In this new age of the carnivalesque, understatement might be a greater currency than overstatement. So if I say that Dylan Krieger’s “Giving Godhead” will be the best collection of poetry to appear in English in 2017, you can trust the understatement, aside from the casual assertion of prophecy. Seamlessly mixing the religious with the obscene, determined to create a new form of the grotesque that marries autobiography to personal and national trauma, Krieger’s book is easily among the most inventive and successfully performative works to appear in living memory.
Krieger’s title and her dedication to “all god’s / little trauma children” seem to indicate a specific trauma at the heart of this collection, although it is never addressed directly. Rather, it haunts the entire collection, as the inherited God of both Judaism and Christianity becomes (as the Marquis de Sade once wrote) a being defined by the inherent violence of his son’s conception. The father who sent “down out of Heaven this respectable part of himself” embodies an act of violation and generation at once, and in the logic of both Sade and Krieger thus partakes of those things we have come most to treasure and to fear — on the one hand, the bread and the wine, communion and transubstantiation; on the other hand, violent intercession, assault and rape. Each shares a part of the other’s reality. In a more conventional narrative sequence, even a sequence of poems, this interpenetration would acquire sequence and evolution. In Krieger’s collection, by contrast, it acquires a new poetics rooted in the recent rise of the Gurlesque movement, with its dramatic wordplay growing out of fury, sexual violence and paradoxical self-assurance.
The first section, “Quid Pro Blow,” makes the case that drives the collection — roughly, “You abused me” (and the entire first section reads the “you” on both macro- and micro-scales) “so watch what I do to you.” But if the primal wound to the speaker here is physical and psychic, she is not out for physical revenge. Rather, she takes on a kind of underground Zohar meditation, as in the poem “rectifire”:
Then she goes further, wondering if what some of us might quaintly call “original sin” in fact invokes a “surprise, surprise: forced consent isn’t anyone’s crime but the fire’s / hanging right above our heads.” The Fall here is perpetual forced consent from birth; rape is one consequence. The problem with rape in “Giving Godhead” is that, unlike the “forced consent” of being human, rape won’t stop giving: the “rape dreams” she cites (in “swaddling plot”) lead to an anxiety of influence when God, unable to bear the burden of his story, creates the Flood and simultaneously sets in motion the motion in which “the Old Testicles always give rise to the New.”
Rape dreams, by a variety of names, haunt the first section of the book: In “biblical umbilical,” when the narrator tries from childhood to imagine a cord back to the divine, she learns in the end “no one’s guarded by — an angel but a bomb.” The shift in scale here is clearly intentional, as the poem foreshadows the expansion in the second part of the book from individuals and dreams toward the larger problem of human lineage, set partly in the language of 20th-century analytic philosophy. The third section explodes that larger problem with its conclusions about the impossibility of conjuring any legitimate answer to the First Question: “Why?”
Krieger’s poetry echoes her earlier academic scholarship on the Gurlesque — a movement that, according to Arielle Greenberg, “was born between about 1960 and 1982 (it was a long labor)” and that came into focus in Greenberg and Lara Glenum’s 2010 anthology, “Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics.” The Riot Grrrl scene was loosely connected, but so were “elements from Sesame Street childhoods, Goth, punk, grunge and ballet class,” Greenberg explains in her introduction. Artifice and camp (“from cosmos to cosmetics,” as the poet and critic Daniel Tiffany has written, in a phrase Glenum quotes in her own introduction to the anthology) — anything that might be anti-objectified or hyper-objectified in protest, anything that might be re-embraced as a claim to power rather than submission, anything that might have roots in fear and contamination and nevertheless be nurtured into a celebration of resistance — became part of the movement. But one sentence near the end of Glenum’s introduction is of particular interest when it comes to “Giving Godhead”: “Gurlesque poets,” she writes, “owe a great deal to Emily Dickinson, the original Goth girl.”
Above all, “Giving Godhead” makes an implicit case that, if Dickinson had been able to turn her rage at the mysteries of the world outward and also invited the sea to follow her inside, she would have blown the lid on creation as a direct precursor to Dylan Krieger. Krieger’s lack of a direct precursor, despite the abundant literary, religious and philosophical references embedded in the ingenious wordplay of her collection, is part of what makes “Giving Godhead” completely remarkable. Not sui generis — the rape dreams came from somewhere. But the places where they go in this book are places I have never seen any poet go before. “Giving Godhead” blows several giant craters out through the walls of our inherited and now somewhat cowed Western selves. It is a bomb with an angel behind it.
Poetry is a bit like Dungeons & Dragons, scuba diving or gardening in that its adherents love nothing more than geeking out over its rules, necessary gear and best practices. To the uninitiated, these conversations might sound like a cacophony of meaningless jargon. But poets aren’t talking about unearthed arcana, buoyancy compensators or controversies over Roundup. When poets jabber about clerihews, tetrameter and negative capability, they’re exchanging trade secrets about the most definitive and common of human paraphernalia: emotion, thought and, perhaps, the soul itself, things everybody can relate to. Two of our best and most famous poets, Robert Hass and Louise Glück, both former United States poets laureate, have new books of prose that delve deeply into the esoterica of the poetic craft, which, for some, will be as necessary as a diving regulator.
