Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 112

These are to be divorced from hierarchy in this new dimensional praxis, along with philosophical
thought: such ‘leisure’ of time, a reorientation of the conditions of work, can be termed ‘aristocratic’
(drawing upon Fisher’s take up of Nietzsche (2019, 490) and claiming of Nietzsche’s radical possibilities).
Fisher argues for the existence as alluded to, of popular modernism 86 and for revival of this as part of
post Capitalist Realist ‘health’, through hauntologically salvaging the residual artefacts and structures of
these ‘popular modernisms’ in a procedure which mirrors the classic Benjaminian ‘illuminatory’ and
counter-granular work, transcending Adornian ‘negativity and left melancholia, as well as Raymond
Williams’ theories of contestation and inheritance around the nexus of Culture 87 .
Texts forming the 21 st century (post-post-modern; hauntological; third-space; new realist) form
of this potentially explore the ‘why’ as well as the ‘that’ of compromised utopias, over-taken by
historical determinations linked to economics, whose promise may have to be extracted and reinvented
partly through subjective self-consciousness about this ‘why’ together with the thing missing as a
dimension within the initial set-up, with hints - lacunae or overt contradictions- at the level of
construction in relation to the social and through the social. In the example chosen and briefly explored
here, Richard Milward’s novel Ten Storey Love Song (2010), we have a sense of the belated, suggesting
(read from the present day) mistakes in present as well the symptoms, of ideological foreclosure and
hence the melancholy of the unrealised potential.
Ten Storey Love Song
Ten Storey Love Song (TSLS) takes place in 2007, written shortly after in 2009 ( to which we can already
attribute some residue of ‘after the fall’, pre and post-Crash) of late but pre-crash New Labour. It
recounts the rise to relative fame of the working-class artist, Bobby, who dwells in a Middleborough
housing block with his sweet-devouring shop assistant girlfriend Georgie, set amidst the distant ICI
towers. He paints its inhabitants – ‘Blob with Eyes[…] to her it’s not a blob with eyes, but a dazzling
masterpiece a wacky celebration of colour and the seaside and the most beautiful sleeping beauty since
Sleeping Beauty’ (2010, 52) - swans around in Boho clothes surviving in malnourished bright drug-
fuelled precarity, as well as attending parties and ‘sit ins’, before becoming briefly famous through
86
Fisher’s Weird and the Eerie. ( London: Repeater, 2017) and K-Punk (London: Repeater, 2019)
In 1961’s The Long Revolution through to 1977’s Marxism and Literature) incorporating residual and dominant
culture within emergent oppositional ways of life as part of a cultural production formed from interpretation and
the process around it (an expanded canon of classical and counter-cultural works) to the dissemination of material
through utilized and technological-institutions to come; in a sense then more broadly Marcuse ‘s vision of
liberation of energies can be compared with Williams in the autonomy (and quasi-autonomism) it accedes even
amidst’ the dominant’ and ‘consumerist technocracy’ alike.
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