Speculating on Housing

Gav, Penny, Ayanna and Rag are in the Palm Tree, a pub in Mile End park, East London. The Palm Tree is the last in a row of buildings to survive aerial bombing of the area in World War II.

Gav: The Egg is a phantom organisation... It's an idea, it's not something you can join.

Penny: But what's the point of a group you can't join. What does it do? What does it have to do with us and our work?

Gav: The Egg has nothing to do with work! If anything it undoes any compulsion to do.

Ayanna: Sounds just elitist nonsense to me. Where's your head at these days Gav? I mean where have you been - you've not been attending any meetings, No Borders, the G20 organising meetings. I mean fuck, you didn't even come to the G20 at all. Where's your commitment Gav?

Gav: Fuck all that. I'm so past it all. I'm so fed up of all the misplaced recognition, false dueness, the spectacle, the ideological kettling, the fucking lifestyle of it all, the reformism, the lazy thinking...

Penny: I get it, you've invented a phantom organisation so that you can play chief, so that you don't have to put up with people's stupid opinions! You're a fucking wanker Gav.

Gav: Fuck it, fuck it, I knew I shouldn't have told you about it. I knew you lot wouldn't understand.

Silence for a few minutes as Gavin, (hurt), stands nursing his beer.

Gav: Listen guys. I'm sorry. I really want you to understand this idea and get behind it. I'll try to explain. The Egg is an idea, but it's also more than that. The Egg acts upon what isn't acted upon, what is ignored in the activist scene, in politics. We have this problem in the scene that our politics are reactive, our actions defensive - against new laws, against police repression and so on. The Egg is about exacerbating the contradictions and conflicts. It's about...

Penny: This just sounds like Class War redux...

Ayanna: Nah, Penny... Let him speak. Go on Gav, I wanna hear this.

Gav: It's about seizing upon this crisis, deepening it, making it pregnant with change. The Egg doesn't recruit and it isn't clandestine either. The Egg is present as potentiality - but it never gets actualised. The Egg is real, in many ways it's more real than the IWW or the GMB, some activist campaign or whatever.

Rag: Are we gonna bomb shit? Totally fuck the system?

Gav: (laughing) Shut up Rag. I'm serious. The Egg is a proposition, it's a structure for thinking some things through, a carrier or vehicle if you like, but I've got other ideas too... Let's go outside.

The crew heads out into the garden. Gav gestures towards the huge blocks of nearly finished luxury flats on the other side of the canal. The group sits down on the grass opposite one of the blocks of flats.

 All images by Caroline Heron, http://carolineheron.com

‘Fucking cunt stables,' Rag offers nonchalantly. ‘Oi!' parries Ayanna, leaning across Penny to deal Rag a hearty slap to the side of the head. Settling back down, the group discusses the state of struggle after the crisis - trying to think through some of the campaigns they have been involved in; occupations, community campaigns to save Queen St. Market, Defend Council Housing and so on. What exactly had the crisis changed? Penny talks about being glad about the crisis bringing everything into the open, ‘I always wore my crisis on the inside, tucked in so to speak...'. Ayanna broaches the reformist nature of their campaigns. She suggests that even within limits, it's always good to get involved and she likes the personal side - what she calls ‘meeting real people'. Gav agrees, the necessity of acting in real situations with all their contradictions, but mutters cynically about ‘real people'. ‘I mean what the fuck is a real person anyway! I don't know if I want to be one!'

The reason Gav has led them there, before the flats, becomes clear. He has a plan, some sort of intention with regards to this almost completed block - Penny second guesses him: ‘You wanna squat them?' she shouts, jumping up and rubbing her hands with excitement. ‘Bagsy the penthouse!'

A week later three figures huddle by behind a JCB, the grotesque silhouettes of hastily built apartments loom above them.

The crew have been hiding out for hours, watching security shifts to change so they can record the hours the guards rotate. They're on a mission together, Ayanna, Gav and Rag, but Ayanna has a second mission. She wanted to puncture the separation between the conversations leading up to the action and the practical task of getting in the building. Now was not the time, and thus exactly the inappropriate time to bring up some difficult thoughts. She'd brought her notebook and wound up the other two bombarding them with quotes from Mario Mieli's ‘Gay Communism': ‘Gav, read this: "The object of the revolutionary struggle of homosexuals is not that of winning social tolerance for gays, but rather the liberation of the homoerotic desire in every human being." That means... Rather than you two having some liberal responsibility to tolerate me and my "perversions"... It's actually the other way round. I, through the practice of my desire, liberate you!'

Gav raises his hands to his head. Rag: ‘Thanks Ayanna! So I can just carry on as before shaking hands with the unemployed and you'll do the liberation bit! Cheers! Thanks a lot... Now that's liberation baby.'

