The Cambridge Humanities Review Lent Term 2015, Issue 8
CHR No.8. Editor: Daniel Matore. Deputy Editor: Harry Dadswell. Copy-Editor: Lynette Talbot. Illustrations: Florence Shaw. Design Editor: Andrew Lister/ Traven T. Croves (assisted by Grant Norris & Joseph Menage at Winchester School of Art).
hinc lucem et pocula sacra
Julian Cosma
17,300
A review of Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser(Allen Lane, 2013)
same Cold War impetus was the driving force behind the immolation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However for President Truman the bomb had the potential of being a substitute for a large and costly standing army. He was not dissuaded when late in the War he received a letter from Szilárd, who after seeing the immolation of Tokyo had devel-oped cold feet about the atom bomb, signed by sixty-eight other Man-hattan Project scientists counselling that the introduction of the bomb would have ‘devastating’ consequences. For Truman atomic weapons were a way to counterbalance the Soviet Army, a military force which outnumbered US troops in Germany ten to one.
His successor, President Eisenhower, followed in his path by building up nuclear weapons in lieu of conventional forces, amassing an overwhelming nuclear stockpile. The attraction of nuclear weapons on the conventional battlefield faded, quite understandably, once the Soviet Union was able to achieve second-strike capability. However, one of the most important consequences of this mutual build up—a phenomenon that spanned the entirety of the US-Soviet relationship
—was the ever-present possibility of a mistake, on either side, initiating fear of an imminent strike, which, in turn, would summon an immedi-ate response. The result, as the novelist Martin Amis phrased it, would ‘bring about the Book of Revelation in a matter of hours’ (albeit with salvation most probably remaining absent).
It is on this point where Command and Control is most interesting: the built-in potential for annihilation, especially for nuclear weapons under a precarious and unstable system of control. Paul Bracken said as much in his ground-breaking 1985 book Command and Control of Nuclear Forces. In all the studies that came in its wake, including the book under review, a unifying theme emerges from all the jargon of Single Inte-grated Operational Plans, Distant Early Warning Lines, and ‘pre-del-egation’: it is luck, rather than sapient methods of organisation, which should be credited with the lack of nuclear war and nuclear accident in the latter half of the twentieth century. General George Lee Butler noted in 1999, ‘we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I sus-pect the latter in greatest proportion.’
There are roughly three types of crisis: accidental, intentional, and an admixture of both. The first is less well known: the inadvertent moments of heightened tension fuelled by human error and specula-tion. The number of instances listed in Command and Control make those who declare the fundamental security of our nuclear arsenal look like Chaucer’s Pardoner, just substitute his Latinate phrases for ‘nuclear umbrella’ and ‘SRAM’. Major or near major accidents: 1948 over Ber-lin, a little known dimension of the Suez Crisis, 1958 in Morocco, and domestically 1960, 1979, 1980 —this list being far from comprehensive. The moving causes were not bellicosity; rather it was asymmetric in-formation and the daily grind of military life (working with nuclear weapons, as this book makes clear, has an enervating effect on military personnel).
In 1983, as Reagan’s simple and simplistic phrase ‘evil empire’ was being broadcast across the airwaves of America, tensions between the US and the USSR were ascending to dizzying heights: the ‘Star Wars’ program had been announced, more than 30 billion dollars would be allocated to building a panopticon of lasers and missiles, which from the lofty heavens would put paid to any potential Soviet missile attacks. A variant on the ‘peace through strength’ campaign slogan of the 1980 election, it was, as the statesman George Ball called it, not a policy of ‘purchasing security’ but one of ‘nuclear escalation’. The effect at the Kremlin was one of heightened suspicion and emu-lation. This was to be expected in an anarchic international system, as Robert Jervis pointed out, where defensive measures are often indis-tinguishable from offensive ones. In 1983, as more Pershing II missiles were being moved into West Germany, a Soviet fighter jet mistakenly downed South Korean Flight 007, killing all of its passengers. Soviets disclaimed any responsibility and it was only after the US released au-dio recordings of Soviet pilots being ordered to shoot down the plane that the Soviets made a public admission of culpability. Soon after, five Minutemen missiles were spotted on the radar screens of soldiers under the command of a certain Colonel Stanislav Petrov. With un-flinching equanimity, he told his superiors that they were not about to become the second country on which the US unleashed nuclear weap-ons and should not launch a volley of their own. Petrov is just one
Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control begins in 1980 outside Damascus, Arkansas, in the rural American south, at an innocuous-looking silo housing a Titan II missile fitted with a thermonuclear warhead. Meas-uring 10 feet in diameter and 103 feet tall, with the explosive force of eighteen billion pounds of TNT—about four pounds of high explo-sives for every person alive in that year—it lay in wait like the barb of a bee. Tension builds as Schlosser alternates between the quotidian minutes of maintenance, the overwhelming sameness of all the Titan II launch pads, the Standard Operating Procedures of the Strategic Air Command and the seemingly slim chance of error. He relays in grave detail the sheer unlikelihood of a nuclear warhead being unintentional-ly detonated, however; that is almost what happens. Everything about the near nuclear explosion, or ‘broken arrow’, is utterly normal. That is, everything but the potential outcome. A socket from a socket wrench, dropped by an airman conducting maintenance in the silo, falls and breaks a hole in the missile’s fuel tank causing a massive explosion. Thankfully the warhead itself doesn’t explode. As he phrases it:
The Titan II explosion at Damascus was a normal accident, set in motion by a trivial event (the dropped socket) and caused by a tightly coupled, interactive system (the fuel leak that raised the temperature in the silo, making an oxidizer leak more likely). That system was also overly complex (the officers and technicians in the control centre couldn’t determine what was hap-pening inside the silo).
Schlosser’s point in penning this catalogue of error, both human and mechanistic, which could have wiped out the state of Arkansas, is clear. Eric Schlosser’s book investigates the systems of command and control that surround nuclear weapons, systems of authority put into place to ensure that weapons be deployed exclusively by a legitimate politi-cal authority. As the Damascus incident demonstrated, with nuclear weapons the flap of the butterfly’s wing and the typhoon are separated by only a few degrees.
It was H.G. Wells, the inaugurator of so many fictional realities, who first intuited an ‘atomic bomb’ in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. Wells writes of a nuclear holocaust that would consume most of man-kind in a grand conflagration. In his typical didactic tone, Wells claims the destruction would unchain the manacled mind of those who sur-vive, leading to—what else!—peace through world government. This burdensome thesis did, as Schlosser recounts, have an appreciable af-fect. The Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd, who had met with Wells in the hope of acquiring the publishing rights to The World Set Free, was so shaken by the notion of such a weapon in the hands of the Third Reich that in 1939 he recruited Albert Einstein to send a letter to Pres-ident Roosevelt warning of the potential German threat. The eventual response was the Manhattan Project.
The development of the Manhattan Project and its consequenc-es was given its best treatment in Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer-Prize win-ning tetralogy The Making of the Nuclear Age (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, The Twilight of the Bomb). Nonetheless Schlosser, by looking specifically at systems of command and control, does an admirable job of finding new edges to this admittedly well-worn pebble. The re-search that led to the bomb was originally prophylactic: the goal was to prevent the Nazi regime from deploying a bomb (which the Reich was keen on creating). However, the system devised by General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan project, proved overwhelming. First, there was the importance of strict compartmentalisation. If you were working on how effectively to deliver the payload from a certain type of plane, there was not much room for deviation from that line of inquiry. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s role was more or less the facilitator of all this; he was less the father of the bomb than the headmaster of the sprawling academy from which it emerged. This model of organi-sation, a strict vertical and horizontal hierarchy, was the future model for command and control. To each player a part; to each function a functionary.
The second was the geopolitical implication, which General Groves was quick to capture. In March of 1944, well after it was clear that the Germans would not build a bomb of their own, Groves said the bomb’s raison d’être was to impose US power on the USSR. There is a not inconsiderable argument among historians as to whether this
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“Missile S
ite and L
eaking F
uel Tank”, Arkansas G
azette, 1978
Titan
II missile sits (deactivated
) in a silo
near Tucson, AZ
(photograph: T
im R
awle)
There’s a quiet pleasure to be had in giving up philosophy and leafing through anecdotes about Ludwig Wittgenstein instead. How he de-signed his sister’s house in Vienna; how he made Norman and Leonida Malcolm run around pretending to be the Sun, Earth, and (himself) Moon; how he quit Cambridge to live by a Norwegian fjord. (The last one mightn’t seem all that outlandish to some of us.) But anecdotes have their own unobtrusive ways of refracting the light of More Se-rious Facts; in the case of Wittgenstein, one such anecdote—‘telling’, as it’s put—is that he used to relax by going to watch Western films. When we hear this, there’s usually a curious kind of cocked-head re-sponse; our first impulse is to be tickled by the image of such a Seri-ous Man at the flicks, watching Gary Cooper gun down bandits. Yet there’s nothing so odd about it: it’s not as if deep thinkers are restricted to watching visual tone-poems. The anecdote momentarily flags up something about what we overlook, the incidental details of a life; it catches us in the act of reflex judgement, and makes us watch our-selves watching. The impulse is caught in the act: that of finding Witt-genstein-at-the-movies out of character. To borrow a Wittgensteinian phrase, it’s as if we want to say: ‘Why do we think that? Why should his character be too slim for both the high and the low? And what’s so ‘low’ about Westerns or so ‘high’ about Wittgenstein anyway?’
Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love began, and begins, with this kind of anecdote. At the 1998 Oscars, there was a performance by sing-er-songwriter Elliott Smith—a poet of the shadows if ever there was one—followed by the dazzling, belting Céline Dion. Both were nomi-nated for Best Song. Madonna, handing out the gongs (Dion won for that song from James Cameron’s Titanic), scoffed at the non-surprise; the media pointed out how incongruous Dion and Smith looked to-gether in this cosmic glamorama; five years later, Smith was dead at thirty-four, after a decade of mental troubles and substance abuse. Wil-son heard the news, and, in his words, ‘flashed back to that night when the whole world had gotten to hear what one of its fragile, unlovely outcasts had to offer, and it answered, No, we’d prefer Céline Dion.’ And it seemed, deeply, to matter that they had said that. Let’s Talk About Love starts there, in orbit around Dion—‘tacky, gauche, kitschy or, as they say in Quebec, kétaine’—and investigates the art of writing what Wilson calls our ‘taste biography’, the shifting record of the things we like, and how we present them to others, and to what extent the liking and the presenting are inseparably twined together. He keeps matters clear by his studied refusal to say whether he thinks certain artists are hot or not: it’s the writing of taste that matters, and why we feel so strongly about it.
He’s careful not to dismiss the value of having taste-standards: in the conclusion he points out that after all’s said and done, he himself doesn’t like Céline Dion much more, and besides, the book was ‘not about her […] but about the ways people saw her’. His concern, in-stead, is to invest the possession of those standards with a better aware-ness of how we come to possess them, whether our tastes are for Céline Dion or Arnold Schoenberg. This involves a lot of generous interac-tion with Dion fans, and gentle exposition of Pierre Bourdieu’s mon-umental Distinction; the notion of ‘social capital’ is glossed at length, and there’s a potted history of the peculiarly Québécois chanson. That said, at one point his careful spectatorship courts a preachier involve-ment: it’s too hasty to say that in ‘the early twenty-first century, almost no one believes’ in the notions of the ‘highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, and ‘lowbrow’. That universal assertion is unusually bold, and comes off as a mishit: ‘almost’ nobody? and are such notions nothing but ‘snob-bery’? Wilson’s rightly keen to drain the social prejudice from those categories—their suggestion that some things are ranked above others, where that rank gives off an unwelcome air of lucre—although even if we amputate the class-aspect, the labels won’t die so easily. Faced with art, judgement is what we do, and if we completely purge ourselves of the old ready-made notions, High and Low Art, we need to start afresh with new data: the number of confessed fans, say, or the raw profit margins. Rank, in some form, matters, because life’s too short to watch, read or hear everything, and we need some guide to doing so; and even if industry PR-figures trumpet budgets and sales and popularity, that merely betrays their and our awareness that how much (or little) we ‘like’ Lou Reed’s music, are immediately and emotively pleased by it, isn’t all that there is to say about whether or not we should listen to it. (What makes the sound of the Velvet Underground difficult to enjoy
Cal Revely-Calder
Ballad Power
A review of Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste byCarl Wilson. Revised 2nd Edition. (Bloomsbury, 2014)
Treaty. However, the desire for the nuclear weapons in both small and large developing countries is an unavoidable fact (especially smaller countries—where their odds of survival, in their eyes, conspicuously increase with each addition to their stockpile). This is only to say, once the feline escapes the bag, it is not liable to re-enter without a great fuss. Globally, there are now 17,300 nuclear warheads. This number is simultaneously frightening and dizzying, as it should be. But the true value of Schlosser’s book is exploring not only what the number 17,300 means but also the unstable and tenuous web in which those multitudes are, or will be, bound.
example of the many previously unsung heroes in Command and Control whose coolness held back almost inconceivable misery.
If accidents are easier to countenance, with some solace to be found in their inevitability, the moments of agency and intention take on an even greater weight. And in particularly contentious situations, intention and accident bow and twist together into something terrible. Initiated in the autumn of 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis was probably the best-known instance where a nuclear holocaust was within sight. One example makes this point succinctly. On the 27th of October 1962, at the height of the crisis, Vasili Arkhipov, second-in-command of the Soviet nuclear submarine B-59, faced a dire situation. The B-59 was humming around in international waters. Importantly, this meant they were outside the zone of exclusion maintained by the US navy around Cuba during the crisis. Nonetheless the Americans were trying to com-pel the submarine upwards, by firing a barrage of depth charges. Too far submerged to receive any communication whatsoever, the situation was, as they say, ‘fluid’. There was intense disagreement on board B-59 as to whether it should fire a warhead as the captain and many of the crew believed that the USSR and America were already at war. Arkh-ipov dissented, inching the world back from the edge of the precipice. This was part of a larger pattern, where it became increasingly hard to determine in the necessary amount of time whether a missile was the initiation of all-out conflict or a mistake that, if responded to as an at-tack, would bring about the same result in slightly more time.
The popular rendition of this crisis has derived very little from this version of events. It traffics in the idea that Soviet aggression was met with firmness and ‘vigor’—American virility walking away the mor-al and strategic victor. This notion of 1962 misses two major points: the technological and political. In the late 1950s the US created the intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs. These technological im-provements radically decreased the warhead’s flight time with a missile capable of arcing from the US to the USSR in a half hour. The stand-ard operating procedures of the navy coupled a ‘strike first’ policy with a total lack of Russian speakers aboard any blockading ships. First off, it is true that Kennedy resisted the notion that the US should use nu-clear weapons in Cuba. However, the combination of Jupiter missiles in Turkey (deployed in 1961) and a campaign of terror against Cuba (the Bay of Pigs in particular and Operation Mongoose in general) gave weight to the idea, readily apprehended by Khrushchev, that the US was more than willing to contribute to the atmosphere of aggres-sion and distrust. Not to elide the duplicities and aggressions of the USSR—Khrushchev repeatedly made soothing promises, at different points, to both Kennedy and Castro, to the effect that no such missiles were in or going to Cuba.
Ironically, two years after Kennedy had, from the right, criti-cised a saturnine Nixon for failing to realise the dangers of the Missile Gap, it was Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command, who de-clared that America’s ‘nuclear superiority was so great, that the Soviets wouldn’t dare to attack Berlin or the United States.’ He followed this up by playing on, nay, ripping at the Kennedy heartstrings, with the admonishment that indecision would be ‘almost as bad as the appease-ment at Munich’ (One might make parenthetical mention of an anon-ymous Kennedy official’s note on UN Ambassador Stevenson during the Bay of Pigs invasion, ‘Adlai [Stevenson] wanted a Munich’). The Munich Agreement, viewed retrospectively as an ignominious toler-ation of Fascism, cast its shadow over the fraught diplomacy of the Cold War, even if the Bomb had realigned geopolitical strategy and the rules of warfare.
Might it be the case, when thinking about nuclear weapons, that the era of Munich is a more apposite one than Kennedy could have ever imagined? The origins of nuclear power lay in the intellectual landscape of World War II. The need for a decisive, eschatological weapon was, in the end, an impulse that could not be denied. But where does that leave not only the United States, which despite Barack Obama’s early cautious proclamations of international abatement still posses 5,113 nuclear warheads, but the rest of the world as well? No country, if they are determined to get the bomb, has failed, although a few countries have been dissuaded. South Africa, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan gave up their weapons with varying degrees of alac-rity, and Iraq and Libya’s efforts at acquisition proved to be abortive. Nine countries now remain, both in and out of the Non-Proliferation
Céline D
ion, “Des M
ots Qui S
onnent”,1991
54
brook analysis for analysis’ sake. Wilson’s chapter on the actual Dion album—titled Let’s Talk About Love (1997)—goes through song-by-song, picking up the flaws and the triumphs with a good, learned critical eye, but his book sometimes pays so much attention to the past and the present of taste and its roots that it doesn’t think much about how they might be joined to its future. Progressive criticism has to be pro-gressing somewhere, after all. King cites the example of Rick Moody, who started a furore after describing Taylor Swift’s music in these less-than-glowing terms:
I respect Taylor Swift’s ability to steal from every available popular form of the moment, viz., ‘country’ and pop and hip hop and electronica, but there is nothing in this music that does anything new besides fusing together a mandolin with a programmed drum track, and so I say it is inert, like the flattened squirrel, manufactured, ungenuine […] Taylor Swift represents what makes me want to die about popular music. She makes me want to die. If it’s all going to be like this— merchandising opportunities, branding, cross-platform-ing—the marble slab of post-mortality, then I am not interested in popular music. I don’t give a fuck.
