The Ethics of Space : Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England

Steph Grohmann, Nicholas De Genova

• Publisher: HAU Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781912808380
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Povertà in sociologia

Across the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space and formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements are deemed less than fully human as they struggle to find a place where they can symbolically and physically exist. Written by an anthropologist who accidentally found herself homeless, The Ethics of Space is an unprecedented account of what happens when homeless people organize to occupy abandoned properties. Set against the backdrop of economic crisis, austerity, and a disintegrating British state, Steph Grohmann tells the story of a flourishing squatter community in the city of Bristol and how it was eventually outlawed by the state. The first ethnography of homelessness done by a researcher who was formally homeless throughout fieldwork, this volume explores the intersection between spatial existence, subjectivity, and ethics. The result is a book that rethinks how ethical views are shaped and constructed through our own spatial existences.

chapter one

Of life and fieldwork

If anthropologists and the homeless have one thing in common, it is that they are people out of place. In the case of the homeless, this is hardly controversial; homeless people are, by definition, out of a place to live in, and at the same time, they are normally to be found exterior to the places that the settled consider their own. Physically and socially, the homeless are “outsiders”—external to society, external to buildings—to the extent that their lack of spatial allocation becomes the determining factor of their very existence. To be homelessness is “to be a person without a place of one’s own, to be someone who is dis-placed or out-of-place” (Wardhaugh 2000: 111), quite similarly to the way that for Mary Douglas, the definition of “dirt” is “matter out of place.” The analogy has not been lost on writers discussing the ordering of space with regard to the built environment, and many have emphasized the way that the human landscape, by virtue of its being ordered, produces a human surplus that occupies a social status analogous to “dirt” (Sibley 1995). Homelessness and placelessness are therefore in many ways synonymous: he or she who does not have a home is seen to consequently have no place in society at all.

The case of the anthropologist, at first glance, appears quite different. Anthropologists, on the whole, do have spaces to live in, and despite the vagaries of contemporary academic careers, few of us would consider ourselves so removed from our social context as to figure as its waste product. Yet, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, once we leave the ordered system of our departments and universities and delve into that mythical and perilous space we call “the field,” something peculiar happens:

The anthropologist’s particular relation to the object of his study contains the markings of a theoretical distortion inasmuch as his situation as an observer, excluded from the real play of social activities by the fact he has no place (except by choice or by way of a game) in the system observed and has no need to make a place for himself there, inclines him to a hermeneutic representation of practices. (Bourdieu 1977: 1; emphasis mine)

In making a methodological point, Bourdieu here touches upon a strange feature of fieldwork: as soon as we arrive in whichever place we have chosen to do our research in, we simultaneously lose our place as a “real” player, and become mere observers of circumstances that do not actually affect us much. The fieldworker thus joins the homeless person in a place where their presence within the network of social relations that constitute the system is, from the perspective of the system, superfluous, a nonposition. Both are seen to contribute nothing to the “real play of social activities” and thus, are presumed to have no stake in a social order they can only observe from the outside. What distinguishes them, however, is that the homeless person is, in most explanatory models, presumed to have had this position foisted upon them, while the anthropologist figures as a free agent who can elect to make a place for herself or not. Bourdieu points out that the latter—choosing to remain an outsider who tries to reconstruct the rules of a game he has no particular interest in playing—constitutes what is commonly seen as scientific distance or objectivity, and thus ethnography consists to an extent in “making a virtue out of necessity by converting a de facto exclusion into a choice of method” (1977: 10). While therefore both the anthropologist and the homeless person face a “de facto exclusion,” only the anthropologist can be assumed to have brought this state upon herself.

