Lincoln Motor Company Ltd. garage, Lincoln, UK (circa 1959).
The distinctive hyperbolic paraboloid roof of the garage for the Lincoln Motor Company Ltd was the largest roof of its type to be completed in the UK. It is made up of two reinforced concrete shells, connected to each other at the highest and lowest points in the structure.
The horizontal thrust created by the shells acts diagonally. Initially, it was planned to construct external buttresses to deal with the thrusts, however these buttresses were replaced with four tie bars built into the interior of the structure. Today, the building has been enclosed with glass walls and is a Nando’s restaurant.
I love this building and posted a photo of it as a Nando’s a while back! The same architect designed some Little Chefs too I think.
The privatisation of stress is a perfect capture system, elegant in its brutal efficiency. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised. Dan Hind has argued that the focus on serotonin deficiency as a supposed `cause’ of depression obfuscates some of the social roots of unhappiness, such as competitive individualism and income inequality. Though there is a large body of work that shows the links between individual happiness and political participation and extensive social ties (as well as broadly equal incomes), a public response to private distress is rarely considered as a first option. It is clearly easier to prescribe a drug than a wholesale change in the way society is organised. Meanwhile, as Hind argues, `there is a multitude of entrepreneurs offering happiness now, in just a few simple steps’. These are marketed by people `who are comfortable operating within the culture’s account of what it is to be happy and fulfilled’, and who both corroborate and are corroborated by `the vast ingenuity of commercial persuasion’.
Psychiatry’s pharmacological regime has been central to the privatisation of stress, but it is important that we don’t overlook the perhaps even more insidious role that the ostensibly more holistic practices of psychotherapy have also played in depoliticising distress. The radical therapist David Smail argues that Margaret Thatcher’s view that there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families, finds `an unacknowledged echo in almost all approaches to therapy’. Therapies such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy combine a focus on early life (a kind of psychoanalysis-lite) with the self-help doctrine that individuals can become masters of their own destiny. Smail gives the immensely suggestive name magical voluntarism to the view that `with the expert help of your therapist or counsellor, you can change the world you are in the last analysis responsible for, so that it no longer cause you distress’ (p7).
The propagation of magical voluntarism has been crucial to the success of neoliberalism; we might go so far as to say as it constitutes something like the spontaneous ideology of our times. Thus, for example, ideas from self-help therapy have become very influential in popular television shows. The Oprah Winfrey Show is probably the best-known example, but in the UK programmes such as Mary, Queen of Shops and The Fairy Jobmother explicitly promote magical voluntarism’s psychic entrepreneurialism: these programmes assure us that the fetters on our productive potentials lie within us. If we don’t succeed, it is simply because we have not put the work in to reconstruct ourselves.
The privatisation of stress has been part of a project that has aimed at an almost total destruction of the concept of the public - the very thing upon which psychic well-being fundamentally depends. What we urgently need is a new politics of mental health organised around the problem of public space. In its break from the old stalinist left, the various new lefts wanted a debureaucratised public space and worker autonomy: what they got was managerialism and shopping. The current political situation in the UK - with business and its allies gearing up for a destruction of the relics of social democracy - constitutes a kind of infernal inversion of the autonomist dream of workers liberated from the state, bosses and bureaucracy. In a staggeringly perverse twist, workers find themselves working harder, in deteriorating conditions and for what is in effect worse pay, in order to fund a state bail-out of the business elite, while the agents of that elite plot the further destruction of the public services on which workers depend.
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― Mark Fisher, “The Privatisation of Stress” (via sfpml)
In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Jack Halberstam points out the revolutionary and queer properties of contemporary animated films from the Pixar and Aardman studios. This means unearthing Marxist/feminist utopian ideals in 2000’s Chicken Run(in which a mostly female coop working together to escape its exploitive farmers), and non-traditional ideas of family in Finding Nemo (2003, wherein a single father must navigate an ocean’s worth of colourful, non-romantic social interactions and connections in order to find his son). While the majority of popular films and TV shows can be seen to lionize the nuclear family and the romantic, heterosexual relationships at its head, these animations showcase the community as the primary locus for growth and socialisation.
When it comes to child-rearing, this method is either cutting-edge or as old as time, depending on your perspective. To a middle-class white experience like my own, alternative family structures are a pre-Industrial artefact, a cultural memory so distant that it is radical anew; outside of this bubble, of course, an enormous variety of larger, not necessarily familial, kinship networks have been operating all along. →
You should probably read this without delay, and then follow The Kitchen Tapes, the blog which houses my friends Meryl and Rupinder’s assorted awesome brain output, without a moment’s hesitation?
My Bloody Valentine — ”How Do You Do It” (EPs 1988-1991 reissue, Sony 2012)
I don’t see the need for two very slightly different versions of Loveless. Just saying. Although I am concerned that saying such a thing outs me as ‘not an audiophile’. My dad would be ashamed!
Really enjoying this remastered EPs comp, though. SWIRLY. If you don’t like this one, listen to ‘Swallow’ forever and ever. The reissues are coming out as records, which is good news even though I know they’ll be £30 each, and there’s a new LP on the way, which I can’t help but feel apprehensive about, but if they could perform live again, that’d be nice? I want my ears to hurt!
Take a highway, some cars, some odd looking 90’s people, a crash, a shirtless guy with a mustache, a guy smoking a cigarette, a few cops and what do you get?… I don’t have a fucking clue, but I’m sure Australia’s finest Total Control are on to something with their video for “For Lease”. Accompanying the images are some fuzzed out guitars, some shotgun drums and some claustrophobic singing. I guess if you would ask the band they would tell you exactly what this video is about but what you also could do is enjoy this great track, because it equals one minute and twenty-four seconds of pure winning.
I feel bad because of the tracks on the Total Control/Thee Oh Sees split 12” of which this track is from, I’ve listened to TC about 40 times, and TOS about once? Could never get into those guys. Get Bent are spot on, anyhow; this is a nervous wreck of a song.
This is good, right? Less glare and less co-opting can only be a good thing?
To be honest, this post is here to remind me to buy/get library to buy Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which seems like an important book to read right now, not least for book club opportunities. He talks about debt and jubilees (nice ones) on Novara here.
Related, probably: Me Favourites Paul Mason and Mark Fisher are in the current Occupied Times, both giving excellent interviews about reporting/dealing with chaos, where the whole Occupy thing goes from here, and so on. Everybody needs to read everything Fisher’s written about the privatisation of stress on repeat, forever.
‘The word ‘crisis’ seems a commonplace at present. It is a word whose ceremonial invocation by commentators and holders of public office alike is made with an almost merry abandon that borders on monotony. This should come as little surprise given the numerous crises of the present can appear…
The Pirate Bay is to be blocked by ISPs in the UK, thereby ending piracy once and for all. Haha, sigh, for fuck’s sake, and so on. Watching the content industries struggle to comprehend that their model of scarcity is over has always produced a laugh and a jolt of terror. They know what’s at stake, and we’re paying for itas a consequence. We’ve got a whole war on computation coming up, and every single industry, sooner or later, is going to realise that their models of scarcity are going to be torn apart by open source, and the ensuing legislative and legal chaos is going to be a sight to behold. “You wouldn’t steal a handbag.” No, but soon we’ll be able to print one. And then what?
Anyway, Aaron Peters remarks upon this in the above link, which lays down the myriad reason why the network society and our open-source, file sharing ways, along with an ill-conceived faith in the digital, ‘network economies’ and so on really do have the potential to bring everything crashing down, unless we rethink our relationship with capital and get transformative. Read while I work out Tor.
