The Philosophy of Homelessness: Barely Being 9781138709737, 9781315200873

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The Philosophy of Homelessness

The Philosophy of Homelessness is borne out of a five-­year ethnographic research project involving being with a group of chronically homeless people in Chester. A small city located in the northwest of the UK, Chester is economically supported by its heritage and the tourism that this attracts. In an obvious sense, the awkwardness of the phrase ‘being with a group of chronically homeless people’ is regrettable. Nevertheless, this unfortunately self-­conscious phrase is significant, with its importance residing in the word and concept of ‘being’. Whilst philosophical understandings of being are often thought about in rather abstract terms, The Philosophy of Homelessness explores the daily experience of chronic homelessness from a perspective that renders its ontological impress in ways that are explicitly felt, often in forms that are overtly political and exclusionary in character, especially in terms of identity and belonging within the city. Themes that emerge from the work, which coalesce around living in the margins of the city and experiencing only the shadow of the right to be, include: the economy of chronic addiction and its impact upon the body; the relationship between chronic homelessness and the law; and chronic homelessness and identity and desire. These themes are explored through a number of thinkers, though predominantly: Nietzsche, Lacan, Bourdieu and Kristeva. This work is likely to be of interest to anyone working in the fields of: criminology; sociology, especially those areas concerned with marginalised groups; and philosophy in its socially and politically engaged forms; as well as to those with an interest in homelessness. Paul Moran is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Children’s Services at the University of Chester, UK. Frances Atherton is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Children’s Services at the University of Chester, UK.

Routledge Advances in Sociology

243 Indigenous Knowledge Production Navigating Humanity within a Western World Marcus Woolombi Waters 244 Time and Temporality in Transitional and Post-­Conflict Societies Edited by Natascha Mueller-­Hirth and Sandra Rios Oyola 245 Practicing Art/Science Experiments in an Emerging Field Edited by Philippe Sormani, Guelfo Carbone and Priska Gisler 246 The Dark Side of Podemos? Carl Schmitt’s Shadow in Progressive Populism Josh Booth and Patrick Baert 247 Intergenerational Family Relations An Evolutionary Social Science Approach Antti O. Tanskanen and Mirkka Danielsbacka 248 Performing Fantasy and Reality in Contemporary Culture Anastasia Seregina 249 The Philosophy of Homelessness Barely Being Paul Moran and Frances Atherton 250 The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse Investigating the Politics of Knowledge and Meaning-­making Edited by Reiner Keller, Anna-­Katharina Hornidge, and Wolf J. Schünemann For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/ SE0511

The Philosophy of Homelessness Barely Being

Paul Moran and Frances Atherton

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Paul Moran and Frances Atherton The right of Paul Moran and Frances Atherton to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-70973-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20087-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

We would like to dedicate this book to all those who are homeless

Contents



List of figures Foreword Acknowledgements



Introduction

1 Eddie and some of his relationships

viii x xii 1 6

2 Blowjob for a can of lager

39

3 Cut away

54

4 Not a proper copper

99

5 Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?

111

6 Sean

130

7 Jenny

145

8 Ella

159



References Index

174 180

Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 3.21 3.22 3.23 3.24 3.25 3.26 3.27 3.28 3.29 3.30 3.31 3.32 3.33

Being homeless Catwalk The share shop Sharing clothes A place to sleep ‘Safe Seats’ The rows in Chester Covered walkways on the rows A Chester subway Surviving the night The prodigal son Inside St Peter’s Church Washing in public toilets Where there’s a will there’s a way The city mission A bag full of pasties At the back of the cathedral Social subjugation Martyr for votes Lovely chattel As complete as men Head of a woman Woman in glasses Black eye Old lady in glasses Two women Wrinkled face Body builder Androgynous Grayson Perry Woman in tie Tattoo Veiled

56 56 58 59 60 61 62 62 63 63 66 68 70 70 72 72 73 76 76 77 77 80 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82

Figures   ix 3.34 3.35 3.36 3.37 3.38 3.39 3.40 3.41

Red scarf Drag Sex worker A natural woman The agency of drugs The day centre Shit life He assaults at once

83 83 83 84 86 87 91 97

Foreword

The Philosophy of Homelessness is, in a number of respects, a ground-­breaking work. It critically analyses the, for the most part, ordinary assumptions by which most of us in the developed world appear to live our daily, ordinary lives. These ordinary assumptions include rights of ownership, and the ability through ownership to fashion one’s own living environment, for example by being able to decorate, add to and modify one’s home, and therefore to express some agency about place, belonging and being; the capacity to engage in an economic system in such a way that allows a distance, an abstraction, a dissociation of the participant, including the participant’s body, from that which is being exchanged; as well as a more general ontology that identifies and establishes the personal, the private, the condition that this – whatever this might be – being mine, again, including one’s own body, and the intimate cradle of one’s self, and thus one’s soul. Our research about homelessness, we suggest, discloses these facets of our contemporary, mundane neoliberal experience as products of an economy of being that forges our beliefs and practices about who and what we are. This critical analysis, amounting to a philosophy, is engendered from the mundane experiences of a community of chronically homeless people; a community that we have known and been part of for over three years. For example: the taken-­for-granted experiences of shopping and belonging are discussed through the prism of heroin dealers and addicts; the process of being a couple and wanting to have a family is understood via a homeless couple’s struggle to live together and have a baby; the attempt to achieve financial independence is discussed by way of enforcers who collect drug debts for organised criminals; and themes of intimacy and privacy are explored through the lives of homeless sex workers. Whilst the daily events of the homeless people that populate this work are arresting enough in themselves, it is their implications, their ontological and political implications, that are most shocking and telling about the brutal and parlous state of contemporary first world society, and the growing number of marginalised and dispossessed that it begets. The appeal of this powerful work therefore extends beyond an ethnographic and sociological analysis of homelessness in urban Britain; it provides a concrete opening for those interested in a radical critique, at the quotidian level of realisation,

Foreword   xi of the current global crisis of neoliberal beliefs and forms of organisation. There are no other books on the market that undertake this work in this intimate, gritty, disturbing and irreverent way. By way of structure it achieves this by foregrounding in each chapter the lives of specific homeless people, which illustrate and develop the themes of being homeless.

Acknowledgements

We would especially like to thank all the homeless people and former homeless people who appear in this book, for their strength, hope and understanding. We would also like to thank the following people who have been influential and supported us in relation to this book’s construction, and the issues with which it deals: Flea, Laura Broome, Tony O., Carl, Anna, Keith, Eira Roche, Dave from Liverpool, David Bowie, Hardcore John, Rockferry Malcolm, William Burroughs, Emma, Claire, John L., Mike T., Ray, Nick Peim, Abi, Kat D., Sam, Jacquie, Freddie, Paul G., Rob and everyone else who works for CATH, Rich, Jo C., Clare, Dave, Mary, Con, Karen, Pauline, Geraldine, Cath, Sarah, Denise, Fiona, Linda, Sue C., Sue H., Sheila, Sue W. and Anthony Bourdain.

Introduction

This work is borne out of a five-­year ethnographic research project that involved being with a group of chronically homeless people in Chester; Chester being a small city, located in the northwest of the UK, that is economically supported by its heritage, and the tourism that this attracts. Whilst the awkwardness of the phrase, ‘being with a group of chronically homeless people’, is regrettable, in another sense this unfortunately self-­conscious phrase is important. Its importance resides in the word and concept of ‘being’. In order to help to understand this importance, it’s useful to think about what, for the purposes of this work, chronically homeless means, and where in particular this homelessness takes place. There are a number, and complex arrangement, of well documented reasons why people become homeless. Research undertaken by charities, government agencies and academics agrees that routes into homelessness tend to be forged by: • •

structural reasons, such as government policy and its local implementation; limited housing; and the economy and its distribution of resources, including the nature of employment markets and personal reasons, such as poverty; education; illness; familial background; the nature of relationships with drugs and alcohol; identity and patterns of behaviour; and the experience of trauma.

It is a moot point as to what extent the two broad categories of structural and personal reasons can be realistically separated; for example, having a turbulent and relatively impoverished familial background coupled with the experience of trauma may well make you more susceptible to the challenges presented by an economy where there are limited prospects of stable employment, which in turn is likely to increase the possibility that you might become homeless. When these conditions are met by a policy environment in which pertinent support services are scarce and accommodation is in some way limited, this possibility escalates. Not only, then, are the reasons why people become homeless various and complex, so that routes out of homelessness can be similarly various and complex; people also experience homelessness in various and sometimes

2   Introduction multiple ways. The most visible way that people experience homelessness is that of rough sleeping. But, as the charity, Crisis (2017), notes, people also experience homelessness in forms that tend to be much less publically conspicuous, such as: ‘sofa surfing, squatting, people living in hostels and unsuitable forms of temporary accommodation, as well as other forms, including people forced to sleep in cars, tents and night shelters’ (Crisis, 2017, p.  4). The same report ‘… shows that at any one time across Britain in 2016, 160,000 households were experiencing [these] worst forms of homelessness’ (Crisis, 2017, p.  4). The group of about ten people on whom this work draws are, or have been, chronically homeless. Chronically homeless, for the purposes of this work, means being homeless, in ways described by Crisis, above, as ‘the worst forms of homelessness’, continuously for three or more years. The predominant form of being homeless, experienced by the individual people who make up this group, is rough sleeping, interspersed with periods of being in temporary accommodation in hostels, and briefer experiences of being in night shelters. Once again, we’d like to draw your attention to, as well as apologise for, the self-­conscious and awkward use of the word and concept of being, which we would now like to explain. Being homeless, as commonly experienced, obviously brings with it a number of conditions that are inseparable from the state of being without somewhere to live, that are generally characterisable as being without. These include, as we describe in the lives of the people who are part of this work: being without money; being without very much clearly definable privacy; being without very many belongings; being without somewhere to shower; being without food; being without shelter; being without certainty; being without warmth; being without somewhere to sleep; being without the capital and power necessary to exercise many choices; being without good health; all and more of which, cumulatively, seem to be expressions of being without belonging, as in due course, we will try to explain. As just mentioned, this is, of course, only an indicative list, but it might help us to think about daily activities, ways of being, that we routinely take for granted; where taking these thing for granted is, in some sense, absolutely necessary; absolutely necessary, because they are realisations of some of the building blocks that constitute and express whom and what we are; they are integral to our way of being, to the enactment of our ontological possibilities, trivial as they may at first appear to be, such as: coming home after work, turning the central heating up, switching on the TV, putting two slices of bread in a toaster, then lying on a sofa in front of yet another episode of Man v. Food. To limit our understanding of this brief, mundane, end of a working day itinerary as simply the domestic product of being able to participate in a contemporary western financial economy is to miss the significance of being and its possibilities as shaped according to the contours of this environment. For example, and very briefly, the short, inconsequential itinerary, as just described, depends, amongst other things, upon the registration of divisions within the experience of the normal day, which the protagonist is – or perhaps even, must be – a part of, such as the division between being at work and being at home; indeed, it is this

Introduction   3 division, registered by arriving home, placing a key in the front door, crossing a threshold, and closing the door behind one, that makes domestic being possible. Further, it is only by participating in, actively being a part of and practising the rituals that are attendant upon this division, that allows the protagonist in the scene to exercise any choice or agency, registered by toasting a couple of slices of bread, lying on a sofa and watching another episode of Man v. Food. Because the real point here is not so much that by having somewhere to live, and being able to be a participant in the various conditions that make this possible, means that you can have perhaps peanut butter on your toast when you get home from work, or a bowl of cereal, or half a pork pie, or the remains of last night’s curry, or nothing at all; but instead, and much more significantly, that this form of choice, this experience of agency, this way of being and its expression of identity, is only open to you as a participant in the economy of being someone who has somewhere to live. If you are outside this economy, if you are homeless, being without somewhere to live, then nothing of this, as a form of choice, as an experience of agency, as a way of being, as an expression of identity, is yours; it cannot be your property, a property of yourself. Please don’t think, though, that if you are homeless that you are without choice; but what these choices are, the circumstances of their availability, what they represent, and how they identify your being, tend, however, to be of a rather different order to the ones that we have just briefly discussed. There is another interesting point, touched upon above, that we would like to draw your attention to, since it is represented symbolically and functionally throughout this work, and characterises the division between being homeless and the cluster of properties of being that coalesce in contradistinction to being homeless, which include: having the right to be, belonging and being accommodated. This may at first seem to be a rather odd contradistinction. But we will try to illustrate this opposition by at first thinking about the last of these phrases, namely, being accommodated. By using the phrase, being accommodated, the intention is not to impute some kind of passive condition, whereby a person, defined by some kind of identity, is grudgingly or even indifferently provided with a place to be by the state as represented by some other body or group of people. Instead, being accommodated is intended to express a continuity between some person who has or some people who have a place to be, and that place itself; which is also to say that there is a continuity of identity between being in a place and that place; which is also to infer the right, or rights, to be, in whatever place is so designated. Much less abstractly, we can recognise this principle in, for example, the workings of and claims about national identity, and their relation to the state and citizenship. Such that, a person’s right to be, their legal right to live, work, claim benefits from, participate in the politics of, have access to the health care – and so on – provided by a state, is likely to depend upon their own identity being continuous with the identity of that state, in other words upon their being a citizen of that state. But whilst the coalescence of having the right to be, belonging and being accommodated, is easy to illustrate at the geopolitical level, for example in contentions that animate debates about the relationship

4   Introduction between the UK and the EU, bearing upon rights to employment, shelter, health care and the like, of people whose identities are deemed to be continuous or otherwise with either of these two political blocks, in contradistinction to being homeless, where such rights, amounting to the right to be, in these areas is denied; the same conditionality of the right to be, admittedly in relative terms, and being without the right to be for homeless people, is observable at the level of the street in the city of Chester. As has already been mentioned, Chester is a small city in the northwest of the UK that is economically supported by its heritage and the tourist industry that this generates. Key historical and cultural areas within the city are populated by businesses, from chains to independent retailers as well as representatives from the service industries. But more than the businesses themselves, and indeed the reason why all of the businesses are established within these places, is the aesthetic of the image of Chester as an historic city that they contribute towards: it is this practice that helps to identify outwardly what Chester is, and in this way promotes and engages the city in its continued economic and cultural viability. This is why businesses set up and continue to exist within these locations within the city; this is why people live in proximity to these same places; it is why others visit Chester; and together, they form the platform for its planned development: outwardly, to a large extent, this is what Chester is. Chester’s existence as such is therefore dependent upon securing and affirming this identity of itself. In a way that is reminiscent of Allen’s (2002) description of the significance of the agora and its role in the production of Athens’ identity, the rights of those who were therefore deemed to belong there by registering their presence, and sanctioning their being, the occupation of key public spaces, and the circulation of sanctioned identities through their occupation of these spaces represents and defines what a city is, and to whom it belongs. The agora, Allen (2002) explains, was one of the clearly defined areas within Athens where Athenian citizens, simply by being there, and having their presence registered by other citizens, had their identity as being such affirmed; and along with that identity, the rights that being a citizen automatically bestowed. Such rights were hardly trivial: they included the right to participate in government; and the right to own property, rather than having to endure the condition of being property; along with privileged access to education and the legal system: in effect, such rights were the political manifestation of the right to be. People who were not citizens, such as slaves, foreigners and women, could be permitted to enter the agora, but only if they had been granted the requisite permission by a member of the citizenry. And legal infractions committed by a citizen were punishable, according to Athenian law, by any such citizen being denied access to the agora, for a period that was commensurate with the nature of the legal trespass. The significance of such a punishment was that a citizen’s presence was, for whatever period, taken out of circulation, so that their exercise of the right to be (there) was suspended. In much the same way, a citizen’s transgression of Athenian law could also be punished by an order that prohibited their name from being mentioned; again, the significance of this punishment being that the presence of such a citizen,

Introduction   5 even as it might be represented by their name, was taken out of the economy of established being, of the right to be. Whilst it would be an exaggeration to claim that access to key historically, culturally and therefore commercially significant areas of Chester, which express and constitute the city’s identity, are contemporaneously policed in precisely the same way that access was regulated by identity and the law to spaces of analogous significance in classical Athens; but the fact that the presence of homeless people in these places, and their right to be there, is consistently contested by agents of the city’s established order – including the local police, the local courts and local businesses – and that homeless people are ejected and confined to being in the city’s limits, is significant and telling. Finally, perhaps we should say a word or two about how this book has been written. Certainly, to my way of thinking, writing is the very last and perhaps the very least significant act in the composition of a text. Prior to a text’s written appearance, if we use this book as an example, comes, but not necessarily in this same order, though certainly over and over again: doing the ethnography, reading, thinking, talking to others, going over the data, wondering about what is happening, changing your mind, worrying, being paid, having no money, sharing ideas, disagreeing, agreeing, and yes, finally, writing. To what extent then anyone can realistically say, I wrote that, claiming very much more than a kind of symbolic ownership, a symbolic authority about it being so, as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and many others have also wondered, is perhaps a rather debatable, uncertain and ultimately political and philosophical point. A point much more to do with the extent to which one can hold a certain regime of power and order in place, a certain rhetoric about belonging, rights, authority, possession, truth and meaning. These are themes about power and knowledge, ownership and the determination of rights that are not disconnected from the conditions of homelessness and belonging that we have recorded in this text. The middle chapters of this book, the cut up section, which in a number of senses, questions the assumed unity and the authority by which belonging, identity and knowledge, are asserted, is the most obvious demonstration of this theme; a theme that wonders about the unity of bodies, the integrity of identity and the conditions that permit the right to be.

1 Eddie and some of his relationships

All of the people that we have been fortunate enough to meet and have come to know during the course of our research, are extremely interesting, unique people, who in many respects confound expectations; despite the fact that in other ways, they also conform to many other depressing statistical expectations that act as indicators of likely chronic homelessness. Indicators such as: personal and family background; experiences of different forms of abuse; and the patterns of behaviour, including illegality, that the chronically homeless people that we have met have been drawn into, and which consequently have marked their lives. Eddie perhaps represents this duality of confounding and confirming these definitive expectations, by way of some of the most remarkable, yet at the same time typically illustrative, episodes of life forged through chronic homelessness that we encountered within the community that we got to know. ‘You haven’t got any burn, have you?’ he used to ask. Burn? This is a term frequently used to refer to tobacco. But in this context, being on the street amongst this community, burn also connotes a wider and more specific set of meanings. It’s not exclusively a term used in prison to refer to tobacco, but it does have a very conscious orientation of tobacco being located in relation to incarceration; especially since all of the people using this term from within this community have been, and for some continue to be, in and out of prison for offences ranging across a spectrum of seriousness and motivations; from, for example, attempted murder, to public order misdemeanours, such as drinking alcohol in public spaces where this activity is prohibited, and very often begging. Moreover, we’re not really talking about a couple of ounces of rolling tobacco, when burn is being referred to, which might quite easily be purchased from any appropriate high street shop. That’s never on the cards; that’s not how burn is acquired. It is perhaps worth briefly outlining why. The very simple and – as it should be – taken-­for-granted activity of walking into a shop and buying some cheap everyday item, first of all requires a series of important conditions to be in place; the most obvious condition being the power to purchase. For the most part, this is a power that the homeless people we know did not possess. The power and then disposition to purchase, say, a few ounces of tobacco, or a pint of milk, or a sausage roll from the Poundbakery, bestows upon the purchaser and the vendor a relationship that simultaneously both

Eddie and some of his relationships   7 distances and makes intimate their respective economic being from their personal being. And this is more than really useful: it instantiates their respective externally symbolic and internally symbolic identities, the integrity of their being, of their internal self and the external world and position by which the self is accommodated; it, the self, being entirely dependent upon this gossamer thin (in some respects illusory) but fundamental division. This, of course granted, might sound at first rather over-­theoretical, over-­philosophically determined, but it’s not; we are actually playing this down: it’s fundamental to maintaining the illusion of who and what we are. Without which, we, in terms of our identities, would be lost. Nor is it, given a few moments reflection, very difficult to appreciate how this ordinarily works. You need, desire, want, then let’s imagine, a few ounces of tobacco, or a pint of milk, or a sausage roll from the Poundbakery, and so step into the appropriate shop, and begin an entirely functional and transitory relationship with the person behind the counter, who is by this means able to facilitate the sale. It is your ability to engage in this entirely functional and transitory relationship with the person behind the counter that secures the sale; it maintains an ontological difference, which establishes the quintessence of your integrity, by marking a separation – in Marxist terms, the necessary alienation – between some notion of your personal identity, so that it is not you that is put on the line in this transaction, you are not exchanging something of yourself, some part of your essence; which, if it goes wrong, will mean risking some principle of your kernel, a sliver, possibly more, of your soul; when all you want is a few ounces of tobacco or a sausage roll from the Poundbakery. And it is in the most quotidian and taken-­ for-granted circumstances, when the inability to maintain this crucially superficial relationship, risks opening a horizon within which your social credibility, awkwardly drifts into the social toilet. Excuse me, would it be possible, you see, I don’t have a £1 to exchange for one of your overly flaky, bland, hot, greasy pastry rolls wrapped around a barely turgid, quivering, fatty, pink-­grey and momentarily comforting seven-­inch tube of sausage ‘meat’; but maybe.…? ‘What?’ the outraged inquisitorial retort from behind the counter cuts off your miserable and entirely ineffective description of what and who you might be, and the predicament that you have found yourself in. ‘Excuse me? Don’t you know how this works? Are you’ – because everyone is a philosopher these days, even, no perhaps especially, if you make your living by working in the Poundbakery: so – are you ontologically retarded or something? Are you asking, actually requesting if you can have a portion, a sliver of my fine industrially produced food product of indeterminate origin? And are you bartering, in an attempt to achieve this sorry state of acquiring part of a sausage roll, bits of  yourself, supplemented with a few inadequate coins, by means of your story, and your, at this moment, very unappealing condition of actually not

8   Eddie and some of his relationships belonging? Moreover, are you making an appeal to something beyond the functionality of my own position here, stripping, in the process, the distance away that distinguishes me from my own superior position in relation to you, as wage-­slave vendor? For some political reasons, of course, as the complex history of alienation, and its descriptions and analyses in the works of thinkers as diverse as Descartes, Novalis, Marx and Lacan demonstrate: it is sometimes strategically essential to claim that identity is continuous with and indeed belongs by fundamental right – since this is how it defines itself – as itself to itself. Though this obviously, to reiterate, is a political act. To claim, by some means or other, that you are in important ways separated from yourself; in the sense of being distinguished from the fruits of your labour, whatever and wherever that might be; so that you are dislocated; has been, and continues to be, the fuel that motivates much of the ideology of identity, in many of its local, national and personal guises. Phrases such as, this land is ours, or, these are my rights as a citizen, or, that is my entitlement as a national subject, or even, they are my people, all indicate a degree of alienation in the sense of the self quite naturally by right dispersed across geography, time, personal relation, consanguinity and population; where this dispersed and differentiated being extends its dominion and power through its politically claimed subjectivity that unites these various areas as different facets of a single (complex) identity. There are, then, a number of positions that are extremely advantageous, which fall naturally from the logic of this very pervasive model of identity that works in relation to conditions of belonging by right (by birthright, by divine right, by right of being born within a domain, by right of familial or any different arbitrary relation, are examples and variants of this ubiquitous theme), and are readily, if not ‘genetically’, assumed as part of the birthright by its various subjects. An example being: well, anything you might own; such as a slave, or a sausage roll. Which means that this relationship between being and owning occurs, potentially, in a very shocking way; so that, whilst you own this slave and sausage roll, as a result of your hard labour, or other form of power, converted into money to better facilitate the purposes of exchange; this slave and this sausage roll are not you, they are your property, so that you have dominion over them – that it is to say, you own the territory, the event horizon, upon which their identity is forged; and it is, therefore, according to this same logic of identity in relation to belonging by right, your own right – which is the same right by which your own identity hangs – that allows you to do what you want with them. (And ‘hangs’ in several senses: in the sense that it is by this device that your identity is secured; and in the sense that this same device is looped around your neck, always ready to strangle your identity into its demise; and continuously, too, in the sense that this condition of your identity is always in this form of it being suspended by this conditionality). Indeed, not to have this right over what you possess would bring into question the fact that it was yours, and that you were by this right who you said you were: this being a nexus around which

Eddie and some of his relationships   9 juridical practice is commonly based as the instrumental realisation of the Symbolic Law (for example, crimes against the person are based upon the same person being the property of and belonging to themselves; which also explains by definition why a crime against the property of a person is so, namely because it is against the law of belonging to a person, as being the point of its property origin). And it is this alienation, of course, of some aspect of some identity of itself from itself, or of oneself from oneself, such as your work from yourself, or your investments from yourself, or your property from yourself; as well as no less abstract manifestations of identity by right, that are more often associated with a kind of revolution, such as yourself from your place of origin, perhaps in terms of class, gender, politics or religion, as well as in other ways. It is this definable ability, to acquire and dispense with, by right, that which we own, but not as ourselves, that is the cornerstone of being able to walk into the Pound­bakery with a pocket containing at least a pound’s worth of change and successfully purchase – not score, like tobacco and burn that’s very different – a nice and greasy seven-­inch sausage roll. And for obvious reasons, it was a cornerstone in a house that Eddie, and the other people that we have come to know, did and do not have. So to return to what used to be one of Eddie’s persistent questions, ‘Have you got any burn, Paul, mate?’ indicates a number of assumptions, and a particular and dislocated context. Dislocated in the sense that: most of the people that we were surrounded by whenever Eddie asked, that is to say the people standing near or passing us by on the street, if they smoked, simply bought their tobacco in one form or another in a shop. In these circumstances, preparing to smoke involves some impersonal variant of exchanging cash for cigarettes. I was always interested and grateful for the fact that Eddie routinely seemed to assume this was not an option that was open to me. Which is where ‘burn’ comes in. ‘Burn’ is, of course, at least hopefully, predominantly tobacco. It’s usually in some sense ‘second hand’, or at least acquired without money. Not having cash for tobacco, but wanting or needing to obtain it, can involve: bartering, by using other goods and services in exchange for tobacco; wheedling, which is very often based on a promissory return of future good deeds, as well as the application of any moral, personal or other form of pressure available to the wheedler; theft of various kinds; but most usually, scavenging and recycling tobacco from the butt ends of other discarded cigarettes, retrieved from the pavement, or filched from ashtrays, or found in bins, or plucked from anywhere else, typically involving a ten-­minute scouring of the streets, especially around tables placed outside cafés, and on the floor of the shelters and on the ground at the bus station. The gathered butt ends are then picked apart, and the shards of any remaining tobacco are collected together and used to roll a new smoke. The reference to and the practice of acquiring and using ‘burn’ is therefore a reference to a practice that is in one sense culturally displaced; that is to say, it originated in prison or in the margins of economic and social being. But in another sense, the practice of acquiring and using ‘burn’ is not clearly culturally displaced, since as the practice exists, it is not the clarity of its existence that is a characteristic of its identity, but instead that it is most frequently un-­seen.

10   Eddie and some of his relationships To be un-­seen is a special term, here, meaning, there but ignored, or obscurely regarded, or even overlooked, but specifically because not to do so would unsettle the behaviours and practices of their more mainstream parallels (in this instance, simply buying and smoking tobacco bought from a shop); wherein the ‘un’ has the effect of cancelling out, or annulling the recording, of that which has otherwise been regarded and ought not to have been. This is because being un-­seen, its ontological status, is principally a characteristic of not belonging. The material illustration of this philosophical point is not very difficult to understand. Ironically, it is clearly illustrated by the practice of acquiring and using ‘burn’: virtually no one does this, no one collects and smokes discarded dog-­ ends, inevitably from those economically and culturally more privileged than yourself; no one, that is, who has not spent some considerable time on the streets, and being very literally outside, un-­accommodated, un-­seen. So I always, then, had mixed emotions, that’s what happened, when Eddie asked me something along the lines of, ‘Have you got any burn, mate?’ What was going on? What was he referring to? True enough, when he, and any of the others I was with, were involved in searching for discarded cigarette ends on pavements, in bins, in ashtrays at empty tables outside cafés and restaurants, I did search with them; but whilst others brought drugs and an unshakable willingness to consume drugs, my more natural recourse, even as an unsolicited contribution to the group, was to buy a packet of cigarettes from the shop. So what, if anything, was going on? Were we becoming confused about who we were, about our different histories, about our respected places of occupation, and where we belonged and lived? What, just in case such a thing was required, was the motivation for this dislocated question that was so often put to me? The overriding and interesting point in all of this, is that all explanations, indeed, all attempts at explanation, are startlingly inadequate; and that they all point, via their inadequacy, to somewhere else; to some place, that is thoroughly beautifully disquieting. Very briefly, this is how it happens. One type of example of explanatory inadequacy would include something along the lines of: ‘He was being accepted into the homeless community, and this was being signalled by the way that every now and then he was enfolded into their discourse through the practices he engaged in with them.’ And another: ‘Through dialogue, and “being open to the other”, the barriers distinguishing the two communities became dissipated and porous, indicating a common human inclusiveness as realised by the adoption of a common terminology, since language bonds.’ And even: What we witness in this example, through Eddie, is a temporary forgetting of identities that previously indicated with respect to each other, alienation; so an amnesia of difference has been facilitated by the patient ethnographic process of extended situational understanding. It does not require much ability to be able to detect that each accounting is in essence a version of the same explanation. One explanation might emphasise a

Eddie and some of his relationships   11 careful listening; another, a self-­reflexive awareness of one’s own position, perspective and prejudices; and yet another, the mutual dismantling of barriers that impede communication. The fact is that for any explanation of this phenomenon, there is no movement away from the liberal humanism of essential identity and difference. Integral to the order to remove barriers to communication is the prior requirement that any protagonists involved re-­establish who they are, and who they are not, together with their associated values, meanings, behaviours and allegiances. This process of knowing, of knowing one’s self, and therefore one’s other, and any barriers that emerge, erected from the practice of knowing, itself depends upon a re-­establishing, and a shoring up, of the differences expressed by the various borders that demarcate the psychological, political and cultural forms of being inhabited by, in this case, those who belong, and those who do not; that is to say those outside, or at least in the margins of who we are, the homeless. And where do we find ourselves? If we are fortunate to belong, then where we find ourselves is on the pragmatically constructed ground of metaphysics, because that is where we attempt to locate and secure our identities. So what does this mean regarding the attempt to explain what was going on when I was being asked for burn? In Lacanian terms, attempts to explain point towards something indicative of the incompleteness of our being, which is forged into being as if whole, as if determined by itself; as if an a priori being true to one’s self, as if the authenticity of our identity was innate and the precondition for our being; as if the contradiction at the heart of any such understanding, involving the unique authenticity of each of our identities being determined alone by themselves; and in so doing, requiring the entire history of the population to have had its identity Fated, and therefore not determined by itself, and not through the practice of the Symbolic Order. As if one simply is or becomes homeless, just as if one simply is or becomes a person who is not homeless and belongs, as if these are a priori properties of being. And indeed, the prospect of being homeless, its dead end of the line status, where there is no actual place to be within the Symbolic Order, realised in this case as being in the city, and more broadly as being in the nation, is so terrible, so demeaning, so wretched an existence in the collective Imaginary of those who do belong, as to be virtually unaccountable. Making the possibility of movement between the two designations, those who belong and have somewhere to live, and those who do not belong and have nowhere to live, or are only barely and temporarily accommodated in the margins of those who belong, seem all the more impossible. Because there is something in addition to, or perhaps even about the facts of the matter, that has led to you being homeless; something else, according to this essentialist perspective, about the fact, say, that you have experienced almost continuous trauma and deprivation since you were born, as a set of circumstances that are statistically likely to propel you towards homelessness; a something else, to do with but beyond the stubborn empirical likeliness of any such context having a near identical impact on any being, not just you; which is precisely that it was not just any person, but was you, and was not me; and – with a brutal twist of the same essentialist logical knife – it is thus you

12   Eddie and some of his relationships who has experienced all of these conditions that have conspired to make you homeless (and not me) because it is you; because you are and have become indistinguishable from these conditions; and because of that, it is not me who is homeless. This essentialist because, in relation to what we might call the facticity of homelessness, saturates our understanding of who and what we are. Its effect is, as already mentioned, a re-­establishing, and a shoring up, an over-­ determination of the differences experienced and expressed through, in this case, the contexts of belonging and not belonging. A very predictable consequence of this over-­determination is that, quite apart from stubborn social facts that describe differences in the lives of homeless people and people who have somewhere to live; relative incompatibilities, such as different patterns of work, leisure, culture and different preoccupations, make it unlikely that, as in the usual course of events, homeless people and people who belong will share, for any sustained period of time, forms of mutual social engagement. But above and beyond the surmountable practical inconveniences of having to manufacture opportunities to meet and socialise, it is very unlikely that unless you have distinct social or professional reasons for approaching homeless people, people who belong tend barely even to acknowledge the presence of homeless people, much less to have any homeless friends. The above and beyond is the contingent result of the symbolic marginalisation of those who do not belong. For example, the appearance of some homeless people can be intimidating. A limited choice of clothing, invariably old, sometimes ragged, often stained, most obviously identifying the wearer as very poor, so marginalised, exiled from the mainstream, and therefore clearly not part of who you are or want to be, antithetical to your Imaginary purpose, and in that respect someone who should have no place in your life and so does not belong. Indeed, if you look a little closer, though this will only be a quick glance, because as you have already acknowledged, this figure of homelessness should have no place in your life, so as you therefore hurry to pass by, you may notice more signs of deprivation: lank hair, grey face, a figure too thin, a figure too fat, very bad teeth, wax coloured yet translucent skin; there is no mistake, this is not you, this should not be part of your world. And whilst you know each defining feature exists through the context by which it was forged, such as the ragged, grey, stained clothing, manufactured from poverty and having to sleep rough; and the mouths of rotten teeth, scraped into being from a diet of nutritional slops and drugs; you also know, that any rational explanation, any attempt to distinguish any human being in its dignity as an inalienable right, from the circumstances that any human being might be born into, will never suffice as being adequate. And this because none of the characteristics of homelessness, such as a chronic addiction, hepatitis, having nowhere to go, enduring mental health issues, can effectively be distinguished from the bodies that these signs of homelessness colonise, inhabit and become. It is this inadequacy, based on the excess of the characteristics and signs of homelessness, manifest as some increments of degradation, that is simply understood as the truth below the surface, that becomes the body of a homeless person,

Eddie and some of his relationships   13 which engenders and describes our feelings of repulsion. And this is why each and every one of these signs of homelessness are representative of a profound dissonance with the Symbolic Order, and the assurances that it represents, that endow these characteristics of homelessness with their meaning. Or, rather, their anti-­meaning, the disinterest of each sign, of each meaningless determination of any stain, or filth, or indication of poverty, in maintaining the reassuring illusion of the sanctity and security of the inclusive nature of the society in which we live. Each developing characteristic of homelessness, such as a cough that will not go away, or the acquisition of hepatitis, or an inability to be properly dry or warm for several days on end, brutally undermines some property or other through which the Symbolic Order of our society and ourselves is sustained within our current socio-­economic context. So that whilst any of these or any other likely features of a chronically homeless person’s appearance might be rationally explained away, so that in effect its understanding is rationalised, understood, and therefore subsumed and managed within the economy of identities forged through its bearable Imaginary limits; in effect, this explanation is never adequate to contain our revulsion. We are, those who belong, complicit in this process. It is not a matter of not wanting to be: choice, here, is a silly, pointless distraction; an irrelevance, that may make you feel better, in its illusionary capacity. Which makes all the more surprising some of what happened to Eddie. But before we encounter Eddie’s uber surprising homeless experience, a little more of what is not surprising about his life is appropriate; starting with the moment that the Symbolic Order came literally crashing through his door, in the form of armed police. In what world, you might be prompted to ask, is it not surprising, but even perhaps likely, that the Symbolic Order breaks your door down in the form of police with guns, rather than, say, facilitates the arrival of a letter, arriving in the conventional way, reminding you of an appointment with your dentist? In what world is it more likely that you will awaken to the sound of splintering wood and visuals of boots and guns, rather than a polite reminder that your cavities need fixing? Well, that’s what we are about to find out. Imagine you have just left prison, a not unknown scenario in this day and age. We’ll discuss how you arrived there shortly, but for the moment, you are being released, which is also not an unusual thing. After all, there are over 27,000 prisoners released from prison in the UK each year. And the accompanying usual procedure, because it is very usual given the figure of 27,000 plus discharges annually, is that, depending on the offence and sentence, some small amount of money is provided to you, from which there is a mutual expectation that it will provide for you to go ‘home’. There are, of course, some other possibilities for support, but mostly these will transpire to mean nothing. The blunt truth is that whatever ‘home’ represents will largely be the determining factor of what happens next. And it is for this reason that it is worth describing the relationship between the nature of the crime for which a person has been sent to prison, and the socio-­economic background, or even better, the habitus, through which that person and their crime have been derived. Whilst the link is not absolute, especially where crimes are idiosyncratically engendered by an individual

14   Eddie and some of his relationships psychological profile, the level and nature of offending is very much a function of who you are because of where you come from. This doesn’t mean that simply if you are poor, then you will likely as not quickly gravitate towards being a drug dealer, but mostly confined to street level; nor that if you are wealthy, then the scandal of ‘insider trading’ or fixing the LIBOR exchange rate will soon enough inevitably configure itself on your moral horizon. But whilst these might appear silly things to say, they do illustrate some obvious but important points about the distribution of criminal activity. Fixing the LIBOR rate and insider trading can be enormously profitable, but access to this portfolio of criminality is very restricted, requiring ordinarily: a fine formal and informal education; specialist training and a series of specialist qualifications; the right introductions; and in order to achieve these decisive skills, a background, if not a culture, that is familiar and at ease with the large-­scale financial practices of management and manipulation. It is more important to remember that amidst the mixture of family, school, university, friends, contacts, colleagues, qualifications and accumulated experience, which is where you will have to be located if you are ever to have a chance of being able to fix the LIBOR rate or take part in insider trading; that something else, that is impossible to dissociate from all of these other often visible and definable aspects of who and what you are, is also, simultaneously, articulating itself during this process, as you. This is the something that is perhaps impossible to define in the same tangible or strictly historical way that you can do so for other aspects of your being, such as those that have been just mentioned; like which university you went to, and who acted as your mentor during your first job in the city. And the reason why is because, unlike the specific period when you might have entered, studied at and graduated from some particular institution, where the dates, the place, and the activity can all be independently referenced and identified, this something is that which will have arisen inside of you. And it is around this point that we should take a little care; because that which will have arisen inside of you is your response, in what at first may seem to be the drearily inevitable Kantian fashion, that we have come to expect, not to the thing itself (such as the unmediated experience of your time at university); but has arisen, we want to suggest, in a sensuous way that departs in emphasis from any standard Kantian technology of yourself; and, moreover, of yourself in that specific situation, that is to say, of your situated self. Why should this be so significant to us? Bourgois and Schonberg (2009) discuss the intimacy with which habitual drug takers come to understand, relate to and experience their own bodies as a result of their drug addiction and their consumption of drugs. There is a significant and growing body of clinical, pharmacological and psychological research that explains the habitual drug taker’s intimacy and knowledge of themselves in terms of an experience that has similar kinds of effects to those we have just expressed interest in, namely the continuity between ourselves (our internality) and the environment within which we find ourselves (that which appears to be external to whom and what we are). And interestingly, and powerfully, this erosion of difference between the inside and the outside has bio-­chemical

Eddie and some of his relationships   15 corollaries, which have been known for some time, long before the revolutionary work of Bourgois and Schonberg (2009). For example, Siegel (1999) notes that for around 150 years it has commonly been observed that the environment within which a drug is habitually taken as well as other associated cues, such as related images, can trigger both the effects of the drug in anticipation of its consumption, experiences of withdrawal from the drug and levels of tolerance, aside from the actual pharmacological effects that are chemically expressed as a result of drug consumption. For people who become habituated to a drug through its chronic consumption, the environment within which this practice routinely occurs becomes continuous with the internal experience of the drug addict in relation to that drug. Siegel notes, that we now have not only empirical data in the form of general observations, detailed psychological analysis and the drug-­ career profiles from chronic addicts confirming this point; but there is also a growing and persuasive body of clinical evidence indicating that when taking a drug ‘… in the context of the usual drug-­administration cues, these CRs [conditional responses caused through the usual drug-­administration cues] attenuate the drug effect and contribute to tolerance’ (Siegel, 1999, p.  1446). What Siegel refers to, as conditional responses, are not vague or even unattributable effects that are simply associated with the general familiarity of the surroundings in which an addict, say, smokes crack or engages with drug paraphernalia. Instead, the drug environment through which the CRs are experienced cause the body to bio-­chemically react in anticipation of whatever drug has customarily been taken within this context. This bio-­chemical reaction, caused by the environment in anticipation of a specific drug, has proven to be persistently highly significant, since it is this reaction (of the inside, as a bio-­chemical reaction inside the body of the addict) provoked by habituation to a specific context (a particular space outside the body of the addict) that precipitates both drug tolerance, as well as withdrawal. By way of illustration, Siegel (2001) describes the case of a man who died as a result of being administered morphine in a different room to the one where, hitherto, he had habitually taken the drug. The addict’s continuity with the environment of his bedroom ordinarily triggered CRs suppressing the drug’s otherwise lethal concentration. Injecting in a different room meant that continuity with the environment during the drug taking practice was not established, and CRs that would ordinarily have been expressed as a decisive tolerance bio-­chemical behaviour in anticipation of the injected morphine was not precipitated: the addict was thus unable to tolerate the chemical impact of the drug, and died. Siegel and Ellsworth (1986) described a case report of a patient suffering with pancreatic cancer, who was receiving about four morphine injections in  his home every day for pain relief. The patient stayed in his bedroom (which was dimly lit and contained apparatus necessary for his care), and received injections in this environment. For some reason, after staying in this bedroom for about a month, the patient left his bed and went to the living room (which was brightly lit and different in many ways from the

16   Eddie and some of his relationships bedroom/sickroom). He was in considerable pain in the living room, and, as it was time for his next scheduled morphine administration, he was administered his usual dose of the drug. The patient quickly displayed signs of opiate overdose (constricted pupils, shallow breathing), and died a few hours later. (Siegel, 2001, p. 510) What is remarkable about this finding, as the above case report demonstrates, is that being, even as it is represented at the bio-­chemical level, occurs by being situated, and that during this process a habituated environment writes itself into the identity of each being that takes place there. The habituated environment written into the body of an addict, and expressed by the CRs that would ordinarily be precipitated through this practice, seem to act as the bio-­chemical enabling factors at this level for situated being to occur; realising what Bourdieu (1977) calls, habitus. When Eddie was released from prison for the third time, he was in his mid twenties. Each successively longer sentence was a response to an escalation of the same offence, namely burglary. It was clearly not what he was good at. It was also clearly not what the incarcerating arm of the criminal and justice system were good at, its principal aim being the deterrence and rehabilitation of offenders rather than a desire to spur them on to ever greater feats of criminal operation and incompetence. Though both parties had proven themselves to be persistent triers, their greater efforts in the same direction appeared to be solidifying and intensifying their relationship, rather than working together towards a mutually edifying divorce. But to regard the respective activities of Eddie and the criminal justice system in this way, is to misunderstand the various practices that brought them up against each other as rational endeavours, as rational in the sense that they can be realistically dissociated and understood as practices disconnected from the contexts within which they are not simply situated, but through which they are forged and positioned; in other words, through respective forms of habitus by which they know themselves and exist. It was not simply that both Eddie and the criminal justice system were hell bent on disregarding the empirical evidence. The empirical evidence was not a matter that could be abstracted, understood and acted on independently by either of the protagonists. Just as individual agents, such as judges, are in practice unable to ignore sentencing policy, and prosecution barristers in practice are not at liberty to ignore pertinent legal arguments in view of the future well-­being of the accused, despite being aware of the mutually miserable consequences; so too Eddie felt obliged, when the occasion seemed appropriate, to practise breaking the law, since his way of life at the time was constructed around the options that were available to the existence of a petty criminal. This is not metaphysics; there was no inevitability about the route that Eddie’s life took through life. His sister, after all, did not fall into crime and homelessness, despite, along with Eddie, being abandoned in the same house by the same parents, whilst they unsuccessfully robbed a local bank, revealing to the police, only a day later, that the two children, both

Eddie and some of his relationships   17 under three, were alone in the family home. Nevertheless, when you become a petty criminal, when you live hand-­to-mouth by the means of petty criminality, associating almost exclusively with other petty criminals, certain outcomes, if not inevitable, may seem to be likely. Where, then, was ‘home’ going to be located for Eddie? ‘Home’ at this point was located in a run-­down holiday town on the North Wales coast; a town that seemed constructed in the opposite direction of normal aesthetic and fun oriented principles, by which one might assume holiday towns become so known. It was a holiday town that seemed to have been built from dilapidation, made up from generous portions of rust, breakages, abandonment, as well as the more personal principle of loss of hope, and the economic principle of depression. Eddie’s ‘home’ within this holiday environment was convenient in the sense of it being readily able to access a familiar habitus of petty crime that was central to the character of the seaside town. Except, as Eddie explains it, there was something different this time. Eddie was met, when he stepped outside of prison in the north of England, by a friend, who was going to drive him back ‘home’ to the town where they lived on the North Wales coast. But after they had travelled only a few miles, without yet reaching the motorway, Eddie asked his friend to pull over and stop, and was then sick. After his friend questioned him about how else, other than being nauseous, Eddie felt, his friend asked if he had been taking heroin whilst in prison. Why yes, now and again, every day, really, Eddie explained. To which Eddie’s friend replied, that what was wrong with Eddie was that Eddie was rattlin’. Rattlin’ – I have never heard it pronounced, rattling – is one of a number of names for withdrawal. Eddie, when he explained this to me, seemed hypnotised by his friend’s diagnosis, just as he was fascinated by his friend’s explanation of how to solve this problem. In order to fix Eddie, to stop him rattlin’, all that was required was a shot of heroin. How lucky that they were heading ‘home’ to the run-­down holiday town on the North Wales coast; where, though it was short of many things, such as hope, and jobs, and fine housing, one of the things that it was not short of was heroin. There are a number of remarkable points about this part of Eddie’s story, which is the genesis for much of what was to remarkably follow, sometimes over the course of many years. Of significance, but perhaps the least remarkable of these points in this section of his story, is that Eddie became addicted to heroin whilst in prison. What is more remarkable is that Eddie was apparently unaware of rattlin’ up until this point, and that his illness on leaving prison was not related to heroin, or more to the point, to not having it. There are, though, a number of ways of explaining this hinge in Eddie’s narrative. I have asked Eddie a number of times, how it was that he had been around heroin for several years whilst in prison, and yet he hadn’t witnessed other prisoners displaying symptoms of heroin withdrawal? Was it that the steady supply of heroin ensured that no addict ever suffered the consequences of not  having the drug washing through their systems, including Eddie’s system? Had there never been 24 hours that went by during the entire duration of his

18   Eddie and some of his relationships heroin-­addicted incarceration when either he or any of his fellow inmates had never been short of a fix? And if not, how was it that he had either never felt sick, or never associated feeling sick with not being able to get the drug that he needed? Had no one ever spoken about rattlin’? What had been going on? And Eddie has always replied with what seems to be disarming candour. He probably had felt ill, now and again, but he must have put it down to some other kind of illness, to having the flu, or the aches, or just feeling shit like you do every now and then simply because you are in prison. And he probably did see other prisoners rattlin’, but somehow, like he’d tried to explain, he didn’t link up the lack of heroin with what he might have noticed, or perhaps not even noticed much at all; because prisons are not normal places. Was it easy to score in his home town? His home town felt like it was the smack centre of the universe, or the universe if smack was primarily what you were interested in, and you sought the company of other people with a similar preoccupation. It was a kind of very low-­end heroin paradise. The economic disintegration, seaside urban decay, absence of opportunities other than those related to smack, and lack of investment, ensured that: rents were low, property prices plummeted, people with the means and futures moved away, unemployment became high, standards of living fell, quality of life tunnelled beneath the derelict ground on which it was ironically founded. But what I meant was, if you had never been there before, and needed to score, how would you go about it, would it be easy? If you just walked onto the front, two minutes from where we used to live, you’d always bump into someone who could sort you out. I don’t know, there’s something about a junkie. A junkie can always spot a junkie. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s our clothes, like; or the way we walk, you can just tell. Like something about the skin, you know, it’s got that grey lifeless look. Looks like the rest of us, like we’ve given up living. Grey clothes too, because the colour has been faded out of them. And the teeth, broken and brown. Where did the heroin come from, Eddie? It came from Liverpool, always from Liverpool. And prior to that probably Colombia or Mexico, via Rotterdam, which, to be fair, a lot of people would have known. But what is less common is that Eddie took more than a passive interest in some of these details. Not really the more abstract far away details, because they were only of incidental interest to him; they were the hooks on which the closer, personal details that were of more immediate relevance hung. Details such as names; and he remembered the people that the names represented, and what they did, liked; and, if he could find out, where they came from and went to. And he put these things together, and could see numbers, routes and journeys, patterns and money. And Eddie put these things together, placed them in motion, in order, as Bourdieu liked to say, to be able to manipulate the rules of the game to his best advantage, and thus to accrue the greatest social capital that he could muster, within the habitus that

Eddie and some of his relationships   19 articulated all of this, including Eddie. And to this end, Eddie made use of himself, his body, its manner of being, to flatter, advise, help, demonstrate his reliability, to establish a network of contacts, and then to work for the drug dealer that suited what he wanted most. Eddie progressed from the dilapidated North Wales coastal holiday town, where he sold bundles-­of-ten, £10 bags of heroin, in order to be paid in kind with a bag for his own use; and relocated to the homeless community in Chester; where he sold directly, for cash, from someone who sourced their product from a major dealer in Liverpool. After not very long, Eddie was making around £50 an hour, and working about 14 hours a day, seven days every week. Which means that at the end of every day, when Eddie switched off his phone, he had around £700 in his hand. We can do some basic arithmetic. First of all, whilst Eddie was making around £50 an hour, that was only one-­fifth of what the man who Eddie was selling for was earning from the same deal; which means that off Eddie’s sales, every hour, he was making around £200. Most of what was sold was crack and heroin, usually bundled into £10 rocks of crack and £10 bags of heroin. The total amount of money earned in an hour by Eddie was around £250, split between Eddie’s £50 and the-­man he-­worked-for’s £200; which meant that Eddie had to make around 25 £10 deals of one kind or another every hour. And in a day? Eddie worked a 14-hour day, so in a day he would have dealt up the equivalent of 350 times, mostly to different people. That’s the equivalent, as already mentioned, of £700 that Eddie makes in his hand, and around £2,800 for the man he worked for. But the thing is, there were five other people apart from Eddie working for this same man. Eddie says these other people didn’t work as hard; they weren’t as good at selling as he was. So let’s say they make only around 20 deals an hour; which would mean in an hour they are each grossing £200, of which of which they keep £40, and the man they work for takes £160. In total, every hour, that means the firm Eddie worked for was grossing around £1,250, of which the man in charge was keeping £1,000; so that in a single day, the firm as a whole was grossing around £17,500, of which the man in charge was keeping around £14,000. And if we estimate this gross turnover in terms of individual £10 servings, that’s around 1,750 in a single day. Whilst each individual serving doesn’t necessarily represent a different individual, since in particular, people addicted to crack are likely to buy multiple times, even conservatively we are looking at somewhere between 1,250 and 1,500 different individuals every day involved in drug deals of either crack or heroin. At the time, Eddie also estimated that there were about 12 other firms of a similar size operating in Chester. So if we take the lower figure of 1,250 individual people scoring crack and heroin in Chester each day and multiply it by 12 we have around 15,000 different people in or around the city taking crack and heroin each day. And the thing about addiction, is that tomorrow, you’re going to be back. In a single year, the firm Eddie worked for was grossing over £6 million pounds. Eddie himself would have been earning over £250,000 per year, and that without having to endure any licit deductions, such as any form of tax. Though that is not to say that there weren’t other expenses that took a sizeable bite out of

20   Eddie and some of his relationships any money earned. For example, whilst the man that Eddie worked for earned around £5 million a year, he had to buy the product in the first place, which might also include contributing to the transportation and other logistical costs that were necessary to get the drugs to the UK in the first place, organised and mostly financed by people much higher up in the drugs business. And Eddie’s own income, too, was not immune from Eddie’s own substantial outgoings. Whilst Eddie’s housing costs were of an ultra minimal order, since he was living in a hostel for homeless people, at the time; his crack cocaine habit was epic, and some days Eddie would spend his entire earnings, so around that day’s whole £700, just on crack. Perhaps it goes without saying that his wages weren’t diminished much by expenditure on food, during this period. To the question, which I have often pondered, about how can it be that a successful drugs seller making £700 each day, £250,000 every year, could be living in a hostel for homeless men, I continue to be thrown back on an answer, made of several interconnecting parts, that no matter how I look at it, even though it is true, still does not make any sense. And that’s, of course, because it doesn’t. But let’s go over the different interconnecting parts of what is true, anyway. First of all, when you earn that much money, in that context, you have a problem about what to do with it, strange as that may seem. What you cannot do with it, is put it into a bank, or something similar. You can deposit a small amount of money into a regular account, but nothing that you can live on, even modestly, without having, in one way or another, to declare its source. Similarly, you can’t buy a property, nor even rent one directly without risking questions being asked. So unless you know someone with the capability and willingness to launder your money, people that are not very easy to bump into, and people who are certainly going to be careful about which people they offer their services to, even at a significant price, then you are left with only two solutions: store it, literally under your mattress, behind the wardrobe, in your shoes, under the rug, in your box of cereals – and now you are already running out of places, in your single room in the hostel for homeless men; or spend it. That’s the second option; spend it; and it’s the only sustainable option you have; because you have to get rid of it somehow; having enormous amounts of cash around is downright dangerous. Though the spending options are also incredibly limited. There are, of course, what people refer to as, consumer goods. Of which, there seems to be an infinite array. Televisions, mobile phones, computers, cars, cookers, dishwashers, a range of interior lighting, CD players, expensive crockery, the list could go on, seemingly infinitely. The only problem is, you only have one room, in a hostel for homeless men. From which, the obvious problem about participating in this potential consumer spend fest becomes immediately apparent, and might best be articulated by the simple question: Where am I going to put this stuff? Very soon into your acquisition binge, you are obviously going to run out of space. But there is a less immediately obvious problem, another background factor that is a more significant impediment than the first spatial block on you indulging in a lavish and continuous consumer acquisition lifestyle; and that is, mostly this stuff, which ordinarily provides the symbolic and practical ground

Eddie and some of his relationships   21 upon which those of us who are part of the established order exist, simply doesn’t fit. That’s right: does not fit. There are clearly some examples that do not fit in a very practical sense, such as buying a car. If you can manage to buy such a thing, in cash, there being no other way; then you have to tax and insure it, park it, MOT it, maintain it, and apart from having to fill it with petrol, every one of these other necessities is fraught with difficulties that are likely sooner or later to lead to your miserable incarceration. Though that’s not quite to the point; which is this. You are living a lifestyle, within which there is no real possibility of coming home at night, taking a long slow bath, then watching a film selected from Amazon Prime, or having a few friends round to enjoy the football highlights of the last game you recorded whilst you order in a pizza. Basically, at around midnight, you switch off your phone, rack up at your friend’s, and load up some needles and pipes, and smoke and inject your way into the near morning. At some point later, you turn on your phone, so that you can begin another day of answering the endless calls that are motivated by an endless demand. Breakfast? Well, maybe some Fanta, and perhaps a biscuit, since heroin and crack don’t just enormously suppress your appetite; they can make it hard to eat. And so, during the day? Dealing. Busy. Your phone never stops ringing. And it’s your job to supply. It’s the only thing you do. Take the money of course, keep a tally, go get more drugs when your bits are sold; but all this other stuff is simply to facilitate the supply. And demand is such that you never stop. People, lots of people, want your drugs, all the time. And after they’ve had them, they want some more. Always. It’s insatiable. All the time; it never stops. Your day commences like this. Drag yourself out of bed; indulge in a couple of gulps of flat Fanta, and a bite of a custard cream, and a rock or two. You are going to be doing a rock or two whenever you can, all day, because in so many ways these rocks are what is keeping you going. You get on your bike, quite literally, a bike, not a Humvee that you haul yourself into, nor a Porsche that you slide your skinny frame inside; no, you have a bike, which you keep inside your room in the hostel for homeless men where you are staying; and cycle through the ancient picturesque city, to one of its quieter and greener areas, where the man that you work for lives, in a really, really nice flat; and outside, not inside, not something propped against some sorry broken bed, is a Porsche. The contrast between the two is enormous. Eddie, who lives in a hostel for homeless men, and this other guy. This other guy looks like he belongs, and belongs somewhere expensive. Eddie looks like he doesn’t belong anywhere, except in a hostel for homeless people. So you arrive at around nine, say your hellos and straight away get down to work, at the coffee table in the front room with the great view. Bags are what it’s all about for the next 30 to 40 minutes. Bags. And there are scales, and some spoons and some tiny scoops. And coke and heroin; and coke cooked up into crack. All bagged into £10 deals. Which you store in your mouth. You don’t have to store, transport and deal from your mouth, of course, but that’s what you

22   Eddie and some of his relationships do. It’s part of being a drug dealer, keeping your bits under the sides of your tongue. Nothing in your pockets. Nothing in your hands. And if the police arrive, swallow them down, or spit them out if there’s some distance between you and them and there’s a place for the bits to go that the police can’t see. But usually swallow them down. Which is why if they do get to you, the police will always go for your throat and hold on tight, to stop any swallowing and make you spit out any bits you are hiding. Otherwise, the police have nothing, and you can retrieve your bits later, at your leisure. But for now, all done. It’s just after ten, like it is at this time every day, and you are on your way, having left this other guy’s flat, sitting crack-­confident on your bike, barely registering his Porsche, responding to your phone, ready to make your first deal. Mostly, and consider if you are supplying the same kind of volume as did Eddie, you will remember who you are dealing up to; which is being able to remember mostly for whom, where and what the around 350 deals daily usually consist. This is very important. It acts as protection. Because the way people get your number, the way you deal, is by other people passing your name on. Word of mouth, passed on by previous record and quality. The more names you have, of course, the more deals you do, the more money you make. Though at 14 hours a day, and around 340 individual £10 deals, you are close to being maxed out, logistically at the limit of what you can serve up in a single day, in a single year, in a single lifetime. But also something else: you have reached the limit of the amount of crack and heroin that you can smoke and inject into your body, doing what you are doing. Not that if the opportunity happened, and there was a chance of getting more, of doing more, you wouldn’t leap towards it. It’s just that, logistically too, that simply also isn’t a possibility. It is as if the two economies, the economy of dealer distribution, and the personal economy of dealer consumption, have collided and are in maxed out synchronised balance; as if the outside and the inside have come together, as one. And that is because they have. Though £700 a day is always only barely enough. So what happens is the customers that you have, who make up the around 350 £10 deals each day become known to you, you keep seeing them, every day, again and again. It’s the nature of addiction; the nature of your trade; and it’s also how you slot into this economy of being, and is what becomes the nature of your body, the nature of whom and what you are. And that repetition, its familiarity, will become the fragile symbolic reality of your universe; wherein its routines, its populace, their habits and identities, the locations they briefly inhabit during the deals where you meet them, your bike, the frequency that you cop from the money you make, its rhythms, patterns and flows, grows into the fabric from which your body is woven and the environment is built, upon which your being depends. The material of the environment you inhabit forms the material of what you are, creating the arbitrary division of the exterior and your insides. So that you inside, your personal being, all that you have, is the reconfigured outside; the covert footfall over the roads and along the pavements, lingering behind the fire station, all of that, your dearest, private things, are made from this economy. The grim fact is made plain to you, that you are not even special, that what you thought

Eddie and some of his relationships   23 was you is outside yourself, and is cold and glistening, and is, as Benjamin and Baudelaire noted, the street. And that you own nothing, are nothing, are as intimate as a road junction, are as personal as a zebra crossing; and that these are your most authentic portions, the direction and grime of the road, and the noise of its traffic. Maintaining all of this, the footfall, the numbers, the trade, the look, is also all you have of being; this solitary means, this single set of fragile and interlocking processes is the sole condition by which you exist. Maintaining all of this complexity, is basically maintaining your survival. Being a part of this world is above all and perhaps only a matter of your self-­preservation. And besides, what else was Eddie, were you, going to do? For reasons already discussed, fixing the LIBOR exchange rate was some distance from Eddie’s criminal grasp. So every day, more or less the same: get up; make your way down to the other guy’s flat; put the dope in the bags; and deal. The inconsequential, that resides in the crevices of your days and nights, such as the typography of the street signs, ephemeral moments, like the brisk gate of the man who runs County News, usual worn experiences, including the grey wornness of your few clothes, these and other marginalia that you notice – the predictability of certain faces in that place at that time on that day; that the backs of your hands turn cold if you cycle far without gloves, this time of year; the blunt melancholy of walls and doorways – break off from this general economy, and become as if being in themselves, as if their being what they are, their identity, was something to do with the things in themselves and not the habitus within which they are configured; so that their respective identities, all that they are and can be, depends on maintaining this definition; every movement authorised as an effort to support whatever that might be, and to ward off any diminution of their outline and being; exactly, every day, like Eddie; exactly like you. So what did you, Eddie, do for £700 a day? Well, after stuffing your mouth with £10 bags of heroin and crack, you consult your phone. You’ve texted that you are going to be at the ‘teacup and spoons’ in ten minutes. So you cross the dual carriageway and cycle up and under the Roman wall on the northern part of the city, where the canal runs. The ‘teacup and spoons’ are huge wooden sculptures in the style of Tenniel’s illustrations for the Alice books. They sit in a space not far from the ancient wall and a lock, with lots of footbridges to the other side, the Garden Lane area of the city, made up from a warren of close knit Victorian Streets. In many respects it’s the perfect location to deal up from. There are lots of exits, should the police or anyone else come along; once over on the other side of the canal, especially on a bike, it is easy to disappear in the streets and cut-­throughs of the Garden Lane area; and if you position yourself, you can see all around for some distance. What it’s got going against it, is that it’s not out of the way enough. Dog walkers, people on their way to work, those with nothing better to do, all use the towpath. And if you’re not in the right position, you can’t see them coming. That’s why it’s best not to arrive there early. But it’s got that culturally and psychologically ‘designated’ identity about it, for being a place to score; a parallel identity that those other people, who are not junkies, but know of or venture to use the towpath, are largely ignorant about.

24   Eddie and some of his relationships This small area has witnessed some of Eddie’s most tense moments. Once he thought he was only dealing up to two people, but within seconds of him spitting his bits into his hand a crowd had arrived and began jostling him; so he tipped what was in his hand onto the floor and rode away across the footbridge to the other side of the canal. ‘You just can’t tell. That’s why it helps if you know ’em.’ ‘Don’t you have to make it up, any you lost, so that he knows you’re not skimming?’ If you have to, then you have to. I mean, I was well known, you know, trusted. You can’t be messing with that, Paul. But I wasn’t going to take a blade for anyone. So you’re constantly watching. You have to be. His favourite place to deal from was behind the fire station. There’s nothing there. No one has any business being behind the fire station, for any period of time. And it’s big. A huge empty space, with a massive wall, with just the fire station behind. That was a place I didn’t mind getting to early. Get there, and the only other person you might see turning up, and from there you could see everything, would almost certainly be for you. That’s what you do, all day, on your bike. Moving between locations. Going back to the other guy’s flat when you’ve sold all your bits. Copping yourself between deals as you travel across the city. And always wary. Never at ease. Like the time you served up to your friend and she had that man hanging out there, at her flat. You’d known her for years. Always dealt up to her in her flat, never anywhere else. And always dealt up to her the same. She says to me ‘Can you sort him out?’ And I say, ‘Look, I know you, known you for years. So you’re no problem. But I’ve never met him before. I don’t know who he is.’ And that was that like, no hard feelings or nothing, but after that I left. ‘Did you see him again?’ Yes, I did, the next time I went round there. I’d sorted her, and she says, ‘Can’t you sort him too? Can’t you see, he’s rattlin’? Well, that’s how it is. But it’s like I told her last time. I said, ‘I know you, but I don’t know who he is. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave this, here. And you, the money, you’re going to put that by the sink, so I don’t know who that money comes from, but it’s in your flat so I’m assuming it’s you.’ Caution, you see, being careful, not dealing up to people you can’t be sure about. But simultaneously being part of the economy by which you are defined. There can be no other way. Business never ends. Put your money by the sink. ‘Then I

Eddie and some of his relationships   25 cycle away. We all do more rocks. And in the end, he was there all the time. In her flat, all the time. To a drug-­seller, just another paying customer.’ So, Eddie was very surprised to see him, very early one morning, bursting through the door to his own small room, smashing into his bike, and hurling the noisy, blunt orthodoxy of the established order about, accompanied by five other armed police officers. One of them, he doesn’t remember which, because it was so chaotic in his small room at that point, was shouting about Eddie being arrested, for supplying class A drugs, that’s crack and heroin, to a police officer, on seven separate occasions. With these words, together with his recognition of a face that was no longer junkified, Eddie instantly knew that the social reality of the Symbolic Order, had literally come crashing through his door and had invaded his life. It had discovered Eddie in its margins. And it granted itself a further six years of being rid of him. For six years he would be taken out of circulation, removed from the economy of being. ‘I done my rattle in prison,’ Eddie explained. ‘And with nothin’. No methadone script, an’ with nothin’ for the rattle.’ It is difficult not to ask, significantly at this point: How come? How come you stopped taking heroin, and everything else, at this point in time? Whilst not wanting to discount any interpretations, about Eddie giving up heroin when he went to prison on this particular occasion, which focus on notions of learning as a process of self-­reflexive moral accounting; privileging this process as being deterministic of change, detaches any identities and their attendant practices, such as being a heroin addict and taking heroin, from the forms of habitus by which they are engendered and leant meaning. By contrast, when regarded in the light of context and habitus, the environment and the ways that it has shaped the mental and emotional landscapes of its subjects, and engaged their selves in their practices with the world, and the resultant choices that are available, not only the space available for autonomous individual reflection, but also the extent of the plausibility of this belief in learning is raised as a question. And is always unanswered. Nevertheless, the next time Eddie was released from prison, he was no longer taking heroin. He was released, inevitably, onto the streets, having, as is normal in such circumstances, nowhere to live. There are several reasons why you are likely, in these circumstances, to return to where you came from. One of these is that being homeless is hard enough, but being homeless in a place that you do not know increases the difficulty on lots of fronts. Being without somewhere to be, without somewhere to sleep, to sit down, to rest against, to eat, to be quiet, that is in any sense your own, means being on the street in a very prosaic, literal sense. It means living there, eating there, sleeping in its corners, in its car parks, and shop doorways after dark, and moving through its networks from one street to another. But at least knowing the streets that you live on might provide some reassurance, as echoes brought back to you of the many previous times that you have lived on them, by way of the incidents that you may have encountered, and the people you could have been with; all reflected back to you, telling you that you are you; reaffirming your history, and sense of yourself, which in this very

26   Eddie and some of his relationships minimal sense of being attached to something that is you, for good or ill, acts as a minimal external confirmation of self. Aside from very significantly easing the existential burden, which in these circumstances, rather unlike Jean-­Paul Sartre’s rendition of this condition, may actually kill you; there are practical advantages, too, that living locally has over being homeless in a place that you do not know and have in some sense not come from. Knowing an area, and thus being able to find somewhere that might be relatively safe and offer some shelter, especially to sleep, can not only mean being relatively secure and less effected by the cold and ill weather, thus reducing the physical impact of homelessness on your being; it also increases your confidence and significantly improves your mental and emotional outlook. It means that each day you have a practical, important, realisable goal. Almost no matter how bad your day has been, even if you are tired, cold, wet, hungry, and have spoken to no one, at least at the end of that day when the streets become emptier and dark, you have some place to go. Some place that you can lie down, pull cardboard, or a coat, or a sleeping bag around you, and close your eyes in hope of sleep. Some place, for a while that will, because it is known to you, afford you, perhaps in the form of a corner on the floor of a multi-­storey car park, or as the space behind the bins of a supermarket, a degree of personhood through their familiarity; a familiarity that increases the more you sleep there, so that a brutal imaginary intimacy, as all intimacies are, accrues between you and the otherwise public but often hidden impersonal stone, brick and metal work, which has been shared with you, which has held you, whilst you intermittently have slept and so intermittently will sleep. Other important practical reasons for returning to the place where you have in some sense come from, include knowing people, a range of people. These will include your friends and other people who can help you. Help might be in the form of them simply being around, so that you are not driven insane through loneliness; though there may be more material forms of support too, such as sharing drugs, food, clothes and shelter. And information is largely acquired in this way; so that you are plugged into and become part of the social network within which the homeless community live, and are configured within its established order of being. There are other people, too, that it is useful to know: GPs who operate dedicated health services for homeless people; charity workers; housing officers; people who front various services that might be useful to you. And, of course, you will know which people it is important to avoid. Indeed, so significant is the predilection to return to the place from which you have come that it is part of working policy in relation to the duty of a local authority to accommodate its homeless subjects, in the sense that no such duty exists unless you as the subject can demonstrate a ‘local connection’, i.e. that you as a homeless person are from that local authority. The symbolic and socially organising principle of this same predilection to return has many significant cultural analogues, including: Homeric myths; the story of the birth of Christ, as well Christ’s then subsequent relationship to the Father, and by theological implication all sinners, that is to say, human being; as well as in Nietzsche’s several commentaries on the eternal return. Should it then be surprising to find this

Eddie and some of his relationships   27 property also configured in local authority housing policy, as a mirror of its symbolic constitution? That as an entity, its existence is based upon its dependency on defining who belongs within what it regards as its geographical area, its place, and onto-­politically, its place to be? And that this constitutes its responsibility, its onto-­political responsibility, which it is charged with administering? In other words: if you are homeless and not from around here, then you do not belong and we have no responsibility for you. But of course, the place where one returns to is not an empty geographical entity. It is not simply, because of its bare but specific features, some location where those features collectively make up some definable area, such as some part of a city, made up of a subway, intersecting roads, shops and railway station, with no other meaning beyond this basic rendition. The place of return, and the specific features by which it is identified, obtains its meaning and identity according to the history of how it has forged the experiences of its various subjects; which for different groups of people, such as the homeless and those who belong, may very well be discontinuous. It is this experience that is forged in the mundane crucible of some place, which its specific features represent, that acts as the location of meaning and its belonging. It was not therefore inevitable that when Eddie left prison after he had served his time for the drugs’ conviction that he would return to Chester; not inevitable, but very likely, as indeed he did. And it was after this, his return, that I first met Eddie. By that time Eddie had been out of prison and homeless for about six years. He was also – whenever some related topic came up in the company of other homeless people, such as who was doing what, where they had gone to score, what the quality of heroin was like, or even if someone said, ‘Meet you later’, when they went off to get their methadone script – keen to point out that he had been clean of heroin ever since his last prison sentence, and that he wasn’t on a script. At the time, John, his best friend, was one of the few others in the group who was in a similar position: not doing heroin and not on a script. This really marked them out, since everyone else within the group of about ten homeless people, who had taken heroin before, were either still taking heroin, or were on a methadone script to support them remaining clean of heroin, or were both on a script and ‘topping up’ with heroin at various times each day. There was one other person, who joined the group, after about a year that I had got to know them, and also fitted this category: Pete the Boat. In many ways, Pete the Boat was an intensely private person; though in others, some of what we could glimpse of his very private life, some of its very traumatic aspects, leaked out between the gaps and cracks and through the border that shored up his self, and looked back at him, beyond the limits of his control. I got to know Pete the Boat over a much shorter time than most of the others in the group: he was around for only about two years. One of the properties of not doing heroin and not being on a script is that it gives you a degree of freedom. That is freedom from the need to score at least every day, with all of the problems this involves. First of these is the problem of getting enough money together for a £10 bag. If you don’t have the money, which is the general mode

28   Eddie and some of his relationships of economic being for homeless people, hence their homelessness, there are options. In general order of usual preference these options include: borrowing the money; begging; cajoling, which some might argue is really a kind of begging; and doing a blag. All come with their own difficulties. Let’s take the usually most preferred method, borrowing. Already, things are not good, prospects are not looking hopeful. You are in the unfortunate position of being homeless and without money, and your first recourse in order to obtain money, is to obtain it from someone else with the promise that in the future you will be able to repay the sum back. Unfortunately, the entire community that you are part of, simply by the fact of it being homeless, is in exactly the same economic situation. But because of the prevalence of this issue, informal systems of offsetting outgoings from the regular receipt of any benefits, such as sickness benefit, have grown up. This might involve not more than perhaps asking a friend to keep a small portion of any money that you might receive because you have accepted that you are likely to otherwise consume all of it very quickly through some kind of binge behaviour. Whilst this is safe-­keeping rather than borrowing, the arrangement can very quickly develop into more systematic borrowing when either the money for safe-­keeping is not actually presented, or the money that is presented becomes spent by the safe-­keeper, so that instead this becomes a reciprocal borrowing behaviour for what would otherwise, through safe-­keeping, have been roughly the same amount; and this occurs in a regular or near regular way. Whilst this allows for a modest financial flexibility with which to score beyond your negligible means, it is very limited. And you are going to have to score at least once every a day. And since almost all of the people that you associate with are in the same situation, the simple logistics of this situation begins to unfold its social and psychological consequences. The small, finite number of opportunities to borrow what you need have two ramifications that act together in a perverse way: your lived daily awareness that the prospect of borrowing what you require is very small, especially as these prospects are being mined by almost everyone that you live with, leads to a deadening, grinding hopelessness, that stretches before you as a daily struggle, day after day without end. But at the same time the very incessant nature of this misery, impels you never to give up hustling, searching, wheedling, imploring, pressurising, in order to get what you need to – temporarily at least, and this is the best you can hope for – assuage the need to score, by scoring. And anyway, what are you going to do? It’s not as if you have much of a choice. This is a problem that will not go away, which is one of its clearest defining impacts. And it infects everyone, in terms of financial and social behaviour. A whole community, both accepting and transcending their fate, their need to score, by scoring. A whole community, ceaselessly hustling itself, nervously negotiating improbable deals – for coins – upon which everything depends, driven on by the unlikely possibility that they just might come off; a whole community, wherein each individual member of that community is equally aware that this fate applies not only to themselves, but to everyone they live with. Not to be part of this economy of being, as, at the time, Eddie, John and Pete the Boat were, was therefore very liberating. It was not simply, as I have tried to

Eddie and some of his relationships   29 demonstrate, freedom from the financial imperative to obtain money to score heroin, but also from its attendant behaviours, such as the need to constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to obtain money from other people, which defined a specific cultural and psychological mode of being. It would be far from the truth to suggest by this that Eddie, John and Pete the Boat did not borrow, nor sometimes, though much more rarely than other members of the group, engage in wheedling behaviours. Their motivations, however, even when the purpose of borrowing money was to buy drugs, other than heroin, were different. Almost all of the drugs that were routinely consumed by the group including Eddie, John and Pete the Boat were consumed socially, and smoked. And by consuming socially I mean not simply consumed together but shared, in the form of passing round a spliff of some kind. Occasionally, people would turn up with pills, that were sometimes prescription and sometimes non-­prescription drugs, which would also be shared, so this would therefore also count as social consumption. Again, I don’t’ want to imply that Eddie, John and Pete the Boat only ever took drugs in social groups. Other drugs, in particular crack, were consumed opportunistically both in isolation and in company, but this was different to being, lived through the need to score heroin. Obtaining money to score might also be achieved through doing a blag. A blag involved taking something that didn’t belong to you, usually to sell on, and was mostly shoplifting. Again, whilst Eddie, John and Pete the Boat sometimes went along on blags, the motivation was not to buy and use heroin. Especially when the blag involved several people, either in order to manage whatever the logistics of the job might be, so for instrumental reasons, or because of its attendant social draw, it was nearly always, possible to detect what Lacan (1964) refers to as, an excess beyond the intention and the act itself; there was always something beyond the instrumental function of the signifier or practice; a remainder, that registered the cultural significance of the operation. So that, whilst the purpose of shoplifting a joint of gammon from Tesco’s might have been to sell it on to the café down the road, in order to buy some weed, or legal high, or crack; there was an accompanying, sometimes, exuberance, or exaggerated sense of tension, or camaraderie, and often humour, that required those involved to assume and play a role, and was in excess of the purpose of the blag, and in some way remained or occurred beyond any functional purpose. Sometimes this was manifested through the discourse of heavy irony about the hopelessness of their situation, so that a shoplifting sortie against Tesco’s might be enacted as a daring bandit raid against the overwhelming power of the establishment. This was communicated much less verbosely. ‘We’re taking on Tesco’s.’ ‘Fuck me, a supermarket giant.’ Given the rather motley nature of the crew that proposed to do this grand job, amounting to the theft of a joint of gammon, with their attendant difficulties, such as the occasional inclusion of Ian Winston Churchill, a practising alcoholic, whose difficult life was further encumbered by him being physically disabled and registered blind, all contributing to his serious mental health issues, often

30   Eddie and some of his relationships making him prone to shouting fits; it would be fair to conclude that they were not a crack professional shoplifting team. Any possible success in them doing any kind of blag was as likely down to skill as it was divine intervention. That is not to say that there were not highly skilled shoplifters within the homeless community, for example, Bill Fox; but this particular group, not so much. Much of Bataille’s work was an attempt to demonstrate the condition of human being through its construction and reflection in what he described as the exorbitant portion of the economy of ontology. He proposed, and attempted to illustrate through anthropological and other data, that if our mundane identities are composed by the environment and its symbolic representation; by, as we have seen in relation to Eddie, the way that you make your living, or don’t, so that it’s very functioning becomes inscribed into the otherwise hollow of authenticity, as your identity, as who you are; there remains, like the Lacanian remainder of the objet petit a, a yearning, an unfulfillable desire to be beyond how you are inscribed as who you are in the general economy of the Symbolic Order. This is a desire to be beyond the limits of functionality and the determinate meaning of identity; its achievement would be an escape from the functional regime of the world, and the prescribed meanings bestowed upon any identity, which is the very property of being knowable: thus, this is a desire to be beyond not just the politics of any identity, but identity itself. Bataille famously describes the exorbitant nature of sacrifice as an illustration of social practices that are ritualised manifestations of attempts to achieve this beyond of the prescription of identity itself. In sacrifice some object is taken, such as money, or food, or some kind of tool or luxury item, that unavoidably takes its meaning and is recognisable as such from the role that it plays within the general economy of being; but at the moment of it being sacrificed sloughs off the identity of what it has formerly been used for, or has represented, and has been recognisable as such; since at that moment of being sacrificed it is no longer what it was, even though, for example, its physical state may have retained or at least referenced what it used to be; such that, its function during its sacrifice, can no longer be registered nor calculated within the logic of the Symbolic Order within which its position, meaning and relations once operated. It is by this practice of sacrifice that being both goes beyond the symbolic and cultural nexus of identity, and simultaneously loses its ontological accountability; that is to say, it can no longer be recognised, it is gone. Whilst Bataille seems to have been forced to demonstrate this desire – to fulfil being beyond the instrumentality of prescribed social and psychological identity – in various renditions of the esoteric, sometimes more than suggesting that it is the area of the esoteric, and esoteric explorations of the extreme, where exorbitant practices and their ontological transcendence of identity lies; I would suggest that in the objet petit a, the Lacanian remainder, we are also able to witness the same manifestation of an exultant desire to be beyond the prescribed identity enacted for us by our unavoidable participation in the mundane processes of the Symbolic Order. Perhaps this obtains a certain poignancy when the

Eddie and some of his relationships   31 attempted acts of escapology are enacted by homeless people; acts of escapology from their various experiences, of misery, numbing tedium, abuse, and not belonging, which constitute a rendition of the order from which their identities are drawn; practices that call to a beyond of this form of being; where the remainder, the aspect of practice that cannot be accounted for within an instrumental order of being, such as the exorbitant behaviours that might accompany a blag, or even the blag itself, in terms of its conception and those determined to carry it out, which are exorbitant from every rational perspective, and enact a momentary leaving behind (within this context) of the established order and how it defines you. But as Bataille and others, such as Nancy (2000), have pointed out; the point at which this exorbitant deal is done, its price for the practice that leads to momentary ecstasy, is, that as the formulation, the deal, very clearly states: there is nothing outside of the identity afforded by, call it what you will, the Symbolic Order, the established order, the state, the sense and ontological understanding of being as experienced through the Lacanian act of méconnaissance, or some such similar. Nothing. And in the culture of human being, there are countless examples of what Agamben (1998) has usefully described as the state of exception, where life is stripped of all but its biological identity, a thing without, as the deal says, the conditions that are thought to be the prerequisites of human being. Coming close to acknowledging this truth is a hollowing experience. And during the first few years when I knew Eddie, John and Pete the Boat, that was the not infrequent experience of the group in general, through acts of drug taking and other forms of abuse and criminality, as well as personally wrecking circumstances – a moving towards, followed usually by a moving away from, moments of oblivion. But as already mentioned, less so for Eddie, John and Pete the Boat. And this, primarily, it appeared, because they were not doing heroin and were not on a script. Indeed, during one winter in particular they were noticeably protective of each other and their status within the group; they were protective of their relative freedom, and their different perspective, since it seemed not to be dominated by heroin and being tied to the routine of being on a script. This emerged during casual, routine interactions when other members of the group left or met up with us following scheduled trips to the pharmacy for methadone or to meet dealers to score heroin. They made remarks about being thankful for not having to go and score, or take their methadone. They never decried being on a script, since without it, functioning became barely possible; but it was still an irrefutable practice and sign of dependency, a dependency that dominated your very being. And however understated, however non-­judgmental their asides, looks, gestures appeared to be, they were always relieved not to be in this position. Moreover, if you ever asked after some remark had been made, the three of them knew for how long they had each individually been clean. They said they remembered coming off heroin. They recounted the length and location where they had ‘done their rattle’. They were extremely wary of their own addictions, and never wanted to go back to using heroin. Each remark about the subject, however

32   Eddie and some of his relationships casual, however humorous, off-­hand, or made in passing, underlined the absolute importance and radical insecurity of the position that they represented. There was nothing assured, nothing necessarily permanent, nothing guaranteed about the relative freedom and different orientation towards being that not being on a script and not taking heroin gave them. Its fragility, its impermanence, was tested almost constantly every day, through their being on the street and its incessant economy of drugs and users. For around two years I saw Eddie regularly, but then Eddie and John became estranged and when John’s partner, Sophie, became pregnant my research time was taken up with them, with their attempts to be a family, and the group of people that they regularly associated with, which did not include Eddie. So for about six months, I had no contact with him. But then one evening, precipitated by a minor domestic, I went into Chester on my own to eat dinner, and decided upon a small independent French restaurant, that was relatively inexpensive, had a tiny menu, and was almost empty. Having ordered, and consumed my starter and most of my main course, I looked up as two more customers arrived. One of them was a woman in her late fifties or early sixties, dressed in what looked like expensive bohemian, flowing clothes; she spoke French to the French owner; and she had an air about her that seemed to declare that she was on holiday. The other person was Eddie. I watched as they were shown to a table at the other end of the room near the window: they began to order wine and look at the menu. I am embarrassed to admit that I was astounded. It wasn’t simply the extraordinary improbability of what I could barely believe I was witnessing that shocked me, though the odds of this happening were staggering. What were the chances, really? That a chronically homeless person, in active addiction for much of his adult life, with a string of criminal convictions, who not very long ago would routinely look for burn, scavenging in bins and gutters for the butt ends of discarded cigarettes, in order to pick out the second-­hand tobacco, and make into roll-­ups to smoke with his friends, would not just get off the street, but would meet someone who existed at an apparently middle class distance from that location, and had become, what very much looked like, romantically involved with that person? But as I keep saying, it wasn’t just that; it wasn’t simply the statistical improbability that such a thing appeared to have occurred, and that I was witnessing it, in a French restaurant on a summer’s evening in Chester, where I wouldn’t have been had the minor domestic not occurred. It was the why, or, more accurately and shockingly, the implications of the why; of why, statistically, this was so unlikely to happen, that truly appalled me; and mostly in relation to myself. It’s perhaps easier to explain if I describe what happened next. I stood up, went across, and said hello. The sentence that followed my greeting, something along the lines of, ‘I haven’t seen you about for some time, where have you been?’ and my genuine pleasure at seeing Eddie, only intensified my surprise. ‘Been living in France for the past couple of months. Fixing up Lynn’s villa. Just come back, not for very long. Looking for a property in this country.

Eddie and some of his relationships   33 Probably somewhere round here.’ One way of understanding my surprise, was that Eddie in some way, had transformed the defining fact about him, from being homeless, to being in a position of having not one, but two private properties at his disposal. That these were private properties was massively significant. Private property is an expression of ownership and relative permanence; it is derived from the power to distinguish one’s self from the ontological identity of public being; it is the symbolic, economic and cultural antithesis of what, up to that point had been Eddie’s lived experience. Indeed, he was talking about these places as places to live, as places that allowed you to live, to be one’s self; as if this was a natural and embedded part of his experience, in direct contrast to the experience of being homeless; since homelessness is very much regarded and treated as not being, as being marginalised, as being made abject from the society of those privileged enough to belong. But he was also very casually and assuredly talking about these places not simply as homes, not simply as sites of domestic or even familial habitation, but this with a supplementary significance; a supplementary significance that only emerges from the assuredness and establishment of one’s being through private property: that is, he was referring to these places as owned commodities; commodities that enhanced a broader portfolio of personal, social and economic status; as being integral to his lifestyle. And also about plural ownership; so that his stock of capital was increasing, with an international dimension. Six months ago, during the day, we were being frequently moved by the police from the public spaces that for most people characterised the city; and at night, Eddie was sleeping rough in car parks and in the doorways of the city’s shops. There had been nothing private. Nothing personal. The most personal space that Eddie had been able to claim, and even this, not for a very long time, had been his temporary occupancy of a room in a hostel for homeless men. But now, there he was, sitting at the restaurant table by the window with Lynn, sipping wine, talking in a relaxed, friendly, assured manner, about his property, as if he had never been homeless. There he was, smiling, tangible, affable, the incredible empirical embodiment, of what seemed to be such a rapid and miraculous transformation. It was so improbable that it seemed that it could only have occurred at some fictive, imaginary level of reality, where inexplicably, it, they, this course of events, had become misdirected or unstuck from whatever fictional bindings ordinarily hold such things in place, away from our normal experience. That’s what it felt like, a story that could not possibly be true, that managed to exist only because the characters and the fictional narrative fell by accident from the pages where they had originally been delineated, into the unshakably predictable and mundane reality that we have come to know as real life. It was this that was shocking. Eddie had crashed through realities. As Christopher Hill (1991) famously explained about the hugely unsettling nature of such events, they seem to turn the world upside down. The apparent rules and certainties by which we know ourselves, others and the world through which we navigate, are all put into question, or placed under erasure as Heidegger (1984) and Derrida (1997) used to

34   Eddie and some of his relationships say. And it is this placing under erasure of all the certainties by which we have previously known ourselves and what is real that is profoundly disturbing. And with it, at that moment, I felt I no longer really knew how to be and converse with Eddie. I didn’t know with any certainty or ease, what to say. Something obviously ridiculous, of course. There I was, standing in front of the table where he was sitting with Lynn, talking. But talking, I felt, very awkwardly, in a very contrived manner. I was by contrast hyper aware of what I shouldn’t talk about; which amounted to most of what we used to say to each other. What do you say? How do you account for such a thing? For the improbability of it all as well as it’s profound disturbance of what we take to be reality? In some ways it is difficult to resist Hume’s (1995) radically empirical analysis, from which it follows that we attribute a solid, stable reality within which we take our place and meaning, to little more substantial than a feeble but deterministic assumption, that our habitual experience is consonant with an a priori metaphysical reality, and that these things are necessarily so, and could therefore not be otherwise. The reason why it is so difficult to resist this Humean analysis, is because, Hume says, not only are the things and states of affairs that we might believe are so, fictional; but also that we too, are also similarly fictions, based on the same feeble but deterministic assumption, that we are what we are and could not be otherwise; which means and demands that any such identity, any such self, must continually, empirically, as a practice, make itself consonant with the identities within which it is situated; because if not, that self, as that identity, that it believes it knows, as itself, could not really be. All identities have a vested interest in believing in and being themselves … because that’s all they’ve got going on, it’s what they do, by definition, that’s what they are; and that’s all they are. So not only are we fictions; because we are fictions we can’t help but claim otherwise, because that claim, that we have to unceasingly make, is all that sustains us as ourselves. It’s not even as if we get any kind of choice about the matter; and worst of all, what we are claiming, what kind of people and who we are, is not even down to ourselves. Even that depends on our circumstances; circumstances that are not actually anyway ours; rather, we are theirs. Circumstances that bore and bear us; circumstances that our identities depend upon, and by which we are compelled and composed as who and what we are. Now unlike Nietzsche, whose reaction to this state of fictional affairs, is powerfully twofold: to be disgusted at the fictional identity’s fictional justification of itself; and in particular any moral or cultural justification of itself, that it behaves and abides and follows itself according to any kind of rightness, rather than a naked will to power, and must see the world in relation to this right. So that this is a visceral, corporeal, political, philosophical disgust; which, and this is the second component of his reaction, he then embraces, and in so doing sees more clearly, the diseased and interesting animal that is the self, which results in a radical form of situated re-­evaluation; well, that’s all very well, but my inclinations are at least at first, much more Humean, in the sense that I scrabble madly to piece together my identity, because as I remarked earlier, all identities have a vested interest in believing in and being themselves … because that’s all they’ve

Eddie and some of his relationships   35 got going on, since that’s all they are. Which means, of course, desperately trying to find the correct discourse that appropriately but sensitively situates me according to what that discourse represents. I need those props, those educated references, the academic world view to be true in order to figuratively prop up who I am, because in the end, that’s all I am. And uncannily appropriately, Nietzsche diagnosed this way of being as a symptom of weakness, engendered by a slave morality, a morality based on the slavery of the subject to the fictional moral and metaphysical justification of its being. Unsurprisingly, this kind of thing disgusted Nietzsche, so he embraced and ingested it as if he was addicted to the stuff. Which in a sense, he was; just as in another, we all are. Anyway, there was some awkwardness on my part, but I was really glad to see Eddie, and he said that he thought we might bump into each other whilst Lynn returned to France and he looked for a property, as he knew the area; after which, he’d return to Lynn in France for the rest of the summer. I did, indeed, see Eddie over the next few weeks, often very sporadically. He was staying in Crewe, and needed to get a train in order to visit Chester; so we were bound to bump into each other less frequently. When I did speak to him, and asked how things were going, his replies were inflected in a way that I couldn’t properly understand; so that when he said that visits to estate agents, searching through property brochures and viewing houses was a demanding way to spend what was an increasing amount of his time, I struggled to understand what was going on. Especially as, apart from these asides, which were delivered with an almost professional air of focussed but resigned, world-­weary application, Eddie also exuded a spirit of intense holiday alacrity amidst his homeless friends, with whom he was obviously intensely pleased to be back. Even towards John, despite the fact that they had been estranged just prior to Eddie’s disappearance into France, Eddie was confident, perhaps even a little loud, outgoing and happy. On one occasion, at least, he even managed to combine this paradoxical bricolage of homeless background with his more contemporary identity of international property magnate, by bringing these two seemingly contradictory aspects of being together, when he ushered a few of us, including one or two rough sleepers, into an estate agents’ shop in the middle of town, not far from the Day Centre, and dutifully requested the details of properties over a certain price, with the requisite number of bedrooms. What were we there for, his displaced retinue? Indeed, were we there for anything at all? Had we just wandered in to what could easily have been a chemist’s, in order to hang around whilst someone else took their methadone script or was seen by the pharmacist about some other of their meds? Except this time it was houses rather than drugs that were on the agenda? Or were we there, intentionally or otherwise, for something else? Perhaps for moral support? Perhaps to witness something else? A transition? Though there was certainly no transitioning to be had on that particular occasion, from that particular venue. Within seconds of making himself clearly understood, one of the women from behind one of the desks informed not just Eddie but all of us, that no such property of the type that Eddie had specified was currently available: it was a blunt indication that we all should leave. When I

36   Eddie and some of his relationships asked Eddie as we stepped into the street if that happened very regularly, the reply I received seemed to completely slide over the issue; and instead he remarked somewhat bitterly, how could Lynn expect him to do this, when the specifications with which she had sent him to do this work with were so vague? As the summer wore on, I began to notice two potentially disturbingly related characteristics that began to emerge with respect to Eddie. The first was an intensification of the holiday verve that surrounded Eddie when I saw him. He appeared to be the focus of attention in the groups he was with. This was partly because of the way he projected himself, louder than usual, but by no means obnoxious; happy, more extrovert than his former self, and confident. Sometimes, it seemed as if those who hung around with him were waiting for something to happen. Though it wasn’t just his more ebullient character that was attracting attention: Eddie also had money. The second characteristic was a growing dissatisfaction with Lynn, that was manifest not simply through what he said about the problems involved in looking for and setting up a deal to buy a house in the UK, but which was combined with the increasing amounts of time Eddie was spending in Chester. And then there were also rumours about Eddie and Lynn having arguments, difficult phone calls, and generally manifesting an air of tension. And then Eddie, already skinny, began to lose a lot of weight. The way that Eddie explained what was happening, when I did bump into him, was that he was back in Chester for a limited amount of time, and he was therefore going to enjoy the summer with his friends. He knew no one in France, apart from Liz, and so it was not simply natural, it was said as if this was an obvious right, indeed a kind of fated entitlement, that he kick back for the little amount of time he had in the place where he had lived most of his life, and spend these moments enjoying himself with his friends. Some of these friends I had never noticed before. Perhaps that was all that Eddie was doing, simply embracing his friends and fate over the short period of the summer. Then afterwards he would disappear into his new life. I was almost convinced; but it coincided with a very noticeable increase in the availability and use of heroin. I was alienated from whatever was going on, very much on the outside. So I began to put things together that I had noticed. Like Eddie and John, who previously weren’t getting on, now had an almost operatic kind of relationship, with lots of bluster but not much intimacy. But what did I know? Really? Then there was all that heroin. But there always was. Because if you wanted heroin or crack it was only ever a phone call and 20 minutes away. It just seemed there was more of it, and more of other drugs too. More people less discreetly doing them? Was that really true? How could you know? Though there was also the police raid on the house where John and Sophie were temporarily staying whilst Sophie was pregnant; and the police blocked off the road at both ends; and brought in dogs. But they found nothing, and John was released without being charged with anything at all. Then again, Chris Phoenix disappeared, owing a lot in back rent; but also wanted by the police in connection with drugs charges, and with a lot of money, so people said. So people said; which is the point, exactly. The motivation for the police raid, though, that takes some thinking about: the police knew

Eddie and some of his relationships   37 drugs operators of some significance had moved into the area, and were obviously looking for them; they were thought to be staying as friends in the same house that John and Sophie were temporarily living in, along with others. And then there was Young John. Young John White, not yet 20. No longer around, but when he was, talking about suicide. Ran up a drugs debt. Rumours abounded that he was shot to death in the back of a truck on account of it. And Eddie got thinner. He spent more time away from the others, in the company of other more desperate people like himself. I then saw him one September morning. He was skeletal. I was standing on one of the rows, looking towards the Cross in front of Saint Peter’s Church. He came up by the side of me, shuffling, weak. He began to talk, but stopped because he was crying. I watched the tendons and muscles around his jaw flex and spasm as his thin mouth opened; but it released only the faintest of sounds. He told me he had explained to Lynn that he was in trouble, but she didn’t want anything to do with him, that everything was over. He could understand why. He showed me the tracks in his arms, some ulcerated, some places where he had said he had tried to kill himself. But he couldn’t do it. He said his tolerance was so high, he just couldn’t do it. His body had got used to not just tolerating but living, as if in its natural environment, in all of that shit. I tried to talk to him some more, but he shook his thin head, and said he had to shuffle off and sell some more drugs. After that, I hardly saw him any more. Occasionally, I’d see him dealing crack and heroin, not really circumstances that lent themselves to anything other than rushed and furtive transactional discourse. I asked friends and other people who knew Eddie and were likely to see him more than I was, how he was doing. From the glimpses that I caught, and from what other people said, I was certain he didn’t have long to live. Not many weeks later whilst walking through town I saw Alex sitting down on one of the benches by the Cross. The summer was still holding; it was midmorning, and warm; I was typically uncomfortably hot and perspiring. I went over, put down my bag and sat next to him. Then he told me: he and Eddie had been shooting up in a hostel. Eddie was shooting into his groin on account of the blood vessels in his arms being fucked for shooting purposes. So he preps his load, undoes his jeans, and leans back and sideways to put the needle in: he’d been stabbing it into around the same spot for a while by then, and the place high on the inside of his leg, underneath his boxers had become tender, and ulcerated and very swollen. So instead of sticking the needle right in there, he feels around, and just to the side he finds a spot, then he hunches forward a touch more, and slowly slides the needle in. Then all the shit in Hell let fly. Because whilst Eddie had thought he was just injecting into his groin, he was actually jabbing his needle straight into his femoral artery. Over and over again. Which had become infected, and oozed pus, and was ulcerated. And when Eddie eased the tip of the needle in, the artery burst and blood shot out of his groin, spurting onto the wall behind where he was hunched over in the chair, with the needle sticking out of him. So Alex leapt onto Eddie’s red soaking lap to stop the blood pumping out

38   Eddie and some of his relationships of him, and got on his mobile for an ambulance, which didn’t get there for half an hour. Eddie’s in the Countess. They took his leg off yesterday. When we saw him in hospital he was sitting in a chair by his bed. As we came closer and he saw us, he waved what we could see was his stump where his leg used to be, an absence, a nothing, what was there, gone, the finality was unbelievable, and he began to cry, and shaking his head, said: ‘I’ve fuckin’ done it this time.’ He had. We talked a bit, then took him outside for some smokes. What did we talk about inside the hospital and out, on that visit? We talked about the mechanics, as you have to. How it happened, briefly, the operation, briefly, everything briefly; the meds, the next stages, getting about, all briefly. But not all at once, of course. We didn’t talk about the mechanics all in one block. Interspersed it between silences. And recollections about his mum. And that he’d told her, when he was admitted, that the next day they were taking his leg off, but she still wouldn’t come. We both thought, no one could blame her, what she’d had to go through. And now this, for how long could you see it coming? But none of us said it, of course. You don’t. All briefly. Snatches of this and that. To hopelessly fill in the hole. To impossibly replace. What’d gone. And other stuff. Other stuff that was never there anyway. Is it ever? Even though you want it to be. Maybe that want is all we ever have, all we ever are? And now, whenever now is? We’ve interviewed Eddie, several times. Those interviews are where some of this, some of what you’ve been reading, has come from. His fingers are fat and swollen from his damaged blood vessels. They’re gone. It’s all gone, for ever. He pulls his wheelchair into the doorway of a strip bar on one of the rows at night to sleep. He gets up there by way of a ramp near the Roman heritage centre. He sleeps there because the doorway is wide enough for his wheel chair. And it feels a bit safer because it’s above street level. In the winter when it was cold at night I’d sometimes go and find him. I was always surprised he was happy for me to buy him a burger and made no attempt to try to persuade me to give him the money so he could buy something for himself later, really heroin, after I’d gone. I saw him the other morning too, whenever the other morning was, in an alley near where I used to live, scoring; fucked, like so many, but closer to the end than many that we know.

2 Blowjob for a can of lager

Inevitably, we want to write about bodies. Inevitable to us because, as Agamben (1998) so dramatically detailed, what seems to become apparent when people live along the margins of society, and so by this process are divested of forms of identity that express their belonging, is that this is how they come to be represented: as bodies. Which is strange, but follows the logic we want to outline for you. It is strange because the mass identity of human being as bodies is, and has been historically, a reductive process. The genesis and development of bare life that Agamben describes, first in relation to classical Rome – wherein, for some, for those who do not belong, the political identity of human being is stripped away because it is unrecognised by the state, so that all of its markers of inclusion and belonging, such as rights otherwise guaranteed by law, are denied to individuals – has, in contemporary terms, an accelerating number of analogues, such as migrants and refugees, and has obvious parallels with regard to homeless people generally. It is in these circumstances that these people come to be represented as bodies. They are identified by the unwanted presence of their physical being. Their access to anything beyond the bare means of sustenance, beyond the state’s most reluctantly yielded resources of food, shelter and sanitation, but in lieu of education, work and other forms of social participation, expresses their being as a kind of absence; an absence that confirms their status, as the existence of their unwanted physical presence, in terms of the marginalised palpability of their flesh and the processes that sustain it, as bodies. And yet, this same object that emerges from this reductive process, which strips human being of its identity in terms of rights to belong, registering instead the (unwanted) body as the unit of existence, is also the locus of the individual self. The individual self, the expression of authentic subjectivity, the carrier of personal integrity is – and this is the strange nature of the logic we want to describe – also expressed through the body. Of course, the body in this sense is always perceived to be the personal singular; but even so is realised as an imaginary experience, which is more or less sustained by the position it occupies in relation to its relative belonging. The body therefore always describes a political condition. And yet, such a political perspective seems to somehow elude the body itself; though, of course, this is not the case. Quite why and how this condition exists, we would now like to explore.

