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This is a giant book packed into just 141 pages because it's not really a narrative in the classical sense it's more of a mixed media onslaught. It is a container of literary forms in a strict permutation of anarchy. You will find lists of things, often funny, neutral prose that slides in a Burroughs-esque fashion into lurid pantomime satires of bureaucratic power, poetry that sounds at times like Ferlinghetti on acid, elderly sex sandwiches, sci-fi fairy tales, but most of all it is a gruelling
This is a giant book packed into just 141 pages because it's not really a narrative in the classical sense it's more of a mixed media onslaught. It is a container of literary forms in a strict permutation of anarchy. You will find lists of things, often funny, neutral prose that slides in a Burroughs-esque fashion into lurid pantomime satires of bureaucratic power, poetry that sounds at times like Ferlinghetti on acid, elderly sex sandwiches, sci-fi fairy tales, but most of all it is a gruelling satire on the form. The bureaucratic form is examined thoroughly from all sides. The thing that lifts this work way above its mundane subject is that the form and its subjects, its operatives, its targets, its managers are all described in great detail, but always generically. So we don't have case studies of forms to achieve this or that bureaucratic goal, rather we get instead a convergent and poetic focus of the form itself. In this way the greatness of the book lies. Although the author eschews the needs of Literature for trite metaphor the reader of the book is drawn from a kind of dole office like frame into the multifarious ways that we all experience 'the form', whether marking student essays, keeping social network diaries of your children's achievements or any other of the system assessment and control procedure we all increasingly experience as ordinary.
"The entire form experienced as a living, writhing sensual panic devouring time, the process of in-fill feasting on boredom and desperation, flooding with adrenaline in the twitches, blows and scorching of anger it latches onto and in the obliterating joy of sensing it all, knowing, asking for details,dividing them up, following staged consequences, offering precision surgery that merely makes for more sensation and an increased capacity of desire for the wounding and gorging on the rubbish of domination." p.49.
"Watch, stare at the black ink on the page of the form, stare at the perfectly printed letterforms against the white paper until the glory wells up behind them and starts leaking through." p.61
"The form is anchored in the values of standardisation, uniformity and fairness." p.106.
"The in-fill assessment process is something we take very seriously and relies upon expert knowledge, precise handling and multi-level quality control at all stages of the process." p.137
How is all this achieved? By fusing bureaucratic management speak with the jargon of programmers who write the algorithms that make these forms exist within a paperless bureaucracy of control procedures. It reminds me of a contemporary Ballard at times, but I'm no literary expert. But the operative and the victims (interchangeable) are not forgotten in their generic struggles and there is plenty of description of miasmic and dystopic office humdrum.
I read it in various locations that all reflected different colours onto the pages. In the Museum of London a giant poster of Michael Caine, perhaps hurt by not being mentioned, says; "Its not the Elephant and Castle to those that live there - its the Elephant". That's right Michael you tell em. I read it in Wetherspoons having a cheap steak. Cackling improvisations interrupt my concentration and a book page gets splattered by bulls blood and fat. Then I got the book out again whilst waiting in the crazy cardiology unit in MayDay Hospital. I am given a hand-drawn number 28. The movement of people around me is opaque and confusing. Finally I sink into the book and miss my number being called three times (so they claim). The ECG procedure takes three minutes and is fed direct into a laptop and goes off deep into the hospital - I feel like I've stepped into the book.
There are people with names that wander through all the mayhem to bring you their personal story: the form is midwife to the young anti-hero Love, his old parents Lou and Fred and the mysterious and only vaguely human Mr Chips who is said to keep watch on the Elephant and Castle.
The main narrator for this novel is also a form operative, the Reader . The Reader is the white collar worker that interprets that work of the more lowly in-filler. Above him sits the King of Decisions with his sophisticated and sly management psychology. "The system is used to ascertain precise power-coordinates for the correct and universal observance of hierarchy in protocol distinction across time and ranking systems." p.42. Any such serious Bourdieu-like formulations are quickly undercut by surreal humour that would have pleased the Oulipians. This is harder to quote as it is often embedded in long flowing passages. If you want fun read the book not this review!
The forms data itself almost becomes a character, as 'the memory unit', but doesn't quite anthropomorphise. It is the dynamic quality of memory use by the Babylonian computers of future, already in the present, that give it a sort of life-like-Ness. 'The producer' is the same, my romantic expectation that this was some worker was dashed as it turns out to be a cornucopia machine that the wonder boy Love gets from some Thames crabs.
My own sitpoint is that the Men of Letters and their progeny are a filthy condensate that holds most of us in thrall or exclusion. At the top we can catch a glimpse of the London Review of Books and all who sail in her, at the bottom forms and their fibre optic tentacles trip our plodding existences. This book is coming from somewhere else, more ancient and yet at the same time a sort of sci-fi Swiftian journalism. Everything is under intense satirical scrutiny from language to archetypes. The book is most often playful and funny, sometimes unexpectedly and wildly imaginative.
