Worcester Women: unspun charm

Over several months, women in the English city of Worcester talked about their lives to the co-editors of openDemocracy’s ‘From My Experience’ strand. These were not just ‘local’ conversations; often, these women saw forces of change working at a remote economic or political level as influencing directly their daily lives. In recounting how, in the midst of such change, they sustained their sense of personhood, of belonging, of security, they announced themselves as quintessentially modern people: the contemporaries, and equals, of political spin-doctors, hunter-gatherers, soldiers and firefighters around the world.

For one of our co-editors, the encounter with Worcester Women was also a journey of transformation, of illumination, and self-questioning. She writes here of her own experience of that journey, concluding with a reflection on how fragile may be the illusion of security on which we all choose to build our lives.

This essay was finished and sent to us at 11am (GMT) on the morning of 11 September, 2001. It is published here unchanged.

The fields were burning, the first day we drove towards the city of Worcester, and the roads were indistinct within a heavy fug of smoke: the foot-and-mouth crisis had made the countryside pagan, unfamiliar, the iron light of late winter lit with pyres. Straw stretched across the gates to farms, and we almost anticipated horse-drawn carts, it seemed so peremptorily antiquated, as though worry had made the land lean back upon its earliest memories, grounding it that way in a familiarity with itself a thing profoundly untechnological.

Electricity seemed to have been usurped by fire. There were few cars, even fewer people. Sight was curtailed, confined to close-range. And whatever landmarks there might have been were invisible: we were obliged to navigate without bearings.

The smoke before the city was our blank page. Secretly, we had already impressed our minds upon the place: we had expectations. But unlike the deliberate excavation of a longed-for fiction – the process of creating as you dig – we were working crab-wise, and curiously, trying to hear voices.

Yet we had already been told: this is the story, the reality. This “type” exists. Not only in the minds of the pollsters but in a nation’s collective consciousness. The freedom of the blank page is disallowed. Here is your character – Worcester Woman – the multiple incarnation of a single set of pre-determined characteristics.

But while pollsters might thrive on such fixity, writers have an instinctive resistance to the finite-seeming net of language: a writer’s aim is to make language appear infinite, to signify everything it is not, everything it can never be.

Robert Frost put it this way: “to say matter in terms of spirit or spirit in terms of matter ... that is the greatest attempt that ever failed. We stop just short there. ... But it is the height of all poetic thinking.”

So we had our “type”; we had to do our best to disregard it. We had to be attentive to what was hidden beneath the white page, not what was graffiti’d upon it.

Most writers confess to a fascination for the possible, rather than the actual. But then the well-worn line that “truth is stranger than fiction” is crammed full of sense. Because the actual is not a thing that can be lassoed and corralled in a phrase. It is endlessly various, by its very nature. Words will not fit to it – and a good thing, too. If they did, we would have no more fiction post the Epic of Gilgamesh, or Beowulf, at a push. Or else we’d all talk in logarithms...

Yet there’s a subtle tyranny at work in this digital age: an insistence that every fact must have its own immaculate numerical correspondent. Perhaps it must.

But the idea of anchored references – like a search engine that always delivers – has crept into our consciousness, which is fat with referential exactness. And this is a bad thing. Because human consciousness is better served by the metaphor of analogue radio-waves. Writing, therefore, can be seen more as a “tuning in” to the myriad frequencies of reality, not an attempt to get a positive fix on it.

And isn’t this the pretext of democracy: the human voice, raised and listened to?

The spontaneous nuance

The question then is how to hear, which can also be framed as a question concerning ways of seeing and understanding. How do we see ourselves? How do we see the world? What kind of language do we wish to use to describe it, and how?

From this point, there are a number of threads one could take up. Possibly, one might follow Catherine Needham’s line of thinking, and see the relationship between people and power in terms of supply and demand – the politician’s job to listen, learn, and deliver; the political Prince rather like a snappy CEO with his finger on the market’s pulse, his sleeves rolled up as he prepares to do business.

From there, perhaps, the argument might extend to her figuring of modern politics as a parallel variant of brand-marketing – a vision that sees no implicit loss of value in that picture of brand-value-centric essentially anti-ideological thinking. (“Essentially” anti-ideological, because the “ideal” of a free market does not allow for any such rival fixity, or slowness, that an ideology would entail: “responsiveness”, “speed to market”, “staying ahead of the game”, the need to adapt to the vagaries of consumer whimsy – pesky humans, being so damn human – such things sweep everything aside in a flurry of salesmanship and logistics. Of course: for all its talk of “brand loyalty”, the market is by instinct faithless.)

Politicians are then characterised as marketing impresarios, spinning their webs of aspiration, gratification and always, somewhere, for someone, profit (power or stock, both are brokered) – this is after all the end-game, the sine qua non of whatever market-borne equation, however it might be dressed up for its swift passage through the People’s Pockets.

