hamish hamilton presents

No. 48 Glitches

five dials

Editor Craig Taylor

Publisher Simon Prosser

Assistant Editor Hermione Thompson

Digital Content Producer Zainab Juma

Five Dials Staffers Nathalie Olah Ellie Smith Caroline Pretty

Thanks to Lindsay Terrell Rose Poole Anna Ridley Amelia Fairney

Creative Direction Visual Editions

Creative Coordination Kirstie Millar

Design Nina Jua Klein

@fivedials @hamishh1931 @visualeditions five dials Table of Contents

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a letter from the editor On glitchessssssssssssssss 7

but first… How To Move On From Scorpio Season Your stars read by Sophie Mackintosh 8

fiction Oblivion A short story by Niamh Campbell 13

featured artist Stanley Donwood Bleak landscapes 28

on music An Album Can Last A Day Sam Byers on Autechre’s glitchy brilliance 32

the writing life Sinatra Sang in Sentences A long sentence, says Joe Moran, should exult in its own expansiveness 37

q&a ‘Social media is a kind of refuge. It’s a refuge from dealing with the more enlivening conflicts within one’s real life.’ A conversation with Adam Phillips five dials

Nicholas Barrett is a journalist who works Nicholas Barrett is a journalist who works at the Economist. His work has also appeared at the Economist. His work has also appeared in The Financial Times, The New European, in The Financial Times, The New European, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair Italia. and Vanity Fair Italia.

Sam Byers is the author of Idiopathy (2013) Sam Byers is the author of Idiopathy (2013) and Perfidious Albion, which was published this and Perfidious Albion, which was published this year by Faber & Faber. His writing has appeared year by Faber & Faber. His writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Times in Granta, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. Literary Supplement.

Niamh Campbell’s work has appeared in gorse, Niamh Campbell’s work has appeared in gorse, The Dublin Review, Banshee, Tangerine, and others. The Dublin Review, Banshee, Tangerine, and others. Her first novel is forthcoming with Weidenfeld Her first novel is forthcoming with Weidenfeld and Nicolson. She lives in Dublin. and Nicolson. She lives in Dublin.

Stanley Donwood won a Grammy Award Stanley Donwood won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package for the Radiohead for Best Recording Package for the Radiohead album Amnesiac. His story without words, album Amnesiac. His story without words, Bad Island, will be published by Hamish Hamilton Bad Island, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in September, 2019. It consists of sixty-four in September, 2019. It consists of sixty-four black and white lino cuts. black and white lino cuts.

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which was long-listed for the 2018 Man Cure, which was long-listed for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Booker Prize.

Joe Moran is the author of Queuing for Beginners, Joe Moran is the author of Queuing for Beginners, On Roads, Armchair Nation and Shrinking Violets. On Roads, Armchair Nation and Shrinking Violets. His latest book is First You Write a Sentence, His latest book is First You Write a Sentence, published by Viking in September 2018. published by Viking in September 2018. He is a professor of English at Liverpool John He is a professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University. Moores University. a letter from the editor On glitchessssssssssssssss

Dear Readers,

DearThank Readers you for These days it’s sometimes difficult to find continuity in life because

fractious

broken apart

You might feel your mind if fragmented and so Glitches Glitches

The new issue features The new issue features and who can ask for more than and who can ask for more than Joe Moran Joe Moran Niamh Campbell Niamh Campbell

Sam Byers Sam Byers

a horoscope from Sophie Mackintosh and an interview with Adam Phillips in which he examines what this age of social media and distraction is doing to our

Enjoy

Enjoy

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but first…the horoscopist How to move on from Scorpio season Your stars read by Sophie Mackintosh

he first step is to move blinking into the light. If safe activities like this are available to you, it’s not Then, maybe, to survey the wreckage. Then, maybe, too late to do them. Also the haircut, the tattoo, to renounce the fear in your dirty heart. the disavowal of beige, of colours, of one particu- lar colour, of fabrics, of clothing itself. But please It is a fact universally acknowledged that many bear in mind that, by the time you read this, it’s non-Scorpios do not trust Scorpios, unless they likely that Mercury will be retrograding. Remem- have already made friends or fallen in love with ber to be realistic about what constitutes safe for a Scorpio. Other non-Scorpios will witness such you. Keeping yourself safe is the key thing, regard- relationships with alarm or possibly even fear. This less of season. is unfair, so don’t do it. Be gracious. Mercury’s conjunct with Saturn can make the Don’t let your personal vendettas obscure your world feel like two bricks moving against each celestial views. It is said that you never know how other. Your teeth on edge. It’s easier, sometimes, to many people you hate before you have to name a blame the stars – though not necessarily fair. The pet or a baby. The same is true of star signs. dark truth about astrology is that it is only inter- esting to you because it holds your life up to your Do your affirmations. ‘Affirmations’ is another own gaze. You are greedy to know it. I see you, word for repeating that everything is fine until it searching furtively for 2019 predictions already. becomes somewhere approaching fine, or at least until you are distracted from your aforementioned Jupiter in Scorpio means that Scorpio season isn’t dirty heart. really over this year. It means you’ll be hungry for the next thirteen months. So do not worry if your See also: if you’ve dug up things that look grim and jeans feel tighter, if your heart feels swollen like the useless, it is possible to polish them rather than to gourd you cut in half and baked. The gourd was soft put them back in the ground. and seed-filled on the inside, the way you imagine your body would be, should someone open it up. It is a fact not universally acknowledged that Scor- pios who are not brooding and sexy will carry the All through 2019, the hair on your head and the shame of this deficiency through their whole life. grass in the ground will keep flourishing, even Abandonment of these kinds of residual shames is when you are not. But what’s the difference? It a key objective of Scorpio season, something that I does that every year. You’re hungry all of the time have not cracked yet, personally. anyway.

The day before the season ended, I walked through a building I had been too afraid to visit for the past eighteen months. In that moment, it seemed that the fear was a skin I could peel off like wax. When I walked out, my terror was greatly reduced.

7 fiction

It was July and a faintly faecal odour carried inland I’m all right, I’m all right, I was teaching a class. from the sea. The air in the city was close. The sky Not a problem at all. I am sorry to disturb you. in the city was dry foam. Any word? Even though it was evening the basement stu- No word. At this the man’s voice dropped, dio retained the heat, gathered and pallid, so that, sounding conspiratorial; Caroline squeezed shut on the sprung floor before the mirrors, women both her eyes, opened them, and nodded sound- now stretched and wilted and fanned themselves lessly. After a moment she said, OK. We will wait. dramatically. A queue had formed by the water We don’t know where he is. machine. No breeze streamed through the galley And you say he has never done this, gone this windows. White keys shone from the piano in the far, before? corner. Caroline shook out a bag of change by Never this long, the man insisted. Never more the piano and began dealing with latecomers who than a day. hadn’t paid her yet. All right. Well. We might have to think about Drink plenty of water, she drilled. something – I mean, about calling the police? People were leaving. They turned disoriented Let’s give it a little bit longer, he said. on the step, turned and made their way from the She could not say why. She could not say why mews to the street, and each time feet in thonged the thought formed in her mind autonomously, as sandals passed by the galley windows, slippers if it had thought itself, but she would not question now in string bags, tights wound up. On a couch it. of throws the woman who taught contemporary She pulled on the cardigan and then removed dance at six sat slumped, scrolling on her phone. the cardigan and tied it around her waist. When All yours now, Caroline said. she passed the studio downstairs the woman who Good stuff. The woman did not look up. taught contemporary dance was crouched at the Caroline delayed a moment more, stretching hi-fi, playing one crunching riff after another, her arms over her head. Her heart was hammer- browsing through the contents of a playlist. It was ing. She let her head tilt and fall back, enjoying it. as if she were deaf and didn’t care that the music She felt thirsty and nervous but wildly alive. There was blasting, erupting as blunt as a weapon – fall- was a climbing sensation: something was climbing ing silent – beginning again. Caroline let herself inside her. out and walked quickly to where she had chained She herself climbed the cramped staircase and her bicycle. Even the mews was loud with evening passed the framed show posters. In the changing traffic. room she removed her tights and shoes and put Wheels spiralling towards Islandbridge. Take a back on the sundress, the white runners, before left before crossing the river; weave around stacked cracking and turning to the locker she had bolted traffic on the quays; navigate the big break of on the wall. Her phone lay on a folded cardigan O’Connell Boulevard and cross the bridge with and there was one missed call, from Patrick’s father: two other cyclists in the path of a bellowing bus, she phoned him back at once. She tapped a toe like dolphins springing up before the prow of a behind a heel as the phone rang on. When the old ship, and it was easy not to think on this jour- man answered he was, as ever, immensely polite. ney – not to reflect – because it was dangerous, Caroline, he said. How are you? palm-sweat dangerous, and still so hot, and Caro-

