Mark E. Smith, Brexit Britain and the Aesthetics and Politics of the Working Class Weird

This article develops my existing published work on The Fall, which seeks to examine the consequences of Mark E. Smith’s classed, educational and regional formation on the band’s aesthetics and politics. I think through these latter categories both as they unfolded during The Fall’s post-punk peak and as they signify in the present, bridging this gap through the elaboration of the concept of ‘the working class weird’. Over the past decade, the work of Mark Fisher has traced a fascinating, if speculative, formal and classed history to The Fall’s ‘pulp modernism’. Here, I respond to and build upon Fisher’s work by situating The Fall more concretely within a postwar British history of working class experiments with avant-garde cultural form. I locate the band’s output within the shifting class relations of the late 20th century and explore its conflicted ideological implications, arguing that although Smith and The Fall may appear to presage and articulate a particular variant of working class conservatism that has coalesced around Brexit, their work also retains elements of utopianism and intransigent oppositionality.

This article develops my existing published work on The Fall, which seeks to examine the consequences of Mark E. Smith's classed, educational and regional formation on the band's aesthetics and politics. I think through these latter categories both as they unfolded during The Fall's post-punk peak and as they signify in the present, bridging this gap through the elaboration of the concept of 'the working class weird'. Over the past decade, the work of Mark Fisher has traced a fascinating, if speculative, formal and classed history to The Fall's 'pulp modernism'. Here, I respond to and build upon Fisher's work by situating The Fall more concretely within a postwar British history of working class experiments with avant-garde cultural form. I locate the band's output within the shifting class relations of the late 20th century and explore its conflicted ideological implications, arguing that although Smith and The Fall may appear to presage and articulate a particular variant of working class conservatism that has coalesced around Brexit, their work also retains elements of utopianism and intransigent oppositionality. 'I thought it was great… still do' (Kinney, 2018). It is unclear whether he meant the result of the referendum, the upheaval that has resulted in its wake or the actual objective of Britain's exit from the European Union.
It may well be that the specifics are less important here than the impulse behind such a statement. Smith's attitudes have always been mercurial, difficult to definitively categorise or pin down, due to a combination of working class autodidacticism, punk contrarianism and his complex social positioning within the dynamics of post-punk.
Like many within that formation, Smith was a voracious reader, thinker and believer in doing justice to the artistic and expressive possibilities opened up by punk.
Unlike certain others, he was not formally educated beyond school leaving age and remained keenly if idiosyncratically conscious of his working class background. As I have argued before, this often set him at odds with the fraction of punk fall-out that initially sustained The Fall (Wilkinson, 2016: 116).
Similarly mercurial is the structure of feeling underpinning Brexit. Despite  However, as I have argued before, this myth obscures Smith's very real social and historical rootedness (Wilkinson, 2016: 115-116 life was atypical, for sure -but as Lucien Goldmann has argued, it is possible for the collective consciousness of a social group to be conveyed in cultural production by ' an individual with very few relations with this group', someone who is 'precisely the exceptional individual who succeeds in creating… an imaginary… world, whose structure corresponds to that towards which the whole of the group is tending' (Goldmann, 1975: 9, 160).
That will be my argument here. In establishing it, I share Fredric Jameson's aim of understanding 'the secret affinities between… apparently autonomous and unrelated domains' (Jameson, 1991: 400), of aiming to cognitively map and critique a historical conjuncture that has only grown more chaotic, accelerated and confused in its mediatised postmodern immediacy since Jameson first formulated such a project.
