Examining four-dimensional life: In Conversation with Laurence Scott

Prior to the release of his debut book 'The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World', I met with Laurence Scott to discuss the ideas and themes that inspired and shaped his thinking.

Read my review of the book here.

MJ
Jean Baudrillard famously said ‘we live in an age of more and more information and less and less meaning’ – what I sense you are saying in your book is that this information takes on new meanings that can only have real resonance with those living within this four-dimensional realm. How far would you see your idea of the ‘four-dimensional human’ building upon Baudrillard’s ‘hyper-reality’ or Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’, or do you think they are now quite outdated?

LS
I think that all of those philosophers who were getting more and more aware of increasing mediatisation were really on-the-money; my book is just a hyperbolic version.

Where I really love Baudrillard is in the image of the desert space, that is a great metaphor for this really strange blankness... he saw the desert space as a big projection screen onto which we, and America particularly, project an image of itself. The desert is one of the most potent images of contemporary life.

MJ
I thought that was a really interesting section... particularly regarding the Google Mapping of the desert. I read recently that they are now considering mapping part of the bottom of the ocean. They’re almost creating in reality that short Jorge Luis Borges piece ‘On Exactitude in Science’ in which the professional geographers create a map to exact scale of the territory and covers the entire area.

LS
I think that’s a new lament now actually, but look back at the Romantics against the material brutality of industrialisation for the loss of the pastoral. In a world of service industries it’s enough for us to sense this in the categorisation and slicing up of everything; we see a marked increase in that in terms of our loss of the pastoral.

MJ
Throughout the book you adopt the ambivalent, almost celebratory, tone of J.G. Ballard. In the epilogue though you worry whether you’ve been too ‘alarmist’ and are keen to ward off the ‘Demon of Melodramatic Prophesies’ – why did you choose this strategy?

LS
I was very cautious, as I mentioned in the epilogue, because I’m at the perfect age to be very nostalgic for a kind of ‘lost world’, writing this in my early-30s. But I think that’s been true forever and so I wanted to be careful not to create another predictable lament.

But also, I hate the idea of generalising people’s experiences online, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I look around and tend to write perhaps more about the uneasiness and some of the strange anxieties mainly because that’s an easy thing to write about... ecstasy is a lot harder to grasp. But I also look around and see people really brimming with joy, connections, solace, comfort, and just pure wit... I know a lot of the stuff I read online really enriches me.

So there couldn’t be one single moral guide and it isn’t even that interesting a proposition.

MJ
I suppose the success of the book for me lies in that you aren’t taking a firm moral standpoint. Nicholas Carr’s book ‘The Shallows’ as an example - a good book, but there’s almost the increasingly resurgent cry of the neo-Luddite about it.

This leads to another question – the sensation of Google stifling particularity or the presumption of original thought. Do you see the creative arts as facing a real dilemma in terms of how they incorporate the digital dimension? Might we see (or are we already seeing) a heavy reliance on nostalgia and pre-Internet time periods?

LS
Yeah, that’s a really good question. There was a section of the book, which I didn’t end up including, looking at dramatic irony. I was thinking that you could define dramatic irony as something’s ‘being on stage’ and another thing’s ‘being off stage’, that are loaded with meaning. It’s all about the imbalance of knowledge; if everyone is disclosed how do you get these levels and that’s a big part of where we get tension from.

I just wrote a review of ‘Unfriended’... I found it really interesting because what they did was to make the connectivity the drama, whereas people had been saying something like ‘Romeo and Juliet’ would never have happened if they’d had cell-phones because they could’ve just texted each other!

So digital life collapses a lot of dramas, but with ‘Unfriended’ the horror was that everyone was being pulled closer and closer together and being forced to reveal things about each other. That’s been one of the first examples where I’ve seen a creative dramatisation of this claustrophobia and breathlessness.

But it is a huge problem, you can write any line down as a writer, Google it and find out it may already have been said; it is the dictionary of absolutely everything!

MJ
From what you were saying about ‘Unfriended’, it just reminded me of a Japanese horror film from a few years ago ‘Pulse’ which I found really intriguing... it reflected the generation of young Japanese becoming hermit-like and living entirely through, at that time, the very new technology of the internet.

LS
I think a commenter on the article mentioned that it was derivative of ‘Pulse’.

Regardless, that hermitically-sealed room will be where the future drama will come from and the horror genre is really good at that because the big irony of [‘Unfriended’] is that whilst they are apparently all together when, as it were, the blade hits the skin, there’s no one actually there to help. I’d say the artists of the present have to deal with the intense melancholy.

But that isn’t altogether that new when you think about the 19th century emotions and the rise of modernity and people being gathered together in cities and the atomisation of that.

MJ
Just as the Camp Grounding slogans such as ‘the most important status we’ll update is our happiness’ would have meant nothing to the original boy scouts, my sense while reading the book was that no one born today as very much a ‘digital native’ would grasp its investigatory quality or forensic examination given that all this is just their world/their normal, would you agree?

LS
I’ve taught bits of this to students in their early-20s and they seemed to totally get the ironies of it... anyone younger, I’m not sure what they’d make of it, maybe it does rely on at least a 1980s-childhood just to get a sense of what we’re missing that they never had. Though they must have different fantasies about where they get their escape from or where they get their sense of peace, isolation or remoteness.