8 fiction

line’s throat was dry. She became confused by the drinks, she said: I mean he basically has a drink lane system and dismounted to push the bike as far problem and his parents are ashamed, I think, so as Pearse Street. The Garda station rose steely and they’re playing it down, but he’s in a bad way. In a square. There were squad cars parked about and bad frame of mind. I believe he might be a danger posters on the double doors with instructions for to himself. tourists who had been mugged. To someone else? Inside, there was something vintage and austere No, only himself. to the reception, with its orange tiles and absence I can file this, the guard said, and then it will go of light – cool, with a bank of mangled snugs – and out on to the system. He asked a lot of questions. the circular counter with biros on beaded cords He asked for the names and numbers of Patrick’s and names and the word pigs cut into it multiple parents. He asked for her name and her number times. Caroline hesitated and blushed. She made and her address; she said, well, I’ll give you my par- and unmade her ponytail. There were people wait- ents’ address. ing, people speaking quietly, and a young guard But the guard said, your Dublin address as well. nodding to her now, impatiently. I can file this now, the guard said. I don’t know what the process is, she said, for, OK. Caroline squinted at him. Hmm, she said. like, reporting somebody missing. OK. Will you wait just one minute? And who is this? he asked. He took out a note- Call his father again, the guard suggested, and book and a pen. see if there’s been an update. When she said ex-boyfriend he wrote down On the phone Patrick’s father listened to her boyfriend and Caroline said, no, no: ex-boyfriend. A and then said, no, Caroline, and I’ll tell you why. moment later he asked, and how long were you If he goes on to the system you see, as missing or married to him? anything else, it will come up the next time he is Never married, Caroline said. vetted for work. She said, I’m probably being stupid. Oh yeah, she said. I’ve found him on the system, the guard told He might never work again. I have spoken to a her, reading out Patrick’s parents’ address. family friend in the Gardai. The night he had been punched and blacked Patrick’s parents had friends in the Guards and out, and woke up in the hospital. She had entered the courts and the medical establishment. They had into the mystery and become incandescent, tell- friends in embassies and senates. They were always ing all the cab drivers, driving around, looking out producing these friends in conversation as if they for him. She had gone to his parents’ house and had only just thought of them. sparked up the steps and was let in, although it was So I hear you, she said. But it’s been three days late, to the threadbare front room with its vast aris- now, and what if something bad has happened to tocratic ceiling of pennants and florets and fruit. To him? speak stoutly. To say, I am the woman who can deal It will be over for him, the old man insisted, as with this. regards work, if he has any run-ins with the law. Now she spoke frankly and sanely to the guard, They will say, what’s this, why were you reported looking him firmly in the eyes to impress upon missing? him a regard for her frankness and her sanity. He I see. You don’t want me to do it?

9 fiction

Can you wait? he pleaded. Can you wait, Car- snapping out of a dream to the bucket before me oline, and we’ll try him again? – I wanted to puke – and the skids of sweat shrink- She had a thought. The thought was, they are ing away from the linoleum. But no matter what, I trying to get into my head. This time it was less couldn’t throw up. of a thought than a reflex. On the night she had I thought that vomit would put a stop to it. sparked up their steps, on the night of excitement, You cannot imagine how nauseous I felt. the old man had looked at her over spectacles and I am sick just thinking of it but that wasn’t even said, I can tell you’re a sensible girl. the half of it. When she’d hung up and explained to the She wrote, listen to this. guard, she asked the guard, well, what do you think When it cleared I slid into the ritual circle and about that? cried because I felt ashamed of myself. I slid on my I can hold on to this – the guard waved the thighs in the short denim dress that had become notebook – and they can decide if they want to an orphan’s attire, a white pinafore, as a part of my pursue it later. hallucination of May Day procession – I carried They have asked, Caroline said drily, that you a Sacred Heart then, and my hair was cut bluntly absolutely don’t log it. So this conversation that across my forehead, and this was in the nineteenth we’ve had, I mean – this won’t be on any system? I century, and there was a nun I admired in the choir have been told to get assurance. – earlier, that was earlier in the high. Now I just Not unless I log it. Nothing on the system for slid to the centre and wept. Now I felt derelict. now. You should call us, the guard said sternly, as I don’t know why I went into the centre of the soon as you hear anything. ritual. I think that I wanted an audience, or help. Caroline felt strangely sedate as she rode into I could say I was high but there was such a logic the evening. For a while it had seemed as if noth- to it, a logic I couldn’t verbalize, but which lassoed ing was ever going to happen again. me into the centre and enclosed me like a bell. Both the sound of a bell and the shape of a bell. A When she was high a crude synaptic stut- cave of misty flickers. Anyway I became convinced ter occurred and she found herself trapped in an of certain things. On two occasions, actually. unfolding moment, a single moment, for the guts On two occasions, she wrote, during this con- of an hour, and it was absurd. trolled high I became convinced or became aware In this moment, she wrote, I became a foetus, that the previous year of my life – of our lives, of powder pink, and shrank into myself. I could feel your life and my life – did not occur, but in fact had my knees on the flesh of my belly. I was reborn like been fabricated by my fancy for the purposes of a person snapping out of a dream, with a gasp of pedagogical hallucination. Which is to say proph- air, and the bucket before me – I wanted to puke – ecy or example. Which is to say a kind of dumb- and the trails of sweat left by my fingers against the show on the wall of the cave or a parable encoding linoleum floor – the bucket before – and I wanted cautions, acting as a cautionary tale, saying: this is to puke, but it wouldn’t come. not how to live a year of your life, this is not how So I buckled and moaned and relented and to be. became a foetus, powder pink, again, in a chamber You see? of luminous skin. I awoke with a gasp like a person What generosity!

10 fiction

My mouth fell open (this was a trope) and I saw So the next day, she wrote, we did it again. We my palms shining upwards like the empty pages of burned sage and palo santo. After the stuttering a copybook. And when I went outside the world moment had stopped – more cartoonish this time was almost goadingly harmonious. Fields behind round, with flying skulls – I became convinced the fences stretched to a sculpture of cloud and a once again that the previous year of my life had copse of absolutely erect evergreens tapering mon- not occurred, merely could occur, if I did not heed umentally against the blue sky and I knew that the advice here proffered, to get out of the buck- they had been placed there by calculation to create et-and-foetus linoleum rut, to see reincarnation as balance, whether by a landscaper or God or Gaia mimetic template, applicable everywhere and not or even Kali, with people standing about in equal only to the actual doctrine of reincarnation, which proportion as the musicians played Canon in D. if I am honest the jury is more or less still out on. It was very much like an eighteenth-century Darling, only think of it. pleasure garden. I began to think that the trees and Later in the dorm we spoke of karmic history. the sky were actually trompe l’œil and I felt that this As we were speaking, women with hairbrushes was sinister but articulate. and rosehip oil, another woman rushed in and said, But when the Pachelbel swelled, she explained, oh no, a frog, a frog. An amphibian as small and it became too much, geysering through me, and I tender as a throat – as a throat disgorged, throb- threw my arms out cruciform. When the Pachel- bing and delicate – had hopped under a bunk bed, bel began to fold up it was embarrassed for me, and we were six or seven minutes catching him fixed in a smile of condescension, so that I felt between the dustpan and the brush, whooshing self-conscious. The fact that the year had in fact him into the bush again. The night came down, happened, the previous year of my life and your fragrant, over privies with half-moon slats. life – of our lives, the shady places where our lives Only think of that. A world without accidents. have intersected – settled into me firmly and then My joy, she wrote, at the thought of undoing I was depressed, I felt very depressed, I sat listlessly a year at a stroke was matched only by my grief at watching trees sift into lizards and Rorschach tests having it – the year – returned to me as unwanted for the rest of the afternoon. property. It was terrible. Longing to be free. I think about it now and I have to sit back Longing to be free. from the page, where I sit at the kitchen table of So I went home and I was out of sorts for a my apartment facing the railway and the park. The week. I smudged and I cried in child pose and I trees of the park are not transforming into anything; dreamed of glowing love-hearts, glowing skulls, they bloom as bulbous and as charmless as brassicas. and I went to a spirit activation class, kindly civil The mountains are soft scoops of navy and baize, servants shrieking and orgasming on the floor of a the sky a self-loathing grey. Every day comes to community hall – a hall with unihoc and basketball this, she wrote: a reckoning. She underlined reckoning and yoga mats – and it was beautiful, even more several times and provided a sketch of the tapering beautiful than Canon in D, because shrieks and trees and the trompe l’œil arrangement with musi- howls had become for me ambient sounds. There cal notes that looked like something drawn by a was laughter and dry electric frying. I sat in the schoolchild, and wrote, see watercolour attached. centre (the centre again) bereft, unable to access

