We went to a screening last night of Luke Fowler's film,
The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper, and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott (2012): see a clip
here. Luke Fowler was nominated for the Turner Prize this year, but lost out to Elizabeth Price. This was a shame, but good for us because it meant that he could make it back to Glasgow in time for the screening, so there was a great conversation session afterwards, and after that drinks in the pub. The title is a quotation from E. P. Thompson's passionate book,
The Making of the English Working Class (1963), in which Thompson said:
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.
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| workers at a WEA class (image from here) |
This fine, moving and timely assertion of the power and resonance of protest (and the pernicious effects of academic/goal-orientated history) propels the film, which is a grainy, sometimes fuzzy, poignant and thoughtful recognition of Thompson's warm commitment to education as socially situated and socially engaged. The film focuses on Thompson's work with the Workers Education Association in the West Riding between 1948 and 1964. Having spent the afternoon beforehand vexing over our first-year courses, this was acutely touching.
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| A still from Luke Fowler's short film, Anna (2010). Image from here |
There was so much in this, and in the conversations we had afterwards with Luke and with those, such as
Tom Steele, who have taught us so much about this movement -- together with those who had also taught for the WEA or, like me and my grandparents before me, have benefitted from adult education evening classes. It can only be painful to talk about this in our current climate that sees such classes and provision as ripe for vicious financial cuts. But perhaps more distressing was its illustration-by-implication of the desperate impoverishing of the ideological and philosophical purposes of education that now dominate in the University sector and beyond. The film grows on you as its significance dawns gently, carefully, and subtly that in Thompson's attack on 'University Standards' is the kernel of an attack on the neo-liberal lie of ideological neutrality that dominates the technocratic University I now find myself working for. The insistence that there are 'neutral' spaces and policies, that commitment is tiresome and immature, that protest is shrill, that to be academic is to be 'tolerant' [of injustice] and that catholicity means 'a little bit of everything and nothing much about anything' turns out to be the thin and bloodless tissue that Thompson excoriates so elegantly and engagingly when he asserts the profound value of lived experience. It was an evening where melancholy and nostalgia were moral forces of opposition, and heartening for it.
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| Van Gogh, sketch of Scheveningen Woman Knitting, 1881 |
But the parts that lit up most for me in all this is the determination to recognise and remember 'lost' causes, and to see in them the refusal to participate in consolidating the power of property owners of all kinds. The hand-loom weavers, the stockingers, the Chartists -- all those records (always written records) and all those stitches and woven fabrics that add up to the traces of labour in production, of experience and debate in history, and ultimately the principle of resistance -- not as retrograde backwardness, but as a stay against casual cruelties, indifference, and rampant empire building.
And it helps that it all comes back to knitters...
