Weeds

Flying into Belgrade on a clear early April day a couple of days ago, I was treated to an amazing spectacle, glimpses of which are shown here, of the heavily farmed agricultural landscape of this part of the Danube valley.

Fields outside Belgrade seen from the air

Unfolding like a bedspread it disclosed a multilayered history of order imposed on disorder, only to be subjected to continuing organisation,  disorganisation and reorganisation in a process that produces subtly changing patterns of great beauty.

It is hard not to use the hackneyed metaphor of patchwork looking at the way these strips of intensively-cultivated land are arranged

Reminding me of the much-loved painting by Judith Rugg that hangs in my sitting room which she told me was also inspired by the view of fields from the air in the American mid-West.

A phtootograph of Judith Rugg’s painting, complete with reflections. as no doubt her original view which inspired it must have included disregarded reflections in the plane window.

The patterns that have been imposed on the land over the millenia make it absolutely impossible to imagine what it might have looked like before human beings singled out  particular plants and animals for special attention and classified them, disciplined them, penned them for their own purposes and disputed the ownership of these pens with their neighbours (although ghosts of earlier land use patterns and watercourses can be seen from the air underlying the bare ploughed soil).

Under the bare earth of the modern fields you can see the ghosts of ancient paths or watercourses

Fresh as I am from revising an article about how to theorise the global division of labour, this brings to my mind the way in class societies that people are classified, corralled and disciplined for the purposes of ordering production.

I wonder what history dictated the abrupt change in angle in the alignment of the fields on either side of this road

How quickly this landscape would change if the maintenance stopped. But this would not bring a return to the old botanical division of labour. Rather, new (perhaps non-native) species would expand aggressively, choking out others, creating a new ecosystem.

Which makes me think of the weed – the farmer’s enemy, trespassing on the areas marked out for formal planting, reproducing itself in ingenious and unsanctioned ways, perhaps brought from afar by birds or boots, an  unnoticed stowaway in the global traffic of commodities.

In human society the weed could be seen as a metaphor for the opportunist, the spiv, the perhaps- criminal entrepreneur who threatens the social order by disrupting its rules of fairness and introducing new inequalities.

But also the lone  dissenter, the voice that wants to emerge from the suffocation of the mass ranks to be heard as an individual.

The socialist in me fears the former; the artist-intellectual in me yearns to be the latter. Do we want a farm-or-be-farmed society in which people are tended in orderly fields? Or a hunt-or-be-hunted wilderness in which they can roam freely at their own risk? From the tension between the two, perhaps, some new solutions can emerge.

1963 – the great unbuttoning

As 2013 begins, I am reminded that it marks the 50th anniversary of 1963, the year when, in most people’s reckoning, the 1960s really started.

Last night, I had dinner with Liz Heron*, whom I first met when she invited me to contribute to a remarkable award-winning book she edited in the early 1980s called Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing up in the 1950s. We were talking about the ways that their parents’ experiences in World War Two had marked so many of our friends, brought up in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, France, or as refugees elsewhere, as well as our contemporaries in Britain. And it struck us that many people of our generation, perhaps even the majority, were brought up in households where the dominating atmosphere, so taken-for-granted that it was like the weather, was one of deep and chronic – and largely unspoken – depression.

Perhaps these days it would be referred to as survivors’ guilt or post-traumatic stress syndrome. Among people who had seen active service, it sometimes took the form of anxiety, like that of an uncle of mine, who was captured after the fall of Tobruk and subsequently escaped to Switzerland from the prisoner of war camp where he was held in Italy, who had constantly to check the back door was really locked, that there was enough air pressures in the tyres of his car and that you had arrived home safely after a visit. Only forty years later, when he was dying, did he voice his nightmare memories of the last days in the desert before his capture. Though sometimes the urge to get back to some sort of normalcy took the form of refusing to mention the war, sometimes, conversely, it involved repeating the same anecdotes over and over again, perhaps in the unconscious hope that this would empty them of painful associations. Among people who hadn’t directly fought, who knows what kinds of guilt swirled about? Whatever the precise form this behaviour took, it coloured the air their children breathed, profoundly shaping their sense of what is normal.

These patterns must have contributed not a little to shaping that 1950s culture, portrayed (it seems now, caricatured) in so many British war films of the period in which what mattered most was to avoid self-indulgence. Men were supposed to keep calm and carry on, keep a stiff upper lip, protect the women and children in their lives from direct knowledge of violence, death or passionate extra-marital sex. Comradeship and solidarity were expressed through handshakes, clipped understatement (‘rotten luck, old chap’) or an occasional hand on the shoulder signifing much more, we are supposed to think, than could be conveyed by the shallow verbiage of effete intellectuals. Linked with these values were strong prohibitions against ‘showing off’, ‘being greedy’ or ‘not pulling your weight’.  These values were of course continuously being undermined not only by working class resentment of the patronising snobberies of the officer class usually represented in such narratives but also by an intense introspection, expressed in the fashion for Freudian analysis and in many novels of the period (as well as ‘psychological’ films, noir or otherwise, with plots that centred on simplistically portrayed forms of mental illness). Nevertheless, these stiff-upper-lip, take-it-on-the-chin, keep-your-troubles-to-yourself values had a hegemonic hold in schools, the BBC and other institutions that taught us what was normal.

Most children growing up in this period did not, of course, see it that way. The older generation were ‘repressed’, ‘square’ or (a bit later) just ‘a drag’. They could not talk about their feelings, were hypocritical about sex and tried to box children into artificial cages of childhood innocence and adults into crippling gender roles. But these adults were just brilliant at inducing shame. Whether one’s  transgression involved betrayal of class values, contempt for what older people found precious, consumerist wastefulness or simple carnality, guilt seemed to bounce down the generations. Only the most impermeable armour of brashness could deflect it.

I am of course over-generalising disgracefully. I can only speak for those people I know, 0r think I know, and I am sure that many counter-examples will be thrust at me. But I cannot but think of the atmosphere of the period as one of extreme emotional tautness. Even as shades of grey gave way to colour and people learned to enact a kind of larger-than-life technicolour normalcy with increasing conviction, there was always a feeling that some dark, held-down rage might burst through the thin stretched surface skin. It was not accidental, perhaps, that the first post-war generation of British writers were known as Angry Young Men. Or that teenage girls were taught to step warily around male lust – seen as an uncontrollable force the poor boys had terrible trouble reining in. You had only yourself to blame if you engaged in the dangerous sport of prick-teasing. (Though of course, in a classic double bind, it was also unthinkable to define yourself in any other way than in relation to masculine desire).

Another powerful disincentive to expressing any aspiration to equality with boys was the constant reminder that it was men who had done the fighting in the war. And boys continued to be conscripted until 1960. Interestingly 1963 was also the year the last conscripted soldiers were released; the first that boys could let their hair grow long and enter adulthood unshaped by parade-ground drill.

Such was the sense of suffocation that it is hardly surprising that the post-war baby boom generation needed to burst out. 1963 was the moment they did so. And it seems to me now not so much the beginning of something new as a great unbuttoning of the heavy greatcoat of the 1950s, exposing the body within (and its internal tangle of contradictions) to fresh light.

At this distance I am not sure if this is something to celebrate. A lot of adjectives can be used about our generation, not all of them complimentary: foolhardy, selfish, naive, narcissistic, destructive, to name a few. We are often thought to have changed the world irrevocably (though, thinking about it, what generation doesn’t do this?). If I have a complaint it is that we didn’t change it nearly enough.

*whose blog you can find here.

Starting the new year with a bit of decay

I used the image in the last post as my greetings card this Christmas (changing the title to ‘knock, knock’ because people found the existing one rather obscure). I took the picture in Budapest several years ago when the sight caught my eye on my way back to the hotel from a conference. When I looked at it again I was surprised by the feeling of optimism it inspired in me – despite the decreptitude of the wall. Perhaps this is something to do with the bright colours? or the jaunty angle of the mysterious square hitching device which reminds me of a knocker? Anyway quite a few people responded positively to it as an image and this has inspired me to revisit a project I never got round to developing – a website called Entropica I originally set up around 15 years ago with the intention of using it for writing and images associated with my fascination with entropy. So today I spent a happy afternoon (tinged with guilt because I should have been doing other things) uploading images to it. You can visit it here. I am not sure about the black background – it was the simplest template I could find that easily accommodated a lot of visual material. Comments welcome!

entropy – the dialectical relationship between human artifice and nature

you’ll never know unless you try

With all best wishes for happy holidays and nice surprises in 2013

Happy Christmas, Corporations! with love from George Osborne

The public debate about yesterday’s Chancellor’s Autumn Statement has been largely framed, by the Labour party as well as by the mass media, in terms of a redistribution between the poor and the rich, with the latter presented in their capacities as individual millionaire property owners. Strangely absent from these narratives are the main beneficiaries of this government’s economic policy: the corporations.

This is not, of course, to say that poor people won’t  pay the highest price – of course they will -  nor that the rich won’t  benefit from this conservative budget. But the main means by which they will benefit will be not as individuals who just happen to be wealthy but in their capacities as owners, directors or shareholders of companies .

And these companies have just been handed a triple christmas present of huge proportions by George Osborne.

Gift number one is the obvious one: ‘I have already cut the main rate of corporation tax from 28% to 24%, and it is set to fall further to 22%’ says Osborne.

Gift number two is a bit harder to spot. The real value of the minimum wage in the UK has been steadily falling (see, for instance, this report). This means that workers in low-wage jobs are increasingly reliant on claiming tax credits (see my blog about this here) which in turn means that their employers are receiving an ever-increasing subsidy from the taxpayer. According to HM Revenue and Customs (see the report here) ‘the numbers of families without children receiving Working Tax Credits-only has risen over time, almost doubling from 235,000 in April 2004 to around 455,000 in April 2009 and now at just over 580,000 in April 2012′ and ‘the numbers of families benefiting from the childcare element has consistently risen over time, from 318,000 in April 2004 to around 493,000 in April 2011′. As this summary table shows, tax credits already account for 27% of all  benefit spending – by far the largest single component. By comparison Job-seekers Allowance accounts for only 4%. So much for the idea that benefit recipients are ‘scroungers’. It is plain from these figures that the vast majority are hard-working people in low-paid work. And the subsidy that allows them to continue to do so is a very nice present indeed to their employers.

Gift number three is potentially perhaps the largest of all. This involves handing over a huge proportion of public assests, including welfare services that our parents and grandparents won at great sacrifice in the 20th Century, to private corporations as a new field for profit-making. (see my article on this here). By outsourcing these services, rather than simply selling them off, governments continue to carry the risk but hand over the potential profits to the private sector. And of course here the rhetoric of austerity is a mightly convenient means to encourage further outsourcing, since this can be presented as a way of saving taxpayers’ money. Public spending currently makes up around 46% of GDP so this is an extraordinarily rich seam to mine. So rich that when we put together a special issue of Work Organisation Labour and Globalisation  on the subject we called it ‘The New Gold Rush’.

So it really will be a very happy Christmas for these corporations and their shareholders.

WHAT SHOULD LABOUR BE DEMANDING?

The first demand should be that large corporations pay a larger share of tax.The recent outcry over tax avoidance by well-known multinationals shows that this will have overwhelming public support. This would not just involve a reversal of the latest cut in corporation tax (perhaps with some exemptions for small businesses) but would also involve a major campaign against tax avoidance. And it should go beyond tightening up UK regulations to close loopholes and include launching an international campaign to close down tax havens.

