During the wintry months, any visitor not wishing to brave the blustery beaches of Hunstanton with it’s freezing winds, might like to take a walk around some of the town’s notable historical buildings. This blog highlights some of those known in the town, three of which display Civic Society coloured plaques. For those of you not familiar with the area, please note the honey-coloured bricks that many of the buildings are made of. It is a sandstone known locally as Carrstone.

Valentine Court

According to Jim Whelam, writing in the Hunstanton Newsletter:

The establishment of a convalescent home at Hunstanton was first suggested in 1869 in Ely Cathedral, so that sick and poor people from Ely could recover their health with the assistance of sea air . . . The Prince and Princess of Wales agreed to officially open the home on Easter Monday, 14^th April 1879. As soon as the date was known, all the villages between Sandringham and Hunstanton began making preparations on a grand scale to honour the visit. During the Easter weekend the weather was foul with keen east winds, rain and snow. The day of the visit commenced with a dull leaden sky, no apparent sign of an improvement, and not even the numerous decorations could make Hunstanton look anything less than miserable. However by noon the clouds lifted and the sun shone, crowds gathered, the railway brought in 3,000 visitors and thousands of others entered by road.

Now a block of flats, the building appears on google searches mostly under property sales. Jim Whelam’s account in the local newsletter is really interesting and can be read here: The Royal Opening of Hunstanton Convalescent Home

Old Police Station

This old police station is great. It just looks like a ‘regular’ terraced house.  However from 1875 to 1954 it was Hunstanton’s police station. I wonder if the three cells were in the basement. One can only assume that crime was a relatively minor issue in Britain until the mid 50s, as the current police station, on the main road, is pretty big in comparison.

Children’s Recovery Home

Health for the Victorians was a major concern, some would say even an obsession, and the seaside was a perfect place for convalescing. This, once, children’s recovery home is now the council offices for the town. Now that our children are not dying of diphtheria, tuberculosis and typhus these old Victorian buildings are put to other uses. I don’t have the mortality figures handy for Hunstanton, but in Leeds in 1867 most people who died were 4 years old and under, and in one book I have – To Prove I’m Not Forgot – Living and Dying in a Victorian City by Sylvia M. Barnard -  the under one’s were classed separately, because their chances of living beyond one year old was so slim.

Old Vicarage

This is the old vicarage and is located in Northgate, at the town end of the street. Again, it is now apartments and it is difficult to find information on online it other than that on estate agents sites. However, I have included another photo of the building (below). This type of architectural detail is very popular in Hunstanton, and manifests in various forms on a number of buildings.

Often this, kind of, inlay appears in a square shape, which produces a tiling effect. I really like it and I wonder if it is a common style from that period that was produced mostly in this area, or whether it is more generic.

My little psychogeographico-historical trip around Hunstanton was interesting. The more time I spend in the town looking at the architecture and soaking up the ambience, the more I get in touch with its aesthetic, which feels like it is very particular to the area.

For information on my other work, please go to: particulations

Links:

Hunstanton Civic Society

The above film was shot in June 2011 in Hunstanton, Norfolk. A Microsoft Sensecam was used to shoot the film and it was edited in Windows Live Movie Maker . The camera on view in the film is a Lomo Diana F+

Paris, capital of the 19th century (english version) from Benjamin Bardou on Vimeo.

“Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation into capricious particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum. Both are made up of the distinct and the disparate; and nothing could bear more powerful testimony to the transcendent force of the sacred image and the truth itself. The value of fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea, and the brilliance of the representation depend as much on this value as the brilliance of the mosaic does on the glass plate. The relationship between the minute precision of the work and the proportions of the sculptural or intellectual whole demonstrates that truth content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of subject matter.”

Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p28-29

Here we have The Arcades Project at the point of its inception. The theme of the intellectual mosaic which emerges from immersion in the minutia is writ large in Convolutes H, M, & N and can be seen in operation throughout the body of The AP. The process of walking through the field to be studied (M: flanerie), collecting from that field (H: collection) and then assembling the result parataxically (N: method) which is The AP is already present in the ‘Trauerspiel’ book.

Three, related, concerns have directed us away from the standard and seemingly straight forward route of ‘talking to people’ as a means of studying life in society.  Firstly, What do we do to people when we ask them questions or talk with them?  Secondly, where do their discourses (their opinions or answers) come from? Finally, what is really being tested when we ask question.  We have already made clear our fear that involvement in the creation of our own materials of study is an epistemological weakness and needs to be avoided but as talking is foundational to so much analysis of life in society our concerns with it as a research tool need additional clarification.  So let us treat these concerns in reverse order..

What is really being tested?

Throughout Distinction Bourdieu is quite clear that questions (here for opinion polls and social surveys) test the competence of the interviewee to answer the question posed and not what they know or think (cf Bourdieu 2004: 417-426).  Those competencies derive from the individuals educational-capital, the extent of cultural-capital in their composition of capital, and their over-all extent of capital and it is these that govern if and how people respond to questions.  Bourdieu shows that questions test a persons sense of competence to answer and so unless we are seeking to examine such competencies we should not ask people questions.

Where do opinions and answers come from?

There is a nexus of thinkers who have pointed towards the social formation of opinions and the kinds of discursive fragments one finds in conversation from a variety of theoretical perspectives.There are two main lines of work: on the process of discourse as action in society and in the field of the common-sense.

