Actress interview leak

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The following has been posted to a dormant soundcloud page for the defunct literary collective Neither Am I. I’m a big fan of Actress – Splazsh carved its own niche in British bass music – and I’ve tracked everything since, including the twitter tracks he put out last year. If you’re at all interested in electronic music, Actress is where its at. He’s got a couple of new records forthcoming. I don’t know what to make of this, though. If it’s a PR stunt it smells a bit weird.

Following the arrest of an unnamed adult male responsible for a series of bizarre desecrations of public buildings – the Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain, the laser at Greenwich Observatory, 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead – police last month raided a house in the Thames Valley. In the premises they discovered evidence strongly suggesting the suspect had been working, unlicensed and untrained, as a psychotherapist.

Documents leaked to the press include the case file of a black, adult male, born in 1989 in Wolverhampton and living in south London. The young man, one Darren Cunningham, a musician working under the name Actress had enjoyed significant and unexpected success with a record release in 2010 (‘Splazsh’), and had just completed the recording a new release referred to in the notes as ‘R.I.P’. He had presented with a series of unusual symptoms: independent automatism of right and left hands; frequent fugue states; pronounced fetishization and personification of electronic machinery; waking visions. He reported dreaming of monuments, geometric figures and the archangel Uriel.

A talking cure had been undertaken, and the patient asked to respond to a number of site-specific or external stimuli relating to his past and/or cultural environments. An audio extract accompanying the leaked case notes is presented below without comment.

Red Wapping

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The redhead wants the copy but she doesn’t want to know. Ian says the redhead doesn’t know. She doesn’t need to know. Ian says do the copy. ‘It’s yesterday’s story’, says Ian.

Yesterday’s news. Yesterday’s drink in my belly. Yesterday’s pain in my gut.

‘Just make the call’, says Ian.

The redhead’s in her office. She’s looking out through the glass walls, looking out over the newsroom, over all she surveys. It’s her fiefdom. We’re her serfs. She doesn’t know what’s going on. There’s what the redhead knows and what she wants to know. Ian says: ‘Make the fucking call’.

There’s pain in my hands, RSI.

Ian looks at me as I shake my arms.

‘You’ve done it hundreds of times before, no use getting cold feet now. Come on you cowardly sack of shit. Do you want that fuck on The Star to get there first? Make the call.’

Ian walks to the redhead’s office. I see them through the glass. The redhead looks at me, surveys me.

I walk over to Foreign. I ask Sarah to dial the number. She looks pissy.

‘Who is it this time?’ she asks.

‘You don’t want to know,’ I say.

‘I do want to know,’ says Sarah, ‘if you want me to do it.’

‘That girl,’ I say.

‘Which girl?’ asks Sarah.

‘The one that’s missing,’ I say.

‘No way,’ says Sarah. ‘No fucking way. Unh, unh, not me girlfriend.’

‘I can’t do it on me Todd,’ I plead.

‘Well you’ll have to find someone else,’ says Sarah. ‘Find another patsy.’

I call John on internal. ‘Need a favour, mate.’

‘Out again tonight?’ asks John. ‘More bloody showbiz? Three in a row, Dave. Getting to be a habit.’

‘No mate,’ I say. ‘Something else. Need you to make a call.’

‘One of Ian’s calls?’ asks John.

‘Might be,’ I say.

‘Yeah, why not? What’s the number?’

I read him the number. ‘Ask no questions, right?’ says John.

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Quietly, quietly, catchy fucking monkey. I’ll give you a minute to get through, so do it right now, alright?’

‘Alright,’ says John.

Thirty seconds later my phone rings. ‘What the fuck?’ says John. ‘That’s a sick joke, right? Because it’s a fucking good one. Who’d you get to record that message? You’re a sicko, Dave. Fucking good one.’

We’re all sick, I think. We’re all sick. Sick to our stomachs. Sick to our souls.

The RSI tingles. The RSI burns. My hand goes numb. I still haven’t got the copy. The redhead knows. I know she knows.

Postcards from a Dying World

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In 2007 I was writing an MA thesis on JG Ballard and I posted him a nerdy letter about publishing history – specifically about the original annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition put out by San Franciscan industrial culture publisher Re/Search. This edition added four new Atrocity pieces and a wealth of annotations that maintained the explosive mobility of the text. It’s a fine piece of work and puts the staid UK Flamingo paperback edition including the same extras to shame. I love getting it out at the British Library. It wears its heart on its sleeve.

I’d read of Ballard’s habit of spending the first hour or so of the day dealing with correspondence but I didn’t really expect anything in reply to my speculative approach. (I’d also written to Re/Search publisher V. Vale and he hadn’t responded). When I received a couple of postcards answering my questions and offering some generous well wishes I was made up. I share these scans in the spirit of literary ephemeral interest: as I say, my questions are a bit nerdy and the textual history Ballard clarifies can probably be pieced together through other sources, but the cards he uses are worth a look, even if they were just what came to hand at his desk. I imagine he had a ready supply.

The first speaks to Ballard’s pop-art fascination and roots: all the covers of Italian pulp comics surrounding the man reading the real news. The world of the imagination is leaking out into reality through this news vendor’s stall. It gestures at the pulp history of Ballard’s own sci-fi beginnings. The photographer for this was Ugo Cozzi and it was taken in Firenze in 1940. The Second World War was year old. The young Jim was in Shanghai but probably not yet interned in Lunghua, where he would be isolated from news of the rest of the world.

