Talking in-depth with author, publisher, and academic Udith Dematagoda, on his intellectual journey from post-punk bands to postwar literary writers, from international development contracts to pursing a PhD on Nabokov, from Scottish council estates to the specter of Marxist ghosts. A romantic, Udith shares his biography, the crossroads of class, diasporic experience, being driven not by ideology, but by aesthetic integrity. The son of a Sri Lankan political exile in Scotland, code-switching between posh-accented academia and the swear-punctuated slang of the personal, discovering reading as a lifeline from juvenile delinquency. On Agonist, his novel of post-internet disintegration, the imagination flooded by the digital hose. On the aesthetics of fascism, the dialectic between technology and masculinity, and the enduring value of Conrad. On the flattening tendencies of ideology and longing for transcendence. From literary engineering to integrity, on Neruda to Nabokov’s politics. On cosmopolitism, hybridization, from Vienna to Tokyo and back to novel publishin. On transgression and techno-pessimism, the diabolic nature of AI….

Excerpts

On Artistic Integrity

I'm an extremely romantic and impractical person, right? Artistic integrity is probably the most important thing to me, I think, because, my, as I said, my ambitions are just very like, artistic, right?

On Techo-Pessimism

 They just come from the depths of hell. The true face of this horrid, diabolical kind of thing….I'm a complete technological pessimist.

I would describe myself as a sort of Luddite in the original sense, in the sense of I insist like the, just because one is you're able to do something. There's no sense. I think a lot of people. techno optimists are really motivated by hatred and raison du monde of human nature of creativity, of, everything that's human, right? And then this is a secret kind of motivation, but one that's really apparent to me…

I think it's because the people that are driving these things really have a sort of fundamental  raison du monde towards something which they feel alienated by for whatever reason…

On Agonist

 I was very frustrated about being on the internet and taking away from what I had to do.

Artistically, intellectually, et cetera, wasting time on the internet…  And then I just decided I'm gonna write everything I see that's annoys me into this notebook. And I just filled that notebook up over a year.

 [Agnoist] is a fever dream of the internet, which tries to confront how people try to communicate and just are not able to, and what underlies this thing, this kind of collective text that we're all offering, whether we like it or not. And how diabolical it is.

On Masculinity, Fascism, and Technology

 So this is the book I've been working on for six years now on masculinity, fascism, and technology. The general thesis of the book is that fascism is equally an aesthetic philosophy as it is in ideology. It's why it describes an ideological aesthetic.

On International Development

 And this isn't a controversial position to say that, international development is just rear guard colonialism, that's all it is. It's just soft power for rear, for the type of colonialism, which no longer requires colonial administrators with boots on the ground.

It just requires technical assistance and expertise and con consultants, et cetera.

 USAID in particular, when I worked within that world was absolutely known to be not even thinly disguised kind of front for the securities state, the projects that they funded, et cetera. That's not that was common knowledge. USAID was just front basically for the American State Department and also the CIA and NSA, et cetera.

On Readership

 I'm happy that there's people that read my work and they enjoy it, and that's fine. I don't really need to have the validation of what, whatever it is. I don't know, like the sort of journalistic class or like the academic class or what, whatever it is, I don't really care.

I'm not really that bothered by that. Honestly I would like that people read my work and that's fine, I think but attaining ambitions for me is setting it to accomplish something that I think is interesting artistically in getting as close to that as possible…

Agonist

Hyperidean Press

Udith Dematagoda

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