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1 Eddie and some of his relationships
All of the people that we have been fortunate enough to meet and have come to know during the course of our research, are extremely interesting, unique people, who in many respects confound expectations; despite the fact that in other ways, they also conform to many other depressing statistical expectations that act as indicators of likely chronic homelessness. Indicators such as: personal and family background; experiences of different forms of abuse; and the patterns of behaviour, including illegality, that the chronically homeless people that we have met have been drawn into, and which consequently have marked their lives. Eddie perhaps represents this duality of confounding and confirming these definitive expectations, by way of some of the most remarkable, yet at the same time typically illustrative, episodes of life forged through chronic homelessness that we encountered within the community that we got to know.
‘You haven’t got any burn, have you?’ he used to ask. Burn? This is a term frequently used to refer to tobacco. But in this context, being on the street amongst this community, burn also connotes a wider and more specific set of meanings. It’s not exclusively a term used in prison to refer to tobacco, but it does have a very conscious orientation of tobacco being located in relation to incarceration; especially since all of the people using this term from within this community have been, and for some continue to be, in and out of prison for offences ranging across a spectrum of seriousness and motivations; from, for example, attempted murder, to public order misdemeanours, such as drinking alcohol in public spaces where this activity is prohibited, and very often begging. Moreover, we’re not really talking about a couple of ounces of rolling tobacco, when burn is being referred to, which might quite easily be purchased from any appropriate high street shop. That’s never on the cards; that’s not how burn is acquired. It is perhaps worth briefly outlining why.
The very simple and – as it should be – taken-for-granted activity of walking into a shop and buying some cheap everyday item, first of all requires a series of important conditions to be in place; the most obvious condition being the power to purchase. For the most part, this is a power that the homeless people we know did not possess. The power and then disposition to purchase, say, a few ounces of tobacco, or a pint of milk, or a sausage roll from the Poundbakery, bestows upon the purchaser and the vendor a relationship that simultaneously both distances and makes intimate their respective economic being from their personal being. And this is more than really useful: it instantiates their respective externally symbolic and internally symbolic identities, the integrity of their being, of their internal self and the external world and position by which the self is accommodated; it, the self, being entirely dependent upon this gossamer thin (in some respects illusory) but fundamental division. This, of course granted, might sound at first rather over-theoretical, over-philosophically determined, but it’s not; we are actually playing this down: it’s fundamental to maintaining the illusion of who and what we are. Without which, we, in terms of our identities, would be lost. Nor is it, given a few moments reflection, very difficult to appreciate how this ordinarily works.
You need, desire, want, then let’s imagine, a few ounces of tobacco, or a pint of milk, or a sausage roll from the Poundbakery, and so step into the appropriate shop, and begin an entirely functional and transitory relationship with the person behind the counter, who is by this means able to facilitate the sale. It is your ability to engage in this entirely functional and transitory relationship with the person behind the counter that secures the sale; it maintains an ontological difference, which establishes the quintessence of your integrity, by marking a separation – in Marxist terms, the necessary alienation – between some notion of your personal identity, so that it is not you that is put on the line in this transaction, you are not exchanging something of yourself, some part of your essence; which, if it goes wrong, will mean risking some principle of your kernel, a sliver, possibly more, of your soul; when all you want is a few ounces of tobacco or a sausage roll from the Poundbakery. And it is in the most quotidian and taken-for-granted circumstances, when the inability to maintain this crucially superficial relationship, risks opening a horizon within which your social credibility, awkwardly drifts into the social toilet.
Excuse me, would it be possible, you see, I don’t have a £1 to exchange for one of your overly flaky, bland, hot, greasy pastry rolls wrapped around a barely turgid, quivering, fatty, pink-grey and momentarily comforting seven-inch tube of sausage ‘meat’; but maybe.…?
‘What?’ the outraged inquisitorial retort from behind the counter cuts off your miserable and entirely ineffective description of what and who you might be, and the predicament that you have found yourself in. ‘Excuse me? Don’t you know how this works? Are you’ – because everyone is a philosopher these days, even, no perhaps especially, if you make your living by working in the Poundbakery: so –
are you ontologically retarded or something? Are you asking, actually requesting if you can have a portion, a sliver of my fine industrially produced food product of indeterminate origin? And are you bartering, in an attempt to achieve this sorry state of acquiring part of a sausage roll, bits of yourself, supplemented with a few inadequate coins, by means of your story, and your, at this moment, very unappealing condition of actually not belonging? Moreover, are you making an appeal to something beyond the functionality of my own position here, stripping, in the process, the distance away that distinguishes me from my own superior position in relation to you, as wage-slave vendor?
