Ode To Jade Goody

“We have swallowed our microphones and headsets.” – Jean Baudrillard

Pilot
Susan Sontag famously wrote that photography “turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” On the capricious construction of Princess Diana’s simulacrum – her life captured and reconstituted in tabloid photography and reportage – Jill R. Chancey takes this idea and asserts that “like nearly all mass media consumers, I can only know [her] through the media’s representation of her life in pictures.” Diana was introduced into the public eye “blushing and blinking into this lens and that lens,” an icon baptised by a wave of clicks and flashes, immediately recognisable and never to be unwatched again. Much the same can be said for Jade Goody, who waded through hordes of television fans, ascended a metal staircase, gave the crowds one final wave and fatefully entered the Big Brother house. The spectacle of the entrance – all cheers, shutters and flashes – was replaced with the quiet of a house rigged with cameras: she too was to never be unwatched again. So, we can only know Jade in the way Chancey describes – and like with Diana, we, the carnivorous public, came to objectify and “symbolically possess” Jade through these representations.

A key distinction between these two figures, though, comes at the point in which they entered the mediascape. Where Diana was introduced to the consuming public in an elevated position, born into nobility and always-already royal (if rejected by some in the Royal Family itself), Jade was different in so far as she was precisely nobody. Jade was but a humble dental nurse upon entering the Big Brother house in 2002. She left the show, however, a “professional not-known-for-anything-of-note Celebrity figure,” in the words of the show’s own website. Umberto Eco once wrote that “television's ideal is the absolutely average person.” This is, at least ostensibly, true of reality television in particular. On reality television, “very little happens that would not take place outside the context of the indifference of our own lives.” We see the apparent foregrounding of the average: the promise of recognition, adoration and legacy, the repeated reassurance that average people are important. But the capitalised “Celebrity” on the Big Brother website is a knowing wink. It tells us: average people are only actually important once they become a spectacle. 

As is now well-known, Jade provided spectacle in abundance, aided in no small way by a manipulative media and pantomime public. It became clear that Jade’s “absolutely average” character – her boisterousness, unexceptional looks, naïve malapropisms – were ripe for demonisation: criticisms of Jade soon became coded attacks on the British working-class, or “ugly, thick white Britain” as the ever-honourable Guardian put it at the time. So, Jade Goody became “Jade,” an icon – the inverse Diana – constructed through image, possession and consumption. A second stint in the Big Brother house, this time as the “Celebrity” her first appearance had elevated her to, saw Jade embroiled in a racial bullying scandal. Caught in the spectacle of self, Jade manifested the character she had been assigned. With a supporting cast of goading bullies, “chav” Jade picked off Shilpa Shetty, articulate and beautiful symbol of cultural globalisation, and subjected the Bollywood actress to racialised insults. “She totally delivered on what we thought she would,” gloated one of the show’s producers.

Cancellation 

It is with great disappointment to remember that cancer and cancel do not share an etymological root. While Jade lived and died before the era of so-called “cancellation,” there is something to be said about her death closing a moment in the history of celebrity (or “Celebrity”). The parallel deaths of Jade and the vehicle that helped launch her celebrity is telling: Jade passed away in 2009; Big Brother was cancelled in 2010 (albeit to return on a different channel the following year with significantly worse ratings). Even further, Jade was featured on the front cover of the last ever edition of tabloid paper News Of The World, which died its own timely death in 2011. 

Like any soap opera, Jade’s ratings had fluctuated wildly with her dramatic arc of villainy, redemption and tragedy. Ultimately, her show was cut short, like that actual programme that had spawned her spin-off. Jade’s ratings were as fickle as Diana’s, who was at any given moment (and often at once) a “whore,” “homewrecker,” “saint” and “People’s Princess.” But if the death of Diana created a national inquiry into the abusive and intrusive role of the media (and specifically paparazzi), Jade – by the time of her death – had done away with the paparazzi and created a spectacle of her own. Jade simply knew that the spectacle that her life had become needed an aptly public conclusion. So her death, like her life, became entertainment. 

It is perhaps poetic that news of her cancer diagnosis came while Jade was a contestant on Bigg Boss – India’s version of Big Brother – as an act of repentance for her earlier words. Her tour of reparation had taken her to Shetty’s homeland. The public was largely forgiving, but her body provided a punishment of its own. It was there, in India, that her final chapter began. 

Programmes aired both prior to and after her death documented her last months. Her wedding was a “private” ceremony, televised on the documentary Jade’s Wedding and published on the cover of OK!. Her funeral was attended in person by hundreds and broadcast on television to millions more. Like all good television series, she was even honoured with clip shows: Jade: With Love and Jade: As Seen on TV were both broadcast in the months following her passing. 

Re-runs

Because her life was cut short, ending soon before the turn of the decade, Jade remains frozen in time. Her death signalled the end of an era and preceded the rise of the populisms, fascisms and nationalisms that came to define the 2010s. It was in the decade after her death that Twitter became embedded in the cultural psyche; Donald Trump broke the minds of the ‘sensible’ and revealed the farcical state of liberal democracy; the end of the decade became memorialised with the designation of Covid-19, the virus that drew the world to a halt for two years. Most importantly, this decade was that which saw the total ascendancy of Big Data. 

Perhaps expectedly, the period post-9/11 and pre-Global Financial Crisis (or pre- the long-term effects of the GFC), of which Jade became mnemonic, is now the subject of great nostalgia. The jolting, jarring entry into the twenty-first century was followed by a period of bemused postmodern enjoyment. It seemed that a world in which the Twin Towers (the symbols of “financial power and global economic liberalism”) could collapse “as if by implosion… committing suicide” could not hold any real meaning whatsoever.

“Indie Sleaze,” the retrospective tag for the party-oriented Hipsterism of the mid-00s, described as a period of “unbridled hedonism” – “all flash photography, live music and a ‘love for outdated technology’” – is one subject of yearning within this present nostalgia-scape. If “Indie Sleaze” was overbearingly middle-class – coloured by socialites and art school graduates; presenting itself as a cultural face for the “gentrification” of Shoreditch, Brooklyn, and so on – another trend has come to represent the nostalgic fawning for the working- and lower-middle class culture of the time. Exemplified by the Instagram page @loveofhuns, “hun” culture is all reality television, c-list celebrity and “salt-of-the-earth women.” While “Indie Sleaze” was clearly more aspirational (its “sleaze” oozing a bourgeois character), “hun” culture capitalises on the relatability that the “absolutely average” television contestant might present. 

But there is something sinister at play here. “Huns” are typically – although not always – women, working- or lower-middle class, and famous for being “absolutely average.” Moreover, “huns are mothers but also need to be mothered,” as one article on the trend suggests. But this concern, this desire to “mother,” comes only from the “tragedy and dramatic arcs of these celebs and their lives.” A cycle becomes apparent. We participate in this arc, we goad the celebrity and consume their tragedies, only to find the consequent vulnerability relatable. This pattern is continual: Sophie Gradon, Caroline Flack, Nikki Grahame. There is a clear absence of reflexivity in the consumer: it is she who devours and ridicules the “hun” who then nominates herself to “mother” the “hun.”

For all their differences, what “Indie Sleaze” and “hun” culture both represented (and what their revivals signify) is a pure aestheticisation: a hodgepodge of signifiers and attempts at making sense of something, anything, in a traumatised and ever-more digital world. No wonder flocks of “absolutely average” people applied to be watched by cameras, by the public, by Big Brother. That opportunity to subject oneself to a sort of auto-voyeurism, to a public humiliation, could surely be no less humiliating than the suicide of the West itself! 

Omnibus

That Jade came to prominence on Big Brother, a show that borrowed from 1984 with its constant surveillance of contestants and the presence of an all-seeing, panoptical Big [Br]Other is of course interesting. What is of more significance, though, is that after the programme had ended Jade extended this surveillance: she internalised its logic and remained the ever-watched subject. Referring to 1984’s panoptica to describe today’s “digital control society,” Byung-Chul Han writes that our present “Digital Big Brother outsources operations to inmates.” Is this not the case for Jade after her baptism on the television show of the same name?

The issue of agency is thus pertinent: was Jade controlled or in control; manipulated or manipulative? Like Jade, Diana also cannot not be cast as mere victim. It would be “offensive to present the canny, resourceful Diana as a woman of no agency, as either a foolish, duped child or the hapless casualty of malevolent muckrakers.” A key difference between Diana and Jade, though, is that Diana’s media construction marked the zenith of “old media,” the absolute supremacy of tabloids and the now-defunct (or internalised) paparazzi; Jade’s arrived in that awkward transitional period in which television remained king but a quietly exciting digital media – a social media – was bubbling. Her celebrity preceded and foresaw the era of the influencer, the vlogger, the e-celeb. People had digital cameras, but not on their phones. Some used Twitter, but it was far from the congenital digital-appendage it is now. As the artist Maria Vorobjova writes, “the early internet harnessed the boundless possibilities offered by cyberspace, providing a liberating and autonomous dreamworld beyond the confines of capitalist structures.” This was perhaps true – a promise of utopian or exterior spaces can be read on forums, websites and games of the early internet. But the evolution of the internet also seemingly “correspond[ed] with shrinking possibilities, and now we're all constantly online on the same five websites.” Not just that, but these same five websites harvest us for our every detail and desire. Agency is not so clearly placed; are we not all both controlled and in control, manipulated and manipulative online?

Surely, the example of Jade Goody makes visible the subsumption of the individual into the mechanisms of the “digital control society” prior to the absolute ubiquity (or embeddedness) of smartphones and social media, and the ascension of Big Data. To be clear: we are nostalgic for the Age of Jade because her moment of Celebrity, her possession-by-public, the spectacle of her life-and-death-on-screen, preceded the period in which we are all watched all the time. One writer notes that “Big Brother insisted it was ‘always watching’, however, social media has a far better claim to that slogan.” We don’t need to worry about the paparazzi now because we are the paparazzi. “We have swallowed our microphones and headsets. We have interiorised our own prosthetic image and become the professional showmen of our own lives. Compared with this, reality shows are only side-effects.” As such, after all the damage and drama, there seems to be even an innocence to the televisual spectacle. Who watches television anymore? Who even owns a television?

Jade Goody is dead, long live Jade Goody!

The Alchemy of Obsession

“He seemed so certain of everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He couldn't even be sure he was alive because he was living like a dead man.” – Albert Camus

“I'd only ever encountered it as a pop-culture punchline,” reads one account on living with OCD. Excessive hand-washing, aligning pencils properly, being orderly. It is a condition that has not been – and seemingly cannot be – grasped by popular accounts. Your on-screen OCD sufferer is a nerdish, pedantic neat-freak. But the search for control and order goes significantly further. Obsessive thinking - and its manifestation through compulsive behaviour - is a persistent horror for (probably) one percent of the population, if not more. Yet it remains impossible to pin down, reduced to punchline, pseudoscientific melodrama or cultural catch-all.

Freud even struggled to decipher OCD – it was a problem that had “not yet been mastered,” with Freud confessing that “if we endeavour to penetrate more deeply into its nature, we still have to rely upon doubtful assumptions and unconfirmed suppositions.” He did nevertheless contribute the term “zwangsneurose,” translated as “obsessive neurosis”: what he saw as the maladaptive response of the brain to “conflicts between unacceptable, unconscious sexual or aggressive id impulses and the demands of conscience and reality.” The energy of these repressed impulses would later be released “through pathological attachment to various thoughts and behaviours, turning them into obsessions and compulsions.” This hypothesis, as will be later discussed, misses the mark. OCD is now recognised across the board as an unmistakeably neurobiological illness, one that “is caused not by vague conflicts in the unconscious but rather by measurable chemical abnormalities that occur in specific regions of the brain.” But Freud’s theory is nevertheless an important one, for it demonstrates not just the elusory nature of OCD and the long struggle to understand a disorder characterised by ritualised magical thinking and a battle for control, but – perhaps more pertinently if also abstractly – because it gives some indication towards the rising popularity of the disorder as a cultural phenomenon and widely-claimed socio-psychological conflict (that is, it could be argued that Freud inadvertently cleared the way for a non-medical and purely-behavioural perception of OCD).

It is a challenge, of course, to address a mental disorder – experienced entirely internally, as much as popular culture’s favourite exhibitions of its behaviour may be external – from a perspective that is neither altogether scientifically informed, nor of the confessional-journalistic genre. That it has “not yet been mastered,” still now, both more than a century after Freud and with an increased understanding of neuropsychiatry, does however open a space for a hybridised theoretical-personal account. If we understand OCD to be chemical, a hyperactivity of the cortico-striatal-thalamic-cortical loop, and/or a lack of serotonin, what we don’t know is why obsessive thoughts take the forms that they do. It is also unknown to most – to a full extent, at least – what a sufferer’s moment-by-moment experience is. Further yet, OCD is also an intellectual disorder, a disease of thinking and overthinking. On the one hand, the subject of an OCD thought is dispensable insofar as it is not any more interesting than the fact that it exists in the first place (each new thought quickly supplants an old one, the previous thought being quickly forgotten). On the other hand, however, obsessional thinking typically appropriates those subjects most important to the sufferer, and so the subjects one becomes obsessive about provide a window into one’s conscience.

And so I set out to obsessively theorise on what it means to obsess. I do not intend to propose a new theory of OCD’s causes – chemical, genetic, psychoanalytical or otherwise. There is a gap, however, for an experiential review of existing hypotheses that surveys psychoanalytical, neurobiological and cultural perspectives that come, largely, from the outside (e.g. of the therapist analysing a patient, or the television writer developing an obsessive character). If obsession is having its cultural moment, it is worth asking not simply why this is the case, but what obsessional thinking is and how it is experienced. This piece thus takes the following structure: a discussion of the origins of obsessive thoughts and Freud’s hypothesis; an overview of the labyrinthine experience of obsession; a wider consideration of OCD’s position within popular culture; and a view to the future: both a concession of defeat and a mind-affirming victory. 

OCD, Depression, Desire

Writing recently on the various “waves” or “phases” of the Coronavirus pandemic, Slavoj Zizek suggested that the pandemic-fatigued public had transitioned from fear to depression: in learning to live with the virus – and in being no longer primarily focused on not becoming infected – we lost the fear of a “clear threat” that characterised the initial wave of infections. We are thus left with “no clear perspective,” having learned to live with a state of uncertainty but accepting the apparent endlessness of this ‘state of emergency’. “We feel fear when there is a clear threat,” he writes “and we feel frustration when obstacles emerge again and again which prevent us from reaching what we strive for. But depression signals that our desire itself is vanishing.” This final sentence is particularly interesting and worth disambiguating from its specific context. One can find a clear delineation between mental states caused by OCD and depression in that the former is characterised by an excess of stimulation and the latter by an excessive lack of stimulation. With depression, as Zizek writes, desire vanishes. One might then say, in the case of anxiety or obsession, that desire doesn’t vanish but remains in sight. But the distance created between what one desires and what one experiences increases so as to create a distance filled by caricature and fantasy. As such, obsession is much like how Zizek describes frustration – “when obstacles emerge again and again which prevent us from reaching what we strive for” – but with one important distinction: despite what we may think, what we strive for is always unattainable, always out of our control. If we were to rewrite Zizek’s analysis but with obsessive thinking in place of depression, we might suggest the following: fear passes into obsession and one comes to believe that they can not only see a way out (“if I do x I can control y”) but that one can reach that goal by ritualistic compulsion (typically purely by thinking). So unlike the depressive, who loses desire (or that which we “strive for”), the obsessive maintains their desire but it is this that becomes overexcited and warped in a continuously shifting process to the extent that it is worse than vanished: I can see it, but the rational perspective on what I can see has gone.

Whilst OCD may be a neurobiological illness, it is of course necessary to investigate the mechanisms – or origins – or thoughts. Repression of or conflict with id impulses may not provide a suitable explanation, but it is nevertheless the case that people have certain thoughts for a reason. So, I would suggest the above discussion of desire speaks to Freud’s idea of conflicts between ego and id, “the demands of conscience” and unacceptable impulses, but with one clear reversal: into this formulation of a conflict we can replace unconscious desires (i.e. sexual deviances, aggression, and so on) with a hyper-stimulation of conscience – or, in Freudian terms, superego (that is to say, the intrusive presence of thoughts antithetical to my desire and antagonistic to my conscience). So it is not id versus ego, or latent desire versus conscience, but rather the heightened, excited product of that which my conscience and desire is not versus that which my conscience or desire is or should be. 

 

This can be illustrated in the example of what some may call pOCD (paedophilia OCD). The sufferer has the intrusive thought that they are a paedophile – this might be through a false memory of an interaction with a child, or the intrusion of a sexual thought when interacting with a child. This thought will, understandably, evoke panic: one is not a paedophile, one does not want to cause harm to a child. So why am I having that thought? Asks the sufferer. The more that this intrusive thought receives validation – the more value is added to it through resistance, panic or contemplation – the more convincing it becomes. Thus, it is not the emergence of an “unconscious sexual or aggressive id impulse” (i.e. one is actually a paedophile or wishes suffering upon a child) that the sufferer is in conflict with, so much as the opposite: if anything, the over-stimulated conscience, prone to sabotage, is subverted so that a new reality is created in which that which one doesn’t desire eclipses that which one does. A list of common subjects of obsessive anxiety demonstrates this: the death of family members; the sexual past of a partner; the blaspheming of a religious figure.

Psychotherapist Michael Alcee suggests that “individuals with OCD are empaths – highly tuned in to the feelings of others – and this allows them to connect deeply, sometimes almost telepathically with others. Is it any surprise that they worry about the magic of their thoughts harming people…?” If we disregard the mimetic connotations of “empath” and the generalisation explicit in the “are” that precedes it, this description does actually strike an important chord. “Magic,” here, isn’t merely a sensationalised description of the experience of perceived augmented responsibility felt by OCD sufferers but, rather, an affirmation of what I earlier called the “hyper-stimulation of conscience.” The “magic” property of a thought can be translated as the excessive burden of conscience (“I can and must make this right”) and it is the inability to fulfil this magical promise that causes distress. In this, we might say magical thinking acts as an extension of the superego demand that one feel guilt or regret for negative behaviours. So, one tries to correct or control a thought or fear by thinking it away – and yet, if we return to the above list of common obsessive thoughts, one obviously cannot control the death of a family member or sexual history of partner by thinking. The point here is that obsessional thoughts (and their accompanying compulsions) are not the enactment of unconscious desires, “id impulses,” that are always-already present (if repressed) but rather a construct of the conscious mind – unrelated to that which “knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality” – and precisely what it fears. 

Crabs In A Bucket 

And so one is tormented by the inability to make right that which feels wrong. But it is an awareness of this process – the intellectual and emotional understanding that I am suffering – that can cause further distress and ensure that one doesn’t escape obsession’s trap. Constant anxious thoughts generate a constant fear that becomes obsessive in itself. Each new thought feeds into this self-perpetuating fear: if I am having this new thought, it must mean I still have OCD and therefore I have not and cannot overcome it. Each new thought is a reminder of the subject’s own failing or disorder, and they must act on that failing. The solution, so they think, is the momentarily soothing remedy of reassurance. I can overcome it, and this is how. That reassurance, however, in serving only to scratch an itch that exists by virtue of obsessive fantasy (that is to say, it is merely an extension of the previous anxiety), then becomes obsessive. One might reassure themselves that they are not a paedophile, to return to the previous example, but this reassurance only further validates the thought for it confirms its very existence and plays into the fantasy that that anxiety might be true. OCD thoughts thus function much like crabs in a bucket: no one crab can allow another crab to escape the bucket; even if one crab’s freedom can be guaranteed, the other crabs pull it down to instead assure a collective confinement and, eventually, death. In the obsessive mind, each thought is committed to a ritual of sabotage, and new thoughts will generate to prevent the painless procession of another. 

A single obsessive thought, then, generates a shopping list of infinite other thoughts. In an ordinary trip to the supermarket my attention is caught by a promotional poster advertising chocolate cake. If I am making cake, I need flour, eggs, sugar. Actually I need cocoa too. But what about the icing? And I need fruit – candles, a sparkler, even. If I am having cake, I will need napkins, and cake forks. And so on. The trouble is, it is not cake that I am cooking tonight. The obsessive subject loses sight of the object of concern. It is useful here to turn to Zygmunt Bauman, who wrote on the compulsion of consumption and that unending search for “examples and recipes for life:” “There is no end to the shopping list. Yet however long the list, the way to opt out of shopping is not on it.” The same applies to OCD: the solution to the original obsessive thought – to simply not think – is the only essential item missing from the shopping list. So we shop forever, looking for whatever it is that will satisfy our urge, but we only perpetuate the cycle and shop, so they say, ‘til we drop. Of course, to quote Brecht’s In Praise of Communism: es ist das einfache / das schwer zu machen ist, it is the simple thing / that’s hard to do. While it is not the prospect of implementing Communism that is of concern to me (here, at least), the principle remains the same: the right or simple thing to do can appear the most complex (coincidentally, Brecht did also supposedly suffer from OCD). Take that typical example of an OCD ritual: my hands are dirty, I need to wash them until they are clean. The simple thing to do (washing your hands once) is not sufficient; the difficult thing (washing your hands infinitely because they can never be clean) appears to the sufferer as the best solution. 

33 Meticulous Cleaning Tricks 

Alas, the image of the perennial hand-washer remains prominent in the popular imagination. The original compulsion to, say, clean one’s hands ad infinitum to achieve an unattainable control is replaced by a simple and incorrect formulation: OCD is about wanting to be clean and orderly. The sufferer washes their hands simply because they are a clean freak. As such, people describe themselves as “a little OCD” (it is passé to even mention Buzzfeed but, sadly, an exemplar usage is that website’s insistence on publishing articles like ‘33 Meticulous Cleaning Tricks For The OCD Person Inside You’). To borrow again from Zizek, this is a decaffeinated OCD, a disorder without its malignant property, like a non-alcoholic beer, say, which one can enjoy without the threat of drunkenness or liver damage. So, the popular image of OCD is one of a compulsion (washing hands, etc.) without an obsession and – importantly – without the threat of genuine distress. Such descriptions of being “a little OCD” would require the illness to be not a neurobiological one but a cultural one. The commonly self-diagnosed decaffeinated OCD is not a physical problem but one that relates to some wider cultural trend in desiring control, perfection or order. 

“Unlike other mental disorders, which are rarely addressed publicly, OCD has entered popular culture and colloquial conversation.” So, it is reasonable to suggest that OCD has become “trendy” – not just in the vernacular but in song lyrics and television shows. The risible character of Sheldon Cooper on television’s ‘The Big Bang Theory’ is a leading proponent in OCD-mythmaking. An exemplar scene depicting his apparently obsessive-compulsive tendencies sees him declare in a moment of frustration that he wants to “peel off [his] own face” after a game of tic-tac-toe (which can only end in a win, loss or draw, he says) is left incomplete, rubbed off a whiteboard before he can place his final o. Again we see the decaffeinated OCD in action, with Sheldon’s frustration a totally normal response to a game being abruptly ended. There is no obsession mentioned, nor is there even a compulsive act. His discomfort is that which accompanies the suspension of gratification (the “hey I was about to win!” that might be heard throughout childhood) not that which stems from obsessional thinking or neurological abnormality. One online article even suggests that his “emotional disconnect” is a symptom of his obsessive-thinking, seemingly confusing OCD with autism. 

But why and when did a serious disorder become a popular trope, stripped of its horrors and inserted with comedy? Fifteen years ago Jennifer Fleissner considered the cultural interest in this previously marginal mental disorder, wondering whether “something in the very organisation of the external world itself answered to the obsessional perspective?” One metanarrative might point to the jarring developments that accompanied (or accompanies, still) the turn from modernism to whatever came next; that is, a turn marked by the rise in digital technologies, the threat of nuclear war (now, perhaps, an outdated or updated concern) and the “intoxicating delirium of ‘the new beginning’”… the result of “tearing up the old local/communal bonds, declaring war on habitual ways and customary laws, shredding and pulverising les pouvoirs intermédiaires” as Bauman put it elsewhere. So attempts at controlling thoughts might be traced to that desire to control what cannot be controlled: “habitual ways and customary laws” would, in fact, be an accurate characterisation of OCD thoughts, and control of such ways and laws might compensate for the lack felt in a broader, material sense, namely that of a hopelessness amid drastically uncertain times. 

We can also certainly suggest that most people in developed capitalist economies live at odds with their occupation or means of income and find themselves working for or within forces that can never truly be known. A lack of control is constituent of most working situations – be that in the outsourcing of labour, ever-declining union membership, the rise of zero-hour contracts, and so on. Further, the coronavirus pandemic that halted much of the world in 2020 perhaps also contributed to OCD mythology, with an endless media stream of catastrophising germaphobia creating a culture ripe for self-diagnosis. So perhaps the cultural interest in OCD does find its origins in the “organisation of the external world” – but it is the mistaken attribution of this organisation as a cause or, even, diagnostic tool for OCD that causes problems. 

To The End 

The critique of a Freudian or socio-cultural perspective on OCD does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that OCD can and must only be treated with drugs or – at an extreme – brain surgery. In fact, it is essential that one does not become stuck on the centricity of a medicalised account, nor hold as gospel the designations of the DSM-5 and its predecessors. Medication – typically SSRIs – can only go so far to alleviate the symptoms of OCD; talk therapy, be it cognitive behavioural therapy or psychoanalysis, or any other means of communicating and exploring one’s thoughts, remains the clearest and most viable option. If obsessional thinking stems from neurobiological malfunction or abnormality it is still nevertheless experienced intellectually and through patterns of thought, and so the management of these thoughts and their mechanisms remains paramount. To be clear, one's repetitive thoughts, the ritualistic hammering of obsessions, strengthen the "neuro-pathways" of one's cognitive processes. Sufferers commonly speak of becoming "stuck" or suffering from "brain lock." That is to say, the attention one gives to a particular line of thought can lead to a rewiring of the brain: there is a dangerous symbiosis between one's biology and the specific thoughts that one becomes fixated on.

So, the wish of this piece is more to avoid OCD becoming “the label to designate the suffering felt by a new generation” as Darian Leader suggested had become of depression and bipolar before it. We also cannot allow obsessional thinking to be reduced to a banal trope or a rigidity of thinking, as is the current pathway paved by cultural representations (not least because obsessional thinking can be intensely creative, with patterned or ruminative thoughts sometimes perhaps perversely amounting to fantastical world-building that can be harnessed for positive use). Perhaps, then, the lack of mastery over the subject reveals some of its beauty: might we instead resist both the misinformed cultural representation and the medicalised inflexibility that kills “the ambiguity of great drama”? The whys of OCD may remain uncertain but the whats and hows of the daily experience can and must be elevated to public concern. Each sufferer of OCD – and only a sufferer of OCD – has the power to characterise its strange horrors as they see fit. Atop the foundation of neurobiology, within and without the speculation of psychoanalysis, popular culture, self-diagnosis or psychiatric insistence, one’s obsessional thinking remains an alchemic ritual experienced internally, in and of the self.

Rogan, Sedation, Domination

"Offering us as a cure the very thing that caused the illness" - Slavoj Zizek

In January of this year, Spotify removed the music of Neil Young from its platform after he threatened to pull it himself in protest against misinformation spread on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. Joni Mitchell soon followed suit. Our beloved singers had committed heroic acts and our class of media pundits appealed to Spotify to further play censor. But in focusing on veracity and Culture War sub-battles, the discourse around Joe Rogan’s podcast and the issue of its “platforming” has failed to address the real issues: the exploitative threat of Spotify itself and the void of power and authority that haunts the political centre.

Joe Rogan, in all his banality and enthusiasm for dubious popular science, reminds us that we have the right to be wrong. In a moment defined by hysteria over “post-truth politics,” amplified by appeals to scientific authority during the Coronavirus pandemic, being wrong represents one of the great transgressions. Rogan invites diverse voices to his online platform and allows them to be wrong. Fine. These voices fill mostly dull, overlong interviews – fodder for the unquenchably curious, but also information (as in our newspapers, television screens, billboards) that we should be able to consume, discern and discard as we please and without mediation. As with these more traditional outlets of information, however, the conduit through which Rogan broadcasts his information and misinformation – Spotify – is not a public forum. That is to say, the traditional newspaper is subject to significant editorial and ideological scrutiny; Spotify is subject to market forces (and of course, naturally, the market's own concomitant editorialising and ideologies). As such, the spread of information deemed wrong outside of this traditional domain now calls to task our postmodern providers of order and ephemera (and the order of ephemera): no editors to issue retractions, no politicians to issue statements, but technocratic wizzes to fill an ideological void. 

The trouble with the discourse around The Joe Rogan Experience begins with Rogan’s own position vis-à-vis these more ‘traditional’ outlets of information. Fundamentally, Rogan disturbs the apparently otherwise-stable ontological categories of internal/external that define the liberal orthodoxy: those of science/scepticism, truth/mistruth, ordered/disordered, couth/uncouth… not to mention capitalism/communism, technocracy/populism, authoritarianism/libertarianism. In this disruption, Rogan plays the role of blood, sweat or nail clippings (among others) in the genre of horror: as being “me/not me, inside/outside, and living/dead” and therefore horrific in being ambiguous or interstitial (blood is a life-giver when inside, but horrific when out; a long finger nail is a sign of good health, but disturbing, dirty, when clipped and disembodied). So, Rogan is both internal and external to this orthodoxy: he has large financial backing, is widely popular, is simultaneously both-sides and neither of the left nor right, primarily hosting uninteresting middle-of-the-road guests; he also, in being both-sides and despite (or because of) his mainstream status, gives platform to the fringe of accepted or established thought (vaccine sceptics, pseudo-scientists, and so on). His views and his guests – and, even further, Spotify as both absolutely quotidian but also still relatively new and, in its mechanisms, surreptitious – disturb and disambiguate our recognised categories. As such, the man with a $100,000,000 Spotify licensing deal and 11,000,000 listeners per episode becomes strangely external, vaguely symbolic of the peripheries, of the “Culture Wars” and – by extension – the right-wing.

Of course, Rogan isn’t really on the right, and only some of his guests are of this persuasion. Rather, by being a centrist – that is, being of both the right and the left, but mostly neither – Rogan holds a mirror to his critics: if it is he who “platforms” that which is external to liberal-centrism, it is liberal-centrism itself that facilitates, feeds, funds it. Our Silicon Valley machines of desire (Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) present one such case of this. Established by “near-divine figures,” these companies promise what Stuart Jeffries calls a “profane liberation theology,” one that proposes to free the user from the stresses of indecision, inconvenience and, ultimately, self. Of course, “in reality we are made into instruments, keeping the system we should overthrow on life support.” Our dependence on these technologies, and their total submersion into the functions of traditional media, creates a cycle that is hard to break: these companies may be born from a post-1968 countercultural ideology of liberation but they serve only to embolden neoliberal techno-tyranny. As such, the solution to misinformation on Spotify becomes a call to that very company to play censor. So, Rogan’s mirroring of liberal-centrism back at itself is inadvertent but important, if also likely futile: the think-piece writer at The Guardian (or wherever else) looks at Rogan and sees that which their ghastly ideology creates but ultimately neglects (that is to say: what does the European Union create other than more refugees; what does a vaccine mandate create other than more sceptics; what does the liberating technology of Spotify create other than further bondage?). I recall an advertisement, probably fictitious, for a “chocolate laxative,” brought to my attention by Zizek: “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!”

The cry for Spotify’s intervention is thus a call to the guidance and authority of the big Other: an appeal to the symbolic order to correct the disordered, destabilising object (here it is misinformation or, in sadder and more plain terms, a podcast). Living in an increasingly fragmented or atomised age – post-society, as per Thatcher – and one that is at the behest of an all-infecting neoliberalism, in which platformed corporations (including those ostensibly “public” ones) perform moral arbitrator, this appeal of course reaches only as far as Spotify, which occupies the role of social engineer and phantasmic organiser of subjectivity. If government has been cast off for being simultaneously too overreaching and too incompetent, the facilitators of our age of convenience – those above mentioned platforms – become the Daddy that the sapless subject reaches to for guidance. For who else will fulfil our desire for authority? 

Of course, Spotify’s principal crime is – and always has been – its total enmity towards artists, those inconvenient workers who provide Spotify with its product but demand remuneration in return. Spotify pays just £0.003 per stream, requiring at least 1200 streams from one user to equal the share that an artist would receive from a single CD sale. And yet it is dubious claims about vaccines that drove Neil Young and Joni Mitchell from the platform and created the media storm that threatened, if only superficially, to unsettle the platform. Economic exploitation is tolerable but being wrong deserves the fury of a liberal media whose interests lie not in serving the public good, nor a pursuit of “truth,” but the defence of platform capitalism. This issue stems, of course, from the fact that politics has become largely depoliticised. As Sam Kriss puts it, referring back to the words of one “millennial capitalist” who flogs “political tomato sauce”: “When people say that tomato sauce is political, what do they actually mean?” They want the tomatoes to affirm that black lives matter.” He continues: “food might be political now, and sitcoms, and novels, and every conversation with everyone you’ve ever known, but the sole exception seems to be politics itself.” Banks may have plunged millions into a crisis of debt but they can find redemption in the brandishing of the depoliticised icon of the rainbow flag. And here at the End of History, how we listen to music or talk shows or podcasts has become poisoned by this ‘politicisation’. Our provider of entertainment, Spotify, – for all its underpaying and devaluation – must take the moral duty to remind us that mistruth is bad and that disruption to the accepted order must be promptly dealt with. What is bad for business is bad for the public and companies such as Spotify must oblige. We might march against government, but why (and how) would we march against Spotify, which mostly exists and functions in – and as a result of – our imagination? That basic tenet of the Frankfurt School rings ever-true: society won’t rise against its oppression but become stupefied, for in the space that real power has vacated, wherein our actions and interests are increasingly privatised, sedated by algorithms and a willed repression, we begin to desire our own domination.

Unfinished theses on children’s entertainment

“The real itself appears as a large useless body,” Jean Baudrillard

The Kidz Bop kids move in such a way so as to suggest not mortal flesh but life-sized screens, projecting learned references from YouTube videos, pop singers and codes of celebritydom. That is to say that their every gesture is mediated through a reference that is known – popularly known – but whose origin isn’t. A fan of the hand, a cock of the arm, a raise of the eyebrow. Innocuous movements, apparently, but anachronistic: decontextualised from the choreographed routines of adult popstars, relearned as the hyper-mediated gesticulation of the popstar in miniature. They bring to mind Baby Annabell, a popula    r children’s toy from the Zapf company. The doll is designed to cry, burp, yawn and so on, as a real child would. The doll is plastic, not convincingly human, but performs necessary human functions as adequately as you might hope for £49.99. A Google search for “Baby Annabell” produces a popularly asked question: “Does Baby Annabell cry real tears?” The answer, of course, is “no;” but are the tears any less real than those programmed gestures performed by the choreographed child?

I was relieved to read a similar assessment of the Kidz Bop kids. Christopher Bell, an Associate Professor of Media Studies at UCCS, argues that “[The Kidz Bop] kids are doing dances that are sanitized but sexual at the same time because no one understands content; they just understand form.” Certainly, while the Kidz Bop operation doesn’t amount to sexual exploitation per se, it does strip its children of their humanity, reducing their performed selves to distinctly adult symbolic codes (forms) that ultimately belong to the pop-industrial language of “sex sells” (the content of said forms). It is of course important to also remember that the Kidz Bop kids sing existing popular songs, not originals. Chart-topping hits with sexual lyrics are rewritten so as to be child-friendly, all in the service of harnessing another market: “censorship of the most banal kind” as Bell puts it. Simply: teaching a child to mimic the gestural language of an adult pop star is not innocent, but functions within the context of capitalism’s exploitation of desire.

The recent controversy surrounding the film Cuties provides an interesting point of reference here. Depending on who saw it, Cuties either "challenges you to think about how individuals and the media sexualizes young girls" or places upon these young girls an "invasive, sexualized gaze." The dancing is the problem - by either admission it is not "sanitized." Kidz Bop, however, is “sanitized but sexual,” and is as such so ordinary that we accept it carte blanche – so much so, in fact, that it becomes more real than ourselves, it is how we (or our children) interact. Eileen Jones writes in a defence of Cuties that “children both long to grow up faster and feel pressured to mature sexually before many of them can emotionally handle it.” That is certainly true. In Kidz Bop, though, that “longing” and “feeling” is replaced by a tacit interpellation: might we not say that with Kidz Bop, "children both grow up faster and are pressured to mature sexually before many of them can emotionally handle it"? Who, here, is the agent?

The child becomes a proactive consumer of media at an increasingly young age. The iPad or computer keyboard becomes an extension of the body. I have observed non-verbal children – children for whom speech and the concept of communication via pen and paper are unimaginable – navigate an internet search bar, tapping, swiping and scrolling with authority to access and engage with visual media. But it is easy to fall into technophobia or conservative moralism (x is corrupting our children, y is ruining our values, etc.), so let’s pivot: what if your child is in fact a humanoid? Likely not, but it is striking how unhuman, how lacking in warmth, the media consumed by children currently is. Take Disney’s Frozen franchise, for example, whose films are the second and third highest-grossing animated films of all-time. The films’ characters are “glacially stiff,” possessing a dollish sheen, moving with little emotion or autonomy. It is remarkable, in fact, how the steeply the quality of animation in Disney films has diminished as the technology has improved.

Musician James Ferraro complains that we are increasingly “building emotional relationships with CGI characters and accepting them as powerful vehicles of meaningfulness.” The case of the Kidz Bop kids would suggest this; the audience responses to Frozen and, in particular, its lead character Elsa certainly would. Although absent of all warmth, the verisimilitude of Elsa’s simulacra is complete enough that it doesn’t require interpretation: the imaginative element of the reciprocal relationship – the character gives the child an archetype; the child gives the character an additional, interpretative personality in return – is absent. For while Elsa is ‘human’ (demonstrated not only in the painstaking attention put into animating her hair, for example, but in her supporting cast of contrastingly non-human acquaintances, not least a talking snowman) she is also, of course, digitally-rendered, a combination of “neoteny and artificiality to invoke pathos” in the viewer.

Is the message of Toy Story 4 not that a child can find as much or more meaning in a plastic fork (to which they can attach as much imaginative designation as possible) than in a mass-produced toy (whose creative possibilities are limited)? This is missing from Frozen, as it is apparently also from the gesticulations of the Kidz Bop kids. As Zizek writes, the uncanny causes anxiety “not because it confronts us with the fact that something is lacking, but because lack itself is lacking, because we get too much.” What is left for us to desire, to imagine? While Frozen does not enter the territory of Disney’s recent remake of The Lion King – wherein photorealistic CGI animals are given the function of human speech – it does occupy a strange position between physical reality and the low-fidelity warmth of early Disney films, shared perhaps with Baby Annabell and Kidz Bop (do the Kidz Bop kids cry real tears?). It feels only right to finally evoke Baudrillard: “The real itself appears as a large useless body.”

Desexed Education

“There is no there there,” Gertrude Stein

If Netflix’s hit show Sex Education is supposed to be a libidinous comedy-drama that thrusts the politics back into teen sex, it is instead lame and neutered. The minutiae of this castration manifest in three primary ways: in its visual representation of a politico-cultural malaise in which any notion of time and place are reduced entirely to anachronistic symbols; its fantastical multiculturalism; and its inability to deal with the ‘serious’ plot-lines that it creates for itself.

Centred on Otis (Asa Butterfield), an impressively dull teenage virgin who starts a sex clinic at his high school, Sex Education presents to its infinitely-scrolling Netflix audience a parade of sex-jokes, insecure teenagers and hormonal mishaps. It would follow, then, that a large part of the mass enjoyment of Sex Education would derive from its universality. This is not on account of the experiences of its characters being relatable, however, but more significantly because the physical, cultural and temporal geography of the show exists nowhere (physically) and yet everywhere (imaginarily). Filmed in rural Wales, every character speaks in an RP English accent. The cultural iconography of this English-Welsh ecosystem is entirely American, with varsity jackets and Breakfast Club lockers and literal mean girls. It is clearly set in the present, as certain cultural and technological reference points make us aware, but its characters dress in some amalgam of Sixties-Seventies-Eighties garb. It is simultaneously pastel-earth tones and neon-Eighties. Our protagonist Otis cycles from his Norwegian luxury lodge in a Welsh valley to his Extremely-American high school lifted from a John Hughes film via a leafy woodland road dotted with cute log bus stops. This film-world, then, is entirely placeless: no part of it is lived-in – although, ironically, you can now “live in” our protagonist’s Norwegian lodge in a bizarre twist of television-tourism. And yet, it should not be ignored that this film-world is also very real in the collective imagination of transatlantic pop culture consumers, whose dreams are seemingly informed by Wes Anderson and the Harry Potter universe as much as they are by a total cultural failure to imagine a better future (or any future at all).

Above all else, this demonstrates an inability to comprehend our global social totality. In Sex Education, there are no real differences between people, no real conflicts, and no real Other. Its placeless utopia exists in multiple decades, countries and cultures. But most of all, it exists at the End Of History (although here, the Berlin Wall didn't fall - it never existed in the first place). It conjures an entirely simulated liberal multiculturalism wherein the diversity of its characters is a given, stripped of politics or meaning. To recall Jameson: it is as though we have “become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience… an alarming symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.” In its homogeneous sludge, then, this placelessness constitutes a sort-of utopia, a wide-eyed and wholly theistic dream-world of collapsed time and place in which the blind can see and the lame can walk.

And so, despite its apparent situation in rural Wales, our placeless utopia is visibly multicultural – a liberal London in miniature. In this sense, numerous experiences are accounted for but immediately neutralised. These include: black gay best-friend; rich gay Asian; brown “pansexual” girl; troubled black boy with lesbian adoptive parents; troubled white posh boy who also might be gay, actually. Of course, the protagonist is a straight, white and very wealthy boy, for the mass-consumer needs someone exceedingly average and undeserving as their vehicle through this colourful landscape. The conceit is that if the show ever needs a subplot or a tokenistic appearance there is a character for that. Otis needs a girlfriend? Enter the daughter of a pornographic plumber (does anybody need their pipes cleaning?) with whom Otis evidently has no chemistry. Otis’s girlfriend gets bored of Otis? Enter the quirky girl with a tentacle fetish to woo her. Otis is a bit too vanilla? Don’t worry, he has an extravagant black-gay sidekick – and he is exactly that, a side-kick, who is predictably always in competition with the other out-gay character in the series and bullied mercilessly by our posh (and also maybe gay) antagonist (because, of course, homophobia stems entirely from repressed homosexuality). Representation here is an aesthetic not a means to an end.

With an almost impressive stubbornness, the show refuses to tackle the serious subject matter that it proudly proclaims. The above-mentioned Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), a gay second-generation African, is mercilessly bullied by the cruel and seemingly irredeemable (and white, upper-middle class) Adam (Connor Swindells). Eric, otherwise one of the show’s more substantive characters, and one whose performances are actually quite compelling, suffers homophobic abuse at the hands of Adam. The resolution for this, inexplicably and without any tension or build-up, is for the boys to end up kissing and masturbating one-another: Adam is also apparently gay (thus explaining his prior homophobia) and Eric’s anguish about being viciously abused is quelled, suddenly, by a symbolic concession to repressed lust. In Sex Education, deus ex machina becomes not plot device but the very language of every interaction and happenstance.

In another scene, Maeve (Emma Mackey) – our protagonist Otis’s improbable business partner – has an abortion. The purpose of this, narratively, is to set up our two business partners as opposites: Otis, who is wealthy and well-loved and high-achieving, does not have sex; Maeve, on the other hand, is poor and un-parented and ill-disciplined and therefore has loads of unprotected sex. As a troubled seventeen-year-old she thus needs an abortion. The depiction of Maeve undergoing the procedure is actually relatively sensitively done and has rightly received praise. Waiting outside the abortion clinic, however, are a couple of kooky pro-life protestors, seemingly dressed in patchwork quilts and squabbling over the misspelling of foetus (imagine!) and how the boyfriend had “cheated on Jesus” (how indecent!). The female protestor abandons her partner and trots away with Otis. He gives her some “advice” and she reveals herself to actually be quite promiscuous, listing numerous sexual acts (gasp!), before Otis walks away the moral victor. The protestors, in the end, are merely confused Christians. Perhaps more importantly, they are momentary twee comic relief lodged ungracefully into the scene to represent the bad in the world; they are temporary antagonists, introduced and then dismissed as a means of mapping some semblance of a political compass onto an otherwise ideologically flat world.

Again, the point here is that the show presents to us a world entirely neutralised. Struggle and solidarity – not to mention structural disadvantage – are subsumed into a post-political utopia wherein everyone is different and yet everyone is the same: this world "pays lip service to ‘solidarity’ and ‘collectivity’, while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold." In Sex Education we experience “the Other deprived of its Otherness – the decaffeinated Other,” as Zizek puts it. That is to say, Sex Education’s language is one of bodies divorced from ideas or politics; the mere notion of representation trumps the lived experience of said subject, or, worse, objectifies that subject. Again, the notion that Sex Education exists at the End Of History arises: because we cannot see beyond our present order (lets say this is called ‘capitalism’), the inevitable means of compromise is representation. Simply: liberal capitalism will apparently never be replaced but it will adopt the rhetoric of multiculturalism, the language of online woke culture, and employ the quantification of marginalised bodies on screen as a metric for progress.

Because Eric’s homosexuality is more a plot-point than an opportunity for political dissent, his masturbatory armistice with his bully Adam becomes an apparently heartwarming moment. The potential weight of Maeve (who quite explicitly represents the show’s “working-class”) having an abortion is counter-balanced by the pointless farce of also-troubled pro-life protestors whose antagonism is not vile, as it should be, but a cutesy misunderstanding of faith. Our totally individualised dream-world reduces struggle to plot (think also, for example, of the conflict between Eric's sexual identity and his family's Christian conservatism: it is reduced to an episode and, thereafter, all is well). And so, with every stereotype or identity-revelation, Sex Education’s nauseating parade of quotas and self-congratulatory nods reminds us that while its world is not real, its ideology is. It is a placeless utopia, and an impotent one at that.