Hass’s “Little Book on Form” is no normal prosody guide. Unlike classic books by Mary Kinzie, John Hollander and Mary Oliver, it will not be of practical use to students hoping to write sonnets, elegies or iambic pentameter (though it’s packed with plenty of examples of each). This is not a handbook or instruction manual. Instead, Hass aims to help readers deeply fathom poetry through considering how a poem’s formal structure, and its interaction with poetic history, enable the poem to embody “the energy of the gesture of its making.” This is the subjective pursuit of a practitioner rather than that of a scholar. It’s also, at more than 400 pages, not a little book. Hass gives innumerable answers to the questions that obsess poets and readers of poetry: What is poetry, and why does it do what it does?
He begins with a primer on stanzas, organized by the number of lines and the uses of those stanza lengths in poetry from various cultures. He stops at stanzas of four lines, though of course poets can use much longer stanzas, too. But, Hass says of four, “this number expresses and stands for evenness and completeness.” Next, Hass moves on to a section on form, beginning with blank verse (think of Shakespeare), followed by a lengthy explanation and history of the sonnet, “the one durable, widely used form in English poetry in the last 500 years.”
Hass is so supremely learned about and so deeply immersed in poetry, he is able to comport himself not just with incredible authority but also with casual humor. Of the Pindaric ode, one of the earliest incarnations of the ode, he writes, “As a strict form, it has not had legs.” He explains, with startling clarity, Gertrude Stein and others’ forays into abstraction, which are at the roots of pretty much all experimental poetry. Stein, he says, worked to “discover by experiment … that syntax was the formal principle that organized language.” Hass concludes with a guide to understanding the workings of stress in poetry, one of the most confusing technical aspects of poetics.
Disguised as a reference book, this is actually a friendly tour of one poet’s mind. Along the way, Hass offers glancing insights like this, on the difference between visual arts and literature: “Form in the visual arts is spatial and in literature it is temporal. A poem has a beginning, a middle and an end. A work of art — whether sculpture or painting — has edges.” In this way, the book isn’t merely a master class on form. It’s a jump-starter for that most necessary of tools for the artist or lover of art, if not for everyone: the sensibility.Photo
Few would debate Louise Glück’s stature as one of America’s most extraordinary poets. Unlike many of her peers, though (Hass among them), Glück has not made a habitual practice of prose writing. She is a writer for whom, one feels, words are always scarce, hard won and not to be wasted. Prose is most likely at least as difficult for her to write as poetry, and she has professed that poetry is very hard for her to write. “American Originality” is only her second slim volume of essays, containing 10 mostly short, starkly titled pieces — “On Realism,” “On Revenge” — as well as 10 introductions to debut volumes by other poets.
Fans of Glück’s own poems will recognize her trademark severity. In her extreme focus and clipped, uncompromising sentences, Glück recalls no one so much as Susan Sontag. Like Sontag, Glück assumes her readers know the texts under consideration — she often omits the customary quotations critics use to illustrate their points. Yet she writes with such mesmerizing authority that her claims feel unimpeachable.Photo
Unlike Sontag, Glück has not cultivated the ability to write about any subject; she confines herself to the practice of poetry in America. Yet her thought accommodates extrapolation in many directions, toward broader aspects of American identity. When she writes that “original work, in our literature, must seem somehow to break trails, to found dynasties … be capable of replication,” it’s hard not to remember that we were, relatively recently, “the new world,” and that mass production was born here.
Glück’s 20th-century America is fallen, equipped with — and diminished by — the tools of modernism, especially psychoanalysis. “Contemporary literature,” she writes, is “a literature of the self examining its responses.” Modernity strove to explain our dreams, always the province of poetry, and so perhaps explained away their magic. Glück’s analyses seem to derive from this grief; she is wary, and sometimes darkly funny about, poetry’s temptation toward grandiosity. “We have made of the infinite a topic,” she notes. “But there isn’t, it turns out, much to say about it.” And yet, one also always feels that, for Glück, poetry is a matter of life or death, the only salvation.
So when Glück writes that “contemporary poetry affords two main types of incomplete sentences: the aborted whole and the sentence with gaps,” one senses a heavy moral choice behind her distinction. This is not just a description of how American poets write; it’s a mandate for rigorous, difficult, even painful reasoning over lazy, incomplete thinking. Specifically, she is differentiating between the fragment in poetry and the non sequitur, which she calls “a more complicated maneuver.” Non sequitur, she writes, “is lively, volatile, skirmishing, suggesting (at its best) simultaneity or multiplicity, loosing a flurry of questions.”
Of course, this could also be said of Twitter “at its best,” while, at their worst, both Twitter and fragmentary poetry can “begin to seem like swimmers competing to see how long they can stay underwater without breathing.” The frenzy of social media doesn’t explicitly enter into Glück’s essays. But, in the guise of a poetry critic, Glück shows herself to be a kind of dark contemporary conscience. “The glory of the lyric,” she claims in a review of recent books by her peers Robert Pinsky and Stephen Dobyns, “is that it does what life cannot do.” Put that way, poetry sounds like something everyone can use.
