How Not to be an Atheist

Ben Pritchett dives into the alphabet soup of Brian Rotman’s Becoming Beside Ourselves and Joanna Zylinska’s Bioethics in the Age of New Media and picks apart the jumbled relations between ethics, new media and subjectivity

These books share a concern with the way that ‘new media’ are changing what it means to be human.

For Rotman, monotheism, and the belief in the soul, are ‘media effects’, a result of the forcing of human nature to conform to the technology of alphabetic writing (a nature subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand). God and the soul, ‘ghosts’ in Rotman’s terminology, are the ideal users which the alphabet seems to presuppose, the kind of agent to which it appears perfectly adapted: but in fact human beings have had to adapt their bodies (even mortify or mutilate themselves) in order to become users of the medium. The ideal user is thus an imaginary projection of the medium, an impossible aspiration given our irreducible materiality. The attempt to transform ourselves into such ghosts causes a great deal of suffering. Now the alphabetic epoch is coming to an end. The rise of new media – particularly motion capture technology – will allow us to express ourselves in new and exciting ways, and the alphabet’s decline will also lead to the extinction of God and soul. The ‘distributed human being’ is the new kind of subjectivity that new media might give rise to. However, in a surprise twist, Rotman proposes that this will not result in an end to supernatural beliefs, but that we will find new, more benevolent ghosts to believe in, more appropriate to the world of new media.

Zylinska’s style is more discursive. She begins with a critique of the dominant humanist philosophies of bioethics, which are based on a medical paradigm. She then considers how these could be problematised by drawing on continental philosophy and media/cultural studies. Her intention is to make bioethics more open to animal and technological otherness. Thus while she flirts with an ecological perspective, by way of her consideration of cybernetics, she ends up closer to a rights-and-obligations-based position. She advocates an ethical philosophy based on Levinas’ philosophy of Alterity (while doing her best not to alienate fans of Deleuze). She then offers three case studies, in the course of which she continues to expand her theoretical palette: a discussion of the reality TV makeover show, The Swan; a consideration of the implications of the popular science discourse around DNA; and a discussion of the body artist Stelarc.

Each writer oscillates between ontological and epistemological arguments. There are two positions, never fully resolved: are new technologies, particularly media, fundamentally transforming (or taking us beyond) what it is to be human, or do they simply reveal that humans were ‘always already’ constituted by technology? Without a historical framework for their analyses, both writers find themselves led into an apocalyptic rhetoric, ambiguously poised between transfiguration and unveiling. However, they are anxious to assert their atheist principles, and thus each produces a paradoxically humanist eschatology. This may be symptomatic of the horizons of the media studies paradigm.

Rotman breathlessly asserts that:

The West’s ontotheological metaphysics, with its indivisible, unique-unto-themselves and beyond-which-nothing monads of an absolute Truth behind reality and a monolithic transcendent God entity begins to be revealed as a mediological achievement magnificent but no longer appropriate of a departing age’.[1]

For Rotman, this brave new epoch not only reveals that ‘God’ is an antiquated notion, but so is ‘mind’ and any notion of transcendent human agency. The history of the human species resembles nothing so much as a roller-coaster ride: ‘We are living through tumultuous, dizzying times on the cusp of a new era; times spanning a seismic jump in the matrix of human culture’.[2]

Zylinska, on the other hand, wants to assert that history is not running on technological rails, but that, in the final analysis, humanity can still influence the direction of travel – or at the very least, keep various options open. She argues that ‘Bioethics, as I have envisaged it [is] a way of cutting through the “flow of life” with a double-edged sword of productive power and infinite responsibility’ – a phrase which brings to mind Milton’s ‘two-handed engine’, or the angelic sword guarding the gates of Paradise.[3] For Zylinska, what is needed is to reclaim the transcendent powers of ethical decision from God in the name of (a suitably chastened and tentative) humanity: ‘I would like to suggest, that partial assessment of the situation by the human […] constitutes a (necessarily shaky) foundation of what I have been referring to as “alternative” bioethics.’[4]

These two diametrically opposed but both avowedly atheist strategies take as their guiding principles, on Rotman’s side, Gilles Deleuze, and on Zylinska’s, a post-Derridean, (and therefore Godless, even non-humanist) Emmanuel Levinas. Zylinska notes how the two strands represent divergent philosophical traditions, of ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ respectively.[5] It would be possible to see the two books under review as skirmishes in a territory dispute between the two strands of theory. This would be unfortunate, since neither author, disappointingly, does justice to their chosen philosophical reference points.

