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CUCR Occasional paper series
Brian W.ALLEYNE Personal Narrative and Activism: a bio-ethnography of "Life Experience with Britain" William (Lez)HENRY Mette ANDERSSON Projecting the 'Natural': Language and Citizenship in S t r e e t S i g n s The Situated Politics of Recognition: Ethnic Minority, Outernational Culture Youth and Indentity Work. Centre for Urban and Community Research : autumn 2007 Colin KING Les BACK,Tim CRABBE, John SOLOMOS Play the White Man:The Theatre of Racialised Lions, Black Skins and Reggae Gyals Performance in the Institutions of Soccer
Andrew BARRY Larry LOHMANN Motor ecology: the political chemistry of urban air Ethnic Discrimination in "Global" Conservation
Zygmunt BAUMAN Ben LOOKER City of Fears, City of Hopes Exhibiting Imperial London: Empire and City in late Victorian and Edwardian guidebooks Vikki BELL Show and tell: passing, narrative and Tony Morrison's Jazz Hiroki OGASAWARA Performing Sectarianism:Terror, Spectacle and Urban Eva BERGLUND Myth in Glasgow Football Cultures Legacies of Empire and Spatial Divides: new and old challanges for Environmentalists in the UK Garry ROBSON Class, criminality and embodied consciousness: Tine BLOM Charlie Richardson and a South East London Habitus Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor:The Question of Evil, Suffering and Freedom of Will in Totalitarian Regimes Flemming RØGILDS Charlie Nielsen's Journey:Wandering through Multi- Bridget BYRNE cultural Landscapes How English am I? Fran TONKISS Ben CARRINGTON The 'marketisation' of urban government: private finance Race,Representation and the Sporting Body and urban policy
Stephen DOBSON Danielle TURNEY The Urban Pedagogy of Walter Benjamin: lessons for The language of anti-racism in social work: towards a the 21st Century Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 deconstructuve reading
Ben GIDLEY Gordon WALKER and Karen BICKERSTAFF The proletarian other: Charles Booth and the politics of Polluting the poor: an emerging environmental justice representation agenda for the UK?
Paul GILROY The status of difference: from epidermalisation to nano- please refer to www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr politics for downloads and further information.
Centre For Urban and Community Research Goldsmiths College Phone: +44 (0) 20 7919 7390 University of London Fax: +44 (0) 20 7919 7383 New Cross Email: [email protected] London Website: www.gold.ac.uk SE146NW www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr Cover_autumn07.qxd 20/8/07 10:16 Page 3
MA IN CULTURE, GLOBALISATION AND THE CITY The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London. CONTENTS The Urban Globe? Our world is moving from being a global village to an Multiculture, Hybridity and Racism and the Spatial Politics urban globe. One of the big challenges of the 21st of Gender and Sexuality. A multi-disciplinary approach is Century is how to understand the social organisation of applied that draws on Sociology, Cultural Geography, INTRODUCTION / CUCR news by Michael Keith page 1 contemporary urban life. The MA in Culture, Cultural Studies, Politics and Social Policy. The MA is Globalisation and the City gives you the theoretical and dedicated to turning students into active researchers, practical tools to make sense of cities like London, Los critics and writers. Small moments in the City photographs by Alison Gosper page 2 Angeles, Nairobi or Tokyo. Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission by Roger Hewitt page 4 The programme consists of 3 core courses, dissertation The course examines a range of issues from the and a choice of options. It can be followed either full-time Spaces of shared cohabitaion photographs by Karla Berrens page 7 economics of the global city to the politics of graffiti or part-time. ESRC funding for one UK resident is On the Commission on Integration and Cohesion by Michael Keith page 8 writing. These include analysing Urban Youth Cultures, currently under review and may not be available next year. Mind the Gap by Steven Hanson page 10 Literary and Political Milieux, the Political Economy of the Next available entry point: October 2008. London Winter 2007 photographs by Cristina Saez page 14 City, Science and the Technology of Urban Life, Urban Another Way of Photographing people by Ariadne van de Ven page 16 Strategies of Sharing: Deptford TV by Adnan Hadzi and Maria page 19 Olympic Debris photographs by Gesche Wuerfel page 22 MA IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND URBAN CULTURES Audio Theory:We are Spartacus! by Emma Jackson page 24 The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) Social theory, the left and terror by Ben Gidley page 27 Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Beyond the Frame photographs by Angelos Rallis page 29 Magis World photographs by Elizabeth Haarala page 30 Introducing the MA Structure The MA in Photography and Urban Cultures has been A combination of written and practical work to include a The Car Park by David Colangelo page 32 developed in response to the increasing interests in urban research dissertation and a portfolio of photographs and More Than Fun: Festivals, Culture and Regeneration theory and the visual representation and investigation of final exhibition. It can be followed either full-time or part- written by Nicola Frost, photographs by Laura Cuch page 35 urban life and the physical environments of the city. time. Next available entry point: October 2008. The Westway by Simon Gummer page 38 Who is it for? The MA is run by the Centre for Urban and Community Photographers, visual artists and media practitioners, as Research (CUCR), a national and international leader in well as those with a background in social sciences, research on urban and community life. CUCR is multi- interested in exploring the creative interplay between disciplinary and focuses on issues such as citizenship and cultural research, urban studies and photographic practice. cosmopolitanism; social exclusion and cultures of racism; You should have a degree or equivalent in a relevant area. sport, popular culture and music; regeneration and wealth creation; issues of crime and community safety; technology LISTINGS and REVIEWS page 42 and new patterns of digital culture. Nylon Conference 2007 by Will Davies page 42 Lewisham’77 by Ben Gidley page 43 Further information and how to apply: UK and EU students:Admissions Office, telephone 020 7919 7060 (direct line), fax Re-Visioning Black Urbanism by Paul Goodwin page 44 020 7717 2240 or e-mail [email protected]; Overseas (non EU) students: International Office, telephone 020 7919 The Great Theft:Wrestling Islam from the Extremists by Stephen Jones page 45 7700 (direct line), fax 020 7919 7704 or e-mail [email protected]; Kings Cross Wildlife by Emma Jackson page 46 For further information about the Centre: Please call 020 7919 7390; e-mail [email protected] or visit www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/ Mise-en-scene, MA exhibition, September 2007 page 47 List of contributors page 48 Centre For Urban and Community Research Goldsmiths College Phone: +44 (0) 20 7919 7390 edited by Michael Keith University of London Fax: +44 (0) 20 7919 7383 Emma Jackson New Cross Email: [email protected] London Website: www.gold.ac.uk Britt Hatzius SE146NW www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr
photograph on front cover by Britt Hatzius
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Introduction by Michael Keith might want to think carefully about how we mediate the relationship between the researcher’s eyes, ears and imagination and the accounts, practices and lives of those Welcome to the Autumn 2007 edition of Street Signs, the in people that populate our research and the audiences that house journal of the Centre for Urban and Community we write to. Research (CUCR) at Goldsmiths College, University of Such engagement in 2007 implies a degree of moral London. ambivalence about the construction of academic CUCR has tried to consolidate links between MA students, engagement that is somehow antithetical to the exhortatory PhD students and short term and long term researchers moral certainties of some leftist traditions of city working at the Centre. In this sense we like to characterise scholarship. Hannah Arendt, with her biographical flaws and the place as a ‘community of researchers’ and one point of counterintuitive judgements in part overshadows this issue this journal is to give you a sense or a taster of the sort of of Street Signs. In a sense the motif that runs through many work that is coming out of the Centre in recent months, in contributions to this edition might be taken from her sense terms of both funded research and graduate work. of the obligation of “bearing consciously the burden that events have placed upon us” that Ben Gidley considers in Alongside PhD work, the centre hosts two MA programmes the light of the relevance of the ‘war on terror’ to (in Culture, Globalisation and the City and Photography and contemporary city scholarship. A curiosity that is moral but Urban Culture). Funded research focuses on five thematic also a morality that is ambivalent about the cast of today’s areas that address issues of city change and regeneration; city informs our work. the politics of metropolitan residence; identity and cultural studies of the city, the visual cultures of contemporary The politics of metropolitan residence strand of our work was urbanism and the evaluation of social policy programmes strengthened over the summer by a small project for the (http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr/html/research.html). Urban Buzz HEFCE funded knowledge dissemination programme. Gesche Wuerfel, a former graduate student at The Centre has developed an ethos of simultaneously the Centre won the award, working together with engaging theoretically and practically with the flux of situationist arts practice City Mined to consider the ways in everyday city life and a consideration of some of the ethical which older people considered the sorts of city futures and political dilemmas that result from such engagement. involved in projects of urban regeneration. The elderly are Consequently, there is a sense that whilst the Centre draws frequently left out in projects to change the city landscape on Goldsmiths traditional strengths, taking culture seriously and the project used inventive and participatory as a dynamic that structures configurations of urbanism, methodologies ranging from photography to a situationist there is also a practical approach to our work that addresses picnic to engage elderly groups in a debate about the the policy and moral concerns of city transformation. transformation of the Thames Gateway generally and their In one way the Centre has taken as axiomatic the structures local neighbourhoods in South London more specifically. of early critical theory both to unpack the everyday but also Alongside a number of smaller pieces of consultancy work to interrogate its moral complexity. Max Horkheimer’s the strand of work around city change and regeneration has injunction in his 1930 inaugural lecture at the Institute of been strengthened by the award from the Joseph Rowntree Social Research in Frankfurt that there is “no way of Foundation of the ‘Fluid communities, solid structures’ comprehending the structures of reason that does not project, involving Ben Gidley, Marj Mayo and Kalbir Shukra involve sociohistorical inquiry” implied a research from Goldsmiths, working with the Centre for Local Policy commitment to engage in depth with the everyday as well as Studies at Edge Hill, the regeneration company Renaissi and with the tropes through which the everyday becomes the third sector organisation Community Links. The two praxis, belief, idealism and enterprise. So we are interested year project, that has just begun, examines the relationship in the way people make sense of their own lives and narrate between communities and the changing nature of local their own stories of the visible and invisible cities of the democratic and governance structures in the context of present. increasing diversity in the cities of regeneration. The work Consequently, what is common to most of the research develops from the notion that the cultural diversity of projects at the Centre is a curiosity and a concern with the British cities is not always reflected in the mechanisms of mediation of the experience that links the scholar of participatory democracy that are supposed to inform urbanism to the life of the city. Whether through walking, structures and processes of urban regeneration. Although at watching or listening to the city, the construction of the an early stage, the project is already questioning received everyday produces a problem of representation but also a wisdoms. In particular, the pace of change and the erasure problem of ‘problematisation’. How we come to think about of institutional memory in forms of local governance make some areas of city life as worthy of academic scrutiny and us reconsider the characterization of local government in not others. How we frame our own engagement with the terms of the metaphor of ‘solid structures’ and the strength lives of the city but also how people frame their own stories and flexibility of networking on the ground likewise qualifies of the past, present and future metropolis. the sense of ‘fluid communities’. How we recognize these So a common theme that runs through the articles of staff respective strengths and weaknesses remains challenging in and students alike in this edition of Street Signs is that we situations of rapid city transformation.
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In the strand of work around identity and cultural studies of urbanism Roger Hewitt has taken forward two significant projects, one funded by the ESRC on the relationship between language skills and processes of integration and cohesion and the other by NORFACE on Small moments in the city the architecture of contemporary religious transmission. The former project involves a consideration of the forms Alison Gosper of economic opportunity that exist in contemporary London that do not necessarily involve cultural or even linguistic integration. Rather than being a study of niche capitalism or ethnic minority enterprise as such, the project interrogates the relationship between forms of contemporary multiculturalism and social integration. In another project that takes the new configurations of the multicultural as its starting point Roger and Caroline Knowles were also awarded over €400, 000 as part of the European NORFACE programme for a project that examines the visual and material cultural of religiously inflected city landscapes. An article in this edition describes in slightly more detail some of the work developing around these new architectures of religious transmission. We have also continued to develop the portfolio of projects addressing the visual cultures of contemporary urbanism. In July of this year we finally heard that the international Signs of the City visual project had been funded by the EC Culture Programme. This work, by Britt Hatzius, Michael Keith and Alison Rooke, mentioned in an earlier edition of Street Signs, will run through 2007 and 2008. It draws together young people from across the cities of Barcelona, Berlin, Sofia and London. They are involved in developing dialogues about the representation of their local city neighbourhoods through photographic practice. The London end of the project has taken CUCR into a partnership with the Goethe Institut, the Waterman’s Gallery,and a number of grassroots arts organisations whilst the project will include an evaluation of the programme across the four cities by CUCR as well as a final major exhibition and conference in Berlin in 2008. A number of smaller projects on the evaluation of social policy programmes have continued to come forward, developing this strand of the centre’s work. Most significantly, the Beyond the Numbers Game project that is funded by the European Social Fund Inclusion Through Media programme and taken forward by Ben Gidley,Marj Mayo, Tony Dowmunt and Imogen Slater at Goldsmiths is developing tools for the deployment of visual methodologies in the evaluation of participatory democratic policy programmes.
More details about the Centre’s work and the MA programmes can be found at http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr/. If you want to know more then please do not hesitate to contact us, either through email ([email protected]) or through the Centre’s Administrator, Carol Keegan (0207-919-7390 / [email protected]).
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Anglican churches and one Methodist church - all in Architecture of an area with a residential population of about 10,000, and placed at a hub of massive daily people- movement where rail, underground and bus services Contemporary Religious intersect on a grand scale. Algerian, Ethiopian, Turkish and Middle Eastern cafes, restaurants and Transmission clubs are packed into the streets south of the station, while possibly the most famous rock venue Roger Hewitt London ever had, The Rainbow Theatre, still looms intact on the western side, but now occupied by the Last year CUCR was awarded a contract from Brazilian-based Pentecostal sect, the Universal NORFACE, a new European funding body, as part of Church of the Kingdom of God (“UCKG”) where a programme of research called, ‘Re-emergence of bad spirits are removed. Its Help Centre offers Religion as a Social Force in Europe?’ Our project, advice on business success, language skills and IT.The The Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission UCKG claims a presence in about 85 countries is now six months into its 20 month life. The around the world, at least 22 of them in Africa. One CUCR/Sociology staff involved are Caroline national meeting of the UCKG that Caroline and I Knowles, Vicky Skiftou, Britt Hatzius and myself. sat in on at the old Rainbow had an attendance of Photography and video form an important part of about 6,500 people from all over the country, mainly how we are approaching this project and it is also Africans and African Caribbeans (though strangely our role to share our experience and knowledge of the pastors and Bishops were nearly all white.) visual media with our partners at the universities of Nearly half of the audience was in our target 18-25 Bergen and Hamburg where small teams of age bracket (unlike the congregations at Anglican researchers are working in parallel with us. and Catholic churches where that age group are mostly visible by their absence.) The UCKG look In London, Oslo and Hamburg we are taking a one like a group we should consider studying more kilometre patch in multiethnic areas and within it closely – a sociologically interesting group, but, as talking to people aged 18-25 who are either sometimes happens with sects, a little veiled by Christian, Muslim or of no faith, about their thoughts controversy. on religion and their lives. We refer to the ‘architecture’ of religious transmission to indicate For controversy,of course, the trump card is held by both the urban landscapes marking out sites of the Finsbury Park Mosque, now re-named the religious practice - domes and minarets, spires and North London Central Mosque. However, gone are arches etc. - and, metaphorically, the structure of the days of Abu Hamza and the preaching of relationships between the people involved. violence, and with a new director and management Inevitably we are photographing a lot of buildings, group and a young (20-something) imam seeking to but also the more intimate evidence of belief, like reach young people in new ways and through crosses and prayers hanging in cars, or small shrines inclusive themes, this mosque has rapidly changed its that people put up in their work places. We’ve been image locally and is engaging with the other faith doing this to form an inventory of visible signs and groups in the area through an ‘Inter-Faith Forum’, as an aide to focus us on just how much is present inter-faith soccer training, and a very open stance. in each of our locations. Perhaps rivalling it in local popularity is the more ‘down home’ mosque of the Muslim Welfare House, Our London site is the 500 metre radius around housed in a collection of low buildings, originally Finsbury Park station in north London. This takes in warehouses and shops just tucked next to the three boroughs, and captures two mosques railway bridge that crosses the Seven Sisters Road. (including the famous Finsbury Park mosque), four Here outsiders could be forgiven for not realising Pentecostal churches, one Catholic church, three they were passing a mosque as they cross the
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unremarkable gateway that could be the entrance to a fine mosque and both Catholic and protestant a carwash or a loading area – unless, of course, it’s churches. In Hamburg it is the St. Georg area, and, Friday and they hear the call to prayer echoing out like the Oslo site, it has a more buzzy feel than from a speaker mounted above a doorway. Muslim Finsbury Park can muster, where red light district, Welfare House has just acquired the freehold to the grand Mosque and Catholic church sit side by side, whole complex, including several buildings they and culture and money mix in meretricious ways. didn’t previously hold the lease on, like one huge Our research is looking at anything to do with warehouse, currently servicing the textile market religion that communicates to the passing (or static) area of nearby Fonthill road, that promises to extend throng for us to reflect on, re-visualize and observe their seating capacity for Friday prayers by over a through the lens of ethnography. Recently we have thousand. Here they engage in many community- been thinking about both religious architecture and based support activities, give advice, run a youth club, art, but also art about religious feeling – examining and engage in charitable work. They have been very the relationship between plastic form and the welcoming to our project and we have already specificities of particular religions.. conducted a series of absorbing interviews with young people there. Gregor Schneider’s Black Cube, Malevich and the Muslim Community We have yet to visit the sites of our partners in Norway and Germany,although we took them round Earlier this year a monumental installation by our area when they came for an early visual methods German visual artist Gregor Schneider was erected workshop with our Goldsmiths team in May of this outside an exhibition of the work of early Russian year. In Oslo the research site is in the eastern inner modernist Kasimir Malevich in the Hamburg city Grønland area, a very ethnically mixed area with Kunsthalle. It was a black cube 15 meters high with
Gregor Schneider’s Black Cube
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base dimensions of 12 x 13 meters – an homage to Support for the Kunsthalle curator also came from the significance of black squares and cubes throughout the manager of the Central Mosque, Ahment Yasici, the history of 20th-21st century art, including who said that Muslims in Hamburg “felt tickled by Malevich’s Black Square (1913-14.) It was also a direct having the Ka’ba in Hamburg”. Adding “That is art! allusion to the Ka’ba – the black cube of similar There will be nobody offended by it. In almost every proportions that stands at the heart of Mecca on the Muslim household you will find a representation of the site claimed to be that of a temple built by Adam and Ka’ba. I don’t know of a single Muslim rule that forbids later rebuilt by Abraham, and now turned to in prayer it.” by millions of Muslims worldwide everyday. As it transpired the cube came to function as an agent Falling at the edge of our St. Georg area in Hamburg for intercultural discourse, with several public forums and also being of architectural impact, Schneider’s on the Black Cube Hamburg 2007 being held by Muslim cube has been of some interest to us in the officials, Schneider and the museum. In co-operation NORFACE project. The erection of Black Cube in with the Liberal Jewish Community Hamburg, the Hamburg from March until June this year was a victory Council of Islamic Communities, and the Church both for Schneider and for sanity in a world of native Circle of Old Hamburg, the museum hosted a series European fear over Islam on the one hand and the of events named ‘Art in the Multicultural Dialogue’. ‘explosive’ capacity of art on the other. Why? Because this was the third time the Black Cube had been put The proximity of the religious and non-religious forward for display in an urban public space. Twice elements in Schneider’s Black Cube I find particularly before, once at the Venice Bienale in 2005 and once in interesting. Much could be written about Malevich’s Berlin in 2006, its exhibition had been opposed and exploration of feeling in purely abstract, non- abandoned by local and national officials on grounds referential form, to which this work and several other that it might stir up unwanted hostility – even acts of works by Schneider involving squares and cubes terrorism – by Muslims. Not that Muslim communities partially allude. For me the juxtaposition of spaces were consulted, but naked fear, based on 9/11 and the seen and inhabited as sacred, and the boldly secular Madrid and London bombings, made Schneider’s Black forms rising all around them in crowded contexts Cube into a potentially even darker object. such as our Hamburg, Oslo and London research sites, constitute a major challenge of urban The curator of the Malevich exhibition in Hamburg architectural semantics, and resonate strongly with saw things differently, however. He did consult with the paradoxes of Schneider’s Black Cube. Where we the local Muslim community and he listened to are concerned with the messages that are Schneider’s detailed account of how the Black Cube ‘transmitted’ by built forms to people in communities had been developed over a two year period in living side by side with others to whom the same dialogue with a close Muslim colleague, how he had structures say nothing or resonate with quite different carefully researched the history and meaning of the meanings, the interplay of the Ka’ba, the artist and the Ka’ba, and how he had set out not to replicate it – community seem particularly apposite. It has also though this was far from forbidden by Islam – but had alerted us in the project to the interweaving of art of constructed a non-referential work which stood in all kinds with the varieties of religious building we are taught relation to both abstraction and this unique, finding in our chosen urban areas. Our Finsbury Park spiritually-charged spatial object. As Schneider said, Station vicinity displays many where levels of following its banning from the Venice Bienale: ornamentation reflect a stance towards the world and the specific religious beliefs and practices, old and new “The Ka’ba is one of the world’s most incredible, together, with the new nestling within the old like mysterious and beautiful buildings. It was a purely cuckoos. instinctive desire to gather information on this unknown space – and this space stands in public space, if you like. When the world is at war it is hard to be apolitical – especially with works in public spaces.”
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Spaces of shared cohabitation, nature and use Karla Berrens
The purpose of this project is to show the mutation that is happening in the 22@ in Barcelona. This area is experiencing big transformations. The area used to be divided into two sections; one was a cosy neighbourhood of people from the south of Spain that settled down in the late 60's, the other was an industrial area.The factories, today forgotten and mostly abandoned, became the homes of a large community of sub-Saharans. However, the government, in a campaign called "Barcelona become pretty" started to demolish those factories-homes ignoring completely their actual use and trying to transform the area in a Catalan version of Spitalfields in London. This project tries to show these spaces of uncertain nature and cohabitation of many different communities.
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On what the Commission on Integration and Cohesion(CIC) really said
Michael Keith
It is flattering to be read and disconcerting to be fought for those things we thought correct.A consensus misunderstood. But is it forgivable to be spun? generated through the scrupulous chairing of Darra Singh produced a list that nobody would agree In the summer of 2006, Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State at unanimously but all could live with. As with all of us, I the Department of Communities and Local could pick my favourite recommendations and those I Government set up the Commission for Integration was less keen on but that would not really be the point. and Cohesion (CIC). The Commission had been promised as a response to the bombing in London in More importantly the report has a structure, an July 2005. I was asked to be one of the Commissioners analysis, an argument and a narrative form. It suggests and in July 2007 we submitted our final report to the why it might be opportune to talk about cohesion and government. integration, the principles on which we should base our deliberations, and a substantive content that is Before the CIC report was released Madeleine Bunting determined by the imperative to translate each of these in the Guardian had already characterised the principles into actions. commission as brain dead; failing to address the key concepts of segregation and multiculturalism that were On principles for her the most fraught issues that faced today’s Britain. The report argues that debate should flow from a set of four principles. The first principle of ‘shared futures’ For others, the key messages were either reassuringly valorises a sense of becoming that does not erase the xenophobic or predictably politically correct and imprint of history and memory over a sense of being. overwhelmingly about a sense of Britishness putatively The second principle argues that we need to consider overwhelmed by migration. The London Evening a framework of rights and responsibilities that Standard highlighted migrants spitting, The Daily recognises the incommensurabilities of the global, Telegraph furiously rejected the Commission’s national and local senses of the citizen. The third suggestion that political parties standing for election in principle argues for an ‘ethics of hospitality’ that the UK should voluntarily abide by the terms of the acknowledges the moral place of the stranger in the Race Relations Amendment Act and should strive to rapidly changing landscapes of today’s Britain. And the become more representative of the diversity of the fourth argues that these forms of recognition need to communities they served. Meanwhile, on the prime be geared with a sense of visible social justice that 8.10 morning slot on the Radio 4 Today programme the stems from principles of equality and institutional BBC decided that the commission had celebrated transparency. Belfast and found there a ‘community’ with ‘perfect social capital scores’. On multiculturalism and segregation
In fact, whilst we visited all regions in the UK, the The report stresses that a serious debate about ossified social relations of the new Ulster were hardly integration and cohesion cannot be a pretext for a the exemplar that we chased; the brutal ‘interfaces’ that focus on contemporary Islam and that it must address mark Belfast’s cartography of ‘peace lines’,a reminder of all parts of the country rather than the metonyms of history stalled rather than sins forgiven, a living multiculture that lists of inner city place names tend to testimony to Amos Oz’s axiom that “A tension runs constitute.The suggestion of the report is instead that between peace and justice; peace requires contemporary British debates about both compromises; justice detests them”. multiculturalism and segregation tend to ‘sleepwalk into simplification’. For what it is worth – and for reasons As one of 14 commissioners I stand by the collective there is no space to develop here - if offered a choice responsibility that informs such an enterprise. We between the multiculturalism advocated by some
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serious scholars such as Tariq Modood or alternatively of spatial scales of material and symbolic flows and Trevor Phillips’ (the chair of the Commission for institutional deliberations.The nation state continues to Equality and Human Rights) wholesale rejection of organise much of social and economic life but not in the multiculturalism I would personally prefer to argue with same ways as 100 years ago. In this context the report both. asks about the appropriate invented traditions that can speak to this politics of jumping scale – that can invoke At times the ‘end of multiculturalism’ debates have the global, national and local simultaneously. focused on competing definitions of the multicultural. Debates about geographical segregation of one This is not evangelising for a naive cosmopolitanism or community from others can at times fetishise the a sub national parochialism, it merely recognises the spatial, rather then explain the social. social consequences of globalisation. There is a geography to this. It is not new to suggest that whilst In this sense, the report prefers a narrative arc that the economic benefits of migration accrue nationally, takes definition (of integration and cohesion) through a the social costs are mediated locally (and impact set of ethical principles and translates each of these in disproportionately in some places). We might want to turn into chapters that focus on practical social policy think slightly more carefully about both the historical interventions. and geographical narratives that make places visible in Britain’s changing social and economic landscape. When On Britishness and Empire Walter Benjamin suggested that ‘the future of the past is not safe in their hands’ he might have added that the The report does not argue that the debate around ‘imaginary elsewhere of their here is forever remapped’. Britishness is illegitimate. It does suggest that the new The spatial boundaries of today’s languages of rights configurations of transnationalism, glocalism and super structure the calculus of citizenship that needs to speak diversity might make us think carefully about how we to the new Rachmans that are wholesaling old right to address the term’s power. Displacing a putatively buy properties in inner London and to the white European ethnic nationalism (bad) with an allegedly working class in Dagenham that face labour market civic American nationalism (good) will not work and competition from A8 migration as construction-related may not be possible for the economy that has so wage rates are forced down and housing competition completely embraced globalisation. The Humpty for each family is intensified by new gentrifiers and old Dumpty of the 19th century nation state cannot be put eastwards migration of the Windrush generation. together again any more than its empire. However, a sense of Britishness that begins to share a reckoning This does mean that the forms of welfare state with the past and an Orwellian notion of patriotic rationing that scale the local, national and global national becoming might be something slightly different. demand a debate about the forms of recognition and the forms of redistribution that might set the A sense of the national that acknowledges that levels of parameters of social policy intervention in housing, in identification are stronger at the level of locality than at health and in education. It also means that we might the level of the nation and that networks, movements just need to consider the figuration of the local slightly and cultures that cross borders create sentimental more imaginatively. In narrating the iconographies of imaginaries at plural spatial scales does no more than place in the stories of Barking fascists, mill town riots, reflect realities already on the ground. Contemporary the New East End and cosmopolitan London we might calls for new forms of transnational co-operation and a just need to recognise some historical ghosts alongside supra-national conversation about poverty or climate the ‘elsewhere’ of the global political. change are hardly radical but they do nuance appeals to Britishness. 21st century sovereignty is an essentially transactional category that sits in a babushka doll nest
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MIND THE GAP: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AS AN EXPANDED TRADITION Steve Hanson In Issue 6 of Street Signs, I gave an account of a walk around Greenwich using a Situationist technique.This was organised by the short-lived group Scape, whose nucleus included former PUC student Katherine Bourke and myself. Jeremy Clouser, author of last issue's photo essay on security huts in Mexico also participated. In the same issue, I interviewed Patrick Keiller. We discussed Situationism, more than eventually made it into the issue. This is a pity, because the interview was picked up shortly afterwards by Merlin Coverley, for his book 'Psychogeography' (2006). Coverley used the interview as a full stop to his book. Writing about Keiller's films, 'London' and 'Robinson in Space', he suggested a re- politicisation of the subject.
I was working at URBIS, the museum of urban life in Manchester, just as Coverley, unknown to me, wrote his conclusion. Here I had already met Mark Rainey, who was interested in many aspects of culture, urban walking included. We had been discussing Situationism whilst working on the 'Sex & Seditionaries' punk exhibition there, which acted as a catalyst, with its pathetic Sid Vicious notes, scrawled on a scrap of paper, insured for thousands of pounds and displayed in a glass case. Was this the logical conclusion to radical Situationism? Over New Year 2006/7, Mark Rainey and I decided to form the Materialist Psychogeographic Affiliation. Very quickly we gained the support of Katherine Bourke, Jim Segers of City Mine(d) and many others. Mark & I formed the group via a casual MSN Messenger conversation, which I printed verbatim in the first newsletter.This conversation is notable only for its naive banality. I wanted as much honesty and de- mystification of the process as is ever possible from the outset. We then launched the project 'officially' at a conference on Aesthetics and Radical Politics at Manchester University, as part of a roundtable debate entitled 'The Street as a Site of Radical Potential'.
