Sonder003

Spring 2014 Issue 003

SONDER TEXT / IMAGE / MUSIC / THEORY 1

Fragmentation Conceived as an interdisciplinary platform for social and academic collaboration, Sonder was founded by members of the Literature Society to cultivate a creative and critical community in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester.

Get in touch if you would like to write for us: Follow us on twitter: @SonderMagazine // or e-mail us: uom.lit.soc@gmail.com

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key concept in late twentieth-century poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, fragmentation has, in fact, been a cornerstone of western artistic practice through the centuries. In Romantic poetry, for example, Percy Bysshe

Shelley’s Ozymandias is a collection of temporal, physical and verbal fragments which attest to and anticipate the Derridean critique of the instability and plurality of history, presence and writing. In the modernist dramatic tradition, Bertolt Brecht aimed for a verfremdungseffekt which would alienate theatregoers from the illusion of theatrical realism in order to produce a critically engaged - and potentially revolutionary - audience. What is crucial, however, is that for poststructuralist theory and postmodern artistic practice, fragmentation does not presuppose an anterior unity. If modernist representation can be thought of as a lamentation of lost meaning in the social totality, then postmodernism celebrates the total absence of unified meaning altogether through pastiche, parody, irony and self-reflexivity and, crucially, multiplicity and plurality. In this issue, our writers have produced diverse creative and critical engagements with the theme of ‘fragmentation’.

Jack Sheen and Jamie Bulman engage critically with fragmentation in and of music. Matilda Roberts and Josh Mcloughlin both invoke Walter Benjamin and other theorists of urban experience to discuss fragmentation in the cities of modernity.

Amber De La Haye deploys Michel Foucault’s model of power/knowledge to discuss the ideology of geographical representation, whilst Emily Bourne draws on Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek to offer a critical response to Dan Bristow’s Everyday Analysis article ‘What is a Strike?’ which is reprinted with kind permission from the EDA Collective. Bethany Lester responds to First Draft’s latest project ‘Next Draft’ a new cabaret night, showcasing brand new work: drama, fiction, poetry, music, comedy, storytelling, spoken word, and more. Claudia Carvell introduces poststructuralist theory and postmodernist writing practices ahead of this issue’s Creative feature, which features the latest in contemporary poetry and short fiction from emerging Manchester writers.

Artwork for this issue is generously provided by Josh Duffy, a London based creative currently in the third year of a BA (Hons) Graphic Design Communication at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Josh’s work ranges across various creative outlets including editorial, identity, typography and moving image. For more of his work, or to get in contact, visit joshduffy.co.uk

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The University of Manchester Literature Society would like to thank the Manchester Art Group, whose support helped make this issue possible

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CONTENTS FRAGMENTATION M U S I C 6/ 21st Century Soundscapes - Jamie Bulman 8/ Fragmentary Composition - Jack Sheen

C I T I E S 10/ Situationist International Architecture and Derivé in the Modern City - Matilda Roberts 14/ Where Do You Come From? - Bethany Lester 146 Walter Benjamin’s Dream World - Joshua Mcloughlin

C A R T O G R A P H Y 18/ Cartography and Ideology - Amber De La Haye

S T R I K E S 22/ Why Strike? - Dan Bristow, Everyday Analysis 23/ Strike Action, Collateral Damage & Revolution Emily Bourne

P E R F O R M A N C E A R T S 25/ Consuming Fragments: Performance Art, Spectatorship & Gallery Practice - Jasper Llewellyn

T R A N S L A T I O N 26/ Charles Baudelaire's ‘Le Cygne’ - Sadie Maher

R E V I E W // R E S P O N S E 28/ First Draft’s Next Draft - Bethany Lester

C R E A T I V E 30/ Creative Editorial: Claudia Carvell 32-33/Poetry: On the big toe of my left foot by Claudia Carvell Twelve Fingersteps by James Mullard Editing by Daisy Church Middlesbrough by Jenny Sloan 34/Short Fiction: How I Got To Where I Could See Everything by Josh Mcloughlin

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21st Century Soundscapes Jamie Bulman

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hen was the last time you had a conversation with a complete stranger on a lonely journey to the library on a Tuesday morning? Or unplugged yourself from the driving um-chi um-chi um-chi pumping through your headphones in order to say more than a mumbled ‘howzit’ to a vague acquaintance in the street? By plugging ourselves into an iPod we nestle ourselves in a cosy auditory bubble, and reclaim a sonic autonomy from the constant claims for attention in our environment; space to gather our thoughts and watch the world go by as if through a double glazed window. By filtering out the polyrhythmic, multi-tonal sonic orgy, we attempt to project cold rationality onto the chaos of the street, with ‘it’s standing invitation to meaningful encounter, dialogue and interaction.’ (Zygmunt Bauman 2003: 105).

Historically, the ears have been both passive and democratic. Passive, as they can exert no control over the sounds which they detect, and therefore democratic as all sounds are given equal import, unfiltered by external devices.

With the advent of the automobile at the end of the last century, humankind not only acquired a faster means of transportation but a means of escaping the street, along with the sounds and interactions which permeated it, allowing us peaceful respite and quiet conversation as we traveled from A to B. As popular music boomed alongside recording technologies in the swinging sixties, so too did mobile listening devices such as car radios and vinyl, placing music at the top of the sonic ‘pecking order’ in our everyday soundworld. Mobile technologies opened up new possibilities for the control over our ears, helping us to simultaneously connect and disconnect, both sonically and socially: by connecting to music and friends remotely, that is, outside of our proximity, we are increasingly disconnected from the people and sounds in our immediate physical environment.

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Michael Bull (2007) uses a warm/cold analogy to describe this relationship, ascribing warmth to communication and interaction, and cold to alienation. The warm space claimed by our headphones and phones is occupied at the cost of a resulting urban ‘chill’ and an increasingly fragmented communal soundscape. But this allows the iPod wielder to stroll around as if in a dream, superimposing an interior narrative onto a cold external world. City spaces become enacted, to be enjoyed and modified (Michel DeCerteau 1988), and the iPhone and iPod become tools for enactment, fetishized commodities which create and, through social media, share a projection of identity based on musical taste.

This projection of a ‘sense of self’ is simultaneously pointed inwards, affording the listener the power of ‘introjection’: of knowing who they are (Tia DeNora 2000: 141).

We paradoxically seek this sense of autonomy and individuality in reaction to the bland aesthetics of urban transport and the hegemony of that most nefarious of massproduced and consumed technologies: the iPhone. However, while these sociological symptoms may be ascribed to our increasingly intimate relationships with our Spotify playlists, our iTunes library and our sounds on Soundcloud, these technologies also allow us to engage with music on our own terms. Ultimately, despite the consequences which this kind of ‘introjection’ can be said to have on the collective experience in the modern city, the individual now has control. Free of the outdated confines of the LP, the tape and the CD, we can order and collect music in new ways, to be deployed on the home stretch of that rainy 4-mile run or as the soundtrack to that picture-perfect sunset. These personal moments give new meanings to the music we listen to, re-contextualising them within our personalised canon of musical experience...

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FRAGMENTARY Composition

Jack Sheen

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ound, like any object, can easily become fractured, even if it lacks a solid materiality. As an art that practices in sound, music employs or results in notions of fragmentation both in itself sonically, and in the contexts within which it simultaneously takes shape and functions.

Music has toyed with the notion of fragmentation to various ends for hundreds of years, to the extent of establishing itself as a technical institution in its own right. Much music of the classical era employed various techniques which deliberately broke down material into smaller and smaller parts; musical 8

phrases by composers such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven are littered with motifs that are gradually deconstructed to give the music a sense of forward momentum before its conclusion. As musical modernism developed throughout the late 20th century, sonic fragmentation became stylistically and ideologically prevalent, especially as modernism itself gradually ruptured into postmodernity. A pillar stone in postwar music, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968-1969) is generally recognised as the ultimate postmodern musical work in its simultaneous extension and rejection of modernist

aesthetics. Sinfonia’s apex is its central third movement, a sublime collage of musical quotations sourced from Western music’s rich and diverse heritage from J.S. Bach to Pierre Boulez, crashing on top of each other in a near indecipherable haze, commentated by eight singers/actors who quote works

by Lévi-Strauss and Beckett. This is itself woven around Gustav Mahler’s scherzo In ruhig fließender Bewegung (With quiet flowing movement) his mammoth second symphony entitled ‘Resurrection’ (1888-1894), which subtly runs throughout the entire 12 minutes of Sinfonia’s third movement.

Quotation here is clearly working on numerous levels and to various affects. This entire third movement could be seen as Berio’s own surreal symphonic scherzo, harkening back to a long tradition of music, emphasised by the ever present third movement of Mahler’s own epic symphony. Yet the level of quotation in the piece transcends the norms of the musical referential tradition present in earlier musical periods; clearly, Berio’s total commitment to the re-appropriation of other composers’ and writers’ work attempts to mark a new chapter in musical development, vehemently dismissing modernist tendencies which rejected the musical traditions of the past in a search for a new, meaningful and sincere language.

However, here, we reach a clear tension in matters of musical postmodernity. Whilst claiming to renounce the tradition of modernism which had by the 1960s become institutionally established, postmodern music harboured the very progressive, dismissive traits of the modernism from which it was attempting to distance itself. The idea of post-modernism as opposed to simply an continuation of modernism can therefore be questioned, and this ambiguity drives Sinfonia, which wrestles with the harsher edges of a modernist sound as well as the pluralistic aesthetics associated with postmodernism - a plurality manifest in the morsels of music pasted together to make this stream-of-consciousness-esque Sinfonia movement.

constructed out of radios, their deployment is clearly motivated by Cage’s desire to bombard his audience in a similarly fragmented way sonically and semantically via its indeterminacy. Like Sinfonia’s third movement, the extent of the audial inconsistency in Cage’s resulting piece, perhaps ironically, eventually plateaus into a comfortable steadiness, where the lack of cohesion bizarrely coheres into an expectation of the unexpected as its obsessive dynamism neutralises itself.

This same indeterminacy deconstructs the notion of Imaginary Landscape no.4 being a unified ‘work’ in and of itself. Music’s ontological status has always been ambiguous due its lack of materiality, in contrast to physical artworks such as paintings, sculptures, and to some extent, films, whose unique, material appearance and existence differentiates them from other artworks and copies. Generally, compositions retain their identity via similarities between their numerous performances: Stravinsky’s ballet score Agon contains a recognised ‘sound structure’ which must be reconstructed in a performance. Here, Cage eludes this sort of classification by designing an indeterminate work which by necessity cannot reconstruct a set sound structure. Imaginary Landscape no.4’s innermost essence as a piece of music is thus one defined by fragmentation, as it holds no consistent sonic or semantic identity.

One composer whose work can be seen as an authentic investigation into musical fragments is James Saunders, whose #[unassigned] (2000-2009) series explores notions of flexible modularity in its musical construction. #[unassigned] is a vast collection of musical modules, some lasting only a few seconds long, which are to be assembled in any way performers choose, creating totally unique yet cohesively similar pieces of music on each performance. The piece deals with fragmentation in its lack of set out, composed linearity, instead replacing it with small units of sound which can be If fragmentation appears only superficially in Berio’s Sinfonia, freely constructed, which Saunders claims took its starting it is employed more rigorously at the heart of John Cage’s point from Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘rings of a necklace that Imaginary Landscape no.4 (1951). Scored for 24 players and 12 is a ring in another necklace made of rings’. radios, the work is performed by changing the volume and FM However, if fragmentation is at the heart of the composition frequency of the various radios at certain times. Amongst and performance of #[unassigned], its aesthetic is one of bursts of hiss, fragments of music and speech appear and startling unity, as each module is written from the same sonic reappear as if they were being treated as musical notes in an palette of quiet, temperamental sounds, often utilising amorphous melody. Each performance of the piece is totally delicate, unusual extended techniques of playing. In contrast unique, as each one will utilise different radio stations, to Sinfonia’s third movement and Cage’s Imaginary Landscape fracturing both the works sonic appearance as well as its socio no.4, fragmentation, despite being used most extremely in -cultural significance. Imaginary Landscape no.4 ’s meaning is musical composition, results in the most cohesive ongoing set essentially fragmented, for example, when the piece manifests of pieces. Even through a cursory comparison between these in different social settings, its FM found sounds change to three very different pieces and composers, it is clear how the those pooled from a different, highly localised socio-cultural play of fragmentation in the composition of post-war music vocabulary, allowing for its semantic content to fluctuate can yield suitably fragmented stylistic and ideological results. between communities and persons. The piece can be seen as a suitable appropriation of Frederic Jameson’s musings on television’s role as the ultimate mediating tool of postmodernity, carrying its relentlessly, semantically disjointed aura through its pictures and audio. Although 9

Matilda Roberts

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‘e are bored in the city!’ wrote Gilles Ivain, the French political theorist, activist and poet, at the age of nineteen. Boredom is a condition first really experienced, by many people, as students. Not boredom just in the sense of having little to do but real boredom where all you can feel, whether you have a lot or a little do, is an emotional flatness and a resigned indifference. Why are we bored in the city? For Gilles Ivain, writing his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ in 1953, boredom is the price we pay for 10

living in a rationalized world where ‘darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning’. For Walter Benjamin, our boredom derives from the repetitive sameness that our mechanized life develops. Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, also explains boredom as a modern affliction deriving from the dominance of technology. Pre-modern societies developed systems that were connected organically to the rhythms and cycles of

Situationist International Architecture and Derivé in the Modern City Music is "purposeless play ... an affirmation of life not to bring order out of chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living." - John Cage

nature. In the performance of apparently identical tasks, there was always variation and novelty, however slight. For example, ocean waves, although appearing interchangeable are each subtly different, shaped by wind and the movement of the sea. There are smaller rhythms within the larger ones; in some instances they are gentle, at other times immensely threatening. They are unpredictable; Lefebvre writes, there is ‘always something unexpected, always something which seems to be a fragment but is suddenly a whole.’ Technology has fragmented a formerly integrated style of life resulting in an automatic, essentially passive response to lived experience.

restricting themselves to the aesthetic plane, art could pose no real threat to the established order.

Members of the group came up with a number of solutions through architecture. Constant Nieuwenhuys’s ‘New Babylon’ architecture would no longer be the concrete manifestation of a controlling social order. It would end nowhere; have no national economies, or collectivities. Every place would be accessible to all and life would be an endless journey across a city which changes rapidly. In his accompanying essay, ‘New Babylon’, Constant describes it as a shared residence, ‘a temporary, constantly remodeled living area and a camp for nomads on a planetary scale’. The very basis of time and space Our automatic response to boredom is to scroll the Facebook would be transformed by the introduction of free time and news feed, search the internet for distractions and play games free movement and completely new social relationships would on our phones or consoles. At the end of this we are very be created. rarely left feeling satisfied or even any less bored. As students we are initiates preparing for our role in a culture of general passivity. At least this was the stance taken by the Situationist Gilles Ivain’s solutions to avoid boredom in the city involved International, of which Ivain and Lefebvre were some time splitting the districts of the city into moods. There would be, members. For them, everyday life in the modern world is so among others, a bizarre quarter, happy quarter, noble and deadened by routine, the banality of culture and the tragic quarter, historical quarter, useful quarter and sinister spectacle, that deep and unrelenting boredom is the inevitable quarter. The city’s inhabitants would engage in a continuous result, and total revolution the only ‘cure’. The SI formed in dérive (dérive is an unplanned journey or stroll, another idea 1957, and it’s two key publications were published in 1967. developed from Surrealism). They would completely The ‘spectacle’ is at the centre of Situationist theory. disorientate themselves in the constantly changing Developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book, The Society of the landscapes. In order to inject fun and play in to the city Ivain Spectacle, it is a development of Karl Marx's concept of suggested a few changes for Paris: fetishism of commodities, reification and alienation. The ‘spectacle’ revolves around the idea that we are ruled by …the underground should be opened at commodity and consumption and the mass media has night, after the trains have stopped rendered us completely passive. The Situationist’s rejected the running… rooftops of Paris should be fragmented nature of modern society and called for synthesis, opened to pedestrian traffic… drawing many of its ideas from Surrealism, and in particular modifications of fire escapes and the Surrealist critique of bourgeois life. However, the construction of walkways where Situationists spurned Surrealism’s concentration on the necessary… public gardens remain open at imagination and chance, and instead promoted the power of night unlit or with dim lighting… street life and living itself. The Situationist’s thought that in lights should have switches… churches 11

