Unearthing social-relations
Even today many decades after the end of heavy industry in this country the (post) industrial landscape continues to yield a diverse array of what I call ‘remembering fragments’, objects imbuing the real and imaginary dimensions of the industrial past. For those who approach history from a materialist perspective, as I do, significant time is often devoted to a form of intensive, almost archaeological, exploration of these landscapes. This involves scavenging for the forgotten and disclaimed: the kind of discarded debris that resists commodification and remains outside the reach of recuperative narratives. Such esoteric materials, the kind that so captivated Walter Benjamin, retain a kind of critical integrity precisely because they resist assimilation into the dominant spectacle of consumer capitalism. Retaining the real of their use-value, their ‘social-relations’, as objects enmeshed, once, in the production and social process.
Even so, as the past is increasingly subsumed by the consumer spectacle, often in ever more totalizing forms, these critical fragments become harder to locate. They are now most often found in marginal places and take the form of increasingly obscure or arcane objects. This is not merely a symbolic development; it reflects a substantive process. Capital, by its nature, tends to efface its own historical traces. This was especially evident during the 1980s and 1990s, when industrial areas across the UK were rapidly cleared of factories and manufacturing complexes. In South Wales, the demolition of collieries proceeded with particular speed following their closure. A prevailing narrative at the time suggested that the government acted pre-emptively to prevent the possibility of worker and management-led buyouts.
One encounter that exemplifies this material history occurred at the former site of Blaenserchan Colliery in the Nant Ddu Valley near Pontypool. There, projecting from a coal tip, I discovered a rusted fishplate, an iron fitting once used to join segments of underground roadway supports beside a plastic ‘Wonderloaf’ bread bag matted, too, in the coal spoil, dating from the 1970s or early 1980s, as indicated by its typographic style. The bread bag, more than likely once used to carry a miner’s sandwiches, had been discarded onto a conveyor belt and transported, like the fishplate, from underground to the spoil tip. I returned to the site several weeks later, regretting my earlier failure to photograph the bread bag, only to find that it had been washed away in a recent heavy storm, along with a significant portion of the tip.