Orientation and Re-orientation: Towards an Expanded Notion of Jet Lag

This text is a re-worked version of an earlier post on Jet Lag. It was included in the recent issue of Flee Immediately!, a publication that is as much an art production as it is a journal. Editions are available at the Whitechapel Gallery bookshop, among other places.

Flee Immediately!

1.

I had returned from Japan 24 hours earlier – or near enough. There were the usual loose ends to sort out after an extended trip and after going into Manchester centre to visit the bank, get a new pair of shoes and some essential groceries, I stopped in a pub for a quick pint. I told the bartender, who was also a friend, that I was off to London on Friday to enroll as a PhD student. “You’re going to London tomorrow?”, he asked. “No”, I replied, “I’m going on Friday”. “But today is Thursday and tomorrow is Friday” he said, spelling it out for me. “That means you’re going to London tomorrow. You’re enrolling tomorrow”.

I nearly spit my beer out. The bubble had burst. I was no longer in that abstracted time of the long-haul flight. I was no longer in that contained world of airport terminals, pressurised cabins, security checks and 30,000 ft views from a window. I was grounded, and had been for at least 24 hours, but still hadn’t made the adjustment.

2.

When Arthur Whitten Brown and John Alcock made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1919, Brown also became the first to identify what is now called ‘jet lag’. After his 15 hour transatlantic flight between Newfoundland and Ireland, Brown described a ‘difficulty of adjustment to the sudden change in time’. [1] There was a marked difference between the experience of air time and the experience of a grounded and localised land time. Jet lag was not only the negotiation of different time zones at the points of departure and arrival, it was also the negotiation of the different perceptions of time and space as experienced in the shift between the airplane and land. In this respect, jet lag is as much spatial as temporal. It is an orientation and re-orientation to different perspectives and relations.

Throughout his War and Cinema, Paul Virlio notes how the airborne perspective fundamentally altered battlefield management. During the Battle of the Marne – the opening salvo of the Great War – the ‘calvary perspective’ of the battlefield lost out to the ‘perpendicular perspective’ of the airplane. [2] The airborne perspective allowed pilots to escape the ‘Euclidean neutralization’ of the individual soldier. [3] Whereas the individual soldier had no comprehension of the immense network of trenches across France and Belgium and even risked his life to catch a fleeting glimpse of his local terrain, the pilot was able to cover vast terrain and visually capture it on camera. However, in escaping the limited horizontal perspectives of the soldier, pilots and aircraft crew were increasingly framed within the isolated and technological space of the airplane cabin: ‘[...] towards the end of the Second World War, the pressurized cockpits of the US Superfortress bombers had become artificial synthesizers that shut out the world of the senses to quite an extraordinary degree’. [4] This is also the case with today’s passenger jets. Technological sophistication has seen airplanes become isolated and necessarily closed environments, with little or no sensory relation to the outside world and in the particular case of the long-haul passenger flight, severely limited perspectives on the outside world. The long-haul flight has become a ‘cinematic derealization’ in reference to the surrounding environment. [5] It has its own abstracted patterns of sleeping and eating and its own patterns of night and day, constructed through the play of light in the cabin and the behaviour of flight staff. These patterns are unconnected to any physical geography and are contained entirely within the unique space of the airplane cabin. The longer the flight, the more this contained space at 30,000 ft is normalised by the passenger. This also may mean that it takes longer for the passenger to orient themselves upon arrival to a specific, grounded and localised site.

3.

Airport terminals may be grounded, but they are still very much a part of the contained world of the passenger flight. They act as starting and end points to the journey and as transition points along the way. Like the airplane itself, they offer a sense of disconnection from the immediate, outside world. The boundaries are clearly demarcated through security checks and passport controls. Once inside the airport terminal becomes a abstracted world of permanent light, 24 hour duty-free shops, restaurants, cafes, souvenir stores and bars with round-the-clock patronage. Marc Augé referred to the airport as a type of non-historic, non-relational, ‘non-place’ in which travelers are offered anonymity in exchange for passage through a generic environment. [6] But these are far from anonymous spaces – as biometric passport controls and, in some cases, electronic finger printing exemplify. And relations are largely governed by security and retail. Retail is embedded in the airport terminal and its inescapability is largely on account of the terminal being a contained space. For instance, the new Terminal 5 at London Heathrow expects up to 30 million passengers a year, but only provides 700 seats. The tired and weary traveller is almost required, through necessity, to find a seat in a cafe, bar or restaurant. As Mark Riches, Managing Director of World Duty Free, stated, ‘If we can’t sell to people who can’t leave the building, then there is something wrong with us’. [7]

4.