The People, then, seen in this way, as consumers of the political cake (avid, reticent, or even ethical, munching only each according to his need), are agglomerated, along with all their differences, (which anyway a well-researched market is protean enough to accommodate), and reduced to elemental types, vacuously chirruping: “My demands are complex, contradictory, and on a good day, even subtle – but I’m worth it” – this cry heard equally as they deliberate in supermarket and ballot box.

So then people are being failed by the mechanisms and proponents of power, merely? Sack all slackers, tighten up efficiency, honour your soundbites, stand by your spin, and we’ll all go gently?

No. This is a presumption of accuracy that says nothing about real life, as really lived. It is not soulless so much as cock-eyed, muddle-headed. People are not only more than the sum of their demographics but something else entirely. And to try to limit the spontaneous nuance, the dimension and solemnity of their lives by branding them for their likenesses, rewarding their sameness, annoyed at their difference – this is foolish, perhaps verging on despotic.

As Louis MacNeice put it, (in 'Autumn Journal IV'): “September has come and I wake/ And I think with joy how whatever, now or in future the system/ Nothing whatever can take/ The people away, there will always be people.”

Politics as hunger satisfaction

So it isn’t simply a worry about inefficiency, or even inaccuracy, that makes me find this market-model of the political landscape troubling. Nor is it that the ship of state has weighed anchor, sailed to new, un-marketed waters without sufficient mandate. It’s more that the captain and crew are suffering from a pervasive form of cabin fever, scurvy, delirium tremens... Whatever the name for it, people eye them with suspicion, and, increasingly, reluctance. This gabbling crew (Mandelson’s “Something’s seriously wrong, but what is it?” – has the boat sprung a leak?) seems strangely obsolete and increasingly superfluous. Not piratical so much as weird. Why don’t they just talk sense?

Yet while some might itch to make them walk the plank, others, in their mildness and their original innocence of human nature, feel disheartened: they trusted their captain; he has let them down. But what on earth for? Their eyes were scanning the horizon, and from the crows-nest pinnacle of 1997, it was quite beautiful – though still veiled in the mists of early summer.

My instinctive feeling of worry at a vision of people and politics as parallel to that of consumers and brands is also because it is vitally untrue – not only descriptively false but prescriptively misleading. It adds nothing to the equation; it narrows the terms, rather, and in so doing, distorts them. It re-writes the relationship between people and power to make it essentially specious, as though there were nothing beyond an elementary hunger-satisfaction motivation at the heart of any political enterprise.

It is also reckless: just as products can be re-branded into inexistence, becoming superfluous to the market’s requirements, so “politics” (in the narrow sense it is setting out for itself, revolving around “core values” of supply and demand: the iron law of market economics) can suffer from a similar obsolescence. If big business delivers where “politics” fails to, “politics” will have priced itself out of the market.

Yet politics is as much a function of the imagination – with just that boldness and visionary risk – as the will-to-pragmatism. And to reduce the relationship between human beings to one of assessment and barter is to miss the point entirely. In Rylean terms, it is to make a simple “category mistake.”

I cannot see the passionate disappointment of many of the women we interviewed as similar, in any meaningful way, to a consumer’s annoyance at a purchase that fails to live up to the promises it is branded with. This was neither the reality nor the mood. We did not discover a renegade focus-group, wild with the political equivalent of pink hair, disconsolately chewing gum and spitting at the gates of Westminster.

For the most part, we found women profoundly concerned about long-term, global issues unmentioned in the political agenda, even around the time of a General Election, yet voting (mostly) reluctantly, stubbornly (“we’re women, our vote was hard to come by”) or rebelliously, with a kind of fierce dismay, yearning for “none of the above” on their ballot-papers.

Almost without exception, the women we spoke to prefaced their conversations with, “I don’t know much about politics – I’m not a political animal”, before going on to prove that these two statements really do not follow. Their emotional investment in the future – thinking for themselves and future generations – was an act of imaginative subtlety and deliberation, in essence deeply “political.” By comparison, the thinking that produces tags such as “Worcester Woman” appears wrong-headed, childish, trivializing.

Fixity and forced unmasking

So perhaps the direction to take is a kind of stepping-aside. As Italo Calvino put it: “it is pointless searching in the depths of the opaque for an escape from the opaque.”

In 1952, FR Leavis argued (in The Common Pursuit) that “without the sensitizing familiarity with the subtleties of language, and the insight into the relations between abstract or generalizing thought and the concrete of human experience, that the trained frequentation of literature alone can bring, the thinking that attends social and political studies will not have the edge and force it should.”