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that space where a year might be wiped, where we might meet again and no cruelty pass between us and no bitterness – only this. The spirit travels up your spine. It wants noth- ing more than to flower from your mouth. But if it can’t it will stay in the spine and vibrate – it will make your whole body vibrate. Think of elec- tricity trapped and wrapping in panic around the scrappy circuit board of a phone charger, desperate for release. Your body will turn into autonomous poses from yoga and contemporary dance. Nobody does ballet because ballet is deeply unnatural.

I got your email, he texted. This was the first sign that he had resurfaced. Well, she replied, I am glad you aren’t dead. In her room he was rolling his shirt up and she saw a brutal bruise dug into his back, cried out in surprise, pointed to it. I don’t even remember how that happened, he said.

12 featured artist StanleyStanley DonwoodDonwood

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t doesn’t so much begin as swoop into land: thirty tions have been answered. The releases comprise seconds of silence followed by the gathering swell new material, and are made up of discrete, titled of sputtering static and a sighing, weary chorus of tracks. Exactly how they’re supposed to be thought what might be low-flying aircraft. At around the of, however – as a sequence, as a single entity with fifteenth minute, new sounds cut through the haze: convenient breaks, or as something somewhere a thin, whining synth tone, a muddy kick drum, a between the two – depends on how you listen. time-stretched glitch that seems to hint at something Autechre’s disruptive approach to form is not mechanistically vocal. The beat coalesces, settling without context. In many ways, NTS Sessions is into a stumbling four-four time that periodically the logical next step in a progression that began teeters off-tempo. The music sounds as if it’s drag- with 2013’s oppressively dense two-hour Exai, and ging itself along, trailing its own decomposition continued through 2015’s nine-hour data-dump in its wake. As it proceeds, it seems to encounter of live performances and 2016’s five-volume, four- sonic events external to its own body: glassy, reso- hour elseq 1–5. These are releases made possible nant chimes and squelching bass tones that refuse by the disembodied liberation that accompanies to fully cohere. Then, after nearly twenty minutes, the demise of physicality in the music industry. the palette changes completely. The low end falls Unshackled from the constraints of a side of vinyl, away, giving ground to what sounds like the chir- or a CD, Autechre are able to release music that rup of game console bleeps and the high-pitched effectively has its own relationship to time. A track hiss of an ancient dial-up modem. Finally, almost can be an hour, an album can last a day. Where thirty minutes in, a new forcefulness takes hold. A for many artists our digital present is character- sonic presence somewhere between a fuzzboxed ized by fragmentation, immediacy, distraction, for string tone and a reverberating organ dominates Autechre it facilitates the release of intimidating the soundscape. A beat constructed from a muf- edifices of music that require ever more time and fled kick and layered industrial clatter takes hold. attention to engage with. In much the same way as Everything – melody, rhythm, time itself – seems extended minimalist performances by the likes of to snap into compelling focus. Musical touchdown La Monte Young required listeners to settle in all has taken thirty drawn-out minutes – the length of night, Autechre’s newest works require an accept- some albums. But this is something different. It is ance that meaning will not be delivered in easy-to- the latest Autechre project, and it lasts eight hours. digest packages. Instead, it will unfold, sometimes I use the word project advisedly. Autechre’s latest changing imperceptibly, and sometimes seeming offering, NTS Sessions, premiered over four weeks not to change at all but to hover in non-progres- on the titular Internet radio station, isn’t exactly an sional suspension. In this state, the roles of listener album, and neither is it strictly a live performance. and sound are reversed: it’s not always the music Given that the material it contains is entirely that changes; sometimes it’s you, and the world by Sean Booth and Rob Brown, who make up around you, with the music becoming a fixed Autechre, it’s not a mix either. When streaming point against which you can measure your own began, intrigued and excited fans spent as much inexorable journey through time. time discussing taxonomy and method as they did Neither album nor performance, NTS Ses- content. Now that the Sessions have been made sions represents both the lofty pinnacle and fur- available as official downloads, some of those ques- thest-flung edgeland of Autechre’s approach. Eight

28 on music

hours of unspooling, artificially conscious sound The effect of this change in process is to desta- that, miraculously, pushes further into the possibili- bilize the very notion of composition. Much, if not ties of their technique while offering a surprisingly all of the music is generative. What has been ‘com- coherent and comprehensive overview of their posed’ is not so much a series of notes and beats palette. The tracks may be ‘new’, but the sounds but a cluster of decision-making algorithms that from which they’re constructed are familiar to not only spit out sound but manipulate that sound the point where they feel patented, as if Autechre over time. Left running, these artificial intelligences now ‘own’ certain sonic signatures: fizzing, angry would produce an infinite, automated music, one crackles; quasi-melodic glitch patterns; and, most that evolved and shape-shifted continually and of all, sounds that exist in the uncanny valley of moved, one assumes, towards a state of ever nois- the almost-acoustic, leading the listener, frequently, ier chaos. Autechre, then, are no longer produc- to imagine processed vocal tones, prepared piano, ing music as such, but controlling the extent to warping strings. If anything were to be described which the engines they’ve designed spew streams as Autechrian, it’s this effect: the duelling decoding of music on their behalf. processes that take place in your own brain when This accounts for the eerie, semi-organic sense you hear the whisper of the organic in something of intelligence that is always at play in the substrata so defiantly artificial. of Autechre’s sound world. In Autechre-land, dis- In much the same way as downloads have ena- tortion, for example, does not simply hiss. It cycles bled Autechre to jettison certain release formats through frequencies, moving from a low rumble up and purchasing protocols, digital technology has to a squealing, strangled sibilance, entirely uncon- also allowed them largely to do away with what nected from the sounds it was originally supposed we might traditionally think of as instruments. Up to augment. This, ultimately, is Autechre’s singular until Exai, much of Autechre’s work was about contribution to contemporary music: the bound- wringing previously unimagined sounds from the ary between sound and effect, impulse and echo, circuitry of synths and drum machines. In their rhythm and texture, is completely broken down. quest for the new, they literally dismantled their Because any element, even static hiss, can be tuned, own tools – opening up the mechanistic bodies of ‘melody’, in the old sense of the word, could come their noise-boxes and rewiring their guts to create from anywhere. a sound palette unlike anyone else’s. These sounds Considering Autechre’s music in light of this were then, usually, sequenced in a software envi- generative process forces us to reconsider not ronment in which progressions could be arranged, only what we think of as composition but what effects automated, and a timeline fixed in place on we think of as performance. Are Autechre ‘play- the screen’s layout. From Exai onwards, however, ing’ their music, in the traditional sense, or are they they have removed an entire stage of their composi- simply unleashing it – firing up the micro-intel- tional process and switched to working entirely in a ligences to which they have delegated the deci- programming system called MaxMSP. Not a single sion-making and allowing them to run riot? As if sound or effect you hear in Autechre’s music now nodding to this, Autechre have always played their comes from anything we would ordinarily think of live sets in total darkness. The effect is both com- as hardware. Instead, it has been coded from scratch, pelling and profoundly disorientating. When I saw built from nothing using raw data itself. them ‘live’ at the Royal Festival Hall, the audi-

