One of the benefits of living and studying in Brighton is that London is only a short train journey away, and so it is easy to take advantage of all the museums, galleries, and events which the city has to offer, without having to put up with actually living there. The Southbank Centre is currently hosting a Literature festival, concentrating on ‘the themes of freedom, justice and democracy’, and aims to be a celebration of ‘the optimism of the human spirit and the ability of the arts to celebrate and transform lives.’ Last week I went along to Slavoj Zizek’s talk, entitled ‘The Myth of Western Liberty’.

The talk began with a short lecture, which was followed up with a Q&A with Paul Mason, and then a few more questions from the audience. Zizek was as entertaining as ever, with the talk flitting from popular culture and current events, to Hegel’s dialectics and the ‘Frankfurt school’ (there was very little Lacan mentioned, to my dismay), and with a generous peppering of his usual jokes.

This was all hurtled through at a heady pace, which for me was at times pretty hard to follow. His Slovenian accent, constant nose-rubbing, shirt pulling, and gesticulating, were all further obstacles to a clear understanding of what was being said, and although the entire talk was being subtitled and shown on a large screen above, this was done with some delay, (and with some hilarious errors – Obama was translated as Owe Balm Ma, etc.). This meant that some of the subtleties of his argument, along with what was as far as I could discern as being (for me at least, having only read a few of his books) new material, was missed.

 The opening lecture was predominantly covering old ground, with a brief reassertion of his philosophical position – presumably intended for those unfamiliar with his work – and steered clear of the nitty-gritty complexities of his books.

Some of the more memorable things discussed were some worrying developments made by scientists in the USA, who have fitted microchips inside the brains of mice which allow their movements to be controlled remotely. According to Zizek, who has spoken with the scientists involved in the research, these experiments have already progressed on to humans. Perhaps even more worrying, is that the control goes completely unnoticed by the test subject. Whilst the chip is active the scientists can control the movements of the subject – make them turn left or right – but when asked afterwards if they felt like they were being controlled in any way, the test subjects responded that it felt like they were making their own decisions. They felt as if they wanted to turn left or right, when really it was the will of the scientist in the room adjacent. Zizek of course then made parallels with the current system of democratic capitalism dominant in the west, in which the big decisions that govern our lives are already made for us in secret, whilst we potter around thinking we are free. 

This is not a particularly new or shocking argument – one is reminded of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice (2004), for example – but interestingly, Zizek goes further. Zizek would rather have less, not more, choice, which is one of his gripes with the current liberal attitude that is constantly complaining about capitalism infringing upon their freedoms. According to Zizek, some decisions should be made for us. We shouldn’t have to be burdened with choosing the best schools for our children, what healthcare insurance to have, and so on, these should be decided already.

Here’s where Zizek goes a little, in his own words, ‘Stalinist’. In fact, he excuses his Stalinist leanings quite frequently throughout the talk. Zizek’s alternative model involves the emergence of a benevolent ‘master’ figure, a person who becomes a figurehead for the mobilization of individuals to form a proper community, and is more of a facilitator, than a traditional leader. Someone who inspires rather than decides on the behalf of the public – and this is where I start to lose sight of what he is talking about. The trouble is, we have to just sit tight and wait for one of these ‘masters’ to emerge…

Zizek becomes quite vague when prompted further by a member of the audience to extrapolate on what should, or can be done, to change the current system. ‘We’re running out of time’, he says, with global warming, the current economic crisis. The time for ‘action’ is surely upon us, isn’t it?

Zizek’s answer is ‘no’. The action of the twentieth century which sought to instate an alternative; communism, uprisings, socialism, all essentially failed to alleviate the onset of late capitalism, and were perhaps the very catalyst for the next, more advanced phase of capitalism to emerge. According to Zizek, now is the time for re-thinking. To imagine, rather than re-act, to start Demanding the Impossible. Action now would more than likely be in the same vein as those twentieth century attempts at reformation, and would inevitably produce the same results. Zizek reworks the old Marxist thesis that ‘”philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is to change it”’, instead, ‘we should say, “In the twentieth century, we maybe tried to change the world too quickly. The time is to interpret it again, to start thinking.”’[1] A sentiment that was no doubt comforting to the audience, who had spent their evening sat in the Southbank Centre doing just that.

Anna Cole was a Visiting Lecturer with the Literature Team at Brighton University, 2012-2014.  She taught Postcolonial Literature, Travel Writing, and New English Writings and Voices.  The following is an account of her recent trip to Paris as part of her ongoing research.

