Polly II : Plan for a Revolution in Docklands

Polly II is Anja Kirschner's second narrative film, a powerful counter-imaginary opposed to the fantasy visions of the regenerated city.

The film draws upon the characters and themes of John Gay's Beggar's Opera from which Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera was derived. Polly II manages to combine the two; both play's characters are transposed onto a projected London in-the-near-future. However, there is a third play and source in this circuit/cycle - another fictional/historical element. After the popular success of the Beggar's Opera John Gay wrote a sequel, Polly, relating the adventures of Polly Peachum in the West Indies. Its production was forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain, the play was published, though not performed in Gay's lifetime. So, Polly II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands sees the characters of the Beggar's Opera inhabit a dystopian version of London half submerged in the rising waters of the Thames, populated by pirates modelled on those of the 18th Century West Indies subsumed under a political economy akin to that of contemporary Dubai. There, the rich live in floating skyscrapers while a global proletariat toils below to satisfy their needs. Yet, these are Brecht and Gay's characters acted out by Londoners themselves, playing amongst the future ruins they have already been, or are soon to be, ejected from.

Self-described as half Eastenders half Brecht the film meanders briefly following the passage of a few people through a uncertain passage of time. People, both fictional and real, animate and articulate this passage. They are the wandering loonies, beggars, dealers, musicians, players, squatters and thieves - the flotsam of the town... they are the (non-)citizens of the cities consultative impolitics - those subject to a paralegal apparatus of ASBO's, ALMO's, PCSOs.

WORK and LAW - pillars of both 18th century mercantile capitalism and 21st century global neoliberalism. Work in each epoch is temporary, provisional, perfunctory. While law in the 18th century is arbitrary, corrupt and deadly – nowadays it is alienated, indirect and preemptive. In a scene in Polly II in which a mock trial is held by pirates occupying a riverside penthouse, these invasive measures, and the continuum of justice as class war are mocked and subverted. If the legal establishment of the river police in the 18th Century was to contribute to the production of the idea of property - property as a new ideology mediating the circulation and use of material, so too the provisional ad-hoc policing embodied by the ASBO, (not necessarily issued by the police, but by housing bodies, social workers, employers etc – all part of an expansive diffuse police), produces a biopolitics - a cradle of para-legal measures that seek to modulate bodies and minds.

These measures are parallel to and exemplary of, the ongoing dispossession of the London poor. Removal of the remaining trappings of the welfare state, just a few staples that contributed to their subsistence and survival : housing, hospitals, schools, markets, pubs, all gone or re-purposed. Whilst one arm takes away in the name of progress and modernisation another strikes and intervenes in the name of discipline and assimilation to the new conditions. Yet this is not simply a form of social cleansing – an ejection of the working class from a traditional haven - it is a prelude to the preparation for work of whole areas of the East End (London) and a reflection of a wider re-organisation of capital all over the world...During the movement eastwards witnessed as a knock-on effect of the Olympics and as property prices in East London spiral upwards we have to ask: where is capital to find the pool of cheap labour it requires to generate profit, to do the messy work of moving its supplies around, to clean up its shit?

'Offenders serving community sentences will be offered the chance to carry out unpaid work on the Games venues as an alternative to a jail term....' Metro, Feb, 2006 cited 'Slave labour and the Olympics' http://www.metamute.org/en/node/7254}

Polly II intervenes at this moment, when the gilded bubble of regeneration driven by the motor of property speculation, looting of state infrastructure and de-regulation of markets is making both the dreams and the nightmares of late capitalism come true. Following the methodology of the Lehstueck or 'teaching play', throughout Polly II attention is drawn to the performance of the action and the audiences relationship to it. From the beginning of the film we are implored by the narrator, Polly Peachum, to examine critically the events that unfold before our eyes. 'Regard even the smallest incidents, seemingly straightforward, with suspicion ... what is considered to be the rule, recognise it as misrule.' Thus the register of the film oscillates between narration - the urge to inquisition/inquiry, and action - the urge to participation. This movement spells out an open question over the distance between idea and activity, between principle and practice that haunts all history's actors. The staging/filming of Polly II propelled a particular group of the city's inhabitants into participation in their own future history. A possible future history, that though apparently determined by the conditions I have elicited above, becomes open to alternatives. Open to, not one, but many scenarios. Thus, the film references a rich vein of maverick filmmaking by luminaries such as Peter Watkins and Kevin Brownlow in which future and past possibilities live out their agency in film as real fictions that impact upon the temporal and social conditions of the living.

History and development do not unfold linearly, but rather carry the parts of previous times as long as the political economy of the times requires them included in, or, in this case, included out. Alice Becker-Ho has pointed out how 'Gypsies are our middle-ages preserved' and thus as much as they are a living breathing, mutating people they continue and have done for 500 years an internal exile as part of English life. Though 'regeneration' has done for them, until only a few years ago there were still gypsies living alongside Lea Bridge Road (key artery through East London and close to several areas to be developed for the 2012 Olympics). The creation of smooth time, empty history upon which the current form of urban transformation is premised accompanies the production of smooth space where (apparently) no conflict can happen.

