A brief tour of the rubble

I have essentially retired from politics - I probably won't vote in the European elections and quite possibly not even in the General Election. My political career ended in failure: I lost so many pub arguments with an ex-lefty college friend who broke liberal that I just gave up and retreated into a sort of embittered exile. Funny thing was, it felt like I'd seen most of it before, on Blogger, in the noughties, in the arguments we all used to have about the war, free markets, America, etc. The Decent Left, the Euston Manifesto, "if you were really left-wing, you'd actually support [war/free markets/America] because [clever-bollocks reason]". A lot of it was indeed familiar, but the practice was for nought. I held out for a bit, a few no-score draws, ten men behind the ball, but ultimately I was routed. I'm now just sitting around in the rubble.

I will give you a brief tour of the rubble. It's made up of little fragments, broken statues, charred fortifications, some ramparts offering pretty views. I've been unable to assemble the pieces into anything coherent, anything that functions, but if you are looking to construct a new worldview, you might find something of use that you are welcome to take with you. It might take a couple of posts, I'll try to break it up with some pictures.

"I'm socially liberal and economically liberal"

I don't trust this at all, it's always struck me as fishy. Same as "I'm an 18th Century Liberal" (great, you're just in time!).

The "and" is trying to do too much work. I'm not going to award you any points for being socially liberal. You don't get points just for not being racist, sexist or homophobic. So all you're really saying to me is, "I'm economically liberal". We can talk about that. But putting a rainbow decal on your economic liberalism isn't going to cut it with me.

Economic liberalism is basically about clever people making sure they are allowed to get rich

Letting clever people accumulate all the money is better than letting people whose dads stole it by force keep it, sure. But watching millionaires like Nick Clegg get all misty-eyed about liberty and the Magna Carta sticks in the craw a little.

What do you mean by "socially liberal", exactly?

That race/gender/sexuality should be no handicap to working within the liberal-rational system, or that there might be other systems and worldviews - other rationalities?

1. Left 2. Conservative 3. Liberal

I guess what I'm really ranking here is the plan for looking after the poor.

1. Some form of solidarity
2. Noblesse oblige
3. Free people pursuing their rational self-interest and it all just sort of coming out in the wash

The first one is vague, I'll grant you, but the third one is obviously a mental utopian fantasy. The second one at least involves an element of care.

There's an element of Oxbridge snobbery in the Left -> Liberal movement

Look at this picture:

Cringeworthy, right? Who wants to keep this kind of company? Even a few steps up, the Guardian columnists, social justice bloggers, "community spokespeople" - such earnestness, such self-satisfaction, so many errors made. Trenton Oldfield! Do you really want to be defending these people at dinner parties? Why can't that nice man Tony Blair come back and make us feel respectable for being lefties again?

Well I would just ask - is a 19-year-old UCL girl holding a po-faced placard and Instragramming herself really a good enough reason to go all contrarian and end up, in the name of "cleaning house", just adopting every liberal counter-argument to lefty dogma you can lay your hands on? Is that how you treat all the members of your family?

The Left is doomed barring a major and violent crisis

People just aren't really into solidarity anymore, and it's difficult for me to imagine how you construct a left politics in a post-solidarity world (other than just a guerilla, oppositional politics).

"Deliberative" democracy is a dangerous sham

I want us to be able to choose our leaders, but I don't think I really believe in the "deliberative democracy" model, where we all apparently come together in the public sphere as disinterested individuals (i.e. not representing class or other bloc interests) and see to it that the best argument carries the day. It's a dangerous fiction, dangerous even as an aspiration.

On a practical level, the clever people just get to stitch it up. But also they get to stitch it up while pretending that there are no "sides", that it's just for the common good. This is incredibly annoying. I don't see politics as a logistical problem to be solved and I don't trust clever people to take care of it just because they are clever. They cut corners.

By popular demand

This is the last stop on my tour of French sociologists, sadly, as Bourdieu, Latour and Hennion are the only ones I really tackled in any depth. But one guy who is impossible to avoid if you go to Goldsmiths is Michel Foucault.

I can only offer crumbs, half-remembered fragments. Pretend that we're in the pub.

1. His books are impenetrable, but his published lectures are lively and readable. His lectures on neoliberalism and governmentality from the College de France - I think 1979? - are a decent starting point. He admitted to an interviewer that he made his books impenetrable because it's the done thing in France.

2. A particularly famous book of his is Discipline and Punish, which opens with a graphic scene of a condemned man being quartered. It then considers Bentham's Panopticon prison. He argues that the notion of sovereignty shifted at some point in the 18th and 19th century from the sovereign king with the power of life and death, to this sort of, um, governmentality thing with the power of life. Government measuring mortality, economic statistics etc, probing and weighing the populace, figuring out the "right" level of this and that (e.g. pathologizing madness, he did a whole other book on that), and then inclucating those "right" levels or norms in us so that we, like Bentham's prisoners, discipline ourselves and our families, friends etc.

3. This shaping and discipling is very much of the body as well as the mind, he says. This notion basically underwrites a huge tranche of queer theory, with Judith Butler being the main thinker who adapted Foucault to contemporary American identity politics.

4. The notion of "governmentality", meanwhile, became a mainstay of critiques of neoliberalism - the notion that, in place of people telling us what to do, the system just sort of moulds us into atomistic entrepreneurs of the self who see everything in terms of markets - and thus provides no real tangible point of resistance, no obvious pricks to kick against. Particularly relevant to marketisation of public services - being an NHS "customer" rather than someone being cared for by the state.

5. That's all I've got time for, and pretty much all I remember. Again, not necessarily worth reading a lot of, but worth a Wikipedia because Foucault is such a big influence on the contemporary Left, i.e. there are a people on the Left whose whole mode of thought is based around Foucauldian concepts, and there are fundamental gaps between Left/Right (or particularly, Left/Liberal) arguments because of these incompatible worldviews, that I don't think gets picked up on very much.

Bruno Latour

I'm going to do at least a post a day up until the World Cup.

This is a quick one (bath filling now) on Bruno Latour, my favourite sociologist. I based my dissertation around some of his theories. I'll start with the conclusion, which is that he's really fun to watch delivering lectures. He makes being an academic look really good. Sorry I can't embed this, but check out this 3 min video - don't worry about the content, just check out his style:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x168gnv_fun-mooc-scientific-humanities_school

I've developed a serious city-crush on Paris over the last 12 months that I can't really explain, but yeah part of it I guess is the vision of being some kind of cool academic hanging out in the same bistros as Latour, Piketty etc, taking the Eurostar to deliver lectures at the LSE, drinking really good wine and eating three courses at every meal.

I'm not sure if there is any point in reading Latour if you are not a sociologist or a scientist, although Reassembling the Social is readable enough and the concepts can be easily applied to one's own interests. In fact Al's post about sauerkraut made me want to post about this - Latour's first major book was called The Pasteurisation of France. 

His main thing is about collapsing the distinction between the material and the social, and showing how our social relations are mediated by material things, which are not purely symbolic "mute intermediaries", but rather "mediators" with their own form of agency - a sort of non-intentional agency that allow them to distort, transform and mutate the "meaning" or the nature of the social relation that is flowing through them. This results in a sort of "slow sociology", where you are not allowed to explain things through concepts like "social forces" or "the rise of individualism" - it all has to be unpacked and reassembled first (hence the title).

Anyway you can Wikipedia the rest if you're interested - I just wanted to close by going back to what I wrote about Bourdieu a few posts ago. Bourdieu says our taste preferences are merely arbitrary weapons in a symbolic battlefield that is really about securing social distinction. Latour thinks this is total bullshit. The qualities of the thing itself have to have some input into how your taste is formed, he says, it's ridiculous to say otherwise. There may be symbolic attachments to certain things floating around in your head, but you can't just take the thing itself totally out of the equation.

As Latour ally Antoine Hennion argues, taste is an activity comprised of moments of attention to objects - tentative moments where we make ourselves passive to objects and allow them to work on us. He contrasts "drinking wine" with "drinking a wine" - i.e. drinking without really paying attention, versus doing that thing where you pause, sniff the wine, hold it on your tongue and have a little moment. In that moment, all of the stuff you've been told to think about wine is still there, but so is the wine itself.

It's an interesting model to use to think about taste, because it lets you account for the hipster/Guardian elements of taste without denying that we can actually genuinely like stuff.

ANYWAY what I'm taking forever to get to is that, unlike scholarship boy Bourdieu, Latour comes from a fairly privileged background - in fact, he comes from the Louis Latour winemaking family. I walked past him at the LSE after a lecture and wanted to ask him whether the wine thing was an influence on his "objects have agency too" notion - terrior, that kind of thing. But I decided not to, he was already talking to someone.

Text from my wife

"Have you thought about becoming a tree surgeon? Sam's son just did a 3 month course and was given a job for southwark council before the course ended- he works 7.30 to 2 weekdays and loves it. (He did a fine art degree at camberwell before) x"

I love being married.

Being a tree surgeon sounds OK, although I worry about chopping off my hand with a chainsaw or something, or like cutting off the branch I'm sitting on. I definitely feel like I want to work for the council, though. Something that would get me out and about would be nice as well. Maybe something to do with trains?

Frying a pork chop

I'm typing in the kitchen while frying a pork chop, I have about 18 mins. Trying to decide what to do today, a little light work on my outstanding commitments, stay at home all day watching Bruno Latour lectures on Youtube, or get out and about. It's a glorious day, I slightly hate feeling obliged to go for a walk, the sun is not my master, but I could do with a little exercise I guess, this stuff is good for you.

I walk all the time now, I love it - the Capital Ring was just a jumping off point for me. I tend to stick the Thames these days. If you want to look it up on a map, I live right next to New Cross Gate station, slightly to the east on Batavia Road. For a long time I would walk directly north up to the river, and then walk west towards civilisation, ending up at London Bridge. Or I would take the overground to Rotherhithe and walk west to Westminster Bridge, or maybe train to London Bridge and then walk to Deptford High Street and home.

But one day I went north to the river and headed east, all the way to the Thames Barrier. Fucking phenomenal. You head through Maritime Greenwich and then the whole west ridge of the Greenwich Peninsula is a deserted path with old rusting boats and shit. When you get near the top there is some actual industrial shit going on, like a fucking crane scooping up shit out of a boat and swinging it over the path, dumping it into some kind of refinery filled with these great big mounds of rubble, it's like the surface of the moon. Some good pics here. And then all the sudden you're outside the Millennium Dome!

I like to break off here and wander through the Greenwich Millennium Village, a sort of planned town they knocked up and haven't quite finished. It looks like a town in Holland or Germany, but kind of eerie because at the edge there is just wasteland where they haven't started building yet. I really want to talk to someone who lives there!

The river carries on with more industry, a yacht club, then the Thames barrier. You can cut back inland, kind of do a loop and go through Charlton. I love how the Charlton Athletic stadium just jumps out from behind a row of terraced housing. You can either get the train back from Charlton or walk all the way back into Greenwich along the A206. This is kind of a boring road but when you walk down it many times, you start to see a new frontier slowly opening up in East Greenwich for that thing I was talking about in an earlier post.

Pork chop then walk, yes that's the ticket.

Food bank

Enjoyed writing those mammoth posts yesterday but I wore myself out a bit, this one will be written in the time it takes the bath to fill!

I've been volunteering at a food bank in Forest Hill for a little over a year now - I signed up the day Thatcher died. Sort of as a gesture of surrender. I've always avoided volunteering because I was worried that I'd end up enjoying it and that it would "make me a better person". My gut instinct was that charity work should be incredibly tedious and humiliating - I can't justify this, it's just personal, maybe I can't trust myself, maybe it's something to do with the example of Jesus, drummed into me in school. But I had time on my hands and this seemed like such an unbelievably boring task that I couldn't possibly find it "fulfilling".

It was really boring the first few weeks and is still pretty boring (especially since Jess got a Friday shift in a shop and can't join me anymore), but I've really grown to like all of the middle-aged / elderly Christians who volunteer there. I talk to them about trains and cricket and shit like that, it's great. I'm pretty much the only non-Christian and the youngest there by about 20 years.

I'm part of the backroom staff, I don't actually deal with clients except when bringing out bags. It's a Trussell Trust food bank so it's all pretty well organised. Orders come in from the front, based on a fixed list. One person calls out the order item by item, the rest of us pick the items off the shelf, then it's bagged and weighed. My favourite ever job was light warehouse work so this is a bit like that.

The process is always far more slow and chaotic that it needs to be. The shelves are arranged in a horseshoe pattern, with the items arranged so as to correspond with the order of the list - i.e. top to bottom list = right to left on shelves. There are almost always more volunteers than we actually need so the back room is crowded. It seems obvious to me that a zonal marking system would make the most sense, with each volunteer stationed next to one shelf, feeding items into the centre. I was able to briefly introduce this early on, during a particularly busy day, but it fell apart and we soon reverted to the old system of bumping into each other and constantly being in each other's way. But of course I came to see that this inefficiency is part of the point - we're volunteering our time, so we don't need to be bound to imperatives of efficiency, we can just bumble around, fuck you capitalism and liberal rationality, Jesus looks kindly on us.

I also like how many of the volunteers have developed a "thing", some kind of self-appointed duty. One woman always makes sure that, if there are young children on an order, that we give full-fat milk not skimmed (clients can pick up three X three-day parcels a year - nine days of sustenance out of 365, probably not nutritionally significant.) Another guy is constantly fiddling with the items on the shelves, making sure the expiry dates are in right to left order. I'm trying to carve out a thing of discreetly checking the ethnicities of clients (it's given on the referral sheet) and using my deeply cosmopolitan Guardianista knowledge to give them culturally-appropriate food. It just passes the time.

People drop off some funny items too. Some are just amusingly posh, like pricey pates and terrines, fancy loose leaf teas etc. The other good one is when people very generously give us enormous 5kg bags of rice, or catering-sized gigantic tins of beans, that we then can't give away because they are too big. The current winner, however, is a box of bikini wax.

We've had one break-in but the biggest issue is mice - not only to they shit on the pasta, but they nibble into the milk cartons and then the milk spills out and gets all funky. I've been called in for mouse shit / gross milk cleaning detail twice now, which seems unfair because I'm not even going to Heaven.

Since I started going, food banks have been in the news a lot. It's really amusing how people seem very keen to have an opinion about them. They get under people's skin somehow, it's funny.

Theorising Gentrification Rage

In my last post I talked about how sociologists are developing increasingly niche theories and studies around the phenomenon of regeneration/gentrification, one of the major narratives of our time. Here is my attempt. 

(Like the previous post, it is not a moan about gentrification.)

Theory of gentrification rage

This theory seeks to explain why certain ways of producing space for the affluent, certain manifestations of gentrification, can make otherwise reasonable observers (such as myself) feel viscerally and disproportionately enraged, dismayed and appalled. 

I contrast this rage with the cold disapproval we might feel towards things like the bank bailout or zero-hour contracts - other instances of what critical sociologists might call capitalist or neoliberal exploitation, but can just as easily be understood as "the rich pushing other people around". (I stress from the outset that I am talking about the rage felt by observers of the process rather than its immediate victims, which is a whole different thing.)

I suggest that there are three key factors at play: an injury and two insults. The presence of one or two factors will create bemusement, cold disapproval, minor irritation etc, but when all three are combined, this explodes into full-blown gentrification rage.

1. Increased residential and commercial rents leading to economic displacement (INJURY)

This is relatively straightforward to conceptualise and quantitatively measure. The cause and effect is pretty clear. The injury can be understood as purely economic, or you can also factor in the negative social outcomes of disrupting existing community ties or dissipating "social capital".

2. Perceived pioneer or saviour complex of affluent incomers (INSULT)

These are established concepts in urban sociology. The "pioneer" complex refers to affluent newcomers who talk about and generally relate to their new area as though they've discovered an unknown land that they are very excited about, thus patronising the people who were already there. The "saviour" complex takes this one step further: affluent newcomers who believe that they are actively helping the area just by living there. 

Evidence of this is more qualitative, but still measurable. It might include a hipster cafe stressing its community credentials, ostentatious displays of local pride (e.g. "I heart Peckham" tote bags) by people who have lived locally for a relatively short time, flashy but low-commitment community projects e.g. the Big Lunch, hyperlocal blogging ("which shops would you like to see open up on Chatsworth Road? Discuss"), lots of Twittering and unfocused, uncritical enthusiasm about "exciting changes". Essentially, we’re talking about smugness.

3. Replacement of existing local businesses with "frivolous" new businesses (INSULT)

This is the innovative part of my theory and the most difficult to conceptualise and measure. I am suggesting here that the consumption practices of the affluent contain both "grown-up" and "frivolous" products and experiences. This opens a massive box of theoretical and methodological worms but I think it starts to explain why a lot of gentrification rage tends to focus on the more infantile affectations of some affluent newcomers. A certain frosted bakery item is the most obvious, if now clichéd symbol of this. People just don't seem to get quite as worked up about "grown-up" businesses opening in gentrifying neighbourhoods as they do about "frivolous" businesses. 

(a grown up business)

Operationalising the three-factor model

An empty retail unit on the high street of a socially mixed area is filled by a new business aimed at affluent newcomers. Different combinations of the three factors result in different reactions.

Rents same / grown-up business / no smug = mild surprise

Rents up / grown-up business / no smug = mild concern

Rents same / grown-up business / smug = bemusement, eye roll

Rents up / grown-up business / smug = irritation

Rents same / frivolous business / no smug = bemusement

Rents up / frivolous business / no smug = irritation

Rents same / frivolous business / smug = bemusement, eye roll

Rents up / frivolous business / smug = GENTRIFICATION RAGE

Problem: conceptualising the frivolous

This is the tricky bit. I admit that I’m basically saying that I don’t mind steakhouses, boutique hotels and Japanese restaurants opening near me, but I can’t stand poshed-up chippies, cushiony tat shops or twee cafes. A feminist rejoinder might be that my notion of the frivolous is gendered.  Bourdieu would just say my distinctions are totally arbitrary and that I’m a snob holding onto a certain Oxbridge-influenced vision of cultural quality. Hmm.

I’m still working on it, but some possible approaches of theorising the frivolous would be:

- If the expensive thing being sold is inherently expensive, like fine wine, haute cuisine or antique furniture, then it’s probably “grown up”. If they’ve taken an ordinary business like a grocers, pub, cafe or chippy and contrived a way to make it more expensive, then it’s probably frivolous (regardless of whether the end product offers value for money). It’s just a way of offering affluent people who like to think of themselves as cultured, but are not actually grown up enough to appreciate fine wine, haute cuisine etc (apologies to Swiss Toni), a chance to “Taste the Difference” in a safe, unthreatening environment.

- Along similar lines, one might ask whether the expensive thing is something that low-income people would pay for if they had the money, or if they at least recognise the thing as a legitimately high-end item or service. If so, it is probably “grown up”, or perhaps, “legitimate”. If the value/expense of the thing depends on obscure middle-class codes – elements of design and typeface, an arch knowingness, contrived scarcity/inconvenience - it is likely to be “frivolous”.

- If the business presents itself to customers in a matey, infantile manner, it’s a strong indication that it’s frivolous. If it treats you like an adult, it’s obviously grown up.

- If the business actually adds something new to the city as a whole (i.e. not just the neighbourhood) – an under-appreciated cuisine, or a genuinely new and useful product or service – it should probably get a pass.

(expensive fried chicken in Brixton)

Practical benefits of the theory

Gentrification will always piss some people off but the arguments that result from it always seem to go in circles. The tone of anti-gentrification rants is always the same, with the same litanies always deployed: ironic moustaches, the three-quid loaf, prams in pubs, soy lattes etc. They’re like a spasm.

Defenders, meanwhile, always make the same specious liberal rationalisations and faux-historical excuses: it’s just the free market, at least crime is down, can’t preserve neighbourhoods in aspic, cities thrive on change, waves of immigration, something about the Huguenots, or my personal favourite, “these terraces in Peckham were originally built for the middle classes!”

Thesis and antithesis stubbornly refuse to merge into any kind of synthesis. By isolating the factors underpinning gentrification rage and thinking about each of them in turn, perhaps both sides can move towards a more level-headed way of making sense of this thing. Some of the more gratuitous annoyances can be avoided, but also the criticism can become a bit more constructive. We may as well try, as the issue certainly isn't going away.

Postscript: frivolous people?

One might also consider whether the perceived frivolousness of the incomers themselves is a factor – not just what they consume, but also what they produce. The hate-figure in gentrification rage is sometimes a banker or lawyer, but more frequently a member of the “creative class” or a trust fund kid – i.e. people who go to work in trainers and don’t have “serious” jobs. In San Francisco, for example, the tech sector is particularly demonised – as though being priced out of your neighbourhood by an overpaid 25-year-old idiot who thinks he’s going to change the world with some meaningless app is more humiliating than being priced out by a 45-year-old evil banker or captain of industry. After all, where is there a purer mix of total frivolousness and total earnestness/smugness than in the tech sector?