The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

Gemma Pitcairn’s blog

I am supposed to be filming a lecture on French cultural philosophy. It’s supposed to be an overview for a second-year unit on the latter half of the twentieth century, Bergson, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Derrida, Althusser, was the path I was to tread. Why do I always finish with Althusser? Is it some deep acceptance of ultimate failure, a reflection of my debatable female trait of tossing my arms in the air to signify eventual powerlessness? A plea for help, someone else’s help, anyone’s help…? And why do we, we ‘thinkers’ of the left, revel so gleefully in ultimate defeat? There was a time when the question, “Why is it that people on the left read only left-wing literature?” would automatically generate “Well, people on the right don’t read”, but that was a generation ago. Now, I suppose people on the left read The Guardian, while people on the right control the rest of the media, apart from the pondlife in the cesspit of social networks, which anyway, like anything that stems from vox pop, is dismissible as witless. Althusser would no doubt see it a corporate power’s unlimited ability to feed the obviously counterfactual into the people’s minds. Thus, they are more likely to retreat to the certain home of what they already know and this makes them easier to control and influence.

Nowadays, left and right seem to believe the same things. We have a corpus of apparently universal faith in unbridled capitalism, markets as free as possible (except in labour of course, both sides have conspired to agree a block on mobility) and the pursuit of libertarian individualism. Left and right, of course, are coming from different places and traveling towards different destinations, but both are agreed about the route. Like all of us at the moment, they have a road map, so to speak, and the single carriageway is one way. They are starting from different places and heading, at least they believe, toward different destinations, but they are both convinced that this single route will take them to where they want to be. Opposing sides of political argument used to compete, whereas now they conspire. And now neither is honest about its motive. The right claims to offer opportunity but in fact revels in a ‘natural’ inequality of riches, while the left insists, like puritans of old, on suffering today towards an eventual, ever receding and indefinable salvation. It was so much easier for dad and his generation. You knew where you stood. The right imposed, the left opposed. There was no debate about which side one should take, since the tendency was probably part of birth right. The ideological badge did the rest. But was it, in fact, any simpler? Or was it all a delusion, a Manichaean struggle between opposites who eventually cooperated to deny such differences ever existed?

And, it seems to me, I am back to Althusser. If one is a participant in a system, whatever one’s motivation or goal, one is always complicit in furthering that system’s aims. Individuals cannot challenge entrenched power. Can we?

For all my deliberation over the cultural neutrality of all deconstructed activities and taking into account the inability of any individual act to rise above the hegemonic structures imposed by controlling interests, it seems that to be radical in today’s society is to be green. I hesitate to use a capital G, because it depends on what country you are in. Like Elsie, it is the environmental campaigners who are the current proponents of direct action. For my dad, it was picket lines, strikes, industrial conflict and social change. For my generation, the issues were feminism, gender equality and consumerism, not to mention war. Though we had the odd strike, leftward momentum among the working class had shifted by the time I became active. For Elsie, however, the issues are sustainability, pollution, climate change, re-wilding and local control. So, why can’t I be sympathetic? If a group of protesting students sat down along Bishopsgate and declared they wanted to stop the city to start global revolution, I might join in. When now they say they are saving the planet, I feel I ought to buy them all Bibles.

They probably all have them.

I used to understand my daughter. Or at least I thought I did. Puberty duly arrived. The blue streak through the hair went orange and then green. I had to wait in the supermarket while she insisted on sitting cross legged on the floor to survey the Whole Foods shelves above her so she could “absorb the presence of what she might like”. What she might be willing to eat seemed to be an ideological decision that had to be revisited and reinterpreted at each apparently resented mouthful. We have all been through the pulses, the grains, the vegetarianism, the veganism. It all seems to carry a weight of guilt that not even a medieval Christian would have invented. I suppose the weight in the guilt didn’t count: it was only the weight on the feet that she was counting. “I’m so fat!”, she would say, viewing her side-on reflection in an Oxford Street shop window while we tramped from one chain-store to the next in search of that imagined garment that “would make me look great”. She’s grown out of that now, or perhaps she might have grown into it. She now seems to wear ideology as fashion, an identity that needs to be changed regularly to keep it respectable. What did someone say last week… that in the Middle Ages, death was so important that it took a lifetime to prepare for it. In our own way, contemporary society seems to live by the same ever-receding credo. The difference now is that we can no longer seek a conclusion. We worship only the process.

God knows where we are now. She cooks her own food, with the stress off the cook, since it rarely seems to involve heat. All of this has to be married to an apparently blind, perhaps merely myopic faith in material consumerism, on the right because it facilitates an illusion of individuality via mass-production, and on the left because the climate crisis comes quicker and with it the never discussed, old fashioned revolution. “Reducing my carbon emissions by not lighting the gas”, is something I hear almost every evening as she switches on the kettle to rehydrate the quinoa. I shrug and go for the salad and quiche, which I buy in a condemned plastic wrapper from the deli near the station. “At least it’s local she says, around the corner.” The packet says made in Leicester. The packaging does not admit its own origin. And the guy who runs the shop is Indian.

