"Acts of Undressing" by Barbara Brownie

This is a fascinating book about something we do every day which can be regarded as extreme: taking our clothes off. The author covers (or should that be uncovers) public changing places; striptease and burlesque; clothes designed to reveal such as slashed jeans, skirts with slits and fishnet stockings; the sounds of zippers, poppers and Velcro; streaking, mooning and flashing; St Francis of Assissi (!); undressing as protest; denuding for dominance; sociofugal places; abandoned clothes as territorial markers; shoefiti and pseudocide.

Absolutely fascinating and easy to read.

Great quotes:

• “The human body is born naked, but moments after birth the body is clothed and begins a lifelong cycle of dressing and undressing.”
• “The institutionalization and ubiquity of the nude body have prompted striptease performers to seek new means of delaying gratification, and so in contemporary burlesque the focus of performance is the undressing, not the nudity that results.”
• “The burlesque striptease is ... intermittent: punctuated by the removal of each part of the costume. There is typically a pause for celebration between each removal, as the audience is given time to appreciate the sight of the freshly unveiled area of skin or costume.”
• “Fasteners cry out to be unfastened. They provide visual cues to how a garment may be removed from the body”
• “As had been so well illustrated in Brave New World, the zipper’s sexual connotations arose largely because of the speed and ease at which it permits disrobing.”
• "Zips, poppers and Velcro all have distinctive sounds ... Some kinds of fastenings make sounds only during unfastening: poppers can be significantly louder when unpopped than when popped, and Velcro is virtually silent when stuck together but generates clearly audible sound when pulled apart. Consequently, the sound of fastenings is more readily associated with undressing than with dressing.”
• “Flashing, mooning and streaking straddle the fluid line that separates erotic and hostile gestures.”
• “In Dunedin’s annual nude rugby game ... ‘reverse streaking’ occurs in which clothed spectators run onto the pitch.”
• “The sporting arena is, and always has been, a venue for thinly veiled eroticism ... the sports spectator’s gaze is both respectful and erotic. Spectators’ viewing habits are based partly on the perceived sexual attractiveness of particular athletes, even when an athlete is not explicitly a subject of his or her erotic fantasies.”
• “Sports practices have always straddled the boundary between athleticism and eroticism, and ancient civilizations ‘acknowledged and celebrated the erotic element in sports’.”
• “In a sports setting, clothing has special value as an indicator of team brand loyalty. Sports fans are visibly marked tribes, and clothing is an essential part of the expression of one’s fandom ...The removal of clothes in this context therefore acts in part to neutralize the streaker.”
• "Nakedness has been imposed (through persuasion and force) to reinforce the perception of natives as primitives. Among European and American slave traders, nakedness was imposed to keep perceived savages in their place, as a sign of their status as chattel.”
• “For those at the very top of human hierarchy, denuding is a means of stripping signs of power and status, as when regalia are torn from those condemned to execution”
• “Class differentiation [is] ... one of the driving forces of fashion”.
• “‘sociofugal’ spaces, such as libraries, in which ‘people typically try to avoid one another’. ... users accept and reinforce their isolation by marking a large territory around their immediate location. This may involve placing coats and scarfs on neighboring chairs”
• “One anonymous caller ... describes tossed shoes that once belonged to gang members who have been shot dead. He describes a local ritual of removing the shoes from a fellow gang member’s feet before the police arrive to claim the body.”
• “Graffiti frequently appears in apparently inaccessible spaces is evidence of ‘spatial conquest’.”
• “‘Place hackers’—urban daredevils whose aim is to reach the most inaccessible locations they can find ... There is an element of skill in accessing an apparently inaccessible site, which attracts admiration (or envy) from fellow artists and audiences.”
• “‘The conquest of territory ... is always an act performed for an audience.’ There is a primary audience who directly view the act of territorial marking, and secondary audience who learn of an individual’s presence by observing the marker afterward.”

October 2018;

"Seven Days in the Art World" by Sarah Thornton

Thornton's first degree was in art history and her doctorate in sociology and this is a book written about the world of contemporary art using the technique of participant observation: “Although usually described as ‘fly on the wall’, a more accurate metaphor for this kind of research [participant observation] is ‘cat on the prowl’.” (p xvii)

Each chapter is based on the observations of a single day:

• At an auction (Christie's in New York)
• At a critique class in a prestigious Californian art college
• At the Bern international art fair
• At the Tate for the Turner Prize
• At the offices of New York's leading art magazine
• In the studio of Japan's leading modern artist
• At the Venice Biennale

It is fair to say that these are observations of the upper end of the market.

The result is an in-depth portrait of a small but exclusive world which revolves around money. The collectors are fabulously wealthy (“I'm just an ordinary rich person ... These young billionaires with their private jets - they’re in a different league.” p 99), the gallery owners have multi-million pound turnovers. Even the artists command six figure sums. But there is actually very little explanation of the art. This is a high end portrait of an industry that seems governed by fashion rather than style, by trend rather than taste, by the story you can spin around you work rather than by the work standing up for itself (one lone voice cried “Never go to the wall text.” (p 54); in other words never read the words written on the gallery wall about the painting/ sculpture/ installation. “Artists shouldn't be obliged to explain their work ... ‘I don't care about an artist's intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences’.” (p 54)

As a sociological text it was fascinating: “Everyone is so full of shit ... it's like a tableau vivant of pretentious greed.” (p 18) But I learnt very little about art. “Contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists ... for many art world insiders and art aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existential channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence.” (p xiv) This book has made it no easier to make that leap of faith. Indeed, the parade of rich sybarites provoked in me a reaction. If you start off thinking that much contemporary art is just an attempt to con the gullible, this book isn't going to change your mind.

The art world is rigidly hierarchical. The collectors are at the top.

