The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd

Hello Folks,

I have contributed a chapter in this new book on Pink Floyd. I have included a book overview below, beneath that are a few paragraphs introducing my own chapter. You can find full details of the book here.

Thanks, Tina

The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd, edited by Chris Hart and Simon Morrison, is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals and fans of the band. It brings together international researchers to assess, evaluate and reformulate approaches to the critical study and interpretation of one of the world’s most important and successful bands. For the first time, this Handbook will ‘tear down the wall,’ examining the band’s collective artistic creations and the influence of social, technological, commercial and political environments over several decades on their work. Divided into five parts, the book provides a thoroughly contextualised overview of the musical works of Pink Floyd, including coverage of performance and sound; media, reception and fandom; genre; periods of Pink Floyd’s work; and aesthetics and subjectivity. Drawing on art, design, performance, culture and counterculture, emergent theoretical resources and analytical frames are evaluated and discussed from across the social sciences, humanities and creative arts. The Handbook is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals. It will appeal across a range of related subjects from music production to cultural studies and media/communication studies.

Chapter 20: Hey You! Subjectivity and the Ideological Repressive State Apparatuses in Pink Floyd’s The Wall by Tina Richardson

Pink Floyd’s long musical history (spanning two decades at its peak) had always reflected the cultural zeitgeist, even at a time when it was at odds with other musical movements of the day, as was the case in the late 1970s with the advent of punk rock. While it is often reported that punk heralded the demise of progressive (or psychedelic) rock – “Never trust a fuckin’ hippie” Johnny Rotten if often wrongly claimed to have said – Pink Floyd’s single from The Wall, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, was no.1 for five weeks in 1979 (UK music charts). Alan Parker’s film Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982) followed, and Pink Floyd entered film history.

Parker’s film, which responded directly to Roger Water’s lyrics, presents us with the protagonist Pink, a rock star who is at odds with his position as a revered musician: he is both a victim of the system of music production and a fascist proponent of it. Early in the film, we see him in his hotel room, barely conscious, waiting for the gig to start. Pink (played by Bob Geldof) looks both physically ill and mentally exhausted (and psychologically removed from the hotel room he occupies). His agent, and the doctor employed by him, inject him back to consciousness – ‘Just a little pinprick’ – so that he can perform for the audience. Within a short space of time, Pink is on stage in a Nazi-style rally as he sings the lyrics to ‘In the Flesh’, asking the audience “So ya… Thought ya… Might like to… Go to the show.” It is this relationship with the audience – one in which he hides from them, but also presents himself to them as if he was their leader – that creates cognitive dissonance in him.

In his book Which One’s Pink? Phil Rose (2002) acknowledges the cultural moment, as it was for rock audiences in the 1970s. He describes an early scene where we see Pink’s reaction to his fans, “As the emergency doors break open at the concert venue, crowds of frantic people are seen running down an empty corridor. In his imagination Pink superimposes on this scene the trampling feet and screaming faces of battle”. It seems, for Pink, that if he must deal with his fans, it will be from the position of someone who is at war. A war that appears externalised for Pink, is really internal and existential.

We see many images of Pink sitting in a chair, alone in his hotel room, holding a cigarette which is turning to ash. This dialectic – the ‘marauding hordes’ (of music fandom, of battle, of collective violence) versus the ‘estranged loner’ – sets up the story of Pink’s life (and along with that a multiplicity of contradictions) as it unfolds in the narrative presented to us through the album and film. At the same time, it creates for the cultural theorist another position open to interpretation, that of the structures of socio-political, cultural space and power, as they pertain to their influence on the individual (in Pink’s case, as they are imposed upon the individual). Nevertheless, we need to be careful not to set up these oppositions in too binary a way, since by using phrases like ‘social structure versus the individual’, we imply that these phenomena sit in clearly delineated camps. The very structures of society that are so prominent in The Wall – the army, the family, education, the media, the judiciary - are what creates the subject in the first place. The subject, which for Louis Althusser, is never an individual: the subject is always the subject of the ideology of societal structures.

This chapter examines the narrative of Pink’s existential anguish as it pertains to the ideological and repressive structures that surround him. By using Althusser’s theory, as defined in ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’, I will discuss how these structures have the simultaneous effect of forming Pink as a subject, yet overwhelming him to the extent that his psyche is fractured and all that is left for him to do is to create a wall to protect himself from the outside world. It is the closing scene ‘The Trial’ that will be analysed to explore the compromise the subject has to make regarding their own position within these structures of power. Following this, the chapter also examines Pink’s existential crisis in the context of the symbolism of the wall. But, firstly, we need to examine Althusser’s concept of the ‘subject’ in some more depth...

From Ivory Towers to Passionflowers: Tina Richardson Interviews Fenella Brandenburg

 

My interview with Fenella Brandenburg coincides with her move from academia into the world of a full-time writer-author. Here we talk conference storm-outs, academic superegos, psychogeography and passion projects. I hope you enjoy our dialogue: as C. S. Lewis said ‘Fenella is on the move’!

I find Dr. Brandenburg sitting - not coincidentally, I’m sure – in the Islington café she insisted we meet in, called ‘Tina, We Salute You’ (her little psychogeographic joke). When she told me we were meeting here, I honestly thought she was making up the name. I’ve included the photo above to prove its existence.

Dr. Brandenburg, who was promoted to Reader just before her retirement from academia (it turns out this was her way of saying ‘f**k you’ to Higher Education), looks very unlike the person I saw last at the 2017 4WCOP Psychogeography Conference. It transpires she was wearing a white bobbed wig and was dressing like a ‘bag lady’ in order to maintain her disguise. It seems there is now no reason to keep up the pretence. I note that she actually has somewhat Titian hair (not unlike my own) and is a zappy dresser: not a fleece or ankle sock in sight!

