Clare Market Review, Issue 1, Volume 104

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Editor-in-Chief - Daniel B Yates, Managing Editor - Sean Baker, Production Editor - Alex Jones

Copy Editor - Sydney Smith, Submissions Editor - Jacob Levine, Art Editor - David Michon, Web Editor - Sean Deel Community Editors - Jessi Tabalba and Alex White, Business Manager - Nishant Bagadia, Treasurer - Rosalie Winn, Layout Editor - Eric King, General Secretary - Jill Kavanagh Associate Editors - Rayna Coulson , Phyllis Lui, Annalise Toberman, Michela Muscat, Lotta Staffans, Oscar Tapp-Scotting, Nizar Manek, Ellen Aabo, Brett Noble, Jonathan Montpetit, Pratyusha Rao, Charlotte Rooney With thanks to - Josh Cook, David Kingsley, Christine Whyte, Nat Holtham, Richard Hylton, Madeeha Ansari, Yoshi Goto, Jessie Shen, Titus Seah, Nathalie Mitchell, Yanmin Chia, Anis Abdullah, Kelesi Blundell, Ugne Greivyte, Marion Koob, Katie Lapotin, Joseph Coterill, Francesca Baker, Anne Towlson, Kevin Perry, UCL Zine Library, Eleanor at Delicate Mayhem, Claire at Jupiter, Bakewell Tarts, Daniel’s old PC,, Simon Reynolds, Mark E. Smith and Pastas and Fil Sans

THE JOURNAL OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS STUDENTS’ UNION (c) all copyright for individual contributions remains with individual authors

Editorial.

“We will not apologise for devoting the opening words of our first issue to the REVIEW itself, for although the idea of a school magazine has long been in the minds of those who looked ahead, no practical steps were taken in this direction until last term when, after the favourable report of a sub-committee, the Union decided to make the experiment. Much, therefore, requires explanation and comment.”

Over a century has passed since those words were written, and in that time Clare has undergone a pattern of ascents and declines, marking the thoughts and concerns of the student and academic body at LSE through periods of profound political and social change.

Clare has been many things, at times a poetry journal, a taxation journal, a bundle of perceptions, a strident radical voice. It has published expletives, escapades, exposés alongside weighty treatises on local government and global political analyses. What it has always been, and will remain, is a voice on the accelerated margins of university culture, presaging broad generational shifts in academic paradigms, dispelling the liberal myth that education is a neutral or apolitical activity, and giving thoughtful voice to those students whose need to be heard is paramount.

The new incarnation of Clare seeks to draw from this textured history to find a new identity for Clare as a critical arts journal. Critical in the sense that its voice seeks to “talk truth to power” engaging critically in contemporary academic debate, reflecting student concerns about the direction of Higher Education, attacks on public space, and the erosion of LSE’s core values. And as an arts journal, to return pleasure to thought, to look to new means of knowledge production, radical ways of presenting that knowledge, a deconstructive undermining of format and form, so that the social sciences at LSE might still come to understand the arts as a galvanising force, and crucial to its vocation of truth-telling.

At a time of global economic crisis, the school’s directing powers, their acute noses twitching in the changing winds, may now appear to be undergoing a readjustment of capitals, and LSE might just be beginning to exploring its own ‘literary-turn’, instanced by the Director’s fondness of reading, the increased arts budget and the upcoming literary festival, Clare exists to prevent there being simply empty celebration, fireworks for the reflected global standing of the insitution, instead grounding it in a community of student and academic production, to being the social sciences here closer to art, both online and off.

We believe there is no clearer expression of the social than in literature and art. The art object retains complex histories, it offers concrete insight - as data it is unsurpassed. As Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz writes “A distance achieved thanks to the mystery of time must not change events, landscapes, human figures into a tangle of shadows growing paler and paler. On the contrary, it can show them in full light, so that every event, every date becomes expressive and persists as an eternal reminder of human depravity and human greatness.” The vivid markers of art speak to us with force that no technical language can reproduce. Art’s ability to frame our imaginations, the unique emotional leverage it may wield over centres of power, make it an enterprise of critical import here at LSE. Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty understood art to be requisite precursors to the political imagination, Karl Popper makes clear to us that art is the intuitive bedrock of scientific endeavour, what we might understand is that art may serve to invigorate the engine of democracy, equality and social justice that many here believe LSE should be.

Clare was produced on a small budget, beset by sordid externalities. Informed by the zine movements and alternative publishing as much as by the staid world of academic journals, we eschewed notions of shallow professionalism, we turned those inadequacies into badges of pride, and our many shortcuts into statements of intent. As G.B. Shaw wrote in this journal one hundred years ago ‘Let me recommend you to practice cheating. It is a most valuable and instructive exercise; only you must do it in the spirit of an artist, and certainly not for irrelevant pecuniary gain.’

What is the

point of the

LSE?

There must have been a pause between their capricious decision at a breakfast party, and the time the London School of Economics and Political Science came into existence, that the Fabians asked themselves the question ‘What is the point of LSE?’. There was a need to reinvigorate postgraduate studies at the turn of

the 19th century, just as much as there was an obligation to provide education to intellectually arm the working-classes. Above all, the Fabian vision was one of weaning the upper classes to socialism; through reformist impulses implanted in the study of social problems that promoted the “betterment of society”.

Today, the motto still reads rerum cognoscere causas: to understand the causes of things. But in this new academic world of league tables, research assessments and top-up fees we need to ask ourselves: ‘What is the mission of LSE?’ ‘What is its purpose?’ ‘Does it indeed need an aim beyond providing a high quality environment for its learners and researchers?’

The real question is perhaps: ‘What is the point of a university at all?’

“A Community of Teachers and Scholars”

The appellation ‘university’ is derived from the latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which loosely translates as a “community of teachers and scholars”. This is something that needs to be rediscovered today.

A university is clearly not an adolescent nursery spoon feeding students absolute truths; or a factory churning out individuals who can brandish their degrees and be considered omniscient in their field. Nor it is a manufacturer of musings on the world—opinions written from ivory towers that may have value on paper, but do not change the facts on the ground.

The fact that the LSE is not entirely guilty of these is no cause for complacency. Its activity should be rooted in the society that it seeks to examine; the point more than ever is not to analyse the world, but to change it, as many of the great academics at LSE indeed have.

For much of their modern existence, universities have been the gatekeepers to influence in society.

Under recent governments, the marketisation of education has deepened this attitude.

Universities are seen as part of a conveyer

belt into the workplace, with more and more people seeking degrees that will help them fill jobs vital to the continued buoyancy of the economy. University becomes an instrument in career progression; courses are restricted, and avenues for exploration curtailed to streamline students into focusing on exams, assessments and the qualifications they will need to slot into their place of work.

For the individual, particularly under the regime of tuition fees, preparation for university begins at an ever-younger age. Acceptance to the best courses is increasingly contingent on going to the right secondary or even primary school, getting the right grades and, financially, scrabbling together a job in their early teens to cover a fraction of the debt that they will incur.

For parents, it begins even before the child is born. Getting into the best school often means being in the right area; being in the right area means being in the right job; and being in the right job means the right qualifications; the circle is closed and it repeats itself again and again.

Tuition fees are key to marketisation, particularly when the current ‘cap’ of £3,000 is lifted, allowing some universities to charge huge amounts and cream off the best students.

Financial pressures squeeze and stress students to choose courses which they might not like but will hopefully lead to lucrative jobs. The

pathway to the American system is already clearly signposted in Britain.

If the government can find £25bn for unnecessary nuclear weapons, countless billions for the ongoing quagmire in Iraq, and hundreds of millions for ID cards and other wasteful initiatives, what is keeping us from funding a positive investment in the future generation? If the considerably well-off are willing to go into debt in order to fund their children’s university education, who is to say that the public will not accept higher taxation on those who can afford to pay in order to get better services?

Hideously Romantic?

Beyond fees, it would be hideously romantic to fool ourselves into thinking that some halcyon age once existed where everyone who deserved a place at university received one, and where inequality was nonexistent.

There has always been a market in prestige, and reversing the recent tide of marketisation or abandoning fees would never be enough to overcome inequality. Nevertheless, it is clear that a battle for the soul of the entire education system, particularly higher education, is commencing, with the silent revolution of marketisation winning ground.

In truth, there is no definitive answer to the question of what a university constitutes. Each of us will make of it what we will, with our own prejudices and opinions. Nevertheless, for many, a university can and should be a centre of original and competing ideas; a place where cutting edge research is passed on through inspiring, state-of-the-art teaching in order to spur further innovation and intellectual development. The qualifications obtained are important, but the holistic university experience is the key. University life is the sum of all aspects of student life, including the classroom, the Library, the local environment, student activities, and more.

Fundamentally, the old mantra that education

is a right, not a privilege, is more relevant than ever. The inequality rife in higher education should appal us, as it would no doubt have depressed the Fabians. Currently, just over 50% of those going to independent fee-paying schools will end up in a Russell Group institution. At the other end of the scale, just over 10% of those coming from FE colleges and around 25% of those from state schools will get into the same universities. This does not begin to take into account the inequality between ‘good’ state schools and FE colleges, and ‘bad’ ones.

LSE is a Russell Group institution with a great deal of political clout and influence in the education sector. It can and will be a significant player in the future of higher education and how that future is created.

LSE’s Special Place

LSE is special and should remain special, with its uniquely cosmopolitan environment and its rounded social sciences outlook. But that does not mean that people should have to strain every sinew—and that of their families—to be able to get here in the first place.

If LSE has a mission today, surely it is to break down the social barriers to learning, and to throw light onto neglected areas of society that are crying out for champions. LSE could widen its participation on a massive scale, by putting its research into practice and making the learning environment it creates open to those with the ability, not the wealth. Above all, LSE could champion its position in this diverse and international city, to become fully embedded in the London community, address its problems and use its international, historic position as a launch pad for new ideas.

Perhaps, the question comes down to how one really understands the causes of things. We learn by doing; and so should LSE.

Aled Dilwyn Fisher LSE Students’ Union General Secretary 2008-9

The Purpose

University of a

Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders Mr. T.S. Eliot has recently written that universities ‘should stand for the preservation of learning, for the pursuit of truth, and in so far as men are capable of it, the attainment of wisdom.’ As Mr. Eliot is well aware, he is saying nothing new; he is echoing the views expressed by those eminent men who wrote on the subject in the last century—Whewell, Newman, Mark Pattison, and others. When it is asked how universities should attempt to fulfil these purposes, we find that we are launched on a discussion of vast dimensions. All that can be done in a short article is to mention two or three topics falling within this field of discourse.

A Community of Teachers and Scholars The first topic may be introduced the following way. We often hear a graduate saying that he was educated at a particular university.

We often hear a university teacher saying that he taught So-and-so when the latter was a student. But we never hear a university teacher saying that he educated So-andso. To say that would be obviously presumptuous. The inference is plain and important. Students, like other people, must educate themselves.

Broadly speaking, a university can and should do two things, in connection with providing educational opportunities. The first is to create conditions under which a closely knit student society or community can arise. The importance of this is to be found in the fact, so much emphasised by Newman, that education largely comes about by the association of students one with another. The second is to facilitate and encourage all those activities and interests of students, whether pursued singly or in common, which are part of education. While the inadequacies of universities in relation to these two things must be admitted, the universities may fairly say that it is lamentable that so few students use fully such chances as they have. In this matter of education, students must take the initiative.

They must deliberately seek to widen their interest, sympathies, and understanding, to explore literature, the arts and philosophy. And they must exert themselves in more than dilettante fashion.

It is equally the duty of students to learn as teaching is the duty of a university. Our scheme of studies is planned on specialist and not on general lines. A specialist scheme of study is often criticised; it is said that such a scheme is narrow. In one sense this is obviously true. The inference is then drawn

that such a course of study is narrowing in its influence upon students; but this is not necessarily true at all. We construct on specialist lines because it is only through intense study in a limited field that a student can come to understand what real knowledge of anything is—thorough, accurate, detailed, objective, comprehensive knowledge. I do not mean that within three years a student can attain to real knowledge of his chosen field; but he can come to understand what real knowledge is—to recognise and appreciate it whenever he comes across it. This ability to distinguish between real knowledge and half knowledge is an acquisition the value of which it is hard to overestimate; moreover, it is something seldom learnt outside universities, and therefore one of the greatest gifts which a university can bestow. In the truest sense of the phrase, this is a widening experience.

Hideous Romanticism?

It is useful to distinguish between teaching and training. By training in this context is meant instruction in a method, and in any university course there must be some training—training in methods of acquiring knowledge. But training is also needed for the practice of professions. We have the fact that our degrees are not tickets of entry into privileged reserves; our graduates are not certified as able to render special services needed by the public. They have got to prove that what they have gained during their university course has made them more valuable members of society than they would have otherwise been. And how can they prove it? By showing that they have a wide angle of vision, are flexible in mind, are open to new idea, can think accurately, are both intellectually discipline and intellectually adventurous, and above all, that they possess that modesty which should characterise anyone who has ever grappled with the fundamental problems discussed in universities.

The Special Place of the University

Today, universities stand well—very well—in the eyes of the public. The universities are regarded by the public as powerhouses whence the state derives energy to solve its pressing problems. When we look round, we see that the universities have become centres of ceaseless activity in the region of contemporary affairs; their staffs are reservoirs upon which the state draws when it looks for men to serve on commissions and committees, as advisors and consultants, and in many other capacities. But is it not possible that the universities are

valued for wrong or irrelevant reasons, even that they are straying somewhat from their rightful path? Certainly the young people and their advisers, parents and schoolmasters, tend to have quite other views about the functions of universities and to regard them as gates into well-paid occupations. Nevertheless such views are not necessarily altogether mistaken; it is proper to hope that the recruits to the better-paid occupations, which in general are the more responsible and influential, will be drawn from among those who have been members of a university striving to carry out its true functions. As to the universities themselves—suppose that they conducted a critical self-examination, would they find that they were keeping the true aims set out by Mr. Eliot? Such a self-examination would surely give rise to some disquiet.

The suggestion that the universities may be straying a little from their true path raises the question whether they are acting under some compulsion from outside. It is often said that the independence of universities may be endangered by their dependence upon public funds. There is some reason to think that they are changing their ways, and if so, it is by their own choice—though they may have made it unconsciously. It is possible that universities are allowing themselves to become organs of the state—of the welfare state—that they are being subtly conditioned, turning out immediately useful products and being assessed, and assessing themselves, by their productivity in this line.

This possibility deserves discussion. An impressive case can be made out that during the present state of affairs all efforts should be directed to solving our immediate problems. But is this case sound? There are always immediate problems. Is it not the duty of the universities to stand a little away from the immediate stress, the hurly-burly of the day; not because they are careless of it and indifferent to it, but because they believe that only by the continued attention to their own special tasks can the conditions be created in which the stress can best be relieved?

It is impossible to suppose that the public will ever fully understand and appreciate universities which are confining themselves strictly to their proper function. If a single phrase had to be found to describe the true life of a university, it might be said that it is a place where a never-ending informed conversation is in progress, a conversation that leads to no conclusion not in need of revision. But the public is not likely to pay much for places of that sort.

University and Rich Human Development In recent years higher education policy has focused on outcomes that support economic growth and enhance individual incomes - the human capital approach to education which measures the returns to education and applies a cost benefit analysis to decisions about education expenditure and profitability. The assumption is that economic growth and development mean the same thing, and that both equate with individual and collective well-being. That education should equip graduates with the knowledge and skills to participate in the economy is unsurprisingly what most concerns governments. But the problem arises when there is now a variable and, for some, declining ‘graduate premium’; when the meaningfulness of economic opportunities and full participation are not debated, and when goals such as intellectual development and democratic citizenship and broader social goods are overlooked.

We now find ourselves in a time of economic crisis. Yet the focus on human capital outcomes and market policy drivers in higher education over several decades has neither equipped us to avoid such an outcome, nor has it removed continuing inequalities at the heart of society. It is nowhere near to solving resurgent conflicts based on contested identities, cultures and religions.

What is needed is explicit attention to pedagogies of/for human development, defined by the United Nations Development Programme as, ‘creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests’. The normative goal ought to be that higher education contributes substantially to individual and social quality of life and well-being, and to improving human lives and societies through the formation of what economist Amartya Sen calls ‘human capabilities’. By this he means to able to be and do what people value being and doing for good lives, to exercise genuine choices and to participate in the decision-making that affects our lives.

The time seems overdue for a rebalancing of the goals of university education away from an unfettered marketisation in which profitability concerns constrain genuinely educational purposes. Universities must again become key locations for pedagogies and teaching which, in philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s conceptualisation, ‘cultivate humanity’, rather than producing generations of useful but obtuse machines, we ought to be developing capabilities of communicative or practical reason and moral imagination for addressing the urgencies of contemporary times.

Moreover, there is room for optimism in what Jurgen Habermas describes as a ‘promissory note’ for universities as a space for the ‘lifeworld’ to flourish against the colonizing effects of ‘system’ (money and power). For Habermas, universities have not departed the horizon of the lifeworld or left behind the moral-political liabilities of the age. In the unfinished project of modernity, he argues, we can mobilize the resource of reason in reaching for autonomy, justice and democracy. It allows us to ask - indeed we ought to ask - what a university pedagogy that reaches for the goals of communicative reason and social justice would look like, what form of academic professionalism is required of us as university teachers, and what kind of public policy is needed to support such goals.

Professor Melanie Walker

by Dr Paul Yates

appalled. Delighted because senior English academics can rarely aspire to irresponsibility, let alone to its public declamation. I was slightly depressed, however; my critique of current empiricism as politically and intellectually neutering being a carefully argued and well-resourced piece of scholarship. The point was that as academics, we can no longer say what we want, indeed what we know to be true, because of the increasing tendency to confuse the empirical with the real. This has happened alongside the trashing of scholarship by the behemothic Research Assessment Exercise and, the relegation of argument to an undergraduate exercise rather than a means of legitimating claims to know.

What constitutes our sociality and how it can be represented is a constant issue for the social sciences. In anthropology, the traditional monograph is an intertextual story about an individual’s experience of someone else’s social being. This has proved endlessly problematic for the discipline. Issues of linguistic translation were encapsulated in the SapirWhorf hypothesis. Hollis and Lukes in the ‘seventies dealt with the philosophical issues of rationality and relativism and these are still contested by scientific universalists such as Dawkins. A more political concern with the representation of the subaltern voice occupied Clifford and Marcus in the ‘eighties and the issue of what can be said is still a live one.

I am leaving academe to become a writer. This move has been partly determined by an increasing frustration with what the academy will allow me to say about the business of being a human. What social researchers do is create text, and in an important sense, the business of social research is the representation of the social in writing. But what sort of writing is admitted into the canon?

A catalytic moment that began the shift for me, from academic writing to more honestly fictive forms, was the remark made by a senior research professor that my paper on ‘The Tyranny of Empiricism’ was ‘irresponsible.’ The observation was made in a Postgraduate seminar and had a strongly beneficial effect on my stock amongst the students. I was both delighted and

The Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) strives to promote anodyne positivism through its kite marking of departments and its increasing grip on research training. Proliferating ‘systematic reviews’ of ‘evidence’ have breathed new life into C. Wright-Mills’ abstracted empiricism. Such reviews provide legitimating myths for prescriptive normalization throughout the public sphere, including in universities. The rise of research governance and surveillance via ethics committees is similarly debilitating. They inevitably make for conformity and can, in my experience, be positively anti-intellectual. This is achieved by the implicit privileging of empiricism-positivism within a universalising bourgeois ethical frame. The result is mechanical and boring research of which there is a great deal.

Despite the normalizing tendency, the academy is not a unified space. It is a global cacophony of endlessly contested accounts.

Part of the power of dominant mythologies is their apparent naturalness. There was recently something of furore in the French academy around a revisionist history of the Revolution. The issue was that it failed to present the events around 1789 and their social and political legacy as an unalloyed good. In a nice Gallic touch it had the allusive title, The Black Book of the French Revolution. The reference being to a text that charted the savagery that accompanied the establishment and maintenance of Marxist inspired government in the twentieth century.

As an anthropologist writing on methodology, I have been perennially concerned with issues of representation, of moving from our experience as researchers to producers of text. This centrally concerns the nature of language and its connection with whatever we might think of as the real. It also connects with our basic anthropology, our models of what it is to be a human. The effect of the dominance of neoliberal governance and the sponsoring of complementary research methodologies is to privilege rational models of the person within a normalising agenda. Medicine, education and social welfare would be discursive sites where an underlying aim of normalization restricts the research agenda. Thus, alterity and difference become constructed as pathological.

Utility becomes the critical legitimating aspect of research activity. This is partly determined by the ‘end-users.’ I’ve recently been researching doctoral candidates’ experience of the viva voce examination. These can be traumatic, four or five years’ work called to account in one or two hours of ritual conversation. This has led me to a construction of the doctorate as emotional labour and a transformative life event. While I would want to argue that this is a significant truth, I am aware that it is not a convenient one in the endless quest for greater numbers of international students.

While multidisciplinary research centres are encouraged, it is my impression that within disciplines the boundaries are being reinforced rather than relaxed. My own discipline of Anthropology has prowled the no-man’s land between the humanities and social sciences for

some decades. Levi-Strauss’s academic memoir, Tristes Tropique, famously won the Prix Goncourt, a literary prize. At an international Anthropology conference in the nineteen eighties, Edmund Leach urged his colleagues to give up scientific pretensions to truth and to admit that our monographs were methodologically indistinguishable from novels. (The current vogue for life writing in universities might readily be described as auto-ethnography.) His remarks caused a certain frisson, not least because of the immediate implications for securing research funds and international consultancies if we came out as mere storytellers. It is significant that within anthropology there is an established sub-genre of the story of the field experience from Hortense Powdermaker’s (1967) Stranger and Friend onwards.

While we cannot write without convention it is useful to be aware of the frameworks that guide us.

Personally I have always sought to entertain in my writing. I would put humorous asides in undergraduate essays because I felt sorry for my tutors having to read them. I want my readers to have a good time. My intention has not simply been to communicate but to engage. Often in the social sciences, writing is seen as almost epiphenomenal to research: recording rather than constructing. However, in some form, text is always the public product of research. It is the encoded representation of the researchers of the social activity of research. While we might think of ourselves primarily as researchers we are also writing from our experience, rather as novelists do.

APersonalMemoir the LSE 1953-59

norman birnbaum Norman Birnbaum is University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center. He has taught at LSE, Oxford and Amherst College and had visiting posts at European universities. He was one of the founding editors of New Left Review and is on the Editorial Board of The Nation. His most recent book: After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in The Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2001. He is presently writing a memoir.

Yet hath my night of life some memory,

my wasting lamps some fading glimmer left.

Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, V. 1.

“That’s history” is an American expression, in which “history” means not the past recalled or invented but dropped into the memory hole, or in any event not deemed worth bothering about. No nation, of course, is more imprisoned in its past than mine, not despite but because of its obdurate refusal—even with the great efforts of our historians—to face it. The failing isn’t exclusively American, and affects cultures and institutions great and small. Even the LSE in its bright and shining new form, might profit from a look back.

An entirely personal one follows.

I came to the LSE in the fall of 1953, aged twentyseven, as an Assistant Lecturer in Sociology, and left in 1959 for an appointment at Oxford University. When

I arrived, I had visited the UK twice previously; the first time being earlier that year for ten days, and then again briefly for the interview preceding my appointment. I had spent the academic year 1952-53 in Germany (at the universities of Marburg and Heidelberg), gathering material for a Harvard doctorate in sociology on the Reformation in the German cities. Taking up the post in London, then, entailed entering two very different European cultures in rapid succession.

I suppose that I could claim that as a native New Yorker from the Bronx, when areas now entirely Black and Latino were inhabited by a large Jewish community with Italian and Irish districts at the borders, I was used to cultural diversity. The claim would be untrue. The New York I grew up in was marked by class and ethnic segregation. I attended the academically excellent high school of the City College of New York, where the students were mostly from the Jewish lower middle and working class.

I had an advantage, since my father was a high school teacher and there were plenty of books in our home.

Our teachers, actually, were rather different. Those were Depression years, and many of them had doctorates. Ten years later they would have been in university teaching posts. An interesting contingent were the Irish, who brought to the classroom something of what I later identified as Jesuit rigour. There were old family Protestants and, of course, a considerable contingent of Jewish teachers of my father’s generation. One teacher had helped the Spanish Republic, another worked with Einstein: we were much impressed by each.

The atmosphere at school (Townsend Harris High School, named for the first American pro-consul in Japan) was a singular mixture of political fervour and the progressivism of the New Deal.

Some students came from unionized families, and the struggles between Stalinist and Trotskyite interpretations of the world crisis found their way into our political arguments. The Nazi-Soviet pact divided our spirits, but we resented the legislative harassment and dismissal of a very few of our teachers who were Communists. Our teachers espoused a standard version of American higher culture, descended from New and Old England in a straight line. One who was dismissed as a Communist taught Wordsworth, but I do not recollect mention of the poet’s ardour for the French Revolution.

It was only when political activity in a New Deal student movement brought me out of this milieu that I met persons of my age from much more prosperous families. Children of bankers, lawyers, physicians, they lived on Central Park West or West End Avenue, a social world removed from ours. They took for granted that they would be going to elite private colleges. One of them, who attended a private school, introduced me to the cultural-political journal Partisan Review, whose attempted fusion of Marxism and modernism was bewilderingly different from the progressivism I had inherited at home and at school. The journal’s London correspondent was George Orwell. It was a period in which I read widely, encountered both Harold Laski and John Strachey, and learned about the Fabians and the founding of the LSE. I learned of its connection with the struggles of the thirties and forties, and before I was sixteen, it had mythic status for me.

truly finest hour—between the fall of France and the German attack on the Soviet Union. Like many in my generation, I can still visualize the cartoon by Low depicting a Tommy on the English cliffs, shaking a fist in defiance of a black cloud moving across the Channel: “Very well then, alone!”

I spent a semester at City College after leaving high school in January of 1942, and then went to Williams College in the fall. It was the incarnation of New England’s culture, this time espoused by a faculty composed entirely of Americans from early waves of immigration, many of whom were ardent New Dealers. I interrupted my college studies at seventeen, and worked for two years for a US government wartime propaganda agency in New York, where I met a lot of American journalists from Kansas and Texas and other places I knew only from film and novels. I returned to college at the end of the war, and then began doctoral studies at Harvard in 1947.

One teacher had helped the Spanish Republic, another worked with Einstein: we were much impressed by each.

Meanwhile, film and novels made London and Britain more tangible. Of course, we all remembered Britain’s

I spent five splendid years at Harvard, where a resident tutorship in one of the houses and wide acquaintanceship in the university brought me out of the narrowness of Harvard sociology, with its ambitions to construct a science of society. The rest of the university had its own deformations. Harvard understood itself, correctly, as the intellectual capital of the new American empire.

The United States as the heir of the ages—and especially of tired Europe—was its belief about the nation, inextricably tied to the conviction that since Harvard served country so well, the rest of America was bound to be delighted by Harvard’s leadership. (There is a bon mot about Harvard: “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you cannot tell him much.”) A good deal of this was clothed as a theory of historical progression, in which the US incarnated modernity, the goal— however distant, and however little they knew or acknowledged it—of all cultures. It was this superbly uncritical view of the US which made it unnecessary for Harvard, in the early Cold War years, to deal seriously with either Marxism or with less triumphalist interpretations of our own history.

Great Britain had a role in this, as an honored if distant ancestor, whose descendants were shabby, if still genteel. Quite a few Harvard faculty members had studied in the UK, mainly at the older universities, many had wartime memories of Great Britain, some had worked

with British officials during and after the war. There was some interest in the new welfare state and the work of the Labour governments. The end of British Empire was taken stolidly, as if a fact of nature, not history.

Hobbes, Locke and Mill were certainly more familiar than Rousseau and Comte. Keynes had become an icon, the struggles over his legacy in the UK and Europe of interest to a very few. There was a residual attachment to Britain, a familial deference without sharp contours. A stream of British academic visitors passed through, their conversational talents often more evident than their intellectual achievements. Karl Popper spent a year at Harvard, but—important in Cambridge—charmed no one. Isaiah Berlin, by contrast, was a welcome visitor, who also had the supreme virtue of flattering his hosts’ belief that they were now at the apex of civilization.

Between Harvard and the LSE, I spent a year in a country whose elites treated Britain and things British with distant respect. World power had passed to the US and to the Soviet Union, in possession of a third of Germany. It was thought indiscreet to speak or write openly of Britain’s eclipse—and, in any event, the German elites were trying desperately to extricate themselves from the consequences of their own defeats.

I do think that many educated Germans admired what they thought of as British dignity in an altered historical situation, and they were European and insightful enough to attribute it to the British sense of historical continuity. Perhaps, indeed, that was what the Harvardians admired in Britain: it was a university peopled by those ambitious above all to move out of their own milieu.

These were the experiences I had before coming to the LSE. None prepared me for the most obvious of initial obstacles: I had to learn a new language, or several, since the classes and peoples of Britain did not speak in one tongue. To make matters more difficult, much of the new language was unspoken. It consisted of conventions of address, meaningful pauses, small coughs, slight movements of the head, quiet inflections of voice, and occasionally, the sheer refusal of response. It took me a while, for instance, to grasp that in learned debate, the phrase “I do not quite understand” had to be translated as “I understand all too well, that is, I see through your preposterously weak argument.”

lence of the Senior Common Room had counterparts at the greengrocers, but these too had to be learned.

No historical intuition, further, prepared me for the fact that Britain was exhausted. The twenty-one years between the cross Channel carnage of the First World War and the home terrors of the Second were definitely not a long respite: there was the Depression.

Six years of war thereafter had drained many of energy, and the vigour of the young was reined by an inherited scepticism: they learned, early, that starting over was an illusion.

The material deprivations of the immediate post-war years were not compensated by the élan of social reconstruction. I arrived in the UK two years after Attlee left office, met both the leaders and followers of Labour’s campaigns, and did not think that theirs was a condition of all passion spent. It was, rather, of tasks dutifully accomplished.

The contrast with the self-satisfied optimism of Harvard was very great. Therein, however, was a lesson I could not have learned on the other side of the Atlantic. My British colleagues in the social sciences (and their contemporaries in the arts) took the density and resistance of history as given. My twenty-one year old students were more aware of the complexities of their existence than their counterparts in the US. The caricatured British don whose philosophy of history reduced itself to “History? History is one damned thing after another!” was onto something, although there were more elegant ways to describe slow processes of historical accumulation. It was not an accident that British historians gave Marxism a depth and specificity its schematic proponents usually lacked. Like their less radical colleagues, they did not expect to leap into a new world: the one they lived in, they thought, was here to stay for the indefinite future. The resigned scepticism with which they all scrutinized new ideas could and sometimes did degenerate into complacency.It was, however, the resistance to dogma of intellectually low churchmen— not the worst thing in a world of multiple illusions.

No historical intuition, further, prepared me for the fact that Britain was exhausted.

The techniques of sly indirection and punctuated si-

norman birnbaum

A Perspective on the State of Modern Economics

by

Tony

Lawson

Perhaps the most notable feature of modern economics is that it is not in a good state of health. This situation is recognised not only by the more marginalised voices of modern economics, but also by the more thoughtful of its leading mainstream proponents, at least when called upon to give public lectures. And this has been the case for some time. As the mainstream game theorist Ariel Rubinstein observes (giving a speech on behalf of the Nobel Memorial Prize winner John Nash), economics does especially badly by the usual standards of scientific performance and even lacks a sense of direction: “The issue of interpreting economic theory is […] the most serious problem now facing economic theorists. The feeling among many of us can be summarized as follows. Economic theory should deal with the real world. It is not a branch of abstract mathematics even though it utilises mathematical tools. Since it is about the real world, people expect the theory to prove useful in achieving practical goals. But economic theory has not delivered the goods. Predictions from economic theory are not nearly as accurate as those by the natural sciences, and the link between economic theory and practical problems [...] is tenuous at best.

Economic theory lacks a consensus as to its purpose and interpretation. Again and again, we find ourselves asking the question `where does it lead’?” (Rubinstein, 1995, p. 12).

Methodologist Mark Blaug sums up the situation in no uncertain terms: “Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing” (Mark Blaug, 1997, p. 3)

A second notable feature of the modern discipline is the existence of a number of separate groups or traditions. On one side are those that collectively identify themselves as heterodox; on the other side is a single project recognised by this heterodoxy as the orthodox or mainstream project. Although the separate heterodox traditions are clearly united in opposition to a mainstream or orthodox project, each separate tradition purports to provide its own form of economics, typically supported by one or more tradition-specific journals.

Thus we find feminist economists (associated with the journal Feminist Economics), post Keynesians (Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics), old institutionalists (Journal of Economic Issues, Journal of Institutionalist Economics), Marxians (Capital and Class, Rethinking Marxism), Austrians (Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Review of Austrian Economics) and more.

Others who are appropriately interpreted as orthodox or mainstream, and this group of course constitutes the overwhelming majority of economists, tend to identify their output simply as economics.

In what follows, I shall argue that these two features of modern economics, its poor state of health and its significant fragmentation, are connected. Further, I shall suggest that it is only by fully understanding the nature of this interconnection that we can sufficiently appreciate the nature and state of the contemporary economic discipline.

A conception of contemporary heterodox and of mainstream economics It proves useful to start by considering the nature of those traditions that collectively identify themselves as heterodox. I take it to be analytic to the notion of heterodoxy that it involves the rejection of some doctrine held to be true by a prevailing orthodoxy.

That is simply what it means to be heterodox. And it is clear that the self-identifying heterodox traditions in modern economics not only all currently ardently oppose the mainstream output, i.e. those contributions that tend to be presented as straightforwardly and simply ‘economics’, but also have done so persistently over a lengthy period of time, even through changes in the mainstream forms. Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude that the heterodox opposition stands against some feature that is enduring and central to the mainstream; certainly it is opposed to something common to, or presupposed by, all its contributions.

In order to fully understand the nature of modern economic heterodoxy qua heterodoxy, it is thus necessary first to identify the (set of) feature(s) of the modern orthodoxy or mainstream that is common to all its contributions. The project that has dominated the discipline of economics for the last forty years or

so is one that, although highly heterogeneous in detail, and fluid in revising its manifest form, is united and stable in, but only in, adhering to a single doctrine or edict. This is an insistence that mathematical methods ( econometric models as well as pure ‘theory’ models) be everywhere employed in the study of economic phenomena. Notably, this insistence often runs over to claim that any contribution that does not take the form of a mathematical model is not proper economics.

It is an opposition to the mainstream’s dogmatic insistence on formalism, I have argued, that distinguishes the modern heterodoxy qua heterodoxy. Put differently, it is this oppositional stance to orthodox doctrine (that formalism is normally compulsory) that is the nominal essence of the current heterodoxy.

If this is correct, what might be said to be the real essence of the modern heterodoxy qua heterodoxy, the explanation of this opposition?

This is where the analysis becomes more interesting, if also more complex. The real essence of heterodoxy qua heterodoxy, I argue, is the recognition (often no more than implicit) that the universal application of the mathematical methods that mainstream economists formulate, presupposes an underlying untenable account of social reality. Let me briefly elaborate.

Ontology The fundamental category here is ontology. Ontology is the study of the nature of being, including the structure of a domain of reality. It can also be stretched to encompass the identification of conditions or (ontological) preconditions under which various tools or instruments might be useful.

For example, a precondition of the usefulness of a cup is the existence to hand of fluids or other discrete objects that need transporting. A mower presupposes something like a lawn that needs cutting. Neither of these tools will be of direct help in writing an academic paper or flying us to a distant country.

The mathematical methods that mainstream economists use similarly have their ontological preconditions. Firstly these are closed systems, namely those supporting correlations or regularities of the form ‘whenever event x then event y’. For example ‘whenever household disposable income changes so does household consumption, by an amount functionally related to the change in income’. It is easy enough to see that such closures are presumed throughout modern economics, underlying micro-, and macro-, including econometric, modelling alike.

Secondly, these event regularities have their own preconditions. Although not formally necessary these are almost always met (albeit implicitly) through the positing of accounts based on (closed) systems of isolated atoms. Why isolated atoms? By atoms I do

not mean something small, of course. Rather I mean causal factors that exercise their own separate and independent effect whatever the context. The condition of their isolation means that their effects are always actualised in outcomes, and so can be predicted (or deduced from assumptions).