The subject of Psychogeography has been troubling me for some time, especially the inclusion of conspiracy theories, numerology and occult discourses, which began to bleed into material generated by groups and writers in the early 1990s.The way the boundaries of the subject have shifted Isle of Dogs solstice event, undated (but mid-nineties) flyer concerns me greatly. 'Psychogeography', as a term, was by an unknown group. coined by the Situationists in Paris in the late 1950s, but as
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Coverley rightly claims, Psychogeography can be applied to many understandable reasons why this element has much culture lying historically previous to the original receded in the text. Still, I feel that the kind of broad usage of the term.That this is a retrospective inclusion or materialism which underpinned some of the Situationist re-inclusion tends to be quickly forgotten though. forays into urban space were useful in terms of an approach, though certainly not as any kind of dogma or A quick illustration is perhaps needed here: Alfred Watkins ‘prophecy’. was essentially an antiquarian of old pathways on and around the Hereford and Wales border, where I now live. I can think of two potential objections to my concerns The inclusion of Watkins and his book 'The Old Straight regarding the 'irrationalisation' of Psychogeography in its Track' (1925) into 'Psychogeography' is an interesting expanded form. Firstly, there has always been a tradition of phenomenon. I think that the way in which Watkins shifted 'the irrational' in Psychogeography, largely because it has his own narrative later in life says something about the some of its roots in Dada and Surrealism. Dada was a shifting of the subject of Psychogeography as a whole. smashed-apart set of reactions to concrete world events Watkins initially examined the physical landscape, yet later and Situationism has been claimed as a long-standing in life, he began to testify to psychic powers. He began to continuation of this.This, too, is an appropriation of sorts, re-shape his account of the original epiphany he had, the but the conspiracy theories and outright attempts at moment he realised how all the old pathways connected, shamanism which tend to pass for the extremer elements into a mystical vision (see Daniels, 2006). From here it isn't of Psychogeography do differ greatly from the original far, via Blake, to the full set of pseudo-religious or outright Situationist conception of the subject. Have a look at godstruck 'Albion' cliches. From there, it's an even shorter 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography', published ramble into practicing magic. By the time we get to the late in the Belgian journal Les Nevres Nues, by Guy Debord in 1960s and Ley Hunter magazine, ley lines have morphed 1955. I must make a key distinction at this point:As I see it, from a series of old physical paths, assumed to be the 'irrational' of Dada was borne out of the concrete connected, into secret lines of energy used by UFOs to circumstances of the world, whereas the more recent, navigate the earth. More significantly I think, these lines are expanded tradition of Psychogeography indulges in an claimed to be detectable using a set of arcane practices irrationalisation of the concrete. which a group of privileged insiders are proficient at using. When I interviewed Iain Sinclair in 1998 he told me, ‘the Secondly, 'magic' is perhaps just another way of thinking force of voices from the past is so strong that I’m actually about the world. An anthropologist operating with any having conversations with people who died forty or four measure of relativism may well see my distinction between hundred years ago’ [...] ‘I do think it’s a magical act’, he said, 'magic' and 'materialism' as false. I am possibly less ‘words just flash’. interested in the distinction than you may imagine, but I do feel that Psychogeography has become a kind of priesthood The 1990s saw a resurgence of interest in the figure of 'the with figures such as Iain Sinclair.People who set themselves flâneur' in academia, in literary theory, sociology, as well as up as privy to insider knowledge regarding the urban are in the practice of Psychogeography by many groups, most cabalists, something I began to see as either quite silly, or visibly perhaps, the London Psychogeographic Association quite dangerous. Debord claimed that the term and Manchester Area Psychogeographic group. I had some 'Psychogeography' was coined by 'an illiterate'. Ironically, its contact with both of these groups at the time, especially 1990s rebirth was largely literary, via Sinclair, Stewart the Manchester Area group, as I lived nearby. It was during Home, et al.The use of metaphor is central to the literary this period that I realised Psychogeography had become a form of Psychogeography, but an astonishing discourse, kind of expanded tradition.Any ideas regarding its potential which includes the aforementioned attempts to 'speak to 'radicalism' could be forgotten. Psychogeography is now a the dead', surrounds the practice. 'Speaking to the dead' tradition in the sense of, say, Morris Dancing.This said, the may mean a kind of literary antiquarianism, archive dredging fact that Will Self has a column called 'Psychogeography' which is then subjected to a process of poesis, of making or perhaps points less to any enervation of the subject than to re-making, but this process is being mythologised from its widening, or its flattening: Essentially, Self writes about inside its coven of practitioners.The MAP Group's attempt things which happen in specific places. Of course, any to levitate the Corn Exchange, inspired no doubt by the widening of tradition is also a narrowing, if only by ratio, in attempt to levitate the Pentagon in the 1960s by Allen terms of what has been added to the soup. What has Ginsberg and friends, was attended by barely anyone, definitely receded is Marxism, especially Lukacs, who although scores now claim to have been there.This event is informed the original Paris group before they broke with now entombed in glossy consumer literature at the re- the traditional left, although his influence goes largely vamped, commercialized, Corn Exchange site.We're dealing unacknowledged by Debord. I probably needn't go into the with cultural myth-making here. ‘Magical’ thinking exists on
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a metaphorical level. Accounts of the city using similar me into a fiction, which is Sinclair's urge. Very simple literary techniques include 19th century literary realism, techniques, for instance the 'algorithm walk', can which later affected much sociological literature. Roland purposefully alienate a person in order for them to see the Barthes and Stuart Hall, for instance, gained insights which concrete city anew, especially if they are familiar with it. could be termed ‘occult’.They reveal hidden,‘mythological’ Walter Benjamin (1997) covered similar ground, rightly layers of our culture. Is anthropology any less a myth claiming that an over-familiar landscape quickly vanishes, structure than the ones its subject accounts for? Is it any becomes transparent. Psychogeographic techniques can less a priesthood? What is important for me, is that reap dividends as a kind of urban temperature gauge, by de- whether you describe it as magic, or even as a branch of familiarising the familiar.It really can be that simple. I do feel sociology, transcendent, expanded Psychogeography has that the techniques should be demystified. Of course, become indulgent, not to mention almost a priori problems then return when one tries to make an account dismissable. At the other pole is the 'Time Out Book of or document of the experience. Fiction it seems, is London Walks', a phenomenon Patrick Keiller and I constantly damming up on the edge of the moment, waiting discussed. I am for a tradition of Psychogeographic to flood inwards. The urge to engage with the concrete practice which can be grasped by anyone who wishes, ought to be a starting point, instead of running headlong ironically, in Sinclair's words, to 'align or dis-align into fictions. I suspect that the 'baroque polemic' (see themselves with what is out there'. Despite Keiller's Sinclair, 1998) plastering expanded Psychogeography concerns, I actually believe that the 'Time Out' populism, attempts to hide the simplicity of its practice and to re-engaged via his films, could be a healthy way forward. exclusivise it. Coverley sees the original Situationist project, in terms of its intended outcomes, as a failure. I An associate of Sinclair’s, Patrick Wright, has a more partly disagree, but rather than nit-pick at the past, I would materialist take on his subject than his friend. In a like to suggest positive, contemporary, future-orientated Guardian profile on Sinclair, he made no bones about his action. scepticism. But Wright was careful to point out that Sinclair’s take on Thatcherism, despite his description of Our newsletter masthead dates each issue with, for her politics as ‘bad magic’, is entirely convincing: example, '1 month of positive existence!' This stands in opposition to the LPAs '35 Years of Non-Existence', ‘“I don’t care about Iain’s hokey-pokey malevolent stuff,” referring to both the defunct London Situationist Group says Wright,“but what was and is fascinating for me is that and its tenuous existence in the first place. these systems of geometry and meaning are brought up by Psychogeography was always a clique, a niche interest for Iain just when the city is coming to the end of the certain males. The subject can be re-angled, re-gendered enlightenment project, when the welfare state is being even. I used to find it hilarious that the 'phallocentrism' of destroyed and the dream of London’s municipal socialism a building which was assumed to be a sinister power is being crushed by Thatcher”.At the same time as Wright 'omphalos' inevitably resulted in a Psychogeographic trip to was producing A Journey Through Ruins (1991), a the great big phallus, in order to walk around its base. Ley historical text about a disappearing London, Sinclair was line theories usually came in handy here, 'jar reactions', a writing a parallel anti-Thatcherite work.Wright recalls:“It form of dowsing, being the transcendent was at the moment in the late-80s when the Bryant & May Psychogeographer's version of a quantitative survey. Male factory, famous for the match girls’ strike, was being Psychogeographers love to explore caves and underground converted into loft apartments and the gentrification of tunnels. Where are the female Psychogeographers to the East End was beginning in earnest.We were both living subvert all of this? Alison Rooke has done much to re- in Hackney, trying to anchor a different form of critical gender the flâneur, I think her work should be investigated analysis.We both thought the polite public literary culture in relation to Psychogeographic practice. Jenks and Neves was barking. It refused to engage with the politics of the (2000) have drawn comparisons between time.” The key difference between Wright and Sinclair, Psychogeographer, Ethnographer and Photo-journalist, the though, was that only the latter – Beat aficionado, walker use of urban anonymity being central to all three practices. of ley lines, alternative poet – believed quite literally that Again, an examination of inter-disciplinary discourses here Thatcher was a witch. He still does.’ (Jeffries, 2004). could bear fruit, both between the disciplines themselves and between academic and non-academic groups. I feel that At the end of the day, it probably does come down to Coverley assumes London and Paris to be centres of the personal preference. Stewart Home has pointed out that doing of Psychogeography, an assertion also questioned by Psychogeography is probably useless as a proper scientific Sukhdev Sandu (2006). Sandu has also written a book on approach and I think he's right. Yet I am for a black and asian writers re-imagining London, the practice of Psychogeography which allows me to re-enter the Psychogeography has been notably white up until now. I concrete circumstances of a place, rather than delivering believe that the basic techniques can be used anywhere and
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that the subject belongs to no-one.There are multiple ways to re-approach Psychogeography, which space does not allow me to fully outline here. The MPA was set up for a critical investigation of its subject. It was formed for other people, not just for ourselves. It has an acronym and a publication, but we have no desire to be a priesthood, we would like other people to run with the project. Please email us to affiliate, but most importantly, to use the website and newsletter to do your own 'Psychogeography': www.materialistpsychogeography.co.uk
REFERENCES: Benjamin,W. (1997) ‘One Way Street’. London:Verso Coverley, M. (2006) Psychogeography. London: Pocket Essentials. Daniels, S. (2006) ‘Lines of Sight: Alfred Watkins, Photography and Topography in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’. London:Tate Papers Online (see the Tate website). Debord, G. (1955) ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, published in the Belgian journal Les Nevres Nues, in 1955, however,you can get all the Situationist texts online at notbored.org most of which are the Ken Knabb translations. Hanson, S. (2004) ‘The Art of Navigation and Patrick Keiller’, Centre for Urban and Community Research Newsletter,Vol.1, Issue 6, which can be found at: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr/pdf/1iss6.pdf Jeffries, S. (2004) Iain Sinclair. Saturday April 24, 2004, The Guardian Jenks, C. (1995) ‘Watching Your Step: the History and Practice of the Flaneur in Visual Culture’. Routledge, London. Jenks, C. and Neves, T. (2000) ‘A Walk on the Wild Side: An article on ‘jar reactions’ and the Warwick Virtual Futures Urban Ethnography meets the Flaneur’. Cultural Values 4 1 conferences, from the LPA newsletter No.9. 1995. pp-17 Sandu, S. (2006) ‘Discovering the Secrets of the City’. New Statesman review, 7th August 2006. Sinclair, I. (1998) ‘Landor's Tower’. London: Granta. In reference to a quote from Patricia Dunkley’s ‘Hallucinating Foucault’ in the opening pages. Rooke, A. (2005) ‘Lesbian landscapes and portraits - the sexual choreographies of everyday life’. Phd thesis, Goldsmiths College. Watkins, A. (1989) ‘The Old Straight Track’.London:Abacus Please also investigate MMUs excellent Driftnet resource: http://www.sociology.mmu.ac.uk/driftnet.php
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London Winter Christina Saez
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Kolkata: Another Way of Photographing People Ariadne van de Ven
It is often a dirty word,‘tourist’, with its associations line than she is—her qualifier ‘most’ often gets lost of superficiality, insensitivity, loud voices and even in the mists of the theoretical canon. I would like to louder shirts.The word even sounds as if it has been argue that the ethical issues go far beyond spat out. ‘Tourist with camera’ is an even dirtier photography; because not only photographing is concept, with its implications of exploitation, political, but seeing itself. As Peter Osborne puts it, cowardice and trophy snapshots. Thirty years after ‘the question “What do I see?” is political’ (2000: ‘On Photography’ Susan Sontag’s dismissal is still 140). We continually interpret what we see and regarded by many right-thinking people as the last burying our cameras is therefore not a solution. On word on the subject: the contrary, if it has the power to do anything, ‘The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and photography has the potential, more insistently than assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely any other medium, to question what we see and to to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled subvert how we interpret what we see. A to put the camera between themselves and whatever is photograph does not provide an answer but by the remarkable that they encounter.’ (1977: 9-10). god of light does it pose questions.
Yet there are millions of us, taking our annual breaks As for me: in my first few visits to Kolkata (it used in far-away countries with our passports, malaria to be called Calcutta), wandering through her tablets and cameras. Sontag makes a point worth streets with a camera around my neck, I tried to get debating, but many of her followers are more hard- away from being a tourist. In an endeavour that is, in
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retrospect, as hilarious as it was hopeless, I catalogued and measured and used as proof that pretended to be a traveller or aspired to be a ‘they’ were incapable of self-government. It would be researcher, until at last it dawned on me that the naïve to think that as a western tourist with a only honest position was to be ‘that’ tourist. The camera in India in the twenty-first century I could Kolkatans who had watched me walking around with occupy a politics-free zone even if I wanted to. In any my camera had never doubted this. case, tourism is as political as photography is. John Urry even connects the two: ‘without photography Now close your eyes and think of India – what do there would not be the contemporary global you see? My guess is that in many a Western mind’s tourism industry’ (2002: 130).The question is: can I eye will appear a strange collage. Like the rest of the make photographs that make a political contribution majority world, India is carved up into hell, without using human beings and without populated by victims of poverty and violence perpetuating neo-colonial attitudes? (traditionally, although no longer,in grainy black-and- white); and paradise, inhabited by servants and Meanwhile, there I still am, in a street somewhere in beautiful local women (‘in glorious Technicolor’). North Kolkata. I self-consciously imagine that I am There may be an elephant or two.The resulting idea conspicuous because I am white—until after a few of India in our collective optical memory bank is visits I recognise that it may be because I am a single much less complex and ambiguous than the woman or even because I am freakishly tall by impressions of cities such as New York or societies Bengali standards - or for all these reasons. Invisible such as Britain. Images are not harmless.They shape I am not. Children, women and men spot me with our ideas when we think about the state of the my camera and sign or ask for a photograph. It also world and guide our perceptions when we travel. It took me years to realise that many women feel free is no accident that the visual representation of India to play with my camera in a way they do not with we are exposed to in the West is still predominantly male photographers of whatever nationality or skin made by … Westerners. colour.
I did not know a great deal about India when I first So, with Sontag in mind, do I remain pure and refuse went, in 1994; but to me, as to many tourists, the and focus on buildings, dogs and sunsets instead? Do experience was unsettling as well as exhilarating. It I take the pictures but never develop them? Do I took me a long time to begin to realise that my own print the negatives but never show them? Would not perceptions in India hit not a blank screen, but one all those responses be patronising to those who filled with expectations from that very collage. I had asked me to take their portraits? With their highly not given cities much thought either, so sophisticated, ancient visual culture, it is not as if the subconsciously I continually tried to map the Indian Kolkatans are ignorant about images. street onto familiar European patterns. I walked and took photographs, holiday after holiday, mile after What does actually happen, in these urban urban mile, roll after roll of film, in different Indian encounters? The camera becomes the means of cities; and my stubborn Western-made mental image communication, sparking a moment of interaction, kept colliding with the reality in front of my eyes. I even if there is no common language (I cannot ask regarded myself as a well-educated, deeply liberal, my ‘subjects’ to remove their crowns, as Leibovitz thoroughly post-colonial, card-carrying feminist; but asked the Queen). I may hold the camera, but the what my eyes perceived in the streets simply did not person in front of the lens chooses how to be. And fit my emotional assumptions and political opinions. naturally they are all sorts of things: they look This was painful. Drastic measures were needed and serious or they smile, they pull my leg or they frown, between holidays, I started to read about India and they stick a tongue out or they laugh.They all refuse about photography in India. to be pinned down, refuse to be part of my or anyone else’s agenda. And in that moment they Until Independence in 1947—that is, for about a shatter that two-dimensional Western image of century—the British took photographs in India that ‘India’ or ‘Calcutta’. As Edward Said puts it, ‘We reinforced the ideology of Empire and made the [Palestinians] do more than stand passively in front colonising argument in pictures. In an infamous of whoever,for whatever reason, has wanted to look project, ‘the Indians’ were captured by the camera, at us’ (1986: 166).
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Both the taking of photographs and the viewing of I would like to end by saying that I have not solved photographs can challenge our responses to my dilemmas yet. For one thing, even when my taking ‘otherness’. Richard Sennett pins down the ‘reaction of a portrait is a collaborative act in the street, the of disengagement when immersed in difference[:] if resulting photograph can still slip into an offensive something begins to disturb or touch me, I need stereotype after its journey to the west. My political only keep walking to stop feeling’ (1991: 129). By aim is still to trigger questions in the viewer about contrast, the camera roots me to the spot and stops complex contexts. One of these questions should be me in the moment. It is not a defence shield, as why our eyes are still directed so often to human Sontag implies, but a pivot for a real moment, faces reduced to simple emblems of ‘the other’ or however fleeting. Of course there are tourist icons of ‘suffering’ that deny the possibility of photographs that are invasive, exploitative, change. In many ways, we tourists with cameras are stereotypical - but they need not be. in the perfect position to explore these ambivalent issues, as we do not have to earn our living with Many photographers in the West still cherish the photography and we do not have to serve any dream of being invisible - like god - but the agenda or please any magazine. If, these days, Kolkatans have no time for such illusions: they see photographing people is deemed politically me and they respond. In any case, in India the incorrect, won’t we end up with a collective portrait camera’s ‘invisibility’ would slot neatly into the of the twenty-first century in which only celebrities colonial history of the white photographer in are visible? That might be ethically less complicated absolute control. As has become clear, I am a slow - but it would also be politically toothless. learner, but in the end I realised that a photographic exchange was much less cowardly and much more ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS truthful than sneaking around catching people With thanks to the women of the Kolkata feminist unawares (or asleep). It is also more fun for all organisation the Women’s Sahayog, especially Kusum Jain, concerned: a bit of street theatre. and the people of photo agency Drik India, especially Suvendu Chatterjee and Subhajit Dashbaumik. www.drik.net/india Those of us who want to be concerned photographers cannot run away from photographing human beings.We should not even want to, even if the responsibilities are hard and the ethics are complex. As we know from the unforgettable REFERENCES: photographs of the past, in the photographic image Alam, S. (10 October 2006) ‘Beyond words:Vagaries of the personal can be at its most powerfully political. visual information’ on Media Helping Media website. This need not be in service to any particular political http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org (accessed 21 July programme - as John Berger keeps reminding us, an 2007). image is much more effective, both politically and Berger, J. and Mohr, J. (1982) ‘Another Way of Telling’. aesthetically, when it insists on asking questions than London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative when it pretends to provide answers.This is why my Society. friends at DRIK, the activist photo agency in Dhaka Osborne, P. (2000) ‘Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Kolkata, are more angry about western and Visual Culture’ Manchester: Manchester University documentary photographers who show people in Press. Pinney, C. (1997) ‘Camera Indica:The Social Life of Indian India as victims in an timeless predicament than they Photographs’ London: Reaktion Books. are with crass tourists. Shahidul Alam argues that Said, E. with Mohr, J. (photographs) (1986) ‘After the Last ‘the majority world screams out for the icons of Sky: Palestinian Lives’ London: Faber & Faber. poverty to be replaced by images of humanity’ Sennett, R. (1991) ‘The Conscience of the Eye:The Design (2006).Wim Wenders has said about his films,‘The and Social Life of Cities’ New York:Alfred A. Knopf. most political decision you make is where you direct Sontag, S. (1977) ‘On Photography’ Harmondsworth: people’s eyes. In other words: what you show Penguin. people, day in day out, is political …. [T]he most Urry, J. (2002) ‘The Tourist Gaze’ London: Sage politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a Publications (originally published 1990) human being is to show him, every day, that there Wenders,Wim (2001) ‘The Truth of Images reprinted in can be no change.’ (2001, 333) On Film’ London: Faber & Faber
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Strategies of Sharing: the Case-study of Deptford.TV MARIA CHATZICHRISTODOULOU [aka maria x] & ADNAN HADZI
p.s. You are personally invited to rewrite this essay Watch the video-essay Strategies of Sharing (2006) at http://www.deptford.tv/bm/
Are you ready to share? The Art of Participation
Web 2.0 is all about sharing and networking. Software It is old news that we are living through 'the like blogs, wikis, social networking sites such as information era (3). Nevertheless N. Katherine Hayles' MySpace and Facebook, and file-sharing platforms such (1999) discourse on information as as YouTube and Flickr have made it possible for anyone pattern/randomness is very timely: Hayles argues that, privileged enough to enjoy access to new technologies whereas materiality is characterised by presence, to publish their thoughts, diaries, personal information, information is characterised by pattern (as literature, photos and videos, and invite everyone else complementary to presence). She further argues that, to access, share and process this information (to within the information era, the presence-absence varying degrees and subject to authorisation). This dialectic – although always pertinent – has been article attempts to explore the 'strategies' of sharing, pushed into the background. In its place, a new using the project Deptford.TV as a case-study. dialectic has been foregrounded: that of pattern and randomness. Hayles goes on to explain that, whereas Deptford.TV is an open and networked project that presence-absence is an oppositional dialectic (absence employs methods of commons-based peer production is the negation of presence), pattern and randomness and uses open source software to build a video are not oppositional but complementary. In that sense, database for collective film-making. It is also a randomness is not seen as the absence of pattern – in community project that attempts to document the way absence is seen as the lack of (material) collectively the regeneration process in the area of presence – but as the ground for pattern to emerge. Deptford, Southeast London. Deptford.TV was Pattern-randomness implies yet another shift of initiated in September 2005 by Adnan Hadzi, in emphasis, claims Hayles: the shift from ownership to collaboration with SPC.org media lab , Bitnik.org, the access. Whereas ownership requires a presence Boundless.coop, Liquid Culture and Goldsmiths (something tangible one would wish to own), access University of London (1). 1 started assembling implies pattern recognition. audiovisual materials about Deptford and the regeneration process taking place in the area by asking local community members, video artists, film-makers, visual artists, activists and students to contribute diverse work (2). All the rough materials and edited media content that people have submitted is available on the Deptford.TV database.The material will also be distributed over the boundless.coop wireless network using open content licenses. Deptford.TV is a work in progress which is currently growing by inviting more people to contribute audiovisual work, and by organising events in physical space, such as workshops and screenings.
