Consolidation and Relocation Programs: Testimony #1 (Fragment from prospective novel 'Archive')

 

When the canals were drained, uncovering the victims of the conflict, the clean-up crews removed those remains that were easily accessible but didn’t bother with excavations. Since then, by some ungodly process of geological movement, the bones of persons submerged in the mud of the canal bed have slowly risen back to the surface. One comes across them regularly along the routes of the Grand Union or Basingstoke canals; those archaic channels that once linked Britain's industrial cities, but which are now little more than open air latrines and dumps for industrial waste. A femur protrudes from beneath a collapsed lock gate; a shattered skull appears one day from an eroded bank near a long disused sewer outflow. The appearance of these broken remains, witnesses to a largely forgotten conflict, seemed designed to remind those local officials still in the area of their complicity in the clearances and forced migrations.

When the Central Authority announced their intention to cut all support for rural infrastructure in the Home Counties no-one expected the regional authorities to put up much of a fight, hence the formation of local 'Action and Protection' associations made up of residents of those towns under threat. Lessons had been learnt from the treatment of smaller towns and villages in the surrounding area over the preceding years. County law enforcement mounted a half-hearted attempt to relocate the remaining populations of Farnham and Aldershot into the new reception districts in the South and West of Greater London. They were often thwarted by these rag-tag groups armed with weapons constructed at home or acquired after the remaining army base at Farnborough was abandoned and the squaddies sold their kit on the black market. Burning cars fortified gated communities; masonry from previous demolitions was reused to build barricades and permanent watches were established observing the movement of unfamiliar vehicles in the town centres.  

Teams of specialist ‘rural administrators’ were then drafted in. Their speciality lay in slowly strangling the community by isolating the remaining sources of clean water and fuel, disappearing prominent local people and demolishing entire streets for the sake of “safety and secure rural development”.  They banned the digging of wells under the pretence that they might be used to plant bombs and access routes into the area were designated for exclusive use by the security services, then blocked altogether. The following winter, a year after the expanded rural consolidation program began, around four hundred residents and their supporters remained holding out at the appropriately named Gun Hill estate in the north of Aldershot. By this time they had taken to collecting rainwater via a network of interconnected gutters attached to the pitched roofs of their modest semi-detached houses. There is evidence that in January of that year they had sent communications requesting affiliate status with the independent communes at Midhurst and Petersfield. No replies have yet been discovered in the records of either and it is doubtful that if such a request had been accepted it would have changed the outcome of events.

A note found in the diary of Geoffrey Alsop, a retired deputy governor of the Southern England Central Bank living at Haslemere states he was woken in the early hours of March 3^rd by the distant sound of heavy artillery coming from the North. There never has been nor do I think there ever will be an investigation into how this group of former banking clerks, teachers, and middle managers vanished from the face of the earth. In the early spring of that year a report was published by the Ministry for Rural Affairs confirming 100% compliance with the consolidation and relocation program in the Surrey and Hampshire regions and hailing their “economic independence”. It was a pattern repeated across rural England over the next five years.

The Pandemic on Reflection: Grasping the Epoch

 

The following is an introduction written in the summer of 2022 for the collection of writing I produced during the pandemic, published on the Battleground website and also here on this blog. My intention in compiling these pieces wasn’t to attempt to get them published as a book but rather to put something of a full stop on that period and to move on. I had already written an addendum to the collection and so an introduction seemed both appropriate and an opportunity for me to reflect on that time and my reasons for writing. Reading over this again it strikes me as a useful index for how events unfolded and the work I produced in response, so I’m making it available here with links to the relevant articles. I’ve also added a couple of paragraphs bringing my personal situation up to date, since I truly believe if it weren’t for the pandemic I would likely not be living as I am now.

 

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"Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos".

Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn

 

The texts included here were written between April 2020 and May 2022. They encompass the period of time when the SARS-CoV2 pandemic was at its height, roughly between the first lockdown in the UK, which began on the 23^rd of March 2020, and the removal of significant restrictions in the late Spring and early summer of 2021. By this chronology the pandemic would have lasted between 14 to 16 months. In practice the long night of pandemic restrictions and the uncertainty they caused lasted through to the end of 2021 and well into the following year. There was also a strange period of existential foreboding which preceded the shutdown, which I find evidence of bubbling to the surface in my choice of subject for a blog entry in February 2020 on Thomas Ligotti’s book ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’. The opening paragraph of that essay, which critiques Ligotti’s quasi-apology for his vision of philosophical pessimism, looks from the distance of two and half years like a premonition:

 

“How to live well in a world that is dying? Increasingly this question preoccupies me. It is a question that is directed in the most radical way at what is most our own, our sense of historicality, of being part of a continuity that exists beyond any one individual, or even perhaps any single community or nation. The significance of the dying world is not immediately ethical but ontological. It disrupts at the base of things, the base on which most, if not all, our commonplace notions about what it is to live are grounded. Finitude, for instance, is hard enough to appropriate to oneself in the context of an otherwise cosy continuity of things. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? It all seems so endless, but in truth the number is perhaps quite small. How then to reconcile such a "personal" relationship to the finite with finitude on the scale of All Things?  Let us then call radical finitude the subjective disposition that identifies one's own finitude with the finitude of the world, and does so by forging a form-of-life appropriate to it. This form-of-life born from out of the wreckage of "last days capitalism" and ecological collapse is the task for anyone who accepts the veracity of the doom of our time and chooses to stay alive amid the gathering ruins”.