Rotman pulls no punches in his contempt for Derrida & Co., at one point describing grammatology as,

‘one of the postmodern branches’ according to Vassilis Lambropoulos, ‘of the Science of Judaism’; a triumph enshrined in Jacques Derrida’s voice-silencing and body-annihilating grammatological mantra ‘There is no outside to the text’.[6]

If this sounds anti-semitic, then it should be noted that Rotman is an equal-opportunities insulter of monotheists, observing in one endnote that

the obligatory gestures and body practices that constitute Islamic worship and indeed define what it means to be a Muslim are far more pronounced than anything resembling them in the other Abrahamic religions and seem, in terms of the inculcation and maintenance of fervent, unshakeable belief, to be correspondingly more effective.[7]

Actually Rotman could learn a lot from Derrida, if he took the time to read him instead of recycling journalistic clichés. Of Grammatology offers close readings of an array of canonical texts of Western literature, most of which decry the inadequacy of written language to represent physical presence: this accumulation of sources flatly contradicts Rotman’s thesis that ‘writing has effaced its own role in constructing the hierarchies of mind over body’.[8] Rotman’s notion of ‘ghostliness’ is also implicitly positioned against the politicised conception explored in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: for Rotman, ghosts are ‘distinct from spectres such as individual revenants demanding, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, retribution, revenge and the righting of wrongs, or from identifiable sites of social repression and invisibilization’.[9]

One of the weaknesses of alphabetic writing, according to Rotman, is the fact that it promotes ‘serialism’.[10] His linear narrative partakes in the very same logic. He even heads a series of subsections ‘gesture -> speech’, ‘speech -> writing’, and ‘writing -> networks’ without an apparent sense of irony.[11] The book reads like a giant ‘liar’s paradox’ – his argument is that the alphabet conceals its own negative effects. So either the alphabet will prevent us from being convinced of the book’s message, or we will accept the book’s message, immediately refuting it in practice.

Of course the logic of the alphabet is not ‘deeply and inescapably serial’, ‘isolated, independent and indivisible’ as Rotman claims.[12] On the contrary, it facilitates random access and cross-referencing, as his bizarrely self-defeating examples of the encyclopaedia and the library demonstrate. Similarly ‘the word’ is not ‘stable, integral, fixed, discrete, enclosing a unique, interior meaning’ – it is deeply ironic that Rotman feels the need to multiply adjectives in order to say one supposedly simple thing here.[13] If further proof were needed that writing can accommodate parallelism, overdetermination, multiple causality, etc., it would be worth reading Bakhtin on novelistic discourse, Empson on ambiguity and Barthes on textuality.

Image: Eine, design for Philip Font

Rotman is remarkably single-minded in his assault on God by way of the alphabet, and thus his philosophical sources are pared down to the point of travesty in order to support his central thesis. This results in a depoliticised Deleuze – it’s hard to believe that Rotman is citing the same writer who co-wrote a critique of capitalism from the perspective of schizophrenia. For Rotman, ‘writing’ is the agent that has enjoyed a ‘three millennia hegemony’, and the pressing political problem of our time is not capitalist imperialism but ‘literacy’s increasing colonization of all that was the province of oralism’.[14] ‘[D]ivision of labour’, for Rotman, is not an economic relation of power between social groups, classes or nations, but a functional split within the brain, between ‘limbic systems’ and ‘neocortex’, and the midbrain takes the place of the ‘disenfranchised and repressed’.[15] Rotman even retains the Marxist categories of base and superstructure, but now the ‘base’ is reduced to ‘reading and writing’.[16] Rotman seems to have missed Deleuze and Guattari’s key point about conflicting regimes of signs, which is that ‘there is more to the picture than semiotic systems waging war on one another armed only with their own weapons. Very specific assemblages of power impose signifiance and subjectification as their determinate form of expression’.[17]

Rotman’s argument is appealingly elegant, but the weaknesses are an inevitable result of such elegance. If we deny the existence of God, only to posit a single material cause in His place, then ‘atheism’ will represent no advance towards a materialist understanding of history and society. Rotman argues that ‘an entire neurological apparatus [was] brought into being by the alphabet in order for it to function’ – we might compare the function of the alphabet in Rotman’s theory with that of the ‘selfish gene’ in Dawkins’.[18]