At the end of the teaching term, Summer 2014 I was lucky enough to spend a fortnight in Paris on the first half of a Research Fellowship at the Centre de Recherches Interculturelles sur les Domains Anglophones et Francophones at Paris University, 13.  I was invited by the Centre to their inter-disciplinary research ‘lab’ – a lab in the French tradition – combining innovative teaching practice in the humanities and social sciences, with researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including literature, history, sociology, and English and Australian studies. Before heading to Paris for the Fellowship I’d recently collaborated with Vanessa Castejon, an Associate Professor in the lab, and with Oliver Haag from the Austrian Centre for Transcultural Studies on a book called Ngapartji Ngapartji.  Ego-histoire and Indigenous Australia (Australian National University Press, forthcoming, November, 2014).  Ngapartji is a book of life-writing by leading and emerging Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars reflecting on the relationship as Pierre Nora (Foucault’s publisher and renowned French historian) wrote: ‘between the history that you made and the history that made you.’  Building on this collaboration my recent time in Paris forms part of the development phase for a potential collaborative bid for an EU grant, potentially part of ‘Horizon 2020’.

Each of the three principle researchers for this project, Vanessa, Oliver and myself, work in former colonial world powers that now hold often dispersed but rich ethnographic collections of material culture from Britain, France and Germany.  Objects with ritual, religious, social and cultural significance for communities from once colonised countries, including Australia, Africa and the Pacific found their way en masse to European centres during and after the high period of colonialism.  Our large grant proposal seeks to bring together a team that includes academic researchers from comparative literature, historical anthropology and political science with writers, artists and practitioners active in creative cultural heritage such as Shazea Quraishi, Alinah Azedah and Rosanna Raymond.  In essence the project intends to reconnect the makers, the takers, the traders and the holders of the ethnographic objects from around the world to the stories that bring them alive today.

At the heart of the project is story: ‘A story is like water/that you heat for your bath/it takes messages between the fire and your skin.  It lets them meet/and it cleans you!/very few can sit down/in the middle of the fire itself/like a salamander or Abraham/we need intermediaries’(Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, c .1270). Sayantani DasGupta who teaches on the Masters programme in Narrative Medicine at Colombia University says she often reminds students that stories were the first medicine.  Storytelling is the way our families and communities weave threads of interconnection, the way societies and cultures ask the big questions and begin to make meaning from life’s mysteries including death, suffering, illness, birth and historical legacies. The baths that holds the water for our project are the ethnographic museum holdings of the former colonial empires of Britain, France and Germany.

During my trip to Paris I visited the relatively new Cite Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (National Museum of the History of Immigration) in the Palais de la Porte Doree, formerly the home of the Musee National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie and built initially for the first International Colonial Exposition of 1931. A building thus redolent with colonial and ‘post-colonial’ history. Mr Sarkozy, then President, guaranteed the new Immigration museum would make headlines when he conspicuously didn’t show up for its inauguration. The museum has something of ‘the slightly ramshackle, melancholy air of a temporary installation’ as Michael Kimmelman who reviewed the new museum for the New York Times when it first opened put it: ‘it shares an old building with an aquarium that occupies the basement.  Most visitors, when I looked, headed down’ (New York Times, Oct. 17, 2004).

‘Road to Exile, 2008.  Barthelemy Toguo

Entrance to the Cite National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration

I wanted to explore the newest exhibition at the Museum, the ‘Gallery of Gifts’, a new and growing collection of objects and photographs, many passed down from generation to generation, given to the gallery as donations.  Members of the French public are invited to give the museum an object with an accompanying narrative that represents something of their personal history of immigration. ‘Objects that were the keeper only of family memories, or personal identity, such as identity papers, an employment contract expired, swell the ranks of object ‘witnesses’ to immigration history’ (http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/la-galerie-des-dons, 17/6/14).  While the permanent exhibition ‘Landmarks’ presents a national or collective history of immigration, the ‘Gallery of Gifts’, foregrounds the personal in the creation of national stories.

Iranian silk scarf, donation, ‘Gallery of Gifts’,Cite National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration

Path to the entrance of Musee du quai Branly

The slightly ramshackle, empty feeling of this museum couldn’t differ more from the second site of my research trip:  The Musee du quai Branly, which opened in 2006.  Built in a state of the art, architecturally innovative building on some of the most expensive real-estate in Paris a block away from the base of the Eiffel Tower, the Musee was the love child of former President Jacques Chirac and art collector Jacques Kerchache.  This museum is a seriously impressive piece of state expenditure, with a lavish gift shop, a roof top restaurant and café with panoramic views up to the Eiffel Tower.  It is a huge site, designed, as the visitor brochure describes it, ‘as a vast territory for visitors to discover’. Chirac and Kerchache envisioned the museum on the quai Branly as the culmination of their long-term dream to attribute non-western cultures their ‘due place’ as the brochure explains, within the National Museum structure in France.  Visiting the museum it seems this ‘due place’ is to be looked down upon by the throngs of tourists who climb the Eiffel Tower and gaze down at the pointillism painted on the roof of the museum by Indigenous Australian artist Lena Nyadbi.  The almost overwhelming collection of ethnographic objects in the Quai Branly is shrouded in high-end art gallery style behind slabs of thick silent glass.  These objects were ‘collected’ in large part from the now Museum for Immigration’s former incarnation – the Museum for African and Oceanic arts.  Divorced from their context and stories, ritual and cultural objects take on an exotic, distancing aura of ‘the other’ and the museum seems to reinforce a disorienting sense of the intransigence of cultural difference of former colonised communities.

My short initial research trip, juxstaposing both museums, points at an intriguing set of directions and questions to be explored as our work progresses.  I’m going to conclude these reflections here with one of those serendipitous research moments from my time in Paris that often uncannily enrich our work.  Tired from hours walking the shrouded circular paths of the Musee du quai Branly I searched for the ‘Kerchache reading room’, a research resource attached to the museum.  As I walked into its hushed interior, a book caught my eye from across the room: Lanterns on the Prairies. The Blackfeet Photographs of Walter McClintock (Western Legacies series, published in co-operatoin with the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 2009).  Darrel Robes Kipp a descendant of the Blackfeet tribe had written an introductory essay ‘Completing the Circle’ and it discussed some of the exploitations involved in the collection of photographs but also the significant reciprocal exchange in this historical collection.  He wrote ‘it is my hope that museums and archive curators will seriously consider disseminating to tribal communities information on collections that originated with those communities…today with a resurgence among tribal members of tribal knowledge, descendants of the original subjects are a ready audience for much of the chroniclers work…McClintock’s study, once it makes the full circle back to the Blackfeet tribe, may in fact serve its greatest purpose (p.100).  Making this kind of full circle, restoring and listening to the stories of these objects and returning them in creative and contemporary ways to the communities in which they originated seems a vital role for research today:

‘water, stories, the body/all the things we do, are mediums/that hide and show what’s hidden/study them/and enjoy this being washed/with a secret we sometimes know/and then not’ (Storywater, Rumi)

Standing in Charles Sandison’s river of words, Musee du quai Branly

Learning about theoretical discourse has been a large part of my education at the University of Brighton, sadly a path not widely shared by my peers. Often, I am asked, quite bluntly, what is the point of literary theory. And up until now, the chagrin of not being able to give a fully coherent answer has left me appearing to reinforce the ‘plaisir’ of textual consumption; as opposed to advocating ‘active reading’ and the resulting ‘jouissance’, of which theoretical study is integral.[1]

But, now I have my most coherent answer yet, a finite way of explaining the primacy of ‘theory’ in the study of any given text. I introduce to you Terry Gilliam’s cult masterpiece Brazil (1985), a raw and hilarious satirical ‘text’ depicting a dystopian future Britain constrained by a hegemony centred around bureaucratic ‘red tape’ gone awry. For those of you unfamiliar with the piece, the film follows the ineffectual Sam Lowry (Jonathon Pryce) and his ludicrous quest to find the girl of his dreams (very literally), whilst attempting to evade the increasing threat of a broken air-conditioning unit that resides in his flat.

On the surface the film and its message seem very straightforward; an open attack on a totalitarian modern age, mixed with swipes at bourgeoisie ideologies, all placed under the umbrella of absurd hyper-bureaucratic nonsense. However, there are aspects of the film that are enigmatic and ambiguous at first glance, the cultural signification of Michael Palin’s ‘Torture Mask’ exemplifies such a discrepancy in meaning, and still alludes me to this day.

Yet all hope is not lost. It is with the application of theoretical discourse that one can begin to ‘unpack’ the deeper meanings within the architecture of Gilliam’s film, giving meaning and purpose to the more illusive undercurrents of the text. Most importantly, before this essay begins, I am not arguing that everything in Gilliam’s Brazil is to be placed under the microscope; I personally believe that Palin’s ‘Torture Mask’ (ironically) is most effective as a talismanic symbol of Brechtian alienation, one of which begs the engagement of the audience’s critical faculties because of its uncanny presence. However, many of the films more poignant swipes at modern culture can be unlocked through the careful application of literary, philosophical and cultural theory.

To begin, let’s take protagonist Sam Lowry’s reluctant dinner with his pseudo-debutante mother, Mrs Ida Lowry (played by Katherine Helmond). The most striking joke in this whole scene is the food that each of the members of the table order. When it arrives, their ‘orders’ are nothing more than amorphous coloured lumps accompanied by an exquisite picture of the ‘real’ food each person ordered from the menu. As it stands this is a simple joke of misdirection; they have ordered food; they have not received what they thought they would receive; it’s so funny how weird the future is…