If, for example, a windup doll can do nothing but walk forward, then on winding it, and putting it down on, say, a flat floor, I can predict it will walk forward, at least so long as its movement is isolated from countervailing factors such as wind or a passing

dog. In economics the atoms tend to take the form of optimising individuals set in contexts so specified that unique solutions to optimising problems exist and nothing inhibits the optimising process (the individuals are isolated from countervailing factors). The relevant deduction/prediction, of course, is that the atomistic agent will head off to the relevant optimum.

This scenario in many ways parallels that of the wellcontrolled laboratory experiment. Here, an event regularity is often produced by way of engineering an experimental closure - achieved by insulating a causal mechanism from countervailing factors and triggering it. The result is that an event regularity, correlating the triggering of the mechanism and its unimpeded effects, is often observed. The difference between this scenario and that of economics, of course, is that laboratory experiments are hard won products of human ingenuity, whereas economists heroically (though implicitly) posit the existence of social closures as ubiquitous spontaneous phenomena.

Social

ontology

My contention at this point is that an ontology of closed systems of isolated atoms does not actually characterise social reality. By social reality, I mean that domain of phenomena whose existence depends at least in part on

us. Thus it includes tables and chairs, language, wars, pollution, markets, money, corporations, universities, gender relations, personal identities, society in total, and so on.

I would argue for the following social ontology.

Amongst other things social reality is characterised by a high degree of internal relationality. Internal relations hold where the relata are constituted by the relations in which they stand. For example, internal relations hold between the positions of teacher and student, employer and employee, landlord/lady and tenant. In each case you cannot have one without the other. Typically, any given position will be located in a network of internal relations. Thus, the position of university lecturer is internally related not only to that of student, but also to university governing authorities, the latter itself internally related to state functionaries, and so on. The result is that much of social reality takes the form of totalities.

A second feature of the conception of social ontology that I defend, is that social phenomena, including totalities, are intrinsically processual or dynamic. Think of the English language. This is given to me as I, and all the other users of English, come to speak. But it is through our speech acts in total that the language comes to be reproduced and/or transformed. The English language is thus the (typically unacknowledged) condition of our speech acts, just as its reproduction/transformation is the (typically unintended) outcome. Language is thus inherently processual. This is its mode of being. But a moment’s reflection reveals that this is the mode of being of all other social phenomena, whether universities, seminars, personal and social identities, or society itself. All are given to, and reproduced and/or transformed, though practice.

Social reality is also structured (different ontological levels, e.g., structures such as rules underpinning social practices), containing emergent properties (causal structures like language, bearing their own causal powers that are irreducible to the practices on which they depend), meaningful, valuey, and so on.

I do not have space to elaborate this conception of social ontology further here. But what has been said is already sufficient to be suggestive of why modern economic modelling tends to perform less than satisfactorily. For, whilst the latter tends to formulate theories couched (implicitly) in terms of systems of isolated atoms, the feature of high internal relationality undermines the requirement of ubiquitous isolation, just as the transformational nature of social phenomena undermines the stability intrinsic to the requirement of atomism. In other words, an additional feature of social reality is that it is quintessentially open, rather than everywhere closed (supporting local event regularities).

I want to advance two contentions here. The first is precisely that the poor performance of modern economics is explained by an over reliance upon

methods of mathematical modelling (requiring for their success that social closures be ubiquitous), in conditions in which such methods seem highly inappropriate .

The second contention I am advancing is that the heterodox groupings have been effectively grasping this ontological argument and acting upon it, even if not always expressing it explicitly or in any sustained or systematic way. For heterodox contributions are found to presuppose the alternative ontology I have outlined, as much as the mainstream formalistic contributions presuppose unrealistic closed worlds of isolated atoms.

alternative ontological conception outlined above.

Specifically, the various heterodox traditions are best viewed as exploring, if implicitly, specific aspects of this ontology (such as openness, process, internal relationality), whilst maintaining a commitment to the whole.

Alternatively put, if the only common and so distinguishing feature of the current mainstream is its continuing insistence upon forms of mathematical deductivist reasoning, the real essence of the heterodox opposition (qua heterodox opposition) is an accepted ontological conception that is at odds with the implicit (closed-system and atomistic) ontology of mainstream deductivist reasoning.

Distinguishing the Separate Heterodox Traditions I must emphasise that I do not distinguish the individual heterodox traditions from each other according to ontological commitments; indeed I suggest that ontological presuppositions are something they broadly hold in common. Nor, incidentally, do I believe it is possible for the separate traditions to be identified or distinguished according to their own results, methodologies or principles, at least not consistently.

For, as is often noted, contributors to each separate tradition regularly debate amongst themselves as to the most satisfactory account of some aspect of the economy.

Rather, my assessment is that old institutionalism, post Keynesianism, feminist economics, Austrianism, Marxian economics, etc., are each best conceived in terms of questions and issues traditionally addressed within their own programme. With this heterodox emphasis on questions and interests (rather than principles, methods or answers and so forth), there is scope both for different members of any given heterodox tradition to produce competing accounts of some phenomenon, as well as for the best-substantiated contributions to be continually improved upon. So, the conception I defend is quite consistent with the shifting variety of contributions we find within any given heterodox tradition.

Actually, I will go further. Not only do I think that the different heterodox traditions are best conceived of in terms of the concerns they pursue. I believe, in addition, that they are best conceived as divisions of labour in one overall project, united by the shared

Thus, post Keynesians, for example, make fundamental uncertainty a central category. This clearly presupposes an ontology of openness, as many post Keynesians have in recent years increasingly come to acknowledge.

Such a focus has involved examining the implications of uncertainty or openness for the development of certain sorts of institutions, including money, for processes of decision-making and so forth. At the level of policy, the concern may well include the analysis of contingencies that recognise the fact of pervasive uncertainty, given the openness of social reality in the present and to the future, etc. For those influenced by Keynes, especially, a likely focus is how these matters give rise to collective or macro outcomes, and how they in turn impact back on individual acts and generate pressures for structural transformation, etc.

I believe, too, that it is best to distinguish (old) institutionalism, following Veblen especially, as concerned with the processual nature of social reality, thereby focussing on those forces working for stability, and on others working for change. This orientation has taken the manifest form of a traditional concern with evolutionary issues, and with studying those aspects of social life that are most enduring, such as institutions and habits, along with those that are most inducing of continual change, such as technology.

Feminist economics, I believe, is best distinguished in terms of a focus on social relationality. Relations of care and gender are of course central issues. But relationality in itself seems central to most feminist concerns. Very often feminist economists have identified their own project as one that first of all concerns itself with women as subjects (which may include, for example, giving attention to differences among women, as well as between genders) and takes a particular orientation or focus, namely on the position of women (and other marginalised groups) within society and the economy.

In practice, this project includes an attention to the social causes at work in the oppression of, or in discrimination against, women (and others), the opportunities for progressive transformation or emancipation, questions of (relations of) power and strategy, and so forth2.

Austrians may perhaps be best identified in some part according to their emphasis on the role of intersubjective meaning in social life . .

I suggest, then, that at least some heterodox traditions are most easily viewed as primarily (though not exclusively) concerned with different aspects of the properties of social phenomena (openness, processuality, internal relationality, etc.) uncovered and explicitly systematised through philosophical ontology.

Other traditions, though, seem to be more interested in elaborating the nature of specific social categories, and in particular how the features uncovered through philosophical ontology (openness, internal relationality, process, etc) coalesce in certain specific social items of interest within that particular tradition. Thus Marxian economics is a project primarily concerned with understanding the nature of the relational totality in motion that is capitalism. A significant Austrian concern is the nature of ‘the market process’ and entrepreneurship in particular. And, as already noted, there is significant post Keynesian interest in the nature of money, institutionalist interest in institutions and technology, feminist interest in care, and so on.

To sum up so far, then, I am suggesting that once we look below the surface, the seemingly surprising state of modern economics is quite intelligible. The discipline is dominated by a mainstream project that understandably (if erroneously) supposes that a reliance on methods of mathematical deductivist reasoning is the surest way to achieve scientific success. Its failures stem precisely from the over reliance on these methods in conditions in which they are not appropriate. It is an implicit recognition of this that unites the different heterodox traditions qua heterodoxy. The latter projects are themselves distinguished by their traditional concerns. However, these separate traditions are usefully viewed as potential divisions of labour in a project that is grounded by a shared ontology.

implications pluralism

for

Let me finish off by pulling out some additional features and implications that hopefully will serve both to clarify the rather brief sketch above and also to offset some of the likely false inferences that may be drawn but which I do not accept or propose. I have in mind here worries concerning the feasibility of pluralism.

Specifically, I want to indicate that, despite concerns to the to the contrary (see for example John Davis, 2006; Robert Garnet 2005; or Jeroen Van Bouwel, 2005) there is nothing in the preceding outline that supports a non-pluralistic stance or orientation. By pluralism, here, I simply mean an orientation of inclusiveness, of supporting and encouraging the acceptance of all interested parties, whatever their differences, within some process.

For example, despite the criticism of the mainstream emphasis outlined above, I do not suggest that heterodox contributors do not, or should not, experiment with mathematical deductive techniques, including econometric techniques. Social conditions may occasionally arise that are locally of the sort presupposed by methods of formalistic modelling (for example traffic movements in major UK cities in the rush hour). If I characterise the mainstream in terms of its usual insistence that (for a contribution to count as economics) various sorts of mathematical deductivist methods be employed everywhere, I conceive heterodoxy as an (implicitly) ontologically motivated rejection of the universalising and dogmatic aspects of this stance, not as a refusal ever to experiment with employing formalistic methods where conditions indicate their relevance.

I recognise, of course, that the ontological conception I defend may yet turn out to be significantly mistaken in various ways; all knowledge claims are fallible. So no one wants to inhibit any serious methodological experimentation, whether involving formal techniques or otherwise. All that is being rejected by heterodoxy, and with reason, on my conception, is precisely an orthodox constraint on a pluralistic approach to economic analysis. The error in question is the dogmatic insistence that only mathematical methods should be used. This takes on a special significance just because the mainstream is constituted through this constraint. But if that is the nature of the beast, we just have to accept that opposing the mainstream (rejecting its constitutive doctrine) is a pro-, not an anti-, pluralistic stance. However, I am not suggesting that we replace one dogma by another. The point is not to deny formalistic methods a place, but rather to include more methods in the toolbox.

Furthermore, just because heterodox traditions are constituted qua heterodox traditions through their rejection of some orthodox doctrine, it does not follow that engagement with orthodox practitioners is thereby rendered necessarily infeasible or undesirable. Nor need communication be other than open and respectful. The possibilities for exchange will depend on context and on the nature of the differences. But this will be so however heterodoxy is constituted. I myself have never

wished to discourage respectful engagement with others.

Nor do I propose that a place is not reserved for advocates of the mainstream doctrine, even if a more pluralistic economics academy were to come about.

After all, they may in the end prove correct, no matter how unlikely that currently seems. So, let the argument that only formalistic methods be used be heard, always supposing, of course, that (unlike at present) an argument for such an exclusive orientation is actually made, and there is no compulsion for anyone to agree.

If the picture drawn is indeed supportive of the idea that heterodox traditions can be pluralistic in orientation, it does not follow that all heterodox contributors are individually pluralistic. I am well aware that certain heterodox individuals may act as gatekeepers, using journals under their control and other resources to promote their own particular concerns. My point, though, is that there is nothing inherent in the heterodox position as I defend it that is necessarily inconsistent with pluralism.

I certainly do not wish to suggest that alternative ontological conceptions are not possible. Clearly they are. And to the extent that competing conceptions are produced, the point, once more, is to do whatever it takes to encourage all parties constructively to engage.

But if one ontological conception can be shown to be better grounded than available alternatives, is that not a reason for drawing on it? Would anyone counsel a different approach in any parallel situation? Yes, let us leave options open. Let us also repeatedly try out alternatives, where appropriate. Certainly, let us include everyone in the conversation, whether it is oriented to the nature of ontology, substantive work, the nature of pluralism or being pluralistic, or whatever, and seek to do so with respect and encouragement. But if, when the time comes to make use of an ontological conception, one such conception (whatever the focus) seems to be significantly more appropriate than others, not least because it is found to be far more explanatorily grounded, then it seems reasonable (for at least those that believe in it) to make use of the latter.

Conclusion Contemporary economics is not in a healthy state and is marked by significant fragmentation. The key to understanding this situation and indeed to facilitating a more fruitful economics, I argue, is a turn to social ontology. The orientation adopted in elaborating the picture presented above is not anti-pluralist, and nor indeed is it anti-mathematics (quite the contrary on both counts). It is one, rather, of urging greater tolerance and especially philosophical awareness in the pursuit of economic relevance.

references Bigo, Vinca (2008) ‘Explaining Modern Economics (as a Microcosm of Society), Cambridge Journal of Economics,vol 32, no 4, pp 527-54, July Blaug, Mark (1997) Ugly Currents in Modern Economics, Options Politiques. (Septembre): 3-8.

Davis, John (2006) ‘The Nature of Heterodox Economics’, Post-Autistics Economics Review, issue no. 40, 1 December Garnett, Robert F. (2005) ‘Wither Heterodoxy?’, Post-Autistics Economics Review, issue no. 34, article1, pp. 2-21 Lawson, Tony (1994) ‘The Nature of Post Keynesianism and its Links to other Traditions’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 16: 503538. Reprinted in Prychitko D.L. (ed.), (1996) Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction To The Contemporary Schools of Thought, New York: State University of New York Press.

Lawson, Tony (1997) Economics and Reality, London and New York: Routledge Lawson, Tony (2002) ‘Should Economics Be an Evolutionary Science? Veblen’s Concern and Philosophical Legacy’, The 2002 Clarence Ayres Memorial Lecture, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. XXXVI, no. 2, pp. 279-91 Lawson, Tony (2003) Reorienting Economics, London and New York: Routledge.

Lawson, Tony (2006) ‘The Nature of Heterodox Economics’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, (30):2 (July), pp. 483-507.

Rubinstein, Ariel. 1995. John Nash: the master of economic modelling, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 97(1): 9-13.

Van Bouwel, Jeroen (2005) ‘Towards a Framework for Pluralism in Economics’, Post-Autistic Economics Review, Issue no. 30, 21 March, article 3.

1 For helpful comments on an earlier draft I am grateful to Vinca Bigo 2 In turn, of course, this focus, reflexively adopted, has come to affect the ways some feminists at least are committed to developing pedagogical approaches that acknowledge and explore (typically hierarchical) relations not just in society at large but also within the academy.

3 The obvious question that remains to be addressed is how the situation elaborated above 1) came about and 2) persists. On 1) see Lawson, 2003 chapter, 10; on 2) see Vinca Bigo, 2008.

T

he dismal state of the economics discipline remains largely unknown to those outside the economics academy. Economics is generally presented as the most “scientific” of the social sciences by many of its proponents, on the grounds that it is in part concerned with measurable material. With alleged measurability, scholars of economics make claims of truth and accuracy, which are all too often naively accepted by outsiders.

Disputes within the profession range from critiques of the orthodoxy for the alleged ideology of their substantive theories, to disagreement as to the very foundations of ‘proper’ science.

In mainstream economics, when tractability and predictability are pursued, critical clusters advance an alternative view of economics.

Amongst these, the Cambridge Social Ontology Group has persistently emphasised the notion of explanatory power as the ultimate criterion for both social and natural scientific success. Its members have laboured the point extensively by way of numerous scholarly contributions (Lawson 1997, 2009; Bigo 2006).

Like others critical of the dominance of formal mathematical deductive methods in the economics discipline, the Group lives in the shadows of the local Economics Faculty.

The latter has recently made taught maths compulsory for all students, including those studying for a PhD, and discouraged philosophical courses discussing questions of methodology, that were once available to students. As a result, those who wish to study Keynes at Cambridge

may be in for a disappointment.

The fact is that economic science deals with human behaviour that takes place in an open, complex, highly interrelated, ever transforming, emergent social realm. The ‘messiness’ of the real economy is not readily taken on board by the mainstream.

Instead, mathematics is too often made to stand in for realistic accounts of economic practices. What is more, other social sciences seem to aspire to similar measurability and prediction.

Even eminent orthodox economists admit that the econometric applications of formal mathematical methods are disconnected from reality and fail to predict successfully. Given the insistence of the exclusive use of these methods, is there not some pathological mechanism at work somewhere, other than (or as well as) the autism alluded to by the Post Autistic Movement? I think there is.

First though, it is worth noting the existence of two rather widespread social phenomena.

Specifically, attempts to dominate and attempts to predict are pervasive features of social life. Unwarranted hierarchies of race, class, gender, and so on, are a generalised feature of society. And the likelihood of future scenarios is a frequent source of speculation by the

media and all kinds of socalled experts alike. This is so, in spite of there being no hope of knowing in precise numerical terms what the future holds. Both attempts are in effect, more often than not, mere fantasies of supremacy and prediction.

How can we account for these fantasies?

Developmental psychology explains clearly how the gender scripts imposed on boys and girls lead to differences in the ways of coping with particular anxieties that result from processes of differentiation.

These include the process of accepting separation from others and from life eternal, necessary to the formation of identity.

Specifically, infant boys and girls are born with the illusion of oneness with the mother: a complete identification with the feminine. Soon enough though, boys must adopt a gender script according to which they resemble men and not women, and so relinquish their initial identity.

This does not occur without

especially the contributions of Tony Lawson (1997 and 2009), have done much to point out the methodological demarcation of orthodox economics, by way of philosophical analysis. I further suggest we take into account, the deepseated psychological dimension of the puzzling state of affairs that besieges the economics profession. My aim is not, of course, to provide a blanket explanation for the persistence with formalism where failure is recognised. Rather I would offer an insight into outlandish behaviour that is marked by a degree of intolerance and dogmatism, currently not encountered in this highly systematised fashion, in any other social or natural scientific research community

some pain and anxiety, against which they will seek to defend themselves. Change, not least a change of identity, tends to be discomforting.

One such defensive response adopted by boys and men, whilst externalising ‘the feminine’ part of themselves, is to devalue the latter, for if they can cast themselves as superior to persons and objects associated with the feminine, then it becomes diminished, reduced, and rendered less threatening.

It can in some sense be (fantasised as) mastered, and more easily brought under control. The process of devaluation typically gets extended, and applied to those generally different from oneself (in terms of race, culture, credo, etc.), an attitude often associated with the complex of superiority (and in turn inferiority) - hence the fantasy of supremacy.

In addition, utterly dependent on their mother, and terribly vulnerable, infants become (shockingly) aware of their mortality. Girls can seek and find comfort in the expectation that they, like their mothers, will one day be intimately responsible for looking after dependants themselves. This helps them recover a sense of control. Not so for boys.

Their anxiety may be defended against by imagining the future can be predicted, and therefore controlled (even when reality is so open that neither prediction nor control can be achieved). Hence, the fantasy of prediction.

Mainstream economics is dominated by male scholars, and the community does seem to display particular versions of the above described defence mechanisms: 1. Only formal mathematical methods are regarded as proper economics, a methodological hierarchy that excludes alternatives. This instance of epistemological domination can now be identified as a version of the fantasy of supremacy.

2. The nature of these methods is such that they presuppose closed worlds of isolated atoms, designed to facilitate prediction; but these worlds are largely divorced from reality.

This instance of ontological delusion can now be recognised as a version of the fantasy of prediction. Both fantasies foster the illusion of control.

To summarise, the Cambridge Social Ontology Group,

References Bigo, Vinca. 2006. “Open and Closed Systems and the Cambridge School”.

Review of Social Economy. Volume 64 (4): 493-514.

Bigo, Vinca. 2008. “Explaining Modern Economics (as a Microcosm of Society)”. Cambridge Journal of Economics. 32(4):527-554.

Cambridge Social Ontology Group (CSOG). http://www.csog.group.cam. ac.uk/ Lawson, Tony. 1997. Economics and Reality. London and New York: Routledge.

Lawson, Tony. 2009. Various chapters in Ontology and Economics: Tony Lawson and His Critics. Edward Fullbrook (ed.). London and New York: Routledge.

by Jonathan Riley

w h y t h e L S E sh o u l d n t b o ther teachin g Econom et cs or Finarnic e

Black Swans

Nassim Taleb’s anger was palpable when he addressed two packed lecture halls at the LSE for a talk on probability. His best-selling book, The Black Swan (Taleb, 2007), suggests that the study of econometrics and finance is largely worthless. But he made an even bolder claim in person, comparing the practitioners of these trades to charlatans and snake-oil salesmen; and blaming their methodologies for the current “Credit Crunch.�

Indeed, one of the reasons for Taleb’s recent rise to fame is that he largely predicted the problems that would befall Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the banks generally. For instance, the following quotes from The Black Swan; The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events unlikely.

The increased concentration among banks seems to have had the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur…I shiver at the thought Taleb’s prescience is eerily accurate, but does this prove the uselessness of econometrics and finance? After all, both disciplines aim for the worthy goal of generating knowledge and understanding in their chosen domains. Econometrics seeks to give some sort of empirical content to economic theory, maybe to test economic theories, and especially to assist in the building of models of the economy – surely a worthwhile pursuit.

Both subjects certainly have big, fat, high-cost textbooks.

The small sample I took suggests that textbooks are, on average, 718 pages long and cost around £37.90, though I note that this is a lot cheaper per page than the average philosophy book. Who is to say that hypothesis testing, regression analysis, multi-variable data analysis, heteroskedasticity, ARIMA, ANOVA and GARCH are unworthy of study? A textbook I used in quantitative finance has recently added a third volume – what better indication of a developing and prosperous subject?

The Black Swan should be considered a book within the philosophy of science, a subject for which the LSE has a fine and honourable tradition starting from the post-war creation of the philosophy department by uber-philosopher of science Karl Popper. Like Popper, Taleb is concerned with the issues of “inductivism” and “justificationism.” This is the process by which observational data is said to lead to generalisations. Successful testing creates further evidence for the generalisations, justifying reliance on them in the future. Many hold this process to be at the heart of science – others, Popper and Taleb included, hold this view to be dangerously wrong.

The “Problem of Induction” is a fine example of a philosophical problem as it cuts deep into the basis for

our knowledge. Closely linked to Scottish philosopher David Hume, though easy to trace back to ancient philosophy, the problem can be stated simply: there can be no reason why the future need be like the past. By a very ingenious argument, Hume showed that any attempt to justify induction is either circular or leads to infinite regress. If true, then generalisations created and tested by past data cannot necessarily be relied on in the future. There cannot even be “probable” knowledge.

We can see this more clearly in Taleb’s colourful example of turkeys living on a farm. Turkey social scientists observe that they are fed daily and taken to the vet when sick. From this, they derive the generalisation “the farmer cares for us.” They use this generalization to predict that they will be cared for tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and so on. This generalisation is confirmed every day until just before Christmas (or Thanksgiving if they are American turkeys) when the generalisation ceases to hold and the turkeys, to use Taleb’s phrase, “will incur a revision of belief.” It is not just that the turkeys’ generalisation was found to be wrong.

Rather, the problem is that the turkeys had apparently done what they were supposed to do to acquire sound empirical knowledge, but were still wrong. Being wrong can have a massive impact. In this case, the “revision of belief” is death. This leads to Taleb’s definition of a “Black Swan” event as being not just an unlikely event, but an unlikely event with a correspondingly huge impact.

Now it is not correct to say that economics has ignored these topics completely. Indeed, there has been some very perceptive writing on them. For instance, Frank Knight (1921) and John Maynard Keynes (1920 and 1937) made a significant theoretical leap by distinguishing between decision making under conditions of certainty, risk and uncertainty.

The first of these, decision making under conditions of certainty, concerns propositions that are either true or false and for which this can be determined if one has the right data. For instance, I can decide on the truth or falsity of the statement “my cat weights over six kgs” by weighing him.

(He does).

Decision making under conditions of risk concerns cases where it is possible to attach a probability to an event in some meaningful way. Examples would include familiar cases such as coin tossing, dice rolling, or most casino games, such as roulette. You might not know which way the dice will fall next, but you could still have a pretty good idea of the long-term frequencies with which the number 4 will occur.

But decision making under conditions of uncertainty is quite different from the two cases above. You can’t attach a fixed truth value to the propositions involved, nor can you attach any meaningful probability to them. As Keynes says in a response to criticism of The General Theory (1937) By “uncertain” knowledge...I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only possible. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty...

The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention...About these matters, there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know!

Tactics have been proposed to deal with each. In the first case, decide on the basis of the highest utility; in the second, choose the highest expected utility. But the third case – uncertainty – is less tractable. Some solutions have been proposed, including the minmax strategy of game theory. But in the main, there is no meaningful answer.

Moreover, using the wrong strategy against uncertainty could be disastrously bad. Taleb argues that this is precisely the circumstances faced by practitioners of econometrics and financial risk management who practice their craft not in a world of “risk” but in a world that is “uncertain” in the way that Knight and Keynes use the terms. Their methods leave no room for the possibility of Black Swan events. Moreover, no additional information acquired in the future will help dissipate this uncertainty – you are stuck with it.

There was a chance that this would be recognised early in the development of finance as a separate academic discipline.

In the 1960s, Benoît Mandelbrot (of fractal fame) published a series of papers showing that changes in the prices of shares and commodities were not correctly modelled by Gaussian (or “normal”) distributions. Instead, the evidence for “fat-tails” in the distributions was clear. In other words, big price changes (up or down) were far more common than standard models allowed.

It was relatively easy to find events which, on the standard model, should not have occurred since the universe began, let alone in a few decades of financial data.1 But these early warnings were ignored. Instead, finance theory

was based on the assumption of the Gaussian distribution.

The fact that real market distributions didn’t behave as normal distributions was brushed aside. It was enough that the models created by finance theory worked most of the time. Events outside the parameters of these models were, literally, freak events. The modern theory of finance also fitted well with the trend towards rigorous model-making that had taken hold in economics more generally – real world application being less important. That these theories cannot account for the occurrence of crises in financial markets has not undermined their popularity.

Other dissenters rarely had much impact. The most famous of these was George Soros, who studied philosophy at the LSE with Popper in the early 1950s. In 1988, well before he became famous as the “man who broke the Bank of England”, he published a book (Soros 1988) in which he rejected the prevailing equilibrium models of how markets work, and substituted a complex model based on “reflexive” feedback loops. This model could explain speculative bubbles but could not be integrated with existing theory and so was largely ignored.

Taleb’s detailed arguments for his views concern our knowledge (or lack of it) of the statistical distributions that we really face when seeking to investigate the world.

Econometricians and financial risk managers see data in a “state space”. This data implies the existence of a “generator” of some type. This generator could be some type of known probability distribution, such as the Gaussian, Binomial, Poisson, and so on. The generator may have specific parameters such as a mean, variance, and other “higher moments” that determine the values of the distribution. If you know the generator, you may be able to use knowledge of the distribution to calculate the things you are interested in. This could include calculating the variance of the data as a measure of “risk”, as used by financial market practitioners.

But the key problem is that the generator is hidden from us and there is no independent way to discover its parameters, except by trying to infer them from past data. This may be an intractable problem. As the turkeys discovered, you may not know anything about the type of generator you are dealing with (but note that the farmer does know the real situation). If this is the case, we are in a situation of “uncertainty” susceptible to Taleb’s Black Swans. Indeed, this is exactly what Taleb accuses econometricians and financial market practitioners of failing to see. They believe they face a situation characterised by risk, not uncertainty, and that this risk can be measured and utilised in practical cases. This is the cardinal sin of econometricians and financial risk managers.

The particular types of distribution that cause problems are those that are “fat-tailed” i.e. extreme events are more common than standard models would predict. In these cases, the probability of an extreme event could be orders of magnitude greater than that which would be given by a Gaussian distribution. If you believe you face a Gaussian distribution, but actually face something altogether stranger

and with fat tails, the possibility of eventual enormous error is extremely high.

In his recent LSE lecture, Taleb characterised the situation by considering “four quadrants” linking type of distribution (thintailed or fat-tailed) with type of payoff (simple or complex).

In the first case, outcomes are simple and distributions have thin-tails. In such circumstances, there is a good level of robustness versus the possibility of Black Swans. More formally, our estimates of observed means and variances are likely to be close to the “real” means and variance from the underlying generator. Statistics works wonders here.

The same is broadly true for the second and third cases, which cover the combinations of “simple payoff / fat-tailed distribution” and “complex payoff / thin-tailed distribution.” A simple payoff stops fat tails having too much effect, and thintails mitigate the effects of complex payoffs.

But the fourth quadrant marks the limits of statistics and is extremely fragile to the occurrence of Black Swan events.

Here payoffs from events are extremely complex and distributions are fat-tailed. The generators of the data we observe might be totally unknowable to us. These generators may have well-defined moments (mean, variance, etc) but the quantity of data required to estimate these may be beyond our capacities to observe. Even worse, they may not have defined moments at all. We might observe data and calculate means, variances, etc, but this need bear no relationship to the underlying generator, which doesn’t actually have means and variances. Reliance on such statistics would then be extremely reckless.

Taleb’s claim can now be restated simply as follows: most social science is concerned with events or processes that occur in the “fourth quadrant” where the limits of standard statistical knowledge have been passed. Any discipline that seeks to apply standard statistical theory in these areas is not only wrong but is worthless. Econometrics and finance attempt such analysis and hence are worthless. Q.E.D. So why is the assumption of a Gaussian distribution so prevalent in econometrics and finance? The answer is that this assumption allows problems to be “solved”. Complex models can be created, and something that practitioners call “risk,” can to be estimated via variance. From this, all manner of apparently interesting propositions flow. There are clearly other possible statistical distributions but these don’t have the agreeable feature of allowing you to apparently solve problems. As academic disciplines, it is perhaps more important to be able to create models that apparently solve problems, rather than correctly identify intractable problems in these areas. No academic discipline will prosper if it provides a reason for its own demise.

So how does this relate to the current “Credit Crunch?” In The Black Swan, Taleb suggests the world in general, and certain businesses in particular, are susceptible to Black Swan events.

This is simply a feature of the world we live in. The situation in financial markets (especially in regard to banks) is complicated

in an interesting way by a regulatory regime that inevitably tangles the industry in Black Swan events. Banks are regulated via a “Capital Adequacy” regime in which they allocate capital against each of their activities, with their total balance sheet being constrained by overall percentage figures for what is called “tier one” and “tier two” capital. Capital allocation against individual activities is based on “Value-at-Risk” methodologies in which risk measurements are applied to each activity. The theory is quite clear – an activity with more risk should have more capital underneath it to “support” it. An example of such a methodology is “Riskmetrics”, released into the world by JP Morgan in 1994.

But where do these measures of risk come from that are so important to the entire regulatory regime? Why, they are calculated from past market data of course. And as we have seen, success in this depends on the assumption of knowledge of the underlying generator of this data. If you are mistaken in this assumption, then you leave yourself exposed to possible fat-tails i.e. Black Swans.

The current problems now become clearer. The sub-prime market, in which the current crisis began, consists of loans to relatively poor people, usually to buy a house. In a rising housing market, statistics for such loans showed low default levels. After all, who would default on a loan attached to a house with positive equity in it? Better instead to find another financial institution (of which there were many) to re-mortgage with in order to free up some equity and enable payments to continue. But when house prices peaked and then started to fall, this reversed. As a borrower moves into negative equity, the incentive to default rises and this leads to a huge jump in default statistics as some form of “tipping point” is passed.

Hence past statistics showed lower risks than were really in the world. They suggested that such lending activities were less risky than they truly were and this sucked more and more bank capital into these areas. The high returns that are available on such loans seemed to outweigh the risk of loan default. It seemed rational to not only make such loans but, with each new period of low defaults increasingly confirming your risk statistics, it seemed reasonable to lend even more as time went on.

An interesting add-on is provided by the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in this process. Until recently, these were two public companies but were considered to have a quasi-government status. Their business models reflected the aims put in place at their founding to encourage home ownership for all, including poor credits. Their business was to take mortgages off the hands of banks and re-package them as new debt instruments that other investors could purchase. Banks had little incentive to consider such loans for the long-term if they intended to sell them on to Fannie and Freddie; buying bonds issued by these companies if they wanted exposure to these markets. It was so much easier to do it this way. And not only that, it seemed so sensible if risk models were to be believed. So the activities of Fannie and

Freddie actually added to the problem – a nice example of unintended consequences.

During his lecture at the LSE, Taleb held market practitioners responsible for the problems that have occurred. In particular, he was outraged by the claims made a couple of years ago

by Ben Bernanke – now Chairman of the Federal Reserve – who pronounced, just before the crisis, that we live in an era of stability and “great moderation” in respect to risk to the financial system. Given that the banks have lost more money in 2009 that they have made in total since banking first began, Taleb’s outrage may be well-founded.

We might also look at an alternative hypothesis that the current crisis is one of deliberate and reckless risk taking on the part of bankers. If you look at a case like Lehman Brothers, the senior management clearly did not expect that events would turn out as they did. Staff held 35% of the firm’s stock prior to its demise and so could surely be considered to have a strong incentive to avoid a blowup. So how could they have been so wrong? Reckless risk taking is a poor explanation as it implies deliberation. No, the correct explanation is to be found in the over-reliance on models founded on incorrect econometric and financial market assumptions. They didn’t know they had the exposure they actually did – their risk models seemed to justify what they were doing.

Yet financial markets have had dozens of Black Swan events over the years. For example; the 1982 sovereign debt crisis, the Japanese property bubble, the 1987 stock market crash, the 1998 Russia default and the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, the dot com bust in 2000, September 11. This suggests a significant epistemological problem at the core of the way these questions have been approached. Given all the previous Black Swans that have swamped the financial markets, why do participants still get exposed to them? It is because they don’t realise they are.

So what should we do? Taleb’s response is interesting here too. In his recent lecture, he suggested that he is merely a doctor who can prevent an illness, but cannot cure you if you have succumbed to it.

I have no idea what to do in a crisis…I don’t know what causes fat tails.

Pretty clear-cut but perhaps not a lot of use. Still, that could be the way the world really is. But can you do something going forward? Taleb emphasises that you should beware of hubris – particularly thinking you understand risk when really you face uncertainty. Learn to say “I don’t know” more often, cap exposure to losses in huge events (however remote they appear now), try to leave exposure to good Black Swans (the remote possibility of being in on the next Google, or finding the next Harry Potter); avoid optimisation and love redundancy; avoid trying to predict remote outcomes; allow loads of time for things to become clear; beware of “moral hazard” where people can be paid bonuses to position you into the fourth quadrant, and so on.

And, most importantly, be aware that conventional statistics

do not apply to most social scientific situations. Standard deviation does not measure anything in the fourth quadrant.

Linear regression has its errors in the fourth quadrant; least squared methods, optimal portfolios, ANOVA, GARCH, literally anything mechanically pulled from a statistical textbook or course in econometrics or finance – they are all literally worthless.

A final quote from his lecture Econometrics is a fraud. It has not delivered. GARCH is no better than simple models and simple models are no good.

You can’t predict out of sample. It is like trying to predict the next lottery winner by an analysis of what previous lottery winners were wearing when they bought their tickets. It is irrelevant.

A powerful claim!

References Nassim Taleb’s work is best approached from The Black Swan (2007) and Fooled

by Randomness (2004). I have also used some ideas from his earlier work in quantitative finance, Dynamic Hedging (1997). Taleb’s personal website (www. fooledbyrandomness.com) contains a vast collection of interviews with him, together with a number of other papers which I have used extensively in presenting his ideas – in particular Taleb and Pilpel’s On the Unfortunate Problem of the Nonobservability of the Probability Distribution (2004) and Taleb’s The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics (2008).

Keynes, John Maynard, 1920, Treatise on Probability, London: Macmillan Keynes, John Maynard, 1937, The General Theory. In Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol LI, 209-233 Knight, Frank, 1921, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Harper and Row Mandelbrot, Benoit, 2004, The (Mis)behaviour of Markets, A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward, Basic Books Soros, George, 1988, The Alchemy of Finance, Simon and Schuster 1 See Mandelbrot (2004) for a survey of these early results and a robust critique of subsequent finance theory.

Daniel B Yates glosses the Mersey Poets of the 1960s Brian Patten and Roger McGough “I read a book once... green it was” proudly stated Heslop, Brian Glover’s character in Porridge. The Liverpool poet Brian Patten may have echoed this sentiment, growing up as he did in a house with only one book, satin covered and smelling of mothballs, it was ‘an innocuous book about a fox.’

Yet from these humble origins it was to be Patten above all of those Liverpool poets that propelled himself into the inky world of alternative publishing, his poetry magazine Underdog running from 1962 through to 1966, established both himself and the Liverpool scene as centres of poetic expression.

