This section brings together funded research by Geoff Bright & Gill Whiteley that links to Polimprov.
Geoff Bright
Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects
Talk presented by Geoff Bright at Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2018
“A small, moveable environment of potential”: Social haunting, micropolitics and the Ghost Labs
During the last decade or so, I have developed a body of research that focuses on the entanglement of affect[i] and imagination[ii] in working-class experience (see Bright 2012a; 2012b; 2016; 2018) and how it has played out in the UK at key moments of a thirty-year period of de-industrialisation. In outlining that still developing story of a ‘social haunting’ –which focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on ethnographic and co-produced arts-based work I’ve done in the English coalfields – I want to hint at a larger argument: namely, that a particular kind of attunement to the affective/imaginative register of class, (and the micro-politics of haunting, as an expression of it), is essential prior to any new ‘assembly’ (Hardt and Negri, 2017) of political forces and vital in developing any account of affect-laden political phenomena such as the rise of Trump in the US or the Brexit vote in the 2016 UK European Union Referendum. In doing that, I will highlight, with examples, how some key features of just one element of our work – the Ghost Labs – has helped me reach that conclusion.
Biographically, the focus of my own activity for 50 years now – firt as a school student activist at the end of the 60s, then trade union militant, then community educator and, most recently, as an academic has been generated out of the ongoing tensions (often presented as a schism) between the counter cultural liberationary energies of the 1960s and the revolutionary political imaginary of Marxism: the central problematic, really, of 1968 (where it all started for me). So, I need to make it clear before I say anything else that the fundamental focus of my work (whichever of these pulls has at a particular moment been the strongest or seemed most productive) has always remained the same: the knotty question of how a practice of anti-capitalist liberation can be imagined, theorized, and operationalized in a praxis that is both personal and collective – a question that not only raises all the old and troublesome binaries of personal/political; autonomy/organization; spontaneity/discipline; horizontal/hierarchical but, more importantly, instantiates the field difference between the micro-political and the macro political and, I’d tentatively suggest, between the new materialisms and the old materialisms, at least in their liberationary applications.
Our work has, of necessity, had to move beyond this impasse and I’ll use our approach to social haunting and in particular the goings on in the Ghost labs to show how we have been required to think in what I think is essentially a Guattarian space between Baradian new materialist ‘ontological reorientations’ (something of a coming orthodoxy, if I might be so bold) and ‘new critical materialisms’ as Coole and Frost’s excellent introduction to their 2010 New Materialism poses it).
Early this year, colleagues and I completed the third of three related UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities (AHRCCC) projects that steadily refined a co-produced inquiry into what – following Avery Gordon (2008) – we called a ‘social haunting’ of de-industrialised communities in England. Our most recent project Song Lines: Creating Living Knowledge through Working with Social Haunting pointed firmly at the UK Brexit context and responded to two key activist community partners, Unite Community and the Co-op College. Both partners were alarmed at divisive political discourses about a north/south UK fracture along lines of class and ethnicity in which the coalfields were profiled in a way that is negatively at odds with their history and traditions,[iii] and were keen to develop a strategic response to Brexit. Song Lines built on two earlier investigations, the first of which worked in the South Yorkshire coalfield and in the former textile production area of Rochdale in Lancashire during 2015, the second of which was based mainly in the North Staffordshire coalfield during 2016. Song Lines itself, while working again in some of the same areas extended the inquiry to the Durham coalfield in the North East of England. (see socialhaunting.com)
All three of these projects grew out of ethnographic research that I had carried out between 2000 and 2013, after I’d already had a good proportion of a working lifetime in the UK coalfields of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, initially as a steel union and railway trade union activist heavily involved in the 1984-85 miners’ strike and, from the nineteen nineties on, as a community activist/educator. My doctoral study focused on pit village youngsters from coal-mining family backgrounds who were being excluded from school for ‘behavioural difficulties’ and concluded that, twenty-five years after its end, the 1984-85 strike and its aftermath of rapid deindustrialisation were far from being matters of merely historical interest. Indeed, the conflicted nature of coalfield deindustrialisation remained as an unspoken affective context in which the swathe of school exclusions that I witnessed could be read as part of a ‘kind of haunting’, as my research participants often described it.
The Miners’ Strike will soon be thirty-five years past, and the coal industry has now completely gone. Coal has been definitively re-positioned from industrialisation’s priceless ‘black diamond’ to the bete noir of the Anthropocene, but the feelings generated by coal’s conflicted past, endure. More than a dozen years after I began that initial research, similar affective/imaginative intensities continue to circulate through the absent presences of the coal industry, flowing now here and coalescing now there, in a complex material entanglement of historical, geographical, economic and psychosocial elements. The spontaneous ‘Thatcher funerals’ that celebrated the death of former UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in 2013 had their root in those revenant energies (see Bright, 2016) as, I would contest, did the widespread coalfields Brexit vote.
Essentially, the projects I’ve brought together have tried to operationalise the insights into social haunting first elaborated in Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, but with maybe a greater emphasis on an approach that addresses the complexities of what Beverley Skeggs has called “person value and autonomist working-class value practices” (Skeggs, 2011, and see Bright 2016). The projects have also had a particular (but not exclusive) focus on communities of activism with our two key partners Unite Community and the Co-op college.
A social haunting, Gordon tells us, is made evident in social settings when “disturbed feelings cannot be put away”. It is an entangling reminder of lingering trouble relating to “social violence done in the past” and a notification “that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present [and] showing up without any sign of leaving”. As such, it “alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future” (Gordon, 2008, xvi). Social ghosts, while strongly felt are, however, not easily known. Indeed, a social haunting is “often barely visible or highly symbolised” (Gordon, 2008, 50) It resides at the “cusp of semantic availability” (in Raymond Williams’ term) as a “practical consciousness that is always more than a handling of fixed forms and units’ [and] describes just those ‘experiences to which the fixed forms do not speak at all, which…they do not recognise’” (Gordon 1997, 200, citing Williams, 1977).
Other work has, to be fair, probed similar territory in the overlap between memory studies’ focus on collective/social memory (Fentress and Wickham,1992) and emotional geographies of place and culture (Liz Bondi, is significant). Some of the most recent research has focused on the Left, too, and on activism, as well as specifically on some post coal-mining settings. So, the idea that the past acts in the present through historical geographies of gender, class and race is thus reasonably well developed.
Nevertheless, in calling for “a method of knowledge production…that [can] represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives, Gordon’s notion of a social haunting still breaks new ground. The important point is that a socialhaunting, in Gordon’s perspective, is a generative ‘socio-political-psychological state’. That is, it primarily alerts us not to a therapeutic problematic related to individualised trauma (which, in fact, may well be present to a greater or lesser degree) but to an immanent collective practice addressing how the past “could have been and can be otherwise” (57, my emphasis). A social haunting is, thus, a call to political action. It is
precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment… when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (Gordon 1997: xvi. My emphasis)
Working with social haunting (and I am very firmly wedded to this) is, therefore, a politicized practice and a micropolitical practice, at that (Massumi’s chapter “Of Microperception and Micropolitics” in The Politics of Affect is particularly relevant here). And, if our work can claim any lasting originality it is in developing the laboratory space of the ‘Ghost Lab’ as a micro-political germination chamber for that “something different from before” that needs to be done. How so? For an answer, we need to look at the Ghost labs
Fundamentally, a Ghost Lab is a participatory process space: a semi-improvised, horizontal, community/activist/arts workshop ‘event space’ (Massumi, 2005) – if I can be excused the ugly locution – which aims to collectively re-imagine “what the ghosts might want from us”. Its only real defining feature is a commitment to let the ‘ghosts’ speak, come what may. Co-produced between a group of academics, artists and activists, all of whom subscribe to a commitment to that process as an open, acceptant and non-judgemental encounter (to “an ethic of caring for belonging” in Massumi’s words. 2015. 43), the Ghost Lab uses a repertoire of playful arts devices to approach affective/imaginary materials that are hidden in plain sight in the life of our partner communities. The arts devices employed have commonly included what we’ve called ‘ghost hunting’; co-operative and individual creative writing; comic strip production and – most frequently now – ‘community Tarot readings’.[iv]
Emphatically, the Ghost Lab is a laboratory space in that the process it sets up is experimentally productive rather than pedagogically or organizationally focussed – though pedagogy and organisation may well be outcomes. It is pretty much the case that anything can happen, in a DIY sort of way, but the process IS facilitated. The fundamental working hunch is that whatever happens allows atomised feelings/imaginings to be re-articulated out of the blind field of a haunting and into the range of a collective, agentic re-imagination in common.
In designing the Ghost labs, I had an eye on the ‘new material’ turn in general and within arts practice, in particular. I was also interested in the growth of affective methodologies. The Labs are inspired, basically, by a promiscuous cohabitation of affect theory; dialogic arts practice and object-based memory work, and ethnography and autoethnography are significant to the general orientation. Key however – and I’ve not shouted about this anywhere nearly as much as I should have, so I’m shouting now – is the work of Felix Guattari, particularly transversal group practice and its capacity for ‘re-singularisation of subjectivity’ as a micropolitical process – more of which shortly.