40   Blowjob for a can of lager Across two sections, nestled against each other, of Esposito’s (2015) remarkable book, Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View, Esposito makes the following interesting observations: that language simultaneously represents and annihilates the thing itself; and also that, ‘In the modern world things are annihilated by their own value’. And in a way, the assumption is that across the two nestling sections, that the representation of the thing itself annihilates the thing itself through that act of representation, and that the value accorded to the thing also annihilates the thing itself, are somehow the same; or if they are not quite the same, then are related in some very intimate way; by an intimacy that is derived from their beings’ being simply differently inflected emanations of the same ontological property. Let us take, first of all, how Esposito tells us that language simultaneously represents and annihilates the thing itself. Esposito notes that it is through language – or any system of representation – that we are able to attend to and know that which is being represented, or the thing itself, in whatever form the thing itself might take, such as the name that indicates a specific person, or some aspect of their being, or even an abstract concept. If, however it is through language – or any system of representation (including, importantly, that of communicating ourselves unto ourselves) – that we are able to become aware of the thing itself, and what it is or might be; that same principle of representation also always stands in for and takes the place of the thing itself; so that the thing itself is always absent; and in its absence, the thing itself, its being itself, is never known. As Derrida (1978) famously reports, this means that we never encounter and really know whatever the thing itself might be, as its presence is continuously deferred through the intercession of an endless series of representatives, from which it is, of course, different, and ultimately alienated; but nevertheless expresses what Nietzsche (and Freud, though with some differences) would call a drive to be that thing that always eludes it, namely the thing itself. In this way the thing itself, even including when the thing itself is the body, is for ever lost to us; and yet despite, well, actually, because, it will always be beyond our apprehension, it beckons us, irresistibly, towards an assurance of it being, and therefore of it being somehow there, but in a place that is inaccessible, and indicated only by means of its various representations, which also, inevitably, register its absence. Whilst, though, we might assent with Esposito that representation in this way annihilates the thing itself, by rendering it in such a way that it is perpetually absent; we should also acknowledge that it is simultaneously only through this rendering of being’s apparition, that the essence of its ontological possibility is composed and registered, and in so doing designates the systematic desire, the drive to be and apprehend, that characterises the thing itself. But what is this second point that Esposito makes, this second point that nestles up to the first, and is assumed to be part of the same ontological weft from which the first point is also stitched together? It is that, ‘In the modern world things are annihilated by their own value’. The value that things are ascribed by the market, in a sense that has obvious Marxist overtones that Esposito draws out (but let us be more general than that, so let us say the world

Blowjob for a can of lager   41 around you and the position in it that you or some other thing inhabits) is determined not by itself, but instead by the surrounding world; and more particularly that part of the world that you or some other thing else that we might be interested in, inhabits. So that, in a way that is very similar to how language and representation annihilates the thing itself, the value accorded to the thing, since it is not determined by itself, also negates any intrinsic identity that the thing itself might have. Or almost. Because there is something of a slippage here. Because even though the discourse about value and the thing operates around the assumption of the thing itself, what we are really talking about, in order to make this discourse work, is not taking this as an assumption; which, without the thing itself being an assumption, then allows there to be an assumed distance between the condition of value, which is produced through the interactions and rhythms of the world, and the value that is accorded to things by these interactions and rhythms, as if that or any other thing already existed, and was therefore, prior to its value being determined for it, in that state already as itself, with its own intrinsic value. This then allows the conventional arguments, explaining this situation away as alienation, to flow. But alienation from what? Though before we begin to answer that question, I am going to say that I have every sympathy for the conventional alienation line, in many of its different incarnations; and I have no doubt that this understanding resonates in political and ontological terms that are felt all over town, every day, all the time, and that this has more or less always been the case. But you still have to ask: if the thing itself is actually forged through the interactions and rhythms of the world, in other words, through its complex and diverse representational mechanisms, such as language; what was there, prior to the operations of these mechanisms that forged the thing itself into existence in the first place? I mean, it might be disquieting, it might also be very inconvenient, but you still have to ask in order to find out what’s there. And do you know what is? Nothing. Well, almost nothing. So fine an almost, however, that it is, in itself, undetectable. That’s right. Of itself, there are only traces, made by those things that represent it, indicating, but indicating what? Indicating, well, an assumption of its being, of its ontological self, no longer – but assumed once to be – present. And it is this same assumption, or nub of assumptions that work in concert, indicating a prior, original condition, that is then perceived to be subsequently overwritten by representation, and overtaken by the value ascribed to it, which then becomes the locus, justification and repository of alienated being. Alienated being is therefore always being that was once being itself, but no longer is; and involves the subject registering this absence by looking back, hoping to see beyond a point that is no longer perceivable, to where being itself, now lost, was, accordingly assumed to be at one time somehow present. This deeply nostalgic and ineradicable turn – back, towards an irretrievable time and place of wholeness, of belonging and self, which can now only ever designate the rending absence of these things – inevitably carries with it not only the sense of loss that accompanies this absence, but also, potentially, a sense of lost justice, of being as discarded authenticity, and of being corrupted as its truth is

42   Blowjob for a can of lager fabricated for purposes that systematically disregard and are careless of the unique and impermanent thing itself. To refer to this as a deeply nostalgic and ineradicable turn is the antithesis of trivial concern. And it’s not like there’s a choice: there is no being rid of the drive to configure understanding and being as if it were in relation to the thing itself, however distant and lost and inaccessible its presence may appear to be. It is not a matter of being rid of this drive by having the requisite strength of character, the institutional determination, or the collective historical and social fortitude to reject its irresistible trajectory towards being and understanding as things in and of themselves. This deeply nostalgic and ineradicable turn – represented perhaps by a glance back to what might have been, an historical assessment of how things ought to have turned out, the recollection of what once was but is now gone – is not a condition that can simply be shrugged off. Nor is it simply a problematic state to which one can learn to be reconciled. Of course, we can saturate ourselves in the theory. We can do the thinking. We can follow the arguments, and regard the place where we have been taken. So take me, for example. I genuinely believe in this stuff. As very uncomfortable as that might be. But when push comes to shove, and especially as the pushing and shoving becomes more extreme; so the tendency to become ever more concerned about the thing itself, whatever that might be, as some expression of who and what you believe you are or represent, becomes ever more tellingly important as it teeters under stress. You might bring any number of recognisable scenarios to mind, such as those times when the police turn up completely unexpectedly and there is just nowhere else to go; or the occasions when you have to attend a meeting where it becomes apparent that your employment is about to be terminated; or even worse, like the moment you realise your  loved ones have become subject to serious illness or distress: the kind of desperation and reaction that these common sorts of incidents entail is one that overwhelmingly involves some kind of radical questioning if not thorough undermining of whom and what you appear to be. It’s your life that you can see going down the tubes, not some more or less arbitrary collection of Nietzschean drives, arranged by the world into which you have been thrown, and not by yourself, so that you are actually already dispossessed, but leaving you with a consciousness located somewhere along the illusion of your necessary and essential being. That’s never how it ever goes down. At least, not at the time of occurrence, anyway. In retrospect, perhaps when the sentencing is done, and you begin doing your time, you will get to realising that when you get out, everything will be changed, your home and family gone, your career in ruins, and that who and what you are has been significantly redefined, and inevitably not as you might have wanted it to be; and that, inescapably, nothing about what you thought was your being, was, or is, inevitable, necessary, essential; and that you, whatever that might have been, are lost. Because the funny thing is, and just as the theory predicts, the more that the integrity of the thing itself is threatened, the more intense the questioning and sense of loss, as well as a retrenching of the mechanisms that hold the thing itself in place, tends to be. We see this all the

Blowjob for a can of lager   43 time as ways of being appear close to jeopardy, expressed across every level that you can imagine, but most obviously at the level of the personal, family, community, and nation state being. Whilst these are all rather extreme examples, they indicate a general condition, which is that: all of us, all the time – indeed, this is an institutional condition – repair and reassert, through the continuous practice of being ourselves, the necessary fiction of who and what we believe we are. And the reason being, because that’s all we have. It’s what – it’s all – we do. The processing of applications for British citizenship, for example, and the more or less continuous bureaucratic and political exercise of its associated machinery, in which we are all implicated, practices and affirms the ontology of national belonging and identity. And every moment that we speak, shop, think, walk, eat, shit, breathe, remember, feel cold, get dressed, and simply are, we practise and affirm being ourselves. Obviously, the more resources that you have at your control – the greater your cultural capital within the established order – then the more secure your practice and affirmation of being is going to be; and, too, the better equipped you are to fend off any questions, assaults, encounters, challenges from which everyday being is composed, that might otherwise reveal the fabricated nature of whatever identity it is, by which you find your place in the world. Let’s take for example, the blowjob. And not just any blowjob, but a specific blowjob. A blowjob for a can of lager. But first of all, we’ve got to situate it. Even the most ethereal and sublime of blowjobs has got to occur somewhere. Even if, as is always also the case, this somewhere is in the domain of the imaginary, as realised in some specific subject in some way. The reason why we like to phrase things in this way, with the subject being the specific site of the realisation of the imaginary, is because it emphasises the role of the subject as being subject to the Symbolic Order; it situates the subject as the site of this realisation; and occurs through the rupture of the Symbolic Order in the subject as the subject’s imaginary; and is thus an expression of the way that the subject is articulated by the Symbolic Order through the imaginary; providing in this way the structure which determines the limits and opportunities of subjective agency. Desire, within this broadly Lacanian schema, is therefore always, with respect to the thing itself, engendered by the gap between that which is supposed to be, as its self-­determined ontologically necessary identity, and the empirical experience of how this identity is contingently forged through the incessant workings of the Symbolic Order. So for each object, each thing itself, each body, there is a double registration of its being, perhaps even a double being: there’s its imaginary eruption in the ontology of the subject, where the thing itself is indelibly imprinted, but so being is for ever deferred, for ever unobtainable; though the distance between it, its assumption within the imaginary and – here is the second register of being – its empirical expression, can be more or less effectively misperceived, with this misperception held in place by its position and investment within the Symbolic Order, and their daily political, social, economic and cultural expressions. Like we said, earlier, this isn’t a case of voluntarism, of being

44   Blowjob for a can of lager able to come to terms, of knowing how to side step the problem, and somehow being able to hook directly into the main vein of the thing itself, whatever that might be, including, yourself, any self, or anyone else, or a blowjob. Because just as much as anything else, a blowjob is also a kind of double; which is not so much two blowjobs for the price of one, but its imaginary orientation and its empirical expression. Let’s deal with the second of these first. First off then, this is a blowjob that is part of a process of exchange, namely a blowjob for a can of lager. And you might then argue that all blowjobs are part of a system of some kind of exchange, especially perhaps in the most loving and also mutually sexually charged of relationships. Since at the very least there is the continuous exchange of the pleasure that the blower may receive by rendering, in the blowee, an exquisite ecstasy through the nature of the blowjob that the blowee is delivering, or any variation that you might care to think about of this equation, up and down an erotic scale of your own choosing. And then there might be other, to some minds perhaps less honourable, more politically contingent, not so sensuously pure forms of exchange that might include a blowjob, including: I know what I want, and if I give him some of this, then I sure as Hell am getting mine; as well as, it kind of seems on offer, and I know it drives him wild; as well as the more blatant, I’ve sort of had enough, and this will get him off really quick. Yes, we are happy to admit that these and an endless number of other scenarios could include the blowjob as being integral to a system of exchange, of being the instance of a practice in an economy that involves the body; such that the meaning of that economy is derived from how the blower and the blowee are situated, reflecting any power relations and any structural conditions that are in play. So that, for example, any inequalities might variously be reinforced or reversed, any identities entrenched or transgressed, any fantasies confirmed or denied; but for each and every modulation of these and any other variables, there is always some referent, and whatever the assumed identity of that referent might be, its assumption depends upon and is articulated, as itself, by the same Cartesian neo-­liberal imaginary. Wherein the economy of being is organised around the assumption of identities being themselves, and thereby have the natural inalienable right to be as such, that is to say to be subject to the place where their identity is so regarded by the Symbolic Order – the Symbolic Order as manifest, for example, through its discourses, by which it articulates your mouth and what your mouth says for each specific situation; by the range of choices and routes that it organises for you to participate in being; and by its positions that you adopt as your own and the practices that it carries out through your body, including those in relation to the blowjob. And for this not to be so, within this Cartesian neoliberal landscape, for some subject to be precluded in this articulation of themselves, as being whom and what they are, then that would be an act that limited or precluded their agency; provoked by an act of nonconformity that distances the subject from being according to this imaginary order. This is because the Cartesian neoliberal imaginary landscape is defined and populated by individual identities that are identified by themselves, by individual identities that exercise the

Blowjob for a can of lager   45 essence of their defining subjectivity by continuously evolving towards – as an act of realising your authentic self – empirical expressions of their imaginary essential being. There are obvious and significant parallels here with Plato’s articulation of Socrates’ ontological understanding of the relationship between the individual, by which he meant the Athenian citizen, and the State. Most importantly, those who are not Athenian citizens are denied any rights that are accorded to this identity, and so, by not belonging, exist along the political and economic margins of being. As has for some very long time been noted: Plato identifies the interests of his ideal state with the objective interests of its citizens (so they are not independent), and in his harmonious world, metaphysics, moral psychology, and political organization combine to ensure that those interests need never override individual mundane interests (not superior) for they never conflict: they coincide. (Neu, 1971) Hence in its political orientation, the withdrawal of the State from the lives of its subjects, whose identities are dependent upon their economic and social independence, as individuals, families and communities, and whose key characteristics are based around the condition of belonging, but are otherwise irrelevant, with belonging securing rights that support life within this established order (such as the ability and right to work, to be accommodated, to be part of the empirical expression of neoliberalism’s imaginary being). But let’s suppose that you find yourself living in classical Athens, but are not, as it were, an Athenian citizen. Or let’s suppose that you find yourself living in a contemporary urban environment, set unyieldingly within a Cartesian neoliberal landscape, but for some set of reasons do not belong. Where are you going to exist, what place is there where you can be? And the answer is, that there is no real place, no designated place, nothing that matches your identity; because the rules of the game, as we have seen, mean that no real identity can be accorded to you, so that it is unregistered, unperceived, disregarded by the State. And this is absolutely relevant to the blow job for a can of lager. Both in relation to place, as well as in relation to its empirical expression of being. Because it means that the resources, and not simply the important material resources, such as having a job, living in a house of some kind, being able to afford food and a social life, but also other resources that are integral to acceding to and maintaining an identity commensurate with having access to these material resources as being your right within the State, such as being educated, being orientated in some directions rather than others, having distinct areas of your life within which you are able to operate with relative ease, none of these things are available to you. And these are the things that confirm or disconfirm within the Cartesian neoliberal landscape what your identity is; these are the things, practices and networks that stitch you to the Symbolic Order; and this is the means by which you are able to proceed through life – but not on the margins. So let’s think, then, where this

46   Blowjob for a can of lager blowjob, a blowjob for a can of lager, is going to take place. And the point about resources, or the lack of them, becomes immediately apparent. Because this blowjob is engendered through a prodigious lack, just like the famous Lacanian lack. But before we think about the obvious ways that this is manifested, such as lack of alcohol, and lack of money, we need to remind ourselves of other expressions of lack within which these are nested, including the lack of a family capable of providing support from the moment that Beth was born, lack of good mental health, lack of education, so that we can gain some understanding of the extent of its realisation. Indeed, so prodigious is this lack that it is has no resources with which to afford accommodation, and so occurs outside: outside, towards the end of November in the early evening, at just before eight. It’s interesting that Beth’s body – Beth, that’s her name, the homeless person, who, in around 30 minutes at about half-­past-eight, will become the blower – has become the demonstrable site of this extensive lack, and is now situated on the edge of the city, behind Chick ‘o’ Land, where the big waste bins are housed, on Russell Street. This has long been a location for homeless drinkers: a recess in a cut-­through, with, on one side, one of the main arteries running out of town, and on the other, the canal side. On the main artery out of town side, there are virtually never any pedestrians. The canal side is host to a number of pubs, and restaurants, so by contrast to the opposite side of the cut-­ through, there are often people in this area. But why would you want to cut through from there, along Russell Street? Are you really the type of person who, having got dressed up to drink and meet friends in one of the trendiest parts of the city, with its own range of attractive dining options, is instead going to want to cut through to eat from Chick ‘o’ Land? And whilst there’s street lighting at the end and part way up the cut-­through; initially, at night time, from the canal side, Russell Street looks dark and unfriendly. But this is where Beth’s body, along with other homeless drinkers, is located. And in about half an hour, this is the area where the blowjob will take place. It’s an area that already, just before eight o’clock, is pressing itself into what will happen, is shaping its circumstances, forging the nature of what will be the crucial proposition, and is writing the significance about the nature of the blowjob encounter. It’s a hidden public place; or at least a semi-­hidden public place; or is a public place where things can be semi-­hidden; so that the thin grey light – its weak luminescence depressed almost into complete darkness by the shadows of the bins, is going to make barely visible the insistent repetitive, jarring motion – can be pulled over the exposed cock that will buck into Beth’s open mouth. Because without these properties, the night, the bins, the space organised into shadows that partition the area into successive places of obscurity, its location on the margins of human being, this blowjob would not happen. It’s almost as if, as the night pulls and settles itself into Russell Street, in conspiracy with other parts of the city, the area gathers its actors into the cut though and stages their actions, and so writes upon them whom and what they are. So this is how Beth arrives. She’s spent the first part of the early evening near McDonald’s on Foregate Street, begging, in order to get enough money together for a bottle of sherry. But

Blowjob for a can of lager   47 anything would do. Sherry, you see, does have a number of advantages, it being cheap, relatively strong, having a familiar palatable taste, is reliably unproblematic to get down, has the capacity to get you wrecked, and lasts a lot longer than a can of beer. But anything, really, would do. The problem is that, and this problem has grown ever since Beth conceived of her plan, the reason why Beth conceived her plan about getting herself a bottle of sherry in the first place, the reason why this course of action seemed to her like a good idea, propelling her along Northgate Street, then turning her left at the Cross, and down into Foregate Street where it brings her to a halt outside McDonald’s, is that this has not quite been Beth’s own plan, it was never really quite Beth’s own idea. It was more of a compulsion, really. A compulsion that introduced itself at multiple, vague areas of her being. Like the taste in her mouth. And that not so much a taste, but again, an absence of a taste. Or what, is always really, the absence of the taste. The taste being itself not so much a taste, but a taste that registers a particular sensation: the emergence of the wall of alcohol blankness, up against which you can only barely feel yourself. And the absence because it always occurs like that at some specific time and place, though it’s also always there all of the time anyway, in the not too distant background. And it quickly escalates, the absence, from being a vague awareness, located around the middle of your tongue, and towards the back of the roof of your mouth, into something more pervasive, where it’s accompanied by a dryness, even though your mouth is also secreting a metallic and slightly acidic tasting saliva that now coats your entire tongue. A restlessness, that’s what’s also happening. A restlessness that invades your entire body. And an incorrigible dissatisfaction with everything. You’d like that to stop. You know it’s you. You’ve got a bit of a headache starting, both temples. A dried-­out throbbing. If only you could slow things down a bit. God, you need that sherry. Because you’re sweating now, and cold. Nausea will come to get you soon. But first the shakes. Which is why and how your body has brought you here. To just opposite ‘Makees’. To get that sherry to make it stop. And then the wall of alcohol will come too. So what you gonna’ do? Your options: limited. No money. No recognisable qualifications. No history of employment, though instead a long history of mental illness. And here comes the nausea. So your options boil down to this: settling on a spot, squatting down and asking passers-­by for change; or doing spot requests, that is approaching strangers and asking them if they can spare 20 pence, or something similar. Some people prefer the settling on a spot long-­haul, but it’s fucking cold already. Plus, the long haul is OK if you’ve got even some cardboard to sit on, and have maybe some blankets to pull round you, but Beth has nothing. It’s busy now, too, so there’s nowhere to sit. And you’re vulnerable if you’re on a spot, you take a lot of stick sometimes from the public, and you’re literally a sitting target for the police too. So even though she would like to sit down, because of the nausea, her pounding dry head, the shivers and the shakes, Beth goes for the doing spot requests option. It’s about six o’clock. Because Christmas is approaching, so the street lights are up, and because of the hour, when people leave the city after their work is over, and because of the location,

48   Blowjob for a can of lager it’s on the main route to the railway station, there’s considerable footfall in front of Makees. In the mostly grey but tinged with flashes of neon shop light, Beth approaches strangers, mostly on their way out of the city, asking them if they can spare any change. If only Beth’s appearance was a little more prepossessing. If only she looked like a romantically drawn street urchin. If only she looked like someone who wasn’t chronically homeless. And was not very ill. In the most unsavoury of ways. She is visibly unsteady on her feet. The skin on her face is grey and oily with cold sweat. Her fingers tremble. The strangers she approaches avoid Beth’s eyes, which anyway look down: no one, neither Beth nor any of the people she approaches, wants to engage at the level of being beyond an appeal to economic transaction. Excuse me, sir, could you spare any change? But what has Beth got to contribute in order to affect a return, of even a very little money? Well, almost nothing. This almost nothing is precisely the same as the almost nothing with which we began. This almost nothing being simply the assumption, the assumption of being, the assumption of its identity, of being itself: of Beth, herself. And in order to preserve this assumption, you need resources. Because it is these resources that will provide an affirmation of who and what you are. And it is with these resources, such as friends, money, social position, and the like that you represent, negotiate and make your way in the world. As well as them providing the means by which you are able to engage in the various economies of being that define belonging; they also provide a buffer, or, if you like, a distance between the means of your engagement, and the assumption of yourself. So that it is not you who is exchanged, or some part of your being, but instead, something that represents you, something and that you have at your disposal. Ontologically, this is what, for example, money facilitates. Its practical property, of acting as a common medium of exchange, inevitably brings with it what Marx and others have described as a form of alienation, a distance, between the assumption of your identity, as yourself, and, in this example, the surplus of yourself (in the form of labour – of any kind – that you in some way own) in the form of money, that you can exchange, and which allows you to be an integral part of the Symbolic Order within which all of this is situated. Unlike traditional interpretations of Marx with regard to alienation, where alienation is generally viewed as a bad thing, on many grounds, but principally because at root it separates the worker from their worked product (whatever those things might be) through the mediation of the Symbolic Order of capitalism, which turns them into subjects; from our perspective, there are massive disadvantages when we do not have the resources that affect a distance between the assumption of ourselves and how we represent ourselves by means of our ability to deploy them effectively, in return for an affirmation of who and what we are, even when this means something as trivial as being able to go into the Tesco Metro and buy a bottle of sherry. Because when this happens, even in order to get something as trivial as a bottle of sherry, the only resource you have is the assumption, the not very well protected, insecure assumption, of yourself, of who and what you are. And since the condition of being yourself is both all of

Blowjob for a can of lager   49 what you have got, it’s literally all that you are, and at the same time is precisely what you do not have, it being an assumption, held in place and sustained by forces that are quite different to who and what you are, it becomes all the more precious, all the more significant, all the more wistfully troubling and incessantly demanding; since your being itself, your true being is, as we have seen, always something that is already, deeply nostalgically absent. Of course, belonging, having money, a job, a family, all provide you with resources that you can use to distance yourself from and cover up this fact. But in relation to their lack? What do you use to engage in an economy of exchange, an economy of being, when all that is available to you is, indeed, the abject demonstration of your lack? Because that’s what it boils down to, nothing other than a demonstration of your lack. That’s all you have to engage with the world, your lack, that’s what you present, the tragic absence of yourself, your identity lost, gone, sometimes barely glimpsed, that’s what you beg with, your abject emptiness. Which is why what people notice about you is not an identity, but instead that your clothes obviously don’t fit, and are old and dirty. That your long hair is long for the simple reason that it has not been cut. Glancing at your greasy, sweaty face, they fear that your body probably smells. No one wants to get close to that. No surprise then that after about an hour-­and-a-­half Beth has managed to score exactly no change. It’s colder now, and she feels and looks much worse than when she started begging. Her body has taken on no sherry. So she’s fucked. Which is why, quite soon now, she’s going to get fucked in the mouth. So this is what happens next: It’s probably about a five-­minute walk from Foregate Street to the cut-­through of Russell Street. Beth is going to go via the underpass and up part of the City Road. She needn’t go that way, but there’s the prospect of a bit of begging in the subway, and a bit more with any people coming to or going from the station on the City Road. Scores nothing. Getting colder. Really tired, too. But jumpy and swimming in nausea. Nausea, now there’s a term. Nausea’s like your churning, sweating, vomitous stomach has colonised – as the warm salty waves of its bilious undulations wash through your body – your entire being. That churning, vomiting sensation floods into your mouth and the sides of your head, whilst the rest of your cranium pitches into a contracting and expanding sweat, like a tightening and loosening band fastened all the way around your head. How the fuck are you going to fill in for that kind of lack? Beth’s body knows. Because at the moment, well, there’s no counselling, and nowhere to be counselled, and basically nowhere to go, so nothing really, to fill in and fend off where the nausea’s come from. Apart, that is, as Beth’s body knows, alcohol. Except – and this is the last stop it knows in its alliance of being with the city, or more accurately in its alliance of being within the city’s margins – so far there’s been none. You see plenty of cars’ headlights coming in and out of town along the dark A51, but no bodies. Were you to see other bodies, and you’re thinking now about bodies that belong, because standing up, moving forward, getting one foot to go in front of another is a dreadful, draining, sweating effort at this point; and that’s why, for less than a second, you are thinking about bodies clothed in the

50   Blowjob for a can of lager warm assurance of no need for human kindness; because were you to see just one, then this would simultaneously provide some reassurance but not enough to override its troubling meaning. Because if you were to blackout now, then no one’s really going to know, no one’s going to be around; so at least a warm body that belonged, a warm body making its way home, or from home, such a warm body might see you. Though then again, how often have such warm bodies that belong, pissed on you in the dark, pissed on you into a warm urine splattered wakefulness as you’ve been sleeping rough? The thing being though, encounters with such people, were they to notice you, now, at around twenty-­to-eight, crossing the A51 in the thin black light, then what would they see? Anything? As Lacan (1972) was fond of pointing out, we have a vested interest in the notion of our integral selves, and of them being in the Symbolic Order where they are supposed to fit: this is not really an orientation with much regard for lack. And it is, after all, dark now; quite a dark place to be. Russell Street is just ahead, on your left. So you’re turning into Russell Street now, and what you need to imagine is this: that it’s a bit like returning home. Maybe after a hard day. You’re completely beat, remember. You just have to crash. Somewhere completely familiar and safe. Putting your key in the lock of the front door. Barely noticing, because it is part of your everyday routine: the special way you have to twist your key; the wallpaper as you step across the threshold; the space where you drop your bag; the sound of the central heating; everything you take for granted, everything good, indifferent and bad in your surroundings that simply get subsumed under the fact of being you. Recall that feeling now, of thank God at last the day is over, I’ve made it back, I’m home, and can be myself and just chill, as you take your first steps beyond the bright street lights of the A51 and into the cut-­ through, where you have been just as many times as you have in your real life returned home. Recall that feeling of your routinely reassured self, as you proceed along the increasing darkness of Russell Street to the alley where the bins are housed; because now, at this exact moment, that feeling met with this reality, means all of the good stuff, all the reassuring stuff, about returning home, has gone for ever. So that, each step that you take towards the bins, is also another step further away from what you have never had. How can you not know this? How can you not know that each step that your chronically homeless body takes, is also irrevocably another step away from inhabiting a space where it belongs? Something you have no choice but to live through. So the important thing you have to do now, as you get closer to the bins in the alley, is to somehow manage the experience of this perpetual loss, and try to exile it from your consciousness, as you get to know the negative space which is left. Because that negative space, opened up and arranged in the penumbra of the onto-­urban geography of Russell Street, won’t go away. And anyway, at the moment, you need it. What could have been; what other people, people who belong, have; what’s supposed to be; simply other aspects of the imaginary of being; like the familial imaginary; the economic imaginary; the social imaginary; the corporeal imaginary; who and what you essentially might have become: gone. Actually,

Blowjob for a can of lager   51 never really, as you know, there for you in the first place. But somehow, as we have already described, this deeply nostalgic and ineradicable turn, this lack that remains, of what could have been you, is something you will always have to more or less cope with. It’s what your alcoholic body living in the margins of the city has become. Though both cruelly and typically for you, yours is an alcoholic body lacking alcohol. Which is why it’s brought you here. You can hear Kissinger, Ian Henry Kissinger, registered blind, physically disabled, mentally troubled, ranting in the dark alley long before you can see him, bobbing and whirling, his erratic movements making as much sense as the gobbets of language that he is spitting and spraying into the night. Someone, Kerry, recognises who you are as you emerge out of the shadows of the cut-­ through: ‘Alright Beth, what you been up to?’ ‘Nothin’. Been beggin’.’ The road and pavement where you are standing are blanched with cold, so that they appear paler, even in the semi-­darkness, than they would normally be, as if the colour has been frozen out of them. ‘Tryin’ to earn enough for a sherry, haven’t I. Got sweet FA.’ In many ways this is a typical conversation, engendered by the discourse of chronic homelessness. Typical because the discourse by which you speak – as it animates your mouth and tongue, and forms the words and phrases that you say – is characterised by absence. What have you been doing? And you reply that you’ve been doing nothin’, even though you’ve been begging, because it counts as nothing, since nothing occurred, other than your tiredness and cold. The experience of your being is now stacking up, negatively, against you. The absence of money, and its particular absence with regard to yourself, has brought you to this semi-­hidden place; a place wherein penury compels its penurious subjects, in lieu of coin, to exchange some aspect of themselves for what they want and need. Because there are practical reasons why this cut-­through is such a draw for a certain group of the homeless community. One of them being the close proximity of a convenience store on the A51 that does not discriminate against homeless people: it sells alcohol, including super-­strength lager. What could be better? A place, on the margins of the city, where the police never go, and you have never been moved on from, where you can almost guarantee, during certain hours of the day and night, that a few other people like you will congregate; a bleak place, an alley, but not exposed, so where you can conspire for a while, with your surroundings, to be, by being hidden in its shadows. And basically, your presence there amounts to a question that you ask, not so much to an individual, but to that place where you are, in the alley. In response to which, Kissinger, who has been off on one, obsessing on an assault he suffered the previous night at a hostel from someone doing a ‘Safe Seat’, insisting with growing determination that he wasn’t going to put up with it again, is jagged out of the wound he has been discoursing on, and catches hold of the edge of the gist of what you have said. There must be some order to the words flying out of his mouth and into the night; they couldn’t really fly out of his mouth all at once; though that’s how it seems. Distinct nouns, spat improperly coalesced into the cut-­through,

52   Blowjob for a can of lager revealing gobbets of barely conscious insight: your name; drink; fuck all; who. Causing him quickly next to stutter: ‘Have you got a drink, Beth?’ And there, it’s done. Because the words that have been articulated through Kissinger’s mouth, the words, formed into a question, which on one level it is understandably appropriate to ask, on another level is a telling declaration about the parlous contingency of Beth’s being. A statement that she needs a drink, and a declaration that she hasn’t got one. Which could have been a plain statement of ontological fact, held in place by a bleak empirical reality, and nothing more than that, a headline about her exposed vulnerability. But it isn’t. It’s more. And that’s because Zack, a tall and skinny, hard as nails ex-­tax collector from Belfast – though it’s been very many years since Zack, who is now against all odds around halfway through his fiftieth year, got sliced up and was lucky to make it out alive, was in his home town, and he sure as Hell is never returning – has just made his presence felt, emerging from the other end of Russell Street, and is feeling mean. And the more he thinks about this, the more opportunity it’s granted, the meaner his meanness becomes. For Zack it’s like being in one of those wildlife programmes, set in Africa, down at a waterhole, where you – vulnerable – and all the other animals are drinking, with your vulnerability exposed and immediately noticed by Zack, with Zack being a very mean lion. You already wish Zack wasn’t there, and you’ve only just noticed him. Because you already know, even now, what’s coming. And there isn’t really going to be any way to stop it. Zack being Zack, Zack is going to have some money. Zack lends money, on the understanding it will be returned, and that return will include interest. The taunting, playing with his prey, softening it up, letting it know that it’s already fucked in order to ramp up the fear before the final blow is going to be delivered – which Zack telegraphs ahead so that his prey can already see it coming – starts immediately. And he makes this clear with a seemingly very simple question: ‘Is that you, Beth?’ Which, of course, is not really a question at all. And that’s because the only reason to ask when he already knows, when he can already see who and what and how you are, is to deadeningly confirm, principally to yourself, that no escape is possible. Because, ‘Is that you, Beth?’ really means: I’m here; so there’s no way out, not from what’s coming; because you know and I know, indeed, we all know, that you’re a desperate alcoholic; and you have no means of getting alcohol; which is why you’re here, to scrounge a drink, the best, but in the end, any way you can. And just to confirm, and this is the part he likes the most, that all of this is true, that your situation cannot be commuted to something less desperate, but not because he’s some obsessive empiricist, more because he likes to demonstrate, in a razor-­wire cutting through exposed flesh kind of way, that in his presence there’s no way out, no mitigation, he comes and stands uncomfortably close to you. ‘Has no one got a drink for you, Beth?’ And he shakes his head, slowly to demonstrate how clearly he understands the graveness of the situation, saying, in his own way, that it is grave; so grave that you’re going to have to get down on your knees, just over there, between the furthest and furthest from last bins, and gag on his cock for a can of strong lager.

Blowjob for a can of lager   53 Zack, you see, has a protracted history of his own raw problems, which helped him to develop his special skill set, his special way of being. They help him to use the environment, to express who he is, to confirm what’s what. And that’s why, any second now, Beth’s open mouth is going to become the place where all of this is expressed, all of this, as the location, the bare life receptacle, for all this shit, in return for a can of lager. Her lips, over which some of this shit will be deliberately ejaculated, encircling an opening to her body, into which the rest of it will be shot; her lips, soft like yours, in another three minutes or so, will be bruised against her broken front teeth, by the sinewy-­meaty friction of that thrusting cock. Where are you sleeping tonight? Do you think about the taste of that cock in your mouth? Of any of the cocks that have used your mouth? Best not to. No. That’s what the lager and sherry are for.

3 Cut away

This chapter borrows from the tradition of the ‘cut-­up’, which Burroughs (2010) confirmed brings to the writer the collage. Diverse and fragmentary, the ‘cut-­up’ can be seen as a literary assemblage, which draws together unlikely or unexpected elements. In juxtaposing the seemingly random and often without transition, an anthology unfolds unpredictably as ideas and thoughts coalesce in one pulsating place. Recalling the democratic narrative which Barthes (1968) extolled; the uncensored wisdom of the cut-­up is used here to construct an account of the lives of homeless women we came to know. The cut-­up here is symbolic of liberation, as in a very small way, it brings back from the margins the homeless women we met and places their stories here. Intact, their voices are not edited; their thoughts are not cut, merely cut amongst the rest. … a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author God) but a multi-­dimensional space in which a variety of writings, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (Barthes, 1968, p. 146) Lydenberg (1978) observed that cut-­up prose is disrupting in that it challenges customary ideas of narrative and logical sequence, however Ardoin (2015, p.  112) accepted the emancipatory nature of the cut-­up text in releasing the writer from the sole responsibility to make meaning, towards a much more egalitarian perception. Barthes advocated the idea of a democratic account and recognised the diminishing authority of the writer whose last vestiges of power, he said, rested in unrest. The anarchic narrative emerges as pieces encounter each other, allow for each other and move tentatively towards acceptance. There is subversion in the cut-­up. It conspires to collapse the accepted state and construct a new disordered state. It undermines and corrupts that which exists and with difference threatening stability, the uncertain may feel its menace. A literary saboteur constructs the cut-­up text and challenges the orthodoxy of customary writing but any ensuing disruption, is not for disruption’s sake. The cut-­up invites the reader to be part of an alternative means of coming to know, to be a different kind of reader, prepared to consent to something new.

Cut away   55 The homeless life is evoked in the cut-­up. Seen to conspire against the niceties of social convention, homeless people may suffer lacerating abjection and confined to a marginalised dystopia of exclusion and degradation, may be pushed to the brink of our concern. We may give ourselves permission to forget them. Cut away, make it clean, dismember with precision, this contagion must be got rid of? Refusing to allow the state of homelessness to fade into our collective unconscious, we use the cut-­up here to tell the story of some of the women we met who were living on the streets. You would know, immediately, that Carrie was homeless. She reeks of it. The stench bleeds from her, envelopes her, sticks to her, follows her and remains. It is a ruthless, predatory, stalker with an unshakeable grip; tightening, as it slowly, relentlessly threatens to choke. There is little chance of escape from its suffocating, determined force. There is no disguise and no place to hide. Carrie wears homelessness. Her gaunt, pallid, face and sallow cheeks are pitted and bare. Leaden eyes, bags under and unkempt brows, her faded, weary face belies her youthful age. Nearly 30 now, the bleak reality of her existence is etched onto her body with a foreboding permanence. Crumbling, brown, intermittent teeth defiantly remain, in a toothless, teeth-­knocked-out mouth. Straggly, greasy hair is scraped away from her face and drips down her back like a long, thin, mousy tail. Her emaciated, boyish frame refutes any predictable representations of woman, female, feminine, womanly, as nothing about her appearance or life succumbs to convention. Her terse staccato tone, loud and confident, almost aggressive, rarely, if ever, is let slip to reveal a gentler nature. She is controlled in this way and seems to remember that surrender or acquiescence on the streets is dangerous, and so a belligerent exterior is maintained. Homelessness has a uniform, a particular style. It is a distinctive brand, as innovative and creative as any gracing the glossy pages of Vogue. Fashion, high society and class merge here in lustrous images, hypnotising the reader to superimpose themselves into an imaginary, which, for the majority, the gullible herd, is a beyond-­reach utopia. This new way to dress, this new way to be, this better, care-­free, flawless, chic, always sunny, always thin, blissful fantasy unfolds, enticingly, as we waft through pages of pre-­occupying temptations. These distant proposals seem accusatory as they hint at absence; our own worthless, insipid existences are inferred in the deceptive reflections of somebody else’s beautiful life. ‘It can all feel very unattainable, very exclusive, very indulgent and very distant from our everyday lives’ chirps a ‘Style Coach’ in a well-­known ‘internet newspaper’, who thoughtfully, goes on to wonder, ‘how does this relate to you? Should you care? Could you care? Do you care? Frankly? I don’t. And it doesn’t, not to me, not to many? But she persists: Often the two biggest challenges we face when dressing ourselves is (1.)  Stepping out of our current style rut and (2.) Not wasting money on impulse purchases so why not use this time as a focus for you. It is a great opportunity before the next season begins to jumpstart who you want to be and how you want to dress.

56   Cut away When your clothes are not your clothes, they are foraged, when you must rummage amongst others’ things, when there are no different sizes to try, it’s them or nothing, that pattern, that material, that length, those sleeves that colour, that style. When they hang off or are too tight and layers of ragged, soiled, shabby cast-­offs designate you as homeless, the option to ‘step out of your current style rut’ or ‘waste money on Figure 3.1 Being homeless. impulse purchases’ is preposterously remote. Yes, I know, to imagine that this relates to ‘them’ is ludicrous. Of course this lifestyle counsellor isn’t speaking to ‘them’. But, hang on, relax, here come the British Fashion Council to explain. At the launch of a recent London Fashion Week (2017), an heroically altruistic invitation was issued by The Business of Fashion in their campaign #tiedtogether. Fashionable sentiments interrupting the fashionistas; a reminder (an introduction?) to another life: To stand together and make a clear statement of solidarity, unity and inclusiveness and encourages everyone to get involved through this simple and singular visual statement: wear a white bandana as a sign to the world that you believe in the common bonds of humankind – regardless of race, sexuality, gender, size, religion and ability. We encourage the industry to have a voice and to show the world that we stand for inclusivity, unity and humanity. Creative innovation is not restricted to the artistic affiliates of the fashion industry. Alongside the benevolent bandana-­ wearers, a modish hierarchy may describe our best fit – Dior, Chanel, Whistles, Boden, Coast, Next, M&S, Primark … but we all prefer to overlook one particular style? The clamour for this exclusive trend Figure 3.2 Catwalk. goes unnoticed. It is rather a distinctive brand, created, cultivated and adopted by loyal clients whose inventiveness promotes a style known only to them. Coveted and copied by the desperate, Carrie and Bea and the other homeless people we had come to know, are marked out.

Cut away   57 A member of staff from the Day Centre for Homeless People told us that items of clothing she was given to repair, often had a similar fault. A hole needed sewing, always at the top of the garment, in the middle, just underneath the collar. There was no conventional exchange to secure ownership of these particular garments, by default and deception, key pieces are amassed and homelessness is the perpetual brand they wear. They are slaves to this fashion, mastered by a weary, enduring fight to survive. Lazily browsing racks of immaculate wears, the seductively arranged tempt the unsuspecting. Captivated, these commercial cathouses stealthily draw us in. Come and feel me, take what you want, do you like what I’m offering? Discard me if you wish, I don’t matter, there are others, you might like them better? Leave me; I might be someone’s sometime. Go on, ‘you’re worth it’. Unhurriedly, we select things to try, gliding to the changing rooms, still scanning available attractions, searching, picking up unlikely additions, not wanting to miss anything, we reluctantly enter the changing room. Reluctantly? We have admitted that there is nothing else for us to see, so our acceptance ushers in our chance to primp. Fortunately, hidden behind locked doors, or more vulnerably, behind closed curtains, we pull at the gather to make them fit and hope that an eager assistant doesn’t draw them back at an inopportune moment and peep in, (un) helpfully. Hanging up our finds on too-­small hooks, we anticipate ourselves. There is a selection process. The most loved item is positioned in front of the others, with less favourable pieces relegated and forced to wait their turn. We discard our own clothes and gingerly, filled with hope, we slip on the new. Taking our time, we turn this way and that, pleased or shocked with what the all­seeing mirror reveals? White fluorescent lights highlight every blemish or too-­ dark, gloomy chambers obscure reality. I think I’ve lost a bit of weight? My hair could do with a cut. My bum, actually, does look big in this. There’ll be no emerging from the confines of this safe, honest place, requiring a loved one to avoid the candid truth with sensitive pretence. And anyway, don’t we really only appear out of a changing room, in search of opinion, when we know we look okay? I’ll press the button and ask the assistant for another size. Holding the curtain as a protective sheath, we tentatively enquire about other options. I’ll go and look. The assistant disappears amongst the stock, busily inspecting and narrowing down the search. There is a pause, where impending disappointment gnaws as hope gives way to resignation. The unhappy news is reported; I’m sorry there isn’t the size you want and all the stock is out. For consolation, we tell ourselves that we have had a lucky escape, it’s too expensive, I’ve nothing to go with it, I’d need new shoes; never mind, and we leave. Not disheartened too much and eager for the next inducement. These cathedrals of consumerism have much to offer the devoted. In succumbing to temptation, salvation is found in commercial sin and Sunday is not the only day of worship. For the more contemplative who prefer a solitary revere, the opportunity to practise is endless. It is a belonging to a closed order but has a fervent orthodoxy; a new life glimpsed in hypnotic swipes. A doctrine for life, carved in tablets of ancient stone, neglected, as this new and

58   Cut away different life is preferred; an avaricious one, go on, covet your neighbour’s everything. When he had finished speaking with Moses on the mountain of Sinai, he gave him the tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God. (Exodus 31: 18) The Share Shop was opened in Chester in January 2016. The aim of the shop is to help people who are homeless in Chester and raise money to buy a house ‘to begin taking people off the streets of the city’. In addition, aid is sent to help refugees who are fleeing for their lives around the world. With buoyant sales already, this not-­for-profit organisation signals the plight of many, and a call to many. Wobbly clothes racks on tiny wheels are jammed together with barely enough room to squeeze between them. A chaotic mess just about avoided as the rickety frames jostle to hold up their wares. The detritus of life seeking a new life. Cast aside and forgotten, this place is a refuge for the unwanted. We would often see some of the homeless group we had come to know standing Figure 3.3 The share shop. outside the Share Shop, smoking, or drinking from paper cups. Today though, there was no one about, perhaps because of the chilly bite in the air, so we continued, and reaching the shop, peered through the window. The Share Shop is both a café and a clothes shop. We could see staff in the café part of the shop behind the serving counter, so we went in. The scuffed laminate worktop was supported by what looked like small, slatted fence panels; I don’t think John Lewis supplied this kitchen. Sandwiches in sealed paper bags, buns and cakes wrapped tightly in cling film, a fruit bowl full of apples, not wizened and brown like ancient skin but shiny and fat, chocolate bars lined up in a row and dimply oranges, all carefully arranged. The drinks machine was behind the counter next to the chalk board advertising what was on offer. It may have been shabby but the place knew its place. A Mecca for the impoverished or bargain hunter, it welcomes all-­comers. In the window, mannequins tempt passers-­by with outfits ready for a day at the races; long floaty dresses, big hats and glittery bags hint at a more prosperous past, and although forsaken, a sense of abandonment is overcome and any accusations of fading allure are swept aside in the courageous pose they strike; this final opportunity to preen.

Cut away   59 One of the women came out from behind the counter and started rummaging amongst the women’s trousers hanging on the rack nearby. We asked her if she had seen Carrie. The woman said that she hadn’t been in for a few days and, holding up a pair of khaki chinos, asked the other assistant whether Carrie might like them. Without hesitation, the woman said with conviction ‘she wouldn’t wear them’! In Carrie’s own words: We [women] stick together. We give each other toiletries and clean knickers occasionally. I had to go to the day centre for some clean underwear as I’ve only got the clothes on my back at the moment. You can get ‘em from the day centre but you can only get one set of clothes at a time. When Carrie wakes up, she is already dressed. She wears her life. Most of the clothes she has, she has on. The other items are in a plastic bag, a 5p one, one of those single use ones, bulbous, about to burst, the handles stretched and tight. Any indications of provenance are warped as Figure 3.4 Sharing clothes. the plastic contorts around the sorry rags inside. You had better put your hand underneath for support, otherwise a rip along the seams seems inevitable. That’s it, that’s everything, there’s nothing else, because there’s nowhere to store anything. Nowhere to go with anything. Portability is a necessity in a migratory life. Carry or discard, that’s her choice; she is forced to abandon almost everything and this can be a painful process of purging. It unties the ties to the past and although Carrie may have discarded most of her possessions, ridding herself of anything that might matter, the past, for her, cannot be left behind. It is a heavy load to carry, but bear it she does. No bags needed. She was dressed in rich materials – satins, and lace, and silks – all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-­ packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing for she had but one shoe on – the other was on the table near her hand – her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a prayer-­book, all confusedly heaped about the looking-­glass.

60   Cut away It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could. (Dickens, 1996, pp. 57–58) One of the many challenges of being homeless, not because you are a woman but because you are a rough sleeper, is actually, to wake up in the first place. To still be alive in the morning after a miserable, bitter night spent alone, on a mattress of concrete, in an isolated corner of a stinking, car park, demands fortitude, and, with dismal irony, fortune. This, for Carrie, is often the preferred plight. This ‘council house’, this place where Carrie chooses to stay has no walls or windows or doors. There is no heating except for the warmth radiating from the engines of its conventional inhabitants. Dimly lit, even when you may not want it to be, no way to turn the light off, tired but fighting sleep, there is a reluctance to give in as this is a dangerous place to seek refuge. Despite the watchfulness of the CCTV cameras, like creepy voyeurs relentlessly peering through the gloom, it is a vulnerable place. A symbol of municipal largesse? It costs to deposit cars but homeless people can stay for free. Except they can’t; they are sought out and unceremoniously evicted. As Carrie told us: I sleep in car parks two times a week and at weekends, anywhere where’s warm. I like sleeping on my own as sometimes you get robbed don’t you? I sleep in a sleeping bag, sometimes with a plastic sheet that the police give you, like a piece of foil; it’s just as good as a sleeping bag. You get them from the hostel, like little heat packs. I don’t feel frightened sleeping in Figure 3.5 A place to sleep. a car park on my own ’cos I sleep with a brick under me or a piece of wood. I get cardboard every day, BHS (British Home Stores) are really good, they leave cardboard out and plastic sheets for us.

Cut away   61 Provision for homeless people in Chester is varied and includes hostels, some of which offer both double and single occupancy ‘units of accommodation for its customers’. These are self-­contained flats with communal laundry facilities and activity rooms. Around the city and its surrounding areas, there is female-­only and male-­only accommodation; recovery-­focussed shared housing that aims to support individuals in crisis and then, ‘Safe Seats’. Speaking about ‘Safe Seats’ to the Chester Chronicle, a council spokeswoman clarified that rough sleepers are offered emergency accommodation that is not reliant on beds being available. These ‘Safe Seats’ are usually upright chairs arranged in a room. She went on to explain that ‘Safe Seats’ provide a time-­limited service that does not create dependency, whilst allowing professional staff to assess an individual for more permanent arrangements. A key provider in the North West of accommodation and support for homeless people confirms that ‘Safe Seat’ facilities are offered for a number of individuals to recline and snooze within a supervised area of hostels. Rough sleepers can spend a night in the warmth at a moment’s notice, have access to laundry facilities, showers and expert assistance to help move into more secure accommodation. They go on to say that it is a basic but compassionate option for individuals who would have no alternative than to sleep rough, with all the risks which that entails. ‘Safe Seats’ are also available on the outreach vehicle as emergency Figure 3.6 ‘Safe Seats’. accommodation. Having to get up at 5.30 am and be out of the shelter by 7.00 was a major hardship of shelter life. It was not simply the fact of having to get up and out, but rather that the women had to do it every day of the week, every day of the year, (Christmas Day excepted), no matter what the weather or how they felt. On any given morning, as the women drifted onto the street, one might see two or three ailing women – this one with a fever or cough of headache, that one with a limp or stomach ache or other ailment – pick up their bags and walk silently into the weather. (Liebow, 1993, p. 28) If you want to go and sleep on a chair at ten o’clock at night, you can, but they kick you out at seven in the morning. You’re in the same room altogether, men and women together all just sitting on chairs. People are ‘doing’ each other on the chair, that’s why I won’t go there. Carrie’s recollections here are sobering. It is disturbing to imagine a circumstance where already vulnerable people seek safety in places where they may be

62   Cut away exposed to abuse, violence and exploitation. Any shreds of dignity that may still be intact are stripped away. You can leave that in the long queue at the door. Get there early as Carrie told us, otherwise, you’ve no chance. And there’s nowhere else. This is the last hope of shelter. After this, you’re on the street. One February morning, quite early about eight o’clock, Paul and I were walking down Eastgate Street towards the station when we saw Carrie coming up the other side of the street. She raised her hand and waved to us and we stopped to say hello and have a chat. She was wearing a beanie hat pulled down because it was very cold, a green anorak and grey tracksuit bottoms. Her face was very animated and her eyes were watery and staring. She gave the impression that she was on some kind of stimulant. She was high. She told us that she had been awake all night walking the streets but she didn’t look weary. She said that she wasn’t even allowed access to the ‘Safe Seat’ in the women’s hostel; it was never made clear why. Carrie had told us previously that she often walks around all night to avoid sleep. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer to sleep but sometimes it’s just too cold.’ So, as she said, she robs Pro Plus® from the Pound Shop. As the advertisement claims, Pro Plus® gives you a caffeine kick that can relieve the symptoms of tiredness and fatigue, so that you can focus on the task at hand. So, sleep is postponed but gnawing weariness prevails in the nightly, exhausted traipse of homelessness.

Figure 3.7 The rows in Chester.

Figure 3.8 Covered walkways on the rows.

On nights when Carrie chooses to keep awake, familiar destinations are frequented in the search for shelter and the possibility of some warmth. The railway arches near the station or by the racecourse become wall-­less brick shelters and round the back of the cathedral if the gates are open; there are benches there so you don’t have to sit or lie on the floor all night. Sheltered car parks, subways, shop entrances set back from the street, and the rows, all provide a modicum of shelter, if all else has failed.

Cut away   63 The Council are planning to replace all the subways in Chester with alternative crossings mostly on the surface. This has been welcomed by the police, amongst other groups, who are concerned that people can be isolated and put in potential danger. Because of the design of the subways, with their curved walls and interrupted lines of sight, there is a chance of not being seen and not seeing who may be approaching. A representative of a Figure 3.9 A Chester subway. local community action team said that police would support the closing of the subways as a means of preventing crime and making people feel safer because the subways are hidden and not surveyed by CCTV. On that February morning when we met Carrie, earlier than usual, when she seemed agitated, we asked her if she was going to the day centre, she said that she had been banned. We asked her why and she said ‘for giving them shit’. For the day centre to ban someone, the ‘shit’ she gave must have been quite serious because they take a lot of ‘shit’ as a matter of course. Carrie told us why she’d been banned.… It was for kicking off … I was kicked out for kicking off. People were getting gobby. Obviously if someone stole yer money, yer gonna go mad aren’t yer? People that have slept with yer? If they offered me [ ] guest house I wouldn’t go there ’cos he’s a bit of a perve. It’s horrible. They put men in [ ] guest house. Through her own choice in rejecting available alternatives, or as a result of imposed exile, Carrie routinely is alone on the streets at night. As a rough sleeper, she is susceptible to all and sundry, as being killed by homelessness is exacerbated at night. The currency is misery and suffering; the price sometimes paid is life. As Carrie said:

Figure 3.10 Surviving the night.

I’ve felt threatened on the street; I’ve had people spit at me, I’ve been pissed on, I’ve had my sleeping bag set on fire when I’ve been in it. I’ve had £1 taken out of my pocket when I was asleep. I woke up and all my coat pockets were open, even my phone. I went to the police but they couldn’t do anything about it ’cos I was in the car park.

