The Absurdity of Utopia
An interview with Ewan Morrison
Ewan Morrison is the prize-winning, critically-acclaimed author of six books, including Menage, Tales from the Mall, Close Your Eyes and Swung (which is currently being turned into a film). His work is provocative, entertaining, and full of possibilities. The following interview consisted of me gingerly broaching a subject before Morrison let rip.
Neil Scott: I saw you a couple of weeks ago at a Phil Collins [the artist not the singer] screening. In the Q&A you asked him why contemporary artists don't provide answers, just more questions. Why do you think answers are so important right now?
Ewan Morrison: I used to be an art critic and one of the great cliches of postmodern rhetoric is that it's the role of the artist to question everything. Where that falls flat is that after 20 years of so-called radical artists questioning everything - questioning patriarchy, capitalism, consumerism, the family - in 20 years it has resulted in ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. We've been on a steep slope from where we were 20 years ago. All of the artistic questioning has not changed anything. Who are they questioning? It's talk in a void. What's really missing is ideological interpretation. Questioning just leads to more questions and makes you satisfied with the posture of being seen to question. I think there are some answers out there. If you look at the shift from postmodernism to Zizek that's an absolute rejection of this inward postmodern questioning and a striving for answers.
NS: But doesn't Zizek, in The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, say he doesn't want to provide answers?
EM: But at the very end of the film he raises the communist fist. He's got his answer. It's not clear how he would enact it, but he's bold enough to take a step beyond the postmodern and to propose tangible political solutions. I've gone back to the pre-postmoderns, the late-Marxists, Marcuse has a lot of useful ideas...
NS: One-dimensional man?
EM: Yes, but he also has this notion of 'repressive tolerance', the idea that the arts are an outlet for frustration. If we didn't have all this bourgeois art-making we might get so pissed off that we might actually do something. Whereas if we convince ourselves that art is radical and making the world a better place then we don't act. It's repressive tolerance in the sense that a voice of dissent is permitted within capitalism and it is repressive because it amounts to nothing but chatter. In the internet era that has been amplified to an extraordinary degree: useless information, useless chatter, useless rhetoric.
NS: So where does that leave you in terms of your writing?
EM: I believe that a question has to be asked by a book and has to be answered within the framework of the book, but also philosophically answered. I'm a very spare writer: I don't embellish, I don't decorate. I like to balance the goals of the characters, the voices of characters, with a life question which they'll have to answer for themselves. They're not so much philosophical essays, I hate to use the word existential, but I'm posing questions throughout the books: How should we live now? What's wrong with the way things are? I use diagnostic tools learned from post-marxism to show how bad things are, but I want to move beyond that to see the individuals struggling to create alternatives.
NS: Why do you hate the world 'existentialist'? It does seem like there's a similar battle with authenticity and bad faith in your work?
EM: Existentialism is the very last humanism and humanism ties in with the hippy-liberal rhetoric of individualism. I'm post-humanist, like Foucault, we don't need the remnants of humanism any longer. Existentialism is caught in its own impasse - the contemplation of the individual and the object. The existential contemplation of nothingness is like a beginner's guide to just being alive. You can't make that a foundation to anything, otherwise you just wander around in awe all the time. It doesn't extend outwards towards the political or the social. It's hip nihilism. Worn out now.
NS: Indeed, it doesn't give you a platform from which you can provide answers ...
EM: Other than hanging out with people who are black, reading Sartre, and listening to Jazz and thinking you're having an 'authentic moment'. Pursuing the authentic moment is a dead end. In Swung the end point of authenticity is a dark room in which lots of people are screwing each other, losing their identities. There's nothing you can take from the dark room into the real world again. If anything you become an addict to the dark room.
NS: So what about collectivism as an alternative to individualist existentialism? I went to Japan recently and found a society where people live for others in a way that doesn't seem possible in the West.
