My new book - A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain

My new book, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, has just come out in Open Humanities Press' Media : Art : Write : Now series, edited by Joanna Zylinska. 

The abstract for the book is below. But it's my attempt to explain why I do some of the things I do. It’s also even angrier than usual if you can imagine such a thing. (It is what it says on the tin in that respect.) But then there's a lot to be angry about at the moment.

Another way of thinking about it would be as an unauthorized sequel to Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?, especially its infamous chapter 14, with its critique of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan et al.

A Stubborn Fury is available open access, no copyright. So please feel free to share.  

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Gary Hall, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain
London: Open Humanities Press, 2021
Series: Media : Art : Write : Now

E-version freely available on an open access, no copyright basis:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury/

Also available in paperback

Abstract

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe.

In A Stubborn Fury, Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much literature in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Hall does so by playfully rewriting two of the most acclaimed contributions to these media genres of recent times. One is that of England’s foremost avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy - especially the importance he attaches to European modernism and antihumanist theory. The other is that of the celebrated French memoirists Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis and their attempt to reinvent the antihumanist philosophical tradition by producing a theory that speaks about class and intersectionality, yet generates the excitement of a Kendrick Lamar concert. Experimentally ‘pirating’ McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, A Stubborn Fury addresses that most urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors? 

Contents

Preface: Stay Elite

Part I: Go to Settings (feat. Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis)

1. On Class and Culture in Elitist Britain
2. Bourgeois Theory
3. Memoirs, Memoirs, Memoirs

Part II : HOW LITERATURE WORKS © Tom McCarthy

4. This is All Pirated
5. Good and Bad Remixes, or The Importance of Having the Right Software
6. Who Speaks, Who Gets to Experiment and What Remains
7. ‘He Wants to Be Authentic, Is All’: Literature as Technological Prosthesis
8. Media Art and the Melancholy Impasse of the Anglo-American Novel

9. Conclusion: A Stubborn Fury

‘When Gary Hall, if he is indeed the author of this book, speaks, he listens, and in listening he writes and in writing he remixes. He, or whatever version of authorship he betrays, shows us how writing works: intuitively, intellectually and intensively. The end result is always illumination.’

Mark Amerika, Professor of Art and Art History, University of Colorado

‘Hall gives a stark account of how the English novel has emerged as a key technology for the reproduction of class inequality in Britain, and its seemingly inextricable connectedness to liberal humanism, anti-intellectualism and, worst of all, Oxbridge.’

Isabel Waidner, author of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and co-founder of Queers Read This. 

Dehumanising the Mind

This is the abstract for a talk I am due to give as part of the 'Inhumanities' seminars Open Humanities Press is curating for the Australasian Post-Humanities series.

In an essay called ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’, which Open Humanities Press (OHP) published in 2017, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst argue that, while the struggle between left and right that has dominated Western politics for the past half-century has been presented as a relationship of opposing positions, they are actually two faces of the same liberalism. I would go a step further to argue that actually most politics in the West today is conducted in liberal humanist terms. In my ongoing work I also explore traces of liberal humanism within the posthumanities – as evidenced by the field’s continuing adherence to concepts such as the individualistic proprietorial human author, the real name, the fixed and finished book, originality, creativity and copyright. Of the two books I’ve written recently for OHP’s MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series, the first, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, provides a critique of the bourgeois liberal humanism that dominates so much of contemporary literature and culture. The second, Masked Media, describes some of the alternative, ‘inhumanist’ ways of being a critical theorist that my collaborators and I have been exploring with projects such as OHP, Living Books About Life and the Radical Open Access Collective. The rationale behind these projects is to show how our bourgeois liberal humanist modes of being and doing as theorists can be reinvented to help produce a more socially just future. For unless we can learn not just to write posthumanist theory but actually work, act and think in terms of the posthumanities, we risk perpetuating the kind of unjust and unequal culture with which many of us are all too familiar. It’s a culture dominated by the liberal humanist worldview of healthy, privileged, middle-class white men, to the exclusion of more radically inventive thought, including that of feminist, working-class, LGBTQIAP+, Black and Global Majority writers. Hence the title of my talk, which is a play on Decolonising the Mind, a book published in 1986 by our OHP colleague Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 

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Gary Hall, Dehumanising the Mind

And here is the slightly longer (and stroppier) first draft, complete with references.

