Back to the Future

Simon, via his own bloggige, bringing this article to attention, re '80s revivalisms as demo-trageting marketing trend. Which reminds me of why this is the one "decades blog" that I was always hard-pressed to ever contribute to.

 According to the marketing logic cited in the NYer article,  I should be winsomely nostalgic for the 1980s. It's the decade in which I went to high school, entered adulthood, finally got out of the shithole town I'd grown up in by eventually going off to college, & etc etc. Yet it's probably the one decade I feel the least the nostalgic about. Why? Because it was a totally shit decade. Because of the politics; because of the economics; because of all the shit music and shit fashion, all of which was inescapably hegemonic at the time due to the way media and culture worked in those days.

 All of which is why, quite frankly, I'm quite fine with seeing the decade being associated -- by way of the cited marketing campaigns -- the last place that most people would ever go to shop for electronics, a lowest-tier fast food chain, and a video game that is unanimously considered the worst in history. Seems only fitting.

Tears in rain (refix)

Catherine Lupton notes, in her monograph on Chris Marker, that Sans Soleil (1982) is replete with instances of the last moments of things. The one the film opens with, and returns to at the very end, is that of a shrine “dedicated to cats” in the suburbs of Tokyo: a couple, who have lost their cat, Tora, kneel and light incense before an altar covered in identical maneki neko statues, to “repair the web of time where it had been broken”. When Tora dies, we are told, it is vital that “death will call her by her right name”: Tora's being will disappear, will be forgotten, in the proper manner, and thereby her former being, her memory, will take its proper place and substance within the “web of time”. This almost archetypal structure is itself repeated throughout the film: in the people attending with flowers after the death of a panda in Tokyo Zoo; the incineration of dolls in a pit; the Dondo-Yaki ritual of burning the debris that accrues during the Japanese New Year celebrations; the purification ceremony performed by a Noro priestess on Hokkaido, of which there will be no more, following the devastation of the indigenous culture by the American occupation in World War II. We find here articulated a dialectical structure encapsulated in Krasna's aphorism that “Forgetting is not the opposite of remembering, but its lining."

 

This corresponds, interestingly, with Walter Benjamin's remarks on the question of happiness and the mémoire involontaire in Proust: “Is not the involuntary recollection […] much closer to what is called forgetting than what is usually called memory?” The substance of involuntary memory is lost in the unconscious until the moment of recollection; things must disappear in order to assume their place in the scheme of time. Benjamin explicitly connects this with the structure of awakening, and “the Copernican [...] turn in remembrance” outlined in The Arcades Project. Proust's work seeks to catch at the “few fringes of the carpet of lived existence, as woven into us by forgetting”. His paralysis, his entrapment in the vast labour of Á la recherche du temps perdu, stems from the difficulty, at that juncture, of the task described by Benjamin in 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', the production of “experience, as Bergson imagines it, in a synthetic way under today's social conditions”. The reclamation of “genuine historical experience [erfahrung]” in the context of “the alienating, blinding experience of large-scale industrialism” would be the recollection of modernity's dream-image, the utopian glimpses buried at the very beginning of that experience. The image stands on the threshold between “the world distorted in a state of similarity” – the memory-saturated world, that is, in which temporal correspondances reign, the intentionless, auratic world of dream – and the world of purposive action.

Stoppages punctuate Sans Soleil. In the Cape Verdean and Tokyo sequences images freeze for a handful of seconds: ; In the film's second half a number of sequences are composed of stills – the digression on a Japanese museum of erotic artefacts, the film's meander through Vertigo, that extracts images from the film whose Technicolor is rendered almost hallucinatory, as if lit from within. Marker's playing with stillness reminds us that forgetting is a part of the memory of the cinematic image: the individual film-frame, the material substrate of the image, is blocked in projection as many times as it is exposed, and half of the time in which the image appears on the screen is composed of darkness (persistence of vision permits us not to notice). When Krasna catches the gaze of a Cape Verde woman “for the 24^th of a second, the length of a film-frame”, the reminder of the disappearance that awaits either side of this moment of connection (a version, perhaps, of the classic Hollywood star close-up) is palpable; it must be reduced to a still, an image in Hayao Yamoneko's Zone, its immanent amnesia erased, in order to be preserved. The theme is recapitulated in the traveller from the future who forms the protagonist of Krasna's imagined film Sunless: in his time, we are told, nothing is forgotten; for this very reason, it is difficult for him to experience the reality of the past (our present) – “memory without forgetting would be memory anaesthetised”. It is through his understanding of forgetting that he comes to begin to remember the “long and painful pre-history” embodied in Mussorgsky's song-cycle, “towards which, slowly and heavily, he begins to walk”. The utopia of the unwounded image, visible to a vantage-point “outside of time”, is necessary but insufficient; only in its glimpses of “the poignancy of things” as they depart can memory move beyond itself, decentering from individual memory into the collective daylight of historical action.

