How arts and humanities can influence public policy

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Jules Evans

I’ve just been at a three-day seminar at the Institute for Government, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to help academics learn how to influence public policy. The seminar brought together 15 academics in disciplines ranging from literary criticism to design and urban planning.The IFG arranged an impressive line-up of Westminster big-wigs to talk to us, including Matthew Taylor of the RSA, Gareth Davies of the civil service, and Sir Gus O’Donnell, former head of the civil service. They gave us a fascinating look into how politics works, but also showed how hard it is for academics to influence policy.

As one civil servant told us, ministers are extremely busy and rarely get time to read a newspaper article, let alone a research paper. They want any ‘action points’ to be clearly expressed in a two-page document. Tony Blair apparently said that if you can’t express your idea in two sentences, you don’t understand it. All of this was quite off-putting for some of the academics, trained as they are to appreciate subtlety, nuance and multiple readings. One academic was particularly horrified by the idea of using an infograph to get their ideas across.

On their side, some policy-makers expressed frustration at how little useful advice they were getting for all the money they were putting into academic research. For example, the government somewhat controversially set aside a pot of money for academic research into the ‘Big Society’, but apparently, few practical recommendations have arisen from all that research. I think that shows a mistake in timing – there is a lag between ‘government time’ and ‘academic time’, and academics can best influence policy in the quieter years before government, when politicians are formulating their broader policy visions, rather than during government when any academic contributions risk being seen as entirely expedient.

American academics might be better at mass communication

Another policy-maker noted that American academics seemed to be better at influencing British policy than domestic thinkers: think of the ‘Nudge unit’ inspired by Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman; or the impact of Martin Seligman’s Positive Psychology on British policy. Why is the RSA’s schedule of public talks so full of visiting American intellectuals, with so few British intellectuals? Perhaps, one speaker speculated, American academics are better at selling themselves because they have a much bigger book market to sell into. That emphasis on mass communication makes them better able to deliver TED-style pitches to busy policy-makers.

However, it’s still the case in the US that arts and humanities scholars have little influence on public policy, with a few notable exceptions in history, law and ethics (Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum). English literature and cultural studies have little influence on policy, and perhaps that’s as it should be – novels and poetry thankfully resist the utilitarian bent of our times.

To be provocative: is it possible that the huge influence of critical theory, and particularly of Michel Foucault, on arts and humanities academics have, ironically, rendered them less capable of influencing power and changing the world? Doing an arts and humanities PhD sometimes reminds me of initiation into a cult – you go through a three-year period of social isolation, by the end of which you emerge fully inculcated in the radical doctrine of critical theory. This world-view puts you at odds not just with public policy, but also with mass society, including your friends, family and lovers. One academic told me that few relationships survive a humanities PhD, and that she herself had broken up with her boyfriend half-way through her studies (she’s now happily married to a Lacanian). The initiate in critical theory can end up so sceptical of power, they become incapable of influencing it. This limits their influence to the ‘in-culture’ of academia – a culture which is ironically very hierarchical. I say this as an ‘outsider’ – someone without a PhD who came into academia through journalism (so perhaps I’m just insecure about my lack of qualifications!)

Four ways that arts and humanities influence public policy

The bard has always played a central, if controversial, role in politics

Let me end on four positive ways that arts and humanities research can and do influence public policy. Firstly, through investigating stories and their impact on our emotions. The arts and humanities are right at the centre of public policy because political communication is to a large extent about stories, words, symbols and how they move us. The scop, the bard, the story-weaver, has always been an important part of court politics. The most obvious way that the arts and humanities could influence public policy, then, is through the exploration of rhetoric, narrative and its effect on the emotions. This exploration would include the recent work of social scientists and psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and George Lakoff into values and metaphor and how they move us.

At the moment, as far as I’m aware, there is only one centre for the study of rhetoric in the UK, which was opened in Royal Holloway’s classics department in 2010 – though I note that Philip Gould left money in his will for a ‘visiting professorship in rhetoric and the art of public persuasion’ at Oxford. There’s room for much more research in this area, and it would have the benefit of being very interesting and (dare I say it ) useful to politicians and their speech-writers. What are Shakespeare’s history plays if not explorations of the rhetoric, narratives and myths of political power? Winston Churchill was able to ‘mobilize the English language and put it to battle’ (as JFK put it) by studying rhetoric, by reading Shakespeare. Our political culture would be greatly improved if more politicians followed his example. Politicians improve or debase our political culture through their language.

Sir Adam Roberts

Secondly, history has an obvious role to play in public policy. We heard, for example, how the History and Policy project helped the policy-makers working on pension reform in the mid-noughties to unearth the history of the existing pension legislation and see how it had grown anachronistic. History helps us see how aspects of our culture that we might take as natural and eternal are in fact recent and constructed. It also gives us useful historical scenarios to think about where we are and where we’re going (think of Paul Kennedy’s work on imperial over-reach, for example, which might have been usefully read by the Bush government). Sir Adam Roberts is an example of a historian who has frequently contributed memoranda to parliamentary debates.

Thirdly, applied ethics has usefully engaged in public policy for several decades, from Baroness Warnock and others’ work on euthanasia, to the contribution of academic philosophers to the Leveson Inquiry’s debate on balancing press freedom with the right to privacy.

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum: a good example of cooperation between the humanities and social sciences

Finally, arts and humanities scholars have a clear contribution to make to the politics of well-being. This new movement in politics has so far been dominated by economists and psychologists – the Office of National Statistics’ committee to define ‘national well-being’, for example, didn’t contain a single representative from the arts and humanities. Now, well-being economists and psychologists like Richard Layard and Amartya Sen are increasingly engaging with the humanities, particularly with philosophy. They are engaging with the history and plurality of philosophical definitions of well-being. This is good news, as it means well-being policy will become less top-down and dogmatic and more democratic. For example, I hope to work with Layard’s Action for Happiness to design a ‘well-being course’ for adults, which won’t try to shoe-horn everyone into one pre-fabricated definition of well-being, but will instead enable people to consider the scientific evidence, while also debating and forming their own idea of the good life.

At the moment, there are two main Centres for Well-Being in English academia – Richard Layard’s team at the LSE, which is mainly economists; and Felicia Huppert’s Well-Being Institute at Cambridge, which is mainly psychologists. Hopefully we can get the Well-Being Project at Queen Mary started up in earnest this year, to bring thinkers and practitioners from the arts and humanities more into the conversation.

Marry Me, Bosie!

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Thomas Dixon

Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London.

Today is the first Valentine’s Day since the House of Commons voted to legalize gay marriage in the UK. An institution, previously the very cornerstone of conventional family life and traditional sexual morality, has been opened to all. Perhaps some will choose today to propose to their beloved – hoping to be among the first same-sex couples to marry in Britain. This blog post offers an historical perspective on this newly state-sanctioned form of romantic love by looking back a hundred and eighteen years to Valentine’s Day 1895.

A tennis-themed Victorian Valentine’s card, 1895

On that day, a new play opened at St James’s Theatre in London – a comedy of love and manners, of marriage and male friendship, with the two leading men eventually exchanging their harmless practice of all-male ‘Bunburyism’ for the more conventional institution of marriage to their lady loves. The play, of course, was Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. On the opening night, Wilde was called for by the audience at the end of the performance and applauded loudly. The theatre critic of The Times wrote that the laughter of the Valentine’s Day theatre-goers was a sign that this was to be one of Mr Wilde’s most marked successes, predicting that it would be entertaining audiences at St James’s for many months to come.

