'The great shame, and dishonour, of the present regime' writes Iain Sinclair in

Downriver (1991), 'is its failure to procure a decent opposition'

Sinclair’s verdict asks a question of the late 1980s. That this was the period of the emergence of debates on the postmodern makes sense of Fredric Jameson's repeated description of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Was postmodernism / is postmodernism to be understood as the reflex or the critical reaction to late, meaning more, capitalism? What were the possible sources and discourses of opposition to Thatcherism and thus of an alternative future? There are three such sources, I think, which we can associate with the historic and contemporary East End. They confirm firstly and importantly contra Thatcher that there is such a thing as society. That’s easy. They do not, however, imply a homogenised community of interests or unified opposition even in this local example. Nor are these sources nor this society in these forms all apparent in Sinclair’s East End.

Contrary to the common association of the East End with support for the Labour Party the labour history of the region has produced a volatile and ambiguous political mentality. So, amongst others, argues the social historian, John Marriott. In Stepney, Bethnal Green and Poplar, traditions of casual labour in the docks, the transport industries and the sweated workshops of the rag trade have meant support for Labour has been more local and strategic than class based. The key example is the 'Poplarism' of George Lansbury and the Labour Party rebels of the 1920s. Poplar, Bethnal Green, Stepney and Shoreditch implemented improved working conditions, a high minimum wage, generous short term relief projects distributed evenly amongst the army of reserve labour, principally of Dockers, and in general varied policy to benefit local people in defiance, if needs be, of the centralised authorities of both Party and State.

Other examples in this history of left radicalism come to mind: the Soviet inspired East London Federation run by the socialist-feminist Syivia Pankhurst in Bow, for example, supported by Lansbury, but directly opposed to the wartime conservatism of the Suffragettes; the traditions of Jewish libertarian socialism or anarchism based in Spitalfields; the anarchism of other fugitive splinter groups and factions, including most recentiy ‘Class War’, as well as nationally and local organised anti-racist groups. The picture emerges not of a homogenous left but of the volatile political mentality Marriot speaks of: one which vied with more Liberal, Conservative and far Right tendencies as well as contesting the mainstream Labour Party. At root this mentality has fed on a rough diet of 'us and them': us against the royals, the bosses, the middle class, the state, the modernisers, but also, in internal divisions, us against the Jews, the chinks, the coloureds, the blacks, the pakis.

This mixed political identity has been locally based, in some ways disorganised or composed of strategic alliances: proletarian and plebeian and 'anti- modern' in character, or, as Marriott argues in connection with the traditions of casual labour, ‘pre-modern'. Excluded or self-excluded from the tendencies of political modernism, casual labour 'inhabited a premodernism', he says, 'at the heart of which lay the carnivalesque'. That this pre- or anti-modernism might have a more extended association is suggested by Marriott’s view that 'the dock strike of 1889 owed rather more to the carnivalesque than to modern forms of industrial struggle', and that the carnivalesque has survived in other ways among the urban poor in a variety of forms across 'the entire subcultural landscape'

Now migrants swoop in by jet plane. Between the early 1950s and mid eighties, the East End Bangladeshi community had expanded from a few hundred to over 20,000 inhabitants and now comprises 80% of the population of Tower Hamlets. From a still rural home life, most men enter the 'Indian' restaurant business. Some trade in leather goods. Otherwise, they take casual factory work or run street stalls and sweat shops servicing city wide cash and carry operations, heavy with security. Computer shops, travel agents, pubs with strippers share Brick Lane with the Great Mosque, one time Synagogue, one time Methodist Chapel, one time Huguenot Church. Centuries are concertinaed along this narrow symbolic time tunnel. In summer 1978, the street was hit by the National Front Squadron. Now gentrification advances house by house, loft by loft. A restored Huguenot dwelling on Fournier Street for Gilbert and George might as well be on another planet. The global instant time of the City sweeps indifferently above the dislocated zones which shape Bengali lives. Men hurry from their businesses to pray, following the schedules of Islamic time. The West s twentieth century is their fourteenth; their year zero the Wests AD 770. Making money means watching the Christian calendar but Muslims qua Muslims will not observe the millennium. Women move at a separated rhythm from their menfolk, from home to the children's school to shop to home. Young brides leave their villages for their new house-bound liberties. Video opens upon the Asian diaspora. English, Sytheti, Bengali and Arabic flick in and out of hearing. Street signs name one place twice.