29 on music

ence were advised to hold their ticket in the air if I wouldn’t say it’s a living entity, really. It’s they needed to exit the performance, so that ush- about as much like an entity as a shit AI in ers wearing night-vision goggles could come and a game is. That’s how intelligent it is, which escort them out. During the hour of tentacular, is not intelligent at all, but it might at least unspooling, monstrous music that followed, during resemble the way a person thinks … It’s not which I felt by turns physically disassembled and another mind at work in our stuff. It’s just cosmically transported, I was not entirely surprised our habits, transcribed. With this kind of to see more than one faint white shape in the air in algorithmic music, because the algorithms front of me, as one audience member then another are made by people, it is people music! You waved their white flag of submission. When the get that thing of, ‘Eww, it’s not human!’ But performance ended and the lights went up, casting that’s so far off how I think of it. I think of us all uncomfortably back into a reality we had it as being more human, because there’s all so comprehensively departed, the stage was empty, these decisions in there, and they’re human Autechre having already left under cover of dark- decisions. They’re what people chose to do. ness. No bows, no waves to the crowd, no encores. Just their now-silent laptops in a state of temporary The language of both techno-utopianism and hibernation, and an audience flailing for descrip- dystopianism invites us to think of large tracts of tions of what they’d heard. ‘It was like a tunnel,’ I our daily lived experiences as outsourced to, and heard someone saying on the way out, ‘and I was in overseen by, decision-making engines that are no the tunnel but then the tunnel became, like, liquid.’ longer human in nature. From the mouths of the Blacked-out stages, a sense of the musicians as Silicon Valley tech-bros whose interest is in con- subversively absent, a set of sounds that are systems vincing us that we’re entering a new era of algo- in themselves, arising not from anything tactile but rithmic convenience, this language tends towards from a matrix of interrelated algorithms: Autechre the emancipatory. We no longer need to think seem to steer us towards ideas of post-humanity, about things like what to buy, what to consume, or even non-humanity, as ways of understand- how to navigate the cities in which we live, how ing their work. This is, however, a misnomer, and to correctly expose a photograph or when to have what interests me is that it’s a fallacy that stems sex without getting pregnant, because now an arti- from a wider, perhaps wilful misunderstanding of ficial intelligence can handle that ‘thinking’ for us, how algorithms and the supposed ‘artificial intel- leaving our minds free to focus on what is impor- ligences’ they represent function. In interrogating tant. To its critics, this vision is positively terrify- our misconceptions of Autechre’s sound world, we ing, with key aspects of our global existence, from are forced to confront a deeper misconception, one stock markets to voting behaviour to the policing that brings to the surface dangerous flaws in the of crime now not only overseen but shaped by arti- way we understand our contemporary reality. ficial means. Both sides of this discussion, however, Speaking with Joe Muggs in a rare interview, ignore the point made by Booth: no intelligence following the release of elseq, Sean Booth explained can ever be truly artificial, because no algorithm Autechre’s work with MaxMSP in the following can ever be genuinely independent from the per- way: son or group who designed it. All the technology we use, every app we download, every alert and

30 on music

notification and targeted ad, is simply ‘what peo- such as reverb and panning are pressed into the ple chose to do’, and in every supposedly algo- service not just of augmenting sound but of seem- rithmic decision we can sense not only a human ingly augmenting the very space in which sound hand but a very human set of prejudices, from rac- exists. You can’t ‘hear the room’ in Autechre’s music, ist face-recognition technology to phallocentric because there is no room there to begin with, but health apps. We have outsourced nothing. We have as you listen, you are transported through multiple simply encoded what was already there. environments: decaying, dust-covered industrial This is why listening to Autechre’s late-style buildings where every rustle and clang rever- work engenders such feelings of vertigo and creep- berates; oceanic realms of dampened amplitude; ing uncertainty: what we’re listening to is not sim- even the emptiness of deep space, soundtracked ply rhythm and melody, it is the musical expression by little more than the whisper of blood in your of the limits and possibilities of the decision-mak- ears. The implication is obvious: it’s not simply ing processes that shape our world. In that sense, Autechre-land that’s drenched in effects, everything Autechre have not, as we might say of a favour- we experience is an effect, from dopplering sirens ite band, soundtracked our lives, they have both to growling engines to the perspectival trickery of soundtracked and concretized the evolving con- the sun dipping below the horizon line. Processing text in which our lives unfold. is all we have. Effects are the bedrock of our fragile Too often, in art, we consider that which is least authenticity. treated to be the most authentic. We moan about NTS Sessions, after around seven hours of films being over-reliant on CGI, or music being music, ends with a single, hour-long drone piece. ‘overproduced’. On Instagram, a #nofilter move- From the ones and zeros of their MaxMSP inter- ment deifies unaltered photographs, as if to suggest face, Autechre summon what sounds like a church that a sunset stripped of the inevitable distorting organ heard at a distance: a vast, swelling body of overlay not only gets closer to some base-level echoing sound. Tellingly, it glitches. The resonant ‘truth’ of the visible world but elevates the person tones stutter and stumble. Beneath the swell, that posting the image above the vulgar trickery of his engine-like bass tone can be heard again, anchor- or her peers and binds them to some (often mis- ing this digital interpretation of the sacred in the leading) contract of honesty and beauty. Autechre, unreal. Often, Autechre’s titles are the post-language through the compositional techniques they have consonant-jumble of filenames: ‘t1a1’ or ‘9 chr0’ or perfected, invite us to consider the possibility that ‘shimripl air’. This one, as if returning us to a place at the extreme edge of processing lie a new raw- of clear meaning after an epic voyage through ness and spontaneity – a beauty that is not natu- encryption, is unexpectedly literal: ‘all end’. It feels rally occurring. The effect of this is defamiliarizing, apocalyptic, yet calming and transcendent. There perhaps even upsetting. What we’re listening to is, is a sense of acceptance, perhaps even submission. in many ways, the realization that ‘nature’ doesn’t We have not been transported at all, merely shown hold exclusive rights to the sublime. where we always were: in a continually reconfig- This is a feeling intensified by Autechre’s ability ured, semi-automated world, entirely of our own to conjure a surprisingly tangible landscape from making. the non-space in which they operate. Such is the pinpoint accuracy of their sound design, effects

31 the writing life Sinatra Sang in Sentences By Joe Moran

he style guides say: keep your sentences short. themselves in a way that allows something, at least, Write cleanly, cut as many words as you can, and to be said. don’t overburden your reader’s short-term mem- ory by delaying the arrival of the full stop. But A long sentence can seem thrillingly out of sometimes a sentence just needs to be long. The breath, deliciously tantalizing, so long as we feel the world resists our efforts to enclose it between a writer is still in charge. It is like listening to a great capital and a full stop. The sentence has to with- singer as he holds his breath and prolongs a phrase. hold its end because life is like that, refusing to fold The secret to Frank Sinatra’s singing is his gift for itself neatly into subject, verb and object. fluid phrasing. Matt Monro may have had better A long sentence should exult in its own expan- technique, Tony Bennett more lung power, Nat siveness, lovingly extending its line of thought King Cole a smoother tone, Bobby Darin more while being always clearly moving to its close. swing. But Sinatra beat them all at breathing. It should create anticipation, not confusion, as it As a young singer, Sinatra listened awestruck goes along. The hard part is telling the difference to his bandleader Tommy Dorsey’s astoundingly between the two. I once heard Ken Dodd say that smooth trombone playing. The note holds seemed the secret of a great comedian is that he makes the to defy human lung capacity. Dorsey would play a audience feel simultaneously safe and slightly on musical phrase right through, seemingly without edge. He has about half a minute from coming on taking a breath, for eight or even sixteen bars. Sina- stage, Dodd reckoned, to establish that he is harm- tra sat behind him on the bandstand to learn when less. He must quickly convey calm and control, so and how he breathed, but could not even see his that the audience members relax into their seats, jacket move up and down. Eventually he worked safe in the knowledge that nothing truly awkward out that Dorsey had a pinhole in the corner of is about to happen. But he must also create a sense his mouth through which he was taking furtive of unpredictability that makes them lean forward. breaths. Sinatra came to see that singing, too, was A good long sentence has that same tension. It about breath control and that the secret was never should frustrate readers just a little, and put them to break the phrase. In music, legato means ‘bound just faintly on edge, without ever suggesting that it together’: a seamless flow, with no break between has lost control of what is being said. the notes. Sinatra wanted to sing legato, running A sentence, once begun, demands its own the whole phrase into one smooth breath. completion. It throws a thought into the air and He worked out on running tracks and prac- leaves the reader vaguely dissatisfied until that tised holding his breath underwater in public thought has come in to land. We read a sentence pools, thinking song lyrics to himself as he swam. with the same part of our brains that processes His breath control got better and, where he had music. Like music, a sentence arrays its elements to breathe in a song, he got better at hiding it. He into an order that should seem fresh and surpris- moved the microphone towards and away from ing and yet shaped and controlled. It works by his mouth as he sang so that you never heard him violating expectations and creating mild frustra- inhale. If he had to sneak in a little breath some- tions on the way to fulfilment. As it runs its course, where he made sure it seemed deliberate, as if he it assuages some of the frustration and may create were letting the message sink in. He learned this more. But by the end, things should have resolved trick from watching the horn section in Dorsey’s

