Against the Written Word by Ian F. Svenonius

Akashic Books, 2023

Burn the world down.

Let nothing exist as it exists now.

All structures, all economies, all institutions are corrupt and cruel and have division and violence and coercion and control baked in at the deepest level.

Nothing deserves to be, and nothing should be maintained as it is.

Yes. Nothing.

–///–

In places, Against the Written Word by Ian F. Svenonius is one of the most compelling, engaging, articulate and entertaining books that I’ve read, especially when considering books that are intentionally provocative.

The book opens with a series of essays that each explore, take apart and emphasise the dangers and suppressing qualities of things that people generally love and think of as (at best “neutral”, but often “liberal”) pleasures.

Obviously, the key one – you’ve guessed from the title of the collection – is literacy, not just literature, but literacy itself, with Svenonus even teetering on the point of arguing for a full wordlessness for all.

This opening piece is genuinely incredibly well constructed and is (at least while in its flow) difficult to argue against, without arguing for the extant status quo, which is something no one who thinks should ever be doing…

There follows a piece on travel, on tourism, and how tourists function as extra-judicial, self-funded colonising agents of Western States, who request, expect and slowly – by force of abrasion – create replicas of Protestant, Capitalist Business and Socioeconomic structures in parts of the world that previously lacked them.

Tourists are a physically present non-militaristic colonising force. Again, this is difficult to argue against!

As Svenonius goes on, they similarly eviscerate music (especially anything that can be considered a song), and then looks at the various ways in which society’s most popular intoxicants at any time mirror the status quo’s requirements for behaviour in its populace, i.e. ritalin and marijuana for the desk-based online worker class, as a shift away from the booze and caffeine and cigarettes that manual labourers relied on for their simple pleasures for the previous few hundred years…

There is a coherent and a clear attitude and ideology expressed across these first few essays, which is then undercut by some typical fucking Gen X bullshit about “ooooo the dangers of cancel culture” which, as always, comes across as nothing more complex than the elder white writer wanting to use slurs indiscriminately, basically, without being told they’re being a cunt. It really isn’t a problem if you’re judged for being racist! Get a life! Or only hang out with people who don’t care about being racist – these are both easy enough options!

In the latter half of the book, Svenonius’ age really begins to shine through, as a clear contempt for social justice movements – very often ones that are led by minority groups – waddles into shot. Svenonius Gen Xly treats these people’s aims and movements with the same level of contempt that he offers towards genuine “elites” and the genuinely corrupt, which is frankly embarrassing to even a fucking millennial reader like myself (I’m nowhere near young enough to be a Gen Z!), and – in my opinion – an editor with any confidence would have cut these later essays that sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, as they dampen the effect created earlier in the book from a genuinely transgressive, revolutionary, confrontational voice.

What this does, then, is fall into that typically Gen X (or maybe even Boomer, ouch) bullshit ideology about the “horseshoe theory of politics”. Svenonius can be read to be coming to some of his topics from a hopeful, positive, direction, but by finding common ground with the “anti-woke” bug bears of the extreme right, he makes himself – and many of his arguments – look much less compelling, less serious and more like someone just trying to piss people off.

Provocative rather than transgressive, innit.

(I think people who don’t have hope or compassion in their souls often tend to collate these adjectives. They are not the same thing.)

All in all, the pleasures of this book do outweigh its downsides, but ultimately the editorial choice to keep all of these pieces in here means that Against The Written Word doesn’t end up feeling like an urgent and important tract, and instead it reads more like a an ageing punk rocker trying to rile people up cuz he thinks it’s funny, which is the exact kind of South Park libertarian bullshit that Svenonius rightly mocks in many of the pieces here…

I mean, I liked it a lot, I don’t want to pretend I didn’t, but I definitely felt that it’s… it’s… it’s… I’m gonna say flawed?

Order direct from the publisher via this link, friends