EM: We sometimes caricature the West as a uniform capitalist dog-eat-dog world. There are many more layers between capitalism and socialism than we accept. For example, I look at Scotland as a failed socialist country: most of our attitudes and behaviours are made for others, even driving is a more communal experience here than anywhere else in the world. People respect each other's space. Compare that to London or Sydney. In Glasgow, a lot of our activities are geared towards the collective and there's negative consequences of that as well which is tall poppy syndrome - if you're too much of an individual in Scotland people will cut you down. We're not an entrepreneurial culture, we're state dependent. A lot of the failings of communism are lurking within Scotland.
NS: Well, with the independence vote, Scotland has this opportunity to establish itself as a properly socialist state.
EM: It'd last about a month until it has to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund. I'm very unresolved. I'm going to decide on the day which way I'm going to vote. I can think of many strong reasons why it would be bad to vote for independence, but I cling to the idealistic belief of self-determination for a small country. What does worry me is the lack of learning and historical knowledge that people in the fight for independence. They seem to have no understanding of the failures of the left, of global economics, of the power of transnational corporations and banks. It's not like they can just generate a country without huge debt burdens and you've got to enter the exchange rate ... and we manufacture fuck-all. We do not have the skills. I'm really concerned by the ignorance in the Yes campaign. Also there are huge psychological blocks to Scotland becoming an entrepreneurial race. We're so used to this collectivist mentality. You see the way people treat their homes - it's very much 'I'm not doing my garden, I'm not painting my house, anyway the council will come and clear up for us'. That's not going to get us very far as an independent Scotland.
NS: Is this not just because people are so alienated from the way things are at the moment. As soon as the future is their own ...
EM: I don't think independence hangs on a date. You can be think independently by painting your house blue, by doing up your garden, by setting up a neighbourhood project. Are we suddenly going to transform ourselves and our nation on one day. We have to really start breaking down this notion of collectivist misery and negativity. You can't just flip that into a positive euphoria. We need a dose of right-wing anarchism in this country, an entrepreneurial spirit that turns that collectivity into co-operatives and companies. We're lacking a strong capitalist base in Scotland.
NS: But as it stands we're all just cogs in the big capitalist machinery and that machinery is destroying the planet.
EM: I'm so anti-ecology that I can't begin to start. You see the greens endlessly looking for facts to justify their apocalyptic thinking. The thing about the greens is that it's so whinging and liberal and middle-class. If we had a revolutionary leftism that would be bearable but this humanist notion of doing your little bit for the planet, I can't tolerate it at all. Also I think human beings are extremely resourceful. The old Marxist-Hegelian in me. I think we will find solutions to things. At the moment we're blocking those changes. What capitalism does is develops to the point where things become unbearable and then it has to make the change. It usually does, it's very adaptable. We could all go electric tomorrow if there wasn't another 15 years of money to be made with escalating prices of petrol. Capitalism slows down the level of invention so that it can capitalise upon it.
NS: That's a very Hegelian view - investing capitalism with a spirit, having its own deliverance and redemption.
EM: It's paradoxical that the greens love and want their ecological apocalypse. The Marxists want their economic apocalypse. I'm more interested in surviving and innovating in the now. For instance, I'm working with an independent film company on a film. Are we just going to sit around on our hands waiting for the apocalypse - the end of films - or are we going to get on with it even though we know the distribution networks are going down and film finance is even harder to get hold of? But I think there are fights to be had in the now. It's so tempting to throw your hands up in the air and say 'I'm out of here. I can't stand capitalism, I'll just get wasted.' It's too easy to opt for the personal escape, there are battles to be had now over copyright, over survival of certain art forms. We've got 8 publishing houses in Scotland that need to be saved because of other forces that are going on whether they be Amazon or Google.
NS: What do you think is the answers to the current publishing woes?
EM: I think we're heading towards monopoly consolidation of big publishing corporations fighting the threat of Amazon. Amazon is doing what American companies tend to do which is to create a loss leader to saturate the market, taking a loss on books, then when everyone else is gone you whack the prices up. I'm trying to get people to wake up to the fact that corporations have been doing this for decades. We're having a massive American takeover of all of our culture at the moment - we don't really notice it because we've having such fun getting all this stuff for free. I'm often heard to say - can we not just bomb America! We need to wake up to the fact that America is this aggressive, self-seeking corporate culture.
NS: There's a big gap between enjoying half-price books and actually thinking about the long-term consequences...
EM: Maybe people are just doomed, maybe people are just stupid because we don't value enough those who take an assessment of consequences. We think we can live without consequences for our actions, whether that be casual acts of piracy on the internet or casual sexual relations. I don't have much hope that society is going to wake up to study the consequences of actions. I watch people's enthusiasm for Russell Brand and his amateur version of communism. The man has not studied the consequences of communism for more than half an hour. He has no idea what a planned economy is and what an extraordinarily awful thing a command economy can be. But people are naïve. There's a big sentimental side to socialism, people love the warm feeling they get from their own good intentions. It's all about intentionality, nothing about consequences. What if people with the best will in the world create absolute mayhem - suffering, poverty, genocide. It has happened again and again and again.
NS: Do you think you're inoculated to utopianism because you were brought up in a household which was utopian?
EM: Absolutely. I remember in my teens being horrified by the fact that my parents and their friends were continuing with this hippy utopian rhetoric in the face of massive failure. And they just couldn't get beyond the fact that the world didn't care about their socialist-anarchist beliefs. Their feminist beliefs. The world was going to go on regardless and grind them to a pulp which it eventually did. It's difficult for a child to watch their parents failing. It did inoculate me. It probably instilled in me a sense of anger to see big dreams fail, which is very painful and disorientating for a kid. Most middle-class kids get fed this do-it-yourself happiness - get an education, get a job, get married. Having parents that believed revolutionary actions and transformation of the social within their own era. Or even worse, parents who passed that onus on to their children. I was born in 68. We were going to achieve the things that our parents only dreamed of: we were going to create universal equality ... it was very vague what the hippies believed.
NS: All those good intentions...
EM: There's a great image of a set of Occupy protesters posting for a collective selfie and then packing away their tents and going home again. They've had their moment of revolutionary hope - it was great - and nothing changed. It's repressive tolerance. Society is more than happy for you to sit in a park, in a place unrelated to the flow of capital and experience your revolutionary moment with a little bit of drugs and a little bit of sex.
NS: But even someone as sceptical as you are about utopias must have an idea of utopia?
EM: I don't think it's necessary to have a utopia. I've studied a great deal of utopias and they all tend towards stasis and management of individuals. There are always people who are excluded from the utopia. In Close Your Eyes some of the founders of the community are thrown out, which is very common. Utopias tend to become dogmatic and authoritarian, which leads to the horrible proposition that we might be better in the mess we're in than in a forced utopia.
NS: What about the techno utopias, where everyone can play as machines do all the work . . .
EM: I'm fascinated by the stupidity of the Zeitgeist Project. I'd love to have a head-to-head with Peter Joseph. I was really enamoured by it when it first started out. I loved this video that spilled the beans about the twin towers, the real history of the bible, sun gods and all that stuff. The critique of the IMF in the second one is really substantial and eye opening, although it all comes from other sources. When he moved away from critique - from questions to answers - he went for the most stupid answer you could possibly have which is straight into the command economy. A global command economy. To get rid of the problem of an elite that can't be unelected he has this airy fairy idea that computers can do it all for us. If we remove humans, we won't have 30 million dead like under communism, we'll have computers giving us means-tested equal amounts. It will fall flat on its face because of the uneven distribution of raw materials. There are only two countries in the world that have the metal that will give us the utopia in the first place. Dug straight from the Congo basin. If you don't buy into this utopia then, sorry, we'll have to force you off the land. Every single step in the global planned economy is going to come across disagreement over distribution of raw materials. So you're going to end up with some geek white global elite who are ruling over the rest of the world ... which is kind of how it is anyway.
NS: So if you can't change society what about then you only have individual choice to escape, but isn't the system part of the problem - that we're constantly being bombarded with advertising?