64   Cut away If you get woken up by the police, they stand there until you get up and go. They take the sleeping bag off you. They put a radio mike next to your head. They tip you up. Piss heads give me shit sometimes ‘get up yer smack head; get up off the floor. Where’s yer parents, where’s yer kids’. I hate my life to be honest with yer. To wake up the next morning is dependent upon surviving the night. If you can avoid being urinated on, set on fire, beaten, robbed, raped or arrested, the new day will dawn. But it will be the same kind of day as yesterday. And the day before. And tonight, will be like last night and many nights before. What causes abjection is that which disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-­between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior.… (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4) There is an ominous foreboding in Kristeva’s abjection, a restless unease. Abjection disturbs consciousness; it is watchful; relentlessly alert, abjection identifies that which is a threat to identity, that which seeks to undermine existence. Foster et al. (1994, p. 6) wonders whether the notion of abjection tends to ‘primordialise’ fear and loathing, ‘paranoicise’ the subject but Kristeva is certain of its haunting nature. Her abjection is suspicious and motivated by a determination to defend against a hostile threat. Unnamed yet decisive; this abjection is unflinching in its resolve to eradicate. The expulsion of the improper, the unclean, is a renunciation of parts of the self, the price to pay for a transfigured self. Kristeva’s ‘immaculate conception’ demands a radical exclusion, a judgement and condemnation, the symbolic place of deliverance refused to the impure. Ricoeur’s (1967, p. 35) impurity, like Kristeva’s, was never a literal ‘dirtiness’ and defilement was never literally a ‘stain’; ‘filthiness’ is cleansed by a symbolic exorcism and it is in McClintock’s (1995, p. 72) ‘abject zones’ where defilement is found. Tyler’s (2013, p.  28) ‘abjecting subject’ attempts to establish a boundary between itself and the ‘polluting object, thing or person’; which for Kristeva, has only one quality of the object, ‘that of being opposed to I’ (p. 1). Opposed? For Ellman (2012), this is about establishing limits, what the body can tolerate and what it must expel, a waste that a culture discards so as to establish ‘what is not itself ’ (p. 181). Abjection in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, is a monumental outpouring of waste and wretchedness. It is a catalogue of purgation, ‘this stony rubbish’ (20); the detritus of small, ordinary lives, now insignificant and discarded, left to decay ‘empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends’ (177–179), ‘broken finger nails of dirty hands’ (303), ‘carious teeth’ (339), what Ellman (2012) describes as signifiers of ‘cultural decay as well as bodily decrepitude’ (p.  180). A thorough exposition of hidden aversion; naked disgust breaches the sea wall of acceptability in a torrent of loathing. The

Cut away   65 disgusted and disgusting ebb and flow in an inexorable tide of cultural effluent. For Douglas, this dirt is a necessary part of the establishment of order, a consequence of its construction. She describes the stages of rejection which ultimately, and unequivocally, result in obliteration. Identity and origin are gone, lost for ever in a thorough annihilation of that which has been identified as dirt. They are recognisably out of place, a threat to good order, and so are regarded as objectionable and vigorously brushed away. At this stage they have some identity: they can be seen to be unwanted bits of whatever it was they came from … they are dangerous: their half identity clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. (Douglas 1966, p. 197) The body is inscribed with accounts of revulsion, mediated by a boundary between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, the subject and object, the abjecting and the abjected; a somatic border and means by which Butler (1990) confirms, ‘Others become shit’ (p. 182). The defecating subject ejects the impure and in this act of expulsion, a sanitised self-­stabilises. The cleansed ideal of the subject condemns the pollutant to an exiled, peripheral life, a place of supposed inconsequence. Kristeva’s decontamination severs griminess; the unpleasant, the unwanted, the distasteful, all are excluded and the ‘self and clean of each social group if not of each subject’ is founded (1982, p. 65). Butler rejects the impenetrable nature of the boundary and warns about the risk of contamination that Kristeva accepts in conceding, that ‘abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger’ (p.  9). There is a deliberate watchfulness in abjection, a necessary attentiveness to impending menace, which requires a conscious vigilance to maintain the preferred state. Ahmed (2004) proposes a hierarchical perception of disgust as ‘that which is below’ (p. 88), a stratification, which in order to be maintained, requires the subject, Gross (2012) cautions, ‘to keep the abject in check, at a distance, in order to define itself as a subject’ (p. 87). Vatan (2013) continues an elitist perception of the abjected in a withering portrayal, suffused with contempt. To maintain an identity within the symbolic order, unwanted identities must be subdued or abandoned but the separation between the preeminent state and its bleak nadir is never absolute. The severance is uncertain and the territory between is an uncomfortable place of desertion. The desolation of this place is where the anguished are, those who inhabit and those who condemn, both alert to the possibility of breached boarders and occupation. In Butler’s (1990) cautioning of the ‘impossible impermeability’ of the boundary, she anticipates the wrath of the expelled. For her, such a state of seamlessness was impossible. The body would inevitably succumb to the overwhelming force of the vengeful; the very part of itself it seeks to expel, would expel itself and in that expulsion, destroy that which sought to expel it ‘precisely that excremental filth that it

66   Cut away [the subject] fears’ (p. 182). As Ellman (2012) observes, fear in The Waste Land, is not of the dead themselves but of their assault on the living. No respecter of place, Eliot’s rats gnaw rapaciously where the decaying and decayed lie. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little dry garret Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

(187–188)

(193–195)

Let dirt settle where it belongs, trampled underfoot, compressed into an indistinct mass of filth. Be aware of the vulnerability of bodily boundaries and discourage salvage; it is distasteful, actually hazardous, as it resurrects existence. The stability of an identity however, which appears contingent upon complete separation between the inner and outer seems flawed. Powerful pollutants lip the shore of separation and the volatility of such a structuralism, which attempts to create separation through expulsion, is exposed. The subject and its contagion are locked in a symbolic battle with infection. Douglas predicts, however, that the ‘quest for purity, pursued by rejection’ (p. 199) has repercussions. Consequences are incurred as a result of segregation. Retaining only the parts of the body that do not offend inevitably results in distortion; deformed, collapsed and collapsing, a shrunken self lives a pretence. Butler (1990, p.  181) observes that ‘the construction of the “not me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject’. This body is emaciated; a gaunt, sick silhouette, paradoxically gorges on contempt and judgment, is eaten away by revulsion, the symbolic site of social sanction, the body’s frame withers inexorably towards death. Kristeva’s deterministic faith in a doctrine of rejection is recalled; she believes that banishment is the only recourse for the profligate.

Figure 3.11 The prodigal son.

… refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live,

Cut away   67 until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 3) A repentant son returns in a wretched state, having exhausted his inheritance. He kneels before his father who is filled with compassion. Such merciful forgiveness, however, disturbs the older son who is eager to condemn. He is unrelenting and judges that this sinful behaviour is beyond pardon. His father reminds him: My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found. (Luke 15:31–32) No welcome return for the prodigal here, as homelessness reaps rejection and is understood without ambiguity; it is known because it is lived, in every moment of every day. Homelessness infects every scintilla of life and exhaustion; hopelessness and despair are barely concealed within wasted, impossibly tough exteriors. As Bourgois and Schonberg (2009) found with the homeless heroin injectors in San Francisco, an uneasy watchfulness persisted that anxiously anticipated any involvement of external law or neighbourhood reprisal. There was no real respite from discovery and ejection and the trudge from temporary shelter to temporary shelter was a constant part of life. Finding refuge in impossible locations, the homeless people Bourgois and Schonberg came to know were confounding in their resourcefulness. They embraced the most improbable of sites: the steepest, the most overgrown, the infested, the filthy, the sodden, preferring the hidden, to ‘carve out, once again, a precarious niche’ (p. 221). Humans, dehumanised, exiled beyond consciousness; the homeless people here seem to share the plight frequently experienced by those we got to know in Chester. Even if you are lucky enough to have secured a place for the night in a hostel or ‘Safe Seat’, you are wakened at the allotted time for everyone and ejected outside. It’s too early. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep. What does that matter? Get out, it’s time to go. Stumbling into the day, the austerity of life on the streets, temporarily interrupted, even perhaps forgotten during a fitful night’s sleep, is remembered with forlorn resignation. No press of the snooze button to snatch a few more minutes; no settling back into the warmth and cosiness of swaddled contentedness, no sleepy intimacies as your loved one drowsily rolls onto ‘your side’, no gentle waking with a cup of tea to bring you round. As piercing as any alarm call, the ephemeral nature of refuge for homeless people is clear. Evicted from the shelter, Carrie talked to us about some of the things she did to fill her days:

68   Cut away In the day, I just walk around town. The people in St Peter’s Church are okay. They’ll let yer sit in there and relax as long as you’re quiet. I’d like my own space, just a roof, somewhere with a lock on the door. Somewhere I can go away when I need to be, when my head goes. I go by the river when my head goes. I like sitting in the park by the river. I’m happy single. I like being on my own; I’m a loner. I don’t get lonely, I like my own company. I’m a strong person to survive on the street. I’ve seen some people; their head’s gone within two or three days.

Figure 3.12 Inside St Peter’s Church.

In Nietzsche’s (1966) musings about the origins of moralities, he distinguished certain traits recurring in particular echelons of society; in a strictly tiered social order, he observed the emergence of ‘master and slave morality’ (p. 194). Established is the ‘pathos of distance’, which ‘develops from the incarnate differences of classes’ (p.  192), and which Conway (1997) noted is ‘an enhanced sensibility for the order of rank that ‘naturally’ informs the rich plurality of human types’ (p. 40). Nietzsche declared that it is the ‘ruling order’ that determines values, actually creates values, thus confirming a distinction from the ‘ruled’ (p. 196). Speculating what a slave morality might be, he wonders what the battered, exploited, tormented, imprisoned, exhausted … have in common, and arrives at mistrust and suspicion of the powerful; slave morality is steeped in ressentiment. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different’ what is ‘not itself ’; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value positing eye – this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back at oneself – is the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world. (Nietzsche 1989, pp. 36–37) Kristeva (1991) rejected the dichotomy between master and slave moralities and instead confirmed an acute and perceptive sensitivity, even wariness, to the differences felt by those in those places, for those in those places. This ‘consciousness of being somewhat foreign’ (p.  19) anticipates Lahman’s (2008) quandary of ‘other’, ‘othered’, where the ‘other’ is objectified and distinct, an ‘otherness’ which segregates, but for her, is not oppositional or suspicious but unknown, perhaps even unknowable. For Kristeva, prescribed or understood

Cut away   69 identities are questioned, become uncertain and the dominating threat, once the preserve of a master morality, collapses when intimidation and menace are reciprocated and power is not negotiated but re-­imagined. Reflecting on the origins of Nietzsche’s slave values, Morrisson (2014) confirmed that they are reactionary and creative and do not simply reflect values encountered in some sort of antithetical opposition. Creativity stems from a determination to overcome powerlessness; the slave seeks power and to be powerful, not over an oppressive external master but power that emboldens and unleashes the valiant, undaunted person within. A power that rejects slavish values is, as Nietzsche proclaimed, a triumphant act of faith; the ‘need for the noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble … the noble soul has reverence for itself ’ (p. 215). However burdened by life’s cruelties, however bleak, Nietzsche urges transcendence. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is a self-­overcoming of audacious force, opposed to conventional social, cultural or pious traditions; a ‘self-­hegemony’ which Eagleton (1990) supposed was ‘the highest aesthetic condition’ a measure of great strength, requiring surrender to ‘lacerating self-­discipline’ (p.  253) in order to release the new ‘I’ within. In Nietzsche’s transcendent life, the individual stands alone, at the mercy of the self; the daring look within and bear what they see. Inventive and determined, this glorious rampaging libertine sweeps through life, triumphant, a law unto itself without laws. The new ‘I’? ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14:6); my way, my truth, my life. Carrie has remarkable fortitude, ‘Where’s there’s a will, there’s a way’ she often said, when talking about the most ordinary, personal aspects of life. To have a home to live in would immediately relegate our private routines to necessary preliminaries, which almost hinder the day from actually starting. We may wake up in the night and eventually, reluctantly, roll out of bed, finally giving in to that nagging call. We may as well have got up and gone the minute we woke up; trying not to open both eyes, lurching, attempting to walk without actually waking up; we do so and return to relish our cosiness before nodding off. Even being woken by the unwelcome shrill of an alarm, we are able to go to the bathroom, shower and breakfast, before blinking into the day. For Carrie, trivial ablutions are an integral part of the daily struggle of life on the streets. When as a rough sleeper you wake up on a park bench, or in a shop front, or car park, or bus shelter, where to go to the toilet and wash are another complication and have their own depressing routine. There’s no privacy. It’s horrible, terrible, you can’t even shower. In the day centre you have to wash your feet on the way out of the shower. I wash in public toilets. McDonald’s are good. I get some soap on a piece of toilet roll and strip off. It’s sad really i’n it? I go in public toilets, behind a bush, in a carrier bag; where’s there’s a will, there’s a way. It’s alright for men, they can just go anywhere but we have to sit down.

70   Cut away

Figure 3.13 Washing in public toilets.

Figure 3.14 Where there’s a will there’s a way.

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place­an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. (De Certeau 1984, p. 103) Homelessness is a remnant existence; kept separate from the rest and labelled cheap; discontinued scraps, homeless people no longer have their place amongst the valued wares? De Certeau’s urban fabric though, is a rich tapestry, entwined with the threads of many and different lives; each fibre stretching and shrinking as it wears, a pattern emerges and augments as experiences embroider themselves into the city cloth; no strand is too worn, too frayed, too ragged, too colourless. Threading her way through the streets, the design of Carrie’s life is unchanging. Every morning, the same day presents itself. It is arranged in hurdles to surmount or barriers to fall by and as she takes her first steps into the day, the rigour of life on the street dawns again. A homeless existence is bare; it is full of lack. Death by a thousand lacks. In De Certeau’s walk, every step bears out a lack; his walk is not purposeful, there is no hurrying, no anticipation of arrival, no tempting destination beckons, it is a walk of resignation that suspends the requirement to arrive because really, there is nowhere to go. No one longs for your coming, there is nothing to take, nothing to be given, there is just you, the lack of you. Where have you gone? Addiction, crime, brokenness, abuse, prison, aversion … has taken you, removed you from you and disgorged a distorted you, an increasingly invisible you; leaving the lack

Cut away   71 of you behind. As you trudge around in search of somewhere, nowhere, absence intensifies. The crossroads to which De Certeau refers seem to suggest that a kind of rectifying relational opportunity exists but perhaps acknowledging the place of intersection as one of intricate volatility, which Rose (1993) and Garry (2011) preferred is pertinent, a place that Crenshaw’s (1991) structural intersectionality describes is one where unequal social groups may collide. Roaming around the streets, Carrie meets aversion frequently and crippling administration regularly but she also encounters philanthropy in many guises. The day centre, the city mission, passers-­by, the shelters, social services and other homeless people are part of Carrie’s life and part of the fabric of the city. Paul and I were walking around the city centre one autumn morning looking for Carrie and Bea and the others. It was about ten o’clock on one of those bright, crisp, shivery, blue skies, watery-­sunshine days. Along frosty cobbles and flagstones, we weaved unevenly through the thickening crowds. Chester is a polished, elegant city with ambition to preserve its affluent, aristocratic heritage. The ordinary go about the mundane but this is difficult to detect beneath such a shiny veneer Shoppers amble distractedly, peering into bags that advertise already-­acquired purchases, whilst they anticipate the next. Tight skirts, clip clop heels and knock­off totes; high-­viz jackets, hard hats and scuffed boots, jeans with holes in and baseball caps, shiny cheap suits, uniforms, thin ties and laptop cases, all scurry past. Mostly with heads down in attentive submission, as phones dictate the way; they look up rarely, or just in time, as they worriedly … resignedly … eagerly … bustle along. Tourists are leisurely but purposeful, lingering briefly to swipe another image, securing their transient place, in this place. The cathedral, a race course, the river and shops on rows high above the streets, separate Chester as distinct. And with a Roman amphitheatre and encircling sandstone wall, the city’s fortress past is recalled. Georgian townhouses and timber-­framed buildings jostle alongside contemporary facades, but still a Ye Olde Chester predominates, so pleasing to the sight-­seeing hordes. Few can resist the Eastgate Clock, a nineteenth century addition to the sandstone archway forming part of the walls, ‘the second most photographed clock in the UK (perhaps even the World) after Big Ben’, so the tourist guide claims. ‘We’ve done Chester’; attractions are listed with exuberant boast and never-­printed images provide the visual proof. Family members and friends squint at too-­small screens as the excited travellers recount their holiday exploits. The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.

72   Cut away The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. (De Certeau, 1984, p. 10) Carrie told us about eating when you’re living on the streets: I usually eat about 11 or 12 o’clock. The City Mission is open today; they do curries and stuff. When I want some food, I rob it. Poundland skips are brilliant. The Poundbakery is good. If you go there just before 5 when they close, they normally give you a bag full of pasties that they were gonna chuck in the bin but they’re not in the bags, they’re just squashed on top of each other. You can see everyone fightin’ over them like vultures.

Figure 3.15 The city mission.

Figure 3.16 A bag full of pasties.

Sometimes I go hungry; you have to don’t yer? I go hungry about twice a week. I get £110 a fortnight to live on. I have to go all day and have something later. Three times a week, I get a meal from the government but what about the other four days? And it’s all pasta and stuff like that. People don’t eat that stuff in the morning. If someone would give out butty packs that’d help. Irish preachers on a Monday night give out bags of food, bottles of water and fruit. You can’t get a food voucher if you’re homeless; no address. I live on junk food mainly ’cos I’m homeless. If I had a choice, I’d have prawns and sushi. It’s good for you.

Cut away   73 When Paul and I met Carrie, we usually asked her if she would like a drink or something to eat and invariably, she said a MacDonald’s. A hamburger, small fries and a tea with plenty of sugar would be her preference but she hardly ate any of it; she would pick at the fries and perhaps have a couple of bites of the burger, as though it was a trial to get down or she had lost interest in it. Sometimes Carrie would have a bag of Monster Munch and that might be the only thing she ate that day. As a rough sleeper, she had nowhere to store food or prepare or cook anything, so when it came to diet, Carrie had very limited choice. She could either eat the food at the mission when it was open, or the day centre, when that was open, or offers from charity, or forage from skips or steal but if she did not, then on that day, she didn’t eat. For homeless people, the risk of developing malnutrition and nutritional problems is high (Daly, 1990; Beasley, Hackett and Maxwell, 2005; Jenkins, 2014) as the reliance on scraps, donations or charity is unlikely to provide adequate sources of nourishment and can result in ‘food poverty’ (Food Standards Agency (FSA), 2015, p.  iii). The FSA found that social exclusion was a fundamental cause of poor diet and that deprivation and adversity had a severely constraining impact on the opportunity to access an adequate, healthy diet. In addition to the preponderance of fast food outlets, which were frequented when possible, it is not surprising that Carrie and the other homeless people we got to know had a range of severe health problems. A meagre diet, drugs, alcohol addiction and chronic homelessness have a devastating effect and can result in ravaging internal problems hardly concealed by pallid, clammy, pot-­marked faces and gaunt bodies. Paul and I had arranged to see Carrie one afternoon so went to find her outside the cathedral as planned. We hurried along, keen to meet up and find out what she’d been up to; Paul had a tee shirt on, jeans and Vans; I had a cotton skirt, sleeveless top and flat sandals, as it was hot and sunny. A sun cream day really but we didn’t know it was that balmy when we set off. We saw Carrie sitting on one of the wooden benches which nestle in the alcoves round the back of the cathedral. Despite the warm weather, Carrie was wearing brown cords, socks, Figure 3.17 At the back of the cathedral. boots, a jumper and anorak, zipped up to the top. The heat of the day seemed unimportant as she pulled her beanie hat down over her ears as we sat down on the grass to talk. As a chronic drug addict, Carrie needed to generate money for drugs and was involved in many of the usual ways of obtaining funds on the streets, namely, shop-­lifting, theft and begging; she never admitted to sex work but instead, that day, she told us of her experiences in dealing drugs:

74   Cut away I’ve dealt heroin and crack cocaine just round here. I used mobile phones to set up meetings but only sold to certain people I knew. I know the heroin addicts round here. Involvement in an illicit street-­level drug economy is fraught with brutality, menace and ruthlessness. It is still largely dominated by men (Dunlap and Johnson, 1996; Denton and O’Malley, 1999; Davis et al., 2005) and remains a violent, dirty market that Maher and Hudson (2007, p. 813) observed is ‘gender-­ stratified and hierarchical … with women occupying peripheral or subordinate roles’. Within this volatile milieu, some women have carved a role for themselves; have moved to a place of ascendance that rejects the collateral place customarily assigned to women on the streets. In searingly stark detail, Bourgois’ landmark ethnography In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1996) captures the lives of the men and women he met living in the inner city ghetto of East Harlem who were involved in drugs and drug dealing. He noticed significant changes in gender relations that were happening in the street drug trade around him and although the pervasiveness of misogynistic street culture, sexual violence and the brutality of everyday life were unflinching, he saw how the position of women was changing and through one particular woman’s story, Candy, Bourgois documented a seemingly new emancipation: I used to take all my husband’s shit. I even used to support my husband, but I woke and smelled the coffee, like they say. And I put a bullet in my man.… … Women on the street are not paralysed by terror … they are in the midst of carving greater autonomy and rights for themselves in El Barrio … daughters, sisters and wives can no longer be beaten submissively as they were in the past for socialising on the street, or for pursuing careers in the underground economy. (Bourgois, 2003, p. 213) An anachronistic elitism has traditionally saturated the subterranean world of drug dealing and induction into this grimy underworld was through hostility, aggression and artful callousness. Seen as resolutely masculine prerequisites, Jacobs and Miller’s (1998), work with female crack dealers and the particular challenges they, as women, faced and how they avoided arrest, found that women who managed to deal effectively, cultivated a series of strategies to evade capture. Using a range of means to elude discovery, referred to as ‘contextual assimilation’ and involving ‘projected self-­image, stashing, selling hours, and routine activities/staged performances’ (p.  562), women were able to deal successfully. Kandiyoti’s (1988) ‘patriarchal bargains’ anticipates this strategising, this re-­imagining of roles, in recognising that ‘different forms of patriarchy present women with distinct “rules of the game” and call for different strategies to maximise security and optimize life options with varying potential for active or passive resistance in the face of oppression’ (p.  274). Moreover, Hutton

Cut away   75 (2005) when investigating drug dealing as a racket and the contrasting experiences of male and female drug dealers, found that women could launch themselves in the covert economy of dealing drugs but this again was contingent upon bargaining within the sexed nature of power relationships which defines this arena. She observed that women dealers could ‘play the game or negotiate in the hegemonic masculine world of dealing despite being excluded as the female ‘other’ lacking in subcultural capital’ (p. 548). Bourgois’ initial belief in the ‘emancipatory resistance’ and ‘inversion of patriarchy’ that Candy so audaciously symbolised in the recklessly brash and courageous way she lived for so long, had been her way to survive in the harshest of environments but he knew, that her return to the man she had shot, was symbolic of surrender. Liberation may have been interrupted or forsaken completely but the extent to which this was representative of the gendered machinations of that particular drug scene, or a consolidation of patriarchal dominance, is uncertain. It was simply one woman’s account of endurance, which resonates with the women Maher and Daly (1996) met who conveyed the message, ‘don’t mess with me’ and maintained a reputation for ‘craziness’ which they perceived was integral in affording them ‘some measure of protection’ (p.  483). The drug-­ addicted homeless women Maher (2000) met did not fall into a binary characterisation of woman depicted in other studies as either completely deranged or utterly submissive, as she found, overwhelmingly, that there was remarkable acumen. Fleetwood (2014) realised the same in her work with female crack dealers, that although they operated in a market predictably dominated by men, it was not restricted too men, it was not exclusively a ‘man’s world’ (p.  104). She observed that the women here were able to deal effectively, in fact, to be female was not detrimental when dealing, it was ‘a resource for dealing’ (p. 105). To be a woman here had distinct advantages; calculated caution could secure a movement from the margins of drug activity to its core, with shrewd arbitration the price of participation in this murky trade. There is a kind of dexterous femininity here; a skilful femaleness that is insightful and cautious, patient, watchful, yet intrepid, fiercely determined and with the resilience and cunning required to survive; this female goes about her business in a way that enables her to go about her business. It might be through ‘incorporating drug transactions into pre-­existing routine activities’, which Jacobs and Miller (1998) noticed in the flourishing covert business of dealing, disguised around the ordinary mundanities of life (p. 559) and achieved by cultivating a concealed persona, one that quietly relishes being overlooked. Alternatively, it might unfold in gaudy acts of the deranged with any shade in between but whoever is exhibited or whoever subdued, this woman has taken control but knows that the control she has is within prescribed limits. In environments disposed to every kind of anarchy, there is surprisingly little lawlessness; drug commerce is strictly regulated and the force of drug governance so powerful, it need not demand adherence to its statute, rather, there is complicit acceptance. Drug discipline designates how players in this market practice and transgressive actions are not advisable.

76   Cut away Women who deal drugs on the streets are often in disguise. They have overthrown subsidiary positions in a repositioning that establishes their place, some sort of place, in the merciless market of street drugs. Master or be mastered, their disguise takes many forms and in the navigation through the turbulent machismo of street drug operation, they are lost. Women surrender themselves; they cannot be women if they are to survive. Ordinariness is weak, so they become another woman; an intensified representation of woman and womanliness; a symbolic distortion of others’ expectations or requirements of woman. Sometimes masculinised; this woman too often emerges where suppressed or embellished identities entangle and contend in a street drug scene. Stuurman (2000a), exploring the invention of modern equality, highlighted the ‘radical egalitarianism’ of Poulain de la Barre and the ‘conditions of possibility’ that he championed (p. 41). Writing in the 1670s, Poulain certainly had a democratic view of society, which Seidel (1974, p.  500) confirmed in referring to Poulain as an ‘enemy of all anti-­feminist prejudice’ who rejected the largely accepted male perspective of women as well-­fitted to the role of ‘lovely chattel’. Poulain sought to expose the social subFigure 3.18 Social subjugation. jugation of women and was unflinching in the face of anticipated criticism, knowing that this would be from both men and women. He was robust in his condemnation of the customary suppression and constraint of women and knew that the dismissal of women as individuals, only to be viewed as possessions, was pervasive in particular social contexts. As Giglioni (2003, p.  116) confirmed, women’s role at this time, ‘if they had one’ was always ‘subordinate … rigidly organized around a sexual division of intellectual labor … they were usually assigned works of translation and philological studies … encouraged to write escapist literature and romantic novels … invited to converse and decorate’. Figure 3.19 Martyr for votes.

Cut away   77 Why is it then, that we assure ourselves, that women are less fit for such things than ourselves? Sure it is not chance, but unavoidable necessity that hinders them from playing their parts. I urge not, that all women are capable of all sciences and employments; that any one is capable of all: No Man pretends to so much; but I only desire, that, considering the sex in general, we may acknowledge an aptitude in the one as well as the other. (Poulain de la Barre, 1676, p. 26) As a fervent advocate for the equality of women, Poulain renounced the disparity in perceived achievements between men and women. He could not restore equilibrium, but certainly proffered a resounding review of the supposed value of each. Schiebinger (1989, p. 176) confirmed, that central to Poulain’s argument was that ‘the mind – distinct from the body – has no sex’. For Poulain, sex was somatic, associated with procreation and the organs required for that. He put forward Figure 3.20 Lovely chattel. that it was convention that kept women in a place of domestic servitude, observing that the traditional view of women as ‘fit for nothing but to nurse and breed children in their low age and mind the  house’, held. He was convinced, however, of the unwarranted nature of such  derision and urged for a reconsideration of women and their perceived (in)capacities. It is commonly believed that Turks, Barbarians and wild savages are not so proper for learning as the people of Europe, though it be certain, if we found five or six of them here, that had the title or capacity of doctor (which is not at all impossible); they would correct our opinion, that these being men like to ourselves; they are capable of the same things; and that if they had been taught, they would not have yielded to us in the least. The women with whom we live, deserve surely as much. (Poulain, 1676, p. 47)

Figure 3.21 As complete as men.

78   Cut away The oppressive social rulings that defined and confined women and which that so distasteful to Poulain, determined that if women were to assume a place which was not their assigned place, but a foreign place, required a denial of an existing sense of being. The transcendence to another place, within the still same place, forced a detachment from the known and accepted, to a hitherto undefined, unoccupied place. It was remote, save for the courageous few, who were able to elevate themselves out of the mire of societal and familial suppression. It was not about being elevated but about elevation; it demanded personal fortitude and an unflinching conviction that this unfamiliar, uncensored democratic place of being was rightfully theirs. How many [women] have there been who have rendered themselves as complete as men in all sorts of sciences! Who have dived into the soft curious secrets of nature, the most quaint of policy, the most solid of morality and who have elevated themselves to the highest pitch of Christian divinity? So that history which has prejudiced abuse against that sex to abuse it, may serve to thorse [sic] who look thereon with the eyes of equality, to prove that it is in all respects as noble as our own. (Poulain, 1676, pp. 71–72) The social grouping of family as a nested construction with particular identities which define the family and the societal structures beyond this, suffused with certain cultural understandings which define it, is capital that Bourdieu (1996) argues is key to the reproduction of these structures. He recognised the family as playing a significant role in the continuance of social order but warned of the potential of these ‘sites of social reproduction’ to be sites of rebellion and fracture. When members of such groups were ‘less inclined to accept the common vision and more capable of imposing their “selfish” point of view’ (p. 23), which for Poulain, and later Wollstonecraft (1792), would have been a relinquishment of familial and cultural inheritances, the family home is reduced to rubble in a symbolic demolition carried out by its own occupants. Aroused by emancipatory promise, the understood social and cultural regulations hitherto lived out in the everyday inequalities of suppression, domination, and suffocating immanence, bequeathed so unreservedly, yet rejected so absolutely, the emboldened few embrace a new disobedience. To re-­imagine how things could be rejects the structuralism that Bourdieu proposed is critical to the existence and maintenance of the family and its interests. The stereotypical subjugation of women in street-­level drugs economies persists as men control their access to drugs and therefore women find themselves irresistibly attracted, or rather, irresistibly addicted, to men’s (pharmaceutical) prowess. Epele (2001) observed that even though women were aware of this attempt to submit them and accepted that they could not defy it, they could mitigate against some of the retribution frequently faced by ‘simulating’ women’s expected roles (p. 176). Earlier, Bordo (1994) and LeMoncheck (1985)

Cut away   79 recognised the complex bargaining that unfolds between men and women in contexts where drug use, drug selling and sex work coalesce. They argued that although women were often subordinated in these contexts, the success, as it were, of the subordination was that women seemed subordinate. The performance of subordination requires just the right amount of defencelessness to be projected, just enough simulated satisfaction to convince; this is where women’s agency seethes. Moreover, Whitaker, Ryan and Cox (2011) found that although feeling considerable levels of shame because of their sex work, drug use and infected states, the women in their Dublin study had agency and were certainly not weak. They resisted outright domination by exerting a particular power held by them as women in very particular situations. In saying no to clients, insisting on condom use and refusing clients’ requests, they exercised a kind of agency in place, a paradoxical imposition of impotence. Poulain’s distant voice, which railed against the inequality of women and their subordinated place, can still be heard in the servitude experienced by the majority of the drug-­dealing sisterhood. Although the agency of drugs bastardises the context, Poulain’s equality will not be silenced; it is appropriated by women who offer an abridged version of themselves, acutely aware of what survival on the streets requires. As a middle class woman writing in the 1790s, Wollstonecraft, a skilled observer of the nuances of domestic society, was only too aware of the cultural norm that submitted women for the pleasure and possession of men. In the drawing rooms of eighteenth-­century refined society, the social transactions that unfolded, where a woman may exhibit herself in order to entice an eligible man into marriage, was a ritual with particular and understood conditions. Wollstonecraft refused to yield to such accepted practice and called for women to renounce any sole ambition of seduction to secure a comfortable life. Wollstonecraft in the last decade of the eighteenth century:

Jane Austin in the first decade of the nineteenth century:

Women … are still regarded as a frivolous sex … they spend many of their earliest years acquiring a smattering of accomplishments but strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire to get themselves settled by marriage – the only way women can rise in the world. (Wollstonecraft, 1792, p. 9)

A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word [accomplished]; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved. (Austin, 1967, p. 28)

Of course, it was not the woman who was exposed, but a partial, perverted imaginary. Put aside honour, integrity, morality, reason, character, independent

80   Cut away thought, expression and a sense of worth, and there may be a gilded reward? Wollstonecraft, perhaps having heard Poulain’s cry, called for liberation; she sought emancipation from the shackles of decorative suppression and rejected the requirement for women to have to stifle, or forego, the cultivation of personal virtues as a condition for material betterment. In The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, she advocated Figure 3.22 Head of a woman. a new prosperity, a release from the poverty of ignorance in an audacious call to conversion. For women and men, the doctrine of this evangelism was of renewal, the baptism of a new society, where women were enabled, felt able, to aspire to what they were worth and men came to accept this: I want to persuade women to aim at strength of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases ‘susceptibility of heart’, ‘delicacy of sentiment’ and ‘refinement of taste’ are almost synonymous with expressions indicating weakness, and that creatures who are the objects only of pity and the kind of love that has been called ‘pity’s sister’ will soon become objects of contempt. So I dismiss those pretty feminine phrases that the men condescendingly use to make our slavish dependence easier for us, and I despise the weak elegance of mind, exquisite sensibility and sweet docility of manners that are supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker sex. (Wollstonecraft, 1792, p. 5) Darcy appears to have come across the writings of Wollstonecraft in the library at Pemberley as he is rather more demanding in his depiction of an accomplished woman; ‘to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading’ (p. 28). Although Wollstonecraft refers to the abstract category of ‘women’, her enlightened argument rejects women as subordinate, superficial, not part of ‘the human species’, not dignified by reason, in fact she assumes women have reason and dismisses suggestions that link human character with sexual character (1792, p. 6). Wollstonecraft was aware that the uniqueness of women was essentially their fatal flaw and urged them to reject the perceived frail nature of femininity, that ‘sweet docility’ and become more masculine. She called for a kind of measured masculinity though, not an arbitrary one ‘the imitation of manly talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character’ (p.  7) as she believed that for women to become equal, they must become men. Wollstonecraft invited women to be different women, transformed, ‘I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body’ (p. 8). She wanted women to be discerning and not obedient to extraneous ideas about

Cut away   81 what being masculine might involve. She dismissed manly frivolities and certainly did not urge women to settle as insipid imitations of men; hers was no feeble attempt to be equal to men but instead, Wollstonecraft called for a new humanity where women felt able to release a hitherto submitted character, not absent character but perhaps thus far concealed; as for Wollstonecraft, this was worthy of liberation; ‘become more masculine and respectable’ (p.  9) was her rallying cry; be as men, not become men. Startled patriarchies of the time made an acquaintance with the women already amongst them, the women they already knew. Wollstonecraft’s call for ‘respectable masculinity’ that distinguished the body and mind is heard in Irigaray’s (1996) insistence that to be born female is not necessarily to be female, ‘female physiology is present but not identity, which remains to be constructed … I am born a woman, but I must still become this woman that I am by nature’ (p.  107) echoed de Beauvoir’s (1997) assertion that ‘the body is not enough to define her as a woman’ (p.  69) that, as her famous aphorism confirmed, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (p.  393). De Beauvoir (1997) was unabashed in citing the many weaknesses of ‘woman’ but dismissed them as insignificant as she sought liberation and warned that ‘every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is degradation of existence’ (p. 29). Braidotti (2003) does not subscribe to a normative perception of woman and woman’s perceived place; in fact, ‘she may no longer be a she, but the subject of quite another story, a subject-­in-process’ (p. 45). This woman has a distinctive sense of self, is not explicitly womanly and is no longer deprived by the bluster of masculine dominance of their personhood. Butler (1990) wonders whether in constructing a category called women as something distinct and constant, inadvertently provokes the discrepant perspective of gender relations, intensifying the intrapersonal and interpersonal nature of what gender may be as part of a complex social, political and cultural milieu. She is cautious about attaching a commonality to ‘women’ and recognises it as a ‘site of contested meanings’, a category with an incomplete definition that might serve as a ‘normative ideal relieved of coercive force’ (p.  21). Such an existentialist feminist position that insists that ‘representation will make sense for feminism only when the subject of women is nowhere presumed’ (p. 8), anticipates Irigaray’s (1996) ‘the natural is at least two’ (p. 35), a rather vexed view of what natural is, as unresolved and irresolvable, laden with intriguing possibility. Irigaray affirms the disputed nature of identity both within and between gender, hinting at an indecisive, imprecise, impossible and unwanted dualist consideration. That no woman or man ‘accomplishes the whole in herself, or himself, neither of nature or of consciousness’ (p. 36) persists in troubling the veracity of a reductive definition of women. De Beauvoir’s (1997) conviction that women would want to be distinguished as ‘this housekeeper, this wife, this mother, this woman’ (p.  542) is symbolic of individualism; she too sees woman as unique and distinct, a gloriously idiosyncratic spirit, Young’s (1990) woman of ‘distinctive value’ (p. 85) boldly sweeps all aside.

exceeding the somatic and etched with ontological significance Figure 3.23 Woman in glasses.

Figure 3.24 Black eye.

an elaborate intersection where divergent perspectives of femaleness coalesce Figure 3.26 Two women.

Figure 3.25 Old lady in glasses.

the female body is a symbolic sight of discontinuity

Figure 3.27 Wrinkled face.

Figure 3.28 Body builder.

Figure 3.29 Androgynous.

where different understandings of what it is to be female emerge

Figure 3.30 Grayson Perry.

Figure 3.31 Woman in tie.

and traditional, prescribed, attenuated versions of female are rejected Figure 3.32 Tattoo.

Figure 3.33 Veiled.

an alternative, disrupting female steps forward and claims her a rightful place.

Figure 3.34 Red scarf.

Figure 3.35 Drag.

Figure 3.36 Sex worker.

84   Cut away Irigaray (1996) knew that liberation for women was about establishing the identity of what it is to be a woman and speculated what a female generic may encompass. She attempted to draft a ‘spirituality in the feminine’ (p. 64), which resists a hierarchic understanding of identity in relation to men and, unlike de Beauvoir (1997), who speaks of ‘other’, woman as other to man, compelled to ‘assume the status of Other’ by men (p.  29), refuses to position woman as ‘other’. Irigaray looks back and around, then, with the weight of tradition pressing, proceeds towards what a woman may be, what being female is. Her ‘spirituality in the feminine’ is a kind of disembodied femininity; a femininity in consciousness that transcends existing understandings of femaleness and woman in a renaissance which sees a feminine soul. To draw up an idea of woman only in relation to man is a diminishment; an impoverished depiction that fails to interrogate the personal womanliness of woman, she, as a distinct being. It overlooks the intricacies of apart and between identities, woman coming to know woman, man coming to know man, woman and man recognise each other as persons alongside each other; counterpoised, their distinct identities stabilise. If difference is arbitrary, always comparative, and not expressive, then how can there be an opening for sexual difference that acknowledges difference as limit, whereby difference is not articulated as difference from? Without difference articulated as a limit there can be no sexuate identity since identity continues to refer to the one, to that which is already known from within this logic of recognition. (Fielding, 2001, p. 15)

Figure 3.37 A natural woman.

Looking out on the morning rain I used to feel so uninspired And when I knew I had to face another day Lord, it made me feel so tired Before the day I met you, life was so unkind But you’re the key to my peace of mind ’Cause you make me feel, You make me feel, You make me feel like A natural woman When my soul was in the lost and found You came along to claim it I didn’t know just what was wrong with me Till your kiss helped me name it

Cut away   85 Now I’m no longer doubtful, of what I’m living for And if I make you happy I don’t need to do more ’Cause you make me feel, You make me feel, You make me feel like A natural woman (You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman (King, Goffin and Wexler, 1967) A woman who deals drugs successfully has become adept at change; she is a surrogate, a substitute woman, woman concealed in woman and in the unregulated drugs economy where Carrie operated, there was no dispensation for being a woman anyway. She was a female drug dealer and an addict and therefore susceptible to the harsh disciplines of drug culture, just like anyone else. I used to hang around with the heroin addicts, I knew ’em. I served an undercover cop three times. I didn’t suspect anything. I only sold to certain people, people I knew. I’d seen his face [undercover police] a few times and thought he was alright. He was hanging around with the homeless heroin addicts, mixing with the heroin addicts, that’s what the police do. He’d buy £40–£50 off yer each time. You’re gonna serve them ’cos it’s cash. He just looked like one of us, hoody, sleeping bag. I went to give him the stuff and he pulled out his badge. Three coppers jumped on me. Ludwick, Murphy and Sales (2015) explored women’s experiences of dealing and the means they employed to protect themselves in the male-­dominated drug market of San Francisco Bay and found that women there ‘performed gender’, and did so in several different ways (p. 711). In accentuating womanliness and perceived female characteristics, they found that the women who did this were able to evade police interest more easily and appeared less conspicuous. Flirtatious behaviour by women bedecked in their best finery, although premeditated, appeared completely incongruous within such a macho economy. Alternatively, some of the women preferred to adopt an antithetic persona to that which may be considered a gendered norm in attempting to be ‘one of the guys’ (p.  712), an unobtrusive existence, forgotten in the testosterone-­fuelled volatile milieu helped secure a semblance of safety. The ‘savvy women sellers’ (p. 713) were accomplished performers; they negotiated complex circumstances and intricate relationships with deft skill, anticipating, reacting and responding; these shrewd women were acutely aware of the arsenal of tools at their disposal and willing to deploy whatever it took to defend their place. Carrie wasn’t ‘one of the guys’ but more Maher and Daly’s ‘don’t mess with me’ as she projected an independent aggressiveness, a fearsomeness that was deliberate and for which she was renowned. Because of this, other drug dealers and users, both men and women, gave her a wide birth and were very wary when they came across her on the streets.

86   Cut away The antagonistic posturing and unpredictable sexual dynamics that persist in street-­level drug activity, as agents compete to assert agency, can neglect to take account of the all-­powerful, insidious agency of another; the distillation of decrepitude and control; drugs have their own agency. This agent is exotic and compelling, clever and manipulative and speaks drugs talk fluently. Seductive invitations and alluring promises are spoken of convincFigure 3.38 The agency of drugs. ingly but the drugs sufferings, drugs exploitations, drugs violence, drugs brutalities are hushed. This agent forgets to mention that the language of drugs spoken is lies and makes its fraudulent offer without regret. In executing its own agency, it takes its place within drugs communities and assumes a subterranean capital all of its own. Carrie got seven years in prison for dealing. Since then, she has stayed out of prison and been living on the streets more or less continuously for several years. In this time, she has had occasional brief spells of staying in rented accommodation or in hostels or other temporary housing but for the large part, she has been a rough sleeper. Although she tends to separate herself from the other homeless people we have met, preferring to be alone, she has had a number of relationships with homeless men during this time, lasting from weeks to months. The men Carrie told us about, whom she’d been in relationships with were all, without exception, violent, criminal drug addicts and some regularly used to beat and abuse her. One of them, she told us about, who was living in temporary accommodation at the time and Carrie with him, knocked her front teeth out in a row; she left and went back onto the streets. Don’t mess with Baz; everyone knew that. Carrie and Baz were a couple and were together for several months. She didn’t say that he was ever violent towards her but his previous experiences of extortion and drug gangs were evidence of a violent past. He secured a protection for Carrie on the streets as no one ‘messed’ with Baz and, by association, neither did they with Carrie. Although she had enough of a formidable reputation herself, with Baz now casting his defensive shadow, the two of them went about their business on the streets without much interference or threat. Baz was in temporary accommodation, which Carrie often shared. Bourgois, Prince and Moss (2004), in their work with homeless, drug-­ addicted women found that they were vulnerable to high levels of violence and predatory sexual behaviour at the hands of men, which prompted many of them to enter into relationships with men on the streets, as a protective measure. These ‘running partnerships’ (p. 236) with homeless men were seen as a way to secure a level of safety, as their running partners would behave ‘jealously’ to protect them from ‘violence and sexual harassment’ (p.  257). Mieczkowski’s (1994)

Cut away   87 research examining women’s varying roles in the drug market of Detroit also revealed that although both men and women faced similar challenges as illicit drug dealers, there were ‘unique aspects of those problems tied to their gender’ (p. 244), which were indisputable and consequently necessitated a particular set of coping strategies. He observed that women often invoked the protection of males but this ‘trusted male’ brought with it certain exploitative risks (p. 245), which Cohen et al. (2003) confirmed in their work, reporting that the extent of abuse and violence women suffered at the hands of their partners was extensive, with a variety of threatening and coercive experiences, everyday occurrences. Protection of this sort can contain an unwritten but clearly understood contract between protector and protected. Although women may be guarded from other men on the street by a male partner, a general protection, their vulnerability remains, becoming a more particular vulnerability at the hands of one man. While some women are able to carve out a successful career as street-­level drug entrepreneurs, theirs is a relatively uncommon experience, as most women continue to be restricted to the periphery of drugs markets and limited to prescribed negligible roles. The Day Centre where homeless people can gather is an old church. The pews have long gone, replaced with shabby, mismatched furniture which fills the centre of the room. Formica laminate tables chipped and worn, the proud centre-­pieces of 1950s suburban aspiration, symbols of an optimistic post-­war domestic ideal, now stand obsolete; as obsolete and confining as they were then? Threadbare armchairs with springs poking through press against the walls, waiting for careless occupants to slump into their once comfortable embrace; with too much on their minds to notice, they suffice. There is a television mounted high on the wall, barely audible and flickering but Figure 3.39 The day centre. that particular day, it still managed to hypnotise those who were gathered. In the corner of the room was a small kitchen with a counter behind where two volunteers were pouring tea and buttering white toast. We spotted Sophie whom we had not seen for a while; she and John were a couple, who were part of the homeless group we had come to know and they were going to have a baby. They had not been a couple for long, a matter of months; both had young children from previous relationships but this was their first together. Sophie was sitting away from the others and John was at one of the tables with some of the other homeless people who were in there. Sophie had always been reserved in our past encounters, quiet and shy so we were tentative about

88   Cut away approaching her. After a few minutes, I went over and sat next to her and started gazing at the television. Sophie was quite far gone in her pregnancy and looked weary and pallid. She was wearing an over-­sized sweat shirt and jogging pants and her hair was scraped away from her face; an elastic band pulled it tight. It needed washing as it was greasy and limp but that seemed to be the least of her worries. ‘Are you okay Sophie?’ She said she felt sick. ‘We could keep the baby if we found somewhere to live.’ She seemed exhausted ‘I just want it finished now’. After a long pause, she said ‘I don’t want to leave this place, this is where my support is’ then later added that she felt at home on the streets with homeless people, Sophie’s ‘homeless intimates’ comprise her ‘street’ family (Hudson et al., 2009, p. 357) with whom, as Takahashi, McElroy and Rowe (2002) found, strong bonds are formed as other blood ties disintegrate. Lives mired in abuse, neglect, addiction, crime, violence, debt and illness take their toll but Sophie was acquiescent; Nietzsche’s (1967) dignity in profound suffering, his principle for greatness, was there, ‘that one wants for nothing to be other than it is’; his love of fate (p. 10). However bleak Sophie’s prospects, she felt able to turn to her urban family and find solace; Profound suffering ennobles; it separates. One of the most subtle forms of disguise is Epicureanism and a certain ostentatious bravery of taste which takes suffering frivolously and arms itself against everything sorrowful and profound (Nietzsche, 1966, p. 209) If Sophie had gone to the Local Authority as a single woman who was pregnant, they would have housed her as a priority but because she was with John, this was not possible so, as an emergency, they had been housed by the charity. When the charity was unable, for legal reasons, to sustain their support, John and Sophie found themselves on the street; deemed to have made themselves intentionally homeless, they could not be housed by the Local Authority. They were advised to find somewhere independently to live. The hope that filled Sophie and seemed to sustain her was, of course, misplaced. That it would be ‘different this time’ (Sophie already had two other children who had been adopted) was completely unrealistic. In her unflinching hopefulness for a family life together with John and their baby, she refused to accept the reality of their circumstance as she talked to us about impending parenthood. Dotson (2011) found in her research with women who were homeless, that they understood the reality of their situations all too well, yet despite the circumstances they found themselves in, they longed to better their prospects, to have a ‘normal, stable relationship’ with their children. The women in Dotson’s study all spoke of their desire for a normal family life; it was something they looked forward to, once they were ‘back on their feet’ (p. 254). The family life of which Sophie spoke was an imaginary. She had never experienced a secure, close family as a child herself; hers was a childhood of trauma and exposure to drugs

Cut away   89 (as was John’s) but still she continued to believe in a nuclear family ideal. Perhaps this persistent hope prevented her from having to confront what was around her, what inevitably would have to happen. The pain in the intimate lives of the Edgewater homeless is exacerbated by the dissonance between their valuation of traditional kinship roles and the reality of their lives. The nuclear family ideal has never been an option for most of the Edgewater homeless. The family as an institution is a crucial network for resources and for the reproduction of cultural and ideological values, but it is also often a crucible for violence. (Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009, p. 208) A few weeks later, we heard that Sophie had had her baby, so we thought we would visit her in hospital. What to take? Bibs, baby grows, pretty little cardigans, bonnets with pom poms on, adorable soft toys … were all out of the question. We decided on chocolates, a lot of them, and a card. What card to choose, what to write? All the cards we could see in the hospital shop were congratulatory, welcoming new life. Pink and blue sentiments offered their saccharine good wishes and images of storks, prams, happy couples and cherubic faces smiled through the cellophane wrappers. We chose a card with flowers on; blank for your own message inside. It could have been for any occasion as its insipid cover refused to commit to any event. In this circumstance, it was the only card that would do. We troubled about what to write for a long time, rehearsing different messages between us and eventually settled on ‘To Sophie, With Love and Best Wishes, Paul and Frances’. Sophie’s baby had been removed and taken into the care of Social Services straight after it had been born. We were not allowed in to see Sophie so we just left the bag of chocolates and the card at the nurses’ station for her. Sophie and John eventually got a place to live in the nearby town of Ellesmere Port. Sophie was reluctant to move there as she thought that it would be a ‘bad influence’ on John, that it was a ‘rough’ area and she ‘didn’t want him to get into trouble’. John was homeless, had a prison record that included attempted murder and was a voracious consumer of illegal drugs. His drug use, and hers, did not diminish in any way during the pregnancy, neither did their conviction that all they needed to do was find a home and they would be allowed to live as a family with their new baby. Whilst living in Ellesmere Port, they spent most of their time coming back to Chester on the train and we regularly bumped into them at the station. Sophie and John had supervised access visits to their baby girl for the time she was in the care of Social Services but when the baby was adopted, their visits stopped. They still live in Ellesmere Port and still frequently make the journey back to Chester, where they have often told us they feel they belong. Walking along with Carrie one afternoon, she began to talk about her experiences as a child. Neglect, exposure to drugs and abuse describe her early life and it was commonplace to hear of such adverse circumstances amongst the homeless people we talked to.

90   Cut away I’m the only child. I was brought up that children should be seen and not heard. When I was a kid I didn’t eat much, I was mal-­nourished, I’m skinny. I had to look for my own food as a kid. I didn’t used to go to school. I had home tuition. I was naughty and every time I went to school I’d get kicked out. I was a terrible child me; naughty. I’ve got a step sister. My dad was different with her; she wasn’t his daughter. I don’t remember her much. I used to be on my own in the shed or in the garden in my Wendy house hiding. My dad was a heroin addict he got me on to heroin my dad did. He used to inject me. He’d give me the heroin then rape me. It’s quite sick really. Carrie was chronically homeless. She had been on the streets for a sustained and significant amount of time, several years in fact. Her life story and what she had lived through was all too common amongst the people we had met. Bea, Carrie, Sophie and John had all experienced childhoods of severe trauma and the consequences of this had followed them through their adolescence and into their adulthoods. Never able to be forgotten, or left behind, the sufferings of their early lives were a part of them. They had impossible perseverance and lived in spite of life. Theirs had been childhoods of exposure to drugs, physical cruelty, sexual abuse, domestic violence, miserable poverty, neglect and for Carrie and Sophie, rape and under-­age pregnancy as well. The link between childhood trauma and homelessness in adulthood is well documented (Fitzpatrick, Kemp and Klinker, 2000; Zlotnick, Tam and Bradley, 2010; Speirs, Johnson and Jirojwong, 2013; Swick, Williams and Fields, 2014) for example, but listening to Carrie talk about the things she had faced as a child, it is too easy to overlook the passage of time, during this time; childhoods of appalling ordeal are lived slowly. If this life has not been lived, it is impossible to comprehend the actualness of it. Anguish infects every scintilla of your being, never without; there is no peace and little hope of escape from its pervasive control. There is a constructed homelessness here where personal, relational, social, material, medical and administrative complexities build. An assemblage of challenges escalates and intensifies around the vulnerable. Anderson and Tulloch’s (2000) account of the ‘route into homelessness’ (p. 11) was a turbulent and intricate one that is picked up in Martijn and Sharpe’s (2006) depiction of the painful ‘pathway’ to homelessness (p. 9) with both acknowledging the many contributing harrowing factors involved. Furthermore, Wilson and Widom (2009), in identifying the relationship between childhood abuse and neglect, and perilousness in adulthood, observed, that sex work, homelessness, delinquency and criminal behaviour, combined with a ravenous consumption of illicit drugs, were all part of an extreme existence, from which women were less likely to recover. On the walk with Carrie, when she had starting telling us about her childhood, she said that she didn’t like thinking about her family, as doing so reminded her of her ‘shit life’.

Cut away   91 I don’t like talking about my family. My mum kicked me out when I was 15. I’ve lived all my life round here. I’ve been on my own since I was 16. I’m old enough to look after myself. I went into a hostel in Holywell. It was horrible, full of drug addicts so I went back home at 17; my dad let me back in. I was using heroin then, that’s where it started. He didn’t Figure 3.40 Shit life. abuse me anymore as I told my mum about it and she spoke to my dad. I was smoking cannabis but wasn’t doing anything. Someone said ‘try crack’; I got myself a habit. Before this I’d only tried the odd spliff and beer. I’ve had a pretty shit life. I still see my mum and nan walk past. Carrie had been evicted from her family home when she was 16 and been given a council flat in Buckley, North Wales. It was her own place but a man she was seeing at the time was living with her. Don was 35 and had just separated from his wife. She said they were ‘like brother and sister, good friends’ but ended up having two children together. Carrie was with him for a number of years. She told us that he was a drug addict and that was when she was with him that she started dealing; ‘I did it to fund his habit’. It was Don, she said, who got her into drugs, heroin and crime, I was his crime partner, he was just a burglar, a bad egg. Most of my criminal record’s ’cos of him; he’d put most of the rip on me, he put stolen goods in my bag, ‘she did it, she did it’. I was with him for seven years. She had three children, two boys and a girl. The baby girl died whilst Carrie was in prison; it was a cot death. Cathy was living with my dad when I was in prison. I got told that she’d died but didn’t believe it at first until I saw the death certificate. They left the funeral until I came out. I don’t want to talk about that. When she came out of prison, Carrie went back to Don. She said he would tell her what to do, mostly petty thefts, nothing major; ‘we were taking heroin, Don would sort me out first before sorting himself out’, then she said they would ‘get smashed and go out robbin’ people. I’m a little shit bag really’. Carrie’s descent into homelessness started early; she had a childhood that made her particularly susceptible to torment in adulthood. The crises she experienced as a child and young person were a precursory homelessness, a portent to expect a harrowing adulthood. Agonies upon agonies, homelessness as suffering describes Carrie’s whole life.