Jet lag is a frame. It is a sort of technological enframing, in a proximally Heideggerian sense, that extends beyond the confines of the airplane cabin and airport terminal as the passenger carries the unique time, space, perspectives and relations of the long-haul flight into other situations. [8] Lost in Translation is a film of jet lag and provides an example here. [9] The two central characters, Bob and Charlotte, spend most of their time in the top floors of the Park Hyatt Tokyo. From their hotel windows, which provide key backdrops to the film, Tokyo is seen from a great height and distance – a near perpendicular perspective. The upper floors of the hotel, including the lounge and bar, replicate the contained spaces, perspectives and relations of the long-haul flight. And Bob and Charlotte are rarely able to orient themselves on the ground in Tokyo. As short term, transient visitors they remain in spaces and relations oriented to flight rather than a grounded and localised place.

5.

I often fly to Japan. My wife lives there. And I increasingly think that the experience of jet lag does not necessarily begin with flight. It may begin, to a lesser degree, with the modes of transport used to arrive at the airport or continue in the spaces occupied post-arrival, as in Lost in Translation. In Japan, I often take the Shinkansen (bullet train) to the airport. Although a grounded transport, the speed and movement of the Shinkansen begins to remove the passenger from a sense of local connection. The carriage also has a spatial similarity to the airplane cabins that I will soon board. When traveling in Japan, I sense that the Shinkansen becomes a precursor to the experience of the passenger jet.

Jet lag is not simply the experience of departing from and arriving at different time zones. This is a part of the experience, but only a small part. Jet lag is a frame and needs to be thought of in spatial terms as much as temporal. It is the orientation and re-orientation to fundamentally different perspectives and fundamentally different environments – environments and perspectives that are unique to the space of the aircraft but can be replicated, to various degrees, in other spaces used along the journey.

Notes

[1] Science Museum, London. Visited on 23 September, 2011.

[2] Virlio, P. (1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso. p. 92

[3] ibid. p.24

[4] ibid. p.31

[5] ibid. p.99

[6] Augé, M. (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. trans. by Howe, D. London: Verso. pp. 77-8.

[7] The Guardian. 15 June, 2007. ‘30 million passengers, 23,000 square metres of shops . . . and just 700 seats’.

[8] Heidegger, M. (1993) ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. by Krell, D. London: Routledge. pp. 311-341

[9] Lost in Translation. (2004) Directed by Sofia Coppola. USA: Focus Features.

The Young Hegelians

Steve Hanson and I are collaborating on a topic of mutual interest: Hegel.

Here’s a link to the site: http://theyounghegelians.wordpress.com/

And here’s the introductory text written by Steve:

This site was created to discuss Hegel, but it is not limited to that topic. Naming this site ‘The Young Hegelians’ clearly also leads the topic on into Marx, Engels, and the Marxist traditions more widely. This site attempts to be forward-facing in its exploration of the history and theory of its subjects.

I’ll likely be doing some cross-posting between the two.

From Kierkegaard to Hegel

I used to work near Manchester Cathedral. On occasion I would meet with Andrew Shanks, a prominent Anglican thinker and Canon Theologian at the church. I don’t read theology, but I do remember the conversations to be both insightful and enjoyable.

Canon Shanks once asked who my influences were when I studied philosophy. “Nietzsche and Kierkegaard”, I replied. “Ahh, Kierkegaard”, Canon Shanks said, “He led me to the truth . . . and that truth was Hegel”.

I was surprised at the time, if only because I’d never met a badge-wearing Hegelian. But I now think I’m moving closer to what Canon Shanks was implying. Recently I’ve been reading through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit [1] as part of a Hegel reading group and I’ve also taken up some close readings of certain sections of that text as part of my PhD research.

Classically, the Hegelian dialectic is seen as a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In other words, a given concept is combined with its opposite to form a new and improved concept. This is the tripartite framework Kierkegaard took aim at in his various writings. Hegel was Kierkegaard’s foil, or more precisely, a crude version of Hegel was Kierkegaard’s foil.

