This interview with David Shields raised some interesting points

I always rather dislike the parallel between artistic creation and technological progress, especially as it is often invoked by people who would be rather unlikely to profess any great belief in progress when meant in a social or political sense. In practice, art can indeed often repeat the same forms for decades or resurrect practices that had long been buried and forgotten (and in a post-Marxist and post-Freudian world it’s not difficult to argue that much of Victorian literature has acquired a greater modern relevance than much of modernism). The contemporaneity of art is the issue, not the advancement of it and applying arguments of artistic progress feels like a rather anachronistic worldview. The more worthwhile points relate to the changes in our conception of setting and time. It’s certainly true that we tend not to be rooted in particular places; as Shaffer put it in Equus we have very little idea of place. Our lives are very far from the stable and homogenous communities that gave birth to the Victorian novel. The point about glacial pace is also interesting, but the likes of Sebald and Coetzee write with far less awareness of the velocity of modern existence than someone like McEwan. Finally, the complaint about the patterned, allegorical nature of literature, how things are parables in George Eliot’s phrase, has a great deal of resonance for me. I’ve always liked the untidy aspects of literature to the neat and symmetrical. But surely, the looseness of life is precisely what the novel is good at and exactly what Bakhtin revered about it.

At the moment, I’m reading Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. In his introduction, Wolfe argues that realism in literature was akin to the discovery of electricity in engineering rather than simply another medium or device. The novel is in many ways a demonstration of that, replacing the taboo of sexuality in the Victorian novel with the modern taboos of race and class, showing that the old forms could be easily adapted to modernity. In many ways, I prefer Wolfe’s view to Shields.

I‘ve never voted for any party in an election other than the Liberal Democrats. Even when tactical voting might have been a more expedient proposition given that I have never voted in an election where the Liberal candidate could win, I still ended up voting Liberal Democrat. One the one hand, I’ve always found the Tories too socially illiberal and too unconcerned with equality, while I’ve always found the Labour contempt for civil liberties something I simply couldn’t bring myself to vote for. In this election, my hope was for a hung Parliament that could bring a Lib-Lab coalition to power. As a consequence, I’ve been more than a little pre-occupied by the election result of late.

My initial reaction to the election result was not an especially optimistic one. In a nutshell, I felt that while Clegg could enter into coalition with him but the idea of working with the Tories would be toxic to a lot of his supporters (and indeed to a lot of Tory supporters). The Labour party would portray it as a sell-out. I assumed that any coalition would be significantly hampered by the impossibility of agreeing on issues like proporitional representation. Conversely, the Labour party might have a more natural fit with the Liberals, but the combined blocs would still lack a sufficient majority to form a stable government (although as they would still have more than the Tories, it might not be impossible to attempt to cobble something together). However, if no-one won the election, Labour had certainly lost and a coalition with them could be accused of being ‘a coalition of the defeated.’ The Liberals would apparently only consider this if Gordon Brown were to resign – and while retaining Brown as Prime Minister would indeed not be sensible, they could be accused of being undemocratic in essentially anointing a new Prime Minister who didn’t stand for election and participate in the leader’s debates. As a result, I felt Clegg’s best plan might simply be to make some arrangements concerning the conditions under which he would not oppose a minority Tory administration.

As it stands, I had underestimated the extent to which Labour would be either unable or unwilling to offer the concessions needed to form a coalition (and indeed their willingness to negotiate at all) as well as the amount of compromise on offer from the Conservatives. Policies to introduce a referendum on AV, introduce fixed term parliaments, scrap IP cards, regulate CCTV, extend the Freedom of Information Act, give much greater powers to select committees, protect the right to protest, introduce the right of recall, extend regional devolution, curtail the current abuse of the DNA database, reform the libel laws, elect the House of Lords under proportional representation are all extremely welcome. Similarly, the fact that the Human Rights act or the Working Time Directive will not be revoked and that inheritance tax will not be cut have gone some way to addressing my concerns. In other areas, like their continuation of faith schools or the moratorium on transfer of EU powers, I am decidedly less enthused. The moratorim on EU power transfer seems like an obvious hostage to fortune at a time when the EU is likely to have to change the way the Euro is structured. Of course, a lot of my concerns almost certainly will prove valid; tactical voters who in the past have voted so succesfully in the past for the Liberals in order to prevent Tory wins will almost certainly not do so now. Much of the Liberal Democrat membership does tend towards the social democratic wing of the party rather than the liberal side, and many of them will find little cheer in this coalition. To put it mildly, this is not something I expect the Liberals to be able to extract electoral gain from.