Rotman’s neglect of international politics (or the world system) is symptomatic of a more general problem of his Anglophone/Eurocentric point of view. It is not clear that Rotman has sufficient knowledge of comparative religion to make his case for a unique tie between phonetic writing and monotheism. His theory is unable to explain how and why monotheism arose in ancient Egypt – this is an inconvenient fact, and he argues that Egyptian monotheism was unsustainable without phonetic writing. There also seems to be some debate as to whether the early Han Chinese worship of Shangdi could be considered a form of ‘monotheism’. I am not able to assess the validity of this argument, but it is notable that Rotman does not even mention the inconvenient possibility, which would falsify his theory.

Rotman’s lack of cross-cultural awareness is matched by a historical insensitivity with regard to ‘The West’ itself. At the origin of ‘Western civilization’ Rotman cannot explain why different ‘ghosts’ arose in the Greek and Jewish belief systems, because, for him, alphabetic writing overrides all other characteristics. Rotman’s linking of new media with the death of God is also unable to account for atheist movements which arose during the alphabetic epoch. Greek atheism, enlightenment rationalism and revolutionary socialist refutations of God are not considered. Of the three best-known atheists in history, Rotman does not even mention Marx or Nietzsche, and only invokes Freud in a footnote, to criticise him for arguing that Jewish monotheism descended from Egyptian monotheism. It seems gratuitous to say it, but all of these arguments were disseminated textually. And, as far as the present moment goes, Rotman can only explain the rise of fundamentalism as a desperate last-gasp backlash of the alphabetic God against his inevitable demise.

I have not addressed mathematics here. Rotman’s earlier texts were concerned with the semiotics of mathematics rather than the alphabet. His ‘interlude’ on ‘technologized mathematics’ in this book seems to be a holdover from his earlier work, and he is somewhat apologetic for it. As someone with a background in literary studies, I do not feel I can tackle Rotman’s argument on its own terms here. There might be some grist for a philosopher of mathematics to compare Rotman’s take on the concept of infinity with the philosophy of Alain Badiou, since both writers assert that their reading of this branch of mathematics is fundamentally atheist; however, as far as I can see, their arguments are diametrically opposed.

Zylinska comes closest to Rotman’s field of interest in her discussion of the discourse around DNA as a ‘secret code’. This overlaps with his discussion of computing and of Alan Turing, the celebrated code-breaker. However, Zylinska situates this discourse far more explicitly in the context of cryptography and the military-industrial complex. This characterises the great value of Zylinska’s book, as opposed to Rotman’s: Zylinska is open to questions of politics and economics. She is aware that whilst technology, and media in particular, does change possibilities for forms of subjectivity, this technological aspect is circumscribed and overdetermined by wider systems. Zylinska is well versed in the Derridean deconstructive tradition, and thus does not attack writing per se, recognising that many qualities of new media were always already present in writing, so, for example ‘linking, brought to the fore in online texts, is always already the condition of linear, grammatological writing’.[19] Thus, pace Rotman, individualism is not an effect of ‘writing’, but of (neo)liberal economics: the ‘dominant politico-ethical models in the capitalist world, where the relationality of living beings is overlooked for the analyses of monadic entities, and at the expense of the forgetting of flesh, of sex, of sexual difference’.[20] This allows Zylinska to indicate why, in spite of an increasingly networked society, people feel ever more atomised, a problem which Rotman completely fails to address.

Image: 'Z' is for Zylinska

The ideological illusion of finding one’s ‘true self’ undergoes a materialist deconstruction in Zylinska’s analysis of the Fox TV programme The Swan, where the self is shown to be a construction which partakes of human, machinic and animal elements. This mystificatory programme is implicitly contrasted with the ‘Bioart’ of Stelarc, which Zylinska argues offers an emancipatory revelation of human situatedness in technical and animal networks. While acknowledging the conditioning effects of technology, Zylinska shows, against a technological determinism, that new media might become technologies of domination rather than freedom, and the way in which things will develop depends on concrete ethical decisions.

Zylinska is rather eclectic in her use of theories, and does not attempt to deny their diverse and irreducible singularity. (Incidentally, her sense of the word ‘singular’ varies depending upon which theory she is using – sometimes it is a synonym for ‘individual’, at other times, it means ‘unique’, in the sense of a one-off event, which may be a social encounter). Her summaries of different theoretical positions are very clear and cogent – the book is a great way to brush up on your biopolitics, with neat encapsulations of Foucault and Agamben, for example. Zylinska is clearly very well read - I was particularly impressed by the positions of Rosi Braidotti and Krzysztof Ziarek, as she summarised them here, and I intend to investigate them further.

Unlike Rotman, Zylinska is conciliatory towards her philosophical rivals: ‘my book is by no means positioned as anti-Deleuzian’.[21] It appears that we are meant to understand that the ‘productive power’ of her ‘double-edged sword’ comes from Deleuze, while the ‘infinite responsibility’ is bequeathed to her by Levinas. Unfortunately, a rapprochement between these two philosophers in Zylinska’s terms seems unlikely, since her argument is premised on the questionable assertion that Levinas provides the theory of subjectivity and agency that Deleuze lacks. This seems to be a reaction to a predominant ‘Deleuzianism’, as noted above with respect to Rotman, which has been purged of its critical aspects. But Deleuze and Guattari did theorise subjectivity, in their analysis of the difference between subject groups and subjugated groups (in Anti-Oedipus). The problem for Zylinska, it seems, is not that Deleuze lacks a theory of subjectivity per se, but that he lacks an individualist, and dare I say it, humanist theory of subjectivity.

Zylinska fails to give a plausible account of the way in which the two philosophical positions represented by Deleuze and Levinas could complement each other. There is very little in common between the way that Deleuze and Guattari argue, in ‘Year O: Faciality’, that faces are produced by a (racist) authoritarian/despotic ‘abstract machine’, and the way that Levinas makes the face of the Other the transcendent starting point of his ethics. This is not a productive combination; it is necessary to choose between the different stances that these incommensurable philosophies represent.

Zylinska’s theoretical generosity tends towards a pose of absolute impartiality. It is a shame, because she is very attentive to those factors of politics, economics, gender and race which Rotman omitted. Thus, rather than seeing the unjustly enshrined user of technology as a truly disembodied ghost, Zylinska critiques the way that, in ‘traditional’ bioethics, ‘“the average white middle-class man in the street” remains […] a measuring stick against which ethical injustice carried out against women is judged.’[22] In other words, these privileged male individuals are not genuinely pure minds, but they are able to pose as ‘disembodied rational subject[s]’ and remain unconscious of their particular kind of embodiment because the social system accommodates it by default.[23] But in the final analysis Zylinska’s empiricism is negated by the fact that she champions the ethical nature of a ‘content-free obligation’, towards a ‘(formal not theological) elsewhere’ and asserts that ‘undecideability […] arguably, is a key condition of ethics’.[24]

I hope Zylinska is indulging in self-parody when she argues, for example, that

[t]he nature and significance of the ethical difference between, for example, abusing a dog and abusing a scallop will nevertheless have to be responsibly decided always anew, in particular contexts, networks and environments we will find ourselves in, and with all the knowledge and affect we will be able to mobilize.[25]

Though it seems redundant to say it, I hope I never have to choose between abusing a dog and abusing a scallop. Should I be forced into such a diabolical dilemma, I don’t think I would regret unthinkingly siding with the dog, even if some people might feel that I was acting on the basis of ‘moralistic’ prejudices rather than an ‘ethical’ decision. If such dog-versus-scallop standoffs arose repeatedly, in a variety of ‘contexts, networks and environments’ I would begin to question my sanity.

Zylinska’s non-judgemental position is less amusing when, having constructed an elaborate Agamben-influenced analogy between the Fox TV makeover show The Swan and the Nazi concentration camps, she protests that

I realize there may be something rather frustrating about a bioethics that refuses to evaluate the morality of the actions in which the producers, participants, and audiences of the radical makeover show The Swan are engaged.[26]

The implied argument up to this point was clear – American imperialism, (post-9/11, at least), is quasi-fascist, and the Fox network is a propaganda machine. Does Zylinska really believe she can make such an analogy and yet not imply a negative evaluation of the show, or influence her readers to reach the same conclusion? Surely she is being disingenuous? If not, she really ought to go the extra mile and draw some explicit inferences from her analysis. (For the record, I think the show sounds pretty depressing. But putting a stop to The Swan is not very high on my list of ethico-political priorities).