The interface between the computer state and seething humanity is constantly hemming in the dry descriptions of the forms qualities and its concrete conditions of enactment. It might be generic but all the parts are based on close observations and re-collections of all-too-real absurdities we have mostly all experienced in the world of commodity excess. Some times the language spits and splutters, and splits apart before gelling again into its obsessive tirade. We are left with a sense of disassociation between the state and its subjects that is almost addictive. But I can't help feeling that the author is out for revenge.
The banalities of the form and its intelligent data memory are liberally mixed with the body fluids of desire. Blood and mucous constantly spill into the circuitry. "In a city the clustering of books, cables, drains, noise, food, insides and outsides, the squeezing together and variation of ideas tastes, involves itself in the same process of patterning and growth as a body does when it turns a little knot of skin into a thinkness of nerve endings, crescendos and undulations of complex figures wrought in the tensions of flesh, simmering with sugars…" p.39.
Intruding into the work of the form we have occasional tongue-in-cheek descriptions of the work of artists-in-residence which particularly appealed to me. Sentence long satires nest within larger rolling ones. The form is ideal as each entry can allow a passing stab at any topic under the flickering fluorescent landscape. There is a kind of ecstatic joy in this interfolding of sarcasm and satire. An unreal grip of life's minutae is unleashed as vitriolic word bombs that burst off the pages.
The tenuous narrative is punctuated with crazed and delirious lists of extraneous commodities. Lists extend to runs of short phrases linked by poetic resonances, that remind me of Duncan Reekie's rants over slides-shows that were one of the highlights in the early years of London's Exploding Cinema. Reekie himself the result of a transatlantic coupling between the musical performer Little Titch and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In the world of screens advertising leeches onto any resistance, leaps into work attention gaps, soothes the troubled brow, uplifts the weary. We can be grateful. "Receive only one form of neurological entrainment and certain layers of the body, certain of its systems, begin to slime." p.77.
"The clients physical queue position, the allotted readers read-time status, and the semantic density of the current state of in-filling will be calibrated in order to give a near reliable appointment time for the stage assessment appointment." p.88.
Overall the book is more like taking a recreational drug than literature. But at the same time it’s more like literature than a bad trip. On page 123 I read that eyes and faces become ‘data supply organs’. I turn to my copy of Metro on a Southern commuter train and read about Tesco's new face readers that guess age and gender to target advertising to shoppers in their aisles. The form is never fully completed because the forms have joined together to become an integral part of all our life-stories.
The jargon of bureaucracy and management speak is brought to a refined level of writing that leap frogs Burroughs and Ballard into a new post Ministry of Sound level of banality satire at 120 bpm. The interface of cybernetic social management is flooded with the suppurating orgiastic rot of life. Using the jargon of programmers who code the algorithms that predispose human desire into a commodity format, Fuller achieves a reverse appropriation of the lingo of oppression and of the mechanistic colonisation of our lifeworld. But don't worry, you can be reassured that: "The in-fill assessment process is something we take very seriously and relies upon expert knowledge, precise handling and multi-level quality control at all stages of the process." p.137
Stefan Szczelkun November 2013
...more
"The entire form experienced as a living, writhing sensual panic devouring time, the process of in-fill feasting on boredom and desperation, flooding with adrenaline in the twitches, blows and scorching of anger it latches onto and in the obliterating joy of sensing it all, knowing, asking for details,dividing them up, following staged consequences, offering precision surgery that merely makes for more sensation and an increased capacity of desire for the wounding and gorging on the rubbish of domination." p.49.
"Watch, stare at the black ink on the page of the form, stare at the perfectly printed letterforms against the white paper until the glory wells up behind them and starts leaking through." p.61
"The form is anchored in the values of standardisation, uniformity and fairness." p.106.
"The in-fill assessment process is something we take very seriously and relies upon expert knowledge, precise handling and multi-level quality control at all stages of the process." p.137
How is all this achieved? By fusing bureaucratic management speak with the jargon of programmers who write the algorithms that make these forms exist within a paperless bureaucracy of control procedures. It reminds me of a contemporary Ballard at times, but I'm no literary expert. But the operative and the victims (interchangeable) are not forgotten in their generic struggles and there is plenty of description of miasmic and dystopic office humdrum.
I read it in various locations that all reflected different colours onto the pages. In the Museum of London a giant poster of Michael Caine, perhaps hurt by not being mentioned, says; "Its not the Elephant and Castle to those that live there - its the Elephant". That's right Michael you tell em. I read it in Wetherspoons having a cheap steak. Cackling improvisations interrupt my concentration and a book page gets splattered by bulls blood and fat. Then I got the book out again whilst waiting in the crazy cardiology unit in MayDay Hospital. I am given a hand-drawn number 28. The movement of people around me is opaque and confusing. Finally I sink into the book and miss my number being called three times (so they claim). The ECG procedure takes three minutes and is fed direct into a laptop and goes off deep into the hospital - I feel like I've stepped into the book.