Raymond Williams has rightly observed that a homological approach risks perpetuating an idealist separation between the cultural and the social, and that it can include ' an extreme selectivity' of evidence in its establishment of correspondences between the two (Williams, 1977: 106). Here, I aim to avoid an understanding of culture as passive reflection by demonstrating how the post-punk work of Smith and The Fall may shed as much light on its conjuncture and our own as a grasp of those moments reveals about The Fall. I also work with a notion of The Fall's output and Smith's public persona not as closed and discrete cultural objects but as materially produced, reproduced and mediated, subject to continual and contested resignification. As for selective evidence, this is perhaps a more dangerous pitfall than usual in the case of Smith and The Fall. As will become clear, sense making can be a fraught affair in a body of work that is so extensive and frequently oblique -a court dispute over copyright between Smith and a former producer once left a High Court judge 'baffled [and] scratching her head while trying to decipher the lyrical rants of Fall frontman Mark E. Smith' (Brewster, 2015). As will also become clear, however, such apparent indecipherability has important homological resonances that require further investigation. Walsh points to the early nineteenth century as a critical moment. Experiencing the immiserating effects of the encroaching factory system and the Napoleonic wars, artisanal workers and tradespeople were often predisposed to nostalgia for a preindustrial 'social economy' within which they had at times been both materially better off and subject to less obvious coercion. At this moment, such a social formation was often still within living memory for many. Despite the radical and even revolutionary consciousness that E.P. Thompson argues this hardship produced in the form of the Luddite rebellion, for instance (Thompson, 1978: 647), Walsh notes that it could be tinged with ' aspects of a Tory tradition in terms of deferential attitudes to the elites and, importantly, respect for custom and prescriptive rights' (Walsh, 2012: 37).
Walsh goes on to quote the Radical activist Samuel Bamford reminiscing over a former bowling green in his native Middleton (an area of North Manchester which borders Smith's Prestwich locale). The green was 'much frequented by the idle fellows of the village who preferred ale-bibbing in the sun before confinement on the loom' (Walsh, 1967: 26). Such revelry was in time legally suppressed and the land converted into a burial ground. Walsh notes perceptively that the right of recreational activity on this land had first been bestowed by James I in response to Puritan opposition (Walsh, 2012: 40). This argument is later developed by the observation that nineteenth century Conservatives often adopted their Tory predecessors' latitude with regard to plebeian pleasures, mocking liberal attempts at regulation and reform (Walsh, 2012: 106, 217 (Fisher, 2016: 15). This seems an appropriate way of conceptualising a variant of class consciousness that contradicts two common assumptions concerning the working class: firstly, its romanticism and nostalgia are at odds with leftist perceptions of the proletariat as an agent of progress; and secondly, its attachment to leisure short circuits the hegemonic association of the working class with labour. Notably, in its explicitly conservative manifestations, this consciousness acted to fragment solidarity, often pursuing sectional interests along racist and xenophobic lines (Walsh, 2012: 113, 199).
In recent decades, this variant of class consciousness has experienced a resurgence that might be said to have come to a head with the result of the June 2016 EU Referendum, in which a large majority of older, often white, working class voters were amongst those who opted to leave the European Union. The determining factors of the result are multiple and are unlikely to be fully grasped without the aid of greater historical distance. Yet it seems credible to suppose that the sensibility that often motivated the working class Leave vote, which various research has suggested entails hostility and resentment towards liberal professionalism and immigration alongside fears concerning the loss of British sovereignty (Bulman, 2017;Carl, 2018;de Piero, 2019), has re-emerged congruently with a number of eminently nameable longer-term phenomena. These include: renewed conservative ideological claims on the working class dating back to the late 1960s in the forms of Powellism and Thatcherism as the welfare capitalist consensus began to break up (Hall, 1983); Clarke of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies suggests that it was possible to interpret working class skinheads as 'the dispossessed inheritors of a disappearing culture', a 'magical' subcultural attempt to recover a lost sense of community and a particular kind of masculine pride (Clarke, 1977: 100). It is important to note, too, that since at least the early 1980s not only such a class consciousness but the working class itself has been ideologically perceived as ' anachronistic' and 'backward-looking' by disdainful metropolitan professionals involved in apparently modernised forms of production (Samuel, 1982: 265).