 

Another image does something of this work. In Blade Runner – again, 1982 – Rachael (Sean Young) sits at Deckard's (Harrison Ford) piano. The score on the piano's music stand is almost entirely obscured by photographs, which proliferate on top of the piano body too. (The notion of a connection between the two films is reinforced by the fact that this scene is quoted in Marker's short film Cat Listening to Music, later included as an interlude in The Last Bolshevik (1993)). She scrutinises one – an ovoid sepia picture of a woman's face that bears a certain distant resemblance to hers. Scott here cuts to Rachael's face, as if in a reverse-angle reaction shot, urging us to compare the two. Earlier, Rachael presents Deckard with a photograph as proof of the authenticity of her memories. He responds scornfully by describing a number of her most private memories, showing that they do not belong to her. (Leon, too, collects photographs.) Rachael's experience has the reality of images inscribed in media. These are, notably, analogue media, representing a previous stage of technology purportedly closer to authenticity than the high deception of replicant production, or the vast array of screen images that flash up in the urban environment. The normal epistemological operation here is reversed: the photograph does not derive its reality from indexical reference to the diegetic 'reality' of the film's world; the filmic image can appeal to no 'deeper' reality, no noumena, beyond its own intensely mediated phenomenal being and the seductions of the densely layered appearances of Scott's shots. The very presence of these photographs in his apartment suggests that this is the case, too, for Deckard. Certainly Ford's withdrawn performance, in contrast to the then-still-fashionable Method style, suggests there is little to him except for the surface borrowed from media – the look, movement and voice of the film noir protagonist. He, like the replicants, is an image in a reality objectively composed of images, of mediations without origin. Like cinematic images, they pass through time – too quickly for the liking of Roy (Rutger Hauer), who seeks to extend their lifespan – into the darkness of amnesia, destined to become the waste of industry. Their momentary appearance, and hence their disappearance, is their reality. Thus the desperation with which Deckard pins Rachael against the wall, with which he tries to know her reality: “Put your hands on me.”

None of this is new, at least as points to be noted of that moment. By the early 1980s Baudrillard had already theorised the detachment of the symbolic economy from production, the image communing with itself in the elaborate exchange-rituals of “seduction”. The image-economy of early neoliberalism, of MTV and Keith Haring, Wild Style and Heaven 17, 'Borderline' and 'Club Tropicana', Dynasty and 'Ashes to Ashes', 'The Look of Love' and Denis Piel, in parallel and at times intertwined with the vast project of the restitution of class power carried out on either side of the Atlantic, is one of permanent dream. But as a reconceptualisation of the problem of postmodernity, in which mass leftist institutions and their double in the cinema begin to dissolve, this is at least possibly productive. The cinematic image enacts at once intense, sensual desire and the impossibility of the making-real of that desire's object-cause. The visual effects of Sans Soleil – primarily the VCS3 synthesizer – belong to the same sort of interstitial technologies that Scott used in the visual composition of Blade Runner, technologies presaging the universe of digital filmmaking and connecting it to early videogames. Yamaneko's Zone eerily anticipates not only the cloud-archives of web 2.0, of Youtube and streaming film and television, in which every action and image in the hegemonic field of mediation is preserved, rendered timeless and unchanging, but the digital-surrealist reworkings of 1980s image-technology of Cory Arcangel's Mario videos. The image's historicity – its connection to a material history in which the image's dream can be recollected and enacted – is erased: when Roy, in his final speech, laments “all those memories, gone, like tears in rain”, it is exactly this extinction to which the memory-image, technologised since the late 19th century, is now subjected.

The reality or unreality of the Zone's synthesized images is related to the question of the cinematic image in general. The Zone's images, Krasna says, are at least honest in the sense that “they declare themselves to be exactly that, images, not the portable and compact form an already inaccessible reality”. Thus the image is objectively determined by the social: society's opacity to the penetrative gaze of cinema reduces the image to one more appearance to be circulated, or, at best, removed from time. Sans Soleil explicitly relates these questions to the failure of the international revolutionary project of the 60s, the historical damage that infects the image. Sans Soleil preserves the moment of ambivalence, before the movement to digital, before the assertion of a new order in Geldof's Wembley and Nicaragua, in the south Atlantic and south Yorkshire. The account of the image summed up in the concept of the Zone is not the film's conclusion: there are, as we have seen, other ways of treating the image in the film; we should treat it, as a proposition, as a moment in the dialectic, even if one that moves in the direction of despair. As Laura Mulvey suggests in Death 24x a Second (2004), the cinema's movement from analogue to digital (as the medium of both production and preservation), the threatened “extinction” of film as a medium, “draws new attention to the index”, to the historical-epistemological questions inscribed in the origins of cinema. The memory of cinema comes into dreamy focus in the moment it is threatened with liquidation. Film theory in its postmodern phase Some film theory has sometimes responded by abandoning the index as part of a theory of the image, sometimes reinterpreting earlier work to suggest it is still relevant to the present situation. Miriam Hansen for example, in Cinema and Experience, argues that Benjamin's treatment of cinema's auratic possibilities should not necessarily “be limited to cinema based on celluloid film”.

