Michael Potts

In this thesis I trace the origins, morphology, and attributes of a particular strain of anti-materialism in the Western literary and cultural imagination of the second half of the twentieth century. With reference to previous work done on this topic I discuss how this anti-materialism rejects materialistic and rationalistic aspects of modernity and emphasises instead the importance of non-material aspects of society such as cultural integrity and cohesion, tradition, and instinct. I demonstrate that this strain relies on what Raymond Williams termed "organic form", the fallacious belief that human society can and should follow a set of rules which can be objectively deducted from nature and I argue that it should be placed within the context of a long established anti-enlightenment tradition. Through an analysis of such writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, JRR Tolkien, Edward Abbey, James Howard Kunstler, Chuck Palahniuk, Brian Aldiss and others I show how a common fe...

Announcing his bid for the US presidency, Donald Trump caused outrage by claiming that undocumented migration from Mexico to the US showed that America had ‘become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems’. Trump began his typically bombastic speech by declaring that the Mexican government was ‘sending people that have lots of problems ... they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.’ However, Trump’s framing of undocumented migrants turning America in a ‘dumping ground’, whilst shocking, can be clearly situated within a persistent strain of rhetoric in mainstream American culture and media that uses imagery of pollution and toxic waste to depict Mexican immigration. In this essay, I want to show how such rhetoric and imagery survives in popular American culture and literature as part of a sublimated discourse that adopts and adapts the terminology, imagery and conventions of genres such as travel or nature writing in order to convey a message which implicit...

In ‘Welcome to Country: Acknowledgement, Belonging and White Anti-Racism’ (2015)
researcher and activist Emma Kowal examines statements acknowledging native title to land
as anti-racist speech acts that, paradoxically, often worked to “maintain White identities
and manage White stigma by questioning White belonging” among a group that
“experience[s] belonging through a sense of not belonging” (pp. 180-1).
Kowal’s work in this area builds on Erving Goffman’s theory of performativity, via the
work of Sara Ahmed. In ‘Declarations of Whiteness: the Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’
(2004) Ahmed argued that statements of anti-racism were non-perfomative because they
were “[not] a turn away from the white subject and towards something else, but another
way of ‘re-turning’ to the white subject”. Indeed, Ahmed remarks, “the most astonishing
aspect . . . is that ‘antiracism’ becomes a [properly] white attribute” which licences the
externalisation of racism on to the ‘other’ of the less educated, unhappy, racist working-
class white.
In other words, White Anti-Racism according to Kowal and Ahmed actually re-
inscribes white privilege through licencing a “fantasy of transcendence” by externalising
racism and a problematic heritage of racist exploitation on to ‘bad’ whites. Racism therefore
becomes a product of ignorance not inequality, of poverty not power. The fantasy of
transcendence “allows racism to be seen as what the working classes (or other less literate
others) do” further fostering the sense of belonging through not-belonging (Ahmed).

My chapter looks at white anti-racism on social media as a performative discourse that works to define and demarcate the boundaries of acceptable white behaviour and discourse. It shows how online media content is often created to cater to this performative aspect of white identity, and how this creates a condescending and unnuanced picture of both ethnic minorities and working-class whites, as well as licencing the myth of meritocracy.

Announcing his bid for the US presidency, Donald Trump caused outrage by claiming that undocumented migration from Mexico to the US showed that America had ‘become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems’. Trump began his typically bombastic speech by declaring that the Mexican government was ‘sending people that have lots of problems ... they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.’ However, Trump’s framing of undocumented migrants turning America in a ‘dumping ground’, whilst shocking, can be clearly situated within a persistent strain of rhetoric in mainstream American culture and media that uses imagery of pollution and toxic waste to depict Mexican immigration. In this essay, I want to show how such rhetoric and imagery survives in popular American culture and literature as part of a sublimated discourse that adopts and adapts the terminology, imagery and conventions of genres such as travel or nature writing in order to convey a message which implicitly frames the immigrant (and particularly the Hispanic immigrant into America) as a form of pollution. As a case study of this process, I will analyse some previously under-researched articles by American nature and travel writer, Edward Abbey.

