Re: Sandwichman and Deconsultant

[timework@xxxxxxxxx (Tom Walker)]

>PS Tom, I am nervous of your signature line about Sandwichman and
>Deconsultant. In the context of a very tricky theoretical discussion, I am
>not entirely joking. Could you explain this in a separate post?

I appreciate the anxiety. It is a long story so I'll just fill in some of
the details. The sandwichman in question refers to his/her/its/my status as
"last incarnation of the flaneur", according to Walter Benjamin and as
elaborated on by Susan Buck-Morss in a 1986 essay in New German Critique,
"The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering". The
essay and Benjamin's remarks are about the precariousness of "the social
individual", although Benjamin wouldn't have been aware of that passage on
page 705 in the Grundrisse and Buck-Morss doesn't specifically refer to it.

I've gone so far as to construct a sandwich board and walk around town in
uniform and was quite pleased at the positive reception I got from people.
It is, admittedly, one of those experiments in mixed media that might be
called an intervention, although it's not entirely clear just what it is an
intervention into.

In my subsequent research, I've discovered that the women's suffrage
movement in Britain in the early 1900s used the sandwichboard to powerful
effect and also that there was a novel written in the 1930s called the
Sandwichman about a young coal miner who seeks to "better himself" through
higher education and ends up pretty much outcast from both worlds.

You will probably be relieved to hear that the deconsultant has nothing to
do with deconstruction, other than alliteration. For the past 11 years, I
have worked as a social policy research consultant and have been somewhat
disconcerted to note that my services have become progressively less in
commercial demand in inverse proportion to my grasp of the issues, command
of the relevant literature, record of publication and recognition by my
peers. The most elegantly crafted, carefully researched and respectfully
submitted research proposal I ever wrote elicited a swarm of verbal abuse.
This leaves me with a great deal of time between contracts during which to
de-consult, which is basically to pursue my own projects and tell people,
not clients, about my findings.


Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC