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Book Notes: The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity by Owen Hatherley

The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity

by Owen Hatherley

Finished 9/20/20

A clever and pointed look at the ways in which objects, spaces, and memory of 20th century social democracy in the UK have been transformed into contemporary commodities that obscure their political origins and content.

Owen Hatherley is a wonderfully rebellious UK architectural and cultural critic. He wrote two excellent books on modern architecture (A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, and A New Kind of Bleak), as well as Militant Modernism, all of which seek to excavate the social-democratic project of post-War British architecture and politics from contemporary scorn, as well as to evaluate the architectural footprint of UK neoliberalism and New Labour.

This book builds off this previous exploration to focus attention on the recent explosion of what Hatherley calls “Austerity Nostalgia”, manifesting in various consumer goods, decorative objects, and souveneirs. He begins with an examination of the now-ubiquitous “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON"poster, which despite being associated with the Blitz and WWII, was never actually widely distributed until the 2000s. The resurgence of this image coincided with the period following the 2008 financial crash and the beginnings of continuous conservative governance in the UK, and Hatherley argues that there was a significant cultural investment in the aesthetics of the WWII and post-war rationing eras of “make do and mend.” Such nostalgia, manifested in art, music, television, and “heritage” belies a depoliticized aestheticization of socialist or social-democratic efforts during the 20th century that created comfortable and beautiful public housing, public art and cinema, and most dramatically, the National Health Services.

Hatherley moves from Keep Calm and Carry on through various cultural dimensions of the current and the historical moments of austerity. He examines the ways in which conceptualizations of the White working class in England as a source of political energy belie the connections between class and empire in the post-war period. As a source of analysis, he examines some documentary films that play on nationalist nostalgia for the social-democratic impulses of this time. He later offers a rich and pointed tour of some of the archtiectural and historical literature which has recently been written on post-war modernist architecture, and finds it lacking in its recognition of the complex politics at play in things like the expansion of the London subway system, or the Empire marketing board, which sought to inspire the English to buy commodities from their colonies.

The book is full of little details that complicate the “make do and mend” ethos. In chapter 4, Hatherley reminds us that the backyard or neighborhood bomb-shelter, that architectural icon of British survival spirit, was a function of elite concern over rebellious politics.

“while the Labour left and radical architects were advocating communal shelters, central government had a firm preference for the privatisation of bomb protection….If big, safe, deep shelters were established, people would simply lie in them and do no work. Worse, such concentrations of proletarians could be breeding grounds for mass hysteria, even subversion.”

He touches on George Orwell’s conversation from radical socialist to conservative skeptic, the Festival of Britain and its architectural ghosts, and the public housing efforts of Aneurin Bevan. He also provides a tour of the archtiecture and exhibits of the Imperial War Museum which is snarky and entertaining.

But his ultimate point, indeed perhaps his professional thesis, is reserved for the last chapter:

In Britain today we are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same time as we’re alternately fetishising and privatising its remnants…we face a massive problem for which, once, the solution was the building of well-designed, well-considered, well-planned modernist buildings, often erected on the ashes of the shoddily-designed, unplanned, badly made, profit-driven housing of the past. Instead, what is actually happening is that we’re transforming the surviving fragments of that solution into one of the main contributors to the problem, as social housing becomes the new front line of gentrification, and the architect-designed modernist flat the new loft conversion.

In short, at the same time that the post-war, social democratic built environment of Britain is being remembered and revered in art, music, culture, and archticture, it is likewise being reshaped and repurposed by Conservatives, New Labour, speculation, and gentrification around a rampant neoliberal privatization that exascerbates the problems it was erected to solve.

All in all, fascinating, funny, and clarifying book and study of place, space, power, and material things.

