I Know Thee Not, Old Man

8/11/2019 I Know Thee Not, Old Man

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I know thee not, old man

Robin Bale

The designated public

Aesthetics can be understood ... as the system of a prioriforms determining what presents

itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the

invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of

politics as a form of experience.1

Public space is the space of the visible, the arena in which the questions of who has the right

to be visible in that space are played out. To be public is to be visible, to be visible is to be the

public.

The present system, whose philosophical basis could be accurately described as market

individualism2, has given rise in recent decades to the dominant model of subjectivity

Homo Economicus. That fabled entitys rational choices, as voter and consumer, underwrite

that system. Voters choose a party, consumers buy thingsand, more recently, also run public

services efficiently in their spare time. Because choice is the mantra andjustification of the

system, the old liberal welfare state, with its universalism in terms of provision, is now

obsolete. We must all, as a previous Prime Minister told us, modernise or die.3It is the

nature ofHomo Economicus, focused on improvement, calculating his striving (aspiring

would be the current buzz word), to consider the present as merely a vestibule to the future

when his investments, of time, energy and capital, come to fruition. This temporality affects

spaces, individuals and practices, consigning some of them to an unredeemable past.

There are some problems, however, with atomised choice and the pursuit of advantage. If all

our collective and individual welfare amounts to is making choices, what are we to say to

those who, like Dostoyevskys underground man, respond to this headlong rush into a bright

and shiny future with: And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly convinced that only the

normal and the positivein other words, only what is conducive to welfareis for the

advantage of man? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being?4Valorising

the choices of autonomous agents, because they are their choices, can lead some benighted


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souls to think they have the right to do what they want; resulting in an epidemic(a nicely

medicalised term) of what has come to be called anti-social behaviour. The contemporary

response to this willed difference seems to be therapy and the law.


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It is from therapy that we get a concept which seems to have become common currency

within public discourse, that of dependency on benefits, public housingused as both

something reprehensible in itself and morally harmful to the dependents. They must be

weaned off,for their own good. Thus, we can have government ministers speaking of

dependency culture5in reference to claimants of state benefits, as if the sick or unemployed

constitute a separate group within society. Dependency is projected as a euphemism for

addiction, something that clouds the lucid self-presence of the choosing subject, breaks the

hermetic seal that protects that core from the contingency of need and undermines the

legitimating function of choice.

An illustrative example: We have created and are perpetuating a vicious circle of

dependency. The challenge is to recognise the individual households need and to support this

through income subsidies allowing people to make choices for themselves in the market.6

On 24 October 2010, I led four people on a walk from Curtain Road, on the fringes of the

City of London, to Shoreditch Park. As an integral part of the piece, I drank alcohol

throughout as we walked, and encouraged the other participants to do likewise. The skewed

perspective this gave, both in the effects of the alcohol on the participants and the effect of

the knowledge that they were performing as street drinkers, was necessary, as I hope will

become clear.

The impetus for my first conceiving this event was the imposition, by Hackney Council, of

Alcohol Control Zones in several discrete areas along my planned route. These zones,

otherwise known as Designated Public Places (DPP), are areas where, in the words of the

2001 Criminal Justice and Police Act, one can legally be ordered:

(a) not to consume in that place anything which is, or which the constable reasonably

believes to be, alcohol; (b) to surrender anything in his possession which is, or which the

constable reasonably believes to be, alcohol or a container for alcohol ...7

Refusal to comply with the demand is an offence and, as the Act says, will render the

offender liable on summary conviction to a fine. The fine can be a fixed penalty notice of

50 up to a maximum of 500.


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The original plan was to take a group to circumnavigate these discrete DPPs and observe

what, in the environment, might have given rise to the measure. Like any other resident of the

borough, I was aware of the tide of gentrification that has swept across it, as in large swathes

of the rest of London. Locally, this has been exacerbated by the recent improvement of public

transport links and, arguably, the fact that the 2012 Olympic Games are to be held here.

