The necessity of composition. Another in the 'last post of the month' series which is analytical and philosophical instead of leading with description. In other words, thinking about Take 2 and what it's trying to achieve, rather than doing a double take on  the news of the day.

A few days ago, at a seminar on 'the new materialism', I had been explaining the duality which, as it seems to me, is necessarily entailed in literary composition; hence it's also true of the way I am trying to 'compose the news'. By 'duality', I mean the way in which the words that refer to a real world thing also refer to another, textual world of similar things and relevant descriptions of them. Also, that the more a composition is indeed literary rather than being for information only, the more it resonates with these further meanings.

Listening to this, a friend of mine hrrrumphed and said he'd heard all this Lukacsian stuff before; didn't want to hear it again. My riposte: regardless of whether anyone wants it or chooses to respond to it, the duality I described, simply is. As any commodity is both use and value, at one and the same time, the singular thing which it can be used for, and also its relatedness - its commensurability - with everything else that is part of the social product (produced for other people to use), so it is in the use of language. As in the world of things, there is no escaping the duality of the word which exists at once in respect of a particular thing, while at the same time that same word exists in respect of everything else related to it, including other things and other usages.

Moreover, whereas in previous societies this duality only really existed in special institutions such as the Church or the Roman Empire - institutions requiring constant maintenance in order to maintain their social character, in the commodity producing society of the past 200 years - a society predicated on production for exchange, such duality occurs spontaneously. It is a constant, instead of an exception requiring repeated re-introduction.

In these circumstances, the level of composition required to realise such duality in writing, cannot be taken for granted, since this quality can only be formulated in the work of individual writers, and there's no guarantee that either these writers or their work will come into existence automatically.

But the potential for achieving such duality does occur spontaneously. At a time when the commodity forms much of the character of society, the possibility of formulating the social character of our existence in words, becomes a necessary feature of that existence.

There is always the possibility of making our social being more explicit by putting it in writing.

It Is Now

They think it’s all over    So farewell then,  Sir Alex Ferguson (71), who topped the English Premier League 13 times as manager of Manchester United; and David Beckham, OBE (38), the only UK footballer to hold a top flight league winner’s medal from four different countries (England, Spain, USA and France).

In the 1998-9 season Beckham was part of the Manchester United ‘triple’ team which claimed Premiership, FA Cup and European Champions League titles – a unique achievement in English football; but Beckham left the club in 2003 after a dressing room incident in which a football boot thrown or kicked by Sir Alex, landed in his face.

Now these two faces of football are re-united in retiring from the game simultaneously, at the end of the 2012-13 season.

Beckham has been the David Bowie of British football. Filtered through him – more precisely, mediated in the way he looked so good when playing so well – football fans have been able to access a repertoire of roles, expectations and attitudes which would have remained out of reach otherwise. As Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust enabled young dudes of the 1970s to touch base with androgynous glamour – even if they remained bloke-ish hod carriers underneath a thin covering of Glamrock bacofoil, for subsequent generations Beckham’s successive hairstyles opened up a new range of implied cultural references.

Moving swiftly on from the Curtains he first appeared in (two swirls of hair draped across the forehead beneath a centre parting), Beckham’s 1990s Moptop (short back and sides with a floppy fringe) echoed Brideshead Revisited – the late 1970s tv series which echoed Evelyn Waugh’s post-Second World War novel, which was itself an elegy to pre-war England. His turn-of-the-century Buzzcut re-made Modernism for the lads. The transition from Mohawk to Fauxhawk acknowledged Travis Bickle’s alienation before babyfying it (fluffy on top like a new born chick). Growing-it-long and dyeing-it-blond gave entrée to Kurt Cobain – and with Alice band attached, Kurt could go Continental instead of joining the ‘stupid club’ of 27-year-old suicides.

More recently, the Beckham quiff – so widely imitated that hairdressers are now said to dread customers asking for it – refers back to Bowie himself (in the time of Heroes). But in Beckham’s rendition, Bowie’s slicked-back hair is bottomed out with more of a jaw line, so that today’s ‘hod carriers’ don’t have to disown their less androgynous traits. Instead they can be metrosexual Men’s Health readers: urbane with pecs and Becks.

While Beckham was playing for change in the popular imagination, Sir Alex has been a bastion of continuity. Though not much older than the Beatles, Ferguson comes from that part of their generation which continued to train its hair into shape, straightening out any tendency to wave or curl – still less, letting it grow. Keeping it regular; maintaining discipline. Hence he hasn’t changed his haircut since his own playing days in the 1960s: short, neat, square neck, parted on the left.

Though the face underneath may have moved on – sprinkled now with the red capillaries of old age, the tonsure on top was consistent to the last. But this does not mean conformity as an end in itself; rather, in Ferguson’s way of doing things (and getting them done properly) it has been the basis – the established, no-nonsense basis – from which to go out on the pitch and play for the team to the best of your ability, without personal foibles or stylistic distraction. From the barber’s chair to the manager’s dugout, in the formidable form of Sir Alex Ferguson continuous discipline was the essential precondition for flair and innovation on the field of play.

