Producers of Imagination
In our latest edition below, Connah clocks in and travels along the production line while listening to Abul Mogard.
Factories have produced nearly everything we own and consume. History tells us factories inspired Engels to write about the working class and how they formulated the first trade unions demanding better working conditions and better pay. Today in hyper-capitalist countries people live in them or they are turned into museums (see Stockport). However, factories have inspired artists too. Abul Mogard released another insight into the mind and history of his experience working in a factory earlier this year. The late 60 odd year old, retiree music maker, released In Immobile Air, his 6th album to date. Mogard’s records are really hard to describe but that’s not really the point here. Instead the interest lies in the conditions for Mogard’s sound. The factory in which he worked all his life before turning to music.
It would take a PhD or book - see Freeman’s - to get to the bottom of the factory's place within history and society. Factories are modern inventions. The beginning and end of modernity in anglo-capitlaist countries. Look at the edges of city centres in Britain today. Ex-factories are franchised bingo halls operated by a man called Bongo; mini-golf centres; axe-throwing sites for large groups; artisanal bakeries delivering by bike; breweries to take a tour of; WeWorks; flats; and everything else. It’s not to say it’s a bad thing. More it confirms the shift of factories as sites of production to sites of consumption. In that, it is interesting to think about whether something has been lost in the type of work that used to function there.
Not only did factories manufacture products to consume, they also inspired products of imagination, allowing an unconscious to drift. Much work today in Britain is “knowledge-based” as proven by Covid-19, with everyone confined to their home. Such work brings us to the end of being able to think while working. Take for example the cities in which factories once provided work but now call centres inhabit. You can’t daydream while checking someone’s claim that their card has been misused. You may say, “What about Amazon?” The difference of the Amazon warehouse is exactly that. A warehouse. Nothing is produced but everything tracked. An obsession with time and targets. Even the amount of milk in your cereal and fluid in your tea will be measured by how long it takes for you to piss it out. Complete oppression and submission of the daydream in order to move around our produced products of desire from one cardboard box to another. The only thing to think about is beating the clock.
If factories have diminished, what has replaced them? The US writer Mark Greif suggested something interesting about gyms. Labelling them as new sites of group work where individuals go to transform themselves. Gyms provide spaces for public displays of hard labour. Some have glass windows for all to ogle in at. They are factory like, Greif states. Repetitive machine work using tools such as the exercise bike or treadmill. Physical pain grimaced for all to see. Sweat and muscles. In popular culture too, FAC-tories have a place. Two clubs have used the name. One after another, first in New York then Manchester. All those over the age of 45 and living north of Stoke visited the British one. Again, in some ways, they provided a place for sweat and muscle. Spaces turned into sites to forget one’s own mind either through pain or hedonism.
There’s another famous factory which more than gyms and FAC51 speaks of Mogard’s music and modernity. It’s one deep rooted in our childhood, stored in our unconscious. It’s the one Charlie fantasied over. Gene Wilder its conductor. Pure Imagination. The psyche is something that could be imagined from within the factory for Wonka. All true imagination allowed to breath, experiment and create within the walls as the town crumbled outside. New worlds to be made. The factory as a metaphor for the mind. Willy Wonka and Abul Mogard have this imaginative perspective in common. Dahl’s creation imagining a world for oneself as Mogard was reimaging the sounds of his own factory floor. There is no doubt than when listening to Abul Mogard’s work knowing what has influenced it, you can imagine the type of factory he may have worked. A deafening quality to the noise of production. Sound as something physical. The conservative BBC historian, Dominic Sandbrook, referenced how factories produced a type of working-class culture that melted into what was culturally being created. Black Sabbath, Sandbrook remarks, arriving from Birmingham’s metal works. Maybe just a coincidence.
In Tate’s collection (funded by the surplus value of 19th century factory work), Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia questions the themes already hinted at here. Who are the individuals working? What can be reimagined within its walls? Another work in the Tate’s collection continues the consideration of the factory. Halun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory in 11 Decades takes inspiration from the first ever motion film. Farocki’s work highlights how factories have dominated the 20th century. It shows how spatial and temporal features may change but the factory as a consumer of one’s time, a linchpin within town life, an embodiment of the reality of capitalism, remains. What’s missing from the piece is the legacy of some factories lying dormant. Not having the luxury to be turned into something else, as they move from place to place, decade to decade.
Going back to Wonka. Gooey’s YouTube comment on Wilder’s rendition of Pure Imagination, sums it up perfectly. The more you listen to the lyrics the more you understand life’s existence. One is free, if free to think. Something Sarte considered in Being and Nothingness. With that too comes the realisation of an aloneness. These ideas are to be imagined when listening to Mogard. Not even imagined but felt. His 2018 album entitled Above All Dreams, points to something he himself might have been thinking about. If all art aspires to the condition of music, as Walter Pater wrote, then maybe all of Mogard’s music looks to move beyond all our dreams.
Wolfgang Streeck’s well-written review of Freeman’s work provides a great historical overview of how factories came to be. In it shocking facts can be read of how those operating today need to be ready to produce 300,000 iPhones at the drop of a hat, or how Henry Ford himself helped set up the VW factory plant for the Nazis. Streeck concludes with his own view of a factory, taking it even further than the Amazon warehouse. Describing the blurring lines between labour and waged labour. The consideration is that the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google are new global digital factories. Us using them is part of the factory line producing content as data, data as content to sell. Even what you are doing now, reading this, is profitable for Substack in one way or another. Why not look out the window instead, imagine, dream? Maybe listen to Mogard? That might be more productive…
Each week we will share some tracks that the contributers to Laughing Stock currently have on heavy rotation. You can follow the rolling playlist on Apple or Spotify.
ICYMI: More from Laughing Stock
Edition 5 - @samhartford on Spotify’s all seeing eye
Edition 4 - @dickiewalker on how amazing organ music is
Edtion 3 - @williampalmer on Music as Muscle Memory
Edition 2 - @connahr on Arctic Monkeys and Quantitative Easing
Edition 1 - @dickiewalker on Dua Lipa and the new pop vanguard
If you are interested in contributing to future editions of Laughing Stock, please DM either @dickiewalker or @connahr