Much of the objections to the coalition are predicated on the assumption that the Liberals were one aspect of the progressive strain in British politics, with the Labour party being the other. Liberals leader have long wished to see the two re-united but this does create the danger of marking the Liberals out as a subset of the Labour party when the two parties have diverged markedly from one another on key issues like civil liberties. Johann Hari makes a more reasoned form of this argument, noting that a YouGov poll just before the election found that Lib Dem voters identified as "left-wing" over "right-wing" by a ratio of 4:1. Only 9 per cent sided with the right (although if asked to rank myself on that rather meaningless scale I’d have opted for left-wing as well; the Liberals simply don’t fit neatly onto a spectrum defined by the Conservatives at one end and the Labour party at the other). The problem with this argument is that the British electoral system has no mechanism of counting preferences in this manner; if we already had an AV system instead of FPTP then that mechanism would clearly exist and the outcome of the election would probably have made a Lib-Lab coalition possible. Given that the Labour party had 13 years to introduce AV (and two disregarded manifesto commitments on referenda), it seems rather churlish for Labour supporters to blame the Liberals for attempting to make the best of a broken result produced by FPTP and for playing what was pretty much the one and only card it had dealt them.

In fairness to Hari, he has always supported proportional representation (which might address the preference issue in some of its manifestations), but much of his and Labour’s conversion to proportional representation seemed predicated on the idea of it leading to a series of perpetual Lib-Lab coalitions that excluded the Conservative party, presumably in the same way that Japan’s Liberal party has only ever found itself in opposition twice in the last half century. That was never a very realistic notion and was arguably the best possible argument against proportional representation. As an aside, one thing that has struck me in the last few days and weeks is that even as politics has become more post-ideological and managerial it doesn’t seem to have become any less tribal. Labour supporters who initially fervently hoped for a Lib-Lab coalition now denounce a Con-Lib coalition as an act of betrayal at best, an undemocratic coup at worst.

For me, I ultimately believe that if you do happen to believe in proportional representation, then that does imply an acceptance of coalitions as an outcome and a belief in the merits of coalitions as a means of creating a more consensual form of government. Given that, it would be rather hypocritical of me to oppose this coalition in principle. That inevitably has to entail a belief that it may be necessary to form an unpalatable alliance (particularly given that Nick Clegg had specifically not ruled out a coalition with either party after the election) if the preferred partner is not a feasible option. It certainly seems to have been very difficult for people like Vince Cable or Paddy Ashdown to accept that a Lib-Lab coalition was not viable. Certainly when I think about the election result, which was in essence a rejection of the Labour party matched by suspicion of the extent to which the Conservative party had reconstructed itself, a Liberal Democrat coalition does seem to create a government better tailored to the majority view (even if I happen to disagree with a great many of the remaining Conservative proposals).

Putting aside the question of whether the coalition was the right thing for Clegg to have done, as well as the question of whether the coalition will last, the real question is what sort of politics it will actually create. From the Tory side, the coalition is being referred to as a Clause Four moment (or even being compared to the way Peel took on Tory vested interests by repealing the corn laws or the way Disraeli outflanked Gladstone by first opposing political reform, then embracing it and going much further than either he or his opponent had planned) for David Cameron i.e. an opportunity to displace the social conservatives of his own party. There’s certainly a good argument that Cameron will gain extensively by being seen to lead a liberal government, while the Liberals are more likely to be tarnished by association in the eyes of the electorate – I’m rather left reminded of how Angela Merkel was at the height of her popularity and effectiveness as leader of a CDU/SDP grand coalition (i.e. their Conservative and Labour party equivalents), which all went wrong after she was elected with a mandate to form a coalition with her preferred Free Democrat partners.

The danger on the Liberal side is the inverse; that the coalition will end up accentuating their economic liberal heritage at the expense of their social democratic one. In other words, that the Liberal Democrats will end up as the Neo-Liberal Democrats, to use the parlance that seems to be becoming popular in the Labour party. One possible illustration of this lies with The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism. Published in 2004, it featured contributions from three then unknowns, who now occupy the posts of Deputy Prime Minister, Business Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. With David Laws as its guiding light, it argued the case for economic liberalism to be reclaimed from the conservatives. As such, Laws argued for the replacement of the National Health Service by a national health insurance scheme as in many European countries. It’s not difficult to see why many conservatives might find themselves nodding in agreement, but while considerably better than what would originally have been on offer from the conservatives, it’s still a dismal prospect. Social equality and mobility both declined under Labour and there is very little in the coalition’s proposals that will do anything to address this, with the more redistributive aspects of the Liberal manifesto neatly removed (Cable’s mansion tax or the upper rate tax increases spring to mind). Equally, a political context that had seen the free market cannibalise and destroy itself inevitably calls for a more regulated (and dare I say, it, planned) form of capitalism. A centre-right coalition will now govern a country that in many respects is in a left-of centre mood, hostile towards the bankers it blames for the financial crisis and resentful of the austerity that must ensue. One of the reason’s why I had felt particularly inspired by the Liberal campaign in this election was that Clegg and Cable had appeared to recognise that the third way in politics had failed and that the market would need regulating and managing to a much greater extent. Even if measures like the bank levy and breaking up the banks go ahead, that side of their policies has now substantially diluted. The manageralism and post-ideological aspects of the politics from the peak of Labour rule had receded as the market had destroyed itself and the political spectrum had seemed to be beginning to open up again. Now, it may be about to close down again. The main hope I have is that if we see AV being introduced, then it may yet be possible to open it back up again.

Stanley Fish summarises a dialogue between Habermas and a group of Catholic theologians:

This all rather reads like some of Sartre’s tortuous efforts to reconcile existentialism and communism and I find myself in the odd position of agreeing with the Catholic interlocutors. Habermas seems to forget that liberalism evolved precisely as a means of diluting (often conflicting) religious tendencies towards ‘morally guided collective action’ and quarantining them in the private sphere. The idea that one’s right to swing one’s fist ends at someone’s else’s face is not one that is easy to recognise in religious ethics, at least not in the ethics of the major monotheisms as they presently exist.

Reality Hunger continues to be much discussed:

It’s not an unappealing vision. Thinking of the formalist division between fabula and syuzhet, between the totality of a work and its central fable, between authorial intent and readerly interpretation, I always preferred the untidy totality of a work rather than the excessively neat patterning of a work where the author has pinned down every single loose end. However, this counter-balancing argument also struck me as interesting:

I wrote previously of how novels increasingly seem to be recastings of previous novels. This article caught my attention recently, presenting a similar thesis:

Fantastic Journal has an interesting article on Terminal Five and the modern airport:

In a lot of respects, I rather liked Terminal Five. Victorians looking at the Crystal Palace or St Pancras Station must have felt the way I did when looking at it. That sort of gleaming futurism is rather uncommon in Britain. With that said, my main recollection of it was the contrast between the gleaming high-tech character of the building and the rather generic anonymity of the building interior; the effect of the contrast is rather bathetic. Terminal Five is in short, the perfect representation of what Marc Auge called the ‘non-place:’

A glancing reference in a somewhat recursive Zadie Smith essay on essays, drew my attention to David Shield’s Reality Hunger:

I tend to agree with Smith that Shields partly refutes his own argument, by noting the fantastical character of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as opposed to the sober realism of The Grapes of Wrath; it can often be the case that the more a writer adheres to autobiography, the more fantastical the narration becomes. Witness Huysmans and DeQuincey as obvious exmaples. One might also note that the division Shields draws between etoliated artifice and the crudity of raw experience is surely a false one; as John Bayley’s The Uses of Division : Unity and Disharmony in Literature was at pains to point out, the most interesting work of many realist writers is often their more fragmented and inchoate. For me, writers like Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy are great precisely because of how untidy their novels often are. With all of that said though, in the end I probably sympathise more with Shields than with Smith. From Isherwood and Pessoa onwards to Coetzee and Sebald, writing that defies the division of reality and invention has become a hallmark of the age. Equally, it’s difficult not to notice that if our age has any genre it has obsessively explored, it would have to be biography, even those of people who are still living and have done apparently little to merit the attention. Put simply, we live in an age where experience is a heavily circumsribed or heavily mediated concept. I recall an interview with Slavoj Zizek on this subject:

