Variant,
issue 32, Summer 2008
Cover
notes on 'New social art school, free daze!'
Contents
The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State
Pierre Bourdieu interviewed by R. P. Droit & T.
Ferenczi
The New Bohemia
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt
Craven New World
Tom Jennings
Comic & Zine Reviews
Mark Pawson
Structural Greed: The ‘Credit
Crunch’
John Barker
Reading is an argument
Althusser’s commandment, conjecture
and contradiction
Liam O’ Ruairc
Sense & Knowledge
Daniel Jewesbury
Hindutva, Modi, and The Tehelka Tapes
The Communal Threat to Indian Secularism
Neil Gray
[A longer version can found here.]
Propaganda Compliant Society
Alex Law
Fortress Britain
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Nationalism and Neoliberalism
Neil Davidson
The End of Tolerance
Daniel Jewesbury
_________________________________________________
Front cover
New social art school, free daze! – an illegal fly-poster seeking the release of Glasgow graffiti artist Daze (Gary Shields) who was jailed for 28 months on March 20th 2008, the longest such sentence handed down in Scotland... amidst a prisons overcrowding crisis and yet further calls for reform of the penal system. Graffiti, as in the case of Daze’s eight instances of malicious mischief perpetrated on the public transport system, is prosecuted both under the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2004) and as vandalism: “the wilful, wanton, and malicious destruction of, or damage to, the property of another person”. With both the most common forms of graffiti, and the most frequent strategies employed to suppress it, firmly established for decades, the effect of Shield’s
incarceration as an example, as argued by the judge in the case, or the long-term
benefits of clean-ups are a little doubtful.
Deputy leader of Glasgow City Council, James Coleman, quoted in the Evening
Times, responded to the Free Daze! campaign: “I’m glad this has been brought to our attention and we will be dealing with it as a matter of urgency. We will be trying to identify the people responsible – and hopefully they’ll be locked up like Gary Shields. Graffiti destroys the environment we’re
trying to create of a clean Glasgow. It just goes to show you the mentality of
these people who have no respect for the city.”
The inconclusive claims about the relation of graffiti to actual crime, or the ‘fear of crime’ which sustain and possibly increase this ongoing ‘battle’ between writers and the arm of the law, are, unfortunately, never matched by an enquiry into such salient questions as whether the public are in favour of the huge expenses incurred in policing and cleaning – such as the whopping £270,000
apparently required to remove traces of Daze.
Neither is the continuing increase of legal and commercial messages up for scrutiny.
Coleman as deputy leader is himself responsible for the recent billboard-erection
spree fouling the city, including the strobing LED displays blaring out sound
pollution into ‘pedestrian zones’ for the likes of military recruitment. According to the BBC, from May 2008, new powers in the Commonwealth Games (2014) Bill, alongside the compulsory purchase of land, will give Glasgow City Council additional rein to censor and suppress “unauthorised advertising”. The excuse for this intensified criminalisation of the ‘misuse’ of public space is to protect the interests of private sponsors. Trading Standards officers are to be given powers to cover billboards and signs and, under warrant, search premises where they suspect ‘offences’ are
being committed.
The good news is that, on 12th May, Daze was freed on ‘interim liberation’ while
on appeal.
The Free Daze campaign: http://livepetitions.co.uk/freedaze
back
to top
_________________________________________________
The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State
The influential sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu (1930 – 2002) was interviewed by R. P. Droit and T. Ferenczi in 1992. Their conversation was published in Le Monde on 14th January that year. Why choose to reprint this interview today, over a decade and half later? Bourdieu conjures up the useful metaphor of ‘the left and right hand of the State’ and with it he illuminates the devastating impact of neoliberalism on social democracy and points to the willing involvement of the socialist political class in this process. As a consequence, social democratic politics in France and elsewhere were transformed beyond recognition. This was shown for some in the UK by Margaret Thatcher’s greatest victory: New Labour. Moving on from such disappointments, not just in Europe but globally, political hopes are increasingly placed in nationalism, particularly of the small is beautiful variety. But the key issue that remains is how the public interest and the common good can be manifested under the conditions of corporate and financial globalisation which enforce privatisation and cut-backs on the public sector. On this dismal point the proponents of competitive nationalism refuse to give any clear answers whilst launching manifestos for what might be described as cultural rejuvenation in the global marketplace. Does the new breed of nationalist not in fact conform perfectly with the self-seeking political characteristics that Bourdieu saw degrading civic virtues…?
Q A recent issue of the journal that you edit was devoted to the theme
of suffering.1 It includes several interviews with people
whose voices are not much heard in the media: young people on deprived
estates, small farmers, social workers. The head-teacher of a secondary
school in difficulty, for example, expresses his bitterness. Instead
of overseeing the transmission of knowledge, he has become, against
his will, the superintendent of a kind of police station. Do you think
that individual and anecdotal testimonies of that kind can cast light
on a collective malaise?
PB In the survey we are conducting on social suffering, we encounter
many people who, like that head-teacher, are caught in the contradictions
of the social world, which are experienced in the form of personal
dramas. I could also cite the project leader, responsible for co-ordinating
all the work on a ‘difficult estate’ in a small town in northern France. He is faced with contradictions which are the extreme case of those currently experienced by all those who are called ‘social workers’:
family counsellors, youth leaders, rank-and-file magistrates, and also,
increasingly, secondary and primary teachers. They constitute what
I call the left hand of the state, the set of agents of the so-called
spending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social
struggles of the past. They are opposed to the right hand of the state,
the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private
banks and the ministerial cabinets. A number of social struggles that we are now seeing (and will see) express the revolt of the minor state nobility against the senior state nobility.2
Q How do you explain that exasperation, those forms of despair and those
revolts?
PB I think that the left hand of the state has the sense that the right
hand no longer knows, or, worse, no longer really wants to know what
the left hand does. In any case, it does not want to pay for it. One
of the main reasons for all these people’s despair is that the state
has withdrawn, or is withdrawing, from a number of sectors of social
life for which it was previously responsible: social housing, public
service broadcasting, schools, hospitals, etc., which is all the more
stupefying and scandalous, in some of these areas at least, because it
was done by a Socialist government, which might at least be expected
to be the guarantor of public service as an open service available to
all, without distinction. . . What is described as a crisis of politics,
anti-parliamentarianism, is in reality despair at the failure of the
state as the guardian of the public interest.
If the Socialists had simply not been as socialist as they claimed, that
would not shock anyone – times are hard and there is not much room for manoeuvre. But what is more surprising is that they should have done so much to undermine the public interest, first by their deeds, with all kinds of measures and policies (I will only mention the media. . . ) aimed at liquidating the gains of the welfare state, and above all, perhaps, in their words, with the eulogy of private enterprise (as if one could only be enterprising within an enterprise) and the encouragement of private interest. All that is somewhat shocking, especially for those who are sent into the front line to perform so-called ‘social’ work
to compensate for the most flagrant inadequacies of the logic of the
market, without being given the means to really do their job. How could
they not have the sense of being constantly undermined or betrayed?
It should have been clear a long time ago that their revolt goes far beyond
questions of salary, even if the salary granted is an unequivocal index
of the value placed on the work and the corresponding workers. Contempt
for a job is shown first of all in the more or less derisory remuneration
it is given.
Q Do you think that the politicians’ room for manoeuvre is really
so limited?
PB It is no doubt less limited than they would have us think. And in
any case there remains one area where governments have considerable scope:
that of the symbolic. Exemplary behaviour ought to be de
rigueur for
all state personnel, especially when they claim to belong to a tradition
of commitment to the interests of the least advantaged. But it is difficult
not to have doubts when one sees not only examples of corruption (sometimes
quasi-official, with the bonuses given to some senior civil servants)
or betrayal of public service (that word is no doubt too strong – I
am thinking of pantouflage3) and all the forms of
misappropriation, for private purposes, of public property, profits or
services – nepotism, cronyism (our leaders have many ‘personal friends’ .
. . 4),
clientelism . . .
And I have not even mentioned symbolic profits! Television has probably
contributed as much as bribery to the degradation of civic virtue. It
has invited and projected on to the political and intellectual stage
a set of self-promoting personalities concerned above all to get themselves
noticed and admired, in total contradiction with the values of unspectacular
devotion to the collective interest which once characterized the civil
servant or the activist. It is the same self-serving attention seeking
(often at the expense of rivals) which explains why ‘headline grabbing’5 has
become such a common practice. For many ministers, it seems, a measure
is only valid if it can be announced and regarded as achieved as soon
as it has been made public. In short, large-scale corruption which causes
a scandal when it is uncovered because it reveals the gap between professed
virtues and real behaviour is simply the extreme case of all the ordinary
little ‘weaknesses’,
the flaunting of luxury and the avid acceptance of material or symbolic
privileges.
Q Faced with the situation you describe, how, in your view, do the citizens
react?
PB I was recently reading an article by a German author on ancient Egypt.
He shows how, in a period of crisis of confidence in the state and in the
public good, two tendencies emerged: among the rulers, corruption, linked
to the decline in respect for the public interest; and, among those they
dominated, personal religiosity, associated with despair concerning temporal
remedies. In the same way, one has the sense now that citizens, feeling
themselves ejected from the state (which, in the end, asks of them no more
than obligatory material contributions, and certainly no commitment, no
enthusiasm), reject the state, treating it as an alien power to be used
so far as they can to serve their own interests.
Q You referred to the considerable scope that governments have in the symbolic
domain. This is not just a matter of setting an example of good behaviour.
It is also about words, ideals that can mobilize people. How do you explain
the current vacuum?
PB There has been much talk of the silence of the intellectuals. What strikes
me is the silence of the politicians. They are terribly short of ideals
that can mobilize people. This is probably because the professionalization
of politics and the conditions required of those who want to make a career
in the parties increasingly exclude inspired personalities. And probably
also because the definition of political activity has changed with the
arrival of a political class that has learned in its schools (of political
science) that, to appear serious, or simply to avoid appearing old-fashioned
or archaic, it is better to talk of management than self-management, and
that they must, at any rate, take on the appearances (that is to say the
language) of economic rationality.
Locked in the narrow, short-term economism of the IMF worldview which
is also causing havoc, and will continue to do so, in North-South relations,
all these half-wise economists fail, of course, to take account of the
real costs, in the short and more especially the long term, of the material
and psychological wretchedness which is the only certain outcome of their
economically legitimate Realpolitik: delinquency, crime, alcoholism,
road accidents, etc. Here too, the right hand, obsessed by the question
of financial equilibrium, knows nothing of the problems of the left hand,
confronted with the often very costly social consequences of ‘budgetary restrictions’.
Q Are the values on which actions and contributions of the state were once
founded no longer credible?
PB The first people to flout them are often the very ones who ought to
be their guardians. The Rennes Congress6 and the amnesty law7 did
more to discredit the Socialists than ten years of anti-socialist campaigning.
And a ‘turncoat’ activist does more harm than ten opponents.
But ten years of Socialist government have completed the demolition of
belief in the state and the demolition of the welfare state that was
started in the 1970s in the name of liberalism. I am thinking in particular
of housing policy.8 The declared aim has been to rescue the
petite bourgeoisie from publicly owned housing (and thereby from ‘collectivism’)
and facilitate their move into ownership of a house or apartment. This
policy has in a sense succeeded only too well. Its outcome illustrates
what I said a moment ago about the social costs of some economies. That
policy is probably the major cause of social segregation and consequently
of the problems referred to as those of the ‘banlieues’.9
Q So if one wants to define an ideal, it would be a return to actions
sense of the sense and of the public good. You don’t share everybody’s
opinion on this.
PB Whose opinion is everybody’s opinion? The opinion of people who write in the newspapers, intellectuals who advocate the ‘minimal state’ and who are rather too quick to bury the notion of the public and the public’s interest in the public interest. . . We see there a typical example of the effect of shared belief which removes from discussion ideas which are perfectly worth discussing. One would need to analyse the work of the ‘new intellectuals’ which has created a climate favourable to the withdrawal of the state and, more broadly, to submission to the values of the economy. I’m thinking of what has been called the ‘return of individualism’, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which tends to destroy the philosophical foundations of the welfare state and in particular the notion of collective responsibility (towards industrial accidents, sickness or poverty) which has been a fundamental achievement of social (and sociological) thought. The return to the individual is also what makes it possible to ‘blame the victim’ who
is entirely responsible for his or her own misfortune, and to preach
the gospel of self-help, all of this being justified by the endlessly
repeated need to reduce costs for companies.
The reaction of retrospective panic provoked by the crisis of 1968, a
symbolic revolution which alarmed all the small holders of cultural capital
(subsequently reinforced by the unforeseen collapse of the Soviet-style
regimes), created conditions favourable to a cultural restoration, the
outcome of which has been that ‘Sciences-Po thought’10 has
replaced the ‘thought of Chairman Mao’. The intellectual world is now the site of a struggle aimed at producing and imposing ‘new intellectuals’ and therefore a new definition of the intellectual and the intellectual’s
political role, a new definition of philosophy and the philosopher, henceforward
engaged in the vague debates of a political philosophy without technical
content, a social science reduced to journalistic commentary for election
nights, and uncritical glossing of unscientific opinion polls. Plato
had a wonderful word for all these people: doxosophers. These ‘technicians of opinion who think themselves wise’ (I’m
translating the triple meaning of the word) pose the problems of politics
in the very same terms in which they are posed by businessmen, politicians
and political journalists (in other words the very people who can afford
to commission surveys. . . ).
Q You have just mentioned Plato. Is the attitude of the sociologist close
to that of the philosopher?
PB The sociologist is opposed to the doxosopher, like the philosopher,
in that she questions the things that are self-evident, in particular
those that present themselves in the form of questions, her own as much
as other people’s. This profoundly shocks the doxosopher, who sees
a political bias in the refusal to grant the profoundly political submission
implied in the unconscious acceptance of commonplaces, in Aristotle’s sense – notions
or theses with which people argue, hut over which they do not argue.
Q Don’t you tend in a sense to put the sociologist in the place
of a philosopher-king?
PB What I defend above all is the possibility and the necessity of the
critical intellectual, who is firstly critical of the intellectual doxa secreted
by the doxosophers. There is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing
critical powers. The intellectual is one of those, of the first magnitude.
That is why I think that the work of demolishing the critical intellectual,
living or dead – Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, and some others who are grouped together under the label Pensée
6811 – is
as dangerous as the demolition of the public interest and that it is
part of the same process of restoration.
Of course I would prefer it if intellectuals had all, and always, lived
up to the immense historical responsibility they bear and if they had
always invested in their actions not only their moral authority but also
their intellectual competence – like, to cite just one example,
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who has engaged all his mastery of historical method
in a critique of the abuses of history.12 Having said that,
in the words of Karl Kraus, ‘between two evils, I refuse to choose the lesser.’ While I have little indulgence for ‘irresponsible’ intellectuals, I have even less respect for the ‘intellectuals’ of the political-administrative establishment, polymorphous polygraphs who polish their annual essays between two meetings of boards of directors, three publishers’ parties
and miscellaneous television appearances.
Q So what role would you want to see for intellectuals, especially in the
construction of Europe?
PB I would like writers, artists, philosophers and scientists to be able
make their voice heard directly in all the areas of public life in which
they are competent. I think that everyone would have a lot to gain if
the logic of intellectual life, that of argument and refutation, were
extended to public life. At present, it is often the logic of political
life, that of denunciation and slander, ‘sloganization’ and falsification of the adversary’s thought, which extends into intellectual life. It would be a good thing if the ‘creators’ could
fulfil their function of public service and sometimes of public salvation.
Moving to the level of Europe simply means rising to a higher degree
of universalization, reaching a new stage on the road to a universal
state, which, even in intellectual life, is far from having been achieved.
We will certainly not have gained much if eurocentrism is substituted
for the wounded nationalisms of the old imperial nations. Now that the
great utopias of the nineteenth century have revealed all their perversion,
it is urgent to create the conditions for a collective effort to reconstruct
a universe of realist ideals, capable of mobilizing people’s will
without mystifying their consciousness.
Notes
I. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences
Sociales, 90, Dec. 1991, special issue ‘La souffrance’;
Bourdieu et al., La
Misère
du monde.
2. Alluding to the author’s book The State
Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (trans.).
3. The practice whereby civil servants move to positions in the private sector (trans.).
4. François Mitterrand (President of France 1981-1995) was often
praised for his ‘fidélité en
amitié’, and a number of personalities appointed to important posts were, according to the newspapers, chiefly noted for being his ‘personal friends’ (trans.).
5. effets d’annonce in the original, produced when a minister
reduces his political action to the ostentatious announcement of spectacular
decisions which often have no effect or no follow-up – Jack
Lang has been cited as an example (trans.).
6. The Rennes Congress (15-18 March 1990), the scene of heated disputes between the leaders of the major tendencies within the Socialist Party, Lionel Jospin, Laurent Fabius and Michel Rocard (trans.).
7. The amnesty that was granted, in particular, to the generals of the
French army in Algeria who attempted a putsch against de Gaulle’s government
(trans.).
8. See Bourdieu et aI., ‘L’économie de la maison’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 81-2, Mar. 1990.
9. Socially analogous to the ‘inner cities’ but in France implying
peripheral housing estates (trans.).
10. As generated and taught in the institutes of political science (‘Sciences-Po’),
in particular the one in Paris (trans.).
11. Allusion to Ferry and Renaut, La Pensée 68 (trans.).
12. Vidal-Naquet, Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent.
back
to top
_________________________________________________
The New Bohemia
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt
“The referendum on Scottish devolution on September 11th 1997 was a historic moment for our country. But the ‘Yes Yes’ result was not a mandate for politicians, civil servants, local government officers or any other public sector officials to take on extra powers ‘on behalf of the people’.”
Bridget McConnell, 19971
In summer 2007, Variant reported on the unprecedented move of Glasgow City Council (GCC) devolving its Cultural and Leisure Services department to a private charitable trust.2 The
main challenges outlined at the time came from Unison – representing the majority of public sector workers affected – which objected that workers would suffer, that previous fundraising attempts offered a spurious precedent for guaranteeing future funding (which might contribute further pressure to seek private investment), that democratic accountability beyond the ‘lucky six’ councillors appointed to the board would be lost in relation to a number of key services (leading to an ‘arms-length’ private
company), that the scheme represented a tax dodge (explicitly prohibited within
Labour Party policy)3 and that this move would compromise the credibility
and fundraising potential of legitimate charities. Unison mounted a legal challenge,
applying for an interim interdict against the Council’s proposals in March
2007 and seeking a judicial review of the process, both of which were unsuccessful.
In January 2007, as a result of similar concerns, Culture Minister, Patricia Ferguson, had sought reassurance about the legality of the move.4 Another
objection was made by Scots Tory MEP, Struan Stevenson – responding to the claims of a whistleblower presumed to be a high-level GCC official – on
the grounds that the creation of a new company to oversee culture and leisure
should have been put out to tender and that the state cannot directly or indirectly
subsidise a company.5 Competition commissioner Neelie Kroes passed the matter over to European Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, who is widely acknowledged to be in favour of free markets.6 McCreevy
contacted the Scottish Executive on 10 April 2007 which, just days before Bridget
McConnell’s husband lost his job as First Minister, penned a joint response
with GCC, refuting any claims of illegality, which was accepted by the Commission.7
Within its first year of trading, Culture and Sport Glasgow (CSG) has given some
indication of its future trajectory. Controversial proposals to allow private
companies to develop businesses in two of its parks have been strongly resisted
and so far resulted in plans for a nightclub in the botanical gardens being scrapped.
Initial fears about job security – especially for casual workers – appear to have been founded, with staff at Tramway being offered contracts that discriminate against artists who rely on flexibility in their paid work, thereby undermining the indirect subsidy that reaches the city’s
creative practitioners through invigilation work. A year ago, Variant asserted
that “one of Glasgow’s proud boasts is that of the free access to museums. How long will that last if the Trust gets into financial difficulties?” Somewhat
predictably, it has just been announced that the feted Kelvingrove Museum will
be introducing admission charges. It would seem to be an appropriate moment to
take a closer look at the formation of Culture and Sport Glasgow, the overlapping
networks and interests of its key personnel and the early implications of this
transfer for culture within the broader strategies being devised for Glasgow,
which are paralleled in other cities around the world.
With reference to city council reports and minutes, it is clear that the genesis
of CSG suffered from a lack of transparency from the outset. In November 2005,
in the wake of the Cultural Commission making its final report to the Scottish
Executive and responsibility for cultural provision having largely been delegated
to local authorities Glasgow’s Cultural Strategy was approved by the council.
In her introduction to this document, Bridget McConnell (then Executive Director
of Cultural and Leisure Services), affirmed the link between cultural participation
and economic regeneration, highlighted the continued need for private investment
in Glasgow and noted that cultural tourism accounted for 37% of all tourism to
the city.8 Indeed, the potential of culture to increase tourism has become widely asserted as a phenomenon, with precedents ranging from Bankside (Tate Modern) to Bilbao (Guggenheim Museum), and McConnell has invoked Bilbao when discussing the new Zaha Hadid-designed Riverside Museum, due to open on the banks of the Clyde in 2010.9
It was McConnell’s proposal to create a new company to manage the city’s cultural provision, which was swiftly taken up by Councillor John Lynch (then Executive Member for Culture and Sport), abetted by Councillors Steven Purcell and Aileen Colleran, who would go on to occupy key roles in Culture and Sport Glasgow. This ultimately led to the formation of two companies – one limited by guarantee with charitable status (with an estimated turnover of £19
million p.a.), and an additional trading arm, or Community Interest Company (CIC),
to carry out those functions not deemed charitable by HM Revenue and Customs
while gifting all income to the charity. While this proposal has the veneer of
passing through the appropriate consultancy phase and council committees before
finally being approved at a meeting of the GCC Executive Committee on 2 February
2007, it is interesting to note that Culture and Sport Glasgow and its trading
arm had already been incorporated as private limited companies six weeks earlier,
on 22 December 2006, with an application for charitable status having been made
the day before.10
The intrusion of capital into the cultural arena is a familiar story throughout the modern period. In his landmark examination of how ruling class cohesiveness is achieved through cultural participation, G. William Domhoff describes how the Bohemian Club was founded in San Francisco in 1872 by artists, writers and musicians who subscribed to the myth of Bohemia, whereby creativity springs from poverty. This privileging of creative talent over financial means was soon displaced by more pragmatic concerns about the daily running of the club and, in the late nineteenth century, wealthy, untalented men were voted into the club, thus securing the future of its activities.11 This paves the way for a detailed consideration of the financial motives informing cultural provision in Glasgow.
The diagram [click for PDF] that begins this text details the interactions between
the invited board members of Culture and Sport Glasgow and some of their external
connections, which are elaborated here:
Bridget McConnell - Executive Director of Culture and Sport Glasgow, and Culture and Sport Glasgow (Trading) CIC
As the manoeuvres outlined above demonstrate, Bridget McConnell was the driving
force behind the creation of Culture and Sport Glasgow. Appointed as Director
of Cultural and Leisure services in 1998, her tenure was blighted by union wrangles
over jobs and by run-ins with the city’s artistic communities about departmental
policies or lack thereof. Promoted to Executive Director with negligible discussion
in August 2005, reports of top council jobs being axed were appearing on the
front page of the Herald by the following November.
As Cultural and Leisure Services complained that an extra £3.5m p.a. was needed to run its museums properly, figures produced by McConnell for the period 1 April 2006 and 26 January 2007 showed her department having a net overspend of £981,000. Yet, while the devolution to CSG was justified to the GCC Executive Committee and the media on financial grounds, McConnell’s
perspective has always been broader, extending to discussions around culture
at a national level.12 In 2000, she served as a member of the focus group set up to implement the National Cultural Strategy13 and – through
CoSLA14 and VOCAL15 – ensured that the work of local
authorities in delivering cultural provision was fully recognised.16 On
the occasion of Culture Minister, Patricia Ferguson, making her recommendations
on the future of the arts in Scotland in January 2006, in response to the findings
of the Cultural Commission, it was said that “arts figures across Scotland are unanimous in one thing: the conclusions of Ferguson’s blueprint, which controversially propose to hand more influence over Scotland’s arts scene to local and central government, were wrought in [Bridget McConnell’s]
image.”17 In order to make her plans a reality, McConnell has secured the help of some of the most influential pro-business minds in Glasgow City Council and beyond.
Controlling the majority of cultural provision in Glasgow, Bridget McConnell
would be expected to have an interest in culture. Some insight into her taste
in art comes from the Christmas present she commissioned for husband Jack in
2004 – an oil painting by Hamish MacDonald of the farmhouse on Arran where Jack grew up. Writing in 1997 – the year Glasgow-based artist Christine Borland was nominated for the Turner Prize, with her contemporary, Douglas Gordon, having won the prestigious prize the previous year – McConnell
confined her appraisal of visual art successes in Scotland to an earlier generation
of painters, mis-spelling John Bellany’s name and merging Peter Howson’s with that of Ken Currie to commend “the
internationally successful Belamey, Campbell and Howie.”18 To
compensate for the gaps in her arts knowledge, McConnell has seconded Dr. Vartan
Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York as an advisor, although
his role seems largely confined to making links with wealthy Scottish émigrés
as part of the CSG development strategy.
One final point of interest before considering the dealings of other CSG representatives
is that McConnell’s brother, Robert McLuckie, is the millionaire owner of property company, Camvo 37. In 2007, retired detective sergeant Alistair Watson – the officer behind the ‘cash for honours’ inquiry that dogged Tony Blair – sparked an investigation into McLuckie’s dealings with the Scottish Executive by writing to the Metropolitan Police. Apparently, five houses and a plot of prime building land, sold to Camvo 37 by the Executive for just two pounds in 2004 on the site of the former Ladysbridge Hospital in Aberdeenshire, had been valued at upwards of £1million. A condition of the sale had been that McLuckie should pay for any subsequent renovation, yet he applied for £120,000 from an Executive quango, Communities Scotland, to help build new homes on the land and another £230,000 of NHS and council cash was allegedly spent renovating the existing houses, despite interventions from Inland Revenue. It was reported that, six months before negotiations began, another McLuckie company, Choices Community Care, had donated more than £2,000 to Jack McConnell’s
election funds.19
Bailie Liz Cameron - Chair of Culture and Sport Glasgow
Passionate about promoting Glasgow abroad, former Lord Provost, Liz Cameron,
travels the world at the city’s expense. This has seen her taking trips to New York, Sri Lanka and Melbourne, the latter of which was undertaken as part of the delegation to secure the 2014 Commonwealth Games for Glasgow. Aside from her work for Glasgow City Council, Cameron works as Vice Chair of Glasgow Cultural Enterprises (the company set up by the council in 1988 to manage various cultural venues, which acts as something of a precedent for CSG) and Glasgow City Marketing Bureau (to be discussed in more detail later). Her connections extend into virtually every aspect of cultural life in Glasgow, while her presence on the planning applications committee ensures that development projects are tailored to fit the city’s
priorities.
Councillor Steven Purcell, - Board Member of Culture and Sport Glasgow
Leader of Glasgow City Council, Purcell has been accused by Christopher Mason
(leader of the council’s LibDems) of being on a crusade to ‘Blairise’ the
council by presiding over changes which saw the traditional committee system
replaced with a policy-making cabinet, or executive, of fifteen councillors in
summer 2006.20 He is avowedly pro-business, and the devolution of cultural and leisure provision follows the creation of several other limited liability partnerships by the council in recent years. In November 2007, Purcell consolidated his approach by offering rent-free premises to new business start-ups in the city. He is a central figure in the 2014 Commonwealth Games, opening the process up to tendering and making Scottish businesses aware of procurement opportunities. Working alongside Liz Cameron, Purcell acts as Chair of Glasgow City Marketing Bureau; he is also a Non-Executive Director of the Scottish Exhibitions and Conference Centre (SECC) and has a non-financial interest in Scottish Enterprise Glasgow.
In response to fears about the vulnerability of charitable companies like
Culture and Sport Glasgow to the 2002 Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act,
Purcell reassured citizens that “a commitment to meeting all the Freedom
of Information requests currently met by Cultural and Leisure Services is guaranteed
as Culture and Sport Glasgow is a publicly owned company and is therefore obliged
to comply with the legislation.”21 And, while the CSG Board congratulated
itself on the Scottish Information Commissioner’s praise for its publication scheme as “one
of best he had ever seen for a publicly-owned company,”22 successive requests for information about various aspects of its operation, have thus far yielded nothing.
Councillor Stephen Curran - Board Member of Culture and Sport Glasgow, and Culture and Sport Glasgow (Trading) CIC
As City Treasurer, Scottish Labour Councillor Stephen Curran has the unenviable
task of running a council with a £1.3 billion debt which pays £90 million in interest every year. Combined with the almost £1m
overspend shown by Cultural and Leisure Services in the 2006-07 financial year,
fiscal prudence invoked in the creation of Culture and Sport Glasgow and its
trading arm will continue to be integral to both new companies.
Councillor Aileen Colleran - Board Member of Culture and Sport Glasgow, and Culture and Sport Glasgow (Trading) CIC
In May 2007, the Council Business Manager became Chief Whip and took up a place
on the board of both CSG companies. She also undertakes remunerated work as Director/Board
Member for two other independent companies set up by the council – Glasgow
Cultural Enterprises and City Building LLP.
Councillor James Dornan - Board Member of Culture and Sport Glasgow
Dornan’s appointment to the Board represents the healing of a rift between
the SNP and CSG. Having initially opposed the devolution of cultural and leisure
provision to the charitable company, SNP leader within Glasgow City Council,
John Mason, announced in May 2007 that the SNP would be represented on the board.
Lord Norman Somerville Macfarlane of Bearsden - Independent Director of Culture and Sport Glasgow
A prominent Scottish industrialist, the octogenarian Conservative peer is Honorary
Life President of both his own packaging company, Macfarlane Group plc, and of
drinks giant, Diageo, one of the biggest alcohol companies in the world. Macfarlane
has held Directorships at Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and Clydesdale Bank and
his cultural links extend to Scottish Ballet, the Scottish National Orchestra,
Third Eye Centre (now the Centre for Contemporary Arts), National Art Collection
Fund and National Galleries of Scotland. As Chair of the Kelvingrove Renovation
Appeal Trust, he was publicly credited with overseeing a massive fundraising
effort to enable Glasgow City Council’s flagship venue to re-open, while
the work of professional fundraiser, Alan Horn, is rarely acknowledged.
In March 2008, in recognition of the synergy he brings to business and the arts, Lord Macfarlane was honoured with a Goodman Award (along with the founders of frieze magazine)
by Arts and Business, the organisation set up during the Thatcher era to promote
partnerships between the two realms. However, all is not rosy in the world of
art and business, with Macfarlane Group suffering from a lower demand in packaging,
at a time of enhanced ecological awareness, to record losses in the four years
up to 2005. When a country’s monetary systems flounder, works of art are known to provide an alternative means of preserving economic capital. Since the American Depression of the 1930s, it has been understood that “exhibiting one’s own art works alongside prestigious international art works, and hence adding to the symbolic value of all the works and to their consequent monetary value, preserved overall capital for the owner by increasing an art work’s present cultural capital for later transformation into economic capital – a
good investment of both time and money.”23 Macfarlane is currently
Chair of the committee to organise the ‘Glasgow Boys’ exhibition due to take place at Kelvingrove in 2010, with a tour to London’s Royal Academy, a foray into programming which will boost the value of his well-publicised private collection of Glasgow Boys’ paintings.
The Rt Hon George Reid - Independent Director of Culture and Sport Glasgow
As Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament under Jack McConnell, from
2003 until May 2007, George Reid oversaw many corporate interventions into the
Scottish Parliament. He was Honorary President of the Scottish Parliament Business
Exchange, which was set up to ‘educate’ parliamentarians about business; while participants are asked to sign a no-lobbying guarantee, dues of £7,500 have tended to confine membership to representatives of trans-national corporations and professional lobbyists. One of its members is Holyrood Communications, a political communications company owned by public consultations advisory firm, Holyrood Consultations, which changed its name to 2Collaborate in 2006. On behalf of its clients the Scottish Executive, 2Collaborate launched a campaign – sponsored
by Microsoft, CapGemini and the Herald newspaper – to advocate
private interventions into public services.
As of May 2008, Reid remains a board member of the Futures Forum24,
a think tank set up by the Scottish Parliament to extend its outreach work into
fields such as the arts and entrepreneurship. Its foundation was, in turn, informed
by the Global Business Network which involves creative futurologists such as
Douglas Coupland, Brian Eno, Bruce Sterling and Francis Fukuyama and “works with Fortune 500 companies from virtually every industry and continent, as well as with many national governments, nonprofits, and foundations” to
help iron out the uncertainties of global business futures.25
Sir Angus Grossart - Independent Director of Culture and Sport Glasgow
Sir Angus Grossart is Chairman and Chief Executive of Noble Grossart, the merchant bank he founded in 1969. Vice Chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland until 2005, Grossart has been linked with fifty business ventures, via Directorships ranging from British Petroleum to Scottish and Newcastle. His links with culture include, amongst others, trusteeships at the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, vice-presidency of Scottish Opera, chairmanship of the Fine Art Society (of which Noble Grossart owns 29%) and directorship of the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Lord Dennis Stevenson of Coddenham - Independent Director of Culture and Sport Glasgow
Like his fellow Independent Directors, Stevenson has multifarious business and
governmental links, engendered through his work for think tanks – including Demos, the Social Market Foundation, SRU, Lexington Communications and Huntsworth PR group – which
lead right to the heart of the New Labour government. His cultural involvement
extends into work for the British Council, a high-profile Directorship of the
Tate Gallery and an appointment as Chancellor of the University of the Arts (the
powerful merger of six art and design schools in London).
Dr. Kenneth Chrystie - Chair of Culture and Sport Glasgow (Trading) CIC
A trained lawyer, Chrystie was Partner of Glasgow-based firm, McClure Naismith, from 1972 to 2007 where he became a specialist in intellectual property law,26 which
is crucial to the much-vaunted creative industries. Retained as a consultant
to McClure’s, he also offers his services to Murgitroyd and Co, Scotland’s
only listed firm of patent attorneys. In July 2007, Chrystie was appointed as
a Member of Strathclyde University Incubator (chaired by Ian Murgitroyd),27 which nurtures nascent companies until they can thrive on their own and raises questions about conflict of interest.
Flora Martin - Board Member of Culture and Sport Glasgow (Trading) CIC
With a background in the military side of the civil service – working at the Fleet Air Arm base near Perth and the Faslane MoD base at Helensburgh – Martin is widely considered to be one of Scotland’s PR gurus. She started her own company, Flora Martin PR, in 1989, with clients largely centred on the alcohol and hotel trades. In 1996, she sold her company to Citigate Communications for in excess of £1 million, staying on to build the turnover up to £5 million, with clients from Asda to Bank of Scotland. Stepping down to become independent in 2004, three years later she became Chair of Platform PR, which works in government relations (i.e. lobbying) and communications strategies, helping their clients to “weather
controversies and cope with crises.”28 Martin will head Platform’s
new Glasgow office.
Edward Crozier - Board Member of Culture and Sport Glasgow (Trading) CIC
Managing Director of Whisky Galore Films Limited, Director of Promenade Productions,
Britannia Productions and several other media-related companies, Crozier has
produced a handful of West End productions. He holds a Directorship at Scottish
Opera and, in-keeping with the sporting element of Culture and Sport Glasgow,
is a member of the Scottish Rugby Union Council, a Grade ‘A’ rugby
referee and past Chairman of the Scottish Rugby Referees Association. He also
currently sits on the judging panel for the Scottish Entrepreneur of the year
awards.
Seamus MacInnes - Board Member of Culture and Sport Glasgow (Trading) CIC
Seumas MacInnes is the entrepreneurial restaurateur behind the expanding Allied Irish Bank-funded chain of Gandolfi restaurants based in the Merchant City area of Glasgow, the hitherto ignored yet historical eastern edge of Glasgow city centre, which has been earmarked for development by GCC. Gandolfi is a member of the Glasgow Restaurateurs Association29 which
represents the main restaurants in the city and forms part of Glasgow’s branding and tourism strategies. MacInnes – who is from Barra in the Western Isles – is
a darling of the Herald newspaper, having served as a food columnist there in 2000-1.
The Bigger Picture
In March 2004,30 Glasgow City Marketing Bureau
(which, it will be remembered, has CSG’s Steven Purcell and Liz Cameron
as its Chair and Vice Chair respectively)31 branded the city with
the slogan ‘Glasgow: Scotland with style’. In his introduction to the brand guide, the Bureau’s Chief Executive, Scott Taylor, writes “Since the launch of the brand, in excess of 535,000 additional tourists have visited the city generating £62 million in local economic benefit and delivering a 2% year-on-year increase in hotel occupancy,” thus consolidating the link between the brand and the city’s
tourism strategy.
Glasgow City Marketing Bureau is part of a consortium – together with Glasgow City Council, Visit Scotland, Scottish Enterprise Glasgow and Glasgow Chamber of Commerce – set up to develop Glasgow’s
tourism strategy.32 As a leading representative of three of the five
partner organisations, Steven Purcell embraces tourism as a key industry within
Glasgow’s economic development strategy and sets the target of attracting one million visitors by 2016 to take the sector into the £1 billion p.a. bracket. The route for achieving this 80% growth in tourism encompasses a major events strategy centred on the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the afore-mentioned Riverside Museum and the Arena at the SECC. Capitalising on the markets for leisure and ‘discretionary business tourism’,
the strategy makes explicit reference to the role of Culture and Sport Glasgow,
the renovated Kelvingrove Museum and the regeneration of Merchant City.
As we have seen, Bridget McConnell is fully conversant with the potential of
culture and sport to increase the revenue of a city through tourism, and her
ambitions for Glasgow, as expressed in CSG’s priorities, closely overlap with those of Glasgow City Marketing Bureau. Emphasis on cultural tourism has led to a ‘festival mentality’, whereby the city’s support is concentrated on attracting temporary tourists rather than supporting Glasgow’s
creative practitioners directly.33 March 2008 saw the Magners Glasgow
International Comedy Festival, Aye Write! – The Bank of Scotland Book Festival – and the 16th French Film Festival. This was followed, in April 2008, by the Glasgow Art Fair and the two-week visual arts fest, Glasgow International. An annual exhibition that quickly became biennial, Glasgow International effectively brands the exhibitions already taking place in the city’s
main institutions and grassroots organisations in a bid to attract visitors en
masse. On 13 May, 2008, Katrina Brown was announced as the new Director
of Glasgow International. Undertaking this role on behalf of the Common Guild – the ‘public’ arm of Glasgow’s predominant commercial gallery, the Modern Institute – this
appointment perfectly consolidates the creeping commercialisation of the art
world in Glasgow.
The second exercise in branding extant visual arts activity within the city is
Trongate 103, which is due to open in 2009. Led by Glasgow City Council’s Department of Development and Regeneration, this will see the redevelopment of a block at the corner of Trongate and King Street – which has long housed eight arts organisations – to
form a unified arts complex.34 Tapping into a familiar, and often disastrous,35 strategy
of culture-led regeneration, this dovetails neatly with the Five Year Action
Plan devised for the regeneration of the Merchant City area at the east of the
city centre. This badly-punctuated document is explicit about the Council’s
intentions to capitalise on the potential of this area, ensuring that derelict
properties are renovated and inhabited. At the time of writing, the cultural
tenants of Trongate 103 have been offered five year leases based on existing
rents, after which time their future is uncertain.
Also consistent with the events-based strategy being perpetuated in the city
is Culture and Sport Glasgow’s involvement in the bid for the 2014 Commonwealth
Games. When McConnell was promoted to Executive Director of Cultural and Leisure
Services, her role grew to encompass sport. Together with husband, Jack, and
GCC/CSG representatives Liz Cameron and Steven Purcell, McConnell has travelled
the world as an ambassador of Glasgow to ensure that the Games come to the city.
Recent reports that she may have been sidelined to protect SNP sensitivities
would seem to be contradicted by the relocation of the sports development team
of CSG to the Commonwealth site.
Critic of neoliberalism, David Harvey, discusses the organisation of urban spectacles,
like shopping centres and the Olympic Games, to “create a positive and high quality image of place…” Serial repetition of successful models, he says, “is
understandable, given the grim history of deindustrialization and restructuring
that left most major cities in the advanced capitalist world with few options
except to compete with each other, mainly as financial, consumption, and entertainment
centres. Imaging a city through the organisation of spectacular urban spaces
became a means to attract capital and people (of the right sort) in a period
(since 1973) of intensified inter-urban competition and urban entrepreneurialism.”36 Indeed, the Commonwealth Games is viewed by the CSG team as a major opportunity for Scottish business. While accounts of Culture and Sport Glasgow have largely ignored its trading arm, the entrepreneurial muscle of Ed Crozier combined with the business-nurturing approach of Kenneth Chrystie will no doubt ensure that the maximum amount of capital is extracted from this event. In parallel with this, the hospitality-based PR work of Flora Martin and the role of influential Merchant City-based restaurateur, Seamus MacInnes, will no doubt contribute to the profitable tourist-led regeneration.
More than the sum of its parts, the creation of Culture and Sport Glasgow represents
the wholesale takeover of culture by business interests. It posits a strategy
for economic regeneration that depends on the whims of elite tourism and its
pace of consumption in a period of economic crisis. It demonstrates an ethos
that is smothering this city and others like it, regarding culture solely in
terms of its use value, stripped of any emancipatory potential. Far from being
considered in terms of the universal creativity to which every citizen has a
right, culture in Glasgow is framed in terms of passive participation and money-making
potential, with the city’s burghers fast accumulating cultural capital in the process. It remains to be seen how this approach will affect the creativity of future generations as Glasgow’s
cultural communities are rendered impoverished and complicit in the new Bohemia.
This research was undertaken as part of an MRes in Social Research in the Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde.
Notes
1. Bridget McConnell, ‘Culture and the New Politics: Reflections from a Small Country.’ In
M. Jacobs (ed.) Creative Futures. Fabian Society, London, pp. 16-22.
2. Anon. ‘O Rose, thou art sick! Outsourcing Glasgow’s
Cultural and Leisure Services.’ Variant, 29, pp. 30-1.
3. This point refers to Labour’s policy document Scotland’s Future:
Report of the Scottish Policy Forum which opposes the creation of charities
for outsourcing services, a policy inserted at the insistence of Unison states: ‘We will look at ways to ensure the legitimate incentives that apply to charities are not used as vehicles for outsourcing by local authorities.’ See Gerry Braiden, ‘Council’s proposal to hand over museums ‘against party policy’.’ The
Herald. 2 March, 2007, p.2.
4. Paul Hutcheon, ‘Executive queries legality of new culture trust: Glasgow council’s
bid to hand over libraries and museums hits legal snag.’ The
Sunday Herald. 4 February, 2007, p. 28.
5. John McCann, ‘Glasgow museums trust faces Euro probe: Investigation
over claims charity is operating illegally.’ Evening
Times. 3 May, 2007, p. 2.
6. Honor Mahony, ‘Free marketers in top commission posts.’ EU
Observer,
13 August 2004.
7. Gerry Braiden, ‘Commissioner clears city over culture and sport trust
claims.’ The
Herald. 30 August, 2007, p. 6. http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.1651843.0.0.php
8. Bridget McConnell in C. Landry (ed) Glasgow: The People,
The Place, The Potential. Glasgow’s Cultural Strategy., 2006. http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/YourCouncil/PolicyPlanning_Strategy/ServiceDepartments/CultureandSportGlasgow/
9. M. McLaughlin, ‘Museum faces delays as costs spiral to £74m.’ The
Scotsman. 13 June, 2007, p. 21.
10. Culture and Sport Glasgow Articles of Association and Certificate of Incorporation of a Private Limited Company (Company No. 313851) 22 December 2006 and letter from Burness to OSCR 21 December 2006.
11. G.William Domhoff, The Bohemian Gove and Other Retreats:
A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness. Harper & Row, New York, 1974.
pp. 52-54.
12. It will be remembered that her husband, Jack McConnell, First Minister of
Scotland November 2001-May 2007, had made the development of devolved powers
for culture a priority. This was reflected in his 2003 St Andrew’s Day speech in which he said, ‘I believe we can now make the development of our creative drive, our imagination, the next major enterprise for our society. Arts for all can be a reality, a democratic right, and an achievement of the early 21st Century.’ See http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/News-Extras/176
13. On 18 December 2002, in her capacity as Chair of VOCAL, Bridget McConnell
wrote to the group charged with implementation of the Scottish Executive’s
National Cultural Strategy to propose a national review of local government cultural
and leisure services. See minutes of Joint Implementation Group meeting 14 January
2003, item 4.6. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/About/FOI/19260/jointgroup.
This intervention led to her being copied into documents collected by the subsequent
Cultural Commission (a visit to the Cultural Commission archive held in Stirling
revealed that the marginalia of documents included the note ‘Copies to Frank
[McAveety], James [Boyle], Bridget).
14. Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. McConnell served as Link Arts Adviser (1997-2001) and Joint Chair of the CoSLA/VOCAL Culture Strategy Task Group (2005).
15. The Voice of Chief Officers of Culture, Leisure and Community Services in Scotland.
16. See Scottish Executive/COSLA Implementation of the
National Cultural Strategy: Guidance for Local Authorities, March 2003.
17. See Eddie Barnes and William Lyons, ‘Are our artists being strung along?’ Scotland
on Sunday. 22 January, 2006. p. 13. In the same article, it was claimed
that McConnell had always viewed the Scottish Arts Council as an impediment to
her plans of offering ‘access to excellence’, which may have led to its demise as a result of the Cultural Commission process. Elsewhere, it was reported that a memo was sent from civil servants to the Executive in advance of the Cultural Commission, seriously undermining the efficacy of the Scottish Arts Council, and reported a feud between Bridget McConnell and James Boyle. See Paul Hutcheon, ‘Revealed: civil servants’ attack
on arts council: Memo sparks fears of secret agenda.’ The
Sunday Herald. 10 April, 2005. p. 10.
18. Bridget McConnell, ‘Culture and the New Politics: Reflections from a Small Country.’ op.
cit. p. 17.
19. Paul Gilbride, ‘McConnell’s relative faces probe into £2
property deal’ The
Express, 26 March 2007, p.15.
20. Stephen Stewart, ‘Chaos as council stopped by sit-in protest: Anger
over cabinet system.’ The
Herald. 30 June, 2006. p. 9.
21. Brian Currie, ‘No hiding place for secrets in our new city leisure
trusts: Freedom of Information pledge by Purcell.’ Evening
Times. 8 March, 2007, p. 7.
22. Culture and Sport Glasgow. Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors, 27 June, 2007. Note 7(4). See http://www.csglasgow.org/aboutus/meetings_minutes/
23. Michael Grenfell and Cheryl Hardy, Art Rules: Pierre
Bourdieu and the Visual Arts. Berg, Oxford, 2007. p. 97.
24. http://www.scotlandfutureforum.org/sff/people.asp
25. http://www.gbn.com/
26. Kenneth Chrystie is a founder member of The Intellectual Property Lawyers Organisation (TIPLO) based in London.
27. http://www.ukbi.co.uk/index.asp?PID=542
28. Platform PR website http://www.platformpr.co.uk/TrackRecord.aspx
29. http://www.bestglasgowrestaurants.com/index.php?page=restaurants&id=86&start=0
30. There seems to be some confusion about dates in the literature. The brand
guide claims that GCMB launched the brand in March 2004 while its Chief Executive,
Scott Taylor, dates the inception of the bureau to April 2005. See Glasgow
City Marketing Bureau, Glasgow: Scotland with style: The City Brand. September, 2007. http://www.seeglasgow.com/glasgow-the-brand
31. According to Steven Purcell’s introduction to the brand guide, ‘The
Bureau has a team of 43 people engaged in branding and public relations; conference,
meetings and incentive sales; event creation, management and marketing; conference
and event accommodation bookings; ICT and finance and administration.’
32. Glasgow City Marketing Bureau, Glasgow’s Tourism Strategy to 2016,
2007. This strategy is predicated on the understanding that ‘tourism is the fastest-growing global economic sector in terms of foreign exchange earnings and job creation’ (p. 7). In considering the policy context for the strategy, it is noted that it ‘takes advantage of the favourable national policy environment’ (p.
4).
33. One of the few roles of the former CLS relinquished by CSG was that of direct grant-giving powers.
34. See http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/Residents/ArtsDevelopment/Newsletter/visualart.htm
35. In Dublin, regeneration of the Temple Bar area led to hiked rents which
precluded its former cultural tenants; the same pattern has been seen in the
Shoreditch area of London, notably through the spectacular demise of the Lux
Centre. Benedict Seymour, ‘The Last Picture Show’, Mute, 22,
December 2001 documents the rent support originally offered to the Lux by the
British Film Institute (themselves renting the building from Glasshouse developers)
which was reneged upon when the BFI underwent a funding squeeze, and concludes: ‘With the forced exodus from New Labour’s bathetic grands projets already begun, the challenge now is to discover a ‘third way’ between the unaccountable bureaucracy that consumed the Lux and the culture pimping that sustains the ICA. If anything good comes out of the eclipse of the Lux it will involve creating a better, viable and contemporary form of the autonomy sought by the original cooperatives a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.’ See http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Last-Picture-Show
36. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell, Oxford, 1980, p. 92.
back
to top
_________________________________________________
Craven New World
Tom Jennings
Documenting attacks on civil freedoms in Britain the film
Taking Liberties (2007) was made for cinema because such a “one-sided” (read
honest) appraisal of the Blair regime’s record was thought unlikely to survive
the requirements of “balance” (read censorship) on television.1
Supported by Fahrenheit 9/11’s producers, Taking Liberties apes
Michael Moore’s populist combo of comic buffoonery and acid commentary and romps
through New Labour’s neurotic erosion of rights to privacy, protest and
freedom of speech, its tacit embrace of imprisonment without trial, unaccountable
extradition and torture. Recounting the personal experiences of a swathe of victims,
from peace protesters to those persecuted in the War on Terror, a convincing
picture of escalating totalitarianism is then sketched against a background of
animated vignettes showing centuries’ worth of legal ‘checks and balances’ on
state power. This is all set to a jaunty Britpop soundtrack. Unfortunately, the
potential of mocking the powerful is undermined by a tone veering from flippant
to hysterical, before being ultimately ruined by dissolving into overstatements
of incipient Nazi-ness among parliamentary leaders and an astounding cluelessness
about the prospects of influencing them.2
Worse; the film’s broad-brush, knee-jerk jingoism cripples any political understanding of past or present. Ancient constitutional antecedents are all very well for patronising children with, but the routine reality of peremptory injustice in recent decades has shaped the patterns of close interference now being ratcheted up: from Northern Ireland policy, racist policing and the internment of immigrants; to Tory anti-union and criminal justice legislation and the penalisation of ‘antisocial’ behaviour.
Kowtowing to globalising capitalism necessitates welfare suffering, while lower-class
community, collectivity and autonomy is hammered to shortcircuit resistance.
But Taking
Liberties ignores the structural and economic frameworks within which governments
discipline their subjects, let alone how they achieve apparent consent for it.
Instead we’re asked to sympathise with rich US bankers suspected of corporate fraud – after all, ‘we’re all in this together’, a supposedly ‘freedom-loving’ people.
This lack of analysis leaves the film wallowing in middle-class moral superiority
and outrage, urging self-righteous symbolic protest. Is this more a recipe for
apathy than active opposition?
The UK government legitimises the increasing regulation of the populace in terms of administrative efficiency rather than historical precedence or legal niceties. Even a cursory questioning sees the pragmatic justifications for the National Identity Register and attendant technologies collapse like a house of (identity) cards, yet the debate stubbornly clings to nationalist sentiment.3 The latest edition of Mute magazine
helps make the stakes clearer. As Josephine Berry Slater points out: “The basic survival of the poor, undocumented or ‘illegalised’ often depends on the ability to operate [in a] ... grey zone of anonymity [which] is constantly squeezed in the interests of population management, border enforcement, welfare clamp-downs, technocratic convenience and, of course, the economy”.4 In fact, precisely those realms of experience which Taking
Liberties ignores.
Meanwhile, mainstream political discourse brooks no argument that only the free
movement of capital allows society to survive and prosper, thanks to the expert,
rational-market disposition of resources. But accelerating human and environmental
degradation resulting from the application of neoliberal ideology generates inevitable
crises, the intransigence of which is disavowed when they are treated merely
as management conundrums. Thus the incipient panopticon society obsessively maximises
data collection, in the pretence that mass bureaucratisation allows the competent
administration of otherwise insolvable problems. In the resulting climate of
increasingly routinised emergencies and attendant moral panics, and the overall
prospect of multiple impending catastrophes, everyone excluded from polite society
can be blamed and targeted while those fortunate enough to temporarily reap the
dubious benefits of consumerism look the other way and defend ‘civilisation’.5 With
each burning issue merely grist to media headline-mills, ordinary current affairs
paradigms plainly lack the imagination to make sense of such extraordinary circumstances.
Conversely, the mysteries of the future are science-fiction’s stock-in-trade,
and so what follows seeks signs of hope in recently screened dystopian visions
that reflect prevailing trends in biopolitical divide and rule.6
Unpleasantville
The Data Protection Act supposedly safeguards against abuse by making transparent
what information, about us, private and state agencies collect. In recognition
of the epidemic of CCTV systems across the UK (now the internal surveillance
capital of the world) its scope was widened in 1998 to include visual imaging.
Crime prevention budgets are increasingly syphoned off into an expanding surveillance
manufacturing industry’s profits, despite failing to have any significant impact in the reduction of offences. Meanwhile, the sinister centrality of surveillance technology in New Labour’s plans for an integrated database and ID card seems threatened only by the bungling of IT entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. But, apart from the usual suspects, the wider British public seem remarkably acquiescent to intrusion. So, is the public really bewitched by anti-social crime and terror hype, hypnotised by spectacular media, wrong-footed by seductive virtuality, and domesticated by reality TV? Given that no less a figure than the government’s Information Commissioner Richard Thomas deems us to have already “sleepwalked” into dystopia, it seems pertinent to ask – riffing on Dr Strangelove – whether we have ‘learned to stop worrying and love Big Brother’.7
Media art collective Ambient TV share the concern, and decided to extend their Spy
School (2002) dramatisations of hitherto hidden assemblages of data held
on citizens into a “science-fiction fairytale” patchwork comprised of visual material plucked from this matrix, with a storyline fitting the philosophical framework used to justify and regulate official omniscience. The result is Manu Luksch’s
surprisingly beguiling Faceless (2007) – helped in part by Ballet Boyz choreography, Mukul Patel’s haunting soundtrack and Tilda Swinton’s austere voiceover – which
emphasises the DPA stricture that individuals deemed uninteresting have their
features obliterated, with those remaining targeted for action.8 The tragic protagonist (necessarily played by Luksch herself) lacks reflexivity or emotion beyond the narcotising flow of interaction with the ubiquitous New Machine. Then, a sudden discovery: she has a face! In her job as data monitor this signifies a disturbance to the status
quo, destined to be corrected in the interests of stability and safety. But with personal identity come fragments of memory and fantasy, prompting awareness of possible pasts and futures along with uncertainty and fear. Exploiting newly incipient agency, her quest to evade oblivion is enlivened by encounters with mysterious Spectral Children, whose joyful unpredictability confounds the control apparatus. Sadly, they give disastrous advice to trust her instincts, but with no opportunity to develop such skills she soon succumbs to re-zombification.
This apparently conclusive fatalism is misleading, however, since the pivotal
social engineering here occurs in reprogramming centres which brainwash people
into numb passivity – not the global data-web itself (policed for deviation as administrative corollary). But how these function – or not, permitting escape – is withheld, thereby disabling viewers’ suspension of disbelief. Fittingly, the logistical nightmare of planning a coherent storyboard against the vagaries of CCTV operators complying with legislation (exposing the fiction of state-dispensed ‘rights’)
mirrors the impossibility of sketching dystopian citizens with subjectivities
echoing digital representations. The fairytale fails precisely because the principles
behind Faceless were too rigorous, taking at ‘face value’ the viewpoint of power. The government’s fantasy of comprehensive knowledge of the population likewise makes scant human sense, whereas its implacable thirst for control will be far more pragmatically baleful. The film’s major artistic weakness therefore signals crucial (though unacknowledged) political potential. As its makers conclude: “The panopticon is not complete, yet. Regardless, could its one-way gaze ever assure an enabling conception of security?” Clearly, neither that nor a secure ability to conceive – and although beyond this film’s
ambition, the relationships between the excluded and included (Spectral Children,
and adults, and the erstwhile organic robots) would be key to dismantling the
rigid walls of regimented otherness.
Apocalypse Soon
Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men (2006) paints a contrasting
but equally ominous picture of a near future where dystopian ghosts in machines
are exorcised by default – with global environmental collapse, mass starvation and a global pandemic leaving humanity infertile. Nevertheless, Bulldog Britain soldiers on, demonising tidal waves of illegal immigrants escaping societal meltdown elsewhere, its increasingly totalitarian government trumping the public’s despair at impending extinction with ‘homeland security’ repression while benevolently distributing ‘Quietus’ self-euthanasia kits for those not succumbing to day-of-judgement fundamentalisms. A rag-tag resistance dodges the rampant militarised police around an exceedingly grubby and battered London in which death squads, random bombings and cages full of foreigners on their way to incarceration litter rubbish-filled streets. Woken from drunken disillusionment by an old flame’s quest, Clive Owen’s civil servant, Theo, then flip-flops around saving the world’s only pregnant woman – fetching up in Bexhill-on-Sea dressed as monstrous concentration camp – their
flight captured in superb action sequences with bravura handheld single-takes,
modulated with poignant moments of stillness amidst the bloodbath as the unexpected
sight and sound of infancy resurrect temporary empathy.
However, the narrative is less daring than the award-winning cinematography and set design, which achieve an effectively estranged familiarity throughout. Whereas a previous UK-set dystopia V
For Vendetta scuppered every ounce of political nous in its literary source,9 crime
writer P.D. James’ novel here had little anyway. So the rainbow coalition of urban guerilla ‘Fishes’ (a symbol used by clandestine early Christians, signposting the messianic underbelly of moral politics) opposes the fascist state only by demanding human rights for refugees. Yet these former anti-war, civil rights and green activists launch armed insurrection! The film’s naff nativity fable subsequently crumbles into faith in scientific progress (the mythical ‘Human Project’ run by ‘the best brains in the world’ on the good ship ‘Tomorrow’), as, in an echo of John Wyndham or J.G. Ballard’s bleakly bilious postwar sci-fi critiques of bourgeois English anomie, Cuarón twists James’ high-church, high-Tory spiritual self-flagellation. The elites barricade themselves in to brazen out armageddon while Theo’s
death, delivering (Black refugee) madonna and (female) child to sanctuary, finesses
the conclusion that middle-class heroism (physical or philosophical) offers no
solution.