92   Cut away Homelessness is a state of disconnection; an extrication where extreme poverty pervades, a poverty of money, of jobs, of homes, of relationships, of family, of love, of intimacy, of hope; a separation that condemns human beings often to a place where suffering is the only thing which flourishes. Unrecognised by almost everything and everybody else, despair is tempered by a kind of secluded humanity. Amongst the homeless group we came to know, a strong sense of community existed, a culture of togetherness, a ‘looking out for each other’, a ‘watching people’s backs’, this private humanity was directed towards each other, it looked to those around them, it kept between themselves, amongst themselves. Mired in failure, they at least had one another. Unsurprisingly, there was volatility, as all of the men and women in the homeless group we knew were chronic drug addicts, which made for an unpredictable and precarious environment with frequent violent altercations. Although there could be aggressive confrontation, or things carried out that some among the group considered reprehensible, they were quickly forgotten, no one condemned or seemed to carry a grudge. We had seen Bea around and about the streets frequently but had not had chance to speak with her much. We knew from Carrie and Sophie that Bea was homeless; she was also a chronic drug addict and an alcoholic. She was normally with a group of men and sometimes one other woman, all homeless, sitting, talking, or rushing, apparently on their way somewhere. Occasionally though, we would see Bea sitting on the ground at the side of the roundabout, opposite the racecourse, alone. It was a scrubby, stony patch of grass, largely hidden under trees, which sloped gently upwards towards the Day Care Centre. One afternoon, Paul and I noticed Bea was on the grass so we decided to go and see if it was okay to talk to her. We were cautious as we didn’t want to disturb her. She was still and looked as though she was relaxing; we thought she might have gone to sleep as it was a warm, sunny day. We carried on walking down the path to see if she was awake; she was, so we walked over towards her. She was leaning against the grassy bank with her legs stretched out in front of her. The jogging bottoms, tee shirt and jumper she wore were all baggy; unfilled cloth folded awkwardly around her but she didn’t seem to notice. Strewn around seemed to be her everything; bulging plastic bags overflowing with more clothes, and cans; cans of lager and cider, not in those packs of four, tied together with plastic hoops, but single ones, mixed types, some on the ground empty and discarded but others stowed in a bag, close by. She had one of the cans in her hand. We went cautiously towards her and started to chat. Bea was friendly and seemed happy to talk with us, so we arranged to meet the day after next on the benches by the Cross. Carrie knew of Bea but they were rarely together. They kept their distance but because ‘everyone knew everyone’ on the streets, when we asked Carrie had she seen Bea because she hadn’t made it to the Cross for our meeting, she began to tell us about her: She’s bad that Bea you know. She’s anyone’s for a can o’ beer. That makes it hard then when she gets raped, the police don’t believe her. It’s easy-­come, easy-­go in it. That girl does anything for a can o’ beer. She’s got a bad rep.

Cut away   93 She’s anyone’s for a can o’ beer, she’s anyone’s. It’s quite sad really. Taxi drivers, you name it, she’ll ’av ’em if there’s a can o’ beer in it, she’ll do anythin’. It’s disgustin’ that in it? She goes to the next man, and the next man, and the next man. Long as she’s gettin’ a beer, she’s happy. She gets pregnant, doesn’t know who the father is. Bea has done it with a 70-year-­old man. I don’t understand that. If you’re going to do something, do it with someone your own age, not someone old enough to be your granddad. Why didn’t she ask one of her friends? We could ’av managed to get a pound between us, a few of us put 20 pence. It’s mostly for drugs and alcohol … and a bit of fun. It wouldn’t stop me from being her friend as she’s still a nice girl. Not many people talk to her ’cos of that. You don’t judge people ’cos of that. We’ve all got our own problems haven’t we? Carrie told us about some of her own experiences of being propositioned on the streets. She never admitted to any form of sex for money or drugs herself and seemed to consider this kind of behaviour reckless and objectionable, preferring to rely on other means to make money and acquire drugs. Someone offered me £20 to go to bed with ‘em last night. I said ‘No’. There’s a lot of people sell their bodies ‘round here for money. Big Bea, the other day, literally gave dirty Dave a blow job for a pound; one pound, just for a drink. She gave another man a blow job for a pound. I think it’s disgustin’.

To allow one’s person for profit to be used by another for the satisfaction of sexual desire, to make of oneself an Object of demand, is to dispose over oneself as over a thing and to make of oneself a thing on which another satisfies his appetite. Human beings are not entitled to offer themselves, for profit, as things for the use of others in the satisfaction of their sexual propensities. In so doing, they would run the risk of having their person used by all and sundry as an instrument for the satisfaction of inclination. (Kant, 1963, p. 165)

Kant had rather a lot to say about sex work and was somewhat condemnatory. In his Lectures on Ethics (1963), there seems to be an inconsistency in his views about objectification in referring to sexual impulse as an ‘appetite for enjoying another human being’ (p.  165). Yet, irrespective of Kant’s positioning of the person, the human being, there is a carnality here that abstracts the personhood, as desire takes over. In the satisfaction of that desire, Kant gives the impression in this that any person, any human, will do; a kind of sex that has no soul and seeks no soul. The discrepancy does not lie, however, in the rapacious, devouring nature of sexual longing inferred by Kant here, as he at least includes a ‘someone’ in

94   Cut away this; it comes later. Kant separates human nature from sex, with the person becoming seemingly inconsequential. He resolved that ‘only her sex is the object of his desires’; human nature is ‘subordinated’, is ‘sacrificed’ to sex (p. 164). This severance is interrupted though when Kant presents a description of the unified body and self; he maintains that each, together, compose the person. Sexual desire for Kant objectifies. It can consume the ‘objectifier’ who, amid desire, appears to lose sight of what makes the now ‘objectified’ who they are, seeing only that which is a means to fulfil desire. Desire in this sense appears symbolic of control, disregard and exploitation with any tender intimacy, emotion or physical expression of love between persons, overtaken by gratification at all cost; the human cost. For Kant, sexual desire is a reductive process of objectification, which denudes the person of their self and institutes the de-­personalised act. He was unequivocal in asserting that women could avoid their own objectification by containing their expression as sexual beings within a monogamous marriage, this was for Kant, the ‘only feasible arrangement’ (p. 168). Kant’s ideal to evade objectification in such a way seems impossibly incongruous but could be thought of as a remarkably perceptive and impassioned plea for equality and respect which extends beyond the context to which he refers. For women on the streets where drug use and sex for money are a part of life, Kant’s ideal seems remote, as the body becomes a contested site of objectification. Although Heerde, Scholes-­Balog and Hemphill (2015) identified the indeterminate nature of the terms used to describe sex for commodities, however understood, ‘street prostitution … engaging in sex work … survival sex … trading sex’ (p.  206) is a dangerous business. Cronley, Cimino, Hohn, Davis and Madden (2016) confirmed that this ‘hazardous industry’ (p. 904) where women comprised the main workforce, did so out of economic necessity, their options were limited and so resorted to what was available to them. Through sex work, they were able to ‘meet their most basic needs’ (p. 905). Kant’s (1963) concern about the likelihood of abuse in arrangements where a person yields themselves to another, so that they have ‘complete rights’ but that person does not likewise ‘yield himself in return’, does not ‘extend the same right’ in a reciprocal way (p. 167) aligns with Epele’s (2001) sex worker as an ‘urban sexual slave’ (p.  163), an exchange of themselves for food, shelter, money or drugs. MacKinnon (1993) deliberated about why women allow themselves to be used by men for sex and, unsurprisingly concluded, that ‘the sex is not chosen for the sex; money is the medium force and provides the cover for consent’ (p.  28). As Murphy (2010) verified, sex work afforded women a kind of financial stability but as Smith and Marshall (2007) observed, the women in their Glasgow study all said that drug addiction was the motivating factor that drove them to sex work and the amount of their sex work was directly related to the extent of their addiction. Epele offered an alternative understanding of objectification, which confronts Kant’s apprehension about the one-­sidedness of these circumstances. Epele (2001) did not think that the extent and nature of objectification that she observed was encompassed in the idea of sex slave and suggested that a new form of sex work could exist. In her work with drug-­using sex workers, women as objectifying, ‘owners of an object from which

Cut away   95 they can obtain profit’ (p. 170) may ‘re-­appropriate’ their bodies and feel a sense of liberation. It may not be, as Cronley, Cimino, Hohn, Davis and Madden (2016) found, the ‘preferred profession’ (p. 902) but nevertheless, objectification in sex work can be re-­imagined; the street becomes a place of deliverance and transformation. Through inversion, women, become a contradictory force. I, woman no longer submit to you man it, my body submits to me not you it is of use for my use I will use it you are there in its use but not just you I have a say you may use it this body and in return I use you again? I cannot say, you may not This body is lost It has nowhere nothing it is too late etched with misery and despair it is an addict’s body no room for desires it owes too much it is indebted it pays with what it has addiction insists It has cost me Addiction It decides my place It determines my life Whore Addict Homeless Woman Call me what you like I know

96   Cut away Paradoxically, there is an immorality in Kant’s Moral Law (1948), his categorical imperative, ‘act in relation to every rational being (both to yourself and to others) that he may at the same time count in your maxim as an end in himself … never merely as a means’ (p. 99) seems to permit a kind of dual objectification within limits; Kant’s humanity temporarily devoid of humanity; there is an objectification in action here, an objectified object and an objectifying subject, whose own objectification is permitted. Regarding a person as a something or in regarding oneself in such a way is an objectification of both other and self. But Kant restores the person. He is unequivocal that treating a person or allowing oneself to be treated as an object, ‘merely’ an object, is objectionable. Kant reminds humanity of humanity, the priority of personhood. Green (2000) continued Kant’s claim that there is a fundamental instrumentality of the person, that ‘people are objects and things’ but clarified that there is objectification when ‘something that is more than an object is treated as a mere object’ (p.  44); for her, people are in some way, objects, but not just that, not only that. This is a clear departure from Nussbaum (1995) whose objectification involves seeing, and, or ‘treating one thing as another: one is treating as an object what in fact is not an object, but a human being’. She continues by detailing a nuanced depiction of objectification, as not about treating things as objects but actually about ‘making into a thing, something that is really not a thing’ (p. 257). Nussbaum specified seven features of objectification and was clear in what ‘treating a person as an object’ involved, that people were: treated as tools to serve another’s purpose, denied freedom to act upon their own will, were without agency, freely exchangeable, permitted targets of violation, commodities to be traded and worthy of disregard. Above all, Nussbaum found ‘instrumentalising’ the most problematic, where human beings were denied what was ‘fundamental to them as human beings, namely the state of beings, ends in themselves’ (p.  265). Although she was unswerving in her belief of the injustice of sexual objectification which reduced women to a something for the consumption of men, she knew that circumstance and situation were paramount in the matter of objectification which allowed for some fluidity in adjudging objectification as wholly negative. Objectification can be reinterpreted in sexual encounters where there is relationship. A sexual encounter is a scene of use, of instrumentality; one and the other willingly succumb to use, but in that use, there is ecstasy in the other’s ecstasy and then our own; in turn, returned, Nussbaum’s (2007) ‘willed passivity … compatible with, and even a valued part of, a relationship in which the woman is treated as an end for her own sake … as a fully-­fledged human being’ (p. 51). Man and woman both respecters of personhood, spirit and soul. Scott and Tuana (2016) accept the oppressive nature of objectification and its potential to diminish agency but speculate about ‘non-­objectifying erotic love’ (p. 2) which they say is ‘at the end of objectification’ (p. 17). Nevertheless, they wonder how desire enacts without objectifying the desired one and arrive at the ‘site of love’ (p.  20); a place where Kant’s ‘object of appetite’ (p.  163), Herman’s (1993) person as ‘object, something for use’ (p.  57) or Dworkin’s (2000) ‘thing or commodity’, a human, ‘made less than human’ (p. 30), through

Cut away   97 objectification, are absent. The ‘site of love’ is a place of impossible objectification which refuses admittance to subjugation and surrender: The site of love is one where love transforms urge and the other’s life has a permeating, primary value, one where a pervasive predisposition to affirm the other’s benefit and safekeeping rules, where satisfaction is governed by delight in the other’s delight and thriving. Delight suffuses, pours over, neither mine nor yours in the happening of desire. It returns and in returning is returned. When this dynamic interplay fuels erotic desire, that desire for the other happens within the site’s parameters. The dynamic interplay infuses. It is not done. (Scott and Tuana, 2016, p. 20) Scott and Tuana’s (2016) site of love is where Kant’s (1963) ‘unity of will’ would enact (p. 167). The reciprocal yielding that he described, man and woman as both possessing and possessed, is an equal, accepting compliance. Carrie holds out, unlike Bea, who, in desperation, ‘does anything for a can o’ beer’ prefers to find other ways to generate money and if she can’t, then she has none, ‘I don’t do it but most of em do. If I’ve gotta do without, I gotta do without, simple cos it’s lower than the low that’. For Carrie, sex work is too great a sacrifice; despite a life of extreme poverty, she finds it impossible to surrender to that last act. Her abjection of the disgusting is of the act not the person; she does not condemn Bea or any of the others for resorting to such a course of action to survive and despite the hardships she faces, Carrie refuses to submit. She does not see sex work for herself as an acceptable alternative to destitution, for her it is symbolic of defeat; a loss of a part of herself which she is not yet prepared to surrender. She is unable to objectify her own body and use it as others might and keeps her sole ownership, but barely. I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Figure 3.41 He assaults at once.

98   Cut away Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed: I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead. Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit … She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-­formed thought to pass: ‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’ (Eliot, 1971, 230–252) Carrie, Bea and Sophie, whom we got to know over several years, continue to exhibit a remarkable fortitude in the face of appallingly bleak circumstances. They are still homeless, still finding a way to exist on the streets, still living bare lives on the brink of collapse. We none of us need go too far to meet them, as the humanitarian crime of homelessness intensifies. The social perception of people who are homeless as deserving of their place of decrepitude, regrettably, seems to persist and rather than make for a society where compassion flourishes, a social distance is maintained; preferred? The street is a place of banishment; it holds people there who find themselves there; but it is not content with that. It prefers a further banishment. It exiles to the margins those who have no place to be on the street; the street is not for them. They must go, out of sight, to a place, any place where I am not. The street where I live, where my home is, where I stroll, where I shop, where I meet friends, where my life is, is not their street. Banished; people who are homeless become ‘homelessness’; the problem of ‘homelessness’, lapsing easily into a collective unconscious, the person who is homeless is overlooked, forgotten. For ever outside.

4 Not a proper copper

‘Who’s that?’ I asked Sally, as she gave a man in uniform we were walking past an exaggerated wide berth and sneering glance. ‘Fag police’, she told me, contemptuously. ‘Not a proper copper.’ Within the mire of identity politics and their undoing, represented variously everywhere – for example, in the plight of refugees and those factions within countries that refuse them entry, in the pages of broad sheets, tabloids and academic journals, in the waves of feminisms and the growth in the consciousness of trans being, and the struggle for rights that traverse cultural practices and ideologies – the common, preoccupying, question that each position with respect to this dynamic is concerned with, is not so much that of who or what I am; but instead with the question, of how to be. Whilst not wanting to suggest that the question of who or what I am is redundant, it masks an ontological condition and misperceives its social formation, which more accurately is taken up with the question of how to be. How to be, of course, is dependent upon the socially and symbolically created places within which recognisable being occurs; it’s where all onto-­epistemic identity is registered, where its meaning, its way of being, is located – such as, for example, the way of being a mother, or way of being able to participate in any kind of discourse, or way of being middle or working class, or way of being contrite, or ambitious, or artistic, or reviled, or of being yourself: it all depends upon the socially and symbolically created places within which recognisable being can occur. At its most basic level, it’s not possible to be, say, a mother without, not just the experience of having given birth, but also outside the social practices represented, for example in the UK by assessable standards of care, safe-­guarding and responsibility as determined by the Social Services agency of the government, as well as a contested infinity of cultural behaviours based in communities and families, which collectively refer to the place of the maternal imaginary way of being. There is no way of being a mother outside of this way of being: you can be a good mother, a bad mother, a devoted mother, an indifferent mother, a mother with no maternal skills, an abusive mother, an absent mother, any kind of mother you like, any kind of figure that is just about locatable on the imaginary being of  motherhood, even your mother, whoever you might be; nevertheless, their

100   Not a proper copper identity as such is only possibly by it being located according to how they are (or have been), how they behave, think, act, comport themselves, are altogether disposed in relation to the maternal imaginary, and its particular empirical expression within the context of where any such understanding is made. So that, in a sense, identity forged in this way, is always something that is not only beyond your control, but also something that always prefigures any notion of you not configured in this way. To return to the simplistic example of being a mother: it doesn’t matter how stereotypically, or outrageously, or predictably, or idiosyncratically motherhood is being, has been, or is about to be acted out; that way of being will always already be accorded some form of identity with respect to the maternal imaginary; all that awaits is its empirical registration of being. Which means that identity, as already mentioned, is not so much about who you are, but about how, or the way, in which you are. This seems very much akin to a mimetic act. The notion of mimesis has a long, complex and diverse history, but the general characteristics of mimesis, and the positions that it adopts and leads to, and questions that mimesis evokes, and are pertinent here, are well known and are evoked by Kurke (2006) in ‘Plato, Aesop, and the beginnings of mimetic prose’. Simplifying, Kurke makes the point that the famous distinction Plato makes, via Socrates, between myth and philosophy, and so constitutes philosophy as a new discourse, and as not simply a new form of thought, but thought itself as philosophy, necessitates the expulsion of other discourses, other ways of understanding that are discontinuous with and threaten to corrupt the course and truth of philosophical being. This is famously represented by the expulsion of poets and certain literary works, or works that embody mythos, in opposition to the logocentric organisation of ontological being and its socio-­political organisation within the Republic. The grounds for their expulsion are that such works propound and encourage in the citizenry a belief not in reality, but in its mimetic depiction; a belief, therefore, in something that is not true, in the sense that it is an ontological fiction; and a fiction, moreover that, because it is a fiction, is manipulable and essentially corrupt, and will be represented in the socio-­political aims and organisation of the state, if not legislated against. And as many others have elegantly commentated, it is in this nexus that we see truth, in the form of the logos, also aligned with the Law, and that this also becomes a political model for the organisation of the state, in terms of the allegiance of belonging with adherence to an identity that is continuous with the notion of truth, and the consequent moral-­political necessity and right to abject as necessary all that do not belong. The process of abjection as necessary is guaranteed by the need to affirm, demonstrate, and maintain the identity of the state. But, as Kurke points out, Indeed, Platonic prose is ‘mimetic’ in several senses: it is a fictive imitation or representation of a whole social world (and as such, as already noted, it was a relatively new form when Plato wrote); at the same time, the Platonic dialogues teem with direct speech or ‘impersonation’ of individual

Not a proper copper   101 characters. But I have in mind yet another kind of mimesis, which is the deliberate imitation or impersonation of the figure of Aesop in the modeling and characterization of Socrates throughout the Platonic corpus. It is this third form of mimesis that will be my subject, for it will allow us to tackle directly the problem of Platonic prose and to restore to the discourse of mimesis the complex sociopolitics of form Plato’s account simultaneously acknowledges and struggles to disavow. (Kurke, 2006, p. 12) Whilst not wanting to diminish the specific details and scholarship of Kurke’s argument, it is the more general point that is of relevance and worth dwelling on here, namely that: the category of philosophy, and all that it represents in terms of truth, thought, being, is only possible through a process of somewhat brutally excising other ways of being and their forms of representation within an otherwise arbitrarily given arena, according to a Law and representative machinery (a form of thought, a form of discourse, a form of civil and political organisation) that itself is thoroughly mimetic, and could, as such, only ever be thoroughly mimetic, whilst at the same time, and this is the most important point, utterly denying this fact. Thus the founding of philosophy, as with its founding of truth, identity, belonging and being, is quite literally founded on a myth, but also, crucially, the disavowal that what it is, is of that myth. Indeed, the very notion of a foundation, of an origin, an authorial, true beginning of philosophy, and all, in this context, that it represents, is also, and can only ever be, a myth. What a paradox! A paradox that is truly foundational, principally in relation to identity – because it means that identity as such, and in its empirical expression, the unique truth of being, of who you are, is essentially mimetic, a form of being by being a fictive copy, an emulation of being, or perhaps more accurately, an act, emulating a way of being as being its/your/self. But then, if what is really going on, ontologically, is not so much about identity itself, but ways of being, of being mimetically, of being by being, as Lacan says, sutured to some position in the symbolic order where you are able to take your place by conforming to the activities associated with being there; how come, how is it, that instead of ways of being, it’s identity that always seems to predominate? It’s an important question. It’s a question that is regularly avoided; often because, we have to remember, a gut response, even if you are willing to grant overwhelming credence to the view of being mimetically over the ontological notion of identity itself, as an intellectual position, as being philosophically convincing and sociologically demonstrable, is that there is always something else. Something other than a theoretically derived and empirically verifiable explanation that privileges how we are over who we are, with the latter understood as a necessary but sad illusion. There has to be something else that isn’t entirely accounted for, that lies outside this form of understanding. A remainder. A leftover. Something. And that thing, right, that thing that cannot be so understood, but is nevertheless the locus for all this mimetic activity at an individual level, that’s who you, we, are, am, right? Because there really has to

102   Not a proper copper be a really me, and you too, of course. A really me, an insomniac, one that boxes obsessively at local gyms, is addicted to watching football matches on big screens in nearby pubs, and harbours an irrational fear of all forms of authority; a unique aggregation of desires, inadequacies, motivations and experiences that constitutes my identity, right? That’s who I am? Or you, a really you; composed from the circumstances of your heritage and the specific set of historically acquired dispositions that formed along your way; meaning that you prefer to live amongst home furnishings and objects that exude personal and historical experience, rather than the status or even the utility of the objects themselves; that you are impelled to think and act and gather things around you in terms of order; that is you, isn’t it? That’s right isn’t it, I, you, are that remainder, around which things, the self, cohere, however irregularly, and of course, idiosyncratically? Though perhaps the response is sometimes a bit more forthright, and, dare it be said, a little more honest, in the sense that this type of response isn’t trying to placate this position as some ideological or theoretical commitment that ineffectually contests a much more felt experience and political allegiance with the exigencies of day-­to-day existence, along the lines of: you can sly talk me all you like with that philosophical crap, which sometimes sounds impressive, because it’s almost always delivered in a cool transgressive discourse that promises to slice right through the world of everyday experience, revealing at its centre some kind of radical truth; but you know what, at the end of the day, what I, you, we feel, what motivates us about anything, it all boils down to being in relation to some version or other of the Cartesian subject. And whether you describe the medium of the subject’s realisation of itself as being through thought, consciousness, instinct, it doesn’t really matter very much, because what this all boils down to, technical descriptions aside, is that it’s all about you and me, whoever you and me are, and my, your, our unique identities – the rest is just weird discursive bullshit, that intends to mask this stubborn reality: you know it and I know it; and the only reason why you can know it, is because you are who you are, namely, you, and not some mimetic assemblage of discontinuous parts. These are slightly differently articulated positions, which in one way or another we all cannot help but subscribe to, because we depend upon what, in a Socratic sense, they commonly assert as being true and by this truth radically different from the (mythological) machinery that articulated this truth into existence. So get ready for the fuck you moment. Though it’s a necessary fuck you; and not least because there has to be a you, of some kind, in order that any fucking can take place: but fucked you will be, and no two ways about it. And this because the entire drive, to discover, act and be who we are, is a drive engendered by the fact that any such identity itself, is and always will be, fundamentally absent. Which just makes the condition all the more tragic, and all the more entrenched. All the more desperate too, because there is nothing there, anywhere, beyond the drive, the determination that there be so. And all the more, in a Lacanian sense, inevitable. Because there isn’t really anything else: the misconceiving, the act of méconnaissance that Lacan discusses, whereby the subject mistakes

Not a proper copper   103 mimetic being for being itself And so, accordingly, we should expect to be able to see examples of this systematic misperception, of the drive to mistake mimetic being for identity itself: but where? Well, everywhere, here, for example; nowhere, no one is exempt. And often most visibly when the discontinuity becomes somehow apparent between the mimetic act and its metaphysical conceit, the ontological assumption, that this is so. And what is disclosed here, what being is disclosed in this moment of mimetic and ontological discontinuity, is this: that the Socratic decision of truth, propriety and order, is built upon the foundations of a myth; upon a mythic foundation, itself, that includes you and your self. So that, of course, what rushes into this vacuum, this lack, is indeed the realisation, a glimpse of precisely that, a desperate, unfulfillable, unrecoverable lack. A nothingness, an emptiness, a glance into the hollowness of yourself, your history and all that you are; a brief encounter with the truth of yourself, as an unenduring composition; a thing, a hollow, that has been forged and used by the Symbolic Order to constitute, define and continue the unending economy of itself. This lack, the realisation of this lack, because of its nature, is unbearable; it is fundamentally disturbing; it is something with which we are unable to cope; because knowing it is to witness, and so take part in, the merciless dissolution of ourselves, of our souls. Is this what Socrates died for? Is this why he took his own life? Did he glimpse in that act, as he perhaps knew but could not bear to acknowledge all along, the hollowness of himself, his artefactual composition for the sake of the eternity of the Symbolic Order, his nothingness and its unending chasm? Very like Alex. Except Alex is from Wrexham, and Socrates was from Athens. But apart from that, pretty much the same. Before we begin, let me say, that there are a number of personal attributes that, in comparison with Alex, Socrates is shy of; and they mark Alex out as being more precious than the generally more widely known Athenian thinker. Beginning with the fact that Alex really has saved people’s lives. For example, Alex has prevented someone from bleeding to death by staunching the blood that was spurting from the victim’s wound, using the continuous pressure of his hands, and staying with the victim until an ambulance arrived. On another occasion Alex resuscitated someone who’d OD’d: Alex called an ambulance, performed CPR, did mouth-­to-mouth, and stayed with the guy, again, until the emergency services got there. Socrates, by contrast, couldn’t wait to take poison, to kill himself; whereas, Alex has stopped a different kind of poison from killing other people. Alex, also unlike Socrates, is understated and self-­effacing. For example, Alex subtly intervened during a dispute on the street, to prevent his wound-­up-tight-­as-a-­coil friend from being arrested, in order that this friend’s heavily pregnant partner would not be on her own during what was becoming a very difficult time. Alex knows about the realities of living on the street, he knows what’s coming, and what can’t be escaped, but that doesn’t mean he gives up on life: he cares about life, because he can see what’s about to probably occur, and can’t be stopped. Just like when Alex looked after young John, who was not then 20: Alex carried young John’s coat and his gear around when young John couldn’t cope, and had lost everything; Alex stayed with young John

104   Not a proper copper when young John was suicidal over a drugs debt he’d run up, and tried to help, right up until the time that young John’s name got changed – though young John was never going to get any older – because young John’s name got changed to dead John, when the drugs debt caught up with him in the back of a van, and was cleared through the default option, with a gun. Alex has been an addict and has kicked his addictions. Alex has become re-­ addicted to what he has kicked. Alex is a handsome man. Alex and his girlfriend robbed a crack-­dealer on a local estate, and stabbed him when the robbery went wrong, and then got a custodial for it. Alex has been to prison before. Alex is a man in whose company I feel secure. Alex is a man I deeply admire. But apart from that, and the Athens and Wrexham thing, Socrates and Alex are pretty much the same. And it all revolves around the systematic, not to say necessary act, of mistaking the mimetic performance of being, with the assumed truth of its ontological identity. It was the summer after Sophie had her baby taken away from her at the hospital, as soon as the baby was born. Eddie, whose life Alex would later save, had begun his descent into a nonstop crack and heroin binge, which took him out of circulation from what had been the rest of the group, many of whom now, anyway, ostracised him because of his extreme and self-­destructive behaviour. John and Sophie, after having lost the baby, had found accommodation in Ellesmere Port, and were present less and less in Chester. Sean had moved away, had got a job, and was living with his girlfriend. Turned-­my-life-­around Gerry had disappeared. Tommy the poet was back inside. Young John had become dead John. Pete the boat was back on the gear, and staying in the Port. So it was a summer during which things had changed: the more regular and predictable encounters and behaviours that had formally emerged and become relatively entrenched, such as where and when people met, what they did, talked about, what issues were live, what feelings surfaced or were repressed, that provided some kind of security and knowledge that could be relied on, such as they were, had disappeared. Alex too, had accordingly changed what he did, where he went, whom he saw. On one of the occasions that I did see Alex, he was with a friend early one morning, standing on the steps of the Bridge Street Rows by the Cross with a friend, smoking a roll-­up. Alex was not doing well. But he said he was going to be okay; the problem with his stomach, the nausea, it wouldn’t last long, he said. He was just having a smoke, to sort himself out, until he could get some doob, or mamba, or spice, later on that morning. It was like he was on some kind of diet, in which new synthetic psychotropic substances had replaced all other kinds of food. Looking at how thin Alex had become, it was a diet that in terms of weight loss was a winner. The downsides, however, should you find yourself adopting this slimming regime, are always worth bearing in mind. The next time I saw Alex he was completely out of it. It was a late morning when he appeared at the Cross. We’d done the usual, spent the first hour or so at the Day Centre, and moved to the benches in front of Saint Peter’s. I’d been speaking to ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris. He was very cagey about pretty much everything. He could speak French, telling me in French – when I’d asked him

Not a proper copper   105 in English, where he’d been before now – that he’d joined the Foreign Legion, because he had to when he left the UK in a hurry, which was where he’d learned French, then after two years he’d deserted. Ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris carried a guitar around with him, which he used for vague strumming purposes, but mostly for holding and appearing as if he might be about to play it, which he never did. This, for ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris, counted as busking. That was how he got his shit together so that he could go and score. I liked ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris; I liked him a lot. Ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris had been around for a couple of weeks now; and even though the weather was good and the tourists were abundant, his busking didn’t always deliver what he needed. So sometimes his busking seemed even more like begging, despite how hard he looked at his guitar. Whilst trying to pretty much keep himself to himself, bits of information, diluted and spiced up through rumour, boredom, assumption and hallucinations, had leaked out about whom he was, and where he’d come from. One of the really intriguing things about ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris was that he just didn’t look like a legionnaire of any kind, current, defunct, moribund, or a prototype of any sort. Even if you allowed for the fact that any one of these possible types of legionnaire might have been half starved to death, and driven and ravaged by an endless need to score, which ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris was, any one of these woeful possibilities would present a more plausible image of a legionnaire than how ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris routinely appeared to be. Ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris looked like he weighed less than the rucksack he carried about with him everywhere he went; he looked as aggressive as a three-­year-old, a very skinny, addicted, three-­ year-old, with the aspiration to be not so thin and maybe a hippy when he grew up. I admired ex-­legionnaire Chris. He was beautiful, and mysterious, and about as harmful as a toy gun. It’s really easy to understand how the confusion, in the circumstances, happened. That ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris was mistaken for ex-­Para Chris. Virtually none of the people ex-­legionnaire Chris was coming into contact with on the street had ever heard of the French Foreign Legion. And ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris didn’t go around speaking French, whenever he was around, partly because no one would have understood what he was talking about. So it’s understandable that some special sounding military group could become translated in this context into a special military group that everyone had actually heard of, and the Paras fit the bill nicely. The ex-­services are, anyway, well represented within the homeless community; and many of the homeless people we know also have family or friends who have at one time been in the military. So ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris, at about 11 that sunny summer morning, finished talking to me – having told me almost nothing whatsoever but mysteriously so, in a really interesting and cool way – and began to amble along Watergate Street. On his back, of course, he carried his rucksack, and across one of his shoulders he had slung his guitar, which he was planning to stop and look at along the way for the benefit of any passing tourists in order to generate the financial answer to that day’s needs. It felt languid and peaceful in the sunshine

106   Not a proper copper as I watched ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris go, whilst from the other direction, coming from Bridge Street, I caught sight of Alex lurching towards the Cross. I imagine this was pretty much the same kind of approach that Socrates used to take, as he staggered into town, mentally and emotionally reeling, bursting for another harangue, or, as it is sometimes euphemistically referred to, engagement in a Socratic dialogue. Basically, a prolonged ball-­busting exercise, about whatever had hit his nerve that day. And what famously exercised the Athenian thinker was the difference between mimetic being and what he proclaimed, all over Athens, to be the transcendent truth of metaphysical identity. And when mimetic being got in the way, because it diverged from the ideals of the transcendent metaphysical truth he wanted to believe in, then famously Socrates exiled it, in whatever mode it might take, because he could not make it conform; these so becoming the classic cases of mythos being ousted and supplanted by philosophy, and a scission between belief, mimesis and habitus on the one side, and the unending truth of ontology as identity on the other, being penned, as if indelibly, so determining the ontological universe; this, the symbolically founding act of méconnaissance, represented in the form of an unkempt and entirely annoying character, who becomes increasingly marginalised as he wanders like a vagrant around his city of Athens. Watching Alex, with some concern, lurch at first towards and then away from me in front of the Cross, I could tell that this, too, was exactly what he had on his mind. And just like Socrates, this wasn’t something that merely appeared to be of abstract concern, or that was trivial, and could be gotten over, or accommodated without too much difficulty; no, this was about being and identity, it was about the order of the world and the values and truth that constituted it, and it was about himself, his own identity and being in relation to it. It was the classic méconnaissance, Symbolic Order, Imaginary deal. Just like Socrates, then, with all this going on, it was no wonder that Alex was stoked fit to bust. Because, if it wasn’t in some way fundamental to you, why would you? Why would you engage in an increasingly self-­destructive process of dispute, a process that is bound to end in only one way, this being an end, a very bad end, which you must have known, at least glimpsed, from the very beginning; and thereafter, with every foray into the myth that separated mythos from philosophy, ways of being from metaphysical truth, have seen ever more clearly? We’re all the same; we all have a vested interest in not knowing, in misconceiving, because as we have already noted, and as all of us, anyway, already know, when you do make that foray, when you do take that look, what you see is what’s left, the nothingness, the emptiness, the glance into the hollowness of yourself, your history and all that you are; a brief encounter with the truth of you, as an unenduring composition; a thing, a hollow, that has been forged and used by the Symbolic Order to constitute, define and continue the unending economy of itself. No one really wants that, do they? No one really wants to witness, and by witnessing to bring about, what amounts to the dissolution of their own soul, of themselves? And all this destruction, justified and motivated by some truth? Well, perhaps not some truth, but an order of truth, or even more

Not a proper copper   107 accurately, and much worse, the agony of a truth; a truth that emerges, after it has been glimpsed at the very beginning. But this isn’t the truth of metaphysical certainty, an order, a real you; it is the truth that these are all banally, cruelly absent; and where we imagined they should be, in the hollow absence of their place, are mistakes, conventions, uncertainties, and desires that cannot be fulfilled. And just how was all of this configured, that sunny morning at about 11 o’clock? Well, not heroically, not in this second iteration of being that I witnessed; but perhaps as Marx, Hegel and Nietzsche have all differently expressed, parodically; where the first expression of being does indeed take on an heroic form, a form that takes itself seriously, as existentially tragic configurations, known to themselves, but at the same time alienated, misunderstood, are pitted against the ontological resources of a universe in which they struggle to belong. The figure of the soldier is, of course, historically and culturally saturated within this context; not the only identity, by any means, to be configured within this same context as first a figure of existential tragedy, and then, a second time as a parody, as a thing, a hollow, that has been forged and used by the Symbolic Order, and simultaneously site of this revelation; but it is the figure of the soldier, and what the soldier represents, upon which the incident turned. Because the first iteration of being, the ontological assumption upon which the identity that this soldier represents; personified by the figure of the Para, who has returned home, heroic in what he has selflessly endured; as an individual whose very point of individuality is that it is given for the life of the nation, without demure of personal costs; is only possible within this first iteration because it is a determined appeal beyond; a determined appeal beyond of the phenomenological experience of the individual combatant, as represented by the Para; and a determined appeal beyond the personal mundane existence of any specific individual, represented by the collective being and identity of the nation. This is a beyond where value, worth, identity, and meaning are mistakenly meant to be. And it was a beyond that appealed to Alex, that late sunny, summer morning; a beyond that was quite beyond Alex’s mundane experience at that moment; a Alex who was, by then, a wrecked Alex; a Alex with nothing; a Alex whose life had been characterised by being, pretty much without anything. And why wouldn’t it be appealing, to look beyond what you don’t have? Since not looking beyond can be tantamount to directing your gaze towards the hollow, the absence, the emptiness of your own identity, and the uncompromising lonely truth of where you and what you are; a parody of the beyond that was promised to be. ‘You were never a fuckin’ Para’, Alex slurred loudly, in the direction of ex-­ foreign legionnaire Chris, across a distance between them that Alex was rapidly closing down. The patina of sweat across Alex’s balding forehead spoke volumes, more eloquently about Alex’s wound up, wrecked, hopeless state, than the message he was ranting to as much of Chester that he could make hear him. A message of confused betrayal, aimed at the beyond, where there was nothing. A message, bellowed up and down Watergate Street, that superficially boiled

108   Not a proper copper down to this: you have never been a Para; by pretending to have been a Para, you demean their name and all that they represent; by using this pretence of having been a Para to beg, you exploit their name, you exploit their sacrifice, you exploit the nation, and everything this all stands for; you cannot play the guitar. And the parodic element? It never stopped rolling. How come, for example, it fell to Alex to notice and right this affront, just as one might have said of Socrates: because as he seemed fixed at the time – sleeping rough, fucked on synthetic shit, sweating from the drugs and the clothes that were sticking to him on what was going to be a broiling afternoon – he wasn’t the most obvious representative of the established order, he didn’t appear to be a person with a stake in the identities, the ideology, the functioning economy of the nation’s citizenry. And yet, there he was, much to the visible unease of the watching citizenry along Watergate Street, and immune to my verbal entreaties to do otherwise, defending the reputation and image of those that collectively constitute the imaginary of the legitimate nation, by kicking the shit out of ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris, on the grounds that he was ‘never a fuckin’ Para’. And then.… And then, after the assault, and a lengthy interval, something else happened; something else that was strange, but really wonderful. And the way that this came to light was, in a couple of respects, a mirror replay of the morning, around two years after the ‘You were never a fuckin’ Para’ scene first occurred. Because what was to be the second scene was a replay, or at least an event, that in some ways Nietzsche, in our obsession with his theme of eternal recurrence, I would like to think, would have been proud of; principally because of its indications contra Socrates. In a reversal of the first scene, in the replay, it was I who walked into the space, at the Cross in Chester, that we have for so long thought about as an example of the agora; and this time it was Alex who was sitting on one of the benches, in front of Saint Peter’s church. What was strange was at that time, the time that was to become the second scene, I was actually writing and thinking about what was then the first iteration of the ‘You were never a fuckin’ Para’ incident; when, walking to work, I rounded the corner at Northgate Street, and there he was, Alex, sitting on his own at the Cross, exactly where I’d been sitting, around two years previously. So what was about to go on, more of the same old same old? ‘Fuck, Alex, where’ve you been?’ We shook hands. I was really pleased to see him. This is what he told me. For about 18 months he’d been living at an anti-­fracking protest site. His life had been organised around what he saw as collectively opposing the multi-­ national exploitation of local resources, in a way that was careless of environmental and other costs. I was blown away. But I shouldn’t have been. Why wouldn’t a man who had saved lives, helped others even when the situation was hopeless, and managed to exist on the street, not think about issues beyond his own immediate concern, dedicate the way he lived to supporting the environment and the lives of those who lived within a local community, take on, in an organised and effective fashion, the power and interests of multi-­national energy

Not a proper copper   109 companies? The reason why I was blown away, even though I shouldn’t have been, was because Alex was homeless. A simple, inexcusable, matter of prejudice. After a few minutes I told Alex that it was a real coincidence that I had bumped into him then, because I was writing about the incident that had happened about two years ago, and I went over the ‘You were never a fuckin’ Para’ scene. ‘You were really out of it that morning,’ I said. We both laughed at various elements leading up to the incident. ‘I got a bit of prison time for that,’ Alex explained. ‘How come?’ I wanted to know; meaning, who grassed you up to the police, because there was no way that ex-­foreign legionnaire Chris was likely to do that independently? Again, Alex started laughing and pointed to the array of CCTV cameras that were focussed on and around the Cross. ‘Couldn’t have picked a worse fuckin’ place,’ he commented. He also thought that the police, via CCTV, had probably been tracking his unsteady movements since he’d entered town, completely shit-­faced, and marked by already being well known to the forces of law and order. But – and this was the other thing that blew me away, though once again, it shouldn’t have done – now Alex was clean. And he’d been clean for about a year and a half. This wasn’t a clean for a day, or a couple of days, and then back on the gear; or a reduction in consumption, a controlled using that he’d managed for an extended period of time. No, Alex was clean, and had been for 18 months. I asked him where he was staying now that the camp had been broken up, and he explained that he was living in a tent with some others, near the railway by Northgate ponds. It was a piece of land that was common owned, he said, so the police were having a harder job evicting them. We talked about the people who had died since Alex had been gone, and how most of the deaths could be attributed to drugs, usually what were called legal highs but are now collectively called New Psychotropic Substances, and mostly then, indirectly, such as by passing out at night in the cold, and never waking up again. Alex reckoned that we were now seeing the third generation of these drugs. The first generation that we smoked, they were just like weed. You could just get it easier, ’cos it was legal. Then they had the stronger ones, and you could get the taps too, which were nice and trippy, and strong too. They would get you shit-­faced. But now, what I think of as the third generation, they’re stronger than heroin. Just part of a joint and you can be fucked all day. Literally can’t move, fuckin’ out of it. I’ve seen ’em fuckin go down from a few tokes; fuckin’ long-­time heroin users, passed out on part of a joint. We talked some more as we went to get coffee, first at the Poundbakery, which was the cheapest close-­by option; but then when they told us that their kettle had broken, we moved on to café Nero, on the corner of Bridge Street, near the Day Centre. The last words he said to me were, I hope your book does

110   Not a proper copper well. But all the time he was talking, and all the time ever since, what was going through my mind, and pretty much overriding everything else, was the fact that Alex was clean, and had been clean for a year and a half. It’s a fact that raises the question, does anything else, anything else here, that is related, in comparison, really matter? Does it? In comparison, is it significant how this might all relate to Nietzsche’s theme of eternal recurrence, and overcoming, and what this might say about agency and ways of being? Does it matter that what Alex had achieved was analogously through a re-­evaluation of values, which once held in place, as the expression of the Symbolic Order, an ideal notion of nationhood and belonging, to which Alex at one time subscribed, because he had nothing else, but from which he was ironically excluded; the demonstration of which, via ex foreign legionnaire Chris, led to this exclusion being realised in the form of a three-­week prison sentence? Does it matter that the re-­evaluation of those values, as Nietzsche describes, involved an intractable relation between the personhood, or subjectivity, or identity of the individual who undertook that re-­evaluation and the identity of the world as they both subsequently re-­emerged? And that Nietzsche understands all of this in terms of an ethics, and specifically an ethics that embraces life, without the metaphysical méconnaissance he believes Socrates was guilty of; a metaphysical méconnaissance that inevitably leads to death? And that in its place, as an active choice, as a kind of will to power, Alex was practicing a different way of being, referred to as life? Or simply that, this time, when we met by chance, and replayed to each other, roughly two years to the day, the ‘You were never a fuckin’ Para’ scene, as it inevitably came around in predictable Nietzschean fashion, that this time when we walked away, all that really mattered was that Alex was clean? Clean, some would say, and I too would instinctively be included with them, against all the odds, against overwhelming odds; against all the odds that ever there could be. Finally, not that we have to make a choice, of course, and even admitting that this, the very idea of choice, of having to make a choice, is a rather dodgy way to look at things, that anything rested on or was a matter of choice; but if you did have to make a choice, about whose life you might have to follow, or learn from, or teach about, a choice between Socrates and Alex, because for some reason, somehow, I feel that I do have to make such a choice, this time, and I pray to God that finally I have the strength and insight to make the right decision, this time, this last time and so for ever, my money is going on the man from Wrexham. Choices? You decide, if you think you can.

5 Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?

I caught sight of Eddie again this morning: I was walking through Edgar’s Field in Handbridge, and as I came close to the park entrance by the Ship Inn, across the road and making his way up the hill in his wheelchair was Eddie. There was ice on the pavement and on the road. A bitterly cold morning: 1 December. I’d seen him in almost exactly the same spot, only a little further up the hill just over a week previously, on a Tuesday, when the weather was cold and wet, but not freezing as it was now. On that day I was with Frances who caught sight of Eddie. There’s Eddie, she told me: had she not, I’d have walked on by, not even having noticed him. So I turned round and saw him. And immediately became hollowed out with guilt. I think I probably said his name, but then in the flow of conversation there was a momentary hollow guilty gap, into which he spoke, as he passed me by in the opposite direction, something that stopped me dead and for which I have here no words, so I then said nothing more. And here’s why: That Sunday I’d met Eddie, quite by chance, in town: I was pushing my bike along Northgate Street, and spotted him sitting outside Wok & Go. By this time, it was 15 months that Eddie had been living on the street and sleeping rough in his wheelchair. He was desperate. He’d spoken to me previously about how he was thinking about suicide. Robert, who worked for the homeless charity that ran the Day Centre, had persuaded Eddie, not long ago, not to kill himself, but the same thoughts were now returning. I asked him that Sunday if he’d consider doing the ‘Safe Seat’ at Richmond Court; but he told me that he didn’t feel safe doing the ‘Safe Seat’ there, where there was indeed a history of Eddie being involved in altercations, disputes with other residents and staff, and police involvement. And because of all of that, he couldn’t do the ‘Safe Seat’, and nothing else appeared available. Eddie’s growing desperation in these circumstances looked to me to be unstoppable. But then he said something that indicated there could be some hope: his key worker had bumped into Eddie yesterday, and said that he had tried to contact Eddie, because they were just waiting for a flat to become available that was suitably adapted for a wheelchair user, and when that was the case, Eddie could move in. The trouble was, Eddie explained, he never saw his key worker. Messages never got passed on. So I came up with the bright idea of asking Eddie where his key worker got his information from, and wondered whether we might be able to by-­pass him and

112   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? hook straight into the key knowledge ourselves. Are you about tomorrow? I asked. Eddie said he was, so I told him I’d come and find him to see if we could do something along the lines of my vague idea. But on Monday I forgot. Added to which, it never ceased raining for the entire day, a fact that probably didn’t help me to remember that only the day before I’d promised to go outside and find Eddie. So when I saw Eddie, by chance with Frances, after dropping my washing off at the laundrette with her in Handbridge the following day, it was little wonder what he said. I was really nothing but a tosser. No different from the rest, if not worse. Since when it came down to it, I was really only interested in what I could make mine, and at the expense of what could be his. Though I always made out that this was otherwise. Conning by my nature. For the benefit of maintaining my hollow private and public conscience. So using him, basically. The kind of using that you do when you use people when you’re an addict using your drug. Of course, these weren’t his exact words. What he said was incomparably more articulate, truthful and succinct. So I hesitated on the pavement, and called after him. He didn’t respond, so I hesitated some more and watched him go, then turned around and took a few steps on my way. But then I stopped again, and turned back. Eddie had gone. I had a feeling that I really shouldn’t do what I also felt obliged to, namely go find Eddie and talk to him. After all, what was I going to do? Apologise? Well quite rightly I should. But did that amount to very much more than apologising for being a wanker? Could apologising as a wanker ever change you into being a non-­wanker, really? And would that amount to very much more, in the end, than me appearing somewhere proximate to Eddie, hoping that he might tolerate my tossing presence? Amounting to just another bag of shit he’d have to carry about with him. So I crossed the road, headed up the hill and turned left at the garage. Unsurprisingly, Eddie was nowhere to be seen. I looked along the road, which, apart from being uphill, was long and straight. There was no way that Eddie had wheeled himself up the entirety of its length, then round the corner and out of sight; not during the few moments when I’d stuttered in my actions. Instead, to the left, was a narrow grass and mud path, bordered on each side by tall hedges, which rose along the hill that followed the Dee outside the town. The feeling was stronger than before that I shouldn’t proceed any further. But I did. As I reached the brow of the hill I saw, as I, too, simultaneously came into view, Eddie in his wheelchair further along the path, with two other people standing with him: Eddie was scoring. Why else be here? Why else drag your body in a wheelchair up a series of steep hills, then along another tough incline but now with nothing under your wheels except mud and grass, to meet two people behind a hedge? Not only had I let Eddie down, not only had I used Eddie, and paid for that use with a grace-­serving nod to my hollow public and private consciences, but further, I’d followed Eddie to this place, and humiliated him, by exposing his most addicted and abject self; just as always – when you secretly, silently, inject or smoke or otherwise ingest, thinking as you do so,

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   113 nervously glancing round, with perhaps your foot jammed reassuringly against some public cubicle toilet door, that only you are there – the same addicted abject self is necessarily always exposed, if only to some empty public toilet stall or dimly lit car park stairwell, where your privacy is chemically and ontologically dispersed, through the network of these places in your veins and through your skull. So naturally, Eddie shouted at me, again. And this time I did what he said. I got away from him. Which meant that seeing him, however briefly, as December started up that morning, was reassuring, even though, given the place and the time, he was more than likely on his way to score, simply because he was alive. It felt like catching glimpses of someone as they flickered about on their way to death. Though no one would choose this life, no one would decide this for themselves, would they? Most of the decisions I’ve ever made have been bad ones. Much as I’d like to change, much as I think, with every new decision I make, this time it’s going to be different (because why would anyone deliberately make the wrong choice?); the old Nietzschean eternal return sucker punches me, just as it claims it inevitably will, and I end up scoring the same old same old, with my decision making career having not really turned any kind of corner. I’m as consistently mysteriously bad at making decisions now as I’ve ever been. Safer always, even though I’ve probably thought long and hard about it, to do the opposite of whatever it is I decide. There is, however, another way of understanding this same point, which then becomes different; a different way of seeing and understanding decisions, of experiencing what decisions are supposed to mean, and the options, or more accurately the optionality, that can appear to be available. This other way of looking and understanding, characteristic, for example, of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, breaks down the distinction between the outside and the inside, a distinction upon which the Cartesian and neoliberal subject is based. This is a way of looking that sees the environment and its features, including those of its various subjects, as being relatively derived from their mutual composition, rather than being distinctly metaphysically given; and thereby is a way of looking that undoes the nature of agency and the authorial identity of subjectivity that inhabits this same Cartesian and neoliberal landscape, where the notion of decision is nurtured and thrives. Because for the Cartesian and neoliberal subject, the decision is a practice that demonstrates their agency, and thereby their identity. In this way the decision has to be more than a concept, as the acme of the expression of a subject’s being, understood as being the innate and defining quality of the subject’s own integrity, distinguishing its unique authoriality from all else, which we might refer to as the environment; the decision is the condition through which the subject plays itself out and into being. What happens when circumstances, political regimes, something that damages, inhibits, represses, takes away your ability to make decisions, not in some abstract way, but as a practice, as the exercise of yourself? What happens, when through these and any other processes, the possibility of making decisions is

114   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? removed from you? Isn’t this how prisons are defined? Isn’t this why kidnapping is a crime? Don’t these all involve constraints on the liberty to be one’s self? Extending even in terms, sometimes, to thought, which is also always a situated practice? And the reason why this occurs, this intrusion into the possibility of being one’s self, for which the ability of the subject to make decisions is required in order to register their identity, expresses a place at which the subject’s integrity has been torn, and they are not able to be themselves, in that place in that way, whatever that might be; so that where this tear in what they are exists, like a breach in the truth, the authority, the ontology of their identity, aspects of the environment, which is not what they otherwise are, enters and becomes part of their being. The neurotic urge, made even more concentrated at times of stress, that drives subjects to police their borders, to shore up and disguise any areas of vulnerability in the consistency of their identities and the veracity of what they are, is why any of this is necessary, the establishing, preserving, forging a difference between the subject, on one side of which is its authentic integrity, its unique interiority, that which it is; and on the other, well, the Other, everything, other human subjects, the road system, pasta in general, as well as any specific pasta dish or meal, all of it, everything that is not you, or whatever subject we might be talking about, such as a stick or pet dog; the reason for this incessant determination to forge a true identity, to abject that which does not belong from inside itself, beyond the border distinguishing itself from everything Other, into the outside, is precisely because none of this is metaphysically given, and that it is necessary, and must be practised incessantly in order to establish and preserve any such identities. Because, more colloquially, if none of that shit gets done, then none of that shit gets to be there. Including the outside and the inside, and all that it connotes, especially in terms of propriety, as reflected in the practice of the law. And in this way, the dominant culture of Cartesian neoliberal subjectivity, and its economic organisation of being, are reflected in and become a part of the naturalised and dominant Cartesian neoliberal landscape. Obsessions with ownership, property, the continuous and sustainable acquisition of that which represents the security of the self, be this an individual subject, a family, a region, a company, a team of any kind, a nation, basically anything that is understood through its identity, can all be understood in terms of the determination of that which belongs to and affirms that identity, and that which does not belong and so falls outside and is other than it. The continuous confirmation, defending, expanding, organising of each and every identity, since this, in the end, is inevitably what each and every identity is bound to be invested in, insures that all of these activities maintain the Cartesian neoliberal landscape on which they are founded. And this occurs all the time in ways that are entirely mundane and not mysterious, as must be the case. Including, for example, at the personal level: choosing, buying, wearing and discarding your clothes; decorating and otherwise organising where you live; deciding what you watch and listen to, who your friends are, where and what you drink, eat … pretty much everything. The key point in all of these transactions, negotiations, acquisitions, compromises,

