Distant Relatives: The Robinson Mythos from Defoe to Keiller

I

At the beginning of the film London, written, directed and shot by Patrick Keiller in 1992, the narrator introduces the central character, Robinson, a part-time lecturer who in recent months has become increasingly reclusive. Once a keen traveller, Robinson now rarely leaves his flat as he wrestles with what he calls ‘the problem of London’. The narrator explains that he and Robinson shall, on the latter’s insistence, undertake a series of journeys around the city; journeys which will, hopefully, diagnose and remedy this problem.

Keiller’s film operates on two corresponding planes. On the one hand, it surveys the social space of London in 1992, at the moment of the Conservative Party’s surprise fourth consecutive general election victory. On the other hand, it tells the fictional story of Robinson and the narrator’s travels, though we never actually see either of them. The film is a documentary fiction, composed of static ciné cam shots of incidental London scenes with a voice-over narration that tells of Robinson’s experiences of the places he visits, as well as literary representations and historical events relating to those places. The film is one part travelogue in the manner of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year; and one part Situationist dérive, that is, a freely-associative journey that attempts to subjectively remap social space.

London became the first in a trilogy of films accompanying Robinson on his travels. The second film, Robinson in Space, was produced in 1997, when New Labour replaced the Conservatives in office; then, over a decade later, Robinson in Ruins was produced between the financial crisis of 2008 and the replacement of Labour with the current Conservative Lib-Dem coalition in 2010. In each film, Robinson researches a different problem: in the first, it is the disjuncture between the London of the literature he loves and the London in which he lives; in Robinson in Space, as Robinson now travels throughout England, the problem is of locating the import-export activity that sustains the national economy yet which has remarkably little social presence; in Robinson in Ruins, the focus is on the rural landscape of Oxfordshire and the history of its acquisition by corporate and military interests.

Keiller portrays England as privately-owned, historically-unselfconscious and seemingly committed to its own social and ecological suicide. However, a summary such as this, which notes only the documentarian impulse, falls short in describing the ambition of Keiller’s films. The presence of Robinson (or rather, as we never see him, the anti-presence of Robinson) attests to another impulse—one which invokes and uses politically certain forms of distance—particularly distances between the representation and the lived experience of place. I want to account for Keiller’s decision to frame his documentaries with the Robinson fiction. What does Robinson signify, and what work does he do—as the fictional counterbalance to the films’ documentarian impulses; but also as an allusion to Robinson Crusoe, one of the first protagonists of the English novel.

Of course, the influence and afterlives of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (the text and the protagonist) are immeasurable. For want of time, I’ll restrict my attention to the very specific branch of the family tree that has Robinson Crusoe as its patriarch, onto which Keiller situates his films. Critics invariably note that both Keiller’s Robinson and Crusoe are both castaways in unfamiliar lands. I want to go slightly further, to suggest that Keiller is informed not only by Defoe but also by a lineage of modernist texts that have, through successive generations, typologised Robinson, who becomes the figure of a lived critique social alienation. The reworking of Robinson from Rimbaud to Keiller has produced a character type who is, literally, a distant relative to Crusoe: distant, in that the new Robinson is used for different political purposes to Defoe’s protagonist; but relative, because that distance between founding father and contemporary manifestation is only recognised as such through shared characteristics, particularly the name, Robinson, and the theme of shipwreck.

My paper will trace the genealogical trail which arrives at the version of Robinson that Keiller inherits; and I want to label the collection of texts that occupy this lineage as the Robinson Mythos. This label is a (slightly frivolous) allusion to the Cthulhu Mythos, the collection of quasi-autonomous stories by H.P. Lovecraft and his successors that are based around the monster god Cthulhu. This practice of pooling resources is common to genre writing; I want to identify a similar practice in modernist literary-fiction production. The Robinson Mythos, to utilise another Situationist term, represents a gradual détournement of Crusoe, that is, the reuse of an existing artistic expression in new contexts to change its meaning. As a result, the Robinson Mythos also demonstrates a mode of production of literary fiction based on a certain type of common ownership.

