cross currents in culture variantnumber 39/40 winter 2010 free 2 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

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There is a modality of excess to shame moral panics of youth deviancy or the influence of which means its deployment in political rhetoric is communitarian authoritarianism on New Labour social just as likely to turn on its handler as on its object policy. – as in all moralistic or moralizing discourse. Is it Yet, as the banks were folding it was neither the difference between individualizing shame or single mothers nor young NEETs (not in employment, collective shame? education or training) in black hoodies that were the Thus for background. Our question here would object of the public’s rage but the profession which be how you would relate the distinction you have continues to operate as the nerve centre of the UK made between the structures and experience economy: the bankers. Amidst calls for public apologies, of shame to the concrete political moment of financial business practices were re-cast as the reckless building a consensus around intensified neoliberal activity of individual ‘banksters’. Suddenly it seemed policies in the wake of the financial crash? that the whole celebrated financial industry, the LB: Polly Toynbee wrote a great sentence about backbone of London’s economy, and thus of the UK as the savage cuts of the new austerity: “The price a whole, had been driven into the ground by deviant of everything was laid out, but not the value of individuals frenzied by ‘perverse incentives’, a ‘bonus anything about to be destroyed.”5 What does it culture’ of greed, ambition and excess. Thatcher-era mean for a symbolic relation to be too expensive, cultural anxieties about ‘City boys’ resurfaced with a an unbearable burden? The image of the good life vengeance but with little of the class politics. is too dear; something has to be sacrificed. The Two years on, we can see how much of this outcry attempt to associate democracy with austerity by politicians has not led to a stronger regulation of – a state of liquidity being dried out, the way banking practices, but that indeed it amounted to wine dries out a tongue – is fundamentally anti- little more than a public shaming of the appetites of democratic. The demand for the people’s austerity bankers; an appeal to conduct their business a bit more hides processes of the uneven distribution of risk privately, not quite so visibly. The lack of any change was and vulnerability. Democracy is supposed to hold re-channelled into a call upon the decency of middle out for the equal distribution of sovereignty and England to sacrifice for the national good and to direct risk. Still, austerity sounds good, clean, ascetic: the their anger downwards on those who exploit the public lines of austerity are drawn round a polis to incite without ‘creating wealth’: people who flout the norms it toward askesis, toward managing its appetites through an ‘excess of dependence’, those who regard and taking satisfaction in a self-management in The big question is whether the popular Appetites/ “benefits as a lifestyle choice” (Conservative Chancellor whose mirror of performance it can feel proud and culture of a “civil society” unwilling to let go Sovereignty 1 George Osborne, interview 9th September 2010) . Their superior. In capitalist logics of askesis, the workers’ of the collective good life fantasy secured by a Claire Pentecost ‘shameless’ milking of state benefits allows them to live obligation is to be more rational than the system, beneficent state can mobilize its assertion of its (2003) in areas of Central London which low-paid workers can’t and their recompense is to be held in a sense of priority over market democracy in a way that can afford, and their reckless personal habits burden our pride at surviving the scene of their own attrition. fundamentally restructure the state’s adjudication cash-strapped public services. This looming overpresence of risk and the of capital, and meanwhile avoid fascism. But this is Little of this is new if we look back across UK leeching out of even the phantasm of sovereignty hard too. We remember that the bubble associating politics of the last 30 years but also if we look across across nations and persons translates into such a economic growth with civil rights of the last sixty to elsewhere in Europe or North America. However, complex assemblage. Under the current conditions years or so is an anomaly in world history. Besides as part of various discussions on how to organize and of debt and exposure, nation-states can’t bear to that, though, the demands of the present mean intervene, we felt it was important to consider more admit their abjection, can’t bear that they have protesting not only the state’s servility to capital carefully the affective register that is so forcefully called become mere supplicants for the wealth that they but people’s very own fantasies of the good life. upon. A register that talks of shame and excess outlined have allowed to become privately held on behalf Just as the relations of the market to the state against an assumed notion of a common-sense decency of a spectral growth on whose tithing the state are fraying and changing, so too the destruction still to be found in the working-class heartlands and has come to depend. The Euro-American state is and elaboration of fantasy in relation to what a which, so some argue, can be mobilized as part of a a cowardly lion, a weeping bully, a plaintive lover life is and what a good life is will need to shift progressive politics. With these questions in mind, we to finance capital. It cannot bear to admit that, about and reknot. The response to a potentially approached Lauren Berlant. Berlant teaches English having grown its own administrative limbs to serve radical reconstruction of the conditions of the at the University of Chicago and is a cultural theorist at the pleasure of the new sovereign of privatized reproduction of life ought to be very demanding on whose work – informed by influences that range over wealth, that the wealthy feel no obligation to feed everyone, including the resisters. At the moment psychoanalysis, queer and feminist theory, as well as the state. So the state bails out banks and tells most resisters are protesting state/capital but not anarchist and autonomist politics – has over the years the polis to tighten up, claiming that the people protesting themselves. Without accommodating provided a remarkably sharp and nuanced analysis of are too expensive to be borne through their state, the affective demands for adjustment to the the relationship between ‘cultures of affect’ and social which can no longer afford their appetite for austere ordinary with which they’re being structures. This interview exchange was conducted over risk. They are told that they should feel shame confronted, people need to think about what several weeks in writing. for having wanted more than they could bear kinds of good life might better be associated with MV: Looking at the role of shame and shaming responsibility for and are told that they should flourishing, and fight that battle (with fantasy, in creating a post-crisis culture and a public take satisfaction in ratcheting down their image politically) too. consensus, we are interested in how assumptions of the good life and the pleasures to be had and norms using the language of personal in the process of its production. The affective That which is unbearable responsibility shape the political discourse of orchestration of the crisis has required blaming MV: I am interested in the point you make about ‘austerity’. There is a sense that such language the vulnerable for feeling vulnerable; not due responding to the imposition of austerity by acts conservatively in how social and economic only to a general precarity but also to the political reconstructing what counts as good life, and how problems are conceived, including their causes and fact that there is no longer an infrastructure for that relates to the ‘shaming of the appetites’ solutions, that it both permits and excludes certain holding the public as a public. The public must which legitimates, as well as provides libidinal types of policy approaches and certain types of become entrepreneurial individuals. All of the satisfaction, to the non-negotiable imperatives defenses and criticisms of those policies. The strikes and tea parties in response to the state’s of austerity. What forms of social action or relationship between shame and indebtedness is a demand for an austere sacrifice under the burden structures of feeling do you think it would take major example, how the link of credit to credibility of shame tell us that this incitement for the public for such attempts at reconstruction to rebut this becomes a cipher for all kinds of social violence.2 to become archaic as a public is not going down kind of shame, as it were, with another vision of On the other hand, the unstable affect of too easily. life rather than adopting shame as a purgative 4 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

and adapting this vision to the lineaments of etc. What kind of practices and strategies are austerity? I guess this goes back to the political possible or necessary to draw upon this imaginary? desires or objectives of the mobilization of shame. How does this engage also with affective politics? Can we programmatically or analytically separate You mention that converting shame into pride is adapting to ‘objectively less’ from ‘protesting clearly not a way forward. Yet: how can emotions yourself’, and how? such as shame be acknowledged, made explicit A smaller follow-up question concerns what you and dealt with (I am tempted to say: overcome, but say about the Tea Party being a sign of the public that is too developmental)? refusing to be individualized, which could be LB: You need to say more to me about why shame, interesting to discuss more since obviously there’s for you, is the fundamental emotion of human a lot of contradictions in what emanates from self-consciousness whose presence is a blockage those groups, and many might think they actually to action or flourishing. I’ve argued that we need represent a hyper-individualized and libertarian to distinguish the structure of shame from its impulse rather than a belief in the public. normative experience. Structure covers much: the LB: The Tea-Partiers are a complex phenomenon, sense of what Ariella Azoulay calls the subject a teratoma of libertarian resistance to the state population’s ‘abandonment’ by the world,8 their as well as state actors who are funding and exclusion from the comforts and protections even publicizing the new patriotism of fierce nostalgia of a phantasmatic sovereignty; what Eve Sedgwick, for a time when one could make a decent living, in her Kleinian phase, calls ‘the broken circuit’ of a living that allowed trust in the continuity of reciprocity that induces a reversion of the subject’s life rather than the constant entrepreneurialism attentions onto herself as weight, a heaviness or on-the-make-ness that now links all workers unworthy of being shared or acknowledged); affectively with subproletarian populations at the or what Sedgwick calls, in another idiom, the level of insecurity about the reproduction of life. So then, you ask, how can we reroute shame for mimetic relation that transpires between a society Everyone’s now a hustler: what varies is the verge making a better social world. Is turning a “shame that negates a population (shaming as political and the risk. What used to be an exceptional form on you” back on the state effective for organizing disenfranchisement, moral aversion, and active of subjectivity related to informal economies now not only social justice but an image of a better denigration) and the feeling of that population pervades the officialized ones. state, better labor relations, better sociality that it has been shamed and is shameful The Tea-Partiers do see themselves as a group amongst strangers whose class and collective (thus producing the ‘gay shame’ movement’s of individuals, you’re right: they’re amplifying interest is really not the same, really not ambitious mobilization of exuberant negativity).9 These are one version of the liberal body politic, the public to produce the same better good life? Partly I’m all different explanations for the communication refusing to become a population. It’s also a a pragmatist: whatever works to interfere with of shame as well as different claims about the sentimental public: a world of individuals who the reproduction of mass injustice, in this case, relation of social negativity to subjectifying feel forced into the political by a structural the projection of the burden for revamping the effects. problem in the world that seems to interfere cushion and the net onto the people who need the I am trying to be productively pedantic here. If with their flourishing, but who long for some cushion and the net, while the wealthy hoard more one of the conditions of contemporary precarity version of private absorption to be regained after of that for themselves. But I still think the battle to is its spreading throughout class and population the structural adjustments are made. What it be thought through and won is at the level of the loci such that everyone has to experience the reveals, I think, is that we’d have to think about imaginary: to confront how powerfully exceptional unreliability of the world’s commitment to the different kinds of shame and rage attached the neoliberal and democratic economic bubbles of continuing 20th century forms of reciprocity – this to different kinds of mediation of sociality. What the last 60 years are, how expensive individualism is a central argument of Cruel Optimism – it does form of mediation of collective subjectivity are is, how the idea of a mortgaged future needs to not follow that people feel in the same way their deemed unbearable, and what kind of threat do be confronted in its stark realities, how entirely abandonment or the archaism of their attachment they present? Remember that during WWII the different models of collective dependence need to certain styles of identification, fantasy, and austerity public in democratic Europe and the US to be forged in relation to the reproduction of life pleasure to be shamed.10 Even in the face of was associated with competence and pride, not because there is no money and the poverty is both shaming negation they could feel nothing, numb, shame. The shame would be in getting caught not material and imaginary. disbelief, rage, exhaustion, ressentiment, hatred, caring, which was deemed not just individualism I don’t think it’s about converting shame, dissolving anxiety, shame – or even feel free to be but a diminution of the chances for survival in the therefore, into pride or anything. I think it requires cut loose from the old repetitions. So the desire social: but even then, everyone knew that at the a hard confrontation with and a very difficult you have to name the negation of shaming as the same time under regimes of crisis where people process of changing what the reproduction of core structure and experience of contemporary are asked to become rational for the collective life means in both pragmatic and phantasmatic retrenchments does not feel to me to cover the good, informal/grey economies flourish whose terms. What this means will vary, but its impact on range of the relations between experience and existence is not evidence that the austere public is the political and on the social relations of labour structure that we would need to understand in a sham but that people will always make spaces for will be astonishing, because it has to happen: order to theorize adequately the conversion of a their appetites to flourish in their unformed and there will be politics, and there will be sacrifice, stunned public into a demanding one, for example. chaotic ways. When I think of political emotions I and there will be a chaos of wants responded to always presume that even the norm is incoherent. badly and with a bigger burden on the already What’s unbearable might therefore appear vulnerable unless they converge to rethink their The good life as an already sacrificial as many kinds of negativity, not just shame own investments in inequality and xenophobia, the model (the thing you’re focused on). The state might ready-to-hand fear formations. LB: So perhaps there is not a monoaffective 6 say it’s austerity or you don’t matter, you are In Slow Death I argue that the long process imaginary. But what is collective is what Cruel not deserving of the social. Or it might say, it’s of delegating worse life and earlier death to Optimism calls the spectacle of the drama austerity: think of your grandchildren’s future; or the poor and hyper-exploited is now becoming of forced adjustment. In that archive, what think of the pensioners who are about to go down general through the population, such that mental ‘shame’ is is to be seen seeing one’s own forced with no safety net. The absence of compliance health and physical health are at war (as seen in adjustment, to be seen seeing the wearing away would not necessarily involve shame, but resolute the amount of alcoholism and obesity rampant of the old anchors for being tethered to the world, narcissism coded as autonomy and pride, or pathos wherever a commodity culture reigns as the to be watched or encountered as one displays and weakness, or some combination of rationales collective scene for forging pleasure in a now profoundly not knowing what to do, to be seen that would appear as affective noise. It would beyond which there is no future) and that mental frantically treading water or to be encountered be interesting to think of austerity in relation health is winning (if what we mean is affective, in paralysis (again, there is a whole range of to claims that the vulnerable should recode loss appetitive relief from exhausted sovereignty). Can proprioceptive performances through which as sacrifice and therefore produce an affective people bear to fight themselves for better versions we learn to register feeling the contingencies cushion to replace the loss of other material ones, of the good life for everyone? Or are we now of survival and the negativity of encountering which were both real and affective, a sense of spiralling down the rabbit hole of liberal culture, ourselves as subjects who make sense either in trust that all lives fallen from productivity would where people will only dig in and fight for the our fantasies or the world). The shame of being not land hard on the concrete. The affect not to right to their individual pleasure? seen in one’s incompetence to life produces be borne might be experienced in transmissions GH: You talk about the ways how this many compensations. The worst of them is in of disgust, shame, a tragic sense of not mattering, struggle needs to be conducted on the level the conversion of shame into all the raging or an ironic, manic-comic sense of not mattering. of the imaginary. I am familiar with Cornelius xenophobias we see in a variety of monocultural It might be unbearable to discover how little one Castoriadis’s work on the ‘imaginary institution of movements (from state-based ones as in Israel, to matters to the reproduction of life, but shame is society’7 but I wondered if you could say a bit more community-based ones as all over Europe and the just one of the many moods of affective relation about this imaginary? Clearly, this is in contrast to US). But even in the places where the response that locates persons and groups in the anxiety of the ideological battles that are conducted, won and to capitalist restructuring involves mobilizations forging an idiom of response. lost around, e.g., the free market, family values, into mass body politic autopoiesis, the insistence variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 5

that the state remain what it was, as though it is representation? Can we bear to withdraw our what it was, which it isn’t, manifests a desire to consent from these forms without withdrawing underdetermine the social imaginary. our consent to the possibility (not the probability, What if people were to take the opportunity sigh) of the capaciously social? The left is not the to reimagine state/society relations such that problem, nor is the fantasy of an older working the flourishing of reciprocity were differently class solidarity (I hear this story most in the UK constructed and assessed, and in which consumer from people who lived through the early 20th forms of collectivity were not the main way people century Depression). The problem is that in their secure or fantasize securing everyday happiness? desperation people try to ride the wave of the This, I would argue, would involve a considerable forms they know, even when there is no water restructuring of the place of work and expenditure beneath them nor air to float them. The problem is in the production of ordinary life; but might also that people do not feel that the world is a generous involve a transformation of what people imagine and patient space for them to be awkward in. In when they project out what the good life is, when the meantime they remember the good times. they make images of what will secure satisfaction, I am grateful that in so many political domains and whether “adding up to something” is the best there have been and are good times, though, metaphor for justifying having laboured. “Adding where solidarity is lived and not just projected. It up” is just one way to think about what it means matters for maintaining social justice aspiration to have and to have had a life: it means a radical even when the episodes of animated convergence rethinking of the relation of labor and time, of are minor, of short duration. But, beyond comfort: sacrifice, security, and satisfaction. This involves a we need to make compelling forms for the social huge commitment to rethinking being in relation, (for sociality, for intimate publics, including the and for showing up for the social and sociability. political ones), forms that make taking the leap Is it a world, a gathering, a public, a normative retroprojection of histories that act as screen into the beyond of comfort worth it. It’s hard to fantasy: where are the zones for belonging to be memories of a time past that was distinguished ask people to become more uncomfortable at a fought out? by its own intractable contradictions, which are moment when comfort itself seems like a nostalgic The spectre I am proposing of shifting the now made inaccessible by the affective toupée. fantasy in the bad sense, but that’s where things objects that anchor fantasy and the ambivalent, You know, we might disagree about this problem are: at the end of one kind of fantasy we need to aleatory affective circuits of sociality is not at all a a bit. First, to me, and I take solidarity in this be lured toward better ones, new misrecognitions command to accommodate the current insistence from Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy12, bad taste, of the relation of the materialized real to a on socializing precarity and privatizing wealth. incoherence, wild projection, nostalgias – these projection but now a projection that reorients us Far from it. It means gently to point to how the are the affective expressions of democracy, to a different, better mode of the reproduction good life model introduced after the war was these are the neuralgias, the nervous disorders of life, a different sensus communis, a different already a sacrificial model, with softer shadows of that keep democracy alive for the parties who structure of feeling associated with the good life. longing and shame hovering around aspirations to are included in order to be managed in liberal There are no unmixed political feelings, there is normative positions of enjoyment, and just with capitalist regimes. This is what it means to no unambivalent potentiality for the social. We softer landings than what we now confront. I am preserve a drive in inadequate objects. But know that when we come to the social component suggesting that we must begin again to reorganize all objects are placeholders, stand-ins, fantasy of the political from affect rather than from the all of the kinds of value now challenged by the magnets. Nostalgia is no more like that than ascriptive. There is just the possibility of teasing new normal that has not yet become the new fantasies of a revolutionary multitude. Second, ourselves toward a reorientation in which we ordinary. and I take this from C. Nadia Serematakis’s work can sense a better accommodation of desire and GH: Many thanks for being ‘productively on nostalgia, there are many kinds, the kinds that pleasure, of risk and sweetness, of aversion and pedantic’ on these points. I feel this section is very are fetishes in the bad sense, genuine blockages, attachment, of incoherence and patience. instructive and constructive as to the limitations of and kinds that are weapons, fierce refusals of the (a) promoting shame as part of a political strategy expropriations of the present.13 Who is to say in ‘How does it feel to be a bad from above and (b) similarly in explicating all the abstract? Who is to say what a stuckness is and that ‘lies beyond shame’, with which I mean your what an arsenal is and when they are the same? investment?’ discussion of the limitations of a political/social Is stubbornness always a bad thing? I am not here MV: I’d like to come back to something you imaginary if it was to engage in a discussion to say that. What I’m interested in is the relation mentioned at the very beginning: “In capitalist of a different public. With our impression of of the noise of the political to the potential to logics of askesis, the workers’ obligation is to how shame as a key emotion has risen to the move a question somewhere towards developing be more rational than the system, and their surface of UK government vis-à-vis its subjects new relational modes, not only among people but recompense is to be held in a sense of pride to induce (beyond the shaming) a desire to take among people in terms of the infrastructures of at surviving the scene of their own attrition.” responsibility and be prepared for sacrifice, shame sociality that they create, from the state to loose Also, to a point you make towards the end of has been the key topic for us approaching you to collectivities, scenes of the intimate public all. your introduction to Compassion: The Culture explore further how affect is productive of politics, Third, I have little patience for contemptuous and Politics of an Emotion: “What if it turns out but also how affect works to precisely avoid the judgments about political style, whether of allies that compassion and coldness are not opposite political and the possibilities for a democratic or antagonists. It’s like mourning at a funeral: at all but are two sides of a bargain that the public (as in your concept of the intimate public in you can’t judge people’s styles of living with loss subjects of modernity have struck with structural 14 the way it operates for US women’s culture)11. in the middle of a situation where loss might inequality?” The connection between these two In this latest response you talk more be all there is even though one is living on and propositions for me is that structural inequality explicitly of the investments that people have not dead. So the problem of demanding better as it is produced by capitalist logics effectively for maintaining all that exists. You talk of the conditions of living on has no solution at the level disappears by slipping back into a (historically many compensations that make up for being of style. My view about your complaint is that we specific) human nature, that of the rational publicly shamed. It touches on one of my early have to throw everything at the hegemons who individual, who may on occasion feel some considerations around how affective politics are the real problem. The old left is not the real sympathy for the less rational, because after all, actively works to not become democratic: The problem, it’s the hegemons to whom we consent. contingent sympathy is also part of human nature. narratives we tell ourselves and others about Who really blocks our imagination of the social? But the implication is that when the co-extensivity a past that never quite was. I am thinking Can we bear to withdraw our consent to the of capitalism with human nature (as well as particularly here about the narratives of working- forms that have pacified us through promising with systems of governing human collectives class communities that were based on solidarity, such as democracy) becomes as established as it consciousness, and an understanding of practice has – without any serious contestation for some Photo left: for change. It is also one that too easily is forgetful time already – even in times of deadlock and Stephanie of its own investments in particular racisms and disorientation, the irrationality of the system is so Brooks. sexisms as well as the many internal divisions of individualized that the perception is that it can be the working classes along craft, industry, religion, dealt with on the basis of individual rationality; and not at least ‘respectability’. I fear that much this is augmented by the actual structural of the political left (when it takes public visibility, equation between people’s life prospects and the in the UK at least) is enthralled by a nostalgia for health of financial systems, like pension funds and that past (still) and again is only too forgetful of so forth. The imperative to ‘rationalize’ personal its own struggles, limitations, and the danger of spending is then embraced on the scale of the premising a future on a wrongly imagined past. I state, thus being converted back into systemic am curious as to your thoughts on this. irrationality. So I guess what I’m trying to ask is how that rationality might be disrupted. Would LB: I love that you asked about this, about the rupture come from people recognizing not just the spectre that haunts nostalgia, inducing a that the system has failed them and they have 6 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

no one to look to but themselves now, but that Notes there is a difference between themselves and the 1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/09/george- ‘system’? Thus to fight not just ‘the system’ but osborne-cut-4bn-benefits-welfare themselves as reproducers of it, as you say, and I 2 David Graeber, ‘Debt: The first five thousand years’, guess that is also a very old question in trying to Mute 12, 2009, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-08- 20-graeber-en.html imagine practical alternatives to capitalism, or how it is practically to be overcome. It is absolutely 3 Sina Najafi, David Serlin and Lauren Berlant, ‘The broken circuit: an interview with Lauren Berlant’, the question of the imaginary, but an imaginary and in the near future, people would converge Cabinet, Issue 31, Fall 2008, http://www.cabinetmagazine. that has to admit a collective dimension to change org/issues/31/najafi_serlin.php to talk not just about taking back the state but in any way. Your observation about the Tea Party 4 Mario Tronti, The strategy of refusal, http://libcom.org/ taking back relationality as such so that the as longing to return to a ‘private version of library/strategy-refusal-mario-tronti state would seem not the origin of the social but absorption’ that they’re entitled to can perhaps be 5 Polly Toynbee, ‘Spending review: What’s all the fuss reflected in the UK context as a feeling of being one of its instruments. That would be a good. If about? Just you wait’, The Guardian, 20 October 2010, beleaguered by interests which are scheming to people were to converge around an understanding http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/20/ spending-review-fuss-polly-toynbee do away with the residual state mechanisms that that a bubble is not a habitable world and that allow people to pursue that private version of a liveable world requires admitting the need to 6 Lauren Berlant, ‘Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)’, Critical Inquiry, Volume 33, Number absorption, by and large. So there is generally not reinvent work (I am completely an autonomist on this question) that would protect both the people 4, Summer 2007. http://criticalinquiry.uchicago. a clash of logics, more a vying for the speaking edu/33n4/33n4_berlant2.html working and the nature and relationality from place of a rationality that cannot be breached, that 7 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary institution of is, an economistic one: saving the welfare state in which they extract value then they would have to society. (trans.: Kathleen Blamey) Cambridge: MIT Press, terms of an economistic logic or doing away with it look at all the kinds of work there are and figure 1998. according to an economistic logic. out a fair way to distribute it not just to match 8 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. At the moment, the fight is indeed being led, in individual capacities but for the good of the world Boston: Zone Books, 2008. the cases where it is happening at all, by defending as such. 9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2002, 35-66. what remains of former collective settlements, of Can we bear to reinvent “new relational modes” an already largely – eviscerated welfare state in across the incommensurate scenes of work-nature- 10 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, forthcoming. the UK. But even this – for example, the recent intimate stranger, and not just among lovers? 11 In The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant writes: education protests – is creating optimism on the Can we bear to see the good of education neither as citizen-building toward monoculture (even “The concept of the ‘intimate public’ thus carries waste ground, and perhaps generating other kinds the fortitude of common sense or a vernacular “in difference”) nor as engineering vocational of projects on a wider level for the first time in this sense of belonging to a community, with all the period – rather than just attempts to hold on to the allegories of self-worth, but a space for the undefinedness that implies. A public is intimate when bearable parts of the current situation. kinds of creativity and improvised interest that it foregrounds affective and emotional attachments cultivate in people a curiosity about living (how located in fantasies of the common, the everyday, 15 LB: I love the line Mark Fisher pulls from it’s been and how it might be) that’s genuine and a sense of ordinariness, and where challenging Jameson, that “it is easier to imagine the end and banal conditions of life take place in proximity and genuinely experimental and not, as you say, to the attentions of power but also squarely in the of the world than it is to imagine the end of aspiring to an unbreachable rational space? If we radar of a recognition that can be provided by other capitalism”: we have become affectively so are educated in experimentality and curiosity, humans… The ‘women’s culture’ concept grows from saturated by attachment to the atrophied field of alterity’s comic mode of recognition-in-bafflement, such a sense of lateral identification: it sees collective sociality routed in revelations of what is personal, enjoyment that we are stymied trying to imagine then we diminish our fear of the stranger and another way of relating to others and to our regardless of how what is personal has itself been of the stranger in ourselves, the place where we threaded through mediating institutions and social own optimism. Developing symbolic practical don’t make any more sense than the world does, hierarchy. It marks out the nonpolitical situation of infrastructures for alternativity is the task of in all of our tenderness and aggression. We would most ordinary life as it is lived as a space of continuity progressive praxis, but it’s a daunting task. The refuse to do the speculative work of policing and and optimism and social self-cultivation. If it were collective settlement was that as long as the political, it would be democratic. Ironically, in the foreclosing each other that lets the state and United States the denigration of the political sphere economy was expanding everyone would have a capital off the hook for exhausting workers and that has always marked mass politics increasingly shot at creatively inventing their version of the pressuring communities to clean up their act, utilizes these proximate or ‘juxtapolitical’ sites as good life, and not just assuming the position not be inconvenient, and to be sorry they tried to resources for providing and maintaining the experience of collectivity that also, sometimes constitute the allotted to them by embedded class, racial, and live well. To make possible the time and space for gendered histories of devalued and unrecognized body politic; intimate publics can provide alibis flourishing affective infrastructures, of grace and for politicians who claim to be members of every economic and social labor. The half century since graciousness, such as those I’ve described could community except the political one. There are lots of the collective settlement was established embeds make happiness and social optimism possible not ways of inhabiting these intimate publics: a tiny point many generations in a binding fantasy. as prophylactic fantasy or credit psychosis but in of identification can open up a field of fantasy and de- It wasn’t cruel optimism to think that isolation, of vague continuity, or of ambivalence. All ordinary existence. All of the hustling that goes on of these energies of attachment can indeed become there would be give in the system, spreading amongst the working and non-working poor and mobilized as counterpublicity but usually aren’t. Politics opportunities for living beyond instrumental the generally stressed has to do with the desire to requires active antagonism, which threatens the sense productivity, and yet we know that even in the coast a little instead of work and police ourselves in consensus: this is why, in an intimate public, the political sphere is more often seen as a field of threat, good times so many people didn’t have enough to death. But right now there’s not a lot of easy hours in the day to look each other in the eye and chaos, degradation, or retraumatization than a condition coasting going around outside of the zones of of possibility.” Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint. relax. What expanded was fantasy, not time and disinhibition that provide episodes of relief from The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American not a cushion of real-time money. The expansion the daily exhaustion, and people seem to think Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, p. 10f. of the credit economy in Europe and the U.S. once that if they’re policed, if they’re always auditioning 12 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve the industrial growth had moved on took care of for citizenship and social membership, so too Corcoran. London: Verso, 2007. that, though, purchasing when it couldn’t purchase should others be forced to live near the edge of the 13 C. Nadia Serematakis, The Senses Still. Chicago: ordinary time, and now that’s being revoked too. cliff and earn standing, the right to stand. Welfare University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 17. Plus the revocation of educational democracy, a used to be called ‘relief’. ‘Relief’ must have said 14 Lauren Berlant, ‘Introduction’, in Lauren Berlant (ed.) stand for a public investment in everyone who Compassion. The culture and politics of an emotion. New much more than it was bearable to say about the York: Routledge, 2004, pp 1-13, p. 10. wanted a shot, is an admission that everyone didn’t capitalist stress position. have a shot, and maybe shouldn’t have wanted it. 15 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books, 2009, p. 1. “How does it feel to be a bad investment?” has substituted itself for “How does it feel to be a problem?” It makes me speechless, for a minute, to face those blinking phrases, and to consider the whole history that has transpired between them. So if an intimate public were to form around this crisis of what the baseline of survival is, and what realism ought to look like for the present variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 7 About the Elephant in the Room Peter Conlin interviews Stefan Szczelkun This is an edited interview with Stefan Szczelkun; artist, discourse. scripts are, but I’m wondering what are our current organiser and one-time member of the legendary PC: I understand that your approach to class examples? Scratch Orchestra, who set up ‘Working Press: books by has often been on a psychological level, trying SS: Current examples of what we can’t describe! and about working class artists’1 in the 1980s, and more to understand class in that way. And so I’m PC: But I think they can be described, they are recently organised the ‘Agit Disco’2 project with Martin wondering, with your experience of approaching not forever ineffable. You can find really clear Dixon, in which people are invited to write a playlist of class on this personal or affective way, how can examples, lots of songs, a film likeFrozen River their favourite political music. He currently teaches part- we broach class without it becoming merely or books like Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a time at the University of Westminster and is a parent. personal, or without it being seen as resentment, Good Woman. That seems to be a classic example Peter Conlin, originally from Canada, is an artist, writer an accusation, triggering guilt? Like a petty of someone exposing these patterns, but they seem and organiser, now active with rampART3 social centre personal thing as opposed to a social- and political- few and far between now? collective and researching self-organisation in neoliberal personal? times. SS: I think there are examples of artists who have SS: Maybe that is the key problem. I have for years The interview, conducted prior to the made breakthroughs about this, but the reason we taken part in revaluation co-counselling, which was implementation of the ‘austerity’ cuts, presents views don’t get a picture developing very interested in understanding oppression. The from different generational and national contexts, from these piecemeal practice which was, simply on a very basic level, and attempts to use these differences as a way to breakthroughs is exchanging time with peers: You talk about what articulate thoughts on working class identification because of this silence you want to talk about for 20 minutes and then and dis-identification, oppression and solidarity. The we are trying to talk they talk about what they want to talk about for questions are vast and some of the issues potentially about. There is, the same amount of time. There was interest from divisive. The intention of this interview is to contribute perhaps, some working class people to do that and share common a larger discussion about the current lived experience of extraordinary experience. So the protection of having this really class beyond being an object of academic research and level of clear amount of time, and, also, with the general outside the terms of the mainstream media. embarrassment agreement that what was said was confidential about bringing Peter Conlin: I think a lot of people when they and you could say whatever you wanted to and hear the term ‘class oppression’ would think it an together all be as emotional as you felt, produced a space to the people anachronism or something better applied to India speak beyond the normal boundaries of polite or China. While there is an increased interest in who have made conversation. So there was more chance to explore these insights. As class in some academic circles, and the recent the affective sides of the class experience. So that financial crisis has reinvigorated Marxist critiques Working Press we was a very important experience in understanding published a book on of capitalism, this doesn’t seem to be evident in my own ambivalent feelings, but also in being able the lived experience of working class people, or is 20th century working to witness other people going outside the limits of class women’s writing4 it? But I assume that you think class oppression is the conventional discourses. alive and well. And so I’m interested in something after some work had been Also, that segueways into culture and what done on male British authors by that you and I feel is very active, formational, culture has to do with class. ...I think that fluid and yet considered not to exist. Of course in the Howard Slater5. But people did not seem to really expression in all forms relates better to working get excited about looking at things in this way – UK there is a never ending obsession with class, class oralacy than everything having to go through and yet so many day-to-day experiences are there wasn’t any shared vision of how this could the funnel of not only words, but written down lead to a dismantling of oppression, or something! nevertheless assumed to be class neutral which words, and written down words that relate to a results in a kind of elephant-in-the-room situation. ...Let’s put all of that stuff together and see background of a particular literary tradition. I’ve what we can learn from it. See what they have Stefan Szczelkun: Yes it is extraordinary. But always thought that was a place where something already discovered. No, it’s all kept isolated as that’s the whole thing – when people can’t even could happen, where we could get a bit more fragments. My idea with Agit Disco was to put the talk about something, it shows the power of the elbow room, be a bit more expressive... musics that talked politically together and see oppression. If you can’t talk about something PC: You have used this term ‘the Definition’ (from what that was. As Stewart Home6 said, “There are then there are unconscious forces at work to the 1990 essay ‘Myths of Class Identity’), and it shed loads of agitdisco tracks out there”, it is just silence discussion. And I think that within middle refers to how working class people are taught to that they are enormously diluted in the media. class circles [discussion of class oppression] is feel inferior. It is a shorthand for a set of scripts considered vulgar, because it starts to bring up PC: So in terms of this whole internalized and situations that have been internalized, and inferiority routine I wonder about the ‘chav’ emotions that people don’t want to feel. And produce a sense of illegitimacy, and, in doing so, mentioning it is seen as divisive. I was vocal phenomena as an example of how working class subjugates. So I’m wondering how ‘the Definition’ people are seen as worthless. It’s part of the in a recent collective meeting where we were works today? discussing how we felt about an upper class class vocabulary of today isn’t it, the classic split patron... and it’s difficult to talk about it. I said SS: To me it’s logically necessary that it must between the worthy and the unworthy working to one person, “I went to your wedding and I be the case (that we have been conditioned class? saw the house your parents live in and I found to feel inferior), although I’m not saying I can SS: I guess so. One of our it quite intimidating”. There was a pause and describe exactly how this happens or have seen it friend’s daughter is I felt awkward. It is difficult to say things like described. If you could describe the mechanisms in her early teens that. And then there’s the history of those sort of oppression they would fall apart because they and very bright, of jokes of saying, ‘I’m more working class than would become absurd. And people would say, ‘We but she talks you’ – one person says that they lived in a house can change that’. But as long as they are kept about people without carpets and then pretty soon someone is outside our ability to express and define them, we in her school claiming to have been brought up in a shoe box, cannot change oppression. But logically it must be as ‘chavs’ – that you went to grammar school and I didn’t. I the case that something pretty drastic happened to people who have another friend who is always going on about us. All of us human beings with all these fantastic do not have people who go to university – that all these people abilities to think and do, but we carry within us intellectual that go off to university and say they are working this sense of illegitimacy, we can’t do anything to upwardly class that they don’t know what they’re talking take charge of our own lives. In upper class people mobile ideas; about, and they all use these long words that you can see the sense of entitlement. Now I would ‘chavs’ take nobody can understand theorising about it. So all think that every single human being was born with on popular these things are kind of uncomfortable, and you the same potential to take charge of their lives. So culture without don’t really want to go there maybe, in a normal if you cannot see that character in most people, being sufficiently chummy chat with people. where does it go? So something must happen in selective about it. the lives of young working class people. I don’t PC: Seems like we’re left with an indirect think we are conceived as oppressed people – PC: Class is so often approach as the only way to talk about ‘it’. But something must have happened in our lifetime. So the elephant-in-the then there are blanks, things that can’t be said, what is it exactly that happens? It is extraordinary room – it’s shaping everything and the very fact that we can’t talk about it shows that the mechanisms can be so unknown. The but no one’s saying anything. For myself, some its power. job, as I see it, is to assume that these things did situations in ‘radical culture’ scenes in London, SS: The discussion starts to go into areas that you happen and find ways of getting knowledge of it is sort of a working class environment, and sort can’t talk about within the university setting. them. This is seeing oppression as an affective, of not. There are perma-culture people, radical The discussion of painful stuff might require psychological, but also mechanical thing that can environmentalists, most of them squatters in something like thumping on the table, or ranting, start to be dismantled once it is known. their 20s and 30s who cannot really relate to the or bursting into tears. And this level of emotions existing class terms. They can see it as important, PC: So you could say that one side of class culture but cannot see their own reality in all that. is not part of a normal ‘rational’, as in academic, is to unearth these and to expose what these 8 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