Smith's trajectory is inseparable from this conjuncture. Pressured to follow in both his grandfather's and father's footsteps and undertake a plumber's apprenticeship (Ford, 2012: 9), Smith came from a class fraction of skilled workers and tradespeople that has since voted disproportionately for Brexit and has recently begun an uneven and tentative electoral swing toward the Conservatives (Niven, 2017). His identification with an elite minority -Smith once declared 'I'm a firm believer in the 80% subsidising the 20% (Gill, 1981) (Brecker, 1986).
All this, especially in Smith's case, might suggest an essential connection between conservatism and the working class weird. Yet the picture is at times more complex than that. For a start, historic working class 'resistance through rituals' of pleasure, excess and nostalgic intransigence must be understood in part as a more ideologically diffuse resistance to the onset of liberal discipline and biopower, a historical development which has been mapped influentially in the work of Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1997). This is unquestionably one origin of Smith's wayward libertarianism: he once claimed 'if someone wants to smoke themselves to death or drink themselves to death… or whatever then it's their basic right' (Martin, 1986 consummation of technical progress' (Marcuse, 1991: 62-63). In the early 1980s, Smith claimed 'I am a dreamer type person and I… resent being associated with realist bands', in opposition to those who would portray a burgeoning punk revival as the social realist sound of the street (Reynolds, 2005: 195). It is perhaps no surprise too that Smith once opined 'I always think the whole idea of civilisation is to get everybody on the dole, surely' (Stud Brothers, 1986), echoing recent calls from the left for a reduced working week and a universal income in response to the growing automation of labour (Rogers, 2019; Press Association, 2019). Thus the desired new 'structuration' (Goldmann, 1975: 156) of the world sought by the working class weird is often ideologically complex and politically inchoate; a fact that will eventually be key to the following analysis of Smith and The Fall's continuing significance.

Class and cultural form
To understand representative voices such as those of Smith -in particular the complex ways in which they articulate particular social groups' ' deepest fantasies about the nature of social life' (Jameson, 1992) -it is essential to think further than the ideological content of their cultural production and their public statements.
Goldmann notes in relation to literature that writers' representation of social reality 'is almost never… systematic' and much the same could be said of other forms of cultural production such as popular music (Goldmann, 1975: 159). This is especially so in Smith's case, given how changeable, contradictory and unreliable his views could be right up to the end of his life. Despite his libertarian conservative tendencies, for instance, Smith supported the Trotskyist Deputy Leader of Liverpool Council Derek Hatton in the 1980s (Ford, 2003: 155). Shortly before his death, he expressed

Popular Modernism
It is on Grotesque (1980), Slates (1981) and Hex Enduction Hour (1982) where the group reached a pitch of sustained abstract invention that they -and few others -are unlikely to surpass. In its ambition, its linguistic inventiveness and its formal innovation, this triptych bears comparison with the great works of twentieth century high literary modernism (Joyce, Eliot, Lewis). (Fisher, 2006) From the outset, Fisher's freewheeling analysis of The Fall's work connects it formally to British and Irish high modernism. In biographical terms, this is an entirely plausible reading; for instance, Smith had a long term interest in the work of Wyndham Lewis that lasted up until the former's death (Kinney, 2018). In more historical and for his early post-structuralist influences, sharing that intellectual formation's tendency to reject realism and valorise modernist form on the basis of its apparent affinities with the theoretical tenets of post-structuralism (Milner, 2002: 140-141).
Though suggestive, this can mean that the more concrete ideological resonances of cultural form and its relationship to class occasionally take a back seat or remain tantalisingly undeveloped.
