Views on business - How can business reduce poverty?

Walking around the area of Thamesmead in South-East London is an oddly disorientating experience. A little over ten miles from the pulsating financial heartland - the Shard a distant syringe plunging into the epidermis of clouds, the Canary Wharf cluster closer still - there is a juxtaposition that resonates, not only in the abstract ambience, but in the very physical Brutalist architecture that once symbolised such promise for its inhabitants.

Stanley Kubrick filmed ‘A Clockwork Orange’ here, and it’s not a giant imaginative leap to discern a certain prophesy fulfilment in terms of such a futurist locale degenerating into urban decay and deprivation. Plastic bags float like jellyfish in the murky lake, a pair of bedraggled horses graze amongst a glade of fag ends and weeds, whilst a couple of teenagers sit astride a concrete bench sharing a silent spliff. According to a 2013 report, 31% of children in Thamesmead and Erith are living below the poverty line.

It is just one very proximate example of how removed so much of the UK now feels from the burgeoning business engine that the Conservatives champion as evidence of a sturdy economic recovery. Thamesmead could be Hartlepool, it could be Rochdale, or any number of poor towns isolated from any semblance of a recovery. It is in places like this that a very real underclass begins to spread like a malignant rot and, wherever it may be, the salient fact remains that business has done very little to decelerate or reverse it.


Business and Poverty

The epoch of global laissez-faire - enshrined and exported by the ‘Washington consensus’ - is heading into terminal desuetude. This should come as scant surprise given that free market capitalism is, by its very nature, self-destructive; eroding the traditional foundations that enabled its implementation – trade unions, a strong state, widespread political engagement, even the family unit itself.

The economic shift from productive enterprise to financial manipulation, in which free marketeers play the inflated ‘virtual economy’ like a casino, has remade the political landscape beyond the possibility of substantive reversal. Even after the longest recession in living memory, Washington’s consensus still remains firmly enshrined. As John Gray elucidates in his prophetic ‘False Dawn’, it remains the last bastion of Enlightenment thought that was promoted as a utopian ideal to transform western civilisation, particularly post-Cold War, to ‘democratic capitalism’.

Politically, Britain (like America) has been neutered by the business sector, and yields to London pumping like a sclerotic heart to try and keep the rest of the country from atrophying. Anyone deviating into heretical thoughts against the state-inculcated neoliberal faith is pilloried as an ‘enemy’, as Chancellor George Osborne expressed recently in an Institute of Directors speech, urging them to “raise their heads above the parapet” and fight back against charities and pressure groups that “make arguments against the free market and stand in the way of prosperity”. Many view Ed Miliband’s vague challenges to the orthodoxy as mere fig-leaves for how toothless Labour have become since Tony Blair leapt gleefully into bed with neoliberalism’s acolytes. Since these dogmatic political elites have, in effect, abdicated their social responsibility to the free market system, and devolved morality to the ever-expanding charity sector, business must surely take over the reins.


What can business do?

Banks and investment firms must be encouraged to increase their lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, since the lack of credit remains a major obstacle to upward mobilisation. Despite an estimated £1 trillion of public finance being used to bail out financial institutions, a 2013 report by the British Banker’s Association candidly revealed a lending fall in over 80% of the UK’s 120 postcodes between 2011 and 2012.

Establishing a state-run bank in which loans could be offered with favourable interest rates to lower earners might appear worthy, but could result in a ‘catch 22 situation’, whereby a bank lending public money to the higher risk poor would in effect be following ‘immoral’ banking practices, whilst a more prudent bank would be deemed ‘moral’. However, continued low lending merely serves to turn the poor into ‘Wonga bait’, whose vastly inflated interest rates only exacerbate poverty.

Much is made of today’s children being taught metadata and coding, but still it is possible to leave school with negligible economic and business skills. Improved education in financial planning is vital, as only through being better informed can those from disadvantaged backgrounds hope to transcend their circumstances. The government should offer more subsidies to businesses that invest in young people from all backgrounds, through sponsorships and apprenticeship schemes. The scales of respectability need to be rebalanced away from favouring academia and further towards vocational training; the fertile ground that businesses should be far more active in cultivating.

Perhaps the most axiomatic step for business to take in alleviating poverty is by increasing wages and job security. It would seem a simple solution for businesses to pay enough so that their employees could afford to live and work without having to rely (as an astonishing proportion do in Britain) on welfare; and yet the prolonged degradation in wages and conditions (reported by the TUC recently as being at the lowest levels since the 1860/70s), is the overall legacy of unregulated global free trade.

Noam Chomsky has described tax credits as ‘basically a subsidy to employers for them to provide low pay’, which adheres with the formation of a ‘precariat’ – those who live a precarious existence on the periphery of society without hope of improving their situation. It was Alan Greenspan’s lauded theory of a healthy economy (success based on ‘growing worker insecurity’), that has become enshrined as the default mentality for free market capitalists; as evidenced by the expansion of zero-hours contracts that pinion people into poverty as living costs rise inexorably above wages. Right the way back to Adam Smith, the reliance on slavery conditions and a disenfranchised workforce was recognised as a poor economic policy for businesses to pursue.

The contrast between politics and business in terms of trying to engage the poorer classes is an issue of potential gains filtered through the prism of self-interest. Politicians may not seek to expend much energy courting those on lower incomes since they make up a declining proportion of the voting base (the IPPR reported that by 2010 in the UK, individuals in the highest income group were 43% more likely to vote than those in the lowest). Conversely, businesses see homogeneous potential customers and it is this fundamental difference that should inspire the establishment, hiring and enfranchising of those in deprived areas who will consume goods and services far more reliably and, in some cases, more loyally, than voting. Such was the strategy of Henry Ford who, realising that his Michigan labourers were also potential customers, raised wages so that they too could afford to buy the Model-Ts they were producing.

As Thomas Piketty has illustrated, the rise of ‘super-managers’ has led to executive compensation spiralling beyond all merit and into realms of absurdity (since 1950, the US CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased to 1,000%). It is this continual accumulation of wealth amongst the ‘1%’ that represents the Gordian knot of capital pulled ever tighter so as to prohibit any downwards unravelling.

Entrepreneur Nick Hanaeur stated in a challenging missive to his ‘fellow plutocrats’ earlier this year, ‘the most insidious thing about trickle-down economics isn’t believing that if the rich get richer, it’s good for the economy… it’s believing that if the poor get richer, it’s bad for the economy’.

The multiplier effect stipulates that capital will circulate several times over before eventually dissipating. Since a greater portion of the poor’s earnings are likely to be funnelled back into the economy through consumption, rather than being stored in offshore tax havens, savings accounts or property portfolios, they will have a greater effect on the economy’s multiplier and subsequently growth. At the same time, the welfare state would not be relied upon to cast quite so many lifelines into the turbulent waters of poverty.


Business and Third World poverty

Insofar as the question of how the business sector can reduce poverty has been pondered at all in recent years, it has related predominantly to non-OECD countries where extreme levels of poverty persist.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s ‘Poor Economics’, concludes that the impetus should be on handing anti-poverty policy back to the poor who are better placed to instigate necessary improvements. They point towards business-centric Community Driven Developments in which communities choose and manage collective projects, successful in post-conflict environments such as Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Indonesia.

This chimes harmoniously with the social entrepreneur Paul Polak, who has promoted the theory that instead of charities, NGOs or international aid dominating the fight against poverty, they should give way and instead allow big business to climb into the ring. As evidence of his logic he points to China’s businesses connecting with the global economy, thereby elevating millions out of extreme poverty; or the rate of business expansion in Africa, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

With market-bias injustices in mind, such as medication in a Mumbai slum costing ten times the amount in the centre, the era of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has bloomed into life; the maxim being that profitability breeds that most enigmatic of things - sustainability. The emerging business case is now aimed at seeking out the opportunities at the ‘bottom of the wealth pyramid’; developing profitable markets that concurrently serve poor consumers and improve their living standards. An example of such a scheme is Unilever’s Pureit, a product designed for water filtration that was marketed and sold widely in Nigeria. Pursuing profit in a competitive market and providing a social good are the dual poles by which the canvas of deprivation can be hoisted.

Of course, it is wise not to overstate corporate altruism; for, when a business decision must be made in favour of either CSR or shareholder expectations, it doesn’t take a mystic to foretell which way the axe will fall. In addition, the risks of pandemics such as ebola, or national governments reversing business-friendly regulations (for instance, the Irish government’s recent scrapping of the ‘double Irish’ tax policy), must be shrewdly factored-in when deciding where and how far to embed corporate-regional foundations. Transparency, local accountability and enforceable regulations must be promoted above a ‘profit at any cost’ mentality to safeguard as far as possible against tragedies such as Rana Plaza.


Do the business sector want to reduce poverty?

