True Lies - when is a trader not a trader?

My previous post concluded somewhat optimistically - perhaps even disingenuously so - that "No matter how crazy our world can seem at times – there are some things that still aren’t quite beyond parody.  (Yet.)"

We have since been confronted by the case of Alessio Rastani.

In case you haven't seen it, the BBC broadcast an interview earlier this week with a 'City trader', Alessio Rastani, who unexpectedly voiced some uncomfortable opinions.

When asked how we can avoid economic collapse in the Eurozone, his response was that his concern is how not how to resolve the problem, but how to profit from it - indeed, he does not perceive the situation as a problem that needs to be fixed at all.  "For most traders… we don't really care that much about how they're gonna fix the economy... our job is to make money from it.  Personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years...  I go to bed every night, and I dream of another recession."

 Interestingly he adds that "Anybody can... make money from a crash…  This isn't just for some people in the elite.  Anybody can make money.  It's an opportunity."  The triumph of the freedom delivered by the neoliberal dream. 

This somewhat touching remark reminds me of a time when my sister and brother both scribbled in blue permanent marker all over the piano when they were about four and five years old respectively.  When my mum went crazy at my brother – who, apart from being the elder of the two (should have known better), was usually the one responsible for such acts of mischief - he plaintively sobbed, "But I shared".  This wasn't designed to land my sister in trouble, but a genuine plea that he had been a good older brother by sharing the felt-tips.

Rastani’s logic also reminds me of a woman who once jumped in front of me in the toilet queue at Climate Camp.  When I pointed out that there was a queue, her response was to smile knowingly, and smugly explain the beauty of her autonomist anarchism - that, not only was she was free to jump in front of me in the queue - I too must realise my freedom to jump in front of others in the toilet queue.  Presumably this would lead to a utopian paradise where, just like on X-Factor, everyone has the opportunity to succeed in getting to piss, as long as they want it enough.

These anecdotes illustrate the difficulty with Rastani's ideology.  Not anyone can profit from a recession, because - by defintion - someone (indeed most people) will lose out, and end up with no job, a scribbled-on piano, or piss on their trousers.  At least my brother had the excuse that he was five. 

I digress.  The point about this incident isn't that his views are stupid and wrong;  anyone can see that.  The interesting thing was the response to the incident.

All over Twitter, and even in rightwing newspapers such as the Mail and the Telegraph - who would normally support the essential logic of Rastani's political standpoint - were accusations that the interview was a hoax.  Admittedly, there are strong physical similarities between Rastani and one of the Yes Men, the activist pranksters who have famously conducted hoax interviews on TV news in the past.

This was weird.  Because the view of the media seemed to be not that they were surprised by the content of his speech, but by the brutal honesty of it.  In other words, they acknowledge their habitual collusion in a political ideology that they recognised as appalling when held up to the light.  But, just like a market bubble, this narrative breaks down when one of the actors doesn't stick to their script, doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain to maintain a united front of brazenness.  The reason that characters like Rastani alarm the press is that their honesty isn't just self-destructive – it holds a mirror up to the whole sordid landscape.  In the words of Leonard Coen, everybody knows - and everybody knows that they know that we know. 

What compounded this weirdness was that the public consensus seemed to be that it didn't matter whether the interview was a hoax or not, since we all know that the sentiments expressed are those truly held by free marketeers in any case.  This constitutes not only an unflinching embrace of what Mark Fisher calls 'capitalist realism' – a permeating acceptance of the capitalist ideology on its own terms. 

It represents a total breakdown in the individual's ability to identify the difference between reality and fiction.  Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that people no longer see the point in making such a futile distinction.  That is, we not only live in a world where parody and reality are literally indistinguishable, it is no longer even meaningful to consider them as separate in principle - since they merely represent alternative stylistic approaches to a single narrative - that of the capitalist infiltration and domination of every aspect of society and the psyche.  This is surely the ultimate capitulation of society to the post-modern political and media culture. 

The icing on the cake came when it transpired that Rastani was neither truly a trader, nor a hoaxster.  He makes a living by speaking about the market to anyone who will pay him, while not actually conducting any significant trading himself.  he is a self-publicist, speaking in order that he may create the opportunity to speak some more, about an entity that is so nebulous one could continue to talk about it for years on end without ever saying anything about it.  This gloriously reflexive and cloudy status, an eloquent example of an existence somewhere between reality and fiction, is surely the perfect vindication of those who see no-difference between parody and truth. 

So maybe, whilst remaining disingenuously optimistic, the statement that "some things aren't beyond parody" is, contains a sense in which it is not entirely inaccurate after all.

Life neutral?

We all know about offsetting our carbon emissions to balance out the harmful effects of our consumptive lifestyles.  (As Joss Stone said during the 2007 Live Earth concert, “Plant a tree, it’s that easy…”  Ahem.)

So, what if you’re an arms dealer with a conscience (bear with me here), and you want to alleviate the consequences of selling bombs and killing people?