For some political reasons, of course, as the complex history of alienation, and its descriptions and analyses in the works of thinkers as diverse as Descartes, Novalis, Marx and Lacan demonstrate: it is sometimes strategically essential to claim that identity is continuous with and indeed belongs by fundamental right – since this is how it defines itself – as itself to itself. Though this obviously, to reiterate, is a political act. To claim, by some means or other, that you are in important ways separated from yourself; in the sense of being distinguished from the fruits of your labour, whatever and wherever that might be; so that you are dislocated; has been, and continues to be, the fuel that motivates much of the ideology of identity, in many of its local, national and personal guises. Phrases such as, this land is ours, or, these are my rights as a citizen, or, that is my entitlement as a national subject, or even, they are my people, all indicate a degree of alienation in the sense of the self quite naturally by right dispersed across geography, time, personal relation, consanguinity and population; where this dispersed and differentiated being extends its dominion and power through its politically claimed subjectivity that unites these various areas as different facets of a single (complex) identity.
There are, then, a number of positions that are extremely advantageous, which fall naturally from the logic of this very pervasive model of identity that works in relation to conditions of belonging by right (by birthright, by divine right, by right of being born within a domain, by right of familial or any different arbitrary relation, are examples and variants of this ubiquitous theme), and are readily, if not ‘genetically’, assumed as part of the birthright by its various subjects. An example being: well, anything you might own; such as a slave, or a sausage roll. Which means that this relationship between being and owning occurs, potentially, in a very shocking way; so that, whilst you own this slave and sausage roll, as a result of your hard labour, or other form of power, converted into money to better facilitate the purposes of exchange; this slave and this sausage roll are not you, they are your property, so that you have dominion over them – that it is to say, you own the territory, the event horizon, upon which their identity is forged; and it is, therefore, according to this same logic of identity in relation to belonging by right, your own right – which is the same right by which your own identity hangs – that allows you to do what you want with them. (And ‘hangs’ in several senses: in the sense that it is by this device that your identity is secured; and in the sense that this same device is looped around your neck, always ready to strangle your identity into its demise; and continuously, too, in the sense that this condition of your identity is always in this form of it being suspended by this conditionality). Indeed, not to have this right over what you possess would bring into question the fact that it was yours, and that you were by this right who you said you were: this being a nexus around which juridical practice is commonly based as the instrumental realisation of the Symbolic Law (for example, crimes against the person are based upon the same person being the property of and belonging to themselves; which also explains by definition why a crime against the property of a person is so, namely because it is against the law of belonging to a person, as being the point of its property origin). And it is this alienation, of course, of some aspect of some identity of itself from itself, or of oneself from oneself, such as your work from yourself, or your investments from yourself, or your property from yourself; as well as no less abstract manifestations of identity by right, that are more often associated with a kind of revolution, such as yourself from your place of origin, perhaps in terms of class, gender, politics or religion, as well as in other ways. It is this definable ability, to acquire and dispense with, by right, that which we own, but not as ourselves, that is the cornerstone of being able to walk into the Poundbakery with a pocket containing at least a pound’s worth of change and successfully purchase – not score, like tobacco and burn that’s very different – a nice and greasy seven-inch sausage roll. And for obvious reasons, it was a cornerstone in a house that Eddie, and the other people that we have come to know, did and do not have.