made into ruins or fearful houses… accentuate their unsettling effects…

While the Situationist International, as a movement, had a habit of over intellectualizing the problem of modern life, a number of their ideas regarding play in the city and attempts In the city the situations we live in are created for us. The to interrupt daily life could be valuable in today’s society. width of streets, heights of buildings, advertisements, lights, Though they claimed art could pose no real threat to the the circulation of traffic, the colours of front doors, and the established order, it can make successful attempts to disrupt shapes of windows all arrange our space and subtly shape daily life and inspire direct living. This can be achieved by urban lives. The Situationists wanted to radically disrupt this escaping the alienating physical and social constrictions of by disrupting the make up of the city. traditional art practice; the separation of audience and artist, production and consumption, and creating art that invades While the ideas of Ivain and Constant may seem unreachable daily life. The film The Institute, documents a situation in San they indicate towards more realistic ways in which the Francisco in 2002 in which artists turned the city, for those boredom of modern life can be broken. Boredom can be seen who were paying attention, into a city of play. Participants in as an estrangement from acting and thinking, from direct the game did not know what was going on but those who living. Natural rhythms cannot be entirely eliminated; many committed themselves to it reported the way in which the aspects of daily life still remain hidden and obscure, beyond intervention to their daily routine changed their lives. Watch the grasp of the fully legible and rational. The human body, for the film and you will see that this is quite an extreme example instance, preserves the ‘difference within repetition’ that - but this kind of project can have a valuable effect on Lefebvre thinks is lost. As long as we do not disengage inhabitants of a city, inviting a latter day Revolution of ourselves from our own bodies we will still encounter chance Everyday Life at it opens the door to a new way of and surprise. For the Situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem, approaching your environment - not just as a tool for survival, whose The Revolution of Everyday stands alongside Debord’s but as a place to play, create and therefore really live.

The Society of the Spectacle as the canonical text of Situationist thought, creativity, love and play are life’s nutrients - the only real ways in which we can participate in the world.

Further Reading Ivain, Gilles, ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ in Libero Andreotti (ed.) Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writings in the City, Barcelona, 1996, 14-17.

Lefebvre, Henri, Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959 - May 1961, London, 1995.

Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Oxford, 1991.

Nieuwenhuys, Constant, ‘New Babylon’ in Libero Andreotti (ed.) Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writings in the City, Barcelona, 1996, 149-155.

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The River Irwell—commons at wikimedia.org

You’re taking a stroll by the water, idly chatting with friends and you're laughing. There is a light shining through the canopy above and it’s falling on to you. You lift your head in appreciation; you notice that you’re in a labyrinth of concrete with walls scaling high above you. Suddenly you're startled by the sounding of a car horn. You turn your head to respond to an apparently disgruntled motorist to find that they’ve quickly passed and left you looking at Special Brew cans and McCoy’s crisp packets bobbing along a canal. You think it’s the Bridgewater. You see a sign which tells you it’s actually a river and it’s the Irwell. An icy tingle makes you shudder as something runs down your top and settles as a wet patch on the small of your back; you look up to confront the perpetrator and you’re blinded by a changing trio of traffic lights. It pauses for a moment and illuminates a sign below that reads ‘Welcome to Salford’, in red. You remember your friends and momentarily lose them among the other pedestrians who have also colour coded their wardrobes to match their grey city. You notice that they are a few steps ahead so you speed up your walking. You take a deep breath and with a contented sigh you think about how little you would like to be anywhere else.

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Where Do You Come From?

Bethany Lester

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here is your home? Is it where you were born or the place that you live now? Can you have more than one? Is a country as much of a home to you as a town or city? Our personal heritage is, indeed, quite personal to us as it is our individual history, and the places that we have been provides the setting for the story of ourselves. Everything we experience helps to determine us individually as characters, and location is an inescapable factor of anything that we do; a large part of one's identity is realised in where they live because the traits of that place extend themselves (and impress themselves on) to the inhabitants and subsequently become a part of them. Regardless of how much we enjoy or endure the quality of life and the aesthetic beauty of our hometowns, we become proud and protective of them anyone from outside a big city will know the excitement caused by seeing your town's name appear on the map of Britain during the weather forecast. I wonder why this is. What is it about the spaces that we inhabit that become so important to us? How do we use our understandings of our homes to help understand ourselves? And just why is location so vital to our appropriation of our identity?

Our identity is our significance as an individual person, what we mean to ourselves and what we mean to others. It is an undeniable truth that we are all humans, but that's a little nondescript, isn't it? We can be further defined by certain qualities, i.e. male or female, but that's still little objective.

How do we extend ourselves from human to person? From citizen to individual? From subject to self? To make ourselves distinguishable characters, we employ various qualities in a combination that is unique to us. We create a personal definition of ourselves which is then, we hope, understood by others.

For many, the place where they were born or where they spent the most time growing up is often particularly important to them. When we have an expert knowledge of somewhere, from an inside perspective, we gain a sense of belonging. Road names, where they lead and who lives at number 32, knowing the local school - perhaps even having attended - and knowing the back way to the park are all fairly insipid things that we learn about a place when we live there, especially when we are young, and yet we hold these close to us as memories as time progresses. We will have initially used these to understand the geography and demographic of our village, town or city and we will have then used that understanding to address ourselves as a part of that culture.

These otherwise negligible facts manifest themselves as a part of us and subsequently become significant to us personally.

When you live somewhere for a period of time, you become a product of that location - that is not to say that this

is bad, but it is an inevitable truth; you would not be the person you are today had you not lived the life that you have done, much in the same way that in 20 years time (shudder at the thought of it) you will be a different person altogether.

Places have traits which are determined by natural, social and economic influences and this subsequently creates an area demographic. These traits are impressed onto a resident and they then determine their perceptions and expectations of the world. What we become accustomed to - the styles and size of buildings, the activities we pursue, the shops we frequent and favour etc. - is directed by this and, in turn, shapes us as people. There is a direct link between your location and your identity; you share common ground which is regionally specific and you owe this to that place. Naturally, you're going to feel accustomed to the norms of that place and so you're going to find comfort in the familiarity of it all.

Are we constricted to feeling a connection with, and adopting the qualities of, only one place, then? Personally I've lived in many places, and many types of places at that. There was a reason for moving on from each place, and they certainly weren't all my first choice, and yet I look back to each one of those situations with fond memories and a half intention to revisit that lifestyle one day. I don't consider myself 'from' all of these places, and at this stage I don't particularly feel more 'from' any one of them than the other, but they are all integral and important parts of my past and subsequently my individual self. They differ greatly in aforementioned demographic, however I will have personally grown around this and the conflict will have allowed me to become an individual based on opposing and differing values.

The relationships that we create with places are perhaps as substantial as those that we create with others: both bonds emanate the same concurrent, reciprocal and devoted possession of 'I am yours, and you are mine', through which we establish a sense of belonging and purpose.

Relationships are built as support networks to guide us through life and all its challenges, so perhaps the way we connect with our natural and urban landscapes provides a rare foundation in a world where one can often feel lost.

‘If you know your history, then you would know where you’re coming from. Then you wouldn’t have to ask me, who the ‘eck do you think I am?’

