This character became an avatar that I would embody to work through societal trauma with my own experiences implicated at the centre.
He (it) began its life in a drawing from 2017, called Dead Ethics Hysteria. And then reappeared as one of the ‘6 horsemen for a bad memory for tomorrow’, in brown prohibition paper bags, addictions to unhappiness, that I symbolically wished to exorcise in the emotion-voting election #GE18.https://johnledger1984.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/ge18-the-general-election-of-governing-emotions/
The character is made up of two specific ‘horrors’ that I felt define England; the plague doctor mask that is associated with perhaps an era where England made a significant break with it’s medieval past; the 17th century, the civil war, the great plague, and great fire of London. These traumatic breaks were coupled with the chancellor’s ‘budget box’; a symbol of the silent horror of what Mark Fisher called ‘capitalist realism’, an ongoing ‘reality management’ by the powers that be, to convince us that capitalist drudgery/misery is everlasting.
Why is it specifically English, the trauma? Well, without even going into the impoverishment and immiserisation agenda the Tories have pursued for the last twelve years, English misery is specific: on the surface we have nice housing estates, Ikeas and craft ale pubs to visit; but as Mark Fisher and David Graeber explained, nowhere has the erasure of the idea of class power and ‘the exorcising of the “spectre of a world which could be free“‘ (Fisher quoting Marcuse in Acid Communism) been as thorough a process as here.
Fisher called England under ‘capitalist realism’ the most depressed place to have ever existed. If you’re reading that and taking personally, try asking yourself some of the questions Keir Milburn used in his Acid Communism workshops: such as “when was the last time you felt truly free from work?’, or ‘when was the last time you weren’t worrying about work, paying bills?’
Our misery isn’t because we are the poorest, more oppressed of people (of course we aren’t), it’s because of how successful ‘the exorcising of “the spectre of a world which could be free“‘ has been here, at least since the Miners’ Strike onwards. This is reflected in our inability to imagine The New, which has made our culturally peculiarly senile in recent years (I’m looking at you: Jubilee – there was a time when it seemed inevitable that we’d abandon our monarchy).
I’m not accidentally calling it English, forgetting English isn’t Britain. This is an English horror story, one that has spread not only around the island, but around the world. The spectre, bereft on any better name to name it, was designed to be a personification of this.
The character featured as a ghostly presence, a reassertion of trauma-informed thinking, in the semi fictional, semi-autobiography, pop odyssey Wall I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oTUtxFlHkc&t=573s
However ‘the spectre’ came into it’s own these 3 ‘situational spoken word’ videos I made during the height of the lockdowns, playing on the heightened sense of claustrophobia, anxiety, and disorientation, and the hangover from the defeat of Corbyn to Johnson (Are Tory voters are never happy, even when they win? It sometimes seems that it’s seeing others lose that matters). The videos had a concerned eye on what I’m starting to call ‘back to normal-ism’; an era that seems blind to the fact that time as we know it, momentarily melted, and that we are in fact inside its hardened melt right now.
The works remind me of personally difficult times. The result of the inner arguments after trying to teach myself ‘not to get political’, a fear of pushing people away or being ostracised in employment. But equally politics is something we can do by many other means other than simply pointing out who we like and who we don’t, shouting and swearing (which I do a lot of in these videos), and from now on, my spirits have lifted, and I’m looking towards the 2020s with a commitment to rebuilding my inner optimism, and will to keep going.
John B Ledger 