There are also some ties with ‘Class War’7, who have very different genres of music they relate their own expense but under a collective imprint want ‘real working class’ and anything outside to. I would say, ‘Oh, here is a new Agit Disco by so that supported it, people would, I thought, express of that doesn’t fit. Often when class comes up in and so’, and Stuart might say, ‘Oh, very interesting what working class artists think and do. I’d often conversation people think immediately of the but that is not my kind of music’, or ‘Don’t bother thought that if 6 or 10 artists got together and said ‘Class War’ style, and it ends there. And then there sending the CD to him because he won’t listen to to the Arts Council [England] or powers that be, are middle class people who are all very ‘anti- it’. So it shows me how most people are in different ‘Look, we want this!’, we would get it. They would capitalist’ and everything, but reject any reference worlds of taste and genre that they identify with. have to fund us or respond, because 6 or 10 people to working class issues as something outmoded But, how about you just listen to these things saying the same thing is very powerful. Only 6 or and in fact part of the problem. And then there is because it is not about trying to convert you to folk 10, I’m not talking about tens of thousands... a few the situation in primarily middle class settings (in music if you are into the blues. What is needed people can be very potent if universities and is an appreciation of the widest spectrum of they can speak fearlessly. also well-heeled art and activist collectives), where approaches to thinking about politics with music. But for some reason to broach the topic of class will get you, directly PC: You have been involved in a lot of collective no one wanted to or in a euphemised way, responses like: ‘Yes, I organisations through the years. How do you do that – to really have had middle class entitlement, and that isn’t understand class in those contexts? As you well assert ourselves fair, but it has resulted in a certain confidence know, to say something is a collective organisation as working class and abilities and I shouldn’t have to apologise for is a little bit optimistic because in actual fact all of artists. Like some that, as a group we require those things’, or ‘Class these existing hierarchies are right there and quite artists didn’t domination of course exists, but not among us, active, so it is more of a goal. want to be seen we’re too aware and nice’, or just triggering guilt as black artists, and awkwardness. SS: Well yes, they vary a lot, because some things they didn’t want 8 People realise the truth in whatever statement I have been in like the Scratch Orchestra , by to be labelled, but feel all this is too deeply rooted, much of it is its name it suggests a collective – it was 50 or so they just wanted beyond our control and was set in motion before people improvising. In actual practice playing to be an artist... we left the womb, so while it is true, ‘What can we a piece of music it would actually be extremely collective, but it also had an aristocratic and PC: The focus of do?’ Once I had a guy tell me that I didn’t really this interview has come from a working class background because my charismatic leader in Cornelius Cardew. And it had other kinds of senior people who were part been largely on class mother was a nurse, and so the training required and affect – emotional to become a nurse severed proletarian ties! And of of the early formation of it, and surprisingly they contradicted the normal hierarchy by saying domination and resistance, class course having a university degree automatically antagonism from within. I guess this is part of the makes people middle class. the youngest should arrange concerts first. So it turned the whole structure around, so those longer project that has been going on since the SS: Everyone of us needs to talk about those things were there but the actual conscious nature late 1960s of getting away from reducing class to situations. Everyone has their versions and they it took turned the whole usual order on its head. economics, seeing culture as a superstructure, etc. need to be talked about! And I guess people, Something like Brixton Gallery9 was, I would But maybe we have gone too far in this direction? like the guy you mentioned, also need to do a guess, 95% working class, and everyone used to We can talk about attitudes, behaviours, mental lot of venting their frustration, but be told in no meet in this huge open meeting once a month, scripts, humiliation stories, etc, but how much of uncertain terms what crap they are talking when and thrash out the next two or three months’ all this psychological and emotional stuff is tied they wrongly project that frustration on to others. shows. Obviously people who could speak more directly to not having the bucks? Growing up with PC: In a different way, part of the elephant-in- forcibly, who had good rhetorical skills, could get limited resources means you just cannot entertain the-room situation comes from really narrow their ideas supported more than those that were certain ideas, you write off entire avenues; and this ideas of what class is. There is the approach that quieter, or silent, or drunk! But we were aware of isn’t due to feeling bad about yourself, negative we shouldn’t focus on class belonging but rather that and worked against it. It was the most open, thinking, what you will, it’s a material limitation. on class becoming. It comes from J.K. Gibson- democratic situation you could imagine. People We can say the economic and cultural are all tied Graham who attempts to do a very direct post- did take administrative jobs and things like that, together, interdependent, but all too often it is one structural theorisation of class, which ends up in but they didn’t really impose themselves on, or the other. the unfortunate direction of social businesses, well, they didn’t draw power away or bring undue SS: Is it all solely held together by economic lack? but I think this point is a really good one. If class attention to themselves. Well they did slightly, I think that the effects of economic lack and the is seen as a frozen entity, and solidarity is built but essentially the thing was this very open, past accumulation of the effects of oppression upon matching a fixed set of characteristics, then democratic entity for about three years, and very on our psyche are woven together and hard to the whole thing is doomed to a bad end. However, interesting results came out of that. So collectives untangle. If we suddenly got economic equality we if class is something that is actively made, and vary a lot really. would still have a legacy of deep affect issues. But continually remade, then solidarity lies more in PC: A couple of different things come to mind in sum I think it will be difficult to get over that people coming together in struggles and situations when you say that. I find cross-class alliances are mountain range to achieve economic equality and which aren’t entirely known. It sounds promising, not so easily made in collective groups; they can the end of class division without first doing some but what could it really mean? in some ways almost be a blood bath in terms other work to recover our ability to think about SS: Yes, I think that’s an exciting idea. I don’t think of recreating class hierarchies because of a lack these things more clearly. This is talking about the solidarity necessarily means belonging to a similar of structure. But in other ways I was never a big effects and affects of class oppression, class. I think solidarity and culture are really ‘group person’ until 7 or 8 years ago, coming and then engaging to counter closely linked and that’s one of the reasons I’m out of a highly individualistic society, and from the ongoing reproduction interested in culture. When we make culture, that’s an arts education that for all its sophistication of those conditions. It’s about making agreements, we are collectively able is still based on the solitary artist. I felt I sort not an either/or really to come to agreements on things, look at how we of came to the end of the road with that. And – better to advance generate language, and any culture is a complex then I discovered all of these really frustrating on all fronts. set of agreements. And that is a basic mechanism organisations! Which I think are invaluable, right, PC: For myself, of solidarity, surely. Solidarity is based on some but for me this is a different way into a kind coming from a kind of mutually held set of meanings, goals, of class politics – essentially learning to work working class recognitions or something like that. together, countering individualism, but it doesn’t background PC: But it seems that, traditionally, working class come easy, in some ways it comes horribly! We with limited power came from similar kinds of people sharing have to figure out how to do it, and often this is resources, there similar kinds of situations. Or at least that is what almost starting from scratch. seemed to be this we are led to believe. Now the working class is SS: Absolutely, even more, the fact that we don’t choice between much more diverse –different ethnicities, different have easy ways of working on our class differences, being ultra- genders, different kinds of work from so-called low and countering those senses of entitlement ambitious, which level white collar looking work, to an endless array in people that tend to dominate, makes those more or less would of service work, to ‘classic’ manufacturing jobs, situations very difficult. I think I would run away have meant succeeding and let’s not forget about all the situations that are from a collective where I saw that going on! through the most conventional channels and conservative roles hidden by the term ‘unemployment.’ It’s the big PC: There are lots of good people in the groups question: How does solidarity come out of that? (being the dominated of the dominated as I am talking about, but the question is how to Bourdieu referred to the ambitious working class SS: Maybe those 19th century proletarians had it introduce class issues into these situations? climber10), or accepting more limited horizons. easy! They’re all in one great big shed all doing SS: Far from it that I suggest what you do. What In some ways I am talking about refusing either the same thing, with the same blue overalls on, I would like to see is working class artists, ‘becoming middle class’ or ‘staying what has been knocking off at the same time, with the same environmentalists, or scientists, coming together defined as working class’. How do you deal with hooter. Why wouldn’t solidarity come easy in and thinking about their own particular area, the ‘career’ question in this respect? that situation. But how do you achieve solidarity and how they are affected by the class situation. within our possibly more diverse and fragmented SS: ...AFC Wimbledon is an example of how I tried to do this with Working Press. By inviting collective action is struggling with economic situation? ...It is interesting to see the current any working class artist I met to publish a book, on limits of this idea in the Agit Disco project. People necessities that arise because of the success of variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 9

the team. Wimbledon was a football team bought art of ‘passing’ as middle class. For them the idea handles, schema, and all that, is how it works. It is by an investor and ‘moved’ from South London to of identifying as a working class person would be part of a symbolic struggle. We can just let it ride, Milton Keynes leaving their fans behind! The fans the kiss of death. With the exception of people there is a loss in never asking what it means, and it were a community that existed for generations so like Damian Hirst who haul out their working usually means being defined by some other group, when this happened they decided to form their class-ness, on occasion, as a badge of authenticity. on their terms. If you have a festival of working own football club from scratch. The joint resources My bind is that in many ways I can’t identify class music, or whatever, you will have to figure out of about 5,000 hard core fans turned out to cover as working class because I am not identified as some kind of criteria of who to invite, the focus of every productive skill that was required to set working class by any class. My class position is too the thing (aside from one’s friends!), etc. up and run a football club. The fans also pooled indeterminate; but no way am I interested in the SS: Perhaps friendship is key… I wouldn’t worry money from their savings to fund it and so the sorry spectacle of trying to pass as middle class. about who is and who is not… I always thought of club, AFC Wimbledon aka The Dons, is now fan So I can only identify with what is called working working class culture being a welcoming thing. owned. The club is doing well and has now climbed class in a few ways. Also my current position – my Funny thought as son of a refugee. But it comes up to the Conference League. From now on they non-middle class financial situation! – is in some from my mum who felt the exclusion of the class may struggle with the rules and regulations that way chosen and other ways not. I never know if above us that she aspired to and yet had an come into play in the higher leagues and their it is a virtue of necessity kind of thing. But this idea of the East End of London as a warm place financial implications. Will the club be able to stay question undermines class identification, and that would want her (or me?) back, even though fan controlled as well as being successful? Or will is part of how ‘the refusal of work’ May ’68-type she came from Nottingham. Maybe that’s just a they be tempted to take on an investor that will protest has in many ways turned into the basis comfort blanket fantasy? trade capital for control? of current forms of exploitation. We refuse kinds To define things you have to collect them In terms of career questions, the best simply of work as a kind of class assertion, but if you together first... So I’d go about this by intuitively theoretical model I’ve come across is Habermas’ are able to refuse work then you can’t really collecting expressive stuff that working class use of system and lifeworld as a binary abstract. be working class. Or so it is said. What are your people do. How do we know they are working When we get into careers to the extent that they reflections on this? class? Biography; content of their artform; contexts become the most important aspect that drives SS: I just had an evening with an Italian poet in which their work is made public; the present our lives we can no longer respond effectively who does temp teaching jobs, in his 40s who is day financial situation of each artist; a sense of and honestly to the lifeworld which is the direct obviously working class to me but who claims resonance with the informed collector. Agit Disco unmediated communication of our collective himself as middle class because of his ‘good’ is an example: asking (mostly) working class desires and needs; the street, the underground, the Italian education, mortgage and so on (he has a people who know their music to say what music crowd, even smaller groups. The need to protect small flat in Thornton Heath one of the cheapest effected them in a political way. The results start career and what comes to depend on it is part of property areas in London), but also because of to give a sense of what musics are the mindcage that constrains us. Of course the the failures of Italian communists who have lost having pointedly political ingenious ways in which people negotiate this is so many people to the Northern League. Then effects in the minds and perhaps one of the main things we should look towards the end of a long argument he suddenly lives of a quite diverse at… said that he was pleased I didn’t see him as middle group of working PC: One thing I didn’t really get across in our talk class! I think that the term ‘working class’ can be class writers. thus far is what seems to me to be the absolutely taken up as a provocation and strategy rather than With Working dire situation of class politics today, at a time when being too worried about exactly how it is mapped Press I just invited there is growing inequality with a whole series of out at any point… all the people I 11 indicators of this, such as Danny Dorling’s work . PC: But maybe this problem of identification met who Who actually identifies as being ‘working class’? is that class politics is going under new terms? were activist in Anyone under 40? Sociologist Bev Skeggs said This could be anything from seeing the rights some way to “who would want to be seen as working class? of migration as a class politics to ‘social justice’ take part. They (possibly only academics are left)”. Or Barbara approaches. I think of the thirst for collective had to be happy Peters’ observation, something to the effect of: forms that we have seen in the past decade, such with the imprint ‘If you can choose to be working class, you’re as recent factory and university occupations, subtitle – ‘books by probably not’. What vital forces are there to open source production, wiki-forms, and also the and about working identify with? This connects with the importance collectivism seen in community organisations and class artists’ – rather of the current economic situation: The professions self-organised projects – whether this be social than fitting a definition are harder for working class people to enter into centres, co-ops, or supporter-run football clubs. of being working class. than they were in the However, a lot of these are lacking in any class So it was done both through 12 1960s. Real incomes of working class people are language, and generally carefully avoid any overt personal meetings and a kind of declining, and there seems to be no vital class politics, and not surprisingly, are easily co-opted intuitive agreement. movement happening. The only class action the within capitalism and existing social patterns. mainstream press identifies is the English Defence Terms like the ‘precariate’ from the Euro Mayday Notes League and the British National Party. In many movement, or theoretical concepts like ‘the 1 http://www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/phd108.htm ways it seems to be a real dead end situation, this multitude’ aren’t used by actually existing working 2 http://www.agitdisco.com/ is why I wanted to do this interview. Do you see it class people in the UK. 3 http://therampart.wordpress.com/ as dire? In most of the things you’ve said I don’t In terms of activism, who can we identify 4 Richardson, Sarah with Merylyn Cherry, Sammy Palfrey detect a sense crisis or anguish, which is good – as active in class issues now: SWP, Class War, and Gail Chester. Writing on the Line, 20th Century Working-Class Women Writers, Working Press, 1996. it’s always bad to panic! – but the actual situation organised labour (though unions are expected to seems to be pretty bleak. What’s your take on this? 5 Slater, Howard. Working Class Novelists 1930 – 1950, usually work for their members’ interests, not for Working Press Research, 1993. SS: Maybe having lived through the Cold War the working class), what else? Does it matter? But 6 http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ when imminent nuclear holocaust seemed quite maybe the idea is to look for working class culture 7 http://classwar-uk.blogspot.com/ likely, plus the fact I’ve always chosen to live on rather than parties or activist groups. But if we 8 http://www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/phd102.htm the edge of poverty to do art, I don’t know… start claiming cultural acts as a putative working 9 http://brixton50.co.uk/artists/ PC: Mounting student debt and situations class resistance or hidden political agency I am not sure we are left with a social movement. It is too 10 For Bourdieu the climber is in a further dominated where it is harder for working class people to position because they are exposed to cultural become journalists or doctors is disempowering, indirect, hedged, all too ‘cultural’? insecurities and lack the correct habitus for the irrespective of negative or positive outlooks. SS: Maybe there aren’t big flashy organisations positions they attempt to secure. This point is not to be but a whole lot of people up and down the country. confused with the classic Bourdieuian formulation of the SS: I think we should resist these slides, but in intellectual as occupying a dominated position within the longer view I prefer to take an attitude based Maybe we can’t point to groups or activism the dominant class. on strategic thinking and theory. As oppression because of the ubiquitous elephants, but people 11 Injustice: Why social inequality persists, Bristol: Polity, tends to picture us as powerless I think it is useful are there, quietly picking away at their patch. 2010; Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005, to look at the reality of our power both in terms In term of looking at working class culture Bristol: Polity, 2007. of our historic achievements and our current rather than parties or activist groups, I think 12 According to recent research by the Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change at the University of possibilities. Do we emphasise the direness and this could be my next project: To create a virtual festival of working class culture – in all imaginable Manchester. downward trends or do we look at the ways we 13 http://www.workingclassmusic.org.uk are doing well, celebrate achievements, and look categories – to seed it with a few names, even at what resources we do have now that we could reclaim significant venues. Perhaps it could be make use of. It’s a choice of strategies and what is published with the title of ‘A Guide to Working the best use of our time. Class Culture: to all those who doubted its existence(s)’. There is a Festival of Working Class PC: Further on this line. One thing I see in you is Music13 in Liverpool each year but that is the an identification with the working closest I know of... class – it’s definitely not dogmatic or just some theoretical claim. So many people I know who PC: I certainly am not too attracted to the tedious come from working class backgrounds, and who game of definitions but there is no way around it. are now in art and the academy, have honed the Coming up with terms, names, metaphors, coinage, 10 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 The Real Broken Society Tom Jennings Beyond flurries of current affairs sound and fury, the regressive scale of the UK coalition government’s austerity programme is clear. Massive cuts in state social spending posed as a balance to the banking sector bailout may marginally inconvenience the relatively well- off, but significantly accelerate the attack on the conditions of the working-class begun with Thatcherism and refined under New Labour. Withdrawal of welfare and support infrastructure risk destitution for millions facing punitive sanctions for avoiding starvation wages and quasi-slavery conditions in neoliberal workhouse society. Meanwhile social cleansing in housing and education will leave the respectable poor nowhere to go, their precarious positions propping up the service economy usurped by children of the new middle-classes trading in cultural capital accumulated during Blair’s debt-fuelled consumer growth. And as intensifying proletarianisation and downsizing of insecure professions erodes petit- bourgeois security, status distinctions congenial to flexible affective labour represent one remaining bulwark against ruin. Structural adjustment’s pitiless downward I. Family Values Nuclear Family Fallout pressure on the majority’s living standards If pretensions of kinship wellbeing readily implode could conceivably threaten the prevailing In Loco Parentis in hermetically-sealed quarantine, neither do commonsense of competitive individualism as Pungent purgatives for romantic fantasies of surrounding communities escape contamination preferable and inevitable. Yet the various strata family integrity feature isolated couples and from its malfunctioning idealisation. In Michael targeted for increasingly intimate disciplining offspring whose complacent coherence, based on Haneke’s Hidden (France 2005), videotapes of and value extraction remain segmented by market carefully cultivated codes of conduct, crumbles their stylish Paris home are delivered to affluent imperatives – ‘good citizenship’ demanding in the face of sundry real or imagined threats to intellectuals and their twelve year-old son. The hysterical self-commodification and the infinite self-sufficiency. Michael Haneke’s typically vicious partnership unravels as they wrestle with memory, infantile acquisition of material trivia. But this Funny Games (Austria 1997; remade in America guilt and denial once the anonymous ‘stalker’ collective psychosis can only masquerade as in 2008) twists home invasion horror motifs in an also shoots the husband’s childhood home and a tolerable lifestyle if its corrosive existential escalating ballet of bland pleasantries between grubby high-rise flat – the current address of the consequences are mystified – accomplished teenage interlopers and victims unable to adjust to son of his parents’ domestic servants, banished to most readily by externalising anxiety about the the psychopathic translation of civilised manners. an orphanage when they were among hundreds sustainability of the self and personal relations Elsewhere, contradictions of internal motivation, of Algerian protestors killed by police. Exploring via the denigration of others. So the recalcitrant explicit rationalisation and external ramification how history dovetails individual biography and underclasses retain residual mass-cultural utility are less simplistically Manichean. Lucia Puenzo’s social hierarchy, the film punctures the self- as cautionary tales – their projected vulgarity XXY (Argentina 2007) postulates a teenager’s serving vanity of elite Western superiority – the and irresponsible comportment exemplify an polysexuality as an abomination her guardians mystery thriller structure matching audience inability to properly adapt to whatever shifts in must exorcise, for her/his own good given society’s puzzlement with the couple’s efforts to conceal the privatised status quo promise quick profits for intolerance, but the child’s insistence on uncertain from themselves their psychic preponderance of someone this year. autonomy leaves their benevolent authority in evasion and hypocrisy. Infantile envy wrecking Mainstream moral fascism, forensically tatters. Expanding manic protectiveness to surreal subaltern lives may seem a heavy-handed allegory, dissecting and punishing failure to thrive, is proportions, Ursula Meier’s Home (Switzerland even with class and race hatred still fundamental mirrored in Reality TV’s gratuitous sadism. 2009) shatters a static rural idyll as a motorway to Eurocentric society. But emotional and cognitive Humiliation heaped on willing supplicants opens on its doorstep. The adolescent daughter patterns conducive to oppression are nurtured subjected to shaming exhortation and judgement sensibly hits the road as mum, dad and her siblings early in the egos and cultures of the established echoes the miserable dishonesty of alienating breezeblock the cottage into a fortress repelling middle-classes, operating precisely through employment and institutional relationships. the outside world, whereupon they immediately misrecognition and displacement cemented by Trailblazing Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, the sub- start suffocating and sheepishly deconstruct rationalisation and aestheticisation. Haneke’s Darwinian lottery logic peaks in Channel 4’s their own handiwork. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth nailing of the discreet karma of the bourgeiosie is, The Secret Millionaire – worthy survival under (Greece 2009) then balefully revives paternalistic nevertheless, tangentially optimistic here. Though compassionate capitalism depends on fitting the omnipotence in a grotesque tragicomedy of ad hoc surreptitiously embedded in the narrative, the shallow prejudices of charitable predators, with home miseducation, including nonsense language present younger generations’ directly solidaristic the majority left to rot. Throughout the genre, and forced incest, with self-harm the only sane rebellion exposes dissembling moral dispositions though, fashionable counselling-babble about rite of passage. Parallelwise, in Lars Von Trier’s among elders whose comfort presupposes ignoring inadequate bodily and interpersonal health Antichrist (Denmark 2009) a liberal marriage the appalling social roots of its constitution. conceals morbid fascination with regimenting literally self-destructs after an infant’s accidental The White Ribbon (Germany 2009) finds the women in traditional caring, nurturing and death, in a physical and emotional bloodbath of same writer-director resuming normal service, parenting roles. Myths and fairytales of a mutual recrimination and disgust. hubristically delving into the founding fallacies ‘Victorian values’ bourgeois nuclear unit assuage of twentieth-century barbarism but offering no fears by way of reinforcing forlorn hopes for redemption for benighted fruit of rotten ancestry. an advancement that has stalled – hence being A feudal Prussian village’s festering network benchmarks for contemporary gloss across popular of baronial condescension and cruelly austere documentary and dramatic entertainment. burgerdom births a malevolent 1914 cohort However, a range of recent, less commercially of diversely resentful youngsters countering obsequious films buck the trend, scrutinising peremptory patriarchal corruption with murderous personal and family dysfunctions among the delinquency – with blame displaced by default middle- and upper-classes – whose trials and onto long-suffering, if incipiently bolshy, local tribulations it’s perhaps timely to dwell on, as the serfs. Immaculate black and white cinematography Old Etonians cover up the failings of the rich by enhances a metaphorical condensation of hammering the poor with renewed gusto. A brief conditions facilitating the rise of Nazism and its survey below sketches some contours in these apparently seamless acceptance, but too much rather nebulous realms of cinematic endeavour. real historical texture is obliterated to convince. Conversely, Babel (USA 2006) overeggs the postmodern pudding, cherrypicking multiple international issues from the progressive zeitgeist. This third collaboration with writer Guillermo Arriaga concludes Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 11

depiction of contemporary collisions of fate, from class divisions in Mexico City (Amores Perros, 2000) and suburban US ruminations on the meaning of existence (21 Grams, 2003) to a worldwide web of violent correlation. Babel’s Berber herders are framed as terrorists when an American tourist is accidentally wounded, derailing her husband’s attempt to salve her unhappiness, while back home their kids and illegal nanny fall foul of border police after attending a Mexican wedding. Elsewhere a well-off Tokyo teenage deaf-mute juggles frustrated sexuality, grief at her mother’s suicide, and the neglectfulness of a father whose generosity, it transpires, originally set the story in motion. Babel’s deft manipulation of narrative fragments and jumbled timelines weaves love and family melodramas across the planet with the pointed MacGuffin of power from the barrel of a gun. Disparities of wealth and mobility determine both the scale of fulfilment realistically sought and the consequences of mistakes and misfortunes. So when subsistence lifestyle encounters Third World realpolitik, embryonic imaginings of a safer future are stillborn. Meanwhile, the neo-colonial service economy exhausts its bondservants in callous Haitian masculinity in a self-defeating addiction anxiety as visual non-sequiturs highlight the class apartheid, with the relatively affluent blind to ephemeral satisfaction. John Sayles’ Casa de dialogic banality and dissembling of milieux to the human costs of what they take for granted. los Babys (USA 2003) similarly flays a bunch of devotedly avoiding awareness. The ambient noise Their self-obsession insulated by consumerism middle-income Americans prospecting south of and incongruous pop soundtrack jar any seamless allows them neither to connect meaningfully the border among those with no socio-economic simulation of experience, forcing viewers to see with each other nor avoid trampling over the less option but to cash-in the fruit of their wombs. through the eyes of an anti-heroine in abject fortunate they depend on. The miscommunication The primitively accumulating adopters neither disarray. Paradoxically, Martel’s surgical precision hinted in the title flows not from faulty cultural acknowledge the trade’s obscene ethics nor stems from deep love for her family but hatred of or linguistic translation, but the contradictions of empathise with their benefactresses, so consumed its institutional prototype for societal structure, underlying sociopolitical conceptual frameworks are they by the magical promise of infantile whereas vagaries of desire ruin individual and shaping comprehension and action. The characters’ possession. Ben Affleck’sGone, Baby, Gone (USA collective integrity and cohesion while promising negotiations of corresponding institutional 2007) then poses even more baldly the dilemmas liberation from the dead hand of civilisation as we discourses which regulate lives and constrain arising from differentially classed valuations of know it. These dialectics resonate strongly with potential nonetheless yield misery for rich and need and care, when borderline innercity mothers Argentina’s trajectory – the murderous military poor alike – with outcomes far starker for those are clandestinely robbed by rogue public servants Junta years whose horrors resist attention, through whose interests are marginalised most. Babel may seeking their own domestic salvation. to current economic and social crises which once scarcely capture deep structures of domination seemed liable to prompt revolution. Yet beyond radiating globally through social fabrics, but it Servicing the Domestic Economy parochial detail, light is undoubtedly shed on does underscore that, beyond men’s self-important Even given material and cultural wherewithals universal concerns – not least, the perenially posturing and decidedly unfunny games, the most securely in place, though, holding home and fashionable refusal among middle-classes poignant pressure-points devolve the onus onto hearth productively together takes its toll. everywhere to acknowledge the profound political women’s labours maintaining bodies, souls and Treating mature order as mere veneer, Lucrecia implications of their identity. socialisation. Martel’s depictions of the Argentinian provincial Two more South American tales purportedly bourgeoisie see adults as essentially arrogant prioritise insubordinate female perspectives II. The Welfare of Queens children, characterising in form and content in specifying their parasitisation. Sebastián their aimless anomie and compulsive moral Silva’s The Maid (Chile 2009) intimately portrays Fertility Rites and Wrongs confusion combined with unthinking diffidence a misanthropic housekeeper whose lifeblood If breeding is a fundamental biosocial function of and contempt towards the lower classes. The drains in drudgery sustaining petulant employers. femininity, its primal mystique occasions febrile Headless Woman (2008) further explodes Meanwhile Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow connections between resource control, cultivation conservative pretensions of propertied propriety, (Peru 2008) pits indigenous endurance against and acculturation. Transcending elite bloodlines, excavating fetid depths of family dynamics whose civilised savagery – first neoconservatively in nervousness around reproduction percolates contradictions radiate outwards to overdetermine sexual atrocity during 1980s guerilla insurgencies, down hierarchies of privilege, now prompting domination, with distraction and disavowal then neoliberally in the plunder of cultural proliferating technical and discursive regulatory simultaneously facilitating class stratification’s inheritance. But the latter’s capricious perpetrator apparatuses. With the affluent increasingly real violence and concealing its beneficiaries’ is surely the director’s alter-superego projecting experiencing the practical obstacle of difficulty responsibility. The titular middle-aged dentist a rapacious other. Moreover, both films’ cheerful conceiving, so viable biomass must be harvested anchors an extended tribe busy with the trivial lower-class life, along with Silva’s infinitely patient from elsewhere – accomplished electively in Lisa trials and tribulations befitting their station, mistress, represent classic ruses displacing bad Cholodenko’s The Kids Are Alright (USA 2010), barely registering the army of indigenous minions faith – the weight of the world’s phantasmically whose enlightened lesbian moms share sperm doing the donkeywork. One day she fears she may rosy glow mitigating guilt while validating donation. Their curious kids inconveniently have accidentally run over one of their youngsters objectifying sentiment. No such palliative pathos reintroduce the originally anonymous passive in the rain. Horrified, she daren’t go back to punctuates Claire Denis’ mordant White Material male member into the household, destabilising its check, sinking into almost catatonic detachment (France 2009), whose European plantation owner sedimentation into patriarchal order and unruly about the damage possibly done – primarily desperately rushes to extract a last harvest of earthmotherhood – with resolution partly hingeing to her flattering self-image. Still, the genteel West African coffee before civil war overruns her. on the offhand dismissal of faithful subordinates everyday sheen scarcely suffers apart from her Indentured locals give up the collaborative ghost whose distress isn’t even noticed. Götz Spielmann’s nearest and dearest closing ranks in assurance en masse, her husband has jumped ship, and the Revanche (Austria 2009), on the other hand, that the problem has gone away, despite not even son sinks into psychotic stupor – before fitfully admirably balances a hapless lumpenprole’s existing in the first place – collusive reconciliation rousing to join drug-addled child rebels routinely dangerous virility against the upright, uptight eventually being signalled by minor cosmetic butchered by government forces whose leaders sterility generally strangling fulfilment all round. renewal, and lo and behold, history is rewritten. vie for remaining crumbs. Her imperial majesty However, vexatious lower-class surpluses of Bold technical disjunctions layer allusion and thus left barren to face the karmic storm, the fecundity but fatal shortfalls in other forms of metaphor, with deliberately awkward framing, end-credit dedication – “To all the fearless young capital almost invariably precipitate unequal focus and camera movement obscuring crucial rascals” – nonetheless plants seeds of hope among exchange – most evidently in Laurent Cantet’s details to powerfully evoke fractured mermory catastrophe’s progeny even if no nourishable Heading South (France 2006), whose middle-aged and perception. Flirtation with generic thriller grounds are intellectually identifiable on its female sex tourists mercilessly vampirise young conventions dissolves into pervasive dreamlike biopolitical terrain. 12 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

indulging them accrues costs which threaten indignity for her audacity. With negotiable III. A Poverty of Aspiration the whole inherently tenuous house of cards of options negated and even contrite rapprochement Downwardly Mobile Makeovers serene status, undermining its ability to reproduce intolerable, she chooses life as a fugitive murderer. itself socially and materially – and thus tainted Lucia Puenzo’s The Fish Child (Argentina 2009) Fortunately for them, however, Western matriarchs feminine goods represent occupational hazards comparably gestures at conflictually compulsive need no longer persevere with patriarchal for smug illusions of security demanding strict rites of passage, before morphing inexorably overdetermination, thanks to feminisms’ erosion cultural policing. So intolerable conduct should into another irreversible insurrection against of male supremacist hegemony. With faultlines take a battering in Roger Eyre’s spiteful Notes affluence. A sullen daughter of a seedy Buenos prised open in the combined and uneven on a Scandal (UK 2006), which instead strives Aires judge prepares elopement with a sexually development of liberal individualisation and to forgive a beautiful bohemian schoolteacher’s exploited Paraguayan maidservant, but the latter’s commodity fetishism, further lines of flight paedophilia. This gymnastic moral contortion is framing for his honour’s execution prompts become available to women of means to seek achieved by excoriating her bitter and twisted descent into overwrought noir and sex-slave passionate independent self-realisation without spinster ally as a psychosocial leech barging into jailbreak to salvage romance. The title’s mythic shouldering burdens of guilt for the wreckage. professional bastions but incapable of capitalising Guarani guardian of dead children’s spirits echoes But with newly sovereign selves under injunction on coveted upward drift. The spectacularly everywhere – lamenting Argentina’s specific to grow and flourish, the flypapered pedestal of differential denigration is compounded by state-sanctioned ‘disappeared’ as well as generic the goddess loses its allure and madonna-whore angelic male innocence, unerringly reinforcing exiles to economic necessity; now extending to trapdoors their purchase. Archaic romance righteously inequitable battlelines of sex and those relinquishing comfortable cushioning, plus trajectories then unravel, whereupon costume station where the emotive force of shame cements all disappointed sophists of bourgeois order. With melodrama revisionisms reassert the last instance respectability’s rule. its imaginary societal institution irredeemably of capital frittered away from the commanding deathly – condensed in the sordid prison-industrial heights once libidinal investment refuses to Disrespect Agendas Oedipal complex the implicated magistrate valorise the same old straitjackets. Pascale threatened to expose – his family had itself Ferran’s aseptic Lady Chatterley (France 2006) thus Though the bourgeois edifice can survive mothers already expired. Only structural nodality and dilutes D.H. Lawrence’s surrender to shameless teetering over the cultural abyss, if somewhat depleting its haughty cachet, disillusionment worldly and cultural infrastructure ever gave it an with the alienating repercussions of recuperation approximation of life, but when those labouring can’t be quashed indefinitely. Anne Fontaine’s low to animate it vacate the premises, along with Natalie (France 2003) naughtily mocks the two- the artistic goods the lovers filch to fund exodus, faced mythos of fidelity to the nuclear family’s nothing of substance remains bar the stench. alms race when a high-powered matron turns Moreover, the screenplay’s apparently proletarian private eye, hiring a presentable escort to prove agent provocateur of universal lust herself suspected spousal philandery. But the mischievous actually originated in contrasting constellations of temptress intuits from the tricks of her trade incestuous privilege – more poignantly deploring that disgust disguises desire. So she trangresses the tragic sins of paternal power, but no longer job descriptions and fabricates evidence for her pretending to appreciate the positions of those employer’s delectation, seducing her with erotic who never harboured such vain hopes to be embroideries of her own prurient wishes. Fontaine punctured. wisely holds back from healing the resulting open wounds of class and sexuality – whereas Atom IV. The Socio-Economic Crisis Egoyan’s bloated remake, Chloe (USA 2009), slams the penthouse door shut before the whore can bolt. Failures of Psycho-Social Cohesion With pompous angst humourlessly misconstruing Unsurprisingly, children reared amidst such the source’s subversive refusal of a traditionally destructive patterns of intimate passion deeply sticky end for a femme fatale’s attraction, he internalise their elders’ disaffection. Supposedly transforms the women’s crossborder ambivalence secure emotional boundaries and channels for into equalised frustrated yearnings for what the cathexis deliver, at best, anxious dissatisfaction other is mistakenly assumed to safely possess. But bequeathing confused fledgling egos guided by this enlightened evenhandedness wishes away neither coherent models for interpersonal fantasy vastly unbalanced forces mustered in support – a nor intelligible templates organising desire repressed reality which returns in thoroughly into agency. However, reliably banal economic reactionary restoration. Dangerous instability is flows nourishing vicissitudes of bodies and souls doubly annihilated – tellingly, when the upstart are more readily intuited – with a plethora of arriviste turns her beady eye on the children – personality deviations deploying the self’s flesh sacrificing both the stirring soul of the wife and its and blood adornment as manageable social capital, reflection in the broken body of the lover and her encouraged by media commodifications of callow degraded lower feminine faculties. youthful sexuality. So, reversing American Beauty’s Denis Dercourt’s The Page Turner (France 2006) (Sam Mendes, USA 2000) parental regression to is another nubile aspirant sabotaging marriage’s adolescence when the suburban family fractures, sanctity – born now of envious hatred rather David Ross’ disreputable The Babysitters (USA than need, let alone playful gender-baiting. 2007) pursues its incestuous logic with high-school carnality, emphasising sensual mutualism in a Her audition ruined by a visiting star’s casual senior prostitutes tricking college funds from liaison still ultimately foundering on rocks of carelessness, a piano prodigy turns the tables each other’s fathers. This film’s hopeless plea for proprietary and polite acceptability. Saul Dibb’s years later insinuating herself as indispensable orthodox Oedipality matches the dishonesty of The Duchess (UK 2008) similarly exploits Lady Di’s factotum. Sham adoring devotion fools the self- British television’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl (Lucy postfeminist fairytragedy in a coffeetable biopic obsessed diva so successfully that she falls in love, Prebble, 2007-10), whose happy high-class hooker of her nineteenth century Devonshire precursor whereupon her erstwhile paramour vanishes – in lifestyle entrepreneurship conceals its real-life – complete with burlesque couture, uncourtly vitriol inverting the already ruined hopes of her source’s temporary pragmatics to pay tuition fees. dalliance and tepid pseudopolitical dabbling. humble family’s investment in the future. That any Elsewhere, in more believably callous worlds, Back in the present, Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love creeping class-conscious promise of sociosexual desperate contortions of sexual subjectification (Italy 2009) honours Antonioni and Visconti’s intercourse can never be trusted, given the yield predictably despiriting results. wallowing in exquisite decadence, with a perfect alien incomprehensibility of the harbingers, is Somewhat superfluously, David Mackenzie’s nouveau riche wife plumping for middlebrow thereby brought home once more. Nevertheless, Spread and Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend epicurean earthiness to abandon her ice-cold its heroines occasionally genuinely burn sundry Experience (both USA 2009) convey the self- industrialist aristocrats just as they sell out to bridges of accrued familial, material and defeating anaesthesia of personable young global speculators. embodied distinction, irrespective of cost-benefit American gigolos and escorts exchanging material Affairs become even thornier as passage calculation. Catherine Corsini’s Leaving (France security for mechanical simulations of erotic down class-structural snakes-and-ladders may 2008) slyly foregrounds the modern moneyed intensity with surrogate parent clients – a process tip miscreants into social oblivion rather than overconfidence that there is no alternative, irrevocably spoiling any mutually meaningful or marginally less rarefied airs and graces – where contriving a bereft husband’s cost-cutting coming lasting relations outside of cynical manipulation. pernicious double standards preserve men’s back to haunt him as his wife escapes with the More intriguingly, in Guillermo Arriaga’s prerogatives to control purse-strings and pursue subcontracted handyman. A subsequent campaign overwrought The Burning Plain (USA 2008) a promiscuous relations. These open secrets of legal and financial attrition makes explicit the woman’s self-harm manifest in perilous one intelligibly populate entertainment genres hostile instrumentality inherent in objectified night stands stems from childish anguish at her pitched at pressurised middle-class women, whose relations miming mature realism which also matricidal interruption of a clandestine affair – ‘polymorphous perversities’ are judged far more catalysed her betrayal. The joyous fleshly intensity whereas a sex addict in Clarke Gregg’s Choke (USA punitively not least because, amidst the manic of the adultress in renewed youthful fire yields 2008) endlessly seeks climactic lack of affect after multitasking maintaining domestic machinery, grim determination, but every turn of the bitter a manically exciting and unstable boyhood. But serious peccadilloes are harder to hide. Worse, cuckold’s credit-crunching screw inflicts vindictive irrespective of the exotic or mundane specifics variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 13