Bob Marley.

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Walter Benjamin's Dream World

Josh Mcloughlin

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alter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project is paradigmatic of a form of constitutive fragmentation and incompletion such that it has been heralded as a foundational postmodern text. Benjamin’s is a collection or rather a collation of elements and fragments whose incomplete assembly constitutes a way in which the text itself enacts 16

fragmentation and disunity as a mode of inquiry. But further, this fragmentation also renders The Arcades Project both an icon and an index of post-modernity: an icon in that its material incompleteness serves as a tangible monument of the challenge to the supposed unity of monolithic history; an index in that the aphoristic make-up of the text is at once an

indexical trace of its source texts, and also the material and conceptual constellation which forms and informs The Arcades Project. The object the of study is modernity specifically its crystallization in the arcades of nineteenthcentury Paris - and Benjamin analyses both past and present to try and identify a way in which the continuity of history may be radically challenged and the modern dream-world disturbed. The interrogative space constructed by Benjamin can be thought of as constituting a post-modern vision of plurality and appropriation, as he says, ‘method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.’

The arcades are to be seen as crystallization - crucially not of timelessness, but rather as a saturation of the ephemera and images of commodity culminating in the dream life of modernity, Benjamin says, ‘The arcades and interiors are residues of a dream world. The utilization of dream elements in waking is a textbook example of dialectical thought. Hence dialectical thought is the organ of historical awakening.’

Benjamin thus maintains that the myth of the individual instance of commodity – the bombardment of images in the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris – needs to be employed and interrogated in order that the myth of modernity can be made visible. The mythic object of commodity behind the glass reflects a dreaming subject, and Benjamin’s project aims to effect a violent and epiphanic awakening from the modern dream-world and the incitement of a revolutionary history whose consequences can serve real, radical change in the present.

The dream which is the focus of Benjamin’s study nevertheless has a very material base, and it is in this sense that Benjamin’s thought shares the Marxism which influenced Theodor Adorno and other thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Benjamin’s fascination with the irrational aspects of social life – the magic of the commodity and the myth of exchange value – could be thought of as having a slightly Gothic flavour to this Marxism.

The aura of the commodity and its drama, Benjamin Argues, must be seen as a fetishizing process insofar as a particular object is invested with a subtle metaphysicality and a theological reverence divorced from its material utility. And Benjamin maintains that mysticism is necessary to ‘Capitalism, [which] was a natural phenomenon with which a new dreamfilled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces’. The arcades are Benjamin’s point of departure for this study of the modern dream-world precisely

because they are a constellation of the varying myths of commodity. A dizzying, seemingly infinite variety of commodities are brought together, made visible – that is, the individual is subjected to them – and out of this develops a haunted space diffused with the ghostly emanations of irrationality and the spectrality of fetishized commodities whose exchange value is a nothing more than a dreamlike investment. This saturation is what Benjamin calls the ‘phantasmagoria’ – the uncanniness of the commodity myth in a state of saturation, played out in a world of perfect visibility and subjection: the glass palace of the Parisian arcade.

At the risk of playing down the importance of Semitic mythology to The Arcades Project, it is nevertheless useful to see Benjamin’s work as an attempt to grasp economic processes in perceptible phenomena. In a sense, Benjamin works backward, certainly through reconstruction, and even in a kind of negative dialectics, as he proclaims ‘For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture’. Revealing the ways in which economy finds expression, intentionally or otherwise, through ephemera - in commodity and architecture especially - is central to enacting the epiphanic awakening Benjamin believes to be the key to revolutionary action. If the myth of the commodity is destroyed, Benjamin maintains, the dream of capital which underwrites it soon follows.

This idea of the dream is central not only to Benjamin’s work, but, in varying forms plays a central role in western thought more generally. It was Friedrich Engels, in a letter to Franz Mehring in 1893, who first posited the idea of a ‘false consciousness’ as a force which could structure lived experience, and Benjamin modified the idea through the fragmented form of The Arcades Project. Michel Foucault, decades later, would proclaim, in Discipline and Punish, ‘subjection is born […] from fictitious relations’. Louis Althusser’s foundational concept of ‘interpellation’ turns on the idea that individuals misrecognise a politically charged concept of subjectivity and its relation to the social totality as natural or real. Using the form of the ‘dream’ to think about society enables the conception of a reality organised and experienced in a way which differs from actuality.

Relationships between subjects, objects and between subjects and objects are invested with certain, essentially fictitious, values and significance which have a material effect - the contribution to the production of a kind of subjectivity which upholds a dominant order. So, although Benjamin’s work remained unfinished at his death at Portbou in 1940, his work lives on through the pervasive influence of the dream model in cultural thought.

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Mercator map

Cartography and Ideology Amber De La Haye aps are the visual unification of our world. They hold everything together; allow travel, communication, a physical and psychological unity. Without them society would fragment, globalization would collapse and I wouldn’t even be able to find my way to my mums house.

However maps are a semiological system; the signifier and signified do not have a natural relationship, but a constructed one. And the process of construction can never be objective, meaning maps take on the function of representing and reinforcing the ideology of their creator.

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to keep citizens in line and prevent them from straying.

Whilst our scientific understanding of the globe has improved somewhat since the medieval era, maps are still reflective of the dominant power: the West.

The Mercator Map is the traditional map adorning classroom walls worldwide. This map, created in 1569 by a Cartographer called Gerhardus Mercator, was designed for sea navigation – naval trade was crucial to European economies at the time.

The clumsy and cumbersome globe could be printed onto 2-dimensional paper and straight lines represented compass A major theme in the work of Michel Foucault is the bearings. This map, however, radically distorts the sizes of relationship between power and knowledge; power is countries. North America is shown to be bigger than Africa, constituted through knowledge and ‘truth’, which are whereas, in reality, you could fit the United States, China, constructed by discourse. The map is a part of a discourse; a India, the entirety of Eastern Europe, Italy, Germany, France, knowledge-system which empowers and promotes a Spain, Switzerland and Japan into Africa with room to spare. particular ‘truth’. Although the map is often viewed as Africa is vast. The size of a country has subtle implications on presenting a neutral reality, innocent of ideology and how we view it upon the world stage; this map, created and creation, it is actually a production of knowledge, inextricably used by western colonial powers, shows the continent they bound up in the process of power and sustaining systems of plunder from as subtly less significant. In addition, the domination. arbitrary choice to place North at the top of the map and South at the bottom has a similar effect. The western, wealthy countries dominate the top half of the map, Maps reflect the ideology and priorities of their creator; they innocuously changing our perception of the southern are a form of knowledge that reinforces the power that hemisphere. Deeply embedded notions of hierarchy based on created it. Medieval maps, for example, prominently feature a binary of top/bottom are present in much of our language – heaven and hell, with demons waiting for travellers who stray top dog, bottom feeder, bottom of the pile, on top of the off the edges of the (flat) earth. This reinforces the power of world – and the world certainly looks dramatically different the church, - and therefore state and divinely appointed when flipped on its head. monarch - by disseminating a knowledge that supports church teachings, emphasizing the omnipresent threat of hell 18

Mercator map: South upwards

So what about maps in the digital age? The ever-expanding power of the internet and its capacity for crowd sourcing information has lead some to suggest we are entering an age of the democratization of maps: Google maps is now the most prolific map, combining a huge number of sources such as digital geographical data, satellite images, traditional maps, street car cameras and local citizens data. These maps are

more homogenous and accurate than ever before, and the advance of technology is leading to a future where cars are equipped with mapping and tracking cameras and maps can be automatically updated every millisecond. However this ‘democratization’ is an illusion, the modern map, perhaps more than ever, serves to sustain relations of domination. It privileges and legitimizes certain meaning systems – for

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MODERNISM

example, corporate capitalism and industry: the location of the nearest Starbuck’s is tracked to the meter but information about gradients in the land, the nearest fresh water source or soil types is absent. Roads are already meticulously reproduced, and will be even more so if cars can be fitted with mapping devices, but footpaths are patchy at best. Poorer and rural areas will not benefit from mapping focused on roads or knowing the locations of expensive coffee shops; the world’s most prolific map only provides information for the western consumer. Cartography used to survey the land, now it surveys the corporations. Further to this, the modern map effaces the privileging of capitalist consumerism that is occurring. The online map makes the greatest claim for accurate representation, through the use of aerial photos, crowd sourced information and a wealth of links to external websites. This elision of the ideology at work within the map

makes that ideology ever more effective. In the terms of Roland Barthes, the discursive mode ‘naturalizes’ and ‘universalizes’ the phenomenon represented so it appears to be described rather than constructed.

It is impossible to create a neutral map; Jorge Louis Borges’ short story ‘On the Exactitude of Science’ illustrates how ridiculous this notion is by describing a fictional empire that attempts to create a perfect map. However, we can recognize the ideology inherent in cartography, thus neutralizing its naturalizing effects. And if you want a map that reinforces your very own systems of domination, why not try drawing one yourself?

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

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What is a strike?

Here we feature another article by the brilliant Everyday Analysis Collective, a group of writers who draw on cultural and critical theory, producing inspired reappraisals of seemingly innocuous cultural phenomenon. The collective’s first book, Why Are Animals Funny: Everyday Analysis Volume 1 is amusing, insightful and on sale now at : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-are-AnimalsFunny-Everyday/dp/1782793925 You can also follow the Everyday Analysis blog: http://www.everydayanalysis.com/ or on twitter @EDAnalysis

Dan Bristow

ast year the BBC reported a story on the confusion of children over where their food comes from: ‘cheese is from plants’, ‘pasta’s made of meat’, ‘fish fingers come from chicken’, etc. Despite the ambiguity that would have arisen over a kid hesitating an answer of ‘horse beef’, we should perhaps look to certain of the tropes by which not only teachers, but the media too, explain things (both of whom being educationalists. Indeed, as is John Reith’s motto that the BBC was built on: ‘educate, inform, and entertain’). So, whereas it might seem preposterous to a certain generation to have to explain where cheese comes from, so it might to have to explain what a strike is. The rhetorical buzzwords of ‘mass disruption’ and ‘financial cost to the country’ that media institutions such as the BBC report such events with, however, display the tendency of presenting a strike as a bizarre aberration of some kind of ‘natural order’ – which is, to be blunt, the capitalist order – recklessly implemented by irresponsible whingers, to purposefully impair real people’s important lives and business in the city.

One would perhaps feel just as ridiculous and pedantic in elucidating the concept of a strike as one would that of the origin of fish fingers, but it might just be necessary in reaction to the ways in which strikes (such as the recent ones on the Tube) are being presented, and going by some of the reactions to them seen of late.

by-product of events that have taken a wrong-turn through irresponsibility, or just the selfish action of the (imaginary) ‘few’ (the workers) which affects the (imaginary) ‘many’ (the ‘country as a whole’)… In this respect – to restrike a balance in its reportage – a strike should have returned to its presentation the aspect which can demonstrate its utilisation as a plea of workers to be recognised as integral to a country as a whole, and to be treated accordingly; for them to unite as a whole, as workers; and not simply to be shown as an act of sabotage, as it often comes across.

A strike is meant to disrupt things and incur unnecessary costs to those to whom the strike is opposed (i.e., employers in a position of power, who exploit that power, or have been in some way oppressive, or unfair); it is not simply the unhappy

As Félix Guattari put it: ‘it is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity.’ Indeed, it appears we might now have to defend against the risk of losing with the word the very concept of solidarity itself."

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We must be wary – in a time in which workers are becoming Turkers – of too quickly surrendering our rights as workers, pandering to the policy-makers who want to ban the right to strike, in the wake of rhetoric that tries to subtly coopt its audience through presenting no alternative to the view that privileges the capitalist (or, rather, capitalism itself) over the worker; the bourgeoisie – to brutally reuse the language of Marx for full effect – over the proletariat. Indeed, we must be on guard against the fundamental misrecognition – the symbolic poverty – that can lead to such an occurrence as Warwick University students organising their own studentled classes as their lecturers striked (an event championed by none other than Katie Hopkins)…

Strike Action, Collateral Damage & Revolution Emily Bourne offers a critical response to the Everyday Analysis article ‘What is a Strike?’ (opposite), drawing on Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan to consider the revolutionary potential – and the collateral damage - of strike action.

Emily Bourne

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n the Everyday Analysis Collective’s recent article, it was brought to our attention that, in light of some of the most recent strikes – for example the tube strikes, and, by extension, the assessment strike currently in discussion at Manchester University itself – the concept of the strike is presented by Britain’s media as: A bizarre aberration of some kind of ‘natural order’ – which is, to be blunt, the capitalist order – recklessly implemented by irresponsible whingers, to purposefully impair real people’s important lives and business in the city.

This is an effective summary of the sheer manipulation of the form and importance of the strike by Britain’s media, which is troubling to say the least, not to mention its effect on the perception of strikes by the general public. I myself have been guilty of going on a Twitter rampage about university lecturers going on an assessment strike – the fear of not tallying up those numerical achievements of my academic acumen is just more important than those lecturer’s paid pittance to push and enthuse me through it (although this owes something more to the capitalist system of education itself). The article goes on to give us a helpful definition of what a strike is, ending with: “indeed, it appears we might now have to defend against the risk of losing with the word the very concept of solidarity itself.” This conclusion to the article emphasises the question I want to ask: – do we ever want to stop striking? In a way, these strikes are in a delicate balance between being productive and self-destructive, similar to Lacanian jouissance, enjoyment which “can be characterised as a kind of existential electricity that not only animates the subject but also threatens to destroy them” as Glyn Daly puts it. By striking we both take part in a necessary fight which contributes to a feeling of solidarity against a higher power, and also paradoxically create fragmentation in our own ranks, together providing a sort of jouissance, a “satisfaction through suffering” as we fight together... something almost martyric.

Strikes come about as a result of class antagonism. To be blunt, it is the “proletariat” working class revolting against

being treated unfairly by the “bourgeois” privileged classes.

These terms, coined by Marx, could be considered ‘aged’; as Tony Blair once infamously said, “we’re all middle class now.”

However strikes show us that these terms are still very relevant. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ are often the same across strikes, suggesting that the concepts of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ that Marx delineated are still relevant. When discussing class antagonism, Yaha. M. Madra and Ceron Özselçuk explain how Slavoj Žižek describes antagonism as the “ineradicable obstacle that throws into disarray every identity with the notion of antagonism as the particular relation between oppositional identities.” It is the fragmentation behind these oppositional identities created by class antagonism which creates a feeling of solidarity: everybody loves an underdog.

This “disarray” of identities talked about shows the fragmentary aspect to class antagonism – it is not just an upper/lower class divide, but striking also alienates those who are being fought for. The unfortunate collateral damage which is often necessary in strikes is the ‘inconvenience’ caused to those who belong to the group who are striking, but are not partaking; not the ‘scabs’, but those of the oppressed class who require the services which are being stopped. It is the parent who has to take an unpaid day off work when their children’s teachers are striking, or the university student who cannot graduate because of an assessment strike; a reality students of UoM were warned of in the informative email about the strikes. This collateral damage causes more fragmentation amongst the working classes than anything. Yet still, solidarity is more and more often created through this romanticised, ‘V for Vendetta’ manner of all pulling together and fighting against the powers that be.

