Why people are unemployed?

Some see the unemployed as lazy, entitled, scroungers who take without putting into the system. This post looks at why people are unemployed, positing some reasons (other that those above) why people might be unemployed.

Francis Alÿs. Turista (1994)

1. Some unemployed people are temporarily between jobs.

People might be made redundant, finish fixed term contracts or face unemployment when their employer ceases trading. According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK unemployment rate is 3.8% (May-July 2019 - the most recent figures at the time of writing). Those who like to scapegoat and demonise the unemployed might be surprised that this figure is so low. Even if 100% of these people found employment tomorrow (and were obliged to take it), the unemployment rate still would not be 0%, as other people would be made redundant /finish fixed term contracts and other employers would creese trading. It is therefore unrealistic to have an unemployment rate of 0%... unless you don't count the short term unemployed. Let us suppose that only 1.2 of the 3.8% currently unemployed fall into this category. That still leaves 2.6% of the population unemployed: why aren't they working?

2. Some unemployed people are working, but are not being paid.

JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter while signing on. Clearly, this was time week spent. Even if you don't like the books or the films, the London School of Economics estimates that the Harry Potter brand is worth £4bn to London's economy. Rowing herself recently dropped off the Forbes billionaire list, with Forbes citing Britain's higher tax rate and Rowling's $150 million charitable donations as the reason. Clearly, Rowling has paid back more than she took out.

But there aren't that many JK Rowling, are there? Maybe not, but if only one in 1,000 authors on the dole become billionaires, they pocket an average of £1 million pounds each. That's not a bad investment, is it? Even if we funded 10,000 authors for the same return, that would be economically viable. This argument focuses exclusively on economic return, but unemployed authors contribute in so many other ways. Some will write good books. Others will go on to work in other fields where knowledge of what is like to graft away as a writer will be useful:
perhaps as teachers or journalists. They also enrich society by their being able to think and live differently to those for whom full time work occupies so much of their time and effort.

Not convinced that there is an army of unemployed writers working to better our society? Fair enough. Their numbers might be fewer that I'd like to imagine. But what about artists? University lecturers in fine art are expected to first gain professional experience before they can teach it. This might be feasible for architects and designers, but most artists (especially at the beginning of their careers) will run at a loss. "The artist's apprenticeship" is a term applied to these early years working to build a reputation with no income other than unemployment benefit. JK Rowling might have become a billionaire in her own lifetime, but her contribution to culture age the UK economy will live on, and is immeasurable. Look at how Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso and others still contribute towards the French economy today. Impressionists emblazon banknotes; tourists flock to see Monet's garden; or where Van Gogh painted "that cafe" abdicate his bedroom; still more tourists pay to visit the Picasso museum in Paris. Now that both Picasso and Van Gogh were immigrants that have become synonymous with France's image as a country of artists.

Some of those 3.8% unemployed will be writers, artists, poets, inventors, scientists, or even future entrepreneurs. It's impossible to tell how many. Let us suppose that they account for another 1.2%. So now we have a remainder of 1.4% of the populating not working, for reasons yet to be ascertained.

3. Some people cannot find work, or hold down a job, because they lack the most basic skills and/or motivation.

It is well-known that many low-skilled jobs (as well as some not so low-skilled jobs) have been replaced by machines and, more recently, robots. Many of the people who would have worked in repetitive and often mundane agricultural and manufacturing jobs can no longer find jobs. Some of them can retrain, of course, but some cannot: they simply lack the communication skills to work in the service industry, or the IT skills to work in many other sectors.

Others, who were more highly skilled workers, have seen their industries diminish. Where they had valued skills, they are now no longer needed. This feeling of being undervalued, coupled with their former pride in their work and a loss of identity (they identified as coal miners, or ship wrights etc) can prove to have devastating consequences, such as depression. It can be difficult to motivate yourself to apply for a job in a call centre, or McDonald's when you previously had a purpose building warships, for example. Although many people seem to have little sympathy and feel that such unemployed people should stop feeling sorry for themselves and take any job on offer, the psychological effects cannot be so simply dismissed - especially with older workers who find it harder to retain and feel that they may never work again.

We are still feeling the effects of de-industrialisation. Some of those who lost their jobs, their professions, in the 1980s really did never work again. This must have had some effect on their children, who will have internalised their parents' bitterness and this will have doubled down in the cases when they too found it hard to find work.

Could this category account for the remaining 1.4%? After all, it's not a huge percentage. 

There are others, it's true, who are unemployed for less relatable reasons. There are criminals, benefit cheats, the lazy, the entitled and the scroungers. But having read the case above, what percentage of the 3.8% do you really think they account for? 

Lacan's Gaze: A Summary

To contribute to this post, or challenge malaised's summary, please leave a comment. 

How can an object gaze back at a subject? Clearly it cannot, since it has no eyes. Therefore, I propose two hypotheses that might help understand Lacan's theory. Firstly, since Lacan was a psychoanalyst, we might consider that the perceived Gaze emanating from the object is in fact coming from with: from our unconscious. Secondly, we might do well to recognise that Lacan's doctoral thesis was about paranoia – once more the Gaze (if it exists at all) might be in our own head.

Lacan reworked Freud's concept of the mirror phase, where a child first recognises itself in its reflected self or in another child. According to Freud's theory, this is an important developmental stage where the child begins to understand the boundary between itself and the outside world.

According to Lacan, the mirror stage is followed by a transition from the 'Real' to the 'Imaginary'. These terms can be likened to Freud's Id and Ego respectively. During the imaginary/Ego stage the infant still believes that it is attached to its mother. It is only when it surpasses this stage and enters the 'symbolic order' (Freud's super Ego) that it represses the imaginary stage and recognises difference.

It therefore seems a reasonable assumption that his Gaze theory can be understood in terms of his concept of the mirror stage – that is, the mistaken identity of oneself in an object (reflection or another baby, but also perhaps many other objects). This is also reminiscent of Freud's concept of the uncanny – especially the instances involving automatons or dummies.

Lacan and Freud have been criticised by feminists for their patriarchal view regarding gender – especially in their definition of the female through its lack of a phallus. Julia Kristeva has used the Lacanian triad of real/imaginary/symbolic orders to propose a new reading of the psyche that is maternal in nature.

The Gaze in Film and Art

As early as 1975 Laura Mulvey discussed how representations of men and women in film could be analysed using Freudian psychoanalysis. She identified roles in films and the associated pleasures experienced by male viewers. She argued that these pleasures related to the construction of the male psyche, but she also went much further by identifying how this reveals and reinforces patriarchal bias in film... and also in psychoanalytic theory. According to Mulvey, the male viewer identifies with the male protagonist in much the same way that the child identifies itself in the mirror stage. The male viewer takes pleasure in the objectification of the female protagonist (both by the male actor and the male viewer) and feels a sense of power as he overcomes the threat that the female represents: the threat of the lack of a penis, or symbolic castration.

Margaret Olin applies Mulvey's work to art. Olin's contribution is to propose that the male Gaze can be subverted if the sadistic power of the Gaze or the manipulation of imagery is exposed. She proposed that single point perspective heightens the power of the Gaze whereas multiple viewpoints (fragmented perspective) has the opposite effect.

Although all the theorists discussed so far were writing in the 20^th Century, the Gaze that they described presumably existed long before it was identified as such. Not only should we be able to find examples in art history, but, in fact, we can find counter examples. Manet provided a challenge to the male Gaze in paintings such as Olympia (1863) and Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882). In both paintings the Gaze is very much focussed on the woman, who is gazing straight back at us. Both paintings also allude to prostitution.

Umberto Eco on Interpretation and Over-interpretation: A Summary

To add to this article, or to challenge Malaised's account of the text, please leave a comment below. 

Overview

In 1990, Umberto Eco gave a series of three lectures on “Interpretation and Overinterpretation” as part of the Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. (Eco, 1990) The lectures were later reproduced as the first three chapters in an edited book entitled Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992) edited by Stefan Collini. In these lectures, Eco outlines his concerns about over-interpretive bias in contemporary theory. In his introduction, Collini characterises these concerns as “the way some of the leading strands of contemporary critical thought… appear to him to license the reader to produce a limitless, uncheckable flow of ‘readings’”. Eco asks if there are limits to what a text can be made to mean, and whether the author’s intentions should play a part in defining these limits. The limits, he concludes, are not located in either the author’s intention or the reader’s interpretation… but in the text itself. Eco’s lectures are followed by three response chapters by hermeneutic pragmatist Richard Rorty, deconstructionist Jonathan Culler and novelist-critic Christine Brooke-Rose. Eco concludes the book by responding to these challenges.

Interpretation and History

In the first lecture, “Interpretation and history”, Eco seeks to reveal, or even undermine, postmodernism’s relativist foundations. His goal is to find the middle ground between totally relativist and totally dogmatic approaches to interpretation. In his words, between a “radical reader oriented theory of interpretation” where Rorty has noted:

“the critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intention but simply beats the text into a shape that will serve his purpose. He makes the text refer to whatever is relevant to that purpose. He does this by imposing a vocabulary – a grid in Foucault’s terminology – on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (1991, p. 151)

and on the other hand, “finding the original intention of the author”, which may be impossible to discern or irrelevant for the interpretation of the text. (1992, p. 25) Eco locates postmodern theories of interpretation within a history of ancient hermeticism and gnosticism. Both his ancient and postmodern examples consider the study of signs and symbols to be unproductive, as they are unable to reveal truths, but only displace them elsewhere. (1992, p. 35) Eco could be describing Derridian Deconstruction when he notes that:

“The reader must suspect that every line […] conceals another secret meaning; words, instead of saying, hide the untold; the glory of the reader is to discover that texts can say everything, except what the author wanted them to mean”. (1992, p. 39)

Acknowledging that in voicing his concerns he has put forth caricatures of the worst kinds of radical reader oriented theory of interpretation, Eco nonetheless asserts that caricatures can be good portraits. (1992, p. 40) The possibility to reject absurd interpretations or agree on reasonable ones disappears when endless possible meanings become acceptable: this, for Eco characterises “overinterpretation”. The reason for the apparent return (or persistence) of anti-rationalist relativism, however, is not addressed. Nonetheless, he sets up the next two lectures by claiming that somewhere there are criteria for the limits of interpretation and that he intends to find and delineate them.

Overinterpreting Texts

In lecture two, “Overinterpreting texts”, Eco argues that overinterpretation can occur even when there are multiple valid interpretations of the text. For Eco, it is not the reader who produces meanings in the text, but the text which produces the “model reader”. This is what he calls the “intention of the text”. The model reader must take their cues from the text, meaning that not all interpretations are valid and that some will be rejected as preposterous. Eco claims that a text can “foresee a model reader entitled to try infinite conjectures” but that this reader is “only an actor who makes conjectures about the kind of model reader postulated by the text”. (1992, p. 64) Eco proposes “the intention of the text” as a solution to the excesses of interpretation based on an overestimation of the possibilities of similarity and analogy (with an implicit nod in the direction of Foucault).

Between Author and Text

In the third lecture, “Between author and text”, Eco makes the case for a “liminal author”. The author is “liminal” insofar as he exists on the threshold between the intention of the author and the linguistic intention displayed in the text. The author is shaped by his “cultural and linguistic background”; (1992, p. 69) the reader, he tells us, must therefore respect these boundaries.

