The whole world seems like a conspiracy to stop me from writing at the moment. Because of call centre rhizomidiocy and corporate incompetence, my broadband connection was prematurely cut off and will not return until the end of February. But this is only one consequence of the trauma of moving.
After I moved back down to the South East last weekend, I worked out that I’ve moved something like sixteen times in the last twenty years. This is by contrast with my mother, who has only moved twice in her life, and has never lived outside a three-mile radius of her first family home. The stability that I took for granted as a child will never arrive. No doubt this is in part an effect of class mobility, of moving away from a rooted working class world in which you are expected to live and work in the town where you were born. But it is also an effect of post-Fordism, a feature of what Jameson calls the ‘fungible’ present of late capitalism. Even if I had stayed in my home town, I could not have remained in the ‘rooted working class world’, because it no longer exists. The stable Fordist town (dominated by a few firms that would employ people for their whole working life) has disappared. The ‘pit town’ about which scholarship boys such as Dennis Potter’s Nigel Barton felt so painfully ambivalent is of course long gone. But what remains – and it has become even more widespread – is Barton’s vertiginous sense of existential dislocation. Mobility is perpetual, but instead of being associated with movement between classes, it functions now as an alibi for class divisions that have reasserted themselves just as, in Barton’s (and Potter’s) youth, they for a brief moment became more fluid.
Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character begins with a powerful comparison between two generations of an American family: an older generation whose working lives were predictable and poorly remunerated, but who measured improvement in terms of small gains that their steady income allowed them to save for; and a younger generation – their children – whose college education projected them into the post-Fordist world of consumer-driven debt, ‘weak ties’ and itinerancy. The motto for this world, Sennett says, is ‘no long term’. Still, nostalgia for the ‘old long term’ should be qualified by a recognition that the ‘long term’ wasn’t actually that long, as Sennett explains:
That ‘old long term’ was symbolised by solid wooden furniture, permanently nailed together, the new era by flat-pack kits. While the rooms change, the objects – heaved from flat to flat – provide the continuity. Records and books are relics of that old stability, the very solidity that is their appeal a problem, a drag, in the age of digital ether. Moving from one rented property to another, from one job (and ‘skill set’) to another, it’s unlikely that I will ever have a ‘home’ in the sense that my parents have one. This provokes ambivalent feelings: I’m well aware that keeping on the move revivifies at least as much as it drains, that the old, limited horizons were constraining, but the thought that there could come a point when I won't move again is increasingly alluring.
Posted by mark at February 10, 2008 12:21 PM | TrackBack