Views on Tourism

First and foremost, I am a tourist. Reluctant maybe, eager to escape the bind of compulsion that shepherd the herd from one photo opportunity to the next, almost certainly; but a tourist nonetheless.

Whenever taking a photograph of some such famous site, I instinctively engineer the shot to exclude as many people as possible from the frame, obscuring the reality just the same as if the face of a photogenic building is marked by the acne of scaffolding. Instinctively I yearn to depopulate my image, isolating the subject as though in a museum, in so doing stripping it of its touristic appeal and hence rendering my own intrigue strangely artificial.

I was given cause to consider this anew on a recent short stay in Munich (incidentally my first visit to Germany). On consecutive days I made excursions out of the city to two sites that despite the differences, offer significant parallels in terms of tourist behaviour – the first was to Schloss Neuschwanstein in the Bavarian Alps (the basis of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty castle), and the second was to the Dachau concentration camp.

Firstly, there is no denying the picturesque charm of Schloss Neuschwanstein, perched as it is like a kitsch nest amidst the spectacular Bavarian foothills; indeed, considering the glorious surroundings, it would be a real architectural carbuncle that failed to wrest some measure of warm appreciation from those who behold it. Its towers and turrets seem to have been inflated like a giant bouncy castle, its multiple levels and tessellations invoke all the Grimm Brothers fairy tales that lay their foundations deep in the imagination.

The aesthetic charm loses its shine slightly when you consider that mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in his desire to construct his fantasy castle in the mountains, tore down the ruins of the original structure that had stood there since the Middle Ages.

In the knowledge that the castle is in fact a 19th century Romanticised simulation of authentic medievalism, it places in a new and more sceptical frame the motives of the hordes who flock here, puffing and panting up the hill-climb towards it, buying the usual gift shop paraphernalia as happily as they buy into the illusion of historicity that the castle symbolises.

To me, the castle stands as testament to blind human ambition and absurd folly. By pursuing his lunatic dream amidst financial difficulties and ill health, dying mysteriously in 1886 with the castle only a third completed, Ludwig could almost be the archetypal Werner Herzog film protagonist (played necessarily by the crazed Klaus Kinski).

It gave me cause to ponder what it is we seek when, in our own slightly mad way, we descend en masse upon places adorned with the ‘Lonely Planet’ stamp-of-approval as a genuine ‘tourist site’. Whether it’s Westminster Bridge, the Sistine Chapel, the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower, we progress in unison, pausing to take the same photographs before moving on. There is a necessary suspension of disbelief implicit in these locations and we generally revel in playing our part.

A particularly bizarre example of this that I’ve witnessed was in Brussels, where one of the prime tourist destinations (indeed the talisman of the city), is Manneken Pis, a diminutive bronze statue of a little boy pissing away into a pool below, around which crowds bustle and compete for vantage points and selfie opportunities.

It is no surprise that this production line tourism grew in ascendency along with the post-WWII consensus for rampant consumerism, fuelled by a new-found Western prosperity that allowed for jet-setting lifestyles, helping to conform to the Keynesian belief that people were working less and playing more. It is only really tolerable for most to toil away in the sedentary and prosaic routines of capitalist economies in the knowledge that for one or two weeks you are free to indulge a sense of adventure and exploration of far-flung lands.

Manifestations of the consumer mentality permeate many aspects of the tourist experience. The writer Susan Sontag in ‘On Photography’, observed that psychologically the capturing of a photographic image is a form of discreet ownership, of taming the wild (consider the terminology – ‘capture’, ‘shoot’, ‘aim’), of trying to sanitise the abstract, foreign surroundings and cultures of which we have limited experience through the solidity of the frozen image.

A recent incarnation of this is the odious phrase “I’ve done Munich” or “I’ve done London”, as though visiting these places were an action with a defined duration like a fairground ride; an ‘I [heart] XYZ’ T-shirt to be stowed away in the wardrobe of experiences. It was only when crossing the Marienbruke bridge (with its prestigious photo opportunities of the castle), that I hit upon a theory for another of these modern trends...

It has become common at tourist sites (bridges over the Seine, along canals in Venice and Amsterdam) to find padlocks affixed in great numbers, personalised with names or initials. Padlocks signify of course ownership and personal possession, and accordingly the psychological implications for the individual of this mass padlocking is the sense, however slight or imagined, that the tourist site has been consumed in some way, if only ticked off as complete on a mental bucket list.

