Beyond Aesthetics: Visibility and Invisibility in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization

Abstract

This special issue on “Crumbling Cultures,” the first to appear on deindustrialization in a labor history journal, confirms the historiographical trend away from displaced industrial workers themselves and the cultural meaning of job loss, to a wider reflection on the cultural consequences and representations of deindustrialization. The subject, here, is the cultural agency or resilience of working-class communities broadly defined. This shifting focus reflects the evolving baseline, as the political heat of the 1980s and 1990s cools and rates of unionization plummet. For the most part, the sense of cultural continuity, or working class persistence, so evident in this issue, is found in places where not much has filled the economic and cultural vacuum. As a result, nobody in this issue speaks to the deindustrialization of large metropolitan cities. There, the actions of the state, and middle-class gentrifiers, are weighed and measured as old mills and factories are demolished or converted into condominiums or art spaces. In effect, deindustrialization and the subsequent postindustrial transformation deliver a one-two punch against working-class neighbourhoods and the old culture of industrialism. The resulting break with the industrial past may therefore be greatest where the outward signs of industrial ruination are least visible. The rise of middle-class ruin-gazing within popular culture and the academy, and the global circulation and commodification of these images and experiences, nonetheless raises important questions about its underlying politics. As historian Jackie Clarke has noted elsewhere, what is rendered visible and invisible in a post-industrial era is highly significant.

Dirty work: cultural iconography and working‐class pride in industrial apprenticeships

“…When industry closed en masse, these iconographies were stripped of value, leaving the communities struggling to find replacements. Industry closure, as many others have examined, was not just a natural economic process but was a moral process of dismantling working‐class pride (Dudley ; High ; Russo and Linkon ). Instead of inheriting an identity that can find value, young men are now inheriting insecurity and a classed identity that is widely devalued (McDowell ; Walkerdine ).…”

Urban trauma in the ruins of industrial culture: Miners’ Welfares of the Nottinghamshire coalfield, UK

“…A dependence on self-description in embodied ruins research has attracted claims of 'ruin-gaze' that trivialises the traumatic experience of industrial ruination (High, 2013;Mah, 2017;Safransky, 2014). While ruins can be variously conceived as sites of experimentation, political critique or ruinlust, the role of industrial ruins in urban trauma makes creative engagements seem somewhat indulgent.…”

Geographies of deindustrialization and the working‐class: Industrial ruination, legacies, and affect

“…We have seen above how “[e]ach site of ruination speaks to the trauma, uncertainty, and tenacity of lived experiences with painful post‐industrial transformations” (Mah, , p. 205). Couched in the political agendas of recovery and representation in deindustrialization literature referenced above, Steven High () dismisses Edensor's approach as “the hipster commodification of misery” (p. 999), incensed by the lack of “desire to inquire into adjoining working‐class neighbourhoods or even to ask what happened there” (High, , p. 146). With industrial ruination being an ongoing process of dispossession, as Mah () articulates, “[t]o treat industrial ruins purely as aesthetic objects is to ignore the social relations invested in them, to romanticize them, and to strip them of their meaning and context” (p. 196).…”

“…The intention to complicate understandings of the emergence of the past has also resulted in the relegation of historical research and knowledges in work on ruins. High (High & Lewis, ) argues this “strips these former industrial sites of their history and their geography just as surely as the departing companies, entrepreneurs, and trophy hunters stripped the sites of their assets” (p. 60; see also High, , ). However, for Edensor (), “ not finding out is part of the methodology of confronting ghosts, it allows the spectral to continue haunting without exorcism” (pp.…”