II

Of the various characteristics that mark Robinson Crusoe as one of the earliest English novels, Ian Watt emphasises Defoe’s insistence on particularity—especially that of the protagonist. Crusoe is a unique and believable subjective being; part of his novelty is that he is not a literary type acting in a traditional plot. His individuation occurs partly through Defoe’s use of ‘ordinary contemporary proper names’ and the detailed presentation of his background. Thus, Defoe’s novel begins:

I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, tho’ not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull [...] he married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called, nay we call ourselves, and write our name Crusoe, and so my companions always call’d me.

Watt insists that despite (or, more likely, because of) his individuation, Crusoe stands also as the idealised representative of the English bourgeoisie of the early eighteenth century. In the first volume of Capital, Marx describes Crusoe as ‘a good Englishman’ who organises his solitary labour on the island according to the principles of bourgeois political economy in their most idealised, abstracted, form. Watt extends Marx’s quip to propose that Crusoe is the first ‘homo economicus’, the archetype of capitalist individualism who represents the ‘hypostasis of the economic motive’. In Robinson, Watt argues, the desire for profit overcomes any connection to family, friends or place.

James Joyce’s reading of Robinson Crusoe is even more acerbic: he regards the protagonist as ‘the true prototype of the British colonist’. Joyce writes:

All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe: virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness.

Marx and Joyce revile and respect Crusoe: he is the brilliant articulation of the sequestration of imaginative potential. He finds himself in fantastic situations, only to replicate the conditions of England. Marx, however, puts this ambivalence into dialectical motion. He uses Crusoe’s relationship with his tools as an example of commodities obtaining their true appearance as use-values, stripped of the exchange–value that they acquire in capitalist economies. Crusoe’s seemingly demystified organisation of his labour allows Marx to make a rare affirmation (in Capital Vol. 1, at least) of the type of society that he envisions: ‘Let us imagine, for a change,’ Marx writes, ‘an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common’.

III

The Robinson Mythos begins with another effort to use Crusoe’s ambivalence to promote imaginative inquiry. In his 1870 poem ‘Roman’, Arthur Rimbaud writes

Le cœur fou robinsonne à travers les romans,

Rimbaud’s neologism—the verb ‘robinsonner’—has long provided problems for translators. Wallace Fowlie offers:

Our wild heart moves through novels like Robinson Crusoe,

While a more literal translation might be:

The crazy heart robinsons through novels.

I think it’s important that the neologism be translated as a verb; and as a verb that jettisons Crusoe’s family name in order to un-individuate Robinson. The Robinson Mythos, therefore, begins with the move from ‘Crusoe’ to ‘Robinson’; and ‘to Robinson’, in Rimbaud’s poem, is to reimagine real and present society via the imaginative journey that is reading fiction.

Fowlie’s translation (…moving through novels like Robinson Crusoe…) seems to me to be slightly off. The process of reading that Rimbaud describes is, in the first instance, an escapist drive to lose oneself (as in the expression, to lose oneself in a book); but Rimbaud implies that that auto-alienation is also an opportunity in which to reimagine one’s social relations. When Rimbaud labels this process ‘Robinsonner’, he is therefore being rather ironic, because Crusoe did not lose himself, he remained overbearingly sane and he recreated conditions he already knew. In its proposal to reimagine lived experience through literary fiction, the poem ‘Roman’ is thus consistent with Rimbaud’s various exhortations to change life, to ‘become a visionary’, and to ‘arrive at the unknown through the derangement of all the senses’.

IV

Keiller’s first Robinson film opens with the line, ‘It is a journey to the end of the world’, an allusion to Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932) which itself features a character called Robinson. In an interview, Keiller explained his attraction to the name as ‘an English name that a mysterious middle-European might adopt as typically English’, though he adds that, ‘the name came not directly from Defoe, nor from Céline, but from Kafka’s Amerika’. Kafka’s novel, whose title Max Brod changed from The Man Who Disappeared, includes an Irish drifter named Robinson who attaches himself to the novel’s protagonist, a fellow immigrant to the United States, though from Prague. The Robinson of Céline’s novel is, similarly, a drifter who reappears in each place to which the narrator-protagonist travels.

The Robinsons of Kafka and Céline are both social outcasts, unwilling to adapt themselves to lives of menial labour in their new countries, and they scupper the efforts of the protagonists to do so. Both Robinsons attempt to exist outside of the modernising economies of the United States and France in the twenties and thirties. They want to exist in the liminal and criminal spaces beyond reach of Fordism. This context is most apparent in Céline’s novel, in which the protagonist briefly works at the Ford Motor plant in Detroit, while Robinson sells home-brew nearby.