• “Although the art world is frequently characterized as a classless scene ... it is also about excellence and exclusion.” (p xii) 
• “Although the art world reveres the unconventional it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that ‘looks like art’ and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes.” (p xv)
• "He loves the art world because ‘it's a neutral ground where people meet and interact in a way that’s different from their class ghettos’.” (p 177)

No one really knows what is good

• “It can initially be difficult to distinguish innovators from charlatans, because the former challenge extent versions of artistic authenticity in such a way that they can easily look like pretenders.” (p 25)
• “The prevailing belief is that any artist whose work fails to display some conceptual rigor is little more than a pretender.” (p 53)
• “When people started to feel uncomfortable with the word avant-garde, they adopted the euphemism cutting-edge. Now ... emergent art.” (p 83)
• “I'm an atheist, but I believe in art. I go to galleries like my mother went to church. it helps me understand the way I live.” (p 93)
• “Artists are meant to find their own path, make their own rules, and compete with themselves. If they develop a habit of looking over their shoulders, they risk being derivative. But if they are completely ignorant of the hierarchical world in which they operate, they are in danger of being outsider artists, caught in the bog of their own consciousness, too precociously idiosyncratic to be taken seriously.” (p 118)
• “Artists and writers tend to revel in ambiguity. It is the gray areas that invite and challenge them to represent the world.” (p 36)
• “Changing the context of an object is, in and of itself, art.” (p 212)
• “The thin boundary between art and entertainment is slowly vanishing.” (p 247)

Other great comments

• “A painting that looks as if it were made with rather too many ingredients.” (p 97)
• “Reality is not what it seems to be. We build our belief systems with fragments of faith.” (p 125)
• “An objective opinion is an oxymoron, but that's never stopped us.” (p 150)
• “Sideline omniscience ... a heightened sense of enlightenment based on inexperience” (p 153)
• “You hear two auto mechanics and you have no idea what they are talking about ... there is a kind of poetry in their impenetrable phrases.” (p 158)
• “Many art educators see artists as autodidacts.” (p 63) 
• “Hindsight is essential to making sense of the contemporary.” (p 221)
• “Heat is the enemy of drag.” (p 222)
• “The nowness of now, which is quite obsessive, is actually a reflection of the consumerism that you see in the whole culture.” (p 235)

A well written and acutely observed sojourn in a world where fantasy seems to have taken over from real life.

August 2018; 253 pages

This is one of a selection of books I am reading to help me understand more about art. Others reviewed on this blog include:

• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• How art made the world by Nigel Spivey  which proposes that art has changed the way we think and altered our civilisations
• The Judgement of Paris by Ross King which is about the rise of the Impressionists
• Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King which is particularly good about the techniques of oil painting
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art

"The Will to Knowledge" by Michel Foucault

This is the first volume of Foucault's “The History of Sexuality”.

Foucault is a respected French philosopher. Were he to be a novelist this might be acceptable. The ideas would be advanced and once could dismiss them as an individual perspective on the world, sometimes extraordinarily perceptive, sometimes not. But given the eminence of this writer and his calling I was expecting to find some evidence for his views.

He rarely cites other authors and this is done hapazardly. He certainly never offers statistical evidence. And yet his thesis is that our 'discourses' about sex began to proliferate around the start of the seventeenth century. This is also (for Foucault, although again there is no evidence offered) the birth of modern capitalism and this is, for Foucault, more than a coincidence.  He uses what I call the 'wow thus' argument: offer a surprising fact such as the coincidence above and while your reader is thinking 'wow' follow up immediately with a 'thus' as if the next section of your fantasy is thoroughly grounded in evidence.

He uses a number of similar rhetoric tricks. For example, he likes to ask questions: “It is certainly legitimate to ask why sex was associated with sin ... but we must also ask why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin.” (p 9) But these 'why' questions assume 'whether' questions: Was sex once associated with sin? If it was, do we burden ourselves with guilt for this association? 

He uses words which suggest that he has won an argument. For example,  on page 17 he says “The seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of an age of repression emblematic of what we call the bourgeois societies”. This word 'then' implies that he has successfully argued that the 17th century was the beginning of an age of repression. The entirety of this argument is on page 5: “By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.” Not a lot of evidence. More an assertion. And an admission that he has 'adjusted' the start of the age of repression "to coincide with the development of capitalism". In other words he has admitted manipulating his evidence and then he uses that as if he has established truths. This isn't academic argument.

Another example. “Over these last three centuries ... it is quite possible that there was an expurgation ... of the authorised vocabulary. It may indeed be true that a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor was codified. Without question, new rules of propriety screened out some words: there was a policing of statements ... Areas were thus established, if not of utter silence, at least of tact and discretion.” (p 17 - 18) "It is quite possible". "It may indeed be true". These are used to weasel assertions in without having to offer evidence. "Without question" is used to back up an assertion which should be questioned. And then comes the word "thus". This is a new type of syllogistic logic. This is a conclusion built upon speculation.

It happens again. “I still do not know whether this is the ultimate objective. But this much is certain: reduction has not been the means employed for trying to achieve it. ... Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.” (p 37) A neat admission of uncertainty before a bold and unevidenced assertion. Who dare question what Foucault says?

How does he get away with statements such as: "Nineteenth century bourgeois society - and it is doubtless still with us - was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion.” (p 47) I just want to scream: where is your proof?

“This much is undeniable: the learned discourse on sex that was pronounced in the nineteenth century was imbued with age old delusions, but also with systematic blindnesses: a refusal to see and to understand” (p 55) Undeniable? If it is undeniable then it doesn't need a great thinker to discover it. If it can be denied then a learned thinker needs to argue it through and provide at least some evidence.

I think I'm going on a bit.