Quentin's Weeknotes 9/12/20-9/19/20

This Week:

• The love of my life celebrated another turn around the sun on Friday. I love you, Alanna.
• I was off Museum work, but continued to teach. This week was about collecting in the ancient world, with examples from Mesopotamia, and Classical Greek Temple collecting.
• I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”, and the first volume of Daniel Jose Older’s “Dactyl Hill Squad” (kids of color in Civil War era New York ride dinosaurs into battle against racists!) which I read with my son. I also read through the first volume of the late John Lewis’s autobiographical graphic novel “March."

Quentin's Weeknotes 9/5/20-9/12/20

via GIPHY

 Haven’t done these in a while, but it feels like time to come back. I find it comforting to take stock of my week, particularly as there is simultaneously so much happening, while at the same time, every day is exactly the same.

This Week:

• It’s Week 2 of MUST250: Collectors and Collecting at Hartwick College, which I’m co-teaching with Dr. Douglas Kendall. This week is about Object Biographies, and I had the students read an excerpt from A History of the World in 100 Objects, about a carved Mammoth tusk in the shape of two swimming reindeer.
• I finished reading Jane Yolen’s book “Cards of Grief.” It is part of a long tradition of anthropological science fiction (anthropologists study an alien culture) but turns that on its head somewhat by having it told from the point of view of the aliens being studied. It’s also a book about grief, remembrance, and art, and written in a lyrical style befitting the poetic subject-matter.
• I did some work re-vamping the hallway display cases at the Museum. The lights in those cases were finicky, to say the least, so we’re trying out some new fixtures.
• I put up some replacement exhibit panels for our exhibit “From Viking to Insight: Henry Cooper and the Quest for Life on Mars”. We installed that exhibit last Fall, but subsequently found that there were some parts of it that needed editing.
• I read:
  • a horrifically depressing piece about the chaos that will likely ensue between the election and inauguration by Dave Dayen
  • A frankly uplifting and historically rich article by Adam Serwer about the relationship between our current moment of racial accountability and the Reconstruction period after the Civil War
  • A modest proposal (actually a radical one) by Alex Pareene that the Democratic party run on competant governance
  • A fascinating deep read of the Boston Massacre trial by Farah Peterson that links it to the contemporary moment of scrutiny on policing and police violence.

Book Notes: You Should Come With Me Now by M. John Harrison

Finished 8/28/20

A fantastic collection by a science/speculative fiction master.

M. John Harrison is a brave writer. That’s the best way I can describe him, though it probably sounds trite. He writes out of a tradition of science fiction and fantasy (indeed, he was present at one of its Big Bangs–New Worlds magazine), but refuses genre fiction’s longstanding commitment to foregrounding plot. Instead, Harrison is interested (obsessed?) with how people live with discomfort, or rather, make discomfort comfortable enough that they barely notice it. Sometimes that discomfort is otherworldy, and sometimes it is entirely mundane or even unplaceable. This is a daring and difficult thing to do, certainly to do well. It also takes him to some places that are both familiar for science fiction and entirely alien to it. For one thing, his characters are rich and weary, not the dark heroes or brilliant explorers of most science fiction. You can read their entire lives in the brief sentences he writes about them. For another, alienation and chilly modernity are lurking in the background of everything Harrison writes about. Human connection, friendship and solidarity are fleeting or nonexistent to Harrison’s protagonists and secondary characters. Any outrageous, supernatural, or impossible forces they encounter end up being just an exterior barrier, a pressure acting on them.

Harrison’s prose is striking and subtle. Every sentence delights and begs more questions, as Harrison uses ambiguity and uncertainty as modes of storytelling. He’s comfortable with uncertainty, or at least with leaving his readers uncertain.  Sometimes, getting caught in the trap of genre, I found myself wondering whether I had missed the fantastical element, and would read stories again looking for a hidden ghost or alien or something else. But this says less about Harrison’s place in genre fiction and more about my need for the comfortable dictates of genre fiction.

