Classification and the species

Despite being busy with the art group I’ve still been making paramontages though at a reduced rate. At the beginning I’d usually take along a USB stick with new images when I picked up prints in Chippendale but it’s different now that I’ve got Eastern Suburbs Art Group to look after, an activity that makes me very happy.

So I’m happy on two counts.

With the art, I’ve been making type-1 and -10 paramontages, the latter being a new format (see below) that provides a space for sonnets but with fewer images and less busy-ness than a type 2.

The image shows ‘Waiting for the doctor’s report’, a sonnet written in 16 February 2013 that was updated on 11 August 2021 and 28 July 2022. The photos are from 31 December 2008, at a time when I was still living in Sydney before my relocation to Queensland. Over a few days I visited Maroochydore to see mum and dad and took a large number of photos, something I’m grateful for now because once I moved to the region I didn’t take many at all apart from touristy snaps. The poem goes like this:

The sky’s metal and the primary green

of the sward unbend as the rain applauds

above the black cul-de-sac’s glossy sheen,

when it falls from the slow flanks of the clouds.

Parakeets careen loudly across the park

where footy players cry out their routine

while water’s plucked up by the paperbark

that stands tall. Harnessing a force, unseen

in bruit the chambered dawn bevels a hymn

as I contemplate what mortality

provides in an endless moment of time

visiting within this locality.

It is what I see; I dread to confide

what creatures flutter in on the flood tide.

This work is being framed so I can hang it on a wall or else send it to someone. I chose a silver frame to go with it and a lilac mount. 

I’ve been out to the framers by car. In fact it was Tuesday 9 August when I drove there along the Eastern Distributor, the Harbour Tunnel, the Lane Cove Tunnel, the M2 and the M7, retracing and surpassing a route I’d use to get to mum’s nursing home back in the day when she was still alive. 

It’s a road I know well.

I also know well the signs of a panic attack so I was wary at the beginning, before I got onto the fast roads, when my heart was beating insistently but not breaking through into a trot.

For the type 2s I chose a natural wood frame, the classification of my work being integral to the process because it allows me to concentrate on the specifics while following a pattern for the design. Specifics include which original image to put in each quarter, and how to enlarge and crop them. It includes the choice of backing colour for the text, a calculation that also involves choosing a density for the field of colour – a lighter tone brings out more of the image sitting underneath. It involves cropping the colour field and the underlying central image, and it also means choosing a font and the colour for the text.

Because there are many variables in the specific characteristics of the layout it helps to have a structure upon which to rely when deciding them. Classification has always been part of humanity’s arsenal of abilities when confronted by a hostile world, consider the Cinq Ports (see image below), which is an archaic system of defensive infrastructure in England.

It’s fascinating to imagine that the government of the country spent a lot of time in negotiations, in building, in spending, in levying taxes, all based on a set of ephemeral words used to classify places and their inhabitants. 

More than fascinating, it’s enchanting. That was hundreds of years ago, and now, in the year of Our Lord 2022 classification is just as relevant on a micro scale to help me make art. 

We classify all the time. It’s essential for the survival of the species, for example in our use of special words for discrete individuals, where “sister” has an entirely different set of feelings associated with it compared to “friend”. The class of people known as “friend” includes those who are not related by blood (though a sister can still be a friend and not an enemy). It’s this need conditioned by biology to set rules relevant to consanguinity that demands a certain sequence of letters when looking for a label for a person.

The word “sister” is a semantic marker that biology demands. It’s not an accident. It’s doesn’t have “no meaning”. It’s mandatory if we’re to survive as a viable race of biological organisms. You could say that it’s been so successful that disaster looms as wildfires ravage Europe and western United States, and floods crippled eastern Australia and the east coast of the US.

Divergism: Everyone’s a drag queen

This article has over 3600 words so, if you are pressed for time, perhaps bookmark and read it later.

In a speech given in 2019 after she won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Olga Tokarczuk talked about contemporary publishing and touches on the notion of the demotic. I urge you to read the whole passage included below, as it contextualises my response. My aim is not to contradict but, rather, to open up a dialogue so that new ideas might emerge from synthesis, though I think the Polish author misses something key about how culture, nowadays, expresses people’s aspirations and desires. She writes:

Whenever I go to book fairs, I see how many of the books being published in the world today have to do with precisely this—the authorial self. The expression instinct may be just as strong as other instincts that protect our lives—and it is most fully manifested in art. We want to be noticed, we want to feel exceptional. Narratives of the “I’m going to tell you my story” variety, or “I’m going to tell you the story of my family,” or even simply, “I’m going to tell you where I’ve been,” comprise today’s most popular literary genre. This is a large-scale phenomenon also because nowadays we are universally able to access writing, and many people attain the ability, once reserved for the few, of expressing themselves in words and stories. Paradoxically, however, this situation is akin to a choir made up of soloists only, voices competing for attention, all traveling similar routes, drowning one another out. We know everything there is to know about them, we are able to identify with them and experience their lives as if they were our own. And yet, remarkably often, the readerly experience is incomplete and disappointing, as it turns out that expressing an authorial “self” hardly guarantees universality. What we are missing—it would seem—is the dimension of the story that is the parable. For the hero of the parable is at once himself, a person living under specific historical and geographical conditions, yet at the same time he also goes well beyond those concrete particulars, becoming a kind of Everywhere Everyman. When a reader follows along with someone’s story written in a novel, he can identify with the fate of the character described and consider their situation as if it were his own, while in a parable, he must surrender completely his distinctness and become the Everyman. In this demanding psychological operation, the parable universalizes our experience, finding for very different fates a common denominator. That we have largely lost the parable from view is a testament to our current helplessness.

Then, in the next paragraph, she talks about genre fiction:

Perhaps in order not to drown in the multiplicity of titles and last names we began to divide literature’s leviathan body into genres, which we treat like the various different categories of sports, with writers as their specially trained players.

She is quite right about the use of genre to categorise what must otherwise be a bewildering array of content coming off the presses and out of the servers of major publishers and minor publishers alike. I think the matter is deeper than that but it is interesting that Tokarczuk found reason, in her address, to remark on this aspect of contemporary society.

I believe that her feeling of alienation from society – expressed here in terms that reflect a deep understanding of the nature of culture – has more to do with her own politics as a progressive in an increasingly conservative global political environment, but she hits on a key aspect of contemporary society, where we are ghettoed by our views into discrete communities, in a unique – and unexpected – form emblematic of a kind of singularity with a collective mind. As though the 20th century’s attempts to impose totalising systems of governance had been a last gasp heralding the dawn of an era of intoxication and diversity.

Taking the blue pill

In the US in 2015, almost half of respondents to one survey admitted to reading mystery, thriller and crime books. In the UK in a 2018 survey the number of crime thrillers sold was equal to the number of children’s books sold. For the UK, says another article: “In 2017, Nielsen BookScan figures revealed that 18.7 million units of crime books were sold, compared to 18.1 million of general and literary fiction.” By 2017 and since 2010, in the US combined print and digital book sales in the genres of science fiction and fantasy had doubled.

It takes time for publishers to anchor a new author in the readership’s imagination, says market expert Jane Friedman, but publishers are less likely to take a risk with a new author because of the possibility of low sales of their book. Genre offers a way to tie a title or author in with people’s predispositions, and it sells well. And nowadays the most politically “engaged” fiction is usually in one or another of the genres that find a market in the economy.

We see this broad interest also in the way the radio station I listen to while driving in Sydney – 2Day FM – plays songs from the 80s, 90s, and noughts, one after the other interspersed, for variety, with more recent tunes, many of which self-consciously sample from earlier styles. I first started writing about Divergism in March last year, and in those posts I talked about how it breeds hybrids. These hybrids proliferate in the spaces between the different strands of the post-war counterculture that has fragmented and atomised. You get a range of different subgenres, such as historical fiction with a focus on transsexualism (Carolina de Robertis’ ‘The Gods of Tango’ and Jordy Rosenberg’s ‘Confessions of the Fox’) or else crime thrillers with feminist themes that are set in country towns (such as Emily O’Grady’s ‘The Yellow House’, Emily Maguire’s ‘An Isolated Incident’, or Shirley Barrett’s ‘The Bus on Thursday’).