Cuaron’s first feature, Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), cleverly seasoned its road-trip sex tragicomedy with a voiceover insistently detailing the contemporaneous Mexican socio-economic convulsions that the upper-class protagonists remained oblivious to. Children
of Men’s more starkly visual disjunction contrasts the immediacy of
the suffering excludeds with the incapacity of the comfortable to recognise the
culpability of their enlightened positions in the mess surrounding them. Slavoj
Zizek interprets this philosophical infertility as the ideological despair of
late capitalism, with no sense of history or agency possible in a liberal-democratic
worldview which actively fosters disaster while precluding political renewal.10 Nevertheless
the film’s lack of engagement with the dispossessed themselves rather works against Zizek’s conclusion – citing the recurrent motif of crossing water – that overcoming the present impasse requires an acceptance of rootlessness, cutting emotive ties just as the migrants have done with their physical ones. After all, a baptism into fresh solidarity chosen by cosmopolitan intellectuals – already arguable as useful strategy – scarcely
compares to the nourishment of collective memory amid desperate necessity.
Mission Implausible
The conspiracy thriller The Last Enemy, which occupied five primetime Sunday
night slots on BBC1 in February-March 2008, extrapolates more narrowly in projecting
only several years hence, albeit with decisive technological advances considerably
enhancing identity-paranoia. Returning to terror-struck Britain for his twin’s funeral after working abroad, renowned mathematician Stephen (Benedict Cumberbatch) witnesses first-hand the downside of fully integrated monitoring with pre-emptive policing. Biometric ID cards are scanned in all mundane movements or transactions, and any anomaly automatically prompts armed intervention; card use being prohibited forthwith. Recruited by the Home Office’s
latest PR drive for computerised security, he tests the new system to discover
the fate of his NGO sibling supposedly killed helping Afghan refugees afflicted
with a mystery illness. Unwittingly opening sundry cans of political, corporate,
diplomatic, and academic science worms, Stephen becomes a target of officialdom.
With informal subsistence all but impossible, he falls in with an unlikely band
of aid-workers, illegal immigrants, renegade intelligence officers ... and his
brother, now also underground having faked his own death.
With timely scenario and entertainingly helter-skeleter pacing making for effective
hokum – despite unconvincing personal ties among excessively narcissistic characters – the
drama is infinitely less subversive than claimed.11 At least, though,
the refugees and migrants are given independent human texture, agency and social
milieux, even while still depending on salvation by criminalised professionals
and professional criminals – fake IDs abound, naturally, but welfare and
charity staff only able to fulfil their remits by acting illegally is both original
and suggestive. And while the national and international dimensions of skullduggery
and cynicism also ring true, in classic parapolitical vein, they deflect attention
from the nitty gritty of life for the majority in favour of the privileged significance
of shallow heroes and villains acting outside of the deep structuring logics
of institutions. As in Children
of Men, we only get glimpses of the indigenous excluded, kept safely at
arms length from all other social fractions – here a mere handful of hopeless
homeless abjectly selling their blood and robbing each other for peanuts in a
disappointing conservative echo of ASBO rhetoric.
Even more disastrously for present relevance, problems associated with the technology
are restricted to its misuse – partly through function-creep, but mainly by corrupt careerists furthering agendas unerringly encouraged by business amoralism. In itself this is doubtless accurate, but New Labour’s
shambolic PFI roll-outs also prove the utter incapacity of the systems to deliver
on processing or fit-for-purpose promises. The
Last Enemy’s effortlessly smooth operation of Total Information Awareness is, however, taken for granted. Even the supremely sinister nanotech radio-frequency tags, secretly injected into bloodstreams, appear neutral in principle – apart from their racially-specific, medical side-effects. The latter contrivance simultaneously kills both the narrative’s
victims and its pretensions to sharp critique of the surveillance state. Tolerably
workable, hard-, soft-, and live-ware is, after all, the crux of government spin.
But their likelihood is contradicted by all the available evidence12 – making stolen identity a risk; victimised identity a probability; and mistaken identity, via faulty data and erroneous interpretation, a commonplace. Yet countless personally disastrous bungles and stitch-ups – which ordinary folk would have least chance of sorting – would
inevitably entail disproportionately lower-class effects, which are rendered
irrelevant and invisible here compared to those of noble philanthropists selflessly
serving helpless clients.
Minority Retort
More promisingly, the marginalised and repressed return with a vengeance in Exodus, written and directed by Penny Woolcock and screened by Channel 4 in November 2007. The film attenuates the Old Testament saga down to a parochial parable set in Margate with local non-actors cast in all but a few leading roles,13 for
many of whom issues of migration and exclusion were immediate personal concerns.
In this new testament, charismatic mayor Pharoah Mann (Bernard Hill with suitably
ridiculous barnet) has turned a formerly depressed borough – re-christened the Promised Land – into something of a BNP fantasy of a municipal fiefdom, where the respectable WASP majority have expelled from their midst a veritable anti-shopping list of undesirables. So members of ethnic minorities, asylum seekers and immigrants, homosexuals, the jobless and feckless, drunks, junkies, psychiatric cases and petty criminals have all been dumped in Dreamland – a shanty settlement nestling in the ruins of a funfair on the outskirts – and
abandoned to fend for themselves. Of course, someone still has to undertake the
menial and shit-work, but scrupulous surveillance and ruthless movement restrictions
ensure that the lower ranks, minutely checked-in and out, barely subsist while
being unable to extricate themselves from apartheid imprisonment.
When Pharoah’s adoptive son Moses turns eighteen, he learns from liberal-minded Mrs Mann that his real Romany mother gave him up at birth hoping he might thrive among history’s favoured. He resolves to search her out, having long been hurt by the condescending treatment given the family maid (another maternal substitute), but immediately witnesses the arbitrary brutal dehumanisation perpetrated by the ‘Pest Control’ police in Dreamland’s nightmare. He feels compelled to intervene violently and becomes a fugitive there, meeting his family distaff and marrying into the riff-raff. Increasingly appreciative of the unbelievably embattled community’s fortitude, spirit and potential, his tentative suggestions of unity go largely derided until his father-in-law, a gentle ghetto pedagogue, is murdered while protecting a pupil. Kickstarting feverish activity with the defiant affirmative gesture of a gigantic funeral pyre, escalating organisation and public confrontations demanding deliverance develop into outright guerilla sabotage, taking advantage of sophisticated knowhow honed individually in bonded servitude and now wielded for collective purpose. Modern biological, chemical and electronic versions of old Egypt’s plagues (thus translating divine intervention from hegemonic theological support into the practical weaponry of the weak – a
brave and potent, if troubling, rhetorical manoeuvre in the present conjuncture)
wreak mortal havoc in the Promised Land, and finally, the defeated fuhrer caves
in and strikes down the gates. The longed-for exodus, however, heralds hand-to-hand
slaughter on the beach ...
There’s no doubting the integrity of Woolcock’s commitment, giving voice and expression to society’s
outcasts and fashioning working practices which flout routine mainstream pretensions
and hierarchies so as to respect, celebrate and empower hidden and suppressed
storytelling.14 But mortal wounds to this narrative’s body-politic are inflicted by its construction and focus – with a quite unwarranted mirroring of Pharoah and Moses and their respective spheres of influence. Dominated by high-bourgeois oedipal dynamics, the latter’s sullen adolescent demeanour hamstrings any convincing capacity to engage or energise others, and (presumably unintentionally) the uprising ends up resembling a miserable vanguardist farce with scant sign of genuine grass-roots engines. Rather than cod-psychohistory, the mythos of prophecy would surely better emerge from the fine-grain of the internal conflicts and specific material circumstances of the Dreamlanders – where the awakening sense of mission fed on their own cultural fecundity rather than a resentful leader’s
personality deficiencies which yield predictably reactionary results. Despite
its welcome attention to processes transforming suffering into struggle, then,
the admittedly well-shot Exodus is sunk right from botched conception – with
clunky structure and contrived script marooning some decent individual performances
(especially from the amateurs) which appear to belong in completely separate
dramatic universes.15
Alienated: Resurrection
Worlds past, present and future eerily co-exist in a specific parallel universe in Polly
II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands (2006), Anja Kirschner’s marvellous carnivalesque allegory of an underground underwater London after global warming leads to breached tidal barriers. The bibles drawn on here are of impeccable rabble-rousing provenance: John Gay’s Beggar’s
Opera (plus its lesser-known sequel Polly) whose staging was deconstructed in The
Threepenny Opera. The project,
“part satirical sci-fi, part soap opera and Brechtian ‘Lehrstueck’ – portrays the lives of pirates and outcasts surviving in the flooded ruins of East London, a lawless zone set to become the latest in luxury waterside living according to government plans and venturing developers’ wet dreams. The film imagines a future insurrection coloured by the legacy of dispossessed peasants, political radicals, whores, sailors ... and former slaves who once inhabited East London and fought a daily battle against their subjection to poverty, displacement and judicial terror”.16
The story’s thrust follows perceptive questioning by the narrator of a welter
of contradictory discourses competing to structure her understanding of, and
hence action within, the mayhem falteringly presided over by the feudal elite.
Engaging in bitter struggle to survive, Polly and her cohorts adopt stances which
mobilise them in various barely official or frankly criminal enterprises undermining
the monopolisation of resources by vested interests. With traditional certainties
turned upside down, the disoriented and impoverished populace is fractured by
any number of crippling hostilities and rivalries but liable to see through the
morass in the difficult forging of common cause.
The resonance of an essentially pre-proletarian Polly II with prospects in contemporary neoliberal urban blight (euphemised as renewal, gentrification or sterilisation, depending on outlook) is tempered considerably by the iron grip of spatial mastery now pursued by the state and its corporate speculator clientele in regulating an inconvenient lower-class presence.17 Moreover,
the unfolding strategy to cybernetically discipline the lifeworlds of previously
upwardly-mobile strata is acompanied by the proletarianisation of precarious
informational sectors of the middle classes, at the same time as state welfare
functions are being downsized, privatised and degraded. Of course, the explicit
logic and efficacy of these tactics are themselves supremely doubtful. In addition,
the mass squeezing of all manner of petty-bourgeois, lumpen and working-class
fractions into collective exclusion, with diverse degrees and levels of psychic
and economic desperation, is unlikely to be affordable and manageable: either
by the carceral containment of plantation slavery (e.g. in the US and China;
possibly coming soon to Britain) or by neo-Stalinist social democracy (Latin
America, South Africa). And that’s before considering the ravages of ecological disaster that international capital is learning to reckon into its insane calculations. But blueprints weren’t in any case Kirschner’s
intention:
“To some extent the plot of Polly II was based on actual events
from the 18th century [...]. But I’m not depicting or referencing these moments so they can be measured against so many subsequent defeats or presented as easily digestible celebrations of ‘heritage’ or downright nostalgia (and I have little sympathy for re-enactments on that level); rather, I use them because they penetrate the present like so many callings and loopholes whose explosive potential still speaks to us”.18
Such mobile constellations of class, culture, power and practical capacity have characterised previous cycles of grass-roots responses to tectonic shifts in economic exploitation and instrumental governmentality, as revealed in many recent radical histories.19 Even
within the activities of the industrial proletariat as understood in more familiar
Marxist terms, class composition, conciousness and praxis have been thoroughly
and complexly woven through community and cultural biography in ways that elude
the programmatic socialist or Leninist grasp. Paul Mason’s inspirational book ‘Live Working Or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global’ (Vintage, 2008) indicates how patterns of solidarity, refusal, mutual aid and autonomy have persisted across otherwise alien centuries. Fresh modes of orientation to the state’s New Public Management are also emerging within structurally-adjusted societies in First, Second and Third Worlds – as discussed, for example, in Michael Neocosmos’ innovative
South African analysis which highlights the magnificent Durban shackdwellers
movement Abahlali baseMjondolo.20 And, despite the vicious megalomania
of New Labour and the Tories’ common ground – competing to punish anyone and everyone on suspicion of anything and everything – it
would seem the height of arrogance to assume some unique divergence from these
epochal trends in this benighted land ...
