ABSTRACT
This book has been an attempt to put into practice ‘a science of singularity’.1
Throughout I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to the specificity of examples and these examples have often been microscopic in scale and may seem irreducibly particular in detail. The Habitat chair; the ‘housewife’ timing the chores she performs; the teenager being enamoured by the music of the Jam; the drunk white guy demanding the hottest curry in the restaurant: these items are not standing here as flag bearers, representing a world of chair sitters, music listeners, female and feminist domesticity, and neo-colonial eating. They are all they can be: instances of ordinary life intricately entangled with more ordinary life and with forces that we only see when they shape our practices and our passions.2 But looking back, now, at the substance of this book I realise that there is a greater degree of commonality across these specific examples than I had been aware of while I was writing: all these instances of ordinary life (which seem to me to be extraordinary when you get up close to them) congregate around the 1970s and 1980s, and nearly all take place in England. The time and place is not incidental (though I must admit that the temporal synchronicity felt accidental): I was a teenager in the 1970s and became an adult in the 1980s. These were formative times for me that have left their creases and traces in the finite plasticity of my apperceptions and sensorial dispositions. But if the 1970s and 1980s were formative years for me, they were also
formative for the neoliberalism that Britain, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, was busily fashioning at the time. In 1979 Thatcher became Prime Minister of that conflictive amalgam of countries and provinces called The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and set about implementing policies that violently undid the infrastructure of state social care, while providing the conditions for forms of entrepreneurial individualism that are still shaping global finances (and global culture) even in the wake of economic collapse. ‘There is no such thing as society’ was one of Thatcher’s most chilling statements and when she made it in 1987 she’d already had eight years to help bring this condition about. Characteristically
the violence of social and cultural dismantling is framed in a language of aesthetics and putative care:
There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people, and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.
