Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London

life.

Introduction

A Dickensian Narrative of Neoliberalism

We live in a time of great social, political and economic crisis that many date to the collapse of the global banking system in 2008. Many are finding it difficult to contextualise the hardships that have taken place in the years following on from those events. It is difficult to find the answers in our present media landscape, or in a political and intellectual climate that continues to laud capitalism as the winning economic system coming out of both World War II and the end of the Cold War, which has become over the last century synonymous with democracy itself. The irony is that in our times the majority of the world’s people feel disenfranchised by both capitalism and democracy. How did we come to this historical juncture? What can we learn not just from history, but from our cultural artefacts that might tell us how we first came to conduct ourselves within a system of global finance capitalism?

This volume proposes that we reinterpret the writings of Charles Dickens to find the antecedents of our present situation with regards to capital, empire and subjectivity. This is the story of an age, the nineteenth century, where finance first becomes the stuff of a life for the average British subject and where capital or the lack thereof shapes whole destinies. Capital imagines a life built in its own image under the auspices of liberal governance, which insists on nature itself as the progenitor of the market. Such an age uniquely transforms Dickens, a political reporter, into a novel author capable of utilising his mental agility, his class motivation and his personal torment to inform on capital’s excesses, its grievances, its ability to dispossess its subjects at will and, rarer still, its redemptive capacities. This becomes the story of our age, recast to mimic the contours of a post-imperial Britain where capital has adapted itself over centuries to become once again the agent of social engineering. Whole classes of individuals are captured through its sophisticated stratagems for managing the flow of wealth and bodies that today no longer require direct management, but rather subtle invocation as neoliberal subjects tethered to the project of continuous self-improvement and self-generated value creation. Today failure is not an option, any more than the financial ruin of our Victorian yesteryear. What must be observed however is the way in which the prospect of failure has morphed into discourses around race, class, multiculturalism, immigration, austerity and postcolonial conflict that bear the unique markers of our age, yet at the same time find their institutional geneses in the spaces Dickens charts so assiduously in his narratives. It’s there that we might find the vital clues that provide critical insight into the contemporary movement of capital, from its portent and modes of resistance to its most dire tendencies found not in the future, but in a past understanding we have heretofore largely neglected to revise.

The year 2012 marked the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth. At this time it is relevant to consider the ‘other’ Dickens and to explore those aspects of Dickens’s life and work that have been less subject to critical revision, reappraisal and transformation within contemporary cultural studies of his work. This book will aim to critically assess the ‘Dickensian’ cultural legacy of the Victorian age in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with regard to the rise of free-market capitalism and imperial expansion, which form the backdrop of his canonical works. These themes, whilst certainly remarked upon in recent scholarship, are seldom examined with regard to the revolution in finance and wealth concomitant to his recurrent subject matters around gender, class, race, emigration, property and inheritance, and moreover, their intersection with trends in law, science, government and criminal apprehension taking place within that same era. This book will argue in particular that the continued influence of Dickens into the twenty-first century has everything to do with a trend towards neo-Victorianism that impacts all of our debates related to economic crisis, globalisation, consumerism, social justice, neoliberalism and neocolonial warfare. Dickens’s work performs for us a past that can seldom be ignored in taking up all these questions and thus poses the opportunity to reassess these issues, in service to today’s societal dilemmas. By focussing on Dickens’s preoccupations within the space of Victorian Britain, we can foresee the implications of his thought to the shaping of attitudes that prevail today when considering the ‘Others’ of our own society and the ‘Others’ outside, which have held up the weight of global enterprise for the past two centuries.

At the heart of capital, and of the human forces that engage it, is the issue of the violence of society itself and what replaces society when it is combined with its surplus. Dickens feared that as time wore on, those considered surplus populations in the capitalist system would eventually face a systematic rejection, once the masses were no longer willing to tolerate the cost of them. The modern derivations of murder, suicide and mass killing as we have now come to know them are all branches of Victorian capitalism. These branches remain open and signposted in Dickens’s writing for all those who care to look. Despite the interdependence between rich and poor that formed the cornerstone of liability that united all of Britain’s citizens under a progressively capitalistic banner, it remained understood throughout the nineteenth century that poverty itself was nobody’s fault, or even if it was it was in a very limited sense. It was unthinkable that such a condition should be in anyway considered a problem in league with the social classificatory system itself.