In fact, within four days a train of events had been set in motion which would see the play close, and its author ruined. On 18 February, the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s friend and on-off lover Alfred Douglas (known as ‘Bosie’), left a scrawled calling card for Wilde accusing him of ‘posing as a sodomite’. By the end of May, after the collapse of Wilde’s suicidally ill-advised libel action against Queensberry, and after being tried and convicted of committing acts of ‘gross indecency’, Wilde was starting a sentence of two years with hard labour, and his play had closed.

Queensberry’s barely legible calling card

During his criminal trial, Wilde made an impressive and moving speech about ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. This has often been misremembered as an impassioned defence of homosexuality. And indeed just this interpretation was recently reasserted by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell as part of a short commentary piece on the House of Commons vote in favour of same-sex marriage. Here’s what O’Donnell had to say:

You may have noticed a few ellipses ‘…’ in the quotations O’Donnell showed from Wilde’s famous speech. What did O’Donnell cut out, and did it alter Wilde’s meaning? The short answer is that he cut out all the phrases which don’t fit neatly with our modern ideas about homosexuality, and in the process reversed Wilde’s meaning.

O’Donnell describes Wilde’s speech as ‘honest, and indeed noble, testimony’. I agree that it was noble but I don’t think anyone could claim it was honest. And, for the purposes of those who would cast Wilde as a gay martyr or champion of homosexual rights, it is pretty hopeless. To state it simply, Wilde’s wonderful speech constituted not a brave public declaration of his homosexuality but rather a poetic, intellectualised, and categorical denial of any sexual feelings towards, let alone sexual acts with, other men. The speech – which can be read online at Douglas Linder’s ‘Famous Trials’ website – was Wilde’s answer to a question from the prosecuting lawyer about the meaning of a poem published in a student magazine, The Chameleon, by Alfred Douglas.

Entitled ‘Two Loves’, the verse juxtaposes a personification of ‘true love’, which fills ‘the hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame’ (we might envisage something like that tennis-playing duo pictured above), with another, more shadowy figure who, when challenged replies ‘I am the love that dare not speak its name’. The lawyer put it to Wilde that these figures stood, respectively, for ‘natural love’ and ‘unnatural love’ (in other words, by implication, the kind of sexual instinct that might lead a man towards acts of gross indecency with other men – including rent boys and servants). Wilde denied this vigorously, going on to explain the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ in the words quoted by Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC. And also some other words – the ones removed from O’Donnell’s segment.

The cut passages make it clear that Wilde’s intention was to defend not a sexual act, nor a sexual orientation (the former he denied, the latter was not at issue), but a spiritual and intellectual form of affection. Wilde appealed to the biblical story of David and Jonathan to make his point and made it plain that he was speaking about a love that was Platonic (in both senses of that word). The speech with the cut passages restored (in bold) is as follows:

The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.” (Loud applause, mingled with some hisses.)

There are a couple of points to take from this, beyond mere historical pedantry, I hope. The first thing to say is that it is, of course, no criticism of Wilde to observe that what he did in the Old Bailey in 1895 was something other than outing himself as the first British gay rights activist. Such concepts, aims and identities simply did not exist, and Wilde’s goal was rather to avoid a brutal punishment for his sexual behaviour. If Victorian precursors are to be found for those who, like David Lammy MP, spoke passionately in favour of gay marriage in the Commons recently, they are figures like John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter who, unlike Wilde, left extensive writings on the subjects of same-sex love, and sexual identity, and took the first, brave steps towards social reform.

Constance Wilde, with one of her and Oscar’s two little boys

Finally, do we suppose that, given the opportunity, Oscar would have proposed to Alfred Douglas, falling conventionally to one knee and declaring ‘Marry me, Bosie!’ I’m not sure (and anyone who has read the full text of De Profundis would have to entertain serious doubts about the sustainability of the match). Wilde had married once already, and so cannot have been entirely opposed to the institution. But when it came to other men, would Oscar Wilde have been the marrying kind?

Let’s return to St Valentine’s Day 1895 and the first performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. A line delivered by Algernon may offer the most Wildean perspective on all this:

I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.

Philosophy lives @QMUL !

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Jules Evans

Last night was the first session in the new Philosophy For Life course at Queen Mary, University of London. It was a full-house, with the Lock-Keeper’s Cottage proving a great venue, and just about fitting everyone in. The audience was roughly one third undergrads, one third postgrads, and one third members of the public. Huge thanks to Rupert Jones for helping me out. Below are some photos from the event.

Next Tuesday at 6pm, we’re discussing the Stoics and the art of maintaining control. Hope you can make it.

The ‘Body-Cutter’ and Emotion in Edwardian Popular Politics

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Susanne Stoddart

Susanne Stoddart is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her doctoral research explores the role of emotion in political culture, within the context of the Liberal welfare reforms introduced in Britain during the Edwardian period.

The strong link between popular politics and emotion was firmly established in Edwardian Britain: a golden age of the political propaganda poster. Contemporaries deplored the sensationalist and slanderous nature of Liberal and Conservative posters, which, they claimed, appealed with great electoral success to the uncontrollable passions and prejudices of the mass electorate. Graham Wallas, arguably the founding father of modern political psychology, referred to the ‘irrational political decisions’ that this style of popular politics resulted in. Economist J.A. Hobson asserted that the mass electorate was incapable of a ‘sustained, energetic, and well-directed effort to realise Democracy’ on account of the ‘artful appeal’ to unreason provided by popular politics.

Punch Cartoon, 1910

Within this context, a poster issued during a January 1910 election campaign by Claude Hay, the Conservative MP for the Hoxton division of Shoreditch in the East End of London, does not seem out of place. At this election, Hay was defending his seat against strong opposition from the recently appointed Liberal candidate for Hoxton, Dr. Christopher Addison. The future Minister of Health had previously, in his illustrious medical career, forged a reputation as one of the most esteemed anatomists of the day. Part of Hay’s poster read:

_________________________

Dr. ADDISON

ASKS FOR SUPPORT

ON THE GROUND THAT HE IS

Used to Cutting Up Bodies.

_________________________

DON’T VOTE FOR ADDISON

Who Cuts Up the Stomach

BUT

Vote for HAY

Who will see that it is FILLED.

___________________________

Hay’s poster aimed to create fear and suspicion in the Hoxton electorate about Addison’s character. Sir Victor Horsley – a renowned surgeon and a future Liberal candidate – was quick to deplore Hay’s ‘weapon of cheap abuse’, which appealed to ‘brutal ignorance’ and ‘savage superstition’ about the important work of the anatomist, implying that it was carried out ‘for the gratification of some idle curiosity’. Certainly, Hay’s attack was designed to inflame the apparent disquiet about the trustworthiness of the medical expert in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. In her late-Victorian exploration of the urban Rich and Poor, social theorist Helen Bosanquet provided a pertinent example of such suspicion. Bosanquet uncovered concern amongst the London poor that hospitals were practising experimental surgery on patients.

Dr Christopher Addison, c. 1910

Also, it could be suggested that Hay’s poster aimed to make the Hoxton electorate consider Addison’s emotional composition. As the historian Ruth Richardson has shown, from the eighteenth century it was acknowledged that the act of dissection instilled in anatomists a ‘necessary inhumanity’. Therefore, by emphasising that Addison was ‘Used to Cutting Up Bodies’, Hay wanted to remind the electorate that Addison was a man very capable of discarding all emotion. Addison had previously distributed a leaflet to the Hoxton electorate outlining his fine reputation and accomplishments at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, which served the people of Hoxton. Hay manipulated this and argued in his poster that Addison asked for political support because he was an anatomist. Therefore, Hay aimed to link Addison’s work in anatomy inextricably with his politics, perhaps aiming to suggest that he adopted a similar mind-set for both.