It is this ‘profit at any cost’ mind-set that gives rise to the question that must be posed as to whether business actually can influence, or even necessarily covets, the reduction of poverty at all.

The notion that a business is duty-bound to its shareholders to pay the lowest possible rate of tax, even if this involves exploiting nefarious loopholes prised open by forensic accountants, whilst at the same time advocating and pursuing policies of social responsibility, is a classic case of cognitive dissonance.

The common apologia for business malpractice is, ‘they all do it’ and ‘its lax regulations that enable their actions’. However, as businesses have become enshrined in law as ‘human entities’, they must surely be held to the same morally responsible principles as human beings, who have a tacit duty to society inasmuch as they have a duty to pursue their own interests.

Leaving the grey area of morality aside, it can be said that the state’s ability to tackle poverty is hindered by business finding means to escape paying socially responsible levels of tax, and by exerting an increasing influence on policy. As Owen Jones has written recently in ‘Establishment’ –‘billions are lost through tax avoidance. Accountancy firms say they advise clients to the letter of the law. Yet they are intimately involved in forming the scope and parameters of such laws.’

Of course, governments seeking tax advice from the business community is not strictly negative, but at the very least, the lighthouse beam of scrutiny needs to be trained through the fog of these government interactions with entities that are accountable to nobody save shareholders. The most egregious current example is the TTIP agreements, being conducted behind closed doors that will enshrine the primacy of business over state interests, and (although it cannot be said definitively) it is unlikely that business responsibility for alleviating poverty is at the forefront of the discussions.


People power over business

With these things in mind, it could be argued that those in poverty should pursue collective action rather than wait for business. Throughout employment history workers have had to fight for positive change rather than wait for the philanthropy of business leaders; women’s equal pay, improved safety standards, fair redundancy packages, minimum wage levels, and so on.

Whether this takes the idealistic form of anarcho-syndicalism, in the form of worker-owned enterprises that consolidate power at the base rather than at the top, or at the very least have workers from across the business hierarchy represented at boardroom level, there are improvements that could be made to effectively enfranchise the lower classes. In practice, such developments can be seen in the many worker/community-owned cooperatives in the old ‘rust belt’ of Ohio where workers have taken direct responsibility over management of the businesses in which they have a stake.

To begin with, low income workers need to become far more active in a union sector that desperately needs reenergising, along with a socialist movement that has at its core the interests of working people. Parties such as UKIP should not be able to claim a monopoly on the electorate’s disenchantment with the system.

With workers acting in coalition with unions, positive action can be achieved. Just look to progress currently being made in the US with fast-food workers (traditionally one of the most exploitable sectors) successfully campaigning against McDonald’s for an increase in the minimum wage to $15/hour. Yet the denigration of British trade unions has become so total due to the legacy of the 1970s, that it cauterises any notion that they could be healthy entities if operated in a less factionalist and more efficient way; whereas, equally myopic financial institutions are repeatedly deemed ‘too big to fail’, excused by the establishment and allowed to continue without notable reform.


Conclusion

Walking around Thamesmead, you could be forgiven for thinking the problems of poverty are set as adamantine as concrete. Yet if meliorism can overtake pessimism and the collective will dictate, society could function not just for the benefit of the few but for all, including the places deprivation seems most intractable. The heavy shroud of Enlightenment ideology that has culminated in neoliberalism may be fast wearing down to its hempen strands, but it will take a seismic effort of comity to bind society tighter together with an alternative fabric.

In his message to plutocrats, Nick Hanaeur warns of ‘the coming pitchforks’ should they fail to act, but such paranoia should remain unfounded. The business world must realise that their relationship with society’s poorest could be mutually beneficial, if only there is the creative innovation, humility and strength-of-will to make it so.

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.

My Favourite Places in London

Maryon Park, Greenwich

This is the park used extensively in Antonioni's seminal film 'Blow-Up'; a film that explores the intricate correlation between the real and unreal, the seen and unseen and the vagaries of imagination. There is real delight to be had in discovering that despite the nearly 50 years since the film's release, the park has barely changed at all which, given the churning rate of change in London, must make it something of an anomaly.

It even seems to have retained the washed-out green and grey 60s patina of the film-stock. Take the steep steps upwards and you find yourself in the beguiling and mysterious plateau of enclosed space where the film's 'murder' is photographed by David Hemmings.

In the three or four times that I've been here it has always been deserted which instils its allure as an undiscovered pocket of London that the city has forgotten about and, since any view into or out of the space is hindered, encourages you to temporarily forget about the city in turn.