These same Victorian dynamics of class in an emerging global society play out everywhere in contemporary Britain, drawing once more on an incorrigible classificatory logic established during the nineteenth century to enact a neoliberal schema in which those who inhabit the under classes may be confined to a zone of economic illegitimacy. Their lives of intense hardship and poverty, according to this (neo)liberal logic, should not warrant care or valuation, because their dire condition comes to them as a result of their own actions. The contemporary lives of those subject to hardship and poverty bear an unmistakable resemblance to the lives of the characters portrayed in Dickens’s novels throughout the nineteenth century. It is here that we arrive at a kind of historical reversal: a critical, historical, and legal moment in which a contemporary neoliberal Britain rejects the mid-twentieth-century ideal of providing a social safety net for all in favour of a liberal, conditional welfare regime backed up with increasing surveillance, moralising and punishment not witnessed since the Victorian era. Today the precarious existence of the poorest has become the precursor to criminality as individuals are reduced to an advanced status of marginality. It is these forces that make up the ills of our time and bring us back to an age where social category becomes destiny. The purpose of this book is to mark off paths of departure from the Victorians’ legacy, through a re-acquaintance with their former representation preserved within the contours of Dickens’s radical literary agenda.

From this standpoint, this book marks a major departure from traditional Dickensian scholarship, because it is about tracing a trajectory of capitalism through Dickens’s writing and the conditions in society and in his personal dealings that reflect this development of capitalism from the Victorian era to the present day. Therefore it must be understood that this book is not in any way a strict literary or historical study of Dickens as such. Rather its object is to demonstrate how the recent financial crisis has its roots in nineteenth-century capitalism’s liberal moral, economic and cultural legacies. This book explicitly draws out an underlying framework of capital subtending all of Dickens’s narrative arrangements, emerging therein as the very substance of character in the Victorian Age. It also makes explicit the intersection of colonial themes into all of Dickens’s ostensibly British-based novels, therefore allowing readers to more fully appreciate the intimate relations of metropole and colony that come to form the basis of numerous new transactional economies represented in the novels touched upon within this volume: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood. It reveals the liberal, political and economic framework that literally reinvents Britain for the imperial capitalistic age through the naturalisation of new class and racial hierarchies based on colonialism that have re-emerged today in the guise of ‘neoliberalism’.

This book argues that neoliberalism takes as it starting point the careful governance of such formations to promote a societal logic for the perpetuation of similar class inequities in the context of a contemporary postcolonial Britain. What we witness in the intervening era between the eighteenth century and the twentieth century is a progression in the understanding of the market from an arena of exchange in eighteenth century, to one of competition in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth one of enterprise. As capitalism attempted to absorb all of these values, the outward consumption initially prescribed by liberalism over time evolved to become a prescription for inward consumption under the new terms of neoliberalism.

In the eighteenth century, classical liberalism identified labour as the critical original human infusion that both created and justified private property. Under the constraints of neoliberalism, any special status for human labour is done away with as are the nineteenth century’s older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in the labour theory of value. What replaces such values in the late twenty-first century version of liberalism, by contrast, is an understanding of the human being as an arbitrary bundle of investments, skill sets, temporary alliances at the level of family, sex, race and so on. Under the new vestiges of neoliberalism there are no more classes in the sense of the older political economy, since every individual is both employer and worker simultaneously; every man should be an entrepreneur, making of himself the governable material of his own business, firm or corporation. As a rationale, neoliberalism has come to stand in for being itself and the market the template for the individual’s own self-management. Therefore the only class that remains conspicuously visible is the one made up of those who fail to adhere to the new labour standard of self-enhancement and its related capitalisation.

The first chapter, ‘Tomorrow and Yesterday: The Peculiar British Property of Domestic Dispossession’, explores the threat associated with the loss of shelter, whether it is on a material or ontological level, through a reading of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House and Elmgreen and Dragset’s recent V&A installation ‘Tomorrow’.