The wording of the original orders was detailed about the areas they covered, down to which

side of Hoxton Street was included (west rather than east), for example. One such zone was

tiny, simply enclosing the churchyard of St Leonards Shoreditch, a long standing resort of

street drinkers. I had an idea of what we would find; my assumption was that the imposition

of the orders was partly there to assuage the fears of the newly arrived and relatively wealthy

about their neighbours, the poorwho, after all, cannot afford the newly refurbished pubs in

the borough. Therefore, constellations of tarted-up pubs serving food and Belgian lagers,

specialist shops and expensive delicatessens, new-build private developments, recently

owner-occupied terraces and parks undergoing regeneration would all have been evident.

However, in May 2010, six months after the creation of the separate zones, Hackney Council,

without any fanfare and little publicity, declared the entire borough a DPP. This was

surprising, especially in light of the councils protestations that nothing had changed. In the

online comments to a piece in theHackney Post, Councillor Alan Laing insists: this is not a

ban on public drinking. This point has been made throughout the process and through the

consultation. The council and the local police have expressly stated that it is not a ban on

public drinking ...8In fact, as the comments on the page where it is archived make clear, the

headline of the piece was amended by the addition of the qualifier anti-social to the original

Public drinking banned in Hackney. It seems that council and police were falling over

themselves to make clear that the ban was only aimed at other people.

A report on the councils move contained the following:

Councillor Karen Alcock, Hackneys Deputy Mayor said: It doesnt stop people from

sitting on their ownand having a beerthats not what the powers are there to do. Its for the

persistent drinkers whore shouting and intimidating people, and giving police the power to

deal with them.9

(emphasis added)


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Alcocks statement gives a clearer indication of the intent of the ban. She differentiates

solitary drinkers from intimidating ones. It looks like drinking in public is not a problem as

long as it is solitaryone is tempted to point out that this would surely be anti-social

drinking, the opposite of the social variety. The worry seems to be more about people

congregating together. We are not informed how large a group of drinkers would need to be

to intimidate the councillor.

Sergeant Matt Devereau, from Hoxtons safer neighbourhood team, said the police would

not be rushing out to confiscate drinks. We wouldnt want to take alcohol from people

having a picnic and some wine in Shoreditch Park, for instance. We would only do it if it was

anti-social and unhealthy.10

Devereau insists that the measure is directed, not against wine-drinking picnic-goers, but the

anti-social andunhealthy (note the conflation of the two terms). Who could possibly be

against health? Only the anti-social, who probably need treatment. So it is not in fact groups

of drinkers, as such, that are the problem. He does not specify who is at risk from this

unhealthy behaviour; whether it is those who are consuming the alcohol (in an insufficiently

social manner) or those who might come into contact with them. It may also seem strange

that behaviour that is unhealthy to the person doing it, but left others unharmed, should

require the intervention of the law.

The largest concern of those against was on ensuring that street drinkers had access to

treatment something we are committed to providing and this will make it easier for them to

so access.11This was from Councillor Laing, describing the substance of objections to the

creation of the DPP. As with Devereaus statement, it purports a therapeutic motivation for

the measure that exists as a complement to the punitive. Why a control order should make it

easier for support workers to access problem street drinkers and help them into treatment

options, as he claims, is rather mysterious. Support workers would surely already know

where to look. However it is presented, this remains an action intended to clear drinkersof

the wrong kindoff the streets and out of the parks; getting them into rehab would be a

means to the same end.

Tim Shields, Chief Executive of Hackney Council and Chair of the Hackney Drug and

Alcohol Action Team, said: This is just one of a number of measures that we will be using to


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combat alcohol-related anti-social behaviour. We dont want to stop those drinking alcohol

responsibly but we want to ensure that people can enjoy our public spaces safely.12There

have been laws against assault, threatening behaviour and public urination for generations, so

why is there suddenly a need for extra measures to ensure peoples safe enjoyment of our

public spaces? We shall also return to the question of who responsible drinkers are

responsible to shortly.

But first, it is worthwhile at this point to reconsider the nomenclature: DPP, a Designated

Public Place. These places streets, parks, bencheswere public beforehand. However, that

is the point. The tautology is necessary, and will seem less nonsensical, if we take the time to

question what is being designated. One of the defining joys of city life has always been a

certain contingency and heterogeneity in the population of its public spaces. Streets, parks or

squares are simply used by whoever happens to be there. And anyone has the right to be

there. One never knows who one will meet. It seems that this very fact has been viewed with

increasing suspicion in recent years. If what is being specified is a Designated Public,

meaning the users of the place, rather than a Designated Place, what motivates this

legislation might become clearer.


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Illust.2, Building site hoarding, Packington Estate, 2010, photograph ROBIN BALE

The Public is not the same entity as that public which means, in terms of space, open to all,

and in terms of entities, contingencywhoever happens to be there. The creation of the zones

is a speech act, which like all the most effective ones(Isentence you to life imprisonment,

or You are under arrest, or I hereby pronounce you man and wife) describes a change in

state, and has a police and court system to back it. The Public who will use these

transfigured spaces (the DPP) are being willed into being by that very act of designation. The

spaces that they will inhabit are already demarcated and shaped by the law. These are the

sober, law-abiding, hard-working subjects, who politicians and columnists never tire of

conscripting (as Stefan Collini13has pointed out, official uncertainties towards the market

individualist position are betrayed by the uneasy shifting from individuals to families in

invocations of the basic unit of society). These people who we must become are already

pictured for us, larger than life and in glossy colour, on the hoardings that conceal the

construction of the new-build apartments that are being prepared for them.

On responsible drinking: ... the era of the long boozy lunch is now coming to an end ... many

of us are too busy to fit in anything more than a sandwich at our desks. These days it seems

that youre more likely to find your colleagues down the gym at lunch rather than the pub.14

What I find surprising in this gem (which is fairly representative of the whole site) is that the

problem framed is not that of being too busy to eat lunch beyond a snatched sandwich. The

problem, apparently, was lunchtime drinking, now thankfully consigned to the dustbin of

history along with trade union membership.

Falstaff

Falstaff: Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?

Prince Henry: Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning thee after

supper and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly

which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?

(emphasis added)Henry IV, Part 1, Act 1 Scene 2


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Soafter a preamble that, I hope, has marked out the territoryto the walk as it actually

happened. The premise of the walk had to change. It would no longer be enough to map out

the discrete zones, look at whatever pockets of gentrification and poverty were existing cheek

by jowl. This was not a matter of localised incursions, the semi-privatisation, or pseudo-

privatisation of a public area. The entire borough was now existing as a zone. It was not that

discrete gated communities had suddenly sprung up, closing everyone else out; more that we

find ourselves within a gated community with strict requirements for membership and no way

to get out.

As the whole of Hackney was now under the sign of the new Designated Public, an

invocation of the same, one could start anywhere, go anywhere, and find it; the eternal and

brightly lit present of the gym, where the machines are equipped with mirrors facing them, so

its clientele can observe their own endless becoming. There was a necessity to find a fracture,

to insert difference. How to thread these spaces together, whilst pushing them apart; how to

consider time and untimeliness?

The reasons for the recently legislated antipathy to street drinkers are probably many; dislike

of the poor is part of it, but it is the visibility of this particular section of the poor that might

be a major factor. They are outside, we have to see them. It is, to a large extent, a matter of

theatre. They parade what might be their dependency, or is quite possibly their choicebut

must be the wrong one. As the user of any drug will confirm, drug time is not normal time.

They appear to live in a different time to everyone else; evidenced not just in the clumsy

movements and slurred speech of the drunk. They are not just passing through, hurrying to

get somewhere else, they stay. They drink in the day, when others have to work, they have

been assumed to be unemployed, or under-employed, avatars of a benefits culture that is

outmoded, an obsolete temporality. They hoard time, so there is less of it for decent people.

The first stop on our way, after the off-licence, was a small brown plaque, halfway up the side

of a Victorian building on Hewett Street, off Curtain Road. It reads: Near this site stood The

Curtain Theatre 1577c.1627 Second English public playhouse ... It was speculation

(though not entirely unfounded) on my part but, for the sake of poetic clarity, I claimed that

there was a strong possibility that this unremarkable street with the van depot at the end of it

was where the character of Sir John Falstaff first appeared.


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So surfeit-swelld, so old and so profane;

But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;

Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape

For thee thrice wider than for other men.

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:

Presume not that I am the thing I was;

For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,

That I have turnd away my former self ...

The cold brutality with which Halnow King Henry the Fifthconsigns Falstaff to the past

is shocking. It is a public judgement, witnessed both by the characters onstage and by the

audience. It is framedthough not without a great deal of ambiguityas a necessary

symbolic act, if Hal is to renew broken Britain. Itlends greater shine to Hals apotheosis as

the chivalric hero of a re-born nation at the battle of Agincourt in the next play. It is part of

that theatres attempt to forge a self-conscious (patriotic) public via the medium of the history

play. It is through Falstaff the exiles eyes that I wished the walk to be seen.

We pass architectural models sitting on top of packing cases in a window on Curtain Road, a

series of proposed futures waiting to be realised


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Illust.3, Arden Estate Board, 2010, photograph ROBIN BALE

At the top end of Hoxton Street Market we passed through the Arden Estate. In a fanciful

mood, and perhaps as a nod to local history, its blocks all have Shakespearian names. Or it

might have been an assumption on the part of the council that ordinary people have as much

right to the ownership of high culture, or what is now known as Heritage, as anyone else.

Just off the street we find Falstaff House. It is fitting that Falstaffs last home is in the name

of a denigrated form of housing.

The current social housing is warehousing poverty in the core of our great citiescities

which need to be the very engines of economic growth.18The assumed teleology is clear

here; warehousing is the thickened time of stasis. Engines and growth are dynamic, future

orientated.


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Illust.4, I Love Hoxton, 2001, KEVIN HARRISON, photograph ROBIN BALE

On the roundabout at the top of Hoxton Street, a brightly coloured sculpture of three figures,

two children and a long-haired youth, who points urgently away from the estates back down

the road, stagger drunkenly in crocodile formation towards the market. One of the children

has a fat chain around its ankle, perhaps the only trace left of a long-stolen bike.


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Illust.5Boulder, 2009, JOHN FRANKLAND,photograph ROBIN BALE

We ended in Shoreditch Park, next to John Franklands sculptureBoulder(2009), a piece of

Cornish granite weighing near 100 tons and around 12 foot high. It is an enormous presence,

a miniature mountain in a relatively flat and featureless expanse of green. Its closed form

seems to bend the space around it with the gravity of its age and weight. Unlike so much

public sculpture, especially that which is part of regeneration schemes, it does not make so

much as a nod to contextlocal communities, anodyne versions of local history. It insists on

its dumb presence and visibility.

In terms of contemporary discourse around art and urban regeneration, this does create a

place, a recognisable landmark, but it is worlds away from the inclusive and upbeat

rhetoric:


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Through aesthetic re-enchantment ... revival and recovery are abetted ... inhabitants are

empowered by the reclaimed environment ... In so doing, the conversion of space to place

builds the self-esteem of the locale, revitalizing all that it touches.19

Frankland, a rock climber himself, has claimed that it is intended to be climbed on and that

this will activatethe piece, but this looks like a sop to those who would demand some sort

of utilitarian inclusivity: the Shoreditch Trust, under whose aegis this work was created, say

that this is a way of playfully debunking the notion of those sculptures in park settings,

which are often fenced off or prominently labelled as not to be touched.20I would say that

it debunks the notion of public art as it stands today. It contains its own time, millions of

years of it, in its unknowable interior, oblivious to the attempts to gentrifyor modernise

its surroundings. It is immovable and gives nothing. One can only look at it, sense its gravity,

or walk past.