of disturbance, hysterical efforts to square its malice – perhaps glimpsing the ex-Soviet Bloc circular intrapsychic arguments eventually exhaust shock doctrine’s cannibalistic sex-slavery whose motivation to persevere. Various means of escape criminal inhumanity David Cronenberg’s Eastern then aim to rid the self of unbearable attachment Promises (UK 2007) magnifies. But obsessive – whether in isolated communion with idealised negative nostalgia and defunct defences of nature in Sean Penn’s Into The Wild (USA 2007), an heroic individuality preempt dialectics – upper-class pregnant junkie’s refusal of parental yielding resigned fait accomplis prefiguring regeneration in Francois Ozon’s The Refuge (France and rubberstamping renewed barbarism. So 2009) or, in Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the present exploration concludes with a film Pippa Lee (USA 2009), the wholesale suppression the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians conceived and executed well after the financial of individuality as trophy wife. are preachers, and the preachers are politicians ... meltdown which supposedly changed everything, Sadly the dynamics of hollow characters The Bad People want us to have more dough, and which also secretes within itself a germinal seeking impossible completion prevent them the Good People are fighting to keep it from us. appreciation that another way is possible. stewing in their own solipsistic juices, fanning It’s not good for us ... If we all had all we wanted Juan José Campanella’s The Secret In Their Eyes out into threadbare fabrics of sociality with to eat, we’d crap too much. We’d have inflation in (Argentina 2009) first flirts with derivative cop markedly more warp than weft. But the radical the toilet paper industry ... That’s about the size of capers, as retired prosecutor’s assistant Benjamin unknowability of others lights fuses of furious some of the arguments I’ve heard” (Orion Books reminisces about his mid-1970s drunken genius frustration whose tantrums explode childish edition, 2002, p.105). sidekick Pablo, wisecracking like Latin Starsky romance – in cretinous designer paranoia in Doug Adding that most avoid awareness of how and Hutches battling the corrupt Buenos Aires Liman’s Mr and Mrs Smith (USA 2005) or more screwed up things are by internalising rules of justice system prior to dictatorship. Cheap and realistically restrained European cosmopolitanism respectability and scapegoating non-conformists, cheerful kitsch then darkens, cross-fertilising in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (Germany 2009). Thompson plausibly accounts for particular crime procedural, romance and political thriller Alternatively, friendship networks bear brunts horrors and hypocrisies entirely from serially to meditate on love and hate, guilt and regret of shallow self-satisfied snobbery, from drearily homicidal sociopathic attitudes, yet ascribing – melodramatically contrasting passions and vacuous teen melodramas and romcoms to tedious equal culpability to biography and social obsessions and their intimate effects where, timeless middle-class enclaves blissfully detached institution in nurturing such outcomes. despite awkward shifts of tone, the structural from vulgar hardship substituting bitching about The film’s glossy 1950s West Texas supplants flexibility leaves many questions satisfactorily fashionable distinction for guts and bite – witness Ford’s alienated understanding with transparent unanswered. Stressing the partners’ emotional and Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives or the reality – spectacularising extreme trangression investigative synergy reflecting shared humble Four Weddings/Notting Hill/Bridget Jones franchise to ignore the inherently collusive nature of origins, flashbacks revisit a traumatic case – a splenetically trashed in Stephen Frears’ Tamara mainstream morality and continuity between raped and slaughtered newlywed whose bereft Drewe (UK 2010). In fact, no matter what fairytale exploitative societal hierarchy and individual husband trusted their premature assurance of sidetracks paper over the cracks – from timid monstrosity. Here, lurid exceptions masquerade closure. They eventually identify the psychopath hipster mysticism tapping magical supernatural among comforting norms, parroting the psychotic responsible, but empathetic solidarity sours power to any number of surreal serial thrillers, logic of detached compulsion which drives ‘freaks’ with our hero’s shy infatuation with aristocratic identity assassins and agents secret even from like Ford as well as other exemplary embodiments high-flyer boss Irene, who equally hesitantly themselves – the old economy’s forces and of capitalism’s congenital antisociality. The reciprocates – neither summoning the cojones government media men simply can’t put Humpty’s deaths of twinned femmes fatales are thus to act. Benjamin’s departmental nemesis springs greedy frightened babies back together again; and anatomised with morbid fascination but merit the killer from life sentence to death squad therefore we all suffer the consequences. mere workmanlike paragraphs in the book operations, wherepon his protests precipitate illustrating macho prejudice – Joyce seeking Pablo’s assassination. He escapes thanks to Irene’s power’s covert endorsement, risking expulsion by Anti Social Bourgeois Orders contacts, and back in the present the couple polite society which craves her; Amy demanding belatedly shack up. Rendering explicit neoliberal narcissism’s overt affirmation to avoid the former’s fate. inexorable projection of self-hatred, a rich- Social and official constraints on perception and Their killer’s conduct stands for patriarchal comprehension here influence immediate action kid house-party in Gael Garcia Bernal’s Deficit relations generally, where the sadomasochistic (Mexico 2007) degenerates into venal discord and retrospective assimilation in individual and perversity of domination is reinforced through collective biography, so this brief encounter with counterpointing the corrupt downfall of financier denial – desire being fatal because it must parents. Olly Blackburn’s Donkey Punch (UK vicious, pernicious history might resonate with be repressed and displaced into partial, rigid anyone’s shared suffering. But whose attitudes, 2007) then twists teen horror tropes, with sexual pathways destined to frustrate and escalate. But venture capital coming unstuck when stockbroker- situations and potentials count? The lower-class with women’s passive complicity now explained victims had no protection against brutal reality to belt scions lure onto daddy’s yacht package-tour as complementary personality defects, masculine lasses more worldly than anticipated. And if it’s allow guilty distance from the distress of others control materialises as natural order – repeating – whereas, like his quarry, Benjamin ‘got out of symptomatic how the hard-won spoils of class the fetish’s psychological purpose and rewarding war are risked for whimsical cheap thrills, Sidney jail free’. Representing social democracy’s uneasy feminist complaints of simple misogyny. But Ford monopoly of professional middle- and progressive Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (USA also models the constitutive camouflage of false 2007) turns the hatchet-job terminally inward upper-classes, our paramours’ personal truth and self in class stratification, stifling offences to pious reconciliation helps them imagine that everyone’s – its botched smalltime heist a rancid family propriety which jeopardise the interests of the collapse whose offspring hyenas pick emotional, satisfactorily moved on. But liberal pretensions powerful. Closing the gap between his distorted secured no justice – their entire shambolic economic and bodily bones of hapless petit- apperceptions of his lovers and their own potential bourgeois forebears. But despite tentatively careers as well as private lives, implicitly, wastes agendas arguably mirrors Thompson’s misanthropy, of time – stranding the grieving widower to deal prophesying late-capitalist nihilism’s universal but his pessimism subtly pinpointed bourgeois disaster, such theatrical experiments rarely alone with the repercussions, in a direct, robust, society’s incapacity to reliably apprehend, care unmediated manner their worldviews cannot generalise circumscribed circumstances to entire about, or benefit those at the bottom of its heap. dysfunctioning communities – as hard-boiled down accommodate. Furthermore, specific historical in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me circumstances expose another secret in this story’s (USA 2010). V. The Big Bad Society eyes. Its brave new world of affectionate national This adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel Abstracting small-scale doldrums to wider world partnership, settling unfinished business from a trades dark literary interior monologue for vivid disorder, Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (USA 2000) painful past, embarks in 1999. Yet within two years visualisation. Concealing raw hatred, Deputy indecently overviews an English stately pastoral Argentina’s casino capitalism catastrophically Sheriff Lou Ford’s affably dim Deep-South standing for the universe of Western incivility – crashed, much earlier than elsewhere, leaving demeanour discursively bludgeons everyone he like younger ensemble exponents Paul Thomas millions of lives again in ruins. Wishing away the encounters – thinly veiling narcissistic self-pity Anderson and Iñárritu, only patchily overcoming material foundations of social crisis thus simply which evaporates when imagined slights threaten mannered modernist stylisation. Arrogant increases the likelihood that projected solutions the grandiose paranoia typical of borderline overreach also cripples Lars Von Trier’s faux- remain flimsy fantasies, destined to precipitate syndromes. So, professional and personal Brechtian Dogville and Manderlay (Denmark 2003 tragedy and farce – as well as critical acclaim, entanglement with prostitute Joyce punctures and 2006), creditably failing to entwine imperious misreading the fluffy denouement’s red-herring his character armour, unleashing suppressed ruling-class vanity and stubborn subaltern as redemptive resolution. Unless, that is, ordinary hostility and undermining fatally fragile backwardness. Similarly, pretentious television folk forgo mourning the inability of their ‘bettters’ boundaries in relation to childhood sweetheart dramas aspiring to literary novelistic ambit to safeguard their lifeworlds, and take it upon Amy. Ford’s pathology stems from sadistic usually prefer pandering to power in mimicking themselves together to hold the future to account. fathering in a miserable middle-class background, epochal insight, while more trenchant critiques in contextualising his sexual proclivities and modus The Sopranos (David Chase, USA 1999-2007) and www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk operandi, but in mistaking cod-Freudian conceit The Wire (David Simon/Ed Burns, USA 2002-8) http://libcom.org/blog/4271 for moral core Winterbottom expunges the author’s succumb to analogous strangleholds of tragic withering cultural commentary. For example, determinism and naturalistic fixation. At least here’s the anti-hero’s rejoinder to a doomed patsy Red Riding (Tony Grisoni, UK 2009) intractably dubbing him fair and honest: dredges the obscene unconscious underbelly of “We’re living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar mainstream morality facilitating Thatcherism’s 14 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 Poverty Porn and the Broken Society Gerry Mooney and Lynn Hancock Once again, people experiencing poverty are basis – yet it is clear that it reflects middle class represented as among the key ‘problem’ groups antipathies and angst while at the same time in the UK. Nothing new there – since the mid delineating in working class communities who the to late nineteenth century, with relatively few ‘real’ poor are that need to be controlled. In this contrary periods in between, people in poverty respect it plays to wider government- and media- have been held up as in some way culpable in generated narratives about ‘scroungers’ and the their own predicament. So what makes our current ‘undeserving’. period of particular significance? In this paper we The pornography of it all is especially clear explore some of the ways in which poverty is being when crimes and anti-social behaviour are constructed and people in poverty represented. involved. However, we also need to recognise that From the outset we want to locate this within the such ‘porn’ is not always read or interpreted in the context of the deep and far reaching assault on same way, witness the debate and furore around public services, social welfare, and on the most BBC Scotland’s The Scheme broadcast in mid 2010. disadvantaged groups in society that have recently been unleashed by the Conservative/ Liberal Democrat UK coalition government, accelerating Welfare in Crisis? and deepening the 13 years of New Labour attacks Central to our understanding of the contemporary which set the stage for this current onslaught. valorisations of ‘the poor’ as ‘problem population’ We are living in the deepest recession and are a series of anti-welfare narratives and economic crisis since the 1930s, yet for successive ideologies which are working not only to construct 4 governments and for large sections of the media people in poverty as ‘other’, but which operate there is another crisis, one characterised as key to in different ways to harden public attitudes to the economic ills which grip much of UK society poverty and to those experiencing it, as well as today – as the title of a November 2001 Labour paving the way for much tougher and punitive 5 conference had it – ‘Malingering and Illness welfare policies . Hardly a week goes by without Deception’1. Underpinning this political discourse some media story which purports to depict some is an even more explicitly US-style workfare episode or crisis around social welfare in some model, framing ‘the problem’ as one of the form or another. Indeed, writing this in early individual behaviour of the least powerful, those December 2010, the front-page headline in The living in poverty. Sun (the most widely read tabloid in Britain) This political approach is accompanied boldly announces: ‘Iain Duncan Smith on benefits by a pervasive media assault on people Britain’. The article slated: experiencing poverty – including some of the “Britain’s shirkers’ paradise shame with hordes of work most disadvantaged groups. The assault comes shy benefit claimants was blamed last night for much of in a number of formats: A 24/7 news media, both our economic mess. Paying a fortune to the five million print and television, that seizes on any example on handouts is a major reason the UK’s deficit soared to of ‘dysfunctionality’ in poor working class a crippling £155billion, Tory minister Iain Duncan Smith communities – which works to both construct told The Sun. The Work and Pensions Secretary vowed and reinforce dominant attitudes to poverty and to press on with the challenge of ending the benefits welfare more generally, while at the same time culture – which he called a deep embarrassment for a expressing largely middle class fears and senses country once known as the workshop of the world. He of distrust of ‘the poor’. These then serve to said: “We have to get Britain to rediscover what was great harden attitudes to poverty and to justify harsher about this country – the culture of work.”6 welfare policies. Alongside these, a range of Immediately, Duncan Smith was again shown television documentaries, reality TV shows, and to be playing fast and loose with statistics, in the like, which also allow ‘experts’ to adjudicate particular his claims that out-of-work benefits are on the faults of working class and disadvantaged “a huge part of the reason” for Britain’s deficit. lifestyles, emphasising the need for self- The numbers are lower than in 1997 and the cost improvements and self-help2. Concurrently, other increase since the start of the current recession programmes offer millionaire philanthropists the has been due to rising unemployment7 – to the opportunity to dispense their largess, or very small point of the UK Statistics Authority rebuking the parts of it, to a range of causes and cases deemed Welfare minister over ‘serious deficiencies’ in data worthy of such. use.8 TV programmes such as Jeremy Kyle, Tricia, This is about the coalition reconceptualising Secret Millionaire, Saints and Scroungers are among the language of ‘fairness’9 in the context of a deep the most notable of a seemingly growing list that economic crisis as means to savage welfare and of families. This is a story of a failure in welfare fit in what is now increasingly being referred public services: ‘Is it fair that we the hard workers, services, put firmly at the door of social workers.10 to as the ‘poverty porn’ genre3. There is a long we the middle classes, we who are striving to do There is little that the right wing media like more history of such sermonizing exposure in the UK, well for ourselves and our families have to bear the than being able to pinpoint the blame for failing echoed in nineteenth century travelogues among brunt of the recession?’ It is also a story of social public services at the door of apparently failing the urban poor, narratives of ‘hidden Britain’, welfare in crisis. Such narratives stretch beyond public sector workers, irrespective of any evidence print and photographic images of urban squalor, stories of ‘benefits shirkers’ to daily reports about to the contrary. That child protection systems and, increasingly, poverty porn is being played hospital waiting lists, inefficient public sector broke down here or were insufficiently rigorous in out on the web where anything goes in terms bureaucracies, through to declining standards of the first place is seen as emblematic of much more of representations of ‘the poor’. The messages service delivery or the monitoring of such delivery. fundamental problems with social welfare. given are pervasive; reflecting and forging an But over and above these everyday accounts there The second incident which we highlight anti-welfarism that fits neatly with state agendas are a larger set of anxieties around social welfare concerned the conviction of the so-called for welfare ‘reform’ and ‘austerity policies’ which focus on particular incidents and episodes Edlington Boys, who were convicted for torturing and legitimates them. Together then, with the as representative of more fundamental problems younger children in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, expressions of middle class fears and distrust, with social welfare. Three examples serve to in 2009. Once more this is set in the context of there is also a fascination with poverty and the illustrate this point: arguments about the failure of welfare protection supposedly deviant lifestyles of those affected – In 2007 the death of Baby P in London and the and again, as with Baby P, around stories of where viewers of moral outrage are encouraged subsequent enquiry and trial (of her mother and dysfunctional family life, cultures and lifestyles to find the worst and weakest moments of her partner) in 2009 highlighted like few other that are problematic or deviant in some form or people’s lives also funny and entertaining. This is cases the absolute horror of violence against another. offered up for consumption on a wider cross-class and harm of a child within the private spaces However, there are other more potent ideologies variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 15

at work that underpin, pervade and give potency scapegoating. There is a renewed political to the range of anti-welfare stories that are in appetite for the condemnation of ‘poor’ places circulation today. These are characterised by and people. The labels the ‘Broken Society’ and a clear anti-welfare message that draws upon ‘Broken Britain’ have entered wider popular and the long standing ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ media discourses to describe the social and moral poor distinction which today is couched in a health of society, and they feature with increasing language that talks of aspirational deficits and regularity across a range of stories about public dysfunctional behaviours, an absence of social provision and future of welfare. As with many capital and a seemingly expanding range of moral other anti-welfare narratives over recent decades, and behavioural problems. This is illustrated by part of the potency and pervasiveness of the the Karen Matthews case which relates to other ‘Broken Society’ is that it is a plastic term, able to apparent crises of social welfare. The conviction be deployed without evidence as an explanation of Matthews and her partner for the kidnapping for a hugely diverse assortment of social problems. of her nine year old daughter in Dewsbury, West For Conservatives such as Iain Duncan Smith and Yorkshire in 2008, provoked a the kind of backlash the Tory Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) there is that had many of the features of a right-wing an explicit argument that the broken and falling moral panic. Speaking after their sentencing apart society has its roots in ‘broken families’ – in December 2008, Conservative leader David teenage pregnancies, increasing numbers of one Cameron stated that: parent households living in a ‘dependency culture’, feature prominently in such perspectives. The CSJ “The verdict last week on Karen Matthews and her vile identifies five poverty ‘drivers’: family breakdown, accomplice is also a verdict on our broken society. The welfare dependency, educational failure, addiction details are damning. A fragmented family held together to drugs and alcohol, and serious personal debt. by drink, drugs and deception. An estate where decency Stable marriages, authoritative parenting, and a fights a losing battle against degradation and despair. two-parent family life are pinpointed as central to A community whose pillars are crime, unemployment ‘mending’ ‘Broken Britain’, thereby reducing levels and addiction. How can Gordon Brown argue that of poverty. But for consecutive governments the people who talk about a broken society are wrong? primary route out of poverty has been propunded These children suffered at the very sharpest end of our as through work. The barriers to employment, broken society but all over the country are other young however, are regarded as matters of ‘habit’ and victims, too. Children whose toys are dad’s discarded ‘culture’ and the unwillingness to be ‘flexible’ and drink bottles; whose role models are criminals, liars and ‘mobile’. There is no recognition of the structural layabouts; whose innocence is lost before their first milk nature of unemployment and long-term economic tooth. What chance for these children? Raised without disinvestment. manners, morals or a decent education, they’re caught ‘Broken Britain’ is also portrayed in a ‘broken’ up in the same destructive chain as their parents. It’s a Scotland, or, more correctly, the identification of chain that links unemployment, family breakdown, debt, particular parts of Scotland as symbolic of such. drugs and crime.”11 Politicians have painted the stage set of sizeable elements of Scottish society as ‘broken’ and cast Poverty, Moral Breakdown and ‘Shettleston Man’ – a stereotypical workshy folk Criminality devil – as the perpetrator: Cameron’s above quote both reflects wider “This individual has low life expectancy. He lives in social discourses around, and re-asserts the alleged housing, drug and alcohol abuse play an important part relationship between poverty, immorality, and in his life and he is always out of work. His white blood crime. The principle targets of such assertions are cell count killing him directly as a result of his lifestyle the working-class poor including those in receipt and its lack of purpose.”12 of welfare benefits. Against the wealth of social A key moment in this new mythology was scientific and criminological research that refutes the 2008 Glasgow East by-election13. The hotly common-sense claims that crime is more prevalent contested Westminster seat, previously a Labour and destructive among these groups, it remains the stronghold, attracted much attention for the case in popular discourse that people in poverty power struggles between New Labour – Gordon are assumed to be more immoral and criminally- Brown – and the SNP – Scotland’s First Minister inclined than their wealthy counterparts, and that Alex Salmond. However, it wasn’t just the political often such assumptions are gendered, racist as well battle that attracted the spotlight as politicians ‘demoralisation’ or moral inadequacy), a place as classed. These are particularly potent in the and the media brought the people of Glasgow containing ‘wasted highlands’16. The Times context of contemporary anti-welfarism and both East themselves to centre stage for public journalist Melanie Reid, while perhaps using inform and are reproduced in media portrayals of judgement. The presentation of Glasgow East was the most headline-grabbing language referred to disadvantaged social groups and places. overwhelmingly negative, giving voice to a type the council estates of the East End as ‘Glasgow’s The ‘problem’ of poor families and communities of thinking that has long featured prominently in Gauntanamo’.17 is told and retold in the print and broadcast media the reporting of poverty in disadvantaged urban Media and political commentary acts to as wreaking havoc on those directly affected areas across the UK, in constructing particular influence and shape each other, and visits to the but also on wealth and security of the ‘law- locales as ‘problem’ places and ‘welfare ghettoes’14 Glasgow East constituency by David Cameron and abiding majority’. Notions of a ‘deserving’ and Dramatic newspaper headlines focussed on Iain Duncan Smith played a key role in shaping ‘undeserving’ poor and assumptions about the premature death rates and persistently high and much of the social commentary of the media trouble the latter create are deeply rooted in social long-term unemployment. The new language during the election. Duncan Smith had visited the policies and popular culture historically. They of ‘worklessness’ became commonplace as an area in February 2008 to launch a Centre for Social have, however, been given renewed currency in the oversimplification of welfare receipt – use of the Justice (CSJ) report, ‘Breakthrough Glasgow’’, contemporary period in the wake of the worldwide term ‘worklessness’ is stigmatising, pays no regard detailing what he identified as the key problems financial crisis in 2008 and, in particular, in to unpaid labour, and is particularly pernicious as afflicting the area. Using a language that was soon the response of governments to this crisis: the it implies that the ‘lacking’ is on the part of the to be the staple of many of the newspaper reports justification for spending cuts. Media coverage individual rather than the labour market which is of the election, Glasgow East was held up to both follows and shapes official discourses; unwilling or unable to provide consistent, decent represent the ‘Broken Society’. exaggerated stories and extreme examples used by employment. newspapers are employed uncritically in official Such representations offered inadequate pronouncements to justify the claims being made. acknowledgement of how the East End of Welfare Dependency and Estate Glasgow suffered long-term economic decline Cultures and disinvestment in the second half of the Across much of this commentary, welfare provision Broken Britain and the Dysfunctional twentieth century, following the dismantling of is identified as the factor underpinning a range of Poor much of Scotland’s heavy and manufacturing social ills: Under both New Labour and now with the Tory- industries. Journalists were quick to comment on “For too long, people have been allowed to languish, led UK coalition government, there has been other ‘problems’ in the area. In the Independent trapped in a dependency culture that held low a revitalised assault on those living in poverty one commentator spoke of the ‘desolation’ of expectations of those living there and made no and in particular those in receipt of welfare. Easterhouse, and of ‘broken families’, that this demands of them either. You only need to look at the 15 In recent years there has been an escalation is a ‘broken society’ . Glasgow East was viewed social housing system that successive governments of what amounts to little more than moralistic as a place of misery, of apathy and despair (read have pursued to realise why, on so many of these 16 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

estates, lone parenting, worklessness, failed education online discussion forums. The Scheme purported and addiction are an acceptable way of life. Over to offer a warts ‘n’ all ‘reality-based’ documentary the years we have put all the most broken families, account of life in this particular housing scheme, with myriad problems, on the same estates. Too few although only a handful of households were the of the children ever see a good role model: for the focus of the programme. It positioned the viewer dysfunctional family life is the norm. in judgement over the behaviour and lifestyles of 24 Worse still, visiting vast Estates like Easterhouse… those exhibited. In showcasing the problematic you realise that incentives to remain dependent far or dysfunctional aspects of family relationships, outweigh anything else…. unemployment, alcohol or drug taking, and violence, without insight into the underlying To rectify this we need to accept that the welfare system causes (such as the devastating economic change has become part of this breakdown, giving perverse in this part of East Ayrshire) or contexts (of incentives to too many people. It needs to be changed. widening social inequalities) of social problems, It needs to have a simple purpose: to move people from programme makers created a modern day dependence to independence…. equivalent of the carnival ‘freak show’. At the heart of this likes work, The system must help One of the most forceful criticisms of The people to not only find work but also to remain in work, Scheme – and ‘poverty porn’ more generally to get the ‘work habit’.”18 – is that it provides a view of poverty and To foster the ‘work habit’ and ‘incentivise’ people experiencing poverty out of context; it work the coalition government will, for example, offered a vision, and a very partial and flawed require unpaid work (Mandatory Work Activity) understanding of poverty which did not consider for a specified period from those deemed to be the the underlying social and economic factors that most intransigent claimants. Financial sanctions work to generate and reproduce poverty over time. amounting to 100% withdrawal of benefits for a Instead, the focus was on one housing scheme, specified period will be imposed for those who fail and on a few particular individuals and families 19 to comply with the new conditionality regime. within it, in isolation from the wider issues Furthermore, the Emergency Budget on 22nd June around poverty, disadvantage, and inequality had already announced wide ranging changes to across Scotland and the UK today. In this respect Housing Benefit and Housing Living Allowance The Scheme, which is perhaps currently the best (private sector) “to ensure that people on benefit known programme of its kind, relied upon a are not living in accommodation that would be largely cultural and behaviour-centred perspective, out of the reach of most people in work, creating focused on the individual and family and on the a fairer system for low-income working families generation of specific cultural and behavioural 20 and for the taxpayer” . As this justification norms, lifestyles, which work to keep people in indicates, ‘fairness’ no longer refers to a notion of poverty. ‘redistribution’. Rather, ‘fairness’ is bound up with There is an increasing interest among poverty how it is imagined by ‘most people in work’ and researchers in what is now being referred to as ‘the taxpayer’ (although many who claim housing ‘poverty porn’ of which The Scheme represents and related benefits are in work). The coalition one particular format. This refers to the offering government is reported to have set up a ‘Nudge up of poverty and of ‘poor people’ for public Unit’ – formally known as a ‘Behavioural Insight entertainment. While some of this is played out Team’ – whose first task is to address ‘obesity, diet on the web and in social networking sites, as and alcohol’. Behavioural Economics, ‘operant well as in the popular press, more significant and conditioning’, marks the return of a psycho- potent is the ways in which the televisual media confidence/ ‘wellbeing’ market under New Labour, political theory that rose up in the mid-20th have began to see in poverty – and its associated evidenced by the likes of ‘parenting qualifications’. century, called Behaviourism. It is based on the conditions – a means to cheap, popular, and In turn, the messages that we as viewers receive view “that individuals can be persuaded – ‘nudged’ populist entertainment. Jeremy Kyle and Tricia are that, for the most part, working-class people – into making better choices for themselves represent one end of this spectrum – and perhaps 21 lack aspiration, are lazy, waste national resources without force or regulation”. The coalition some of the best known examples of TV-based and tax-payers’ money – an especially heinous agreement talks about “finding intelligent ways poverty porn. The question of who the audiences crime when there is an economic crisis and when to encourage people to make better choices for are for such programmes is a pertinent one. 22 the middle classes are doing their bit, losing out themselves” .The proponent of this approach, Advertisers have no compulsion in lining-up to be on child benefit, for instance; they do not have David Halpern, a behavioural economics expert, associated with these programmes in some shape the character to lead a morally upright and crime- will also play a role in David Cameron’s ‘Big or form. The advertisers and sponsors of ITV1’s free life and lack the wherewithal to improve Society’ project. flagship daytime programme, attracting over one their condition without being ‘nudged’ in the Our contention is that the behaviourist million viewers daily, Jeremy Kyle, clearly have a right direction. But we are also asked to concur educational function made explicit in the ‘Nudge particular audience segment in mind. Arguably, on who is designated ‘deserving’ or not. The BBC Unit’ is operating in many registers, including some of the organisations keen to be linked to the TV series Saints and Scroungers (in 2009) is one through policy programmes, forms of expertise, series may be surprising – at least on one level. such programme centred on the ‘deserving’ and and through the state’s influence on the mass While Learndirect25 ceased its sponsorship in 2007, 23 ‘undeserving’ poor. As its web pages inform us: media and other ‘cultural systems’ . The ways following a District Judge in England’s description “Dominic Littlewood follows fraud officers as working-class families and communities are of the show as “a human form of bear baiting”,26 they bust the benefits thieves stealing millions portrayed in the mass media in general, and the Department for Work and Pensions apparently of pounds every year, while charities and ‘poverty porn’ in particular, can be read as part considered the utility of using the programme councils track down people who actually deserve of this same educative process. The ‘normality’ format to target those out of work.27 government help”. The programme reminds us that of middle-class lives are contrasted with The programme formats of Jeremy Kyle and ‘we’ law abiding taxpayers are being ‘robbed’ by dysfunctional working-class families; ‘backward Tricia are supplemented by a whole host of the ‘scroungers’; we acquire the impression that it looking’ attitudes among the poor are rendered ‘make-over’ and ‘self-improvement’ shows, as well is easy to obtain welfare benefits (as evidenced by shameful and middle-class values associated with as other programmes which offer the wealthy supposed prevalence of ‘scroungers’ – whereas in self-improvement and aspiration are revered in the a chance to express their benefactor role or 2008/09 £12.7bn of means-tested benefits and £5bn messages conveyed. philanthropism by dispensing money to good of tax credits went unclaimed28). causes (Secret Millionaire) and the like, or to live The cameras pay attention to the possessions among poor people to ‘experience what poverty is From the Problem Estate to The of those experiencing severe poverty (on The really like’ (How the Other Half Live). Scheme Scheme for example) and through the camera’s Another example of how poverty in contemporary gaze on the plasma TVs and other goods, use of Scotland is portrayed is provided by the four-part Being nudged in the right direction? alcohol and tobacco we learn that many of those 29 BBC reality television programme The Scheme, That Learndirect’s sponsorship was withdrawn in poverty are ‘flawed consumers’ and that, as the first two parts of which were broadcast in suggests that there is some degree of contestation these are ‘non-essentials’, the benefits which May 2010. In this example the community of a and ambiguity around the messages that Kyle’s claimants receive must be ‘too much’. Once more deprived housing scheme, Onthank in Kilmarnock, show carries. Together with the other poverty the question of the ‘fairness of it all’ is raised, was presented as entertainment for public porn formats highlighted here, it does however albeit implicitly or by suggestion. In the absence consumption. The series provoked a great deal illustrate the importance of media discourse in of understanding any further context, the viewer of debate and controversy across Scotland and the constructing particular groups as ‘problem’, as responds with moral indignation and disgust; beyond, reflected in considerable press coverage well as contributing to tutelage for those deemed the ‘binary divide’ between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is 30 and presence on social networking sites and in need of such – part of a burgeoning skills/ reinforced . In the context of increasing economic variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 17

and social insecurity, flawed consumption and the heartlands of the so-called middle classes too. processing/local-housing-allowance/impact-of-changes. this seemingly pathological behaviour mobilises The ‘normality’ of middle class lives represent an shtml#rc support for a harsher and more punitive welfarism. aspirational construct, a device by which to divide 21 Lawrence, Felicity ‘The first goal of David Cameron’s Furthermore, these messages also work as a ‘us’ from ‘them’, to delineate those who are not ‘nudge unit’ is to encourage healthy living’, The Guardian, 12th November 2010 http://www.guardian. warning – inculcating fear that personal ‘failure’ like us, but an us who are increasingly also unlike co.uk/politics/2010/nov/12/david-cameron-nudge-unit will lead to the flawed and deviant lifestyle of ‘the the ‘us’ who are held up as a beacon for others to 22 Ibid. poor’. aspire33. 23 Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, Poverty porn fits with and contributes to In conclusion, the broader narratives of ‘Broken B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law the political and cultural zeitgeist. In so doing Britain’ with its underpinning allusion to family and Order. Basingstoke: Macmillan. it constrains creative film-makers who wish to and community dysfunction is punctuated with 24 Libby Brooks ‘Exotic, extreme, engrossing – tune in to work outside conventional ‘journalistic rules of heightened anxiety around particular episodes channel poverty’, The Guardian, May 27th 2010. relevancy’31, but, moreover, it provides fascination and cases that are accorded so much prominence 25 Ufi, which operates the learndirect brand (covering and nurtures revulsion among the viewing public in the print and broadcast media. In this manner, a range of inter-related services for online learning, and provides a focus for who is to be ‘blamed’ and in different ways, the Baby P, Edlington Boys, advice and guidance) also operates a commercial company and runs the UK Online Centres network of for our ‘broken society’. Poverty porn provides, and the Karen Matthews cases (among many community internet access points. or helps to provide, the justification for the others) are regarded as emblematic of welfare 26 ‘Did you see?’, Marketing Week, Vol30, No40, April 10 ‘remaking’ of welfare along US-style ‘workfare’ failure. Poverty porn in its various formats, with 2007. models. It fits with the common-place anti- its focus on individual and community failure 27 ‘Government and ITV consider joint Jeremy Kyle series’, welfarism in the tabloid press. In August 2010, and wholly de-contextualised from a critical The Telegraph, September 7 2008; Personnel Today, The Sun, for example, ran the headline that understanding of the broader historical and September 8th 2008. ‘Cam’s [Cameron’s] a £5bn Scambuster’. While structural processes that shape working class lives 28 ‘Britain’s unclaimed benefit billions’,The Guardian, it is true that some informed commentators in and life chances, reinforce and reproduce the logic Friday 10th September 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/ the broadsheet newspapers and on social media of neo-liberal, punitive workfare policies – and, commentisfree/2010/sep/10/britains-unclaimed-benefit- billions quickly pointed out the headline figure of £5bn concomitantly, the multi-sectoral restructuring Also see: http://www.cpag.org.uk/cro/wrb/wrb181/DLA_ was misleading – it includes ‘fraud and error’32 and of social welfare policy and social work practices cancer.htm that fraud in benefits and tax creditscombined along market principles. The attention accorded 29 Zygmunt Bauman Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, accounted for the much lower sum of £1.5bn – The to ‘aspirational’ deficits and what are deemed as Buckingham: Open University Press, 2004. Sun was building on ground that had already been problematic consumption patterns draws a veil 30 See: Jock Young The Vertigo of Late Modernity, London, well laid; that benefits claimants were ‘takers’, not over the contradictions that may be revealed Sage, 2007 ‘givers’, and that ‘something needs to be done’. on closer scrutiny. Once more we find ourselves 31 Chibnall, S. (1977) Law and Order News: An analysis of It is important to emphasise that there amidst a war on the poor, not on the economic, Crime Reporting in the British Press. London: Tavistock. is resistance to the dominant way people structural causes of poverty. 32 A guide to what overpayments may now be defined as experiencing poverty are represented; there are fraud was rewritten again in September 2010 - part of a system so complex “HM Revenues and Customs important challenges to the re-conceptualisation Notes (HMRC) have begun a tax reconciliation exercise to of ‘fairness’ we have described above, and there 1 A reference to William Hogarth’s 1747 engravings contact around six million people to tell them that they is support for re-distributive measures as well as ‘Industry and Idleness’ to illustrate to working children have either under or over paid tax for 2008/2009 and/or critiques of the way many disadvantaged groups the rewards of hard work and the sure disasters 2009/2010.” http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/g15-2010.pdf otherwise? are demonized and criminalised. There are 33 See: Jock Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity, London: 2 See Bev Skeggs ‘The making of class and gender through Sage, 2007 examples too numerous to mention of resistance to visualising moral subject formation’, Sociology, 39, 5, the way working-class lives and communities are 2005 pp965-982 constructed and portrayed in the media, as well 3 Pat Kane ‘It’s not about people or poverty. The Scheme as mobilisation against government proposals and is quite simply porn’, The Herald June 1st 2010; Barbara policies and the broader ideological framework Ellen, ‘Please give generously, but not to Poverty TV’, in which they reside. Acts of resistance remain The Guardian, May 23rd 2010; Martyn McLaughlin, ‘Brutal eye-opener or ‘poverty porn’? The Scotsman, May too frequently met by counter-methods including 28th 2010. messages that protesters are behaving in ways that 4 Ruth Lister, Poverty, Oxford: Policy Press 2004. are unreasonable and extreme, but these struggles 5 Gerry Mooney and Sarah Neal ‘ ‘Welfare worries’: nevertheless illustrate that ‘poverty porn’ and mapping the directions of welfare futures in the dominant constructions of the ‘Broken Society’ contemporary UK’, Research, Policy and Planning, 27, 3, and its core messages are not totalising or all 2009/10, pp. 141-150 encompassing; rather, they reflect the operation of 6 The Sun, December 1st 2010 power. 7 Left Foot Forward, December 1 2010 – http://www. Not surprisingly, a host of interrelated tensions leftfootforward.org/2010/12/ids-misleads-the-sun-on-out- and contradictions are thrown-up here: consumer of-work-benefits/ growth and consumption is heralded as key to 8 ‘Welfare ministers rebuked over “serious deficiencies” in data use’, The Guardian, Friday 26 November http:// national economic salvation, and individual www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/26/welfare- consumption as a sign of having achieved the ministers-serious-deficiencies-data normative consumer-worker-citizen status, 9 Reagrading conceptualisations of equality: as ‘fairness’ a sign of success. Yet at the same time such becomes the lowest common denominator, Brian Barry uncontrolled urges, at least on the part of the has stressed equality is of not much value on its own and most disadvantaged, signal personal weakness; that we should, rather, be talking about social justice. a failure to plan for a future that might never be 10 See Ian Ferguson and Michael Lavalette (eds) Social attained, to save for a retirement that is being Work After Baby P, Liverpool Hope University, 2009 pushed further and further away, to save and 11 David Cameron, Daily Mail, December 8th 2008 support a child’s education which beyond school 12 Ian Duncan Smith ‘Why talk alone will never end the is increasingly being put out of reach. It is also misery I saw in Glasgow East’, Mail on Sunday, July 13th 2008. seen as corrupting of civility, of social and civic 13 Gerry Mooney ‘The ‘Broken Society’ Election: Class responsibility, of encouraging instant gratification Hatred and the Politics of Poverty and Place in Glasgow rather than other forms of reward – ‘Why East’, Social Policy and Society, 8, 4, 2009: pp.437-450. constantly strive to consume when we can play a 14 ‘Damned lies and statistics’, Media Interview, Fraser part in the ‘Big Society’, as opposed to the ‘Broken Nelson, Sunday Herald, July 5th 2009 Society’, gaining in other ways from doing our bit 15 John Rentoul ‘The Prime Minister’s nightmare scenario’, for community and society?’ The Independent, July 13th 2008. Another significant contradiction is apparent 16 Melanie Reid ‘Labour’s Glasgow fortress may succumb here, one which is increasingly being put into to apathy’, The Times, July 8th 2008. stark terms: aspiration has become one of the 17 Melanie Reid ‘A political timebomb in Glasgow’s most valorised government and policy making Guantanamo’, The Times, July 3rd 2008. terms of recent times. It is seemingly innocuous 18 Ian Duncan Smith ‘Living and dying on welfare in Glasgow East’, Daily Telegraph, July 13th 2008. – who, apart from the most disreputable among ‘the poor’ could be anything but aspirational? 19 Department for Work and Pensions (2010) ‘Universal Credit: Welfare that Works’, Cm 7957 London: This is all underpinned by a neoliberal agenda Department for work and Pensions. http://www.dwp.gov. that promotes individualism and individual self- uk/docs/universal-credit-full-document.pdf help, but that which we are encouraged to aspire 20 Department for Work and Pensions (2010) ‘Impact to is increasingly and sharply colliding with the of changes to Local Housing Allowance from 2011’, lived realities of more and more people’s lives London: Department for Work and Pensions. http://www. across the UK today – and this extends too into dwp.gov.uk/local-authority-staff/housing-benefit/claims- 18 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 Real Phôné Howard Slater “… it seems that the only thing that counts are the functionality of (theoretic and rhetoric) language, words with which all people manifest that they wish to is itself a proviso of permanent consensus and a stay away from being or action.” foreclosure of the strong affect needed “for staging – Pierre Guyotat, Coma scenes of dissensus”. In some areas, like music and therapy, noise It seems that one of the original divisions of social is a compound of affects, it is that which is not life, one which to some degree defines the practice easy to interpret, it is the sound of suffering, of of politics, could well be that which splits off the phylogenetic agony, it is the breach of the real domestic and reproductive spheres of existence as constituted by the logos, it is rousing. And as from that of public life. The discriminations that such, as unmediated experience (i.e. non-narrated, ensue extend to a mode of speech that is permitted non explicated), as raw nerve, it is neither into the polis and a mode that, in being akin to denounceable, nor decidable nor demonstratable. animal-life, is excluded. Rancière, discussing If this unpolitical sound of suffering, this phôné, Aristotle, states: “the sign of the political nature is difficult to listen to, if it is auto-traumatic, of humans is constituted by their possession of if crucially, it emanates from ‘those without the logos, which is alone able to demonstrate a part’, it could well effect a ‘redistribution of the community in the aesthesis of the just and unjust, sensible’ beyond that of a logos-led dissensus in contrast to the phôné, appropriate only for that Rancière asserts is a part and parcel of expressing feelings of pleasure and displeasure”1 democracy. A redistribution that could figure the (p.37). non-subjects as ‘whatever singularities’ (Giorgio In some ways Walter Benjamin’s conjectural Agamben), as ‘approximate people’ (René Ménil), category of the ‘affective classes’, a class which Right: Our world as the affective classes through which noise as would be one that sees no regressive wrong in makes me sad, unnameable affect requests that we attend to expressing pleasure and displeasure, is one for Milan Knížák, it with a non-prosthetic ‘living attention’. These which phôné would be valued and not sought 2001 non-subjects, then, are those for whom phôné can to be converted into logos simply in order to be supplant the logos, for whom the convolutions admitted to the polis. If it could be said that the what we have with the ‘distribution of the sensible’ of the diagnosed and the wailings of the infant working class was formerly in the position of the seems to be another more recent police function are communicative. In many ways it is the excluded and seeking access to representation, of preventative measures. The ‘distribution of domestic and reproductive sphere that has never then, the reframing of its anger and suffering into the sensible’ protects us from the trauma of been allotted a ‘sensible’ and in this light the the language of politics, has to a degree made unmediated (cultural) experience in order to ‘domestic utopia’ of Fourier was one attempt at a it a consensual figure. Its visibility by means preserve desire as functional and satisfied with ‘redistribution of the sensible’. Barthes suggests of representation has made it into a “figure what is already in circulation to appease our that “Fourier has chosen domestics over politics” possessing a specific good or universality” upon already identified senses (taste). Could one say the and that his penchant for neologisms “upsets the which a hoped-for practice is based. Is this maybe ‘distribution of the sensible’ (carried out not solely laws of language”6. With this there seems to be a why Rancière asserts that “politics cannot be by a huge media workforce but by underlying choice that lies beyond choosing the ‘just and the defined on the basis of any pre-existing subject” dispositifs) is concerned with blocking dissensual unjust’, beyond ‘good and evil’, in that through (p.28) for the pre-existing subject, one that interventions by making them imperceivable and the domestic comes the noise of desire and the ‘possesses’ the logos, is already a representation hence unconscionable? Erich Fromm certainly inconsistent expression of suffering that demands made visible, made perceivable, by the currently thought so when he offered that societies that we hear it with all its lawless and inarticulate operative ‘distribution of the sensible’ and as such “develop a system, or categories which determine phôné. cannot effect a new “dissensual reconfiguration of the form of awareness. This system works, as it These may be grand claims for a polyvalent the common experience of the sensible” (p.140)? were, as a socially conditioned filter”3. Is such a noise, but it comes to act as a metaphor for the This may go some way to guessing at Rancière’s ‘partitioning’, then, a fair distribution according to effects of suffering and the self-exclusion from the reasons for the abandonment of class struggle choice or a structural ruse to avoid the ‘common’ polis of those that suffer. Where better to find the politics, but it does not explicitly explain what of shared affect and the rousing of those who “the interval between identities”, that Rancière ‘supplement’, what non-existent subject, could ‘come to partake in what they have no part in’. suggests can found the political subject (p.56), come to take its place and effect what could take Aristotle: “a lack of strong affection among the than in those ‘non-subjects’ who in attending to on a pro-revolutionary hue: the ‘redistribution of ruled is necessary in the interests of obedience the phôné are seeking to refind their species-being the sensible’. and absence of revolt”4. This line of enquiry through a traumatic refusal of the partitioning It feels like Rancière’s notion of ‘distribution could extend to cultural critics too. The rash of effects of identity and the overdetermined forms of the sensible’ is of equal importance for him interpretations of objects and oeuvres has not only of awareness that this entails. The worker-poets as such Marxist notions as the ‘ownership of the a publicity outcome but the ‘cop in your head’ of Rancière’s Proletarian Nights are said to have means of production’ or the ‘redistribution of function of prosthetic thought and a reducing of “made themselves ‘other’ in a double hopeless wealth’ are to a more straightforward socialist the indeterminacy of chance encounters. rejection, refusing both to live like workers and to politics. It seems to figure as a radical concept Where then for the politics of dissensus? talk like the bourgeoisie”7. As workers they were that may have received its charge back when Rancière: “the essence of politics consists in denied access to the ‘sensible of poetry’, separated Rancière was writing about the worker-poets of disturbing this arrangement by supplementing from it in a structure of work and militant politics. utopian socialism for whom workers’ emancipation it with a part of those without part identified Being neither workers nor bourgeois puts them in was “not about acquiring a knowledge of their with the community” (p.36). But who could this the in-between of a contemporaneous ‘distribution condition it was about configuring a time and supplement be and from what community? Whilst of the sensible’ (if, in fact, such a distribution space that invalidated the old distribution of Rancière offers that this supplement could be allots identities in its operation), and their leaving the sensible”2. It’s as if the homogenising effects made up of those “with no qualification to rule, to found utopian communities was maybe, as with of capital, its reduction of disposable time and which means at once everybody and anyone Fourier, their attempt to give their ‘redistribution its guiding of the meanders of sensuality, have at all” (p.53) and whilst this seems less than of the sensible’ a public space that was not a polis effected a colonisation of the sensorium, for, meretricious, it is still unclear how this ‘non- for political subjects but a ‘domestic utopia’ of by means of what he calls a ‘police function’ subject’ would act to ‘redistribute the sensible’ approximate people. But what kind of space is Rancière asserts that this distribution of the (determine for itself the ‘form of awareness’) or this that these worker-poets wanted to create? The sensible “structures perceptual space in terms of how politics could escape the loop of consensus/ practice of poetry, whilst seemingly attributable places, functions, aptitudes etc, to the exclusion of dissensus. This is further complicated when to the logos, may very well interject too much any supplement” (p.92). One could think here of Rancière, not picking up again the thread of phôné phôné to be taken as political. Is it, then, an Atopic Deleuze’s Control Society (“marketing is the now and hence the ‘domesticating’ sphere, seems to space? When Barthes, in A Lovers Discourse, the instrument of social control”) or of the effects be in accord with a form of civilized consensus writes of atopia he speaks of “making language of the division of labour as they impact upon our when he has it that politics is the “making of indecisive”. Is he, perhaps, here hinting at a ability to sense and feel, on the stunting of our statements and not simply noise” (p.152); or, in On practice of poetry? When he supplements this with experience in favour of the sliced-up gridlock the Shores of Politics, when he urges individuals “one cannot speak of the other, about the other… of corporate culture. Elsewhere Rancière, more to “tear themselves out of the netherworld of the other is unqualifiable”8 this too sets us at a dramatically, has the distribution of the sensible as inarticulate sounds”5. Taken from the point of great distance from the polis for it is there where effecting a “definite configuration of what is given view of Benjamin’s prospective affective class, is the logos reigns that just these generalising and as our real, as the object of our perceptions and it not here, in what is definitively and historically other-defining modes of speech come to qualify, the fields of our interventions” (p.148). excluded from politics, that the ‘non-subject’ quantify and speak-for the ‘supplement’ and its Is it maybe in the interests of a self-preservation arises? The rejection of phôné, of the sound of anonymous suffering. that this state of affairs is tolerated by many for suffering, of noise and its replacement with the variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 19