A short portrait of Brockley in 2020

Brockley’s neighbours
Brockley is not tall. Brockley Road runs through the modest valley between Hillyfields and Telegraph Hill. Unlike in Lewisham Centre, where new-build towers sit on stilts of gold, in Brockley you can’t watch over the borough from a penthouse. You also can’t commute directly to Canary Wharf, which is what the New Lewisham Centre – end (or beginning) of the DLR line – is becoming in miniature. Lewisham, you fear, is becoming ideology as high-rise. Some minutes west of Brockley are Dulwich and Peckham. The former has stature in its reputation as an Affluent Area (it is a village amidst urban sprawl). The latter’s ego comes from its rapid development, expensive cocktail bars and characteristic ‘edginess’. Peckham once had a reputation for violence and poverty; those things have not gone, but have instead been swallowed into an aesthetic ‘authenticity’ (the necessary evil that compliments the postmodern: "belong," ironically, in this place, but be prepared to pay the price). Williamsburg, Shoreditch, Kreuzberg, Peckham. By contrast, Brockley is humble. Again, you can’t watch over the borough from a penthouse. Rather, you watch Brockley from the streets: from a bench, from the top deck of a bus, or perhaps from the vantage point of Hillyfields. Brockley is humble.

In defence of Brockley’s hipsters
Brockley today is a paradigm of misconceptions about gentrification. The Brockley Barge – not a boat but the sixth best Wetherspoons in South East London – is home to Brockley’s Greek chorus. Functionally a mass, this Chorus really consists of old boys, garishly-dressed students, football lads, committed ambassadors of bygone subcultures, every caricature that your liberal mother might warn you to avoid, and your younger sibling’s mates who you’re sure are still only fifteen. Within this demographic stew is The Guardian writer’s wet dream, a chance to pit each group against each other as though these residents of the same streets, drinking in the same pub, should be natural adversaries. That is because Brockley “feels like London used to feel, only with decent coffee.” Here, The Guardian writer conjures the fetishistic semiotics of the common beverage. Coffee – the universally-popular bean-based drink and somehow, also, the signifier of metropolitanism, elitism and hipsterism – has apparently been brought into Brockley by the newer, younger crowd; a crowd naturally adversarial to the old boys (those who represent how “London used to feel”). According to this logic, no one over sixty drinks coffee or, at least, they certainly don’t drink decent coffee. A typical piece written about a recently “gentrified” area such as Brockley will find a way to both romanticise and demonise the older, working-class residents of an area. That is to say, there’s a longing for a bygone (authentic?) “feeling,” but also a resentment of said feeling’s essence. The older, working-class residents are a nostalgic reminder of how London used to be, before all these awful developments, but also an irremovable rot of conservatism, backwardness and culturelessness (or rather, an agent of the wrong culture). And the coffee hipsters are only nominally safe: despite being the supposed suppliers and buyers of decent coffee, the people who inject that much-needed multiculturalism and metropolitanism into the area, they are also parasitic and entitled. These young hipsters expect everything despite never having worked a day in their short lives. Decent coffee is a privilege but these wretched young people expect it straight from the kitchen tap. Yet, as Joe Kennedy notes: “it is often claimed that it is hipsters, rather than people who bought vast amounts of cheap property in the nineties with the intention of profiting from it, who are ‘gentrifying’ areas and ‘socially cleansing’ them.” It’s hard to swallow, but those students who pay £850 a month for a squalid bedsit aren’t actually the problem – even if they do have colourful hair. A spectre looms over Brockley and it isn’t Goldsmiths College.

Deflatable Brockley
Culture is ordinary. On June 1st 2019, nineteen-year-old grime MC Yizzy performed on an inflatable stage plopped on Foxberry Road, just off Brockley Road. To stage left was the aforementioned Brockley Barge and all it contains. To stage right was the new-build housing development that replaced the iconic Brockley MOT Centre and the much-loved murals celebrating black artists Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Maya Angelou that had graced its walls. Behind the stage was the recently-built Sainsbury’s Local that had been subject to some – albeit muted – protest upon its opening (being “Local” in name only). This convergence of people, places and signs – of a young grime MC on an inflatable stage, between a Wetherspoons of a diverse and working-class clientele and the new-builds intended for a decidedly different demographic, with a shining Sainsbury’s Local sign looming in the background – crudely represents Brockley. The prospect of capital – that "unnamable Thing" – encroaching, with even the seemingly-eternal Wetherspoons pub subject to proposed changes (that isn't to say we like Wetherspoons, so much as we like its imitation of communal solidarity). One doesn’t have to stretch too far to imagine the stage deflating, its youth aboard, leaking air and shrivelling into a sorry plastic puddle.

Brockley votes
In the election of December 2019, Gavin Haran – Conservative MP for Lewisham Deptford, the constituency within which Brockley sits – received 6,303 votes (or 11.4% of the total share). Who are these 6,303 Tories, and how can they exist in Brockley, of all places? To start, they’re probably your neighbours. Possibly even your relatives. More concerning, perhaps, is the 5.1% gain for the Liberal Democrats, who finished with 10.4% of the vote. These voters, flocking to Brockley Market in their masses to buy £9 burritos, are in most senses of the word conservative: we like Brockley how it is (now, at last) and want it to remain this way. “New Brockley,” or so it’s called, divorced from itself and injected with the fantasy of Dulwich, serves these people well. It feels like London used to feel but there is also decent coffee. Feel is the important word here, for they are glad it is only a feeling and nothing more substantive (London didn’t used to have decent coffee). This growing breed is only ostensibly liberal, for the Liberal Democrats are the party of crypto-Conservatives. Brockley is bourgeois but multicultural; there is decent coffee but a third of the greater borough's children live in poverty. The rise of the Liberal Democrats – ‘Party of Remain’ – in Brockley makes sense, for it is not only decent coffee that we might lose if we leave the EU (our entire metropolitanism is at stake!), but cheap labour too (for who is going to clean my four-story house on Breakspears Road?).

Brockley in my heart
"Most of the mandem rep the postcode / But I don't know why we like the postcode." Where Soho is pornographic London, Peckham is authentic London, Stoke Newington is fantasy London, Shoreditch is gilt London and Beckenham is suburban London, Brockley is simply London. One’s home is always neutral. That Brockley is increasingly the clean, desirable backdrop for films, television shows and advertisements raises concerns that Brockley is becoming the media’s de facto decent coffee London, as wherever Outnumbered or Lead Balloon were filmed once were. Perhaps, soon enough, Brockley will be cupcake London. But Brockley lives on in my heart; not untouched or unchanging, but as something consisting nevertheless of an immovable spirit. Brockley's streets are lined with empathy. Recently deceased fast food restaurant Lions Fried Chicken is memorialised by a Facebook group. The long-gone video rental shop Homeview lives on fondly in local memory despite its crass replacement. Somehow still-standing bric-a-brac shop Sounds Around, now nothing more than a haunted house, is a constant reminder not only of struggle and death but family and community. The hipsters come and go, the old boys fade away, but Brockley remains Brockley.