Striking is an act which purposely creates fragmentation within our infrastructure– the act itself of one group causing inconvenience to another is fragmentation at its best – in order to attain ‘equality’ and alleviate the oppression of a section of society. In striking, we gain solidarity through this fragmentation, through opposing each other. Thus our fear of losing the word isn’t related to our fear of losing the power to make a change and become a fully equal society, but a fear of 23

losing the paradoxical fragmentation which makes us feel solidified, through the identification of an “other”. Žižek argues that

show an unconscious will to remain in a constant state of striving for it, a constant state of striking. Žižek’s conception of identity contains antagonism at the heart of it, identity is a constant of fragmentation and thus we are it is not the external enemy who is preventing drawn to this fragmentation, it is a necessary to, and a me from achieving identity within myself, but normality of our identity. In a way Žižek is wrong, whilst every identity is already in itself blocked, marked we do project the cause of our infrastructure’s by an impossibility, and the external enemy is fragmentation onto an ‘external enemy’, it in fact still simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon allows us to attain our identity- just not necessarily our which we ‘project’ or ‘externalize’ this intrinsic, perceived one. Whilst a ‘true’ identity may not exist, the immanent impossibility. idea of a true, fragmented identity not only exists but is achieved through striking.

As we strike, we push further this discourse of fragmentation, this “us” and “them”, projecting an insecurity over actually attaining an equal society. We 24

Consuming Fragments: Performance Art, Spectatorship & Gallery Practice Jasper Llewellyn n a time where we’re more ‘connected’ than ever - yet work as Barry’s own status as ‘artist’ or ‘creator’ is elided by more people than ever are identifying themselves as the lack of tangible, visual physicality in his work. ‘lonely’- how has the act of viewing and experiencing In the work of Barry and Arman we find examples of a life, and consequently art, been changed? fragmentation of the physical process of experiencing a work.

Advances in technology and progressive art theory have However, an artwork’s temporality is another key point of unlocked a whole new set of tools for many contemporary interest for many contemporary artists. Working under the artists and the role of physical proximity, time and distance in description of ‘durational performance’, Taiwan-US based the process of viewing a piece of work has drastically changed. artist Tehching Hsieh performed a number of experiments in Groups like Germany’s Rimini Protokoll have experimented performance duration in the late seventies and early eighties. with distance between ‘performer’ and spectator in pieces Hsieh performed five ‘One-year’ performances in which the such as their 2008 ‘intercontinental phone play’ Call Cutta In a acting of viewing was radically problematized due to the highly Box , where audience members engage in a semi-scripted unconventional time scale and the often varied - and audio and video performance with a call centre worker on the sometimes non-existent - viewing conditions. Hsieh’s other side of the world. Devised in conjunction with the call performances ranged from being tied by a rope for a year to centre workers themselves, the audience members have no fellow NY performance artist Linda Montano, to living outside physical interaction with the performer and this ‘digital’ in the city without using any form of shelter. Due to the length performance effectively takes place in cyber space. of Hsieh’s performances, the viewer was granted a developing perspective of the work that would naturally change due to However, is this fragmentation (physical, in the case the large number of other events that would occur in their of Call Cutta In a Box) of the process of experiencing a work a own life, and consequently inform their judgment, over the new phenomenon or is it, in fact, simply a digital exploration course of year. The conventional process of judging a work – of ideas already discussed in earlier contemporary art? rooted ultimately in the viewer’s particular perspective at the Artists have been stopping us from physically interacting with given moment of viewing – is dissolved as Hsieh’s radical works for decades, disrupting and fragmenting the viewing temporality defies a judgment formed from an isolated process in order to create a variety of effects. As early as 1960, moment.

French artist Armand Arman (a close friend of infamous conceptual provocateur Yves Klein) filled the Gallerie Iris Clert in Paris with rubbish in his piece Le Plein; forcing the spectator Although championed as the quintessential practice of to experience the work from outside on the street, through contemporary postmodern practice, I hope to have shown the gallery’s window. By fragmenting and changing the setting that the trend for disrupting the spectator’s viewing process in which the work is experienced, Arman stimulates questions through fragmentation is, in fact, one based in a broad history about the effects of the gallery institution on the viewing of performance and installation. From Marcel Duchamp’s experience. By framing Le Plein in the setting of the street Sixteen Miles of String in 1942 to Daniel Buren’s contemporary itself, this radical ‘gallery gesture’ is one of many that ask us to stripe installation, artists have long been fragmenting consider the consequences of a fragmented physical viewing elements such as temporality and physical proximity in order experience to provoke refreshed responses in the spectator.

I

However, Arman’s experiments almost pale in comparison when compared to what critic Brian O’Doherty describes as ‘the ultimate point’ in the ‘conceptualization of the gallery’ – Robert Barry’s 1969 Closed Gallery. Similarly concerned with the physical disruption of the viewing experience, Barry simply sent out cards printed with the sentence ‘During the exhibition the gallery will be closed’ and subsequently closed the Eugenia Butler gallery in Los Angeles for the duration of his three week residency. Removed of visual stimulus, the spectators are forced, Barry argued, to ‘explore their own minds’, and their experience of the work is consequently ‘private and internal’. Instead of framing the work in the street (such as is seen in Le Plein), Closed Gallery exists solely in the mind of the viewer. Through this fragmentation of the physical act and stimulus, the spectator is placed in the centre of the

Further reading: Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of The Gallery Space (San Francisco: University of California Press, 1999).

Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Quitting Time’ in Helen Molesworth ed. Work Ethic (London: Penn State Press, 2003).

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Translation The Fragmentary Modern City

A

Sadie Maher

desperate swan scouring for a drop of water in a dirty Parisian city street, pines for the return of his native lake. Upon reading Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’, it soon becomes apparent that this distressed swan is in fact himself. Except it isn’t merely a lake that the speaker mourns, but his beloved Paris: ‘The form of a city changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart’

Baudelaire’s despair is unsurprising. As ‘Les Fleurs du mal’, the volume of poetry in which ‘Le Cygne’ finds itself, was being written, Paris itself was being completely overhauled. Appointed by Napoleon III, Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s renovation of the capital not only transformed the buildings, but played a part in a wider development in which Paris became an economic superpower - which many Parisians viewed as signalling a loss of its revolutionary political heart.

The speaker feels trapped in a city they no longer recognise, and the rhyme scheme reflects this entrapment. ‘Cage’ and ‘plumage’ surround ‘bec’ (beak) and ‘sec’ (dry); the bird is quite literally ‘caged’ in this lifeless environment. The speaker employs unconventional imagery in the personification of nature, describing the sky as ‘ironique et cruellement bleu’ (ironic and cruelly blue). Even nature, typically a sign of predictability and order, can no longer be relied upon: "Rain, when will you fall? Thunder, when will you roll?"

There exists throughout the poem a juxtaposition between Old Paris and New Paris; between permanence and transformation. The speaker mourns the clutter and chaos of the old centre: ‘le bric-à-brac confus’, and ‘les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques’ (huge stone blocks stained by puddles of water). The image of staining inverts Haussmann’s aim of building a new, cleaner Paris free from disease and overcrowding. For the speaker this has in fact permanently stained the Paris, the land of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’. Paradoxically, as Haussmann builds an ordered modern city, the speaker is thrown into an anxious, permanent uncertainty.

Both swan and speaker feel lost. This hopeless reluctance to adapt to the changes that surround them is typified in the line ‘la forme d'une ville change plus vite que le cœur d'un mortel’ (The form of a city changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart). Despite his dismissal by Napoleon III in 1870, many now credit Haussmann with the creation of the thriving, beautiful Paris we know today, but in ‘Le Cygne’, the speaker sees him as the destroyer of a beloved hometown.

A Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann - Gustave Caillebotte 26

Charles Baudelaire Le Cygne (I) Andromaque, je pense à vous! Ce petit fleuve,

Andromache, I think of you! That little stream,

Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit

Poor and sad, where the mirror shined long ago

L'immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,

With the vast majesty of your widow's grieving,

Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,

That false Simois swollen by your tears,

A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile,

Suddenly my memory was teeming,

Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.

As I walked across the new Carrousel.

Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville

Old Paris is no more (the form of a city

Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d'un mortel); Je ne vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques, Ces tas de chapiteaux ébauchés et de fûts, Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques, Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-à-brac confus.

