I am going to also write about the elements of re-pathologising poverty, from the notion of ‘No Forgotten People’ to ‘Responsibility. Real fairness. Compassion’, from Broken Britain to Big Society. But also I am going to go off track, so in no way is this a consistent thing. Sleeplessness, my actual insomnia & some other biographically coded details will leak out. Canterbury East Train Station, Austerity Programme, epiphenomena of class, GIDEON, Working Britain, Shame, libidinalism, Zurich, Rodin etc etc. etc. I am going to leave this here, as a very rough draft and hopefully over the next working day mend it out or reformulate areas.
EDWG – Economic Dependency Working Group ESA – Employment and Support Allowance SJPG – Social Justice Policy Group SRA – Strategic-Relational Approach SRSSC – Social Rented Sector Size Criterion. Now that's music to my ears?
George GIDEON Osborne
The Euro-American state is a cowardly lion, a weeping bully, a plaintive lover to finance capital. It cannot bear to admit that, having grown its own administrative limbs to serve at the pleasure of the new sovereign of privatized wealth, that the wealthy feel no obligation to feed the state.
(...)
I don’t think it’s about converting shame, therefore, into pride or anything. I think it requires a hard confrontation with and a very difficult process of changing what the reproduction of life means in both pragmatic and phantasmatic terms. What this means will vary, but its impact on the political and on the social relations of labour will be astonishing, because it has to happen: there will be politics, and there will be sacrifice, and there will be a chaos of wants responded to badly and with a bigger burden on the already vulnerable unless they converge to rethink their own investments in inequality and xenophobia, the ready-to-hand fear formations.
Laura Berlant
There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity when an authentic upheaval can be born . . . . descent into a real hell
Fanon
For the One Nationers, New Labour had dramatically increased the welfare spending to a maddening level. It had given the public too much, too soon, too fast. It had failed, at once to economically have the intended effect on poverty & deprivation (the expressed Forgotten People, the people of Broken Britain, child poverty, slum estates, the whole package was illustrated by the Conservative critique of New Labour’s income-based concept of relative poverty.
The false question to the problem was devised: ‘How is it possible for the state to spend so much money, to devote so much energy, to fight poverty – only for poverty and inequality to win the fight?
Here, the claims that New Labour's welfare state had in fact endorsed its opposite, had ensured poverty had won and inequality ruled. Time for austerity. Time to end irresponsible spending. Button up.
George Osborne, or simply GIDEON said that the Conservatives had aligned its thinking with ‘Working Britain’; ‘the shift worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning’, contrasted with ‘the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’ & so as the blind wrap.
Iain Duncan Smith, IDS from henceforth ‘tended to prefer’ to imply that the ‘system’ is the thing that traps people into the dependency. That is therefore easy to equate this insufficient drive to ‘remove oneself’, to cancel oneself, from this ‘urge to depend’ so casualised as a direct result of New Labours ‘culture of excess’. It was all then, adjustable to a sense of personal failings, personal dependencies that refuted the desire to otherwise just stop being a parasite.
'today I weep for spiders
soaked in LSD
their Brocades broken Scaffolds
made hilarious by Camera's Eye:
Lonely Contraction
spooks Me into Clothing'
Frances Kruk
I remember a fairly rough period during late 2016. I had crashed outside Sturry, cycling on a bend near Mill Rd appearing to lose my senses over the Chopra Dentist practice on the corner. I had been fired from my zero hours job, I had been robbed twice in a month. I had been made homeless by my landlady, who stood outside my Ramsgate flat drunkenly reminding me I was ‘jobless & now homeless.’
I would cycle 25 miles to one specific library situated in Canterbury. Stay periodically with a friend there. Canterbury is a particularly divided location. There are literal memes about what train station you arrive into. Canterbury West, the affluent bubble near the Unicorn pub, Half-timbered, 17th-century pub with beamed ceilings and wood burning stove. Canterbury East, is the Dover branch & notably did not have ticket barriers. It was for the rest & it looked like it. Two train stations, one city. Urban planning.
You would walk out and see Dane John Mound, a former Roman cemetery turned into civic gardens. It was ultimately a city divided. It had always been blue until fairly recently, when Rosie Duffield gained the constituency in 2017. She is unfortunately a member of LFI. It ultimately has the strange touristic appearance of an idle, albeit an historical site of the Church of England and symbolic leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion but its underbelly is quintessential Broken Britain, to sound like a BBC playmaker for a tiny second. Anyway, Chopra Dentist practice.. Chopra Dentist practice.
I had been having substantial molar issues on my right side, I was going 31 miles an hour. I love going fast on the bike. I crashed on the bend, slipped more specifically. My bright red Cinelli Proxima 2002 going the opposite way to the rest of my body. I suffered a concussion & had split my eyebrow around 4 inches to the bone upon the tarmac, the blood was effusive. The concussion so effective I failed to realise I was in the middle of the road, felt a generalised warmth around my entire body. Blood. It seemed to fall out of my head like an object onto my fitness tights, then hands, then bike, then tarmac. In that order.
A child from Kings School had gotten out of the car with his mother and a series of baby wipes were placed on my face. I pulled away one drenched, the second drenched & third. How much blood is in the face? That’s not how it works I thought. I tried to stand, pulling my bike with me. I collapsed into a pail, hands fastened.
I was steadily taken by this child, his dark black blazer, the termly fee of what was then £7,500 (seeing as he was a junior) the crest a variation of Canterbury Cathedrals symbol, the school being famed member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference and the Eton Group. It is Britain's oldest public school; and is arguably the oldest continuously operating school in the world. Another world.
I sat there, holding three sheets of crimson baby wipes. I was on my way to Jobcentre, having recently been relinquished of my zero hours job that immediately ensured I was back to living with my dad. Potentially in the garden, in a shed that I was meant to build myself. It was not even a month, I was not even a month away. A paychecks breathe.
The results of my returning were not greeted willingly or happily & I had internalised a great amount of shame about it all. I remember being so defeated, on the phone just asking to be picked up the following day. I had had periodic homelessness in London, but this had been waylaid by friends, sofas, empty industrial unit floors, kitchens, bathrooms occasionally. My dad always seemed to chide me on this, as if i was intimately involved with my own fuck-ups. As if I enjoyed all this shit, as if-hang on tight, and spit on me- I enjoyed the destruction of my body; enjoyed the hysterical. masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on. That I enjoyed the mad destruction of my organic body which was indeed imposed upon me, that I enjoyed the decomposition of my personal identity (having three surnames), that I enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity.
I had a few months before appeared to him in a sort of maddening weakness, hollowed out nausea. I had gone to Switzerland & camped out behind the Gates of Hell by Rodin for a pilgrimage to Picabia.There was also the Mike Bouchet, a fecal work wherein he had worked with the sewage treatment facility to make a sculpture out of one day’s worth of citizens’ fecal waste. The final sculpture, titled The Zurich Load, was composed of 252 hand pressed blocks, and measured 8 meters wide and over 30 meters long. It was Zurich, an effective police state. The worst possible version of sanitised Germanic order, falling into clerical Swiss clamour. Libidinally dry. So notionally the idea of 4-5 day rough sleeping was very feasible & very very much needed. I had needed to leave the UK, clear my head. A place arose to stay for a week or so. This collapsed as I had arrived at the airport. I have left a voicemail. I had a strange evening staying with one of my friends remote friends (now not a friend), who certainly did not want me staying but seemingly had no choice. The next morning I was packed away with a pack of Swisslion appetit biscuits. On you go, enjoy Zurich as he handed me of the flat. Fine. I remember 1916. Incomprehensible sounds, not words with meaning. No. 1 Spiegelgasse.
It was all worth it, I pressed my dad sat side on. Unlistening? But it was Hitler's Gates, Dad...dad... they got stuck in Zurich, meant for Linz & they remained. The only one off the wall, not intended. Begotten! He nodded, that was sufficient for a monosyllabic painter and decorator that I could conjure. But the shame remained inside, even if I could jumble another anecdote. It was somewhat obvious, with no job, no home, having been recently robbed that I was 'in no good place'. Yes, that would be the place. No good Place.
will get you to sleep
behind a rust packet
centre back collapses
into turbulent tectonics
of bumps, kidney shaped abscesses
curling black lids
fading shells screws
and bolts of an exploding firebox
locomotive dead moulds
227 figures
secured from the heimplatz
Anyway, child's blazer. Jobcentre interview. Kings, Canterbury. Professionalism & shame. Eton. The culture of blame. Sacrificing the sick for their improbity. Eton. Putting your limp penis inside a dead pigs head. Shame. etc. I remember around that time I had mentally routinised the words zopiclone 7.5mg & three-four days of sleepless waking. It was one of the few medications I could remember. zo · puh · klown.
the barbitone against
decimal numbers
move on their own cuticles
But why sleep?
Effectively most if not all the early poems are about sleep, or the ends of sleep. I had written something around the time, likely in the stretches of that exhausted feeling. Between the periodic sanctions, the zero-sum responsibility craft of Big Society, the zero hour contracts, the ‘last minute scheduling changes’, the latenesses, the latenesses, the many manifold latenesses. At the behest, prioritisation of ‘responsibility’ as moral obligation leaves little room for anything else. I had written to myself largely:
What is the contemporary decibel?
The English & their fucking moralism of work, an O inside her wretched public announcement of productivity despite 4 hours sleep. Britain Awake, ‘Sedatives have been prescribed by people, in and out of Government, telling us that there is no external threat to Britain, that all is sweetness and light.’
As good any rallying speech?!? But what is the contemporary decibel? Her mouth the perfect alarm clock heralding ascension of the over-worked, hyper-competitive neo-liberalism with personal computers and the ends of social protection…The power to conserve, transmit, circulate, & enhance compositions. Aid finance rather than bodies/ minds. The culture of wealth has internalised the social logic of surplus to the penal labour of self-management. (I know in reflection, this is rather trite ‘easy target’ material). Panic is no longer a collectively dissimulated feeling but a personal one. Pharma sector has the remedy for any little 'chemical imbalance'. Troubleshooting the organic. But what is the contemporary decibel?
When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly & loosely, a few fringe images as if woven into us by forgetting. The disquiet of sleep mapped by 100% volume option suddenly ripping dissipation of the dream- world as it was shredded. There was, in the midst of this a quote (not footnoted): ‘we could unfurl the turnstiles of Eliot and the ‘newly’ invented cylindrical blinds that acted as sealant on the burrowed frames of the bourgeois, whom awoke presumably to the ‘special occasion’ of upward social mobility.’ It certainly stuck out, in its strange accoutrements of sleep. The class politics around sleep. The demure sense of inevitable sleep.
Insomnia ‘like many other physiological symptoms, such as exzema, psoriasis, restless leg syndrome, is the result of hyperarousal and stress response’, I’ve been told. It is because, largely, my concept of responsibility was jilted. I could not administer my nervous energy sufficiently. Obviously, the question of what sleep was, had leaked into everything. It is why in some measure I have pathologised Moritiz Erhard, the magic roundabout, the intensive irresponsibility of the financial ‘sector’ to break ‘sleep’ even further into the time of non- and semi-conscious mental processes. Time discipline is a site of struggle, that seems obvious.
But what had occurred with Erhard was the termination of sleep. Sleep as the site of failure that encompasses the relation to the self in terms of responsibility. Unemployment, the most frightful capitulation of the self, the complete bottoming out of the prospective individual within a speculative economy has no cover of virtue but rather complete personal disintegration. What is the contemporary decibel? In the jerkwater of the mind, the actual permanent extinguishing of sleep is still implacably there. It resides in the mind like the most unlikely of constancies.
‘The behavioural account of insomnia tries to fully socialise the economic/energetic model itself. And in so doing our surpluses, attitudes, symptoms, can be considered as though they were social problems that need to be resolved rather than reconciled, they are errant expressions that require normalisations, and those norms are utterly social, cultural ones. There is an implicit managerialism to the idea, as well as an effacement of the boundaries of the public and the private.’
JBR
The fear of sleep. I was most fearful of the permanence of wakefulness, what that had meant in terms of my own capacity to control my thoughts, rationalise my actions. Or in any way photosynthesise the act itself. The hatred of death? All of these were quickly just farcicals of the same unending readiness.
To exhaust one's substance we negotiate sustenance, survival rate for the waking state of exhaustion to conclude. So Big Society. IDS, responsibility, fairness, compassion. Hardworking people and benefit dependents, ‘detoxification’ under Cameron. Cuts and the programme of austerity.
The explanation was clear as day, it was so obviously to do with a ‘culture of entitlement’ to state support, in which there is ‘less expectation to take responsibility…Because today the State is ever-present: either doing it for you, or telling you how to do it, or making sure you’re doing it their way’. Big society a ‘centrist’ methodology of abstinence & hope was to be implemented:
A country not just back in the black but back in business. A big society. A prouder people. And we know the values that are going to get us there. Responsibility. Real fairness. Compassion.
A poem, written 2016. 11th of July, after Cameron’s resignation. Today, 8 years on.
For workable antinomy
new decimal impressed
on the condition of
intense purified awareness
of the young & The State
of their coherence is to
make distinct concentratedly
despite throbbing uncertainty
of being just right relief
to the social kernel of abolition
patter the balance looks
like austerity produced this
urban stampede and the unkillable
infants with no name or place
stiffen in the air preserve
this basmati as a living
thriving literalness
taking in a 360 degree
revolution of a world and says:
'I'm not a piece of shit, I'm a piece of society'
will never be exhausted
by feeble sketches or
piloted extinctions
in tinctures with lease
go down our debt is
mind-dependent & a negativity
so negativity you say a tungsten
ring is forever but the basmati
is still a living thriving literalness
The political climate in the UK found a new affective register with the financial crisis: the invocation of public and personal shame. Stuff of wholly Victorian demarcation, the deserving and undeserving poor, moral panics of youth deviancy emerging straight from the privilege of EMA, straight from the communitarian authoritarianism on New Labour social policy. It was that during this period, wherein GIDEON would chastise those that exploited the public without generating wealth, those that flouted it through a culture of ‘dependence’, that he would sometimes label an ‘excess’, much like the very same nervous excess carried by those with insomnia, depriving them from the ability to sleep or maybe it was a perpetual wakefulness, ‘the closed blinds of the next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’ their dependency a ‘cultural choice’. Shameless milking of state benefits enables these reckless personal habits to grow uncontrollably burdensome to (our collectively) cash strapped public services. The register of shame and excess, outlined against an assumed notion of a common-sense decency still to be found in the working-class heartlands. As the late, great Marina Vishmidt had written, in terms of the roles around shame & shaming within the political climate of post 2010, ‘the language of personal responsibility shaped the political discourse of ‘austerity’... There is a sense that such language acts conservatively in how social and economic problems are conceived, including their causes and solutions, that it both permits and excludes certain types of policy approaches and certain types of defenses and criticisms of those policies. The relationship between shame and indebtedness is a major example, how the link of credit to credibility becomes a cipher for all kinds of social violence.’
Libidinal satisfaction to the non-negotiable imperatives of austerity or rather the question of how can we reroute shame? How can there be a re-formulation of the terms around which shame and its punitive assortments, its empanelment in daily life can be revolted against. As Berlant noted :
Austerity sounds good, clean, ascetic: the lines of austerity are drawn round a polis to incite it toward askesis, toward managing its appetites and taking satisfaction in a self-management in whose mirror of performance it can feel proud and superior. In capitalist logics of askesis, the workers’ obligation is to be more rational than the system, and their recompense is to be held in a sense of pride at surviving the scene of their own attrition.
On this subject Berlant is too inimitable & so I have to quote at length again, as if I am apologising to some invisible version of a peer review…I am a poet not a writer:
What ‘shame’ is is to be seen seeing one’s own forced adjustment, to be seen seeing the wearing away of the old anchors for being tethered to the world, to be watched or encountered as one displays profoundly not knowing what to do, to be seen frantically treading water or to be encountered in paralysis (again, there is a whole range of proprioceptive performances through which we learn to register feeling the contingencies of survival and the negativity of encountering ourselves as subjects who make sense either in our fantasies or the world.
There has been much here that has devolved into a new literary gauge for many lower working class artists, I emphasise ‘lower’ as a definitional category status. I will try to first broach the subject here, with the intent in exploring it more heartedly elsewhere. I mean it. The profound stratification and fragmentation of the working-class & how this manages itself into the effective
The closer you are to the forms of punitive systems such as the DWP, the more the relation of social negativity to subjectifying effects is a reactive intensity. But it is also a birthright. Rendered in blood. Mended into your sensibility, just not experienced vicariously. It is a cartography, you hold it in your sternum. It is the intensive build of the self. Within the Big Society narrative Burkean ‘little platoons’ largely rested on the ‘vigorous values’ of moral responsibility to work & to self sufficiency. That is, the historical fracture lines around the English working class, post-1980’s disintegration & disenfranchisement, 90’s reinfranchisement as a cipher, a symbol re-liquidated, primed & pasted. The epiphenomena of class obsessed over by marketers, psychologists, and rock musicians & so what approach is to be taken with regarding to the post Big Society clutch on the throat of the disintegrating integers of ‘working class culture’ other than the opined death wretch of its junk the necessary traps, its clobber its gubbins its odds & sods its dunnage equipage.
As Huw Lemmey lays out; That fancy dress is especially popular when young people attend university, searching to find an identity that fits and distinguishes them from the dreaded label of being middle class. English universities are full of people using their miner grandfather to offset their stockbroker grandfather.
The impossibility of Bossnapping in the Mind of Someone Dead. Or whatever the Hirst work was called,, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living……
And to at least, in respite mode attempt an ending, or edging to an end. Fisher on the experience of class, as it bifurcates as it irritates your skin, eyes, nose, or throat.
In epistemic terms - i.e. in terms of knowledge of the true nature of the social - the subordinate group is in the privileged position precisely because its experience is incommensurate and discontinous, precisely, you might say, because it experience is not (a consistent or quasi-natural) experience at all. It encounters the social field not as some natural(ised) home, but as a series of irreconcilable antagonisms and discrepancies. But this sublime and traumatic ‘experience of the unexperiancable’ is an encounter with the social field as such - which, in class societies, is not contingently but necessarily and inherently distorted by class antagonism. The working class becomes the proletariat when it recognises this - when, that is to say, it begins to dis-identify with the ‘class fantasy’ which has kept it in its place.
To repeat, when it begins to ‘dis-identify with the ‘class fantasy’ which has kept it in its place, in other words when the class itself is abolished. When the class abolishes itself. The antagonism at the heart of this quote, is seemingly obvious when you think the condition in which class is coincident and therefore experienced as a collective ‘oppression’ or a structural position has been increasingly fractured. The forms in which Big Society has opened out the space wherein the experience is individuated is so vast as to effectively mirror the transformation itself. In the ways in which, ‘Responsibility. Real fairness. Compassion’ migrate themselves into the forms of privatised social justice, in the ways in which the eviscerated welfare state dissolves the casing around a collective Dole Mentality that had a kick on reactive cultural movement. What then? What happens when the enfranchisement of the disenfranchised are rendered null & void, HERE insert. Weatherley Law, 2012.
Michael Richard Weatherley, now dead, was MP for Hove from 2010-2015, which following his election he campaigned an EDM alongside Kenneth Clarke to criminalise squatting in residential properties., SQUASH (Squatters' Action for Secure Homes), a pressure group which reformed to oppose section 144 included the likes of John McDonnell in helping organise a meeting for the at the House of Commons. McDonnell said, ‘"there was no need for a new law. It was put through on the basis of prejudice … to pander to the media and the right wing of the Conservative party. We are now finding young homeless people being sent to prison at great cost to themselves and to the exchequer.’ 34,080 families were homeless in 2012 which was a 12% increase on the previous figures. The campaign itself received Royal Assent on May 1st 2012. Its title was Legal Aid, Sentencing & Punishment of Offenders Act & its enforcement ranged from 51 weeks in HM or hefty ‘fines’ & of course a criminal record.
Weatherley noted in Valedictory debate, that ‘scrubbing the law on squatting was a huge deal, and it has virtually ended squatting in residential properties in the UK. Wikipedia now lists it as Weatherley’s law. We won.’
What now, what happens now?