On the streets third generation Sylheti youth live out the complexities of being British-Bengali, Bengali-British, Muslim British-Bengali, swung between imagined pasts and futures, the remembered land and promised city, the family home and personal freedom, the competing traditions of arranged marriages and romantic love. Mainstream Islam conducts a day by day negotiation with the host culture. Joi Bhangra, born in Tower Hamlets, affirms Bengali identity in a dialogue of traditional folk music and Western rap and hip hop. For some Islam provides a rhetoric of self-affirmation, a base line in the global exchange across musics and youth cultures. For others militant Islam provides a sense of belonging beyond local community, nation and the West to the global brotherhood of the Ummah. The logic of Joi Bhangra is postmodern hybridity, of militant fundamentalism separatism, less postmodernist than premodern, a way as Akbar Ahmed concedes, of confronting and coping with the radical doubt of the postmodern age.

The Gothic hailed a hansom and in the gathering decadence of the late century slipped into the East End. Tony Pinkney discovers a gothic modernism in D. H. Lawrence, especially in Lawrence's women who are ‘intense, mystical, religious, romantic ... rhapsodic': not normal. They encode an internally disruptive literary mode which at the same time runs counter, says Pinkney, to the conservative international modernisms of Eliot, Pound and company.

In murky, ambigous guise this Gothic lurks in the folds of Sinclair’s London. Above all, in Hawksmoor's churches, whose solid forms he reads as cunningly inscribed with the ancient knowledges of the occult. Elsewhere, at St Pancras Old Church, St Augustine’s rediscovered altar stone throbs like the tardis with the accumulated energies of Boadecia, Chatterton, the young Shelley and Mary Godwin, Thomas Hardy and the passing shades of Verlaine and Rimbaud, nearby lodgers, gathered across time in some mystic company like the church’s own strange clustered fist of gravestones. Further East, Sinclair and Patrick Keillor are both drawn on distracted quests by the spell of the otherwise nondescript Abney Park, Stoke Newington. Here Edgar Allen Poe, serious doppelgänger and inventor of the modern gothic detective tale went to boarding school. In Paris, Poe influenced Baudelaire who influenced Walter Benjamin's reflections on the urban flaneur stroke detective. And sometime in the 1890s, Poe, or his double, called on Conan Doyle at Baker Street. Ghost stories drifted amongst East End sailors. Dockers, Ken Worpole tells us, found their favourite reading in US hard-boiled fiction, the life blood, in its turn, of die-hard East End hack, Robin Cook, friend and star-turn of Sinclair’s essay 'Cadaver Club'.

So it goes around. What is The Hound of the Baskervilles but a gothic horror detective fiction version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness? What are Bodmin Moor, the Belgian Congo, Transylvannia but psychic allegories for London's dark places? In White Chappell Scarlet Tracings, an elaborate, conspiratorial reading of the first edition of Conan Doyle's 'Study in Scarlet’ plots the textual journey of one Nettley, a coach man said to have regularly carried the surgeon William Gull into the East End.

Dr William Gull, flaneur of sorts, is exposed, at last, courtesy of Allan Moore’s 13 part graphic novel From Hell ,as no less than Jack the Ripper. The family of related stories of John Williams and the Radciiffe Highway murders, the Limehouse Golem, the Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer Dr John Dee and eighteenth century architect Hawksmoor are all explored in Peter Ackroyd's postmodernist London gothic, the last worked up into the figure of a ghoulish child-murderer cum detective from an account in Sinclair’s Lud Heat.

So it goes round. At Bishopsgate and Aldgate, East and West meet like the outer and inner life of the same mutable body. The other half peers back, itself two-faced. A wavering composite figure of Jeckyll and Holmes and Jack London and the Booths throws a lumpen shadow of the Elephant Man across the walls of the East End. Open the city's symbolic imagination. Slice off the crown, split it down the middle. The East End fawns, simmers, multiplies. A place of destitution, licentiousness, crime, and low life: a babel of languages and motley faces: Hugenots, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Turks, Vietnamese, Somalis, Sylhetis. Whores, golems, slashers, anarchists, potato bashers, opium peddlers, municipal socialists, shop stewards, class war militants, neo-nazis. The foreign, the poor, the homeless, the other. Thatcher simply abandoned the docks and moved the yuppies in. Business as usual. Mind the mud. Step right up. Just ask the LDDC. Capitalist postmodernism overflowed. There was apparently no alternative.

'The great shame, and dishonour, of the present regime is its failure to procure a decent opposition'.

The East End has produced unexpected, possible but crucially unrecognised and unrealised alliances: cultural and political traditions antagonistic to capitalist modernity and mainstream political traditions and a gothic mode running aslant of contemporary modernism; an alley off the main highway, as riven and ambiguous as the East End's instinctual plebeian anarchism.

Sinclair looks to London's dispossessed, those he describes as 'deregulated shamans' and their associated 'strategies of derangement’. Where Baudelaire had cited the figures of the ragpicker, the apache of the left bank, the demobbed soldier, prostitute and dandy as the heroic detritus of the modern metropolis, Sinclair mythologises a new gallery of East End types: the enigmatic gangland boss cruising his manor; the sixties survivor/ pulp writer/ sometime movie maker/ itinerant bookseller, the uncompromising, remote and pioneering artist. Above all, and first in line there is Brian Catling, sculptor-poet-performance artist, 'wandering scholar and magician'. 'The health of the city', Sinclair reflects, 'and perhaps of the culture itself, seemed to depend upon the flights of redemption these disinherited shamans (there were women too, plenty of them) could summon and sustain. They were associated in my mind with other avatars of unwisdom: scavengers, dole-queue antiquarians, bagpeople, out-patents, muggers, victims, millennial babblers'.

Sinclair offers to front this band of lumpen-intelligensia, the 'mad ones' of Ginsberg's late fifties, falling through the subsequent decades to emerge alongside the street drinkers, deracinated minds and assorted survivors of a later generation. The social bearings and temper or structure of feeling of the work lie here with those pushed to the extreme late century margins, and reach back, perhaps, to the uncertainties of casual labour and militant plebian sympathies of the earlier era. Its literary bearings lie in Beckett, the Black Mountain poets, Ginsberg and the Beats, David Gascoyne, Rimbaud, and the visionary Blake, the ‘godfather of all psychogeographers’ as Sinclair terms him. These are names in a tradition of sorts but not one that runs in a straight line. They join rather as points of energy along literary ley lines, pulled in to serve the motley social army of present day recruits against the single minded foe: Sinclair’s enemy, the widow: Mrs T.

This highly eclectic take on the past, including the modernist past, is embodied in the figure of the walker, the Sinclair persona or his fictionalised equivalents and a photographer companion who traverse the contemporary East End, the City and South London. 'Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode ... in alert reverie', writes Sinclair, but this is no fin de siecle decadence: 'the born-again flâneur, he says 'is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything'. Attending Ronnie Kray's funeral, he concludes, 'The concept of "strolling", aimless urban wandering, the flâneur, had been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent - sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our role model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing ... This was walking with a thesis'. If Sinclair is a flâneur he's on fast forward. He doesn't amble, he legs it, moving at pace in pursuit of a prey, on the scent of secret London, or 'the powerful dose of fiction', he adds, with a wink which will bring this to light. This 'alternate cartography' he tracks and sometimes finds in unread graffiti, forgotten script, concealed statuary, ignored gargoyles, neglected plots, rivers and ruins which become the sites of an underground occult energy, hot with meaning. Unlike the desultory ‘nomadic’ postmodern walker described elsewhere, Sinclair moves off from and returns to a centre, the homely and symbolically named Albion Road, Hackney. His routes expose the rationality of modernist planning to the cultivated rupture of those plans; writing/walking modernist intent into postmodern contingency. Thus he hopes for some accident to revise the 'near-arbitrary route' of a V shaped quest he has planned from Hackney to Greenwich Hill and back along the River Lea to Chingford Mount in Lights Out for the Territory. He finds it in a forgotten invitation to visit an installation by Richard Makin at the University of Greenwich in Woolwich and is sure then of dropping off into the zombie spaces of South London. 'Already the purity of the V had been despoiled,' he comments. 'Good'.

Sinclair’s dogged flaneur is interested, he says, in 'noticing everything'. The disinherited shamans upon whom the redemption and health of the city and culture depend include ‘women too', he adds in parenthesis, 'plenty of them'. Show me you say. You look. The companion stalkers are always male, always white. I want finally therefore to comment on the determining absence of women and ethnic others in Sinclair’s writing and on what this says of the alternate cultural formation it invokes.

An apparent exception to the absence of women is the story of the character Edith Cadiz. Her name and the circumstances of her life are invented it transpires from a photograph picked up from a Bermondsy trader. In this fiction she is a dancer working as a stripper and then as a half time nurse and prostitute. In her act she clothes herself in photocopied areas of a map of London. When the punters call out the right place name, her dog pounces and pulls off one of the sections. Later as the mistress of a Labour MP whose left credentials are a sham, she performs another act, bringing to life a painting that has haunted him since boyhood. She performs sex with his Alsation which has, he says, 'absorbed most of his masculine virtues'; it manifests 'his warrior soul... his power’.

She disappears but then on a train journey Sinclair later takes to North Woolwich he hears her voice quoting T.S.Eliot and Stella Bowen. Bowen, she tells Sinclair introduced her to Mary Butts, sometime social worker in the East End, associate of Jean Cocteau, addict, dabbler in black magic and author. In an extraordinary, whirling passage, Edith Cadiz materialises and merges with a resurrected Mary Butts, 'pale, powdered in arsenic' as if 'buried alive' and is assaulted by her grotesque contrary, Aleister Crowley, a 'male thing' which ' rolls and lisps, stuttering its obscenities'. Sinclair detaches himself from the viscous spasm of 'formless horror’ he has imagined: 'I do not possess the technical language to justify the completion of my account,' he announces: stiffly. What follows in passages of 'compulsive associationalism' is an overlayered analysis of the sexual fantasies encoded in John Tenniel's drawing of 'Alice in the train' for Lewis Carroll's Alice Though the Looking Glass . Alice has the 'will' he writes 'of my daughter, of all daughters: mothers of daughters' and he comes, in the most astonishing of much that is astonishing here, to appeal to women as an exit from the accumulating implications of guilt and confession. 'I must draw on the anger of women to escape from this quilted cage,' he writes, 'a strength we will never understand, and transcribe as "will", "stubborness" or some other biological imperative' . He is transported, in what may be the sole occurrence in his writing, to the domestic interior of his home in Hackney. There in a loft of books - any word from which might further derail his already 'unfocused’ quest - he discovers a set of drawings by 'my daughter’ and accompanying narrative explanations by 'her mother’. The drawings yield the extrapolated tale of a dead woman killed by a train and a baby she rises to take home by the light of a candle.

This troubled tale confesses as it pulls back from a nightmare of guilty fantasies. It is 'formless' and 'unfocussed' but its incoherence belongs to another world surely than the 'special qualities' of light, music and so on which are 'impossible to define' that Sinclair speaks of in connection with Catling's work. What results indeed is the opposite of the unspeakable but controlled serenity the quest should produce: something indeed more like the unalloyed shame and paranoia of Kafka's 'K' whose life ends 'like a dog!'. It is with this passage indeed that the chapter closes. Women figure in this story but less as actors than the creations and creatures of man's fevered sexual imagination. Edith Cadiz is the author’s fiction worked up from another male character’s yams through a tissue of further textual allusions and extrapolations. A story about a woman turns out to be a story about man's struggle with the shame of his other who is like a dog: the stalking beast who would hunt down a fantasised feminine and come home to woman's idealised 'anger’ and 'strength'.

This is where Sinclair’s gothic intertextuality takes us and what, if you will, reveals.

How does postmodernism, how might postmodernism register the presence of the colonial other in the late century metropolis, when that other is no longer so much stranger or newcomer as near neighbour?

In Downriver Sinclair notes the variety of multi-ethnic life, in shops, in Kurdish, Turkish, Afro-Caribbean peoples and organisations; he explores the fabricated rituals of colonial life in a scrutiny of 12 photographs; honours the grave of the Aboriginal cricketer, ‘King Kole' buried in Victoria Park, and more besides, including the remarkable story of the unexplained disappearance in 1963 of David Rodinsky, caretaker of the Jewish synagogue at the corner of Princelet Street, Brick Lane. However, whereas these earlier immigrants and colonised others are an acknowledged, sometimes considered presence, the newer ethnic majority of Bangladeshis, whose great Mosque now occupies the site of the former synagogue, are as if invisible. Bengalis are twice observed in groups, once having sex in their break from work, once shifting leather goods up to the West End. The artist who would notice everything in his chosen territory and redeem the culture barely registers the existence of the majority population of that area. In one vituperative charge towards the river Sinclair throws out the accusation that 'Banglatown, as it was vulgarly known, replaced the perished dream of Spitalfields'.

What provokes this particular silence and itself vulgar outburst? Other East End essayists and writers would present a differently accented opposition to Thatcherism and perhaps a more open awareness of ethnicity. These are complex matters for both writers and readers, however. At their core there is, one suspects, the matter of whiteness as the paradoxically transparent mark of an undeclared but hegemonic ethnicity, but also, more particularly, the continuing, unresolved relations of Islam and the West. As the stories of one of the very few published East End Bangladeshi writers Syed Manzarul Islam suggest we may come to see in this case a mutual sense of otherness at the determining edge of a contemporary social consciousness, prey to stereotypes and off the cuff gut reactions, but written out on both sides into a kind of invisibility. Sinclair virtually blanks Bangladeshis, Islam daubs in whiteness. We are presented with the extraordinary occlusion of a manifestly obvious day to day reality of co-existence which cannot, for whatever complex reasons, be directly acknowledged or centred in narratives of this life.

A reviewer of the anthology A Various Art in which Sinclair appears counted up the number of white male contributors. Sinclair damned him for his political correctness. I want to avoid being politically correct. Sinclair’s aesthetic and spleen derive at their core from the libertarianism of the mid-1960s. The welter of cultural and literary affiliations crowded into this vortex supply the extra energy Sinclair needs to do battle with a regime which vilified precisely this decade. The deviant and deranged, occult and oddball are as much as anything a product of this contest between the widow’s vision and the poet’s super-charged imagination. Part, too, of the strength of this oppositional formation, as it is remade and mythologised in the 1980s are the personal histories, friendships and contacts which give it its social and mythological materials; which make it a society and an imagined world. The result is highly inventive and compelling but governed, quite plainly, by a corporate white male consciousness. Sinclair’s project is limited not because it fails some pure and external standard but because it colludes in the very norms of Thatcher’s Britain. To dislodge these norms in the name of 'a decent opposition' would have required the assistance of a more various art.

Selected References

Iain Sinclair: main publications.

Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge (1975,1979, repr.1995).

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987, repr. 1995).

Downriver (or, the Vessels of Wrath) (1991).

Radon Daughters (1994).

Lights out for the Territory (1997).

Slow Chocolate Autopsy (with Dave McKean) (1997).

See also Conductors of Chaos. A Poetry Anthology, edited and introduced by Iain Sinclair. (1996). Contains Brian Catling’s The Stumbliong Block Its Index; ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent, Modern Painters 4, no 2 (1991) 46-71 (on the artists Stephen Dilworth and Brain Catling. Lights Out for the Territory contains a reworked version of the essay in the chapter, ‘The Shamanism of Intent’); ‘Mandelson’s Pleasure Dome’, London Review of Books, Vol.10, no.19, 2. Oct 1997, pp.7-10.

John Marriott, ‘The Political Modernism of East London’ in Tim Butler and Michael Rustin (eds) Rising in the East. The Regeneration of East London (1996).

Akbar Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam (1992); Islam, Globalisation and Postmodernity (1996).

Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence (1990).

Alan Moore, From Hell. Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts (1991-8).

Syed Manzarul Islam, The Map Makers of Spitalfields (1997).

A Various Art, eds. Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (1997).

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