Là s'étalait jadis une ménagerie;

Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart); I see only in memory that camp of stalls, Those piles of shafts, of rough hewn cornices, The grass, huge stone blocks stained by puddles of water, And, glowing in the windows, the jumbled bric-a-brac.

There, a menagerie was set up;

Là je vis, un matin, à l'heure où sous les cieux

There I live, one morning, when under the heavens

Froids et clairs le Travail s'éveille, où la voirie

Cold and Clear, Work awakens, and the road

Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l'air silencieux, Un cygne qui s'était évadé de sa cage, Et, de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec, Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage.

Près d'un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre, Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal: «Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?»

Sighs a hurricane in the silent air, A swan that had escaped from his cage, And, his webbed feet stroking the dry pavement, On the uneven ground, he dragged his white plumage.

Beside a dry gutter the bird opened his beak, Restlessly bathed his wings in the dust And cried, homesick for his fair native lake: "Rain, when will you fall? Thunder, when will you roll?"

I see that hapless bird, that strange and fatal myth,

Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal, Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide, Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,

Towards the sky at times, like the man in Ovid, Towards the ironic, cruelly blue sky,

Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide

Stretches his avid head upon his quivering neck,

Comme s'il adressait des reproches à Dieu!

As if he were reproaching God!

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First Draft’s Next Draft Bethany Lester

F

irst Draft is, in their own words, ‘a bi-monthly cabaret night, showcasing brand new work: drama, fiction, poetry, music, comedy, storytelling, spoken word, and more…’ As the name might imply,

the nights provide a performance platform for new work which is not yet completely finished and has

not yet been shown publicly. Next Draft is a new addition to the First Draft family - its big sister, if you will. After combining creative efforts with Faro Productions and Studio Salford, they hosted two evenings at the King’s Arms pub, showing performance pieces which are in their next stage of development, some of which had been performed for the first time at First Draft itself. Totalling some fifteen performances, there were numerous themes addressed including gender, sexuality, heteronormativity, mental instability, addiction, racism, consumerism, education, colonialism, family relationships and performance itself, and they were applied to scenes of contemporary life.

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Papermash Theatre's Happy Birthday Without You, written and performed

by Sonia Jalaly

Trisha Anne Starbrook performs her 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' set

I take my hood down and adjust my coat in an attempt to I begin to wonder what is expected of a young woman. shake off some of the mancunian rain. I head away from the door and take a look around the place; I’m struck by a sense The light descends and causes me to shake my thoughts and of distant nostalgia as this quintessentially English, working look up. I strain my eyes to see through the darkness. The man’s pub initiates me to recall scenes from dated British trio of girls are no longer there. A dusty yellow slowly settles sitcoms that I would watch as a child with my dad. I head across the room; I rub my eyes and adjust as I return from towards the bar and half expect swirls of smoke to frame my dream land. The stage becomes a platter of performance packets of pork scratchings on the back wall, but instead I am as various faces step up and send the audience to realms of welcomed by my reflection in a mirror and a selection of whimsy. The night slowly draws to a close and I consider the drinks. Hanging from one of the draught taps is a label with conviviality; it is all a little rough around the edges, but an instructing scribble reading ‘drink me’. Transporting charmingly so. Most of the performers have been out-offurther back in time and feeling smugly now a fantasy costume and all outfits that have been worn were plain and character, I duly oblige and order from the disappointingly there has been no particular scenery set-up for the majority uninteresting bartender. I thank him regardless and take a of the acts. sip of my cider. Undeterred, I head towards the darkly lit staircase and consider what this possible wonderland has in We often channel our 'self' through external, material store. I take a spiralling ascent up to the first floor, continue things. Clothing, hairstyle, books, music, food, drinks (the through to the next room, choose my seat and settle down. I list is not extensive) - what we choose, or choose not, to take another sip at my drink and eagerly await whatever is to associate with ourselves works to employ an identity which happen next.

can be perceived by others. As others - spectators - we are accustomed to distinguish people by these (word). We may

Music rings loudly through my ears. Two young girls enter manipulate this to create a new persona; despite the the room, laughing and dancing around; soon after a door critique of this in everyday life, in performance this can be opens and an older girl walks in. “Who are you?” she asks, vital in the effort to transport an audience from their interrogating one of the younger two. She appears to care awareness of reality. little for an answer but continues to question them. “What are you listening to?" Her eyes dart across the room in a I find myself impressed by the charisma delivered solely by seeming effort to inspect the surroundings. "And what are the artists which have worked to present beautifully raw you wearing?” The younger girls anxiously stumble over their performances and their skill to the audience. Each has been words as they try to justify their actions with an answer. The incredibly personal, addressing the audience and inviting music is stopped and a hostile silence takes its place. It all them to enter the world of the character with empathy. becomes uncomfortably recognisable.

What is and isn't socially acceptable in a situation is decided in the moment by the people who are present. It's indirectly addressed by one's responses to another's actions; for fear of judgement we become compelled to meet these set standards. In this quest for affirmation, individually we create a superficial self which sits on the surface of us. We turn to the values placed upon objects and opinions and adopt them as our own to tell stories which hide our uncertainty of ourselves.

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FRAGMENTATION Claudia Carvell he theme of ‘Fragmentation’ speaks to the postmodern and post-structuralist movements that began in the 60’s to destabilise ideas of essential, stable meaning and absolute truth. Theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva contributed significantly to a poststructuralist change in thought that distrusted established norms and challenged the naturalness of just about everything: language, textuality, history, power, gender, sexuality , subjectivity and psychology. Established research areas in the humanities such as structuralism, feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis

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underwent radical changes during the period of poststructuralism’s influence in the academy. Owing much to nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida’s ‘Deconstruction’ theory usurped binary oppositions in their very depiction of opposition, instead showing that, as Ki Namaste states ‘meanings are organised through difference’ and thus what appears to be outside of any given system, is always-already inside of it. To claim or appeal to normality, for instance, relies upon the existence of the abnormality it seeks to distance itself from. This constituted a radical challenge to the purity of language - its

assumed function as transparent nomenclature – which went further than Ferdinand de Saussure and the structuralist movement he inspired. Further, Roland Barthes’ canonical text ‘The Death of the Author’ – a text which marked Barthes’ own transition from structuralist to post-structuralist thinking – radically challenged the notion of textual authority and decentred authorial privilege to the extent that biographical criticism has all but disappeared from university departments across Europe and North America.

If post-structuralism was primarily an academic movement, the changes it implicitly advocated found their realisation in

artistic postmodernism. Postmodernism prioritises hybrid forms, eschews binaries, and incorporates metafictional elements, intertextuality, temporal distortion and ironic selfreflexivities. Postmodernist writing practice often refuses a notion of fixed reality – and sometimes even the existence of reality itself - striving instead for a disorientating effect, often with the use of unreliable narrative voice. Conveniently, creative writing often fragments through its focus on minute details and specific perspectives that disintegrate a “whole”, rejecting the definitive nature of experience, understanding or identity.

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On the big toe of my left foot.

Claudia Carvell

Twelve Fingersteps James Mullard

My toenail grew back

Twelve fingersteps, from midnight to noon

Even though they said

1am – Your feet, unshoed, toenails painted green

The chances were slim

2am – Your ankles, subtle, hairless, supporting

Or that if it did

3am – Your thighs, pulled, revealing jewels

It would be thicker

4am – Your buttocks, purpled, birthing bruises

Or shorter Or fatter than the rest.

5am – Your lower spine, steel, pushing against skin

Even though they said

6am – Your hands, adorned with a single silver band

There would be

7am – Your arms, white, with memories of scars

Lasting consequences

8am – Your shoulders, that sometimes hang dainty dresses

From you

9am – Your neck, grooved with finger marks

Hacking it off at 3:00am With a pair of clippers in one hand And scissors in the other.

The nail, so far from its bed That you could see dust

10am – Your chin, lifting up, with a single touch 11am – Your lips, parted, opening to inside 12 noon – Your throat, tubed, where the heart rises, then falls

Collecting in the gap.