As film's material reality becomes a historical relic, the image is historicised; cinema's historical actuality – and its betrayal – becomes ever more visible and important. Cinema is not deleted, liquified, but turned into a ruin. Damage, darkness, seep into the image. An analogy can be drawn with the process described by Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama: as with the turn to allegory, the dissolution of analogue film is the eruption of history into the indexical image. This goes some way to explaining what Edward Branigan calls Sans Soleil's air of “premature nostalgia”This is not quite to say that the film mourns cinema and its attendant historical potentialities – the air of tragedy comes five years earlier, in the grief-numbed close of A Grin Without A Cat, ending on the brink of the neoliberal experiment in Chile. This situation, Laura Mulvey writes, “has rendered the presence of the index anachronistic”; passing into memory, “[t]he mechanical, even banal presence of the photographic image as index takes on a new kind of resonance […] The index can now be valued in its relation to time and as a record of a fragment of inscribed reality that may be meaningless or indecipherable”. The critics who've queued up since his death last July to describe Marker as the cinematic laureate of network society, as the filmmaker as multimedia entrepreneur (in other words,as not-film-maker), as metaphysicist of failure, memory and nostalgia, refuse or fail to reckon with the material desires, the promise of undeadened time bound up in the archive, accumulating with panic since the 1980s, as a correlate of "the only post-religious ‘infinite’ permitted to matter".

An earlier version of this post appeared at A Scarlet Tracery

Realm of Dusk

A man, a hunched solitary, is standing at the far end of the long platform, beneath a bank of television screens that play back an idealized version of this necropolis junction: pearly, dim, soft. These pictures have the quality of transmissions from a diving bell in the deepest ocean trench. Eel-grass fronds of morbid light flare from the black hole of the tunnel: an extinct monster's last breath.

Iain Sinclair Downriver

Welcome to the Occupation (UK Edition)

"The Government accept the clear conclusions of Lord Stevens and Judge Cory that there was collusion. I want to reiterate the Government's apology in the House today. The Government are deeply sorry for what happened. Despite the clear conclusions of previous investigations and reports, there is still only limited information in the public domain. That is why my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and I have committed to establishing a further process to ensure that the truth is revealed."

Rt Hon Owen Paterson MP (2013), on the role of state involvement in the murder of Pat Finucane.

“After the publication of the Parker Report in March 1972, much publicity was given to the government statement that the use of hooding, the noise machine and the SD process would be 'discontinued', less, much less, publicity was given to Mr. Heath's statement at the same time that although the hooding might not be used, he must 'make it plain that interrogation in depth will continue.'”

John McGuffin, The Guineapigs (1981).

It is possible to watch a thread emerging in British film and television in the last decades of the 20^th century articulating a nameless anxiety about Britain’s role in Northern Ireland. The reaction is an interesting one because it is separate to conventional worries that Northern Irish terrorism could bleed over into England (The Long Good Friday), or ‘heart of darkness’ anxieties about Britain’s imperial presence in a region of alien strangeness (Harry’s Game). What this reaction was, expressed most fully in the conspiracy thrillers produced by the BBC and Channel 4, by two of Britain’s best writers for television, Troy Kennedy Martin, and Alan Bleasedale, is that Northern Ireland is a testing ground where practices of experimental torture and coercion can be applied before they are subjected on the real colonial subjects of the Empire: England and the English. Edge of Darkness and G.B.H. both deal in a similar reality where in the 1980s and 1990s a militarised state has emerged within Britain, governed by elites in the security service and politics. Northern Ireland represents a zone where this collusion can be see much more clearly than in Britain, and where the practices of the English establishment results in paranoia, bloodshed, and hatred.

Edge of Darkness is the story of a police detective who has a history in the sectarian conflicts of Northern Ireland, and shadowy dealings on behalf of the security services.  Craven’s job in Northen Ireland was to manage a network of touts, who relayed information to Craven who himself sent it on to MI6; Craven had a privileged position within the English machine, he has control over part of the flow of information and knows that in practice Northern Ireland is closer the India of the 19^th century: keep the factions playing off against each other and they’ll never know who they’re really fighting. Craven is withdrawn however from Northern Ireland, aware that the network of informers he left behind are all extremely likely to be uncovered and murdered. Craven is forced to confront his own role in the empire when one of his informers makes an unexpected reappearance and murders his daughter before his eyes. The rest of Edge of Darkness is a realisation for Craven that England, and the rest of the world, is Northern Ireland in macrocosm: alone he is only one point of contact for something bigger, more organised, and more ruthless, than anything he could have imagined. If the establishment (or elites, or empire, or security services, or Americans, or energy companies; the evil that Craven opposes is so pervasive and protean it cannot be named or truly understood) wishes to play with the lives of the natives, then there is perhaps nothing, as Craven discovers, that can be done to stop them. The forces Craven encounters in the UK are similar to the role he served in Northern Ireland; he is a missionary amongst heathens, bringing the gospel and the law to heathens in the manner of Henry Morton Stanley; when his begins to unravel the conspiracy of the collusion between politics and energy, he encounters missionaries of a greater gospel than his own, Neoliberalism. Great Britain has become the last outpost of the British Empire, its people the empire’s last subjects, and its politics the only game in town for the intelligence services.