He was interesting in the things he pointed out about confession. Here he seems to apply the classic philosophy tool of subjecting an idea to forensic analysis to reveal aspects that might be considered:

• Since the 1215 Lateran Council codified penance confession has grown in importance. (p 58) “the confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations ... one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles ... one confesses in public and in private” (p 59)
• “When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat ... since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow.” (p 59)
• Literature has changed from “heroic or marvellous narration of ‘trials’ of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself ... a truth.” (p 59)
• “The obligation to confess is now ... so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface” (p 60)
• “We belong to a society which has ordered sex’s difficult knowledge, not according to the transmission of secrets, but around the slow surfacing of confidential statements.” (p 63)
• In confession “the truth did not reside solely in the subject ... It was constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke. It could only reach completion in the one who assimilated and recorded it.” (p 67)

There were lots of interesting fact snippets within this short volume. The trouble is that Foucault's cavalier treatment of logic and evidence make me wonder whether anything he says can be taken as true. Nevertheless:

• Before the Council of Trent a confession involving sex was expected to describe “the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure.” (p 19). Afterwards vagueness was advised.
• Erasmus advised “on the choice of a good prostitute” (p 27) 
• “For a long time hermaphrodites were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union.” (p 38)
• “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transferred from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” (p 43)
• Charcot used amyl nitrate as well as ether in his public demonstrations of neurotic women having seizures etc. (p 55)
• “Where sex and pleasure are concerned, power can ‘do’ nothing but say no to them.” (p 83) “To deal with sex, power employs nothing more than a law of prohibition. Its objective: that sex renounce itself. Its instrument: the threat of a punishment that is nothing other than the suppression of sex. Renounce yourself or suffer the penalty of being suppressed.” (p 84)
• “Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.” (p 86)
• “Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex, which mounted throughout the nineteenth century ... the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult.” (p 105)
• Once the mechanism of heredity was understood sex became responsible for inherited diseases and its control was a target of eugenics. (p 118)
• “The theory of ‘degenerescence’ ... explained how a heredity that was burdened with various maladies ... ended by producing a sexual pervert ... it went on to explain how a sexual perversion resulted in the depletion of one's line of descent.” (p 118)
• “The young adult man, possessing nothing more than his life force, had to be the primary target of an subjugation destined to shift the energy available for useless pleasure toward compulsory labour.” (p 120)
• “One of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death ... the power of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised ... only in cases where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy ... if he was threatened by external enemies ... he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects ... to ‘expose their life’ ... but if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct power over the offender’s life: as punishment, the letter would be put to death.” (p 135)
• “The ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live. ... power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction ... a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself.” (p 136)
• “It is over life ... that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it.” (p 138)

There are things here which might be good starting points for an investigation but the overall feeling is that this writer uses rhetorical tricks to support unevidenced assertions.

April 2018; 159 pages

"Liquid Modernity" by Zygmunt Bauman

This book, written in the year 2000, explores our modern ideas from a sociological / philosophical viewpoint. It has some interesting alternative perspectives and it is written with passion, sometimes anger; it is extraordinarily readable.

His thesis is that the advent of 'liquid' modernity (the internet, the flexibility of new capital, the changing relationships within society) have created substantial and important changes in the way we live our lives.

Freedom
Thus, he discusses freedom. After all, we live in the 'free world'. But this tends to concentrate on political freedom: freedom of speech, of religion, and so forth. Most of us in the western world enjoy this and it is a very precious freedom. But many people are not economically free. Poor people rarely have control of their own destiny. They may not be technically slaves but they often have little opportunity to determine their lives.

Bauman points out, first, that being free doesn't necessarily mean being happy. This works the other way as well. “what feels like freedom is not in fact freedom at all; that people may be satisfied with their lot even though that lot were far from being ‘objectively’ satisfactory; that, living in slavery, they feel free and so experience no urge to liberate themselves" (p 17) But this is not allowed by the libertarians who suppose "that people may be incompetent judges of their own plight and must be forced or cajoled, but in any case guided” to seek freedom (p 17).

In fact most so called libertarians are very distrustful of the mob. In the past, political freedom and human rights were balanced by the suffocating moral code of society. Even today, one's freedom to speak one's mind may be severely curtailed by the social opprobrium one suffers should one's opinions be deemed politically incorrect. So freedom is a balancing act. Hobbesian libertarians “draw their credibility from the assumption that a human being released from coercive social constraints ... is a beast rather than a free individual ... social coercion is in this philosophy the emancipatory force and the sole hope of freedom that a human may reasonably entertain. ... There is no other way to pursue the liberation but to ‘submit to society’ and to follow its norms.” (p 20)

Identity and Individualism

In the old days, people were born into their identities but now you have to become your identity. (p 32) In early modernity the challenge facing people was to conform to “the emerging class-bound social types and models of conduct.” (p 28) “class and gender were ‘facts of nature’ and the task left to the self-assertion of most individuals was to ‘fit in’ in the allocated niche through behaving as the other occupants did.” (p 33)

Nowadays “we are presently moving away from the era of pre-allocated ‘reference groups’ ... the destination of individual self-constructing labours is endemically and incurably undetermined, is not given in advance, and tends to undergo numerous and profound changes before ... the end of the individual’s life.” (p 7) This means that “the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual’s shoulders.” (p 8)

Nowadays Big Brother, the punisher of individuality, no longer exists. Nor does Elder Brother, who guides the individual into their proper channel. (p 61) “Everything ... is now down to the individual. It is up to the individual to find out what she or he is capable of doing, to stretch that capacity to the utmost, and to pick the ends to which that capacity could be applied best.” (p 62)

And we need guidance. Bauman points out that TV chat shows are “daily compulsive viewing for millions of guidance-hungry men and women.” (p 68) However the only support offered is the self-help support group. “One may perhaps also learn from other people's experience how to survive the next round of ‘downsizing’, how to handle children who think they are adolescents and adolescents who refuse to become adults, how to get the fat and other unwelcome ‘foreign bodies’ ‘out of one’s system’, how to get rid of addiction that is no longer pleasurable or partners who are no longer satisfying. But what one learns in the first place from the company of others is ... advice about how to survive in one's own irredeemable loneliness” (p 35)

Shifting the blame
“At the threshold of the modern era we have been emancipated from belief in the act of creation, revelation and eternal condemnation. With such beliefs out of the way, we humans found ourselves ‘on our own’ - which means that from then on we knew of no limits to improvement and self-improvement other than the shortcomings of our own inherited or acquired gifts, resourcefulness, nerve, will and determination.” (p 28)

“That men and women have no one to blame for their frustrations and troubles does not need now to mean ... that they can protect themselves ... if they fall ill, it is assumed that this is happened because they were not resolute and industrious enough in following their health regime; if they stay unemployed, it is because they failed to learn the skills of gaining an interview, because they did not try hard enough to find a job what because they are, purely and simply, work-shy.” (p 34)


The relationship between the governed and the governors:
Modern life is like a caravan site: “Drivers bring to the site their own homes ... each driver has his or her own itinerary and time schedule. What the drivers wants from the site managers is not much more (but no less either) then to be left alone and not interfered with. In exchange, they promise not to challenge the managers’ authority and to pay the rent when due. Since they pay, they also demand. They tend to be quite adamant when arguing for their rights to the promised services but otherwise want to go their own ways and would be angry if not allowed to do so. On occasion, they may clamour for better service ... but it won't occur to them to ... take over the responsibility for running the place.” (p 24)

Certainly the bosses no longer want to look after people. “The contemporary global elite can run without burdening itself with the chores of administration, management, welfare concerns, or, for that matter, with the mission of ‘bringing light’, ‘reforming the ways’, morally uplifting, ‘civilizing’ and cultural crusades. Active engagement in the life of subordinate populations is no longer needed (on the contrary, it avoided as unnecessarily costly and ineffective)” (p 13)

Instead the prime technique is to relocate the blame for misery. “Being an individual de jure means having no one to blame for one's own misery, seeking the causes of one's own defeats nowhere except in one's own indolence and sloth, and looking for no remedies other than try harder and harder still.” (p 38) As in the Bible, the Israelites are being ordered to make bricks without straw “and the producers of bricks are told that solely their own laziness prevents them from doing the job properly.” (p 49)

But the destruction of collective action and the iconisation of individualism has left the poor, those "limited to their own, individually owned, blatantly inadequate resources.” (p 33)  without a weapon:

Too many opportunities

Bauman suggests that modern capitalism has, in order to keep selling, moved beyond need. In the olden days goods were produced to satisfy need. But "there is a bottom line to what one needs in order to stay alive and be capable of doing whatever the producer’s role may require, but also an upper limit to what one may dream of, desire and pursue while counting on the social approval for one’s ambitions ... whatever rises above that limit is a luxury, and desiring luxury is a sin. The main concern is therefore that of conformity.” (p 76)

We've gone beyond the 'luxury is a sin' point. And now we are moving beyond desire. This is because “it takes time, effort and considerable financial outlay to arouse desire ... Consumers guided by desire must be ‘produced’, ever anew, and at high cost".

In order to keep selling the capitalists must create a mind-set in which we are desperate for endless self-improvement. “The ‘my body a besieged fortress’ attitude does not lead to asceticism, abstinence or renunciation; if anything, it means consuming more - but consuming special ‘healthy’ foods, commercially supplied.” (p 80)

But this pursuit of wishes brings anxieties: “One thing the fitness-seekers know for sure is that they are not fit enough, yet, and that they must keep trying. The pursuit of fitness is the state of perpetual self-scrutiny, self-reproach and self-deprecation, and so also of continuous anxiety.” (p 78)

We used to admire those who could wait for things. But now we are too busy running to catch up with eternally receding goals. “No longer is the delay of gratification a sign of moral virtue. It is a hardship pure and simple, a problematic burden signalling imperfections in social arrangements, personal inadequacy, or both. ...In the casino culture the waiting is taken out of wanting, but the satisfaction of the wanting must also be brief, must last only until the next run of the ball, to be as short-lived as the waiting, lest it should smother, rather than replenish and reinvigorate, the desire.” (p 159) “To stay alive and fresh, desire must be time and again, and quite often, gratified - yet gratification spells the end of the desire.” (p 160) “One can think of no reason to stick to an inferior or aged product rather than look for a ‘new and improved’ one in the shops.” (p 164)

But there is too much to want.
"The world full of possibilities is like a buffet table set with mouth-watering dishes, too numerous for the keenest of eaters to hope to taste them all.” (p 62)
I just need to look at my bookshelves, stuffed with books I have bought but not yet got around to reading, and the Amazon 'later' list which has over one hundred titles on it, and the poster of a hundred books I 'must' read on which I have nearly half still to be read, to know that there is too much wanting in my world.

