2008

This has been a weird fucked up year. At the start of it, I expected to be back in London by this point, doing a PHD at the LSE and generally having severed ties with Coventry. Yet in actuality I’m here, I now own a house and I’ve doing a PHD part-time over six years.  The weird thing is that I’m actually glad about it. No matter how much fun London may be to live in, I couldn’t do everything I’m doing here in London, I’d find it too distracting. Plus my supervisors here are far better than they would have been in London, no matter how interesting it would have been to have sessions with Richard Sennett if he’d accepted me.  I’ve had two things published in journals, with a few more to come next year and my first conference paper, on a research area which I was unsure I was interested in at the start of the year. There’s not a chance in hell I would have bothered to sit down and write those if I’d just moved back to London after two years away. When I went there last weekend for a gig it felt really foreign to me in a way it never had and I really didn’t like the crowdedness of the place (though that was partly me being a grumpy twat as a result of getting shit faced till 4am on Friday night). The point in London when I’d have to “go home to Coventry” was always unbelievably fucking depressing to me and this time, for the first time, I was oddly glad. How strange. I appear to have settled in this weird little town, there are a lot of really safe new people in my life and I seem to be becoming rather content here. Apart from getting stressed because I have absolutely no outside organization of my time and it seems to leave me feeling the obsessive need to plan. But I figure this is just practice and a sign, which is leading to a new years resolution,  that I should smoke less weed. I’d much rather control my own time than have it controlled, even if it’s initially slightly tricky.  Next year will be easier though: my paid work is very structured, I’m auditing one/two classes and I start teaching, which ought to be interesting. So things seem likely to start to cohere in a really positive and satisfying way. This year was really truly shit at points but in a way it seems to have been really good for me,  in terms of making me think about what I really want in life, rather than what I find exciting and distracting. I seem to have these things and be set to get much more of them. Plus I’m so fucking excited about the next year of my life. Taking in themselves, these two things seem to suggest this was a very good year… though an exhausting one.  I don’t even think I regret the shit bits any more, as I think they were a necessary part of me getting from where I was at the start of the year to where I am now. So in conclusion: this has been a fucking excellent year and I think I’m almost certain to be able to say the same thing at the end of 2009.

The most well suited video/song combination ever?

As the Flobots describe what they’re trying to express in the song,

The song “is about the idea that we have so much incredible potential as human beings to be destructive or to be creative,” Flobots’ MC Jonny 5 (a.k.a. Jamie Laurie) told MTV. “And it’s tragic to me that the appetite for military innovation is endless, but when it comes to taking on a project like ending world hunger, it’s seen as outlandish. It’s not treated with the same seriousness.”

“…at the same time, I knew there were people at that moment who were being bombed by our own country. And I thought that was incredibly powerful.” It is the contrast between these “little moments of creativity, these bursts of innovation,” and the way these ideas are put to use “to oppress and destroy people” that the singer feels is both “beautiful and tragic at the same time.”

I do think there’s a whole host of genuinely interesting points here (the liberal individualist self drunk on its own autonomy, constiutively blind to its own subjugation by unaccountable global power and pervasive systems of technocratic reasoning)… and it’s so much nicer when it’s not expressed not in abstract language. As illustrated in the previous sentence.

For what it’s worth…

Gaslight Anthem – 1930

Give me mercy and a minute now.
I’ma bleed a little poison out.
I’ma cry a little river down,
then I’m setting this whole thing on fire.
And I’m burning up the night she died.
I’m putting every last picture aside,
I’m gonna say what I need to say.
In my very last letter to you
‘Cause you always made it clear,
said you’d never be my pain.
So here’s to you and your bright baby blues,
just a pause to cool the refrain.
And you said were satisfied,
that this body just weighted the tide.
And that you missed him sometimes,
but you said it’s all right,
its just a whole lot harder alone.
But I wish you knew her now.
She’s the better side of me now.
I’m doing the best I can.
That’s what you’da wanted.
And I see like you were there.
I know just how you’d smile.
Mary, you looked just like, it was 1930 that night.
But hear the days will eat you alive,
but I won’t give in tonight.
You said its not worth my time,
and not to regard them.
And not to settle just for piece of mind,
I could wait it out all night,
If I just keep breathing
[sigh]

But Mary, I found the sound,
and if this heart keeps pouring it out,
The glory hasn’t come,
and it’s probably gonna fade,
like a tattoo that hides this shame.
But reasons always fade.
The pain gives out some day.
So I’m saying my goodbyes to your deep blue eyes,
cause I don’t know how say, to stay still in the pain.
“Stay still in the pain.”And if I recall the last thing you said to me,
before it broke up.
Before it took you from me.
You said I love you more than the stars in the sky,
but your name just escapes me tonight.
(Nobody does it like you anymore)

Portfolio Careers

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot recently about portfolio careers. Partly this is because I’m now pretty set on this being how I want to live my life… however I’ve also found it interesting because the glaring gaps in the business/self-development literature I’ve found on the subject point to the glaring inequalities within modern societies. There’s a sense of triumphalism accompanying the concept, as if it represents the setting free of human agency from stifling social structures, such that people for the first time are able to exercise a genuine control over their working life. I don’t doubt this is the case for some people but this liberation (of sorts) is dependent on material opportunities available to the individual. Portfolio careers are path dependent in a way that belies the ideal of unfettered human agency that seems to move the management gurus that advocates them. They possible avenues of employment that portfolio careers depend upon are dependent on the past choices the individual has made and, crucially, on the opportunities afforded to them by their social position. In the first case, structure restrains agency in a way that is susceptible to agential resolution (i.e. making the best of what you have & maximising your use of the opportunities available to you) and, in the second, there’s no possibility of such resolution. If someone simply doesn’t have the skills, the resources and the connections that make this work then it won’t. Yet the degree to which social and economic relations structure the opportunities available to the individual is occluded behind a celebration of the individuals freedom to choose. Everything becomes about the individual and, implicitly, this becomes the individual who is lucky enough to have all the opportunities they desire to enact their chosen portfolio career trajectory. Yet the vast bulk of people for whom this is not true have their difficulties marginalised, as what it is for the elite few a setting free becomes for the majority a privatization of responsibility and risk. Lauding the free individual embarked on a portfolio career, with its institutional backdrop of the precarity that inevitably results from ‘flexible labour markets’ in the information society, acts as a demand that individuals live up to what is effectively a moral ideal. The methodological individualism of the approach obscures the question of how different individuals are differently able to live up to this, as well as how those differences have their roots in social and economic structures that are contingent and thus susceptible to change. The portfolio career, a symptom of wider processes of individualizationwithin society, has (like individualization) very different consequences for different people. For the privileged, it offers great freedom. For the majority who are not, it simply confers even greater burdens upon them while simultaneously obscuring investigation of the social and economic inequalities underlying this.