Indeed, a number of people have offered up the opinion that the riots have merely damaged a few items of property, and that this is not very important. All that’s happened, they say, is that a few insurance premiums have gone up and a few middle class people have got worried about their house prices. I suppose these people have never been burgled, since they don’t understand that this kind of thing is about more than just losing a few gadgets that can readily be replaced. I also assume they haven’t seen any footage showing families with young children literally burned out of their flats and made homeless. I guess they imagine everyone is insured for everything, which they’re not. To claim that these are victimless crimes, or that they are “not really violent”, is simply a denial of the obvious.

Yet, at least as of yesterday, there remained a few on the left who seemed to feel as if this was the beginning of their revolution, and that somehow these events marked a step towards the downfall of capitalism. Yet, just as Marx predicted, the lumpenproletariat are rather obviously repeating the ideological formations under which they live by going shopping for trainers and tellies. Well, if you think Supermarket Sweep is your revolution, put your best hat on and get out there. The truth is that all crime — insider trading, rape, parking on a double yellow, racial abuse — is civil disobedience by its very nature. That doesn’t make it laudable even if you don’t like the society you live in, and it doesn’t make it revolutionary either.

As everyone now knows, the spark was a small, peaceful protest about the police-involved shooting of Mark Duggan two days earlier. Relationships between the police and the non-white urban poor in Britain have been bad since time out of mind, and remain so today, as Alex Wheatle and Nina Power remind us. The raised prominence of Mark Duggan’s death might lead to a more transparent inquiry than would otherwise have happened, and could conceivably lead to structural changes. That would be a Good Thing but right now there’s no reason to believe the opposite won’t happen. Linking the riots with the long and difficult work of campaigners dedicated to police reform dignifies the former without acknowledging the harm they could do to the latter.

Blogger Laurie Penny quotes a participant telling a reporter that the disorder has achieved something because the media are now focussing on problems that peaceful protest has failed to raise to prominence. If nothing else I suppose that serves to remind us of the importance everyone seems to attach to the attention economy these days. The fact is that media coverage doesn’t change lives: laws do. NBC does not have the power to pass laws and its influence on lawmakers is hard to predict or control. Again, this is a failure to have any kind of strategy of resistance or any real idea about how the world works.

I suspect (but do not know, and nor at the time of writing do you) that the people on the streets are overwhelmingly those who have been hurt by recent austerity measures, and it seems unlikely that this is a coincidence. As just one concrete example, many of those I saw out around Lewisham yesterday looked about the same age as the teenagers I taught in an FE college a couple of years ago. In those days those kids were on the EMA, which the government has scrapped in favour of a bursary system that colleges award to whomever they choose, and that is much smaller in total value. In some cases the EMA — a tiny sum — was an important part of the household income. Those families are now poorer and those young people have had a source of self-respect taken away from them. They can’t get jobs instead because there aren’t enough jobs, and certainly not enough they’d be qualified to do. And all the while our popular culture tells them their worth is measured by how much money they have. It’d be surprising if they didn’t act out, perhaps by acquiring the chief goods they feel society has made inaccessible to them: consumption and freedom, the latter expressed through a kind of joyous destruction. Some people seem to think that proposing an explanation like this counts as excusing what was done. A little reflection makes it obvious that it doesn’t.

So what will be the outcome of this outburst? I’m sure the government would be delighted to use it as a way to show they’re tough on crime and to reassure their middle-class core voters that they’re safe in their homes. If this e-petition is successful (and it’s a long way off that) we could see a parliamentary debate on the reintroduction of capital punishment that may very well provide a background against which extended police powers could be made to appear liberal by comparison. That would be a product of the attention economy, too, being the work of right-wing blogger Paul Staines, but see what a difference it can make when you have a plan?

[EDIT: Fixed a gaff about the petition. Thanks to Ben Henley for the correction (via FB).]

