Endless Growth

“Under capital, austerity is necessary.” (Escalate Collective, Salt, p.4)

The common commitment of the texts Springtime, Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible1, and The Occupation Cookbook2, which have been produced as responses to a series of struggles since 2008 – struggles against policy, struggles for space, for new ideas – is that they make use of assemblages of materials to try and simultaneously document, promote and develop new forms of resistance. While one struggles to make out easily recognisable formal political projects emerging from what is unsatisfactorily known as ‘this crisis’, all around there seems to be an incessant drive to document every small event. The pieces are typical of the proliferation of tactical documents; documents that collate the detritus from, rather than demonstrate the nature of, this unnameable. Conceding that even an analysis of detritus may help towards a praxis of change, this, to my mind, cannot be undertaken by mimicking in form the professional legislative ‘white paper’ or policy review. The famous dictum of song-writer and poet Joe Hill, “Don’t mourn, organise!”, can be recalibrated as “Organise your mourning”: these documents either mourn or organise, but, crucially, as of yet, our mourning remains unorganised. They are users’ guides that operate as quick overviews and re-bakings of old events, movements and motivations to flatten differences of time and space through positing possibly non-existent common motivations or effective forms. Is this a revolutionary tract or a funding proposal? Is it a measurably ‘outcome orientated’ revolutionary practise that would be most useful in this situation? This review is intended as a proposal towards a discourse of resistance that is beginning to resist mere resistance.

The narrative is clear now, every rant written, spoken or declaimed begins with its own version: the banking crisis of 2007/8 quickly became a series of world crises, a complex chain of spatial, institutional and temporal deflections which continues to lengthen, interlink and take the form of a steady inundation. The banking crisis is translatable into a public debt crisis; a US crisis into a European crisis; a public debt crisis has become a crisis of international finance; and this a crisis of international finance is quickly becoming, if it wasn’t already, a crisis of national and international democracy. Greece, Italy and Ireland are occupied by hostile bureaucrats. In our preparation for a decade of deepening economic depression, a deepening of the social effects of these crises should be expected, as should an ebb and flow of social and protest movements in response.

In a year in which so much ‘history’ seems to be taking place – to catch up with the short period of its claimed obliteration between 1989 and 2008 at the hands of what Mark Fisher outlines, in his 2009 book of the same name, as ‘Capitalist Realism’ – there are not only periodisations to be made, but spatialisations. It is the simultaneity of these events combined with their spatial and cultural reach that is so astounding, resulting in a sudden glut of spectacle and movement. For the majority of participants and commentators there is very little contemporary history to compare this with, they stand in amazement or resort to documentation. It should never be forgotten that our culture has a ready stock of the cynical and the superlative, and the amazed stance is a well learned one (as is that of the variably arrogant or cynical commentator) – and its deployment delays analysis. As with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the informed listener is presented with a comprehensive overview of the day’s events without context, daily (sometimes hourly) restating that these events are historically world-changing, and therefore beyond analysis. For example, debate around the alter-globalisation movements of the 1990s is insufficient, despite the similarity of the targets and sentiments. The 1960s is the ubiquitous reference, not only for advertising companies and pop singers but for protesters and commentators. It is now being reconfigured by the ugly fact that we are having to ‘re-live’, rather than simply remember, such complicated historical transitions.

What, it is asked, are the connections between Millbank Square, Puerta del Sol, Tahir Square, Zucotti Park, Paternoster Square? What does it signify that the age-old tactic of ‘occupation’ of public space has become so prevalent as identifiable and visible forms of resistance and protest? Under what circumstances are occupations politically effective, and with what implications?

This exploration will tend to function as a partial (incomplete and partisan) review of the techniques and justifications for operating an occupation, as outlined to a greater or lesser extent in a series of publications and drawing on subsequent interventions – most notably: Danny Hayward’s ‘Adventures in the Sausage Factory’3 published by Mute, and Salt4 by Escalate Collective. It will also draw on my own experience of the seven-month occupation at the University of Glasgow between February and August 2011, known since as the Free Hetherington.

Springtime

These texts – Springtime, Users Guide, Occupation Cookbook – and the manner in which their ideas are expressed, have now been overtaken by events. This is necessary and desirable; as forewords use to say in the future anterior tense: ‘May this book soon become redundant due to the abolition of these problems through struggle!’. When the student protests of 2010, emerging from the short invasion and occupation of Conservative Party HQ on November 10th, were largely put to rest with the passing of the fee hike in the Houses of Parliament on December 9th, many of the arguments produced as agitation became instantly outdated. For those involved, their struggle was immediately followed by more important events in the chain of escalations of popular unrest; the North African self-immolations which triggered a pan-Arab uprising on an unprecedented and unexpected scale. In the face of this example it must be insisted, if we are to have any hope, that the month of protest in Britain does not represent the limit of the reconfiguration of British education politics: the implications of events in the Middle East and North Africa could bring far reaching change. Similarly it is difficult to know what will become of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement, now that it is being referenced by Bruce Springsteen’s new album. Economic crises are as uneven in their development as growth. In the year after the publication of Springtime, a collection of journalism and essays previously published in pamphlets and various blogs, we see that many of their conjectures (“Simmering Greece” outlining the ‘troika’-led collapse of Greek democratic legitimacy, escalating action on US campuses) have now become reality, and grown to a new urgency. The deadly inevitability of the ‘capitalist realist’ construction of ‘no alternative’ and ‘the end of history’ no longer remains self-evident; we can see changes happening, we can see choices being made to achieve those changes however ‘tough’ they may be. Will another moment like ’68 emerge, where students in France were taken aback at how the edifice fell, like fruit rotted through except for the skin? The growing almanac of minor crises for the UK Government – pasties, police horses, corruption and bought legislation – are surely proxy conflicts masking a larger implicit logic that must become apparent? David Harvey anticipates change for all:

“Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes, of course. But at what cost? This question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political and geopolitical and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding ‘Yes it can’. This will, however, require the mass of the people to give generously of the fruits of their labour to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights) and to suffer environmental degradations galore… More than a little political repression, police violence and militarised state control will be required to stifle the ensuing unrest… The capitalist class cannot, if history is any guide, maintain its power without changing its character…”
(David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, p.215-216)

Springtime, edited by University of London Union president and sudden student leadership figure Clare Solomon, presents itself as a historical source-book, published before the dust has settled. It documents a series of stifled attempts to create an emerging mass mobilisation of students (prevented by not a little political repression). The volume’s impulse – to view documentation and collation as active a protest as any other – is typical of those, for whom transmission is always anterior to content, as they are long used to being bystanders instead of one amongst many agitators. Its temptation is to pre-emptively historicise, to transmit the idea of happening before knowing what is happening, to communicate rather than act upon history: in the case of Springtime it is as though the History has pre-empted the event. The inclusion of ‘flashback’ pieces from the 1960s by Eric Hobsbawn, Fritz Teufel and Ernest Mandel stand-in for any new analysis of the history of student radicalism – there is a radical edge to historical re-enactment, but it is the re-enactment of the impulse that is radical, not the reprinting of the articulation – and this is one assessment that will bear on the glut of (profitable?) publishing projects in the near future. However, the inclusion of Nina Power and Peter Hallward (including his blog posts from Cairo as a voice from outside the UK), who, along with Laurie Penny, Peter Osborne, Owen Hatherley and Owen Jones have emerged from the discontent of 2011 as an increasingly recognisable grouping of ‘citizen’-journalists/bloggers and academics, showing the emergence of newer voices. Owen Jones’s appearances on the weekly spectacle of UK ‘democracy’, Question Time, and his and Laurie Penny’s inclusion on other mainstream broadcast channels as tokens of a mostly unheard left-wing voice, is particularly interesting despite the condescension they are shown. This group can be found as initially emerging around the Middlesex University protests (including its occupation) prior to the UK general election in early 2010, when its Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy was closed. The “Con-Lib coalition’s aggressively philistine and class-driven rhetoric was amply anticipated by the Middlesex management” says Hatherley5.

More recently, two new texts have appeared that belong to an emerging and productive line of enquiry, self-consciously outlining the underlying situation and political topography on which a coming intervention might act. In January 2012 Escalate Collective, a writing and activist group associated with the University of London, produced the pamphlet Salt, demystifying the collapse of the logic of neoliberalism. Later that month Mute (tagline: “we would feast on those that would subdue us”) published Danny Hayward’s ‘Adventures in the Sausage Factory: a cursory overview of the university struggles, November 2010 – July 2011’. Where the earlier publications left me despondent, these subsequent texts represent an evolving, alternative critique that ought to be of use in coming months to understand the blasted landscape that the receding froth of the earlier wave of publications has left.

Leaderlessness?

Critiques must provide actionable ‘alternatives’ to the stances taken by contemporary representatives and leaders: that of the ineffectual or discredited role of official student representatives who so far, at the very least, have opposed any militant mobilisation; similarly, the positions of trade union leaders have tended towards the conservative; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, mainstream political leaders and their parties have only sought to capitalise on the current popular actions to continue their reactionary policies. This, even as, in the UK and the US, there appears to be a public questioning of some of the consequences of contemporary capitalism.

Even a cursory involvement in the current movements, whether it is the wave of ‘Occupy’ events or the student occupations of 2010/11, gives witness to a characteristic expression and advocacy of ‘leaderlessness’ – something not uniformly practised nor actually attained. Mistakenly, this confusion of ‘leaderlessness’ with declarations of ‘consensus’ (such as through subsequent evokings of a ‘99%’), has led to a disavowal of all hierarchy – viewed as being susceptible to co-option. However, on these flattened swamps of consensus there are bubbles rising.

The ‘Free Hetherington’, a seven month occupation at the University of Glasgow, more or less sincerely attempted (and never achieved) a non-hierarchical formation. Its focus on hierarchy involved continual attempts at the breaking down of accrued status and privilege, rather than seeking to attain the necessary platform – involving a level of hierarchy and leadership – from which effective actions could more quickly flow. The debate over who should speak, when and how, was frustrating for those who saw this as a ‘cultural’ issue irrelevant or subordinate to issues of revolutionary mobilisations and State power. The revolutionary groupings that involved themselves, and participated in these debates, did so principally by their ascetic removal of political tactics such as co-option. This was perhaps the first prominent grass roots political event I have experienced where the question would regularly be asked: ‘Where is the Socialist Workers Party?’ This is not to say that such groupings weren’t influential, but it was more their non-Centralist presence that influenced debate. The implosions of the party political ‘left’ in Scotland have necessitated other stances, thereby opening up other potentialities. There were figures who at times dominated through their regular attendance or their ability to speak, but they either refrained from seeking a formal dominance or could not arrange for it to be conceded to them, and a cultural norm emerged whereby those keenest to speak were expected to self-censor. The intake of breath and of holding back in political meetings was palpable, if only in comparison to the more usual flow of debate:

“More information is not going to motivate us to act, neither are representations or pictures of politics, what makes us move is tasting dreams of what could be, stepping into the cracks where another world is coming into view.”
(Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible, p.25)

This commitment to pre-figurative politics – ranging from promoting non-gendered terminology, communal vegan cooking, removing images of objectification, running a donation and in-kind economy – was an important experience for many, though difficult to sustain. It has continued subsequently in collective reflection, and, as with campuses across the world, there is an explosion of collectives and reading groups: invitations to join reading groups of Marx’s Capital (led online by David Harvey) flooded into inboxes just as reports of police-free streets in Tottenham were pouring in. Marxism and the working class are back as spectre though not as force: The Telegraph6 raves against ‘far-left’ groups attacking government policy, Conservative MPs have started to blame communists, anarchists and even largely absent unions7 for online protests and picketing of abusive employers. Conversely, as the contestation of established institutions began to generalise beyond Universities, the apparent routes of potential action began to narrow. After the experiment of the Hetherington, the local and much national focus of student activism switched to running in student elections. The ‘broad left’ coalitions on campus which had mobilised over 2010/11 attempted to use their new prominence to focus on more traditional attempts to capture supposed power. On some campuses this has been successful, though at the University of Glasgow the ‘OurGlasgow’ coalition campaign narrowly failed to win any of the major positions. Whether those attempting to change institutions like the National Union of Students from within will manage to do so, or are in fact embarking upon a well-worn career path, is yet to be seen.

Endo-Politics

Compare this to the UK/US manifestations of the Occupy Movements, where ‘politics’ is not just mistrusted but actively feared and rejected – because acting politically or ‘politics’ (sometimes ‘as usual’) is seen as the problem. The ‘person in the street’, the authentic individual member of the public, is not interested in the ‘political’, only in challenging injustice: we have politicians to do politics for us, the problem is that they aren’t listening! The failure is seen as one of communication and education, we’re not speaking loudly enough! While much remains uncertain and in flux, the construction and then rejection of a certain image of ‘politics’ among the Occupy Movements results largely from a reductive conflation of the term with ‘party politics’. The result has been a loose consensus for a commitment to a form of ‘distributed protest’, where the job of each activist is to focus on facilitating the voicing of every voice except their own – the isolated voice is mistrusted as a voice of unwelcome authority. The ‘People’s Mic’ of Occupy Wall Street, an echo chamber devised to avoid a local by-law against amplification (crowd repeats the words back to the speaker) is a potent manifestation of this tendency. It is an extremely ‘low bandwidth’ method, which communicates action but rarely allows for extemporisation or rhetorical power.

If the Hetherington said “We are not political!” less loudly, it was because it was understood that the problem is the political process – including those extra-parliamentary tactics commonly practised by progressives – rather than politics as such. This tacit agreement to keep ‘politics’ on the back-burner can quickly become something more unpleasant once it morphs into dogma: within ‘Occupy’ people have been attacked as a dangerous cabal for being ‘Maoists’, ‘Communists’, or, in the furore surrounding Chris Hedges’ criticism of ‘black bloc anarchists’ in Oakland, as simply “criminal”8.

For the wider sympathetic constituency that these protests have managed to activate (and of which it is constituent), it mimics the familiar amplification of the online social network, the repeating is a formal re-occurrence of the impulse to re-blog: such protest today is not action – when defined as confrontational counterpower – but is limited to sorting and retransmitting previously existing information which, when done on a mass level, takes on the appearance of political action. The desiderata is no longer the new, but faster and more coherent transmission. In fact the form of a ‘mob’ (to use the terminology of the detractors) has found its closest match in technological form in Twitter and Blackberry messaging – forward forward forward! The message matters little as long as it is passed on. The reciprocal relationship between response and message, both feeding off each other, takes the effect of an increasingly lubricated situation that allows ritualistic dissent to spread more quickly than ever. And as long as it is the communicative rather than the operative that is given primacy, a non-violent fundamentalism prevails – Occupy needs to appear both everywhere and non-threateningly.

The actors congregate around a tactic rather than a political project: a confluence of anger, entertainment, aesthetic and action that comes before understanding or politics, this is not a novelty in terms of historical mobilisations. What is interesting about the new protests is the tendency for protesters to quickly change their designation and apparent allegiance – such as the quick transition from ‘acquiescent’ protester to a more militant stance either in response to police aggression or in order to catch police off-guard.

“Wanton press releases from the Met confirmed this fact, as the authoritarian PR service pumped out anxious declarations about how ‘extremely disappointed’ the service was ‘with the actions of many protesters’, who were evidently becoming more confrontational, quicker and more spirited, more prepared to abandon routes and disregard ‘advice’ issued by frantic ‘organisers’ wherever the balance of forced on the ground demanded it.”
(Danny Hayward, ‘Adventures in the Sausage Factory’, Mute)

It is this duplicity and instability of the nature of the crowd which is (quite rightly) identified by security services as a threat of the becoming mob. Similarly there is a worry among organisers (whether it be the NUS at student demonstrations or the adherents of non-violence in Occupy) of the Jekyll and Hyde nature of protests. The infectious nature of these tendencies is latent, initially not apparent and difficult to locate, its almost instantaneous emergence at the protests of 2010/11 reflecting both frustration at further constriction and criminalisation of protest. But key is what Hayward, to my mind rightly, identifies as a revivified cross-class class mobilisation: it was the ‘EMA kids’, of long-oppressed minority groups, who brought the trouble that so shocked and exhilarated the other students – the ones that truly understood the nature of urban territory. To a great extent the training and development work of the anti-capitalist protesters of the ’90s, the experience of many during protests against the Iraq War, and the climate change movement, mean that under current conditions there is an available body of experience in society – the potential for co-operation here is astounding and unrealised. That the mobilisations dropped away in militancy and size is largely down to the failure to maintain consistent and reciprocal relationships with the more marginalised protesters. There is a very deep class prejudice at work in those parts of the left dominated by middle classes that find the potential power of cross-class solidarity terrifying – in Glasgow those college and school students who took to the streets at the end of 2010 would, in my experience, be told by police that ‘you don’t belong here’, and they would be looked at suspiciously by the ‘real students’ as potentially disruptive or even dangerous; they were not like us. As Danny Hayward neatly summarises in ‘Adventures in the Sausage Factory…’, “Middle class students might piously hope that working class teenagers will be allowed to ‘access’ universities and become more like them.” They might even fight to do so if they believe it is necessary to bolster their own position.

Different and Similar Forms of Dissent

Largely unspoken within the context of all these protests is the biggest determinant of Western foreign and domestic policy in the post-2001 era: the ‘War on Terror’ and its urban militarism. Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani – whose works of ‘theory-fiction’ I believe usefully explore modern politics – describes the tactics of Jihadis, explaining their strategic response to postmodern and neoliberal hegemonic global politics. There is an overlap in the imagination of some observers (especially policy makers) between the apparent form and effect of the terrorist and the Occupy protester, the ‘Islamist’ and the ‘domestic’ terrorist. Where there may be a similarity between the two is in attempts at moving away from anti-politics into an ‘endo-politics’.

“This, ‘endo-militarization of peace’, a new type of tactical line which totally blends with the enemy’s lines in such a configuration that it introduces radical instability and eventually violent fissions into the system from within… In attempting defence the enemy can only necrotize and dissolve itself.”
(Reza Negarestani, ‘The Militarization of Peace: Absence of Terror or Terror of Absence’, Collapse I, ed. R. Mackay. Oxford: Urbanomic, September 2007. p.55-6)

The success of the insurgency – itself a cyclical “blowback”9 of US strategy/support for the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan – has been to entice the repressive apparatus of the State into ‘hyperfoliant’ (excessive and overspeed) cycles of investment in, and development of, containment techniques that, unable to complete the imposition of ‘peace’ on Western societies, and always unable to eliminate the enemy within, will never attain their declared horizon of ‘stability’. While since 2001 the external, ‘Muslim’ enemy has been promoted as the likely terrorist, such constructions are supplemented with the internal threat of the potential catastrophes of dissent and non-competitiveness, as witnessed in the responses to recent workfare protests. More disruptive are the hacktivist tactics of ‘Anonymous’, a sort of online Black Bloc, and the appropriation of ‘meme culture’ as a political vehicle by groups such as DSG (Deterritorial Support Group10). The cultural, contextual and doctrinal differences between the insurgent ‘network’ of Al Qaeda and the ‘network’ of activist actors cannot be ignored, nor can the former’s willingness to use their own death as a tactic (a doctrine of asymmetric warfare) – nor attempts to criminalise political engagement in the form of dissent/protest by cynically conflating the two. However, from a structural point of view, they can seem to share a morphology; the flashmob that disrupts a train station or shop is not an explosion, but it is a disruption not easily resolved by the authorities, it represents a time-limited interruption of accumulation.

The networks and conceptual arrangements are ‘ad hoc’ in the technical sense. As complex adaptive systems they not only work around the unreliability of individuals, but draw power from it, giving up the discipline of hierarchy for the power of anonymity. The shared technical standards that allow networked computers to replicate information resemble agreements of limited solidarity which can be assumed in situation of unrest. As with any complex system, small core groups and organisations emerge based on affinity and trust, but as with the copy-cat explosions of Occupy (or indeed, the riots in England) there is no need for formal links to exist for a series of events to take on a common external appearance.

When ‘networks’ can “at one moment appear to be universal and at another vanish into thin air”11 the result is that the State’s readiness for excessive violence will find its target in the ‘host population’ of such potential emergences – students, workers and other malcontents. These were recently the (unwitting or complicit?) test group for spectacular ‘total policing’ witnessed at the November 9th 2011 student protest. Billed by student organisations as the one year anniversary of the Millbank occupation, it in fact took the form of a parade of (State) force as 10,000 students were chaperoned around the City of London by 4,000 police for the benefit of the camera phones of investment bank staff standing behind floor-to-ceiling windows. At indeterminate intervals the police would put on their helmets, extend their batons. Later, they would remove their helmets, retract their batons and attempt to chat with protesters. Similar to the appearance of arbitrary escalation by protesters, for protesters the actions of the security forces were just opaque. Suddenly, a three-layered blockade of officers would present itself, flanked by horses. The ‘militarisation of peace’, and of the police – distending the accepted distribution of violence dictating social relations – results in the well documented systematic use of anti-terrorist legislation against ‘regular’ citizens, designating them ‘domestic extremists’.

“Today, strikes remain battle re-enactments – but re-enactments which exist solely within the realm of cathartic performativity. Institutionalised by the state, neutralised through anti-union legislation, strikes become dress rehearsals for nothing – since all claim to challenging state violence has been forsaken. They can neither be ‘political’ (the assertion of labour against capital; the product of class consciousness) nor consecutive (where they could threaten infinitude). Reduced to the status of impromptu public holiday, defined by action-as-symbolism, the new strike abandons politics for theatre: a gesture not of antagonism but of conciliation, reinforcing its impotence in every moment of its articulation.”
(Escalate, Salt, p.15-16)

This is the space prepared for us, but where in the past there was a managed political consensus – be it by Union leaders, officers, the Labour party, the courts – on occupying this space, there is a new attempt to keep the shape of that consensus not by politics but by blunt force. The enforced carnivals that are one-off occasions, such as football matches or the Commonwealth Games, are the model for protest. Protest quickly becomes another form of entertainment, but it can quickly return to the political: the ‘Kelvingrove Party’ was an example of this. Following on from David Cameron’s invitation to celebrate the Royal Wedding, with its on-the-ground class and sectarian tensions, it quickly became a riot. The skill embodied in the techniques of cultural production under capitalism are formidable, as Mark Fisher puts it: “authenticity has proven highly marketable”12. The ‘Great Britain: You’re Invited’ ad campaign focusing on images of Tudor villages and Highland scenery grates with the February announcement of the deployment of surface-to-air missiles to ‘protect athletes’ confirming the 2012 Olympic Games as a London-based ‘Green Zone’: “Why will an unmanned drone be flying over the London Olympics next year in 2012” asks Escalate (p.47), while Francis Fukuyama explains “Why we all need a drone of our own”13. History has restarted, and the theoriser of its end is arming himself, as if a State-driven hyper-inflation of the full-spectrum panopticon and dispersed militarism runs counter to, rather than continuous with, State violence. Indeed, some appear to propose that certain of these technologies, assuming access, may, at least for a short time, provide advantages that can be used in the interests of the oppressed while primarily being tools of oppression:

“Know your enemy – how it moves, reacts, changes shape, lies. Know your material – the people and movements around you, the places you occupy, the desires you keep…. Take up residence in the thing you will transform, flow with it until your relationship becomes seamless. Feel its patterns and networks so deeply that they somehow become you.”
(Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible, p.13)

The role of University occupations for ‘re-appropriation’, as the Hetherington was, applies a technique which can also be found in Negarestani’s Jihadi, or the Users Guide’s model artist – “take up residence in the thing you will transform” – in a strained effort to become a site for a general social dissent. One of the key demands of university authorities, one that was never granted, was that the occupation should be able to prove that all occupiers of the building were enrolled as students – members of the public could have no legitimate interest in the fate of higher education. This demand is usually acceded to – often without question by student occupations that contain no non-students – but turns a potential re-appropriation by the community into a recuperation on behalf of the power structures of the University. As long as it remains within the University body, protest and rebellion can be billed as a part of the lively student experience, a safely bounded constituency where disputes remain on-campus. It was this mixture of constituents, and the attempt to project messages beyond the recuperative structures of the University bodies into wider society, that is necessary and which often cannot occur.

By sitting directly on a nexus between the State, the Church and the City of London, Occupy the London Stock Exchange pulled a largely unexpected but impressive feat. By turning the dead transit spaces between Paternoster Square and St. Paul’s into a public place it acted as a significant enough irritation (intentionally or not) to elicit a process of systematic over-reaction. The tools brought to bear: first ‘Health and Safety’, then the legal process contorts to find purchase on an assembly which eschews individualism, the basis of the judicial system. This was, for one, exemplified in the judgement delivered in the case of the Fortnum & Mason’s sit-in “that each defendant did take part by encouraging others with his or her presence”. The systematic reaction of councils and local governments to occupations exposes the impasse between the administration and the administrated. A similar narrative played out in the occupation at the University of Glasgow. First control was applied to occupiers for their own safety, then appeals were made to vacate the building so it could be returned to the use of staff and students (for which it was intended), before the authorities resorted to a violent eviction. Months after the occupation ended, the building is still shuttered.

Collectivisms

“The most important trait of the media strategy was depersonalization…. The reason for this was not because students feared possible sanctions, but rather because they wanted to emphasize the collectivity of the action and the general demands which concern not individuals but the society in general. This was also a way to avoid creating leaders and recognizable individuals who might avert the media’s attention from the action and its goals, reducing it to a vehicle for turning several ‘leading’ students into new media stars…. The continuous rotation of spokespersons (as well as delegates and plenum moderators) served to ensure that the plenum is the collective and only political subject of the action.”
(Occupy Cookbook, p.55)

This demonstrative submission by the individual to the ‘multitude’14 is the key marker of membership of the new protest movements. Often this formal submission is a form of cynical Pieta, where those cradling, mourning and celebrating the dying of leadership figures will soon be the new leaders. The idea of leaving formal positions of responsibility vacant is not new; in fact it is the essential truth underlying capitalism’s vigorousness. The occupation of the Hetherington, like the Occupy Movement, consciously used this logic as a simple technique to derail criticism. By insisting that everyone is welcome to make their views heard (including University administrators, Mayors, Police officials, and other opponents) it makes opposition more difficult. In short, critics must submit to the operational structures of the General Assembly to reject the General Assembly. The response to critics is simple: come down and make your view heard. The alternative democracy of the recuperated space, like the mass ‘democracy’ of the Nation State, demands that the enemies of a structure accept that structure, one which is well placed to defend itself in its own terms and can claim tacit legitimacy. Liberal societies promote the equality of the laws and institutions, while ignoring the arguably more important inequalities of social and economic relations. Occupy and similar movements promote the legitimacy of their arguments while ignoring their lack of power, defining non-violence as an unwavering moral principle rather than a tactic. In trying to use the power of the multitude, while denying the use of force by any tendencies in that multitude, they fail to acknowledge that there there is a problem with saying violence is never justified:

“Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy… Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow. Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.”
(Hannah Arendt, On Violence,15 p.52)

The ethico-political response of the pre-existing – in the case of the University of Glasgow, the role of student bodies – is to sustain the structuring principle that there are ‘legitimate’ and right decision making bodies of a non-political authority. This was seen in the response by University management, who stated that they would not negotiate with people who violated the concept of rightful property ownership. The power of an occupation is that it matches a demand that can be seen as legitimate by the current system – ‘no fees, no cuts’ – with a certain amount of (‘illegitimate’) hard power – ‘this building is ours’. It creates lines of defence and sovereign boundaries that are to be defended, usually passively, and invites possibilities to cross those boundaries. This poses a problem for the ‘legitimate’ bodies, who must respond with active violence against the power of passive resistance, which will be justified as necessary to restore some form of status quo, but will, as Arendt states, never be legitimate. Slavoj Žižek suggests “political space is never ‘pure’ but always involves some kind of reliance on ‘pre-political’ violence”16, and, to go beyond Arendt, aggressive use of violence by those who nominally have power actively saps whatever legitimacy is appealed to. This sapping of legitimacy is the necrosis identified by Reza Negarestani cited above. As Escalate outline in Salt, “you can only asset strip once” (p.38). The legitimacy of the post war consensus was based on welfare – universal healthcare, guaranteed housing, and, if capitalism cannot provide you with work, guaranteed benefits. After the London riots this logic has returned as censure, where councils (Conservative and Labour) threatened the families of rioters with the loss of their council houses. However, as the state hollows, privatising housing, utilities, transport, healthcare and education, when “there are no means of purchasing a new class base” (p.41), and it is the very people who gained from ‘right to buy’ schemes who are now losing their homes, the only resort may be violent suppression. “Where social peace can be ensured only by the police… the class struggle is converted ever more definitely into a situation of war” (p.50). Even commentators on the Daily Mail website have started referring to the return of the days when the police were more readily understood as being the “paramilitary arm of the conservative party.”17

This spectre of oppression will appear more on more – it is repeated on a small level with every eviction that takes place. This is particularly noticeable in the controversy surrounding the use of ‘pepper spray’ against a sit-down protest at University of California, Davis, on November 18th 2011. The most widely circulated video18, which attracted around 1.5 million online viewings within 3 days, is edited to show none of the limited confrontation between police and protesters, instead focusing on the particularly gladiatorial flourish of one of the officers involved and this direct act of violence – the spraying of sedentary protesters with chemical agents (to use language which re-animates the violence quashed in the name ‘pepper-spray’). This is designed to further decontextualise and erase all possible legitimisation of the officers’ actions. It has been called a ‘Bull Connor’ moment in the media, referring to the use of fire-hoses and dogs against peaceful civil rights protesters in May 1963. This focus on the violent moment delegitimises the authority of the (civic) State, while, in a similar way, representations of violence among protesters seek to delegitimise their claim to power. The media focus on violence in protests appears to have the effect of seemingly eradicating politics from the narrative, and of turning it into a moral game of good vs. evil. On March 26th 2011 the Hetherington was evicted by police, though there was active resistance and attempts to break through police lines by protesters, the final image of the day presented by the media was that of almost a hundred officers used to evict half a dozen students.

Manuals for Action

The Zagreb occupation, outlined in The Occupation Cookbook lasted for 35 days in protest against tuition fees. It was organised around a ‘plenum’, or general assembly, which was designated the “central organ of decision making” (p.19). The Cookbook/Manual, like any such blueprint document, presents an ideal that almost certainly was not achieved. At the Hetherington the result of the ‘plenum’ format was often a constant deferral with a specific result: acceptable inaction. The tactic of peaceful occupation can have only limited claims to power: 1) to present a serious enough alternative to the normal power relations to represent a formidable challenge of legitimacy, or 2) to halt the operation of the target institution to such an extent that they choose to act (in the public eye) in a disproportionate manner, leading similarly to a crisis of legitimacy. For both, the concept of ‘legitimacy’ hinges on a perceived continuity of a public consensus around underlying desires for social justice and/or solidarity. The Zagreb occupation attempted the first method:

“What does it mean to ‘occupy’ a school? A school occupation is not, as the corporate media like to portray it, a hostile takeover. A school occupation is an action by those who are already its inhabitants – students, faculty, and staff – and those for whom the school exists. (Which is to say for a public institution, the public itself.) The actions termed ‘occupations’ of a public institution, then, are really re-occupations, a renovation and reopening to the public of a space long captured and stolen by the private interests of wealth and privilege. The goal of this renovation and reopening is to inhabit school spaces as fully as possible, to make them truly habitable – to make the school a place fit for living.”
(The Occupy Cookbook, p.7)

Off With Our Heads!

The idea that if citizens remain passive in the streets – thus allowing the state to oppress us directly and violently – then the ‘masses’ will be able to recognise injustice and rise, is beginning to wear thin. It is an essential failure of liberalism to assume that all political actors have the same general interest in a ‘good’ society, that it can be achieved through discussion, and that all bad behaviours are merely error. It also presupposes a degree of access to and transparency of public communication in the form of ‘the media’. This was, however, to some extent, the stance of the Hetherington: publicly it was framed as a re-appropriation of education, privately we understood that the best chance of producing a political effect was a violent confrontation where the occupiers could be positioned as victims – but where was justice to be imposed from?

But requiring punishment from the state is as useless a route towards autonomy as requiring praise or pity. There is an increasing seriousness and movement from ironies to concrete affirmation and direct conflict. This is different to the previous tendency to push protest into the realm of self-expression and entertainment. Instead of finding release in the assemblage and carnivalesque there are indications that a new seriousness is breaking out: “The beauty of protest is not simply about how it looks, the fun and pleasure it engenders in our bodies, but as importantly it’s about its success. … nothing is more beautiful than winning.” (Users Guide, p.57) There is an important opportunity (the example here being the Users Guide) for art practise to move into the politics of work, to produce victories rather than artworks. All around, more artists are downing tools and beginning to discuss rather than ‘produce’: in New York the Arts and Labour group of Occupy Wall Street have demanded the end of the Whitney Biennial, pointing out its position in the apparatus of the State and the abusive practices of key sponsors such as Sotherbys and Deutsche Bank19. Will the Whitney take the joke, react angrily, ignore it or absorb it? As Art Not Oil have found in attempting to publicly shame UK institutions such as the Tate’s continuing co-reliance on BP sponsorship, assuming a moral high ground for the arts does little to account for the conservative nature of its public and practitioners or shared institutional value systems. One of the key logics of direct action is to destabilise a situation enough that forces of authority will react – and by reacting against a fissure the authority widens the gap between itself and the processes by which it constructs its legitimacy.

Such an over-reaction took place in California – the police spraying chemical agents on students sitting peacefully on the ground. It also took place during the UK education protests with the use of mounted police charging ‘kettled’ protesters.

The spectre here is the precedence of the Kent State shootings of 1970. As one of the key delegitimising moments against expansion of the Vietnam War it is seen as a model turning point in struggle: the hyperbolic cries of ‘brutality’ and ‘shame’ during every encounter with the police may be a willfully amnesic, though not inaccurate, calling out of the repressive and deadly nature of state violence. While at the Free Hetherington the precedent of an autonomous space was important both in principal and as an organising hub for action and education, equally important was that we waited for the use of force.

“…the government… itself begins to filter, purge and hunt down its own civilians, curtailing their rights, confining them to economic, social and political quarantine to isolate or even purge the disease and its potential hosts at the same time.”
(Reza Negarestani, The Militarisation of Peace, p.62)

One concern with such a ‘quarantine’ is the fear of the activist in the face of potentially deadly violence; it is not enough to be angry and act, it is necessary to find a way of holding out. The new protests are not a demand for death. They have, however, organised around a self-produced vacuum of leaders and demands which are a result of what is commonly thought of as a postmodern crisis of grand narratives – there is a form of Protest Realism that, like ‘Capitalist Realism’, “…no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted; modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living.”20 We have the slogans of 1968, of 1917 even, but it is all already aesthetic. The events remain primarily reformist, incipient rebellion is rehabilitated in advance and radical critiques are quickly overcome and made redundant due to the pace of neoliberal ‘shock and awe’ – what Naomi Klein famously describes in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine as ‘disaster capitalism’. Why, after all, are some people demanding free education but not free food? ‘Shock and awe’ seems clearly to be the tactic of the current UK administration: NHS privatisation is eclipsed by privatisation of the roads, the police, and so on, backwards and forwards. The initial crisis of 2007/8 is used as cover for a series of social dismemberments and instead of providing an increasing stock of motivational injustices, the protest movements are increasingly silenced by the weight and speed. An echo of political death returned shockingly with the suicide of 77-year-old Dimitris Christoulas who shot himself outside the Greek Parliament on April 4th 2012; unlike the young Mohamed Bouazizi, who set fire to himself on December 28th 2010 in Tunisia, Christoulas’s anger was no longer directed only at a government but the people who were too passive, writing in his suicide note:

“I believe that youth who have no future will one day take up arms and hang the national traitors upside-down in Syntagma square just as the Italians did in 1945 to Mussolini.”21

‘Occupy’ in its current form will probably not work for much longer, and as a single tactic is not enough – in many locales the state can be seen to have eradicated resistance through the use of greater force – but it has got us a long way: Does anyone believe the other when she declares ‘we have nothing to lose’? If there was really nothing to lose, would campaigners still be mobilising around defending single issue campaigns?

As stated at the beginning of this piece, the dictum of protest singer Joe Hill (‘Don’t mourn, organise’) can be recalibrated as “organise your mourning”. Too much can be made of apparent novelty: organisation, communication and co-operation are common to all historical periods, and political experiences today are not fundamentally different than in the past. It is their ornament and a lack of historicity which obscure this. They still predominate on the street, they still rely on territorial concepts, they still produce the exhilarating feeling of licence and comradeship. Tragedy, resistance and community are everywhere at lower or higher intensities. They are not enough. Critically, and yet again, we need a new form to inhabit. To restate the Salt Collective, rather than merely quote: under capital, austerity is necessary. It should be remembered that the social wage and the settlement for those subsisting under capital has always been austere.

First the tragedy, then the funeral, then…

What would an organised mourning look like? As the Users Guide says, “Nothing is more beautiful than winning”. This is not a co-ordinate but a common direction of travel. It is to abandon the image in favour of the event, or, more accurately perhaps, it is to consciously appreciate the necessity of an orientation with which to position our values, processes, tactics. and objectives. The tragic becomes farce only because the mistakes of the past have not been appropriately understood and buried – the capitalism we hoped had died in 2007 must be dug up and reburied with the social consensus that has preceded it into the grave. Taking the worst seriously is not very different to what the pessimist does today: we would announce the failure of our projects before we have attempted them, we would take on the grief of our incapacity to change our situation. We would accept the return of the past, and rely on the fact that this time the same will be not better or more bearable but different. If we are mourning the wastage of our lives under capital, it must be an ‘organised mourning’. What is key is taking the horror, the scale and the intensity seriously. We cannot demand our own immiseration, but we can mobilise it as it happens. As organisational form switching overspeeds, technological fact overcomes legal and national barriers for communication, and techniques of co-operation become more permissive – that as the machine begins to heat up and lose control then we can imagine a coming social [eu]catastrophe. Our civilization is a blight, and whatever happens next, it will be worse for all involved.

Notes

1PDF available freely online: www.minorcompositions.info/usersguide.html
2PDF available freely online: www.minorcompositions.info/occupationcookbook.html
3‘Adventures in the Sausage Factory: a cursory overview of the university struggles, November 2010 – July 2011’, by Danny Hayward, Mute, January 2012. PDF freely available online: www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/adventures-sausage-factory-cursory-overview-uk-university-struggles-november-2010-%E2%80%93-july-2011
4Salt, by Escalate Collective, January 2012. PDF freely available online: www.escalatecollective.net/?p=32
5‘The Occupation of Space’, Owen Hatherley, Afterall, 21 October 2010: www.afterall.org/online/the-occupation-of-space
6‘Tiny band of left-wing radicals bring jobs policy to its knees’, Patrick Sawer and Robert Mendick, The Telegraph, 25 February 2012: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9105983/Tiny-band-of-left-wing-radicals-bring-jobs-policy-to-its-knees.html, 25.2.2012
7‘Owen Jones: If trade unions don’t fight the workers’ corner – others will’, Owen Jones, The Independent, 2 March 2012: www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-if-trade-unions-dont-fight-the-workers-corner—others-will-7468921.html
8‘The Cancer in Occupy’, Chris Hedges, Truthdig, 6 February 2012: www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/
9Johnson, Chalmers. Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (January 4, 2004 ed.). Holt Paperbacks. pp. 288.
10‘Autonomy Tonight / Utopia Tomorrow: DSG is over’: http://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/
11Hardt & Negri, Multitude (London, Penguin: 2004)
12Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009) p.14
13‘Why we all need a drone of our own’, Francis Fukuyama, Financial Times, 24 February 2012: www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9cc59dce-5e27-11e1-8c87-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1rd6OSgML
14Hardt and Negri’s: “The deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes necessary its destruction.” Hardt, Michael & Negri, Antonio, Empire. (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) p. 61
15Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (Orlando, Harcourt, 1969)
16‘The Obscenity of Human Rights: Violence as Symptom’, Slavoj Žižek, lacan.com, 2005: www.lacan.com/zizviol.htm ; libcom.org, 2011: http://libcom.org/library/the-obscenity-of-human-rights-violence-as-symptom
17‘Tories order police to halt workfare demos as MP makes formal protest to BBC over bias in favour of hard-Left militants’, Simon Walters and Glen Owen, Daily Mail Online, 26 February 2012: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106601/Tories-order-police-halt-workfare-demos-MP-makes-formal-protest-BBC-bias-favour-hard-Left-militants.html
18‘UC Davis Protestors Pepper Sprayed’, 18 November 2011: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4
19‘2012 Whitney Biennial to open March 1; Museum breaks with two Corporate Sponsors, apologizes to participating artists’: http://whitney2012.org
20Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009)
21The translated, full text of Dimitris Christoulas’s suicide note is reported as reading:
“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state.
And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.
I believe that young people with no future will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.”

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The Poverty of Imagination
Tom Jennings 

The UK’s soporific slide deeper into fiscally-imposed structurally-readjusted barbarity, without much in the way of disturbance to putative social peace, has now been thoroughly punctured.

First the exuberant Lethal Bizzle of EMA kids prompted their university ‘betters’ to trash Conservative HQ. Latterly, so-called Black Blocs bypassed passive masses of notional protest and pissed on complicit bureaucracy to attack the City. And then, most vividly, came unexpected eruptions of spontaneous sustained rage among festering slumdwellers that blazed all over the national shop.

What is remarkable, nevertheless, is how unprepared those supposedly in-the-know were in the face of these socio-political squalls, storms and tornadoes. Sure enough, the flog-’em-and-bang-’em-up brigade broadcast their bile in a prompt chorus of class-hatred, as if the perpetrators of anti-social crime were restricted to archetypal, opportunistic, small-time hoodies and arsonists. As if it had nothing to do with a wider, more deliberate orchestration on an apocalyptic scale, thanks to elite financial obscenities mugging the 99% and foreclosing on the mortgaged futures of global and local populations.

But why do the revolting poor come as such a surprise? After all, despite unhealthy upstart idealisms regularly messing up business-as-usual elsewhere, a mythic enlightened middlebrow rationalism is normally alleged to have bewitched this geographic idyll. Early last century it even gave birth to that dispassionately charitable media empiricism called ‘documentary’ or ‘social realism’. This has remained at the centre of the country’s fantasy factories ever since – despite infernal colonisations by vulgar American kitsch and purist continental aesthetics. And this cultural paraphernalia of institutional and representational patterns, disciplines, practices, and rhetorics has always taken as its very special scientific project the minute observation and adumbration of the travails of the poor. In other words, where was the careful data gathering, processing and interpretation, on large and small public screens, when the think-tanks, policymakers, police, and movers-and-shakers seemingly needed it?

Accepting that current predicaments set-in during Thatcher’s yesteryears, not yesterday’s recession, this essay subjectively surveys two decades of austere growth in British poverty porn. Dissecting grim-up-north platitudes, perilous-down-south perambulations and sundry slumming-it social-realist serenades, an attempt is made to see if the national film oeuvre ought to have opened any eyes.

The Coming of Age of Austerity

UK cinema responded in a relatively sluggish manner to the tragedies of the 1980s, hot on the heels of the Tories’ first decade of cuts and the accompanying degradation of working and living conditions for vast swathes of the populace. In the 1990s, however, veteran social-realist director Ken Loach was soon able to make up for lost ground, forensically detailing the latter in terms of restructured employment (Riff Raff, 1992; The Navigators, 2001) and unemployment (Raining Stones, 1993; Ladybird Ladybird, 1994; My Name Is Joe, 1998) – with Jimmy McGovern’s rare account of grassroots industrial struggle in Dockers (Channel 4, 1999) integrating both within a wider urban context.1 Elsewhere, less shackled by documentary motivations, more expressive aesthetic and narrative means were mobilised to bemoan crumbling lower-class ties – whether these were traditional (Nil By Mouth, Gary Oldman 1995), biological (Orphans, Peter Mullen 1997) or alternative (Among Giants, Sam Miller 1998). Yet, despite not shrinking from the heft and scope of misery suffered, these films still reserved space for germs of unprepossessing hope – some genuine residue, albeit tenuous, conflictual or deeply buried, of affiliation, commitment, conviviality and solidarity.

But beyond being corruptible for cynical enterprise, such organic human values have no obvious place in the New British Order. If Thatcher’s “no such thing as society … only individuals” was not so much empirical description as statement of intent in a parochial version of global neoliberalism, its enduring corollary that “there is no alternative” was pointedly rendered in baleful portraits of attenuated nihilism and hopelessness among younger generations in Naked (Mike Leigh 1993), Butterfly Kiss (Michael Winterbottom 1994) and Stella Does Tricks (Coky Giedroyc 1997). Conversely, a cinematic coming to terms with ‘capitalist realism’2 sketched resignation to the rule-of-the-market over economic and social relations among impoverished post-industrial subjects, yielding three highly successful British films which profited from blending social-realist tropes with populist melodrama, comedy and romance. Worse, Brassed Off (Mark Herman 1996), The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo 1997) and Billy Elliott (Stephen Daldry 2000), as well as sad retreads like Up ‘N’ Under (John Godber 1998), displaced structural relations of class into its contrived performance3 – projectively mystifying the contemporary crisis into anachronistic patterns of masculinity4 presented as wilful personal obstacles to survival, health and happiness via vicissitudes of cultural capital.

With class-denialism promulgated promiscuously – left, right and centre – elegies to what was lost from a mythical social-democratic golden age of the political clout, social stability and economic security of labour now readily figured as mere consolation. Period drama recuperations of recent proletarian experience strategically accentuate style over substance in a distanced nostalgia of ‘decadent mannerism’5 cut loose from specific historical moorings. This ironic mendacity retrospectively legitimises its referent’s inevitable demise, having eviscerated the messy contextual blood and guts which animated it. The outcome is queasy revisionist hokum in outwardly well-meaning, commemorative approximations of, say, traditions of northern music-hall (Little Voice, Mark Herman 1998), Northern Soul (Soulboy, Shimmy Marcus 2008) and even the militancy of factory women (Made In Dagenham, Nigel Cole 2010). Having said that, other film revivals of working-class life – in the 1950s (Vera Drake, Mike Leigh 2005), ’60s (Small Faces, Gillies MacKinnon 1995), ’70s (Neds, Peter Mullan 2011) or ’80s (This Is England, Shane Meadows 2006, plus 2010/2011 television series sequels)6 – may flirt with sentimental closure but, courtesy of subject matter and handling, instead serve genealogies of the present far better than safe paeans to, or laments for, heroic or hellish pasts.

Service economy realignments in value-generation also nudged middle-class identification from institutional professionalism towards crass corporate or petit-entrepreneurialism – which, among only recently mobile fractions, often led steadily back to precarity. Class recomposition had myriad reflections in new social movements – from anti-Poll Tax action, hunt sabotage, New Age travel and Reclaim the Streets, to anti-globalisation – but direct political manifestation scarcely troubled mainstream media fiction. Instead, as in working-class realism, markers of commodified (counter)culture dominated representations of hipsters and bohemians flaunting superior fashion; foregrounding consumption over production and assuming assimilation to blind materialism in biopics of youth music scene appropriation like Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes 1998) and 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom 2002)7. The postmodern manoeuvering was more deviously deployed by Cool Britannia’s celebrated middle-class vanguards who, adapting slick cinematic innovations from Hollywood and MTV spectacle, purportedly blurred class boundaries in superficial travesties of underclass abjection – such as Shopping (Paul Anderson 1994), Twin Town (Kevin Allen 1997), South West 9 (Richard Parry 2001) and, most iconically, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996)8.

If the illusory bubble of New Labour’s “Things can only get better” mirrored Boyle’s thematic trajectory – from yuppie psychosis (Shallow Grave, 1994), through Trainspotting, to X-Factor transcendence (Slumdog Millionnaire, 2008) – concurrent trends in UK cinema thoroughly tainted any seamless passage to consumerist nirvana9. Darker urban pastorals spoiled ersatz streetwise cosmopolitanism with the return of the repressed, signalled again through dysfunctional macho convolutions – such as the ‘disease’ of football hooliganism forever worried over in The Firm (Allan Clarke 1989) all the way to a protracted 2000s cycle spearheaded by Nick Love. A parallel nostalgic restoration dredged up more archaic ghosts of mockney spivs and hardnuts dressed up in Tarantinoesque neo-noir, posturing at hyperstylised gangster gloss in the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie 1998) franchise. These twin fetishisms then promptly smart-casually cross-fertilised in a lucrative homegrown exploitation genre greeted with universal critical derision. A common denominator throughout is supine acceptance of the petty bourgeois order, with its pitilessly diminishing real returns wished away in infantile dreams of lottery wealth and celebrity lifestyle. The accompanying solipsistic vacuum is then hysterically concealed in atavistic charisma, in the latter cases of ‘New Lad’ vintage, coding stranded, fragmentary memories of collective vigour, pride, and even resistance to the present desperate state of things. Even when upwardly-mobile, it seems the rough and dangerous classes could not be persuaded to exit the big historical stages and screens.

Coming of Age in Austerity

Meanwhile the working and workless inhabitants of sink estates and industrial wastelands suffered the New Public Management of state provision, which increasingly appeared premised on shortchanging both its demoralised education, health and welfare staff and ‘customers’ punished for privatised, personalised deficiencies. But in the ruins of the post-war Keynesian settlement – the practical and psychological ramifications of which their parents wrestled with in struggling to survive – fresh cohorts of kids were growing up relatively unencumbered by broken twentieth-century promises. For them, material and social decay and deprivation were always already facts of life; the glittering sheen of consumerism a world away even when on sale round the corner. And again, the millennium’s social-realist filmmakers were well-placed to explore how these young generations could conceive, build and live lives in such straitened circumstances. After all, the original colonial impetus of early British realism also thrust anthropological apparatuses into slums to observe and record their strange exotica. This time round, many of its exponents had themselves emerged from working-class backgrounds and, with more intimate knowledge, were motivated by their own unfinished business.

So a heterodox flow of realist films by low-budget auteurs blended poetic naturalism with European arthouse enchantment and popular melodramatics. Each sought potential in contemporary poverty, in contradistinction to the deafening discourses flooding media, culture and politics which blame, dismiss and demonise neoliberalism’s victims. Established old hands like Amber Films10 paid painstaking attention to authentic sources, while bold faces like Lynne Ramsay, Pawel Pawlikowski and Andrea Arnold tempered miserabilism with impressionist perspective or mixed-genre expressionism. Shane Meadows had also privileged local and autobiographical narratives for Smalltime (1996), Twenty Four Seven (1997) and A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) before risking provincial Hollywood pastiche in Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) and Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and subsequently returning to more expansive social-realism in This Is England. Conversely, Penny Woolcock’s faithful ethnography in Tina Goes Shopping and Tina Takes a Break (Channel 4, 1999; 2001) gave way to audacious crossovers, with wildly uneven results, in The Principles of Lust (2002), Mischief Night (2006), Exodus (Channel 4, 2007) and 1 Day (2009).

UK cinema’s 2000s infancy intelligibly embarked from middle-childhood fantasies of escape, after the surreal end-of-century Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay 1999) cut adrift abandoned offspring to blissful suicidal merger in the poisoned urban womb. A rash of kitchen-sink stories then set about the salvation of dying families via wounded youthful innocence, with fairytale resolutions varying in outlandish naffness in Purely Belter (Mark Herman 2000), Billy Elliott, and Gabriel and Me (Udayan Prasad 2001)11. More complex portrayals of the negotiation of naïve Oedipal archetypes among networks of kith and kin – for example in Like Father (Amber 2001), All or Nothing (Mike Leigh 2001), Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach 2002), or A Boy Called Dad (Brian Percival 2009) – again endeavoured to resurrect the nuclear alms across intransigent generations, and amid corrosive infrastructure. Perhaps more presciently, further contributions fast-forwarded past adolescence to recalibrate bad family romance in elective relational antagonisms no longer so bogged down in blood provenance – including A Way Of Life (Amma Asante 2004), Love + Hate (Dominic Savage 2005), Summer (Kenny Glenaan 2008) and Somers Town (Shane Meadows 2008).

However, uprooting from unsafe havens in migrant dislocation to make economic and emotional ends meet risks alienation at every turn. This was charted in melancholic accounts of young adults depressed beyond their years in transient oddball communities of uncertain motive, in Human Traffic (Justin Kerrigan 1999), The Last Resort (Pawel Pawlikowski 2000), Late Night Shopping (Saul Metzstein 2001) and Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay 2002). Corresponding paranoid detachment may then follow overweening malevolence, as in London To Brighton (Paul Andrew Williams 2006), but also prehistories of impersonal or absent nurturance poignantly conveyed in Helen (Christine Molloy & Joe Lawlor 2008) and The Unloved (Samantha Morton, Channel 4, 2009). Finally, black-magic temptations of addiction to stave off social and psychic collapse easily prove fatal, overwhelming ambivalent forbearance and despairing care offered against all the odds in Pure (Gillies MacKinnon 2002), Shooting Magpies (Amber 2005), Better Things (Duane Hopkins 2008) and The Arbor (Clio Barnard 2010)12 – thus circuitously recalling Ratcatcher’s comparably psychotic oblivion in other polluted hinterlands that no last-ditch love could cleanse.

But the love remained alive, albeit in abeyance, and the newbies weren’t giving up without a fight. Filmmakers who had matured within Thatcher’s blight, witnessed at first-hand the squandered and dashed hopes among peer groups which they had, nevertheless, survived. So Nick Love’s biographically inflected picaresque, Goodbye Charlie Bright (2001), chased its eponymous likely lad, streaking round a run-down but still marginally benevolent south London manor, flanked by equally schematic petty criminals and sociopaths. Despite ducking and diving soon going decisively pear-shaped, Charlie’s readiness to put away childish things gets spun unconscionably sunny – even if his creator’s own output graduated from wideboy thuggery to middle-aged bovver and raving vigilantism. However, in many rotting metropolitan boroughs, things already were more murderous, and dilemmas starker, for schoolkid armies brokering narcotic economies with knives and guns. And this wasn’t just according to moral-panic merchants and tabloid crisis-mongers – the teenagers believed the hype too. But before their versions of events reached the screen, there was still time for sober documentary observation as well as cynically intemperate exploitation.

In depth and texture, Bullet Boy (Saul Dibb 2005) merited promotion as the ‘Brit Boyz N the Hood’ even if hardly matching the gang-infested intensity of American New Black Cinema. The film’s restrained picturing of Hackey towerblocks, terraces and playing fields counterpointed troubled biographies and questionable futures, as a paroled aggravated assaulter fails to go straight thanks to irreconcilable demands of family, friends and foes. His pre-teen brother strives to avoid the same fate with an integrity built from scratch, himself facing multiple threats in an environment of jaundiced institutional hypocrisy and thoroughly compromised masculine power. With their own preoccupations, the damaged and besieged elders exhibit contradictory nobility and inflexibility, with the generations’ lifestyles barely intersecting. Even when they do, mutual incomprehensiblity ensures a zero-sum game of passionate relations. In impressive yet impeccably modest social-realist style – thanks to a complex, subtle script and naturalistic dialogue delivered by a committed cast – both the spiralling determinism of violence and, counterintuitively, genuine chances of youngsters thriving without abandoning homemade ethics or home turf are convincingly rendered.

Only the former was managed by the resolutely unrealistic Rollin’ With the Nines (Julian Gilbey 2005), a cheap blaxploitation ripoff revelling in kinetic drug-fuelled brutality and depths of sexual depravity. It did, however, showcase the indigenous gangster-rap incarnation of Grime – London’s ascendant mixed-race music subculture which, like the tawdry trappings of pornographic consumerism, was neglected in Bullet Boy’s atmosphere before being thoroughly integrated into later youth-centric fare. Accordingly, Life and Lyrics (Richard Laxton 2006) was next up in the neighbourhood-watched stakes – a relatively mild Brixton hip-hop romance kitsching Eminem’s 8 Mile – which was promptly blown away by the manic virtuosity of Kidulthood (Menhaj Huda 2006). Written by Noel Clarke (who directed Adulthood, the 2008 sequel), this pursuit of classmates dragging a panoply of delinquent predicaments round streets and high-rises drew on his intimacy with its disreputable setting – more like four funerals and a teenage pregnancy than in the yuppie Notting Hill – and the vernacular of impatient yearning, impassioned loyalty and harsh wit rang as true as the quickfire intimidation and unforgiving shaming and disrespect among incipient predators and prey.

Sadly, rushing to deliver revelations of moral squalor in juvenile rites and wrongs of passage rammed far too much implausibility into a twenty-four hour exegesis. Inflated physical, mental and sexual cynical prowess in characters left little of the humdrum anomie and vulnerable uncertainty of real adolescent shades of grey. The breathless narrative panned out thick, fast and predictable, leaving no space for reflection let alone quotidian teenage kicks such as enjoying the spot-on beats blaring on the soundtrack. Maybe kids do mature that quickly and wickedly. But such suspiciously partial verisimilitude seems rather to reflect teenage’s own delusions of grandeur, keeping fear of the future at bay while inadvertently nourishing agendas pushing the repressive containment of subhuman underclasses. And authorities in any sense are conspicuously absent here, as in later Menace II Society wannabes like the rather charming 1 Day (Penny Woolcock 2009) and relentlessly charmless Cherry Tree Lane (Paul Andrew Williams 2010), as well as, at another figurative extreme, the comedic contempt of Anuvahood (Adam Deacon & Daniel Toland 2011) where clueless cretins with Ali G pretensions are antisociality’s primary perpetrators.

Recent entries in UK youth cinema’s urban killing fields continued to earnestly craft dialogue scripted from authentic patterns of banter and patter, but disguise blindingly obvious narrative arcs with increasingly tired crowd-pleasing novelty gimmicks. Sket (Nirpal Bhogal 2011) at least tempered testosterone overdoses with feminine ferocity and tenderness in girl gangs betraying their men and each other – whereas Shank (Mo Ali 2010) and Attack the Block (Joe Cornish 2011) traded respectively in Mad Max and Spielbergian sci-fi buffoonery. The former parachuted an utterly unconvincing nonviolent direct action credo into the directionless moral starvation of infantile teens, while the latter’s unwelcome intruders were rampaging pitch-dark aliens disrupting mugging, drugging and blagging in a motley starstruck crew. Our petty posse transform themselves into unlikely superboys in ridding the ’hood of its unspeakable nemeses – forging alliance with a slew of more or less respectable middle-class fractions in the process. Sadly, and ruinously, however, the ultimate deeply offensive corollary implies that the otherworldly invasion actually emanated from their own psychic recesses, whose ‘blackness’ they must expunge to prevail.

Alongside high-energy grimefests running out of steam for want of hints of the transcendence of endless, restless immaturity, more contemplative slices of community hard-knock life have embedded individual outsiders within – as opposed to insiders without prospects – in translating elements of the filmmakers’ own conflicted upbringings. Among the best was Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), updating her Oscar-winning desperate single-mother short Wasp (2003) and showing a disaffected daughter suffocating under constricting Thames Estuary horizons. Her obsessive-compulsive acting-out veers from solitary hip-hop dancing to cathexis with her mam’s new boyfriend – the exotic downhome appeal of local travellers and strangeness of semi-natural landscapes beyond the estate contrasting with its familiar ambient clamour of a back-catalogue of plaintive calls and responses from British soul musics. Coloured and lit with bewitching point-of-view cinematography, this potent expressive interplay of single-minded interior and implacable exterior alienation perfectly conveys the reckless damage risked for self and others; when lashing-out at each successive vain option threatens a self-fulfilling prophecy of disappointment.

The grievous hostility here evident in dysfunctional lower-class daily life, however, matches fractiously vibrant intimacy, spirit and intelligence, and such vital human impulses can warp destructively when inchoate fury narrows the limits of the foreseeable. Refusal to relinquish desirous intensity, no matter how inadequately articulated and negotiated, or subsume it in conventional role prescriptions, is highly likely to result in schism. Yet emotional bonds run as deep as the profanity even in a family this fragile; one which nurtures as well as neglects. Conversely, Channel 4’s recent four-part Top Boy (Ronan Bennett 2011) revisits Bullet Boy’s Hackney(ed) crossroads, whose socio-economic climate over intervening years has exacerbated the unravelling of further impoverished kinship networks: blood connectivity now stretches beyond breaking point. Fashioning substitute clans from social detritus at hand is thus imperative and, as in its precursor, realism and crime melodrama are skilfully blended, daring to expose prevailing commonplaces of urban deviance as simplistically prejudicial with Ashley Walters nailing yet another bad boy with a heart of tarnished gold, and a young cousin warding off his ambivalent mentorship.

Psychiatric and relationship breakdown and overworked drudgery leave kids fending for themselves among drug cartels who succumb to the vicious logic of their enterprise more from lack of alternatives than psychopathy – paralleling the affective sufferation among children, parents and intermediate cohorts alike. Highlighting one lad’s navigation through everyone’s stormy weather, a sophisticated meshing of trauma, painful love and hope, in overlapping biographies, convincingly sketches manifold constituents of crumbling commons, in spite of an unfeasibly minimal cast and plentiful questionable plot holes. In the light of dishonest commonplaces elsewhere overstating degraded sociality, the anachronistically threadbare gangs and police presence here rather suggest institutional neglect, paradoxically letting autonomous interaction breathe. Dehumanisations of feral scum crescendoed after the series’ completion, but no deterministic truck is had with clichéd inadequate parenthood, positive role models and the ‘Victorian’ values toxic in any strata, but pathetic in these. So, Reality TV’s tough-love presaging of soft-cop invasion to transform fortunes is trashed along with traditional professional imperialism; with social workers only being useful when disavowing officialdom and following class-conscious noses, instead of turning them up in disgust at respectability’s failure to thrive.

The older characters seem paralysed in sad individualistic tactics just as useless these days as the moral homilies which blatantly failed them. Acutely so aware, the youngsters combine wily intelligence and obstinate interpersonal commitment to carve out coherent paths from limited material resources, relations and ethics discernible in the city’s wreckage. Their tentatively awkward strategies may have only modest chances of pragmatic success, but ultimately they reject the false promises of embracing addictive barbarity to feed fatal fancies of fulfilment. Maybe Top Boy’s author retains radical sensibilities from his own outspoken revolutionary republican, libertarian-Left youth, even if in dotage accepting political and artistic limits of temporary respite for isolated souls. But what works best, as in much of the work described above – whether focusing on personal or interpersonal change or stasis – is imaginatively brewing trials and tribulations into ensemble patchworks of juxtaposition to creatively mull over. This was already explicit in the rhythms and rhymes of the local soundsystems and griots, and now brings to life on screen the extraordinarily multifarious striving for individual and collective redemption and empowerment still characteristic of environments mired in the most unpromising circumstances. Misery? Yes: in spades – but far more besides, and by no means only representable miserably.

Community De- / Re-generation

For the most comprehensive excommunication of kitchen-sink drudgery in the service of exuberant flatulent hilarity – but never abandoning a scandalous sacreligious slant on magical realism – the unique, groundbreaking Shameless (Channel 4 2004-2012), now in its ninth series, is unlikely to be beaten. With nary a trace of patronisation or mockery, but profound and abiding respect for those making the most of the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, Paul Abbott’s barnstorming soap-operatic brainchild – based on memories of his troubled childhood – began serial offending with a humble family-in-meltdown on a satellite Manchester sink thoughtfully dubbed the ‘Chatsworth’. The non-landed gentry of this lumpen country estate are the Gallaghers, presided over by drunken, feckless Frank: a fleetingly present, irredeemably self-centred dad gone rotten who was doubtless never good for much other than siring nine. Successive series inexorably haemhorraged siblings pining for greener grass, so narrative blinkers slowly widen to a panoramic kaleidoscope of ne’er-do-wells and inadequates who actually do tolerably and adequately well, from day to day at least – shoring up mutual, unapologetically glaring weaknesses and bad-luck excuses with irrepressible optimism, surprising nous, and adventurous brio. And, as well as their effortless practical genius in syncretic cultural expropriation, this best of humanity certainly know how to throw a party – both in the dry political and festive wet-bar senses13.

The writing team’s eschewal of any harsh judgement that the characters wouldn’t already level at one another – affectionately or otherwise, though never with superior snobbish boosterism in mind – instantly and consistently irked all conceivable sneering moral majorities. The high-minded chatterati can’t handle every facet of their bourgeois omniscience being bawdily punctured with unforgiving regularity, pinpoint alacrity and alarming accuracy. And they writhe and whinge in apoplexy about this ‘fetishisation’ of poverty as if we haven’t had to put up long enough with schedules full of the pompous circumstances nourishing their vanity. Yet among sublime crackpot pratfalls and subversive overcomings of official and informal malignancy, mistakes have certainly proliferated – like embracing local Plods to the bosom or, worse, installing criminal tribe the Maguires at the heart of the darkness – but the surefooted guiding vision sweeps such embarrassing accidents under the carpet-bombing profanations of sincere single-issue and PC complacencies. Shameless automatically and unerringly takes the side of the subalterns, without sacrificing clear-sighted vulgar class pride and righteous reverse prejudice. And if the proof of TV puddings is ratings, it has vastly overperformed, whilst remaining fondly appreciated by all demographics closest to its beady-eyed gaze.

Among few cultural products with the bare-faced cheek to compare, Under the Mud’s (Sol Papadopoulos 2006) repair of a lame marriage seems wastefully unambitious given the scouring Scouse humour and invention in its community workshop source material. Mischief Night (Penny Woolcock 2006) also skims romcoms and amateur northern (this time Leeds) raconteurship, but with inspired whittling and surreal realisation is a different kettle of fish altogether from the previous Tina films. They located their Channel 4 Cutting Edge credentials in recounting everyday resourcefulness among the urban deprived struggling to stay afloat, rather than merely reactions to trauma as in normal social-realist agonies. But the cinematic denouement was shot amid heightened police paramilitarism after the London bombings, reinforcing aims to comedically undermine increasing segregation of British Asians from neighbours. Here, legacies of closer prior interaction converge on a single mum seeking stability for the kids, and various diverse connectives develop with the embattled Khan family leading to November 4th’s festivities of benign delinquency set against the mundane disrespect and darker anti-sociability of crime, racism, drugs and violence.

Design and photography magnify warmth and vitality despite divisions, and the overlain New Beats and bhangra avoid cliché as the mayhem resolves into generational contrasts of multiracial hope. Romance rekindled breaks backward-looking traditions, while teenagers pursue quests and forge friendships based on generosity and – glimpsing the limitations of parental blind alleys – working-through toxic power relations to serve future needs. But deterministic narrative arcs rather miss the point – an urge obliquely lampooned in the Big Men’s ballooning fetish; a deft condensation of joyriding, lifestylism and the Northern kitchen-sink ritual of climbing a hill to look down on the town. The lieutenants flail out of control of their territory, ending impaled on the mosque tower – contrasting the failed Western secular hot air of mastery with the impotence of the Muslim hierarchy in challenging the fundamentalists eventually repelled by enlisting dope-dealers’ muscle. Such plot absurdities likewise signal the humility of the film-maker in relinquishing authorial omnipotence – bravely weaving the weft and warp of meticulously collected grass-roots anecdotes and repartee to demolish pretension, free up energy and facilitate agency.

Fittingly, the children’s exploration of a mysterious adult world provides most bite, blithely juggling real danger and heartache with naïve sass and insight. They grapple with the inanities of respectability (“My mam’s a smackhead.” “Mine’s a dinner-lady.”) and are drawn to the relatively well-off ‘Death Row’ whose denizens – paedophiles, headteachers, gangsters, bosses – correlate posh with perverse. While one joyrider views Osama bin Laden screensavers and jihad videos as comic relief from being pressganged into iniquity, another’s apprenticeship to a hardman grandad entails blundering around junkie mums and courier pensioners. And whereas one lass finally guns down her unlikely father, a younger Muslim stepsister strategises her transcendence of patriarchy in the local urban music nightclub – a temporary autonomous zone where lower-class youth of all races enjoy their hybrid culture in relative peace away from vexing intransigence elsewhere.

Cross-stitching the corrosive fissures of white and Asian communities, the film’s hysteria consistently erodes stereotypes, remaining rooted in working-class neighbourhoods. Here, despite intense material pressures, upward mobility’s false promises are just as destructive as the baleful allure of the law of the criminal jungle in crystallising vicious circles of isolation. The desperate rearguard defence of ancestral families provides no useful prognosis, merely locking members into perpetual hypertension and the submission to oppression which carnivals have always had the function of momentarily overturning. In fact, though now celebrated only in Yorkshire, the druidic origins of Mischievous Night – a time when fairies walk the earth – predate Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes by many centuries. While hardly supernatural, the outcomes of this highly unusual urban fairytale “with its head in the clouds and its feet on the ground” might also appear somewhat improbable. Nevertheless, its hidden script alchemy of pragmatic irreverence for authority, laughing-off of adversity, and imaginative empathy and engagement updates age-old formulae for survival, solidarity and resistance still applicable most anywhere.

Of course, a crucial salient caveat with suspiciously benevolent heterotopias like the aforementioned is a risk of soft-pedalling tragedies and turning points, indelible scars and intransigent devilishnesses probably present in many midsummer night dreamers’ real lives. Shameless sometimes surely errs on the rosy side since, for example, sticky ends are so few and far between. But significant negativity can nonetheless be acknowledged and encompassed if the storytelling is sufficiently freewheeling while being carefully, caringly choreographed. Exemplary in this category are Greg Hall’s super-ultra-low budget guerrila productions14 – The Plague (2005) and Same Sh*t, Different Day (2010) – chronicling teetering trajectories among lovable London hip-hop chancers, which allow frustrating prevarication and protracted interludes to modulate impending agony or ecstasy and judiciously sprinkle sudden serious twists among inadvertent clowning and slobbing. But for deep dramatic chutzpah, oscillating humour and winning gross caricature, as well as in facing nightmare scenarios head-on, the 1980s saga This Is England (2006-12) might, if mentally calibrated to regional, sonic and sartorial specifics, share common class co-ordinates across the present day UK.

The four-part This Is England ’86 (2010) reconstituted threads of the initial film, depicting its ensemble’s continuing misadventures three years later. The skinhead subculture whose ambivalences the earlier work unpicked – echoing only in fading NF graffiti – has diluted further into post-punk, goth, mod and casual crossovers. Style-sense promiscuity mirrors diverse fortunes among misfit gang members who nevertheless retain the rabid loyalty emblematic of the depressed post-industrial contexts excavated so convincingly. Again structured by the re-engagement of old mates, Meadows’ loosening of the semi-autobiographical focus allows fully-realised grappling with the challenges of young working-class adulthood, with prospects dire and dubious past certainties disappearing in rampant political Machiavellianism. In such inauspicious circumstances the ‘imagined community’ of nation coheres no better than England’s footballers at tournaments then or since – rendering concrete damage to social fabrics most explicit in gamuts of savage stress and ill-ease which friendship networks struggle to heal or ameliorate – metaphorised in failed marital attempts by the couple at the centre of comic gravity. Cheap, cheerful ceremonials fall foul of material, social and historical stumbling blocks threatening to cripple the future. The groom sorrowfully panics about turning into his father’s facsimile, and the bride’s abused backstory comes intolerably into conscious relief in a transfixing strand escalating to unlikely resolution.

Switching format seemed natural in light of the cinematic inspiration of social-realism by Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh which failed to attract film funding. Trademark collaborative practices with a superb cast shine through, improvising everything from dialogue to design and costume, placing a premium on the awkward naturalism of time, place and interaction rather than slavish devotion to seamless superficial simulation. This approach favours narratives weaving together multiple characters without relegating subsidiary roles as mere props for conflicted heroes – which previous work, including the cinema film, was regularly guilty of. That it augured well for emphasising the open-endedness of real communities – haunted by ghosts of crisis past but with potential for resilience, autonomy and creativity as well as regression, submission and malice – was amply demonstrated in the 2011 series set at Christmas 1988 and with the most gut-wrenching but almost inconceivably optimistic collective passion on display. Skilfully melding the mildly amusing, sympathetically grotesque and downright horrific without detracting from very serious concern, Meadows’ best script yet sketches comparably tangled personal tensions and pressures across the board in a compelling portrait of a desolate generation bodging their own coming of age15.

“We Come From the Slums of …”

Not only run of t’ mill rations of awfulness, but also fascinating cornucopias of fictional fancy and food for thought about the social and cultural reproductive conditions of the wretched of our earth have smuggled through the closed-circuit Big Brother filters of conformism in the towering manufacture of consent. On closer inspection, grounds for provisional encouragement that another world is possible seem least opaque in exactly those scenarios where groups of characters have some paltry time and space to arrange their affairs without constantly being individually and collectively fingered and pestered by formal market and governmental forces. In which case, it’s telling that the remnants of Old Left patrician vanguardism these days, in concert with the usual bourgeois suspects, line up to a man, woman and transgendered being in the parties of the dark angels of capitalism and the State. No doubt we should also give a passing nod to conspiratorial paranoia over the recuperative inoculation of animalistic carnival among human couch-potatoes vegetating in the future-in-the-present matrix of Baudrillardian simulation. But that too comfortably coincides with the absorption of comfortable classes into twittering Webs inconsequentially cluttering up so many Occupy Everything liberal world views. Effete consensual dissociation from the obscene Real cannot stomach any of the hideous visceral immediacy and euphoria, let alone convulsive mortal agonies, of the libidinous and death-drive imaginaries of illiberal billions – who can’t in any case afford the latest must-have digital gadgetry or other high-blown or low-rent distractions of fashion, let alone decent IT facilities. Descending back to ground zero, two tendential gaps may be noted in TV and cinematic transitional programmes out of the post-war social-democratic settlement ushering in the post-class-war neoliberal consensus and beyond.

First is the odd erasure alluded to above of signs and symptoms of the direct intervention of either corporate or state services and utilities, be it hard forces of law, disorder and criminal injustice or, for that matter, soft bizzies of all education, social work, or welfare disciplinary stripes. But then the contemporary repressive SNAFU (‘situation normal, all fucked-up’) of the militarily-industrious complex is moderately disinclined to bother mobilising its bungling apparatus unless the lower-classes collectively impinge outside abject zones on solid middle-England ground. Except, of course, in cultural representations – those discussed herein, but more especially in the mesmerising panopticon of Reality TV16. Of course, once sticking our necks above the parapets and daring to intrude in the sterile civic spaces of genteel residence and dirty commerce, they’ll come down like a ton of bricks – but neither is there much hint of that on telly or at the pictures. Whereas, as the riotous August proved17, if there’s more than a few of us at a time they’re not really fit for that purpose anyway, unless tooled up like robocops bludgeoning and blasting innocuous passers-by and those deluding themselves trying to cash in on ‘rights’.

At stake, then, is what will happen when the unruly multitudes emerge en masse from symbolic and actual respositories of despair and sleepwalking estates of mind, to posture, frolic and act directly in the faces of authority, its reluctant or enthusastic servants, and those who just don’t care and are content – if not intent on it – for us to remain corralled there? Apart from sideways glances and glimpses in Shameless and the like, and occasional frescoes of fury against the indiscriminate, discriminatory intrusion of public policing and, even rarer, the intimate internal biopolitics of the nano-commodification of desire, UK filmmakers are largely silent on such questions – and would doubtless be booted offscreen pronto if presuming otherwise18. However, in matter of fact – to cite one tiny recent example – when East London’s Muslim and other youth come out and about scouting against fascist manifestation, blatantly flouting the commands of community ‘leaders’, and make a point of seeking out ‘Mischief Night’ camaraderie with ‘the anarchists’ while the woefully backward self-styled ‘advanced fractions’ of self-important politicos studiously self-kettle down the other end of the road; well, maybe there’s hope for us all.

Notes

1 And, even now, we can confidently predict that no right-on leftie accountancy will reach our plasma screens – matching the mainstream media news blackout of the most significant victory of British industrial labour for many years – of the recent magnificently horizontal national networking militancy of sparks, siteworkers and allies, defeating with inspired direct determined action (against the grain of their appalled and appalling trade union hierarchy) the massed ranks of the Big Seven construction companies; thus, for now, retaining some of the precious terms and conditions remaining from what their ancestors battled so hard for (see, for example, reports at http://neanarchists.com/).
2 Cf. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero, 2009); see also Slavoj Zizek, ‘Risk Society and its Discontents’, Historical Materialism, 2, 1998, pp143-64.
3See Mike Wayne, ‘The Performing Northern Working Class in British Cinema: Cultural Representation and its Political Economy’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23 (4), 2006, pp287-297.
4 For relevant discussions and varying interpretations, see: Slavoj Zizek, ‘Whither Oedipus’, in: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Verso, 1999); John Hill, ‘Failure and Utopianism: Representations of the Working Class’, in: R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 1990s (BFI, 2000) and ‘From New Wave to Brit-Grit: Continuity and Difference in Working Class Realism’, in: J. Ashby & A. Higson (eds.) British Cinema Past and Present (Routledge, 2000); Claire Monk, ‘Underbelly UK: the 1990s Underclass Film, Masculinity and the Ideologies of “New” Britain’, also in Ashby & Higson; and Cora Kaplan, ‘The Death of the Working Class Hero’, New Formations, 52, 2004, pp94-110. For a corrective, see James Heartfield, ‘There is No Masculinity Crisis’, Genders, 35, 2002, www.genders.org/g35/g35_heartfield.html.
5 As Paul Marris aptly puts it, in ‘Northern Realism: An Exhausted Tradition?’ Cineaste, 26 (4), 2001, pp30-66.
6 Not to mention the excoriating postmodernist grandeur of the Dante-meets-James Ellroy apparitions of 1970s-80s West Yorkshire in the Red Riding trilogy (by Tony Grisoni, from four David Peace novels, Channel 4, 2009); let alone those dipping into the rural and urban class-saturated vicissitudes of previous centuries, such as Andrea Arnold’s exhilaratingly trenchant take on Wuthering Heights (2011) and the sickly-sour sex-work exposé The Crimson Petal and The White (by Lucinda Coxon, based on the Michel Faber novel, BBC2 2011).
7 A rare exception being the reggae dancehall-themed Babymother (Julian Henriques 1998); discussed in Rachel Moseley-Wood, ‘Colonizin’ Englan’ in Reverse’, Visual Culture in Britain, 5, 2004, pp91-104.
8 In Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (Berg, 2006), Paul Dave convincingly parallels the venture capital speculation on low-cultural signifiers emptied of context in Trainspotting with similarly blatant cultural commodity trading among the era’s Young British artists – as critiqued by Julian Stallabrass in High Art Lite (Verso, 2000) – calculatingly pandering to sundry aspirational, reactionary and aristocratic deceptions that class really no longer mattered.
9 See Carl Neville’s valuable analysis in Classless: Recent Essays on British Film (Zero, 2011).
10 Amber’s work is discussed in more detail in my ‘Hunting, Fishing and Shooting the Working Classes’, Variant, 34, 2009, pp25-27.
11 See James Leggott, ‘Like Father? Failing Parents and Angelic Children in Contemporary British Social Realist Cinema’, in: P. Powrie, A. Davies & B. Babbington (eds), The Trouble With Men: Masculinities in European & Hollywood Cinema (Wallflower, 2004).
12 The latter not being fiction at all, but a quasi-documentary with professional actors ventriloquising the family and friends of troubled Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. For a discussion of the ‘truth’ irretrievably lost in this variety of realism, see Omar El-Khairy, ‘Clio Barnard’s Talking Heads’. Mute, 3 (1), 2011, ‘Double Negative Feedback’; www.metamute.org.
13 Despite all these uncommon attributes, it is revealing that scant recorded intelligent attention has accrued to Shameless so far. What does exist includes: James Walters, ‘Saving Face: Inflections of Character Role Play in Shameless’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 3 (1), 2006, pp95-106; Sally Munt, ‘Shameless in Queer Street’, in Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Ashgate, 2007); and Stephen Baker, ‘Shameless and the Question of England: Genre, Class and Nation’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6 (3), 2009, pp452-67. For discussion of the first series in terms of previous television comedy and drama, see my ‘A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame’, Variant, 12, 2004, pp11-12. Note also a considerably tamer Shameless U.S. (produced by John Wells and Paul Abbott in 2010), with the otherwise superlative loser-actor William H. Macy completely unconvincing as a Yank Frank. Whereas north of their border, the comparably mordant mockumentary saga Trailer Park Boys (Mike Clattenburg, Canada 1999-2009), as with Manchester’s favourite fictional pikeys, broke viewing figure records year on year – see Dean DeFino, ‘From Trailer Trash to Trailer Park Boys’, Post Script magazine, 2009 (posted at http://libcom.org/library/trailer-trash-trailer-park-boys).
14 The outfit responsible is called Broke But Making Films, whose website at www.broke-but-making-films.com can now be visited to snap up The Plague and extras on DVD for only a fiver …
15 For an account of Meadows’ own coming of age in bodging bang up-to-date slickly digital production, see his interview in The Guardian, 16th December 2011, online at www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/16/making-of-this-is-england-88.
16 At the turn of the century, sociologist Beverley Skeggs embarked on a thoroughgoing decade-long investigation of Reality TV’s primary function of informally legislating popular orientations to lived class – see: the excellent collection Reality Television and Class (edited with Helen Wood, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Reacting to Reality Television (by Skeggs & Wood, Routledge, 2012); and, for tentative political lessons, ‘Imagining Personhood Differently: Person Value and Auonomist Working-Class Value Practices’, Sociological Review, 59 (3), 2011, pp496–513 (also at: www.hum.aau.dk/~proj-forsk/beverley_skeggs/articleskeggs.pdf).
17 For a range of interesting perspectives on the significance of the UK riots, see: ‘Paul Gilroy Speaks on the Riots, August 2011, Tottenham, North London’, http://dreamofsafety.blogspot.com; Slavoj Zizek, ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’, London Review of Books, 19th August 2011; Aufheben, ‘Communities, Commodities and Class in the August 2011 Riots’, Aufheben, 20, 2012, pp1-17 (available at http://libcom.org); The Guardian, ‘Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder’, 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/series/reading-the-riots; plus the Khalid Qureshi Foundation & Chelsea Ives Youth Centre, ‘Riot Polit-Econ’, and Howard Slater, ‘FTH: The Savage and Beyond’, both in Mute, 3 (2), 2012, ‘Politics My Arse’, www.metamute.org. Finally, for a preliminary – if sometimes strangely misconceived and over-reaching – exploration of what insurgent educational praxis might entail, see the admirable Mastaneh Shah-Shuja, ‘Zones of Proletarian Development’ (Open Mute, 2008).
18 Perhaps that’s why the risibly underwhelming Wachowski brothers-produced American version of Alan Moore’s graphic novel V For Vendetta (James McTeigue 2005) wasn’t a whole lot more illuminating on the subject, either.

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Generation Bailout
Art, Psycho-Geography, and ‘The Irish Mind’ debate
Joanne Laws

The Crisis Becomes Visible: Ireland and the European Project

Following a period of rapid economic growth beginning in the 1990s, Ireland was ranked by management consultants in 2002 as the most ‘globally connected’ country in the world1. With this newly awarded status, Celtic Tiger exceptionalism, and a uniform acceptance of capitalist ideologies among the neo-rich, “a new monetary hero” was spawned – “the brilliant Irish capitalist”2.

Under the centre-right Fianna Fáil, ‘crony capitalism’ prospered, and was largely defined by mutually beneficial arrangements between government and the corporate elite. The Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority was appointed in 2003, but failed to “impose major sanctions on any Irish institution, even though Ireland had recently experienced several major banking scandals”, prompting the New York Times to dub Ireland “The wild west of European finance”3. The economic boom, (fuelled by an over active construction sector, extreme house price inflation, an unhealthy dependence on foreign multinationals, and easy access to credit) came to an end in 2008 when the economy collapsed and Irish banks were unable to refinance their foreign borrowings, exposing corruption in Anglo Irish Bank in the form of hidden money and loans to ‘anonymous’ businessmen. In order to alleviate fears of a sovereign debt crisis, the Irish government nationalised six banks and issued a spectacular blanket guarantee to pay the bondholders, in the hope that the financial markets would regain ‘confidence’ in the euro-zone overall.

Receiving a bailout of €67 billion from the European Central Bank for this purpose in 2010, the Irish government swiftly shackled this debt onto the public, through the implementation of ‘austerity measures’ – a euphemism across Europe for forced cuts to public services and public ownership. Under such conditions, Ireland’s dire fiscal situation is set to continue for generations, amidst soaring unemployment, tax hikes, shrinking public services, and crumbling infrastructures for health, housing and education; the original pillars of the Irish free-state and 1937 Irish Constitution.

If Ireland’s boom phase was an exemplary model – an archetypal blueprint from which to observe the extent of ‘functioning Capital’ – then the bust phase will surely provide a necessary gauge to study its effects and measure its repercussions, not least for those still advocating larger doses of the same. Once a small, introverted, post-Imperial4 country on the peripheries of Europe, Ireland, having joined the anti-pluralist ranks of ‘new muscular liberalism’,5 is now compelled to scramble, like the rest, for restitution in the crisis-ridden European project.

Many economists and cultural analysts have ruminated on the systemic failings of the Celtic Tiger era, and the implications of the subsequent financial collapse for Irish society. “The Celtic Tiger wasn’t just an economic ideology,” wrote Fintan O’Toole, “It was also a substitute identity. It was a new way of being that arrived just at the point when Catholicism and nationalism were not working anymore.”6 Describing the Celtic Tiger as a “mirage” largely defined by social inequality, Peadar Kirby warned of the “social costs of economic success in the era of neoliberal globalization”7. The main purpose of this text however, is to examine what is happening to the visual arts in Ireland at this post-bust juncture, with a view to highlighting current socio-political, intellectual and artistic concerns.

An emerging ‘political turn’, visible across recent festival formats in Ireland, will be examined in detail, portraying an institutional framing of an ‘emergence’ from crisis, supported by discourse on political exhibition making. Most notably, in cultivating a new fidelity to the ‘local’, contemporary Irish art is re-inhabiting familiar terrain – that of ‘land’, ‘place’ and the “native sensibilities of the local genius”8. Concluding thoughts will draw on a revival of the ‘Irish mind debate’in cultural studies9, harking back to an earlier, seemingly simpler, era of pre-globalisation. Doing so it will query whether there is a specifically Irish intellectual tradition counter to a ‘hegemonic rationalism’ of ‘Anglo-Saxon/Ango-American logic’ which might enable “a reinvestment in the notion of what it means to be a republic”.10 In framing culture as decisively conditioned by changing economic and socio-political relations, how are current artistic and curatorial practices in Ireland producing a “systematic analysis of relations between economic interest and competing versions of identity on offer”11? In short, I will examine artistic practices which consider national psycho-geographies as a supposed counter culture to material interest and burgeoning global hegemony.

Festival Formats: Curating the Political Turn

2011 was defined by waves of political protest and sustained campaigns of civil resistance, whose groupings were perceived as largely non-hierarchical in structure, characterised by a heavy reliance on internet technology and social networking sites for communication, mobilisation and reportage. Describing the Arab Spring protestors as “democracy’s new pioneers”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri outlined how the self-organised, leaderless “multitudes in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi” have the capacity to “invent a common plan to manage natural resources and social production”, concluding that “This is a threshold through which neoliberalism cannot pass and capitalism is put to question…Here insurrection touches on not only the equilibriums of north Africa and the Middle East but also the global system of economic governance…raising aspirations for freedom and democracy beyond the region.”12

Inspired in part by Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the global Occupy Movements patchily called for an examination of alternatives to capitalism, reactivating modes of resistance in the public consciousness with demonstrations, sit-ins and occupations of work places, corporate buildings and civic spaces. In an Irish context, Occupy protests in Dublin’s financial district and other parts of the country aligned in opposition to the State sale of Ireland’s oil and gas reserves, and the burden of ‘private debt’, referring to the billions currently being paid in increments to the unsecured bondholders of defunct banks. As redundant workers of the Vita Cortex factory continue to occupy the Cork premises in an on-going dispute over the terms of their dismissals, an Anti-Eviction Taskforce13 seeks to prevent county sheriffs from carrying out ‘unlawful and unconstitutional’ repossessions and evictions, while Occupy protestors seek to ‘liberate’ NAMA14 property, retaining vacant buildings as community centres and civic spaces, highlighting NAMA’s failure to deliver on a promised ‘social dividend’.15

In February 2011 the governing Fianna Fáil party suffered defeat on a historic scale. The new Fine Gael/Labour coalition, inheriting the post-Celtic Tiger economic wasteland, have subsequently reneged on many pre-election promises, most notably on political reform and the elimination of (crony) political patronage. Historic state visits from Queen Elizabeth II and Barack Obama articulated international statements of solidarity with Ireland, but the strategic interests behind the visits went largely unchallenged, with mainstream media coverage centring on the morale-boosting effects of these symbolic gestures. Visiting his great-great-great-great grandfather’s ancestral home in Moneygall, Country Offaly, Barack Obama spoke about Irish-American connections, blood lineage and the (voting?) Irish Diaspora for whom the ‘homeland’ symbolised such extraordinary traditions and people. The Queen’s visit in May, the first by a British sovereign to the Republic since 1911 when Ireland was still under British rule, was a powerful reminder of the troubled relationship between the two nations. Poignantly, Ireland’s colonial past and history of mass emigration found contemporary resonance below the glossy media veneer, against the current backdrop of increasingly depleted national sovereignty, Europeanisation and financial ruin.

As 2011 drew to a close, several prominent Irish art events utilised their respective exhibition and seminar platforms to consider the current Irish situation, citing art’s potential to navigate political terrain. The curatorial framing of this ‘emergence from crisis’ centred largely on negotiating a position for art within this period of ‘re-building’. References to local and global networks of exchange persisted as a reoccurring theme. Curator driven statements gestured towards something radical, while substance was delivered with varying degrees of success.

Irit Rogoff recently described the process of ‘turning’ as not only a move away from out-dated modes of doing towards something more urgent, but also a means of propelling an audience towards active engagement. “In a ‘turn’, we shift away from something or towards or around something, and it is we who are in movement, rather than it. Something is activated in us, perhaps even actualized, as we move.”16 In reading ‘the political’ across curatorial formats, how were new perspectives generated? How were audiences engaged, forcing “these spaces to be more active, more questioning, less insular, and more challenging”?

Dublin Contemporary 2011: ‘Terrible Beauty – Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of Non-Compliance’

Dublin Contemporary 2011 marked Ireland’s inauguration onto the international art circuit, promising a “quinquennial art exhibition of global magnitude and local consequence”. But while lavish international launches and optimistic visitor/revenue statistics created a celebratory veneer, tensions (both internal and external) over-shadowed the ambitious project. Resistance had built up among the arts community in Ireland, who generally felt that the lack of information and communication projected an air of exclusivity. In early 2011 the original management board was dissolved17 and new curators were appointed. New York-based curator and critic, Christian Viveros-Fauné, and Franco-Peruvian artist and curator, Jota Castro, swiftly assembled the ‘Terrible Beauty’ theme, referencing Yeats and the 1916 Rising, alluding to the current climate of austerity, which could hardly go unnoticed.

The curatorial vision for the large scale event aimed to provide a departure from the flashy, conventional biennial or art fair model, drawing inspiration from the principles of the Italian Arte Povera Movement of the 1960s, which had reacted against the corporatisation of art and culture. This positioning aligned with a growing acknowledgement that the global art biennial format is a product of the “distorted relationship between art and market” – a value system based on “west-eurocentrism”18 – which is currently experiencing retrenchment in an age of “art-funding austerity”19.

As a platform for contemporary practices and periphery events, Dublin Contemporary 2011 was critically relatively well received. 20 Certainly, there was an acknowledgement of the quality of the work produced by artists in Ireland, when viewed on this international stage. An emerging kind of ‘constructionist’21 aesthetic was discernable, suggesting an impulse to deconstruct, to salvage, and to clear, privileging an active ‘learning through building’ over a transmission of existing limiting forms of knowledge. 

The Danish Art collective Superflex provided the most biting prognosis of the current Irish predicament, with a video-installation entitled The Financial Crisis (Session I-IV). A space, containing hundreds of euro coins (which were glued to the floor), provided a backdrop for a video projection, which presented crisis in the euro-zone from a “therapeutic perspective”: “A hypnotist guides us through our worst nightmares to reveal the crisis without as the psychosis within. During 4 sessions you will experience the fascination of speculation and power, too fear, anxieties and frustration of losing control, economic loss and personal disaster. In Session 1 ‘The Invisible Hand’ we are introduced to the backbone of capitalism, the idea of the ‘invisible hand’ as the benign faith in self-regulation that prevents markets and people from spinning out of economic control. Under hypnosis we are asked to interrogate that faith and to imagine a world no longer governed by the invisible hand. In the following Sessions we go deeper and deeper into the financial crisis…”22

Declarations that Dublin Contemporary could engage with “art and its place in society” or operate as a hub for “non-conformist art proposals”23 proved unconvincing. Occasional glimpses of curator-centred hierarchies, and knowledge that the event was executed with a heavy reliance on internship staff, made it difficult to reconcile such a radical preamble with the hostile atmosphere palpable within the venues. Most disappointing was the format of the event, which did not deviate from the typical biennial model, doing little to circumvent notions of art as entertainment. Art market rhetoric and tourism statistics took precedence over any politically motivated curation, bypassing any opportunity to engender political agency through the implementation of robust exhibition making strategies. Slogans reminding us that “art has the capacity to imagine and effect change in the social sphere” adorned the walls of the main venue at Earlsfort Terrace, while graffiti ‘subverted’ the walls of the National Gallery, producing a lack-lustre veneer, conveying vague gestures towards institutional critique that were never formally realised.

Tulca Festival of Visual Arts24, 2011 – ‘After The Fall’

Tulca 2011, curated by Megs Morley, embarked on a socio-political inquiry into the world ‘After the Fall’, which negotiated imagined pasts and dystopian futures, producing an experience that was unequivocally of the moment. The programme was tightly under-pinned by an incisive curatorial statement, framing the event as a “pause in an endless circulation of ideas… positioning itself in the juncture at the end of one era and the beginning of the next”. The exhibition functioned as a point of convergence for many relevant conversations – civil protest, emigration, how capital moves – referencing land, territory and nationhood, punctuated with potent imagery such as ‘flag’, ‘border’, ‘island’, and ‘counter-monument’. These images resonated within an immediately perceived and conceived surrounding ‘Irish landscape’, while also offering access to wider geo-political discourse.

Filip Berta’s single channel video, Homo Homini Lupus (2011) gestured towards conflict in the euro-zone, with a depiction of wolves fighting over an Italian flag. A symbol of territory, the flag, luminous against the desolate landscape, is decimated, as the wolves each display their instinct to survive and dominate. In Elaine Byrne’s A Message to Salinas (2010), Mexican citizens articulated their desire to retain national sovereignty in the face of US intervention and state privatisation. A border is a defining national and geographical feature. The border zone, as place and ‘non-place’, as a site of migration, surveillance, and a threshold between native/foreigner, enemy/ally, import/export, has been revived as a source of study within geography and wider fields of social theory, providing a counter-culture to ‘borderless’ transnationalism. To the simple construction of binary terms – Good? Evil? Terrorist?25 – the notion of borderlands enables a more nuanced engagement.

While The Good Hatchery, informed by their ‘islanded’ position, cultivated a fidelity to micro-geographies with a meditation on the transportation of cargo and monarú earraí (manufactured goods), Gareth Kennedy referenced 19th century industrialist logic, plotting an average location for all of the cargo pallets currently traversing the planet with his folk-fictional Mean Pallet.26 In developing rural ‘folk-fictions’, Kennedy stages encounters between globalised and localised material cultures, in an attempt to identify social and environmental concerns within macro-economic contexts. Kennedy often works collaboratively with Irish artist Sarah Browne, producing temporary occupations which trace “alternative historical trajectories linked to contemporary concerns”27.

In Oral Hearing (2009), Seamus Nolan re-staged and filmed the final session of a Bord Pleanála public hearing, where members of a small north Mayo community voiced objections to the Corrib Gas project, and the laying of a production pipeline by Shell Oil to bring high pressure gas inland, reaching the Irish coast at Glengad and Rossport. Members of the community took part in the re-construction, which took place in a local community centre. Formed out of a deep connection with their own locality, the contentious ten-year struggle against corporate and state forces cited concerns about public safety and safe-guarding the rights of its farmers and fishermen as their main areas of concern, displaying an impressive accumulative knowledge of judicial and democratic processes. The Irish state, viewing the Corrib gas field as ‘a gateway to sustainability’ deployed Gardaí to heavily police the area, facilitating construction workers to carry out their production schedule. “No matter how much knowledge or information people had gathered, it was secondary to a homogeneous globalised model of how things work”28 stated Nolan. The myth of progress, enticed by corporate investment and the prospect of economic growth, was upheld, while the endangerment of nationhood, identity and cultural sovereignty declared by those claiming historical rights to working the land and seas, was unilaterally disregarded by an amorphous enemy. The local had become marginal.

Collective modes of resistance, protest and activism were expressed by several other artists including Amie Siegal and Jesse Jones. When re-appropriated into the present moment, surveillance footage29 and megaphones30 – symbols of ‘them and us’; the state and the disenfranchised classes – become inscribed with the time that has lapsed, calling for new modes of resistance within this post-binary political landscape. Recession in the 1980s was defined by trade union unrest following the adoption of neoliberal economic policies in the west, creating a shift from manufacturing and heavy industry into finance and service industries. The current recession is a product of these global economic systems, as the flight of capital shifts to the east, highlighting the precarious nature of labour within capitalism. Contemporary campaigns of resistance, as already described, are becoming increasingly self-organised and more informed about law and civil rights, in trying to hold the state, authorities or corporations accountable for breeches of their own policies, relying on the judicial and democratic systems of international law. “The shift from the industrial form of production to the semiotic form of production – the shift from physical labour to cognitive labor – has propelled capitalism out of itself, out of its ideological self-conception”31.

Paul O’Neill has written extensively on the shifting parameters and apparatus of exhibition making, biennial culture, and the emerging role of the curator as “subject and producer of this discourse”32. Reflecting on O’Neill’s description of exhibitions as “subjective political tools” and “modern ritual settings which uphold identities”33, it seems plausible that the formation of a ‘political exhibition’ is partially, if not largely, determined by the radicality of the curators’ own personal politics. Insights into Megs Morely’s own political persuasion are provided not just through her approaches to curation but also in her work as an artist. Recent works such as Post-Fordlandia34 (a film produced in collaboration with Tom Flanagan) portray a fidelity to anthropological research, supported by textual analysis in the critique of capital, which frame the visual and material narratives, outlining artistic inquiries that are echoed in her approaches to curation. Tulca 2011 was a panorama of embedded insights that gradually merged, contributing to an over-arching dialogue. O’Neill’s concern that artistic and curatorial practices should not be treated in isolation, but as co-existing spectrums “within the field of cultural production”, is further expanded by Boris Groys when he described the interplay between exhibition-making and art as producing a space that “installs everything that usually circulates in our civilisation”35. For Groys, the mass of exhibition visitors “…become part of the exhibition …in a way that assists them in reflecting upon their own condition, offering them an opportunity to exhibit themselves to themselves.”

Examining civil rights, environmental campaigns, judicial structures and corporate agendas in proximity to artistic processes, Tulca’s visitors observed tangible connections with the surrounding location. This ‘landscape revival’ is not concerned with nostalgia for celtic romanticism, nor has it become interestingly kitsch following decades of subversion. An island engulfed for so long in cross-border conflict must now acknowledge that the biggest threat to national sovereignty comes not simply from the conditions of already having renunciated national economic sovereignty under globalisation, but from the continuing political compliance and the “democratic deficit”36 of the ‘flexible developmental state’. EU/ IMF financial logic and restructuring, enacted through the state via directives for local and regional government, propose another, arguably more intrusive round of regulating the rural and legislating for the domestic. Multinationals, most topically those in the business of oil and gas exploration and production, continue to seek to exploit and monetise the land and waterways, a prospect welcomed by the Irish government with the same enthusiasm as it embraced foreign direct investment in its economy. ‘After The Fall’, while focusing on these locally sited issues, is questioning the broader body politic, just as crisis in the euro-zone points to a broader systemic concern – that of the ‘utility’37 and permanent nature of ‘crisis’ as a function of capitalism38.

TRADE Seminar 201139

Foreign multinational gas and oil exploration also became the focus of a group of artists participating in TRADE residency 2011, in Carrick-on-Shannon, with an examination of the devastation that hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a ‘fracking’40) for gas would have on their locality. Their campaign ‘Talk About Fracking’ pertinently demonstrates the tangible links between global practice and local impact, with the national, (i.e the capacity of state governance to implement, mediate or reject those practices) occupying a determining position. As already outlined, the government stance on this issue focuses heavily on economic prospects, with Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Fergus O’Dowd, recently stating that “if there was a chance that billions of euros in untapped gas could provide a massive economic boost, the Government must take account of that”41.

The ‘Talk About Fracking’ campaign, while questioning the apparent consensus of economic necessity that subordinated the local, also functions self-reflexively in its capacity to align artistic activity with societal concerns. Interrogations regarding the social function of art have persisted across a spectrum of twentieth century movements, from dadaist and constructivist directives towards a new social order, to conceptualist and feminist experiments of the 1970s and relational aesthetics practices of the 1990s. Much of the discussion at the TRADE seminar centred on how art might continue to negotiate a socially engaged position, and the important role the artist plays in advocating active citizenship, challenging the commodity and entertainment functions designated by capitalism, which define art as a servant of the economy and support the bourgeois image of the artist as a ‘creative genius’ existing on the margins of society. Coupled with the proliferation of artist led initiatives across the country, alternative methods of production and display are emerging as defining features of the “new ecologies of practice”42 in contemporary Irish art. Formed largely out of practical necessity – the sharing of space and resources – artist led co-operative structures have become increasingly associated with seemingly political models of collective self-organisation. Although the suggestion that art, in this recessionary time, might experience a “renewed purpose” seem patronising, it does seem tenable that institutional and art market hierarchies are less prevalent in these spaces, with less of an emphasis on commerciality. But that is not to say they are entirely emancipated. In many Irish urban districts, artistic activity is becoming increasingly intertwined with urban planning, with numerous county councils inviting artists to temporarily ‘activate’ vacant commercial spaces in dormant retail sectors. While artistic practices in Ireland appear to be genuinely thriving under these conditions, revealing an underlying capacity for co-operative production, the lingering uneasy relationship between developer and artist is yet to be tested. Pitched as a ‘win win situation for everyone’, this arrangement is reminiscent of the gentrification discourse which followed the development of ‘creative quarters’ in Temple Bar, Shoreditch, Soho, etc. ; a debate too lengthy to enter into in this text. By contrast, the image of rural art practices emerging from the TRADE seminar utilised the distance from the (urban) centre as a pensive site for many artistic inquiries – commonage, local infrastructure, connectivity, and temporary publics – producing meditations on ‘the periphery’ and ‘the local’, which are translatable across a spectrum of geographies, cartographies and cultural discussions.

Cultural Geography – Signs, Routes, Perspectives

In his contribution to the TRADE seminar, artist Phillip Napier described the M1 motorway connecting Belfast and Dublin, which forms part of a larger European EU01 route infrastructure connecting Ireland to mainland Europe via land and sea links with Portugal and Spain, facilitating an ease of passage for production and distribution within ‘Fortress Europe’. His observations centred on the ‘absent’ border checkpoint – no military, no surveillance, no flags – where the transition from one country to another, north to south, is only visible via the signage denoting either miles or kilometres. [Paraphrasing] “The logic economy has swept away the sovereigns of the foreign. A nation that historically was defined by Unionist introversion is now being asked to adopt an outward-looking perspective.”

‘Border-zone’ study within traditional anthropology, which examined primitivism and the typology of ethnic groups, seems increasingly static in the context of contemporary globalisation. The relationships between populations and the heterogeneous structures of geography, nation states and international law are becoming correspondingly blurred. Drawing on the influence of post-structural, post-colonial and Marxist theories, emerging interdisciplinary thought re-asserts the role of cultural struggle in reproducing social life, while making apparent the inherent power relations. Much of this deconstruction centres on a re-examination of cultural convergence and population mobility. Meanwhile emerging anthropological studies focus on the cultural differences between ethnic groups which persist precisely because of border division and examine identity and political organisation across national spaces in the context of global economic expansion, increased global transportation and telecommunication technologies.

Speaking recently north of the border, at the opening of his exhibition ‘Recalculating’, at The Void in Derry, Philip Napier examined the persistent connections between “frontier discovery” and the “lingering idea of terror in civil society”43. ‘Recalculating’ is a continuation of the narratives explored in previous bodies of work, most recently in his ‘HMS Terror’ series, which examined Franklin’s ill-fated arctic expedition to the North West Passage in the 1840s, headed by Captain Francis Crozier, from Banbridge, Co.Down. Several countries are currently in competition to locate the shipwreck, which could establish economic sovereignty over the major sea way. Suggesting that the Arctic explorers were “the space men of their time”, Napier considered the HMS Terror expedition as being enshrined in myth and romantic imagination. With global warming the North West Passage has widened, offering potential for the expansion of a trade route linking Europe to China and the Far East. With dominant global power now shifting eastwards, the industrial and economic logic of connecting to China becomes salient, thus “accelerating consumption where the Communist ‘command economy’ meets and the capitalist ‘laisez faire’ economy”.

The most radical aspect of Napier’s work is the ease with which his sculptural installations oscillate between aesthetic manifestation, site specifity and cognitive abstraction. When linked to contemporary culture – the “atomisation of human experience, which creates anxiety and then offers a (comforting) resolution to that anxiety, for the purposes of consumption”44 – any symbolic exploration into unchartered territory, (going without maps or satellite navigation technology, being stripped of co-ordinates) reactivates a potential to be curious; to navigate using fear as an instinctive force; to discover political alternatives; to observe the spaces where civil resistance occurs before armed combat is deployed; to devise our own ‘global positioning systems’. In this way the “expectations of the conditioned mind”45 are disrupted, and there is “no easy resolution to that anxiety”46. Referencing French philosopher Michel Serres’ analogy of the fly, whose pattern of discovery on a window pane portrays a “speculative route-making between cartographies of knowledge”, it becomes possible to observe the sites where translation between accounts can occur, back and forth between domains, without privileging one as accurate or authoritative.

On my journey into Derry city I was aware of the significance of painted kerbs stones, and the ceremonial removal of ‘London’ from its precursory position on road signs. I had heard about the tours of the Bogside, and the murals – enduring icons of the troubles – which have accumulated an ironic distance and become in some way kitsch, turning the residents into tourists of their own history. These “visible manifestations of underlying conflicted realties” 47, which became legible externally through the mass media (with its “hunger for ‘drama’, a beginning, a middle and an end, heroes and villains and the idea of resolution”48) are still palpable, real, and “not consigned (completely) to historical abstraction” in present day northern Ireland, despite its constant inscription as a post-conflict zone. When competing powers have caused turmoil to erupt, how might this ‘discontinuity’ of history and ‘unresolved remembering’ be meaningfully inhabited? Art, as a site for communally constructed, lateral rather than linear meaning, can pose the question of “…not, what does it mean, but what do we mean?”

When asked how art might navigate a position for the historical, national or local within globalised or post-colonial contexts, Napier suggested that these structures can be redefined through emphasis on ‘the particular’ through the embedded processes of situation, and the “transference of agency to place and context”. By constructing ‘psycho-geographies’, which engage across the symbolic structures of land, religion, place names, language and identity, micro-political landscapes can be represented while also acknowledging those “deep seated fault-lines which, like trade routes, are local and global, at the same time.” In this way, art practice becomes “local, but legible and meaningful elsewhere”, and the land becomes an active cultural force, rather than merely a subject of monetisation, consumption and political division. ‘Territoriality’, as an epistemological principle, provides a “cognitive framework through which the world is observed” 49, while it nonetheless remains a concept that needs careful attention and critique.

Concluding Thoughts – Art, Ethnocentrism, and the Future

Cultural accounts of ‘Irishness’ projected internationally via references to the land and territory have historically persisted through romanticism, celtic revival and nationalism, conveying an ethnocentric mindset constructed largely through an introverted fidelity to the native landscape. The idea that Irish cultural tradition is a product of specific (and previously unacknowledged) intellectual traits was the focus of the Richard Kearney’s ‘Irish Mind Debate’ of the mid-1980s.50 With reference to Ireland’s strong literary tradition, Kearney suggested that the Irish position – of periphery and exile –produced an intrinsic ‘decentredness’ in the Irish population, generating a stereotype of the geographical or linguistic ‘other’, with a capacity to “respond creatively to dislocation and incongruity”51. The border, as a partition between Gael and Saxon, colonised and coloniser, catholic and protestant, was a geographical division that further permeated the Irish intellect, producing a distinct capacity to identify the ‘foreign’ over the ‘familiar’. Kearney also proposed that double vision – a Joycean kind of lateral thinking which simultaneously holds two contradicting thoughts in the mind – demonstrated a ‘dialectical logic’ characterised by an “intellectual ability to hold the traditional oppositions of classical reason together in creative confluence”, providing a counter-movement to the “mainstream hegemonic rationalism” and “linear, centralising logic of the Greco-Roman culture which dominated most of Western Europe”.

The main oppositions to this classification of ‘the Irish mind’, centred on a rejection of these proposed ethnic characteristics, which ultimately reinforced the celtic racial stereo-types devised under English rule, formed out of an enduring master/slave colonial self image. “…Kearney, in the cause of Irish nationalism, had essentialised Irishness and simply reversed the usual colonial claims that Ireland was full of people who simply couldn’t think straight, privileging this inability as an ‘alternative system of thought’.”52

In attempts to identify a particular native sensibility in Irish art in the 1970s and ‘80s, ‘poetic, passive and introspective’ interpretations were positioned within nationalist, anti-modernist and romantic stylistic and iconographic contexts and aligned with a distinct lack of scholarly analysis in art criticism pre 1990. These in turn contributed to the marginalised position of the visual arts in comparison with a strong literary tradition53. Under these conditions, the Irish landscape, as a site of artistic, ‘native imagination’, assumed priority over any reference to increasing modernisation, or the influence of economic and consumerist forces.

Calling for a balanced assessment of ‘provincialism’ in art criticism in the 1980s, Tom Duddy highlighted a need for lateral thinking in the ‘local versus global’ dichotomy. In carving out an identity for ‘Irish art’ at that time, Duddy insisted that the ‘geographical aesthetic’ should resonate within the local, but must endeavour to resist clichés of Celtic mysticism and Nationalism (a ‘provincialism of the right’). Similarly, for Irish art to convey a ‘sense of place’, it should articulate an awareness of international influence, global issues, and the economic realities of modernism (a ‘provincialism of the left’) without pandering to trends.

In examining the influence of the Irish intellectual tradition on national identity, much of the discourse generated in the fields of cultural theory has historically privileged the ‘literary imaginative vision’ of traditional intellectual thought, which addressed nationalist, political and cultural concerns but “left the analysis of economic and class issues to others.”54 Conversely, the emerging ‘specialist’ intellectual stratum of economic modernisation, reliant on state institutions, delivered only the technical requirements of nationalism (trade, economy, etc.) that were based on a generated ideological consensus, while marginalising socialist or radical alternatives. How can contemporary debates on nationalism (or localism?), as a counter to neoliberal globalised positions, move beyond historical abstraction, nostalgia or idealism? Fundamental to this debate must be a self-reflexivity regarding Ireland’s newly assumed national role in continuing to reproduce a competitive globalised space favourable to transnational capital, underscored by an acknowledgement of the power relations already put in place by a colonial past. How can “nationalism, culture and even racial stereotyping”55 endure amidst current portrayals of Europe as one big “Western tribe” – a model conceived for the collectivisation of trade and resources, implemented through the modernisation of infrastructures, in the pursuit of a single European financial market over the last fifty years. The recent relegation of the older periphery states such as Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Portugal – which remain comparatively central given the new eastern european periphery56 – and the socialising or ‘nationalisation’ of their respective debts have caused many cultural commentators to describe the European project as fundamentally flawed and unsustainable57, with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas warning that present policies are leading to the “creeping death” of the European Union and the “sinking [of] 50 years of European history”. This ‘democratic deficit’ in Europe is representative not only of the increasingly precarious relationship between citizen and nation state, but also of the increasingly visible discrepancies between economic forces and societal realities, something which has arguably been at the core of the European common market/ currency from its conception.

This ideological void was the basis of (post-) autonomist media theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s recent ruminations on ‘The Future After the End of the Economy’. Aligning economics not with the logic of science but with religious doctrine, he outlined an ideology based on “profits, accumulation, and power”, which gives credence to the future as a site of “infinite expansion”. Economists, akin to priests, “worship the dogmas of growth and competition, denounce the bad behaviour of society, require repentance for your debts, threaten inflation and misery for your sins, and profess social reality to be in crisis if it is does not conform to the dictates of these notions.”58 The implications of his argument are further evident not only in the ‘crucifixion’ of Ireland59 but also in the sacrifice of Greece to the economic gods of the European Union.60 The future orientated ideology of finance, which draws its momentum from the philosophy of flexible accumulation, cannot evolve self-reflexively in response to “changes in the social paradigm”.

Current economic ‘solutions’ to the global recession – that in refinancing the banks, credit will flow again, and consumption will resume, thus re-activating a stagnant economy, returning it to a path of exponential accumulation – place infinite faith in an ideology defined by the conceptual framework of future growth, with an insistence that society comply. But what if, as Berardi suggests, this version of ‘the future’ is actually over and we are “living in a space that is beyond the future?” This question forms a point of departure for the upcoming EVA International, in Limerick (19th May – 12th August 2012) curated by Annie Fletcher, and provides a few short thoughts on which to conclude this text. In the EVA press release Annie Fletcher states that “aesthetic practices and artistic thinking have an integral role at the juncture of the present and past, rather than as part of a prophetic future fantasy”61, supporting Berardi’s advocacy “for living slowly in the infinite present”. The active, contemporary Irish arts community, more educated and outwardly aware than previous generations, is displaying a capacity to engage not only with enduring legacies of the past, but with the destabilising and complex current realities of permanent crisis in a post-industrial era.

In distilling the present moment through historical, geographical and social lenses, identity unfolds within the vernacular of profit, privatisation and economic transnationalism with increasing ambiguity. A distinct connection with wider art practices reveals a congruity with international discourse, the elevation of the curator, the fluctuating form and function of the biennial, the temporary public62, the welcoming of the ‘political’ into the gallery space63, supported and extended by a return to substance in art criticism. Echoing the politically self-organised and the horizontally collectivised, supplanting the alienated and exploitable individual, a reorganisation of the production process attests to the implications of community, which searches for alternative modes of being – exploring, living, acknowledging fear, in being, for the moment, bereft of the answers previously provided by a linear and unconscious belief in the future. Drawing on this ‘present collective intelligence’, alternative routes can be found, proposing that, like Serres’ fly, we might experience “abrupt, unexpected, diagonal transitions of the mind” and “oblique accidental insights” which lead us up “the zigzagging but royal road to the understanding of how things come, and cease, to be.”64

Notes

1A.T Kearney, ‘Globalisation Index’, Foreign Policy Magazine, (2003). www.atkearney.com/images/global/pdf/Measuring_Globalization_S.pdf
2Ciarán Bennett, ‘Dublin Contemporary, Dublin Diary’, Artnet, (September 2011). www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/bennett/dublin-contemporary-9-7-11.asp
3Brian Lavery and Timothy L. Obrien, ‘For Insurance Regulators, Trails Lead to Dublin’, New York Times, (2005). www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/business/worldbusiness/01irish.html?_r=1
4Luke Strongman, ‘Post-Colonialism or Post-Imperialism?’ Deep South, v.2 n.3 (Spring, 1996). www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol2no3/post-col.html
5Bryan Fanning, ‘Irish Connections, Immigration and the Politics of Belonging’, Variant, Issue 26, (Summer 2006). www.variant.org.uk/26texts/BFanning26.html
6Fintan O’Toole, Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic, (London:Faber and Faber, 2010).
7Peadar Kirby, ‘Globalization, the Celtic Tiger and social outcomes: is Ireland a model or a mirage?’ Globalizations  Volume 1, Issue 2, (2004) pp205-222.
8Tom Duddy ‘Irish Art Criticism – A Provincialism of the Right?’ published in Sources in Irish Art: A Reader, Fintan Cullen ed. (Cork University Press, 2000) p91.
9Richard Kearney, Navigations: Collected Irish Essays 1976-2006, (New York: University Press, 2006) pp17-31.
10Fintan O’Toole, Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic, (London:Faber and Faber, 2010).
11Liam O’Dowd, ‘Neglecting the Material Dimension: Irish Intellectuals and the Problem of Identity’, in The Irish Review, No.3 (1988), pp8-17.
12Michael Harte and Antonio Negri, ‘Arabs are Democracy’s New Pioneers’, The Guardian, (February 2011). www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/24/arabs-democracy-latin-america
13Fiona Gartland, ‘Anti-eviction Blockades Promise’, The Irish Times, (February 2012). www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0223/1224312243910.html
14NAMA – National Assets Management Agency
15Brian O’Connell, ‘Protesters take empty offices for community use’, The Irish Times, (Jan 2012) www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0103/1224309736369.html
16Irit Rogoff , ‘Turning’, e-flux, (2011). www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/
17“At the end of 2010 some money was actually committed to the project, but with the condition that it be managed by the same firm that had handled the St Patrick’s Festival, a very successful tourist event, though not one having to do with contemporary art. With the inevitable change in focus, the international art star curators disappeared and so did Rachel Thomas as curator, along with many of the original Irish artists.” Ciarán Bennett ‘Dublin Diary’, Artnet.com www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/bennett/dublin-contemporary-9-7-11.asp
18Interview with Huang Zhuan, ArtZineChina, (2008). http://artzinechina.com/display_vol_aid717_en.html
19Ben Davis ‘The Humbling of the Art Biennial in the Age of Austerity’, artinfo.com, (December 2011)
www.artinfo.com/news/story/753700/the-humbling-of-the-biennale-in-the-age-of-global-austerity
20Several critics have produced cohesive responses to the exhibition, outlining details of artists, artworks and venues. See Chris Fite-Wassilak, ‘Dublin Contemporary’, Frieze Magazine, Issue 143, (Nov/Dec 2011). www.frieze.com/issue/review/dublin-contemporary/
21I am using the term ‘constructionist’, while acknowledging the existence of the deconstructionist activity of the 1930s, and its revival in architecture in the 1980s. Firstly, I am commenting on a masculine DIY aesthetic visible in the work of several artists at Dublin Contemporary 2011, and other Irish art platforms. Secondly I am drawing comparisons between these artistic processes and the pychycological process of ‘leaning through making’- the basis of Jean Piaget’s epistemological theory of constructivism. Using this term in this way I am seeking a linguistic definition for the experimental process of ‘constructionist learning’ – the making of tangible objects as a as a mode of processing the world. See M. Cakir ‘Constructionist Approaches to Learning in Science and Their Implications for Science Pedagogy: A Literature Review’, International Journal of Environmental & Science Education, 3(4), (2008), pp.193-206.
22http://superflex.net/tools/the_financial_crisis
23www.dublincontemporary.com/exhibition
24Tulca Festival of Visual Arts takes place annually in Galway, in the west of Ireland: www.tulca.ie/
25Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘The Global State of War’, War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p16.
26“The Mean Pallet functions as a symbolic barometer for worldwide economic activity. Estimated to be somewhere over the Caspian Sea, the mean pallet is moving eastward with an approximate velocity of 0.24 km/day, attributable to a high level of manufacturing and economic growth of the far eastern ‘Tiger economy’ countries.” [A tiger economy refers most commonly to Asian countries (such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) who have undergone a period of rapid economic growth. In the 1990s the term Celtic Tiger was applied to the republic of Ireland.]
27www.kennedybrowne.com/
28Judy Murphy, ‘Corrib Gas row the subject of show in Tulca Festival of Art’, The Connacht Tribune, (Nov 2011). www.galwaynews.ie/22584-corrib-gas-row-subject-show-tulca-festival-art
29Amie Siegel, DDR/DDR, HD Film, (2008).
30Jesse Jones, Against the Realm of the Absolute, Film, (2011).
31Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘The Future After the End of the Economy’, e-flux journal, (2011) www.e-flux.com/journal/the-future-after-the-end-of-the-economy/
32Paul O’Neil, ‘The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse’, in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick eds. (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007) p13-28.
33ibid.
34Post-Fordlandia, Press release, June 2011.www.galwayartscentre.ie/events/view-event/168.html
35Boris Groys, ‘Politics of Installation’, e-flux journal, (2011)
www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-installation/
36Mathias Albert, ‘Territoriality and Modernization’, Institute for Global Society Studies, (2001)
www.uni-bielefeld.de/soz/iw/pdf/albert_3.pdf
37Naomi Klein, ‘Wall St. Crisis Should Be for Neoliberalism What Fall of Berlin Wall Was for Communism’, presentation at the University of Chicago, (2008), available at Democracy Now: www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein
38Slavoj ŽiŽek, ‘A Permanent Economic Emergency’, New Left Review, Issue 64, (July/August 2010)
www.newleftreview.org/?view=2853
39TRADE is an annual Visual Arts Programme supported by Leitrim and Roscommon County Councils, and the Arts council of Ireland. “The initiative consists of a residency phase, where four local artists work under the mentorship of an invited artist, and a seminar event – which has historically displayed a substantial engagement with current critical discourse. An interesting legacy has evolved out of contributions from an array of national and international participating artists, curators and thinkers.” Joanne Laws, TRADE report, Paper Visual Art Journal, http://papervisualart.com/?p=7560
40Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) involves the propagation of shale and rock layers using pressurized fluid as a means of releasing oil or  gas for extraction. Fracking has been suspended in France, South Africa, parts of Australia and a number of US states pending more detailed investigations
41‘Minister of State’s comments alarm opponents of fracking’, The Irish Times, (Jan 2012): “Exploration licences were granted to companies such as Tamboran Resources by the preceding Fianna Fáil government before any policy was developed around the fracking process. The income generated to the exchequer is thought to be negligible, especially considering the favourable tax concessions in place for oil and gas exploration, which allow consortiums to right off all capital and development debt, including security, policing and ultimately hefty public relations costs, before declaring any taxable profit. Any extra revenue generated from future rises in inflation of gas and oil prices will be distributed as profits multi-national overseas partners.” www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0127/1224310808790.html
42New Ecologies of Practice: A short season of projects by Catalyst Arts [Belfast] / Occupy Space [Limerick] / The Good Hatchery [Offaly] / Basic Space [Dublin]. NCAD Gallery, (9th February –13th April 2012). Exhibition and public seminar presenting the work of a number of Irish artist led initiatives, embodying new approaches to production, distribution and display, as a perceived counter to mainstream and institutional practices. http://gallery.ncad.ie/index.php/2012/02/newecologiesofpractice/
43Parts of this section are paraphrased from Philip Napier’s artists’ talk in The Void, Derry, (10th March, 2012.)
44Parts of this section are paraphrased from Declan McGonagle’s, ‘Remembering The Future’; an upcoming text on Napier’s work.
45ibid.
46ibid.
47ibid.
48ibid.
49Mathias Albert, ‘Territoriality and Modernization’, Institute for Global Society Studies, (2001). www.uni-bielefeld.de/soz/iw/pdf/albert_3.pdf
50Richard Kearney, ‘The Irish Mind Debate’ in Navigations: Collected Essays 1976-2006, (New York: Syracuse, 2006) p19.
51Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) p173.
52Richard Haslam, citing Conor Cruise O’ Brien, ‘A Race Bashed in the Face: Imaging Ireland as a Damaged Child’, Jouvert, 4: 1 (Fall 1999). http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert
53 Dr. Róisín Kennedy, ‘Made in England: The Critical Reception of Louis le Brocquy’s A Family’, Third Text, Vol. 19, Issue 5, (September 2005), pp475-486.
54Liam O’Dowd, ‘Neglecting the Material Dimension: Irish Intellectuals and the Problem of Identity’, in The Irish Review, No.3 (1988), pp8-17. Considers the roles played by intellectuals in debating Irish communal and national identity and investigates why material circumstances have been ignored in cultural studies worldwide; applies Michael Foucault’s definitions of traditional and specific intellectuals when examining intellectual criticism of Irish society, North and South, while comparing the focus on abstract traditional debates to the marginalisation of socialist or radical alternatives; refers to theories put forth by Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Maurice Goldring.
55ibid.
56The so-called peripheral countries of the eurozone are: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. However, EU membership has today grown to 27, including northern and eastern countries, the most recent being: Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia in 2004; Bulgaria, Romania in 2007. Until the mid-1990s, Ireland was classified by the EU as a single territorial unit eligible for aid from the Structural Funds (Objective 1). However, by 1999, because of the high levels of economic growth experienced during the previous five years, average GDP for the state exceeded this threshold. Regional disparities in levels of development and well-being were still recognised though, with the Irish government successfully seeking to have two regions recognised as eligible. See: Doris Schmied ed., ‘Winning and Losing: the Changing Geography of Europe’s Rural Areas’,. (USA: Ashgate press, 2005).
57See Fintan O’Toole, ‘Treatment of Ireland a disaster for European project’, The Irish Times, (May 2011) www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0503/1224295913381.html
58Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘The Future After the End of the Economy’, e-flux journal, (2011). www.e-flux.com/journal/the-future-after-the-end-of-the-economy/
59Fintan O’Toole, ‘Treatment of Ireland a disaster for European project’, The Irish Times, (May 2011) www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0503/1224295913381.html
60William Wall, ‘This shameful sacrifice of Greece to the gods of the market’, Irish Left Review, (February 2012). www.irishleftreview.org/2012/02/13/shameful-sacrifice-greece-gods-market/
61EVA International 2012, Press Release March 2012,
http://gallery.limerick.ie/Events/evaInternational
AftertheFutureMarchAnnouncement.html
62Simon Sheikh, ‘In the Place of the Public Sphere’
www.societyofcontrol.com/research/sheikh.htm 
63Tempered as it is by Anthony Davies’ observations in ‘Take Me I’m Yours: Neoliberalising The Cultural Institution’, Mute Vol 2, No.5 – ‘It’s Not East being Green: The Climate Change Issue’, (2007). www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/take-me-im-yours-neoliberalising-cultural-institution
64Steven Connor, ‘Fly’ (London: Reaktion Press, 2006) p184.

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