a side of cringing humility.

    The aperitif of self-criticism may eliminate the lingering dull flavours, but I’d rather have eaten some good food in the first place.

    Possibly Insidious…

    I was pleasantly surprised by the self-awareness exhibited in this novel, especially evident in the emails sent between Eileen and Alice, articulating how I feel about the contemporary novel and the cult of Rooney in a way better than I could myself.

    These critiques are, however, ultimately unsatisfying, because they undermine rather than justify the narrative sections.

    They don’t spur Rooney on to write superior work, or even anything different. Instead, they simply undermine the banality of the narrative in a possibly insidious way.

    Why insidious? Because the critique of the mainstream fitting seamlessly into the mainstream really illustrates the failure of the critique to have any effect on the status quo. It becomes a pose, emotional venting that doesn’t amount to anything; failing to point to anywhere better, or just different.

    Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You was published by Faber & Faber (London) on September 7th.

    All Images (c) Frank Armstrong