A cartoon from Liberal Monthly, 1908

The suggestion that Addison was emotionally detached had the potential to discredit him and his political agenda in Hoxton. A key feature of the Edwardian Liberal Party was its concern with the provision of welfare reform, through measures such as Old Age Pensions, established in 1908, and National Insurance, passed in 1911. The reforms, which Addison fervently supported, offered hope that poverty would be alleviated for the hard working poor, or for the previously industrious elderly poor, without them suffering the shame or loss of independence associated with provisions under the Poor Law. Therefore, the legitimacy and success of welfare politicians rested to some extent on their ability to empathise publicly with the plight and emotional concerns of the poor and to develop strong social bonds. Hay’s poster suggested that it was in fact he, rather than the anatomist, who had the humanity to address the emotionally-charged issue of welfare reform, pledging that he would ensure that stomachs were filled.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this case study for the historian of emotion becomes apparent when we move beyond considering the feelings that Hay’s poster attempted to evoke and instead uncover some of the actual emotional responses from the Hoxton electorate. While contemporaries theorised about the influence of sensationalist political posters on the supposed mass mind, the vulgarity of Hay’s poster was widely believed to have in fact lost him a significant number of votes, resulting in the election of Addison as the MP for Hoxton at the end of January 1910. The rational but emotional response to the Conservative poster by members of Hoxton’s working-class electorate can be traced through letters written to Addison following the distribution of the poster. The chief emotions expressed were gratitude towards the skill and kindness of medical men, and resentment at the offence caused to them. In one letter to Addison, published by the Liberal press, a Hoxton voter wrote:

Will you allow me, as a working man, to express my disgust at the disgraceful attack made upon you and your profession, without which so many (myself included) would now be going about limbless. It has done more for your success than all your speakers.

This extract indicates that at least some working men could look beyond the sensational appeals of political propaganda and remain mindful of social bonds and notions of mutual care. The voter was concerned not only with his own treatment by the medical profession but also with the treatment of others. Having been successfully treated by doctors and surgeons in the past, who relied upon the learning of anatomists, many of Hoxton’s working men acknowledged the role of the anatomist in securing their independence, sparing them the shame often felt by men unable to work, and to provide for their families, due to physical disability.

This brief case study illustrates that Edwardian popular politics is not only of interest to the historian of emotion in terms of exploring debates surrounding the supposed irrationality of the political process. It is certainly fascinating to deconstruct the sensationalist posters produced during this period, particularly when they provide insight into wider culture – in this case, the abuse that could still be directed at some medical experts (and not just the pro-vivisectionists). However, this case study shows that where possible the historian of emotion should look beyond contemporary theories on how the mass electorate responded to political propaganda in order to uncover the actual, conscious emotional responses provided by members of the mass electorate. This, in turn, provides a valuable lens through which we can reflect on other related themes such as issues surrounding masculinity and the working man.

Once more, with feeling: the latest attempt to teach flourishing in schools

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Jules Evans

I’d like to examine the latest attempt to teach young people how to flourish in schools, via a randomised controlled trial of a new, evidence-based curriculum for Personal and Social Health Education (PSHE), which is being launched in 30 English schools this autumn.

The attempt to educate the emotions has a long history, of course, as Thomas Dixon has explored. We could go back to the 19th century, when private schools tried to teach character through a combination of muscular Christianity and the classics. We could go back even further, to ancient philosophy schools like the Stoa, the Garden or the Lyceum. But let’s start more recently, in the late 1990s, when New Labour became interested in bringing psychotherapy into education.

The idea of teaching well-being in schools took off in the late 1990s after the publication of Daniel Goleman’s pop psychology book Emotional Intelligence in 1995. That book inspired a local education authority in Southampton to introduce EI classes in its schools, through a subject called Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL). Other LEAs followed Southampton’s example, and in 2002, Ed Balls, the minister for education, made SEAL a non-statutory component in the national primary curriculum, as one part of a new subject called Personal and Social Health Education, or PSHE (sorry for all these acronyms). In 2007 it was introduced in the national curriculum for secondary schools. Although it was voluntary, around 80% of comprehensives taught SEAL in some form.

Despite the enormous, almost religious enthusiasm of LEAs and New Labour, SEAL rapidly attracted controversy. Some, like Kathryn Ecclestone at the University of Birmingham, criticised the ‘dangerous rise of therapeutic education’, where children were taught that a certain model of emotionality was ‘good’ and other models ‘bad’ or ‘sick’. Indeed, Goleman’s EI argues that the healthy child is socially-skilled and happy to publicly share their emotions – in other words, a girl. Boys or introverts, who may be reluctant to publicly discuss their emotions in circles, are immediately pathologised.

Schools were given a SEAL starter-pack and not much other guidance from Whitehall.

Another problem with SEAL was that schools were given very little guidance in how to teach it beyond a SEAL pack sent out from Whitehall. Only a fifth of teachers have any training in SEAL or PSHE. Many schools made it up as they went along, and SEAL classes included everything from CBT to rainbow rhythms. This, to some extent, reflected the intellectual incoherence of Goleman’s pop psychology book (Goleman wasn’t a trained psychologist, he was a journalist for the New York Times).

The big problem with SEAL, which a team at the University of Manchester discovered and reported in 2010, was that it didn’t do what it was meant to do. It had no impact either on children’s emotional well-being or their academic performance. Somehow, in all the enthusiasm, no one had thought to evaluate it until it had been in our schools and imposed on our children for a decade. I find that cavalier attitude pretty shocking, and a classic example of the policy risks of good intentions without good evidence.

The realisation that SEAL lacked any evidence base seriously undermined the idea of teaching flourishing in schools, and also undermined LEAs in the eyes of the new Coalition government. When Michael Gove became minister for education, he rolled back many of New Labour’s well-being initiatives in schools, abandoning Every Child Matter and insisting that OFSTED no longer try to evaluate the well-being of pupils. Gove also ordered a review of PSHE. That review is on-going – it was supposed to have published its results by now, but apparently the Department of Education has its hands full with its academy and free school programme. The government has made clear it doesn’t think much of SEAL.

The Penn Resilience Project

However, there was another attempt to teach young people how to flourish in a more evidence-based way. This was the Penn Resilience Project (PRP), which was designed by Karen Reivich, Martin Seligman and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. It was an attempt to introduce the basics of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy into classrooms, with the same evidence-based scrupulosity with which Penn’s Aaron Beck brought CBT into the mainstream of therapy.

In 2007, three local education authorities (Hertfordshire, Manchester and South Tyneside) paid to send around 100 teachers to Penn to be trained in the PRP, and then to teach it in 22 schools. The impact on students’ academic results and emotional well-being was then evaluated by a team at the London School of Economics. One of the driving forces behind the PRP was Richard Layard, professor at the LSE and the author of Happiness: Lessons From A New Science, who had also been instrumental in getting government support for the huge expansion of CBT services in the NHS.

The PRP was the great hope of enthusiasts for well-being education, because it was supposed to be carefully scientific and evidence-based compared to SEAL. Unfortunately, when project evaluation was published by the LSE in 2011, the results were not a home-run. Amy Challen, one of the project evaluators at the LSE, tells me:

There was a 0.1 standard deviation for participants on the Beck Depression Index, and that quickly tailed off after the project finished. That’s quite small. There are lots of possible reasons for that. Most young people don’t have depression in the first place. Also children were only taught 18 hours of the course in total – as Richard Layard said, you can’t learn French in 18 hours and it may be the same for well-being. There were problems with recruitment of teachers as well. Twenty of the teachers didn’t teach any PRP workshop, and some only taught one. And some teachers had excessive expectations – they thought you could teach the programme and everyone’s life would be transformed. They would focus on individual cases where they saw transformations, and not understand why that impact didn’t show up in the data. It’s because that was just one child among 30.

During the PRP pilot, Richard Layard and two colleagues decided to be more ambitious, and try and gather together the best evidence-based programmes from around the world (well, the US and Australia) not just for emotional well-being but for the entire PSHE curriculum, which also includes topics like sexual and physical health, media awareness, and also occasionally citizenship, environmental awareness, and even (shock horror) moral philosophy. Last year, they published a report outlining their new, evidence-based curriculum for PSHE, which brought together around 16 evidence-based programmes, including PRP and other CBT and mindfulness-based programmes. Layard wanted to test this curriculum out over a longer period, to give the children the time to really learn the cognitive and behavioural skills embedded in the course. James O’ Shaughnessy, former head of the Downing Street policy unit under David Cameron, who is a big enthusiast for teaching flourishing and who is involved in the new pilot, told me: ‘One of the things we know from the evidence is the importance of habit formation. That takes time.’

Emma Judge, one of the two founders of How To Thrive

The new curriculum is now being road-tested in a randomised controlled trial at 30 schools around Hertfordshire, starting in autumn of this year. The RCT is being funded through a £687,000 grant from the Education Endowment Fund, and is being evaluated by the LSE. The teaching and teacher-training is being organised by Emma Judge and Lucy Bailey, who helped to run the original PRP for Hertfordshire local education authority, and who subsequently set up a not-for-profit called How To Thrive. Since the PRP pilot finished, they have trained 700 teachers to teach the resilience programme in 80 schools around the country. Emma Judge says: ‘The initial PRP pilot was just 18 hours. The research suggests that people can learn new habits but it’s hard work and takes practice.’ The new project will teach children an hour a week, over four years, and will cover all the topics of PSHE, including media / advertising awareness, drug awareness and sexual health, bringing together evidence-based programmes like the PRP, Mood Gym from Australia, and the Parents Under Construction programme from Houston.

Lucy Bailey says: ‘An important idea is that this is a proper subject, which is valued in schools, which teachers can talk about, which students see as valued by the school. In the initial project, some schools felt ‘don’t go into that classroom, they talk about feelings there’.’ Emma adds: ‘We used to get a lot of nervousness from teachers with the original PRP, who were worried they would be opening up a can of worms by venturing into the emotions. But that’s reduced now, because teachers realize it’s not about that. Some experiences would not be suitable for the classroom and would be handled differently, through the school’s counseling services.’

The tricky values question

I ask Lucy and Emma if the new curriculum is trying to teach young people values. This seems to me the thorny question for both PSHE and Positive Psychology in schools. On the one hand, they are attempts to help young people to flourish. On the other hand, there is an understandable nervousness about state schools promoting a particular ethical vision of the good life (there’s less nervousness about this in private schools, perhaps because they’re less multicultural in pupil demographics, and also because an ethical culture is what parents are paying for).

Emma says: ‘Positive Psychology does face that value question, and we’re involved in the designing of a Positive Psychology whole-school approach for Wellington College. But this PSHE curriculum is much more about skills and awareness than values. Of course, we don’t want kids to take drugs, or get drunk, or have unprotected sex, but there’s nothing more invasive than that.’ Lucy adds: ‘We want to strengthen young people’s capacity to make their own decisions. Of course at year 7 or 8 we say ‘it’s better not to take drugs’, but at year 9 or 10 we say ‘what’s your view?’ We want to help people develop their own value system. A Catholic school might have a very particular set of ideas about sex, for example. While we’re not trying to influence young people in any one way. We’re not saying how they should be.’

This is, of course, a tricky area. It’s one I grapple with in my book too. You can leave out values from the curriculum altogether and say you’re just teaching ‘life-skills’, but that risks leaving children in a moral vacuum, where you sacrifice children on the altar of your own liberal tolerance (wow, quite a melodramatic metaphor there). Or you can opt to include explicit values in the curriculum, but then you risk indoctrinating young people in your own unexamined dogma, drilled into them Madrasah-style, rather than enabling people to develop an autonomous and sceptical mind-set. The challenge is balancing indoctrination with skepticism, balancing inherited wisdom with a freedom to choose one’s own path. This is not an easy trick to pull off, and requires a great deal of skill, wisdom and humanity from the teacher.

I would still love to see more ethical discussion in PSHE, to combine it with Religious Education and philosophy, and to introduce more Socratic discussions about different models of the good life – particularly in year 11, year 12 and at university. Life-skills are the means, but it’s useful also to think about the ends. I wish the new project the best of luck over the next four years. I’m not sure what the government plans to do with PSHE in the meantime.

Review: Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Gabriel Watts

Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy

Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro (eds.) Oxford University Press, 2012, pp.285

Anyone interested in philosophical characterisations of emotion, both contemporary and historical, knows the standard line concerning the relationship between emotion and reason. Emotions, traditionally conceived, motivate us to action in opposition to reasons. This can be a bad thing, causing us to do the worst whilst we see the best. But then again, what motivational force could reason possibly have without the passions? Maybe then it ought to be their slave…

The gambit of Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro, is that this standard line tends to skew our thinking about emotions in two broad ways. Firstly, the opposition of emotional states to rational thought draws our attention towards the ethical dimensions of our emotional lives, at the expense of a more general understanding of the way emotions function in cognition. And secondly, contemporary attempts to resolve this opposition, such as the so-called ‘cognitivist’ view that emotions are certain types of judgements, often result in a much too simple assimilation of emotions to rationality.

Instead the task Pickavé and Shapiro set for themselves and the 11 other contributors to Emotion and Cognitive Life is that of presenting a nuanced and complex account of historical thinking about the intersection between emotional experience and cognitive activity. They do so in the hope that renewed “attention to the debates and concerns that engage philosophers of the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods can provide contemporary debate with a host of ideas regarding the relationship between emotions, cognition, and reason, or the way emotions figure in our cognitive lives.” (p. 2)

The most general theme explored throughout Emotion and Cognitive Life is the positioning of emotions within the soul. Amongst the medieval contributions this is a question of whether passions are essentially somatic, or whether some passions properly belong only to the intellective soul. Peter King’s contribution sets the stage for discussions of this and related questions by threading together Augustine and Aquinas’ engagement with the paradoxical Stoic notion of ‘goodpassions’, experienced by the passionless sage. Here King demonstrates how Aquinas turns what for Augustine are properly ‘dispassionate passions’ – such as God’s love – into ‘pseudopassions’, affections only analogous to passions.

Both Ian Drummond and Simo Knuuttila develop this theme further through explorations of John Duns Scotus’ notion of ‘passions of the will’. Drummond’s essay asks whether the will, as the appetitive faculty of the intellective soul, can coherently be said to experience passions insofar as its divinity consists in a radical freedom of action. Knuuttila, on the other hand, examines the causal basis of Scotus’ theory, where the will’s passions are caused by the activity of the soul’s apprehensive faculty. Knuuttila then links the 16^th Century demise of Scotus’ passions of the will to Francisco Suárez’s rejection of causal interaction between the soul’s different faculties.

