Norman Spinrad and Radical Science Fiction

What's in a title? For something like The Void Captain's Tale, Norman Spinrad's 1983 confession of one such, you would be forgiven for expecting space opera fare with little to differentiate it from the post-Star Wars gold rush of star fighters, blasters, and explosions. Albeit with a darker tinge. Void, after all, is not just a synonym for space but for negative absence. Likewise, after learning the main conceit of the book - that interstellar travel of the future is powered by women's orgasms - one might expect the tacky, questionable sexploitation that is the hallmark of low rent science fiction, and of which there was plenty around at the time. Happily, on both counts, these assumptions are wrong.

Spoilers follow.

The titular void captain, Genro Kane Gupta, is looking forward to journeying on the Dragon Zephyr. This will be a routine flight transporting cargo and 10,000 passengers in cold sleep to a far-flung destination. In this future, instantaneous FTL is possible but this can only happen in short hops of three to five light years. The technology, which was salvaged and retro-engineered from a precursor race of sentients referred to as We Who Have Gone Before requires a living component - a pilot. They are inserted as a node into the star drive's circuitry, and they have to be willing. It won't work if someone is forced in against their will. Unfortunately, experimentation has adduced that only a vanishingly tiny population of women are capable of the rigours of piloting and only 200 out of untold billions were in service. At the moment of the jump, the instantaneous translation of the ship from one point in real space to another is experienced by the pilot as a moment of bliss and release whose nearest approximation is sexual ecstasy. Typically, the pilot is left inert and unresponsive and requires at least 24 hours to recover before the next jump. This experience also exacts a physical toll. The career of a pilot is not a long one.

Star flight abides by strict social etiquettes. Genro oversees a very small crew such is the ship's automation, and the captaincy is largely ceremonial. While responsible for the ship, the main duties on a flight are to press the jump button and be active in the shipboard society of awake passengers. The captain is expected to partner with the Honoured Passenger, the ship's social lead who spends their time contriving entertainments, occasions, and fitting out cabins and decks to fit the travellers' moods. It is typical, as the ship's two points of authority, that their relationship is sexual. The purpose of this is not just to entertain, but to overlay and suppress how the interstellar arteries of this far future society are effectively dependent on the (ultimately fatal) sexual labour of a minority of women.

What happens if the facade breaks down? This is the domain of the Void Captain's Tale, and as such should be approached as an SF novel of manners. For the ship to work as per convention, there must be strict separation between them and the pilot, with their only being attended to by the three medical crew in-between jumps. This is broken within the first few pages as, on the shuttle up, Genro has an awkward encounter with Dominique Alia Wu - the assigned pilot. Having already stumbled over the contact taboo, following the first jump Dominique breaks protocol by shrugging off the usual medical ministrations and taking up a place in the officers' restaurant. Not only is this shocking, her plain appearance, workmanlike uniform, and buzz cut hair outrages and offends. Which does not deter Dominique from demanding the privileges she, as an officer, is entitled to. Genro is called in to negotiate a compromise that would please all parties, but in so doing begins nurturing a sexual obsession with her. Partly because she's taboo, but mainly because she speaks to his sense of sexual inadequacy. He wants her precisely because her sexual experience far exceeds his own. Dominique has touched something he can never experience, and he becomes haunted by how no matter how expert his technique or attentive his lovemaking, this will only be a faint shadow of the ecstasy that explodes through her at the moment of the jump.

There starts the unravelling. Genro stops being able to perform his conjugal duties according to expectations, suffering the dysfunctions of impotence and premature excitement in equal measure - forcing a rupture between the captaincy and the Honoured Passenger, who is quick to communicate her displeasure to the other tourists. He steals away for private liaisons with Dominique, which only affirm his feared inadequacies. He appears distracted, he goes for a space walk while the ship is travelling at relativistic speeds, and all this is draining him of authority. And when his affair with Dominique is found out, there is uproar. The man charged with veiling the grim reality of FTL travel not only fails in his task, but by his obsession he has eroticised it. However, worse is to come. In their tete tete, Dominique tries to describe the ineffable experience of the null space that enables the transmission of the ship. She requests that Genro does not input any coordinates prior to the next jump. She argues the technology the star drive is based on was not meant for fast travel but was for the precursor race to transcend and inhabit the next layer of reality she has had glimpses of. Jumping blind would enable her to shed her body and inhabit this realm. The only problem is that should the ship survive, there's no telling where it might re-emerge into reality, there's very little chance of any other female passenger being able to become the next pilot, and at relativistic speeds it would take years to reach the nearest inhabited system. And that's without taking the supplies situation into account. Will Genro run the risk of sacrificing all to free - and satisfy - his lover?

Spinrad's book is what you would expect from something sat at the intersection of the transatlantic new wave. There is the concern with literary sensibility it shares with the British school, and the punkish tear-it-all-down attitude of the Americans. It also bears witness to a distinction Spinrad makes in his 1990 book of SF criticism, Science Fiction in the Real World. Here, he posits "sci-fi" as a specific sub-division of science fiction, which he associates with the space operas of the Golden Age. These are swash-buckling adventures with heroes, villains, space weapons, and clear story arcs in which everything comes good in the end. This, he argues, is the way the mainstream sees science fiction and why they are wary of ever trying it. Science fiction proper, however, is about experimentation, future visions, imagining new ways of being and becoming, and pushing literature's envelope. Good SF should provoke and unsettle, while avoiding the temptations of neat narrative resolution - something that might comfort publishers and readers, but serves to undermine the innovative or revolutionary character of the work. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is singled out as an example, with its academic-sounding epilogue closing down the ambiguity of the ending and the idea the horrors of Gilead persisted for any length of time. The same could be said for Keith Roberts's Pavane, on the end of which is appended an explainer which is very sci-fi, unnecessary, and a touch cringe.

The Void Captain's Tale is a contribution to the revolutionary SF tradition. Its society is post-scarcity and sounds much better than ours, but here it is a foil for critiquing the vanities of bourgeois culture in its high and mass forms. For the former, ritual, manners, and "high art" species of cultural capital paper over the brute realities of economic necessity. For the latter, it's the immediacy of the commodity as one among many purchasing decisions to be made that divorces that separates if from a biography produced under a determinate set of production relations for profit. Dominique is of a minuscule cohort of pilots, but without sexually exploiting their talents Spinrad's interstellar society would crumble. It is a way of thinking through masculine sexual anxiety, and how it might lead to individual behaviours that impact on and endanger the community. And a meditation on radical action, that a politics guided by an understanding of how the world really works is by no means a guarantee of success. This novel confounds and challenges, it plays with and dumps on the space lasers and pervy sex beloved of more conservative-inclined SF authors of the time, and while trashing the tropes tells a compelling story that does not shy away from ambiguous conclusions. A book that, over 40 years on, still deserves a wider readership.

The Awful Dissonance of Orbital Resonance

When the world is maddening, why not sublimate that anger into a critique of an obscure science fiction novel from 33 years ago? Okay, but as it happens John Barnes's Orbital Resonance did not pass the SF reading public by at the time. Far from being one that got away, it was in the running for a James Tiptree Jr award and a Nebula in 1991 and 1992, was plastered with blurb from the likes of Poul Anderson and Orson Scott Card, and was variously and favourably compared by reviewers with Robert A Heinlein's juvenile novels. That should make for a good, or at least an interesting book, right?

Apart from the the two Donaldsons earlier this year, this is the worst novel I've read since embarking on the SF quest. On paper, Barnes's book sounds intriguing. In the far off future of 2025, the world has been devastated by the "Eurowar", resource depletion, and a megadeath "mutAIDS" pandemic. On the plus side, a new spirit of cooperation is abroad. All nations have scrapped their arms, and an international effort is underway to colonise the solar system with a view to rebuilding society on Earth. Instead of being at loggerheads, humanity is pulling in one direction.

Melpomene is a 13 year old girl whose family has moved onto The Flying Dutchman, a hollowed out asteroid that plies the trading route to Mars. Free from the constraints of Earth, the crew are tasked with building a new society. Families were screened beforehand to admit certain personality types, who would end up raising children best suited for a particular niche in the burgeoning interplanetary society. Melpomene, for instance, finds out during the course of the book that she's being groomed for some kind of mayoral role while Randy, her sort-of boyfriend is primed for the officer ranks. Education consists of constant testing and being shuffled around temporary teams. This applies whether one is taking maths, Earth history, or playing aerocrosse - a low gravity sport where four teams compete but can (and do) make temporary alliances with one another. This, it is subsequently revealed, is to try and build a post-capitalist society by digging out the root of generalised commodity production: individualism. After scrapes arising from bullying, rivalries, flunking tests, and parental tension, the adult crew abruptly decide to get off the ship at Mars and leave - having decided their Earth-bound neuroses were drags on and causing dysfunctions among their children. The kids are so alright they can build socialism without their folks around.