Right: Lying Down Ceremony, Milan Knížák, December 1968, New Brunswick, Douglass College Rancière’s interest in aesthetics seems to go expression. The ‘redistribition of the sensible’ that against what seems to me, in his ‘Ten Theses on such shared perversions could occasion may very Politics’, to be his pro-political aim of injecting well have led to a far-reaching challenge to the dissensus into the polis to recharge democracy. ‘determined forms of awareness’ in that, following His fight against consensus in this text seems Lacan, perversion could well be seen as “the to be about saving politics from ‘annihilation’ privileged exploration of an existential possibility (p.44). But, if the required modes of ‘dissensual of human nature”11. subjectification’ are such that they should “reveal However, leaving aside Fourier’s ideas for a a society in its difference to itself” (p.42) is it not ‘collective prostitution’ as well as the ‘reciprocal of affective states, entail an ‘autotraumatic’ that we have already taken cognisance of this polygamy’ of the more risk-unaverse communes, embracing of the ‘wilderness’ of the psyche as point? The aesthetic discussions that Rancière this sensual belonging can be as straightforward a social microcosm? The traumas embedded in engages in seems to have much more to start out and polymorphously perverse as listening-to the the past are maybe not so much indicators of from in that they allow for and seem to encourage other. But it is a listening that is far from passive, personalised pathologies as potential insights into an impact of the aesthetic on the current it is an empathic and non-evaluative listening that the ongoing social constructedness of each ‘self’ as ‘distribution of the sensible’. Art, he suggests, can can, in its offer of ‘living attention’, be sensual it is pervertedly incarnated in history. undetermine our awareness, can upset identitarian rather than instrumental. So, when Rancière During an interview, pondering Marx’s equilibriums, can introduce us into the forbidden writes that “art lives as long as it expresses a statement ‘man produces man’, Foucault and can encourage our intervention in the ‘folds thought unclear to itself in a matter that resists commented: “what must be produced is not of the real’. Aesthetic practice, then, for me, seems it” I feel we are more or less in the realms of an man identical to himself… we must produce to be charged with revealing the difference in attentiveness to the phôné. The struggle to express something that doesn’t yet exist and about which ourselves, to revealing and cultivating a sense is itself a marker of some kind of suffering. The we cannot know”12. Whether or not this ‘existential of society in ourselves (it could consequently resisting matter could, in some instances, be the possibility’ could mean an evoluted being to kick- be just as much therapeutic as aesethetic). logos, the unwieldy institution that often speaks start development beyond our being what Michael This troublesome and once pathologisable trait on our behalf or which overwhelms us with its Balint has called ‘neotenic embryos’13 is maybe (‘we are all a complex of different, miniature ‘founding’ status. When Rancière goes on to add not the point. What is maybe at play in refusing groups’ – Deleuze), with all its infra-psychic “it [art] lives inasmuch as it is something else than to ‘anticipate effects’ is an acknowledgement of conflicts premising any common transformatory art” (p.123), we could well be in the realm not both how we may well be ‘neotentic embryos’ and articulation, is a further indication of the only of child-rearing, but also in the atopic space how, ‘leaning-on’ the offered commodity-props, we relevance of the phôné for any ‘redistribution of of the therapeutic relationship in which listening ward-off the effects of contingency. From repressed the sensible’. is orientated towards phases of singularity rather memories to social planning, from routines and In his discussion of one of several scenarios for than carapaced ‘selfs’. Both these spaces are in timetables to keeping our fingers crossed, from the aesthetics, that of ‘art becoming life’, Rancière has many ways well distant from the polis and political recycling of acclaimed cultural moments to a risk- it that for this schema the alternative to politics discourse, but maybe it is here in the phônétic averse society what we are faced with is, as Adam is “viewed as the constitution of a new collective ‘confusion of tongues’, in the difficult disclosure Phillips writes, “a history that our competence ethos” (p.119). This view, says Rancière, goes back of anxieties and of infra-psychic conflicts, in the conceals”14. This history is one in which Marx and to Schiller who, it seems, may have had an impact ‘hetereogeneous sensible’ of the self as a society, Freud collide: the necessity of an awareness of upon the utopians that followed him and whom, that there lies some chance of a redistrubution the past, to become historic beings in order to ‘act Rancière suggests, influenced the young Marx with of the sensible; a ‘metacategorical revolt’ to cite out’. Rancière does makes reference to works of the synchronicitous notion of a ‘human revolution’. Alexander Trocchi. For in both these spaces, as in the past as ‘metamorphic elements’ (p.125), but Here communism is seen as the founding of many improvisatory musical spaces, there rings out we could suggest that our own pasts, the history of a ‘sensory community’ that may have more another of Rancière’s hopes for critical art as an relationships that have formed us (some haphazard applicability to Fourier’s passionate combinations “art that questions its own limits and powers, that and personal, some determining and structural), of the phalanstry than the parties and leagues refuses to anticipate its own effects” (p.149). are the Grand Narratives from which to embark that ensued. And so, what is ushered-in by ‘sensory This latter is maybe not something to herald on a ‘redistirubution of the sensible’. That these community’ is the ‘affective labour’ of domestic as such as to discover in the discontinuities of may resound with phôné is no reason, from the and reproductive work, a ‘spieltrieb’ or play drive history and it may explain Rancière’s trap, as a perspective of the polis, to denounce them as (p.116), where the relation much published cultural critic, incoherent, animalistic and self-centred. The polis between non-subjects is neither to be compelled to speak of encourages all of these things. solely passive nor solely active, contemporary art. For such that replaces knowing with a ‘refusal’ as he envisions is (June 2010) doing, delegating with sharing, already there in the radical and, who knows, intertwines indeterminacy of much surrealist Notes the partition of the sexes in an practice; in the happenstance 1 Some notes on Jacques Rancière: Dissensus, Continuum, 2010. All page references in brackets relate to this book. imbrication of ‘being-there-for’ of contingent music, in a 2 Jacques Rancière: ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Art in a shared transitional space. free improvisation willing to Forum: March 2007. So, in ‘Rethinking the Link’, question idiom. But it is, one 3 Erich Fromm cited by Adam Phillips in On Flirtation, Rancière has it that for Schiller could hazard a guess, at play Faber 1994, p.136. “the only true revolution would anywhere that there is a lack of 4 Aristotle: Politics, Pelican 1981, p.110. be a revolution overthrowing the conditionality and an openness 5 Jacques Rancière: On the Shores Of Politics, Verso 2007, power of active understanding to accept and treat as material p5.0. over ‘passive’ sensibility, the the unconscious desires that 6 Roland Barthes: ‘Fourier’ in A Roland Barthes Reader, power a class of intelligence and animates and disables the Vintage 1993, p.342. activity over a class of sensitivity potentially fluid metabolism 7 Jacques Rancière: ‘Introduction to Proletarian Nights’ and wilderness”9. One could say of the ‘heteregeneous sensible’ Radical Philosophy No.31, 1982. that this is not only a restaging of the social-psyche. This is the 8 Roland Barthes: A Lovers Discourse, Noonday 1989, p.35. of the projected conflict between material (for better or for worse) 9 Jacques Rancière: ‘Rethinking the Link’ at http:// logos and phôné, but an indicator through and from which group www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/001881.php that sensitivity and wilderness psychotherapy issues. So just 10 Barthes, ibid, p35. are the markers of a ‘dissensual subjectification’, as such a practice or concern could be ascribed 11 Jacques Lacan: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book an atopic subjectification that resists its to the partitioning of art as a separate sphere it I – Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, Cambridge apprehension by a logos-driven normalcy. What could just as likely be de-partitioned to become, University Press, 1988, p.218. could follow from this, then, is a displacement that like it was always, the propensity of ‘everybody 12 Michael Foucault: Power/Knowledge, Harvester Press helps affinities to assemble: “I divine that the true and anyone at all’. This generic capacity, a facet 1980, p.121. site of originality and strength is neither the other of species being caught in suffering in order to 13 Michael Balint: Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic 10 Technique, Karnac - Maresfield Library, 1985, p.133. nor myself, but our relation itself” . The ‘class’ produce passion, could well be what is meant “Man (sic) can… be regarded as an animal which is that Schiller speaks of, then (as well as perhaps by ‘class of sensitivity’ or ‘affective class’, for retarded even in his ‘mature’ age at an infantile form of hinting at Benjamin’s ‘affective classes’), is maybe in ‘refusing to anticipate its own effects’, in love.” premised on relational affinity: the unoriginal and being beguiled by a candid expression of its 14 Adam Phillips, ibid, p.12. thus unifying predisposition to sensual belonging own individualistic pitfalls, is it not that there which is a spark for singularities. For Fourier is a refusal to reproduce the same confines for these singularities may well have taken the form awareness? Does this refusal, based less on of the perversions he encouraged into collective protective self-identification than on the mobility 20 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 Protest in the Park Preliminary Thoughts on the Silencing of Democratic Protest in the Neoliberal Age

RonanOn a crisp morning Paddison in March 2009, I took part in a merely ‘technical’. advocates a direct [though fictive] relationship demonstration against a proposal to install a novel The events that morning, together with the between people and political participation”. As recreational facility proposed for a major historic other meetings and demonstrations that took such, “populism cuts across the idiosyncracies park in Glasgow. The brainchild of a commercial place to oppose the Go Ape proposal need to be of different forms of expressions of urban life, company, the ‘Go Ape’ facility takes participants understood against the wider politics of the city silences ideological and other constitutive social high into the canopy of the trees and through a – the Council is effectively a ‘one party city’ led differences and papers over fundamental conflicts variety of experiences that – judging from the by Labour, the ruling party for all but eighteen of interest by distilling a common threat or opinions of those who had used similar facilities months since 1950 – which in Glasgow, as in challenge”, customarily invoking “the spectre of elsewhere in Scotland – is fun. It is an experience many other cities, have come to be dominated annihilating apocolyptic futures” where the whole which does not come cheap. The issue of financial by the practices of entrepreneurial governance of urban life as we know it is under threat from exclusion aside for now, for the protestors its David Harvey discussed some two decades ago4. potential catastrophes “if we refrain from acting installation in Pollok Park was intrusive; it was Following the lead of Mouffe5, Žižek6, Rancière7, (in a technocratic-managerial manner) now.” This not only that screams of masochistic pleasure and others, here I want to explore whether the “enemy is always externalised and objectified would permeate an otherwise peaceful area of the politics of the city has in fact become a post- [e.g. ‘non-competitiveness’], examples of fetishized park, but that it would be invasive of one of the political and post-democratic configuration where, and externalized foes that require dealing with last remaining areas of forest within a park which as geographer Erik Swyngedouw outlines, “the if a new urbanity is to be attained”. Importantly, had been progressively eroded through earlier post-political condition is one in which consensus populism is expressed in particular demands that planning developments. This, combined with the has been built around the inevitability of neo- remain particular and foreclose democracy, and, fact that Pollok Park is a major green lung which liberal capitalism as an economic system” – that according to Swyngedouw, “are always addressed at its northern tip brings a relatively wild space is, “a political formation that actually forecloses to the elites. Urban populism is not about within less than three miles of the city centre, the political, that prevents the politicization of [obliterating] the elites, but calling on the elites to meant that it was perhaps inevitable that the particulars [by mobilizing] the vast apparatus of undertake action.”13 proposal would attract opposition. experts, social workers, and so on, to reduce the How the post-political thesis has been The demonstration was fixed by its timing to overall demand (complaint) of a particular group articulated by Rancière, Žižek and others and coincide with the site visit to the park arranged for to just this demand, with its particular content.”8 how it has been developed by Swyngedouw is not the councillors on the City’s Planning Committee “[C]ontrary to popular belief that these forms of unproblematic. Talk of the ‘new’ – a new style by the Council’s planners, the purpose of which neo-liberal urban governance widen participation of politics – courts the risk of highlighting what was to acquaint the decision-makers with the and deepen democracy”, Swyngedouw insists appears novel but represents more a continuity, nature of the development and its environmental “that this post-political condition in fact annuls albeit one expressed in alternative terms. Nor setting. The demonstrators, of which there were democracy, evacuates the political proper - i.e. does the denial of true political debate deny its about 30, were uninvited – and as it turned out the nurturing of disagreement through properly emergence in the interstices, in in-between spaces unwelcome hangers on. We were a motley crew: constructed material and symbolic spaces for that have not yet come under the entrepreneurial from unemployed factory worker to university dissensual public encounter and exchange - and gaze of the (local) state or in spaces where professor, to mothers with pushchairs, the elderly ultimately perverts and undermines the very effective resistance can be mounted. These caveats as well as the young; some were local activists that foundation of a democratic polis.”9 are important to bear in mind in the following council officials would describe pejoratively as Supplanting it, consensual managerial policies discussion in which it is argued in two propositions the ‘usual suspects’, recidivist participants in local are “predicated upon new formal and informal that through the rise of urban entrepreneurialism politics, while others had little history of political institutional configurations [...] often with the and its populist advocacy a new style of urban involvement and would consider themselves explicit inclusion of parts of the state apparatus governance may be emergent. apolitical. The common denominator was that all [...] a governance arrangement that consensually of us were concerned with what appeared to yet shapes the city according to the dreams, tastes another proposal that privatized public space and and needs of the transnational economic, political, Emergent Styles of Urban had, to varying degrees, been involved in earlier and cultural elites [...] that prefigure a particular Governance: Two Propositions protests against Go Ape. form of urbanity”10, an urban order which does not Yet, that we were only there by sufferance, as permit contestation precisely because of its threat Proposition 1: Urban Entrepreneurialism as a Post- far as the councillors were concerned, became to consensus? Political Configuration readily apparent – we had certainly not been Was the protest against the Go Ape proposal as It is two decades since David Harvey published ‘greeted’ by the councillors, acknowledged in the the performance of resistance at odds with a post- his seminal article on the shift towards urban sense that Young1 gives as an essential preliminary political thesis? As an historical glance over the entrepreneurialism as the emergent orthodoxy to any deliberative process of engagement. At the last few decades would show, the Go Ape protest underpinning how cities were becoming governed periodic stops in the visit at which the planner was just one of a myriad of oppositions that have in an increasingly globalised and competitive would explain what development was envisaged, bubbled up in Glasgow, just as they do in any city, world14; that in “fierce competition with other the invitation to pose questions was only extended to challenge how the city is to be reconstructed cities, city governments become curators of their to those on the council. My own attempt to ask and the policy orthodoxy more generally. If the own image as they coordinate aesthetic strategies a question went unheeded – it was ruled ‘out of politics of the city is increasingly invested in in a desperate attempt to divert currents of order’ – as were those of others. The sole exception a process of “the evacuation of the properly global financial capital.”15 However, “[c]ontrary to our being treated as non-persons was a single political (democractic) dimension from the to the mainstream argument that urban leaders councillor from the opposition. urban”11, annulling democracy for a high degree of and elites mobilize such competitive tactics as a From the outset as the excluded it was “consensual agreement on the existing conditions response to the assumed inevitability of a neo- inevitable that our presence would reflect and the main objectives to be achieved [...] within liberal global economic order, [Swyngedouw] the unequal power relations between elected selectively inclusive participatory institutional insist[s] that these strategies in fact construct and representatives, their officials and ordinary or organizational settings”12, implying a common consciously produce the very conditions that are citizens, reflecting in turn the tensions between purpose and shared values amongst participants, symbolically defined as global urbanism.”16 representative and participatory modes of then why? And what strategies have been adopted Hitherto, urban government had been portrayed democratic engagement. Further, those who to ensure that government is projected through as an essentially managerial task defined around control the agenda, and by implication also control such consensual managerial policies? the processes of planning and managing the city, what is not on the agenda and thus the realm of Furthermore, in adopting neoliberal policies, providing infrastructural, social and cultural non decision-making, wield considerable power.2 is a new expression of neopopulist governance services essential to its maintenance, resolving Yet, if we were relatively powerless in being emergent in this ‘Governance-beyond-the-State’? problems of resource allocation, and arbitrating ‘outside’ the formal rule book, what is equally Swyngedouw notes that “[p]opulism invokes ‘THE on issues such as planning conflicts. Globalisation true is that performance itself can challenge how city’ and ‘THE (undivided) people’ as a whole and the rise of competitive urbanism was political agendas unfold. Our performance, even if in a material and discursive manner”. This “[u] accompanied by the new orthodoxy of neoliberal muted by the formal procedures, could politicize rban populism is also based on a politics of ‘the governance defined by the shift from government the issue where the council had sought to project people know best’ (although the latter category to governance and a raft of policy initiatives aimed the proposal as common sense3, as beyond remains often empty, unnamed), supported by at reviving local economies including privatization, reasonable question and thus beyond debate, an assumedly neutral scientific technocracy, and deregulation and liberalization. For Harvey, urban variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 21

entrepreneurialism – expressed through the redefinition of the relationships between state, can only tinker with the edges of a system whose reproduction across cities of enterprise zones, the market and society. It is these shifts which for core ideological structure remains inviolable”29. advent of place marketing and the competition Harvey became associated with the emergence Žižek’s contention is that the struggle to hold cultural and sport spectacles, the of urban entrepreneurialism as the state sought of multicultural identity-politics has had a privatization of public services, the construction of to redefine its position in relation to a new round depoliticizing effect, a “transformation of ‘politics’ waterfront development – was “embedded in the of capitalist development. These changes were into ‘cultural politics’, where certain questions are logic of capitalist spatial development in which accompanied by others, the effect of which simply no longer asked … like those concerning competition seems to operate…as an external was to dramatically reshape the relationships the nature of relationships of production, whether coercive force”.17 His arguments were persuasive between state and society at the local level. The political democracy is really the ultimate horizon, and, from the experience of the subsequent shift from government to governance changed and so on … Take a concrete example, like the decades, prophetic: urban governance became the structure of how cities were governed; if multitude of studies on the exploitation of either disciplined into (and re-produced) an assumption urban governments continued to be major African Americans or more usually illegal Mexican that abstaining from competitive urbanism was actors the shift to governance, the development immigrants who work as harvesters here in the neither an economic nor a political option. of managerial partnership working, the U.S. I appreciate such studies very much, but Several decades of urban neoliberal governance quangoisation24 of local economic development in most of them – to a point at least – silently, have amassed a barrage of evidence demonstrating and other innovations, meant that the governing implicitly, economic exploitation is read as the that its practice is socially divisive and that it has of cities was now apportioned between a complex result of intolerance, racism. …the point is that resulted in increasingly polarized and divided array of institutions, many of which lay outside the we now seem to believe that the economic aspect cities. This interpretation of urban change is conventional play of local democracy represented of power is an expression of intolerance. The not uncontested – the debate surrounding the by liberal democratic institutions. Other shifts fundamental problem then becomes ‘How can we changing class structure of world cities and were to mark out the changed world of British tolerate the other?’ Here, we are dealing with a whether this is reflected in evidence of increasing urban politics in the last decades polarization, for example18, or the benefits of the twentieth century, in resulting from the use of culture to ‘regenerate’ particular the ‘Third Way’ the city, for another.19 However, it is precisely metamorphosis of dominant Left/ because of how neoliberal practices become Right party politics and voting rolled out that their impacts harbour differential alignments of earlier decades, benefits which are fore-closed to particularised and the rise of identity and issue- subjects of demand within the framework of based politics and its crowding existing relations; that is, reduced to localised out of class as the prime cleavage appeals over resources placing the hegemony of around which (city) politics neoliberalism beyond politics, with Žižek warning focused. “the point is that we now seem to believe that These shifts summarise some the economic aspect of power is an expression of of the changes associated with intolerance.”20 Whereas a genuine politics “implies the political turn initiated by the recognition of conflict as constitutive of the the end of Fordism. Most have social condition”: “A true political space is always been the subject of considerable a space of contestation, in the name of equality, debate which a listing is unable for those who have no name or place ... the space to do justice. The point to be for those who are not-All, who are uncounted and emphasized is the fundamentally unnamed, not part of the ‘police’ (symbolic, social, different world in which state) order, where they claim their right to the emergent neoliberal governance polis.” was to be defined and operate As Žižek warns, the essentially “post-political within from its Fordist approach has achieved hegemonic currency, the counterpart. Certain principles of government false psychologization. The problem is not that of only acceptable line of resistance today is that of were to remain: for one, the continued centrality intrapsychic tolerance…”30 supposedly marginalized voices to a mysterious given to (local) representative democracy as a key In the post-political what is discussed on the capital power, manifested in the fight for the means through which the governance of the city political agenda is pre-ordained on the basis of acceptance of such voices. As this resistance itself was to be conducted. In what many contemporary fundamental axioms – e.g. of power relationships, now becomes the hegemonic norm, the root (Real) observers argued as a progressive assault on how the economy should be organised – being of global capitalist antagonism is pushed into the local democratic institutions initiated during unquestioned and unquestionable. “In claiming background.”21 the Thatcher years culminating in the abolition to leave behind old ideological struggles and, Historically, the politics of the city became of the major metropolitan councils in England, instead, focus on expert management and played out around questions of distribution and including London, even such reforms were not administration … what remains is only the redistribution; the dominant political cleavage able to supplant the place of urban government. efficient administration of life... almost only came to be represented by tribal divisions between Further, towards the end of the 1980s and during that.”31 Thus, the inevitability of neoliberalism or Right and Left. Thus, the election of ‘welfarist’ Thatcher’s third term, the play of class politics the status of liberal democracy as the principle parties saw the initiation of redistributive policies became performed spectacularly through the poll around which the processes of government should which sought (for example) to ameliorate housing tax25. Yet, both the reform of local government be organised become unquestionable in the post- conditions for the working class. In post-World structure and of the system of local taxation were political formation (Žižek proposes we instead War II Britain, much more extensive programmes part of the wider unfolding canvas of neoliberal summon the courage to reject liberal democracy as of social housing construction, accompanied by transformations affecting how cities were a master-signifier and a main political fetish, and other social welfare reforms, became part of the governed and the changing relationships between seek “actual universality”); it achieves hegemonic Fordist deal. Local government, particularly the state, market and civil society. currency32, conforming to what Bourdieu refers to major city councils, became deeply implicated in It is against this background, particularly since as “the common-sense of the day”33, the doxa, the the delivery of the local welfare state; it was ‘big the election of New Labour in 1997, that the contemporary unquestionable orthodoxy. government’ operating at the local scale in which post-political configuration is to be understood. Lahoud: “Swyngedouw clearly marks out the city governments were the key institutions through Post-politics26 is not meant to be understood in topography of the post-political landscape: the which urban politics was conducted. If during ‘endist’ terms, as the end of politics. Indeed, post- entrance of a managerial logic into all aspects of its heyday the Fordist consensus was broadly political theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, would life, the reduction of government to administration subscribed to by the Right as well as Leftist argue that politics – as the construction of the where decision making is seen as a question parties, this did not mean that urban politics did political communities in which we wish to live – is of expertise and not of political position, the not become split along partisan lines reflective of always in construction and contested. Rather, post- diffusion of governance into a host of non-state socio-economic class. Nor is it meant to imply that politics refers to the emergence of managerial actors, the brand management of urban space, the redistributive measures were not the outcome of consensus politics which for New Labour had its predominance of consensual understandings of class struggle, but that it was through City Hall conceptual foundations in Third Way resolutions;27 political action, the particularization of political that such changes were concretised. and as Swyngedouw argues, presents “a political demands, and the termination of social agendas in The Fordist crises of the early 1970s were formation that actually forecloses the political, planning.”34 to mark the beginning of a new phase of local that prevents the politicization of particulars”.28 With this “evaporation of dissent” in politics. Under the ‘postmodern turn’ – expressed That is: “The post-political … describes a space of contemporary urban governance a “neoliberal as the transformation of ‘politics’ into ‘cultural political operation structured by choices relating governmentality … has replaced debate, politics’22, elsewise the subsumption of post-’68 to micro-political procedures, administrative disagreement and dissensus with a series of ‘artistic critique’23 – there were seismic shifts in apparatuses and technocratic management. technologies of governing that fuse around the nature of the (local) state accompanied by Operating wholly within the shrunken coordinates consensus, agreement and technocratic the unravelling of the state-society relationships of neoliberalism, political agency is constrained to management” (Swyngedouw35); establishing what centred around state welfarism and the nothing more than a shadow play where decisions is ‘common-sense’ inevitably requires synthesizing 22 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

agreement. revitalization has replaced earlier key policies Liverpool riots in the 1980s and the so-called race For that reason, it is the engineering of this of city governments that – at least in much of riots in northern English towns in 2001, what ‘consensus’ configuration that inevitably becomes western Europe – were more closely defined is paradoxical is that street protest in Britain of importance, and it is at this juncture that the around the delivery of the local welfare state, has become more associated with the universal arguments of the two propositions here elide into but that policy innovation to improve the city’s (global) and distant (Iraq) problems than it has one another; that it is through the employment of competitive position has gained its own premium. ones that are rooted in structural inequalities and techniques of neo-populism that the advantages Successive new policy tropes have become defined the local. That in the first decade of the twentieth of consensualism become socially and politically around local economic development – the rise of century Britain is a more unequal society is cemented. At the outset, though, Swyngedouw’s the knowledge economy, the adoption of clusters amply evidenced through statistics44. Precisely account emphasizes the style of politics that theory, and most recently the increasing use of by their nature, cities become the most visible characterizes post-politics, the hollowing out of culture as the means by which to foster economic site of inequalities, where in the finer graining the political dimension: “the polis, conceived in growth – and through emulation rapidly been of the post-modern city relative poverty exists in the idealized Greek sense as the site for public incorporated as part of the ‘new conventional closer propinquity to relative affluence than was political encounter and democratic negotiation, wisdom41. How these policy innovations become the case in the more segregated, coarsely-grained the spacing of (often radical) dissent, and adopted will in practice vary, not least because Victorian city, a reality that reflects the progressive disagreement, and the place where political of the different position cities occupy in the gentrifying of the city. subjectivation emerges and literally takes place, competitive ladder. Yet, fundamentally, how these One possible line of explanation (to the absence seems moribund. In other words, the ‘political’ policies fare in practice remains interpreted in of street protest) is to be sought in the changing is retreating while social space is increasingly similar terms to the primary aim identified by relationships between state, market and civil colonised by policies (or policing).” Beauregard, the attraction of inwards investment, society marked out by neoliberal governance For Žižek: “The ultimate sign of post-politics a reality which has particular veracity for those through the emergence of a new style of urban in all Western countries is the growth of a cities where (re)establishing competitive position politics, neo-populism. The linking of populism to managerial approach to government; government poses particular challenges. Amongst these, the neoliberal governance needs careful explanation; is reconceived as a management function deprived generic (if somewhat elastic) category of ‘post- conventionally populism and liberalism would of its proper political dimension”36. “[T]hat the industrial cities’, are prime examples. be considered as oxymoron to one another. Thus, way the political space is structured today more Of Glasgow, considerable evidence can be populism and liberalism tend to have opposite and more prevents the emergence of the act. But marshalled to argue that it is not only that conceptions of the state (maximal vs. minimal), I’m not thinking of some metaphysical event... For economic regeneration of the city has become the nationality (ethnic vs. civic), human agency me, an act is simply something that changes the key policy objective of the political elite, but that (social determinism vs. free will) and other key very horizon in which it takes place, and I claim how the policy should be pursued has become dimensions characterising state, market and that the present situation closes the space for such deeply impregnated by neoliberal practices42. society45. Further, where political scientists tend to acts.”37 So it is not just that political debate is For the central tenet of the post-political thesis preface discussion of the concept by highlighting becoming curtailed as to how supposed collective what is critical here is that this evidence points its ‘vagueness’46, populism is highly contested. decisions over specific policy concerns are to be to how policy orthodoxy exists beyond political Its most widely quoted examples – from Latin made, rather, more fundamentally, whether those debate. Added to this is that it is through the city America, in particular – have arisen as political concerns have a site for public political encounter council, in its capacity as the lead actor amongst movements aimed at correcting injustices and at all. Thus, the premises on which decision-making the network of partnerships, that economic invoking an appeal to ‘the people’ as in opposition is made become excluded, yet it is precisely in development policies are delivered. In fact, to an ‘enemy’, the elite. Thus, populist movements their encounter that democratic negotiation might recent changes by the Scottish Government to aim to meet redistributive goals, one of the more be transformative. The centring of managerial the role of Scottish Enterprise, the main quango obvious apparent contradictions it raises in being politics, then, accompanies the marginalization charged with an economic development role, have used alongside neoliberalism. For Weyland47, of real politics. “The problem for [Žižek] is that further enhanced the role of local government. the re-emergence of new forms of populism in in politics, again, the space for an act is closing In other words, in spite of the assumption that Latin America – Menemism in Argentina and viciously.”38 the shift to governance involves the downplaying Fujimorism in Peru – is not accidental, nor is it At this juncture it is useful to rehearse the of the status of (local) government partly in contingent, but rather it has become employed extent to which urban neoliberal economic favour of other institutions, recent experience as a political strategy to accommodate neoliberal governance has become orthodoxy. Most analysts in Scotland suggests that the status of the local governance. The argument envisages two separate are in little doubt of “the entrance of a managerial democratic institutions based on the principle of but interdependent spheres in which the political logic into all aspects of life, the reduction of representative democracy has been strengthened. (neopopulist politics) exists parallel to the government to administration where decision Consequently, its ability to claim legitimacy economic, the neoliberal marketplace. Critically, making is seen as a question of expertise and not through the electoral system, combined with the the role of the state is to bolster not just the of political position, the diffusion of governance powers it has to address economic regeneration of marketplace but also itself through a strategy into a host of non-state actors, the brand the city and the pre-eminence given to the task, which is designed to weaken democracy, in other management of urban space, the predominance gives it the capacity to crowd out the feasibility of words to constrain opposition to the neoliberal of consensual understandings of political action, debate on the city’s development and the means, project. the particularization of political demands, and democratic participatory practice, through which Such arguments have not been uncontested the termination of social agendas in planning.”39 it might be expressed. Limiting the boundaries to including amongst analysts of Latin American In a thoughtful paper40, the US urbanist Robert what is – and what is not – the subject of debate, politics.48 Clearly, too, it raises questions as to Beauregard outlined the rules that defined local one means by which consensus politics becomes why electorates disaffected by neoliberalism – economic development as it had developed to date defined, is simultaneously antithetical to the lower income groups – are willing in effect to (1993) in the practices of local governments and democratic polity; it is what Rancière and others vote for it. Tellingly, this is the same question as not-for-profit organisations in the United States. have defined as postdemocracy.43 was posed earlier in relation to British cities, the Predictably, the attraction of inwards investment It is not pretended here that the postpolitical apparent acquiescence of those less advantaged by was the prime objective repeated across the thesis is unproblematic. In particular, it neoliberalism who are simultaneously unwilling to organisations as the most overt measure that the undervalues the role of human agency and of challenge it politically, either through the ballot locality was at least retaining, if not enhancing, its resistance in being able to challenge consensus box or through direct action. At this point the neo- competitive position. Of secondary importance was politics. Its claim, then, to outlaw ‘real politics’ is populist argument offers explanations through the question of the quality of the jobs that were not borne out by empirical reality; all cities have showing how neo-populism is being developed as a created, their pay status, their likely durability, so histories of local insurgency seeking to challenge new style of politics. that the consequences of what forms of investment orthodoxy. Clearly, too, its explanatory power calls Swyngedouw49 has outlined the methods by were being attracted, its longer term trajectory, out for much deeper empirical scrutiny than is which populism has emerged in a new guise as and its equity implications were effectively possible here. Yet, the value of the thesis is in its an integral part of the post-political formation. marginalized as being the direct concern of local ability to provide clues as to how ‘the protest in Fundamentally, the state – its component economic development. Place marketing was the park’ was marginalized by the representatives institutions, including city governments – is considered a vital tool particularly in that it could of the city council as beyond the boundaries of concerned with the advancement of the neoliberal be used as the means of narrativising investor consensus politics. Its ability to do so is dependent project and more specifically, for the city, of success, besides which it gave markers to what on the second proposition underpinning emergent meeting the exigencies of competitive urbanism. were successful strategies that might be used neoliberal practices in the city. How, then, does city government develop neo- to influence future local economic development populism as a political strategy? Key here is the policy. Proposition 2: Urban Entrepreneurialism and its role of discourse and the employment of language It would be over-simplistic to suggest that what Emergent Neo-Populism that seeks to persuade that its policies are the only Beauregard itemised as the key tenets of local Future historians of British urban politics and appropriate course of action. In this debate, economic development policy nearly two decades looking back at the period between the 1980s the threat is globalization whose confrontation is ago in the United States is simply repeated in and the present day may express some surprise inescapable particularly as it affects everybody. experience nearly two decades later, whether that the palpable inequalities following from This raises the possibility of talking of the city in the US or elsewhere. Mirroring an earlier several decades of neoliberal governance did not and its population in unitary terms, invoking the argument as to how competitive urbanism is a result in more opposition on the streets. The poll city and the people, and the need for a unified disciplining force, it is not just that economic tax riots apart, together with the Brixton and response to meet the challenges of globalization. variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 23

