WE ALL PAY YOUR BENEFITS - NEGATIVE SOLIDARITY

 Well, this is quite sickening. Here's the blurb from the BBC website:

"Four claimants and four taxpayers come face to face to explore each other’s lives, examine their values and speak their minds. Will the taxpayers feel that benefits are too high or not enough? And will the claimants decide that hard work is good for them or will the sacrifice be too much?"

When most "hard work" boils down to slaving your guts out for someone else's profit, why on earth is anyone going to decide that it's good for them? And I do like that term "sacrifice" with its (I think deliberately) sacral overtones. So working is a sacrifice, is it? Taking that seriously. we would have to ask to whom, and for whom? But the point seems to be fostering of negative solidarity, which translates as: "we have it shit, so you should have it shit, too". Like Ian Duncan Smith's constant mantra of "making work pay": you might think that that would mean making sure pay and conditions for most jobs improved; no, it means making sure that benefits are harder to get, worth less, and are easier to lose. The working population are expected to be grateful that someone is getting shafted more brutally than they are. More, they are told that it is claimants that are somehow making them work longer and harder for less money, and obscurely, that the precarity of work (zero hours contracts and the rest) is somehow down to the doleys. But if work is a sacrifice, it's not one that is made to claimants, claimants are not the ones who have kept wages stagnating for years.

"[...]in this second episode the experiment is reversed as the claimants spend time with the taxpayers. Getting up early, working alongside them through long shifts and seeing the effects on family life[...]"

So working "long shifts" (we're talking about most work that is done, the savagely underpaid variety) has effects on family life...But because it's a sacrifice (unclear to, or for, whom) it's worth it? The lack of affordable child care is somehow just a fact of life, like those long shifts.

"[...]the claimants experience the sort of work it takes to pay for their benefits and get a taste of the reality of working life. They must decide if they think that work is worth it. With the battle lines drawn between claimants and taxpayers, this series brings the two sides together to discover if any of them can agree."

At what point will we get to see the salt-of-the-earth-taxpayers get to have a face off with Lord Freud, for example, the charmer who recently said that the increase in food banks was due to the fact that they were giving away free stuff, and not because people might not have the wherewithal to buy food. Maybe he could be put in the position of explaining to them why he has so much and they have so relatively little. But no- that's not the way negative solidarity works. The working population are slaving so hard because of the unemployed, apparently, not because of their bosses.

DUNCAN-SMITH AND POLITICAL AMNESIA

Here we have the centimetres-deep political philosopher Duncan-Smith holding forth on the benefits of (waged) labor in 2010. Unfortunate turn of phrase. To put it further in context, I added bits of a Cameron speech post-riots in september 2011.

duncan smith cameron work from robin bale on Vimeo.

G4S AND "TROUBLED FAMILIES"

Minister Chris Grayling

So by now we all know about G4S's colossal fuck-up with the security for the corporate wank-fest that is the Olympics (although this more serious G4S story has apparently been overlooked during the self-righteous ire poured onto the company by some of the very same politicians who commissioned them for this and many other disasters. Or their involvement with the occupied territories.) Johnny Void has a plausible explanation of what happened there, I think. Also, in another posting he describes succinctly the mechanisms that allow scumbags like G4S (or A4E, or Serco etc etc) to milk the system.

Anyway, yesterday's newspaper headlines presented us with this: the launch of Louise Casey's report, commissioned by Cameron after last year's riots -  "Listening to Troubled Families". There are, apparently 120 000 of them in the country, and they cost the state £9 billion a year. Honest. It's a fact. I thought that it was Blair who first used this   utterly spurious - figure, but actually I haven't been able to track down any reference to that. As a matter of fact, the statistic appears to have been pulled out of the arse of someone in Whitehall, or rather, extrapolated from different studies, as Ruth Levitas points out. What is astounding is that this mathematical conjuring trick has been swallowed, to the extent that critics of the plan are now pointing out that the promised £450 million will not be enough to cover the "120 000" families, as if those families actually exist out there, in those numbers. As the New Statesman blog piece linked above points out, the Casey report is a piece of qualitative research on 16 families with very serious problems indeed. It's only those 16 families that can be said, with any certainty at all, to fit the template.

As Levitas and the New Statesman piece both point out, the original figures that have since been  warped and extrapolated from were an estimate of families in poverty. It's hard to imagine (though it is possible, when one considers the towering intellectual capacities of this government) that this was simply bad accounting. There are happy results of conflating poor people -who are increasingly numerous, for obvious reasons- with people who are -supposedly- a danger to their neighbours, an unwarranted drain on the public purse, and have a prediliction for child abuse. The plain-speaking man-of-the-people fat-Tory-Twat (and minister in charge of this) Eric Pickles put this view succinctly

"[...]these folks are troubled: they're troubling themselves, they're troubling their neighbourhood. We need to do something about it."