Since then my ideas have matured and developed and have also adapted to accommodate new inputs. They have specifically become more closely linked with ideas I have developed about the public sphere, particularly as it relates to social media which, now, is so pervasive that it has changed almost every aspect of our lives, from the ways that we get information to how we form friendships. In fact, this mediated world with its often challenging and sometimes violent virtual interactions lies at the heart of the idea of my conception of Divergism – what I call the “Divergist” project. This trend is present partly because it helps us to cope with the abandonment of convergence as we come to terms with a tribal world of harsh language and loyalties made of steel, and partly because of our sense of panic at the state of a world changing rapidly with new geopolitical realities, with rapid technological advances that often feel overwhelming, and with climate change.

“Stupidity is knowing the truth, seeing the truth but still believing the lies,” tweeted Professor Richard Feynman on 2.27am Australian Eastern Standard Time on 11 May. Underscoring my point about the severity of debate online, by 6.36am of the same day the tweet had garnered 27 replies, over 4600 “likes” and over 1600 retweets. Everyone is stupid except for those who think the same as us.

Tokarczuk said in her Nobel lecture that there is now “a choir made up of soloists only, voices competing for attention, all traveling similar routes, drowning one another out”. But rather than soloists, the raised voices actually contribute to forming a united chorus within each genre that gives participants solace, gives them comfort, and gives meaning to their lives. In order to achieve this neuro-cultural symbiosis – in the locus of influence that engenders the production of those precious chemicals that make us feel good when someone acknowledges a post on Facebook – there is an unceasing tolerance for what, in the absence of our collective attention, would remain stale forms, each instalment just one in an endless sequence of variations.

This behaviour betrays an endless perfectionism and is itself a perfection of the Postmodern self-reflexive gaze, a regard turned in on itself and onto all of its operations. New seasons of TV shows are constantly loaded to the servers operated by Netflix, each new vehicle in a favoured sci-fi or crime franchise hastening people to the couch or to the cinema. You can get this kind of comment: here – at 8.02am AEST on 11 May – Ohio writer Ben Doublett talks about a Canadian sci-fi thriller that had just been released:

Code 8 on Netflix is everything you want a superhero movie to be: Eye-popping action, tight pacing, and not a second of runtime wasted setting up other films.  

It’s also a powerful meditation on what need, poverty, and inequity does and does not entitle us to take from others.

It’s kitsch with heart, like a drag queen. In fact, everyone’s a drag queen, not just those living on the fringes of society.

Creating community

Tokarczuk calls for the use of parables to give meaning to our lives, through art, but we are already getting this form of work in such common-or-garden action heroes as you might find in a movie by Peter Berg or Antoine Fuqua. Others have made this connection. In his 2019 novel ‘Big Bang’, David Bowman creates a scene with Howard Hughes the American millionaire, in a restaurant with an actress on New Year’s Eve of 1955:

Hughes sat down and began lecturing Jean Peters. ‘You have to understand about westerns. People who go to them don’t care whether they’re good or bad. It’s like going to a baseball game. The difference between a good western and a bad western is infinitesimal. People go to a western for American comfort.’

Moreover, it’s not just comfort that people find. In finding solace, in popular culture, amid the exigencies of the world, they can also find a way forward in a personal journey. This can happen in a way that the originators of those products might never have imagined. On 11 May at 3.31pm, for example, the Guardian Australia Twitter account tweeted: “Trans writer Juno Dawson: 'The Spice Girls were my female awakening!'” The tweet came with a link to a story on the outlet’s website.

I think I understand what Tokarczuk is trying to express in her lecture but, for my part, I think that, rather than “drowning” in products among which they are forced to choose something to read of watch, people in the community are leveraging the diversity available in the marketplace to create community, to find agency, and to express themselves. There are any number of genres and subgenres but different people use each of them in the same way. Memoir or autobiography is certainly one genre that is current today – you can find any number of such titles in your average bookshop – but it is not, I think, the most popular.  And while there is an unlimited number of genres people can use in order to do that for which they need culture, our relationship with such products appears superficial but in fact it answers a deep human need. I will return to this theme later in this article but, for the moment, it is possibly germane to consider the convergence thesis of Teilhard de Chardin and then turn it on its head. Rather than bringing the world together, the internet has actually atomised the community into distinct tribes, each with its own gods, seers, prophets, and acolytes.

Today’s popular culture celebrates the collective as much as it does the aloof, or lone, individual. In depictions of the collective, values must be shared by all members so that it can succeed. The values of the artist are, also, shared with the consumer. What binds people together – as easily as a cliched expression of emotion or a kitsch rendition of perfection – is more important than the uniqueness of the experience for the hero or for the spectator. The artist loads his or her work with easy formulae in order to achieve a symbiosis with the viewer or reader, a moment of communion. In a kind of parable, as Tokarczuk references in her lecture.

Because diversity flourishes. Witness Luc Besson’s stunning film ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ which is a reflection of the reality that we see globally. Every year more and more countries become more multicultural in nature, though there are attempts by some politicians and their followers to curtail this trend. In this environment characterised by diversity, only genre can guide people so that they can orient themselves amid the cacophony of voices, the plethora of inputs. Here, the rhetoric of the visual or written language is just as important as the content, where authenticity resides within common tropes: good-guys and bad-guys, cops and robbers, chase scenes, the stern guardian or head of department versus the posse of mavericks who eventually serve the aims of justice that, in real life, most often eludes us.

There remain spaces for such esoteric modes as Postmodernism and Modernism. Arthouse is a genre, just as is literary fiction, so there is still room for stories about individuals. But it’s no longer the primary space for the creation of essential meaning in society.

The following image shows a Lego model inspired by a classical Roman theatre, but in ruins and captured, using plastic components, in a fashion reflecting how it might have appeared in the Middle Ages. I wanted to use the image to show how art creates community. There are theatres like this throughout the world, in places colonised by republican and imperial Rome, many of them still in a state where they can be used. A key element of classical Roman civilisation, theatres helped to create cohesive communities that could be ruled efficiently, but in today’s agora – the public sphere in social media where people chat and argue and make new friends – there is a diverging of viewpoints and a reforming around certain magnetic poles that attract, as a magnet attracts iron filings, participants who invest parts of themselves in a particular brand of politics, or a particular genre of fiction or nonfiction. The community today is self-organising and disciplined in a way that is new, since organisation is necessary for people to have in order to live together in harmony.

The allure of teamwork

Tokarczuk’s comparison of genres to sport is revealing and by doing so her ideas consone with my own. Not only is sport endlessly fascinating for people – enabling them to express themselves and to create community, both at the same time – but it embodies the idea of the team, as it often involves stories of groups of people rather than individuals. They are important as loci of desire and require soft skills that enable the individual to communicate better, so are critical to both the wellbeing of the individual and to the cohesion of the community. Community in fact results from people living in harmony with each other, on the basis of shared narratives that enable the release, in that brain, of chemicals that make us feel good. It is as old as civilisation. 

In popular culture, Divergism is reflected in the way that many movies involve teams that are engaged in achieving a single goal. Celebrating the collective is pertinent as such enterprises as basic research is nowadays mainly done by teams of scientists working together on one project, often based in different cities and, even, on different continents. Like real-world professionals, the characters in a film that belongs to a franchise such as ‘The Avengers’ combine their talents to enhance their effectiveness.

Teams are common in such genre fiction as action movies. In cultural products designed for children, teams are even more popular – Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, Pokemon, Teletubbies, and the Wiggles come to mind – as we value such themes because they help to properly socialise the young. 

On Netflix, one of the most popular shows in recent years, and the company’s most-popular non-English language TV show, is ‘Money Heist’. In a review of the show, marketer Luca Bertocci writes about how its filmmakers made sure to include a range of different character types when developing the script. There are characters that are more or less impulsive, and more or less extroverted. The most popular ones, going by their Instagram followings, are those with the most extreme profiles. So, a character who is introverted and cautious, and a character who is extroverted and impulsive, ranked highly with viewers. Bertocci writes:

Since viewers might vary a lot and have different tastes and personal preferences, having a broad range of personalities and values is useful, in order to appeal to as many people as possible. However, these very different people must also share the same mission, in order to work smoothly together.

The team is the pinnacle of existence. The tribe, the collective. With genres, furthermore, each singular movie or TV show or book references, in subtle ways, others that have gone before, works by different filmmakers and authors. This diversity of voices reflects the existence of a virtual team produced by Capital in order to indulge a ready market. Every movie is seen to exist within a broader context of influences, spin-offs, and franchises that attract a large following.

