boredom is always counter-revolutionary

If anyone who reads this is from Brighton or the University of Sussex, I’ve recently been involved in curating a small exhibition from the Library’s Mai 68 archive, and we’re putting it up on Friday (2nd May) in one of the glass cabinets on the right as you enter the building.

It comes as my small contribution to the commemoration of May 68 on its 40th anniversary. There are some good things going on in London: some tenuously-associated, already over-documented movements; but also some level of tracing how the events were felt in wider cultural spheres. All interesting stuff, of course, but problematic in how the evenements are (re)historicized. The passage below comes from a collection of posters produced by the Atelier Populaire, the renamed Ecole des Beaux Arts, occupied by students early in May ‘68, who would screenprint posters to be wheat-pasted all over Paris during the strikes:

The posters produced by the Atelier Populaire are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseperable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the Atelier Populaire has always refused to put them on sale. Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an outside observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the Ruling Class. That is why these works should not be taken as the final outcome of an experience, but as an inducement for finding, through contact with the masses, new levels of action, both on the cultural and the political place. (Atelier Populaire)

Their fear is that their material legacy will function as an inert historical document rather than a dialogic interpretation of specific circumstances and an active site of propagandhist resistance in an ongoing conflict. Whilst many of the more famous images appear to carry vague, catch-all anti-capitalist slogans, most of the posters were reactions and responces to particular events (as opposed to the graffiti, which takes a more Situationist/Surrealist inflection). Taken out of their particular historical instance and experiential context, it is feared that the posters will become either art - bourgeois and decorative - or history - depoliticized and static - shorn of their revolutionary purpose. The dilemma to a contemporary enthusiast (who, for whatever reason, hesitates in acting against the express interests of those more immediately involved) is in what context these artefacts can now be brought to attention.

A similar situation was played out when the ICA held an exhibition on the Situationists in 1989. This was perhaps even closer to the bone: in 1961, at a conference also at the ICA, it was announced that “the Situationists of which you believe yourselves perhaps to be the judges, will one day judge you”. When asked exactly what Situationism is, Guy Debord said “We’re not here to answer cuntish questions!” and promptly left. Nearly thirty years later, though, and relations between the institution and the (ex)situationists seemed to have calmed down. Ralph Rumney, in interview with Stewart Home, sounds apathetic and quiescent to the ironies of the exhibition, willing to myth-bust Debord and concede to his own material circumstances: “Now I’m getting older and want to earn a living, its nice to see the work doing something for me after all these years”.

So, is my glass cabinet of ephemera doing a disservice to the Atelier Populaire? Is this exhibition counter-revolutionary? I imagine that really depends on how you perceive the revolutionary situation at present. I’m certainly not working for The Man, but neither am I advocating a Situationist sense of despecialized social roles. The exhibition enforces the artist-observer, producer-consumer divide, producing a very real distance between the observer and the revolutionary situation. Yet that is to assume that these images still have some revolutionary potential, that they are molotov cocktails only to be unleashed in the fight against the forces of alienation and division. Really, what these posters have come to represent is a nostalgia for revolutionary potential. Although still constituting a political aesthetic, the emphasis is on the aesthetic.

This is not to say, however, that these are simply decorative items to be displayed within triumphant capitalist environments like the pelts of slain beasts. This circumstance is more true when applied to the co-option of revolutionary or anti-capitalist iconography into explicitly commercial settings, from Che Guevara t-shirts to ad campaigns drawing on Situationist aesthetics: capitalism’s seemingly inevitable reification of oppositional voices, its de-detourement of iconography. Rather, we can understand exhibitions of revolutionary cultural material in a sense of reconfigured semiotics, which doesn’t hold onto these artefacts as revolutionary tools in and of themselves, but as crystallisations of a revolutionary ideology that has passed but that allows for new formations and new aesthetics. Valentin Volosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), reacting against the algebraic fixity of Saussurean linguistics, locates the site of revolutionary struggle at the sign, on the plane of these images, as opposed to an idealistic conception of ideology behind culture:

Every phenomenon functioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material embodiment… consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs.