But the Hegelian Aufhebung shouldn’t be treated as a three-part movement, nor should it be treated as any sort of ‘framework’. Michael Inwood takes Aufhebung to mean ‘abolish’, ‘preserve’ and ‘raise up’. It is also a mobile term – one that Hegel deploys in different ways throughout his writing. [2] The rubric of thesis-antithesis-synthesis doesn’t hold up. Aufhebung is utilised differently, in different circumstances.

I’ve only given a cursory glance to Gillian Rose, but her account of the Hegelian dialectic seems valuable. She writes:

“To read a proposition ‘speculatively’ in the Hegelian manner means that identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate. [...] An empty name, uncertain and problematic, gradually acquiring meaning as the result of a series of contradictory experiences”. [3]

At the very least, this breaks apart the crude dialectic often applied to Hegel and we can view Aufhebung as emerging from experience rather than a framework applied to experience. In this reading the Aufhebung is also not be regarded as the incorporation of a feminine antithesis into a masculine thesis, which is the position of prominent feminist critiques of Hegel. [4] It would also suggest that Kierkegaard is not that different from his old adversary. And that’s probably what his biographer, Joakim Garff, was getting at when he suggested that Kierkegaard’s real enemy was the Cophenhagen academy who were applying “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” as a framework for all manner of disciplines.[5] Kierkegaard was perhaps closer to Hegel than commonly thought, precisely because he was attacking this.

References:

[1] Hegel (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. AV Miller (trans). OUP

[2] Inwood (1992) A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell.

[3] Rose (1981) Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Athlone.

[4] see Irigary (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman. C Gillian (trans) Ithaca: Cornell University Press and Butler (2000) Antigone’s Claim. New York: Columbia University Press.

[5] Garff (2005) Søren Kierkegaard B Kirmmse (trans). PUP

Jamie Peck at Queen Mary

This text was written as a post for the London Social Science website. When (and if!) it appears, I’ll add the link

Neoliberalism is not an unproblematic term. It can be difficult to pinpoint and define. It is a ‘fuzzy concept’, as Noel Castree tells us. He also warns against turning neoliberalism into an academic ‘consolation’ – in other words, we should be wary of casting it as a monolithic hegemony solely for the purpose of providing a critical object for scholarly work. The geographer Jamie Peck has noted that the term itself is rarely used in mainstream politics and carries a certain toxicity in media and politics. It is primarily used in the pejorative sense and is deployed mainly by critics rather than assumed practitioners. As a largely critical term, its use may be limited beyond critical circles and this may, in turn, limit the reception of the critique it provides. However, while these concerns need to be considered, there is, nonetheless, still great value in formulating responses to neoliberalism and our contemporary political and economic climate.

Jamie Peck, Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, was recently a guest at the Department of Geography at Queen Mary. In late November, 2011, he held postgraduate and departmental seminars as well as delivering the Eighth David M Smith Lecture. In his recent work, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, Peck approaches neoliberalism as a sort of hybrid phenomenon. He defines it as ‘market fundamentalism’ and the pursuit of market rule through privitisation, commodification and financial deregulation while also emphasising security and the protection of property rights. For Peck, this is essentially a utopian pursuit with the ideal of pure market rule ultimately unachievable. However, this is a source of strength for neoliberalism. It is at once dogmatic and opportunistic, allowing neoliberalism to continually constitute and reconstitute its strategy according to changing circumstances while also claiming that there is always more to be done to implement pure market rule.

Peck’s focus is not so much on neoliberalism as neoliberalisation and he broadly sketches this process out in what he terms the “roll back” and “roll out” phases of neoliberal policy application. The “roll back” phase is the initial onset. It is the privitisation of public services and institutions, the deregulation of finance, the loosening of bureaucratic control and the disorganising of alternative centres of power – such as trade unions. It is all applied in view of the belief that the market will correct any issues, such as unemployment, that occur when things like public institutions are dismantled. The “roll out” phase is triggered by the failure of the market to overcome the vacuum left by its own application. It includes market-conforming regulatory intervention, the selective empowerment of service providers and NGOs and the use of public private partnerships to fund projects and developments. What’s significant, is that the “roll out” phases is predicated on the failed application of neoliberal policy – in other words, the market is used to respond to crises of its own making. In doing so it sets aside its dogmatic goal in order to work with traditionally non-market institutions, including the state.