The argument to which this gobbet of text is supposed to contribute goes like this. Since 1968 (yes, he gives the date) academics in the Humanities have fallen under the spell of funny Continental philosophy and started writing weird stuff nobody (i.e. not Nick Cohen) can understand. Because it looks complicated, successive governments have continued to pour money into this industry, not realising that the more obscure it got the easier it was for charlatans to write utter drivel, Sokal-style, and get away with it. As the “work” they were doing became ever more content-free and obsessed with stylistic density it also became completely detached from public interest or debate. Hence the fact that nobody is out on the street protesting about the proposed withdrawal of funds. Oh wait.

Let’s put a pin in a few of the claims and assumptions we hear, over and over again, when this little cliché gets wheeled out.

1. No writing, of any sort, can be judged good or bad simply by counting the number of people who have read it or the percentage of those who claim to have understood it; almost all writing is accessible to some people and not to others. Maybe Nick Cohen really doesn’t have the word “hegemony” in his vocabulary or doesn’t know who Althusser was; in that case it would be hardly surprising that he finds Butler’s quote hard going. One could certainly impart in fifteen minutes all the information needed to understand it to a roomful of intelligent and interested people.

2. It’s true that there’s something special about the difficulty of the kind of work that was influenced by Derrida and Lacan and that began to appear in English in the 1970s: not that it’s more difficult than anything else (it isn’t) but that its difficulty has an unusual cause. But it isn’t what people like Cohen think, which is to say a veil of obscurity behind which only banal ideas are hidden. I’m afraid that to see why it’s special takes a bit more than just defining a few technical terms. It may be that after going through that process you think this work is not worthwhile. It may also be that you notice that a great number of people working in this tradition go to enormous lengths to explain as clearly as they can what they’re up to. But:

3. The Humanities do not mostly produce torrents of articles and books of Derridean density. Yes, you can cherry-pick stuff that’s ridiculous, of course, but a great deal of research in the Humanities isn’t even in this tradition. Pop into a Philosophy department some time if you don’t believe me.

4. A beef about the kind of research that’s done at universities can’t be used to justify a cut to funding for teaching done there. The two things are slightly connected, more so at postgraduate levels, but they are most certainly not the same thing.

5. You can’t reduce questions about whether research X should be funded to whether research X would make a best-selling non-fiction title. If we could then we could simply get rid of all research funding immediately and leave it to the publishers to sort out. And while we’re at it, publishing popular books and appearing on the radio and at events like Big Ideas are good for an academic career, not bad for it as Cohen claims. The trouble is finding the time for these things, on which see below.

6. The introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise in 1986 significantly skewed university work in favour of quantity of publication. Hence even projects that don’t yield much of value tend to spin off a few minor publications simply to satisfy departmental quotas and beef up the author’s CV. Yes, this means low-quality stuff gets published, and yes if you’re going to publish something that’s not very interesting you’re going to have to stuff it full of citations, jargon and so on to make it look the part. A Thatcherite reform created a problem that a neo-Thatcherite administration is now going to solve. This would be the time to refer back to Judith Butler’s comment about hegemony and stuff, should you have it in you to read it again.

People who know me know I’m no fan of the current system of Higher Education, and I’ve had times when I’ve been so frustrated with it that I, too, have thought a scorched-earth policy might not hurt. Even if you’re not with me on that, there are obviously serious questions to be asked about how and why the Humanities are funded, just as there are in relation to the arts. Cohen’s right when he says the Humanities are really feeling the lack of a full-throated defence, a coherent and intelligible account of why it’s worth spending money training people to read Old Norse and study the semiotics of advertising, whether that money ultimately comes from the state or elsewhere. Until we get past comparing scars from the Theory Wars, though, that’s unlikely to transpire.

The Silk Mill

The car park at the back of Lewisham Tesco can be reached by Silk Mill Path, its name a clue that a mill had previously stood close to the site. The same theme has been picked up by the new Silkworks development of apartments close by, whose marketing material suggests it is positioning itself as a luxury development. But silk, as it turns out, wasn’t the first thing to be milled on this site.

The mill was made possible by the existence of the River Ravensbourne, one of four waterways that flow through this part of South-East London, eventually converging at Deptford Creek where they meet the Thames. In the middle ages corn mills lined the river; there are said to have been eleven in the area by the time of Domesday, but by Chaucer‘s time steel was being produced here. This is an early example of the industrial revolution that was to gradually transform the English economy between the late fourteenth century and the Civil War.

It represented a gradual erosion of the dominance of farming which had been, for centuries, the only way to amass wealth. Indeed, the feudal system was predicated on the idea that wealth and land were more or less synonymous, but steadly the extractive, chemical and manufacturing industries became more advanced and demand grew for their products, both domestically and for export. Lewisham’s corn mill gave way to the demand for steel.

As the nearby Armoury Road reminds us, Lewisham steel was primarily used to make armour and other military equipment. We might imagine Chaucer’s knight equipped by just such a place. Yet the irony is that Chaucer’s knight represented a nostalgic image of a feudal world that was already beginning to show signs of stress. By Tudor times, capitalism was already clearly encroaching on the old order; it threatened the whole social heirarchy, for the power lords held over their vassals was entirely due to the unique capacity of land to generate wealth. The enclosures of the seventeenth century, which led to so much hardship and created such strong antipathy towards landlords, were the final stage of Renaissance industrialisation. They represented, in my view, the birth of the English Baroque.

In 1530 Henry VIII acquired the armoury along with the manorial land in which it stood, and it became part of the Royal Armoury at Greenwich, grinding steel to produce fine armour for the wealthy and powerful. This was a typical gesture of the period, an attempt to subsume these industries into the existing social order. Like the granting of monopolies, it temporarily brought the wealth they generated into the existing power-structure that Feudalism had produced. It was not, ultimately, to be successful.

Pastoral

This industrialisation, like the more famous one of the late eighteenth century, produced a deep anxiety. The medieval world-view was rigidly heirarchical, a Dantean cosmos of crystal spheres characterised by a divinely ordained, cyclic repetition. The turning-over of parts of the land to industry and the growing roles of the cities (especially London) were accompanied by growing economic power among the lesser gentry. All of this threatened to overturn the picture England had of itself.

The Tudor period has its own form of Romanticism to combat these worrying changes. With the English Renaissance of the early sixteenth century came a renewed study of the Latin classics, including Virgil. John Rocque’s 1745 map of the area shows a Free School close by, but grammar schools — which taught Latin grammar alongside literature, mathematics and theology — had been flourishing since the early reign of Henry VIII. At the time the earliest known examples of pastoral were Virgil’s Eclogues, which told of shepherds playing music and falling in love in an Arcadian paradise.

The renaissance of the pastoral genre may have begun with scholarly imitations of Virgil but it soon took on a life of its own in English literary culture. It spoke to the anxiety of the time, the sense that the middle ages (as we now call them) had slipped away, and with them a coherent world had also been lost to the chaos and terror of the Reformation and the especially tyrannical reigns of Henry and his daughter Mary.

The most famous examples appeared in the reign of Elizabeth: the most celebrated are perhaps Spenser‘s The Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queene, but the genre appears in Sydney and Shakespeare as well as countless less well-known poets. These are the sixteenth century’s equivalents of Blake, Wordsworth and Keats: they resist the contemporary by inventing a mythic, rural past, just lost, to which they can return in literature.

The Ravensbourne between Lewisham and Deptford

The Ravensbourne, half of whose course we walked and attempted to photograph yesterday, is in part a contemporary pastoral. Largely man-made, its course has been changed in the past century and it is almost entirely hemmed in by concrete. One exception is the section just below Armoury Mill, where the concrete has been replaced by low wooden supports holding the banks in place. The effect is more “natural”, like the landscape gardens of the early Romantic era. It’s a simulacrum of a natural environment — indeed, of a place of rural beauty.

In many ways this is no different from the other strips of suburban parkland that litter London outside Zone 1. As you walk north you pass a nice playground, a duckpond turned bright green with algae, a flower garden and a fountain spouting stagnant, yellowish water. It’s an odd, postmodern pastiche of several conflicting historical styles. The river has been formed into serpentines recalling Regent’s Park and its banks planted with studied naturalness; just a step away one can find formal gardens, tiny Versailles like icons of the Baroque. Other fixtures — railings, climbing frames — are self-consciously postmodern, brightly-coloured and formally simplistic. The building of the Stephen Lawrence Trust is an angular, sheared reincarnation of Le Corbusier clad in punched steel.