All three response chapters take up positions contra Eco. Unsurprisingly, Rorty makes a passionate case for interpretation, disputing Eco’s distinction between “using” a text (for irony or parody, for example) and “interpreting” a text. (1992, p. 93) Culler takes on both Eco and Rorty. He suggests that the most extreme over-interpretive moments can be the most significant, as it is in such moments that greater literary and social understandings lie. (1992, p. 110)

Rorty’s challenge forms the main part of Eco’s response. Eco ends by asserting that “Hiroshima was bombed and that Dachau and Buchenwald existed” (Eco et al., 1992, p. 150)– thus implicitly linking over-interpretation to post-truth. He concludes that the author’s intention may, indeed, set limits to the work’s interpretation.

References

Eco, U. (1990). Interpretation and overinterpretation: World, history, texts. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Presented at the The Tanner lectures on human values, Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Eco, U., Brooke-Rose, C., Culler, J., Collini, S., & Rorty, R. (1992). Interpretation and overinterpretation (Paperback; S. Collini, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rorty, R. (1991). Consequences of pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980. Hemel Hempsted: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (or the narcissism of Caractacus Potts)

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a film about a father of two young children whose mother has died. The father, Caractacus Pott, (Dick Van Dyke), is an apparently independently wealthy inventor who doesn't believe in playing by the rules - although he is not rich, he wouldn't consider working for anybody else, and owns property and some land in an unspecified idyllic village, for example).

The Potts children (Jeremy and Jemimah) don't go to school - that would run contra to Pott's fiercely independent streek. He prefers for them to learn through play. He does not homeschool them; rather, they run about unsupervised... left to their own devices.
One day they encounter Truly Scrumptious (the female character who will eventually become their surrogate mother) . Scrumptious is appalled that Potts lets his children runaround unsupervised, and she is fearful for their safety when she nearly runs them over. The father however has no such concerns. He believes that a little danger is no bad thing in a child's upbringing and that they will learn to care for themselves rather than being suffocated by a mollycoddling nanny State.
Scrumptious and Potts become friends and take the children to the beach. From this point on on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a dreamlike fantasy. Scrumptious learns that, far from being the uncaring father that she assumed him to be, Potts is a deeply devoted parent. He has endless patience, time and love for his children. They learn through imaginative play with him. For example, they fantasize about seeing a pirate ship just off the coast. The idyllic world of learning through play quickly becomes darker, when they travel to the land of Vulgaria where a mad ruler, Baron Bomburst, has banned children, so that he alone can have all the toys.
Bomburst employees a sinister Child Catcher who runs around imprisoning children in a cage on the back of his cart.
The film concludes when the Potts family join forces with a toymaker (Benny Hill) to free all the children imprisoned by the Baron and fly home in their magical flying car.
It is noteworthy that the evil child-snatching baron story is Potts' invention. The Child Catcher personifies Potts' fear of losing his children, just as he has lost his wife. The Child Catcher is the darker side of Potts' personality. Far from rescuing his children from the boredom of a life at school, he is like a narcissist who wants to keep his children close, to serve his own ends. Their infantile fascination with his many failed or commercially unviable inventions makes him feel important and provides him with an audience 24/7. As is common with people suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, his children really serve to make him feel more important and to alleviate his fear of being left alone. At the same time, paradoxically, he is far from over-protective. Once the children are out of sight, they are out of mind and only of interest to their father once he has need for their attention.
Therefore, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang can be read as a warning about the potentially self-serving motives behind home schooling.

Steam Punk & Colonial Nostalgia

Asylum Steampunk Festival (Lincoln 2019)

If you walk around the streets of Lincoln during the annual Asylum Steampunk Festival (the largest and longest running steampunk festival in the world), you will hear that the steampunks – easily identifiable by their dress – speak in many different languages. While the appeal of steampunk has certainly broadened its horizons, one cannot help but feel that it is most warmly received by white Europeans, nostalgic for empire. 

Clad in pith helmets, these intrepid explorers lament that America has overtaken the European powers to become the dominant global superpower. Steampunks long for a return to the good old days of European supremacy that were only ever possible because of colonisation. Steampunk as a fantasy where Europeans continue to dominate the world using (new) pre-digital technologies. Outsourcing labour leaves Europeans with a nostalgia for the days when they could actually make and repair things. Nostalgia is evident in the dressing up (not just literature) – people want to have a go at living this alternative reality. 