Now, when considering Jean Baudrillard’s theory of ‘hyperreality’, in his work The Vital Illusion and The Illusion Of The End the innocuous food blobs take on a much more sinister and satirical meaning.[2] In Brazil’s future dystopian society, the bourgeoisie culture ‘no longer [has] any critical or speculative distance between the real and the rational’, their food is an example of a hyperreality. The blobs ‘abolish the real’ food that has been ordered, ‘not by violent distinction’ but by ‘the strength of the model’ i.e. the picture, the perfect example, of which, can be imbued with the recipient’s emotional resonance. This image or ‘referent’ has penetrated the reality of the culture, becoming an adequate substitute for food and thus we are left with a meal, stripped of its impetus, being and reality.[3] This analysis provides a much darker and more biting satirical commentary (much more in keeping with the tone of the film). Through such an analysis, we are no longer bamboozled by the manifestation of a very queer futuristic looking meal, instead we are enlightened to a much more subtle derisive swipe at bourgeoisie cultural values and its practices.

Next, an analysis of the heroic and hilarious Archibald Tuttle (played by Robert De Niro), a rogue plumber hell-bent on making the world a saner place in the face of Central Services, because, after all, ‘We’re all in this together’. Tuttle’s minor role in the film serves, at first, to reflect how mad a dystopian capitalist Britain has become. The extreme lengths that Tuttle must go to, zip lining around high-rise industrial housing blocks for fear of death, for being an independent plumber convey the capricious behaviours of this fictitious Britain’s institutional state apparatus.

However, the madness of this fictional Britain’s authoritarian ideology runs much deeper than merely Tuttle’s escapades. By drawing on the influential critic Raymond Williams, in his work, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, we can see how the character of Tuttle is symptomatic of a proposed future capitalist society that has lost any ability to distinguish between ‘oppositional’ and ‘alternative’ sub-cultures. As a result, the ‘dominant mode’ of the British state is to extirpate all forms of emergent and residual cultures, be they opposing or not.[4] Moreover, this notion presents the argument that capitalism is unstable and detrimental to humanity’s freedom.

Let’s consider the hyper-capitalist Britain that is the background to Brazil to be the ‘dominant mode’ of society. We might then consider Archibald Tuttle to be an example of a ‘residual mode’ of practice, an out-dated idea of capitalist culture (by Brazil’s premonitory standards) that allows for competition to provide the best service for the consumer, i.e. the best and most reliable plumber at the most competitive rate. In its current state, this version of Britain has ‘incorporated’ all competitive plumbing outlets into the dominant mode via the Central Services, in an attempt to maintain the maximum profit. This is where the role of Archibald Tuttle in relation to his society becomes misleading. If Tuttle were gaining any monetary profit, and thus impinging on the dominant mode, he would be considered oppositional and ripe for eradication. However, Tuttle’s reasons for going rogue are put down to simple socialist empathy, ‘We’re all in this together’, and in conjunction a hatred of bureaucracy depicted by the collectively dreaded ‘form 27B/6’. In actuality, Tuttle poses no real threat to the infrastructure of the dominant mode, as Williams states, ‘in capitalist practice, if the thing is not making a profit, or if it is not being widely circulated it can be for some time overlooked’; he is nothing more than a freelance plumber picking up the slack for Central Services, a residual and alternative mode in society.[5] So why is he a person of interest to the Ministry of Information? Well, the very fact that Tuttle has a gun in his tool kit, and works under the cover of darkness, is illustrative of an authoritarian state that is so greedy and power mad that any alternative mode of practiced living to the dominant mode is unacceptable. In Brazil, there is no longer incorporation, only extermination. Thus, Tuttle’s character foregrounds how Britain in this proposed future society has lost all sense of humanity and cultural co-existence because of extreme capitalist endeavour. We might then read that, in the eyes of the text, capitalism can only lead to the eventuality of totalitarianism. This idea is exemplified in the opening of the film when, due to an insect related error, the cobbler Archibald Buttle (as opposed to Tuttle) is removed from his home and sentenced to death by the Ministry of Information.

By extrapolating on the film’s minor characters in conjunction with cultural philosophy, the role of Tuttle and Buttle have become expository in a wider social reading of the film. However, without the use of Raymond Williams’ discourse Tuttle becomes nothing more than a helpful plumber whose primary aim is to fight authoritarian bureaucracy, and Buttle as simply a casualty of that bureaucracy in action. Without theory, Brazil’s wider intimations remain closed off to its audience.

To conclude, I hope this essay has shown that ‘theory’, in its many varied forms, is of the gravest importance. By applying certain theoretical discourses to specific and often enigmatic aspects of a text, one can elucidate meaning more readily; lumps of ‘future food’ reveal themselves to be very intelligent and witty satire; the analysis of minor characters serve to single-handedly illuminate the entire architecture of their text. Now when people ask me, ‘what is the point of theory again?’ I can answer simply, that it makes understanding a text so much ‘easier’. And, wouldn’t it be nice if the world was a little ‘easier’ or ‘clearer’, I mean, ‘We’re all in this together’, aren’t we?