Skegness Part One…

Skegness, on the North Sea coast of the east of the country, is one of England’s most famous seaside towns.  It is home to the first holiday camp, set up by Billy Butlin in 1936, which I visited last month ago for a conference on seaside development and culture.  You can read my thoughts on the conference by clicking here.  I spent my spare time over three days in Skegness as a flaneur, experiencing the town and its promenade areas at a walking pace and recording my observations in pictures.  This is the first of a two-part post, in the next post I’m going to sketch out some preliminary thoughts on the general form of the promenade, investigating the layered methodology that we keep encountering.

My first observation on Skegness’ promenade is that it has a similar morphology to the promenade at Teignmouth, which I blogged about here.  Skegness unrolls backwards from the sea, leaving a layered pattern behind as it has developed.  Firstly we have the beach itself, a stretch of golden sand bordering the cold North sea:

Separating the encroaching sands from the built environment is the most obvious strip of the promenade itself:

This first layer of the promenade is, at this point fairly level with the sands and the protection offered is for those brave enough to admire the views on a bracing October day.  Walking parallel to the beach, the promenade takes you over the pier itself:

Descending, we are confronted with a pair of signs that inform us not only of the particular economic rationality of seaside spaces, but also of the aspirations of the planners and architects who constructed them:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite the regal naming of this strip however, the demands of coastal defences have imposed a less aristocratic and more brutally utilitarian aesthetic on the post-pier promenade:

The next layer of the promenade is a strip of sand and a path, separated by a low wall from the main walkway.  This forms a mirror image of the area that it borders and appears to be used mainly by dogwalkers and cyclists.  It doesn’t run the full length of the promenade, but forms an interesting feature mainly because of the way it separates the sea from a small moat.  Yes, a moat.

The moat seems to be there to protect the fun fair, Skegness Pleasure Beach from invasion.  There is small bridge providing entrance from the sea-side,which brings you to a locked gate in the off-season.

The fair, seen from the promenade, presents a skeletal sillhouette.  A ferris wheel is an iconic image of leisure and childhood that can’t help but excite the viewer, but it is precisely this suggestion that produces a profound melancholia when confronted with a deserted fair ground.

This walled-off, empty space is foreshadows the pleasures of summer as well as pointing backwards to the time when the queues for attractions like these would be managed in the same way to those at Disneyworld or Thorpe Park now.  The high walls around the fair ground are a reminder that the very democratic form of cultural capital that is embedded in the seaside town has always been propped up by an entrepreneurial and exclusionary capitalism.  The uncomplicated, unmediated and hence unexploitable pleasures of viewing the fair from the promenade or to look across the elegant steelworks

and out to sea, are denied by the wall that simultaneously obscures and invites you to move from the position of viewer to consumer.

The photo above shows the first mock-promenade that I have come across.  The pleasure beach’s own promenade stands between the final layers of the promenade proper and the funfair.  It breaks all the ‘rules’ of promenades; it has no view to the sea and runs both vertically and horizontally in relation to the coastline.  It clearly exists only to extract profit from seaside visitors but borrows the symbolism of the liminal space of the promenade in its marketing.  This excess of this strange dialectic, that which cannot be consumed by the negation of the natural, appears to be the liminal – leaving a space that produces such dissonances, culturally and architecturally, that it cannot be simply synthesised into the form of the seaside economy but instead announces its incongruity as a way of explaining itself.  Turning your back to the sea and walking out through this gate, from this space of managed liminality into the hyper-capitalism of the final layer of the promenade you are immediately confronted with seaside commodities, ice creams, doughnuts, inflatables and alcohol.  In the next post, I’ll pick up on these themes and start to think about the general spatial form of the promenade that we might be groping towards on this blog.

The emancipatory politics of the dialectical image

At the start of Convolute N, Benjamin quotes from Marx,

“The reform of conciousness consists solely in…the awakening of the world from its dream about itself” (Marx 1932 cited in Benjamin 2002: 456)

This quotation brings together two of Benjamin’s preoccupations at the time of writing,  the emancipatory project of Marxism and the politico-cultural aspects of the Surrealist movement with its focus on the imaginary and dream worlds of the modern subject.  The method of the Arcades Project is an intervention in these concerns that seeks to produce “lightning flashes” (Benjamin 2002: 456) of knowledge, sufficient to jolt the self-dreaming subject out of their slumber and make present to them the world as it is, rather than as it is represented by the conjoined narratives of historical progress and technological change.   This radical, violent interruption of the dreamworld of false conciousness is to be achieved through the construction of dialectical images, which replace the linear narratives of history with a constellation of events frozen momentarily in an image containing histories of the past and present.  It is the construction, presentation and consumption of dialectical images that provides the emancipatory potential of Benjamin’s historical method for the present situation.