Of course this endless choice is only available to the monied. “The more choices the rich seem to have, the less bearable to all is a life without choosing.” (p 88)

Cities and strangers

The modern dream is to live in a community. But other people are dangerous. Defining a city as "a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet" (p 94) Bauman suggests that such encounters require us to develop "civility" (p 95) a code of behaviour appropriate for an encounter unlikely to have either a past or a future. He suggests that the spaces we develop where encounters with strangers regularly take place (airport lounges, hotel rooms, motorway service stations etc) "do not require a mastery of the sophisticated and hard-to-study art of civility, since they reduce behaviour in public to a few simple and easy-to-grasp precepts.” (p 102)

But we are becoming so frightened of strangers that we are redeveloping gated communities (going back, perhaps, to the walled towns of the middle-ages) in which civility and community is ensured by the tight surveillance of security guards and CCTV (p 92)

Then we dump everything that is bad outside the walls. The “communal world is complete in so far as all the rest is ... hostile - a wilderness full of ambushes and conspiracies and bristling with enemies wielding chaos as their main weapons. The inner harmony of the communal world shines and glitters against the background of the obscure and tangled jungle which starts on the other side of the turnpike. It is there, to that wilderness, that people huddling in the warmth of shared identity dump (or hope to banish) the fears which prompted them to seek communal shelter.” (p 172)

Work

Once upon a time, we worked for our tribe. Work was “the collective effort of which every single member of humankind had to partake." This meant that work became elevated into a moral imperative. "All the rest was but a consequence: casting work as the ‘natural condition’ of human beings, and being out of work as an abnormality; blaming departure from that natural condition for extant poverty and misery, deprivation and depravity; ranking men and women according to the assumed value of the contribution their work made to the species-wide endeavour; and assigning to work the prime place among human activities, leading to moral self-improvement and to the rise of the overall ethical standards of society.” (p 137)

This was a time when labourers were needed. Bauman suggests that the welfare state owes its origin to the need for the bosses to make sure that there was a supply of (healthy) labour ready to be call upon. “The unemployed were fully and truly the ‘reserve army of labour’, and so had to be kept through thick and thin in a state of readiness, in case they were called back into active service. ... More sceptical observers saw the welfare state as a collectively financed and managed sanitation device - a cleaning-and-healing operation to be run as long as the capitalist enterprise kept generating social waste it had neither intention nor resources to recycle.” (p 145)

But now there isn't enough work to go round. “Work can no longer offer the secure axis around which to wrap and fix self-definitions, identities and life-projects. Neither can it be easily conceived of as the ethical foundation of society, or as the ethical axis of individual life. Instead work has acquired ... a mainly aesthetic significance. It is expected to be gratifying by and in itself, rather than be measured by the genuine or putative effects it brings to one’s brothers and sisters in humanity ... let alone the bliss of future generations ... It is instead measured and evaluated by its capacity to be entertaining and amusing” (p 139)

Furthermore, the global economy means that mobile capital can roam the world while the less-mobile workers are stuck in one place. This in turn means that localised governments have to pander to capital. “To an unprecedented degree politics has become a tug-of-war between the speed with which capital can move and the ‘slowing down’ capacities of local powers ... A government ... has little choice but to implore and cajole, rather than force, capital to fly in ... In practice, all this means low taxes, fewer or no rules and above all a ‘flexible labour market’. More generally, it means a docile population.” (p 150) The only weapon governments have is their markets. “Capital is dependent, for its competitiveness, effectiveness and profitability, on consumers ... a labour force is but a secondary consideration.” (p 151)

Bauman suggests there are now four sorts of work: “People who invent the ideas and the ways to make them desirable and marketable ... those engaged in the reproduction of labour (educators or various functionaries of welfare state) ... ‘skin trades’ requiring face-to-face encounter with the recipients of service ... routine labourers ... the most expendable, disposable and exchangeable parts of the economic system.” (p 153)

Other ideas

• Reality “is created by ...the stubborn indifference of the world to my intention, the world's reluctance to submit to my will, that rebounds in the perception of the world as ‘real’ - constraining, limiting and disobedient.” (p 17)
• “When authorities are many, they tend to cancel each other out. ... It is by courtesy of the chooser that a would-be authority becomes an authority. Authorities no longer command; they ingratiate themselves with the chooser; they tempt and seduce.” (p 64)
• “Heavy modernity was the era of territorial conquest. Wealth and power was firmly rooted or deposited deep inside the land - bulky, ponderous and immovable like the beds of iron ore and deposits of coal. ... Anything lying between the outposts of competing imperial realms was seen as masterless, a no man’s land, and so an empty space - and empty space was a challenge to action and a reproach to idlers.” (p 114)
• “The labyrinth becomes the master image of the human condition” (p 138)
• “If staying together was a matter of reciprocal agreement and mutual dependency, disengagement is unilateral.” (p 149)
• “Leadership has been replaced by the spectacle, and surveillance by seduction.” (p 155)

This is an amazing book. I might not agree with many of the things that has been said, and time may prove wrong, but there is no gainsaying that this is a brilliantly argued position and it certainly made me think.

March 2018; 200 pages

"Dead Boys Can't Dance" by Michel Dorais

Written by the man who also wrote Rent Boys, this is a sociological inquiry to understand why the rate of suicide amongst homosexual male youths is sixteen (sixteen!) times higher than for their heterosexual counterparts.

He suggests that there are two scenarios for gay boys: they can be identified as gay early on by other people because of their behaviours. One respondent stated: "At the age of six, I was being called a fag. I was already the school fag. Others therefore knew what I was before I did." (p 33) Others come out or are outed when they are older.

