Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London

Description

For much of the 20th century the modernist city was articulated in terms of narratives of progress and development. Today the neoliberal city confronts us with all the cultural ‘noise’ of disorder and excess meaning. As this book demonstrates, for more than 40 years London-based writer, film-maker and ‘psychogeographer’ Iain Sinclair has proved to be one of the most incisive commentators on the contemporary city: tracing the emerging contours of a metropolis where the meeting of global and local is never without incident. Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London explores Sinclair’s investigations into the nature of conflicting urban realities through an examination of the ways in which the noise of neoliberal excess intersects with the noise of literary experiment. In this way, the book casts new light on theorisations of the city in the contemporary era. Cover Contents Abbreviations Introduction - ‘Doctored maps, speculative alignments’: Iain Sinclair and the Matter of London Noise and Iain Sinclair The return of the unselected Noise as parasite Staging and the locative effect of noise 1 Reforgotten Cities: Noise and the Politics of Method Finding form The locked shutter Walking the city: Psychogeography as cut-up The ‘John Bull printing set’ and small-press politics Reforgetting: Forms of complicity The walk as spatial collage 2 Parasitic Poetics: Lud Heat and the noise of genre Background noise: Lud Heat and its contexts The ‘charting instinct’: Long poems, big cities ‘These facts fade. The big traffic slams by’: Art in absolute and abstract space ‘[I]n there for the duration’: Poetry as workplace 3 The Vessels of Wrath: Noise and Form in Downriver The empty vessel ‘[N]o female sound’: Noise and narrativity in Downriver The locked room ‘[No] sides to take’: The fiction of disorientation Opposition in a world without sides The ‘vessels of wrath’: Satire and cynicism 4 Between Archive and Ash: Rodinsky’s Room The solemn mystery of the reappearing room Noise as lieu de mémoire Room as archive Lichtenstein and noise as redemption Sinclair and the production of absence Ghost storage 5 Roadworks: Orbiting the Orison The politics of bus stops The road as parasite An unpeopled country: Misrecognition and reforgetting on the Great North Road Conclusion - Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Works Cited Index