Northern Ireland returns to haunt the end-of-history setting of G.B.H., with a security service plot to overthrow the elected socialist council leader of a northern city. G.B.H. is a tale from the end of history because it depicts the world post-apocalypse, post-1980s, after the great work of Neoliberalism was nearly complete: both main characters, Murray the socialist councillor, Nelson the old-labour teacher, are yesterday’s men next to the apolitical security service operators (you could say managers) who have been dispatched to cause chaos. The security service characters are incarnated Neoliberalism, cored-out of all real beliefs (Nelson’s and Murray’s political convictions are wavering, or clouded by personal ambitions or neuroses, but never allowed to be completely distinguished), faster, better organized, and better able to shape themselves to the needs of the job at hand (Neoliberalism demands flexibility and fluidity of its subjects) , changing roles and accents with ease (Murray and Nelson maintain their accents through the programme as a mark of their integrity; even Nelson’s middle class friend changes his accent, softened when attempting to romance one his students, choppy working class when with Nelson). The Northern Ireland analogy works well in G.B.H. because Murray for instance is depicted as being of Irish descent, with the addition that the Northern city is implied to be Liverpool. The intelligence agents, when they reveal their real nature, make many comparisons between working in England and working in Ireland: they are greatly displeasured to be once again working amongst, as the character Grendel describes them, “heathens.” There is no concern for England as a place, but as a colonized zone where the consequences of causing anarchy are summed up by Grendel’s triumphant grin as he, like Craven, abandons his native dupes (socialist henchmen attacking the city’s ethnic minorities) to be murdered by a mob of the city’s citizens. Britain is just somewhere that if you are prepared to submit yourself to the colonists, you can drive away from.

Northen Ireland today has assumed a very strange position in British culture. Everybody knows ‘something’ went on there, but despite this something being periodically fleshed out (the Stalker Inquiry, the Saville Report, the Pat Finucane review) the public are still unwilling to probe deeper. The tone taken towards the recent ‘flag riots’ is very much one of “why, I thought all of this had been sorted out years ago,” with an added “the fucking peasants”, depending on one’s political sensibilities. This common-sense approach can be seen applied in the BBC tv movie Mo: the peace process is simply a process of getting two silly boys to sit down in front of level-headed but cookie Julie Walters and “grow a pair.” No death squads, no sensory deprivation, no collusion with terrorists, not in this account of Northern Ireland’s recent history (this will also be the definitive account of Iraq and Afghanistan around 10 years hence). ‘Occupy’ became a buzzword for the pseudo-socialists and activists a few years ago who organized themselves to seize territory from their perceived opponents, high finance and corrupt politicians. With Northern Ireland as an example they could perhaps better glimpse how power really works in Britain, how little regard the colonists have towards the colonized, and the brutality that is an everyday fact of the occupation.

All The Frightened People Running Home Before Dark

The last glimpse of a mainstream political party not assuming that Britain’s future lay in ‘the service economy’ (in general) and the City (in particular) was in 1988 when the Labour Party was doing its policy review after the defeat of 1987. The economic part of that review was done by a committee chaired by Bryan Gould MP. Gould represented a current within the Labour Party and wider labour movement at the time which was hostile to the bankers. It had concluded that the key structural conflict in Britain wasn’t between the classes, the Marxist view, but between the interests of the domestic and overseas sections of the economy; which in shorthand boiled down to the City on the one hand and manufacturing on the other. 1 This group included Neil Kinnock, as his 1986 book, Making Our Way, shows, and Bryan Gould, who was appointed by Kinnock to chair the committee on economic policy. Gould’s committee duly produced a detailed analysis of why the bankers had too much power and how to reduce it. 

But the Gould committee report was rejected by Neil Kinnock as soon as it was finished. Gould tells us that, just before the report was due to be published, a group of Labour MPs came to see him to try to get it stopped or modified. One of them was the then rising star of the back-benches, Tony Blair. This was 1988. Gould went on to stand against John Smith for the leadership of the party in 1992 and lost heavily. New Labour – at its core the capitulation to the financial sector– could be said to have begun there.  

We still don’t know why the Gould report was dumped. My guess would be that the group around Kinnock wanted to get elected more than they cared about the state of the British economy or the fate of its citizens; and having lost two general elections, decided that the bankers were too powerful to challenge. By this time – 1988/9 – the City had been largely sold off to American banks in the so-called big bang of 1986 and was well on its way to being an extension of Wall Street; and thus to be anti-City of London increasingly meant being perceived as anti-American. But for a while a Labour Party which was explicitly an anti-City of London party did seem a real prospect. For whatever reason, the policy review document on the economy was abandoned and Labour began the long process of making itself acceptable to the City of London – even though the City then was only about 2% of the British economy.

Gonna Be All The Rage In Those Fashionable Pages

Springtime For Joseph

"We shall not conceal from my lord that the silver has run out and the animal stocks are my Lord's! Nothing is left for our Lord but our carcasses and our farmland! Let us not perish before your eyes, both we and our farmland! Take possession of us and our farmland in return for bread, and we and our farmland will be slaves to Pharaoh. And give us seed, that we may live and not die! And that our farmland not turn to desert!" 

And Joseph took possession of all the farmland of Egypt for Pharoah, for each Egyptian sold his field, as the land became Pharaoh's. And he reduced them to servitude, town by town, from one end of the border of Egypt to the other.