So to return to what used to be one of Eddie’s persistent questions, ‘Have you got any burn, Paul, mate?’ indicates a number of assumptions, and a particular and dislocated context. Dislocated in the sense that: most of the people that we were surrounded by whenever Eddie asked, that is to say the people standing near or passing us by on the street, if they smoked, simply bought their tobacco in one form or another in a shop. In these circumstances, preparing to smoke involves some impersonal variant of exchanging cash for cigarettes. I was always interested and grateful for the fact that Eddie routinely seemed to assume this was not an option that was open to me. Which is where ‘burn’ comes in. ‘Burn’ is, of course, at least hopefully, predominantly tobacco. It’s usually in some sense ‘second hand’, or at least acquired without money. Not having cash for tobacco, but wanting or needing to obtain it, can involve: bartering, by using other goods and services in exchange for tobacco; wheedling, which is very often based on a promissory return of future good deeds, as well as the application of any moral, personal or other form of pressure available to the wheedler; theft of various kinds; but most usually, scavenging and recycling tobacco from the butt ends of other discarded cigarettes, retrieved from the pavement, or filched from ashtrays, or found in bins, or plucked from anywhere else, typically involving a ten-minute scouring of the streets, especially around tables placed outside cafés, and on the floor of the shelters and on the ground at the bus station. The gathered butt ends are then picked apart, and the shards of any remaining tobacco are collected together and used to roll a new smoke. The reference to and the practice of acquiring and using ‘burn’ is therefore a reference to a practice that is in one sense culturally displaced; that is to say, it originated in prison or in the margins of economic and social being. But in another sense, the practice of acquiring and using ‘burn’ is not clearly culturally displaced, since as the practice exists, it is not the clarity of its existence that is a characteristic of its identity, but instead that it is most frequently un-seen.
To be un-seen is a special term, here, meaning, there but ignored, or obscurely regarded, or even overlooked, but specifically because not to do so would unsettle the behaviours and practices of their more mainstream parallels (in this instance, simply buying and smoking tobacco bought from a shop); wherein the ‘un’ has the effect of cancelling out, or annulling the recording, of that which has otherwise been regarded and ought not to have been. This is because being un-seen, its ontological status, is principally a characteristic of not belonging. The material illustration of this philosophical point is not very difficult to understand. Ironically, it is clearly illustrated by the practice of acquiring and using ‘burn’: virtually no one does this, no one collects and smokes discarded dog-ends, inevitably from those economically and culturally more privileged than yourself; no one, that is, who has not spent some considerable time on the streets, and being very literally outside, un-accommodated, un-seen.
So I always, then, had mixed emotions, that’s what happened, when Eddie asked me something along the lines of, ‘Have you got any burn, mate?’ What was going on? What was he referring to? True enough, when he, and any of the others I was with, were involved in searching for discarded cigarette ends on pavements, in bins, in ashtrays at empty tables outside cafés and restaurants, I did search with them; but whilst others brought drugs and an unshakable willingness to consume drugs, my more natural recourse, even as an unsolicited contribution to the group, was to buy a packet of cigarettes from the shop. So what, if anything, was going on? Were we becoming confused about who we were, about our different histories, about our respected places of occupation, and where we belonged and lived? What, just in case such a thing was required, was the motivation for this dislocated question that was so often put to me? The overriding and interesting point in all of this, is that all explanations, indeed, all attempts at explanation, are startlingly inadequate; and that they all point, via their inadequacy, to somewhere else; to some place, that is thoroughly beautifully disquieting. Very briefly, this is how it happens.
One type of example of explanatory inadequacy would include something along the lines of: ‘He was being accepted into the homeless community, and this was being signalled by the way that every now and then he was enfolded into their discourse through the practices he engaged in with them.’ And another: ‘Through dialogue, and “being open to the other”, the barriers distinguishing the two communities became dissipated and porous, indicating a common human inclusiveness as realised by the adoption of a common terminology, since language bonds.’ And even:
What we witness in this example, through Eddie, is a temporary forgetting of identities that previously indicated with respect to each other, alienation; so an amnesia of difference has been facilitated by the patient ethnographic process of extended situational understanding.
It does not require much ability to be able to detect that each accounting is in essence a version of the same explanation. One explanation might emphasise a careful listening; another, a self-reflexive awareness of one’s own position, perspective and prejudices; and yet another, the mutual dismantling of barriers that impede communication. The fact is that for any explanation of this phenomenon, there is no movement away from the liberal humanism of essential identity and difference. Integral to the order to remove barriers to communication is the prior requirement that any protagonists involved re-establish who they are, and who they are not, together with their associated values, meanings, behaviours and allegiances. This process of knowing, of knowing one’s self, and therefore one’s other, and any barriers that emerge, erected from the practice of knowing, itself depends upon a re-establishing, and a shoring up, of the differences expressed by the various borders that demarcate the psychological, political and cultural forms of being inhabited by, in this case, those who belong, and those who do not; that is to say those outside, or at least in the margins of who we are, the homeless. And where do we find ourselves? If we are fortunate to belong, then where we find ourselves is on the pragmatically constructed ground of metaphysics, because that is where we attempt to locate and secure our identities. So what does this mean regarding the attempt to explain what was going on when I was being asked for burn?
In Lacanian terms, attempts to explain point towards something indicative of the incompleteness of our being, which is forged into being as if whole, as if determined by itself; as if an a priori being true to one’s self, as if the authenticity of our identity was innate and the precondition for our being; as if the contradiction at the heart of any such understanding, involving the unique authenticity of each of our identities being determined alone by themselves; and in so doing, requiring the entire history of the population to have had its identity Fated, and therefore not determined by itself, and not through the practice of the Symbolic Order. As if one simply is or becomes homeless, just as if one simply is or becomes a person who is not homeless and belongs, as if these are a priori properties of being. And indeed, the prospect of being homeless, its dead end of the line status, where there is no actual place to be within the Symbolic Order, realised in this case as being in the city, and more broadly as being in the nation, is so terrible, so demeaning, so wretched an existence in the collective Imaginary of those who do belong, as to be virtually unaccountable. Making the possibility of movement between the two designations, those who belong and have somewhere to live, and those who do not belong and have nowhere to live, or are only barely and temporarily accommodated in the margins of those who belong, seem all the more impossible. Because there is something in addition to, or perhaps even about the facts of the matter, that has led to you being homeless; something else, according to this essentialist perspective, about the fact, say, that you have experienced almost continuous trauma and deprivation since you were born, as a set of circumstances that are statistically likely to propel you towards homelessness; a something else, to do with but beyond the stubborn empirical likeliness of any such context having a near identical impact on any being, not just you; which is precisely that it was not just any person, but was you, and was not me; and – with a brutal twist of the same essentialist logical knife – it is thus you who has experienced all of these conditions that have conspired to make you homeless (and not me) because it is you; because you are and have become indistinguishable from these conditions; and because of that, it is not me who is homeless. This essentialist because, in relation to what we might call the facticity of homelessness, saturates our understanding of who and what we are. Its effect is, as already mentioned, a re-establishing, and a shoring up, an over-determination of the differences experienced and expressed through, in this case, the contexts of belonging and not belonging.
A very predictable consequence of this over-determination is that, quite apart from stubborn social facts that describe differences in the lives of homeless people and people who have somewhere to live; relative incompatibilities, such as different patterns of work, leisure, culture and different preoccupations, make it unlikely that, as in the usual course of events, homeless people and people who belong will share, for any sustained period of time, forms of mutual social engagement. But above and beyond the surmountable practical inconveniences of having to manufacture opportunities to meet and socialise, it is very unlikely that unless you have distinct social or professional reasons for approaching homeless people, people who belong tend barely even to acknowledge the presence of homeless people, much less to have any homeless friends. The above and beyond is the contingent result of the symbolic marginalisation of those who do not belong. For example, the appearance of some homeless people can be intimidating. A limited choice of clothing, invariably old, sometimes ragged, often stained, most obviously identifying the wearer as very poor, so marginalised, exiled from the mainstream, and therefore clearly not part of who you are or want to be, antithetical to your Imaginary purpose, and in that respect someone who should have no place in your life and so does not belong. Indeed, if you look a little closer, though this will only be a quick glance, because as you have already acknowledged, this figure of homelessness should have no place in your life, so as you therefore hurry to pass by, you may notice more signs of deprivation: lank hair, grey face, a figure too thin, a figure too fat, very bad teeth, wax coloured yet translucent skin; there is no mistake, this is not you, this should not be part of your world. And whilst you know each defining feature exists through the context by which it was forged, such as the ragged, grey, stained clothing, manufactured from poverty and having to sleep rough; and the mouths of rotten teeth, scraped into being from a diet of nutritional slops and drugs; you also know, that any rational explanation, any attempt to distinguish any human being in its dignity as an inalienable right, from the circumstances that any human being might be born into, will never su...