The ideology, then, exists within these artefacts, rather than behind them. Volosinov continues to identify a distinction between “theme” and “meaning”: the theme, or initial significance, is “individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance [in this case, the poster in situ on the Parisian street] is individual and unreproducible”; whilst the meaning, although the “lower level of linguistic significance” and essentially meaningless itself, “possesses potentiality”. A contemporary observer may now be unable to grasp the theme of these posters - that can only be understood by those who were there at the time - but can sense their meaning, however dislocated it may be from a specific stuggle or moment of revolutionary potential.

If this is beginning to sound apologetic or even defensive of bourgeois ritual, then I shall take recourse to Derrida’s “La Parole Soufflee” from Writing and Difference (1967). Here, in relation to Antonin Artaud - who was himself quoted via ‘68 street graffiti - Derrida says that,

Artaud knew that all speech fallen from the body, offering itself to understanding or reception, offering itself as a spectacle, immediately becomes stolen speech. Becomes a signification which I do not possess because it is a signification. Theft is always the theft of a speech or text, of a trace.

As such, although the primary signification of the Atelier Populaire posters may forever be lost, they offer speech to be stolen, voices to be spirited away and recontextualised, reexamined. La lutte continue. We should not shy away from revisiting these materials out of context, nor should we be delicate about coddling this iconography as if we could damage its revolutionary potential. At the risk of sounding trite, these images have an inspirational function, rather than a more immediately revolutionary one. The meaning of the posters is now partly nostalgic, yes; but it is a nostalgia for a moment when representation became real, when counter-alienation forces took material form. We are not to reproduce these forms, but we can sense the continued relevance of their meaning. These posters should be seen and felt.

[I may re-draft this post. Its late and I'm tired.]

He looked round: a deserted beach. But there again, a vast shadow thrown in a slanting way to his right now. He moved a step or two, then halted. Was he being followed, perhaps someone had seen him? In the act of pouncing maybe, right this minute, lurking behind a rock, and behind another one the old man probably signalling instructions. Down with him, tear him to shreds, he’s not human, such things as he does, assaults my woman, takes his pleasure how and where he can find it, blasted pimp, screw him up good and proper, throw him to the gulls, the sea can lap up his remains.

Following some discussion on this blog - and as another key in unlocking Stewart Home’s 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess - I recently read Ann Quin’s Berg. She’d been mentioned in relation to how she committed suicide by swimming out to sea alongside Brighton Pier: “British experimentalism died there, within sight of the amusement arcade”.

The Brighton of this novel wades in this sense of doom, jumping between its dual identity as chips’n'peas, seaside resort and out-of-season, weather-beaten relic. Its quite hallucinatory: not in the neon lights and electric sounds of the Pier, but in the shadows cast by the moon and the lamps, the lack of quiet. The seafront is always there, disrupting any attempts to immerse yourself in civil affairs and normal behaviour. The sea laps at the town, teasing it, lurking at the periphery of vision like a spectre of finality and inescapable doom. This is the end of the road. We find Berg at the beach whenever he is in his most haunted mindset, at his most schizophrenic and paranoid, rolling amongst the pebbles and staggering between the rotting wooden planks that hold up the pier, taunted by tramps and circled by seagulls.

This seaside town offers itself as an escape, the sea as a glimpse of something bigger than the trivialities of normal life. Quin herself, it seems, enacted the ultimate seaside escape.

This essay seems to have been mentioned here quite a lot already. Again, its written to specific criteria and word length, so parts of it may feel a bit slow as I’ve provided most of the introduction and background elsewhere on this blog. The second half, though, is where it picks up speed and starts to talk about some new ideas regarding “model living”.

Model Living: Experiencing The Ideal Home from The Great Exhibition to IKEA

In defining his term “cultural phenomenology”, Steven Connor identifies our age as one shot through with “an intense exteriorisation of intimacy [whereby] we get our sense of interiority from the outside in, by appropriation, mimicry, purchase and exhibition” (1999, p22). Although Connor is speaking of a subjective, psychological interior, this statement can be read in a more materialist sense to draw a parallel between the formation of the domestic interior during the Nineteenth Century and the establishment of Victorian events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851. (more…)

Because they have taken up so much of my life lately, yet disappear without trace into the dark channels of university procedure after submission, I’m posting up my two most recent term papers. If aspects of the presentation or form seem a little clunky, please bear in mind they are written with consideration of specific marking criterea. Copyleft, or whatever; but, plagiaristic students, please plagiarise for good use rather than wholesale stealing.