EM: I have a problem with the notion that capitalism is a system. I don't believe it is. If you have an ideology that depends for the functioning of its critique on the existence of a system then that system has to be created. This is what Marxism did. A system can be changed and a system can be overthrown. But what if it's not a system? But the system they propose - a command economy - IS a system, so the system that they have to overthrow is another system. But I think it is too complicated to be a system. It's a malfunctioning series of interlocking processes, which no one is particularly in charge of. It's like a runaway force. Not a system.
NS: A lot of capitalists would use natural law as a justification for capitalism saying, "y'know, in nature it's the survival of the fittest..."
EM: Again, this is people trying to rationalize what capitalism actually is. We just have to not try and impose these very simple analysis on what capitalism and the economy is. It's hard for human beings because we really want to sum things up. Attraction to systems thinking you see in technological people who say - the human being is a machine. This is profound influence in the 20th century. Whether it is behaviourist psychology, pharmaceutical alteration of human chemistry, or Marxists who have to think of the self and society as a reprogrammable blank slate and brain washing and false consciousness ... "we can correct these people!" In socialism the correctional facility is always just down the road from the utopia, linked by a subterranean tunnel.
NS: Maybe behaviourism is on the way back because of the Skinner boxes called social networks. People can't help pecking at them. You use social media. Do you like it?
EM: I do it to a certain degree and note within myself that I'm giving away my labour for free when I do. When I'm writing the next book I'm going to force myself into a box - not a Skinner box - and cut off all social media.
NS: Jonathan Franzen has been talking a lot recently about the banality of Twitter. Do you see it as absurd or something that you have to do?
EM: I didn't at first, but now I absolutely agree with Franzen. You post something, you want to see what effects you have so you'll check again and again. Post something else. It's all short-term neurological activity which is all about keeping the ego propped up. For wannabe writers it's a curse because it provides you with the illusion of an audience out there. You're relating to 10 or 15 people, but you're on this very shallow level of stimulus-response and immediate reward.
NS: You've written six books now and I was wondering, qualititatively, how much better is the reward from that than getting something hugely popular on social media?
EM: Well, anyone can tweet or do Facebook. 3 million people can't write a novel. And it would be a fucking mess if they ever tried to. I believe it's really important to have big things made by individuals, whether that's an orchestral piece or a book or a film.
NS: I guess social media is also a release valve for creativity.
EM: It goes back to repressive tolerance. Social media does make you feel better. Or worse. "Oh, I've lost 5 followers - I wonder who it was and you spend an hour trawling through your friendslist". No one even paid for any of this activity anyway...
NS: Having written a novel, though, you know you already have the self-discipline to do another one...
EM: It has become harder and harder to do that. There are so many distractions. It comes back to trust and investment. Trust yourself enough to invest that amount of time in a big project. If we just survive on shallow trust then we never get anything big done. Once we've clicked to save the rainforest are we really concerned if we have saved the rainforest? No we don't! It's about intentionality. People are good in their intention but don't care about the consequences.
NS: We talked earlier about escape attempts - what have been your escape attempts?
EM: On a personal level I've tried numerous desperate escape attempts. We try to escape because the the world seems too predetermined to us. The idea that we're just fulfilling our role and our role seems very limited. It's like that film 'They Live' with the magic goggles - consume, obey, make babies, don't question, this is your god - there is a sense that our life is predetermined and we're just acting out our roles. The one good thing in Existentialism in the idea of Nausea, that we're living a role, which can be extrapolated into the bad faith of the waiter. We feel this collectively all the time now and we try ways to escape. The Marxists are good at critique, bad at solutions. The critique of the weekend - the weekend is an escape from the oppressive working conditions we've had - get plastered, lose your identity in alcohol, drugs and sex and ritualised dancing - and then you're back to work on Monday. The two things get balanced out. You can hate yourself profoundly for the servile job you do and then have this extreme escape on the weekend. So you become a swinger, a drug dealer, you invest in a Harley Davidson, buy an effects pedal... what's interesting is those who escape completely - those who go over the wall. Criminals. If you keep escaping and don't go back to work. Think 'I've had the best time of my life, I'm never going back.'