Some areas of our cities look like this because centuries of history have formed them. The Baroque, Romantic and contemporary rub together because they arrived at different times. This section of the Ravensbourne, despite its long history of human occupancy, is a recent invention. As industry became heavier in the late eighteenth century it moved downriver to Deptford Creek; water mills were no longer adequate for its needs. It was turned over to leisure only much later, in the post-war period. The railways had brought a population boom to the area and the Blitz had erased the traces of the rural in the area, and a sentimental pastoralism had tried to recreate something of them here.

St Paul’s and St Alfege’s

At Deptford itself the river runs through industrial estates to which we were unable to gain access; walkers tracing the river are forced away from it for a while. We passed through Deptford High Street to St Paul’s church, built by Thomas Archer, the architect of St John’s, Smith Square. Its interior bears a strong resemblance to the contemporary St Martin’s In The Fields by Gibbs, although on a rather more muted scale. It was one of the famous Queen Anne Churches.

This is English high Baroque, the exterior full of swooping curves and multiple levels, oddly-shaped balusters and clusters of classical ornament that would have made a Tudor schoolman shudder. Inside it is, like St Martin’s, tranquil; clear windows and white stone make it airy and are offset by dark wood. Corinthian columns carved in wood and Portland stone wryly echo one another.

Later in the walk we visited Hawksmoor‘s only South London church, St Alfege’s, built on a medieval site and another commissioned as part of the Fifty New Churches project. Thomas Tallis is buried beneath it.

Deptford Creek

When we pick up the Ravensbourne on the north side of Deptford we are in a very different space. The Ravensbourne, Pool and the Quaggy have converged onto the creek, which is suddenly a working river. The landscape is uncompromisingly industrial, as it has been since at least the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII created one of the largest towns in England by establishing the Royal Dockyards there.

The area offers a sharp contrast to the equivalent wharves on the north side of the river. There gentrification and redevelopment have turned the area into a kind of live-in theme park of the industrial revolution. This is a different, perhaps a new kind of pastoral, a fantasy of an earlier, simpler world of high industrial capitalism. It’s the world of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a world dominated by hardware rather than software, the actual as opposed to the virtual.

Here in Deptford we might believe, smugly, we are cutting through that fantasy to a gritty reality. But here, too, we are authenticity tourists. The rusting iron hulks and oily water make us feel as if we’re in touch with a more solid reality. In truth, of course, we’re engaging in a fantasy. The Docklands Light Railway, which also follows the river, hoves back into view again. Its chief purpose is to transport workers from the suburbs to Canary Wharf, reminding us that we live in the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth.

Soon we come to the point at which the creek empties into the Thames. The narrow, riverine view we’ve had for the whole walk opens up into a huge, grey vista.

Lewisham to Catford Bridge

We walked the lower half of the Ravensbourne out of order. We started at Lewisham, walked up to the Thames and crossed to Greenwich for lunch at the excellent Greenwich Union pub. We then took the DLR back to Lewisham and walked south along the Ravensbourne to Catford Bridge station.

This second leg of the walk passes mainly through municipal parkland, and the same observations apply as downstream of Lewisham. It begins at a bridge on which is based Adhesive Specialities Limited; London has few art deco buildings and none, to my knowledge, as ugly as this one. In Ladywell Fields a completely artificial stream has been cut from the Ravensbourne in a ludicrously sinuous route and miniature hillocks have been mounded up around it in a kind of exaggerated parody of Capability Brown. The river is hemmed in by raw concrete near the railway stations, giving it a brutalist quality.

Along the walk we did our best to photograph every section of the river that’s visible from publicly-accessible places. The pictures are available on Flickr in the sets Ravensbourne north of Lewisham and Ravensbourne from Catford Bridge to Lewisham. We hope to walk the upper half from the source in Keston to where we left off at Catford at a future date.