Dr Arliss Loveless

Critics will rightly point to the reception that steampunk has in the United States. Films such as Eli Roth’s The House With a Clock in its Walls (2018) and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West (1999) are testament to steampunk’s popular appeal in America. Arliss Loveless, the baddie in Wild Wild West, is a racist played by a British actor. The British baddie is, of course, a Hollywood tradition who (potentially) represents the way that contemporary Americans continue to view the old world as a threat. On the surface racism in Wild Wild West (both the British and confederate varieties) is a bad thing to be combated. However, this belies the colonial nostalgia of Wild Wild West and, indeed westerns more generally. Will Smith’s character James West might be black, but the metanarrative here is that, together with the white folk, he will wipe out the indigenous peoples to establish a white European colony. 

It should not be surprising that the Antebellum South is receptive to steampunk ideas. This analogue era was prosperous because of slavery; this was halted by progressive new ideas and technologies. The Antebellum South was an agricultural society, somewhat resistant to the industrial north. As such, it represents a pre-industrial, and therefore pre-steam power, mentality. This seams not to matter in Wild Wild West, where white colonial nostalgia takes precedence over nostalgia for steam power. This illustrates my first point: steampunk’s nostalgia for the analogue is a proxy for its nostalgia for white European supremacy. 

In the United States, this means European ways and traditions supplanting indigenous and non-European customs – the zenith of which is reached in The House with a Clock in its Walls, which depicts a mainly white New England society underpinned by ancient European superstition, magic and folklore. All of the main characters are white, and the architecture speaks not to America (the Art Deco Empire State Building, Diners and so on) but to Britain. In Europe, the difference is that America itself becomes a proxy for that which supplanted European supremacy, adventure and colonial expansion. After all, steampunk is trapped in the Victorian age – the peak of European colonial domination. 

Ideology

Ideology

In Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, ideology has a pejorative sense that denotes "false consciousness". For Hegel, we are all influenced by forces that we cannot understand (ideology): we are "instruments of history". This sounds like Marxist historical materialist, but Marx criticised Hegel for what he perceived to be a fatalistic worldview: why try to change the world if we are being controlled by forces that we cannot recognise or understand? (The German Ideology, published posthumously in 1932). Marx's conception of ideology differed to Hegel's in that he believed in human agency to overturn ideology and in that he believed that all idea systems are products of economic structures. 

Today, some thinkers (Richard Rorty) have suggested we're are in a post-ideological age. Žižek argues that the conception of a such a post ideological world is evidence that the dominant ideologies have finally "come into their own."

In medieval times, serfs were told that kings and noblemen had been put there by God and, likewise, they had a place (at the bottom) in the cosmic order. Everybody was told to accept their fate, as it was part of God's plan and that suffering in this world world be rewarded in the next. 

Today, Liberal capitalist democracy might be seen as post ideological, only because it convinces us that it is the only viable, natural order. Therefore, liberal capitalist democratic ideology influences us psychologically so that we think it is natural: this is a "false consciousness" about the world, how it works, and their place in it, according to Marx.

Žižek takes Marx's conception of ideology and combines it with Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. For Lacan, we do not intact with the world as such, but with linguistic representations of the world. 

In this view, "different ideologies are different representations of our social and imaginary 'reality'"... not the world itself. For example, medieval ideology worked because it represented the social imaginary reality of the time.

If people think coffee is taken black (English, black coffee; Italian, caffè nero) they do not think of it as lacking milk. But if they think of it as "coffee without milk" (e.g. Spanish, café solo or coffee on its own) they do. This demonstrates how language plays a part in ideology. Žižek uses the following joke to explain further:

"A man comes into a restaurant. He sits down at the table and he says, 'Waiter, bring me a cup of coffee without cream.' Five minutes later, the waiter comes back and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, we have no cream. Can it be without milk?'"