Which all makes me sound like a cantankerous old woman... Sixty is the new forty, we were told a while ago, in tandem with white is the new black, when it comes to clothes, written by someone who doesn’t travel around London, no doubt, does not suffer the indignity of the dark streak across the bum when the dash for the gap between the closing doors is ever so slightly mistimed. And if sixty is really the new forty, then fifty must be a new thirty-five. All I can say is that it doesn’t feel like that to me! I feel a lot more than twenty-five years older than my daughter. We are different, Elsie tells me at every opportune moment, underlining the “we” with surreal stress to reinforce how apart we are when together.

But perhaps things don’t change, perhaps there is a more fundamental experience that we all live, we all share, but between questions we have to claim it in our own terms. We make assumptions that allow us to see the shortcuts, so we don’t have to keep solving the same imponderables every time we try to think, and this creates culture. I must talk to dad about this. Just how much evidence exists as to whether we humans chose arbitrary change to justify identity? Did many societies, I wonder, go as far as the ancient Paracan cultures and use stones to force infant heads to grow into different shapes? The practise must have made wars possible to fight in an era without uniforms. Even in the English Civil War we had Roundheads. I wonder if the Royalists were square? I think I might have an answer, at least an opinion.

Perhaps the effects I seek are generational, and don’t show up when the time span is thousands of years. He will be here in a few weeks, ready for his annual check-up so he can return to Yogyakarta and continue screwing his Indonesian maid. I wonder how much he pays her. I wonder how much the family back home costs him? Am I cynical? Am I the cantankerous old woman I just accused myself of being? And what do I ask my dad? Would, “Just how much do you pay for each fuck?” be apposite? I suppose, given Geoff Sullivan, I am not one to speak…

Of course, I have never met her. I never met the Australian woman. I never met any of the others. Neither did my mom, as far as I know. My dad was not one to shit on his own doorstep. But shit, he did, and extensively. His duplicity was always removed by at least a three-hour flight, which might be a euphemism for the clandestine convenience of the conference.

And those were indeed the days, when academics could actually travel to listen to their colleagues from across the world offer genuinely different perspectives on their subjects, positions that were not driven by the need to attract foreign students, the need to market one’s institutional identity, the need to promote the national agenda, the need to maintain the social media profile, the need to retain one’s New Right credentials. Now, after a fourth gin and it, I know I am being cynical, probably also cantankerous. I know that the lecture isn’t going to get done, again. I know I am on a rant and, as usual, to myself and myself, alone. Now there’s a word… But I am worried.

Dad, in his letter, admits to not feeling well. It’s a first. How should I react? What should I do? Can I intervene? Can I stop him getting older? He’s in hospital. It’s a double first. He passed out on the dig, banged his head, may even have had a stroke. The email says he is ‘under observation’ in Yogyakarta. Should I go? Stupid question. We are locked down. Locked in. Locked out. Locked up. We are, let’s face it, all over the place, up, down, in or out, who knows? The only reality is that we don’t move. Bit like death. There are no flights. We can’t travel. If he were at death’s door, perhaps I could make a case, but ‘under observation’ certainly doesn’t sound serious enough, unless it’s God that’s doing the observing. But then, if God was ancient Greek, being under observation was not a safe place to be. Just ask Oedipus.

The really stupid thing is that if dad were at death’s door, I could go to do nothing, because there would be nothing I could do. If he really is ‘under observation’, I could at least help to observe, share the work, so to speak, and my presence might just influence things. We are told that placebos cure a third of all ailments. So, ‘Mummy kiss it better’ was in fact good medicine. Perhaps ‘daughter cares’ would be just as effective. If he needs care, should I have him back here in what is still, when push comes to shove, his house? Am I jumping the gun? It is an interesting question for an anti-Iraq-war campaigner. I don’t like guns. I grew up a pacifist, daughter of a Greenham Common protester and the revolutionary socialist dad, at least in his youth, which I never knew. Archaeologists ought to know about legacy and his socialism was my legacy, but it will never be recorded, let alone fossilized.

And then there’s the generation the other way, the one that extends towards youth. Do I know my daughter? I used to think that I did. But now she is her own individual, making her own way, creating her own success, bedevilling her own targets, one of which is Uking Palace, the development I have been told is crucial to the financial viability of my employer, and perhaps my job, which, let’s face it, is far from secure. I’m still glad I wrote that paper on Brexit. I had to get the anger off my chest. I knew it wouldn’t do any good, as far as the debate was concerned, but I did not expect it to become a shot straight through my own foot. I did not expect it to make the national media, to be trawled through, word by word, by the right-wing press, to be labelled hypocritical. It was identifying the use of racism, not being it! If work were a bank, my account would be overdrawn, on the verge of foreclosure. I have to do some payback…

I am fifty years old. Should I care? Damn right I should care. I need at least five years more work before I could even contemplate the early retirement I dread. Without increased institutional income, we are regularly told by administrative powers that be, powers that increasingly look and sound like the professional management they claim not to be, the cuts will fall, the axe will be swung. Or was that the other way around?

I am growing more incoherent with every mouthful. More ice. Perhaps it’s a mother and daughter thing. What once seemed so distant and yet, ultimately, so close, now feels uncomfortably accommodating yet, ultimately, estranged. She is living her own life, pursuing her own career, campaigning for what she believes in, but for some reason I no longer trust her. Perhaps she should find her own place. More ice. More everything.