Both writers produce versions of their philosophical sources which are rather unethical. I do not feel that either of them fully takes on the challenge of their dominant theoretical borrowings, Deleuze or Derrida. In neither book does the use of theory support a strong atheist position. My acquaintance with the discourse of Media Studies is limited, but it seems that there may be something inherent to the way that the questions are framed by this discipline that necessitates a form of (theologically inflected) humanism. This distorts the philosophies taken up, and leads to a regression from the radical, though very different positions advanced by Deleuze and Derrida.

Image: still from David Cronenberg's Videodrome, 1983

Taking the position of devil’s advocate, I would like to suggest that it is no coincidence that one of the founding texts of Media Studies, Understanding Media, was written by a Catholic humanist, and subtitled ‘The Extensions of Man’. McLuhan trained in the English literary tradition at Cambridge, under F.R. Leavis, who is (in)famous for his nostalgia for the ‘organic society’, and his role in the Two Cultures controversy with C.P. Snow. Whereas McLuhan criticised the (Protestant) ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ of the printing press from a Catholic point of view, Rotman wants to criticise writing itself from an atheist point of view. However, he still partakes of the old organicist rhetoric, albeit clad in a dubiously ‘neuroscientific’ garb.

There are moments when Rotman’s argument reads like a restatement of T.S. Eliot’s lament over the ‘dissociation of sensibility’. Rotman, for example, describes the arrival of new media as causing the ‘coming apart of a previously self-sufficient and seamless whole. The result in each case is a dissociation which restructures consciousness’.[27] At times Rotman suggests that this disrupted unity was only ever an illusion: ‘every medium disrupts what had been for its predecessor conceived as a seamless whole’.[28] But his account of the effects of the alphabet does not seem to be a description of the irruption of reality into an imaginary unity. Rather his language implies something ontologically fundamental: what he calls a ‘transcendental fissure’ or, indeed, a ‘pre-frontal lobotomy’.[29] This is more than a superficial rhetorical problem. The conceptual vocabulary which structures the discourse of both these books, at a deep level, partakes of the same difficulty.

The first problem relates to technology. Both Zylinska and Rotman are in agreement that technology plays a part in determining what actions we are capable of: it does not simply extend or circumscribe a natural human condition, but is implicated in the production and constitution of the human. But neither writer is able to consistently sustain this avowed position. By using the term ‘technology’ there is already a danger of reifying an object. It is for this reason that Raymond Williams, in his study of Television, preferred to discuss individual technologies in the context of broader ‘cultural forms’ – ensembles of social processes and mutually reinforcing technologies. Rotman falls at the first hurdle here: his all-consuming fixation with the negative characteristics of the alphabet participates in the very ‘fetishism’ that he claims to decry: ‘Jahweh’s self-birth from within alphabetic writing at the site of the written ‘I’ left in its wake an intense and lasting alphabetic fetishism within Jewish mystical and philosophical thought’.[30]

Furthermore, although both writers draw on theories that address general questions of technology, their specific area of interest is ‘media’. By narrowing the focus from ‘technology’ per se, to ‘media’, there is an inevitable foregrounding of those particular kinds of technology that operate between people, producing human bodies, affects and subjectivity, i.e. individual and collective human life. This narrowing of attention leads to a neglect of those technologies which produce physical products like commodities or public works. It also marginalises consideration of those technologies which are directed against other people with violent intent. In other words, by zeroing in on ‘media’, Rotman and Zylinska tend to marginalise technologies directed towards an objective outside, or against outsiders: ‘tools’ on the one hand, and ‘weapons’ on the other. A theory of media is necessarily much narrower than a general theory of technology, or of machines, which would encompass all these types. So in both books, technological questions relating to economics, warfare, and even politics are given little space – always with the caveat that Zylinska is more open to acknowledge the limitations of her discourse, and look beyond it. This tends to undermine the avowed goal of each author to advance a materialist, atheist and non-humanist position. One can imagine a ‘machine’ which is directed towards a non-anthropomorphic other, but it is much more difficult to conceive of a ‘medium’ which would be.

Nevertheless, even within this broad horizon of humanism, it seems an unfortunate result that each writer should (against their avowed intentions) fall back into individualism, rather than a social theory. Again, Raymond Williams’ attendance to vocabulary is helpful here: he noted that the term ‘medium’ is another reification, and that we would be better off talking about ‘social practices’ (in Marxism and Literature). The word ‘medium’ almost inevitably implies a third term mediating between two individual actors. Thus for Rotman the guiding empirical paradigm is the cognitive neuroscience of discrete brains, implying interiority and possessive individualism (‘activity in the body of the user’; ‘technologies of parallelism […] reconfigure the thought diagrams inside (as we still say) our heads’).[31] For Zylinska, bioethics is based on the ‘narcissistic’ relation of self and other: ‘an act of reaching to other […] is narcissistic, but also that narcissism is revealed as necessary to establishing this relationship’.[32]

My initial feeling, reading Zylinska after Rotman, was a sense of relief in her return to concretely situated cases, and the way that she openly named the powerful forces which anybody trying to act ethically quickly comes up against. But I was ultimately disappointed as she fell back on what I can only call a more humble egocentrism:

the question whether this ethics also applies to others other humans but perhaps also apes, dolphins, or even ‘intelligent machines’ is not really important because it only ever applies to me. It is my anxiety about death and my awareness of my own mortality that establish a temporality for me while also opening up a set of possibilities.[33]

Zylinska signals her anxiety about this move by her apologetic protests that she is ‘not bringing back humanism’.34 Her capitulation belies the virtues of her critique of previous models of bioethics. As she had correctly argued, the conditions of human agency are trans-individual and trans-human. This seems, indeed, to be the basis of her favourable account of Stelarc’s bioart: the aesthetic precedes the ethical, because it makes the trans-individual and trans-human (i.e. social) formation of subjectivity visible. It does not seem to me that any ‘decision’ is necessary before drawing the logical conclusions of this insight: any active, ethical agency must necessarily be trans-individual and trans-human too, or it will exclude the very forces from which it derives its power. Thus, contra Levinas, ethics do not precede, but follow upon, social and political participation – bearing in mind that ‘society’ can no longer be circumscribed by a preconceived, organic notion of the human.

Perhaps I will be accused of impatience – naïvely believing that if we can stop using the language and discursive forms of possessive individualism and theology, then we can make our problems disappear. But it is only through the construction and consistent application of a set of concepts adequate to the potentials (but not the inevitabilities) of new technical and social formations, that we will be able to articulate the necessary alliances for an emancipatory socialist project.

Info:

Joanna Zylinska, Bioethics in the Age of New Media, London: MIT Press, 2009.

Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Footnotes:

[1] Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, p. 9.

[2] Ibid., p. 105.

[3] Joanna Zylinska, Bioethics in the Age of New Media, London: MIT Press, 2009, p. 179.

[4] Ibid., p. 164.

[5] Ibid., p. 30.

[6] Rotman, op. cit., p. 124.

[7] Ibid., p. 141.

[8] Ibid., p. 126.

[9] Ibid., p. 113.

[10] Ibid., p. 83.

[11] Ibid., p. 109-110.

[12] Ibid., p. 93.

[13] Ibid., p. 95.

[14] Ibid., pp. 4 and 30.

[15] Ibid., pp. 30 and 31.

[16] Ibid., p. 136.

[17] Gilles Dezeuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London: Continuum, 2004, p. 200. Italics in original.

[18] Rotman, op. cit., p. 82.

[19] Zylinska, op. cit., p. 92.

[20] Ibid., pp. 139-140.

[21] Ibid., p. x.

[22] Ibid., p. 16.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., pp. 121, 30 and 52.

[25] Ibid., p. 53.

[26] Ibid., p. 123.

[27] Rotman, op. cit., p. 112. My Italics.

[28] Ibid., p. 25. My Italics

[29] Ibid., pp. 54 and 31..

[30] Ibid., 123.

[31] Ibid., pp., 82 and 103.

[32] Zylinska, op. cit., p. 88.

[33] Ibid., 62. Italics in original.

[34] Ibid., 53.

Ben Pritchett <PritchettBen AT googlemail.com> is an unemployed Oxbridge graduate, who turns down unpaid internships out of necessity rather than choice. He finished his MPhil thesis on Raymond Williams’ novel Second Generation in June 2009. He works on video documentaries when he gets the chance.