Blairism, The Dogs & Working Death: Wendover, Millennium Dome & New Britain (Draft)

 

 Blairism, The Dogs & Working Death:

Wendover, Millennium Dome & New Britain 

(Draft)  

Outside Wendover House, Blair made his first public speech after New Labour’s 1997 landslide election victory. It was the first image of Blair in action, utilising the image of a ‘Broken Britain’ in the background for a set of new ideas about a ‘New Britain’. Blair’s team told the accompanying estate police officer that there might be ‘a few photographers’; it turned out there were about 300. His speech was headline news at lunchtime. Labelled the ‘Hero of the Estate’, his picture in all morning papers. Blair went on to say:

I have chosen this housing estate...for a very simple reason. For 18 years the poorest people have been forgotten by the government...There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build... There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concrete.

Subsequent to his maiden speech occurring w/ Bobby in tow, the Estate was to be a sort of javelin for his New Urbanism project. The re-investment in Britain’s housing stock was to be named in a strange Orwellian fashion: Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders or ‘pathfinder partnerships’ for shorter, more alliterative purposes.

It ensured that the Estate was ‘awarded’ under the Government’s New Deal for Communities scheme – ‘a key programme in the Government’s strategy to tackle multiple deprivations in the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country’ around £57 million.

To put this amount into perspective, this was some 2268 dwellings, many of which had left at the expense of cost saving methods during the construction. As several Southwark architects noted during the time:

There is little doubt that the public areas are the least successful part of the Development. The lack of finishes and the poor quality of many of the materials provided has provided a very drab environment...This seems almost to have provoked mistreatment and vandalism. The extensive areas of bare concrete, asphalt, and cheap obscured glass, contribute to the overall feeling of low cost Local Authority housing, and it is almost an insult to the many tenants who are proud of their homes...It is essential that adequate financial backing should now be given to put these deficiencies right. Failure to do so will result in the Estate rapidly becoming a slum.

The Aylesbury Estate, being the largest social housing estate at point of finish, replaced a series of rundown areas of terraces, tenements & old works.

Its Jespersen system large panels used prefab concrete slabs to implement ‘Streets in the sky’ as massive elevated pedestrian movement systems were created to corridor the dwellings. Walkways linked the Estate’s blocks – ‘route decks’ at second floor level for movement between blocks which included space for shops and other community facilities and ‘local decks’, with play areas, within the blocks. Garaging and traffic movement took place below.

The reason for this track-padded informational deluge is something to do with attempting to talk about the past 45 years of invented failures to ensure that existing social housing dies under the most auspicious urban policies.

Right to Buy, stock transfer and the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders programme, New Labour’s Respect agenda & consequent ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards anti-social behaviour & other low-level disorder ensured that the squeezing was unremitting. Blair’s new urbanism was nothing short of punitive ground control.

In turn, it located new modes of ‘urban renaissance’ & its equitable Urban Task Force. Richard Rodgers, commissioned by the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in 1998, to identify the causes of urban decline rendered out a means to both demonise extant urban spaces for the purposes of re-incorporating middle class flight & ensuring the total monopolisation of extant Dockland & works units.

As Rogers noted on the White Paper:

Towards an Urban Renaissance, published three years ago by the Urban Task Force, marked a major shift in thinking and practice in urban policy. The report set out a vision of sustainable regeneration of our towns and cities through making them compact, multi- centred, live/work, socially mixed, well designed and connected, and environmentally sustainable. It put on the agenda the need to upgrade the existing urban fabric, and to use the derelict and brownfield sites in our cities before encroaching on the countryside.

What this has actually meant, headed by Mr Bowellism himself, would seem obvious now. To have more or less help to invent an architectural modality that focused on externalizing the innards of the building so that it looked like a series of ‘stomachs sitting on a plate. Or bowels, connected by bits of bristle’.

Circulation externalised, or rather the visual language of that concept of flow (and the related notions of code and stock). There are material flows of raw matter/utilities such as oil and electricity, the control of the grid, the flow of commodities, marketing and transport, the flow of traffic; the mastery and control of speed.

This but for the local ‘community’; lottery funded ‘centres’, Marina developments, plastic art planted in concrete business district, shopping/eating molluscum, entertainment venues, the local community, housing ‘mixed use’ blocks, Gormleyesque bollards, districts branded ‘quarters’.