—which is cruel, but searingly and publicly honest, and consequential in the sense that its fire is born of a concern for where pop is going, and whether that’s the right direction or not (seemingly, in this case, ‘not’). It seems uncharitable and wrong-headed to criticise Wilson for the book he didn’t write, but his satisfaction at having sparked a ‘dialogue’, a ‘conversation’, a ‘cocktail party in prose’, ironically give Let’s Talk About Love the air of a successful therapy rather than a useful prescription for the rest of us. It might be that, reprinted seven years after its publication, it’s become less timely, a possibility which Wil-son himself calmly raises in an Afterword. But calmness might not be timely either—if you believe Rick Moody, Taylor Swift is the omen, a symbol of what’s going wrong, and that’s a downward movement happening in time, our own time: ‘The frog, in the pot, is being heated very slowly, and soon the frog is going to boil, without ever having realised it.’ Then again, the frog is a metaphor, and it could be just a matter of taste.
The supplementary essays are a success, and lend more success to the book in toto, because they balance out Wilson’s restraint and introspection with a punchy range of perspectives. They consist of personal responses to Wilson’s book, as first published, or musings on similar themes, or general thoughts about taste or pop. Though they’re wildly varied in attitude and interest, they give the second half of the new, expanded Let’s Talk About Love a zip and zest which would otherwise be missed. In retrospect, the first half sounds better, smaller in stature and scope but at least more secure in its new-found company, a personal tale at that ‘cocktail-party’, sometimes better and sometimes worse for talking alongside other guests. Some of these guests are thoughtful and lucid, such as Roth, King and Sukhdev Sandhu; Jon-athan Sterne and Mary Gaitskell are less so, and Drew Daniel’s chap-ter creaks with academese. But none, fortunately, plumb the depths of contemporary binge-thinker James Franco, whose lengthy account of various art-projects is tiringly conceited (‘my position was unique’, ‘I was nominated for an Oscar’, etc.) and irritatingly shallow. For in-stance, his film Francophenia, a meta-portrait of footage from T.V. soap General Hospital, was—despite his humble concern that ‘I wanted to en-ter their world, not to transform it’—ultimately ‘about frames within frames within frames, an examination of how we entertain ourselves’. This kind of thing isn’t bold or new, and after a dozen such pages, the only conceivable entertainment would be to batter him with Stewart Home’s work until he learned something by osmosis.
The stand-out chapter is by Sheila Heti, who contributes a play-list, with brief narrative sketches, of ten songs that talked to her about love, which ‘helped me understand something about my heart’. She and Wilson, ex-spouses, appear in each other’s sections, unnamed: it gives their reflections a retrospective sadness and emotional purchase. As with the best of Let’s Talk About Love, it’s the human element that has the strongest traction, from Heti’s heartbroken mix-tape to the words of the Céline Dion fans, or the chummy wit in Wilson’s best turns of phrase: Titanic is ‘the ultimate planetary love boat’, Sin City
is, under another aspect, precisely what made them influential agents of various kinds of musical and performative change.)
The ‘high’ and the ‘low’, then, can imply a depth of intellectu-al and compositional complexity as much as they’ve encoded social background and outlook: there’s a way in which we can continue using these words, one which is less about denoting what should be accept-able fare than about what’ll take more digestion. In one of the book’s appended essays, Marco Roth points out that militant anti-brow-ism sounds vaguely like it should be desirable, but doesn’t match up to our actual desires:
Seeing art as a product, mere stuff, rather than a work, has become a sign of a good liberal (as opposed to bad elitist) state of mind. This is why you must support upper-middlebrow Terrence Malick one day, and the next spuriously shock everyone with a loud defence of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Too often, being on the left tasks you with a vigilant daily quest to avoid being tagged with snobbery.
There are at least a hundred reasons why—particularly in comparison to a Malick film—Transformers 3 is, on the level of narrative, character-isation, acting, editing, dialogue, pacing, tone, cinematography, and ideology (inter alia), a hideous sin against everything that makes cine-ma holy. But the shock wouldn’t just be ‘spurious’ because the defence would ring false: it wouldn’t be a shock at all (unless your friends had ever been unwise enough to rate your cinematic judgement), because people’s tastes can and do vary from day to day. Brows can be raised or lowered according to circumstance, and that doesn’t mean that the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’ can’t be meaningfully distinguished. It’s possible to assert that late Beethoven is more tonally and harmonical-ly rich than Rihanna, and therefore in some usefully germane sense ‘highbrow’, without being inconsistent if you choose “We Found Love” over the Hammerklavier Sonata at 1am on a Saturday morning.
Such consistency, spread over times, moods, and circumstances, requires an open-mindedness which Wilson is always keen to display. He meets a number of Céline Dion fans, among them Sophoan Sorn, a twentysomething film-production student from California: Sorn’s words are honest, upbeat, sweet, and genuine; when he professes love for Phil Collins’ “Groovy Kind of Love”, you feel guilty for thinking of Patrick Bateman. Afterwards, Wilson is bewildered by how the mo-ment of comparison throws his cynicism into relief:
[…] it is one of the most surreal ‘taste shock’ experiences I’ve had: I couldn’t fathom where to begin challenging his perceptions or comparing them to mine. Nor would I want to. His taste world is coherent and an enormous pleasure to him. Not only does it seem as valid as my own, utterly incompatible tastes, I like him so much that for a long moment his taste seems superior. What was the point again of all that nasty, life-negating crap I like?
This ends on a gently self-deprecating note, but for the most part he sounds truly taken aback. The self-abasement—‘for a long moment his taste seems superior’ (by what standard?)—stands tall as a testimonial, but it demonstrates the occasional difficulty with Let’s Talk About Love, which is that its fiercely human and humane drive, plunging someone out of their own world and towards those of the most distant others, can tend to push too strongly against the question of whether taste is ever anything other than free-floating, something tinged with one col-our and then another by the social world in which we revolve. He’s keen to ask where the ‘guilt’ comes from in the sense of pop being a Guilty Pleasure, and suggests that we should instead conceive of the ‘guilty displeasure’: we should look a little harder at ourselves when we reflex-ively condemn the mass-market, slushy ballads of Céline Dion. That’s Wilson’s own impulse, and it’s an honest one, but Jason King’s supple-mentary essay strikes a more urgent note, lauding Wilson’s sharp atten-tion even as he points out its limits: ‘criticism is only progressive if it is met by an approach that honours the historical continuity of response to artistic works and if it acknowledges the ongoing value of context’.
This has an eye on why it’s worth talking about taste at all, per-haps saying unwelcome and occasionally impolite things, and it won’t
is ‘Vegatraz’, Seattle’s Experience Music Project ‘bleeds money like a Rockefeller on an autopsy table’. As with his brief moments on the kitschiness of Catholicism, these little personal twists often seem like unopened windows onto bigger thoughts, but Wilson’s book is con-tent to stay on personal terms, without letting go of the human hands it tries hard to feel and understand. For those concerned with the state of pop and where it’s headed, Let’s Talk About Love could be the book to draw out, thoughtfully and tactfully, the origins and limits of their concerns; but it refrains from saying what might be done with them next, and to what all those concerns might amount.
When the physicist Ernst Mach died in February 1916, metaphysics lost its most renowned interpreter of science. The following month Einstein published his Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Similarly the death of the philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1970 was followed a year later by the first paper to confirm in vivo MRI scans—an imaging technique which would allow scientists to probe higher-level brain func-tions in remarkable detail. The unfortunate timing of these events, which prevented influential figures from responding to the technologies most relevant to their philosophies, is not entirely coincidental. Mach’s philosophical writings heavily influenced a young Einstein, who himself confessed that some of Mach’s ideas directly inspired his relativistic theories.
Along with the psychologist William James, Mach and Russell advanced a realistic empiricist philosophy which reflected their close ties to the scientific community. It is this philosophy on which their ‘neutral monism’ was predicated. Monism, the idea that reality is of one form and not some duality of the psychological and the physical, had been gaining momentum for some time, but between the 1880s and the 1920s these three disparate figures developed a variant of monism in which the underly-ing content of the world was neither physical nor mental, but some neutral substance between the two. Against a backdrop of scientific revolution and increasing physicalism, the neutral monist movement provided an influential but short-lived contribution to the mind-matter discourse. Banks’ new book claims to be the first to discuss this movement as a whole. It starts by giving an historical overview of the movement and by providing a reinterpretation of its message; Banks then constructs his own monist philosophy to analyse and redeploy in a contemporary context. The book also aims to convince us that Mach has been unfairly excluded from contemporary discourse, and should be reintegrated into the metaphysical canon (a worthy cause). To do this, it adopts a historico-critical approach which has actu-ally been taken from Mach himself, and this style makes the text much more interesting than a purely historical review might otherwise be.
Banks interprets Mach’s philosophy as an ‘umbrella theory’ which he thinks is capable of pre-dicting some of the features of subsequent scientific theories and developments. For example, Mach predicts the demise of absolute space and time and is vindicated by theories of Relativity. In this way we are provided with a useful metric for evaluating realistic empiricism; in the words of the author, ‘Any value for the schema has to come through the specific theories it predicts’. However the way in which such an umbrella theory is formulated is critical, and could leave it as either ‘an empty shell’, or as a theory so general as to predict ‘any and all theories’. Banks acknowledges this, but by his own admis-sion the book is extremely vague in places and this can be frustrating to navigate—in particular because Mach, James, Russell, and Banks all use different nomenclatures. The figures also come from different academic backgrounds and since philosophy, physics, and psychology share a few homonyms the dis-cussion becomes ambiguous in places.
Adam Thelwall
Neither Mind Nor Matter
A review of The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived by Erik C. Banks (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
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The basis of Mach’s theory-schema is a form of neutral monism in which the world is construct-ed from events or ‘elements’, rather than matter, sensations or anything else. These events are neutral between physical and mental entities and give rise to everything else in the world (including objects, extended bodies, brains, minds, and even space-time itself). The elements relate to one another by ‘caus-al-functional’ dependencies, a term adopted by Mach in order to distinguish his ideas from those of the mechanical physicists. In fact it seems that much of Mach’s writing was to challenge the mechanical view of science which characterised English physicists at the time, a view in which everything must be describable in terms of visual, mechanical models. Such models were too seductive, too idealistic and ultimately appealed too much to intuition over logic. Instead Mach appealed for a science based on phenomenological laws. Scientific theories were to be derived from such laws without the use of visual, mechanical models, and Banks argues that this is what has happened, especially in the case of Quantum Mechanics where counter-intuitive and non-mechanical theories have proved extremely successful.
When seen from this angle, it is clear that Mach was a realist—in the philosophical sense of believ-ing that reality is (at least partially) ontologically independent of our subjective perceptions. But Banks argues that this aspect of Mach has been ignored due to a ‘lingering association’ with the Vienna Circle philosophers, also known as the ‘Ernst Mach Society’, who were influenced by Mach but took his ideas in a different direction. He proposes that the false labelling of Mach as an idealist, positivist, or any-thing other than a realist, has prevented Mach from taking the place in contemporary discussions that he would otherwise occupy. This is a convincing angle, especially when considering Mach’s approach to consciousness.
It is clear that Mach thought of all conscious thought as a subset of processes in the brain which ‘simply reflect the underlying physiology of the brain or the sense organs’. This kind of view is both well-known and enjoys a broad consensus in contemporary discourse, and so much of the subsequent discussion is actually quite dull. In fact it is not Mach but his personal friend William James who does the most to construct a realistic empiricist conception of the philosophy of mind. In discussing James, Banks spends too many lines dealing with ridiculous objections from a scientifically naïve era, in which the notion that a brain could contain a representation of an object much larger than itself, such as a tree, is considered problematic. The commercialisation of cameras and computers probably did more to normalise ideas around representation and computation than any philosopher has done, and in turn the ability of the brain to construct representations of the outside world and to perform calculations has been demystified. However, these events do not dim the criticism from the sceptic scenario, which is also neatly dealt with in this section. The irritating position of the sceptics, in which experiences of hal-lucination are introduced to challenge the reality of perception, is incorporated into Banks’ new notion of ‘forward-looking certainty’. This seems to embody the belief that most of the time we’re probably viewing reality and not merely dreaming, and that the two scenarios are fundamentally distinguishable.
This forms the groundwork on which Russell built his own form of neutral monism. An entire chapter is devoted to Russell’s conversion to neutral monism: the period between 1919 and 1927 in which Russell adapted his position from an opponent of monism to a fully-fledged neutral monist him-self. Here we are presented with a very analytical explanation for this conversion, based mainly on the criticism of an abstruse linguistic argument in Russell’s manuscript ‘Theory of Knowledge’, which feels quite unsatisfying. Some of the criticism had come from Russell’s former student, Wittgenstein, and Russell later said of the matter:
[Wittgenstein’s] criticism was an event of first-rate importance in my life and affected everything I have done since. I saw he was right and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.
In parallel with Banks’ dry technical explanation, a very humanising sub-plot is also revealed in which Russell is caught between his admiration for the theories of Brentano and the bite of his former stu-dent. This appears to keep a wedge between Russell and Mach/James, who apparently have no such baggage. Russell’s monism seems to be less concrete than the others, and a ‘lingering dualism’ between psychology and physics remains in his thinking. However Banks vociferously declares that Russell did not abandon the neutral monist position, as many scholars would have us believe. The publication of his ‘Analysis of Matter’ in 1927 did not signal a shift to ‘scientific realism’ but merely a change in ter-minology which relabelled his ideas without changing them. Actually, the strongest evidence for this comes from Russell himself, when he privately averred in 1967: ‘I am conscious of no major change in my opinions since the adoption of neutral monism.’
Regardless, when Banks moves on to develop the formalism of his own neo-Russellian philos-ophy, he does so under the name ‘enhanced physicalism’, rather than neutral monism. Though no explicit explanation is given for the change, this shift could also be thought of as a relabelling exercise, since the two views are so similar. In his enhanced physicalism, Banks makes a small amendment to the minimal definition of physicalism, that everything in the world supervenes on the physical, by intro-ducing the constraint that the same laws of instantiation (read ‘laws of physics’) apply in all scenarios. Banks also aligns enhanced physicalism with the a posteriori physicalists, in the spirit of Mach, rather than the a priori physicalists.
For the most part, Banks has been discussing metaphysics using concepts which would be fairly palatable to most scientists. After all, his discussion has been mostly guided by scientists. However, he expands on his a posteriori model, and begins to claim that the workings of the brain cannot possibly be deduced a priori: not even with the most advanced understanding of physics, the most sophisticated computers, and a detailed understanding of the physiology of the brain. Banks introduces some artifi-cial barrier between the brain as a physical structure and its functions. He does this using the unfortu-nate example of colour; unfortunate because sight is the most well understood sense, and the specific
scenarios used in the book are scientifically meaningless. It is true that the details of neural systems are extremely difficult to model, but few neuroscientists would claim that it is impossible in principle.
In fact throughout Banks’ work there is a strange interpretation of science on offer, which reflects the late 19th century more closely than it does the present day. He uses outdated terminology, and men-tions almost nothing of the science which comes after 1925. He erroneously interprets the ‘manifolds’ of General Relativity as describing the topology of space-time, when in reality there are no theories which do that. He talks about Mach bands, a part of the brain first described in the 1890s, but doesn’t men-tion the fMRI scan which has far more to say about the brain. In his discussion of the Kantian system of perspectives—which fundamentally challenges the primacy of space-time —Banks seems ignorant of some key physical theories which would challenge this view. In an attempt to ‘construct extended objects and regions from elementary events’, Quantum Field Theory, which claims to do precisely that, is not mentioned.
It is a shame that empiricist philosophies struggle to engage with contemporary empirical learn-ing from other fields, but a lack of pluralism is a perennial problem which could be said to be true of almost any discipline. However, this book is good at combining wide-ranging concepts, and is all the more interesting to read as a result. Banks argues compellingly, and I find myself agreeing that his cause—to re-integrate Mach into the contemporary discourse—is a worthy one.
Faridah Zaman
From Jahiliyya to Hakimiyya
A review of Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual by James Toth (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Sayyid Qutb, the mid-century Egyptian thinker and sometime lead-ing ideologue of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has remained a fixture in radical Islamist thought in the decades since his execution in 1966. Most recently it is his intellectual links to Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, who assumed leadership of Al-Qaeda in 2011, that has consolidated his reputation as ‘The Philosopher of Islamic Terror’. James Toth in this recent addition to the literature on Qutb wants us to see beyond such epithets and appreciate a complex, radical thinker whose positive leg-acy is still unfolding in Egypt. In a short epilogue covering the period since Qutb’s death to the near present, Toth traces the various factions that have constituted the shifting terrain of Egyptian politics for the past half century. Qutb’s legacy stretches beyond the Muslim Broth-erhood to the many militant organisations that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s which deemed the Brotherhood too moderate and pacifist in the face of what they regarded as a corrupt, Westernised government. But with the Arab Spring of January 2011 that toppled President Hosni Mubarak and in the elections that followed, the Brother-hood, riding on the coattails of a peaceful movement born of twen-ty-first century social media, were brought to power for the first time. The Arab Spring, regarded by Toth as the wider social realisation of those same ills that had affected Egypt since the dawn of European colonial adventurism in Egypt, achieved without violent revolution what Qutb had wanted all along. In a telling passage found on the penultimate page, Toth writes that ‘the advance toward Qutb’s Islam-ic state and society’ in the wake of the Tahrir Square moment ‘need not spell mayhem’:
It represents, instead, a viable alternative to a Western-derived modernity. Its authentic character may well prove to be the correct antidote for the corruption, ill-will, depravity, and hedonism that have plagued Egypt. The January 25 revolution threw off the mantle of tyr-anny and has allowed a true and free Egypt to come forward. There’s no telling at this point exactly which way the country will go. The hope is that it will be better than the dismal excesses of the past.