The early modern essays addressing this theme shift from considerations of the appetitive nature of emotions to the function of the passions within the understanding. Lisa Shapiro presents a strong case for committing Descartes and Spinoza to the thesis she calls ‘passionate perception’, that “experience is, basically, intrinsically affective, and our sense perceptions fundamentally contain information about the importance of things to us, the sort of information we take as proper to the emotions or passions.” (p. 194) Deborah Brown examines the role of wonder in sustaining the conscious intellectual attention Malebranche deems necessary for the search after truth. And Lilli Alanen asks whether there is room in Spinoza’s hyper-intellectualist concept of mind for a passionate form of self-understanding.

Another focus of Emotion and Cognitive Life is the opportunity for dialogue between historical and contemporary accounts of the cognitive aspects of emotions. Some of the essays here concern the possibility (and the utility) of projecting contemporary debates back onto the past. On this front Martin Pickavé engages with contemporary ‘cognitivist’ accounts of emotion by examining Adam Wodeham’s explicit (and unusual) alignment of emotions with the apprehensive faculty (rather than the volitional faculty) of the rational soul. And Dominik Perler links medieval debates over animal passions to contemporary attempts to understand “the island of instrumental rationality” (p. 50) between the conceptual reasoning of humans, and the non-rational existence of plants. Conversely, a number of papers re-examine the past with the intention of opening up new avenues for debate. Paul Hoffman’s chapter examines early modern talk of passions as ‘inciting’ or ‘inclining’ the will and asks whether passionate inclinations might function somewhere between providing a reason to act and causing an action to occur. And Dennis Des Chene draws explicit attention to the role of physiology in Descartes’ moral theory, suggesting that Cartesian générosité should serve as the model for reconciling rational autonomy with human corporeality.

(La Primavera, Sandro Botticelli)

There are a few outliers in the collection that nonetheless make for some of the most interesting reading. Claude Panaccio’s technical paper on William of Ockham’s identification of the apprehensive and appetitive soul, though light on emotions, provides valuable conceptual background to the other medieval essays. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer’s study of Renaissance attempts to appropriate Platonic Eros for a public intellectual audience is a fascinating counterpoint to the otherwise academic focus of the collection. And Amy M. Schmitter’s genealogy of Hume’s account of the passions contains, to my mind, one of the most interesting ideas in the book: that Hume’s psychological mechanism of sympathy grounds both the replication and the mutation of passions within a population.

As a whole Emotion and Cognitive Life feels well edited, which is to say that it not only is well edited but that this fact intrudes on phenomenal consciousness at numerous points. The individual essays are each of a very high standard, and frequently state-of-the-art, but Pickavé and Shapiro’s skill in weaving together consistent and coherent themes across all 13 chronologically ordered essays remains, I think, the standout contribution. The obvious careful attention paid to the development of ideas throughout the collection sees that Emotion and Cognitive Life delivers engaging historical scholarship in a manner accessible to non-specialists. For anyone interested in philosophical characterisations of emotion, both contemporary and historical, it should affect a kind of joy mixed with wonder.

Gabriel Watts is an Education and Outreach Officer with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. He is also a graduate student in philosophy department at the University of Sydney and mainly writes on David Hume’s engagement with Nicholas Malebranche.

Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Katherine Faulkner

Valerie Purton, Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Lamb (London: Anthem Press, 2012)

After a year of centenary celebrations of Dickens and his world, Valerie Purton’s book reminds us that the author has as many critics as devotees. Purton’s monograph aims to redress some of the criticism aimed at Dickens’ ‘sentimentalism’ and to provide a ‘fuller and fairer’ reading of his fiction, by placing it in the context of what she defines as ‘the sentimental tradition’. Dickens’ eccentric and sometimes grotesque sense of humour is appreciated and mined by writers and broadcasters in our own century, Mark Evans’ Bleak Expectations for Radio 4 being one current example. Dickens’ sentimentalism, however, has not fared as well in British literary or popular culture, thanks to the forces of intellectualism and irony.

The treatment of Dickens’ novels by some as ‘populist’ and ‘anti-intellectual’ provides the starting point for Purton’s study. Her introduction sets out the key questions to be addressed: Why have Dickens’ novels been labelled sentimental and why does this give grounds for dismissing the work? How can we define sentimentalism for Dickens and his Victorian readers? What is the after-life of the sentimentality in Dickens’ works and can this still be appreciated in the twenty-first century?

George Cattermole, The Grave of little Nell, 1867, watercolour. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Purton’s definition of sentimentalism is firmly grounded a literary history of Dickens’ eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century predecessors: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Lamb. Close literary analysis of the specific sentimental characteristics in literature forms the backbone of Purton’s argument. These tropes are not discussed in context of developments in science and philosophy that were shaping society’s understanding of emotions and sentiment. She acknowledges the importance of key works by scholars such as Gillian Beer and George Levine, and does précis key scientific, philosophical and moral texts that tackled the causes and effects of emotion, by authors such as John Keble, Charles Bray, Charles Bell and Charles Darwin, in her introduction, but the ideas contained within these texts and their possible influence on Dickens’ work are not discussed at length. Instead Purton draws upon an impressive array of eighteenth-century texts to explore how Dickens’ own definition of sentimentality was defined and informed by his readings and ‘mis-readings’ of these works.

As she explains in the first chapter, Purton adopts a functionalist approach to her assessments of the characteristics of the sentimental tradition, following the methodologies of Isobel Armstrong’s study of emotion and Victorian poetry. Purton identifies features common to eighteenth-century drama and fiction and Dickens’ novels, such as tearful, but virtuous heroes and heroines; benevolent guardian figures who guide lost ‘children’ and the privileging of pity and self-denial over calculating logic and reason. Central to Purton’s analysis is the idea that Dickens’ inherited understanding of the sentimental tradition was mediated through a Victorian reformulation of ‘sentimentality’, where the heart ruled the head and ‘sentiment’ was cast against the forces of industrialization, mechanization and science. Purton argues that this polarized system, heart vs. head, defines the structures and plots of Dickens’ novels, with ‘feeling’ characters being kept apart from the plotters and schemers that inhabit the darker corners of the Dickensian world.

In the second and third chapters, Purton expands upon her exploration of eighteenth-century literary sentimentalism. She challenges the accepted view, which states that Dickens’ childhood reading of Fielding and Sterne helped form his own moral vision. Instead, the author convincingly argues that while eighteenth-century sentimentalism was closely bound up with anarchic humor and earthly concerns, Dickens’ sentimentalism is an attempt to deny the physical in order to present all human experience in spiritual terms. Purton picks up on this point again in her discussion of Dickens’ understanding of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. The play shuttles back and forth between wit and sentiment, and never allows the audience to relax into one mode or the other. Dickens’ selective reading of Sheridan, Purton argues, resulted in his discovery of a different source of dramatic power: the extreme separation of humour and sentimentality. The tension involved in keeping these two registers apart results in an intensification of either grotesque humour or deeply felt sentiment in Dickens’ work.

William Egley, Florence Dombey in Captain Cuttle’s Parlour, 1888, oil on canvas. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Purton’s arguments gain momentum as she goes on to illustrate the occurrences of sentimentality in Dickens’ fiction. Across two chapters, the fifth, which focuses on the earlier novels, in particular The Old Curiosity Shop, and the sixth, which tackles his later work, with the most attention paid to Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, Purton rattles through Dickens’ work at a swift pace. Each selected example is illuminating and allows Purton to develop her ideas about Dickens’ presentation of sentimentality, although many of the intriguing points raised in her analyses could have been explored further. In tantalising passages, Purton introduces the possibility of a Lacanian or Baroque Dickens and I felt the argument could have lingered a little longer on these ideas.

In her conclusion, Purton again draws on ideas from twentieth-century critical theory, in particular the work of Roland Barthes, which is discussed in relation to notions of affect and authorship/readership. Purton argues that the new possibilities opened up the work of by Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and others, has enabled a reassessment of sentimentalism. In turn this has fed into the twenty-first-century scholarly preoccupation with the history of emotions and their literary construction. Although the sentimentalism of Dickens’ work has often been attacked by critics, most prominently J.S. Mill, George Eliot and in the twentieth-century, Virginia Woolf, Purton argues that sentiment and melodrama need to be recognized for their cultural, if not their aesthetic, value. This response will strike a chord with many Victorianists working on literature, art and popular culture that is now considered beyond the pale The clear and elegant prose and logical and perceptive analysis make the book appealing and accessible to scholars and students alike, although there is little concession made to those who are not already familiar with Dickens’ life and work. Possibly revealing more about my own preoccupations than any gaps in Purton’s research, I often found myself wishing that she had mapped some of her ideas around sentimentality onto contemporary ideas about physiology and psychology. Nevertheless, this is an original and convincing book and successfully makes a case for a reassessment of the significance of Poor Little Nell and her sentimental companions.

Katie Faulkner is a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has recently completed a doctoral thesis examining the relationship between Victorian sculpture and dress and is co-teaching a masters’ course looking at art, science and literature in British Aestheticism.

Pop stars are the unqualified legislators of the world

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Jules Evans

To talk about David Bowie, first we need to talk about Thomas Carlyle, a philosopher who, near the beginning of the 19th century, recognised that rationalism was undermining the mythical foundation of society – Christianity – without putting any new myths in its place. In Sartor Resartus, his unusual and wonderful book of 1830, he called for new myth-makers to form new stories, new images, new icons, which could hold society together and connect us to the divine. He initially thought poets could achieve this – they could be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, as Shelley put it. But Carlyle decided later in his career that what society really needed were heroes – Byronic figures who, through the sheer strength and charisma of their personalities – could control historical events and command respect and obedience in the masses. He thought Napoleon was the last such Great Man of his time.

Looking back today, we can see the potential dodginess of Carlyle’s thinking. He seems to be arguing that the only thing which can hold society together is some sort of emperor-cult, some irrational worship of a military hero. He ignores the message, in Jesus and Socrates, that the kingdom of heaven is within us – not in external forms and icons to be worshipped. His ideas were bad, but prophetic: in the 20th century, the cult of Napoleon evolved into the Cult of Hitler, the Cult of Stalin, the Cult of Mao, the Cult of Kim Jong-Il, the Cult of Putin – though historians will dispute whether these strong men really held their society together, or rather blocked their progress and tore them apart. They certainly didn’t connect them to the divine, if that’s what Carlyle thought would happen.

Luckily, western democratic societies took a different path from dictator-cults. Through no form of central planning, no grand vision, western societies discovered that the masses could be amused, placated and joined together by a different form of icon or hero: the celebrity entertainer. I think of Oscar Wilde as one of the first self-invented celebrity icons, and he developed his own theory of cult personalities: charismatic and dazzling people who give the masses an archetype to dream about, and a pattern to imitate. He created a cult for himself, changing his name, generating his own publicity, creating a legend around his life. He also discovered that celebrity icons, unlike dictators, are easily disposable. We can smash them and find new ones, to assert our power, we, the people. This is fun for us, less fun for the celebrities.

A few years after Wilde died, the mass manufacture of celebrity icons took off with the rise of the dream factory, cinema, and of mass icons like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Yet, even with the arrival of sound and a new generation of stars like Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe, cinema only allowed a certain amount of immersion. You could go to the cinema repeatedly, collect magazines and photographs of your favourite star, but there was still something of an emotional separation – compared to the old cult of Christianity or violent new cults like Fascism.

Freddie Mercury commanding the crowd at Live Aid

Then rock music happened. It was a total immersive art form, particularly live, combining music, poetry, theatre, dance, art, design and costume and, later, film, video and animation. Suddenly, a handful of rock stars were plugged into the cultural mainframe and channeling the dreams and desires of the masses. Through radios, TVs, walkmans and now iPods, they had a direct line to the national psyche further and deeper than any communist dictator.

This was a shock for everyone – especially the rock stars. There was no planning, no grand vision. Intellectuals, the guardians of high culture, were particularly miffed, because they thought they were the keepers of the nation’s soul, and then suddenly these young men – teenagers really – came along and commanded such utter adulation. And no one gave much of a damn about poets, playwrights and novelists any more. Power had been passed over, to a small group of young musicians who were not prepared for it. There was a moment in 1956, for example, when Enoch Powell was on an evening talk show with Bill Haley. And after the show Powell went up to shake his hand. Him, Enoch Powell, a man of such high culture that, when he was on Desert Island Discs, every one of his song selections was from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. ‘Why did I want to shake his hand?’ Powell said when asked. ‘He is the most influential character of our age.’

Elvis Presley found himself subjected to the most intense religious adulation, and he couldn’t handle it. Then Bob Dylan found himself seized upon as ‘the voice of a generation’. And he couldn’t deal with it either. Watch him in interviews, as fans and journalists try to get him to pronounce on society like he was Jesus or Marx. It’s intensely uncomfortable for a young singer in his 20s, utterly unprepared for such epic cultural influence to be placed on his shoulders. So he disappeared, and converted to Christianity. He decided that ‘you gotta serve somebody’, and he’d rather serve God than have people bow to him. He thought the rock cult was inane. As he told two pestering fans in 1965: ‘If you needed my autograph I’d give it to you.’

The Beatles and the Stones were also subject to intense quasi-religious hysteria, teenage girls competing with each other in their screams, wetting themselves, so that rivers of urine flowed down between the seats (I’m not making that up). They were also wooed by politicians (the Beatles in particular) who recognised that, abruptly, rock stars wielded far more cultural power than politicians or anyone else for that matter. They could instigate cause riots, even topple governments.

A 1963 cartoon showing the prime-minister, Alec Douglas-Home, desperately trying to recruit the Beatles to his campaign.

And they were also pondered over by intellectuals, the guardians of high culture. Look, for example, at this video of Mick Jagger, being interviewed by a bishop, a judge, and the editor of the Times. They’re trying to figure him out, but he’s just as surprised and unprepared himself to be channeling the dreams of the masses. He’s not so much an unacknowledged legislator as an unqualified one. As Kanye West would put it 40 years later: ‘No one man should have all that power‘ (particularly not a loveable dufus like Kanye…)

The rise of pop to the heights of unchallenged cultural influence presented a challenge to the old intelligentsia. It was a cultural revolution, less bloody but no less powerful than the cultural revolution occurring at the same time in China. It was a revolution of hierarchies. Suddenly, teenagers were empowered and low culture – pop stars – was raised on high. They had the public’s attention. Their art was the art that was really soaking into and shaping the nation’s psyche. So how should the old guard react to this?