Dorais identifies four "adaptive scenarios in response to rejection" (p 37):

• "The Perfect Boy wishes to live up to expectations ... he will not reveal his homosexuality to others ... his great fear is the anticipated embarrassing event that will compromise him." (pp 37 - 38) For Jean-Francois this happened when his mum read his diary. His parents ostracised him. "They no longer celebrated his birthday." Wow! That's rejection! (p 39) The Perfect Boy scenario tends to end in one of two tragic ways: "The young man reveals his homosexuality and the responses are disbelief, followed by the general dismay of all around him. He is perceived as a traitor and also as an intruder who has been lying about his real desires. He feels, with reason, that he is not understood, and that he is being judged and rejected." (p 40) Alternatively "Instead of revealing his homosexuality, the young male attempts suicide so that he will take his secret with him and hide forever the desires perceived to be so shameful." (p 40)
• "The Token Fag ... pegged as homosexual at an early age ... the object of ridicule, harassment, and psychological and/or physical violence. Given the inaction of adults when faced with his abuse, he feels powerless in these situations, and he will sometimes consider his fate to be sealed." (p 41) One said "I wanted to be between the paint and the wall because I wanted to be invisible." (p 41)
• "The Chameleon's varies from being one who pretends to be and at other times is an imposter. ... This situation reaches crisis levels when he no longer wants to be a part of the masquerade that is suffocating him. ... Arriving at a balance between his secret inner life and his everyday life is difficult for him, and the older he gets, the more he fails to see how to escape the situation ... I felt that I was human garbage because I was gay. ... I was a monster, someone who should not exist: human garbage." (pp 44 - 45)
• The Rebel rejects homophobia and develops a resistance but in one case the rebellion led to drug addiction.

There are some telling insights:

• "Claude found himself on the street with only the clothes he was wearing ... It was therefore in silence, destitution and solitude that he began to cope with family rejection." (pp 52 - 53)
• "My mother, I saw her as a saint. ... When I told her I was questioning the possibility of being gay, she said: 'You better leave now. I don't ever want to see you again.' It's not easy at sixteen to find yourself alone and having to somehow survive. I will always remember that." (p 55) 
• "I slept in saunas and under balconies." (p 66)
• "My parents were fervent believers. ... God rejected and hated gays. A god of love, so it seems." (p 69)
• "It would seem that compatibility is impossible between religious beliefs and homosexuality for those interviewed young men who described themselves as believers, or as having been so. The journey to acceptance of being gay must pass through religious rejection, they say." (p 69)
• "Being treated as a fag is the worst thing that could happen to a boy's status as a male." (p 79)
• "To flourish, human beings must perceive themselves to be part of a whole greater than self." (p 87)
• "Suicide is a final solution to a temporary problem" (p 105)

Ways in which gay men can be resilient (p 85):

• "A healthy determination to criticize and contradict the opinions of others ... I have the right to be different"
• "A sense of humour when facing adversity ... a creativity that permits one to dream as a way of compensating for reality"
• "Well-established significant relationships"
• "The awareness or even the celebration of one's potential in spite of degradation by others."

A fascinating book. May 2017; 114 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Rent Boys" by Michel Dorais

This book is based on an academic study of forty young male prostitutes in Quebec and Montreal. The author has also written the equally readable Dead Boys Can't Dance, a study of male homosexuality and suicide.

The 3 most common arenas for male prostitution are street hustling, stripping and escorting. On average they were twenty when they started sex work. Nearly half said they were gay, the others were more or less evenly divided between heterosexual and bisexual. On average in North America one in 6 boys are victims of child sexual abuse but over half the prostitutes reported such. Many were unsuccessfully fostered or adopted because of unstable family backgrounds. The vast number were ill educated, only 5% attending university and none graduating. Most or all of their clients were male although sometimes they had threesomes.

There are four groups of people involved: prostitutes, clients, entrepreneurs (eg owners of clubs etc, pornographers, drug dealers, hoteliers etc) and judges. The book also categorises the rentboys themselves into four types:

• Outcasts: often younger men, usually destitute, often runaways from difficult childhoods and nearly always addicted to a substance; they are living from day to day, usually street hustling. These boys have very low self-esteem: "I see myself as a garbage can that's been soiled, washed, bleached, but it's still dirty" (p 37)
• The Part-Timers are often heterosexual men who are using sex work to supplement their income; they often have a family  from whom they keep this work entirely separate. They usually work in the 'higher status' stripping or escorting and they almost always insist on safe sex.
• The Insiders grew up in the sex trade, often having a parent who was a prostitute. Thus, sex work is normal and it gives them a sense of belonging: "the street is yours, it's your playground, it's a part of your life." (p 41)
• For the Liberationists "prostitution is a way of living out fantasies, exploring new experiences and partners, and profiting from those discoveries." (p 41) But they may become disillusioned: "We're paid for dreams, and we wind up living in a world of dreams." (p 42)

• "rent boys are seeking adventure and, especially, ready cash, but they find themselves in an activity in which idealism and disillusion lock horns. Though they may lack the features and physique of cult film idols, they have learned to act as if they possessed them. In fact, the male prostitution market is a universe shot through with illusions. Fantasy reigns supreme, whether deliberately cultivated by sex workers in order to entice their clients or projected by clients onto the young men whose services they hire." (p viii)
• "Prior to the emergence of the homosexual/ heterosexual dichotomy in the public mind, male-to-male relations were, as in antiquity, considered acceptable from the vantage point of the active partner." (p 15)
• "Poor youths, finding themselves unemployed and destitute or simply unable to find female partners, have willingly prostituted themselves to men." (p 16)
• "Intimacy and virility are what the client requires ... hence the young hunk, muscles rippling from bodybuilding, heterosexual in appearance even though he has sex with other men." (p 21)
• "everyone is involved in watching each other. Sex workers have to attract clients ... they keep a low profile with respect to police or local residents. Clients clearly put a premium on discretion." (p 23)
• "All forms of sex work - street hustling, stripping, escorting - are trades learned by contact or apprenticeship with more experienced individuals, for example family members, peers, or clients" (p 26)
• "Clients are brutal with me at times, especially the big tough ones. They get violent when I suck them off. They hold my head and jam their dick down my throat until I choke. When I have anal sex, some of them try to hurt me on purpose, as if they wanted to bust me open." (p 27)
• "Street hustlers ... are easily identifiable ... by the way they lope along the sidewalk trying to entice potential clients: 'It's all in the body, the attitude, the posture, especially the look in your eye,' ... For others, the clothing and what it suggests count for a good deal." (pp 27 - 28)
• "Mutual masturbation costs less than oral sex, which costs less than anal sex or 'extras' such as sadomasochistic relations." (p 28)
• "You have to have short hair, wear nice clothes, be really clean, and sit there like you're part of the furniture." (p 29)
• "make sure the client undresses first, so as to examine his body ... ask the client to put the money on the night table in advance so as to avoid any misunderstandings." (p 29)
• "Strippers are paid a minimal base wage for their stage show and earn extra income by offering various services. ... First the stripper begins to undress to rhythmic music, baring his torso or somewhat more. He then performs a slower, more lascivious dance to a ballad, undressing completely or almost." (p 29)
• "Surveillance is claimed to be vigilant so as to prevent acts such as genital fondling or fellatio that are illegal in public, but the reality is that the darkness of the room, the amounts of money changing hands, and the guards arbitrary judgement militate in favour of more relaxed enforcement." (p 30)
• "No stripper will say he turns tricks, not even me, and I do. Nobody wants to be taken for a hustler. The guys want to preserve their male image." (p 31)
• "It is no exaggeration to say that strippers watch their clients as much as their clients watch them. Most strippers consider their own attractiveness to be a function of their gaze as well as their physique." (pp 32 - 33)
• "The merciless reality of the male prostitution market dictates that popularity waxes and wanes as a function of ephemeral traits such as youth, beauty, and physical fitness. Therefore, mobility tends to be downward with age." (p 35)
• "If you want to hustle, you can't love yourself. It looks like an exchange of services, but basically what you are is a garbage can for society ... You're immediately overcome by drugs, violence, rejection - it all comes with the territory. It's inseparable from prostitution." (p 45)
• "No employer acknowledges their experience as having any value; on the contrary, most perceive it as something negative, degrading and contemptible. Where the job market is concerned, these men are usually better off keeping their past a secret." (p 86)
• "even those who had ceased their sex-work activities remained in or on the periphery of prostitution." (p 87)
• "Sex work ... offers no easy exit." (p 87)

This is a fascinating study of a hidden world and it is extremely well-written. March 2017; 100 pages

"Outsiders" by Howard S Becker

This sociological study of outsiders is by an ex-American jazz musician and includes fascinating portraits of 'marihuana' users (parts were written in the early 1950s) and jazz musicians.

The fact that the book is written when it was means that the chapters on drug taking are devoted to 'marihuana' which is obviously regarded as really rather naughty. Its study of 'dance musicians' is about musicians who want to play 'jazz'.  It also brands homosexuals as deviants:  "many homosexuals are able to keep their deviance secret from their nondeviant associates" (p 21); explaining how difficult it is for them to keep jobs. It is difficult nowadays even to understand how anyone can refer to homosexuality as deviance let alone a sociologist especially without putting the word 'deviance' into quotation marks. But it does make this book a rather fascinating unintended social history.

"What laymen want to know about deviants is: why do they do it? How can we account for this rule-breaking? What is there about them that leads them to do forbidden things?" (p 3)

"different groups judge different things to be deviant." (p 4)
Disease analogy (p 5)
Some forbidden acts are tolerated so long as they are not done openly (p 11)

Deviant 'normalises' behaviour thus:

• Not my fault: tossed by the winds: he is at the mercy of circumstances: it was society made me do it (p 28)
• Not wrong if no one hurt (p 28)
• Not wrong if you are righting a wrong eg beating up other deviants (p 29)
• Not wrong if your condemners are hypocrites (p 29)

"Members of service occupations characteristically consider the client unable to judge the proper worth of the service." (p 82)

"Musicians feel that the only music worth playing is what they call 'jazz', a term which can partially be defined as that music which is produced without references to the demands of outsiders. Yet they must endure unceasing interference with their playing by outsiders and audience ... In order to achieve success he finds it necessary to 'go commercial', that is, play in accord with the wishes of nonmusicians for whom he works; in doing so he sacrifices the respect of other musicians and thus, in most cases, his self-respect." (p 83)

"Only musicians are sensitive and unconventional enough to give real sexual satisfaction to a woman." (p 86)

"Musicians live an exotic life, like in a jungle or something. They start out, they're just ordinary kids from small towns - but once they get into that life they change. It's like a jungle, except that their jungle is a hot, crowded bus. You live that kind of life long enough, you just get to be completely different." (p 86)

Well written by an ex musician and really interesting about jazz. January 2017; 208 pages

"Folk devils and moral panics" by Stanley Cohen

This brilliant sociology text describes what happens after a few young people were arrested in Clacton on a bank holiday, how the myth of the Mods and Rockers was created, and how society massively overreacted. There are times when it reads like a thriller.

There are shocking moments. The criminal offences committed by the young people seem trivial compared to the wickedness of authority. Two lads, for example, were arrested and charged with threatening behaviour for flicking elastic bands at people. One lad who put a piece of driftwood on a pile of litter as he was leaving Brighton beach was told by a policemen to pick it up and immediately arrested for possessing an offensive weapon. Kids were taken off the streets, herded into cells and illegally denied bail to teach them a lesson. "A young journalist, who was trying to get into the Margate courtroom, was shown to the cells instead of the Press bench because he had fairly long hair and was wearing jeans." (p 157)Those were the ones that got there. Teenage campers were banned from campsites. Lads with long hair were put on trains and returned to London. And, in a tragic aside, "A boy accidentally fell to his death over the cliffs at Saltdean (Brighton) during the night. When his friends woke up and missed him, one went across to the houses on the other side of the road to phone the police. 'But,' he told a reporter' 'they wouldn't open their doors at first. They thought we were out for trouble; you know what it is.'" (p 158)

I think it is the pathetic acceptance of his roles as a despoised outsider that makes 'you know what it is' so sad.