The second is really the one, though: Etienne-Louis Boullee’s 1784 drawing for a Cenotaphe a Newton which was not built; a spherical funerary monument dedicated to a dead physicist; a possible pre-Modernist future that looks the epitome of the high Modern. Insert your own hauntological reading here and begin to imagine the world in which Boullee’s architecture had dominated the 19th century. The geometrical style of Boullee’s architecture speaks directly to Ballard’s geometrical obsession – it really can’t be read as anything other than obsessive – that finds its purest expression in Atrocity, and about which I was writing. This one was published by a German publisher but the copyright is owned by the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

With the benefit of hindsight I wish I’d asked him more expansive questions. I didn’t know him so I was aware it was a bit of an intrusion, and that made me err on the side of caution. And of course I had no idea of how ill he was and probably entertained ideas of writing again. He died two years later on 19 April 2009. If you’ve not read it his autobiography is a model of concise modesty.

These cards represent something of a missed opportunity but they are in a box of things I’d save in the case of a house fire.

The Melancholy of McCaw

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“Thinking nothing, McCaw looked up at the Auckland sky, a white sky spun with grey clouds and blue reflections, one of those powerfully and tumultuously windswept skies of Flemish painting, McCaw looked at the Auckland sky above Eden Park on the evening of 23rd October 2011 and he savoured with a poignant intensity the feeling of being there, simply there, in Auckland’s Eden Park stadium, on the evening of the Rugby World Cup Final.”[1]

In his LRB essay on Jean-Philippe Toussaint (‘Stabbing the Olive’, Vol. 32 No. 3 · 11 February 2010, pp. 26-28, see previous post), Tom McCarthy praised Toussaint’s essay Le Melancholie de Zidane, the Belgian author’s lyrical appraisal of Zidane’s performance in the 2006 football World Cup Final. McCarthy highlighted Toussaint’s interest in geometry; his invocation of Zeno’s paradox to understand Zidane’s headbutt into Materazzi’s chest as an attempt to “short-circuit finitude”.

I want to translate Toussaint, indeed to translate him to the power of two: from French to English; from association football to rugby football. The player analogous with Zidane at this rugby world cup is New Zealand’s captain, open-side flanker Richie McCaw, a player as instinctive and unique as the French midfielder, a player who has recast his sport and who, having passed a hundred caps, nears his own retirement. It is possible to switch elements in this equation, but in performing the translations we must balance out.

Ellipsoid

First we must squash the ball. We’re dealing with an ellipsoid rather than a sphere, but it still all revolves around the ball, the quasi-object that brings the collective into being, dictating the shape of the game, the patterns and waves of its human thermodynamics: understand that and you have it all in your hands. The quasi-object performs this role as long as it is in motion. As soon as it stops moving, it ceases to be a quasi-object, becomes just another moulded plastic egg. It seems too good to be true that the point in open play at which the ball stops moving is called the breakdown: deny the ellipsoid its quasi-objective status and the game breaks down. As England demonstrated, if you attempt to enforce your own pattern too hard, attempt to make the ball do your will and your will alone, it will not perform as you would like it to. Some essential quality of the game is lost (see also Scotland, and their English coach, for a text-book demonstration of patterned objectification of the ball). Allow the ball to define you within the closed system of the game, however, allow it to exert its influence dependent upon its relation to you and the other members of the collective, and then it begins to emerge: the true game.

McCaw is the ultimate geometer of this true game, a Thales intuiting his science from the ellipsoid rather than the pyramid. As a breakdown technician, the man responsible for maintaining the motion of the ball in play, lines of run must be persistently recalibrated, the mind becoming an anti-aircraft gunnery system, recalculating trajectory at each event along the ball’s path. Pace alone won’t get you there – although he has it in spades: you need to be able to reconfigure, respond, process information and run the routines. Williams slips it to Nonu, you’re still heading for zone A, where Jane will take it at pace. Nonu fumbles and you cut deep into zone B, switch to a recovery remit, ready to swoop onto a grounded ball.

When you arrive the immediate shape in which you organise your limbs is all-important, the angle between back and thigh, the hinge. You need to achieve equilibrium; your upper body cannot overbalance. The setting of the feet is crucial, a strong base required to withstand the impacts that will come as your opponents, lagging by two metres due to inferior angle readjustment, pile in. Trapezoid is the best fit.

Perspective too is crucial, maybe even sleight of hand, that combination of speed of movement and obfuscation that so infuriates oppositions throughout the world: that they call him a cheat only proves how close he is to perfecting it. That they suggest referees have been suckered only goes to show that he’s got it right. Because the law is ambiguous, it’s about interpretation (as are all laws). McCaw interprets it correctly, allows the pieces to fall around the moving line within its range of movement. His hands are on the ball and pulling it away, his body remains off the ground. Then his hands are off the ball. The ball is on the right side. The impacts knock him over. He’s done it. Or if he hasn’t, he’s slowed it, and pulled his hands out in that thickened second in which the referee might blow.

McCaw
Photo by Trevor Coady. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Tonight, as always, McCaw is in the moment. But can his team be in that moment too? Can they get through without the mass of a nation bearing down on them? All that angst: you can’t transmute it. They’ve been stuck in a compulsion to repeat, repeat defeat. They don the mourning colours but the defeats remain unmourned! Melancholia. Catharsis required: McCaw the dart to the heart of the problem.

