This post is part three of three. (You can find part one here, and part two here.) The images across these posts are from Any Other Business, a exhibition of mine and Rohanne Udall’s work that we recently presented at an artist-led space in Nottingham called Gasleak Mountain. The particular works pictured below – pen drawings on tracing paper, which have then been fixed to panes of glass – are all called Pull Yourself Together. The photos were taken by Freddy Griffiths.
Dear readers,
I find the question of institutional responsibility – where the previous post ended – most striking when considering roles in which one is meant to be supporting another. It is not simply a matter of how content or ashamed we might feel about our own efforts by themselves (if there is ever a situation as simple as that), but in how our efforts within a compromised situation might go on to compromise others. I assume that our feelings of responsibility and obligation towards are complex, and are felt by different people in vastly different degrees: coming about not only from our professional lives and circumstances, but also deeply personal and formative experiences of which any of us can only be partly aware.
This question – of personal responsibility in upholding institutional demands that cannot be met – has arisen throughout this PhD project. Over the past few years, the academic union UCU has been taking strike action over what they term the ‘Four Fights’, one of which concerns the unsustainable workload of staff.1 They (we) argue that the hours allocated to each academic staff member to complete the various aspects of their workload (e.g. teaching, marking, administration, research, etc.) in no way reflect the actual time required to fulfil of these responsibilities. Despite already being pushed to their limits by the pre-existing working conditions, the University of Roehampton (where I am undertaking my research) alongside other universities have undertaken massive redundancies, further burdening the academic staff who remain.
Additionally, all of this has taken place during and in the aftermath of Covid lockdowns, which has placed significant demands on teaching staff to devise new strategies for online learning, and also fulfill their pastoral responsibilities to support increasing numbers of students expressing profound needs.2 How much can we expect of someone while they are living through a pandemic? How much can we expect of someone in what might be deemed a “non-crisis” situation; in the ongoing tumult and trying circumstances that constitutes ‘regular’ life, in this country, at this time?
One of the things that many of my fellow PhD students and I have discussed over the past couple of years has been the feeling of apprehension and uncertainty about how much if feels reasonable to ask or expect of our supervisors. There are certain expectations (a minimum amount of meetings a year, some administrative duties, the understanding that they will read and give feedback on some written materials), which students and supervisors formalise or not depending on their particular relationship. Many of us have expressed doubts about how much we can or should ask for, and how appropriate it is to push or insist when such agreements of support are not upheld.
And these are just the more easily identifiable factors of these relationships. It is far more complex to make sense of the more affective and intimate possibilities of intellectual or professional mentorship.3 To what degree should we allow ourselves to be dependent on another person, and when does that become an unfair burden? What is a reasonable or unreasonable expression of need? I am reminded of the moment in Neil Bartlett’s novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, set in 1980s London, in which the narrator reflects on the woman who runs the gay bar at the center of the novel, and the profound ways the patrons of the bar grew dependent upon her:
Do you know what that meant, and means, to have someone who was there every night like that? Sometimes I wonder why she didn’t collapse under the sheer weight of how much we needed her, of how unreasonably we all admired and needed her.4
One way of thinking about individuals in positions of responsibility within the arts or academia is to remind ourselves that we, in the UK, are thirteen years into austerity: a social and political programme that has enacted significant cuts to political, civil, educational, medical and welfare services. Our infrastructures of care and support are decimated. There are fewer resources; less time and less flexibility to operate in ways that can be responsive to interpersonal and intersectional complexities, as opposed to adhering to ill-fitting administrative programmes of activity. But while this is true – and certainly has ramifications in the arts and academia, and how the how individuals are able to interact with one another – I hesitate. To understand any kind of friction within our institutional encounters as entirely being the consequence of austerity seems to obviate any individual operating within these structures of any responsibility.
I want to return to my encounter with the producer working in the theatre local to me. I had been offered a meeting with them to discuss and advise on my practice, and I had quickly decided it was most useful for me to hear their candid feedback on my project. But there seemed to be both personal and organisational factors that were making it difficult for them to offer this to me. I ended up spending most of the meeting trying to support and cajole them their hesitations and anxieties, such that they could share with me their thoughts.