It also reflects the existence of a virtual team of consumers who share online, as part of their daily lives, ideas about the artworks. It creates echoes that are comforting, as they make people feel seen in a way that goes to the core of their very identity. Our wishes are acknowledged because what he had enjoyed once is given back to us, in a new guise, by the next artist whose work we sample. We become part of a collective that expresses itself on social media, and also in relation to the artist (or artists), whose personality becomes pertinent to us due to the link that is forged between the artwork and the consumer. Participating in debates about a work of art, we become part of something larger than ourselves, and the forms of genre facilitate this sharing.

There is also an ardent, concomitant need to connect with the movie star or director who makes the film, or with the author who writes the novel. Someone whose ideas we can share, because it makes us feel better to do share, so alone and confused are we in the maelstrom of inputs that make up our world, so precarious are the livelihoods that we rely on to pay for our Netflix subscriptions and our internet connections and our mobile phone plans.

Dark roots

As to the question of where it all started, I find a puzzle, one that is worth a study all of its own – perhaps someone will, one day, write a PhD thesis on it. I think I discovered a hint of where Divergism began when, on 22 April, a friend on Facebook posted this about her boyfriend:

So the man just tried to cheer me up by putting the Bee Gees on and dancing around the kitchen.

It was then I realised how perfect they are for these times. 

Staying Alive.
Tragedy.
Saturday Night Fever. 

Tell me I’m wrong.

She was right, and while Covid-19 prompted this educated woman to improvise and deploy popular culture references in order to create community on social media, where her friends and colleagues are watching her activity, she was also saying something more revealing about the world. 

It is in such places that we probably should go to look for the roots of the cultural mode of Divergism; in the exploitation of genre in order to convey meaning. If Postmodernism – with its roots in such works as Mahler’s self-conscious musical constructs – and Modernism – with its roots in the atmospheric paintings of J.M.W. Turner – are centripetal, centrifugal Divergism must take its cue not from Tarantino’s 1994 pastiche, ‘Pulp Fiction,’ but from another movie released in that year, ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,’ which also harks back to the outrageous kitsch perpetrated upon a willing world by the ‘James Bond’ movies of the 1970s, with their ridiculous villains, outlandish scrapes, and voluptuous co-stars. 

The 70s was an era of celebration when, for a moment, people thought that things might get better. Some were more pessimistic. It was an era that also saw the beginning of the trend for wages for the middle class in the US to flatten (a state of affairs that continues to this day). By the naughts, when the end of the Cold War seemed about to usher in a new era again, this time one of concord, new sources of conflict started to appear, as both Russia and China showed that they would not willingly embrace pluralism and democracy, and as radical Islam grew in prominence.

The irony used for ‘James Bond’ movies was both wicked and fitting. Don’t mock it, the filmmakers seemed to be saying, the next person to get it might be you. It’s as though things have gotten so bad that the only thing people can believe in is the most obvious appropriation from some past master of one genre or another. And added to a nostalgia for the past is this desire for collective enterprise and neat conclusions, something to make us feel secure even though, in reality, we are more fractured, especially in the developed world, than ever before. Tokarczuk talks of soloists but where she hears discord I hear the intoxicating harmony of Divergism.

The artist at home and abroad

Cliché is the reification of an idea. To illustrate my point I want to look at two images, showing artists, that I found on Twitter. One is a portrait of composer Erik Satie by Santiago Rusinol (1861-1931). Dated 1891, it shows a young man sitting alone in what we imagine is a room. His boots are on the floor and his backside is upon a hard, wooden bench. The room is cold: the man sits near a fire burning behind a grate but the fire is meagre. A few books sit discretely on the mantlepiece above the fireplace. There is a mirror on the wall above the mantlepiece and some clippings and illustrations stuck to the wall. It’s an image that screams “poverty” and is titled ‘The Bohemian’.

The second image is a more recent one. It is by American artist Scott Gustafson and is an illustration, showing American author Edgar Allen Poe, from the children’s novel ‘Eddie: The Lost Youth of Edgar Allan Poe’ (2011). It has a young man sitting in an ample chair, his body stretched out in a comfortable pose, his fist supporting his chin. Behind him is a grandfather clock and in front of him, on a table, is a skull. The clockface tells the time: almost midnight. Heavy curtains are held back by cords and a candelabra on the table gives off ample light, in fact it blazes more brightly than Rusinol’s fire.

Gustafson is aged in his 60s and for me the troubling thing is that, in his image, Poe – gazing straight at the viewer with lowered eyes full of passion and intensity – looks like a caricature of a bad-guy from some second-rate spy thriller, an arrogant bully who dispenses arbitrary justice on a whim at the expense of some poor wretch who is brought in, to see the boss, by armed toughs.

Obviously, the two images have little in common apart from a link to the 19th century: the era to which we owe the most. (Who we are is an idea that was first imagined at the end of the preceding century, the century that saw the American Revolution, and what we value in terms of cultural products are therefore often of the 19th century. We are children of the revolution. The founding document of the Romantic revival was published in 1797 though there were proto-Romantics publishing works of poetry in the decades leading up to that date; the Romantics acknowledged their debts to those men and women.)

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The domestic interiors shown in the two images are of one vintage but the messages, in either case, could not differ more. I am an authority on neither the period nor the people but there are good reasons to imagine that Poe, like Satie, was poor and often cold at home. What the second image shows is not the reality of Poe, but that of his readers. Their opinions are captured in ink on paper, transposed backwards time to an era where they didn’t exist except in the minds of a few. The majority ignored Poe (1809-1849), who was born two generations before Satie (1866-1925).

Both men were more famous after their deaths than when they were when alive, so what we see in the second image, due to the effects of the passage of time, is the artist triumphant at the same time as the artist as the outcast (the lowered eyes, the intense gaze, the slouch, the jester on a stick, the mask). What we see in this image is very different from what a person alive at the time must have witnessed. It is an oxymoron of a most flagrant kind. The outcast of this image cannot have existed in reality because of his status as an outcast. The outcast is recast as the ultimate insider, the chosen one. It is an old story, and telling it never drains it of vitality (e.g. James Wan’s ‘Aquaman’ of 2018).  The nub remains the same, only the forms, with time, alter. The most popular book of all time is based on the same theme. 

The New Testament is also a reification of an idea. The figure of the artist is managed into a scenario that suits our desires but that does violence to the truth. The first image is an authentic rendition of the home of an artist. The second image belongs in the province of cliché even though it contains an essential truth: the artist is resilient though poor, determined to show the truth though the bounty of the world is withheld from him [sic]. It also layers ourselves over the image of the artist, who is always a person who enables an exchange. Money for product, but also attention for comprehension. The artist beguiles the reader or viewer with popular tropes so that they will accept other, more difficult ideas, ones that without help would have no way to be expressed. Innovation takes place incrementally, not in leaps and bounds. One thing leads to another, and then another, and before you know it you have a new aesthetic mode. In art, as in diplomacy, there is a certain amount of flattery involved. Without it no message would get through. 

But the artist, even though he or she uses flattery, often struggles to find time to do what he or she loves doing due to the necessity or earning money some other way. The jester on the stick and the mask, furthermore, help to render the artist in Gustafson’s image as everyman [sic]: we feign compliance in order to get by because we know that if we didn’t lie all the time we’d lose our livelihoods. 

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It shouldn’t be necessary for me to ask which image is more accurate; your conclusion in the question must be unambiguous. The first image shows what life was really like and the second shows how we want it to have been. Despite its lack of authenticity – Gustafson has taken a 19th century image of the artist and replaced it with a 21st century cliché – the second image shows a complex reality. And it comes complete with all the trappings of the genre, even down to the open book lying haphazard on the floor (as though flung down, in a passion, by the sitter; an instant of justifiable rage). He is showing us what we want, in place of what was. 

Like a Renaissance monarch, we rewrite history to suit our tastes: the artist is talented therefore must be rewarded (even if, when alive, he was not adequately rewarded financially). Gustafson’s Poe is amphibian, and can live inside the mainstream as well as retain his legitimacy as an outsider and critic of it. As in ‘Aquaman’, where the eponymous character can live in and out of water because he possesses a noble lineage. (In the movie, mere mortals are not able to complete this trick and can only live on land if they are inside a special suit that contains water, the element that sustains their lives. Such creatures fight and achieve agency on dry land but they are vulnerable because if their suit is breached, they instantly die.) Rusinol’s Satie is a fish and can only live in water but the idea embodied in his painting, though alienated from the context in which it was born, has been transposed by Gustafson and placed in a new pond in a different time.