And the papers went to town. After all, "The media have long operated as agents of moral indignation in their own right." (p 16)

• "irresponsibility, immaturity, arrogance, lack of respect for authority ... moral depravity and sexual perversity" (p 55)
• "odious ... grubby ... louts and sluts ... cunning ... bovine ... ape-like" (p 55)
• "timid and shifty, backwards, apathetic, ungregarious and notably inarticulate" (p 55)
• "neurotic ... exhibitionist ... violent ... cowardly ... aimless ... half-baked ... precocious ... unwashed ... slickly dressed ... slow-witted ... cynical, inarticulate" (p 56)
• "chronic restlessness ... greed, hedonism and ungratefulness ... laziness, selfishness and lust" (p 64)
• Many thought that they were a sort of disease.

These were kids, mostly working class, ill educated, poor. The boy who offered to pay a £75 fine with a check did so from sheer bravado: he didn't even have a bank account. Most of those charged were unskilled. "We're bored at home, so it's a change to come down here and be bored at Brighton." (p 151) "The specific desires for change and freedom over the holidays, to get away from home, the romance of roughing it on the beaches or sleeping four to a bed in a grotty seafront boarding-house, finding a bird, getting some pills." (p 183) Many slept on the beaches. That was all they could afford.

There are some classic concepts in this brilliant book:

• "The Mods and Rockers ... appear as disembodied objects, Rorschach blots on to which reactions are projected." (p 25)
• "As the Mods and Rockers drama ran its course, the whole script changed and the reaction of each successive audience altered the nature of the stage." (p 27)
• "The gullibility effect is less significant than a general susceptibility to all sorts of rumours" (p 45)
• "The recognised weekend kit, purple hearts and contraceptives." (p 56)
• Elements in a "successful status degradation ceremony" include comparison between sinner and an idealised saint (p 61)
• "Females were more intolerant than males" (p 73)
• Sensitization: "Any item of news thrust into an individual's consciousness has the effect of increasing the awareness of items of a similar nature which he might otherwise have ignored." (p 77)
• "Ambiguity, which gives rise to anxiety, is eliminated by structuring the situation to make it more predictable." (p 77) so if you blame someone you feel better (p 78)
• "presumably hunchbacks were not always unwilling to perform the jester role." (p 140)
• "No matador wants to be laughed at." (p 168)
• "How many people do feel that their jobs are worth while and dignified?" (p 181)
• "What starts as revolt finishes as style." (quoting George Melly) (p 201)

Superb. January 2017

"Redirect" by Timothy D Wilson

This is a book about the social sciences. It starts off by giving a number of examples where treatments for social and educational ills have been implemented, sometimes at the cost of billions of dollars, without being subjected to careful scientific testing. It shows which of these treatments are ineffective or, worse, counter-productive; the author compares these to the blistering and blood-letting treatments of quack doctors which were either unpleasant and useless or dangerous.

Some of the treatments are:

• Critical Incidence Stress Debriefing which results in a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder
• Self Help books which suggest that positive thinking will get you want you want (implying that "if you are poor, or if, God forbid, you contract a serious illness - well, it's your own damn fault")
• Bribing kids to read which might work for kids that don't read but actually turns kids who do read off reading
• Just say no to drugs or underage sex; a better way of preventing these is to encourage kids to volunteer
• Getting convicts to scare kids off crime which increases the chance that they will commit crime
• Diversity training

The author's panacea (OK so I was getting a little cynical by this time) for all these is to encourage people to rewrite their inner monologues so that they saw themselves as empowered.

He also emphasises the need for randomised control tests for all such programmes before the politicians spend vast amounts of money on them.

A very readable book which demolishes a lot of shibboleths. Not sure if his message on rescripting lives was quite as clear.

March 2015; 240 pages

"The better angels of our nature" by Steven Pinker

Outstanding. Life-changing. Brilliant. Important.

This book should be required reading for politicians and journalists. It should be on the compulsory school curriculum.

Steven Pinker time and time again debunks perceived wisdom and puts forward a radically new way of seeing the world. And it is so readable. I thought Pinker's The Blank Slate was important; it changed my philosophy of life. This book is better.

Many people believe that the world is becoming more and more violent. Pinker shows that the reverse is true. Judging from the archaeological evidence deaths from warfare in prehistoric societies averaged about 15%; it is 14% in hunter-gatherer societies and 24.5% in pre-state societies. In the earliest states this reduces to 5%; in the modern world it is 1%. The same is true of homicides: the most dangerous US inner cities are safer than the most peaceful non-state societies. In fact Pinker reckons that becoming a state makes the citizens five times safer from violent death. The civilizing process of western Europe from early statehood to modern days has reduced danger of violent death by a further thirty times.

Developing a functioning state is therefore one of the principal ways of making a society safer.

Even states can be dangerous, sponsoring violence such as judicial execution. But nowadays we have all but abolished torture, slavery, judicial execution and mutilation, wife beating and marital rape, beating children etc. In most places of the world homosexuality and adultery are no longer capital crimes. This is not because we are more moral; Pinker points out that moral societies tolerate judicial executions for 'crimes' such as homosexuality, adultery and blasphemy. "The world has far too much morality" (p751). Nor is it thanks to religion. He points out that the Bible portrays a bloodthirsty and genocidal deity. "The theory that religion is a force for peace ... does not fit the facts of history." He believes it is because we have become literate, more educated and more able to use abstract reason.

He is convincing.

This book has too many wonderful ideas for me to adequately document them here. You have to read it. It is huge but his readability means that it is manageable. Give it a go. It might change the way you view the world.

Brilliant, life-changing and readable. August 2013; 841 pages.