In the light of 60’s optimism Sartre had seen the destiny of the colonised, in effect the parents of the mufflered faces who walk by, as the bearers of a new Modernity which the European tainted by colonial inheritance could never envisage.
… the undocumented created an architecture of a shadow society whose political form is unaddressed. It is described by words like Township, Settlement, Slum, but again like camp, each of those words presents us with shortcomings.
On a wet windy November day in Bedfordshire, outside the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre, Judith an ex-detainee is on the mobile sound system: My sisters on the inside, On the 8th August I was on the inside and you were on the outside.
Anti-psychiatry drove at the foundations of both institutions – the family and the asylum. But in the process the asylum in its idea form, providing caring sanctuary from violence, inner and outer, has waned dangerously in the collective imagination.
Here labour (of the artist) exists in the knowledge that it is transient, it serves the purpose of the time. A wageless labour that may be redeemed as labour if frozen by Capital as Art. Then it can stay – for as long as it wants.
Johnny Cash’s song is about how he makes his own dream Cadillac by smuggling out all the parts from the factory over twenty years. It’s essentially about stealing from work but that’s not how it’s meant to be understood.