The bully-boy Poe of Gustafson’s drawing is troubling for me. It is essentially a 20th century image. People on the left side of politics often hold up some lone genius, like the writer in question, as one of Percy Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world” though the artist as political functionary might be less appealing if Gustafson’s vision were realised in fact, rather than in fantasy. A dour, brooding tyrant is all too commonplace, but this seems to be the kind of accomplice some want as they negotiate the avenues and byways of the world, especially as you see them conduct themselves online. They always seem to have (like their idea of Edgar Allen Poe) “history on their side”. 

Or perhaps Gustafson’s Poe is a promise of what’s always to come. The price we’ll pay if we don’t, collectively, pay enough attention and listen to heralds of change. Perhaps this aggressive Poe of the artist’s diurnal imagining reflects fear, some dream of a dystopian future where a knock on the door can lead to unimaginable torment. Perhaps if they remain unacknowledged in the present, such legislators might in the future turn nasty, become uncontrollable, even have impulses of their own that, if they give in to them, may make them as bad as those they criticised when they were living in their garrets. 

Even with the distortions posterity confers upon his or her image, an artist can remain remarkably inviolate in his or her works. Conditional, of course, on our reading or viewing the work, though a reading made in the 21st century is not the same as a reading of the same work made in the 19th century. If it were the same, no talented artist would ever be poor.

But at least if money’s the only thing you need to be accepted, then you can use whatever talents you naturally possess to get it. Under such a regime at least your thoughts won’t require approval to be licit, though they may be worth less than someone else’s. 

Book review: Aftershocks, Anthony Macris (2019)

If pressed for time perhaps save the link to this review, which has about 3900 words, so you can read it later on. Apologies for the length but this wonderful book – a fundamentally generous gesture that signals at a better future for humanity than the one we are often given to view in popular culture – warrants careful consideration. It contains book reviews and essays, as well as interviews the author participated in. Its scope is equally broad: Macris asks us to look at not just the role of the artist in society, but its very nature. Not only how we go about earning a living but how we create meaning in our lives (the two things being, of course, due to time constraints, inextricably linked).

The pieces here started being made in the final decades of last century, and most have been published elsewhere but some are published now for the first time. To start with the literary criticism, for me the best articles in this category are the negative reviews. I love it when Macris lets rip with an author of popular fiction such as Iain M. Banks, whose (to me, garish and unreadable) scifi fantasies are popular with fans of the genre. I disagree with Macris on some particulars, for example with regard to the work of David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. And I think Bret Easton Ellis’ 2005 novel ‘Lunar Park’ is a great read. But when it comes to niche genres we agree that there is often a disappointing lack of form even if the ideas themselves might be, because of the dictates of the class of art you are dealing with, largely out of bounds. Speculative fiction trades in various forms of unreality. This in itself is fine but works of literature endure on the basis of their style (all art does) so if the writing is bad, in time nothing will save it from itself.

For those, like me, who were not properly educated in the intricacies of postmodernist discourse, reading the essays at the beginning of the book might be a kind of revelation. I felt like Dante being guided through the underworld by Virgil.

In a piece in the “film” section titled ‘Waves of Love: J.L. Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve”’, Macris asks us to look at the ways that we, ourselves, not just artists, obey the dictates of our nature by seeking out the approval of others in our community. I thought about the consonance of this essay with a passage in a book I read just after I finished ‘Aftershocks’. A memoir, ‘The Tennis Partner’, chronicles a doctor’s passage from living with his family in El Paso, Texas, to single life. Abraham befriended a student of his, an Australian named David who was studying medicine in the US. David had originally won a scholarship on the basis of his tennis prowess. David and Abraham played tennis often, and in their games as well as the conversations they had with each other both found solace in the face of adversity. On one occasion when they met after an absence, David was full of excitement and wanted to talk about something. Abraham wrote much later:

He had so many insights that he wanted to validate by sharing them with me, so many friendships with others who had made similar voyages. He had heard incredible stories of compulsion and dependence. He had a firm sense of emerging from a dark tunnel.

In both of these works – a 1951 movie and a 1998 memoir – moments of shared pleasure or pain – complex feelings, at least – are manifest through the creation of meaning. This is also the place where economic value can be exchanged. Is it only by sharing things that are true to our nature that we create meaning, or anything of value? How does Modernism – which Macris in one essay says is concerned with the subjective – help us to discover things about the realm of the personal? Does the subjective need to be shared to be validated, helping us to know things that otherwise would remain hidden? Is this the true purpose of art or is art about making things that do not yet exist in the real world but only – perhaps – in our minds? And, is art different from fashion?

Anything goes

I’ll come back to such questions later but first I want to remark on an ancillary point made in ‘Aftershocks’ that struck me with some force. Like Macris I think that the times, in terms of artistic expression, have changed and that we are, now in the first decades of the new millennium, living in a period that will be labelled one day with a new word. No longer Postmodernist, but something else entirely. In his introduction Macris remarks on the shift that has taken place:

[What] does the term ‘postmodernism’ mean today? As I was putting this collection together, I was struck by how many of the writers I reviewed, often associated with postmodernism, seemed to be conducting an investigation into what comes after postmodernism. In this quest to find a name for the period we find ourselves in, there are a number of contenders – post-postmodernism, the new sincerity, metamodernism, pseudo-modernism, and so on – but no clear consensus has emerged. Yet it is clear that what might come after postmodernism doesn’t seem all that cheery.

Maybe it’s not so bad, though. It might depend on how you view the phenomenon. I have called this new phase “Divergism” in order to reflect the ways that the market has fractured into a thousand discrete communities, each with its own gods, prophets, and disciples. I wrote about my ideas here and here but it is evident that Macris has been heading in this direction for a while. In 2000, for example, writing a review for the Bulletin titled ‘20/20’ – about an exhibition titled ‘World Without End’ held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales – he noted that

images now circulate through the vast television, cinematic and digital networks that have proliferated with terrifying rapidity in the last decades of the century

And though there is bulk in the mass of texts, images and videos that has grown in the 20 years since that was written, there is also structure. Niches are as varied and numerous as the platforms themselves in a restive marketplace where money and symbols are constantly exchanged. For each niche there is fan art, where favoured books and movies are used as a springboard for further creative endeavour on the part of devotees who are as passionate about the objects of their interest as they are faithful to the ideas of the original artists, each of whom has his or her own history and influences. And these artistic products are linked with more abstract ideas, such as equality, equity, justice, and truth.

To illustrate how such an ecosystem can operate, I will briefly look at a public artefact, a tweet I saw on 1 April this year from a New York graphic design student using the Twitter handle @Ron_Salon:

Most Shows on [Netflix] with gay male lead characters that don’t get canceled [sic] give me strength. You know, not like October Faction. Netflix cancels another show with a gay male [person of colour] character. To Netflix diversity and inclusion work only if the gay male is whacko.  

Ron’s comment is not a piece of art but, rather, it is a token of exchange within a specific community. It was posted in reply to one from another account, whose owner had typed, “Nikki Blonsky gives me strength,” which refers to ‘Hairspray’, a 2007 teen movie that deals with such issues as body shape and racism. The actress Nikki Blonsky plays the female lead in the film, a character named Tracy Turnblad, who befriends a group of black students at her secondary school. Now, a TV show Ron refers to in his tweet is one I reviewed in February on this blog. ‘October Faction’ is a fantasy with elements of social commentary where two characters are gay. The parents of one of them: one white and one black. The parents of the other are from an ethnic group with its origins in the subcontinent. I’m not sure how the “whacko” label fits, and it might be that he mistyped a word. The important thing to note in this case is how Ron used the title of a TV show to make a point about something that is closely aligned to his personal beliefs.

Macris addresses the issue of art produced by audiences in a previously unpublished 1996 review of ‘Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man’, a book edited by Carin Kuoni with writings by the German artist.

Beuys consistently attacked the reifying effects of specialisation. … The career artist, the professional artist, the artist who fits his works to the needs of means/ends rationality; Beuys was opposed to all these models of art practice.

And a bit further on:

There is a clear Marxist influence in these arguments. The increasing division of labour in capitalism as one of the forces splitting society into ever smaller, ever more isolated units has been well documented even if, in the 1990s, it has lost some of its polemical edge. In his critique of specialisation, Beuys is calling for a more holistic approach to creativity.

