Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London

217 Pages·2015·2.027 MB·English

by  Niall Martin

Iain Sinclair
Bloomsbury Studies in the City
Series Editors: Lawrence Phillips, Regent’s University London, UK; Matthew
Beaumont, Senior Lecturer in English, University College London, UK.
Editorial Board: Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London, UK);
Professor Brycchan Carey (Kingston University London, UK); Professor
Susan Alice Fischer (City University of New York, USA); Professor Pamela
Gilbert (University of Florida, USA); Professor Richard Lehan (University
of California, USA); Professor John McLeod (University of Leeds, UK); Alex
Murray, Lecturer (University of Exeter, UK); Professor Deborah Epstein
Nord (Princeton University, USA); Professor Douglas Tallack (University
of Leicester, UK); Professor Philip Tew (Brunel University, UK); Professor
David Trotter (University of Cambridge, UK); Professor Judith Walkowitz
(Johns Hopkins University, USA); Professor Julian Wolfreys (Loughborough
University, UK).
The history of literature is tied to the city. From Aeschylus to Addison,
Baudelaire to Balzac, Conrad to Coetzee and Dickens to Dostoevsky, writers
make sense of the city and shape modern understandings through their
reflections and depictions. The urban is a fundamental aspect of a substantial
part of the literary canon that is frequently not considered in and of itself
because it is so prevalent.
Bloomsbury Studies in the City captures the best contemporary criticism on
urban literature and culture. Reading literature, film, drama and poetry in
their historical and social context and alongside urban and spatial theory,
this series explores the impact of the city on writers and their work.
Titles in the Series:
New Suburban Stories
Edited by Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen
Irish Writing London: Volumes 1 and 2
Edited by Tom Herron
London in Contemporary British Literature
Edited by Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Lynn Wells
Salman Rushdie’s Cities
Vassilena Parashkevova
G.K. Chesterton, London and Modernity
Edited by Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby
Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age
James Peacock
Iain Sinclair
Noise, Neoliberalism and the
Matter of London
Niall Martin
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2015
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-7484-8
ePDF: 978-1-4725-7486-2
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Contents
Abbreviations vii
Introduction - ‘Doctored maps, speculative alignments’:
Iain Sinclair and the Matter of London 1
Noise and Iain Sinclair 10
The return of the unselected 14
Noise as parasite 18
Staging and the locative effect of noise 20
1 Reforgotten Cities: Noise and the Politics of Method 27
Finding form 27
The locked shutter 29
Walking the city: Psychogeography as cut-up 38
The ‘John Bull printing set’ and small-press politics 47
Reforgetting: Forms of complicity 51
The walk as spatial collage 54
2 Parasitic Poetics: Lud Heat and the noise of genre 59
Background noise: Lud Heat and its contexts 60
The ‘charting instinct’: Long poems, big cities 64
‘These facts fade. The big traffic slams by’:
Art in absolute and abstract space 72
‘[I]n there for the duration’: Poetry as workplace 77
3 The Vessels of Wrath: Noise and Form in Downriver 87
The empty vessel 87
‘[N]o female sound’: Noise and narrativity in Downriver 92
The locked room 98
‘[No] sides to take’: The fiction of disorientation 104
Opposition in a world without sides 108
The ‘vessels of wrath’: Satire and cynicism 116
vi Contents
4 Between Archive and Ash: Rodinsky’s Room 121
The solemn mystery of the reappearing room 121
Noise as lieu de mémoire 123
Room as archive 125
Lichtenstein and noise as redemption 128
Sinclair and the production of absence 132
Ghost storage 138
5 Roadworks: Orbiting the Orison 141
The politics of bus stops 143
The road as parasite 149
An unpeopled country: Misrecognition and
reforgetting on the Great North Road 160
Conclusion - Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project 179
Works Cited 188
Index 199
Abbreviations
AA Sinclair, I. (2013), Austerlitz & After: Tracking Sebald, London: Test
Centre.
AS Sinclair, I. and Klinkert, R. (2007), Ah! Sunflower, The Picture Press,
DVD.
CC Sinclair, I. (1996), Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology, London:
Picador.
D Sinclair, I. (1991), Downriver, London: Paladin.
DB Sinclair, I. (2007), Debriefing, The Picture Press, DVD.
DD Sinclair, I. (2007), ‘Diving Into Dirt’, in S. Gill Archaeology in Reverse,
London: Nobody in Association with the Archive of Modern Conflict.
DS Sinclair, I. (2004), Dining on Stones, London: Hamish Hamilton.
EO Sinclair, I. (2005), Edge of the Orison, London: Penguin.
GM Sinclair, I. (2011), Ghost Milk, London: Hamish Hamilton.
HRE Sinclair, I. (2009), Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, London: Hamish
Hamilton.
KMD Sinclair, I. (1971), The Kodak Mantra Diaries, London: Albion Village
Press.
LCD Sinclair, I. (2006), London City of Disappearances, London: Hamish
Hamilton.
LH Sinclair, I. (1998), Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge, London: Granta.
LO Sinclair, I. (2002), London Orbital, London: Granta.
LOf Sinclair, I. and Petit, C. (2002), London Orbital, Illuminations, DVD.
LOT Sinclair, I. (1997), Lights Out for the Territory, London: Granta.
LT Sinclair, I. (2001), Landor’s Tower, London: Granta.
RD Sinclair, I. (1994), Radon Daughters, London: Cape.
RR Lichtenstein, R. and Sinclair, I. (2000), Rodinsky’s Room, London: Granta.
SD Sinclair, I. (2013), Silenic Drift, London: Strange Attractors.
SM Sinclair, I. (1999), Sorry Meniscus, London: Profile Books.
WG Sinclair, I. (2002), White Goods, Uppingham: Goldmark.
WST Sinclair, I. (1995), White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, London: Vintage.

Introduction
‘Doctored maps, speculative alignments’:
Iain Sinclair and the Matter of London
Assembled over forty years of charting London’s ‘unresolved’ and ‘reforgotten’
spaces, Iain Sinclair’s account of the city where he lives and works is
simultaneously one of the most distinctive visions of the urban condition
at the dawn of the twenty-first century and, this study will argue, one of the
most compelling. As a writer and film-maker, Sinclair has chronicled London’s
transformation from a down-at-heel former imperial metropolis into a node in
what sociologist Saskia Sassen has dubbed the network of ‘global cities’ (2005).
In so doing, he has described the peculiar and often paradoxical spaces that
emerge when the lived reality of urban life seems incompatible with inherited
ideas of national identity and civic function. Visually, his work presents us
with a city of decaying Victorian asylums and motorway hotels, allotments and
shopping malls, ‘retail landfill’ and pop-up art spaces in former synagogues. As
such, it is a London characterized by its familiar unfamiliarity – an uncanny
London that in its particularity reflects a world where cities are both the same
all over and places of encounter with cultural strangeness.
The tools he has used to explore this city reflect the peculiarity of its
topology. ‘The matter of London’, he writes, ‘is exposed by doctored maps,
speculative alignments, black propaganda. The revenge of the disenfranchised’
(LOT: 26). Although applied to the operations of the mysterious London
Psychogeographical Association, it is an inventory which provides a checklist
of the devices deployed in Sinclair’s own poetry, fiction, essays and films. Maps
derived from the world of nation states that first emerged in Medieval Europe,
the world that found its literary expression in the Matters of Britain and France,
are of little use in getting your bearings in Millennial London. For, where
the Matters of Britain and France, the legends of Arthur and Charlemagne,
are stories of aggregation and political and imaginative enfranchisement, the