The second demand should be an increase in the minimum wage to at least the living wage recommended by the Living Wage Foundation, currently estimated at £8.55 per hour in London and £7.45 in the rest of the country. This would, at a stroke, reduce the largest component of benefit expenditure as well as raising extra money for the government in income tax.

The third demand should be to keep our public services public and allow public servants to work directly for the benefit of public service users, not for corporate profit.

Size Queens, consumption work and the unpredictable paths that ideas travel

Last week I received an email saying,

‘My band, The Size Queens, are about to release our 5th album, in part due to your work. The cybertariat was the inspiration for it — though we’ve been progressively moving in this direction, to try and understand why the economic promise of weightlessness seems heavier than before. Our entire project, to be released on Election Day in the States, is a song cycle and accompanying video …  no guarantee you’ll like the project at all. But we like you. .. The new record [is] “Consumption Work: Tammy, Cybertariat, At The Aral Sea.” I hope you’ll find it edifying to see that your work in economics has inspired those of us working in music.’

I’m not sure that ‘edifying’ is quite the word, but I was certainly very pleased and flattered. And this reminded me that the concept of ‘consumption work’ that played such an important part in my thinking in the late 1970s first came to me as a result of listening to music. So the idea could really be said to have come full circle.

The original inspiration, so far as I remember it, was Lord Buckley’s Supermarket. His work seems little known now, but, although he died in 1960, so I never had a chance to hear him live, for me, and for the group of friends (I have now forgotten which) in whose company I  first heard his records he was an important figure, not least because he first introduced us to a kind of Black American hipster slang we had not come across before, although much of it later entered the hippy mainstream. I think he was the first person I heard referring to the police as ‘the fuzz’ and mentioning in public, in various lightly-coded ways, the smoking of marijuhana. There was something irrestistably cool – intelligent and funny in equal parts – about his semi-improvised verbal riffs, performed against a jazz background. I suppose nowadays he would be thought of as a performance artist, or even a proto-rapper. In his eloquent monologues, Jesus was resurrected as ‘the Nazz’, Shakespeare as ‘Willy the Shake’ and Gandhi as ‘the Hip Ghan’. With a typical touch of genius, in Supermarket the store owners are referred to as ‘Greed heads’.

The observation that stayed in my head described the experience of self-service in a supermarket, a phenomenon that must have been pretty recent in the 1950s when he performed it.

‘Remember the first supermarkets?’ he asks. And, after describing the process of getting a cart he says,

‘And there you are pushin’ in the supermarket with the cart.
You grab the cart and you go strolling up and down the aisles
and you load up all your jazz
and you’re working for them, see?’

At first, he explains,

‘It’s alright, because you’re getting -
this is the beginning -
very, very, low, low, low, low prices.
Saving, you see.
So you don’t mind, you know, pushing a little bit.’

But then, after the prices have risen (or, in his immortal words, ‘Prices – whhhhooooo!’)

‘you’re still pushin’ the mother cart.’

This idea that employers save money by getting consumers to carry out, without payment, the work that was previously done by paid workers lodged somewhere deep in my brain. Nearly fifty years later, I can still summon up the exact intonation, rhythm and self-parodying sexiness of tone of his ‘You’re working for them‘.

The phrase ‘consumption work’ came from a 1976 article in Monthly Review by  Amy Bridges and Batya Weinbaum, called ‘The other side of the paycheck: monopoly capital and the structure of consumption’, a socialist feminist analysis of the relationship of housework to capitalism.

These two insights came together for me when, in 1978, as a member of a study group on new technologies, organised by the journal Capital and Class, I was trying to solve two intellectual puzzles. The first of these was how it is that the amount of time people spend doing housework carries on going up despite the ever-increasing number of ‘labour-saving’ products they buy. The second was how it is that prophecies that automation will lead to permanent mass unemployment have never been fulfilled.