Bookmongers, Brixton

A veritable Aladdin's cave of words, the sort of place you can distractedly peruse away time scouring the second-hand spines, too wary of leaving in case in so doing you overlook a real find.

Often with an eclectic selection of Burroughs and the Beats enticingly placed in the front window, and a floppy Alsatian manning the door, the stock - once its been segregated into its rightful category in the scruffy shop - is joyfully anarchic, the pleasure persisting in not knowing what you might come across next

There are still many delightful secondhand book shops in London but this is my first choice; in fact I don't think I've ever left empty-handed.


Gordon's Wine Bar, Villiers Street

This is an antiquated vinous institution tucked away just off the Strand; a dingy stone-walled grotto with a low-arched ceiling that basks in the orange tinge of wax candles. The affordability of the menu might tend toward visits being infrequent, and its predictable congestion persuade towards going at odd times (in my experience, only at around 3 or 4pm on a summer weekday are you guaranteed an inside table).

That being said, it maintains a hold on me in the fact that it conjures up vague and romanticised imaginings of a Dickensian London – subterranean drinking dens, gin houses and decadent wine cellars – a place you can imagine Boswell and Johnson holding court in one corner and Prime Minister Pitt supping on a post (or pre)-Commons port in another.


Brockwell Park, Brixton

Aside from Hampstead Heath, the finest open green space in London has to be Brockwell Park, a protuberant expanse that has been wonderfully adapted to the needs of the local community – the lido, tennis courts, bowling green, play park, etc.

A circuit round the park will take you on a steady incline to a panoramic spread of the city skyline, from the tusks of Battersea Power Station in the west to Canary Wharf in the east. On a summer’s day the congested and manic up-thrust of the Shard and the minions that flank it, appear to shimmer with the heat haze like a mirage of an Emerald City painted onto a bright blue canvas.


The gallery of the Royal Albert Hall

Whilst the Proms purists might gaggle together like over-zealous seals on an outcrop nearest the crashing sonic waves, I prefer to head higher to a promontory on the rim of the great ceremonial bowl. At this higher altitude one can survey the full breadth of the orchestra at a remove from being down in the hubbub of the auditorium, as the symphonic tones evaporate upwards like a musical convection current.

Seeing a great orchestra in full flow is, I like to think, the musical equivalent of a tuna fleet swimming in synchronicity, their motion mandated almost by an instinctual telepathy, and there's still probably nowhere in the UK to rival the Royal Albert Hall as a setting in which to play witness.


Postman's Park

Hidden away like a secret cupboard amidst the bustling corridors and antechambers of the City, this diminutive park is a place of calm reflection hemmed in by the Barbican, St. Paul's and bunches of anonymous office buildings, which succeed in neutralising the constant hum and grind of the operational city.

What marks this particular spot out though is the sombre memorial wall opened in 1900 by George F. Watt, to commemorate ‘those who have heroically lost their lives trying to save another’. Each panel paints a different snapshot of selflessness, like a 19th-century Twitter feed that stirs the mind to pondering further on the enigmatic glimpses of particular characters and situations.

The place was a focal mise en scene for Patrick Marber’s play ‘Closer’, as well as in the underrated film adaptation; centring on Alice Ayres who ‘saved 3 children from a burning house in Union Street, Borough at the cost of her own young life’. Others that are personally intriguing are William Donald – ‘was drowned in the Lea trying to save a lad from a dangerous entanglement of weeds’, and Ernest Benning – ‘upset from a boat one dark night off Pimlico Pier, grasped an oar with one hand supporting a woman with the other but sank as she was rescued’.

In a city that is so often characterised by, or redolent of, the self and all the associated ambition, pride and endeavour bound up with it, it is disarming and affecting to pause in a place emblematic of such antipodal virtues.

The Shacklewell Arms, Dalston

The hipster diaspora may have migrated north-eastwards to envelop the province of Dalston but the Shacklewell Arms retains its grungy ‘armpit-pub’ ethos that even the craft ale and inevitable menu of ‘rustic’ £8 burgers and ‘artisan’ hot dogs cannot dispel.

The gig room itself is the perfect intimate setting for seeing a band raw and without pretension; the stage space is nicely confined with the drummer isolated in a kind of rear alcove, whilst the soundwaves scintillate outwards in ever higher waves of nauseating volume, and sweat drips from the ceiling tiles like the inside of a damp cavern.

Culture - September

Reading:

Albert Camus - 'The Fall'
Ernest Hemingway - 'Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises'
Guy de Maupaussant - 'The Best Short Stories'
John Gray - 'False Dawn - The Delusions of Global Capitalism' (non-fiction)
Fredy Perlman - 'The Reproduction of Daily Life' (essay)


Watching:

'The Phantom of Liberty' (Luis Bunuel)
'Wetherby' (David Hare)
'Two Days One Night' (Dardenne brothers) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'La Haine' (Mathieu Kassovitz)
'The Fog of War' (Errol Morris)


Listening:

Van Morrison - 'Astral Weeks'
Esben and the Witch - 'A New Nature'
Richard Strauss - 'Four Last Songs'
Aphex Twin - 'Syro'
U2 - 'Songs of Innocence'
Robert Plant - 'Lullaby...and the Ceaseless Roar'
Goat - 'Commune'
This Will Destroy You - 'Another Language'


In attendance:

Live flamenco at Las Tablas, Madrid
Xavier Coll - 'Masters of the Spanish Guitar' at Basilica Santa Maria del Pi, Barcelona)
Rachael Dadd at St.Pancras Old Church, London

Tearing the city at the seams #23 - From Madrid to Valencia to anywhere

Where better to begin a trip in Spain than the very epicentre itself, Puerto del Sol in Madrid, ‘0km’ demarcated by a subtle paving slab beneath the clock-tower. From this nexus point it is possible to envisage the disparate segments from Galicia in the north-west, Andalucía in the south, Extremadura in the west and Catalonia in the north-east all straining, some firmer than others, on the moorings that prevent them from floating free and keep them anchored to the central post of Madrid.

(Side note: maybe this should be a solution for the fractious United Kingdom instead of forever slouching south towards London? A quick online search would tend to place this somewhere in Derbyshire...)

Being profoundly regionalist by nature, Spain is one country watching the developments surrounding the Scottish referendum with the scrutiny of an apprentice surgeon aware that they may soon have to perform a similarly tricky operation themselves.

As detailed in John Hooper’s comprehensive book ‘The New Spaniards’, this is a country that, since the death of General Franco in 1975, has oscillated remarkably across the political spectrum, with democratic socialism and pragmatic conservatism, together with a recline in the influence of the Catholic Church, dragging Spain into a modern Europe where, like many others post-recession, its stability is far from assured.

My girlfriend and I are instantly taken with Madrid, our expectations being somewhat more muted than for Barcelona, and the joie de vivre lifestyle and easy atmosphere seem to immediately corrupt one’s more intense London-centric sensibilities.

Traffic cascades in a steady ribbon up and down the main Gran Via and Calle Alcala but never feels oppressive or intolerable, merely a fixture of the scenery. The city feels pleasantly divested of the tourist maelstrom that we feel confident of in Barcelona; instead there is the air of a functional city – locals chat over coffee in plazas, shop for legs of ham that hang from butchers’ windows like cavemen clubs, and peruse glossy magazines from innumerable kiosks that punctuate the streets. I’m reading Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’; his steady prose masterfully portraying the ecstatic abandon of the Spanish fiesta, so much so that I almost expect the tireless revellers to come barrelling round each corner before the running of the bulls commences.

The old heart of Madrid is easily explored on foot; the Plaza Mayor siphons tourists into the cobbled space from passageways leading upwards from the main street. Over the centuries, generations of aristocrats would gaze from their balconies onto the spectacle of the Inquisition’s ‘auto-da-fe’s, monarchs being crowned, fiestas and bull runs; now there is little more activity than Charlie Chaplin impersonators and a posse of waiters trying to reel in tourists to their overpriced restaurants like egregious lifeguards at the side of a swimming pool.

The sinuous alleyways of La Latina, enclosed by ochre walls and spindly iron balconies like stanzas of musical notation, break here and there onto an intimate plaza or small gothic church. We venture down to the El Rastro flea market barrio that with its beggars and street prostitutes instantly takes on a seedier, edgier vent; evidence of the tough realities of life in modern Spain for the down-at-heel.

We shelter from the heat in the Jardines de Sabatini, a Romanesque garden with intricate hedges and ornamental fountains from which the palace appears as imposing and dull as most, especially our own English Queen's pad. Indeed, it is uncertain times for Spain's monarchy, with Juan Carlos, long-feted as the king who helped steer the nation out of its post-Franco daze, withstanding a military coup along the way, deciding to secede the throne to his son Filipe IV.

Polls suggest that there is a rising tide of republican sentiment coursing through particularly the younger generations, which has lead many to conclude that perhaps Juan Carlos' true legacy of achievement is to have helped transform Spain to the point where his own role is now surplus to requirements.

We walk east along the Gran Via and into the Museo del Prado, hunting out Velazquez's realist masterwork 'Las Menines', Hieronymous Bosch's epic 'Garden of Earthly Delights' and Peter Bruegel's cataclysmic rendering of the apocalypse 'Triumph of the Death', in which an army of skeletons unleash hellfire and slaughter upon kings, revellers and countrymen alike in a chaotic danse macabre.

The greatest reverence though is reserved for Francisco de Goya's 'Black Paintings'; a series of 14 enigmatic and haunting murals that document the artist's downward spiral into hermetic madness and despair.

Madrid's artistic keg is not drained there though, for a few minutes' walk brings us to the Reina Sofia which exhibits more modernist works. Here are held numerous pieces by Dali - including 'The Enigma of Hitler' and 'The Grand Masturbator' - and of course, the piece de resistance, Picasso's monumental 'Guernica', a billboard-sized riot of high-octane depravity, chaos and symbology. Indeed so reverential does it feel to be able to examine such an icon up close and in person, it feels a little like sacrilege to leave the gallery.

It's easy to come away with a strong impression of the abstract and surreal visual style that burns brightly through avant garde Spanish culture, almost as though the common causality was the effervescent sunlight refracting colour into new dimensions and forms for the fertile artistic imagination to plunder. From Dali, Picasso and Gaudi, to Juan Gris and Joan Miro, whose starburst shapes of playful colour on everything from street murals to bank logos begin to appear almost as sunspots leaving their imprint on your retinas.

A couple of days later we arrive in Valencia, the young upstart city snapping at the heels of its elder siblings Madrid and Barcelona. It's an appealing and unpretentious place, with a modest medieval centre and its arms open wide onto the Mediterranean.

We stroll around the central plazas, overlooked by the Catedral, and its Miguelete tower. Inside is purported to be one of the prime contenders for the Holy Grail chalice itself; although with a fee of €10 each to take a look we decide against it. The Crystal Palace-like Mercado Central, a cavernous indoor food market is almost a religious experience in its own right, being a veritable cathedral of produce; fruit and vegetables arranged in the dazzling abundance and variety of rare antiquities brought back from foreign lands.

We try some chewy chorizo and sickly sweet sherry, perusing a whole harbour-full of fresh fish dredged up and slapped out on crushed ice for the punters. Racks of paella pans are lined up ranging from cymbal to gong-size, alongside glazed slabs of nougat stacked like gold bullion.

In the afternoons we head for the beach, a place with (for me) alarmingly little shade as the sun blazes on through the top-30s, and populated by young Valencians who look as though they must never migrate far from these white sands. Later on we gorge on seafood paella and get steadily sozzled on wine at the renowned Le Pepica, one-time favourite of Hemingway, Orson Welles and a smattering of legendary bullfighters.

On the subject of bullfighters, the one adversarial moment in my girlfriend's now firm resolve to emigrate to Spain as soon as possible, is when I drag her into the Museo Taurino (Bullfighting Museum). It's nestled just behind the stadium itself, which (if the posters of lederhosen and steins were anything to go by) appeared to be hosting an Oktoberfest in a bizarre cross-pollination of European cultural identities. I imagine that somewhere in Munich, flurries of flamenco dancing were spontaneously breaking out.

It's only through reading something like Hemingway's stolid 'Death in the Afternoon' that its possible to comprehend the deep strata of cultural significance that have built up upon the bedrock of the Spanish bullfight. Indeed, aficionados elevate to an almost balletic precision the drama of man versus beast, the skill and adeptness of the matador in bringing the bull to heel during their dual performance.

It's a necessary by-product of the act of travelling that one becomes exposed to milieus that might shock, surprise or challenge our ingrained sensibilities. Indeed were this not the case, the very praxis of travelling would be entirely moribund.

Trying to remind my girlfriend of this though is futile as museum footage displays bulls goring horses until their guts drape behind them like the train of a wedding dress, and the bull impaled by multiple picas until they can no longer see straight through their own blood. To those not emotionally invested in the ritual, the whole thing looks like what it is - a cruel anachronistic exhibition of human power over animals.

This qualifier aside though, there is something in the flourish the matadors perform, the way they draw the bull towards them before pivoting just out of reach of the horns, I think embodies the same flamboyant energy and poetic passion that can be seen in that other Spanish tradition, flamenco.

In a small bar in Madrid, we are awestruck by the fervent intensity and sensuous power of the dancers; the way the coagulating compas (rhythms) of the acoustic guitar and the jaleo (hand-clapping, feet stomping) interlock with the anguished vocals of the matriarchal cantaora (singer). The long skirts swish in perfect synchronicity and the upper bodies held rigid as heels become a blur, sounding like a jazz drummer trying to cram in as many flourishes as possible within the confines of each bar.

The real surprise of Valencia comes from a walk away from the old centre, following the course of the Rio Turia, a drained river that threads its way through the city, remade into a landscaped stretch of urban community space. It's almost an inversion of the so-called 'Garden Bridge' planned for London, or the High Line in New York; an existing feature reappropriated and exploited for the common use of the inhabitants.

Walking along at around 9pm is a wonderfully enervating experience, families are still out and about, joggers and cyclists as well, and groups of youngsters in the designated skate parks. I couldn't help but think that were this in Britain it would quickly become clouded over by the perils of urban decay and anti-social behaviour; although maybe such thoughts reflect an anticipation of the inevitable mediarised response to such a space and not the reality.

Eventually you arrive at La Ciudad de Las Artes y les Cencies, Europe's largest cultural centre, a gargantuan complex of stunning futurist architecture that is so effective that I find my sense of location gradually ebbing away. One of the structures bulbs out from an artificial lake like a gigantic blue whale breaching the surface; another incorporates streamlined steel limbs and supports; whilst another comprises a skein of sleek arches enclosing an oasis of landscaped vegetation as though it were ancient ruins that nature has sought to reclaim.

Strolling around beneath the walkways and dipping our feet in the icy-blue chlorine water of the pool that makes up this artificial archipelago, surrounded by thrusting high rise blocks and the drone of unseen traffic flows, I'm convinced that this is a vision of the ultra-modern future in which geographic alterity and temporality has been eroded. This could be Los Angeles or Toronto, Brasilia or Berlin, Dubai or Beijing; place itself feels entirely fluid and interchangeable once cultural signifiers are obscured or altogether removed and you are left simply to upload your imagination onto this white sterile template of blank forms. To paraphrase Marx, all that is solid, in terms of being somewhere, melts into the air of anywhere.

Masterworks of Cinema #6 - 'Martyrs'

Regarding films, as well as art in general, the very finest are frequently found to levitate above the landscape of the medium, held aloft by the ballast balloons of cultural critique so that it is almost impossible to approach them free of expectation. So it was that I viewed Pascal Laugier's 'Martyrs' with scarcely any awareness of its content or subject matter aside from it being held within the crude crucible of the New French Extremity movement, alongside others such as 'Inside', 'Livid', and 'Trouble Every Day'.

The gratification to be gained therefore from discovering it to be one of the most visceral and transgressive films ever made was magnified intensely. It must be said that I don't approach it lightly, singing the praises of such a film given that its gruellingly graphic violence and harrowing content will surely alienate and repulse many viewers. Indeed, the scythe of opinion sliced audiences markedly in two upon its release, and have remained divided ever since.

In my view, 'Martyrs' easily surpasses almost the entire undergrowth of exploitation or 'torture porn' horror films that have perforated the mainstream over the last couple of decades, by constantly confounding expectations and by daring to tackle weighty Manichean enquiries of embattled light/good and dark/evil.

The chief success of the film is in the way it manages to contort itself away from conventional horror tropes in a way expressly designed to disorient and confuse the audience. So the first hour proceeds as a more orthodox genre piece - a harrowing opening sequence of a bloodied and bruised child fleeing a rundown industrial complex, and the tormented dreams and delusions of the child in a care home thereafter. Fifteen years on, an apparently normal family are slain in cold blood at the breakfast table by a ruthless assassin who we subsequently learn is the young girl Lucie come to wreak her ambiguous vengeance.

Still she is possessed by terrifying visions of a monstrous being that compel her to brutal blasts of self-harm. Anna, her friend (and we are lead to believe lover), clings to her conviction of Lucie's victimhood but, like we the audience, cannot help but play host to the doubt that she may in fact be deranged. Gradually though we come to realise that the demon possessing Lucie is the psychological manifestation of an extreme guilt harboured for failing to help another young girl escape her torture 15 years previously, and for which the slaughter of the family (presumably the perpetrators) is her attempt at atonement.