“It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.  In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.  For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal one, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent” (Benjamin 2002: 262)

I have used the same quotation here that Wesley brought into play in his last post.   In what follows I will re-present some of the entries from Convolute N that provide an insight into my own reading of this idea of the dialectical image and its emancipatory role.   These could help us to  think through the politics of our own project and draw out similarities and tensions within our work. 

“In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always, simultaneously, ‘what has been from time immemorial.’  As such, however, it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch – namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such.  It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation.[N 4, 1]” (Benjamin 2002: 464)

“The realisation of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics.  It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian.[N 4, 4]” (Benjamin 2002: 464)

“The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state [N 7a, 5]” (Benjamin 2002: 471)

“The now of recognizability is the moment of awakening. [N 18, 4]” (Benjamin 2002: 486)

” ‘Our election cry must be: Reform on conciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical conciousness that is unclear to itself, whether it appears in a religious or political form.  Then people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing – and that it needs only to  the conciousness of this thing in order really to possess it.’  Karl Marx, Der histrorische Mposessesaterialismus: Die Fruhschriften, ed. Landshut and Mayer (Leipzig <1932>), vol. 1, pp.226-227 (letter from Marx to Ruge: Kreuznach, September 1843) [N 5a, 1]” (Benjamin 2002: 467)

But, how to access this mystical conciousness?  Clearly not be approaching it from within the mysterious, but by engaging with the lived experiences of everyday life, by attending to the details and the debris of existence in the face of the compelling stories of the sweep of history.

” ‘I regret having treated in only a very incomplete manner those facts of daily existence – food, clothing shelter, family routines, civil law, recreation, social relations – which ave always been of prime concern in the life of the great majority of individuals.’  Charles Seignobos, Historie sinecere de la nation francaise(Paris, 1933), p.xi. [N5a, 5] (Benjamin 2002: 467)

This method, which draws on the experiences of the majority in order to construct dialectical images which can reform conciousness like a flash of lightning, finds more contemporary echoes with the heirs of the surrealists, in one of the situationist slogans of 1968:

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth” (Vaneigem 1967: 1:4) 

 

 

Convolute N

Benjamin is, very, clear and, far too, concise in his summation of the method of The Arcades Project.  Convolute N, which deals with his historical method and his analysis of that method (moving into the philosophy of method and history), contains a very great deal of material but the following are his key methodological statements on the Project itself.

This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.
[N1,10]

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.
[N1a,8]

These two short notes are Benjamin’s expression of the parataxic approach to the study of the past he was engaging in and of its role in his work.  Benjamin was not content to assemble this material and set it side-by-side-by-side rather this was the staring point in his efforts to discern something far greater and far more important; the ‘dialectical images’ or ‘constellations’ to which he constantly refers (not just in The Arcades Project but elsewhere – the Theses on the Philosophy of History for instance) and which The Arcades Project seems to be intended to enable the creation of.  The ‘dialectical image’ is part of Benjamin’s attempt to seize ‘the thread of expression’ [N1a,6] of society and of the study of society [N1a,7] so that we can come to understand both and the connection between them.  This anthropological concern with the past and, simultaneously, with the study of it is what makes The Arcades Project so interesting methodologically.
The Arcades Project is the very parataxic assemblage that Benjamin allows to ‘merely show’ his ‘dialectical images’ (suggesting that the Exposes are Benjamin’s expressions of the dialectical images resulting from this work and thus its most important part rather than ephemera)  and getting to grips with these ‘dialectical images’ is an essential part of reading The Arcades Project as it is they that we ought to be looking to generate in our own analyses.

It’s not that  what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.  In other words, images is dialectics at a standstill.  For a while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.-Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.   {Awakening}
[N2a,3]

The final indication of this note – that dialectical images are encountered in language – directs our attention to discourse and its role in our studies and its presence in the objects of our study.  It also indicates the great difficulty we are faced with.  We must realise and understand the discourses we are enmeshed with before we can hope to bring the what-has-been in to imagistic contact with them (establish a ‘heightened graphicness’ for history) and thus establish the dialectical images that Benjamin took to be the starting point of genuine analysis.

Collecting the elements of the montage – establishing the paratxic framework of the what-has-been (practicing history if you like) – is merely time consuming it will be bringing ‘dialectics to a standstill’ that will be difficult.

It is good to give materialist investigations a truncated ending.
[N9a,2]