Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T18:12:26.954Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond Aesthetics: Visibility and Invisibility in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2014

Steven High
Steven High*
Affiliation:
Concordia University, Canada
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This special issue on “Crumbling Cultures,” the first to appear on deindustrialization in a labor history journal, confirms the historiographical trend away from displaced industrial workers themselves and the cultural meaning of job loss, to a wider reflection on the cultural consequences and representations of deindustrialization. The subject, here, is the cultural agency or resilience of working-class communities broadly defined. This shifting focus reflects the evolving baseline, as the political heat of the 1980s and 1990s cools and rates of unionization plummet. For the most part, the sense of cultural continuity, or working class persistence, so evident in this issue, is found in places where not much has filled the economic and cultural vacuum. As a result, nobody in this issue speaks to the deindustrialization of large metropolitan cities. There, the actions of the state, and middle-class gentrifiers, are weighed and measured as old mills and factories are demolished or converted into condominiums or art spaces. In effect, deindustrialization and the subsequent postindustrial transformation deliver a one-two punch against working-class neighbourhoods and the old culture of industrialism. The resulting break with the industrial past may therefore be greatest where the outward signs of industrial ruination are least visible. The rise of middle-class ruin-gazing within popular culture and the academy, and the global circulation and commodification of these images and experiences, nonetheless raises important questions about its underlying politics. As historian Jackie Clarke has noted elsewhere, what is rendered visible and invisible in a post-industrial era is highly significant.

Type
Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 84: Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory , Fall 2013 , pp. 140 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Stoler, Ann Laura, “Imperial Ruins: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 191–398 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Kuhn, Annette quoted in Sayer, Andrew, The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge, 2005), 22Google Scholar.

3. Hubert Gervais interviewed by Steven High in 2006. See, also High, Steven, “Placing the Displaced Worker: Narrating Place in Deindustrializing Sturgeon Falls, Ontario,” in Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada, eds. Opp, James and Walsh, John (Vancouver, 2010)Google Scholar; and, High, Steven, “Mapping Memories of Displacement: Oral History, Memoryscapes and Mobile Methodologies” in Place, Writing and Voice in Oral History, ed. Trower, Shelley (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.

4. Johnson, Christopher H., The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700–1920 (New York, 1995), 258–59Google Scholar.

5. Jones, Owen, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London, 2011)Google Scholar; Charlesworth, Simon J., A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (Cambridge, 2000), 2Google Scholar; and Collins, Michael, The Likes of Us: A Biography of the Working Class (London, 2004)Google Scholar.

6. Dudley, Kathryn Marie, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America (Chicago, 1994), 134Google Scholar.

7. Harvey, David, “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2 (1978), 124Google Scholar; Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis, 1994)Google Scholar.

8. Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Toronto, 1975 [1942]), 82–83 Google Scholar. See also Harvey, David, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Conditions of Postmodernity,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Changes, eds. Bird, Jon, Curtis, Barry, Putnam, Tim, and Tickner, Lisa. (London, 1993), 7Google Scholar.

9. Cowie, Jefferson, Capital Moves: RCA's 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, 1999), 185Google Scholar.

10. Bevan, Robert, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture of War (London, 2006), 12–13 Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 8.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 62.

14. Clarke, Jackie, “Closing Moulinex: Thoughts on the Visibility and Invisibility of Industrial Labour in Contemporary France,” Modern & Contemporary France 19 (2011): 446CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. For more on this debate, see Strangleman, Tim, “The Nostalgia for Permanence at Work? The End of Work and it Commentators,” Sociological Review 55 (2007): 81–103 Google Scholar; and, Strangleman, Tim, “Work Identity in Crisis? Rethinking the Problem of Attachment and Loss at Work,” Sociology 46 (2012): 411–25Google Scholar. Always useful is: Kirk, John, Class, Culture and Social Change: On the Trail of the Working Class (London, 2007), 2Google Scholar.

16. Cowie, Jefferson and Heathcott, Joseph, eds. Beyond the Ruins: The Meaning of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, 2003), 5, 14Google Scholar.

17. Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), xiii–xiv Google Scholar.

18. Strangleman, Tim, “The Nostalgia of Organisations and the Organisation of Nostalgia: Past and Present in the Contemporary Railway Industry,” Sociology 33 (1991): 742–43Google Scholar.

19. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (Volume 1) (London, 1994), 189.

20. Zadoorian, Michael, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit (Detroit, 2009)Google Scholar; and Barzak, Christopher, On for Sorrow (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

21. Linkon, Sherry Lee, “Navigating Past and Present in the Deindustrial Landscape: Contemporary Creative Writers on Industrial Change,” ILWCH 84 (Fall 2013)Google Scholar, pp TK

22. A few other scholars likewise emphasize cultural continuity or persistence; see for example, Byrne, David, “Industrial Culture in a Post-Industrial World: The Case of the North East of England,” City 6 (2002): 279–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Glazer, Peter, Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration (Rochester, 2005), 7Google Scholar. Bonnet, Alastair, “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography,” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2009): 45–70 Google Scholar.

24. Fink, Leon, “When Community Comes Home to Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause,” Journal of Social History 40 (2006), 119–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. See, for example, Massey, Doreen, “Questions of Locality,” Geography 78 (1993): 142–49Google Scholar; and Massey, Doreen, “Places and their Pasts,” History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 184Google Scholar. For a very useful reflection on community and class, see Taksa, Lucy, “Like a Bicycle, Forever Teetering Between Individualism and Collectivism: Considering Community in Relation to Labour History,” Labour History 78 (2000): 7–32 Google Scholar.