I was and am fascinated by this dynamic: in which a person is expecting to receive support from an organisation, yet finds it necessary to facilitate the other person to do their job. (I suspect this is not an uncommon experience in publicly-funded institutional arts in the UK, or in other fields.) This apparent reversal of roles (who is offering or receiving support) throws up immediate questions about what we understand an offer of ‘support’ to be.
In publicly-funded arts in the UK, the kind of meeting the producer and I had is frequently offered to artists alongside and distinct from more tangible resources (funding, studio space, etc.). It is ‘conversational support’, with the artist usually being able to direct the subject of the conversation (artistic concerns, project design, funding, etc.) with the institutional staff member listening and offering recommendations.5 Rather than a totally open-ended conversation between two individuals, it is an asymmetric exchange in which the needs and interests of one person is being prioratised, for which the other person (temporarily, and to some degree) puts aside or minimises their own desires. A currently popular term for this asymmetry is to say that one person is “holding space” for the other, and could be applied to a range of very different contexts such as mentor and mentee, therapist and client, academic supervisor and student, and artist development officer and artist. (I am fascinated with this term, and its relationship to ‘hosting’, and I want to explore it further, elsewhere. It feels like it usefully encapsulates something, but I find myself repulsed when most people speak about it.)
In their publication Producing Liveness in Interesting Times (written during and partly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic), the performance producers The Uncultured highlight this relational asymmetry as being central to their work. They describe the figure of the producer as ‘holding everything’6, and evoke the complex efforts and demands of this position; of being “someone who fights for the best for those they work with. […] Someone who knows the minutiae of relevant policy but can also be a right laugh. […] Someone who can contain all emotion. […] Someone who listens without speaking. Someone who knows they don’t have to be listened to. […] Someone who is both within the ‘we’, and outside of it.”7 They note the particular tensions of sustaining oneself when in the role of offering support to others, by describing themselves as being “[s]omeone who cannot fail, who cannot be tired or sick […], who does not experience ill mental health.”
Many of the producers The Uncultured invited to contribute to the publication wrote of the challenges of sustaining themselves alongside their efforts to support the artists they work with:
As a producer I value caring for, welcoming, hosting, and helping to create supportive spaces for/with the people I’m working with, but sometimes it can be difficult to prioritise strategies for looking after myself.8
These reflections are coming from the perspective of freelance producers, but I find the provocations useful to reflect on the ethics of holding an organisation role that offers support to others (alongside many other kinds of roles and fields). How do we – those people offering support – sustain ourselves, and ensure we are able to continue to support others? What kinds of composure or coherence are necessary to fulfil our responsibilities others? And how to we account for our situations when we are unable – for whatever reason – to provide the support that is agreed or needed?
As Cineros et. al write, just as freelance artists themselves live “precarious lives”, “the institutions that are designed to support them are themselves surviving hand to mouth.”9 The texts of The Uncultured speak to the widespread struggles of many working within the UK’s publicly-funded arts organisations to fulfil their responsibilities. Throughout this PhD, I’ve been in a fraught dialogue with an organisation, which is nominally meant to be hosting this research, in which members of staff have been unable to reply to communications or deliver on contractually-agreed resources, reported themselves as going through profound crises, and have repeatedly broken down crying in meetings.
There are all sorts of reasons why we might find ourselves or our colleagues falling apart at work. Grief and desire are well documented for their capacity to unsettle and unmaster us.10 Both of these feelings have arisen throughout my PhD process, and taken up significant chunks of my time, to the benefit or detriment of the project as a whole. We could understand these things as being ‘personal’ experiences of an individual worker, with the wider organisation being able to make accommodations for certain periods of intensity (bereavement leave, etc.) But this presumes both that the organisations itself is not significantly responsible for the deep distress and incapacity they might have arisen. How much can one be expected to ‘hold it together’, within a crumbling institution, and what might be the risks of doing so?
One of the risks of ‘coping’ is that it can create a culture of expectation. I have a friend who is a senior academic, who always promptly replies to email and regularly maintains a public blog to disseminate his research. This might sound relatively unexceptional, but due to the particular conditions and culture of academia in the UK, it is uncommon. Sometimes when I’m describing this person to my friends, I joke about them feeling like a bit of ‘scab’ (a worker who crosses a picket line). Their capability to keep on top of their workload seems to undermine the UCU’s argument of unsustainable demands being made of academics. My friend’s capacity to manage, in this situation, might create an expectation for others to similarly get by. The design of our institutions can ‘flatten out’ the nuances of each individual’s particular situation, and the contextualising factors that shape the capacity for this person’s work. Like me, my friend is able-bodied, in secure housing, and without dependents. Few people are in this situation. I can only speculate about the life of my friend, but I know that I have an uncommon dedication to my working life that reflects in my activity both within and outside of the frame of the PhD. I spend a significantly more amount of mental, social and emotional energy on my work I think is required in many other professional fields. I regularly work weekends. Broadly, I am content with this; I have some sense of what is driving my commitment, and I feel aware of some of the things that I miss out on, and I’m currently happy with those compromises. However I wouldn’t expect or demand any other PhD student to make such a commitment to ‘succeed’, let alone ‘get by’. When speaking with peers about work, I try to be vigilant about noticing the differences in our lives that shape our different capacities to work.
Secondly, alongside the pressures it can place upon others, one’s ‘coping’ can be can be an excuse to legitimise and sustain the situation. If one manages one’s overwhelming workload, than that workload will be seen to be manageable. It will not decrease; if anything, it might be seen as an invitation to management to pile even more on. When and how does our sustaining of ourselves actually end up sustaining the systems we might object to, and want to protest? To what degree are we willing to risk refusal or collapse, and potentially let down others down who we care about? I frequently hear academics and arts administrative staff trying to keep up with their workloads, in an attempt to adequately support their students. I assume many people working in arts organisations similarly are driven to persist within hostile circumstances, in order to protect a small part of the programme, and ensure some resources are still being directed to artists or communities they admire or in which they feel invested.
Is it possible to honour these promises, and to protect oneself, while also pushing back against the system, against management, and refusing to perpetuate this situation? I don’t think it’s a binary: to cope or collapse. Our refusals can be specific and strategic. During the summer, I went for a drink with one of my friends had recently finished his first year as a full-time academic. At the start of the year, he was thrown in to the deep end – leading various modules that were outside of his expertise, being tasked with reshaping the undergraduate programme, and also various pastoral responsibilities toward the students. He had been overwhelmed and exhausted. But when we catching up at the end of the academic year, I was amazed to hear the shift in his demeanour. He told me about developing systems for his workdays over the course of the teaching year: he started to only look at email at certain times of day, and had learned what he could prioratise or delegate. He shifted how he was participating in and leading different committees and positions of responsibility; to what degree he would respond to input on certain matters from colleagues, and when he might exert his authority on a matter, despite others being dissatisfied.
One of the ways I would characterise this shift in my friend is to say that he was no longer ‘at the mercy’ of the institution (as my friend the guest curator would put it). Rather than reacting to and trying to satisfy the demands being made of him, he was able to instigate various structures that could manage the flow of tasks and demands. He could determined which tasks were of greatest importance, how much time he was willing to allocate for others, and what he could bypass or reject entirely. Rather than merely ‘coping’ with the workload offered to him within the organisation, or ‘collapsing’ under its strain, he was consciously and strategically identifying which processes he would uphold or push back on, and further, which values and processes he wanted to introduce into his department to reshape the wider culture there.
It’s rarely clear just how much agency someone might have in their institution to respond to their circumstances or effect change. We work within complex webs of external pressures (governmental policy, funding, market pressures), internal infrastructures (the particular values and design of the institution, legacy of old and possibly obsolete infrastructures), and then interpersonal mess of our colleagues and ourselves. We all have different skills, capacities, and limits.
Most roles have some formal delineation of expected responsibilities and decision-making, and of how or when workers are able to voice their concerns or ideas within their teams. But these do not necessarily match up to the actual processes or cultures within the organisation. Our agency in any given situation can often only become clear through how that agency is permitted or circumscribed in actual practice. You try something out in a given situation, and you realise you can get away with it. Or you butt up against an invisible wall, and are met with implied or explicit threats by others.
When I was co-organising with other students to protest the redundancies taking place at Roehampton in the autumn and winter of 2020/21, we held a series of ‘Open Forums’. These were large meetings on Zoom (it was the middle of lockdown) in which we had invited all staff, students, management and other stakeholders of the university – local politicians, representatives from the trade union, etc. These were meetings in which different individuals could speak towards the issues at the university, and in which these different parties could share information with one another that had been withheld or misrepresented in management’s communications. Despite management never attending these meetings, we were modeling a different way that the various agents across the university could listen to, demand from and support one another.
One senior academic reflected to us privately, a little later on, that these Open Forums were the action we had undertaken that had most impressed them. They felt like such a dramatic shift within the university: nothing like that had happened there before. Rather than simply attend the meetings that management had held to ‘address student concerns’, the students now had the right to call their own meetings, and demand that different figures holding significant roles of responsibility within the university should turn up to and participate in these meetings. It’s unclear what impact these Open Forums might have had on the wider redundancy process (or how one would go about measuring that), but the senior academic suggested that these meetings gave rise to a meaningful shift within the university about the culture of permission – of taking and granting ourselves the permission to speak and organise in ways that were not established or expected.
I’m interested in this term, ‘permission’, and how it intertwines with the concepts of ‘hosting’ and ‘belonging’ that are central to this PhD. ‘Permission’ is a nice word. It is often used in a positive sense, and is imbued with good feeling. Yet, in this situation at Roehampton, I could just as easily use the word ‘entitlement’: which is nasty word, imbued with bad feeling, and often used to connote privilege and arrogance. Both words could be used to address situations (like in Roehampton, or with my friend the junior academic) in which people are choosing to act in ways that have not been explicitly or implicitly granted by others. I would suggest that rather than any firm differences between these terms, their distinction seems to reflect the perspective and tastes of the speaker. Going ‘off-piste’ can be celebrated or reproached by others.
But we can think about not only to the individual whose ‘entitlement’ has lead them to deviate from convention, but also consider how their actions have an effect on others. The senior academic who praised our Open Forum was not merely celebrating our actions in themselves, but in how they cultivated a culture in which others students (and others) had a new sense of permission and agency in this situation. In Gregg Borodovitz’ obituary for Douglas Crimp – both significant figures in the American art world, both active members of HIV/AIDS activist group ACT UP in the late ‘80s – wrote of the effect of Crimp’s contributions to the generation of activists younger than him: “Douglas gave us all a lot of permission to do a lot of things—and not as acts of authority. He didn’t “grant” permission, as if to a vassal or like a member of the clergy. Douglas opened doors and freed us from conventions and restraints by leading the way, by being an exemplary figure of courage.”11 This has become my definition of leadership: not the managerial practice of designating and overseeing responsibilities, but the degree to which my actions can cultivate a sense of permission to others.12
This still doesn’t offer any firm distinction between ‘permission’ and ‘entitlement’ (e.g. leadership as ‘good’ behaviour that gives permission to others, with entitlement as purely self-interested action, etc.). However, it can help attend to the many factors at play in a situation in which individuals are complying with or deviating from institution protocols, and how we can value or critique those behaviours. I have no desire to celebrate some abstracted sense of heroic defiance here. Reflecting on his working life, a friend recently admitted that his critique and avoidance of various tiresome institutional bureaucracies was partly sustained by through the efforts of his (predominantly female) colleagues who handled the administration. The leadership different individuals is accepted or censured due to class, race, disability etc. Who can get away without doing the work – and who is left to pick up the slack?
The potential demand to rethink and redirect the institutions we are part of is endless. Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, the theatre company Slung Low in Leeds changed its operations to become a food bank, in order to better respond to the needs of its local community in Holbeck, which suffers extreme deprivation.13 In Alan Lane’s book The Club on the Edge of Town (2022), the charismatic artistic director of the company reflects on the extraordinary challenges he and his colleagues faced in sustaining these efforts. He writes about their long-term disposition of going against the grain, which lead them to do undertake this extraordinary new venture:
When we started out making theatre, the people who had been doing it for a long time told us that we were doing it wrong […] and we ignored them and after a while everyone agreed that we were doing it right. […] And the same thing when we opened a food bank: that we were doing it wrong, we were naive, we were putting public money at risk, that we were dangerous […]. And we ignored them and got on with it. And after a while they gave us a medal for doing it.14
These efforts require deep self-confidence and bullheadedness. Lane acknowledges the risks of such qualities:
the hardest part of doing this is dealing with the fear I have about being wrong with this next challenge. […] the fear that years of smashing ourselves up against systems designed to keep the status quo in place[…]. What if I become part of the problem rather than an attempt at a solution? Certainty has been the best weapon, best advantage for twenty years – the crowbar by which we’ve made real change in a number of places from an improbably unimpressive starting position. […] But that certainty will be […] my undoing eventually.15
Lane gives extensive details about the team’s efforts to honour the responsibilies they feel and commitments they have made to their local communities. Throughout this period, Lane seems to have made himself endlessly available to others: forming close relationships with people he is serving in the community16, attempting to carry himself with compassion and patience while interacting with individuals with complex and profound needs17, and responding to unexpected crises despite his evident exhaustion.18
I find Lane’s relentless effort both praise-worthy and disquieting. He acknowledges that the needs of the community that he and his team are responding to are the consequences of much larger issues (he identifies the Tory government’s Hostile Environment as “an active policy to make some people’s lives unpleasant.”) and suggests that “it was only vanity in my heart that made me think, if only for a few moths, only within a small neighbourhood, that maximum effort and total commitment could overcome that cruelty.”19) He recognizes that his efforts amount to short-term solutions to mitigate harm, and can only hope that this acts in concert with others who might be working to address these issues in the long-term: “We are the people with the finger in the dam hoping, hope against all experience and evidence, that someone upstream is doing something to make the situation better in the long run.”20
Why do some people feel so driven towards supporting others, and how do they live with the potential endlessness of the problems they are seeking to address? As Hannah Arendt notes, “It is obviously not everybody’s responsibility to be a saint or a hero.”21 Lane suggests that all the people he works with have their own personal experiences that motivate their extraordinary efforts: “I do this because of a chip on my shoulder. I’ve never met anyone who drives change who doesn’t have a chip.”22 Lane offers his own story to account for his motivations: a sense of civic justice based in his desire that no one should be met with the indignity that he and his mother suffered when he was a child. Others, like Quentin Crisp, write from an endless guilt in the face of their responsibilities toward others: “I am assailed once again with the feeling that overtakes me whenever I think of anyone that I have known well. I didn’t do enough.”23
The Croatian trans activist Romana Bantic strives to support younger trans people, through both formal support groups in LGBT+ spaces, and through more personal mentoring that occasionally takes place in her own home. She speaks of the complex balancing of caring for others, and sustaining herself:
I can’t deal with that, with other people’s problems. I cry all the time. I see injustice and I get very sad. I try to be brave, to lift you up. But when I’m left alone, I’m full of sorrow, I cry and I’m unhappy that things have to be that way. That’s why I’ve distanced myself a bit. I can’t give so much of myself because I’m transitioning as well. I love to help and I love to be available but I can’t take it too personal because that’s my biggest problem.24
In the same interview, Bantic reports that these younger generations think of her as a ‘mother’ or ‘grandmother’. I’m interested in this lens, and viewing the figure of the activist not as a the patriarchal figure of the heroic man, but rather the figure of the mother, who sustains a seemingly-endless project of tireless and tiring care. I think the figure of ‘the mother’ is useful in accounting for our ethical obligations to others: particularly in offering care that might sit in conflict with our care for ourselves, and in situations which endure for seemingly-endless periods of time, that cannot be resolved through a dramatic event of (self-sacrificing) action.25 I was speaking with a friend recently – an artist, and life-long anti-nuclear and anti-capitalist activist, who these days is mostly busy providing end-of-life care to friends and family – about how we were making sense of our efforts within our respective communities, and she drew on the metaphor of breastfeeding. She noted that when giving milk to an infant, the body will continue to give nutrients even at the expense of the body’s own need for them.
To make sense of this, one could retreat from such depleting demands of care by insisting on ‘healthy boundaries’, or from drawing from rhetorics that insist on the need for activists to nourish, rest and care for themselves. As an alternative to these models of exhaustive demand, there are black feminist traditions of thought that insist on care and replenishment of the self. I’ve not read it yet, but I understand that this to be a central tenet of adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism (2019). I’ve continually returned to this extraordinary passage by Audre Lorde, that suggests her vitality and energy seems to be directed towards herself as much as any others:
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. […] I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!26
But as much want to spend more time with this tradition, I do so with a note of suspicion. Rather than seek a harmonious solution, I’m interested retaining some understanding of the troubling potentials of the practices of care and support. For example, the philosophers Fred Moten and Stefano Harney insist on the privileged role of the figure of the mother within the political practices of ‘assembly’ and ‘sharing’. While acknowledging of how the history of maternal labour is dependent on the exploitation of women (particularly Black women), they continue to insist on the unsettling qualities of this figure’s availability to others:
Sharing is not an interpersonal relationship. One doesn’t share, one is shared. Now, the greatest moment […] of feeling the combination of horror and possibility of this is in Hortense Spillars work [which] emphasises for us the utter access […] that has to stay open for that kind of sharing to take place. […] The kind of sharing we’re talking about is ‘being accessed’. […] We’re already in each other, we already have a way of moving each other, a way of being in each other. And so much, of course, of the march of the modern bourgeois subject is the closing off of that truth […] the closing off to what Denise [Ferreira da Silva] calls ‘affectability’.27
To be a mother, to try to care for others, or to continue to show up to the needs of ones communities, seems to me to be an irresolvably complex and troubling demand. In thinking back to the figure I alluded to earlier – the institutional staff member who appears to be working in a permanent crisis – I am curious about the ways we meet and adapt to the intensities of the situations we find ourselves in. How do the messes we attempt to meet, go on to mess us up – and to what degree do we allow that mess to spill over onto others? When do we call it a day, and step away from the ongoing demands of the particular organisation, or cause, or scene, and bear the profound and likely necessary process to recalibrate our sense of self? As the former producer Salome Wagaine asked herself, while contemplating stepping away from the field of theatre and performance: “I felt like I had been invested in, and I’d invested in myself […] I couldn’t throw all of that away, right?”28
I have been writing this text since July. it has been an intermittent process, and my efforts to complete this writing – my PhD work – have repeatedly interrupted by other obligations and demands. I have been delivering project with my collaborator Rohanne, which are always inevitably more complex and demanding that we have predicted. My father has died, and I have been dealing with various administrative and social demands that have come with that, alongside attending my own grief and that of my family. Where possible, I have been trying to show up to my friends and peers within my communities who have reached out to me in need. Over the past weeks, I have been receiving messages from friends in the Middle East, who are expressing their fears about eruption of violence in Palestine. I have attended protests, and shared information on my social media, I have tried to better educate myself about what is happening there, but again, these efforts are potentially endless – I have not put myself forward to co-organise any demonstrations, or taken part in any other forms of direct action. I keep trying to show up to the demands of each day, achieve can be done and bear the discomfort of letting others know what no longer seems possible, and insist on pockets of time to look after myself amidst all this too.
There is no ‘right answer’. The support each of us can offer is limited. We can only keep re-assessing where we are putting our energy: which demands we are responding to or turning down. We invest ourselves in particular communities, practices, organisations, causes, or individuals. By orienting ourselves towards these things, we are turning away from others. As Arendt notes, this can seen as much as matter of our desire to change the world, as it is the degree to which we can go on living with ourselves.29 We discover what we are unwilling to compromise on, or pick the hills we choose to die on, and then we live out our lives there.
Thanks for reading. I hope you’re all getting the support you need,
Paul
The feminist scholar Jane Gallop insists on and celebrates the possible intimacy of the student-supervisor relationship in a brilliant and very risky essay called ‘The Personal and the Professional: Walking the Line’, in her book Anecdotal Theory (2002, Durham and London: Duke University Press).
Bartlett, Neil (2017 [1990]) Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall. London: Serpent’s Tail. p.51
e.g.: “Sessions are informal and artist-led, offering an opportunity to talk about anything from artistic ideas and project development to funding and contexts for your work. […] These sessions are places of support, which means everything spoken about in these meetings is confidential. This also means this isn’t a place to pitch work that you hope to get produced at Artsadmin. The support team won’t share anything about you or your project with the rest of the Artsadmin producers.” See here.
Hale, Daisy (2022) Holding Everything Doesn’t Mean You Need to Do Everything, in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.3
The Uncultured (2022) ‘Producing f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶E̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶W̶o̶r̶l̶d̶ Liveness in Interesting Times’, in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.4
Rose, Sally (2022) Isolation and Loneliness, in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.3.
Ellis, S., McLelland, R., & Cisneros, R. K. (2023). Dance After Lockdown: Living With Paradox. Kritika Kultura, 2023(40), 154-175. p.166
I’m thinking of Katherine Angel’s book on sexual desire Unmastered (2014, London: Penguin Books) and Nick Blackburn’s account of his grief following his father’s death in The Reactor (2022, London: Faber).
I’m very interested in how these cultures of permission (and individuals’ leadership and courageousness) are remembered or forgotten as institutions pass down across generations. I have been meaning for a while to write something about note-taking, archives and legacy – how we develop or clear traces of our efforts, in anticipation for future generations – that I hope can somewhat address this.
In a remarkable passage, Lane sets out his mission by describing the violence of continuing to provide ‘artistic entertainment’ when people are without food:
“let’s imagine we are putting on a great cabaret in the car part. […] in one of the 200 houses and flats in line of sight and hearing of the club there is a women. Let’s imagine her as a zero-hour contract cleaner with two kids […] And she doesn’t know where she’s going to get the kids’ breakfast from tomorrow. And imagine the panic that causes in her chest. [..] And then she hears a noise – it’s a band starting up. The show is going to start. There’s no godly way she can possibly come to that show. That show becomes an act of aggression. A taunting, noisy disturbance. What started off as a moral imperative becomes a cultural aggression, an insensitivity that flows from the most cardinal of sins for professional artist – a lack of imagination. We know that people are in this situation. […] It’s not our fault. But it is our responsibility. It isn’t only our responsibility, nor our only responsibility. But it is our responsibility. How was I going to put on a big old, joyful show on in the middle of a pandemic whilst people went hungry as they started at the stage from their homes? Who would that make us?”
Lane, Alan (2022) The Club on the Edge of Town. London: Salamander Street. p.193-4
Ibid. p.207-8
Ibid. p.208
“Eric was everybody’s favourite. A genuinely pleasant man with tales of a glorious past who had managed to find himself alone and somewhat bereft in a two room flat with no oven. […] I lent in. Everyone sent with food was told to find ten minutes to listen to his stories […] he would ring me. Nearly every other day for most of the year. Normally before 8am as I drove along the motorway on the way to work.” p.173
“He’s crying now. […] He’s not shouting. Tears rolling down his face. A human desperate. […] ‘Just give me the money’ He’s up on his toes now. Fist clenched. I will knock him down if he comes for me. If I have to. But I’m hoping it won’t be necessary. […] That day was the day we bought 300 toys for kids ready for Christmas. We delivered sixty food parcels that day. And I did my day job. But in bed I was thinking of […] the moment Pete had given up. I’d broken him just by standing there. Refusing to move. It felt like bullying.” p.156
The press got interested and the local BBC News telly programme did a piece. I missed the piece wen it aired because I was having a bath. And whilst I was having a bath, my phone rang. […] I was tired, in the bath and at this point of the crisis, bored of being shouted at by members of the public.” p.121-122
Ibid. p.203
Ibid. p.174
Adrendt, H. (2003 [1964]) Personal Responsibiity Under Dictatorship, in Responsibility and Judgement. New York: Schocken Books. p.35
Lane, Alan (2022) The Club on the Edge of Town. p.175
Crisp, Quentin (1985) The Naked Civil Servant. London: Flamingo. p.191.
Queer Archives Institute (2016) Interview with Romana Bantic. Available here. From 5.30-6.30. I first saw this interview when exhibited as part of QAI/GB-NGM, an exhibition by Karol Radziszewski (who leads the Queer Archives Institute) at Bonington gallery in Nottingham in January 2022.
Earlier this year I heard Lisa Baraitser – who has written a book called Enduring Time (2017) and Maternal Encounters (2008) on give a lecture drawing from Joy James’s concept of the ‘captive maternal’. I want to spend more time with the work of both scholars.
Lorde, Audre (2017 [1988]) A Burst of Light. Dover Publications
Millenials are Killing Capitalism (2020) "Wildcat The Totality" - Fred Moten And Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 1) [Podcast]. Available here. From 44.30 - 46:00.
Wagaine, Salome (2022) The Only Way Out is Through the…No., in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.3
Adrendt, H. (2003 [1964]) Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship, in Responsibility and Judgement. New York: Schocken Books. p.44