The second chapter, ‘Bank Draft: The Winds of Change in Little Dorrit’s Domestic Economy’, re-examines the representation of the market in Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit. There we are able to not merely identify developments in the realm of contemporary finance capitalism proper to the age of the novel, but to unearth a new cultural imaginary within it that expressed changing ideas of moral probity and indeterminate identity, creditworthiness and the management of financial risks, and to consider its repercussions for the British subject both at home and abroad.

The third chapter, ‘Cosmopolitan Fortunes: Imperial Labour and Metropolitan Wealth in Dickens’s Great Expectations’ looks at the spatial history of Britain’s relationship to its penal colony, Australia. This is mapped by positing Magwitch’s imperial labour as both central to the text, and part of a greater spatial history that crucially intersects with the linear biography of Pip’s development in England.

The fourth and concluding chapter, ‘Age and Ills: Dickens’s Response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 within the Present Context of Neoliberal Empire’, addresses the ways in which Dickens’s writings deal with a set of persistent anxieties and uncertainties that plagued the maturation of the British Empire within his lifetime. This chapter examines the parallel between the Victorian era of liberalism and its postmodern successor neoliberalism to map the ills of our present age, by bringing us back to a time where social category first materialises as biopolitical destiny.

In closing, the epilogue, ‘Crony Capitalism and the Mutuality of the Market’, provides a Dickensian critique of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech, delivered on 11 November 2013, which called for economic austerity to be enacted ‘not just now, but permanently’ in a political tone reminiscent of Our Mutual Friend’s Mr. Podsnap.

Whilst this book certainly references Victorian themes and their contemporary significance, its larger aim is to bring the political discourse of the Victorian era (which Dickens, as a public figure, played an enormous role in drafting) to bear on contemporary re-imaginings of the nineteenth century and their sustained impact in shaping twenty-first-century social, political and economic policies in Britain. These same relations still implicate themselves in the way we look at culture and capital, both human and financial, as we approach the twenty-first century in some senses as Neo-Victorians operating on registers of neoliberal and neocolonial enterprise that have their antecedents in the historical atmosphere of Dickensian London. Therefore, at a fundamental level, this book addresses the relationship between the themes of capital and empire in Dickens’s novels and the confluence of global economy and liberal politics in the Victorian era that remain relevant to our understanding of our present global financial crisis and the significance it has in maintaining a logic for neoliberal governmentality.

‘Tomorrow’ and Yesterday: The Peculiar British Property of Domestic Dispossession

In the autumn of 2013, The Victoria and Albert Museum commissioned leading contemporary artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset to create a major site-specific installation in the former Textile Galleries entitled ‘Tomorrow’. The setting already evokes a spatial and temporary reference to the British Empire, which is then mirrored in the central character of the exhibition: an elderly 75-year-old failed British architect named Norman Swann. Dragset explains in a video commissioned for the exhibition by the V&A that ‘He had a lot of great ideas, he was quite visionary but he never got to realise any of his projects. He was a part-time teacher, probably at Cambridge. Visitors can see a lot of his models in the study that we install as part of his home. You do get a sense that this is a grand South Kensington apartment, all these things have trickled down through generations and now maybe the old architect living there might be the last person to sit on this from the family empire’ (V&A, ‘Elmgreen & Dragset at the V&A’). The idea that the British Empire might be coming to a close in 2013, rather than sometime in the 1950s or 60s, is an intriguing one. This is further spoken to by Elmgreen when he describes the audience for this installation as ‘diverse, they come from many different backgrounds’, tacitly referring to Britain’s postcolonial social makeup. Their multifariousness for the installation artist is equated at once with the performance of labour on one level, and on another a bastardisation of the original rational intent of the architecture: ‘Often your audience will create and elaborate on the artworks in a much more interesting way than you ever could do yourself – they make it wilder, more romantic, sentimental or perverse than your intentions were to start with’. This sets the stage for a drama of meaning to play itself out, often with results that undermine the order of things through an interpenetration of tastes and desires.