Casey is obviously singing from the same hymn sheet: "If they are causing so many problems to their neighbours … the families that have to live next door to them, to the teachers that have to teach their kids in schools, to the people on the receiving end as victims of crimes – it is wrong that we allow them to carry on living this way."

So there we have it - a bit of statistical mumbo-jumbo, and there's the proof: poor people are dangerous. And it's their own fault that they're poor because we give them so much money.


It has, of course, private provision as an essential component, or private companies who will cream off their chunk of the funding and then subcontract the work to the voluntary sector. So guess who's got some of the contracts? Yes indeed - G4S. An article in the Salford Star points out some difficulties (to put it mildly) with this model of provision:  

"It's a bit of Catch 22" a Salford City UNISON member told the Salford Star "Either we don't refer to these agencies and there's sanctions imposed on the local authority, or we do and they take our work from us. 

"We're struggling to find work for them" he added "We've been given instructions to refer to these companies who haven't got any accountability and their results are not judged on outcomes but on how many families they get coming through their service. How are they proving their worth by numbers?"

Casey and Cameron claim that it is a "black box" operation, as with the Work Program - providers only get paid by results and their methods are up to them. But as the intended result is to save public money that would be spent on courts, or time in school exclusion units, or benefits - how does one prove a negative? Payment will be on the basis of crimes not committed or school days not skived off, or benefits not collected. Even if the model is plausible, and it isn't, I can't see how this could be assessed. But councils having their budgets viciously slashed have every incentive to provide fodder for this process, where successful referrals will be bring money from central government. Now, having the figure of 120 000, councils will be expected to find those people. Or face Tory reprisals for not co-operating with this innovative, shiny piece of coercive privatisation.

The void article linked above, concerning the practices of welfare to work providers also applies here, where forcing people into work is only one strand of a  complex series of processes. On "Creaming and Parking": "Under the ‘black box’ style of provision on the Work Programme, welfare to work companies are able to almost anything they like to ‘help’ someone back into work. This can include doing nothing at all and in fact that makes good business sense. It’s a numbers game. Some of even the hardest to help will find work on their own [or decide to go to school or get off drugs etc.], meaning yet more money for providers. As to the rest, well the company already have the attachment fee in the bank.

The most lucrative way to manage the hardest to help is to not spend a penny on them. This is far more profitable than throwing endless resources at people who the welfare to work companies know are unlikely to find work. [or decide to go to school or get off drugs etc.] "

What is deeply disturbing in this, amongst all the other disturbing things, is that data protection is waived for the targets of this scheme:
[...]ministers have agreed to suspend the privacy of poor households. For the first time, local councils will be allowed "without informed consent" to access benefit records. The idea is to build up a map of troubled families – which will be shared with other agencies such as the police, GPs and housing associations[...Casey says...] "I don't think that is about someone's civil rights. I think it's about their right to get help and the system's right to challenge them to take it."  Her statement sums up the coercive nature of the interventions, and the customary couching of them in therapy-speak: the "challenge" to "get help".

There is undoubtedly a reality tv show in the making here - maybe there already has been something like it? Cameras follow Casey around as she kicks in the front doors of those prole-porn staples, the lardy, feckless, overly-fecund, drunk and workshy. She gives them some tough love, they resist. She's warm, empathetic, but takes no bullshit; she's on a mission here, and it's for their own good. Then, roughly at the three quarter mark of the episode, we get the money shot, On being "challenged" the family, as a whole, collapse into lachrymose prostration, burbling through wads of snotty bog-roll clutched convulsively in porcine hands. "You're right Louise! We thought our situation was a result of the vicissitudes of late capital, or perhaps a reasonable reluctance to engage in the pointless grind of wage-slavery or the indoctrination of school - we were wrong! It's all because we've got low self esteem!" She then gets them to "work on their issues" and... well, you've seen the show before. You know how it goes.  At the end, they talk about their "journey".

Before doleys can be conscripted onto the Work Programme they have to sign a consent form, or be bullied and threatened into signing one by JobCentre staff, that gives their consent for their private data to be shared with the provider - A4E, G4S or whoever. The provider gets no money unless they have that person on their books, until they have their data. With the waiving of reasonably informed consent, cabinet ministers in effect giving consent on these "troubled families" behalf, there is no limit to how many people could find themselves signed up to the tender mercies of the providers -that is, as profit-making units to a private company - and it is of no concern to the providers how "troubled" they are.

From the Salford Star article:  "[A]t a Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion conference in May, titled Families, Communities, Places: A New Way Forward for Delivery. Hot topics included `public sector and welfare reform', while a presentation was entitled `Cost benefit modelling for working with troubled families'...

On the day, George Selmer, North West contracts director with G4S, gave a presentation [...] He revealed that, six months into the Government contract, G4S had achieved only 15% of its target… "This represents at best a delay, at worst a loss of around £2million of revenue for our supply chain."