MJ
The book refers to the Savile scandals – ‘the broader cultural mood that feels the proximity of its past, its accessibility, a sense that it has been preserved for our moral re-evaluation’... do you see this as something that can only continue now, especially post-Snowden, in an age where anonymous apps are targeting young people under the auspices of offering privacy?

LS
That was quite a careful theory I put forward. With digital life there is the sense that nothing is ever really lost, things leave traces and old crimes deserve to be reconsidered and morally re-evaluated.

The flip side of that, where there isn’t actually grotesque criminal activity involved, is this relentless presence of the past in peoples’ lives. All this tainting of Hollywood actors who you’ve quite liked and then you hear they’ve done something in the past; it’s almost as though this has been a piece of radiation at the bottom of the sea leeching stuff out.

It does give a strange sense that we’re hauling our pasts behind us all the time and asked to be accountable, not necessarily in a sensational way, but the way nothing can be off-the-cuff, there can be no such thing as misspeaking.

Remember that beautiful time when you could wake up feeling a bit icky about what you might’ve said the night before at a party, whereas now everything is on record. When I think about that too much that’s when I get dreams of desert-scapes..!

MJ
I get the impression now as well that this ‘haulage of the past’ is directly related to the imbalance of demographics, the ‘grey generation’ that have saturated our cultural lives with their produce... the Rolling Stones constantly on tour, that sort of thing.

LS
It is incredible. But that’s the real oedipal thing isn’t it? That’ll be the big affect to deal with, the simulacrum of everything being a copy of something else...

MJ
People like Umberto Eco and Baudrillard were writing about the Disneyland culture and the simulacrum of that... the problem is that this was perhaps only at one or two removes from ‘the real’ whereas now, like you say in the book, there’s almost this endless hall of mirrors of replication.

LS
I agree, and there’s a dreamy ‘wonderland’ quality to it, but at the same time, cutting through all that is quite a brutal solidification in terms of privacy and anonymity.

MJ
Early on in the book you touch on the internet’s early promotion as an egalitarian realm free from hierarchy and property power. I wonder how you see that as having fared in light of the Occupy movement that you suggest was stalled by a lack of progressive movement.

Also, the Arab Spring which was lit by the touch paper of social media but quickly dissipated under the very three-dimensional pressures of control, ideology and violence?

LS
We shouldn’t be too surprised when utopian visions don’t quite pan out how we wanted them to! It is quite stark that the manifesto was a kind of disembodiment, a move away from the corporeal self, and what’s happened is that it’s been literally incorporated.

The students I teach and those younger are coming up with the sense that they’re mini-corporations who have their own publicity departments, PR departments, when they study abroad they have to be their own tourist board, etc. It feels as though the celebrity culture of the 90s and 00s was setting us up for this, teaching us what celebrity-dom means and allowed us to then transplant that. I wonder whether the idea of celebrity has been eroded because everyone has that possibility now...

MJ
I’m sure it’s due to the celebrity culture of the 90s morphing into the ‘celebrity of everybody’ in the 00s with reality TV as the vanguard...

LS
And everyone’s meeting in a strange middle where an aspect of celebrity is now revealing the domestic space, and I wonder at what point in the algorithm is it decided that this is where they’ll share a child’s birthday party or whatever...?

MJ
The economic claustrophobia you describe, whereby it seems you can’t do or buy anything without fuelling or legitimising forces we might otherwise object to... do you get the sense that this tacit knowledge exemplifies our personal insignificance and lack of power and influence to change and assists with the growing weight of apathetic inertia?

LS
Yeah, when the best expression of morality is an economic one it’s a very dreary state of affairs! Because it relies on the fact that there is a moral competitor all the time and that isn’t necessarily the case. So unless you’d rather not buy anything and just not participate in a consumer society at all, you’re stuck!

Thinking about this in terms of just the morality of people’s ‘digital brands’, the culture of life which is its own currency – you have to get so many followers or so many ‘likes’ – there’s a real moral question to that because if we load that with value and currency then it has all sorts of ramifications on the examples I give, such as the ‘click farms’.

MJ
I found that quite astonishing. Those must surely be an incarnation of some kind of Marxian hell!

LS
It’s just so satirical! Its sweat converted to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and that constant jubilation. That’s one of the awful things about it all, this cynical commoditisation of smiles.

MJ
Reading that section reminded me of a friend of mine who worked a few years ago on helping produce an independent film. He told me that one of his tasks during the marketing stage was to sit on YouTube and refresh the trailer over and over again just to ramp up the viewing figures.

LS
Exactly. We’re living in an age where almost every technological breakthrough has been already imagined.

When you were talking about the stifling older generation – even our innovations have a retro quality to them and datedness. Captain Picard had an iPad in 1989! I remember watching The Simpsons in the 90s and them joking about picture-phones and Skype, so it’s one thing to say it’s hard to write a story that hasn’t been done before but now even our gadgets have a slight passé feel to them.

MJ
I certainly sensed that last year at the Barbican's big digital technologies exhibition. There were all these interesting futuristic displays and yet the thing you couldn't get near for the crowds were the old-school Pacman and Space Invaders arcade games machines!

