A Foreword to Adam Lehrer's 'Communions', by Udith Dematagoda

Writer and publisher Udith Dematagoda shares his foreword to SP editor Adam Lehrer's new book 'Communions', available for pre-order now

Drug addicts are the mystics of a materialist age who, no longer having the strength to animate things and sublimate them into symbols, undertake the inverted task of reducing them, wearing them down and eating away at them until they reach a core of nothingness

– Le Feu Follet (1931)

These are the despondent reflections of Alain, the tragic protagonist of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s Le Feu Follet: one of French literature’s unacknowledged masterpieces. It was adapted into a poignant film by Louis Malle in 1963, who introduced to it one serious flaw: addiction to heroin becomes alcohol, thereby obviating a philosophically significant element in the original. Adam Lehrer’s Communions approaches this subject directly, though in my view this is only one of its main themes. Le Feu Follet was inspired by Drieu’s friend, the Dadaist poet Jacques Rigaut, who had committed suicide in 1929 at a rehab clinic at the age of thirty. Opiate addiction was then mostly the preserve of bourgeois and upper-class bohemians. Though he produced a negligible amount of work, Rigaut was described by his contemporaries as the most brilliant, talented and handsome of the Dadaists. He was certainly one of the most nihilistic. Many in the Dada movement had been brought together through a shared connection to war (either as combatants or pacifists) and a deep yearning to give some form of aesthetic articulation and sublimation to their experience.

Yet Drieu’s strong identification with Riguat existed on a more unsettling plane, one marked by an obsession that had no obvious explanation. Despite their differences, Drieu seemed convinced of some fateful commonality, seeing in Rigaut’s tragic and dissolute life, and within the fragmentary and unrealized work left behind - something of his own future. Drieu had distinguished himself in the First World War by leading a bayonet charge on a machine gun positon at the Battle of Charleroi. In common with many of his generation, he was a man who couldn’t seem to get out of the trenches - long after the actual war had ended. In 1945, Drieu La Rochelle would also to take his own life upon the liberation of France. He would die a traitor, a fascist collaborator with the Vichy Regime and the Nazi occupation - leaving behind a compelling body of work that will forever be tainted by his actions.

At the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, those who witness the trial of the eponymous hero’s moment of cowardice and desertion are incredulous because he seemed to all appearances ‘one of us’ - a man of the sea, bound to a sacred fraternity through shared experience, and thus privy to certain moral codes and metaphysical imperatives. Jim eventually finds redemption only at the expense of his life: the price one apparently must pay for spiritual betrayal. We can see that the bond of experience was even in Conrad’s time a necessarily aesthetic one. Having spent the majority of my adult life convinced that I entirely lack the credulous gene, I do occasionally find myself incapable of disavowing an uncanny contiguousness of experience shared with some of the people I’ve encountered. Though I have never met Adam Lehrer in person, we’re of similar age and had a comparable musical and cultural bildung. As it happens, when he was approaching the grim apogee of his addiction in the summer of 2013, we were living only a block from one another in Bushwick. Although we apparently went to the same bars, gigs and clubs – and perhaps even crossed paths – we never became acquainted until last year. I had gone to New York to consult the archives at the NYPL, but spent the majority of my time either blackout drunk or hungover in the sweltering heat without an air-conditioner. I was also grappling with what was, in retrospect, a debilitating addiction to Xanax, which I had originally been prescribed for a severe panic disorder by an otherwise indifferent doctor.

Commonality of experience, though unquestionably rooted in narcissistic identification, has of late become a potent form of solidarity, all the more intense for being mediated through technologies that continuously render our perception of reality aesthetic. This has had many consequences in the past decade, most of them unwelcome. In the first instance, it has led to the proliferation of online communities and identities constituted solely on the basis of shared experiences, to which many pledge an intense fealty. But the constitution of the ego is a perilous and deceptive enterprise, and one necessarily based on misrecognition. We are now forced into a quotidian confrontation with this misrecognition, and the results are unsurprisingly pathological. On the one hand, we are compelled to project an idealized, stable and contained self onto the world for the purposes of validation and recognition by a symbolic order, which then permits us to take our place within the various aforementioned ‘communities’ of experience. At the same time, however, we must face the fundamental inauthenticity that is at the heart of the ego – the prospect that this idealized self (in appearance, word and deed) is nothing but a fraudulent version of our true self, which bears little resemblance to the projection. Are these experiences in fact our own, or ones we have acquired vicariously, deceptively, or through mimesis? This was a disjunction that previous generations likely never had to confront with such obscene regularity, and one that is driving people to newer and higher levels of hysteria. The bonds of experience are mired in unreality and self-deception, but are horribly tangible nonetheless.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in popular criticism of art, music, literature and culture. I write with little malice when I observe that such criticism has become entirely servile and mediocre in recent years. It is now seemingly practiced only by writers who share a tedious and over-wrought lexicon, but have remarkably little to say aside from how a work speaks to their own subjectivity. The uniformity of such criticism becomes clear when we consider that its pretentious style can be seamlessly applied to any cultural product with little modification. This is mostly due to the complicity of the corporate media and publishing worlds, which exert a hegemonic influence and clearly prefer frictionless and banal cultural outputs that revel in aesthetic mediocrity. The functionaries of these entities serve the interests of a reader who they erroneously imagine to be no different from themselves; one who prefers tepid bourgeois morality and facile appeals to the affective politics of ‘representation’ (a corollary of identification) over actual artistic merit. Lehrer, having practiced as a critic under such constraints, has seemingly come to a realization uncommon among his contemporaries; that it is now necessary to drop all pretense in order to force a confrontation that can no longer be deferred: what is the meaning and purpose of such criticism? Here he writes about (and through) the work of others, but there is absolutely no question that he is writing about himself; his tastes, his obsessions and his experiences. It is an attempt at exorcism, but one open to the possibility of complete possession.

Communions thus confronts the ghostly remainder of the bonds of experience, real and imaginary (increasingly the same thing) and their unwieldy influence on criticism and contemporary culture. He does so with a degree of honesty not apparent in similar creative endeavors, which often end up producing what is too generously referred to as auto-fiction, but should more accurately be called ego-fiction. The questions I view as implicit in this work are essential ones for the present moment: what is the value (if any) of the identification derived from shared experience? Is it merely an affective and sentimental attachment too readily exploited and recuperated by a technological Total State comprised of vast, borderless, semio-corporations? Or can this bond of shared experience, at its core an aesthetic and spiritual one, portend something greater than the sum of these forces…and even point to a way beyond them.

This text is the foreword to SP editor Adam Lehrer’s new book Communions, a work of hallucinatory biographical fiction, surrealist art criticism and encrypted memoir, which is out now for pre-order on the Hyperidean Press website (a publishing imprint of which Dematagoda runs). You can pre-order Communions here