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tury, such as Abdul A’la Mawdudi in Pakistan, it was these doctrines rather than other religions such as Christianity that constituted their ideological competitors. And here is the crux of the matter. Whatever else Qutb was or was not—Toth discussion of Qutb’s early career as one of Cairo’s premier literary critics before the Second World War is particularly interesting—he cannot be rehabilitated as a figure compat-ible with liberal democracy. For Qutb, this de-spiritualised ideology was complicit in all the evils of the world, and stood in the way of establishing God’s sovereign government on earth.
Berman may have had a good sense of Qutb’s complexity, but that understanding merely redoubled his commitment to the War on Terror. Berman was dismayed by Bush’s lack of philosophical flourish, his failure to articulate the finer points of liberal principles in the face of an enemy that was well-versed in a deeply anti-liberal philosophy. Here liberalism revealed its own capacity for totalitarianism—liberal values are not only the best, but they are the best for everyone. For lib-erals of this tradition, to be opposed to liberalism, however eloquently this opposition is voiced, is to be in some fundamental sense irrational and unconscionable. The War on Terror was about establishing this fact in the face of political Islam, but the rhetoric was not altogether dissimilar to that of the Cold War—liberalism was in both cases thrown into turmoil by an ideology that competed for the same ground that it occupied. This same tradition of liberalism is as fervently opposed to moral relativism as Qutb was, meaning that this particular battle of ideas is destined to continue indefinitely, absorbing more and more regions into its zero-sum game.
More than a decade on from the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, lib-eralism has not found a better way of understanding its militant ene-mies. Egypt has become a relatively new battlefront. Although there were a number of high-profile acts of violence against the state since the 1960s, including the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, successive governments have essentially succeeded in stymying those militant organisations that emerged espousing Qutbist ideas. In the late 1990s, two of the most significant of these bodies, Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Association) and Tanzim al-Jihad (The Ji-had Organisation), disavowed violence. Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya not only disavowed it as a political method but also undertook a scholarly revision of some of the central ‘errors’ in Qutb’s thought. Tanzim al-Ji-had meanwhile distanced itself from any of its members that disagreed with its disavowal of violence, and thus figures such as al-Zawahiri were abandoned, seeking new sources of support such as the wealthy Saudi scion, bin Laden. The last act of terrorist violence in Egypt was in 1997. Egypt seemed to have won the war against militancy. In 2010, however, Muhammad Badi’a, who belonged to the ‘radical, Qutbist branch of the Brotherhood’, was elected Supreme Leader of the organ-isation. Almost immediately the Egyptian Government renewed its of-fensive against the Brotherhood, which had technically been a banned organisation since 1954. Among the official charges against arrested members was a novel one: ‘belonging to an organisation based on the ideas of Sayyid Qutb’.
It was shortly after this, and seemingly independently, that pro-tests erupted in Cairo demanding political justice. Initially the Broth-erhood remained aloof, but eventually Toth tells us some 100,000 took part in protests. The Brotherhood saw an opportunity to enter the political fray and assume legitimacy after decades as an outlawed organisation. After a democratic elections, the Brotherhood declared victory, and Muhammad Morsi became President. For Toth, this was a moment of truth: Qutb’s grievances against the injustices and cor-ruptions of Egyptian society were finally becoming widely held among the Egyptian people. It is ‘ironic’ for Toth that the tyrant should have been toppled non-violently in the end. ‘Now, nearly 50 years after his death, Sayyid Qutb’s heirs are attempting to bring his vision of a truly Islamic Egypt to life.’ This was decidedly not the tenor of reactions in the United States and Europe, where the Brotherhood’s ascendency was met with scepticism if not panic.
Toth’s Sayyid Qutb, which went to press in 2013 and ended on a note of hope, did not foresee how short-lived the Brotherhood’s suc-cesses would be. After nearly a year of worsening domestic conditions, allegations of anti-democratic intrigue by Morsi’s government and of the murdering of demonstrators, a counter-revolution (a coup d’état, technically) led by the army removed Morsi from power in July 2013.
Soon afterwards, the Brotherhood was declared a terrorist organisa-tion, with many of its members arrested or driven into exile.
Even liberal hawks, such as the Observer’s Nick Cohen (who once credited Terror and Liberalism with having shown him the error of his ways) were rendered extremely uncomfortable by this turn of events. Writing in August 2013, Cohen stated:
[The Brotherhood] may be a foul religious right movement, but it did not abolish democracy or drive the opposition underground. […] However hard it is to say, European Union governments and the US have to live by their principles and call a coup a coup. Aid and normal diplomatic relations must depend on the release of political prisoners, the restoration of civil liberties, and a return to democracy—even if that means a return of Morsi to power until the next elec-tion. Western liberals ought to stir themselves as well.
The story, it seems, has come full circle and ended up trapped in a paradox. The liberals of the early 2000s, who believed that they had to support wars against totalitarian regimes wherever they were to be found, now had to acknowledge that the Brotherhood’s forced remov-al and suppression was anti-liberal according to their own principles. But for all Cohen’s calls on liberals to ‘stir themselves’, they did not re-ally have the stomachs to come out as defendants of the Brotherhood. If only it was Aung San Suu Kyi being rounded up by the Burmese military, Cohen bemoaned: ‘Then I would know how I felt and how to respond’.
Earlier this year David Cameron commissioned an internal gov-ernment review into ‘the philosophy, activities, impact, and influence’ of the Brotherhood, with scope for banning the organisation in Britain as it has been in Egypt. Perhaps Sayyid Qutb has already found its way onto Westminster reading lists. While it does not add substantially to the existing literature on the subject, and while it would be misread-ing history to suggest that the present-day fractionalised Brotherhood are the embodiment of Qutbist ideals, in wearing its sympathies on its sleeve, Toth’s book will serve to demonstrate that there have been important intellectual traditions in the twentieth century that have of-fered robust critiques of Western liberal democracy and that some of them remain convincing for a large portion of the world today.
leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion?
This was almost evangelical writing, but contrary to Toth’s accusation, Berman’s article provided a surprisingly nuanced exposition of Qutb’s life and intellectual thought, recognising that the Egyptian’s analysis of the world was ‘soulful’ and that his theological analysis was cultur-ally aware and ‘reflected the style of 20th-century philosophy’. Qutb tackled some ‘genuinely perplexing questions’, such as the division of mind and body in Western thought, the impersonality of modern power, and the problem of social injustice. His views on women had been ‘misinterpreted’, according to Berman, his attack on the Ameri-can way of life was theological rather than political. Militant thought emerged rather late in his writings. Many of these points are borne out by Toth’s discussion too. The fact that Berman’s understanding of Qutb was based on a close, textual reading, and cuts close to the bone of its subject makes him a particularly complicated straw man: Berman decidedly did not present Qutb as occultist, misogynistic, or medie-val precisely because he knew that this was the kind of polemic soggy left-liberals had come to expect from the War on Terror advocates.
Berman also understood that Qutb’s antipathy to the United States was not rooted in the question of hypocrisy—its failure to up-hold its own principles—but in those principles themselves. ‘He op-posed the United States because it was a liberal society, not because the United States failed to be a liberal society.’ For Qutb, liberalism itself was a fatally flawed ideology that compartmentalised religion when it ought to be the very basis of all life and social organisation. Islam was perfection, and, at least in the latter stages of his life, Qutb regarded the Quran as an objective text of political theory. For Qutb, there was no question of compromise with other ideologies, and, in Berman’s eyes, it is this conviction that places him in the traditions of the twentieth century’s totalitarianisms. This reasoning is again borne out by the second half of Toth’s book, which discusses Qutb’s ideas widely. The leitmotif of Qutb’s writings was the problem of how to re-place jahiliyya, society, with hakimiyya, or God’s dominion. In a chapter on the ‘Islamic Concept’, for example, Toth discusses Qutb’s empha-sis on divinity, stability, and balance, but it is unity (al-tawhid) above all that emerges as important—Qutb opposed any class-based analysis of society, which he believed fostered divisions, and believed that it was only subordination to God that could free men and women from the tyranny of each other.
In the discussion of Qutb’s ideas on ‘The Islamic State’ it’s clear that Qutb wanted to see Shariah law comprehensively instituted in Egypt because he believed it was the only guarantee of Egypt’s security, livelihood, and social equilibrium. He regarded Shariah as a dynamic law, but that dynamism did not imply compromising with non-Islam-ic traditions. Where there was any doubt, he looked to the example of the salaf (early Muslims). On shura (consultation between the ruler and the ruled), Qutb was clear that he did not think that there was an equivalence with parliamentary democracy as is sometimes stated—for Qutb, multi-party systems represented a logic of perpetuating differ-ence and partisanship rather than working towards unity. Toth tells us that after the 1952 revolution that abolished the Egyptian monarchy and brought Gamel Abdel Nasser to power, initially with Brotherhood support, it was Qutb who urged a crushing of Communists and other dissenters in the country.
Given these uncompromising positions it is no surprise that, according to Toth, Qutb did not believe in the idea of relative moral-ity either: ‘moral standards are not determined by environment and changing conditions; rather, they are fixed criteria above and beyond differences in environments […] the standards of morality are inde-pendent of the environment, the economic status, and the stage of de-velopment of a society; these are nothing but superficial variations’, he wrote in his most famous work, Signposts, which was penned during his decade in prison under Nasser’s rule.
In a chapter on ‘The Islamic Society and Islamic System’, Toth briefly discusses Qutb’s idea of Islam as against other doctrines, such as capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy, and nationalism. It is clear that for Qutb as for other radical Islamists of the twentieth cen-
Toth cannot help but betray here that he welcomed the ascend-ancy of the Brotherhood in 2011, willing, more than actually believing perhaps, that this was to mark a new period of social justice and har-mony for Egypt along Qutbist lines. He clearly has no qualms sharing Qutb and the Brotherhood’s language of disdain for the ‘corruption’, ‘depravity’, and jahiliyya (ignorance, apathy) of pre-revolution Egypt.
If the end of the book lays out these sentiments explicitly, the reader can sense the author’s sympathies from the start. On the very first page, Toth tells us that his book is intended as a corrective to those ‘popular portraits’ of Qutb that describe him ‘in dark, negative, and uncomplicated terms’. He is referring here primarily to influential New York public intellectual Paul Berman, who published an ‘iconic’ arti-cle entitled ‘The Philosopher of Islamic Terror’ in the New York Times Magazine in 2003. ‘Berman characterizes Qutb variously as Hitler […]; as pathological, paranoid, medieval (or ancient), unreasonable, erratic, misogynistic, offensively anti-Semitic, anti-Christian […]. Berman em-ploys the conventional Orientalist repertoire of tropes and expressions to guide his reader away from not only sympathizing with Qutb but from understanding him at all.’ Berman allegedly portrayed Qutb as ‘totally consumed by hatred for the West’. For Toth, Berman’s ren-dering of Qutb as a xenophobe and misogynist allowed him and his readers to ignore ‘the chaotic disorder and confusion of complicated domestic politics’ in Egypt, Qutb’s ‘intricate and methodological re-ligious reasoning’, and to dismiss or discount ‘serious, profound, and legitimate ideas’ in his corpus of works.
The problem is that Berman’s article does not live up to this hype. The article on Qutb was based on excerpts from Berman 2003’s book, Terror and Liberalism, which established him as one of the leading ‘liberal hawks’ (some call him their ‘Philosopher King’) that advocated an aggressive, interventionist liberal response to terrorism in the wake of 9/11. Liberal hawks were exercised over what they saw as the tacit support for fascism, particularly in the Middle East, that the Left’s re-sort to tired arguments about neo-colonialism and so forth amounted to. Berman supported both the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and defends the latter to this day: ‘the iso-lationist alternative was fanatical nonsense’. He was critical of George W. Bush at the time, but the critique was about the prosecution of, rather than the need for, war: Bush’s reasoning was not sound, nor was he sufficiently guided by the liberal values necessary to ensure suc-cess in Iraq. ‘The Philosopher of Islamic Terror’ article exhibits such sentiments. Appreciating that Qutb was a ‘hero’ of militant Islamists such as al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden (who studied under Sayyid Qutb’s brother Muhammad Qutb in Saudi Arabia), Berman ploughed through all the English translations of Qutb’s multi-volume work of exegesis, In the Shade of the Quran, that he could get a hold of, and came to the following conclusion:
Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. In the Shade of the Qur’an is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organisations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things.
He goes on:It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas—it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. […] The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The anti-terrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse. But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society’s every failure? President George W. Bush […] is not the man for that. Philosophers and religious
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Claire Jackson
The Father of Lies
A review of Herodotus and Hellenistic Culture: Literary Studies in the Reception of the Histories by Jessica Priestley (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Throughout his literary afterlife, Herodotus has had two faces, one as the Father of History, the other as the Father of Lies. Cicero may have given him the former appellation (pater historiae), but Plutarch’s work On the Malice of Herodotus accused him of lying and falsifying history, and this was almost certainly not the only work of its kind in antiquity. This apparently mutually exclusive reputation has been interwoven into Herodotus’ reception, both in scholarship and more generally, render-ing him as simultaneously an exemplary historian and irresponsible fictionaliser, an ethnographer and a pedlar in barbarian stereotypes, a sceptical critic and a gullible collector of anecdotes, a serious journalist and a tabloid hack. Indeed, the word historia in Greek does not signify history in the modern sense, but rather an inquiry, and Herodotus’ self-definition of his work as a historia in his famous prologue almost seems calculated to bring out this clash between ancient and modern thought for a twenty-first century reader. This ambivalence has con-tributed to Herodotus languishing in the shadow of Thucydides for many years. In comparison to the latter’s promises of eternal truths and objective facts, Herodotus’ blurred lines between fact and fiction, myth and history, Greek and barbarian were uncomfortable, awkward, and ultimately useless for recovering ‘the truth’ of classical history. The advent of postmodernism has allowed Herodotus to gain more prominence, but the two are still inexorably tied together, with Thucy-dides’s neat fit into our ideas of what a historian should do highlighting Herodotus’ refusal to conform. In other words, Herodotus retains his two faces precisely because his work challenges convenient dichotomies and easy generic answers, and no matter what generic box we allocate the Histories, it will both conform to and elude our definitions.
This relationship, however, goes both ways: just as the Histories fits uncomfortably into ancient and modern ideas of historiography, so these ideas are shown up as artificial and unnecessarily limited by the Histories itself. In this way, Herodotus can provide a clear and fas-cinating example of the impact of classical reception studies, as the problematic and challenging designations of Herodotus as historian, ethnographer, or fiction writer can unnecessarily limit the scope of the Histories and reveal our own cultural preoccupations with fact, fiction, and what we demand of the ancient world. If our demands are that a historian be meticulous and objective, Thucydides fits the label bet-ter than Herodotus, but Herodotus’s challenges to the limits of the reader’s disbelief exposes the extent to which a historian’s claims to objectivity are in fact just a stylistic facade. After all, Thucydides does not simply promise to report what people say, but, if he cannot get that information, to report what they should have said instead. Un-derstanding the origins of the modern world’s reception of Herodotus, therefore, not only exposes how far back the roots of this seemingly contradictory reputation go into antiquity, but also shows up how in-fluential these ideas and comparisons have been for the modern under-standing of the Histories.
Against this background, Jessica Priestley’s monograph on the reception of Herodotus within Hellenistic culture (which the author defines as late fourth to mid-second century B.C.) promises to link to-gether two alluring strands of classical scholarship: firstly, by focusing on one of the most fascinating writers of the ancient world, and sec-ondly, by using their work to shed greater light on one of the most di-verse and fertile periods of literary invention in the ancient world. The Hellenistic era’s interest in paradoxography, wacky geography, and self-conscious fictionality suggests an obvious Herodotean influence, but as the author describes, the twentieth-century model of ancient historiography which diminished both Herodotus’ authority and the legitimacy of Hellenistic histories suppressed this connection. Many issues of reception and Herodotus’ significance, however, are left frus-tratingly implicit, as much of the introduction is taken up with the standard literature review and Quellenforschung. Indeed, the limitations of the period and the fragmentary status of key texts are discussed to such an extent that the impact of her subject feels somewhat di-minished. This partly emerges from the author’s emphasis upon the validity of different ways of interpreting Herodotus’s Nachleben, which reflects contemporary thinking on classical reception theory but fails to give a solid argument to the work. A criticism which could easily be levelled at this volume is that while it spends a large part of the Introduction on its self-proclaimed limitations, it lacks a strong line of reasoning to give structure to the breadth of material which Priestley
considers. Yet one could argue that this is an intentional ambiguity, designed to demonstrate the broad and nebulous scope of Herodo-tus’ influence without unnecessarily forcing it into a single constrain-ing narrative, which would deny Herodotus’ multi-faceted reception through history. Rather than trying to force Herodotean receptions into a box, therefore, Priestley tries to make the box fit around them.
The first chapter looks at the biographical traditions concerning Herodotus in antiquity. It is tempting to use Herodotus the author as a kind of shorthand for the work itself because both share a num-ber of characteristics: in the preface Herodotus declares himself to be from Halicarnassus, situated on the border between Greece and Asia, at the same point where he describes the work’s purpose as to explore the causes of the rivalry between East and West. Yet, Herodotus was claimed as a citizen or visitor to many cities in antiquity, some based on his description of the city in the Histories, others on the belief that some historical event or personage provides a link between it and Her-odotus himself. Priestley’s explanation for these contradictory tradi-tions, many of which are entirely historically implausible, is that they reflect the new figure of the itinerant historiographos in the Hellenistic world, who would travel from city to city reciting their Histories. The author here follows other recent work on poetic biographical tradi-tions, such as Barbara Graziosi’s Inventing Homer (2002), which has emphasised instead the utility of a plurality of divergent biographies, as it demonstrates how different readers have interpreted the author’s work and used this to shape their image of the author himself. In other words, rather than reflecting the reality of Herodotus’ life, such bio-graphical narratives bring Herodotus into the contemporary Hellen-istic world, and in doing so reveal the benefits, or indeed, negative effects, of an association with a historian like Herodotus. In particular, the accusations that Herodotus’ descriptions of a city were contingent on how much he was paid (or not) expose attempts to rationalise the historian’s cultural self-positioning and to provide explanations for his apparent lack of objectivity in certain matters.
The second chapter, on wonder (thōma) in Herodotus, is one of the most interesting in the volume. In the first place, the shift from bi-ographical narratives to a literary theme allows for fruitful comparison with other classical authors such as Aristotle and Herodotus’s old rival Thucydides, which demonstrates how such interest in the unbelievable and the marvellous was used by later authors to denigrate Herodotus. A thōma in Herodotus can take many forms, but in general it implies a gap in perception and a dissonance with expected reality that is worthy of comment, such as a bizarre and exotic animal, an incredible man-made structure, or any kind of visual spectacle. As Priestley demon-strates, this broad definition, which included a great many outlandish marvels, was both inspiring and challenging for later writers, as, al-though it was awesome, it often lacked scientific or tangible evidence. For example, while in Herodotus something can only be a thōma if it is true, for Thucydides a thōma implies that it may in fact be false, and for Aristotle such thōmata need to be dispelled and rejected. This chapter is the most densely packed with material, but Priestley deftly navigates the fragmentary minefield of Hellenistic paradoxography and brings together an impressive range of material to examine the extent of Her-odotus’ influence. Indeed, many of the modern conceptions of Hero-dotus as a collector of exotic and marvellous tales are clearly grounded in this Hellenistic reception, and throw light on the bivalent nature of Herodotus as both fabulist and sceptical critic for later readers.
Hellenistic geographies and their use of Herodotus are the sub-ject of the third chapter, and it is here that ancient and contemporary viewpoints come into conflict. Geography was a broader field in the ancient world than it is in the modern one, combining mythic, histo-riographic, and ethnographic narratives to explore both the oikoumenē, or the known world, and the regions beyond it. Consequently, ancient geography is not simply a question of where a certain island is, but is in fact a rich and fascinating field concerned with the boundaries be-tween fact and fiction, the known and the unknown. As knowledge of the oikoumenē increased throughout the Hellenistic era, however, earlier literary models of geography, like Homer and Herodotus himself, were challenged for perceived inaccuracies. Consequently, the Histories is both fundamental for Hellenistic conceptualisations of the world and often set up in opposition to them, and Priestley is quick to highlight moments where Herodotus is misrepresented in order to give another geographer a straw man to knock down. The fact that Herodotus’s influence remains so pervasive, from scientific debates about the ex-act source of the Nile to symbolic geography in Apollonius’s epic the Argonautica, reinforces the many different (often contradictory) ways Herodotus can be read and used. Indeed, as Priestley notes, geogra-phy in this period was ‘a flexible tool with which to experiment and create new possible worlds’, and Herodotus’s influence here reinforces the amorphous potential of the Histories to quite literally rewrite the boundaries of the known world, either in factual or fictional discourse.
Herodotus’ significance for later accounts of the Persian Wars is undeniable, but in the fourth chapter, it also becomes clear how much Herodotus underlies later conceptions of East-West conflict. Hero-dotus’ prologue establishes the origins of this conflict as a series of abductions (Helen of Troy perhaps being the most famous, but also those of Medea and Europa), and that these act as the catalysts for future conflict. A familiar pattern has emerged by this point in the vol-ume, however, and here as before we see later writers needing to find excuses to explain Herodotus’s ‘bias’ towards or against the subject of his writing. Indeed, it is impossible not to think of modern paral-lels when Priestley details the multitude of ways in which Herodotus’s motivations behind his account were consistently challenged through antiquity. For example, Herodotus is accused of distorting the truth of the wars by not giving enough prominence to Sicily and Italy despite their historically limited role. By contrast fiction writers like Apolloni-us and Lycophron reinforce Herodotus’s account by incorporating it into their own mythic epics, the Argonautica and the Alexandra respective-ly. Although both these epics take place historically before the period covered by the Histories, their reuse of Herodotus’s treatment of the Persian Wars not only picks up on the complicated questions about motivation and causality raised in the prologue of the Histories, but also allows them to manipulate Herodotus’ framework of East-West conflict to firmly reassert their origins in a mythic past. Unlike earlier chapters, Priestley here handles a few lengthier case studies in depth
Dedication
page for the H
istoriae by Herodotus, printed
in V
enice 1494
Herodotus bust, M
useo N
azionale Rom
ano (photograph
: Dan
Diffendale)
1312
Book-length collections of poetry, and especially of lyric poetry, rarely carry anything quite so coherent as a ‘story’ or an ‘argument’, even when their authors write with a very clear sense of that writing as a project. To say that a volume is ‘about’ some theme or event is to lo-cate exactly this inexactitude, the way in which poems would always rather be themselves than some manifestation of systematic thought or of programme; poems have a tendency to be immanences, about their own business more than about yours. A ‘Collected Poems’, as a compendium of a completed career, is in some ways no different. A caravan of individual volumes held in convoy by no exigency more pressing than chronology is almost certain to be enormously varied in its manners and matters; few editions exemplify this better than a ‘Collected Poems’ for the British-American poet Denise Levertov, which must span six decades, nineteen volumes (plus uncollected work and juvenilia), at least two continents, and (in this edition) a gargan-tuan one-thousand-and-twelve pages. Published by New Directions (the New York house from which a number of Levertov’s individual collections emerged) and edited by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, with an introduction by fellow poet Eavan Boland, The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov comprises the entirety of the poet’s long career and presents the reader with the overwhelming quantity and richness of her work. Whilst being far too heterogeneous in style and content to be easily corralled into an explanatory narrative, the major benefit of this edition of Levertov’s work lies in its bringing together all of her major verse (much of which is now difficult to access in its original format) in a fashion that illustrates the development and trajectory of her poetics (though on a more critical note, I wonder if the opening section, ‘Early and Uncollected Poems’, which contains miscellaneous material from 1940 through to the early Sixties, might not have been better dispersed throughout the book at the correct chronological mo-ments—as it stands, this first section is rather splenetic and disorien-tating). Though offering at best a refracted sense of its author’s life, the poetry thus presented constitutes a clear and useful biography of a practice, one responsive to the pressures of the histories poetical and political in which it was shaped.
The standard outline of Levertov’s poetic career, rehearsed in Boland’s Introduction, depicts a development in three major stages: an early, formative period of concern with private life and private percep-tion, characterised by antiphonal love-poetry and landscape writing, as the poet sits on a bench in Central Park and watches the world pass by; a second, overtly political period in which the poetry abandons its park bench and gets involved in the pacifist and feminist movements of 60s and 70s counterculture; and a final stage in which Levertov’s belated but much-trailed conversion to Catholicism crystallises her work’s already transcendent bent into a poetics of spiritual and moral exercise, concerned with the meditational and the numinous; there is perhaps a fourth phase to be identified in the difference (and decade) between Levertov’s first, British, collection, The Double Image (1946), and her second, American, book, Here and Now (1957). The volume present-ed here broadly corroborates this view of Levertov’s work. The early uncollected poetry and the material in The Double Image is of a most-ly pastoral hue, in a style that would not be unfamiliar to readers of Donald Davie or Charles Tomlinson, though the concern with dream evinced throughout suggests already the interest in accounts of inner psychological experience which would go on to characterise a great deal of Levertov’s later and more mature work.
The four collections that follow The Double Image, which are Here and Now, Overland to the Islands (1958), With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960) and The Jacob’s Ladder (1961), share a similar set of genetics; at their worst, the poems here are slightly banal narratives of the angst of domestic relationships, populated by rudderless ‘you’ and ‘I’ inter-locutors who never gain any real traction or heft; at their best, they are punctuated by sharp, defined images which carve themselves into the eye (‘As you read, a white bear leisurely / pees, dyeing the snow / saf-fron’). This ability to render chiselled, vibrant images becomes evident from the beginning of Levertov’s American period, and suggests the influence of a new correspondent, William Carlos Williams, the Amer-ican poet of red wheelbarrows and peaches so nutritious the reader can practically live off them. Levertov first wrote to Williams in 1951 (‘if a man is a force in one’s life, he certainly ought to know about it’), and the influence of his famous dictum from Paterson, ‘Say it! No ideas but
Brendan Gillott
An Actual Earth of Value
A review of The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (New Directions, 2013)
Poster for D
enise Levertov Young
Poets S
eries Reading, 1962 (B
urns Library, B
oston C
ollege)
Sagetrieb 5.2, Fall 1986 (cover portrait of L
evertov by Rollie M
cKenna for The M
odern P
oets, 1970)
rather than various fragments, and it creates a rich and rewarding read-ing experience.
Priestley’s final chapter explores Herodotus’s complicated rela-tionship with Homer, starting from the claim that Herodotus was ‘the prose Homer of history,’ as an inscription from Halicarnassus labels him. Throughout antiquity, Homer was considered the father of and exemplar for a number of different disciplines, to the extent that some writers attempted truly death-defying leaps of logic and plausibility in order to make Homer’s fictional epic fit with reality. At the same time, Homer was attacked as a liar and a fictionaliser, and consequently he provides a neat parallel for Herodotus’s own reception in antiquity. Indeed Lawrence Kim’s Homer Between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature (2010) complements this chapter nicely, as both emphasise the potential of Homer and Herodotus to be actively misinterpreted in a variety of contradictory ways as a way of reflecting on their readers’ relationship with the past. Through examining the relative statuses of poetry and prose in antiquity, as well as the significance of stylistic choices and the unclear distinction between fact and fiction, Priestley demonstrates that by referring to Herodotus as a prose Homer, the inscription navigates both contradictory facets of Herodotus’ own rep-utation: the historian, and the fabulist. This provides an appropriate note to end the volume on, with Herodotus’ reputation as the Father of History and the Father of Lies neatly brought together as opposite, but connected elements of his reputation throughout antiquity and beyond.
Throughout this volume, it becomes clear that Herodotus has often become the epicentre of a chain reaction, provoking violent re-sponses from later writers and necessitating revisions of history in or-der to explain his virtues and faults. The volume is dense with referenc-es, often to fragmentary or little-known texts, but Priestley handles her material deftly, and often coaxes fascinating observations out of what could have been a dry comment. Although it was stated earlier that the volume could be criticised for lacking a single narrative of argument, this refusal to prescribe a univocal thesis in fact emerges as one of the volume’s strengths, as it preserves the Histories’ potential for multi-fac-eted and contradictory interpretations. The one major drawback of the book, however, is that it sometimes feels as though Priestley does not go far enough. While it is clear that the Hellenistic era provides ample evidence for Herodotean reception, the conclusions drawn here also have resonance for the modern world’s perception of Herodotus, as I have emphasised throughout this review. Naturally, this could easily be a separate and vast project, but considering the deep resonances of this work for our own self-perception of Herodotus as a multi-faceted, genre-defying writer, it would have been gratifying to have some of these conclusions brought out more strongly. This point aside, Priest-ley’s volume is an engaging and fascinating one which, by looking back along this chain of reception into antiquity, not only exposes what Herodotus meant to the ancients, but also opens up the intrigu-ing question of what Herodotus means to the modern world.
Denise L
evertov, Five Poem
s, January 1958 , White R
abbit Press, S
an Francisco
1514
Having to write as a body, an object in a world, necessitates reflection on that body’s relationship to that world; that is, it immediately neces-sitates an economics and a politics. The poetry Levertov wrote in the Sixties and Seventies became an explicitly political, campaigning art foregrounding the violation of the human form, pointedly addressing the fact that those eyes and ears and mouths require a sustenance that cannot be provided by words alone, a sustenance that is too often en-dangered or absent:
Man gets his daily breadin sweat, but no one saidin daily death. Don’t eat
those nice green dollars your wifegives you for breakfast
A lifelong leftist and anti-capitalist, the political turn in Levertov’s writing was specifically motivated by what she saw as the vicious and fruitless war in Vietnam. The five volumes of Levertov’s poetry writ-ten and published during the period of serious anti-draft protests and actions in the United States constitute both the angriest and the most compelling contributions to her corpus.
Of these ‘Vietnam’ volumes, perhaps the most celebrated and the most successful is 1971’s To Stay Alive, a compendium of texts of various lengths, mostly addressing the struggles of draft-dodgers, pacifists and conscientious objectors, with found-texts from political button-badges and radical U.C. Berkeley student journals. Levertov was primarily a poet of short lyrics, and so To Stay Alive is particularly notable amongst her oeuvre in being the closest thing to a long poem or poetic series that she wrote. Though by no means monolithic, it is considerably more focussed and directed than any of her other col-lections. The book celebrates the bravery and moral courage of the protestors and the refuseniks, but it also decries the violence of the war in images and expressions as concrete and striking as any from her earlier work, though now serrated with an uncompromising anger and disgust which is a new and powerful addition:
the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milkruns out over the entrails of still-alive babies, transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,implosions of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.
In the face of such dismemberment, an embodied poetry must find its own senses compromised, its ‘witnessing eyes’ reduced to ‘pulp frag-ments’, and To Stay Alive attests to this disabling impact of the war on the poet throughout. Faced with imported images of gruesome death and mutilation and bombarded by a domestic conversation which too often consisted of little more than euphemism and propaganda, any such uncompromising vision as offered above becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, and the poet comes to feel that ‘There is a cataract filming over / my inner eyes’. The misuse of language as an obfuscator rather than an illuminator, always a concern motivating Levertov’s po-etics of immanence and championing of instress, finds its apogee for her in the America of the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading the poet to protest, contra Wordsworth (‘The World is too much with us’) that ‘The world is / not with us enough’. Rather than being the threshold between human and world, language has become the very opposite, Levertov says; it has become a barrier and a perversion.
And yet the poetry is never finally despairing. In a poem from 1972’s Footprints entitled ‘The Good Dream’, Levertov describes a fanta-sy in which all narrowness has been taken from experience, and human alienation from the world, the subject’s war with the object, is finished:
that all impediments,every barrier, of history,of learn’d anxiety,wrong place and wrong time
has gone down,vanished.
Even in its darkest passages Levertov’s work retains this totemic image of the commensurability of humanity and the world through poetic language. This is one of Levertov’s great achievements, leaving her a poet still able to say ‘I want / a world’, not as a declaration of mega-lomania, but as if to call for such a thing is to state exactly the most radical hope imaginable, the utopian dream at the heart of any phe-nomenological poetics, what Olson called ‘an actual earth of value’.
The curse of utopias famously lies in their duality; their good-ness is twinned with their notness. Levertov’s later work, even as it becomes more explicitly religious, becomes less optimistic about the capacity of its own or any poetry to really map the inscape of the hu-man universe. To some extent, as any work over a long career will do, it simply wanders off into other interests and other areas of endeavour. But though it becomes more sceptical of its youthful enthusiasms, it remains committed to the idea that language, and poetical language particularly, has the potential to give voice to the world of phenomena, and to let humans into that world as participant equals. Even in the final, posthumous volume represented in The Collected Poems, This Great Unknowing, there returns, fleetingly but insistently, a sense of the liv-ing of the universe, caught in glances, not quite graspable but always there: ‘When I opened the door / I found the vine leaves / speaking amongst themselves in abundant / whispers’. It’s a conversation worth eavesdropping on.
development she held that it was not just the object-phenomena of the physical world but the emotional and imaginative phenomena of the inner world which could be rendered in this fashion, arguing that ‘It seems to me that the absorption in language itself, the awareness of the world of multiple meaning revealed in sound, word, syntax and the entering into this world in the poem, is as much an experience or constellation of perceptions as the instress of nonverbal sensuous and psychic events’. Here language itself is understood as being at the threshold between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’, between the world and understanding. As both a structure of meaning and a series of sensi-ble phenomena, language has the capacity to heal the rift between the psychic and the physical, the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’. ‘Organic form’ is thus understood as a method which allows the world to speak in its own tongue:
All trivial parts ofworld-about-us speak in their formsof themselves and their counterparts
The Levertov of the 1960s and onwards came to think of her art as being one committed to releasing this immanent voice of reality. Quot-ing the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she once described her practice as intended to ‘Knit / idiom with idiom in the / “push and shove of events”’, to let the world and its energies in.
The focus of much of Levertov’s work, especially in the Sixties and Seventies, is thus on the local and the chthonic rather than on the transcendent, and her greatest poetic strengths are found in such ten-dencies. Her poetry is often framed as a form of study, though study is always understood as an ever acuter attention to the present, rather than as a process of abstraction and classification. Poetic study uncov-ers rather than describes, locates what inheres:
I like to findwhat’s not foundat once, but lies
within something of another naturein repose, distinct.
For Levertov, the only true value is found in the small and the buried; it is not the universe’s vastness but its detail which holds the key to its inscape. Eschewing the stars, the poet promises that ‘I’ll look / down into paradise’, amongst the earth and fungi. In doing so she invites comparison with the rejectionist cosmology of Olson (who in his final years stated that he thought the moon-landings were a waste of time and that everything outside of the earth was ‘a load of shit’), invest-ing supreme spiritual value in the perception of the quotidian. The religious poet in Levertov found its initial and ultimately most inter-esting stirrings in this study of mundanity. Though the gentle Angli-can-Catholic-Jewish eclecticism of Levertov’s work never achieves the supercharged, hyper-speculative Cheezeburgers-‘n-Mazdaism syncret-icism of Olson’s Maximus Poems, the implicit link between the spiritual and the embodied is common to both poets, as in Levertov’s poem ‘The Son’, which considers questions of incarnation from the position of the poet’s own experiences of pregnancy.
Levertov’s poetry takes it as read that it is, and could only ever be, a poetry of embodiment, one whose very conditions of possibility inhere in the human body as a site of sensible perception:
When my body leaves meI’m lonesome for it.I’ve got
eyes, ears,nose and mouthand that’s all
in things’, can be felt from that point on throughout her own poetry. A Williams-esque investment in the primacy of the object and of the demotic over the standardised was reinterpreted by Levertov into a concern with the ethics of expression, and particularly into an interest in the relationship between word and world. This manifested itself in what would prove to be an enduring manner in Levertov’s poetry; a battle against the ontologically alienating capacities of language and a campaign for a poetic language that partakes in rather than abstracting from life:
It is to themwho speaks must speakPreciseas rain’s firstspitting words on the pavement pick out the core lost impulse
(give it back
‘Precise’ here is not the penetrative precision of classification but a promise of immanence achieved through poetical language, one which will return the world to us renewed.
In tandem with, or perhaps because of, her discovery of Wil-liams, Levertov began to consciously reject traditional verse forms (which had never predominated in her work in any case) in favour of a more open, field-orientated poetics, one increasingly popular with the post-Pound-and-Williams American avant-garde, amongst whom Levertov was becoming an increasingly senior figure. Levertov, an em-inent literary scholar outside of her poetry, articulates this conception of poetic form in her 1965 essay and position paper Some Notes on Organ-ic Form. In that text, the poet-essayist states that ‘Form is never more than a revelation of content’, i.e. the supposed form-content division is a pseudo-conflict, as each can have no being without the other, and as a result ‘form’ should not coerce ‘content’, but rather be its instan-tiation, with the poet using the page as a blank canvas on which to position words against one another. The phrase ‘Form is never more than a revelation of content’ has a complex genesis (via Robert Creeley and Wallace Stevens, likely amongst others), but this formulation of it is a variant on Charles Olson’s, who wrote in his seminal 1950 po-lemic ‘Projective Verse’ that ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT’. Levertov’s reference to this hugely influential broadside in her own essay indicates another crucial and formative poetical association, that with the so-called ‘Black Moun-tain School’ of poets, headed up by Olson. Though this new volume demonstrates that Levertov’s reputation as an outlying planet in the Black Mountain cosmos has been severely overplayed, and she was at any rate closer to other supposed members of that grouping (Creeley and Robert Duncan are the central figures here), there can be little doubt that Levertov’s inheritances from Olsonian poetics are as salient as her differences (the substitution of ‘extension’ for ‘revelation’ sug-gests the more overtly and uncomplicatedly spirituo-Christian direc-tion of Levertov’s writing).
Where Levertov develops ‘Projective Verse’ is in her understand-ing of ‘organic form’ as a method for uncovering the world through an immanent poetics. She writes that ‘For me, back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things (and in our expe-rience) which the poet can discover and reveal’. The abandonment of traditional forms frees the poet to get at the form of the world itself for itself; Gerard Manley Hopkins’s concepts of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’, indicating the peculiar ‘thisness’ of an object and its particular means of communicating that essence, became key conceptual categories for Levertov here. In the same essay Levertov states that she is more giv-en to understand poetic form as a horizon for expression (horizons are a common preoccupation throughout the poems) rather than as a series of strict limits (‘It’s not a question of / false constraints—but / to move well and get somewhere / wear shoes that fit’). As a further
1716
Tom Cutterham
True To Their Own Interests
A review of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne (New York University Press, 2014) & The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 by Alan Taylor (W. W. Norton and Company, 2014)
At the turn of the century, slavery spanned England’s main-land colonies. It was prominent in Rhode Island, where at Newport a healthy male could be bought for 115 gallons of rum, and in New York, taken from the Dutch in 1664. The greatest threat, however, was to be found where the slave population was proportionately largest, and where Florida was closest: in South Carolina, settled principal-ly by Caribbean migrants. In 1733, the same year Spanish authorities announced freedom for all slaves escaping English owners, an extraor-dinary plan was undertaken that promised to restore safety to all the slave colonies of the mainland. A new colony, Georgia, was founded on South Carolina’s southern border —and it was to be completely free of slaves.
The leader of this enterprise was James Oglethorpe, a former officer of the Royal Africa Company, and a strategist who sought to directly counter the double threat to the colonial empire. There are, he wrote, ‘as many slaves as there are many Enemys to the Government and consequently friends to the Spaniard […] The way to overcome all this is to persist in allowing no Slaves.’ Resisting the demand for slave labour among some Georgian colonists, Oglethorpe hoped to encourage the migration of Germans instead. ‘The people being white and Protestants and no Negroes were naturally attached to the Gov-ernment,’ he declared. Only this would save the colony, and its sisters to the north.
A slave uprising near the River Stono in South Carolina in 1739, which killed twenty-nine settlers, might have served to strengthen Oglethorpe’s position. But its principal impact was to demonstrate Georgia’s failure as a bulwark against Spanish Florida. A Spanish agent was captured in Savannah, supposedly tasked to ‘procure a gener-al insurrection of the Negroes,’ who were then to escape to Florida’s capital, St Augustine. In response, the colonial authorities organised a coun-ter-attack which was to include ‘800 Negroes,’ with 160 overseers, to assault St Augustine, the scourge of mainland slavery. This force was repelled, in turn, by former Carolina slaves, fighting fiercely on behalf of the Spanish crown and their own freedom.
Neither the Stono Uprising, nor any of the other flashpoints of the previous decades were enough to undermine demand for slaves in every British colony. The profits to be made from employing slave labour in the production of sugar, tobacco, and rice were too tempting to ignore even in the face of such tangible peril. Instead of abandoning slavery, British colonists preferred to pin their hopes on the elimina-tion of the Spanish threat. If only the empire could achieve a defini-tive victory, the spirit of rebellion would fade without its sponsor, and planters could rest secure.
Pressure from colonists to defend slavery with force of arms put strain on the entire imperial system. Though they enjoyed their sugar and tobacco, Englishmen could also wonder if justice was done by spending blood and treasure to protect the planters from the con-sequences of their own immoral system. A British pastor visiting the Chesapeake and Carolinas soon after Stono told colonists, ‘I think God has a quarrel with you for your abuse of and cruelty to the poor Negroes.’ Slaves were the source of profit, but also of danger; it was hard for many in the metropole to sympathise with colonists who re-fused to curtail one in order to defuse the other.
Yet something like the definitive blow did eventually come. In the Seven Years War of 1756–63, as well as conquering Canada from the French, British forces took Cuba, the key to the Caribbean, from Spain. In fact, the victory had come with the help of enslaved troops raised in Jamaica. Over white colonists’ objections, authorities in Lon-don assigned these men ‘an equal share in all Booty gained’ from the operation; one official went as far as to suggest granting them freedom and land on ‘one of the neutral islands, where a black colony might be settled.’ Long avoided by imperial strategists, the use of armed slaves paid off in the capture of Havana in 1762.
The result was to strengthen American slavery. With Cuba ex-changed for Florida at the war’s end, the British Empire finally com-pleted its conquest of the eastern seaboard, and, crucially, cut off the slaves’ overland route to freedom. This triumph quietened southern colonists’ fears over their internal enemy, opening the floodgates to re-newed expansion of slave imports. Yet the war also increased tensions between metropole and mainland colonies, as Parliament introduced new taxes and garrisons, whilst a royal proclamation sought to restrict
westward expansion that threatened relations with the Indians. More-over, London’s successful policy of arming slaves in the Caribbean suggested a divergence between the strategic interests of the empire and the security of colonists’ human property.
That divergence deepened dramatically in the year 1772, when two events rocked the slave system across the British Empire. The first was the destruction of the slave ship Gaspee in Newport harbour by a mob that included some of Rhode Island’s leading men. The con-flagration, which broke out when the ship was boarded by imperial customs officials, resulted in a trial held in London where the Crown’s key witness was a ‘mulatto lad,’ Aaron Briggs. Colonists from Thomas Jefferson to Yale President Ezra Stiles were outraged that prominent white men faced conviction on the word of a slave. ‘Nothing more con-tributed,’ wrote Stiles, to establishing ‘a Union and Confederacy of the Colonies’ than this ‘obnoxious, alarming, and arbitrary’ prosecution.
Just days after the Gaspee incident, Lord Justice Mansfield gave his decision in the case of Steuart v Somerset. He ruled that having set foot on free British soil, James Somerset could not be compelled to return to Virginia as the property of Charles Steuart. Slavery being no part of either the law of nature or the British common law, Mansfield declared, it could be upheld only where enacted by positive statute. His decision effectively abolished slavery in the British Isles. As the news of Somerset’s case spread among white colonists, it also reached the ears of their slaves. It might as well have been, said one Jamaica planter, a ‘direct invitation’ to mutiny.
‘The Negroes are ever true to their own interests, without be-ing at all slow in apprehending them,’ a mid-century English observer noted. It was just as true in 1775, when following a long series of al-tercations between colonists and Parliamentary government, fighting broke out on mainland America. A full year before Thomas Jefferson declared his self-evident truths, a group of slaves in his native Virginia approached the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offering their services in helping to put down the rebellion. Within months, Dunmore issued his famous proclamation granting freedom to male slaves who took up arms on behalf of the Crown. White colonists made revolution; their slaves launched a counter-revolution.
Catholic Canada and Florida, where many former slaves re-mained, were the only mainland British colonies that did not join the rebels. Once the revolutionaries proved themselves in battle, however, the Spanish and French governments seized the opportunity to wound the British Empire and take back the initiative in the New World. Slaves who had once looked to Spain for freedom now found it under British banners; 800 men arrived in Dunmore’s camp by early 1776, bringing women and children with them. The Virginia campaign was hampered by imperial unwillingness to promote full-scale slave insur-rection, and by smallpox, but enslaved people all over the colonies continued to escape to British lines throughout the war. In the end, thousands found liberty or died in its pursuit.
The memory of their counter-revolution had a powerful effect on generations of slaves in the new American republic. For them, the sight of British ships in the rivers off the Chesapeake signalled the chance of freedom. Meanwhile for slaveholders in the southern United States, the revolution succeeded in entrenching the slave system still further. The federal constitution of 1789 gave the South enhanced rep-resentation on account of its wealth in human property, and foreclosed the possibility of banning the slave trade until 1808. On the French island of Saint-Domingue, revolution resulted in the bloody massacre of white owners in 1791 —an event Americans took as a warning to keep their internal enemy under tight control.
Back in Britain, the wars against Napoleon helped energise ab-olitionist sentiment, as Britons strove to position themselves on the global moral high-ground. After Parliament declared the abolition of the international slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy used its new man-date to dominate the world’s oceans like never before. Indeed, it did so with a certain arrogance. The use of press gangs to force American citizens to work at sea on British warships was the rallying cause for hawkish American politicians in 1807, when President Thomas Jeffer-son began his ill-conceived embargo of all foreign trade, and again in 1812 when his successor, James Madison, declared war on the British Empire. By returning the Royal Navy to the Chesapeake, Madison’s war also renewed Virginia slaves’ hopes of freedom.
By the time William of Orange took the English throne in 1688, shatter-ing the brief Catholic supremacy in Europe, slavery was already well-es-tablished in the royal colony of Virginia. Most of its early enslaved pop-ulation arrived in the ships of the Royal African Company, founded in 1660 during the reign of Charles II with the patronage of his brother and heir James Stuart, the Duke of York and future James II. When in 1688 the Company lost its royal favour, and a decade later its formal monopoly, the slave trade to the colonies began to multiply under the impetus of competition. The Virginians who chose to purchase men, wo- men, and children as property knew that they were buying not only a la-bour force, but an internal enemy that would have to be closely guarded.
That task was vastly complicated by the dynamics of empire, ethnicity, and religion in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century At-lantic world. In the Caribbean, where slavery had come to predomi-nate decades earlier, unrest and revolt among enslaved Africans were perennial. But so were threats from other foes internal and external
—Catholic inhabitants of English colonies, including exiled Irishmen, were constantly feared to be in league with the Catholic empires, ready to defect as soon as French or Spanish forces appeared. For Protestant planters in need of cheap labour, there was little to choose between ‘heathen’ African slaves and Catholic white servants.
Warfare and insecurity in the Caribbean spurred capital and planters, with their slaves, to flee to England’s mainland American pos-sessions, where the ratio of friends to enemies was kinder, and where there were no maroon communities, that is to say, independent set-tlements of escaped slaves, like those in Jamaica. But the mainland was not far enough to escape imperial conflict. In 1693, the Spanish began offering incentives for slaves who escaped south to Florida, and accepted conversion to Christianity. In their desperate efforts to main-tain control of the New World, Spain’s imperial rulers were more will-ing than their English counterparts to put weapons into the hands of Africans. If anything terrified the planters more than armed slaves, it was armed slaves with the backing of a rival empire.
Before the British even arrived, rebellious slaves began calling themselves ‘Englishmen,’ and their oppressors ‘Damn’d American Bugger[s].’ Virginia planters, even more than usual, stood in fear of ‘the whole state being convulsed by an insurrection.’ Through 1813, British ships kept up harrying raids on the Chesapeake coastline; at the same time, they took on hundreds of black escapees. The following year, the navy began to recruit escaping slaves into the war effort, as the corps of Colonial Marines. ‘They are British in their hearts,’ a Vice Admiral re-ported. In August, Colonial Marines were among the British force that marched into Washington, burning the White House and the Capitol. More escaping slaves joined them as they returned to their ships.
The American Revolution had upended the imperial dynamic in the western hemisphere, aligning Britain with slaves and Indians against former colonists supported by the French and Spanish. In the War of 1812, the United States sought to strengthen its position on the continent by taking Canada, just as the British did in 1763, and attacking Florida and New Orleans as well. Despite Andrew Jackson’s late victory, these efforts were futile. Both wars made it painfully clear that the slaves who propelled America’s economic growth were also, as Madison recognised, its Achilles heel. Only the domination of slavery across the whole continent might offer any real security; the failure of Madison’s war put that hope out of sight.
In his Pulitzer prize-winning book, Alan Taylor continues this story up through further major slave rebellions —Denmark Vesey’s in 1822, Nat Turner’s in 1831—and decades of muted, guilt-laden discus-sion of the slavery question among Virginia gentry. He nicely captures, in a telescoped final chapter, how Virginians’ responses to the problem of their internal enemy were often ways to avoid facing it. Even discus-sion of the issue was tacitly forbidden, on the grounds that it would excite restlessness and rebellion. For all the anguished theorising of their impossible situation—Jefferson with the wolf by the ears, foresee-ing divine judgement—Virginians never came close to tearing down their slave system. It took a northern army with its own black soldiers to do that.
But it’s the War of 1812, also the subject of Taylor’s previous book, that makes up the bulk of this new one. It’s his stories of families broken and reunited, vengeance wrought against villainous masters, and escapees made good in distant Nova Scotia that give it its heart. ‘I will follow my wife and children to death,’ cried one Dick Carter, as he ran for the barge that would take him to freedom. In 1826 he was found, by a white agent seeking compensation, living free in Trinidad with his family. Southern slaveholders have not lacked for sentimen-talists; Taylor here goes some way to giving the enslaved their own. At the same time, his emphasis on kinship networks and female agency in escapes is an important historical contribution.
Horne’s book will be less read, not least because his outlandish prose style gives no quarter to current convention. Neither does his unorthodox narrative approach, continually foreshadowing the events of 1776, which occur only schematically at the book’s end. Readers de-serve the pleasure of a representative sample, from a chapter ostensibly on Stono:
The new republic garroted the ‘divine right’ of monarchs, while undermining the challenge provided by a rising population of enslaved—and the feisty indigenous—by opening the floodgates and admitting a tidal wave of European (or ‘white’) migrants. The latter, overjoyed by the opportunity to be reaped in a new continent—and their Enlightenment cheerleaders
—could then readily turn a blind eye to the existence of enslaved Africans (and even their frequent revolts), which had propelled the lunge toward secession in the first instance.
As this example also indicates, one of Horne’s principal concerns is the emergence of ‘whiteness’ as a crucial element of the construction and defence of racial slavery. He puts slavery at the centre of a much wider imperial and global context that saw bitter conflict along religious and ethnic axes, and a context of class struggle in which poor whites and enslaved blacks could find themselves friends one moment and foes the next. Taylor is not blind to these issues, especially when he tells how ‘the British officers invited the runaways into the partial freedom
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of the working class,’ but it is Horne’s book that has most to teach about the complex intersection of race, class, religion, and ethnicity.
Each of these categories, along with the gestating nationhood of both Americans and Britons in the period after 1776, formed its own communal ties as well as its own lines of hatred and conflict. Struggles for freedom always took place within and among the shifting contours of allegiance and identity, on the dangerous fault-lines of imperial tec-tonic plates. The people enslaved by American colonists-cum-republi-cans were no more ‘British in their hearts’ than they had been Spanish during the many decades when His Catholic Majesty had harboured rebel runaways and sent them back against their masters. Their ca-pacity for resistance lay in their being ‘ever true to their own interests, without being at all slow in apprehending them.’