26. Most promising, perhaps, is Andrew Perchard's use of “cultural circuit” in this special issue to theorize the exchange between individual and collective composition or meaning-making. For more on the concept see Thompson, Alistair, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar.

27. Strangleman, Tim, “Networks, Place and Identities in Post-Industrial Mining Communities,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (2001): 253CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. High, Steven, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt (Toronto, 2003)Google Scholar.

29. Rhodes, James, “Stigmatization, Space, and Boundaries in De-Industrial Burnley,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35 (2012): 684–703 Google Scholar. For more on class in post-1945 England, see: Skeggs, Beverley and Loveday, Vik, “Struggles for Value: Value Practices, Injustice, Judgment, Affect and the Ideas of Class,” The British Journal of Sociology 63 (2012): 472–90Google Scholar; and Jones, Ben, The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (Manchester, 2012)Google Scholar.

30. Jeff Manuel, “Developing Resources: Industry Policy and Memory on the Post-Industrial Iron Range.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2009).

31. Portelli, Alessandro, They Say in Harlan County (New York, 2010)Google Scholar. For county level results of the 2012 US presidential election, go to www.politico.com.

32. Kirk, Class, Culture and Social Change, 2, 8–9 Google Scholar.

33. Byrne, David, “Industrial Culture in a Post-Industrial World: The Case of the North East of England,” City 6 (2002): 287CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar.

35. Kirk, Class, Culture and Social Change, 8.

36. Dudley, The End of the Line, 177.

37. Stoler,“Imperial Ruins,” 17.

38. De Silvey, Caitlin and Edensor, Tim, “Reckoning with Ruins,” Progress in Human Geography 37, 4 (2012), 1–21 Google Scholar.

39. High, Steven and Lewis, David, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (Toronto, 2007), Chapter 2Google Scholar. High, Steven, “‘The wounds of class’: A Historiographical Reflection on the Study of Deindustrialization, 1973–2013” History Compass 13 (2013)Google Scholar.

40. Edensor, Tim, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford, 2005), 30–31 Google Scholar.

41. Ibid., 67.

42. This was the slogan of urban explorers during the late 1990s. See, for example, Ninjalicious, Access All Areas: A User's Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration (Toronto, 2005)Google Scholar.

43. For a good example of what I mean here, see McKay, Ian's fascinating study of middle-class cultural producers (writers, visual artists, promoters, others) in the wake of early twentieth-century deindustrialization, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal, 1994)Google Scholar.

44. For example, see Strangleman, Tim, “The Nostalgia of Organisations and the Organisation of Nostalgia: Past and Present in the Contemporary Railway Industry,” Sociology 33 (1999): 742–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Salverson, Julie, “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play about Land Mines,” In Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English (Toronto, 2010), 78Google Scholar.

46. Ibid., 80.

47. Huyssen, Andreas, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (2006): 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. Stoler, “Imperial Ruins: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” 5. See also Jakle, John A., The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth Century North America (Lincoln, 1985), 3Google Scholar.

49. Jasen, Patricia, Wild Things: Native, Culture and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto, 1995), 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. Ibid.

51. Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981), xiii–xiv Google Scholar.

52. Ibid. See also, McKay, The Quest of the Folk, 8.

53. Jasen, Wild Things, 20; Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London, 1990), 3–10 Google Scholar.

54. Kirk, Class, Culture and Social Change, 6.

55. Stoler, “Imperial Ruins: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” 9–10.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. Massey, Doreen, “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, eds. Bird, Jan, Curtis, Barry, Putnam, Tim, and Tickner, Lisa (London, 1993), 61–62 Google Scholar.

59. Skeggs, Beverley, Class, Self, Culture (London, 2004), 49Google Scholar.

60. Ibid., 50.

61. John Patrick Leary, “Detroitism,” Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics. http://www.guernicamag.com/features/leary_1_15_11/ (Accessed August 12, 2013).

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Paul Mullins, “The Politics and Archaeolgy of ‘Ruin Porn,’” Archaeology and Material Culture Blog. http://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/the-politics-and-archaeology-of-ruin-porn/ (Accessed August 12, 2013). See also, Clemens, Paul, Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.

65. Paul Mullins, “The Politics and Archaeology of ‘Ruin Porn.’”

66. Zukin, Sharon, The Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York, 2011), xiiiGoogle Scholar. See also, Zukin, Sharon, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore, 1982)Google Scholar.

67. Ibid., xii.

68. Ibid., 51.

69. De Silvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” 3.

70. For a good example of this tendency, see Bradley L. Garrett, “Place Hacking: Tales of Urban Exploration,” (Ph.D. diss., Royal Holloway, 2012).

71. De Silvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins,” 6.

72. See, for example, Ley, David, “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification,” Urban Studies 40 (2003), 2527–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73. Kirk, Class, Culture and Social Change, 25.

74. For example, none of the five articles included in a special issue that I edited on the politics and memory of deindustrialization in Canada focused on metropolitan areas. I discuss this geographic pattern in High, Steven, “Introduction,” Special Issue on “The Politics and Memory of Deindustrialization,” Urban History Review. 35 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75. Clarke, “Closing Moulinex,” 446.

76. Cowie and Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins, 1–2.