Using found objects from Viennese flea markets and relics from New Zealand beaches, Wild Theatre’s Stonebelly conjures a dreamscape haunted by its instigator. In this desert of mirages, characters form and crumble, explore and disappear, destroy and reconstruct. This is a world of the other, yet for all its ephemeral abstracts and sinuous atmospheres, it’s less adventurous than it promises to be.

This entirely visual show, with a specially composed soundtrack, aims to explore the cracks of reality and the creatures that hide there. On three tall barrels lie three deserts of salt, barren and empty, awaiting their colonisers. Corrugated iron tools and discarded wooden vestiges begin to populate this strange world. Creatures shift, transform and explore in front of us, they contort, jump from one environment to the other, lonely in their otherness. It’s a set of dangerous and decrepit characters in search of a story.

This is perhaps the reason the show falls flat. Despite its visual language being highly developed and precise, it often lacks consequence and specificity. It’s a series of fragmented moments, some narrative and others iconographic. The objects are carefully chosen and wonderfully histrionic, colonising a sea of salt - forgotten vestiges that we spend so little time with.

Visual theatre doesn’t need a narrative, but it cannot survive without clear motifs and a real sense of purpose to its imagery. In Stonebelly, too many times a storm passes over the salt desert without it gaining any meaning; we leap from one creature to another without an opportunity to really delve into their otherness, their life in this desert of the haunted imagination. A clatter of bones amasses and crumbles, and we’re left longing for this transient creature.

It’s a shame, since the performance contains some highly engaging moments. It is the scenes so concerned with their own ritual that are most engaging. Moments when a creature rises from the desert and interacts with what it finds, exploring the dangers of its landscape until one of them is destroyed. The relationship between sound and image is at its most powerful when the two are in antithesis, changing the rhythm and emotional life of a scene. The show is often characterised by a haunting eeriness which gives it a level of unpredictability and sustains even the most problematic of scenes.

Humour plays a part too - objects topple over, creatures fall apart - but the show leaves little room for inconsistencies and accidents, so when they do happen, it is always without resolve. Surely this world with such fragmented micro-politics, is not an absolute one; by allowing for incidents to happen, it brings more credibility to an otherwise carefully crafted series of surprises.

Stonebelly is mixed bag of work, sometimes packed with wonderful surprises both dark and comic, and at other times too impenetrable and rushed. It certainly reveals the possibilities of object manipulation to create surreal, moving, living landscapes, and Wild Theatre hold the skill to bring these to life. It’s an atmospheric piece with potent metaphors, albeit scattered and fragmented.

Run over.

Keeping in touch with our humanity

This week on CW, Rob Clowes asks whether social networking is actually making us antisocial, in an essay-review of Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. Lee Jones reviews Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, and finds impressive research into the global governance of pandemic disease does not necessarily make for gripping cinema. And Paul Kilbey reports from an ICA talk on sound in art, and reviews Fiona Shaw’s current ENO production of The Marriage of Figaro in London.

3 November 2011

The Marriage of Figaro’s director Fiona Shaw was on a panel at this weekend’s Battle of Ideas festival, discussing the role of marriage in society. Given the scrutiny to which Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte subject marriage in this work – and given Shaw’s intelligent response to this in her production – few people could have been better qualified.

The three principal marriages with which the work deals all cast a very different light on the issue. The Count’s roving eye causes problems in his marriage to the Countess, whose distress was brilliantly captured here by Kate Valentine in the aria ‘Hear my prayer’ (‘Porgi amor’). Figaro and Susanna’s relationship is put under pressure and overanalysed in the build-up to their wedding. And the young Cherubino rather arbitrarily jumps into marriage with keen-but-boring Barbarina, and instantly appears to regret it. Shaw’s production, set around a labyrinthine rotating house in southern Spain and full of bleached animal skulls and languid Spaniards in black, well captures the intense heat of the opera, its obsession with libido; it is a classical work packed with romantic intent.

Though not in modern dress, this feels a very contemporary production, with an intricate but minimal set and artful silhouette projections above the stage. The libretto, translated by Jeremy Sams, is an unashamedly 21st-century version, which works extremely well. The contemporary puns and turns of phrase help grant the performance a groundedness and approachability completely in keeping with the opera’s tone. The line ‘What did you expect: the Spanish Inquisition?’ is little more flippant than much of the original text by Da Ponte, who, in adapting his text from the play by Beaumarchais, deliberately expunged all references to politics. The Marriage of Figaro is absolutely not a commentary on the banking crisis, and is all the better for it.

Shaw’s cast all seem secure in their roles, with Valentine the standout performer as the Countess. Iain Paterson’s Figaro is jovial and confident, and Devon Guthrie’s Susanna equally assured. Roland Wood relishes the lothario aspect to his role as the Count, performing trouserless for a considerable period. And Kathryn Rudge is a model Cherubino, combining sweetness with annoyingness and singing with a disarming, pure tone.

For all the frenetic action of the moving stage, and the potential aggression of the animal skulls, this is still a charmingly light production, with the singers always graceful and elegant in negotiating the complex set. Shaw has not been afraid to put her own thoughts on the table, but the musical performance is strong and clean enough that it can support multiple interpretative ideas on stage, and my overall impression was of balance rather than busyness.

This is Shaw’s first directing of a ‘canonical’ operatic work, her earlier two efforts having been for Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers and Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea. She has approached the task sensibly, without appearing overawed by the magnitude of the work and its reputation. She also clearly has a lot to say, on both marriage and Mozart, and I look forward to her saying more such things in future.

Remaining performances on Thursday 3, Saturday 5 and Thursday 10 November 2011.

Can you make an interesting film about the global governance of global pandemic disease? Apparently not, if Contagion is anything to go by. Steven Soderbergh gets an A+ for his research, but at best a B- for entertainment value.

Contagion doesn’t really work as cinema. Structurally, it is modelled on films like Magnolia and Crash, which follow a number of distinct but related story arcs surrounding a central event. In this case, it’s the outbreak of a highly contagious strain of influenza which infects a fifth of the world’s population, killing a large proportion of them. The main story arcs feature the efforts by the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) to manage the epidemic and devise a cure, investigations by the World Health Organisation (WHO) into its origins, one family – headed by a character played by Matt Damon – infected by the virus, and a blogger – played by Jude Law – determined to expose government and corporate conspiracies surrounding the disease.

This sounds fine and potentially interesting in principle, but actually none of the storylines is particularly gripping or emotionally engaging. Matt Damon does his damnedest to make us care about him and his one surviving daughter, and just about succeeds by the end. The other narratives deliver precious little emotional payoff. Rather than building towards some great climax or cathartic moment, they each seem to ebb away, just like the disease itself. Some reviewers have called Contagion a cross between The Road and 28 Days Later. It is absolutely not. It contains nothing of the horror and tension of 28 Days, and aside from a couple of brief scenes, is oddly calm and plodding, conveying little sense of apocalypse or social collapse, unlike The Road.

Why doesn’t Contagion work? Perhaps because it is simply too realistic. For Soderbergh has certainly done his homework (or someone has done it for him). The film has a remarkably finely tuned awareness of how global health governance actually works in practice and it relays this extremely realistically to the audience. The CDC really would start looking for a cure in the careful, methodical way described, and it really would take many months to develop and manufacture enough, by which time the disease would already have wreaked havoc. The R0 – the number of people each sufferer would communicate the disease to – really would determine the urgency, scope and type of methods used to contain and manage the epidemic. The WHO would seek to find the ‘index’ victim – the one closest to its origin – in order to track down the source, identify the contagious and contain its spread. The origin of any deadly worldwide pandemic is indeed likely to be East Asia and involve animal-to-human transmission, à la SARS and bird flu. And so on.

The trouble is, a lot of global health governance is highly technical and rather bureaucratic stuff. You need to work pretty hard to bring it alive in a way that will engage a cinema audience. Contagion doesn’t work hard enough. It is often painfully didactic: the characters actually explain – to other characters, but obviously for the audience’s benefit – what R0 is, what the ‘index’ is, and so on. At times, it is like watching an extended episode of CSI, with all the engaging and exciting parts stripped out.

This is a huge pity, really, because global health governance raises very important political questions, and the film deals with them quite ham-fistedly. A WHO investigator is taken hostage in China and only released in exchange for one of the first batches of the vaccine. This is a reference to two recent controversies: first, China’s reluctance to cooperate with WHO investigations into SARS in 2004; second, Indonesia’s decision to stop sharing bird flu virus samples with the WHO in 2008. Both related to questions of sovereignty, but the second controversy was also about who benefits from the global systems set up to manage transboundary disease. Indonesia stopped sharing the virus when it realised that the WHO was passing them on to big pharmaceutical companies to manufacture vaccines, none of which would be available for Indonesia to buy for its own people. Although Jakarta had scraped together enough money to buy some, rich developed countries had already secured first dibs on tens of millions of batches, leaving Indonesia facing a huge waiting list. The country worst-affected by bird flu would therefore be least able to access the vaccine. Indonesia’s decision to suspend cooperation with the WHO in protest was widely condemned as irresponsible by the global health community, but it raised important issues about the power relations involved in the technocratic systems featured in Contagion.

