Bodies, Affects, Politics

The Clash of Bodily Regimes

Steve Pile

• Verlag: Wiley
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781118901946
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Physical Sciences
• Thema: Geography

This book seeks to understand the coexistence of bodily regimes and the politics that emerge from the clash between them:

• Presents a novel conceptual model for understanding the relationship between bodies and affects
• Reworks Rancière's notions of the distribution of the sensible and the aesthetic unconscious
• Establishes a dynamic and multiple understanding of the repressive, distributive and communicative unconscious by rethinking Freudian psychoanalysis
• Utilizes a variety of empirical materials, from Hollywood movies to Freud's case studies
• Sets its argument about politics within the context of significant social events to ensure its conceptual and empirical material is relevant to the contemporary political moment

Chapter One
Introduction: Bodies, Affects and Their Politicisation

It is impossible to discuss the relationships between bodies, affects and politics in the abstract: that is, abstracted from the material and ideological conditions of their production, from the processes of politicisation and depoliticisation that bring bodies and affects into, or keep them away from, politics (to paraphrase Harvey, 1993, p. 41). To introduce this book, then, I will start with the story of a particular neighbourhood in West London. It is a story worth telling in its own right, for it involves social murder, as Labour MP John McDonnell put it. However, my purpose is to show how bodies, affects and politics have been entangled at various moments in the area’s recent history. But, more than this, I want to argue that there are different regimes of bodies, affects and politics operative in these moments – and it is in the clash between these regimes that different forms of politics can emerge. The problem that animates this book, then, is this: how are we to understand these regimes and what are we to make of them?

Lancaster West Estate, North Kensington

In 1972, work began constructing the Lancaster West Estate in North Kensington, London. The Estate was intended to redevelop part of the Notting Hill area, which had become notorious for its slums, poverty and criminality. This reputation has, for decades, been racialised. Since the HMT Empire Windrush first docked (in 1948), the neighbourhood’s cheap rooms for rent had proved attractive to new immigrants from the Caribbean (see Phillips and Phillips 2009). Notting Hill also attracted ruthless slum landlords, such as (most infamously) Peter Rachman. By the 1950s, local white people, especially working‐class Teddy Boys, were starting to display hostility towards black people moving into the area. In the summer of 1958, there were increasing attacks on black people as well as the rise of right‐wing groups, such as the White Defence League; its slogan, ‘Keep Britain White’. On Sunday 24 August 1958, armed with iron bars, table legs, crank handles, knives and an air pistol, a gang of white young men bundled into a battered car and drove around Notting Hill for three hours on what they called – in a ghastly echo of lynching culture in the South of the United States – a ‘nigger hunt’ (‘The Nigger Hunters’, Time Magazine, 29 September 1958, p. 27). They attacked six Caribbean men in four separate incidents: nine of the gang were arrested the following day in the nearby White City estate, after their car was spotted by police. (Later, in September 1958, to their shock, they were each sentenced to four years in prison by Mr Justice Cyril Salmon.)

The following Friday, 29 August 1958, Majbritt Morrison, a white Swedish woman (who would later author Jungle West 11 about her experiences) was arguing with her Jamaican husband, Raymond Morrison, outside Latimer Road tube station (which is situated on the western edge of the Lancaster West Estate). A crowd of white people gathered to protect a white woman from a black man (see Dawson 2007, pp. 27–29), despite Majbritt herself not needing nor wanting to be defended. A scuffle broke out amongst the gathering crowd, Raymond and some of Raymond’s Caribbean friends. On Saturday 30 August, a gang of white youths spotted Majbritt leaving a dance, recognising her from the evening before they started hurling racist abuse – and milk bottles. Someone hit Majbritt in the back with an iron bar. Yet, she stood her ground and fought back, but, when she refused to leave the scene, the police arrested her. The situation quickly escalated. Soon, a 200‐strong mob of young white men was rampaging through the streets of north Notting Hill (half a mile or so to the east of the tube station), armed with knives and sticks, shouting ‘down with niggers’ and ‘we’ll murder the bastards’ (reported in The Independent, 29 August 2008 and The Guardian, 24 August 2002, respectively). The mob attacked police with a shower of bottles and bricks. This led to five nights of constant rioting (until 5 September), fuelled by the arrival of thousands of white people from outside the area, and by the retaliation of the local Jamaican population, which eventually armed themselves with machetes, meat cleavers and Molotov cocktails.

Ironically, these events were described at the time as the Notting Hill Colour (or Racial) Riots, implying that these riots were the fault of, and conducted by, black people – when, in fact, black people were the target of white riots. Indeed, it was only the Jamaican fight back that brought the riots to an end, with the police singularly failing to control the situation. Afterwards, the Metropolitan Police refused to acknowledge white racism as a cause of the rioting, despite the testimony of officers on the ground to the contrary. Of the 140 arrested during the riots, 108 were charged with offences, with 9 white youths eventually being sentenced: each was given the ‘exemplary’ punishment of 5 years prison along with a £500 fine. One response to the riots was the creation of a Caribbean Carnival, first held indoors on 30 January 1959, by Claudia Jones – a Trinidadian activist, who had been deported from the United States in 1955, having famously written about the subordination and struggle of Negro women from a Communist perspective (Jones 1949; see Boyce‐Davis 2008). The Caribbean Carnival was an important precursor to the now world‐famous Notting Hill street carnival, itself policed as if it were a riot in 1976 and 1977.

Partly as a consequence of the so‐called ‘Colour Riots’, the 1960s saw the north Kensington area embody a reputation for poor housing, drug use, prostitution and violence. Of course, this is characteristically an unfolding story of class and racial inequality, with factions of the white working class remaining antagonistically opposed to the developing Caribbean community, yet with new working‐ and under‐ class solidarities being formed across racial lines, through cultures associated with sex, drugs and music. This reputation was consolidated in novels, such as Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners (1959), which is set against the background of the riots, where race and racism are unavoidable. The area’s evident social inequalities and antagonisms also attracted filmmakers.

In 1970, in advance of the imminent destruction of the original street layout by the development of the Lancaster West Estate, John Boorman filmed Leo the Last on a set built on Testerton Road. The film dramatically dealt with issues of class and race conflict. In the film, Leo, an exiled prince from a foreign country, becomes a Marxist after he witnesses the exploitation of his poor black neighbours by rich white landlords. Rallying his neighbours together, Leo stages an uprising, quickly overcoming the intellectual classes (in the form of a doctor and lawyer). However, the capitalist class (in the form of rent collectors, shopkeepers and shareholders) proves harder to defeat. Leo retreats to his house. Eventually, Leo is forced to flee, burning down his house (repeatedly) in the process – an uncanny portent of the tragedy to come. Within a couple of years, Testerton Road (along with much of the surrounding area) would be demolished by the wrecking ball of slum clearance and redevelopment. Following Boorman, we might think the wrecking ball represents the inevitable victory of capitalism over the working class, with the antagonisms of race and class flattened by the bulldozer.

Although the Lancaster West Estate redevelopment required the displacement of about 3000 people, few were against the plan to replace the crumbling Victorian housing stock. The original plan was a grand design, involving the creation of a modern housing estate with workplaces, shops, offices and amenities, with improved access to the Latimer Road tube station. The master plan was drawn by Peter Deakins, who had been involved in the first stages of designing the Barbican Centre. Though the grand plan would never be fully realised, building went ahead. The initial phase, starting in 1970, would construct three ‘finger blocks’ (three‐ and four‐storey housing blocks) and a tower block to the north of the site. The finger blocks had large, enclosed, open spaces with children’s play areas. One finger block, Testerton Walk, replaced the former Testerton Road. The finger blocks were seen as tower blocks laid on their side, with internal walkways to keep the housing as compact as possible and a central covered walkway to provide access. To the north, the finger blocks were anchored by a single tower block, designed by Nigel Whitbread applying principles derived from Le Corbusier and the modernists. Building of the tower block began in 1972 and was completed two years later. The first four of the 24 floor tower contained commercial and administrative units; on the remaining 20 floors, there were 120 one‐ and two‐bedroom units, six dwellings on each floor, to house about 600 people. This building would be named Grenfell Tower (as it stood on Grenfell Road).

