As argued in the introduction to this chapter a third discernible feature of pop-up’s
imaginaries is how they serve as narratives that compensate for the changed conditions of urban life after recession and under austerity. This approach positions pop-up alongside a host of other phenomenon that play a part in the normalisation or glamorisation of precarity and crisis and that could also be read as compensatory narratives. I have already mentioned how xenophobic narratives compensate for experiences of urban precarity, historically and again today (Freeman, 2017; Bhambra, 2016; Virdee, 2014). Two other interesting examples that have been explored by others are how ‘hipster’ culture narrativizes the global financial crash (Luckman, 2015) and how ‘culinary localism’ promotes an aestheticized version of thrift (Potter & Westall, 2013).
Susan Luckman explores the rise of hipster economies in relation to the resurgence of interest in craft in the aftermath of the recession (Luckman, 2015). She argues that there is an emergent culture of ‘hipster domesticity’ (44) where practices such as ‘making, cooking’, knitting and ‘growing one’s own food’ are on the increase as is
the amount of young, university educated people taking on small scale craft and making jobs such as bike repair, or baking. These practices, Luckman suggests, betray a desire for retreat into the domestic and the DIY which she, quoting Crawford (2009), suggests is about the need for the world to feel intelligible, for people ‘to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves
from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy (Crawford, 2009, 8, in Luckman 2015, 41). For Luckman, the growing prominence of the hipster aesthetic and craft sensibility can be explained as, in part, a reaction to the financial crash; “successfully making something offers the sense of unequivocal achievement missing in the lives of many white-collar professionals’ and, at the same time, speaks to the burden newly ‘placed on the individual to create their own employment options as part of the wider project of fashioning the conditions of their own life’ (44). We can therefore see hipster aesthetics (which, as chapter six will explore, pop-up is closely related to) as a way of narrativizing experiences of post 2008 crisis. And yet, like pop-up, the craft and hipster economies reproduce the precarity they react against by accepting that burden for creating their own employment and finding ways to acclimatise to and normalise disruptions to assumed vocational and economic trajectories.
In their discussions of ‘austerity foodscapes’ Potter and Westall make a similar argument that an ‘austerity foodscape’ is discernible in contemporary Britain where thrift, home growing and re-use are encouraged (Potter & Westall, 2013). They argue that this trend draws on a 1940s ‘austerity aesthetic’ to make austere lifestyles seem appealing through reference to an imagined, patriotic past. Potter and Westall argue that this foodscape, while having an aesthetics of thrift, is actually still untenable for many as buying the products to ‘re-use’ in subsequent meals is expensive and the
complex processes of thrifty cooking put unrealistic demands on time. The function of this foodscape is then not to offer relief from the very real food poverty in post- recession Britain but to shame those struggling with food poverty by demonstrating a mode of resourcefulness they are failing to attain (Potter & Westall, 2013). These two accounts are examples of other phenomenon which I think produce and engage compensatory narratives in the way that pop-up’s imaginaries do; offering ways of
living that are positioned as solutions to precarity but in fact entrench, by normalising, that precarity.
In that these compensatory narratives offer hope within precarious times while conversely entrenching that precarity they are closely related to what Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’. In Berlant’s words a relation of cruel optimism, exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 1). For Berlant, this is prevalent in the contemporary condition where, in an ‘impasse shaped by crisis…people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 8). Yet the skills developed are often ones that reproduce rather than solve the crisis conditions which necessitated them. As I have explored, this is an apt descriptor for pop-up which offers a solution to pervasive conditions of urban precarity but does so by glamorizing and reproducing those same conditions. Anderson has written that ‘structures of feeling can normalise states of affairs –for example make alternatives to capitalism seem ridiculous’ (Anderson, 2014, p. 121) and this is certainly what is achieved by pop-up’s imaginaries which make alternatives to precarity seem
unnecessary.
Now, having drawn together the theoretical concepts with which this thesis approaches pop-up culture, the next chapter turns to the methodological approaches I have developed and applied. As well as discussing the practical dimensions of my methodology, the chapter advances discussion of the relationship I have suggested exists between i-Docs and nonlinear spatiotemporal imaginaries, arguing for their utility in thinking through pop-up’s nonlinear imaginaries, and the functions I have suggested they have, within the contemporary city.