The film tries to explore these issues through the hostage storyline, but its treatment is rather undermined by the other story arcs, particularly the blogger’s. Law’s character, Alan Krumwiede, is a geeky conspiracy theorist convinced that the US government, the WHO and big pharmaceuticals are all in cahoots to conceal the truth from the public and make big profits from manufacturing a vaccine when a cheap, complementary medicine can cure it. Some of the issues Krumwiede raises have real validity. As the Indonesian controversy suggests, the WHO and big pharma really are – as he puts it – like ‘a hand in a glove’; global health governance is big business and that profoundly shapes how it works and how the benefits are distributed. Yet the relevance and import of this point is profoundly discredited, both by their insertion into wild conspiracy-theorising (the character is made to be Australian, despite Law’s extraordinarily bad Australian accent, presumably to evoke the equally ‘weird’ anti-corporate activist Julian Assange) and by Krumwiede’s attempts to profit from the pandemic himself by investing in the complementary medicine. He is ultimately arrested by the US government on anti-trust charges. Consequently, it is big pharma and the American state which are painted as the responsible – if rather dull – heroes of the piece. Everyone in the US eventually gets their vaccine in a calm, orderly and fair fashion, in an order determined by a lottery. The fact that the vast majority of the world’s population would probably never receive a vaccine is only hinted at when the WHO delivers a fake shipment to the Chinese village in exchange for the release of their investigator.

Soderbergh tried to do a lot with Contagion – perhaps too much: explain basics of epidemiology, convey a sense of how pandemic viruses are governed, explore the ethical issues it raises and the political controversies surrounding it, and show how individuals might deal with the disease on the ground. It is a tall order, and not without some success. Certainly it is a thought-provoking film that has great fealty to its subject. But ultimately, Contagion is surprisingly dull for a movie about a disease that kills up to a fifth of the global population.

There is something inherently paradoxical about the notion of sound in the ‘visual’ arts. Not only because sound-based art is traditionally the domain of music, but also because attention towards the auditory is surely at least as likely to distract a ‘viewer’ away from the visual as it is to focus his or her attention on it. While multimedia artistic projects have become very common, there may still be a sense in which the visual and the auditory are two distinct realms; mixing them destabilises things and leaves everything up for grabs.

The starting point of the talk on this subject at the ICA last week was Robert Morris’ 1961 work Box with the Sound of its Own Making, a wooden box which contains a recording of the sounds made during its assembly. Artist and writer Salomé Voegelin was the most eloquent of the four speakers on the significance of this work. She described the box as representing a break from the reverential silence of the traditional gallery, a jolting away from the idea of the purity of the finished product. While a silent, modernist work demands that the viewer’s scrutiny be directed exclusively to the complete, perfected artwork - thus idealising the process of artistic creation - Morris’ box points the viewer/listener towards the banal reality of its creative process. By putting the sound in the box, Morris also calls attention to its actual absence: the making of the box can still only be imagined, as the outcome (even given its contents) cannot constitute its genesis.

Interpreted thus, sound becomes an intrusion, its addition casting doubt and uncertainty into the viewer’s mind. Voegelin played us an extract from one of her own sound pieces, which through extreme incongruity and apparent shifts of time and place challenged listeners to construct a coherent visual scenario: again, sound acts to destabilise, to disconcert.

Voegelin was not the only speaker to reflect on sound as intrusion. The artist and writer Tim Etchells described a project called Hour of Noise, which had involved leading a group of residents of Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, through the streets in a directionless tour of pure cacophony, embracing sound as noise and for its own sake. A key aspect to this work, Etchells suggested, was the complete pointlessness of the sound created; he deliberately chose a sleepy, quiet mountain town to maximise the impact of sound as something alien.

In a different way, Aura Satz also asked her audience to reflect on the strangeness of sound. She played several extracts from videos which deal with the strange ways in which image and sound can coalesce: close-up images of gramophone grooves, and a machine (an ‘Oramics’ machine) that produced weird sounds through being fed squiggly lines. Though as in Hour of Noise sound is unambiguously celebrated in these pieces, there is still very much a sense in which it is the foreign element; that the sound is an immanent aspect to the visuals, the same as them in substance yet still so unpredictable, is what gives the films their otherworldly atmosphere.

All the artists who spoke, in other words, treated sound as something other. As a musician, I was surprised by this - perhaps just because I am used to putting sound first, but also perhaps because the visual element of musical performance is and always has been a firmly established part of music: any musical experience always involves seeing things. But the difference is that the reverse is not the case: a traditional visual-artistic experience involves no sound whatsoever. One consequence of this distinction may be that merging visual art into a musical setting is a lot less controversial or problematic than merging sound into visuals. This, at least, was the impression I was left with after the talk. That said, I am looking forward to having to reassess this conclusion at the ICA’s Cut and Splice festival, which again engages with sound art, next month.

You know I hate to ask
But are ‘friends’ electric?
Only mine’s broke down
And now I’ve no-one to love
‘Are Friends Electric?’ Tubeway Army (1979)

Antisocial technology?

The social web: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and the host of other technologies that invite us to connect to each other through a variety of internet-based interfaces seem to be technologies that provoke existential questions. Who are we? What are we? Where are we going? Some, such as novelist Zadie Smith, even see the new tech as creating a new sort of person: People 2.0.

Only a few years back this kind of questioning may have had an optimistic flavour, but now things seemed to have turned around. We may even be in the midst of an internet backlash, with a series of prominent writers and commentators: Susan Greenfield (2008), Nicholas Carr (2008; 2010), Viktor Mayer-Schönberge (2011) and even virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier (2010) writing high profile books or articles lamenting the possible and actual dehumanising effects of the internet. Given the social designation given to the new web, it at first seems paradoxical to claim that Web 2.0 could be undermining something about our social nature, yet this is precisely what is being claimed. So is this really the case? Sherry Turkle takes up exactly these questions in Alone Together.

Will the Real Sherry Turkle please stand up?
Who is Sherry Turkle? She began an article written for Wired magazine back in 1996 by explaining:

There are many Sherry Turkles… There is the “French Sherry,” who studied poststructuralism in Paris in the 1960s. There is Turkle the social scientist, trained in anthropology, personality psychology, and sociology. There is Dr Turkle, the clinical psychologist. There is Sherry Turkle the writer of books.

The article, written shortly after the publication of her 1995 book Life on the Screen went on to analyse the new internet technology and the experiments in self-construction and self-experimentation she saw it making possible. The book, was the second part - Alone Together being the third - of what is now a trilogy of books Turkle has written over the last three decades which chronicle the transformation of computer technology from a tool for research scientists to a part of our everyday life and also a master metaphor which now plays a central role in our conception of mind, knowledge and ourselves.

Arriving at MIT in the 1970s, Turkle became obsessed with how the new computer model of mind transformed our self understanding. Turkle, schooled in the psychoanalytic tradition, came as an outsider to the computational model of mind, but this did not stop her becoming one of the most influential analysts of how folk-psychology (the intuitive way that human beings think about and interpret minds) was being radically reshaped by work in the computational cognitive science and especially people´s interactions with the new computer-based technologies.

She was on the scene not only as the personal computer revolution was taking place, but as artificial intelligence became (albeit temporally) core to the project of understanding the mind. It was also at MIT that some of the most important theoretical and practical work on robotics has been undertaken over the past 40 years, perhaps culminating (at least in prestige terms) with Rodney Brooks stewardship of the humanoid robotics lab since the mid 1990s. Brooks robots rather than based on an older Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI) – or reasoning based artificial intelligence - model of being programming robots to build detailed internal models of world coupled with sophisticated logic-based inferential engines, instead build ´creatures ’: robots which aimed to replicate animal level (especially at first insect level) intelligence which rather than reason about the world sort to dynamically respond to it (see eg, Rodney Brooks, 1991 and 1999; Rodney Brooks et al., 1998).