He wrote this in the context of a consideration of John Bunyan’s allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress, made great, in his opinion in spite of its “bigoted sectarian creed”, because its author “belonged to the civilization of his time, and that meant, for a small-town ‘mechanick’, participating in a rich traditional culture.”

Allegory, as both a form of mirroring and participation, is important here. Needham’s writing that “politics has become a reflection of a reflection” is perfectly accurate. A politics that adopts the idiom and process of brand-marketing, that uses the currency of “types” such as “Worcester Woman”, has strayed into a Hitchcock hall of mirrors: aiming at itself, it is shooting at nothing.

It’s not surprising that, as Richard Hoggart observes (in Townscape with Figures, 1994), “We do not have much sense of a ‘Them’ outside who govern us.” It is not the remoteness of “Them”, so much as their dissembling: they’ve spun their web, now squat nervously in it, bleating paranoias and demands for “two or three eye-catching initiatives... Something tough, with immediate bite... This should be done soon, and I, personally, should be associated with it.”

Crucially, this form of dissembling places a mask across both government and those governed. Brand-speak is after all a form of calculated lying. Ultimately, a brand is a kind of mask.

In the chapter on “Transformation” in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, he distinguishes the mask “from all other end-states of transformation by its rigidity. In place of the varying and continuous movement of the face it presents the exact opposite: a perfect fixity and sameness.”

He could almost be writing about a branded style of government when he goes on to describe the despot who “dislikes all transformations in others which he has not enforced on them himself”, who “wages continuous warfare against spontaneous and uncontrolled transformation.” His weapon: “unmasking, the exact opposite of transformation.”

I’m reminded of the salesman’s creed satirised in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: “ABC: Always Be Closing.” This yen for fixity and closedness – the hatred of spontaneous transformation – is at the heart of a marketeer’s mentality. The urge is to pin down, to shut out all alternatives, to get a digital fix on life. The reverse of this is true of fiction. Robert Frost’s famous description of poetry as a “momentary stay against confusion” is to see the value of a pause button, a moment for reflection, open thinking – and an invitation to transformation, to “always be opening.”

Just as the politics which uses the branded model has, as its fantasy premise, a vision of a world that is entirely knowable, susceptible absolutely to market-research, reducible to a complex set of tendencies, loyalties and predictable behavioural patterns, so Canetti writes: “It is part of the nature of this process of unmasking that the perpetrator always knows exactly what he will find.”

It is not so much that “They” don’t like surprises. They don’t really believe in them, either. Certainly, they don’t see them as essential to what it might mean to be human. So, “the urge to unmask appearances becomes a kind of tyranny”, a form of paranoia, and “if it is practiced often the whole world shrinks. The wealth of appearances comes to mean nothing; all variety is suspect.”

The myopia of salvation

But, as Louis MacNeice wrote, “world is suddener than we fancy.” Reality shows through. And when we agree in “denial of chiaroscuro ... the cock crows in the morning.”

It is not within the falsifying glamour of brand-speak that “people” and “world” are to be found.

Visiting Worcester in 1826, William Cobbett spoke of “the kindness of receptions from frank and sensible people.” Which is not to say that the people of Worcester were entirely gentle folk: at the Reform Bill’s initial rejection in 1831, the mayor was hit on the head by a stone while he read the Riot Act outside the Guildhall. He sent in the Hussars. But the people got their First Reform Act a year later.

Throwing stones is one way, and polemical writing has its place. But perhaps what’s needed is a different way of looking at things, a way of tuning in – an alternative to the tyrannical fixity of brand-language, the despotism of Canetti’s forced unmasking.

Again, Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion” is not to attack the state of confusion, for he perfectly understood the advantages of chaos: “To me, any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing.”

The point, he thought, was to assert a small figure of “order and concentration.” In this respect, fiction stands in a critical relation to the world. It posits not what merely is, but what might be. It takes metaphor as its vehicle of invention and imagination. And metaphor is a very different thing from a spun untruth, an “aspiration” associated with a brand, or a demographic tag such as “Worcester Woman.” All these things have a tendency to obfuscate (unsurprisingly: they are the “messages” of dissemblers). Metaphor, on the other hand, illuminates. It helps us to tune into the world. It reveals the truth beneath the blank page.

And of course, the democratic instinct is out there. So while we might not choose pitchforks at dawn, a metaphorical armoury of understanding is essential.

Perhaps the web, with its tight feedback loop back to reality, is a useful metaphor, made real with use – a net of global connectedness, un-spun by those whose threads lead only into the opacity of a “reflection of a reflection.”

Richard Hoggart spoke of “that saving illusion of security” by which people live (he was referring specifically to the English). It’s an illusion that each day becomes more fragile to sustain, and more reckless to wish to do so. Because how can we want to be saved, when “salvation” is a form of self-willed myopia, accepting things as they are spun to us, never asking, as a writer must ask: but what if – ?