In many senses, Blairism & its concomitant ‘Urban Renaissance paper’ was written as valedictory neoliberal urban policy to rectify the ‘mistakes of the 1960s’ implementing nothing short of a paranoid, militaristic blend of urban design with the new affliction of carving out deviancy permanently from the stock-brick-clad ground-floor blast walls (Anti- Social Behaviour Order). Slowly but surely these social ailments will be eked out leaving just a wealthy urban core.

‘The island is a state of mind’, or the Expansion of the Visitor Economy.

The Millennium Dome, as I recall smaller and smaller snippets, was terrifying, it was also very realistically my first expressive sense of being a Child of Blair. I am going to talk about it in the most fragmentary way I can recall. I was 6/7 again. Child of Blair.

It was terrifying, then & to some extent is exciting now (terrifying & exciting I now know are cousins of sorts). It represents the premature cultural implosion of Blair’s entire ideogram.

His soon corrupted (realface) dropping to the pulpit floor; bungling his New Britain erected from the aggregate contributions of the poor through the National Lottery. His marquee (literally) made of spin, remains a massive pantheon to the human ego, the ‘Ozymandias of its time.’

The Millennium Commission was the public body set up to celebrate the turn of the millennium & of the many commissioners Peter Brooke, Baron Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, Thomas "Robin" Valerian Dixon, 3rd Baron Glentoran, Richard Walter John Montagu Douglas Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry, KT, KBE, CVO, DL, FSA, FRSE, FRSGS.

The whole lead up to the Dome clattered with dismissals, resignations and general managerial disarray.

A large white marquee with twelve 100-metre-high (330 ft) yellow support towers. Observable from the moon. The architect was Richard Rogers (a joint venture company, McAlpine & Laing). Spot a theme. Land reclamation.

The land was previously derelict and contaminated by toxic sludge from East Greenwich Gas Works that operated from 1889 to 1985. The clean-up operation was seen by the then Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine as an investment that would add a large area of useful land to the crowded capital.

The by-products of the gas industry; ‘the tar; sulphate of ammonia; the trains; the phenol’.

Increasingly, it appeared that this blighted Greenwich Peninsula was somehow cropping all of its Creative Directors, as one noted: ‘then I was told we could not have foreigners! It got worse, and I left after six months of high-pressure misery, deceit and bungling...Peter Mandelson was moaning the other day that the millennium had left no permanent remains worthy of note, neglecting to add that it was entirely his fault that this was so.’

A triumphalist pomp of New Labour, a polymer tent supported by tensioned cables arranged radially around a dozen 100m masts made of open steelwork subdivided into 14 zones: "Who We Are" (Body, Faith, Mind and Self-Portrait), "What We Do" (Work, Learning, Rest, Play, Talk, Money and Journey) and "Where We Live" (Shared Ground, Living Island and Home Planet).

Years of slovenly processing activity by British Gas had left the area irredeemably polluted by carcinogens. Trucks leaving the site had to pass through wheel-washers to cleanse their tyres of contamination. Breathing apparatus was available for contractors.

Blair said the Tent would be on the first page of his second manifesto, later economised. A white elephant at a disused gasworks in Greenwich. Sun, May 1997.

The remote location helped minimise the humiliation. A social and environmental disaster of which the state government of Amazonas would be proud. George Monbiot, Guardian, June 1997.

Proposals of different levels of reality came and went.

We will say to ourselves with pride: this is our Dome, Britain's Dome. And believe me, it will be the envy of the world. Tony Blair, February 1998.

'Even God doesn't like the Millennium Dome'... Daily Mirror, June 1999 when it was hit by lightning.

Peter Mandelson, now an East German Stalinist, both the Prince of Darkness & presider in Chief of Cool Britannia grapheme. The opening night happened, 31 December 1999. Zaha Hadid refused to come unless by limousine. Thousands of VIPs. Newspaper editors and the CEOs and chairs of sponsoring corporations, of which there were hundreds. In the winter cold, at the tube station in Stratford, east London, from where they were to take the train to the dome. “You could blow it up,” said a certain columnist later in the year.

