saladofpearls

Title: Noise and Capitalism
Publisher: Arteleku Audiolab (Kritika series), Donostia-San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa), Spain
Publication date: September 2009
ISBN: 978-84-7908-622-1

Contributors: Ray Brassier, Emma Hedditch, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles, Sara Kaaman, Mattin, Nina Power, Edwin Prévost, Bruce Russell, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater, Csaba Toth, Ben Watson

Editors: Mattin & Anthony Iles

 

 

‘Noise’ not only designates the no-man’s-land between electro-acoustic investigation, free improvisation, avant-garde experiment, and sound art; more interestingly,it refers to anomalous zones of interference between genres: between post-punk and free jazz; between musique concrète and folk; between stochastic composition and art brut. – Ray Brassier

If the conditions in which we produce our music affects our playing then let’s try to feel through them, understand them as much as possible and, then, change these conditions.

Alienated language is noise, but noise containspossibilities that may, who knows, be more affective than discursive, more enigmatic than dogmatic.

We find ourselves poised between vicariously florid academic criticism, overspecialised niche markets and basements full of anti-intellectual escapists. There is, afterall, ‘a Franco, Churchill, Roosevelt, inside all of us…’ but this book is written neither by chiefs nor generals. Here the non-appointed, not yet disinterested, practitioners in one way or another, autotheorise ways of thinking through the contemporary conditions for making difficult music and opening up to the willfully perverse satisfactions of the auricular drives.

If you wish to receive a printed copy of this book please write or send an email with your postal address to submitting your own feelings about or responses to the words ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Noise’. Any letters, comments, criticisms, records, CDs or contributions in other media related to this book will be gratefully received in exchange. Post: Arteleku, Kristobaldegi 14 (o nuevo P. Ainzieta), Loiola Auzoa, 20014 Donostia - San Sebastián (Spain). Email: arteleku@gipuzkoa.net

This book can be downloaded as a PDF file:
http://www.arteleku.net/audiolab/noise_capitalism.pdf

Undoing the City, and Ourselves

By Anthony Iles

A recent festival in Copenhagen dedicated to the cultural politics of
the city escalated into a Dionysian street party-cum-riot. With the
stakes raised by this sudden, if fleeting, show of force, conceptual
discussions around urban activism took on new perspectives — report by
Anthony Iles
*

http://www.metamute.org/en/content/undoing_the_city_and_ourselves

 

 

 

 

In April 2007 Stewart Home wrote a report from Copenhagen for Mute on a self-organised conference about the legacy of the situationist movement in Scandinavia.i The conference coincided with large scale rioting sparked by the eviction and destruction of the Ungdomshuset (The Youth House) social centre. During the subsequent two years, activists in Copenhagen have continued to build upon the energies catalysed by the defence of a popular social space. Finally, after numerous actions and demos, activists were granted a new social centre by the city council on 11 June 2008.

 

Image: A street party in the central shopping district of Copenhagen that became a riot, Friday 8 May, 2009

 

These energies also entail marked attempts by Copenhagen’s activist scene to educate itself and draw in discourses from elsewhere. To this end, I had participated in a two-day workshop on political readings of the financial crisis, Finanaskrise Socialkrise this February. At the time, the Danish press and political elite were confidently issuing statements that the crisis was something happening elsewhere, while at the same time Danish firms were widely using the crisis as an excuse to carry out wage cuts and workforce rationalisation. The crisis is unfolding differently across the specific temporal frameworks of national boundaries – Denmark’s housing bubble peaked in 2006 and its economy went into recession in early 2008 following the collapse of the Roskilde bank.ⁱⁱ It remains to be seen whether the crisis will be used to extend neoliberal reform (ongoing since the 1990s) of Denmark’s almost unique combination of low unemployment, high-level of unionised labour (80 percent) and comparatively strong welfare state.

 

Such neoliberal reforms extend, of course, to the lock-down of Copenhagen’s ‘slack space’ essential for the self-organisation and survival of people existing at the economic and cultural margins. Undoing the City was a festival dedicated to tracking and strategising the struggles to defend such spaces. Its accompanying conference covered gentrification, squatting, urban gardens, mapping, policing the police, anti-racist organising, actions against detention centres, housing speculation, water and land rights. The festival took the form of a two day seminar accompanied by film screenings, walking tours, distributed actions and workshops across the city over four days. In the end the festival drew a huge amount of press and created a national scandal after a street party in the city centre culminated in riots and property destruction. This event forced a mainstream debate in Denmark around the term ‘gentrification’ for the first time. The action has also been interpreted (as it probably should be) by right wingers in the Parliament and mediasphere as a deliberate provocation by the activists around the Youth House, bringing their struggles and culture to the centre of the city. The Friday night riot was one of several reasons to see this young movement as deliberately breaking the Danish State’s monopoly on violence by mounting asymmetrical attacks against the its very power to define violence.

