Schleswig-Holstein digested

The long-running tale of furniture designer-makers reforming their association has reached some kind of conclusion, but in the two or three year long process has become rather like the Schleswig-Holstein question. When I die no-one will understand it except our founder, who, by then, will be in a lunatic asylum after his long battle against the committee-ising tendency.

So, before I forget all about it, here, for the benefit of posterity, is my digested read.

There once was an association called DMOU without rules or leader. It had an internet forum called Discuss, or the forum, but you couldn't join Discuss except by being a member of DMOU, though you could be a member of DMOU and not take any part in Discuss. Being a member of DMOU was if existing members recognised you as such. After the Two Hundred Years War a majority of members of DMOU voted to call themselves FDMA, call Discuss the Forum, adopt a set of rules which nobody read but everybody thought were jolly good, and elect a committee which wasn't meant to do anything except keep the money, answer the post and deputise for each other when they fell ill from too many committee lunches. (Some hope there!) Since DMOU had no rules, no-one could say whether this was legitimate or not, but FDMA had 'force majeure' on its side. Following the example of David Owen when the Social Democratic Party merged with the Liberal party, some old lags from DMOU declared the vote was not legitimate and that they embodied the continuing DMOU. Others, like aging bishops slumped in their armchairs in the library of the Athenaeum, no longer knew what they belonged to. There then ensued the War of the Succession, which lasted for the next five hundred years, outlasting the survival of furniture as it was once known, and which, as I hardly need tell you, in our day has been totally replaced by Gravity Control Differential Force Fields and Invisibility Cloaks. If you're interested to know what 'furniture' actually looked like back then I think you can still find a few examples in Reserve Collection 5C of the European State Museum of Antiquities (normally open every third Wednesday afternoon of the month by appointment). As I recollect, there are even one or two pieces reputed to have been made by members of DMOU or FDMA. It is now difficult to know what functional purpose theses strange-looking objects possessed, and at least one of them has a peculiar mark called a 'Guildmark'. No-one now knows what that mark represented, but it is thought to have had some significance in the War of the Succession. Or not.

I hope that makes it all clear

War is the health of the state

'It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression.
...
'What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand as a definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact enough to mean something. On the Government we can put our hand as a certain organization of ruling functions, the machinery of lawmaking and law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war — or at least, its significant classes — considers that it derives its authority and its purpose from the idea of the State.
...
'Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest hand. We have not even the advantage, like those little unborn souls in The Blue Bird, of consciousness before we take up our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group our own passionate inertia against change, against the effort of reason, and the adventure of beauty.

'Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given. Society and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it, as much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is, therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is in the weather. We may bow down before it, just as our ancestors bowed before the sun and moon, but it is only because something in us unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshiped. Once the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into a general resistance toward a lessening of their privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes identified with the sanctity of the ruling class, and the latter are permitted to remain in power under the impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us. . . . '

War is the health of the state

RANDOLPH BOURNE 1918

The cutting edge of luxury

 

Furniture designer-makers anxiously and interminably fret about their commercial viability, their social responsibility, and look to their new association to make them rich and famous (whilst keeping them ethical and sustainable).

It would repay us to reflect on an account of a commercially highly successful sector of the retail trade in the UK published in today's Observer. At first sight, we are the polar opposites of women's high-street fashion, but we live and work in the same world. Is that the globalised world?

A brand too far

Furniture designer-makers – well, British ones, mostly – well, some of them – have been busily changing their association into something more ‘outward-looking’ that will make them much better known, and much better off. DMOU becomes FDMA. It has taken more than two years of discussion and debate and some people – well, me anyway – regret that the open and fluid character of the old association will be lost for no actual gain. So this is a post only for furniture designer-makers and those with a direct interest in such things.

The association will certainly have to change the ‘About Us’ page on its website.

Now we have a committee, whereas before we prided ourselves that we did not, and it takes its first small steps into brand definition with a quest for a Iogo. To what extent, I wonder, is it possible to advance the interests of all members by the promotion of a single FDMA ‘brand’?

Members get touchy at being differentiated from other members, at least at the upper end of the spectrum, but we cannot sensibly ignore the fact that, having already taken our association down the road of ‘inclusiveness’, our membership embraces a very wide range of work.

Of course the FDMA can say, ‘At whatever level you wish to acquire a piece of furniture you can find a small independent designer-maker who can provide you with something individual and satisfying.’ But that’s hardly compulsive promotion. As soon as the promotion tries to be more effective it has to concentrate on some differentiated particulars. Can we really advance the fortunes of --- --- and --- --- in a single breath? Do we all sell to the same market? I think it is difficult to answer ‘yes’; the membership as a whole just does not constitute, in a commercially meaningful sense, a single ‘brand’. We do have a, rather frayed, ‘philosophical’ identity as ‘designer-makers’, but, although that is real, I do not think it will be much called upon in commercial promotion: it is sometimes difficult to get our membership to understand it, let alone the buying public.

