Dr Daniel Gerke | Swansea University (original) (raw)

Papers by Dr Daniel Gerke

Alluvium: 21st-Century Writing, 21st-Century Approaches, 2019

A short piece published in the open-access journal Alluvium on Mark Fisher's 'hau... more A short piece published in the open-access journal Alluvium on Mark Fisher's 'hauntological melancholia' and its relation to two literary engagements with the anthropocene: Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2040 (2017). I argue that the apocalyptic pessimism of The Road is slowly giving way to forms of activist optimism in the period immediately following the the hegemony of capitalist realism.

Raymond Williams Society / Verso, 2019

An analysis of Raymond Williams's relatively unknown 1961 essay 'The Future of Marxism', which re... more An analysis of Raymond Williams's relatively unknown 1961 essay 'The Future of Marxism', which reappeared in New Left Review in 2018. This piece was published on the Raymond Williams Society blog and republished on the Verso blog.

Alluvium, 2019

A short piece published in the open-access journal Alluvium on Mark Fisher's 'hauntological melan... more A short piece published in the open-access journal Alluvium on Mark Fisher's 'hauntological melancholia' and its relation to two literary engagements with the Anthropocene: Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 (2017). I argue that the apocalyptic pessimism of The Road is slowly being superceded by forms of activist optimism in the period immediately following the hegemony of capitalist realism.

Knowledge in Ithaca is most assuredly not power. Reduced to information, Ithaca’s knowledge evade... more Knowledge in Ithaca is most assuredly not power. Reduced to information, Ithaca’s knowledge evades a number of questions which have traditionally been those which afford us purchase on the category; who wields it? Where does it reside? To what does it refer? What is its utility, if any? We are presented with two intra-textual ‘characters’, the Questioner and the Answerer (Q and A). Together the pair perform a feat of separation, divorcing knowledge from its lived context while paradoxically bringing us closer to it than ever before. Behind this dialogue the narrative progresses uniformly, another hour passing on the day of the 16th June, 1904, but the linguistic lens through which these events are presented seems determined to give us more. This ‘more’ is an impulse towards encyclopaedic completeness, and it is in the relationship between Q and A that we find the reasoning behind this strange lurch in Ulysses towards the security of objective knowledge. This essay will argue that the heavily ironised faux-dialogue of Ithaca functions as a kind of ‘feint’, a turning back towards the ranks of Modernism’s allies in the mask of the enemy. It will demonstrate that this strategy is one of both rigorous analysis and disarmament by mockery; the seeming inability of the text to close itself becomes a fierce meta-commentary on the novel form, its relationship to epic, and the structural oppositions of knowledge and memory, present and past. It will also explore how, behind such powerful discursive investments into the practice and display of knowledge, an entity at one remove is always half-present: the Lacanian Other, the ‘subject supposed to know’ (Fink 1995: 89).

From surface to structure, Gawain and the Green Knight is a fundamentally triadic text. We are pr... more From surface to structure, Gawain and the Green Knight is a fundamentally triadic text. We are presented with three major settings (Arthur and Bertilak’s courts/ the Green Chapel), three narrative ‘phases’ (offer of the game/temptation at the castle/conclusion of the game), three hunts, three temptations, three resistances, three sets of kisses thrice given over to the lord, three Masses attended by Gawain. Thrice the Green Knight’s blade falls. It will not be the aim of this essay to historicise the number three, that is, to consider its particular significance to the chivalric romance, to the knights and ladies of the story, or to the period and person of the Gawain-poet. It will rather be an attempt to read Gawain’s relationship to the number within the context of a particular theoretical system, that of Jacques Lacan, in an effort to gain the insights into the story offered by that system. The number three is the most important in all of Lacanian theory, perhaps psychoanalysis. The introduction of the father as the ‘third term’ (Fink 1995: 55) between mother and child is the principle consequence of the paternal or ‘phallic’ function, literally producing the subject in Lacan’s version of what Freud called the ‘castration complex’ (Freud 2001: 195). For Lacan, castration really does occur, but as a symbolic castration, a process of terrifying the subject into existence. This essay will argue that Gawain and the Green Knight is particularly well-suited to a Lacanian reading in this vein, unifying under one narrative all the key themes of the paternal function: exchange, debt, choice, coercion and identity.