Help is at hand.  Life Neutral Solutions is a consultancy that allows arms companies to ‘offset’ the civilian deaths they cause, by sponsoring western families to have babies.

Luckily for everyone’s sanity, Life Neutral isn’t real.  It was a hoax perpetrated by activist group the Space Hijackers, in order to raise public awareness of the world’s largest arms fair (Defence Systems and Equipment International – ‘DSEi’), which takes place in East London every two years.

Arms dealers, military officials, and civil servants from around the globe, haunt the ExCel Centre to tout every conceivable tool of destruction available to modern military science.  In previous years, this has included banned cluster bombs and torture equipment.  Delegates include those from regimes with the worst records for human rights abuses.  It is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer, mirroring the £700m annual subsidy received by the UK arms industry.

But, despite priapic displays of military muscle – one worker from the neighbouring University of East London tweeted that the battleship HMS Dauntless was parked outside her office window – the event’s organisers are, unsurprisingly, keen to stay out of the media spotlight. There was almost zero press coverage of DSEi in the run-up to the exhibition.  During the 2009 arms fair, the host venue went as far as to erect signposts claiming that it was closed for refurbishment.

Enter the Space Hijackers.  A group of ‘anarchitects’ with a penchant for subverting the corporate domination of public space, we also have a history of resisting DSEi – notably in 2007, when the Hijackers bought a tank, drove it to the arms fair, and ‘auctioned’ it off to the public.

We thought that the merchants of death deserved to receive a little more attention for their activities, and used Life Neutral to provoke interest in the issue by stirring up a bit of controversy.  We simultaneously hoped to scratch away some of the banality that shrouds the defence industry, by parodying the absurdly hygienic and neutral corporate rhetoric.

While studying for a Masters a couple of years ago, one of my lectures was attended by a clique of half a dozen engineers from BAE Systems, who dropped by for a spot of CPD.  When the topic of environmental sustainability was raised, they entered into an earnest conversation with the lecturer about improving the eco-friendliness of their weaponry.  They were particularly interested in removing lead solder from the electronic circuitry in their missiles, to reduce the impact of heavy metal contamination of the soil in warzones.  (When I accidentally laughed, the lecturer and all the BAE staff turned and glared at me;  the lecturer said gravely, “This is a very serious issue”.)

The Hijackers took to the streets of Islington, to entice families into signing up for Life Neutral sponsorship.  After causing suitable outrage among the citizens of North London, we set our sights on wooing the media.  Eventually, a Life Neutral spokesman was invited to interview by the BBC World Service – only to be ‘outed’ as an activist prankster midway through the recording.  This bizarre conversation, which was broadcast on Friday 16 September, is now available online.

Far from being disappointed though, we were relieved to be rumbled as a hoax.  As well as getting an audience of thousands to hear about the arms fair for the first time, it proved that – no matter how crazy our world can seem at times – there are some things that still aren’t quite beyond parody.  (Yet.)


This is cross-posted from a piece that was first published at the Comment Factory.  

Riders in the abyss

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a tale of a haunting.  A house is infested with voids that exist between its walls;  the adventurer who enters them finds a parallel universe of eerie nothingness, which slowly but brutally consumes the inhabitant through its very lack of spatial and temporal substance.  These non-spaces are an affront to the ‘legitimate’ sites of domesticity, which characterise the rest of the ‘normal’ rooms in the house. 

The fear of being trapped in a parallel world, where one can see – but not be seen by – the familiar, is a potent one, which has been repeatedly articulated in popular culture.  Honey I Shrunk the Kids, 1960s TV series Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, all feature protagonists who can look in on the real world they have left behind, but who are invisible to their loved ones. 

Neverwhere is particularly important, because it draws an explicit political link between invisibility and powerlessness.  The unseen inhabitants of Gaiman’s ‘London Below’ represent the homeless and otherwise disenfranchised poor of the city, whose plight is ignored both by the authorities, and by individuals whose personal circumstances create them as ‘recognised’ citizens. 

It is also this expression of powerlessness that makes tales of being ignored such an important theme in children’s books, such as David McKee’s Not Now Bernard, which play on children’s sense of insignificance in an adult-dominated world. 

The same logic is seen in the shanty towns on the outskirts of cities in developing countries.  Vast groups of people dwell in un-titled properties, in places that are not bestowed with legitimacy by the authorities, and that rarely even feature on official maps. 

But every day, all urban cyclists become Bernard;  become Hopkirk;  are thrust into London Below, and into the abyss within the walls of the House of Leaves;  occupy uncharted shanty-territory.

Our mental constructions of road-space divide our streets into different regions.  One region is the large block of space in the middle of each lane, which is used predominantly by motor vehicles.   Collectively, motor vehicles dialectically create this space as legitimate, whilst individual drivers simultaneously become the beneficiaries of this legitimacy whenever they inhabit that space as they use the roads. 