Adnan Hadzi (initiator) Deptford.TV 2005-ongoing. This is the first image one sees once s/he logs on the Deptford.TV website.
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Networked practices often – but not always – operate collaboration and inter-authorship that shift the focus as open systems that provide their users/audiences from conventional inter-disciplinary exchanges with access to their content, internal dramaturgies, “towards a synergy that marginalizes individual structures, and/or rough materials. Due to their contribution over the relational dynamics and networking quality, which means that such works bring emergent possibilities of the collective.” The Internet, together many interconnected things or people, such being a decentralised peer-to-peer environment, practices can be more open, fluid, dynamic and provides a good infrastructure for projects that favour unexpected in comparison to work created and thus open access and collaborative creativity over 'controlled' by one artist or a tightly knit team. Such ownership and authorship. (6) practices – and Deptford.TV is such as example – invite users/audiences to take part in them, rather than Participants we interviewed for the Feedback 0.4 own them. The degree of access and involvement reader enjoyed taking part in Deptford.TV as this participants are offered depends on the project. It can provided an opportunity to produce new work (film, vary from formal interaction where audiences can performance, software, other) within an interesting make choices within the frame of a predefined and inspiring (to them) social context and/or revive narrative, to co-authorship where participants are archived projects by contributing them as content invited to create the piece together with its within a 'living' database.According to Sharon Daniel: initiator(s). Even more radically, communities of users A 'conception' of the 'beauty' of a database is not can, sometimes, initiate themselves the collective located in the viewer's interpretation of a static form production of a piece (4). Once participants become but in the dynamics of how a user inflects the database central to a piece and, possibly, claim co-authorship for through interaction with its field or frame.A database it, the power, responsibility, and -conceptual, aesthetic, incorporates contradiction (...).The aesthetic technical or other– control over the outcomes dimensions of the database arise when the user radically shifts from the 'creator(s)/producers' to the traverses this field of unresolved contradictions. 'audiences/consumers'. This shift challenges the traditional dichotomy between creators /producers vs. Talking with its participants it became clear how consumers of content and context, and calls for the Deptford.TV, as a database film-making project, exists rethinking of such distinctions. as a dynamic, permanently in flux “field of unresolved contradictions”: the participants talked to us about Open projects that challenge the producer vs. their will to share one's work with like-minded people consumer dichotomy demonstrate the emergence of a and their fear of the work being misused; their wish to new paradigm called 'commons-based peer explore alternative copyright litigation and their production'. This term was coined by Yochai Benkler scepticism regarding the legal complexities alternative (2006) to describe a new model of economic licensing systems are bound to unearth; their feelings production in which the creative energy of large of ownership and protectiveness towards their own numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid work, as well as their desire to see the work evolve of the internet) into large projects, mostly without and acquire several unpredictable lives of its own. traditional hierarchical organisation or financial According to Hadzi (2006: 8) one of the aims of compensation. The free and open source software Deptford.TV is to raise awareness about individual movement along with collaborative projects such as responsibility in the way we relate to mass media, wikis are the best known examples of such practice. In through providing a multiplicity of accessible the cultural sphere a growing number of projects standpoints which await for us to select and possibly invite the audiences' involvement, participation and shape into potential 'news-feeds'. Hopefully contribution, and/or use open source software Deptford.TV succeeds to generate an open, flexible providing their users with access to content and and dynamic pool of contradictions that demands from know-how, as well as the possibility of developing or its spectators to create their own 'spectacles'. How recycling the project for the production of their own many people will actually take the challenge though? work (5). Sher Doruff (2003: 73) employs the term We'll have to wait and see. 'collaborative culture' to describe cultural practices of
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NOTES: REFERENCES: (1)Deptford.TV was initiated and is currently managed by Benkler,Y. (2006) ‘The Wealth of Networks: How Social Adnan Hadzi (2006) as a practice-led research project. Production Transforms Markets and Freedom’. http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Main Hadzi's research focuses on new forms of film-making and _Page#Read_the_book (accessed 1/12/2006). the development of technologies and platforms that can Block, R. and Nollert,A. (eds) (2005) ‘Collective Creativity’. Kassel support collective post-production, which he believes is the & Munich: Kunsthalle Fridericianum & Siemens Arts Program: 8. most difficult part of film production in terms of Bourriaud, N. (2001) ‘Esthétique Relationelle’. Paris: Les Presses du collaborative work. This is the main difference between Réel. Deptford.TV and other file-sharing platforms such as Daniel, S.‘Database Aesthetics: Issues of Organization and YouTube: the aim of Deptford.TV is not just to provide a Category in Online Art’. database of videos that everyone can access, but also to http://time.arts.ucla.edu/Al_Society/daniel.ht Doruff, S. (2003)’Collaborative Culture’ in Brouwer, J., Mulder, A provide the technical platform that will allow for the and Charlton, S. (eds) (2003) ‘Making Art of Databases’. collaborative processing and post-production of these film Rotterdam: V2 &NAi Publishers. materials.Another major difference is that Deptford.TV is a Guattari, F. (1992) ‘Pour une refondation des pratiques socials’. Le thematic project which collects videos that relate to the Monde Diplomatique, October 1992: 1 in Block, R. and Nollert, A. area of Deptford in Southeast London and the regeneration (eds) (2005) ‘Collective Creativity’. Kassel & Munich: Kunsthalle process that takes place there. Deptford is one of Southeast Fridericianum & Siemens Arts Program. London's oldest industrial areas and has always been one of Hadzi, A. (2006) ‘What is Deptford.TV?’ in Deptford.TV (eds) the most underprivileged areas of the country.According to (2006) Deptford.TV diaries. London: OWN, SPC Media Lab & Heidi Seetzen (2006),“Deptford is now the site of a number Deckspace: 7-9. Hayles, K. N. (1999) ‘How We Became Posthuman:Virtual Bodies in of high-profile buildings and cultural projects, to the point Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics’. Chicago & London: that there is now talk of the emergence of a 'Deptford University of Chicago Press. Riviera' and a limited amount of media speculation that the Kristeva, J. (1980) ‘Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to area may finally emerge as “Britain's answer to Left Bank.” Literature and Art’. New York: Columbia University Press. Nollert, A. (2005) ‘Art is Life, and Life is Art’, in Block, R. and (2) For example current work, archives, rough materials, Nollert,A. (eds) Collective Creativity. Kassel & Munich: Kunsthalle edited content, but also performances in physical space Fridericianum & Siemens Arts Program: 25 which are documented and put on the web. Pearce, C. (2002) ‘Emergent Authorship: the Next Interactive Revolution’. http://www.cpandfriends.com/writing/computers- graphics.html (retrieved February 2003). (3) For example see Toffler,A. (1980) The Third Wave. New Seetzen, H. (2006) ’The Production of Place: the Renewal of York:William Morrow & Co.; and Bell, D. (1973) The Coming Deptford Creekside’ in Deptford.TV (eds) (2006) Deptford.TV of Post Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. diaries. London: OWN, SPC Media Lab & Deckspace: 29-44 New York: Basic Groups The video-essay was created as a contribution to: (4) The First Person Shooter game Counter Strike is a good Yiakoumaki, N. and Karaba, E. (eds) (forthcoming 2007) Feedback example: according to Celia Pearce (2003), the first version 0.4. London: OpenMute of the game was created entirely by its players using the (http://www.liquidculture.info) level-builders in the Half Life game engine. (http://www.boundless.coop) (http://www.spc.org) (5) See for example the work of UK-based group Radioqualia (http://www.bitnik.org/en) http://www.radioqualia.net, Danish collective Superflex http://www.superflex.net, as well as the work of programmer /artist Jaromil http://rastasoft.org
(6) In saying that it is important to point out that I in no way consider the Internet to be a 'pure' medium – I would rather think that it is, by now, clear to all that it has become heavily controlled by corporate giants such as Microsoft and AOL. To quote Doruff again (2003: 77), “There is no guarantee that the self-organizational innovation commons of the Net will continue under the potentially crippling controls of wireless protocols, perhaps dead-ending the future of proliferating communities.”
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Olympic Debris London
Gesche Wurfel
Olympic Debris is part of a larger project documenting the changes in the Lower Lea Valley over the next five years. The images show what is currently visible at the future Olympic sites but only the titles evoke their future status while the images document what has been left behind. .
An earlier series on the future Olympic sites was entitled Go for Gold! and was exhibited in September 2006 in the Village Underground. Four images from the Go For Gold! series were selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2007.
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Audio-Theory: already done this because genuinely I just want it to exist.' We are Spartacus! But more recently I've understood the way things happen more in the world and if there's an individual driving force behind something it's not such a bad thing. If there's a by Emma Jackson product where someone is responsible for it and you can see exactly how the circuit is running then that's a really good thing. I started understanding things like that and being Emma Jackson talks to Spartacus Chetwynd more proud and conscious. It's not necessarily arrogance, about the Audio-theory Project it's the confidence to say 'No, I want it to be like this'.
Audio-theory is a project by Spartacus Chetwynd, an artist who EJ- You've got a bit more ownership of it? has exhibited and performed at the Tate Britain (Tate Triennale) and the ICA (Becks Futures) among many others. She is keen to SC- Yes, I'm much more like 'No, I want it to be like that. stress however, that audio-theory is not an art piece, it is a facility. That's on purpose it isn't random and off the cuff.' I want it The project consists of the recording of non-actors reading to be a facility, that's genuine. But what I didn't understand academic texts of their choice. before, I thought on a professional level that ... things like my stupid name.You know the art name 'Spartacus Chetwynd'? The project stems from Spartacus’ own experiences as a dyslexic That came out of the audio-theory project because I person at University, struggling with reading theoretical texts.The thought that everyone who does a reading has the solidarity recordings are available on-line and on CD. Although some texts of 'I am reading. This is my project, I am Spartacus'. Maybe have been recorded in a studio, people can upload their own because I was at the Royal College, people I spoke to had a readings.This is how the project will grow. problem with me being an artist and with this being so close to my art projects that if I was going to do it as a facility then SC- The way I approach doing things, I always think of them I should not have my name associated with it, I should have as slightly klutzy, cack-handed, not well done, not it as something really practical and not quirky at all and not professional, actually quite badly made, hacked out, but I'm humorous. But the problem with me is I can't do that. I feel beginning to appreciate that this can be seen to be a more like I've lost the battle if I do that. So I've kept it, almost subversive thing. Something much more serious, like the de within my art practice, which I don't want it to be. It's meant Certeau writing about making small subversive efforts to be a facility. It's meant to be functional and I used to think within culture when you can. I seem to do them naturally that was a real weakness. I kept telling myself off in my head just by doing stuff. It's really weird that these things come and saying, 'I know what those people have advised me and out, it's really funny. they're telling me to let go. Let the project go into the world'. Like I should have almost gone into 'the Dragon's EJ- I think if you're a doer-of-things and you're not scared Den' and asked for money to make it a public thing! That's about putting things out into the world that are not perfect what I was being advised to do. products then that is quite subversive, saying the flaws are part of it and hopefully the next one will be a bit better. Do Last year I suddenly realised from loads of different things, you know what I mean? like the 'Walk to Dover' project , even when I presented that, a really great guy in the audience asked me a really SC- Because you're not encouraged to work like that are great question that I got too nervous and talked over, you you? You're encouraged to be more careful and more know when you put something aside? It was whether about rigorous with what you produce before you hand it over. I was doing the 'Walk to Dover'(1) as a political thing, as a subversive thing. How much was the cloak of romance and EJ- Yeah, or to put a sheen on things. humour hiding it being a really political statement about living off the land? - like de Certeau in 'The Practice of SC- Totally. It's really strange for me recently because I'm Everyday Life' about a form of rebellion.And I answered him feeling more independent in my life. It's changed in a year rubbishly saying 'no' and then I tried to earnestly answer it and a lot of the things if I had been asked about them last and I think that as I explained before, I will do something for year, I'd have said 'I don't know', I just wouldn't have been the passion of the idea and then when you see how things able to answer. I can see clearly now. Like the audio-theory, have come out, if there is this strange undercurrent of I would've said before in a really mealy mouthed apologetic serious political energy then I'll say yes to it, I'll claim it. I'm way 'I don't mind if a publishing company comes along and not going to say it's not meant to be there but I'm not takes this project off me or if a publishing company has setting out with that as the initial plan.
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EJ- But also, who says politics can't be humorous, or arty, or now I'm beginning to realise that the connection, that romantic? someone is reading a piece of theory, is crucial because its alive, it's an alive person vouching for that text. It's probably SC- 'Rabelais and his World' really influenced me. Have you the most important part of the project, not necessarily to read that? Bakhtin. And it's analysing this medieval do with the quality of their voice, its demonstrative, 'Me, it, debauched behaviour. It blew my mind. It completely I'm going to do it.' voting with your feet. It's like a speakers explains to you why things that are more established and corner thing. 'I am vouching for this text. Now.' official are humourless and that anything to do with humour is suppressed or kept in it's place, put into those 3 days that I suggested to Spartacus that the way in which you read a piece are allowed to be carnival and everyone lets their hair down out loud adds another level, it becomes a kind of translation. She and then is so debauched and drunk and hungover that wasn't very into this idea. ['too art school']. However, take the they're actually quite happy to go back to work and so it piece I read, Water Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of actually reinforces order. So all my quirkiness and all that History'... stuff, I've begun to recognise that it's totally legitimate. There's nothing wrong with audio-theory being a bit more EJ- I think part of what I found weird when I was reading quirky. It can still be professional and function and it can still around the house, because I've read that piece a lot of times have it's personal side – like me being involved - and it can but never aloud, was that it felt like a really alive thing.At the be just as good and effective as I was encouraged to be by same time, I know you're not into the idea of the voice of those people who thought it should be more official. It's like the person having a big effect on the text. I've grown up enough now, maybe when you're doing your MA at the Royal College you take people in charge very SC- I don't want it to be interpretive. But what did you seriously and now I understand that their advice was one mean? lot of advice and actually, the way that the project has developed it is totally functioning. EJ- I just meant that, for me ... it sounds a little bit strange to hear that piece of writing read in my accent and it being EJ- I don't see why there has to be a great divide between a woman and although it's not a translation I think it would what you do as an artist and a practical intervention. have a different feel if it was read by a German guy or a Shakespearian actor. SC- But that's because you're cool. Seriously, and you're not threatened by humour and it being linked to politics. SC- That's really interesting, so actually it's more significant than I'm making out. But the only thing I'm thinking with the EJ- But I think it makes it so much better the fact that when voice is, it's a voice, it's a live person, it's someone who's got you go into the audio-theory site there's those crying heads. their own brain, it's not a mob, it's a a particular person, it's It's so much more fun than dealing with something that is the grain, it's the miniscule individual. I'm not over-analysing characterless and anonymous and the people coming to it. It's not the fact that it is a female with a - am I allowed to your stall at Publish and be Damned...(2) say 'regional accent'? What I think is more important, and why I'm not thinking of it as an art project, is that I think the SC- I was wearing a see-through dress remember? priority is someone is bothering to make it into a different medium - like from water to vapour, from written down EJ- I'm sure it was partly to do with the see-through dress! word to aural. Someone has bothered to make that transition for someone else, to help them and the only SC- No no no! I didn't mean it in that way! No, the see- reason to do that is because they think the text is of worth, through dress, I winced putting it on this year, thinking 'is it of value. I think this masks out any anxiety that a person has really necessary?', but in a way that's the point. There's a about their voice, I'm not saying that's where you are slippery slope to becoming a grown-up, to becoming coming from but that's what I have said to people when they respectable. I think the see-through dress is really have been self-conscious. I'm not drawing the curtains on an important. It's what we are talking about, the level of it being interesting analysis. I personally, am proud that it's a girl silly and personal, even more so with theory. Theory reading that text,That's all. desperately needs it, it needs that humour and perverseness and personal aspect.That's what I meant before, the people EJ- Maybe all it does is highlight that there has been a reading it - rather than having an actor's voice – was meant transfer from one medium to another medium, maybe it to do with their emotion coming through, their empathy, being me reading it, rather than a guy who sounds like the their excitement or the fact that they were stumbling, but author, makes it so obvious that it is now and that there has been a change into a different medium.