 

Whilst intended to be one of the smaller and more playful events in the busy Danish activist calendar, Undoing the City has achieved a significance through the press attention it received and what seemed like a meaningful balance of actions, international participation and theoretical debates. Each of these delved into the specific history of a neighbourhood (Nørrebro) and radicalised understandings of the city based on the potential for change inherent in existing conditions.

 

That property destruction radicalised what was on the surface a ‘fluffy’ event tailored to fit the artivist niche and fashioned to annex small streams of arts funding seems to be a dynamic peculiar to Copenhagen at the moment. What would seem absolutely impossible and perhaps outmoded elsewhere – Reclaim the Streets-style tactics of multiform antagonistic occupation of public space – seems to have legs in Copenhagen. I attribute this, at least partly, to the fact that actions take place within a context of dialogue, self-critique and reflection missing from the use of similar tactics elsewhere. Throughout the four days there was a welcome questioning of the usual affirmations of activist gatherings I have encountered elsewhere.

 

Jaya Klara Brekke’s talk on the ‘post-capitalist city’ reflected on different engagements with activism around migrant struggles and squatting. It culminated in the strong proposition that work on urbanism be imaginative and affirmative in its construction of post-enlightenment and post-capitalist forms of living in the city. The presentation by the Hamburg based group Es Regnet Kaviar (It’s Raining Caviar), though full of humour, was less inspiring. The group’s anti-gentrification actions amounted to little more than symbolic subversion and the production of a spectacle of antagonism around spatial privatisation in the city. The group’s actions were often defensive, if playful, and fell short of a meaningful theorisation of what they actually wanted from their city other than to be left alone to enjoy it.

 

 

Image: One of Reffen’s constructors at work

 

Rikke Luther’s presentation on water rights and the transformation of cultures of water use and ownership in and around Copenhagen Harbour drew upon extensive research into the harbour’s history and land reclamation. She also drew on her own experience of living on a self-built, floating platform in the harbour. The history of the production and development of this new land has been determined by changing patterns of sovereignty (from the absolute right of the king, to parliamentary sovereignty, to its privatisation), the shifting needs of military defence and expansion, and the demand for labour. Initially dredgers were powered by convicts and later horses. Now water ownership in Copenhagen Harbour is distributed across three agencies – the military, a private-public consortia which manages Malmo-Copenhagen Harbour and Copenhagen’s municipality. This multi-agency management of the waterway has allowed rampant privatisation of the land around the harbour, giving rise to a swathe of flats and offices, financed by global consortia, that effectively block pedestrian access to the waterfront.

 

Joen P. Vedel presented ‘Reffen’, a utopian building project on reclaimed/polluted land in the midst of Copenhagen’s harbour. This took the form of a temporary occupation of a public street and surrounding land. The occupiers, or ‘constructors’ as they became known in the press built structures with found and donated materials over a period of three months. These physically and experientially risky buildings briefly found their place between the city’s fortifications, the Queen’s palace, military-owned harbours, PoMo yuppie stables, a container port, an opera house sponsored by the shipping giant Maersk and reclaimed polluted land. Vedel saw this experiment as very much in the original spirit of Christiania. This comparison was made more pertinent because Christiania, now largely overwhelmed by tourists drinking marijuana-flavoured beer, has just lost a major case against the city and is under the impending threat of eviction. The ongoing demise of this once thriving experiment in alternative living was a timely reminder of the need for free space and the human capability to make first one’s own environment and, perhaps secondly, if at all, laws to govern it by. Reffen could be dismissed as a bunch of hippies playing out their survival fantasies, but in the context of Copenhagen’s heritage culture and in the slipstream of the real estate boom and crash, this messy settlement posed the basic question again of who can build and how, on playful and inventive terms.