Characterised as it is by increasing fragmentation, the market for literature and for films appears to be following a Capitalist paradigm though specialisation is a mode of experience fans themselves embrace when they are faced with (and even when they encourage) representations of their society, or of the world, that embody shared ideas. This is identity politics at work, and it is a facet of the market that companies like Netflix must consider when making shows and uploading them to their servers. Big business is a common bogeyman in popular culture even though it was Netflix that, in the first place, disseminated and made available to Ron the shows he was then able to talk about on Twitter. Macris talks about the way the individual’s subjectivity is used by Capital, in the “society and politics” section of ‘Aftershocks’ where we find ‘The New Millennium: Facades and Duplicities’, a 2001 essay:

In the free market you can have all the inner life you want. Inner lives are good, they’re great for business, as long as they can be externalised and turned into products. And, as the increased commodification of everyday life has shown, there isn’t much that can’t be.

It’s arguable how much all of the user activity is encouraged by businesses and how much of it is a grassroots effort by the audience, but at least Netflix cannot ignore consumers – and, through fan art and social media, producers – of content if it wants to succeed because clumping and tribalism seem to embody a species behaviour, where an “in group” is ranged against an “out group”. People are included or excluded using language, or using other representations of things, people, or places that are inscribed with meaning. (Macris explains the idea of the “socius” in ‘Words & Worlds: Joyce, Duras, Kundera’, an essay from 2007, and also uses it in an interview with academic Anthony Uhlmann published in the journal Axon in 2015; both are included in ‘Aftershocks’.) The use of a movie like ‘Hairspray’ to create community happens all the time and we can see this process in action on social media. Rather than “buy now!” the cry heard in every hashtag is “must watch!”, an exhortation as mundane as any other form of marketing jargon, but that ordinary people use enthusiastically as they feverishly try to connect with potential allies and consumers.

And what are the aesthetics of social media? Do fashion and art constitute dual loci or are they related in some way? Does fashion make bad art palatable, so that it won’t be rejected (leading to money being wasted)? And to what extent are the feelings of the audience influencing plots and characterisation used in such shows as ‘October Faction’? How important to the creative process are the views of consumers, and if an artist makes allowances for their biases does it dilute or enhance his or her vision?

The creature behind the mask

The problem with labels is that as soon as you articulate yourself using one, someone will offer another. Modernism is full of such shifts, some of them very small, with variations in style over time. If you use a word like “duplicity” when you are at the office you’ll likely receive a warning from a manager. If you call an aesthetic mode “Divergist” someone will rock up and call it something else. People are naturally aggressive but they crave community.

I was reminded of Macris’ meditation on the final scene of ‘All About Eve’ when, earlier this month, I watched a documentary about a competitor named Luciana Aymar. In one scene from the end of her career, Lucha, as she is known in her native Argentina, is shown about to join a match between two hockey teams. The stands are full of fans shouting her name and on our screens we eagerly watch them watching her; as the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) shows us, humans yearn to be united, and sport offers this kind of reprieve from the pain of living independently. Knowing this, the filmmakers – who we never see – show Lucha close-up, her face slightly raised so that her jaw is horizontal and her strong chin points toward the field of play as she waits for the voice that will allow her to move her feet and run out to join her teammates. We identify with her for a few moments – she is elated – and as she channels the passion of the audience she resembles a predator ready to spring.

History tells us this that people have always been this way; I’m talking about both Lucha and the spectators (but also the filmmakers). What changes over time is the expressive mode used to harness such impulses. This is as true for society as it is for art. We are not born free, but are rather shackled always to our physicality, a painful impasse, at times, that art can help to alleviate because it offers access to imaginary realms beyond the confines of matter. Netflix has some movies on its servers that were made in the 1980s but perhaps it’s time for managers to release some 50s classics so that more people can be exposed to films made by the Boomers’ grandparents. What a shock that would serve! After reading about half of this book I thought about the title used to bundle its contents and decided that it maps the aftershocks of Modernity. Throughout history, like the sound that comes after rapping a tuning fork on a hard surface, shifts over the long term follow tonic events. For example, Europeans’ gradual awakening, starting in the final decades of the 15th century, to a new reality – suddenly there were two additional continents on the earth containing their own peoples and their own cultures – as they started to see themselves through a fresh lens.

Similarly, the 20th century was a time of great change, WWII especially serving a tremendous shock to the global community and spawning a radical counterculture that thrived during the economic boom of the years that followed it. In a sense WWII created, for the first time, a global community. The internet accelerated this change in the individual’s conception of him- and herself, and such companies as Netflix, which is the first global TV station, have cemented those gains in tangible (though partly electronic) form. A single marketplace with products from almost every corner of the earth. One dazzling portal; unrestrained diversity.

The essay on Beuys’ book shows that the market and creativity have occupied Macris’ mind for at least a generation. This consistency is worth noting. One issue that pops up again and again in ‘Aftershocks’ is the complexity inherent in the figure of the artist, as the artist can stand in for everybody. And in ‘Autographic’, a review of two art shows held in Sydney in 2006 that was published in the Bulletin, Macris unveils briefly a conception of the individual living in the world as “an infinitely fragile thing” that is often protected by a mask, reprising a theme expressed in a piece written after he interviewed American photographer Cindy Sherman, that in 1999 was also published in the Bulletin.

I want to briefly look at a concept introduced by academic Anthony Uhlmann in the final interview in the book, which is titled, ‘The Analogue Real and the “Capital” Novels: Thinking the Real and the City in Literature.’ In discussing some of Macris’ fiction, Uhlmann uses a term he had developed – the “analogue real” – and describes it in this way:

The way in which writers organise their novels will depend upon, or be informed by, the ideas they have about how the world works. I called it the ‘analogue real’. It is easy to understand. What I mean is that if you have an idea of what the ‘real’ is – from philosophy, say, or religion, or science, some other domain of knowledge that is capable of offering a broadbrush picture of how the world functions – you will, consciously or unconsciously, structure your novel in a way that answers that idea of the real, that adapts to it.

A writer with certain biases and preconceptions about the world will embed such ideas in his or her works. Many people – though a minority of people – feel alienated from popular culture because it doesn’t consone with their view of the world. We might choose not to take bad art seriously because we understand the forms of the relevant genre and go with the flow, laughing along with whatever corny routine is served up as entertainment for us. But in our daily lives we might also come into contact with realities that are at odds with our personal beliefs. To deal with this in our social or professional lives we wear a kind of mask, in the form of a persona.

In a digitised world of avatars and icons, of virtual buttons and hyperlinks, all of us are familiar with symbolic representations, so the concept is easy to understand. In his book, Macris does more than highlight the contrast between the interior life of the individual and his or her persona, he also touches on the issue of our complicity in the marketplace of ideas and of real value. In the 2001 essay ‘The New Millennium: Facades and Duplicities’ mentioned earlier in this article, he talks about a character in a novel he eventually published in 2012 but which percolated in his mind for a good deal of time. Her name is Penny and she works at a job placement agency. She must “lie and smile at the same time” to keep her job, writes Macris, anticipating ideas of my own published in a post on this blog on 12 August last year:

[To] get ahead in an organisation you have to believe in its virtue and you have to be skilful at lying without being caught doing it. A strange amalgam of duplicity and conformity is what will help you to progress in your career.

This consonance is possibly fortuitous – some years ago I read the novel ‘Great Western Highway’, where Penny appears – but in fact it is not surprising. The things Penny has to put up with in order to perform her role are familiar to anyone who has held a regular office job for any length of time. The brand of ennui she experiences as she earns her pay is commonplace.

The market and the ecosystem

Just as an artist might not immediately be rewarded for his or her creativity – a novel idea might be ignored because its value is not understood, while common tropes are shared widely because everyone groks the meme – in the workplace the dictates of the subjective mind might not be understood by colleagues and so a kind of camouflage must be used. A general conundrum is that only by living in a community can we realise our true species nature, and be happy. This should mean being rewarded for things that are particular to us as individuals. Or, perhaps, are we already being so rewarded? Competitive people are given access to more resources because they are usually better at achieving institutional goals. Do we achieve happiness due to the essence of our nature or despite it? Perhaps the answer to this question is: both. Or else: different things at different times. Lying is different from telling the truth only in terms of its effects on others, but uninterrupted solitude is just as bad as constant exposure to their judgement. Lying might be a solution to the problem of monotony but do we lie only when telling the truth is attached to too great a cost, or are we more perverse than that? People lie all the time on social media so mendacity and duplicity seem to be more than just commonplace; are, instead, endemic.

Rather than using our creative talents to lie at work or to perform a wicked feint with our stick to get past a defender on the hockey field, might we not all think of ourselves as artists? Can art form a preferable vehicle for humankind’s competitiveness? We encourage children to be creative but once we reach our majority we seem to think that making art is at best optional. Macris appears to have been exercised for a long time by the belief that adults, too, are creative, suggesting that we can perhaps use such talents in places other than at work, in social situations, or in sport. An implication being that if more people had an art practice we would be served up better cultural products as the audience would be more discerning as to the quality of what it consumes.

Let a thousand flowers bloom! Relevance for artists struggling in today’s marketplace of kitsch and cliché, of Disney franchises and Marvel spin-offs, might be delayed by our blind obedience to fashion. Some might not enjoy success in their lifetime, others will be conceded the esteem of posterity. But many people with superior aesthetic acumen who, 200 years ago, might have written mediocre poetry, nowadays work in a creative industry – in film or in advertising or as a freelance copywriter. And social media, where such legacy influencers as journalists and writers compete with everybody else for attention, has given people access to audiences at scale.

So perhaps spring has well and truly entered in. If you are old enough to remember a different time, is the territory you now survey filled with brighter blossoms or is the quality of what’s made available too poor to warrant regard? Or is it like Twitter’s Netflix hashtag? (An occasional elegant bon mot sitting under a Thai spam post that offers a service with less appeal – if that is possible – because it is repeated ten times an hour.)

Equality or equity: which is a better gauge of community health?

In a story published by the Sydney Morning Herald on Sunday 18 August, journalist Eryk Bagshaw wrote, “Young Australians are being locked out of a ‘generational bargain’ as the wealth gap between children and their parents soars, new figures show, as the government prepares the terms of reference for its landmark retirement income review.” The story goes on:

In a report to be released on Monday, the Grattan Institute found Australian household wealth has tripled over the past 30 years from $2.8 trillion in 1990 to $10.3 trillion in 2018. 

"But the wealth bonanza has been far from equally spread. Most of the increase in wealth has been accumulated by older households, who benefited most from the housing boom and growth in superannuation assets," researchers Danielle Wood and Kate Griffiths found.

This story feeds a common source of discontent in the community broadly, and it’s a gripe that is almost as old as Modernity itself. From the downfall of China’s Qing dynasty to the October Revolution in 1917, around the world people with not much wealth have been mobilising their forces in order to try to capture the wealth of the better-off parts of societies. But this impulse – the idea that all people in the community should share in the community’s wealth equally, regardless of their profession or their talents or their industry or their dumb luck – has been a source of untold suffering. The 20th century is strewn with the bodies of the dead, people killed in the service of promoting equality. The corpses of martyrs to this idea, if they were all placed above ground, would probably stretch from the top of Mount Everest to the moon.

The image above is a piece of propaganda produced in the wake of the French Revolution, the originary cash grab launched by the proletariat. It’s a curious image. In the left of the image you have two symbolic figures, a man and a woman. The man holds a pole on which a pennant, the Tricolor – the flag of the revolution – is flying. The woman has bare breasts to show that she is liberated. But in the right of the image there’s a heteronormative couple with three children: a girl, a boy, and a toddler. The boy and the girl obediently hold their arms out toward the titulary figures, encouraged by their mother. The father, obligingly bent a few degrees at his waist, brings up the rear as the supporter of his family. There’s a plough in the frame, a symbol of industry. The woman with bare breasts holds against her knees a cornucopia to embody plenty – the benefits available to be enjoyed by the people if they follow the dictates of the state. The image is full of interest and shows how, at that time, in the final years of the 18th century, French people were expected to obey in order to prosper. Obey not the king but the state.

The state today fulfils some of the same roles, particularly through taxation and redistribution of wealth. It can also function to regulate wages so that even the lowest-paid among the community’s breadwinners are adequately compensated for their labour: if people have no money to spend, then not only do tax receipts go down, depriving the government of funds from which the poor can be supported, but business also flags and the economy tanks. Equality turns out to be a matter of degree rather than an absolute good in itself.

Australia today, according to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, is the fifth-best place in the world for workers, as measured by social mobility. But despite the prosperity stemming from a high degree of equity in the system, a current bugbear is the Baby Boomer generation, as the story mentioned at the start of this piece shows. Boomers are the bad guys du-jour, the group that the majority of the population loves to hate. They are, if they are white, the patriarchy who have benefited from favourable policies and so have quarantined for themselves the majority of the nation’s wealth. If you say this often enough it becomes true, regardless how much wealth each person aged over the age of 55 actually possesses. An entire class of people is demonised. They must, consequently, pay. 

The parallels with Germany in the 1930s come to mind here. It’s probably only a matter of time before the family home will be included among assets to be assessed for the purpose of calculating the pension. Already, the government has been clawing back money from older Australians, including in 2014 when, in a bipartisan move, the government changed the way that nursing home fees are calculated. Before this time, fees were calculated based on income alone. But assets are now included in Centrelink calculations of the fees people are asked to pay to stay in a nursing home (the government provides a subsidy depending on the individual’s ability to pay). So both sides of government are in on the game: older people will be asked to pay more and more older people will therefore be living in poverty as a result.

If you have worked, as I have, in the education sector, you will know that there is another measure of social health: equity. In the tertiary education sector equity of access to academia is a gauge of institutional health by which senior managers judge their own performance. The idea is not that all people are equal (because, clearly, this is a nonsense). The idea is that all people have equal access to the good things that are available in the society in question. In this case that thing is higher education. A passport to higher wages and to personal fulfillment. Making sure all people have the same level of access to higher education is a goal of university managers and they take this task seriously through the use of a range of measures that can help people coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and from linguistically diverse backgrounds to enrol in a course of study.

So the measure that we should use to gauge the health of our society is not whether people are equally remunerated, but whether they have the same opportunities to develop their skills and talents so that they can thrive. Seen this way, the task for Millennials envious of their Boomer parents is to try to build something as robust as that class of people has managed to construct over the years. They should also be cognisant of the fact that most Boomers, when they die, will, in any case, bequeath their wealth to their children, so we will see a massive transfer of wealth between generations as a result of mere mortality. 

In any case, Boomers are entitled to their wealth. Once you arrive at the age of 55 it is hard enough to keep your job. Just try getting a new job if you lose your job and you are aged 55 or above. The number of Australians over 55 who are on Newstart is increasing at an alarming rate. Millennials on the other hand might switch easily from position to position. They might change jobs every two years, as far as I know. But once you hit the big 5-0 you are considered by most employers to be a liability even though the things that you can contribute to a workplace are many and varied.

Boomers, for their part, are very aware of the community’s views about them. In the past year, for instance, I have read two novels by older Australian men that had a man as the protagonist who philanthropically provides a home for a woman fleeing a dysfunctional family. Neither novel was influenced by the other but both had this common plot element. This indicates to me that there is a type of survivor’s guilt among Boomer men who find themselves, in their later years, comfortably well-off and able to avoid relying on the government to supplement their income. Headlines like Bagshaw’s are neither needed nor warranted.

More on the new literary mode of Divergism

Back on 1 March this year I published a post I had written to outline what I see as a new literary mode. I called it Divergism in order to encapsulate the variety of different styles that are available, now, for writers and readers in the marketplace for books. But when I recently read through the post, I saw that it was quite spare and I felt, on review, that there were other things to say that were germane to the case. Hence the current blogpost. What you are reading now is an attempt to fill out the gaps that I see, on a second look, in that original post. You might want to go back to read that post first, before going on with what’s below. It might help you to orient yourself as I won’t repeat here everything that was in it.

The first thing to say about Divergism is that it builds on the gains that were made in the art of novel (and short story and novella) writing as a result of Modernism and Postmodernism. To illustrate what that means, I’ll insert a case study here.

Recently, I read a novel written by a second-tier novelist who publishes all of his work in French and who is not as well-known in the Anglosphere as he is in France. He is very old now and his most productive era was the 1990s. Reading his book, it struck me how old-fashioned it felt to me. One thing that was missing here were the internal processes of the individual’s mind. The rich tapestry of thoughts and impressions that help us to understand the motivations of the individual characters. There was also a lack of detail in the depictions of the environment in which the characters moved.  I felt that the book was a bit jerky, like a film that is not running at the correct speed on the spool. It was like seeing an uncoordinated animal trying to walk, like a foal just out of its mother’s womb, standing up jerkily on the straw of the barn and moving uncertainly forward.