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I first encountered this piece of writing on an undergraduate EJ- Events? course taught by Vic Seidler. I struggled with it and it took several readings to start to understand some of it. I still don't understand SC- Audio-theory events. Good God! Its embarrassing isn't some of it. I think I might have understood it more easily though, it? if I had had it read aloud to me, which is why I chose it and which is why audio theory is a worthwhile project. A useful tool for EJ- No! Why is it embarrassing? people with learning difficulties, but also it's just nice to be read to. SC- Because it's square! It's mega-square! Am I queen of the geeks?! SC- The main premise is dead simple. I think the only reason the project is going ahead is because EJ- I think you have to embrace the geeks, not literally. it isn't only for differently abled people, it's for anyone and people do take information in aurally. I think it goes back to SC- But I've always said I'm square but people think I'm not shamanism and early theatre, people enjoy being told stories because I wear leotards. [both laugh] but I have to be one and narratives. of the squarest people I know!
EJ- I definitely take information in by listening, that's partly I play the recording at home. The female north-east why I chose the reading, because it is difficult. accented voice reads to me in its slightly too cheery tone:
SC- I really enjoyed that one, and it's in list form. 'Eight. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception EJ- I like lists. How do you feel about the variety of stuff but the rule...' that's come in? Do you ever feel like steering the content? SC- No, I'm not knowledgeable enough to do that. That SC- I also sincerely believe in crediting things that have gone comes up loads, at the fair, with my Dad. He thought I was before you, I don't believe in that concept in art college that asking him to read a specific piece. I explained that the point you can draw a blank and be original. I like crediting things. was the connection- that the person had to be able to I think audio-theory is to do with history, you're sourcing vouch for what they were bothering to read.Also, they will and giving credit to someone's work that has come know which chapter, which makes sense or the way to read generations before you. Someone's lifetime's work, it's the sentence. It's really important the person has the saying 'Hats off to you, I know about you and I'm going to connection to the text but when we were at the fair people benefit from the knowledge of your lifetime.' Rather than asked if I'd 'curated' it, like it was my show. It's so much saying it didn't exist. more natural and I really like the selection, its been amazing.
I pick up the CD from Spartacus at 'Publish and be Damned'. She has an impressive queue ... Read the full interview with Spartacus Chetwynd in the SC- I know at the fair I'm really good at ... it's almost like I High Horse Issue 10. have a dark talent, that I should be in advertising. I'm really http://www.thehighhorse.net good at pitching, it's scary, like I should be a quack doctor in Hear 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' read by Emma the old days saying 'get this lotion! The lotions and the at http://www.audio-theory.com potions!'. I've got that horrible gift of the gab and a horrible kind of zeal. It came across at the fair.And if I'm pitching an art project, like the latest geodesic dome that I'm trying to NOTES build. I'm really good at putting my enthusiasm across. I (1) See http://www.studiovoltaire.org/exhib-walk.htm guess audio-theory is a really earnest project so its not a (2) Independent publishing fair see bad thing, it's not malevolent, I'm not trying to do anything http://www.publishandbedamned.org/fair4.htm nasty to anyone, so its all good. REFERENCES: EJ- How many people signed up? Bakhtin, M. (1984) 'Rabelais and his World.' Bloomington Ind. Indiana University Press. SC - Loads, I'll show you, they were really cool people with Benjamin,W.(1968) 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' in really great ideas, like someone wanted us to hire the 'Illuminations'. New York, Schocken Books. Newington Green Working Men's Club and do a reading de Certeau, M. (1984) 'The Practice of Everyday Life.' evening. Fun promotion sort of things, promotion's not the Berkeley, Los Angeles,London, University of California Press right word.
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Chickens coming home to roost: Social theory, the left and terror
by Ben Gidley When the September 11 attacks on New York In July 2005, when my adopted home town, London, was happened, I was in my office in the Laurie Grove Baths at attacked, exactly the same pattern of responses CUCR, trying to finish a report that was overdue. A followed. I received my first e-mail from a friend with the colleague, Garry Robson, came into my office to tell me words “chickens coming home to roost” within hours of what was happening. It seemed unreal and my first the 7/7 bombs – while I was still waiting to get through thought, of which I am now ashamed, was that this was to close friend who lives very near to Tavistock Square a distraction I didn’t need. I went downstairs to the and who I feared had been caught up in the rush hour communal office where people were standing around atrocity. Now it was not American international policy in the radio listening to events unfold, then after a while general, but the Gulf War specifically, and Britain’s returned to my office to try to finish off the report. It involvement in it, that was the chicken which had come was only when I arrived home and started to watch the home to roost. images on television that it began to feel more real.And then it began to feel painfully real when I spoke on the These two responses – chickens coming home to roost telephone to my mother - a New Yorker transplanted to on one side and pure evil on the other – demonstrate Yorkshire. two opposite failures of thought, or, more precisely, failures of understanding.The claim that the attacks were Within hours after the attacks, I got an e-mail from a evil was often accompanied by an insistence that seeking friend describing them as “chickens coming home to any explanation beyond the purity of evil was illegitimate roost” for American foreign policy (1). The specific and would somehow violate the sanctity of those who context of this idea was the US sponsorship of Osama had been killed in the attacks.The concept of evil comes bin-Laden and al-Qaeda, as part of the final stages of the from moral – and more specifically religious – language war on Communism, and, in this sense, the phrase has a and has the connotation of the ineffable, the certain chilling accuracy. But the more general claim incomprehensible.To insist on this ineffability is to deny behind the phrase is the idea that America’s foreign the possibility of rational analysis. The insistence on policy would inevitably lead to “blowback”, to use ineffability is a refusal to think about the attacks. The another phrase which soon afterwards appeared in an e- word “evil” in these contexts can be a manifestation of a mail from a friend – in other words, that the rush to judgement. In these statements, the attacks are a responsibility for the attacks was somehow America’s; moral outrage, and to think about them, to try to responsibility and culpability are dispersed away from understand their causes, is tantamount to excusing the terrorists themselves and on to a larger system. In them. the days and weeks after 11 September 2001, the “chickens coming home to roost” e-mails came thick Thus, for those whose drive is to analyse, particularly for and fast. those of us with a commitment to secular values, there is a basic reaction against the use of the concept of evil At the other end of the spectrum, of course, came the itself. Intellectuals, trained to refuse moral categories like speeches describing the bombers in terms of their evil. “evil”, naturally reject this sort of rush to judgement. But The focus on the terrorists as evil, common in there is no doubt that, if the word evil has any meaning, politicians’ speeches and newspaper editors’ leaders, the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians – regardless removes the attacks from any kind of social or of age, gender, race, religion, politics or any other geopolitical context. It focuses responsibility for the act category – qualifies precisely as evil. To deny the evil squarely with the moral agency of the terrorists status of the terrorist attacks is to deny the possibility of themselves. moral judgement.
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The refusal of moral judgement typical of secular greatness”. In other words, the insistence on moral intellectuals does not, however, shy away from judgement, and suggestion that there is something in acts apportioning blame.This time, though, as in the formula of of radical evil which exceeds rational analysis, does not chickens coming home to roost, the blame is not make it ineffable and beyond the challenge of apportioned to evil but rather to the underlying structures understanding. of global society.This has the effect, I believe, of removing the events from the agency of their perpetrators. The Part of Arendt’s message, I think, is that there is no “final bombers cease to be protagonists but become pawns in analysis”. For Arendt, understanding is always something some much larger game: global capital or Western you seek rather than something you achieve: like the imperialism. Such a refusal may be an intellectual strength, funeral shroud that Penelope weaves for her father, she allowing us to reach for a deeper analysis than the writes, the task of understanding undoes every night what politicians and leader-writers, but it can be a moral failure it has finished the night before. Responding to terrorism, too. seeking to understand it, is both a rational and, crucially, a moral task. It calls us to think morally, to reckon with the The refusal to judge individuals, the dispersal of agency possibility of evil in the world, as urgently as it calls us to away from actors on to systems, is very much reach the “correct” analysis. This truth has a message of programmed into social science as a discipline, because of intellectual humility for the left and for social science – the legacy of its formation as a science: Marx’s notion of that the chickens coming home to roost reflex, the rush to “scientific” socialism, Durkheim’s insistence on sociology’s analyse, must sometimes be paused, to allow space and scientific method. We are programmed to seek the time for moral reflection. underlying causes, the deep structures: in Marxism, the material base which “in the final analysis” determines (1)The phrase was brought into political discourse by events; in structuralism, the elegant structures behind the Malcolm X, commenting on John F Kennedy’s messy realities; in both cases, the hidden reality behind assassination. The most prominent use since 9/11 is appearances. probably by leftist academic Ward Churchill.
There is a strong affinity between the left and social science on this, because of the shared debt to Marx. On the left, the thing to aim for is “the correct analysis”. On the left, when we criticise our rivals, we talk of them lacking an analysis, lacking a perspective. I was a person of the left long before I was trained as a social scientist, and so was well-trained long before I came to university in looking for root causes, systemic failures.
In recent years, I have become more and more influenced by the work of Hannah Arendt. In particular, I am taken by the way she uses the word “understanding”. It seems to me that to seek understanding is to refuse to chose between the judgement and the analysis. For her, understanding means “bearing consciously the burden that events have placed upon us” and “attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality”. Arendt sought to reckon with morality; she did not shy away from discussing evil, in both its banal and radical forms (and, most importantly, evil that is both banal and radical). Describing the Nazis in terms of the banality of evil was, for Arendt, a way of insisting on the non-rational, moral dimension of their crime (which for her was “radically” evil precisely because it defied “humanly understandable” motives like greed or revenge), while at the same time denying them any “streak of Satanic
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Beyond the Frame Angelos Rallis Bethnal Green Road market
There is something lively, mild, wistful and sentimental about Only minutes after this photograph was taken -somewhere London East End street markets that I am increasingly in the background- street market black marketers launched attracted to. a physical attack on Chinese origin sellers of counterfeit DVDs.Two of the sellers were held up against the wall as if Markets in Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, Brick Lane, Roman they were prisoners, searched thoroughly while hundreds of Road and Hackney are places where one can stroll around DVDs were seized.The reasoning behind this attack was not for hours on end as if seeking an overdose of the beauty obvious. Was the territory under the control of another that unfolds in front of one’s eyes, perhaps to compensate criminal network, was it a personal vendetta? for the endless routes of boredom and anxiety in other parts of London. Besides the bustling sounds, smells and Surprisingly, most sellers, buyers and passers-by did not sights, these markets sell everything from fresh fruit and show the slightest concern, as if they unconsciously agreed vegetables to fish. with this behaviour. Indeed most passers-by walked right through without even noticing the assault, some turned This is not to underestimate the cultural significance of this their heads to keep the spectacle out of their sight, whilst all socioeconomic institution; an alternative to big of them continued their everyday stroll so as not to delay supermarkets (as it is akin to forms of direct marketing), and the streams of the crowd. the significant role that the market has to the everyday lives of people who use them, Stallybrass and White Meanwhile official documents and police reports announce conceptualise the traditional market place as both ‘the a swathe of arrests and prosecutions of illegal sellers. What epitome of local identity’ and ‘the unsettling of the identity these reports fail to do is to go behind the main streets of of the trade and traffic of goods from elsewhere’. It is a place the city in order to get at the real criminal networks that where there is an inevitable ‘co-mingling of bring unaware immigrants into the country, promising them categories…centre and periphery, inside and outside, a better life, only to find themselves exploited and forced stranger and local, commerce and festivity, high and low’. into the harsh reality of the streets. (1986: p.27)
When observing more closely the structuring of power REFERENCES: relations across the market’s topography, one may realize Stallybrass,P and White,A (1986) ‘The Politics and Poetics of that East End markets, besides being vibrant places with a Transgression’, London: Methuen specific history and unique atmosphere, are also places where micro worlds collide.
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Magic World France 2006
Elizabeth Haarala
My encounters with the theme parks started last November when, by chance I was travelling to Hyères a town on the southern coast of France – not a place that I usually find myself, but I was meeting a friend on assignment.
As my plane was circulating the town waiting for landing I saw what looked like timber junk yard, but as the plane flew closer I worked out that it was a roller coaster. Once I landed I suggested that we visit this place that I had seen from the sky – it was even more fascinating from the ground – the amazing emptiness that surrounded this place, but at the same time you could still hear in the wind the sounds of the rides, laughter and the smell of popcorn. This was where my project was going to start – in Magic World.
I needed to get to the hotel and load my dark slides with film and find everything from my suitcase and rucksack and think about the budding project. Driving to Hyères I discovered that this was a town that in the summer was filled with sun-loving holiday makers, but with the onset of cool November weather it died and waited for the summer to return.
The next morning I went back to this site of magic with my camera to have a proper look around.The night had brought rain and the morning made this place even more magical with the puddles on the wet ground and the sun glimmering on the wooden rides.
That morning, with my big camera and cloak and dogs barking on the other side of the wire fence, I felt more like a trespasser but thinking rationally my wits returned. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. So I continued to look at this place that was momentarily abandoned waiting for the summer to embrace it once again and fill the air with the sounds and smells associated with theme parks. What I wanted to capture was the footsteps, sounds and smells that only existed in my imagination, but also capture the strange and uncanny feel of a place that had been purposefully built for people to fill and not to stand empty like a relic of past encounters. This was the beginning of my exploration into the magic worlds of the sleeping theme parks.
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Marc Augé, the author of ‘Non-places: Introduction The Car Park to an Anthropology of Supermodernity’, argues that we live in supermodern times characterized by an excess of time (a proliferation of events and David Colangelo information that keeps history at our heels), space (expressed in changes of scale, imagined and imaginary references and accelerated means of transport), and individual references (a proliferation of activities and spaces requiring login and password, chip-and-pin, identity card, and/or passport). In his book he argues that supermodernity produces non-places, spaces “which can not be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (1992/1995, 78) and offers the motorway, the airport lounge, and the car park as examples. I chose to investigate Augé’s theory by visiting the Cabot Square Car Park in Canary Wharf.
I lingered a little bit too long in front of the “payment-point”. A business man in a long wool coat came into the space behind me and muttered an “excuse me” in my direction, somehow sensing my inactivity. He glanced at me side-long as I stepped aside to give him a chance to insert his parking stub into the grey slot beside the flashing green light. I continued to watch out of the corner of my eye.The screen said he had retrieved the stub about twelve hours earlier from the machines at the entrance to “Cabot Square Car Park: Canary Wharf” at “7:28” this “13/02/2007”. He was prompted to “please insert £8”, which he did brusquely.With the settling of this contractual debt his ticket in had been transformed by the machine into his pre-paid ticket out.
As the man boarded the elevator I took a few steps back, leaned against the wall and took out my notebook. I scribbled down some notes about what had just happened:“offensive loitering … practiced expediency”. Soon enough I was joined in the payment-point/elevator corridor by a girl who seemed to be waiting for someone, apparently guiding this person in by text message or just fiddling away the time.Another girl walked between us towards the machine. I watched the machine reject her damaged ticket. Frustrated, she left in a huff and went off to who-knows-where to remedy the situation.
Noticing the camera above the machine I started to wonder how long it would be before I became a security issue. I took the elevator down to “P2”.
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One man already had his motorbike helmet on. The the odd speed-bump. I followed the cars past the recorded voice announced “P2: doors opening” and “TESCO: collection point” and the up-to-the-minute the doors opened to another set of automatic doors “Spaces Available” sign: “This Level: 58, Lower Levels: tripped off by a motion sensor above.The service-bell 279, Upper Level: 26”. reverberated in the corridor as people filed into the garage, vacating the space as quickly as it had been As I approached the exit gates, I looked up to see a filled. maze of pipes and ducts allowing water and air to flow through the space.Walking past the cars without “Pass I lingered in their wake. Between the pair of elevators Cards” or “Prepaid Tickets”, items which would have hung a message board. The entire centre panel was allowed them to slip through unmanned gates, I reserved for the “Terms & Conditions” of the “Car noticed that most drivers were clutching their steering Park” – the fine print.This miniscule text demanded a wheels and tickets simultaneously, often with mobile closeness and stillness that few, I felt, would oblige phones in their free hands, waiting out the last except under fleeting moments of extreme waiting- moments of their stay. for-the-elevator boredom. I had my own reasons, so I read on. Under clause “7.2” of section “7. Tickets” it Having completed this unorthodox circuit I went back stated that “The Company reserves the right to refuse to the elevators, stopping at every other parking level or release any vehicle”. Section “9. Moving and to re-confirm that they were all – apart from different Relocation” said “The Company reserves the right to primary-colour accents – exactly the same. Back up at move any vehicle within the Car Park by driving or the payment point where I began my journey, I stuck otherwise, to such extent as the Company’s servants around long enough to notice a customer accidentally or agents may in their discretion think it necessary to putting her ticket into the credit card reader. Quickly, avoid obstruction or for the more efficient almost reflexively, she remedied the situation and arrangement of its parking facilities at the car park” continued on her way. (my emphasis).There was also section “12. Prohibited Activities” and section “14. Definitions” that, in “14.3”, The car park – along side the airport lounge and the outlined “The Customer” as “…a person who shall motorway – seems to epitomize Marc Augé’s have entered into the contract with The Company”. (1992/1995) theory of non-place: it is a creature of Parking sounded very complicated all of the sudden. modern capitalism and provides a critical service to it All the while, hot waves of embarrassment washed (something that is excruciatingly apparent in Canary over me every time a fresh batch of “Customers” Wharf), it is a landscape of recognition in that it bears came in to wait for the lift to take them up to the direct resemblance to other structures of its kind, and shops. I found myself glancing at my phone periodically, it speaks to us in the standard forms of payment point hoping to justify my stagnation to them. machines and standardized graphical signage. In other words, it does not relate to the specificity of its I moved, finally, surrendering to the invisible current geographical location (passing the “picture test” in that led through the automatic doors and into the which a photograph of a place should not, roughly, garage. On my way I learned that “24-hour reveal its location), it is not historical in that it appears surveillance” was in operation for my “safety and exactly as any other car park and makes no reference security”. I walked around, sometimes following the to the historicity of the place, and it is not concerned large yellow arrows painted on the pavement, with identity outside of the standardized forms of chip, sometimes not. On foot, these things didn’t seem to pin, license number, and ticket (78). It is not place. apply to me; they were not to my scale. There were other signs though, higher up with black text on white In fact, I would take Augé a little further and say that backgrounds, that seemed to be for pedestrians, the car park militates against being what he calls place. outlining alternate payment points and elevator Whenever I stepped out of the flow prescribed by entrances. screen prompts, elevator voices, and big yellow arrows I distinctly felt out of place.As Marcuse (1964) says in I wandered some more.The deep frequencies of four- One Dimensional Man,“The intellectual and emotional stroke V8s bounced off the flat concrete.Vehicles sped refusal ‘to go along’ appears neurotic and impotent” up and slowed down as they followed the yellow- (5). I certainly felt that way, particularly when I was arrow road, ascending to the next identical level on asked to move away from the pay machine that I the way to the surface, braking from time to time for clearly was not intending to use. At times it even felt
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criminal, and the omnipresence of video recorders can, in some cases, be seen as both relational and served only to multiply my anxieties. When I went historical. For example, how can we forget that the car along with the crowds, when I did what was expected, park formerly under the World Trade Centre was once the anxiety went away and a kind of calmness set in. In the sight of terrorist bombing? Surely this car park can this space flow was clearly encouraged and blockages be given a place in history apart from all the rest.What were at best deemed strange and somewhat annoying about Joni Mitchell’s famous indictment of those that and at worst illegal. ‘pave paradise and put up a parking lot’? Here, car parks in their symbolic totality, are used to mark a Both illegal and coincidentally almost unthinkable in particular time, space, and place (the 60s, the this space would have been some kind of alteration or proliferation of suburban retail centres, North vandalism of its no-frills interior. Just as in Chris Petit America) and make a political point. and Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’ (2002), this non- place, like the motorway,embodies ceaseless flow in its Still, for most of us, these examples remain untouchable and unalterable surfaces that appear to go subconscious if anything, seldom entering into our on forever.Altering this would shatter the spatial flow, thoughts as we hypnotically slip through the space of and alter the uneventful spatial narrative that typifies the car park that so strongly militates against said the space and makes it efficient in its express divergence. What these points may prove is that purposes. One wonders, as in The Orbital, what the although place and non-place cannot be fully cameras see in a disciplined, controlled space made separable, there are certainly some spaces such as car immune to the passing of time, the variability of parks that lie very close to – and gravitate towards – weather, the phases of the moon, and the earth’s daily the non-place end of the spectrum. rotation. In such a homogenous space, even the smallest aberrations, such as a lingering pedestrian, One last critique of Augé would be the potential for become painfully obvious to both the camera and the individual agency in turning non-place into place. From self, regardless of who is watching. my observations of patrons filing through the “Cabot Square Car Park” I feel as though the potential for this Augé’s (1992/1995) point that in non-place is quite low in the car park. It seems as though those “…individuals are supposed to interact only with who were most familiar with the space, such as the texts, whose proponents are not individuals but ‘moral business man who “excused-me” out of the way in entities’ or institutions” (96) was also verified by my order to expertly operate the payment point machine, experience of the car park.The uninvitingly small-print exhibited only greater mastery of the space’s “Terms & Conditions” just outside of the elevator privileged flow, preferring to get out to some place explained the rules and prohibitions with the most else as quickly as possible instead of engaging in important ones reproduced in smaller graphical signs anything but highly distracted thought. I doubt that around the car-park (ie. No smoking, no refueling, no anyone who uses the car park thinks of it fondly, if at entry), or apparently understood by the customers I all, and thus the non-place remains as such. The only observed who did not even come close to breaking a way that I can conceivably see non-place drifting into single rule. And, of course, the proponent of these place is by examining and writing about it thereby instructional texts was the institution, the “moral simultaneously opposing, exposing, and critiquing the entity” that owned, operated, and set the rules:“Cabot epistemological foundations that underlie more and Square Car Park”, shortened to “The Company” in the more (non)places in supermodernity.Apart from this, “Terms & Conditions”.The importance of contractual Augé seems to be right in saying that non-places, such relations (101) in this non-place also become apparent, as the car park,“… create neither singular identity nor where innocence or belonging was proven and relations; only solitude, and similitude” (103). ensured through the purchase and validation of a ticket or a pre-paid pass card, made possible for the most part by machines and screens. More obviously – REFERENCES: but I think also worth mentioning when speaking of Augé, M. (1992/1995). ‘Non-places: Introduction to an legitimacy in the space – is the ownership of a motor anthropology of supermodernity’. London:Verso. vehicle. As a pedestrian, a large proportion of the Marcuse, H. (1964).‘One-dimensional man’. Boston: Beacon. space did not apply, or speak, to me. [accessed 21 December 2006] Available from World Wide Web: (http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/64onedim/odmcont Despite the congruencies, there are some aspects of ents.html) the seemingly banal car park that can lead to a critique Sinclair, I. (2002) ‘London Orbital:A Walk Around the M25’ of Augé’s concept of non-place. Firstly, the car park London: Granta Books
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More Than Fun: Festivals, Culture, and Regeneration
Written by Nicola Frost Photographs by Laura Cuch
The director of a business advice agency which runs a role of festivals and carnivals in local regeneration large neighbourhood festival in the East End of London initiatives, but felt that this characterisation was explaining to me his vision for the event, and the contributed to a sense that carnival was ‘poor people’s reason why he put his other activities on hold for art’ (ACE 2005: 34). several months each year to organise the festival. ‘It should be about more than fun’, he said firmly. ‘Any What then is the relationship between the cultural, event, if it’s well-run, can be fun, but it can do a lot artistic, and social functions of community festivals, and more than that.’ their economic significance? Is an emphasis on economic activity inevitably in tension with artistic It has become fashionable to advocate ‘community’ integrity, and does it carry an implication of festivals as effective vehicles for regional regeneration, marginality? We have been working with two annual especially in disadvantaged urban areas (Evans and events based within particular migrant populations in Shaw 2004:26). Local and national cultural policy London: the Carnaval del Pueblo, a Latin American increasingly frames festivals and carnivals in terms not event held in Burgess Park in Southwark in August,and only of their cultural or artistic content, but with the Baishakhi Mela, marking Bengali New Year held in regard to the potential economic benefits the event and around Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets each May. could bring to the neighbourhood. Critics have Although in many ways there are important differences protested that this instrumental approach conflicts between these events, in terms of history, location, with and compromises the artistic value of the festival political context, etc, there are also some significant activities. This complaint comes from a variety of parallels. Both have been running for around a decade, perspectives. There are those who resist the and have grown considerably over that time; each can encroachment of the ‘creative industries’ or economic attract upwards of 100,000 visitors, with a justifications into the field of artistic practice for its combination of music, processions, food, stalls, and own sake (see Mirza 2006). Others worry about the fringe attractions. Both Carnaval and the Mela are an political ramifications of this trend. Delegates at an important focus in the calendars of London-based Arts Council conference in 2004 acknowledged the Latin Americans and Bangladeshis.
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These festivals are ‘more than fun’ in several related awe-inspiring, with its fierce roar. It is however by no ways. First, their organisational structures both reveal means the only set of meanings conveyed by the Mela, and influence political relations at local, national, and which is a multi-vocal, often contradictory, symbolic international levels. Both these events are run by an space. Indeed, many visitors miss the procession organising committee made up of Latin Americans and altogether, intent simply on catching up with friends, Bangladeshis respectively, in close cooperation with and relishing seeing Bangladeshis at centre stage in the relevant local authority.The relationship between Tower Hamlets. the two bodies is complex. On one hand it is an opportunity for close, practical and very visible The festivals also provide a focus for informal artistic partnership between local government and community groups, and for specific cultural forms.At Carnaval, for initiative, which can help foster improved example, the procession is largely composed of small understanding and communication that is valuable in float-making groups and dance troupes who meet in contexts beyond the event. On the other, it throws the weeks running up to the event in restaurant into relief underlying tensions relating to ‘community’ basements or public parks, to rehearse their routines representation, political correctness, and ideas of and design costumes and floats. For some of these, it’s multiculturalism.Who is on the organising committee an artistic, political, and social undertaking, combining a is a matter of debate in both contexts: for Carnaval the chance to represent their particular cultural tradition issue is equal representation of the various Latin (the number of national flags on Carnaval day are American nations; for the Mela it is the division testament to that), with a welcome opportunity to between supporters of Labour and Respect in local escape menial jobs and come together socially.At the politics. Such tensions can quickly become mapped Mela, the fringe festival of Bengali literature is a rare onto broader themes involving immigration, inequality, glimpse of migrant culture beyond music, dance, and even global terrorism, so the stakes can be high. food.
The events are opportunities for generally marginal And of course festivals of this kind do have economic populations to address discrimination or disadvantage effects. Since its early days, the Mela has embraced a in a pro-active and public way. In 2006 and 2007, the conscious regeneration agenda, with the aim of Mela hosted a locally based community arts project, supporting small businesses in the Brick Lane area. In Tiger Out East, commissioned by the local authority, 2007 it staged an Asian fashion show with the intention and partially funded by the Arts Council. It is a huge of providing exposure and experience for aspiring articulated tiger, accompanied by drummers and models and technicians as well as the design houses. dancers, forming part of a carnival procession. The Brick Lane’s restaurants and supermarkets can do Royal Bengal Tiger was chosen by local community weeks’ worth of trade on a single day.At both events, groups as an appropriate symbol of Bengali culture: renting a stall to sell food, handicrafts, etc can be a low- both admired and feared by the people with whom it risk way of making some extra cash with family shares its habitat, it is threatened with extinction. It members, or of testing a trading idea or launching a was seen as an ideal metaphor for a community business, especially for groups who can find it difficult wanting to respond affirmatively to an atmosphere of to raise capital, or to gain employment at anything but suspicion and hostility following the London bombings the least sustainable level. Different people trade for in 2005. The Tiger is beautiful, seductive, and a little different reasons: one woman selling Ecuadorian
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jewellery at Carnaval explained ‘More than selling, I am Tower Hamlets pointed out that in Bangladesh, looking for exposure to the Latino community. They Baishahki Mela is an auspicious day, when new know you here and then they will visit the shop the businesses are started, and new account books are rest of the year. It is more promotion than profits.’ opened. Although originating as an externally, publicly Others are out to have fun, with some profit on the funded arts project, the Tiger is increasingly recognised side, and still others are trying to make a living as a distinctive attraction that contributes to the event travelling from festival to festival. Then there are the as a whole, and can provide experience and training opportunities for volunteers to gain experience, either opportunities for local people wanting to find work in of performance, or in event management. Often, the carnival arts sector. Both festivals experience people are attracted into the festival neighbourhood habitual constraints on programming due to funding who wouldn’t otherwise visit, spending as they go. limits, and rumours of petty corruption, but remain socially, economically, and politically significant All of this is indeed going on at Carnaval and Mela, nonetheless. though it manifests itself slightly differently in each case. But this rather pedestrian account doesn’t begin Yet it is precisely this synergy, this subtlety, which is to describe, account for, and explore anyone’s actual missing from both the economic impact/regeneration experience of the events. As Laura’s photographs mantras, and their critics. Both positions risk show, it’s not possible to divorce abstract functions privileging and separating economic effects. The and symbolism, economic benefit, even political action, problem with the ‘festivals for urban regeneration’ from each other, or from individuals’ participation. game is not that this isn’t the case, but that in labouring Festivals are inevitably subjective, embodied, and lived, the point in an exclusive way, this disengages from the which of course means that their myriad elements are other related functions. A reductive return to the complexly interconnected, and inter-dependent. They world of homo economicus misses the point, as does are more than a sum of their parts (and are not a critique that observes the same narrow parameters. reducible to any of them). This is their great strength We need to understand the complex relationships and value; it means that there is no necessary between festivals’ many sides, and to take account of contradiction between something being fun (or indeed diverse cultural constructions of the moral economy artistically challenging) as well as a good business along the way. opportunity. But it does require a careful and detailed analysis of the whole – an ecology of festivals, if you The research and photography drawn on here are funded by a like, to understand how this might work. European Social Fund EQUAL project, Celebrating Enterprise, led by City University, London (www.celebrating-enterprise.org.uk). Business and celebration, for example, or work and Thanks to Ricardo Leizaola. art, for that matter,are contained and combined within these festivals without undue contradiction. The REFERENCES: various strands are stitched together with dense Arts Council England (2005). ‘National Carnival Arts Strategy’. networks of familial and cultural ties, and interlaced London:Arts Council England. Evans, G. and P. Shaw (2004). ‘The Contribution of Culture to with artistic continuities and innovations. The Regeneration in the UK: A Review of Evidence’. London: London introduction to a retrospective exhibition of Metropolitan University. photographs from previous melas held recently in Mirza, M. (2006) ‘For art’s sake?’ Guardian 10 February
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Back in Britain, J.H. Forshaw, architect to the London County Council, and Patrick Abercrombie, professor of The Westway Town Planning at UCL, had devised a comprehensive plan that was to deal with, among other things, traffic congestion and neglected housing areas. It was to be a Simon Gummer reworking of this plan that was to go on and form the Westway and while it would be wrong to say The Westway; a two and a half mile stretch of elevated Abercrombie and Forshaw shared Moses’s alleged motorway on the A40 between Shepherds Bush and disdain for the lower classes it is possible to see where London Paddington station. For many of its users it is the prevailing architectural and urban planning a means to an end, a piece of the built environment atmosphere was situated at the time. It is this attitude that has utilitarian properties, a structure that does and the mantle of respectable modernism on which it not warrant further thought or investigation. For piggy backed that enabled the GLC to carry the others, the road features more prominently; whether it planning and building of the Westway forward through is used merely as an entry and exit point for west numerous public protests. London or because its placement has affected the lives of the communities that surround it, there is no denying the Westway is an important piece of urban architecture.
In the winter of 2006 I set out to analyse and investigate this structure for the purposes of understanding not only the impact caused by its placement, past and present, but to refute the commonly held notion that roads and motorways equate to a sense of modernity.There is, it seems, a common belief that there is a unity between the ‘narratives of speeding up, increased mobility, connectivity and the changing conceptions of time’ (Merriman 2004) that are commonly associated with modernity and the great swathes of tarmac laid across the developed world. Surely it makes sense to combine a set of social practises that is concerned with speed, which privileges the new over the traditional, which places emphasis on the conditions of capitalism, with a physical space that embodies and assists these conditions?
From its initial pre-war conception the Westway was meant to be associated with modern values of speed, freedom and advancement. Its design ethos came partly from Britain’s desire and need to rebuild following WW2 and partly from the running trend in urban planning at the time, that of the Corbusian ideal. In America, the dreams of the architect who Indeed, the official opening was soured by envisioned the Contemporary City based on a specific demonstrations from residents of Notting Hill and and isolating social configuration were already being West Kensington who objected to having a four lane translated into the expressways of Robert Moses; motorway just yards from their bedroom windows. If most famous for his wholesale clearance of the Bronx it was only for these reasons, the Westway would be in order to place a road that skirted around the worthy of study. Yet it can also be taken as a properties of some of the cities wealthier inhabitants. synecdoche for post war rationalist (road) design.
