On Jürgen Habermas

I yield to no man in my admiration for Jürgen Habermas and his Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests, 1968). But in one of his more lucid passages he defines Critical Theory as "a form of hermeneutics, that is the acquisition of knowledge via interpretation that leads to an understanding of the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions, including the interpretation of texts which themselves interpret other texts", an elucidation that leaves this reader feeling like Molly Bloom (O rocks!). With its sanctions, prescriptions and hierarchies, a lot of Critical Theory seems to me to  resemble Catholicism. A lot of it is sinister bollocks.

That so much academic writing about literature should be so aggressively unliterary (the prose equivalent of a musicologist being tone deaf) is enough to put you off reading, or at least reading academic writing. That a reader such as myself feels repelled and dismayed by academic writing about literature (and, come to that, about architecture, and theatre, and history, and photography - especially photography) is not something that troubles me much any longer. If academic writing has any content worth sharing it will appear, mediated into reasonably plain English on the internet, sooner or later. But - and this is a very bad thing - literary criticism no longer forms part of mainstream public discourse as it did (albeit within a small circle) back in the modernist heyday of the 1920s. 

I did a degree in English in - well, in the last century. The syllabus was staid, but robust also, with plenty of close reading and textual analysis, with an emphasis on the past. 'From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf' said the department's prospectus, and there was certainly plenty of Anglo-Saxon and a lot of phonetics and phonology. My special interest was Joyce and the modern movement, which was something of a reaction against The Battle of Maldon and Layamon's Brut. But Joyce had long been my favourite writer, despite my repeated failure to complete Ulysses until after I'd graduated and had the time to do so. One thing university taught me is that invention almost always has a long tradition behind it - a tradition on which it can build, or which it seeks to challenge and overturn. Eliot is essential to any understanding of literature as The Waste Land did for poetry what Ulysses did for the novel. 

Since university I've worked mostly in education (some teaching, mostly managing, nothing fancy or influential) and had a parallel and low-key career as a writer and reviewer and all-round literary hack. I read a lot, and re-read even more. I grew up without a television and still don't own one - not an affectation and not as unusual as you might think for us fifty-somethings. When we unwind we tend not to do so in front of the telly because met of us didn't have one in our childhood. Can you imagine that?

Of course, I used to see telly programmes when I was growing up, and because they were few in number they tend to stick in my memory. What I liked most were documentaries about science and wildlife - the BBC's Horizon series was an education in itself and (here's my point) these documentaries were brilliantly scripted in a simple language that a large popular audience could understand, back in the days when public service broadcasting still had a mission to explain. Here's an example, about language acquisition. It's a 1983 broadcast in the aforementioned Horizon series - A Child's Guide to Languages. It's brilliantly paced, richly informative, consistently entertaining and endlessly re-watchable. The script  is a model of elucidation, serenely navigating a complex subject. It's delivered by an off-screen commentator, not some babbling chump with a haircut flapping his arms around.

What we need today, and urgently, is the contemporary equivalent of this kind of television. And this might just counterbalance the tendency for critics to write like Jürgen Habermas. Fat chance.

What lies beneath

'Fantastic grow the evening gowns' wrote Auden in The Fall of Rome, couture standing for a more general decadence at the end of empire. The line came to mind as I leafed through Shaping the Body: An intimate history of the mechanics of underwear. Don't snigger at the back - this is a high-minded academic tome from a very respectable publisher.

Is clothing, as Auden suggests, really an economic bellwether? Do hemlines actually rise and fall in line with the markets, as is commonly believed? It's a theory that doesn't stand up to close inspection but reflects a popular idea that industrial societies are fully integrated, that capitalism expresses itself through consumer taste and taste is best reflected (or determined) by the way we dress.

Those of us who share Dorothy Parker's belief that brevity is the soul of lingerie may be disappointed by Shaping the Body as the book is less about revelation than insinuation; not what is revealed but what is implied. What's more the human form is largely absent in the many illustrations of uninhabited underwear - museum exhibits shorn of all allure.

Many of the items under consideration are situated at a point where art and science meet. Howard Hughes famously designed a cantilever bra to enhance Jane Russell's atomic décolletage and there's a scene in Hitchcock's Vertigo in which Barbara Bel Geddes (playing Midge, a lingerie designer) explains the process to Jimmy Stewart (her boyfriend, a troubled ex-cop). He is courteously baffled, rather than mildly aroused.

Scottie: What's this doohickey?

Midge: It's a brassiere! You know about those things, you're a big boy now.

Scottie: I've never run across one like that.

Midge: It's brand new. Revolutionary up-lift: No shoulder straps, no back straps, but it does everything a brassiere should do. Works on the principle of the cantilevered bridge.

Scottie: It does?

Midge: An aircraft engineer down the peninsula designed it; he worked it out in his spare time.

Scottie: Kind of a hobby, a do-it-yourself kind of thing!