If we start with action in society and Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism we can see that Blumer’s criticisms of opinion polling (Blumer 1986) hold good for all question-asking because they focus on the development of opinions in society. For Blumer “the formation of public opinion occurs as a function of society in operation” (Blumer 1986: 199-200) and as an active process in society and not in the individual “it is also very clear that in the process of forming public opinion, individuals are not alike in influence nor are groups that are equal numerically in membership alike in influence.” (Blumer 1986: 200). For Blumer question-asking confronts these unequal processes in society and not the individual interlocutor. This of course is a similar line of thought to Foucualt’s position on the episteme; the discursive regime in society that orders discourse for (or against) individuals (Foucault 2006: xxiii-xxiv. Foucault 1971).  Foucault and Blumer force us to recognise that it is to optimistic to accept that people’s opinions are their own. We live in society and the language of that society must be the minimum condition for the development of ideas & concepts.  The structures of relations of power in society will structure and effect individuals responses to questions.

The common-sense is a field of knowledge that resides in society and culture and which individuals can mobilse in their own discourses. It is a form of distributed knowledge that we do not control and which, because it seems to exist everywhere, seems neutral and harmless. This is of course not the case and its effects have been worked through by Gramsci (1971), Geetz (1993) and (under the synonym doxa; via Aristotle) by Barthes (1975) and Bourdieu (1977: 159-171).  In each case the common-sense (or doxa) has been theorised as a field of social force that individual are enmeshed within (imbricated with) and which is beyond their control. For Gramsci the common-sense’s “most fundamental characteristic is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is” (Gramsci 1971: 419).  The key point being that for Gramsci much of the action of hegemony was directed towards the common-sense and that the force of ideology in capitalism was felt in this very field.  That which we encounter when we talk to people or ask them questions may well be the ‘common-sense’ and not the thinking of the person before us (or our questionnaire) and how could we tell? Epistemologically it may be that asking (however obliquely constructed this ‘talking to people’ may be) might be the worst way of finding things out (See also Edwards 1997 p62-76).

What do we do to people when we ask them questions or talk to them in the course of our studies?

In the act of asking people questions or of more obliquely talking to them we establish a relation of subjectification with them. We transform them into subjects of our study. This process of interpellation (Althusser 1971) forces them into a mode of being which is specific to the situation of being asked and divorced from the rest of life (following Benjamin we could say ‘made-auratic’). The direct imposition of the analyst-of-social-life on that very life in society that is trying to be studied will not uncover the traces of life because the analysts involvement has effaced them. We can see similar approaches to the construction of the subject in the work of Butler (1993) and especially in Foucault’s History of Sexuality (vol.1 1998).  Foucault insists that “one must not suppose that there exists a certain sphere of” knowledge “that would be the legitimate concern of a free and disinterested scientific inquiry were it not the object of mechanisms of prohibition brought to bear by the economic or ideological requirements of power” and that it is only possible to study something “because relations of power had established it as a possible object” of such study (Foucault 1998: 98).

This combination of issues requires us to acknowledge that we need other modes of exploration of society if we are even going to begin confronting problems caused by that very process of study and investigation.

We, inspired by Benjamin, propose to adopt eavesdropping as a method to see if that helps us avoid these problems.

Bibliography

Louis Althusser (1971). “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)”, in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Books

Barthes, R (1975) The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R Miller, New York, Hill and Wang

Blumer, H (1986), ‘Public Opinion and Public Opinion Polling’, in his Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Berkeley, University of California Press

Bourdieu, P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Bourdieu, P (2004) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, trans. Nice R, London, Routledge

Butler, J (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of sex, London, Routledge

Foucault, M (1971) ‘Orders of Discourse’, Social Science Information, Vol. 10, No.2

Foucault, M (1998) History of Sexuality (vol.1), London, Penguin

Foucault, M (2006) The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences, London, Routledge

Gramsci A, (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Trans. & Ed. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London, Lawrence & Wishart Ltd

Geertz, C (1993) ‘Common Sense as a Cultural System’ in his Local Knowledge, London, Fontana

Flickr Groups on the Seaside

Promenade Photos

Reid informed me, after reading an early draft of some of our work, that we should supplement our analysis of seaside photography and the Arcades Project with considerations of the work of Eugene Atget and Martin Parr. This may take some time for us to process, but we offer up a couple of images here.

Atget was a contemporary of Walter Benjamin, taking photographs of Paris streets that influenced the surrealists and Dada at the time that Benjamin was working on his study of the Parisian Arcades. Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer, whose study of the seaside ‘The Last Resort’, clearly sheds light on our work on the links between tourism and the everyday within the capitalist constraints of the promenades.

Eugene Atget: avenue des gobelins (1927)

In his ‘little history of photography’, Benjamin makes the case for photography, still in the early stages of its development, to be “moving out of the realm of aesthetic distinctions to social function”. Leslie [2000] locates this movement in the dialectic, claiming that there is always an excess in photography, a residue of the social. In this sense, photography can provide research material, historical evidence that goes far beyond merely that which is represented on the surface of a photographic image.

Leslie goes on to identify three ways in which Benjamin conceptualised photography:

Firstly, as analogical representations of an external reality. Photographs provide a way of capturing natural perception and thus, of making the subjective objective.

Secondly, “the photograph fixes on celluloid a view of reality, held in the consciousness of a class when it imagines itself and the cosmos. Technological art is capable of tendering in ocular form the ideology of the self-representing class” [Leslie 2000: 49]. Benjamin refers to this as ‘optical-unconscious’, a relationship between the unconsciousness of the subject and the a-conscious machine perception of the lens

Finally, photography disrupts the ‘natural’ flow of images and perception and allows for reconfigurations of space and time, new constellations of knowledge.

“Photography…was first adopted within the dominant social class…:manufacturers, factory owners and bankers, statesmen, men of letters and scientists” Gisela Freund, “La Photographie au point de vue sociologique” (manuscript, p.32). Is this accurate? Shouldn’t the sequence be reversed? (Benjamin, AP, Y3, 1)