London’s Burning

By the 2010s, nearing forty years after the Lancaster West Estate had been completed, Notting Hill was best known for its flamboyant Afro‐Caribbean carnival, a saccharin romantic comedy film, and massive inequality: popstars, super models and politicians lived in multimillion‐pound homes, ordering the latest ‘flat white’ coffees and quaffing Chenin Blanc wine from South Africa, while the new model estates of the 1970s visibly deteriorated. The area had become trendy, with beautiful and exclusive and increasingly expensive private housing sitting side by side with the rundown Lancaster West Estate. In 2012, Westminster Council began an £8.7M renovation of the Grenfell Tower, which received new windows, a new heating system and, on the outside, aluminium cladding was introduced to improve the block’s appearance and rain‐proofing. The renovation was completed four years later in May 2016. A new story of class and race had been set in motion.

At 54 minutes past midnight on 14 June 2017, the emergency services received the first reports of a fire at Grenfell Tower. Starting in a faulty fridge‐freezer on the fourth floor, the fire quickly engulfed the Tower Block. The fire burned for 60 hours, despite the attendance of 70 fire engines and over 250 firefighters. The fire killed 72 people, in 23 of the tower’s flats, mostly above the twentieth floor.

On 21 May 2018, the Grenfell Tower public inquiry began, after completing its procedural hearings in December 2017. (Complete proceedings are available online at grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk and on YouTube.) It opened with a commemorative hearing, with testimony from the relatives of all the dead. Along with the memories and feelings of the relatives, the inquiry included pictures and videos. There are many stories in the fire – all are heart‐breaking.

Marcio Gomes was in tears as he recalled the excitement that news of his wife’s pregnancy had brought the family. Hours after the fire, he was holding his stillborn child in his arms, while his wife and two daughters lay in a coma having escaped from their twenty‐first floor flat at around 4 in the morning. He told the hearings on its first day: ‘I held my son in my arms that evening, hoping it was all a bad dream, wishing, praying for any kind of miracle…that he would just open his eyes, move, make a sound’. The family had plans for Logan; he was going to be a superstar; he was going to be a football fan, supporting Benfica and Liverpool. Marcio added, ‘He might not be here physically, but he will always be here in our hearts forever […] Our sleeping angel he was. We let him go with the doves so that he can fly with the angels. We are proud of him even though he was only with us for seven months’. Later that day, the West End Final Extra edition of the Evening Standard chose Marcio’s words for its headline: ‘I Held My Son In My Arms Hoping It Was A Bad Dream’, reinforcing this with a picture of Grenfell Tower in flames. This front page replaced the earlier West End Final headline: ‘Grenfell: Don’t Make Us Wait 30 Years for Justice’, which (curiously) had no accompanying pictures of the tragedy.

The change in the headline might, on the surface, seem innocuous for both are highly emotional: one headline speaks to the families’ angry demand for justice, while the other picks up on the families’ unbearable loss. These two stories have the same source – yet, in this moment, the unrelenting anger that inhabits the demand for justice is replaced by the unspeakable grief and horror of the tragedy. Perhaps, maybe, because a story about the tragic loss of a child would have more appeal for the Evening Standard (a free paper that relies on advertising revenue) than the demand for justice. Yet, although the headlines both draw on Marcio’s words, the switch in headlines represents the first signs of the separation of different strands of the Grenfell story: with the raw emotion of unbearable loss becoming detached from the rage‐filled demand for justice.

That said, in this moment, anger and grief and hope and love and justice and truth are not yet cauterised from one another. Listen to Emanuela Disaro, mother of Gloria Trevisan, a young Italian architect who was trapped on the twenty‐third floor by flames coming up the single stairwell. In a phone call on the night of the fire, Gloria had told her mother, ‘I am so sorry I can never hug you again. I had my whole life ahead of me. It’s not fair’. Speaking through a translator, Emanuela told the inquiry on 29 May 2018 that she had taught her children not to hate, but that she felt a lot of anger: ‘I hope this anger is going to be a positive anger. I would like this anger to help to find out the truth of what happened’. A positive anger would, Emanuela hoped, lead to justice.

Anger, Truth, Justice. Intimately connected. Yet the Evening Standard’s West End Final edition headline suggested that this might not be enough: bound up in the demand for justice was the feeling that justice should also mean not having to fight for justice. Maria ‘Pily’ Burton, wife of Nicholas, was the seventy‐second vict...