La traversée fantôme : Ghost Milk de Iain Sinclair

• Published in: Études britanniques contemporaines
• Main Author: Catherine Lanone
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; French
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2015
• Subjects: dissensus; drift; East End; Gormley (Antony); Lea; London; Arts in general; NX1-820; English language; PE1-3729; English literature; PR1-9680; Northwest Passage; Sinclair; Northwest passage
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.2161; https://doaj.org/article/4de1b85a29c445b7a925966f35efedbc

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.