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Liberty, a term dear to the Enlightenments emancipatory project, has long been a key concept in the Gothic. No branch of the Gothic more powerfully or creatively examines the complexities of the liberty question than the Gothic pharmography – a narrative chronicling drug/alcohol seduction and addiction. Drawing on three novelistic sub-genres – the Oriental tale, the imperial Gothic, and the Urban Gothic – the Gothic pharmography coalesces several distinct nineteenth-century debates – the nature of the will and liberal individualism; social oppression and conformity; urban and national degeneration; and British imperialist expansion, which involved the perceived anxiety-inducing sense of Britains growing economic dependence on the non-Western world. This essay offers an overview of the Gothic pharmography from the late eighteenth century through to the fin de siècle in Marie Corelli‘s Wormwood.
This paper explores the Gothic videogame Limbo (PlayDead, 2010) in terms of an aesthetic and conceptual precariousness and preoccupation with uncertainty that, I suggest, are particularly associated with the traumatic legacy of 9/11. It engages with Judith Butler s post-9/11 reflections in her work Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) on the loss of presumed safety and security in the First World. From here, she expresses the potential for shared experiences of vulnerability to inaugurate an ethics of relationality, without recourse to investment in systems of security. I then contrast this with an alternative critical trajectory that emphasises the use-value of such systems over a desire for moral purity. This critical framework is considered in relation to the treatment of vulnerability in Limbo, through its construction of a dialogic relationship between its diegetic game-world and the formal structure of its game-system. The former is found to articulate a pervasive experience of uncertainty, whilst the latter provides a sense of security. I draw upon psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott‘s theories of play and creative living to argue that the tension between game-world and game-system in Limbo creates a model of how uncertainty can be dwelt with, through a precarious balance between the use of systems of security and disengagement from them.
Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.
field report submitted by Sara Wong on the artist-academic collaborative project PostiveNegatives and the Drugs & (dis)order project foregrounds the questions of authorship, knowledge production and power relations suggested in the research articles. The report reflects critically on one of the group’s creative collaborations – part of the Drugs and (dis)order project in Colombia – and particularly on the interpersonal relations and questions of capacity building and learning which form part of
life and live out the fascistic dream. That doesn’t mean to say the threat of violence ever truly dissipates from the relationship. Once the power over life is normalised, the spectre of violence is in fact omnipresent. It has to be that way or else the still existent capacity to resist might result in a reversal of fortunes. In the absence of violence there is an absence of fear. And in the absence of fear life can live affirmatively, creatively, resistively in the primary and ontological sense of these terms, with all the public and joyful expressions of difference
and a tight timeframe, yet they managed to respond creatively to the peculiar situation in Vienna, where huge empty office buildings had been allocated to shelter new asylum seekers during the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015. The architects had focused on adding simple furnishings that created a more homely environment, articulating a careful, human-centred approach that had interpreted shelter not as four walls and a roof but as a calming and secure internal space. The aim
was very confused – a mixture of creative narrative and academic historiography– as I sought to position my experiences in context. It was all a lengthy, unedited mess to be honest, but at least I had finally ‘got it out of my system’. RR: Did you have an imagined audience in mind while you wrote the book? Did that influence how you approached the writing? TR: I had three audiences in mind. First, I wanted my colleagues, both academic and clinical, to accept the contents, and at times criticisms, as a true and fair reflection of the events that they either
have. This is not a problem until a situation arises which presents an existential threat and a paradigm shift is required purely for survival, which was of course the rationale that the original ALNAP study gave for innovation. This rationale draws on the idea of creative destruction, the phrase coined by Joseph Schumpeter to describe how the ‘fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation
the NGO for which he worked had a policy against the use of military escorts. Yet, in a context where, due to the insecure nature of the field environment, the use of military escorts was ‘the only way authorities would accept movement’, they reached a creative solution by which the NGO travelled behind the armed convoy, ten minutes later. Another interviewee described similar dynamics at play during a hostage situation. The NGO he worked for had a policy precluding payment to secure hostages’ release, but in practice during hostage negotiations, the organisation
particular, networks forged by years of being there on the ground. As a journalist I am alone, and in the best-case scenario I have a vehicle and three phone numbers that a colleague held onto from a previous assignment. Creative use of these limited resources and, above all, the war reporter’s isolation – which allows a more independent, yet fragile, view of the violence – are mentioned by Adrien Jaulmes, a Le Figaro reporter and ex-soldier (he was a lieutenant in the Foreign