One example of this occurs in Fisher's discussion of the modernist utilisation of working class language. He begins by arguing that 'The Fall extend and performatively critique that mode of high modernism by reversing the impersonation of working class accent, dialect and diction that, for example, Eliot performed in The Waste Land' (Fisher, 2006). For Fisher, The Fall's combination of working class signifiers like accent alongside ' arcane literary practices' has radical implications, short-circuiting the association of intelligence and education with middle class culture and formal institutions. I have argued something similar elsewhere, pointing to Smith's desire for popular appeal alongside his refusal to capitulate to the banal musical conventions and economic servitude of the mainstream music industry (Wilkinson, 2016). In the terms of the working class weird, it is possible to construe this as an opposition to intellectual sophistication as the exclusive preserve of bourgeois liberal modernity as expressed in the work of thinkers such as John Maynard Keynes, who once contrasted 'the boorish proletariat' to 'the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement' (Keynes, 1931: 300).
It is such resonances that remain unexplored in Fisher's work, as it moves on for instance to approvingly characterise Smith's use of scrawled working class slang on the cover of Hex Enduction Hour -'have a bleedin' guess' -in post-structuralist terms as uncontainable paratext and, following Roland Barthes, as writerly rather than readerly. Yet the ideological and political implications of such claims are unclear -and there is surely more to tease out here. If, as Fisher claims, Smith re-inhabits the ironic and parodic use of working class language in modernism from a working class perspective, then formally this is a complex and tense move. On the one hand,  (Fisher, 2010: 104). Even as Smith wished to escape from an 'inoffensive cap-touching attitude' (Ford, 2012: 43)  horrific the way they put VAT on take-away food' (Snow, 1984).
Thus, too, the distinctive aggression that is as characteristic of The Fall's work as it is of a writer like Wyndham Lewis. Fredric Jameson notes of Lewis's formal aggression that it is not ' a private characteristic of the novelist' but a structural formal feature of an outlook that features ' a reification of struggle arrested and transmuted into static structural dependency.' Such aggression is 'the rage and frustration of the fragmented subject at the chains that implacably bind it to its other' (Jameson, 1979: 60-61). If this was the case for the upper middle class outcast Lewis, it is even more so for the working class weird in its conservative incarnation. The fury of Fall songs often seems directed against the liberal-leaning musical and media infrastructures upon which the band were dependent for their visibility and commercial viability: 'Printhead' lambasts a 'horror-face' music journalist (1979b), 'Who Makes the Nazis?' targets cultural commentators portrayed as 'balding smug faggots/intellectual halfwits ' (1982), and 'Deerpark' makes short work of 'fat Captain Beefheart imitators with zits' (1982). Yet such fury may also be read as the displaced frustration of a particular working class consciousness that has sought solace in a contradictory allegiance with its pre-modern oppressors in the face of liberal capitalist advance.

White Crap That Talks Back
Such a 'reification of struggle' into 'static structural dependency' takes on further depressing resonances in a context of renewed conservative claims on the working what Alberto Toscano has called 'the sociologically spectral figure of the "forgotten" white working class' (Toscano, 2017). As Joe Kennedy has noted, this has become a dominant narrative amongst the media and political establishment, ' a one-dimensional portrait of "provincials" grounded in a simplistic, badly modelled opposition between them and the "elites of Islington" or wherever'. For such an establishment, this 'badly modelled opposition' serves as an alibi, allowing the Right to imply that recent social friction is the result not of free market generated inequality, poverty and uneven economic development but of neglecting the supposed 'innate social conservatism' of the regional working class in favour of cosmopolitan liberal values (Kennedy, 2018: 11-12). Kennedy's convincing contention is that the ' authentocrats' who peddle such a dubious alibi often do so formally by means of displacement. This includes the 'mass obviation' of 'prole-whispering' journalistic features that purport to have discovered and heeded authentic working class conservative anxieties, despite showing little genuine interest in the demographic, ethnic and political complexities of the communities they report on (Kennedy, 2018: 80-86 Elsewhere, Fisher refers to Jean Baudrillard's 'The Ecstasy of Communication' and 'the schizophrenia of media systems which overwhelm all interiority' (Fisher, 2006).
