walking's new movement

3: savilian spaces

There is in operation a dark version of the layering of space. Despite the queer and feminist deterritorialisations that an understanding of the relations between spatial layers can nurture and provoke, there are also reactionary reterritorialisations of such spaces, where the transitions and overlaps between the layers are exploited to make new spaces of violence, exploitation, threat and misery. This dark layering operates less across defined battlefields or in secret places, but more often alongside ostensibly benign and neutral spaces.

In the recent revelations about the abuse of vulnerable people, mostly young and mostly female, by celebrities, politicians and organised gangs in the UK, accounts of this abuse often describe a particular kind of space of abuse; a space that seems to have gone missing, become invisible or meaningless, that seems to have been largely unacknowledged in public, legal or academic discourses but to have been consistently exploited semi-publicly/semi-privately by abusers, both individual and organised, active in different class and cultural milieus.

In the case of the abuses of young women in Rotherham and other English cities, this Savilian space of abuse lies in a particular relation to family, ‘community’ and small businesses, in the same way as it has, in other instances, lain in a similar relation to the entertainment industry, churches, local and national state bureaucracies, hospitals, psychiatric wards and special schools. These Savilian places of abuse are often located somewhere between private and public space. They are places to which access is negotiated; though not public places they are usually ‘known’ to, even administered by, the institutions, families and communities the abusers operate within. These are not places of confinement or concealment, nor are they clandestine or taboo, covert or transgressive. They are inversions or inlets of semi-informal and semi-official space: dressing rooms, offices, private rooms on wards, curtained beds, and so on.

The behaviour of the perpetrators using such spaces is often described by witnesses as “reckless”. But it is not unwitting. The late Sir Jimmy Savile, a TV personality and presently the most notorious individual associated with this abuse, would manipulate corpses into tableaus to which he was sole spectator and redeploy glass eyes as ‘gemstones’ for his finger rings. He did not hide his behaviour in a conventional sense, but performed an eccentric, sexualised presence, posing in skimpy clothes, leering through TV shows. Savile embodied the spectacle, but he also spectacularised embodiment: the body of no one – child, patient, elderly person or corpse – was safe from him.

So close at hand to an official world are Savilian spaces that these acts of apparent recklessness are in fact very effective in creating a symbiotic relationship between criminal and official spaces. Semi-hidden abuses in semi-hidden space put the official world in a position of ‘semi-knowing’; hearing tales whispered behind the hand, gossip about ‘bad reputations’, and so on. By non-action and by witting, unwitting and half-witted collusion with abuse in a semi-public zone, powerful official bodies (hospitals, the BBC, churches, social services), consistent with what Slavoj Žižek describes as the ideology of all institutions (“pretend to deny your self-interest and you can have it all”), have legitimated outrages committed against some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The dynamic of this abuse has something in common with the pattern of anti-semitic pogroms described by Leon Trotksy in his book 1905 (1973). During these pogroms, the police would arrive, apparently to restore order, but then step back, allowing the mob to run amok. The violence of the mob would be legitimated by the semi-withdrawn passivity and disinterested witness of law officers (and often blessed by Christian priests). Pogroms so validated tended to be the most intensely violent of all. A more recent example of a similar dynamic would be the behaviour of Dutch UN peacekeepers and NATO forces at Srebrenica in 1995, first giving protection to Bosnian civilians and then withdrawing it, evacuating, witnessing and validating space for violence and exacerbating the mass murder of citizens by Mladić’s Army of Republika Srpska and accompanying militias.

Savilian space is only different from these examples in that it is a semi-private space adjacent to public space, rather than public space itself, but it is subject to the same evacuation and validation (and to a greater or lesser extent the same disinterested witness) by official authority. Savilian space is a semi-privatised space within a public context, where abusive agents act with the accommodation, tolerance, connivance and embarrassment of public power and authoritative communal relations. These are places close to which authorities display their symbols, put up their signs, but then withdraw their responsibility and their empathy. A parade of authority and ‘normal procedures’ is followed by their effective self-negation, delivering a space where abusers are able to enact power and authority over victims in an apparently or semiofficially-validated, but evacuated, space. These are neither transgressive spaces nor ‘temporary autonomous zones’ but spaces validated by layers of a broader communal culture, ranging from a fearful not-wanting-to-know to an enthusiastic cheerleading, where Leeds football fans can chant in praise of Sir Jimmy Savile’s rapes or where young women can be openly treated (and marked) by their communities as chattels unfit for agency in public space (with the embarrassed or pragmatic connivance of liberal authority). They are stages where the authorisation by, and then withdrawal or semi-withdrawal of, the state (or its surrogate authorities such as families or ‘communities’) empowers non-official individuals or groups to enact naked ideology and unapologetic power.

Part of the immunity of celebrity and political abusers was conjured by their performance of authenticity. Sir Cyril Smith, Sir Jimmy Savile and others were players in the sustaining of everyday Reality; they were bizarre and phantasmagoric expressions of Ordinariness. Often with uneasy relationships to their working class backgrounds, the likes of Savile and Smith were best able to represent Ordinariness (and the freedom of opportunity to transcend it) by not quite ever being part of it. They were valuable ideological players in a fantasy about liberality and equality (behind which they, like other less-obviously rapacious manipulators, liberally took advantage of those less equal than themselves); further proof that without an understanding of the Spectacle one can mistake spaces of exploitation for those of liberation.

Sir Jimmy Savile crafted his control of space and spectacle as a Mecca(!) nightclub manager and DJ. He manipulated the adjacency of differently privileged spaces within a spectacular production of entertainment in which the main commodities were its consumers. He knew how to recruit wilfully ‘ignorant’ authorities to actively pimp for him; in 1967 town councillors of Otley (UK) paid for Savile’s participation in a charity event by providing a tent of six young women overnight next to his own (Davies 2014, 236-41). Savile grasped quickly how liberalities could be engineered to generate their opposites, such as enforcement and silence. If Jack the Ripper was “probably psychogeographical in love” (i.e. in sexually motivated murder) according to the situationists (Andreotti & Costa 1996, 42), then Sir Jimmy Savile was certainly psychogeographical in rape. He self-consciously deployed what he called “the effect” to psychologically transform space, to create unreal places of invisibility and silence; as with the Whitechapel murders of ‘Jack the Ripper’ there was no irony or magic, only a dead-heart of misogyny-ideology (a discourse in which victims were always “it”) beating down upon, and into, the unprepared.

If the UK government’s ‘Independent Panel Inquiry’ (or something similar) into historic sexual abuse ever effectively reports, it may reveal something more than is presently known about the, possibly interwoven, roles of Savilian and related spaces (for example, private spaces of exploitation such as the guesthouses and flats that have figured in recent accounts of establishment abuse rings) in the processes of maintaining power, through the violent subjection of (mostly) young and (mostly) working class people and the blackmail of those in office by those in power. Part of any new movement in psychogeography, if any such thing is to genuinely exist as a force for change, might be an obligation to identify and classify in popular taxonomies the locations and general dynamics of these and other spaces of exploitative and repressive power, requiring an inquisitiveness every bit as un-tame as place hacking: “exploit[ing] fractures in the architecture of the city…. to find deeper meaning in the spaces we pass through every day” (Garrett 2013, 6). Alongside psychogeography’s meanders, boosted by pleasure and affordance, this will be a harsh and threatened mapping. If we take it on, we should do so chastened by the understanding that reactionaries, with the advantage of hegemony, will be able to exploit our discoveries about transit and affordance while we can never re-utilise theirs about exploitation and repression.

The peeling away of psychogeography from general situationist...