Established 2005
Manchester / London
Manchester / London
'I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.'
Susan Sontag, The Paris Review (1995)
Susan Sontag, The Paris Review (1995)
INDEX
2024
Interview
Hannah Filler (Towson University)
quizzes Brett Gregory
about filmmaking as a career
Hannah Filler (Towson University)
quizzes Brett Gregory
about filmmaking as a career
HF: What do you do in your job?
BG: I’m the Creative Director for a small UK film production company called ‘Serious Feather’ which was established in 2005. My main duties include researching and generating ideas for short films or feature films; screenwriting; storyboarding; location scouting; sourcing crew members; sourcing props and costumes; researching and casting performers; rehearsals; liaising with the director of photography; directing on location or on set; maintaining technical and aesthetic standards on location or on set; editing; sourcing foley; liaising with the composer; sound mixing; publicity and marketing etc.
My debut feature film, ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’, was released on Amazon Prime in 2022, and my cast, crew and I have just completed a short film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s parable, ‘Before the Law’.
HF: What's a typical day like?
BG: Creatively, I’m at my best as soon as I wake up, when I’m still half-sleep, and I still have the memory of the last dream or nightmare swirling around inside my head. In turn, I usually just sit and write, or re-write, or storyboard for about five hours straight. Then I check my emails and social media messages, and spend about two hours replying to them. Then I usually have a snooze in the late afternoon before I carry out boring administration duties, and look through the calendar to see what else needs to be done without using too much brain power. And then I’ll talk to friends, read stuff, watch stuff, play stupid video games etc.
HF: What do you like about your job?
BG: I enjoy creating distinctive yet honest characters, dialogue, situations, scenes, and stories out of nothing. I like the idea that I’m trying to create a more interesting world than the one I usually experience day to day outside of film and media. I also enjoy working with decent, respectful, hard-working and/or talented people who are able to improve and/or motivate me to produce better creative work, and inspire me to be a better person.
HF: What's the hardest thing about your job?
BG: I suppose the hardest thing about my job is trying to convince non-creative people that the arts are actually about being a human being, and that human expression is more valuable than money.
HF: Is your job satisfying?
BG: Each creative project is satisfying at each stage of its life cycle in sporadic moments. You write a good line of dialogue; you compose a decent shot in storyboarding; you source an evocative location; you discover a memorable actor; you finish the film you’re shooting a day early, etc. The most satisfying moment for me however is in the edit, and you know the narrative is complete, and it just needs tidying up with grading and colourisation, and elevating with the soundtrack etc. I don’t know if that’s actually ‘satisfaction’ however. I think that might just be ‘relief’.
HF: What kind of experience, skills and qualities do I need to get this job or internship?
BG: A knowledge, understanding and passion for film, film history, the filmmaking process, and the film industry; critical thinking and judgement skills; research skills and a desire to know lots of things; an ability to solve problems; a good listener; a good talker, a good writer; note-taking; punctuality and time-management; ordered; hard-working; focused; ambitious; humble. And, importantly, you also need to be a bit of a social outcast. Naturally unconventional, but not troublesome.
HF: What can I be doing now, while I'm in college, to qualify for this job or internship?
BG: I would recommend that you read as many classic novels and short stories as possible from around the world, and not just by US authors. I would recommend that you independently study the history of painting and photography, and decide which styles and types of content you like, and why. I would read and re-read ‘Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts’ by Susan Hayward, and ‘The Cinema Book’ by Pam Cook. You should watch as many films from 1910 to 2000 as possible, particularly German expressionist films from the 1920s and New Hollywood films from the 1970s. You should watch every documentary about filmmaking that you can lay your hands on, even if you don’t like the films that they’re discussing. You should start adapting very short children’s stories, fairy tales and/or nursery rhymes into short screenplays during evenings and/or over the weekends. You should then storyboard the screenplay you’ve written; and then follow this storyboard, shot by shot, and film it in the real world on your iPhone or similar with friends as actors, or stuffed toys as actors, or whatever. You should then edit the footage and sound you’ve recorded using free software like CapCut. Export the completed film, watch it over and over again, and then try and work out why it just isn’t as good or as magical as the original story, fairy tale or nursery rhyme. Then you should pick another story, and start all over again, learn from your mistakes, and do this once a month for at least the next three years.
HF: What technology and tools should I learn to prepare for this job?
BG: As I mentioned, on a basic level, you just need a smartphone and a copy of CapCut on your PC or Mac. If you’re taking filmmaking more seriously, however, then you need to learn how to use a Canon 5D Mark IV or similar; a Tascam DR-40X audio recorder or similar; a Rode microphone and boom pole or similar; two Lavalier microphones; a basic film lighting kit so you can carry out three-point lighting effectively and efficiently; and post-production software packages like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Photoshop.
HF: What do you wish you knew about your job when you were in school?
BG: I wish that when I was at school that I had stopped dreaming about making films, and had actually just got on with making them. That would’ve probably saved me about ten years of my life.
Hannah Filler is an undergraduate in Electronic Media, Film and Mass Communications at Towson University, Maryland (US)
Brett Gregory is an independent screenwriter, director, editor and producer based in Manchester (UK)
BG: I’m the Creative Director for a small UK film production company called ‘Serious Feather’ which was established in 2005. My main duties include researching and generating ideas for short films or feature films; screenwriting; storyboarding; location scouting; sourcing crew members; sourcing props and costumes; researching and casting performers; rehearsals; liaising with the director of photography; directing on location or on set; maintaining technical and aesthetic standards on location or on set; editing; sourcing foley; liaising with the composer; sound mixing; publicity and marketing etc.
My debut feature film, ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’, was released on Amazon Prime in 2022, and my cast, crew and I have just completed a short film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s parable, ‘Before the Law’.
HF: What's a typical day like?
BG: Creatively, I’m at my best as soon as I wake up, when I’m still half-sleep, and I still have the memory of the last dream or nightmare swirling around inside my head. In turn, I usually just sit and write, or re-write, or storyboard for about five hours straight. Then I check my emails and social media messages, and spend about two hours replying to them. Then I usually have a snooze in the late afternoon before I carry out boring administration duties, and look through the calendar to see what else needs to be done without using too much brain power. And then I’ll talk to friends, read stuff, watch stuff, play stupid video games etc.
HF: What do you like about your job?
BG: I enjoy creating distinctive yet honest characters, dialogue, situations, scenes, and stories out of nothing. I like the idea that I’m trying to create a more interesting world than the one I usually experience day to day outside of film and media. I also enjoy working with decent, respectful, hard-working and/or talented people who are able to improve and/or motivate me to produce better creative work, and inspire me to be a better person.
HF: What's the hardest thing about your job?
BG: I suppose the hardest thing about my job is trying to convince non-creative people that the arts are actually about being a human being, and that human expression is more valuable than money.
HF: Is your job satisfying?
BG: Each creative project is satisfying at each stage of its life cycle in sporadic moments. You write a good line of dialogue; you compose a decent shot in storyboarding; you source an evocative location; you discover a memorable actor; you finish the film you’re shooting a day early, etc. The most satisfying moment for me however is in the edit, and you know the narrative is complete, and it just needs tidying up with grading and colourisation, and elevating with the soundtrack etc. I don’t know if that’s actually ‘satisfaction’ however. I think that might just be ‘relief’.
HF: What kind of experience, skills and qualities do I need to get this job or internship?
BG: A knowledge, understanding and passion for film, film history, the filmmaking process, and the film industry; critical thinking and judgement skills; research skills and a desire to know lots of things; an ability to solve problems; a good listener; a good talker, a good writer; note-taking; punctuality and time-management; ordered; hard-working; focused; ambitious; humble. And, importantly, you also need to be a bit of a social outcast. Naturally unconventional, but not troublesome.
HF: What can I be doing now, while I'm in college, to qualify for this job or internship?
BG: I would recommend that you read as many classic novels and short stories as possible from around the world, and not just by US authors. I would recommend that you independently study the history of painting and photography, and decide which styles and types of content you like, and why. I would read and re-read ‘Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts’ by Susan Hayward, and ‘The Cinema Book’ by Pam Cook. You should watch as many films from 1910 to 2000 as possible, particularly German expressionist films from the 1920s and New Hollywood films from the 1970s. You should watch every documentary about filmmaking that you can lay your hands on, even if you don’t like the films that they’re discussing. You should start adapting very short children’s stories, fairy tales and/or nursery rhymes into short screenplays during evenings and/or over the weekends. You should then storyboard the screenplay you’ve written; and then follow this storyboard, shot by shot, and film it in the real world on your iPhone or similar with friends as actors, or stuffed toys as actors, or whatever. You should then edit the footage and sound you’ve recorded using free software like CapCut. Export the completed film, watch it over and over again, and then try and work out why it just isn’t as good or as magical as the original story, fairy tale or nursery rhyme. Then you should pick another story, and start all over again, learn from your mistakes, and do this once a month for at least the next three years.
HF: What technology and tools should I learn to prepare for this job?
BG: As I mentioned, on a basic level, you just need a smartphone and a copy of CapCut on your PC or Mac. If you’re taking filmmaking more seriously, however, then you need to learn how to use a Canon 5D Mark IV or similar; a Tascam DR-40X audio recorder or similar; a Rode microphone and boom pole or similar; two Lavalier microphones; a basic film lighting kit so you can carry out three-point lighting effectively and efficiently; and post-production software packages like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Photoshop.
HF: What do you wish you knew about your job when you were in school?
BG: I wish that when I was at school that I had stopped dreaming about making films, and had actually just got on with making them. That would’ve probably saved me about ten years of my life.
Hannah Filler is an undergraduate in Electronic Media, Film and Mass Communications at Towson University, Maryland (US)
Brett Gregory is an independent screenwriter, director, editor and producer based in Manchester (UK)
Interview
Jon Greenaway discusses his new book
'Capitalism: A Horror Story'
Jon Greenaway discusses his new book
'Capitalism: A Horror Story'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
September 14th 2024
by Brett Gregory
September 14th 2024
Overview
Jon Greenaway is a horror expert, with a PhD from the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is the co-host of the leftist film analysis podcast Horror Vanguard and his work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Baffler and a host of other online publications. He lives and works in the North of England.
Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination
What does it mean to see horror in capitalism? What can horror tell us about the state and nature of capitalism?
Blending film criticism, cultural theory, and philosophy, Capitalism: A Horror Story examines literature, film, and philosophy, from Frankenstein to contemporary cinema, delving into the socio-political function of the monster, the haunted nature of the digital world, and the inescapable horror of contemporary capitalist politics.
Revitalizing the tradition of Romantic anticapitalism and offering a “dark way of being red”, Capitalism: A Horror Story argues for a Gothic Marxism, showing how we can find revolutionary hope in horror- a site of monstrous becoming that opens the door to a Utopian future.
For further information visit: Repeater Books
Interview Transcript
BG: From revulsion to revolution. Hi, my name’s Brett Gregory, and I’m the editor of the UK arts, culture, and academia website, Serious Feather, as well as the Spotify podcast, Serious Feather Arts. I’ve interviewed 19 authors, artists, and academics over the past year and a half, and today will be my 20th guest, the writer of a new political book called ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’.
BG: Hi, what’s your name, where do you work, and what are your research specialisms?
JG: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on the show. My name is Jon Greenaway. I'm currently an independent writer and researcher, and I specialise in Gothic Studies, Horror Studies, film, and Utopian Theory.
BG: You were awarded your PhD via the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies which, in turn, is attached to Manchester Metropolitan University. Could you please tell us a bit more about this research group?
JG: Yeah, so I was part of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies which is an incredible research centre in Manchester Metropolitan University. It has some of the country's leading experts, some of the world's leading experts on the Gothic, and offers undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral courses in Gothic Studies, encompassing everything from film to literature to popular culture. It's an incredible place, and it was a really special thing to get to be involved with at the time.
BG: Let’s start at the beginning. With examples from film and/or literature, how would you define Gothic horror in terms of style, content, and conventions?
JG: To Define Gothic horror in terms of its style, content and conventions is something that involves going back probably to the late 1700s. Generally, Sir Horace Walpole's ‘The Castle of Otranto’ which was published in 1764 is counted as being the sort of first true Gothic novel, and inaugurating a particular set of concerns and ideas. Most of these revolved around history, haunting, the supernatural. So to talk about the Gothic is one thing, but to talk about horror is another aspect to this genealogy. So a lot of the Gothic emerges from these aesthetic debates around literature more generally, particularly Edmund Burke's aesthetics and theory around sublimity, what the sublime is in literature. And the distinction that's generally drawn historically is that the Gothic is something that draws you to towards the sublime, it is an expansive feeling of awe, whereas horror is something that we recoil from. A really good example of an early horror novel is Matthew Lewis' late 1790s novel, ‘The Monk’, it features a lot of horrifying scenes, an awful lot of violence and magic and abduction, and it ends with the Inquisition and Satan appearing. So generally the Gothic is quite a controversial feel to give a concrete definition too. In terms of literature its high point is the 1760s through to about the 1830s with ‘Frankenstein’ really being one of the kind of final parts of this traditional conception of the Gothic. Because from there the Gothic hybridises, and goes into lots of other different forms, and moves away from its traditional conception of haunted castles, ghosts, and mysterious goings on in the night.
BG: And how would you define Gothic Marxism in terms of ideological aims, objectives, and historical background?
JG: In terms of Gothic Marxism, in terms of its ideological aims, objectives and historical background, there are a number of different kind of genealogies or traditions that I think you can draw from. I think one of the most underappreciated, but probably one of the most important, is a two-fold tradition that emerges out of French surrealism on the one hand, and the aesthetic and philosophical work of Walter Benjamin on the other, and both of them are interested in doing similar things. So Benjamin's work, particularly something like the great ruin of a book, ‘The Arcades Project’, is an attempt to investigate the fundamentally unfinished nature of history, and to try and give history itself a sort of dynamic, living charge. The surrealists are trying to do the same, but for the repressed or unconscious aspects of culture. That's why they were interested in things like automatic writing and the interpretation of dreams. Basically, at a sort of super foundational level, I would say that to have a Gothic Marxist account of culture is to take seriously the idea that history is not finished, that there are aspects of culture which are not simple irrationalisms that we have to get over or move on from. But these unfinished haunting or non-rational aspects of culture have deeply revealing things to tell us and teach us about history, the nature of politics, and the nature of subjectivity.
BG: Throughout ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ you frequently use the term ‘necropolitics’. Could you briefly explain this concept for us, its relationship to the Gothic genre, and how these might work together to help us productively critique the ideological drive behind neoliberalism?
JG: So ‘necropolitics’ is a coinage that I use in the book, or rather I describe contemporary neoliberalism is necrotic and this is not, I think, a super controversial way of thinking about it, but contemporary neoliberal capitalism is dealing with certain crises that it doesn't necessarily have the tools to resolve. The ideological promise of neoliberalism was the ‘responsibilisation’ and empowerment of the individual to achieve economic success, and we simply outsource the responsibilities of the state to the private market, and this leads to freedom, it leads to empowerment; but the institutions of contemporary liberal politics are decaying, if not outright dead. There are huge crises of representation and democracy, there are huge crises of wealth inequality, access to the various means of life are becoming increasingly precarious for huge amounts of people. So the aim here is to kind of draw a thread that connects all of these crises and gives them a kind of coherent identity, which is that the institutions of neoliberalism are in decay, but there is not yet anything that has clearly emerged that could replace those institutions.
BG: With this in mind you write extensively about Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ published in 1818 and, in particular, The Creature who has been [QUOTE] ‘stitched together from the bodies of the poor and the dead’. While this is an extremely evocative indictment of capitalism’s corporeal exploitation of the proletariat and the precariat, you argue that it’s The Creature’s often overlooked sentience in the novel, their articulation, their reading of Plutarch and Milton, which is their true subversive power. Would you care to explain this further?
JG: ‘Frankenstein’ is a really interesting novel, and it's far stranger than I think people who maybe haven't read it for a while think. One of my favourite things about Frankenstein's Creature – and I try to refer to The Creature rather than a Monster from the novel – is that The Creature, the great horror for Victor Frankenstein is that his creation can speak, his creation can reason, and there are these moving passages where The Creature recounts their own coming to self-consciousness. You know, they do read Volney, they do read Plutarch and Milton, and have a rational and philosophical approach to their own consciousness. The great horror for Victor Frankenstein is that his Creature speaks in the same discourses that he sees himself as having exclusive access to. The Creature is reasonable, he makes an appeal to Frankenstein as if Frankenstein is a judge in a court of law, and the response of Victor to this very impassioned defence of reasoned debate is violence.
