Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 113

entanglement with a London agent, sinking into drug-psychosis, and recovering to paint again
apparently free of London.
As a zone TSLS’ tower is described as ‘grey’; nevertheless, it has a sheen of futurology, which we
will discuss shortly , but also a specifically acidic dimension; imbricated with public-work imaginaries and
the partly-suppressed project of transforming the psycho-political nature of the municipal space, it is all
‘candy’ inside. Thin walled places (like those walls described by cultural theorist Joe Moran in his
writing on the working-class home, 2005) are transformed, like the ruins and abandoned places that are
symptoms of capital, into something potentially utopian 88 . Acid sight, early on in the text ,and then
later on what Bobby marks as ‘derives’ ( implicating them with the de-territorialising lines of post
Situationist utopia), brings about the frame as such of dispersal and engender dreams of production and
of specific modernism; these occur when seeing the landscape’s chrome 89 .
Technological objects in everyday life, when encountered through ‘acid’ thought in the form of
special attention as well as the substance itself, thus assume an uncanny resonance, the pylons and ICI
towers 90 in TSLS 91 , markedly mirroring the objects of the ‘rave’ 92 . Such activities around acid as well as
through acid are already immanently gothic in their full aesthetic ambivalence as reversal; for Bobby,
even the nightmarish drips also recall ‘Lou Reed’ music: critique alongside jouissance and paroxysmal
deterritorialization rather than the mythic recovery of pure pleasure.
This structure of feeling is accomplished by external efforts, residues of civic work, and by the
work of community persons. TSLS’ tower block is replete with other ‘characters’ 93 , recalling Zizek’s
88
If replete with their own internal disturbances; as a structure of feeling we see a form of Voloshovian-
communality of speech and habitation in speech as well as in physical space
89
The perspective in terms of these changes of labour recognizes the potential of 'work’ but also that conditions of
it are not there nor that libidinal investment is other than the work itself; there is also an element of appropriation
and unrealized imaginary nevertheless.
90
The two of them slip into the metal clunking, fire dunking fortress called ICII. It’s a strange old place. The trees
they put up to hide the eyesores have all withered to grey twiglets from the pollution. Ravens swoop overheard
ready to peck your eyes out (2010, 219)
91
She rides through the industrial estate with their burning frosty flames and Bladerunner pipes and lattices and
cooling towers and she takes her sadness to the seaside[…] it’s a funny little resort , Redcar , with its lose proximity
to such overbearing rusty blast furnaces and black generators Tankler line up like grey matchsticks waiting to float
down the Tees (2010, 208)
92
Mirrorballs and projectors with Nasa-style loops of rocket booster flaming in the stratosphere…glow sticks…,
they were proper sci-fi (2010, 134).
93
Floor seven is a mirage of exotic smells and spices, floor two has a poster up encouraging you to know
your limit. Tower blocks tend to house a really strange collection of people, ranging from skint young
families to slightly frightening hermits rowdy y little drug-taking bastards.. depressed middle-aged
people and immigrants (2010, 50)
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