September 11, 2009 The Remembrance to a Lost Work: Nostalgia, Labour and the Visual
Taken from the Introduction to Ming Jue: Photographs of Longbridge and Nanjing (Stuart Whipps, 2008, Walsall: New Art Gallery)
Photography by Stuart Whipps [http://www.stuartwhipps.com/]
One of the main concerns sociologists had in the 1960s and 1970s was how industrial workers coped with the boring monotony of their routine jobs, but ironically within two decades attention had shifted to how these same workers could manage without those very jobs. Over the last three decades the industrial economies of the West — America, Europe and the UK — have undergone a profound transformation. Across the world whole industries have been lost, millions of jobs have disappeared and communities are left wondering where to turn to for the next form of employment. Traditional industries such as coal, iron, steel, and shipbuilding as well as light and heavy manufacturing have been particularly badly hit.
What has been the response to these changes? Well, for some, industrial loss was a cause for celebration, it representing what Joseph Schumpeter had many years ago described as ‘creative destruction’. Schumpeter argued that in order for developed economies to evolve successfully they had to rid themselves of industries and even whole sectors where they no longer enjoyed a competitive advantage over other nations. Certain types of manufacturing or primary industry could and should be sloughed off like some monstrous snake shedding its old skin. This view was held by many neo-liberals on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1980s and 1990s. Sure industrial change was painful but was a necessary evolutionary process.
Another strand to the response to change was resignation rather than celebration. Like the neo-liberals there was an acceptance of the necessity of change; that the West could no longer compete with Japan and the so called Tiger economies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore – little was said then about the threat of China. The shift out of traditional industry was blamed, or explained, by reference to the free market and the increasingly globalised nature of the world economy.
Finally, there is another response, that of lamentation for the loss of industry and the particular heritage it imbued on places, regions and whole nations. As long ago as 1982 American scholars Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison wrote their seminal account The Deindustrialisation of America (1982). In addition to coining and popularising the phrase deindustrialisation, Bluestone and Harrison made the important link between industrial loss and the impact economic change wrought on individual displaced workers, their families and the communities they lived in.
During the 1980s and on into the 1990s one community after another suffered industrial shutdown, or were ‘Worked Over’ to use Doukas’ (2003) phrase, as corporations moved to more benign parts of the country or shifted continent altogether. In the rest of this essay I want to reflect on the nature of this lamentation, or what some have labelled as ‘smokestack nostalgia’ (Cowie and Heathcott, 2003). I am interested here in why it is that the loss of industry continues to excite the popular imagination. What is it about the shift witnessed over the last three decades that continues to provoke and disturb us? Why are we still interested in the evidence of the industrial past, and, if we are nostalgic, what is at the root of this sentiment?
One of the clearest consequences that the loss of traditional industry brings is a calling in to question of the sense of identity which was invested in an older industrial order. Sociologists in the post war years were apt to light upon what they called occupational communities, localities that derived their importance, indeed their very raison d’être, from the industry located there. Although not a phrase often on sociological lips at the time such academics were discussing the sense of identity that both place and people enjoyed from a type of work. There was much speculation as to the nature of the culture which was formed by certain industries, coal being the most obvious example. One of the reasons why there was such attention paid to these communities was the fact that this type of identity was seen to be under threat from various factors, especially the growing post war affluence which threatened to erode traditional working class patterns of behaviour. Away from academic discussions there was a wider sense that industry and types of work were bound up with place, and that the economy of an area was important in understanding its particular culture. Thus in the UK the North East of England became synonymous with heavy industry such as coal, shipbuilding and steel; the Northwest with cotton, glass and chemicals; the North Midlands with pottery; and the West Midlands with light industry and the automotive sector and so on. Within each region there was seen to be a distinctive cultural pattern formed out of industrial history and trajectory. Work then was both embedded in place, and place and the people were embedded in their work and industry. Whole families across generations were formed in one way or another by work; socialised in the factory; subject to an anticipatory socialisation by the proximity of settlement to factory; community life ordered by the shift patterns demanded by employers, seasons or times of day. The result were patterns of culture, class, language, attitude and gender relations with a particular flavour and nuance.
During the 1990s academics, journalists and other commentators fell on this shift in the economy and began to talk of an ‘end of work’. This was the idea that a heady mix of globalization and new technology was eroding the foundations of employment. Where once jobs lasted generations some now argued that shrinking time horizons meant that workers were lucky if they enjoyed more than a few years tenure. In his book Work, Consumerism and the New Poor sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted that in the past: ‘… work was the main orientation point, in reference to which all other life pursuits could be planned and ordered’ (1998:17). And goes on to claim that:
A steady, durable and continuous, logically coherent and tightly-structured working career is however no longer a widely available option. Only in relatively rare cases can a permanent identity be defined, let alone secured, through the job performed (Bauman, 1998: 27).