A major part of Turkle’s research method over this time was ethnographic. She lived among the computer scientists, roboticions and AI researchers of MIT. Her influential 1995 book Life on the Screen held that the newly created internet allowed us unprecedented possibilities for developing and experimenting with our sense of self through our interactions and use of constructed online identities through avatars. It focused on the use of the then nascent internet and gave a deal of attention to the users of the pre-eminent virtual world technology of the day: ‘Multi-user dungeons’ (MUDs). Computer pioneers created multi-user text-based virtual worlds (often sword and sorcery based - hence dungeon) in which through an avatar it was possible to interact with others, all made possible by the new network computers.

Turkle, leaning heavily on her psychoanalytic background and Eric Erikson´s ideas about personality formation, was enthusiastic about the online world of MUDs and the possibilities they afforded people to experiment through their online identities with their sense of self. Such experiments often involved creating other-gendered avatars but allowed users the possibility to explore the possibilities for presenting as people (or other beings) with radically different personalities. Broadly she saw this as having at least in principle a therapeutic character, and endorsed (indeed was a principle developer of) the then highly fashionable notion that we were all decentred and plural selves which the strictures of contemporary society which modern society forced into a debilitating unity. She believed that users of MUDs were writing themselves into a new form of being through their fantasy world, which at least could have potentially beneficial effects in RL (real life, the acronym being used by MUD players of the time).

Turkle is now the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology and Society. She has a unique position at perhaps the foremost world hub of technological research and is one of the world’s most respected authorities on the subjective side of our relationship with computer technology.

Given this history, it perhaps comes as something as a surprise that Turkle has taken such a turn against technologies which are in many ways the direct descendents of those that she viewed in ultimately hopeful ways only a decade or so ago. She nowviews Facebook, Twitter etc as really anti-social technologies which are undermining human capacities for empathy, intimacy and are ultimately challenging our abilities and desires to engage with other human beings at all. For Turkle, we are becoming alone together because, while we are ever more connected to each other by parallel channels of communication technology, that same technology is now inviting us to step back from deep engagements with each other and be satisfied with something altogether more shallow.

In Alone Together, Turkle once again attempts to chart the subjective side of our relationships with computer technology. While ‘the self’ and especially its online avatars remain at the core of Turkle’s interests, her opinion of what the new tech is doing for the self has been radically downgraded. While in her first two books on this theme she was broadly optimistic about the potential for self-exploration offered by MUDs, she has become pessimistic about how successor technologies now threaten to diminish and dehumanise us.

The main theme of the new book is that the extension of the technologies Turkle examined in the 1980s and 1990s, are, rather than setting us free into a newly experimental selves, in fact diminishing our abilities to relate to each other, and, at the limit, in danger of undermining our humanity. Turkle contends that intimacy is an increasingly problematic area for 21st century people and we are likely to take refuge from these our difficulties with ‘the Other’ when shielded by a variety of technologies. She believes we are becoming immured to our isolation, settling for interactions with rather than through our technology,  and are dangerously close to withdrawing from social contact altogether. It is dour view indeed. All of this begs the question, What has changed?

A psychoanalysist among the robots
Part of the answer according to Turkle is a profound change in how we regard and encounter some of our technologies. In essence we have stopped treating them instrumentally as tools, but as significant others in themselves. The first half of the book looks at our, and especially children´s, relations with ‘sociable’ robots. In this category Turkle includes everything from the once ubiquitous Tamagotchi (irritating and needy electronic toys for children that ‘die’ if not regularly ‘fed’), through Furbies (moderately responsive fury robots from late 1990s that burble to entertain children), the sony AIBO (moderately expensive cat/dog robot which had some sophisticated visual recognition abilities and which was used as development platform by universities until Sony discontinued it) to Paro (creepy seal-like robot targeted mainly at providing some companionship for the elderly). She also includes the sophisticated humanoid research robots COG and KISMET produced at MIT in order to study embodied intelligence in human beings.

Turkle’s research over the last dozen years has involved observing and documenting how mainly children, but also the elderly, relate to and understand these technologies. Children and the elderly are indeed the main market segments that the sociable robot manufacturers are looking at and indeed Rodney Brooks even back in 2002 saw robots are carers for the elderly, at least in Japan, as a major future application of robotics (Rodney Brooks, 2002) Some at the time saw this as in part desperation as visions of robots in home never really been quite realised. Since that time battlefield robots (drones etc) have proved a valuable source of funding for the further development of ‘creatures’. Turkle was present at MIT through one of the most dynamic phases of the humanoid robotics lab run by Brooks.
Brooks’ idea – as we have seen - ´was not to focus on symbolic intelligence (formal logic driven reasoning and decision making) but instead on creatures which was to replicate insect-level intelligence but more than this build reactive robots whose behaviour was based on online dynamic interactions in the world more than offlline reasoning. It is the progeny of Brooks outlook, the robots of MIT laboratory in all their embodied and dynamic glory which are the backdrop to Turkle´s meditation on technology and what it means to be human.

It was a natural extension of this approach to attempt to build social robots who, rather than attempt to deeply understand minds, attempt to respond in ways that might be interpreted as social by interacting with human movement and gesture. One of Brooks’ students, Cynthia Breazeal, built a robot Kismet more or less to play on human emotions and invite the projection of complex mental states on them.
In many ways Kismet, if not a particulary clever robot, was a very clever robot design. Kismet with its big eyes and cutesy features reminiscent of Gizmo the Mogwai from the film Gremlins attracted interaction first because of its sympathetic appearance and because of its responsiveness to social cues. Kismet was designed to dynamically interact with people by registering superficial aspects of their behaviour such as how fast they moved, how close they got to the robot, how quietly or loudly they spoke, and use these variables as control parameters for its movement and chattering. It also implements a system of artificial emotions which regulate how it responds to its various interactions. Central to Kismet’s control was that it internally modelled emotions; really just certain numeric thresholds which could trigger the modulation of a behaviour.

Kismet, who I ´met’ on a visit to MIT some years back, is one of the most interesting of the MIT robots. Truly an evocative object in Turkle´s sense, Kismet’s design was based on not trying to model deep features of social intelligence but instead by being a dynamic interactive partner able to elicit and respond to emotional cues. There is undoubtedly something interesting about the human capacity or need to project complex psychological states onto technology and robots, and Kismet brilliantly exploited this phenomenon. Back in the 1970s, the philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term the intentional stance for the ways that human beings interpret not just humans, but other animals, the forces of nature and under some circumstances. Kismet appeared to have emotions because it was able to interact responsively by picking up on clever but superficial aspects of human behaviour.

For Turkle, these encounters have serious implications because the children who she interviewed and observed as they played with the MIT robots understand these encounters not as imaginative play in a traditional sense (involving the psychology of projection) but treat the robots as though they are themselves significant Others (the psychology of engagement). Essentially children relate to them not as toys but as playmates.

Referring to these childhood encounters with Tamagotchi, Furbies but also the range of sociable research robots being pioneered at MIT Turkle worries we are all starting to treat technology as though it were a social other in itself. The idea is that we have become – or may soon become - so habituated to interactions with robots (and game characters) that we have started to prefer these constrained interactions to the possibilities with humans. But the Robots are not Others but are clever facsimilies, designed to play on our tendencies to project mindfulness onto anything that has the right kind of responsiveness profile.

That analysis of sociable robots is fascinating but offering this as part of an explanation of our supposed social withdrawal which seems highly problematic, perhaps mainlybeacuse the general public’s encounters with such robots has been so limited. Moerover, it is by no means clear that even children’s experience with the MIT robots have so far muddled them about what real and ersatz emotions in general. Turkle´s many interviews with children demonstrate is they have a tendency to project mindfulness onto machines, which as we have seen was already a much commented on phenomenon (children are particularly good of course at sustaining such projections in play).

Moreover, given the prime place set for robots - which are far more capable and personable than anything yet invented - in children´s fiction it is hardly surprising that when confronted with Kismet, or even tamagotchi, children are willing to suspend disbelief and treat them as social others, at least in play. But this is not really evidence that outside the play setting or as children mature into adults with a more sophisticated understanding of real minds, that they are likely to be content with relationships with only virtual social partners. What’s more, Turkle offers little evidence that this is really happening.  If we have become content to retreat from real social encounters with people to ersatz ones with robots then the explanation lies elsewhere.

Problems with Intimacy: A tale of two anthropologists

The second part of Turkle´s answer is that the current crop of social technologies have changed and now rather than offering us opportunities to experiment and develop, they tend to constrain and diminish us. Each chapter of the second half of her book chronicles ways in which we are purportedly being diminished by practically every social technology developed in the last ten years. Chapter 8 argues that thanks to our access to mobile connections we feel unable to switch off we have become ‘always-on’. Unable to disengage ourselves enough from our gadgets and mobile devices we ourselves have become dissipated our attention divided and our ability to be with others diminished. Chapter 9, ‘Growing up Tethered’ discusses how we (but especially children) find ourselves tied to the profiles set up on various social networking sites to diminishing effct. Chapter 10 claims that having becoming habituated to the controllability of the new social technologies, many teens are withdrawing from even talking by the telephone as they have become uneasy with the rich expressive power of voice. Chapter 11 through 13 continue this theme of how we all supposedly being reduced through the constraints offered by the new media and that has brought with it the widespread experience of presentation anxiety as we find it difficult to live up to the claims of our online profiles or are constantly driven to massage our online presence. We have become, she believes tethered, to our use of social network sites in such a way that our ability to have rich relationships with others and ultimately ourselves is being diminished.

Many of Turkle’s reservations coalesce around the traces we unavoidably leave when we use social network sites and how this tends to limit and restrict us. She worries that the young in particular will fail to develop properly as properly socialised people, their future possibilities tethered to online profiles which retain information about them they might otherwise wish to forget. Referring to the work of Erik Erikson Turkle believes that we are all constantly going through stages of identity development. Erikson claimed that adolescents need to experience a phase where they can experiment with who they are essentially without consequences: a social moratorium (where actions had few consequences for later life and consequently the sort of self exploration she once championed is foreclosed).

On this analysis most of what goes on through Facebook and other social network sites is really a kind of pimping one’s profile, or ‘self’ (really the persona one adopts). Turkle has a whole chapter on how the teens obsess about to what to write on their facebook profiles. She also thinks that these profiles are avatars (which in a sense they are, but only in a very thin sense). Yet it is far from clear that this is all teens are really doing on SNSs or that they are as constrained in quite the way that Turkle insists. To be fair one’s teenage years are of course deeply involved with projecting a certain (ideally a cool) persona and it is unsurprising then that Facebook etc are used by teens for these purposes. But Turkle is wrong if this is all the teens are doing. They are of course negotiation their relationships with others and looking for a space unconstrained by too much adult intervention to do this.

Turkle claims teens today are unable to experience ´normal´ teenage years because SNS have cancelled the moratorium. Even teens who have not experienced anything different feel what they have lost, she calls them the nostalgic young (Chapter 14) for they are wish a for previous simpler (golden) age where their parents were not always distracted by mobile phones and where they were not oppressed by the needs to continually keep up with the personae they are trying to project through various online avatars.

For those who keep up with research on social network sites, there is a glaring omission in Turkle’s book. It takes no account at all of the work of her main rival: dana boyd (yes, she really does spell her name in lower case). Boyd came to prominences in the light of her (2008) PhD work Taken out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Contexts and is now a researcher for Microsoft. The reason that the absence of any attempt to deal with boyd´s work is so striking is that boyd´s work also deals with teens and their experience of social network software but comes to radically different conclusions from Turkle. Boyd´s work covers the experience of young adults some of the same age rages as Turkle, yet, whilst Turkle find a fragile and vulnerable bunch of teens, boyd finds teens resourcefully using social network sites to stake out a little autonomous space for themselves against a background of increased adult surveillance and reduced autonomous space for themselves.

Reading the excerpts of Turkle’s interviews with her subjects one would indeed assume that teens are those very fragile being she suggests. Yet as boyd makes clear, teens are using these technologies in order to negotiate challenges that are all too similar to what the rest of us face. Social network technologies are irrevocably leaky technologies, technologies that encourage us to interact and give perhaps more than we might like, but that does not stop us attempting to use them to address real problems. While no-one would doubt that teens do spend a lot of time thinking about how they are seen by others Turkle expands this frame of reference to obscure what they are actually doing with the technology.

For boyd, teenagers have only existed in the later part of the 20th century; they, and their particular problems are a social construction. This is helpful, I think, as the very idea that there is a natural state for teens is in many ways mistaken. Moreover body notes that teens continue to exist in an uncomfortable space between adult autonomy and childhood dependence and are represented as a group in society both risky and at risk. One of the problems of teen life is the struggle for autonomy and one of the new facts of both the lives of children and teens is that they have left time for interaction with their peers which is unsupervised by adults. For boyd, teens are struggling to assert some autonomous private space which is indeed a space for experimentation but the problem is not so much worries about what the future may hold but a struggle to keep their space of experimentation away from the prying eyes of significant adults.

Whether the new denizens of the social web are really as alienated as Turkle depicts them seems to depend on what we see them as doing. For boyd, teens are really busy negotiating relationships with their peers and the main space of potential autonomy left open to them: the social web. For Turkle, teens - and by implications the rest of us - are locked in a reductive and rather autistic mode of self-expression tending toward an ever reduced ability to relate to each other as fully realised human beings. The outlooks is grim. Deciding between such irreconcilable frameworks is difficult from a purely empirical perspective but as we shall see in a moment some of the most up to date and extensive empirical research runs counter to Turkle’s position.

When you compare boyd’s picture with Turkle´s, it is clear the latter has a rather ahistorical character. Worse, Turkle’s teenagers are pictured as fragile individuals with little autonomy and their capacity for self-expression being undermined by technology. Turkle´s teens always seem to be complaining that their parents do not have time to talk to them while at the same time admitting that they can’t bear to disconnect from their smart phones and instant messaging for even a second. (It is of course really true that many of us who are users of these technologies find it difficult to switch them off.) But the picture of teens as being unable to probably socialize or to form rich relationships with others starts to dissolve.

In fact Turkle is obsessed with the notion of ‘the self’ at least as much as the teenagers her books. The term figures in the title of the first book, The Second Self and it was of central importance to her analysis in Life on the Screen. (It might be better if there were more focus on what we do with technology apart from merely presenting through it, it is noticeable for instance that there is little analysis of what we do with these technologies at work.)

This doesn’t mean that Turkle is always very clear about what she means by the term. Turkle’s use of the term self does not designate what you are, but rather a persona that you project. It can sometimes mean your online internet avatar or profile. This can get confusing. If what we are trying to understand is how and whether our encounters with the social web may be changing the sorts of people we are then we want to presumably understand what we are as people, not merely how we present through websites. It’s true some of Turkle’s analysis does touch on how her subjects virtual screen lives intersect with their real lifes but in all but a few cases what we see here is uses of the media which seems to Turkle to be diminishing, rather than really a sense that her subjects are themselves feeling disconnected. Rather what Turkle does is extrapolate from the way people use multiple channels of difference bandwidth (texting, emails, instant messaging, the occasional phonecall) to a future where all higher bandwidth interactions are cut off. Yet, there is little sense that this is something we are seeing. Another reading of many of her interviews are people who fell somewhat cut-off from each other – when invited by Turkle – obsess about their use of technology.

The love of machines and what we are really doing with social networks

We are for Turkle Alone Together because while we are in constant contact with each other (always on) the qualitative nature of this contact is ever more impoverished. Rather than enjoy rich embodied one to one interactions we are instead ever more likely to be dissipated with one ear always open for an incoming text message. This state for Turkle has been provoked through our engagement with technologies that encourage us to settle for less from each other and ourselves. At the limit we may be in danger of even losing the ability by becoming habituated to a narrow experience of ersatz intimacy and retreat altogether from each other altogether content. Although Turkle does capture something of our present condition it does seem remarkable that social technologies could achieve all of this.

Turkle’s book really turns on the idea that the readiness of interviewees to accept ersatz contact over the real human variety is the same phenomenon that draws people to using social network sites. She is probably right I think that some of our responses to both robots and the new social network technologies are driven by difficulties in our intimate social relations but there is no real demonstration here that social alienation is being driven either by children playing with robots or the rest of us using social network sites. Indeed one recent report The Pew Internet Survey (Hampton, Goulet, Rainie, & Purcell, 2011), which surveyed 2255 people, seems to find exactly the contrary relation.

The central finding is that the supposed isolation of the surveyed American people seems to be declining in crucial regards. The average number of discussants (close ties) that people report has gone up to 2.16 rather than 1.93 as reported in 2008. Internet users were found to score higher on scores of total support, companionship and instrumental aid. But Facebook users who use the site multiple times per day score higher in total support, emotional support and companionship over those with similar in demographic status. The headlines of the study are that social network site users have more close confidants, are more trusting of others, get more social support when they need it and are more politically engaged than others.

We should of course be cautious of asserting based on this study that Facebook or the internet causes people to have more friends, as this is only a correlational study, and clearly up surveys will need to be done to ascertain if there is really a trend here. But the study is compelling not just because of the large number of people surveyed, but because the evidence seems to run exactly counter to the assertion that the use of SNSs is intrinsically alienating. Of course Turkle´s analysis is not so easily refuted, but it does seem that contrary to her expectation all of those people reaching out through social network technology are not just feeling more alienated.