‘Quiet'. The group held still for a moment. They stared at each other beaming, enjoying the power over themselves that it took to hold in the bubbling laughter and maintain calm. When the stillness seemed to have overtaken their bodies again Ayanna continued to unravel her notes and fill the other two in on how ‘Towards a Gay Communism' went to work on groups. Gav waited patiently before responding, ‘Obviously there's a...' ‘Wait!' Ayanna interrupted, ‘NOTHING IS EVER FUCKING OBVIOUS!'

Silence. And they all breathe in again. Gav says: ‘delete that word.' He breathes deeply, before stuttering. ‘Th-th-there's a strong tradition of communists who became disaffected with groups and turned themselves to the task of internal critique. Jacques Camatte, Sam Moss, Debord even... You get this from anti-psychiatry too. Gangs, council communism, the working class, schizophrenia - each provided the promesse du bonheur, the sacred or profane form. The question of organisation is ultimately not resolvable, but it could be that the destruction wrought by internal critique is productive. Prompting splits, an endless secession rather than endless revolution. Though we are constantly being duped into believing in, and identifying with images of individuals which are not ourselves - we are duped into thingness, yet the revolutionary organisation does not provide an answer in the dissolution in the crowd, the singular identification does not speak poverty to the richness of myriad possible alternative attachments...'

‘There he is. Duck!' Rag whispers as Gav's short sermon trails off.

They would wait another hour in silence before speaking again. After this intermission they go to work. Rag takes control. He leads them along an unfinished ditch at the side of the building, tightly following a smoothly curving cast concrete wall to the back of the building away from the canal and the bright lights. Along the way they check entrances, door sizes, locks and windows. At the far southern corner of the building next to an unfinished pit with a drain at its base they find a door ajar and slip inside.

The following night Gav and Rag are sitting in an Irish pub in Stoke Newington, the kind of place where everyone looks conspiratorial. Rag's relating his experiences with sound systems he used to run with in the 1990s, Desert Storm and Exodus. ‘There were plenty of conversations during quiet times, but when we had stuff to do we didn't really think about it all that much, it was always just a question of where, when and how to get in. Brute force and a bit of canny timing usually did the trick.'

Gav wants to know how they're going to defend the building once they've got in. They've enough people to get in and they know the entrances they're going to use, how to get the security off their backs for enough time to seal the place... Gav stands up, ‘I've got it. We use a flash mob. I'll call a flash mob outside the Comedy Café across the road - 400 people dressed as clowns miming the words to the Beatles "Hard Day's Night" should provide enough of a distraction to get in. After we're in we'll send down a crew to bring the clowns in and party. At noon a massive banner drop off the top of the building. On the banner: "Here we make ourselves anew - Free Housing for All!'"

‘Great,' Rag mumbles ‘but still way too Leninist for me'. He strolls off to the bar. Gav calls him a ‘cunt' under his breath. Presage the first split.

End of the night. Gav and Rag are standing waiting for buses going in opposite directions.

‘After a step forward comes a split,' Rag says, and turning seeing his bus rolling up the road, ‘good to start with a split then. I'm off... you know everything about how to get into the building now, but I'm not down with your plan. I got my own. I'm going to approach it from another direction. I'll be in touch.'

Rag doesn't go far, but as far as the others are concerned he's gone for good, he breaks off all contact. He scopes out another building further up the canal, The Pinnacles. The building is finished, but the garden, car park and reception have not yet been completed and it looks like work has been abandoned long ago. None of the retail units around the base of the building are occupied. Rag counts a total of 11 flats out of 90 flats occupied.

The next day he calls the company who manages security for the building. He calls the developers themselves, then the agents who manage the building for the developers. To each he puts a simple proposition, that he occupy a few flats in their building, decorating each one and giving the impression they are inhabited. From the agents he gets an appointment to meet one of them on site the following Tuesday.

Initially it's just Rag, but before long he persuades others. Rag gets his mate Azurre - an out of work architect - a job on the front desk. He notices a shortfall in the cleaning services and manages to persuade the agents to take on an Ecuadoran cleaner - someone he met at his weekly adult education classes. In exchange for a small broom cupboard and less than minimum wage, Adolfo sweeps the corridors, landings and stairwells of The Pinnacles. He's surly and uncommunicative, barely exchanging a syllable with any of the other staff or residents, but when he and Rag are in private he opens up about his past in Ecuador and isolated present in London.

Officially Adolfo's staying in the broom cupboard where the cleaning products are kept, but since Rag's responsible for three flats and, by the second month, he's managed to purloin the keys to a further 10 vacants, Adolfo has his pick of places to crash in, listen to the radio and read. By the end of the second month he begins to make a garden in one of the three flats Rag is charged with making look inhabited. He fills the bath with soil purloined bag by bag from nearby building sites. Ferns and horsetails spill out of the bathroom and form a leafy curtain across the entrance hall.