There are people with names that wander through all the mayhem to bring you their personal story: the form is midwife to the young anti-hero Love, his old parents Lou and Fred and the mysterious and only vaguely human Mr Chips who is said to keep watch on the Elephant and Castle.
The main narrator for this novel is also a form operative, the Reader . The Reader is the white collar worker that interprets that work of the more lowly in-filler. Above him sits the King of Decisions with his sophisticated and sly management psychology. "The system is used to ascertain precise power-coordinates for the correct and universal observance of hierarchy in protocol distinction across time and ranking systems." p.42. Any such serious Bourdieu-like formulations are quickly undercut by surreal humour that would have pleased the Oulipians. This is harder to quote as it is often embedded in long flowing passages. If you want fun read the book not this review!
The forms data itself almost becomes a character, as 'the memory unit', but doesn't quite anthropomorphise. It is the dynamic quality of memory use by the Babylonian computers of future, already in the present, that give it a sort of life-like-Ness. 'The producer' is the same, my romantic expectation that this was some worker was dashed as it turns out to be a cornucopia machine that the wonder boy Love gets from some Thames crabs.
My own sitpoint is that the Men of Letters and their progeny are a filthy condensate that holds most of us in thrall or exclusion. At the top we can catch a glimpse of the London Review of Books and all who sail in her, at the bottom forms and their fibre optic tentacles trip our plodding existences. This book is coming from somewhere else, more ancient and yet at the same time a sort of sci-fi Swiftian journalism. Everything is under intense satirical scrutiny from language to archetypes. The book is most often playful and funny, sometimes unexpectedly and wildly imaginative.
The interface between the computer state and seething humanity is constantly hemming in the dry descriptions of the forms qualities and its concrete conditions of enactment. It might be generic but all the parts are based on close observations and re-collections of all-too-real absurdities we have mostly all experienced in the world of commodity excess. Some times the language spits and splutters, and splits apart before gelling again into its obsessive tirade. We are left with a sense of disassociation between the state and its subjects that is almost addictive. But I can't help feeling that the author is out for revenge.
The banalities of the form and its intelligent data memory are liberally mixed with the body fluids of desire. Blood and mucous constantly spill into the circuitry. "In a city the clustering of books, cables, drains, noise, food, insides and outsides, the squeezing together and variation of ideas tastes, involves itself in the same process of patterning and growth as a body does when it turns a little knot of skin into a thinkness of nerve endings, crescendos and undulations of complex figures wrought in the tensions of flesh, simmering with sugars…" p.39.
Intruding into the work of the form we have occasional tongue-in-cheek descriptions of the work of artists-in-residence which particularly appealed to me. Sentence long satires nest within larger rolling ones. The form is ideal as each entry can allow a passing stab at any topic under the flickering fluorescent landscape. There is a kind of ecstatic joy in this interfolding of sarcasm and satire. An unreal grip of life's minutae is unleashed as vitriolic word bombs that burst off the pages.
The tenuous narrative is punctuated with crazed and delirious lists of extraneous commodities. Lists extend to runs of short phrases linked by poetic resonances, that remind me of Duncan Reekie's rants over slides-shows that were one of the highlights in the early years of London's Exploding Cinema. Reekie himself the result of a transatlantic coupling between the musical performer Little Titch and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In the world of screens advertising leeches onto any resistance, leaps into work attention gaps, soothes the troubled brow, uplifts the weary. We can be grateful. "Receive only one form of neurological entrainment and certain layers of the body, certain of its systems, begin to slime." p.77.
"The clients physical queue position, the allotted readers read-time status, and the semantic density of the current state of in-filling will be calibrated in order to give a near reliable appointment time for the stage assessment appointment." p.88.
Overall the book is more like taking a recreational drug than literature. But at the same time it’s more like literature than a bad trip. On page 123 I read that eyes and faces become ‘data supply organs’. I turn to my copy of Metro on a Southern commuter train and read about Tesco's new face readers that guess age and gender to target advertising to shoppers in their aisles. The form is never fully completed because the forms have joined together to become an integral part of all our life-stories.
The jargon of bureaucracy and management speak is brought to a refined level of writing that leap frogs Burroughs and Ballard into a new post Ministry of Sound level of banality satire at 120 bpm. The interface of cybernetic social management is flooded with the suppurating orgiastic rot of life. Using the jargon of programmers who code the algorithms that predispose human desire into a commodity format, Fuller achieves a reverse appropriation of the lingo of oppression and of the mechanistic colonisation of our lifeworld. But don't worry, you can be reassured that: "The in-fill assessment process is something we take very seriously and relies upon expert knowledge, precise handling and multi-level quality control at all stages of the process." p.137
Stefan Szczelkun November 2013
...more
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