Ultimately Turkle blames the seductive powers of technology for what is going on rather than looking at the background which has shaped the technologies adoption. To be fair she realises that something beyond the technology is going on here but seems to mainly attribute to a cultural mood that follows 9/11. In the decade after 9/11 – and before in fact -our insecurities have surely shaped our relationship to technology but it is far from clear that it is the technology that is causing us to withdraw from intimate relationships. In fact the corrosion of intimate relationships can be seen as back as far as the 1980s. This underlying cultural trajectory has deeper roots and has left almost all deep emotional connection as understood as potentially damaging and whole idea of passionate engagement as at risk. Turkle´s pinning this withdrawal from intimacy on 9/11 is just historically myopic as attributing it to sociable robots. This leaves one to doubt much of Turkle´s basic thesis.

The mistake is really then apparent in the second part of the book where she carries over her critique of the mechanisation of the object of feeling (our tendency to project humanity onto objects) onto what people are doing with social networking sites, but this analysis is really too reductive and leaves out the real sociological background. And without noticing the cultural trajectory the danger is that we end up with the problematisation of the technology in itself. The biggest danger in this approach is that in so doing we foreclose the possibililty of using the new technologies in liberating ways.

The irony here is that regardless of outcomes many are using the technology precisely in the hope they counteract their feelings of disconnection. The danger in Turkle´s approach is that in misunderstanding what is driving our use of technology its potentially liberating powers become foreclosed.

Rob Clowes will be discussing some of the issues raised in this essay at a Battle of Ideas Satellite event on Is technology making us smarter or dumber? in Brighton on Tuesday 1 November 2011.

References
boyd, d. m. (2008). Taken out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Contexts.
Brooks, R. (1991). Intelligence Without Reason. Paper presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Brooks, R. (1999). Cambrian intelligence: The early history of new AI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,.
Brooks, R. (2002). Robot: The Future of Flesh And Machines. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Allen Lane: The Penguin Press.
Brooks, R., Breazeal, C., Irie, R., Kemp, C. C., Marjanovic, M., Scassellati, B., et al. (1998). Alternative essences of intelligence. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Carr, N. (2008). Is Google making us stupid? Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 107(2), 89-94.
Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. London: Atlantic Books.
Greenfield, S. (2008). ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21 st Century: London: Sceptre.
Hampton, K. N., Goulet, L. S., Rainie, L., & Purcell, K. (2011). Social networking sites and our lives: How People’s Trust, Personal Relationships, and Civic and Political Involvement are Connected to their use of social networking sites and other technologies: PewResearchCentre.
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. London, England: Allen Lane.
Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2011). Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age: Princeton Univ Pr.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

A black box dangles, alone, in the centre of an Oliver stage consumed by darkness. The box looks like a Rubik’s cube, only rinsed of colour. Suddenly, the small box is replaced by a similar but massive model, which rumbles forward ominously. Inside this construction, lives a huge host of characters, all of whom have been having bad dreams.

The opening to Mike Bartlett’s 13 is consuming stuff, as the characters emerge from their box and share their gradually interweaving stories. All are having trouble sleeping. All are wary of what the future holds. Lawyer Mark, after years of wrongdoing, is now being plagued by nightmares. The young girl he is paying for sex is equally troubled – as is the grandma she lives with. The prime minister has good reason to be stressed, as her country edges ever closer to war with Iran.

Shadows loom and smoke swirls, as Bartlett’s chaotic, dystopian vision comes to life. It is more than a little bit frightening. Just what haunts these characters at night? Why do they keep jolting weirdly? And why is a booming voice, which sounds like the Milk Tray lady turned bitter, warning us of sleepless nights? And what of this scruffy lad John, who has an uncanny ability to affect and connect with the young? 

Yet, even at this early stage, it’s hard to shake off the thought: is this intrigue really going anywhere? This suspicion grows stronger, as director Thea Sharrock patiently draws parallels between the myriad characters with clever, visual links. A sad mother shares the same breakfast counter as a squabbling couple. People put down cups, only for other characters to pick them up again.  Scenes mesh together and lines from one scene are picked up by characters in another.

The explicit, visual connections begin to snag. It feels like Sharrock patting us on the shoulder, reminding us what a clever writer Bartlett is. Yes, Bartlett is a very intelligent playwright,  who has the guts to explore huge ideas through an intricate maze of characters – but such connections shouldn’t have to be pointed out so blatantly and they start to undermine what could’ve been a much hazier, spookier and more abstract first half.

Fortunately, the momentum is notched up as the act reaches its close and the lingering oddness of the first half is unleashed. There is an exhilarating flurry of unnatural endings, as a grandma discovers a hand in a sewer and the young people’s prophet, John, rises up on a table, seemingly moving mountains. Suddenly, Bartlett’s imagination is flying again and his play feels distinctive and meaningful, with the real potential to say something about the decay, distrust and downright sadness that seems to be pervading our streets, our newspapers, our dreams.

But this weird euphoria is replaced, in a disappointing second half, by a static, political discussion. Suddenly, the play is grounded in reality and relatively conventional, as the prime minister and John talk politics on the eve of war with Iran. Yet, despite this traditional structuring, the context still has the abstract gloss of the first half and the scene lacks any persuasive authenticity. Instead, we get serious (if not pretty vague) political discussion merged with an infeasible political context. They don’t work well together.

On top of this bizarre combination of serious discussion and not-so-serious context, Bartlett also finds himself with various plot threads to tie, left dangling from the first half. His characters, who were once unsettling, start to seem silly; overblown and out of place in this distinct and much flatter second half. Their storylines just stop working.

Following the declaration of war, the actors converge at the front of the stage to offer their last lines. Rather than driving home the play’s message, these final lines only cast the conclusion under further doubt. 

Till 8 January 2012

BBC Four’s recent series, Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, should have been on BBC1. Comprised of archive footage showing influential thinkers talking about their work - and interspersed with commentary from contemporary figures - these three one-hour programmes aimed high to explore choice cultural themes from the last century. Despite over-pegging the role of television in general the BBC in particular, this was a thought-provoking if shaky attempt at something serious and intellectual.

The series begins with a strangely never-aired clip of a thick-accented Sigmund Freud being interviewed about psychoanalysis, and goes onto explore the emergence of ‘a new breed of thinker’ around the turn of the century. The series illustrates a (very) rough turn away from the certainties and assumptions underpinning nineteenth century thought, the rise of psychology and genetics and all they implied, touching on the impact of the two world wars, and ending with the cultural contestation of the 1960s.

After the turn of the century, more noticeably individualised explanations for what became thought of as ‘human behaviour’ became prominent. Non-rational, even unconscious forces were found to be shaping people’s choices and experiences: hidden drives, childhood trauma and even ‘the selfish gene’. Throughout this period more widely, various forces were working to decentre the human being from his accustomed place at the centre of the social and natural world – and of history. At the same time, there were important debates to be had about the economy, politics, culture. Mass communication in the form of radio and later television brought all these things to a massive audience, calling forth thinkers who could bend the medium to their message. 

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as all that – and this programme doesn’t pretend it was. Advances in human science were no bad thing in themselves: the discovery of the gene was a move forwards, as was the extension of a more scientific approach to the human mind. What the series does neglect to explore more insightfully is the cultural context that shaped the ideas it presents. Instead, it focuses in a superficial way on how thinkers came to television to popularise their ideas, following the construction of magnetic on-screen personalities: the Glaswegian psychiatrist RD Laing, known for challenging conventional thinking on schizophrenia, is a particular example.

An obvious practical influence on Great Thinkers is Adam Curtis, whose idiosyncratic work covers some roughly related ground. His recent All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace disappointed fans and led to several mock-ups on YouTube micky-taking the film-maker’s tendency to make tenuous-seeming links between disparate people and events. This was unfortunate, as his work is actually very good. BBC Four’s attempt is here more grounded in its subject matter and sedate in scope, yet falls short of the insight and distinctiveness that marks out Curtis as a pioneer in a still too-small field. This intellectual documentary form has yet to be perfected in a way that brings the past into clearer focus for us in the present. Yet the fact of homage is most telling – the Beeb is here absorbing and taking off Curtis’ rough edges (arguably his draw), dampening the more cranky-seeming aspects of his approach.

Quibbles aside, what is immediately striking is not so much the content but the world conjured up on screen. For example, the leading Cambridge logical positivist Bertrand Russell makes an appearance as a conscientious objector during the First World War. Russell played out most of this period locked up in a cell for his pacifism, though as a Lord had access to his books. Here, he looks out of place in his neat suit and characteristic bright white hair, sitting on a London pavement with others more unkempt, but at this time principle rode roughshod over such things.

His sentiment and posh tones reveal his aristocratic origins as he explains, in a way that seems faintly ridiculous today, how his conscience just can’t bear it that men are being sent off to die. It is fascinating to see a (more or less) genuine aristocrat on screen. As with the brief and unfair reference to Cambridge critic FR Leavis in the third episode, these last representatives of a fading aristocracy asserted a real and too easily forgotten influence on British cultural life as it unfolded through the early part of the twentieth century.

It is further engrossing to watch footage from the 1930s onwards, showing people very much like ourselves, dressed not too differently, but so direct, simple, straightforward and seemingly unselfconscious on screen. There is no obvious speaking down to viewers, little awkwardness, any forced putting on a show or making a scene. There are no outpourings of emotion, daft questions or attempts to patronise viewers, but rather a soothing sense of self-control and clarity of purpose. In fact, the overall atmosphere in footage shown throughout the series is noticeably unburdened compared with today. Interviews make sense rather than sounding over-rehearsed or superficial, there are genuine discussions between people who sit in a semi-circle without clunky tables and studio furniture between them – the discussions sound real, developing naturally out of themselves in a considered, even-handed way. The unfussy intelligence and well-meaning conviction is compelling.

This point is particularly true of primatologist Jane Goodall, an odd but compelling individual, who went off abroad to study chimpanzees. She was the first to discover that they used tools – something at the time considered the unique preserve of human beings, distinguishing us from lesser animals. What seems remarkable now though, is the way she first took off on her own, without any qualifications or complex wad of forms and official permissions, simply following in an inner compulsion to be close to the chimps. The sense of felt freedom and movement, coupled with her obvious vigour, is infectious.

Indeed, it is more generally a shame that this kind of original, historical footage is not used more innovatively and more often, and that when it is gets safely tucked away on BBC Four: going for a broader audience might have led to more meaningful framing and substantially critical responses. In fact, watching these episodes brings out just how much today’s programmes tend towards the dumbed-down, patronising or downright silly. It would be unfair to solely blame broadcasters for constricted intellectual horizons and confusion over how to make sense of them more broadly – but they do shoulder some of the responsibility.

In this, two clips stick out. The first features William Beveridge – architect of the postwar British welfare state – giving an interview on American television. The interviewers, drawling somewhat sceptically, ask if the whole idea of welfare isn’t turning lazy people away from pursuing a job and allowing them to simply live on taxpayers’ money. No, says Beveridge, quite evenly, no man would want to live on so little: his welfare state is a safety net, not a permanent measure, based on a sense of aspiration: people prefer to work, to earn for themselves. Nobody would want to live on welfare. The second clip is of a modest-sounding Lord Reith, often seen as the father of the BBC, being asked by an interviewer if it isn’t rather insensitive to air programmes in received pronunciation rather than representing regional accents. No, he says simply, ordinary people deserve the best stuff, and that’s what they will get. 

What these two clips unwittingly illustrate is something quite topical: how far the welfare state of today has moved from the principle and aspiration that underscored it historically. Welfare payments were a necessary respite: it was more properly the responsibility of society to provide well-paying jobs. Similarly, public service broadcasting – the BBC – was a serious matter with a heartfelt civilising mission, bringing ordinary people closer to the best of culture, intellectual discussion and debate. Despite the welfare state ultimately representing a compromise with more radical sections of the working class, the aspiration underpinning it represented at least some sense of what was important in life - and why.

What comes out on reflection is the relative absence of that same mood of aspiration and muted seriousness today, not least, the downsizing of the BBC’s intellectual ambitions as an institution more widely. In this, the final episode on the culture war of the 1960s is noticeable in its awkward foregrounding the role of television in the dispute. It is nevertheless fascinating episode, picking up on the television battle between Kenneth Clarke’s landmark series Civilisation and the response of self-defining Marxist critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing.

There is a telling clip of a common working man, watching protesting students in 1968, commenting words of the tune that if they’re so bored they should go out and get a job; likewise, ordinary people are shown complaining that the BBC is giving them some weird American talking about popular culture rather than a serious historical programme educating them about the art of the past. Whilst it would be wrong to expect too nuanced a look at the complexities of the 1960s period from a one-hour episode, this does a good job that ultimately bears out the still ambivalent legacy of that period.

The final observation, though, must go to the vacillation of the BBC. Public service broadcasting is something more than a system of social taxation: historically, it was given moral authority by a real sense of intellectual direction and confidence. Today the BBC is not the pioneer of insightful programs it could be, and any more thorough-going intellectual and civilising aspiration has mostly shrivelled away or else seems to hide in embarrassment. This is wrong. The development of niche channels – BBC Three for youth and BBC Four for the highbrow stuff - is not an entirely good move. The allocation of public funds to the more ‘popular’ (mostly with teens) Channel Four should be seen in a similarly critical light.

In fact, the whole idea of BBC Four seems to imply that highbrow programmes are the niche preserve of the highbrow people – whilst the rest of society can make do with bog-standard trivial fare on the mainstream channels. This keeping the intellectual, more difficult stuff out of the mainstream looks like exactly the sort of narrow-minded elitism the BBC once sought to challenge with its more egalitarian, highbrow and more substantially public orientation. 

Alex Danchev is a Professor in International Relations at Nottingham University. He currently lectures on a diverse range of subjects - global politics, power and international order, biographies, Anglo-American relations and art and war. He has had a number of books published, including his collection of essays, ‘On Art and War and Terror’. Alex will be presenting some of the ideas provoked whilst he was compiling his book ‘100 Artist’s Manifestos: from the Futurists to the Stuckists’ at the November East Midlands Salon. Jo Herlihy interviewed him to get a flavour of some of the ground he will cover at the Salon.

JH: You’re a professor in International Relations; why a book on art manifestos?

AD: It’s become apparent to me during my academic life that an understanding of international relations can be greatly enhanced with a cross-disciplinary approach. Art is one such discipline and much more can be learnt from it than may traditionally have been conceived. So, for example, I incorporate books such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in my courses that study power and international order. So when Penguin approached me with the idea of a book on manifestos, I suggested I look specifically at the art manifesto…and they let me run with this…hence the book!

JH: ...and have you found a good way to define what a manifesto is?

AD: The sheer variety of the artists’ manifestos is why they are so interesting. But despite this variety, they do generally share some common features. I think they are, in part, a proclamation. They are written by people who believe they have a message they want to communicate. These people want to change you. The language of the manifesto aims to grab you and shake you up. And the manifesto usually contains a programme that would bring the change artists want to see. A helpful way of thinking about the role of the manifesto is the conception contained in Robert Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives. He captures the notion of where artists like the Futurists wanted to go - the manifesto becomes a passport to modernity.

JH: Why 100 manifestos and why 100 years?

AD: There were more than the hundred I selected. The Futurists alone wrote hundreds. However, the book intends to show the range of content and of debate rather than providing a comprehensive compendium of all art manifestos. And it was simply a happy accident that I was researching the book 100 years after publication of the first of the artists’ manifestos written by the Futurists in 1909.

JH: 100 manifestos is a lot of manifesto! And as you’ve said, there’s a huge variety in both style and content. What observations have you made that help make sense of these manifestos?

AD: First, any reader of the book will probably notice that the majority of the manifestos are written pre-Second World War. That simple fact is worth some reflection. Second, we can observe that many artists who wrote manifestos, although not all, considered the work they created as a radical break from the past and saw their work being a new movement in art. To be a movement, a manifesto was essential; you absolutely needed to have one. The art and the manifesto went together and shaped each other. Today’s equivalent would probably be a website – to be taken seriously usually means that you have to have one.

Then, of course, there is what you had to say, the content. The early part of the 20th century was a time of incredible social upheaval and the artist manifesto borrowed heavily from political ones, most importantly from the communist manifesto of 1848. Mostly the artist manifesto stated what you were against – typically everything that went before! It was a bold statement to your artistic competitors. And this set the tone for ongoing debate that has continued up to the present day. And I think the power of all these manifestos brought together in one place is that they reveal to us the energy of the time – and some of this was big stuff! People didn’t just want change, they wanted revolution, overthrow. There was a lot at stake.

JH: How much notice did people take of these – what was their impact?

AD: The early Futurist, Dada and Surrealist manifestos were widely distributed and read. The Futurist manifesto got front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. It was translated in to every European language, thrown off the top of buildings and performed in theatres. And there were attempts to ban their production. Everyone who considered themselves an intellectual had to have an opinion about each of the manifestos and the ensuing public discussions often led to heated debates and brawls.

JH: The first Futurist manifesto (1909) is a bold rebellious statement, declaring an intention to shake off the deadening influence of the old conservative order. How do you think this manifesto compares with more recent ones?