There are some members scarcely involved in one-off commissions; there are great disparities of scale (some members head companies that employ around 40 people, others are one-person, or even half-person bands); enormous variation in the character of ‘artistic’ approach; there are members concentrating just on particular types of furniture; and so on. But the most obvious disparity is in – I struggle to find a word that expresses what we all recognise without giving offence – ‘sophistication’? ‘refinement’? ‘originality’? maybe just ‘expense’. Not all our members can meaningfully offer to inlay their client’s coat of arms into their purchase. A few of our members have achieved almost ‘heritage’ status, actively admired by a section of the public who cannot possibly aspire to own a piece of it. You have only to look at the published results of successful PR about our work, with that vulgar or pretentious vacuousness that so often characterises it, to see that we cannot blithely ignore unwanted externalities in constructing our promotion. These are marketing facts. The world is not about to change, even if we are.

So, ill equipped as we are to direct the public attention with any developed distinguishing discourse of our own about our work, we focus it (or allow it to be focussed) on the small group of individuals whose work we know, from experience, provokes the readiest response, a small group selected by the even smaller group that runs the project, one perhaps not completely distinct from our (non)-executive committee. So FDMA becomes a successful public brand; we have created stars, or at least buffed up our existing ones – but is it a successful association?

Once an identity of structure and an identity of brand are adopted they require, for their effective functioning, an identity of membership, and one will be acquired and imposed by process and practice if it is not chosen by discussion and consensus.

The question of our identity needs answering not only in deciding what to do in defining FDMA as such, but also in forming the relationship between individual projects and the FDMA ‘brand’. It is difficult to see that most marketing or promotional projects will not be slanted towards the ‘upper’ echelons of one-off commission work. I don’t mean exclusively so, but, given our inability to select or characterise our work by any criterion beyond a general and unarticulated notion of excellence or expressiveness (to award it a Guildmark so to speak), it seems all the more likely. That is the easiest sector to promote; those are the members most likely to have the resources, the time, the money and the appetite to support projects; that is the territory from which the FDMA idea sprang and it is quite prominent in the committee make-up.

In that way FDMA will become ‘aspirational’: with people joining expecting to serve a long apprenticeship before they can hope to participate fully in the tangible benefits of membership. That is not how DMOU/FDMA has presented itself to designer-makers hitherto, and it is not, in my view, a sustainable format for the association.

I am not suggesting there are dark forces at work here, or that this is the exclusive character of FDMA’s likely development, but I do think it is a real danger that, over time, after the initial enthusiasm, a significant body of members (including some who voted for FDMA) will come to see FDMA (with some justification) as benefiting mainly those ‘upper echelons’, those who, to their minds, least need it.

They will say nothing at first and so, in that sense, the association and its discussion forum will appear undivided. But the resentment will grow, and from time to time break out in fractious and slightly them-and-us. This is the classic path of broad-based but formalised ‘professional’ associations, especially those (and FDMA is quite likely to join their ranks) where membership is seen as essential for professional advancement.

All the talk now of course is of success, democracy and solidarity, but this minority will feel more and more ignored and become less and less inclined to take any part in the association, and so sets in its slow decline, or else its conversion into (or supplanting by) a more frankly selective and ‘aspirational’ body.

The more our committee tries to define the single FDMA ‘brand’, moving on past logos, thinking they are being ‘inclusive’, the worse it will become, because it can only be a pretence that all our interests are served by a single kind of promotion and FDMA will become effectively identified with the kind of work that is easiest to promote. It is our own backyard globalisation, our surrender to the deracinated concept of the ‘world-class’, where creativity is validated not by the individual, rooted imagination but by general commercial endorsement – a concentration on the kind of furniture whose market depends upon a globalised, high-input, low resource-cost, high wealth-polarisation economy, which, it seems to me is what the Guildmark culture links into. We are in danger of adopting a cult of mindless excellence, complete with its own external identifiers. DMOU/FDMA, despite in practice always veering towards inclusiveness over any individual membership application, has already, in its outward pronouncements, begun slipping down that slope by putting first, in its list of indicators for potential members to use in pre-assessing themselves, awards, selection for particular exhibitions, and membership of other groups.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear; maybe we’ll just rub along with nothing terribly remarkable being achieved for any of us. So that we all stay a little disappointed, but no-one gets resentful of others. I doubt it, but, if we want to maintain a broad association more than we want to achieve substantial advantage for just a section of it, that may be the best we can hope for, unless we take radical and determined steps to disaggregate the FDMA commercial ‘brand’ and get back to our original vision.

Why do people join associations?

Why do people, including furniture designer-makers, join associations?

Now there is a really interesting topic of psycho-social speculation.

To be brief: why do people join (or in the case of furniture designer-makers, why were they so exercised about having a newer better association instead of just getting on and doing the things themselves in ad hoc groups)?

They join because they see themselves as the sort of people who ought to belong to that sort of association - and vice versa. It's ideas in their minds in each direction.

It's a question of identity, and the association becomes a small (usually) part of their identity. But of course they're not in control: other people form part of this thing that is part of them, and they have different ideas and modes of behaviour. Therein lies the explanation of why people not infrequently behave so badly in associations - behaviour they would feel inhibited from indulging in individual encounters. They impugn people's motives; they object over strongly to other people's actions or even discourse; they misrepresent others' words and deeds; they hope to expel them. But they have to do so because they are correcting a wayward part of themselves. They don't mean to accuse others. It's a mild form of derangement, probably with a name in the literature (I expect it's the 'Strangelove syndrome' - remember his arm?).

These are the stronger (or madder) members. The more vulnerable join because they hope they are, or hope they will by joining become, the sort of people who ought to belong. They keep quiet and nurse their discontents. For the time being.

There it is in a nutshell, totally theoretical of course. No reference to any living person is intended or should be inferred, and no animals were harmed in the production of this post.

Where are we in the world?

I recently initiated a thread on the furniture designer-makers forum to which I subscribe trying to identify our place in the wider social and economic currents swirling around us. This, I suppose, was the heart of it:

It can hardly be denied that 'We make expensive objects that few can afford'; that even our batch produced furniture needs a more than average level of disposable income; and that many of us are uncomfortable with that - just as William Morris was all that time ago.

Long ago our society and economy got to the point where no ordinary person could afford the fruits of 'hand production', except for very small items and the repair of important technologically produced goods, like fixing our cars. Yet even there the range of those mass produced items that it is 'economic' to repair by individual labour rather than just buy a new one is, as we all notice, shrinking rapidly, and many are explicitly manufactured in a way that means it is impossible to take them apart without destroying them. (How many of us incidentally have any concern for the possibility of taking our furniture apart non-destructively in decades to come?)

And things have moved on, so that here most people cannot afford even mass-produced objects unless the relatively low labour content they still require comes from third-world workers, whom we regard with an uncomfortable mixture of guilt that we are exploiting them, and moral self-approbation that we are 'lifting them out of poverty'. (Never mind that we are also lifting them out of their own cultures, and we usually put aside the thought that once we have so lifted them the added burden on the world's resources will become truly insupportable.)

And things are moving on still further, so that the globalised economy is moving towards an end where generally labour will be unable to earn sufficient money to purchase its own product and wealth becomes increasingly invested in assets of inflating value rather than in productive industry. This is, as far as I understand it, the collapse of our economy that some people predict through a combination of simultaneous inflation in one area and deflation in another.

The one indispensible item for us all where a relatively high element of hand labour is difficult to eliminate or outsource to the third world is our houses, which have inflated to a value where they become a life-time burden on our personal earnings and a key asset prop of the whole unstable financial/economic system, ripe (or over-ripe) for corruption by those who believe they can manipulate the system for their own advantage.

My point is that, however morally aware and troubled we are, it is a difficult treadmill to step off.

You are right too that we attach tags to our furniture to redeem it. 'Green' is one of the most common, but some time ago Barnaby pointed out that the carbon footprint of a small workshop was likely to compare very unfavourably with that of larger production. So we concentrate on how sustainably we source our raw materials and gloss over the sustainability of our whole operation, let alone the fact that a large proportion of our sustainable timber ends up in the dust extractor.

'Heirloom' is perhaps safer if we just mean that we expect our furniture to out-last us and we hope it will still be valued by succeeding generations. Yet we have to steer clear of meaning 'value' in any monetary sense, because when our furniture does reach the resale market it commands pretty miserable prices, and, in the 'antique' market generally it is only a very few outstanding and 'collectible' items that attract high prices, and the vast bulk of well designed and made furniture from the past sells for low prices in the sense that no-one today could possibly make it from scratch so cheaply.

That is a reflection of the nature of the asset market that characterises the wealthiest end of our society and economy, and what is, I think, most ethically uncomfortable for us as designer-makers is a tendency to aspire in our work to the trappings of that level of luxury. Mostly the hope is vain, but it results in very expensive furniture with a very high level of finish and a sophistication verging on the absurd, a rarified claim to be taking our product to unprecedented, never before thought of heights. (And here we break ranks with our Arts and Crafts predecessors.) That sort of approach of course finds willing allies in the ranks of professional marketers and promoters, publicists and even 'critics', and maybe associations. It is inimical to any more culturally distinct or articulated characterisation of a body of craft or art work. Historically, work that has been so characterised has often met, initially, with surprise, incomprehension or hostility from the contemporary market - which is not what our new association is aiming at.