 This collection mixes some short stories with very short flash fiction–a paragraph or two. Like most short story collections, there were stories that grabbed me and others that didn’t, so your mileage may vary. Here are few that stuck with me:

“In Autotelia” is an absurdly simple story–a minor bureaucrat goes to work in the eponymous city which is perhaps metaphysically adjacent to London, spends a mundane day on the job, and then returns home to London. For other writers, such a story would likely take place off scene, replaced with more traditional investigations of this extradimensional city, populated by people who may or may not be human. But for Harrison, the city of Autotelia becomes a backdrop for exploring questions of immigration, neoliberal accounting, gender politics, and alienation. This sits with the best science fiction tradition of the future or the otherworldly holding up a mirror to us. 

 “Entertaining Angels Unawares” is a story about two men who repair the tower of a rural chapel. As the men work, they talk about their dreams, which grow increasingly violent and apocalyptic. The ending is strange and ambiguous, with the narrator abandoning his work partner to climb the church, and wander the gravestones of the churchyard. It’s unclear whether he’s possessed, crazy, or inspired by the murderous dreams of his partner.

“The Crisis” is perhaps one of the most straightforward pieces of fantastic fiction in the collection, where an area of London has become infected with supernatural force that transforms or repels all attempts to enter or subdue it. But for Harrison, such an invasion reflect London’s increasingly inhospitable housing situation, and the story, though strange and grotesque, seemed to me to be a commentary on the neoliberal city, with its exlcusion and privatization of public space, increasing and increasingly disposable vagrant popualtion, and a middle class somewhat blithely making accomodations to all of it.

 Some of the stories are funny–“Psychoarchaeology” takes place in a future (present?) England where technology allows enthusiasts to hunt for dead and buried kings, from the comfort of their car and their fast food, echoing the furor and excitement around the re-discovery of Richard III.

I’m still enamoured of Harrison’s Viroconium cycle (and a Viroconium story, “Jack of Mercy’s” appears in this collection), and some of these stories sit with the best of that work, and as with Viroconium, deserve and reward repeat readings. This is great, subtle stuff, and well worth the time of anyone who enjoys fantastic (in all senses of the word) and engaging fiction.

Booknotes: A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis

Finished 8/16/20

A rich but readable account of American labor history that is refreshingly honest about both its successes and its challenges.

Eric Loomis is a professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, but is perhaps more well known as a History blogger at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and for his “This Day in Labor History” series. This book is a cogent coalescence of that series, which provides a periodization of American labor history using ten historical strikes to exemplify the state of labor at given historical moments. These are

• The Lowell textile strikes of the 1830s
• The strikes of enslaved Africans during the Civil War
• The Strikes for the Eight Hour Day in the “Gilded Age” of the 1880s and 90s
• The Anthracite strikes, particularly the Ludlow, Colorado coal strike and massacre at the dawn of the 20th century
• The “Bread and Roses” strike and the IWW in the 1910s and 20s
• The Flint sit-down strike of 1937 and the New Deal
• The Oakland General Strike of 1946 and post-war Unionism
• The Lordstown strike of 1972
• The Air Traffic Controller’s Strike of 1981
• The Justice for Janitors movement of the 1980s and 90s

The book is filled with an astonishing and interesting cast of characters, and Loomis works hard to bring to life the stories of everyday, working people and the struggles they faced. Perhaps because of his blogging, Loomis is a gifted and clear writer, and despite its broad reach, the book is eminently readable, while still being filled with plenty of wild details, and astonishing stories and quotes. Interesting and complicated characters like Sarah Bagley (who organized arguably the first Women’s Union in the US), or the story of the tensions in the Oakland General strike are rich and rewarding. And the book is full of anecdotes and details, such that I suspect even people relatively knowledgeable about American labor history will find something they didn’t know before (I certainly did).

Loomis chooses to focus on the diversity and social tensions that have run through the US labor movement. Loomis is not shy about discussing the ways in which race and ethnicity have structured and organized the forms that labor organization and class consciousness have taken in America. He follows Du Bois in seeing the Civil War as being won due to the labor action of enslaved African-Americans, and he casts a clear eye on the racism of swaths of the labor movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, with rich discussions of the AFL’s failure to organize non-white or marginally White workers in the 19th century, or the violent pushback by White workers and Southern elites when the CIO attempted to organize Black and White workers in the 1940s. There are also clear (though brief) discussions of the role of race in the election of Donald Trump and his courting of the putative “White Working Class” (though I have found other analyses more useful in understanding 2016).

More explicitly than most academic histories, Loomis is clear that he wants the book to serve as a guide for activists and political supporters of working people. He begins the book with a discussion of the recent teacher’s strikes in West Virginia, which were ultimately successful. And his conclusion argues that we “live in a new Gilded Age” of rampant income inequality and exploitation of working people. He sums the book up by arguing what he sees as the main lessons of American labor history. These are that labor wins when it focuses both on organizing and on political persuasion, that a racially diverse labor movement is ultimately stronger than a racially homogenous one, and that successful labor movements recognize the wide range of laboring activities rather than focusing on just a few (re: industrial) forms of work.

The book is a clear and digestible history, and a call to arms to make a more just and equitable society, using the lessons of past attempts to do the same. Well worth the time of anyone who wants to change the world.

Quentin's Weeknotes 6/6/20-6/12/20

This Week

• We attended the Rally for Black Lives in Delhi, NY. Like many central New York towns, Delhi is a predominately White community, so it was inspiring to see such a large and enthusiastic crowd supporting of Black Lives.
• I hosted the Yager Museum’s Artists conversation with Cathie Jamieson, whose work features in our current exhibit dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share Stories. Cathie and I have known each other since I worked for the Mississaugas of the Credit Consultation Office, and she’s a great artist and a smart and interesting person.
• Along with several others, I worked on completing a grant proposal from the IMLS.
• I finished reading Alex Vitale’s “The End of Policing” but am still collecting my thoughts about it. As of this posts publication, it’s still free as an ebook from Verso and you should definitely read it!

Quentin's Weeknotes 5/31/20-6/5/20

This Week:

• My family and I attended the Justice for George Floyd protest in Binghamton, NY. The march was powerful, angry, and focused, while staying completely peaceful. Black Lives Matter.
• I finished Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest, a strange, genre-hopping novel that starts out as a kind of sci-fi noir and ends up in strange, Lovecraftian territory. Entertaining, but definitely picks up in the second half.
• I did some prep work for an upcoming virtual event at the Yager Museum, where I’ll be talking to artist Cathie Jamieson, whose work is currently hanging (unseen!) in the Yager Museum.
• I worked on a grant from the IMLS to help the Yager Museum and the Stevens German Library undertake more digital engagement and access.

Book Notes: The Origins of Unhappiness by David Smail

Finished May 22, 2020

A complex and critical work that takes psychology and psychotherapy to task for their failure to account for power and its role in producing the phenomena they study and treat.

David Smail was a psychologist, who spent much of his career working in the Mental Health departments of the National Health Service in the UK. This book draws on that experience, as well as his own social and philosophical analysis, to articulate the idea that “emotional distress” (his preferred alternative to the standard descriptor mental disorders) emerges from a tension between an individual and their location within fields of social power, particularly class power. Smail wrote the book in the early 1990s, and saw firsthand the “explosion in the expansion of the therapy and counselling industry in Britain.” (112) He aligns this explosion with the simultaneous expansion of Business culture, or what would later be called flexible or neo-liberal capitalism, and sees the two as linked in their disarticulation of people from forms of community and reconstitution as individuals unmoored from society.

His critiques of therapy are three**-**fold. First, therapy focuses attention on individuals or families and away from broader social or environmental factors that spur distress. It reinscribes social inequality as personal failure, read as psychological or mental instability. Second, the doctor-patient relationship of therapy is limited in how much it can effect such factors, and therefore any positive outcomes are likely related to the establishment of that relationship, and not on the actual causes of distress. Thirdly, because it is routinely a commercial enterprise itself, therapy amounts to a kind of commoditized form of solidarity that is dependent upon one’s class position and relative social power for efficacy. It is likewise easily inserted into other relationships as a mechanism of obscuring or side-stepping power and inequality–Smail mentions ‘redundancy counsellors’ hired by firms in England whose purpose was to provide therapy to fired workers upon their termination, and whose deployment was seen as a humane benefit. Essentially, Smail’s book is an exploration of the socio-psychological experience of the Marxist concept of alienation.

To make this provacative claim, Smail recasts psychology not as the study of constituent parts of human personality, but as a kind of phenomenological study of the relationship of human bodies to their social environments at multiple scales, and the meaning systems “which reflect [people’s] struggles to represent and talk about what it is like to be a body in a world.” (230) This profoundly materialist analysis requires an understanding of power as it operates on people, and as they make sense of those operations. He sees emotional distress in a person as a response to an inability to access or even comprehend the action of power on their body, particularly power operating at a distance.  

Smail argues that instead of a personalized, commoditized vision of therapy to treat emotional distress, we should instead invest in solidarity–the recognition of our shared experience as bodies in the world that can experience pain and distress. He argues that a relationship of mutual care, in which the impacts of social power are not just recognized but actively confronted, is a better basis for handling such distress than an anemic, individualizing therapy that focuses only on a persons interior life.

As a case study, he uses the 1980s and several patients that he worked with, encountered, or treated during this time of neoliberal upheaval and the implemention of Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that there is no such thing as society, only individual and families. He draws on the sociology and economics of the period to contextualize the 1980s as a time in which understandings of the relationship of individuals to their power horizons were being reconfigured towards exalting business. This had profound consequences for the meanings that people made of their own lives, and therefore their feeling of personal wellbeing, and Smail explores the impact of these changes on several pseudonymous people.

I found this book fascinating, and I also recognized that there are others better suited to evaluate its provacative claims than I. For one thing, the line between emotional distress and psychosis (particularly complex psycho-phenomena like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc…) is not well-defined and Smail doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking through the implications of compartmentalizing such phenomena as “emotional distress.” I find it hard to believe that 100+ years of psychological diagnosis and its long-term work identifying and describing conditions of psychotic or neurotic behavior has simply been an exercise in self-perpetuation (which he suggests in numerous places). At the same time, it is true the psychology has frequently pathologized aspects of human behavior in ways that are now seen as harmful.In any case, Smail is writing a synthetic polemic, and as such, may have smoothed over complexity in ways that might deserve further scrutiny later, or by someone else.

All in all, The Origins of Unhappiness is a complex, deeply humanistic work that sets out an ethical vision of our treatment of each other that, while perhaps a bit unnuanced, is forthright, deeply considered, and politically righteous.

Quentin's Weeknotes 5/16/20-5/22/20

This Week:

• I did some work figuring out how to potentially move the First Year Seminar that I co-teach on-line. It’s called “Collectors and Collecting” and it’s about material objects and their complicated meanings in our world. I’m not entirely sure how to effectively run a seminar-style class on-line, but am putting in some time now, to get ready.

Quentin's Weeknotes 05/8/20-5/15/20

This Week:

• I finished reading “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” by Kelly Robson. It was a strange and delightful novel about rebuilding after apocalypse, time travel, transhumanism, and the tensions of tradition and change.
• I finished teaching MUST204: Collections Management at Hartwick College. The class, which is a practical, hands-on exploration of museum collections management, was particularly dereailed by COVID-19, but we fumbled our way through, and the students put together an excellent collections procedures manual that we will use in the Museum moving forward.
• I started brainstorming some on-line and hybrid on-line/museum programs that the Yager Museum can do as we slowly, safely re-open Hartwick College.