 

The question 'how many more times will you watch the full moon rise?' is from Paul Bowles, who I had not read prior to the pandemic. I knew of that quote from a recording of his voice sampled by the US band Neurosis. I've always liked it since I first heard it as a teenager. On the subject of ruins, though, I could never have predicted just how ruinous we were to become over the next twelve months. Giorgio Agamben (a near constant intellectual companion during this period) eloquently captured this feeling of nascent collapsology in what was probably the most philosophical of his pandemic interventions:

 

“‘Everything I do makes no sense if the house burns.’ Yet even as the house is burning, it is necessary to continue as always, to do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more studiously — even if no one should notice. It may be that life disappears from the earth, that no memory remains of what has been done, for better or for worse. But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no more time”.

 

And indeed, things do endure. Life - of a sort - goes on, and small pleasures are taken where once there was only tension, dread, and helpless frustration. Nevertheless, this premonition has come to be the guiding light for my own post-pandemic world. It is summed up in a single word: decline. Decline is the interpretive lens through which everything can and must now be viewed. Not because Decline has suddenly come to define our epoch, implying that there was perhaps once a period where Decline was not active in our world, but only because the present is utterly unintelligible without it. It is too late. There is no time.

 

If the texts presented here are a record of anything then it’s the coming to consciousness of this fact, which until now I have only partially grasped and never fully bound myself to. That separation, which would distinguish my fate from the fate of the world is now utterly untenable, and the task now is to develop a form-of-life appropriate to our collective fate; a Being-towards-Decline if you like.

 

For me personally a sense of the pandemic being less of an all-consuming event only came into view when international travel became more predictable and I was finally able, after a period of almost 30 months, to travel abroad. That trip - which was to Copenhagen - and a subsequent trip to Prague in March of 2022, gave me the confidence to draw a line under these writings and to end them with an essay centred around the Francis Bacon exhibition ‘Man and Beast’ held at the Royal Academy of Arts after a long pandemic induced delay. I also wrote the addendum ‘Hurtling Back to Earth’ in the same month.

 

When I look back at these writings it’s clear that I, like so many others, were trying desperately to find mental space in a world turned completely upside down. The two part ‘Plague Power’ (One, Two)  drew on the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to analyse the pandemic response as an expression of what the former termed (and the latter further developed) as Biopower. These were essentially theoretical analyses of the political implications of the emergency powers used to enforce lockdowns and take a somewhat distanced, if rather polemical, tone. This was not the case for other writing I produced that year. By the end of May it was clear that the pandemic would not be a short-lived event, and my ‘Pandemic Musings’ of that month addressed the changed reality with a much more personal approach.

 

By that point the “enforced nihilism” of the restrictions and the constant fear porn being pumped out by government and compliant media had left London a lonely and alienating place. Although masks had yet to become the ubiquitous medical sacrament they are now, there was still enough anxiety and social distancing around to make venturing into the metropolis a jarring experience. The sun was out, and so was I. During May I cycled constantly, clocking up over 600km around the centre of the city and the Western outskirts. My workplace had never closed and throughout the lockdowns I attended site, working on projects with cancer charities and contributing to the tentative moves my employer made to get in on the various vaccine projects that were then underway. All that was good, and I think without work to distract me and the weather to lure me outside, those first few months of the pandemic would have been far harder, as they undoubtedly were for others.

 

I never succumbed to fear. Nothing about the SARS-CoV2 virus led me to believe that it harboured a serious risk to me. But, as we all know, personal risk was only one side, and a fairly minor one at that, to the psychological warfare practiced upon populations of the most developed economies at this time. Very quickly the emphasis shifted from stay home to “flatten the curve” to a potentially endless task of protecting some nameless vulnerable other by avoiding “unnecessary” social behaviours. The legal contortions and bizarre range of restrictions that were imposed during the late summer and Autumn of 2020 must count as one of the most chaotic periods in British legal history.  The practice of regional lockdowns was imported from China, but unlike in China they were only imposed after rounds of horse-trading with local government officials who were keen to protect their local industries from damaging stay-at-home or compulsory closure orders.