In an essay called ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’ that Open Humanities Press published in 2017, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst argue that, while the struggle between left and right that has dominated Western politics for the past half-century has been presented as a relationship of opposing positions, they are actually two faces of the same liberalism.(1) I would go a step further to argue that actually most politics in the West today is conducted in liberal humanist terms. And this is the case regardless of whether those involved identify as liberals, socialists, conservatives, libertarians, feminists, Greens, Marxists or anarchists. Something similar can be said about the relation of the posthumanities to the humanities. Posthumanists may write about transgressing the boundary that separates the human from the nonhuman, be it animal, insect, technology, plant life, water, air, the planet or the cosmos. Yet when it comes to how they themselves work and act these critical theorists remain liberal humanists. Evidence their continuing adherence to concepts and values inherited from the humanities, such as the individualistic proprietorial human author, the real name, the long-form argument, the fixed and finished book, originality, creativity and copyright. In this respect all the references in their work to objects, materials and media technologies is just non-human filler designed to make their liberal humanist ways of being and doing appear otherwise.

Of the two books I’ve written recently for OHP’s MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series, the first, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, the first, provides a critique of the bourgeois liberal humanism that dominates so much of contemporary literature and culture, including antihumanist theory and what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘posthuman Humanities studies’.(2) The second, Masked Media, describes some of the alternative, ‘inhumanist’ ways of being a critical theorist my collaborators and have been  exploring with projects such as OHP, Living Books About Life and the Radical Open Access Collective.

In this talk for the Australasian Post-Humanities seminar series I want to develop this critique of both the humanities and posthumanities as different aspects of the same bourgeois liberal humanism by referring to three recently published texts: Reni Eddo- Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Zadie Smith’s Intimations and Bernadine Evaristo’s Goldsmiths Prize Lecture, ‘The Longform Patriarchs, and their Accomplices’.(3) For the answer to the question of why my collaborators and I want not only to write posthumanist theory but actually work, act and think in terms of the posthumanities is quite simple. It’s about showing how our ways of being and doing can be reinvented to help produce a more socially just future. Unless we can learn to do so, we risk perpetuating the kind of unjust and unequal culture with which many of us are all too familiar. It’s a culture dominated by the liberal humanist worldview of healthy, privileged, middle-class white men, to the exclusion of more radically inventive thought, including that of feminist, working-class, LGBTQIAP+, Black and Global Majority writers. Hence the title of my talk, which is a play on Decolonising the Mind, a book published in 1986 by our OHP colleague Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In it Ngũgĩ explains why he regards the translation between African languages such as Ibo and Yoruba as the ‘foundation of a genuinely African novel’, rather than anything written in English, French or Portuguese, the languages of the European colonisers. (4)

References

(1) John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, ‘The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism’, in Michael Marder and Patricia Viera, eds, The Philosophical Salon: Speculations, Reflections, Interventions (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017): http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-philosophical-salon/.

(2) Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity, 2013) 157.

 

(3) Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays (London: Penguin, 2020); Bernadine Evaristo, ‘The Longform Patriarchs, and their Accomplices’, New Statesman, October 1, 2020: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/10/bernardine-evaristo-goldsmiths-lecture-longform-patriarchs. After the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests that occurred around the world following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Eddo-Lodge became the first black Briton ever to top both the non-fiction paperback and overall UK book charts during this period, while Bernadine Evaristo became the first woman of colour to top that for paperback fiction with her novel, Girl, Woman, Other (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).

(4) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Heinemann Educational, 1986) 84. 

Blurb for my forthcoming book: A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain

Below is the blurb for my new book, which is forthcoming from Open Humanities Press in the MEDIA : ART: WRITE : NOW, edited by Joanna Zylinska.

Gary Hall,  A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe.

In A Stubborn Fury Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the literary novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much writing in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Hall does so by playfully rewriting two of the most acclaimed contributions to these media genres of recent times. One is that of England’s foremost avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy, and the importance he attaches to European modernism and antihumanist theory. The other is that of the celebrated French memoirists Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, and their attempt to reinvent the antihumanist philosophical tradition by producing a theory that speaks about class and intersectionality, yet generates the excitement of a Kendrick Lamar concert. By experimentally pirating McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, Hall addresses that most urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men, very much to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors?

In Masked Media, a follow-up to A Stubborn Fury which is also due to be published in the MEDIA : ART: WRITE : NOW series, Hall proceeds to show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a more socially just future after the years of austerity and the coronavirus pandemic.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, A Stubborn Fury will be freely available to download.

Sin criterios: Spanish translation of Steven Shaviro's Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze available from Open Humanities Press

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce the latest in Graham Harman and Bruno Latour's New Metaphysics series: the Spanish translation of Steven Shaviro's Sin criterios: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze y la Estética. Traducción de Román Suárez y Laureano Ralón. (Originally published as Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics by MIT Press in 2009.)

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Sin criterios is freely available to download:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/sin-criterios/

En Sin Criterios, Steven Shaviro nos propone explorar una fantasía filosófica: imaginar un mundo en el que Alfred North Whitehead toma el lugar de Martin Heidegger. ¿Qué habría pasado si Whitehead, en vez de Heidegger, hubiese fijado la agenda del pensamiento posmoderno? Mientras que Heidegger pregunta: “¿Por qué hay algo y no más bien nada?”, Whitehead pregunta: “¿Cómo es que siempre hay algo nuevo?” Shaviro argumenta que, en un mundo donde prácticamente todo –desde la música popular al ADN– está siendo sampleado y recombinado, la pregunta de Whitehead es sin duda la más urgente. Sin Criterios es un experimento que trata de repensar la teoría posmoderna, especialmente la teoría estética, desde una perspectiva que nos conduce a Whitehead en lugar de Heidegger. Al trabajar con las ideas de Whitehead y de Deleuze, Shaviro también recupera a Kant, argumentando que ciertos aspectos del pensamiento kantiano preparan el terreno para el “constructivismo” filosófico adoptado por Whitehead y Deleuze.

Kant, Whitehead y Deleuze no siempre aparecen juntos en un mismo grupo, pero la yuxtaposición que encontramos en Sin Criterios nos ayuda a esclarecer una diversidad de temas de interés para las prácticas artísticas y mediáticas contemporáneas. Traducción de Román Suárez y Laureano Ralón. 

Sobre el autor

Steven Shaviro is DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory, The Cinematic Body and The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism.

 

Traductores

Laureano Ralón es licenciado y magíster en ciencias de la comunicación por la Simon Fraser University, becario de CONACYT y estudiante avanzado de doctorando en filosofía por la Universidad de San Nicolás de Hidalgo y la Universidad Libre de Bruselas.

Román Suárez es licenciado y magíster en filosofía por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, becario de CONACYT y estudiante avanzado de doctorando en filosofía por la Universidad de San Nicolás de Hidalgo.

 

Diseño de la colección

El diseño de la colección Nueva metafísica fue realizado por Katherine Gillieson con ilustraciones de Tammy Lu.

With our best wishes,

Sigi Jöttkandt, David Ottina, Gary Hall (for OHP Press) 

Midlands 4 Cities PhD Studentships with the Centre for Postdigital Cultures

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry University invites Expressions of Interest from prospective PhD students, with view to a starting date of September 2021 (submission deadline is Wednesday 30th September 2020):

https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/m4c-studentships-with-the-centre-for-postdigital-cultures/

We are offering to support the development of PhD proposals for the AHRC M4C (Midlands 4 Cities) consortium fully funded bursary scheme (https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/midlands4cities.aspx).

These prestigious, competitive studentships offer a fee waiver and a maintenance grant for 3.5 years (full time) or 7 years (part time), as well as access to unparalleled training, additional funding and networking opportunities.

Although we will support the development of your proposal we cannot guarantee your success. All applications are assessed by the consortium committee and it is a highly competitive process.

You will need to make an application for PhD study via the Coventry University platform PGR+ (https://pgrplus.coventry.ac.uk/).

In the section for the research proposal please state that this is an ‘EOI for M4C Studentship at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures’. 

•     1000 words (max) statement providing a short description of your planned PhD project, including key bibliographical/artistic references;
•     500 words (max) explaining why you would like to do your PhD at the CPC (potential supervisory team members that might have attracted you to our Faculty Research Centre);
•     500 words (max) resume, detailing your background (be it academic, professional, or both) and explaining why it is relevant to this project.

 In case you have previous experience which you deem relevant to the project (publications, artworks, etc), please feel free to add your CV and images of your work, if appropriate.

Please note that the submission deadline is Wednesday 30th September 2020.

About the Centre for Postdigital Cultures

The CPC investigates alternative forms for society in the 21st century. Exploring issues of collaboration, community, and the commons, the Centre facilitates new articulations of culture that call for a radical rethinking of the relationship between the human, technology, economy and the environment. Along with conventional arts and humanities methods, we support PhD projects adopting a range of mixed methods, including various practice-orientated methodologies, visual argumentation, case studies and ethnography.

We encourage applications from suitably qualified candidates keen on developing a doctoral research in any of the following research areas:

• Digital Arts, Humanities and Posthumanities
• Affirmative Disruption and Open Media
• Data Cities and the Politics of Care
• Art, Space and the City
• Postdigital Intimacies
• Immersive Cultures and International Heritage
• AI and Algorithmic Cultures

Further information about the Centre and our staff are available on our website (https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/).

For an overview of our PGR offer please see our Study With Us pages (https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/study-with-us-pdc/).

Prospective PGRs are eligible for this studentship if based in the UK or EU and if they have an MA qualification (or nearing completion), or relevant professional experience.

Please note that candidates who do not meet the eligibility criteria for M4C PhD funding scheme, but who are interested in PhD study at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, are encouraged to contact Prof. Mel Jordan (mel.jordan@coventry.ac.uk) and Dr. Miriam De Rosa (miriam.derosa@coventry.ac.uk). We welcome applications from all sectors of the community and we encourage those currently under-represented in the Centre to apply.