That is all there is to the book. If it wasn't for the aerocrosse scenes, which read like badly bowdlerised and diluted battle sphere scene from Ender's Game, a race her Melpomene's brother wins on the outside of the rock, and the jarring insertion of future speak, this could easily be a twee high school drama. And nothing ever happens. The Heinlein comparisons are understandable (some might day because of his clumsy characterisation), but unlike Citizen of the Galaxy or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where the SF contrivances are central to the plotting, in Orbital Resonance they read like badly sutured grafts. This could, be forgiven if the rendering of dialogue and relationships were any good, but they're not. The cast is wooden and not believable, and that's fatal if the work wants the whizz bangs of cognitive estrangement to play second fiddle to the exploration of the human condition and character study. Melpomene, as a 13 year old school girl, is probably the least convincing viewpoint character I've ever read.

What really grates is the poor effort Barnes makes to address adult themes. The not infrequent swearing suggests this is not really aimed at youngsters. But piling on the cringe, if not the shudders, is the purient treatment of burgeoning sexuality. A few times Melpomene sees girls her age around her age naked, and Barnes has her pondering when she's going to start developing like her ample contemporaries. If that wasn't bad enough, this clearly pre-pubescent 13 year-old has a couple of masturbation scenes slotted int without any warning The past is a foreign country, not an alien planet. This was not acceptable in the early 90s, so what was Barnes, his publishers, and those who penned the sparkling reviews thinking it was fine to include them? These creepy asides make the book much worse and far from appropriate to the age groups this was aimed at.

There are three more books in this setting, with its sequel - Kaleidoscope Century - containing rape and murder, despite also being marketed at kids. Start as you mean to go on, I suppose. Of course, awful things happen and believable fictional universes often reflect the world to say something about it. Here, Barnes is saying nothing. This is a 198-page trudge through the humdrum lives of school children who never do anything interesting. As if to make up for it, Barnes turns authorial sex pest and we get voyeuristic glimpses a young girl's body. One to leave on the shelf unopened with, by the sounds of it, the rest of his Century Next Door series.

Image Credit

Pornography and Partial Subjectivity in Crash

Stating Crash is a pornographic novel is not to court controversy. The gratuity of bodies smashed, gouged, and maimed by car crashes, the ick factor of fusing the violence and sexuality of the wreck is the book's appeal and the prophylactic that occasions its notoriety. What attracts many to Crash is what turns off the less prepared reader and shews them away from Ballard's other, more conventional litfic and science fiction. What Ballard accomplishes in Crash is a distillation of the pornographic gaze in extremis. Unlike porn proper, which leaves nothing to the imagination but is supposed to, as a psychologist puts it, achieve an "instantaneous stirring of the genitals", the wanton prose of Crash disassociates sex from arousal and accomplishes an evacuation of all erotic content. What, in other contexts, would be considered hot is cold and bleak.

The narrator, one James Ballard, documents his entry into the underground fetishism of cars and sex following a fatal accident. There are bangs, and there are bangs. Human bodies or car bodies, there's no distinction between seminal fluid and oil. Warped radiators and broken glass are intimate discards as much as empty condom packets. Scars and injuries are prized reminders of past explosive entanglements between cars. But it's all described matter of factly. There's nothing lecherous or leering. The explicit is rendered without a desire to titillate. And as Crash's conceit is supposed to be fetishistic, there's no notion of joy, feeling, pleasure, satisfaction, or even desire on show. Cars and sex chase each other around London's motorways. There is a fleeting thrill, but little else.

In Signs and Machines, Lazzarato dissects capitalism's reliance on partial subjectivities and the reflex actions of machinic enslavement. I.e. The direction of social behaviour through command and response to signals, as if each of us are cogs and switches in a vast machine. To understand power and exploitation we must relinquish philosophies of the subject and attune our theoretical tools to the unthought/barely acknowledged, and the constitution of the relations that operate below subjectivity's radar. Something he praises Foucault, Deleuze, and particularly Guattari for for doing a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting. As it happens, Lazzarato uses driving as an example of one of these partial subjectivities. He talks about how it is a learned competence, but how for most driving to work or driving into town is a semi-conscious performance. The driver melds with the car, adopts a practical sense for navigating the roads and, more often than not, the journey evaporates from memory no sooner it is completed. Being alert as one pilots through one way systems and chooses appropriate traffic lanes is a semi-subjective state almost akin to reflex. The mind is often elsewhere, focused on what's blaring out of the speakers, engrossed in chatting with passengers, or day dreaming about tea time. Likewise at work, discipline and control has dulled us to the point where subjectivity is actively demobilised. We are unthinking machinic components. Subjectivity only comes into play when something has gone wrong, or we are called upon to design new circuits to enable the signals to flow more smoothly.

Ballard captures the experience of a fused partial subjectivity by bringing together the mechanical body - the car - with the fleshy body's sexual mechanics. Bataille's writing on eroticism was fascinated by the dissolution of subjectivity in sex and the orgasm and, of course, Marx's diagnosis of alienation argued that capitalism meant we only found our humanity in our animal functions - eating, sleeping, and procreating. Crashing together the two partialities creates a new mangled subjectivity or way of being. This is far removed from the 'man' whose death Foucault declaimed, and is something else. The sex in car wrecks is joyless, but so is the desire to court serious injury and death at the intersection. All there is is unfathomable obsession, which is condensed in the figure of Vaughan. A former TV scientist off the nation's screens since his own crash, he has gone from rounded public intellectual - the epitome of 'man' - to a condensation of the one-dimensional. He habitually turns up at smash scenes with his cameras, pores over the images, and obsesses over his goal: a fatal collision with Elizabeth Taylor's Limousine. He has a death drive for a death drive, and the novel begins with this end: the mangled body of Vaughan pinned in the wreckage of a kamikaze launch from a flyover.

The perversity of Crash is not so much the shock of improbably extreme sex between improbably extreme people, or the eroticisation of serious injury or death, but in truthiness. Ballard's imagined community of fetishists cuts up door panels and human limbs to assert the materiality of mutability. Car parts and body parts are thrown together, colliding in an ugly metaphor of the possibilities and becomings technological augmentations have opened to us. And all of these surpass the 'man' of Western philosophy, whose obsolescence is catapulted through the windscreen.

Alien Embassy by Ian Watson

What if we're doing space travel wrong? Are there better ways of getting around than launching huge rockets and spending months/years in flimsy tin cans if we want to visit nearby planets? This is what Ian Watson explores in Alien Embassy. In this possible future, the answer to what is a monumental engineering challenge lies in Eastern philosophy and, particularly, passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And because this book was published in the 1970s, tantric sex. A scientist works out the rituals contained therein can unlock the real star drive: the one in our brains. As such, the world 200 years hence looks very different. Industry is unobtrusive, the world is a managed social ecology, cities have more or less disappeared as the old distinction between town and country has faded away, capitalism's dead, and people rarely venture out of their own locales. Yet there is a space programme and, moreover, there are three alien embassies on the Earth.

How does this all work? Young people found to have latent energies are recruited to their nearby embassy. They undergo training, get paired up with a designated "lover", and when they have sex they learn to project their consciousness across space. Humanity has come into contact with three alien races this way: a bird/tree analogue symbiont, sentient inflatables that float about a low-gravity moon, and more-or-less static crystalline entities rooted to a world bathed by an energetic sun. Communication is psychic so the humans, and presumably vice versa, occupy a volunteer's body so they can talk with their space siblings. Sounds far out. But is there more than meets the eye? Alien Embassy follows Lila, a young East African woman who has the talent. When she enters the embassy, she's told in no uncertain terms never to go through the doors with the red swastika on them. Whatever might happen next?

I'm not going to say more than that about the plot. This is the first Ian Watson I've read, and it was very good though some aspects of it were, let's say, of its time. His previous book was called Orgasmachine, to give you a flavour of where Watson's coming from. There are adolescent sexual encounters that, thankfully, aren't rendered in too much detail and would never make it into a mainstream publisher today. There's also the uncomfortable asides on breasts, but they're not as frequent nor as prurient as others one might mention. Thankfully, the rest of Alien Embassy rises above these awkward moments. The prose is literary, there is proper character development, and Watson is able to explain his esoteric melding of Eastern philosophy and Western science without intrusive and barely digestible info dumps. He sustains interest through two conceptual breakthroughs that completely upend the world he's built, highlighting a theme apparently common to his work - the manipulation of people and situations by elites.