“Limitless Postponements”: The Changing Presence Of Control

Introduction

To do philosophy is thus to fabricate concepts in resonance and interference with the arts, past as well as present. It is never simply to apply concepts already supplied by a given theory… For one must always again produce the concepts; and a great critic is not one who comes armed with prior theory, but rather one who helps formulate new problems or suggests new concepts (Rajchman 2000, p115).

This paper will offer itself as an addendum, of sorts, to Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control”[i]. My primary intention is to make explicit something which Deleuze only implies, to reconfigure his argument to place emphasis elsewhere, and then interrogate the effects of this change on broader debates around control, discipline and surveillance. Following the transition from the Foucaultian notion of a Disciplinary Society to a Society of Control which models itself not on the Panopticon but more covert and digitalised forms of dataveillance, this paper shall propose that one characteristic of this new regime of control is a displacement of the here-and-now. For Deleuze’s control model, the dominant logic of power is one of pre-emptivity, as opposed to the post-emptive - or at least real-time - operation of Foucault’s Disciplinary Society. The wider implication is that the type of subjectivity formed by control, rather than discipline, is a mode of existence that prioritises the future and what is yet to happen. Less “live for now”, as “live for tomorrow”.

(more…)

I really wish that cinema had been some integral part of my youth, but it wasn’t. The films I watched were the same films any kid did in the 1990s, mostly blockbuster American films with accompanying action figures. Nonetheless, there is a certain aesthetic that fills me with nostalgia and still really appeals to my imagination. It lies in the cityscapes of films like Batman and The Crow. I’m not really sure what genre these films come under, they were normally adapted from comic books, and took cues from film noir, the gothic, crime films, dystopian fantasies: the product of Metropolis and Marvel/DC comics.

I was never too fussed about what happens in the films as such - especially not with the psychoanalytic vulnerability of superheroism - but the cities get me every time. They’re prototype cyberpunk environments, but it seems that they root themselves too firmly to the past and to material humanity to really embrace the digitalised dystopia suggested by that label. The ingredients for this type of city are simple: lots of smog and shadows; alleys and rooftops; ‘trashcans’ replete with ‘hobos’; old billboards and external staircases; lots of big sweeping shots between buildings; baddies who live underground; lots of pedestrians, especially tarted up prostitutes or gangsters with trilby hats. It seemed to me that any of the passing characters or faceless ‘Noo Yoik’ background chatterers held a story just like Bruce Wayne’s (I guess Jarmusch’s Night on Earth would be the result of this). Anyway, all this has certainly affected how I imagine (particularly American) cities to look.

And so today, for no reason other than revisiting my pre-to-mid teenage nerdism, i present to you a collection of my favourite science fiction cities from the 1980s and 1990s.

Gotham City (the classic)

New York from ghostbusters (in a way, all these cities are new york)

The Crow

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Dark City (this one actually came a little later, but gives the actual city more attention. It shape shifts. Sweet.)

Lost boys has the same aesthetic, but without the city. The Warriors too, but its a bit early and too definitely associated with New York City for this list. Gremlins goes a little suburban. Blade Runner is definitely an influence, but not really part of the same lineage.

I love how all of these films seem to converge and occur within an imaginary city. The city of late Twentieth Century mainstream science-fiction. I guess these places can’t exist after 9/11. But what psychogeographical sites they would offer! What lawlessness and intrigue!

Considering this is its 100^th anniversary, the 2008 Daily Mail Ideal Home show is a disappointingly modest affair. Whilst other years have seen the construction of whole model communities, contributions by pioneer architects and ever grander installations, including the world’s largest bathtub in 1996, the central piece this year is Century Street. This consists of little more than the façade of three Georgian townhouses, with signs trying to convince the visitor that one frontage represents the Fifties, one the Sixties and one the Eighties. Actually, I’m not even sure that these are the right dates, so unimpressed was I by their tired signifiers of days-gone-by: three cars from different decades and a few mannequins dressed in the supposed fashions of the day. Inside the unit – not even constructed as the interior of those homes – is a small museum display of products representative of each decade of the Twentieth Century. The commercial imaginary of history: modern life as experienced through brands and logos and children’s toys. Star Wars figures from the 1970s, cassette tapes from the 1980s, the Spice Girls from the 1990s. Public life and private memory as product identification: “I remember Fiendish Feet”.

The Dream Home section was, quite frankly, fucking terrible. I don’t think they even tried this year. I think it had some IKEAesque furniture, neon glowing lights and a flatscreen TV, but I couldn’t really pay attention. Just trying to imagine this as a dream home, an ideal life, model living, elicits such beige images of content consumerism that you get bored even with your dreams. This is no future, this is no aspirational model to keep people working hard, reaching forward for a better life. This is shameless reproduction of the norm, a fear of alternatives. Does capitalism not even need to try anymore? The rest of the hall was filled with jumped-up market-hall salesmen selling rubber brooms, onion slicers and massage chairs. More grimacing, gelled and perma-tanned salesmen flogging plastic bits and offering an easier life for the wife. “Ain’t that right ladies?”

The reason why I’m a little worked up about all this – aside from the £6 entrance fee and notable lack of freebies – is that I’ve started to imagine the Ideal Home exhibition as a site of potentially great imaginative power. These events emerge with the Great Exhibition of 1851, just as consumerism and a collection/commodity-based lifestyle are gathering speed: Walter Benjamin says that these events “erected the universe of commodities”. Later on, they serve to sustain consumerism during more austere, post-war reconstructive periods, convincing people to keep on buying, something better will come. The scale changes, from the Victorian spectacularity and phantasmagoric display of a world of products (or, an empire of products), through to the more domesticized mid-C20th, quietly aspirational, middle-everything, house-and-home values.

So whilst home exhibitions may have functioned as harbingers of capitalism - as decidedly hegemonic projections of the official vision for private, domestic life into the mind of the general public - at least in previous years they seem to have tried something a little more, well, fun. This year, I felt like I was attending a tradition that was on its last legs, overtaken and co-opted by IKEA, Habitat and glossy magazines that make the ideal home a permanent fixture in the consumer’s imagination, something intrinsic to regular everyday life. Spectacularism, novelty and imagination have been domesticized to the point of ritual. The future has been colonised by IKEA’s interior design team.

In fact, witnessing the absolute banalization of the Ideal Home exhibition, I drew a parallel with the proposed demolition of Robin Hood Gardens. Both of these institutions have, for at least one moment, represented a reconfiguration of domestic life, an attempt to conceptualise the everyday in a slightly different register. Both tried to offer a more imaginative, speculative image of how the future could look and be lived. Both, similarly, seem to have simply been overtaken by more efficient, more easily recuperated practices and institutions. So whilst the aesthetic of the Ideal Homes exhibition has been co-opted into regular promotional aesthetics, particularly via IKEA, the brutalist aesthetic has become simply a historical moment that, it would seem, is to be preserved as a relic or forgotten. These utopian moments are being trampled beneath a runaway rationality that sees and sells one - and only one - official future.

After leaving the exhibition, on the train home I was to have an encounter that served to demonstrate the effect of this conceptual limitation, this restriction of imaginative possibility regarding the future. A young man - mini bottle of wine in hand, tie-loosened and salmon pink shirt untucked - staggered up to my girlfriend and I and, seemingly drawn to my utterly outrageous combination of a pierced nose and “conservative clothes”, started to berate me to, essentially, “give it up - get serious - get a proper job and start preparing to provide for a family”. The crux of his argument was, without knowing a thing about me, that I wouldn’t get a good office job looking like I do, so sort it out. He knew, of course, because he had already been through it before, but the system breaks you down (he actually said that). He couldn’t imagine any lifestyle other than his own, with an office job, a family and a financially secure future and, it would seem, a repression of leisure time so acute that within a couple of hours of finishing work on a Friday evening he is drunk and berating people who, for whatever reason, are avoiding the same self-flagellation.