The V&A website describes the installation as a ‘domestic setting that will appear like a set for an unrealised play’ (‘Elmgreen & Dragset at the V&A’). This play however must be in some sense stage-managed as evidenced by the provision of ‘a script, written by the artists, made available for visitors as a printed book’ prior to their entrance into the formal space. Though many visitors only take a cursory glance at this material, laying it down before commencing to explore the apartment, perch on the sofa and read Norman’s books and magazines, it nonetheless speaks to an intention on the part of the artists to in some way maintain their script or rather inscription in the experience laid out before them and to mark them in some way upon entrance to this vaunted space. The choice of South Kensington to create the grand residence of a fictional architect in a series of five rooms within the museum is already overlaid with meaning, and then placed into further temporal relief through a careful ‘domestic sequence of entrance hall, dining room, kitchen, study and bedroom, furnished with a combination of pieces from the V&A collection alongside replicas and the artists’ own additions’. This potent combination of artefact and artifice says a great deal about the British Empire itself as ‘the setting for a highly elaborate fiction’ (Woodman). The objects point to a larger truth about empire. Despite its impressive holdings, the architecture that subtends its offering is only ever as good as the flawed and fragile individuals charged with its assembly. What we see then displayed in Swann’s world is not solely of aesthetic interest, but is also useful as a means of detecting what will come in to reassemble these parts in the wake of the British Empire’s formal dissolution.

Perhaps it is telling that we enter the exhibition space of ‘Tomorrow’ after passing the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries that were donated to the V&A ‘in lieu of tax during the post-war dismantling of the old aristocratic system’ (Jennings). Quite suddenly we find ourselves at the entrance hall of a grand Kensington town house, confronted as it were by another postwar period of English aristocratic austerity. The property we encounter, whilst superficially retaining its grandeur, also displays the look of decay – a bucket in the corridor catches the occasional drip coming through the ceiling making us perhaps subtly aware of other failings to come. What we confront next are an array of images that hang in the corridor mingled together in a grouping that speaks at once to nostalgia and loss: ‘a photo of Ronnie Scott’s jazz club next to one showing the moment Rhodesia initiated breakaway from colonial rule; childhood sketches; a military medal’ (Jennings). The inhabitant seems to have difficulties in distinguishing his ardor for his male companions and their institutional settings as evidenced by a fake photo album we discover in the sitting room with holiday snaps reflecting his mutual interest in architecture and young men. One in particular is singled out through a series of postcards that appear in his study received from an ‘acquaintance from Berlin recalling fond memories of their time together, but who is now seemingly upset Norman never replied’ (Bradley).

As Kimberly Bradley mentions in her review, Norman’s presence is portrayed totemically through ‘a wealth of sculptures of horses (They love their horses here, don’t they? Elmgreen observes); an OBE hanging on the wall; and perhaps most disturbingly through what presumably is a sculpture of him huddled in the frame of the fireplace, curled up in fearful despair with his face to his knees’ (Bradley). His likeness is echoed in a portrait that hangs over the mantelpiece of that same fireplace, wearing an identical schoolboy uniform to his three-dimensional likeness below, equally melancholy and apprehensive. The theme of youth and its sorrows resonates throughout the house, existing as it were side by side with the torment of its present occupier: a living and aging man, the adult version of Norman Swann. Again it is not just the representation of young men that captures our interest throughout; it is also the way in which they become aesthetic objects and forms within themselves, transmitting through ‘the carefully chosen library with books by Thomas Mann, Tony Benn and Jean Cocteau … alongside tomes on queer architecture and copies of Architectural Review’ a certain well-known structure of society which allows the very existence of Norman to become intelligible to visitors (Bradley). Norman’s absent body is indeed riddled with meaning. The HIV medicine he takes to keep disease from ravaging his body is peeking out from the drawer, his pills reluctant objects in their own right competing, as it were, with his massive, unmade bed, a pillar of which is crowned with a golden vulture, looking over the sleeper perhaps lying in wait for his ultimate demise or rather in perpetual harsh judgment of his past actions in this position.