Aside from being a well-written and entertaining novel, Alien Embassy could be thought of as a polemic against the arrogance of Enlightenment-centred thinking. Which, given how most of the main texts of French poststructuralism had appeared by the time this book did, certainly finds it swimming in a cultural current that hasn't got weaker in the 40-odd years since. The fantastical uses to which Tantric ritual and Tibetan mythology are put underscores how, despite their elision with mysticism in the West, they emerged as practical frames of reference for making sense of the world. And though exploiting the "mystery" and "exoticism" Eastern philosophy typically has for Western (British) readers, Watson makes the case that they are valid frames for interpreting the world. However, the fact the Bardo - the Space Communication Administration - that runs the embassies and is in charge of space flight might not be all that it seems could serve as a cautionary note to his more credulous readers; that they should beware anyone who touts Eastern philosophy as a cure all for the empty Western soul. As such, Watson is making a more nuanced point than some contemporary writers do about similar themes.

Alien Embassy is a stunning work of imagination, and is very much on the readable side of mind-bending genre fiction. Most of the uncomfortable sex stuff is toward the beginning . If you can get past that, an unsung banger of British SF awaits.

Image Credit

Gateway by Frederik Pohl

As the winner of a Hugo and Nebula award, Frederik Pohl's Gateway has its share of the highest honours organised science fiction can bestow. But time is often unkind to the works of the recent past, and that is true of this 1970s space opera. Not because the depiction of the technology is dated, or that the mores are old hat. What sits ill with the contemporary is the tension at the core of the novel: the uneasy wedding of world building and narrative.

The premise of Gateway piqued my interest. The exploration of Venus finds the planet honeycombed with tunnels left by a mysterious alien race dubbed the Heechee. The disappeared without explanation 500,000 years previously, leaving behind a smattering of artefacts but nothing resembling writing, or clues about their society, or how they looked. Eventually a ship is located, an autopilot is triggered and off it flies to a nearby asteroid. Except it's hollowed out and contains a thousand Heechee ships, most of them operational. A corporation independent of Earth's competing nations is formed to oversee Gateway and prospectors are invited to take flights out. The ship controls and how they work are a mystery, so it's a case of volunteering for a flight, activating a ship, and hoping it will take you somewhere safe and return you before the on board rations run out. Big cash awards are available for prospectors who take close readings of celestial phenomena, bring back evidence of alien biology, and/or serviceable Heechee tech for reverse engineering. But it's all about chance. Because the controls are inscrutable and are only slowly worked out over the course of the novel, every launch is a lottery. Only the exceptionally lucky make a strike big enough to set themselves up for life. For the unlucky, of which there are plenty, life is exactly what they lose.

There are always volunteers and our hero, Robinette Broadhead, is typical of the world's working class. He was condemned to a life of drudge in the Earth's proliferating food mines. Because the population has swelled to enormous proportions, fossil fuel production is the only means of sustaining the hungry tens of billions. Oil and coal are extracted to feed yeast, which provides the dietary staples for most. In this future, the entirety of Utah has become an open cast pit and Wyoming is being strip mined of its oil-bearing shale. The problem are these fuels are finite and when they run out billions will starve. The hunt for Heechee tech that can alleviate this crisis is a top priority. But this isn't Bob's problem because, as fortune would have it, he wins the lottery. With his quarter of a million he escapes the grind and buys a single ticket to Gateway in the hope that, Micawber-like, something wonderful will turn up. And so we're set up for an interesting tale of discovery.

There are three aspects to the book. There are Bob's adventures on the station and the experiences of shipping out, his later engagement of a Freudian computer to help him through the trauma of the trip that made him rich, and a selection of vignettes, notices, and corporate reports that build background and provide the necessary info dumps. It sounds good, but the problem is while the conceit stands up the narrative that explores it does not. Pohl proves unable to provide a story that makes the most of the premise.

Reviews regularly complain about how unsympathetic a character Bob is. He's selfish, bedevilled by anxiety, and has his big secret hanging over him. But that's not the problem. Character flaws are fine - the problem lies in characterisation. Reflecting on Ringworld (among other things), I said there was something that didn't sit right with my teenaged self. Different author and a few decades later, but same problem. There's a hokey thinness to its structure of feeling. Not quite Hanna Barbara with swearing, but a cartoonish quality that pervades Bob's thoughts and actions. We see it also in the academics who appear in the bulletin segments. These glimpses are marred by an awkward join of everyman befuddlement and jaded wiseacring, which I can only presume is an effort at overfamiliar endearment. The difficulties with pitch are evident in relationships, which are stunted and almost always imminently sexual. This is where we encounter a major problem with Pohl's characterisation.

In this supposedly sexually liberated future where bed-hopping is the norm and same-sex relations don't raise an eyebrow, Bob frets about his sexuality. From declaring he has no problems with gay men as long as they leave him alone to shamefully enjoying unspoken and alluded-to liaisons, his psychoanalytic sessions with Sigfrid (to whom he contemptuously appends "the shrink") contrive a singularly uninteresting suggestion that his denial of gay inclinations are one of his main drives. The problem is if the future doesn't attach any importance to sexuality as it does now as an identity marker, therefore sexuality-based discrimination and oppression does not exist and it cannot work as a source of anxiety. The repression of desire and guilt has no material basis. There are no sanctions attending sexual activity between men, and therefore no costs of being found out. As motive it simply does not work because it cannot work, The second aspect of this sexuality tension, which is pretty insulting, lies in Sigfrid's location of Bob's repression. We learn that he was brought up by his mother alone and that they had a distant relationship without much tactile contact. The only time she showed any concern was when she took the infant Bob's temperature, which she did anally. His psyche defines this as intimacy, which explains the wellspring of his desire for men. This side narrative does offer an explanation about why Bob (or Robinette to give him his not-at-all coincidentally feminised full name) is annoying, but it is logically inconsistent and aits inclusions seems solely down to prurience - as if Pohl was trying to work out his own attitudes, but couldn't shake off what bothered him about homosexuality.

The depiction of women are of a type as well. They are up for going to bed with everyone at the drop of a hat, including married women. There are four female characters that become significant to Bob, and he ends up having sex with all of them. Klara is the most important and he forms a romantic relationship with her. She's impulsive, illogical, and beholden to horoscopes. Whenever there's some kind of intimate scene between the two star signs always come up, as if Pohl has trouble imagining his creation might have a complex internal life and be interested in other subjects. At least he doesn't keep talking about breasts. But in what is the book's most disturbing scene, after she hits Bob during a row he beats her up. Nowhere is this reflected on. Bob is aware that it probably means curtains for their relationship, but there's no guilt, or indeed much of a realisation that this is unacceptable. It's neutrally passed over and sealed with an apology once she returns after fleeing to Venus.

The politics of Gateway are ambivalent. The world is carved up into different power blocs, and each of them station their own cruisers by Gateway - presumably to keep an eye on each nation and their designs on the asteroid. As a hyper-marketised society, there is only one way out - the lottery of chance. Given how real world mining has bequeathed a rich tradition of worker militancy, it's difficult to conceive how a world dependent on tens if not hundreds of millions of miners would allow for a turbo-charged, semi-libertarian dog-eat-dog capitalist dystopia. It's worth noting that the world's power blocs, or at least the North American one, isn't groaning under the iron heel of dictatorship. Where there authority is represented in the text it stems from the Gateway corporation. As such, you could make the case that Pohl finds the society he's conceived repugnant and his use of the lottery to get Bob to the station and then treating every ship trip as a throw of the dice underlines a condemnation of the limits capitalism foists on human development. Or he's just noting that chance is a fact of life, fortune is tied up with risk taking, and all we can do is get on with it. Not explicitly neoliberal, but in concert with the spirit of the times.

Gateway does follow the conventional structure of introducing the new and then making what Steve Andrews calls the conceptual breakthrough, whereby the world is turned on its head and everything is cast in a different light. That happens via the trauma weighing down on Bob, and is about the only part of Bob's character arc that works. Some might not think this shortfall matters given how compelling the setting is. And to a degree, I'm interested in what happens next (there are a slew of sequels and shorts set in the Heechee sequence), but it would undoubtedly swear others off the series and perhaps Pohl's volumes of other works. As a 1970s space opera it does not compare well to the New Space Opera inaugurated by Iain M Banks a decade later, which did and continues to pay attention to literary quality, character development, and believable and consistent world building. There's a stylistic chasm between this and Hyperion, for example.