By constructing the latter as the ‘enemy’, it record in the field within urban marketing circles lays the blame on a force that is external to the The Constraints on Public is widely cited in paradigmatic terms.65 The city’s city and by implication diverts focus from the Participation - Returning to the marketing agency is engaged in an ongoing process problems of marginalization, injustices or unequal Protest in the Park of bidding to host events, major conferences, power relations that define the inequalities of At this point we can return to the story of the tourist attractions of different types, in which the city. Yet, neo-populist strategies do not just ‘protest in the park’ to draw out some of the precisely because other cities are engaged in emphasise the unity of the people but are active implications arising from the propositions that it, questioning the premise on which it is based in demonstrating that the people are part of the have been outlined in order to contextualize is not a political option. As an entrepreneurial political process, hence the emphasis given to the episode, drawing in the interplay of local project – such competitive bidding operates under political participation. How, though, participation political processes (in Glasgow) which also help a ratchet effect with a high degree of institutional is performed – and what issues are debated – explain why otherwise legitimate protest could aggregation to accumulate marks of distinction becomes constrained to the agenda needed to be effectively marginalised. The reality of protest and collective symbolic capital – the process has pursue economic objectives. What becomes critical is that it has invariably been marginalised by gathered increasing momentum. This, in turn is the language, the signifiers, through which the state, particularly where it runs counter means that it is a key, and increasingly important, developmental objectives become expressed; to the political priorities of the state. Rather, item on the local political agenda. Questioning the in Laclau’s50 terms the use of empty signifiers – the argument of this paper centres around how strategy is political heresy. constructs such as the ‘European city’, the ‘healthy the state seeks to marginalise opposition by In the efficacious discourses surrounding urban city’, the ‘sustainable city’, terms that are ‘empty’ championing its own project and through its ability economic development, a consistent trend has in the sense of having one particular meaning but to foreclose political debate. Again, the episode been that cities should be ‘attractive’. Whether which are capable of alternative interpretation and the longer conflict of which it was part is a expressed through urban imagineering66, ‘soft – become a powerful means of projecting visions rich and complex story in which it is not possible assets’67 , the ‘quality of place’68 or through of the city. As empty signifiers, their apparent here to present detailed empirical evidence or design69, the essential narrative is that cities inclusiveness – directly reflecting their ambiguity – tease out the nuances of the power relationships need to be ‘attractive places’ in which to live in defies the legitimacy of their being challenged. that were to unfold. Here, attention is focused on order to be competitive. The Go Ape facility, and As a political strategy it is rich in the those parts of the neopopulist strategy – the use the council’s support of it, is part of the wider suggestions that empirical analysis should include. of discourse and of governmentality – that seek to argument of constructing the ‘attractive city’ – Simultaneously, it raises questions as to how be persuasive of the city’s overall developmental while affirming market precedent for common such a strategy might be persuasive. Limiting the policy objectives and simultaneously to be able to good assets. Judged by its financial benefits discussion here to the question of participation, marginalize political opposition to it. for the city, the leasing of the land on which the starting point of this paper, it is a question of Fundamental to understanding why the city it would be built, the case for support was far how participatory practices are drawn into urban council enthusiastically supported the Go Ape from obvious. (Added to this, the city was to give government/governance. woodland adventure is that it complemented leasehold rights to Go Ape, a private company, for A hallmark of New Labour’s urban policies, and the wider discourses within which the city is a relatively long period; 21 years.) Rather, support one which has been universally remarked upon, envisioned. Within the prime goal of economic was publicly expressed in terms of the amenity it has been the frequency with which ‘community’ regeneration, Glasgow has had to confront the would offer to both citizens and visitors and the and ‘community participation’ have been invoked physical, economic and social legacy of it having improvement to the range of facilities in the park. as essential to the transformative process.51 The been one of Britain’s, and certainly Scotland’s, It was anticipated that using the facility would be development of Area Based Initiatives, normally major industrial centres. The story of the city’s expensive (c. £20 per person per day entry) and, operating at the neighbourhood or similarly local regeneration beginning with the marketing because of its implications for social inclusion, city scale, were introduced; some to address specific campaign ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ in the early officials negotiated that the company offer 2,000 needs, health, crime control, education, others 1980s is a familiar one, as was its proactive use free ‘rides’ to school children from disadvantaged with a broader remit, notably the comprehensive of its winning of the designation ‘European City neighbourhoods in the city. Having such a facility, renewal, physical and social, of disadvantaged of Culture’ in 1990 to bolster its image.56 Culture, the city planning committee and its key officials neighbourhoods. All co-opted community too, it was propounded, could be used as the also energetically argued, would contribute to the participation, albeit in different ways. Cities means of diversifying the economic base.57 From quest to making Glasgow a healthier city. It was became criss-crossed by a complex mosaic of the economic nadir of the early 1980s – at which an argument that connected with another policy neighbourhood governance structures in which point the city’s unemployment was consistently trope around which the city’s future is projected local participation was part of a partnership above 10% and well above the Scottish and UK through official discourse (‘Glasgow as a Healthy arrangement linked with state agencies. averages, and at which time the city was all but City in which to live’), emphasis to which has been Most observers of the trend have been absent from the tourist map – inroads into its given a pronounced fillip since the city’s successful critical, particularly of the ways in which, perceived economic position have been made. But, bidding for the Commonwealth Games in 2014. while the projects emphasized partnership and “although unemployment levels are relatively In other words, the facility bolstered several key collaborative working, the reality was that often low (in comparison to say 25 years ago), economic aspects of the official vision of the future Glasgow; local participation came up against the buffers activity rates remain well below the national the case for its support became indisputable. of unequal power relations.52 For its critics, the average”58 – by 2007 Glasgow had the highest In the post-political city the future is expressed concept of governmentality was resorted to for workless households in the UK (ONS) – and as a consensual understanding; it does so through explanation why and how participation was being questions remain as to the impact of population emphasizing the value of local participation as emphasized through policy discourse53: “political dispersal – a spate of demolitions has seen the steering policy. As in other British cities, the city forces seek to give effect to their strategies….. total amount of social housing reduced from 81,000 administration in Glasgow has innovated with a through utilizing and instrumentalising forces of to under 62,000 by 200959. Simultaneously, the mix of participatory techniques to trawl for local authority other than the ‘State’ in order to govern city’s marketing agency claims that Glasgow has opinion including citizens’ panels, opinion poll – spatially and constitutionally – ‘at a distance’ become a major tourist destination within the ‘city surveys which monitor council performance and ’’(Rose, 1996, 46). For Foucault, governmentality break’ consumer market. Yet, as mentioned earlier attitudes (as, for example, to the holding of the becomes the means by which the state has been following Beauregard60, the job creation says 2014 Games and the ongoing progress achieved able to progressively establish social control. It little about the quality of the jobs61 – the actual by the city council in meeting objectives) and becomes exercised through the technologies of decline of full-time work and the growth of a part- questionnaires targeted at specific policy fields. power the state has at it disposal, in particular time labour market – and in spite of the physical In 2005 the (then) Leisure and Parks Department its technical expertise and the skills of the transformation of parts of the city – the central of the city council issued a consultation paper professionals employed by the (local) state. Hence area and the waterfront development, in particular and questionnaire on the problems users had in orchestrating local planning the state’s local – the city remains characterized by high levels of of the city’s parks and possible methods in planners are able to organize how consultation social deprivation62. Indeed, the assertive adoption which they could be improved. Of the latter, an takes place and offer expert advice, both of entrepreneurialism – the shift in the marketing overwhelming majority (somewhat predictably) particularly for their employer, the state. Rose’s of the city towards emphasizing retail consumption gave their support to “improving the facilities in post-structuralist analysis offers the connection (‘Glasgow, Scotland with Style’) – has served to parks”; it was this response to an otherwise ‘apple- between discourse and the ability to create further polarize its social division, which some pie’ question that was to become a key popular governable subjects. Here, discourse is more than analysis have sought to articulate in revanchist mandate in justification for council support to language but rather it denotes a way of acting and terms63, others in more exclusionary language64. the Go Ape application – and to other proposals behaving. As Barnes et al argue54, this opens up the It is an irony that the practice of neoliberalism affecting green spaces in the city.70 Questionnaires possibility of exploring how discourse becomes the is a disciplining force, not just for labour and were also used by the city council to elicit opinion means of shaping behaviour and that specifically more widely in its social ramifications, but also it specifically to the Go Ape facility; these too it becomes feasible to create “categories of would appear for its advocates and practitioners. showed support for the proposal. It was not that public that are produced for the purposes of Competitive urbanism functions as a ratchet such survey data could be challenged that is of participation”. It is an argument that resonates within which cities become locked into an importance here (which was the case), but rather with the power of discourse as it is used in populist increasingly competitive process of bidding for that it was being used to manufacture consensus politics.55 inwards investment. Nowhere is this more explicit towards the proposal. than in the bidding to hold mega-events, including As a plethora of studies have shown, beginning major sports and cultural events. Glasgow is a with Arnstein’s71 still quoted ladder analogy, prime, but increasingly common, example whose participation, particularly where it is initiated 24 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

through state-led practices, operates at different Notes A. (2001) Against the Third Way. Cambridge: Polity Press. levels from the tokenistic to scenarios in which 1 Young, I.M. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: 28 Erik Swyngedouw, The Antinomies of the Postpolitical there is a real redistribution of power through Oxford University Press. City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ local devolution72 or through the realisation of 2 As Bachrach and Baratz were to amply demonstrate - j.1468-2427.2009.00859.x/full deliberative forms of democratic engagement73. Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M.S. (1963) ‘Decisions and non- 29 Adrian Lahoud, Post-traumatic Urbanism, Architecture Realisation of the empowered participatory decisions: an analytical Framework’, American Political Science Review, 57, 641-651. in the Aftermath governance Fung and Wright highlight is 3 Featherstone, D. (forthcoming) ‘Common sense beyond Home, Review: Urban Politics Now, May 14th, 2009 http:// the exception; clearly, pre-existing centres of neo-liberalism: the counter-Globalization movements post-traumaticurbanism.com/?p=138 institutional power, urban governments, will be and the current crisis’ 30 Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with reluctant to devolve decision-making powers 4 Harvey, D. (1989) ‘From managerialism to Slavoj Žižek, Christopher Hanlon, New Literary History, substantively. Further, to do so would be to entrepreneurialism: The transformation of urban 2001, 32: 1–21: http://www.scribd.com/doc/39642938/ undermine the legitimacy representative modes governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler 71B, Žižek-and-the-Post-Political of democratic practice are able to claim. If politics 3-17. 31 Adrian Lahoud, Post-traumatic Urbanism, Architecture is the negotiation of conflict, the post-political 5 Mouffe, C. (1992) ‘Democratic Citizenship and the in the Aftermath, Review: Urban Politics Now, May 14th, Political Community’, in C.Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of 2009 http://post-traumaticurbanism.com/?p=138 formation is defined around its antithesis, Radical democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community. 32 ‘The Obscene Underside of Liberal Democracy: Slavoj that politics is a managerial task involving the London: Verso; Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox. Žižek’. Natasa Kovacevic, Politics and Culture, October identification of consensus. Limiting participation London: Verso; Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political. 2, 2009: http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/10/02/ to relatively ‘shallow’ forms of democratic London: Routledge. the-obscene-underside-of-liberal-democracy-slavoj-Žižek- engagement averts the problems of conflict. For 6 Žižek, S. (2002) Revolution at the Gates – Žižek on Lenin- natasa-kovacevic/ the city council, the knowledge gained through The 1917 Writings. London: Verso. 33 Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations. London: Polity. participation could become a tool of ‘consensual 7 Rancière, J. (2001) ‘Ten Theses of Politics’, Theory and 34 Adrian Lahoud, Post-traumatic Urbanism, Architecture persuasion’ and simultaneously to bolster the Event, 5 (3) in the Aftermath, Review: Urban Politics Now, May 14th, legitimacy of state action. Its actions were the 8 ‘Post-Democratic Cities For Whom and for What?’, Erik 2009 http://post-traumaticurbanism.com/?p=138 Swyngedouw, Paper Presented in Concluding Session antithesis of the kinds of democratic engagement 35 Swyngedouw, E. (2006) ‘The Post-Political City’, in BAVO Regional Studies Association Annual Conference Pecs, (ed.) 74 Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the envisaged by Callon et al and in particular of Budapest, 26 May 2010 Neo-Liberal City. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 58-76 the ‘hybrid forums’ through which dialogue takes 9 Ibid. 36 Žižek, S. (2002) Revolution at the Gates - Žižek on Lenin place. 10 Ibid. - The 1917 Writings. London: Verso., (p303), quoted in Swyngedouw, E. (2007) ‘Impossible “Sustainability” The protest, on the other hand, reflected 11 Ibid. dissensus; its silencing needed to draw on the and the Postpolitical Condition’, In R. Krueger and D. 12 Ibid. technologies of power the state could engage, Gibbs (eds.) The Sustainable Development Paradox: Urban 13 Ibid. Political Economy in the United States and Europe. New demonstrating its ability to regulate how York and London: The Guilford Press. participation could, or could not, be part of 14 Harvey, D. (1989) ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation of urban 37 ‘Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with the democratic process. For the elected city governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler71B, Slavoj Žižek’, Christopher Hanlon, New Literary History, councillor the protest was a challenge to both the 3-17. Vol. 32, No. 1, Views and Interviews (Winter, 2001), pp. mandate the electoral process had given to the 15 Adrian Lahoud, Post-traumatic Urbanism, Architecture 1-21 http://anarcosurrealisti.noblogs.org/files/2010/10/ ruling administration to govern and as, has been in the Aftermath, Review: Urban Politics Now, May 14th, Psychoanalysis-and-the-Post-Political.pdf argued, to the wider visions for the city’s future 2009 http://post-traumaticurbanism.com/?p=138 38 Ibid. development. The ability to marginalize protestors 16 ‘Post-Democratic Cities For Whom and for What?’, Erik 39 Swyngedouw, E. (2006) ‘The Post-Political City’, in BAVO through their absent presence was possible Swyngedouw, Paper Presented in Concluding Session (ed.) Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Regional Studies Association Annual Conference Pecs, Neo-Liberal City. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 58-76 through the technologies of power councillors Budapest, 26 May 2010 40 Beauregard, R. (1993) ‘Constituting Economic could draw upon; the procedures for site visits – as 17 Harvey, D. (1989) ‘From managerialism to Development: A Theoretical Perspective’, In in the park – were governed by regulations devised entrepreneurialism: The transformation of urban Bingham, R., Mier, R. (eds.) Theories of Local Economic by the city council. governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler 71B, Development: Perspectives From Across the Disciplines. Many of these questions revert back to the 3-17. London: Sage, 267-283. fundamental questions that have consistently 18 Sassen, S. (2001) The Global City: New York, London and 41 Buck, N. Gordon, I., Harding, A. and Turok, I. (2005) defined the politics of the city; who speaks for the Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Hamnett, Changing Cities: Rethinking Urban Competitiveness, C. (2003) Unequal City: London in the Global Age. London: Cohesion and Governance. Basingstoke: Palgrave city?; whose vision of the city is privileged and Routledge. MacMillan. whose is not? As Harvey proposes: “The question 19 Paddison, R. and Miles, S. (2007) (eds.) Culture-Led 42 See, for example: ‘Class, Agency and Resistance in the of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced Urban Regeneration. London: Routledge. Old Industrial City’, Andrew Cumbers, Gesa Helms, from that of what kind of social ties, relationship 20 ‘Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Kate Swanson, Antipode Vol. to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic Slavoj Žižek’, Christopher Hanlon, New Literary History, 42 No. 1 2010; ‘Beyond values we desire. The right to the city is far 2001, 32: 1–21: http://www.scribd.com/doc/39642938/ Aspiration: Young Žižek-and-the-Post-Political People and decent more than the individual liberty to access urban work in the de- resources: it is a right to change ourselves by 21 ‘The Obscene Underside of Liberal Democracy: Slavoj industrialised changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather Žižek’. Natasa Kovacevic, Politics and Culture, October city, Discussion 2, 2009: http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/10/02/ than an individual right since this transformation paper’, June 2009; the-obscene-underside-of-liberal-democracy-slavoj-Žižek- Andrew Cumbers, inevitably depends upon the exercise of a natasa-kovacevic/ Gesa Helms collective power to reshape the processes of 22 Where “certain questions - like those concerning the and Marilyn urbanization.” In their new guise these questions nature of relationships of production, whether political Keenan form the core of the debates surrounding democracy is really the ultimate horizon, and so on - Lefebvre’s dictum, ‘The Right to the City’75 (as these questions are simply no longer asked.” http://www. scribd.com/doc/39642938/Žižek-and-the-Post-Political contested as it may be for operating in a sphere of 23 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of ‘pseudo rights’). For neoliberalism the city is a key Capitalism. Verso, 2006 testing ground for innovative practice; what we 24 Quangos are Quasi Autonomous Non-Governmental need to know is how the state is accommodating Organisations. In the UK these are defined as these shifts and its impact on democratic processes a “body which has a role in the processes of in the city. national government but is not a government As an emergent style of politics, as an extension department or part of one, and which accordingly operates to a greater or lesser of governmentality, the discussion in this article extent at arm’s length from Ministers.” See UK is more exploratory and suggestive than it claims Public Bodies 1997 at www.offical-documents. to be definitive. Both the concepts of the post- co.uk/document/caboffice/bodies97/bodies97. political and neopopulism are contested. Further, htm the argument needs empiricising more fully, 25 The Poll Tax (or Community Charge, as it was particularly where contingency is acknowledged officially known) was a local charge payable by all local residents in lieu of public services. As a flat as key to identifying how the practice of urban rate tax it was socially regressive and while the charge governance unfolds. As a version of populist payable could be reduced for those on (defined levels reasoning, how is advocacy expressed through of) low income, all residents were liable for at least 20% language? How are ‘the people’ defined? How of the local tax. It was widely viewed as inequitable and became the focus of considerable political opposition. 43 Crouch, C. (2004) Post-Democracy. Cambridge: Polity are the ‘techniques of consensual persuasion’ See: Burns, D., Simons, M and Simmons, M. (1992) Press; Rancière, J. (1995) On the shores of politics. able to manufacture assent? Is the practice of Poll Tax Rebellion. London: AK Press; Bailey, S.J. and Trans. L. Heron. London: Verso Books. urban politics becoming increasingly intolerant of Paddison, R. (1988) The Reform of Local Government dissension? How does leadership become critical76 Finance in Britain. London: Routledge. 44 For example, “Over the past three years, average living standards have continued to stagnate, though poverty 26 The term ‘post-politics’ is used here so that the and what, if any, are the parallels to charismatic and income inequality both rose” (Institute of Fiscal 77 discussion of it directly engages with how the term has leadership linked to ‘classic’ forms of populism? Studies, June 2009). http://www.ifs.org.uk/projects/127 been used by previous writers. Where a defining feature of post-politics is the manufacture of consensus the term 45 Armony, V. (2001) ‘Is There an Ideological Link between An earlier edition of this article was published in the ‘consensus politics’ is a plausible alternative. Neopopulism and Neoliberalism?’, Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, 21 (2), 62-79 online journal L’Espace Politique, Volume 8, 2009-2: 27 Giddens, A. (1998) The Third Way: The Renewal of Social 46 Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso. http://espacepolitique.revues.org.org/ Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press; see also Callinacos, variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 25

47 Weyland, K. (2003) ‘Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Sage, pp. 51-67. Latin America: How Much Affinity?’ Paper for Panel 73 Callon, M, Lascoumes, P and Barthes, Y. (2001, 2009) on Neopopulism in Latin America: Conceptual and Agir dans un monde incertain. Paris : Seuil (Published Theoretical Issues, XXIV International Congress, Latin as Acting in an Uncertain World : An Essay on Technical American Studies Association, Dallas, TX, 27-29 March. Democracy (translated by Graham Burchell) Boston, MA: 48 See, for example, Vila, C.M. (2004) ‘Recycled populism MIT Press.) or just more neoliberalism? The myth of Latin American 74 Ibid. “neopopulism”, Revista de Sociologica e Politica, 22, 135- 151. 75 Lefebvre, H. (1996) [1974] ‘The right to the city’, in Kofman, E. and Lebase, E. (eds.) Writings on Cities. 49 Swyngedouw, E. (2007) ‘Impossible “Sustainability” Cambridge, MA: Blackwell; Purcell, M. H. (2008) and the Postpolitical Condition’, In R. Krueger and D. Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle Gibbs (eds.) The Sustainable Development Paradox: Urban for Alternative Urban Futures. New York: Routledge; Political Economy in the United States and Europe. New Jouve, B. (2009) (ed.) Urban Policies and the Right to the York and London: The Guilford Press, 13-40. City: The UN-Habitat and UNESCO Joint Project. Lyons: 50 Laclau, E. (1996) Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Presses Universitaires de Lyons. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso. 76 [Eds] On the ‘leadership’ of new management 51 Imrie, R. and Raco, M. (2003) (eds.) Urban Renaissance?: culture, see: ‘The empire in miniature’, Neil Gray New Labour, Community and Urban Policy. Bristol: Policy and Leigh French, Scottish Left Review: http://www. Press. scottishleftreview.org/li/index.php?option=com_content 52 Barnes, M., Newman, J. and Sullivan, H. (2007) Power, &task=view&id=318&Itemid=1 Participation and Political Renewal. Bristol: The Policy and, ‘Artist as Executive, Executive as Artist’, Kirsten Press. Forkert, Variant, issue 35, Summer 2009: http://www. variant.org.uk/35texts/CultLeader.html 53 Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies 77 [Eds] On Fascism understood as an ideologically in Governmentality. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester sophisticated, creeping set of political relations, Wheatsheaf. the monopolisation of public reason by ‘coercive rationalism’, see: ‘The Progress of Creeping Fascism’, 54 Barnes, M., Newman, J. and Sullivan, H. (2007) Power, Owen Logan, Variant, issue 35, Summer 2009: http:// Participation and Political Renewal. Bristol: The Policy www.variant.org.uk/35texts/CreepingFascism.html Press. 55 Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso. 56 Paddison, R. (1993) ‘City marketing, image reconstruction and urban regeneration’, Urban Studies, 30, 3, 339-350; Garcia, B. (2007) ‘Deconstructing the City of Culture: The Long-Term Cultural Legacies of Glasgow 1990’, in Paddison, R. and Miles, S. (eds.) Culture-Led Urban Regeneration. London: Routledge, 1-28 (Previously published in Urban Studies). 57 Myerscough, J. (1991) ‘Monitoring Glasgow 1990’. Report prepared for Glasgow City Council, Strathclyde Regional Council and Scottish Enterprise. 58 ‘Class, Agency and Resistance in the Old Industrial City’, Andrew Cumbers, Gesa Helms, Kate Swanson, Antipode Vol. 42 No. 1 2010 59 http://www.gha.org.uk/content/mediaassets/doc/ AnnualReport2009.pdf 60 Beauregard, R. (1993) ‘Constituting Economic Development: A Theoretical Perspective’, In Bingham, R., Mier, R. (eds.) Theories of Local Economic Development: Perspectives From Across the Disciplines. London: Sage, 267-283. 61 ‘Beyond Aspiration: Young People and decent work in the de-industrialised city, Discussion paper’, June 2009; Andrew Cumbers, Gesa Helms and Marilyn Keenan: http://www.variant.org.uk/events/Doc7Poverty/ BeyondAspiration.pdf 62 By comparison with other local authorities in Scotland Glasgow is characterised by disproportionately high levels of social deprivation. In 2009 the city accounted for 31% of the nation’s most deprived areas (defined officially where more than 15% of households in a local area are disadvantaged across a range of basic needs including income, employment, accessibility to public services) but only 13% of its population. Nevertheless, there are signs that the city’s problems may be declining relatively; in 2006 the comparable statistic had been 34%. 63 MacLeod, G. (2002) ‘From Urban Entrepreneurialism to a “Revanchist City”? On the Spatial Injustices of Glasgow’s Renaissance’, in Brenner, N. and Theodore, N. (eds) Spaces of Neoliberalism: urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 254-276 ( First published in Antipode, 2002) 64 Hassan, G., Hayes, M. and Tims, C. (2007) The Dreaming City and the Power of Mass Imagination. London: Demos. 65 Miles, S. (forthcoming) Spaces for Consumption: Pleasure and Placelessness in the Post-Industrial City. London: Sage. 66 Holcomb, B. (2001) ‘Place Marketing: Using Media to Promote Cities’, in Vale, L.J. and Warner, S.B. Jnr. (eds.) Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions. New Brunswick, NJ: Centre for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, 33-56. 67 Lever, W. and Turok, I. (1999) ‘Competitive Cities: Introduction to the Review’, Urban Studies 36 (5/6), 791- 793. 68 Florida, R. (2005) Cities and the Creative Class. New York and London: Routledge. 69 Montgomery, J. (2007) The New Wealth of Cities: City Dynamics and the Fifth Wave. Aldershot: Ashgate. 70 Paddison, R. and Sharp, J. (2007) ‘Questioning the end of public space: Reclaiming the control of local banal spaces’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 123 (2), pp. 87-106. 71 Arnstein, S. (1969) ‘A Ladder of Participation’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35 (4), pp. 216-224 72 Fung, A. and E.O. Wright (2003) Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. London and New York: Verso; Gaventa, J. (2006) ‘Perspectives on Participation and Citizenship’, in R. Mohanty and R. Tandon (eds.) Participatory Citizenship: Identity, Exclusion, Inclusion. New Delhi: 26 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 Hierarchies of Risk John Barker the world of international ‘free’ trade; where the I dice are truly fixed against their interests. The “We have no future because our present is too volatile. most terrible and stark consequence has been the The only possibility that remains is the management of well-documented suicides over the last decade of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present.” a large number of Indian farmers when faced with – William Gibson, Pattern Recognition unpayable debt. The limits to the efficacy of being Risk assessment and management is a serious simply well-documented, however, is shown in the business these days; professionalised and a major continuation of this horror year on year. There was interdisciplinary field of academic research. some respite in the post loan-waiver year of 2008, There’s a Society for Risk Analysis and an Institute but in 2009 suicide numbers rose again. Suicides of Risk Management. There are numerous theories are especially high amongst cash-crop farmers and measures, such as the Arrow-Pratt Measure, and, most of all, cotton farmers using a GM type Prospect Theory, Risk Sciences, Decision Theory, of cotton seed, Bt Cotton, which originated with the academic field of Risk Communication, Risk Monsanto and which was relatively expensive Treatment Plans; and many varieties of Risk and to buy. The promise was of bigger crops and less Decision Analysis software. All these have a power In June 2010, Foxconn announced its Shenzhen factory need for insecticide. But crops did not always of definition. Just as the British government elite in China (which saw wage raises in the wake of a materialise, soil was depleted, and secondary elaborated its own distinction between ‘torture’ wave of suicides) was too expensive except for iPhone pests emerged. One estimate is 120,000 out of and ‘inhumane and degrading treatment’, so risk manufacturing. 200,000 suicides were committed by Bt Cotton professionals can define what is ‘objective’ and farmers, who also faced lower prices for the cotton. what ‘subjective’ risk; what ‘external’ as against Many died by drinking the very pesticide they ‘manufactured’. Or, define it as uncertainty had bought to improve their situation, but whose multiplied by the impact size of a possible future cost formed part of the debt; and which, in the event. medium term, failed to deal with secondary pests. Risk assessment and management’s The deaths were painful. The dead-men-to-be fields of interest include: the environmental screaming for hours on end.4 future; possible effects of new technologies; Outside the specific business of GM seeds, infrastructural projects; health and safety, both neoliberalism rationalises the transference of of work and pharmaceuticals; and the world of risk by contemporary capitalism and also acts finance. While a degree of professional knowledge politically to enforce it. This was most visible in the is required in all of these, this is no guarantee that attacks on and final demise of several commodity either assessment or management will produce price agreements like that for coffee. This had an ‘objective’ outcome. There are interests at given a guaranteed price to coffee farmers. Since work in shaping criteria, interpretation and One of many textile and garment factories in Mae Sot, the 1990s, however, it has been managed by the implementation; predominantly these interests are Thailand. In most cases observed, Burmese workers SMI (Supplier-Managed Inventory) system by of capital accumulation via profit making. There is made up the majority of workers inside the factories, which suppliers are responsible for maintaining no guarantee that an analysis is disinterested just as they were cheaper than Thai labour. Photograph by stocks used by the corporate purchaser even because it is mathematical. Daniel Cuthbert, 2009. if the stocks are held at a port in the purchasers In recent years this process of accumulation own country or its own storage. SMI is a type of has become more extensive and leveraged modern stock control process enabled by IT (debt-dependent), and in 2007 an internal development in the 1980s which created Supply crisis developed that showed up several of Chain Management. It is this, Lyne says, which its pretensions. ‘Excessive’ risk-taking and a means: “Risk and cost are passed down the supply dependence on mathematicians was blamed, but chain to those most vulnerable such as developing at a systemic level there was no risk, because country farmers, and women or migrant and temp banks and other financial institutions were ‘too workers.”5 And on top of this is the sheer power of big too fail’. The notion of ‘moral hazard’ – i.e. purchasers: wholesale coffee is an oligopoly and a that the institutions of finance capital should take chain the size of Wal-Mart can micro-manage the responsibility for risk-taking losses – was sidelined, market. and the risk pushed downwards on to citizens and More recently, ‘microloans/microcredit’ seen non-citizens. As for the external risk professionals, by elites as a method of helping the poor out of auditors, they heard no evil; saw no evil.1 Neither poverty at no cost to themselves has, in Andhra did ‘risk-taking’ take long to be re-established as a Pradesh, become another form of risk-taking virtue by capitalism’s media class. Not long after rebounding on the poor. The praise accorded to Goldman Sachs had repaid its government bail- the Grameen bank in Bangladesh made it into a out money a ‘blowout’ profit was reported, with template. It was taken up by conventional Indian the New York Times commenting: “Goldman has banks which financed microloan companies managed to do again what it has always done so in southern India. The wishful thinking they well; embrace risks that its rivals feared to take The body of Praveen Vijay Bhakamwar, whose promoted, risk-without-risk (and profited by), has and for the most part, manage those risks better accumulated debts of Rs 40,000 (less than US$ 900) lead to women committing suicide. than its rivals deemed possible.” pushed him to suicide. In the richer world, too, there is a marked The melodramatic discourse of ‘teetering on Photograph by Johann Rousselot, 2007. increase in the numbers of vulnerable workers, the edge’ and ‘economic collapse’ has changed. which has been well documented. Contracts Such an event must not happen again is one welfare state did not just exist but was an article are imposed whereby employer responsibility message, but there is also a shrug of the shoulders of faith, our neighbour was a cabinet-maker, a is vague while the power over conditions, time, which implies a selective version of adulthood of highly skilled woodworker. He had a contract to and pay are absolute. The starkest form is the which we’ve suddenly all become members: that’s produce de luxe TV set cabinets for a well-known zero-hours contract. This is inherently risky for capitalism for you; got to take the rough with the company which arranged a strategic bankruptcy, the worker. Being permanently ‘on call’ there is smooth. The economic and technological future is and he was left unpaid for months of work. It little opportunity to earn a living elsewhere, and spoken of in a similar voice. It presents itself, says was an early view of how, in reality, rather than if the person doing the work is told to go home Melinda Cooper, research fellow with the Centre mathematical equations set in limited and after three hours, then to-and-from work transport for Biomedicine and Society, as perpetual promise often deceptive parameters, risk gets pushed costs mean the income is derisory. In the UK it is combined with risk, what she calls “selective downwards. This imposition of risk onto those with a double-risk for people on any kind of welfare fatalism”.2 Ours is the only way, it says, great the least economic power is hardly new. income, especially housing benefit, if they are things are on the way, but don’t be looking for Farmers have always faced climatic risks in pushed on to work to such a contract – the time guarantees; you know the score, shit happens. addition to whole cycles of pillage and crop lag between such a job coming to a quick end and expropriation. Empirical evidence is showing a actually getting housing benefit restored is one of worldwide range of regional and local extreme maximum anxiety. It is then, in many instances, a II weather patterns that are likely to exacerbate risk to take a job. “Transfer of risk 68% higher than same time last year” this ‘external’ risk.3 Other, ‘directly’ man-made, Angela Mitropoulos, for one, would say of this – ‘Ten catastrophe bonds close before hurricane risks have been created by the way small-scale working class, and of new forms of insecure work season’, Reuters: June 1st 2010 farmers have been induced, or forced, into joining in the richer world, that: “The regular work, or Growing up in London in the 1950s, when the variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 27

besides, a world-wide phenomena. This can take the form of abrupt rises in the price of basic foods, as in 2008, or, in the richer world, somewhere to live becoming more expensive. What is special about the Western working class, however, goes further than this, as Dick Bryan has described: “In the last 20 years or so we have seen the household being treated like a small businesses, have seen labour being treated like capital…It requires households to decide whether to have a 20-year or 30-year mortgage, and at a fixed or floating rate; how to balance the car-loan with the credit card etc. These are complex financial calculations that require taking positions about an unknowable future…being working class now means engaging in competitively-driven risk calculation and management…The IMF has, perhaps surprisingly described households as the In response to the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak global financial system’s depositories of risk as the UK Ministry of Agriculture ordered the killing last resort… in terms of risk analysis. Capital has of all livestock in at-risk areas. 442,000 animals were devices to hedge its risks…For workers, labour slaughtered. 80% of culled livestock were clean. power cannot be hedged.”7 This is the rational individual of classical weapons. Too much has happened since: Chernobyl economics writ large. Only s/he is an individual and Three Mile Island, deeper and deeper sea who must be an expert in reading the small print, drilling and the Gulf of Mexico disaster, and, and ruthless in suppressing any wishful thinking. despite climate change denial, a pragmatic The narrative of the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage ‘crisis’ knowledge that extreme weathers have become has had no space for how high-risk lending put more common. all the pressure on borrowers, women most of all, or how, with its deceptive mix of ‘teaser’ rates, “You’ll have access to over 1000 risk engineers… variable interest rate, and rescheduling costs, it “BECAUSE CHANGE HAPPENZ” made this borrowing exceptionally expensive, and – Zurich HelpPoint advertisement 2010 the cost often foreclosure and likely homelessness. This relatively new understanding that technological development involves ecological risk is muddied by a culture of selective fears. The III human security literature, though it may describe “The message is that there are no ‘knowns’. There are the consequences of globalized neoliberalism, things that we know that we know. There are also avoids any mention of its economic imperative; known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that the accumulation of capital. There is no obvious we know we don’t know. But there also unknown machinery at work, but structural adjustment unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t and aggressive trade policies are clearly creators know.” of ‘failed states’, and yet they come, apparently, – Donald Rumsfeld, NATO HQ, 6–7th June 2002 as a nasty surprise to the security part of the A form of denial when faced with unambiguously business; people like Rumsfeld. Similarly, soon ruling class representatives of capitalist states after the UN predicted the end of infectious is to laugh at the way they speak. The mangled diseases in the 1980s, structural adjustment prose of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are policy – austerity for the poorest people in the obvious examples. Perhaps it gives us a feeling world – meant cuts in public health and clean of superiority, or that such people cannot be water provision. The consequence: new infections serious. This is a highly mistaken viewpoint, and on the rise and the return of old ones, so that by is perhaps one that Rumsfeld was conscious of 2000 the World Health Organization was talking when, immediately after his ‘unknown unknowns’ of the return of infectious diseases as being more – which came as a reply to a question – he said: “It dangerous than war. This reintroduced an old sounds like a riddle. It isn’t a riddle. It is a very language of ‘contagion’, with a psychic underlay of serious, important matter.” And, as it happened, the economic migrant as a disease-carrier, while in this instance, the corporate media also had fun during the technical financial crisis it functioned at his expense. Not as a form of denial but rather as melodrama, blood-and-sawdust; the ‘risk of to smother the significance of what he’d said. contagion’ was a constant and added to the For what Rumsfeld’s ‘riddle’ did was to converge pressure for public money to be used. Since then neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies of risk. there’s been the Greek contagion, while the global On the one hand it provides a generic justification scare of a non-occurring swine flu pandemic gave for the pre-emptive strike, while at the same more material to a culture of selective fears. time establishing risk – risk as a capability and Dick Bryan’s conclusion from his analysis of the characteristic unique to capitalism and its future transference of risk to the working class is that the – as inherent in the world, its technologies, and state can no longer guarantee the future. But the Protests at 2007–2008 dramatic increases in world food economy. state has other things to do. Aware, underneath prices. Commodity market speculation is attributed with In the recent past the promises of the future the flim-flam, that the casualisation of labour being one contributing factor. were visibly deceptive. Describing the New York’s combined with more conditionalities on smaller 1964 World Fair, Richard Barbrook talks of how, welfare payments might, unlike Bryan’s working regular pay, or the normal working day that is “Instruments of genocide were successfully class with its financial obligations, produce a class regarded as typical of Fordism is an exception disguised as benefactors of humanity”.8 The of people with very little to lose, even in the rich in the history of capitalism.”6 True, and none of promise was of unmetered electricity from nuclear world, the UK state is pre-emptively monitoring10 what is happening in the richer world compares fusion9, a computer revolution meaning more such people seen as presenting a risk. There is to farmer suicide or the condition of Burmese and more free time as a corollary of less work, no pretence here that this might come as a nasty migrant workers in Malaysia, but the change and space travel. The reality: nuclear weapons, surprise to the ruling class. Instead, risk, like described is to the benefit of capital, whose minders militarized computing, and militarized space use. a form of original sin, is seen as a personality are taking great relish in telling the European The promises made now, focused especially on disorder within the individual of a certain class. working class it’s had it too easy and must ‘face up biotechnology, still have a utopian element while This was visible not just with new Labour’s ASBOs, to reality’. Attacks on workers with contracts is not being dependent on ever-increasing computing prevention orders, and so on, but especially so in for, or to, the benefit of those without. The way in power. What’s different is that the ‘world is a ContactPoint, the identity register of all children which additional surplus value is being extracted dangerous place’ has more real traction than in England. As Terri Dowty describes it: “What from the reproduction of labour-power itself is, even in the Cold War period of strategic nuclear ContactPoint is really doing is keeping tabs on 28 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

children, as part of a ‘risk management approach’ to childhood and youth. It tries to spot problems IV early. There is a belief that future criminals have “The loose coalition of business firms, policymakers certain tell-tale signs about them…”11 and experts who comment on and/or advise policies Simone Bull’s ‘Color by Numbers: Racism, about risk in contemporary society have constructed 12 a discourse of euphemisms as a means of disavowing Power and Risk in a Post-Colonial Context’ goes 17 further, talking of a Western obsession with risk their responsibilities.” and criminologicaly evaluating the ‘danger’ posed – Peter Herries-Jones by potential offenders. She cites what developed However, when it comes to the presentation in New Zealand whereby models were created of new technologies and their possible risks to marginalize Maoiris and Pacific Islanders, – both environmental and social – the ‘known and how ‘protection’ discourses and supposedly unknowns’ and the ‘unknown unknowns’ make ‘atheoretical’ mathematics were used to divert no appearance. Inside a culture of selective fears, attention from an official commitment to the and selective pre-emption, people are still treated premise of minority criminality. Similarly, Berkeley as rational individuals in the neoliberal form of Deepwater Horizon oil rig on fire in the Gulf of Mexico Law Professor Jonathan Simon has pointed to how consumers with choice. In this instance, consumers on April 21st 2010. ‘bad assumptions’ ‘risk assessment’ led to both of what Brian Wynne and others call ‘one-way dodgy mortgage sales and to prosecutors grossly information(s)’. Despite the zero-priority given to overstating the risks to society of a large number critical thought in an ever more instrumentalised of defendants. education system18, people are not stupid, and For the generic, potential ‘enemy within’ there assume that information providers will frame is as yet no overt ‘war’ rhetoric (the non-legal what they provide in their own interest, yet are categorisation ‘domestic extremists’ being heavy still positioned as consumers without agency. with implication), but in the global world it’s all ‘Transparency’ is supposed to be the fix to this grit war: against AIDS, drugs, even poverty.13 It was inside the pretensions of the ‘information society’, in the now mocked Rumsfeld’s period as Defense and Anthony Giddens’ ‘reflexive modernity’ as Secretary that ‘environmental’ risks were taken making the ‘precautionary principle’ a reality. seriously, couched in a language of both war and Leaving aside the financial realities of the contagion. In 2003 the Pentagon produced a report hierarchies of informational power however, there on the potential consequences of abrupt climate is an assumption amongst all providers that it is change for US security, and did so while the Bush not their task “to communicate unknowns – areas Administration was strategically vague on whether of uncertainty or scientific ignorance with respect there was such a thing. In 2004 the USA approved to their products or responsibilities.”19 Deepwater Horizon burning as it sinks the largest ever funding project for bio-defense It is not a matter of being hostile to all on April 22nd 2010. research ($5.4bn) under the name of Project technological development, but when its dynamics BioShield. Meanwhile DARPA (Defense Advanced are, by and large, determined by private property Research Projects Agency) was working on interests we are right to be wary not just about creating biological sensors that would respond to to whose benefit and to whose cost, as with GM both known and previously unknown agents to give seeds/crops, but also its irreversibility; master- a warning sign of attack and to develop vaccines race fantasies within genetics research and social and antiobiotics.14 control in a whole raft of identity technologies These programmes were yet another boost and neurosciences. What we look for, short of a to the US biotech industry, as Melinda Cooper social revolution against the dominance of private describes. She goes further in her analysis, property interests and the dynamic of capital however, focusing on biotechnology as the perfect accumulation, is regulation of such technologies: material medium for a ‘current’ of neoliberalism that agency of some sort can be reached through coming out of the Santa Fe Institute which rejects an accumulation of individual information(s) any notion of equilibrium as either possible or absorption which, through the obstructive and desirable. Cooper uses notions of economist mysterious channels of representative democracy, Joseph Schumpeter’s ‘gales of destruction and achieve effective results. innovation’ and those of chaos/complexity theory; Regulation then, along with a new doctrine that the unpredictable and the speculative are of pre-emption and an older one of insurance (with its pretensions to cost-effective pre- essential to capitalism as a model: “Neoliberalism Oil burns during a controlled fire on May 6th 2010. and the biotech industry share a common ambition emptive capability) is what is offered against an to overcome the ecological and economic limits ever riskier world. It is, however, less and less of an offer. Neoliberalism in its breezy voice is to growth associated with industrial production warning signs were missed, but that “to date we 15 constantly chipping away at effective regulation, through a speculative reinvention of the future.” It have not found a single instance where human whether it be financial or health and safety at is from this that she can say contemporary modes beings made a conscious decision to favour dollars work; at damaging ‘red tape’ which is to the of capital accumulation are quite comfortable with over safety.” This misses the point: a survey before cost of everyone who is not you, the one in the the unexpected, but in doing so makes one of those the explosion reported several worker concerns mine or on the oil-rig. This goes along with that quasi-analogies that makes one wary: scientific but that workers feared reprisals if they reported shrug-of-the-shoulders, treat-you-as-adults voice: creativity as an encounter with the unforeseen problems.20 In a reply that kicks the stuffing out of ‘You know how it is, regulation is no guarantee, consequences of the experimental process, and the banality of the argument as to what is and isn’t can’t legislate for every circumstance, or for the workings of speculative capital, which, she ‘conspiracy theory’, Ed Markey, Democrat leader individual error’. The International Association says, is its ‘reality’. This, for one, simply passes of the Congressional investigation into the event, of Drilling Contractors (IADC) has a whole set of over the long-term planning made by capitalist commented: “When the culture of a company Health and Safety Guidelines, while the Stanford corporations. Those attacks from capitalist favours risk-taking and cutting corners above Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Risk entry), ideology on Soviet five years plans as gross and other concerns, systemic failures like this oil spill describing the “expectation value of a possible laughable; what did they think, that Pepsi, Sony, disaster result without direct decisions being made negative event”, says: “It is common to use the Exxon and the rest don’t have their own ten year or trade-offs considered.” plans, adaptable to circumstances no doubt, but number of killed persons as a measure of the with a clear strategy over the long period? severity of an accident.” None of this prevented The historically material connection Cooper the 2010 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil V does make is that the take-off of the US biotech rig in the Gulf of Mexico in which twelve workers “Worker safety cannot be sacrificed on the altar of industry, enabled from above by the Bayh- were killed. innovation. We have inadequate standards for workers Dole Act of 1980,16 was further enabled by the ‘Guidelines’ are the compromise that corporate exposed to infectious materials.” establishment of NASDAQ, a riskier technological capital imposes on regulators. In the Deepwater – David Michaels, director of Occupational Safety and stock exchange which allowed pension funds Horizon case key components like the blowout Health Administration (OHSA), USA and the like to make high-risk investments; to be preventer rams and fail-safe valves had not been The limitations of regulation are that much greater ‘venture capitalists’ as part of the portfolio. On inspected since 2000, even though the guidelines within those areas of technological promise and this basis she talks of “a tight institutional alliance called for an inspection every 3-5 years. The rig risk which Melinda Cooper has focused on – the between the arts of speculative risk-taking and the had never been in dry dock. BP and Halliburton Life Sciences’; biotechnology and bioinformatics. actual cultures of life science experimentation.” knew that the wrong cement had been used to seal The promise comes from Tissue Engineering And then cites at length the prospectuses of the the well. What is most disturbing is the evidence and Stem Cell Research, both of which are biotech sector star, Geron corporation, which that the crew and the company overlooked a characterised by the possibility of the unexpected. amount to a Thesaurus of hedged promise. negative pressure test on the well hours before Thus, the “construct works only if it continues th the 20 April explosion. What was this; wishful to grow and respond to surrounding tissue after thinking, or a suicidal crew? The Presidential implementation, i.e. to transform in ways that are Commission report of November 8th says that variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 29

not so easily predicted”. There is a danger, she can only be financialised, quantifying the says, of “excess tissue mutability”. With stem cells unquantifiable – as Swiss Re has it – with acts of there is the promise of being transformed into God as a contractual get-out. When the response the cell of which ever organ you wish, but as yet is socialised – for example by‘the international no guarantees seem on offer, as the disclaimers in community’ – there is usually a large gap between Geron’s reports make clear. One Geron disclaimer what is promised and what appears on the ground runs: “as new technologies these products run after any catastrophe, as well as competition the risk of unforeseen side effects for which amongst different institutions, agencies and NGOs. Geron has no product liability.”21 Back in 1998, Dick Bryan, in describing the transference of Swiss Re, the world’s second largest re-insurer, risk to working class households in the richer talking of the potential for accidents, demands world, mentions the luxury capital has of hedging that “we think the unthinkable and quantify the its risks; laying-off the bet. The largest sums of unquantifiable.”22 This need to quantify is how money in the insurance business are there to private capital deals with risk. Such abstract protect money. A myriad of insurance contracts quantification is also the basis of carbon credit and capital market vehicles have been created as trading. But in this instance where is the pre- forms of ‘hedging’. As it turns out, these vehicles emption? Would Swiss Re employ its own specialist can take on a life of their own. In the language, health and safety experts to examine every biotech a ‘hedge’ might equally well be a speculation. lab? And if so, what criteria would be applied? Credit Default Swaps (CDS), a hedge by which a Do such experts exist? That is, people with highly bond-holder can ‘buy protection’ against the issuer sophisticated and specialised knowledge, who of the bond defaulting, ceased to be a form of would – for no doubt less money – work in the insurance and could be traded by traders with no health and safety field? financial interest in the bond issuer. In the months Melinda Cooper does rather force the since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, CDS on BP connection between a financialized world have swung up-and-down and up-and-down26 as dealing in uncertain futures and the nature of speculative investors divine just how much the biotechnology, but her take on the overly-capacious Gulf of Mexico well explosion and oil ‘leak’ was notions of Fordism and post-Fordism – despite a US Army patrolling the streets of the French Quarter going to cost; how it would be quantified. In this seemingly obligatory Deleuzian stamp of approval in New Orleans, September 2005, following Hurricane dominant narrative of BP’s financial prospects and – is more fruitful. The production of prosthetics, Katrina its ups-and-downs, there was no room for the death organ transplants and blood transfusion is of twelve workers. standardised and regulated (Fordist), she notes; These swaps were also used to structure “precise techniques and protocols for freezing, Collateralized Debt Obligations. Both they and packaging and transportation.”23 Whereas CDS have taken part of the blame for the banking the bioreactor (post-Fordist) delivers, “Not a crisis of 2007-9, of which there has been much standardized equivalent but a whole spectrum of talk of ‘excessive’ risk taking. What was supposed variable tissue forms.” She goes on to note that to spread risk and make a speculative banking George W. Bush was able to avoid the split between system safer had the opposite effect. But in the the very different wings of his Republican Party end it didn’t matter, rather, it turned out, there was because “there is a highly deregulated market in in effect no risk. Those melodramas of economic privately funded scientific research and services ‘collapse’ were taken at face value, even when exist side by side with an often intensively other financial instruments were not, and the prohibitive stance on the part of the Federal banks saved by public money. Instead, the result government.” One consequence, as the New York of the ‘crisis’ is to have increased the momentum Times reported, is that “the modern biolab often of the transference of risk on to public finances. has fewer Federal safety regulations than a typical To effect this shift, the predictions of CDS players blue-collar factory.”24 have themselves determined the rate of interest David Michaels, cited above, said that OHSA sovereign debtors must pay. The result, riskier lives rules governing laboratories were not written with for those with the least economic power and a genetic manipulation of viruses and bacteria in qualitative increase in class stratification. mind: “The OSHA standard deals with chemicals. What stood out in this arcane financial world It doesn’t deal with infectious diseases.” was that there was a trade “in purchasing Regulation in the USA seems to be taking a insurance against what would in effect be the very long time to catch up with new realities, failure of the modern capitalist system”. Calling and in the meantime reports are of a series of this the “End-of-the-World trade”, Donald deaths and comas among the 232,000 people Mackenzie describes its fantastic assumptions: working in such labs. The bland assurances from “No ordinary economic recession or natural the ex-president of the American Biological Red Cross debit cards issued to Hurricane Katrina disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it”. Safety Association simply ignore the possible evacuees. Neither hurricane or earthquake would trigger consequences of renewed biowarfare research; the such a collapse. All one trader could imagine as a shift to wholesale genetic changes in organisms, cause was “a revolutionary Marxist government powerful that it has fought US health reform at and the new weight of pharmaceutical capital in Washington.”27 And yet, from a normal price of great expense. The image of the business, however, thrown into vaccines and biological drugs made in $2-3,000 per $10million, the cost of this fantastical is a democratic one – they’ll take your several vats of living cells. hedge had risen 10-fold by November 2007. quid so that if the holiday suitcase disappear en Mackenzie ascribed this to “a collapse of public route tears will turn to smiles, even if the smiles fact”. There was in effect no way to assess risk, take a lot longer to arrive than it takes to pay the VI because there was no way to assess what many premium. But they’re choosey too, and life and “Throughout the 1980s a new understanding of risk derivatives were worth. Public facts are almost health insurance will become even more so with turned up simultaneously in the language of insurance bound to be rare when ‘the public’ are no more genetic testing. This is especially significant given institutions, capital markets and environmental politics. than individualised consumers of information(s), 25 the neoliberal push towards the individualisation This was the concept of ‘catastrophic’ risk.” and yet by having information(s) to consume are not just of financial risk-taking but all kinds of – Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus made complicit in risk-taking decisions. insurance. Picking up from Foucault, Melinda The final and oldest form of dealing with risk There is of course such a thing as a catastrophe Cooper describes the Welfare State as “the first on offer is insurance. It is an after-the-event insurance business. There is even a catastrophe political form to place the acturial strategies of recompense which has some claim to being bond market which, ironically, gives little weight risk socialization at the very core of government… pre-event by the size of its premium acting as to predictions. In the face of what is expected to borrowing its juridicial forms from life insurance, a deterrent; the no-claims bonus, an incentive. be the worst US hurricane season since 2005, this generalizing its principles of mutual risk exchange Risk, then, is financialized, just as the system of market is back to normal after the global banking to the whole nation.” Life insurance, and pensions abstract quantifications of carbon credits and crisis. Reinsurers have transferred $2.35 billion of as a form of insurance against the future, is not offsets that came out of Kyoto has taken centre catastrophe risk to this market where the drawing only increasingly individualised and privatised, stage in climate change policy. As financialized up of the bonds are conducted by the usual they become more dependent on the increasingly risk management, it’s natural enough that the suspects: Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. speculative nature of mutual fund investment. insurance business is an increasingly integrated Such insurances, and the capital market products Uncertainty is introduced into what is supposed to part of financial capital. Just how integrated was evolving from them, have become more significant deal with it. shown by the large scale public rescue of the because of environmental events, and speculation When it comes to environmental or risk-taking US insurance giant AIG. A company based on their future. But they are both localized technological risk, insurance can at best only be so powerful that its boss, Maurice ‘the Czar’ and private, and on a very small scale. localised, making some reparation for localised Greenberg, had been a major force in changes What insurance and its derivatives offers are damage; reparation which will for sure be imposed on East Asia in the 1990s. An industry so necessarily partial guarantees against the future. contested by corporate lawyers. The reparation 30 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

Chernobyl victims after thyroid cancer surgery.

We also now know that, after numerous instances Notes of “inappropriate mis-selling”, ordinary persons 1 For various instances of this, see ‘Sticky Fingers: KPMG have to be financial experts who can read the and the Accountancy Oilgopoly’: Variant Issue 36, Winter smallprint of a contract drawn up by specialists in 2009 drawing up contracts, in order not to be shafted. 2 Melinda Cooper: Life as Surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era: University of Washington, 2008 VII 3 The distinction between external and manufactured risk made by Anthony Giddens in his characteristically banal The realities of this way of dealing with ‘Runaway World’, does not hold in a period of climate catastrophic risk are brought to life in a witty change and deep sea oil drilling, just as the ‘reflexivity’ and predictive satirical riff in James Kelman’s right in there. A recent example concerns the of his modernity is a highly selective reflexivity. ‘You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free’. It money that should go as a reward to IRS (US Tax 4 For a very thorough and unrhetorical report of cotton runs in and out of 30 pages of narrative without authority) informants who identify tax evaders farmer suicides, see the ISIS report of 6th January 2010. flagging28 and scorches a whole sequence of abroad. The reward has been jumped up to as 5 Thomas Lynes: Making Poverty: Zed Books, 2008 capitalist pretensions in the process. It has as much as 30% of any money recovered by the IRS. 6 Angela Mitropoulos: From Precariousness to Risk its premise a near-future spate of airplane scare Several millions can be involved, but there may Management and Beyond. ZHDK 2010 stories: “A common theme had to do with the be considerable time lag before the pay out, so 7 www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/07/13/marxists- insurance problem and how you would get a better that “hedge funds, private equity groups and capitalist-crisis-6-dicky-bryant deal if you accessed a bookie offering odds on yer other big investors are offering an alternative… 8 Richard Barbrook: Imaginary Futures: Pluto Press, 2008 plane’s survival …Either way you were a winner. to buy a percentage of these future payments in 9 As I write, EU research into nuclear fusion or its If ye survived the flight you lost the bet but if exchange for a smaller amount upfront to the possibility is on the edge of being a victim of cuts in publicly funded research. ye perished yer family collected the cash.” This whistleblowers.”30 Of course there is the usual became the ‘Survive or Perish Option’. Middle yakety-yak, the risk that the IRS won’t pay out, 10 http://www.wombles.org.uk/article2009105704.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/23/police-target- America, however, had to learn about bookies, seen all so that “this whole new class of assets to be radical-student-activists monetized” will involve the investor taking as as belonging to a dodgy, dangerous world, and this 11 Convention on Modern Liberty: Open Democracy, 2010, was helped by an outstanding ad which begins with much as 65% of the pay-out. And feel absolutely p296 a ‘lil ol feisty lady’ who must fly across the USA to entitled. 12 To be found at academic.com look after her grandchildren. However: “Recent 13 It is in the ‘War on Drugs’ most of all that one can see disturbances have unsettled so called ‘securities’ how neoliberal capitalism and its unequal free trades and on one singular difficult day the feisty old VIII have destroyed agricultures in both places where coca is lady’s life savings are gobbled up. The very next It may well be that those who made the progressive grown, making it the least risky option, and in the most important, (though shifting) entrepots like Jamaica day things return to normal and the big boys get promises of the future in 1964 really believed them. The Cuban missile crisis had been and (sugar and banana economies undermined) and Mexico their money back with interests. But due to the since the NAFTA agreement and now Senegal. vagaries of fate the small-time players are left gone, so why not?! From the Club of Rome report in 1973 on the finiteness of natural resources, 14 Melinda Cooper: Life as Surplus, pps 85-90 high and dry as usual. The lil ol feisty lady’s dough 15 Ibid p11 is blown. Her entire life savings just upped and then Chernobyl and evidence of global warming, however, the notion of catastrophe entered the 16 This Act transformed US attitudes to patents and was disappeared into thin air. How can she take care of especially favourable to biotechnology patenting. the granweans.” A kindly black fellow points her in language. Many futurist promises made now (with the exception of nuclear energy when we are not 17 ‘The Risk Society: Tradition, Ecological Order and Time- the direction of a bookies and she finally arrives, Space Acceleration’: wwwidrc.ca/en/ev-64356-201-1-DO_ bruised and battered at the destination airport given anything with which to judge the degree of TOPIC.html eradication of risk achieved) are by corporations – to be greeted by the grandchildren. The ironies 18 “Instrumental learning might be summarised as that of the advertisement were dangerous however, usually in the energy sector – promising that they which occurs as an accumulation of insight, but insight and it was attacked by religious, political leaders, are either clearing up the waste and pollution of a within more or less assumed and fixed (explicit or implicit) ends.” Brian Wynne, Robin-Grove-White, et “and other spokespersons for the corporate previous era, finding ways around the exhaustion of resources, or, in real 1964-style, promising an al. ‘Bio–to–Nano? Learning the Lessons, Interrogating industry who thought it reflected badly on the Comparison; A Working Paper by the Institute for ethical capitalism.” But its popularity continued, end to disease and an increase in longevity of life. Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster becoming the Perishing, and finally the Persian In contrast, people in ever larger parts of the University and Demos’, July 2004 bet. It became too popular for corporate capital, so breathing-eating-and-shitting world feel constant 19 ‘Wising Up: The public and New Technologies’: Centre their PR implied that bookies necessarily meant pressure to work harder amidst fear of losing for the Study of Environmental Change, Lancaster University. This group have, in various groupings with the Mob: “Corporate interests were irritated, that job; see that, for example, the development of biofuels is pushing up basic food prices; and Brian Wynne and Robin Grove-White as constants, in particular those with large holdings in the produced a whole series of critical reports on new airline and insurance industry. Nay wonder. This know that despite the many, many promises of technologies risk assessment genetics, the poorer you are the younger you die. was supposed to be their action and had been 20 Ian Urbina, ‘Workers on Doomed Rig Voiced Concern legally legitimized by order of the democratic What capitalism does is to create expectations About Safety’, New York Times, July 21st 2010 powers for that very purpose. Why in hell were and simultaneously temper them, for, whatever 21 Melinda Cooper: Life as Surplus, p144 maist of these new profits passing them by…The is developed, capitalism must reproduce scarcity. 22 Ibid p81 Such a world requires that we are also psychically money men swiftly instructed their legal teams 23 Ibid p123 prepared for the unknown and the unexpected to swiftly instruct the state and federal politicos 24 Andrew Pollack, Duff Wilson, ‘Safety Rules Can’t Keep to move swiftly; procedural rulings and all kinds on terms determined by the rich and powerful. Up With Biotech Industry’, New York Times, May 27th of legislations were quickly enacted to ensure the Obviously the globalised world is complex. We 2010 bulk of these profits were assigned to their rightful don’t need Anthony Giddens, professionalized 25 Melinda Cooper: Life as Surplus, p81 owners, swiftly and absolutely at once and fucking NGOs with their institutional interests, or anyone 26 BP itself carried no significant insurance. Like other immediately.” else to tell us that. In our daily lives we are large capitalist corporations it set up its own – what are called ‘captive’ – insurance, in this case Jupiter In the 18th and 19th centuries the Persian bet constantly having to assess the odds on the basis of imperfect information. Insurance, but with only a small pay-out capability, may not have seemed so ‘sick’ or outlandish. though with access to reinsurance markets they The promises of technology are immense, Melinda Cooper, citing Viviana A. Zelitzer, otherwise could not have. Early on there was some describes speculative life insurance of the time: our problem is that their development is not fuss as to whether it could claim on a policy held by “In a context where the difference between neutral but subject to the compulsion of capital Transocean from whom the rig was leased, but the contract was clear;Transocean’s insurance was only for speculation and risk hedging was far from evident, to accumulate, and the psychic needs and desires of those who control capital, their ‘imaginaries’ damage to the rig. The real action has been in the CDS insurance policies on the lives of the poor and market for BP, Transocean and Halliburton. Speculative elderly were considered legitimate forms of often marketed in utopian terms. Despite all the predictions here would have to quantify what will be investment, while popular lotteries were regularly talk of the ‘precautionary principle’, the promoters contested extents of damage, and take into account the of those technologies which capital chooses to political pressure to ‘punish’ BP while not impinging on wagered on the chances of the shipwrecked and the corporate capitalist business of deep sea oil drilling. 29 develop, treats scepticism or opposition as being newly arrived immigrants.” 27 Donald Mackenzie: ‘End-of-the-World-Trade’: London Cooper implies that there is a continuation due either to ‘irrational fears’, or a ‘deficit’ of Review of Books Vol 30 No 9 8th May 2008 from this to speculative neoliberalism, but leaves public understanding. Regulation, especially in the area of worker health and safety, does matter, 28 James Kelman: You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the out of her account what Kelman shows: the sheer Free. Penguin, 2005, pp 94-128 but requires alertness and the need to fight for political and economic weight of ‘institutional’ 29 Viviana A. Zelitzer: Models and Markets: Transaction it over and over. More generally we are forced to finance capital demanding its monopoly rights. The Publishers, 1983 be alert, not to the projected fears of men like rescue of the gargantuan insurer AIG by the US 30 David Kocieniewski, ‘Whistle-Blowers Become government, “swiftly and absolutely at once and Rumsfeld, but to the fine print of every contract Investment Option for Hedge Funds’ New York Times, fucking immediately”, tells as to how insurance we cannot avoid being a party which can only be a May 19th 2010 is an integral part of finance capital, the speed collective endeavour; alert to which technological in this case prompted by Goldman Sachs being a developments capital that is being invested major AIG counterpart. goes, and why, and in which not, so that we can ‘Sick’ and ‘outlandish’ wagers still exist but pro-actively ask: ‘Why? Why is it like this? Who ‘institutional’ finance has got its sticky fingers benefits, and whose cost? Exactly the questions risk assessment does not ask. variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 31 In a Class all of their own The incomprehensiveness of art education John Beagles

“Over the last thirty years, capitalist realism has tracts of the magazine to various contributors’ just for art schools. The one solution I can see successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it thoughts on the subject. The majority of these – as a practicing artist and tutor – is a renewed, is simply obvious that everything in society, including often-impassioned defences and polemics focused reimagined, core insertion of comprehensive healthcare and education, should be run as a business. on and were united by their condemnation of the education values as absolutely essential. To be As any number of theorists from Brecht through to impact of New Labour’s enthusiastic advancing clear, this isn’t just about economics, or questions Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory of neoliberal ideology upon state funded ‘public’ of diversity, or core values of universal access politics must always destroy the appearance of the university education – aka ‘corporate pedagogy’. based on fairness and equality. As fundamental ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as As numerous voices stated, the accession of as these are, the assertion here is that a diverse, necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just this cast-as-technocratic market rationalism comprehensive mix of students is absolutely as it must make what was previously deemed to be (managerialism) is creating a dysfunctional intrinsic to art school culture, pedagogy and by impossible attainable.” relationship between student and tutor, one which extension the creation of wider culture that it is more akin to that of consumer/ customer and Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Zer0 books, 2009) informs. ‘knowledge provider’.4 This reciprocal commercial relationship is further muddled, because, as Fisher Prologue has written, it’s never too clear if the students Art for a few As is often the case, events have over taken are the consumers or the actual products being “The one ‘selecting’ institution that readily agreed to this article. When I started writing this text, art produced.5 participate did so at the insistence of a senior manager education was in its familiar state of permanent While the magazine pages and websites of who was concerned that their admissions tutors were crisis. Certainly it seemed those working in art publications (even Frieze ran with a similar ‘trying to make everyone middle class’.” art education had become battle fatigued by ‘debate’) were consumed with a largely negative ‘Art for a Few’, National Arts Learning Network9 the burden of increased managerialism and its perception of art schools’ future, other critical NALN’s recent report, ‘Art for a Few’, reaffirmed attendant bureaucracy. Now, however, it seems we voices in the ’sector’ were less vociferous in tone, that for art school education issues pertaining have accelerated into a new phase. keener to stay away from too much overt discussion to the lack of social diversity are still central; In recent years it’s been fashionable, with some of the politics of policy – involvement in structural identifying problems relating to continuing overt justification, to accuse critics of resorting to crude issues often came across as being beneath many. and covert exclusion (non selection) of students economic determinism when discussing culture However, this work was similarly underpinned by from ‘outside’ the dominant middle class strata. As and education. However, the consequences of a shared sense of emergency. In books such as ‘Art the report remarks, “the art academy has a deeply massively increasing tuition fees and by extension School (Propositions for the 21st Century)’ and embedded, institutionalized class and ethnically student debt, especially in the humanities, will, ‘A.C.A.D.E.M.Y’, contributors proposed how art biased notion of a highly idealized student against if they go ahead unchallenged, result in the most schools could and should respond to the shifting whom they measure students”.10 While there are decisive and seismic changes to UK education position of art and culture in a world dominated many programmes run by national art schools since 1945. That of course is the point. Reversing by Fisher’s pervasive business ontology. The talk aimed directly at widening the intake of students and eradicating those socially progressive was of alternatives to existing models. In articles from outside the ‘natural’ or ‘usual’ selection advances (however compromised they have been) by educators such as Yve Lomax, Simon O’Sullivan, pools (the report highlights how some tutors refer is the ideological objective of this government, and Irit Rogoff, the focus was less on responding to disparagingly to students as WPs, aka Widening as it was of the last. In education, the core values economic and policy assaults and more on trying Participation Students11), profound problems still of a comprehensive system designed to ‘‘suit the to identify the possibilities and potentialities of persist. 1 many as well as the old fitted the few” have been developing radically new forms of and locations The report’s figures (based on those provided subject to systematic dismembering. Consistently for art education. Against the instrumentalism by UCAS) state that those students classified as the argument has been that this system is and resultant specialisation of market driven coming from the lower socio-economic classes unsustainable. The idea that this is simply how it aesthetics, they proposed alternative practices (referred to as SEC 4-7’s; which range from those is, is the basis of Mark Fisher’s useful notion of that develop ‘embedded criticality’, ‘non in routine occupations to small employers12) in ‘capitalist realism’. teleological epistemologies’, and ‘problem based Fine Art represent 24-33% of the whole student 6 However, while the crony capitalism of learning’. The danger of this approach lies in what population (these figures refer to the period this system may have become more naked, futurology skillfully avoids, namely any assessment between 2004/5 - 2007/8, and compares to 32- David Harvey argues the restoration project of of where we are and how to get somewhere else. 32.4% for all HE students in the UK coming from neoliberalism has always been about an ideological Rather, it tends to simply ‘wish’ us out of ‘crisis’ households classified as SEC 4-713). As this is a and political endeavor to restore class power to while acquiescing to the imperatives of ‘now’, as mean average, this figure needs to be digested 2 small elites. In 2008, Naomi Klein framed the witnessed by the sudden Big Society-oriented with some skepticism. Fluctuations between project this way: academic research interest in ‘co-operatives’. geographical areas and schools suggest a far more “...that really what we have been living is a liberation The pervasive sense of crisis that saturated pronounced spiking of those statistics at some movement, indeed the most successful liberation these different responses continues to be hard schools. For instance, some controversy surrounded movement of our time: the movement by capital to to dispute. While it’s difficult to countenance this question of class composition in relation liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation. the rather self-serving mythologising of a to Glasgow School of Art – in 2002 a Guardian For those who say this ideology’s failing, I beg to differ. Halcyon period of “free and open zones of article ran with the headline ‘Glasgow “posher” I actually believe it has been enormously successful, experimentation”7 which often underpins defences than Oxbridge’14, while a wikipedia entry in 2008, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of art school values (and perhaps secures its stating that its class diversity was the third worst of Chicago textbooks. That I don’t think the project conservatism), this doesn’t invalidate the anger in the UK after Oxford and Cambridge, provoked actually has been the development of the world and the prompted by the application to education of a principled defence of the school’s record on elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war neo-liberal ideology and its beliefs in market inclusion. While the figures that prompted these waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they liberalism and managerialism. articles on the alleged elitism (which related to 3 won. And I think the poor are fighting back.” However, while signs of the pathogens a 2002 report) were flatly disputed, with some infecting the system were hard to ignore, there justification, they do point to possible fluctuations The Ship is Sinking was a problem in the focus on the reasons for within the figure of 24-33% inclusion. For instance, the breakdown. Reading the varied discussions, the mean average figures are undoubtedly “I think anger is very important, and, contrary to the the defences and alternatives felt hampered upwardly skewed by the much higher than average classical tradition, in Seneca say, I think it is the first in their potential by a blind spot. The majority composition of SEC 4-7 category students (working political emotion. It is often anger that moves the of these exchanges paid insufficient attention class students) at schools such as Wolverhampton subject to action. Anger is the emotion that produces to the ongoing, but now it seems exponentially and Sheffield. motion, the mood that moves the subject.” increasing, problem of class exclusion within art Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of schools and the resultant rise of a homogeneous Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) student body. This is an old story but it’s The Good Student and the In recent years there has been a steady flow of clearly getting worse and will continue to do Consensual Idyll publications, magazine articles and impassioned so – not least due to tuition fee increases8 and ‘Art for a Few’ evidenced how the sample art letters decrying the current state of and gloomy ‘globalisation’ representing the imposition schools’ admissions procedures were formally future prophesied for art education. Art Monthly of this neoliberal ideology on a transnational and informally prejudiced against students was prominent in describing this crisis, devoting scale. The consequences of this are dire, and not from outside the usual spheres of selection (the 32 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

WP student). As the report noted: “Normalised student identity is subtly held in place whilst the WP student is constituted as ‘Other’, deserving of higher education access but only to ‘other’ kinds of discourse and institutions.”15 The kind of exclusion operating within art school culture at the point of entry into the system then revolves around naturalised assumptions about the right type of student. Notions of good communication skills are, as the report makes clear, “judged from a white, middle class perspective”16, which result in judgments [...] being enacted, which are claimed to be ‘fair’ and ‘transparent’ and even ‘value free’ but [are] clearly (from the long list of quite specific and value loaded sets of expectations) [...] embedded in histories of classed and racialised inequalities/ misrecognitions and complex power relations”.17 The report goes on to question the increasing emphasis on academic qualifications as another way in which students from the SEC 4-7 category are prejudiced against. High quality academic Too Obvious the UK’s current Conservative/ Liberal coalition qualifications are identified as being a further government is implementing Klein’s ‘shock Within any discussion of exclusion and the need doctrine’. Within the sphere of state education, privilege many will have been denied – “class- for embedding of comprehensive values within art biased ideas of effective signs of intelligence as many Tories have been gleefully pleased to school culture lies, as detailed in the NALN report, announce, the opportunities for Conservatives – which seem natural and innate are partial and the thorny question of class division, hierarchies class centrist.”18 to further privatise are the ones set up for them and exclusion. The problem of focusing on this by the previous Labour government. Education issue of class and exclusion within art education secretary Michael Gove’s21 recently announced Once they are in… is ‘difficult’. Not least because talking about class plans for schools in England to opt out of Local more broadly is in itself a deeply troubling thing What the report makes clear is how art schools Authority control point to this – thus green for many to do. Firstly because, as David Harvey at the point of selection continue to play an lighting the perennial Tory dream of finally has written about at length, there is a pervasive, active if largely occluded role in what sociologist demolishing the state supported comprehensive ideological issue today in discussing class at all. As Pierre Bourdieu termed ‘cultural reproduction’. system. After years of ‘softening up’ by both Tories he notes: Bourdieu’s analysis is fairly explicit in setting out and New Labour, the comprehensive system, like how education plays an active role in perpetuating “Progressives of all stripes seem to have caved in to the health service, is sufficiently on its knees class-based inequalities between generations Neoliberal thinking since it is one of the primary fictions that the ‘sound logic’ of the necessity of applying (i.e. people from the same backgrounds become of Neoliberalism that class is a fictional category that ‘business ontology’ to education seems likely artists). For Bourdieu, a key factor is that this exists only in the imagination of socialists and crypto- to be passed without significant parliamentary cultural reproduction frequently occurs despite communists…The first lesson we must learn, therefore, opposition – who, after all, is there to oppose it? the best efforts of those involved in education is that if it looks like class struggle and acts like class It is clear to most that this legislation, coupled – exclusion operates often as a result of hidden war then we have to name it unashamedly for what it with what is already known as the postcode assumptions on the part of educators. is. The mass of the population has either to resign itself lottery22, will result in the effective privatisation The mechanisms of cultural reproduction to the historical and geographical trajectory defined by of the state education system. With a certain overwhelming and ever increasing upper class power, or historical irony, a moment of crisis is being used to don’t just begin and end at the point of selection. 19 The perhaps thornier question is what kind of respond to it in class terms.” implement legislation that will reverse a previous Elsewhere, Harvey goes on to discuss this experiences those “lucky enough to get in”to art moment of crisis legislation – which was after ideological sleight of hand in greater detail. The school from outside the usual territories have once all what the Keynesian welfare state emerged idea of a classless society or the notion that class they’ve crossed the threshold? from. The consequences will effectively plunge us distinctions are no longer applicable is itself an If, as ‘Art for a Few’ reports, there are in many back to a pre-welfare state, an explicit hierarchal ideological construct. Few would dispute, and art schools implicit class-centrist assumptions division of education. For an ideology that finds Harvey doesn’t himself, that traditional, simplistic regarding what kind of applicants will make the abhorrent the very notion of anything public divisions of society into working, middle and upper best future art students, it’s logical that these and outwith (seemingly) the logic of profit, the class are no longer appropriate – for one they fail assumptions (biases) continue to operate with situation looks perilous. Writing from the context to take into account the intersections of gender, regard to the kind of teaching that occurs within of US education, Henry A Giroux’s analysis is ethnicity, and sexuality – but to extrapolate those very same institutions and the kind of prescient: and state as many do that class issues have education experiences students from the SEC “Public schools are under attack not because they are disappeared is at best delusional and at worst 4-7 groups can expect to experience. The nature failing or are inefficient, but because they are public, ideologically self serving. The statistics Harvey of these experiences may well be more difficult an unwanted reminder of a public sphere and set of uses to show how much richer the rich have got to ascertain or ‘prove’, but if the model of the institutions whose purpose is to serve the common during the last thirty years are stark.20 ‘good student’ is a pervasive model, it does seem good and promote democratic ends.”23 While Harvey and others identify this reasonable to assume that those same internalised We are then faced with a pivotal moment, one naturalising of class inequality and class power as categories for grading and assessing students at where the very idea of public subsidised free the central, pivotal achievement of the neoliberal the point of entry continue to operate internally universal comprehensive education is in danger project during the last forty years, there has been within the pedagogic culture of the schools. of being erased from the imagination as a popular a far longer silence in the art world as regards It’s a shame that the NALN report didn’t viable ideal. The Conservative assault is hardly class, and it remains the elephant in the room. explore this further. Issues over inclusion at the surprising, but is exasperated by the manner in Rarely does it make any kind of substantive point of entry for those figured as ‘other’ are which prognosis of its ‘natural death’, its ‘flawed appearance. Although the collaborative group perhaps well known. But questions regarding logic’ as a system, has been internalised and Bank made numerous, highly entertaining these students’ experiences once in art school are accepted widely across society – the ‘natural excursions into this territory in the mid 1990s, more problematic. For instance, researching the impossibility’ of a comprehensive system owes it has generally remained the guilty liberal social background of students who drop out of art its success to a similar ideological sleight of hand secret that has propelled many well intentioned school would be significant. This kind of research deployed when (not) discussing class. participatory practices and socially inclusive might highlight how even in schools where SEC 4-7 Faced with this moment, it is clear to public art works. Unfortunately, this ‘traditional’ inclusion appears high, problems of self-exclusion me that issues about exclusion need to be often embarrassed, guilt-ridden silence that and the equally problematic one of ghettoisation equally embedded alongside all curricula and dominates within the art sector needs now, as a are high, both as a result of implicit and explicit pedagogic innovation. It is no longer forgivable matter of urgency, to be broken within the spaces pedagogic practices. As Bourdieu’s analysis shows, or strategically appropriate to regard them as of education. the most effective means of cultural reproduction appendices to be dealt with by external WP is the generation of the feeling (‘habitus’) that programmes. Tackling exclusion and transforming ‘that’s not for me’. The worry is the distinct To be Comprehensively rewritten the culture of art schools are two inextricable sides possibility a two tier culture, with clusters/pockets/ (out of history) of the same coin. groups of distinct students, operates within art Focusing on issues about student satisfaction, or Predictably, following Milton Friedman’s and the schools, something which isn’t being flagged up by criteria of the latest evaluation regime of Higher Chicago boys’ credo, it is every day clearer that statistics of inclusion and diversity. Eduction, resources, or alternatively suggesting ‘crisis opportunities’ are being manipulated and the creation of independent small scale artist-run variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 33

art schools, still means that the wrong questions by Boris Groys entitled ‘Education by infection’. about, and causes for, the current state of art Groys examines the challenges faced by educators education are being proposed. At present, either teaching in a post post-modernist “free for all”29 the defences of art education are too reactive, and culture, where no one tradition dominates. wiling to replicate and reinforce the neoliberal In this new pedagogic space, he writes, “just agenda, for instance the focus on student as art after Duchamp can be anything, so art dissatisfaction reinforces the paradigm of student education can be anything”. Groys’ “solution” for consumer and teacher provider; or, as with much how art education can be reinvigorated uses an of the discussion around new art schools becoming idea coined by Malevich, namely the “trope of unshackled from the state, are undermined by biological evolution”. Adopting Malevich‘s work, a complete failure to identify how they would Groys discusses how artists (and art students address this core issue of exclusion and diversity – within the confines of an art school) need to small scale, privately funded independents would “modify their immune systems of their art in order probably face greater challenges than pre-existing to incorporate new aesthetic bacilli”.30 For Groys, schools in terms of diversity. this means artists/ students/ educators opening The second aspect is the inability to themselves up to distinctly different forms of imaginatively and publicly state the need for the work, experiences, subjectivities and identities. centrality of comprehensive values as core to any Groys states that this was an essential aspect of reimagined notion of art school – as being both progressive modernism that needs to be reaffirmed an ethical, and, more practically, a structural and grasped: “radical modern art proposed that necessity for the informing of artists and art – artists get themselves infected with exteriority should also be best understood as part of the [and] become sick through the contagions of bigger problem now facing those who used to, the outside world, and become an outsider to once upon a time, refer to themselves as being of oneself”.31 (There is not scope here to also critique the Left. The problem is the familiar inability24 to the pathologising of communion in Groys’ motif.) popularise a seductive, imaginative alternative to For Groys, this is essential for the production the bankrupt values of our consumerist-capitalist- of art that avoids the kind of stagnation and stasis entertainment-network, which permeates the art favoured by “sincere artists”. Sincere artists, in artists sent out on field trips to carry outresearch education sector too. Just as the Left has largely Groys’ analysis, are dull and powerless, because by into what ‘non art people’ are like. And this is the failed in popularising a set of alternative values25 being sincere they follow a repetitious programme problem – the extent to which multiculturalism (Simon Critchley regards this as fundamentally a that only reproduces “their own existing taste” in practice fails to involve interculturalism. If problem of naming26), within art education there and only “deals with their own existing identity”. ‘contact’ with the ‘alien’ or ‘other’ is only ever has been a similar failure of the imagination to In contrast, Groys argues that the production of temporary and structurally prescribed, the express comprehensive values as core. The sort creative, “insincere artists” (in creative industry kind of interrelatedness, ‘infection’ and ‘ethical of ideological debates that could distinguish newspeak – to try to recoup it from market avidity imagination’ argued for will at best only ever be between liberalism and democracy. Consequently, – those who favour ‘risk and experimentation’) is transitory. Where art education has, all too briefly, there’s been no ‘big idea’ to get behind – e.g. key fundamentally predicated on openness. This is, for ‘worked’32, the mutual interrelatedness that Groys values such as the principle of autonomy as the Groys, the essential characteristic feature of art talks about as being essential for the infection of means to defend culture from government, and schools’ “modernist inheritance”. An inheritance the artist with foreign bacilli is embedded within the public interest which that principle is meant that favours the revelation of “the other within education ecology, not as a bolted on arranged trip to protect – just an increasingly confused, often oneself”, and asks the student to become ‘other’ – to ‘foreign lands’ or manufactured introductions tribal, partisan defence of something frequently to “become infected by Otherness”. to ‘exotic others’. In an education system that vague, intangible and contradictory. This is a In another context, Iain Biggs in his article ‘Art is comprehensive, these experiences of being particular problem for art education, as it has Education and the Radical imagination’ makes challenged and opened up to foreign subjectivities always been hampered by its epistemological similar claims to Groys’ for the need to assert the and identities that contradict who or what you instability, something that since the breakdown of importance of inter-relatedness (‘cross pollution of are, and which are frequently antagonistic to our rigid Modernist certainties has increased. While students’) within education. Biggs talks about the position, is structurally integrated into the fabric this loss of particular forms of authoritarian need to embrace the “reanimating of alternative of the pedagogy. This bringing together of distinct power and control is a good thing, it has created a narratives, based on values inherent in alternative identities produces the opposite to an “idyll of pedagogic vacuum within art education since filled histories and memories” which are distinct to consensus”33 (a homogenized space of agreement) by neoliberal dogma. The loss of an emancipatory those validated by the new establishment. That which is, as the statistics indicate, becoming project or dimension to education – body snatched only by turning away from the competitive, market increasingly common within schools purified of by an ‘entrepreneurialism’of the self – finds driven, unethical mode of being in art school ‘infections’ and ‘others’. echoes in other areas. For example, both Nancy (heroic individualism and the progressive careerist Fraser and Nina Power have recently written model) can we resurrect a more transformative about the depressing consequences for Feminism role for art. Biggs argues that only by changing Missed critiques of multiculturalism of a similar decoupling of its radical politics, pedagogical practices can this be done. For him New Labour posited multiculturalism’s ‘cultural or as Fraser puts it, Feminism’s ‘emancipatory this is about ditching what Paulo Freire critically diversity’ as an innocuous competition of peers, edge’27 from its everyday practice, as a result of called the “banking concept of education” – rather than an unequal struggle, writing over neoliberalism’s granting of its demands. As Power “where knowledge is seen as a gift bestowed by inscriptions of inequality and conflict. However, pithily remarks; “stripped of any internationalist those who consider themselves knowledgeable, behind the egalitarian rhetoric, issues of inclusion and political quality, feminism becomes about upon those whom they consider to know nothing” and control were obscured by talking as if all as radical as a diamante phone cover”.28 The – to one which is far less hierarchal and is centered cultures were distinct and equal. A central issue fundamental differences here centre on the sort of on problem posing and a relationship where in the politics of multiculturalism has been its democratic society one believes in: a technocratic students and tutors develop, simultaneously, ability to simultaneously recognise and disavow and managerial one, mainly geared towards powers of “critical solicitude”. For Biggs this is difference – political turmoil has instead been supporting freedoms of expression hedged within representative of “good educational practice”, defined as the result of failed communication. consumerism, or one geared towards freedoms and the kind of pedagogic practice that ensures that Under new Labour, institutions were increasingly equalities in public discourse as a whole. teaching is based on: “A real concern for the called upon to demonstrate their multicultural students’ self understanding, because genuine credentials – who benefitted from the use of ‘Interesting things happen in art self understanding is always an understanding multiculturalism as a signifier of institutional of our interrelatedness to others, and so finally value when institutional statements of schools because of an interesting to questions about the common good in a just multicultural purpose have not evidently resulted mix of students’ society.” in tangible changes in staffing or pedagogic While a publicly stated commitment to the ideals For Biggs, the shift away from the competitive, practice? of comprehensive education, to directly confront career orientated individualism, dominant in much Pragna Patel: academia including art education, towards what issues related to class exclusion as being vital to “Sure. And what’s happened in education in the last he calls an “ethical imagination” – a capacity for the production of artistic culture, may be read as decade is just a kind of liberal multiculturalism. There’s imaginative empathy – is “fundamental to any just archaic, an example of one of Žižek’s “lost causes”, been no actual antiracism, just ‘recognising diversity’ society”; “it makes possible our ability to allow it’s telling how frequently in a sublimated form – different religious festivals – a lesson on how not to the ‘other’ its own existence – not for my sake, nor the ‘ideals’ of comprehensive education haunt tackle racism in schools. One main finding was that the because it conforms to my scheme of things, but contemporary discussions about art school and the kind of antiracism schools espoused was dogmatic and for its own sake”. future of art education. moralistic which was divisive and guilt-inducing, quite The fact is that experience of the other is In Steven Madoff’s ‘Art School Propositions dangerous. One thing I find frustrating is that the media st now frequently pedagogically manufactured as for the 21 century’ there is, for example, a text are discussing these issues in such a compartmentalised a segregated curriculum activity – students or 34 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

Book Bloc and their books at demonstrations in Rome, November 2010.

way. There’s no attempt to link economics or social those which allow for the unregulated greed of deprivation with racism, for instance.... But this is not individuals to ‘abuse the system’, are in reality, as my idea of a civil rights movement. If race is the only Harvey and Klein have written, intrinsic structural focus there’s a danger of returning to a hierarchy of features. oppressions, whereas my experience is that one has to In a 2008 lecture, Judith Williamson referred deal with things simultaneously.”34 to our society as being one where a culture of As Homi Bhabha states: denial dominated.41 Within this culture we actively “To question the deployment of ‘difference’ as a counter seek to ‘unknow’ basic facts of our existence – to the negatively perceived ‘totalisation’, is not to deny Williamson explicitly focuses on the inability the fecundity of a notion which insists on subjectivity to discuss global warming. We can think of this as polymorphous, community as heterogeneous, active unknowing as being another example of social formations as mutable and culture as vagrant. the kind of cognitive locking, that, as the much It is to recognise that ‘difference’ has been diverted paraphrased remark by Slavoj Žižek, has meant it’s by a postmodernist criticism as a theoretical ruse to been easier to imagine the end of the world than establish a neutral, ideology-free zone from which the an alternative to capitalism. Day by day it seems social dissension and political contest inscribed in the that this denial, this unknowing, this cognitive antagonist pairing of coloniser/colonised, have been locking, is loosening its grip. Now, after forty years, expelled. A policy statement defining difference in terms the “political project to re-establish the conditions of bland variations on a placid continuum, unhinged for capital accumulation and to restore the power from the planned inequalities of actually existing social of economic elites”42 is revealing itself in all its regimes and political struggles...”35 blunt, brutal greed and venality. The hollowness The consequence of this consensus – where of the rhetoric of freedom, choice and liberty social dissension and political contest have been reverberates. The internal contradictions and expelled – appears to conform to a broader brutal economic reality of this system are now so technologically produced narcissism; as Robert publicly known through personal experience as Hassan writes of the negative aspect of new to undermine the authority of the daily common technologies: sense pronouncements of ‘capitalist realism’ – “Through the technological ability to be exposed only nobody needs a degree in economics to see this to what you want to be exposed to, opinions, views anymore. What’s more, the various ways consent and ideas ring as if in an echo chamber. As Sunstein for this system was previously manufactured and puts it: ‘New technologies, emphatically including the bought (easy credit) can no longer deliver on the internet, are dramatically increasing people’s ability to promise of paying tomorrow for pleasure today.43 hear echoes of their own voices and to wall themselves Lord Browne’s 2010 review of Higher off from others’. More than ever there is the tendency Education funding and student finance, ‘Securing to listen out only for ‘louder echoes of their own voices’. a Sustainable Future for Higher Education’, This presents a major problem as far as a vibrant and rehashes the illusion of perfect competition, the diverse democratic functioning is concerned.”36 sovereignty of consumer choice and demand – its A homogenised student body produces suggestion, that the block grant for teaching be its own form of this broader technologically abolished; its overwhelming belief, that social manufactured narcissism – ‘I only engage with value can only be thought of in ‘economic terms’. ideas that reinforce my pre-existing values’. It also In a scathing overview of the review44, Stefan increasingly appears to replicate the production of Collini made clear the catastrophic consequences consensual islands or ghettos produced by broader and ruinous folly of further adopting the business social engineering (or apartheid) dominant in our the evolution of culture in our cities has been ontology within higher education – referred to as cities and towns (‘Where are Britain’s working proven to be oxymoronic to ‘real’ culture. There’s a the requirement to ‘meet business needs’. classes?’37). These characteristics should be similar danger within the art education system of In Collini’s analysis, the report represents a anathema to art school culture. The consequences believing pedagogic and technological innovations blueprint for a devastating attack on the public of encountering distinct subjectivities, namely are ‘engines of change’. Not least, because the role of universities in our social and cultural life. forms of dissensus and antagonism, should exist notion that art schools and art tutors can envisage That we are now at pivotal moment is clear for between students, and occasionally between the art of the future is as, it always has been, Collini: “What is at stake is whether universities in student and tutor (something which the wholesale something that should be resisted or dismissed the future are to be thought of as having a public adoption of a consumerist ethic absolutely negates outright. cultural role partly sustained by public support, against). Indeed, butting up against a dominant or whether we move further towards redefining culture, imbued with an untroubled sense of its Playing God, Social Darwinism them in terms of purely economistic calculation own unquestionable value was (and remains) a of value and wholly individualistic conception of “This government knows that culture and creativity depressing experience for those not ‘blessed’ with ‘consumer satisfaction’.”45 He goes on to show how matter. They matter because they can enrich all our lives, an inalienable sense of being at home within ‘real’ the consequences for higher education couldn’t and everyone deserves the opportunity to develop their culture.38 However, the often antagonistic debates be clearer: “the most likely effect of Browne’s own creative talents and to benefit from others. They created between these ‘others’, those whose proposals […] will be to bring about a much closer matter because our rich and diverse culture helps bring subjectivity is often motivated by being bored and correlation between the reputational hierarchy of us together. They also matter because creative talent out of place, and those at home within culture, institutions and the social class of their student will be crucial to our individual and national economic frequently leads to a questioning of dominant body […] ‘Free competition’ between rich and success in the economy of the future.” modes of thought. In the case of art, it has led to poor consumers means Harrods for the former and 40 fundamental questions regarding the ontology Tony Blair Aldi for the later: that’s what the punters have of art – those radical destabilizing acts that, like There is another, grimly amusing aspect in ‘chosen’.”46 Conceptualism, produce the sickness Groys argues which the application of a business ontology As I noted at the beginning, events have for. This is mainly because students from outside rebounds when judged against its own rhetoric; overtaken this article. Initially it was set to the strata of ‘normal art students’ are frequently, the consequences of neoliberal education highlight a blind spot in much of the art world’s because of their backgrounds, more troubled by restructuring directly contradict the stated aims of critical discussion of the future of art schools. The the divisions in the broader culture that allow for its education policy – producing dynamic, original aforementioned failure to grasp the fundamental, arts’ ‘freedom’.39 thinkers for the knowledge economy. In this, the intrinsic need for a principled adherence to and I’m not adhering here to a grassroots fantasy actuality of neoliberal practice, as opposed to argument for comprehensive values as being of art schools or some pseudo bullshit version of its ideological rhetoric, is revealed. Its economic absolutely core in art school culture. Not just as Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. I don’t have unbridled aggressive brand of Social Darwinism produces an ideal, but intrinsic in practice. It was based faith in the power of students to exclusively exactly the kind of conditions the neoliberal on what increasingly seems a rather cosy idea, develop innovative art, autonomously. Conversely, project was purported to rid society of, namely the namely that we will in the foreseeable future have however, at the moment there’s a compensatory stasis and stagnation of flattened, state controlled more than, say, ten art schools in Britain (just overemphasis and faith in pedagogic innovation culture. the blue chip ones?). However, the severity of the as the primary, at times it seems exclusive, means Harvey elucidates how neoliberal ideology present situation and the starkness of the choices of generating energy within the art education and its beliefs in markets and managerialism are facing us, means that the imperative to assert the system. Re-examining radical pedagogic practices riddled with these kinds of transparent flaws and absolute core values of comprehensive education from the 1960s is timely, but the power, control and apparent contradictions. Some are nakedly self- (free, universal access for all and a commitment authority, however much it is self-questioning, still serving, such as a deregulated private banking to a thoroughly diverse body of students) is, now lies with tutors. It’s an imposition of change from system that can’t be allowed to fail and must be more than ever, unquestionable. The pernicious above, however well meaning. The folly on the part shored up by increasing public debt. What might capitalist realism that has labeled this as a fanciful of city managers as to believing they can engineer be presented as flaws in the system, for example utopian impossibility needs to be shown for what variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 35

it is. David Harvey is quite clear about the kind and actively seeks to increase social segregation – an of immediate, imperative choices that need to be educational apartheid that wholeheartedly welcomes Comprehensive Education the end of commitment to ‘mixed education’. This made: was clearly witnessed during a select committee cross “What I think is happening at the moment is that they examination in July 2010, when he gleefully spoke of all The 1944 Education Act raised the school-leaving are now looking for a new financial set-up which can Afro-Caribbean schools, Muslim schools, etc. age to 15 and provided universal free schooling solve the problem not for working people but for the 22 A highly inappropriate piece of populist jargon, there is in three academically differentiated types of capitalist class. I think they are going to find a solution no lottery about it – the ability to send your children to schools – streamed entry was based on “accident the best schools is clearly directly linked to capital – i.e. of innate ability”; selection at the age of eleven for the capitalist class and if the rest of us get screwed, having enough money to live somewhere expensive. too bad. The only thing they would care about is if we via the 11+ exam. Following the 1964 General 23 Giroux, H. A, ‘Teachers Without Jobs and Education Election, the Labour government instructed all rose up in revolt. And until we rise up in revolt they are Without Hope: Beyond Bailouts and the Fetish of the going to redesign the system according to their own Measurement Trap’ (Part 2), truthout, June 8th 2010 local authorities to prepare plans for the creation class interests. I don’t know what this new financial http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles.htm of a common comprehensive education system of architecture will look like. If we look closely at what 24 Whether it is an inability or a refusal is worth new schools, either by amalgamation of existing happened during the New York fiscal crisis I don’t think considering. I’m reminded here of Dave Beech’s schools or by building new ones. Clyde Chitty, the bankers or the financiers knew what to do at all, argument regarding the problems of the left in ‘Seizing in 2002, reflected on differing conceptions of The Reins Of Power’, Art Monthly issue 294. now what they did was bit by bit arrive at a ‘bricolage’; comprehensive education, past triumphs and 25 I’m not thinking of a value to come with alternative mistakes, thus: “…many genuinely believed that a they pieced it together in a new way and eventually programmes of social organisation here. That is a they come up with a new construction. But whatever problem but the first step, as with Thatcherism in the capitalist society could be reformed, and that the solution they may arrive at, it will suit them unless we late ‘70s, would be to create a powerful set of core ideals new comprehensive schools would be a peaceful get in there and start saying that we want something capable of motivating people. At present it’s largely a means of achieving greater social equality – greater case of a getting behind a reactive defense. In art school that is suitable for us. There’s a crucial role for people social equality in the sense that working-class culture, for instance, it would be far more persuasive children would be able to move into ‘white-collar’ like us to raise the questions and challenge the to demonstrate the appeal of collaboration, collective legitimacy of the decisions being made at present, and work, dialogue and constructive dissent as ‘attractive’, occupations or move on to higher education. to have very clear analyses of what the nature of the as opposed to tribal defence of individualised practices problem has been, and what the possible exits are.”47 and reputations. 26 Critchley, S, Infinitely Demanding Ethics of Commitment Notes Politics of Resistance, London, Verso, 2008, p. 103. I’ve some time for Paul Bowman’s use of ‘ConDemned’ 1 Jones, K, New labour: The Inheritors in Education in http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/5449/ Britain 1944 to the Present, Cambridge, Polity, 2003 27 Fraser, N, ‘Feminism, Capitalism And The Cunning Of 2 Harvey, D, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, 2007, History’, New Left Review 56, March-April 2009 p. 16 http://www.newschool.edu/uploadedFiles/Faculty/NSSR/ 3 Naomi Klein: ‘Wall St. Crisis Should Be for Fraser_NLR.pdf Neoliberalism What Fall of Berlin Wall Was for 28 Power, N, One Dimensional Woman, Winchester, Zero Communism’, Democracy Now, October 6th 2008 Books. 2009, p. 30. http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein 29 The epistemological uncertainty that appears to be 4 Michael Corris succinctly pointed out how the simultaneously art education’s biggest handicap and internalisation of this logic creates a key flaw in student best source for progressive reinvention. criticisms, “while complaints about poor provision are legitimate, these are often tinged with the value for- 30 Groys, B, “Education by Infection” in, Art school: (propositions for the 21st century) MADOFF, S.H., ed., money mentality of consumers who aren’t satisfied with Writing in 1965, for example, leading sociologist what they expect from their purchase. In this situation, 2009, p. 29 it is all too easy for managers to use the complaints of 31 Ibid. A.H. Halsey could begin a New Society article with students against teaching staff, and the ‘customer is the ringing declaration: ‘Some people, and I am 32 With some reservations, I would suggest during the always right’ culture does little to accustom students ‘60s, when the class composition of British art schools one, want to use education as an instrument in to the experience of robust criticism or demands for underwent something of a ‘challenge’. pursuit of an egalitarian society. We tend to favour intellectual rigor, while the weary hypocrisy of passing students who should be failed is imposed by managers 33 Quoted in Critchley, S, Infinitely Demanding Ethics of comprehensive schools, to be against the public who value the income far more than the educational Commitment Politics of Resistance, London, Verso. 2008 schools, and to support the expansion of higher standards of the teaching staff.” Art Monthly, issue 302 34 Pragna Patel, from Southall Black Sisters, Red Pepper, education (Halsey, 1965, p. 13).’ Other social reformers 5 Fisher, M, Capitalist Realism, Zer0 books, 2009, p.42 2003 believed in the idea of the ‘social mix’ – the theory 6 Rogoff, I, ‘Academy as Potentiality’, in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y 35 Parry, B, ‘Signs of Our Times: Discussion of Homi which anticipated the steady amelioration of eds Nollert, A, Rogoff, I, Baere de, B, Dziewior, Y, Esche, Bhabha’s “The Location of Culture”’, in The Third text social class differences and tensions through C, Niemann, K and Roelstrete, D. Frankfurt, 2006 reader: on art, culture, and theory, eds Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, Ziauddin Sardar pupils’ experience of ‘social mixing’ in a new 7 Maria Walsh makes this point very well in her comprehensive school. This very narrow view of 36 Hassan, R, The information society: A sceptical view, contribution to Art Monthly’s special on education. egalitarianism could be found in one of Circular She also counter intuitively, and interestingly, offers Polity Press, 2008 some reasons for why we should be optimistic about the 37 As Mark E Smith muses on ‘Your Future our Clutter’ 10/65’s definitions of a comprehensive school:‘A changing face of art school. (2010). comprehensive school aims to establish a school 8 Few independent reports seem to disagree upon 38 The idea of a wholesale levelling out of cultural community in which pupils over the whole ability the impact of fee increases within the humanities, hierarchies has to be taken with a pinch of salt. I range and with differing interests and backgrounds specifically on the levels of class exclusion. can’t see power relinquishing power that easily – it’s can be encouraged to mix with each other, gaining 9 ‘Art for a Few’, National Arts Learning Network, 2009 mutated for sure, but to say, pace class divisions, that it’s stimulus from the contacts and learning tolerance disappeared is self serving nonsense. 10 Ibid. and understanding in the process (DES, 1965, P. 8).’ … 39 One coda: it’s important to be clear that SEC 4-7 11 Ibid. students are not figured as inherently radical here, 12 For more information on the Office for National either in the history of British art schools or in any Statistics social-economic classifications of occupation utopian imagined future idyll. There isn’t and never has (NS-SeC), see http://www.ons.gov.uk/about-statistics/ been some pure potent chemical to be added to the mix classifications/current/ns-sec/index.html and stepped back from. Indeed frequently they are, as a 13 ‘Art for a Few’, National Arts Learning Network, 2009; consequence of a poor national art curriculum, the most it’s worth mentioning that about one quarter of the conservative students. applicants do not state their SEC status, so there is a 40 Jones, K, Education in Britain: 1944 to the Present, Polity significant ‘unknown’ to these figures. Press, 2002, p. 165. 14 ‘Glasgow “posher” than Oxbridge’, The Guardian, 41 Williamson, J, ‘The Culture of Denial’, keynote lecture, Wednesday 18th December 2002 Frieze Art Fair, http://www.friezeartfair.com/podcasts/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/dec/18/ details/the_culture_of_denial/ accesstouniversity.highereducation 42 Harvey, D, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, 2007, 15 ‘‘Art for a Few’, National Arts Learning Network, 2009 p. 19 16 Ibid. 43 See Adam Curtis’ blog for a good overview: http://www. 17 Ibid. bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/02/the_economists_ Apart from any other considerations, the emphasis new_clothes.html 18 Ibid. on promoting ‘social equality’ or ‘social cohesion’ 44 Collini , S, ‘Browne’s Gamble’, London Review of Books, 19 Harvey, D, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 202. Vol. 32 No. 21 . 4 November 2010 http://www.lrb.co.uk/ in a capitalist society had the undesirable, if not 20 “After the implementation of neoliberal policies in the v32/n21/stefan-collini/brownes-gamble entirely unexpected, effect of setting up useful 1970s, the share of national income of the top 1% of 45 Ibid. targets for the enemies of reform to aim at.” income earners in the US soared, to reach 15% (very close to its pre WWII share) by the end of the century. 46 Ibid. ‘The Right To A Comprehensive Education’, Second The top 0.1% of income earners in the US increased 47 Harvey, D, ‘The Crisis and the Consolidation of Class Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture, Clyde Chitty, their share of the national income from 2% in 1978 Power: Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?’, November 16th 2002 to over 6% by 1999, while the ratio of the median Counterpunch, March 13/15 2009 compensation of workers to the salaries of CEOs http://www.counterpunch.org/harvey03132009.html increased from just over 30 to 1 in 1970 to nearly 500 to 1 by 2000”. Ibid. p. 16. 21 Gove’s plans use the rhetoric of choice and freedom to disguise a policy that is highly anti democratic 36 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 …for more interesting times Benjamin Franks The Politics of Postanarchism contradictions that are core) to anarchism. In doing reject – and the other interpretation deals with so, it handily also raises questions about Newman’s wider constructions and distributions of power, Saul Newman own postanarchist presuppositions. which anarchists have always engaged in, from Edinburgh University Press, 2010. (pp.200. £65) Newman’s central contention is that anarchism the unions and revolutionary syndicates to is wedded to an enlightenment rationalist – and insurrectionary committees. There is evidence In 1994 the global apparatus of the neo-liberal indeed positivist – account of knowledge, and of anarchists in these organisations reflecting economic order was solidifying, with the to a fixed, essentialist account of the subject, on how to avoid recreating hierarchies. Newman enactment of the North American Free Trade in which, Newman claims, anarchists produce a is right to point out that the state is not just a Association; and at the same time contestation Manichean split between, on the one side, the set of coercive institutions but is evident in the arose, signalled by the Zapatista uprising. It was benign natural law or social principle (a form of structure of our everyday social relationships. This also the year that a small but significant book by a anti-politics) and on the other the malign political is a view he finds in the (pre-post) anarchism of US academic, Todd May, was published, called The principle, an unnatural order of power. The latter Gustav Landauer (pp.161-62), and the last great Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism. is associated with the state (p. 4). These classical modernists, the Situationists Guy Debord and This book sought to update and renew the anarchist assumptions are not only philosophically Raoul Vaneigem (pp.65-6), who borrowed it from anarchist tradition, by highlighting the restrictive unsustainable (pp. 58-59), but also produce the Marxian-thinker Henri Lefebvre. As a result, strategic and modernist features of traditional hierarchical political practice. The knowledgeable it is hard to see what postanarchism is bringing revolutionary thought, using some of the elite armed with vanguard knowledge leads the here which is not already part of anarchist self- theoretical insights derived from poststructuralist masses in confronting the state and leaves other reflection. thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, Michel micropolitical oppressions untouched. In seeking By seeking out the aporia in anarchism (even Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. out the authoritarian moments in anarchism, where they are not always present) Newman In the nearly two decades that followed, Newman seeks to make an anarchist critique to usefully acts as a spur to re-think postanarchism. there has been a noticeable rise in interest anarchism (p. 51). Are there perhaps some inherent limits or conflicts not only in anarchism, but also in tracing the Thus, the first conflict Newman identifies in in his postanarchism? Whilst sympathetic to similarities and tensions between politically- anarchism is that between its commitment to Newman’s account of anarchism/postanarchism engaged post-structuralism and anarchism. freedom versus the fixed essential self. If humans sharing an open commitment to ‘equal liberty’ Amongst the most insightful, prolific and, as a are essentially good, or prone or determined to a (pp.20-24) or ‘equaliberty’ (pp.144-45), namely consequence, influential postanarchist thinkers particular type of benevolent social relationship, the view that freedom and equality are mutually has been Saul Newman. His 2001 book From this severely restricts human freedom to produce defining rather than in conflict, it does present a Bakunin to Lacan and his subsequent writings its own destiny. It also leads to an anti-politics, number of problems for postanarchism. It does, have done much to raise the profile of anarchist as such essentialisms lead to a view of the good for example, suggest a fundamental or universal features of poststructuralism amongst academics, coming from natural social harmony which the core to postanarchism, something which Newman’s and the possibilities of fruitful engagement state disrupts or distorts. anti-foundationalism rejects. In addition, the in poststructuralist theory for anarchists. In Newman has made similar criticisms of principle of ‘equality’ is a fundamentally unstable addition, academic publishers have published classical anarchism’s essentialism, and this and potentially contradictory concept. After a variety of scholarly contributions that are has led to objections to this characterisation. all, appeals to equality suggest a shared value avowedly postanarchist or include a major Notable opposition to Newman’s account of structure by which differing phenomena or agents postanarchist current, such as: Lewis Call’s classical anarchism has come from a variety of may be assessed as ‘equal’, which is something Postmodern Anarchism (Lexington, 2003), sources: Sasha Villon, Jesse Cohn and Shawn that Newman problematises with his emphasis on Richard Day’s Gramsci is Dead (Pluto, 2005), Uri Wilbur, author(s) from South Africa’s Zabalaza singularities and rejection of moral norms (p. 7). Gordon’s Anarchy Alive! (Pluto, 2007), many of Anarchist Communist Federation, Alan Antliff and As contemporary feminist critics have pointed out, the authors in Randall Amster, Abraham DeLeon, Nathan Jun. These are not explicitly addressed demands for ‘equality’ suggest that there is some et al, collection, Contemporary Anarchist Studies in this book. A dominant theme amongst many standard by which all other entities are measured (Routledge, 2009) and Nathan Jun’s edited book of these criticisms is that Newman (and other by, such that gender equality is simply an appeal New Perspectives on Anarchism (Lexington, 2010). similar postanarchists) has misrepresented for women to measure up to the standard of ‘man’, Other volumes are expected to join them soon classical anarchists, as they were not united and thus privilege the ‘male’. Thus, appeals to including Duane Rousselle and Sureyyya Evren’s by an essentialist view of the human subject. equality are actually reassertions of a hierarchy of long-awaited anthology The Post-Anarchist Reader Significant classical anarchists such as Errico values and identities. (Pluto, 2011). Specialist academic journals too Malatesta (Life and Ideas, p. 73) viewed the concept I am sympathetic to the main thrust of have published articles utilising, analysing or of ‘natural harmony’ as ‘the invention of human Newman’s thesis – “to affirm anarchism’s place as critiquing the methodologies and techniques laziness’. In addition, Peter Kropotkin – who the very horizon of radical politics” (p.2) – though of postanarchism, including a special issue of Newman specifically cites as an essentialist (p. it is also slightly problematic, for it assumes Anarchist Studies dedicated to postanarchism 36 and p. 38) – was clear that humans have anti- that everyone shares the same horizon. It might alone, which was edited by Newman. Contributions social instincts as much as social ones, and whilst instead be more accurate to see anarchism as have also appeared online in ‘zine format. Whilst Newman acknowledges this (p.39) – perhaps in ‘a possible horizon’ rather than the prime or a little short of a decade ago postanarchism was part in unacknowledged reply to earlier critics sole discourse and practice of radicalism. The a ‘cottage industry’, to use Ronald Creagh’s 2006 – he nonetheless asserts a social essentialism on risk of such a clear, but singular, vision is that it description, it has now developed into a small but classical anarchism. potentially closes off routes of political solidarity significant section of the knowledge factory. Newman’s critics are not denying that there or risks colonising other thinkers from distinctive Readers of Newman’s earlier works will are some essentialisms in classical anarchism but radical traditions, claiming them as unconscious be familiar with many of the key themes and they point out that where they do exist they are anarchists (see for instance p.168, p.176). Although arguments in The Politics of Postanarchism. It not universal and rarely core to anarchism in the Newman recognises some heterodox movements is a useful addition to the literature on four way that Newman contends. Instead, the appeal in Marxism, he places anarchism in opposition main grounds. First, it is a clear re-statement to benign humanism are often a rhetorical ploy to Marxism (pp.11-12, pp.75-76), portraying it of Newman’s version of postanarchism (with to either counter the social Darwinism which as a fundamentally statist and realist political occasional reference to other formulations); suggested that individuals were inherently selfish movement. Despite rightly rejecting Leninism, second, it does apply postanarchism to such that market relationships refereed by a Newman nonetheless adopts an almost entirely contemporary events, such as the banking crisis strong state is the best mode for humankind, or to Leninist reading of Marx, which risks closing (p. 28, p. 80), the surveillance state wrought highlight that as biological creatures certain basic off the possibility of more fruitful engagement by The War O Terror (pp. 29-30; p. 75) and the needs are not being met by capitalism. between anarchists and Marxists. struggles around immigrant rights (p. 115, pp. The apparent contradiction in anti-politics is A further tension in Newman’s work concerns 172-3); third, it situates postanarchism amongst similarly resolvable within the anarchist canon. postanarchism’s location in relation to anarchism. recent theoretical developments such as Badiou’s Anarchism proclaims to be anti-political, says By endorsing poststructuralist anti-essentialism, critique of the natural social principle against the Newman, because it rejects the state, but it and a view of power/knowledge as contingent, artificial political principle (pp.110-11) or Michael has to be involved in politics because it seeks constructed and situational, Newman suggests that Hardt and Toni Negri’s autonomist account of the new forms of anti-hierarchical organisation and postanarchism offers a substantive improvement multitude (pp. 121-3). Finally, in keeping with interrelationship. This is no contradiction, but on this form of radical politics, whilst at the same Newman’s goals, the book provokes the reader to simply a different use of the word ‘politics’. time wishing to suggest that post-anarchism is assess the limits of anarchism (p.5), by searching One is the standard definition concerning not such a transcendence. Newman views such for and highlighting aporia (inconsistencies and battles for state power – which anarchists claims to progress as being a fundamental part variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 37

Levinas and the concept of the encounter. This posits that in dealing with others we unsettle the sovereignty of our ego and also disrupt others with whom we engage; in relation to others, we have therefore a “radical responsibility for the other” (p. 55). The encounter between academic post- structuralism might radically unsettle anarchism, but rather than produce new anti-hierarchical social relations, it might simply act to assert the sovereignty of the academic discourse. Radical discourses have gone this way before. Terry Eagleton laments that when Marxism encountered academe its trajectory was altered: Socialist analysis which was a resource “among dockers and factory workers ha[s] turned into a mildly interesting way of analysing Wuthering Heights” of a Hegelian, modernist mindset that recreates (After Theory, p.44). In this case the danger is that hierarchy (p. 148 and p.153). whilst poststructuralist engagements provide Newman states explicitly at critical junctures useful aids for encouraging anarchists to reflect of the book that: “Postanarchism is not […] an on their practice, they might overcode anarchism abandonment or movement beyond anarchism. into a discourse associated only with those On the contrary, postanarchism is a project located in particular educationally-privileged of radicalising and renewing anarchism – of locations and thereby domesticate and dominate thinking of anarchism as a politics.” (pp. 4-5) (like the reviled vanguard) radical activity. It is and “Postanarchism is not a specific form of this fear that explains some of the hostility to politics; it offers no formulas or prescriptions for postanarchism and poststructuralism in anarchist change. It does not have the sovereign ambition forums less centred on academe (see for instance of supplanting anarchism with a newer name”, libcom.org). but is rather a “celebration” of anarchism There are mitigating factors against this (p.181). This is a position that is consistent with academic colonisation. Newman clarifies – and Newman’s arguments against Modernist discourses therefore democratises – some complex debates of progress. However, such assertions seem from within the realms of high theory, making inconsistent with his other claims that anarchism them more accessible to the non-specialist reader. requires a substantive break, which postanarchism He deserves at least a pint for making sense of offers – “if anarchism is to remain relevant to the Simon Critchley versus Slavoj Zizek dispute political struggles today, it must construct new (pp. 113-15); for making the argument between understandings of politics, ethics, subjectivity Ralph Milliband and Nico Poulantzas clear and and utopia which are not grounded in essentialist relevant (pp. 76-77), and for explaining and or rationalist ontologies and which eschew critiquing potentially obscure concepts such as guarantees of the dialectic” (pp.163-64) – and Negri’s constituent and constituted power (pp. 87- that postanarchism provides grounds to think of 89) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post- anarchism “in new ways” (p. 182). socialism (pp.89-93). Newman seems to suggest that postanarchism Also attractive is Newman’s optimism, provides a way of refreshing or revitalising drawing from examples of militancy like the anarchism. This is an attractive project, but not aforementioned Zapatistas, peasant and landless one without a number of problems. The first is that protection of the commons in Brazil, Peru and West whilst there is much to agree with in Newman’s Bengal and factory occupations in Europe (pp. account of postanarchism, it is hard to see, bar 174-75). It is a refreshing change from discourses in its more academically sophisticated mode of defeat, retreat and retrenchment to hear a of expression, how it differs significantly from knowledgeable theorist propose “that an insurgent the internal critiques already part of anarchist political space has already emerged, characterised and other radical traditions. Take, for instance, by new experimental forms of political practice Newman’s account of the role of utopianism in and organisation that are anarchistic in anarchist thought, which, like so much of the book, orientation” (pp. 167-68). If he is right it will make is cogent and insightful. As Newman points out, for more interesting times. utopias are not blueprints to determine action, but ways of critiquing present social forms as This article is based on the review that appeared in well as ways to inspire (pp.67-68, pp.138-39). Anarchist Studies Vol. 16 No. 2 (Autumn 2010). Benjamin Such an account of utopia one which was already Franks is the author of Rebel Alliances: The means and significant in anarchism, drawing as it does from ends of contemporary British anarchisms (AK Press, Georges Sorel and Kropotkin. Moreover, the 2006) and co-editor of Anarchism and Moral Philosophy idea that the utopian should be embodied in the (Palgrave, due out October 2010). practices of the here and now, such as contesting the state in our daily action (p. 163), sounds exactly like the principle of prefiguration – the means embodying the goal – which has been one of the main distinguishing features of anarchism since its earliest classical forms under Michael Bakunin and James Guillaume. If these characteristics are already present within the classical anarchist canon and within contemporary (non-post prefixed) anarchist tradition, what does Newman’s postanarchism add that is new? It is, first, a welcome reassertion that fluid, anti-hierarchical practices are already a core feature of anarchism. Newman’s postanarchism also rightly highlights the ethical in radical politics, another longstanding feature of anarchism. Here, though, Newman cites Emmanuel 38 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 Aesthetic Journalism in Practice Manifesta 8 and the Chamber of Public Secrets Maeve Connolly In his recent review of Alfredo Cramerotti’s Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Art, edited by Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (New Curatorial Discursivity and Critical Informing, Matt Packer notes that the term York: Sternberg Press and Center for Curatorial Reception ‘aesthetic journalism’ is “alternately deployed Studies, Bard College, 2008). This compilation of Although Cramerotti favours discussion of throughout the book”, recalling “the way that new and republished texts includes ‘Documentary/ artworks over the analysis of exhibition-making, ‘Relational Aesthetics’ functions for Nicolas Vérité’ by Okwui Enwezor, framed as a response to he is careful to specify the optimum conditions Bourriaud”.1 So it is used both to elaborate upon criticism of Documenta 11. of reception for aesthetic journalism. He states; recent tendencies in art practice and, in a more These publications are preceded by an array “Two aspects are equally important: for the author polemical sense, to propose “a radical interaction of texts appearing in journals and catalogues.5 not be forced to adapt to the speed of the news yet unfulfilled”. This comparison is appropriate, They include ‘The Where of Now’ by Irit Rogoff, industry, and for the spectator not to be required not least because both authors are curators, a contribution to a book published by Tate on to accept or refuse it on the spot. Come and go but while Bourriaud assumes familiarity with the occasion of the exhibition Time Zones: Recent in front of a representation at one’s leisure”.12 a number of artists and artworks considered as Film and Video at Tate Modern in October 2004 In practice, however, the actual conditions of key, and largely avoids in-depth discussion of his – January 2005. Ostensibly concerned, like the reception for an exhibition such as Manifesta 8 philosophical and theoretical reference points, exhibition itself, with perceptions of temporality, – particularly during the professional preview – Cramerotti is clearly writing for a somewhat more Rogoff’s essay actually focuses on location, artistic bear little relation to this ideal. As with previous diverse readership, encompassing media students labour and the emergence of a mode of art editions, hundreds of artists, curators, critics and and practitioners as well as artists, curators and practice “that informs in a seemingly factual way, students attended the preview, which took place art critics. Each chapter of Aesthetic Journalism but at a slight remove from reportage.”6 She finds over four days.13 While the accreditation process features suggestions for further reading, in evidence of this shift in a series of exhibitions and was hampered by technical glitches, the actual addition to the comprehensive list of “references goes on to cite a number of examples, such as a experience was marked by a sense of inclusivity and niceties” at the back of the book, going two-channel video work by Laura Horelli entitled – no obvious VIP areas or parties with restricted so far as to contextualise major art events. So, Helsinki Shipyard/Port San Juan, 2002-2003, shown access – and generosity, with free bus transport for example, Documenta is introduced as “an at Manifesta 5. This is one of a relatively small from one venue to the next. Yet the organisation exhibition taking place in Kassel ever five years number of contemporary examples of aesthetic of the exhibition at fourteen venues, spread across since 1955 [...] an event that helped to shape an journalism (eight in total) discussed by Cramerotti two cities (an hour apart) necessitated a very idea of art not as an autonomous field, but as a and it also features in my own discussion of tightly-scheduled programme, so that hundreds practice investigating (and reporting) the social “documentary dislocations” in artists’ cinema7, of visitors arrived at each venue together. It was and the political via aesthetics”.2 indicating the register of biennial exhibitions in difficult to view many video installations in their As this reference to Documenta suggests, the (re)producing a common curatorial and critical entirety let alone “come and go in front of a notion of art practice – and the art exhibition – as vocabulary. representation at one’s leisure”.14 an arena for social and political investigation is Although Cramerotti identifies historical The advance information for Manifesta 8 not new. Cramerotti identifies “early patterns of precedents for the journalistic or documentary signalled a strong thematic emphasis on curatorial aesthetic journalism” in the eras of Reformation turn, his theorisation of aesthetic journalism discursivity. This was apparent both in the and Enlightenment, before charting the rise of derives much of its coherence from a critique of selection of three curatorial collectives (the other “art as social criticism” in the 1970s (exemplified news media production and reception that seems two are Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum and by the work of Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Martha particular to the present curatorial moment. At tranzit.org) and the inclusion of various projects Rosler and the artists associated with Vanguardia) one point he proposes that this mode of artistic requiring audience interaction. During the and contemporary practices (citing works by Laura practice can offer a point of orientation within preview, members of all three collectives organised Horelli, Renzo Martens, Alfredo Jaar, The Atlas an overwhelming “flux of information”8, and events, talks and tours, so that those attending Group/Walid Raad, among others). Cramerotti later makes reference to “the current trend were sometimes constituted as participants, rather argues, however, that the more self-consciously of event reporting” that offers “no space for than observers. As several commentators have journalistic turn evident in recent decades can critical distance”.9 According to Cramerotti, art noted, critics routinely occupy a role similar to that be partly understood as a response to a crisis in and journalism are characterised by different of the embedded journalist15, not least because traditional journalistic media. Before exploring temporalities of research, production and in practical terms art reviewers often depend, the concept of aesthetic journalism further, it is reception, with artists typically working at a for access, information and even resources, on interesting to note another aspect of Cramerotti’s slower pace than news media producers. He also the very organisations and institutions that approach that is highlighted by Packer. Aesthetic notes proximities between art practice and fiction, they are expected to critique. Perhaps more Journalism includes a list of approximately twenty stating that “while journalism reports, and fiction importantly, however, reviewers are also reliant on exhibitions between 2002 and 2005, focusing reveals, aesthetic journalism does both”.10 the networking opportunities offered by events on artists who work with “the document, the The slower pace of artistic production and such as the Manifesta professional preview, as a archive, the report and the documentary style”3, the questioning of truth claims through the means to develop and maintain linkages in an era including Documenta 11 and Manifesta 5 (2004), exploration of fiction create the potential for of increased competition. But this does not mean yet Cramerotti does not actually focus directly critical reflection, at least in theory: that a reviewer who follows the prescribed route, on curatorial practice. Despite this, it may be “The problem we have today is that a lot of touring from venue to venue on the official bus, possible to infer his position through reference to journalistic art merely attempts to disseminate is prohibited from producing a critical response his input as a member of the Chamber of Public information in a way that is allegedly neutral; an to an exhibition. Quite the opposite might in Secrets (CPS), one of three curatorial collectives artist is not better at producing a more transparent fact be true, because artists, curators and critics responsible for Manifesta 8, taking place from picture of the real than a journalist. What the are capable of establishing and asserting self- October 7, 2010 to January 9, 2011 in the region of artist can do better, instead, is to construct a self- consciously critical positions through an ongoing Murcia, southern Spain. reflective medium, which ‘coaches’ its viewers to process of discursive production, which often ask relevant questions by themselves, instead of involves the assertion of critical judgements accepting (or refusing tout court) representations (publicly or more informally) regarding events Theorising ‘Aesthetic Journalism’ and as they are proposed.”11 such as biennial exhibitions. the ‘Documentary Turn’ It is interesting to note the use of the term Teresa Gleadowe’s review of Manifesta 8, one Cramerotti’s book is one of the first monographic ‘medium’ here – perhaps Cramerotti may of two accounts published in Art Monthly, is studies dedicated to this identification be referring to the fact that text, video and particularly interesting in this regard because of journalistic and documentary turns in photography are employed both by journalists and of its shift of critical focus towards the economic contemporary art4, but it follows a number many of the artists cited in Aesthetic Journalism. and political accountability of the Manifesta of relatively recent anthologies exploring But it is impossible to conceptualise the ‘medium’ Foundation. Gleadowe emphasises that “Manifesta similar territory. They include another Intellect of aesthetic journalism without reference to the occupies a very particular place in the landscape publication, Truth or Dare: Art and Documentary discursive and narrative contexts within which of biennales brought into being in the past (2007), edited by Gail Pearce and Cahal artworks are experienced. This is because the self- two decades [...] Launched in the early 1990s McLaughlin, featuring contributions from theorists reflexivity that Cramerotti highlights as a potential as a roving art event to be hosted in different Michael Renov and John Ellis, together with panel property of this type of art practice is located (at cities around Europe, it evolved as a response discussions and interviews with practitioners least partly) at the point of reception, linked to to the political and economic changes brought such as Trinh T. Minh-ha, Ann-Sofi Siden and Jane the conditions of exhibition and circulation that about by the end of the Soviet Union and the and Louise Wilson. A more direct emphasis on differentiate contemporary art from print, online consequent moves to European integration.” curatorial practice is apparent in The Greenroom: or TV news. Noting that “Manifesta has a more than usually variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 39

curators state that they “attempted to redirect as an acknowledgement of loss. It is too soon to Manifesta into a new situation, namely, a mutual know if CPS actually succeeded in expanding dependence of other discourses and ‘systems’ – in Manifesta’s discursive networks and information this case, information systems”.19 This interest systems – the only credible way to determine in systems was apparent in the development of this would be to undertake a formal study of its projects across multiple platforms. In addition to reception. In the absence of such a study, the organising exhibitions and projects at numerous critical response already offered by commentators sites in Murcia and Cartagena, CPS developed and such as Gleadowe might at least prompt greater commissioned works for print, TV, radio and the self-reflection on the part of the Manifesta internet and two of the venues included media Foundation, so that it may perhaps support (some) archives or hubs with access to documentation artists, critics (and curators) to work differently and contextualising material on the CPS website. from journalists. But the website actually offered relatively little in terms of additional material during the preview, Notes and development of projects across so many media 1 Matt Packer, ‘Book Review: Aesthetic Journalism: How platforms may have overstretched resources.20 to Inform Without Informing’, Photography & Culture Vol The practical problems cited by Gleadowe 3, Issue 3, November 2010, 364. are significant, if only because they illustrate a 2 Alfredo Cramerotti, Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Informing, (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect and explicit agenda”, she goes on to point out that possible blind spot within Cramerotti’s analysis. “its press material fosters the expectation that Chicago University Press, 2009) 30. His endorsement of aesthetic journalism is partly 3 Cramerotti, 84. the financial contribution it seeks from its hosts founded, as I have suggested, on the assumption – said to be 3.3m – will be amply recompensed in 4 It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss that artists have more time than journalists. He distinctions between ‘journalistic’ and ‘documentary’ income from cultural tourism and in international states; “time is what dictates the limits of present- 16 fields and modes of practice. But while documentary is positioning”. Gleadowe also states that the day researching and reporting. Artists do not have often defined, following John Grierson, as the ‘poetic Foundation “has an interest in curatorial to work within the deadlines of traditional news treatment of actuality’, journalism could be said to assert a stronger truth claim, and has traditionally innovation” and although she does not elaborate production, but can ‘investigate’ [...] At a slower on this point, the context of her discussion been more tightly regulated through professional pace to develop meaningful relationships with organisations and codes. suggests an economic imperative for the thematic communities. Through the assistance of curators focus on curatorial collectivity. This could be 5 Recent examples include John Douglas Millar, ‘Watching and an organisation such as Manifesta 8, artists V Looking’, Art Monthly, October 2010, 7-10, and one way of ensuring the attendance of visiting have the means to infiltrate the public and private various contributions to Jane Connarty and Josephine professionals, whose presence is presumably infrastructures and reveal new takes on past, Lanyon, eds., Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within essential to “international positioning”. She Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video, (Bristol: Picture contemporary and future issues”. As the case of This, 2006). concludes, however, that the Foundation largely Manifesta 8 demonstrates, however, both curators failed to offer the appropriate curatorial and 6 Irit Rogoff, ‘The Where of Now’, Time Zones: Recent and artists can only work in this way if this Film and Video, eds. Jessica Morgan and Gregor Muir editorial support for Manifesta 8, leading to ‘assistance’ is forthcoming. (London: Tate, 2004) 85. Emphasis in original. significant problems with exhibition texts, venues As Gleadowe implies, the repurposing of a 7 Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, and installation. number of buildings in Murcia and Cartagena Site and Screen, (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect and for cultural and social use – part of the funding University of Chicago Press, 2009). Cramerotti’s research arrangement with the hosts, as problematised first came to my attention several months before the CPS at Manifesta 8 publication of Aesthetic Journalism, when I was invited Turning to the CPS catalogue contributions, above – might have contributed to technical by Bristol-based artist Daphne Wright to take part in a Tirdad Zolghadr’s essay, ‘The Man Who Stares problems and delays. But this does not easily public discussion on her work in June 2009, which he organised as the curator of QUAD gallery in Derby, UK. at Media: Remote Viewing of the Chamber explain the situation at the two museum venues 8 Cramerotti, 69. of Public Secrets’, also offers a critique of used by CPS, in which projected videos at times the Manifesta project. Unlike Gleadowe, who suffered from poor image quality. In fact one of 9 Cramerotti, 104 pointedly cites facts and figures, Zolghadr the most effective works, Amnesialand by Stefanos 10 Cramerotti, 103. adopts a self-consciously speculative position, Tsivopolous, was devised in response to a site not 11 Cramerotti, 30. describing himself as a “remote viewer” with previously used for contemporary art exhibition 12 Cramerotti, 106. limited knowledge of Murcia and also of CPS – the Casino in Cartagena. This was one of a 13 I attended with a group of students on the MA in (whose activities he has encountered mainly relatively small number of works in ‘¿The Rest Visual Arts Practices (www.mavis.is) and my article is partly informed by class discussions, particularly with through their website and publications). As is History?’ to fulfil the potential of aesthetic journalism, as theorised by Cramerotti, through criticism students such as Joanne Laws, whose review though anticipating the extinction of Manifesta, of Manifesta 8 is forthcoming in Afterimage, January/ its fusion of fictional and documentary modes of he describes it as “belumbering the continent like February 2011. address. In addition, while numerous contributions a mammoth on the icy tundra. Now loudly laying 14 Evidently, it is possible to experience Manifesta outside claim to neighboring land masses in complete, to Manifesta 8 employed a self-consciously the frame of the professional preview. sweet oblivion to the colonial connotations its ‘archival’ mode of display, Amnesialand was one of When I reviewed the exhibition at Donostia-San Sebastian in 2004 it had already been open for several appetites imply”.17 This critique is then developed the few video installations to make effective use of – and clearly acknowledge – already existing months and I moved from one venue to another at my through reference to journalism, as Zolghadr own pace, relying upon public transport and directions archives. notes the longstanding complicity of journalists from strangers as well as Manifesta maps and signage. with colonial enterprise, citing Nietzsche on the See Maeve Connolly, ‘Nomads, Tourists and Territories: arrogance of nineteenth century journalism: Manifesta and the Basque Country’ Afterimage: Journal Nostalgia for the Public Realm of Media and Cultural Criticism, 32.3, November/ “the newspaper steps into the place of culture, and he So, to what extent does the CPS presentation at December 2004: 8-9 who, even as a scholar, wishes to voice any claim for Manifesta 8 success in furthering the critique 15 Chris Fite-Wassilak, ‘The Hope for an Open Wound’ education, must avail himself of this viscous stratum developed by Cramerotti in Aesthetic Journalism? CIRCA 131, November 2010. http://www.recirca.com/cgi- In their primary contribution to the catalogue, bin/mysql/show_item.cgi?post_id=5264&type=Issue131& of communication which cements the seams between ps=publish all forms of life [...] In the newspaper the peculiar CPS emphasise that they want to “search out and 16 Teresa Gleadowe, ‘Manifesta 8’, Art Monthly 341, educational aims of the present culminate, just as the engender dialogues, placing them in the public November 2010, 22-23. journalist, the servant of the moment, has stepped into realm, through the practices of media, film and 18 17 Tirdad Zolghadr, ‘The Man Who Stares at Media: Remote the place of the genius.” documentary production, artistic research and Viewing of the Chamber of Public Secrets’, Manifesta 8, Zolghadr welcomes the interrogation of aesthetic journalism”.21 CPS clearly conceptualise (Milan: Silvana Editorale Spa, 2010) 153. journalism that is potentially offered by CPS, in the public realm as aligned with, and dependent 18 Zolghadr, 155. terms of its relation to the Manifesta project, but upon, diverse forms of cultural production and 19 CPS, ‘¿The Rest is History?’, Manifesta 8, (Milan: the task he seems to envisage is distinct from that research. Yet there is also a sense that they are Silvana Editorale Spa, 2010) 127. undertaken by Cramerotti in Aesthetic Journalism. seeking to preserve – or perhaps reanimate – a 20 There is a possible parallel here with the situation Zolghadr not only challenges the European relatively traditional model of the public sphere, of ‘old media’ producers (such as public service tradition in which journalism is posited as “the aligned to specific forms of media production and broadcasters, for example) struggling to provide content across multiple platforms. conscience of civil society”, but also identifies consumption that are under threat, if not actually Manifesta as an extension of this model. By in decline; 21 CPS, 128-129. contrast, Cramerotti seems – at least in part – to 22 CPS, 133. “we need printed journalism and broadcasts to help lament a decline in contemporary journalistic us make sense of the world around us. The amount of standards resources, while implicitly valorising an administrative, cultural, political and financial processes earlier era. that occur during our average day cannot be digested in With ‘¿The Rest is History?’, CPS aim to 22 any other way.” contest the limits of the Manifesta project, From this perspective, ‘¿The Rest is History?’ primarily through the embrace of new media might then be viewed partly as a nostalgic and information systems. So, for example, the undertaking, particularly if nostalgia is understood 40 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 The Housing Question Redux Neil Gray Militant Modernism public housing itself. Militant Modernism, by Owen Owen Hatherley Hatherley, and Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World, edited by Zero Books, 2009 Sarah Glynn, however affirm the benefits of public 978-1-84694-176-4 housing in quite different ways, but in ways that help provide a critical, progressive conjuncture if we think them both at once. At a time when Where the Other Half Lives: the dogma of ‘no alternative’ is a neo-liberal Lower Income Housing in Neoliberal World commonplace – despite signs everywhere of that Glynn, Sarah (ed) creed’s decadence – Hatherley’s excavation of Pluto Press, 2009 ‘Socialist Modernism’ and Glynn et al’s affirmation of collective housing struggle offer primers for a 978-0-74532-857-7 different kind of future. Militant Modernism ranges widely, delivering perceptive insights across the Public housing is in a period of major decline. historical avant-gardes, popular culture, Russian Long-term disinvestment – associated with sci-fi modernism, Disurbanism, the ‘SexPol’ of an ideological shift towards the neo-liberal William Reich, Brechtian aesthetics, and more shibboleths of something called ‘the market’, besides. Where the Other Half Lives meanwhile, fetishised as an abstract, uncontrollable, interrogates the present state of public housing autonomous force – and private property have internationally by way of varied contributions rendered the construction of new public housing from France, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Right: virtually unthinkable at the level of governance. the US. For the purposes of this review, I want to Hutchesontown Housing costs are an ever-present concern, yet concentrate on those elements in each book which C: The Gorbals its socio-political relevance is often overlooked consider housing and urban questions in the UK. – even as housing costs, as a percentage of median income, have increased exponentially1. a massive transfer of wealth from the public to The sub-prime mortgage crisis, and its disastrous the private domain. Building new homes for rent Militant Modernism repercussions in the global economy, put housing made no sense for councils if they could just be Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism attempts on the map again, but the reaction of neo-liberal bought up on the cheap through ‘right to buy’. Loss to resuscitate a radical modernism from its governance has only been to deepen the ideology of rent revenues through reduction of stock also ossification within academia, the heritage industry, that caused the crisis in the first place. impacted heavily on the maintenance of remaining and the jaded discourses of ‘leftism’. Appearing In 1979, council housing represented just council homes. Moreover, any money gained from as part of the Zero Books series, the title makes under a third of all Britain’s housing stock (Glynn sales was ring-fenced to pay off local housing good on the imprint’s manifesto claim that p.25), and in Scotland, over half the population debt. Years of disinvestment and ghettoisation “another kind of discourse – intellectual without once lived in homes provided by the public sector have resulted in a negative cycle of stigmatisation being academic, popular without being populist (Glynn p.27). The regressive defamation of this with council housing routinely viewed as housing – is not only possible: it is already flourishing”. 5 everyday reality, and the naturalisation of home of last resort . To the despair of the radical left, A dedication to the Southampton City Council ownership as first preference in housing relates to owner-occupation since the late 1980s has seemed Architects Department, and a quote from John a state-sponsored ideological offensive of major a more assured way of improving many individuals’ Ruskin’s A Defence of the Idealists (1853), frames proportions. A recent article by Maya Gonzalez standard of living than collective action. The sale the eclectic, but critical tone of a wide-ranging for Endnotes2 explains how the ‘preference’ for of council housing is one of the most important excavation of Utopia from the “futures ruins” – home-ownership in the US was engineered by material conditions underlying the advance of those architectural relics of modernism still extant fiscal restructuring of the state in the 1930s. individualism, consumerism and neo-liberal in urban life. By the middle of the decade, the federal ideology in the past two decades. Hatherley asks if the modernist impulse to government had set up the mechanisms for the The Comprehensive Spending Review of ‘erase the traces’ – to destroy in order to create – promotion of national economic growth through October 2010 represented another massive assault can revive a once radical modernism that would a flexible market for consumer credit. Credit on social housing. The government announced certainly reject current attempts to replicate both stabilised the economy and fuelled debt- a budget cut for the construction of affordable or ‘preserve’ aspects of its original intentions. driven economic expansion; a credit revolution homes over the next four years of nearly 50%, from Modernist conservation organisations like 6 that actively promoted economic growth based £8.4 billion to £4.5 billion . Meanwhile, the system DOCOMOMO9, he argues, have granted Modernism on the mass production and consumption of for managing council housing financing – the museum status, but in doing so they have commodities. Central to the reproduction of Housing Revenue Account subsidy system – is set surrendered the radical heritage of modernism. labour-power, housing was the key commodity. to be replaced with an undisclosed ‘self-financing’ As Pawley contends, this tendency meekly accepts New mortgage guarantees insured private lenders arrangement. Funding for a promised 150,000 Modernism’s “absorption into the art-historical against loss, and established the use of long-term new ‘social’ homes, it is proposed, could be raised classification system as a style…converting their mortgages: the Federal Housing Association by allowing Housing Associations to charge their once proud revolutionary instruments back into mortgage insurance programs established in the tenants a new ‘Affordable Rent’ tenancy at 80% of monuments for the delectation of the masses National Housing Act of 1934, and the Veterans the market rate. The principal of secure tenancies alongside the palaces of the ancient regime…” Administration mortgage guarantee programs is also under threat. For new tenants, Government (p.5-6). Hatherley’s argument, however, follows of 1944 privileged the expansion of the markets will give Councils and Housing associations powers Walter Benjamin, whose “destructive character for home-improvement and for privately owned to grant ‘fixed-term tenancies’ with a minimum knows only one watchword: make room. And only homes in the US3. These financial arrangements time period of two years, abolishing the right to one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air effectively entrenched the kind of debt-financing existing secure or assured lifetime tenancies. and space is stronger than any hatred” (Cited, that helped derail public housing, prioritise Government is also consulting on whether existing p.4). Benjamin’s desire to ‘live without traces’, private home ownership, and stimulate the tenants should continue the right to a lifetime manifested his desire to supersede the historical commodity-economy. These policies of debt-driven tenancy if they move. Social polarisation will be accretion of decadent bourgeois culture superbly expansion finally imploded in the sub-prime further cemented by allocating on the basis of evoked in the re-purposed image of Klee’s ‘Angel mortgage crisis. those who are, “the most vulnerable in society of History’10. His “dialectical, double-edged” In the UK, a key issue for Thatcher’s success and those who need it most”, reinforcing existing acumen, aimed to blast open the capitalist dream in the Conservative election campaign of 1979 policy and further tarnishing the principle of world, with its proliferation of phantasmagorical 7 was the sale of council houses. The ‘Right to Buy’ social housing for all . Meanwhile, Government commodities, “into an entirely new world; one scheme gave massive discounts for long-term proposes to reduce Housing Benefit by 10% for job shaped by the promises of the dream itself” (p.4). council tenants to buy their rented properties, at seekers who have been out of work for more than For the avant-garde modernisms, as for Benjamin, the same time as it offered the promise of social 12 months. Unemployed people will have to make ‘erasing the traces’ meant “outrunning the old mobility and a foot on the property ladder. By up the rent shortfall from the £65 they get on Job world before it has the chance to catch up with offering huge discounts on council homes, the Seekers Allowance, even as almost half of those you” (p.5). For Hatherley, modernism had no state subsidised the sale of the better part of on Local Housing Allowance (for those renting interest in continuity: the shift from 19th century council housing stock in order to break up Labour- privately) are already £100 a month short of what encrustation to the stark, unfinished concrete 8 dominated estates and establish a distinct private they need to pay the rent . wall was “brutally short and sharp”; not merely sphere through which the values of the consumer/ Public and social housing is being attacked progression, but “an interruption, a rupture, a citizen could be established in working-class like never before, and much of it is justified by a break with the continuum altogether…” (p.6) estates4. The sale of council housing was a key campaign of vilification which judges the people Militant Modernism was written with the coda factor in the housing speculation that followed: who live in public housing, just as harshly as the “that the Left Modernisms of the 20th century variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 41

continue to be useful: a potential index of ideas, speed through urban development projects Top left: successful or failed, tried, untried or broken on the that routinely mask the real class content of Councillor David wheel of the market or the state” (p.13). Even in gentrification through the utilitarian euphemism Gibson, Housing their ruinous state, suggests Hatherley, they offer of ‘regeneration’. Strangely, for a polemic so firmly Committee “spectral blueprints” (p.126): alternatives to the wedded to notions of radical rupture (‘erasing Convenor neoliberal dogma that ‘there is no alternative’. the traces’) the concept of creative destruction, of Glasgow Hatherley’s ‘nostalgia for the future’ resides in the Schumpetarian mantra for neoliberal modes Corporation his reflection on modernist architecture as the of devaluation and ‘renewal’, appears only (left) and radical remainder of the more progressive aspects latterly. Even when this rhetoric was firmly George Bowie, of social democracy: the once futuristic walkways, wedded to municipal socialism, as with Glasgow Chief Architect precincts and high-rises of modernism, even in in the 1960s (the ‘shock city’ of the modernist of Crudens Ltd. their dilapidation, engender a critique of the housing revolution), the process and result was conservatism, and inequality reproduced through ambivalent to say the least. When David Gibson, contemporary planning and architecture. What Glasgow’s post-war ‘housing crusader’ (“arguably remains of Council Housing and the NHS are the the most remarkable of Western Europe’s post- vestiges of that ‘Eldorado for the Working-Class’ war municipal housing leaders”13), worked with envisioned by Aneurin Bevan and others. For engineer Lewis Cross to develop a programme of Hatherley, these contested remains of modernism house building in Glasgow, their “extreme concern represent an epochal moment when the working- for output” was driven by the maximisation of class got ideas above their station. The worth ‘productivity’. They eagerly embraced ‘package- Bottom left: of his untimely thesis lies in its unfashionable deal’ housing contracts in a process of ever Hutchesontown determination to consider the more radical diminishing returns in terms of quality. In the C, concrete moments of modernism dialectically. With a nod 1960s, under their leadership, high-rise flats made pouring, main to Brecht and Eisler, he points us ‘Forwards! Not up nearly 75% of all completions compared to less columns. Forgetting’. than 10% in all other post-war years: this period When the Situationst Internationale (SI), marked “the most concentrated multi-storey drive developed the theory of the dérive (“a mode of experienced by any city in the UK”14. Cross’s crude experimental behavior linked to the conditions utility was notorious. One planner said of him: of urban society; a technique of rapid passage “He had no conscience, no soul, no heart – just through varied ambiences”11), they updated a machine for producing numbers!”15. Of course, techniques from the Surrealists, and cultivated there was a context for this ‘no-holds-barred’ an urban critical praxis as a means to critique productivity. The post-war housing crisis risked the Haussmanisation of Paris and the ideology of causing major social unrest. The ‘numbers game’ urbanism12. They thus sought out the labyrinthian was fought out by both major parties in electoral alleyways of old Paris where Hausmann’s hand had competition. As well as easing working-class no dominion; where odd corners, the working-class, discontent in a period of near full employment, and worn surfaces could still afford to exist. But, investment in public housing (reproduction) eased for Hatherley, the SI were prone to nostalgia, and upward pressure on wage-bargaining at the level of for him the modern dérive, in a UK context, would production16. have to take place among the concrete walkways of These arguments shouldn’t detract from some the 1960s (p.11), rather than the quaint streets of of the gains that were made in eradicating the Victoriana, which might be the perverse analogue worst of tenement slum housing and preventing to those Parisian zones investigated by the SI. more overspill to the ‘new towns’, but a one-sided The contention is debatable: the dérive is a mode defence of socialist modernism borne from its of experimental critical enquiry, and the point is most avant-garde tendencies fails to account for surely that everything must come under critique the rather more banal conditions of most post- a product of a Social Democratic institution in a society dominated by capitalist relations. war public housing. Meanwhile, only latterly does (London’s metropolitan government in its changing However, Hatherley’s argument generates a Hatherley mention the working-class people who guises: LCC, GLC) and had a chance to influence stimulating eulogy to the New Brutalism – a harsh live in the kind of blocks he lauds. He is right to the quotidian through (limited) architectural architectural interlude within modernism – that note that tenants frequently want to stay in council commissions. New Brutalism regarded itself as presents a hypothesis which is original and flats, despite virulent campaigns of defamation the real fulfillment of modernism’s initial radical provocative. waged on public housing. But his argument that impulses, and in tracts like ‘Criteria for Mass Brutalist architecture took its name from the tenants like the “views and the open space” (p.42) Housing’ opposed itself to the established practice French term breton brut: raw reinforced concrete, is insufficient even if it does express a moment of the ‘classical’ modernists of the International cast in rough, unfinished form; while the termThe of truth that detractors rarely acknowledge. Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM). New Brutalism derives from a Reyner Banham One flat in a block may be suffused with light, ‘Angry young London architects’, like Alison and book on the architectural movement. The buildings and benefit from fantastic views; another in Peter Smithson, were immersed in the problem of New Brutalism fetishised “hardness, dynamism, the same block might lie in the shadow of the of producing architecture of everyday use-value scale and rough edges” (p.17), and were informed building, be prone to damp, and have a less than for the proletariat, at the same time as they by the advanced urban industrial landscapes of the glorious perspective. Depending on what is being pursued ‘shocking’ avant-garde techniques in UK; the most developed industrial nation in the allocated, in a vastly reduced market, it’s a bit of ‘bloody minded’ architectural form. Concrete 19th century. The return to pre-industrial arcadia, a lottery. Another explanation might be that those manifestations of the Smithson’s theory of evoked in the phrase ‘An Englishman’s Home people who want to remain in public housing ‘streets in the sky’ were realised in the Golden is his Castle’ is both patriarchal absurdity, and are often being offered an even worse option in Lane project, and the Robin Hood Gardens retro-feudal myth. As Hatherley notes, a ‘castle’ ‘stock transfer’ regeneration packages. Above estate. They saw themselves as, “building for the intimates a functionalist fortress, not a Mock-Tudor all, public housing remains the cheapest option17, socialist dream, which is something different home in suburbia. A closer analogue is a high- and wanting to remain in council housing is a from complying with a programme written by the rise modernist housing estate like Robin Hood thoroughly pragmatic and common-sense decision. socialist state” (p33). For Hatherley, Brutalism Gardens in Poplar, London. Hatherley is at pains The widespread rejection of ‘stock transfer’ from was defined in some relation to the pop, sex, to stress that there is no pristine return. Britain’s Council Housing to Housing Associations across and glamour of its times. In one memorable role in the brutal industrial revolution made it an the UK has shown that tenants have a healthy passage, Hatherley pays homage to Pulp’s “ten “industrial island machine” (Cited, p.20) whose distrust of hyperbolic ‘regeneration’ rhetoric18. minute fantasia”, ‘Sheffield: Sex City’, in which Edenic contact with ‘the soil’ was irrevocably Hatherleys’ tribute to militant modernism the concrete lines and walkways of Park Hill ruptured. Vorticism, which shared ideas with provides a stirring counter-narrative to are imbued with a sense of mesmeric eroticism, cubism and futurism in the mid-1910s, understood stigmatizing discourses, but at times his argument finally climaxing in a collective orgasm on Park this new reality well, setting itself apart from the founders on an outlook that privileges the Hill at 4.13 am (p.37). The Barbican complex, Futurists’ romantic veneration of the machine age aesthetic over a deeper analysis of the role of meanwhile, is “as mysterious and attractive as a (developed from the point of view of ‘primitive’ working-class antagonism in securing public JG Ballard heroine” (p.34), while Eros House is Italian rural life). Vorticism, in contrast, had housing, and the constitutive role of economics in noted as a reminder of the “strangely lubricious” been “warped, ‘modified’ by the presence of the determining outcomes in the built environment. (p.36) tone that creeps into the aesthetic of machine from birth” (p.23). Wyndham Lewis’s As Frederic Jameson once observed, “Of all the Brutalism. JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, famous riposte to the Italian Futurist, Marinetti, arts, architecture is the closest constitutively Crash, and Concrete Island have covered similar captures this particular strain well: “you are to the economic, with which, in the form of territory before, but Hatherley’s account adds always on about these driving belts, you are always commissions and land values, it has a virtually a particularly architectural slant to the popular, exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had unmediated relationship” 19. For a book about everyday conjuncture of flesh and concrete, adding machines in England for donkey’s years, they’re no ‘socialist modernism’, it is surprising how little a cultural and aesthetic dimension largely absent novelty to us” (p.24). discussion of capital there is – even accounting for from accounts of public housing. While Vorticism failed to stamp its presence an understandable rejection of vulgar Marxian For Hatherley, the remaing ‘cities in the sky’ on everyday life, effectively wrapping up with economics. While Hatherley’s book sheds new light are persistent vestiges of socialist modernism, a the onset of World War I, the New Brutalism was on many cultural aspects of militant modernism, modernism now being dismantled at frightening 42 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010

Sarah Glynn et al’s substantive and empirical stigmatised, just as private home ownership was account of public housing in Where The Other both subsidised and eulogised through right-to- Half Lives helps fill in some of the aporias in his buy. Disinvestment and poor management have account. Where The Other Half Lives can’t match since resulted in council housing that has come the imaginative vigour of Militant Modernism, but to be seen as a residual second choice for those it does benefit from situating itself very much from unable to afford their own home (p.26). As Glynn within the perspective of collective class struggle notes, such systemic inequalities are crudely in housing. ignored in the resultant false choice between degenerated council housing and regenerated ‘social’ housing. Everyday Modernism Glynn’s purview suggests other histories “Public ownership allowed for a municipal form of market to provide decent housing for a large unrealised. In the post World War II reconstruction, collective control, took both the land and housing out section of population, it also shows that tenants’ Aneurin Bevan, as Health Minister in charge of of the property market, boosted the role of elected local organisations have been pivotal in securing better Housing, offered a “glimpse of a socialist vision” councils and provided a decent home at affordable housing and rent control legislation. The Glasgow – housing as a universal public service, just like rents for more than a third of the population by the late rent strike of 1915 is a celebrated example, the National Health Service (p.20-21). Bevan’s 1970s, dramatically reducing the social power of capital which Glynn gives detailed attention (p.283- redefinition of the Housing Act in 1949 removed and the disciplinary role of rents and mortgages in the 290). The rent strike arose from profiteering rent “for the Working Classes” from the Act’s title, and labour market. his conception of housing, located firmly within 20 rises during the war. As workers crowded into – Stuart Hodkinson Glasgow to take up jobs in munitions factories Labourite Keynesian principles of equitable Hodkinson’s appraisal of public housing as part and engineering and shipbuilding works, housing redistribution, was one where good quality of a great account of housing privatisation in supply became scarce and overcrowded. Private homes in mixed communities would be built by Where The Other Half Lives does a good job of landlords capitalised on this situation by raising local authorities for people of all backgrounds. summarising its positive role in countering the the rents. The resultant anger of tenants was Bevan failed to nationalise housing, but he did tyranny of private rent, even if ambivalence organised through work-gate meetings and through ensure that four-fifths of the country’s new homes remains, for this author at least, over “the role groups of women in the tenements who fought were provided by Local Authorities at a quality of elected local councils” in the ownership and evictions, went on rent strike, and organised mass standard still recognised today (p.22-23). Post-war management of public housing. As well as a demonstrations. A government inquiry was set up, economic restraints, the prioritisation of foreign bulwark against rent hikes, municipal housing has but the landlords’ response was to raise the rents policy and defence, and the scale of damage done also been an “expedient service”, obfuscating the again, and to take eighteen tenants to small debt to Britain’s housing stock during World War II, failings of the private market. Glynn cites Peter court. A demonstration of thousands, including meant that Bevan’s hopes for quality universal Malpass who has argued that state intervention in all the men from five shipyards and an ordnance housing provision were quashed by the realpolitik council housing has played a significantsupporting works, threatened a general strike and the case of the ‘numbers game’. But the scale of ambition role for the private sector by supplying needs was dropped. With strikers still out after eight in his proposals are striking in comparison to not met by the market, securing government days, the government conceded and froze rents at contemporary demands for the ‘Fourth Option’ in contracts for the construction industry, and pre-war levels. housing (direct investment as an alternative to the withdrawing when housing construction becomes Housing campaigners continued to apply three options of ‘stock ‘transfer’ of council housing more profitable for the private sector (p.23- pressure on government at the same time as to Housing Associations, PFI schemes, and control 24). Nevertheless, Hodkinson’s summary of the workers fought for better conditions. By 1919, by Arms Length Management Organisations22). social benefits of public housing provides an the threat of revolution, if not revolution itself, In fairness, the less than inspiring demand important rejoinder to a dominant narrative of gave rise to the Government bringing tanks for a ‘Fourth Option’ is an index of the current stigmatisation. As Glynn observes, an emphasis on and soldiers to George Square in order to quell status of Council Housing amongst a raft of the continuity of capitalist control of the housing workers’ demonstrations (backed by widespread public-private options – signified, in the parlance market risks obscuring the role of working class strike action) for a shorter working week. When of ‘regeneration’, by ‘social’ not ‘public’ housing – struggle in securing affordable homes. She cites Lloyd George debated the 1919 Housing Bill that threaten to engulf public housing in a wave of a Community Development Project report in in Cabinet, he argued: “Even if it cost a £100 privatisation. These institutional co-ordinates are, 1976 which contrasted “the political struggle million pounds, what was that compared to the of course, as much a heritage of ‘the Left’ as they of the working class to establish a socialised stability of the state” (p.287). Meanwhile, the are of ‘the Right’, as witnessed by the catalytic form of housing which recognised the right of Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government role the Labour Party have played in prosecuting everyone to a decent house at a reasonable cost”, Board told the House of Commons, “the money neoliberalism. In this context, Glynn’s criticism of to the political ‘Right’ who “have always tried we are going to spend on housing is an insurance neoliberalism, central to her overall argument, is to contain development of council housing by against Bolshevism and revolution” (ibid). From in certain respects flawed. For instance, she argues narrowly defining the purposes for which it is to the point of view of government and business, that, “Neoliberalism, as the name implies, is based be provided, and creating an alternative to it more investment in housing was necessary to defuse on a return to the ideas of free-market liberalism closely related to their interests” (p.24). political agitation, but the reforms wrung out of that predominated before the development of the While Hatherley’s version of militant the government in the Housing Acts of 1919 and welfare state and the Keynesian mixed economy” modernism tends to reify the ‘roles’ of specialists 1924 were hugely significant gains nonetheless. (p.9). Further, she asserts that neoliberalism, in modernist housing (architects, planners, artists, Threat proved itself. As Glynn notes, there was “dismantling the regulatory and distributive film-makers, etc),Where the Other Half Lives also a growing awareness on ‘Red Clydeside’ that structures of the Keynesian mixed economy” emphasises the role of collective working-class rent would have to be found from wages. Questions (p.38), is diametrically opposed to anything that agency in obtaining decent, affordable housing. of reproduction were being linked directly with interferes with capital accumulation. However, This agency was borne from necessity. In 19th those of production, with women playing a it is important to realise that neoliberalism is century laissez-faire capitalism, the ruling classes decisive role in working-class composition at the profoundly assisted by the state, which under believed it was neither right nor necessary to time. As surplus capital is increasingly invested neoliberal conditions pro-actively regulates the intervene in housing markets. Until after World in urban landscapes rather than industry and planning and institutional landscape on behalf of War I, nine out of ten households rented their manufacturing, the lessons of the 1915 Rent Strike neoliberal accumulation strategies. home from private landlords, and rack-renting and at a reproductive as well as productive level are As Foucault insisted, power is productive. Cuts in slum conditions were endemic. By 1917, as the extremely prescient today. state budgets are also opportunities for capitalist Scottish Royal Commission acknowledged, there For Glynn, at the heart of today’s housing crisis growth in former state sectors. It would be better was more than enough pre-war evidence to show lies “the prioritisation of the house as investment to theorise the neoliberal state, along with Hardt “the inability of private enterprise to provide rather than as home, that is, of its exchange value and Negri, as “not really a regime of unregulated houses for the working-class”. All of this is widely over its use value”21. Speculation in housing, capital, but rather a form of state regulation that known, and the slum conditions of the period have assisted by decades of deregulation in banks and best facilitates the global movements and profits been detailed extensively. More important is the building societies, alongside the distribution of of capital”23. Neil Smith usefully elaborates on antagonistic response of the working-class to these ‘soft’ mortgage deals, has led to enormous price this point, framing the roots of neoliberalism in conditions, and the reaction this elicited from rises, and until recently, the promise of high the 18th century liberal assumptions of Locke and government. The Industrial Unrest Commission returns. This in turn led to more speculative Smith – e.g. the free exercise of individual self- of 1917, for instance, recorded that slum housing activity, further exacerbating the problem of interest leads to the optimal collective social good, had become an important source of social tension; spiralling rents. However, as Glynn points out – private property is the foundation of this self- while the Royal Commission on the Housing of the and as the differing US and UK contexts briefly interest, free market exchange is its ideal vehicle. Industrial Population of Scotland conceded that, outlined in the introduction show – there is Twentieth century US liberalism (Woodrow Wilson, “Before the war, the demand for better housing nothing inherently natural about home-ownership. Franklin Roosevelt, JF Kennedy), emphasising had become articulate; to-day, after three years of Swedes, Germans, Swiss and Dutch people of all social compensation to counter the excesses of war, it is too insistent to be safely disregarded any classes still live in good quality public housing, capitalism, was not so much a misnomer as a re- longer” (p.15-17). while in the UK many people have chosen to live appropriation of liberal terms in an attempt to The ‘threat from below’, expressed in powerful in public housing for a range of reasons including regulate their sway, but by no means to break their tenant protests in the 1910s, lay not only in their security of tenure, affordability and size of original axioms. Contemporary neoliberalism immediate impact but in their relationship with home. However, with the onset of Thatcherism, “represents a significant return to the original an increasingly powerful labour movement. private home ownership began to dominate, with axioms of liberalism” but this time galvanised Just as history demonstrates the inability of the council housing increasingly under-funded and by 20th century liberalism, resulting in “an variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 | 43

unprecedented mobilisation not just of national Council Housing Briefing, August, 2010. http://www. Previous state power but of state power organised and defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/ page and left: exercised at different geographical scales”24. 9 International Committee for the Documentation and Photographs by Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the State Mode Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of Colin Woon from the Modernist Movement (DOCOMOMO). of Production (SMP) is also useful here. For the Campaign 10 See ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in To Save Robin Lefebvre, the SMP is intimately bound up with Illuminations, Pimlico, 1999. state productivism, whereby the state assumes Hood Gardens. 11 See, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/1.definitions.htm responsibility for ensuring capitalist growth. The 12 “The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has SMP thus provides a means to understand the evolved its own special technique for molding its own continuity of capitalism through Western liberal territory, which constitutes the material underpinning democratic models such as social democracy, for all the facets of this project. Urbanism – ‘city Fordism and Keynesianism. Through the SMP, project. Urbanism – ‘city planning’ – is capitalism’s planning’ – is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical social democratic forms are directly inscribed method for taking over the natural and human development toward total domination, capitalism now into the state form, serving as a crucial fulcrum environment”29. can and must refashion the totality of space into its own and legitimising tool for state productivism25. Even if a “certain utopian irresolution” particular décor”. But as Benjamin Noys recently wrote, we miss (McDonough p.16) hung over the SI project Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone books, the point if we simply say that neoliberalism is of unitary urbanism, their critique of p.121. as statist as other governmental forms. Drawing functionalist planning as a concrete expression 13 Glendinning, Miles and Muthesius, Stefan, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and on Foucault, he argues that, “the necessity is to of the hierarchical organisation of advanced late Northern Ireland, Yale University Press, 1994, p.220 analyse how neoliberalism creates a new form of capitalism casts a long shadow over the housing 14 Ibid, p.224. governmentality in which the state performs a question as a discrete and specialist mode of 15 Ibid, p.226. different function: permeating society to subject inquiry. Hatherley, in a positive review of Glynn’s it to the economic”. In the words of Foucault, 16 ‘The Housing Question’, Aufheben magazine, #13, 2005: book, hints at a possible resolution when he http://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-13-2005/the- Neoliberalism intervenes on society so that asks if we can ever regard council housing as our housing-question competitive mechanisms “play a regulatory role at architecture, or rather, “an architecture we defend 17 View comparative graph between local authority and every moment and every point in society and by as best we can for want of something better” 30. Housing Association rents, 2001-2008. http://www. intervening in this way its objective will become Defending council housing, just like defending insidehousing.co.uk/ihstory.aspx?storycode=6508126 possible, that is to say, a general regulation of the all those other state institutions currently being 18 Defend Council Housing website. http://www. society by the market”. Thus we move from “a attacked by ‘The Cuts’, risks obscuring all the cuts defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/dch_novotes.cfm state under the supervision of the market rather that have preceded the current ones, and hiding 19 Jameson, Frederic, The Cultural logic of Late Capitalism, than a market supervised by the state.”26 the incorporation of social democracy into Fordist/ Verso, p.5. The state thus needs to be conceptualised Keynesian modes of state productivism on behalf 20 Hodkinson, Stuart, ‘From Popular Capitalism to Third- as a demoted but active partner in neoliberal Way Modernisation: The Example of Leeds, England’, of capital. What we defend has already been cut, in, Glynn, Sarah (ed), Where the Other Half Lives: Lower accumulation strategies, and this necessitates a and this history, and those who sanctioned it, Income Housing in a Neoliberal World, Pluto Press, 2009, more critical position to social democracy than must be recognised. However, Hatherley’s point p.99. Glynn allows. This has serious consequences leads us to certain unavoidable realities. We 21 Glynn, Sarah (ed), Where the Other Half Lives: Lower for the way change is conceptualised. As Glynn defend Council Housing, education (“the sausage Income Housing in Neoliberal World, Pluto Press, 2009, acknowledges, one of the main reasons for the factory”31), the NHS, welfare provision, transport p.40 atrophying condition of council housing in the UK services, etc, because of solidarity, and because 22 See Defend Council Housing website: http://www. has been grass-roots reliance on the Labour Party, if we don’t the options are even worse. But in defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/dch_stockoptions.cfm with its emphasis on parliamentary socialism. doing so we risk delimiting the parameters of 23 Hardt, M and Negri, A, Multitude, Penguin, 2006. p.280. This adherence to the Labour Party and the state struggle – only talking about what the telly talks 24 Smith, Neil, in, Spaces Of Neoliberalism: Urban is in contrast to many European socialists who Restructuring In North America And Western Europe, about. These ‘minimum’ demands are necessary, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002. ‘New globalism, New were more wary of state involvement, setting up and Glynn’s book lays some of them out very Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy’, independent tenants organisations to advance well, but without ‘maximum’ demands (the p.82 their claims (p.29). The current situation in the radical construction of a new world) the claims 25 Introduction, Brenner, N, Elden, S, eds, State, Space, UK, where tenants sit on Housing Association of the present risk being defined by the limited World: Selected Essays/Henri Lefebvre, University of committees with the landlords, is indicative parameters of a circumscribed past. Minnesota Press, 2009. of a situation where tenants have been fully The SI have received sustained critique over 26 ‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism’, 2010 http://chi. incorporated into the management structures the years32, but their refusal of utopian project academia.edu/BenjaminNoys/Papers/285622/The_ Grammar_of_Neoliberalism of private companies, surrendering whatever building, following Marx’s aversion to formulating 27 27 Tenants are bound by company law to support their independence they had into the bargain . While abstract schemes within capitalist relations, Registered Social Landlord (RSL). http://www. Glynn is deeply critical of these developments, led them to a position whereby revolution was defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/dch_StockTransfer.cfm an inadequate theorisation of the complicity of viewed as the most exemplary critique of human 28 McDonough, Tom, ed, The Situationists and the City, social democracy in the neoliberal conjuncture geography; and the riot the most refined critique Verso Books, 2009, p.2. puts her at risk of falling behind her own analysis, of urbanism (p.28-29). If that sounds implausible 29 Available on Bureau of Public Secrets website, Ken and eliding a self-critical conception of where the in these austere times, it’s worth remembering – Knabb, ed. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/7.htm new methodologies for radical housing change may as Glynn’s history of council housing shows – that 30 Hatherley, Owen, ‘Architectures of Dereliction’, Mute arise. However, despite these concerns, or perhaps many of the reforms of the past have emerged magazine, June 2010. http://www.metamute.org/en/ even because of them, Glynn et al’s contribution from the existence, or threat, of revolutionary content/architectures_of_dereliction provides an excellent overview of the housing activity backed by sizeable working-class 31 Really Open University. http://reallyopenuniversity. wordpress.com/sausage-factory/ debate as it currently stands. movements. 32 Some of this critique has constructively advanced SI positions. See for instance, Barrot, Jean, ‘Critique of the Notes Situationist International’, in, What is Situationism? A Summary 1 “In the late nineteenth century the typical mortgage Reader, ed, Stewart Home, AK Press, 1996. In the introduction to the recent collection of taken out by a skilled worker would take ten to twelve writings by the Situationist International (SI) – years to pay off. Now the standard length of a mortgage The Situationists and the City – Tom McDonough is twenty-five to thirty years”. ‘The Housing Question’, Aufheben magazine, #13, 2005: http://libcom.org/library/ argues that what is important about the SI is not aufheben/aufheben-13-2005/the-housing-question the plans they produced in their ‘architectural 2 This brief summary can do little justice to an excellent interlude’ (1957-62), but their critique of urbanism article. Gonzalez, Maya, ‘Notes on the New Housing and their challenge to its very premises and ways Question: Home Ownership, Credit and Reproduction of thinking. Resisting the viewpoint that the SI in the US Post-war Economy’, Endnotes, # 2, April, 2010: had some interesting ideas but rarely put them Misery and the Value Form: http://endnotes.org.uk/ articles/3 into practice, McDonough suggests that the most compelling moments of SI theory are precisely 3 See the graph in Gonzalez’s article for an indication of the sharp incline in homeownership rates after these those ideas which express a radical resistance housing credit was made widely available. Ibid. to incorporation and assimilation into the 4 For a good overview of housing in the UK context, see, mainstream histories of the 20th century and the ‘The Housing Question’, Aufheben magazine, #13, 2005: historical neo-avant-gardes28. Borrowing heavily http://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-13-2005/the- from Henri Lefebvre, the SI set about a radical housing-question critique of functionalism and modernisation in 5 Ibid. planning and architecture. Urbanism was seen as 6 Gillman, Blake. Inside Housing, 27th October, 2010. http:// the very technology of separation, and modernist www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/housing-management/ spending-review-is-assault-on-tenants/6512224.article architecture, for them, lay somewhere between the barrack and the prison. As Guy Debord wrote 7 For a summary of the proposed changes, see, Dept for Communities and Local Govt, 22nd November 2010, in 1967, “The society that reshapes its entire ‘Local decisions: a fairer future for social housing’. surroundings has evolved its own special technique http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/ for moulding its own territory, which constitutes pdf/1775586.pdf the material underpinning for all the facets of this 8 Stop Cuts – Invest in Council Housing, Defend