There is certainly the sense though that we’ve seen all this before isn’t there? The oppression and control metamorphosing into new forms, like Edward Bernays and his ‘happiness machines’ which was all about engineering positive thought to keep the masses docile and happy through consumption.

Now we have moved on to charity as a commodity in itself with things like the ‘ice bucket challenge’ and ‘clicktivism’...

LS
Yeah I meant to write about the ‘ice bucket challenge’ actually, and the sense that other charities then had to compete to come up with something equally gimmicky to capture the viral imagination like that.

It does us a great disservice I think, there’s a lot of anxiety, the idea that we won’t be able to engage with anything unless it’s instantly amusing or we’ve already seen it before in some variation.

MJ
Charity campaigns might almost become pastiches of themselves...

LS
Don’t you think that absurdism of pouring the ice over the head does come at times when it seems increasingly oppressive? There’s a Jean-Paul Sartre novel [‘The Age of Reason’] - WWII is approaching, the Spanish Civil War has just begun, France is in complete paralysis. It’s a very melancholy novel, two lovers, in a very Sartre way, meet in a bar and they have a game where they stab each other in the hand.

There is a sense of the ‘ice bucket challenge’ being like that; this shock to the system as the purer form of sensation that we were craving in some way, or something that hadn’t been done before, having to turn to the body.

I’ve not read much of it but the book ‘My Struggle’ by Karl Ove Knaussgard... the first few pages are these descriptions of the innards of the body and imagining the organic life of the body as this vast Russian landscape... so there’s no real space anymore, even at the cellular level you had to magnify that up to get the vistas.

MJ
Do you foresee a gradual rise in wilful ascetism, a rejection of the ‘fourth dimension’? Or, as you touch on, has ascetism as a ‘thing’ or lifestyle choice already been colonised by the digital, with mindfulness podcasts and meditation apps, etc.?

LS
That’s one of the big terrors of the claustrophobia, even the exodus choice is also somehow internalised.

I think there will be, it’ll be interesting to see what people tolerate, there’s these two quite mutually exclusive strands where there seems to be this complete reliance – what would my social life be like without it? What would my business be like without it? – especially since people are becoming freelance and not embedded within the mechanisms of an institution, to survive in that milieu we’re forced to have this digital presence, even for romance.

At the same time it’s hard to find people with a pure sense of enthusiasm for it and that’s putting it too mildly – it’s hard to find someone without some degree of panic or weariness or a sense of ‘get me out of here!’

MJ
Which is amazing after something like the Snowden revelations, which were met with just a chorus of shrugs...

LS
It is about what you can bear and it’ll depend upon the next generation to see how weird they think this kind of interaction is and whether they can put up with the ghostliness of it or whether they won’t even notice.

MJ
Lastly, what do you plan on working on next?

LS
There’s a book of essays which I’ll be doing. And also a novel that I had in mind before writing this book, but it’s very inchoate at the moment.

REVIEW - 'Accepting Reality: The University Years' - Saimon A. King

‘Accepting Reality’ is Saimon A. King’s second collection of short fiction that, as the title suggests, documents the writer exercising his skills in a more rounded, reflective and accomplished manner than his first collection ‘Confronting Reality’.  Initially a mutual correspondent of mine, King has since become a good friend, and it is pleasing indeed to see his highly idiosyncratic and scatological style growing in strength and confidence; occasionally lapsing into flights of absurdity and solipsism, but further expanding in breadth of influence and subject.

Growing up in Chile, only moving to England at age 11, King’s prose contains within itself the ambivalence and aloof alterity of the natural ‘outsider’, most discernible when occasionally attempting to characterise the quotidian or the mundane, as opposed to his preferred portrayal of the beleaguered obsessive, lost in a tempest of solitude, introspection and isolation-induced despair.

He often takes as inspiration the lives of figures such as Olivier Messiaen in a touching story reflecting on the transcendental quality of art (‘Quartet for the end of time’); the obscure pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus in a story about all the chance moments of history expunged in the flames of time, while others manage to resist the perpetual flux to become mythology (‘Consigned to Mythology’); and the Russian writer Nikolay Gogol who, in a fit of spiritual despair, was impelled to destroy his work (‘Burned Manuscripts’).  The intellectual intent of these experimental pieces is evident; King is seeking to explore the parameters of his own psyche, his foibles and motivations through the lens of these seminal true-life figures.

Written over a period between 2011 and 2014, the stories gain in strength as they progress which is promising in and of itself.  What is equally promising is that, in parallel, the initially overt influences on his work begin to fade to the periphery; evidence of a gradual but very definite formulation of his own ‘voice’.

Indeed, the first story ‘8pm in Buenos Aires’, depicting the protagonist’s wanderings around the Argentine capital having just watched Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’, resurrects several of those foremost South American influences as ghosts – Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Roberto Arlt.

King’s predilection for political theory, for philosophy and for the creative arts frequently enforce their weight upon the texts; more than once reflecting upon the importance of the literary canon and intellectual enquiry as being the most profound mode of existence.  There seems to be a constant tug-of-war between rational pragmatism and irrationality, even nihilism, being waged through the stories alongside a quest for understanding and self-realisation (most successfully, I felt, in the Borgesian tale ‘The Hermit and the Despot’).

