27.01.2011

Conversations with the sat-nav

Mike Belbin reviews Jonathan Coe 'The terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim' Viking, 2010, pp344, £18.99 hardback (paperback £12.99)

More and more cultural products take the safe route these days. They perform the 'bare minimum' of their genre (detective fiction) or offer attention-grabbing thrills or comfortable nostalgia. Popular TV series like Downton Abbey create a consoling past, where not only does everyone know their place, but satisfyingly they have time to give comfort and advice - even across the class divide, even to the extent of servants hugging employers.

Remakes and sequels make for safe drama, superheroes for secure fantasy; comedy, meanwhile, is mainly intimate and observational (if not abusive); documentaries promote empathy, not new information or interesting opinion. The papers and airwaves are dominated as never before by celebrity gossip (often from the celebrities themselves). News focuses on personalised disasters (a murder rather than a war), moral panics ('offensiveness') or how plausible a politician is, how well liked and attractive - or not. Enjoyment is offered through humiliation contests of the self-deceiving, as well as the embarrassment of select VIPs.

It is harder to find really challenging art work, intellectually or otherwise, even on the internet, which is more and more clogged with advertising and distractions. In fact, Jaron Lanier in You are not a gadget (London 2010) asks whether the net has come up with any new art at all in the last 10 years. What music style is there to compare with hip hop, new wave, reggae, jazz, the symphony or the Beatles? Is avatar gaming much of an advance on animated Tolkien or Terminator films? How many YouTube clips of kittens and painful incidents can equal the movies - whether Chaplin, Eisenstein, Ford, Spielberg or, for that matter, Toy Story 2? Maybe the triumphs are ahead. After all, there was that very funny pastiche of the 'Thriller' promo with someone playing Obama as Michael Jackson …

This lack of creativity may not just be down to the flattening of 'shared' technology (Wikipedia does facts, not 'opinions'), but to the centrist consensus that pervades everywhere. Many issues - capitalism, the existence of nation-states, civil partnerships - seem settled, though others - bankers' bonuses and politicians' expenses - remain hot.

The interest in new worlds that even some of the most abstracts modernists, like Mondrian, showed in the 20th century, has gone. A vision of a new world, like the one aboard the Enterprise in Star Trek, has been replaced by TV sci-fi about hostile visitors from other worlds appearing through space or time gate to spoil our 'non-discriminatory' society.

Exception

One exception last year to the consensus of pastiche or evasive works was a novel published to little fanfare. While no masterpiece, it did engage with the present in ways few other fictions dare. The terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim is Jonathan Coe's ninth novel (all page references to Viking hardback edition). Coe is probably most famous for The rotters' club, which was adapted for TV. This attempted to sum up the 1970s from the point of view of a Birmingham schoolboy. In Maxwell Sim, Coe seems to have set himself a more ambitious task - to catch some of the texture of life today.

The novel begins with the character of Maxwell Sim and his particular problem: he feels isolated, bereft of nourishing human contact. His paid work follows no definite career; he is divorced; he does not consider himself to be fully adult. He suffers a very modern - or postmodern - malaise. Over the first few pages, Sim considers his separation from others: his ex-wife and daughter, his father in Australia, as well as a man he started talking to on a plane who dies beside him without Maxwell noticing.

What is emphasised here is people's separation from each other. But then in a world where capital is mobile - going where the workers are cheapest - human beings will find many of their relationships shifting, as the jobs go and state benefits disappear.

Maxwell Sim is not the sort to stay in one place either. He leaves his current job of 'after sales service' - a job even he cannot explain simply - and joins a 'promotion' for a new design of toothbrush. The marketing people have devised a campaign involving sales reps driving cars to the far ends of the UK (for Maxwell, it is the Hebrides). These journeys are supposed to show how 'committed' the drivers are to selling the product. In other words, they are a stunt. They have no point, not even to sell to customers where the cars arrive. They are a movement through space, pursued, with effort and expense, to merely suggest something is worth having, to propose an image of desirability, to stimulate a fashion, a promise of something intangible: a virtual reality.