Pop music and the Culture Wars

Madonna’s Justify My Love: feminism at its finest

From the 1960s to the 1990s, if you were an intellectual, your attitude to pop music decided which side of the barricade you were on in the Culture Wars. On one side of the barricade were those who decided that pop culture was worthy of serious academic attention, because, after all, culture is culture. Everything is culture – from toothpaste to Titian. Everything is part of our lives, and if explored intelligently it reveals interesting things about our social, emotional and economic attitudes. That was the idea behind Cultural Studies, a field arguably begun by George Orwell with his essay on Boys’ Weeklies, and then pioneered by the likes of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdidge, who wrote a famous book analysing the sub-culture of punk music. Later on, you had postmodernist critics like Camille Paglia declaring that Madonna was the leading feminist of our times, thanks to the saucy video for Justify My Love. The flowering of Cultural Studies led to all sorts of PhDs on Lady Gaga or Buffy the Vampire-Slayer or other pop artifacts.

On the other side were the brave defenders of High Art, protectors of The Canon, people like Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom and Roger Scruton, who insisted that we have lost any sense of the hierarchy of the good. Our tastes have become debased. Allan Bloom wrote a famous chapter on pop music in his 1989 best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, in which he identified it as ‘the youth culture’ against which ‘there is now no other countervailing nourishment for the spirit’. Pop is the triumph of narcissistic infantilism, Bloom suggests, which makes children the arbiters of society’s taste and gives them ‘everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for’. Pop burns people out, ruining their imagination, barbarising their emotions, and making it ‘very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education’. Roger Scruton is a little less harsh on pop, but only just. He also sees it as the triumph of infantilism, and criticises (in his book Modern Culture) the gross inarticulacy of Oasis lyrics (no argument from me there) and the crude angry robotics of ‘The Prodigy’s latest techno-slam’.

And, between these two extremes, there are a few intellectuals in the middle, who try to insist that there is good pop and bad pop, and to direct our taste to the good, so that we begin to ascend the ladder of taste. Such intellectuals insist that pop needn’t ruin our emotional and cultural palette, as long as we listen to good pop. Indeed, the best pop can be considered great art, some argue. This is the position of Christopher Ricks, one of the leading critics of poetry, who wrote a book on the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan. It’s also the position of Tom Stoppard, probably my country’s greatest living writer, who celebrates the power of pop in his play Rock N’ Roll.

Wowie Bowie

Which brings us to David Robert Jones, born in Brixton in the 1940s, who went to technical school to study art and design before surprising his parents by telling them he planned to be a rock star. And to me, he is the greatest British rock star there’s been. His body of work is unrivaled – for a decade he produced incredible albums, like Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Low, Station to Station, Space Oddity and Aladdin Sane. His lyrics are right up there with Morrissey and only just short of Dylan. His live shows were an incredible mix of dance, mime, costume and film, and Ziggy Stardust is one of the greatest concert movies made. But what really makes him the best British rock star, in my opinion, is that in his own songs, he conceptualises and comments on the cult of the rock star and its relationship to power, more intelligently than anyone before or since.

Bowie studied the cult of the rock star, hung out in Andy Warhol’s Factory – a sort of think-tank for the modern obsession with celebrity – and then went and made Hunky Dory (1971), an album in which he imagines homo sapiens being succeeded by a super-race of ‘pretty things’. The album contains two particularly interesting songs, Life On Mars and Quicksand. The former paints a scene of mass post-war culture as a sort of sordid spectacle put on at Butlins:

It’s on Amerika’s tortured brow

That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow

Now the workers have struck for fame

‘Cause Lennon’s on sale again

See the mice in their million hordes

From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads

Rule Britannia is out of bounds

To my mother, my dog, and clowns

But the film is a saddening bore

‘Cause I wrote it ten times or more

It’s about to be writ again

As I ask you to focus on

Sailors fighting in the dance hall

Oh man! Look at those cavemen go

It’s the freakiest show

If you want to watch him sing the words, here’s the vid

Then in Quicksand he thinks about the role of the rock star in this mass spectacle, as a conductor for the dreams and desires of the masses:

I’m closer to the Golden Dawn

Immersed in Crowley’s uniform

Of imagery

I’m living in a silent film

Portraying Himmler’s sacred realm

Of dream reality

I’m frightened by the total goal

Drawing to the ragged hole

And I ain’t got the power anymore

No I ain’t got the power anymore

I’m the twisted name on Garbo’s eyes

Living proof of Churchill’s lies

I’m destiny I’m torn between the light and dark

Where others see their targets

Divine symmetry

Should I kiss the viper’s fang

Or herald loud the death of Man

I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought

And I ain’t got the power anymore

Don’t believe in yourself

Don’t deceive with belief

Knowledge comes with death’s release

I’m not a prophet or a stone age man

Just a mortal with the potential of a superman

I’m living on

I’m tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien

Can’t take my eyes from the great salvation

Of bullshit faith

This is pretty heady stuff – he’s suggesting the rock star is a Nietzchean or even fascist superman, while also sensing a void of nothingness beneath him. After that album, Bowie went out and lived his art, by creating a sort of fascist monster in the character of Ziggy Stardust, who walked out on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo to the theme from the Clockwork Orange, a totemic symbol on his face and on the wall behind him, and a mob of teenage imitators and worshippers screaming before him. It’s a performance-piece, a comment on celebrity culture, its power and nihilism. But the line between performance and reality rapidly became blurred, as Ziggy / Bowie became a global superstar. As he discusses in this BBC documentary from 1975, Ziggy took him over. He was no longer performing ironically.

So he killed Ziggy off, and then created a succession of other alter-egos: Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke. But they’re all, really, variations on the same theme of the celebrity ego and the hero-worship of the masses. They’re all riffs on that line from Ziggy: ‘Making love to his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his mind’. What other message is there, in terms of ethics or how to live, besides the worship of brute charisma? In the BBC documentary, Bowie reflects that Ziggy is about a guy who becomes ‘an almighty prophet-like superstar rocker who found he didn’t know what to do with it once he got it. It’s an archetype really.’

In other words, the real theme of Ziggy is the strangeness of our society giving so much power and cultural influence to these young, inexperienced and unqualified legislators of the world, who have nothing much to say apart from the glorification of ego, sex, fame, wealth and power. Perhaps that’s harsh. Bowie says he hopes his multiple personalities have also allowed people to express the different parts of themselves. And that’s what pop music has really taught us, over the last 50 years: that we can be ‘a million different people from one day to the next’. We can endlessly re-invent ourselves, like Madonna or Lady Gaga or Bowie. But we’ve learnt that now, and we already do it, on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else.

After strange gods

Meanwhile pop music seems to be getting more and more banal and brutal. Bowie was the best of it, and made haunting wonderful complex music. But now, there’s nothing avant-garde about Lady Gaga’s music. It’s the same brutal maximilist dance-pop as you hear in Rihanna or David Guetta or Flo Rida or any of today’s stars. Imagine being a teenager today when your emotional range is limited to that music. It reminds me of the line from George Orwell’s 1984: ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’ That’s what every David Guetta single sounds like to me: a boot stamping on a human face forever. Bowie was at least aware of that (Diamond Dogs, his eighth album, is actually a musical version of 1984), and saw it coming . But we don’t need any more ironic commentaries on the cult of celebrity. We need something else, we need someone to lead us beyond it. I can’t help feeling the cult of the pop star might be wearing out. We don’t believe in it any more, and we have grown numb to the latest shocks. The age of the superstar is fading, to be replaced by a rapid shuffle of disposable stand-ins, and all that’s left is the Cult of Me.

The Many Faces of Emotion

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Stephanie Downes

From Dec 5-7, 2012, Stephanie Downes and Stephanie Trigg convened ‘Faces of Emotion: Medieval to Postmodern,’ an interdisciplinary symposium at the University of Melbourne. Here they reflect on three days of intensive discussion on, artwork about, and performance of, facial expressions of feeling.

Geoffrey Chaucer, Wikimedia Commons

Researching emotions on the human face can take us into some strange and wonderful places, from Chaucer’s poetry to the ethics of cosmetic surgery.

Many academic disciplines and artistic and cultural practices are fascinated by the face and its capacity to express — and to withhold — emotion. Questions of performance, historical change and cultural difference further complicate the relationship between emotions and the face.

The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) focuses on the period 1100-1800. One of its research programs, Shaping the Modern, moves beyond this historical period to explore some of the ways in which contemporary Australian culture responds to the European past. The Faces of Emotion symposium brought together researchers on medieval and early modern literature and art with artistic practitioners and scholars from a range of other fields: psychologists, philosophers, photographers, museum curators and cultural theorists.

The keynote public lecture was given by Stephen Jaeger, author of Enchantment (U Penn Press, 2012), on the ‘silent’ film, The Artist. Stephen began with the story behind the cover of his book, a portrait of Durer pixilated with portraits of other faces, painted and photographed, all of which are analysed in his book. Images of these faces were pinned on the noticeboard where he worked.

His lecture drew on the long history of redemptive female faces that sits behind the 2011 film, from Dante’s Beatrice to Marlene Dietrich. In a first for CHE, the lecture was signed by AUSLAN (Australian Sign Language) interpreters. Audience members were particularly struck by the eloquent language of the hands describing Dante’s descent into hell and his ascent to the vision of Beatrice in Paradise.

It became clear over the course of the three days that the face is radically undertheorised. The scholar mentioned most often was Emmanuel Levinas, though Eileen Joy cautioned us against taking his idea of ‘the face’ too literally [see Eileen’s take on the Melbourne collaboratory in the comments thread at In the Medieval Middle]. Her paper typically ranged widely across Levinas, other metaphors of the face, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Malory’s Tale of Balin. As she talked about the two Balins and the destruction of the face in this traumatic medieval battle, we looked into a still shot of the wide-eyed face of Jim Caviziel as Private Witt ‘receiving the world’ of war:

In her own paper, Stephanie Trigg explored Geoffrey Chaucer’s translations of facial expression into words, through his use of the phrase, ‘as if to say’. Many other papers also tackled the problem of the relation between image and text, and the ways textual, visual and cinematic media describe and represent faces. Joanna Gilmour, for example, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, in Canberra, showed a portrait of eighteenth-century Indigenous Australian Bennelong. An anonymous contemporary annotation describes the portrait as painted ‘when he was angry.’

Natural History Museum, London

There was much discussion about the status of such descriptions, and the difficulties of attributing emotions through such highly mediated forms as portraiture and photography, especially in colonial contexts. Such descriptions openly challenge modern European understandings of the ‘universality’ of facial emotions.

A paper by Anne Maxwell on race, colonialism and photography in nineteenth-century America similarly troubled modern interpretive practices and assumptions. Are droplets of water on the skin of the face necessarily tears, or might they be beads of sweat, from heat or the exhaustion of sitting still for the camera? Reaching further back in history and across a range of cultural encounters, Jonathan Lamb, from Vanderbilt, compared Hogarth’s anatomy of the blush with the inverse patterns of facial tattoos in the Pacific.

Dianne Jones talked about her own artistic practice as an Indigenous photographer making ‘the Mona Lisa series’: portraits of her relatives posed as Leonardo’s iconic sitter. Her stunning ‘Kristy’ was the artwork adorning posters publicising the Faces collaboratory.

‘Kristy,’ by permission of the artist, Dianne Jones, Niagara Galleries

Odette Kelada offered an analytical approach to emotions in modern Australian art, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004).

The Centre has a strong interest in contemporary Australian art and culture. A performance of a short play by Mark Nicholls (Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne), ‘Richard II and the Old Queen,’ brought lines from Shakespeare to the fore, as we watched an actress (Madeleine Swan) playing an ageing Elizabeth as she applied heavy white face makeup to complete her onstage transformation into Gloriana:

Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face:
[…]
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face.
[Richard II, 4.I.285-91]

We moved next from the intimacy of encounters between actors and audiences in the space of the theatre, to the modern art gallery, where a pop-up exhibition at the Brain Centre brought us face-to-face with a series of artistic expressions of emotion, using the face as a central medium. The exhibition showcased self-portraits by psychiatric patients from the Dax collection: a moving reminder of the complex interior states that can lie behind the representations of facial emotion and the therapeutic role that representation of facial emotion can play.

From a different psychological perspective, Ottmar Lipp (Psychology, University of Queensland) presented a series of ‘happy’ and ‘angry’ faces of different genders and races. These images had been shown to participants in cross-cultural clinical trials to test the speed with which emotions such as ‘happiness’ and ‘anger’ are recognised on the faces of strangers. (As it turns out, happiness wins, which puts a nice, positive spin on our assumptions with which we go into a new social interaction!)

For the historians among us, this research invited the question: how would modern participants in clinical trials interpret emotion on the faces of the past? [Editor’s note: you can read about a very unscientific and preliminary attempt at such an experiment via a previous post on this blog which includes a link to my report on using historical images in a programme teaching emotional literacy in a local school.]

The director of CHE, Philippa Maddern, wondered about the outcomes of a trial in which subjects were asked to assess images of historical faces. Her own paper suggested that medieval people looked for a range of signs in their ‘reading’ of the human face, from gesture and expression, to facial shape (shades of phrenology here?), changes in colour and complexion, and emanations such as tears, sweat, and blood.

The collaboratory showed that the face is not only interesting historically, but has political implications, especially in twenty-first century Australian contexts, from debates about refugees, indigenous relations, and the performance of gender. Interpreting and understanding emotion on the face is not just a matter of discriminating between anger and shame, for example, but about discrimination itself: faces tell emotional narratives about ethnicity and identity as well as individual feelings.

Discussions between historians and psychologists, and between theorists of visual and textual representation, confirmed just how much work remains to be done, exploring the expression and communication of emotions on the face, whether historically, or contextually. It is clear that we need longer, transhistorical as well as multidisciplinary accounts of thematic topics like ‘the face’ in the history of emotions.

Over the course of the three days, it also became apparent just how pervasive metaphorical language about the face is. This is as true of modern Australian English as it is of Middle English, Welsh [Stephen Knight on Culhwch and Olwen], and Old French [Stephanie Downes on ‘bonne chère’]. Yet while literary and artistic representations about the face seem to have much in common, historically and in the present, real faces seemed to stay elusive, somehow veiled and inscrutable.

Michael Jackson in 1997, Wikimedia Commons

One of the last presentations, by Meredith Jones, treated the manipulation of facial expression into individual expression in faces that have undergone cosmetic surgery. Is this the face of emotion of the future? We barely touched on issues of posthumanism and technology in the time we had for the symposium, but this might be where literary and artistic representations of the emotive face – the face as text and the face as image – finally meet with reality.

Dr Stephanie Downes is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne.

Professor Stephanie Trigg is a Chief Investigator with the Centre, and leads the Shaping the Modern program. They are both members of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

New Publications, October-December 2012

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Thomas Dixon

If you would like to review or write about any of these publications for the History of Emotions Blog, then please get in touch with me (Thomas Dixon).

A book listed in a previous round-up on this blog, Hannah Newton’s The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720 has been short-listed for the 2013 Longman/History Today Book Prize. Hannah recently wrote a post for the History of Emotions Blog about her research.

Happy reading, happy holidays, and happy new year…!