In the coming months Adolfo will turn the flat into a rainforest - an uncommon meeting of species - blackberry plants brought from Lidl as well as seeds and fungus he's received in well-padded envelopes from relatives. A reddish algae, found only in Ecuador, stains the glass plates surrounding the balconies. One day Rag notices a small plaque on the inside of the door, ‘Jardim Botanico Entropico' he reads. Sweet.

Rag and Adolfo are sitting on the decking over the canal opposite the Palm Tree pub watching the sun go down. This is their end of the day ritual and it usually passes in silence except on Sundays when an elderly gentleman in a motorised wheelchair rocks up and sees out the sunset booming music from the back of his vehicle. To Rag's surprise, Adolfo opens the conversation. ‘I'm thinking about my garden... I'm always thinking about my garden these days. Whilst I'm looking at the pub and thinking I should have a palm tree in my garden, I'm also thinking of another garden.' Rag has learnt the art of pause hanging around this surly cleaner-gardener. He waits quite a while, until a swan below them has slowly floated by and the air has cooled slightly, before asking, ‘And which garden would that be? Is there another garden in the world as beautiful as this one?'

Adolfo tells him about the other garden, the one he is thinking of, the one Pizarro's conquistadors found in a temple in Tumbes in the territory now called Colombia. ‘This garden was made from silver and gold, mined by the sweat of the natives and fashioned into flowers and plants by the temples' finest craftsmen.'

‘What happened to it?' Rag asked hastily, despite having already guessed the answer. Adolfo looks up at him with a look of mock surprise, ‘The Spaniards melted it down and transported it across the ocean. Of course, with everything else.' Adolfo goes on, Rag is amazed to hear more words spring from his mouth in one evening than in the sum of their conversations over the last months, ‘My garden is dedicated to the memory of that garden at Tumbes, but my garden works in the opposite direction. It does not spring from labour, but from entropy. It does not dissolve into value.. It poisons value and destroys it, it is particular and never equivalent to nothing... never.'

With Azurre taking care of things front of house, Rag retreats to one of the more isolated flats at the back of the building. With no canalside view and overlooking the unfinished gardens full of bags of cement these were the cheapest and least desirable. Rag's got plenty of space to make as much noise as he pleases, undisturbed. He's planning to go to work on something that's been a long time percolating. On the far wall of the apartment lean nine full-length mirrors collected from nearby empty flats. To its right Rag has plastered the wall with fragments of broken glass and mirrors he's found in skips and on other sites. In amidst the broken glass wall are bits of tiles, broken CDs and ribbons adding colour to the disorienting play of reflections. Rag has rigged up one of the CCTV cameras to a hard disk recorder and each night he stays up till the early hours reciting political speeches dressed in a range of costumes; from drag to commedia della'arte, workwear and high fashion, African and Trobriand masks. He delivers Jerry Rubin's speech outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago dressed as a Wild Man, the Marquis de Sade's ‘Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans' in the costume of a petrol station attendant, and the Arabic translation of Valerie Solanas' S.C.U.M. Manifesto dressed as explorer Wilfred Thesiger. His great work is the recitation and recording of the Putney Debates delivered in comic voices, make up and various costumes over the course of eight nights.

Rag spends the daytime lounging on the sofa snorting ketamine and reviewing the previous night's video footage. He thinks of these performances as out of body experience, time travel and a total exorcism of all prior political histories and rituals. While he's laying this material to rest without peace, he's also putting himself through intense fragmentation - a complex and generative game between selves which become increasingly distant and unrecognisable.

For as long as he could remember Rag had detested all forms of theatre and fiction. He could not conceive of a work detached from life. He found any contrivance or artifice meaningless decoration. Now he dwelled intensely upon this hated psychologisation of fictive figures. In his play he aspired to absolute inauthenticity - the matter of making himself an ass in a lion's skin and a king of nothing - pushing the inhabitation of other poses until they are forced, through his body, to impart the real. At present the real was taking the shape of scar tissue forming inside Rag's lungs from the asbestos dropping off the roof of the cave and onto the table where he cut his K. He had made a kind of den built from skipped ceiling tiles - a secondary stage of isolation from the penthouse. On the table he chopped up fat lines of K spelling out the various names for the possible conditions that might in time be responsible for his demise: pulmonary fibrosis, mesotheliomas, asbestosis. It seemed that at this point Rag had found a way out. An end of sorts.

Anthony Iles <anthony AT metamute.org> is a contributing editor to Mute