 

What resulted was an epidemiologically absurd mishmash of differing guidance and legal restrictions, where gyms in Blackburn were allowed to stay open, while those in Manchester had to close, and where hairdressers in London could open with social distancing and masks, while those in Leicester had to shut up shop completely. Then there was the arbitrary distinction between essential and non-essential shops which like so many of the restrictions privileged large retailers over small businesses; a fact that no doubt drove many a struggling entrepreneur into the arms of conspiracy theorists. And I won't even touch on the nonsense which led to the debate over whether a scotch egg constituted a 'substantial meal'. None of this was alleviated in early Winter when the no less arbitrary tiers system was brought in and government was accused of keeping London open at the expense of the North of England.

 

This is just a flavour of the chaos which was a near permanent presence during the later months of 2020. In an attempt to make sense of what was happening I had done extensive research into the history of the development of Pandemic Preparedness, tracking its emergence from out of Cold War planning for a nuclear attack, its convergence with theories of the precautionary principle and radicalisation during the years of the War on Terror, and then finally its institutionalisation at the global level under the auspices of the World Health Organisation and their international health regulations. All this helped flesh out what was now commonly being referred to as the Biosecurity Regime. Among the many authors and researchers whose work aided my understanding at this time I’d single out books by Carlo Caduff and Andrew Lakoff, as well as the real time analysis of Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing. There has been, understandably, a veritable tsunami of words written about the meaning of the last two years, and I claim no special status for my own contribution to this field. But the voices that have provided real guidance have generally been few and far between.

 

Understanding, however, does not afford oneself the capacity to abstract completely from the reality of the crisis. After the government u-turned on its pledge not to impose new restrictions over the 2020 Christmas period I found myself less inclined to understand and more determined to resist. After this point the tone of my writing became darker and more serious. The theme of Ends and Decline making themselves felt more strongly.

 

Going back to that Ligotti review in February 2020, there is another premonition which became central to my thoughts about life and death under biosecurity. Against the admonishment to “Live your best life!” I contended;

 

“Some of us would be satisfied with a passably happy death, or if not happy, then at least not scrabbling around in our own shit gasping for breath as the experts circle and the Muzak drones on”.

 

How many countless thousands were forced to face such a death owing to the pandemic restrictions which barred them from their loves ones, or from even seeing the unmasked face of another human being in their last moments? I continue to hold that the duties we owe to the dead and dying are what distinguish us from beasts. Fail to live up to them and we are no longer human. It’s with these unfortunates in my thoughts that I wrote in the addendum:

 

“To be released from the demands of the society of production, of unceasing optimisation of the self, of the death march of progress; to escape all this and to be able to turn one's face to the warmth of the sun, that is to live well in a world which is dying”.

 

Over the extended lockdown covering the first months of 2021 I produced more focussed and overtly political takes on the crisis. I particularly railed against the imposition of vaccine passports either for international travel or access to facilities at home. I also covered some of the artistic responses to the pandemic from the film makers John Smith and the collage artist Cold War Steve. My most polemical piece was written for my blog and contrasted the reduction of pandemic deaths to mute statistics with the outpouring of grief and solidarity in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard. The police response to the vigil held for Sarah on Clapham Common further reinforced my increasingly militant opposition to State imposed pandemic restrictions. I watched the police break up this gathering of grieving women with incandescent rage.

 

As Summer turned to Autumn and things in London began to look vaguely like they used to, my attention turned to the broader implications of the pandemic and in particular the penetration and radicalisation of digital control technologies into daily life. Digital health surveillance technologies in their manifold forms had throughout the pandemic frequently been compared by their opponents to China’s so-called Social Credit System. The three pieces of writing I produced at the end of 2021 cover the reality of that system and the anxieties around a possible post-political society controlled by Algorithmic Governance. My research also took me towards theorists most attuned to the post-political management of populations and the continuing effects of digital technologies on forms of subjectivity. The writing of Ignas Kalpokas, in particular his Algorithmic Governance: Politics and Law in the Post-Human Era, were highly instructive, as have been my continued reading of the work of Bernard Stiegler and Byung-Chul Han.

 

On a personal level the pandemic was a watershed for me. Tracing the origins of formative thought in one’s life is always a little futile and there is a tendency to narrativize what is often random unconnected events and decisions, but I do think that the December evening of 2020, when Boris Johnson announced another nationwide lockdown, set in motion the ideas, or at least the subjective break that has led me both to leave London and find myself planning a life with my soon-to-be wife in near total opposition to what I had previously taken to be essential. Even live music, the absence of which in the two blog articles titled ‘The Sounds ofSilence’ I lamented, has faded as a motivation for remaining in the Capital. By the end of 2022 I was in no doubt that everything had changed, even if it was in ways that were scarcely perceptible and difficult to describe. Nevertheless, I no longer felt at home. I don’t know the future, but I am pretty certain it is not in the cities.

 

The world is changed, but there is nothing new under the sun and we will make ugly ruins; which according to a certain - notably illiberal - strain of thought, means we have failed to build a worthwhile civilization. The pandemic is not over, nor will it ever be, since like the truly epochal events of the previous century - the great depression, the world wars, the war on terror - it's not that history moves on, but rather that the event is integrated into our sense of being historical, and thus we carry the wreckage with us into the next crisis. This is another way of conceiving Decline; a gradual, inescapable build-up of weight upon the back of the present, until time itself collapses. Grasping the Epoch is grasping the time of the Now, when no other future is thinkable.

 

"But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no more time”.

 

London Bridge: A Becoming Non-Place

 

"Everything proceeds as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history were drawing its motives, its words and images, from the inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the present".

Marc Augé - Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995)

How to describe the becoming non-place of my place of birth? How to put into words the feeling of homelessness on finding oneself inescapably funnelled into the habits of a tourist in places you have frequented for over four decades?

Southwark is my home borough. It holds my family home, my first years of schooling, and many of the places I most associate with my childhood and youth. At its Southern tip it grazes the edge of Crystal Palace park, home to the ruins of that legendary 19th century edifice, which more than any other symbolised the coming age of transparency and globalisation. A glass house, originally conceived to hold a trade fair; a house with transparent walls, so that the divisions between inside and outside were dissolved, giving the illusion of total visibility, illuminated by the burning sun of commerce and the industrial spirit of the age.

Southwark's midriff comprises the less storied neighbourhoods of Peckham and Camberwell; the one known for being the home of fictional "dodgy-dealer" Del Boy Trotter, the other containing what was formerly London's murder mile (I believe it lost this crown in the mid-2000s to Clapton-Hackney). At one time I had a dentist based on the crossroads at Loughborough Junction; the dark heart of Camberwell on the frontline of a turf war between various competing drugs gangs servicing the local markets in Peckham and Brixton.

I was sixteen or thereabouts and had to go for a filling. For the first time I was given a local anaesthetic in the gums before the drill went in. Now, this wasn't the first filling I'd had and with hindsight I might have inquired why previous tooth doctors felt able to grind away at my pearly whites without a second thought to my state of suffering. In any case when I emerged into the April afternoon the left side of my face was still totally numb. This didn't however stop me from trying to rid my mouth of the taste of dental detritus by pouring a bottle of warm fizzy drink into it. Cue moment of pure physical comedy as I made a futile attempt to keep the liquid from falling out the side of my flaccid mouth onto my new trainers.

Futile as I say, however, my efforts had not gone unnoticed by two gentlemen conducting a no doubt entirely innocent transaction under the cover of a partially derelict railway arch (these were the days when London railways arches were used to store railway equipment or drug dealers, rather than artisan tequila producers ). In the face of their chortling I tried with my unfeeling-flappy-face to explain my temporary palsy, to no effect but to appear even more sub-normal than before. I gave up and had the ignominious experience of being offered a pity rate on whatever happy pills these two noble souls were about to unleash on the borough. I passed, and scampered back up towards Red Post Hill and the safety of East Dulwich.    

Southwark's Northern region extends from Elephant and Castle in the West out as far as Rotherhithe and Surrey quays in the East. At the centre of this near five mile stretch of riverside real estate lies London Bridge and the area encompassing Borough market and Southwark cathedral. This is the original Olde Southwark, of the bishops prison, the clink, the black friars and the Winchester Geese; of dozens of coaching inns lining the high street, and of course the famous bridge itself, its Medieval predecessor the site of spiked heads of executed criminals and several multi-storey houses along its length. The present bridge dates from the 1970s and replaced the one that was bought by Missourian entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch in 1968. The area has seen more change over the last two decades than it probably has in the preceding two centuries, and is for me paradigmatic of the becoming non-place of London, a city of transients, where no-one really lives and for even born and bred locals like me the experience of being there seems to have lost all intelligibility.

If the transformation of London bridge into a non-place has particular emotional resonance for me that may be because I have so much personal history bound up there. I have worked and played, lived, loved and lost within that small enclave. But this history and its sudden impossibility is perhaps the signal experience of a becoming non-place, since now I find I can no longer memorialise, nor take stock of the passing time. The places and the faces are no longer recognisable and do not seem to recognise each other. Ironically this transition coincides with London Bridge having become a "destination" and place to have "experiences"; which is to say it has entered fully into the network of consumer and tourist and thus no longer caters for those who linger, let alone those who dwell.

 

"The general de-temporalization leads to the disappearance of temporal sections and caesurae, the thresholds and transitions which create meaning. The feeling that time passes more quickly now than before is also due to the absence of a pronounced articulation of time. This feeling is intensified by the fact that events follow each other in quick succession without leaving lasting traces, without becoming experiences. Because of the missing gravitation, things are encountered only fleetingly. Nothing carries weight".

- Byung-Chul Han - The Scent of Time

Borough market is one of the great old markets of London alongside Smithfields and Spitalfields, and was once a place where people actually came routinely to buy produce - mostly wholesale - though in the late 90s the market was rebranded for retail, selling high-end meat, fish, cheese and speciality produce. It was expensive but it still felt like a place you might go to buy quality fresh food, perhaps for a special occasion - my mother and I still maintain this tradition buying our cold meat and cheese there before every Christmas. Until recently the surrounding area, however, still had a somewhat grimy, vaguely Dickensian edge to it. The backstreets running West of Borough High street were a mixture of Georgian terraces, derelict warehouses and the crisscrossing of overhead railway lines that ran out in three directions from the station.

The rhythmic thumping of trains passing across the viaducts above the market are on my playlist for classic London soundscape. The old London Bridge mainline station was on a huge raised platform of arches with road tunnels running beneath, in-between which were a number of longstanding shops and attractions, not least the London Dungeon. Whatever they used to pump into that place to give it that musty old smell would leak out into those tunnels, making them a less than salubrious place to be after dark. On a sweltering night in the summer of 2001 two men died beneath the railway arches there after consuming a lethal combination of drugs and alcohol at the SE1 Nightclub.

The London Dungeon, part of a chain of cheap thrills, historically inaccurate horror based attractions, was based beneath the station from the mid-1970s to 2013. Most of it was rather lame waxworks exhibits themed around things like water torture, garrotting and the black death. The Jack the Ripper section - where you were led from crime-scene to crime-scene as if investigating the murders yourself - used a lot more historical documents, including photographs of the victims. In the darkness, surrounded by the Victorian brickwork of the railway arches, the mocked up Whitechapel streets seemed pretty convincing, as was the piped voiceover reading police reports of the discovery of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman as a spotlight picked out a partially clothed female form slumped in the doorway.

I remember finding that stuff really quite disturbing, much more so than the depictions of Sweeney Todd or ridiculous looking fake medieval torture instruments. I was 14 when I first went there and remember jokingly asking for a Whisky from the fast food kiosk at the end. I've never liked drama shows that made extreme violence and murder of women into their standard plot device, and I think my experience of the London Dungeon might have played a part in that. My mum always refused to take me there - in the end I went with my Godfather - she would say that they made into entertainment things which were still happening in parts of the world. As I got older I came to agree with her and wouldn't recommend a visit at its current location in County Hall. I still associate Tooley street with that smell, with dark alcoves and grim discoveries.

Now it's all gone, even the roads that ran beneath the station which I would frequently traverse on my way between my student halls and the Absolutely Starving cafe to pick up a bacon baguette. The new incarnation of London bridge station has smashed through most of the old railway arches and replaced them with modern supports which has allowed this huge airy space to appear where before there was a network of occluded passages, walkways and covered streets. Now, it's all bright and shiny and smells of disinfectant and fast food. A transparent space, just like the Crystal Palace. I was once slapped by a girl in the bowels of London Bridge Station. Now that place is gone too, and with it the reminder of the lesson the slap taught me.  

 

"Without the monumental illusion before the eyes of the living, history would be a mere abstraction. The social space bristles with monuments - imposing stone buildings, discreet mud shrines - which may not be directly functional but give every individual the justified feeling that, for the most part, they pre-existed him and will survive him. Strangely, it is a set of breaks and discontinuities in space that expresses continuity in time". 

Marc Augé - Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995)

Let us unto the stews! And what stews did Southwark once have! Not quite as legendary as the houses of ill repute that Shakespeare's prince Hal would visit on Cheapside, but the sex workers of Olde Southwark have left their mark in the poignant space of Crossbones Graveyard and garden of remembrance on Redcross Way, a dank unprepossessing street that also features the wonderful Boot and Flogger wine bar and, ironically, the Most Precious Blood Catholic Church. The graveyard is a paupers graveyard, and during the Medieval period was unconsecrated ground. The women who worked in the area were known as the Winchester Geese as they were granted a licence by the Bishop of Winchester, who held jurisdiction over what was then something of a lawless area, known as much for its bear baiting and theatres as its brothels. Today the patch of land holds a number of memorials created by the Friends of Crossbones to the "outcast dead" buried there, and is also the site of monthly ceremonies of remembrance and an annual Halloween festival presided over by the poet and playwright John Constable, whose Southwark Mysteries cycle of poems did much to publicise the existence and importance of the site. It is one of the few places of ritual and remembrance to remain in the area. A place where the deep history of London still lives through the people who come together to remember and memorialise.

I described the Shard of Glass in an essay on this site in 2019 as equal parts corporate and military architecture, like a watchtower standing in the Green Zone of an occupied territory. The anomic corporate space and identikit retail experience, the sense of being at the intersection of any number of anonymous capital flows; the tower's smooth glass exterior perfectly allegorizes the faceless world of price signals and an international class who are at home everywhere and no-where on the upper levels of the Crystal Palace, far above the captured city and its bewildered population, staring into the screens of their phones.