Admitting a lack of referrals and `questions over where the programme fits', Selmer urged conference attendees to provide more referrals and to `trust' the ESF  programme [the European Social Fund, who have been providing money for the initiative so far]… "Providers only get paid if they deliver…But if they don't have enough customers to enable them to hit their targets they can't afford to maintain the service to the necessary levels…" The article points out then that Salford council social workers already do the work that G4S wants referred on to them, so it seems a bit redundant and G4S's duplication could well lead to job losses amongst council staff. It's worth remembering here that G4S will use the voluntary sector for delivery, in true workfare style.



the idea of some sort of multi-agency action to "help"  "problem families" was first floated by the last government. It was Blair who revived what is arguably simply another version of that old chestnut, the dichotomy between the supposedly worthy and unworthy poor, but with the family as the basic unit; something that the present government obviously believe still has some mileage.

I thought that Blair was the one who first came up with the precise - and

Blair blithely posited a continuum from what he and his government called "Anti-Social Behaviour" (which, by definition, is not actually criminal) with actual crimes and, at the top end of the scale, international terrorism. Quite how there is a spectrum with, at one end, drinking in public, or dropping litter, and at the other, bombing a tube train or flying a plane into a skyscraper, is beyond me. Nevertheless, the phrases "crime and anti-social behaviour" and "crime and disorder" have become part of common parlance.

There is more than a little continuity here. Louise Casey, a civil servant who became the Blair governnent's "Respect Tzar" (why tzar? Who knows.) and then Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses.



What might have helped with getting the contract would be this sort of thing, or this.

LEAKING BOG

I'm struggling with a leaking toilet at the moment. Not leaking in the sense of effluent on the floor, but a cistern that won't stop filling. It's pretty nightmarish- I will go up and adjust the gaffa tape on the ballcock or try and wedge something underneath it, and the next minute I'll hear a torrential outpouring that goes into the cistern and then down the back wall of the house. Just a minute ago, I thought that it had started to rain again, but then realised it was the bog.

There is something remorseless and inexorable about the power of water. We might think that we've domesticated it with pipes and sewers - to some extent we've treated it with contempt - but we're wrong. It's there right now, eating at the bricks of the house, and our neighbour's fence. It sounds like a small, localised rain shower.

This is my dad's bog. It has nothing to do with me. In my mother's lifetime it was secured with elastic bands, she didn't care too much about these things. To flush it one would fill the cistern with the jug on the side of the bath. It was always going to be fixed next year. Now it's not.

I can hear it now, turning the back garden into a swamp, and giving the neighbours a free new age -1990's- sound effect to assist them in their slumbers (unless it's deeply annoying, which is entirely possible) like a "rain forest waterfall".

I'm going to sort it tomorrow with a bent coathanger. That will make a cradle to hold the ballcock at the appropriate angle to shut off the valve that allows this miniature Niagara to persist. Obviously, a plumber is required at some later date - was always required.

But it is ultimately the noise of family. My dad has just got up for a slash, necessitating, I hope, flushing, which will give me a bit of respite from having to re-adjust the ballcock- for maybe half an hour.

As I was saying, anyway; it is the noise of family. As the Amazon ad for the the alarm clock that I linked above puts it: "filters out background noise as you read, work or study", family is the background noise. This is the noise of my particular place, where you fix the bog with elastic bands; my inheritance, where I must live - when I'm here- with the remorselessness of water, the sound of it, or I must get it fixed, because no-one else is going to.

YOU

SOCIAL JUSTICE

THE DANDYISM OF CONTEMPT II

Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind”

Charles Baudelaire “The Dandy”

Zurburan "Saint Francis in Meditation" National Gallery

“We” are not “All In This Together.”

The original dandies dressed like you – that is to say, like anyone2. They took on the "Buff and the Brown", the uniform of the American Revolutionaries – those slave-owning avatars of egalite. The difference was in the individuality of the cut; an impeccable silhouette might, perhaps, assuage the sting of merely being subsumed into that tedious, newly minted abstraction -“The People”.

In opposition to the blunt bluffness of the democratic Everyman, whose sober attire was a sign of the bearer's public virtue, they disguised themselves as themselves. They displayed – I was about to say “their otherness in public view”, but this not only lacks precision, but is also misleading. Their otherness as the public is closer to the mark, but might imply a collision between private inclination and civic demands. Apparently trivial details on the surface of appearance, the minute stitching of a button hole, a knot on a cravat or the width of a lapel, signalled the otherness of the public, its difference from, and incapability of being reduced to, itself.

This index of withdrawal, invisibility, was a style in the most serious sense of the word *; and style, as the tangible arrangement of elements, is always serious.

*"...Every style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we perceive...Every style is a means of insisting on something... It will be seen that stylistic decisions, by focusing our attention on some things, are also a narrowing of our attention, a refusal to allow us to see others."

Susan Sontag “On Style”

Contempt, to be elegant – as wholeness or necessity - has to be marked with a totality - that is to say –like any totality – artificial, or symbolic. It has to be raised above its everyday self to become its own sign, stark against its shifting background.

It requires a gesture that inscribes a circle that encloses itself. That which is mixed with, say, compassion or indulgence, belongs too much to the heterogeneous world.

Contempt is sterile. Closed within itself, it expresses only itself - ultimately its own difference from itself. In this world, there are only two qualities, the gesture and its background. To this gesture, all is background, and it indicates this with subtle and weary brevity. It neither genuflects, nor grieves.

Dandyism is a form of address, a subtle inclination forwards, merely enough to display a hint of shirt front and the cut of the sleeve. The immaculate contains itself, gives little more to the world than its scent.

The surface, the gesture that encloses itself, gives a brief farewell - perpetually departing. A sign of legitimacy external to all other forms can do no other; it cannot explain itself. It barely acknowledges what it departs from; marks its own difference/indifference to it with the briefest nod - not even something that could be called a glance.

"Whether the Lumpen … present themselves as paupers, dandies, or poets makes little difference. They are, in any case, beings without dignity (if anything, they have majesty). What deprives them of dignity is precisely their contact with something extrasocial and self-sufficient, true nefas: pleasure, the invisible, the gratuitousness of art…as soon as he speaks of l'art pour l'art … his insolent retort, in a cracked falsetto, to the power that has stripped him of authority. Since he no longer has a function and has been banished from Court, he spurns every function".

Roberto Calasso, “The Ruin of Kasch”

“Nefas” here, is the deepest level of offence - adherence to something beyond getting, spending, voting: a subject whose legitimacy (in the sovereign sense) derives from something different to a deeply prosaic and disappointing participation in the role Homo Economicus. That apparently hard-wired “enlightened self-interest” has recently displayed remarkable results.

Zurbaran’s “St Francis in meditation”, which can be seen at the National Gallery, depicts a man (or Saint, if you prefer) wearing a monk’s habit, clutching a skull. He kneels in a starkly lit concavity. The painting is a study in holes. The shadow cast by his cowl dissolves most of his face, except where the strong chiaroscuro reveals the tip of his nose and, beneath that, his mouth, gaping in ecstasy or vacancy- a void within a void. The skull clutched in his praying hands is also illuminated; displaying its hollow sockets filled with the same darkness that has invaded Francis, who gulps at a vacuum. He is nothing more than a rough garment, torn at one elbow (the last detail, in stark illumination, is the stray threads on his torn robe) folded around a void. This space would, in fact, be invisible, if Zurbaran had not clothed it in hessian robes and painted light. This is Zurbaran’s version of St Francis of Assisi. He does not depict the devotee of brotherly love in the usual saccharine manner, not preaching to birds or beggars, but hollowed out, absent – as if the message of a radical equality can only come from, and maybe be addressed to, a place where the subject is no longer itself.

St Simeon Stylites stood at the top of a column for thirty six years. The column was periodically rebuilt, each time higher. Paradoxically, this incremental withdrawal from the common things of the earth, further into a solitary communion with his God, led to his ever greater visibility. His increasing elevation, index of his vanishing, must have been evident for miles around, like an ornament on its plinth.

“…there is no valid reason why we should not believe that the tribes we call savage are not the remnants of great civilizations of the past. Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy.”

Charles Baudelaire “The Dandy”

THE DANDYISM OF CONTEMPT

I am in this next thursday. Starts 6:00pm. I've recently been messing around with Linux Multimedia Studio (freeware, highly reccomended) and VSTHost, and my contribution will quite possibly include some live digital manipulation.

The title actually comes from an essay that I half-wrote, then lost the original of, then was meant to re-write for the curators of this, then got writer's block/flu/distracted - and they have been enormously patient. It is nearly done, and will, I hope be available on the night as a handout, also, posted here when I finish it.

Meanwhile, the press release for the show (I didn't write this):

"The Dandyism of Contempt is a performance art event curated by Vanessa Mitter and Joshua Y’Barbo with performances by: Mark McGowan, Brian ‘Dawn’ Chalkley, Jack Catling, The Skinjobs, Nicola Ruben Montini, Robin Bale, Douglas Park, Adham Faramawy, Alec Dunnachie, Pauline A. Amos, John Wild, James Gardiner, Kiki Taira, Lennie Lee, Frog Morris, Karl Weill and Edward Cotterill.



Who is the dandy? What is dandyism? He is an ambiguous figure, both insider and outsider. He hides in the shadows, only to come out to play and be admired at his best. Finally, he disappears into oblivion. ‘Cynicism’, claimed the Victorian novelist George Meredith is ‘intellectual dandyism’. According to Giorgio Agamben, Beau Brummell, the great Regency dandy ‘can claim as his own discovery the introduction of chance into the artwork so widely practiced in contemporary art’.



Provocation is his raison d’être. The dandy is dedicated primarily to an image of originality through ‘the abolition of any subjectivity from his own person’ . There is an implicit contradiction in this stance. ‘The dandy, after all, longs to recreate himself as an emblem of complete originality’ (Agamben).



Nevertheless, if the dandy had one genius, it was to be the first true performer of the self. The construction of himself was his greatest work of art. As Balzac wrote in his Treatise on Elegant Living, ‘making himself a dandy, man becomes a piece of boudoir furniture, an extremely ingenuous mannequin’. The dandy requires an audience in order to exist. ‘As the work of art must destroy and alienate itself to become an absolute commodity, so the dandy-artist must become a living corpse, constantly tending toward an other, a creature essentially nonhuman and antihuman’ (Agamben).



The artists in this performance event, although diverse, all share the dandy’s contempt for the prosaic, the mundane, the humdrum. There are elements of chance, although these are as well rehearsed as the elusive but exacting criteria of how to tie a cravat, Beau Brummell style. The figure of the dandy may belong to the past but the traces of his complex disregard and simultaneous adherence to a set of self imposed rules can be found in many of the performances in this show.



The Performance Event is on January 20th 2011 and performances will take place at Camden Town Unlimited starting from 6pm onwards."

TUITION FEES ETC.

It seems typical of the instrumental thinking on both sides of the divide, this. That students are getting their future stolen; that increasing of tuition fees and the cutting of teaching budgets will consign a huge number of young people to impoverishment. The logic is that increased tuition fees and cuts in money for teaching of the humanities will prevent a whole generation (or more) of graduates from getting the well paid jobs that will enable their children to go to university to get qualified for the the well paid jobs, so that their children will not go to university and get the well paid jobs etc. 

It seems to me that the problem is "well paid jobs". It is not outrageous that not everyone goes to university - it is outrageous that not all jobs pay a living wage. For all the talk of the older generation, who benefited from a free higher education pulling the ladder up after them (which is true), we are missing the  point that there should not be a "ladder" in the first fucking place. It's like talk of the "housing ladder", or "starter homes", implying that it is just a beginning and that one will move onwards and upwards. A human right (shelter) is not a stepping stone. A system that treats it as such will need fodder for the increasingly finely shod foot to step on, to keep it clear of the mire; the grateful backs of those who are touchingly grateful even to be allowed to breathe.

If we accept that the best (the best paying) jobs are only accessible via a degree (and, who knows, an MA or PhD next), then we are accepting that university is simply a training ground for young professionals who, in addition to their qualification, build up an address book of contacts to help them on their way. That is the way that the bourgeoisie have always worked. Then, of course, the university is seen as a panacea for social ills, lack of mobility etc. If, on the other hand, we maintain that all jobs should be decently paid and that decent public housing is a universal right,  then it might be reasonable to frame the debate in terms of education as a good in itself, which I believe it is.

On question time tonight- it was enlivening to see Caroline Flint slagging the Con-Dem benefit plans...This would be the same Flint that floated these proposals. So being the poster girl for middle England authoritarianism has suddenly worn off. She now says that forcing the unemployed into any sort of work is only acceptable if there is any sort of work available. Something that she didn't care about a couple of years ago.

"Ms Flint said that a family applying for a home could be offered "new opportunities linked to employment and training.

She suggested that a "voluntary contract" would set out the opportunities on offer, "underscoring the commitment of the tenants to self-improvement."

A spokesman from Ms Flint's Department of Communities and Local Government would not confirm whether this meant that tenants who then broke their contracts would face eviction."

This actually never happened but her attempt at "starting a debate" tells you about the nasty mindset of our ruling class. And, naturally, the New Labour obsession with property ownership.

As always, she was ready to demonise, in a thoroughly neo-lib manner the recipients of public housing, but in line with the current therapeutic politics, it would be for the tenant's own good. Like many MPs, I have no doubt that her expenses were entirely within the rules, but it is not too many people who can buy and sell different properties as and when necessary - think about those who are forced out of central London due to caps on benefit/social landlords being able to charge "market rent" who will pay most of their wages simply to get to work, and being thankful. Now that work is now rewarded-at the minimum wage rates, of course.

JUST FOR THE RECORD...

This site has graphs showing the UK national debt, both in £s and as a percentage of GDP. Note the extremely high levels as % of GDP in the '40's/'50's. Obviously, the result of the war. But what is worth noting that this was the period that the welfare state was being constructed. The governments of that period did not seem to feel that universal benefits, free education or building council housing was an expensive luxury. 

It casts an interesting light on this (watch the video), as well as other pronouncements coming from the government. Clegg claims that the state of the public finances has forced his hand on recanting his stance on tuition fees. We are constantly being told that things are so bad that vicious cuts in public services need to be made. What is not fully explained is why post-war UK governments did not feel that way.

From an interview with Danny Alexander in The Independent:

"...he is strident in defending the Tories from the claim that they see cuts as a route to a smaller state. "I genuinely have not had a sense from anybody that this is an ideological thing. We didn't come into politics to do this but we have an unavoidable problem that we are stepping up to the plate and dealing with.""

Amazing. It looks very much to me like Tories doing what Tories love to do; what they wanted to do in the '80's, but just got as far as laying the groundwork. New Labour continued it. Now they are ready to finsh the job.

I don't know how he, or any of them, can sleep at night. But especially the Lib-Dems.

IT'S NOT CALLED "WELFARE".

Quite apart from how despicable Duncan-Smith's proposed "reforms" are, the thing that is sticking in my throat most, and has been for a while, is when did the dole start to be called "welfare"? That's what they call it in the U.S.

Over here it was always called Social Security, which is what it is meant to be. As a claimant over many years, i can remember the names for the actual benefit changing - being variously Supplementary Benefit, Unemployment Benefit (maybe these names containing the word "benefit" were considered to sound to positive) Income Support, then Jobseekers' Allowance...The shift from "Benefit" - a right- to "Support" - assistance- to "Allowance" - something grudgingly given; speaks volumes. 

This present government has gone out of its way to demonise claimants  (contrary to the writer of the linked piece, I would support the workshy and fraudsters myself). They make a conveniently soft target for the ideologically driven cuts. They were never going to get much sympathy from sanctimonious middle-Englanders who seem to see wage slavery as a badge of honor.

But anyway, my issue is also with the word: "Welfare". I do not know when the term became detached from the noun it qualified - "state", in order to denote benefits specifically. The welfare state is (or maybe, more accurately, was) a good thing. I owe my education, my still functioning teeth, my late mother's successful treatment for breast cancer, and other things too numerous to mention, to it. And so do most of those, Lib-Dems, Tories and Labour too, who are now attacking it with such ghoulish relish - but they seem to have forgotten that. An attack on the benefits system is an attack on the welfare state. An attack on universal benefits is an attack on the universalism that was part of the founding of the welfare state. To make benefits that were initially conceived as a right belonging to citizens conditional, is to make citizenship conditional. 

This is typical of the drivel we are subjected to. The approach adopted in Wisconsin that the article lauds sounds repulsive. One has to prove one's bona fides before receiving any assistance. One has to prove oneself worthy. This utterly inverts the idea behind benefits that we had in the UK; a right conferred by citizenship. Citizenship being a universal value and, most importantly, content-neutral. You did not have to prove that you were the right kind of person in order to enjoy your rights.

"One of Wisconsin's biggest successes was diverting people from claiming benefits in the first place. If you try to claim benefits, the first thing they do is offer you a job – rather than start filling in forms to process your application. In fact, you have to demonstrate that you are searching hard for a job for several weeks before you can even start to make a benefits claim. In contrast, our depressing "Job Centres" are really more like benefits offices." (that's because they are benefits offices, you prick.)

The most telling part of the article, which I quote because it illuminates the kind of thinking behind this proposed butchery - it's not just an isolated right wing rant, someone who fancies themselves as a Jeremiah or Ezekiel, howling the unpalatable truth at the desert- are these sentences:

"Perhaps we have come to think that it is normal to have a large part of our population without work, and cut adrift from the rest of society."

People who are in receipt of benefits are somehow not part of society. So membership of society, enjoyment of its benefits, is dependent upon work, and, apparently, work alone.

It is not "Welfare" - they might have that in America (or, rather, they don't), but here it is the benefits system, or the welfare state, and it does what it is meant to do. It seems to me that the use of that word, by politicians and journalists, has imported with it some really unpleasant ideological baggage. It is also sad and pathetic to base a political program and it's rhetoric on the sense of sanctimonious alertness to the idea that someone, somewhere, is having a better time than you, and that you're paying for them to have it!

If this image of the polity as a load of paranoid, grudging curtain-twitchers is the best that we can do, we may as well give up now.

PERFORMANCE THIS SATURDAY OCTOBER 30

I will be performing at this event on Saturday, the content is, as yet, unclear to me - but I will have some audio backing, from John Wild and some loops that I am constructing myself.

Further details available here. Come down if you can.

THE UPSTAIRS TWATS

The twats upstairs who frequently keep my missus awake with random banging (we often speculate about what they're doing up there, I have the theory that, Robert Crumb-like, he rides her around like a prize race horse whilst, from that vantage slamming doors and cupboards like anyone's business) have surpassed themselves tonight. They came in from the pub with some mates - so far so normal- and put on music - again, normal. This would not bother me as I can sleep through anything; but what they chose to play was, I assume, Now That's What I Call Music 2007  - the "indie" version thereof, if such a thing exists.

What, quite apart from their shit taste in music, that really pissed me off however, was their singing along to whatever moronic choruses from the Kaiser Chiefs et al. The exuberant howling was something that even I could not countenance. It reminded me of a pub about 1997, I think, full of rugby shirted morons drooling away, arms around each other, to the whole of "What's the story.." by Oasis. They were engaged in a circlejerk of laddish bonhomie, but also singing at the whole rest of the pub - as if to say "this is it. We're having a great time, look at us; this is what a Friday night is all about".

I have nothing whatsoever against drunkenness. I have nothing whatsoever against singing, inebriated or otherwise...But that kind of thing is so fucking high street. The togetherness of the singalong chorus so designed. Leisure for those who have to grab it roughly, allowing themselves so little...I don't know, this is not well expressed - but they were singing along to Paul Weller for fuck's sake - not The Jam, Paul Weller! Unforgiveable.

So I'm glad that I heard the muffled, angry buzz of their doorbell not so long ago. One of the other neighbours went to complain, and it didn't have to be me.

WALK AND PERFORMANCE TODAY

Today at 4:00pm. Meet outside Hanbury Hall. From there we shall have a look at some bits of Shoreditch and Hoxton, ending up in Shoreditch Park. The original idea was to circumnavigate Hackney's Alcohol Control Zones - but Hackney stole a march on me and have turned the whole borough into a zone, with very little fanfare - well, none at all, I completely missed that one.

So, I have had to re-think things a little. If the whole borough is a zone, but it is clearly not enforced, what is it?

Councillor Alan Laing says in the comments to the Hackney Post article linked above "...this is not a ban on public drinking. This point has been made throughout the process and through the consultation. The council and the local police have expressly stated that it is not a ban on public drinking..." If it is not that, what is it?

It seems to me like Zizek's description of totalitarian regimes as regimes of tolerance. In such a state the law, if stringently applied, would make anyone guilty of something. So the state benevolently does not enforce the whole of the law, or not all the time. They keep it there just in case. Remarkable generosity. it looks like an extension of the de-normalisation strategy that is used in public health campaigns, previously against smoking, now against alcohol use - also latterly against recieving state benefits or living in council housing.

The problem seems to be not so much with alcohol as the people who are percieved to be the users of it. Hence, alcohol control areas frequently contain licensed premises, often with tables outside, as well as benches, walls or whatever other accommodation that street drinkers might find conducive. However, the licensed premises and their clientel are unlikely to receive the attentions of the local constabulary. 

If alcohol is so dangerous and corrosive to manners, health and morals why not ban it altogether? There are already laws that have been on the books for some generations against assault, threatening behaviour and public urination. This measure looks excessive because it is aimed at prevention, a drastically illiberal aim. Despite the advertisements exhorting us to "Drink Responsibly", there is apparently a class of people who cannot be trusted to do so. For their own good, they must be discouraged from drinking at all. Incidentally, I have often wondered about "responsible" drinking - responsible to whom? Purely by coincidence, the irresponsible class against whom pre-emptive measures are to be taken are those who drink on the street because pubs are too expensive. The poor should not be on the street at all, let alone congregating in groups.

Ironically, the designation of an alcohol control zone is DPP, (discussed here in some council minutes) a "Designated Public Place". That these places were public beforehand - streets, parks, benches - is not the point. The were providing a space for the wrong sort of public. The tautological nomenclature is necessary, the capital p "Public" is not the same entity as that negative designation of small p public space ie. not privately owned, open to all without the specifying the characteristics of "all". The "Public" who will use these spaces is brought into being by that designation. The spaces that they will inhabit are already demarcated and shaped by the law, an un-enforced ban. This is a sober, law-abiding, hard-working polity, the "hard working, law-abiding Britons/families" who politicians and columnists never tire of conscripting into whatever illiberal fantasy they are flogging.

Anyway, time is getting away from me, I have to leave very soon. Suffice it to say that I have re-thought the walk as a whole in light of this development and have moved from physical to psycho-geography as an approach. This seems to make sense as we are looking at something without edges, an undefined space - the space of the ban. Because it is not necessarily enforced it has no specific content, so everything exists under the ban. What can be done is to look at some tropes that cut across this contentless authoritarianism.

So, I have come up with, liquids, sewers - the possible derivation of Shoreditch, "sewer-ditch" - and holy wells, Holywell street. Liquids flow, they reflect, and constantly leak from wherever they are meant to be. The other two sites are the Curtain Theatre and specifically the character of Falstaff, and John Frankland's boulder sculpture in Shoreditch Park. Anyway, will post more on this later.

 

ANTI-DESIGN FESTIVAL 2

Was a very fun night. McGowan and I attempted to foment a riot in the audience, and the Psychick Self Defenders did their Velvet Underground/Drunk and nasty Hawkwind thing. There was a bear as well. The whole thing was deliberately ritualistic confrontational; McGowan's attempt to split the audience in two and get them to fight each other, and the band, then me, screaming threats and imprecations over a background that throbbed and droned like "Sister Ray." A good night for all. I have posted a video of the performance here, I appear somewhere towards the middle.

ANTI DESIGN FESTIVAL

Tonight I perform at the Anti-Design Festival with Mark McGowan and Rex Nemo and the Psychic Self-Defenders. As is usual, but perhaps more so than usual, I have no clue what I will be talking about. There will be some sort of reference to football hooliganism - or at least that's what Mark's piece will be. I think that I will be touching on this, largely due to the EDL's chant, borrowed from the terraces: "You're not English any more". The "any more" part is telling; you were English, but now you're not. However, you are still included in the category English, as "Un-English"; an entirely different matter from "You're not English". It is a clear example of the state of exception in spatial practice.

McGowan's recent video plays with a similar disjunction, Irish music accompanying scenes of what one assumes are English (possibly nationalist) hooligans disporting themselves.

The festival itself is a manifestation of a clapped out aesthetic, full of "punk" references and "interactive", if not "relational" elements that needs a design context to look subversive rather than simply tired.

I'm intrigued by the statement on the website that claims that the festival is "a response to 25 years of cultural deep-freeze". I can't work out where the twenty five years comes from - why not 13? Election of New Labour, or 31 - the Tories? Or, in my personal opinion -21 - fall of the Berlin Wall? I suspect that twenty five would be about the average age for someone graduating from an art or design M.A at this time, and roughly half the age of a good few of the participants, but I don't know what this might mean.

THIS IS ENGLAND

I liked Shane Meadow's film largely for its performances - the kid was especially good - but was less convinced by the "period detail" (music, dad killed in Falklands) that quite a lot of the critics enthused about. I'm also more than a little ambivalent about skinheads, anyway; I know there were anti-racist skins around, but there weren't any where I grew up. What seemed to get a lot of people excited when the film came out was its apparently shocking premise that the working class were not all knuckle dragging xenophobes.

Anyway, to the series - which follows the characters from the film a few years on. I haven't yet watched the second part, so maybe what I'm going to say will be proved redundant. Brendan O'Neill in Spiked has already pointed out what is probably the most telling sequence of part one:

"One of the most striking things about the first episode is how people-free the settings were. This was most clear in the scenes in the hospital...Utterly bereft of other patients, doctors and nurses, the hospital becomes a playground for the good skins to muck about in...having a wheelchair race...or to resolve their personal differences in..."

There are no other people. The whole point about youth subcultures is that they were oppositional, you defined yourself by your tribe and your tribe was defined against not just other tribes but society in general. Meadow's skins exist in a bubble, they are not in opposition to anything. In this, it is absolutely unfaithful to the 1980's in particular and to the meaning of youth cults in general. However, in this it is faithful to the 21st century.

O'Neill makes the comparison to "Friends", which I think is pretty accurate. That enormously successful sitcom was a quintissential product of the "Happy '90's", its protagonists occupied a de-politicised (one assumed that they were vaguely liberal/left)and largely depopulated void. Their semi-incestuous inter-relationships were posited not just as a defense against the world, they were the world.

SHOCK HORROR - THE POPE (or his aides) STILL CATHOLIC

This in the Guardian.

OUT-PATIENTS

There is a street - I see a street - a long street; lined with sick beds. People visit, murmuring good wishes, delivering flowers and fruit. But the patients are swapped around during the night, every night. The friends and relatives deliver their food and solicitude to a different person each day. No one seems to mind, or notice.

Uniformed nurses parade along the street several times a day, dispensing drugs and taking temperatures in no particular order.

Patient's notes are clipped to the end of each bed; but, of course, the notes do not often correspond to the occupant. Details of each condition, medication and treatment are considered interchangeable. The patients do not mind this- winks of complicity are frequently exchanged between adjacent beds - because they all consider themselves incurable; therefore, they are. It makes logical sense that the treatment for another's malady has as much chance of success as their own. Their nightly shuffling from bed to bed, executed by silent, masked orderlies facilitates this process.

The doctors make their rounds weekly. They look at the patients' notes and ask a few questions. To the question "And how are you feeling now?" the patients invariably reply "Quite poorly, today." The doctors ask "- and your symptoms?" To which the only reply is a shrug; neither party knows what these symptoms are, the occupant of the bed because the notes clipped thereon are not theirs, and the doctors because they have only given the notes a cursory glance.

It is not unknown for a nurse or an orderly to find themselves occupying a bed as a patient. This might happen to the doctors, too, but they are taken elsewhere; perhaps to a special street reserved just for them. In the case of nurses and orderlies, a particular protocol is observed. Both parties - new patient and their ex-colleagues - will pretend that they never knew each other. In response to the mechanical questions, they will reply "quite poorly, today". After being swapped from bed to bed a few times as is customary, patient and staff have forgotten that they ever knew each other.