In what Mike Horovitz called his ‘purest of little mags’ Patten began to assemble the printed cosmic spiral of Liverpool, reeling in poets from across the Atlantic such as Aselm Holllo, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg, alongside more local voices. ‘Living on chips, amphetamines, sexual adrenalin and hope’ Patten produced the magazine from the small attic that he was renting in Liverpool, and like Sniffin Glue for the punks, or the Yellow Book for the Victorian Decadents, it burst from its modest material circumstance to become a document of a scene of historical relevance, synonymous with the arts and pop movement of 60s Liverpool.

Patten once described his decisive nature with the words ‘I’m more: fuck it, let’s do it’, a sentiment that belies the delicacy of his output. but as an attitude of self-direction it proved a neat fit with the energy and free-form spontaneity of the North American Beatniks, who had begun to enter Liverpool, at first in glimpses, from magazines and letters. Those roving ‘sputnik’ allegories, both products and abnormalities of America, had a profound effect on the bohemianism that was emerging there. Upon Patten’s invitation to the city, Ginsberg declared Liverpool to be “the centre of everything that is happening in the universe at this time” and despite Ginsberg’s meeting with the Beatles being soured somewhat by his appearing stark naked with a ‘No Waiting’ sign hung around his cock (Lennon in particular was upset, conservatively chiding ‘you don’t do that in front of the birds’) the flamboyant American, with his ready quotes and mythical persona, served to secure the notion that a new beat was emerging in the English North West. From Jasper Johns’ ‘Happenings’ to the non-literary takes on literature, from the popart sensibilities and the rhythms of jazz: the thumbprint of the Beatnik whorl gave the Liverpool poets - who, through McGough’s admission had ‘no literary or dramatic heritage’ of their own - a vernacular by which to organise the expression of their locality. As Stephen Wade has it, the ‘Liverpool of folk songs, a focus for immigration, cheap labour and working class consciousness. The singing, the drinking, the jokes, the football – and the poetry’, all were rendered as living art in the Beatnik mould.

On an individual level the requirement to “speak in one’s own voice” was compelling for this group of poets, who having rejected the academy, sought a new basis for poetry, as Wade puts it, ‘raw, iconoclastic, and without any intellectual encumbrances from the schoolroom or the seminar.’ It was to be voice of experience, in Patten’s phrase, ‘the Hard Lyric.’ direct and true, relating poetry as the emotions fundamental to our language and being.

As a child, Roger McGough’s speaking voice was subjected to speech therapy instigated by an aspirational mother. He used to ‘runallthewordstogether’, a predicate for the distinctive urgency of his rhythm. In McGough’s hands poetry was humorous, immediate, recognisable and no less profound for being so. He tuned into an idea of poetry that was democratic rather than populist - closely tied to a community of producers and seeking to access shared experiences. He describes his audiences of the 60s, who ‘didn’t look on it as poetry with a Capital P, they looked on it as modern entertainment, as part of the pop movement. They may go away crying, or they may go away very sad, but it was a certain experience to them, all part of experience.’ This holistic and reduced idea of poetry is trademark McGough, and it served him well. combining with a kind of polyamory of artistry that was to take him to number one in the charts, to an international audience, and establish him as one of the first media figures of his kind.

Alongside Patten, and McGough there were many others in Liverpool contributing poetry to the scene, not least the third prong of the Liverpool triumvirate Adrian Henri. These men (and they were mostly men) were the actors in the distinctive piece of English history that goes by the shorthand of 1960s Liverpool, that at once talks to us of our notions of centres and parochialisms, the lineage between the bohemians and the creative classes, and the mediatisation of art and the art of mediatisation - all continuing concerns of art in the 21st century North. That they made a democratic challenge to the academy was unquestionable, unlocking poetry from its rarefied prison in the ivory vault, to invent a pop vernacular, hewn from the qualia of the everyday. Just as a sung pop lyric speaks directly to us, in the words that we use to transfer feelings, so the Liverpool poets found a way to transcend the banality of cliché with a Mersey sound that spoke as closely as a lover, or as humorously as a friend, that continues to speak to us, as clearly as we could ever want to speak to ourselves.

So we’re sitting in the Red Lion in Barnes, waiting for our man, Roger McGough, unsure whether to be inside or out. We’ve opted out, for a series of small fires.

That is, cigarettes, but we’re trying to be poetic. It seems to us that when meeting poets of repute, above all else, be poetic. Apart from a bunch of paintings, we’ve never seen our man. But we’ve read the autobiography, we’ve read about him, and we’ve read the poetry.

w e i v r e t n i r n e A g o R h t i h w g u o McG

Roger McGough was born in Liverpool, 1937.

Now he lives in South West London. He is credited with completely changing the place of poetry in British culture. As an integral part of the 1960’s Liverpool scene, McGough was central to a movement that spoke lovingly of a place no one else had previously romanticised. His poetry made it into average living rooms, in a way that no other poet has managed since. Through his work on The Mersey Sound with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, his place on primetime evening TV, his hit with The Scaffolds that got him to top of the pops and…

C l a r e (C ) : H e l l o , he l l o he l l o ! A r e w e o k o u ts i d e?

He arrives suddenly but casually. We’re caught off guard and forced into nervous, petty formalities; saying random, unpoetic stuff, like ‘Howard Davies did everything he could just to judge last year’s Booker prize.’ We’re not able to catch his responses as we’re too busy thinking about what to say next. Our plan is to talk to him about the role Place plays for an artist: how it influences the work, how settings are chosen and how places themselves develop identities. But we also want to talk more specifically about poetry, about the role it plays and how it comes to get written in the first place.

McGough went to Hull University, where he studied French and Geography. Instantly he justifies why he didn’t do English, which is weird, because we didn’t ask him. Turns out he failed his English O levels. As he continues talking, we notice it’s hard to keep up with the muffling of his words; although now that we’re getting all this onto paper, it’s clear that understanding the man was far easier than transcribing him. But then, he is a poet for whom poetry is a spoken performance.

C: Y o u a n d o t h e r L i v e r p o o l p o e t s a r e o f t e n l i n k e d w i t h t h e B e a t m o v e m e n t t h a t r o s e t o f a m e t h e U n i t e d St a t e s d u r i n g t h e 1 9 5 0 ’ s . W e w a n t t o s t a r t o f f t h i s d i s c u s s i o n o f P l a c e by a s k i n g y o u h o w t h e N e w Y o r k o r i g i n s o f t h e B e a t m o v e m e n t i n f l u e n c e d y o u a n d specif i ca l ly the g ro wth of the Liverpo o l scen e thro u g ho ut the 19 60s.

Roger McGough (RM): I remember distinctly going into a local library, a little library… which was unusual for a poor kid… and finding this book called The Town and The City, and it was very un-Kerouac, you know what I mean? It was very held back and very Nathaniel West and rather traditional; before he became Kerouac. But there was something about it. It was marvelous. It really touched me. And then of course On The Road, and a bit later there was Kerouac and the Beats.

What was interesting about them was their sense of freedom. Of course, to be a young man is exciting. But I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and it was a very dull time. Now we think the 60s was wild. But the early 60s was almost still the 50s. People didn't travel or go abroad. Those open spaces [the American Beats] created, that geography and their celebration of place, it was very exciting.

M c G o u g h m a ke s t h i s p o i n t i n h i s a u to b i o g ra p h y : “ I f y o u co u l d n ’ t b e i n S a n F r a n c i s c o w i t h F e r l i n g e t t i , o r i n N e w Yo r k w i t h G i n s b e r g , o r o n t h e r o a d w i t h Ke r o u a c , t h e n L o n d o n w a s w h e r e i t a l l s e e m e d t o b e h a p p e n i n g w i t h t h e p o e t r y a n d j a z z . T h e n t h e re wa s M i c h a e l H o rov i t z a n d P e te B row n t ra ve l i n g u p a n d d ow n t h e co u n t r y w i t h t h e i r f re e fo r m p o e t r y a n d j a z z co l l a b o ra t i o n B l u e s fo r t h e H i tc h - h i k i n g D e a d , a n d I w a s s t u c k i n L i v e r p o o l w h e r e nothing was happening.”

Thereafter place would become an increasingly important element in his work. McGough

envied those writers who “lived in such exotic places where the very rink? tad pavements must have emitted psychic poetic energy.” It was n a w common for poets in the Liverpool scene—what he calls yone . nd k, a n n n k you go a i r i d r “our local beat poets”—to write about New York’s d a d you a b a ney an yellow cabs and walking along 52nd street. g et an I d g r u the mo n a After all it was the stylish “furniture you R M: C o e a l . tar. go ve y o d da half of S o could bring into your verses to appear : I ’ l l it. I’ll gi g C o a ve cool,” even though they had no first RM: I’ll d l i k e err, I’ll ha s d , t n . t hand experience of the stuff. do i s o u ht into tha t m y …

It wasn’t until several years later that hat ig go m C : T ou fell r o I’ I’ve n Y McGough, along with Adrian Henri and (to : e n M n a R i a lesser extent) Brian Patten, began setting m f ou sure? s . I m e : I’ ye some of his poems in Liverpool. At first, says C : Are y RM yes, , McGough, it seemed “unnervingly surreal, and s e Y non-poetical.” Then other people started doing C : it too. This coincided with the first successes of The Beatles. They, of course, wrote about Penny Lane, and The Shadows (much more famous at the time) did Stars Over Stockton as their B-side to Apache.

RM: It all just seemed very funny, just seemed almost ironic. Adrian did this very well, writing about Skelhorn Street and cowboys in Lime Street and all that sort of stuff. Since those days, of course, young poets have whined to me, ‘Oh it must have been easy for you to write poetry, living in Liverpool at such an exciting time.’ But a writer struggles to dignify his particular time and place, ‘No easier, mate, than it is for you, right now, right here.’

C: L e t ’ s c o n t i n u e o n t h i s i d e a o f a L i v e r p u d l i a n i d e n t i t y b e i n g e x p l o r e d t h r o u g h p o e t r y . Y o u w e r e b r o u g ht i n t o s c r i p t e d i t t h e [ 1 9 6 8 m o v i e ] Y e l l o w S u b m a r i n e t o g i v e it a Liverpud l ia n i n f l ecti o n . What was the po i n t of d o i n g this, a nd what w en t i n to the process?

RM: The script originally…God I should've kept it; gutted I didn't keep it! And you could've seen the difference. The original was very witty, very American. Initially it was purely for an American audience, not an English one, and so the producer wanted American voices. He suggested that no one would understand them otherwise. There was a running battle going on while I was there, about the British side of it. We said we must have a British side, and the Beatles, who came in quite late said ‘Yes, we must have English voices.’ But on top of the voices, the jokes were all like American Jewish jokes! And to add to all this, the guy who wanted it out, he wanted to move very quickly to get it out. He was scared that the bubble would have burst. So there was great pressure to move—it was a massive rush.

I was involved with much of the early stuff, and managed to get in a lot of jokes, like the sea monster as a creative orator. I think, in the end, the Liverpudlianisation of the thing was probably about as weird to the Americans as the animation.

C: I n y o u r a u t o b i o g ra p hy , S a i d a n d D o n e , y o u m e n t i o n a p a r t i c u l a r r e l a t i o n s h i p y o u h a d w i t h E d i n b u r g h a n d t h e S c o t t i s h p o e t s . W hy w a s t h i s ?

RM: What I loved about Edinburgh, and the Scottish tradition, was the sense of surrealism they brought to it, and the playfulness they brought in. [He mentions Edward Morgan and Norman McCabe]. All these people, they all had this surrealism, this European sort of surrealism, which I liked. [McGough explains that he felt there was no English equivalent. He says English C: H e r e w e a r e , h a l f St a r, S poetry seemed, to someone who wasn't an English graduate, overly o l , o ra n g e . difficult. It took itself seriously.] The Scottish stuff came out of a folk Wa it a sec, he re’s yo u r cha n g e music place, and there was a playfulness about it, the oral tradition, RM: Oh err, than ks . Cheers. that sort of Celtic thing you know.

C: C h e e r s .

C: L e t ’ s c h a n g e t h e d i r e c t i o n o f t h i s c o n v e r s a t i o n f r o m

Pla ce to Po et ry itsel f. W hat d o es po et ry m ea n to y o u? W hat is its va l ue?

RM: What’s the role of poetry? And what’s its value?

He begins to get very stop-starty, as if thinking out loud.

RM: Well, if that’s all you do, like I do, you can’t just say, ‘uohh, I do it, so must be good mustn’t it?’ Errrm, noooooooo. So that’s not the answer. ‘It makes you feel better about yourself?’ Yeah, can do, yeah. Passes the time away (laughs). But it does give

people peace and quietness as well. That’s another thing about it, quietness. At the times when everything is so so hectic and the need to elbow and push; with all the sounds and noise – just to have something quiet. Meditation, like all those things; I mean it’s good for you, actually.

C: D o y o u h a v e a n y p o e m s w h i c h a r e o f p a r t i c u l a r s i g n i f i c a n c e t o y o u , w h e r e y o u f e e l t h a t y o u ’ v e r e a l l y su cceed ed i n ma k i n g a po i n t that y o u’ve wa n t ed to ma ke fo r a w hi l e but haven ’ t been a bl e to fo r o n e rea so n o r a nother?

RM: You sometimes surprise yourself. (He takes a sip of his Star while he thinks) I mean there’s the new collection I’m just doing, you know. And one of the poems in it, which I don’t know if it works very well, is about Alzheimer's. It is something I’ve never really thought about, but I just had this line, about erm, ‘Forgive me darling in advance for the slow macabre dance I may one day lead you into.’ It’s all about talking to your wife, and saying, excuse the time when I start falling over, kicking and howling at the scrabble board. So I think I’ve said something there that I didn’t plan to say. I didn’t think I’d write the poem.

Sometimes you do things like that, and that’s what’s exciting about it. You know, it’s not like ‘I must write a thing about global warming. I must try and do something and make a point.’ It’s just somehow things come together and you write something and it was something that you didn’t know you could have written, which would touch people and make people…

C: B u t i n t h a t s e n s e , d o y o u g e t n e r v o u s a b o u t p u t t i n g y o u r s o u l o n d i s p l a y ?

RM: You don’t really, no. That’s the funny thing about it. You don’t understand the need to write a poem, the need to get something down on paper, or even to keep the darkness at bay, and that’s a good reason to do it. I don’t quite know why you then need to show someone it, or even read it out loud and everyone can go ‘ooahh, very good.’ And of course the more affirmation you get the more you maybe do it, and that’s partly why you do it. I mean, people say you do it to get girls. Well, that’s one of the reasons…you’re young but erm, that fades.

C: D o y o u f i n d y o u r s e l f k e e p i n g c e r t a i n e m o t i o n s t h a t y o u d o n ’ t l i k e a b o u t y o u r s e l f s e c r e t ?

RM: Not really, what you do is… there are these poems that I’ve just worked on today for instance, and the last one is erm, ‘the last poem you write, what will it be?’ Because, everyone has a final poem. What will it be? Will it be something worthwhile? Or will it be an advert? Or something commissioned for a Bar Mitzvah? Will it be a texted birthday thing? You know what I mean? Will it be something crap? And I’m talking to the final poem and I’m saying ‘don’t worry,’ you know, ‘you’re not carrying on the baton,’ there are no ‘low leaves turned to dust.’ ‘Just don’t worry about it’.

Another of the poems is to wisdom teeth, of which I’ve lost two, and they’re all about losing wisdom. This is an area you don’t want to go, because you want to present yourself as the best. Well you don’t have to, but... You don’t want to talk about losing teeth, but you do because it’s there. So you do it in such a way that is actually funny even though it is treating something serious; about decay and ageing. It’s not about not talking about things that you don’t want to talk about, but about going into them and finding a way of doing it.

C: H o w d o e s h o n e s t y p l a y a r o l e h e r e ?

RM: It’s interesting, because it is not always truthfulness, but honesty. I think in the poem I may have lost all my wisdom teeth. That’s not true, but the honesty is still there.

C: B u t i s n ’ t t h a t a d e f l e c t i o n w i t h h u m o u r ? A r e y o u d e f l e c t i n g t h e t r u t h by e x a g g e ra t i n g i t ?

RM: Yes it is, exactly.

C: A n d d o y o u l o o k a t y o u r h u m o u r i n a n y w a y ? D o y o u t a k e i t a s a n o b j e c t ?

iew by

Interv

niel and da ; b yates jones by alex words eorge Gerke g y work b

Sea

, alex n baker

jones

RM: I never used to because I thought it was a humorous thing and I didn’t think it could Art be serious. When I was serious I always made a joke of it at the end. I was afraid of being seen as serious or a bit clever, and humour is very deflecting. I think in the end you find a way of being able to combine the two actually, of being serious and funny.

At the end of the day, being as honest as you can and trying to talk about the things that you don’t really want to, a lot of writers think ‘who’s going to be interested?’ You know, who’s going to be interested in my wisdom teeth? But it’s not about my wisdom teeth, is it? It becomes something else. I mean you don’t have to be of the same age, religion, or anything. We’re all human beings.

brian patten interview by DBY

DBY: You describe the genesis of your poetry as a particular moment at school, when, to get out of doing a cross country run you offered to write a poem for the teacher, And rather than receiving a softball to the side of your soft head, the teacher accepted.

BRIAN PATTEN: Yes, the “cross-country” running tended to be around the gasworks and through the back alleyways to the park – it was an inner-city school, eventually pulled down to make way for a budget supermarket where roll mop herrings were sold to the locals along with other nearly past-its-sell-bydate goods.

In that story your poetry was a twinkling piece of classroom politics rather than a stellar grade in Eng Lit. Similarly your professional life as a poet has skirted the traditional schemes and placements of the academy.

How do you find yourself standing in relation to the academic establishment, which to a degree seems to have canonised you? What use might we find in the academy for poetry, then and now?

No, I don’t stand canonised, more marginalized, but that’s fine. True or false, its always been part of my makeup Tell me though, is there an academic establishment anyway? – or is that a phrase that younger practitioners of any art form use for people who, in their eyes, have achieved what they themselves desire?

Whatever, let’s say there is. I take it by academic establishment you mean the small groups of people who infest all institutions and feed off creativity; who prod and poke and write about creativity and eventually grow bloated enough to believe what they feed on is of less value than their own efforts. How do I stand in relationship to them? I don’t give a toss. But it is important to be positive here. There is room to celebrate poetry in any academy, and there are brilliant people who are in love with writing and learning and they are wonderful, and I’d not like to dismiss their enthusiasm, which is like gold dust! One such person, Martin Kay, now dead, was a student at Liverpool University. He published a few of my first “serious” poems when I was fifteen years old in the University magazine, which he edited until he was dismissed as editor for bringing the University into disrepute.