He’s a glider pilot: it’s no coincidence. Gliding is the poetry of three-dimensional geometry. The human, confined to the surface of a sphere for most of his activities, only briefly raised above it by his line-out lifters, gains unpowered access to the unvaulted space of the sky. “You’re using the atmosphere, the wind, and whatever the sun is doing, and you have to learn how to use those elements to stay up in the air — and then be able to go somewhere,” he told Scott Kara of the New Zealand Herald. “I just love being up there. It’s the closest thing to having wings on your back.” Has Thales become Icarus? Perhaps the wings are on his sandals; he’s more like Hermes, an intermediary, finding the route through the complex system.

Or perhaps in that moment he embodies Te Rauparaha, the author of Ka Mate, the standard Kiwi haka. Ka Mate tells the story of Te Rauparaha’s escape from death after hiding in a food storage pit. “I die! I die!” chants the leader. “I live! I live!” respond the team. In closing they all follow Te Rauparaha in climbing out of the pit: “The sun shines! Rise!”

The 1924 All Blacks who toured the UK, Ireland, France and Canada, and were nicknamed The Invincibles, performed the Ko Niu Tireni haka. Both in its original form, and the noisier version immersed by James Joyce, who saw the Invincibles play in Paris in 1925, in the spume of Finnegan’s Wake, we read and hear meteorology, ascent. “The New Zealand storm is about to break”, they chanted (“The Wullingthund sturm is breaking”, wrote Joyce, “The sound of maormaoring, The Wellingthund sturm waxes fuercilier”, his prose washed over by associative noise, signal distorted). “We shall attain the zenith the utmost heights,” they finished.

McCaw, in his glider, attaining the zenith.

The conditions near Omarama where McCaw flies are excellent for gliding. Lenticular clouds form along the lea of the Southern Alps, where hot air rises from the mountains. McCaw can glide for long distances. It’s all about the weather, as it was for his grandfather, who flew Typhoons, Tempests and Hurricanes in the Second World War.

Thinking nothing, McCaw looks up at the Auckland sky, a white sky spun with grey clouds and blue reflections, one of those powerfully and tumultuously windswept skies of Flemish painting. McCaw swoops and arcs into the next thermal, which he rides to gain height: static in the column of warmer air, desperate to use one form of temps, weather, to suspend the other. If only he could keep rising forever, in that shaft of more agitated gas. If only he could always be tracking towards a breakdown that never comes. If only the final whistle could not be heard, all sound drowned in a vacuum.

[1] A modified translation of the first paragraph of Toussaint’s essay Le Melancholie de Zidane (Editions Minuit, Paris: 2006).

Calling All Agents

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Earlier in the summer I gave a paper at “the first international symposium on the work of Tom McCarthy” responding to Tom’s  LRB essay ‘Stabbing the Olive’, in which he argued for a geometric fiction. The video of the paper is here. I’d written about Tom’s work during my MA and we’d done a brief interview by email about Remainder which is published below.

An overview of the entire event written by attendee Martin Eve is here, while Derek Attridge wrote a brief review in the Guardian Review the next weekend (‘McCarthy has leapfrogged many older novelists into the academic canon.’ (Derek Attridge, ‘THE WEEK IN BOOKS: Booker odds, Tom McCarthy in conference, Muriel Spark at the Poetry Society’, Guardian, Review Section, 30 July 2011, p. 4).  As a not-yet-doctored speaker, it was exciting to give a paper to an audience that included the author, assorted INS cohorts – including Simon Critchley, who also spoke – and Eng Lit profs like the aforementioned Attridge and Andrew Gibson, whose paper on Speculative Realism opened up a lot of interesting channels. The afternoon session was pretty lively as the more established folk exchanged opinions in robust fashion. Kudos to Burkbeck’s Dennis Duncan for organising.

A collection of essays around the symposium is planned by Glyphi Press, so I’m not going to post the text of the paper because I’m working it up into an essay that I’ll submit for that.

Tom has been active over the summer: the blog Surplus Matter maintained by 3AM magazine’s Andrew Gallix keeps tabs on McCarthy material online so I refer any interested parties to that for some great articles and talks.

Tom McCarthy interview (16/04/07)

Remainder puts to work some of your theoretical writing on trauma and re-enactment. In your essay Between Pain and Nothing you argue persuasively for Rod Dickinson’s Milgram Re-enactment as “offer(ing) us the possibility of ethics and, in so doing, offer(ing) us the very possibility of subjectivity – that is of being at all”. This raises a number of questions with regard to your protagonist in Remainder…

I wrote the essay on Dickinson’s work a year or so after finishing Remainder, so the more formal thinking-through of the question of re-enactment that you get in the essay hadn’t happened for me when the novel was taking shape. I hadn’t read Levinas at that point, for example. But writing about Dickinson’s work was a kind of formalising after the fact of some of the questions raised in Remainder. The protagonist of Remainder is much less of an ethical subject than my putative model viewer of Dickinson’s re-enactment, though.

1) As his programme of reconstructions progresses, he loses his subjectivity for periods to increasingly frequent fugue states. Are his re-enactments in fact creating problems for his subjectivity?

His re-enactments both give him the possibility of subjectivity and remove this, pull the rug from under his feet. It’s a catch-22 situation. Perhaps you could draw a parallel with some of Lacan’s notions of how, for example, the imago both forms a vital component of the thrust towards subjectivity and, by always remaining just outside the circle of the subject, that elusive extra part, makes a totalised or unified subjectivity impossible. Ditto the little other or objet petit-a. I wouldn’t want to paint the correspondence between Lacan, or any other thinker, and Remainder as that schematic, but the echoes are there.

2) As he re-enacts increasingly ‘found’ events he enters an ethical space but responds in a neutral manner. Indeed any sense of an ethical subjectivity is absent from the narrative. Has he failed to relearn an ethical framework?

The obvious answer would be that yes, he fails, he ends up a psychopath for whom the deaths he causes can only be understood in terms of their aesthetics, as ‘beautiful’.  But in fact I think he does engage with ethics, in a totally Levinasian way, when he does the shooting re-enactment. In that sequence, he opens himself, his time and consciousness, up to the absolute otherness of the man whose death he’s re-enacting – its mute enormity, its endlessness and so on. The authorities have cleared the area, washed the blood off the street and erased all traces of the event, but he goes back to it, and lets it snag him, tear him open, again and again and again. He, not the sane people around him, is the one who keeps repeating the mantra ‘Everything must leave some kind of mark.’ Levinas characterises the ethical moment as an entry to a diachronic space in which traces of surprised forgettings are recovered: that’s the space my hero wills – cudgels – into being and occupies, repeatedly.

The term ‘event-field’ is not a term I’m familiar with, although your citations from Faulkner make it clear how an event field operates: as ripples spreading out from an original event. Could you elaborate on this idea?

I think Faulkner said it all. You get ripples, and more ripples, moving over pools that aren’t even necessarily the one in which the original stone dropped. Events play out over generations: the playing out is itself the happening of the event, although the event itself always remains outside of its own field, even if it passed through its plane at some unspecified point in the past, ruptured it.  Badiou’s thought might hold some answers here. But in that magnificent passage (from Absalom! Absalom!) Faulkner also talks of seeing, remembering and reflecting, which for me echo (again) Levinas’s notions of bearing witness – although for Faulkner the rippled pools aren’t bearing witness to the event as such (the stone dropping) but rather reflecting ‘the infinite unchanging sky’ from which it fell.

Cracks, rips and imperfections are recurrent in Remainder. In these irruptions reality returns – Lacanian tuches or Barthesian puncta – and you exploit the possibility of lending such seemingly insignificant events an ever-expanding event field. Does an event-field view of history prioritise the traumatic event? Are these in effect micro-traumatisms?

Yes and yes. An event-field view of history is impossible without a traumatic event at its core. And then the little rips you mention are like stand-ins for the big one, little envoys, mini-mes. They’re like the boy whom Godot sends to keep Vladimir and Estragon in a state of anticipation. The big one will never appear and show itself, and yet we live in the belief that it might – live for that belief even.

The second half of chapter three, an imagined conversation with a homeless man in a restaurant, appears to effect a narrative equivalent to such a notion: the artifice of narrative is punctured in this moment. How do concerns change when writing a fictional narrative about the re-enactment of found events as opposed to writing critically about art events that are themselves re-enactments?

Fiction is intuitive. I was in a bathroom at a party, not entirely sober, looking at a crack on the wall, got a moment of déja-vu, and in half an hour the novel was there. I didn’t stop to work out what it all meant, and in fact still haven’t. It just made sense, in its own warped way. With critical writing, it’s more about making sense of that kind of intuition in retrospect. That’s not to say that critical writing can’t be creative and exhilarating – look at the work of Derrida, for example – but it does inhabit a different mode.

Because the trauma suffered by your protagonist is a physical as opposed to purely psychical trauma, it remains unclear whether or not his amnesia is a result of brain tissue damage or a psychological condition. How important is this ambiguity between the physical and the psychical trauma?

Not that important, frankly. There’s no Cartesian split in Remainder. The hero is ill-at-ease in the world physically and behaviourally and mentally, but these are all part of the same complex. It’s a very materialist book – in effect, what he’s coming to terms with throughout it is a certain materialism, a matter-based vision of existence as opposed to a transcendent one. His mind is matter, damaged brain tissue, and the world is matter, bitty flows and scar tissue all bathed in liquid daylight spilling from a ruptured sun.

Some key terms in both Remainder and the field of trauma studies operate doubly. Chief among these is notion of authenticity which is implicated in debates over witnessing – indeed the crisis of witnessing uncovered by Abraham and Torok in Cryptonomy is fascinating in this regard, placing it at a crux point in the history of psychoanalysis as well as at the history of modern trauma theory. In your work authenticity is at the heart of a crisis in subjectivity. Do you aim to exploit this doubling?

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘doubling’. Paul de Man has written a brilliant essay about doubling, a term he takes from Baudelaire’s notion of dédoublement. For Baudelaire, and subsequently de Man, doubling names the effect of self-consciousness that prevents us from being authentic: if we can reflect on our experience, that means we’re not simply living it, and we’re therefore split in two and consequently not complete. What’s worse, figuring all this out doesn’t bring about a return to authenticity, but rather re-doubles the problem, makes it play out at more and more self-conscious levels, endlessly regressive. Again, I hadn’t read that essay (‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’) when I wrote Remainder – but it could be describing the book. In fact, it’s the best thing ever written about Remainder, without even mentioning it!

Not only is the modern understanding of the term trauma a medico-legal construction, but so too has the reconstruction become a medico-legal tool. The artistic re-enactment operates in this context but how does the medico-legal aspect of the reconstruction relate to its artistic cousin?