Though not a columnist nor a PR dissident, I experienced the thing as a child. Child of Blair. My notions or ideas, being shrunk to the scuttling experience of the new, as New. It was a bereft spectacular container, attachment to vacuous statements of modernity, hammering focus groups to deliver meaningless platitudes & all with the biting tokenism to regeneration.

This was not the decamping venture of Bankside, the former liberties of the Clink and Paris Garden. Bankside Power Station being the true, singular convertible success of that era. Tate Modern. This is where the millennium would begin. (Again, a pedant speaks: the millennium actually started on Caroline Island, Kiribati).

Blair had publicly aligned himself with a vision of Britain as a creative, dynamic country: food and furniture by Terence Conran, buildings by Richard Rogers, art by Damien Hirst, music by Oasis. The dome & its contents would be its expression. Major corporations would sponsor different elements – a process that had started under Heseltine.

New Labour was chum to capital, business was part of one that BIG NATIONAL FAMILY.

Montego Estate, 1997. British Leyland. Rover. Driven by Tony Blair into 10 Downing Street. Listening to Bitter Sweet Symphony by the Verve. Over & Over again. Until Cherrie decides the only salvation is Angels by Robbie Williams. Euan in the back. Aged 13.

Now an MBE businessman who runs Multiverse. It provides internships for school leavers. Nine apprenticeship programmes that range from Level 3 (the equivalent of three A-Levels) to Level 6 (the equivalent of a university degree). The company was judged to be "Outstanding" in its most recent (July 2021) inspection by Ofsted.

Inside a skull is a set by Tommy Cooper. Laughing brains with fez’s on. He died in 1984. Surely there is going to be an episode of My Parents are Aliens in the next room. No. Okay. Don’t worry, Quantum Cloud outside by Gormley.

The steel sections were arranged using a computer model with a random walk algorithm starting from points on the surface of an enlarged figure based on Gormley's body that forms a residual outline at the centre of the sculpture.

Gormley is Blairism par excellence & it is obvious & clear that this is the case as to be somewhat whimpering in the delivery. Of course he is. From points on the surface of an enlarged figure based on Tony Blair.

Cost £43m, covers 87,000 square metres; less than 20kg per sqm, the lightest building in the world. Spawning the Jubilee line & definitely decontaminating the land. Around 120 tons of benzene and other hydrocarbons were removed from the soil. Following its opening there was a public apology; "management problems".

The faith zone, possibly the most quintessential of the various ‘management problems’ suffered in large part due to being one of many stratigraphic groups used to compose it. The Lambeth Group, a commission of clerics. Curving plasterboard wall indented with crosses, each one carrying a TV screen in its centre.

But one element I do remember, was the animatronic pubic lice that scaled the inside of the dome. Supposedly, during a meeting between Hirst & Mandelson, he remarked that body zone louse was his favourite. He loved how it moves on its metallic joist. Its allure being that it worked. In the catalogue it was identified only as ‘a parasite.’

Some years later when the disassembly of parts went to auction, the pricings also appeared. Giant hamster and cheese £3,000. "Time cogs" engraved crystal dish £1,700. Piaggio Vespa scooter, (incomplete) £1,250. Mannequin wearing England football shirt, head in hands £900. A brain, from the body zone £700. Heart from the body zone £1,500. "Time machine" brass-faced clock and two Blackadder paintings £650 The eye from the body zone £500. Front half of a flower power Mini ("no tax or MoT") £450. A snowman costume, hat and scarf £180. A spotted glass floor tile £120. 10 hamster cages £25. "Theo" millennium show costume £20. Oversized metal chair £15.

Prices exclude 10% buyers' premium and 17.5% VAT.

Little Fucking Machines (draft/unfinished)

There are those, even our enemies, we want to live; there are those, even our friends, we want to die. We imagine death may be the end of pain, but we may well will our pain. We honor those who die with dignity, but dignity is not something we ascribe to ourselves or can be our objective.

Alphonso Lingis

 They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God, all they found were beautiful shoes.

Imelda Marcos

The scenes (describing The Laughing Star) are shot with some tenderness, even those that show bloody rituals, like the flagellants during Holy Week. In between footage, a young boy is shown playing with matches. The view is from beneath a glass table, on which the boy breaks each stick & arranges the pieces to form a star. He drops water inside the formation, making the matches move so the outer tips touch to form a bigger star. The boy does this over & over until it looks as if the star is laughing: 'I tried to look openly at the hybrid identity of this country...The Laughing Star tries to look at the situation without lambasting the evil colonizers.'

I have wanted to write something about Der lachende Stern for a little while, this mainly for my own attempt at recollection. So the following, might be more or less poorly consolidated compendium of notes taken shortly after the screening & in the interceding weeks. I was prompted by shortly re-watching the ‘Final Edit’ of Apocalypse Now & dipping back into Conrad. For full measure, I rewatched Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse focused solely on the film’s mimetic realities (onscreen, narrative/plot, etc) with The Laughing Star being shot in 83’ at the tail-end of the dictatorship. 

The film enters the Philippines officially, under the hospitality of the Manila International Film Festival, while simultaneously operating within that invitation inconspicuously, gathering another Philippines at the edge of the image regime. The Manila International Film Festival belonged to an attempt to manufacture an image of national modernity, poverty & political violence existed alongside an almost hallucinatory insistence upon glamour where the camera slips away from the guarded cultural venues. 

The festival becomes more the accidental circumstance of Schroeter’s visit, wherein the Philippines becomes not merely a geographical territory governed by Marcos but a psychic landscape produced by crushed overlapping histories; Spanish Catholicism, American colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, Cold War anti-communism, consumer, indigenous & popular cultures compounded on-top of one another. Sometimes the banal mixes with the grotesque or beautiful. Imelda Marcos sang all these beautiful songs like ‘Strangers in the Night’.

The film nabs this strange position between essay-film or documentary-form, travelogue & politico-kino hallucination in a twilight haze of Marconian rule. Drawing on notes, I had a few loose essays by Alphonso Lingis in my bag; a man who has slowly become something of an opening to thinking the complex elision between bodies in Coppola & Schroeter. 

Lingis is interested repeatedly in what occurs when bodies encounter systems much larger than themselves: state violence, international capitalism, tourism, military power, poverty, sexuality, illness & death. In Abuses, these encounters occur not as abstract problems of distributive justice but as physical confrontations as he through Manila, Latin America & other sites in which the circulation of capital & display of sovereign power are written directly on bodies. 

Lingis in no way attempts to resolve these situations into an immaculate or moral positionality; here the ethical problem is therefore not simply was this exploitation? It becomes, what does it mean to stand before another body when the very conditions of the encounter have already been organised by radically unequal powers? It rides that sentiment often by the extreme.

This leads me into the crux of the notes, namely what arrangements of bodies were required before the film could say anything at all in Coppola & how does this re-enactment mean on the level of corpses & nationalism. 

When a corpse plays another? Or when the Vietnamese refugee in Philippines does not simply signify Vietnamese suffering, he/she is hired. 

A Philippine soldier does not signify military power, since his military institution rents its machinery & Ifugao tribes-people do not merely signify Kurtz’s archaic kingdom but their actual rituals become extracted from one cultural situation & installed into another, in a play of truth. The same body can become communist, prisoner, victim, civilian or corpse; where the dead body has no defence against its subsequent appropriations, similarly, the corpse in Lingis is not just a sign of mortality but the absolute exposure of the body to others, a body from which sovereignty has departed. 

It had made me think of a passage in Carrion Body, Carrion Utterance, a chapter by Alphonso Lingis from The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common:

Every discourse among interlocutors is a struggle against outsiders, those who emit interference & equivocation, who have an interest in that the communication does not take place. But in the measure that communication does take place & that statements are established as true, it designates outsiders as not making sense, as mystified, mad, or brutish & it delivers them over to violence.

Lingis' subjectivity is never substantively self-contained, as the body is continuously invaded by what is foreign to it be that language, desire, bacteria, food, other bodies, social codes or morals, technologies or climates & political organisations as they come & go. 

***

The following are largely from my notes that were attempts to pen what was the dialogue. 

Scene begins. A man stands in a room, stiffly announces ‘an enemy is coming…strikers…strikers’ & ‘he is the enemy but we know he is a strong man & let him pass; we watch as he enters the temple’. 

A man enters, is allowed to pass through men with was appear to be spikes encircling him, everything is performed precisely as if informed 5 minutes prior. 

It is interspersed with Virginia R. Moreno, a poet & play-writer; she is figured here as a kind of high priestess, her spoken poetry becomes part of Schroeter’s filmic structure as she comes in & out often appearing as a total counter-weight to Imelda. 

Schroeter undertook research & consultations with Moreno & filmmaker Ishmael Bernal. Moreno subsequently became close friend of his, founding the University of the Philippines Film Center in 1976 during the period in which Schroeter came to the Philippines. 

Return to the room, wherein they the re-enactment has broken down & the disclosure of the economics of their involvement in the production is made clear: 

'We are paid 1 dollar for the first month, by the second month we are paid 2 dollars...then little more, they give us 4 dollars.'

 Schroeter later would come to describe Hollywood as the 'rear guard' of American military, a direct inference of Coppola's crew as an 'invaders' of the archipelago. 

A further testimony; 'I enjoyed taking part in the filming of *Apocalypse*, because they taught me how to operate & fire M16 & an M14 gun' & another: 'I was very happy to take part in *Apocalypse because there was a lot to see, & the food was very good.' 

Professional actors tell traditional myths while amateurs improvised scenes from their lives.

***

By 1976, the Philippines had been under martial law since September 1972 wherein nearly all political opposition was suppressed through arrests, detention, censorship & state violence. Marcos alongside the DND imposed no fee on the film production of Copolla’s & infamously the given use of any military equipment; including 20 Huey helicopters, military personnel. Requiring only that the helicopters be called back at any time, in the government’s fight against its own Communists & separatist. As American capital arrives in a former American colony governed by a US-aligned dictatorship, the production could only become ‘Vietnam’ by the transformation of another Southeast Asian country into the American imaginary of Vietnam. A film attempting to represent ‘the horror’ reaches a point at which simulated death is judged insufficient & actual dead bodies enter its material environment; the corpse ceases to function as the boundary beyond representation & production design. 

At what point does a production like Apocalypse Now cease to function simply as a film, & begin to resemble a temporary nation-state or an enormous cultural-industrial apparatus?Testimonies from Martin Sheen describes discovering that some of the corpses brought onto the compound were not props at all but actual human cadavers acquired for the production, the incident itself acquired a second cinematic existence because it was discussed during the making of Hearts of Darkness, according to co-director Fax Bahr, Coppola did not want the sequence included in the documentary. Contemporary reporting describes the production as having become, in the surrounding countryside, something resembling both an invading army & an inexhaustible source of American money & endangered visionary; at once obsessive & unstable whilst being financially imperilled but willing to descend into the material of the film for its own sake. Here, any suffering of the auteur conceals an unequal distribution of actual danger, Coppola's mortgaged property, suicidal thoughts or artistic exhaustion become the dramaturgy of Apocalypse Now's production. 

The Last Pioneer of Hanoi. 

TBC

Notes on Outside (draft/unfinished)

 

In my dreams, I imagine Merlin Carpenter dressed in a Celine bathrobe atop a slow moving Voro motorised scooter. The types you seen men with crash helmets with bunny ears attached speeding upward of 60 miles near E & C in shorts. Merlin is not this type but a torn copy. uk2uk playing out the JBL.  A luxury Celine bathrobe coat (such as a double-face cashmere or wool-blend outerwear style) typically costs between £4,200 and £5,000, so wearing outside Tunnel Avenue in Deep South London, is something akin to going really fast with bunny ears near E & C. We all die, eventually. Anyway, I saw him once without the Celine at Historical Materialism and wondered. I thought it all died with Terry Atkinson. But it appears alive and well, well. But then the following year it was the police show at dependence. So no change. Anyway, so the conference was 2012, I recall Sutherland & Bonney in mutiny over militant poetics, early visions of the impervious intelligence of Marina Vishmidt & a fondly the general agitation of a recently incantation of rage that filled the rooms. 

Art institutions were able to be stripped, loaded into the iganmity of international student fees & that was that. It was said as much after Variant had collapse in Scotland which trundled down to London for a last blow out. Sometimes I do press the penis pills on Mute magazine just to see. Real Junk Subjectivity. So, Merlin sits down and write a Marxist text. Who's in his corner, the shadowy glimmer of Kelsey (others) & some South American mathematicians. Time for Trance. Why write it, Sternberg called? Light blue cover, bring down the Institut für Kunstkritik, settle a few scores...kick a few heads. 

I guess the sort of negative, anti-programmatic Marxism with a crypto-Kantian ethics of mediated freedom needs to find a home & the aggressive gestures of early-’80s neo-expressionism racialised/abjectified caused a problem for Simon. Hence why The OPENING offers some prevarication on the terms of a celebrated, provocative series. Penis pills never came. Pure junk subjectivity. Aggressive slogans, insults, or inside-jokes directly onto the blank walls and canvases. But before, much before that Northerner did it. Calling your own gallerist TOTAL SWINE is niche, but ultimately reperforms the notion of bite the hand that feeds or contains its own recuperation in advance.

TOTAL BEUYS is good, or was it BAD BEUYS. DIE COLLECTOR SCUM. Also good. It's eventuation preordains the humor but it occupies both sides. In that, the collector that owns it owns their own insult, occupies it almost as a silken cravat speckled with the shit of another persons bag-dog. But I am not here to write about the paintings that seem to operate as the theoretical subplot to the essay, which you can read for yourself and come to your own finisher. If you can get through the trance-stuff. I was pushed into TOTAL KANT, but then I thought maybe TOTAL KANTIANISM is really useful. As in, maybe that occupies some of the ideas. TOTAL KANT. 

I was thinking that “total Kantianism” could describe a position in which freedom becomes almost entirely noumenal, formal, and self-legislating. I think this is what Merlin wants. I might be wrong. As in, for Merlin capital becomes the transcendental condition of possible social appearance, while “trance” occupies the position of an unknowable noumenal outside. Freedom through non-coincidence. Freedom exists only when an action does not coincide completely with its stated meaning, assigned function, institutional location or capitalist use. 

Sometimes I press the penis pills on Mute magazine just to see.

But the essay also does contains a genuine Marxian correction in a few ways. Kelsey in the corner. Its strongest point is that not every exploited, creative or socially useful activity produces surplus value. Hence the point of the Opening, I guess. Its larger speculative architecture, however, turns that correction into an almost metaphysical division between value and an impossible outside. This is where several of its contradictions originate. 

***

MC collapses these heterogeneous situations into the ontology of “art.” The Opening does not simply exploit an audience’s “energy.” It theatrically confuses production, circulation and consumption; exhibition opening, normally a moment of display and social circulation, is presented as the place where the painting is produced. The essay even says that trance “does not exist,” yet assigns it enormous structural importance. 

That is very close to a noumenal object: inaccessible in itself but necessary for delimiting the phenomenal field. The only remaining freedom is indirect: coded transit, displacement, strategic falsity and the formation or destruction of groups. Carpenter has replaced Kant’s transcendental subject with capital and relocated freedom into a radically negative, unpresentable outside. 

***

Proposing itself as a hyperliberal residue, this is where his 'revolutionary subject' (he has one) begins to resemble a sovereign operator who enters, manipulates and leaves arrangements while refusing capture by them. Leaving them is the most important aspect in this list. It must be left. “Make Your Own Life“, 2006 by Merlin Carpenter. The artist asked the ICA Philadelphia, the original venue for this exhibition, to provide him with $4,000 cash. The artist then went on a shopping spree consuming luxurious goods and services, with only the receipts and empty shopping bags exhibited. Carpenter's revolutionary subject starts strangely resembling the liberal sovereign individual that Marxism is supposed to have overcome. The subject can enter arrangements, manipulate them, exploit their possibilities and leave before they solidify into determination.

Institutions, traditions, durable solidarities and historical obligations become dangers because they might crystallise into control. He converts value into an all-determining metaphysical plane. Everything outside it becomes either unreal or a tool of control. Art is then stripped of its contradictory material specificity: different forms of artistic employment, ownership, production, circulation and reception are flattened into a single cultural-management function. The noumenal outside has to remain inaccessible because the instant “trance” acquires positive content—this community, this politics, this institution, this revolutionary programme—it becomes another determination and therefore another potential mechanism of capture.

***

Capital is no longer a contradictory social relation reproduced through particular institutions and struggles but instead it becomes a transcendental apparatus preceding every possible action. Once that happens, political freedom can survive only as an encrypted gesture from an impossible outside. The final irony is severe though, as Merlin begins by criticising art-world theory for wrongly turning every form of social life into productive labour. He ends by turning every form of cultural appearance into control. One totalisation has merely replaced another.  

I guess now, after all those years I realised why he was swooping through the halls at HM. Knock Knock. I think it's the penis pills. 

Post-Blairism, Big Society, Compassion, One Nationers & Working Death (redraft/unfinished)

Post-Blairism, Big Society, Compassion, One Nationers & Working Death

(Draft)

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.

Lauren Berlant

For the One Nationers, New Labour had dramatically increased 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.

New Labour should therefore occupy a more structural position in this genealogy, rather than appearing merely as an interlude between Thatcherism and Cameronism. Cameron did not invent welfare conditionality, labour-market activation or the elevation of paid employment into the privileged measure of social inclusion; these principles were already embedded within New Labour’s communitarian authoritarianism. 

Under New Labour, the redistributionist understanding of unemployment as a consequence of inequality or insufficient employment was increasingly displaced by an integrationist emphasis on participation through paid work. At the same time, this became entangled with a moralising account of dependency, behaviour and family disorder. New Labour constructed this ideological and administrative bridge; Cameronism extended it under austerity, intensifying its punitive dimensions while theologising them through the moral language of responsibility, community, voluntarism and the Big Society.

Time to Button the Fuck 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. This ‘heating up’ would soon be keyed in by the chief architect of Universal Credit (IDS) via its means tested overhaul. Many other faces shrouded amid its creation, namely Iain Duncan Smith’s thinktank CSJ adjuncts Tim Montgomerie, Philippa Stroud, Baroness Stroud & American management consulting firm Oliver Wyman. 

The closed blinds are especially productive. Osborne converts an architectural surface into a moral diagnostic instrument. The claimant’s home is interpreted from outside: closed blinds become evidence of sleep, sleep of idleness, idleness of dependency, and dependency of defective character. It is a miniature of the sanctions regime—an administrative fantasy that claims to see through walls.

In addition to policy development, the CSJ has built an alliance of poverty fighting organisations that reverse social breakdown and transform communities. We believe that the surest way the Government can reverse social breakdown, and poverty is to enable such individuals, communities and voluntary groups to help themselves.

The CSJ was founded by Iain Duncan Smith in 2004, as the fulfilment of a promise made to Janice Dobbie, whose son had recently died from a drug overdose just after he was released from prison. This emerging underclass lives in communities consistently defined by five characteristics, which become the pathways to poverty: family breakdown; educational failure; drug and alcohol addiction; severe personal indebtedness; and economic dependency – caused by intergenerational worklessness.

The five-pronged attack would soon be undertaken by a brooding batch of ‘Compassionate Conservatives’ with heavy links to the Religious Right of Britain. Yet this right is less a sin- gle ideological bloc than an unstable convergence of Conservative theological traditions. One lineage descends from Anglican Tory conceptions of society as an inherited moral organism: a structure of reciprocal but unequal obligations joining family, parish, property, Church and nation. From Burkean association and Disraelian paternalism came the argument that property conferred duties, privilege required stewardship, and reform might be necessary to preserve authority. This was never egalitarian. Poverty appeared less as the consequence of exploitation than as a disturbance within an organic order, to be met through protection, discipline and charitable obligation. The poor entered this theology not as political agents but as objects of care, classification and moral supervision.

A second lineage passes through Anglican social theology and Philip Blond’s post-liberal Red Toryism. Influenced by Radical Orthodoxy, Catholic social thought and older traditions of guild, parish and associative life, Blond diagnosed the centralised welfare state and deregulated capitalism as expressions of the same liberal abstraction: one dissolving association through bureaucratic administration, the other through commodification, debt and monopoly. Red Toryism was not initially a theological defence of Thatcherism. It proposed dispersed property, reconstructed local economies and institutions between individual and state—a moral ecology of families, cooperatives, churches, mutuals, small businesses and civic associations. Its criticism of monopoly finance was genuine, even if its organic community could obscure class antagonism and naturalise inherited authority.

Cameronism drew from these traditions without fully belonging to either. From paternal Conservatism it borrowed duty, stewardship and the distinction between responsible and irresponsible conduct; from evangelical social action, dependency, family repair and personal transformation; from Red Toryism, association, localism and civil society. But these moral languages were joined to a fiscal programme with a markedly different destination. Blond’s attempt to restrain monopoly capitalism was attenuated while his critique of the central state was retained. Community survived; the economic redistribution that might make communal autonomy possible did not. An argument for dispersing economic power became a mechanism for dispersing public responsibility. Post-liberal theology supplied part of the language; evangelical social action supplied personnel and exemplary institutions; neoliberal government supplied the fiscal and administrative machinery.

The ‘brochure’ at some point refers to dynamic modelling—a method used extensively in the private sector. The model imports the epistemic authority of management consultancy into social security: poverty appears as a system of incentives to be optimised, while the claimant appears as a behavioural variable. Benefits are no longer ‘just a passive money dispenser; it is also an active player in determining whether people work’. And yet, Iain Duncan Smith, known as IDS from henceforth tended to prefer or imply that the ‘system’ is the thing that traps people into that dependency & that the insufficient drive to ‘remove oneself’ or ‘cancel/self-abolish’ from this ‘urge to depend’ is something like an overture of the New Labour ‘culture of excess’. So Big Society. 

IDS, Responsibility, Fairness & finally Compassion. Hard Working people & benefit dependents, ‘detoxification’ under Cameron. Cuts & 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’. Today the State is everpresent: either doing it for you, or telling you how to do it, or making sure you’re doing it their way. So BigSociety & its ‘centrist’ methodology of abstinence & hope were 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, immediately 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

Big Society did not reverse Thatcher’s denial of society. It reconstructed ‘society’ as an unpaid, morally disciplinary infrastructure through which the state could withdraw material provision while intensifying its supervision of the poor. Cameronism retained the individualising move but added a communitarian vocabulary: neighbourhoods, charities, churches, families, voluntary associations and Burkean ‘little platoons’. Thatcherite market liberalism, One Nation organicism, Christian service and personal transformation, New Labour activation, austerity’s fiscal withdrawal and an increasingly punitive administrative state could now inhabit the same programme. 

The paradox is crucial: the state became smaller as guarantor but more intrusive as examiner, assessor and sanctioning authority. The welfare state was not simply dismantled. Its protective arm was shortened while its examining finger was extended.

Its capacities were poured into a proliferating field of contractors, consultancies, charities, social enterprises, behavioural experts, philanthropic foundations and policy institutes. Think tanks did not straightforwardly remove power from government; they helped constitute a para-state in which policy could be conceived outside democratic institutions, returned to government as expert necessity, and implemented through contracts and financial incentives. Central provision was fragmented, but central power remained active in constructing markets, enforcing welfare conditionality, measuring outcomes and determining which organisations could deliver formerly public functions.

Public services were decomposed into measurable interventions; social needs became contractual outcomes; charities competed for commissioned work; investors were invited to treat social dysfunction as calculable risk and return. The Open Public Services White Paper crystallised the settlement by combining reduced expenditure, devolved responsibility and the opening of provision to new suppliers and financial instruments. What appeared as decentralisation was also a parcellised corporatisation of the social: profitable functions passed to private providers, reproductive burdens to households and voluntary labour, and a residual state remained to manage the risks the market would not absorb.

The theological force of this transformation lay in economic compulsion being recoded as moral agency. State withdrawal became vocation; unpaid substitution became service; conditionality became responsibility; exposure to the market became independence. The citizen was summoned as volunteer, entrepreneur, parent, worker, donor and self- regulating moral subject. Communities already deprived by austerity were expected to generate the social capacities that retrenchment was destroying, while financial and corporate actors entered newly opened domains of provision. The older paternal promise of protection remained chiefly as moral imagery. Its material obligations were evacuated. Cameronism did not resolve the contradiction between distributism and financial concen- tration, paternal obligation and fiscal abandonment, evangelical compassion and punitive conditionality, local autonomy and centrally imposed austerity. It made these contradic- tions operational: a moralised disaggregation of the state.

The political climate in the UK found a new 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 car- ried 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 conser- vatively 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:

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. 

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. 

These are not merely bureaucratic abbreviations. 

They show political violence passing through a purification process: moral assumptions become technical categories, categories become administrative instruments, and instruments act upon bodies. Now that’s music to my ears? 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 in- tensive 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 grandfa- ther 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 expe- rience 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 disconti- nous, 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 an- tagonism. 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 con- dition 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 enfran- chisement of the disenfranchised is rendered null & void? One answer is written into law. 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.’ But he's dead.