It is this deconstruction of our formal belief systems regarding victimhood that resonates so powerfully for contemporary society, with the Yewtree investigations and the Rotherham sex gangs being such pertinent issues. So quick and adeptly are we to claim the role of victim for ourselves and our own misfortunes, but so equally swift to admonish those that may have a more legitimate and needful stake to the claim.

It is around the hour mark that the film begins to diverge away from this more familiar territory, as Anna is taken prisoner by a mysterious sect led by Mademoiselle who reveals to her their real intent. They seek to administer periods of methodical and systematic suffering to their victims in the hope of eventually cultivating their 'transfiguration' and making them a martyr.

The term 'martyr' derives from the Greek word meaning 'witness', and as Mademoiselle explains to Anna, 'martyrs survive pain, survive total deprivation. They bear all the sins of the mortal world, they give themselves up, they transcend themselves.' Upon achieving this transcendence through extreme suffering they might just glimpse through to 'the other side' and in so doing perhaps obtain the fundamental truths behind our very existence.

Accordingly, Anna passes through various stages of rebellion, despair and insanity to an eventual state of complete dehumanisation, her own self having been decidedly eroded. She is kept alive and beaten by anonymous operatives who proceed with a workman-like efficiency devoid of sadism, instead acting in the vein of Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' dictum.

It is at this point that audience members will enter an internal wrestling bout with the film. Although the first act surpasses any of the 'Saw' or 'Hostel' gore-fests, it does so in a more familiarly squeamish manner. By contrast, the second act's relentless envelope-pushing in terms of documenting pain as a means of empirical investigation is a deviation into jarring, and purposely alienating, moral terrain.

Of course, what imbues the film with its legitimacy in my view and prevents it from appearing exploitative or flippant, is the historical nature of martyrdom and the all-too-recent examples of pain deployment in the name of some higher cause that continue to disturb our collective sensibilities.

Traditionally, martyrs were deemed to be holy and held in high regard by their followers for 'bearing witness'. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Christians were martyred for their faith by public burning by the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th and 17th centuries; and of course, the most famous martyr of all is Jesus Christ, the emblems of whose pain and suffering stare you in the face almost the instance you enter a church.

But it would be an error, as Mademoiselle tells Anna, to regard martyrs as an exclusively religious phenomenon. During the Holocaust, Drs. Mengeles and Rascher conducted twisted pseudo-scientific experiments on camp inmates such as exposing them to extreme temperatures and altitudes, performing transplants and vivisections, and using them as guinea pigs for a whole host of poisons, gases and other medical drugs. This was carried out with the same cold and calculated obedience as is portrayed in the film, with the deluded aim of attaining greater knowledge through others' suffering leading to some kind of enlightenment.

Consider as well, Unit 731 which was a covert research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. Between 3,000 - 12,000 people (mostly Chinese) were systematically killed in experiments involving amputations, deprivation and biological weaponry. (As a side note, after the Imperial Army surrendered, the American government assisted them in covering up these wretched atrocities in exchange for the research data which they deemed to be of value in their on-going conflict with the Russians...)

The communistic social experiments of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot that claimed the lives of untold millions throughout the 20th century, also indicate a despotic authority ruthlessly engineering progressive policies that were designed so that the stated aims would justify the harsh means by which they had to be employed.

Look as well, at how humans have long utilised animals as a means of testing whole pharmacies of drugs and other products that aim to further our scientific understanding and subsequent enrichment of life.

Anna, once broken down fully and flayed alive by a surgeon, begins to transcend her physical reality in a wonderful '2001'-esque sequence gazing briefly through some mystic portal, that cosmic dimension which we all may eventually traverse. Similar to '2001', Laugier closes the film with an ambiguity that throws up a myriad of theories and conjecture - Mademoiselle, having had Anna's insight imparted to her, chooses to commit suicide, telling the congregation of her organisation to "keep doubting".

Perhaps Anna relays the fact that there really is nothing on the other side, that all her searching has been in vain; or perhaps she is told of the eternal damnation that awaits her for her crimes. Personally, I like to think that she was told of something so beyond the realms of our earthly comprehension, something either so sublime, evil or alien that she was simply not able to continue living a human existence in the full consciousness of such a revelation.

In the end this is, I believe, the film's overarching message; whatever it is that lies beyond, whatever can or cannot be attained through martyrdom, it is simply not knowledge to which we should be privy, we are mentally ill-equipped to fathom the boundless possibilities of whatever lies beyond this world and so indeed we are compelled, for the sake of our own humanity, to keep doubting.