BG: Interestingly, The Creature, particularly in the movie adaptations, is also superhuman and, we later discover, unable to die. If I remember correctly, you equate this characteristic with the notion that the poor in society and culture will never die either, and will continue to haunt capitalism and its dead-eyed, deluded disciples until the end of days. Am I right here, Jon, or have I got it wrong?
JG: The characterisation of The Creature in the novel with the notion that the poor in society and culture will never die either, and will continue to haunt capitalism until the end of days. [LAUGHS] I think, this is a nice way of thinking about it. If you think to the very end of the novel The Creature vanishes out of a window and is lost in the darkness, but is never completely eradicated. And I think there are so many ways that we can see the figure of Frankenstein's Creature as this very powerful, multivalent metaphor, yes, for the continued existence of the working class, no matter how marginalised and excluded they might become. But also The Creature has a revolutionary and disruptive potential in the course of the novel, so I think you're completely right, and I would totally agree with your argument, but I would also say that perhaps there is a more hopeful way of reading this that, yes, despite the apparent security of Victor Frankenstein, that great representative of the bourgeois middle classes on the edge of things, one that is completely on the edge of things there remains this kind of haunting figure of a revolutionary class. And it's not a surprise that as I sort of briefly touch on in the book, that Frankenstein's Creature was often used as a metaphor to respond to revolutionary uprisings and riots that would occur that the working class was seen as this Frankensteinian Monster that might overwhelm its master.
BG: In relation to this, what role do monsters play in our collective psyche, regardless of our wealth or poverty?
JG: The Creature and, I think, maybe monsters in the tradition of Gothic fiction, more generally, show that there's possibility for great rupture and disruption into what we take to be just normative standards of how the world should operate. I think if you look at the Latin roots for the word ‘monster’ it is both a warning and a sign for something, and what it is the sign of is something new coming into being. And, I think, in an era that seeks to kind of naturalise forces of exploitation, you know, people were constantly told that the way the world is, there's nothing that can be done about it. I think these monsters are kind of haunting the kind of popular imagination as signs and symbols of something else or something other. It may be better, it may be worse, but there is the possibility of change that can never be completely eradicated after all, and this is true with Frankenstein's Creature, but it's also true of a much more popular figure like the vampire. The monster always returns, right, the monster always comes back no matter how secure the victory might seem to be. There is still the possibility of the entire world being transformed again.
BG: You proceed to analyse Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ published in 1897, another incredibly influential icon from the Gothic genre, although, on the surface, they don’t enjoy a similar affiliation with the exploited proletariat which Victor Frankenstein’s creation does. That is to say, many of us would regard Count Dracula as being the aristocratic embodiment of early 20th century capitalism, feeding off the poor and the innocent to sate his own nefarious desires in order to expand his dominion.
You understand them from a different perspective, however. Firstly, as an immigrant property developer and, secondly, as a maternal figure, particularly with regards to their relationship with Mina and Jonathan Harker. Could you elaborate on this please?
JG: Yeah, this is a really interesting chapter, I think. ‘Dracula’ is often read in this kind of as a figure of capitalist predation, and I think the reading is valid, but it raises some problems that you have to kind of ignore or gloss over certain parts of the text. Quite literally the novel is about a lawyer going to a foreign country to help a foreign investor buy property in London. However, I think that's not the sole way of reading the novel. I'm very indebted particularly to sort of feminist critics like Katie Stone and Sophie Lewis who have talked about family abolition as a utopian programme, and there are a couple of things about Dracula that allow you to give this kind of counterintuitive reading to the novel. So Dracula, of course, does not work, and is a threat to the extremely patriarchal and heterosexual family structures, the social structures of the London that he's moving into. There is a kind of troubling, like, ambiguity, there is a troubling maternal side to Dracula who feeds Mina Harker from his breast, and kind of inducts her into a new family structure. And it's very telling that it's a group of men then that have to secure their sort of ownership of property, but also their own kind of like heterosexual neuroses has to be worked out in excluding Dracula. So Katie Stone who wrote this brilliant paper on Dracula as a utopian figure points out that he is representative of a sort of familial mode of connection that goes beyond work. The great horror of Dracula is that he doesn't need to accumulate capital, and he doesn't need to work for it like everyone else in the novel does. That's why I sort of close with drawing on Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, who wrote a great and very underappreciated pamphlet called ‘The Right To Be Lazy’ which is trying to get a kind of left critique of work and this valorisation of work, you know, that figures like Max Weber would call the Protestant ethic, the spirit of capitalism, this idea that work is in and of itself a kind of good thing or a positive thing. It's something that ‘Dracula’ as a novel manages to destabilize in some really interesting ways.
BG: As you quite rightly underscore, horror never goes away under capitalism since it’s an inherently destructive, cruel and murderous enterprise. In turn, to excuse or protect itself from the inhuman and unnatural crimes it commits minute by minute, you write that it engages in a process of ‘responsibilisation’: [QUOTE] ‘a state of politics in which systemic issues become something for which the individual has to take responsibility’ rather than, say, the government of the day. Could you clarify and illustrate this argument for us?
JG: So this is about this question of responsibilisation. A lot of it is sort of endemic, I think, especially in British politics, and it's something that was written about quite movingly by some people like Mark Fisher quite a few years ago in the immediate wake of the financial crisis of 2008. So, between 2010 to 2015, there was this big move towards … politicians would use buzzwords like ‘flexibility’ and ‘choice’, and that they would say that it was about empowering us, but really what it was about was about making sure that there was less for the state to do. So the great idea of ‘responsibilisation’ here can be tied to something like mental health, mental health care in the UK, and the rates of need for mental health care in the last decade have shot up almost exponentially, particularly among young people, and so this is a social problem. Obviously there's biomedical reasons behind any kind of health issue, but mental health and indeed our physical health is tied to our kind of social being. And one of the big reasons why you might be sick or you might be unwell is, let's say, you need to work two jobs because wages are so low, or you spend 75% of your income on rent because housing is so inaccessible. But really what the kind of support or message that we're given now is that we have to take responsibility for ourselves, we have to be taught how to be resilient rather than focused on trying to change the structures of the society within which we live. So it's a very small way in which – this is what Fisher referred to as ‘capitalist realism’, the sense that there is no major change possible – it's kind of inculcated into us as a sort of ideological law of the universe.
BG: In 2023 I interviewed the University of Stirling’s Dr. Darren Elliott-Smith about ‘Queer Horror, Marxism and Hollywood’ and, amongst other things, we discussed how queerness can explore itself and find itself within the horror genre, away from the heteronormative strategies of capitalism, and thus become a subversive and destabilising force.
In ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ you discuss the ongoing demonising and dehumanising of a group severely marginalised by mainstream politics and the media, the trans community, wherein, for example, trans people are regularly framed as predators or [QUOTE] ‘monsters at the door’.
Consequently, can trans people also explore themselves and find themselves within the conventional horror genre and/or the Gothic genre and, if so, in what specific ways?
JG: Yeah, I know of Darren Elliot Smith's excellent work on queer horror and the queer Gothic, one of many kind of amazing academics who've really done trailblazing work on this. And, I think, a really good thing to point out is that horror has always been a cultural form that those who are in some ways Othered or seen as outsiders have always been drawn to. So towards the end of ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ I talk a little bit about the ways in which British media discourses refer to trans people, and how this is in many ways a continuation and acceleration of similar discourses that were aimed towards lesbian and gay people a few generations earlier. There was this idea that they are kind of predatory, that they are these monsters at the door threatening the sanctity and purity of children. So … and I talked about this in the context of some excellent trans horror that's come out recently, particularly Allison Rumfitt’s superb novel ‘Tell Me I'm Worthless’, and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s excellent novel ‘Manhunt’. So I think the question is, can trans people see themselves represented in horror? I think the answer to that is absolutely, yes, but in what ways is to be determined by themselves. There has been some really exciting trans horror, I'm thinking of things like ‘I Saw the TV Glow’, but the point at which film generally has developed, this is still a very minor kind of sub-current in a lot of mainstream cinema. There's some really exciting work happening on trans histories in cinema, and so for a far better answer that than I could give to this question I'm going to recommend a book by Caden Gardner and Willow Maclay, two incredible trans film writers. It's called ‘Corpses, Fools and Monsters’ that came out the very same day as my book, and it's this really exhaustive history and deep dive into trans representation in film, and a kind of great contribution to this developing archive that we should be drawing from.
BG: Taking this a little further, could it be argued that the ‘horror’ expressed towards transgenderism by the heteronormative mainstream emanates from a fear and, maybe a suppressed awareness, that gendered identities are actually fluid and unstable, not natural or inevitable, or, as Judith Butler argues, ‘performative’? Moreover, since such issues arguably question the fundamental manner in which citizens are generally ordered and governed in society according to biological binary oppositions, capitalist institutions and organisations choose to demonise, marginalise and/or oppress trans communities, individuals, experiences etc. in an attempt to maintain their idea of the status quo, and thus remain in power?
JG: Yes, I absolutely think that's true. You mentioned Judith Butler and, I think, Butler's a really important point here. They've written quite extensively about the kind of fear of gender politics, and it's not always tied to specifically just trans people or LGBTQ people, but is part of a wider reactionary mode of politics that is extremely heteronormative and patriarchal. It’s seeking to police and define choice and agency of women so, particularly in the last few years as trans people have been writing and campaigning around the issues of rights and freedoms and autonomy, many, many people have pointed out that this discourse of gender ideology is a bulwark for a larger far more reactionary politics. And I think you've seen that in the British Conservative Party, you've certainly seen that in US Republicans, you've certainly seen that in populist movements like Bolsonaro in Brazil, that the monster is a kind of tool of political utility. So if you enact a discourse that seeks to create or to kind of categorise a certain kind of person into a monster, that becomes sort of like a permission to enact a wider set of politics.
BG: Unashamedly, your book puts forward a utopian vision in terms of us finally accepting the monstrousness within our own histories, our own cultures, our own political systems, as well as within ourselves, in order to bring about positive change.
Before this can occur on a large scale however, shouldn’t people first be guided and encouraged to fall in love with the subversive power of reading and learning before they venture on to the political battlefield of, say, the utopian imagination?
My rationale here is that since Gothicism is traditionally linked to Romanticism which, in turn, connotes ideas of aristocracy, high culture, and elitism, isn’t there a danger that so many who are either, for one reason or another, ill-read or uncultured, will be left behind? I’m thinking here, for example, of the workers who help to build the laptops, the writing desks and the office chairs upon which writers and academics research and compose their work.
JG: [LAUGHS] I really like, I really like this question because this is a very challenging question because it makes an excellent critique of Romanticism. And I would say that, yes, this book fits into what often gets called ‘Romantic Anti-Capitalism’. So ‘Romantic Anti-Capitalism’ was first coined by the Hungarian philosopher and communist, György Lukács, and Lukács thinks that ‘Romantic Anti-Capitalism’ is essentially irrational, and this is because it's tied up in as, exactly as you pointed out, these notions of high culture, of aristocracy, of the individual, but I would say that this is not the only mode of Romanticism that there is. There is also precisely this vision of mass of communalisation, of the commune of the mass over just the aristocrat ruling over us, and there is this idea of a kind of vision of life that embraces the complexity of the totality. So, yes, I would agree there is this belief in the kind of subversive, as you put it, the subversive power of reading and learning, but I think this wildly underestimates just how popular the Gothic always was, traditionally. Right, so the 18th and 19th century, the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to the Gothic novel as the trash of the circulating libraries, right? The stories of monsters were not simply for the aristocrat, and those who had their reading library at home, but monsters and the old Penny Dreadfuls, and the sensation fiction of the 19th century was beloved by an extremely literate and extremely poor group of readers. You would borrow your Gothic novels from the lending libraries rather than having to buy them for yourself, so many Gothic tales were first published as instalments in magazines and, yes, these were commercial enterprises, but they were read widely and massively by working-class people rather than some enlightened aristocrats sitting in an Ivory Tower. So the workers who help to build the laptops to writing desks and the office chairs, is there a danger that that so many who are ill-read might be left behind? I think we should never underestimate the ways in which working-class people have educated themselves and told their own stories. Also, the great kind of joy of thinking about horror is that it connects immediately to the realities of working-class life. The working-classes who know what it is to feel the absolute dread of the credit card statement dropping through the mail slot at the end of the month; the great fear that your landlord will jack up your rent by another 35 or 40 or 50 or 60%; the idea that one unlucky day or one tragic illness can really be the thing that completely ruins any semblance of security you might have, right. I think the great thing about the Gothic and horror is that it speaks very immediately to these concerns in ways that are elusive and referential and metaphorical, but are very connected to immediate fears, concerns and anxieties around bodily autonomy and bodily integrity, and our human finitude and fragility. So, yes, there is an elitism to Romanticism, but there is a revolutionary spirit in it too, and it's in that spirit that ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ has been written.
BG: Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Jon. It’s been an extremely illuminating discussion.
‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ is a serious, and challenging book. Its narrative stretches beyond the aesthetic confines of literature and film, bleeding into the real world of politics and people, their presence, their passions, and their purpose. It is highly recommended.
I’ve been Brett Gregory, editor of the UK arts, culture and academia website, Serious Feather, and the Spotify podcast, Serious Feather Arts.
Cheers.
Jon Greenaway is a horror expert, with a PhD from the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is the co-host of the leftist film analysis podcast Horror Vanguard and his work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Baffler and a host of other online publications. He lives and works in the North of England.
Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination
What does it mean to see horror in capitalism? What can horror tell us about the state and nature of capitalism?
Blending film criticism, cultural theory, and philosophy, Capitalism: A Horror Story examines literature, film, and philosophy, from Frankenstein to contemporary cinema, delving into the socio-political function of the monster, the haunted nature of the digital world, and the inescapable horror of contemporary capitalist politics.
Revitalizing the tradition of Romantic anticapitalism and offering a “dark way of being red”, Capitalism: A Horror Story argues for a Gothic Marxism, showing how we can find revolutionary hope in horror- a site of monstrous becoming that opens the door to a Utopian future.
For further information visit: Repeater Books
Interview Transcript
BG: From revulsion to revolution. Hi, my name’s Brett Gregory, and I’m the editor of the UK arts, culture, and academia website, Serious Feather, as well as the Spotify podcast, Serious Feather Arts. I’ve interviewed 19 authors, artists, and academics over the past year and a half, and today will be my 20th guest, the writer of a new political book called ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’.
BG: Hi, what’s your name, where do you work, and what are your research specialisms?
JG: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on the show. My name is Jon Greenaway. I'm currently an independent writer and researcher, and I specialise in Gothic Studies, Horror Studies, film, and Utopian Theory.
BG: You were awarded your PhD via the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies which, in turn, is attached to Manchester Metropolitan University. Could you please tell us a bit more about this research group?
JG: Yeah, so I was part of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies which is an incredible research centre in Manchester Metropolitan University. It has some of the country's leading experts, some of the world's leading experts on the Gothic, and offers undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral courses in Gothic Studies, encompassing everything from film to literature to popular culture. It's an incredible place, and it was a really special thing to get to be involved with at the time.
BG: Let’s start at the beginning. With examples from film and/or literature, how would you define Gothic horror in terms of style, content, and conventions?
JG: To Define Gothic horror in terms of its style, content and conventions is something that involves going back probably to the late 1700s. Generally, Sir Horace Walpole's ‘The Castle of Otranto’ which was published in 1764 is counted as being the sort of first true Gothic novel, and inaugurating a particular set of concerns and ideas. Most of these revolved around history, haunting, the supernatural. So to talk about the Gothic is one thing, but to talk about horror is another aspect to this genealogy. So a lot of the Gothic emerges from these aesthetic debates around literature more generally, particularly Edmund Burke's aesthetics and theory around sublimity, what the sublime is in literature. And the distinction that's generally drawn historically is that the Gothic is something that draws you to towards the sublime, it is an expansive feeling of awe, whereas horror is something that we recoil from. A really good example of an early horror novel is Matthew Lewis' late 1790s novel, ‘The Monk’, it features a lot of horrifying scenes, an awful lot of violence and magic and abduction, and it ends with the Inquisition and Satan appearing. So generally the Gothic is quite a controversial feel to give a concrete definition too. In terms of literature its high point is the 1760s through to about the 1830s with ‘Frankenstein’ really being one of the kind of final parts of this traditional conception of the Gothic. Because from there the Gothic hybridises, and goes into lots of other different forms, and moves away from its traditional conception of haunted castles, ghosts, and mysterious goings on in the night.
BG: And how would you define Gothic Marxism in terms of ideological aims, objectives, and historical background?
JG: In terms of Gothic Marxism, in terms of its ideological aims, objectives and historical background, there are a number of different kind of genealogies or traditions that I think you can draw from. I think one of the most underappreciated, but probably one of the most important, is a two-fold tradition that emerges out of French surrealism on the one hand, and the aesthetic and philosophical work of Walter Benjamin on the other, and both of them are interested in doing similar things. So Benjamin's work, particularly something like the great ruin of a book, ‘The Arcades Project’, is an attempt to investigate the fundamentally unfinished nature of history, and to try and give history itself a sort of dynamic, living charge. The surrealists are trying to do the same, but for the repressed or unconscious aspects of culture. That's why they were interested in things like automatic writing and the interpretation of dreams. Basically, at a sort of super foundational level, I would say that to have a Gothic Marxist account of culture is to take seriously the idea that history is not finished, that there are aspects of culture which are not simple irrationalisms that we have to get over or move on from. But these unfinished haunting or non-rational aspects of culture have deeply revealing things to tell us and teach us about history, the nature of politics, and the nature of subjectivity.
BG: Throughout ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ you frequently use the term ‘necropolitics’. Could you briefly explain this concept for us, its relationship to the Gothic genre, and how these might work together to help us productively critique the ideological drive behind neoliberalism?
JG: So ‘necropolitics’ is a coinage that I use in the book, or rather I describe contemporary neoliberalism is necrotic and this is not, I think, a super controversial way of thinking about it, but contemporary neoliberal capitalism is dealing with certain crises that it doesn't necessarily have the tools to resolve. The ideological promise of neoliberalism was the ‘responsibilisation’ and empowerment of the individual to achieve economic success, and we simply outsource the responsibilities of the state to the private market, and this leads to freedom, it leads to empowerment; but the institutions of contemporary liberal politics are decaying, if not outright dead. There are huge crises of representation and democracy, there are huge crises of wealth inequality, access to the various means of life are becoming increasingly precarious for huge amounts of people. So the aim here is to kind of draw a thread that connects all of these crises and gives them a kind of coherent identity, which is that the institutions of neoliberalism are in decay, but there is not yet anything that has clearly emerged that could replace those institutions.
BG: With this in mind you write extensively about Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ published in 1818 and, in particular, The Creature who has been [QUOTE] ‘stitched together from the bodies of the poor and the dead’. While this is an extremely evocative indictment of capitalism’s corporeal exploitation of the proletariat and the precariat, you argue that it’s The Creature’s often overlooked sentience in the novel, their articulation, their reading of Plutarch and Milton, which is their true subversive power. Would you care to explain this further?
JG: ‘Frankenstein’ is a really interesting novel, and it's far stranger than I think people who maybe haven't read it for a while think. One of my favourite things about Frankenstein's Creature – and I try to refer to The Creature rather than a Monster from the novel – is that The Creature, the great horror for Victor Frankenstein is that his creation can speak, his creation can reason, and there are these moving passages where The Creature recounts their own coming to self-consciousness. You know, they do read Volney, they do read Plutarch and Milton, and have a rational and philosophical approach to their own consciousness. The great horror for Victor Frankenstein is that his Creature speaks in the same discourses that he sees himself as having exclusive access to. The Creature is reasonable, he makes an appeal to Frankenstein as if Frankenstein is a judge in a court of law, and the response of Victor to this very impassioned defence of reasoned debate is violence.
BG: Interestingly, The Creature, particularly in the movie adaptations, is also superhuman and, we later discover, unable to die. If I remember correctly, you equate this characteristic with the notion that the poor in society and culture will never die either, and will continue to haunt capitalism and its dead-eyed, deluded disciples until the end of days. Am I right here, Jon, or have I got it wrong?
JG: The characterisation of The Creature in the novel with the notion that the poor in society and culture will never die either, and will continue to haunt capitalism until the end of days. [LAUGHS] I think, this is a nice way of thinking about it. If you think to the very end of the novel The Creature vanishes out of a window and is lost in the darkness, but is never completely eradicated. And I think there are so many ways that we can see the figure of Frankenstein's Creature as this very powerful, multivalent metaphor, yes, for the continued existence of the working class, no matter how marginalised and excluded they might become. But also The Creature has a revolutionary and disruptive potential in the course of the novel, so I think you're completely right, and I would totally agree with your argument, but I would also say that perhaps there is a more hopeful way of reading this that, yes, despite the apparent security of Victor Frankenstein, that great representative of the bourgeois middle classes on the edge of things, one that is completely on the edge of things there remains this kind of haunting figure of a revolutionary class. And it's not a surprise that as I sort of briefly touch on in the book, that Frankenstein's Creature was often used as a metaphor to respond to revolutionary uprisings and riots that would occur that the working class was seen as this Frankensteinian Monster that might overwhelm its master.
BG: In relation to this, what role do monsters play in our collective psyche, regardless of our wealth or poverty?
JG: The Creature and, I think, maybe monsters in the tradition of Gothic fiction, more generally, show that there's possibility for great rupture and disruption into what we take to be just normative standards of how the world should operate. I think if you look at the Latin roots for the word ‘monster’ it is both a warning and a sign for something, and what it is the sign of is something new coming into being. And, I think, in an era that seeks to kind of naturalise forces of exploitation, you know, people were constantly told that the way the world is, there's nothing that can be done about it. I think these monsters are kind of haunting the kind of popular imagination as signs and symbols of something else or something other. It may be better, it may be worse, but there is the possibility of change that can never be completely eradicated after all, and this is true with Frankenstein's Creature, but it's also true of a much more popular figure like the vampire. The monster always returns, right, the monster always comes back no matter how secure the victory might seem to be. There is still the possibility of the entire world being transformed again.
BG: You proceed to analyse Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ published in 1897, another incredibly influential icon from the Gothic genre, although, on the surface, they don’t enjoy a similar affiliation with the exploited proletariat which Victor Frankenstein’s creation does. That is to say, many of us would regard Count Dracula as being the aristocratic embodiment of early 20th century capitalism, feeding off the poor and the innocent to sate his own nefarious desires in order to expand his dominion.
You understand them from a different perspective, however. Firstly, as an immigrant property developer and, secondly, as a maternal figure, particularly with regards to their relationship with Mina and Jonathan Harker. Could you elaborate on this please?
JG: Yeah, this is a really interesting chapter, I think. ‘Dracula’ is often read in this kind of as a figure of capitalist predation, and I think the reading is valid, but it raises some problems that you have to kind of ignore or gloss over certain parts of the text. Quite literally the novel is about a lawyer going to a foreign country to help a foreign investor buy property in London. However, I think that's not the sole way of reading the novel. I'm very indebted particularly to sort of feminist critics like Katie Stone and Sophie Lewis who have talked about family abolition as a utopian programme, and there are a couple of things about Dracula that allow you to give this kind of counterintuitive reading to the novel. So Dracula, of course, does not work, and is a threat to the extremely patriarchal and heterosexual family structures, the social structures of the London that he's moving into. There is a kind of troubling, like, ambiguity, there is a troubling maternal side to Dracula who feeds Mina Harker from his breast, and kind of inducts her into a new family structure. And it's very telling that it's a group of men then that have to secure their sort of ownership of property, but also their own kind of like heterosexual neuroses has to be worked out in excluding Dracula. So Katie Stone who wrote this brilliant paper on Dracula as a utopian figure points out that he is representative of a sort of familial mode of connection that goes beyond work. The great horror of Dracula is that he doesn't need to accumulate capital, and he doesn't need to work for it like everyone else in the novel does. That's why I sort of close with drawing on Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, who wrote a great and very underappreciated pamphlet called ‘The Right To Be Lazy’ which is trying to get a kind of left critique of work and this valorisation of work, you know, that figures like Max Weber would call the Protestant ethic, the spirit of capitalism, this idea that work is in and of itself a kind of good thing or a positive thing. It's something that ‘Dracula’ as a novel manages to destabilize in some really interesting ways.
BG: As you quite rightly underscore, horror never goes away under capitalism since it’s an inherently destructive, cruel and murderous enterprise. In turn, to excuse or protect itself from the inhuman and unnatural crimes it commits minute by minute, you write that it engages in a process of ‘responsibilisation’: [QUOTE] ‘a state of politics in which systemic issues become something for which the individual has to take responsibility’ rather than, say, the government of the day. Could you clarify and illustrate this argument for us?
JG: So this is about this question of responsibilisation. A lot of it is sort of endemic, I think, especially in British politics, and it's something that was written about quite movingly by some people like Mark Fisher quite a few years ago in the immediate wake of the financial crisis of 2008. So, between 2010 to 2015, there was this big move towards … politicians would use buzzwords like ‘flexibility’ and ‘choice’, and that they would say that it was about empowering us, but really what it was about was about making sure that there was less for the state to do. So the great idea of ‘responsibilisation’ here can be tied to something like mental health, mental health care in the UK, and the rates of need for mental health care in the last decade have shot up almost exponentially, particularly among young people, and so this is a social problem. Obviously there's biomedical reasons behind any kind of health issue, but mental health and indeed our physical health is tied to our kind of social being. And one of the big reasons why you might be sick or you might be unwell is, let's say, you need to work two jobs because wages are so low, or you spend 75% of your income on rent because housing is so inaccessible. But really what the kind of support or message that we're given now is that we have to take responsibility for ourselves, we have to be taught how to be resilient rather than focused on trying to change the structures of the society within which we live. So it's a very small way in which – this is what Fisher referred to as ‘capitalist realism’, the sense that there is no major change possible – it's kind of inculcated into us as a sort of ideological law of the universe.
BG: In 2023 I interviewed the University of Stirling’s Dr. Darren Elliott-Smith about ‘Queer Horror, Marxism and Hollywood’ and, amongst other things, we discussed how queerness can explore itself and find itself within the horror genre, away from the heteronormative strategies of capitalism, and thus become a subversive and destabilising force.
In ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ you discuss the ongoing demonising and dehumanising of a group severely marginalised by mainstream politics and the media, the trans community, wherein, for example, trans people are regularly framed as predators or [QUOTE] ‘monsters at the door’.
Consequently, can trans people also explore themselves and find themselves within the conventional horror genre and/or the Gothic genre and, if so, in what specific ways?
JG: Yeah, I know of Darren Elliot Smith's excellent work on queer horror and the queer Gothic, one of many kind of amazing academics who've really done trailblazing work on this. And, I think, a really good thing to point out is that horror has always been a cultural form that those who are in some ways Othered or seen as outsiders have always been drawn to. So towards the end of ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ I talk a little bit about the ways in which British media discourses refer to trans people, and how this is in many ways a continuation and acceleration of similar discourses that were aimed towards lesbian and gay people a few generations earlier. There was this idea that they are kind of predatory, that they are these monsters at the door threatening the sanctity and purity of children. So … and I talked about this in the context of some excellent trans horror that's come out recently, particularly Allison Rumfitt’s superb novel ‘Tell Me I'm Worthless’, and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s excellent novel ‘Manhunt’. So I think the question is, can trans people see themselves represented in horror? I think the answer to that is absolutely, yes, but in what ways is to be determined by themselves. There has been some really exciting trans horror, I'm thinking of things like ‘I Saw the TV Glow’, but the point at which film generally has developed, this is still a very minor kind of sub-current in a lot of mainstream cinema. There's some really exciting work happening on trans histories in cinema, and so for a far better answer that than I could give to this question I'm going to recommend a book by Caden Gardner and Willow Maclay, two incredible trans film writers. It's called ‘Corpses, Fools and Monsters’ that came out the very same day as my book, and it's this really exhaustive history and deep dive into trans representation in film, and a kind of great contribution to this developing archive that we should be drawing from.
BG: Taking this a little further, could it be argued that the ‘horror’ expressed towards transgenderism by the heteronormative mainstream emanates from a fear and, maybe a suppressed awareness, that gendered identities are actually fluid and unstable, not natural or inevitable, or, as Judith Butler argues, ‘performative’? Moreover, since such issues arguably question the fundamental manner in which citizens are generally ordered and governed in society according to biological binary oppositions, capitalist institutions and organisations choose to demonise, marginalise and/or oppress trans communities, individuals, experiences etc. in an attempt to maintain their idea of the status quo, and thus remain in power?
JG: Yes, I absolutely think that's true. You mentioned Judith Butler and, I think, Butler's a really important point here. They've written quite extensively about the kind of fear of gender politics, and it's not always tied to specifically just trans people or LGBTQ people, but is part of a wider reactionary mode of politics that is extremely heteronormative and patriarchal. It’s seeking to police and define choice and agency of women so, particularly in the last few years as trans people have been writing and campaigning around the issues of rights and freedoms and autonomy, many, many people have pointed out that this discourse of gender ideology is a bulwark for a larger far more reactionary politics. And I think you've seen that in the British Conservative Party, you've certainly seen that in US Republicans, you've certainly seen that in populist movements like Bolsonaro in Brazil, that the monster is a kind of tool of political utility. So if you enact a discourse that seeks to create or to kind of categorise a certain kind of person into a monster, that becomes sort of like a permission to enact a wider set of politics.
BG: Unashamedly, your book puts forward a utopian vision in terms of us finally accepting the monstrousness within our own histories, our own cultures, our own political systems, as well as within ourselves, in order to bring about positive change.
Before this can occur on a large scale however, shouldn’t people first be guided and encouraged to fall in love with the subversive power of reading and learning before they venture on to the political battlefield of, say, the utopian imagination?
My rationale here is that since Gothicism is traditionally linked to Romanticism which, in turn, connotes ideas of aristocracy, high culture, and elitism, isn’t there a danger that so many who are either, for one reason or another, ill-read or uncultured, will be left behind? I’m thinking here, for example, of the workers who help to build the laptops, the writing desks and the office chairs upon which writers and academics research and compose their work.
JG: [LAUGHS] I really like, I really like this question because this is a very challenging question because it makes an excellent critique of Romanticism. And I would say that, yes, this book fits into what often gets called ‘Romantic Anti-Capitalism’. So ‘Romantic Anti-Capitalism’ was first coined by the Hungarian philosopher and communist, György Lukács, and Lukács thinks that ‘Romantic Anti-Capitalism’ is essentially irrational, and this is because it's tied up in as, exactly as you pointed out, these notions of high culture, of aristocracy, of the individual, but I would say that this is not the only mode of Romanticism that there is. There is also precisely this vision of mass of communalisation, of the commune of the mass over just the aristocrat ruling over us, and there is this idea of a kind of vision of life that embraces the complexity of the totality. So, yes, I would agree there is this belief in the kind of subversive, as you put it, the subversive power of reading and learning, but I think this wildly underestimates just how popular the Gothic always was, traditionally. Right, so the 18th and 19th century, the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to the Gothic novel as the trash of the circulating libraries, right? The stories of monsters were not simply for the aristocrat, and those who had their reading library at home, but monsters and the old Penny Dreadfuls, and the sensation fiction of the 19th century was beloved by an extremely literate and extremely poor group of readers. You would borrow your Gothic novels from the lending libraries rather than having to buy them for yourself, so many Gothic tales were first published as instalments in magazines and, yes, these were commercial enterprises, but they were read widely and massively by working-class people rather than some enlightened aristocrats sitting in an Ivory Tower. So the workers who help to build the laptops to writing desks and the office chairs, is there a danger that that so many who are ill-read might be left behind? I think we should never underestimate the ways in which working-class people have educated themselves and told their own stories. Also, the great kind of joy of thinking about horror is that it connects immediately to the realities of working-class life. The working-classes who know what it is to feel the absolute dread of the credit card statement dropping through the mail slot at the end of the month; the great fear that your landlord will jack up your rent by another 35 or 40 or 50 or 60%; the idea that one unlucky day or one tragic illness can really be the thing that completely ruins any semblance of security you might have, right. I think the great thing about the Gothic and horror is that it speaks very immediately to these concerns in ways that are elusive and referential and metaphorical, but are very connected to immediate fears, concerns and anxieties around bodily autonomy and bodily integrity, and our human finitude and fragility. So, yes, there is an elitism to Romanticism, but there is a revolutionary spirit in it too, and it's in that spirit that ‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ has been written.
BG: Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Jon. It’s been an extremely illuminating discussion.
‘Capitalism: A Horror Story’ is a serious, and challenging book. Its narrative stretches beyond the aesthetic confines of literature and film, bleeding into the real world of politics and people, their presence, their passions, and their purpose. It is highly recommended.
I’ve been Brett Gregory, editor of the UK arts, culture and academia website, Serious Feather, and the Spotify podcast, Serious Feather Arts.
Cheers.
Report
Alliance of Working-Class Academics Conference 2024:
Poverty, Class and Education - Conversations and Topics
Report written
by
Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
and
Brett Gregory
June 23rd 2024
by
Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
and
Brett Gregory
June 23rd 2024
The 3rd annual conference of the Alliance of Working-Class Academics (AWCA), in conjunction with The Scottish Poverty and Inequality Research Unit (SPIRU), was held at Glasgow Caledonian University on June 14th 2024.
Amidst the UK’s increasingly divisive and deadening economic and political climate, the overarching aims of the AWCA are to be attended to, admired and applauded:
1) Help academic colleagues overcome class-based barriers throughout their careers
2) Amass data on the economic, social, and cultural challenges facing working-class academics
3) Mentor and support working-class students
4) Develop best practices on recruiting, retaining, and meaningfully advocating on behalf of working-class faculty, staff, and students
5) Abolish global class discrimination
The focus this year was ‘Poverty, Class and Education – Conversations and Topics’ with specific attention being paid to working-class students in further or higher education who are suffering from low attendance, exclusion, isolation, alienation, mental health issues and high drop-out rates. Unthinkably, these are all typical features of the UK’s corporate education system in the 21st century which, it could be argued, are primarily ignited and fuelled by classism, inequality and poverty on an individual level, and by chronic underfunding and senior mismanagement at an institutional level.
The free-of-charge hybrid conference was attended by hundreds of lecturers, teachers, students and writers, alongside curious and concerned members of the general public. In turn, dozens of academics, researchers and practitioners from an extensive range of disciplines in education and the public sector presented an array of insightful papers. Characterised by in-depth experience, cutting-edge perspectives and imbued with a strong sense of moral duty, they examined in detail the routes, challenges and barriers which working-class students encounter before, during and after their journey through the institutional education system.
Dr. Neil Speirs from the University of Edinburgh, for instance, put forward a paper entitled ‘Rejecting the Coldness of the Hidden Curriculum Through Loving Acts of Solidarity’, accentuating that at the core of higher education there is a clash between Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘field’ (for instance, the values and practices of a working-class background) and ‘habitus’ (the values and practices of a middle-class university). This habitus is often embedded in the ‘hidden curriculum’, a method of situating, timing, resourcing and delivering lessons or lectures which prioritises and legitimises bourgeois understanding, expectations and ideals, i.e. a particular way of being. In turn, this then facilitates a specific construction of knowledge and behaviour which can then only lead to compliance with the dominant ideologies that existed in the past, and that still exist now. That is to say, ‘Do as you’re told, stop complaining and you’ll get your degree’. This can pressurise working-class students towards a divided habitus, a form of cognitive dissonance, which can result in detrimental consequences for their learning experience, academic progress and employment opportunities. Such students often recount impressions like ‘I’m not taken seriously in lessons’, ‘The lecturer clearly doesn’t like me’, and/or ‘I don’t think this education lark is for me’.
Education is never neutral, but instead always serves certain socio-cultural interests while impeding others. As a remedy to the reproduction of working-class jobs for working-class kids, and middle-class careers for middle-class children, Speirs considered Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of ‘hope and love’. This negates and rejects the coldness of the hidden curriculum, its unfairness and inequalities, by identifying, revealing, challenging and rejecting its veiled discriminatory narratives and performances. In response, educators should actively proffer ‘loving acts of solidarity’ and ‘compassion’ in order to begin to eradicate the dissatisfaction, frustration and alienation which working-class students frequently experience, as well as their disenchanting attendance figures and disproportionate drop-out rates. Of course, one major practical problem in the UK is that the time, energy, and commitment which would be required to adopt and consistently implement such a humanistic approach would be completely unrecognised and unrewarded by university management teams, distracted as they are by the sanctity of their Excel spreadsheets and the nobility of their neoliberalist liturgies. However, quoting Dr. Alpesh Maisuria, Speirs contends: ‘Only people working in solidarity can make history’.
Easier said than done, as Dr. Pamela Graham from Northumbria University explored in her presentation, ‘Trying to Juggle Study and Work: University staff reflections on supporting students experiencing financial hardship’. Here Graham analysed how materialist issues like the cost of accommodation, food, heating and travel can force students into excessive employment hours outside of education and which, inevitably, can then force upon them psychosocial and behavioural issues. Stress, fatigue, poor attention span, irritability, lack of group integration etc. can thus impact their course achievements, attendance and retention. This ‘real world’ struggle for such students – who may also be unable to stay awake in lectures, afford a key text for a particular module, or even buy the latest clothing items – can be then exacerbated by a sense of shame and a code of silence due to the stigmatisation of financial hardship amongst the wider student body.
For example, I (Brett Gregory) taught an Access to HE student in Salford in 2018 also worked nearly full-time for the gambling company, Ladbrokes Coral. He would wear the same tracksuit to lessons, sit alone in the corner, yawn constantly throughout, sigh audibly whenever an academic task was set, only to then angrily disappear for two weeks to carry out extra shifts at the bookies.
As Graham reminded us, working-class students often opt out of valuable work placements and extra-curricular activities due to the costs and time involved, thus placing their cultural capital into unmanageable debt. Moreover, they also have to contend with a pernicious prerequisite which has burrowed its way into the UK’s psyche: that individuals from a working-class background who choose to formally educate themselves are somehow traitorous, and are thus meant to personally struggle and suffer in order to succeed; to escape the defeatist demands of their part-time job in the service industries, and the perpetual petty criticisms of their working-class peers at the pub, the club, and the kebab house; to try and better their own lives once and for all, as well as those of their children who are yet to be born.
Just as memorably, Deirdre O’Neill from the University of Hertfordshire submitted an original and worthy initiative called ‘The Inside Film project: Radical Pedagogy, Prison and Class’ which focuses on short films produced by prisoners, ex-prisoners, and probationers who are almost exclusively poor and working-class. They are provided with filming equipment, and then attend workshops where they are taught the basics of camera operation, sound recording, scripting, storyboarding, and editing, alongside representations of class and race. Understandably, most of the participants are already media-savvy from years of consuming news reports, soap operas, commercials, movies and music videos, and so are familiar with the conventions of film and media language. This critical space however also taps into their potential to address the profoundly political role which the mainstream media plays in constructing societal beliefs, norms and values that, more often than not, cast the poor as antagonists, background characters, or simply ‘scenery’, if they are ever cast at all. Crucially, the initiative – as a form of intellectual and creative activism – doesn’t speak on behalf of, or over, the participants, but provides them with their own voice, agency and legitimacy. Facilitating personal and group creativity, this radical pedagogical approach provides opportunities for learners to understand and engage with the wider socio-economic and politico-legal context of their ‘crimes’: working-class experience as cultural consciousness in order to raise awareness about the class-based inequalities that are often responsible for the ‘deviancies’ of the marginalised and excluded. Interestingly, the films produced frequently focus on issues of justice and injustice, and can be seen in a way to echo Bertolt Brecht’s observation in The Threepenny Opera (1928): ‘What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?’
Of course, due to the high number of sessions at this year’s very thoughtful and very human AWCA conference, it was not possible to attend and cover everything; it is hoped however that an edited collection of submitted papers will be assembled and published. Furthermore, while the focus was predominantly on Scotland and the UK, the overseas experience was rightfully considered in, for instance, ‘First Nation access to higher education in Australia’ by Dr. Emma-Jaye Gavin from Federation University. Here, Gavin, a Garrwa Aboriginal woman from the Northern Territory, revealed the obscene statistic that, due to barriers of classism, racism and colonialism, not only did it take until 1966 to award a degree to a First Nation student, in today’s Australia First Nation people are more likely to go to prison than university. Indeed, she went on to explain that the Oceanic arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire continues to perpetuate scurrilous indigenous stereotypes and, in response, she outlines the following solutions: more financial support from academia and the government; outreach projects in high schools; ongoing support for decolonisation projects and anti-racist pedagogy; as well as more role models to help redirect the negativity surrounding First Nation family discourse about formal education.
In conclusion, it has long been recognised that the education system is central to the cultural and economic reproduction of wider social division. Higher education is typically unwelcoming and hostile to, for example, working class entrants, whereas the privileged who are able to navigate its middle-class habitus – its codes, culture, behaviour, and language – are often mistaken for having ability, are rewarded, and thus progress. This year’s Alliance of Working-Class Academics Conference however reminds us that there are many, many intelligent, insightful and intrepid individuals who are working day in and day out to redress these scales of injustice in an effort to encourage this wounded world of ours to become a far more sensible, safer and successful place.
Amidst the UK’s increasingly divisive and deadening economic and political climate, the overarching aims of the AWCA are to be attended to, admired and applauded:
1) Help academic colleagues overcome class-based barriers throughout their careers
2) Amass data on the economic, social, and cultural challenges facing working-class academics
3) Mentor and support working-class students
4) Develop best practices on recruiting, retaining, and meaningfully advocating on behalf of working-class faculty, staff, and students
5) Abolish global class discrimination
The focus this year was ‘Poverty, Class and Education – Conversations and Topics’ with specific attention being paid to working-class students in further or higher education who are suffering from low attendance, exclusion, isolation, alienation, mental health issues and high drop-out rates. Unthinkably, these are all typical features of the UK’s corporate education system in the 21st century which, it could be argued, are primarily ignited and fuelled by classism, inequality and poverty on an individual level, and by chronic underfunding and senior mismanagement at an institutional level.
The free-of-charge hybrid conference was attended by hundreds of lecturers, teachers, students and writers, alongside curious and concerned members of the general public. In turn, dozens of academics, researchers and practitioners from an extensive range of disciplines in education and the public sector presented an array of insightful papers. Characterised by in-depth experience, cutting-edge perspectives and imbued with a strong sense of moral duty, they examined in detail the routes, challenges and barriers which working-class students encounter before, during and after their journey through the institutional education system.
Dr. Neil Speirs from the University of Edinburgh, for instance, put forward a paper entitled ‘Rejecting the Coldness of the Hidden Curriculum Through Loving Acts of Solidarity’, accentuating that at the core of higher education there is a clash between Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘field’ (for instance, the values and practices of a working-class background) and ‘habitus’ (the values and practices of a middle-class university). This habitus is often embedded in the ‘hidden curriculum’, a method of situating, timing, resourcing and delivering lessons or lectures which prioritises and legitimises bourgeois understanding, expectations and ideals, i.e. a particular way of being. In turn, this then facilitates a specific construction of knowledge and behaviour which can then only lead to compliance with the dominant ideologies that existed in the past, and that still exist now. That is to say, ‘Do as you’re told, stop complaining and you’ll get your degree’. This can pressurise working-class students towards a divided habitus, a form of cognitive dissonance, which can result in detrimental consequences for their learning experience, academic progress and employment opportunities. Such students often recount impressions like ‘I’m not taken seriously in lessons’, ‘The lecturer clearly doesn’t like me’, and/or ‘I don’t think this education lark is for me’.
Education is never neutral, but instead always serves certain socio-cultural interests while impeding others. As a remedy to the reproduction of working-class jobs for working-class kids, and middle-class careers for middle-class children, Speirs considered Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of ‘hope and love’. This negates and rejects the coldness of the hidden curriculum, its unfairness and inequalities, by identifying, revealing, challenging and rejecting its veiled discriminatory narratives and performances. In response, educators should actively proffer ‘loving acts of solidarity’ and ‘compassion’ in order to begin to eradicate the dissatisfaction, frustration and alienation which working-class students frequently experience, as well as their disenchanting attendance figures and disproportionate drop-out rates. Of course, one major practical problem in the UK is that the time, energy, and commitment which would be required to adopt and consistently implement such a humanistic approach would be completely unrecognised and unrewarded by university management teams, distracted as they are by the sanctity of their Excel spreadsheets and the nobility of their neoliberalist liturgies. However, quoting Dr. Alpesh Maisuria, Speirs contends: ‘Only people working in solidarity can make history’.
Easier said than done, as Dr. Pamela Graham from Northumbria University explored in her presentation, ‘Trying to Juggle Study and Work: University staff reflections on supporting students experiencing financial hardship’. Here Graham analysed how materialist issues like the cost of accommodation, food, heating and travel can force students into excessive employment hours outside of education and which, inevitably, can then force upon them psychosocial and behavioural issues. Stress, fatigue, poor attention span, irritability, lack of group integration etc. can thus impact their course achievements, attendance and retention. This ‘real world’ struggle for such students – who may also be unable to stay awake in lectures, afford a key text for a particular module, or even buy the latest clothing items – can be then exacerbated by a sense of shame and a code of silence due to the stigmatisation of financial hardship amongst the wider student body.
For example, I (Brett Gregory) taught an Access to HE student in Salford in 2018 also worked nearly full-time for the gambling company, Ladbrokes Coral. He would wear the same tracksuit to lessons, sit alone in the corner, yawn constantly throughout, sigh audibly whenever an academic task was set, only to then angrily disappear for two weeks to carry out extra shifts at the bookies.
As Graham reminded us, working-class students often opt out of valuable work placements and extra-curricular activities due to the costs and time involved, thus placing their cultural capital into unmanageable debt. Moreover, they also have to contend with a pernicious prerequisite which has burrowed its way into the UK’s psyche: that individuals from a working-class background who choose to formally educate themselves are somehow traitorous, and are thus meant to personally struggle and suffer in order to succeed; to escape the defeatist demands of their part-time job in the service industries, and the perpetual petty criticisms of their working-class peers at the pub, the club, and the kebab house; to try and better their own lives once and for all, as well as those of their children who are yet to be born.
Just as memorably, Deirdre O’Neill from the University of Hertfordshire submitted an original and worthy initiative called ‘The Inside Film project: Radical Pedagogy, Prison and Class’ which focuses on short films produced by prisoners, ex-prisoners, and probationers who are almost exclusively poor and working-class. They are provided with filming equipment, and then attend workshops where they are taught the basics of camera operation, sound recording, scripting, storyboarding, and editing, alongside representations of class and race. Understandably, most of the participants are already media-savvy from years of consuming news reports, soap operas, commercials, movies and music videos, and so are familiar with the conventions of film and media language. This critical space however also taps into their potential to address the profoundly political role which the mainstream media plays in constructing societal beliefs, norms and values that, more often than not, cast the poor as antagonists, background characters, or simply ‘scenery’, if they are ever cast at all. Crucially, the initiative – as a form of intellectual and creative activism – doesn’t speak on behalf of, or over, the participants, but provides them with their own voice, agency and legitimacy. Facilitating personal and group creativity, this radical pedagogical approach provides opportunities for learners to understand and engage with the wider socio-economic and politico-legal context of their ‘crimes’: working-class experience as cultural consciousness in order to raise awareness about the class-based inequalities that are often responsible for the ‘deviancies’ of the marginalised and excluded. Interestingly, the films produced frequently focus on issues of justice and injustice, and can be seen in a way to echo Bertolt Brecht’s observation in The Threepenny Opera (1928): ‘What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?’
Of course, due to the high number of sessions at this year’s very thoughtful and very human AWCA conference, it was not possible to attend and cover everything; it is hoped however that an edited collection of submitted papers will be assembled and published. Furthermore, while the focus was predominantly on Scotland and the UK, the overseas experience was rightfully considered in, for instance, ‘First Nation access to higher education in Australia’ by Dr. Emma-Jaye Gavin from Federation University. Here, Gavin, a Garrwa Aboriginal woman from the Northern Territory, revealed the obscene statistic that, due to barriers of classism, racism and colonialism, not only did it take until 1966 to award a degree to a First Nation student, in today’s Australia First Nation people are more likely to go to prison than university. Indeed, she went on to explain that the Oceanic arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire continues to perpetuate scurrilous indigenous stereotypes and, in response, she outlines the following solutions: more financial support from academia and the government; outreach projects in high schools; ongoing support for decolonisation projects and anti-racist pedagogy; as well as more role models to help redirect the negativity surrounding First Nation family discourse about formal education.
In conclusion, it has long been recognised that the education system is central to the cultural and economic reproduction of wider social division. Higher education is typically unwelcoming and hostile to, for example, working class entrants, whereas the privileged who are able to navigate its middle-class habitus – its codes, culture, behaviour, and language – are often mistaken for having ability, are rewarded, and thus progress. This year’s Alliance of Working-Class Academics Conference however reminds us that there are many, many intelligent, insightful and intrepid individuals who are working day in and day out to redress these scales of injustice in an effort to encourage this wounded world of ours to become a far more sensible, safer and successful place.