Is it worth reading? As a historical artefact, yes. But it is untouched by the British and American new waves, so the health warning is in place for those expecting crafted characters and decent plotting. Gateway is not a good novel for anyone thinking about getting into science fiction, and I'm left wondering how many mainstream readers tried it on the strength of its award winning reputation and went on to give SF a lifelong body swerve. One for the curious, but its glaring deficiencies do not make for a great read today.

Exposing Russell Brand

Like many of the celebrity sex predators who were outed before him, Russell Brand paraded his disgusting behaviour in plain sight. And a lot of us, me included, did not see what was obvious. From his jokey shagging references on EFourum and Big Brother's Big Mouth, to grossly inappropriate harassment via his BBC radio shows, and stand up routines furnished with references to violent sex, in the context of the post-ironic 00s many were quick to - wanted yo - assume this was an anarchic act in the British tradition of near-the-knuckle cheeky chappies. A persona as affected as Michael Pennington's permadrunk alter ego, Jonny Vegas. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

Saturday night's Dispatches and the accompanying Times article were difficult to stomach. In painstaking detail, the joint investigation established repeated patterns of behaviour in which women were groomed and gaslit, subject to sexual assaults and, in one case, rape. Among them included a 16 year old whom, it was alleged, was seriously sexually assaulted. Accompanying the grim details was not just the weight of testimony, but corroborating witnesses, character references, admissions by Brand himself in his multiple autobiographies, and text messages that came from his phone number. If anyone has any doubt after wading through overwhelming and credible claims which, remember, would have been vetted by the notoriously twitchy libel lawyers in C4 and Times employ, then they were either reading or watching something different, or had concluded out of hand that Brand was innocent of the allegations.

Take Britain's self-described working class hero, Paul Embery, for example. He immediately said that Brand was entitled to the presumption of innocence. A typically stupid response from a very stupid man. Firstly, there are no charges and we do not live inside a court case. Second, what does it say about someone who, confronted with overwhelming evidence that a celebrity is a danger to women and has been given a free pass from a succession of broadcast controllers, prattles on about "innocence"? And then we have a clutch of right wing misogynists closing ranks around their man. If you have Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Tate - backed by the usual horrors from British right wing media (who were not so reticent about the Huw Williams allegations) rushing to provide a defence, then surely that should give anyone thinking about defending Brand pause. But there's never stopping Chris Williamson, who not only retweeted Brand's own conspiracy-mongering defence of his conduct ("all my relationships were consensual", as if that's the issue here), but also the just asking questions response of Jackie Walker. A reminder, as if it was needed, that this pair and their supporters would be the kiss of death to any left project.

A common theme of Brand's conspiracy-inflected support is that their man is a "threat" and therefore needed taking down. But how is Brand a threat, exactly? To whom? Because he incoherently rants about media bias? Or that his snake oil bullshit of wellness retreats, talking therapies and motivational mantras, and ice baths threaten the scaly grip of big pharma? Brand poses the status quo less of a threat than a GCSE media studies class. Indeed, the so-called cosmic right with its anti-vax rubbish and faux anti-authoritarianism fits right wing governance strategies hand-in-glove. Brand threatens the powers-that-be not a jot. He reinforces them.

The more convincing explanation to the "why now" comes from turning the conspiracy theory on its head. The allegations against Brand have had an airing precisely because he's not a threat. Or, to be more accurate, because he's an irrelevance. Since disappearing up his own spiritualist backside, his mainstream entertainment career has more or less withered. He still does stand up, but most of his money comes from his very anti-establishment business interests. In other words, no one in the media has any capital tied up in his celebrity. This is different to, for example, Noel Fielding whose inappropriate relationships have circulated extensively around social media. Yet with a new series of the Great British Bake Off in the can, C4 won't be inviting the spotlight to play on his affairs. Until at least the season wraps up. Similarly, the case of Dan Wootton is instructive. A proper sexual predator and no mistaking, his behaviour has been covered in the Byline Times and has since received coverage in the more liberal sections of the media. Yet his berth at GB News looks secure, even if his position at The Mail is less so. And shall we mention Nick Cohen as well? All three are protected to a degree because of the investments sunk by different media institutions into their person. If Brand was still a significant figure with a hit TV show or series of films currently under his belt, then chances are these allegations would not have had an airing.

Brand's long history of sexual abuse and mistreatment of women has justly caught up with him, and the women who have had the courage to speak out about their awful experiences should be listened to and believed. Likewise, the work sunk into this exposure of Brand's shitty behaviour reflects well on The Times and the Dispatches team. But the forces that enabled their work are the same ones that enforce a pall of silence where other TV and radio personalities are concerned. Brand is not the only sexual predator to have prowled around the celebrity circuit, and even now there are commercial interests working to ensure other allegations about other men remain nothing more than whispers and rumour.

The BBC: A Qualified Defence

It hasn't been long since The Sun last overreached itself. On that occasion, they allowed Jeremy Clarkson to go into print with a typically disgusting attack on Meghan Markle. This time, it's a salacious story on a so far unnamed BBC presenter that is, at best, shoddy work, and at worst deliberately misleading.

Let's recap what we know. On Saturday The Sun splashed its exclusive claiming a household name had paid over thousands of pounds to a young person for explicit photos. It also claimed they were under 18 at the time, had a crack habit apparently brought about by their interaction with our unknown celebrity, and was still in receipt of money from them. The paper further reported that the family had complained to the BBC but no action had been taken. Indeed, this celebrity was seen hobnobbing with BBC bosses recently, suggesting that yet again the corporation's management were looking the other way while questions hung over one of their biggest names. But then in an about-turn yesterday, a lawyer acting for the "victim" said this was all a tissue of lies ("rubbish" as the statement put it) and was more a case of their family disapproving of their lifestyle. I.e. They were on OnlyFans and all the presenter had done was pay them for explicit content.

Earlier today a second story came out, claiming that our presenter had contacted a guy in his early 20s, asked to meet up, didn't, and then sent him a slew of abusive messages when he threatened to go to the press. The latter has been confirmed by the BBC as coming from the celebrity's phone, but for the speculators following this on social media there is no way of knowing if these are actionable from a police point of view until The Met says something. There is now the allegation he tried meeting a third person in contravention of the lockdown rules in force at the time.

For The Sun, jumping on and spinning the story to suggest there was something inappropriate and underage going on was designed to undermine the BBC's legitimacy. It's likely to be a very costly gambit for which they'll end up grovelling again. Nevertheless, The Sun's anti-BBC vendetta isn't something worthwhile cheering on, despite the broadcaster having massive problems from our point of view. There's the obvious commercial argument. The BBC still has massive resources and can potentially out-compete most media organisations. It's a non-commercial rival to Murdoch's operations, and he has an economic interest in seeing the BBC brought low and/or transformed into a commercially-funded operation. And as we know, regardless of how distorted the institution or public good, for hyper class conscious right wingers anything that isn't about straightforward commodity production or challenges their power a smidgen is an enemy.

And there is the politics. The claims of BBC neutrality and impartiality are easily disproved, but despite that the ideology it secretes combines certain values with its pro-establishment positioning. The Sun and Murdoch want to see the BBC disestablished because, for millions of people, it embodies integrity and fairness in news. It has a certain standing against which News Corp's output is shown to be outright partial and bent to the sectional agendas of the right, and that makes their propaganda less effective than it might be. Think of it as the BBC providing a yardstick. With its disappearance from the news gathering and reporting scene, standards would inevitably tumble, or become appendages to the politics of commercial broadcasters. This is a recipe for segmenting the audience along political lines as per the United States, making divide and conquer easier, and the development of a common ground more difficult. Only oligarchical interests and grifters are served by this scenario. Presently, the BBC is an obstacle to this happening to broadcast news because it is an institution that is valued by millions across political divides.

This is reflected in the right wing and left wing critiques of the BBC. The left often criticises its low key pro-establishment editorialising and its using right wing frames to construct its reporting because it falls short of the values its committed to. The right criticises the BBC when it does approximate impartiality and even-handedness, such as when it allows left wingers onto its politics shows or critically reports on government policy and activity. Accuracy and evidence counts more for the left simply because right wing politics is structurally dishonest. Its purpose is to present the minority interest as the universal interest, and that means lying and obfuscating as a matter of routine. Or being economical with the truth when the indiscretions of a BBC presenter are used a lever for pushing a highly sectional political and commercial agenda.

Masturbation is Not an Ethnographic Method

Masturbation as a research tool. Really? Karl Andersson makes the case in the Qualitative Research journal. His piece, which argues that masturbation is a form of method acting, of entering the mindset of the subculture he's studying, allows for a deeper, more embodied way of grasping the subject matter than the standard methods of interviewing, observing, and immersing oneself in their output. He argues that there's a (subterranean) tradition of academics having had intimate relations with the people they've researched in the past, so is this any different? Unsurprisingly, this caught the attention of the Daily Mail back in April, and Tory MP Neil O'Brien weighed in, using it as foil for an ignorant attack on social scientific and humanities research generally. "The non-STEM side of higher education is just much too big, producing too much that is not socially useful", he crowed.

On this occasion, however, O'Brien has a point about this article. It's not that the author was writing "about his experiences masturbating to Japanese porn", it's what this pornographic content is. Andersson is undertaking a PhD examining shota culture, which is a subset of "erotic comics" whose content deals with young boy characters in sexually explicit scenarios. For "research", Andersson masturbated exclusively to this material for three months to help enter the subcultural mindset. After each session he wrote up his impressions as field notes, with the material presented in the article more a commentary on his enjoyment than reflections on them. These raise several questions.

Firstly, how the hell did this get published in a prestigious methods journal? Where were the editors' moral compasses and their common sense? As a contribution to understanding paedophilic subcultures, which is worthwhile only when it is bound up with an ethic of prevention and cure, this piece offers nothing. Andersson suggests his article is about "combatting loneliness", which seems to boil down to the fact other people enjoy this sort of content and therefore that knowledge helps overcome it - while imparting a frisson of eroticism. What a load of rubbish.

Second, it's a complete ethical failure on the part of the supervisory staff to not only allow this PhD to go ahead, but for Manchester University to fund it directly from their pot of money. This is not disinterested research: Andersson was the editor and publisher of explicit "arts" magazines that promoted the sexualisation of young boys and under-age teenagers. He said paedophilia was "far away" from the discussion of his publications, which by any sort of conventional or social scientific definition is obviously untrue. And yet here we have someone undertaking a PhD to, it seems, sate his particular proclivities. Why didn't this set the alarm bells ringing?

Going back to Bourdieu, he was very clear that all of us occupy intersections of power and struggle. Over the course of our lives, we cultivate stakes and interests in particular social fields - though often we're not fully conscious of this, nor of how the assumptions underpinning the rules of those fields condition and are assimilated into our spontaneous outlook. Anyone undertaking a social investigation will likely import those biases into the research and, by accident or design, distort their representation of the research object and the claims they make about it. Bourdieu's argument is any investigator must, as a scientific precondition, apply a sociological analysis to the coordinates they occupy in social space. A sociology of one's own sociology, if you like. This would highlight the systemic social advantages one has, the power that the researcher acquires over the researched, and crucially the material interests they have in the completion of this research. This reflexive practice does not eliminate bias, but by accounting for the stakes one has in a project a researcher is committing an act of sociological honesty and therefore enhances the scientific bona fides of their work. It is situated as an intervention in a claims-making body of scholarship, and if there are any distortions their lineage is visible.

This very basic methodological precaution is entirely absent from the article. It even states at the bottom that there are no conflicts of interest! Andersson says his research is about "desire and identity", a laudable and fascinating area of research - albeit one that has to be handled with sensitivity and where safeguarding and the understanding of vulnerabilities are necessities. But by adopting a position of faux objectivity in which his own sexual and material interests do not figure, this is nothing but a prurient exclamation of his socially unacceptable tastes, alibied by some light theory and academic poetry. This is the unacknowledged promotion of a legally dubious subculture, not edgy methodology that shows how hung up everyone is about sexuality. Second, it's obvious from this trash article that masturbation offers no insights - except into the tastes and the mind of the author.

Qualitative Research are undertaking an investigation, and the University of Manchester is also looking into the project. That such a thing could have got through the research and ethics committees suggest something is very wrong with their processes and procedures. But is not just the grotesque subject matter that stings, it's the complete reputational and political cluelessness on show. When the social sciences and humanities are under attack, taking on someone into abusive "art" to "investigate" paedophilic mangas is tone deafness of the most stupid, morally vacuous, and damaging kind.

The Class Politics of the OnlyFans Porn Ban

Banning sexually explicit content from OnlyFans is the 2021 curve ball no one was expecting. According to reports too numerous to count, the company, which has 150 million users and oversaw transactions worth $5bn last year are being forced to dump the porn by banks and payment processing companies. Soft porn content will apparently be allowed when the terms of service change from October, but for the hundreds of thousands of sex workers who've made OnlyFans tens of millions are out.

Is prudishness to blame? Apparently not. According to work done by the BBC, leaked OnlyFans documents showed inconsistencies dealing with illegal content. If posts contravened their terms of service, particularly underage material, then accounts wouldn't face an automatic ban, and leniency was shown to popular users. OnlyFans's client companies have also recoiled at the presence of extreme sex acts, escorting, and the use of drugs. It's worth noting Mastercard and Visa announced last December they would no longer process payments for Pornhub because of the prevalence of stolen content, depictions of sexual violence, and underage videos which Mindgeek, the parent company, has proven tardy at removing. Rather than ramping up its moderation capacity and cracking down on illegal posts, OnlyFans have obviously decided it's too much bother and/or not feasible to police a couple of million performing accounts.

This raises all sorts of issues. By cracking down on illegality, hundreds of thousands of sex workers, most of whom are women, are going to be robbed of their income. Particularly during the pandemic, OnlyFans and, to a lesser extent, similar sites like ManyVids and AdmireMe have provided a livelihood and/or much-needed supplementary income for workers who've had their workplaces shut down. Particularly for those already in the sex industry, it has become a safer alternative to survival sex work. None of this doesn't mean there aren't women manipulated and pushed into performing on the site, but by the same token testimony abounds of the control this affords content creators. They can choose their hours, their limits, their prices, and over what they offer. There is no pimp nor shady owner of a dubious "gentlemen's club" taking their cut. Therefore the anger content creators have at the decision is easily understandable. With an imminent cut to income, they either have to spend time building up a profile on one of OnlyFans's rivals amid the uncertainty of whether they too will get shut down, or run the risks of returning to more conventional settings - now with the added prospect of Covid.

Did OnlyFans have to dump on the workers that made them rich? Of course not, but avoiding their predicament would have meant breaking decisively with the political economy of platform capitalism. As Nick Srnicek persuasively argued, not only does surplus value materialise in plain sight of the worker who generated it (in this case, the 20% cut OnlyFans takes from every transaction on its platform, a feature of advanced capitalist societies more generally), but making money out of the internet depends on monopolising a particular market. As Twitter has cornered microblogging, Instagram photo sharing, Google search, and YouTube video, their continued profits depend on data harvesting and therefore the maintenance of market dominance. Our trendy Silicon Valley friends are distinctly old school when it comes to appetites for mergers and acquisitions, as well as extending the reach of their platforms. For example, it is quite possible - and is certainly the case for millions of internet users - to eke out an online existence entirely on Facebook.

The consequence of this is prickly, authoritarian corporate structures and cultures. Nick talks about the dirty tricks Uber, for example, undertook to drive potential rivals out of business. More recently we've seen eBay accused of harassing critics, reading like the low grade gangsterism of the 1920s as opposed to the ultracool techbro image of the 2020s. The people they make money from - the users - are so much bits of data to be manipulated, chopped up, repackaged and sold advertising to. They're somewhat less than individuals, so the default cognitive setting of social media managers towards their service users will be conditioned by this. Which goes some way to explain the disrespect OnlyFans has shown the pool of people who make it its money. It didn't have to be like this.

In the first place, OnlyFans acted like other social media companies, particularly Pornhub, when it came to extreme and illegal content. Their instinct was to indulge it, just as Twitter has long tacitly encouraged racism and fake news on its site for the clicks and attention. In other words, the situation the firm now finds itself in is thanks to management failure, of permitting everything to build its market. Instead of giving illegality the nod, OnlyFans might have democratised their platform instead. Moderators and service users could have been empowered to flag and ban members, albeit with a more robust and accountable appeals process. Allied to this would be moves to cooperatise the platform - no to "enlightened" management - and give performers a real stake in how it was run. Existing management would retain its stake as cooperative members on a one member/one vote basis. But naturally, the choice between running a successful service providing safe sources of income for sex workers versus a reduced service firmly under corporate dictation, management are always going to choose the latter. Happy, empowered workers and improved cash flow always comes second next to the class politics of command and control.

It is to be hoped that from the ashes of the OnlyFans debacle that enough sex workers club together to go down this alternative route, taking back the full value they generate and showing other social media users that platform management is not just unnecessary, but entirely antithetical to their interests.

The Rosie Duffield Affair

There is always a tweet. During last week's furore over Dominic Cummings, Opposition whip and Labour MP for Canterbury got on her high horse about social distancing. Little did anyone know that she herself was being somewhat economical with the actualité of the rules. Well, thanks to the Mail on Sunday we now know their letter and their spirit mattered as much to her as the niceties of Catholicism do to Sicilian mob bosses. Caught red-handed, at least she did the decent thing and resigned her shadcab role, turning what could have been an embarrassing story for Labour into a strength. If Rosie can fall on her sword, why can't Dom?

A couple of things about this affair about an affair. Like the case of Prof Neal Ferguson, the author of the lockdown strategy who broke his own rules for a knee trembler, the Mail now as the Telegraph then cultivated salacious gratification from talking up the married lover angle, as if the matrimonial arrangements of Ferguson's and Duffield's significant other has any bearing whatsoever. A reminder of the Tory press using sexual morality to defame their opponents while turning a blind eye to the extra-marital dalliances rife among the government benches. While most don't care about whom is bed hopping with whom, it does matter to a small and important social conservative section of the Tory base. It wasn't that long ago when ministers used to resign as a matter of course if they were caught with their trousers down, and in the 1990s scandal after adulterous scandal helped compound the sense of sleaze clinging to John Major's government. While the vast majority of the Tory base were prepared to overlook everything to get their precious Brexit done, that weapon will not be available in 2024. If trust becomes as an issue, as it clearly has now thanks to the Cummings crisis, reports of Tory infidelities can only contribute to its draining away and staying at home. Don't expect any more stories about Boris Johnson's colourful "innovations" in his private life between now and election day.

On resignation, sundry Tories on Twitter have tried to fool themselves into thinking there is complete equivalence between Rosie Duffield and Dominic Cummings, that the left are complete hypocrites for demanding action against the latter while ignoring the former. Well, Rosie has resigned. Aha, say the Tories, but she hasn't resigned her seat! Well, they've got us. What a gotcha. Of course, if we're abiding by the logic of their argument seeing as Cummings hasn't resigned neither should Rosie. Second, when Ferguson stepped back from his official role with the government he didn't resign his academic job as well. Considering Rosie is far more peripheral to the government's mishandling of the crisis than Ferguson or Cummings, it's ridiculous to expect her to pay a heavier price for breaking the rules. And third, while Ferguson's work informed the Tory quarantine strategy Dominic Cummings is the one figure in Downing Street more responsible than any other for its formulation and messaging. If the law maker can't be, refuses to be a law taker, their position is utterly untenable.

Overall, the Mail on Sunday's splash on Rosie Duffield might be counterproductive from the point of view of defending the government. They have fired the starting gun on other papers scrutinising the comings and goings of other MPs, including Tory MPs. Will the Conservatives be helped by more stories of salacious lockdown breaking? I doubt it.

Image Credit

The Aesthetics of the Pubis

Sometimes, what is relatively innocuous can signify a great deal. Consider the case of pubic hair, for instance. What decorates - or doesn't - your private parts is very much public property as far as celebrity culture, fashion, the beauty industry, pornography, and the ever watchful eyes of surveillant others are concerned. And, as with most things, not all mons pubis are created equally. For one set of bodies, it means very little. For the other, it is yet another zone of scrutiny and policing despite being hidden under layers of clothing and not on display to all and sundry. Why then does it matter, how is it used to evaluate women's bodies, and what road did Western cultures travel to arrive at a gendering and moralistic aesthetics of the pubis?

Burning questions Channel 4 tried addressing with its Bring Back the Bush: Where Did Our Pubic Hair Go?. Presented by body positive activist and social media influencer credited with #saggyboobsmatter on Instagram and Twitter, Chidera Eggerue, as someone who's for celebrating the female body in all its diversity she still takes a razor to her nether regions because she also feels the pressure of fitting in. She therefore wanted to challenge herself by bringing her bush back for the first time since her late teens, and open a conversation about desirability and body autonomy.

And autonomy here is key, as women face being cancelled or worse for not conforming to pubic normativity. Women can receive rape threats and the rest for even daring to pose online with hairy legs, so how did women's pubes become a hot button topic? Chidera ventures over to California while observing that a great many young people learn sex education through porn, and with it comes a whole set of expectations about what counts as desirable bodies. Speaking to Lena Paul and Casey Calvert, performers and sometime producers they argue what matters in porn is that absolutely nothing is left to the imagination and therefore keeping it shaved renders all the more explicit what is explicit. However, in more recent years Chidera notes there's been a turn back to the bush. Once a niche category approaching a fetish, Casey suggested established A-list performers started defying convention, which then filtered down and across the industry. Lena, who is one of this wave of enpubed superstars says her bush is very polarising, observing that "it feels like our bodies aren't good enough unless we change them."

While out in Hollywood, Chidera explores this further by sampling mirkins from down the ages. Starting with the late 19th century when even showing a bit of ankle was too much, private parts were, formally, very private. Matters then were, well, matted as this was the age of the big bush. Yet out of sight didn't necessarily mean out of mind. Riffing off his theory of evolution Charles Darwin suggested it was natural for men to be hairy and women hairless, meaning one didn't have to go far to declare women with lots of pubes unnatural, deviant, and immoral. Moving forward to the 1950s and the invention of the bikini comes with the invention of the bikini line. From there evolution moves to the landing strip of the 00s (90s, surely?) and from there where we are today. The more women's flesh comes on public display, the more the hair has to retreat until disappearing altogether.

But what about teh menz? Gathering together a group of late 20s/early 30-somethings for their opinions on matters mons, they ranged from preferring trimmed pubes to not bothered at all to preference for completely shaved - for appearance's sake and for oral sex. One guy chipped in to suggest it was a character thing, if a woman does it it shows they're interested in looking after themselves. In other words, pubic hair is a moral issue.

Chidera was joined on her growing out journey by four other social media micro celebs, all of whom make a living from modelling. Six weeks into the experiment, Krissy Vee said she felt uncomfortable and dirty. Rachel Kaitlyn, who also works as a cage dancer, said she was starting to attract stares. Jessie Bell said she had a run in with "a massive dickhead" after riding his shoulders at a festival was told by him that she should shave. And Jessica Megan said she'd lost a couple of photography jobs because she refused to cave in. Gathering them all together for a photo shoot at the end - later to be featured in an exhibition - Chidera concluded that owning a bush is a step toward normalising it and that it was her way of refusing to let others govern her life.

As an intro into some of the issues around the politics of women's bodies, it was okay. But it was a bit weak sauce. Where it was good was demonstrating the ubiquity of the emphasised feminine body standard and how its most ardent gendarmes are women themselves. The confession booth segment of the show was interesting for getting the perspective of others who, almost to a woman, attribute their hair removal practices to the pressure and commentary of significant people in their life - friends, lovers, family members. The panoptican no longer exists because it has insinuated itself seamlessly into the feminine everyday. Its practice and discursive enforcement is just accepted and barely questioned.

Chidera mentions the flex of male power as having something to do with it, but exploring it as an aspect of the pornographic imaginary alone cuts out a great deal. For one, it only explores men superficially. Indeed, a more interesting documentary could be made about the hysterical males who find agency obsessing over a stray pube here, a bit of stubble there, and what it is about the gender order that easily collapses masculinity into toxicity. Chidera does mention feminism very briefly, but in the past tense of the second wave and doesn't really bring it into her discussion. Secondly, what is completely absent is the political economy of the pubis. As with all aspects of female grooming, patriarchy and markets have gone hand in hand to reify and sexualise women's bodies for profit. The disappearance of pubic hair in porn and its subsequent spread into mainstream culture was neither natural nor inevitable. The beauty industry pushed for it and created a market for its depilatory creams, specialised razors, waxing salons, electric trimmers and all the rest, and successfully integrated these into the beauty regimens of hundreds of millions of women. The pubic place is a public place for commerce too. But alas, this history was airbrushed out like so many blemishes on a Playboy model.

As we began, the relatively innocuous can say a great many things. Bring Back the Bush, unfortunately, did not say enough.

Image Credit

Acid Corbynism and Acid Communism

Really interesting discussion between Jeremy Gilbert and Alex about, well, the topic you see above these letters. Jem's argument is the counter-culture of the 1960s raised serious questions about individuality and living in a thoroughly commodified society that are still with us. Acid Corbynism then is about radically transforming our impoverished culture in the same way Labour aspires to reconfigure our broken political economy. An engaging and at times inspiring call to arms. Give it a listen!

As always, Politics Theory Other could do you with your help so do please consider supporting via Patreon.

Stanning for Corbyn, and Other Twitter Tribes

Twitter is a blessing and a curse. Mostly a curse. It enables the rapid networking and dissemination of information - any information - but simultaneously doubles down and condenses the pathologies of platform capitalism and the attention economy. I'm reminded of this every single moment of scrolling through my Twitter feed and seeing shared articles and bad tempered polemic mixed in with attention seeking and mind-bending narcissism. Normally, you just go with the wretched flow. In terms of a cost/benefit analysis the price of scrying performative stupidity is outweighed by the pay off of decent opinion and info. But the toxicity does grate, and a lot of what is bad has to do with the Twitter tribes.

Because I inhabit a very particular online universe, there are two groups who are especially annoying and sometimes toxic. The Follow Back Pro Europe crowd, grouped by their totemic #FBPE hashtag overlap with the worst people in the Liberal Democrats, the Labour right, and with centrism more generally. However, the target of my ire this last weekend - and the subject of this post - are ostensible allies. People who regularly use #SocialistSunday or #SocialistAnyDay, and combine this with Chris Williamson fandom, tweet about Israel and Zionism as if they're the only active forces in British politics, enthusiastically push The Canary and reckon prominent left wingers, like Owen Jones, have sold their souls because they write for the bourgeois press. While, as a whole, they don't think Jeremy Corbyn is a messiah, there is a certain black-and-white moralistic streak running through their group identity that rules out nuance or perceiving the world as shades of grey. These then, for want of a better phrase, are the Corbyn stans. So-named after the titular character from the famous Eminem hit, a stan (or stans) is a not-terribly flattering term for someone or a group of people who aren't so much stalkers, but will doggedly and dogmatically push an idea, a movement, or a figure in a particularly single-minded way. Consider this in the context of the Labour Party. This single mindedness can and often is pushed to the detriment of the object of their ostensible support, such as supporting figures who have proven themselves obvious liabilities and touting obsessions and arguments long disavowed and, in most instances, not ever endorsed by the Labour leadership. There is a bit more to this. Stanning should also evoke the Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa, which were ethnically homogenous constructs set up by the regime to keep the white minority and black majority apart. That is the typical end point of stanning, whether willed or not: the constitution of an undifferentiated intentional community, one that is ghettoised not by repression from without but the pressures of conformity from within.

Why am I writing about this now? Because this weekend we have seen well-known social media anti-racism campaigner, @a_leesha1 driven off Twitter (hopefully temporarily) following a series of exchanges with older activists, nearly all of whom are Corbyn stans. They did not like how she used her following to point out incidences of racism on the left, sometimes unconscious, sometimes not, and so turned on her as if she was some kind of apostate. Try imagining the spectacle of middle aged white people telling a young British Asian woman what is and isn't racist (which isn't difficult to envisage if you're familiar with Dan Hodges' output) - and you've got the general gist of what happened. No one likes their deficiencies pointed out, but for a clutch of self-described leftists and ostensible Corbyn supporters to behave like this is appalling. In typical social media fashion the crimson mist has descended, and rather than confront their own deficiencies they have lashed out in a coordinated excommunication of Aleesha. Whatever she'd done prior to this clash, as far as they were concerned she wasn't really one of them, isn't worth paying attention to, and politics is better without her presence.

These dynamics are nothing new, but in the age of social media they have acquired a certain virulence as well as persistence in what is a dynamic and fluid environment. It's incongruent. In a medium of proliferating networks and news, it might be reasonable to expect identities to possess a certain fluidity, and yet groups and sub-groups of stans - Corbyn-centric, FBPE, Brexit Party/Farageist stans, Tory Twitter generally - reproduce and persist. And what we see in politics is by no means unique to it. Sports, fandoms, fashion and style, music, and, unsurprisingly, celebrity, stanning is a fact of digital life This, alas, is more than just a consequence of Twitter, but rather the alignment of the platform architecture to the inculcation, interpellation, and invention of identity in advanced capitalist societies.

As we have seen recently, self-styled traditional Marxists have counterposed identity politics to class identities and class locations. The former is a matter of lifestyle or oppressions ascribed to particular embodied characteristics - sex, sexuality, skin tone, presence of physical/mental impairments, age. Class on the other hand is about our relationship to the means of production, whether we have to sell our labour power in return for a wage or salary to physically and culturally reproduce ourselves and our families as human beings, or not. For the so-called orthodox, while being oppressed as a woman or as a disabled person is awful and these struggles are important, they are cut across by common class interests around which we should organise. This implies there is a tension between the two, a tension arising out of their separate character and rootedness in different and separate structures of exploitation and oppression, and one that should be resolved in favour of emphasising, with varying degrees of crudity, class first.

This is wrong. It baldly states your experiences as a disabled person, as a gay person are inessential, an attitude that encouraged the formation of women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-racist movements independently of and separate from labour movements. The truth of the matter is different identity locations have been nurtured and managed since capitalism began its path to global dominance in the late mediaeval period. For example, race has a history and it is inseparable from colonialism, slavery, and "conventional" capitalist exploitation. The historical experience of surplus labour and surplus value cannot be told without the brutal enforcement of racial hierarchies. Likewise, the division of labour in the fields and the factory was not the neat, disinterested technocratic affair reading too much Weber would have you believe, but is absolutely premised on sexual divisions of labour. All-women workforces were used to undercut men in the same way ethnicity and nationalities were used to cultivate competition within the working class, and as the power of trade unions grew, as disposable incomes grew, the better off layers of workers imitated the respectable mores of their supervisors, managers, and employers. The idea of the working man is a result of late 19th century trade union struggle to keep women out the workplace to increase wages, and it was this absence of economic independence that was and is the material root of the private patriarchies of the proletarian household.

Capitalism did not emerge in a vacuum. It was the by-no-means-inevitable outcome of the class struggles of decaying feudalism, and evolved alongside the development of the modern state. In the home of capitalism, England, the development of the nation state and capitalism were coterminous, mutually constitutive, and mutually conditioning. As capitalism evolved, the state became more than a military apparatus oriented against threats at home and abroad, it had the job of managing populations, which was fairly pressing considering its administrative centre tended to be among the most densely populated cities. This management problematic beget systems of knowledge and classification about its population - often arrived at through the threat and actual application of violence to human bodies, and the invention of identity categories through the application of disciplinary power. For example, the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality was concerned with the 19th century invention of the homosexual as a particular subject, or type of human being, whereas prior to then and despite the prohibitions against same-sex intercourse and sexual relationships, so-called sodomites were merely men who happened to engage in illegal sexual activity. Their behaviour did not define them. The invention of homosexuality was at the same time the invention of sexuality as such, which in the Victorian imaginary was bound up with moral rectitude: sex and sexuality started saying a great deal about who you are, an outlook that persists to this day. To what end? Well, you can't manage populations if you don't have technologies and prohibitions governing reproduction.

Class politics and identity politics or, if you prefer, the politics of the body are integral and integrated. It is nonsensical to oppose the two. However, this doesn't mean their configurations don't change, and since the 1960s they have. As recounted many times here, in the post-war period the state expanded even further and touched more points of social life than previously. Following the Italian autonomists, greater layers of workers were employed whose object, to all intents and purposes, was the reproduction of capitalism and the management of its consequences. What are health and social services if not to mend the people broken physically and spiritually by it so they can be thrown back into the fray? What this development also represents is the complete subsumption of society as a whole to the dictates of capital. The needs of accumulation were primary everywhere at all times. Class struggle is less a point of production thing, it is generalised to all areas of the social. So teachers, who educate and train the next generation of workers, are confronting capital when they take industrial action. When women's movements and LGBT movements challenged gendered and sexual repression, they were taking on capital by contesting its politics of reproduction, and so on. These collective challenges were fed by and fed into new modes of individuation.

In Capital, Marx discusses the individuation of the worker, how the formal, legal relationship between employer and employee is individual - workers get a certain wage or salary in return for X hours of labour power under the foremen/manager's direction. They are addressed and treated as individuals: their relationship to the boss class is not collective, unless there is strong trade union organisation. In the post-war period, (relative) economic stability married to rising wages opened the doors to mass consumption and privatised forms of entertainment. The invention of the teenager, a house with all the mod cons, fashion and style, these inculcated an acquisitive individual sensibility and, in a number of crucial ways, eroded the collectivist cultures underpinning mass semi-active affiliation to Labour ... and the Conservatives. Identity wasn't something just ascribed and interpellated from above, but could be cultivated and styled from below, albeit bounded by class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability. The Teddy Boys, as an early youth movement, were macho, hard-drinking and hard living, overwhelmingly working class and male. It came and went (though sometimes, you can espy the odd old Ted) but generated a set of markers and touchstones subsequent movements would take on: sets of consumptive practices, a more or less coherent group identity and a nascent solidarity, and an instrumentalist attitude to work: that was something you had to do, the life outside of the workplace was where you wanted to be.

As mass consumption was normalised, so was marketing. Firms were in the active business of generating identity locations to capture the minds and the wallets of the (relatively) affluent mass. The music industry and its rapid churn of fashions, along with the lightning fast turnover of artists and groups generated youth movements and ecosystems around genres and acts, deepening the naturalisation of the private, instrumentally-oriented and acquisitive individual further. Indeed, the keeping up with the Joneses, the habituation of millions of workers to rising living standards helped ensure trade union organisation and collective bargaining as the means of raising wages retained its relevance. Collectivism at work supported individualism at leisure. The whole shebang presented as a coherent, functional whole even to radical critics.

This individuation and the expansion of the state were never at cross-purposes from one another. The kinds of work millions of workers were engaged with, with the consequences of maintaining and reproducing the system, was not productive labour in the view of vulgar economics. It did not directly produce value, rather they produced the social infrastructure that made 'conventional' capitalist exploitation possible. They did not make stuff, their labour was, for want of a better phrase, immaterial. Its object was the production and reproduction of care, knowledge, moralities, relationships, and immaterial workers had to (and have to) draw on their own capacities as socialised beings to undertake this work, mobilising their own subjectivities and identities. In other words, through the expansion of the state its provision of services were in the business of conditioning and generating new identities, and accomplished this by exploiting the socialised selves and identities of its personnel.

Without getting too much into the history of the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1980s, it had two chief consequences as far as immaterial labour and the constitution of identities were concerned. With privatisation of sections of the state, with the shift away from primary industry and manufacturing to services, the axis of knowledge generation and service provision moved to the private sector and became direct vectors of capitalist accumulation. Secondly, the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan governments and later pretty much all the advanced countries intersected with and directly cultivated the acquisitive individualism welling up from below. It became a blueprint for social engineering. And so while the programme of privatisation and marketisation is commonly associated with neoliberalism, in its more insidious forms it is a mode of subjection, a means of cultivating human beings of a particular kind. And for Thatcher and friends, those human beings were mini-entrepreneurs whose acquisitive nature went beyond the stacking up of consumer durables but were oriented to the accumulation of capital and property. Throughout her reign, her war against post-war social democracy was about inculcating these sensibilities - the privatisation programme, the council house sell offs, conditionalities attached to social security, even the introduction of the Poll Tax had the object of remaking the souls of millions of people. This process was deepened by Major as well as, to their eternal discredit, Blair and Brown, and was pushed even further under Cameron and the recently departed Theresa May. What this accomplished was a fusion of identity constitution and the entrepreneurial self. You were free to style your own identity within the conditions imposed by long standing inequalities and oppression, but the state and its institutions expected you to orient to them as mini-capitalists with your self as the asset. In the job markets from the 80s onwards, employers were less interested in what your body could do but what kind of person you were, and how your personality, intelligence and aptitudes would benefit their organisation. The language of unlocking potential and aspiration encourages a subjectivity in which the self is saleable.

This neoliberal self selects for certain personality traits then: it emphasises the showy over the staid, the confident over the reticent, the sociable over the shy, and the narcissistic over the modest, the possession of which confers real economic/job market advantages. And it is exactly these sorts of traits social media, and Twitter in particular, exaggerate. All social media is based on attention. The more time you spend on a particular platform, the more data the host gathers about your habits and the better able they are to sell targeted advertising. For example, this blog is hosted by Blogger, which is owned by Google. It carries no advertisements. However, Google insists on inserting cookies onto your computer/device so it can build up a data picture of you. Because you regularly visit this place, or you click on certain posts while avoiding others, that's all grist for the Google data mill who will use those choices to sell advertising space targeting you on other platforms it owns. And, in return for my data and your data, they ever so generously provide this wee blog and its storage space to me for free.

Other social media platforms ramp up the neoliberal sensibilities. Over its evolution since 2006, Twitter has been modified multiple times, often by pressure from Twitter users. Nearly all its features - hashtags, retweets, favourites/likes, threading, extra characters, image and video hosting - these were not thought out in advance but were added as users demanded their inclusion, or developed their own workarounds. Twitter (allegedly) gathers the wisdom of crowds, and exists as is for that self-same reason. But the actual logic of the platform itself is almost chemical pure neoliberalism. The number of followers one has is a validation of sorts, especially if the follower-to-follow ratio is high. And from here, the number of retweets and likes your missives receive suggests you're making your way, that your messages, whatever they might be, are resonating. And on top of that Twitter have added a load of metrics so you can see how many page impressions your profile has had, along with tweet performance and a whole lot of other stuff. The temptation is to keep plugging away, keep churning out the hot takes and the witty repartee and your influence will grow, all of it available in handy metric form. In other words, Twitter offers a crude measure of one's social capital. It puts rocket boosters under the neoliberal self, while mining self-curated identities for data

What has the evolution of identity under capitalism and its rendering by social media got to do with Twitter tribes? Well, for one, the emergence of consumerist/subcultural identities have always attracted and recruited the like-minded. But there is something else: the pathologies particular to and immanent in the acquisitive and neoliberal self. Contemporary identities can present themselves as ready made social locations, something you can acquire off-the-peg that are packaged with cognitive structures, styles, language, and exclusive social spaces. In other words, we are encouraged to orient toward and appreciate identity as if it's property: a complete self-contained package. Identity is irresolutely social and only possible because we are social beings, yet it is sold as an individual attribute, a design for life. Its appearance, to borrow the old language, is not its essence, which is inseparable from the abstract relationships underpinning capitalist exploitation. The fusion of class and identity at the point of (immaterial) production goes unacknowledged, its collective character as the strategic fulcrum of exploitation and capital accumulation is unremarked. The collective life of collective identity is talked up solely in terms of consumerist tribes by marketing language: it very definitely isn't a site of class struggle with the potential of proliferating networks and combining with other locations, other identities in an alliance against capital. Rather it is a path to individual fulfillment, expression, and bliss. Keeping it narrow like this is a way of negating the potential of identity beyond the neoliberal entrepreneurial self. It is the common sense, a species of economism not unlike the trade union consciousness Lenin once wrote about, in which the every day realities of exploitation are consented to and one's eyes are forced down by the weight of convention and routine.

The Twitter tribes mirror economism in the age of immaterial production. The accumulation logics married to identity-as-exclusion, of its assertion against what it's not, draw together the like-minded. Their networks condense as they expand, drawing toward the centre those who most identify with the identity properties of the tribe while expelling dissenters, the faint hearted, and those not fully signed up to whatever totalising narrative or politics they're promulgating. And, as we have seen, this even happens in leftist movements, in movements ostensibly dedicated to doing away with capitalism. In this particular case Corbyn is the lynchpin not for a transformative socialist politics, but for the constitution of identities in which moral purity is defined in terms of one's distance from what is rejected. This is the new economism in extremis: the radicalism and their in-groupness is fetishised and the possibility of loosening up, of identifying themselves in terms of the actual movement they are nominally part of, warts and all, is foreclosed. There is no reaching out, no room for collaboration and alliances. It's all a zero sum game: they are the true. Everyone and anyone who falls short, like taking anti-semitism seriously, challenging racism when they find incidences of it, or have dared venture criticisms of Corbynism from within Corbynism, well; they're out, not worth bothering with, and should be chased off if needs be.

While it is annoying, frustrating, damaging, and dispiriting, we should not find this behaviour in left wing movements surprising. As we've noted on many occasions, all political parties and social movements, all of them, are affected and afflicted with the prejudices and outlooks of the society they are part of. Labour has them all - sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious bigotry, national chauvinism, and the rest. Therefore the economism appropriate to the age has its home too, and is systematically reproduced by the logics of capital, of class and identity formation, and the (necessary) participation of political activists on social media. Better political education is only one way of addressing the problem - drawing more people into active, flesh-and-blood participation, while attacking neoliberal culture and building our own institutions of cultural production, all have a role to play. Most crucial of all is the inculcation of a more flexible, more fluid movement identity that identifies with the objectives we have set ourselves ahead of luxuriating in the fact of the movement itself. To be fair, we do have that, this is what the bulk of Corbynism is like: a proper broad church united around a common programme. But for as long as neoliberal sensibilities reign supreme without challenge, stanning will present a self-erected barrier we have to persistently and ceaselessly struggle to overcome.