 

Artist Lasse Lau’s talk posited male homosexual cruising as spatial contestation. Initially opening a discussion on gay militancy by giving a history of queer and trans activism in New York, Lau then showed video footage of Gay Pride events in different cities that now include floats advertising major corporations, in particular banks and investment funds. This juxtaposition was not developed, but it seemed to be intended as some sort of ominous address to Copenhagen’s militant queer scene and a corrective to its present exuberance. Lau’s own artistic practice, however, did not live up to the militant culture he was surveying. His interventions into heavily policed and controlled cruising spaces were gestural and ineffectual rather than pragmatic and constructive. They failed to negotiate the subversion of public space constituted by acts of ‘improper’ sexual intimacy, and appeared completely compromised by their need to publicise clandestine sexual practices. Yet, if anything was recovered in Lau’s presentation that could be applied to the field of activity engaged by Undoing it was, for me at least, the residue of surreal animality present in a certain anecdote he told about 19^th Century Paris. According to Lau, men seeking temporary partners would meet in the Tuileries before a statue of a wild boar. If anything, this anecdote and the events of the four days suggest to me that the investment of the city with myth, the savage topography drawn daily across ordered and policed space, should be intensified rather than rationalised.

 

One practical contribution to this project was the ‘surveillance of the Police’ which took place over 24 hours from Thursday morning to Friday night. Imitating the Black Panther tactic of ‘policing the police’, albeit unarmed, groups of observers walked the district of Nørrebro monitoring police activities and stop and search operations. Against a background of intensifying violence in this district – where the sight of gun battles between Hells Angels gangs and local migrant youth is not uncommon – police stop and search operations targeting migrants are rising. The street violence stems largely from a struggle over control of the soft drugs market which has moved in recent years from Christiannia to Nørrebro. The sharpening struggle over this economy seems to relate directly to the migrants’ increasing marginalisation in the job market and exclusion from social provision. The mainstream media reported this surveillance action in a surprisingly positive light, showing ‘concerned citizens’ following police activity in their area, ensuring that the law was carried out correctly and without intimidation. This positive media coverage would later prove an anomaly in light of Friday night’s events, further complexifying ‘public outcry’ over the festival.

 

On Sunday, Saul Albert and Jakob Jakobsen staged a workshop, Nørrbro Open City, during which the courtyard parks of Nørrebro were mapped using a free editable map of the world called Openstreetmap. The courtyards have an interesting history bound up with local housing activism, and were renewed and turned green during a period of urban renewal lead by housing and community activists. Originally they remained open as thoroughfares and play spaces accessible to all. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s however, and in the context of rising property values, these have become enclosed, private spaces enhancing the property values of the flats which surround them.

 

During the workshop Jakobsen and Albert used Openstreetmap to locate and mark the courtyards and pose the question of access. There is no equivalent to the UK’s ‘public right of way’, or legally enshrined common ownership under Danish law, making access to such spaces a question of social contestation. Making them accessible to all would significantly improve the quality of life for the many rather than just a select few. There is very little other green space in this area, so opening up the courtyards makes it possible to navigate the area without crossing roads, encountering traffic or police. Shortly after the project was announced many residents approached the organisers with keys and, by the end of the afternoon, nearly all the courtyards in Nørrebro were mapped and their accessibility (open, gated, key available etc.) recorded. The Nørrebro Open City project is continuing and there will soon be a map and a set of keys to the courtyards in the Folkets Hus. A link to the map here shows the green courtyards plotted by those attending the workshop.

 

The problem of access and marginality in the city was addressed in the project Trampoline House which was a temporary centre for discussion, social activities and self-education for migrants. This initially took the form of a series of workshops in the Danish asylum centres Kongelunden and Sandholm this January and February. The Trampoline House and Asylum Dialog Tank are currently attempting to establish a permanent space in which to continue the activities begun earlier in the year. But by Sunday the exaggerated media and police presence at the festival meant that the planned speakers’ corner was called off. Many of the users of the Trampoline House, however, attended the discussions at the Folkets Hus over the two days, and made some of the more interesting contributions to the ongoing exchange over anti-racist organising and techniques of exclusion in the neoliberal city.

 

Berlin based group Kanak Attack’s rigorously theorised presentation on the problems of anti-racist/anti-fascist organising, whilst rejecting rights and notions of identity, was central to this exchange. Kanak Attack understand ‘integration’ as the state’s counter-claim to ‘unreasonable’ basic demands. Under the rubric of multiculturalism the state’s injunction to migrants is to ‘assimilate but remain different’. Against this, Kanak Attack theorise political goals in terms of the good life and struggles over access to it, taking a position of ‘no integration’ and promoting the notion of ‘escape routes’ as a replacement for the fetishisation of ‘roots’. This amounts to a refusal of the division of labour and a refusal of the paternalism that lingers in much anti-racist organising. Migration is thus understood as the escape from unbearable conditions and the fixity of identity. This critique of paternalism had a powerful resonance with the question of organisation being thought through by many activists around the Folkets Hus, and spilled out of the seminars and into conversations running across the whole four days.

 

Action Diritti’s presentation covered similar issues to Kanak Attack’s, albeit with a less theoretical but more concrete relation to similar issues. The group has a strong tradition of organising with migrants in Rome. This has involved establishing squats to provide housing for new migrants as well as setting up shop-front advice centres providing legal advice and a point of contact. In Rome, intense speculation, a lack of coordinated housing policy, high rent and instability all contribute to what the group terms Caravita – life which is ever more expensive. Action Diritti’s response is to wage campaigns of auto-reduction, self-organisation and ‘real’ political representation. Their somewhat schematic plan for ‘new social rights, new welfare and new citizenship’ was of course troubled by Kanak Attack’s prior questioning of these terms.

 

As is fairly common, there was a palpable disconnect between those from Northern Europe and Action Diritti’s enthusiasm for welfare and rights. In many ways this, and the strength of Italian and Spanish movements around precarity, can be attributed to the relative absence of social housing, healthcare or unemployment benefits in each country. This struggle passes by those of us who have had the dubious privilege of a strong welfare state, and see the need for social struggles to move beyond the compromise it compacts. This raises the question of how to bridge these two discussions and find ways to deal with the local and national characteristics of capitalism. The question is particularly relevant in Denmark, and several of those who participated in the discussion following Kanak Attack’s presentation made the point that existing struggles in Denmark need to go beyond asking the State for equal rights for migrants. Something that, in any case, seems highly unlikely. but also because, as one Kurdish/Iraqi activist saw it, the important thing is to ‘question the state’s very authority to dispense rights’.

 

It was rewarding to see this discussion of ‘rights’ significantly testing and extending the discourse invoked by the festival’s promotional literature which had deployed the phrase ‘Right to the City’ popularised by Harvey and derived from the work of Robert Park.

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

– Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior, Chicago 1967, p.3.

Taking collective power to reshape the ‘process of urbanisation’ sounds very good, but both Park and Harvey are not always explicit about whose class interests the city is being shaped in. Like many theorists of neoliberal urbanism, Harvey runs the risk of putting his tools of critical analysis in the hands of those uncritically shaping cities through gentrification. A friend once told me how he had overheard a group of young people plotting about their neighbourhood in a pub in Limehouse. Initially excited that this might be some group addressing local problems in the area he quickly recoiled in horror when he realised they were home owners plotting to raise their house prices by engineering the eviction of unruly neighbouring council tenants. There are many actors ‘reshap[ing] the processes of urbanization’ of cities, but by what criteria are we to judge, ethically or otherwise, the truth of their ‘right’ to do so? Since rights are almost always dispensed in an exclusive manner, a privilege of the stakeholder society, what becomes of those excluded from full admission into the citizenry so much in evidence amongst the population of districts like Nørrebro?

 

I would question whether it is possible to square the truth of this aspiration ‘to change ourselves by changing the city’ with the rejection of a discourse which requests ‘rights’. Democracy in its neoliberal phase is full of so many forms of false dueness; from the ready made forms of identification used to sell yuppies homes, to the forms of governance exercised on populations around regeneration projects, consultations, local democracy etc. By recognising ourselves as the subjects addressed we confirm the power that addresses us and, in the neoliberal city in which no-one belongs, belonging or its simulacrum is endlessly promoted and solicited. When, after a week of media hysteria, three communiques by the organisers of Friday night’s party appeared signed Os der ikke findes (We who do not exist), what was held up as a response was not only a mask of secrecy, the rejection of a stable identity, but also a refusal to be called to account or to reveal that which the public sphere expects and demands.

 

 

Image: After the street party, Saturday 8 May, 2009

 

The programme for Undoing the City had promised ‘street dancing’ and that they would ‘set up an overthrowing ass-shaking to the smell of canny untidiness in the market place. Cheap bars – mad dj’s – open street stylee! Somewhere in the inner city…check your cell phone’. The street party took over a narrow street off Copenhagen’s main shopping thoroughfare blocking it with a van parked sideways and carrying the sound system. Ladders were raised to allow graffiti artists access to two stories of chain storefront as ‘canvas’, sofas, fires and bars were placed on the street. After a few hours of diplomatic negotiation with police the sound system was switched off at 4am (apparently this had more to do with the driver needing to get home to start his day job later that morning). As the sound system wound down the back streets dancers began to pull up their hoods and the sound of imploding shop windows replaced the beats, while choreographed looting was exchanged for the shapes previously being thrown on the dance floor. Practically everybody seemed to know what they were doing except the Danish police and myself, each of us equally unsure whether to get involved and in what capacity. Amidst tumbling glass, bricks and bicycles soaring through the air, the mood felt safe and festive, several people took a break from fighting the police to check I was ok, and make sure I got out of the action and to the nearest good pub safely. The ‘perpetrators’ of the events of Friday night we’re most definitely not a minority of ‘troublemakers’. The organisers stress that they remain invisible in the public life of Denmark and shunned by it and this is clearly a common feeling across whole sections of Copenhagen’s youth. They wish to remain outside of the public gaze, but refuse to be prevented from actively reshaping the material and symbolic fabric of their city. Moreover, what they claim, with a cheeky grasp of political rhetoric that does not preclude seriousness, is a very real politics at odds with the democracy of the market:

Politics is opposition. Politics is to refuse to obey. Dissensus is politics. Consensus is anti-politics. This is why parliamentarism is not politics – but an illegal street party is!

– We do not exist, ‘An explosive force of freedom’ⁱⁱⁱ

Thus the politics of dissensus much discussed at the two day seminars found its clearest expression in the joyous cacophany of a noisy party – it was the catalysing event which forced everyone to shift and reassess their positions. It embodied the struggle over the state’s prerogative to dispense violence and to a small degree briefly broke it. As Alberto Toscano, explaining Badiou’s conception of violence, concurs:

Without the ‘violent’ inscription into the situation of a subjective tendency or force of transformation, which is itself the product of internal divisions and separations, we are left only with the dumb brutality of a structural violence.^iv

This indicates the work that must be done. But, it must also be made clear, random manifestations of constitutive ‘violence’ will not be sufficient to reverse the malign movement which squeezes profits and life out of our cities. Those for whom such ‘radical expressivity’ is merely the icing on the cake of spectacular commodity society will want to shuffle off to the nearest peaceful study lined with Adorno’s books. Those who approve, but contest that street parties, property destruction and proletarian shopping are fun for the few but not for all may be heartened to hear the organisers caveat:

…this vandalism is also an authoritarian expression that is undemocratic and excludes. It is often male dominated. Women and gays also smash windows. But not all can participate in the destruction. Many are excluded from vandalising, but destruction should be for everyone, not only white heterosexual Danish men!

Nonetheless, the party and aftermath was a temporary breach, with the damaged shops claiming record sales the following day. In fact a sofa dragged outside during the party and graffitied was sold, though not, despite the rumour circulating, for more than its original price tag. It is clear that some longer term strategic thinking is required for those wishing to chase the spectre of gentrification from their cities.

Therefore, just as things are a little more complicated than simply declaring opposition to capital – likewise with gentrification we cannot simply extract ourselves from this relationship. Attacking gentrification might also involve, in a certain sense, attacking ourselves as constituted by present conditions.

This statement, given as part of my own presentation, was generated by thinking through the consequences of the crash on the built environment in London, yet it became pertinent in Copenhagen. On the final day of the festival I was interviewed by a feminist collective who were filming the festival for the website Modkraft [modkraft.dk/]. At one point my interviewer asked:

But look what happened, we did an anti-gentrification action, we smashed shops in the centre of town, but this has been recuperated immediately [attracting tourists and shoppers to the scene of the crime]. We gained a new youth house, but this is in a poor area and contributes to the gentrification of the area. How can we really attack gentrification?’

Gentrification is a process born out of the present organisation of capital. In capitalism violence is structural, the destruction and displacement enacted by gentrification is part of a social relation – part and parcel of the contemporary relation between capital and labour. That struggles around gentrification appear to focus on the reproductive sphere and capitalists’ efforts to extract profits from workers’ consumption does not mean these struggles are disconnected from capital’s imperative to reproduce us as ready for work. There is a tendency towards a purely cultural response to gentrification as if gentrification is only a culture rather than a network of relations that derive from vested interests in property, ownership, law-making and the reorganisation of work. Underpinning those relations is a mode of production.

 

After a decade of project-oriented activism characterised by media stunts and voluntarism, it is clear that longer term approaches are required. There has been little examination on the left of the actual preconditions for involvement in struggles. To understand how struggle against the iniquities of the existing social and economic system that governs our lives starts from real lives, from peoples’ lived circumstances and extends outwards from them is to walk away from activism as practised by specialists. With the current resurgence of struggles in the workplace, factory occupations and strikes across the world, there is the opportunity to link struggles at the point of production to contestation at the point of reproduction – struggles over housing, food, environment, welfare and so on. To make room for these connections might mean giving up ‘activism’ and giving up ‘recuperation’. Giving up on belonging, as theorised by both Kanak Attack and Os der ikke findes, could mean becoming more self-aware about the group identifications that are in circulation and which sediment around class, religion and culture. Recuperation might mean change – actual change that could destabilise the radical identity of an oppositional group. After all, any movement working to make radical change must not fear its ends unintended or otherwise.

 

Anthony Iles <anthony AT metamute.org> is a contributing editor to Mute

 

Info

Undoing the City took place at the Folkets Hus and at many other locations across the city of Copenhagen, 7-10 May 2009

Footnotes

In 1964 Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood made plans for a ‘Fun Palace’ to be sited in the Lower Lea Valley  just outside the zone. This zone, shaped by successive waves of redevelopment that have assailed its wild, industrial and ludic nature, is currently the largest building site in London, if not Europe, being developed for the 2012 London Olympics. Responding to the aims of the 1951 London Development Plan and the Civic Trust’s 1964 plan for A Lea Valley Regional Park, the Fun Palace was to be the culmination of Price’s idea of architecture as ’social means’ and Littlewood, the socialist theatre director’s dream for a flexible theatrical space open to all and shaped by its users interests: a space where, in her words;

the latest discoveries of engineering and science can provide an environment for pleasure and discovery, a place to look at the stars, to eat, stroll, meet and play.

Like many radicals of his time, Price was influenced by the expectation of the ‘new windfall of leisure time’ provided to workers by the introduction of mechanisation and automation. He applied himself to the problem of the ‘brain drain’ that Britain faced in the Post-War years – skilled and educated workers were leaving the UK for employment in Europe and America.  While government planners were concerning themselves with reproducing workers with more free time as ‘workers’ by disciplining them, introducing credit and loan schemes, Price was devising new forms of training and education disguised as ‘leisure’.

The difference in scale between the Fun Palace plans and those of the Olympic Park may seem to make it irrelevant to compare the two, but there are significant overlaps. Price’s plans for the Fun Palace in the Lea Valley Regional Park remained unrealised, yet like many of his projects it became hugely influential. His approach to planning for contingency and spontaneity is shared by Peter Cook (Archigram) currently a consultant for the Olympic stadium. Their architectural principles of flexibility, interdeterminacy, mobility, openness have become the cornerstone of recent building techniques attuned to the political economy of our times.

Price followed through his explicit challenge to existing State-sponsored culture by finding corporate sponsorship to support the Fun Palace project. His (unbuilt) architecture anticipates the turn from an industrial to a service economy. The celebration of this ‘creative economy’ is central to the framing of the London 2012 Games. Price fully intended to nest his vision of the future in the shell of (what was quickly becoming) the industrial past. The ODA designers’ approach has been to erase any industrial heritage along with much of the amateur sports and activities that, until recently, energised the area.

Upon his appointment as head of the Cultural Olympiad, Keith Khan said ‘he was keen to embrace the “iPod generation” with the use of digital technology and concepts used by websites such as MySpace and YouTube.’ The buzz-words of participation and user-generated content are, as with the Millenium Dome, deployed to give a democratic feel to what is ultimately a top-down process of creative branding devoid of any real content or culture. Whilst Price was to employ cybernetics and early computing to enable users to move and programme elements of the building and the activities within it, the ‘flash mobs’ who are expected to populate the Olympic park are conversel shaped by its designers interests and will at best be able to upload their pictures and videos from mobile phones to the big screens which will fill the park and public spaces around it.

Since the lead-up to the Olympic bid the conceptualisation of the building around the games has focussed on the regenerative effects of the games upon East London. The emphasis is upon what will happen after the three weeks of athletics. The plans and extensive composite drawings made by the Olympic Delivery Authority for the Olympic Park in legacy mode do not refer to the concrete outcome but remain only ‘indicative’ of what might happen. However, neither the Park nor the buildings in it respond to its users’ desires, instead, this in-built contingency is predicated on shifting economic conditions, government agendas and the vapidity of its designers’ aims.

In projections for the Olympic Park one views an official playground; managed nature, organised and safe exercise, communication technologies, mobile phones, big screens and water all set against the backdrop of the Docklands and the City – centres of global financial flows. These images are characterised by a multiculturalism peculiar to the visual creations of urban planners – the dream image of difference without conflict, an endless playscape without work or workers. The cleaners and security guards upon whom these spaces depend are placed firmly outside the picture. Whereas Price’s model disposes of labour through automation, the ODA’s vision hides labour in dream-like reflections, screens, glass, water, smoke and mirrors.

As the ongoing financial crisis unravels, there are signs that the liquidity fuelling the building boom in and around the Olympic site is drying up. On Monday 30th June 2008 ODA chief executive David Higgins explained to the Public Accounts Committee that the number of apartments to be built had already been reduced from 4,200 to around 3,300 because of trouble financing the project. Since then that figure has further reduced to 3,000. The speed with which these expectations are being revised suggests that there is plenty of scope for future problems. An indication of the degree of these problems is evident in last November’s announcement of the cancellation of a bespoke Olympics Media Centre – the creative solution is to house the world’s media in retail units for the duration of the games.

If the Fun Palace can be considered a pre-vision of the emerging post-industrial society, we can wager the London Olympics won’t be that society’s crowning success. Rather, these designs represent the return, as farce, of Price’s visionary dream – a plasticated world populated by unreal avatars repeating gestures rehearsed on TV. The very creation of this landscape will be underpinned by debt, exploitation and public bankruptcy. As the scale of the promises, hype and actual building begin to ebb there is the opportunity to reassess the post-Blair UK built landscape.What if we could think like Price and take a visionary stance towards the future? Is it possible to imagine what might be built out of the ruins of the financialised city after the new economy?

Anthony Iles,
Legislating for Enthusiasm: from Fun Palace to Creative Prison

Adapted from the self-published pamphlet ‘The Lower Lea Valley as Fun Palace and Creative Prison’, this essay explores the legacy of experiments in flexibility and interdeterminacy in Sixties architecture by mapping them onto the futuristic projections for the London 2012 Olympics. By stressing the continuity between the post-war development of London and contemporary regeneration projects, the text attempts to excavate the common interests re-shaping both work and free time across apparently discontinuous phases of capitalist development.

Legislating for Enthusiasm (PDF 1mb)

A short piece on work and water via Conrad, Engels and Sekula written for the Viennese magazine Malmoe no.45 published March, 2009

What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river

I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s greatness before he sets foot upon English soil. It is only later that the traveler appreciates the human suffering that has made all this possible.1

Since Engel’s wrote these words, what history has washed from the water and banks of London’s river, the canals that fed off and into it, is labour and the labouring part of the population. When these words were written the river in London was already the site of a disappearance, from one phase of maritime transport to another – that is one phase (technical development) of accumulation to another, Engels remarks in a note to his study of the Condition of The Working Class in England, ‘In so far as such ships still ply to and from London they are now to be found only in the docks, while the river itself is covered with ugly, sooty steamers.’ Yet, though labour increasingly escapes representation, work is everywhere to be found. As capital has shaped the city in its interests, the river too which flows through it has been reshaped. This short text will travel along the waterways of London’s past and present fishing for keys to the shifting relationship between capital and labour.

In 1951 the Port of London was the second largest docks in the world. So, whilst it is claimed that the docks and the extensive canal traffic that served them were wound down due to the impossibility of getting larger ships up the Thames, containerisation also has a pivotal role in the transformation in the Port of London’s fortunes. It was also no accident that London’s docks had historically contained some of the most militant unions and labour organisations.

 With the use of larger ships and containerisation, the importance of the upstream port declined rapidly from the mid-1960s. The enclosed docks further up river declined and closed progressively between the end of the 1960s and the early 1980s.2

As early as 1951 the potential for the docks as a site of work was to be transformed into the scene of leisure, conspicuous consumption both picturesque and historic. The displacement of industry from the river and canalside was initially argued for in terms of the twin evils of blight and pollution to be cured by the virtues of parks, open space and picturesque views. In 1951, 85.1 percent of the riverside below Blackfriars Bridge was used for industrial and commercial uses. At the time of speaking at least the same percentage is occupied by luxury apartments. This development would not only affect the river, canals and former docklands, it was symptomatic of a broader shift across the UK to a services based economy and a built environment that would both reflect and to an arguable extent engineer that shift. Although this shift began properly in the 1980s as the move to a ’service-based economy’ beecame Conservative government policy, the origins of this movement can be seen in the Post-War II period.

[Regeneration] … seems to travel along water, canal systems, sewers, ditches anything as long as there’s a glimspe of water the developers will whack it into their prospectus and there’ll be photographs of Water and parks and regardless of what else is there they just take over all the industrial premises and come up with more and more New York loft-living style tackily built hutches. What was once very marginal and off the map seems to have become central to the arguments of the city at the moment.
– Iain Sinclair quoted in The Occupation, a film by the London Particular

Reshaping the material fabric of the city and its class relations, ‘regeneration’ seeks to smooth the passage of capital investment, pooling liquidity and creating ease of access to state funds and resources in a form of ‘capitalist commoning’.3 As part of the same movement, disinvestment or divestment occurs as publicly owned resources are sold off or broken up to suit the interests of this movement of privatisation. In some cases this takes the form of direct transfer of wealth to the private sphere; a sell off, a land grab, a theft or the mechanism of debt is used to bind the state into a relationship of dependency upon the private interests of the market. Legislation and para-legal apparatus punish recalcitrance from the market or non-compliance with the new regimes of consumption being put in place. Along the south side of the river visible from the part of the river closest to where I live, between warehouses long ago converted to luxury housing units with panoramic views, there is a public park affording rare access to the river. In this park stands a sign which invokes a local by-law prohibiting public drinking and the use of barbecues. Opposite this park cum enclosure Canary Wharf towers over representing a privatised island, a business park containing buildings modelled like glass credit cards.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of empires.4

Both Conrad’s and Engels’ narratives relate the river as the carrier of history as well as of goods and men. While Engels figures the river as a picturesque space increasingly crowded and obscured by the expansion of industry, Conrad evokes ‘the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames’ to render history as one long catastrophe of brutality and conquest. At the very beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow, moored in a ship on the Thames off Gravesend states suddenly ‘And this also, […] has been one of the dark places of the earth’. The river Thames reverses the image of enlightenment’s outflow from the centre of civilisation.

The photographer, Allan Sekula, has tracked in the transformation of maritime space through containerisation how the space, both of the sea and on land, is flattened, smoothed out, tuning it to the abstract flows of money that commands the flow of goods.

What one sees in the harbor is the concrete movement of goods. […] If the stock market is the site in which the abstract character of money rules, the harbor is the site in which material goods appear in bulk, in the very flux of exchange. […] But the more regularized, literally containerized, the movement of goods in harbors, that is, the more rationalised and automated, the more the harbor comes to resemble the stock market.5

If we increasingly relate to the sea and its history only through the commodities which travel the world in order for us to consume them then this isn’t because there is any less traffic.6In fact, since the implementation of containerisation, the logistics industry, and shipping as part of it has expanded manifold times. In the UK port traffic exports increased fivefold between 1965 and 1994. Until recently the Port of London Authority (which has jurisdiction over the entire Thames estuary) had the largest traffic in the UK (52.7 million tonnes in 2007).7 The growth of London as a centre of financial during the 1990s and the boostering of an attendant ‘creative sector’ actually masks the fact that the UK’s balance of trade is still sustained by manufactured exports. ‘[…] the service sector’s  share of exports has actually declined since 1960, and imports of cars, electronics and other visible items are balanced by exports not of services, but of less visible manufactured items, in particular intermediate products (for example, chemicals) and capital goods (power stations, airports, weapons).’8 Labour is pushed out by the ever increasing technical composition of capital, but it is also made remote, divided and furtive, by the race to the bottom for cheaper rents and lower wages driven by individual capitalists in competition over prices. This takes the form of a centralisation of profits (paper claims on wealth) in those glass towers that cover our cities and an almost subterranean distribution of labour – the life-spring of production – now perversely invisible and outcast.