Norman’s vulnerability, his propensity toward self-destruction, and his fractious life course are all meticulously plotted through Elmgreen & Dragset’s arrangement of a number of set pieces: a dressed and decorated dining table broken into two denying the diner uncomplicated succor, a study populated with maquettes of his failed modernist social housing projects, an office where the unpaid bills that provoked Norman’s departure are on view, an Evening Standard front page from the summer of the 2011 riots pinned to the wall, the headline: ‘London’s Shame’. Norman’s lingering pre-occupations about discomfort encroaching upon the domestic environment are announced in the vacant drape of his Burberry trench coat, a discarded pair of his tatty slippers and a Zimmer frame concealed behind an elegant screen. The noise of a running shower and the drip through the ceiling together convey a sense of presentiment for the visitor. These perhaps are gothic reminders that this extraordinary new multi-room installation lodges within itself the historical insinuation of five vast Victorian spaces, which are being temporarily altered into these present quarters in aid of illuminating a greater historical legacy; one that at once shelters Norman’s being and portrays Britain’s own interiority.

Elmgreen & Dragset acknowledge as their inspiration for Norman’s home ‘the European interiors depicted by Dutch Masters and the Danish Golden Age’ which equally portray the plenty that imperial enterprise afforded to these domestic settings (Himelfarb). Elmgreen asserts that their work, ‘like artists painting interiors throughout centuries, is intended to imply psychology and social codes’. These codes support the act of trespassing into history’s deepest recesses in the home. The fact that the owner of that property is an ambiguous one gives persuasive licence to the visitor to pass through. Norman’s progressive bankruptcy gives the property a look of dereliction. It gives the visitor the initial impression that the owner has long gone, only to discover him curiously sonically embedded into the walls of the place. We never hear his voice, his version of events per se; instead his narrative is sustained through the script written by Elmgreen & Dragset. Within it are contained the heated discussions he has with former German lover Daniel Wilder and Daniel’s present girlfriend Wendy, ‘about how attached Norman is to the home and its contents, and how disappointed he is that the signs of decay point to the contrary’ (Bose). Norman, like his belongings, is ‘being tested against the perils of time’ and found wanting. Conspicuously on the cover of the book is a tombstone emblazed with the word ‘Tomorrow’ and the impressed insignia of the V&A. Could this signal to us from the start Norman’s demise, or indeed the untimely demise of our own ‘Tomorrow’? Through Norman, Daniel and Wendy’s conflict with one another, Elmgreen & Dragset are able to reveal personal histories as poignant in their own right, possessing of a dark humour that carries over to ‘reveal the fragile, quivering heart of human avarice, ego and intellect behind various spatial and societal constructs’ (Bose). The visitors for their part get to experience the crushing, private disappointment Norman embodies as a result of coming too late to the party of Empire, the loneliness of entrusting one’s legacy to future generations for whom all biography will become the stuff of electronic entry and digital self-enhancement, a somewhat tragic missive sent from one dehumanising imperial architecture to another equally dehumanising neoliberal architecture.

One thing is for certain: the inherited and imperial wealth that empire provided is disintegrating, just like the institutions that house them, right before our eyes, giving way to new forms of wealth derived elsewhere beyond Britain and Europe and by a new money elite, who still wish to embrace for the time being ‘the dust-sheeted dreams of a benevolent empire’, to master its architecture and in some sense claim its power and influence for themselves as immediate cash buyers (Bose). Perhaps it is their time, this ‘Tomorrow’. Perhaps it will become someone else’s. Today the major shifts in society have their beginnings in political and economic will, as they once did in the nineteenth century when Britain was at the height of its empire. In Elmgreen’s words, ‘this rude, rough neoliberalism, new money from all over the world, and new parameters’ appear superficially to clash with all the mindsets of old imperial Britain, which was brought about by a very strict class system and maintained a banal domestic architecture through aristocratic ministering of the state, leaving those less fortunate largely to negotiate the social structures they put in place with little optimism (Elmgreen qtd. in Bose).