32 the writing life

band during long instrumentals. When he sang, it the sentences. The rhythm of rock ’n’ roll always sounded as if he was making it all up as he went drowns out the syntax. Even a great phrasemaker along, pausing to pluck a word out of the air, lag- like Chuck Berry has to make his sentences fit the ging a fraction behind the beat – like a long, lithe backbeat. sentence, ad libitum but always in control of what It always irked me that in record shops Sina- it was saying. tra was filed under ‘easy listening’, the suggestion Unlike writing, which runs with its own irreg- being that his songs were as undemanding as eleva- ular pulse, music has a regular rhythm with a steady tor music, and best heard as the background buzz downbeat. Musical metre controls time completely: in a cocktail lounge. Another unfashionable singer a half note hangs in the air for exactly half as long filed in the same section, and whom I unfashion- as the whole note. This allows harmonizing singers ably loved, was Karen Carpenter. The emotional and instruments to pursue separate agendas and yet power of Carpenter’s singing comes not so much still pleasurably coincide. But music also depends from her vocal tone, gorgeous as that is, but from on phrasing, which is more subtle and varied than the fact that she, like Sinatra, sings in sentences. metre. A musical phrase lasts for about as long as a Singing for as long as she does on one breath, in person can sing, or blow a wind instrument, in a complete sentences over twisting melodies, is an single breath. What phrasing does to music is more amazing feat – not just of lung capacity but of like what a sentence does to words. A skilled singer tricking her throat into thinking that she is not can make the phrasing, the sentence structure of a about to swallow. song, work with or against the metre. By the end of a Carpenters song you feel wrung Pub crooners and karaoke singers never sing out, as if someone has emptied their heart in front in sentences. They focus too much on lung power of you. All that has happened is that you have been and hitting the notes and not enough on the words. sucker-punched by the dexterity of a technical vir- They just belt it all out, taking gulping breaths mid- tuoso, effortlessly unspooling a long sentence. Easy line, killing the meaning and the mood. But skilled listening is hard singing – and easy reading is hard singers know that the words matter. They might writing. hold a note for effect, or add a bit of melisma, but mostly their phrasing will mirror the way the words Every writer is a poet by default and every sen- of the song would be spoken. Songs are written tence a little poem. The longer the sentence, the in sentences, and phrasing is about singing in sen- more closely it resembles poetry, or should do. A tences, not song lines. good training exercise for the long-sentence writer A phraseologist like Sinatra overlays the metre is to read some of the countless poems written as with something like confiding speech. He is all one long sentence, often just a simple collection about the lyrics – you can hear him enunciate of modifiers. Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Night’ has no every syllable – and it feels as if he is saying as well main verbs or connectives, just a lightly tied bale as singing them to you, stretching out and twisting of appositives that rename the noun in the poem’s the pitch of words as we do in speech. Sinatra sings title: ‘this world’s defeat; The stop to busy fools’. in sentences. Perhaps he hated rock ’n’ roll for this George Herbert’s ‘Prayer’ repeats the trick: ‘the reason, not because he thought it ugly and degen- soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage’. erate, as he said, but because it did not care about American poetry, from Walt Whitman to Amy

33 the writing life

Clampitt, offers a vast lending library of these poem’s music just as much as the metre. Line and one-sentence poems that pile up free modifiers metre are the flimsy frame behind which the unas- parted by commas. So many poems work as long, sailable syntactical rhythms of the English sentence loose sentences – running over many lines, or the rumble on. For many poets, the unit of composi- whole poem, and inviting us to wonder at how tion is not the line but the sentence spoken in a much they can fit inside themselves, and whether single outbreath. Robert Graves said that a poem they will ever be an adequate vessel for all that came to him in ‘the usual line-and-a-half that needs to be said. unexpectedly forces itself on the entranced mind’. In fact a long, loose sentence turns into a poem Poets write in sentences, just like everyone else, if you just add line breaks: then play them off against the metre. Metre, like rhyme, is so strict that it has to pull against some- The London Underground thing to create its agreeable tensions. Without sen- marks the hardest of borders tences, poetry would just be sing-song. between tourist and native: Think of a long sentence as a poem and it will the tourist fumbling for change, always be clear, because each part of it will unravel squinting at the ticket machine in little musical phrases, with all the different parts and trying to work out colouring one another without it ever feeling dis- which zone he is in, cordant. The one indispensable quality in a long then flinching at the barrier sentence is that it must divide into these smaller as if unsure it will open for him, pieces to be chewed and swallowed one at a time, while the native absently and still always be moving, with each short phrase, places her card on the reader, towards completion. A long sentence should feel and walks straight through alive, awake, kinetic, aerobic – like a poem. in one balletic action, For the American writing teacher Francis knowing the exact moment it will open Christensen, learning to write was also about learn- without even breaking her stride, ing to live. He believed that teaching his students and then gauging the spot on the platform how to write a really great long sentence could at which the doors will open, teach them to ‘look at life with more alertness’. It and answering the beeping sound should not just be about ensuring that the sentence that announces the closing of the doors is grammatically correct, or even clear. The one by instinctively contorting her body true aim, he wrote, was ‘to enhance life – to give to fit inside the carriage, the self (the soul) body by wedding it to the world, pulled along by habit to give the world life by wedding it to the self’. He and the momentum wanted his students to become ‘sentence acrobats’ of other moving bodies, who could ‘dazzle by their syntactic dexterity’. as at home in her habitat The poet Elizabeth Bishop similarly liked sen- as a swift on the wing. tences that ‘attempted to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose’. In an essay she wrote Poems, like songs sung well, are made of sen- for Vassar Review in 1934 while still a student, tences as well as lines. The sentence is part of a Bishop explored how Gerard Manley Hopkins

34 the writing life

catches and preserves ‘the movement of an idea – man Philippe Petit one August day in 1974, when the point being to crystallize it early enough so he secretly strung a wire cable between the twin that it still has movement’. A single stanza of Hop- towers of the World Trade Center and walked kins could be, she wrote, ‘as full of, aflame with, across it in the morning rush hour, a quarter of a motion as one of Van Gogh’s cedar trees’. mile above a street in Lower Manhattan. And yet Bishop’s own poems are like that. Spoken by Petit made the comparison himself. On the steps a restlessly darting, apprehensive voice, they live of the courthouse after his arrest for this illegal act, inside their slowly cumulative sentences, loose he shouted, ‘I am not a daredevil, I am a writer in trails of words full of qualifications, self-correc- the sky!’ tions and second thoughts. Bishop also thought The trick, with both a long sentence and a of the long-sentence writer as an aerial artist. Her high-wire walk, is to give off an air of controlled favourite lines from Hopkins were ‘reminiscent of anarchy, of boundless freedom within clear con- the caprice of a perfectly trained acrobat: falling straints. Wire-walking may be a little more peril- through the air to snatch his partner’s ankles he can ous than writing, but both are, ultimately, all about yet, within the fall, afford an extra turn and flourish technique. Petit prepared like a scholar for his New in safety, without spoiling the form of his flight’. York walk, studying photographs, calculating the I like this metaphor but am not quite persuaded effects of high winds and building sway, sneaking by it. Is the writer of a long sentence really like an into the building to case the joint and recce the acrobat? Should a long sentence be as showboat- anchor points. But once he stepped out on to that ing as the turns and tumbles of the trapeze artist? thin steel cable he had to rely, like the sentence I side more with Thoreau, who warned the writer writer, on learned instinct, got through assiduous against ‘trying to turn too many feeble somersaults rehearsal. The high-wire artist must arrange his in the air’. And I am reminded of Burt Lancas- body so that it fights the wire’s urge to rotate, like ter and Tony Curtis in Trapeze, attempting to draw any cylinder, when stepped on. He must teach his reverential gasps from the increasingly bored cir- feet to land on the cable in such a way as to absorb cus crowds, while down below an elephant stands its swaying and then coax his centre of mass to on its hind legs or a bear rides a bicycle. A tra- move up to his torso, using his ankles as the pivot peze act is all jumpy, interrupted suspense – the point. He must know to pass the wire between his somersault over as quickly as it is seen, with that big and second toe, along the sole and behind the awkward smack as the anchorman grabs the fore- middle of the heel. arms of his flying partner and the ropes quiver. I A high-wire walk has the rhythm and momen- am not sure I want to write sentences like that, tum of a long sentence. ‘I don’t see fear in my life,’ more death-cheating jeopardy than unforced ele- Petit said. ‘That’s how people die: they are frozen gance. And if learning to write is also learning to rather than acting and thinking.’ The walk, like a live, then I don’t want to live like that either. sentence, takes place in time as well as space. It can- not be done all at once, and only succeeds if it is A better metaphor for the long-sentence in constant motion. The high-wire walker must be writer, perhaps, is the high-wire walker. I know ever alert and dynamic – although, like a sentence that will sound overblown, perhaps deluded. A writer putting in a comma or semicolon, he can writer is not risking all, as did the young French- pause at the cavaletti, the anchor ropes that create

