The weekend of the 11th and 12th of December Glasgow hosts a conference entitled "On or about December 1910, human character changed": Centenary reflections and contemporary debates: Modernism and beyond. I'm part of an organising team for a parallel postgraduate symposium called Interceptions: Theory's Modernism and Modernism's Theory. A while ago, I wrote a small article on "future-war fiction" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the 1910 Centenary Reflections conference blog. You can see that version here. Below is a longer version.
On the 19 March 1906, the Daily Mail began the serialization of William Tuffnell Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, an "invasion-fantasy" in which Germany invades Britain. It was enormously popular (no doubt helped by marketing that included sending actors in German military uniforms to march down London's Regent Street), greatly increasing the Mail's circulation and translated into 27 languages. Somewhat surprisingly for a bestseller, the book made some interesting formal choices, couching the events as a military history with excerpts from journals and military descriptions of troop movements. Subscribing to the theory that Britain was in constant threat of invasion by the Germans, the book stressed the importance of preparation and training. Nevertheless, apparently unable to countenance a total German victory, Le Queux describes a British resistance called the "League of Defenders" who lead an uprising against the invading hoardes. A film version, retitled If England Were Invaded, was released in October 1914.
Having been an art student in Paris in the 1880s, Le Queux went on to become a journalist and prolific author. One of three books he published in 1910 was the intriguingly titled The Unknown Tomorrow, with an even more intriguing subtitle of How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor. 2010 eyes may find equally fascinating the title of a 1913 book by Le Queux The Lost Million, somewhat underestimating the carnage to be wrought over the subsequent five years. Two books published in 1914 bear the titles The German Spy, A Present-day Story and The War of the Nations.
In his article "Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900", I.F. Clarke notes that after Francis Cheynell's Civil War-infused Aulicus his Dream of the Kings Sudden Comming to London, published in May 1644, the future-war genre failed rather conclusively to take off. Until, that is, the year 1871, the year of the Paris Commune and the unification Germany. Clarke's article traces the explosion in stories of guerres imaginaires across Britain, France and Germany, all if which imagined variations on "the next European war" utilising the new weaponry made possible by technological development. Some writers (notably H.G. Wells in his 1914 book The World Set Free) went as far as to imagine a bomb so massive in its destructive capabilities that its use as a deterrent would lead to a new era of peace on earth.
The tone of this "massive European interest in The Next Great War, der nächste Krieg, La Guerre de demain" was a "cheerful language of anticipation", a language by no means limited to the military minds that first wrote such stories, nor the popular press that took over.
"With you I would have liked to depart for the Great War, which we are all expecting and which is so long in coming. Under your flag I still hope to see it, if there is a god of battle and he can hear me. To while away the waiting I have dreamed of this war, this holy war in which we shall be victorious." So wrote Commandant Šmile Augustin Cyprien Driant (known as Capitaine Driant), dedicating his book War in Open Country (1888) to his old regiment.
Compare the above to Marinetti and the Futurists, describing in 1909 how "like young lions we ran after Death". Singing "the love of danger", they "glorify war -- the world's only hygiene -- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture". These are "beautiful ideas worth dying for", lit by "the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons".
If, then, 1910 ushers in a new mode of human consciousness, human character, one may be forgiven for thinking that it was long in the making. Long in the making, and wide in its reach, too; not merely the artistic consciousnesses of those that went to the Grafton Galleries in the last months of the year. Woolf may well have been right about the “human” scale of it. With these future-war tales and fantasies, it appears people were longing for a change, desperate in these “fantasies of the future” for what Clarke calls a “newer universe”.
Showing posts with label conference. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conference. Show all posts
2.12.10
4.11.10
23.2.10
Double Metaphors
I've been accepted to present a paper at What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English – The First Decade at the University of Lincoln in July. Provisionally entitled "'Zombies of the Interrogative Mood': Contemporary Theory, Fiction and the Question of Questions", I'm going to be writing on Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood and William Walsh's Questionstruck: A Collection of Question-Based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin and wondering whether the question-based text is a particularly apt form for our uncertain times.
When searching for a title, I flipped through Powell's book and found the zombies quote. I thought it was cool and would catch the conference organisers' attention. Which presumably it did. After I'd submitted it, though, I began to think that the zombie is another curiously apt metaphor for contemporaneity. The zombie is neither alive nor dead, and that's pretty precarious if you ask me! Then I remembered Paul Krugman's "zombie ideas" and thought how apt it is for capitalism - it's not working, but it's not dead. It's in this precarious, limbo-state; everyone knows something has to change, but no-one's doing it.
Interestingly, Krugman meant to point out the lack of imagination in economic policy making - zombie ideas are ideas that keep coming back, as per the common imagination of zombies in computer games and films. He wasn't specifically referring to a precariousness (or precarity, as I've heard people describe it) but it was implied. That's a common thread in contemporary theories and writing: the conditions are talked about, perhaps even uncertainty is mentioned by name, but no-one talks about it as precariousness, as something that isn't just in politics or economics, but filters down from those apparently "lofty" disciplines to everyday life. That's what I'm interested in.
So, the upshot of all this is that my 2000 word paper now has two guiding metaphors, which is one too many really. Either the question-as-concept is (the openess of the question, something that opens up to the unknown and therefore precarious) or the zombie is. Haven't quite worked this out yet.
When searching for a title, I flipped through Powell's book and found the zombies quote. I thought it was cool and would catch the conference organisers' attention. Which presumably it did. After I'd submitted it, though, I began to think that the zombie is another curiously apt metaphor for contemporaneity. The zombie is neither alive nor dead, and that's pretty precarious if you ask me! Then I remembered Paul Krugman's "zombie ideas" and thought how apt it is for capitalism - it's not working, but it's not dead. It's in this precarious, limbo-state; everyone knows something has to change, but no-one's doing it.
Interestingly, Krugman meant to point out the lack of imagination in economic policy making - zombie ideas are ideas that keep coming back, as per the common imagination of zombies in computer games and films. He wasn't specifically referring to a precariousness (or precarity, as I've heard people describe it) but it was implied. That's a common thread in contemporary theories and writing: the conditions are talked about, perhaps even uncertainty is mentioned by name, but no-one talks about it as precariousness, as something that isn't just in politics or economics, but filters down from those apparently "lofty" disciplines to everyday life. That's what I'm interested in.
So, the upshot of all this is that my 2000 word paper now has two guiding metaphors, which is one too many really. Either the question-as-concept is (the openess of the question, something that opens up to the unknown and therefore precarious) or the zombie is. Haven't quite worked this out yet.
27.7.09
Moving Forward, Sideways, and Backwards
I presented a paper at Moving Forward, the 6th Annual College of Arts and Social Sciences Postgraduate Conference at Aberdeen University last week. But that's not what I'm writing about here.
The theme of the conference was "interdisciplinarity", a word that's very hard to say but which is becoming something of a buzzword in academic circles. Or so I'm told. In addition to the 130-odd postgraduate delegates presenting papers ranging from "literary reflections" to "resistance and artistic output" to "military security" to "European community law" were four plenary speakers, talking about various subjects they felt fitted into the theme of interdisciplinarity.
I only went to two of them, but they were the right two insofar as they acknowledged each other and in many ways trod similar ground, albeit in different shoes.
Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology and has just taken on the post of Head of the School of Social Sciences at Aberdeen university. He got the conference off to an "interesting" start by suggesting that it wasn't actually interdisciplinarity that should be the aim of scholars and academics, but more a determination to let the path of scholarship follow itself, wherever that may be. To be interdisciplinary, he said, was actually not to "move forward" like the conference's title suggests, but to move sideways. It was to be self-consciously interdisciplinary by "setting targets" for knowledge before the scholar knew what knowledge they would find. Academics shouldn't set out to be interdisciplinary at the start, he said, because that's just as prohibitive as strict disciplinary work. More it should be an accidental act; scholars should improvise pathways, resist closure.
And anyway, disciplines aren't really as bounded and strict as everyone thinks they are. Scholarly work is a "tangled field", and what we call interdisciplinarity has always existed in those moments where unexpected joinings occur.
It is management structures that impose disciplines, he said. They set targets for "knowledge production". We should be aiming for a more holistic mode of thought, where the whole matters more than the parts, where one creates an "architectonic museum of knowledge". I'm not entirely sure what that means.
That's all very well, but those management structures that impose disciplines also run universities and govern how courses are set up and ran. And so his ideas of resistance come face to face with the cold face of reality telling anthropologists to be anthropologists and mathematicians to be mathematicians and literature scholars to be literature scholars. He didn't really seem to accept this.
This may well be because he is -- to be disciplinary -- a social scientist, and therefore does not suffer from quite the same management strictures as Chris Fynsk, the next day's plenary speaker does as a humanitarian.
Four years ago, Fynsk set up the Centre for Modern Thought. Besides boasting a lovely font, the centre exists "in order to foster dynamic and theoretically informed cross-disciplinary research. It was established as a forum for rethinking the key intellectual movements of modernity in the context of the most urgent questions of our time."
To quote further:
"In its activities, it traverses the fields of literature, philosophy, theory of art, political and legal thought, and science studies. With a strong emphasis on intellectual history and philosophical foundations, we seek to give a new impetus to contemporary theoretical research. We also want to explore what is possible in the academy and to create a new interface between it and other sectors of cultural and political activity."
Fynsk's plenary address was to give an overview of the centre's work and its raison d'etre. He sees interdisciplinary work as revealing both the lines of convergence and those of divergence between disciplines. The centre's work is to ask what philosophy's role is in the modern university, and where the humanities fit into the academy as a whole. The word "humanities" is not an empty one, he said, it "answers to something". It means something. And it is under threat, a threat the social sciences may not feel quite so keenly.
The centre has a "strong respect for difference", he said, noting that the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities are different, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact it's a good thing, because it can bring together different viewpoints on key issues. Climate change, for example. Such a vast problem cannot be "solved" by one discipline alone. Just as it needs the natural sciences to work out alternative fuels, it needs the social sciences to suggest ways of using those fuels and the humanities to examine the effects of using those fuels. Each discipline can only "grab a certain type of truth". It "goes as far as it can" but it has to recognise its limits. It is akin to a relay, where each discipline hands on to the next, giving the problem a different voice that compliments the others whilst retaining its difference.
It is wrong, he said, to ignore the ways disciplines have been traditionally set up, and how they continue to be informed by those parameters. It is simply unrealistic. These institutional frameworks have in the past and continue to create limits for knowledge in certain disciplines. What Tim Ingold talked about in relation to setting paths and tracing routes can be looked at as creating lines. Lines show a path but they are also a function of tension, difference and resistance. That is why interdisciplinary work is needed.
Fynsk paraphrased Georges Bataille, who remarked of the boredom a person must feel to want to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. His point was that we should want to be all of them!
To champion interdisciplinary work is not to denigrate specialised knowledge. From a purely practical point of view, universities employ people because they have specialised knowledge. No-one would get anywhere without it. And in fact, interdisciplinary work would not be able to exist were it not for specialised knowledge: it is precisely the coming together of specialists! What interdisciplinary work aims for, said Fynsk, and I was inclined to agree, is to resist the traditional frameworks of knowledge in order to take practical and real steps forward in answering the key questions of our era.
The theme of the conference was "interdisciplinarity", a word that's very hard to say but which is becoming something of a buzzword in academic circles. Or so I'm told. In addition to the 130-odd postgraduate delegates presenting papers ranging from "literary reflections" to "resistance and artistic output" to "military security" to "European community law" were four plenary speakers, talking about various subjects they felt fitted into the theme of interdisciplinarity.
I only went to two of them, but they were the right two insofar as they acknowledged each other and in many ways trod similar ground, albeit in different shoes.
Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology and has just taken on the post of Head of the School of Social Sciences at Aberdeen university. He got the conference off to an "interesting" start by suggesting that it wasn't actually interdisciplinarity that should be the aim of scholars and academics, but more a determination to let the path of scholarship follow itself, wherever that may be. To be interdisciplinary, he said, was actually not to "move forward" like the conference's title suggests, but to move sideways. It was to be self-consciously interdisciplinary by "setting targets" for knowledge before the scholar knew what knowledge they would find. Academics shouldn't set out to be interdisciplinary at the start, he said, because that's just as prohibitive as strict disciplinary work. More it should be an accidental act; scholars should improvise pathways, resist closure.
And anyway, disciplines aren't really as bounded and strict as everyone thinks they are. Scholarly work is a "tangled field", and what we call interdisciplinarity has always existed in those moments where unexpected joinings occur.
It is management structures that impose disciplines, he said. They set targets for "knowledge production". We should be aiming for a more holistic mode of thought, where the whole matters more than the parts, where one creates an "architectonic museum of knowledge". I'm not entirely sure what that means.
That's all very well, but those management structures that impose disciplines also run universities and govern how courses are set up and ran. And so his ideas of resistance come face to face with the cold face of reality telling anthropologists to be anthropologists and mathematicians to be mathematicians and literature scholars to be literature scholars. He didn't really seem to accept this.
This may well be because he is -- to be disciplinary -- a social scientist, and therefore does not suffer from quite the same management strictures as Chris Fynsk, the next day's plenary speaker does as a humanitarian.
Four years ago, Fynsk set up the Centre for Modern Thought. Besides boasting a lovely font, the centre exists "in order to foster dynamic and theoretically informed cross-disciplinary research. It was established as a forum for rethinking the key intellectual movements of modernity in the context of the most urgent questions of our time."
To quote further:
"In its activities, it traverses the fields of literature, philosophy, theory of art, political and legal thought, and science studies. With a strong emphasis on intellectual history and philosophical foundations, we seek to give a new impetus to contemporary theoretical research. We also want to explore what is possible in the academy and to create a new interface between it and other sectors of cultural and political activity."
Fynsk's plenary address was to give an overview of the centre's work and its raison d'etre. He sees interdisciplinary work as revealing both the lines of convergence and those of divergence between disciplines. The centre's work is to ask what philosophy's role is in the modern university, and where the humanities fit into the academy as a whole. The word "humanities" is not an empty one, he said, it "answers to something". It means something. And it is under threat, a threat the social sciences may not feel quite so keenly.
The centre has a "strong respect for difference", he said, noting that the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities are different, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact it's a good thing, because it can bring together different viewpoints on key issues. Climate change, for example. Such a vast problem cannot be "solved" by one discipline alone. Just as it needs the natural sciences to work out alternative fuels, it needs the social sciences to suggest ways of using those fuels and the humanities to examine the effects of using those fuels. Each discipline can only "grab a certain type of truth". It "goes as far as it can" but it has to recognise its limits. It is akin to a relay, where each discipline hands on to the next, giving the problem a different voice that compliments the others whilst retaining its difference.
It is wrong, he said, to ignore the ways disciplines have been traditionally set up, and how they continue to be informed by those parameters. It is simply unrealistic. These institutional frameworks have in the past and continue to create limits for knowledge in certain disciplines. What Tim Ingold talked about in relation to setting paths and tracing routes can be looked at as creating lines. Lines show a path but they are also a function of tension, difference and resistance. That is why interdisciplinary work is needed.
Fynsk paraphrased Georges Bataille, who remarked of the boredom a person must feel to want to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. His point was that we should want to be all of them!
To champion interdisciplinary work is not to denigrate specialised knowledge. From a purely practical point of view, universities employ people because they have specialised knowledge. No-one would get anywhere without it. And in fact, interdisciplinary work would not be able to exist were it not for specialised knowledge: it is precisely the coming together of specialists! What interdisciplinary work aims for, said Fynsk, and I was inclined to agree, is to resist the traditional frameworks of knowledge in order to take practical and real steps forward in answering the key questions of our era.
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.