A string of other sociologists and social theorists have likewise suggested that work, as a viable source of identity at least, is dead. US sociologist Richard Sennett for example talks about the Corrosion of Character by which he means the way in which modern work is marked by a dangerous short termism resulting in an erosion of the strong bonds between people and place, workers and their work. In the new economy he argues a premium is placed on those workers who are mobile and detached, not bound to place. To invest oneself in a community and embedded oneself in work is to risk stepping off of the career escalator. Sennett (1998) suggests that relationships become fugitive and shallow both in and outside work.
While this trend in cultural and social commentary has its focus on the present and future nature of work part of this narrative is retrospectively critical of the idea that work once did provide much over and above purely monetary reward. The late French social theorist André Gorz welcomed the collapse in traditional industry as a chance to rid ourselves collectively of an attachment to a degraded type of work which offered people little real meaning. As he wrote:
Even in the heyday of wage-based society, that work [modern work] was never a source of ‘social cohesion’ or integration, whatever we might have come to believe from its retrospective idealization. The ‘social bond’ it established between individuals was abstract and weak, though it did, admittedly, insert people into the process of social labour, into social relations of production, as functionally specialized cogs in an immense machine (1999: 55).
So we have here the sense that all work meaning and identity is being lost or corroded, and, or, that this type of identity was always a type of false consciousness, an industrial social chimera, which gave people the sense of community and place but was in reality nothing more than illusory. It follows for these commentators that a regret for the passing away of industrial life is nostalgia in a very simple sense – a lament for a false history. I want to argue in contradistinction to this type of approach that it is possible to find meaning and value in the work of the past. And that rather than simple nostalgia, if there is a nostalgia here, it is of an altogether more sophisticated and complex kind.
In his 1979 book Yearning for Yesterday American sociologists Fred Davis identified three distinct levels at which nostalgia operates – simple, reflective and interpretive. At the simple level nostalgia is the largely unexamined belief that ‘things were simply better in the past’. In second order, reflective nostalgia, a person does more than sentimentalize about the past, they begin to raise questions about truth claims. Finally, in the realm of interpretative nostalgia the emotion itself is rendered problematic — a person will seek to objectify the nostalgia they feel. Davis makes the point that ‘simple’ nostalgia is actually rather rare in that few people would or could hold to a wholly positive view of history. In reality nostalgia, when studied, is usually a more critical interrogation of ones’ memory, bringing to the fore critical questions about the past and the part one played in it. For those who bother to actually interview people about their experience of job loss and industrial change the idea that workers are uncritically sentimental for a return to hard traditional work is laughable. But, equally, what many researchers have found is a willingness to reflect on what that type of work meant to people, and by extension, what implications its loss has for them.
In my own research I have spoken to many former workers from a wide variety of industries. What people always talk about are the strong social bonds which grew up in certain industries. Now at times this is taken to extremes where some workers, and miners are a good example here, say that the only things they miss are their former work mates. In other groups there is a lament which goes beyond personal connection, one where work and its loss is grieved for[1]. There are many examples of this sort of elegy in accounts of deindustrialisation but I want to draw on two examples here, both from North America. The first is from Katherine Dudley’s The End of the Line: Lost jobs, new lives in Postindustrial America, where she quotes two former car workers from the closed Chrysler assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In different ways these passages emphasise the ambiguity of working lives spent in hard blue-collar jobs. At the same time Dudley deals carefully and sensitively with workers who have lost their jobs and who reflect upon the experience of the loss and the work itself:
The building itself is something I’ll miss. That building is older than I am. My whole concept of this city is that this city has been that big factory downtown. When they tear it down, my whole concept of what this city is, physically as well as psychologically, is gonna be drastically altered. It’s gonna be this huge gaping hole where this chunk of my life was…literally, just a huge gaping hole (Bill Sorensen, Tool and die maker) (Dudley, 1994: 173).
Another former assembly line worker speaks of the need to remember or mark part of her working life:
When they start tearing [the plant] down, I’m going to go get a brick. I would just keep it. My kids know mama spent fifteen year of her life [in the plant] working, and to tell my future grandkids about it. You know, tell them that it was a place where we worked, and that when they tore the building down, Grandma went and got herself a brick. For all that I put in there. I figure at least I deserve a brick (Donna Clausen, Assembler) (ibid.).
Interestingly, Donna here chooses to remember a working life by the collection of a material object, in this case a brick. It is almost as if memories and the stories they evoke are inadequate for the marking of a working life, instead a tangible link between the past and present is needed to elicit reflection, to somehow valid a story. We could say that the now redundant capital embedded in the brick increasingly embodies symbolic and cultural capital for those made redundant by the plant’s closure.
In Bamberger and Davidson’s (1998) Closing: the life and death of an American factory the authors chart workers coming to terms with redundancy after the closure of a traditional furniture factory in North Carolina. The book is filled with regret and anger for what has happened to a loyal and skilled workforce, but to describe this account as ‘simple nostalgia’ would again be wrong. As in Dudley’s writing there is an attempt to understand the contradictory experience of this process. Interviewees do not remember work entirely positively, there were very real tensions over work, race, class and gender but if there is nostalgia here it is again of a reflective or interpretive kind. There is here the questioning of what it meant to build a life through work and an exploration of the stability and dignity that such employment gave both individuals and communities. The importance of these accounts lies in their ability to critically examine the past without simplistically replicating a positive/negative dualism. The workers cited by Dudley and Bamberger and Davidson are active agents engaged in real lives reflecting on change and its meaning.
At the end of Closing the authors’ chose to subtitle their epilogue ‘Does Anybody Make Anything Anymore? While the chapter is a beautiful reflection on loss and mourning that subtitle, and especially the emphasis placed on Make, offers important clues as to what is at stake in this wider process of economic transition. It is simply a sense that something tangible and valuable is being lost when plants close. It is the sense that there is something decadent in the discarding of perfectly efficient factories, communities and individual workers. These jobs meant something to the people who did them and that that fact is rarely acknowledge. Often times communities are given too little time to mourn properly for lost industry, and are too close to events to understand what the passing of a way of life really means. There is equally disquiet at the process which leads to the export of jobs elsewhere in the world. The migration of tangible jobs is mirrored by creation of new employment in the service sector, which often pays less than traditional industry, and is short term in nature. But there is also the sense that these new posts are in intangible sectors, tasks which could be done anywhere.
I want to briefly explore some of these themes through a reflection on Stuart’s photography. Capturing a spirit, a culture or an identity is difficult, and this is especially true in the context of an empty factory. The absence of work and workers seemingly offers little for those looking to understand what work means. But take a longer more reflective look at the images from the redundant Longbridge site and we see a far more complex story. There is a poignancy in the hastily abandoned semi-completed vehicles left where they stand on their tracks – doomed never to make it to the next part of the production process. This raises all sorts of questions about the last days, hours and minutes of the factory’s life. Dig deeper still and we see in many of the images fragments of working life, such as a broken telephone in a dilapidated office. Human touches are also apparent in the canteen area where a roll of material offers some form of potential comfort to the unlucky fourth person to sit at the Formica table and plastic chairs.
 Photography by Stuart Whipps |
 Photography by Stuart Whipps |
 Photography by Stuart Whipps |
There is though a more tangible sense in which we can think about work within this abandoned site. It is the way work and labour is embedded in the material surroundings and elements of the factory. While it is true that labour of some kind is always embedded in material artefacts Stuart’s pictures force us in to a deeper consideration of its presence and meaning.
Photography by Stuart Whipps
One possible explanation as to why Stuart’s images from China are disquieting is their impenetrability. There is a newness, a freshness to the plant’s resurrection in China. In reflecting on that aesthetic we find a difficulty in the reading of the present and future. It is almost as if we can understand a death, but find the evidence of an industrial afterlife somehow more painful. Fred Davis argued that nostalgia could only experienced if one had had direct experience of the object of sentimentalisation. In the case of MG the new Chinese owners make much of the marque’s heritage and embodied values – the car is, they believe quintessentially English. In building a brand the new owners are explicitly drawing on nostalgia for something that a new audience has no direct experience of. It is almost as if memory is detached from its host and becomes a free-floating symbol, rather than something rooted in an historical past. What is also detached here is the industrial manufacturing culture which created the cars and the people whose lives were spent making them.
References
Bamberger, B. and Davidson, C. (1998) Closing: The life and death of an American Factory. London: Norton.
Bauman, Z. (1998) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Bluestone, B. and Harrison, B. (1982) The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closing, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry, New York: Basic Books.
Cowie, J. and Heathcott, J. (eds.) (2003) Beyond the Ruins: The Meaning of Deindustrialisation, Ithaca: Cornell/ ILR.
Davis, F. (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia. New York: Free Press.
Doukas, D. (2003) Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Dudley, K. M. (1994) The End of the Line: Lost jobs, new lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Gorz, A. (1999) Reclaiming Work: Beyond the wage– based society. Cambridge: Polity.
Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, London: Norton.
[1] I have written in the context of several industries including rail and coal mining sectors, Strangleman, T. (2001) ‘Networks, Place and Identities in Post-Industrial Mining Communities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25, 2: 253–67. Strangleman, T. (2004) Work Identity at the End of the Line?: Privatisation and Culture Change in the UK Rail Industry, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Strangleman, T. (2007) ‘The nostalgia for permanence at work?: The end of work and its commentators’, Sociological Review, 55. 1: 81–103.