Brandenburg, who recently moved from somewhere in the North of England (she seems reluctant to say where, for some unknown reason – although the academic rumour mill says it is related to reports of stalking made by another academic) to Islington to, as she says “Be with my peoples”. The pressing questions are ‘why her move from academia?’ and ‘what was the fallout of 4WCOP?’. Here is the transcript of our interview in full and unedited:

TINA: Thank you for meeting me, Fenella. I love the choice of venue. How have things been since you left academia a month ago and how did the university feel about being snubbed when you resigned the day of receiving your readership?

FENELLA: Well, it had been a long time coming, the Readership, and I had been overlooked on a number of occasions. I actually only hung on in HE for that long so that I could resign when I finally received it. You know the adage ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’, well the ‘cold’ was about 5 years of torture, but was well worth it. The adage turns out to be true, but for all the reasons that are the opposite of what is implied by the adage, if one wants to get semantic about it. That, and also I heard rumours that that Bollinger bloke was moving to my university, and I just wasn’t up to having to deal with his ‘advances’ any more.

T: I’d like to talk about David Bollinger later, if that’s alright with you, but for the moment, what have you been doing, since you left?

F: Well, I very speedily set up a local writing group. I plan to take the same approach that the postmodern university does to how it ‘tasks’ its own academics. This is oriented around what HE calls the Work Load Model (WLM), however I will be calling my model of work allocation applied to the members of my fiction writing group the WLF, The Work Load Fiction. I think this will work out well for all concerned and it allows me to take a firm hold on what is happening and provide a hypodermic approach to the management of the group (for those of you not familiar with the term it comes from communications theory, it means top down and coming from above). People love being micromanaged, despite their protestations to the contrary.

T: So what do you see as being wrong with academic workload being managed by those who are clearly qualified enough to be managers?

F: The WLM epitomises the postmodern university par excellence. It is the moment where the university’s bureaucratic superego reaches its full potential in the daily control of its academics. For Freud, the superego represents all authority figures (initially the Father), but eventually the part of the individual that negotiates with the id (the basic instincts), producing the ego, the aspect of the individual that is presented to the world. On the level of power, say a Foucauldian model of power, if you will, this is tantamount to a kind of self-surveillance. I am absolutely behind the WLM and have no problem in bringing it into the creative sphere, in this case fiction writing. Creative people can get completely out of control, there is no absolute structure for them to adhere to, and they must be constrained at all costs.

T: Thank you, Fenella. I’m not sure everyone would agree with you there, but I appreciate your candour. Can I ask you: Why the move to creative writing?

F: Well, I’d met my 5 year plan: to leave at the point of my Readership. Let me just say, plans are incredibly important: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 year plans are not fiction at all, whatever academics say. They help keep you on track and ensure you meet targets, which are not at all unreasonable despite what you may read in regard to those adversaries of HE research-related policy. In regard to my move: I’m a well-published academic (as you know, your own publishing company has published some of my work on 'presupposed actualization'). I’m already an author. Really, how hard can it be?

T: Can we talk about psychogeography? What are you currently working on in that field and do you still consider yourself a psychogeographer?

F: Well, I am currently working on a project on abandoned shopping centres in the US. Partially inspired by your research on the Trafford Centre. I am also looking at a rural space, the Black Forest national park in Baden-Wűrrttemberg. As you know, I was born near there and I inherited my family cabin in the area. I am however, somewhat offended by your second question: that I may no longer consider myself a psychogeographer. I appreciate the damage done by the paper Bollinger and I delivered at 4WCOP 2017, but I feel we more than made up for that in our paper based on Ballard’s Concrete Island in 2019.

T: Talking about David Bollinger: can I ask you some questions about some of the gossip about where you and he were located. During 2016-2020 rumours abounded about where you were both working. I heard that Bollinger had an office in the Psychology Department at Huddersfield at one time. But managers in that school denied that he even existed, despite him clearly having a desk and a label on the door. One of the academics - a friend of mine, Dr. Alex Bridger - said he knew Bollinger was there as he saw his coat over the back of the chair. That, and he actually shared an office with him. I also heard that you had a temporary office in the old Maltings building, that once was the Geography Department at the University of Leeds, but has now been demolished. You also, purportedly, had an office in the School of Design at one point. But then, I also heard that you were popping up in online Zoom meetings at MMU in the early days of Covid.

F: I cannot vouch for Bollinger. You could ask Charlotte Tilbury, his wife. She’s a counsellor and also writes for The Guardian, I believe (good luck with her psychoanalysing that miscreant, is all I can say!). However, I can confirm that I did work at Leeds during the period you mention, and I will supply proof of that, which you can include on your blog. [included above]

T: Thank you for your clarification of the rumours, Fenella. Can I just ask one more question before we end the interview, for our psychogeographic audience? Where do you see psychogeography going?

F: Well, as you know, you very arrogantly labelled the current phase of psychogeography as ‘The New Psychogeography’ in your own book Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. I have to say, however reluctantly, that I am more on the same page as Bollinger with this: psychogeography is reaching its zenith inasmuch as it is now all about its own undoing and negation. This is best summed up by an urban-walking colleague of mine, who will remain nameless, who said, when I asked him the question ‘Why did the psychogeographer cross the road?: ‘I’ve no idea why the psychogeographer crossed the road, but I bet when they got there they found Iain Sinclair had already written about it’!

T: Thank you so much for your time, Fenella.