The phrase ‘really existing’ in my title is intended to echo the common prefix to Soviet state an... more The phrase ‘really existing’ in my title is intended to echo the common prefix to Soviet state and other socialisms thought to have at various times operated as the dominant economic mode in a given country. That such a phrase exists is indicative of the fact that there has been a strategic need, on the Left, to distinguish between effective (in the sense of ‘having effects’) socialism and the strains of latent or regressive socialism which exist to greater or lesser degrees in non-socialist countries. In this paper I will argue that an aspiration towards an ontology analogous to that represented by the ‘really existing’ prefix is what Tyler Durden and the members of the titular organisation in David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club embody and negotiate. This aspiration is both gendered and revolutionary, that is, an attempt is made to solidify a particular ontological status in the spheres of both identity and politics. Durden is the strategy Edward Norton’s narrator (whom I will refer to as ‘X’) unconsciously employs to effect an alteration in the postmodern order. I will argue that the ‘problem’ of Fight Club is that X (and therefore Durden) are products of that very self-contradictory postmodern moment, and that their revolutionary efforts are thus problematised from the outset. The narrative progressively explores two strategies for change: a) a reversal of the postmodern destabilisation of gender and, when an ineffective identity politics becomes an exercise in simulacra, b) revolution proper. Whether the latter of these strategies has been effective is left ambiguous by the end of the film, but what emerges is a compelling picture of the historical limbo of postmodernity, a moment antagonistic to both past and future.

It is unlikely, were The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written by Wordsworth, that its central figu... more It is unlikely, were The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written by Wordsworth, that its central figure would have suffered so miserably. As a Kantian in a far stricter sense than Coleridge, Wordsworth may have been more sympathetic to a figure whose only crime was an act of radical self-assertion amidst a literal sea of externalities. What Keats called the ‘egotistical sublime’ (Keats 2006: 1375) of Wordsworth is not apparent in the Unitarian Coleridge, whose method of obtaining the sublime is always one of deferral and absorption before assertion and personal transcendence. In this essay, I aim to read the crime and subsequent punishment of the mariner as a problematisation, never entirely resolved, of the Coleridgean moral ontology and its relation to Coleridge’s variant of the sublime. The main theoretical framework I will be using to unpack this reading is the theory of subjectivisation developed by Jacques Lacan, in particular his use of the concepts of subject, Other and alienation. Over the course of the essay I will deploy a reading of the narrative as indicative of the subject’s severance from and progressive re-assimilation into the Other, a process which is at once arduous, inevitable and ultimately incomplete by the poem’s conclusion.

Conference Presentations by Dr Daniel Gerke

This is the text of a paper I delivered at the first Raymond Williams Society conference in Manch... more This is the text of a paper I delivered at the first Raymond Williams Society conference in Manchester, 27/04/2019. It compares and contrasts Raymond Williams and Andre Gorz on the issue of post-work vs direct democracy, and the 'non-class of non-workers' vs the revolutionary working-class. It also compares the political situation in 1983 (when Gorz wrote his Farewell to the Working Class), in which class politics seemed in perilous decline, to the radicalism of the present moment, in which class politics and the economics of post-scarcity appear to be fusing.

In what follows I explore whether, if Anderson was in fact wrong to exclude Williams from his can... more In what follows I explore whether, if Anderson was in fact wrong to exclude Williams from his canon, it was because Anderson wanted to construct an English or a British Marxism, when in fact it was only by bypassing England, as Williams did, that a thinker from the British Isles could have a close affinity with continental Marxism. My paper will explore Williams’s relation to the Western Marxist tradition from the standpoint of his self-description as a ‘Welsh European’. It will position Williams within the 1960s and seventies New Left debates around the relation of British Marxism to continental theory, arguing that Williams occupied an important space between Anderson and Nairn’s anti-British theoreticism and E.P. Thompson’s stubbornly empiricist rejection of European Marxist theory.

An account of Raymond Williams's engagement with the thought of Georg Lukacs from 1962 to 1984

While the 1970s was undoubtedly the decade in which Gramsci became a significant reference for Wi... more While the 1970s was undoubtedly the decade in which Gramsci became a significant reference for Williams, I’ll argue here that he was channelling Gramscian themes at least from The Long Revolution (1961), and that Williams’s views on what constituted revolutionary change amounted to a British development of Gramsci’s theory of socialist struggle in the capitalist West.

An exploration of the translation-evading Welsh word 'hiraeth' via Lacanian psychoanalysis.

An exploration of Alex Garland's Ex Machina via Lacan's 'Formulas of Sexuation', an attempt to sc... more An exploration of Alex Garland's Ex Machina via Lacan's 'Formulas of Sexuation', an attempt to schematise the famous aphorism: 'There's no such thing as a sexual relationship'.

A conference presentation on the links between the work of Raymond Williams and Jean-Paul Sartre ... more A conference presentation on the links between the work of Raymond Williams and Jean-Paul Sartre on the tensions between human freedom and the material force of history.

To many observers, class today appears as something ephemeral, decentred and irreducibly subjecti... more To many observers, class today appears as something ephemeral, decentred and irreducibly subjective. Contemporary political realities, such as the fact that the working-class cannot be reliably counted on to avoid endorsing reactionary parties, have led both apologists for capitalism and the post-Marxist left to either eschew class as a substantive category or to view class as purely categorical and therefore divorced from a multiplicitous human reality. This has proceeded hand in hand with the philosophical hegemony of post-structuralist and postmodernist thought. Indeed, until quite recently, those who have defended the reality of class and its centrality to historical investigation have been castigated for having, in the Derridean sense, a quasi-religious faith in the wisdom of the Western metaphysic.

