A Post-industrial Vignette and a Driving Song

The density of the landscape slowly melts into the falling night. The hesitant rain, quietly coming and going, dots the windshield with ephemeral drops. I drive through the falling night: I drive back home, my eyes fixed on the red lights of the car in front of me. Postmodern life, I wonder, so replete with suburban roads and constant traffic flows, so glassy and dimly lit, so unpredictable: rhythms of work which are as hesitant as the autumn rain, now coming, now going, as capricious as the changing season. Winter is coming, by the way...

The car in front of me turns left and I unthinkingly probe the night with the high-beam lights. There’s not much to see beyond the flickering radius of the lampposts. Deserted sidewalks, precariously crammed between apparently empty houses and the road; scattered stores, here and there glimmering in the dark; and, overlooking the ensemble, heavy, silent and often crumbling buildings of old textile factories loom beyond the reach of the lights. The factories are everywhere: this is the heart of industrial Minho. Places like Vila das Aves, Moreira de Cónegos, Vizela, Pevidém, places with interesting names that may sometimes sound familiar on account of local football teams. Places of low wages, widespread illiteracy and rampant unemployment.

I stop somewhere among these places to pump fuel. Rising prices, a few cars and a lorry. As I finish pumping a car queues up behind mine. It takes rather long to pay. The lorry driver is telling a guy how easy it is to get a job when one has a driving license for heavy weight vehicles. In the meanwhile the cashier stares at the cash register, apparently unable to deal with some technical problem. The lorry driver completes his idea: “some money is needed to get all the proper licences, of course; prepare to spend some 3000 euros in the process”. The guy, not older than thirty, laughs off the idea: “3000 euros?” he gasps, mentally processing such a huge amount, such an unthinkable fortune; “I would get married if I had 3000 euros; why would I need a job in the first place if I had such money?”. 3000 euros, a driving licence, a job: those things are apparently way beyond the reach of the guy, their sheer inaccessibility making them not even worth the effort of trying. The lorry driver allows himself a little smile, takes his change and leaves.

As this edifying conversation takes place I keep looking at the car behind mine. It didn’t move, even though all pumps had long become available. Some ten minutes have gone by and there it is: why doesn’t its owner simply choose another pump? As I pay I notice that the fuel station staff is growing impatient with the guy. I learn that he must have been there for quite a while: he’s waiting for a coffee; I mean, he’s trying to persuade the staff into giving him a coffee: “I would pay for it if I had 3000 euros”, he amusedly says.

I take my change, slightly disturbed by the passivity of the customer who keeps on waiting behind my car. I’m about to make some gesture, some shoulder shrugging, something that could express some empathy, some regret for the time it took me to pay when I actually see the driver: a middle-aged woman, her eyes blankly looking at some fixed point in the distance; there’s no sign in her whatsoever indicating that she had moved at all during the nearly fifteen minutes it took me to pay; I give up my shoulder shrugging: she simply didn’t see me. In her eyes nothing but absolute nothingness.

I have seen this look on other people’s faces: the look of purposelessness. Time stretches no more than a day for these people, the future lying somewhere in the distance, vanishing beyond the radius of the lampposts, darkened by the crumbling building of some old textile factory. They are utterly demoralized by having nothing to do, nothing to expect, nothing to hope for.

I drive through the night. I turn on the radio: news of austerity darken the darkness even more. I change to another station and some music fills the car. Driving music, how appropriate: this one, to be more precise.

The Meaning of Unemployment

            The two things may seem unrelated but as I was reading about Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes in a book about cultural studies the blog o desemprego tem rosto (unemployment has a face) immediately came to my mind. The website is a one-year long project described by the newspaper which publishes it as a photographic essay made with the aim of giving the Portuguese unemployed a voice of their own: a touch of human actuality to help break down the hegemony of cold statistics and faceless numbers. In terms of layout the concept is remarkably simple: over a dark background a black and white close-up photograph of a face and a mini-interview with questions such as how old are you, how long have you been unemployed, what was your last job, what are your educational achievements, what do you expect the future to be. 

         It is certainly interesting to note how people articulate their speech or, more specifically, their self-representation in the face of the particularly difficult context of their lives and in the broader scope of Portuguese society in general. Contrary to the apparent homogeneity of the mainstream narrative of unemployment, common people show a remarkable variety of stories about this alarming social concern. The fact is that the wearied talk about the economic crisis reverberates kaleidoscopically in popular expressions of actual unemployment, according to the specific circumstances of each person’s life. Ideology, as Barthes refers to it (the mainstream meaning of unemployment disseminated, with the help of the traditional media, by both the political and economic elites, with the maintenance of the status quo in mind), thus echoes increasingly dimly within the people who actually have to face the social and individual consequences of unemployment on a daily basis. 

           As ideology wanes so the legitimacy of the whole political system begins to falter: in the specific case of Portugal it would be fair to say that we’re living the final days of a social grand narrative which started with the Carnage Revolution. The question that nowadays dominates social debate is, however, one of alternatives: all over the West, and most likely beyond it, the what to do of the whole thing is far more a blank than the already contentious affair of the how did we end up in this mess. This blank, translated in the general moral void into which society has fallen, is a huge challenge to social agents of signification everywhere. The most interesting point about the aforementioned blog is how this challenge is being individually met by common people in the field. 

            A reading of its entries shows how the poorest among the poor cannot even articulate the proper words to define their situation. Their laconic answers and meagre use of language bears testimony to the real nature of their poverty: in fact, they’re in a state of utter symbolic deprivation. Referring to what Stuart Hall calls the struggle to signify it is fair to say that they lost the battle of signification before it had even begun. Others, usually younger and holding a university degree, opt to call for a narrative of action in the hope of change, but do so without reference to any intellectual framework: thus action, change and even revolution become in their speech signifiers without signified, failed attempts at meaning-making. Others still are significantly despondent, finding themselves lost somewhere outside the realm of social meaning after the collapse of the symbolic pillars which had previously sustained their biographies: not altogether defeated in their struggle to signify, they are still grappling to understand where they are. It seems to me that these are the most interesting of them all: people in the middle of difficult process of self-reinvention, only their faces can properly signify the deep and painful mutations Portuguese society is going through.