The two other regions of the roads are the space between the kerb and the nearest car, and the gap between the cars in adjacent lanes.  In other words, these regions are defined as the spaces in between motor traffic;  not as a space in their own right, but as a region that lacks traffic. 

It is these regions – undocumented, unlegitimised, even non-extistent - that are, necessarily, inhabited by cyclists.  (They are given short shrift if they cycle in the middle of the lane;  besides, it is the area next to the kerb that contains the cycle lane.)

One of the main reasons given by motorists for cutting up, knocking over, and otherwise besmirching cyclists, is that they did not see them.  Public information campaigns urge motorists to be vigilant, and ‘look out for’ cyclists;  others entreat cyclists to make themselves more visible to motorists, either by making themselves brighter (through hi-vis apparel and lights), or by staying out of motorists’ blind spots. 

But until we collectively reconfigure the way in which we conceive the physical space of the roads, cyclists will, by definition, remain in a permanent blind spot.  Not a bind spot created by the positioning of wing-mirrors, but by inhabiting a part of the road that simply does not exist. 

Cycling through Kafka's Castle:

Why cyclists bend the rules

Motorists don’t like cyclists breaking the rules.  They argue that cyclists will only garner respect on the roads when they stop jumping reds and riding on the pavement.  Many cyclists take the reverse stance, demanding equal respect with motorists before they conform to the same strictures. 

This is a manifestation of the classic ‘rights vs responsibilities’ argument – the idea that your ‘right’ to express certain freedoms, and to be treated to a certain standard, should be in direct proportion to how well you discharge your ‘responsibility’ to behave as a good citizen.  

But this line of reasoning is misleading.  The idea that everyone should be expected to behave (and be treated) in the same way is based on the false assumption that everyone inhabits the same road.  They do not.  Motorists and cyclists have fundamentally different experiences of using the road, which inevitably leads them to develop very different road-use behaviours.  These are rarely examined outside the confines of moral notions of how either party should behave, obscuring the real issues at play.

It is a truism that our cities are designed for cars.  However, while a great deal has been written about the implications for city-wide mobility, consumption, class and gender, etc, little has been said about the environment within roads that distinguishes between their various inhabitants. 

When drivers get behind the wheel, they find themselves in a seamless landscape.  Roads all join up with each other.  Signs always point in the right direction.  Maps all show you exactly what roads you can go down, and which direction you can go in.  (Albeit with the odd glitch in new satnav technology in recent years.)  The most difficult obstacle encountered by motorists is probably finding where they are allowed to park, in the case of zones requiring residential permits – but even parking is usually pretty clearly signalled with lines painted on the roads. 

Cyclists are not afforded such luxuries.  Bike lanes frequently stop dead at physical obstructions, or just disappear without warning.  (This phenomenon is so prevalent that whole books have been published containing nothing but pictures of absurd cycle lane cock-ups.)  Blue signposts marked ‘Quiet route’ lead unwary cyclists into backstreet shortcuts – only to leave them stranded in the middle of nowhere when the breadcrumb trail of signs runs out.  Standard A-Z maps (as opposed to specialised bike lane maps) display areas prohibited to cars – but don’t include contra-flow cycle lanes down one-way streets, or alleys that cyclists may (legitimately) cut through.

Parking is a minefield.  Street cycle racks are rare, meaning that street furniture must first be scouted out, and then assessed for its probable legality (“Am I allowed to chain my bike to these railings?  How about these ones…?”);  its security (“Could my bike be lifted over the top of this sign…?”); and finally its physical availability, as you embark upon a grim bodily struggle with a street lamp that’s just too thick to wrap your lock around.

The upshot is that motorists never have to think about the space they move through.  They never have to make split-second decisions about how to interpret mixed messages about how they’re expected to drive along a particular road – everything is handed to them on a plate. 

Cyclists meanwhile are forced to constantly question how they are going to navigate an obstacle;  to second-guess whether a cycle lane that directs them from the road onto the pavement will lead to them being shouted at by pedestrians 50 yards down the line;   to query every few minutes what is being asked of them by the authorities, and whether they are responding in the correct way. 

Cars drive through cities designed by Euclid.  Cyclists ride through cities that were designed by MC Escher, and which are administered by Franz Kafka. 

This article is not a straightforward justification of law-breaking by people who have been hard done-by.  It is a critique of those who get surprised when cyclists behave as though they exist below the radar.

When a group of people inhabits a world that demands constant reflection on what behaviour is required of them, they inherently develop a more fluid and immediate form of cognitive and physical engagement with their surroundings.  This blurs – even transcends – the more bureaucratic elements of the laws that are designed to govern the presumably legitimate heirs of this landscape. 

Campus news

The campus of the university I work at has been chosen as the location for not one, but two films, to be shot this summer.

In one film, we'll be the set of the MI5 headquarters.  In the other, we are the scene of a futuristic secret-police headquarters  in some sort of Blade Runner dystopia....  Spot the connection?  When K-Punk described our campus as Ballardian, he wasn't wrong. 

In other news, these recent additions to some of our buildings appeared last week - a pleasing counterpoint to our very own No No No sign. 

Fennesz, Philip Jeck, and Old Apparatus

at St Pancras Parish Church, Friday 20 May 2011

St Pancras Parish Church provided a fitting backdrop for this evening’s artists;  its towering ceilings and marble columns, offset by the closeness of its mezzanine galleries, combined to create a space that imparted an imposing Georgian grandeur, yet with a sense of intimacy and warmth. 

First up were Old Apparatus, recent additions to Mala’s Deep Medi label, who gave a remarkably assured performance in what was only their third ever live show. 

Moving effortlessly between sonic themes with subtlety and poise, sounds would emerge, shift ground, and then recombine to coalesce into something new.  Distant rumbles, clicks and whirs, sinister hollow waves.  The listener would at points become suddenly aware that they had with been transported from a hazy dronescape, into a track with a powerful two-step beat, without quite knowing how, like a child being lifted from a car whilst asleep.

Despite a scarcity of explicit drum loops or bass lines, the audience’s active attention was held constantly by an innate sense of musicality, a pervading sense of rhythm and sonic cohesion.  In this way, Old Apparatus managed to pick out a delicate path between all-out asbtract drone, and something more akin to dubstep;   by carving out this space predominantly through the interweaving and development of different textures, the possibility of melody seemed almost crass.

One of the most interesting points in set was when a cacophony of unimagined factory assembly-lines emerge, with enough rhythm to satisfy rather than jar, but with enough robot complexity to make it tantalisingly difficult for the listener to pin down whether or not it forms exactly a ‘beat’. 

The music was tied together by visual projections, which were controlled live onstage.  But this was not the drab Winamp-skin wallpaper that is familiar to so many electronic artists - rather, it was deployed as an extra instrument.  Harsh arrays of sounds - metallic clacks, hisses, howls and clangs - suddenly swing sharply into cognitive focus, when imagery is introduced containing pistons, crank-shafts, jets of steam. 

And while this example may read on paper as a rather obvious juxtaposition, its effect is powerful.  This is particularly so in the case of the piston episode, because of the introduction of the image after the musical scene has already been set.  It feels somewhat like a naming of your extant but unspoken thought, in the same way that Doris Lessing describes the seductive potential of your character being ‘named’ by a suitor:  pinning down a vague sense that you had already been incubating but not assigned a category to, and haven’t even realised you have been incubating until this revelatory point. 

These hauntological motifs of Old Apparatus operate in the same territory as a Magnus Mills creation, or the creature in Wallace and Gromit’s ‘Grand Day Out’ – the figure is unknown, does not belong to an identifiable category, yet speaks to a half-understood aesthetic sensibility that sits just on the tip of the tongue; a semi-formed childhood memory; an itch that cannot be located.  Mark Fisher has described this unattainability as “The sonic equivalent of the 'corner of the retina' effect that the best ghost stories have famously achieved”.  Quatermass groans emanate from the boiler room of a Ballardian nightmare;  a Cronenberg photocopier stalks Jacob Epstein shadows across the derelict corridors of a Victorian workhouse. 

Philip Jeck contrasted the previous set with warm analogue tones, like butter melting on crumpets, his sound constructed entirely from live vinyl sampling and effects.

This was a more stately affair than the previous act, Jeck allowing himself time to linger over passages, savouring smooth trains of sound that extended over periods of several minutes, their momentum carried along by only the most delicate of tweaks.

As well as a suspicion that this is something that arrives with the confidence and comfortableness that arrives with age, there is an element of the sonic output here that arises from the physical apparatus of his methods.  While it may smack of generalisation and nostalgia, there is something intuitively calming about seeking out suitable records, homing in on just a few seconds-worth of material, and expanding on them for extended periods, experimenting to bring new perspectives the fore.  In the dexterity and care required to manipulate the vinyl, imperceptibly adjusting dials to hone their form like a woodturner, slowly yielding a pulsating seascape of sound.  

This suggestion could seem to be merely a fetishisation of ‘retro’ technology.  It is also tempting to dismiss the ‘calmness’ notion by pointing to flaring among turntablists.   We could also argue that vinyl sampling was merely a precursor to the ‘shuffle button’ generation, flitting through Youtube amputations like ADHD butterflies. 

But Jeck’s approach  is surely the antithesis of Youtube surfing.  Because, whereas Simon Reynolds writes about the effects of the proliferation of the world’s music at the click of a mouse making for commodification and ephemerality, Jeck’s music takes a small, carefully selected nugget and considers it, examines it, and (crucially) prolongs it over time – swimming against the current of the attenuation of our collective attention spans.

Christian Fennesz began his set in the well-trodden territory of effects-laden guitar loops.  It was pleasant;  but for all the fuzz and delay, he never managed to lift this element of his performance above the prosaic, and the set really stepped up a notch when he put down the guitar and picked up the laptop, and began to work from a broader palette.

The performance contained extensive passages of sublime mastery of his material, with overlapping themes sculpted and embellished upon.  His peak moment was when he stripped away all of the layers to zoom in on a single tone, which he then manipulated for several minutes, exploring its possibilities in detail, before re-expanding the scene by re-building the structure from the ground up. 

But, lacking the assured consistency of Jeck’s work, Fennesz hopped between sounds too readily, with an uneven, plum-pudding assortment of tricks.  Like the Robert Green of drone, you could never tell when he would rudely intrude upon your reverie with a too-obvious transition, or a pre-heated Ikea synth line. 

Fennesz established an even keel in the final third of the set though, with floating, glassy waves that approached something of a digital Jeck.  This was a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the evening, as we were enveloped by a luxuriantly textured fog;  a modernist lullaby;  a cold, yet soothing ambience that moulded perfectly to the flagstones and oak of our surroundings. 

Osama bin Laden

Casting my eye around today’s newspaper front pages, all of which announced yesterday’s death of Osama bin Laden, I wasn’t surprised to see some pretty salty headlines.  Though I do admit to being slightly surprised that quite so many were quite so extreme. 

While the New York Times demurely stated, ‘Bin Laden killed by US forces in Pakistan, Obama says, declaring justice has been done’, its city-mate the New York Post opted for the more striking ‘Got him!  Vengeance at last!  US nails the bastard'.  Called me old fashioned, but… two exclamation marks, and a swear-word, before your cornflakes?

The Chicago Sun-Times simply had ‘Dead’, while the Salt Lake Tribune subtly improved on this with ‘Dead.’  -  the finality of the full-stop giving a sense of closure, I feel.  Back in Blighty, wags at The Sun hit upon ‘Bin Bagged’.  Not to be outdone, and probably winning the award for the most unpleasant headline of the day, was the Daily News, with ‘Rot in hell’. 

Finally, I also stumbled upon David Icke’s website, which contains what appears to be an out-of-date reference to a much older story – claiming as it does that, ‘Osama bin Laden has been dead for years’.

But beyond the lurid front pages, the really surprising thing was that no news source I’ve seen has pointed out the fact that the operation was completely illegal from start to finish.

Invasion of Pakistan

The US military has been using unmanned drones to carry out unauthorised airstrikes in Pakistan for a number of years now, which not only demonstrate America’s hypocritical disdain for national sovereignty, but have killed hundreds of innocent civilians.  Until recently, complaints from the Pakistani authorities have been minimal, for two reasons – to maintain good relations with the US, and to avoid looking pathetic at home.  But over the last year, they’ve been increasingly vocal in their criticism of bombing raids on their soil.  

Yet in the aftermath of the Bin Laden operation, the latest of these strikes, the US army has remained unapologetic in confirming that the Pakistani government wasn’t even informed it was going to happen, let alone consulted about its planning.

To add insult to injury, one main strand of commentary to emerge over the last 24 hours – notably espoused by John Simpson on the BBC news – has been that serecy from Pakistan was justified, on the grounds that the situation raises implications of Pakistani incompetence, or even complicity in Bin Laden’s hiding. 

Assassination

Even in Iraq, that other great military adventure conducted in the face of the law, Saddam Hussein was captured and put on trial.  (Whatever citicisms people may have had regarding the legal process and the execution.) 

By contrast, in the bin Laden case, a summary execution was conducted by soldiers - and so brutally, that the photographs of body are too "gruesome" to be released.  No attempt was made to bring him to even the pretence of justice, despite the fact that the US army state he was unarmed when they found him.

Body dumped

The army has stated that his body was ‘buried at sea’, but with no apparent explanation.  According to a cursory look through an atlas, the assassination was about 800 miles from the nearest sea.  This means that it was in no way a convenient place to put him, but a deliberate mafia-style dumping. 

While it makes tactical sense (more on ‘tactics’ later) that no one would want a martyr's grave on their hands, this does seem an extraordinary move.  To kill someone without an arrest or a trial, and then to conceal the body without a coroner’s report is just plain suspicious.

Capitalist Realism

Mark Fisher’s 2009 book, 'Capitalist Realism', argues that in order to maintain a façade of credibility, capitalism requires the abstract character of the ‘referrent Other’ to believe its own lies.  Even if everyone knows that the system is mad and wrong, order can be maintained as long as no powerful figure publicly acknowledges this fact. 

For example, it doesn't matter that everyone knows the Blair government lied to us over Iraq, and that it was a war for oil - as long as no one in government admits that they lied, or that the war was indeed for oil.  As soon as someone admits the truth however, all hell will break loose – even though everyone knew the score already. 

Despite this, it does seem that governments these days are starting to ignore this code of conduct, and are becoming more blasé.  We are increasingly told: “Hello!  We’ve done something outrageous!  And we don’t care whether you like it or not!”  Increasingly it seems to be that powerful nations justify their actions on the basis of their tactical or even financial benefits, as opposed to whether they stand up to legal or moral scrutiny. 

Dario Fo once wrote of the ‘cultural burp’ – the state’s momentary acceptance of liability for some misdemeanour or other, which acts as a release-valve to alleviate a build-up of public anger, permitting a controlled outburst of rage, hence allowing normal service to resume the following week.  But Fo's momentary 'cultural burp' is slowly being replaced with a permanently open valve – a continuous admission, a perpetual ‘I-dare-you’ – which has the effect of a pressure hose on the synapses, numbing individuals to the extent that they can no longer express rage – merely bewilderment. 

After all, it is difficult to offer any other response, to a government which openly declares, "We're going to assassinate whoever we like, wherever we want to, no matter who gets trampled in the process, because it suits us, and because we can - and you can't stop us."

It is this brazen-ness that makes modernity so crazy-making, so exasperating, and so frequently beyond parody.  Satirical website The Onion today ran with the headline ‘Osama Bin Laden:  death of a motherfucker’.  When the spoof headline is milder than, and on the same plane of discourse as, dozens of real newspaper headlines, the world has surely eaten itself. 

Urban design for lout-litter

Amid scenes reminiscent of Tron Legacy, Barking and Dagenham Council have painted yellow lines on the pavement, which guide where pedestrians should walk in the street.  A council spokesperson explained why: “The lines were painted to provide a marked walkthrough for pedestrians outside the shops.” 

OK, so perhaps I should have used a milder word than ‘explained’.

These BBC news vox pops provide footage of some suitably disbelieving residents (or ‘shoppers’ as they’re described by the reporter).  “Why did they not put money into the hospitals… or schools?”  A boy of about 10 demurely notes, “They could have saved their money, to spend it on something more – constructive.”  (Also – listen to the outstanding three-second snippet at 1:25 of the video.  I dearly hope someone out there will sample this.  If you do Cassette Boy sound-bite mash-ups, please take heed.)

But the interesting thing about the council’s apparent non-explanation is that it makes a certain sort of sense when accompanied by a statement on the rest of the work they’re doing in the same road:  “A number of measures have been brought in to tidy up the shopping parade near the Harrow pub. The pavement has been power washed and the railings painted by the Community Payback Team.”

(Side-note – interesting to see that the slave labour, ritual humiliation, and brutish vengeance implicit in the deployment of the ‘Community payback team’ is not so much criticised, but used to justify this project, and is presented as prudent financial management in austere times.)

So, as the Londonist notes, the programme to ‘tidy up’ the area, also “Appears to also include tidying up the people using it”.

An extensive body of town planning literature describes how to design streets so as to ‘script’ the actions of those using them -  to subtly suggest behaviours to the public that are deemed to be desirable by the authorities.  (See especially ‘Secured by Design’.)

But it must be rare for a local authority to issue a public statement that explicitly equates pedestrians with litter. 

Debord spoke of the way that the modern city is organised to bureaucratise and alienate its inhabitants, whilst streamlining their movements and interactions to better facilitate the circulation of consumption.  But even in his sinister conception, this shaping of territory was seen as necessary to prevent a potentially dangerous working class from mobilising, and challenging the status quo.

These days, we aren’t even given the credit of being oppressed to deter an uprising – or even viewed as human at all.  We’re literally seen as street litter, and are swept up accordingly, making room for more efficient navigation and consumption of the city, in just the same way that one might try to carve out a trench to facilitate the orderly departure of a swarm of mice. 

Police adopt 'no frills' crime-fighting tactics after budget cuts

Sinister street furniture

My grandparents have always loved that old joke:  “When is a door not a door?”  (“I don’t know  - when is a door not a door...?”)  “When it’s ajar!”

So, when is a public bench not a public bench?  When it’s secretly a reinforced anti-terrorist bulkhead, designed to withstand the onslaught of a 7.5 tonne articulated lorry ploughing into it at 30 mph, being exhibited at the 'Counter Terror Expo 2011'. 

Marshalls (‘Creating better landscapes’), the creator of this dubious piece of kit, also charmingly boast that their ‘Giome’ planter “Provides an elegant solution for introducing planting to the public realm, coupled with exceptional levels of security”. 

At a time when street furniture is continuously being removed in a bid to purge undesirables from town centres, (notwithstanding the odd exception), we are once more reminded of our irrelevance in our own neighbourhoods.  The only remaining justification to install civic amenities is now unrelated to public benefit, which has become merely a serendipitous bonus.  The primary function of these objects is instead to prepare for Mad Max street-battles, waged between Transformers trucks and hapless Godzilla pagodas.

This visceral vision of future security-risks, re-imagining our cities as battle-fields, is not a response to experience of any previous terrorist modus operandi, but is conceived in the realm of Hollywood blockbusters. 

It is an escalation of a trend that follows New Labour’s ‘Secured by Design’ policy, whereby since 1998, plans for new building developments must receive approval from specialist police units, which encourage the inclusion of ‘security’ features – fences, CCTV, roller grilles, barbed wire, machine gun nests, that sort of thing.   

It also chimes with the Olympic plan to militarise London policing, using unmanned drones developed for use as spy-planes in Afghanistan, to patrol the skies in 2012 – and probably beyond. 

Marshalls’ grand vision of not just putting up benches, but ‘Creating better landscapes’ and the wholesale reconfiguration of public space, also fits perfectly with the mindset of the megalomaniac authors of urban regeneration, who feel the hand of history weighing heavy on their shoulders as their Olympic legacy is forged.

It’s not a big deal that people make benches that are hard.  But the logic behind their conception is indicative of serious underlying problems in the way that planners perceive cities, and the way that they intend to shape the places we live in the future.

Keep digging

There are no ‘frontline’ services - only services

Another day, another cuts announcement.  And still, those responsible repeat their tired mantra:  “Don’t worry – ‘frontline’ services won’t be affected!” 

Last week alone, we were told by the Police Minister that there are '“Immense opportunities” to make savings in the police force without hitting the frontline'.  Amid the Arts Council funding announcements last Wednesday, the Hulture Secretary said the government had “Limited cuts to frontline arts organisations”.   

(If anyone can tell me what a back-line arts organisation is, I'd love to hear from you.  I imagine a secret chamber of painters, working away by candle light, occasionally throwing darting glances towards their bolted, oak-studded door, lest an intruder catch sight of their secret labours;  suspiciously covering their work with crooked elbows, like at a primary school spelling test.)

So, what’s a ‘frontline’ service?  And how does it differ from any other service?

First, let’s ask why we have public services.  Is it to provide sufficient office-space to house a national surplus of swivel-chairs?  Is it to create more jobs, like some bizarre Magnus Mills creation?

Or is it to fulfil a specific requirement that society has deemed to be necessary? 

                                                                                     

If the answer is the latter, and public service institutions indeed exist to provide public services, why do they employ staff?  Presumably to do the work which is required to provide that service. 

The reason that the government has to say “ ’Frontline’ services will be unaffected”, is that this bit of wordplay distances the sentence from its ugly cousin, which is simply: “ ’Services’ will be unaffected”.  Which is palpably false – since if you sack anyone, it follows that the service they previously provided will now cease to exist, whether they be telephony services, toilet-cleaning services, or teaching services. 

Most public service organisations are, by nature, huge and complex.  That means that in order to get the whole job of the organisation done, they need to employ a lot of people, doing a variety of different jobs.  The justice system wouldn’t work if it only employed judges.  The NHS wouldn’t work if it only employed nurses. 

So, what are these extraneous services being provided by public service bodies that are not ‘frontline’ services?  Is the NHS due to sack 150 croupiers from its hospital casinos, deemed unnecessary in these times of austerity?  Are the 2’600 military jobs lost today the result of a personnel audit that uncovered a hitherto unknown network of lion-tamers, drawing full-time wages but contributing little to the war-effort?

Or, to put it another way – have you, or anyone you have ever known or met, ever worked anywhere (in the public, private, or any other sector), where you and your colleagues have all gathered round and said,  “You know what?  I don’t know why we employ those extra thousand people downstairs in C division.  If they went tomorrow, we’d never notice the difference.”?

The fact that redundancies are being justified using sneaky word games instead of reasoned discussion should tell us something.  The false dichotomy between ‘frontline’ services, and other – unnamed – services, implied to be so much dead skin, is a rotten trick.  And the joke is on those of us who have need of the services that are being so cavalierly thrown to the wolves. 

Response to David Willetts on feminism

David Willetts claimed yesterday that feminism has put men out of work, essentially making the age-old argument that ‘they’re taking our jobs’. 

When I first heard about the story, although not funny enough to be an April Fool, I did wonder if it had originated in the Daily Mash - because the story relies on precisely the reverse logic that characterises their satire.  

With that in mind, let’s see what we get if we make Willietts’s argument backwards:  “Ongoing social and economic gender inequality are manifestations of centuries of patriarchy, the majority of the ill-effects of which are borne by women.  Despite many years of feminist struggle, this imbalance has yet to be redressed.”  Which, far from being Daily Mash material, seems like a bit of a platitude.

Now, let’s invert the wording of Willetts’ argument and see what we get.  “Men should be helped to get more jobs, at the expense of women, who should be encouraged to stay at home as dependents.”  Which doesn’t sound quite as reasonable as his caveat that “It is delicate territory, because it is not a bad thing that women had these opportunities”.

And even this magnanimous caveat isn’t particularly reasonable, indicating as it does that that Willetts doesn’t see women as part of society, but as an external group trying to encroach on it.  

It is significant that Willetts is the Universities Minister, and his views speak volumes about the ideology behind the government’s education cuts.  They’re not about the economy, but about keeping people in their place.  He specifically associates current male unemployment with feminism’s success in broadening women’s access to education in the 1960s.  

It is clear that the Conservative agenda is to use the cuts, particularly those to education, as a tool to roll back the advances in the rights of women and other marginalised groups, which have been made over the last four decades. 

Meanwhile, Christina “I live at the grungy end of the King’s Road in Chelsea” Odone, while actually disagreeing  with Willetts, uses media coverage of his comments as a somewhat flimsy hook on which to hang a totally unrelated attack on feminism, opting for another old favourite - “feminists hate men”.  It is the tenuousness of the link that belies the motive for her attack. 

For all the rhetoric of being ‘In this together’, conservatives across the land continue to expose the real aims of their policies – and they’re unrelated to any exceptional circumstances implied by the language of financial ‘crisis’.  The goal is to protect the status quo – the same as it’s always been.

Pop will auto-eat

Auto-tuning in modern pop vocals

A great deal has been written on self-referential lyrics in modern music.  The way that fame and wealth are no longer merely one of the trappings of being a popular musician, but have become a distinct musical genre;  that the meta-narrative of the fact that the artist is singing / rapping has become the main subject of many of their songs.  Over the last few years, a similar trend has accompanied ‘auto-tuning’.

The means becomes the end

Auto-tuning is a piece of sound-effect software, invented to correct the pitch of errant notes in a sung melody.  For decades, it has been used a humble mechanism to assist in a song’s production, and is usually unobtrusive; only a highly trained ear would generally detect its presence.  

However, in recent years, auto-tuning has made the transition from being a tool – a peripheral meta-component of a song – to a style in its own right;  a signature part of the musical content, bordering on becoming a new instrument, or even its own genre.  This move to the centre-stage was achieved by using it not to softly adjust the pitch of a single note, but to harshly glitch between notes, creating a distinctive sound that quantises fluctuations in pitch into a robotised glissando.

The first singer to use auto-tuning as the focus of the song itself, was Cher, in ‘Believe’ (“Do you belie-^ee-ieve in life after love?”) in 1998. Since then, the use of ostentatious auto-tuning in pop songs has become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to cite key examples.  However, R’n’B star T-Pain has become particularly strongly associated with the sound – so much so, that an auto-tuning iPhone app is named after him.

Reification of art

With the increasing commodification of music, songs have increasingly been ‘presented’, just as television gameshows are presented, as opposed to being played.  It has become a cliché that singers are increasingly hooks on which to hang the sale of a commercial product, and that as a result, pop stars’ musical accomplishment takes a back seat to how photogenic they are.  The rise of auto-tuning then makes perfect sense, as a proportionate response to the rise of mediocrity.  

Bur what is interesting here is not auto-tuning’s increased deployment, but the way that it has become its own subject.  By brazenly parading the destruction of artistic merit, and simultaneously nullifying the merit attributed to art in the first place, the logic of auto-tuning comes full circle – eats itself (auto-eats) – the reification of art becomes both the mode of production and subject-matter of its usurper.  

Meanwhile, the way that auto-tuning removes the human character from a voice, wiping it clean of personality and expression, also fits well with the musical commodity as a replacement for creative human endeavour.  Where Walter Benjamin once spoke of the replicability of an artwork becoming more important than its artistic function, this has now been taken one step further – not only are songs reproducible (through CDs, MP3s, etc): so, in effect, are the singers, as they become interchangeable through the loss of their individual character. 

Reify everything

Auto-tuning has become refracted through the lens of internet pop-culture to produce the phenomenon of ‘auto-tuning everything’.  With the notable exception of the genre’s most celebrated exponents, ‘Auto-tune the News’ (who use the technique as a comedic device to produce topical parody songs, in the same way that Rory Bremner uses impersonation), auto-tuning everything tends to have the effect of reifying its subject-matter.  

 

For example, there is a Youtube video of a Barack Obama speech on healthcare, which has been auto-tuned by T-Pain.  This is utterly deleterious to any engagement with the content of Obama’s speech, stripping it of political intent and transforming into a purely sonic spectacle.  Likewise, a baby crying is no longer a visceral plea for affection, but a sound.  

In the visual arena, Vice magazine performed a similar trick in December 2010.  When they used the student demonstrations as a backdrop for a fashion shoot, they did something more destructive than expressing a view for or against the education cuts, or even subsuming some counter-cultural niche market within the capitalist mode of production:  they turned the demonstration, and its political meaning, into an image.  Not an image of something – just an image; an object in its own right, in isolation, untethered from any social critique or human experience.

This piece is not a criticism of auto-tuned music itself.  (Some of my best friends are auto-tuners.)  Even if it is argued that the unique personal qualities of the human voice distinguish it from other musical instruments, the auto-tuning question is not fundamentally different to the long history of the mechanisation of musical production.  Very few would criticise a musician for using electronic drums, or for using computer software for mastering tracks. 

The difference is that electronic beats are used because they sound interesting, not because of a surplus of beautiful but unskilled drummers.  So, even if we don't criticise auto-tuned music in its own right, it's still worth considering the self-referential, self-consuming and self-destructive tendencies, which lie in the origins of this genre's inception.