In his latest collection of essays, Milan Kundera wrote that the social changes in the Czech Republic after the fall of communism, as property rights were returned to their original owners and a middle class accompanied by social inequality returned overnight. Kundera wrote that after Kafka and Broch he did not feel equipped to write a Balzacian novel on the subject, but the material nonetheless found its way into his last novel, Ignorance. I tend to agree with Kundera; when nineteenth century novelists like Thackerary and Dickens wrote it was out of a reforming spirit that seems remote in an age characterised by its rejection of reforming projects in favour of pragmatic and incremental measures. Nontheless, modern society is perhaps easier to describe in the terms Eliot and Zola had available to them than the ones devised for the age of Freud, Marx and World War.

I live in an English provinical town. It doesn’t matter which one, as like most English provincial towns it suffers from an absence of any sense of place and could very easily be found in any part of the country. When I arrived there, it was a rather dowdy and humdrum place with its rows of terraced housing, grey sixties concrete and a town centre that was invariably empty and closed on Sundays. Since then, much of that quiet town centre has been dismembered and reconstructed, with gleaming new shopping centres and towering hotels dwarfing and frequently demolishing the redbrick and terracotta building surrounding them. The centre now throngs with people at any time of the week, from incessant shopping to incessant clubbing and drinking. Conspicuous consumption sets the tone throughout, with old fashioned furniture shops making way for casinos. Shops routinely go bankrupt and new franchises open in their place at a dizzying speed. Voices in multiple languages fill the streets as English newspaper headlines on rising house prices or the risk of social inequality leading to rioting alternate with newspaper headlines written in Polish. Posters calling for the destruction of the state of Israel briefly appear before being torn down. Small shops now stock readymade ghoulash, pickled gherkin and tripe while swanky restaurants for the affluent open nearby. Mosques, Methodist, Baptist and Polish churches nestle close to one another. Gleaming glass and steel offies or flats rise up everywhere.

Elsewhere, just at the margins of all this, the number of down and outs seems to have swelled and the streets seem to be filled with the displaced. I pass by a man at a bus stop every morning shouts loudly into the air and gesticulates wildly while those that have joined him in the queue stare fixedly down at the ground. A man in a supermarket queue gently talks gibberish to himself and chuckles. Those that had joined him in that queue also stare fixedly down at the ground. Estates with rotting sixties tower blocks and burnt our cars are left to fester. Crime has increased markedly with reportings of shooting having become common, in spite of the burgeoning numbers of CCTV cameras now found on every street corner. Needles and glass from smashed car windows are regularly found on pavements. Television adverts appear for social darwinist programmes that celebrate entrepreneurship and the firing of the substandard.

It is rather easier to describe this picture than to interpret it. I would not wish to live in a slightly earlier time, with a more homogenous, repressed and straightlaced society but that does little to accommodate me to the rather alinated society I do happen to find myself in. I have often enough cited Anthony Giddens’ work on post-traditionalist societies and in theory much of what I see around should be an exemplar of it. In practice, it is not quite as easy and as the country transitions from one administration to another, it is difficult not to conclude that England as a place is more unequal, more divided, less liberal and more brutual than it seemed to be before. As an end-note, this article on London’s recent socio-economic history puts my rather anecdotal account of how England has changed into a more specific context:

In the unlikely event that I have regular readers, some of them might happen to recall that one of my obscure passions is the early twentieth century literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin:

Eagleton’s review does an excellent task of highlighting what I found so appealing in Bakhtin; his defence of the untidy, unfinished and chaotic, that which defies order and system. Nonetheless, for all of the comparisons evinced here Bakhtin’s work contains no assumption that there is nothing outside language, pertains largely to the formal and linguistic properties of the novel and lacks any metaphysical critique of meta-narratives. One can draw some parallels with Derrida, viewing differance and dialogism as being spiritually akin concepts but any such parallel is necessarily rather strained. The figure Bakhtin does remind me of isn’t so much Derrida but Sartre. Both Bakhtin and Sartre were drawn in many respects to Marxism as a philosophy (albeit with Sartre far more committed to it than the man who was to die in one Stalin’s gulags). In the former case, Bakhtin’s work treats of the novel in materialistic terms as a product of specific cultural, historical and social forces as much as the linguistic ones Eagleton highlights. His work nonetheless treats of the ways in which these forces combine to ensure that the novel is, to purloin a phrase, condemned to be free or, to use Bakhtin’s phrase, to be dialogic. Similarly, Sartre’s work struggles to yoke together the heterogenous elements of existentialism and communism, of how freedom could gear itself to the social conditions it found itself in. The polyphonic novel was naturally the ideal vehicle for Sartre to manifest those ideas, utilising concepts like the cutups and multiple viewpoints that he had borrowed from Dos Passos but which also bore a distinct resemblance to Bakhtinian dialogism.

Having been interested for a while in the ideas of Sapir and Lee Whorf, the recent research on the Piraha language, which has occasionally been characterised as providing evidence for those theories, was something I was immediately interested in. Looking into it in more detail, I don’t think it actually does support Sapir to any marked intent, but as this article argues, it does challenge many current assumptions about language and consciousness:

What particularly interests me about these arguments is the role they play in the overall history of ideas. In contrast to the ideas of Marx, Freud, Skinner and Foucault, which all assumed to varying degrees that environmental forces are markedly more important than what would now be termed genetic considerations, modern conceptions of rationality have increasingly spurned the idea of the blank slate and moved towards a conception that bears a marked resemblance to that of Thomas Hobbes, if we substitute the term ‘genes’ for ‘passions.’ As Edward O Wilson observed every human brain is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as ‘an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid. I have to admit that evolutionary psychology of this kind is not something I have ever had a great deal of regard for; it tends to involve post-hoc extrapolations that are typically every bit as unfalsifiable as Freud’s theories. In either case, the term ‘just-so story’ seems amply deserved. It tends to disregard culture as a natural and material phenomenon and one that can be described as responding to a form of natural selection. If that is being displaced in favour of a more nuanced, tempered view, the I’ll certainly be happy.

Slavoj Zizek reviews The Lives of Others:

I find myself in agreement with Zizek that The Lives of Others is a far from complete description of the Stasi, an organisation that simply never witnessed one of its agent showing mercy towards a subject in the way the film depicts. This article presents a rather more acute political criticism of the film:

With this, however, the agreements ends. The illusions perpetuated in Goodbye Lenin! are effectively a form of propaganda, something that the film is explicitly critiquing and which ensures that the ostalgie it depicts is decidedly ambivalent. But what I find most striking is Zizek’s insistence on the ‘emancipatory potential’ of communism alongside his admission that The Lives of Others is far from adequate in depicting the nature of state surveillance in East Germany. It is, for instance, rather difficult to see Stalin displacing Lenin in the title and helicopter scene, although Lenin was far from having different methods (a fact I rather thought Zizek had endorsed). More generally, surely it was the utopian ‘emancipatory potential’ of both fascism and communism that lay at the root of their danger, both being essentially religious rather than political phenomena.
Christianity asserts spirit as the ground of being for the presence of matter, while communism asserts materialiasm as the ground of becoming for the emerging mind. The invisible God promising the invisible Heavens was faced with the visible God promising the visible Earth. Dialectical idealism was opposed by dialectical materialism, and contemplation by action. Both are absolutist, both are deterministic, and both accept deductive logic as valid and the principle of noncontradiction as sound. The relationship between communism and christianity was essentially that of thesis and anti-thesis. As Koestler put it "the two poles of the Communist’s faith are longing for Utopia and rejection of the existing social order."