Let’s look at some examples of what actually happens in the Ghost Labs when the various arts-based approaches are used. Most commonly, a Ghost Lab begins with a circle discussion prompted by ‘haunted objects’ that people have brought along, and things develop from there to talking, writing together as a group, cartooning, or being involved in a ‘reading’ from the community Tarot pack. At a given moment, everyone might be riveted to the voice of a single person. At another, they’ll be talking wildly over each other as re-inhabited feelings find expression. Things will fly off at a tangent, then meander and repeat a while. Exchanges are by turn heart-rending (there are frequently tears), stomach churning, and uproariously funny. Jokes are cracked. Stories – of place, change, conflict, growing and ageing, trauma, lightness, love, loss, cherished hobbies, risks taken, joys enjoyed, death – are ubiquitous and the rhythm is one of growing and diminishing intensities. Given my limited space, let me share just two vignettes selected from the scores of equally vivid examples on which I could draw.
The first is an account of an underground ‘roof-fall’ at a coal-face six miles out and 500 metres deep under the North Sea off the east Durham coast. It was given in Seaham county Durham by D, a former coal-miner who “after workin’ in rehab an’ that” now runs an agricultural and outdoor education project for young people. D’s story was part of his response to his ‘haunted object’: his colliery identity tag (or ‘pit check’ as they were known). D began by evoking the strangeness of the underground colliery environment by describing how a permanent wind (caused by the unidirectional flow of mechanical ventilation) is always present and, depending on your position, is “either in your face or behind yer. It nivverchanges”. D was working in a “forty-two inches deep coal seam with a post stone roof…a very hard stone” and describes how, when the coal was cut and the face “retreated” the unsupported roof was meant to “just drop” in a predictable way, but:
post stone just stands for a very long time and we kept coming back, and coming back, an’ it got to about 500 metres still standing, standin’ behind you, and your light couldn’t get to where you started from…and we could see this fault comin’ in the roof like a pencil line on a piece o’ paper. You’re watchin’ it and it’s just comin’ further and further doon the face as you’re retreatin’ the coal, and then once it got the other end, this whole roof, about 550 metres by then, it just dropped – schfff! – and the weight and volume of stone just pushed all the air off the coal-face. An’ it just stopped the wind. Everything just stagnant for a while. And then after a while you could feel the wind startin’ to come back. And that terrified the life out o’ us. The noise of it, and the feel of the lost air.
The second vignette is from a very different Ghost Lab that was offered for the East London autonomist youth group with whom we were working on the first day of the 2016 Utopia Festival, the day after the EU Referendum and the day on which the narrow Brexit result was declared. The Lab was a development of previous ones in that it combined three of the devices we had developed. A three card Community Tarot reading was facilitated jointly by our in-residence poet, Andrew McMillan, and our theatre partners from New Vic Borderlines, whilst verbatim comic strip was used as a form of representation (a professional comic strip artist was present as part of our team). The young people in attendance, a diverse and aware metropolitan group, were very agitated about the Referendum result and talked of being “robbed of our future”. One young woman drew her three (past, present, future) cards: Sleep, Summer, and a card showing the untitled image of a petrol service station, in that order. She immediately repositioned the cards to make a narrative that expressed her experience and nominated Sleep as her ‘present’ card, saying “I was kind of confused because I thought this represents me now. I’m really tired”. Summer she decided was her ‘past’ card: The petrol station was her ‘future’ card: “like a place you go to stop off and just get a breather sort of thing and it’s, sort of, like a – gateway”. From this stimulus, she wrote the following poem straight out and unaided:
An exhausted way
Out of the city
Pretending to find happiness
With only a road away
Two, three streets of
Love a day
But not a sound
Or sleep could make me happy –
Summer light to cause a future
But a dark night
To cause a savior
This, on Brexit day one.
These vignettes might at first glance seem slight, though I now think of them, rather, as ‘compressions’. If we set them in a context of a social haunting, however, they speak resonantly out of the blind field, as Avery Gordon called it. Recently, Valerie Walkerdine (2016) has emphasised how affective histories of communities make themselves present through small, anecdotal details in conversations and interviews that, taken together, constitute a space of community self-determination. In the two vignettes, there are commonalities across very different times and contexts. We see powerful and unpredictable forces; fault lines that are geological, geographical and political; an anticipatory sense of warning; precision of imagination; a feel for agency in materials that are other/more than human and both organic and inorganic; and an acute sense of the precarity of events and their outcomes – and underneath all of this a recalcitrant, obstreperous, self-reliant and a joyously (in Spinoza’s sense) vivacious vitality which, while hidden at first, holds its extraordinarily creative capacities in waiting.
