Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

 
While it goes without saying that it is the mark of a pride for any reasonable person to disagree with Roger Scuton on any conceivable subject, I did think this article was not entirely without interest:

"Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions... Krier presents the first principle of architecture as a deduction from Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim that we can will as a universal law. You must, Krier says, "build in such a way that you and those dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, work in them, spend their holidays in them, and grow old in them with pleasure." Krier suggests that modernists themselves follow this dictum—in private. Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster—between them, responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities—live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisanal styles, traditional materials, and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience. Instead of Bernard Mandeville’s famous principle of "private vices, public benefits," it seems that they follow the law of private benefits, public vice—the private benefit of a charming location paid for by the public vice of tearing our cities apart. Rogers in particular is famous for creating buildings that have no relation to their surroundings, that cannot easily change their use, that are extremely expensive to maintain, and that destroy the character of their neighborhoods.

Krier identifies the leading error of modernism as that introduced by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: separating load-bearing and outward-facing parts. Once buildings become curtains hung on invisible frames, all of the understood ways of creating and conveying meanings lose out. Even if the curtain is shaped like a classical facade, it is a pretend facade, with only a blank expression. Usually, however, it is a sheet of glass or concrete panels, without intelligible apertures. The building itself is hidden, and its posture as a member of the city, standing among neighbors and resting its weight upon their common ground, is meaningless because unobservable. All relation to neighboring structures, to the street, and to the sky, is lost. The form conveys nothing beyond the starkness of its geometry...

The lack of vocabulary explains the alienating effect of a modern airport, such as Newark or Heathrow. Unlike the classical railway station, which guides the traveler securely and reassuringly to the ticket office, to the platform, and to the public concourse, the typical airport is a mass of written signs, all competing for attention, all amplifying the sense of urgency, yet nowhere offering a point of visual repose."


There's a great deal I have sympathy with here. I've long felt that modern architecture is a form of engineering rather than a branch of aesthetics, leading to the situation whereby one can wonder around the City of London at a weekend and find a deserted ghost town filled with modern skyscrapers whose weekday workers would never dream of living in anything that even remotely resembled them. Whereas early modernism led to the construction of private villas as well as public buildings, I'm not aware there is any private analogue for the Lloyds or Swiss Re buildings. On the other hand, this is all far from persuading me to endorse the tepid pastiche of Krier's Poundbury, Barratt Homes with a royal warrant, which is surely as unpleasant a form of utopianism as anything Corbusier dreamt up. Poundbury does have the rather unpleasant air of being a middle class commune.

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posted by Richard 7:36 PM

Saturday, March 15, 2008

 
From a recent interview with Tom Stoppard:

"The citation mentions Travesties, Stoppard's play based on the fact that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin all lived in Zurich during the First World War; Arcadia, featuring a Cambridge contemporary of Lord Byron; The Invention of Love, which took for its subject the poet AE Housman; The Coast of Utopia, about the roots of political radicalism in 19th-century Russia; and his latest stage hit, Rock'n'Roll, which travels between Prague in the spring of 1968 and the present. "I'm attracted to the past," Stoppard says. "It doesn't necessarily have to be the distant past, and I certainly didn't think about it, but looking back on it, the truth of the matter is that for about 15 years everything I've written has got at least one foot in the past."

What he fears most about this new world is the drive towards homogeneity. "The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority."

Individual freedom was central to Rock'n'Roll, in which Jan, a young Czech V C lecturer at Cambridge University in 1968, returns home as members of the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, invade Czechoslovakia. In contrast to Jan's increasing politicisation against the forces of Communism, back in England, his mentor Max Morrow refuses to abandon his communist principles. Stoppard sees Morrow as "a rather moving, strangely sympathetic figure. To me he was an idealist with a strong sense of natural justice and social justice and all these things are admirable." But the attitude of many on the left who persisted in their support of communist ideals irked him. "