An example would be useful here. Peck refers to the privitisation of public utilities such as water. When the state sells off utilities and services, it is often the case that the state needs to re-appear or intervene to deal with the ensuing problems of privitisation. For instance, a regulatory state body may need to be formed to ensure that a public utility, such as water, is still properly run, avoids monopoly control and can be bailed out with public money if a private company mismanages its operation and finances. This is an example of neoliberalism’s hybridity. It is able to make use of the state to meet it its desired ends.

Peck’s critique has a degree of current relevance to it. It can be applied to some very contemporary political issues in the UK. For instance, in the increasing roll-back of welfare services, the coalition government is promoting its vision of the Big Society – that is, the expectation and encouragement of community groups and NGOs to fulfill social service provisions typically provided by the state. The higher education system is currently being reformed under market principles – tuition fees will be trebled and state funded teaching budgets will be slashed. Yet, even before these reforms have been fully implemented, the Higher Education Funding Council for England has emerged as a lead regulator in order to ensure student category targets are still met. And while the government will shy away from a formal privitisation of the NHS the Health and Social Care Bill currently waiting to be passed will further twist the NHS into a profit making institution for private health providers.

Perhaps it’s worth returning to the limitations of the neoliberal critique mentioned at the opening of this post. During one of his seminars, Peck mentioned an interview he had with a Wall Street Journal journalist. They were asking Peck about his criticisms of Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Cities’ programme, which advocates the creative industries as a response to cities struggling with post-industrialisation. Peck’s criticisms of this movement are both sweeping and incisive. When the journalist asked Peck for an alternative to help boost local economies, Peck suggested “raise the minimum wage”. He said the phone went silent. Such suggestions, alternative to market oriented reform, still remain toxic in mainstream politics and media. If anything, the story is testament, not only to the difficulties in using the term neoliberalism, but also in voicing criticisms of it.

Live, Relax, Work (When Machines Go Silent)

This is a post from a few months back that I reworked and updated for the Nyx, A Noctournal website. A friend asked me if there had been any changes to the Whitworth Street development between the two postings. There hasn’t – in fact, the only change is that the unemployment figures have risen.

Advertising slogans such as these become ironic to young people as unemployment rises

Construction cranes once meant success. On a city skyline they were symbols of regeneration, redevelopment and investment. Then the recession hit. Many building projects went bust and some, like the Origin development on Whitworth Street in Manchester, not only lacked the finance to finish the project, but also lacked the money to remove the cranes from the building site. For three years the towering construction cranes stood silently in the sky. They were reminders that work had ceased. They became symbols of the recession.

While walking along Whitworth Street not too long ago, I noticed that the cranes had finally gone. However, the protective hoardings with their promotional advertising still remain. These advertisements have also become unintentional reminders of the recession. Under slogans such as ‘Efficient, Effortless & Individual’, ‘30-Something, Desirable & Knows it’, they depict the lifestyle hype of the pre-recession world. Now they act as stark reminders of lost aspiration. In his Society of Spectacle Guy Debord wrote that capitalism portrays itself as young, as youth characterises its dynamism. [1] The images of relationally and professionally aggressive young people on the hoardings along the abandoned development seem to act this out in the most obvious fashion. But there is a bitter irony here. This portrayal of youth is ‘by no means proper to people who are young’ [2] – the lost aspiration symbolized by this out-of-date advertising reflects the loss of opportunities available for young people. The slogan, ‘Live, Relax, Work’, on the hoardings takes on new and twisted meaning as unemployment reaches 2.68 million with young people hardest hit. [3] The cranes have gone, but the advertising remains. What once may have been fashionable, now seems embarrassingly out of place.

Notes:

(1) Guy Debord (1967) The Society of Spectacle, §62

(2) Ibid.

(3) ‘Unemployment Rises to 2.68 Million’, The Guardian, 18 January, 2012.

Ian Duncan Smith vs The Bishops

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Work and Pensions Secretary Ian Duncan Smith took aim at Church of England Bishops sitting in the House of Lords. It was in relation to social benefit provision. Duncan Smith’s proposed benefit cap is currently being debated in the House of Lords with the Bishops spear-heading its opposition. His attack is based on the argument that the Bishops have failed to recognise the plight of ‘ordinary’ people whose taxes, he argues, fund the benefit payouts given to others.