... Or perhaps not arrogance, so much as escapism – and that’s the purpose of juxtaposing documentary realism and frivolous futurist entertainment here. The contemporary cultural artefacts examined work hardest of all to maintain distinctions between those whose survival is most imminently threatened and the comfort zones of aspirational experience – just when the economic and structural conditions which underwrote the flight from drudgery for the twentieth century’s new middle-classes unravel before our eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the surprise discovery by TV bosses of defensive, backward-looking ignorance among the depressed, so-called ‘indigenous white working class’. BBC 2’s White season
and Channel 4’s Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth21 legitimise
the racism and antagonism found as intelligible responses to economic restructuring,
while new migrants attempt to forge a future from starvation wages, casual hostility
and official contempt. However, great care is taken for the professional media
tourists to avoid the countless people and places making horizontal links, conducting
joint operations, productive relationships, cultural exchanges and social interactions
at the base. Thus a view of society is reproduced as no more than interlocking
networks of exclusion zones, where the only negotiation between dimensions of
difference – whether biological, social or economic – occurs on the state’s terms at its own designated, tightly-policed sites, carried out by the market’s
credentialled experts. In which case, converging material situations, interests,
expressions and struggles among foreigners, natives, underclasses and the new
nearly-destitute simply disappear from view.
Writer Margaret Atwood called recently for a re-assessment of the respective merits of Brave
New World and 1984, seeing a need to measure the travails of consumer
capitalism and globalisation against Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s contrasting
anti-utopias.22 Of course the question is misplaced, since neither
hangover from Victorian middle-class moral conservatism could predict how the
tortured and/or noble proles would fare in the New World Orders of their time.
So these authors’ best efforts to twist the enlightened (or not) liberal
consciences of their milieux, thereby masquerading as ordinary folk, hardly succeed
even in articulating the presence of the bulk of humanity whose quite different
agendas and actions would be decisive. Irrespective of any of their strengths, Taking
Liberties and the other fictions cited here (with the exception of Polly
II) fail for comparable reasons – whereas tackling themes of unholy unruly otherness directly, honestly and empathetically is central, as it happens, to the most useful prognostications of sci-fi’s
genuinely critical dystopias.23 Finally, therefore, and to reverse
the point – as well as travestying Giorgio Agamben’s famous notion of ‘Homo sacer’,
the abject human object of pity24: Is it instead the achievement of Faceless to suggest that an empty, static, sterile existence is actually what is planned for the fortunate included?
Notes
1. Perhaps symptomatic of writer-director Chris Atkins’ self-important
naivete. Taking
Liberties was screened on More 4 on May 6th, 2008.
2. To Atkins: “Our only hope is that Brown is desperate to claw back some of the popularity that Blair has lost, so if it becomes a big political issue then he might turn back the authoritarian tide to try and win votes” (Socialist
Review); and “If several thousand people go to mass lone demos the Metropolitan Police will beg Gordon Brown to repeal the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act” (www.eyeforfilm.co.uk).
3. Journalist Henry Porter’s assiduous reporting of the ID card plans regrettably fits this template, e.g. in: ‘Blair Laid Bare: the article that may get you arrested’, The
Independent, 29th June 2006. The No2ID campaign’s otherwise excellent coverage flirts too with civil liberties particularism (but see Martin Twomey, ‘State of Denial’,
2007, www.metamute.org/en/State-of-Denial);
whereas the Anarchist Federation widen the argument decisively towards class-consciousness – in, for example, ‘The Panopticon Society’,
at http://libcom.org – regular updates also
appearing in the Resistance bulletin (www.afed.org.uk/res/index.html).
Recourse to the imagined community of nation is a persistent problem with Michael
Moore’s work too – see, on Fahrenheit
9/11 (2004), my ‘Extracting the Michael’, Variant 21,
September 2004; and on Sicko (2007), ‘Body Politics’, Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 2, February 2008 (www.starandshadow.org.uk).
4. ‘Editorial’, Mute magazine, Vol. 2, No. 7, 2008: ‘Show Invisibles? Migration, Data Work’ (www.metamute.org). Other excellent contributions discuss aspects of the relationships between surveillance and subjection to state control, rights and visibility, informality, legality and the enforcement of work discipline, among various segments of populations here and abroad.
5. These issues are tackled with great intelligence in Adam Curtis’ groundbreaking
BBC 2 documentary series, The
Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007); see my critique in ‘Paradise Mislaid’, Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 10, May 2007 (www.starandshadow.org.uk).
6. Space here prohibits consideration of otherwise relevant US titles such as A
Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, 2006; a Slackers’ version
of the Philip K. Dick novel), Look (dir. Adam Rifkin, 2007; pretending to use
CCTV footage), and Southland
Tales (2007, dir. Richard Kelly; previously renowned for Donnie Darko). However for discussions of Strange Days (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) and Fight
Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999), among others, see my ‘Rose Coloured Spectacles’, Variant, 27, 2006). For comprehensive popular-literary studies of utopian and science fiction subgenres, see: Tom Moylan, Scraps
of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, Westview Press,
2000; Raffaella Baccolini & Tom Moylan (eds), Dark
Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Routledge, 2003; and Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies
of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso, 2005.
7. One of the themes of my ‘Closed Circuit Tunnel Vision’, Variant, 29, 2007;
discussing Andrea Arnold’s Glasgow-set CCTV suspense drama Red
Road (2006). See also, for example, Twomey, note 3; and Henry Porter, ‘Blair’s Big Brother Legacy’, Vanity
Fair, July 2006.
8. Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel’s ‘Faceless:
Chasing the Data Shadow’, Variant, 31, 2008, tells the fascinating story of its production (see also www.ambienttv.net).
9. Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel; the film produced by The
Matrix series’ Andy & Larry Wachowski and directed by James McTeague (2005) – see my review, ‘V Signs and Simulations’, Freedom, 67, No. 7, April 2006 (at www.starandshadow.org.uk).
10. Slavoj Zizek, 2007, www.childrenofmen.net/slavoj.html (video clip at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE). Extras on the Children
Of Men DVD (Universal Pictures, 2007) include a ‘Possibility of Hope’ featurette with contributions from Fabrizio Eva, John Gray, Naomi Klein, James Lovelock, Saskia Sassen, Tzvetan Todorov and Zizek, as well as a separate ‘Comments by Slavoj Zizek’.
11. See, for example: www.bbc.co.uk/drama/lastenemy; Benji Wilson, The
Telegraph, 16th February 2008; Peter Tatchell, The
Guardian, 3rd March 2008; James Rampton, ‘Caught Off Camera’, The
Scotsman, 18th February 2008. Writer Peter Berry’s major headache in sustaining the sci-fi element was keeping ahead of the government’s actual surveillance intentions – a
problem also noted by Judge
Dredd comic writer Alan Grant (Sunday
Herald, 27th January 2008).
12. Meanwhile the IT providers whose promotional optimism helped translate these
particular authoritarian wet-dreams into policy are now jumping ship as the bubble
threatens to burst – see, for example, the Corporate Watch report ‘Corporate Identity’ (2006,
and subsequent updates at www.corporatewatch.org);
and, more recently, BAe and Accenture pulling out of ID card systems tendering
(after the latter’s boss moved to the Identity & Passport Service),
leaving only more shamelessly incompetent profiteers still in the frame (e.g.
reported in February this year at www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39169811,00.htm).
13. In addition to this film, corporate art commissioners Artangel’s Margate
Exodus 2006 blockbuster (see www.themargateexodus.org.uk)
included Wendy Ewald’s Towards
A Promised Land photographic project, with banners showing children relocated to the area from near and far due to war, poverty, repression or family crisis; a Plague
Songs music CD with performances by fashionable (so I’m told) artistes Scott Walker, Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, Cody Chesnutt, Martyn Jaques, Imogen Heap, Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt; the ‘Exodus Day’ itself on 30th September 2006, held on Margate seafront with various events and performances culminating in a spectacular bonfire consuming Anthony Gormley’s
80-odd foot tall Waste
Man sculpture – built from the vicinity’s rubbish, flotsam and jetsam with the help of many local folk of diverse origins – in
front of thousands of Thanet residents and visitors; with Caroline Deeds’ Waste
Man documentary (broadcast on Channel 4 on 2nd December 2006) charting its production and destruction.
14. Related to but very distinct from others in European cinema’s social realist and naturalist traditions – see
her interview about the making of Exodus at www.channel4.com/fourdocs/articles/penny_int.html; and another by Stella Papamichael from 28th June 2007 at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A24168585.
Her refreshing views on the political role of art are summarised in ‘Art Has No Real Power’,
7th May 2007 (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/arts/author/penny_woolcock/).
15. Perhaps this reflects the gulf between a turncoat toff as beloved leader
and the grimy multitude (or between privileged creator and the objects of her
vision, for that matter ...) which the entire enterprise of Exodus seems to want
to disavow. If so, that would be completely uncharacteristic of the best of this
filmmaker’s previous work, crafted from meticulous research leading to grass-roots accounts, experiences, anecdotes, characters and perspectives being central – as
in the Bradford underclass trilogy Tina
Goes Shopping (1999), Tina Takes A Break (2001), and the culture clash comedy Mischief
Night (2006; see my appreciation in ‘A Midautumn Night’s Dream’, Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 1, January 2007 – also
at www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk). Other highly original (though variously flawed) films by Penny Woolcock include The
Principles of Lust and The Death of Klinghoffer (both 2003).
16. At www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/9891.htm.
17. See the thoughtful review of Polly II by Anthony Iles (2006, available at www.metamute.org/en/Polly-II).
18. From an interview with William Fowler in Vertigo Magazine, January 2007 (www.vertigomagazine.co.uk). Note that the prescience of this vision, as well as the acclaim the film has received from many quarters, have not been accompanied by the wide distribution its quality certainly deserves and therefore the enthusiastic audiences it would doubtless receive.
19. For example, among many pathbreaking analyses, see those by Ted Allen, The
Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Verso, 1997); Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch:
Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004); Peter Linebaugh, ‘Charters of Liberty in Black Face and White Face: Race, Slavery and the Commons’ (www.metamute.org, 2005); and Marcus Rediker, Villains
of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2004).
20. ‘Civil Society, Citizenship and the Politics of the (Im)possible: Rethinking Militancy in Africa Today’ (2007),
at http://libcom.org/library. Libcom
also has a useful array of articles on Abahlali baseMjondolo (which has its own
website at www.abahlali.org). For the wider context here, see the excellent collection
of essays: ‘Naked Cities: Struggle in the Global Slums’, Mute magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2006 (www.metamute.org); and my review of the Favela
Rising documentary (covering Rio De Janeira’s Afro Reggae movement) in ‘Riodemption Songs’, Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 3, February 2007 (also at libcom.org).
21. The White season, BBC 2, March 2008, included documentaries on a
Bradford workingmen’s club, Polish migrants in East Anglia, the BNP in East London, and the relevance of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ provocation
three decades on; the latter also a touchstone for the three-part Immigration:
The Inconvenient Truth, Dispatches, Channel 4, April 2008. Covering related ground, in ‘Same
Difference?’ and ‘Breaking
Cover’ (Variant, Nos. 23 and 24, 2005) I hinted at some of the implications of such inherently false multicultural dichotomies in the context of prejudicial characterisations of European Asians and Muslims.
22. In ‘Everybody Is Happy Now’, The Guardian, 17 November, 2007. Atwood herself wrote one of the many excellent post-1960s dystopias, The
Handmaid’s Tale (1986; with a film version directed by Volker Schlondorff, 1990).
23. My personal favourites being Ursula K. LeGuin’s The
Dispossessed (1974) and Samuel R. Delany’s response Trouble
On Triton (1976) through to Marge Piercy’s Body
Of Glass (1992), Kim Stanley Robinson’s California (1984-90) and Mars (1992-96)
trilogies, and Octavia Butler’s Parables (1993/98).
24. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998).
back
to top
_________________________________________________
Comic & Zine Reviews
Mark Pawson
French artist Pascal Doury is best known for his contributions to the RAW comix
anthologies – intricate intensely worked black and white scraperboard illustrations, chaotic schematically drawn scenes of a small boy seemingly built from a construction kit with several extra limbs and penises, furiously driving his toy car round-and-round in a graphically precise motion blur. These simultaneously innocent and sexually charged scenes are whirlwinds of action with an entire comic book’s
content compressed into a single drawing. Pascal Doury was sort of a contemporary
of the Bazooka group of painters (Kiki Picasso, Loulou Picaso et
al) but his uncompromising attitude coupled with a heroin habit set him apart. Cherishing his outsider status, his work surfaced in a succession of self-published underground magazines, often collaborations with scatological scrawler Bruno Richard who
he’d know since the age of ten.
I first saw Pascal Doury work in 1980s issues of RAW and remember
staring at his graphic explosions on the oversized pages for ages, trying to
find my way into them and decipher the meaning, eventually feeling a bit defeated
and flicking forwards to other easier-on-the-eye strips. Attempting to get to
grips with Doury’s work was not helped by the fact that his drawings were censored. Ridiculously, all the numerous genitalia had been blanked out with small white numbered rectangles. Over 18’s
who wrote to RAW were sent a sheet of stickers to strategically affix
in place, and I’ve still got my 2 sheets of dicks stickers, unused in the
original envelope!
I hadn’t thought about Pascal Doury for at least 15 years until I picked up a copy of MOLLSUK #04, Doury – a
special issue of this magazine published by Bongout in Berlin. Doury died of lung cancer in 2001, having kicked heroin a decade earlier. This is a great, informative collection of exhibition shots, unpublished work, interviews and reminiscences by colleagues and collaborators including Art Spiegelman and Gary Panter. A fitting tribute to a unique artist. Later issues of RAW were published in the UK by Penguin with Pascal Doury’s
work uncensored. Secondhand copies can be found relatively easily.
Just what is it that makes today’s sheds so different, so appealing to artists,
musicians and illustrators? These prefabricated buildings seem to be a popular
subject at the moment. I can envisage a themed park exhibition coming together
with Simon Starling’s shedboatshed (re-purposed, sailed and reassembled)
next to Cornelia Parker’s smithereened Cold Dark Matter, alongside Mark Dion’s Biological Field Unit Research Station, and there’d
be curious sounds at high volume emerging from a shed with Dj Beekeeper inside
(Wire’s Bruce Gilbert). The reading area – an essential element of such an exhibition – would
be inside Mark Dion’s Shed. Amongst the butterfly nets and
sample jars, on the bookshelf of botanists’ reference books there would
of course be a copy of Walden by self-builder with attitude Thoreau, some early copies of Viz Comic (yes you read correctly, Viz were
early shed adopters and always included spoof small ads for sheds), plus there’d
be copies of the Men and Sheds books (UK, NZ and Australian versions which
all share the same title). What’s this here? A copy of Sheds by Nigel Peake, a collection of illustrations of sheds real and imagined. I can picture Nigel Peake on
his travels going into local tourist information offices and asking if they know
the locations of any good sheds. His drawings of real shed exteriors focus on
the visual effects of being patched up, repaired and weathered. Using accumulations
of scavenged materials and never seeming quite finished, these ad hoc buildings
are meticulously recorded in fine line drawings with cross hatched detail; drawings
which could be used as plans for building your own shed. The imaginary structures
move into more fantastical but still practical territory. Elaborately patterned
with the wooden laths themselves – reminiscent of the work of untutored
obsessive self-builders and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers – these
drawings are delicately, sparingly given a watercolour patina.
John Isaacson’s Do-It-Yourself Screenprinting is a collection
of 3 self-published comics reprinted by the always good Microcosm Publishing.
It’s part practical guide, part autobiography as we follow John on a personal journey into the world of silkscreening. In ‘How to turn your home into a t-shirt factory’ he does exactly that, starting with the basics of building frames, stretching screens, preparing artwork, exposure, printing and drying all on a nonexistent budget. His enthusiasm is clearly conveyed by the expressive drawings, which improve as the book progresses, and a desire to share his knowledge and experiences. As someone who’s
printed hundreds of postcards in my living room, laid out flat to dry on every
available surface, leaving a small path clear to leave the room by, I can completely
identify with this approach. Part 2 is a humorous account of selling his not
very good t-shirt designs in Californian street markets. Berkeley is Hippie central
so we get to meet an appropriately colourful cast of characters, the other traders
and various time-wasting non-customers. In part 3, John somehow gets a job in
a professional silkscreen workshop, which he barely has enough experience for.
He faces a steep learning curve and asks the other workers every imaginable question
about commercial silkscreening. They obligingly explain and demonstrate, conveniently
providing perfect material for the comic! It turns out that all the employees
sneakily work on their own projects. They quickly bond, working together to conceal
their personal print jobs from the boss. For this section of the book the title
switches to Do-It-Together Screenprinting as John realises that helping
each other out and working together is a more efficient and enjoyable way of
printing than always stubbornly adhering to the principle of DIY. This book can
never teach you everything you need to know about silkscreening, but with some
trial and error and lots of practice you’ll be on the way. John Isaacson successfully conveys the fun and satisfaction, hassles and frustrations of Do-It-Yourself Screenprinting, along with lots of useful technical advice.
After picking up a copy of AC Dickson’s Guide To eBay Powerselling zine I realised that I now have a small eBay section on my bookshelf! Two are books by artists: Bill
Burns’ Everything I Could Buy on eBay About Malaria and John Freyer’s All My Life For Sale.
The two others are more mainstream books; a ‘How to Sell…’ book,
and a company history. AC Dickson’s Guide To eBay Powerselling fits neatly between these two categories. A C Dickson is
a Portland USA-based performance artist and filmmaker and this zine accompanies
his Powerselling Seminar Performances, the theme of which is ‘learning-how-to-unlock-the-power-of-the-internet-for-personal-fortune-and-job-freedom-with-eBay’. In 28 practical, down to earth pages, you learn pretty much everything you’ll
ever need to know about selling stuff on eBay, together with some nuggets of eBay history. AC Dickson makes a living by selling items he gets from flea markets and charity shops on eBay,
although I just checked and he doesn’t have anything up for sale right now. He’s
highly enthusiastic about the opportunity that eBay has created for liberating
people from the drudgery of boring jobs, enabling many sellers to become self-employed;
no boss, work when you want, plenty of free time and you don’t even have to speak to customers, because everything’s done by e-mail. As someone who’s been self-employed for years selling books and magazines by mailorder I can thoroughly recommend it, but I haven’t
actually got into selling on eBay yet, just read a few books about it... AC Dickson sees eBay as
having democratised the marketplace, allowing millions of consumers worldwide
to sell stuff directly to each. He also points out that selling stuff on eBay
can be seen as an ecologically sound way to reuse or recycle unwanted items.
I can imagine his impassioned presentation of these topics going down especially
well in a live seminar situation. It’s interesting to remember that there
was an idealistic, Libertarian streak to founder Pierre Omidyar’s original concept for eBay,
but any remaining vestiges of these ideals seem to have disappeared as it rapidly
grew into a multi-billion dollar business…
This seems to have developed into a how-to book section, so The Garden Sketchbook by Anna-Kaisa
Laine & Emma Wills fits in perfectly. It’s a pocket-sized notebook telling the story in words and drawings of their year-long project to turn a barren Cornwall council house back garden into a working vegetable and flower garden. They scavenge materials, go slightly over the top ordering organic seeds from seductive mailorder catalogues, build raised flowerbeds, and much to the amusement of their neighbours have ten tons of topsoil dumped in the front garden which they then carry by hand, two buckets at a time, into the back garden. The drawings begin by showing the garden as it was at the start of the year and how they imagine it will eventually look, then there’s
monthly updates as it progresses, careful drawings using a palette of green and
black with the addition of bright splashes of red in the second half of the book
as flowers burst into bloom. These drawings are accompanied by diary entries
from both authors and detailed charts showing what they planted and what actually
grew. The Garden Sketchbook clearly conveys their gentle and slightly
haphazard approach to growing. They’re delighted when crops flourish, resigned
when their vegetables are eaten by slugs and battered by the rain. Perhaps The Garden Sketchbook sticks a bit too literally to its title. I want to see more drawings; pictures of the front garden obliterated with tons of soil, drawings of the neighbours who are alternately bemused and encouraging, illustrations of Anna-Kaisa & Emma working in their garden or just sitting out there with a cup of tea enjoying their creation. Less slugs, more people. I want to be encouraged into thinking that I might, just might transform my pigeon shit encrusted East London 5th floor balcony into a verdant herb garden.
Omsk is a roving, collectively organised club night who’ve been putting on sporadic events around London since 1995. Their slogan, ‘A testing ground for film, video, live art, sound and mayhem’, sums up the approach perfectly. Their curated but chaotic shows have taken place North and South of the Thames in locations as varied as a squatted Bank, railway arches, and Hoxton’s infamous 333 club. The programme for a 2004 show lists 7 performances, 4 installations, 8 musical acts and 25 short films, all for just £6.00 entry fee. Drifting locations and spasmodic occurrence, popping up when and where you’d
least expect it, always make Omsk nights special events. Omskbook with its cover gaffer taped shut and austere black and red print job marks 12 years of activity. Rather than a dry documentation and historifying account of Omsk’s manifestations, the book is constructed exactly as a show would be programmed: each contributor is allocated a time slot, i.e. a couple of pages to do whatever they want with, the book starts at 4pm and goes all the way through to 6am. Along the way there’s a miscellany of artwork, film stills, performance scripts, DJ playlists and short contextualising essays from about 90 contributors, together with an informative how-to-put-on-your-own-event section, plus there’s a CD and a DVD. In fact the only thing that’s
missing is a close up photo of Omsk prime mover Steven Eastwood’s
notorious cycling jersey. Viewing/reading Omskbook with both the CD and DVD playing at the same time is recommended.
Ratio: Pan-dimensional Film Guide – with a subtitle like that you know you’re
in for an interesting ride. At first glance Ratio looks like a 1970s film
journal; clunky layout with earnest analytical reviews of the latest international
avant-garde and ‘adult’ releases alongside interviews with introverted auteurs backed up with small adverts for private film clubs and scholarly film themed publications. This issue’s date is Winter 1973 but there’s a barcode on the back cover and a website address inside. Look closer and things get curiouser. There’s
an interview with filmmaker Penelope Nordstrom-Lloyd, living in self-imposed
exile in the Carpathian mountains, making films with her tribe of 10 adopted
kids and gradually using up her stockpile of vintage film stock; seriously strange
sci-fi films; and a frightening free association session between Japanese horror
Maestro Kosei Nakadai and Finnish Director Urho Virtanen (Q. Flesh
freaks, knife, demon possession? A. Blood splatter liquids exorcism, shot in
head, rotting corpses, child murder, exploding head, lots of blood). Some illustrations
are film stills which have been drawn over and drawn through deforming the grey
live action film stills into thick black outlined animation cells, others look
like mutilated storyboard images with a hint of menace lurking in the background
or images from half-remembered children’s books. It’s all very strange
indeed. I felt slightly fuzzy headed before the hay fever medication you understand,
but after reading Ratio: Pan-dimensional Film Guide now I’m completely
confused and disorientated.
Contacts
MOLLSUK #04, Doury A4 88 pages, 17 euros.
www.bongout.org
Bongout Showroom, Torstrasse 110, 10119 Berlin, also from NOG, 187 Brick Lane, London, E2
Sheds, Nigel Peake, A5 36 pages, £8.00.
www.analoguebooks.co.uk
www.secondstreet.co.uk
Do-It-Yourself Screenprinting, John Isaacson, 188pgs, $10.00 www.microcosmpublishing.com
A C Dickson’s Guide To eBay Powerselling
A5 28 pgs $2.00. andrewdickson.com
The Garden Sketchbook
by Anna-Kaisa Laine & Emma Wills
A6 52 pages. £3.50? www.atlanticpressbooks.com
Omskbook 20x20cm, 154 pages inc CD + DVD &p |