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That is, it lays claim to being a piece of modernist space development, causing both the destruction and able to produce new forms of living and being. privatisation of public urban space and the patterns of However,by analysing the Westway and its influence on zoning that reflect class and ethnic fragmentation the city as a piece of urban design symptomatic of (Zukin 1996); but the Westway has sharpened and modernity,it is possible to see how not only the dream focussed this process by providing a literal line across of its designers has been shattered but that new and the landscape from which different social classes can perhaps more vibrant and relevant visions have be defined.This divide is then reproduced many times emerged. over in small pockets of space creating micro-climates of not only different economic worth but carrying Today the windows are further back but the residents different emotional undertones. These undertones are just as displaced as they were forty years ago by inevitably infect the area’s inhabitants and its visitors; in the giant scar that streaks through their Little Venice I am looked on with suspicion as I neighbourhood. This becomes obvious as I walk the photograph the houses. Cross a mere 30 meters under area underneath and alongside the Westway; taking my the Westway to Bayswater and it is I who look out cue from the dérives (literally meaning ‘to drift’) of distrustfully as I attempt to conceal my camera. Guy Debord and the Situationist International (S.I.) I was to let myself wander the areas directly underneath and alongside the Westway. Along the way I occupied myself with documenting through notes and photographs the various ‘odours and tonalities of the cityscape, its unconscious rhythms and conscious melodies’ (Merrifield 2005)).This idea of walking as the pre-eminent spatial practise for exploring the city goes back to perhaps Baudelaire and the now famous concept of the flâneur. Updated by the S.I and contemporary figures such as Iain Sinclair I was able to mould a unique methodology that enabled me to study the micro climates of the Westway area without giving in to imposed administrative boundaries. By drifting, the varying ambiences and effects that are the result of a complex set of geographical, spatial and psychological conventions became obvious. The combination of economic development and This was to show itself initially as I negotiated my way human actors stimulating the space have left behind a around the space operated by the Westway series of boundaries, some physical, some emotive.This Development Trust. Primarily set up to provide relief has resulted in no entry signs, green spaces locked of and support in the form of community services by at night and through paths under the Westway using the area directly underneath the road.Today, the permanently blocked. There is a reason for this; it Trust whilst still charitable, operates within a financial affects a form of symbolic control of the areas framework similar to a business; profits are used for inhabitants.This is achieved, partly through a panoptic grants, given to local charities or ploughed back into like form of self regulation which produces an the business. Essentially though, the Trust is market led, association between visibility and the codifiers of it needs to own and develop physical assets in order to power, which when extended onto our streets create fulfil its charitable obligations. By doing this it slowly multifaceted spaces that assign values via architecture, raises the value of the entire area, thereby pushing street furniture and debris. those that cannot afford to keep up into smaller, more segregated areas.This conflict for space leaves zones of These values are then read in either a preferred or deprivation alongside areas of gentrification. As I walk negotiated way to create areas of inclusion or between these alternating zones, it seems obvious that exclusion for differing social groups and can be as this small section of London is doing nothing more diverse as the parking of prestige cars on one street than follow the inevitable pattern of uneven and the addition of street art on another.
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both Debord and Le Corbusier as a surplus labour which correspondingly reduces leisure time (Knabb 2006).What was meant to be a road system that frees up movement has turned into one that often halts it. These things are not signs of modernity, they do not as Baudelaire would have hoped, orientate us towards the future, rather they bring to memory a Baudelairian paradox in which he muses on the notion that for the city, modern advancement was an illusion and that ‘indefinite progress might be its most cruel and ingenious torture’ (cited in Berman 1999). Indeed, as I sat in traffic and looked out at the drivers trapped in their cars I felt I shared their agony; the rhythms I watched them tap out in frustration on sticky dashboards spoke more of the decline of the master plan than its fruition. The Westway then acts as a physical divide between these two areas of different social class. It was built to In some instances this stasis has turned into an open up the city to its outer western suburbs and advantage; Clearchannel, the media and allow free movement but due to its failure to unite the communications company, uses a tower protruding up immediate community, modes of movement and over the road to host one of their billboards. peoples have become segregated. This is then represented in physical divides like the Westway itself This is surely evidence of the society of the spectacle. and more symbolic ones that need to be read in order When the optimised flow of traffic ceases, causing, via to be understood. a knock on effect, a halt in the repetitive cycle of production, the driver has only to look up in order for When Le Corbusier made his statement that a new that cycle to start again.At the time the billboard was type of man would ‘need a new type of street’ that was advertising Land Rovers. By promoting a car that has a in essence ‘a machine for traffic’ (Berman 1999) he was literally (according to the advert) a free range of thinking of how modernist urban planning could movement, able to get you into the most inhospitable obliterate the messy chaos and contradictions of areas, it is being placed as more than a mode of modern life. In his cities of the future traffic would flow transport. It is in fact being marketed as a space of freely along raised motorways straight into their leisure. To advertise leisure, essentially happiness, as a designated parking space at the base of the high rise car to those already in cars serves to reconfirm the S.I tower. thesis that the automobile and the roads on which they drive are symbols of propaganda; that they stands As I sat in traffic on a December afternoon on the for not transportation but the development of Westway I tried to keep this in mind. It was proving capitalism. difficult. Despite being conceived with added extras like built in de-icers to keep traffic flows steady, the A40, and the Westway are renowned traffic hot-spots. In a pollution survey the Westway area scored in the top 20% for particles of lead in the air. By viewing the Westway like this, as separate from when it was constructed, the rhythms of the lived reality not the constructed one come to the foreground and tell us the truth about how a space is used. Our concerns therefore are the erratic flows of traffic and the stop- start rhythms that commuters on the Westway experience daily. This commuting time was noted by
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As I stopped on the hard shoulder to take a photograph with the Clearchannel tower looming above the sensation was one of confusion. The Westway as a driving experience was clearly not modernist; it was slow, polluted and when you bore in mind the proposition of uprooting 600 families for its construction, downright archaic. Yet the presentation of the spectacle, in the form of mediation between consumer and image, offers a thoroughly modern way to understand the Westway and the society it symbolises.
The Westway was constructed at the end of an era in British post-war urban planning. It was an engineering breakthrough that was imbued with utilitarian properties and was seen as capable of symbolising the modernist tropes of form, functionality and the building of a better world through science and technology.
Yet instead of following through with these promises it has turned into a site of conflict and contradiction. Modernity here has not entered the realm of post- modernity for it is still actively contested. Rather, I would argue, it is in a state of flux; a form of late- modernity characterised by the segregations of those that are at the forefront of a market led society and those that are on its edges. This map is homage to Debord’s The Naked City produced in 1958. It attempts to give a psychogeographical guide to the Westway area If we are able to consider the modern city as a post- by identifying islets of differing emotional cadence and paths of travel urban space; that is by definition, a space whose within. intrinsic meaning is read through a polysemic variety of representations, both real and imagined, then we begin to see some of the ways in which the Westway contradicts the idea of urban motorways as markers of modernity.
Through this brief examination it is possible to say that the Westway does not lead to a place but becomes one; its concrete form signifying a ‘landscape in which the future was written but found wanting’(Sinclair 2003).
REFERENCES: Berman, M (1999) ‘All the is Solid Melts into Air - The Experience of Modernity’ p144. p167. London:Verso Merriman, P (2004) ‘Driving Places Theory Culture & Society’ V21 N 4&5 p148 Knabb, K [ed] (2006) ‘Situationist International’ Anthology Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets Merrifield,A (2005) ‘Guy Debord’ p31. Bath: Bath Press Sinclair, I (2003) ‘London Orbital’ London: Granta. Zukin, S (1996) ‘The Culture of Cities’ Oxford: Blackwell
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LISTINGS and REVIEWS
NYLON Conference 2007 by Will Davies
Around five years ago, Richard Sennett got together with thought, the craftsmanship of glass-blowing, the auditing of his New York University colleague, Craig Calhoun, to US psychiatry,and the social contexts of HIV/AIDS in Africa. establish a methods workshop for PhD students working in Papers from the London end covered issues including sociology of culture. The workshop would explore rich deindustrialisation in Russia and the UK, local identity in qualitative research techniques, bringing together students South London, and the morality of consumption in Hungary. who were using ethnography and theories of narrative in their work. Goldsmiths students were themselves responsible for three papers, with David Lee’s presenting findings on career Five years on, this group has developed into something with structures in the television industry, Paolo Gerbaudo’s a distinct identity with a base in London (at LSE but with a containing an ethnography of the World Social Forum and growing number of Goldsmiths students and formal my own analysing interviews with government economists. involvement from Goldsmiths Professor Vic Seidler) and in New York.It has an annual conference, alternating between Over the years, the group has become increasingly diverse, London and New York, fortnightly seminars in both cities, with a literary theorist attending this year, and a usual and a collection of essays to be published by Routledge this smattering of political scientists, anthropologists and year entitled Practicing Culture, edited by Calhoun and philosophers. Together with the fact that half of the room Sennett.At some point along this journey it also acquired a are from a foreign continent, this provides the benefit of colloquial name – NYLON, derived from the names of its what economists would call lots of ‘non-redundant two home cities. information’ – to you and me, that’s stuff you haven’t heard before. If there is a downside to this, it’s that sometimes March of this year saw the fifth of the annual conferences, authors feel they receive too much feedback from too many held this time in a hotel in Somerset, in the hope of perspectives, and that if they took it all on board, it would preventing the bright lights of London from distracting involve abandoning the paper. participants over the weekend. Around twenty-five New Yorkers flew in for the conference, and a similar number of But at the very least the conference is a welcome London-based students were also in attendance. opportunity to gather fresh references and discover how sociological problems are addressed in a different academic One of the distinctive aspects of the workshops and culture.This is in addition to the warm friendships that have conference is that papers are distributed beforehand and been struck up over the years between the two halves. read, rather than read out by the author. Rather than hearing immediately from the author, a suitable respondent When 2008 comes round we’ll be heading over to New is identified in advance (ideally from the other side of the York. Quite what will be on the agenda by then is anyone’s Atlantic) who gives a ten minute overview and critique of guess, which is precisely what makes NYLON so useful and the paper.This is followed by half an hour of discussion with enjoyable. the broader group. Authors of papers discover that this method of distributing papers in advance results in an unrivalled quality of scrutiny and critical feedback on their work. This year saw the usual rich diversity of content. Papers from NYU included empirical material on (amongst other To find out more about NYLON and how to join, email Will things) the origins of American conservative political on [email protected]
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Lewisham ’77 by Ben Gidley
August 2007 marks the 30th anniversary of the Battle of More widely, the NF’s humiliation marked the beginning of Lewisham, an event that is of major significance for the their decline as a force in British politics. (Two years later, history of South East London and for the story of race and the 1979 general election saw Margaret Thatcher, with her racism, policing and community formation in the UK at talk of immigrants “swamping” Britain, steal what electoral large. support the NF still had.) The march also helped lead to the launch of the Anti-Nazi League, who brought a new kind of The National Front, then the leading fascist party in British anti-fascist politics into the political mainstream. politics, had been growing in strength and support through the 1970s. In inner London, many white working class The landscape today has changed considerably. British residents were attracted by their anti-immigration politics fascists no longer seek to assert a physical presence on the and calls for pride in Britishness. In areas like Deptford and streets.The NF’s successor, the British National Party (in a Bermondsey,this resurgence must be seen in the context of change signalled by the election of Derek Beackon as a the economic changes that had been occurring in the area: councillor on the Isle of Dogs in 1993) now practise a form the closure of the docks and other riverside industries and of community politics: articulating the day to day concerns the slum clearances that saw the dispersal of close-knit of white working class people around issues like housing. communities. Surrey Docks closed in 1970, one in a series of closures starting with East India Dock in 1967 and Nonetheless, some of the questions raised by the Battle of culminating in West India Dock in the 1980s. In the 1970s, Lewisham remain pertinent.Which strategy is right today – in Peter Ackroyd’s words, “the banks of the Thames were the ALCARAF strategy of staking a moral claim to the bare and empty, with echoing warehouses and waste street while not physically confronting the fascists, or the ground the only visible remnant of what once had once militant anti-fascist strategy of physical confrontation? 1977 been one of the city’s glories.” (2000, p.762) With this was a victory for Lewisham – but did it simply displace the emptying came the weakening of forms of working class fascist presence, to neighbouring Bermondsey and into the solidarity and self-organisation associated with the Labour growing “white flight” suburbs like Welling and Eltham, movement that had provided alternative platforms for helping to create the outer-city racism on which the BNP these residents. A “labour aristocracy” of high-paid, high- vote now feeds? Fascism’s respectability was undermined by skill workers now found itself unemployed, living on the the Battle of Lewisham, but to what extent have the large towerblock estates that were being built to replace material conditions for its flourishing been tackled? And, the old slums. while politicians of all stripes give lip service to a now official and dogmatic “multiculturalism”, how many take a In this context, the National Front proposed to march from stand against the anti-migrant “xeno-racism” that has Fordham Park in Deptford to Lewisham town centre. become commonplace in the public sphere? ALCARAF, the All-Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, planned a massive counter-march, from Ladywell to CUCR is part of Lewisham ’77, a collective of local activists New Cross, to show that the far right was not welcome on and residents that has come together to commemorate the Lewisham’s streets. Meanwhile, thousands of locals youths, Summer 1977. Lewisham ’77 is looking for participants’ black and white, and militant anti-fascists from across the memories of those events. We are also organising two capital, decided to stop physically the NF from marching. events. On September 15, there will be a walk, symbolically The NF were unable to follow their planned route, and only retracing the route of the NF march, reclaiming that ground. managed to get by at all because of police protection on a We encourage both veterans of the Battle to come on the massive scale.The police deployed riot shields for the first walk to share their stories, and people who want to learn time on the British mainland. about it to come and listen. On October 27, there will be an afternoon event commemorating the Battle and The event was a turning point for Deptford. Although the discussing its contemporary significance, with screenings National Front were believed to be behind later arson and an exhibition of footage and photography of August ’77, attacks on the black community, they were never again able and an evening event, with live music. For more information, to claim a physical presence on the streets of the area.The visit our website http://lewisham77.blogspot.com/. You can ALCRAF march was a significant mark of the black also e-mail us at [email protected] with your stories presence in the area, claiming Deptford and Lewisham as a or to get in touch. multicultural community, helping to give it the relatively harmonious character it has today. REFERENCES: Ackroyd, P. (2000) ‘London: A Biography’, London: Chatto and Windows.
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Seminar Series: ‘Regeneration: Challenges of Black Urbanism’.Three half-day seminars were held at the Laban Re-Visioning Black Urbanism Centre (November 22, 2006), and GLA, City Hall (March 20 by Paul Goodwin and April 20,2007).The themes tackled were:‘Re-generating Regeneration: black communities and regeneration in London’; ‘the City and the Grassroots’ and ‘Culture and Re-Visioning Black Urbanism is a research initiative at the Regeneration’. Speakers included: Sayeeda Warsi (now a CUCR that aims to explore new modes of inhabiting, shadow minister), David Ubaka (Transport for London), imagining and making cities from progressive black and Maria Adebowale (Capacity Global), Dr. Lez Henry culturally diverse perspectives. The project will critically (Goldsmiths), Kenyasue Smart (Ileto Caribbean Womens examine the impact, contribution and engagement of black Network), Karen Chouhan (1990 Trust), Michael Keith and minority ethnic communities with the changing forms of (CUCR), Gus Casely-Hayford (Arts Council), Munira Mirza, contemporary urbanism. Black Urbanism at CUCR is and Bonnie Greer. Both the GLA seminars were very well developing as a multi-disciplinary platform to explore the attended (60+ and 80+ respectively), although the Laban multiple modalities and creative potential of the relationship was less well attended due to the relative isolation of the between the expressive cultures of the African diaspora and venue (26 attended). The possibility of some kind of cities in the UK and beyond.This platform includes: writing, publication based on the seminars is being explored. Kim curating, symposia and seminars and community education Keith from CUCR was very much involved helping to work. organise the seminars.
I see Black Urbanism as a cultural project or form of Publications: a series of short online e-books on various creative intervention as much as it is a traditional academic aspects of black urbanism is being developed in research project. The project is trying to provoke a collaboration with Proboscis creative publishing studios. paradigm shift in the way we think about the relationship between black cultures and the city, in three main ways: Curating: an exhibition featuring photography, text, and sound interventions called ‘Peckham Rising’ will be hosted at 1.) the project aims to open up the ‘productive space’ of the the Sassoon Gallery in Peckham from September 4-9, 2007. ‘black urban’: in what ways is black urbanism a conflictual, Curated and organised by Paul Goodwin, the exhibition will schizoid but also creative and productive force in generating be displayed in the gallery along with photographs by new norms and forms of urbanism? Daniele Tamagni and Thabo Jaiyesimi and a sound installation 2.) the project critically examines the globalisation of by Janine Lai. This exhibition is funded with a £2000 grant blackness and its manifestations in terms of spatial practices, from Southwark Council’s Peckham Programme (Southwark uses of urban space and cultural expressions across of Neighbourhood Renewal Fund). variety of social and cultural fields 3.) the project aims to develop a ‘dissident, post-ghetto Film Screening: a film screening of La Haine (Mattieu urbanism’ that can inspire new thinking not just about the Kassowitz, 1995) at the Starr Auditorium Tate Modern, part sociology of the black urban presence but also about urban of the Global Cities exhibition was organised for July 23rd, design and architecture 2007.This screening marks the launch of collaboration with Tate Modern to host a series of seminars – Re-Visioning A number of case studies are being prepared to explore the Black Urbanism 2 – in 2008. Funding from AHRC/ESRC questions the project seeks to explore: networks and seminar funds will be applied for.
The history and geographies of ‘Black Paris’ (France), the Collaborations: Partnerships have been developed with role of black communities in the transformation of Capacity Global (environmental justice campaign group) and Peckham, South London and the relationship between black the GLA (Mayors’ Commission on African and Asian artists and architects and spatial practices. Heritage) for the seminar series and with Tate Modern for the film screening.These collaborations can be strengthened The principal objective for this initial year of the Re- on for future events and help to raise the profile of CUCR’s Visioning Black Urbanism Project was to get the project up work across several fields: environmental politics, city and running and to put it on the cultural and academic map government and museums/arts. of Goldsmiths and beyond.The following is a brief summary of some of the activities of the project in 2006-2007: The principal objectives for the following year (2007-2008) are to extend and increase the profile of the project in the Conference Paper: A paper was delivered at the "Black CUCR. As different platforms develop we are attempting to European Studies in Transnational Perspective": 2nd develop further collaborative projects that will extend the Interdisciplinary Conference of BEST, Free University Berlin reach of black urbanism as a form of cultural engagement, Germany, July 27 - 30, 2006 at the Friedrich-Meinecke- writing and critique in conjunction with the CUCR’s own Institut. The title of the paper was “Re-Visioning Black commitment to socially engaged critical research. If you are Urbanism in Europe: some notes for research”. interested in finding out more then please contact [email protected]
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The book’s task, therefore, is to try and wrest the moral and Abou El Fadl, Khaled: ethical injunctions of Islam away from the confusion of the present and the twists of history and systematically think ‘The Great Theft: Wrestling through how they should properly be applied to the present. It goes from one subject to another—law, morality, history, modernity, warfare, dissent—and makes the argument, utilising Islam from the Extremists’ an impressive array of classical and modern Islamic HarperCollins, 2007, 322 pp., £8.99 (paperback) scholarship, that the way to remain consistent with the Book review by Stephen Jones teachings of Islam is not to see ‘Islam’ as a quasi-political designation, to be opposed to others, but as a body of moral Khaled Abou El Fadl is, in relative terms, a largely unknown teachings and calls for justice. In this way the political content figure in the UK and Europe. Compared to progressive Muslim of Islam remains, but no longer relates simplistically to intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan he remains little read. Only particular territories in the ‘Muslim world.’ In this connection, in the US, where he holds a chair in law at UCLA, does he Abou El Fadl quotes the (I should stress, intentionally have any major influence, and this is reflected in the fact that exaggerated) words of the early Twentieth Century Egyptian this book has no more than trickled across the Atlantic; only scholar Rafa’a al Tahtawi: “In Paris, I saw Islam but there were this paperback version, released a lengthy two years after the no Muslims, but in Egypt, I see Muslims but there is no Islam.” original copyright, can easily be found on these shores. When he reaches the subject of Islamic dress, for example, Abou El Fadl goes to some effort to demonstrate that the Abou El Fadl’s influence in the States is, however, for an Islamic supposed mimicry of the Prophet’s style of dress ends up jurist at least, substantial: his regular TV appearances and mimicking, in effect, Hollywood’s Twentieth Century particularly his appointment - by none other than President representation of the Orient rather than the actual time of Bush - to serve on the US Commission on International Muhammad. And he argues, following on from that, that these Religious Freedom makes him one of most prominent Muslim kinds of flawed mimeses efface rather than perpetuate Islam. voices in the country, if not the most prominent. Unlike The question of clothing is, he argues, one of piety and Ramadan,Yusuf Islam or other well-known ‘moderate’ Muslims modesty; and hence, whilst it certainly relates to political issues he has not encountered troubles entering into the US or (from the ostentation of wealth to the exploitation of the obtaining work there, and so he has been able vocally to make body), it does not back up the contemptible idea that the only the case for Islam where others have not.This book’s promise way to place Islam in the political realm is through one ‘creed of a ‘manifesto for moderate Islam’ therefore offers a rare and community’ usurping or dominating another. welcome opportunity to correct a number of misconceptions, as widespread in the States as they are here. It is true that the aforementioned binary split between ‘puritans’ and ‘moderates’ is rather unwieldy, taking little notice Inevitably when a figure such as Abou El Fadl gains of differences between different present day contexts (save prominence he becomes ripe for accusations of servility, and Saudi Arabia) or historical sectarian divides. Also, the book can easily be seen little more than a lackey for the Bush does not throw its weight around when it comes to the administration. Indeed, The Great Theft seems, on initial thorniest issues. Palestine and Iran are only infrequently inspection, open to such criticisms.Throughout it maintains a discussed, and the moral status of homosexuality is not even seemingly strict division between ‘moderates’ and ‘puritans,’ touched. I suspect, however, that Abou El Fadl was conscious which brings to mind the (normally suspect) rhetorical division of his potential audience: the book is directed at anyone, between ‘normal’ and ‘fanatical’ Muslims. Consequently, it regardless of faith, knowledge of the subject matter, or even comes almost as a strange relief to see the American Right political orientation. It appears, therefore, that the author took fulminating against him. When consistent ‘Islam basher’ Daniel steps to ensure that the book was not easily rejected out of Pipes and the borderline McCarthyist CampusWatch hand. denounce him as a ‘stealth Islamist’ and ‘Islamic revisionist,’ one gets the feeling he must be doing something right. One is therefore inclined to be lenient about these mild flaws, particularly because the book as a whole gets right to the In fact, this effort to label his work as in some way revisionist heart of a very important issue.The author’s ability to provoke reveals its true importance. Abou El Fadl is well aware of the such opposition from the ‘Islam bashers’ and ‘puritans’ of the enormous pressure currently being exerted from many world shows, if nothing else, his opponents’ need to maintain quarters to demonstrate that Islam is a religion that belongs their own - ultimately questionable - versions of Islam. In this to a particular culture, and he is equally aware of what that account About El Fadl lucidly and concisely manages to pressure presently threatens to do (if it has not done so demonstrate that this is not a version consistent with anything already) to Islamic philosophy and jurisprudential norms, not other than their particular political desires. More than anything to mention its possible effects upon world politics. His else though he shows that it is only through together working concern is that the combination of current events and colonial to expose the perversion of religious tradition that we can and postcolonial history are threatening to together redefine reveal this bellicosity for what it is. Fidelity, to borrow a phrase Islam, its moral tradition becoming eclipsed by the blind focus from Alain Badiou, requires work; Abou El Fadl’s point is that upon shallow particularities. if this work is avoided everyone suffers.
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Kings Cross Wildlife – notes on ‘Breaking and Entering' a film about Kings Cross - with spoilers by Emma Jackson
There is a lot of digging in this film.Will (Jude Law) is will find another dark alley somewhere', firmly aligning an architect, a partner in a firm involved in the herself with nature. Ah, the fox again. To make this regeneration of Kings Cross. While musing on his point more forcefully she steals Will's Land Rover, decision to move the office to such an ‘unsafe’ area only to return it later intact … with a fox stole in the (and, while his beautiful wife congratulates him for glove compartment. this leap of faith 'It's great what you're doing ... for London'), the office is being burgled by Bosnian Although the relationship with the prostitute friend is refugee, Miro.Will is disturbed that very night by a fox chaste, she makes him smell of perfume arousing in his beautiful Primrose Hill garden, the fox motif suspicion at home. More significantly, on chasing Miro recurring throughout the film - we see a fox walking after his second robbery,Will follows him home and through Kings Cross - it is, you see, a reminder of the sees his mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche). An affair dark animal heart of this particular neighbourhood. blossoms. Amira is cultured and poor, a Bach playing As a transgressor of rural/urban divide, invader of seamstress. Things get complicated. Will has become homely space and with a cry that is strangely human, mixed up with the local wildlife which – temporarily the fox is a perfect symbol of the uncanny. In this film - disturbs his existence. the tenacious fox and the people who become characterised as 'wildlife' are what the regeneration The film comes at a pivotal moment in the history of project cannot dispel. Kings Cross and attempts to show the flip side of regeneration, the disorder that isn’t pictured in Will’s Miro and his cousin are first portrayed as Kings Cross high tech models. But it is a very neat and tidy version wildlife (this is, of course, before we meet Miro's of urban disorder. Will muses on his job as an beautiful and worthy refugee mother). They occupy architect, 'all we do is fix the windows when they get the canopy of the city,leaping across roofs.When they broken, maybe we need to break a few more'. Could break into Will's office they enter through the ceiling this be an allusion to 'Broken Windows'; the influential somersaulting - their simian nature made explicit by essay by Wilson and Kelling which argues that the Miro's uncle, a villainous Serbian Fagin, who calls him presence of broken windows (1) can trigger a 'monkey man'. After the initial break-in, the robbers neighbourhood's descent into disorder (1982)? wait until the new computers are delivered (and they Maybe, maybe not.Anyway,Will comes to realize that should know because they are the people who you can't keep the foxes out. In fact, the whole deliver the computers) to strike again. Frustrated by experience of ‘letting the wildlife in’ turns out to be the police effort - unfortunately Will happens to have quite a therapeutic one. He heroically saves Miro an office in the only road in Kings Cross that isn't from incarceration with the help of his forgiving covered by CCTV - he and his business partner have partner. Amira and her son can't cause any more to watch the building themselves. Whilst keeping trouble because they return to Sarajevo.And to top it watch a local sex worker 'hilariously' mistakes Will all off Will has a whole new perspective on urban and friend for punters. 'I've nothing on under my planning. coat', she says, while opening it. She looks more 'Boogie Nights' than Kings Cross.The obligatory 'tart (1) 'Broken windows' can also refer to other with a heart' starts hanging out with Will while he disorderly elements in the community. Alarmingly, Wilson watches the office. She buys him coffees and they and Kelling argue that 'The unchecked panhandler is, in discuss the regeneration effort. 'Go ahead', she says, effect, the first broken window.' (1982:5) 'make everywhere Disneyland' (echoing Marxist Wilson, J.Q and Kelling, G.L. (1982) 'Broken Windows' geographers everywhere) but she sagely points out in Atlantic Monthly, March 1982. her unnamed eastern European accent 'It's like the fox in your garden, you move us out of here and we ‘Breaking and Entering’ is a film by Anthony Minghella (2006)
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For all news, events, seminars and conferences organized by the CUCR please refer to webiste: www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr/html/news.html
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List of contributors to this issue, autumn 2007:
Berrens, Karla MA Photography and Urban Cultures
Colangelo, Dave former MA Cultural Studies
Cuch, Laura former MA Photography and Urban Cultures
Davies,William PhD CUCR and Centre for Cultural Studies
Gidley, Ben Professor of sociology, CUCR
Goodwin, Paul Geographer and Urban Theorist at CUCR
Gosper,Alison MA Photography and Urban Cultures
Gummer, Simon MA Photography and Urban Cultures
Haarala, Elizabeth MA Photography and Urban Cultures
Hanson, Steve MPhil/Phd student
Hewitt, Roger Professor of Sociology, CUCR
Jackson, Emma MPhil/PhD Sociology student based at CUCR
Jones, Stephen MPhil/Phd Sociology
Keith, Michael Professor of Sociology, Head of CUCR
Rallis, Angelos MA Photography and Urban Cultures
Sáez, Cristina former MA Photography and Urban Cultures
van de Ven, Ariadne MA Photography and Urban Cultures
Wuerfel, Gesche former MA Photography and Urban Cultures / Research fellow, CUCR
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MA IN CULTURE, GLOBALISATION AND THE CITY The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London. CONTENTS The Urban Globe? Our world is moving from being a global village to an Multiculture, Hybridity and Racism and the Spatial Politics urban globe. One of the big challenges of the 21st of Gender and Sexuality. A multi-disciplinary approach is Century is how to understand the social organisation of applied that draws on Sociology, Cultural Geography, INTRODUCTION / CUCR news by Michael Keith page 1 contemporary urban life. The MA in Culture, Cultural Studies, Politics and Social Policy. The MA is Globalisation and the City gives you the theoretical and dedicated to turning students into active researchers, practical tools to make sense of cities like London, Los critics and writers. Small moments in the City photographs by Alison Gosper page 2 Angeles, Nairobi or Tokyo. Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission by Roger Hewitt page 4 The programme consists of 3 core courses, dissertation The course examines a range of issues from the and a choice of options. It can be followed either full-time Spaces of shared cohabitaion photographs by Karla Berrens page 7 economics of the global city to the politics of graffiti or part-time. ESRC funding for one UK resident is On the Commission on Integration and Cohesion by Michael Keith page 8 writing. These include analysing Urban Youth Cultures, currently under review and may not be available next year. Mind the Gap by Steven Hanson page 10 Literary and Political Milieux, the Political Economy of the Next available entry point: October 2008. London Winter 2007 photographs by Cristina Saez page 14 City, Science and the Technology of Urban Life, Urban Another Way of Photographing people by Ariadne van de Ven page 16 Strategies of Sharing: Deptford TV by Adnan Hadzi and Maria page 19 Olympic Debris photographs by Gesche Wuerfel page 22 MA IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND URBAN CULTURES Audio Theory:We are Spartacus! by Emma Jackson page 24 The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) Social theory, the left and terror by Ben Gidley page 27 Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Beyond the Frame photographs by Angelos Rallis page 29 Magis World photographs by Elizabeth Haarala page 30 Introducing the MA Structure The MA in Photography and Urban Cultures has been A combination of written and practical work to include a The Car Park by David Colangelo page 32 developed in response to the increasing interests in urban research dissertation and a portfolio of photographs and More Than Fun: Festivals, Culture and Regeneration theory and the visual representation and investigation of final exhibition. It can be followed either full-time or part- written by Nicola Frost, photographs by Laura Cuch page 35 urban life and the physical environments of the city. time. Next available entry point: October 2008. The Westway by Simon Gummer page 38 Who is it for? The MA is run by the Centre for Urban and Community Photographers, visual artists and media practitioners, as Research (CUCR), a national and international leader in well as those with a background in social sciences, research on urban and community life. CUCR is multi- interested in exploring the creative interplay between disciplinary and focuses on issues such as citizenship and cultural research, urban studies and photographic practice. cosmopolitanism; social exclusion and cultures of racism; You should have a degree or equivalent in a relevant area. sport, popular culture and music; regeneration and wealth creation; issues of crime and community safety; technology LISTINGS and REVIEWS page 42 and new patterns of digital culture. Nylon Conference 2007 by Will Davies page 42 Lewisham’77 by Ben Gidley page 43 Further information and how to apply: UK and EU students:Admissions Office, telephone 020 7919 7060 (direct line), fax Re-Visioning Black Urbanism by Paul Goodwin page 44 020 7717 2240 or e-mail [email protected]; Overseas (non EU) students: International Office, telephone 020 7919 The Great Theft:Wrestling Islam from the Extremists by Stephen Jones page 45 7700 (direct line), fax 020 7919 7704 or e-mail [email protected]; Kings Cross Wildlife by Emma Jackson page 46 For further information about the Centre: Please call 020 7919 7390; e-mail [email protected] or visit www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/ Mise-en-scene, MA exhibition, September 2007 page 47 List of contributors page 48 Centre For Urban and Community Research Goldsmiths College Phone: +44 (0) 20 7919 7390 edited by Michael Keith University of London Fax: +44 (0) 20 7919 7383 Emma Jackson New Cross Email: [email protected] London Website: www.gold.ac.uk Britt Hatzius SE146NW www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr
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CUCR Occasional paper series
Brian W.ALLEYNE Personal Narrative and Activism: a bio-ethnography of "Life Experience with Britain" William (Lez)HENRY Mette ANDERSSON Projecting the 'Natural': Language and Citizenship in S t r e e t S i g n s The Situated Politics of Recognition: Ethnic Minority, Outernational Culture Youth and Indentity Work. Centre for Urban and Community Research : autumn 2007 Colin KING Les BACK,Tim CRABBE, John SOLOMOS Play the White Man:The Theatre of Racialised Lions, Black Skins and Reggae Gyals Performance in the Institutions of Soccer
Andrew BARRY Larry LOHMANN Motor ecology: the political chemistry of urban air Ethnic Discrimination in "Global" Conservation
Zygmunt BAUMAN Ben LOOKER City of Fears, City of Hopes Exhibiting Imperial London: Empire and City in late Victorian and Edwardian guidebooks Vikki BELL Show and tell: passing, narrative and Tony Morrison's Jazz Hiroki OGASAWARA Performing Sectarianism:Terror, Spectacle and Urban Eva BERGLUND Myth in Glasgow Football Cultures Legacies of Empire and Spatial Divides: new and old challanges for Environmentalists in the UK Garry ROBSON Class, criminality and embodied consciousness: Tine BLOM Charlie Richardson and a South East London Habitus Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor:The Question of Evil, Suffering and Freedom of Will in Totalitarian Regimes Flemming RØGILDS Charlie Nielsen's Journey:Wandering through Multi- Bridget BYRNE cultural Landscapes How English am I? Fran TONKISS Ben CARRINGTON The 'marketisation' of urban government: private finance Race,Representation and the Sporting Body and urban policy
Stephen DOBSON Danielle TURNEY The Urban Pedagogy of Walter Benjamin: lessons for The language of anti-racism in social work: towards a the 21st Century Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 deconstructuve reading
Ben GIDLEY Gordon WALKER and Karen BICKERSTAFF The proletarian other: Charles Booth and the politics of Polluting the poor: an emerging environmental justice representation agenda for the UK?
Paul GILROY The status of difference: from epidermalisation to nano- please refer to www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr politics for downloads and further information.
Centre For Urban and Community Research Goldsmiths College Phone: +44 (0) 20 7919 7390 University of London Fax: +44 (0) 20 7919 7383 New Cross Email: [email protected] London Website: www.gold.ac.uk SE146NW www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr