The book's title mocks the author's own position. It comes from a newspaper column of 1985 in which he attacked what he saw as 'the retreat from politics' into nihilistic spectatorship, and thus passivity. 'Games with shadows and changing reflections threaten the citizen's most elementary weapon of self-defence: memory.' Acutely and characteristically, he links passivity to unemployment, and the argument moves off from the dubious 'politics of spectacle' into the world Ascherson so insistently dissects, the one in which most people are without power, where social participation is not a right but a privilege. But then, by using the phrase as title, he implicitly turns part of the attack on himself and his kind. This isn't self-deprecation, rather a stubborn stoicism which seems to mean: take it or leave it, this is all I can do. It asks us to think about the apparent political impotence of mere writers and readers; if writing and reading are all we can do, we must either gamble on their validity or surrender.

LRB 24 November 1988 | PDF Download