I poured beer on it, the most honest homage I could do, and walked away.

Biography

Robin Baleis an artist and writer from London. He makes improvised spoken word pieces.

He studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art and has recently received a scholarship to

study for a doctorate in fine art at Middlesex University, with the working title of The

Performer and the Polity. (http://www.purgeglut.blogger.com,

http://www.robinbale.blogger.com)

1 Jacques Rancire (trans. Gabriel Rockhill), The Politics of Aesthetics(New York:

Continuum, 2006) p. 13.

2 Stefan Collini, Blahspeak,London Review of Books, 32(7), 2010, pp. 29-34.

3 Sara Helm, Modernise or die, Blair tells partners, The Independent, 6 June 1997,

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modernise-or-die-blair-tells-partners-

1254375.html (accessed 27/02/11).

4 Fyodor Dostoyevsky (trans. Constance Garnett), Notes from the Underground, in

Deborah A. Martinsen (ed.),Notes from the Underground, The Double and other storie(New

York: Barnes & Noble,2003) p. 261.

5 Benefits culture is a national crisis that must end, says Iain Duncan Smith,Daily

Telegraph, 12 November 2010,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/8127923/Benefits-culture-is-a-national-crisis-that-must-end-says-Iain-Duncan-Smith.html (accessed 25/02/11).
http://www.purgeglut.blogger.com/http://www.purgeglut.blogger.com/http://www.robinbale.blogger.com/http://www.robinbale.blogger.com/http://www.purgeglut.blogger.com/


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6 Stephen Greenhalgh and John Moss, Principles for Social Housing Reform, Localis, 15

April 2009,

http://www.localis.org.uk/images/Localis%20Principles%20for%20Social%20Housing%20R

eform%20WEB.pdf (accessed 22/02/11).

7 Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001,section 12, HM Government, 2001,http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/16/section/12#commentary-c1772955 (accessed

25/02/11).

8 Gregor Hunter, Anti-social public drinking banned in Hackney,Hackney Post, 23 March

2010, http://hackneypost.co.uk/?p=3784 (accessed 22/02/11).

9 ibid., Gregor Hunter (2010).

10 Chris Kay and Arj Singh, Anti-social drinkers face fines or arrest,Hackney Post, 18

March 2010, http://hackneypost.co.uk/?p=3668 (accessed 22/02/11).

11 ibid., Gregor Hunter (2010).

12 Team Hackney, Safer Dalston newsletter, May 2010,

http://www.teamhackney.org/may2010-ward-dalston (accessed 20/02/11)

13 ibid., Stefan Collini (2010).14 Last orders for the boozy lunch, Drinkaware, 19 May 2010,

http://www.drinkaware.co.uk/alcohol-and-you/work-and-study/last-orders-for-the-boozy-

lunch (accessed 26/02/11).

15 William Shakespeare,Henry IV, Part 2, Act 2 Scene 4.

16 William Shakespeare,Henry IV, Part 2, Act 1 Scene 2.

17 Germaine Greer, Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction(London: Oxford University

Press, 2002) p. 24.

18 ibid., Stephen Greenhalgh and John Moss ( 2009).

19 Luca M. Visconti et al., Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the Public in Public Place,

Journal of Consumer Research, 2010, 36(October), pp. 511-529.

20 Boulder, The Shoreditch Trust, 2009, http://www.shoreditchtrust.org.uk/Physical-Regeneration/Peer/John-Frankland-s-Boulder (accessed 22/02/11).
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/16/section/12#commentary-c1772955http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/16/section/12#commentary-c1772955

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I Know Thee Not, Old Man