Of course, tourism is also a destructive passion, with places such as Ankhor Wat, Machu Picchu, the Great Barrier Reef, Mount Everest and even the submerged wreck of the Titanic under increasing threat from large-scale tourist activity exacerbating their natural fragility. It is notable how, in the wake of Alex Garland’s novel ‘The Beach’, the paradisal location was reported to be under siege by people desperate to emulate the sense of escapist utopia romanticised by the book and Danny Boyle’s film adaptation.

In striking parallel to King Ludwig II, there was another figure in German history who wanted to realise the operatic splendour of Richard Wagner in a resurgent articulation of nationalism and grandiose power. This man was Adolf Hitler.

Through architecture and ceremony, Hitler wanted to create the monumentalism that would inspire the far-flung veneration of the Third Reich’s ruins in the same way as Athens or Rome. In his mind he would surely have relished the idea of the tourist hordes of the future flocking to marvel at the magisterial spectacle of the Third Reich’s legacy. Instead tourists flock to monuments of its calculated barbarity.

The museum at Dachau is excellent, full of well-written analysis charting the rise of Nazi Germany and life at the camp. A 30-minute train ride from Munich, Dachau was inaugurated in 1933 as a camp ostensibly for political opponents and dissidents, and became the prototype for all the other notorious camps that would follow across Europe. Whilst a gas chamber and crematorium were built there, mass extermination was never actually enacted (inmates were instead transported to places like Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen), yet somewhere in the region of 32,000 died as a result of execution, medical experiments, hunger and diseases such as typhus that swept through the camp in 1945.

Walking across the expansive courtyard and along the central road of poplar trees that divided the barracks, it is impossible not to feel drugged by an immensely dull ache. By the time you are confronted with the gas chamber and ovens, feelings of despair and sorrow begin to congeal around you both physically and mentally like rigor mortis.

It is imperative for those who visit, I feel, to try and imagine your way inside the head of both an inmate and an SS guard. And yet such effort is futile, for both oppressed and oppressor were so utterly dehumanised in their separate ways that there is no basis in reality with which to comprehend such horror. Instead the mind conjures up fantastical images such as Peter Bruegel’s ‘Triumph of the Death’, or the ground ripping open for a relatively brief period of time to expose the evil manifestations of one of Dante’s circles of hell, before closing up again to leave only psychical scar tissue.

Try as you might, you cannot hear the marching jackboots on gravel, nor the cries of prisoners for absent loved ones or the fate of strangers. Instead all you hear is the breeze whipping through the trees and across the empty spaces like so many bows playing the strings of a vast cello, welling up the most mournful threnody.

And yet even here it is possible to observe varying degrees of compulsive touristic behaviour. Groups of men on an excursion from the Munich beerhalls shuffle around with hungover eyes, whilst gaggles of schoolchildren are shunted here and there by dutiful teachers. There are only so many times you can watch people posing for photographs and selfies next to the infamous wrought-iron gate ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work Sets You Free) before you have to conclude that the innate absurdity and un-selfconscious banality of some people knows precious few boundaries.

Moving away from the crowded Marienbruke at Neuschwanstein I came across a trail. As I followed this it began to zigzag up the side of a mountain, the sounds of people drowned by the sound of a nearby waterfall, and the glorious sight of a patchwork quilt of trees, textured with different tones of green. I climbed higher, spurred on by the promise of more stunning vantage points until eventually I stopped on a natural promontory of rock, the fog starting to pour down the mountain-side, and Neuschwanstein now looking like a child’s piece of Lego discarded amongst the folds and creases of a vast green duvet. It was a moment of wonder and awe, I felt like I was Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Mists’; the unexpected transcendence of a formulaic tourist experience.

In a similar vein, after returning from Dachau to the apartment I was staying in, I shared a bottle of wine with my host J, a German of the same age as myself. Despite, or perhaps because of, still feeling the depressive after-effects, I avoided mentioning my visit that day to the memorial site, but after a while and with no prompting, J raised the subject of the Nazis and the Second World War.

My impression was that the subject would be far too taboo and sensitive to broach with any German, let alone one from Munich (the birthplace of National Socialism), and so I was amazed at the candid honesty that J displayed. He described the continued underlying sense of shame and guilt that persists to this day amongst Germans of all ages, and the increasing desire to address the topic openly – as evidenced by the fabulous Museum of National Socialism on the site of the original Nazi ‘Brown House’ on the Konigsplatz.

This introspective analysis of the motives and impulses that lead to the Holocaust, on a personal and national level after so many years of silence and repression seemed to me most inspiring and gave me cause to consider the ways in which Britain and America continue to live in the glow of the Second World War as the moral victors triumphing over an unconscionable evil.

No discourse or analysis in mainstream British culture over the WW2 progresses, it seems to me, much beyond the patriotic Churchillian narrative of good defeating evil, with scant reflection on the level of anti-Semitism existing in Britain prior to the war or dreadful atrocities such as the firebombing of Dresden that were perpetrated by the Allied forces.

I was elevated psychologically by the unexpected nature of the conversation just as I had been elevated physically by the wonders that had largely eluded me from the tourist assembly line at Neuschwanstein. For all the calculated consumerism of so much touristic experiences, it is the serendipity of random events that undoubtedly makes travelling one of the most enlightening and rewarding experiences that life has to offer.

The Arrival of the Transhumanists

Earlier this year, Michael Cockerell’s documentary series ‘Inside the Commons’ lifted the neo-Gothic lid on Westminster, revealing many of the arcane practices that have settled like a film of dust within. Among many surprises was the fact that the building was still struggling to install a stable Wi-Fi connection.

The notion that in 2015 the seat of representative power isn’t sufficiently cushioned with the kind of technology that has come to be seen as something of a utility is for some a genuine concern.

Dr. Alexander Karran, a cognitive neuroscience expert, asserts that “too few politicians understand the implications, and the potential, of science and technology”. For Karran, his despair at this perceived lack of competence or foresight on the part of the political establishment has led him to co-found the Transhumanist Party. On May 7th, he stood as the first ever transhumanist candidate in a British election, in the Labour safe-seat of Liverpool Walton.

Transhumanism is built around the core principle that ‘technology can and should be used to overcome human limitation in all its forms’. These limitations span psychology, with the increased capacity for engineered intelligence, as well as biology, through the symbiosis between body and machine.

The likes of Stephen Hawking may decry Artificial Intelligence as threatening to “spell the end of the human race” but, as far as advocates are concerned, humans becoming cyborgs is, far from being the end of humanity, just the inevitable next step for the evolution of our species.

Far-fetched though it may seem, transhumanism has bloomed from the fertile ground of the vastly expansive tech industry in Silicon Valley, led by the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple, who in terms of innovation, turnover and social influence are almost unrivalled in stature. Meanwhile firms such as Cisco Systems and IBM have estimated that 50 billion devices (from driverless cars to kitchen appliances) could be interconnected by 2020 as part of what is termed the ‘Internet of Things’, with the intelligent collection and sharing of data as its lifeblood.

In many ways we live in an artificially intelligent transhuman world already; with drones, 3D printing, wearable tech, medical bioengineering, developments into surgical robotics and ectogenesis (artificial wombs), not to mention software predicated on an array of ever more complex algorithms that continue to automate our everyday lives.

It’s nothing new for politicians to face derision for being seen as out-of-touch and sheltered from the lives of ordinary people, but Karran points to the fact that “only 1 MP out of 650 in Westminster has had a career as a software engineer” as evidence for how ill-prepared the political elite is for exploiting the enormous gains, as well as mitigating the risks, that could develop from science and technology.

Across Europe there are several transhumanist groups gaining political momentum and beginning to weave a loose web of shared ideals and principles. But it is in America that the movement has generated the most mainstream attention, with the writer Zoltan Istvan recently announcing his intention to run in the 2016 Presidential election.

Anchored in sci-fi though it may seem, it would be wise not to completely dismiss the movement as another fringe intrigue too soon. For Karran, his electoral candidacy on May 7th was only the first step in what he hopes is the long journey that will carry the Transhumanist Party to the forefront of British politics, the landscape of which is now more fragmentary and uncertain than it has been for decades.

Accordingly, the first and subsequent generations of ‘digital natives’ may well seek representatives who reflect their own experiences and appeal to their concerns, rather than holding tight to fading ideologies of the left and right.

Indeed, from the intensifying sophistication of cybercrime, the pervasive data surveillance of the security state, the uncertain currency of BitCoin, and the ominous underworld of the Dark Net, the technological threats of the present and near future are real and genuine. So much so that British political society could become steadily transformed by an electorate who may prove to be persuaded, less by the merits of Oxbridge PPE graduates, and more by the rising tide of the transhumanists.

Absurd Shards #13 - The Psychogeographic Theory of Straight Line Walking (part 3)

The countryside:

Following the limited success of the primary field test, the secondary test was undertaken in a rural location where it was predicted the psychological strictures placed on physicality might be more effectively shaken loose. I had it in mind to repeat the straight line experiment over an unobstructed plot of land to ease myself gradually into the bath of deorientation.

The walk progressed well at first, given the open field location, I was able to get to the point where I could almost visualise the imprints of my own feet before me, scouring a ruler-straight line across the perpendicular terrain. I noticed at once the relative agility with which my mind managed to recalibrate itself in accordance with the prescribed direction; a collision between rigidity and the freedom of expansive space. My delineation of this linear path stood as a steady and measured rejection of the hundreds of alternative routes across the landscape that were available.

As I neared the edge of the field I encountered boggy ground and relished the sense of necessary avoidance having already been subjugated to the will of the walk. Bordering the field was some thick bracken leading into a dense patch of woodland and, with not inconsiderable effort, I was able to scramble over, incurring only minor scrapes to hands and forearms. Entering the woodland I found myself slackening the taut rope of the walk, as per the conditions of the experiment, around trees that obscured my course. At one point I became quite entwined in a thick cluster of branches and overgrowth which took several minutes to break free from. A narrow but deep stream was crossed with less difficulty save for soaking myself up to the thighs.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these physical inconveniences I found myself beginning to be quite exultant with the prospects for this psychogeographic method, my conviction in its potential renewed after the frustrating shortcomings of the urban foray. If I am only able to master the temperament and mental balance I will be soon able to develop the technique into more unorthodox situations.

Culture - April

Read:
Jonathan Swift - 'A Modest Proposal'
John Gray - 'The Soul of the Marionette' (non-fiction)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The Brothers Karamazov'
Russell Brand - 'Revolution' (non-fiction)
Heinrich von Kleist - 'On the Marionette Theatre'  (short story)
Will Self - 'Shark'
Will Hutton - 'The State We're In' (non-fiction)
Nikolay Lestov - 'The Steel Flea' (short story)


Watched:
'Pineapple Express' (Judd Apatow)
'Grizzly Man' (Werner Herzog) (documentary)
'The Living Dead' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'Cropsey' (Joshua Zeman & Barbara Brancaccio) (documentary)
'Three Colours Blue' (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
'Three Colours White' (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
'Three Colours Red' (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
'Food, Inc.' (Robert Kenner) (documentary)
'The Way of All Flesh' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'Terms and Conditions May Apply' (Cullen Hoback) (documentary)


Listened:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor! - 'Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress'

Tearing the city at the seams #25 - A walk across London in search of British leftism

Two quotes to begin:

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.’

‘At this point it’s worth noting that the economy is not a real thing, it is a man-made system designed to serve us, an ideological machine.  It has gone wrong and is tyrannising us.  We wouldn’t tolerate that from a literal machine...’

The first is attributable to Karl Marx from 1848; the second, some 166 years hence, to Russell Brand.

This is an essay about a walk across London.  A walk that sought to explore the state of contemporary leftism in Britain, and, as the most unpredictable election in decades draws near, what we can possibly expect and draw from left wing ideologies in the future.

The walk began just south of Covent Garden, in the tempest of tourism, on a sunny Saturday afternoon.  On the corner of Russell Street, in what was formerly the Red Lion pub but has now morphed into a branch of All Bar One, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were commissioned to write a pamphlet, the aim of which was to formalise in words the burgeoning spectre of disparate revolutionary ideals that at the time was haunting Europe, ‘The Communist Manifesto’.

Some of the Manifesto is now hopelessly archaic, but counterbalancing this is so much that reads as fresh as agit-prop graffiti.  In particular, the revolutionising of production constantly creating an environment of agitation and antagonism for the workers; in its condemning of the global market system that ‘must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’; and in its assertion that the formation of every society has been based on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes, towards which certain conditions must be kept in perpetuity.

Within the generic surroundings of the All Bar One though, the early afternoon clientele armed with their libations certainly looked as though they’d reject any such assertion of their oppression.  One of the bar staff, a tall and raffish Italian man in his late-20s, was unequivocal in his view that Marx’s theories are still relevant to today’s workers.  “The advantage is definitely all on the side of the employer, especially somewhere like London...I mean, if you don’t like your job there’ll be someone else waiting right behind you to take it off you...and they know that.”

Heading north through the West End, the streets thronged with consumerist bustle, arms locked with chain store bags, restaurants engorged with diners, and coffee shops liberally scattered like a sack of beans split open over a map.

The historian Niall Ferguson has written that our infatuation with the humble bean may have helped fuel our once glorious empire – ‘the English were luckier in their drugs; long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the 17^th century by American tobacco, Arabian coffee and Chinese tea.  The Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den.’

If, as is often mooted, we are living in an age that celebrates the individual, with notions of collectivisation increasingly rendered lacklustre and inert, then one has to search for new arena of communality that this secular post-modern society presents.  Undoubtedly, one such place is the coffee shop; a blend of strong Continental European flavour and aesthetic with the American ‘Friends’-style froth of social discourse.  The Costas, Starbucks and Caffe Neros that sprinkle the country’s streets are where we are elevated to the imaginary realm of the petit-bourgeois, exalting in the freedom of the latte, the cappuccino, the varieties of herbal tea.

The internet, with all its transformative zeal of harnessing a new egalitarian realm, can often be seen in its true atomised form through the window of any high street coffee shop – tables of individuals locked into glowing portals to a digital ether.

Hitching east along Theobald’s Road, one passes by the famous Great Ormond Street Hospital, representing as it does the increasingly taut and frayed rope of socialism that binds our society’s conscience, the NHS.  Forever haemorrhaging capital, the NHS, according to experts, requires a steady and prolonged transfusion of government spending, the acceptable public spending vice that must be satiated just as we crave the caffeine stimulus to fortify us for the day ahead.

Still one of the most fraught battlegrounds of political warfare, with the managerial structure of Kafka’s castle, the NHS occupies a curious, almost fundamentalist, place in the British public consciousness.  For the most part, the NHS is relied upon in the final few years and months of one’s life.  Our unshakable totemic faith in the institution reveals the conviction that, whilst we may cleave to the establishment matrix of class structures and hegemonic institutions, we do all deserve equality in death.  For whilst we may not seek provision for people to avoid indignities and suffering in life, we do at least believe that everyone is entitled to the dignity of a good death.

I peeled off into Clerkenwell, a place whose history is synonymous with radicalism, although you wouldn't think it to stroll through now.  Long gone are the headquarters of the Communist Party, the left wing printing presses, and the places where Bolshevik leaders in exile at the start of the 20^th century would flee to in order to escape the secret police of the tsars and plot the revolution.  On Clerkenwell Green though, there is the Marxist Memorial Library bursting with busts and flags, whilst a beard’s tug away on Farringdon Road is where the Labour Party were founded in 1900.

Winding past the once Brutalist ghetto now eminently prime real estate of the Barbican, one gets a feel for how the post-war collectivisation programme manifested itself in the unforgiving architecture of the concrete jungle.  Not to mention how, decades later, when property in central London has become the sturdiest financial asset attainable, it can be re-imagined and re-marketed as a prestigious retro location (much like the Trellick Tower has been in Notting Hill), to be snaffled up by a shrewd Russian, Saudi or Qatari investor.

Approaching Liverpool Street, the revolutionary history almost reaches its arms up from the ground like necrotic zombies.

For it is here, whilst excavating colossal mounds of earth as part of the Crossrail project, that archaeological work has begun to try and disinter the bones of some 3000 people buried at the Bedlam site during the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  The osteological analysts hope to uncover the skeletons of ‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne and Robert Lockyer who, aged just 23, led the Bishopsgate mutiny of 1649 as part of the Levellers movement during the tumult of the English Civil War in which the monarchy was usurped and various rival factions vied to enshrine a parliamentary executive power.

Executed in front of St. Paul’s by a firing squad for refusing the leave the City of London and face being ordered to obey the whims of the New Model Army without pay, Lockyer’s death brought about tremendous discontent amongst the Leveller movement which had pushed against Oliver Cromwell’s aims for a plutocratic form of Parliament and instead championed ideas of popular sovereignty, extended suffrage to all households, and equality before the law.  But they were only one of many dissenting groups that thrived during the period, one of the which was the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who advocated a form of agrarian socialism in which small rural communities would gain prevalence in a renewed interrelationship between man and nature.

Could it not be postulated perhaps that by disturbing the resting place of these long-dead radicals it might serve as an omen of sorts for the brewing discontent and disillusionment with the financial epicentre that is the City of London?  The long-entombed spiritual energy might soon undulate through the strata of history to manifest itself in renewed unrest, or at the least, a new found scepticism in the sanctity of its institutions.

As it is, the City of London is the fulcrum around which the entire nation slowly revolves.  Ever since being un-tethered from 1979 onwards by Thatcher’s New Right programme, it has come to float like a financial Hindenburg destined for cyclical inflation and immolation.  The kind of sums are traded on the derivatives, currency and stock exchange markets each and every day that make government budget quibbling look by comparison like rather small change. 

The astonishing failure of Labour in recent years is that it has allowed the Conservatives to tarnish them as economically profligate and untrustworthy, while defining themselves as prudent and trustworthy.  Whereas, it was Thatcher, taking the lead from Reagan’s America and a squadron of technocratic monetarists, who subjected Britain to a prolonged economic experiment that gave the illusion of prosperity with Right to Buy schemes and easy credit. What was enshrined instead was something close to an elected dictatorship whereby short-term investments, a decimated industrial base and a nation with higher levels of personal debt than anywhere else in the world was to become the basis of a new and unquestionable faith in the market system.  On the other hand though, Labour, along with its vestigial hope of socialism, had at the time never looked so spent and out-of-touch; in 1979 any prospect of leftism being electable rolled over and died. 

Herein lies the fundamental paradox of Thatcherism and modern Conservatives.  Those on the Right claim as their ethos and raison d’être the preservation of intrinsic British values – the institution of family, ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’, a small state, hierarchy and order – and yet at the same time push wholeheartedly for the kind of rapacious and unregulated technological progress and economic growth that, as a natural consequence, serve to distort and erode them. 

With free market laissez-faire capitalism, Britain (as with America), was left with a breakdown in family life (higher divorce rates, parents working longer for less pay), high crime and incarceration levels, stagnating and in many cases falling wages, and massive levels of state intervention when inevitably the whole edifice looked set to crumble and fall (the bailing out of the banks, austerity measures and Quantitative Easing).  As one of the leading contemporary left wing voices, Owen Jones, has said, that with their protected interests, propped-up wages and next-to-no threat of unemployment, ‘it seems its socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.’

Make no mistake, the British left is no less confused.  A quick online search dredges up from the ideological swamp innumerable groups, collectives and talking-shops that offer an outlet for left wing politics – Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Left Unity, Solidarity, Respect, Reality, Communist Party of Great Britain....

Socialism, representing as it does a wide plane of moralistic and progressive values, with collectivism and social justice as a fundamental tenet, can only paradoxically splinter into a myriad disparate factions and cliques that cleave to a swathe of idealistic myths about revolution, the working class and Marxist theory, that draw a resilient potency from assuming the perpetual mantle of the embattled underdog.

Britain has not seen the kind of groundswell of public disenchantment that has elevated Syriza to power in Greece or Podemos to the mainstream in Spain; and perhaps that is due to the largely suffocating force of the City of London.  All the same, that no strong coherent voice of the left has emerged to lay a real challenge at the door of economic orthodoxy during the harshest recession in living memory is a damning indictment.

Continuing north through Shoreditch and on through Hoxton, revelers were out on the streets celebrating or lamenting their fortunes in that afternoon’s Grand National race (a sporting event that typifies the entrenched aristocratic conservatism that defines so much of British society and culture).  Perennial events such as this, along with royal family jamborees, all infused with encouraged intoxication serve as both useful distraction agencies and as necessary valves for energy that might otherwise manifest itself in other more deviant and subversive directions.  (I don’t take against them per se, but it’s wise to recognise them for what they are.)

Will Hutton wrote in ‘The State We’re In’, that Conservatism has become anchored into the collective consciousness as the ‘party of instinct’, bestowing a sense of hierarchy, class and ‘born to rule’ politics.  This can be seen from the church, to the legal system, the media (most notably with the monopoly of the Murdoch press), public schools, the Bank of England, and an obsession with property, towards which the ladders of social mobility are poised just within reach.  This was particularly salient when New Labour soared to power and instead of reforming the Westminster system to a more socialist ideal, came to revel in the hegemonic majority-party power structure that Thatcher had enshrined and exploited to great effect.

 Walking through Shoreditch, the hipster central full of Greek philosopher beards, craft beer and fixed-gear bikes, one could be forgiven for forgetting the principal reason why a major political overhaul towards leftism is most unlikely in Britain any time soon – the demographics.  An ageing population looking towards retirement, with property to safeguard and pass on to children, and pension funds woven into the global money markets, has simply too much invested in the economic orthodoxy to challenge it even if they were inspired to do so.

The younger generations are entering adulthood in an era of utmost political confusion, where disillusionment with the contemporary political order – that has itself become more and more toothless – causes people to latch onto the pseudo-anarchic hyperbole of Russell Brand.  

In many ways, Brand’s book ‘Revolution’ is a perfect encapsulation of the confused and fissiparous times in which we live, sliding as it does between hopelessly vague summations, banal presumptions and snatches of refreshingly clear thinking.  It chuffs comfortably along on intellectualisms from the likes of Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty, but always ends up derailing down the banks of flippancy and spiritual musings of which the following is a choice quote:

‘We human beings are the temporary expression of a greater force that science as yet cannot explain  but is approaching in its fledging understanding of the harmony and translucent principles of the quantum world.’

My walk ended at the recently opened Trew Era Cafe, that Brand has commendably helped finance with the profits from his book, on the New Era Estate that he last year championed in their fight against being eviction by the perfidious Westbrook Partners.

And so, the journey across London returned to its symbolic beginning, immersed within the coffee shop culture that we now invest with such communalism.  One customer there, a girl in her early-20s training to be a primary school teacher said that she “didn’t think much about left or right wing”, that it tended to resort either way to alienating rhetoric.  Instead she said her vote would be going to the Green Party, due to it being the only party seeking to address the environmental calamity that threatens us.

In many ways this is perhaps the most sensible course for British politics to take; surrendering the banjaxed posturing over fatigued policy points, where Labour can’t even raise the issue of basic rent controls without the right opposition accusing them of seeking to emulate Chavez in Venezuela, and focusing instead on installing a green economy that makes some attempt to draw the ever-widening poles of inequality closer together.

As Naomi Klein discusses in ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’, the main reason those on the right have been so slow-footed in tackling climate change is that they recognise the necessary steps to alleviate long-term global damage happen to be those that lead away from the improvident free markets and rampant consumerist path they would have us all queue along in an orderly line.

Whether Labour succeed at the General Election or not, leftism in Britain is now a confused network of beliefs and ideas in search of an electrode to earth rather than allow them, as ever, to melt into air.

Absurd Shards #12 - The Reverse Shopping Experience

With Tesco’s staggering decrepitude making the headlines recently, I have been reminded of my own experience working in a supermarket as a teenager.  There was one task in particular that seldom came my way but in spite, or perhaps because of that, I often found myself pining for the opportunity.

The task involved walking around the supermarket with a trolley that had been left by the customer and returning the items to their rightful places on the shelves.  This might initially sound mundane but the therapeutic qualities are not to be underestimated.

The supermarket shopping experience is such a fundamental, ritualistic part of our lives; a survey recently put the average amount of time that an adult in the UK spends in a supermarket at 5.5 full days per year.  With consumer buying habits used to extrapolate accurate conceptions of the individual shopper, I often felt like I was taking part in some kind of autopsy on the absent person’s life.

Why did they favour the value range for certain products but choose to upscale on others?  What was the allure and resonance of a particular brand that inspired them to buy into its charms?  What were the luxury impulse purchases and what were the staple goods flung without thinking into the trolley?

I would also ponder the possible circumstances that had led to this person mysteriously abandoning their shopping trip.  Had unfortunate or pressing news compelled them to flee, was it some kind of bizarre pastime being indulged by someone going through the motions of shopping but with no intention or even means of paying, simply lured there subconsciously like Romero’s zombies in ‘Dawn of the Dead’?

Perhaps the whole post-modern supermarket experience had finally triggered dormant fault lines in the person’s psyche, the synthetic banality of it all dredging forth latent horrors that had forced them to take flight.

Whatever the reason, I would urge everyone to indulge in this meditative and oddly soothing pastime, the browsing of almost limitless commercial incentives, and bask in the strange hinterland between assigning choice and making a purchase, where perceived value and personal buying power oscillate wildly, before abandoning the goods and leaving with nothing. 

This form of anti-shopping could have valuable curative agencies for those who find themselves pushed and pulled almost against their control by the tides of commercial imperatives, and allow the reclamation of some notional sense of personal free will.