For all of his periphrastic ambition, King’s style is still, one can discern easily, of an inchoate form (as he himself concedes in the Preface, ‘several stories are clumsily written’).  He occasionally seems to stumble over his own feet with jarring turns-of-phrase that sit more than a little uncomfortably; delinquent phrases tossed like stink-bombs down the otherwise elegant corridors of his prose.  He can be prone to the odd clunky solecism (for instance, ‘verminous liquid’, ‘motes of dust coaxed over...’), and clichés that do disservice to the high-minded frame of the narrative (for instance, ‘drink like a fish’, ‘I slept like a log’, and particularly, a cringe-worthy sexual metaphor involving Dracula).

Such quibbles regarding a formative writing style aside however, the wealth of imaginative ideas is palpable, particularly, to my mind at least, in the pieces that King himself appears keen to disregard in the afterword.  There is the joyously nonsensical absurdism of ‘Hit the North!’,  in which an inhabitant of a flourishing neoliberal South of England takes a bizarre journey to the nuclear wasteland of the north, encountering Mark E. Smith who has become the immortal leader of a mutated Fall.  There is also the Freudian screenplay ‘My Vinyl Fetish’ in which six characters, five of whom appear to be different manifestations of King’s personality, sit around and discuss Captain Beefheart, Van Morrison and Bach records.

Ironically, where King’s writing is at its most comfortable, assured and imagistic is the incidental piece ‘Valperaiso’ (dismissed in the afterword as an experiment in naturalism), which belies the versatility and future potential of his work.

As oblique, ambiguous, even knowingly difficult, as many of these efforts undoubtedly are, they demonstrate just the kind of absurdist and subversive literary mind that in years gone by may well have thrived but nowadays seem lamentably redundant.  The challenge for King now is to iron out the occasional clumsiness, hone his voice further and embark upon something more substantial, of a longer form. It’s encouraging to believe that this strange creature of creative flight is only just learning how to stretch his wings.

Check out Saimon's blog here.

In Conversation with Will Self

Will Self is one of those increasingly rare and precious figures in contemporary British culture; a polemical and voracious man of letters with an oceanic intellect that crashes in prolific waves upon the sprawling beach of his fiction and journalism. He is a writer who fully personifies Montaigne's notion of the 'observed life'.

That Self is still able to provoke ire and fascination in equal measure renders him a castaway on the desert island of literary notoriety along with perhaps only Martin Amis. (Bret Easton Ellis' purchase on the island may have slipped somewhat in recent years, leaving him hopelessly frolicking in the social media froth, whilst the unlikely figure of Hilary Mantel may have parachuted down in recent weeks after the furore of her story 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher', but it remains to be seen as to whether she makes herself at home or seeks a swift and redemptive airlift.)

His recent provocations on George Orwell, the impending demise of the serious novel, and the cult of the 'dickhead hipster' amply demonstrate how Self has long sought to use his prose as a wrecking ball to dismantle the collective delusions and popular myths of our society.

I've gone to the Archway Methodist Church to see Self give a reading from his new novel 'Shark' as part of the 'Archway with Words' literary festival, and thereafter to hopefully cadge an interview, a long-held personal ambition. As the Q & A session winds up, the nerves begin to race around the circuitry of my body as if they were late for an important meeting with a host of other electrochemicals.

Having answered a battery of questions from the diverse audience and sat at the end of a production line of people wanting their books signed and selfies snapped, he is quite reasonably tired and keen to keep things brief. "I can only spare you 10 minutes or so", he stipulates as we mooch outside so that he can smoke. My mind begins to panic over the catalogue of questions I had stored up; I begin to rifle through them like a frantic homeowner choosing prized possessions to rescue from rising floodwater.

We sit on a bench adjacent to the Archway intersection where Junction Road collides with Holloway Road amidst a staccato rhythm of sluggish traffic punctuated by the streamlined shriek of emergency sirens. Fumbling with my tatty sheet of questions prepared the night before, I begin to appreciate just how out of my depth I may be, attempting to engage in conversation with one of Britain's most intimidating intellectuals, as though I were a tennis novice trying to sustain a rally with a Wimbledon champion.


MJ: In your new book Shark, the image of the shark manifests itself in all kinds of allegorical forms. Do you like to think of the shark as being the menacing threat of our own irrationality, or even insanity, constantly swimming beneath the surface of our psyche?

WS: Yeah, I think that is the main meaning of the title, but specifically this idea that the release of nuclear fission into the world was a new kind of demonism. It’s not that people hadn’t been irrational or crazy beforehand, because clearly they had, but I think the inception of nuclear warfare made everybody psychotic in a strange way. It’s somewhere in the book that Zack Busner thinks, ‘how can you respect any authority or government when you know that they’re stockpiling the means for your total annihilation?’

The theory that was so influential on R.D. Laing, and the other anti-psychiatrists, was the ‘double-bind’ - it’s basically like mummy saying [aggressively] ‘I LOVE YOU!’ It’s two conflicting messages at once, and particularly for those of us who grew up in the Cold War, we felt the very solidity of the world being totally called into question, the fact that it could shiver and liquefy before your eyes. It’s a very shark-like thing.