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   115 practices, is that they occur with respect in some way to the identity of you, in relation to its imaginary construction; and it is on this side of the apparent equation, the side where you buy that shirt because it’s the one you choose, perhaps on grounds of affordability, or utility, or because it goes with what else you have, or whatever, it is on this side of the equation where you are supposed to exercise agency, your agency, the defining condition that is supposed to register you being you. The reason, and to an interesting extent, this reasoning has also come to be understood as being synonymous with rationality itself, why you exercise your agency in this and any other way is because it is an act that affirms your identity; even if that act is compromising, that it is compromising is only possible because of the assumption of the identity upon which the compromise must be based. And it is this act that creates the division between that which is, and that which is not. That which does affirm who and what you are, and that which might in some way compromise that same imaginary integrity. This act is therefore an aspiration to be more than an act, since its intention (or the assumption of intentionality) is for this act to be extended beyond itself, as if to indicate being beyond the limitations and transient, finite nature of being a practice, since it is principally the guarantor of the division between what you are, and what you are not. This, too, is the reason why losing one’s liberty is dominated by the limitation of the exercise of choice that is available to the individual subject in question, even, for example over what you wear; so that privileges include being awarded the possibility of extending one’s apparent ability to make more choices for yourself, and so bring into being the act of agency, and the scission that has just been described, that separates you from being not you, from being an otherwise anonymous indistinguishable figure without the liberty that would otherwise define them as Cartesian neoliberal subjects, which, in short, for the incarcerated body, brings closer to the perceptual horizon, a faint indication of whom you are. A faint indication based on your ability to distinguish who and what you are, from what you are not, distinguishing you, as you, by the apparent exercise of your agency, from the mass, which is essentially the practice of separating off from you that which does not belong and affirming that which does. Meaning that, it is on this side of the ontological equation, this side of the ontological scission, the side associated with identity, the side associated with being itself, with being one’s self, that the notion of the decision is predicated as being the defining condition of that which is true to being the thing itself. Which is what the Cartesian neoliberal ontological landscape looks like, and how it is configured. But, as has been pointed out many times before, in many different ways (for example, by Lacan in relation to what he calls ‘the speaking subject’; by Derrida, in relation to Western metaphysics in general; by Hobbes, in relation to the identity of the nation state and each of its members; by Butler, in relation to gender; and more): none of these identities, because this is a basic property of the general condition of all identity, are anything other than normatively composed, where normative composition includes, for example, those features that are created by

116   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? culture, ontological assumptions, economic organisation, basically by what Bourdieu (1984) and elsewhere, along, now with very many others, refer to as habitus. Thus, whilst acts of agency, the apparent exercise of choice, are acts that aspire to be more than acts, so that even their intentionalities, and the force, direction, rational excuse and justification for these intentions are perceived to be detectable in the performance of these acts, and are thus taken to be an index of a subject’s truth, authenticity and being; acts, as we have already noted, that are instrumental to the production of the scission that forms the Cartesian neoliberal ontological equation of identity, with, on one side, the thing itself, whatever that might be, and on the other, well, everything that is other than the thing itself; these are acts, which, simultaneously, are inspired, directed, driven and contextualised by the habitus within which they are practised and so exist. The innately tragic component of this arrangement, however this plays out, is that the being of every subject is predicated on it being exactly what it is not: of course, the resources that different subjects have at their disposal to sustain the misapprehension of their identities varies. But what has any of this got to do with glimpsing Eddie on the first day of December, in Handbridge, seeming to be, like a ghost of himself; having seen him in almost exactly the same spot, just over a week previously? What has any of this got to do with Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return? Or with making decisions, and specifically bad ones? And how, if at all, are these various component parts, configured within the Cartesian neoliberal ontological landscape that has just been described? What does it all mean and imply? That Eddie is fated, eternally, to return to the same spot more or less at the same time, every day, in order to score? That I am inevitably bound, each time a decision is required, to make the wrong one? That this eternal recurrence is set in motion because our identities are predicated on repeating these patterns, since each identity is composed by the practice of who and what it is through its experience of the Symbolic Order, as the habitus that has forged the sense and meaning of itself and the world around it? Well, potentially, yes. Because not to do so, to do things differently, would be to be different, to be other than the identity by which one has been forged and is, as would also be one’s relationship with the world. As Nehamas succinctly put it, quite some time ago: … a different life would constitute a different person. To want to be in any way different is, on this view, to want to be in every way different. And since, as Nietzsche claims, everything is essentially connected with everything else in the world, to want our self to be different is also to want everything in the world to be different (Nehamas, 1980, p. 344) It’s worth drawing attention to two very obvious points that follow Nehamas’ description. The first is, to repeat this point, that Nehamas described Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence quite a while ago, and this still reflects a mainstream reading. And this is the second point; that Nehamas’ reading is consonant

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   117 with an approach to the concept of eternal recurrence that emphasises a Nietzschean injunction, along the lines of: If it were and you knew that you had to relive your life over, for eternity, in exactly the same way, unable to escape its eternal recurrence, would you make the same decision that you are about to make? Can you accept what you have done and are about to do? Because to do so is an affirmation of life, and by the logic Nehamas describes, the life of the world. So what do we have here? It’s something very close to the supposition, ‘If it were and you knew that …’ in order to provoke, in those who listen, the joyous, because accepted and undertaken according to the will of the subject, ratification of each decision that they make and course that they take and thus their – re-­ appropriated – life, rather than being decisions and courses adopted because it is implicit in the habitus through which one exists. Such an attitude would also be an affirmation of the subject’s life, and by implication, since Nietzsche understands that everything is connected, an affirmation of the life of the world. This doesn’t mean that everything in the world will inevitably be pleasant, and precisely as the subject might will it to be. The point rather is to face the shit for whatever shit it is, as shit; rather than ascribe to it some metaphysical conceit that grants its ontology, as in some essential way, beyond its empirical experience. So, for example, when it’s bleak and comfortless, that’s what you face, head on, since that’s what life is: bleakness and comfortlessness. This existential position, involving the overcoming of faith in anything other than a kind of brutal faith in the experience of life, and the casting aside of conceits, theories, metaphysical dogmas, and their attendant forms of behaviour and ways of thinking that exist in order to evade the experience of life, is thus characterised by an incessant revaluation of values; which in sociological terms amounts to an incessant revaluation of what you think, do and are in relation to habitus and the position and meaning one is accorded through it. There are a couple of more points that we should note about this existential direction of the eternal recurrence. Whilst the Nietzschean injunction to embrace life and nothing other than life through the incessant revaluation of all values does not result in the claim that the eternal recurrence has been evaded, it does at the very least continuously orient it in the direction of affirming life. But affirming life in relation to what? It’s very difficult not to see this in terms of the symbolic order generally, but also specifically as it is represented through the cultural habitus that Nietzsche understands himself and the world, but through and against which he describes himself as being in continuous revolt. Once again, what does this mean for Eddie and his heroin addiction, and my inability to make the right decision? Is the implication that through a revaluation of his values, Eddie would be able to realise that his decisions were not his own but a product of the environment through which he lived and according to which his identity was determined, and that in making this realisation he would be able to make different choices, because he would see things differently, and would therefore

118   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? be different, and would then (try to) kick heroin and so transcend his environment? To, in a sense, by overcoming oneself, to overcome habitus, the symbolic order? But isn’t that all too teleological? Simply another myth? Another discourse? This time one of incessant struggle, continuous revolt, motivated to achieve the unachievable goal of overcoming – or does it mean simply facing the inescapable bleakness of this unachievability as a fact? In which case, why be so grim about everything? Why not simply accept the inevitability, as best you can, and likewise chill, moving from moment to more bearable moment, negotiating the problematic interstices as is pragmatically manageable, mixed with a relatively large and unhealthy portion of having to grin and bear it? If anything, it is this latter attitude, this perhaps pragmatic version of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence that permeates the homeless community that we have come to know, and their relationship with agency, the world, and life. And it is this same pragmatic Nietzschean attitude about the eternal return that in a number of respects seems to plausibly account for Eddie’s relationship with heroin and crack and the practices that constitute his self. It’s visible, it makes its mark, in a number of ways, but materially through what Bourgois (2003) refers to as the political economy of the marginalised. This happens when the structural organisation of the economy and society impacts on those who are already marginalised in ways that intensify their condition of barely belonging, such as when the state abnegates his responsibility for vulnerable groups by withdrawing funding and other forms of support as part of a neoliberal ideology of economic independence as a moral imperative. These impacts, whilst material, are internalised as they become part of the enduring habitus of marginalised individuals and communities. Sometimes this leads to the development and adherence to an oppositional but often self-­destructive counter, or for homeless people, street culture; as well as to the exacerbation of practices and a sense of non-­belonging of exclusion in relation to the non-­street world. One obvious expression of this oppositional but self-­destructive street culture, involves drugs, and their economic, social, physiological and criminal ramifications and concomitant organising patterns. Four weeks later, after the incident when I saw Eddie whilst visiting the laundrette in Handbridge, we’d made up, I’d apologised, we’d talked, and were again friends. But during this time Eddie’s physical and mental condition worsened. I phoned and emailed the council and other agencies on his behalf, but got nowhere. One night around this time, we met Eddie by chance in town. It was close to midnight. He was in his wheelchair in a wide shop doorway next to the Slug and Lettuce. With him, leaning next to him against the doorway itself – barely conscious as she leant there, every now and then moving into a deep nod – was a tall, thin woman, of an age it seemed somewhere between about 20 and 40 years. We went over to say hello, and inevitably Eddie wanted to talk about not being able to cope on the street for much longer, and what increasingly was seemingly like the unsustainable cost of his chronic heroin addiction. We talked about how he was scared to stop using, and about why he didn’t want to go on a methadone script, about Land House, and finally about not being able to do this

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   119 without help, and going to Narcotics Anonymous (NA). We talked, too, about why he was scared to go to an NA meeting. One of the reasons was because he was homeless, and thus different to everyone else, he said, who would be there. It’s interesting, that even in that context, where the common denominator, indeed, the only salient and identifying property to the attendees of an NA meeting, the only ontological reason for any such meeting to be, is that everyone is an addict, but is otherwise anonymous; even in that context, Eddie felt the alienation of being homeless. At this point he called to get the attention of the tall, thin woman who was leaning against the doorway; she roused herself momentarily out of her nod, to wipe away the suspended slimy lengths of drool that had been hanging from her nose and mouth. He’d been to NA before, he said, but that was in prison. In prison everyone was the same. Okay, I said, I’ll come with you: and we talked about that, too, for a bit. We subsequently agreed to meet the next day, after I’d found out where and when the next meetings in the area were scheduled to be; then we’d decide which would be the best one to attend. Can you predict what happened? And if you can, how come? Well, this is what played out. The next meeting was a week away and required us to take a train to Ellesmere Port. The meeting was about a ten-­minute walk from the station, and started at 7.30; so we were going to have to catch the 6.30 train. I’d talked with Eddie earlier that same day, and we’d agreed to meet in front of Chester station at 6.15: it turned out to be a filthy night. But from what Eddie was telling me when we’d met earlier, it was unlikely he was going to be there. I caught up with him at around 11 that morning, just to go over the arrangements. Listen, he said, my head’s not in the right place. We were sheltering in a shop doorway from the rain. Only an hour or so earlier, Eddie explained, as the rain beat down, after nearly a year and a half of living on the street in his wheelchair, and sleeping rough, a woman from a housing agency had told Eddie that a flat was available, and had taken him to view the property in her car. This is an adapted flat, isn’t it, Eddie had asked, just as they were pulling up to the building? Oh yes, the woman assured him, it’s been adapted for disabled living. But it hadn’t, in any respect. At the time, it seemed a completely pointless lie; a lie exposed as such even before entry to the flat had been gained, since Eddie was unable to reach the handle and the lock to the front door. He then ran through the problems that existed once they were inside, including: cupboards he could only look at; a bathroom he struggled to access; a bath that he couldn’t get into; sinks, taps and electrical fittings he assumed worked, but because of where they were positioned, couldn’t easily use; as well as doors he couldn’t get through whilst sitting in his wheelchair. It wasn’t so much, according to Eddie, that the flat was simply unsuitable; what was really fucking with his head, what was worse now than ever, was that he had gone and got his hopes up. He’d allowed himself to think that things were going to get better. Worse than that, he’d slipped into thinking that things were going to be alright. In his head, he’d transformed his prospects from wondering if it was worth putting in the effort needed to make it through

120   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? another day, grinding his way through the same predictable, precarious regime of life on the street; he’d moved from the greyness of perpetual uncertainty, tinged with meagre hope, to somehow thinking that all of that, not just the discomfort, the wet, the cold, the humiliation, but most of all the nightmare of wondering, the worrying if, if things were ever going to be alright, was now miraculously over. But then, of course, it wasn’t. ‘Shit, Eddie; that’s fucked,’ I told him. And I knew that to be so, for a number of reasons; reasons that I suspected I always had known, but mostly didn’t want to express, even to myself. Because as Eddie explained what had happened, he seemed to be telling me that he had been the one who had told the woman that the flat wasn’t suitable, which it clearly wasn’t; but something else was gnawing at me, and making me think: if it was you, not Eddie, so it was you who had to struggle to open a door, to hop out of your wheelchair to get into the bathroom, to maybe even leave your clothes on the floor because the wardrobe was inaccessible; but despite that, despite those and other similar difficult things, you’d be in the warm, with hot water, and lights, and even a bed, and have somewhere to live rather than be on the street – well, I know what I’d choose, without the least hesitation. And I think you’d do the same. So how come, Friedrich Nietzsche, even in the most appalling of circumstances, your theme of eternal recurrence seems to threaten us with its presence, perhaps predictably, yet again? Therefore, no, Eddie didn’t turn up that night: it pelted down hard rain, bouncing off the road and pavements, whilst I waited under the awnings outside Chester railway station, until I knew the train that wasn’t going to take us to NA that night had gone. He didn’t turn up, as I always knew was likely to be the case. Is Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence explicable in broader social terms? One of the remarkable processes that Bourgois (2003) describes is how the development and intensification of street culture in the marginalised, trapped, poor Puerto Rican community of East Harlem, and particularly its manifestation in those who engaged with the illegal and very often drug related economy, provides an oppositional identity to the legitimate economy and the culture that it supports, largely represented by the white, middle-­class hegemony that exerts its power through other, effectively for this section of the Puerto Rican community, more exclusive areas of New York, such as areas of at least adequate housing, meaningful employment, access to health care, and successful participation in education. Whilst participation in this oppositional street culture progressively provides: an intensification of a participant’s identity; a purpose and direction to one’s life; economic advantage; a sense of respect for one’s self and for others engaged in this economy; and most importantly, through all of this, the accrual of cultural capital; Bourgois convincingly demonstrates how the formation of this oppositional identity through participants’ engagement with street culture in order to accumulate cultural capital is ultimately a destructive and self-­ destructive process. It is self-­destructive in rather obvious ways, including: its likely potential of bringing participants into damaging contact with the law and  penal system; its dependence on opening and courting scenarios that are saturated with personal risk and high levels of violence; as well as the personal

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   121 physiological and other forms of damage that drugs usage tends to mark its participants with. And for similar and related reasons, these aspects of street culture damage communities, families, friendships. But perhaps more importantly still: there is an ever growing likelihood that participation in and identity gained through street culture and engagement with its illegal economy will make it progressively more difficult to ever join the legal economy and the culture that it represents in any sustainable fashion. Conviction for public order offences, time spent in prison for drugs-­related charges, as well as developing skills, forms of behaviour, and a world outlook and attitude that support these and other forms of transgression, which are integral to operating within the illegal economy, such as developing a propensity to break the law as pragmatic circumstances dictate, all make it much more problematic to secure ways of being, a job, a place to live, a set of social relationships, and a realistic future within the realm of the legitimate economy and the culture that it maintains. So yes, there are significant broader social grounds on which Nietzsche’s theme of eternal recurrence might appear to be explicable, but there is also something else. Bourdieu (1984) in explaining and demonstrating how experience of social reality deposits that reality within an individual, and through the nature of that experience, locates that individual within that social reality, thus forming the habitus by which an individual is articulated; simultaneously expresses how dispositions within an individual are built-­up, and thus appear only to accord with the array of limited choices that are available to them. These dispositions and the array of choices that they appear to generate are analogous to the degree of agency that such conditions prescribe in relation to their subjects. More plainly, and my analogy here is obviously only descriptive, and flawed, and could well say more about myself than about the exactitude of Bourdieu’s mapping of habitus to the opening – as well as a recognition of the limits – of agency; but this is crudely what I think it’s like, and what the above technical expression boils down to. It (being, the being of the subject, such as you, or myself, or your dog) is like being as a hollowed out space along the bank at some specific point of some river; a space that was made by and gets its peculiar shape from the deposits and eddies and currents of the continuously flowing river water. The contours of that space, its internal dimensions, the whirls, spumes and vortexes of water that this specific space entertains; these become the specific characteristics that define and identify the subject, forged as they are through the deposits, erosions and forces of the environment and its articulation of this being. That which becomes the identity of that same space, its dynamic orientation, what Bourdieu refers to as the forms of disposition that orient the subject, is thus composed by the battering, caress and depositions of the river, and its history and continued effect, as the environment, upon the same space that the river contains. Within this analogy, the physical and dynamic characteristics of this space, the dispositions that have been built up in this subject through its experience of this environment, accord to the array of choices, and consequently the degree of agency, that appear to be possible for the subject within this system. And in concrete terms?

122   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? Part of Bugsy’s story, a person with a decision-­making skill level so low that it rivals even mine in terms of the disastrous results that any decision I make routinely leads to, we suggest may illustrate this concrete point. Bugsy seemed very different to many of the homeless people that we knew. Not only did he not seem to drink or take drugs, he had worked successfully in a series of skilled manual jobs and seemed interested in securing similar forms of employment. Bugsy was also noticeably actively caring of his then partner, appearing to exercise responsibility for her attendance at hospital for the numerous appointments that it was important for her to get to because of her serious heart condition, encouraging her to take her medication for her mental health issues, gently supporting her emotional needs, and helping her eventually to move from the street into a women’s hostel. Bugsy’s preoccupations were also not with drugs and the limitations of life on the street. This was reflected in the direction and content of his conversations. Because at the time, there appeared to be mostly three things on his mind: the health and well-­being of his partner; finding work; and being shot. These tended to be different to the concerns and interests of many of the people that during this period he associated with. Indeed, it seemed likely that the only reason why Bugsy was associating with this particular group of homeless people was because of his attachment to his partner, whose profile matched the others very closely in the group. During this time, Bugsy was living in a squat in front of the bus station. Whilst there were some characteristics, apart from his homelessness, that Bugsy did share with the group, such as having lived through an extensively physically and emotionally abusive childhood at the hands of his carers, and having spent time in the Forces; there was another characteristic that set Bugsy apart: since his mid to late teens, Bugsy had spent much of his life working for a crime family that operated in the East of England and the Midlands where the family were engaged notably in a turf war involving the control of fast food outlets. It was this experience – along with his childhood background, which provided the circumstances of vulnerability, of growing up witnessing violence as a routine part of everyday life, of being progressively excluded from mainstream forms of being, manifested, for example, by being excluded from school and the familiarity of stable familial relationships, together with his close proximity to organised criminality by simply growing up in the environment that surrounded him – that shaped the habitus through which he understood himself and the world in ways that were both congruent as well as being significantly different to the other homeless people that surrounded him. Bugsy began his association with organised crime through the influence of an uncle who ended up looking after Bugsy, after other forms of care had broken down. It was during this period, when Bugsy was in his mid-­teens, that he moved from being included in social aspects of the organised crime world, such as being with criminals, often drinking with them, and becoming habituated to venues known as social establishments that were identified with criminals; to taking part, at first, in fringe activities that were part of the local criminal world, including the distribution of stolen goods, and the exchange of information

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   123 related to crime; and from this, progressed to work that was more obviously integral to the establishment and extension of a family criminal enterprise, by actively and reliably taking part in door work and the securing of door work, involving the control of drugs in pubs, clubs and other venues; extortion and intimidation; debt collection; and torture. It was especially the violence and the threat of violence that Bugsy had witnessed and been part of that bothered him. So that often, whilst Bugsy seemed quiet, even-­tempered, and reflective, he was rarely relaxed. It was also, it seemed, this experience of violence and the threat of violence that gave him a wary edge, and stopped him from falling into a familiar downward, but often protracted, spiral of self-­destruction, through an otherwise unfettered engagement with street culture, drugs and alcohol, and a damaging relationship with the law. This is not to say that Bugsy had not, at times, had problems with drugs and alcohol, but never heroin. And by the time Bugsy had come to Chester, he’d stopped using: he described the different times that he had weaned himself off both drink and drugs; with alcohol being the most difficult, he said, because of how the impact that coming off drink hammered him, how sick and damaged it made him feel, as well as associated problems resulting from the broader lifestyle that defined him, and the culture that he was immersed in at the time. Looking back, conversations that took place with Bugsy when he first appeared on the scene, and his then references to threats of violence that seemed to come from nowhere, now take on a different, more obvious, less oblique kind of meaning. On one occasion we were in Town Hall Square, sitting on the benches with the cathedral wall behind us. It was warm, and promising to get warmer. Nothing seemed remotely like it was ever going to kick off. Indeed, in town generally, there was a kind of slow, lazy feeling to the late morning: it looked like it was going to be a beautiful day. Then Bugsy told me, apropos of nothing, that ‘people’ didn’t really know what ‘it’ was like. By ‘people’ I assumed he was referring to people who were not homeless, and that ‘it’ referred to the experience of homelessness and the lives that people had led leading up to that point. So I agreed with him. But then he said, they think if someone’s going to kill you that you’ll know about it, but they could shoot you from over there, and he indicated somewhere across the square, beyond the library. That was the point, he said; they could do it any time, from far off, so that they were never going to get caught. Then he told me what kind of gun would be best to use. Then every now and then Bugsy would disappear, and when he re-­emerged, was vague about what had precipitated his departure, other than saying he needed to get away to sort his head out, and that this was sometimes related to his feeling that ‘some people’ were looking for him. At other times he would mention that it was ‘difficult to get out of some things’ which I used to think was some kind of elliptical reference to leaving homelessness behind, or being free of alcohol and drug addiction, or more generally just extracting one’s self from a destructive way of life and mental attitude, all mixed together in a vague kind of way. Once, his partner told me, that when Bugsy disappeared on one particular occasion, he’d moved out of Chester and had been sleeping for a few nights

124   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? under a canal bridge, also for reasons to do with his head and the feeling that in Chester he wasn’t safe. It was always very likely that Bugsy’s relationship with his partner would not be smooth, and would inevitably be subject to the pressures of homelessness, as well as all of the challenges that ordinarily confront any couple, such as the strains that build up by simply being together for a long time. But because Bugsy was no longer with his by then former partner, and subject to the risks and lifestyles that were habitual to their daily existence, and given the other positive characteristics that Bugsy impressively demonstrated, he was seen as a very good candidate to be given support by local agencies to move out of homelessness. And as a result, Bugsy gained a place in sheltered mixed residence accommodation, just outside the city, but within 15 minutes’ walk of the venues that his former partner and her friends frequented. It was this gap, the gap between Bugsy and his former partner and the way of being that they represented; the gap between the location of that way of being, and the temporary sheltered accommodation where Bugsy was then housed; that provided a reassuring distance between one way of being, and another of barely being, which seemed to function as a buffer zone or immunising ground, preventing the passage or otherwise neutralising the characteristics of oppositional street culture being injected from the realm of barely being into Bugsy’s body, and incubating there. This was a position at least casually acknowledged by Bugsy himself, and had been from as soon as he became known to us: he repeated many times that he wanted to get away, to not associate with the homeless group his former partner normally met with because he felt it would inevitably lead to trouble, even if that amounted to nothing more tangible than messing with his head. And yet, perhaps because Bugsy felt reassured, as everyone else was, though with hindsight perhaps Bugsy was too reassured, that contact more on his terms, if not actually physically, on his ground, would mean that an array of other choices might seem to be available to him. Choices that might not emanate from an oppositional street culture, as Bourgois (2003) notes, choices that would not entrench his distance from the established order, making his likelihood of being beneficially sutured to it a greater possibility. After all, nobody wants to make bad choices. But as Bourdieu never ceases from telling us, rational choice, what constitutes rational being, is itself not a matter of choice, but an effect of the environment and the history of our experience within it, which in effect articulates us: choice is accordingly an effect of habitus. And not simply any old choice, but the types of choice that you might be presented with. For example, I’m guessing, but I imagine that if you are reading this now, then one kind of choice that you routinely might make is: where are we going to eat tonight? Meaning a restaurant, or bar, or some other kind of similar eatery, where the establishment lives off a culture of event rather than simply utility dining, as in, for example, the works canteen. This is a nice type of choice, on the whole, to be able realistically to make; a choice that might include, not only the cuisine, but also the ambience, which you might select in order to match or enhance, or maybe even

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   125 detract, from the mood of your guests as well as yourself. Of course, our ability to exercise this kind of choice, even if it is rarely acted upon, is a function of privilege, of the capital that we have accrued, and with it our ability to deploy these resources. Not simply the financial capital, but the cultural and other forms of capital that make the exercise of this choice a rationally tenable and meaningful possibility. Just as entertaining which choice of restaurant you might treat yourself to this month might not be a rationally tenable and meaningful possibility for other groups of people. Indeed, for some groups of people, simply thinking about such a notion as a conceivable event would be tantamount to an act of madness. The problem is, that whilst we might understand this idea about choice being a rational possibility according to the parameters as more or less affected by some habitus or other; we tend to only grant that it is a possibility according to the proximity with which it accords to our own experience, and the rationality of that experience. So that whilst we can see how it would be reasonable to conclude that if you did not have the money, or had only limited means, to blow those resources, which might otherwise last you for an entire week or more, on a single gastronomic experience of, say sashimi, that we might this would be a bad choice. We might account for this view as not only being unjustifiable on grounds of prudence and economy; but also on the grounds of the experience being so outside say such a person’s eating history, that not only will the concept of willingly consuming raw fish be alien, their palate too is unlikely to have been educated in such a way that the event will be rewarding. Other choices, however, because of the extent of their distance from us and the material out of which such choices heave been composed, indeed between us and the way of life that their ontological possibility appears to inhabit, seem so far removed from the conditions that hold our own rational edifice together, as to appear to be choices that are virtually incomprehensible, to be mad in themselves. So that what is being argued for here, is not so much the rational agency involved in assessing the pros and cons about making one choice over another; but instead, that the nature of the choices that occur, and which for one reason or another have to be decided upon, are themselves constituted as being possible, viable, ontologically realisable, according to the environment within which they, meaning you, are situated: they exist as part of the structure of habitus. For example, and again, I’m only guessing, but I am nevertheless guessing that if you are reading this book now, and every now then you are in the position to and make and act upon the decision to eat dinner in some kind of non-­ utilitarian establishment; then ways of making or continuing to make money are likely to be or to have been related to some kind of legitimate form of employment, including if you are retired and have a pension. And the kinds of choices in relation to this aspect of your life that you might have to make, are probably of the order of: Should I remain in my current position or look elsewhere? Should I apply for promotion? Where should I look for work in the face of redundancy? And so on. And within that type of context, you may make good or bad choices: who knows? But the nature of the goodness or badness of those

126   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? choices is circumscribed by the context within which they appear. Good, or bad, that’s what appears to make the nature of those choices reasonable – because they appear to take place on a rational horizon. Because wouldn’t it be madness, for example, pure madness, not only to think about making the following choice, but wouldn’t the grounds upon which such a choice might even exist; of whether or not it was a good idea, after three people knocked at your door one day, to go along with their proposal? Quite out of the blue, of forcing your way into someone’s house – which, because at this point you will be in the owner’s house, with the owner also in it, this being very much central to the proposition, and will not be interested in forcibly moving them anywhere else, then technically this may not be kidnapping? A point to keep in mind, which might sway your eventual judgment – in order to extort money from the owner, which the people explaining this to you, are pretty sure the owner probably has, with the intention of employing for the extorting in this case – you, and more specifically your much sought after skills of intimidation and torture, supplemented by – and they let you have a glimpse of what they have brought – the awesome slicing and stabbing capacity of a military-­looking sword, which they have procured for you, so you don’t even have to find and bring your own; just in case that helps … in what world would that be a possibility? Should I? Shouldn’t I? Then there’s the fact that it probably wouldn’t be kidnapping. And that they’ve already sourced a very tasty and business-­looking sword. It would have to be mad, right? But you’re still going to have to make a choice. You’re still going to have to decide. Is it the ethical qualms? Is that what’s disturbing you, is that’s what’s holding you back? No problem. We can sort that too. Just like the sword. How? The owner, well, he’s a nonce. Mad? Mad, the kind of world where barely known figures knock on your door and suggest, as if this is nothing out of the ordinary, because basically, really, it isn’t, that you threaten and torture someone into giving you money? Mad, because if such a world did exist, that you would in any rational way have anything to do with it? Mad, that any practicalities involved in undertaking such a venture, such as procuring a sword, have already been taken care of, so encouraging you nicely along the path to committing extortion and a host of other violent crimes? Mad, that you would consort with such people, including a paedophile, even if the association with the latter figure is only to scare the living daylights out of, torture, extort money from, and possibly exploit him and his nonce status, in order to further blackmail and persuade him from not going to the police? Mad, because the status of the nonce within this context is utterly irredeemable; so much so that to register the nonce even by means of the general male gendered but specifically unidentifiable subject, as ‘he’, or object, as ‘him’, is impossible, unthinkable, because it would be to accord the nonce some ontological capacity, some form of being, beyond being a nonce, and would have to allow for a leak from the hermetically sealed category, nonce, into the gendered male category, which would be utterly unconscionably? Mad, because all of this is so outside the Law, and yet, fuck, there it is, this thing, unfolding, happening before your very eyes?

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   127 But what if you said no, that none of this was really mad, including the, what would you call it, the moral or ethical position, that this was not even a symptom of madness? Would that be to make you complicit? But, complicit in what? Hopefully not some form of moral relativism. Because for Bugsy, this wasn’t mad at all. And the role of the nonce, the importance of that identity, almost legitimated the proposal. Almost because it’s not entirely clear if the owner wasn’t a nonce that some variation of what was proposed might not ever have occurred. But it was the discovery of this figure’s nonce status along with the money involved – how come a nonce has this, a nonce, and we, who aren’t nonces, are struggling? – that motivated the idea. How do you want to explain this? Do you want to suggest that the figure of the nonce represents for you – and the people you are identified with at this time, as the bearers of bare life and marginalised being – the shifted embodiment of your own alienation; a figure that even you can abject from the realm of ontological acceptability? That the nonce thus fulfils the condition of the scapegoat, so meticulously documented by Girard (1986), whereby the expulsion of the identified figure that does not belong, purifies the area of belonging, the state, the city, the imaginary within which one is recognised as having a place, and by this means reaffirms the identity and status of those perceived as rightfully being there? And for people whose ontological status is already one of barely being? People like you? Doesn’t the figure of the nonce represent the tiniest hope of salvation; but not in the sense of a revolution in terms of the acceptability of your being, not in the sense that at last, because of the figure of the nonce, you have finally, somehow been admitted into the security of the established order? It’s not that the established order has become, thoroughly egalitarian. Done away with the whole notion of belonging and not belonging that seems to depend on the politics of identity. But because, instead, somehow the established order made a mistake, got things slightly wrong. You see, it’s not you and your kind that are at the bottom of the ladder; well, not even the bottom, simply don’t belong. No, that’s not you, because they, the established order, forgot the category of the nonce. It’s the nonce that represents alienated being; the nonce that needs to be expelled, as such; and have symbolic and all other forms of violence visited upon it; because isn’t this, after all, what a nonce is? Doesn’t it become, well, your civic duty to recognise, and by this process, become part of that dynamic? Aren’t you glad now that they brought the sword? The practical and symbolic instrument by which you can affirm your own place, power and opportunity, quite literally at the expense of the nonce. Doesn’t this kind of logic force you to ask: is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? A question that came up, subsequent to the attack. Because, as well as being motivated by money, didn’t carrying out the crime assert at least your position on the ladder, albeit on the bottom rung, at the expense of the abjected nonce, along with the determination of the nonce identity as such? Though, of course, that wasn’t how the Law regarded the attack, which they managed to see so clearly, partly because it never went according to the vague plan that Bugsy and his associates had formulated. After having burst through

128   Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce? the front door, attacking and capturing their victim; the victim then escaped, wounded, from the premises, pursued by his assailants along the road where his property was located. The process of reasoning, guided by the habitus through which Bugsy and his fellow assailants negotiated themselves through the world, that designated the failed extortion plan as being a project worth undertaking, at this point in the afternoon collided head – traditionally represented as the site of reasoning – on with the reasoning mechanisms of the police and the citizenry and the values and forms of order that they represent. The time in the afternoon when this occurred, also playing a part, it being around about the time when parents and carers pick up their children from primary school; so that the scene was very close to symbolically resembling the very reasoning of the divisions between those who belong – the innocent, law-­abiding, educated, productive members of society, represented by the young school children, the mothers and the signs of our conformity with this regime, represented by the school – and those who do not – the armed assailants, careering down the road. With the consequence of not conforming to this lawful regime, symbolised by the terrorised victim, wounded, fleeing in fear of his life. And in order for this chaos not to run amok within this disturbed moment of the life of the established order, it was entirely consistent with this tableau that the Law would be urgently prevailed upon, and that this disturbed moment would be arrested with the arrival of the police. Someone was bound to call. All of these were not so much factors as ways of conceiving that did not prevail upon Bugsy and co during the moments when they conceived and initiated their plan. You remember those moments, from above. Sure enough, however, as the plan unrolled it also unravelled as it, to use the same phrase, collided head on, with the habitus and its symbolic and practical organisation of the established order; then this alternative way of conceiving what was happening began to prevail upon Bugsy and co with a kind of dramatic immediacy. At first, perhaps not so much, but by the time the victim had escaped it became pretty clear that the way Bugsy and co had been compelled to initially imagine the project was not how it was going down. It was this, the victim’s escape, which initiated the second act, the desperate pursuit of the victim; which was really only an intensifying of the confirmation that the realm of understanding about what was happening had shifted, probably irretrievably, towards the realm of the established order, represented by the imminence of a custodial sentence. Chasing a screaming, bleeding man along a busy street, with mothers and children looking on aghast, as you brandish a military sword, accompanied by a couple of other desperados, with the sound of approaching police sirens playing in your ears, will likely provoke that kind of reflection in almost anyone. So Bugsy does his time, which is not as substantial as you might have imagined; and when it’s done, he returns to Chester. Bugsy is then fortunate enough to find another place in a different mixed residence property, owned by the same charity that supported Bugsy’s last transition from homelessness towards independent, housed living. The charity made it very obvious, however, that this was

Is it ever really wrong to extort a nonce?   129 dependent upon Bugsy steering clear of his former partner and the people she associated with: a condition that Bugsy was keen to adhere to. There was a very real determination on Bugsy’s part to maintain a low profile. Which makes what happened next all the more surprising, when looked at from the outside. Surprising, here, is an interesting word. How else might you describe, if you were one of the other men living in the same house as Bugsy, what first seemed to be the onset of an ordinary night, as the rush hour and light faded, the curtains were drawn, and thoughts of food and its preparation began to gently percolate into the tenants’ collective evening consciousness? Anything much other than the uneventful process of cans and packets being opened, the TV being switched on, water being boiled, crockery selected, the internet browsed, and the reassuring noise of the boiler as it does its business to keep the cold at bay, would be surprising, because there was always a very high expectation, based on experience, that not very much more than this did, or could, or therefore would ever happen. On just such a night, therefore, for the denizens of this same property, reassured by the pervading atmosphere that nothing ever would happen, that the back door of the property burst open, allowing access to three men, only one of whom was armed though all were united in their collective search of Bugsy, who was upstairs, was, perhaps, understandably surprising. Surprising, too, perhaps, that during the brief violent fracas that ensued, Bugsy disarmed the armed assailant, and chased all three from the house. In all but the last of these respects, the attack that Bugsy had been involved in, which had led him to the property where he was staying at the time, was similar to the attack perpetrated against him; but on both occasions, it was Bugsy doing the chasing. Though in essence, hasn’t this all happened before? Surprising also, perhaps, that when the police arrived, Bugsy was whisked away, because his life was in danger, and placed in a witness protection programme for his own safety. Is there an outside, a way out of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and making bad decisions? Is there any kind of re-­evaluation of values, any kind of overcoming? Why don’t you decide, especially if you think you can?

6 Sean

Clearly, this can’t go on for ever. This has to be the final chapter. Though I suppose, or think, or actually, more honestly, know full well, that what is disguised here, in this, this can’t go on for ever, is really the feeling that I can’t keep doing this. And doing what, exactly? Well, the homelessness, I mean, the chronic homelessness, the inexorable, slow movement, away from any sustainable hope, into the blunt, uncompromising, finality of death. Death that you can see coming, from a point, measured in years if you like, but that’s barely very different from its point of origin. Though of course, in another, more rhetorically, purer, theoretical sense, I also know that I could go on in the same way. And not just me: I know that it, chronic homelessness, will keep going on. Stretching out, beyond this final chapter. Where, despite the ‘… this can’t go on for ever’ motif, whatever it represents – what might you call it? Giving up? Cowardice? Withdrawing from forces beyond your control? No longer wanting to pursue this chronic waste of life? Very probably all of these and any other versions that emphasise the fantasy of escape will do – it, chronic homelessness, will persist; since, however any such version of this can’t go on for ever, might be presented, all of them, each one, will be ground and erased away, during their inevitable engagement with the relentless truth of material reality. What do we have to do in order to recount, in this final chapter, this unforgiving knowledge; about the apparently inevitable return of the powers of degradation; that they are impervious to the existence of any sentiment; and that they dismantle any hope that the this can’t go on for ever response is anything more than the declaration of your own weakness? Are more stories of unending abuse and being made abject necessary to make that point? Because, isn’t the pervasive feeling that this can’t go on for ever, the pervasive desire that this Nietzschean theme of eternal recurrence is no longer tenable, actually confirmation, instead, of our own wretched powerlessness in the face of the truth of material reality? In one of Žižek’s early books (Žižek, 1992), he describes how, in City Lights, a Chaplin film from 1931, the character of the tramp that Chaplin plays is able to save the sight of a poor, beautiful, young, blind woman, though the appellation of girl, rather than woman is more appropriate, since culturally and symbolically, girl carries with it the connotation of innocence, naivety and vulnerability; who barely manages to keep herself alive by selling flowers on the street. He, the

Sean   131 tramp that Charlie plays, gives to the girl her sight, via some quirk of fate, which presents Charlie, the tramp, with enough money so that in a fleeting moment he is able to hand what becomes his gift over to the girl, by financing a life-­ changing operation on her eyes. The condition of sight, of being able to see, also carries with it the metaphor of knowledge, in its awful biblical sense, just like the fall from grace. But crucially, of course, Charlie the tramp does this anonymously, without the girl knowing his true identity, which he is able to disguise since the girl’s blindness, her innocence prior to her Fall into knowledge, prevents her from seeing him. This condition, of the girl’s blindness, and Charlie’s willingness to hide his identity away from her, allows the girl to mistake the tramp for being a rich, young, caring benevolent member of society. Indeed, we might say more than that, we might say that this mistaken gesture evokes not just a member of society, but that society Ideal and being an Ideal member of that society itself. But by extension of the same quirk of fate, a quirk, that might lead one to believe, innocently, through the changed life of the once blind girl, that it is possible to escape the ontological determinations of identity, that one might leave behind the preconceptions that society has about those who live on the street; Charlie, because he is a tramp, is mistaken again; but this time the mistake is made by the police, that the tramp is a thief, and he is incarcerated, and thereby removed from the society that he was mistakenly taken, by the blind girl, to embody and represent. Upon leaving prison, and returning to the streets where he originally met the girl, the tramp discovers that the operation he has anonymously facilitated has been successful; and the beautiful, young girl can now not only see, but has prospered to the extent that she is the proprietor of her own florist shop. We are directed during Žižek’s analysis to reflect on the following points: the course of Chaplin’s fate is historically determined; that is to say, what happens to him, repeatedly, is the result of his tramp identity, and that this is recognised, as such. For example, that the tramp lives on the street, and according to its order of being, its rules, limitations, and its general conditions of depravity, ensures the tramp’s eternal return to this same field of poverty, where he serves as its material, or its fuel, and functions as the currency that sustains the economy of its being. Even when some quirk in the fate that determines Charlie’s tramp identity occurs, with him by chance being in a position to be in receipt of the large sum of money, of life-­changing dimensions, the forces of the Law, which police the distinctions between those who belong and those who do not, Charlie is positioned according to his indelible tramp identity, of not belonging, is sent to prison, out of the presence, out of the sight, of any being in society of those whom by right belong. The killer punch comes, of course, at the end. As Žižek explains: when Charlie, the tramp, returns to the streets, which we may read as another manifestation of the same symptom of the same pathology of eternal recurrence; and is one day seen by the girl outside her shop window, within which she has continuously anticipated the return of, in order to be united with, the rich, young, caring benevolent member of society, evoking not just a member of society, but that society and being a member of that society itself; and she approaches the

132   Sean tramp outside her shop, but at the same time still does not know that this is the identity of the person who gifted her the money, her sight, prosperity and desire; but then after an instant’s contact with the tramp, realises that this is who he is; the scene, resonates, according to Žižek, a profoundly disturbing ambiguity, and fundamentally because it is discordant with love. We see this profound discontinuity – since we too, like the girl, are now Fallen – registered on the tramp’s face in the closing shot of the film. Because when we see that the girl is able to see the identity of the tramp, when she knows who this is – that it is an identity that erases the ideal figure of the rich, young, caring benevolent member of society, evoking not just a member of society, but that society and being a member of that society itself, a figure that was always, in reality, absent – and its abject nature is exposed, then in the same moment, the ideal, symbolically constructed representation of her true love is also stripped away, and the woman’s reaction, now that she sees, is ambiguous towards, well, towards him, towards a tramp: and this is a look that he, the tramp, cannot help but recognise himself. Since being ambiguous is not, of course, in any way close to a reaction that describes love; as love, according to Lacan, but more specifically according to the explicit tracing by Žižek of Lacan’s work in relation to love, is that which the subject seeks as completeness in the Other. And oh God, knowing this, we are all, all of us, so utterly fucked. And yet, there is Sean. Sean, who at the time of writing was not long off his twenty-­fifth birthday. I first knew Sean when he was 18, and sleeping rough; confederate of Eddie, John, and Pete the Boat; associate of Chris Phoenix and Tommy the Poet; taunter of the old-­time drinkers; tireless provocateur of the forces of local law and order; tall and skinny, with a shock of light brown hair, and gapped teeth; owner of a broad smile, ripped from the mouth of a cartoon character, but owner of not much else; armed with a tongue, dripping with quick, hilarious wit; dressed in the street uniform of grey trackie bottoms, and an oversized light-­blue puffer jacket that stretched down to his knees. He was waiting on a case to be heard at the Magistrates’, to do with the theft and driving away of a motorbike, and evading the police, for a very limited amount of time, with his mate on the back, riding around the estate where he was born and raised, though he hadn’t lived there for some time. At 18, Sean was an irrepressible explosion of tall, skinny, wicked fun. And I want to say that everyone liked Sean, but that just wasn’t true. During the same winter of his eighteenth year, when it snowed and the snow stuck in the town, at not long after 10:30, having left the Day Centre, we made our way as usual down Grosvenor Street to shelter on the rows that began on Bridge Street. There we met up with tall Pete and Lou, and turned-­my-life-­around Gerry, and broke out the burn, spicing the rollies we made with what was then legal legal high. Turned-­my-life-­around Gerry was quickly wasted; tall Pete was already halfway gone, habitually topping up on his daily script, but nevertheless shouting out ‘Five-­O’ as he spotted the approach of the police coming from Eastgate Street. So the rollies were extinguished, because smoking on the rows is illegal, before

Sean   133 the police arrived, but no one dispersed in a kind of fuck-­you expression of limited truculence, to the most visible agents of local law and order. The police made it obvious, in a deliberately assertive way that they knew everyone, apart from myself, making references to some about the last times that they had encountered each other, when searches had been undertaken and personal items were taken away, and alcohol had been confiscated and poured onto the street. One of the officers took me aside, and asked me who I was: I took out my university card from the wallet in my rucksack, explaining what I was doing. Tall Pete in particular maintained an aggressive defiance, and even though the question had never been asked, told the police that what he had in his roll-­up was legal high, and that he could smoke it in public within the boundaries of the law. After only a few minutes of the officers leaving, the group dispersed, with tall Pete and Lou going one way, Eddie, John, Sean, Pete the Boat and I going another, and turned-­my-life-­around Gerry, being the most bitter about the encounter, since it was his alcohol that the police had previously tipped away, heading, on his own, off towards the station. Turned-­my-life-­around Gerry – who would have been able to predict it at the time? – died in his prison cell, five years later, having hanged himself, unable to face his sentence, and doubtless other things, for having sliced up a Polish lad, over an argument about a bottle of vodka. It was bitterly cold. I was wearing a thermal hat underneath my hoodie; and the rest of us, apart from Sean, were also wearing gloves and multiple layers. Sean’s long thin fingers were blue and red from the freezing temperature, and his face glowed and grinned, warmed, it seemed, internally, by the possibility of fun and future mischief. What intrigued me more than anything, as we crossed Watergate Street, and climbed the steps to the rows on the other side of the road, was the line that everyone in the group had been aware of, between defiance and arrest, or even, if not arrest, provoking a harsher response from the police who had just spoken to us: a response that might have meant that we were all individually searched, or told to move on, or taken into custody with no other purpose than increasing our inconvenience and the shitness of our day. This was a line that could be drawn in various ways, according to the context of the encounter, including: what had happened during the last meeting with the police, and when and where this had taken place; the number of officers involved in the current encounter, and the number of homeless people present; what had provoked the current visitation, which had perhaps only been standard CCTV coverage of the group’s movements through town, or a call from a member of the public; the officers’ workload, and perhaps if they were on their way to some more pressing matter; the atmosphere and nature of the interactions; maybe the colour of the sky, the temperature of the air, the expressions on the faces of all those involved. What was remarkable, I thought, was that tall Pete, turned-­my-life-­around Gerry, Eddie and John, pretty much everyone present, seemed to be able to sense at the time where this line was drawn, and how much they could press themselves against it, with verbal expressions and body language, before it broke, and the border that it delimited, between relative freedom and becoming more obviously

134   Sean subject to the agency of the law, would be transgressed, and they would have to bear the consequences. The group I was with sat down about half way along the northern rows on Watergate Street, broke out more rollies and legal high, and passed the joints around. After about ten minutes, Sean left, without saying where he was going; and whilst he was gone we were joined by Danny, who was only wearing a tee shirt, jeans and trainers. He was already buzzing from some prescription drugs he’d ingested; but within seconds of taking a toke on a joint, his eyes rolled back in his head, he slowly slipped sideways onto the floor, and began to have a fit. We crowded round him, Eddie held his thrashing head from off the ground, and John ran to one of the shops beneath the rows to call for an ambulance. Minutes later, paramedics had arrived and were performing a series of tests on the now conscious but still prone Danny. After a couple of more minutes Danny was sitting up, and refusing the advice of the paramedics that he be taken into hospital: it seemed he had a more pressing appointment; and not long after, Danny and the paramedics went their separate ways, into the cold, snowy late morning. Maybe, I began to reflect, as we cracked jokes and wondered where Sean had got to, that understanding about how the line, delimiting relative freedom and being more inconveniently subject to the authority of the law, and its prescriptions about life and its permissibilities, was drawn, and how it might be broken, and what its durability might be, maybe this expertise did not necessarily fall within the expertise of the group that I was with. Then Sean appeared. Smiling, holding a plastic bag. Inside the bag was a different coloured tee shirt to the one he was wearing, and some other clothes that his girlfriend had brought to him: that’s where he’d been, a brief rendezvous with sanity. Then looking over the balustrade, tramping down the eerily deserted snowy space of Watergate Street, with their static-­sounding radios blaring, we spotted a couple of police, obviously on the lookout for something, but fuck knew what; until, that is, with his cartoon grin expanding to each of his red-­cold ears, Sean’s long, thin fingers scooped two mounds of snow together, balling them tight into fuck-­you projectiles, and let them fly in quick succession at the upper back and neck of one of the cops, before taking off, like a thawed-­out turkey with a reprieve from Christmas, in the opposite direction that the law had been marching, off towards the city’s Cross. Tell me about the law’s fleeting humiliation. Tell me about order’s brief embarrassment. Tell me about their collective ambush. Then tell me about a sliver of joy and momentary release. And see Sean go, like a turkey on speed, and the cut of his cartoon grin. The grey cold day crackled with more static from the police radios, as the officers turned in righteous confusion, giving slippery chase in the direction they presumed the grinning thawed-­out turkey was heading along the rows. And very soon after, there was a siren and more police appeared to search for the skinny, tall fugitive, whilst we looked on. Though on that occasion, they didn’t catch him, at the time, what had been precipitated was a very Sean moment. Stupid, of course, especially given that the police had been interested in us from before 11 that morning, when the

Sean   135 meeting on Bridge Street rows, I thought, had come close to becoming a confrontation. Then not long afterwards there had been the Danny incident, with an ambulance being called, and the paramedics wanting to take Danny into hospital. It hardly amounted to a discrete morning, living below the radar of the law. And with the Magistrates’ appearance hanging in the air, it wasn’t going to be long before Sean the fugitive became Sean the apprehended villain. Indeed, Sean spent his nineteenth birthday in prison. On the morning I was due to see him at Altcourse, a category B prison in Liverpool, which is relatively close to Chester and convenient for his family to visit, he phoned the Day Centre, and managed to pass on a message: that very same morning, without any further prior notice, he was going to be transferred to Deerbolt Prison, in County Durham. By car this is a round trip of around six hours; and on the train, it’s more like ten. Everyone in the Day Centre said this was a standard prison system practice. Everyone in the Day Centre who commented on it said that this was because the prison system was a system made by cunts. Over a year passed before I next saw Sean, quite by chance. He was walking along the rows, on Bridge Street, covered in a fine grey dust, and wearing black overalls, with a logo on one shoulder, around lunchtime. Lunchtime, hitherto a meaningless concept for Sean, but not now. ‘Sean!’ I greeted him, enthusiastically shaking his hand. ‘What you up to? Great to see you!’ ‘On my lunch break.’ He said it like it was the most normal thing in the world to tumble from his mouth. ‘Working at Blackwell’s. Three days a week’. I was overjoyed, but didn’t know what Blackwell’s was. ‘It’s the stonemasons, just over the river in Handbridge’, which was how come he was covered from head to toe in dust, and was wearing what turned out to be one of their company overalls. We didn’t speak for long; we both had to be elsewhere; but Sean wanted to talk at greater length, sometime in the future. We worked out it would be easiest to do this on one of the days he was working, because Blackwell’s is just over the river from where I worked, and we could meet up there, in the University – which was to turn out to be a big fucking mistake. I’ve done many things that have made me hate myself. I’ve done many things about which I am ashamed. And on the day when it rained, and I watched Sean awkwardly leg it across the old bridge from where he worked, during his lunch break, as I stood waiting for him at the entrance to the University, was to turn out to be another such occasion. Nursing a habit that was barely acknowledged but wouldn’t go away, we talked in my room, with another colleague Sean had met before. My room: packed with books; with a carpet and fancy rug on the floor; festooned with pictures of Chester, and cards sent by people who loved me; art peppering the walls; a reproduction Wedgwood tea set from the V and A sitting on one of the desks; a Lust for Life CD by Iggy Pop prominent amongst others resting in a rack; a  computer and screen set up opposite one of a couple of easy chairs; warm, comfortable; reeking of privilege; stinking of a world that Sean had never known; that he had only ever ineffectually stolen from; but had not even properly

136   Sean understood what he had ever really taken; in which he began to tell me about the bits of his life that the statistics will help you guess; pretty much about the same age as my own stepson; talking haltingly about Altcourse and Deerbolt; about sleeping rough; about his dad, whom he never saw, and rarely ever had, because of his dad’s chronic heroin addiction; about his younger brother whom he loved but now also rarely saw, since his mother needed to protect her younger son, and so had to limit Sean’s access and influence, causing Sean to fret about being his dad; about his mother, whom he loved too, but accepted that, also like his father, she could no longer cope with his bad-­boy ways, though she had made the long trips to visit Sean when he was in prison; so that after a while, thinking about those things as he continued to speak, he couldn’t take it anymore, and began to cry, and needed to leave. I watched him go, in the pouring rain. The bits of the agony of his life, recorded as he had asked, on these pages, in this room. Bits of his life, recorded, then revisited, and left behind in this room, because it was convenient for me to do so for the construction of a book. And then I didn’t see Sean, properly, to speak to, for some time, for over a year. We would occasionally, during the beginning of this period, pass each other in the early morning, as he walked to work from a sofa at a mate’s house where he’d slept, and I trudged towards another research project, coincidentally on the same estate where he had grown up, both of us slightly sullen at the prospect of our work ahead, each asking how the other was, but that was all, then moving on; and after a while, even that sporadic form of brief meeting stopped: Sean, it seemed, had gone away. Then one day in April I saw him again; and as before it was around lunchtime. At first we didn’t quite recognise each other. I was walking back to work along Pepper Street, self-­absorbed, full of shit, but to my left, in the top quadrant of my eye, on the opposite side of the road, I noticed a skinny tall guy with a cartoon face and extended grin, touring around on a bike with no gears nor brakes, stripped back to nothing but a frame on wheels, doing circles by the Roman arena. And five minutes later we were talking to each other on the extended pavement near Café Nero. He was anxious to tell me what was going on, that his life had been transformed, that he had another job, and a girlfriend, and a place to live, in a very expensive village, where the sitting MP at the time was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, born into the elite of the high Tory establishment, motivated to keep on living by the extension of his own assured privilege. Why wouldn’t you want to pour out all of this excellence to a man researching the lives of those who exist along the margins of society: this, I’ve left all of the old shit behind; the closeness to death on the Rows; the messing with the Law, that you can never escape or get the better of; the familiarity with its periods of incarceration; the addictions and abuses that are the commonalities of your bare life – why wouldn’t you want to report, whenever you could, that all of that was done with? And so he did, and I was overjoyed to hear: that Sean loved the girl he was with; that she worked in a pet grooming business, and that they lived together in a flat above the pet-­grooming shop; that he worked for her family, which owned a farm, where he drove trailers and laboured, and with his

Sean   137 earnings took his girl out for meals in pubs in the exclusive village of Tatton, where his transformation was located. Talk about fairy tales come true, talk about Sean on his stripped-­down bike talking to me on the extended pavement outside Café Nero: I walked the few yards back to work, next to the Crown Court, like a modern day Hans Christian Andersen. But when I saw Sean next. His life had come crashing down, and the questions that I didn’t want to think about asking, on the extended pavement outside Café Nero, were answered. Another stretch of prison time, and then another; because this is what had happened: Sean’s brief but very regular trips to Chester were fuelled by his need to score Spice, one of the various iterations of a variant of the new psychotropic substances, which used to be legal highs. Doing a Spice rattle can be devastating, can make you think you are going to die, and that dying would be a very good thing; and after a while, the only sliver of your current existence that might dissuade you from this option is the imperative that you have to score. But the rattle is only part of its invasion and colonisation of not just your body, but your very being. A heavy addiction involves your entire thought processes being coordinated around the consumption of the drug. From the moment that you wake, every motivation that you experience is derived from making Spice continuous with yourself. Its acquisition is logically the first component in realising this continuity. And this is a vicious, unrelenting logic, dedicated to the consumption of your being. The compulsion to acquire determines, then, at the very point of consciousness, the order of your day. Being without Spice in this condition would be ontologically unbearable. It’s as if the drug is alive, that it has an intentionality all of its own, but that it can only realise this motivation to be parasitically, by feeding, desperately, off its host, by consuming the only thing by which you are defined, namely, yourself; which Spice therefore must have, by possessing it, which it can only do – because otherwise Spice is only a papery, dry, and pathetic grey-­green material, waiting, patient, but expectantly, in a tiny little plastic bag – by making Spice and you – because you are going to be, and nothing more than this, its vehicle for becoming – the same: and that is why being without Spice, when you are in this state, is ontologically unbearable, because you become virtually the same. But the possibility that this incarnation of living death might not happen, that being without Spice might actually occur, is inevitably, always, of course, a distantly credible truth; since for any number of reasons, you might not be able to score; so that this possibility is always there, lurking as an apparition, a shadow, waiting to materialise, on the margins of your dual-­consciousnesses. But were that to happen, then it would bring about and open up an unbearable, an unmanageable, chasm; a fissure in the desperate dual, in the living deadness of whom and what you have become. So you, that is to say, the both of you, the dual of you, but not the you that was, that could have been, but is no longer there, must, must, must have your Spice; since that is what you, living deadly, have become. So first thing in the morning, then, roll a joint, pepper it, crushed between your thumb and fingertip, with Spice, lick the paper’s edge, maybe twist together

138   Sean the fatter end, just to keep it all inside, light the rollie, and inhale. First thing in the morning, to remind you that you are not you, that you are a host, the living dead embodiment of Spice, very often what you’ll experience is nausea; the stops-­you-as-­you-walk-­along, makes-­you-sit-­down, head-­emptying-I-­can’t-take-­ this any-­more kind of nausea. But your joint, your fix of Spice, will always sort this out. Providing, that is, there’s anything left of your stash from the night before to be had. There should be. There certainly should be. There absolutely definitely should be; there should be with all the urgent moral imperative that the six letter modal auxiliary can carry, to the very extent that it will be an outrage if there isn’t. Because, fuckin’ damn it, this is about getting through the rest of the day, and beyond; this is about fixing the direction and continuity of your being; so there fuckin’ well ought to be; there ought to be, has to be, got to be enough to get your colonised being by; because if there’s not, there’s gonna’ be trouble, more than trouble, there’s gonna’ be fuckin’ Hell to pay! And not only that! Not only should there be enough for the first reassuring joint of the morning; there should be enough to last you for the rest of the day, at least to get you to the point of being late on in the afternoon; there has to be enough to get you by until then, because there’s no way, no fuckin’ way, it’s going to be possible to score before fuckin’ lunchtime. Not before lunchtime, not all the way to fuckin’ Chester. Don’t you know? Don’t you know how much you have; how much you have left? No? Really? Really, really? What you have, instead, instead of knowing, for a couple of reasons – partly because you smoked so much last night that you can’t remember; and partly because you smoked so much last night that you can’t bring yourself to remember, but suspect, and hope against hope, that you might be wrong, you should be wrong, if you could bring yourself just now to face this possibility – is a vague, tight-­rope, feeling. You can’t be rattling yet. It’s not even late. In fact, it’s early. She’s still asleep. It’s not even time to make and bring her a cup of tea. Your head’s still fucked from the night before. So how come you’re awake, sweating, worried; how come there are these voices in your living dead colonised skull? How come the Spice is already in there talking to you, negotiating, demanding, and you’re pleading with Fate that you’ve got some left? Because you know, the both of you know, confirmed when you swing your legs out of bed, and stumble to look in that secret place where it should be, that it’s gone. The shock, when you have been used to the continuous consumption of Spice, at its unplanned cessation, is like experiencing a never ending body blow, of feeling the incessant impact of a series of tremendous punches, as if thrown by Tyson at the peak of his career. But the punches are actually delivered by incontrovertible Fate. So what are you going to do? What are you both going to do? Let that fissure open up? Are you going to be divided by a chasm that neither of you can control? Is there a way out? Can you cheat Fate, but rush towards its reality? The desperate future of your combined living dead being is hanging in the balance. And there aren’t really any boundaries that you won’t cross, any transgressions that are part of the properly sanctioned Other world that you

Sean   139 won’t commit in order to forestall the end of your colonised being. None. Isn’t that why prisons are full of addicts? So this is what Sean described doing next. And his description was very vague. But the destinations, as they say, are always the same: jails, institutions and death. The only question was how he was going to get there at that particular moment of his life death. Nietzsche, and another depressing example of his eternal return? In a very sketchy way, Sean mentioned arguing with his girlfriend about his urgent need for her car, because this time he was going to meet his destination via motor vehicle transportation, for which, of course, he had no licence and was not insured (their absence simply contributing all the more effectively in speeding him towards one of those same three famous places, already mentioned and known as the ends of addiction); then he vaguely explained about forcibly taking his girlfriend’s car keys, so ticking the box of common assault; driving the car to Chester, which in terms of the law works out as theft; and scoring more drugs; which became the icing on his felonious cake. The result being, another prison sentence. So Sean comes out of prison, and what is he ready for? As Nietzsche would have it, another round of the same? And once again, Nietzsche seemed to be right. How could it realistically be otherwise? The characteristics by which Sean has become known, in this last chapter, the characteristics that form his onto-­ epistemic identity, forged as being him by the environment through which, ontologically he becomes, a part, a part of the street and street culture, a part of homelessness and its ontology of not belonging and barely being, are more or less the same characteristics that have defined the identities of everyone else that we have written about. You get out of prison, and you have nowhere, really, to go, to belong. You have no prospect of employment; no resources; no money; only an addiction and, as has already been mentioned, its colonising effects, which will in reality secure your ontological identity of being homeless. So what does Sean do, when he gets out, but re-­unite with Spice and the rest of the gang? Wherein he receives another prison sentence, for hurling around a traffic cone, just outside the ShareShop. How come? It could have been anything, almost anything at all; but it ends up being a mock fight. A mock fight, injected with too much exuberance. And around the corner, conveniently situated, a police station. He gets out. Then I meet him, again. And he’s broken. Inside, he is utterly broken. Virtually the same age as my stepson. If you have children, and they are in their mid-­twenties, or have been in their mid-­twenties, or will be that age at some point in the future, think about what this will mean. No matter what your relationship with them, and especially if it is not a good relationship, think what it could have been, what it should have been. Because, here is Sean. His ongoing criminal activities: shoplifting for food. His latest more viscerally criminal involvement: robbing a drug dealer, with a blade. At night he sleeps in car parks, or shop doorways. He is constantly tired, but should he fall asleep in town, then he will be arrested and given a dispersal order; eventually being dispersed back to prison. But he wants to be written about. He wants it explained, what his life has become, how it has unfolded, and what is left. And why? Because it seems

140   Sean to be already almost over, already almost irreparably broken and gone, past before him; and even though that seems to be the case; he doesn’t want his life, the only thing that has ever been his, that is now virtually all taken away from him, to be all that there is. For there to be nothing more, that his life has amounted to nothing more than this, an unnoticed absence, a skin dressed in the greyest of clothing, indicating that the meagre pulse of life inside is already over, gone without even some kind of record of its passing, is a prospect that is so bleak that it is barely tolerable; and is barely thinkable. Because even when thought, and he is amongst the few but is the most affected by noticing this thought, it amounts to the almost anonymous annihilation of himself. When we meet, he often shakes. He cannot engage in eye contact. He is thin beyond measure. No jokes exist to bridge the awkward reality between us. Lacan’s real is at hand. It is here, and already let in. One morning when we meet Sean, Mike’s name comes up in conversation, and I mention that the last time I saw him, Mike was clean, and Sean says that he, too, is clean. Sean looks jittery. He looks like you do when you cannot get the drugs you need; when their colonising forces that make Spice continuous with the living deadness of yourself, have been absent for too long; and in their place, a raw neurotic wound, that will not leave you alone, sliced open with razor wire, is being extended through your once united being, and is threatening to cut you both in two. He looks like he’s rattling, but says he’s not. His body’s tense. His movements are jerky. He sits on the edge of his seat. When we make him a cup of tea, his hands return to it and leave it alone, return to it and leave it alone, carry it to his lips, as if the whole procedure is a worrying operation. He tells us that he doesn’t want to be like the others that we know, addicts and drinkers, periodically unconscious in town, but more often now dispersed to being living dead by the forces of the Law along the city’s edges. He wants a job, somewhere to live, then a girlfriend, then a family; that’s all he wants; and not for people to look at him and think that what they see is all there is; he wants them to know; and in that knowing he wants them to recognise that he’s a person too. When he talks like this it seems as if – and Sean, remember, is only 25 – he is rising and reaching to take control of a fiction of himself that could be him. Then falling back and returning to the jitters, he tells us something else: that his mum’s just been diagnosed with bowel cancer, and is being admitted to Clatterbridge, but that he doesn’t know where Clatterbridge is. Walking back into town together, in the passage between the Golden Eagle and the Grosvenor museum, Sean doesn’t want to talk about his mum any more, so talks instead about his ambitions to go to college, or one day even uni, maybe to study forensics or criminology, or some such related field. At Café Nero we say goodbye, see you later, and Sean disappears, to keep his mind off certain things. Keeping his mind, and himself, off certain things, I think to myself, will be a critical factor in Sean’s survival. Let’s now have an intermission in our adumbrated narrative of Sean. We can fill this intermission with further reflection on Žižek’s analysis of the closing scene of City Lights:

Sean   141 The letter definitely arrives at its destination when we are no longer able to legitimize ourselves as mere mediators, purveyors of the messages of the big Other, when we cease to fill out the place of the Ego Ideal in the other’s fantasy space, when a separation is achieved between the point of ideal identification and the massive weight of our presence outside symbolic representation, when we cease to act like placeholders of the Ideal for the other’s gaze—in short, when the other is confronted with the remainder left over after we have lost our symbolic support. The letter arrives at its destination when we are no longer ‘fillers’ of the empty places in another’s fantasy structure, i.e., when the other finally ‘opens his eyes’ and realizes that the real letter is not the message we are supposed to carry but our being itself, the object in us that resists symbolization. And it is precisely this separation that takes place in the final scene of City Lights. (Žižek,1992, p. 8) What is it that Žižek asks us to respond to in the final scene? Because, I think, this is a reasonable way to put this question, that Žižek asks us to respond. Otherwise, why bother? Throughout, Žižek makes much of the role of the tramp being both an intermediary, but also as something that gets in the way, which prevents the message from being delivered. So what is it, accordingly, about us, about Sean, that this would mean? Let us, then return, too, during this intermission, to a scene that has also recently been described, wherein Sean sits on the edge of his chair, struggling with a cup of tea, ragged, exhausted, his thin body responding to the environment with shaky movements, false starts, indecisions, his being seemingly stripped of certainty and the merest scintilla of ease; a scene, more or less begun, with Sean’s declaration that he was clean; and ended with him saying that his mum had just been diagnosed with bowel cancer, and that she was about to be admitted to hospital. Rather than anything that might be revealed during this scene about Sean, perhaps the more telling revelation is that with respect to us. Žižek suggests that the message finally arrives when we are no longer able to represent ourselves as ‘… mere mediators, purveyors of the big Other, when we cease to fill out the place of the Ego Ideal in the other’s fantasy space …’. It would be tempting to suggest that the other’s fantasy space at this point in this scene was Sean’s. That, for Sean, we fulfil some desire, some mythic content, that the world does, after all, possess some kind of order, some rationality, some moral or ethical compass, around which justice and righteousness and salvation will eventually be configured; that there is an authority, a body that listens, that understands, and that understanding is equated to care and being made whole; and that we, we academics, researchers, readers, interested individuals, somehow fulfil that fantasy, for Sean: but no. Resoundingly, silently, no. Go fuck yourselves, if you ever dared imagine such a thing: no. From what source would Sean derive such a fantasy? What experience might he have encountered, what fairy tale might he have read, what story might he have lived through that could possibly have furnished the material, the narrative building blocks, that might cobble together,

142   Sean even at the level of fantasy, a myth with any such credible dénouement or discernible theme? What then? Well, if not Sean, then us. The fantasy that Žižek speaks about, that must be disassembled if the message is ever to arrive at its destination, if it is ever to return to its home, is ours. The position of academic, researcher, reader, thinker, and so on, positions us, through what Žižek refers to as the big Other, in a way that creates a distance between what we then take to be ourselves and, in this case, Sean. Ideas about methodological objectivity, or at least techniques through which data might effectively be gathered, even if those techniques eschew beliefs about any possibility of objectivity; followed by the scrutiny of that data against a contextual background made up from an analysis of the presumptions and rules and patterns of behaviour that describe the assumed ontological experience of those who belong; and then bringing this to bare upon themes and processes drawn from Bourdieu, Kristeva, Agamben, Plato, anyone that you like, really, as long as they are expressed as being members of a certain philosophical pantheon; any of it, all of it, articulates an identity and a position that symbolically establishes a distance between us and Sean. A position and distance that is symbolically translated into a salary, an income, the ability to acquire, the power to invest, to express one’s being through forms of financial capital; all derived from being part of the economy of belonging, an economy that is the only economy of importance, but which is accessed by means that are largely the results of chance, by means that exist beyond our control, by a throw of the dice, by the accident of where and to whom we are born. Is this something that we can face? Can we face the conclusion that, in Žižek’s terms, we are not any of those things bestowed upon us by chance; we are not the vehicles through which the values, the learning, the culture, the beliefs, of some realisation of the Symbolic Order, are sponsored and expressed: but instead, when this ephemera has been deducted, and we can no longer justify ourselves as ‘the placeholders … for the other’s gaze’, that we are simply the remainder, that which is left over; that we are the unadorned detritus that is being itself, which exists, unaccountably, after society is gone, having taken its fill? The next time I met Sean was an unscheduled meeting. He was resting on a pushbike on Grosvenor Street, with one foot on the curb and the other on a pedal, talking to two people, who were saying their goodbyes as I walked by on my way to work. One of them turned to me and said: ‘He’s doing alright, you know. Really pulling himself round.’ ‘That’s great’, I said, and they crossed over, heading towards Bridge Street. ‘I’m doing alright, Dr Paul.’ Sean was keen to talk. ‘I’ve got a place to live.’ ‘That’s brilliant, Sean’, I told him, and he explained what had happened. Sean was living, with three other men of around his age, in one of the mixed occupancy residences owned by a local charity in the Garden Lane area of the city. He looked pleased, but also troubled and jittery. He smiled quickly and nodded at the sky, remarking on how it was hot; the weather had played a significant part in his life on the street. Even now that he had somewhere to stay, nice, warm days, the sunshine, blue skies, meant a great deal to him.

Sean   143 ‘What’s it like where you’re living?’ I asked him. Sean nodded again: ‘Good, it’s really good,’ he said. I can wash, shower, have a shave, go to bed and that, watch a bit of TV. Though I’m not much of a television watcher. It’s nice being in a bed at night. Sometimes I can’t sleep, though. Especially with it being light in the morning. And I get up too early. The other day I walked into town, and there was no one about, nothing open. I hadn’t realised how early it was. Sean didn’t have a clock, or any other personal means of telling the time. Nor very much, at all. In fact, shopping for food was a bit of a problem. ‘You want to go for a cup of tea?’ I asked him. He couldn’t, he said, he had to be off: he was on his way to get an emergency loan, hence the bike, because it was going to be a while before any benefits came through. We said our goodbyes, and I watched him cycle off towards Pepper Street. The next time I saw Sean was when I was walking to work. I was just coming out of the passage between the Golden Eagle and the Grosvenor museum, and thought I heard someone shouting my name. I pulled out my earphones and turned around. ‘Hi, Sean. I’m sorry I didn’t hear you. I was listening to music.’ I waited for him, and he came up beside me. ‘I like listening to music in the mornings, too, sometimes,’ he told me. ‘Do you put the radio on?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got a radio. But sometimes in my room, if I put my ear to the wall, I can hear music from next door.’ ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he said. He was going to wait until the Day Centre was open and get something there. ‘Do you want a cup of tea? I can make you a cup of tea if you want.’ ‘Yes please, Paul.’ So we went inside. Over the next few months, Sean was evicted from the house where he was staying: his explanation about what had happened was vague, but it was something to do with a dispute with the other people who were living at the same address, so Sean ended up back on the street, sleeping rough. Since time had moved, the weather had become colder and wetter. Every now and then, but less often than before, we’d meet. Sean’s appearance had understandably grown shabbier and greyer. We talked about him accessing the ‘Safe Seat’ at Richmond Court. This was clearly an option Sean was not fond of, very much like many other homeless people; but because his life and living conditions had deteriorated, for a while it was an option that he took advantage of. During the course of this time, Sean’s mother was discharged from hospital, and on one occasion when we met him, he was about to see his sister in town: she was employed as a care worker, and would be doing a lot of the looking after of their mother now that she was no longer in hospital. Then after a while, Sean stopped using the ‘Safe Seat’, and he began to sleep rough on a regular basis: as was becoming his way of life.

144   Sean For a brief moment or two, there was the most marginal of possibilities that Sean might attend an agricultural college, where he had a place to study Level 1 Agriculture; but the college is over 20 miles away, and paying for the transport each day was another factor that in the end proved to be prohibitive. Then for a while we saw Sean more regularly in the early morning: we’d see him if we arrived at work just as it was getting light, after he uncurled his tired and wrecked and often wet body from his sleeping bag; this was when he’d been sleeping in the car park beside the Crown Court, at the back of the university, prior to the car park opening officially, when the police would turn up and move him on. This is the dreadfulness and truth of our being, the remainder, the resting place, where our truth arrives, where its message is delivered and its destination is reached; and our waking to this truth in the cold early morning, prior to the police moving us on. This is what we are, this is our remainder, which we see when we no longer justify ourselves as ‘the placeholders … for the other’s gaze’: we are the unadorned detritus that is being itself, which exists, unaccountably, after the illusion of our society is gone. This, if we can look, is all that there is; there is nothing else that is left to see. No theory will save us from this vision; no philosophy can guard us from what is there.

7 Jenny

It had just gone four, and I was on my way back to work from Sainsbury’s, on Watergate Street, with a packet of six deep-­filled mince pies, a carton of milk, 20 Berkeley Green, and two £10 notes. It was overcast and cold, and had been raining on and off all day, and soon would be dark. As I entered the foyer at the rear entrance of the building, immediately to my right I saw a homeless man, sitting in layers of clothes, his coat done up to his chin. Standing next to him, his ear pressed to the receiver of the internal telephone, similarly dressed to the man who was seated beside him, was Sean. It had been months since I’d  seen him. This was the same Sean, whom we believed, when we began writing the previous chapter, would stand out as a convincing counter example to Nietzsche’s oppressive theme of eternal recurrence; the same Sean whose fate might not have been determined in line with a statistical likelihood of depressing predictability; the Sean who would be a representative of hope, with whom we might finish this book. And there he was, standing in the crepuscular light of the late December afternoon, in the wrong chapter, waiting to speak to me. ‘Hi Sean, how are you doing?’ ‘Can I talk to you?’ he asked. And when I said yes, he gestured that we should go outside. ‘You haven’t got any smokes, Paul, have you?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, and rummaged in my Sainsbury’s carrier bag, pulling out the carton of 20 Berkley Green. I fiddled with the tightly packed filter heads, and handed him three cigarettes. ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘Of course, take ’em,’ I replied, as he handed me his Bic, and we both lit up. ‘How’s the book going?’ he asked. ‘I’m writing the last chapter now,’ I told him. We both shivered, and blew clouds of smoke and breath into the cold, greying air. It has to be finished by 15 March. You were going to be the last chapter. We wanted to finish on something hopeful. And you seemed to be our best prospect. But then, things didn’t seem like they were working out.

146   Jenny He nodded. ‘So your chapter’s the second to last.’ A colleague exited the building, walking hastily across the car park; his head tucked into his neck and hunched shoulders, forming the universal gesture against the cold. ‘Did you manage to get something at Richmond Court?’ We both took another drag. ‘I might be able to get a room there, they’ve said; but I’ve got a lot of back rent to pay. Then I’ve got a fine for the Court, for sleeping rough, not complying with a dispersal order. But they’re going to work out a payment plan for me.’ ‘So are you sleeping rough now?’ I asked him. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘just over there’, and he nodded, ‘in the corner of the Court car park.’ ‘Shit,’ I commiserated, miserably. ‘Paul,’ he said, ‘could I ask a favour?’ ‘Sure,’ I said, inhaling again, my fingers wrapped around the filter of my cigarette. ‘Could you give me £16 for my bus pass, Paul, so I can get to college tomorrow?’ Smoke shot out of my lungs. He was going to college. He was homeless, and he was going to college. He told me when he was going to start the theory part of the work, the exact date, in February; he told me where he caught the bus from; he told me that he was going to his mum’s, now, to have a shower; that he’d have to make his way back into town, to sleep in the Court car park, and then get himself up in the morning, and make his way to Delamere Street at 8.45 am. ‘You’re not shitting me?’ He wasn’t. He was in the wrong chapter. And he didn’t want a mince pie. ‘I can only give you ten quid. I’ve only got ten quid on me that I can give you. I’d come with you and get you the ticket with my card, but I’m waiting to meet Jenny; that’s why I’ve bought this lot’, and I nodded at the Sainsbury’s bag, ‘she’s the person who is going to be the last chapter of this book’. ‘Jenny?’ he said. ‘Jenny Cavafy?’ ‘Do you know Jenny? She’s in her forties.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Has she really turned her life around?’ ‘Jenny, you know Jenny?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said again. ‘She was really big on the pipe.’ And he made with his cigarette like he was sucking on a crack pipe. ‘She used to serve my dad up.’ ‘Fuck.’ ‘She was a really big dealer round here.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. What kind of coincidence was this! ‘Then she lived on the street for ten years.’ ‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘Has she really turned her life around? Really big on the pipe, she was, really big.’ ‘God,’ I said, taking a deep drag, ‘this is fuckin’ weird.’ ‘What does she do now, Paul?’ ‘She’s got a house and everything. She’s got a really responsible job. She works in drug rehabilitation, at Land House. She’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.’

Jenny   147 ‘Land House?’ he said. ‘I’ve got a referral there. I picked the letter up from the Day Centre today. I’ve got an appointment for next Wednesday.’ ‘Fuckin’ Hell,’ I said. And all I could do for the next few moments, was swear. It was properly dark now. We’d been talking for about ten minutes. Stupidly – because it was nothing to do with me, I’d done nothing to help him, the effort was entirely his – I felt proud to be standing next to Sean, smoking with him in the Court car park, as the night settled around us. When I met Jenny on Pepper Street, after she had finished work, she hugged me, and asked me how I was. I told her about Sean whilst we walked back to my room at the university: this was the second interview; I wanted to ask her some more specific questions about what she had already told me already. Looking at the papers, with my added notes, detailing the chronology of Jenny’s movement into and out of homelessness, it’s obvious that there’s enough material for several volumes: a number of those volumes would confirm Nietzsche’s theme of eternal recurrence; and there would be other volumes that would be able to explain this confirmation sociologically, through Bourdieu’s theory of habitus – but then, there would also be something else, one volume that described a way out. Jenny has deep scars on both of her arms, obtained not simply from injecting, but more specifically from the amount of citrus she needed to dissolve the huge quantities of heroin that she was putting into her veins with each shot. Was there an inevitability about this? Was this how Jenny’s life was destined to run? The deep scars, once one or two other things were settled into place? One or two, or three or four, other things? Like the bottle of Dubonnet she asked for and received from her parents for her fourteenth birthday present? And the speed she was introduced to by her elder brother and his girlfriends, at their parents’ home, snorting it all down, at around the same age? And her habitual frequenting of what used to be the night club on Love Street, which supported Jenny in developing a speed and weed lifestyle, and helped her to stop frequenting school, whilst her parents began to separate? All, as has already been mentioned, happening, and accelerating in what, looking back on these events, seems to be a certain direction, when she was just 14 years of age. Not everyone, of course, who asks for and receives Dubonnet for their fourteenth birthday from their mum and dad, and does speed and weed, and goes to Love Street, commits three armed robberies, or becomes involved in kidnapping, or spends ten years homeless. Do they? It does seem, reflecting on the notes and on what Jenny has said, that the various pieces of her early life, after only a short while, attracted each other and fit together; culminating in those deep, indelible scars on her arms. ‘So, can I just go over some things?’ I ask Jenny. She says that I can. By the time you were 16 and moved out your parents’ home and into a bedsit in the Brooke Lane area, which is eerily close to where I currently live, you’d developed a way of being that was moving you into a position that was increasingly outside the Law. And by the Law, of course, what I mean is not simply its

148   Jenny colloquial juridical expression, but the Law as Lacan understands it. For Lacan, the Law is the regulatory mechanism that intervenes and creates a safe distance between the subject and the Thing, that which is posited to be beyond the limits of signifying practices and the constraints and determinations of meaning that they represent within the social field. Let us take a very simple example to explain this point. As is well understood, any word within a linguistic system as a signifier refers to some signified, to something, be this thing an object, or concept, or practice, or symbol, as something itself, which, however, does not exist as such, but is instead, whatever this thing might be, held in place by the relationship that it has and the function that it is lent within a broader signifying field. Continuing with our trivial example to illustrate this point: the ‘cup’ to which I now refer that is on my desk is only a cup because it is designed, manufactured and used in ways that are synchronous with an established history, culture and practice of beverage containing and drinking systems; its identity as a cup is contingent upon these and other overlapping signifying fields; its unique ‘cup-­ness’ is dispersed and coalesced not by being itself but through the position that it comes to occupy within this complex matrix of relations, which are maintained and function according to the Law. In this relatively trivial example the Law is that which serves to distinguish between the different signifying fields, such as the field of the manufactured objects that serve as containers for beverages, and the field of cultural assumptions that designate these containers as being the appropriate object from which to drink, preserving their consistency and the practices that maintain their usage; so that the Law in this respect is therefore social, in that it organises social practices; as well as being transcendental of the social realm, in that complying with the Law has the effect of granting onto-­epistemic identity to objects and practices, as beings themselves, within any signifying field, and the meanings that they come to bear. For Lacan, of course, onto-­epistemic identity is in this respect characterised, because it is configured by, an essential lack: this lack being also the site of the assumption, to refer back to the example, of the ‘cup-­ness’ of the cup on my desk, the hollow assumption that simply by being there it has an identity, essential to itself, rather than lent to it by the array of signifying fields that have already been mentioned, but outside of which its meaning and place within the Symbolic Order would be absent. It is nevertheless this absence, which is also the site of an infinite, unfulfillable desire, beyond the Symbolic Order, outside the remit of the Law, where the ‘cup-­ness’, its thingness, which in general terms is where the Lacanian Thing is also assumed to be, like a lure, because of course, since it is configured by lack, it is not. The Thing is continuous with jouissance, troublingly sometimes translated as pleasure; but whereas pleasure is the operation that occurs when psychic – perhaps it is better to say, ontological – tensions become balanced, jouissance is the experience beyond this balance, of pleasure beyond pleasure, beyond the constraint, beyond the limit that retains the integrity and identity of the subject, which is held in place by accession to the Law. Another simple, well-­known example that might help illustrate this point, is that in relation to the release of libidinous energy:

Jenny   149 jouissance is that experience of orgasm, wherein the subject is momentarily released from the sexual tension that has led up to this point, and at the point of orgasm experiences through jouissance not only the climax and release of libidinal energy, but momentarily a release from being yourself, a climax beyond your identity as being determined by the Law. And this is also the point of Death, the end of the subject, sometimes, rather archaically now, referred to as the little Death. And by the age of 16, Jenny was moving in a certain direction, that of being outside the Law. A movement characterised in terms of the Symbolic Order as it is played out in the world of social experience: by being evicted from her first bedsit for the disruption that she caused as a result of the parties that she held there, and for her non-­payment of rent, and for her failing to take care of the property; by her shoplifting; and by, at the age of 19, after moving from one temporary place to stay after another, becoming acquainted with heroin, so that heroin became her familiar, as she occupied a flat in the Garden Lane area of the city with her partner, another heroin addict. Heroin, it transports you beyond pleasure, beyond yourself and the Law. Heroin, in which you lose yourself, first with its jag that intensifies the possibilities of being beyond the world, and then with its warm blanket, which envelopes and settles you into some place beyond care. Heroin, it takes you in its arms, and suffuses your soul with its own solace. Heroin, which makes no demands, bar one, and that demand being that you only take more. That is its very simple economy, and with that, as it circulates through your blood stream, and away from the surface of society, it will guide you on its journey, elsewhere, to some place beyond the pleasure principle. What was your flat in the Garden Lane area like, Jenny, where you stayed for two years? Perhaps not to begin with, but it became, like everywhere else, you explain, a wreck. Heroin. Heroin, already, it seems, was being true to its word: that it makes no demands, bar one, and that demand being that you only take more. It’s a simple, but very exacting demand. Life must have been difficult. It was whilst being in that flat, with someone that was abusive towards you, that you had to free yourself from whilst having your first child, Sam, on your own. Gear, needles, bags; clothes, baby food, cutlery. Scoring, thieving, college; studying, using, caring. Being a mother. Being a student. Being an addict. Selling everything in the flat, for gear. Like everywhere else that you lived before becoming homeless, after you left home at 16, not much left, in the end. A kind of rehearsal for homelessness? Having next to nothing. A preparation for being on the street? Heroin, you see. Heroin, having its way. When I look at my notes, and make the comment out loud, that, ‘It must have been difficult’, as Jenny sits in the big chair in my room at the University, ‘being a single parent mother, looking after a flat, paying the bills, going to college, and being an addict’, Jenny adds a few more details. She used to drop Sam off, with a friend or her mother, when she went to college at Ellesmere Port; but realised that study wasn’t sustainable after she found herself suffering from the symptoms of withdrawal, and was unable to finish the exam that she was taking. One of the instances of realising your identity as an addict. And at around the same

150   Jenny time she took herself off to her GP, to explain that she had been taking heroin for a while, and presumably, vaguely, thinking about some kind of solution, but perhaps more realistically, a response. And indeed, the GP did respond, with what was estimated to be two weeks’ supply of methadone, of around 600 ml, which she picked up in what must have been a rather large jar from the pharmacy, to administer herself, as required. ‘I kept falling on and off scripts,’ she said. ‘But it was good to always have some methadone around.’ By the age of 22 Jenny had moved out of the flat in the Garden Lane area. The landlord had entered the premises when she was out, and discovered needles, bags, syringes amongst the coats, plates, and pillows, and had terminated their residence; because by this time Jenny was with her second partner, who was going to be the father of her next three children, who was also a heroin addict; so the couple, and Sam moved into another flat, in Upton. This was also the same period that Jenny experienced two attempts to get clean. The first when her brother took her in, because, he said, he was responsible for introducing her to speed when she was 14. But after she left her brother’s care, Jenny immediately picked up drugs again. The second time was after Jenny stole £500 from her mother’s bank account, and, unable to contain her guilt confessed to her mother about what she had done, telling her that she was a heroin addict. Jenny emphasises her mother’s relief at finding out, because she thought that her inability to account for the missing money was a sign of the onset of her own dementia or insanity; and in an attempt to address her daughter’s heroin addiction, as Jenny’s brother had done, she looked after her, providing some respite away from her life and scoring and using in order that her daughter could get clean. But as before, once Jenny left this care, she immediately returned to heroin, which makes no demands, bar one, and that demand being that you only take more. From what Jenny says, as she moves back and forth through the history of her experiences, her mother was a decisive figure in her life. A mother that at times heroin has covered over and obscured; a mother that heroin took away, replacing her with a ghost, a guilt exuding figure of financial opportunity, the figure of £500, with which Jenny could go and score: but other than being such a figure, a mother that heroin was scared of, but that with its power of guilt, heroin was able to make Jenny run away from – but not under the identity of Jenny the daughter, but instead under the identity of an addict. ‘Did you really want to quit drugs at this time?’ I stupidly asked, as any stupid person would. Do you know what this question means? Because, you see, this question is not really about drugs. This question is about seeing a different life. Could you see a different life? To ask this question at the wrong time is like asking: do you want the same life, but without drugs? So, could you imagine the shit from which your life is composed, but without drugs? Could you imagine the hand to mouth, the chaos, the baseness, but without drugs? Could you imagine not knowing, but without drugs? All that you would be imagining would be the same, but worse. You could imagine that, all too easily. You could imagine that, and worse, because of every time you haven’t been able to score, or have been worried about scoring, or have scored and the drugs didn’t work:

Jenny   151 you’ve done more than imagined it, you’ve actually experienced it. That shadow is omnipresent. Do you want that omnipresent spectre made real? So after a while, for Jenny and the father of her three children, a logic built. Here are some of the bricks from which that logic was composed, that were forged and moved into place along the way. A pattern developed as the couple’s using grew: one day Jenny would go out and shoplift in order to obtain enough money to score, whilst her partner stayed at home to look after the children; and the next day they would reverse roles. Shoplifting, arrest, prison. Fraud, arrest, prison. Arrest for possession, prison. Eviction, moving to another flat. Living hand to mouth, living to use, using to live. Telling yourself throughout it all, I never wanted to be a bad mother, I was never going to be a bad mother. Being unable to stop. Heroin makes no demands, bar one, and that demand being that you only take more. Eviction. Moving to another flat. Repeat. Not feeding the children until late at night. Always looking over your shoulder. Living hand to mouth. No money. Moving into Gorse Hill, a hostel in Blacon. Being unable to stop. Crack, now, too. More crack. No money. Shoplifting. Prison. And then, two giros waiting for you when you get out. And an idea. Because we can’t stop. Heroin’s solitary demand, you see. And crack. We could either cash the giros and do the usual, or.… Or what? Because we can’t stop. We could cash the giros and go over the water, and with the money. So that was what they did. There were so many questions that I wanted to ask Jenny about moving from the rung of scoring to use, to buying to supply. And at the time, they went on to fill a significant hole in the market, because it wasn’t easy to get crack in Chester. And then, after a short time, it was. ‘Can you remember how much heroin you bought, to start with?’ I wondered. I can see Jenny thinking, and working out, teens, eighths, grams, she’s saying; but it doesn’t make sense to me; because what I wanted to know was how much she bought, to begin with, how many customers she sold to, at that time, how much she made on what she bought, how quickly she had to go back to Liverpool to buy more; and then, how quickly the business expanded. And there were other questions too. How much money did you end up taking to Liverpool each time? Where did you meet? Was it always safe? How did you transport the brown and white back to Chester? But what Jenny was saying was moving too quickly in another direction, and I had to keep up. So Jenny and her partner began dealing from the hostel. Heroin and crack. Brown and white. And the money came in. Demand for their product only accelerated, thanks to the only demand that heroin makes, not just of Jenny but over the entire market of users, that demand being that you only take more. Very democratic in its outlook. Somehow I gained a reputation that I was a fighter; hard; that I’d never back down. It was chaos, with people coming to the door at the hostel, sometimes kicking it in. But I’d never give up. I’d never give the drugs up. I’ve had knives pulled on me, held to my throat. You’re not getting the fuckin’ drugs

152   Jenny I told them. Let me go, or I’ll fuckin’ kill ya’. They never got the drugs. I never gave up. There was something about the chaos too. It was exciting. I got caught up in it. I got a buzz from it. Rather than being evicted from their flat in Gorse Hill, Jenny and her partner, because of the money that was coming in, decided, fuck it, we’re not moving to another flat, we’re moving to a big house, in Upton: so that’s what they did. ‘Can I ask about your kids?’ I say. Jenny says that I can. ‘So you’ve got this chaotic lifestyle, which is very much outside the Law; but then, your kids are primary school age.’ Because the thing was – Jenny explained – by then, what she was doing, and the house, well, by then it was all well known. It was obvious to everyone in the area that the house where Jenny lived was being used to sell drugs. The neighbours, the people in the area, the ordinary folk, they couldn’t help but know. There was constant stream of people, none of which were invisible, indeed quite the reverse, buying crack and heroin coming to the door; this being one of the doors that were frequently kicked in by the police when they raided the house, which, too, were hardly moments of reserve and discretion. So everyone in the area pretty well knew Jenny, and her family, and where they lived, and what was going on. So what was it like, I wondered, taking the kids to school, doing the school run? Did you talk to the other mums at the gate? What Jenny said was that because she had grown up in the area, and been to school with a lot of the mums, around about half of the adults she routinely met dropping the kids off recognised her. But then, as is customary, when taking your children to primary school, on entering the classroom, to drop off your child, and perhaps pass the odd word with your child’s class teacher, when the opportunity presented itself, she robbed a handbag. In some ways there couldn’t be a clearer example of living on the margins of society, of being outside the socially realised expression of the Law. Especially with regard to children and the norms of schooling and standard educational behaviour, and what this means. To have asked if these mums ever invited Jenny for coffee, or if they casually shared remarks about the progress their children were making, or if they ever enquired about Jenny’s own family, seemed to be questions that would have been out of place. So I refrained. Out of place, just like Jenny? When she told me that, at the time, Sam did have friends at school, which he sometimes enjoyed being with outside of school, but that other parents had told their own children that they weren’t allowed to go to Sam’s house, not even to knock on the door to ask if Sam could come out to play, I wondered if this might have been just one of the understandable and many signs that you lived on one side of the Law, whilst the social and cultural establishment of belonging was regulated by and lived on the other; and if this kind of division meant that it was all the more likely that when the opportunity availed itself, robbing one of their handbags, forging a signature, exploiting their vulnerabilities, was more likely to occur, as much as a form of vengeance as anything else? Indeed, when we later returned to this subject, Jenny said that it was. So that demonstrating and carrying out these and other similar activities had a symbolic

Jenny   153 value, as much as anything else. Moreover, a symbolic value that affirmed the identity of the bearer, in a way, which, from this perspective, was positive; but by affirming this identity, in contradistinction to belonging, to being part of the established order, meant equally obviously, that Jenny and her family were confirming their place, with ever greater certainty, as being outside the social expression of the Law, and all that this represents. And always at a cost. If not the cost of penal servitude, then the cost of its consciousness and exile. After robbing the bag, they must have known it was me, I still had to go back the next day and drop Sam off. I always had to go back, but never wanted to. They never expected me to attend parents’ evenings. They knew. I wasn’t one of them. Knowing; running away from knowing; never really being able to get away; none of it ever really being able to be mutually accommodated. It keeps coming back: keep coming back. And the money keeps rolling in. One of the strange things is, money is also the symbolic as well as the practical oil that lubricates the ideological economy of belonging. Money is the means of exchange that represents cultural capital in the established order. But outside the established order? Heroin and crack, as has already been mentioned, circulates and gathers meaning according to a different economy; one that doesn’t really recognise the symbolic value of money, only its practical quality of facilitating acquisition. Because heroin makes only one demand, and that demand being to only take more. So, says Jenny, we’d sometimes send the kids to school in taxis. They’d be wearing and going to school in the latest trackies, and have all the latest and most expensive gear, but they’d be living in something close to a crack den; they wouldn’t get fed until we remembered; so there’d be fuck all food at the right time, and nothing in the house, except that which accorded with the ontology of drug consumption, and the bare sustainability of drug exchange. One of the times when her partner got busted for possession and distribution, and the police were ambitious for a long prison sentence, as Jenny spoke to him on his way down to the cells, he told her that under the carpet in one of the children’s bedrooms was £16,000 in cash. The police’s ambitions for a lengthy custodial were never realised, and after 12 weeks Jenny’s partner was released; but after only 12 weeks Jenny had smoked all the cash. £16,000, all gone on crack. ‘So how much were you selling at about that time?’ I wondered. Jenny says she has never been good with money, but after a quick reflection thinks that she was selling about £3,000 of crack and heroin a day. She doesn’t really know how much she was making from selling that much. She and her partner didn’t have a bank account. I have more questions that I can’t really ask. They’re irrelevant really, anyway, as crack psychosis kicked in, and Jenny and her partner imagined one night that the police were outside, watching the house, preparing for another bust. Imaginary police as well as the real police, representatives of the social incarnation of the Law of the Symbolic Order; so the Law on all Lacanian fronts was surveilling

154   Jenny their house and their transgressive being. Nothing much soon to protect you from the apocalypse of the Lacanian Real. A prospect that was not too far away, as Jenny and her partner had a row, and her partner took away the children as Jenny went to prison for two or three weeks over a shoplifting charge. And a new era of Jenny’s life opened up when Jenny was released. Jenny found, on her return, that the house in Upton had been abandoned and boarded up, with the help of the police; the landlord taking advantage of the fact that Jenny had been in prison and her partner had left with the children. Nevertheless, Jenny removed a board or two and entered the property, and lived in it, without gas and electricity for, as long as was tenable (I never discussed whether there was anything specifically that prompted her to vacate what had been her home), before moving into the city, and living on the streets for more or less the next ten years. It was during her relatively brief stay in the abandoned house, where she had once lived with her family, that her drug use, predominantly speedballing, injecting crack cocaine and heroin together, escalated to even greater levels. ‘Fuck it’, she thought. Expecting, at first, that in some short while, she would resume the chaotic but nevertheless family life, which up until that point she had been used to; and too, that her escalated drug use, when they returned, would revert to its previous, less extreme, chronic levels. But that day never materialised, unlike the indelible scars on Jenny’s arms. And it was with that understanding – that her children and her family were not coming back – that Jenny turned to the street. It was that, that knowledge that did it, that they weren’t coming back, that her children were gone; it was in the face of that lack, that Jenny left the boarded up house and walked into town, to be on the streets. Ten years. What was in abeyance? What had been resigned? What had been given up? What had been taken away? Heroin, you see. Just heroin, it was only heroin, having its way. Because heroin, you are probably beginning to see, makes just the one demand, and that demand being that you just take more. Nothing else. That you have nothing else. That you just take more. Heroin, as you can probably begin to understand, will take all the rest. What did you do Jenny, for those ten years? Slept in the corner of the Crown Court car park. Just like Sean. Just like the others. Slept on the rows. Slept in bins. Slept in abandoned buildings. Slept in hostels. Slept in flats with dying alcoholics. How much were you spending each day on drugs do you think? Around £40, she says. Slept in a tent near Saltney on the banks of the Dee. Slept on the street. Slept behind buildings. Then got things together, a bit. Used some connections. Put together some deals. Committed three armed robberies. Took part in a kidnapping. Watched a man die; bled to death from being stabbed with a knife. So made some money. Moved into a flat. Upped her consumption of drugs. Her flat was near the main Tesco’s in town. A place of such bare and depressing dimensions that Jenny’s previous experiences of staying in abandoned buildings had expressed more comfort for her than did the bleak absence of that place. A very bare place indeed. Quite literally empty. Apart from a bare light. And, of

Jenny   155 course, bags of white and brown, needles and a spoon, and a ring to do the cooking on. Lined up near the windowsill. And one more thing. The citrus. Lots of citrus. The scars, you see. Just heroin, having its way. I cannot help but think, the bags of white and brown, needles and a spoon, and a ring to do the cooking on, and, of course, the citrus, all lined up near the windowsill, but nothing else, with heroin having taken everything else, of Heidegger’s famous comments about technology, despite not really wanting to think in this way. In that well-­worn essay Heidegger describes how the enframing that flows from our contemporary obsession with following the essence of technology has resulted in a kind of reductionist and instrumental understanding of being as a series of objectives, interpreted as truths; so much so that being ceases. Since nothing but the pursuit of these truths, achieved through the apparatus of technology, within this mode of enframing, can be perceived. If human being, for Heidegger, occurs through the condition of being in the world, during which being is brought forth as presence, so that it is unconcealed; enframing, through the apparatus of technology, is that condition wherein the possibility of being is closed off; the opening of the horizons through which being is allowed to be unconcealed, is foreclosed: the obsessions that determine the objective truths constructed by the limited existence of the enframed order of things, render being outside this context unperceivable, impossible. Not only being, but also the place within which being, the Heideggerian world, through enframing, becomes cut off; it all becomes inaccessible. And not simply inaccessible, because inaccessible suggests a possibility, an uncovering of being, could be realised: no such potential, within this context, is even latent. This is the end of being in the world. The end of being there. In her flat, near Tesco’s. What else, in the end, is heroin? What else but an instance of enframing? And here is its technology: the bags of white and brown, needles and a spoon, and a ring to do the cooking on, and, of course, the citrus, all lined up near the windowsill, but nothing else; because heroin has taken everything by now. So that this is what is coming: not being. All that is left: a shadow of being. Just like the shadow across your lungs. Pneumonia. Collapse. Hospital. Released from hospital. Back to the flat. More dealing. And went to prison. It was a big drugs bust. There was a lot of us involved. The police had CCTV of me selling to an undercover cop. And by then I was beat. But couldn’t give up. Weighed nothing. Dying, really. It was all just heroin, having its way. I was the only one who didn’t ask for bail. My solicitor asked me, why don’t you want bail? I think you intimated to me that there was no point. What were you going to do prior to the inevitability of being sentenced and then prison? Die, possibly. Well, more than possibly. You were quite certain that you were inching closer towards death with every breath in and every breath out. Like everything else, wasn’t it only a matter of time that you would be recorded selling class A drugs to an undercover police officer, on multiple occasions, all of it captured on video tape? Simply a matter of which was going to get there first? Time or the end of time? Fate? Like the scars on your arms? Sentenced to three years.

156   Jenny There were more questions that I wanted to ask, but didn’t, couldn’t. There is an inventory, composed in part from some of the names of the people mentioned in this book, and from some of the people we have met during the course of this research whose names and lives have not been recorded here, people who are now dead, or who are still on the streets where death is waiting for them: Jenny looked for all the world as if her name would be included in that same dreadful list. Especially when – after becoming clean in prison, where on this last occasion it seemed, she had given herself up to the experience of incarceration in order not to die – upon her release she returned to the street and to the same pattern of being as before: heroin, still having its way. That her fate would be to die, that her name would be added to the inventory of the homeless who died or waited for death on the margins of society, dispersed by not belonging into the edges of the city, seemed doubly certain; since in prison not only had she become clean, and on her release quickly relapsed back into drugs, but whilst in prison had time to think, and had critically revaluated her life and who she was – but, it seemed, this critical understanding of herself, by herself, a la Descartes, was not going to save her. So much, not just for Descartes, then, but also, so much for Nietzsche; or at least, so much for his revaluation of values. Because if anyone was going to be capable of such a revaluation of values, of not just thinking an overcoming of the metaphysical dogma of the established order, but being that overcoming, embodying it, literally, through the course, the veins, the scars of her addicted body, through its habitude, through the places where it might come to reside, through its dealings, through its circulation within a new economy of coming to be, then my money would be on Jenny. It wouldn’t, by contrast, be on Heidegger. But then, my ability to make the right decision has always, I think, in an inversion of the famous Cartesian cogito, been pathologically flawed. My money, nevertheless, would still be on Jenny. And so, predictably then, or, at least, almost predictably, I would be wrong. And would Heidegger, the later Heidegger, be right? Because Jenny, when she was released from prison, very nearly did die. And perhaps, in another sense, we could even get rid of the very nearly; because perhaps, in another sense, she did. Because when Jenny was released from prison, her mother took her in. A bit like before, during her twenties. Jenny’s mother wanted to look after her. Keep her off the drugs, away from death. But she didn’t stay long. ‘The lure of drugs, I just wanted to inject crack and heroin again,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stop. I was back on the street.’ Heroin, having its way. Its only way. Followed quite soon by another collapse. And the prognosis, this time, much worse. Pneumonia again. Hospital: intensive care. This is what they said: If you inject again, then you will die. We think, anyway, you probably have only a few weeks, three, maybe, to live. Your mother is called, more or less to say goodbye. And as if to make the point more tangible, the end of tangibility, the end of being, later, whilst you are in intensive care, they tell you that your mother is terminally ill. And then, of course, she, not you, dies. These were the events, Jenny said, the death of her mother, and the prognosis of her own imminent death, that combined and triggered another kind of death:

Jenny   157 the death of Jenny as the consuming addict. That is to say: the death of the determination to pursue the assumption of Jenny as being beyond the Law, where there is, anyway, nothing; the death of the determination to align unrestricted jouissance with being itself, and the death of the determination to make this continuous with being yourself. Enframing, near the windowsill: looking away from the truth that it desires. The death of its determination to pursue its reductionist annihilation and understanding of being, through the technology of bags of white and brown, needles and a spoon, and a ring to do the cooking on, and, of course, the citrus, all lined up close to your window. There were good people around her, Jenny emphasises, people who supported her through rehab and the programmes that she did; people who helped her learn skills essential to living within the social regulations that express the quotidian realisation of the Law. Skills that, because they express the Law in its empirical form, must be generally understood, taken, and practised as being the imperative modalities through which identity is conveyed and permeates acceptably through society. Skills as basic as: paying bills; recognising and prioritising certain needs, such as eating; developing and sustaining functional relationships; planning, in order to maintain existence beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs; consistently adhering to rules and accepted patterns of behaviour. Like language, these are the practices that articulate identity within the order of belonging. Unlike the determination by the subject to locate and become continuous with its identity as being beyond the Law, where there is nothing; being as articulated by those forces that comprise the social order, and the grammar that describes their regularities, points of idiosyncrasy, modes of combination, requires of the subject, in order to be the subject, to accept a certain degree of giving up, so that the subject’s identity can take its place, can be part of, can be recognised within, can belong to, the established order. A certain degree of giving up. A certain degree, by the subject, of giving up its determination of being itself, beyond the Law, where there is nothing. That place, where there is nothing. Because if you don’t give up, heroin will take you there. All you have to do is give up. What did you give up, Jenny? What did you have to resign yourself to? After being in prison, for example, when you returned to, then left, what had once been your family’s home in Upton, boarded up, realising that they weren’t coming back, that your children and your partner weren’t coming back; so you left too, and lived on the streets in Chester? For ten years. Had you lost your children, just as, in a sense, your mother had lost you? Then at your mother’s funeral you saw one of your girls, the eldest, Hayley, at first from a distance. You were no longer allowed to have contact with your kids, but she saw you. Two of your children had been taken into care: their father, your ex-­partner, had been unable to cope, and social services had placed two of your girls with a foster family; but your son and eldest daughter were living with your ex-­partner’s mother, their grandmother. And here she was, your eldest daughter at your own mother’s funeral. You weren’t allowed to approach her. But she approached you. Your daughter told you that she wanted you to be part of her life. And then you went back to rehab.

