Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans

Cited

      To Chantal Meza:

      Once we were then,

      Now we are now, until then.

      “The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night.”

       — J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

      Preface

      Russell Brand

      I FIRST HEARD of Brad Evans while completing a degree in religion and global politics at SOAS University in London in 2016. I had come to academic study late in life mostly to arm myself with hard critical knowledge in response to an astonishing and sustained personal attack by the British media. As I had begun to publicly comment on politics, the reaction was at times unfathomable. Without rehashing the whole affair here (this is, after all about Brad Evans), the thrust of my argument — conducted through blogs, online videos, The New Statesman, Newsnight, then ultimately, oddly for a while, all media outlets — was that contemporary, centrist politics made the rituals of electoral democracy redundant. Or as The Sun reported it: “Russell Brand Says Don’t Vote.”

      The whole situation got rather out of hand, the attacks increasingly personal. It was spoken about in parliament, on Fox News, across the pond and across the political spectrum. What I was saying was being analyzed, rebutted, condemned, and sneered at because one could assume it wasn’t supported by a University “education” of a particular kind, or spoken from behind the mastery of a power-dressing suit, suitably cut into the political fabric. Eventually flattened by the deluge, I retreated from the “conversation” and a year or so later made the decision to equip myself more favorably should such a confrontation ever recur.

      In SOAS’s Religion in Global Politics course you encounter Professor Brad Evans’s work somewhere between Michel Foucault and Edward Said. Man, you get hit up with some dense texts in that place: queer theory, orientalism, ontology, post-colonialism, post-modernism, all great icebergs of impenetrable information, with more concealed in the footnotes than visible in the text, written in tiny fonts as the language retreats into microscopic inaccessibility. Every week we’d be assaulted with another block of knowledge and I’d go home and ignore it until the next lecture. Eventually, blessedly, my teacher Sian Hawthorne gave us an essay by Brad Evans where he artfully illustrated how the 9/11 terror attacks had acted upon our shared psyche, ending the idea of a safe, outside space, elucidating how violence is framed, normalized and purposed according to the intentions of the powerful. Brad Evans’s writing articulated something that I sensed but could not describe, as if the information was inside me but needed to be ignited and defined in order to become psychically activated. He explained how both the 9/11 attacks and the fall of the Berlin Wall could be understood as real time metaphors: The fall of the wall representing the end of separateness, the annihilation of the point of tension between two rival powers as one imploded; and the spectacle of 9/11 erasing the idea of bounded conflict and facilitating a state of constant terror. Brad’s argument showed us that it can happen anywhere, at any time, so however scared you are, you can never be scared enough; and importantly, whatever action “we” take to counter this terror, it can never be too aggressive. In one passage he riffed on the absurdity of a 2011 headline, “9/11 Terror Threat,” positing that the event now existed as a dislocated and independent icon, that could be used like a Bat Signal to summon dread and impose insipid popular order. Elsewhere in the piece I was reminded how he demonstrated the ways Tony Blair and George Bush’s pre-invasion rhetoric was structurally indistinct from the doctrinaire announcements of declared religious fundamentalists. It was underwritten by an assumption that they were right — that their violence was necessary, rational, reasonable, and proper, and that this idea of “rational violence” was being used to justify actions that, without this normalizing framework, would be regarded as abominable. You could swap out the idea of rational violence for the phrase “This is Allah’s will,” and other than the specific vocabulary there would be no difference in the actionable words and events. Simply, the powerful use violence to achieve their goals, and then mask that violence as a necessity. And in the process, humans end up becoming what we most despise, in both our language and our actions.

      For the first time during my excursion in academia I experienced the possibility that esoteric information could be smuggled from the cloud-capped towers of aloof, circuitous chin-scratchery into the public discourse. Critical thinking now meant something all too important and real: that we can create an alternative to the easy ideas with visceral appeal that spreads like ink through blank minds blotting out all nuance. This book, a series of essays and conversations, is a step toward this alternative. Dear Brad, the silver-haired, handsome and darting Clooney of philosophy, zips through topics as diverse as the 2012 Olympics, Zygmunt Bauman’s “self-plagiarism,” the devastatingly honest letter to murdered Mexican student Mara Fernanda Castilla, and, well, me, never failing to illuminate important and neglected facets of arguments we are used to seeing presented in specific ways that encourage particular conclusions, which are so often determined in advance. Brad is at ease with complexity and he is able to infect us with that ease. He is able to explain to us the uncertainty many feel around 9/11 and its subsequent repurposing. He fills with knowledge, reason, and passion a gap that may otherwise be filled with fear and conspiracy.

      After I read more of Brad’s work and felt the warmth of his lucidity, I thought ‘Hang on, I have a media profile, I can probably meet him if I want’ and I promptly set about tracking him down. It wasn’t hard, he’s forever online, harping on about violence, continually revealing its subtle presence in the quotidian. My joy at encountering this great educator through his work quickly quadrupled when I discovered he had written about me. Positively! In a glorious, serendipitous flash I came upon his writing about my appearance on Newsnight, my New Statesman issue, and the subsequent furore. It felt like finding out that Conor McGregor had my back in a pub carpark ruck. Brad’s analysis of the coverage, of my commentary and activism, weeded out the confusion and shame that I had felt having been unable to be objective, since I was literally the subject, and helped me to see where I had intuitively been right, why I had been so anxiously and forensically condemned and what I could learn from the process. The essay is included in this volume and I can scarcely read it without being once more engorged with the righteousness that got me into all that bother in the first place.

      When I decided to launch a new podcast in which I interviewed important and innovative thinkers, in order to colloquialize and popularize their views, Brad, in part the inspiration for the venture, was the inaugural guest. Since then Naomi Klein, Al Gore, Adam Curtis, Jordan Peterson, Brian Cox, Paul Gilroy, Yuval Harari, and many other great and illustrious guests have featured. But none have Brad’s druidic ability to conjure up a complex opinion on basically anything. He must see the world in numbers and codes, the helix of our DNA must refract off the lenses of his glasses. Brad is making critical theory something more than an insular academic pursuit; he is a taut and romantic Prometheus, seizing sizzling branches of hot wisdom and laying them before us.

      I’ve since hung out with Brad (who I now see as a good friend) a fair bit, making podcasts, discussing addiction, working on TV shows, meeting each other’s children, and his excitement and sharp triangulating intellect are as powerful in person as in these pages. Within these compelling and yet accessible set of essays and conversations, I hope you will experience the brilliance, originality, warmth and vigor that first attracted me to Brad’s work. A great teacher must engage in plain sorcery, this can be almost shamanic: to be able to occupy many worlds simultaneously, the world of academic expertise, rarefied and inaccessible, to be able to reach out