Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘We are all Narcissus, we are all monstrous, in that we are trapped between various ways of seeing and being seen’.[1] A foundation for a queer left cultural commentary and history of ideas in art and  writing. Some books cannot be praised enough. This is a blog on Matt Colquhoun (2023) Narcissus in Bloom: An Alternative History of the Selfie London, Repeater Books. @xenogothic

Books by Matt Colquhoun. @xenogothic the Twitter name of Matt Colquhoun.

Matt Colquhoun is a writer I discovered after browsing the shelves at the bookshop in the Baltic Contemporary Arts Centre, Gateshead and finding Narcissus in Bloom last Satuday. I was waiting to go to a matinee of three short plays at the Live Theatre on the Newcastle side of the Tyne, lingering in Gateshead, shy of the biting cold weather and ice on the paths outside. In the end, two of the plays were good (well one was excellent) but otherwise the event was disappointing both for me and the three friends me and my husband I went with. The day was cold too – one of those days when even warm friendships have stifled conversations, often about how cold you were. Arriving home though I remembered my purchase and read the three chapters after an early night after rooting for Layton on Strictly Come Dancing.

I had to read on and I finished it today (Monday). The three post-introduction parts are in sequence and respectively entitled: ‘Life’, ‘Death’ and ‘Transformation’. That tells in part the story promised in the introduction in a book that seems to marry the mythical nous of Frazer’s The Golden Bough with the cultural criticism of the history of ideas, art and philosophy of left-wing writers like, as Dan Taylor says, of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall.

I agree with Taylor, except I thought Colquhoun’s work whilst reading it, seemed to have a more keenly critical relation to their own times. In short, it is even more urgent than those precursors, perhaps because not so communally supported as his forebears in conventional political groupings or Centres of Contemporary Culture. Their publisher, Repeater Books, sells itself as an attempt to ‘create a new reality’ in twenty-first century arts and letters which it describes as ‘faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egoistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past’. By these criteria anyone might feel interpellated as wanting if they have in some way added words to the fray. In contrast Repeater Books promise ‘vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed’.[2] This seems a worthy project but defined thus it seems, I think, maverick in its vagueness of stated direction and altogether very difficult to place in some context or other of political discourse. That may indeed be the point, for we are ill-served by political loyalties and tired obeisance to manners in politics rather than a striving for some liberatory aim.

This breach of social codes becomes part of the method of enquiry. It is not ‘self-reference’ this book detests but self-reference that seeks the validation of institutionalised standards of what is ‘reasonable’. What is meant however by the publishers referring to the ‘egoistical self-reference’ of our current discourses, for these words seem to mount a simple and straightforward attack on the narcissism of current bourgeois cultural discourse dominant in institutions like universities. This problem raised by the publisher’s statement of intent sets problems, of course, for a book on why ‘narcissism’ must be re-evaluated because of its capacity for disruption of conventional, normative and established modes of the performance of self-identifications and interaction: ‘the frequency of’ their ‘trespassing into spaces beyond the bounds of a liberalist reason’. ^[3]

How are we to distinguish repressive narcissism when called the ‘egotistical self-reference’, of the institution of art and culture of the status quo, from the liberatory version outside its borders, represented by writers of Repeater Books? The whole of Narcissus in Bloom addresses this very problem.

Is the narcissist a person with ‘an excess of vanity or pride’ with regard to their appearance or assumptions of social status (as is probably the target of Repeater Books’ words ‘egoistical self-reference’ to characterise todays cultural situation and the person who will ‘post too much online’ or ‘overshare the minutiae of ‘their ‘personal existence’. Or is there, as Colquhoun says, ‘another narcissism’ – or ‘multiple narcissisms’ lurking beneath the surface of our shallow reflections’. And that other alternative or set of them is what Colquhoun wants us to see under the surface of the currently stigmatised characteristic called narcissism. These other narcissisms exploit association of the ‘flower and man’, Narcissus, found in art and taken up from the basic stories in which they are embodied, such as ‘self-transformation, rebirth and self-overcoming’.[4] But, make no mistake, you can’t have depth without surface and hence the contradiction with which I started. The major difference is the relation of narcissism to power – either in the helpful two words French uses for this one word, power, in English:

Puissance and pouvoir. … The former crudely put, refers to our individual power to act – what I can do, what I am capable of, what is within my power – whereas the latter refers to a more relational sense of power – how someone or something has power over me, be that through an authority exercised by another individual, an institution or the broader structures of society at large.[5]

I think if you get this idea, then the book becomes plainer sailing, even its later theory-dense pages. In the eyes of some, the reliance on specialisms, like post-modernist theory, with its characteristic densities of writing, is itself a kind of vanity. And so it can be. I remember attending a session at Durham University – it was in November 2016 from the evidence of Kurtz’s signature on my book – on a book by J.M. Coetzee and psychotherapist Isabella Kurtz (2015) the good story: exchanges on truth, fiction and psychotherapy, where the latter only was present. At question time, one lecturer from the university prefaced his contribution by saying: ‘I suppose I am the acknowledged expert on Coetzee here given my publications and …’. One stops listening there for nothing was clearer than the attempt to use the power of the institution we were sitting in to have ‘power over’ others – students and local yokels like myself alike. Isabella Kurtz had to put him right on what she knew of Coetzee’s understandings about the psychotherapeutic.

The point is however that, in our current state of culture, institutions still seem to lend power to individual egos and validate them above other voices, even those of their learners, in order to cancel that pretention in the thus subjugated, who are presumed not to the potential, to have it within their power, to make good enough or ‘expert’ comment. What Colquhoun insists upon is that narcissism can release the potential not only of an individual on the cusp of making a breakthrough in their identity, by necessity or accident of changing times, that fuels a renewal, some what when Narcissus is metamorphosed into a daffodil as a way out of his contradictory situation of being both trapped in fascination with himself but unable to grasp the object of that fascination or its meaning to him. And Narcissus as a flower then does this annually – every spring, being never the same flower twice but a renewed token of a flower-type.

Colquhoun addresses this in their ‘Epilogue’ where they make their own personal ‘self-reference’, inevitably touching on his ego-identity, that invokes mental health instabilities provoked by the disorientating  detachment from ‘habitual moorings’ of their life, contingent on, but not caused by, the end of a ‘long-term relationship’. Why is this not ‘egotistical self-reference’? I think the answer clear. Colquhoun does not invoke their credentials in academia, other than those necessary in Acknowledgement of sources and influence, but in their lived and living experience of instabilities in both ego-identity and fortunes that in fact transform the academic materials worked with – in cultural theory, art, politics  and photography (‘an inventory of our subjective instability’)[6] into an exploration of a situation and enforced habitation of a liminal space in our culture. That space is not one not validated by institutions at all. It was an experience of what Narcissus’ tussle with life, death and transformation in folklore, literature and in continual reference in the lives of socio-cultural commentators of all kinds (most movingly in his last instance Derek Jarman in his beach cottage in Dungeness), but especially those marginalised by race, a state of embodied ill-health and sexuality, lent to a personal chance of freedom from the trap constituted by seeing and being seen in their own unclear subjective self-definition. The strongest statement of this is in Derrida and used much later in the book though it still requires reading more fully by me:

And that this book tells of a personal, socio-cultural and academic faith (all loved as only a narcissist elaborating their own authoritative right to exist can) of a resurrection to a new life is clear. Resurrection indeed is a metaphor that plays with and against one of transformation in this book right from its earliest pages where the narcissus is inscribed as ‘a symbol of life, birth and resurrection’. Only the limiting Christian reference means that the daffodil is seen as ‘an emblem … of transformation’. Yet we ought to keep the word in mind in terms of  the placement of Gothic culture at the centre of this book, itself revived from an earlier publication of Colquhoun’s. Gothic here covers its medieval manifestation to its return as a series of neo-Gothic forms and the Gothic Revival in the eighteenth and nineteenth century respectively. Gothic, moreover, is this writer’s signature, in their Twitter-name and personal page heading (below) with its startling spirit-written version of that Twitter-name, Xengothic.

Gothic is a mode that celebrates the liminal between the binaries of life and death and provides a space for transformations both positive and negative. And Colquhoun rightly sees it everywhere in the spectral, ghostly and monstrous that so easily can be seen as attempt to escape the trap of being typed in one conventional form. They start with its demonisation as a form of art by latter artists like Molière naming it as a ‘besotted taste’ in ‘”odious monsters of ignorant centuries” from which “the torrents of barbarity spewed forth”’ to Charlotte Brontë and Robert Louis Stevenson, meanwhile pointing out that it is in Marx (not least the ‘spectre haunting Europe’ in the Communist manifesto) as well. Marx is there for a purpose because Gothic becomes hated and seen as populist because of its association with the ‘community’ and the common as opposed to the elite forms of later art.

I would guess that this helps explain Colquhoun’s attempt to rescue ‘Communism’ as a name. But communitarianism is different. In an important way the subjective instability underlying the arrogant ego of Cartesian philosophy (‘I think therefore I am’) is undermined and set against new multiple potential in a repertoire of the common, as Colquhoun and John Berger argue that Dürer did in his Apocalypse woodcut prints. Colquhoun evokes too the ‘poltergeist’ paradigm in modern horror films for instance as a sign of how the theatre spectator, siting with others, allies their potential with a disruptive element in settled bourgeois heavily conventional lives that frightens but opens up alternative potentials of being. Such phenomena are articulated with a fully legitimate use of the contemporary art theory of Jacques Rancière as a means of preserving the ‘living communitarian essence of theatre’ that has been killed off by bourgeois capitalist forms of social art, that become increasingly privatised experiences.

Perhaps the most important theoretical input is from Agamben, with whom I have always struggled, and particularly with his concept of “Whatever being” that represents, together with ‘fractal selves’ the virtuous space of subjective instability and is the best name to give a Gothic ‘monster’ between all categories of identity. A ‘whatever being’ though is also that person finding themselves in the  teeth of the trap of being seen and seeing . That person becomes ‘open’ (another important Agamben concept) to renewal in forms as yet unknown or prescribed – ready for you to write yourself. And all of this is dependent on the strength of a new appreciation of narcissism. The reading of Kim Kardashian in these terms is purely brilliant.[7]

I find myself frustrated as I write this, because so much of the illumination and joy of this book lies in moments where you learn something new that perfectly fits the framework of the argument, or learn, for the first time how Rancière’s work should be read (though I do noy yet have any confidence with Derrida). An illumination about what both Picasso and Bacon were doing in portraits delighted.[8] The introduction to great photographs and photographers I did not know, like Hippolyte Bayard and Lee Friedlander, astounded, for their richness opens up so many issues.[9] The brilliant re-reading Of Laura Mulvey on the ‘male gaze’ explained all my past problems, and misunderstandings passed on by poor summaries of it in courses, with that concept.[10] The facility to move from writing to visual material was wonderful and William S. Burroughs on concepts of ‘control’, delegated from oppressive social power structures, in art came alive for me again, in ways that only Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth (see my broken-backed blog at that link) has achieved for me before.[11]

Of course I am left with questions mainly about self-reference. Critical commentary and the tone of the book itself makes me believe it is a wonderful contribution to queer theory and yet self-reference in it hardly covers this potential in ways usual to writing. There is, as it were an occluded part of the ‘selfie’ this book constitutes. But why should this not be the case. The invocation of male queer lives, especially Jarman and his role in the beginning of Colquhoun’s own subjective instabilities feels like a story deliberately not told fully, particularly since we are told that the only relationship specified was with a girlfriend.[12] There are so many ways to read this. Has Matt just begun an identity as queer, a queer ally or is their lost story one of transition to non-binary status or a trans male with non-binary preference or is none of this relevant at all. There is always a suspicion of prurience in oneself when asking such questions. The topic of this book makes the alternative of non-relevance unlikely and given that the book continually analyses how identity is distributed across works including and especially ‘selfie’s’ it feels as if one might ask. But in the end, no answer should be given for as the book says ‘the blooming and wilting’ of selves alike is part of the process of narcissism properly understood – a letting happen. And for another to ask for certainties here is a kind of appropriation of the process and its re-insertion into unnecessary conventions.

With love

Steve

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[1] Matt Colquhoun (2023: 93) Narcissus in Bloom: An Alternative History of the Selfie London, Repeater Books.

[2] Publisher’s statement: Ibid: 278

[3] Ibid: 233

[4] Ibid: 8f.

[5] Ibid: 130

[6] Ibid: 117

[7] Ibid: c. 174

[8] Ibid: 141

[9] Ibid: 103ff, & 161ff.

[10] Ibid: 144f.

[11] Ibid: 139

[12] Ibid: 244