Keep Calm and Be Modern
Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity
Verso, 224pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781784780753
reviewed by Benjamin Noys
Moaning about Britain is a very British thing to do. The national ideology of ‘muddling through’, of compromise and moderation, is usually accompanied by a moaning about the misery of these compromises. The British, or perhaps that should be the English, are never so happy, it seems, as when they are queuing and complaining. Owen Hatherley’s Ministry of Nostalgia brings to bear his considerable polemical gifts to analyse a particular instance of ‘muddling through’: the emergence of austerity nostalgia, beginning with the financial crisis of 2008 and symbolised by the ubiquity of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster and meme. Under Hatherley’s withering gaze, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ appears, as if seen through the ideology revealing sunglasses of John Carpenter’s film They Live, as ‘Stay in Your Place and Do as You’re Told.’
In place of another exercise in moaning about Britain, Hatherley prefers to tease out the troublesome history of the current appeal to the past austerity of wartime Britain. Hatherley is well placed to write this book. His already substantial body of work has often been devoted to excavating the history of public modernism in Britain. In particular, Hatherley has focused on the various architectural experiments in public housing and public space that often go under the cursed name of ‘brutalism.’ Contrary to the ideological assault of the right, and certain forms of libertarian leftism, Hatherley has stressed the emancipatory and utopian possibilities that remain in Britain’s fraught post-war engagement with the projects of modernism and the avant-garde. The current austerity aesthetic threatens to erase this history.
The Ministry of Nostalgia carefully probes this ‘austerity aesthetic’, revealing its appeal to largely mythical values of sacrifice and solidarity that supposedly brought us ‘all’ together in the ‘Blitz spirit.’ In fact, the wartime moment is one of fractious class conflict and the post-war welfare state settlement a deeply contested and precarious achievement. It is notable, as Hatherley points out, that the original ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was not even widely distributed, as it was feared it would provoke further working-class ire against a ruling class prone to flee the demands of national sacrifice. What also emerges is that this primal scene of austerity was itself an exercise in nostalgia and compromise, as the British state struggled to deal with the demands of its working-class subjects and the new currents of modernist design and architecture. These struggles are literally visible in such iconic buildings as Finsbury Park Health Centre, built between 1935 and 1938 by Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton architectural practice. While the striking building is, as Hatherley explains, a compromise with the modernism of Le Corbusier and Moscow constructivism, it is also an icon of austerity nostalgia and an image used on anti-austerity demonstrations.
Perhaps the most important intervention of this book is to unpick the relation of this original moment of austerity to imperialism. Politicians of the right, unsurprisingly, and of the left, depressingly, maintained the necessity of the British Empire into the post-war period. George Orwell, the poster-boy for left-wingers gone right, emerges as a complex figure in this situation. While his Lion and the Unicorn remains the go-to text for so-called ‘left’ patriotism, Orwell was strikingly aware of how the British class system, including British workers, were reliant on the labour of their colonial subjects. Hatherley notes how the current revival of austerity nostalgia aims to obliterate this history, and how reactivating a mythical ‘1945’ also obliterates the emergence of Britain as a multicultural society.
This is not simply a book about unpicking nostalgia, but also a reflection on how this nostalgia is enacted in the present. The return to post-war public modernism in the styling of contemporary London housing developments results in better buildings. The use of brick instead of flashy ‘modern’ exteriors and attention to street access make these new developments in tune with contemporary London. The irony of ironies is, as Hatherley notes, that it is the design guide of Boris Johnson that has helped ensure this situation. Of course, as Hatherley adds, this is unaffordable to most Londoners and the new-old modernism becomes the preserve of the developer and the wealthy.
The book brings Hatherley’s usual close attention to the built environment, but the attention to particular buildings, while illuminating, does not always give sufficient attention to the wider forms of austerity aesthetics. This aesthetics is not only a matter of wartime posters, retro food styling, and pastiche public housing. Our most common aesthetic experience of austerity might well be the proliferation of charity shops, shops closing and ubiquitous sales on the British high street. Also, while noted, the grinding misery and acute expense of public, which is to say privatised, transport might deserve more attention. Austerity aesthetics is often felt in the spaces of transit, as well as in the dilapidated public and private buildings that litter the landscape.
A difficulty confronted at the beginning and the end of the book is the role of history for an anti-austerity project. In the face of cynical nostalgia, making a mythical appeal to ‘history,’ debunking by reference to what actually happened is certainly necessary. But, as Hatherley realises, to return to the past as a ‘better moment’ to reactivate past forms of the modern, is to risk feeding into austerity aesthetics. Ministry of Nostalgia is acute on the difficulties of escaping nostalgia. Celebrating unsung works of public modernism is easily enough transformed into new investment projects for developers. This is a book of self-criticism. At its close Hatherley suggests the need for a detachment from the relentless British obsession with the past, visible on left and right, for a new anti-melancholic mode of struggle. The problem is not so much the past, but the present, and myth-making of any kind won’t get us around that. We might invoke Brecht’s famous advice to city dwellers: erase the traces!