One of the first things my hero’s lawyer explains to him about the terms of the Settlement the parties (‘bodies’) responsible for his accident are offering him is that, if he accepts, the accident ‘will cease to become actionable’. In the first draft, I added: ‘It will lose its status qua event’ – but I removed that because it’s bad writing (a lawyer would never say such a thing, unless he was a philosopher as well). But the legal moment of erasure of the ur-event, of ur-erasure (say that fast if you can), goes hand in hand with the more philosophical (Blanchodian) erasure. And the medical one. I did my research: even the most positivist psychologists, the kind of people who would oppose Freud on every other point, concur with him completely that the trauma-moment bypasses the narrative chain we call memory. Their term for this phenomenon is ‘dissociation’: the data gets laid down in the brain (in the hipocampus, to be precise), but not as memory. So it’s there, but in an absent or negative form – but no less there for that. I’d say the artistic is the synthesis of all these modes, plus a little more besides – but I wouldn’t want to say what that little more is. It’s the remainder maybe. The hero of my novel doesn’t at any point consider himself an artist, though – although that’s a slight sleight of hand because the novel itself belongs to the category of art, and to a large extent allegorises it. But if he’d stood in front of the crack when he experiences his moment of déja-vu going ‘Oh yes, this is a bit like Proust and the madeleine,’ the book would have been over then and there. Ars est celere artem, like the man says.

ADAM CURTIS INTERVIEW (19/07/2011) UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

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Earlier this summer I interviewed documentary maker Adam Curtis for Dazed and Confused magazine. Curtis generously gave me an hour of his time and was an extremely engaging and candid interviewee, running with my questions and providing answers that far outstripped their scope. Dazed were only able to run this at 1,000 words and I thought there might be interest in an unedited transcript so post this online in the hope that it might find some readers. (When I say unedited, I have of course made my questions far tighter and more coherent than they were.)

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

We met at Television Centre the morning before James and Rupert Murdoch were due to appear before the Commons Media and Culture Committee and sat in the horseshoe of the magnificent building, soon to be vacated when the BBC moves its base to Salford media village. Curtis mentioned that he’d been offered the use of the Centre after this move for a Punchdrunk project but we began by discussing the Murdochs and the excitement around the breaking story despite his concern that it would be out-of-date by publication. I asked if he would be tuning in to the Murdoch testimony later in the afternoon. Of course, he replied:

It’s just a great story.

How do you think it will play out?

In essence no one really knows. At the moment it’s a wonderful, wonderful story. It’s not Watergate, in the sense that it’s the corruption of power, but these scandals can often flick a switch that starts something broader.

You’ll find me resistant to comment any further. Daily journalism is about trying to record, as best you can, the fragments you have in front of you. What I tend to do is come along later and try and pull all those fragments together and say what does it all mean or have you thought of looking at it this way. When you’re living through something you absolutely no idea what it means. That’s part of the thrill of it. You can speculate. I really don’t know.

What do you think of the current state of journalism?

This whole argument that the internet is destroying newspapers is a bit of a smokescreen. I know it’s taking advertising away from newspapers, but it’s also that the journalism is so boring.

If someone like, say, the New Journalism movement of the early 1960s came along and reinvented journalism – which is story-telling about the real world – in a way that connected with the way people think and feel today, then people would buy that newspaper or magazine or whatever it was because they’d want to have it. At the moment the journalism we have most of it is written in such a way that it feels very out of date, it doesn’t connect with the way we feel about the world, it’s not real to us. Murdoch journalism has never felt real, it’s always been a comic product. Broader journalism now feels very unconnected, not with the things it’s describing, but with the sensibility of audience, which has changed radically in the past five or ten years. The sensibility of an audience now is much more fragmented, much more shifting, much more emotional. If you live in an age where there are no big stories anymore, what is substituted for that is an emotional response. That’s not wrong, that’s just what happens.

The realism of our time – to use a literary term – is a fragmented emotional one. That’s how most people experience the world, as fragments which they fit together emotionally. The internet encourages that, you flit around that, you experience that in a fragmented way. I notice that story-tellers – and myself when I edit – I find I’m much happier, and my audience are much more happy, with big emotional jumps. They like it and they like filling in the gaps themselves.

Traditional journalism still tries to be much more causal and analytical. That’s fine except that the audience knows that most of those journalists have no idea what’s going on, we have no idea what’s going to happen in Europe, we have no idea how this scandal’s going to play out – so when we try to do this causal analytical approach it feels thin and somehow false and the audience knows that.

Each age has its own way of experiencing stuff and our way is very emotional and associative. Now, someone is going to come along and create a kind of journalism that both reflects that and connects with that yet at the same time takes people out of themselves and describes the world in a broader way than they can experience through their own narrow experience, that somehow feels real to them.

New Journalism. I think we’re on the cusp of that. I don’t think it’ll come through television, I think it’ll come through writing, and when it does, people will love it, because they want to be taken out of themselves and then they will buy the product that has it in it and they’ll pay a lot of money for it. So I don’t think that print journalism in the general sense is over. That’s a smokescreen. It‘s because it’s boring and it doesn’t connect.

If you live in an age of individualism – which is what we’re encouraged to be, and what we want to be as well, it’s us… at the moment – you judge what is right and what is wrong by what feels right to you. What did Tony Blair say about Iraq and the ultimate justification – I’m misquoting but it’s pretty much what he said – “I did it because it felt right to me.” And that, in our age, is the guiding principle by which you judge. It’s not that you are told that it’s the right thing to do, that’s how it used to be, it’s whether it feels right to you now.

That’s what I was trying to trace in The Century of the Self, the rise of that idea and those who would then take that new idea that feeling was important and shape it and use it for their own purposes. It had to exist before they used it. And I don’t think journalism’s really caught up with that. In a funny way politics did under Blair, and now it’s lost it again partly because the world’s got so confused and the strange territory that Blair took it into as a result of that.

If you live in an emotional age then of course it’s going to be a confused age because there isn’t an elite telling you a story by which you can judge events. So what in effect happens in that age is that events come and go like the waves of a fever and sometimes they come into focus and like in a fever they’ll float out of focus. That’s the realism of our time. In many ways it is more real than previous ages which tried to tell you a grand story. Now, the question which no one really knows the answer to is whether that’s what we’re in for the long run. I mean, the patrician age of mass democracy lasted from the middle of the 19th century really to the early 1990s. We may be into another period of that. Or it may be the blip between the collapse of one big story and the rise of another. And you could say that the whole problem with the press – including the Murdoch thing – is that they don’t have a big plot – in literal terms they’ve lost the plot – there isn’t a plot. If you’re in a newsroom in The Mirror, The Sun, or The Telegraph, The Guardian, when an event just happens there isn’t a big plot, there isn’t a frame into which to fit it. So things come and go. Journalists have lost the plot. People turn away from that kind of journalism because it doesn’t connect with them.

No one knows whether that’s going to last. I suspect that it probably won’t. Some big, serious cataclysm is going to happen, it may be a big, really serious economic crisis that hasn’t happened and out of that will come the necessity for a big story.

What role does a historically engaged journalism such as you produce play in that?

I do two things: I trace how that happens but also, I think that I feed off that mood. I’m very emotional. The way I do my journalism also tries to rework journalism so that it’s couched in those terms. The way I edit is much more associational and fragmentary than previous ways of telling stories on television. And also, I’m quite emotional. I take quite serious subjects and quite causal and analytical arguments – my films are quite old-fashioned – and I try – sometimes successfully and sometimes not successfully – to integrate that and fuse that with emotion so you feel that as well. I use music, images and my voice to create a mood because I think mood is incredibly important to get something over to people. It doesn’t mean that you are then incoherent or emotional yourself. What I’m saying is very straightforward, causal and analytical but you create a mood platform on which you tell that story. And people like that. They just do. Because mood is the thing of our time. That’s why people like immersive theatrical experiences like Punchdrunk. What Punchdrunk do brilliantly is create a mood. They’re just brilliant at it. The extent to which you can then create a story, I don’t know, we ran into problems with that one.

Your captions have begun to seem more and more like artistic interventions: they remind me of Jenny Holzer’s work.

People have said that but I don’t know her. I don’t really know about art. That really comes out of wanting to use songs. I didn’t want my voice to get in the way of the songs so I used captions. People are really happy with films that have a varying texture.

The Trap

I’m quite normal. Given a bit of confidence by this lot but basically I’m quite normal. So if I like it, if I think it’s a bit silly or a bit funny or a bit appropriate then I think people will probably think that as well.

Can you imagine working outside the BBC?

No, I can’t, because I sit on top of the world’s biggest, richest, most wonderful archive, a record of the past, what? 80 years? They have been so wonderful to me because they allow me to explore that archive. And I’d have to go and do something else.

How do you negotiate working with the archive and are there any particular issues surrounding that? What is already left out of the archive?

We have a record that is seriously just fragments, and out of those fragments we stitch together stories about the past. And what I do is go back and re-stitch those fragments together in other ways and say well have thought about looking not just at then but also at now in a new way. Everything is fragments. That’s what reality is. And all journalism and politics is is taking the fragments of experience, dropping most of them and stitching together the ones you want to tell a story that makes sense of the chaos of the time. As I said, when you’re living through something it makes no sense. It’s afterwards that you look back on it and make it into a story yourself, whether it be a love affair or as day you lived through or whether it be a grand event, we all individually and collectively, stitch together, and politics and power is fundamentally a debate about how you stitch those fragments together and the change in the structure of power is when, in a way, those fragments are re-stitched, reworked. That’s what happened in the 1970s when you got the collapse of the idea that politics and the state could control everything. And it was reworked into a sort of technocratic, strange version of the free market, where in a way, the state takes a lesser role and individual’s choices and things can be catered to by other organisations.

No story just happens, it’s made, and here is one of the great factories which constructs that frame. And all the people you see around you are the construction workers of the story we live through. Whether they’re on Newsnight or on a reality show, they’re construction workers, we’re all construction workers.

I’m a parasite construction worker in the sense that I come along, take the fragments that have already been stitched together, pull them apart, rework them and ask have you thought about things in this way, and I do that because I think we live in this inter-regnum between frames.

I try to give people confidence that what you’re told is not absolute truth, it’s a construction. And let’s understand, it’s not a conspiracy or anything like that, it’s a construction. Let’s see a) how a construction is made and b) that you can construct it this way or that way and what do you think? If a big news story comes along people like me will just disappear out the frame.

If I was to make a serious film next I think I would like to go back and examine was that really the free market? Was it a sort of scientific, technocratic version of the free market that we’re still stuck with.

When you talk of big stories it makes me think of Lyotard and grand narratives, and your critique of structures of power is reminiscent of Foucault. Is your work informed by theorists such as these?

I have really serious problems with academia. I would never ever use those terms because a) they intimidate people and b) people don’t understand what you’re talking about. And actually what they say can be put very clearly in simple language, that’s what journalism is all about. Of course I am aware of those things and what they say is not really very profound. The world is constructed, how we see it is constructed and who constructs it has a great deal of power and every now and then that frame cracks and is replaced by another one. That’s called the struggle for power.

People then go and write books full of very long words that are saying that same thing but basically mystifying it, and preventing people like myself, who are normal but quite clever, from understanding it because it’s intimidating.

The only thing I’m interested in doing is communicating ideas to other people and saying ideas are quite powerful and important. Why dress it up?

Actually, I think academia is one of the institutions that should be examined. I think it has a really destructive role in stopping people thinking. Far from liberating people they actually intimidate people from thinking freely and more widely and more imaginatively, which actually should be their role. I’m in a privileged position, I’m allowed to make films which try to explain the world to people. I have never ever used a word that I thought people would not understand.