After Rimbaud, and then Kafka and Céline, the next phase of the Robinson Mythos lies with two Anglophonic writers concerned not with the experience of immigration but of home. Four poems by the American writer Weldon Kees—‘Robinson’, ‘Relating to Robinson’, ‘Robinson at Home’ and ‘Aspects of Robinson’—survey what has been left behind after the unexplained disappearance of their titular Robinson. These mournful poems suggest that Robinson was a Jay Gatsby-like figure: a playboy and a socialite whose nocturnal revelries disguised a deep sadness and inability to settle down. Robinson haunts the places and the poet that he has left behind.

The English writer and filmmaker Christopher Petit’s novel, Robinson (1993), begins with an epigram from one of Kees’ poems, then opens with the narrator-protagonist’s observation that, ‘There was something vaguely familiar about Robinson’. Robinson is, again, a shady figure who lures the protagonist into his world of drugs, pornography and criminal entrepreneurialism in Soho, central London; yet Robinson is unable to satisfy his own increasingly unhinged desires, and he dies. In Petit, the Robinson Mythos recognises itself as such (though not by that name); it signposts its sources and applies the Mythos to genre fiction—this is a Robinson thriller.

The shift that has taken place in the Robinson character from Kafka and Céline to Kees and Petit is that, in the former, Robinson is just about able to eke out an existence at the peripheries of society; in the latter, more recent texts, he is not, and he is forced to disappear. Robinson finds himself adrift from a society that has become increasingly administered. The Robinson Mythos is thus used to demonstrate the fallacy of Robinson Crusoe: each of these modern Robinsons attempts to live unto himself and to avoid wage-labour, and fails; in modern society, the Mythos suggests, the Crusoe adventure is impossible.

V

Keiller’s three films inherit, consciously, much from this Robinson Mythos; but where Keiller’s precedents only critique modern social relations, Keiller returns to Rimbaud’s proposal that Robinson’s value is as a figure for their reimagination. In one of the earliest scenes of London, to a shot of Tower Bridge, the narrator offers a sardonic overview of English culture in 1992:

Dirty old Blighty. Undereducated, economically backward, bizarre. A catalogue of modern miseries, with its fake traditions, its Irish war, its militarism and secrecy, its silly old judges, its hatred of intellectuals, its ill-health and bad food, its sexual repression, its hypocrisy and racism and its indolence. It’s so exotic, so home-made.

Keiller’s Robinson wants to counteract this (exaggeratedly) mundane image of English culture by superimposing onto it the transformative aspirations of European avant-garde writers, as well as the native but obscured radicalism of English Romantic writers. ‘For Robinson’, the narrator observes, ‘the essence of a Romantic life is in the ability to get outside oneself, to see oneself as if from outside, to see oneself, as it were, in a romance’. Keiller’s Robinson is thus the personification of Rimbaud’s desire ‘to robinson’, that is, to overwrite reality with literary fiction.

Throughout London, Robinson ‘imaginatively reconstructs’ various places in the city as monuments to Rimbaud: Thatcher’s Canary Wharf development, the English home of financial mega-corporations, is a monument to Rimbaud’s sexual explorations in the docks that previously existed on the site; the BT tower that pierces the London skyline is, likewise, a monument to Rimbaud and Verlaine’s tempestuous relationship when they lived nearby.

Robinson, however, becomes increasingly frustrated at the distance between his experiences of the places that he visits and how his literary heroes seem to have experienced them. There exists an asychonicity between the literary past that he values and the dejected present in which he lives. At the end of the film, he concludes that London’s individuality has been eroded by its post-Fordist reorganisation. The capital is ruled by a suburban government, its empty centre is filled daily by commuting office workers, and it offers no space for bohemian activity. ‘London’, Robinson says, ‘is obscured [...] As a city, it no longer exists. In this alone it is truly modern. London was the first metropolis to disappear.’