I mistakenly compared the giant spire-like construction to a Cathedral consecrated to global finance. Now, this might be true from the perspective of the power of the Qatari royal family who effectively own the thing, but as a metaphor it falls down precisely on the point made by Marc Augé in that the Shard, despite its vast size is no monument, nor does it introduce a discontinuity into space that allows the marking of historical time. It is, just as I said in 2019 just the most recent iteration of that model of total transparency and fluid modernity that characterises the paradigm of the Crystal Palace. It doesn't so much dominate the area as thoroughly consume it, undermining the distinction between inside and outside, drawing everything into its orbit. It's also a giant spectacle that invites professional narcissists to visit and snap a pouting selfie on one of the upper levels. This touristic ephemerality can be seen all over the market and the riverside as businesses and the local council turn every possible corner into an opportunity for spectacle and consumption, not least consumption of the self.  As a result of the swarms of tourists dumping food waste the lovely garden surrounding the market side of Southward Cathedral has been closed to the public.

 Since the Shard's construction and the completion of the newly transparent station, the collapse of the 'anthropological place' that was London Bridge has only continued at pace. The emptiness and non-relational quality of that building has seeped into the general experience of the area as a whole. The addition of pop-up street food and tent bar shanty villages like Flat Iron Square, Vinegar Yard, and a little further inland Mercato Metropolitano, have only added to the feeling of a superficial pan-international sludge of spectacle and non-place entertainment clogging up the area. This is what it means when a place becomes a "destination" where people anticipate viewing themselves having experiences which are only marked by the selfie or the video taken on the ever present camera eye of mobile phones.

There are still some little havens of genuine life such as the living community at Crossbones Graveyard, and there is also the Old Operating Theatre housed at the top of the tower of the 18th century church of old St Thomas' hospital where my mum now volunteers. Some still hidden gems like the Boot and Flogger or the Horseshoe Inn remain, but for how long? The latest venture to open is Borough Yards, which opens up yet more of the copious railway arches near the market to yet more chain food outlets and designer clothes stores. Walking through there a few weeks ago I found myself lost and unable to navigate my way through. The artifice of the construction job had, like the Shard and the station, rendered transparent and continuous an area that was formerly full of light and shade, that contained old monumental architecture, some in decay, some not, but it was a place that existed in time. Now it is little more than a hellscape of cleaned up brickwork that leads nowhere and turns everyone who enters into a tourist observing themselves in the endless walls of sheet glass.

The story of London Bridge over the last twenty years is the story of London, of its Disneyfication, its selling off and succumbing to plague tourism, the wilful destruction of its liveable environment and heritage, and its conversion into a vast space of permanent transience that is always busy but no-one seems to stick around. A non-anthropological space as Augé would put it; a non-place, where it is no longer possible to create a form-of-life.

Addendum to Pandemic Writing 2020-2022: Hurtling Back to Earth

 

The break for me was in December of 2020, when Boris Johnson announced a U-turn on his previous commitment not to tighten restrictions over the Christmas and New year period. Not that I was relying on that sinister clown for deliverance or anything. I had long since abandoned  even the most minimal belief that the UK government - indeed any government - knew what it was doing with its pandemic response. Nevertheless, something snapped, and I recall the apoplexy I felt at the prospect of another interminable period of lockdown and isolation. Up until that point I had approached the pandemic with as cool and analytical an eye as possible. Neither weep nor laugh, but understand. Spinoza’s well known encomium to enlightened enquiry was a straightforward response to an otherwise chaotic and unforeseen situation. But in truth, this rational attempt to grasp what was happening was always destined to have its limits. When the world is changed we cannot avoid being changed along with it, and as the Winter dragged on I found myself turning towards thoughts of a pessimistic and atavistic kind.

The history of the development of pandemic response from out of all-hazards planning and cold war paranoia is highly instructive, but fails to capture some essential features of the way States and populations responded in practice. My own position on the role of the government and of the media has shifted over the course of the pandemic, from broadly supporting the containment measures (while acknowledging their biopolitical consequences) and batting away anything that vaguely smacked of conspiracy, to seeing with ever greater clarity the toxic mix of factors within Western societies which reveals the pandemic ultimately to be a judgement on our entire civilization. Radical? Overly dramatic? Of course! But to quote Lenin, one must always strive to be as radical as reality itself. And I continue to maintain that the ultimate form of the new reality ushered in by the pandemic is still unclear. 

What is clear to me is that the pandemic has created nothing new under the sun, and certainly nothing like the “return to real life” some naïve commentators hoped for in the early months of 2020. What I do see is an acceleration of existing movements towards harnessing the power of networked (or reticulated, to use Bernard Stiegler’s term) society in the interest of Capital, and away from rooted, self-determining individuals and groups (I would say communities, but does that word even have any meaning anymore?). It goes without saying that these shifts in the way Western societies are run are profoundly anti-democratic, and amplify to unprecedented levels the exploitation of human capacities (most notably cognitive capacity and attention) for the benefit of an increasingly tiny and authoritarian elite. Another concept of Stiegler's, Absolute Proletarianization, captures well the now indiscriminate impoverishment of human life that follows the cybernetic and computational turn. The most egregious injuries are the ones done to the spirit.

That’s at the top level. But what do we see – we who still have enough self-regard to look reality in the face - when we step outside our homes?

Firstly, pandemic response, and the accompanying deluge of fear-porn pumped out by governments and the media, have left a significant proportion of the population for whom a state of permanent terror functions something like a life support machine, without which they could scarcely get out of bed. These are people who still clamour after daily infection rates (always still too high) and wring their hands at the uptake of booster jabs (3rd, 4th? doesn't matter, but they're never high enough). Then there are those who talk earnestly about their daily hygiene routines and commitment to social distancing, all resolutely honed to prevent transmission of both microorganisms and any sense of fraternity. These people can be found across society, but it strikes me that they are disproportionately represented by that wellspring of neuroses and civilizational ennui, the white professional middle classes. Which is to say the class of which I am a part.

We need a deeper understanding of the forms of subjectivity engendered by the pandemic. Thinking of how so many people continue to live in a state of epidemiological anxiety and fear, it’s as if bureaucratic risk management strategies characteristic of reflexive modernity have become personalised into a terror inducing hermeneutic of the self. Or to put it another way, risk has metastasized into a general concept of near religious significance, which at all times must be attended to with unswerving vigilance and adherence to rules made by an expanding class of technocratic administrators. What are we to do with these people and their priests, who exist as a standing army for the next wave of restrictions?

I don’t mean to suggest that the pandemic will return, but what is clear is that the model of response, which in practice deviated dramatically from the field of pandemic preparedness developed over the past thirty years, will set the framework for how State and non-State institutions handle future crises. It is appropriate to talk of 'Before Covid' and 'After Covid'; this being a reflection of the epochal shift in the world-picture, comparable to the shock of the Great War.

 Of paramount importance will be the consequences of redrawing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable government restrictions of fundamental rights. A new interpretation of the Social Contract is rising that drastically shifts the State’s responsibility away from the defence of rights and freedoms and towards a permanent war economy of bare survival in the face of inescapable decline. Such an apocalyptic form of politics can in no way be described as Liberal. Liberalism is dead. It was on a ventilator before the pandemic, and little SARS-CoV-2 has pulled the plug for good.

Giorgio Agamben has been off the mark about many things over the last two years, but his most recent comments, which revisit reflections on global civil war, accurately describe the way in which governments across the world have set up a series of fundamental divisions within society as a means to govern the emergency; vaccinated/unvaccinated, infected/uninfected (note this has no relation to any intuitive understanding of health!), Covid-Pass/No Covid-pass. These divisions continue to haunt us despite their legal force having been almost entirely removed, a fact which points to their power to normalise the State of Exception well after the Law has departed the scene. It is the remnants of these divisions which rise up as anxiety and animus when we warring citizens of the post-Covid world encounter each other.

What, then, should we make of the Italian philosopher's comments at the end of 2020, from his elegiac prose poem 'When the House Burns'?:

"Whoever realises that the house is burning can be tempted to look with disdain and contempt at his fellow men, who appear not to notice the flames. Yet is it not these men, who do not see and do not think, that will be the lemures to whom you will have to give an account on the final day? Realising that the house is on fire does not raise you above the others; on the contrary, it is with them that you will have to exchange a last look as the flames get closer. What can you say to justify your claims of conscience to these men who are so unaware that they seem almost innocent?"

His use of lemures (typical for Agamben) is ambiguous. Lemures, the etymology of which runs through larvae, meaning a frightening mask, and the Greek monster Lamia, were the unhappy spirits of archaic Roman religion. The aesthetic of ephemeral, miserable persons, wandering the night is perhaps what Agamben wants us to imagine, but he could also be referring to the idea in Ovid that the lemures were vagrant spirits, vengeful, for having not been afforded proper funeral rites. This interpretation is given credence owing to Agamben's previous statements on the scandal of those who were buried or burned during the lockdowns without proper ceremony. Perhaps, then, he is warning us that even those who do not see the devastation, perhaps even enable it, still deserve to be treated with the full ceremony befitting a human being.  It's also possible, since Agamben presumably does not think we'll be communing with ghosts, the term could be a veiled hint towards the stupefied, zombie like state of some people who drifted unthinkingly through the pandemic, conforming to every demand.

There is something seductive about Giorgio Agamben's use of these overburdened words from antiquity, just as so much of his pandemic writing was heavy on portent, but light on real analysis. I really hope that he writes a considered and extended theoretical account of the pandemic, drawing on his past work, and treating the events of the last two years with some minimal distance, enough at least to shake off the conspiratorial and at times just plain cranky tone of some of his interventions.

There are clues to what may be coming, out there amid the fevered anxieties and depressive hedonism of the lemures. Against Agamben I see more that is undead in the airbrushed face of a YouTube influencer than I do in the average Covid fanatic. People, like civilisations, rot from the inside, even while the surface appears as pristine as polished marble. If the true state of our inner putrefaction could be brought to the senses, the stench would empty the heavens.

Let us then point to the spectre of Climate Lockdown, a "conspiracy theory", all too conspicuous for its general plausibility, which the mainstream media have pre-emptively lumped in with the 5G paranoiacs and white supremacists. The basic premise is simple and emerges directly from the experience of the last two years. No "time and propinquity" nonsense is needed. It asks, under conditions of climate emergency, what is the more likely path governments around the world are going to take?

1. a massive intervention into the economy to shift production away from polluting and destructive forms of enterprise, and towards a sustainable and equitable distribution of resources. This would entail the wholesale tearing down of environmentally destructive capital accumulation; the abolition of the economy of Western overconsumption; a geopolitical consensus moving away from "strategic competition" towards rapid decarbonisation, and the relegation of the Arab petrostates back to the level of Bedouin backwaters.

Or

2. Will they keep the capitalist shitshow running, but with increasingly desperate authoritarian interventions into society for the purpose of maintaining the exploitative framework in the face of general collapse. One could gloss this scenario as technocratically managed decline. Climate lockdown is then a shorthand for those interventions which aim to address the climate crisis for the benefit of the minority, while the majority of the populations of advanced economies languish in a cage of digitally augmented vampire capitalism and permanent psychological warfare. You could call it Ecofascism for the few. 

I once put this line of reasoning to an Extinction Rebellion activist during their occupation of Waterloo Bridge in the Spring of 2019. During that action - which was a very seasonal and pleasant alternative to the hazy London traffic - one of their key demands was for so-called Citizen's Assemblies to be formed which would have the role of leading the government in their response to the climate emergency. This participatory democratic mechanism struck me as intuitively superfluous. After all, if you know enough to declare an emergency, and know broadly what has to be done to reduce carbon emissions, then surely it's a super strong executive rather than a flabby deliberative body that is needed? The activist I spoke to made a reference to the democratic deficit, but I failed to see how that connected to the need for action right there in the present. As we saw only a few month later during the pandemic, when the crisis actually hits, democracy becomes a luxury we can do without.     

It's no longer possible to deny that the conditions for these speculative futures already exist. Just as it is no longer possible to believe that mass slaughter and mechanised warfare are a relic of the 20th century. We are still the same wolf in sheep's clothing; homo homini lupus, a creature - who in the words of Schopenhauer - discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand. Centrist Dads may cheer the West's new-found military unity, but the expansion of Nato further into Northern Europe will only push the hands of the Doomsday clock closer to midnight. We'd largely forgotten about that clock, but its infernal machinery has never ceased to tick on through the long night of the Nuclear Age. A night without dawn, that was the result of our best science; a culmination of human endeavour that gave to us the God-like power of total self-annihilation. Though, in truth I believe the theologians of the Middle Ages concluded that God was incapable of suicide.

How then is it possible - returning to a question I initially formulated in February 2020 - to live well in a world that is dying?

A mass politics of palliative care is a remote possibility, though that's not far off what I think is needed. If decline is the unavoidable horizon against which every future must be set, then I for one would prefer a government of end-of-life nurses over Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's attempts to abolish death. No, if an adjustment to the New Normal (or should that be post-normal?) is at all possible, it won't come by the way of mass political mobilisation.

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.

Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let's choose executors and talk of wills.

And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Richard II, Act 3 Scene 2

To be a witness to the emptiness, the illegitimacy and vainglorious impotence of Western institutions, at the moment of their eclipse; is this all that is left to do? Can even this be done with some measure of dignity? Decline and Fall may be the interpretative key for the present, but the ethos of the witness, that anarch who remains in place while others scatter, can only be one of exhilarated despair. There's no contradiction here. The person who embraces radical finitude in the spirit of exhilarated despair is the diametrical opposite of the depressive hedonist, whose insatiable pleasure seeking is analogous to the somnambulant march of the un-dead, who twitch and fret their way towards the abyss. In contrast, exhilarated despair is a cleared eyed expression of the reality principle, which recognises in the promise of radical finitude (that is, finitude at the civilizational level) the possibility, if not of happiness, then at least something approaching contentment. To be released from the demands of the society of production, of unceasing optimisation of the self, of the death march of progress; to escape all this and to be able to turn one's face to the warmth of the sun, that is to live well in a world which is dying.

Exhilaration as a mode of despair is the sine qua non for riding the Western rollercoaster as it reaches the top of the incline. Slowing to a crawl, the passenger brave enough to look around is afforded a spectacular view of all that has occurred up to this point. The car tips forward, and the feeling wells up from the pit of your stomach as you hurtle back down to Earth.

wheeeeeeeeeee!