 |
| Middleport Pottery V McGarvey cc-by |
It's been a couple of months since I blogged. I could blame antipathy, procrastination or plain old apathy. If there was a word that could describe something like "antipathstination" - then that could adequately be applied to my condition but the word does not exist so I cannot use it. However, I think I have been in a state of melancholia of place, resulting from the recent political failures, Brexit conservatism and the like.
People will be aware that I have lived in Stoke-on-Trent, The Potteries, most of my life. I was born in Burslem commonly known as the mother town. I have a considerable amount of emotional investment in the area, in particular, its cultural heritage, which has been built on industrial ceramics. However, the material elements, its pots, decaying factories and bottle kilns of heritage have become part of the city's dogma. It could be argued that the pottery industry is artifice, a symbol of an idealised past and the desperate ill-founded hope of future liberation of the challenges of the present. For cities like Stoke, distorted memories of how it was, compared to how it is now, has allowed conservatism to take advantage of a parochialism that was to some extent always present. The City has always been a bit small "c". However, there has been an eradication of social consciousness, as was once evidenced in the city's historic activism, unionism was strong in the area, and this was consequential of the collectivism of the workplace and its daily challenges. Also, the obsolescence of urban youth that was once manifested by northern soul, punk, new wave, the new romantics, goth, two-tone and indie has distressed the City's once rich social fabric. Add to this the loss of community resulting from the catalyst of the workplace, expecting individuals to have the skills to critically analyse social media-driven polemic is a high expectation.
I would argue that the material artifacts of the potteries have been a barrier, to permitting the people of Stoke-on-Trent to critically analyse their past, this includes those indigenous to the city and those that are not. Nostalgia perpetuates conservatism, but who can blame people for clinging on to their material past when they are surrounded by decay and neglect. It could also be challenged that the nostalgic ornamentalism of marketeers is feeding into this hegemony.
Glenn Adamson, curator, writer, and historian, has introduced the phrase "material intelligence", he argues a consequence of consumerism is that people no longer have the knowledge of how items are produced - we have lost our material intelligence. The value of a pot was always less than the quantifying skill that went into its production, this is capitalism, simplistically explained by Marx's concept of the Means of Production, although his dialectic is far more complex. However, at my Stoking Curiosity presentation, I suggested that the term negative equity could be used to describe the diminished value of a pot. Negative equity is when the value of an asset used to secure a loan is less than the outstanding balance on the loan. If a pot's value is comprised of cultural and skills assets, and if the pot is cheaper on Ebay, than its original product price, we have negative equity.
 |
| Johnson, Meakin, Royal Doulton, Portmeirion Pots V McGarvey cc-by |
If we have the material intelligence to calculate the combined value of the cultural and skill assets invested in the production of a pot or anything, we can see that our society is flooded with negative equity objects. What remains to be seen is what the value of those objects will be once the skills and culture completely disappear. Will the objects become invaluable or completely worthless, maybe that will depend on our developed material intelligence, which can be acquired, and those within society that attribute value to material objects, which can be challenged.
 |
| Steelite Cups V McGarvey cc-by |