I figured you’d be there To see it recover

Editing Daisy Church

And be here To see it recovered

There is a moment there.

To see our

In between “you fat slut” and when you picked up the chair.

Unorthodox method Proving them wrong.

Before the doctor was called, before the shock of it all seeped in, lodged

When I considered a life

in the interim. A lull.

Of lacking a nail On the big toe of my left foot

Door-framed, you wait - street lamps fluoresce in the background -

I considered a life

all blanched knuckles and bared teeth,

Laughing with you

a Frankenstein’s Bride lit from behind

About lacking a nail On the big toe of my left foot.

and unhinged.

But now the nail On the big toe of my left foot Is looking up at me

Fade out. Pan to an aerial shot. There.

Watch the script leak from the chimney and disband;

Like it never happened Like you never happened And I’m looking down at it Reminding us both That we did.

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ebb then flow then soften into smog and answer only to the seagulls now.

Middlesbrough Jenny Sloan The last day of summer and August barbecues have blackened the park benches.

You pull up your Superdry hood and swear with glassy wet eyes, That you were drunk when you said you wanted to jump in the lake.

I spot a scrunched up crisp packet wedged in the blistered oak.

I poke Mr Tayto with a stick. You have work in an hour but you don’t have your uniform. Stacking shelves with Heinz and Cadbury and Walkers with your name spelt wrong On your badge. You’re only 17 and it’s no fun.

So you took your driving license and went to the International.

Tangled tinsel. Avicii. Pink lights. The caretaker walking in.

The countdown to midnight with a Coors Light, a curry half and half and my best friend, who you couldn’t stand. And I couldn’t stand up.

Black heels in the sea. A broken Blackberry.

National Express. Your Auntie Linda. Scary cousin Heather.

The church you were christened in. A blow up mattress. The Thistle.

St Patrick’s Day in Middlesbrough. One tenth Fanta and the rest Vodka.

It sat on the fireplace all night. Asking how we met. One year.

A drinking den surrounded by dead fields and duvets.

A fight with your friend and the fireplace.

Your smashed up Polo. 4.17am. Loudspeaker.

Streetlight turning your bruises neon, hiding your acne.

The bus ride to Newry. Christmas trees and Costa coffee.

Me crying in the bathroom and you crying in court.

You were the only one wearing a shirt and tie – At least that’s something your mum could be proud of.

This time your breath smelt of Strawberry Laces not beer.

Your jeans and t-shirt and jumper tied together.

Back to The Thistle. Goosebumps and locked windows.

Broken bottles. Clean sheets. MRI. The hum of take off and the hum of life support.

That driving license took you to the worst place: A gift bag with baby wipes, jelly beans and a car magazine.

I forgot your favourite. You forgot my address.

The last day of summer and they’ve dug up the park benches and planted a fountain.

I have that Superdry hoodie in a Sainsburys bag under my bed.

I looked at Mr Tayto’s plastic corneas to avoid looking at the lake.

Your eyes looked like glass because you were still drunk and hadn’t slept for two days. That was the weekend you lost your job.

You’re always drunk but you weren’t lying about the lake.

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Josh Mcloughlin

S

o I’m in there, in the fucking stinking farm they have the imbecility or the astute irony – though I doubt it – to call as ‘fast food’ outlet, and I’m looking at those stupid, backlit boards of horror and I’m thinking: the product they’re selling is dead; the people eating in here are killing themselves and their offspring (never too early to start) and the employees are so fucking dead behind the eyes I’m wondering if they’re not just papier mache obscenities with the voice of that guy from the drive-by computer piped up through their throats. The whole thing just starts boiling me, I mean really getting to me. Sometimes things just get me. I don’t know, I think can see things that other people can’t. I can see that this whole place, and all the other places just like it – the plastic shopping dungeons, the clinical hotels with the fucking pasted on smile at the reception, the empty salesman in the street, all of them – are just one big fucking joke. I can see that they mean, what they really mean. Some people don’t much like my clarity of vision. Or maybe it’s the way things get at me, when they really get to me, and how I react.

But these things need a reaction, and sometimes people can get sore about it, but they don’t have my clarity of vision, so they never understand. Call me crazy and throw pills at me.

But I’m not crazy, never have been. I just have a particular clarity of vision.

So I’m in the McDonald’s, which maybe proves I’m crazy, and I’m starting to wonder why people get so happy when they’re here? I mean, I’m looking at this whole awful, dead place thinking, surely its all a mask, this happiness? I’m usually right about these things, you can trust me. Like once in the movies, I was watching one of those fucking train-wreck blockbuster shit storms and I knew, I knew all the people in there were in as much pain as I was, and get this: as soon as I got up and told them how miserable they all were, and how it was okay to see it, to admit it, not only did they leave, but the showing got cancelled! People look to a guy like me for his vision; they see when I let my vision be known, as a permission to stop pretending. Just like at that movie. They left so quick – soon as I gave the strength, the belief.

name for it. But, anyway, they’re all packed in like their fucking burgers. I mean, most people don’t have the clarity of vision to see a thing like that.

So, as my luck would have it, its my god-awful turn. This surly string of grease looks at me, anywhere but in my eye. It gets to me when people don’t look me in the eye. Eyes are for looking, I mean, it makes sense for you both to look at each other’s’ lookers doesn’t it? He looks at my shoulder, this fleshy humanoid, or my chin, or at the talking bag of meat behind me shouting so loud she must not understand the concept of the goddamn telephone. Something comes out of the hole in his head.

‘Can I take your order?’

And I try and pin down his eyes with my own but he’s a slippery looker. Slippery lookers can really get to me, and this place is already, so by now my jaw is clenched. I mean, when my jaw is clenched, something is really getting at me – in fact, it got me, you know? I know right at that moment I’ve got to order whatever piece of shit I can muster than sanity to order and get out, sharp. So I say, prying my mouth open, chasing his fleeing eye, pointing at the board, ‘I’m bananas’.

‘Sorry, what?’

‘I want a banana milkshake,’ I repeated.

I hate having to repeat myself, it really gets to me. I mean, by this time, the whole fucking place , this fucking eye-avoider in front of me, my jaw like a vice – and now, having to repeat myself. I’m about to have some serious clarity of vision. I mean, I’m about to become a fucking prophet. Call me fucking mohammad!

‘I’m sorry sir we are all out of banana today. Can I offer you strawberry or chocolate?’

There’s a bright light like a switch, like the flicker of a voice through the deserted hallway of a hospital late at night.

So, anyway, I’m in this fucking place, like I told you, famous for Something lurches and breaks and runs in beautiful red, its happy meals, and it’s my turn at the goddamn deathleaping up and warming my arms. Like scratching an itch, I’m counter. Now, I already said this whole thing was getting to pressing two soft buttons and pinning them, opalescent, down me. I mean, truthfully it was working on me something forever. Two geysers – hot just like a geyser – throwing terrible. So I get to the stinking counter, with all the puppets patterns on my shirt, my jeans, my hands. I’ve pinned them running around in their own sweat, and the others’ sweat, and now. I feel okay, now. Now I’m on the other side of the I’m seeing how they’re packed in: packed in like the burgers counter, using my clarity of vision and showing everyone here frozen in their boxes at the far end of the.. of the what? The what I can see. Maybe not they’ll begin to see like I do. Maybe Kitchen? The grease fucking preparation area? There’s no not; not everyone is meant to see.

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How I Got to Where I Could See Everything

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A

S Editors - Amber De La Haye & Josh Mcloughlin Arts Editor - Beth Lester Performance Arts Editor - Jasper Llewellyn Creative Editor - Claudia Carvell Artist - Josh Duffy sondermanchester@gmail.com

LIT SOC Join the Literature Society facebook group - uom.lit.soc Follow us on twitter - @SonderMagazine Feedback and submissions - sondermanchester@gmail.com Thank you for reading.

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