The book was an historical fantasy and it was very good in the end but I noticed something about it that the author if, when the book was originally published, he had been told what I felt, would probably have been puzzled by. He might have said that he wasn’t writing a literary masterpiece. The kinds of detail that you find, say, in the novels of James Joyce or Marcel Proust, were not relevant for his purpose. But in today’s book market this kind of separation is no longer necessary. Even books that are deliberately aimed at a specific market – crime thrillers, say, or romance – now often have in them elements that derive consciously from the innovations that people like Joyce and Proust introduced into the canon at the beginning of the last century.

But the situation is stranger even than this, even. There is, now, a rich croop of hybrids available for readers to consume. It’s not just that genre novels are more literary in their style now than they had been, say, 20 years ago. It’s also that writers who want to send a message are using both genre elements and literary elements in their books. The market for literary fiction is small (and always has been; people benefit in many ways from what is classed as literary fiction but they won’t take the risk to buy a book by an unknown author who aspires to producing high culture) and so authors are pitching their work at the middle market. To do this they wrap a plot that is heavily influenced by genre norms (for example, by the norms common for crime or science fiction novels) in a package that also contains a poetics that is heavy on literary fictional devices.

These new hybrids both challenge – through the use of secondary colour and through the deployment of detail that relies often on imagery – while also reassuring the reader that he (or, more often, she) will get something that is fun to read. In a hybrid novel these things do different things and they complement each other. The genre plot ensures that the story has strong forward movement. But the stream-of-consciousness and the secondary colour help the author to create drama.

Both give the reader an opportunity to engage with the book. You keep turning the pages because you want to find out who did it, or what happens to the protagonist at the end of the book. But you are also entertained by the feelings that the secondary elements evoke in the spaces between the end of one chapter and the end of the next. Reading this kind of novel is doubly fun: through access to their personalities and interior feelings and thoughts you get insight into the nature of the characters who animate the drama and, as well, you are compelled by the need to know, by the overriding suspense that runs through the novel like an electric current, to find out what happens to the man, woman, boy, or girl (or non-binary individual, or animal, or plant, or rock) sitting at the centre of the web.

Not everyone likes books that actually challenge the reader’s way of seeing the world. Most people want the reassurance of what they are used to, and they will stick to their favourite type of novel loyally: not just the author’s name but the cover design will orient them toward their preferred type of book in the bookstore. But the aspiration to express things in a novel that cannot be expressed in any other way and that go to the core of who we are and what the world is, remains in any number of complex and beautiful (or flawed) novels that can be found in your local independent bookstore. This kind of aspiration is found especially in novels that cleave to our legacy Postmodern mode.

And the stylistic elements that you find in such novels are also often found, today, in genre novels which are, more often than not, an example of the hybrid form of novel I have described above. These novels also express things that can be expressed in no other way than through a novel, but the messages they send, and the ontological superstructure they rely on to create meaning, is rooted in the world rather than in the realm of ideas. Novels of ideas are still being written and they are still being read and they are still being enjoyed – by a few – but the mainstream now has the same goals. Writers of the new hybrids want to change the world in the here-and-now and their readers share their desire for novelty on the political front. Who would have thought, in the 1990s, that the most completely engaged fiction would turn out to be crime thrillers?

I want to add a short note at the end here about the ways that novels are talked about in public. Because of the large number of books I read and because of the necessity of putting books somewhere once they are read, I get most of my books from the Kindle store now. I use a standard non-backlit Kindle that I bought a few years ago. But I still go to bookstores from time to time. I might combine a walk to the bookstore with an outing for lunch, and while at the bookstore I will browse the new-release shelves looking for things that look interesting. I have found some real gems this way and I have also found some real stinkers (often, topical nonfiction).

But most of the recommendations I get nowadays are from social media. I use Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. With the first of these, especially, every week I see the titles and covers of a large number of new releases. If I see something that I think I might be interested in reading, I will write down the name of the author and the book’s title on a piece of paper I keep next to my PC for this purpose. If I am out and about and see the title of a new book on the Twitter app I will use the Notes function of my phone to capture it for future reference. People tweet book covers frequently to their followers, and they also tweet the titles of books and the names of authors they like. You also see, from time to time, magazine articles with a specialist angle. An article a friend posts on Facebook might contain the titles of 20 new novels from one part of the world and, if this happens, I scribble furiously for a few minutes in order to capture as many new items as I can.

People want to share in order to create community and so book recommendations are a staple of social media; they give people an opportunity to express something about their own personalities and to signal to others where their allegiances lie. My magpie-like behaviour is also a facet of Divergism. There is a plethora of new works out there are and, even if you even only pay occasional attention, they will come to you without your having to do anything more than sit in front of the computer or look at your mobile phone. Just choose good people to follow.

“Stubborn as a mule:” People dig in to protect their guy

Although it contains a lot of particular details, this vignette can be taken as representative of something that is common on social media: people’s tendency there to do anything possible, in the conversations that they hold, to avoid conceding the tiniest sliver of ground. People don't want the truth, they want their own ideas given back to them. I’ve written before about people’s tendency to treat politics as a kind of football game: they support political parties in the same way that they would support a football team (use your preferred form of football, in Australia we play four different kinds). That is, with passion and unthinkingly.

But it’s the case with any event that engages people’s attention. If you grab someone by the collar or by the button and talk to their faces, they will talk back. And they will tell you that you are wrong. If you disagree in public about someone they are used to agreeing with, they will take this very personally. They will, in fact, take it as a challenge. “Hey,” they will think, “this guy Matthew is dissing my guy Eric, I have to stop this!” So to help Eric they will do whatever it takes to discredit Matthew, starting with the arguments he puts forward.

To show how this happens, let me describe a conversation I had with a US journalist, who is the deputy editor of a reputable news outlet. He is based in New York City and I saw his first tweet at 10.40am on 3 September, Sydney time. I’ll use his first name for convenience. Eric said that his niece, who is 14, had written a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times to complain about an op-ed that had been published in the paper that had remarked on the fact that teenagers don’t read serious books anymore. She said, in reply, that, while literature (specifically, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’) had changed her life, so, too, had the fantasy podcast ‘Rabbits’, the ‘Harry Potter’ books, and the video game ‘Minecraft’.

In reply to Eric, I said that studies had shown that reading literary fiction helps to improve empathy in the reader, while other forms of culture, such as genre fiction, movies, and video games, do not. “I call bullshit on said studies,” said Eric. I replied that he was being a bit unreasonable, like a climate-change denier discrediting the work of scientists that shows that global warming is caused by humans. He said that he meant for me to show him the studies. I hadn’t gotten this particular Americanism – “call bullshit on” something is apparently a common turn of phrase there – and then told him to google it.

In response some of his followers had a look for the studies. And while Eric never responded again to me, I got a long series of comments from people on Eric’s side who questioned what I had said. In order to discredit the whole, they took apart what I said and debunked bits of it. There was only one study, went one guy. The study didn’t take into account video games, it only compared reading literary fiction with reading other types of book, such as nonfiction and popular fiction. One person said that, in her view, “There are *many* movies that increase human empathy.” Other people were less kind. One said, “produce the evidence or shut up,” even though others had substantiated what I had initially said.

Others were supportive of what I had said and one person even put up a blogpost about a study that had been done on the phenomenon in question. One Melbourne writer said, accurately as it turns out, “yeah the studies don't confine it to literary fiction, fwiw. found the same thing with Stephen King as they did with Proust. a large part has to do with the level of engagement of the individual with the art, not the art itself.”

The thing is that I had known about the benefits of reading literary fiction for over a year and it rankled with the people who objected to my statement that they had been caught out sitting in ignorance. It was shame that made them all so defensive. So they backed their guy to the hilt, and damn the facts. This is the way Twitter works, I have found. This example was just so neat that I felt compelled to describe what happened in detail.

Strangely, just as I had finished editing this post a guy I follow from the US put up a retweet that contained a quote. It went, “’If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse.’  -  Jim Rohn.”

Are institutions good for us or bad for us?

I thought for a long time about writing this and eventually decided to go ahead. I am going to omit names of organisations in what follows, and the names of people will also be left out. Some people who have worked with me in the past who read this will know what I’m talking about, but I am going to take a risk and talk about these things because few do.

