Being in Love is Dangerous

"Being in Love is Dangerous" (2015) is a project in which I took the habitual field of DIY as a starting point, in order to interrogate the relationship between material and immaterial labour, work and leisure, in neoliberal society. In isolating material labour from the creative act of art, I was able to explore the potential of making and embodied geographic relations to disrupt flows within the habitual discources and representations of capitalism, and to attempt to produce - through practice, performance and performativity - alternative modes of being and becoming.

The room interior was designed the youngest member of the host family and all materials were bought from corporate owned DIY stores. I walked from the host family's house in Southbourne to Castle Point retail park, Bournemouth, on three consecutive days to collect materials including three 15kg bags of Homebase 'beach pebbles'. One of the journeys was documented in the following video, which plays with the idea of slowed-down 'zombie' walking, attentive engagement with non-human objects, and fissures and disruptions in the spatial and temporal flows of late-capitalist geographies. The video includes music by Pink Turns Puke. 

 

The title for the project is taken from David Salle, who argues that “being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you’ve never had it so good”. This statement can be taken literally as a warning towards the mythologies of romantic relationships and their embeddedness within the power and property structures of late-capitalism. However, the statement also allows us to consider the ways in which subjectivity is shaped by capitalism as we engage in everyday creativities such as DIY as part of the endless work of self-making and the 'affective labour' of disseminating our efforts within networks of humans and non-humans. Thus, the home becomes a shop front for the self and its wider habitus. Individualism places identity solely in the hands of the markets, it focuses our attention on the material and symbolic property required to shape who we are rather than what we can become. Yet, the power and property relations of subjectivity are rarely just our own. For Foucault (1998), 'technologies of the self' work as a dispositif, or apparatus, through which power is exercised upon individual bodies within the biopolitical structures of late-capitalism. 

Fire surround clad in 'beach pebbles' bought from Homebase, near Castle Point retail park, and brought back on foot, despite house being a few minutes walk from the sea.

Wood cladding 'trompe-l'œil': I wanted the gifting of labour to be a gifting of skilled labour to oppose the deskilling of the neoliberal workplace and the economic rationalisation of skill and craft as entrepreneurial capital in the creative economy.  

 

Recomposition of the total amount of masking tape used to create divisions between planks on mural.

The initial aim of this project was to take a phenomenological approach to the performance of 'work', in order to critique the relationship between material and immaterial labour in everyday production. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri (2011) suggest, ‘[w]hen immaterial production becomes hegemonic, all the elements of the capitalist process have to be viewed in a new light’ (Hardt and Negri, 2011: 25). In the everyday structures of neoliberalism, labour and work are the same thing! Immaterial labour becomes a productive force, that proliferates – when aligned with the big data revolution – increasingly quantifiable surplus value through the unpaid work of everyday life. On these terms it becomes increasingly difficult to mobilise a critique of work. The immaterial labour of everyday production blurs the boundaries between work and non-work to such an extend that work is prevalent both in and out of the workplace. A further aim of this project, therefore, was to make visible the immaterial work of everyday life and to use performance as a way of “doing” work, phenomenologically, in order to isolate its affects. Methodologically, I have attempted to articulate a series of affective relations by using practice and performativity as a means of opening up to – and feeling – the process of becoming in order to critique the conditions of work and leisure in neoliberal society. 

My 'work' became problematic, as neither skilled labour nor the creative act could be rationalised in economic terms or exchanged as capital or labour value.

The 'soft touch' rug.

The performance took place, in (and on) several stages. The first stage involved walking to a large “out-of-town” retail park, over several days, to purchase decorating materials and bringing them back to the host's house. This process reconnected the act of labour with material and spatial ways of thinking – for example the difficulties of carrying 'beach pebbles', bought from a large DIY store, to their destination – the house, which is, unironically, a few minutes walk from the beach. On the second day I began the work of cladding a fireplace in the pebbles, and on subsequent days completed this task along with the rest of the decorating – including the creation of a 'trompe-l'œil' of wood panelling on one wall. This process highlighted the nature of skilled work in an age where the de-skilling of the workplace is a neoliberal trick to perpetuate low wages, precarity and interchangeability employees. Likewise, the possession of hard skills and creative talent, leaves individuals vulnerable to the insecurity of the marketplace. It is not enough to possess a skill or creative propensity, tradespeople and creative workers must also be “front-facing” affective labourers – ceaselessly smiling, eternally grateful and polite self-publicists, tirelessly working their magic on others to stay ahead in the marketplace. 

Absolute Radio: a stupefying mix of masculine melancholy, nostalgia and normative advertising. A false haven from the turbulent seas of 'crisis capitalism'.

The receits: all time-stamped as evidence of my presence 'within' systems of immaterial labour and capitalist exchange.

 

As the performative engagement with the work wound-down, and the space was re-staged as an installation, the performance took to a new stage, upon which I became a 'tour guide', explaining the project to visitors and justifying this 'work tourism' to myself and others. This was perhaps the hardest part of the project – to break away from performative mediation of the habitual and embodied, and to justify the gap between intention and reception, artwork and context, rather than simply occupying that gap. The work itself allowed for the opening up of meaning and I did not want to close down the material and imaginative dialogue. Instead of defending the work as 'art', I used the opportunity as an exercise in 'commoning' – to talk with audiences about the work and to enable them to connect ideas emanating from the 'work', with their personal experiences – bringing things back to the material and ontological. One visitor, for example, said that the discussion enabled him to value DIY as a way of connecting with his home, when he had previously begrudged the fact that his labour was a consequence of not being able to afford to pay for professionals to do it for him. He was able to reflect on the development of skills and creativities based in materiality and outside of immaterial demands of work. Here work becomes play, as it is without consequence. Moreover, in engaging with materials and spaces, the labour of DIY becomes a poetic act, allowing memory and embodiment to collude, and giving birth to poetic images in the unlearning of habitual objects. Indeed, Bachelard (1992) characterises the phenomenological exploration of the poetic image as being fruitful by virtue of fact that it has ‘no consequences’. He argues that the poetic image is ‘the property of a naïve consciousness; in its expression a youthful language’ (Bachelard, 1992: xix). The visitor also articulated the way in which his labour was imbued with a sense of care for his family and for place, and was a way of becoming at home in the world (Ingold, 1995). In this direction, phenomenology offers a way to move beyond transcendental critique, to the immanent and its affects on body and imagination. Here, practice-based research is used as what Crouch (2010) calls a 'gentle politics' – a way to explore becoming from within the conditions of late-capitalism, in the recognition that there is no outside.

References

Bachelard, G. (1992) [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Crouch, D. (2010). Flirting with Space: Journeys and Creativity. Farnham: Ashgate.

Foucault, M. (1998). 'The Birth of Biopolitics'. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works Michel Foucault, 1954-1984). New York: New Press.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2011). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ingold, T. (1995). 'Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World'. Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, ed. Marilyn Strathern. London: Routledge.