In recent years, however, the hegemony of both post-structuralist idealism and class-sceptical post-Marxism has faltered. Since the global financial crisis, radical booksellers have helped Marxist political economy and theory stage a significant comeback. Simultaneously, in the field of continental philosophy, a resurgence of metaphysical, materialist and realist thinking has collected, since 2007, a loose school of thinkers under the name of ‘speculative realism’. My paper aims to interrogate the possible lines of combination and alliance between the Marxist tradition and this new(ish) philosophical realism.

'Determining the conditions of our own social being'; a notion I think is central to all of Willi... more 'Determining the conditions of our own social being'; a notion I think is central to all of Williams's work. So here Williams finds an affinity with Sartre against the stubborn and, at times, hypocritical resistance of internationalist Marxism against the politics of place. I now want to focus in on Sartre's account of the Burgos Trials, before comparing his analysis to some broader comments on the national question by Williams. The key question for Sartre can be simply stated, but less simply answered: what is the relation between national independence and socialism? On one level, it is a question of territory: It has become clear that the present frontiers correspond to the interests of the dominant classes and not to popular aspirations, that the unity of which the great powers are so proud is a cloak for the oppression of peoples and for the overt or covert use of repressive violence (Sartre, 'The Burgos Trials', 1971) Popular aspirations, Sartre implies, would carve up the world in a different way. The current boundaries, moreover, serve class interests, and are the product of imperialism. There is a certain kind of national unity, Sartre suggests, which is illusory, ideological, but this is not the case with the Basques. What Sartre is really opposed to is liberal or bourgeois universality, the abstract individual with formally equal rights but no particular grounding; in existentialist parlance, a surplus of essence and a surfeit of existence. In place of this abstract universality Sartre endorses what he calls concrete particularism, a specific identity borne of a real, which is to say lived, and pre-existing polity:

Raymond Williams on six of Sartre's major plays, primarily from the analyses in Modern Tragedy (1... more Raymond Williams on six of Sartre's major plays, primarily from the analyses in Modern Tragedy (1966)

An account of the link between Williams's 'Welsh European' identity and the development of his ow... more An account of the link between Williams's 'Welsh European' identity and the development of his own humanist Marxist approach, 'cultural materialism'

Alluvium: 21st-Century Writing, 21st-Century Approaches, 2019

Raymond Williams Society / Verso, 2019

Alluvium, 2019

An account of Raymond Williams's engagement with the thought of Georg Lukacs from 1962 to 1984

An exploration of the translation-evading Welsh word 'hiraeth' via Lacanian psychoanalysis.

A brief account of Raymond Williams's views on the distinction between realism and modernism in t... more A brief account of Raymond Williams's views on the distinction between realism and modernism in the arts via The Long Revolution and some of Williams essays of the 1980's.

A brief account of the difficulties Raymond Williams faced in encountering, over the course of hi... more A brief account of the difficulties Raymond Williams faced in encountering, over the course of his career, the works of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs.

A critical comparison of the approaches to gender identity and subject formation in Judith Butler... more A critical comparison of the approaches to gender identity and subject formation in Judith Butler and Lacan/Zizek. Radical inclusion vs lack.

Draft of a paper I'm hoping to edit further and publish. The idea that things 'might have been o... more Draft of a paper I'm hoping to edit further and publish.

The idea that things 'might have been otherwise', that even the past is infused with contingency, is vital to Brecht's project, as is a conception of history as an act of self-making by human beings. Specific historical, or indeed fictional, events are then presented and analysed as 'case studies' in the contingency of human choice and actions. Brecht was one of a handful of significant European influences on the development of Williams's cultural materialist perspective. This essay takes an in-depth look at Williams's responses to Brecht's drama, in particular the major plays of the period 1937-1945. I demonstrate that it is the anti-mechanical, anti-teleological nature of the Brechtian project which primarily attracts Williams to this unique dramatic corpus, but also that Williams ultimately views Brecht as merely opening a door. It is the more difficult task of walking through it that faces the post-Brechtian radical dramatist. As of the late 1960s, Williams regards Brecht as without parallel among modern dramatists. He is not only a formally original artist, but a pioneer of a new and progressive manifestation of what Williams called a structure of feeling, that historically specific complex of perceptual, affective and creative responses to social life that functioned as the central epistemological category of Williams's early cultural materialism. A literature of the totality, as Williams's analysis of the novel in The Long Revolution3 broached and later writings developed4, would be a robust realism, conceiving the individual and society dialectically. For Williams, Brecht does not achieve this; nevertheless, via the successful application of an original theoretical apparatus and dramatic conventions, Brecht's best plays achieve a prodigious level of social critique, opening out new horizons for a politically committed drama.