Politics – Page 31 – Hannah Nicklin

This piece of writing represents the spaces, ideas and places I’ve been thinking on throughout the first 3 months of my PhD. The next 6 months will be made of thinking deeper into the ideas covered in this piece, and working on a creative project exploring the same aspects. Please respect the IP of this content. It’s protected by a CC license.

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In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century (McDonough 2004, 10)

Another key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves in shows like Coney’s Small Town Anywhere, increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

From 1957-69 a new radical reading of the commodification of western capitalist society emerged. The situationists, born out of the fiery nihilism of the Dadaists and the irreverent playfulness of the Surrealists cast their gaze over society and saw:

That the alienation which in the nineteenth century was rooted in production had, in the twentieth century, become rooted in consumption. Consumption had come to define happiness and to suppress all other possibilities of freedom and selfhood. […] Everyone was first and foremost a member of an economy based on commodities” (McDonough 2004, 3)

The situationists identified a transition from the Marxist state of alienation, to a once-removed state of spectacular illusion. This ‘spectacle’ transformed every inch of our lives into an empty capitalist dream, maintained through the mutation of desires into needs. However the situationists believed that the image of society as it is was still intact behind the spectacle, and so they set about attempting to break the illusion.

“Just as the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy” –out of Marx’s dictum that philosophy, having interpreted the world, must set about changing it – now one had to look to the demands of art (McDonough 2004, 11)

The situationists saw art as the solution – an art practised by every member of society, an art that ceased to be art and became a continually revised way of seeing. The situationists (though they didn’t credit it) were summoning the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ aspect of art:

Phenomenologists like to pick objects up with their minds, so to speak, and turn them around, examining them from all sides. This cannot be accomplished by viewing them frontally as they are embedded in the rest of the experiential world – hence bracketing (Roach 1992, 354)

This bracketing aspect – or epoché – that art provides is at the root of its ability to reveal the spectacle.

Continue reading The Situationists, Phenomenology and Pervasive Gaming: New Narrative Strategies.

image by cym at home shared via a creative commons license.

Once again the Tories are out in force applying gaffa tape and No Nails to the shards of our broken country. This time they are offering tax breaks to shore up shaky marriages, and to prevent marriage becoming the scourge preserve of the middle-classes. The Tory rhetoric runs thus: Britain is broken! Societal values have been degraded! We need a return to traditional family values! The sanctity of the family unit is something often championed as the route to fixing our so-called ‘broken’ nation. The idea of family being at the heart of society is certainly tenacious – and harks back to nostalgic ideals that belong the Victorian age. There you will find the Angel in the House – the woman as central to the family – the hearth, submissive, caring, doting, safe. Is this the ‘intact’ time that the Tories are harking back to? Perhaps the 50s, where children born out of wedlock were forcibly adopted, when women were beaten with impunity and expected to cook, clean care for children whilst quite often also having a job? Maybe the 1970s, where women still weren’t allowed to open a bank account without their father or husband’s permission? Or perhaps that of up to 1991, where spousal rape was not only commonplace (the majority of rapes are still committed by partners), but legal?

Contrary to the politicians’ rhetoric, the structure of the family is far less important than the quality of its relationships, as a recent Gingerbread report demonstrates. Source

I’m not going to argue that family is not important, it certainly is, along with our education and peers, our family is one of the key influences that shape our lives. What I certainly will argue is that the Tory definition of ‘family’ is both outdated and damaging, especially when they use tax incentives to try and engineer it.

And yet those good old Tory brains carry on ticking:

So only the middle classes are getting married – and they’re all quite happy aren’t they? I know! Let’s make those troublesome working class marry, and then they’ll be happy too!

Marriage is a symptom, rather than a cause of social stability. Simply putting incentives in place to bribe quite unhappy people into staying together ‘for the sake of their children’ isn’t going to magically create social stability. That kind of logic is cargo-cultism, and it’s lazy, and it’s stupid, and it won’t work. Penny Red

There’s also some lovely science to support Penny Red’s assertion, too:

Continue reading When was Broken Britain intact?