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In an era of free market globalisation, in which environmental conservation and extractive industries take priority over indigenous claims to ancestral lands, Prakash Kashwan’s Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania and Mexico is an opportune and timely book for scholars studying the social justice aspects of nature conservation within democratic contexts. It offers a valuable contribution to debates around forest regions occurring on every continent, which range from dispossession of indigenous peoples’ lands to tensions between conservation and economic development. Following Kashwan’s firm belief that environmental conservation and social justice are the two most important issues of our times, the book gives prominence to the inclusion of social justice within narratives of nature conservation and positions human rights within a political morality that is often missing in these discussions.
Kashwan uses social justice as a lens through which to examine environmental and conservation policies in the context of land rights claims by indigenous forest peoples. Kashwan analyses the political institutions and policy processes that shaped environmental policies and land reforms during the 1990s and 2000s in India, Tanzania and Mexico. Using country-specific comparisons of tensions between political elites and peasant mobilisations over land rights, the book examines the resulting dichotomies between social justice and environmental conservation. It focuses on the politically mediated interactions between states and citizens, which have led to different forms of ‘transformational institutional change’ (117) in the three contexts. This comparative multi-country analysis is a key strength of the book.
Kashwan’s three country-specific case studies also trace the historical trajectories of unfolding forest rights, and the socio-political landscapes underpinning transformational institutional changes. The case studies are therefore grounded in discussions of history, the politics of institutional change, public accountability and policymaking, which culminate in different realisations of social justice within nature conservation. The author outlines the political evolution of forest governance under colonial rule and post-independence as well as in contemporary periods, as a methodology for ‘separating out the effects of path dependence from contemporary institutional structures that shape policy making’ (213).
Image Credit: Walk for Land Rights, Chambal, India, 2009 (Ekta Parishad CC BY SA 3.0)
Democracy in the Woods maps the extent to which state-controlled forests and the colonial extractive exploitation of forest resources continue in contemporary forest policies in each context. India and Tanzania, where forests are state-controlled, offer a useful comparison to Mexico. The Mexican government’s large-scale land redistribution was implemented to counter the power of political elites after the revolution, which ensured an unprecedented control of forest lands for Mexican forest communities. This, Kashwan argues, has resulted in an alignment of community forestry with conservation programmes in Mexico, in stark contrast to conservation policies in India and Tanzania that have excluded forest communities.
The case studies also illuminate the centrality of political engagement in shaping historical and contemporary policies, and outline relations between peasant communities and political elites in the three countries. Tanzanian forest peoples are shown to have the least political clout, and ‘the task of steering it in the right direction is hampered by Tanzanian leaders’ single-minded focus on the goals of economic growth without ensuring that a majority of the country’s population acutally benefits from such economic growth’ (203). In India, forest communities have been a stronger mobilising force, and have also benefitted from a secure multi-party system. Mexico is shown to be the greatest success story, with the strength of peasant mobilisation coupled with ‘inter-elite competition’ fuelling a partnership with the government that has benefitted indigenous and peasant welfare. This, Kashwan contends, also has had lasting and positive implications for climate change policies. For example, the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, which the author refers to as the ‘strongest international environmental governance agreement ever’ (211), is attributed by Kashwan to it not having taken domestic politics sufficiently into account. All three case studies nonetheless represent the conflict between redistributive policies and environmental protection.
A third strand of analysis illuminated by the case studies is how the international community influences domestic forest governmentality and vice versa. Kashwan concludes that ‘domestic policies in developing countries also greatly influence the outcomes of international conservation’. An example cited are the ‘perverse incentives for state agencies to promote unsustainable and wasteful environmental policies and programs’, which normal domestic policies might constrain, but which could be created by global environmental governance (211). This significant analysis goes beyond the conventional perspective of the influence of international conventions on domestic policies. Instead, Kashwan argues that:
while the international environmental community has to engage with domestic political actors, such engagements should be broad-based engagements with a plurality of actors and voices, with the goal of fostering public demands for global environmental quality (211).
The rich conclusions of the book are deliberately not based on a particular theory, but instead use the ‘political economy of institutions framework, comprised of conceptual tools drawn from historical institutionalism, institutional analysis, development studies and comparative politics’. Kashwan posits that eclectic frameworks such as this are more conducive to understanding institutional change in relation to environmental conservation and social justice, because of the ‘inherent diversity and complexity of the process’. Kashwan’s empirical study also uses a wide range of data on the displacement of indigenous peoples from their lands based on extensive fieldwork. The book would nonetheless have benefitted from a better disaggregated and representative analysis of the inequalities which exist within indigenous communities themselves as well as the effects of land dispossession or successful land claims on these. Kashwan’s argument that institutions ‘reflect the intricate layers of social economic and political inequalities within a society’ could particularly have been deepened by exploring gender inequalities and comparing and contrasting social dynamics within the three forest communities (207).
Despite this, the book is thoroughly documented and comprehensively cited. The analysis is nuanced and contributes original findings, which challenge the conventional understanding of the conflict between the environment and economic development. Kashwan posits that these might actually reinforce each other, as demonstrated by the argument that land conflicts and poverty alleviation need addressing in order to respond to the root causes of deforestation. Finally, he highlights the position of forest land rights between social justice and environmental conservation, arguing that they cannot be separated from forest policy reforms and sustainable development.
Democracy in the Woods is a powerful portrayal of the complexities of governance and justice contained in the issues of land displacement and environmental conservation, which can both contribute to widening livelihood and habitat insecurity. The trespassing on human rights creates an urgency to the debates explored in this book. Institutions reflect the dynamics in a society, and Kashwan argues that unequal access to natural resources, social justice and environmental power presents ‘a set of interconnected social dilemmas of the grandest scale’, here embodied in forest rights and the rationale for forest protection.
Two Books Explore the Furor Over Rape on Campus
A protest against sexual violence at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C, on April 7, 2015.CreditRicky Carioti/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
According to our last president, several sitting senators, feminist activists and female college students all over the country, sexual violence on campus is one of the most pressing issues facing young American women. Statistics promulgated by the Obama White House declare that an estimated one in five college women will be sexually assaulted. To combat this scourge, universities have hired new administrators, mandated anti-rape training sessions at freshman orientation and sped up the disciplinary process for accused assailants. Prominent feminists and lawyers say many schools are still doing too little to protect female students and far too much to protect male ones.
But according to the Northwestern professor and cultural critic Laura Kipnis, the opposite is true: It’s now men who are the victims of a nationwide sexual panic, one seated more in traditional views of women as vulnerable and sexually passive than in a feminism that recognizes young women to be self-sufficient independent actors (who are also human enough to make, and learn from, stupid sexual blunders).Photo
Kipnis’s “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus” focuses on one professor whose career was ruined by accusations of sexual assault and the ensuing Title IX investigation. Kipnis is drawn into this man’s professional drama after she too was on the receiving end of two Title IX complaints stemming from an essay she wrote deploring her university’s policy of frowning on relationships between teachers and students. Her book is a look at the secretive and largely unaccountable processes by which campus sexual assault allegations are investigated and adjudicated, using a handful of real incidents to illustrate her broader argument that complex interpersonal relationships and dumb drunken mistakes are now the quasilegal purview of well-paid administrators more interested in protecting a university’s reputation — even if it means ruining a few men’s lives — than seeking either truth or justice. The high-volume conversation about campus sexual assault, she says, is a kind of black-and-white gender traditionalism dressed up in feminist clothes, obscuring ambiguities and power plays inherent to human sexual desire, and instead casting adult women as innocent victims (or victims-in-waiting) and men as either rapists or potential predators
The book, per Kipnis’s style (this is the woman, after all, who wrote a book called “Against Love”), is polemical and often outrageous — she writes, for example, that professors who date students are a “newly outlawed sexual minority more or less where gays were pre-Stonewall.” While the men in her book are often stumbling into “male sexual stupidity,” the women are scheming, vengeful and “histrionic.” Though she rightly points out the feminist hypocrisy of casting women as inherently sexually vulnerable, she falls into her own stereotypes of jilted lovers sinking their claws into bumbling, sex-drunk men. She seems to think the feminist directive to explain clear standards of consent (a yes, not just the absence of a no) and to shift male behavior is a pipe dream, but telling women to change their behavior to avoid being sexually assaulted (for example, to quit drinking to excess) is eminently realistic rape prevention. As a feminist writer and (nonpracticing) lawyer relatively well-versed in the details of Title IX and campus sexual assault, I couldn’t help reading her book with pen in hand, furiously scribbling in the margins.
And yet I loved reading it. Kipnis’s book is maddening; it’s also funny, incisive and often convincing. Her observations on “the learned compliance of heterosexual femininity,” how campus hookup culture remains “organized around male prerogatives” and the necessity of allowing ambiguity to exist in sexual relationships reframe feminist visions of consent, sex and male sexual entitlement. She unmasks the Title IX adjudication process as shadowy and baffling on many campuses, and not just in how accusers are treated; she also makes a powerful case that a student-led demand for intellectual safety has too often encroached upon academic freedom and even the work of teaching itself.
Kipnis pushes her argument beyond the realm of what’s reasonable in part, it seems, for professorial aims — to force readers to really consider their position and to see if they can fully defend it, or at least to think beyond feminist platitudes. It is a discomfiting process, and surely many feminists will come away, as I did, deeply disagreeing with her; others will, as I did, nonetheless find her book a persuasive and valuable contribution to the continuing debate over how to deal with sexual assault on college campuses.Photo
If only the same could be said about “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities,” by KC Johnson, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Stuart Taylor Jr., a contributing editor at National Journal. An in-depth look at how universities compromise due process norms in adjudicating sexual assault cases — and it is clear they do — is overdue; instead, the authors choose a handful of egregious examples to make the case that campus sexual assault isn’t all that common and that the bigger problem is innocent young men railroaded by promiscuous women who get drunk and regret their choices, or flat-out lie at the behest of conniving campus feminists. Instead of an honest analysis of the complex issues and competing values at play, the book teems with vastly overstated claims, questionable statistics and quotes massaged beyond their original meaning.
Johnson and Taylor describe the sexual histories and relative state of drunkenness — often according to bartenders or other observers not conducting breathalyzer tests — of the various female accusers, as well as the “flirtatious” nature with which those women either talked to or texted the men they later charged with sexual assault; the men are given no such treatment. Being falsely accused of rape, it seems, is just as common, and just as terrible, as being actually raped. Men who are penalized in any way for their own bad behavior (like the Yale fraternity that was suspended after pledges chanted, “No means yes, yes means anal!”) are victims of identity politics and infringements on free speech. But students who don’t shut down speech they find offensive but rather counter with their own speech (for example, by planning an event on “rape culture” for the same time as a debate on whether “rape culture” exists) are part of “a new generation’s contempt for civil liberties.”
The only way, at least theoretically they say, for men to truly defend themselves from women who “have been propagandized and lobbied to believe that they should make claims against you whenever they end up unhappy about sexual contact, even if it was clearly consensual,” is to be celibate or to videotape all sexual encounters. As they castigate the news media for being too deferential to alleged rape survivors and not investigating women’s claims independently, they adhere to no such standard for themselves, sympathetically sharing the story of one young man who “suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder,” after being “accused of rape and other sex crimes by a fellow student whose story kept changing, according to his mother.”
This is too bad, because the question of how campuses should combat sexual assault while upholding important principles of legal fairness is an important one meriting coolheaded analysis. The same is true of the seemingly growing consensus among social justice advocates that bigoted or simply emotionally triggering speech is akin to physical violence and should be regulated as such. But unlike Kipnis’s book, “The Campus Rape Frenzy” is neither thought-provoking nor revealing of uncomfortable truths — except, perhaps, in demonstrating that implicit misogyny continues to permeate American culture, contributing not just to sexual violence itself, but to the ways we understand, discuss and write books about it.
The twentieth century in Britain saw the arrival of gramophones, motor traffic, aeroplanes and the mechanisation of labour – all ‘the clash and clatter of urban and industrial life’ (1) that, in all its chaos, seemed only to signal meaninglessness. James Mansell’s historiographical approach in The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity is to consider sound not as a product or representative of the modern age to be analysed like visual culture or the moving image, but as ‘modernity manifested in audible form’ (1).
Mansell has written extensively and curated exhibitions on the cultural history of sound and hearing and on spiritualist movements such as Theosophy. At the time of writing, there is a programme available on BBC iPlayer in which he discusses his latest work. In this book, Mansell argues for an ‘age of noise’ in Britain, bookended by the two World Wars, during which noise was variously associated with nervousness, the constitution or disruption of subjectivity and selfhood, spiritualism, the power of the state and nationhood. In an echo of John Berger’s famous ‘ways of seeing’ (1972), Mansell posits ‘ways of hearing’ (183), arguing that hearing and listening are far from passive experiences or immune to ideology. The attempts to order and manipulate hearing in the first half of the twentieth century form the subject of this study.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, many figures railed against the intrusion of noise in public life, including Dan McKenzie (City of Din: A Tirade against Noise) and agitators of the anti-noise campaigns. The Cambridge psychologist F. C. Bartlett wrote in The Problem of Noise (1934) that ‘sound, like love, laughs at locksmiths’ (118), identifying the threat it poses to the separation of the public and private spheres. Kant had also observed this in his Critique of Judgement (1790): music ‘extends its influence further than desired (in the neighbourhood), and so as it were obtrudes itself, and does violence to the freedom of others who are not of the musical company’. For this reason, he held music to be the lowest art form; it is, incidentally, one of the most popular (‘vulgar’, in the original sense) cultural products today.
Image Credit: (Rhonda CC BY SA 2.0)
The critique of noise was largely due to its association with nervousness and disturbance. Modernity itself was taken as synonymous with nervousness, and indeed the discourse of shock and distraction in modern (specifically urban) life is familiar from the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. But even Simmel, in his famous essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, contrasted city life with the ‘slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence’. In the crisis of nerves, metaphors of rhythm, vibration and harmony were especially prominent. The US neurologist George M. Beard theorised that the noise of modernity was unrhythmical and disturbed the body, unlike natural sounds (34). Terms of expenditure were also common, and fitted Beard’s idea that each individual had a fixed amount of nerve energy which could be spent or reserved (30). This chimed with Simmel’s notion of the Geldwirtschaft (money economy) of the modern city.
Mansell’s introduction and first chapter focus on the activities of the Anti-Noise League and other noise abatement movements, which figured noise as a disease: a pathologisation of modernity. As he writes, ‘neurasthenia [nervous exhaustion] was a critique of modernity as much as it was a medical diagnosis’ (32): cause and effect were conflated. The condition’s threat to workers’ capacity for labour and the idea that nervous energy should be preserved as a patriotic duty were the first manifestations of the destructive potential of noise for the modern capitalist nation. This national rhetoric was only strengthened in the ‘total warfare’ of the Second World War.
The second chapter, ‘Re-Enchanting Modernity’, yields the most surprising conclusions for the non-specialist reader who might associate the age of noise with the rise of mechanised labour and the concomitant disenchantment of the world, as Max Weber argued. ‘Sound matters in modern history,’ wrote Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past, pointing to the material elements of sound that were recorded, amplified and distributed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In early twentieth-century Britain, however, mainstream science was attacked as too materialist by movements of occult spiritualism, such as the Theosophists. Unlike the anti-noise agitators, these practitioners advocated the harnessing of ‘vibratory influences’ (71) to attain a self in harmony with the world. Mechanical noise was still problematic because it threatened self-realisation, but certain forms of music and abstract art were held to have a good effect on the nerves. Kandinsky’s treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) was influenced by Theosophy, which was founded in New York in 1875. Annie Besant led the movement from Madras, India, after she became president in 1908. In Britain, its figurehead was Maud MacCarthy, the ethnomusicologist, expert on Indian music and occultist who had studied with Besant. MacCarthy set up devotional concerts on Sunday mornings and a Brotherhood of Arts, Crafts and Industries, based on medieval guilds and intended to be ‘temples of magical sound’. Chapter Two is especially successful in exposing the tension and slippage between the spiritual and the secular in this period of cultural transition.
Mansell then turns to the political aspects of sound in early-twentieth-century Britain. The state intervened in two everyday soundscapes – the workplace and the home – and state filmmakers searched for the most adequate ways of representing and promoting these. One key priority was to bring the human body into harmony with the machine to counter the negative image of mechanisation. Thus, industrial psychologists began to figure ‘nervousness’ as a mental rather than physical condition, and claimed that industrial work shared a rhythm with the collective, social self which manual workers entered into. ‘Brain workers’, however, retained a personal, interior selfhood with its own rhythm, which could easily be disturbed by the pulse of industry. This led to a gendering of the noise-sufferer (female secretaries at the typewriter vs. male ‘brain workers’ who needed peace and quiet).
Sound was also increasingly co-opted into ‘the ideological work of nation building’ (149) during World War Two. In the face of Hitler’s ‘psychological war’ (172), it was imperative to stay calm in loud conditions and resist the fear of noisy aerial bombardment. It was, perhaps, a stereotypically British response: in the face of ‘a crisis of nervousness on the home front[,] stoical adaptation instead became the order of the day and the age-of-noise narrative faded as a consequence’ (182).
Mansell’s work is a welcome attempt to redress the visual and textual biases of modern historiography, and covers an area of past experience that is often assumed to be inaccessible. As a student of Modern Languages, I missed some reference to continental philosophy (Peter Szendy, for instance, who has written an excellent history of listening) and to German studies of vibration and rhythm (Michael Cowan is a figure to consult here). However, Mansell’s study usefully highlights the overlap between cultures of rationality and spirituality, and references some fascinating investigations, especially into the relationship between sound and power, if one wishes to pursue a Foucauldian line. Carolyn Birdsall’s Nazi Soundscapes and Susan Cusick’s work on isolation and the role of sound in the constitution of prisoner selfhoods (see her ‘Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the “Global War on Terror”’ here) are two such examples. We would do well to remember that the aural sense is not free from ideology and coercion, and that studies of listening can yield conclusions that trouble the ideas suggested by visual and textual investigation.
In his conclusion to Foucault: The Birth of Power, the political theorist and geographer Stuart Elden cites Michel Foucault on writing:
Basically, I do not like to write. […] Writing interests me only to the degree that it incorporates the reality of combat […] I would like my books to be like a kind of scalpel, Molotov cocktails, or undermining tunnels and to be burned up after use like fireworks (Dits et écrits 152; see 186-87).
Foucault’s contemporary Gilles Deleuze also described Foucault’s works in terms of instrumentality, although in less violent language –as ‘tool boxes’ for readers (187). In this volume, Elden argues that the theorisation of power was the essential tool Foucault developed during the early 1970s.
The period that forms the focus of Foucault: The Birth of Power is from the late 1960s to 1975, when Foucault returned from three years of teaching in Tunisia to a post-1968 France whose political and intellectual landscape had changed utterly. These are the years of ‘the political Foucault’, of wanderings ‘from the streets to the archive, from the classroom to the desk’ (20), in Elden’s own words, during which Foucault worked with the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), medical groups and on campaigns for abortion rights.
Elden draws on the familiar works of this period (between the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge and the completion of Discipline and Punish), lecture courses at the Collège de France, short writings and interviews, as well as unpublished manuscripts from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and material related to Foucault’s activism from the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine. The corpus thus provides an overview that would otherwise be inaccessible to anyone but the specialised scholar. Furthermore, Elden’s task is not a simple matter of systematisation: in addition to his dislike of writing, Foucault was famous for his vexing of epistemology. In a lecture course, he described knowledge as ‘allied first with malice’ (33). We consider, then, the work of a writer with a deep aversion to writing, and a philosopher who does not love knowledge, or, at least, one who shows us that knowledge is constructed, shifting, multiple and intertwined with power.
For this reason, Elden’s book on the genesis of Foucault’s theory of power is, necessarily, an account of forms of knowledge. Elden challenges the accepted notion that knowledge is only a concern of the early Foucault writing produced at the end of the 1960s. Rather, he shows that the problem of knowledge is a pervasive preoccupation throughout Foucault’s work.
Image Credit: ‘Life in the Panopticon’ (Anokarina CC BY SA 2.0)
The first three chapters of The Birth of Power, headed ‘Measure’, ‘Inquiry’ and ‘Examination’, are structured around these three forms of knowledge, elaborated in Foucault’s 1973 lectures on ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’ in Rio de Janeiro. ‘Measure’ emerges from Foucault’s study of Greek juridical, political and religious practices, although he suggests that the concept originated in Eastern thought (27). It encompasses strategies of exchange, distribution and moderation (for instance, in money) as well as the law (nomos). It is ‘both calculation and norm’ (28), emerging from statistical analysis and used as a standard, both constitutive and constituted.
‘Inquiry’ was the model dominant between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries among philosophers and scientists; it is associated with the science of observation. Foucault locates the rise of inquiry in the transition from Germanic law, which functioned on the basis of a test or duel between parties, to a legal system imposed from above, adjudicated by a separate ‘inquisitor’. The third model of knowledge, ‘examination’, is prevalent in the disciplinary and punitive society. It is the basis of knowledge-power, savoir-pouvoir, that generated the ‘human sciences’, as Foucault terms them (6), the social sciences of psychology, sociology, even the medical discipline of psychiatry. It is examination that is at work today when terror suspects are held indefinitely at Guantanemo Bay without charge – ‘inquiry, but before any offence’, as Foucault wrote (84).
The next three chapters, ‘Madness’, ‘Discipline’ and ‘Illness’, also draw on Foucauldian manifestations of power in culture, but these are less forms of knowledge than themes that interested Foucault in theory and in practice. This half of the study provides the more substantial account of Foucault’s activism in prison reform, health and debates on sexuality. It also covers Foucault’s preparation of a study of madness and criminality using the memoirs of Pierre Rivière, who killed his family with a pruning hook in 1835; his work on space and the formulation of panopticism; the positive and negative uses of power in the disciplinary society (for instance, administrative strategies versus exclusion and expulsion); and the intersection of medical debates with wider political struggles and other sociological concerns, such as public hygiene and urban planning.
These chapters are filled with illuminating insights: into the process of subjectification initiated by the panopticon’s spatial disposition (i.e. thinking themselves to be observed, individuals begin disciplining themselves, 152); an unexpected, more positive view of knowledge as a weapon of defence (131); and on the intersection of capitalism and the disciplinary society and the formation of ‘productive bodies’ for work (99). The distinction of Elden’s work lies in his intertwining of theory and practice. His methodology borrows from Foucault’s own approach: Foucault’s reading notes at the BNF are undated and sorted by theme, which is an indication of his manner of thought, drawing thematic connections over a wide expanse of chronology.
Elden also makes several useful remarks on style and translation, including on the controversial rendering of Surveiller et punir as Discipline and Punish and on Foucault’s extensive use of the passive voice in this work. However, these points are rather buried in the overall narrative, and could be given more breathing space. One gains a sense of how difficult Foucault is to systematise from the manner in which Elden is obliged to treat several similar topics in different places, only stopping to note that the point is ‘further discussed in chapter…’. The book can therefore be a little difficult to follow, and one would appreciate greater contextualisation of historical events under discussion, such as the Nu-Pieds revolt against taxation in Normandy of 1639-40 or the story of Rivière. It is perhaps Foucault’s own hallmark to present such events as the execution of Damiens at the beginning of Discipline and Punish in vivid, narrative terms; in contrast, Elden skims over the details to pursue a more theoretical discussion. For this reason, the volume is more suitable for those engaged in a specialised study of Foucault than for the general reader.
For its account of unpublished or newly available material and manuscripts, woven together with Foucault’s publications, Elden’s book is indispensable, and it succeeds in showing how the theorisation of power guided Foucault’s activity in this period, both conceptually and politically. The book is firmly geared towards the English reader, with references to both French and English primary texts and little recourse to French terminology without elucidation. Elden has also written a guide to the late Foucault in the same mould, Foucault’s Last Decade, thus providing us with the intellectual book-ends to consider his work and career. The Birth of Power is, finally, a reminder that the critical analysis of philosophical texts should be read with the primary work open, and that the limitations of one can lead to the completion of the other.
Among the characters described in Jamie Bartlett’s Radicals, I’m finding it hard to shake the image of the grinders. A particularly dedicated and self-focused branch of biohackers, grinders operate on their own bodies, adding microchips, devices and prosthetics as they seek to turn themselves into living DIY cyborgs. This is a kind of meat and metal transhumanism — one that the grinders see as standing apart from the abstractions and pointless waffle of the transhumanist movement. The transhumanists want to think about how technology can extend and enhance human life; the biohackers want to get stuck into the practicalities of testing and experimenting.
This is where Bartlett’s book is so successful. He is a natural storyteller and Radicals is a book of tales. Showing understanding and humility, moving himself into the role of outsider or studied observer when needed, Bartlett exercises the art of storytelling. The chapters follow a series of individuals and groups to explore their apparently radical properties. Each looks closely at the toils, successes and failures of those figures and the features of their thinking that might lead them to be labelled radical. Often mixing individual human stories with those of the movements of which they are a part, the book ranges across a transhumanist presidential hopeful, eco-protestors, mushroom-eating gatherings, a commune pursuing self-sufficiency, a libertarian nation-state start-up and a comedian-led anti-establishment political party, through to an interlude on the ‘Prevent’ strategy and an account of some disturbing multinational Islamophobia.
Bartlett’s ability to be probing whilst remaining sensitive and non-dismissive draws out intriguing details that could easily have been lost — the state of the mattress in a commune love-shack, the emotional post-match reactions to hallucinogens, the character traits in a Five Star meeting, the revelation that a coffin-shaped bus was used partly to try to highlight a problem with American democracy and so on. For want of a more accurate comparison, this is documentary storytelling in the mode of Louis Theroux. As a result, subtleties emerge, such as tension between what appears, on the surface, to be philosophically aligned: for instance, biohackers and transhumanists. Intriguing and sometimes fraught with a little jeopardy, you can’t help but get hooked on the narratives.
Image Credit: (Jeremy Segrott CC BY 2.0)
In places, the stories seem unreal or like Bartlett is gate-crashing a film set. In other cases, the stories are grim and all too gritty, upsetting in how easy it is for unpalatable ideas to circulate and create action. There is a message here about what happens when frustration builds. Bartlett’s argument is that we need different radical approaches, however unsettling, to enable genuine debate to thrive. Radicals are important, Bartlett suggests, because they bring both disobedience and the possibility of getting things wrong.
Genuine radicals, by definition, are hard to find. An easy point to make about a book like this would be to take issue with the selection of stories chosen. In places I found myself wondering if these were, indeed, all that radical. Psychedelics and free-love communes seem a bit dog-eared. People have been implanting themselves with RFID chips for well over a decade. And setting up a new nation state has even been the focus of a fairly well-known comedy series. In places Bartlett acknowledges this, and adds reflections on the ‘unoriginality’ of what he is seeing. I’m not sure that matters though. In all cases, the contemporary context lends new life or new circumstances to even old ideas. And anyway, this seems to be a book about people trying to be radicals. I started to wonder if these characters were actually trapped in the idea of what a radical is, causing patterns to be repeated. Bartlett’s stories are laced with more than enough self-awareness for him to see the limits of the various propositions on display. As I read the accounts, I sometimes imagined the author flashing a knowing glance to camera — occasionally that glance was tinged with discomfort and even, in some key moments, deep concern.
Bartlett’s radicals may not always be all that radical, and they certainly bring out a strong sense of disgust in some cases, but their stories tell of something beyond the surface. These stories often feel symptomatic. As well as being a book about radicals, it is a book about problems. Sometimes the radicals are trying to solve the problem; in other cases they embody one. As Bartlett begins the book, he claims that: ‘although we have more information, fast computers and clever analysts to understand these problems, we seem less and less capable to predict or affect any of them’. We can’t data-analyse our way out of a number of these issues, especially as we are data-analysing our way into quite a few of them.
Undoubtedly we find ourselves in a moment that calls for some radical thinking — which is probably something you could have said for most moments in history. Bartlett acknowledges that there were some political shifts whilst he was working on his book, shifts that altered what might be seen to be radical. Genuinely radical thinking can’t now deal only in grand issues: it needs to ask how we can stem the rise in homelessness, transcend growing prejudice and divisions, make social housing safe, reopen libraries or rebuild crumbling health and education systems.
Bartlett’s prediction is that there is more to come. His book was finished in 2016 and the events of 2017 seem to lend it some credibility. He identifies the shifts in 2016 as being early signs of a ‘more significant realignment’ and that political norms will change. Prediction is difficult at the moment, but this one seems to have some weight. If this realignment does continue to unfold, then some radical notions might well be guiding it.
Bartlett’s book inspires both caution and enthusiasm for radical thinking. The current moment is defined by a battle for ideas in a mutating public sphere of social media, algorithms and unfettered real-time reaction. In this context, I’d be a bit worried that we don’t really fully understand how ideas circulate or who is able to conjure the authority to make those ideas visible and give them power. As Bartlett points out, it is what is seen to be possible that is at stake. As this book begins to illustrate, it is not just ideas themselves that matter, but how they become part of the world; how they are promoted, controlled and silenced. This is no fault of Bartlett’s, but I’m left wondering about the mechanisms by which radical ideas take hold.