Though Fisher does not acknowledge it, we seem to be somewhat beyond 'popular modernism' here and into the territory of the postmodern. If Smith was indeed the archetypal 'schizo' who could 'no longer produce the limits of his own being' and was ' only a pure screen, a switching center for networks of influence' as Baudrillard has it (1983: 133), this does not bode well in terms of the potential of working class weird resistance to the kinds of ' authentocratic' manipulations theorised by Kennedy. In fact, the absence of 'reflexive subjectivity' in The Fall's ' dense schizoglossic tangles' is directly comparable to the effacement of actual working class voices in current conservative discourse; as Kennedy notes, the 'rhetoric of "listening" [is], in reality, a way of talking over people's heads' (Kennedy, 2018: 86). Revelling in excess, disarray and grime, the phrase 'since I was so long' rather than the more familiar 'so high' implying a base horizontality in opposition to bourgeois uprightness, the hip priest is the atavistic avatar of working class weird revolt. 4 Nearly two centuries later, the brief ' end of history' hegemony enjoyed by the socially progressive, technocratic neoliberal inheritors of nineteenth century free market economics is at an end. In their place a succession of provocative radical right political leaders have emerged across the globe, as oligarchic sections of the economic elite have shifted their weight behind what George Monbiot has memorably described as the rise of the 'killer clowns' (Monbiot, 2019). In many respects this new right has little in common with the feudal nostalgia of 19 th century Toryism; ironically, it is liberal-inclined 'tech giants' like Facebook and Google whose operations have been characterised as ' a hyper-modern form of feudalism' (Morozov, 2016 (Smith, 1982). In a list of dislikes drawn up for the NME in 1987, Smith included 'France (permanent)' and ' all Dutch groups' (Wright, 2019).

Conclusion
It may not be a stretch, either, to observe a potential homology between the barbed logorrhea of reactionary modernist form and the rise of a so-called 'post-truth' era in media and politics -in Fisher's terms, 'the hectoring form of advertising copy or the screaming ellipsis of headline-speak… a Vorticist front page of the mind'. As Monbiot has observed, the seemingly chaotic and contradictory public pronouncements of 5 See for instance James Bartholomew, 'What explains the idiocy of the liberal elite? It's their education', The Spectator, 26 December 2017, available online at https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/12/ what-explains-the-idiocy-of-the-liberal-elite-its-their-education/, last accessed 22 October 2019.
Bartholemew's article is an especially effective example of the way such rhetoric bewilderingly elides liberalism with socialism in order to present itself as the only viable alternative. the 'killer clowns' fit with their deliberate recklessness concerning the established conventions of liberal democracy and the functioning of the state. This is a calculated strategy, serving both a distracting purpose at an ideological level whilst maintaining a climate of uncertainty in which ' oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense' (Monbiot, 2019). It is a strategy that extends rather than curtails neoliberal ' accumulation by dispossession', including the 'management and manipulation of crises' and 'state redistribution' of public wealth into private hands (Harvey, 2007).
Yet the association between current working class ressentiment and this new right is neither total nor inevitable. In 'Just Step S'ways', Smith memorably advises all those disenchanted with the contemporary world to 'just step sideways… don't let it beat ya ' (1982), suggesting the submerged utopian potentialities of the working class weird. Notably, the song advocates neither a reactionary fantasy of return nor a progressive and collective advance forwards. As Fredric Jameson has observed, at a moment of historical defeat for the left -which we might add with hindsight is still some way from being overturned despite the recent resurgence of popular socialist movements in the West -in which it has become increasingly difficult even to conceive of what a more just future may look like, utopia 'serves a vital political function… a rattling of the bars and an intense… concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived' (Jameson, 2007: 233 point out that the differences I have with Fisher's readings here ought to be taken as a sign of utmost respect, in the sense that I believe his work has a pressing cultural and political significance that demands engagement through such critical response and development. He is and will remain a sorely missed comrade.