Études Britanniques Contemporaines (Jun 2015)

La traversée fantôme : Ghost Milk de Iain Sinclair

  • Catherine Lanone

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.2161
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 48

Abstract

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In Ghost Milk, published on the eve of the London Olympics in 2011, Iain Sinclair goes against public consensus to defend the post-industrial East-End, sacrificed to build computer-engineered olympic superstructures such as the huge stadium, highway and shopping mall. For Sinclair, the olympics are nothing but a mirage, a dream of gold medals that harks back to explorers’ journeys and the quest for the fabled Northwest Passage. In keeping with psychogeography’s fight against the society of the spectacle, Sinclair opts for drift, wandering through the vanishing landscape and cityscape. The book moulds itself into a kind of passage, switching from walk to walk, relying upon underlying metaphors of gold and ice. Ghost Milk offers a passage to polluted modernity, pointing out ironic parallels with China. The image of Antony Gormley’s statues on the beach probes into the horizon of space and time, as the book edges its way away from consensus seeking to express what Rancière calls dissensus.

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