People would also, if they had any confidence, laugh at that language, and quite rightly so.

People talk about Foucault. What he says can be put in very simple, clear terms. I’m not trying to dismiss what he said, I’m trying to dismiss the terms in which he has written and the terms in which he is written and talked about. It’s anti- everything I believe in, which is clarity, and trying to give people the confidence that I was given by a good education which came about because of the state and also by good university teaching.

That confidence led me to believe that you can take any idea and explain it clearly and imaginatively to anyone. And the academy seems to be actively in many respects working against that which makes me think that it might be in decline.

In the late 1980s what went on in the Humanities in academia in Britain and America was as absurd as what was going on in the Soviet Union’s academies when they were trying to prove that the Soviet plan really was working by things that didn’t exist.

I also have problems with academia, because as a journalist I go and read a lot of academic books and to give them their credit they have good facts in them and they tell you interesting things but what I find with academics is that they won’t speculate. And it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because they’re frightened, frightened that their colleagues will jump on them. It’s most dispiriting and unhelpful. Your heart sinks.

I’m still waiting for a new generation to come up in history that really want to tell stories, that don’t just want to theorise too much, that’s not to say you can’t have a theory. In many of my films I have theoretical arguments, but I would never put it like that.

But surely there are bigger problems with more popular ways of doing history?

The problem with popular history is that it over-generalises. It tells you what you already know and if it does that you switch off, you think I already know that, and you stop listening. Novelists have devices. What we need to do is to find similar devices to take you into that world. In the Century of the Self I used Sigmund Freud’s nephew, who I discovered in an academic book, and who claimed he’d used his uncles theories.

You begin to look at the world of PR and advertising in a new way. Throughout the series I kept on coming back to the Freud dynasty.

The problem with popular history is that it doesn’t tell stories, it just gives you the received wisdom, and people just go I know that and they don’t listen.

Can I pick up on what you mentioned as we were coming in, and ask you about Punchdrunk and doing a project here at the BBC?

The thing to do here would be a ghost story about all those fragments that are sitting in our library. There would be millions and millions of fragments of experience recorded. And maybe over the last 80 years something’s been moving through it. I would do a ghost story based on that idea. It would start on television sometime before. And ultimately it would end up with people on the day this building closed, the doors would be open and anyone could come in and go anywhere they want but what they would discover is that something that had already be on television would be continuing in here and it would be like in a ghost story.

It would be the ultimate opening up of the public service broadcaster only to find something strange at the heart of it. Everyone would be gone, this building would be completely empty, but you would begin to discover things, which you’d have to piece together yourself.

The problem I discovered when I did a thing with Punchdrunk was that as opposed to television, when even if you’re being emotional and you’ve gone away from your story for a bit ultimately you come back to your story, in a Punchdrunk thing you can go wherever you want, you’re making your own story, it’s actually very difficult to then tell a big story. It doesn’t cohere. The thing I did in Manchester with them was actually about how the fragments don’t cohere so it seemed an appropriate use of those limitations. What I couldn’t do was tell the audience something new. If one could somehow find a way of engaging people through the immersion that Punchdrunk do and at the same time fusing that to a narrative that told them…

It Felt Like a Kiss

I know Felix who runs Punchdrunk said he had real problems with the Duchess of Malfi – the play out in Docklands – he had real problems with that.

No one knows how to do that. The internet can’t do it, film can’t do it, immersive theatre had a stab at it. It may come through literature, I don’t know. I suspect someone will write some kind of novel that will send you somewhere. Somehow someone will fuse a film, a book sending you somewhere.

Back in the 1920s people really loved puzzles. Great thick books of puzzles, where you had stories where you had to work out diagrams. They reminded me of computer games.

While we’re on the subject of collaboration, I was wanting to ask about something that I’d read in Private Eye, that you turned down a commission from The Guardian?

No comment. Is that what Private Eye said? I didn’t see it. I did.

Charlie Brooker

Another collaboration I was wanting to ask about was your film for Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe?

What I think Charlie Brooker has got is he’s one of the few journalists who gets the modern age. What he reports on is how he reacts to things. That is the journalism of our age. Because what people are concerned about is how they feel. I go back to what we said right at the beginning: ‘it feels right to me’ is the thing of our time. What Charlie does is he literally reports to you how he feels, how he reacts to something, whether it’s a television programme, or, I dunno, the Murdoch thing. He’s describing the events but he’s also describing how he feels about them so it has an authenticity to it, and it’s a modern authenticity. It’s narrow and it’s narcissistic, because it’s all about how he feels, but that is the realism of our time, you can’t escape it, and he’s got it and that’s why I think he’s really good and that’s why I feel privileged to be allowed to make films for his programme. He is one of the early construction workers in what I think is going to be the journalism of the future. Something that somehow when people read it is going to make them think: ‘That’s it, that’s how I feel.’ Because at the moment so many of our news programmes just literally tell you about your own experience because they’ve discovered that’s how you get an audience. So for example Panorama will – and this is not criticism – Panorama increasingly finds itself making films about, I dunno, car insurance fraud. It’s not a bad story, but it is just about what you already know. That’s fine, and we should be making those films, but we have to move outside of that.

Do you think there’s a risk that this affective mode of doing journalism doesn’t move us beyond being trapped in our own feelings?

Well, yeah, it’s limiting. We live in a very limited age, it is an age where we are trapped by our own sensations and everything around us is about validating that and saying that is the right way to be. In many ways it’s wonderful because we’ve been liberated from the old hierarchies of the past and the old elites of the past who told us how we should feel. Our archive is full of people from the 1950s onwards telling you how you should feel and how you should think. And just trusting your own feeling is quite empowering but at the same time it’s quite limiting and its limiting in two ways. Because it means all you know is what you see and what you feel and also if you are on your own and things go wrong it’s quite frightening. And when things do get bad for people – and they may get worse – when you live in world where you are just encouraged to trust your own sensations and things go bad, there’s nothing else around to help you. And I think that is why there’s such a sense of anxiety around at the moment. Journalism tends to feed off that. You get waves of apocalypse journalism, or avalanche journalism, waves of fear sweeping through. The reaction to al q’aeda was one of those that I tried to argue against, that a serious terrorist threat was being magnified out of all proportion and sweeping through society. It can only do that because it has a purchase on a fear or a feeling in the back of people’s minds and I think a lot of that is there because in an age of individualism when things go wrong it is quite frightening. If there is a big economic crisis there will be more fear and a bigger sense of isolation and loneliness. It’s also disempowering because what it stops you realising is that actually together you are stronger, and you can challenge power and you can change the world. And I think that’s the thing we’ve forgotten. It may come back or we may be in this for the long run. I don’t know. But journalism hasn’t even really caught up with individualism, it hasn’t actually created, to use an academic word, a discourse that describes the world to people in ways that connects with their individualism. So quite naturally they turn away from journalism and turn to each other, actually, and just chat, and live their own lives. It’s what I call the Richard Curtis ideology, that all you have in the world you and your own sensations and your own circle of friends – because that’s all his films are about. I think that’s very narrow and quite dangerous. That may lead to problems in the future. What people like me are trying to do is to connect with that emotional way of seeing the world.

That’s what the world is about at the moment, it engaging with that, it’s not narcissism, it’s individualism.

I’d like also to ask you about music. The music you use in your films is striking and very catholic, drawn from all sorts of sources. How do you encounter music? Is the music in your films representative of what you’re into?

A lot of my friends have got into the habit of pointing me in the way of music they like and giving me stuff. My mood changes. For example, Nine Inch Nails. Completely by chance I was staying with a friend in America and I had jetlag and so one night I was playing his Itunes thing and I literally by mistake played a Nine Inch Nails song and it was very romantic but it used industrial noise and I thought this is wonderful and I started listening to a lot of them and the last series is slathered in them. People quite like the idea of something that is almost falling apart but is somehow held together.

I listen to stupid pop which is my great love. Never go with the fashion of the time. The problem with a lot of music at the moment is that it’s completely in the hand of PRs. I get quite a lot of people come to me and say “will you do a video for us?” and so I listen to their stuff and so many bands are an archaeology of the 80s, that kind of post-punk stuff, early to-mid-1980s. You just have to listen. Often the most stupid things might work against a piece of footage. There was a bit in the last one where I had a shot of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton and I slowed it down and cut it to a song by Leonard Cohen, who normally I would never like, but it just worked.

If it feels authentic, people somehow get that mood. You know those documentaries that have that dreary ambient drum and bass with a little bit of skittering, and there’s almost like a central factory that feeds this into documentaries but because you notice that they haven’t done it in any way to enhance the image, they’ve just needed to fill something in their structure, in a way you go off the film. You don’t feel it’s an authentic response.

The other way I use music is its punctuation, it’s a full-stop or a comma, it’s just grammar, it’s all it is. I listen to just masses. I have a drive with about 72,000 tracks on it. At the moment I’m listening to early recordings of opera – 1900s, Caruso and stuff like that, very, very scratchy stuff.

The film I’m cutting at the moment about the press in the 1960s, I’m using a lot of hard guitar music from the 1990s like Jesus and Mary Chain and more obscure bands, because it just feels right. It has to be very pop, have loud guitar, and that one drum noise, which is flat.

Using opera was a 1980s thing in films, all that minimalist stuff, Philip Glass. The ones I really hate – and this is bitchy – the documentaries I have a real problem with are the ones that use Arvo Part on their films. I’m sorry, this is not a criticism of Mr Part, but somehow the combination of the music of Arvo Part and, I dunno, dead bodies in Bosnia, just… again, it stops you looking at it and experiencing it for what it is, it’s like a cliché, you hear the language of the film-maker, it’s what you’d call modern plangent and because it’s so concerned with trying to convey something it actually conveys nothing, whereas to convey things you have to surprise your audience.

I did it to a very silly song from the 1960s cut very fast, just to make you look at it afresh. It’s silly but it’s sarcastically silly, it’s playing against it. Basically, one has to play against the knowledge that your audience already has about what the film is trying to tell them. Basically, audiences are really mature these days and they know all the different types of films and the way they tell you things. I’m not being deliberately contrary, I want to intervene in that a different way.

I’m sure you’re tired of this particular question, but I’ve read that you’re a first reader for Popbitch?

I’m good friends with Camilla who runs Popbitch. Every now and then I’ll send her a silly animal story. Popbitch has bought a racehorse, Super Injunction. I went to see Super Injunction race last night. She came last. She’s young, it’s her third race.

During the interview Curtis’s sister phoned to let him know that there was a photo of their dad in the G2 section of The Guardian illustrating a listing for the documentary Britain Through a Lens. Curtis’s father Martin was a cameraman who worked with Humphrey Jennings and was part of the British Documentary Movement.

I asked: so it’s a family business, then?

“He was a sensitive and modest film-maker. I’ve never been accused of that.”