35 the writing life

little oases of three-dimensional steadiness and stop on Microsoft Word will never tell you. They deal the wire swaying too much. only with reading ease, not the knottier, exacting In the middle of the wire between the twin pleasures of expectancy and surprise, the teasing towers, as if neatly punctuating a sentence, Petit way that long sentences suspend the moment of knelt, lay on his back and waved at the puzzled closure. birds hovering over him. The crowds of people I am a fully terrestrial being, afraid of flying and gazing up from the streets below relaxed a little, scared of heights. On the top floors of tall build- but could not quite exhale. As Petit neared the ings, I don’t even like being close to the windows. South Tower they began to breathe out, and as he I could no more walk on a tightrope between two made it there they sighed with relief – at least until towers than I could flap my arms and fly across. he turned round and did the whole thing again, Just looking at photos of Petit on that wire makes making seven more crossings before surrendering my legs wobble. But how I would love some day to the waiting police. Eight sentences: a high-wire to be able to write a sentence of such pointless, paragraph. big-hearted, joy-bestowing beauty, one that would As a metaphor, walking a tightrope means tread- make a stranger drop what they were doing and, in ing a fine line, living on the edge. But Petit was not the middle of a crowded street, look up. interested in this death-defying aspect of high-wire walking. He refused to wear a safety harness, not because it would make the walk safer, but because it would be ‘inelegant’. He also refused to play to the crowd as a big-top tightrope walker might, by making it all look harder than it was, or pretending to lose his balance and nearly fall. Not for him the stunts of Blondin at Niagara Falls, walking the wire on stilts, blindfold or pushing a wheelbarrow. It was as if he were doing it all for his own amusement and for anyone who just happened to be looking on. Even after the walk he employed no agent, refusing to trade it for money or renown. It was simply, as Paul Auster put it, ‘a gift of astonishing, indelible beauty to New York’.

A long sentence too should be a beautiful, indelible gift. It should give pleasure without pro- visos, not buttonhole and bedazzle the reader with virtuosity. It can put the reader on edge a little, so long as this does not feel like its main point, so long as it feels as if the sentence has no ulterior motive other than the giving of its own life-delighting self. This is what those algorithmic ‘readability scores’

36 q&a Social media is a kind of refuge. It’s a refuge from dealing with the more enlivening conflicts within one’s real life. Adam Phillips in conversation with Nicholas Barrett

In his 2016 biography of Sigmund Freud, Adam Phillips feels like a very unconscious process in the sense describes the development of psychoanalysis as an attempt that when something occurs to me it will often do by the secular Jews of Vienna to recreate the experience so in the first instance as a sentence or as the initial of talking to their rabbis. Phillips has said that talking to sentence and then when I start writing it becomes him is like talking to your mum about your day when what it is. So I don’t research things, for exam- you get home from school. When I arrived at his office ple. And things either work or they don’t. But if in Notting Hill, I was offered a coffee and ushered into something occurs to me I assume it’s because I am a sizeable study. As we talk he listens intently. When he preoccupied by it and have thought about it, and answers, he looks back and forth between me and the so when I start writing it then has its own momen- window as if he’s describing an ongoing incident in the tum. But the actual process of things occurring is street. Every wall is a bookshelf, but all the best real estate very unclear to me. One of the first things I wrote has long since been taken and so when Phillips sits down was an essay on tickling, and on that day I had seen in front of me he is surrounded by piles of books that a mother and child in the clinic where I worked grow out of the carpet like saplings competing for sunlight and the child was tickling her mother all the time in a forest clearing. Behind him sits a large wooden desk and we talked a bit about it, but not particularly untouched by technology; he doesn’t use email. intently. Then, that evening, I went to have super- A recent study found that around 37 per cent of work- vision and my supervisor told me that a French ers in Britain reported having a job that either made no magazine called the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse difference to the world or made the planet slightly worse. wanted people to write short essays on any topic of Perhaps the reason that talking to Adam Phillips feels so their choice, and I went home and I found myself cleansing is that so many of us assume that if we talked writing two and a half pages on tickling. I literally to our parents, friends or partners about our day and how went to my desk and it wrote itself. I was slightly we felt about it we might bore them into a state of silent amazed by this, and slightly thrilled by it. Now torture. And so Phillips’ desire to listen carefully is valua- that’s a relatively straightforward example; mostly ble. And yet behind the kindness and curiosity there is a it’s much less discernible than that. I don’t know radical message: that ‘fantasies of satisfaction are saboteurs where things come from. I do know that things of pleasure’ and that anything that you believe can satisfy strike me. you can frustrate you in equal measure. I wanted to ask him if capitalism, democracy and the will to live depended 5D Do people ever suggest topics to you? on naive expectations. I also wanted to know whether social media was destroying our capacity to be interesting AP They do, but I resist that. I can give lectures on to others and interested in the world around us. a given topic, but it doesn’t seem to work when there’s too explicit a demand. Adam Phillips Do feel free to ask me anything. Five Dials How do you choose the topics of your 5D Do you have an idea in your head as to what books and essays? And how do you know when an kind of person reads your books and why? idea is worth pursuing in the form of a book? AP Not really, partly because I don’t go out very AP It doesn’t involve conscious deliberation. What much. My life is really my work, my family, my seems to happen is that things occur to me, and it writing and my friends. I have a sense that all

37 q&a

sorts of people might be interested in my books. when started writing, I loved writing. I find it imagine they’re mostly university-educated peo- so exciting and interesting as a way of thinking. ple. But then I hear anomalous things. I’ve got a Why I do it, I don’t know. I do know that it gives very close gay friend who’s told me that he’s met me a great deal of pleasure. Of course, I like being several people in gay sex clubs who have talked praised, admired, hated, read – all those things have about my work and enjoyed it. I obviously like that their own pleasures – but the real pleasure is the it’s anomalous and unpredictable. But I’m not con- doing it. scious of writing in any sense for an audience. I don’t write for my profession, for example. I write, 5D Do people hate you? in the abstract sense, for anybody who might be interested. AP I’ve had some very critical reviews.

5D Why don’t you go out much? 5D What do we gain when we re-describe our experiences and what do we lose? AP Because I went out a lot when I was young and I sort of adored going out and now – I don’t AP We never know beforehand, but the wish to know what this is to do with – I like it less. I have re-describe is the wish in some sense to enhance less appetite to do that. My pleasures are much or to amplify, so in the attempt at re-description more domestic and circumscribed. you want to move the story on or open the story out. And there’s always a risk of getting stuck with 5D In ‘Why I Write’, Orwell suggests that writers a description. And – I don’t know why this occurs are motivated by egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, his- to me now – that the reason we look after our toric impulse or political purpose. Do you agree? parents is by agreeing with what they say to us. And if so, does what you do fit into any of those We want to both protect them and also we want impulses? to be reassured that there are authoritative fig- ures who know what’s going on. Growing up is AP All of them in different ways. It’s a very ambig- choosing who you want to be judged by and that uous title, this ‘Why I Write’ thing. I very much means being freer to re-evaluate and rethink what doubt that people know why they write. They one is being offered or encouraged to believe. And know that they write, and they sometimes know so I think of re-description as potentially a kind the consequence of what they write, but in my of freedom. It doesn’t mean that all ways of re- case it’s very mysterious. I didn’t have, as a boy description are better than the thing we described, growing up, any ambition to be a writer. And but it can be. So it’s as though it makes aspects of when I became interested in books as an adoles- things available that might previously have been cent, I wanted to be a reader. And then I wanted concealed. to be a child physiotherapist. And then I wanted to be a psychoanalyst. And the writing sort of hap- 5D Who do you want to be judged by? pened to me. Like all children, I wrote essays in school, and in university, and I quite enjoyed it AP I want to be judged primarily by my friends but it just wasn’t a big deal in my life. And then, and then secondarily by people I admire.

