LAST
ORDERS FOR THE LOCAL?
Working class Space -v- the market place
Theme pubs and Other Environmental Disasters
1
“Poor
Donald Cameron, 39, a Birmingham publican, has committed suicide. His pub
had been revamped and given a Seventies theme. Cameron, who prided himself
on his smart appearance, believed that he would look ridiculous in the outfit
decreed for him by the brewers who owned the Kaleidoscope theme pub. They
wanted him to wear a Seventies wig and flared trousers.” (London Evening
Standard, 17/7/98).
“The introductory plaque at the entrance to Disneyland, written by Walt
Disney himself, reads ‘Here age relives fond memories of the past…youth
may savour the challenge and promise of the future”
“The whole idea is to escape from reality into a place where you can
simply have fun. life is full of problems, but it is our job to stop harsh
reality intruding. Euro Disney has a turn of the century feel... research
shows that it is an era that most nationalities feel most comfortable with...
we’re trying to design what people think they remember about what existed.”
(Fred Beckenstein, senior Vice-president of Euro-Disneyland Imagineering,
quoted in ‘Organise’, no 51, ACF. 1998.)
The layout of the pub has traditionally reflected the class and gender division
of the wider society; a public bar for the working class, the saloon bar for
gentlemen and ladies, with sometimes a smaller ‘snug’ for a particular
group such as women or the elderly. (This is how most 20th century pubs were
laid out but obviously, depending on location, their actual clientele could
be exclusively of one class and/or gender). Now those divisions are largely
gone, replaced by a more democratic consumerism, reflecting modern trends
in marketing and consumption.
A pub’s location has traditionally been the main factor in determining
the class of its locals - although increasingly a selective door policy can
also be used, as can refurbishment to attract “a better class of customer”
or younger age group. (So while pub landlords are occasionally prosecuted
for racism for displaying anti-tinker and gypsy “no travellers”
notices, a class apartheid is still maintained for some drinkers; e.g., in
the City of London’s financial centre pubs still often display “no
workboots or overalls” signs, to protect the brokers in their suits
from having to share their drinking space with the dusty workers who build
their offices.) The local pub and other institutions such as working men’s
clubs have functioned to some degree as autonomous working class space, as
sanctuaries and relief from the stresses of wage slavery and, especially in
times of struggle, as centres of meeting and debate. But the development of
the Theme Pub points towards Capital’s desire to see the end of all
specifically working class space (except as containment areas; housing estates,
ghettoes, prisons etc.). Proletarian identity – as expressed in the
environment – is being obliterated (the same has largely happened in
the football stadium).
In the past a pub environment reflected the people who used this space, who
they were and what they used the space for. To some extent, the environment
was often of their own making, determined by what they did there. But increasingly
nowadays a pub interior tells you only who is supposed to use the pub and
what you are supposed to do there. Whether it’s too loud music, noisy
gaming machines etc that force youngsters to huddle together to hear each
other (the greater physical closeness calculated to appeal to those out on
the pull) - or the shelves lined with books (bought by the weight as ornaments
regardless of their content) encouraging a subdued library-like atmosphere
- the authority of the environment attempts to assert itself on punters’
behaviour. These choices have been made by the brewery marketing men and their
designers.
Influenced by gentrification in the 1980’s, when rapid image changes
for pubs became common, the breweries have intensified the capitalisation
of every aspect of pub life. Drinking space is being carved up and allotted
to specific social groups (according to age and spending power), with décor
and design (plus sometimes a selective door policy) used to attract the desired
clientele as defined by the marketing men – all part of the streamlining
of consumer targeting. This shows the real role of artists, designers and
architects in relation to the pub (as in many other areas of life) –
their work is a form of policing of the environment to further the ends of
the breweries’ marketing strategies.
The creation of the Theme Pub is intended to strictly limit or destroy any
traces of autonomous social culture that previously existed in the pub environment,
as part of a process also at work in other areas of society. Like those native
dancers and singers who are now obliged to make a living performing for tourists
– re-enacting a culture that has already been destroyed by the colonisation
process that tourism is a part of – the Theme Pub represents a manufactured
image of authenticity (Irish-ness, Northern-ness etc) which is in reality
its complete opposite. No wonder that the Theme Pub’s theatrical décor
often makes us feel like a bit-part actor in someone else’s play.
The pub has kept much of its historical, individual and social character long
after most other public spaces and areas of consumption have been economically
‘rationalised’ and standardised. For centuries occupying a central
place in the community (for some at least) going to the pub was truly a visit
to ‘the local’. The pub name generally had some relation to either
local or national history and the pub was often a geographical, and sometimes
historical, landmark itself. But the emergence of identikit chains of pubs
is changing this; in 1996 the Nag’s Head in Islington in north London,
which gave its name to the local area, became “O’Neill’s”
– part of a chain of Irish Theme Pubs. In response to unsuccessful protests
by local residents a spokeswoman for the brewery which runs O’Neill’s
said “Pub names do change over the years, usually when investment
is made…. There are 80 O’Neill’s bars around the country
and the aim is to create bars so that the one in Holloway Rd will be the same
as any other one around the country.” (Islington Gazette,
19/12/96).
Today any traces of a sense of community are gained more through our often
somewhat randomly distributed social connections than from where we actually
live; for many people there is no longer anything very local about one’s
locality. We live in an increasingly uniform and anonymous environment of
identikit chain stores, multi-national fast food outlets, shopping centres
etc; all equally familiar and equally alienating, monuments only to our domination
by commodities. And now pubs can be added to this list of Legoland amenities.
Theme Pubs like O’Neill’s attract punters partly by appealing
to their feelings of nostalgia fed by an increasing sense of dislocation,
loss of identity and need for escape in the modern world; they encourage a
temporary diversion into an environment representing an idealised past and/or
a different, more novel or exotic culture. (‘Irish-ness’ in particular
lends itself to this kind of interpretation, which can also be seen in Irish
beer adverts as well as most other ads for Irish products – all the
sentimental cliché images of ‘the mother country’ aimed
at Irish emigrants as much as foreign consumers.) The false history of the
Theme Pub environment is superimposed over the real history of the place;
changing names and interiors are examples of this. History as accumulated
lived experience that tells us something of ourselves – that locates
and situates us – is replaced by an instant mass produced history, changing
appearances and eras according to passing fashions and marketing strategies.
Yet it is partly this disorienting de-historicizing of the daily environment
that encourages nostalgia and (for some) an attraction to the Themed environment.
* * *
“This
is the age of contrivance. The artificial has become so commonplace that the
natural begins to seem contrived. The natural is the ‘-un’ and
the ‘non-‘. It is the age of the ‘unfiltered’ cigarette
(the filter comes to seem more natural than the tobacco), of the ‘unabridged
novel (abridgement is the norm), of the uncut version of a movie. We begin
to look on wood as a ‘non-synthetic’ cellulose. All nature then
is the world of the ‘non-artificial’. Fact itself has become ‘non-fiction’.”
(D. J. Boorstin, ‘The Image’, 1962.)
A recent innovation in pub Theming is the T and J Bernard chain. These are
“theme pubs whose theme is – wait for it – not looking
themed.” With its ‘traditional’ interior of brass fittings
and wood pannelling, its gimmick is “that it doesn’t have one.”
According to a Theming supremo for one
brewery, “T and J Bernard is a fantastic idea because they have
such a long life.”. In the Theming business that means about 5
years. But the surreal nature of Theming is taken to new heights by one Ray
Evans – a lost soul in search of an identity. Evan’s local was
a normal London pub until the brewery turned it into an Australian Theme Bar;
English beers all replaced by Aussie lagers, a Kiwi manager, toilets marked
Blokes and Sheilas, surfboards on the ceiling, food served in billy cans etc.
“Bar Oz ….is unlike anything in Sydney or even on Neighbours,
but is recognisably Aussie – to Poms at least…. So what did the
faithful Ray do now that the brewers had finally themed his original pub out
of existence?.. .Ray Evans decided to Theme himself. Previously broad Leeds,
he now speaks in a pronounced Aussie accent, calls you blue, has a Kiwi girlfriend
and is thinking of emigrating down under.” (Evening Standard,
1997.)
The search for identity in spectacular consumption leads to its total loss.
* * *
2
TIME TRAVEL
The
Theming of pubs is only part of a wider application of Theming in the fields
of leisure and tourism; this is in turn linked to changes in the social function
of history and memory within capitalism and our shifting
relationship to them. The modern quality of perpetual newness – “the
newer replacing the new” – whether in consumer goods, ideologies
or
environments, only hides the unchanging nature of the fundamental
underlying structure of class society. “A fixed society is simply
spinning faster”. In a society that applies “planned
obsolescence to thought itself” then “the new not only surpasses
the old, but displaces and dislodges it. The ability as well as the desire
to remember atrophies.” (Jacoby, ‘Social Amnesia’,
1975.)