Such craftily-engineered devices - panniers, crinolines, stomachers, bustles, body shapers and push-up bras, whalebone, hoop skirts, lacing, chains, zippers, clasps and straining elasticised fabrics - have a single purpose: the creation of a silhouette that is likely to attract a sexual partner. That allure should be a cultural rather than natural process goes without saying - breasts are natural, cleavage cultural. Today Spanx can render the dumpy svelte, can streamline the male or female form into something approximating the ideal. 

Men are part of this process: jackets emphasise (or simulate) broad shoulders, Cuban heels add an inch or so to shortarse filmstars, the codpiece swells the crotch and the necktie, pointing unambiguously downwards to where the codpiece once was, is nothing more than a directional prompt, an arrow. (When, incidentally, will a male M.P. of any political party have the confidence to enter the House of Commons is an iconoclastic open-neck shirt? He'd get my vote). Male dress is about potency, which is a form of allure. Female dress is about allure, which is a form of potency. The lineaments of gratified desire are left on the bedroom carpet, on the bedside table.

Of particular concern in this enjoyably erudite volume are constructions that constrict, that pummel and pleat the flesh into ample simulacra of promise. That such accoutrements, coupled with high heels, make it well-nigh impossible for the wearer to walk suggests that said wearer elects to be objectified - a case of 'take me I'm yours'. This, of course, is a form of empowerment, or so we may choose to believe.

    

The editor is curator of pre-19th-century fashion and textile collections at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, but the volume includes work by such illustrious contemporaries as Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier, Rei Kawakubo, Christian Lacroix and Vivienne Westwood. Shaping the Body: An intimate history of the mechanics of underwear is published by Yale University Press.

Dead reckoning

January saw a succession of public figures suddenly taken from us - the musicians Lemmy and David Bowie, the actors Alan Rickman and Frank Finlay, the broadcaster Terry Wogan. There were others. So it goes.

We'e entered the final and inevitable stage of the proliferation of popular culture that began in the 1960s, that high dishonest decade, a time when television supplanted cinema and the radio as the primary source of entertainment. Television, through its ubiquity and implied intimacy created many 'household names', some of them very talented, others not, but all of whom made a direct impression on their large audiences. They were young then - now they're getting old and dying.

Those 1960s figures - not only telly and radio names but also artists and novelists and fashion designers and theatre directors and architects and producers and directors and scriptwriters and journalists and comedians and photographers and choreographers and all the rest - made their mark when they were in their twenties, and that was half a century ago. We have to brace ourselves for much more of this over the next ten years or so - a veritable culling of well-known (if not always 'much-loved') names, and we have to prepare to go on living what's left of our own lives in a world unadorned by (say) the continuing presence of a favourite singer or actor or writer or politician, although I cannot think of a single serving M/P. whose immediate dissolution would cause a moment's pang.

Come to that I wouldn't give a tinker's toss if Lady Gaga popped her clogs tomorrow,or one of the Kardashians, or all of them, or Bono. But I was saddened, by news of the passing of Bob Ellot a few days ago. You may not have heard of Bob and Ray Goulding (who died in 1990). As Bob and Ray they were a sublimely deadpan American double act (the nearest British equivalent to which might be the fondly-remembered Johns Bird and Fortune). Here's Bob and Ray in their renowned sketch: Komodo Dragon. They skewer the inanity of interviewers and the narrow range of most expertise. "I believe we've just about exhausted the subject". I love their bland subversion, their mellow voices. They always seem to be coasting and are never in a hurry but you can see their minds racing. Hell, here's another and another.  Seriously funny guys.

Dingy (4)

Concluding a short series on English dinginess . . .

The English alphabet has 26 letters representing 44 sounds (or phonemes). Of course, one could argue that there are actually 52 letters (lower and upper case) but let's not quibble. This shortfall of letters is the reason why English spelling is irregular and 'difficult' and this is what  makes it a target for reformists such as George Bernard Shaw, who argued that since (theoretically) 'fish' can be spelled 'ghoti' by analogy - think 'enough' / 'women' / 'nation'-  there was a strong case for simplifying the system using his Shavian alphabet. 

Shaw had a point - his aims were noble, his approach humane. English learners have a greater distance to travel than, say, Spanish learners, because Spanish is phonetically very regular - you say what you see, and spell what you hear, and there are fewer pitfalls. But Shaw's ideas were developed and fatally misapplied by educational theorists in the 1960s.

In September 1961 pupils at twenty primary schools in the Midlands were unwitting subjects in a social experiment.  They were introduced to a new way of learning to read and write, with texts such as this:

This is the Initial Teaching Alphabet (I.T.A.), developed by the businessman and Tory M.P. Sir James Pitman (1901-1985), the grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, of shorthand fame) as a simplified writing system to teach English-speaking children to read more easily. The idea was that once children had learned to read using Pitman's I.T.A. system they would confidently progress to learning standard English spelling. The experiment was extended to 75 UK schools in 1962, rising to 200 the following year. By 1966, 140 of the UK’s 158 Education Authorities taught I.T.A. in one or more of their schools.

There were 43 symbols (the number later rose to 45). They can be seen on the chart below:

Wot kud posibli gou rong?