Precisely this was the subject of the argument I had with my friend and fellow squatter Gavin in the fieldnote preceding this chapter. Gavin, a longtime squatter, occasional street-sleeper and, at the time, all-round destitute person, could not understand why I, endowed with all the privilege he had been denied, would freely elect to make myself as placeless as he involuntarily was. There would have been little point in explaining to him that, at the time the discussion took place, I was no less formally homeless than he was. He knew all too well that in contrast to him, I had had ample opportunity to spare myself the indignity, and that I was therefore guilty, in Bourdieu’s sense, of electively dis-placing myself. To Gavin’s mind, this was not only silly, he took personal offence to it, since by recklessly embracing the very circumstances that were oppressing him, I was making a mockery of his hardship. Just like Bourdieu, Gavin had concluded that nothing compelled me to occupy the nonplace I had chosen to take up next to him, and therefore, my bag-lady lifestyle constituted little more than a “game.” Unlike Bourdieu, however, Gavin did not attribute this state of affairs to my being an anthropologist (even if he had cared about what that is), nor was he particularly concerned about my representation of his practices, hermeneutic or otherwise. What really ticked him off was the fact that I had no need to make a place for myself among the squatters, and thus, the social and material restrictions that governed his life, for me, were merely “data.”

My dispute with Gavin touches upon a number of themes that will guide this book, first and foremost, the way that space and place shape ethical relationships. Examples of this will take many forms throughout these pages, some more conventional, some perhaps more experimental. The space I have chosen to begin with is perhaps the most “sacred” known to our profession, and at the same time, the most elusive, simultaneously located in all geographical places at once and nowhere at all—the space I mean here is the space of the ethnographic field. Anthropologists carry this space with them, neatly tucked into the back of our minds, until we decide to whip it out and superimpose it on whatever geographical location we have chosen as our “field site.” In declaring a place “the field,” we are making it our own; like intellectual nomads we pitch our tent and subsume those around us under its roof. At the same time, this mythical transformation of someplace into the field comes with a reordering of social relationships: under the “field” umbrella, relationships follow their own rules, and others are not necessarily aware that they have become the counterparts to our professional neuroses. What is conventionally accepted as “research ethics” is one aspect of this; declaring a place “the field” means that the fieldworker must adhere to formal rules of engagement, usually specified in special ethics procedures designed to avoid damage to research participants and lawsuits for universities. At the same time, anthropologists have spent extraordinary amounts of time discussing ethics outside of these formal codes, as the debates on reflexivity and power relations in recent decades demonstrate. But as important as these issues are, they do not yet touch upon what is perhaps the most profound issue—namely, the way that the notion of the field as a unilaterally declared space of engagement in and of itself produces particular moral relations. As Bourdieu writes, the peculiar placelessness of the fieldworker consists, first and foremost, in the fact that she does not need to be there, does not have to fit in or get along, can always choose to walk away and play a different game—much in contrast to those for whom the “game” is the stark reality of their lives. As Andrew Sayer puts it, “this removal from the pressures of practical activity also reflects and signals the privileged social position of the academic” (2011: 15), and thus, declaring somewhere “the field” has the strange tendency to make the anthropologist untouchable, immune to the mundane concerns and anxieties of those to whom whatever is going on actually matters.

George Devereux (1967) makes a similar argument when he frames the cognitive distortion inherent in fieldwork in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of countertransference. As the fieldworker enters into the liminal phase of fieldwork—“after separation from one’s familiar lifeworld but before one finds one’s feet and feels at home in one’s new environment” (Jackson 2010: 41)—they experience a kind of separation anxiety as they are plucked from their familiar environment and thrust into a bewildering new world. In the countertransference, they experience in the other unknown and unacknowledged parts of themselves, and resort to a range of cognitive maneuvers to deal with the resulting tension. Devereux argues that a good share of anthropological methodology—certainly the type of disinterested “objective” distance Bourdieu attests, but also all manner of perceptive filtering and projection—is in essence an attempt to mitigate this anxiety, to manage the transition between the familiar and the strange and the frightening encounter with the other. The challenge of good fieldwork then, for Devereux, is not to eliminate such distortions but rather to make them conscious and use them knowingly to understand oneself in one’s interaction with the environment. As in the psychoanalytic encounter, however, where this psychological dynamic is combined with material or social inequality, these maneuvers can become not only tools of self-defense or insight but potentially also methods of establishing and maintaining social power. For anthropologists, there is therefore often a power move contained in “declaring the field”—and Gavin was all too aware of that.

My relationship with Gavin has shaped the research for this book like none other, academic or ethnographic, and it is no exaggeration to say that without him, this book would not have been written. Our friendship was the happenstance result of the sort of cultural dilettantism that is the hallmark of the new immigrant (in this case, myself).¹ When I first arrived in Britain, I was clueless enough about the subtle codes of class and status in my newly chosen home to simply not realize that Gavin and I were not actually supposed to be friends until it was too late. I had first arrived in Brighton to pursue a postgraduate degree at the University of Sussex after a short and unsatisfying career as a social worker, and did not decide to turn to anthropology, let alone the anthropology of Britain, until much later. I approached “British culture” with all the naivety and enthusiasm of a privileged immigrant who is making a polite effort to fit in, but has not yet bet her fate and fortune on her chosen destination (insofar I was perhaps already an anthropologist in the making). I had been heavily involved in vaguely defined “anarchist“ politics in my native Vienna, Austria, and thus circumvented British “mainstream” culture as a matter of course, aiming to join the British branch of the same movement I already considered myself to be part of. Luckily, Brighton supplied ample opportunity to attach myself to what by dress code and jargon I identified as my subcultural niche, and it did not take long until I met my first squatters. What I did not immediately understand, however, was that squatting in England—for the most part—was very different from I was used to.

“Squatting” is not a particularly well-defined term. In its most basic meaning, it simply refers to occupying a space one has no legitimate right to be in, and the term is thus applied to a range of practices, from partying in disused buildings in the West, to the occupation and cultivation of agricultural land in the Global South. While there is a sizeable literature on the latter, the type of occupation happening in the cities of the West is not often considered a subject worthy of academic attention. In part, this appears to be due to the fact that squatting in the West is considered “subcultural” and therefore frivolous, while elsewhere it is “cultural” and therefore serious. In part, however, it also reflects the fact that the clandestine nature of squatting means that short of joining the movement, researchers often find it difficult to obtain information about it (e.g., Manjikian 2013). One of the few systematic attempts to map squatting in the West, by Dutch researcher Hans Prujit, offers a taxonomy of five squatting “configurations”: deprivation-based squatting; squatting as an alternative housing strategy; entrepreneurial squatting; conservational squatting; and political squatting (2013: 21). Each of these corresponds to a different conception of social problems—lack of affordable living space for the poor, danger to sites of cultural significance, etc.—and employs different strategies to amend those. For example, in “deprivation based squatting,” there is

an organizational pattern that makes a clear distinction between activists and squatters. . . . The activists open up buildings for the squatters and support them . . . the central demand in this configuration does not involve structural change, but instead focuses on helping the squatters obtain (temporary) leases or alternative accommodation. (Prujit 2013: 21)

In “political squatting,” in contrast, “squatting is not a goal in its own right; it is attractive because of its high potential for confrontations with the state . . . because here the involvement in squatting is driven by an ulterior anti-systemic political motive” (Prujit 2013: 44). This distinction between “political” squatting and the kind that has “no other motivation than to remedy a desperate situation, secretly and in silence” (Cattaneo and Martinez 2014: 3) is rarely questioned by squatting researchers, academic and activist alike, and to a degree it also informed the understanding of the matter I brought with me to Britain.

Shortly before I left, Vienna had seen some fairly spectacular squatting actions² on the part of a radical left that was composed largely of middle class students like myself. The modus operandi of these actions involved a very public takeover of high profile (council) properties, passionate demands (addressed to no one in particular) for “autonomous spaces,” and subsequent heavy-handed eviction by police, usually all within a matter of days. The occupations drew intense media attention, especially when they involved more than the normal degree of police brutality, but rarely made it beyond a performative assertion of solidarity with those deprived of affordable living space. Few of the occupiers themselves were precariously housed, and the occasional participation of actual homeless people tended to turn theoretical solidarity into practical class conflict very quickly. This, however, was my unquestioned understanding of “squatting” when I came to Britain, and I was thus thrilled to be told that here, squatting was actually legal (or at least not punishable), and any empty building was, in principle, ours for the taking. The first squats I visited in Brighton were grim, dingy places full of fungus, without heating and sometimes without electricity, but how lucky were these anarchists (which is what most identified themselves as) to have an unlimited supply of spaces to turn into anything they wanted! I did not realize at the time that while Prujit’s taxonomy may well be appropriate in continental Europe, in Britain, social inequality in general, and lack of affordable housing in particular, had well and truly quashed the distinction between “deprivation-based” and “political” squatting. As Crisis, one of the largest national homeless charities, reports:

Squatting is relatively common for single homeless people with 39 per cent having squatted at some point. . . . Most homeless people who squat try other avenues for resolving their housing problems before turning to squatting. While a few describe the squats as in a reasonable condition and have positive experiences living in them, this is not the case for many. The conditions in squats are often difficult to discern from rough sleeping; with dereliction, discomfort, and life with no amenities or furniture typical.³

I met Gavin one night after a squat party, me trying to get out of the house by the half-barricaded entrance, him trying to get in. He was seventeen years old and making a point of classic punk attire, including a tidy green mohawk, a Subhumans⁴ t-shirt and 18-hole boots. Tipsy banter soon turned to a serious conversation, and it emerged that Gavin had just been thrown out of the squat he was staying in because of a romantic relationship gone bad and had nowhere to go. In the spirit of solidarity, I offered him to crash at the windowless room I was renting in a flat near the seafront. Once there, it soon became clear that Gavin’s experience somewhat differed from mine: for one thing, his appearance sent my middle-class housemates scrambling to hide their valuables. Offended by their lack of respect for my new friend, I assured the embarrassed Gavin that my house was his house, and over the next few months he became a regular visitor when he was in between squats or just plain hungry. One of the first born-and-bred British people—as opposed to other academic migrants—I came into contact with, he forever shaped my intuitive understanding of “British culture” by introducing me to The Specials, trilby hats, and the This is England films. Much later, I would sometimes wonder why some British people turned up their noses at me, until I realized that what I thought of as “cultural integration” was my idiosyncratic interpretation of a leftist English skinhead habitus, circa 1980s.

Gavin’s biography, which he volunteered over the course of my first year in England, was an education in cultural difference. When I first mentioned I that was a social worker (in Austria, synonymous with “bleeding heart liberal”), his eyes darted to the nearest exit and he appeared extremely uncomfortable until I explained that I wasn’t entitled to work in Britain. As it emerged, Gavin, who had been homeless at age fifteen, had filed social workers right up there with the police as authorities that were not to be trusted. Far from what I considered my professional purpose, his experience of the system of homeless provision was one of coercion and antagonism, and he empathically preferred squatting or even the street to the “help” the authorities offered him. I was simultaneously impressed and horrified at his aptitude at survival: street-wise in a way I could never have been, life had taught him to look at the world with the eyes of someone who could find use value where others saw only waste. I would watch in dismay as he investigated bins and thrown-away lunch packs for edible scraps, and was informed that he had once, when there was nothing else, eaten a pigeon. In time, we developed an awkward dance around food and other provisions I bought for both of us. Gavin’s survival instincts clearly told him to go for a free lunch when one was offered, but his pride meant he had to refuse at least twice before accepting.

It was Gavin who first invited me to visit Bristol, as his guest at first and later as a member of the “squatting scene” in my own right. “Squatting scene” was the term most often used for the social network that this book is about by the people who were part of it, but not without some reluctance and often an undertone of derision. The reluctance stemmed from the fact that while one was aware that one was, to some degree a “subculture”—complete with dress codes, music, specific slang, etc.—the network was also something more than these performative factors, insofar as it was profoundly linked to its member’s material reproduction. One could have called it a “community,” but as anthropologists have pointed out, this concept is not without its problems (Amit and Rapport 2002), and the word was in practice never used as a self-descriptor by the squatters, even though other social groups—for example, “the black community in Bristol”—were sometimes referred to under this heading. The word “scene” mirrored the image the police and media often gave of political activists, such as in “the extreme left wing scene,” and thus was hardly ever used without a hint of sarcasm, but it provided a convenient enough shorthand to describe what was a distinct and complex subgroup of Bristol’s popula...