aesthetic poverty¹

“A salient feature of these riots,” designer Adrian Shaughnessy wrote of the recent disorder in England, “has been the fact that the main target of the attacks has been the shops of the major retail brands of British commercial life.”² Writing on Design Observer’s website, Shaughnessy further noted that most of the outlets which were targeted — sports stores, mobile phone shops — “spend huge amounts of money on branding, on store layout, on window displays, and slick advertising.” The comments on Shaughnessy’s blogpost were telling: many fellow designers saw the post as, at best, spurious, and, at worst, offensive. Shouldn’t the rioters take responsibility for their own behaviour? What role could design possibly play in inciting such “criminal” actions?

The reactionary commentary on the riots has tried to downplay the idea that the rioters were deprived. The rioters had expensive smart phones and wore top-end sportswear — so how could they be poor? While this has been exaggerated — the places where the riots took hold overwhelmingly tended to be areas of poverty and unemployment — it’s true that, so far as we can tell, most of the rioters weren’t homeless or starving. But there are other kinds of destitution than these. As well as “physical” poverty, there is also an aesthetic poverty, evident to anyone who takes a second look at the dismal vistas of England’s hyper-corporatised high streets. While the rich have the material and cultural resources to “unplug” from the dreary banality of these cloned spaces, the poor are far more embedded in them. This embedding in tightly defined media, social and physical environments is in fact a major symptom of aesthetic poverty.

One feature of the moral panic over the riots was the claim that the rioters “destroyed their own communities”. But this presupposes both that the rioters belonged to a “community” and that chain stores could constitute any sort of “community” in any case. (It is true that the rioters did not only target corporate outlets, and I don’t for a moment want to underplay the horrific destruction caused to small businesses and to people’s homes, but it remains the case that most of the destruction and looting was aimed at corporate chains.) Isn’t the point, rather, that the rioters were outside, not a “community”, since, increasingly, no such thing exists under late capitalism, but from the quiet desperation and miserable resignation that characterises many people’s working lives today? The fact that some of the rioters had jobs was supposed to prove that these were not insurrections of the underclass. But many of the jobs that the British media kept citing — one of the rioters, it was trumpeted, was a classroom assistant, another, interestingly, was none other than a graphic designer — were not in themselves indications that the rioters had serious prospects. Such jobs, which are often part-time and short term, are typical of the “precarity” in which increasing numbers of young people — graduates as well as those with few or no qualifications — now find themselves languishing. Those pushing the idea that being a “graphic designer” automatically means that you are inured from poverty or hopelessness only demonstrate how out of touch they are.

The point about mobile phones is also worth pursuing. In what the theorist Jodi Dean has called “communicative capitalism”, a smart phone can no longer be conceived of as a mere “luxury item”. Communicative capitalism is not about the production of material objects, but the ceaseless circulation of messages. The “content” in this culture comes from users themselves; hence paying for an interface into the communicative matrix is more like paying for one’s own tools at work than it is like buying a luxury good. The very distinction between work and non-work, between entertainment and labour, erodes. There are no office hours, no clocking off. In addition to ensuring that we are always connected to the communicative matrix, smartphones are tethering devices which allow employers to call short-term workers into work at a moment’s notice. But the notorious use of social networking sites and BlackBerry messenger to propagate the riots shows that the potential of these machines and these websites is not exhausted by communicative capitalism. It has been said that the riots in London spread once groups who usually engage in territorial turf wars called a truce in order to band together against the authorities. While the riots in England could hardly be said to be a coherent political statement, in this collective use of social media there was perhaps the beginnings of something like class consciousness. And in the destruction of the depressing facades of corporate retail, is it too fanciful to see a rejection of the aesthetic poverty that corporate capitalism imposes on so many of us?