Playing in the margins : Iain Sinclair's poetics of refusal

Abstract

In a 1991 essay entitled “Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective Manifesto,” Iain Sinclair writes: “Any proposition asserted with enough force could ghost as the truth.” Sinclair’s aphorism, and the “manifesto” in which it appears, can be read as a response to the politics of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and, more specifically, as a retort to her free-market economic and social policies, characterised as they were by her definitive declaration: “there is no alternative.