As I read this article, I realised that it reminded me of a certain contemporary figure:

If the current recession can be described as a counterpart to the great depression, it’s hardly surprising that writers might respond to the times in a similar fashion to what is described above, which was why I found myself wondering whether John Gray might not count as our modern Spengler. Gray is in many ways the perfect embodiment of the spirit of our times; a self-styled contrarian whose arguments actually reflect an essentially mainstream view. Having had to live under a ‘third way’ government without any idea of political narrative and whose pragmatic approach to government resulted in little more than inconsistency, I do grow slightly weary of Gray tilting at windmills of Enlightenment political thinking. There were a couple of reasons why Gray came to mind when I read the above piece, of which this and this were the first:

There’s a great deal I agree with here, such as insistence that communism as an ideology was responsible for the crimes committed under it rather than any abuse of the political theory by its practitioners. Nonetheless, there are two particular aspects of the above that particularly irk me. Firstly, while Gray is certainly correct that communist denialists tend to exculpate their ideology by claiming the cultural revolution as an aberration, he comes quite close to some of Marx’s tactics in that last paragraph, suggesting that objections to his ideas represent a covert proof of them. Popper disdained that sort of circular argument in Freud and Marx and would doubtless take a similar view of the above. Even without that, it seems a little disingenuous to cite communism as an Enlightenment project without mentioning that the ideas of pluralism and democracy that opposed it had the same pedigree; those ideas being the ones that provide the normative basis against which Gray himself can critique Kant for racism or Comte for conservatism. More pressingly, it’s doubtful that the opponents that Gray is addressing here really exist in any meaningful form; believers in a Marxist or Hegelian conception of progress as a form of historical inevitability must be few and far between. His references to the Euston Manifesto ignore the problem that its signatories were a relatively small group without substantial influence; had they or like-minded individuals not existed recent historical events would have run exactly the same course. For all their references to democracy, it somewhat strains credulity to take the view that the political elites that instigated the Iraq war were especially motivated by ideals of progress rather than by religious faith or simple expediency. Certainly, if that was the case it left precious little trace on the domestic policies of either the British or American governments of that time.

While I tend to agree with Gray on the role of politics as a means of facilitating the co-existence of different groups and ideologies, the denial of any meliorist trend in politics is an essentially conservative or Hobbesian worldview. Susan Nieman’s recent articles make this point rather well:

I was struck by this article on the rise of non-places:

The non-place is a familiar concept; transient spaces designed in a mass-produced manner. Airports, hotels, business parks, motorways, service stations all fit into the model. One of the reasons why I think Ballard was the greatest English author of the second half of the twentieth century is that he adapted the emphasis English novels had tended to put on place for an age where the idea of place was being erased. It’s also interesting to note that the provincialism of the Victorian novel emerged precisely at the point that rail transport was beginning the erosion of regional difference. I was thinking of this concept, when I came across this anti-tourism manifesto:

I sometimes think tourism is an attempt to recapture the idea of a sense of place. Cities like Venice have long been described as ossified mausoleums (incidentally, aspects of the above read rather like the Futurist Manifesto, which in itself was prompted by Italy having become a large museum for tourism) but in having been trapped like a fly in amber they retain the sense of individual difference that would otherwise have been lost. The issue is not the banality of the familiar, it is the anomie of the non-place.

A list of real fantasy cities, with China Mieville’s choice being London:

Mieville’s choice is rather different to the other writers. Venice or Prague seem exotic because of their perceived exoticism, London because of its emphatic mundanity. After all, British science fiction tends to prefer to see forests in wardrobes or timeships in Police boxes. With that said, I’ve have chosen Oxford. From Hardy’s Sepulchre College and Trollope’s Lazarus College to Sayer’s Shrewsbury College and Pullman’s Jordan College, it’s a city that already exists as a myriad of Calvino’s invisible cities.

Update: although Moorcock picks Marrakesh as his city, this piece on London is in a rather similar vein: