The fate of Ezra Pound

Lately I’ve been trawling through old modernist ‘little magazines’ from the 1910s as research for my chapter on Pound. Tonight I found the following, written by Pound’s friend A. R. Orage:

However often we may have mentioned Mr. Pound’s name, it is at least certain that we have never countenanced his theories. But then Mr. Pound is so much better than his theories that to dispose of them is by no means to dispose of him. What, in fact, he does in the company his theories keep, it is hard to say; for they do not distinguish him, but link him with inferior schools; they do not influence his work, except when he is wilful like an American child; and they afford him no help. I would part Mr Pound from his theories as often as I found him clinging to one, for they will in the end be his ruin.’

(The New Age, 17:14, 5th Aug 1915, p. 332).

Considering this was written in 1915, it is quite stunningly prescient of the much darker course he did indeed take in the 1930s. Not only this; Orage also anticipates the perennial probematic of Pound scholarship: can and should one try to separate the poetry from the politics? How far is the former tainted by the latter? And is it naive try to draw out some kind of submerged utopian desire that must, surely, be present in such great poetry? Because, if it is naive, do we not have to reassess our whole sense of what great poetry is and does?

‘Mr. Pound is so much better than his theories that to dispose of them is by no means to dispose of him’.

Call for Papers: Science / Fiction

‘Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths’.

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963. London: Routledge, 2002), 66.

‘Arts research needs to change direction, to look outwards, and investigate the audience not the texts. It needs to link up with sociology and psychology and public health, and create a body of knowledge about what the arts actually do to people. Until that happens, we cannot even pretend that we are taking the arts seriously’.

John Carey, What Good Are the Arts? (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 167.

‘Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination’.

Lehrer, Proust Was a NeuroScientist (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
2007), xii.

As the ‘Two Cultures’ debate of the mid-twentieth century, and the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s, suggest, relations between the sciences and the arts and humanities have often been characterized by mutual suspicion, frustration, and misapprehension. In academia, interdepartmental competition for diminishing resources has only exacerbated this trend.

But this polarized picture belies the rich possibilities presented by the intersection and / or re-articulation of these two fields. In this spirit Excursions calls for critical scholarly work on any aspect of the relationship between science and the humanities. We welcome submissions from any discipline, within the contexts of academia, scientific/cultural institutions or society itself. We strongly encourage work that questions or challenges preconceived disciplinary boundaries.

Submissions may consider, but are by no means limited to:

• The question of ‘truth’ in science, art, literature, and the humanities
• Science fiction / Fiction as science / Science as fiction (or scientific narrative)
• The Two Cultures / The Science Wars / The Sokal affair
• The notion of the experimental in art and literature
• ‘Impact’ and the instrumentalization of academic research. Can and should science and humanities research be assessed against the same criteria?
• The public legitimization of science / climate change denialism / the UEA email affair
• Psuedoscience and the humanities. Karl Popper regarded Marxism and Psychoanalysis as ‘pseudosciences’ because their findings were unfalsifiable. Should the humanities be concerned about this kind of criticism?
• Popular science writing
• Engagement with the work of figures such as Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Bruno Latour

Scholarly papers should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words and must follow MHRA style guidelines. We also encourage creative submissions in media such as film, photography, or audio. For creative submissions, please include an abstract and a brief biography (no more than 150 words) along with your submission.

All enquiries should be sent to enquiries@excursions-journal.org.uk. Submissions should be made via our website, www.excursions-journal.org.uk, no later than 1st August 2012.

Image: Joseph Wright, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768). Image taken from a collection compiled by the Yorck Project, issued under a GNU Free Documentation License. This CfP also issued under a GNU FDN.
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Republicanism (the other kind, for once)

I have been thinking a little bit about the Monarchy and republicanism lately. I have always regarded it as a bit of a side show. Sure, the hereditary principle is abhorrent; but I can’t really see what the abolition of the Monarchy would contribute to, for example, the protection of the welfare state, the prevention of ecological disaster, or the even achievement of a more economically equitable society.

But my mind has (probably temporarily) been budged by a question about the issue on Question Time last week, to which some of the answers were interesting. I also happened to passively hear an utterly nauseating programme on Radio 4 about the royal art collection recently. This latter broadcast glowingly congratulated Queen Elizabeth for turning the British Monarchy into ‘a global brand’. I had to re-swallow little bits of my breakfast.

There were two semi-decent-seeming arguments given on Question Time for maintaining the Monarchy. The first is that the Queen is ‘great value for money’ because she is a big draw for tourists. The second is that in the place of the Monarchy we’d need a US- or French-style elected president to act as head of state.

Bollocks to both of these. Firstly, abolishing the Monarchy doesn’t mean bulldozing Buckingham Palace. There would still be all those creepy monuments to imperialism and class oppression for Spanish tourists to take pictures of. If London is so shit that the only thing attracting tourists is the royal family, we need to seriously reassess our urban priorities.

Secondly, why does it follow that abolishing the monarchy requires a president? Why do we even need a ‘head of state’? Why do we need to have one person who somehow mystically personifies, what, our ‘national identity’? I don’t think it’s remotely hyperbolic to say that I think very idea of ‘national identity’ reeks of some very dark ideological detritus. It is inescapably associated with some kind of unitary and normative value. And even if that value is ‘pluralism’ (which, regardless, hardly squares the circle), how can one arsehole personify pluralism?

Whatever. Let’s just call it a day, eh?As Marina Lewycka suggested we could just very quietly forget about the whole thing after Lizzie dies. We’ll Flog the crown jewels to Abu Dhabi for £70 billion, pay off the deficit, the Tories can finally fuck off, and everyone is happy. For ceremonial occasions, we could just have a stuffed mascot.

Oh gosh that feels better.

Bureaucratic tact (and the NHS)

This is what Mike Farrar, Chief Executive of the NHS Federation, said about the passing of the Health and Social Care Bill:

Let there be no doubt that this will be among the toughest projects the NHS has ever taken on. We have to find our way through the considerable confusion and complexity that has been handed to us as we build and stress-test the new NHS system. We need to heal the rifts that have opened as many of our clinical staff have debated the merits of the bill. We need to completely redesign NHS services against a backdrop of unprecedented financial pressure, bringing the public and staff with us. We have to do all this with significantly reduced management capacity.

That’s a pretty roundabout way of saying the word ‘clusterfuck’.

In other news, I’ve started blogging again, if anyone cares.

Late-night observations the eve of J30

I’m conflicted about today’s strike action. I feel immense solidarity with what will be a massive show of resistance and revulsion at an austerity programme which has no democratic mandate, and which is serving only to force down the living standards of the vast majority in order to protect that of the wealthiest.

In a real sense, this is the final neo-liberal surge. We saw quite clearly in Greece yesterday that sovereignty has now passed to the Merkel and the IMF. And to the extent that there is now effectively a consensus in the UK Parliament regarding a) austerity b) the response to it, and c) the limits of acceptable protest—all of which radically fails to reflect public opinion—genuine electoral democracy has broken down.

This isn’t just hyperbole. We are now in a situation where utterly unaccountable institutions like the credit ratings agencies and the IMF—which quite openly represent the interests of no one but private finance—unquestionably have more influence over fiscal policy than do the national governments of all but China and the USA. Standard’s and Poor’s has even flexed its muscles against the US recently, threatening to downgrade the US rating if the Obama administration didn’t do as it demanded.

In that sense drastic and radical resistance is absolutely necessary: if the Labour party has capitulated to the Tory narrative of the crisis and the deficit, we are left without a single audible voice in mainstream public discourse wholeheartedly defending the remnants of social democracy. The point that public-sector pensions were very recently reformed, and that their cost as a proportion of GDP has levelled out and will shortly start to fall has, in the recent debate at least, been ignored (see this op-ed, in the Telegraph of all places, from March).

The NASUWT (one of the teaching unions actually not striking tomorrow) claims that ‘for every £1 public service workers and other taxpayers pay towards the modest pension of a nurse or a teacher, £2.50 is paid to support the gap left in private sector schemes by those employers who fail to provide decent occupational pensions for their workers and to offset the pension tax relief of the top 1% of high earners in this country.’ The shitty private-sector pensions that Francis Maude keeps trumping as some kind of benchmark will ultimately cost the tax payer too, because they barely provide subsistence in retirement and have to be topped up by benefits like Pension Credit.

But herein lies my hesitation. The TUC isn’t getting these points across. It may not be (entirely) the unions’ fault that the media treats them with total contempt, but I worry that if it isn’t underpinned by a credible counter-narrative in the public’s mind, strike action will be, at best, completely ineffective.

At worst, it could be catastrophic. I think the TUC underestimates how well the insipid ‘I pay your wages’ comment that every public sector worker has to face at some point in the course of their working life, resonates with the public at the moment. More work should have been done to show that kind of attitude to be flawed and illogical before strike action was taken.

I finally came around to this position after reading an article by lefty political theorist Colin Hay called ‘Narrating Crisis: The Discursive Construction of the “Winter of Discontent”‘ (you’ll need a uni subscription for that link), which I think shows quite convincingly how the hubris and strategic incompetence of the unions gifted Thatcher the opportunity to define and characterise the ‘crisis’ in whatever way best served her interests. That particular narrative (apologies for my repeated use of the n-word, but it’s central to Hay’s point, and I think it’s appropriate here) of ‘bodies lying unburried’, etc., not only won her the governmental power, but also what Hay calls ‘state power’, i.e., the power to structurally transform the mechanisms of the British state.

This is precisely the situation Cameron is in currently, despite having not even won a majority. And if the largest block of organized resistance to the coalition’s programme discredits itself by pissing off a public who, due to lack of any alternative explanation, see the strikes as the tantrums of spoiled children, then.. well we’re probably fucked aren’t we?

Call for Papers: ‘States of Emergence, States of Emergency’

The interdisciplinary journal I’m involved with, Excursions, has released the call for papers for its forthcoming issue. The deadline is 15 August 2011. We’re  encouraging submissions from as broad a range of disciplines as possible.

States of Emergence, States of Emergency

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history which is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940)

Benjamin’s remarks on states of emergency have been fundamental to an understanding of political life which considers the roles played by threat, danger and fear in processes of political control. In one sense, Benjamin suggests that we live in a constant state of emergency, something Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘paradigm of modern politics’, a situation where threat is deployed by government in order to wield power and restrict human rights. Yet Benjamin refers to the need to ‘bring about a real state of emergency’ (italics added), suggesting, perhaps, the etymological connection between ‘emergency’ and the verb ‘emerge’. We could thus read Benjamin as calling for something new, for a state of emergence in which newness is constituted.

Excursions, an interdisciplinary, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, now calls for submissions upon the theme of emergence/emergency which draw upon the vast possibilities contained both in terms of disaster, threat and power, as well as beginning, becoming and creating. As a journal with an interdisciplinary mandate we welcome research from all areas, creating a space wherein the richness of concepts can be explored. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The history of states of emergency, states of emergency in different historical contexts, parallels across contexts
• A literal take on ‘states of emergence/ emergency’ perhaps inspired by the ‘Arab Spring’ – the emergence of new democracies, new political rights, new modes of political representation
• New technologies/media – their role in shaping public space, discourse and our relationships with others; their implication in new forms of representation/artistic practice; the (re)presentation of states of emergency in the media
• General emergence – the rise of new aesthetic or political paradigms and perhaps the difficulties inherent in recognising/ narrating these emergences
• Emergence and origins – narratives or myths of origins and emergence; our modes of narrating the emergence of the individual, the state etc.
• Scientific advances – space exploration, genetics, cloning – the border of threat and newness
• Environmental/ecological disaster and emergent environmental conditions
• Physical/chemical states, stasis and change

Papers should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words, follow MHRA formatting guidelines and be submitted via the Excursions website. Click ‘Register’ to create an account, making sure to select the tickbox ‘Author’ on the registration form.

We are keen to receive submissions in other media,e.g., film, photography, etc. Please contact enquiries@excursions-journal.org.uk regarding other forms of submission. Please include an abstract and a brief biography (no more than 150 words) along with your submission, not later than 15th August 2011.

‘The War on Language’

Following on from yesterday, Steve Bell sums up the situation pretty incisively.

© Steve Bell, 2011

This morning on the bus I heard someone from Wootton Bassett saying how proud they were of the honorific and how offended they were by this cartoon. They admitted, though, that they didn’t know what/where Fallujah is, so clearly most the sentiment was lost on her.

Anthony Barnett at OurKingdom rightly argues that the dignity and respect of Wootton Bassett’s denizens should be honoured with something more meaningful (and less blatantly and manipulatively ideological) than a bland monarchist epithet.