MJ: Do you think there’s any weight to the notion that our collective cultural fascination and foreboding of them stems from the shark’s evolution many millennia ago to a specimen of near-perfection? They are symbolic almost of an ‘anti-progress’ which goes entirely against the humanist ‘faith in progress’ towards some kind of unattainable ideal. Do we perhaps have species envy?

WS: Yeah, I hadn’t really considered it in quite that light, but it’s an extremely good observation. I didn’t so much think of that, and I kinda wish I had actually!

I reviewed a book called Deadly Powers about the origins of human nemesis, which really goes back to Aristotle and beyond, that human art starts in the mimicry of animals. Of course, the top predators are incredibly important in the mythology of the traditional peoples, and normally sharks are used to construct chimeras (mixtures of humans and animals), so that idea is very much lying behind it.

But yes, I think that’s right, you’ve put it very well, they fly in the face of the Enlightenment; they’re ‘steampunk’ in a sense that it’s a genre founded on the idea of discontinuous technology. But the paradox of steampunk of course, is that this world is steampunk, we live in a world of discontinuous technologies and it’s really just a camp form of that.

---

Thankfully by now I feel I've piqued Self's interest somewhat and as he lights up a neat roll-up the pleasant aroma of herbal tobacco drifts in curlicues around the bench.

MJ: Through your writing I discovered a writer that I now love more than I think any other – J.G. Ballard, who you’ve said was a mentor-figure to you. I remember reading Crash when I was about 18 and it really did change my life in some way...

WS: Yeah, it is a great book.

MJ: Do you share Ballard’s wary, but almost gleeful, ambivalence about the onward march of new technology? Or do you think humankind is gradually surrendering itself to technological advances that it really shouldn’t?

WS: I share Jim’s curious ambivalence. I find it, not so much in shiny, flashy gadgets, but in the city. I loathe what money is doing to this city [London], how it’s grinding any sense of community or comity out. You know, the big thing about London was that municipal socialism worked here in a way and it did level things out a bit, but that’s all now being thrown into reverse. But at the same time I can’t help but love the Shard! I find all that big construction really exhilarating.

MJ: I really like the fact that the guy who designed the Walkie-Talkie building [William H. Rogers], the one that burns people’s cars, designed a similar one in Las Vegas that did exactly the same thing and no one thought to do any kind of preliminary investigation into the guy’s past form...

WS: Yeah, but that’s just a fuck up isn’t it, it is quite funny.

No, I find high buildings exhilarating. I went down the Crossrail tunnel the other day; it’s useless but you can’t help but be amazed by these civil engineering projects, and the city’s always like that, it’s always ambivalent. And I think in our era, the Enlightenment project looks very threadbare, so even the technology and progress ‘boosters’ are finding it hard. It’s no coincidence that ‘sustainable’ has become not a buzzword but a kind of ‘nonce word’.

MJ: Yeah, it means nothing...

WS: Yeah, ‘I went for a sustainable shit’. Oh really?!

MJ: It’s like ‘growth’, what does ‘growth’ actually mean?

WS: Well, sustainable does mean growth now. It has a very strict meaning of course; it comes from environmental science, and it means the behaviour of a species that isn’t a long-term threat to the environment. But now it just means anything you want it to mean!

Taking this as my cue, I steer the conversation towards politics, trying to explain the ideological joust that charges on within my mind. On the one side is the leftist hope of a society removed from authoritarian power structures that mollify, impoverish and perpetuate social divisions, with people taking control of their own work and lives. And on the other side, is the nihilistic quicksand that I find it impossible to wrench myself free from. I bring up the philosopher John Gray's work regarding the idea that we have scant free will, we are not masters of our own destinies, and humankind is too adverse to mutual co-existence, as all the while we swaddle ourselves in a comfort blanket of myths and delusions. I ask whether Self experiences such conflicting emotions and how he comes to resolve them...

WS: John Gray’s amazing book Straw Dogs came at a very interesting time, because the Iraq War really was the point at which the old ideas of internationalist socialism really fell crotch-first onto the vaulting horse of history. It really exposed that aspect of the socialist project completely, and I think it became very difficult after Iraq to think of yourself unproblematically as a socialist. But I have to say, John, as we’ve since become friends, is not at all pessimistic, he’s a stoic at heart.

MJ: I dunno, maybe it’s my age...

WS: Yeah, you can’t be that stoical at your age. When I was your age I was just insane, absolutely fucking mad. And actually, what I regret not doing was just having an ordinary job that brought me into contact with people, because it makes for great copy. I did all kinds of jobs but I didn’t become a full-time professional until I was about 28, 29. So, I wouldn’t feel that you’re wasting your time in that way because, as you’ll know yourself from writing, it takes a while to find your voice, and you can’t rush that, you need to write a lot of words, grow a bit older and have a job, save some money.

But it does get easier to be stoical as you get older; it sounds naff, the idea of being able to comprehend the extinction of humanity with some equanimity, but you can.

MJ: I look forward to it!

Those familiar with Self's oeuvre will recognise the thematic evolution from his obsessive ruminating on the 'motorway verse' in surreal short fiction such as Waiting and Scale in the early-90s; to his long strides into psycho-geographic terrain from the late-90s on, with his Psychogeography collection and Walking to Hollywood.

Being something of an amateur flaneur myself, I ask him whether he has a 'dream' psychogeographic walk that he has yet to undertake...

WS: There are lots I’d like to do and there’s lots I’ve planned that haven’t come off yet. Tehran is laid out very well for psycho-geographic expeditions, because the airport is positioned south, and the city is built up the flank of a hill, so in about two days you could walk and see the city as a whole. So I’d like to do that one. I’d like to walk from here to Paris through the Channel Tunnel.

MJ: Can you do that?

WS: Well there is a service tunnel. They found this Russian guy sort of staggering about near the English-end of the tunnel not long back; he’d walked the whole way!

MJ: I found it bad enough walking through the Rotherhithe Tunnel... it takes about two years off your life...

WS: Oh yeah, you don’t wanna do that. But there’d be no carbon monoxide down in the Eurostar...

MJ: What I’d really like to do is a psycho-geographic walk in Talinn, Estonia, where Andrei Tarkovsky filmed Stalker. I think that whole landscape would just be phenomenal to explore.

WS: Yes! That would be very interesting, good idea. I haven’t read it but Geoff Dyer wrote that book about it - Zona. It’s not my favourite ‘Tarko’ though, my favourite’s Solaris. I was actually in Priypat [the city of Chernobyl] ...

MJ: Yeah, I was there this year!

WS: Right! The thing is; you know the Chernobyl meltdown happened in Reactor Hall 4, and where does the writer say they are when he answers the phone in the Room of Knowledge? - Room Number 4!

MJ: That’s fascinating.

WS: Yeah, there are all sorts of weird correspondence.

MJ: So did Stalker in some way prophesise Chernobyl..?

WS: Actually, I went to CERN in the summer and wanted to walk around the Large Hadron Collider. I did the walk aboveground, and then went down at various points to talk to wonks. It was really interesting actually, because as a psycho-geographic walk you start in Geneva, more or less where Rousseau was locked out of the city and you end at Voltaire’s villa. So I’d thoroughly recommend that, it’s basically a 3-day stroll in the sub-Alps.

MJ: I had a thought the other day that, has Guy Debord’s ‘spectacle’ been realised in some way by the web? Are the heirs of the Situationists, by some bizarre twist, Google Maps, seen as how they reconfigure the globe entirely to the whim of their own commercial imperatives?

WS: Well it’s just algorithms. What it hasn’t got is the derive, let alone the detournement. So it’s not quite Debord-ian what Google do, but yeah, it’s here, it has arrived. But while I talk meliorist, I am personally quite pessimistic. It’s hard not to see that elements of people’s psyches are going to become seriously commoditised, people are going to start having product placements in their dreams.

MJ: I think in the not-so-distant future, people will be defined more and more by their digital profiles, their ‘online selves’, instead of being defined by what clothes you wear or what products you buy, it’ll be the ‘labels’ attached to your digital profile.

WS: I’m sure that’s right, it’s a very age-geared thing. I didn’t have a 2G phone or a wireless-enabled phone until about 2 years ago, and when I got it I was hopelessly addicted to it. It was comic. I’d excoriated everyone around me for spending their lives looking at their crotches and there I was full-on obsessed for about 5 or 6 months, still powerful for about 8 or 9 months, and then just over. Completely over, like it had never happened. And now the technology has no affect for me at all, in that way.

MJ: I’m 25 so I’m just old enough to remember having to corral my parents into letting me dial up to the internet for maybe 10 minutes every evening. Kids growing up now in a digital landscape will have no conception of life without it...

WS: Well that just shows how you can’t help but valorise the Gutenberg culture, because all the clued-up, smart young people I know are all trying to ‘age themselves’ out of being ‘digital natives’, and you’ve done it most eloquently. You’re right, it’s 2004, when people start to get wireless and broadband in and outside the home, that’s the moment it all changes. I always maintain, if you were a child at that point then you’re different. But you’re arguing that you weren’t a child at that point, if you see what I mean?

MJ: The screen really is a primitive instrument now isn’t it? The next stage is already beginning with Google Glass...

WS: Yeah but is anyone really bothering with it...?

MJ: Well no, no one’s going to want to wear those clunky glasses for any serious period of time, but as soon as you get the functionality, Google contact lenses perhaps, that symbiosis with technology, I think the Screen Age will pass into history.

WS: Yes that’s true, but it’s very powerful, the screen and the frame. The conception of Euclidean space embodied in all framing is very deeply encrypted and relates to a Panopticon-view of the Judeo-Christian deity, and certain kinds of ideas about how the world really is, that are highly congruent with systems that we’ve handed our lives over to in general.

So all I would say is, you think how long particular skeuomorphs endure, the screen is certainly going to be a super-powerful skeuomorph and it’ll take a lot to wean people away from replicating it. It’s replicated in transport systems - you drive looking at a map on a screen, you sit in a train staring out of a screen. And the screen is old; it’s as old as easel painting in a way, so I wouldn’t count it out that fast. But it will be generational, because people like me – what do we fucking know?! Nothing!

MJ: I already feel too old for it…

WS: Right, so how am I going to know anything about it?!

I mean, take Ballard, why was he so prescient? Well, let’s boil it down, what was he prescient about? He was prescient about the commoditisation of personae, the form of modern celebrity...

MJ: The media landscape...

WS: Well yeah, but what did he specifically get right? He got right that environmental problems were going to be a major feature. But he always said to me that that was a bit of a hunch. I mean, what causes the sea rise in The Drowned World is sunspots!

MJ: I always think his short fiction is where he was most prescient. There are two short stories in particular. Billenium, a story about a future city in which everyone’s so tightly crammed in, it’s so over-populated that people have to go out in synchronised waves of street traffic; everyone’s time is heavily mandated. And the other is The Intensive Care Unit, where he almost prophesises social media, about the family who are only in contact with one another via screens.

WS: Yeah but that goes back, I mean E.M. Forster wrote that story The Machine Stops, H.G. Wells has got the interweb in The World Brain, so it’s out there. The thing about futurity in the 60s was that it wasn’t that people didn’t prophesise all these things, because they did, but the things they really believed in, it sounds preposterous, but it was stuff like interstellar travel.

MJ: Moon colonies...?

WS: Yeah! Right up until the moon programme ended, because once it became evident that it was no long economically viable the whole fucking thing just collapsed, it had been huge. It was gonna be jet packs, everyone would have a fucking jet pack!

MJ: James Bond-style...

WS: They would only be small, not big cumbersome things. Totally ease-full private transport. Moon colonies; interstellar travel; food in a pill…

MJ: Now we’ve got ‘dirty burgers’ instead!

WS: Right, nobody gave a shit about food in the 60s ‘cos it was so bad. All I’m saying is that everything Ballard may have prophesised was accented out of the whole scrim of things people were imagining at the time, and though clearly a lot of it never actually happened, it didn’t mean they didn’t spot the things that did.

MJ: Maybe their moon landings is our Singularity theory. Those wonks in Silicon Valley creating some kind of human-negating system that is kinda terrifying, but will it happen? Probably not.

WS: Well it haunts my youngest child’s nightmares, the Singularity theory. Somebody should look into it, because I think it’s becoming a pathological and anarchic, Gnostic heresy. If I was fucking around on computers a lot now aged 13, I think stuff like that would really freak me out.

MJ: I understand your arguments about the death of the novel, and I’m with you a lot of the way, but do you think the problem is more to do with the fact that there isn’t as yet a coherent ‘internet literature’ that accurately explores what it’s like living in a digital landscape.

WS: Yes there is, it’s called computer games.

MJ: Yeah, but is there the same intellectual stimulation?

WS: Not yet. But it’ll come.

MJ: Will there be a Ulysses of the digital world?

WS: Why not? The problem with video games is that the conventions of how to modulate personations haven’t been figured out yet, because it has to be done by trial and error. They have to consider what’s going to make people feel simultaneously a degree of identification, and that strange thing that readers of fiction experience, of still feeling that there is a conditional element to the characters’ behaviour, that your empathy towards them has some psychological reality to it, and, as you say, at the same time the objectivity to be discursive or intellectual with it.

MJ: I think there’s an elitist thing that comes with it as well though. A lot of people decide to read the ‘high culture novels’ in order to show off about it. That has to stick around surely, the aesthetics of the book shelf that people use to identify themselves?

WS: I think that’s exactly what won’t make the cut actually. And that’s what’s so disturbing. All you see in the street are shelves that people have thrown out. It’s a total interregnum in the whole parameters of what it means to be intellectual, educated, cultured; it’s just game over in that sense.

Revelling in the conversation, I had scarcely noticed that half an hour had gone by, until Self rises from the bench and asks which direction my home is. "South", I reply. "Ah, come on then", he says and we march off across the intersection towards the bright light of the tube station, glancing up at the monolithic Archway Tower that Self remarks has yet to be enveloped in proposed cladding like a Cristo art installation.

It's only as I get to my feet that I realise, having neglected to eat anything since the morning, my head feels like a bubble of water diluting the nervous energy that had hitherto been sustaining me. As we head down the escalators and along the gullet of the underground, I can't help but visualise myself as an overly-eager Mickey skipping along in the wake of the sorcerer's robe.

I remark at how satisfying it must be to prod the hornets' nest of the blogosphere with his latest essay provocations. "Yeah it's fucking funny", he affirms with a wry smirk, "and there's worse to come".

We board the Northern line heading south, Self stretching out his legs like a rower laying out his oars. We talk on about the nature of futurity and the digital landscape; the devaluation of literature since the 'democratisation of culture'; and about John Gray's "new obsession with concision", trying to defenestrate thousands of words from his latest work-in-progress. "Maybe soon he'll end up just writing on Twitter", I comment.

The stations tick down from Kentish Town to Euston, and we move on to modern politics and satire. Self theorises that the movement of mockery from Monty Python to Private Eye and so on has paradoxically defused the efficacy of satire by the state's bringing it in-house. Characterised most explicitly by Boris Johnson, a man who succeeds in satirising himself. We agree that 'The Thick Of It' is little more than an excruciatingly well-observed fly-on-the-wall show.

By this point, my hunger-induced fugue seems to amplify the torrent of air that shrink-wraps the train with harsh sound between each station. Over the years of reading his work I must have compiled mental dossiers of questions, and yet I find my mind suddenly stalling at the intersection of conversational roads; the rhythm of the train massaging my forebrain towards sleep. It feels like my brain has been suffused with lactic acid, throbbing with intellectual ‘burn’, as though I’ve endured a session in the gym with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s likely raised barely a sweat.

To be fair, Self also looks visibly tired as we shudder and grind through Charing Cross and Waterloo. I’d often thought how stimulating a derive across the city in his company would be, and yet I never contemplated the notion of worming across the same distance by tube. By the time we arrive at Stockwell, the Northern line feels like a fraying rope enervating my consciousness, and I’m near-hallucinatory with hunger.

As we exfoliate out of the tube's pores onto the city skin once again, I thank Self for his more than generous apportionment of time and he in turn bids me a warm farewell before schlepping off in the direction of home.

It’s a well-worn aphorism that you should never strive to meet in-person anyone you hold in admiration, since they are almost duty-bound to disappoint. Walking home though, I don’t feel I can say this about Will Self. Though he might (knowingly) aggravate some, I feel certain that figures of his intellectual stature in our contemporary culture are in austere supply and long may he persist in roving through the creative waters like an iconoclastic shark.

Books with the greatest impact

These are a handful of the books that have had the greatest impact on me during my life. All of these have played a substantial part in inspiring my own literary aspirations.

Roald Dahl - 'Charlie & the Chocolate Factory'

As far as I can recall this was the first 'novel' that I ever read, at the perhaps precocious age of 4 (speaking somewhat immodestly), and in the following formative years I must have revelled in it time and time again. The sense of magical adventure brims with a relentless energy, it races along like the sugar longboat down the chocolate river with Dahl's fervent imagination flailing off into countless avenues that you long for him to stop off at and develop further. The boyhood ecstasy at discovering that mythical 'Golden Ticket' - essentially an exit, an escape route from harsh reality - surely must speak profoundly to everyone.

Stephen King - 'The Shining'

Whilst not being the first King novel I read - that was 'Insomnia' - this was the horror hook on which I was ensnared around the age of 14 until eventually managing to wriggle free almost 2 years later. In the interim period I must have read almost exclusively Stephen King. The film became seared into my brain after being scared senseless by it at age 11 - to this day no film since has had such a profound effect on me. The book had a lot to live up to therefore, and King's constantly imaginative prose and vivid character portrayals didn't disappoint. Indeed the two versions, book and film, are such different entities that each have their merits over the other. Whilst the film is, in my view, a flawless achievement by Kubrick, what I enjoyed about the book was the much more forensic examination into Jack Torrence's troubled past (aggression and alcoholism, essentially human, issues) and consequent damaged psyche that result in his gradual unravelling at the hands of the Overlook Hotel's equally disturbed history.

Irvine Welsh - 'Trainspotting'

This was another book I gravitated to as a result of my fondness for the film adaptation, and again I found there was just as much, if not more, about the novel to appreciate. Given that I'd been gorging myself on Stephen King's often production-line ouevre for so long, first encountering Welsh's gritty, sardonic writing style was - pardon the cliche - a real slap in the face. Instead of ghouls, demonic forces and axe murderers, here was a writer who was seemingly writing from the very gutter; with all the filth and grime of degenerate reality embedded under the fingernails of the prose. Substance abuse, Scottish council estates, scummy pubs, prejudice and violence - it all burned from the pages with a vitriolic wit that I found almost as compulsive as the subject matter. After 3 or 4 revisits, I still find it just as entertaining and now credit it as being the novel that exposed me to harsh fictional realism, wrenched me from my King-induced apathy and made me passionate about literature again.

George Orwell - '1984'

I forget at what age I first read this book, having been pressured to by my father, but I'm certain I failed to understand it. Several re-readings later, I consider this book to be something of a sacred text for me; the sheer weight of the ideas and concepts that come tumbling from every page is staggering, and the pervading sense of despair and hopelessness is more palpable than any other book I can think of. The final 'interrogation' section is as disturbing and visceral as I believe fiction has achieved, and for a book to have had such a lasting impact on society is surely something all writers can only fantasise about.

JG Ballard - 'Crash'

Whilst I don't believe this to be Ballard's most ingenious work (that, for me, is 'The Atrocity Exhibition' or several of his short stories), it was 'Crash' that first introduced me to Ballard and is still perhaps the single strongest influence on my own writing. Indeed, as far as my relationship to literature (and perhaps outlook on society itself) is concerned there is my life pre and post 'Crash'. I can remember precisely where I was and what my frame of mind was as I sat down and began reading the first page. I recall closing the book at the bottom of the first page and sitting back swimming in a very odd sense of dual emotions. On the positive side - I knew just from a single page that I had discovered a writer who's fervent imagination and body of work would captivate and inspire me from then onwards. The same feeling you get when you see a great film or hear a musical artist's work for the first time; that striking sense that your life has just been enriched somehow by that discovery. The other sensation I felt however was a crushing sense of inadequacy - here was a writer who seemed to be saying everything I wanted to say only decades earlier and far better than I would most likely ever be capable of!