On his journey, Maxwell Sim does not see much of the places in Britain he moves through. They are in any case mainly motorway and service stations. He does though manage to look up various friends and family along the way. None, however, supply the satisfactory relationship of which he dreams. Of course, being constantly on the move does not help.

During the course of his drive, Maxwell Sim exhibits nostalgia too. He is obsessed with another solitary traveller, lone yachtsman Donald Crowhurst. In 1968, Crowhurst took part in a round-the-world race during which he had a breakdown, started faking his log and eventually went overboard. However, despite Crowhurst being revealed as a failure and a cheat, Maxwell insists on admiring him. He sees Crowhurst as the adult he is not.

By the final stretch of the drive, Maxwell gets to the point of imagining that his sat-nav is talking back to him: "she" is someone with whom he feels he can have a conversation. Of course, how many of us come very close to this kind of relationship with our technology - relying on our 'personal' machines, swearing at them, seeking playfulness and comfort from them? There are even net heads who think that one day the 'cloud' (the sum of all web technology and interactions) will become a super-intelligence, for which human beings will simply be researchers and pets (see Lanier, op cit).

Early on, Sim meets one human being with whom he thinks he has a chance of contact. Poppy is a young traveller who also turns out to be a promoter of 'image' - or rather virtuality in sound. Her job is to visit various cities and make recordings of their noise. The recording is then sold to a client who, for example, when they are next in Singapore or Paris with their lover, can play the CD in the background when they ring their spouse. The spouse believes they somewhere more mundane.

At the first hint, though, of Sim's disapproval, Poppy is ready to retaliate: "… if there's anything people of my age cannot stand hearing, it's people of your age giving us lectures on morality … you're the ones who brought us up to be consumerist zombies … Yeah, let's get those losers in the far east to make everything for us and we can just sit on out backsides in front of the TV, watching the world go to hell in a handcart - in wide screen and HD, of course" (pp37-38). Clearly, Poppy accepts her situation, but is not fooled by it.

Maxwell Sim's story is shot through with insecurity: his fear of his own managers, of the bank foreclosing on the company, of poverty. Just so - as mobile capital vacates the west for that very far east Poppy refers to (such as China), even the incomes of the middle class recede. Those 'middle class' with the money to invest - that is, the entrenched mega-rich - hand their capital on to their children (think of the Murdoch dynasty), while the working middle class find they have to support their own children for longer and longer: perhaps one source of the feeling that so many young people have not yet achieved adulthood. The fashion lately has been to blame this on the older generation of 'babyboomers" rather than the system where wealth flows increasingly to the entrenched elite.

New division

One searing post-crunch diagnosis, or forecast, in this situation is Meltdown: how the 'masters of the universe' destroyed the west's power and prosperity by Stephen Haseler (Forumpress, 2008). Haseler points out that "the new division between the global aristocracy (based on capital and inheritance) and sinking 'uncompetitive' workers has so embedded privilege that it is now almost impossible to rise from bottom to top, from bottom to middle and from middle to top ... In the age of global capitalism [globally mobile capital] when the state has been weakened and politics reduced, then those with wealth are the only ones with power. The old 'rags to riches' myth was never much of a reality, but today it is an utterly impossible dream" (pp244-45).

Haseler sees this as leading to a new aristocratic ethos, which will devalue the previously 'bourgeois' ethic of meritocracy and effort. It is not what you do, but what you are that guarantees position. The rise in British tuition fees, for example, will force parents and offspring to calculate where a 16-17-year-old will be over the rest of their life, and whether they can afford the debt incurred by earning above £21,000. For some expecting to be 'on the cusp' of this salary, it may not be judged worthwhile. They just will not go to the especially high-charging institutions. Families with the money (for maintenance and fees) will, of course, send their children there, where they will be enabled to go on to the high-paying jobs. This is tantamount to creating a caste society. Offspring of doctors, management and even entertainers will step into their parents' shoes. The offspring of the unemployed and low-paid are 'free' to find what they can. Those in the 'middle' middle class may remain deluded that their children can 'get on', if not as far as before, at least somewhere. Too many will stand by the 'low income tax' parties in the belief that these will 'protect' them: most of the 'middle class' are, however, effectively proletarian.

At the end of the novel, Maxwell Sim does not get anywhere much either - not even to his designated finish line. The company he is working for is swallowed up by higher powers. This journey that started as pointless ends up as useless. Maxwell, however, manages to pull back from madness, divorcing himself in time from his sat-nav. Finally, he sets off on a journey all his own, across to the other side of the world to find family there, as well as someone 'non-European' he glimpsed in a restaurant that he wanted to contact. Maxwell's own solution then is not to be found 'at home'.

The narrative focuses on one consciousness, Maxwell Sim, but we are constantly aware of how all others are connected, even in their seeming disconnectedness. We are all items in a market, human commodities (with some - the 'redundant'- not even that), organised by a few who are also subject to the needs of the elite for short-term profits. As Haseler shows, this elite are not the 'moguls' of yesteryear - top hat-wearing adventurers with whims and ideas. These high-caste individuals (and families) work to the plots and profit-making programmes designed by others, the super accountants. They are mostly discreet, anonymous, because they are afraid: afraid of their employees, the volatile public and any limitation on their parasitic practices, like proportionate tax or withdrawal of 'bailouts'.

Even a successful financier like George Soros has felt the need to question the market as the bedrock of freedom. In the ideal market. Soros declares, "supply and demand were taken as independently given … [but this] cannot be reconciled with reality" ('The capitalist threat' Atlantic Monthly February 1997). Soros's counter-argument is that market players, certainly in the financial sector, far from providing free interaction with customers, are inevitably imposing their will, in the form of expectations, but also in the form of their values and interests. The financial markets have 'moods', make judgements and demands. This is potentate capitalism, more like royal spongers than 'captains' of industry or, for that matter, financial 'services'.

For Maxwell Sim a solution to this 'privatised' world is an individual effort at face-to-face connection. For the Keynesian Haseler, it is a return to nationalisation, state intervention: "[Western countries] can either tolerate increasing inequality - a strategy which in the coming downturn will lead to social resentment, the growth of stealing and violence, and innumerable social problems. This route will need vast increases in public expenditure on prisons and police, if not on social welfare. Or, alternatively, we can change tack and try new policies, particularly tax and trade, to lessen these sharp inequalities with a degree of economic redistribution throughout the social structure" (S Haseler op cit p245).

Coe's novel, however, affirms that in a disconnected world - disconnected by working practices and misuse of technology - an effort at personal connection is still possible and not limited to your own kin or national group. Maxwell Sim, though, does not press through to any sort of organisation, one founded on a few fundamental revolutionary demands with room for debate. He does, however, act to make personal connections: he maintains an idea of the human subject who can work along with others - essential for any social transformation beyond a 'command economy'.

That other future, the continuation of 'royal' sponger capitalism, is mind-numbing: an entrenched caste presiding over decreasing social mobility while national democracy, though not perhaps nationalism, disappears into a fragmented global society; a managerial state subservient to mobile capital and global finance, bringing us ever closer to worldwide war, a degraded living space and environmental catastrophe.

The old Labour/'official communist' solution of a nationalising nation-state is dead, in any form; the only alternative is some kind of world network of modular - that is, semi-autonomous - connections between local and international assemblies, no doubt using e-technology for more than Facebook. Not a big society or a big state, but a web of participation, all the way from workplace and neighbourhood to a global delegate assembly; a cooperative economy where individuals do the work they want while sharing the less empowering labour and taking decisions in common (See M Albert Parecon life after capitalism London 2003).

Whatever the alternative proposals, there will be no 'return' to any golden age of a national welfare state; thinking internationally is now a necessity for any workable solution. The choice is not between the state and the market, but between elite rule (state or market) and worldwide participation.