During the Victorian era museums open to the public were designed to invite working-class individuals in to revere the spoils of empire in their best display, so that the hardships of their own environment could temporarily be offset in proximity to these riches. The V&A itself was established in 1852 (from the proceeds of the Great Exhibition of 1851) on the founding principle of making ‘works of art available to all, to educate working people and to inspire British designers and manufacturers’ (V&A, ‘A Brief History of the Museum’). The air, light and space of such places would turn them into spaces of revelation. Many people visiting these type of institutions were anticipating being changed by what they saw, for these interior spaces to make them see things in a different light, to stimulate ideas and discourse and ultimately to act in the cause of breaking down the normal hierarchy in aid of another potential order. The museum as a structure, for Elmgreen & Dragset, is one that exists alongside other institutions such as ‘prisons, social security offices, hospitals … galleries and parks [to] act as means of social control’ (Elmgreen & Dragset, ‘The Welfare Show’). They see it as their job to enliven the theatrical, even filmic quality of all individually lived experience nestled within these institutions, by re-authorising these seemingly prosaic spaces and revealing their hidden, generative potential through novel exhibition.

In the case of ‘Tomorrow’, biographical and fictitious identities are made to connect seamlessly within the various strands of narratives defining this exhibition and indeed spacing out that identity-based logic to achieve full subversive effect. In ‘Tomorrow’, it is the personal detail, the exceptional circumstance and the disaffected atmosphere that are brought forth by the artists to interrogate what we consider common or universal about our age. The exhibition intimates, at least superficially, that it is possible to understand one’s identity from one’s belongings, but also that people can in a sense ‘become’ themselves through ‘becoming’ items in someone else’s collection, allowing them to free themselves from the illusion that they are living their lives in assumed privacy, and instead realise that they have always in some sense been part and parcel of a larger societal apparatus. As subjects it is up to us to grasp the fact that what we are looking at are always already-staged interiors, our self-understanding coming to us through the windows of society, conventionally from the outside in. The spaces we occupy are equally invented for us to arrive at from a distance, our identities vaguely skewed to conform with the objects collected about us which themselves are slightly off, underlining the constructedness of the spaces we inhabit and in turn our own interior lives.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s work implies that within society, some individuals replicate their personal narratives to function as miniature versions of the overall social hierarchy of the national space. However some cannot be employed for the roles they appear to be designed for, and some are broken and therefore cannot participate fully in the mechanism drawn up for them. Despite the apparent awkwardness of the design of such spaces and indeed subjectivities, outsiders are nonetheless welcomed in, if only to the extent that they are encouraged to imagine how life in these dwellings could be and what values the inhabitants share. The entry point for such dwelling assumes that one’s life story is in some way based on one’s possessions. Herein lies at once an institutional critique of capitalism, but also a social criticism that becomes a commentary on public shifts in power, aesthetics and priorities, and how they affect our most private ambitions and situations. It is these and many other recurring historical themes and overlapping subjectivities that populate this interior space, crowding it, forcing the visitor to devise meaning and decode themes within its narrative space.

In the case of ‘Tomorrow’, curiously, for a deal to be brokered to save Norman Swann from the burdens associated with his core identity, he must call up one of these very burdens: his former student, Daniel Wilder. Elmgreen explains that Wilder ‘was never very intellectually gifted but has become a very successful interior designer of celebrities’ homes and has found him a buyer’, and has set to work remodelling the apartment for its new owners. ‘So, unlike our architect, he’s actually got something realized’, adds Dragset. ‘Though of course it’s something dear Norman looks down on’ (qtd. in Wrathall). Swann’s disdain for Wilder, presumed here to be a foreign interloper but nonetheless allowed to cash in on South Kensington, speaks to another theme Elmgreen & Dragset are keen to cash in on themselves in their choice of setting for Swann’s tragic fall: ‘the clash between old and new money’ (Wrathall). As Elmgreen comments, ‘Power is shifting in the world at the moment. Who are the rich in London? Not Britons. It’s no longer the traditional upper class. It’s mostly people who have moved here’ (qtd. in Wrathall).

Tellingly, it is neither the traditional upper class nor their rich migrant counterparts whom Elmgreen anticipates as the audience for their installation, but rather the vast remainder of London’s inhabitants who will flock to the exhibition ‘to relax’ amidst ‘a nice welcoming environment with seating’; it is these people who will ‘use’ the installation, because ‘99 percent of the population in London have so little space’ (Elmgreen qtd. in Wrathall). Elmgreen elaborates on their condition: ‘They live in such shit domestic conditions that they enjoy