boredom is always counter-revolutionary

To walk down Brighton pier on a weekday is to walk on a sleeping giant. Its body inert, its lights turned off to reveal flaking paint and mismatched planks that peel away from iron encrusted with seagull shit. The shops are shut, the wind is cold and the tired pop music piped out overhead is lost to the breaking waves and the hum of the sea.

Everything is in place to distract you from quiet contemplation. For if you were to gaze from the pier, what would you see? In most directions, only water and sky. Off to one side, though, you meet the cold gaze of the skeletal remains of the West Pier.

The West Pier is the spectre of death, and Brighton Pier is uncomfortable. It is trying desperately to live out a history that has already died. It thrashes in its death throes, throwing lights, sounds and colours at visitors with the tense jollity and uncomfortable grin of an old man who knows death is imminent but makes jokes to distract it. The burnt corpse of the old pier is watching, there in the corner of your eye.

To enter the arcades, to attempt to escape this glare, is to be confronted with ever more spectacular recreations of life. It is cruel to take a child into the arcades, how can they resist? Their senses are not ready for this overload of electricity and money.

There is a sallow gesture toward magic, but the fortune teller’s booth is empty and the tarot reader’s gypsy caravan is too small, an intensified miniaturisation and an exhausted gesture. Everything comes with a warning or an advert. Everything is world-famous. The pictures of the karaoke bar, all glamour and disco balls, are compromised by its actual presence a little further down. I read that ‘one of the most innovative ideas… was free deck chairs’ and I suspect this to be true.

At the end of the pier you try for an escape, a reassuring view of the sea which does not lie, but you are blocked by the tangled metal of the roller coasters, infinity is blocked by the Crazy Mouse.

Although, really, there is no pretence here. This whole space is a construct, literally: it is neither on the ground nor on the sea, but suspended away from both. As the old pier tips into the water across the beach, we see that the sea does not want us, yet we disavow land as prisoners walking down a gangplank.

(This is a modified section from one of my term papers, called ‘Authentic Appearances: Patrick Keiller and the Promotional Aesthetic’. I’m writing about space and place and its invasion by ‘promotional imperatives’, particularly in relation to the pseudo-documentary films of Patrick Keiller. Here, I am trying to defend notions of space from excessive post-modernisation, so to speak, and retain the primacy of material reality.)

It is in the Black Country, West Midlands, where Robinson and the narrator find the most authentically industrial landscape yet, and its aesthetic differs remarkably from the nearby Merry Hill shopping centre, another outpost of the concentrated promotional aesthetic. As the camera faces a small factory, Robinson quotes Doreen Massey:

…amid the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace… most people actually still live in places like Harlesden or West Brom. Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the First World, still consists of waiting in a bus shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes. (Massey 1994, p163)

This sentiment, like the many shots of desolate riverbanks, wayside urban spaces and inconsequential streets which punctuate the films’ more notable scenes, remind the viewer that the promotional aesthetic has not entirely colonised the landscape just yet. We do still exist in real spaces, as unremarkable or one-dimensional as they may seem.

I would like to adopt a more polemic tone. In general, Keiller’s treatment of nonspace and the promotional aesthetic is not as hostile as one may expect, considering the Marxist analysis rooted in historical materialism with which he approaches these spaces. He is sure, however, to remind us that we should not get carried away with abstract conceptualisations of space and reminds us of the undeniably real spaces which we inhabit in our day-to-day lives, spaces inefficient with or hostile to the relentless self-promotion it seems necessary to adopt to survive. We must be careful not to try to fix space, not to deny new possibilities, not to become nostalgic for realities that probably never existed as we remember them, and not to fall prey to what Doreen Massey calls the ‘opting out from Progress and History’ (1994, p4). Likewise, we must balance this openness about the future of public space with an awareness of who is guiding this progress and writing this history. Meaghan Morris recommends constructing histories of specific shopping centres as ‘one way in which the clash of conflicting programmes for the management of change, and for resisting, refusing or evading “management” can better be understood’ (1988, p206). Associated with this awareness of historical representation should be an awareness of promotional representation, as a way of keeping a gauge on how far commercial and imperatives are claiming spaces as their own, both physically and conceptually.

The promotional aesthetic, I have tried to say, works best where it is most intensified, most concentrated, such as the shopping centre. As far as is possible without being regressive or excessively oppositional to ‘Progress and History’, it would seem that the promotional aesthetic is best contained within these spaces. The immersion offered by the shopping mall should be experienced through choice, through visiting such a centre and taking a step out of daily life, rather than that becoming the norm. We should remain materialists in asking for real space to remain sovereign, but aesthetes in wanting fulfilling, complete experiences through representation and honest promotion.

I was feeling quite angry anyway – public transport unfortunately does that to me – and the sheer shamelessly fantastical utopianism of the advert made me even angrier. I knew I had something to say about this image, but I didn’t know what. It confused me, because I normally like futuro-fantastic images of imagined cities (see Bladerunner or the cloud city from The Empire Strikes Back), and I’m also normally fascinated by those really busy, composite images of juxtaposed cultural forms, like Where’s Wally pictures or adverts like this.

What makes these images ugly to me, though, is the presence of the authoritative Barclaycard billboard that stamps its brand onto the landscape, colonising the future, or at least our attempts at visualising the future. Should there ever be any huge rupture in time and space and I find myself looking out over Future London, then I certainly don’t want to be greeted by Barclaycard, inviting me in. They were here first; they welcome my late arrival. I’d better get one of their entrance cards so I too can enjoy this city devoted to leisure, and play golf down Oxford Street or hurtle past Big Ben on a rollercoaster free, of course, from loose change in my pockets or any more than one credit card. Oyster-Credit-Cashless: Work-Rest-Play, they have it all.

But their vision is so puerile. The choice of a Future London based on a golf course surely says more about the cultural capital of the design team and the bank’s marketing department than how we could envisage cities to encompass spaces to play and dream and enjoy ourselves. This most certainly isn’t the Situationist vision of unitary urbanism or an hedonic Utopia that welcomes frivolity: firstly, I hate golf; and secondly, it would seem there are still an awful lot of monotone and monolithic office blocks between those greens.

Future London the theme park perhaps seems more appealing. It would, indeed, be more fun to travel to work on the Corkscrew than on the Circle Line. But ultimately Future London still doesn’t look particularly pleasurable. It seems competitive and hostile. The Barclaycard brand is suspended above the citizen’s heads like Christ the Redeemer looking down on Rio de Janeiro. The landscape is cluttered by an architecture that seeks only to outdo itself, each new building aiming to dominate more of the skyline and commandeer an ever more comprehensive view of its own surroundings.

Future London is little more than a gallery of progressively more ridiculous observation towers. It confuses itself: each building whose primary function is observational - from its high vantage point but also towards it, as a spectacle in itself, like the London Eye - seems necessarily to make a claim that its viewpoint across the surroundings offer an authoritative centre, the correct place from which to view the city. They may become landmarks in their own right, such as the Eiffel Tower, but there is a limit to how many of these buildings a city can hold before the landscape becomes all observational, vacuous, like a football stadium without a pitch in the middle. In this way, both the proliferation of inconconguous towers and golf course playgrounds for City businessmen actually offer very little other than unoriginal leisure-time diversions that reflect and repeat already-existant social and physical structures that are bringing me down in the first place.

Soon, the train arrived and I got on. The adverts on the trains are less ambitious, reassuringly mundane perhaps, relating to hair loss or insurance. The insult, I feel, of Barclaycard’s Future London is its scale - its promise that London will soon be a fun and exciting place to exist and to travel around - and ultimately its lack of imagination, its use of recognisable and tired images of play rooted very much in the present. Its CGI spectacularization of the landscape offers no real escape from the drudgery of everyday life or, more specifically, the stifling tube station.