The resulting article (reprinted 25 years later in my 2003 book, The Making of a Cybertariat) made singularly little impression at the time (it was not included in the book the group produced). In fact I had more or less given up hope that anybody would take the idea and run with it*. Though, of course, it remains an active part of my thinking and I have developed the idea further over the years. If ever I find time to write it there will be a book….

So it is a really wonderful surprise to discover that the idea has spread so far, and helped inspire such creativity. And these guys make good music too.The video, which can be found here is a knockout! Their main site is here: http://thesizequeens.bandcamp.com/ .

*The term was taken up by one academic who did not acknowledge my work at all, although I had given her quite a bit of my material. (I should have been suspicious when she asked me ‘who knows your work?’. But I was feeling very intellectually lonely at the time and anxious to discuss the concept and its implications with someone at last, and I misread the clues and thought, in my naiveté, that perhaps she was asking this because she wanted to help promote my ideas. I was more or less unemployed at the time and she had a senior academic post and it would certainly have helped my career). I was in two minds about stating this here. It does sound a bit bitter and paranoid. But I discussed it with a friend this morning who thought I should put it on the record, so here it is. Thinking about it again now I realise that I am myself partly to blame: for acting like a kid in a playground holding out my toy saying ‘please play with me’ to the other kids and then being hurt when they grab it and make off with it; for not taking sufficiently into account the incredible damage done to any idea of sisterhood or collaborative working by three decades of attempts by neoliberal governments to destroy the radical tradition of British social science and discipline its practioners into habits of competition and commodification and marketisation of intellectual property; and finally for neglecting to play the game of self-promotional publishing in A-list academic journals.

Found Art (or the delights of negative entropy)

Cream on cream. Multiple layers of slightly mismatched paint covering graffiti on this wall produce an effect that reminds me of the visual experimentation of early 20th century artists like Kazimir Malevich or Ben Nicholson*.

A sophisticated awareness of graffiti is now part of the essential intellectual armoury of any East London resident or visitor with pretentions to hipness or gentility. Tourists take guided tours of the street art of Shoreditch, Islington home-owners trying to sell their £1 million houses proudly point out the Banksy at the end of the road to their potential buyers and no art bookshop is complete without a table of expensive glossy books on street art (some, rubbing in the irony, with names like ‘The Art of Rebellion’). There is even an iphone app called ‘Street Art London’, celebrating the work of the likes of (pseudonymous yet would-be famous) Phlegm and ROA.

A found ‘Frank Stella’*

Conferring this formal status as ‘art’ onto something that used to be regarded (by society at large) as nuisance and vandalism and (by a minority of intellectuals) as a transgressive form of Art Brut creates troubling contradictions both at the aesthetic and the social level.

At the aesthetic level, the self-conscious artistry of a Banksy or Phlegm deprives us as viewers of our ability, in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp or Jean Dubuffet or  Kurt Schwitters, to become an artist ourselves by being the person who ‘sees’ the art in our environment. Their graffiti are defiantly presented to us as ‘already’ art and we are put immediately onto the back foot, with the choice of passively enjoying it, thus constituting ourselves as fans of the artist, thereby conferring status on him or her, or of being cast as killjoy philistines. Either way we lose that intellectual superiority that comes from asserting the dominance of our own vision that goes along with the identity of artist.

A found ‘Mark Rothko’*

At the social level, the public authorities or property owners who are keepers of the urban landscape are faced with the practical dilemma of defining what is, or is not, public art in their daily decisions about what to leave untouched and what to paint over. This gives them an unacknowledged role as arbiters of taste.

Another found ‘Rothko’*

The results of their paintings over have become a great source of visual pleasure to me. there is a cream-painted wall opposite my house that is frequently graffitied on and, just as frequently painted over by Council workmen. Each time they do so, another rectangle of slightly differently coloured cream paint is layered over what already exists creating a subtle patchwork of cream-on-cream that I love. It reminds me of early 20th century experiments in abstraction.

Also near my house is a derelict pub one of whose walls is overlaid with similarly overlapping layers of shades of red and pink. I think of it as a wall of  Rothko paintings, though the other side of the building is more reminiscent of Jasper Johns or Frank Stella.

A found ‘Jasper Johns’

I am of course seeing them through modernist-trained 20th century eyes. But no eye is innocent. Sometimes I wonder about the vision of those Council workmen whose job it is to go round implementing the zero-tolerance-of-antisocial-behaviour-including-graffiti policy. For all I know, some of them could themselves  have spent teenage evenings with a spray can leaving their personal mark on the drab neighbourhoods they grew up in. Or some might be spare-time artists in a more socially recognised sense. Or might some even be doing the work as Community Service, enforced punishment for past crimes, perhaps even seeing what they have to do as a brutal desecration of forms of cultural expression that they identify with and cherish? Or could this repeated repainting be work done, not under the Council’s jurisdiction at all but by some artist-squatter?

Another detail from the ‘Rothko wall’*

 

Most jobs, of course, involve some sort of pride in the craft being exercised (I have written about this here) and I am sure that any conscientious worker with a paint roller in hand must be exercising some sort of judgement about how the paint is applied, perhaps even with some sense of leaving an individual stamp on the finished work. I wish I knew more about the labour process of these workers. Is the defiant patch of grey on my local Rothko wall (pictured here) the result of a conscious aesthetic decision, perhaps? Or had they simply run out of reddish paint that day and abandoned the attempt at a colour match?

An artefact created in a complex interaction between weather, plant life, neglect and human intervention both sanctioned and unsanctioned*

Whatever the intention, my pleasure as a viewer is tempered with a certain unease. Haunting each such wall is its complex history: the pristine wall, the graffitied wall, and the overpainted wall, with perhaps many intevening layers of deterioriation, repair, alteration and restoration. Each of these might provoke a different aesthetic response: admiration, regret, celebration, aversion. In taking a picture of such a wall, am I responding to it as intended art (like a tourist taking a photo of the Taj Mahal) or as unintended art (like someone ‘finding’ unexpected beauty in nature)? Or might I be ‘discovering’ some form of ‘naive art’, like a Cubist coming across an African mask, or a feminist historian a patchwork quilt? And if so, am I perhaps patronising the people who made it, imputing to them an ignorance of their own creativity or even appropriating and commodifying the results of their aesthetic labour? Am I entitled to see my representation of it as an original artistic work?

View from train window, mid 1990s*

I first became aware of the beauty of the overpainting of graffiti when I took this picture from a train window in Brighton, some time in the 1990s. When I took it, I was most conscious of the pattern of black verticals and horizontals against the different reds and oranges on the station platform. It was only when I looked at it afterwards that I realised that the lovely subtle colour patterns, whose irregularities had puzzled me, must be the result of such overpainting. Despite the streaks (caused by the hairy plate on an old scanner on which a cat used to sit) I still like it as an image, especially the serendipitous way it has captioned itself with the word ‘private’.

There is something both moving and optimistic in this continuous human effort of renovating and remaking our urban landscapes. It gives us a visual representation of the dialectical relationship between originality and inherited aesthetic values, between individual transgression and collective social control, between the private and the public and between the past and the present. Unfortunately, the conditions that sustain this delicate dynamic balance are now under threat. It could easily be lost: if public spending cuts continue; if the anger of unemployed youth spills out of control; if more of our common public space is privatised and placed behind locked gates; or if ‘development’ is allowed to bulldoze our communities. Cherish it while you can.

Another luscious ‘Rothko’ to end on*

Postscript: All this was triggered by the fact that I was burgled last week and my handbag stolen, leaving me temporarily not only without any formal means of identification or of conducting any financial transactions but also without my bus pass. As a result, I was obliged to walk along a route I usually travel by bus, giving me a chance to take photographs of the ever-evolving ‘Rothko wall’ I so often enjoy through its windows.

* click on these images to see them in greater detail.