“The Multicultural Dilemma”: Ignoring Racism in the Works of James Howard Kunstler.

At their worst, the rap videos played on cable TV resemble the war chants of a conflict that has not yet been joined. Only among a group as narcissistically lost and clueless as white suburban America would these messages be welcomed as just another species of entertainment. In the disorders of the Long Emergency, when the poor become really poor by world standards, the urban ghettos may explode again, and the next time it happens it will be in the context of a much more desperate society than the one that witnessed the 1992 Rodney King incident and its aftermath.

~ The Long Emergency (300-1_.

James Howard Kunstler is a social critic and bestselling author of fictional and non-fictional books on resource depletion, urban planning and environmental degradation. His work has appeared in, and is favourably reviewed by, such progressive and liberal periodicals and newspapers as Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Slate and The New York Times. Kunstler’s focus on sustainability in urban planning, peak oil and the problems of resource depletion have made him a respected commentator who is regularly invited to give guest lectures at colleges and universities.

But there is another issue of great concern to Kunstler which has received almost no serious attention or comment: the importance of a “common culture” and refusal (as Kunstler sees it) of large swathes of Black America to partake in it. His first popular non-fiction work The Long Emergency (2005) ended with a section in which he discussed the probability of social breakdown under the pressures of resource depletion and climate change in a society in which he believed African American disfunctionalism and materialism had been allowed to flourish, enabled by cheap credit off the back of the oil boom and justified and excused by a professional class of “diversity cheerleaders”. “There are real political issues facing the black underclass minority in America” Kunstler declared, “and the outstanding one would seem to be how much longer significant numbers of them can afford to put off growing up. The twenty-year-long peak oil blowoff has made this experiment in arrested development possible” (298). His later non-fiction work on the same subjects, Too Much Magic (2012) pursued a similar trajectory. After devoting most of the book to an earnest discussion of the perils of climate change and other urgent issues, Kunstler ends with a chapter entitled “The Multicultural Dilemma” in which he develops an argument that multiculturalism is an ideology of the unsustainable twentieth century that arose in order to help white America deal with changing demographics, rather than from a genuine desire for social equality.  The problem, as Kunstler explained in a web log entry on the death of black teenager Trayvon Martin, is that “the Civil Rights victories of 1964 and 1965 — the public accommodations act and voting rights act — created tremendous anxiety among African Americans about how they would fit into a desegregated society, so the rise of black separatism at exactly that moment of legislative triumph was not an accident. It offered a segment of the black population the choice of opting out of the new disposition of things”.  Encouraged by the academics, journalists and commentators who espoused multiculturalism, Kunstler believes that Black culture, and specifically young Black men developed “an oppositional culture saturated in violence that will never accommodate itself to any kind of a common culture” (“American Anxiety” July 2013). After the more recent police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Kunstler doubled down on his victim-blaming rhetoric, asking “are we hard-wired to self-segregate . . . Do we have different standards of behavior for different races? Does that work? (“Mr Bad Example” August 2014).

Clearly Kunstler has a problem with African Americans and with Black culture, blaming everything from criminal activity to aggressive rap lyrics on a refusal to integrate with the “common culture” of America, a process he believes is aided and abetted by those he contemptuously refers to as “diversity cheerleaders” who excuse bad behaviour by pointing to injustices and inequalities in society. Whilst this is a particularly reactionary and simplistic response, Kunstler is, of course, entitled to his views and to expressing them in print. The real question though is why they haven’t been challenged by the media, particularly in the liberal and left-leaning journals and periodicals that would normally be alert for the kind of victim-blaming Kunstler indulges in, but which seem to be oblivious in this case. Neither is this effect limited to the media. Harlan Morehouse, a lecturer interested in the intersection of race, culture and the environment, writes in a blog post of his horror at attending a guest lecture by Kunstler at the University of Vermont at which Kunstler, after discussing the usual roll call of ecological and resource depletion threats began talking about post-oil agrarian communities and who would be suitable to participate in them and lead them. “It became clear” Morehouse remarks, “that Kunstler’s explanation of ‘who?’ was thoroughly racialized, sexualized, and masculinized”. Observing with some disquiet how the largely progressive audience of university students and faculty applauded the lecture Morehouse notes in bewilderment that “I was left wondering how such a seemingly ‘progressive’ and ‘forward-looking’ crowd could relish in a politics so acutely at odds with its apparent own” (“Reactionary Progressivism” Geocritique June 2013).

My chapter will use the example of James Howard Kunstler to ask why, in a twenty-first century world so acutely aware of the dangers of racism, such prejudiced and reactionary sentiments are allowed to go more or less unchallenged and the author of such sentiments be lauded as an important voice whose words must be heeded. It will look at the claim of necessity which is implied by reference to ecological imperatives and ask if we have been too willing to overlook the dangers of reactionary sentiments proffered under the guise of a discussion of ecological and societal breakdown. I will argue that this is not an isolated phenomenon, and that we cannot allow our concern over ecological degradation to blind us to the kind of exclusionary logic perpetuated in the books and blog postings of James Howard Kunstler and others like him who talk about the Black community only in terms of violence, failure and obstreperousness.

I examine the use of organic, cyclic metaphors in Lord of the Rings and show how they are consonant with Spenglerian themes of cultural growth and civilizational decay that were prevalent in the twentieth century. I compare Spengler’s description of the West as the “evening lands” to Tolkien’s description of Gondor and the West in his novel as a “Twilight” or failing civilisation, succumbing to depopulation and lacking the cultural vitality it once had and I note some striking similarities between Spengler's metaphors and Tolkien's  imagery in The Lord of the Rings.

In this paper I consider Abbey as an anti-pastoral writer by looking at his version of pastoral that emphasises red-blooded masculine struggle and competition, and analyse how this relates to his libertarian-anarchist political ideology which defines wilderness as an apolitical space subject only to putative ‘laws of nature’.  In exploring the political and anti-pastoral element in Abbey’s writing I seek to advance the argument that Abbey was a writer concerned fundamentally with what he perceived as the decline and corruption of American culture which he felt had become too commercial, too urbanised, and most of all too cosmopolitan and multicultural, lacking in cultural identity and cohesion.

Homosexuality and transgenderism have a long history of being attacked and slandered as somehow ‘unnatural’ and a sign of decadence and degeneration in culture and society. This paper demonstrates that this mischaracterisation continues today, with homosexuality and transgenderism still being used as a marker and symptom of decadence and degeneracy in contemporary literature. It will examine how this perpetuation is an aspect of an ideology of anti-materialism that has a long and disturbing lineage in Western thought and culture, and it will discuss how current manifestations of this ideology attempt to justify their prejudices by conflating liberationary movements with consumerism to imply that they are a manifestation of unsustainable and decadent modern liberal society.

In this thesis I trace the origins, morphology, and attributes of a particular strain of anti-materialism in the Western literary and cultural imagination of the second half of the twentieth century. I demonstrate that this strain relies on what Raymond Williams termed “organic form”, the fallacious belief that human society can and should follow a set of rules which can be objectively deducted from nature. I argue that this anti-materialism should be placed within the context of a long established anti-enlightenment tradition. Through an analysis of such writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, JRR Tolkien, Edward Abbey, James Howard Kunstler, Chuck Palahniuk, Brian Aldiss and others I show how a common feature of this anti-materialism is a distrust of, and reaction against, modern technology. More specifically, I am interested in this thesis with examining the way in which this reaction allows for a curious confluence and convergence of progressive and reactionary tendencies. I argue that anti-technologism is a distinct and detectable mood in Western literature, and I trace its origins and influences. Without claiming to provide a functionalist analysis, I consider the role of anti-technologism in Western literature which I see as broadly facilitating an exploration and discussion of themes of cultural vitality and cohesion in the increasingly cosmopolitan and technologically advanced societies of the West. In pursuance of this, I focus in each chapter on a particular aspect of anti-technologism, to draw out its defining characteristics. By reference to other fictional and non-fictional texts I analyse and situate these characteristics to show how anti-technologism is the survival and mutation of earlier dogmas