The Guilty Pleasures MixCD Series: Part 3 – Work/Labour

Work Your Body: Between the Factory and the Pay Check

Please click here for CD 1: Manchester and CD 2: Animals.

This is the third mixCD in the series and takes a look and work and labour within the third stage of capitalism or late capitalism (Frederic Jameson). It includes music from the 1970s up till today: for example, we have The Strawbs Part of the Union (1973) and also Jungle’s Busy Earning (2014).

Like the animal CD, previously, this one is of an ‘activist’ nature and it comes with an insert which says:

Work Your Body is inspired by an intervention by Ally Standing and Gavin Rogers that took place at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography in 2016. Their performance, on the street in Huddersfield (UK), was a response to Dr. Alex Bridger’s walk which questioned the Northern Powerhouse. Rogers and Standing suggested that in postmodernity ‘professionals’, who were no longer able to use up excess energy by working in jobs that required manual labour, worked their bodies in other ways, such as at the gym.

In his book Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) Jameson explains that in postmodernity people are abstracted from reality because of how capital operates. He believes we need a cognitive map to help us negotiate this new terrain and give us access to the reality that we cannot reach through the mediated representations that are directed to us. Standing and Rogers' intervention cleverly brings this to our attention. Louis Althusser describes our ideologically oriented subjectivity as being “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence” and their intervention momentarily lifted this veil.

Co-incidentally, the day that I wrote this post, Nicolas Bourriaud’s new book Exform (2016) landed on my doormat. This book is inspired by the work of Althusser and on the matter at hand he says:

Free time belongs to the universe of what production has discarded – except when it can be channelled towards leisure that generates new profits…Today, the proletarian is defined as the consumer-of-the-world, pure and simple; his original patch of land – which Fordist-era factories provided so that he would employ free time in a useful manner – has assumed the immense dimensions of the ‘world of leisure’.

While this only represents part of the story of Standing and Rogers intervention – the defunct proletariat turned user of commodities, rather than the producer of them – it does not theoretically take care of the expending of energy which their intervention suggests replaces the physicality of factory work. However, this article in The Guardian looks at how we may be able to make even more profit out of gym users by actually turning them into simultaneous consumer-labourers through the kinetic energy produced from their bodies: The fat-burning and energy-producing gyms. This means the subject is no longer replacing their need to expend energy in the gym, post-industrialisation, but is instead being profited from twice: gym-user-cum-labourer. Hurrah for capitalism!

Cognitive Mapping

While Fredric Jameson dedicates Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism to the cognitive map problem, he does not provide a definitive answer on how to proceed. However, he does offer his analysis on the concept of cognitive mapping as it appears within postmodern theory:

These are, then, not really theories, but rather themselves unconscious structures and so many afterimages and secondary effects of some properly postmodern cognitive mapping, whose indispensable media term now passes itself off as this or that philosophical reflection on language, communication, and the media, rather than the manipulation of its figure (2009: 417).

He highlights the problem at its most fundamental level: if the system itself does not change, then all we are able to do is contemplate it within its system of effects (and with the tools) it produces. This is not a new problem for theory – the inside/outside dichotomy of language – but, it does leave us with the perennial problem of where to go. The concepts highlighted above – such as the need for tools to navigate the environment, and the materiality of space and its system of effects – lend themselves to discussion within the field of psychogeography and under the umbrella of cognitive maps, also.

Roger M. Downs and David Stea’s Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping (1977) is an extensive geo-psychological study of cognitive mapping, although it does not deal with mental and physical space in any political sense. It offers a concise study of psychogeographical cognitive effects and provides definitions of cognitive mapping: “Cognitive mapping is an abstraction covering those cognitive or mental abilities that enable us to collect, organize, store, recall and manipulate information about the spatial environment” (1977: 6). They explain that cognitive maps are not just visual images contained in our minds but are also connected to our other senses (1977: 23). While they acknowledge ‘the social’ as one part of what influences our cognitive maps, they do not deal with the complexities of postmodernity as it pertains to culture and/or capitalism. However, since their text was published in 1977, it may have been too early to take a retroactive position on postmodern space.

In his essay ‘Cognitive Mapping the Dispersed City’, Stephen Cairns cites Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City as his own influence. While Lynch provides an analysis by form – looking at various urban elements such as paths, landmarks and edges – he adopts a post-war narrative, the book being written in 1960. Cairns’s critique is in the way that Lynch’s cognitive mapping may be further used to decentre the subject in the form of how they appear as “‘the user’, ‘the community’ and ‘the people’” (2006: 193). This could be seen as both positive and negative, depending on differing perspectives attached to ‘where you stand’. Decentring is considered a common position for the individual to take up in the postmodern text (such as in deconstruction). When that text is the city landscape, this may enable an opening up of other views of the city, such as its edgelands. It encourages differing perspectives with regard to a sense of place. However, the concept of decentring may be considered as a devaluing of the citizen in the centre of public life (as it pertains to the city as civic centre).

Cairns is concerned with what is not representable in and of the city. Citing Harvey, Jameson, Baudrillard and Debord, he discusses the material reality of the city with its postmodern problems of wayfinding, while seeking out its ‘blind spots’ in an attempt to answer some questions about cognitive mapping. These “blind spots” appear on “a refined spectrum between social space and architectural space such that conventional representational logics simply cannot register them” (2006: 203).

Please click here for a free online article on Cognitively Mapping the Campus

Related Links:
GPS Trails on Campus
Blue Plaques on Campus

Bibliography:
Cairns, Stephen. 2006. ‘Cognitive Mapping the Dispersed City’, in Christoph Lindner (ed.), Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives From Modern and Contemporary Culture (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 192-205.
Downs, Roger M. and David Stea. 1977. Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping (London and New York: Harper and Row).
Jameson, Fredriç. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).

Deconstructing the Ziff - Part 1

Up, Down and Around or The Chamber of 32 Doors

"There were doors all 'round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again." (Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland)

On the University of Leeds campus we often find new buildings 'shoe-horned' into small 'leftover' spaces, much like the Marjorie and Arnold Ziff building which was opened for business in January 2009 and operates as an administration centre, primarily for students. The building appears squeezed in between the end of a Victorian terrace and one of the lecture blocks, the Michael Sadler Building.

This recent building has the effect of drawing attention to the buildings either side of it if you make an effort to look, but despite these architectural differences urban space operates such that it naturalises the very space that it forms, hiding those differences. Postmodern space is hugely complex because of the history on which it sits; yet there is a type of homogeneity also operating which smooths that space and presents it to the viewer like it has been that way 'forever'.

This is one of postmodernism's paradoxes well noted by Fredriç Jameson. He explains how the notion of a dialectic opposition is not something that appears in the analysis of postmodern society in the same way that it did in a more modernist or Marxist period. (2009: 344) He goes on to say that the cultural objects considered under postmodernism often seem to "fold back into each other". (ibid.) This is apparent when viewing postmodern space, especially in the examples Jameson offers, such as the Westin Bonaventure building consisting of four mirrored columns which simply reflect Los Angeles back to itself.



While it would not be possible to describe the Marjorie and Arnold Ziff building with the same intensity that Jameson describes the Westin Bonaventure - it is not exactly a postmodern hyperspace - it does share some of its qualities, to varying degrees. There are two entrances to the Ziff building. The main one is obvious and is the one that you would first come to if you were encountering the campus from the main university entrance. Here you are taken in to the queueing area that students who require administrative assistance would use. There is also a staircase straight ahead that takes you up to the café on the floor above, which once you are a few feet into the foyer, you can see opening up at the top of the stairs and overlooking the administration area. However, from the other end of the building there is a much smaller, less obvious entrance which takes you on to a level which is between these two floors, requiring you go down a few steps to enter the student admin area, and up a few steps to enter the café. This is slightly disorienting if you have previously only ever entered the main entrance before, as you are not necessarily aware of the slight incline on which the building is built, even if you regularly walk that slight uphill path on your way elsewhere. The image below shows almost the full length of the building on that side, which is not a great distance. However, it is enough to mean this smaller entrance cannot take you directly onto the ground floor of the building inside.



Once just inside this other entrance, while you can work out where the administration area is in space (it is still visible from outside these windows you see in the image above), the café has suddenly disappeared from view. It is closed in at this end of the building and it requires a moment for you to realise that you are entering the building on a different level, and that since there is only one staircase that goes up, it must be that direction you need to take. This disoriented moment is fleeting, but nevertheless is a common side-effect of postmodern buildings, an example of which was recently expressed to me by a friend attempting to orient herself in the newly opened shopping centre Trinity Leeds, which truly is a postmodern hyperspace.



Part 2 of this blog will look further at the mirroring effect of the glass surface of the Ziff building.

Bibliography: Jameson, Fredriç. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).

Austerity & the University of Excellence Part 1

The Parkinson Steps at the University of Leeds.
Image CC Tina Richardson

During modernity the university's relationship with commerce grew out of a direct response to an economic need, whereby the university reacted to demands for a certain type of knowledge requirement. In postmodernity the university has acquired the mantle of a business-oriented philosophy in its own right, this means that attempting to demarcate industry and institution as separate entities is far more complex. In order to compete in a globalised market the contemporary university is expected to think and operate as if it were a business: it has to take up the procedures and practices of commerce.

What this means for the university is that in its corporate incarnation it is essential that it becomes part of the globalised marketplace and in that move adopts the modes of operating that capitalism endorses. It needs to involve itself in the transfer of capital within society both at home and abroad. The university does this in a number of ways, from its relationship with industry in its vocational courses, to research that directly benefits business and technology.

However, even as far back as 1990 academics were writing about the negative aspects of applying a commercial formula to every aspect of education. In her essay ''Hard' Decisions and 'Tough' Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline' Cynthia Hardy says:

The tough choices advocated in business literature are likely to escalate the political conflict that surrounds declining resources, not resolve it. Draconian measures - terminations and program closures - can send shock waves through the university community. The more marketable individuals will leave to find less hostile surroundings; potential recruits will resort to political infighting, as they try to protect their departments. (1990: 317)

I provide this illustration not because I think academics do not know this already, but because I wish to emphasise that this current period of austerity is situated within the greater issue of how organisations operate under neoliberalism. And, not just organisations, but individuals also. We no longer look to the nation-state for our sense of cultural identity, nor the modernist university, but to the High Street. We are first and foremost consumers.

This is how Mark Fisher puts it: "Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems." And Félix Guattari would agree. He believes that while we have many subjectivities available to us, the prevailing consciousness is a capitalist one. He says that capitalism works in such a way as to prevent anything that is antithetical to its project from taking hold. The signs that capitalism creates discourage any singular processes of individuation and attempt to reroute subjective desires back into capitalist production: this is anti-production, and here Guattari situates it in the context of education:

It is impossible to separate the production of any consumer commodity from the institution that supports that production. The same can be said of teaching, training, research, etc. The State machine and the machine of repression produce anti-production, that is to say signifiers that exist to block and prevent the emergence of any subjective process. (1984: 34)

So what are we to do if this is less to do with the current crisis and more to do with 'the postmodern condition': the restructuring of education under neo-liberlism and the prevalence of a capitalist consciousness?

I think the clues are in the ruins of the university. Not only in those left by Bill Readings in his posthumously published book The University in Ruins but also in the material of the university which we inhabit today, the physical and abstract space of the university behind the spectacle.

Because the university needs to reduplicate itself internally, and also express that reduplication externally, what this means for the university is a spectacle-like appearance in the form of signs that appear as representable data, the output of the excellence process. These signs present the university in the guise of what Guy Debord would describe as "commodity as spectacle". Debord explains that the spectacle is "where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence." This is problematic for the university because it means it is removed from its original idealised functions - the pursuit of knowledge, high quality academic research, education for all, etc. Readings believes that the university as a concept no longer has any content: "The University of Excellence is the simulacrum of the idea of a university". And while this might sound negative, or even hopeless, herein also lies the possibility for it to be remade under a different concept; as Readings says "the wider social role of the university is now up for grabs".

In a time where grand narratives no longer hold sway, where culture and ideology is decentralised and where the once autonomous subject can even be argued to be posthuman, we need a different model of consciousness to help us negotiate the postmodern terrain and those institutions that are manifest in them. This is well-noted by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism when he calls for a new cognitive map:

It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its environment [...] can itself stand as the symbol and analogon1 of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (2009: 44)

This is echoed by Fisher when he states: "To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or 'precarity'" (2009: 34)

So, if we are to believe that a predictable future is unavailable to us in this simulacra-like university that is inseparable from these global networks, how do we find the university of tomorrow?

Related link: Austerity and the University of Excellence Part 2

Bibliography:
Debord, Guy. 2005. The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red).
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
Hardy, Cynthia. ''Hard' Decisions and 'Tough' Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline', Higher Education, 20, 3 (1990), 301-321.
Jameson, Frederic. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

The Good Adventure: A Psychogeography of the Westin Bonaventure

A Miniature City

Before I went to LA this month, my only impression of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown LA was based on the text of Frederic Jameson: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). In his critique of postmodern architecture he uses the hotel as an example:

"...the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd." (2009: 40).

What a perfect place to do some urban walking!

Westin Bonavanture


The Entryway is Always the Seam That Links the Building

"In this sense, then, ideally the minicity of Portman's Bonaventure ought not to have entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute." (2009: 40).

As I was walking to the Bonaventure I entered it at street level. When approaching the hotel it was difficult to get a good shot of it, as it's surrounded by flyovers and, as you can see from my first photo, trees. The point I entered was on South Figueroa Street. You don't really feel like you are entering a hotel as such, because really it isn't just a hotel. The section of the building you enter from there is not even shown in the image on Wikipedia. The top section - the shiny glass tubes - is floor 6 upwards. Floors 1-5 feel like they are underground, although they are not. They are the concrete base, which appears under the ground of what you see in the image. The top of this section forms its own outside floor, where the swimming pool is located. Here is the swimming pool, and below the image I took of the building from that level:





It is Our Pleasure to Welcome You as a Guest



This is how the little booklet of the hotel opens. It lists the facilities, services and eateries that belong to the hotel, including a revolving cocktail bar on floor 35 (the lift wouldn't take me there at the early time I went, though). But alongside the hotel services are many others provided by retailers that are not part of the hotel - because it is also a shopping centre. I even found a actual brewery right near the swimming pool.



The building is so complex that there are two massive illuminated displays that provide information on what is to be found in this giant minicity:



There are signposts, that look like street ones. They are colour-coded (if it is not apparent from the image, this one is yellow):



This is the floor plan, which shows a horizontal slice through the building.




The People Movers

Apparently this is how Portman described his elevators: "people movers". The four glass tubes that surround the central tubes, all have their own lifts. Each tube is not only colour-coded but also shape-coded. For example, the one below is green and square. This sign appears outside the relevant lift:

"...it seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also, and above all, designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper..." (2009: 42).

There are staircases, which are very apparent in the concrete base section. I'm not sure what they appear like above this level though. Below is a photo from under one of the staircases:



Since people don't tend to take stairs, and are not even encouraged to walk in LA in general, I was a little concerned that my behaviour may draw attention. But, I think because this place is not purely a hotel, anyone could potentially be there for a number of reasons, i.e. you don't have to be a hotel guest or hotel staff to be in the building.


Dynamic Paths and Narrative Paradigms

"...recent architectural theory has begun to borrow from narrative analysis...to attempt to see our physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are asked to fulfil and to complete with our own bodies and movements." (2009: 42).

The Westin Bonaventure is only the second building of which I have done an internal urban psychogeographic walk. The first one was the Union Church in Hunstanton: A Journey Around My Church However, this hotel lends itself perfectly to the psychogeographer because of the complexity of its space and the multiplicity of its signs; and, here, I mean literal signs. How fortunate I was to find that part of the building was under construction and, as with outside urban space, had all the relevant notices on display. Although the grey 'branded' ones were a little more stylish and more polite than the ones provided by the British Highways Department:





Here is a rather unfriendly sign I took near Kirkstall Electricity Substation in Leeds, UK. Please click here for the relevant blog: Kirkstall Valley Subdub or The Prozac Walk



Locating the Human Body

"So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space - postmodern hyperspace - has finally succeeded on transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its position in a mappable external world." (2004: 44).

Most of us (in Cultural Studies, Postmodern Philosophy, Sociology, etc) are aware of Jameson's famous plea for the need for a cognitive map to help the postmodern subject navigate the urban (and psychic) domain. However, some of us relish in the profusion of reflexive signs (Baudrillard), the Spectacle (Debord) and our decentred place in a society that no longer has a cultural identity for us to pick up and put on, rather like a hat (Lyotard). Urban space may be confusing, it may be overcoded, it may even be psychologically distressing. Nevertheless, it is historically rich and culturally abundant, and maybe the best we can do is appreciate its complexity by attempting to spatially navigate it. By situating our physical bodies in these spaces, the osmotic effect makes them become benign and familiar. We no longer see urban space as something 'out there', but become connected to it in the most basic of ways: through the physical act of ambulation.

Relates websites:John C. Portman (architect)
Westin Bonaventure, LA (official site)

Bibliography:Jameson, Frederic. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).