Like Stoppard, I do seem to see myself becoming a comparatively young fogey, and can easily understand the allure of the historical to the present day. It doesn't seem especially difficult to understand how writers from Eliot to Woolf and Tolstoy to Pasternak could see the individual in relation to a wider narrative in a way that is considerably more fraught at this time. One of the paradoxes of modern society is that in one instance it is highly individualistic, with a general loss of social cohesion leading to a prevalent state of alienation and anomie. As Robert Putnam put it, social capital is in decline. In another instance, the prevailing political ethos has been a frequently coercive communitarian one, which has been essentially disinterested in the individual and at best dismissive of individual rights. Restrictions of civil liberties that would have been fiercely resisted by previous generations are acquiesced to with barely a murmur now. Governments have gone from treating migrant communities as monolithic blocks of racial categories to regarding them as monolithic blocks of religious categories, with scant regard given to the possibility of individuals having multiple forms of affiliation. On a commercial level, large sections of the population are employed within large corporate organisations that tend to regard consumers as demographic segments rather than individuals. Modern society is in many respects a highly homogeneous one, whereby there may be more brands of shop and television channel than ever before but what they all tend to offer seems at best a case of variations on a theme. As Hal Niedzviecki puts it:

"Individuality becomes a goal to be framed by rules and regulations and measured in predetermined plans and models. The paradox of “natural” is the paradox of having to follow a communal and well-travelled path in order to arrive at individuality. States Ulrich Beck: In modern life, the individual is confronted on many levels with the following challenge: You may and you must lead your own independent life, outside the old bonds of family, tribe, religion, origin and class; and you must do this within the new guidelines and rules which the state, the job market, the bureaucracy, lay down.

The Princeton professor of psychology Hadley Cantril noted as early as 1941 that almost every individual was born into a highly organized society. "Almost all the experience which constitutes his life are likely to be prescribed roughly for him by the particular culture within which his life happens to be lived." Cantril softened the blow, and ceded that some small changes to the way society operates were still possible: To be sure, the individual will develop the capacity to select alternate courses of action. He may also set about changing some characteristics of his culture which are by no means to his liking. But still this selection and this desire to alter certain practices are themselves bounded and determined by the original conditions imposed by a certain way of life.

What are the conditions imposed on us, what is the "certain way of life" that constitutes our particular existence in postmodern capitalist society? De Tocqueville’s 1835 travelogue/social study Democracy in America points us in the right direction. The author’s primary observation concerned the way the political and economic system of the United States was creating a new kind of individuality. As he saw it, freedom American-style was forcing everyone into their shell, their social framework reduced to immediate family and friends, their only interest personal success. De Tocqueville wrote of an "innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest." If we depend on anything, it is the largely bureaucratic structure that shapes our increasingly atomized, solitary lives. So it is that the appearance of independence is underscored by a vast world of regulation and restriction. "

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posted by Richard 12:34 PM

Saturday, June 23, 2007

 
In his latest collection of essays, Milan Kundera wrote that the social changes in the Czech Republic after the fall of communism, as property rights were returned to their original owners and a middle class accompanied by social inequality returned overnight. Kundera wrote that after Kafka and Broch he did not feel equipped to write a Balzacian novel on the subject, but the material nonetheless found its way into his last novel, Ignorance. I tend to agree with Kundera; when nineteenth century novelists like Thackerary and Dickens wrote it was out of a reforming spirit that seems remote in an age characterised by its rejection of reforming projects in favour of pragmatic and incremental measures. Nontheless, modern society is perhaps easier to describe in the terms Eliot and Zola had available to them than the ones devised for the age of Freud, Marx and World War.

I live in an English provinical town. It doesn't matter which one, as like most English provincial towns it suffers from an absence of any sense of place and could very easily be found in any part of the country. When I arrived there, it was a rather dowdy and humdrum place with its rows of terraced housing, grey sixties concrete and a town centre that was invariably empty and closed on Sundays. Since then, much of that quiet town centre has been dismembered and reconstructed, with gleaming new shopping centres and towering hotels dwarfing and frequently demolishing the redbrick and terracotta building surrounding them. The centre now throngs with people at any time of the week, from incessant shopping to incessant clubbing and drinking. Conspicuous consumption sets the tone throughout, with old fashioned furniture shops making way for casinos. Shops routinely go bankrupt and new franchises open in their place at a dizzying speed. Voices in multiple languages fill the streets as English newspaper headlines on rising house prices or the risk of social inequality leading to rioting alternate with newspaper headlines written in Polish. Posters calling for the destruction of the state of Israel briefly appear before being torn down. Small shops now stock readymade ghoulash, pickled gherkin and tripe while swanky restaurants for the affluent open nearby. Mosques, Methodist, Baptist and Polish churches nestle close to one another. Gleaming glass and steel offies or flats rise up everywhere.

Elsewhere, just at the margins of all this, the number of down and outs seems to have swelled and the streets seem to be filled with the displaced. I pass by a man at a bus stop every morning shouts loudly into the air and gesticulates wildly while those that have joined him in the queue stare fixedly down at the ground. A man in a supermarket queue gently talks gibberish to himself and chuckles. Those that had joined him in that queue also stare fixedly down at the ground. Estates with rotting sixties tower blocks and burnt our cars are left to fester. Crime has increased markedly with reportings of shooting having become common, in spite of the burgeoning numbers of CCTV cameras now found on every street corner. Needles and glass from smashed car windows are regularly found on pavements. Television adverts appear for social darwinist programmes that celebrate entrepreneurship and the firing of the substandard.

It is rather easier to describe this picture than to interpret it. I would not wish to live in a slightly earlier time, with a more homogenous, repressed and straightlaced society but that does little to accommodate me to the rather alinated society I do happen to find myself in. I have often enough cited Anthony Giddens' work on post-traditionalist societies and in theory much of what I see around should be an exemplar of it. In practice, it is not quite as easy and as the country transitions from one administration to another, it is difficult not to conclude that England as a place is more unequal, more divided, less liberal and more brutual than it seemed to be before. As an end-note, this article on London's recent socio-economic history puts my rather anecdotal account of how England has changed into a more specific context:

"Each year from 1997 to 2006 saw a net inflow of 100,000 foreigners to London, to which must be added the population's natural growth (more births than deaths) of 50,000 to 75,000 a year. These increases are partly offset by an annual outflow of around 80,000 to the rest of Britain—take immigration out of the picture and, according to some estimates, the capital's population would have fallen by around 600,000 between 1993 and 2000. The net effect of this population "churn" is that London's population is now around 35 per cent foreign-born, a figure moving rapidly towards 50 per cent...

There are 108,000 people in London earning over £100,000 a year, which as a proportion of its population is more than twice the national figure, and there are 38,000 who earn more than £200,000—over a third of the national total. (If those working in the City of London were removed from the national earnings figures, Britain's income differentials would look far more like the more egalitarian continental European countries.) Even average annual earnings in London are far higher than the rest of the country: £37,323 compared with £24,301 for Britain as a whole...

As London adapts to its new status as the global city, there remain doubts about the quality of life it is able to offer the majority of its citizens. London's growth is already creating stark inequalities. The new jobs being created tend to be at the very top and bottom of the pay scale. Despite all the wealth generated in the city, London has some of the highest levels of poverty in the country, as well as the highest unemployment rate, at over 7 per cent. From 2002 to 2005, 52 per cent of children in inner London were living below the poverty line. As Livingstone himself says, "It's worse being poor here than anywhere else." The cost of housing, as well as transport, is very high for those on low incomes. The average house price in London is almost £300,000 (almost 50 per cent higher than the British average), and, if you are not an emergency case, the wait for public rental housing can be as long as three years. The expected sharp increase in population can only exacerbate those problems...

The most obvious symptom of social stress is the rise in support for extremist politics in London—challenging Livingstone's rosy vision of a happily multicultural and unsegregated city... The problems are particularly acute in the borough of Barking & Dagenham, which has in the space of a few years lost a Ford assembly plant that had employed generations and gained a host of new ethnic groups, attracted by low house prices. The result was a striking result for the BNP in last year's local elections—they won 12 seats to become the council's official opposition. The BNP has not yet reached the mid-1970s levels of support for the National Front, but a survey at the 2005 general election found that the capital had among the highest levels of potential support for the BNP of any part of the country, with 23 per cent of respondents saying they might vote for the party... Ronald Dworkin once described New York as a "carnival on the edge of frenzy." Modern London occasionally totters close to an edge of this kind."

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posted by Richard 1:12 PM

Sunday, January 28, 2007

 
This piece on German conceptions of identity rather struck me:

"Speakers at awards ceremonies and festivals often remind their listeners of the role of literature in the creation of the German nation... But most speakers overlook the fact that by the time Germany finally emerged as an intellectual and later political structure, Germany's writers had long since begun to think beyond Germany. The great German philosophers and poets of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – be it Goethe or Kant – had their sights not on German but on European unification. In Germany, the Enlightenment was from the very start not a national but a European programme. In literature too, the preferred models were not German, drawing instead on non-German literature from Homer to Shakespeare and Byron. German was something German literature did not want to be – and which is was nonetheless precisely in its appropriation of non-German motifs and structures. "Overview of the European Conditions of German Literature" is the title given by August Wilhelm Schlegel to his 1825 essay on the peculiarities of German intellectual life: "We are, I may confidently claim, the cosmopolitans of European culture"...

This vision put its proponents at odds with the nationalist zeitgeist in Germany, although in retrospect they are often claimed by it. Anti-nationalist opposition intensified in the twentieth century, especially after the experiences of World War II: the dream of a democratic union of European states was what the Mann brothers, Hesse, Hoffmansthal, Tucholsky, Zweig, Roth and Döblin upheld in the face of German nationalism... Germany's writers have always been characterized among other things by their fraught relationship with Germany. They are Great Germans, despite or precisely in the way they quarrelled with Germany. In other words: Germany can be proud of those who were not proud of Germany... At the end of his lecture on "Germany and the Germans" in May 1945 at the Library of Congress, the same Thomas Mann reminded his listeners that none other than Goethe "went so far as to yearn for a German Diaspora." The comment by Goethe quoted by Mann here comes from a conversation with Chancellor Müller from 14 December 1808: "Like the Jews, the Germans must be transplanted and scattered over the world […] in order to develop the good that lies in them, fully, and to the good of all nations.""


This rather reminded me of one of the more striking examples of Germany's national guilt, WG Sebald:

"After moving to England as a student and deciding to live there permanently, Sebald began to see a connection between his own emigration and the Egelhofer family history of emigration to the United States. Attached through his father's military career to the legacy of German aggression on the one hand, Sebald imaginatively connected himself through his maternal line to the displaced wanderers and "victims" of history on the other; for instance, his (fictional) great-uncle in the story "Ambros Adelwarth" in The Emigrants (loosely based on his aunt Fanny's brother-in-law) is the lifelong companion of a wealthy American Jew who dies insane, tormented by visions of the horrific carnage in World War I that also call to mind the later Nazi atrocities.

Readers have sometimes expressed discomfort with this connection, accusing Sebald of inappropriately identifying with the Jewish victims of National Socialism, as if he, too, were an "exile" of history. The objection is misguided, however, for Sebald never forgot the distinction between the forced exile of the Nazi period and his own voluntary postwar emigration; his entire work offers an eloquent tribute to the memory and memorialization of that historical difference. However, his literary imagination naturally sought out points of contact and continuity. For his book about four aging "emigrants," he deliberately avoided the term exilierte, preferring instead the capacious and somewhat antiquated term ausgewanderte (literally, those who have "wandered" or "gone out") in order to include his own family history of emigration. The Jewish exiles of National Socialism are but one, admittedly central part of a much broader pattern of modern displacement reaching back to the French Revolution (with an implicit titular reference to Goethe's Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten) and the economic emigrations of both Jews and Germans from Central Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sebald's semiautobiographical literary work is thus premised on a dual identity: as the son of a Wehrmacht officer who bears witness to the victims of German violence, but also as a member of his grandfather's nonmilitary, emigrant family who identifies with these victims existentially."


My interest in this stems from my own ancestry, which although predominantly English, also stems from Saxony in what was once known as East Germany. To be specific, it stems from migration from Germany at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. Equally, the theme of exile is something I feel keenly in that while I now live in the south of England, I grew up in the Midlands, a place of markedly contrasting character and economic fortunes. My relationship with my country of birth is accordingly every bit as difficult as that described above for Germany (particularly since I find easier in a lot of respects to relate to my home region of the Midlands than to a construct called 'England'). The British do (at least in their better part*) tend to deprecate ideas of national pride, instead emphasising a vision of England of motorways, national decline and high rises. The nation that, to paraphrase Morrissey, they forgot to shut down. In theory, Britain and Germany should have a great deal in common. Both are not so much states as convenient constructs formed to unify a disparate collection of ethnic nations. Since both nations had been constructed rather than having evolved, both tended to exist as essentially an idea. Where Germany has been defined through its diaspora of writers like Sebald and Kafka (as well as the wartime diaspora of figures like Mann, Schoenberg and Lang), Britain has been defined through a cosmpolitan assimilation of foreign artistic techniques and artists, like Joyce, Swift, Marx, Handel, Pevsner and Conrad. Both nations tended to look towards France for their model of civilisation, with Frederick the Great refusing to write or speak German and inviting Voltaire to his estate.

Of course, in practice, I suspect a lot of the above essay reflects a romanticised view of Germany and Britain alike. Both nations invented traditions, based to a large extent on those of Prussia and England and indeed of each other (as with Britain importing the idea of the Christmas tree from Germany along with its royal family), stressing national identity with all the neurosis of countries lacking one in the first place. The preoccupation of both nations with their medieval pasts, from Castell Koch to the Wartburg and from Wagner's nationalist medievalism, Grimm's Fairy Tales through to the Pre-Raphaelites is perhaps attributable to this. But, if nothing else, it does provide contrarianism with a pedigree and a heritage.

Addendum

* I say in their better part as I increasingly feel that this sense of deprectation is being diminished. During the course of our recent military escapades, it has become more common to recast the empire as a mantle we are obliged to take up once more (if only as a means of national pride by association with the United States) rather than as a source of shame and to boastingly compare our economic fortunes with those of European states like Germany on what are typically the flimsiest of grounds. I was rather reminded of that in this piece by imomus, himself a good example of an artist turning his back on his home country in favour of adopted homelands in Germany and Japan:

"British TV seems to be obsessed with the ideology of Social Darwinism. Shows like Big Brother and The Weakest Link are all about the elimination of losers, and involve their audiences in the choice of those losers. It's all very tally ho, a fox hunt. They're the result of the transformation of Britain from a society that was at least heading towards horizontality (in other words, low-Gini equality) in the 60s and 70s to one that's wedded at every level to inequality, unfairness, high-Gini -- a "winner takes it all" society where income inequality is seen as something natural and even desireable.

Here in Germany you could never have shows as Social Darwinist as that, I ventured, because there really was the elimination of "the weakest link" here, within living memory, in the form of the extermination of gays, gypsies and Jews. In the same way, the surveillance excesses of the East German secret police have made it much harder to survey Germans. Britain's ubiquitous citizen surveillance would be unacceptable here.

And this, for me, is why guilt is good. It's guilt over things like surveillance and eliminating "the weakest link" which keeps the German state more liberal and benign than the UK state. It's lack of guilt that's the biggest current political problem in Israel, the UK and the US, and evidence of the return of guilt the most hopeful thing happening right now. "

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posted by Richard 7:20 PM