By the time of Robinson in Ruins, shot during the 2008 financial collapse and with an overwhelming sense of forthcoming ecological disaster, Robinson’s continued investigations into the English economy and its manifestations in the landscape have left him unwilling to simply console himself with poetic denunciations. The narrator of this film, a different one to the previous two, announces early on that Robinson has disappeared, and the footage we are seeing is what he bequeathed, along with his notes, to her research institute. His absenteeism—though, of course, he is never fully present in any of the films—is consistent with the theme of disappearance that pervades the Robinson Mythos. Keiller’s Robinson has pushed Rimbaud’s ‘robinsonner’ to its conclusion, and lost himself. The opening lines of the film indicate how far Robinson has progressed in the derangement of his senses: ‘When a man named Robinson was released from Edgcott Open Prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt.’

The critic Robert Mayer suggests that Keiller’s Robinson

seems in important ways to be seeking to undo Defoe, identifying the Protestantism and individualism that we associate with Defoe’s most famous protagonist as constitutive elements of a catastrophe that has rendered the Robinson of Keiller’s films a victim of a “shipwreck” in his own country.

Robinson valorises a specifically English version of socialism, and his literary sensibilities are informed by European avant-garde traditions, and as such he is the negative image of Crusoe. Where Crusoe is the archetype of English bourgeois self-fashioning, Robinson is his antitype.

The Robinson Mythos, therefore, represents a counter-tradition to the English bourgeois novel which has Crusoe as its originator; a counter-tradition that condenses and exacerbates its distance from more mainstream Robinson traditions. It is not determined by its individuated protagonists, but by its unindividuated antagonist. The diminished status of the socialist politics inherent to this counter-tradition is represented by Robinson’s repeated disappearances. In Keiller’s films, Robinson’s spectrality reflects the asynchronicity between the historical possibilities that he attempts to keep alive and the fallen present/bleak future of global capitalism.

Perhaps more interesting than the use of Robinson as a critical device, however, is the shared use of Robinson as such. The gradual typologising of Robinson from Crusoe, the latter’s un-individuation, represents a refusal of something of the proprietorship of imaginative inquiry that is, in the readings I have offered, the foundational claim of the English bourgeois novel. Instead, the writers who engage with the Robinson Mythos make an effort to imagine collectively, to reimagine endlessly, without sacrificing a material engagement with specific cultural conditions. The Robinson Mythos holds in common some tools of fictional production—tools that it has expropriated from a bourgeois tradition.

Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, Now

University of Sussex, Brighton, UK – Friday 8^th June 2012

Keynote: McKenzie Wark (The New School, NY), author of The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), Gamer Theory (2007) and Hacker Manifesto (2004).

Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as to what to call artistic works by members of the SI. It was understood that none of them was a situationist production, but what to call them? I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that that has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be coopted by society and used against us. Our impact lies in the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever people are ready to struggle for them. At the present stage the movement is only in its infancy regarding the elaboration of these essential points.

Attila Kotányi at the Fifth Conference of the SI, 1961

Is it oxymoronic, heretical or just plain wrong to talk about Situationist aesthetics? The Situationist International (SI) condemned attempts to discuss its work in terms of aesthetics, but perhaps it is now time to brush the SI against the grain.

When it first announced its programme, the SI insisted that ‘There is no such thing as Situationism’. A few years later, before expelling its members deemed to be too invested in artistic production, the SI declared that in an age of spectacle any work of art produced by a Situationist must necessarily be ‘antisituationist’. The SI’s tactical intransigence regarding the political value of the aesthetic, and its refusal of the possibility of a specifically Situationist aesthetic, threw up problems that remained unresolved by the time of the SI’s dissolution. Since 1972, particularly in Anglophone contexts, Situationist practices have penetrated an array of cultural spheres, and much cultural production which the SI would have dismissed as spectacular has claimed some Situationist influence.

The SI located itself within but against culture. This symposium asks whether such a position is tenable, and what possibility might there be for Situationist aesthetics after all. Do cultural phenomena such as punk, or the current psychogeography industry, for example, work as or against Situationist aesthetics? Is it possible to identify art works and/or practices indebted to the SI that do not recuperate its politics but fortify and develop them?

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

• the work of Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International
• the work of artists, writers, thinkers or film-makers proximate to or influenced by the SI
• critiques of the SI
• (post-)Situationist theory now
• détournement, plagiarism, and recuperation
• spectacular and anti-spectacular aesthetics
• the uses and abuses of psychogeography
• punk and art writing

Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words for papers or presentations of 20 minutes to Sam Cooper at situ.aesthetics@gmail.com by 16^th March 2012. For further information: situationist-aesthetics.blogspot.com.

Chapter 1 – The Dialectics of English Surrealism

Chapter 2 – Surrealism put to work: Mass-Observation

Chapter 3 – Alexander Trocchi and the Dissolution of the Avant-Garde

Chapter 4 – Alexander Trocchi’s Invisible Insurrection

Chapter 5 – The English Section of the Situationist International

Chapter 6 – King Mob

Chapter 7 – English Situationist Poetics

I’ve always been much more interested in something else: The self-conscious attempt to construct conceptual practices outside of formal settings. That is what Marx did, it’s what Freud did, it’s what Benjamin did; I’d even say it’s what Nietzsche did, because of course he’s on ‘permanent leave’ when he’s writing all these amazing books, when he’s already losing it. Somehow, these guys are all now ‘high theory’, but that’s not where they came from whatsoever. Marx is not a philosopher, Freud is not a philosopher, Benjamin is not a philosopher; I’d even say Nietzsche is not a philosopher. They’re all doing ‘low theory’, and I’m trying to tell stories that fit into that tradition, maybe not at that level, but as a whole other way of thinking about the practice of knowledge in everyday life. This puts on the table the question of the politics of knowledge in a way that can’t be directly asked, or answered, in the space of the university.

Sample quote:

the press gesticulate at their demonstration-model abyss and moan about the ‘nihilism’ of the riots which shattered the facades of so many betting shops; and the sky does not fall in. But fulmination against the destructive ‘nihilism’ of the riots merely underwrites what it claims to protest against, because it refuses to acknowledge just how much of our social ‘fabric’ would have to be destroyed if any social life were to be more than accidentally livable. In the future, it must by now be obvious to anyone without a derivatives portfolio that effective social action will have to be more and not less destructive, because less and less of that fabric is capable of being redeemed merely by a modification in the terms of its ownership. However important concerns about the ‘proper’ targeting of destruction may be, when their social function is to serve as a gag – and it usually is – better not to let them be put in your mouth.

There are a couple of sections in ‘Riot Polit-Econ’, toward the end, which I either don’t follow or which seem to make rather large and unannounced stepping-stone steps over some issues and onto others. The analysis deals well in political economy, not so well in race. For example, I’m not sure of the origins or source of these lines of questioning:

But what is the relationship then between structural long term unemployment and co-incident class and ethnic divisions within ‘communities’? How do ethnically defined petit bourgeois groups constitute themselves? If they do so in certain material settings through crime, why is this? This is to suggest that the subsistence-level underclasses of the UK, including ethnically specifiable petit bourgeois elements, may have relied for whatever material security they do possess on recourse to extra-legal economies.

Similarly, the analysis of community defence groups feels rather ramshackle. However, the writers acknowledge their (our) ‘current outpost on the cloud of unknowing’ and, as I said, their structural analysis of a service economy is particularly illuminating.

* I’m no expert here, but I would suggest that ‘Riot Polit-Econ’ is most proximate, by way of a leftist category of analysis, to David Harvey’s ‘accumulation through dispossession’.

http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/7/totality/

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. It reminds me of the Usborne books I read as a child, but instead of annotations like ‘The telephone can be used to speak to people in other places’, we now have ‘The spectacle is the antithesis of historical consciousness.’ Which is cool, I guess.

Perhaps you have already seen this and this.

Well, in the interest of public safety and in unthinking deference to state power, I hereby recommend that you report this blog to your local Police. Its author is not an anarchist but most certainly has anarchic tendencies and sympathies. When push comes to shove comes to truncheon blow, this blog’s author is on the side of the anarchists.  This blog’s author espouses direct action, will readily identify as anti-capitalist, and has even been know to listen to crass (he prefers rudimentary peni, but he is isn’t certain that the Met’s intelligence office will have delved that deeply into the crass records roster). He would gladly discuss with your local Police what he considers to be the merits and the demerits of ‘anarchism’, in relation to politics, culture and the critique of capital. If, however, your local Police  would prefer a more subterfuge (Murdochian) means of ‘intelligence’ gathering, he would advise against phone-hacking as his texts usually consist of ‘pub?’ and he doesn’t even know how to use voicemail.