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5D Kafka said that ‘we need books that affect us AP No, they’d be right. The problem with it is pre- like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death cisely to do with time and money, and that’s why of someone we loved more than ourselves, like it’s been an almost exclusively middle-class occu- being banished into forests far from everyone, like pation. Two things are true. There’s an economic a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen reality that puts us all under pressure: people have sea within us.’ Was he right? Or is that completely to earn a living and it’s hard. That’s a fact. I also antithetical to a therapist living under the injunc- think it can be easy to recruit time and the lack of tion to ‘first do no harm’? it as a rationalization for not doing the things that might not matter to one a great deal. One might AP I’m not myself very taken by the melodrama of be fearful of what one might suffer in talking to catastrophe. I love that thought about the axe that somebody else and also fearful of what one might breaks the sea inside us and all that. Indeed, when enjoy. And so it’s always worth wondering what I was an adolescent I had that phrase typed up and people’s reasons are for not wanting to come to a sellotaped to a mirror. There are lots of good effects talking therapy. Not that they might be wrong – of books and Kafka is describing one of them. The they might be right. But given that psychoanalysis problem with what Kafka’s saying is that it has the is just an extension and a re-elaboration of what rhetoric of depth, as though it is essentializing what people do ordinarily, which is talking to each other literature is about. It seems to be that literature can when they’re troubled, I don’t think there are a lot be wonderful as an amusement, as a distraction, as a of reasons for not doing it. stimulus, as a provocation, a whole range of things. It then depends on sensibility, what you yourself 5D You’ve tried to get away from the idea of psy- happen to find yourself enjoying. I myself don’t choanalysis as ‘a middle-class seminar on the mean- think tragedies are deeper than comedies; I don’t ing of life’, but when you said that it reminded me think anybody’s deeper than anybody else. For me, of Camus, who said, ‘The literal meaning of life is it’s much more a question of what gives me more whatever you’re doing that prevents you from kill- life, what’s more enlivening, what gives me more ing yourself.’ As long as people feel despondent, is life in the way I’d prefer. Because the risk of the it not inevitable that therapy will become a discus- Kafka position is that if literature’s traumatic … sion about how and why we should be alive? trauma has two effects: it either actually petrifies one and immobilizes one or it stimulates one. I AP It’s much more specific and concrete than wouldn’t want to promote the wonderful value of that ideally – in the sense of it’s very much about traumatic experiences. I think traumatic experi- how it’s come to this for you. In other words, it’s ences are what we have to deal with, and ideally a historical story and it’s a story of what makes there would be as little trauma as possible in life. your life feel worth living to you or not and how this has come about. Whether or not that trans- 5D You’ve remarked that talking to you is like talk- lates into a generalization about life with a capital ing to your mum about your day when you get L is questionable. But I do think a lot of people go home from school. A lot of ordinary people assume through a period in their lives when they wonder that they wouldn’t have the time or the money to whether their pleasures are sufficiently sustaining try psychoanalysis. Would they be wrong? or whether there is enough pleasure in life, and

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these seem to me to be good questions. It seems to and bear what you hear from a diversity of voices, me a crucial question to wonder what makes one’s is a good ideal. It doesn’t strike me as impossible, life worth living, if anything. but it does strike me as very, very difficult. But for me and the people who agree, this is an aspiration 5D That sounds quite dangerous. What if you were worth sustaining. Because fascism and all the fascis- to arrive at the conclusion that there wasn’t enough tic variants are all a false solution. In other words, pleasure in life? there’s a wish to delegate authority, there’s a wish to pursue one’s own servility, and people should be AP Well then, you must act on that. The risk is wary of their fear of freedom. that people could be a bit like alcoholics who need everybody to drink. So the people who happen, 5D ‘Poisoned by hope’ is an interesting phrase. for all kinds of reasons, to enjoy their life could What does it mean? make the people who don’t feel that they’re some- how inadequate or failing in some way. Whereas it AP Giving people unrealistic hope, such that the seems to be entirely plausible that some people’s hope as it fails makes them feel worse than they felt lives are unbearable to them and to go on protract- before they had it. I could, for example, promise ing it is like torturing them. So it’s like the thing my child that they were so wonderful they could Winnicott said: when people come to see me say- do anything they wanted to do when they grew ing they want to kill themselves, I don’t dissuade up, and the child could be full of grandiose expec- them, I just make sure they do it for the right rea- tation and be thrilled by this. But it could end up son and the right reason is their right reason, not over time that the child actually can’t do everything mine. and isn’t a genius and that this is radically dispirit- ing, as though he’s been made a false promise. So 5D Is that ethical? one is poisoned by hope when one is made what turn out to be false promises. AP I think it is. I think it’s unethical to keep peo- ple alive if they can’t bear their lives. 5D Aren’t capitalism and democracy both depend- ent on promises? 5D It seems like a lot of our frustrations come from the idealized notions of democracy and meritoc- AP Yes, very much dependent on promises. There racy that we picked up as children. Are our aspira- are certain promises of satisfaction and certain tions an enemy of our satisfaction? promises of prestige that are radically misleading. It’s a version of redemption. As in, ‘my life will be AP It’s a very good question. The risk of cultural redeemed if I become rich enough, famous enough ideals is that they’re recruited to make us feel like and acquire the right commodities’. Whereas it can failures or humiliate us. It seems very difficult, and be the most debilitating story about a life. There interestingly difficult, to have inspiring and realistic may be things to do other than profiteering, for ideals for ourselves so that we keep a sense of pos- example. There may be a lot more nourishing pleas- sibility without being poisoned by hope. Democ- ures than the pleasures you can get by shopping. racy, which I take to be the willingness to listen

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5D You have a job that allows you to help other tation of this is that the woman is suffering from people and a hobby that allows you to express a separation anxiety but the real interpretation is yourself. How do you relate to people who feel that when the husband leaves she’s free. She then jaded or superfluous to the happiness of those has to think about her own desire. Well, it’s a very around them? good representative story because there’s a fear of possibility and also people under capitalism live AP I feel fortunate about what I am able and under a great deal of intimidation and fear. We are free to do. I’m very aware of how much thwarted led to believe that the world can’t be otherwise. ambition there is around and how much capitalism It’s like the thing Žižek says about it being easier makes people unhappy. It’s as though one is prom- to imagine the end of the world than the end of ised the possibility of a life that is actually quite capitalism. impossible for most people, and there is something really terrible and dispiriting about a culture that’s 5D It seems that in the last few years we’ve moved based on envy and where there’s such a radical ine- on from capitalist realism and that politics today is quality of wealth and opportunity. So I don’t see more about protecting cultures from globalization. how you could be easily or unequivocally happy living in a culture that is sponsored by so much AP I can see that, and it could be like being a exploitation and unhappiness. sort of fuddy-duddy left-wing person, but one of the formative experiences in my life was working 5D Why do we put up with it? for the NHS, and the collapse of the NHS seems to be a symptomatic catastrophe. And actually the AP Well, that’s the question. I don’t know the solution to the NHS is very simple, and it’s taxing answer to that, because obviously everybody is wealthy people more and putting money into the wondering about this a lot of the time. But psy- health service. But, for all sorts of reasons, people choanalysis gives us a bit of a clue about it, which is are not willing to do this. And it becomes, funda- that first of all, people are able to make their suffer- mentally, a question of what kind of world you ing pleasurable. So you could think that masochism want to live in, and I would prefer to live in a is one of our most useful devices and the most world where everybody’s health needs and educa- debilitating. Because if I can enjoy my suffering I tional needs are met. won’t protest against it. So there’s the cultivation of masochism, which is a terrible thing. I also think 5D A YouGov poll has suggested that 37 per cent that there is a fear of freedom and fear of pleasure. I of British workers say their jobs do not ‘make a don’t mean that this explains everything at all. I’ve meaningful contribution to the world’. Is that always been very struck by a story that Sartre tells, something we should be worried about? I think in Being and Nothingness. Basically, there’s a young married couple and every morning they AP Very worried. People feeling that they’re spend- come down to breakfast together and the husband ing their time doing futile things doesn’t work for goes off to work and the wife sits by the window anybody. Lots of people want to do good. They do crying all day and when the husband comes back want to address the suffering of other people and she perks up. Sartre says that the obvious interpre- themselves. People are much kinder than we’re led

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to believe. The fundamental thing is that people, by which ‘real desire can crystalize’, but whenever I nature, identify with the suffering and the pleasures get bored I look at my phone. Am I destroying my of other people. It then becomes too painful and capacity to be interesting? culturally disregarded, so that people gradually mis- identify from people and they become increasingly AP Yes. You might be, because the risk is all the able, as they grow up, to think of ‘us and them’ and pre-emptive solutions, so it would be about toler- to be, as it were, relieved that ‘I’m not suffering what ating frustration. One of the problems of capitalism other people are suffering’. Wilde is right when he is that it doesn’t, in a sense, allow people who have says that everybody’s everybody. I am other people. money to feel their frustration, because when you I can’t just say I’m not X because I am X. And I feel an absence of a loss or a lack you very quickly think there’s a commonwealth and the common- have an image of what will satisfy that. Whereas wealth is disregarded and disidentified from. psychoanalysis says wanting is much more diffi- cult than it looks. It’s quite difficult to know what 5D We’re sitting in the middle of a city with one wants, and it might require conversation and 8 million people, but our emotions evolved in thought and experimentation. In that moment much smaller groups. Are we ready for this kind of when you feel bored and immediately look at society? your phone, it’s as though you’ve assuaged some- thing, whereas sometimes you’ve distracted your- AP It may be simply an excess, that having con- self rather than engaged with yourself. In may be tact with so many people evokes more than we worth, as an experiment in living, trying, when can bear and we have to insulate ourselves and in you have that impulse to look at the phone, not that insulation we suffer a kind of alienation. But I looking at it. It’s like all the things one wanted to agree: the transition between growing up in a fam- do in the past when there was a kind of boredom – ily or a small group of people and going into such it could be masturbation, shopping, having a bath, a huge world is very, very traumatic. phoning somebody, reading something. Well, the question is: why does it have to be filled? What is 5D Do you feel that kind of alienation? Just by liv- the unbearable feeling that is being pre-empted? ing in London you probably walk past a hundred Because there may be more in the unbearable feel- homeless people a day. ing than one lets oneself know.

AP It would be melodramatic and self-pitying to 5D If you don’t look at your phone, you have to be say it’s unbearable but there’s something unbeara- alone with your thoughts for a while. ble about it. AP Exactly. 5D And yet it is bearable. 5D Why is that scary? AP And we’re bearing it and that’s the problem. I can bear it. I can more than bear it. AP Partly because it’s unknown; you don’t what your thoughts will be. Plus there’s no thought 5D You’ve called boredom a ‘precious process’ in without feeling. So you’re going to be feeling all

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sorts of things. And then the questions becomes: rupted and diminished by capitalism and /or new will I be able to contain my feelings and will I be kinds of people are being produced. So that social able to contain my feelings in the absence of some- media is not unequivocally moral degeneration. It body else? And these are real and also interesting could be that there will be a gradual creation of fears. It would be better not to be too daunted by different kinds of people, so that people will both those fears. suffer the disabilities of social media and they will then need to find a self-cure for this, and/or people 5D What distracts you? will use it very creatively. In other words, we could think that we don’t really know what it is yet and AP I’m more inclined these days to resist distrac- we’re going to get a lot of Jeremiahs faced with the tion, but I too can phone my friends. In a work- new thing. ing day, if I feel restless I will wander around here. [Phillips gestures to the street outside the window.] I 5D Do you ever worry about social media under- won’t go shopping as much as wander around or mining the public sphere and making it harder for eat. The great distraction we all have is food. In our us to be curious by only showing us things we distractions we become cultural clichés, we revert think we already want to see? to type, and if one doesn’t do that then there’s the possibility of discovering something else. The rest- AP Yes I do, and I also think that this could sim- lessness itself is not a disability. There should be ply be to do with one’s age. Virtual reality is very gaps in desire. limited, because I do think there’s an exchange between bodily cells that goes on that is both con- FD When I read Missing Out, I could only think of scious and unconscious. We’re having a conversa- it in the context of social media, which seems to tion now, but more things are being exchanged present a toxic ongoing reiteration of the unlived between us than we know about. So we’ll end up life. All the research seems to suggest that spend- thinking about this particular encounter in ways ing too much time on social media makes people we can’t predict now, and there’s something about unhappy. Why do think people find it so appealing that that is very fundamental. After all, we start and go back to it endlessly? Why is it addictive? body to body and we develop through that, but the risk is we then gradually become disembodied AP It’s a kind of refuge. It’s a refuge from deal- through virtual reality, and I think disembodiment ing with the more enlivening conflicts within one’s drives people mad. real life. Winnicott has an interesting phrase where he talks about depression as ‘the fog over the bat- 5D Do you think conversation as we know it is tlefield’, as though rather than feel the intensity of immortal or is conversation always changing? a conflict one might want to anaesthetize oneself. And there are a lot of cultural anaesthetics available, AP It’s always changing like everything else is. But of which social media is one. I’m also slightly wary it’s also useful to think about the ways in which though, because I remember my parents being very we might want it to change, as well as the ways in dispirited by pop music, for example, and what I which it’s changing in spite of us. think is happening is we’re either being really cor-

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5D How would you want it to change? all agree. So we don’t endlessly have to be electing consensual objects of desire. It’s like believing that, AP When you read or go to see a play by Oscar say, all men really want to be with a supermodel. Wilde, you think, ‘Wouldn’t it be fabulous to be Now it seems to me that this is absolutely and able to talk like that,’ so on the one hand, given my manifestly untrue, but what it deals with is the fact education and class and so on, I would like conver- that people’s desires are very idiosyncratic. People sations to be more amusing, provocative, intrigu- desire and are moved by people for lots of different ing, alive. But also, it’s just amazing that people can reasons, many of which they don’t know, and that speak and that they speak to each other and what can feel so troubling or estranging. they are capable of saying, if you see what I mean. So rather than being prescriptive – and this is one 5D I see the hunger for authority as being almost of the reasons I like psychoanalysis so much: it’s omnipresent. Everybody wants authority. an experiment in what people are able and want to say to each other. Because it seems to me that AP Yeah. But if I sit here and nod, that itself may the potential of conversation is unknowable. But be too much of a concession. Because it’s more we also know from our experiences that conversa- interesting as a question. Which is: if they do, why tions have tremendously powerful effects of a very do they? And what’s the alternative? If I don’t want unpredictable kind. authority, what do I want? That seems to be an interesting question. The troubles with authorities 5D Now that we’re into the epilogue of the inter- are that the authorities tell us what we really want, view, I was curious to ask you if you’ve heard of and how could anybody do this? They could make Jordan Peterson. Are you aware of him? suggestions. They could free us to experiment with what we might want. But no one knows what AP Yes I am, but I don’t know why. I’ve definitely someone else wants any more than anyone knows heard of Jordan Peterson, but give me a clue. what’s good for somebody else. I as a parent have to have some idea of what’s good for my child, but 5D He’s a right-wing professor of psychology. He’s as adults it seems to me that we have to have a con- very appealing to young men who may feel alien- versation about this and it’s an open-ended one. ated by modern culture. He says you shouldn’t express opinions about the world until you’ve 5D The demagogues get away with it. tidied your bedroom. AP They do. But just because something’s always AP I suppose what I’m wary of more generally is happened doesn’t mean that it always has to go on of people’s craving for gurus. I’m not at all wary happening. There was a French Revolution. Things of people’s admiration for people or of people’s do happen. interest in people and so on. But I just don’t think it’s a very good idea to pool one’s self-esteem into somebody else. What I like about democracy is that there are a lot of competing and collaborat- ing views around but we’re not under pressure to

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