William
Walton, S
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ony No. 1 , A
ndré Previn
& L
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, 1967
Alexi Vellianitis
A Communism of Notes
A review of The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton by J. P. E. Harper-Scott (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
The past few years have seen extensive scholarly engagements with musical modernism as a twentieth-century historical moment. Some scholars have even argued that modernism is alive and well in the twenty-first century, after having run concurrently with its postmod-ern nemesis. Modernism is also still described in terms of the way it integrates its others, namely, popular music and any kinds of classical music that are seen as ‘reactionary’. The Quilting Points of Musical Modern-ism goes to the heart of these issues. The text begins with the ‘radical contention […] that the definition of modernism must encompass all the music of the twentieth century, and not just a privileged group of works by a group of nominated composers.’ Harper-Scott also uses recent global events to argue for modernism’s contemporary political relevance. The twentieth-century English composer William Walton, the subject of the text, is traditionally seen as a ‘not-quite-modernist’, especially in comparison with his contemporary Benjamin Britten (a narrative sus-tained by writers and commentators during the Britten Centenary last year). ‘No sane person would claim that Walton is a modernist,’ writes Harper-Scott at the outset, ‘so that is of course exactly what I propose to do.’ And, more broadly, the ‘ultimate outcome of this book is […] an insertion of the ‘conservative’, evidently external limit of modernism into the definition of modernism itself, the assertion of an irresolvable parallax gap of faithful and reactive responses to the truth of the modernism event.’
The text is rife with such propositions, stamped with the con-founding logic of psychoanalytic thought. The text is radically inter-disciplinary in nature: a large amount of space is devoted to discussing the ideas of Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Martin Heidegger (in the most intense instance, fourteen whole pages are devoted to paraphrasing Alain Badiou’s Logic of Worlds, with no oth-er footnotes). All of this will easily alienate readers unfamiliar with the work of these writers, but, pre-empting these complaints, which dogged the negative or dismissive reviews of his previous book, Edward Elgar, Modernist, Harper-Scott is explicit in making ‘no apology for the heavy dependence on philosophy in all [his] work.’ The book is also
a communist critique: according to Harper-Scott, ‘the time is ripe for musicology to join the rest of the world in revisiting the tradition of ideology critique bequeathed by Marxism, and to ask what the idea of communism can contribute to musicology.’ The author suggests the book should also be read from beginning to end, because it ‘advances a single, cumulative argument throughout’, beginning by attempting to expose the capitalist underpinnings of our contemporary concep-tion of modernism and tracing a trajectory towards a ‘new community’ at the end. This is a lot to deal with, but, just like the writings of Lacan or Badiou, the text functions less as a conceptually coherent entity and more as a visceral force: even if one does not follow the argument cu-mulatively, this basic critical approach is compellingly present at all levels of the text.
What, then, is a ‘quilting point’? This is a term borrowed from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose work provides the the-oretical backdrop for the text. Harper-Scott quotes Lacan’s own de-scription: a quilting point is ‘the point around which all concrete anal-ysis of discourse must operate’, the ‘point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively’. The author also gives the following example:
Suppose that someone buys a sexual lubricant in a supermarket or chemist. Everything else in their shop-ping basket now takes on insalubrious connotations. The shopper begins to feel nervous and furtive, imagin-ing that the person behind the till is thinking ‘Are they going to insert that submarine roll, hairdryer, or tube of toothpaste into their orifices for the purpose of extracting sexual pleasure from it?’
A quilting point, then, is approximately a referent or a theme—a point that gives meaning to an otherwise unruly or disparate set of facts or ideas. In practice it provides an extremely pliable theoretical frame-work, allowing the author to tease apart and question several different themes associated with modernism: urbanisation, anti-Semitism, ex-pansion of tonality, xenophobia, and masculine prestige. More impor-tantly, the term works inasmuch as it foregrounds the essentialising tendencies of any themes or reference points that become conventional wisdom and end up going uncriticised: a quilting point is not merely a theme or a referent because it is imbued with a certainty that can also lead to essentialism and ideological violence. Lacan’s original French term, the point de capiton (literally ‘upholstery button’), provides a clear-er metaphor: these buttons keep material securely fastened over the padding of a chesterfield sofa, but they create deep creases in the fabric that extend outwards further than we might realise.
The opening section is a meditation on the violence of essen-tialism. Entitled ‘A ruthless criticism of everything existing’, it is in practice primarily a criticism of one text: the Early Twentieth-Century volume of renowned American musicologist Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music. Harper-Scott argues that Taruskin’s attempt to write modernism off as a kind of Romanticism-turned-rotten is a way of drawing modernism closer to Wagnerism, and by extension, closer to anti-Semitism. Taruskin’s ‘entire musicological output [is found-ed on a] xenophobic-capitalist quilting point’, central to which is the E>G>N (European>German>Nazi) short circuit, a supposed series of logical leaps present in all of Taruskin’s work that leads him to im-agine that all Europeans are anti-Semitic. Harper-Scott concludes that the ‘hideous European—racist, elitist, and imperialist—serves a very obvious purpose by concealing the racism of America.’
Taruskin is cast as a kind of musicological tyrant, and Harp-er-Scott’s argument is consequently both uncomfortably personal (‘Taruskin’s xenophobia has long been evident to Europeans like me who are the target of it’) and vindictive (‘his obsession [with Britain] is so extraordinary that I can only imagine he had some kind of child-hood trauma involving Marmite’). Where Taruskin is not explicit, Harper-Scott is also uninhibited in filling in the blanks: ‘[Taruskin] does not have to say ‘Well, [the British] would love [John Adams’s supposedly anti-Semitic opera The Death of Klinghoffer], wouldn’t they? They’re all anti-Semites!” We can read it from the context.’ In the worst case, Harper-Scott reads a ‘basic sexism’ into Taruskin’s tenden-cy to agree with the work of female scholars. The ultimate driving force behind this chapter is rage, making it less a criticism and more of a ti-
rade. The opening chapter is in many ways extremely illuminating, but the reader will have to cultivate a critical distance from the text rather than getting carried away by the diatribe.
The second section, entitled ‘Relationship problems’, contains, according to Harper-Scott, ‘the most difficult pages in this book’. Here, ‘the rather cold abstractions of set theory are clarified by juxtaposition with Aristophanean and Wagnerian theories of gendering’. This sec-tion is an in-depth expansion upon a central idea of Lacanian psycho-analysis, of the essential difference between the sexes, their failure to relate, and the consequent decentering of the subject. This section is far too rich to be described in full, but one potent example can be giv-en. Following Badiou very closely, Harper-Scott gives a reading of the famous C sharp at the very start of the Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, a shockingly dissonant note that, although it is resolved immediately, provides a starting point for the rest of the tonal drama throughout the movement. He describes it as an example of a ‘void’, which is
[…] present in every situation … [and] is the truth as it appears in the situation—strictly external to the situation (since it cannot be expressed fully in the terms of the situation), but nominated […] in faithful confidence, as an infinite possibility ‘to-come’. […] Void terms like serialism uttered in 1912, or socialism in one country uttered in 1917, then, [quoting Badiou] ‘do not, in general, have a referent in the situation.’
This is one of the main ways in which the book’s musicological project meets Marxism: through a void that is present both in the establish-ment of a tonal drama and in the moment of revolution.
Harper-Scott then reads this essential difference into the por-nographic interlude in Walton’s opera Troilus and Cressida, in which the protagonists cement their love through a parodic sexual act. Having set up the theory with regards to sexual identity, Harper-Scott applies it more metaphorically to tonality itself. We tend to conceive of tonal-
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and the work has often been seen to mark the point at which Walton regressed to a pre-1912 musical language and failed in his status as a modernist. But Harper-Scott argues that, far from being a compro-mised or reactive ending to this work, it is actually a logical outcome of the first three movements. The affirmation of the tonic at the end of the symphony comes as a kind of parodic, performative closure, high-lighting the violence of tonality and effecting a change from faithful to reactive subject: it is not that tonality is ‘returned to’ in some sense, but that tonality is looked back upon, or given newly present meaning. It is a fresh mode of argument, not least because of the compelling paradox of describing a clearly tonal finale as modernist in and of itself.
The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism is an extremely strange text. It pursues the most conservative questions down one of the most well-trodden musicological paths, using a methodology that even a decade ago would have been considered old-fashioned by many: psy-choanalysis and continental critical theory have been sidelined over recent years in favour of a new historicity, and Marxist critique is of-ten viewed as naïve or pointless. But these questions are not treated conservatively: Harper-Scott convincingly argues against both of these problems, and the scale and scope of the study amply updates all of the methodology. More importantly, this is by far the most charged political musicological text in recent years, and, the first chapter not-withstanding, it makes lucid and trenchant points about the broader role of academia in the Western world. In short, Quilting Points is an extremely refreshing addition to musicology, and while the scholarly response to this text has so far been one of stunned silence, in time there will be recognition of its value.
ity hierarchically: the key signature is the most important and stable point, a point of resolution; the drama of a musical work is set up by the creation of dissonance which takes on the character of Otherness, an Otherness which is eventually neutralised by the masculine tonic. Harper-Scott analyses the harmonic language of Troilus and Cressida by locating in the score instances of Richard Wagner’s famous Tristan chord, which points to an ever-absent object of desire, in this case, the A minor tonic (a key shared by both the Tristan prelude and ‘Out of My Childhood’, the aria from Troilus under discussion). He writes that ‘If you do not feel this absent A minor, you are missing the (quilt-ing) point’. The discussion of the tonic as a Tristan-esque eternally lost object, while arguably being apt for the sexual desire in the opera, raises questions. How much does this preoccupation with the hierar-chical functioning of desire reinforce the monolithic status of tonality? Wouldn’t part of a critique of tonality be to unlearn to respond to the syntax of tonal music, or at least to learn that it is only one response? Isn’t a lot of the yearning in Tristan to do with the long melodic lines and the general, local harmonic deflections, rather than at each point wishing for a perfect cadence in A minor?
The answer to this comes in the final section, entitled ‘The revo-lutionary kernel of reactionary music.’ Here Harper-Scott is concerned with tonality, which is by its very nature hierarchical: a tonal piece necessarily has its tonic key at the top of the hierarchy, to which all other key signatures and chromatic sections are subordinate. The at-tainment of a successful tonal hierarchical structure means the sub-suming of these other materials within the tonic key, a process that happens at the end of a work. But Harper-Scott is mainly concerned with highlighting the contingent nature of the hierarchy of tonality: to create an explicit point of drama is to heighten the presence of the hierarchical tonal structure, to reveal its violent ideological nature. ‘It is Beethoven’s more ruthless and Haydn’s more startling presencing of tonal structure that,’ writes Harper-Scott, ‘precisely because it shows the system emerging with maximum vehemence, offers an emancipa-tory glimpse of a world beyond tonality.’ Harper-Scott cites a farcical minuet by Haydn in order to illustrate this point, but it could be equal-ly well-made by looking at Beethoven’s Fifth: the excessive repeated cadences at the end of the work are alarming in drawing attention to the act of closure, which must be attained at all costs. The point is not to get rid of this closure, but to see it as what it is: a contingent and historically specific act, rather than a natural inevitability. This is one of the great paradoxes of the text: this focus on the Germanic heart of musicology marks a purposeful overcharging of the conservative drive. Rather than searching for the false security of a paradigm shift, the author wishes to explode it from within by stretching it to its furthest logical limits.
This is also the core of the communist project of the text, an ar-gument set up through Badiou’s writings on revolution, and through his theorisation of the positions of ‘faithful’ and ‘reactive’ subjects. A faithful subject is one that subordinates their ‘entire material existence to the trace of the Event’, and the reactive subject turns this Event ‘definitively towards an optimistic “proof” of the universality of truth and the hope for revolutionary emancipatory change.’ We can put it in different terms: a faithful subject carries out or is engaged in a rev-olutionary act that shakes the structure of the existing situation; the reactive subject then comes to terms with this act and uses it to effect positive change in the future. In musical terms, ‘the faithful subject of musical modernism is instituted by the process whereby a body of works is subordinated to the trace of the Event [the breaking away from tonality], which by 1926 carries the name emancipation of dissonance.’ Thus, ‘the negation of the emancipated dissonance is the privileging of “tonic” configurations, which is to say the reassertion, to a greater or lesser degree, of the “centrality” of certain relatively “stable” chords.’ By contrast to the hierarchically violent functioning of tonality, this emancipation of dissonance creates a ‘communism of notes’.
In order to expand upon this, Harper-Scott then turns his at-tention to Walton’s ostensibly tonal First Symphony, a work with a troubled genesis: Walton struggled to compose the finale, with the result that the first three movements were initially premiered alone. When the work was premiered in its entirety, its unabashedly jubilant and tonal finale seemed to many to diverge too much in tone from the stormy and fragmented modernist tone of the first three movements,
‘The administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost’, the psychiatrist Alexander Leighton reflected glumly in 1949: ‘for sup-port rather than for illumination.’ Leighton had more reason than most for such ambivalence, having participated in an ethically dubious study of interned Japanese-Americans during the war, before finding his efforts to shape US policy in Japan systematically frustrated after it. Meanwhile, the use made by government of some of Leighton’s for-mer colleagues increasingly called to mind certain other things drunks sometimes do to lampposts—perhaps none more than the anthropolo-gist Margaret Mead, whose work in various parts of government over the previous decade had embroiled her in controversies that would later seem to have marred, and even defined, an illustrious career.
For a while during the 1940s Margaret Mead was the world’s most famous anthropologist, author of three best-selling monographs, contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s, and Vogue, and adviser to several US government agencies. In 1943 the Washington Post named her one of ‘eight outstanding women of the modern world’, alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson, and Eve Curie. Yet since her death in 1978 her public reputation has largely evaporated, and among anthropologists the cautionary tale of her professional and intellectu-al entanglements retains almost as much fascination as the works in which she helped to define her field.
As Mead’s academic standing diminished, so too did that of the broad ‘Culture and Personality’ approach to anthropology of which she was a leading exponent. Having enjoyed, at its height, a profes-sional and public authority to match that of Mead herself, by 1960 Culture and Personality was so widely discredited that the authors of a new textbook on the field re-named it ‘psychological anthropology’ to evade the stigma it had attracted. These vertiginous trajectories of rep-utation trace an influential episode in the history of the human scienc-es, our understanding of which is greatly enriched by Peter Mandler’s enjoyable new book. Focusing on the period of Mead’s career between 1939 and 1953, when she attempted to establish anthropology as a guide
for US government policy and international relations, Mandler traces a history with acute relevance to current debates on the public role of intellectuals and on the vexed question of academia’s proper relation-ship with government and the state.
Mead’s first encounter with anthropology as a senior at Barnard College in the early 1920s was with a discipline still relatively young and undergoing rapid development. The time and place were propi-tious: New York City in the early twentieth century was the setting in which the new ‘cultural relativism’ had been formulated by Mead’s teacher, the Columbia Professor of Anthropology Franz Boas. Dis-placing long-standing evolutionary assumptions which situated soci-eties along a linear scale from ‘primitive’ to ‘advanced’—assumptions which, in the US, carried particularly strong biological and racial over-tones—Boas demonstrated the autonomy of the intellectual and behav-ioural standards within societies, and re-cast anthropology’s mission as the apprehension of ‘difference’ more nearly on its own terms.
Under the influence of Boas and his brilliant teaching assistant Ruth Benedict, Mead embarked on fieldwork in Samoa and New Guin-ea whose publication secured her academic and public standing before her thirtieth birthday. This was not solely due to her subject-matter (Mead protested to a critic of her first book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) that ‘only’ 68 of its 297 pages were about sex) but also to her conclu-sions as to how Americans might learn from the practices and mores of her subjects in the southern Pacific. In this respect Mead arguably went further than Boas to affirm the value of relativism within cultures as well as between them and to argue that a ‘heterogeneous culture’ such as America could permit individuals to choose among several available normative frameworks, rather than mandating one for all.
Her concern with the position of the individual within a culture aligned Mead’s work with an emerging tendency in American social science that came to be known as ‘Culture and Personality’. Although never a unified or even cohesive field, the studies grouped under this term shared an interest in the reciprocal relationships between individ-uals and cultures, and in the formation of adult personality by child-hood experience. Its most systematic articulation, Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), became one of the best-selling anthropological works of the century despite containing no original fieldwork. By the mid-1930s Mead was developing her own theoretical framework for Culture and Personality studies, in the course of which an encoun-ter with neo-Freudianism in 1934 turned her attention to the role of child-rearing practices in the formation of adult personality and its situation within a culture.
This work already marked a loosening of the cultural-relativist principles that had guided Mead’s early career, by imagining diversity in terms of the varying extent to which cultures exhibited certain uni-versal characteristics. The more problematic aspects of this came into sharpest focus not in Mead’s own work, however, but in that of the amateur ethnographer Geoffrey Gorer after he sought her out in New York at the end of 1935. Gorer emerges from this account almost as a kind of holy fool, blessed with what Benedict thought ‘a wonderful eye’ for fieldwork, but cheerfully resistant to Mead and her persistent efforts to turn him into an anthropologist. Instead, his idiosyncratic use of their techniques unwittingly exposed the weaknesses of what-ever Mead was attempting to take more seriously over the subsequent fifteen years. In 1937 Gorer published a study selectively applying her methodology to American culture under the title Hot Strip Tease—which, as Mead astringently informed him, did little to burnish either of their academic credentials. Chastened, he did an anthropologist’s penance in the Himalayas, producing another monograph which strayed even further from Mead’s relativist principles; but in ways which Mandler deftly shows were also becoming evident in her own fieldwork in Bali.
Returning to the US in 1939 and stranded by the outbreak of war, Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson joined the throng of academics for whom the conflict was an opportunity to put into prac-tice the previous decade’s theoretical discussions of purposive social science. For them this meant adapting their Culture and Personali-ty framework to produce studies of ‘national character’, which they hoped would support the war effort by providing insight on allied and enemy countries. The unease felt by other anthropologists at the inher-ent simplifications of this kind of analysis was considerably magnified when Gorer, probably at Mead’s own instigation, used it to explain
Stuart Middleton
Diaperology
A review of Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War by Peter Mandler (Yale University Press, 2013)
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Ditlev Rindom
New York, New York
A review of Grand Opera: The Story of the Met by Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron (University of California Press, 2014)
In the lead-up to the Metropolitan Opera’s 2014 revival of Richard Strauss’ Arabella, the German sopra-no Juliane Banse was asked by an interviewer what it felt like to be making her debut with this cele-brated company. She answered by recounting a popular joke from her student days: what are the three most beautiful words in the world? ‘I love you’? No: ‘The Met called’. Her answer encapsulates the immense prestige which has encrusted around this particular institution, a prestige supported latterly by a global network of HD broadcasts which transmit the company’s productions to audiences around the world, and which serve to cement the Met’s status as the pinnacle of operatic entertainment. In the eyes of many opera fans, the Met is a kind of Mount Olympus for the vocal arts: not simply another establishment institution, but the ultimate expression of what the art form can achieve; not just opera, but ‘grand opera’.
In their new history of the Metropolitan Opera, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met, Charles and Mirella Jona Affron do not seek to debunk or deconstruct this myth; indeed in their final sentence they proclaim that this American company, ‘arguably pre-eminent in the world […] has become the imperial capital of opera’. As they make clear in their introduction, their own experience as Met regulars since the 1950s has informed their account of its performance history and they write not merely as historians, but also as opera lovers (mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli is amongst those friends thanked in the ac-knowledgements). The most significant gap in their narrative of the Met’s relentless rise to the top, in fact, is their unwillingness to locate the company’s travails within a broader story of opera’s survival into
Marg
aret Mead
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eo Fortune in
Pere V
illage, 1928
approach. It is in this rather limited sense that she can be said to have ‘won the second world war’; this account makes clear what common sense would suggest, that, even at the height of their involvement with the US state, social scientists never exercised more than an indirect influence on government and military decision-making.
Nonetheless, the disappointment expressed by Alexander Leighton later in the decade is some measure of the hopes raised dur-ing the war that state power might yield to the rational control of the social sciences. Mead accordingly continued her work in government after 1945, hoping to shape the emergent international order towards her long-held values of pluralism and inter-cultural understanding. But the political and intellectual forces ranged against her were in-creasingly formidable. In the immediate aftermath of war, the permis-sive tolerance preached by cultural relativists held less appeal for many policymakers than various forms of proselytising universalism, which promised to make the world safe for putative American values rather than just for Boasian anthropologists. The environment became even less favourable with the establishment of the ‘Cold War’, when the spectre of global Communism did little to encourage the passive con-templation of cultural difference in Washington.
Such pleasures were not, though, lost on a growing popular audience for Culture and Personality studies in the immediate post-war years. The primer on Japanese culture which Benedict prepared from her government propaganda work, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), was a bestseller in both America and Japan, and several Cul-ture and Personality-based studies of contemporary America met with similar success (some of which, by Erich Fromm and David Riesman, remain in print). This very prominence, however, helped to make Cul-ture and Personality in general, and Mead and Benedict in particular, convenient targets for anthropologists advocating rival approaches which they claimed would better serve the requirements of an increas-ingly formalised and professional discipline.
And then there was Gorer, whose aversion to formality and professionalism was accompanied by an unerring instinct for project-ing his particular kind of bull into whatever china shop happened to be nearby. Noting the popularity of quasi-anthropological studies of America, Gorer hastily produced one of his own which drew heavi-ly on Mead’s work, and dismayed her with its sweeping generalisa-tions. (Her concerns were not unfounded: reviewing Gorer’s book in The Guardian, Alistair Cooke reflected ‘It makes you wonder if it’s true what they say about the Trobriand Islanders.’). Worse, Mead had by then invited Gorer to participate in a project for RAND examining the Russian national character, for which he developed his infamous ‘swaddling hypothesis’ linking the swaddling of Russian babies to a supposed proclivity for authoritarian leadership. By the time the fully-worked-out version was published in 1949, the disparaging term ‘dia-perology’ was being applied not only to Gorer’s work, but also to that of Benedict and Mead, whom Mandler shows damaged her own pro-fessional standing by stoutly defending Gorer whilst painfully aware of the shortcomings of his analysis.
Her clients in RAND were little more impressed by Gorer’s work than were Mead’s fellow anthropologists, and their fractious re-lationship ended in 1950. Increasingly desperate to find a way of shap-ing the post-war order in accordance with her intellectual and ethical ideals, Mead carried out further work that was at best distantly related to them before finally abandoning Washington in 1953 to undertake a re-study of the Manus people in New Guinea, about whom she had written her second book twenty-five years earlier. If she had previous-ly ‘won the Second World War’ in a limited sense, Mead could now be said to have ‘lost the Cold War’ as anthropology was marginalised from the decisions that would shape global politics for the remainder of the century, while her own professional reputation was seriously diminished partly by association with the very policies she had tried to alter.
This account convincingly vindicates its central claim that Mead was less complicit in the misadventures of American foreign policy after 1945 than she was subsequently held to be. Never really possessed of the influence that was attributed to her, she was increas-ingly at odds with the tenor of US policy during the Cold War, and her most controversial work arguably proceeded from a desire to turn it to a different, less confrontational course. Nonetheless, Mandler
Japanese ‘national character’ as a product of ‘early and severe toilet training’. A subsequent study of Greek culture which Mead and Gorer undertook together for the federal Children’s Bureau identified ‘a fan-tastic fear of castration’ at the root of the national psyche—an analysis which was poorly received at the Greek embassy when it was inadvert-ently supplied with a copy.
These ‘rapid diagnostic studies’ were responsible for much of the opprobrium that subsequently attached to wartime deployments of Culture and Personality studies. Yet other aspects of Mead and her immediate circle’s work in government were less culpable than these simplistic analyses later came to appear. When Benedict took over Gorer’s job at the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1943, her briefings for personnel preparing to occupy mainland Europe were ap-plauded for their rigour and sensitivity, and she had to recruit extra staff to keep up with demand for them. Mead herself won wide pub-lic attention for the ‘culture-consciousness’ that she hoped would un-derpin international relations after the war, commanding an audience outside academia that only Benedict among her peers could match. Mead’s study of contemporary America, published in 1942 as And Keep Your Powder Dry, was both a popular success and a major influence on later studies of American society. Her work in Britain during 1943 on behalf of the OWI, of which there is a particularly full account here, was similarly effective in promoting awareness of cultural difference as the basis for understanding and co-operation: the producer of one of her BBC broadcasts declared that Mead ‘achieved more towards real Anglo-American understanding in her ten minutes’ talk than most other American speakers put together’.
Mandler coolly notes that rumours of Mead’s influence during this period—which, at their most febrile, credited her with the drop-ping of the atom bomb and the retention of Emperor Hirohito—were exaggerated, but that nonetheless by the end of the war she had helped to establish a broad role for anthropology in government and to demonstrate the particular efficacy of her own Culture and Personality
does not shrink from pointing out Mead’s departures from the ethical principles that cultural relativism had claimed to embody, which were of a different order from the purely intellectual departures that she had already undertaken before the war (such as her engagement with variants of neo-Freudianism). Mead’s awareness of her own position is also clearly registered here: her attempts to stand aloof from the more compromising uses of anthropology whilst arranging for colleagues, friends and lovers to contribute to them make especially uncomforta-ble reading.
This discomfort is a reaction that academics facing the inter-national situation of the 1930s and 1940s were arguably less able to indulge, but Mandler’s account of the results yielded by their work ap-pears barely commensurate with its ethical and professional costs. The worst of these were in large part self-imposed, the product of personal and disciplinary ambition as much as of the inherently toxic effect that a younger generation of anthropologists would later ascribe to gov-ernment work. If Mead’s failure to secure a voice for anthropology in government and international relations therefore takes on a certain tragic aspect, there may nonetheless be a measure of redemption in the enduring popular appeal she won for it. In September 1966, as she settled into her last public role as ‘grandmother to the world’, a new television show depicted a group of explorers fulfilling their mission to seek out new life and new civilisations in accordance with a ‘Prime Di-rective’ prohibiting any intervention in the cultures they encountered. The stringent cultural relativism observed by the crew of the Starship Enterprise ensured that Mead’s vision of peaceful inter-cultural co-op-eration lived long and prospered, as it were, long after its purely aca-demic vogue had passed. As legacies go, most of us will do a lot worse.
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the 21st century, as the emergence of cinema, globalisation, and the creation of the European welfare state all worked to reshape the operatic landscape in dramatic ways. Theirs is emphatically a local, even provincial history, which grounds the Met’s triumphs and struggles chiefly in its American environs, and even more significantly in the company’s relationship with the city of New York.
The Affrons’ account opens with a richly detailed depiction of the Met’s opening night on Octo-ber 22nd 1883: a gala performance of Charles Gounod’s Faust starring Christine Nilsson and performed, as was the custom, with the libretto translated from French to Italian for an audience which included some of New York’s wealthiest families. Class distinctions were made manifest not only in the structure of the building, with its separate staircase for cheap ticket holders, but also in the very existence of the company. The Met’s most significant precursor in New York, the Academy of Music, founded in 1854, had become incapable of accommodating the growing number of elite citizens who desired boxes in which to flaunt their social status, and available spaces were invariably given to members of the ‘Old Families’ (or ‘Nobs’) rather than the expanding (and far wealthier) ‘Newcomers’ (or ‘the Tens’). The Met’s founding by the Vanderbilts, Roosevelts and others was thus a private enterprise rooted in social display, amongst whose chief purposes was the establishment of a monument and playground for the social elite of New York City.
One of the most interesting threads which weaves its way through the Affrons’ history is how the Metropolitan Opera gradually transformed itself from this private venture into a global brand, one whose finances are underwritten not merely by ticket sales and minimal state funding but also massive public sponsorship. Readers who have followed the recent trade union troubles at the company (includ-ing the possible cancellation of the season) may be comforted to know that this is merely the tip of an historical iceberg: the Met’s financial history reads like a concatenation of crises, each one precipitating significant structural changes which have ensured the temporary survival of an extravagantly expensive art form. The transformation of the family-owned Metropolitan Opera Company to a non-profit Met-ropolitan Opera Association; the dissolution of the Metropolitan Real Estate Company and eventual purchase by the Association of the opera house; the introduction of radio broadcasts and sponsorship campaigns; the establishment of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and Opera News magazine; the introduc-tion of HD cinema broadcasts and a marketing division: all of these developments were driven by the need for financial solvency and attempted to plug the persistent hole in the operatic sinking ship. At the same time, the ever-widening expansion of the Met’s reach and its emergence into the public sphere repeatedly posed the same questions: who is the Met for, and what purpose does it serve?
The Vanderbilts and Roosevelts who occupied the most prominent boxes at the Met’s opening night may have offered one answer: it served to establish their position at the peak of the social hierarchy, and in turn participated in the construction of New York as a major cultural centre, whose cosmopolitan population was reflected in the repertoire on-stage. The Italian translations of the opening year swiftly ceded to a program dominated by German language opera, before the company developed separate Italian and German language choruses in the early 1900s and a wide roster of artists suited to diverse operatic offerings. These artists included such legendary names as Nellie Melba, Lilli Lehmann and Enrico Caruso—singers whose arrival on the international scene coincided with the advent of recording technology, a situation which ensured not only their own celebrity, but that of the Met, who secured a share of their royalties. From its earliest decades, therefore, the Met took advantage of technological developments in order to cultivate its position at the pinnacle of the operatic industry, and by extension that of New York, as the focal point of twentieth-century Western culture.
By the time Edward Johnson assumed management of the Metropolitan Opera in 1935—and in the wake of a devastating depression in which wealthy sponsors dried up and the general public had been called upon to subsidise the company—there was a growing imperative to provide opportunities for young American artists in a country with no regional opera companies. Spurred on by the example of Rosa Ponselle (who made her debut opposite Caruso at the age of twenty one, never having had a singing lesson), Johnson founded the ‘Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air’, which in their modern incarnation as the Met Council Auditions still provide the company with a stream of the most promis-ing American opera talents. The establishment of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, an educational and fundraising institution linked to the company, likewise acted to democratise opera and encouraged the development of companies in cities such as Atlanta and Miami. Most significant of all was the crossing of racial boundaries that occurred when Marian Anderson became the first black performer to sing a role at the Met in 1955 (the same year Rosa Parks made her Montgomery bus protest): a development which opened the doors to sensational talents such as Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry and Jessye Norman, who number amongst the Met’s greatest ever stars.
From one perspective, then, the Met’s history is an optimistic one of expanding social inclusivity, aided by technological advancements from wax cylinders to HD close-ups, Peach Melba to Twitter and Rolex sponsorships. But there is another, perhaps more poignant tale to which the Affrons gesture only periodically and which the Met shares with many other companies: the movement from a performance culture of new works to a museum culture of past ones. No new opera was premiered at the Met between Mourning Becomes Electra (1967) and The Ghosts of Versailles (1991) and no American opera premiered at the Met has become a part of the company repertoire (Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, commissioned for the opening of the new house in 1966, was a legendary critical failure). This stagnation of the reper-toire has been tackled by the rediscovery of forgotten works and attempts to move from the lavish, pic-torial stagings made famous by Franco Zefferelli towards a more contemporary aesthetic that prioritises quasi-cinematic acting and non-naturalistic productions. Public and critical reaction has been mixed; audience attendance figures slipped to 79.2% in 2010–11 during the height of the recession, a long-stand-ing problem exacerbated by the vast size of the house (at nearly 4000 seats, the largest in the world). Accompanying all of these misgivings has been a refrain familiar to opera lovers from every generation:
the claim that the golden age of singing is dead, a complaint re-articulated now as a tirade against the mediatisation of opera and its focus upon physical beauty and acting prowess. The dazzling succession of Rossini and Handel singers before the public does little to quell such cultural anxiety.
The Affrons remain sanguine, even wilfully cheerful in the face of such troubles, seeking to pro-vide a balanced account of recent problems that draws upon journalistic reports, statistics culled from the Met archives and judicious comparisons with earlier crises. Their story proceeds in a series of elev-en chapters which each focus upon a segment of repertoire that dominated the Met’s programming during a particular epoch, from bel canto to Slavic opera, and the book is enlivened by thoughtfully chosen anecdotes and some striking photo reproductions; the publicity still of Geraldine Farrar should remind nostalgic fans that glamour has always been intrinsic to opera’s appeal. The Affrons’ appraisal of the Met’s recent production of the Ring cycle is axiomatic: acknowledging its widely publicised weaknesses and the inconsistencies in its casting, they maintain that the virtuoso orchestral playing ‘was by itself worth the inflated ticket price’ and situate the production’s shortcomings amongst a variegated record of success and failure in the Met’s history. Where the Ring fails, Parsifal triumphs —even the Met’s opening night Faust in 1883 was a critical flop.
So what purpose does the Metropolitan Opera serve now, and to whom does it speak? The orig-inal function of the enterprise remains largely intact: at glitzy galas such as the Season Opening Night, wealthy donors mingle with Hollywood celebrities in a powerful display of financial and cultural capital and cosmopolitan programming still reflects the city’s ethnic diversity. HD broadcasts remind us of the brand’s prestige, and allow observers in far-flung corners of the globe to ‘experience the magic’ and enter into a performing environment which still ranks amongst the most distinguished on the planet. In a world of competing entertainments and persistent financial woes, the Met’s social position may seem less secure, but in one particular respect the company can indeed justify the Affrons’ designation of ‘imperial capital of the opera world’. Since the Met began its cinema broadcasts, major opera companies such as the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the Bayerische Staatsoper have followed suit, but the Met’s exclusivity contracts mean that other companies have been side-lined to fringe theatres or online streaming rather than the multiplexes that dominate our cities. For better or worse, where the Met goes, other companies follow; and as the Affrons’ gracefully written and finely researched history so often reminds us, the history of the Met is frequently the history of opera itself.
Atiyab Sultan
The Dismal Science
A review of GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle (Princeton University Press, 2014)
No event in recent times has shaken popular belief in the therapeutic credentials of economics as much as the 2008 financial crisis. While previous economic downturns have validated the dismal science as the discipline dispensing the requisite diagnoses and policy prescriptions, the years since 2008 have seen increasingly strident denunciations of economics for its failure to predict and combat the crisis, criticisms of economists as policymakers, and the push to revise university econom-ics curricula to reflect a renewed interest in economic history among other things. Emblematic of this disillusionment with economics is an exploratory mindset that is questioning the ubiquitous econom-ic measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As debates rage on the validity of using GDP in a changing global economy, Diane Coyle’s ‘brief but affectionate history’ responds to detractors of the measure with a distilled account of its continuing relevance. One finds oneself nodding resignedly at this defence of GDP as the lesser of all evils in attempting to measure economic productivity.
Coyle’s greatest achievement is to succinctly describe the histo-ry of the concept as it emerged in the 1940s as a result of wartime poli-tics obsessed with measuring productive capacity in an economy. She points to the longer tradition of attempts to understand state income accounting and how to separate productive and unproductive activi-ties, stretching back to Adam Smith and beyond to seventeenth-cen-tury economist William Petty. Nonetheless, she is quick to argue that GDP was a post-World War II construct. She rightly points out that the conception of the ‘economy’ had changed by then from the idea of the economic sphere being private and small-scale in the times of Smith and Petty: the twentieth century saw the emergence of an in-terventionist government and a state-run economy ushered in by the ideas of neo-classical economists, particularly Alfred Marshall. In the shadow of these intellectual developments redefining the role and con-ception of the economy at large, Coyle skilfully humanises the inven-tion of the concept of GDP by American economists. She quotes from the debates between Simon Kuznets, who favoured a measure captur-
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ing welfare instead of the outcome-oriented GDP, and other econo-mists who wanted a measure for production in the economy. Wartime politics saw the latter win the debate, and GDP emerged as the single most important datum measuring the success and productive capacity of an economy. This historical retelling helps the reader appreciate the fallibility of economic constructs and how they are rooted in particular ideological, political, and economic circumstances. It also successfully demystifies the idea of the GDP, revealing it to be a very recent inven-tion, raised to prominence in a specific historical context.
The chapters which follow introduce some of the failings of GDP, such as the inability of the measure to capture changes in the quality of goods and innovation as economic activity has become in-creasingly intangible and globally integrated. It has proven difficult to translate the trends of an increasingly dominant service sector, rising consumerism, and an efflorescence of goods with complex function-ality into GDP, a construct intended to enumerate physical units of production. The fact that GDP is a flow variable, not an asset one, can lead to critical failures. For example, when a government decides to rebuild a road, destroyed perhaps by war or natural disaster, this increased economic activity will be recorded as an increase in the GDP without appreciating the loss that the war or disaster has caused, in this case the original road that has been destroyed. GDP will capture the ‘increase’ in production but not the depletion of the existing as-sets or structures that prompted the increased economic activity in the first place. An example of this is the dramatic GDP boom of the post-World War II era, where the Marshall plan hinged on the effective computation of national incomes through GDP. It was the infatuation with this kind of planned economics and growth, in what Coyle terms the ‘golden age’ of GDP in the 1950s and 60s, which eventually led to the recession, oil price shock, and radical changes in developmental economics that marked the tragic decade of the seventies. Coyle makes the thinly veiled suggestion that, had GDP calculations been more fa-vourable, the UK might never have turned to the IMF for a loan in 1976, a decision which some associate with the subsequent political support for Thatcher’s government. Such historical episodes signal the immense power GDP can wield and the potential for its manipu-lation. The reader might have benefited at this stage from a more sys-tematic treatment of how GDP is calculated. Coyle instead lists a few famous paradoxes to illustrate this: when a man marries his maid, he reduces the GDP as he no longer has to pay her salary, although in an absolute sense actual economic activity has not changed if the former maid continues to take care of the house. GDP does not take stock of such ‘invisible’ or ‘unpaid’ activities like child-care or housework. Yet Coyle shies away from estimating the size of this informal economic activity or how it might be added to the GDP.
GDP is reflective of the era in which it was conceived, when economists viewed productive activity as belonging to the traditional-ly ‘hard’ sectors. As such it seemed out of kilter with the increasingly informal and invisible ways in which technology impacted production as well as the evolution of financial markets in subsequent decades. Yet whilst these failings of GDP were highlighted in the financial crisis of 2008, Coyle is ultimately dismissive of alternative measures. She sug-gests that those who propose using subjectively valued happiness as an alternate measure understate the ways in which a fall in GDP or na-tional income can be the cause of anxiety and stress. Coyle’s response to the other alternative, the so-called ‘dashboard indices’ of measuring welfare across various levels as opposed to output, is less persuasive. These indices, which not only take stock of physical production but have a more pronounced understanding of individual concerns like work-life balance and happiness, were proposed by a commission led by economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz after then French President Nicholas Sarkozy invited them in 2008 to propose an alter-native measurement to GDP. Coyle records these developments but finds them premature, insisting that GDP is a better marker for eco-nomic activity. What is missing from her analysis is a consideration of how a new role for the economy might displace GDP from its salient position in the popular imagination, leading to a conception that is more in tune with shifts in the careers, life-choices, and social values since the era of post-war reconstruction.
In the field of developmental economics, something like this occurred in the 1970s when the failure of growth-oriented policies to
achieve sustainable development led to higher rates of inequality and worsening welfare indices. This was the context for Pakistani econo-mist Mahbub ul Haq’s proposed alternative measure of welfare: the Human Development Index (HDI), which incorporated measures of health and education on top of per capita income in its calculation. Coyle lauds this as an acceptable advance and a variable that may be used alongside GDP in tracking progress, however she understates some other failings of GDP as it relates to developmental economics. Coyle’s book opens with the recent attempts of the Greek government to doctor its crucial GDP figures and the surreal case of Greece’s chief statistician being charged with treason last year for attempting to report the size of the economy in an accurate manner. However, Coyle fails to consider the extent to which this problem identified in Greece plagues developing economies the world over, especially given that foreign aid is disbursed largely on the basis of GDP measures. She recognises the problems with purchasing power parity being used to standardise GDP across countries but does not consider the ways in which data may be falsified and under-reported in developing countries, perhaps on a very large scale. Ultimately, even the more reputable statistics from the World Bank or IMF may be derived from weak national sta-tistical services. Coyle’s predominantly Anglo-American account does not deal with non-western economies in any specialised way but as-sumes that the same measure, GDP, is an effective representation of all economies whether or not they may have the same conception of the economy or state-market relations as developed economies. In gener-al, her treatment of environmentalism and development economics is sketchy. She also makes no mention of the rise of corporations that have GDPs larger than nation-states and how reliance on national sta-tistics alone can blind one to the actions of multinational corporations that may be structuring, destroying, or otherwise determining econom-ic activity including trade and production in a country.
Coyle’s account of the emergence and hegemony of GDP is a timely one, capturing in lucid historical detail the major conceptual weaknesses in the construction and use of GDP and the menu of al-ternative measures one might turn to. While she remains a supporter of using GDP, her analysis is broad-minded and balanced enough to allow the reader to consider the alternative measures of welfare, pro-duction, output and development. She lays bare the close ties between politics and economics and demystifies the concept for what it is: a postwar construction for calibrating macroeconomic reconstruction, and national productive capacity in the twentieth century in ways that may soon be obsolete. Notwithstanding the book’s subtitle as a ‘brief and affectionate history’, lurking in its deeper discussion is a sense that GDP is an artefact from the past, increasing unwieldy and flawed.
Jesse Harrington
A Retrospect
A review of The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis
Born in Belfast, to a middle-class, Church of Ireland, unionist family, Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963)—or C.S. Lewis, as he is better known
—is today best remembered as a fantasy author, Christian apologist, and lay theologian. The Chronicles of Narnia ranks as a classic of chil-dren’s literature and of Christian ‘supposition’ (he preferred to see its Christian themes as thought-experiment rather than as simple allego-ry), alongside such similarly-themed classic adult fiction as The Space Trilogy and The Screwtape Letters. In non-fiction, his serialised BBC war-time broadcasts published in 1952 as Mere Christianity remain perhaps the most popularly influential defence of the Christian religion by a twentieth-century layman.
It was however as a medievalist and a literary scholar that Lew-is was professionally known: a fellow and tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1925; appointed University Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cam-bridge in 1954, which he held for the remainder of his career.
With the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’ death falling little over a year ago, Canto Classics have reprinted some of Lewis’ scholarly work in eight new editions—comprising books, collections of essays, and articles
—putting his work as a medievalist back in pride of place. I wish here to draw attention to just one of those reprinted works, Lewis’ The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Originally pre-pared as his introductory undergraduate lectures on the subject, and first published in 1964 one year after his death, the work thus represent-ed the consummation of ideas developed over the course of his academ-ic career. Fifty years on, as an introduction, it holds up remarkably well.
Writing some time before the French Annales School made the study of ‘mentalities’ (‘mentalités’) central to the appreciation of a giv-en period, Lewis sought to draw his audience inside and rationalise the medieval thought-world. Lewis’ particular object was the cosmol-ogy central to that thought-world, which he explained as ‘the whole organisation of their theology, science, and history into a single, com-plex, harmonious mental Model of the Universe’—or, in short, ‘the Medieval Model’. His aim was to show that, far from being a primitive, irrational, or illiterate reaction to an incomprehensible pre-scientific world, the very existence of the Model was inherited in large part from the classical world and engaged with in rational terms.
It was a thought-world in which all the important thinkers of the High Middle Ages knew the Earth physically to be a globe. What we call gravitation, or what writers such as Chaucer called ‘kind-ly enclyning’, was common knowledge. Medieval maps such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, which seem grossly unrealistic to modern eyes, did not suggest that their creators ‘were almost totally ignorant of geography’, but rather that practical knowledge of geography was communicated in terms ‘of winds to be waited for, landmarks to be picked up, capes to be doubled’. Maps were an inefficient means for conveying such geographically precise details for practical navigation, and thus were meant to be read instead in terms of ‘the noble art of cosmography’: a representation of varied lands and their relationships in chiefly symbolic rather than literal terms.
But it was also a cosmology of four elements, of heavenly spheres, of temperate zones, of a universe in which the Earth was the lowest place and all the heavens rose upwards. All in heaven and on earth was guided by divine providence, with the spheres moved in Ar-istotelian terms by their inborn ‘intelligences’, their innate love and desire for God. These worlds were inhabited in turn by other intelli-gences: by angels, men, beasts, and, in an ambiguous position at the margins, by the ‘Longaevi’ or ‘long-livers’—a fluid cast of fairies, elves, and nymphs known from various strands of literature.
This is ‘the discarded image’ to which Lewis refers. Far from being irrational, however, it was an image grounded in the literature of the classical tradition. In this respect, a major strength of the work is its introduction in turn to the authors who served as the bridge be-tween the classical and medieval worlds and underpinned the latter’s Model. The medieval model of the ascent through the heavens, with its division between sky and aether at some point around the Moon, owed much to the writings of the Roman orator Cicero and the poet Lucan. The mechanics of providence were made known by the po-et-philosopher Boethius.
Plato was known very differently to medieval readers than to modern ones: the only writing of his to survive was the incomplete
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(though influential) translation and loose commentary of his Timaeus produced by the fourth-century Chalcidius. What medieval authors inherited instead was a ‘diffuse’ Platonism, intermediated by such writ-ers as Apuleius, who introduced the Platonic ‘Principle of the Triad’, the idea that two binaries required an intermediary, and the ‘Principle of Plenitude’, the idea of the universe always seeking to fill a vacuum.
Those principles were given application by Pseudo-Dionysius, the sixth-century Syrian whose writings reached the Latin West in the ninth-century. Pseudo-Dionysius populated the heavens with angels arranged in three hierarches, filling the vacuum and fulfilling the tri-ad by providing the necessary intermediaries between God and Man. Nonetheless, these angels were understood to be pure unembodied minds. (‘This statement, in a book which came to be so authoritative, may be taken as proof that educated people in the Middle Ages never believed the winged men who represent angels in painting and sculp-ture to be more than symbols.’)
It is a fascinating turn through a series of often unfamiliar clas-sical authors, elaborating too on Statius, Claudian, and Macrobius. It demonstrates that the Model was a sophisticated synthesis of the best that survived of the Pagan and Christian traditions—while also fur-nishing Lewis’ argument that the Pagan and Christian worlds were in many respects closer to each other than the ‘post-Christian’ world is to either.
As Lewis reminds us, medieval culture (or rather, the main-stream of that specifically literate culture which has left us its textual remnant) was ‘overwhelmingly bookish’ and consciously imitative, as well as being a time not only of ‘authority’, but of ‘authorities’. This was not however its weakness, but its strength. As he had argued else-where, acceptance of fact on authority is a habit of life, attesting sim-ply to the trustworthiness we ascribe to the authority in question; the fact that the authors of the past were believed on authority where their beliefs could be reconciled with each other was not itself irrational. All that has changed for us in the interim is the total culture and the temperament of our age. The American literary critic John V. Flem-ing summed up Lewis’ insight that ‘our ancestors’ belief in marvel-lous beasts, a fairy world, and ranks of unseen angels and demons was caused by the same thing that has caused us to disbelieve in them: literacy.
Perhaps appropriately then, it is by bringing to bear his own reading that Lewis hoped for the student to see the Model from the in-side. In his 1961 essay An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis wrote perceptively that what we should seek as readers is ‘an enlargement of our being’: ‘We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.’ So too in The Discarded Image, where it seems that in presenting the Model, Lewis wants one to rec-ognise its beauty, and, even for a moment, imagine it as if it were true:
[…]to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The space of modern astronomy may arouse terror,or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.
This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien—all agoraphobia—is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky. Dante, whose theme might have been expected to invite it, never strikes that note. The meanest modern writer of science fiction can, in that department, do more for you than he. Pascal’s terror at le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis never entered his mind. He is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea […]
The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval comos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered.
For a moment he almost convinces the reader that it is indeed the case. In some respects, the metaphorical language even seems more reasonable than our own. As he observed, to describe objects as ‘kind-ly enclyning’ makes more sense to describe them following the law of gravity: ‘to talk as if inanimate bodies had a homing instinct is to bring them no nearer to us than the pigeons; to talk as if they could “obey laws” is to treat them like men and even like citizens.’
But then the door closes shut. ‘I hope no one will think that I am recommending a return to the Medieval Model’, he wrote. Chang-es in cosmological models and mentalities in the broadest sense were effected not only by the discovery of new facts but by changes in philosophical outlook, by ‘the prevailing temper of mind’. ‘I am only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolising none.’ To the extent that we are called upon to respect the Medieval Model, Lewis’ aim was to make the spirit and temper underlying its thought-world intelligible.
What is apparent however is just how long the Model persisted. Lewis’ illustrations of the cosmology draw from a much broader defini-tion than the term ‘medieval’ might at first suggest, including the early modern poets Edmund Spenser, John Donne and John Milton.
His justification was that the Model was ‘not totally and confi-dently abandoned till the end of the seventeenth century’. Lewis’ study of medieval and Renaissance literature and the thought-world that un-derpinned them thus helped problematise the traditional boundary definition which drew a sharp division between the two periods, and in so doing he followed the work of E.M.W. Tillyard at Cambridge and Douglas Bush at Harvard.
Lewis had made this same argument more extensively as the theme of his De Descriptione Temporum (1954), his inaugural lecture from the newly established Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature. There, he proposed that the line drawn between the historical-cultural mindsets of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had been ‘greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist prop-
aganda’. He saw the greater intellectual shift as taking place with the acceptance of Copernicanism, Cartesianism, and the new science of the seventeenth century; the broader cultural shift followed some time afterwards.
Lewis’ revision to the schema of history saw three periods: the classical (until the fifth century), the medieval (even into the eight-eenth century), and the modern (only beginning in the nineteenth cen-tury). The sharpest distinction, given what we have seen of the classi-cal heritage underpinning the medieval cosmology, was between the medieval and the modern. Thus, the Middle Ages could only appro-priately be treated as ‘a specimen of something far larger, something which had already begun when the Iliad was composed and was still almost unimpaired when Waterloo was fought’. The charge is ambi-tious, but it does much to restore the sense of what is ‘medieval’ to its well-deserved dignity.
It turns now to consider some of the limitations of The Discard-ed Image. Students of disciplines other than literature may miss Lewis’ rather strong assumption that medieval literature proper begins in the twelfth century, and that by medieval literature he means specifically the high vernacular literature of French and Middle English, particu-larly those of courtly romance, with its poetic and prose successors. Excluded from his assessment of the Model are spiritual literature (‘partly because the spiritual books are entirely practical—like medical books’), and the large corpus of Norse and even non-Arthurian Celtic literature (‘almost a separate culture, rich in native genius but half cut off from the Mediterranean legacy which the rest of Europe enjoyed’). This may be conventional to his discipline and it may make the work more cogent and readable to the beginner; moreover, examples from Beowulf and Snorre Sturlason are sometimes allowed to reintrude as illustrations of the Model their cultures are supposedly outside. None-theless, if unrecognised, this unspoken assumption disguises much of the diversity of views and thought-worlds, in the plural, even among the literati of medieval Christendom.
A second problem is that The Discarded Image is a work with lim-ited academic apparatus: there are few footnotes, much less a bibli-ography. One suspects this was not to intimidate his undergraduate audience: the specialised reading of literature was still to come, and in the meantime one could readily follow up the ‘seminal’ primary texts to which he referred. But Lewis’ style of argumentation is definitive, which is all the more tricky when one gets a sense at times of his ideas floating around in an aether without being tied down strongly to cited evidence or secondary support. As Fleming has written of another of his scholarly works, the reader is unlikely to question even questiona-ble statements ‘while being swept along on the cascading white water of Lewis’ prose.’ Much of what Lewis wrote in The Discarded Image in comparison is fairly incontestable, but one is left to take the professor at his word.
Nonetheless, as a lucid and engaging introduction to the medi-eval thought-world, for medievalist and non-medievalist alike, it holds up well. Much of Lewis’ strength as a scholar lay in his utter immer-sion in the texts which he studied, and his ability to communicate that ‘insider knowledge’ with unassuming familiarity. Even the established medievalist is bound to find some new insight, some unexpected par-allel casually drawn between a remote classical text and some familiar motif or phrase of Renaissance literature he has hitherto misread. It is a weighty scholarship which has been measured out over the course of a full scholarly career, and is here worn lightly. One is left to concur with Fleming: ‘I know of no better introduction to the fundamental assumptions undergirding the medieval and Renaissance literature of Christian Europe than The Discarded Image.’
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. Lew
is, The Discarded Im
age, 1964
C. S
. Lew
is, An
Experim
ent in C
riticism, 1961
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