The title of this post is somewhat inflammatory. This was done for rhetorical reasons. But this post will be deliberate and careful in its conclusions. This is more like a piece of memoir than a piece of journalism, so care should be taken to generalise for the whole of society on the basis of observations made and conclusions drawn here. This account is based on what happened to me and to people I have known. Other people might have different experiences, I wouldn’t know. The lack of information about this kind of thing is, itself, disturbing. I imagine personnel managers attending convocations where such issues are discussed in a collegial setting, but news of such conversations never seems to gain a place in the broader public sphere.

Since the majority of people work, or have worked, in an institution at some point in their lives, and many still do so, this absence of material on such a central part of our lives seems to me to be scandalous. People often talk about suicide and how it is hard to talk about it in public. But work? Surely we are able to have meaningful conversations about something that is so central to our lives. Something that occupies such a large proportion of our lives, in fact. Eight hours a day, five days a week for 40 years. Day after day after day of labour, of restlessness, of thwarted ambition, of disappointments and satisfactions. Month after month. Year after year. And not a peep about any of it in the media unless there is a scandal such as an employer underpaying staff or someone who breaks the law and embezzles funds. We only talk about work if it gets into the court system.

To get back to the title and start off: institutions have been around for as long as society has existed. Some of them, like the parts of national armed forces, are very old indeed. The role of institutions is to organise people so that they can achieve better results than might be achieved if they operated alone.

It is often said that in the West we have such good polities because of the maturity of our institutions. But if you work in one you often find that things are not quite so rosy. The place of the individual in an institution is usually difficult because it is fraught with danger, as well as with opportunity. Like a game of snakes and ladders, you can find yourself on a ladder one year and the next you are on a snake. Twists of fate, things over which you have little control, can affect your mental health and your domestic life. If you are sidelined or if you lose your job this can have a big impact on you in many ways. Marriages can fail, children can lose a parent, financial ruin can follow from events that can operate completely independently of the individual.

Conversations that I have followed about institutions often point to their failings, but these seem to be linked to precisely the same things that go to form their merits. In my experience, institutions can shelter the individual against such things as economic downturns but at the same time they ask for loyalty. Loyalty, for its part, can operate to stymie innovation because people are unwilling to speak out when they see that a policy pursued by a superior is having a deleterious effect on the health of the larger organisation of which his or her work unit forms a part. Often, feuds over territory that an organisation cannot properly modulate into meaningful action can result in people being unfairly criticised, and they may even, as a result of the outflow from a disagreement, lose their job for no reason other than to make sure that another manager, whose work unit had been threatened by the actions of the first one, keeps his or her budget and privileges intact.

In this kind of situation, line workers are often asked to say or do things that are not in the best interests of the larger organisation. Their managers might encourage them to continue to voice opposition to a change suggested to work processes that would result in a diminution of the importance of their work unit, but they will do what they are told even though they can see that making the change suggested would benefit a large number of people. Turf is protected and front-line workers are forced to deal with the majority of the friction it creates.

One problem with institutions is that there is often a knowledge imbalance that characterises the work unit. Line workers know more about the problems that exist but they are not empowered to make decisions that might solve them. Instead, often, a manager has a policy he or she is following in order to achieve a result that consones with her own ideas about how the organisation should operate, or to conform to industry best-practice, or to further their own ambition or the ambition of someone further up the hierarchy from them. Front-line staff may have to do things, in such cases, in order to benefit someone other than themselves. That person might be right and the policy they are following might in the end benefit the broader organisation. But, on the other hand, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So whatever policy it is that is being pursued, there will be conflict resulting from interactions with people in other work units.

What to do? If you are caught up in a feud you are probably best advised to keep your head down and get on with the job. But this can have costs to your and to your family. You might suffer stress or even, in a worse scenario, a mental breakdown. If the latter outcome eventuates, will your organisation let you keep your job or will they sideline you or even fire you? All of these things happen all the time everywhere in the world.

The paradox of organisations is that they both help people to earn enough money to live decent lives and operate to make people conform. Just to survive you have to do what you are told. Failure to do this will often result in your being sidelined into a useless role with low status and no prospects for advancement, or even to you losing your job. For my part, I not very good at working in organisations, although as an arts graduate, at a time when getting an arts degree was considered to be a waste of effort, I didn’t have the most auspicious start.

In my career have learned more than just the rudiments of writing an application report. I have learned more than just that I am good with words. I also learned that the knowledge gaps that exist in organisations lie at the core of the problems they evince. People up the tree know more about the direction your work unit is heading in, but people on the front line know how those decisions are influencing relations with other work units. Caught in the middle are these front-line staff, men and women who risk everything sometimes for no other reason than to feed the ambition or vanity of a person with more power than them.

Is this what we want? Is this the best we can do? Personally, I think not. We can’t live without organisations but if we want them to be better places we need to have intelligent conversations about them. This can be difficult for obvious reasons. People are usually unwilling to jeopardise their livelihood by talking in public about a current employer even if that employer is causing them to experience levels of stress that might, given the right circumstances, lead to a breakdown or worse. People are afraid of organisations and therefore organisations continue to treat people as commodities. A new person can easily be brought in to replace someone who breaks. The whole survives even if an individual is hurt.

But how are people chosen for the fast track to the top? Is it enough to have good ideas? I think not. Is it enough to be good at your job? Again, no.

I haven’t worked for an organisation for a decade but I think that the old rules are still in place. What I found in my time working in them is that in order to survive and thrive you have to obey the ethos they embody and you have to have what are usually referred to euphemistically as “superior communication skills”. To be able to parley your way to achieving personal goals can send a message to people higher up in the hierarchy that you might also be useful for them. So, to get ahead in an organisation you have to believe in its virtue and you have to be skilful at lying without being caught doing it. A strange amalgam of duplicity and conformity is what will help you to progress in your career. Sort of like being in a royal court: every step you take is watched and displays of obedience carry weight.

For every Steve Jobs there are tens of thousands of dead-weight executives who live fat in expensive suburbs in big houses and who send their children to private schools. For executives an innovative mind is relatively low on the list of desirable qualities, so an organisation usually continues to follow a well-trod path until the whole thing is taken over by a more profitable organisation, until it fails completely and its assets are sold off, or until things get so bad that there is a major shake-up and heads roll.

The left and its disconnect from the mainstream

One of the reasons the world is hard to understand these days, and this might be one reason for the rise of parties like One Nation, is that there seems to be a radical disconnect between the progressive left and the mainstream. People on the left get themselves all exercised about minuscule issues that they invest themselves heavily in, such as black-face comedy or veganism, which the mainstream deems unimportant.

If you take a plane and go overseas, furthermore, as more and more Australians are doing, you find more of a disconnect between the progressive left and reality. In some places I visited recently on my Middle East trip they don't have pedestrian crossings on major roads or even clean drinking water. So the minute concerns of a Greens voter living in Newtown actually have no basis in reality beyond the applause that holding those views elicits from his or her friends when they go out to the Bank Hotel on a Friday night to down a few schooners of 4 Pines pale ale.

In so many countries (countries whence refugees come) people have no right to vote, do not read anything approximating the truth in the newspapers, and face all sorts of problems because of general corruption and a culture of untruth that permeates the social fabric from the top to the bottom. But if you point out to a person on the progressive left that there is a democratic deficit in the countries where refugees come from, and that something should be done about fixing that situation, they will more likely than not think that you are a racist.

There is plenty of support for refugees among people on the progressive left, but none of them seems to worry much about the actual living conditions of the people they think they are supporting. Helping refugees resettle in a country like the US or Australia is important for them, but making sure that their families back home in Guatemala or Afghanistan can get to work safely, earn a living, drink clean water, or vote, is considered peripheral.

The left is adrift on a sea made from its own tears that normal people never touch. The harebrained concerns of a sociology professor specialising in transsexualism, a graphic designer with a cavoodle named Jasper, or a computer programmer with an interest in Star Trek sequels – people who populate the progressive left in developed countries – are so remote from those of normal people living in places like Turkey or Jordan that it is as though they inhabit different planets. And the mainstream in the developed world knows this and treats their compatriots as though they were insane. For its part, the left wonders why it keeps losing elections, blames the electorate for making the wrong decision when it does, and starts reading stories in the Guardian that ask whether Communism should be reintroduced.

Given this kind of disconnect from the mainstream, it's no wonder that Pauline Hanson poo-poohs every comment made in public by Richard Di Natale. The fact is that the left has lost its moorings. It should be getting exercised about Hong Kong, but instead it dicks around with little details that mean nothing to anyone apart from itself.