But history and memory are not easily disposed of, especially when we are talking about that strange paradox: the memory of the modern. These problems will only become more acute, we can suppose, as that past moment of austerity passes out of living memory and struggles have to find their unsteady feet in the unpropitious ever-extending moment of crisis. The reaction to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour party leader in Britain is telling. Now it is not wartime spirit that is invoked by the right-wing media, which is to say nearly all the media, but instead the tropes of 1970s and 1980s anti-communism: the dowdy-dressing, ‘looney lefty,’ insufficiently deferential ‘enemy within.' Corbyn is painted as trapped in the past by the invocation of a past rhetoric, but who ever said the right cared about consistency? Hatherley’s work is a salutary and necessary antidote to austerity nostalgia, but the struggles over memory and the modern remain.
In place of another exercise in moaning about Britain, Hatherley prefers to tease out the troublesome history of the current appeal to the past austerity of wartime Britain. Hatherley is well placed to write this book. His already substantial body of work has often been devoted to excavating the history of public modernism in Britain. In particular, Hatherley has focused on the various architectural experiments in public housing and public space that often go under the cursed name of ‘brutalism.’ Contrary to the ideological assault of the right, and certain forms of libertarian leftism, Hatherley has stressed the emancipatory and utopian possibilities that remain in Britain’s fraught post-war engagement with the projects of modernism and the avant-garde. The current austerity aesthetic threatens to erase this history.
The Ministry of Nostalgia carefully probes this ‘austerity aesthetic’, revealing its appeal to largely mythical values of sacrifice and solidarity that supposedly brought us ‘all’ together in the ‘Blitz spirit.’ In fact, the wartime moment is one of fractious class conflict and the post-war welfare state settlement a deeply contested and precarious achievement. It is notable, as Hatherley points out, that the original ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was not even widely distributed, as it was feared it would provoke further working-class ire against a ruling class prone to flee the demands of national sacrifice. What also emerges is that this primal scene of austerity was itself an exercise in nostalgia and compromise, as the British state struggled to deal with the demands of its working-class subjects and the new currents of modernist design and architecture. These struggles are literally visible in such iconic buildings as Finsbury Park Health Centre, built between 1935 and 1938 by Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton architectural practice. While the striking building is, as Hatherley explains, a compromise with the modernism of Le Corbusier and Moscow constructivism, it is also an icon of austerity nostalgia and an image used on anti-austerity demonstrations.
Perhaps the most important intervention of this book is to unpick the relation of this original moment of austerity to imperialism. Politicians of the right, unsurprisingly, and of the left, depressingly, maintained the necessity of the British Empire into the post-war period. George Orwell, the poster-boy for left-wingers gone right, emerges as a complex figure in this situation. While his Lion and the Unicorn remains the go-to text for so-called ‘left’ patriotism, Orwell was strikingly aware of how the British class system, including British workers, were reliant on the labour of their colonial subjects. Hatherley notes how the current revival of austerity nostalgia aims to obliterate this history, and how reactivating a mythical ‘1945’ also obliterates the emergence of Britain as a multicultural society.
This is not simply a book about unpicking nostalgia, but also a reflection on how this nostalgia is enacted in the present. The return to post-war public modernism in the styling of contemporary London housing developments results in better buildings. The use of brick instead of flashy ‘modern’ exteriors and attention to street access make these new developments in tune with contemporary London. The irony of ironies is, as Hatherley notes, that it is the design guide of Boris Johnson that has helped ensure this situation. Of course, as Hatherley adds, this is unaffordable to most Londoners and the new-old modernism becomes the preserve of the developer and the wealthy.
The book brings Hatherley’s usual close attention to the built environment, but the attention to particular buildings, while illuminating, does not always give sufficient attention to the wider forms of austerity aesthetics. This aesthetics is not only a matter of wartime posters, retro food styling, and pastiche public housing. Our most common aesthetic experience of austerity might well be the proliferation of charity shops, shops closing and ubiquitous sales on the British high street. Also, while noted, the grinding misery and acute expense of public, which is to say privatised, transport might deserve more attention. Austerity aesthetics is often felt in the spaces of transit, as well as in the dilapidated public and private buildings that litter the landscape.
A difficulty confronted at the beginning and the end of the book is the role of history for an anti-austerity project. In the face of cynical nostalgia, making a mythical appeal to ‘history,’ debunking by reference to what actually happened is certainly necessary. But, as Hatherley realises, to return to the past as a ‘better moment’ to reactivate past forms of the modern, is to risk feeding into austerity aesthetics. Ministry of Nostalgia is acute on the difficulties of escaping nostalgia. Celebrating unsung works of public modernism is easily enough transformed into new investment projects for developers. This is a book of self-criticism. At its close Hatherley suggests the need for a detachment from the relentless British obsession with the past, visible on left and right, for a new anti-melancholic mode of struggle. The problem is not so much the past, but the present, and myth-making of any kind won’t get us around that. We might invoke Brecht’s famous advice to city dwellers: erase the traces!
But history and memory are not easily disposed of, especially when we are talking about that strange paradox: the memory of the modern. These problems will only become more acute, we can suppose, as that past moment of austerity passes out of living memory and struggles have to find their unsteady feet in the unpropitious ever-extending moment of crisis. The reaction to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour party leader in Britain is telling. Now it is not wartime spirit that is invoked by the right-wing media, which is to say nearly all the media, but instead the tropes of 1970s and 1980s anti-communism: the dowdy-dressing, ‘looney lefty,’ insufficiently deferential ‘enemy within.' Corbyn is painted as trapped in the past by the invocation of a past rhetoric, but who ever said the right cared about consistency? Hatherley’s work is a salutary and necessary antidote to austerity nostalgia, but the struggles over memory and the modern remain.