It’s extremely unlikely that either retiree will have thought about their haircuts in these terms. It’s not necessarily the case that the millions of fans who look up to Beckham and Ferguson will have clocked all these cultural references outright. It is enough for them to be implied, rather than made explicit. What matters is that football manages to stage both continuity and change. In its capacity to address both ends of this spectrum, it really is that ‘theatre of dreams’ which allows supposed dreamers to negotiate their own path between them.

Personified in Becks and Fergie, truly a game of two halves.

Look At Me

Narcissism more than terrorism    Meat cleaver in one hand, blood on both, the butcher explains himself for the benefit of a bystander’s smartphone – and the millions standing behind it. The grain of his voice is the giveaway. Truth will out of the mouth of the (alleged) Woolwich murderer. He may have customised Islam into a rhetorical skin – the surface account of his own horrendous actions; but the way he speaks – neither Cockney nor Nigerian but ‘multicultural London English’ – suggests that the substance of who he is and what he is doing, lies in London itself.

And what does London do nowadays? The ‘world city’ of London is a global spectacle, largely paid for by the outside world: funded by the millions of international tourists who experience the London scene in person; grant-aided by billions more who stay home to watch The London Show (Reality TV wherever and whenever you want it); zillions the world over who subscribe to pay-per-view London by entering their domestic wealth into the financial circuits routed through here.

Money that makes the world go round, itself revolves around the spectacle of London.

Young Londoners have never known anything else. They are keen – desperate, even – to be entered into this spectacle. To be featured in it if only, famously, for 15 minutes. For the most part they have nothing to circulate but themselves; and in the attempt to get a showing/gain a hearing, they are under constant pressure to raise the spectacular value of the self – their one and only commodity in the attention economy.

In Woolwich yesterday two isolated individuals responded in a manner that plumbed new depths of desperation and depravity. Not even ‘lone wolf terrorists’, they are best comprehended as pop-up narcissists. A perversely extreme manifestation, here today and gone tomorrow, of what has become London’s guiding principle and principal dependency: manifesto ergo sum; I show myself therefore I am; my existence depends on spectacle.

Not terrorism, but a terrible way of saying: LOOK AT ME!

In writing this, the author has to confront the possibility that he too has succumbed to the same addiction. Is it that I crave the controversy which could be sparked off by my analysis? Am I touting myself in the intellectual’s version of famous-for-15-minutes? Or by showing how even such depravity has something in common with the life of London, am I staying true to the maxim that nothing human is completely alien to me?

Hoping it’s the second of these..... 

Clockwork Tories

James Wharton (29), the MP for Stockton South charged with proposing the Tories’ in/out EU referendum Bill, once tried to lubricate the progress of a £30,000 enterprise grant to the ex-Mayor of the Teeside town of Yarm, Jason Hadlow (Conservative), best known in the ‘Tees Corridor’ for trading in giant, sandstone penises. 

On the same day (17^th May) that Wharton came top in the private member’s Bill ballot, thus landing the job of fronting the party’s mildly Eurosceptic, anti-UKIP spoiler, a metropolitan Tory insider, said to be part of prime minister David Cameron’s social circle, was overheard describing local association activists as ‘mad, swivel-eyed loons.’  The latest fracas at Tory HQ sounds like a mash-up of a couple of scenes from Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange (1971) in which (1) a giant, model penis is used for sexual violation; and (2) Alex and his droogs start fighting among themselves.

There was me and my three droogs, that is Dave, Georgie and Dim, and we sat in the Metrovia Milkbar trying to make up our rassodocks what to do about Europe. Dim, also known as Jim Whart, announces he’s up for a bit of the old in-out, in-out referendum on EU membership. Better to resolve the situation, he says. Release the pent-up frustration among grassroots activists so that afterwards we can focus on that which ordinary malchick- and devotchka-voters are worrying about all the time, namely ‘the cost of living’. 

When he used that antiquated phrase – viddy well, oh my brothers, ‘the cost of living’ was last spoken of before there were even videos – the bile in me started to rise. I thought I could hear the blissful music of dear old Ludwig Van urging me to visit some actual ultra-violet upon Dim and his ilk; upon all the mad, swivel-eyed loons who populate the party with their outdated, provincial customs and embarrassing clothes. 

I looked across the table at Dim-Jim: still in his twenties and already the first signs of the-comb-over-to-come; veteran of the Officer Training Corps at Durham University where he studied law – making him the conservative conservatives’ conservative.  Why, oh my metrosexual brothers, is the party stuffed with such Dim antediluvians, dinosaurs who would stamp the life out of our ultra-modern, frictionless Westminster Village with their flat feet encased in socks and sandals? Watching his pudgy round face – surely the face of a boy who’s been carrying a briefcase since his first day at secondary school – I thought of the giant, model penis we had nicked from an artist's house earlier that night, and I couldn't stop thinking of ramming it right into him.

You see how dangerous and damaging they are? The presence of these awful people prompts frenzies of internal violence and turns the Conservative Party into a re-make of Kubrick's destructive masterpiece.

Little and Large

Only the little people pay bedroom taxes  On trial for tax evasion in 1989, New York billionaire Leona Helmsley aka ‘the Queen of Mean’, was famously said to have told her housekeeper: ‘we don’t pay taxes, only the little people….’ More than 20 years later, Stephanie Bottrill (53) was one of the ‘little people’ in line to pay the new Coalition ‘tax’ on unoccupied bedrooms.

The small terraced house in Meriden Road, Solihull, where Bottrill had brought up her two children on 'state handouts', was judged too big for her solitary needs; and she was required either to accept alternative accommodation or pay back £80 a month from her benefit. Instead, in the early hours of Saturday 4^th May, she walked on to the carriageway of the nearby M6 and was killed outright by an oncoming lorry.

Bottrill and Helmsley, who died of heart failure in 2007, had similar hair – cut short, then growing out thick and bushy (Sheena Easton meets Bonnie Tyler), but there the resemblance ends. Helmsley’s wealth has been estimated at $8 billion – that’s how much she counted for. Whereas Bottrill spent most of her life being discounted: diagnosed from childhood with myasthenia gravis (immune system deficiency), but this did not count as ‘disability’; living in the less well-off part of an otherwise prosperous Birmingham suburb – the bit that does not count as well-heeled Solihull. Not considered important enough for the education system to ensure she could spell (in her suicide note, she invites her son, HGV driver Stephen, to blame ‘the Grovement’).

Stephanie Bottrill died a small, sad death having lived a marginal life. But society (yes, Mrs T, there is…) only cheapens itself by discounting the little people like her.

Open and Shut

Hand outstretched. With an open hand, Ariel Castro’s lady lawyer beckons him into position at the podium (new courtroom furniture: metal-effect, moulded plastic, scroll-shaped). Her open hand outstretched; his clapperboard house in Cleveland was anything but open. Locked down to keep visitors away from the three sex slaves – finally freed after 10 years – he kept locked up. Brought to open court today to hear the charges against him, Ariel – his name conjures up the spirit enslaved to Shakespeare’s Prospero – is not enclosed in a defendant’s dock; though the biggest, broadest, burliest guard stands half-an-arm’s length away, watching the defendant carefully as he is positioned in the direction of the judge. You couldn’t say ‘facing’: eyes downcast, head bowed and burrowed into the upturned collar of his prison-issue coverall, he would efface himself if he could; but we can still see the small features framed by wisps of fine, black hair. Hands bound together with yellow plastic cord, ‘Mr Castro’ still manages to sign the legal documents put in front of him. He will be imprisoned in his own past for the rest of his natural life – unless the Ohio state death penalty brings early release.   

Two Nigels

Farrage the Frog, uneven teeth and a rep for City living: he was a teenage stockbroker; straight outta Dulwich College (now aged 49). Of the established political parties, ‘you can’t get a cigarette paper between them’, says the Eurosceptic leader of UKIP and unofficial winner of Thursday’s elections in England and Wales. He would know, having been a chain smoker; hence, perhaps, the oyster of catarrh audible in his voice (distinctively non-career-politician). Nigel F, Jolly Jack Tar, bane of Brussels, self-proclaimed senior servant of Britain’s national interest. Enjoying the unaccustomed attention attached to last week’s electoral success. In the television studio, sitting maybe a little too comfortably. The wonderboy who’s sure the new story's only just begun, unaware that it could change again at any moment.

Before ‘F’ there’s ‘E’.

Nigel Evans (55), survived being the boy from the corner shop (ripping us all off, they are) on a Swansea estate; survived being one of a handful of Tories in South Wales; survived losing by-elections in Greenwich and Ribble Valley before securing the Lancashire seat for the Conservatives in the 1992 general election; even survived coming out as a gay MP in 2010. But it’s too early to say ‘Gloria Gaynor’. Now released on bail, reeling from accusations of rape and sexual assault. This morning’s pasty face accentuated by black glasses with fashionably thick frames. Face muscles tight; you can bet he's feeling the pressure in his teeth. Reading from a prepared statement, Welsh lilt sounding reedy and thin, Nigel E declares his innocence. Standing up against the wall of his constituency home, fighting for his political career. Unkempt – that’s the garden wall and the state of Evans the Shop.

Two Nigels: diddly, diddly, dee. 

Surviving

Rag trade Pushed up through the roof like fish reeled in from a hole in the ice. Pulled, dragged and chivied through eight floors concertina-ed below. Finally out in the open, survivors of the collapsed garment factory speeding down a makeshift slide of unrolled cloth, held taut by the crowd. Rushed to safety, hospital, oxygen. Cloth they would have pinned into place, cut and stitched into bargain brand clothes; the same cloth now clothes corpses too. Rolled up in it, lined up in neat rows, ready for sewing into the ground. The body count rises – 150, 343, 477, 501: this factory’s final batch. A small contribution, soon overlooked, to an assembly line worth $20 million; 80 per cent of Bangladesh’s annual exports; and four million jobs. On the other side of the world, I rise from my sick-bed (bronchitis) and put on bargain brand clothes made in Dhaka last year, woven from heat and dust and drudgery; already hemmed with death and destruction, always going to happen there someday. But wait a minute: have you been asked to feel guilty; still less make a display of it? Donning a hair shirt does nothing for the living or the dead.