NS: Have you ever climbed over the wall?
EM: Short path from going over the wall to death - you enter addiction, you become criminal, you go over the wall when you say 'I'm going to reject everything'. The escape attempt and the suicide attempt are not very far apart. It can be really creative. Certain artists are those who have gone over the wall - Van Gogh, Pollock, Cobain - suicides! We value artists for going over the wall for us, living vicariously through them.
NS: So what do you believe in now?
EM: What do I believe in? I don't know. World peace. Bono. I believe it is necessary to get by without belief.
NS: Or, rather, what has meaning for you now?
EM: I set myself artistic goals and they are selfish goals that tie in with what I think is missing in the contemporary world. I feel very much like a litmus test for what's going on. I can become a nobody some of the time. It's important to pull together movements and forces that are happening and become a melting pot for all those forces and generate something new out of that. To create an allegory from these forces or a picture of the time. If you do it well you can live by it or you've added a bit to the world vocabulary. I think of Orwell's 1984 and how focused he was to produce that. He created all this vocabulary that we live by. He's been so useful for the world to show that you can go so far and then it becomes the big brother state. We can monitor our society by the terminology set out by Orwell. That's something to aim for. It soudns grandiose, but that is the task I've set myself.
NS: The theme of this issue is the Absurd; is there anything you do to make life less absurd?
EM: My first encounter with the absurd was the bureaucratic absurd, I came across it in reality before I read Kafka. I had this job in the Shetlands helping to dig holes around telegraph poles so they could test for rot. I was in northern tundra taking two hours to dig one hole and then a man would come along and take a tree sample and then get us to fill it back in. We were doing this at great cost to our bodies. It was absurd. Pathetic. Another job I had was working in a hospital as a porter. I was with three old men and we had about 10 minutes of work to do everyday, collecting bags of soiled geriatric nappies, and we were on call if there was a corpse - we had to wheel it out to a fridge. The rest of the time, 8 hours and 40 mnutes - we had nothing to do. Because the old guys had the bureaucratic mentality, they actually sat around doing nothing. I turned up with a book. It was like Ionesco or Beckett - 'Waiting for Poo poo' rather than 'Waiting for Godot'. That was in Shetland as well. It was a helluva three months. I come across that bureaucratic absurd all the time - it's the plague of communism, it's when people do exactly what they're told to do or come up with little deviances that make their lives less absurd which then breeds more absurdity.
NS: I saw recently that Alain de Botton's School of Life has a new series of Life lessons from philosophers, including one on Nietzsche who ended his life dribbling.
EM: Alain de Botton is building a franchise out of philosophy. I did enjoy the Consolations of Philosophy, which introduced me to Seneca, but he's keeping it all on the level of the introduction. His books don't get any deeper, in fact they've become more diffuse.
NS: He's always looking for the lifehack...
EM: It's this horribly middle-class privatised solution. We can all come up with a privatised solution, it's just the mediocrity of his privatised solution. He's never tried heroin, for example. It might do him some good. Or binging on chocolate or stimulating his prostate. He's never really tried much in the way of happiness. It's very banal and anodyne. He talks about Epicurus asking for a lump of cheese to give him great pleasure. Fuck off, go to Sainsburys and get some cheese, Alain!
NS: So what's your plan for the next few years?
EM: I am going to continue setting more and more ambitious artistic goals until the Western economy collapses, which will happen within my lifetime.
NE: Any final words of advice for New Escapologist readers?
EM: Just be aware of where your desires take you. There's too grave dangers in escape: one is the revolutionary escape where you have to take everyone with you - that's the apocalyptic dream of escape and the other one is the privatised escape which is rather pathetic and usually leads to death through addiction or misadventure. We're stuck with the desire to escape, but both options are very dangerous.
NE: I want a third option!
EM: Well, maybe you'll just have to buy some cheese with Alain de Botton.
This article originally appeared in Issue 10 of New Escapologist magazine.
Read my other New Escapologist articles.