158   Jenny Not long after the funeral, Jenny met her eldest daughter again, secretly, in town. On the steps of the town hall, your eldest daughter pointed to a group of children who were dancing and playing to the music of a busker. ‘There’s Nancy,’ she said. But it had been ten years, and it wasn’t until Hayley told which of the children Nancy was that you recognised your youngest daughter’s face. From rehab, Jenny moved into a sober-­house in Warrington. Learning to stay clean, learning to live and be with others, attending social services meetings, going to court about her children. I wondered if she had ever thought that she might not see her children again. I wondered if she worried that they might see her on the street. I wondered how she thought about them during the time she had been homeless. Ten years. Most of the time designated to being a child. A decade of a parallel life, of missing lives, of unknown love, gone by. More than a decade of heroin, just having its way. It is important to us that this is the last chapter. And that it contains Sean. And that on one of the occasions when I met Sean, I was on my way later that evening to meet Jenny. And that when I met Sean on that occasion, that Sean was going to college. And that Jenny’s children choose to be with Jenny; and that, even though they are not children any more, and have their own independent lives, they are very happy to stay with Jenny and her new partner in their home in Guilden Sutton. That Jenny has a home. That Jenny has a partner. That Jenny has a job. And that through Jenny’s job, Jenny saves lives. And that during much of her time outside work, Jenny still saves lives, and supports people who, once like her, as the scars on her arms testify, suffer and do not belong. It’s important because it means that heroin and spice and crack, and any of the other drugs, don’t always continue to have their own way. Because it means that Nietzsche’s theme of eternal recurrence isn’t an irrefutable law, a metaphysical condition that determines empirical experience.

8 Ella

This is what we wanted, though we had moments of disagreement about it: originally we wanted the last chapter of this book to be hopeful. And at the time, we thought, as we began to conclude the ethnographic element of this research that Sean’s life appeared to be just such an opportunity: to end with a record of hope. But then, as the ethnography unfolded, the idea that the Sean chapter might prove to be such an indication, even faintly, of hopefulness, seemed quite otherwise. So would it matter, then, if we left this book there; that its last breath didn’t signify some possibility other than another iteration of Nietzschean recurrence; that its final exhalations didn’t murmur something about hope? Because, wouldn’t even the murmur of such a conclusion be nothing other than the hollow murmur of yet another betrayal? A betrayal of life; a betrayal of this book; a betrayal of the experiences that it witnesses and has recorded; a betrayal of degradation and suffering itself: the betrayal, as Nietzsche once remarked about Socrates’ death, of philosophy itself. Is it any wonder, then, that a man, addicted to philosophy, mired in its systems of thought, stinking with the composition of betrayal, should find such a conclusion so difficult to face? Is it any wonder that such a man, who is selfishly drawn and composed by his addiction, would find it impossible to resist another explanation, another theory, but this time, the last time, as he is bound to truly promise, a theory beyond theory, an explication that announces theory’s limitation and the audacity to end Nietzsche’s proposition of his eternal recurrence? Wouldn’t such a theory, a theory beyond theory, a theory that was therefore not a theory, a theory that promises to be away from theory’s conceits and practices, amount to what Badiou (2007) has famously called not a theory, but an event? And what better example, could there be of such an event, given this context, than the example, also famously described by Badiou (2003), of Saint Paul? This being an event: an event not so much about being but of being; and of being that accepts being in its most radically abject form. Being precisely because it is unmediated by and is therefore outside any established and so philo-­theologically determined composition, which would otherwise bring with it automatically the right to belong. Such an event, then, is characterised as being that is outside the structures and meaning composed as being within the Symbolic Order: indeed, any such event,

160   Ella is that which does not belong, with not belonging accepted as being integral to that event’s constitution. Lacan refers to this as the objet petit a. The objet petit a reflects that which cannot be accounted for by the process of symbolisation and meaning. Let’s take a simple and trivial hypothetical example, that of a noun. If a noun refers to some kind of thing, and this is the only reason for any noun to be, indeed, this constitutes its entire meaningful identity; for the human subject, the objet petit a would be that part of the noun that is left over, apart from its referential existence. The objet petit a would be some aspect of the noun’s acoustic or graphic makeup, as noticed and caught up, for some reason, in the web of awareness of the human subject, as being there, but unaccountably so, since it falls outside or is in excess of the noun’s referential purpose and definition. In this sense, remaining with the same example, there is no reason for this manifestation, of the objet petit a, to exist: it is as if it is broken off from the noun; called into being and made manifest by the noun, but not really a part of it; and is thus, ontologically, problematic. Actually, worse than problematic: problematising. Problematising because it, this manifestation of the objet petit a, is there, but unaccountably so, according to the Symbolic Order; the Symbolic Order where meaning is constructed and resides, as represented by the meaning of the noun. And therefore, and here is the deeply problematising part, ontologically problematic for the noun itself, and thus the function of the noun, and thus the system that holds the significance of the noun in place; because this arrangement of being, this order of meaning, this categorisation of identities, is unable to account for the objet petit a, which it nevertheless calls into being manifest. It’s bad enough thinking about the onto-­epistemic problematising nature of the objet petit a in relation to grammar and semantics; but what about when we think about this in relation to ourselves? Because, after all, it is only when some aspect of – again, remaining with the same example – the noun is noticed and caught up in the web of some person’s awareness, for whatever reason, that the objet petit a appears to be; and what one person notices, and becomes fascinated by, as being outside the Symbolic Order, for whatever reason, might be quite different for you and me. What is there, apparently broken off from reason and meaning itself, but is there, nevertheless, alienated from this account of possible being, might be quite different for different people. Ella grew up in a family of gangsters, though they were quite well to do. Her parents were publicans, and she was surrounded by criminality: bank robbery; fencing of stolen goods; fraud; theft; bribery; violence; intimidation. But none of that, according to how Ella speaks, was of determining significance to her; none of that was specifically responsible for the course that her life took. She remembers instead an incident that she reserves as being of iconic importance. It happened one day when she was very young, prior to the age of ten. And on that day Ella was poorly, not ill at some point approaching death, but just unwell enough to be kept off school. And it was on this occasion that, secretly, Ella took and drank, from a bottle in the living room cabinet, some alcohol, which was probably sherry, and liked it. What she liked was not so much the

Ella   161 taste, but how it made her feel; which was a satisfying feeling of not being quite herself. There are two aspects to this iconic moment that Ella believes are inextricably tied together. The first of these, most obviously, is that the alcohol made her feel satisfyingly different to being whom she was; but the second, which Ella accords at least equal if not even greater importance than the first aspect of this iconic moment, is that the feeling of being satisfyingly different to whom she was occurred through an act of secrecy; and that the two together combined into the characteristic activity of forging something inside her; and the illicit nature of becoming different to whom she was became realised and set in motion. It became an irresistible compulsion to repeat the first occasion when she consumed something that changed how she felt. A point she illustrates by explaining that when the very next opportunity presented itself to her, to do the same, that this was precisely what she did. So that the next night, the very day after she had taken her first drink, when she was alone with access to the same cabinet, she stole downstairs from her bed and put the bottle to her lips, and emptied as much as she could manage into her body. Then she retired back to her bed, and waited: the effects of the alcohol put her into an unconscious stupor. Despite being raised in an environment where she was surrounded by criminality, Ella explained, no one had taught her to act in this way: to deceive; to hide; to maintain a secret about herself. And it was this that struck her so forcibly; moreover, it was this complex of secrecy, manipulation and illicit being that engaged with her determination by consuming alcohol to become different to whom she was. A space now existed inside herself, brought into being through a performative act of will; a space that fascinated her; a space that attracted through its fascination, if it were to be maintained, other acts of being, other performative rituals, that grew, and were necessary to the continued existence of that space. Chief amongst these, to begin with, was the need to cover her tracks, to conceal what she was doing by finding and placing something else over what she had brought about, so that this illicit act and the space where it existed could not be detected. And immediately, this is what Ella did, by replacing the alcohol that she had taken from the bottle with water. So that not only, now, did the space where she consumed the alcohol contain a secret, and a manipulation of circumstance, but also an act, a ritual, that was necessary to the maintenance of that space, where the experience of being whom she was not was located. In Lacanian terms, what Ella was doing was treating the entire site of this activity as if it were an instance of what Lacan refers to as the gaze. Perhaps in a way that might appear at first to be conceptually strange, the gaze, for Lacan, involves in the act of looking, that which is being looked at, looking back at the looking subject. And what better example of this could there be, than what Ella had done, than the example of all of this looking back at her? In Lacanian terms, this is why Ella regarded as being so significant, not simply the consumption of alcohol, but the entire activity, the rituals, the compulsion, the precise occasion, the specific location, the times when this occurred, and the illicit nature of what she had taken place. This is why, in Lacanian terms, Ella covered over what she

162   Ella had made happen, to make it invisible, so that its presence, the space within herself, the site of the objet petit a, would not be seen, as it looked back at her. A child, less than ten years old, being, as Lacan famously describes in Seminar XI (Lacan, 1998), fascinated, captivated, by the objet petit a, that space within herself, which now existed, activated by her illicit consumption of alcohol; a part of herself that was broken off from the functionality and meaning of her identity; caught in the gaze of that entire site, as it looked back at her; disturbing the coherence of her being; just like the remainder of the noun in the example given above. Why is it that this should be such a disturbing, a profoundly disturbing, experience? Lacan explains that the gaze and being caught in the gaze of the look that is returned to us by that, usually described as an object, which we have in some way looked at, is a fascinating, obsessive, and extremely disturbing experience, in the following way. Symbolically, during the mirror phase the function of the gaze appears to be one of mastery – rendering the illusion, as the child perceives itself to be looking back at itself in the mirror – over its own completeness; since what the gaze appears to unveil to the child is the child as being itself, whole, integral, distinct, defined, and clearly and uniquely placed within the world. What the gaze appears to offer the child, then, during this moment of symbolic becoming, is the certain condition of itself, and the world (of meaning) – otherwise known as the Symbolic Order – and its place within the Symbolic Order. Though of course, what the child, in fact, perceives is not itself, but an image of itself. So that even during this symbolically originary moment, what the gaze discloses at the same time that the identity of the child is forged, is the artifice of the child’s identity at the asymmetric point of the child’s becoming. And asymmetric because visually, if we imagine this occurring as the mirror image – or object in the mirror – of the child looks back at the child, the gaze is collected, received and registered at a certain vanishing point; a vanishing point as in the point of convergence in the two-­dimensional representation of perspective; a vanishing point, at and beyond which, there is nothing that is really there; this, of course, being the vanishing point of the child, represented by its eye, and by what it beholds, which is nothing – the famous Lacanian lack. And, indeed, when this happens, when this view is acceded to, the child, the child as a whole and meaningful, unique subject, is displaced. And the gaze itself, taking on this function of displacement, acquires a different meaning and bestows a different function with regard to the entire scene. Which is more akin to being a meaning without meaning, a function without function, since these, since during the originary moment of identity formation, were the result of a certain kind of not seeing, of disregarding the look that is returned to the child by the image that it sees in the mirror, and of the child mistaking this image as itself. So that, the gaze as it comes to be regarded during this secondary moment of realisation, as meaning without meaning, as having a function without function is in excess of its originary identity bestowing appearance. This being an excess that also profoundly disturbs the meaning, coherence and certainty of the child’s identity and the Symbolic Order

Ella   163 within which it was once situated. Once realised in this way, the gaze becomes another manifestation of the objet petit a. But perhaps a more profound manifestation, because it is seen as being something that fascinates and undoes the order of identity and meaning not in a way that is somehow external to the experience of the subject, but by displacing the identity and meaning of the subject itself, and by exposing what is an essential lack, an absence, where the subject is meant to be. Ella saw in the space where she was supposed to be, nothing, or rather not nothing – because nothing is easy; in nothing, nothing is promised; in nothing, nothing is glimpsed; there is no desire to be, in nothing; in nothing there is no hope for what might come next; there is no regret for what might have been; there is nothing to compare anything to, in nothing – but lack, lack will tear your fucking heart out. So, to paraphrase a well-­known, clichéd gangster saying, spoken in circumstances when no real choice appears to be available: whatcha’ gonna’ do? You want to carry on? I mean, really carry on? That is to say, do you want to be? You? Which amounts to, do you want to carry on living? Because remember lack: lack’s just ripped your heart out. The fascinating logic with which you are presented, according to which your being is distributed, and by which you appear to exist, seems very simple, and is this: where I am supposed to be, there is an absence, lack; and my awareness of this lack both fascinates me, catches me, and will not let me go, and compels me to fill it, to find myself, my heart, essentially in order to be; which is an act, a form of performativity, a condition of will; this being an affirmation of my will to be; without which, because of this lack, I am nothing; hence my compulsion to repeat, over and over again, and also to cover, over and over again, what I am doing – which at the moment, is to pour alcohol into my body. Are we at the site of Nietzsche’s theme of eternal recurrence? And will this become compounded by the sociological forces that we have looked at before, associated with habitus, which will cohere and makes us continuous with the environment within which we find ourselves? The answer to these questions appears to be, yes. When Ella talks about these things, she becomes very emotional, which, despite trying to, she cannot hide. The next thing that Ella talks about is school. Ella says that she was bright, and that she enjoyed school. But then, there was that bit of her, that hollow, that she was both fascinated by and was compelled to fill in; which she did, of course, as temporarily as this was destined to be, by acting out. By sometimes not going; she’d pretty much stopped altogether by the age of 14. And in its place: weed and party drugs. If school represented being part of the established order, acquiescing to the lore of the Symbolic, which, especially given the cultural background of Ella and her gangster family was registered as the Other, as being Other, for Ella, to herself; then weed and party drugs not only represented but also functioned as a practice of being part of a counter culture to the operations of the Other, in relation to which she did not belong. It is tempting to understand this simply in material, political and cultural terms. And whilst not

164   Ella wanting to deny the significance of this analysis, what I want to emphasise here is the way that these manifestations of difference are underwritten by the Lacanian gaze and its manifestation of the objet petit a. Weed and party drugs became a demonstration of not belonging within this context because Ella became part of the logic wherein the experience of her own lack is predicated by the condition of should and must, that there should be an essential Ella, indeed that there must be an essential Ella; but that, of course, it does not exist within the established order, represented by schooling and the more socially, politically and culturally accepted behaviours, codes and values of what is taken to be normal quotidian being. A contingent opposition is thus very quickly established between the more socially, politically and culturally accepted behaviours, codes and values of what is taken to be normal life, and the day-­to-day existence of those, designated by this logic, as members of the population who do not belong. A logic that is supported by the Lacanian Law, but especially its juridical analogue: for example, by weed and party drugs being illegal; by the lifestyle that supports the production, distribution and consumption of party drugs also being activities that must, by definition, occur outside the law; and by these ontological practices, therefore, necessarily occurring not just illicitly but also secretly; and so, in a very real sense, occurring as rituals that had already been established, which defined the lack, the absence, where Ella’s heart was supposed to be, as she discovered when she was a child, when she stole her first drink; this being an act that she was thereafter compelled to repeat in an attempt to fill or cover over the absence where her self should have been – an act that was inevitably bound to fail. So that by the time that Ella should have been but was not going to secondary school, which was simply another practice that designated her absence from the scene of established belonging, and was another manifestation of her compulsion to repeat, it was not sherry that she was secretly pouring into her body, in order to fill or cover over the essential lack of being her self, but was instead weed and speed. One of the problems with drugs, with being addicted to drugs, is the escalation of their usage. The persistent practice, through drug consumption, of achieving the experience of being satisfyingly different to whom you are, by eluding the observation of being whom you are not – this being the negative of yourself, which is at the displaced heart of the Lacanian gaze – can also bring about an attendant and very familiar condition. This condition, over time sees the addict having to consume progressively increased concentrations of the narcotic that they are taking, since becoming habituated to a drug, which is part of the definition of being an addict, results in building up a tolerance to the consumed narcotic’s effects. This can mean that not only might increasing amounts of a drug that is being consumed be required, but also that that specific drug itself, almost regardless of the quantities in which it is taken, no longer works for the addict as the addict would like it to. This is why some addicts not only take increasing amounts of drugs, but also why they progress to increasingly ‘harder’ varieties. From weed and speed, via periods of drug-­induced paranoia and psychosis, to crack and heroin. Which is what happened to Ella.

Ella   165 These are the components of what we might think of, in terms of arriving at the destination of not belonging, as a perfect storm; of a demonic and uncanny allegiance between the psycho-­chemical demand to consume ever-­increasing concentrations of progressively more potent forms of narcotics, in order to elude the confirmation of not being oneself, as being outside the Lacanian Law, which within the current social regime of belonging, exists outside the juridical law. It is this double form of being outside, combined with the progressive need to consume ever larger quantities of ever more potent drugs that, for many addicts including Ella, precipitates being outside the licit world, and compounds the desperation of addiction. There are obvious practical points to consider, practical points that have accumulated during a history of not belonging, which come to dominate existence. For example: a history of being outside of school and formal education results in an impoverished stock of educational capital, which is customarily one of the standard requirements that is necessary to access opportunities to paid employment in the legitimate economy. And being outside the other standard requirement that assists access to paid work in the legitimate economy, which includes experiences that lead to the acquisition of skills that indicate a disposition towards subjugating aspects of oneself for employment by others, such as the resignation of one’s liberty during prescribed hours, restraining one’s ego in the expression of attitudes of servility, and making oneself available to opportunities of employment generally. Being outside – never having been inside – environments where these technologies of the self operate and are acquired, technologies that allow the human subject to have their being forged in a way that makes it viable within the market of legitimate employment; means that, for the addict, in order to maintain their position and identity as and by being outside the double inscription of the law, the Lacanian Law and the juridical law, which is fundamentally based around the practice of acquiring and consuming drugs, finding a place within the illegitimate economy is a much more likely possibility than the legitimate option. Moreover, and returning explicitly to the example of Ella, since from the start the identity that Ella describes finding problematic is an identity configured by the established order, an identity that she has sought to escape through her determination to be in proximity with the objet petit a, first encountered when she secretly and illicitly poured alcohol into herself, this being an identification that explicitly escaped the rules and norms of the laws of established being, the possibility that she might find herself and support her being by the means that are legitimately available through the established order was all the more unlikely. And indeed, to demonstrate this last point, Ella supported her independent being, the being of an addict, through crime. The forms of criminal activity were, of course, accordingly predictable: shoplifting, predominantly, but also fraud, and offences related to small-­scale drug dealing – selling drugs for others – all in order to support her habit, her being other than herself as prescribed by the double inscription of the law. It is especially interesting that what is visible here is that ontological identity is supported by its economic modes of being, by shoplifting, fraud, selling drugs and so on; a visibility that is made especially

166   Ella visible because it transgresses the law, the juridical law, of the established order. At the point where this transgression is detected, the law makes the transgression legible, by inscribing the transgression in the form of a criminal record; and, in keeping with its economic order, exacts the cost from the transgressor of deviating from this order, in terms of a penal tariff. Inevitably, then, Ella went to prison. When Ella went to prison for the first time, in her early twenties, she had, for about four years, been injecting heroin into herself almost every day, and for most of this period several times on each of those days. Whilst Ella doesn’t talk about this in much detail, taking the experience for granted, it’s worth thinking about what this means. At a conservative estimate, Ella was spending around £150 each week on heroin. On top of this, Ella was also taking other substances, such as benzodiazepines, when she could get them. Since she was unemployed during this time, the only legitimate income stream available to Ella was state benefits. The costs of food, accommodation, household bills, and any other expenses that are routinely encountered as part of the basic, mundane financing of everyday life, were all of secondary and even negligible importance when compared with the costs associated with procuring and using heroin. This is the prime reason why Ella moved, during this period, through a succession of short-­ term property lets, squats and couch surfing; this being a way of life that added to the instability and chaos of her existence. Though there were periods amongst this chaotic transience when Ella was technically homeless, being homeless is not how she characterises this phase of her life, prior to her first prison sentence. There were, however, despite the turmoil that Ella describes during this period, certain consistencies, which in some ways counted as forms of stability, even though they were also at the core of the way of life that was also so damaging; these being consistencies that centred around obtaining and using drugs. Scoring very regularly over a four-­year period meant that not only did Ella develop knowledge and transactional-­based relationships with a small number of dealers, but also that she became part of the community of similar heroin users at this time. She also developed routines that supported her heroin use that ritualised aspects of her way of life, including practices necessary to shoplifting and selling the goods on that she had stolen. It was the rituals of going into town, thieving, selling, scoring, and the people that she met during these routines, who were buying, supplying, using, waiting, all of them transactional, all of them configured around heroin, that established and cemented her being in opposition to the established order, the order that was maintained by the Law; the Law that held identities in place that were becoming more than ever, Other to herself, outside of which, being defined now in this routine way, was lack. It is perhaps, before we move on, important to think about this point: that the patterns of existence, repeated every day, by which Ella was defined, and the relationships that she had that sustained this existence, were transactional; their clear and only purpose being to obtain and use heroin; her body and her thoughts, and the activities with which they engaged, were contracted ever more bleakly to this end. Other interactions and experiences, other

Ella   167 feelings and motivations, superfluous to the ends of obtaining and using heroin, were stripped away. This is important, because it meant that when Ella got three months for shoplifting, upon entering prison the course of her life was already well defined, and all that the carceral experience did was to clarify and confirm its nature and direction: ‘All it did was make sure I was coming back.’ Ella’s first experience of prison was notable to her only for that fact, its guarantee of her return. The most obvious way that this guarantee slipped into place was not through the proximity that being incarcerated provided her with a criminal class, since her life for some time had already been continuous with practices of being outside the law; but because when she was released from prison, it had taken away any safeguards or opportunities that might intimate at any other way to be. Since it was the moment of being released from her first prison sentence that Ella thinks of as the moment that marked the onset of homelessness: ‘I literally had nowhere to go.’ Of course, in an absolute sense this wasn’t true. ‘I could have gone to my mum’s.’ Her dad by this time was dead. ‘But all I wanted to do, as soon as I got out, was score. I was always alright inside, but as soon as I got out, that was it.’ So naturally, going to stay with her mum wasn’t really on the cards. The order of events was always predictably simple. Travel back to your home town, then when you get there, score. And afterwards, never before, but always afterwards, when the damage has been done, try to work things out. The damage was always done because the money would always be gone, and the same patterns of behaviour set in place. So, where were you going to stay on that first night of your release? The people that Ella knew from her routines were either uncontactable or unable to help. And whilst Ella was not unaware of hostels and emergency accommodation, a combination of arriving at these places late, if arriving there at all, being disorganised and unsure about what to do, being broke, hankering after more drugs, meant that for the first night of her release Ella stayed out, and crouched in doorways. If a process were ever to be designed, with the express purpose of making people vulnerable after they were released from prison, then that process would doubtless follow the contours of Ella’s life from the moment that she left prison for the first time. I spent the next few days trying to find somewhere to stay. It dawned on me that this was likely going to be it, being homeless. It was like I’d moved down a couple of steps on the ladder, right to the bottom. I’d been close to the bottom before I went in prison, but when I came out it came to me that’s where I was. What followed was an escalation in Ella’s drug consumption and involvement in crime, predominantly selling drugs for one dealer in particular, staying in hostels, staying the odd night with friends, and occasionally sleeping rough. And it was during this period, as a result of her closer connections with the illegal drugs economy, that Ella began a relationship with the dealer that she had begun to sell drugs for, eventually moving into his flat.

168   Ella At the time he offered me what seemed like a lot of stability. And I really thought he’d got it going on. But to be honest, my head was really fucked. Because I was living this junky desperate lifestyle, and always dodging the law; but at the same time my head was up my arse, thinking about being a proper couple and having a family, dreaming we were how normal people were. It was partly because of what appeared to be the stability that had been lent to her life by her drug dealer partner, and the flat where they both lived, and her fantasies about being a couple and having a family in the world of the established licit order, that caused Ella to restore contact with her mother. The development of this contact became enormously significant. Within less than a year of Ella moving into the flat with her drug dealer partner she became pregnant: the onset of Ella’s pregnancy coincided with her partner becoming physically abusive towards her. It was like the beginning of one of those really difficult, confusing times. In my head I thought the baby would sort things out, make everything normal. But then I was getting battered. I think I would have got battered anyway, but I was also being battered because I was pregnant. Then I was going round to my mum’s and pretending everything was alright, and keeping this fantasy going in my head about having a normal family. And I still couldn’t put the drugs down, so I was lying about that as well. Amongst the competing pressures that Ella faced was the determination that she would have and look after her baby. It was this determination that also prevented her from seeking support from the state. ‘I was scared to go to social services because I thought they might take my baby away from me.’ But as her pregnancy progressed, it became less tolerable to stay with her partner, until eventually Ella reached the point where she decided that her only recourse was to ask her mother for help; this was specifically help with accommodation, with living with her mother, and not help with her drug addiction. Ella continued to try to hide her addiction from her mother because of the shame and inadequacy that she felt about being an addict; but there was also another reason, namely that to have admitted and discussed her addiction with her mother would have brought with it the very strong likelihood that Ella would have been pressurised by her mother to stop taking drugs. The secrecy, the covering over of her illicit activity, a practice that Ella had embarked on as a little girl, as continuous with being beyond herself as defined by an ontology regulated through the Symbolic Order, was if anything more significant to the more mature Ella than it had been whilst Ella was still in her infancy; more significant because as Ella became more proximate to her own desire of establishing an identity for herself in the Symbolic Order, so this idea of an identity of being beyond herself, seen as being achieved through heroin, but actually impossible in itself, had to be concealed. Lacan famously describes desire as being the desire of the Other, namely the desire that

Ella   169 is engendered by that which is not ourselves, realised in this instance by almost everything that Ella was not, which was for Ella being part of a ‘normal’ family, being a ‘normal’ mother, being someone who was part of a ‘normal’ couple. There was also a clear and powerful realisation of the Lacanian gaze that Ella was subject to at this point: the gaze of Ella looking back at herself, fascinating her, making her ashamed, paralysing her being; the gaze of Ella staring at herself in the throes of her addiction and the secret practices that she had to undertake that were part of being a heroin addict. After Ella had her daughter, she stayed with her mother for a while, and the stability provided by her mother’s care meant that Ella was able to begin looking for a place again of her own. There were a number of reasons why she wanted to do this, but part of the motivation was in order to more effectively resume taking the quantities of drugs that she had previously been used to. Ella’s mother was sceptical of her daughter’s wisdom in pursuing this move, particularly because she was concerned about her daughter’s ability to care for Debbie, her daughter’s child, but she was unable to persuade Ella about this point, and was also worried that any significant and sustained confrontation about the matter might result in an irreparable breakdown in their relationship, which might in the end prove to be more damaging for her daughter and her grandchild. At the time I believed that I could manage being a proper mum, looking after my daughter, and continue to manage my addiction. But I also knew I couldn’t stop. So I just thought, manage it. Leaving my mum’s was basically an indication that that wasn’t going to happen. It was an indication that my addiction had already won. There were things I used to do at first to keep my mum off my back. Show her how I was coping, that everything was alright. Even though it wasn’t. So I used to ask her round. She’d come for tea. And I’d be like, making sure she’d notice there was enough food, and plenty of clean clothes, that the place was all tidy and everything. But when Ella’s drug consumption quickly escalated her patterns of behaviour altered to accommodate the escalation. She recommenced shoplifting, often taking Debbie with her in a pushchair and using her to help steal more effectively. She began to make excuses in order to prevent her mother coming round to the flat, but would also call in, with Debbie to see her mother more regularly; sometimes leaving Debbie at her mother’s for extensive periods of time, whilst Ella scored and used drugs. When the opportunity presented itself she borrowed money, and stole from her mother, and sold whatever she could that was in her own flat. Before Debbie’s second birthday, her mother was back inside, and Ella’s mother began to look after Debbie on a full-­time basis. When Ella was released from prison for the second time it became clear to her that she was not going to be able to look after her own daughter. For one thing, she found it very difficult to talk to her mother about herself, about

170   Ella her  inability to stay clean, about her history of dishonesty, and her failure to prioritise the needs of her own child. Even though the barrier to talking to her mother about these issues was predominantly in her own head, and looking back on these events she now knows that her mother’s reaction would not have been the rejection that at the time she had assumed it would be, Ella’s own inability to understand her addiction meant that seeking help in any form didn’t appear to be an option that was available to her. Instead, Ella’s contact with her mother became sporadic, and her contact with her daughter almost non-­existent. This exacerbated Ella’s isolation and intensified her relationship with the world of drugs. What is especially remarkable is that Ella’s desire to be part of the world of the established order, to be a mother, have a home, be part of a family, to work in the legitimate economy and provide for herself and her child, combined with her inability and her failure to be able to do any of this, drove her drug consumption and her move into homelessness. The way that Ella was now defined through the practices involved in seeking her being beyond herself, which were illicit in two inextricably related senses, namely illicit in terms of the Lacanian Law and illegal in terms of the juridical law, and her consequent determination to hide these practices and their continuity with herself, just as she had done when she was a child, guaranteed her lack of belonging, just as this tendency had been brought into being when she was much younger. What followed was an eight-­year period of homelessness, an escalation of her heroin consumption, together with crack and alcohol abuse, punctuated by repeated prison sentences. In order to maintain her heroin and crack addiction during this period, Ella moved into sex work. I can’t remember how it happened. It wasn’t like it was a single decision. Any relationship I had with another male addict or a dealer, it was always a bit blurred about the sex and sharing their drugs if I had no money. And then I suppose it became a bit more obvious what was going on, but starting off with people I already knew. Getting off with them, then taking the drugs together. In the end it was all that I’d got, nothing else, just myself. Selling myself. I was feral in the end. Full of self-­loathing. If someone looked at me wrong in the street I’d just rip into them. What the fuck are you looking at? You don’t pay my fucking rent. I didn’t pay any rent. Didn’t have anywhere to live. That was the lowest. Making enough money to score, scoring, using, smoking crack, then going out to earn more money to do it all again. I lost everything. Every last bit of dignity. Every last bit of self-­worth. Just running on crack and gear. In the circumstances that Ella describes, the possibility of her having a place in the established order was becoming increasingly dim, looking ever more unlikely. It was not simply the lack of material resources at her disposal, but also her understanding of herself, as being in exile from the world of worth and belonging, with an identity of self-­contempt, that determined the increasingly abject nature of Ella’s existence. From Ella’s perspective during this period she

Ella   171 was living in a way that was not simply unacceptable to the social order, but was unacceptable according to some anonymous condition that represented that order, that constituted its meaning as being distinct but synchronous with the habits, behaviours and values of social conformity. It wasn’t simply that Ella was an addict, was homeless and was engaging in sex work that was so destructive, though these activities were massively injurious; it was what these activities, these forms of being represented, being that was unacceptable, being that was outside legitimate identity, that was so definitively ruinous. Even though it was and is not possible to grasp anything specific about this unacceptability, other than to endlessly represent it as being something else, Ella talks about this condition as if she was being consumed, being eaten away, by the knowledge of  her own impermissibility, by what she saw as the secret stain of her own impermissible self. This chapter began by mentioning something referred to by Badiou as an event, which is a form of being that is an act, which prior to it having taken place is unaccountable, and so is an act that marks a violent rupture with the forms of being from which it emerges. A defining characteristic of such an act is that it simultaneously calls into being fidelity between the subjects affected by the event and the event itself creating a new context wherein it has emerged. Indeed, for Badiou the event is fundamentally creative. Badiou is fond of citing the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of such an event, creating fidelity with the workers who were caught up in its eruption onto the political scene, and changing their identities in relation to its emergence. Another famous example that Badiou cites is the conversion of Saint Paul, who, in relation to the resurrection of Christ rejects Judaism and the Law that holds it in place, and through his subjective experience of the Christian event experiences a rupture with the forms of identity that constituted being prior to this experience. For Saint Paul, it is impossible to overstate the significance of this event: what had changed was not simply the appreciation of a different perspective; there was a radical overthrowing of all previous meaning, of the order of the world, of his own identity, of Being itself. In Badiou’s terms, such an event occurred for Ella as a result of her collapse whilst living on the street, when she developed pneumonia and emphysema, was hospitalised, and came close to death. She doesn’t know who found her, or remember the journey in the ambulance, or being admitted to hospital. But it was this experience, this event, that Ella relates as being significant in changing her life. It brought me face to face with the fact that I couldn’t do it on my own. I’d tried loads of times to get clean, to change my way of life, which was shit. I mean, no one would choose to live like I was living. If you said to anyone, what do you want to do, be homeless and have to sell yourself to fund your habit, which will kill you, and each day you’ll hate yourself, or be happy, have friends, a family, money, somewhere nice to live – who’s gonna’ choose the first one of those? No one.

172   Ella One of the interesting points that Ella makes here, and repeatedly, is that she, Ella, or rather the Ella that she wanted to be, that was somehow beyond herself but that she had discovered and become fascinated with from the moment, according to her, that she illicitly stole down from her bedroom and drank the sherry when she was a little girl, was marked and increasingly characterised by a lack of agency. In one respect this is the reverse of what we might expect. Intuitively, an absolute determination to pursue being one’s self is inseparable from the notion of self-­determination, and as such could only be driven by the agency of the subject. And yet, what we find is that paradoxically Ella’s own attempts to get clean and leave being on the street behind her were repeatedly met with failure. Further, it was only when Ella renounced her own ability to change her life and came to believe that she was powerless in the face of her own addiction, that she was able to stop taking drugs. Changing Ella’s life, instead of resting with herself and her own agency, came to depend upon a power that was outside herself. Crucially for Ella, and again paradoxically, this also meant that she had to accept herself as herself, as being an addict. This is paradoxical because it constituted the event, as Badiou describes it. This, for Ella, marked accepting a change in whom and what she was; a change that, in its most basic sense, from this perspective, was ontological, since it marked a change in her being. Not only did Ella stop using all drugs, she also began a programme that she described allowed her to reassess and thus transform her own identity and her relationship with the rest of the world: ‘I learned that it wasn’t really about the drugs. The drugs weren’t a problem. It was the fact that when I took them I couldn’t stop. So the problem was me.’ This identity of being an addict is crucial to understanding, in Ella’s terms, how this constituted the event that signalled a radical rupture with her past. Integral to accepting her identity of being an addict was her concomitant acceptance that she was powerless to be otherwise, and that in an irreparable sense it was beyond the exercise of any act of will to escape or move beyond this definition of whom and what she was. From a Lacanian perspective this meant that Ella’s desire as configured through the desire of the Other, to be beyond herself, with being as fixated by the gaze, was overthrown. This does not mean that desire now rests with the subject without reference to the Symbolic Order, but that this is now located firmly within its empirically established and manifested way of being, rather than beyond this domain of attempted ontological realisation as represented by the objet petit a. According to this ontological re-­categorisation of her identity and her new way of thinking, Ella, from this point on, has constantly realigned her self with an ethic of being in the world that promoted the needs of others before her own sense of whom and what she was; rather than being captivated by something beyond the captivation of the Symbolic Order, Ella submitted to being con­ stituted by what she understood to be its moral and spiritual construction, and that this order of being was right, proper, and more powerful than any notion of self.

Ella   173 ‘What have I got now? What am I, now?’ Here are the things that Ella lists: I’m a grandmother, a mother, a graduate, an employee with a responsible job; I have a fiancé, next year I will be a wife; I love, I’m loved; I have responsibilities, and am responsible; I’m a home owner, a tax payer; I own a car and a driving licence; I care, am cared for; I feel, I hope, I know, I’ve a future, I live. I’m clean.

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Index

abjection: Kristeva on 64–5; in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land 64 Agamben, G. 31, 39 agency: Cartesian perspective 113–16; of drugs 79, 86; Nietzschean perspective 110, 118; potential of objectification to diminish 96; practising of rituals as expression of 3; of women in the Dublin study 79 agora 4, 108 Ahmed, S. 65 alcohol 1, 46–7, 49, 51–2, 93, 123, 160–3 Alex: appearance 104; assaults ex-foreign legionnaire Chris 107–8; comparison with Socrates 103–4, 106; drug addiction 104; gets clean 108–10; imprisoned 109; personal attributes 103–4; relationships 103–4; and young John 103–4 alienation 7–10, 36, 40–1, 48, 107, 119, 127, 160 Allen, D. 4 Anderson, I. 90 appearance of homeless people, contribution to marginalisation 12–13 Ardoin, P. 54 Athens: rights of citizens 4–5; role of the agora 4 Badiou, A. 159, 171 bare life 39, 53, 127, 136 Barthes, R. 54 Bataille, Georges 30–1 Bea 90, 92–3, 97–8 Beauvoir, S. de 81, 84 begging 6, 28, 46, 49, 51, 73, 105, 108 being: alienated being 41–3; availability of resources and 43; the concept of 1, 2; relationship with ownership 8

being accommodated 3 being homeless: contradistinctive properties 3; the predominant form of 2 beliefs 106 Beth: appearance 48; blowjob for a can of lager 46–53 blag, definition 29 blowjob: Lacanian perspective 46; as part of a process of exchange 44; Platonic parallels 45; situating the 43–5 bodies/the body: abject 64–5; Esposito’s observations 40–1; and identity 39 Bordo, S. 78 Bourdieusian perspectives 78, 147; see also habitus Bourgois, P. 14–15, 67, 74, 86, 118, 120, 124 Braidotti, R. 81 Bugsy 122–4, 127–9 burn (tobacco), connotations of the term 6, 9 Burroughs, W. 54 busking 105 Butler, J. 65–6, 81 buying of an item, relationship with identity 6–9 Carrie: appearance 55; childhood experiences 89–90; children and parenthood 91; descent into homelessness 89–91; drug dealing 85, 91; experiences of being propositioned on the streets 93; feelings about prostitution 97; fortitude 69, 98; imprisonment 86; relationships 86, 91 Cartesian perspectives 44–5, 114–16 CCTV 60, 63, 109, 133, 155 Certeau, Michel de 70–1 Chaplin, Charlie 130–1

Index   181 characteristics of homelessness 12–13 Chester: characteristics 71; economic and cultural background 4; location 1; planned closure of subways 63; provision for homeless people in 61 childhood experiences: Carrie 89–90; Ella 160, 162; Jenny 147 childhood trauma, link between adult homelessness and 90 children and parenthood: Carrie’s story 91; Jenny’s story 149–50, 151, 152–3, 157–8 Chris Phoenix 36 Chris Phoenix 132 Chris the ex-foreign legionnaire 104–5, 107–9 Chris the ex-para 105 chronic homelessness: indicators 6; the meaning of 2 Cimino, A.N. 94–5 citizens’ rights, in ancient Athens 4–5 citrus 147, 155, 157 City Lights (Chaplin) 130–2, 140–1 clean, getting see getting clean clothes, foraged 56 Cohen, J.B. 87 community, sense of 92 condom use 79 Conway, D. 68 Cox, G. 79 crack cocaine: availability 36; Eddie’s relationship with 19–23, 118; Ella’s relationship with 164, 170; Jenny’s relationship with 151–8 Crenshaw, K.W. 71 criminal activity, relationship between socio-economic background and nature of 13–14 criminal justice system: Eddie’s experience 16, 25; the homeless experience 16, 25, 36–7, 132–5; John’s experience 36–7; Sean’s experience 132–5 Crisis, on the experience of homelessness 2 Cronley, C. 94–5 cut-up prose: disrupting effects 54; evocation of homeless life through 55; the tradition 54 daily ablutions, the homeless experience 69 Danny 134–5 Davis, J. 94–5

Derrida, J. 40 Dotson, H.M. 88 Douglas, M. 65–6 drug addiction: Alex’s story 104; as driver of sex work 94; economics of 27–8, 30; Ella’s story 164–6 drug dealing: Bourgois’ observations 74; Carrie’s story 85, 91; economics 22; Eddie’s story 18, 37; Ella’s story 167; Jenny’s story 151–4; the lifestyle 21; women’s experiences 85 drugs: as cause of death 109; conditional responses 14–16; not doing heroin and not on a script 27, 31; legal highs (new psychotropic substances) 109, 133–4, 137; lifestyle and 150; rattling (withdrawal) 17–18, 24–5, 137–8, 140; role of women in the illicit street-level drug economy 74, 76, 78–9, 85, 87; social consumption 29; see also crack cocaine; heroin; Spice Dworkin, A. 96 Eagleton, T. 69 East Harlem, Puerto Rican community 120 Eddie: not doing heroin and not on a script 31; drug dealing 18, 37; drug withdrawal 25; experience with the criminal justice system 16, 25; feeling of alienation 119; feels let down by Paul 112; first meets Paul 27; heroin addiction 17–27; inability to cope on the street 118; and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence 116–20; ostracised from the group 104; relapse 36–8; social drug taking 29; transformation 32–6; weight loss 37 Ella: becomes homeless 166–7; childhood and background 160; criminal activity 165; drug addiction 164–6; drug dealing 167; hospitalised 171; illicit childhood consumption of alcohol 160, 162; imprisonment 166–7; Lacanian perspective 164–5, 169–70, 172; moves into sex work 170–1; pregnancy 168–9; relationships 167; route into homelessness 160–7; transformation 171–3 Ellman, M. 64, 66 Ellsworth, D.W. 15 Epele, M.E. 78, 94 Esposito, R. 40 eternal recurrence, Nietzschean theme of 108, 110, 116–18, 131, 147, 158–9 ex-foreign legionnaire Chris 104–5, 107–9

182   Index ex-para Chris 105 experiencing homelessness: criminal justice system 16, 25, 36–7, 132–5; Crisis report 2; daily ablutions 69; dealing drugs 73; forms of 2; generating money 73; most visible way of 2; nutrition 72–3; people’s ignorance of 123; sense of community 92; shelter life 61; sleeping rough see rough sleeping; still being alive in the morning 60; threats and intimidation 63–4; waking up in the morning 69 familiar places, practical reasons for returning to 26–7 family/families, Bourdieu’s argument 78 fashion, homelessness and 56–7 feminism 81, 99 Garry, A. 71 Gerry see turned-my-life-around Gerry getting clean: Alex’s story 108–10; Ella’s story 171–3; Jenny’s story 150, 157–8; Sean’s story 140 Giglioni, G. 76 Girard, R. 127 Glasgow 94 Green, L. 96 Gross, E. 65 habitus 25, 106, 116–17, 121, 147, 163; choice as an effect of 124–5; the concept 16 health care, access to 3 health problems, suffered by the homeless 73 Heerde, J.A. 94 Heideggerian perspectives 33, 155–6 Hemphill, S.A. 94 Herman, B. 96 heroin: availability 36; availability in prison 17–18; Eddie’s addiction story 17–27; the experience of using 149; impact on appetite 21; Jenny’s addiction story 149–58; solitary demand 150–1, 153–4; withdrawal symptoms 17 (see also rattling) Hill, C. 33 Hohn, K. 94–5 homelessness: as a style 55–7; see also chronic homelessness; experiencing homelessness; routes into homelessness Hudson, S.L. 74 Hutton, F. 74

identity: abjection as a threat to 64–5, 170; bodies and 39; Cartesian perspective 113–16; functionality and 30–1; homelessness as an expression of 3, 49; Humean perspective 34; Lacanian perspective 11, 101–3, 148–9, 162–3, 165–6, 172; mimesis and 101–3; mistaken 106–8; motherhood and 99–100; national 3, 43; Nietzschean perspective 35, 110; relationship between place and 3, 23, 27; relationship with addiction 25, 149–50; relationship with belonging 127; relationship with gender 81, 84; relationship with power to purchase 6–9; relationship with rights 4–5, 8–9, 45; the symbolic order and 31, 43–4, 65–6, 168; vs ways of being 99, 101 ignorance of the homeless experience 123 imprisonment: Alex’s story 109; Carrie’s story 86; Ella’s story 166–7; Jenny’s story 154–5; Sean’s story 139 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Bourgois) 74 intersectionality 71 Irigaray, L. 81, 84 Jacobs, B. 74 Jenny: attempts to get clean 150, 157–8; becomes acquainted with heroin 149; childhood experiences 147; children and parenthood 149–50, 151, 152–3, 157–8; drug dealing and its impact 151–4; gets clean and stays clean 157–8; imprisonment 154–5; mother’s death 156; moves house 152; route into homelessness 147–54; transformation 158 John 133; not doing heroin and not on a script 31; experience with the criminal justice system 36–7; moves away 104; relationships 27, 32, 36, 132; social drug taking 29 Kandiyoti, D. 74 Kant, I. 93–4, 96–7 Kissinger 51–2 Kristeva, J. 64–8 Kurke, L. 100–1 Lacanian perspectives: blagging 29; Ella 164–5, 169–70, 172; identity 11, 101–3, 148–9, 162–3, 165–6, 172; the integral self 50; love 132 Lahman, M. 68

Index   183 language: and acceptance into a community 9; and representation 40–1 the Law, Lacanian understanding 148–9 Lectures on Ethics (Kant) 93 legal highs (new psychotropic substances) 109, 133–4, 137; see also Spice LeMoncheck, L. 78 Liebow, E. 61 Lou 132 Ludwick, M.D. 85 Lydenberg, R. 54 MacKinnon, C. 94 Madden, E. 94–5 Maher, L. 74 Marshall, L.A. 94 Marxian perspectives, alienation 48 McClintock, A. 64 McElroy, J. 88 methadone 25, 27, 35, 118, 150 Mieczkowski, T. 86 Miller, J. 74 mimesis 106; and identity 101–3; Kurke’s evocation 100–1 Moral Laws (Kant) 96 morality, Nietzsche’s musings 68 Morrisson, I. 69 Moss, A. 86 motherhood, dependent factors 99–100 Murphy, L.S. 94 Murphy, S. 85 Nancy, Jean-Luc 31 national identity 3 Nehamas, A. 116–17 new psychotropic substances (legal highs) 109, 133–4, 137; see also Spice New York 120 Nietzschean perspectives 26, 34–5, 40, 68–9, 88, 110, 116–18; see also eternal recurrence nonce (sex offender), ethical questions around extortion 126–9 Nussbaum, M. 96 nutrition, the homeless experience 72–3 objectification: Kant’s view 93–6; Nussbaum’s view 96; Scott and Tuana on 96–7 objet petit a 30, 160, 162–5, 172 organised crime, Bugsy’s experience 122–3 ownership, relationship between being and 8

Paris Commune of 1871 171 personal reasons, for homelessness 1 Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View (Esposito) 40 Pete the Boat: not doing heroin and not on a script 27, 31; relapse 104; relationships 27, 132; social drug taking 29 Plato 45 “Plato, Aesop, and the beginnings of mimetic prose” (Kurke) 100 police 13, 22, 33, 47, 51, 60, 63–4, 85, 128, 133 Poulain de la Barre, F. 76–80 pregnancy: Ella’s story 168–9; Sophie’s story 88–9 Prince, B. 86 prison: availability of heroin 17–18; discharge procedure 13; release from and vulnerability to becoming homeless 167; see also imprisonment privacy 2, 69, 113 Pro Plus®, Carrie’s use of 62 purchasing power, relationship with identity 6–9 rational choice 124–6 rattling (withdrawal from drugs) 17–18, 24–5, 137–8, 140 reasons people become homeless, research findings 1 relapses of study participants: Eddie 36–8; Pete the Boat 104; Sean 137–40 relationships of study participants: Carrie 86, 91; Eddie 27, 29, 31–2, 36, 104; Ella 167; Jamie change Jamie to John and is highlighted in the proofs. 27, 32, 36, 132; Pete the Boat 27, 132; Tommy the poet 132 representation: Esposito’s observations 40–1; language and 40–1 Republic (Plato) 100 Ricoeur, P. 64 the right to be 3–5 rights of citizens, in ancient Athens 4–5 Rose, G. 71 rough sleeping: benefits of knowing an area 26; and daily life 69; emergency accommodation 61; as most visible experience 2; and nutrition 73; risks of 63; still being alive in the morning 60, 64 routes into homelessness: Carrie’s story 89–91; childhood trauma 90; Ella’s story 166–7; forging of 1; Jenny’s story 147–54

184   Index Rowe, S. 88 Ryan, P. 79 safe seat facilities 51, 61–2, 67, 111 Sales, P. 85 Schiebinger, L. 77 Scholes-Balog, K.E. 94 Schonberg, J. 14–15, 67 Scott, C. 96–7 Sean: appearance 132; attends college 146, 158; eviction and rough sleeping 143–5; experience of the criminal justice system 132–5; gets clean 140; imprisonment 139; personal life 135–6; relapse 137–40; relationships 132; transformation 136–7; Žižekian perspective 140–2 self-destructive behaviour 104, 106, 118, 120, 123 self-determination 172 Seminar XI (Lacan) 162 sex work: Ella’s experience 170–1; relationship with addiction to drugs 94; Kant on 93; potential for reappropriation 94; as source of feelings of shame 79; terminology 94 sexual desire, Kant on 94 shelter life, being ejected in the morning 61, 67 Siegel, S. 15 situational understanding 10 slave values, Nietzsche’s 69 sleeping rough see rough sleeping Smith, F.M. 94 social consumption of drugs 29 social services 71, 89, 99, 157, 168 socio-economic background, and nature of criminal activity 13–14 Socrates 45, 100–1, 103–4, 106, 108, 110 Sophie 32, 36–7, 87–90, 92, 104 speedballing 154 Spice 104, 137–40, 158; see also legal highs street culture 118, 120–1, 123–4, 139 structural reasons, for homelessness 1 Stuurman, S. 76 Symbolic Order 31, 43–4, 50, 65, 101, 106–7, 110, 116–18, 160, 162

Takahashi, L.M. 88 tall Pete 132–3 threats and intimidation, the homeless experience 63–4 Tommy the poet 104, 132 transactional sex: Carrie’s views on 93; see  also sex work transformations of study participants: Eddie 32–6; Ella 171–3; Jenny 158; Sean 136–7 trauma in childhood, link between homelessness in adulthood and 90 ‘trusted male’ strategy, exploitative risks for women 87 Tuana, N. 96–7 Tulloch, D. 90 turned-my-life-around Gerry 104, 132–3; death 133 Tyler, I. 64 Vatan, F. 65 violence 62, 86, 88–9, 120, 123, 127, 160 waking up in the morning, the homeless experience 69 The Waste Land (Eliot) 64, 66 ways of being 2, 101, 106, 110, 121 Whitaker, T. 79 Wollstonecraft, M. 79–81 women: Butler on 81; as drug dealers 85; experiences of being propositioned on the streets 93; Irigaray on liberation for 84; Nussbaum on the injustice of sexual objectification 96; Poulain’s advocacy for equality 76–80; risks of ‘trusted male’ protection for 87; role in the illicit street-level drug economy 74, 76, 78–9, 85, 87; the role of transactional sex on the streets for 94–5; Wollstonecraft on 79 Young, I.M. 81 young John: Alex and 103; death 37, 104 Zack 52–3 Žižekian perspectives: City Lights 130–2; Sean 140–2