He is essentially deploying Victorian rhetoric – the old division between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. It’s a useful, if saddening, political tactic as it creates division amongst the sections of society bearing the brunt of austerity measures following the financial crisis. The logic of the deserving and undeserving distinction implies that if you’re wealthy, you deserve to be and if you’re poor its because you’re lazy and workshy. The Sunday Times sides with Ian Duncan Smith and later articles highlighting tax avoidance by wealthy property owners across the country are left unconnected to the front page issue, although they should be.

The Bishops, whose intention to block or seriously amend the benefit cap could lead to its ultimate defeat, are unable to support the politically motivated social divisions advanced by Duncan Smith. From a theo-ethical perspective (in this case a specifically Christian perspective) there can be no distinction between the deserving and undeserving. All are equally deserving or vice versa.

This all raises other thorny issues surrounding the role and position of Bishops in the House of Lords. There are both historic and contemporary arguments against their position. They are essentially unelected law makers who hold their seats solely on account of their high position within the state church. Yet, this said, they currently seem to be some of the most vociferous voices against government policy which leads to the strange question of why it takes Church of England Bishops to articulate critiques that the Labour party should be advocating. The whole thing exposes the flaccid state of opposition in parliament today. It also reveals something about the role of the church. It was long ago stripped of any moral or social authority and Žižek’s argument seems to ring true: contemporary religion (ie, Christianity) is reduced to being either therapeutic or critical.[1]

[1] Žižek, S. (2003) The Puppet and the Dwarf. London: MIT Press.

Portrait of a Summer Camp Preacher

In Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man Father Arnall uses a thorough dogma to instill a deep sense of dread into a young Stephen and his schoolmates. [1] Like Joyce’s priest, the preachers I sometimes encountered at summer camp and church youth events could be puzzling, disturbing and formative – if not in the intended way. Unlike Father Arnall, these evangelicals were rather undogmatic – in the sense that any theology was thin on the ground. Rather, they could be better characterised as moralistic ranters. There were two types – the professional speaker and the layman. The latter was typically appreciative, approachable and an otherwise normal person until given a microphone, a platform and a contained audience. Both types would become hot, bothered, angry and slightly unhinged when addressing their target. I remember, vividly, these preachers railing against things as diverse as the corrupting lyrics of Kurt Cobain, the perils of playing Dungeons and Dragons and the evils of sex. A middle-aged man ranting about sex to an audience of teenagers is, at best, an odd sight.

As suspicious as I am in regards to psychoanalysis, it does provide some tools for understanding this behaviour. The most obvious account is that a preacher of this sort simply expresses his own, repressed, desire. This was certainly the case with former George W. Bush advisor and leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard. His comments to camera and audience in the excellent, if disturbing, documentary Jesus Camp were testament to this. [2] But it is often more nuanced and complex than this. Slavoj Žižek’s account of Lacan’s jouissance is useful here. Jouissance, according to Lacan is both enjoyment and the prevention of enjoyment. [3] In view of this Žižek writes ‘every renunciation of enjoyment generates an enjoyment in renunciation, every obstacle to desire generates a desire for an obstacle’. [4] With this we can make some sense of the manic summer camp preacher. The given preacher, we can safely assume, did not secretly enjoy Dungeons and Dragons. The firebrand rants were not a coded admission that he organised illicit sessions of the game. Rather, it was clear that he absolutely enjoyed the act of prohibiting the game and preventing others, especially an easy manipulated young audience, from playing it or possibly enjoying it. The desire was in the prohibition, rather than the act itself.

I don’t think I’m saying anything new or particularly insightful here. It’s pretty obvious. If anything, it provides an opportunity to recommend the excellent blog: Authentegrity. [5] My cousin (and friend) recently ‘came out’ (for want of a better word, as he says). This was after years spent in a particularly conservative evangelical church. His blog is an honest, reflective and quite frank account of faith and sexuality. I’m sure it will become an important tool for those in a similar situation. His blog is not directly related to my comments above, but it did act as a sort of trigger for them.

Notes

[1] Joyce, J. (1916) A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. New York: BW Huebsch.
[2] Jesus Camp (2006). USA: Loki Films.
[3] Lacan, J. (1992) The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960) (Dennis Porter, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
[4]Žižek, S. The Monstrosity of Christ, p. 245.
[5] http://authentegrity.wordpress.com/