The Book of Genesis, Ch. 47 

In primary school, our Headmistress would tell us stories from the Old Testament with a fair amount of pizzazz (I also enjoyed anecdotes about her colonial experiences - shooting elephants, 'house boys' and all). Although obviously religious, she wasn't insistent that we accepted those wild tales (or British hegemony for that matter). To my impressionable mind, they were as believable as Marvel comics; but no less interesting for that. All that domestic skullduggery, apocalyptic punishment, imperial cruelty and confusing morality was just what the doctor ordered after an hour of maths. The stories were often a cue to work on some DaDa-esque mural, or papier mache installations soaked in glitter, red paint and PVA glue. Being an 'arty' kid, that part was easy. It was the 'moral' of the stories that was the tricky part. As we cut out fuzzyfelt Assyrians or sellotaped a Tower of Babel together, my mind would wander; frequently confused about God's peculiar hang-ups and hissy fits. Like if He was so annoyed with "the wickedness of the Human creature", why did He have to drown all the other creatures too (even the kittens? A bit harsh, surely...)? And if building an Ark was so urgent, why did He make old Noah do it by himself? Or, why were those angels so incensed about the Sodomites dropping by, merry and keen to 'know them'? Talk about unfriendly! Unfortunately, our Headmistress ruined my mental picture of Jacob's wrestling match - he didn't look like Giant Haystacks in the book, and he was definitely wearing the wrong boots. That said, it didn't prevent some of us from chanting 'the countdown' when it sounded like Jake was on the ropes.

Anyway, my mind's wandering again; so I'll get to the point. The Bible character who irritated me the most was Jacob's son, Joseph. He of the Incredibly Boring Coat; whiny spoiled brat and apple of his father's eye, fulfilling his part of the bargain by snitching on his fellow shepherds. Frankly, I don't blame his nasty brothers for throwing him in a ditch. His 'righteous' career made Jacob's youthful con-jobs appear benign in comparison. After being sold into slavery, he ingratiates his way into his master's affections by behaving like the most irritating prefect to ever patrol a bike shed. Piously rejecting his master's wife's sexual advances as an "offense to God", she promptly has him thrown in prison; where he follows a supposedly inoffensive trajectory of back-stabbing and arse-kissing: "... and God was with Joseph and extended kindness to him, and granted him favour in the eyes of the prison-house warden" - he's definitely not Spartacus. Joseph manipulates his fellow slaves with some tabloid horoscope mumbo-jumbo, while driving up their productivity as an unpaid foreman ("are not solutions from God?" - do any recruitment agencies use that motto, I wonder?). He even gets a hapless inmate impaled, currying favour with Pharaoh. In short, he is the ultimate scab.

After Joseph brown-noses his way into being Pharaoh's personal trouble-shooter, reassuring his neurotic boss with further mumbo-jumbo, he emerges as a Biblical prototype of Milton Friedman. As the populace suffers devastating famine, Joseph seizes the opportunity to expropriate the 'best value' from the plight of Egypt and Canaan; a hostile takeover to consolidate a rentier monopoly and accumulate maximum surplus value from widespread starvation. Financializing the livestock, stockpiling the grain to increase its market value, demanding all the silver the starving populace can carry, enslaving the entire labour force, bonding them in inescapable debt, and confiscating their humble means of production: He's God's own 'shock doctrine' neoliberal. Even on his own terms he's a shitty economist. "Seven years of plenty" followed by "seven years of famine in all the lands" would make Norman Lamont look competent. Correctly predicting further famine doesn't let him off the hook either. It only confirms his insufferable smugness (making another nice little earner from it, it's his fault famine returns!). His claims to 'divine guidance' are dubious from the outset. His 'prophecies' have the smarmy, scheming, empty humility of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. The Big Guy Himself is tellingly muted throughout these chapters. Which may be why Joseph makes a point of keeping the Priesthood sweet, despite fucking over everyone else. They probably had the fraud's number before his balls dropped.

After gaining even more power from his trans-national 'shock treatment' solution, Joseph goes on to play creepy emotional games with his desperate, starving father. Then, as Jacob and kin hit absolute rock bottom, Joseph has the sheer gall to expect a grateful hug from them, and a blessing from the ailing father he's humiliated to exhaustion. I was disappointed the legendary wrestler didn't remind his son that he wasn't too old for a world-class ass-whuppin'; giving him something to actually cry about (Joseph's ostentatious tears of self-pity occur quite regularly). If Jacob 'got Biblical' on his son's ass, instead of rewarding him with a colourful coat, he could have saved the Egyptian working class years of agonising poverty. To add insult to injury, our 'hero' dies at the ripe old age of 110; surrounded by wealth, slaves, and needy relatives - decades after dramatically asking them "I'm not God, am I?" Did he even make it to human? For a character from Genesis, Joseph is curiously asexual. One can only hope it was due to him being a eunuch. With a career like his, the little shit definitely had it coming...

So, despite being a junior 'Bible-buff', I can't say Joseph was worth my crayon labour. Besides his odious character, it was quite a boring saga anyway. Why does Genesis devote twelve whole chapters to this twerp - more column inches than the creation of the universe? As people, moralistic business gurus are hardly interesting. They could sum themselves up in three sentences: I'm rich. I'm a cunt. The end. Which brings us to the 1980s. Along with my 'unorthodox' (?) appetite for Bible stories, I was also partial to musicals; an apparently rare taste among heterosexual males under 60. For all the film-buffery of the male blogosphere, you'd think the history of Hollywood was largely made up of cowboys, gangsters, noir, sci-fi or horror. But that merely reflects an outlook of frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails. As a child, I'd lap up any movie on TV; and back when very old movies dominated schedules, quite a few show tunes embedded their way into my consciousness. However, by the 80s, the musical - be it stage or screen - was in the doldrums; and no one was more responsible for this degradation than Baron Andrew Lloyd Webber: Anti-Christ Superstar, Vampire of the Opera. Even 'West End' became an ominous term following its conquest by the most tone-deaf songwriter of the late 20th century. He turned the most Utopian of genres into the stuff of nightmares.

In between celebrating Fascist regimes (from a country then having thousands 'disappeared' by another Fascist regime), and vandalising modernist poetry or The Greatest Story Ever Told, Baron Webber was quite vocal in his support for Mrs. Thatcher. Like any number of plutocratic creeps, claiming "she did wonderful things for this country" easily translated into "she did wonderful things for me". His generous Conservative Party donations are his own grateful tribute to Pharaoh. This of course was honoured in kind with a peerage, though as one of the richest people in the UK that would be inevitable. It's not just Tory tax policies he represents. Rupert Murdoch's recent problems remind us of the cultural 'contribution' that Thatcherism (and moreover, neoliberalism) made to society: The lowest common denominator for the maximum amount of profit, floating on a bubble of empty hype, inherited privilege, labour oppression, lazy conformity, market terrorism, and aggressive self-importance. Their class wouldn't settle for anything less. 

Loath as I am to judge a society according to taste, it's unavoidable considering Baron Webber's astronomical success. From the mid-70s onwards, his 'songs' were everywhere. Even people who could sing did versions of them. During the 80s, they flooded our ears like a Biblical deluge; as though we were suffering divine punishment for privatization and the Miner's Strike. That his cheap, nasty exploitation spectacles could be sold as a 'big night out' (on both sides of the Atlantic), laden with Tony and Olivier Awards, hundreds of millions in (tax-free) profits, and still turn big moolah via that most powerful medium - television - is too depressing to contemplate. Now he's maintaining theatrical hegemony via the sadistic bread and circuses of 'reality' TV, it's positively Dystopian. Those who wouldn't go near a theatre can watch desperate wannabes vying for his approval, as he sits in solemn judgement, upon a throne funded by regressive taxation. Theatre might be dying, but Baron Webber's tat certainly isn't. He too may make it to 110, surrounded by weeping slaves and the spoils of ill-gotten Empire; with the BBC's Grovel Correspondent tearfully reporting the funeral proceedings of a Great Briton.

Baron Webber's definitive 'boffo' sensation was Joseph's Technicolour Dreamcoat: An idiotic title for an idiotic show, about the most frigid creep to worm his way into the Old Testament. A character so tediously craven and sanctimonious, we can forget how ruthless he actually was. Dreamcoat sung to a decade when enclosure, neo-primitive accumulation, cronyism, profitable famine, illusory prosperity, financial imperialism, self-help snake oil, labour subjugation, legislated dispossession, moral fraud, and devotion to power for its own sake became openly celebrated from corner to corner. And make no mistake - like Baron Webber, it's still being celebrated. Somewhere right now, the career of the God's first management consultant is being reproduced with gaudy lights, tacky costumes and sub-literate hymns sang to packed auditoriums. It's happening in quite a few schools too (over 20,000 school and amateur productions); even in those too overworked for any other kind of storytelling. The show has proven to be so profitable, its institutionalization may be more assured than that of health, welfare, libraries, or any other public utility.

Lavishly depicting the authoritarian - but sycophantic - acquisition of power and wealth, paying lip service to dynastic 'family values' as an afterthought, Dreamcoat is the ideal tableau for an ideology drunk on its own bankruptcy; representing a class that encloses farmland into deserts and forces the peasantry into 'grateful' servitude. Render your wealth, resources, dignity, community and autonomy unto Pharaoh. If you're lucky, you can get a matinee, a hotel room and a ride to Oxford St. for a hundred or two. Who cares if you actually 'enjoy' Baron Webber's senile, inert pantomime? His side served it up; so consume it or go hungry - it's there. No Utopia on (or at) this stage. With bigger fish to fry, the ruling class washed its hands of any 'cultural responsibility' decades ago. That was just another pretension they downsized in the name of productivity. Let them eat Webber, Tory soothsayer of stage, screen and sickbag. The market's knackered 'invisible' hand carries on regardless, with a masturbation marathon of its own spectacle. They have no need to justify their mess either. Any dream will do.

Iron Age

The Icon Lady

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

- Marina Warner Monuments and Maidens  

"Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign. 

Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted."

(More here)

A Hill Of Keynes In This Crazy World

In the era of globalization of production and employment, the reserve army of labor has drastically expanded beyond national borders. According to a recent report by the International Labor Organization (ILO), between 1980 and 2007 the global labor force rose from 1.9 billion to 3.1 billion, a growth rate of 63 percent. Historical transition to capitalism in many less-developed parts of the world, which has led to the so-called de-peasantization, or proletarianization and urbanization, especially in countries such as China and India, is obviously a major source of the enlargement of the worldwide labor force, and its availability to global capital. The ILO report further shows that, worldwide, the ratio of the active (or employed) to reserve (or unemployed) army of labor is less than 50%, that is, more than half of the global labor force is unemployed. 

It is this huge and readily available pool of the unemployed, along with the ease of production anywhere in the world—not some abstract or evil intentions of “right-wing Republicans and wicked Neoliberals,” as Keynesians argue—that has forced the working class, especially in the US and other advanced capitalist countries, into submission: going along with the brutal austerity schemes of wage and benefit cuts, of layoffs and union busting, of part-time and contingency employment, and the like. Ruthless Neoliberal policies of the past several decades, by both Republican and Democratic parties, are more a product of the structural changes in the global capitalist production than their cause. This is not to say that economic policies do not matter; but that such policies should not be attributed simply to capricious decision, malicious intentions or conspiratorial schemes. 

It might be argued: “who cares what caused the unemployment? The fact is that it is a huge problem for millions; and why not simply replicate the Keynesian-type stimulus policies that were adopted in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II?” Indeed, this seems to be the view of most of the Keynesian economists and liberal policy makers. 

While prima facie this sounds like a reasonable suggestion, it suffers from the problem of issuing useless or ineffectual prescriptions based on inaccurate or flawed diagnoses. Not surprising, repeated Keynesian calls of the recent years for embarking on Keynesian-type stimulus packages in order to help end the recession and alleviate unemployment continue to sound hollow. For, under the changed conditions of production from national to global level, and in the absence of overwhelming political pressure from workers and other grassroots, there are simply no refills for Dr. Keynes’s prescriptions, which were issued on a national (not international or global) level, and under radically different socio-economic conditions—the solution now needs to be global.

The Dining Room in the Oil Rig

If there's a building which encapsulates in one structure what happened in Britain in the 1980s, and what afflicts it still, it's Lloyd's of London. Designed by Richard Rogers in 1979 and completed, just to coincide with the City's 'Big Bang' in 1986, it is usually interpreted in one of two completely inadequate ways. For architectural history, it's a monument to 'High-Tech', a style which arose in the mid-70s as a sort of last flicker from the white heat of the technological revolution, at the hands of currently ennobled, often American-trained architects - Baron Foster of Thames Bank, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Sir Michael Hopkins, Baron Rogers of Riverside. High-tech, or a version of it, has been the dominant form of architecture in the UK for the last two decades, though you can read a lot from the change in its functions - in the '70s most of the above were designing factories, now, with rare and telling exceptions, they design office blocks, cultural centres and luxury flats with a still residual 'industrial aesthetic'.

The other thing it is known as is a huge metallic embodiment of the Big Bang, a Thatcherite machine for underwriting in (it features on a Five Star sleeve, and a shop in the basement still sells Athena-style framed pictures of it in moody monochrome). Neither of these give any even slight indication of how monstrous, compelling and utterly fucked-up Lloyds is; the architectural critics can't talk about much more than the detailing, the anti-capitalists can't look beyond its (admittedly extremely unpleasant) function. In order to really capture it's weirdness you have to go inside. I've tried to get here for Open House weekend for most of the last decade, finally making it last month, with these people, the latter of whom took some of these photos.

One of the many things Lloyds is about is a strategy of tension between the two complimentary factions of the British ruling class. Before Rogers, the insurers were housed in a neoclassical building built as late as the '50s, contemporary with the Seagram Building - an embodiment of a practically unchanging British gentlemanly capitalism, resistant both to modernism and to swanky, brash American finance capitalism. On one level, Lloyds is Weinerisation to the nth degree. It houses one of the oldest institutions of the City of London, the insurance firm which can date itself to 1688 (neatly contemporary with the 'Glorious Revolution'), and it houses them in the most astonishing futurist structure ever erected in the UK. If it evokes any previously existing buildings of any kind, then they're almost always industrial - oil refineries, or the North Sea Oil Rigs which were built off the east coast of Scotland in the '70s, much beloved of high-tech architects. Both of these are visually striking typologies because of sheer utility, because their functional parts are in no way sheathed or hidden, and because the refining process requires the baffling, twisting intricacies of pipes and gantries. Like so many things with Lloyd's, you can just tick off the political-economic resonances - the oil boom that kept Thatcherism secure in its confrontations with the unions providing inadvertent inspiration for the aesthetic of the City itself at the exact point it was let off the leash.

Maybe this was some kind of unacknowledged appeasing of the gods of industry, paying tribute to it at the same time it was destroyed. It's also possible that Lloyds was and is especially thrilling for people who have never worked in a factory, the only other kind of place where services, pipes and ducts are habitually left so bare, in those places because 'nobody' is looking. Maybe. If there is a specific non-industrial built precedent, though, it's Rogers' earlier Pompidou Centre, the first of a very long and still unbroken line of non-specific cultural centres and tourist draws with wilfully spectacular architecture erected across Western cities. The 'Beaubourg' is often considered to be a '60s dream built, Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price's adaptable, anti-architectural 'Fun Palace' completed and then named after an anti-68 Gaullist. The 68ers immediately moved to disavow it, of course - the text So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg was the gauchistes' 'don't give me what I want because that's not it' response - but if it looks like a Fun Palace, quacks like a Fun Palace, etc. You can see where I'm going with this, right? An industrial aesthetic is used for FUN and then is used for CAPITAL. The finance-entertainment complex.

What makes visiting Lloyds such a bizarre experience, however, is seeing how the underwriters have conserved so many elements of their atavistic previous existence. These remnants are scattered around the new building, decontextualised fragments ripped from 1763, 1799, 1925 and 1958, rudely riveted onto the ducts and pipes. There's the antiquated uniforms worn by the service staff; the front facade of their 1920s offices is held up like a trophy on street level; inside, the Lutine Bell sits at the foot of 'The Room', more of which later; several paintings and bits of furnishings survive from previous buildings; and strangest of all, a complete 18th century dining room by Robert Adam was preserved and recreated. At first, it seems like these are tokens kept on a sort of reservation of gentlemanly capitalism in order to placate the old guard. After a while you realise that what is really happening here is more like a marriage, a reconciliation, a mockery of Wiener's idea that there should be any difference or hostility between the capitalism of gentlemen and the capitalism of industrialists. That comes about especially forcefully in The Room.

Agata mentions Koyaanisqatsi the first time she sees The Room, and that captures some of its sense of controlled, mechanised mania. It's an enormous, multi-storey concrete atrium dominated visually by two things, on an axis so that the link between the two is unavoidable. There is a web of criss-crossing escalators, which can take the client to the underwriter at speed. These align with the open-plan offices on every side, creating a sort of visual simulation of industrial activity. As you see all this it's hard to imagine that nothing is actually being produced here; the look of some putative industrial hub employed purely for the purposes of immaterial, literally speculative finance. The open floors and the dynamism of the escalators draw the eye straight away to the more sentimental of the assembled, decontextualised objects, the Lutine Bell itself. What you can see is a neoclassical rostrum housing the bell itself, made in the 1920s, mahogany and Corinthian columns, with an antiquated clock on top. The bell inside is rung when a member of the Royal Family dies, and on the rare occasions when a ship they have insured sinks, as was its original function. After that, look up, and you'll see a glass barrel-vaulted roof. You're in a gigantic '80s version of The Crystal Palace, the 1851 iron-and-glass fantasia that Martin Wiener considered British industrial capitalism's unsurpassed zenith. These two sentimental remnants are what they whole high-tech assemblage revolves around. Like the Gothicism of services on the facade, the Room is a quite ridiculously thrilling thing to behold; you have to catch your breath and remind yourself where you are. What this is.

With its glazed lifts, moving parts, girders, cranes, components all crammed into a tight, fierce, metallic mesh, Lloyds has always been a building that has (on me, at least) much the same shivers-down-spine effect as The Human League's 'Dancevision', or 'Strings of Life', or 'Trans-Europe Express': a mechanical sublime that sweeps away any residual humanist resistance with your willing participation. Fully aware of this, there's also a series of get-out-clauses left here by the architect. Rogers was and is a figure of the soft left; as a Labour Party peer, he'll have been one of those who were the NHS' unlikely last line of defence last week. The other stylistic influence here, one which Rogers draws attention to in his books, was the unbuilt projects of the early Soviet Union. The lifts shooting up and down the metal frame are taken from Leningradskaya Pravda; the overwhelming metal-on-metal rush of the street facade is taken from Iakov Chernikhov; the irregular, techno-Gothic approach to the skyscraper is from Ivan Leonidov. So add to the list of ironies the era when the USSR was considered to be capitalism's gravedigger being evoked on the eve of its suicide, for the purposes of the forces that would soon drag its territory into a ferocious gangster capitalism. Another get-out-clause is adaptability. The building is adorned at the top by fragments of the cranes used to construct it, as if to tell us that the thing is in flux; the floors, too, are moveable. The suggestion seems to be that one day it could all be made into something else by someone else. The building is about to be Grade 1 listed, so that's certainly not happening, pending another glorious revolution. Then there's the promise of an organic, reformed and reformist city, which made Rogers a 'New Labour consigliere', in which capacity he was probably the last major British architect to have any ideas about society whatsoever. From 1997 to 2010 the architect had a semi-governmental role advocating street life, compact cities, let's-be-like-Barcelona-or-Berlin-rather-than-fucking-Texas. But the Lloyds Building, no matter how astonishing it might be to look at as a passer-by, meets the street with a moat.

The real moment of madness in Lloyds is the Adam Room. While much of Lloyds evokes the more ruthless side of '80s cinema - a John Carpenter film, The Terminator, Robocop or Gremlins 2 could all be shot here - this place is pure Tarkovsky. It's the last scene of Solaris, where the alien intelligence re-creates the familial hearth. On the 11th floor, the high-tech corridors, with their Gigerish sculptural ceilings, suddenly meet a white concrete block. That concrete block is decorated with classical details. Lloyds is not generally thought to be postmodernism in the usual sense of irony and historical montage - in fact it's often presented instead as 'late modernism', a strident keeping-of-the-faith; Rogers' continuing role as antagonist to the Prince of Wales helps that presentation. Yet here's an absolutely pitch-perfect bit of pomo, a seemingly mocking, parodic reproduction of an Alexander Popish 18th century thrown into a completely alien context.

Walk into it, and you're as far into the heart of the establishment as a commoner is ever likely to get (one weekend, every September). The Adam Room, named after its designer, was originally part of Bowood House in Wiltshire, was commissioned by the first Earl of Sherborne, and is rammed so full of objets d'art that ten increasingly head-bangingly boring series of Antiques Roadshow could be built around Michael Aspel inspecting it piece-by-piece. The sensation it creates is of reaching the inner sanctum of the great parasite itself; all that outside is just for show, a display of how sprightly and modern and with-it we are, a delicate subterfuge, an elaborate joke about deindustrialisation where we can look at paintings of galleons while the shipyards are closed. In here, Lloyd's of London are the same organisation that built itself on the slave trade; it's a time-machine that physically brings Old Corruption back to the site of its inception. They play at modernisation, but always keep this place in reserve, are always able to return to it. We queue to get in outside the Palladian bunker, and then circle round the table for our allotted time.