This withering and wasting away of historical memory is encouraged by and
occurs within an environment where all references to history have become merely
props and scenery in the service of the market place and also its ideological
justification – telling us how it was, is and always should be in, if
not the best of all possible worlds, then at least the only possible one.
The Theme environment is Capital’s colonisation of history materialised
– congealed and frozen around us like a prison. As all traces of real
history and memory are being obliterated in daily life, so its
spectacular representation expands; as Historical Theme Parks, Heritage Centres,
Industrial Museums etc.
There is a direct link between the growth of the “Heritage Industry”
and the destruction of the traditional manufacturing industries – as
well as the fate of those communities dependent on them; “There
has been a … remarkable increase in interest in the real lives of industrial/mining
workers. MacConnell points out the irony of these changes: ‘Modern Man
[sic] is losing his attachment to the work bench, the neighbourhood, the town,
the family, which he once called “his own” but, at the same time,
he is developing an interest in the “real lives” of others’
(1976). This interest is particularly marked in the north of England, where
much heavy industry had been located. It seems that it is such industries
which are of most interest to visitors, particularly because of the apparently
heroic quality of the work, as in a coalmine or steelworks.”
“Nostalgia is the memory without the pain.”
The prospects for the redundant workforce and their community appear less
“heroic”: “The Rhondda Heritage Park is the latest in
a series of large scale heritage parks like Ironbridge in Shropshire, the
Black Country Museum in the West Midlands and Beamish in the north-east that
have a ‘cast’ of characters in period costume. For the most part
these are people recruited at Government expense from job creation schemes:
the unemployed of the Eighties paid to pretend to be the employed of the Twenties.
For these ‘museums’ the temptation is to’ sanitise’
the past: trim out the nasty bits, omit the poverty, the hunger and the strikes
– to see life as a newsreel film of the Thirties and Forties, where
the working classes are always irrepressibly cheerful.”
So, while the museums create a past that never really happened, the consequences
of real defeat quietly take their toll. As depression and heroin ravage what
is left of some mining communities* (something that was unthinkable 15 years
ago), we can visit a Heritage Centre and see a few ex-miners employed to dress
up in colliers costume to perform a role for the visitors. Once again, Capital’s
old strategy; destroy the native culture, then get the natives to earn their
survival by dancing for the tourists. With the destruction of nearly all community,
and with it an identity and tradition, history as lived consciousness –
of the roots of oneself and one’s situation – begins to die. Leaving
only a nostalgia for a falsified history as the last refuge of the dispossessed.
One relevant example of how the ruling class has used censorship and
repression of memory to help impose and maintain the crushing defeats
suffered by the working class in Britain in the last 15 years; when the final
big wave of pit closures were announced in 1992 by Minister Heseltine, within
a week 300,000 people were marching through torrential rain in London in protest
– as if the disappearance of the once mighty miners, symbols of the
collective strength of the working class throughout its history, had touched
a nerve deep in the proletariat’s folk-memory. Heseltine’s cagey
and devious response was to say he would reconsider the proposals. 3 months
later, after a total media blackout, all those pits were gone – marked
only by the odd liberal journalist hypocritically expressing mild concern
– after the event of course. But obviously the real battle had already
been lost for the miners in the 84/85 strike….
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present
controls the past.” (George Orwell.)
Heritage centres, Preservation areas, Historical zones etc are precisely the
places where there is no longer any history being made – the act of
preservation ensures this, like a form of mummification. It is a part of the
de-historicizing of our environment (and our consciousness of it) where time
becomes frozen, the clock has stopped at a certain date. This capturing of
the past by the rulers of the present runs parallel with their projected designs
on the future. All history is portrayed in bourgeois terms, and as leading
to, if not the best of all possible worlds, at least the only possible one;
i.e. perpetual modern capitalism. So the Preservation area, Theme park and
Museum become the model for the environment of the future; ever more policed
and controlled, CCTV covering every angle. Yet ever more interactive, “hands
on” and “entertaining” in a cretinizing kind of way, where
only what is supposed to happen ever does – over and over again.
Allied to this is modern architecture’s goal (aided by modern
synthetic building materials) to abolish all built environments that live,
breathe and visibly grow old – and their replacement by sterile, easily
maintained and controlled surroundings. The historical suppressed by the perpetually
functional. The “preservation” of older buildings freezes them
at a certain age, creating a similar effect.
* * *
“Shopping, as anyone knows, is what makes the world go round. It is the vigorous weed that occupies ever more luxuriously the spare spaces of airports and museums with its mutating forms, and which has entwined itself with almost every cultural and leisure experience you care to think of. Cathedrals, stately homes, the National Gallery, the National Theatre and Chelsea Football Club all feel the need to authenticate themselves with a shop.” (Evening Standard, 1997).
As
every leisure/cultural event becomes more of a shopping experience, so every
shopping experience becomes more of a leisure/cultural event. The various
threads of Heritage and Theme environments, leisure and cultural experiences
and shopping are all being pulled together by the latest developments in the
American shopping mall. They are now becoming “total leisure experiences”;
“To flourish, a mall must no longer be just a mall. It is no longer
enough just to garnish some shops with potted palms, fountains and Muzak.
A mall must now offer what a computer can’t, fuse itself with that other
great power in the world, entertainment, and become an experience….
Ontario Mills, one of the new breed of uber-mall…. Is about more than
just shopping. The secret of its success is that it brings together in a deadly
combination two previously separate concepts: one is the themed mall, where
the shopping glands of the masses are lubricated by allusions to (for example)
Ancient Rome, as in Caesar’s Forum in Las Vegas or the new Trafford
Centre in Manchester. The other is the outlet mall, where designer labels
are sold cheap.
“Ontario Mill’s other big idea is to give almost as much space
to
entertainment as to shopping. There are amusement arcades… Basketball
courts… and the American Wilderness Experience, where real snakes, seals,
wildcats, tarantulas, sloths and long-tailed porcupines occupy glass enclosures
within not-real redwood forests. There are also 50 cinema screens….The
building is a vast, flat shed, the size….of 38 football pitches.”
(Evening Standard, 1997.)
All over the western world, a family day out now often means a drive to the
out-of-town shopping mall, where shopping and leisure have
seamlessly merged and entwined into one unified experience – the organisation
of territory determining the content of activity and social
relationships permitted there.
The architectural references to Ancient Rome unintentionally remind us that
such past empires and “civilisations” were also class societies
– the word “proletarian” is Roman in origin. And as always,
today’s proles remain a troublesome necessity for the ruling class;
and those poor who are inevitably excluded from fully participating in this
shopping heaven
nevertheless still come to congregate in these cathedrals of consumption.
Whether on shoplifting sprees or just hanging out with pals, they often have
to defend their presence against the harassments of the private security guards.
* * *
Other
themed environments – the ethnic/cultural “leisure experience”
or culture-vulture trip – are based on an accumulation of cultural motifs,
stereotypes and artefacts from the history of a particular ethnic group. Like
nostalgia, this visitation into another culture is also a form of yearning
to escape from one’s normal daily experience; the appeal of otherness
– experiences in contrast to normality.
“Themed cafes, restaurants and bars, where diners sit down for the
fancy dress and props as much as for the food, are set to become even more
popular… New ones are expected to open at the rate of 15 to 20 a year,
to meet an appetite for eating out in recreated film sets, Mississippi riverboats,
rock memorabilia museums and fibre glass jungles. Themed establishments could
count for 1 in 10 restaurant meals… Britons will spend more than £250
million on the “leisure experience” by 2001… Next month
will see the opening of the Rainforest Café, a recreation of a South
American jungle with real parrots, waterfalls, a crocodile pit and tropical
storms.” A Rainforest Theme Park is also being constructed in England,
and Rainforest Cafes are a worldwide chain. So as the irreplaceable Rainforest
is being destroyed in reality, its tacky artificial representation is reproduced
everywhere; in a very few years this Café may come to double as a museum.
* * *
“The
next stages of other-worldliness are here already. Disney is launching interactive
theme-parks in the US at the moment. Created by ‘imagineers’ using
highly sophisticated virtual reality technology, they allow you to climb aboard
a river raft and then believe you are paddling down rapids; or fight with
the Disney Hercules characters; or ride a magic carpet.” (Organise,
1998.)
Theming applies the tourist concept to much of leisure, and increasingly to
other forms of consumption; go shopping on a Themed mall, later visit an Ancient
Roman Theme Park, tonight an Irish Theme bar, then on to a South American
Theme restaurant, after that maybe a Rave party (the psychedelic Theme park)…
Debord defined tourism as “human circulation considered as consumption”.
Trips to a different location bring the sharpest contrast with everyday life
and are therefore meant to give the greatest relief from it. But as the tourist’s
main activity is looking, recording their own looking and other forms of passive
consuming, Theming is intended to refine and rationalise the tourist role:
instead of taking the tourist to the exotic location, Theming brings the exotic
location to the tourist – localising it. The logical extension of this
is virtual reality tourism, as seen in the film “Total Recall”.
The inconvenience and expense of actual physical travel in the company of
others is eliminated – “This society which eliminates geographical
distance reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation.”
(Debord).
Many aspects of Capital’s projected future are evident here; new technology, in the guise of communication gadgets, increases isolated consumption as leisure - walkmans, mobiles, personal computers, virtual reality trips; the pain of mutual social isolation and repression encourages the desire to escape the body by fleeing into cyberspace (and other ethereal spaces) – the ultimate destination of the severely alienated individual. (Naturally there are counter-tendencies and subversions of Capital’s intentions….some hacking, phone phreaking, Net discussion sites etc.)
* * *
3
1st TIME AS TRAGEDY, 2nd TIME AS FARCE
“The
strength of revolutionary armies lies in their creativity. Frequently the
first days of an insurrection are a walk-over simply because nobody plays
the slightest attention to the enemy’s rules: because they invent a
new game and because everybody takes part in its elaboration. But if this
creativity flags, if it becomes repetitive, if the revolutionary army becomes
a regular army, then blind devotion and hysteria try in vain to make up for
military weakness. Infatuation with past victories breeds terrible defeats.”
(Vaneigem, “The Revolution of Everyday Life”.)
“On January 3, 1914, in the city of Juarez, [Pancho] Villa signed
an exclusive contract with Mutual for the sum of $25,000. It was also
contractually agreed that Villa would do his best to win all his battles in
sunlight and to forbid the presence of any other rival cameramen on the
battlefield! Aitken also stipulated that in case Mutual did not succeed in
shooting enough suitable material during the actual battle, Villa would
guarantee to re-enact it the next day before the cameras.” (Quoted
in ‘Spectacular Times: Cities of Illusions.’)
The re-enactment of historical battles is said to be the fastest growing hobby
in the UK, drawing large crowds of spectators to battle sights. Partly a simple
fetish, perhaps, of military uniforms, weaponry and strategy (toy soldiers
for big boys) – while ignoring the deeper social roots and context of
the battles (such as class conflict) - but also an attempt at temporary escape
from the modern world into a cosy nostalgic primitivism. One feels that these
spectacles of frozen historical costume drama are just asking to be playfully
subverted; the many re-enactments of battles from the English Civil War of
the 1600’s are a prime example. After all, many of the unresolved social
tensions of the present day originate in this period – questions of
ownership and access to land and commons, class relations, the role of the
monarchy etc. One can imagine a band of Diggers and Ranters (the true radical
elements in the Civil War) storming the battlefield and disrupting the carefully
choreographed manoeuvres of Parliamentarians and Royalists; at the same time
Digger and Ranter pamphlets could be distributed to the spectators with an
accompanying critique of the event and our reasons for disrupting it - and
calling for them to join in, to cease being spectators and to enter the battlefield
of history. Just a mad fantasy? A Reclaim the Battlefield of History movement,
anyone? The desire to finally live history and no longer merely consume it
has been too long repressed.
“How long does the battle last?” I asked. “It starts
at 12.30 and ends at 3.30, but there’s an interval for lunch at 1.30,”
replied the woman with the Coal Not Dole badge. We all laughed nervously.’
(Guardian, 21/6/01.)
A pathetic parody of this repressed desire was recently played out on the
15th anniversary of perhaps the bloodiest picket line conflict of the Miners
Strike; the Battle of Orgreave was re-enacted near to the original site. Filmed
for Channel 4 TV by a Hollywood director, and with ex-pickets and cops from
the original battle as extras (but ‘real’ actors playing the ‘heroes’
of the event such as Arthur Scargill – typically bourgeois history as
the history of leaders), the event was painstakingly reconstructed from media
footage of the time. As always, once the event is safely far enough in the
past, the media that acted in its own class interests by lying and distorting
the truth in the real time of the class struggle, feels confident enough to
now reveal a somewhat more truthful version of events; now that it no longer
has any consequences. This is a sure sign of the ruling class’s confidence
that these are dead issues, definitively resolved in their favour. They want
us to believe that class struggle is a thing of the past. Again, the colonisation
process at work; get the defeated to dramatise their defeat as entertainment
for the victors. Despite a bit of temporary flattering attention and extra
pocket money for the locals, who really gains from this farce? No one but
the ruling class and their media. The claims that the event was therapeutic
(or
“healing”) for some are predictable – but what does it help
them come to terms with? Only the acceptance of their defeat and all its consequences
since.
This filmed re-enactment follows in the footsteps of other Northern films
like ‘The Full Monty’ and ‘Brassed Off’ which (although
quite funny) are really just hymns of praise to the new entrepreneurial economy
that smashed the miners and others and replaced their solidarity with the
Thatcherite ‘get on your bike’ selfish individualism. The sermon
is that redundant industrial workers should move with the times and reinvent
themselves as cultural entrepreneurs, giving a positive, if unrealistic,
inspirational message to the post-industrial workforce. Want to escape low
wage drudgery? Then compete commercially against your former fellow workers
and neighbours and/or try to sell them things.
“A nation of shopkeepers” in the making
A real re-engaging with the making of history can clearly only occur on the
terrain of a major resurgence of class struggle… which we await with
some urgency….
* * *
4
PROLETARIAN GEOGRAPHY
The increased commercialisation of pubs, and other social space, and the progressive
destruction of those aspects that once kept them as socially welcoming (as
opposed to merely commercially enticing) only shows that the contradictory
tensions of these places and their use have been resolved in favour of the
market forces that were always one part of the equation. Defeats in the area
of leisure are linked to defeats suffered in production; the virtual collapse
of workplace struggles since the 80’s and its shattering of confidence
and basis for solidarity had a knock-on effect with a decline of struggles
outside production – in the areas of life where we reproduce ourselves
such as housing, public services and leisure.
For example, disinvestment in various dockland areas (Liverpool, Cardiff,
London etc) was an effective weapon in wrecking dockworkers
combativity and their communities during the 80’s and 90’s. As
the
traditional industries have closed in these areas ‘urban regeneration’
(or ‘waterfront development’ in estate-agent jargon) has often
been touted as the solution to unemployment, poor housing etc. Gentrification
is presented and justified as the means to provide the infrastructure necessary
to attract new investment to revitalise the area; so local shops get replaced
by ones more appealing to the incoming yuppies/gentry (art galleries, estate
agents, wine bars etc), pubs get gentrified and Themed and the unemployed
get forced out of their boozers and off the dole into crap low paid jobs providing
services for the new settlers.
* * *
"We
comprehend architecture and environment “in a twofold manner; by use
and by perception – or, rather by touch and sight.”
(W. Benjamin).
Themed locations are pseudo-environments in the sense that they are parodies
or copies of other places that possess a real history of specific uses for
their location - while the Themed space is mere transported appearance, taken
out of its original context and given a different function for the purposes
of commodity consumption. In the original real environment the appearance
was largely determined by the use the place was put to – while in the
Theme environment the appearance is intended to determine the use of the space.
The Theming attempts to pre-determine what can happen in such spaces; the
script is already written and a role already prescribed for you, which means
various forms of consumption. But what is being consumed is not only the food,
drink, exhibits or whatever else is being bought, but also a kind of framing
of the consumption venue, framing the permitted limits of behaviour.
Theming bears a relation to material commodities which is
similar to that of advertising and shop window dressing; a less tangible less
easily quantifiable commodity than those that are physically consumed, operating
on a more ideological, emotional and aesthetic level. Just as Capital seeks
to destroy all autonomous use of public space by reducing it down to a common
consumerism, so it seeks to dominate the psychic map – a kind of urban
planning of the mind; Theme environments are very carefully planned by specialists
down to the smallest details – but they are designed to influence our
behaviour and encourage consumption at a subconscious level, in much the same
way as Muzak or advertising. “Culture – the ideal commodity that
sells all the others.”
* * *
5
THE PRICE OF TIME
”Economy
of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.” (Marx,
‘Grundrisse’.)
“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.”
From around 1100 to 1300 church bells were the main markers of time in daily
life, calling the people to Mass. There were also secular bell signals developed
– for example to indicate that the parish oven was ready for baking.
But their most important use was for enforcing curfew; indicating that all
fires must be out and all lights extinguished at a certain time of night –
9pm in many places.
In 1282 in London a law was passed that “at each parish church curfew
shall be rung at the same hour as St Martin’s (Le Grand)
beginning and ending at the same time, and then all the gates, as well as
taverns, whether of wine or ale, shall be closed and no one shall walk the
streets or places.”
In its ascendancy as a class the bourgeoisie made a history that changed the
general conception of time; the decay of medieval society and the emergence
of the rising bourgeoisie and consequently “of the free market,
was expressed succinctly, by the
development of a new mechanism, that of the clock….”. The
rising bourgeois class “were learning… that Time is Money.
In the past there had been sundials and waterclocks, clumsy mechanisms with
a limited effect in the regulation of existence. But the clock proper made
possible a total new system of controlling and arranging human activity; it
broke men from the agricultural year as the basic measure of life, a matter
of rhythms and of adjustments to the phases of nature. Now men could in many
important spheres increasingly ignore the earth-rhythm and treat time as an
abstract line divided into equal moments or lengths. For the idea of time
as a maze, a circle, a spiral, a series of rhythmic coordinates, a unifying
moment, there was substituted the idea of time as a mechanical succession
of rigid units. If we look at the periods of early industrialisation we see
what anguish it was for the peasant, brutally torn from the land, to accustom
himself to the treadmill cage of the relentless clock, which he felt as identical
in its beats with the nagging finger of the new master, money.”
(J. Lindsay, ‘A Short History of Culture’, 1963)
How time is experienced is determined by its location, by where (and how)
it is passed. The forced removal of the peasantry to the towns by the Enclosures
of common land was necessary before the new discipline of clock time could
be fully imposed. The new industries threw workers together but also created
new separations; in the form of domestication to new patterns of life and
labour and habitual obedience to new authorities such as clock time. The pub
was a place where workers could retreat from the stresses of work, partially
reconstitute new community and overcome separation. As well as simple social
relaxation, pubs were also frequently used for (often clandestine) meetings
to organise unions, self-education, strikes and insurrections.
In the workplace workers have (to varying degrees) through struggle often
retained some control over how their work is organised. Similarly, due to
the nature and history of social alcohol consumption, drinkers have by default
been to some degree the authors of the pub environment, by their needs and
preferences. But as Capital has consistently tried to restructure to regain
control in workplace production in the interests of greater profits and discipline,
so the same process occurs in the environment; both at the level of urban
planning and also of interior design such as pubs and other leisure spaces.
Nowadays it may no longer be religion but consumption that is the “opium
of the people” and the commodity that is now the object of worship,
but the bell rung for ‘last orders’ every night in every pub contains
an echo of the church curfew and of the ordering and arranging of time as
discipline and economic measurement – and it still rings out the same
orders. The domination of clock time that made labour so alienating also penetrated
into the leisure used as escape from it. The revolutionary transformation
of lived time and space is a rendezvous we are already late for…
* * *
“Historical time is not simply measured time. It is time that has been
lived through, suffered, and experienced. It is determined not by the hand
of the clock moving forwards minute by minute, but by the far more a-rhythmical
clock of internal and external experiences.” (Jacob Burkhardt,
1868.)
"I drink, therefore I am.”
Pubs have historically been the predominant and most long lived
working class social space. Periodic refurbishment, whether through Theming
and/or gentrification, only reflects the fact of our being dispossessed of
the means for the conscious creation of our environment; this is the essence
of the proletarian condition - we produce these means but their use is monopolised
in the hands of the ruling class. Radicals have long been aware of this fact
as regards the labour process of production, but we have often failed to see
that the same is increasingly true in the fields of leisure, culture and environment
where we reproduce ourselves. Theming and gentrification gives the illusion
of movement, development and innovation - and encourages us to identify with
this enforced trendiness - but the unchanging basis of commodity relations
and class society is the necessary foundation for these marketing trends and
modifications of social space.
* * *
Although today we might have more appreciation of the value and use of some
places deliberately left uncultivated and domesticated, we can still appreciate
the basic sentiments of Walter Benjamin, who saw outlined in the work of Charles
Fourier a world where “places are cultivated by human beings, made useful
and beautiful by them; all, however, stand, like a roadside inn, open to everyone.”
We’ll drink to that.
* * *
This text was first
published in November 2001 by
A Class Act to Abolish All Classes.
More writings from the authors can be read at www.endangeredphoenix.com
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Download Last orders for the Local