It is appealing to get caught up quickly or too joyfully in the easy analogy that Polly II makes. Examples crop up everywhere once you look, but there are important qualifications to make, indications of just how much conditions have changed. The language in Polly II draws upon a mix of contemporary and 18th century vernacular and official speech. The rarefied script smoothly transitions between the placatory jargon of council officials, West Indian patois and actual transcripts of mock-trials held by pirates. Yet it is important not to confuse this made up language with the argot of the past which serves entirely other orders of social division and different ends :

'The slang of former times was centripetal: in other words it was coined by and for "the dangerous classes" (who would net for their own use those terms appropriated in different localities). Nowadays it is centrifugal: no sooner has it rolled off the media production lines than it is beamed instantly and intensely at the entire population.' Alice Becker-Ho The Princes of Jargon Trans. John McHale, Edward Mellen Press, 2004.

In Polly II London is presented as an island and its and its inhabitants a trapped, shipwrecked (cast) crew (A narrative device that has encouraged the inversion of social roles and values since Homer). In reality the London of the 18th Century (the golden age of piracy) and of the 21st Century are the exactly the opposite, London is pourous, articulated by its extensions, by the mobility of its workers. It is a nodal point in a network of exploitation and expropriation.

In a very specific way the conditions the film describes are less those of the recent decade long period of primitive accumulation and more those faced at the end of the 1970s, a time  London's underclass faced the predicament when : '... the combination of efforts to shore up the inner cities, amounted, in practice to nothing less than a conspiracy to contain the disadvantaged'. Colin Ward Welcome Thinner City Bedford Square Press, 1989. Those who didn't move onwards and upwards became 'trapped in the city', abandoned to a decade of neglect by the council and government under the austerity measures of the 'energy-crisis'. Yet the stranded do not stand still for long and the film goes only so far towards describing the dynamic movement and forms of life practised upon the fabric of the city. The upheavals London is going through now were kick-started in the 1980s with the policy of owner-occupation, the  extension of the City into the East End and the beginnings of intensive speculation upon housing and land within easy reach of the financial district.  Whilst the film dredges up an, arguably broken, circulation of struggles it relies heavily on a prescient narrative device to do so. The flood that has submerged East London underwater is a unifying disaster, one that produces the polarised conditions necessary for resistance.

In the satirical 'community consultation that makes up the central scene of the film, an agitator interprets the council official's nod to capital's tendency towards disaster : 'The flood was engineered as a direct response to unforseen fluctuations'. Just as financial risk is the eye of a tornado towards which finance capital is irresistably drawn, so disaster must be anticipated, calculated for and necessarily become a part of the plan. The implication is that 'unforseen fluctuations' may refer to either the 'invisible hand of the market' or of the equally unfathomable resistance of those preyed upon by it.   

In a sense the difference between The Beggar's Opera and the Threepenny Opera is that the former is pre-proletarian - but this pre-proletariat apparently dismissed by Marx is exactly the subject that has been mined by so many scholars attempting archeologies of anti-capitalist struggle, from Amadeo Bordiga and C.L.R. James to Peter Linebaugh, Yves Moulier-Boutang, Sylvia Federici.

'This gray army ... of socially shipwrecked and homeless elements composed the beginnings of the proletariat ... ' Alfred Muesel 'Proletariat' cited in Peter Linebaugh The London Hanged Penguin 1991 p.122

Like the population of London today, the slaves working West Indian plantations received all their necessities from abroad. 'The product was shipped abroad for sale. Even the cloth the slaves wore and the food they ate was imported.' C.L.R. James The Black Jacobins Penguin, London, 1938. James argues that they were a modern proletariat. Nonetheless, the plots of land they kept to reproduce themselves and their families, tied them to the land and arguably provided a minimum of subsistance. The London proletariat of the 18th century is a cosmopolitan workforce, both activated and divided by mobility, striated by immiseration, lawlessness, non-unionised, casualised, unsupported by reliable housing or medical institutions, racialised and removed from access to traditional props of subsistance, land, water, shelter etc.

'The London of today - it has been said - demonstrates that it is good for capitalism to preserve a certain backwardness.' Walter Benjamin Understanding Brecht p.76 NLB, London, 1977.

Revisiting London in fiction and in fact the film re-discovers the continuity between these two and in this discovery it is plain to see that those dread inequities are not restricted to a surpassed historical phase. Once capital has looted its margins it begins again at the centre. This is a key theme of the film, the resonances between conditions and social relations of several other times – of modernity, pre-modernity, post-modernity. Polly II proposes a Benjaminian approach to collective memory, locating history not in documents or witnesses, but in the living actors themselves:

'Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge.' Walter Benjamin 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' Illuminations p251 Trans. Harry Zohn, Fontana Press, 1992.

Achieving the same carnival of class that the Beggar's Opera embodied through which upper and lower  classes fraternise, exchange places. In Polly II we see a fragile alliance of classes  played out (a rich man's daughter turned activist, housewives turned pirates, building contractors turned agents of subversion) in which class does not dissolve in the muddy wash of the Thames, but is reconfigured in a delicately stacked reversal of the norms ...  a portent of higher games to come.

Links

Download a torrent of the film http://publiclibrary.metamute.org:6969/torrent.html?info_hash=b7f158d1ce11d45e76d2949c75abf6b907d60849

Polly II and other projects by Anja Kirschner
http://supernumeraries.org/

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil's Threepenny Opera
http://www.threepennyopera.org/

John Gay's Beggar's Opera
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beggar's_Opera

Information and analysis of East London's regeneration
http://www.thelondonparticular.org/

London's Olympics
http://www.libcom.org/features/olympics/index.php

The Thames Gateway project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Gateway

Amadeo Bordiga, capitalism and other disasters
http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/lobby/3909/bordiga/mtdintro.html

The films and writings of Kevin Brownlow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Brownlow

The films of and writings of Peter Watkins
http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins/