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 theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
2.12.10
6.3.10
Precariousness and the Real
Like Tom B, I've been thinking about the Real a lot recently. Tonight, I was thinking of a conversation I had with him the other day about poetry, in which I said that nice lines were nice and everything, but if that's all they were, if they just made you go "aahhh, that's a nice line" then they were fairly useless, because, after reading the Brecht chapter of Owen Hatherley's book Militant Modernism, I now view that line-making somewhat suspiciously.
As I understand him, Brecht was suspicious of nice lines because it dragged the reader (or the spectator in theatre) into a state of pleasure, encouraging them to both view art as a site for value exchange (you go to a play or read a book in order to "get something out of it") and to suspend their critical faculties. In becoming a product to give its user pleasure, art loses any ability to effect change.
Now, whenever I find myself liking a nice line, I remember Brecht. Nevertheless, there is the possibility of a nice line doing something else. It can be so nice that it goes beyond nice, far beyond it, into something beyond value judgements or questions of taste: the Real. Art is able -- though very, very rarely, see Badiou's chapter on "The Real and Semblance" in The Century -- to access the Real, although only as a glimpse, as a quick-as-lightning flash that darts through the gaps in reality/ideology/culture. The Real is beyond what we know, it is just what simply is. (The Real was the topic for our theory reading group last week, and it was one of the best yet; the point was raised about how you take this theory - its language is so totalising one tends to forget it is a theory that can be accepted or not, just like any other).
It is this quick-as-lightning quality that has interest for precariousness. The Real appears unknowable, unpredictable, and undecipherable. It has no quality, no content, no shape; it does not relate to morals or belief systems. It is -- perhaps -- the ultimate precariousness. The section we read was from Catherine Belsey's book, Culture and the Real. On page 14 she says this: "the real is a question, not an answer". I am writing on the potential for the question to be a key form of precariousness. The Real may turn out to be important.
As I understand him, Brecht was suspicious of nice lines because it dragged the reader (or the spectator in theatre) into a state of pleasure, encouraging them to both view art as a site for value exchange (you go to a play or read a book in order to "get something out of it") and to suspend their critical faculties. In becoming a product to give its user pleasure, art loses any ability to effect change.
Now, whenever I find myself liking a nice line, I remember Brecht. Nevertheless, there is the possibility of a nice line doing something else. It can be so nice that it goes beyond nice, far beyond it, into something beyond value judgements or questions of taste: the Real. Art is able -- though very, very rarely, see Badiou's chapter on "The Real and Semblance" in The Century -- to access the Real, although only as a glimpse, as a quick-as-lightning flash that darts through the gaps in reality/ideology/culture. The Real is beyond what we know, it is just what simply is. (The Real was the topic for our theory reading group last week, and it was one of the best yet; the point was raised about how you take this theory - its language is so totalising one tends to forget it is a theory that can be accepted or not, just like any other).
It is this quick-as-lightning quality that has interest for precariousness. The Real appears unknowable, unpredictable, and undecipherable. It has no quality, no content, no shape; it does not relate to morals or belief systems. It is -- perhaps -- the ultimate precariousness. The section we read was from Catherine Belsey's book, Culture and the Real. On page 14 she says this: "the real is a question, not an answer". I am writing on the potential for the question to be a key form of precariousness. The Real may turn out to be important.
27.1.10
"People tend to sit where there are places to sit" . Or do they?
I've been watching this documentary by William H Whyte called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. There was a book too.
I'm revelling in seeing New York in the late 70s. Not the New York of that time seen in films by Scorsese, for instance, or Cassavetes, but the quotidian city, the metropolis of the everyday. In the first ten minutes alone, there are tens of wonderful little moments: the child in the playground hacking up a crate on his own, the lovers dotted around the Seagrams plaza, the business-men saying goodbye to each other. Each of these little urban vignettes are so wonderfully alive!
It reminded me of something John Coyle said about "phantom rides", films made in the very first years of the twentieth century by placing cameras on the front of trams or on carts and just moving through the city. For the audiences at the time, it made them think of the space of the city in new ways, they'd never seen their daily routes depicted in this separate way: they'd never seen them through someone else's eyes before. John said that watching them now, one hundred years later, you are captivated by these people, these ordinary people. They are doing the same things (roughly) that we do; going about their business, going to lunch, to work, to school; their gestures are the same, they wave, they smile; you feel a real connection to them somehow. And then you remember that they're all dead, and it's the most beautiful thing in the world.
For the Modern Everyday course that I'm taking this spring, a key text is Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. That book is famous for de Certeau's conception of tactics and strategies in the urban environment. Simply put, a strategy is the means by which institutional power (government, business, planning departments, transport systems) control an environment. By constructing obstacles to movement, they funnel human activity into certain routes. Or at least they attempt to. Tactics are used by individuals to re-humanise these spaces, to create mini acts of resistance to the dominance of what in the end is capital; each new route is one of these acts. Think of those parts of grass that have become mud because they have been trodden down by so many people taking shortcuts over them. Those patches of mud are tactics made manifest.
In the film (in part 2), Whyte talks about the relationship between planning and use. But what is the characteristic of the relationship between the plan, the intended use, and its actual use? Who controls what? Whyte is making suggestions for planners based on making the places more friendly to pedestrians. But is that what the businesses that own these plazas want? Are the activities that this film records in fact instances of individuals using tactics to fight the strategies of business and capital?
Are planners planning for people to sit, or are the people sitting breaking the intentions of the plans, are they rebellious? Whyte recommends that places should have "sittable space" but then shows us how "management" obstruct potential seating spots by putting stones, ruts, ledges, spikes, plants or slants in the way. Later on, in part 3, Whyte shows us the (infamous, for students of postmodernity) Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, and the wall it turns to the street. "Have you ever seen a more brutal rejection of the street?" he says, showing us a plain white-brick wall at an impossibly inhuman scale, rising hundreds of feet up from the street.
The tensions brought out by de Certeau's championing of little acts of resistance and Frederic Jameson's description of the Bonaventure as "postmodern hyperspace" are the same ones developing in my, Ben and Tom's talk in the Modern Everyday class: the potential for radical resistance to capital and the form that would take. Is de Certeau to individualistic? His tactics can be used by anyone but there's no sense of collective action. Does the legacy of postmodernity (I don't think we're postmodern anymore) mean that capital can assimilate these little tactics and that collective action is the only challenge to it?
I'm revelling in seeing New York in the late 70s. Not the New York of that time seen in films by Scorsese, for instance, or Cassavetes, but the quotidian city, the metropolis of the everyday. In the first ten minutes alone, there are tens of wonderful little moments: the child in the playground hacking up a crate on his own, the lovers dotted around the Seagrams plaza, the business-men saying goodbye to each other. Each of these little urban vignettes are so wonderfully alive!
It reminded me of something John Coyle said about "phantom rides", films made in the very first years of the twentieth century by placing cameras on the front of trams or on carts and just moving through the city. For the audiences at the time, it made them think of the space of the city in new ways, they'd never seen their daily routes depicted in this separate way: they'd never seen them through someone else's eyes before. John said that watching them now, one hundred years later, you are captivated by these people, these ordinary people. They are doing the same things (roughly) that we do; going about their business, going to lunch, to work, to school; their gestures are the same, they wave, they smile; you feel a real connection to them somehow. And then you remember that they're all dead, and it's the most beautiful thing in the world.
For the Modern Everyday course that I'm taking this spring, a key text is Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. That book is famous for de Certeau's conception of tactics and strategies in the urban environment. Simply put, a strategy is the means by which institutional power (government, business, planning departments, transport systems) control an environment. By constructing obstacles to movement, they funnel human activity into certain routes. Or at least they attempt to. Tactics are used by individuals to re-humanise these spaces, to create mini acts of resistance to the dominance of what in the end is capital; each new route is one of these acts. Think of those parts of grass that have become mud because they have been trodden down by so many people taking shortcuts over them. Those patches of mud are tactics made manifest.
In the film (in part 2), Whyte talks about the relationship between planning and use. But what is the characteristic of the relationship between the plan, the intended use, and its actual use? Who controls what? Whyte is making suggestions for planners based on making the places more friendly to pedestrians. But is that what the businesses that own these plazas want? Are the activities that this film records in fact instances of individuals using tactics to fight the strategies of business and capital?
Are planners planning for people to sit, or are the people sitting breaking the intentions of the plans, are they rebellious? Whyte recommends that places should have "sittable space" but then shows us how "management" obstruct potential seating spots by putting stones, ruts, ledges, spikes, plants or slants in the way. Later on, in part 3, Whyte shows us the (infamous, for students of postmodernity) Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, and the wall it turns to the street. "Have you ever seen a more brutal rejection of the street?" he says, showing us a plain white-brick wall at an impossibly inhuman scale, rising hundreds of feet up from the street.
The tensions brought out by de Certeau's championing of little acts of resistance and Frederic Jameson's description of the Bonaventure as "postmodern hyperspace" are the same ones developing in my, Ben and Tom's talk in the Modern Everyday class: the potential for radical resistance to capital and the form that would take. Is de Certeau to individualistic? His tactics can be used by anyone but there's no sense of collective action. Does the legacy of postmodernity (I don't think we're postmodern anymore) mean that capital can assimilate these little tactics and that collective action is the only challenge to it?
7.6.09
"The Coke and Pepsi of the primate world"
Great interview with Dave Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors in the Guardian today:
"Something of what he set out to achieve, though, might be read into his admiration for the deconstructions of Björk, whom he loved when he first heard her a decade ago because she combined art music and pop music, "as if the entire world doesn't have to believe they're opposed"."
"What was his particular gift as a child, I wonder? "My thing was that when I got into something, I'd obsess about it," he replies, thinking back to the age of nine or 10, when he became deeply fascinated by "gallinaceous birds" - grouse, pheasant, prairie chickens and ptarmigan, a species that, he informs me as if reciting from an encyclopedia, "lives in exclusively alpine regions out west"."
and this, which is my favourite:
""I wasn't into chimpanzees or gorillas, because I kinda felt like they were the Coke and Pepsi of the primate world.""
"Something of what he set out to achieve, though, might be read into his admiration for the deconstructions of Björk, whom he loved when he first heard her a decade ago because she combined art music and pop music, "as if the entire world doesn't have to believe they're opposed"."
"What was his particular gift as a child, I wonder? "My thing was that when I got into something, I'd obsess about it," he replies, thinking back to the age of nine or 10, when he became deeply fascinated by "gallinaceous birds" - grouse, pheasant, prairie chickens and ptarmigan, a species that, he informs me as if reciting from an encyclopedia, "lives in exclusively alpine regions out west"."
and this, which is my favourite:
""I wasn't into chimpanzees or gorillas, because I kinda felt like they were the Coke and Pepsi of the primate world.""
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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.