Kirkham, Nicola. Ph.D. Thesis
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Title J18: movements towards an ethico-aesthetic paradigm Type Thesis URL http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/5790/ Date 2009 Citation Kirkham, Nicola (2009) J18: movements towards an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. PhD thesis, University of the Arts London. Creators Kirkham, Nicola Usage Guidelines Please refer to usage guidelines at http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact [email protected]. License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Unless otherwise stated, copyright owned by the author Nicola Kirkham 118: movements towards an ethico- aesthetic paradigm PhD in Fine Art Central St. Martins College of Art and Design University of the Arts London May 2009 1 Abstract This thesis offers a materialist account of political action from the perspective of the aesthetic, focusing on a global day of action, protest and carnival staged to coincide with the G8 Summit on June 18th 1999. An event known as J18. Part one begins with a review of contemporary literature concerning the sociologies of contemporary political movements, theories of space and locality provided by geography, analyses of public interventions by art practice as well as the tactical deployment of media and writing related specifically to the cultural politics of anti-capitalism. The theory and methods chapter surveys historic shifts in thinking about political action, through an attendant Marxist epistemology, through three key events: the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and May 1968. The search for a materialist understanding of political action feeds the act of drawing together empirical material from J18 by way of the data gathering process and the reciprocal development of a critical framework used as a method of interpretation. In Part Two a multi-centred account of the event is narrated by way of micro- examples that are each affectively attuned to, and constitutive of the events happening. Acknowledg ments First of all I would like to thank my supervisors; Malcolm Miles for his encouragement and support from inception to completion of this thesis; Graeme Evans for his interest and assistance in its early stages; Elizabeth Wilson, by whom I was taught when studying for my first degree and who has generously encouraged my work since, and James Swinson for seeing it through to completion. I have enjoyed working with them, and appreciated their ability to guide my work in the most productive way. Research does not, fortunately, take place in a vacuum. The people, groups and spaces connected with this thesis have also enhanced my research and life in many ways. Thanks to Andrew McGettigan, Jane Gibb and Martin Woolley at Central St Martins, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, Studio for Creative Enquiry, Platform, Kabele in Bristol, Casa Vidis, London Action Resource Centre, Hilary, Mary Chabel in Lancaster, Steve in Sheffield, Vincent Bethell, Indymedia, Chris Knight at the University of East London, Roger Gomm in the London Metropolitan Police Public Order division Scotland Yard, Eddie Botham in the Corporation of London Security and Contingency Planning Department, Kevin Sapsford in the City of London Police force and Frank Placek in the British Transport Police Event Planning Division. For friendship and imaginative and productive arguments I would like to thank John Jordan, Graeme Chesters, Brian Holmes, Paul Rae, Marcelo Exposito, Greg Sholette, Tim Collins, Anthony Davies, Stephan Szczelkun, Michael Lane, Nick Cobbing, Christian Nold, Nick Thorburn, Ana Betancour, Monica Degen, Lin Holdridge and Isac Petruzzi (for their patience and proof reading) and Evi Baniotopoulos who started her thesis at the same time as me and who has therefore shared with me all the stages of life as a PhD student. Thank you is also not enough for Gary Anderson and Lena Simic, whose friendship has guided me to completion and who, amongst many other things, have provided a much desired community. I am grateful to all of them for their generosity, steering conversations, coffees, dinners, late nights and more. My warmest thanks go to my dearest friends Martha, Mariella and David whose interest and insight have been extremely important in my life and my work. Finally, thank you to my Dad and Barbie for providing a home in which to finish writing this thesis over the winter of 2009. Contents Abstract. Acknowledgments . PartOne . 1. Introduction 1 2. Literature Review 9 Introduction 9 Sociologies of New Social Movements 9 Geographies of Space and Place 14 Art Practice and Performance 23 Tactical Media - Retreats from the Street... 27 Anti-Capitalism 33 3. Theory and Methods 45 Introduction 45 Historical Precedents 46 Marx's materialism 46 Marx and Marxism 49 Relations of production and ideology 52 Commodity, value, and commodity fetishism 53 The Paris Commune, 1871 57 October 1917 61 Marxist-Leninism 61 Spontaneity versus Democratic Centralism 63 Art in the Revolution and the Revolution in Art 66 Critical Theory: Theodor Adorno 72 May 76 Althusser, Ideology and Structuralism 76 Political Subjectivization 87 The Spectacle and the Avant-garde 91 New Times 96 Gramsci, hegemony and class struggle: 96 Hegemony 97 The role of the Intellectual. 98 War of manoeuvre and war of position 100 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and Marxism Today 101 Methodology 106 Biopolitics and biopower. 107 The Multitude, Virtuosity and Immaterial Labour 111 Virtuality, Movement, Affect... 116 The ethico-aesthetic paradigm 121 Researching J18 124 Data Gathering 125 Part 2 135 4. Inhabiting the Archive 136 5. Conclusion - Towards an ethico-aesthetic paradigm 174 Beyond Critique 177 6. Appendices 185 Bibliography 188 Part One 1. Introduction This thesis represents an attempt to understand a global day of action that took place on June 18th 1999. The perceptions of key players who participated in the production of J 18 are drawn together to develop an understanding of the event. Key players include; the protestors, the government, mainstream media, the City of London Police force, the London Metropolitan Police force, British Transport Police, the Corporation of London municipality, residents, workers and corporations. A desire to situate this PhD research in the aesthetico-political aspirations of J 18 stems, in part from my sense of gratitude towards ravers with whom, in northern warehouse parties in Britain I danced through the late 1980'S and early 1990'S. At the time I was unaware that ravers were perceived as a threat. Beyond the confines of my experience, family and friends, rave was producing an endless tirade of disparagements, which along moral, ethical, aesthetic, and socio-economic lines called for its removal from society.' The government and the mainstream media focused their attentions on the use of drugs, such as ecstasy by ravers. The use of abandoned industrial warehouses for mass parties was also not legislated for and was thus deemed to be illegal. 2 The sonorous degeneracy of machine-made rhythms was perceived as environmental pollution, which combined with the youthful abandon of the 1Richard Card and Richard Ward, The 1994 (London: Jordans, 1996); Rupa Huq, "The Right to Rave: Opposition to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994," in the The ed. Tim Jordan and Adam Lent (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 15-33. In 1994 ravers were singled out by the Criminal Justice and Public Order These accounts foster an understanding of the raves in this context. 2 Drew Hemment, "Dangerous Dancing and Disco Riots: the Northern Warehouse Parties," in DIY in (London: Verso, 1998). Hemment emphasises that this view was worked up in part by local police forces, namely the Lancashire Police Force who note the initial difficulties of identifying rave as a crime, 'It needed quite close scrutiny of the law by our legal people to actually find what offences were being committed.' 1 raves was conceived as a form of public disorder. The political censure and equally restrictive commercial colonisations of rave music, whereby many DJ's voluntarily channelled their talents into the legitimated realm of Manchester clubs, would eventually dispatch the northern warehouse parties altogether. This, I discovered only afterwards, through theorys and concepts, housed in books, written by cultural theorists. To re-emphasize this point; at the time my experience of the parties was not that they were in defiance, knowingly transgressive, deviant, subversive, a refusal of, or resistant toward an external force. As thrilling as the discovery of my unwitting protest was, this revelation came only afterwards in time. In the 1990'S cultural theorists, in search of latent political potentials In popular culture positioned the rave in a complex of youth formations brought under or adjacent to dance or club culture. Although there is no consensus about the political and social significance of the rave, descriptions always emphasised the democratic potential of the dance floor as a site for the expression and experience of popular pleasures. To give just a few examples, the feminist cultural theorist Angela McRobbie describes rave as a form of symbolic escape from social tensions and in this she considers rave to be a contemporary version of spectacular subcultural resistance." Following Angela McRobbie, Maria Pini argues that the rave dance floor acts as a vehicle for the expression of alternative forms of femininity that "do not clearly 'fit' standard, patriarchal