This comes from an excellent online analysis of the subject::

Children who quickly mastered I.T.A. could not immediately read the words they saw about them every day, so that their growing enthusiasm for reading was frustrated. Although teachers were encouraged to allow a mixture of I.T.A. and T.O. in children’s spelling, the children were effectively learning two systems at once: one at school, one in the outside world. And, since children made the transition to T.O. at different ages, teachers would find themselves teaching both systems within the same classroom. Parents were encouraged to take part in the scheme, but many found themselves excluded from their children’s written communication, while children who had begun to read before starting school, or who moved house and changed schools, had to begin again.

(First published in Eye no. 55 vol. 14 2005 - Eye is "the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal" and (quite reasonably) the authors praise the beauty of the I.T.A. typography, and its idealistic aims.) 

Only a zealot could fail to see that the drawbacks of this approach to literacy outweigh any theoretical advantages. The simple fact that parents could not read the texts to (or with) their children immediately eradicated one of the key ingredients in developing literacy outside school. That children were estranged from their surrounding literate environment was also, let's say, an issue. An impoverished range of I.T.A. texts was available making it the typographical equivalent of Esperanto. Imagine having to learn this as a toddler (and imagine having to teach it). The method was quietly phased out in the late 1960s and seems to be almost forgotten today.

From Wikipedia's studiously neutral entry on the subject:

Though the I.T.A. was not originally intended to dictate one particular approach to teaching reading, it was often identified with phonics methods, and after the 1960s, the pendulum of educational theory swung away from phonics.

Don't get me started on phonics - another example of the misapplication of misunderstood ideas. There's a world of English dinginess in the phrase "not originally intended to dictate one particular approach".

The Wikipedia entry on Sir James Pitman includes the following statement:

Overall, the Pitman initial teaching alphabet (ita) points the way to the needed overall reform of English spelling, such as the Dutch accomplished in regard the writing of their own tongue some two decades ago. [sic]


ITA © the Estate of Sir James Pitman (I assume)

Dingy (3)

Continuing a brief celebration of English dinginess, here's a telly commercial from 1985 promoting the Sinclair C5, a battery-powered one-seat vehicle which entirely failed to interest the public. One wonders why.

Dingy (2)

Continuing a short run of blogs celebrating English dinginess in its many manifestations, here's the telly presenter Hughie Green, of Opportunity Knocks fame, in his thoughtful farewell to "the year of 1977": Stand Up and Be Counted.

Do try and sit through the whole thing. Just when you think it can't possibly get any worse, it gets very much worse. What was this all about?

From Wikipedia:

Right up until its final shows, Opportunity Knocks was a ratings hit that attracted up to 18 million viewers weekly. But Green, known for his right-wing politics, had decided he was bigger than the show format he had devised and began politicising an apolitical family-friendly format. It has been suggested that Green believed that Harold Wilson and his Labour government were communists and that Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, should replace Wilson as leader of the country and, to that end, he used Opportunity Knocks as an end-of-year soapbox, telling the country at the end of 1974 to 'wake up!' Two years later, in December 1976, Green sang a rant about the state of the United Kingdom called "Stand Up and Be Counted", with the words coming up in subtitles: "Stand up and be counted, where the managers manage and the workers don't go on strike". It was released as a single in 1977. Partly seen as an open support of Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, he was disciplined by Thames Television, but continued to make political comments. After numerous viewer complaints, Thames axed the show in March 1978, despite its attracting high ratings, something Green mentioned in a bitter rant against Thames in his last show. 

Dingy (1)

I don't know what to do with this small discovery - apart from share it with you, the world. So bear with me, because after an unpromising start this goes somewhere.

The nearest overground railway station to where we live is on the former Great Northern main line from King's Cross. It was formerly named Wood Green until, keen to exploit a possible connection with the newly-established conference centre at the adjacent unlovely Victorian pile (home to the original BBC television service) it was re-named Alexanrda Palace on 17th May 1982.

The renaming ceremony involved the film star Diana Dors (in a bright tangerine dress, and past her prime), local reporters, some sheepish-looking British Rail managers, a special electric train (plus headboard) and the unveiling of a plaque. A little girl presented the star with a cellophane bouquet. It was the sort of non-event deemed newsworthy in the barren 1980s and here's a 35-second report from Thames Television. 

I chanced upon the clip yesterday while looking up train times online and was swept back thirty years. It's the apotheosis of low-key English dinginess: the overcast sky, the damp platforms, the ramshackle organisation, the fading celebrity, the pervasive lack of glamour, or momentousness, or even significance - all very post-Suez, It could form the basis for a modernist opera (think Nixon in China in reduced circumstances).

Or, if not an opera, a monograph?

I see from a review in the current TLS that, in an off-the-cuff remark during a lecture at Le Collège de France in the 1970s, Michel Foucault once suggested that there should be a history of laziness (ir perhaps, in a  sterner register, idleness). I'd argue that dinginess also has a claim for serious analysis. It has a pictorial presence in (say) the photographs of Martin Parr and the Crap Towns series edited by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran. But neither of these quite cut the mustard, if their respective creators will forgive me. i want something non-jokey and cerebral. I want an Encyclopedia Dinigana.

This is a rich seam. More English dinginess to follow . . .