It became clear that we were certainly dealing with a poetics here – a poetics where the aesthetic meets the existential and affective at a micro-perceptual level and initiates the kind of connection I’ve just mentioned. I should have expected this really, as the firm direction of my own ethnographic work had been increasingly towards forces of affect and imagination (as a category of the aesthetic) and to anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s “ficto-critical” approach
Stewart has characterised her ethnographic project as a:
…slow, and sometimes sudden, accretion of ways of attending to the charged atmospheres of everyday life. How they accrue, endure, fade or snap. How they build as a refrain, literally scoring over the labour of living out whatever’s happening. (Stewart 2010b: 2)
Drawing, like Gordon, on a literature that sees (as I do) a crux point in Raymond Williams’ (1977) work on structures of feeling, Stewart calls for an attunement to “ordinary affects” that “come into view as habit of shock, resonance or impact” (Stewart, 2007:1), that “work not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds” (3).
Narrative invention is critical to what happens in the Ghost Labs too but more is happening than just story-telling. Anthropologist, Peter Collins, has recently addressed the challenge that the notion of haunting brings to anthropology and has, as we have, zeroed in on imagination and affect as key. Reminding us that “[g]hostly presence reaches beyond the allegorical and metaphorical”, Collins notes that “the relationship between imagination and haunting is complex [and is] an imaginative process, that is itself inherently social and generative of relationships…that has been largely overlooked”. Hauntings, he suggests, “can only be understood…in relation to narrative” (99) and, what is more, “the narrative gaps, spaces, lacunae” that are characteristic of them (as they are, incidentally, of the Ghost Labs) – “are completed or repaired, most often by the prompting of ghosts” (111). So, there is aesthetic-affective-existential work happening here. And, moving towards the conclusion of what I have time to address, this takes us straight back to Guattari.
Massumi, drawing heavily on Guattari, describes the micropolitical as a returning to the “generative moment of experience at the dawning of an event”; as a “brewing, a world stirring”. Each such moment, experienced micro-perceptually, opens the possibility of “reconnecting processually with what is germinal in… living” and raises the prospect of “living more intensely, more fully, with augmented powers of existence”; “micropolitics, affective politics, seeks the degrees of openness of any situation, in hopes of priming an alter accomplishment” while “chipping away at the macro problems”.
In Three Ecologies, Guattari proposes a “mental ecology” as a necessary aspect of any freeing of ourselves from the catastrophe of what he calls Integrated World Capitalism. Key to that mental ecology, is the “re-singularisation of subjectivity” that emerges from Guattarian transversal therapeutic group work practice. Singularity is not individuality, although it is about being singular. In Gauttarian group work, re-singiularusation is the hinge of the move from the paralysis of the subjected group to the autonomy of the micro-political “subject” group It is an ongoing aesthetico-existential-affective process that is inherently anti-individualistic and thus reaches beyond any liberal political model of liberation.
It now strikes me very clearly that the Ghost Labs’ distinguishing feature is precisely their capacity to enable a micro-political poetics of forces and intensities, of “ordinary affects”, to flourish and move towards the repair and completion (that Collins identifies) through collective reconfiguration. The language – of flows and of pause and acceleration; of accruals and fractures; of embodied dreaming; of densities, textures and, notably, of the refrain of forces and intensities – is the Ghost Labs’ natural register, just as the Lab’s laboratory space is the natural locus of these forces’ collective ‘worlding’. Basically, ghosts are made material here by being transformed “from the apparitional through the concerted efforts of participants [such as D, T, and the young woman from East London] who are familiar with their haunting presence” (Collins, 111). However, Collins can’t get to the politics of that materialisation without Guattari and neither can we. Using Guattari’s notion of re-singularisation as a means of moving from what he defines as a ‘subjected’ group to the autonomy of a subject group allows us to see how affect and feeling, initially held privately, is made available for aesthetic-existential re-imagination in common and being thus made common, is thence forward held in common as a collective bond, collectively carried in a counter-value practice of relationality.
Nearly every one of the Ghost labs has ended with an enormous sense of energy and renewal that has been in direct contrast to the routine depletions and exhaustion of the daily activist grind experienced by our participants. Each Lab – its micropolitical capacity a “small, moveable environment of potential” (Massumi) – has, I think, afforded a way of meaningfully amplifying the Ghosts’ inveterate call for “something to be done that hasn’t been done before” (that Avery Gordon’s so perceptively articulated) as a route to repairing the rend between the personal and the collective, and the micropolitical and macropolitical.
[i] Throughout this account I’m thinking of affect as “an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage… of forces or intensities… that pass body to body (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010)
[ii] I’m thinking of imagination, here, as a “space of indeterminacy amid social and cultural life” (Rapport, 2015,7)
[iii] The English and Welsh coalfields generally voted around 60/40 for Brexit
[iv] For pictorial examples of these devices in operation see socialhaunting.com
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