I’ve left this a bit late. The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, the wonderful gallery space that brought us the highly acclaimed Rank, is running an exhibition through Saturday, 5 March, titled “Hints to Workmen.” The theme expresses a pointed critique of liberal paternalism, bringing together a pamphlet from the 1840s that aimed to provide clues to improve the lives of working people in a time of capitalist crisis with the recently popular notion of “nudge” promoted by Sunstein and Thaler, which tempts policy makers to imagine they can “design choice environments” to make it easier for people to make good (presumably in the view of the policy makers) choices. I’ll say more about liberal paternalism, in the context of international relations, below.
NGCA’s own description of the exhibit would lead one to expect this kind of pairing of historical and contemporary documents as an opportunity to reflect on the current crisis and the “big society” approach promoted by the Conservatives – which it does, quite ingeniously. But that is not what you first notice when you enter the gallery space. The exhibit is in fact very noisy, with numerous film and video installations. The first one you see, confronting viewers as soon as they pass the door into the gallery space, is Peter Watkins’ “La Commune,” a re-creation of the 1871 Paris Commune using non-professional actors. Circling through the gallery, the next video exhibit is Rainer Ganahl’s “Bicycling Moscow,” followed by Baptiste Debombourg’s “Babybottle 45,” Gailan Abdullah Ismail’s “Traffic,” and Anna McCarthy’s “How to Start a Revolution Part 1.” The combined effect of these video installations is to produce an aural environment that disrupts the contemplative readings of the pieces hung on the walls.
These hung pieces are the ones that the theme of the exhibit invokes. They are typically small: pages taken from the pamphlet referred to in the title of the exhibit, ads from the press for banks, building societies, and bonds sold for the Treasury. The captions for these provide a critical commentary on them, highlighting both the efforts of advertisers and their clients to “nudge” people to behave in ways that might sustain an unstable financial order – as well as the limits of these efforts. The Church of England, for example, started a building society out of concern that the cooperative movement’s socialist orientation promoted atheism but this building society only operated in the South East of England. HM Treasury’s bonds, promoted in 1921 as Geddes’s Big Axe was about to impose severe cuts in public spending, would have produced returns a fraction of the size of comparable investments in stocks – highlighting the class differences between investment opportunities that, despite financialization, are still the rule.
But the key is that the sound environment makes it difficult to take in these pieces as merely ironic juxtapositions. Indeed, the “nudge” is clearly taking place against an already-existing “big society” that is as unruly and uncooperative as it is diverse. The various video exhibits provide a variety of hints about what that “big society” might look like. Each of the videos described above, in addition to being noisy, also documents alternate uses of urban or public space. Haroun Farocki’s “Workers Leaving the Factory” collects a series of film loops including or resembling the Lumiere Brothers’ primitive clip showing people – strikingly, mostly women – passing through a factory gate. Other loops seem to come from Russia, Malaysia, and also from non-documentary film. Taken together, the loops reflect on the space that is the border between the time and energy the workers have sold and their private lives away from work. The Open Council documents ongoing experiments in transforming urban space through policy in defence of a strong notion of public space. Vinca Petersen’s photographs of the lives of travellers, ravers and anti-capitalist protesters also highlight the production and habitation of spaces that are not subordinated to the ordering of sovereignty and accumulation.
There are various other works on display that also make this exhibit well worth the time to see it (in the next 28 hours, regrettably). But the exhibit as a whole has its own meaning and the key to that meaning is that the liberal and paternalist stance both frames and is overwhelmed by the social forces it intends to “nudge.” With the uprisings in North Africa now, just as in 1989, we are seeing a re-visiting of the liberal internationalist project that seeks to nudge the forces unleashed against authoritarian command into directions where the unruly can be contained and subordinated. But there is another politics in play, as seen in the UK in the anti-cuts campaigns, in the defensive revival of trade union militancy in the US, and in the manifold mobilizations in support and sympathy with the people in North Africa. It is still an open question whether that politics can escape the enabling logic of sovereignty or break the subordination of its social and cultural energies to the economics of capital accumulation. The hints to workers on display here suggest a possible affirmative answer to that question.