So there was town and there was gown, how did the two intermingle, and was that crossfertilzation crucial for the success of the scene?

Hang on- it wasn’t town and gown at all. I’d never have been published in a University magazine back then if not for Martin Kay. There were interesting students, but that’s about it.

Here’s an example of how things were: When I was a teenager I’d invited the poet Robert Creeley - a major American poet- up to Liv-

erpool to read. I organised two readings for him. The first was at the University, where begrudgingly I was given the use of a small room tucked in the basement.

About five students turned up, no lecturers or any other university staff The second reading was in a large basement coffee-bar where I used to put on gigs with an audience mostly of office workers, the unemployable, and art college students. The place overflowed. It was a buzzy evening and Creeley was amazed at the wonderful reception. Similar situation with Allen Ginsberg. He did one reading, in a bookshop. (I published both Creeley and Ginsberg along with local poets in a magazine I ran at the time) In my experience of Liverpool the sixties were never really town and gown. It was far more town and easel.

What narrative of Liverpool as it was then, makes the most sense to you now?

Liverpool’s docks faced America. My generation of children felt America’s influence first through comics – usually the pull-outs from American newspapers - brought over by sailors on shore leave.

And of course later the young rock groups were influenced by the records the same sailors brought back from the states with them. The influence has waned now, but if Liverpool’s face pointed towards America then it goes without saying that its arse pointed towards London. Like in other cities at the time – Newcastle, Sheffield, Edinburgh – no one thought London was the place where things happened. Liverpool was one of the first cities to feel culturally independent of London. It was no longer the place from which other cities took their lead. Still isn’t.

Whatever alchemy it was that made Liverpool ‘happen’, might it happen again for UK city life in the noughts?

Liverpool is a small city and most things happened within walking distance. Painters pimps poets playwrights pushers bankers boxers thieves musicians and lovers all used and met up and interacted in the same clubs. People knew each other.

There was a nice human soup to sip. And anywhere you get that, things happen.

Roger McGough suggested to us that as your media fame grew, your inclination to shrink from the spotlight grew with it.

This runs somewhat contrary to the view of the ‘pop poet’ as an inherently mediafriendly figure. What has your relationship with recognition and fame been?

I guess if ‘pop’ means popular then that can’t be all bad, though initially, the

pop-poet label was used dismissivelyi.e. ephemeral. I’ve never called myself a pop poet and if you look at my Collected Love Poems for example, you’d be hard pushed to work out why the label was ever used.

As for fame- I think that a great dichotomy is often at work: many creative people would prefer to stay invisible while seeking attention for what they have created.

What is poetry?

All I know is that poetry reminds us of what we forgot we knew. It links memories that then become routes to places that, through tiredness or forgetfulness, we no longer visit in ourselves; it wakes sensations that we thought lost.

Someone wants to be a poet? Reach people? OK: A poet should first of all realise that their experiences are not unique, even if the intensity with which they feel is extreme. They should also understand that part of being a poet is refreshing language. If it has any “function” in the material sense, then that’s it. I think the Northumbrian poet Tom Pickard put it best. I think it was him who said writing new poetry was akin to cleaning the shit out the rabbit hutch.

Poets should remain indifferent to an audience until the work is finished. At the same time, I’ve always thought it important that if people make the effort to turn up and listen to someone read, the poet should make the effort to present their work as well as they can – and be grateful.

Very few poets can make a living out of the sales of poetry books. Poets live on the by-products of poetry.

Famously Roger, Adrian and yourself all wrote poems about Batman, (printed overleaf) how did this fit into your respective takes on pop?

Adrian’s poem was a homage to the 1960s TV version of Batman and Roger’s was, I think, a homage to A.A. Milne. The Batman I wrote of was the character as portrayed in the early Saturday morning film-serials I saw as a child. There were two serials made, one in the 1940s and the other in the early fifties. I saw them at a local flea-pit called The Cameo.

There was a famous double murder at The Cameo, which was around the corner from the house I grew up in, off Lawrence Road in Wavertree, so I guess Batman is mixed up with all that childhood stuff. In no way was it part of “pop” culture for me.

?

Where are you now, Batman? Now that Aunt Heriot has reported Robin missing And Superman’s fallen asleep in the sixpenny childhood seats?

Where are you now that Captain Marvel’s SHAZAM! echoes round the auditorium, The magicians don’t hear, must all be deaf . . . or dead.

The Purple Monster who came down from The Purple Planet disguised as a man Is wandering aimlessly about the streets With no way of getting back; Sir Galahad’s been strangled by the Incredible Living Trees, Zorro killed by his own sword.

In the junk-ridden, disused hangars Blackhawk’s buried the last of his companions; Rocket Man’s fuel tanks have given out over London.

Though the Monster and the Ape still fight it out In a room where the walls are continually closing No one is watching.

Even Flash Gordon’s been abandoned, A star-wanderer weeping over robots loved

half a universe ago.

My celluloid companions, it’s only a few years Since I first knew you, yet already something in us has faded.

Did we kill you off simply by growing up?

We who made you possible with our unsophisticated minds And with our pocket money And the sixpennies we received by pretending to be good?

Sucked from tiny terraces on Saturday mornings We cheered you on from disaster to disaster, Never imagining how that Terrible Fiend,

that Ghastly Adversary Mr Old Age, would catch you in his deadly trap And come finally to polish you off, His machine gun dripping with years.

HM

Pantomime Poem by Roger McGough.

‘HE’S BEHIND YER!’ chorused the children but the warning came too late.

The monster leaped forward And fastening its teethe into his neck, Tore off the head.

The body fell to the floor ‘MORE’ cried the children ‘MORE, MORE,

MORE

MORE

caroline ward

HOSTAGE

Urban Guerrilla you burst into me machinegunned the old poems stationed at the door for just such a contingency made off with my heart in the getaway car despite a desperate chase by police in armoured cars held it to ransom demanding nothing less than total involvement.

That night a bloodless revolution statues of the old regime toppled in the streets victory-fires lit on every hillside.

BY ADRIAN HENRI (In memoriam Ulrike Meinhof)

Now, in the final shootout you fight on alone at the window of the blazing house I a voluntary hostage bewildered listen to the howl of approaching squad-cars taste the stench of gas grenades as the masked militiamen burst into the room wonder if I’ll miss you .

I Sexual insecurities suck.

Or maybe I would, if I didn’t have them. That And a debilitating Gag reflex.

II Venereal yearnings overcome ‘I should know better’, Hovering rough warmth teases slumbering nerve-endings.

Inner muscles stretch And convulse, Corporeal, and mind-bending.

Nails dig, gouging for the shuddering culmination, The satisfied sigh at the end of a laundry cycle: Warm Wet And always filthier than you expected to come out.

Laundry’s probably not what you want on your mind As you feign enjoyment of a lumbering prick ploughing you.

Cut in with i-pod shuffle’s romantic choice Of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack - am I Hobbit-fucking?

Is good sex An unrealisable quest?

How much longer is this going to III A rollie would have lasted longer.

Nicotine grants me the heady inebriation that you can’t.

The cigarette drops, belligerently like you did, And ash sears the rejected latex impediment, Our scapegoat.

I ejaculate white smoke And leg it.

Please return my bra in the post.

Anon

Policy to Poetry Transfer the knowledge.

Bank the education.

Roll it out, roll it out I tell you across China.

Fill the seven seas with these words these my words and these ways these my ways.

May all be competent efficient competent professional efficient competent Yes. I repeat. Professional competent.

And between us there will be success, I say.

It is our settled will that having settled our will we settle for competence efficiency professionalism.

In place of brokenness and the tenderness (which is learning’s due):

quality’s roar.

This is the policy.

Ours.

Our policy.

This will deliver.

This will deliver up

Standards.

Quality.

And of the rolling out there will be no end.

In place of rest:

efficiency.

In place of beauty:

excellence.

In place of diversity:

national standards.

In place of dancing:

rolling out.

And there, look, in the path of the excellent rollers:

violets. there were […]

a curriculum for excellence, standards for success.

And across the Seven Seas,

across seven, there will be competence between us. And excellence and ceaseless efficiency and professional success.

crushed […] now […]

violets

by Alison Phipps

FIELD-TESTED MUSIC ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take music away from your desk, out of your routine and into the world; you’ll experience something very different. Place amplifies the music I listen to, strange places and excellent music even more so. But this is a bit more complicated than that. This is about Field-Testing. The idea that when you reflect on listening to some music in some places both are transformed.

Writing on the Internet, the space between hearing about a band and hearing the band has been cut; describing a musician’s sound is tedious, largely unnecessary and I try to avoid it. It allows for things like FieldTesting to happen. Over at Coudal.com they’ve been Field-Testing books for years, publishing an almost yearly, fantastic anthology reviewing experiences with books.

Music is different, as one album is more frequently experienced than one book. So in order for music to stamp its boots on your subconscious it has to be really good and the place dramatic and memorable. When wading through my digital record collection some things pop out.

It took a visit to New York and the combination of disorientation and fatigue to allow me to really enjoy the recently unmasked British musician Burial. I really had to listen to his music in the right place, in the right frame of mind, to enjoy it properly.

My first view of New York, from the air, was obscured by an evolutionary biologist who described the scene below as “soupy”—I was unimpressed. A better view, early this summer, was later that afternoon in a friend’s echoey apartment in which we agreed that the rooftop party might have to be cancelled due to the weather. The atmosphere was made much more memorable with the introduction of Burial to the scene; he sound-tracked blank stares out of huge windows as a lightning storm was passing over the Brooklyn Bridge, and dismissal of the storm’s severity was punctuated by a lightning strike too close for comfort.

Friends washed up off of the streets into the tense, humid warmth that complements Burial’s music so well.

Above being a descendant of dubreggae and two-step, Burial’s music is grey, stormy, and silhouetted, painted with long strokes of treble and bass. Burial respects the sparseness of every city at night and presents a ghostly and almost Gothic space—somehow this is glorious. Out in that American field I had time and the perfect space to appreciate Burial’s subtlety, something that can’t be done in the comfort of home in South-West England.

Mike Smith

by Mark Fisher The discussion of hauntology that has been going on for the past three or years in relation to music has been preoccupied with time: broken time, time out of joint, dyschronia. In the mottled crackle of Burial, Philip Jeck, William Basinski and Ghost Box we hear spectres of prematurely curtailed possibilities, futures that never came to be. What these spectres haunt is the end of history, the postmodern impasse where nothing happens forever, where pastiche and recombination have replaced the new.

But hauntology must also concern space as well as time. It is spaces that are haunted; space in which wounded time makes itself felt.

The spatial equivalent of the end of history is the cloned space of the shopping mall and the retail chain, where space is annihilated, landmarks eliminated. Just as, faced with the latest pastiched confection, it is impossible to know what year you are in, so, entering into these cloned nonspaces, you lose track of what town you are in. You could be in any year, you could be in any place. Such nonspaces pro-

duce their own pang, the longing for a different kind of spatiality.

You can hear this pang in the music of Burial, which is possessed by an extraordinary sense of space. This isn’t only a question of the production, which recalls Martin Hannett as much as King Tubby or Basic Channel. It is also about the images the music evokes – very vivid audiovignettes of South London this decade. Burial’s tracks are like Edward Hopper sound paintings of London after the rave, showing a city populated by ex-ravers gone to seed, smiley faces degraded into Nigel Cooke’s dejected vegetables. His music lingers in the spaces that are the correlates of the disaffected condition that has defined London’s formerly vital subcultures this decade - a long comedown after all the highs of the 90s, a serotonin crash into antidepressants. Burial takes us on a tour of all day cafes and night buses glowing like diving bells in the undersea murk of the early hours.

With Burial’s debut LP in particular, it was as if you were hearing double: both the current dereliction and the former collective ecstasy.

What you are attuned to is a specific

sense of place, as opposed to the so called ‘third place’ – the space that is neither home nor work, but which combines elements of both.

The third place is a site of consumer convalescence or laptop-enabled immaterial labour which could be anywhere. Burial’s ‘In McDonald’s’, from his second LP, Untrue, relocates the spatially-indifferent multinational capsule of the corporate franchise in a specific city: London, once again the capital of Capital.

Formerly the sooty, smoggy centre of industrial capital, now the main hub of cybercapital.

What haunts Burial’s London is not only the past but the possible catastrophic futures pressing in on the present like floodwater against the Thames Barrier. Speculation about global warming has turned Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World from surrealist science fiction into a plausible projection.

Burial sounds as if it has been recorded in an underwater city where the disaster has already happened, as if the future has leaked back into now, and we are plunged into the submerged spaces of a London to come.

by

OWEN HATHERLEY

FROM MINITECH

MODERNISM TO THE

POVERTY ASPIRATION : OF

BUILDING THE POST-WAR UNIVERSITY

I blame Stanley Kubrick. When he and his team were looking through architectural magazines in search of locations for A Clockwork Orange, they settled upon Thamesmead, a mini new town at the edge of South-East London as the home of the marauding droogs. For the Ludovico Institute where young Alex is ‘cured’, they used the lecture theatre of Brunel University in Uxbridge; again at the furthest edge of London, this time to the West. The associations here condemned, seemingly for all eternity, these social and educational projects to serve as synonyms for a society of casual violence and ‘totalitarian’ social control. Just as several buildings in London have been tagged in urban legends as ‘Hitler’s headquarters’ post-conquest, so too are universities assumed to the Ludovico Institute while estates are pejoratively linked to Kubrick’s vision of ‘Municipal Flatblock B, Wilsonway.’ One almost wishes that Brunel would be proud of this unwanted fame, to announce itself ‘as seen in the famous A Clockwork Orange!’ But most of all, the film served to confirm some age-old prejudices of the British, against Modernism, against ‘science’, against artiness, against the future, and inevitably, against reinforced concrete.

It is difficult to imagine the climate of optimism, soft socialism and benevolent technology in which these places were conceived. But let’s try.

This is the Britain of Tony Benn’s Ministry of Technology, or ‘MiniTech’, of the abortive ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ that Harold Wilson claimed he would harness to Socialism, and which collapsed at the end of the 1960s in a mess of racist immigration acts, cheap system building, and above all, obsessively balanced budgets and fiscal conservatism. The expansion of the universities, to serve more than the children of the haute bourgeoisie, necessarily had its own architectural counterpart. And unlike many (if by no means all) of the council housing projects of the 1960s, these were mostly bespoke complexes, thoughtfully and intelligently planned by the middle class technocratic intelligentsia for the middle class technocratic intelligentsia, rather than for an increasingly suspicious proletariat. The finest of them all, the masterpiece, the campus by which all others should be judged, is the University of East Anglia (Fig.1). Try to ignore the hopelessly pallid 1990s and 2000s structures that append the bus stop, and stroll through the walkways that connect the various laboratories and lecture theatres – then, down the spiral staircases, are the halls of residence. Justly famous, these ziggurats – by Denys Lasdun’s firm, but rather incredibly, largely designed by the ‘humanist’, ‘organic’, ‘vernacular’ architect Edward Cullinan – are truly astonishing structures. The glistening aggregate of their concrete and the glare of their glass walls suggest a fearlessly open society, the tiers of the blocks eventually culminating in rabbit-filled fields and a lake, a bucolic brutalism that seems to offer the tentative outlines of a new world.

Of course, the buildings are Fig. 1 alleged to be the cause of the (equally alleged) high suicide rate at UEA. Nonetheless, Lasdun and Cullinan’s complex suggests what new universities could achieve in a time of class mobility that was unprecedented then, and remains unmatched. The most famous University buildings of the 1960s, for better or worse, were those in Oxbridge, indicating the eventual failure of the attempt to wrest education from the old school tie. Leslie Martin, Stirling & Gowan, Alison and Peter Smithson and Arne Jacobsen designed halls, colleges and workshops for the old edifices of privilege that gave them a conveniently modern face. The buildings have been rewarded with listing and conservation, despite some hysterical attacks by the likes of Roger Scruton, or more famously David Watkin, who rather impressively saw the ethos of totalitarianism embodied in Leslie Martin’s warm, Alvar Aalto-inspired moderate Modernism. So here, we shall concentrate for the most part on the unlisted and the provincial, the places where the failure and success of Bennite Modernity can be measured.

Here, new collectivities could be built that didn’t have to deal with the poverty and institutionalised inertia that so often condemned the rehousing of the working class to mere stacking of slums. There’s a fascinating variety in these places, no

matter how much they may jointly suffer from a flip dismissal based on their common deployment of a much-maligned material.

One place that has been claimed erroneously as the Ludovico Institute is the 1960s section of the University of Leeds. The UEA’s strange combination of primordial and modern was here replaced with a confident, Constructivist-inflected series of walkways and exposed pipes, which were aptly used by the Designers Republic as emblems of Yorkshire techno in their sleeves for Warp Records’ 10th anniversary series. Sadly, the concrete was painted white, as part of the irrational horror of all things ferroconcrete. The many educational works of Sir Basil Spence, long a hate figure for the aesthetes of the New Right, have a calm intensity that is far too often taken for a mere aggressiveness. One of the less famous, at Southampton, is placed in a campus formerly made up of some third-rate redbrick offcuts from the office of Giles Gilbert Scott, executed by the wonderfully named local firm of Gutteridge & Gutteridge. Spence’s structures have a certain haughty disdain for their surroundings – one of them, the Faraday Building, seems a sort of architectural joke, a tower rising with a preposterous cantilever out of a grim conglomeration of mock Tudor. The lower-rise blocks, in the usual vaguely sylvan setting, are a fascinating combination of industrial and whimsical, despite suffering from decades of neglect. The Faraday Building is, disgracefully, currently being considered for demolition.

London has the same varieties and the same problems in microcosm. One of the lesser known, but quite stunning edifices of MiniTech Modernism is the former Engineering Building of the Central London Polytechnic, its delightfully positivist handle now replaced under the blander rubric of the University of Westminster. Designed by the criminally underrated practice of Lyons Israel Ellis, a finishing school for ‘angry young architects’ like Stirling and the Smithsons, this is another example of that unlikely genre, English Constructivism. The arrangement of jutting lecture theatres and angular towers evokes the 1920s work of Konstantin Melnikov, though here with the expanses of glass and precise finishes that the Soviets merely dreamed of. It’s somehow all squeezed into a tiny stretch of New Cavendish Street, tightly packed and full of tension; Alphaville architecture, slightly paranoid but thrilling. Its proximity to the BT Tower, for decades kept off maps, gives it extra Cold War resonance.

In Bloomsbury, of course, everything is dominated by Senate House, a bracing edifice erected in the 1930s at the behest of William Beveridge. Charles Holden’s tower certainly overshadows his own pallid, post-war neo-Georgian buildings for Birkbeck, ULU and SOAS, leaving the only aesthetic competition to be provided by Denys Lasdun, in the form of the Institute of Education and the SOAS Extension.

Like the Westminster Engineering block, there’s little sense in these buildings of the ville radieuse, the fusing of nature and futurism, that can be found at UEA. However, they form an enclave of sorts—especially the IOE, an incredibly complex structure which ranges from the odd combination of elegantly Miesian glass and domineering concrete service towers that face the street, to the more articulated megastructure which faces SOAS and Senate House. Here too, there is a sense in which the building is wasted on its owners – the complex boasts some of the most vertiginous, inspired staircases one would ever want to descend, blocked off no doubt

for reasons of security. Perhaps the only time that the building really uses its abundance of public space – the terraces, walkways and plazas – is when the SWP use it for their annual Marxism fest, where suddenly it’s bedecked with banners and full of activity.

The educational buildings of the 1960s-70s became as discredited as the Wilsonian compromises that brought them into being, but that could hardly have excused the truly astonishing failure of imagination, idealism and simple tectonic facility that followed in the 1980s and 90s. Practically every university or college had its halls of residences designed in the Thatcher-Major years. They were generally made in a stock-brick ‘vernacular’ with meanly miniscule windows and a total lack of any architectural, let alone social ambition. There isn’t even the excuse of a social disaster, a Ronan Point or a Broadwater farm to explain this aesthetic cowardice, merely a received idea of disdain for technocracy and modernity. If you want to see this non-style at its mind-numbing worst, go to New Cross Road and survey the halls built for Goldsmiths College in the 1990s, Loring Hall and Dean House.

Two stockbrick edifices seemingly competing with each other to be the most bland, they seem more appropriate to the outskirts of Reading, than one of the most historically rich and aesthetically complex cities in the world.

Things have thankfully changed in some respects since. Obsequies no longer have to be paid to an imaginary vernacular. Yet some of the university expansions that accompanied the New Labour campaign to introduce the 18-21 set to a future of crippling debt resulted in architecture far stranger and more intimidating than the alleged fontbrutality of the 1960s’ New Universities. Take Edward Cullinan’s Terminal Beach for the University of East London, on the poisoned, abortively gentrified former Royal Docks (Fig. 2). This is a linear strip running parallel to the runway of City Airport and the now-purposeless Lake of Cyprus dock. For all Cullinan’s drably liberal intentions, this exponent of the ‘organic’ has, since his tenure as an assistant to Denys Lasdun in the 1960s, consistently created stunning non-places, outside of time and history. UEL’s housing pods are coloured in a childish relational aesthetics manner to look as bright and jolly as possible. The expressionistic angles of the classrooms, with their ‘simulated trading floors’, are all bracingly desolate - feeling not so much like the edge of London but the edge of the world. After a place like this, the more urban interventions by various architectural showmen—Will Alsop at Goldsmiths, adding an extraneous squiggle to a sober glass block, or Daniel Libeskind’s new building for Metropolitan thrusting pointlessly

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into Holloway Road like a crashed spacecraft—seem positively normal; and for all their extremism, neither manages to approach Cullinan’s awesome (if no doubt inadvertent) Ballardian-Blairite sterility.

Yet as a pointer to where we are now, we could note the new buildings currently being completed for the University of Nottingham. Now that universities are once again being monitored for ‘extremism’, we should note that this is the university where Hicham Yezza was shipped to the anti-terrorist squad on the basis of printing out some course reading for a student. The new campus, designed by the ex-Foster practice MAKE, is a litany of Blairite gestures: the shiny pink cladding is a reference to the local redbrick workers’ housing, there are sundry nods to everything from the long-destroyed local industries to the particular effect the buildings will induce in young business students, and so forth. In a hilarious rhetorical demolition of its central feature, a sculpture unctuously Fig. 2 named ‘Aspire’, the blogger Douglas Murphy (www.youyouidiot. blogspot.com) lists the vacuities.

There’s a definite cultural aversion to the idea that the viewer/user might be able to use their imagination and make their own associations and connections with an object in space. For example, the Jewish Museum in Berlin is festooned with cards and panels telling you exactly what the uncomfortably sloping floor is supposed to remind you of, and what you should be thinking about that...this corporate symbolism is everywhere - cladding materials that ‘represent’ the absent industry of a site, everything has to represent some kind of ‘value’. Even in this current project, MAKE talk about ‘the theme of nature being drawn through the site’, primarily because there are two ponds nearby. This method of minimal ‘referentiality’ should be compared to the naively heroic abstraction of post-war public art and architecture, with the positive universality of their solutions, and should be

It’s only fitting that what is essentially a very large, shiny column that supports nothing is considered the best physical evocation of the spirit of contemporary higher education.

seen as an entirely vacuous gesture of lending what are negatively generic solutions the veneer of a contextual relationship...The sculpture sits in a campus that is home to computing, education and business studies, and the name Aspire, rather than evoking some noble human spirit of endeavour and self-betterment, is actually much more like a barked ideological order - like ENJOY in the former Millennium Dome, the spatial imperative is to ASPIRE! WANT! ACHIEVE! GET!

Here then, is where the story ends. For now modernism appears to have triumphed as the expression of the contemporary university. But it is a modernism where the egalitarian aims of the MiniTech era have been replaced by colleges with in-built trading floors. It is also marked by a prevalent contempt for the intelligence and brightly ephemeral gestures that fail to obscure their function as edifices of enterprise and catastrophic debt. The new university of today may appear to be far from the idealism-in-ferroconcrete of 40 years ago with its dirigiste and totalitarian associations - but a Kubrickian apparatus of student surveillance, ever-more paranoid security and outbreaks of mere barbarity is more at home in MAKE’s forced jollity than it ever was in Brunel’s Ludovico Institute.

by wee keat cheoh winner of the LSE Arts photo prize 2007/8

This piece uses the opening sequence of the animated film Metropolis by Rintaro and Katsuhiro ‘tomo (2001) to discuss the political implications of the film and its references back to two earlier Metropolises (Fritz Lang’s silent film, 1927; Osamu Tezuka’s comic book, 1949) and to urban projects, architectures, and social conditions contemporary with them. It makes the assertion that the final version of the story speaks of a contemporary geopolitics—which reduces populations to a condition of bare life; as once did fascism.

The city is central to the imagery of Japanese animated film – or anime, and cities in this branch of popular culture generally come to a sticky end: they are blown sky high. This is often paralleled with the destruction or transformation of an iconic work of architecture or a human (or quasi-human) body at the centre of the apocalypse. This is a phenomenon many have linked to the trauma of the Second World War or to more general modern traumas as they impact upon Japan (Lamarre 2008,

Murakami 2005, Napier 1996), but the threat of urban destruction did not originate in anime, nor end there. There are, for instance, numerous Korean examples of animated film based on the premise of apocalypse. The connection of the city with apocalypse goes back in cinema until at least the 1920s, and one of the more intriguing pieces of apocalyptic anime finds its origins ultimately in that era.

The animated rendition of Metropolis from 2001, directed by Rintaro (the pseudonym of Hayashi Shigeyuki) refers back to two earlier Metropolises. The first of these of course is Fritz Lang’s silent film of 1926; the second is a comic book by the grandfather of Japanese comics, Osamu Tezuka (1949). Each of these stories engages with specific imagery of architecture and urban form, and the films in particular engage with visions of the city native to the first half of the 20th century.

This is apparent from the very beginning of Rintaro’s animation. The film’s opening sequence takes us through a succes-

sion of fragmented images from the top of a towering building, through the inauguration ceremony at its base, draws back along a central boulevard until it comes to rest at a shot which places the building and the cluster of towers around it in the context of the city. This single shot, summing up the opening sequence, superimposes visions of the city taken from at least five sources, including Lang’s film, rivening it deep into intertextual territory.

One of these images is the city we see stretched out at the foot of the tower. Nowhere in print do the filmmakers admit to this, and they have manipulated it somewhat, but with its central core dominated by tall buildings, wide divided boulevard, triumphal arch (now orientalized and emblazoned with half of a rising sun), raised elliptical platform in the centre, and surrounding blocks of mediumrise modernist housing – this is starkly reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s City for Three Million Inhabitants, an unrealized urban project from 1923. It appears here perhaps refracted through

the form of Stuyvesant Town in New York City (the film-makers did visual research in Manhattan). The City for Three Million epitomizes the utopian striving typical of modernism in architecture, and the filmmakers make use of it here in their depiction of a future city gone terribly wrong. For at the centre of the animated metropolis stands a building which both structures the city and threatens it. Distinct from the array of cruciform towers which Le Corbusier had placed at the heart of his city, this is a single, cruciform skyscraper, a fusion of art-deco and high technology. Named the Ziggurat, it is nominally a species of pyramid; but it is a cross in plan, topped with gargoyles and flanked by flying buttresses. It thus recalls the two most prominent buildings from Lang’s cinematic city: the New Tower of Babel and the Gothic Cathedral. The animators in fact modeled this architecture on Hugh Ferris’ drawings of New York (‘tomo 2001) – in all likelihood one of Lang’s sources too (Cohen 1995) The very next shot after the title image is from the point of view of the building, looking down at the city below, which shows us that the modernist city is hemmed in by a skyline borrowed from Manhattan in the 1940s; here it is as though Le Corbusier’s city has been set down in place of Central Park. There is however another source apparent, one which sits rather disturbingly in a cartoon film. This is the obvious reference to the scenographic designs Albert Speer created as Hitler’s chief architect.

Given this, a second reading of the central boulevard emerges - consistent with the choice of a public ritual for the opening shot, the marching crowds on the central boulevard, and the nationalist imagery of the rising sun that emblazons the arch: Speer’s own grand boulevard and triumphal arch for Berlin.

So the animated Metropolis is caught between the cities of international socialism and Modernism (stretched out below) and (towering above) those of national socialism and industrial capitalism which Speer and Ferriss monumentalized. This overlaying of images might be dismissed as just a well-informed pastiche of sources contemporary to Lang and Tezuka, employed as fodder for the animators’ imagination. But it is more than that, for the content of the animated film concerns political overthrow, global domination, citizens divided by ontological status, problematisation of identity, and apocalyptic conflict – in short, a discourse of political crises related to notions of community, identity, and sovereignty.

In fact each of the Metropolis tales articulate political crises from their own times in architecture and urban form.

In the case of Lang’s film, the figures of Tower of Babel and Gothic cathedral were implicated in a contemporary debate over the most “German” form of urban structure – in effect a rejection of the American model of skyscraper (Neumann 1994). At the end of Lang’s film, the cathedral forms the backdrop for the immolation of an evil, alien creature that threatens the stability of the city.

This robot is associated with technology, wealth, and industry and also, remarkably, with the oriental spaces encapsulated within a dark and twisting labyrinth that threatens to undermine the shining modern edifices of the city (an orientalism even more pronounced in the novel version of the film, by Lang’s scriptwriter Thea von Harbou). With the robot and her creator dead, a divided community is finally reunited and its leader’s legitimacy restored. For Siegfried Krackauer,

who also compared Lang’s immense and highly choreographed set-pieces to the Nuremburg rallies, this conclusion forewarned of—but in some sense was complicit in the coming rise of— the Nazi party (Kracauer 2001). Thus the city in Lang’s film speaks of a crisis in community and political leadership which, it is implied, can be resolved by expunging the foreign from the city.

Tezuka’s comic speaks of another complex of national identity, another promise of its resolution – though this time a promise already broken. In contrast to Lang’s city, Tezuka’s is a horizontal, fragmented patchwork; while there are tall buildings, no single one dominates the city. Consistent with this, there is no central authority holding together this metropolis – or none that we ever see. But this city does have what, in the context of Japan at the time, was considered a symbol of authority and sovereignty: the sun. The story hinges on the pollution of the face of the sun by a criminal pretender to power, a pollution which he plans to use to control the world and whose effects lead ultimately to the partial destruction of the metropolis. One of these effects is the creation of a robot, though one more ambiguous than Lang’s: hermaphrodite; not evil but, like so many Japanese monsters, just misunderstood; and in fact misunderstanding her/his own self, believing he/she is human.

The work of Tezuka, especially at this time, often spoke of collective pathos (Natsume 1997) and while the explicit theme of this Metropolis was (as with Lang’s film) the danger of technology, another concern is implied: the fragility of Japanese sovereignty, with an Emperor stripped of divine status and ruling over only a patchwork of (physical and political) ruins, occupied by a foreign army and poised between two competing superpowers.

At the end of the last century, Rintaro and his scriptwriter ‘tomo were to pick up several elements from Lang’s film and Tezuka’s comic and in Metropolis throw them together in a form which spoke of a more recent crisis. As we’ve seen, the film overlays cities which each embody one form or other of totalizing vision, and pierces them with the twinned towers of Babel and

Gothic cathedral: united in the figure of the Ziggurat. This anchoring point extends down into a bustling and colourful subterrain, Lang’s own labyrinth rethought as an unfocused, fragmented city, divided rigidly into Zones but within those limits lawless. This area is populated by disenfranchised humans and inhuman robots living, to steal a phrase from Walter Benjamin, “a life lived in the village at the foot of the castle” (quoted in Agamben 1998, p. 53). Power in this city is focused on the Ziggurat, and it is a power charged with national identity. For the animators transport Tezuka’s superweapon from the comic book (where he had placed it on a distant island) to the exact centre of the city, within the tip of the Ziggurat; and through it the city is refocused on a sun Tezuka had darkened and pushed off to the side. This recentring in the end brings the city itself into its own crosshairs, and the film concludes with the destruction of city, tower, and Rintaro’s own version of the robot. She is, like Tezuka’s robot, unsure of her own identity, and in fact falls to her death repeating a question which has haunted her throughout the film and which is echoed again in the last shot on the screen: Who – am – I? A closer look at the contents of these tales in the context of their times bear out this interpretation. The final, animated, Metropolis is a global city caught up in tensions related to a resurgent nationalism and a problematic relationship of individual to community, and of communities to each other. In this it shares much with today’s Japan, which continues to struggle to come to terms with its international role and its own definition as a nation. These ambiguities can be traced back to the post-war era under the Pax Americana, Japan’s earlier legacy of fascism, and indeed a deeper modern problematisation of identity and sovereignty with which the image of the city, and architecture, seem to be bound up. The overlaying of cities with which we began turns out in the end to have set up a fissile condition, as the utopias built into the imaginary city prepare to detonate each other.

References Metropolis (film) UFA production ; director, Fritz Lang ; screenplay, Thea von Harbou. New York, NY : Kino on Video, 2002. Tezuka, Osamu Metoroporisu, (comic book) Tokyo: Kodansha, 1979 Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis-Metoroporisu (animated film) TriStar Pictures; screenplay by Katsuhiro Otomo ; directed by Rintaro. Culver City, Calif. : Columbia TriStar Home Video, 2002 Harbou, Thea von. Metropolis. (novel) Boston : Gregg Press, 1975. “‘tomo Katsuhiro x RintarO: the Making of Metropolis,” interview in ‘tomo Katsuhiro, Metoroporisu (screenplay), Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2001.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998 Cohen, Jean-Louis.

Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge 1893-1960, Paris: Flammarion/Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1995. Ferriss, Hugh. The Metropolis of Tomorrow, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Krackauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004. Lamarre, Thomas. “Born of Trauma: Akira and Capitalist Modes of Destruction”, in positions, east asia cultures critique New York: Duke University Press, spring 2008, p. 131-156. Murakami, Takashi.

“Earth In My Window”, Linda Hoaglund, transl., in Little Boy : The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture / ed. Takashi Murakami. New York : Japan Society : New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, c2005. Napier, Susan. “Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira”, in Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture, John Whittier Treat, ed., Honolulu: University of Hawai’i press, 1996 Natsume, Fusanosuke. Manga to“SensO” (Comics and “War”). Tokyo: KOdansha, 1997. Neumann, Dietrich. “The Urbanistic Vision in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis”, in Dancing on the Volcano: essays on the culture of the Weimar Republic, Thomas W. Kniesche et. al., Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994.

Autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and with what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities.

Walter Benjamin, One Way Street (1932) ‘Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city’, wrote Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, remembering his childhood in old Berlin. In his case, it was nursemaids; in mine, my mother. She planted within me, never to be eradicated, a conviction of the fateful pleasures to be enjoyed and the enormous anxieties to be overcome in discovering the city.

Every excursion we made together was an immense labour, a strenuous and fraught journey to a treacherous destination: we waited for buses that never came, were marshalled into queues that never grew shorter, walked down endless streets in the hot sun. Our destinations were also terrible. The tower of London, Hampton Court and Madame Tussaud’s were theatres of cruelty: here was the exact spot upon which Anne Boleyn was beheaded; this was the gallery along which Catherine Howard ran desperately to beg Henry the Eighth for mercy; here was the Chamber of Horrors with its electric chair.

There were also the crowds of that first, weary, hot, London summer. I had never seen crowds like those. The insolence, the promiscuity of the crowd, jostling my mother and myself, seemed like a vast yawn of indifference. The stale suits and rayon dresses brushed up against us, bodies against bodies. The air seemed yellow with a kind of blasé fatigue. My mother tried to keep her hat tipped forward, her little veil in place, her corsage of soft suede anenomies – blue, rose-red and purple – crisply pinned against the navy crepe of her dress, but I felt the vulnerability of her pretensions exposed, and together we seemed so insignificant and lost.

I saw and I snatched a pound note from beneath the feet that tramped across a mosaic floor in the food hall of our local department store. I was offered the forbidden chewing gum by departing American soldiers.

We took boat trips down the Thames. And on one occasion there were

fireworks: the crowd swarmed darkly, softly, beneath the trees.

There was a hiss, and gold and white and magenta stars burst silently towards us, to melt away just out of reach.

Our visits to the Zoo and to Kensington Gardens expressed some longing for what was so absent from the stony streets where we lived and wandered: a memory of the rural life we had left behind. Walter Benjamin recalled the park as a scene of bourgeois domestic harmony: There were serpentine paths near the lake and...benches…at the edge of the sand pit with its ditches, where toddlers dig or stand sunk in thought until bumped by a playmate or roused by the voice of a nursemaid from the bench of command; there she sits stern and studious, reading her novel and keeping the child in check while hardly raising an eyelid until, her labour done, she changes places with the nurse at the at the other end of the bench, who is holding the baby between her knees and knitting.

Old, solitary men found their way here, paying due honour, amid these scatterbrained womenfolk, among the shrieking children, to the serious side of life: the newspaper.

And perhaps my mother hoped to find a lost tranquillity in the green vista with its lines of trees in faultless perspective. The flowers and especially the spring blossoms, like all flowers in cities, appeared as a luxury item set against the urban fabric.

Rather than as an invasion of nature or a rural enclave; they symbolised some other, idealised world.

The zoo was a very different experience, for there again were the crowds, jostling to stare at the infant gorilla and the apes.

This was an old-time crowd, more of an eighteenth-century

‘mob’ come to stare at whatever exotic spectacle was on offer – a hanging, lunatics at bedlam. Screams of laughter greeted the antics of the chimpanzees, those caricatures of humanity. Family groups approached the tiger’s cage with a frisson of fear. Always for me, the great question was whether to brave the reptile house, where huge snakes lay so creepily still. Their malevolent, horrible inertia gave me nightmares, yet I could never resist. ‘I won’t look’ – but I always did.

The reptile house was for me that Minotaur’s chamber cited by so many writers who liken the city to a labyrinth. Benjamin’s Minotaur was ‘three-headed’, being the three prostitutes in a small Parisian brothel. In either case, fear mixed with an obscure or suspect pleasure lay at the heart of the city’s secret courtyards and alleyways.

In Benjamin’s adolescence, the Berlin cafés played their part in introducing him to the world of pleasure that is one layer in the geology of the social city, and years later he remembered the names of those cafes like an incantation: the Romanisches Cafe, the Viktoria, the West End Café. These salons were neither exactly public nor private space and yet partook of both, and in them bohemia and the bourgeoisie mingled as part of the quintessential urban spectacle: One of the most elementary and indispensable diversions of the citizen of a great metropolis—wedged, day in, day out, in the structure of his office and family amid an infinitely variegated social environment—is to plunge into another world, the more exotic the better. Hence the bars haunted by artists and criminals. The distinction between the two, from this point of view, is slight. The history of the Berlin coffeehouses is largely that of different strata of the public, those who first conquered the floor being obliged to make way for others gradually pressing forward, and thus to ascend the stage.

There were of course no comparable cafés in London in the mid 1950s, when I was myself of an age to explore the city alone; coffee bars and jazz clubs offering a poor substitute. Soho drinking clubs were barred to me, in any case unknown. I nevertheless roamed London, solitary, engaged in that urban search for mysteries, extremes and revelations, a quest quite other than that of the wanderer through the natural landscape: a search less hallowed, yet no less spiritual.

Christine Mallet Joris’ Into the Labyrinth was the title of the second lesbian novel I ever read (the first being, of course, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness). Into the Labyrinth was French, and, unlike Radclyffe Hall’s Edwardian Romance, fitted precisely into my aimless, desperate walks and rides round London’s streets, squares and inner suburbs. The heroine, a schoolgirl, discovers love on a house in a street called, romantically – and inappropriately – the Rampant des Beguines (The Rampart of Nuns).

The adventures and sufferings attendant upon her sexual initiation take place in the bedrooms, hotels, the theatres and cafés of a great city – a city like a magic set of boxes, with, inside each both, a smaller and more secret one.

This recurring image, of the city as a maze, as having a secret centre, contradicts that other and equally common metaphor for the city of labyrinthine and centreless. Even if the labyrinth does have a centre, one image of the discovery of the city, is not so much finally reaching this centre, but of an endlessly circular journey, and of retracing the same pathways over time.

Yet one never traces the same pathway twice, for the city is in a constant process of change, and thus becomes dreamlike and magical, yet also terrifying in the way a dream can be. Life and its certainties slither away from underfoot.

This continual flux and change is one of the most disquieting aspects of the modern city. We expect permanence and stability from the city. Its monuments are solid stone and

embody a history that goes back many generations. Rome was known as the ‘Eternal City’. Yet, far from being eternal, in the sense of being outside time, Rome like all cities, is deeply timebound. Although its history gives it its character, and a patina of durability, in modernity especially the city becomes ever more changing. That which we thought was the most permanent dissolves as rapidly as the kaleidoscopic spectacle of the crowds and vehicles that pass through its streets. As Siegfried Kracauer wrote of Berlin in the 1920s: If some street blocks seem to be created for eternity, then the present day Kurfurstendam is the embodiment of empty, flowing time in which nothing is allowed to last...Many buildings have been shorn of the ornaments which formed a kind of bridge to yesterday...Only the marble staircases that glimmer through the doorways preserve memories: those of the pre-war world.

Walter Benjamin noted this constant destruction and replacement in his inventory of the cafés he had once frequented. The Viktoria Cafe no longer exists. Its place – on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden – has been taken by one of the noisiest luxury cafes of new Berlin, against which the earlier one, however luxurious it may have been in its day, stands out with all the magic of the age of chandeliers, mirrored walls and plush comfort.’

Even if the building itself – a cafe, hotel or department store – survives, its life may have long departed. At the turn of the century, the original Vienna cafes, possessed an astonishing intellectual and bohemian life. Today they are almost empty, and dust floats down the bars of sunshine that reveal worn velvet and threadbare carpet, while a bad-tempered waitress surveys her deserted realm.

The London of the 2000s, for all the destruction that has occurred, is a livelier place than gloomy 1950s London. Today I am nevertheless sometimes conscious of a nostalgia for that vanished city: for the hushed interior spaces of long-defunct department stores with their carpeted trying-on rooms; for the French provision stores of Soho, replaced first by stripshows, later by fashion boutiques; but most of all for the very gloom and shabbiness now banished by gentrification, redevelopment and commercialisation of leisure. It felt safe, and as you wandered through the streets you sensed always that pervasive English privacy, of lives veiled by lace curtains, of a prim respectability hiding strange secrets behind those inexpressive Earls Court porticoes.

In my mid teens I was unfamiliar with the writings of Benjamin, but I intuitively identified with an urban consciousness of which his reminiscences are one of the most beautiful examples. This consciousness had been developed by the dandies and the ‘flâneurs’ (strollers, loiterers) of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. They relished the kaleidoscope of urban public life and had created from it a new aesthetic, perceiving a novel kind of

beauty in streets, factories and urban blight. In the 1930s, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss discovered this beauty in an even more intense form in the Latin American cities he visited. He wrote that although ‘São Paulo was said at the time to be an ugly town...I never thought São Paulo was ugly; it was a “wild town” as are all American towns.’ This quality of ‘wildness’ was, Levi-Strauss felt, due to exaggerated and surreal contrasts. Extremes of wealth and poverty, of enjoyment and misery, made an essential contribution to this perception of the city. It was just those things and the awful about city life that constituted its seduction, its peculiar beauty.

What Lévi-Strauss found strange and evocative about the cities of the New World was their premature decrepitude, the incongruity of concrete skyscrapers alongside shanty towns, of Victorian Gothic churches jumbled up with bleak warehouses, creating a stone landscape as melancholy as it was striking.

His perception, like that of the dandies, ‘makes strange’ the familiar and disregarded aspects of city life. It inverts our values: what we once see as marginal becomes the essence of city life and that which makes it truly beautiful, even if its beauty is a beauty of ugliness.

This new definition of meaning places the underside or ‘Other’ of city existence at the centre of consciousness. The nineteenth century Parisian flâneur did not care about the pomp of the ‘official’, public city being created by Napoleon III and Baron Haussman. It was the trivial, fragmented aspects of street life that appealed to him.

Lévi-Strauss was a latter day flâneur who discovered in the streets of Sao Paulo and Chicago, a heartrending nostalgia not for the past but for the future. Their street canyons and windswept vistas suggested a suggested a lost future that was never to be, and ached with the yearning of human aspirations destined ever to fall short of the grandiose hopes that inspired them.

This sophisticated urban consciousness, which reached a high point in central Europe in the early twentieth century, was an essentially male consciousness. Sexual unease and the pursuit of sexuality outside the constraints of the family were two of its major preoccupations.

This in itself made women’s very presence in cities a problem. The city offers untrammelled sexual experience; in the city the forbidden – what is most feared and desired – becomes possible. Woman is present in cities as temptress, as whore, as fallen woman, as lesbian, but also as virtuous womanhood in danger, as heroic womanhood who triumphs over temptation and tribulation. Writers such as Benjamin concentrate on their own experience of strangeness in the city, on their own longing and desires, but many writers more definitely and clearly posed the presence of women as a problem of order, partly because their presence symbolised the promise of sexual adventure. This promise was converted into a general moral and political threat.

Nineteenth-century planning reports, government papers and journalism created an interpretation of urban experience as a new ver-

sion of Hell. It would be even possible to describe the emergent town-planning movement – a movement that has changed our cities almost beyond recognition – as an organised campaign to exclude women, children, and other disruptive elements – the working class, the poor, and minorities – from this infernal urban space altogether.

Sexuality was only one source of threatening ambiguity and disorder in the city. The industrial city became a crucible of intense and unnerving contrasts. The hero (or less often the heroine) of urban literature was lured by the astonishing wealth and opportunity, threatened by the crushing poverty and despair of city life. Escape and entrapment, success and disaster offered heightened, exaggerated scenarios of personal triumph or loss of identity.

There was another contradictory aspect of city life. The sociologist Max Weber argued that the western city developed a typical form of organisation: democracy. Feudal lords found that they were unable to retain their hold over their vassals, bondsmen and serfs once these had settled in cities. It was in the western late medieval city that men and women for the first time came together as individuals rather than as members of a kin group, clan or feudal entourage. The western city evolved political organisations which displaced existing paternalistic and patriarchal forms, and so the way was opened both to individualism and to democracy.

By the nineteenth century this had become contradictory. Commentators and reformers of that period claimed to value individualism and democracy, but as cities grew, the mob became a revolutionary threat. The dangers seemed especially clear in American cities, already becoming for Europeans a paradigm of all that was new.

Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to voice the heightened paranoid fear of the crowd, reporting that: The lowest classes in these vast cities are a rabble more dangerous even than that of the European towns. The very lowest are the freed Negroes, condemned by law and opinion to a hereditary state of degradation and wretchedness. Then, there is a crowd of Europeans driven by misfortune of misbehaviour to the shores of the New World; such men carry our worst vices to the United States.

As he saw it, it was the ‘size of some American cities and especially the nature of their inhabitants’ that constituted a danger, even ‘threatening the future of the democratic republics of the New World’. He predicted that the new urban crowd would destroy those infant republics ‘unless their government succeeds in creating an armed force...capable of suppressing their excesses’.

There were women as well as men in the urban crowd. Indeed, the crowd was increasingly invested with feminine characteristics, while retaining its association with criminals and minorities. The threatening masses were described in such terms as hysterical, or in images of feminine instability and sexuality, as a flood or a swamp.

Like women, crowds were liable to rush to extremes of emotion.

As the right-wing theorist of the crowd, Gustave Le Bon, put it,

‘Crowds are like the sphinx of ancient fable; it is necessary to arrive at a solution to the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.’ At the heart of the urban labyrinth lurked not the Minotaur, a bull-like male monster, but the female Sphinx, the ‘strangling one’, who was so called because she strangled all those who could not answer her riddle: female sexuality, womanhood out of control, lost nature, loss of identity.

Yet the city, a place of growing threat and paranoia to men, might be a place of liberation for women. The city offers women freedom. After all, the city normalises the carnivalesque aspects of life. True, it makes necessary routinised rituals of transportation and clock watching, factory discipline and timetables, but despite its crowds and the mass nature of its life, and despite its bureaucratic conformity, at every turn the city dweller is also offered the opposite – pleasure, deviation, disruption. In this sense it would be possible to say that the male and female ‘principles’ war with each other at the very heart of city life. The city is masculine in its triumphal scale, its towers and vistas and arid industrial regions; it is feminine in its enclosing embrace, in its indeterminacy and labyrinthine uncentredness. We might even go so far as to claim that urban life is actually based on this perpetual struggle between rigid, routinised order and pleasurable anarchy, the male-female dichotomy.

Perhaps the ‘disorder’ of urban life does not so much disturb women. If this is so, it may be because they have not internalised as rigidly as men, a need for over-rationalistic control and authoritarian order. The socialisation of women renders them less dependent on duality and opposition; instead of setting nature against the city, they find nature in the city. For them, that invisible city, the ‘second city’, the underworld or secret labyrinth, instead of being sinister or diseased as in the works of Charles Dickens, is an Aladdin’s cave of riches. Yet at the same time, it is a place of danger for women. Prostitutes and prostitution recur continually in discussions of urban life, until it almost seems as though to be a woman – an individual, not part of a family or kin group – in the city, is to become a prostitute: a public woman.

The city – as experience, environment, concept – is constructed by means of multiple contrasts: natural/unnatural; monolithic/ fragmented; secret/public; pitiless/enveloping; rich/poor; sublime/beautiful. And behind all these, lies the ultimate and major contrasts: male/female; culture/nature; city/country. In saying this I am not arguing (as do some feminists) that male-female difference creates the deepest and most fundamental of all political divisions. Nor am I arguing that the male-female stereotypes to which I refer accurately reflect the nature of actual, individual men and women. In the industrial period, nonetheless, that particular division became inscribed on urban life and determined the development and planning of cities to a surprising degree and in an extraordinarily unremarked way.

contributors list

Vinca Bigo completed her BSc in IR at the LSE. her MSc at Université de Versailles and her Phd at Cambridge. With particular interests in gender and development, she is now teaching at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Norman Birnbaum is Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center. He has taught at Oxford and Amherst College and had visiting posts at European universities. He was one of the founding editors of New Left Review and is on the Editorial Board of The Nation. He is presently writing a memoir.

Lawrence Bird taught and studied architecture and urbanism in Kanazawa, Japan, before coming to the LSE. He completed an MSc CDSS in 2000 and worked for the LSE’s Cities Program as an urban designer. He has since practised architecture and urban design and taught at McGill University, where he is currently completing a PhD in History and Theory of Architecture.

Alexander Carr-Saunders (1886 - 1966) was a sociologist and demographer. Throughout his life, he invested himself in educational service, first heading the University of Liverpool, and then the London School of Economics. He is also responsible for establishing many university colleges across Africa and Asia.

Delicate Mayhem is partly Laura Jordan. Their work can be found at Portobello Road Market on Saturdays, Brick Lane Back Yard Market on Sundays and on www.delicatemayhem.com. Clare cover design for this issue is copyright © delicatemayhem.

Aled Dilwyn Fisher is General Secretary of the LSE Students’ Union. He has been an LSE delegate to the National Union of Students (NUS). He is an active member of the Green Party of England and Wales, and was the youngest London Assembly candidate in the 2008 London Elections.

Mark Fisher is a writer and a lecturer with a PhD from Warwick University. He teaches Philosophy, Religious Studies and Critical Thinking at Orpington College, Kent. He was a founding member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and now maintains the weblog k-punk.abstractdynamics.org.

Jessica Hagy’s www.thisisindexed.com has been nominated for numerous blog awards. Originally Hagy described the site as “a little project that allows me to make fun of some things and sense of others without resorting to doing actual math.” Now, she says she’d “have to take the word ‘little’ out of that line.”

Owen Hatherly is a leftist essayist and serial blogger, writing primarily in the areas of culture and architecture. He has written for New Statesman, Frieze and other magazines. His subject matter ranges from Architectural Drawings of the 1960s to Sartorial Socialism (Newton to Honecker) to American Cartoons before WWII.

Adrian Henri (1932 – 2000) was a poet and painter. In 1972 he won a major prize for his painting in the John Moores Competition. He was president of the Merseyside Arts Association and Liverpool Academy of the Arts in the 1970s and was an honorary professor of the city’s John Moores University.

Tony Lawson is University Reader and Executive Director at the Cambridge University Centre for Gender Studies. His particular interests are in Economic Methodology and Epistemological issues in Social Sciences. He has written widely on the subjects and is considered to be at the forefront of these fields.

Mike Smith has written for The Times and the The Morning News.

His blog ‘Nothing But Green Lights’; was nominated for Best Music Blog in the NME awards 2008 and named “the UK’s best mp3 blog”

by Q magazine.

Roger McGough is a celebrated English performance poet. He regularly performs his own poetry, presents the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Poetry Please’, is a Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University and a member of the Executive Council of the Poetry Society.

Antigone Valery explores the urban landscape as a space of transition – focusing on buildings. Printing enables her to layer her images, for which she uses fragments from various photographs to form new compositions. She then uses varnishes and wax to create particular textures.

Brian Patten is regarded as one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets, writing extensively for children as well as adults. Over the years he has read alongside such poets as Pablo Neruda, Allen Ginsburg, Stevie Smith, Laurie Lee and Robert Lowell. In 2002 Patten accepted the Cholmondeley Award for services to poetry.

Alison Phipps is Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on languages and intercultural communication, with a particular concern for the ways in which people learn to live and communicate together.

Melanie Walker is Professor of Higher Education in the School and Extraordinary Professor in the Faculty of Community and Health Sciences at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her current research deals with the normative purposes of higher education.

Elizabeth Wilson Studied at St Anne’s College, Oxford and the London School of Economics. She worked as psychiatric social worker before entering higher education. From 1987 to 2001 she taught cultural studies at the University of North London (now London Metropolitan University) and is currently working as an independent researcher and writer.

Jonathan Riley obtained a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics in 1984. He subsequently made his way into quantitative finance, eventually becoming a hedge fund manager. He is currently taking an MSc in Philosophy and History of Science at the LSE.

Paul Yates is Emeritus Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex.

He has written widely in the field of sociology of knowledge, and is currently dividing his time between a book on knowledge & identity and his novel.

Additional Artworks provided by: Neshy Boukhari, Iqbaal Aalam, Maraid Addii, flickr users Ronald Hackston and See Wah, and especially George Gerke of the Darkside Farmers

SirAlexan derCarrSa unders|Al edDylwinFi sher|Prof NormanBi rnbaum|P rofMelan ieWalker|D rPaulYat es|ProfAl isonPhipps |ProfTon yLawson| DrVincaBig o|Jonatha nRiley|Bri anPatten |RogerMc Gough|Adr ianHenri|A nonymou s|DrMark Fisher|Mik eSmith|Ow enHatherl ey|Lawre nceBird|P rofElizab ethWilson