AD: I’ve spoken at quite a number of talks now since the publication of this book and what I think people really love when they first read the manifestos is they see that they aren’t technical, dry documents. What people realise is that they are living and breathing social documents that talk of human beings speaking to other human beings. The language and mode of expression is radical, bold and strident. And I think it relates to what we’ve already discussed…that artists saw themselves as part of a much bigger change that some sections of society were attempting to bring about.

JH: But if things are so different today, aren’t the manifestos merely historical curiosities?

AD: Whether or not the manifestos were seen as part of a new art movement or the notions of an individual artist, they are a device that allows an ongoing discussion about art, what it is and what it represents, to take place in concise and clear ways. They provide a way for people to debate with those from the past – a self-conscious way to reflect on artistic creation. André Breton’s surrealist manifestos of 1924 and 1929 encapsulate everything we know about surrealism. They are the vehicle through which our understanding of surrealism becomes a pervasive way of looking at art and life – and I think are probably the most impressive of modernist documents. I think there is much in these documents that will resonate with today’s readers.

JH: The Dada manifestos make explicit what many other manifestos only hint at – modern society’s unease at living in a Godless world. Dada, instead, celebrates doubt. Do more recent manifestos suggest we have come to terms with living in a godless world?

AD: No, I don’t think so. I think that the issue of doubt about the world and our place in it continues today. I think that is an enduring problematic within art.

JH: You include manifestos from around the world. Early manifestos emphasise the importance of the localism, some being stridently nationalist where others seek universal meaning in art. Where do you think the balance is today?

AD: From those manifestos I’ve compiled, I definitely think the balance is that they were attempts to propose universalistic movements. And I do think this is the strain that continues today.

JH: Given that the production of manifestos declined post Second World War, and, it seems, the phenomena of big movements has passed, does this mean the days of the manifesto are numbered?

AD: No, I don’t think so. Yes, I think that the conditions today are incredibly different from when the first manifestos were written and the days of the big ‘isms’. But I can see a few places where we might still find individuals striving to grapple with artistic creation and its meaning. You certainly continue to see a strong strand of this within architecture – generally manifestos in this field have been written by individuals that haven’t been part of movements. Then there are those quirky individuals who have a novel take on the world and find new and interesting ways to express this – take Kitaj or Herzog. Look at how Herzog aims for a poetic, ecstatic truth versus the truth of accountants!

And finally, there are probably manifestos already penned that just haven’t surfaced yet. Look at the tentative thoughts written by art student Derek Jarman at the tender age of just 22 years old – you can see how the form of the manifesto helped someone crystallise their thinking. Maybe there are other art students of today who have written the contemporary manifesto and these are just waiting to be published or found.

JH: ...and which is your personal favourite?

AD: Manifesto 90 by Lebbeus Woods from 1993

‘I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength then ‘melt into air’. I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know you name. Nor can you know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.’

Just brilliant!!

Alex Danchev is speaking at the East Midlands Salon, the Studio, Broadway, Nottingham on Tuesday 15 November at 7pm. £5 / £3 for Salon members/concessions. Come and join the discussion.

Creative realities

This week on CW, guest blogger John Boyden, former managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra and re-founder of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, puts the musical case against state subsidies for orchestras. Sarah Boyes considers the relationship between writing and editing in a review of Raymond Carver’s Beginners, while Sharmini Brookes reports from a Johannesburg talk by South African crime writer Deon Meyer, on the writer’s craft.

Meanwhile in London theatre, Miriam Gillinson reviews Jumpy and Bang bang bang at the Royal Court and Saved at the Lyric, while Matt Trueman reviews Sixty-Six Books at the Bush Theatre. And Diana Damian reports from the KRT Festival in Krakow, Poland.

21 October 2011

This recent collection of short stories from an adept of the form puts unusual emphasis on the editorial process. Carver is known for his sparse prose and focus on the hard, cold substance of things, his unstinting gaze at those moments of realisation or crystallisation of feeling that fix a life, however slightly, and for his painstaking depiction of them on the page. There is something exhausting but rewarding about his work. Reading it is like time suspended: you almost want to run away, but can’t.

These seventeen stories were sent to his editor Gordon Lish and published in 1981 by Knopf. In that edition, the stories were cut down in length by over half; here, Jonathan Cape present the original versions. It is tempting to see too much of the publicity coup in such a venture: if you’ve read them once, why read them again? Who would, other than the mildly obsessive?

It seems just odd to present editing or the lack of it as a factor so important that unedited versions are worthy of republishing, since you only know a good edit in so far as you don’t spot it: nobody comes away from a book thinking, ‘Wow, that was one great edit!’. What this collection bears out, though, is that the real craftsmanship of good authors lies not in any superficial treatment of words as such – the editor’s art - but in a whole approach to the subject-matter – the way they look at something, what they pick out about it, what they choose to write about in the first place, as well as the distinctiveness of voice and the way they take the form and make it their own. Editors may be under-valued, but ultimately they are little more than window dressers - albeit necessary ones -  all things considered.

Take the beginning of the story ‘Want to see something?’ for example:

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I had heard that. I tried to wake Cliff, but he was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon hung over the mountains that surround the city. (p31)

I don’t know what this reads like in the 1981 version, but it is already quite compact, word-wise. Yet there is also pertinent patience and space in the telling, the short and direct sentences, a sense of being inside a real person’s head, a hint of boredom, a hinted-at whole life that begins to creep in around the text. This big moon. You know you will be here for a while, reading this story - you don’t know if it will take you anywhere, but you carry on reading anyway. At first it sounds like a child’s story, but the ‘but I had heard that’ tells you it isn’t. You are in bed, then; you know the feeling. And you are lying next to somebody passed out. You hear something, you get out of bed. This is believable, do-able, probably done-able in a way a bit like that.

It turns out it’s neighbour Sam, who comes ‘out here nights after Laurie and the baby are asleep. Gives me something to do, is one thing’ (p35). He’s picking up slugs, Sam, saving them in a jar then redepositing them under the rose bushes as fertiliser. And then:

I stopped for a minute with my hand on our gate and looked around the still neighbourhood. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt a long way from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly I couldn’t do that. (p36)

This is logical, understandable – believable – too. It speaks. It is also striking in its very realness. The scarcity of adjectives imbues the ‘still’ with a heaviness and presence it might otherwise lack, conveying thae stillness that does fall over suburban neighbourhoods late at nightI. It also draws the homeliness and danger of the hand on ‘our gate’ into focus, too. Almost inevitability, the rightness of the sudden remembrance of childhood, then of quick, keen distance, of understanding being in the present, the past being past and gone. It is a small experience, even banal in its very ordinariness, but at the same time very important.

Then back inside, waking up Cliff, feeling his pulse at his throat, ‘the warm breath on the back of my hand’, telling him she loves him, telling him everything she has to say, despite him probably not hearing, telling him at last ‘…I felt we were going nowhere fast, and it was time to admit it, even though there was maybe no help for it’. Feeling better, thinking she might now be able to sleep.

The story is muted, but powerful. There is the hidden terror of normal life (Or is that what this is? - it sounds crass), the dissatisfaction mingled with a queer secret sense of being somebody. It also describes something true to experience, and in such a way it’s like it’s happening, just now, just like that, the odd inertia that creeps along – the fear of realising where you are, that this is it – the need to do something, to run away, the staying where you are - but the very depth of all these things, their quiet love and humanity - everything else. The way you reforge a relationship with yourself in a new way in these moments. Those odd moments that puncture a life, fixing you in who you are while showing you as well that wide open sense of space, the potential and sheer possibility of what else you could be doing, where else you could be – who else. What a very odd feeling.

It’s unclear what Carver is trying to ‘say’ with this sort of thing; it might be preferable if he isn’t trying to ‘say’ anything, but rather reflecting something true of life, thinking on it, reflecting it, giving it back to us. This is something to which the short story lends itself well (among other things), as it lets the author’s eye linger – it’s enough to simply observe a tiny happening, something of life, innocuous or maybe not – to give the world time to breathe.

This is also where more mature short story writers can show their talent at expressing their slow truths of life - and with their own clear definition, editor’s knife or otherwise.

According to Deon Meyer, speaking to the largely female fan-club of crime fiction at Novel Books in Bryanston, Johannesburg, writing is more perspiration than inspiration. All this stuff about waiting for one’s muse is nonsense. Writing is hard work; a laborious task that forces him to struggle with every word to find exactly the right one. The first quarter of the book takes him half the time of the total. This is because each book is a uniquely lived experience and this uniqueness has to be developed at the start.

He starts his day at 7am and likes to work in a confined, dark space, so he always chooses the smallest room in the house for his workspace. There must be no distractions; no music, no telephone, no visitors. It takes him at least half an hour to get into the mind-space of his fictional world before he can put pen to paper. If there is a distraction, it will take an extra half hour.

Story ideas come from the writing process itself, from reading widely and from aspects of life that fascinate him. In Thirteen Hours, the book that won the 2011 Barry Award for best thriller in the USA and was short-listed for the 2011 CWA Dagger Award in the UK, he developed an awareness of how important the role of time was in creating suspense and so he decided to experiment in how few hours one could compress a whole novel.

Meyer doesn’t believe he fits any specific categorisation within the crime genre, as his books are part mystery, part detection and part thriller. For him, the traditional novel structure is very rigid and follows that of the Greek dramatic structure written in three acts: the introduction, the development of the characters and the resolution. But the crime novel is one big second act. You start with the action, move to the climax and end with a short resolution; hopefully leaving your reader wanting more in terms of character. Aware of the dictatorship of this structure, he continually wants to challenge himself, to grow as an author and to bend the rules.

In his latest novel, Trackers, he decided to write three different stories as though they were three completely different books and then bring the whole together in some kind of resolution. The first story idea was suggested by his brother, a director of the big Transport Company called Golden Arrow in Cape Town, who mentioned the new technology he had installed on all of his trucks; a mirror which tracks the progress of his trucks and saves an image whenever the truck accelerates too quickly. Hundreds of separate images are collected and sent off for collation. The next morning they are delivered back to him in a format that he can scrutinise. It has saved him millions in identifying staff training needs and in resolving cases of road traffic disputes. In this scenario, Meyer perceived an interesting source of conflict which he says is the mother of suspense; so he is always on the lookout for sources of conflict everywhere he goes and in everything he reads.

The idea for the second story came to him when he moved from the cosmopolitan and culturally-aware Melkbosstrand on the Cape West Coast to the more conservative Afrikaans suburb of Durbanville.  His workspace happens to overlook the outside yard of the grand house of a typical Afrikaans family; a successful businessman, his very attractive wife and the obligatory two and a half kids. He began to wonder whether the attractive housewife might be thinking of escape – of leaving tracks - and what would happen if she followed her dream. The third story was suggested by his reading about the black rhino that are hunted for their horns and wondering why their horns are so valuable. He found he couldn’t decide which story he wanted to write so decided to write all three as one book.

When working as a journalist, Meyer learnt how to do research and to make useful contacts. He has developed close relationships with individuals within the police force to help with his research and they read the manuscripts for accuracy before he sends it to the publishers. A motorcycle enthusiast, he rides around the country picking up interesting facts and other useful research material. One has to shut oneself away during the writing process but at every other opportunity one needs to be open to and relating to as many people and as many experiences as possible. Sometimes he gets so fascinated by his research that it is tempting to put too much of this absorbing detail in and then he has to cut it back and only put in what actually moves the story along.

Ideas for his characters may come from people he meets or sees, but on the whole he spends a lot of time creating them, imagining a back story for them so that he can feel how they will react in different circumstances. The more time he spends with them the more real they become and sometimes he is even surprised by how they react. Writing a book takes about 12 to 18 months and during that time the fictional characters are more real to him than the real world. He chooses names for his characters from a telephone book. It is important to him that the name is right as he has to get to know this character. He always chooses the surname first and one of his foibles is that the bad person should have a name starting with the letter ‘B’.

Meyer speaks fluent English but is in fact an Afrikaans speaker. He writes in Afrikaans and has a translator for the English version. In fact his books have been translated into 29 other languages around the world. He says the subtleties of words are too important to him and he feels more intimate with his mother tongue. When he speaks English, he has to think too much about it because he has to translate it first.

Writing is fun but to do it well is hard work. For Meyer, reading as many books in the genre you want to write in is essential. Ed McBain, Robert Harris and Ian Rankin are a few of the many writers who have made an impression on him. His books and characters are based in South Africa, a country he still loves and will never consider living anywhere else.

Tamsin Greig, although greatly respected amongst the critics, isn’t as famous as she should be. That might be because she’s often cast in crummy new comedies, which prove rickety vehicles for her considerable skills. Thankfully, April de Angelis’ play, Jumpy, showcases Greig’s superb comic talent, as well as her massive heart. This comedy about mid-life crises and teenage traumas is sharp and insightful, if not a little slight. Yet Greig’s presence – her ability to invest even a single word with such rich meaning – lends this play more weight than perhaps it deservers. 

Greig hits the comic bullseye, over and over again, without ever seemingly ‘performing’. It’s like watching a wonderfully self-contained stand up show. Greig plays Hilary – a harried mother with a reticent husband, reckless daughter and recession-hit job. She gulps down her wine but never guzzles. She nails her one-liners and involves the audience, without ever stepping out of role. And, perhaps most importantly, she is a generous actress, outshining her co-stars but never so dazzling that they’re lost altogether.

When Greig’s Hilary and Doon Mackichan’s Frances share the stage – two fifty-year-old friends moaning about their miserable, mid-life crises - we’re treated to a masterclass on two contrasting comic acting styles. Machichan’s extrovert character, who has a penchant for burlesque and an unquenchable thirst for men, struts around stage like a soldier on heat. She’s all legs and leery one liners. It is the type of fired up performance that could’ve burnt out but Greig’s more understated, yet equally entertaining, turn keeps things grounded.

Director Nina Raine, too, has shored up this play with some excellent physical observations. Each character has its own distinctive and revealing tics. After Greig’s Hilary mortifies her daughter, Tilly (Bel Powley), the livid teenager storms across stage as though trapped in a cage: ‘I hate you!’. Leaving for a night out, Tilly – donning impossibly high heels – clambers down the stairs like a kid learning to walk. And mother, Hilary, seems attached to her daughter, shadowing her across stage until a door is, inevitably, slammed in her face.

Lizzie Clachlan’s set is clever too, with the bleached white walls concealing the normal family clutter; temporarily hidden but always on the verge of spilling over. Hilary and her husband’s bedroom stands way backstage, cavelike, reflective of this once frisky but now forgotten arena.

Despite all this, Jumpy loses its bounce in the second half. As the plot kicks in, DeAngelis finds increasingly infeasible ways to wriggle out of her storylines. The family struggles with news of Tilly’s pregancy – only to be ‘let off’ by a miscarriage. There’s an interesting scene in which Hilary bonds with a sexy and smart young lad - but his overburdened back-history renders him ridiculous. And, just as Hilary is set to embark on her first date, Tilly accidentally lets off a gunshot and lets the writer off the hook. The scenes start to sweat with the effort of trying to really ‘mean something’ and the play’s shortcomings – for all the brilliant performances and inspired burlesque numbers – start to shine through. 

Till 19 November 2011

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t hugely looking forward to a play about foreign aid. I feared Bang Bang Bang might be fact-heavy and just a little bit preachy. I worried it’d have all the charm and sophistication of one of those damn Bono/Bob Geldof concerts. Indeed, Stella Feehily’s play does begin with a roaming spotlight, which wouldn’t look out of place at a Live Aid gig. But then there’s the most tremendous crash and two terrified girls scuttle on stage, one so scared she’s forgotten how to speak.

What this is not – thank God – is a research dump. Instead, Feehily has wisely decided to hang on, tightly, to a small number of a storylines and a few, fleshed-out characters. The focus is firmly on Irish Sadhbh, a weary long-time aid worker, who has been ‘meeting with warlords for years’. Her area of expertise is the Congo and, this time, she’s taking educated but naïve French intern, Mathilde, along for the ride. Sadhbh’s boyfriend, Stephen – who was so traumatised by his NGO work he began to see phantoms around his fridge - isn’t too happy about the upcoming trip. It’s a tidy plot, which allows Feehily great structural freedom and lends real emotion to her politics.

Some scenes do feel a touch too neat, though. Following that heart-thumping opening, we travel back in time to London, with Sadhbh preparing for her trip and bickering with her boyfriend. If you listen carefully, it’s a little too easy to hear Feehily placing down her building blocks, as the couple’s finances, futures and fears are neatly laid out. But, just as things are becoming a touch straight-forward, the scene is abruptly blotted out a tiny girl soldier, with a huge gun, storms on stage.

These fluid flashbacks are used sparingly but effectively throughout Max Stafford-Clark’s lively production. The audience is never allowed to settle, the chaotic structure reflecting the volatile situation in the Congo. In between these startling disruptions are the set pieces and they, too, are thoughtfully constructed. Whilst visiting a clinic in the Congo, Sadhbh and Mathilde listen to the story of young Amala, a one-time warlord wife and now a terrified exile. Amala whispers her words to her companion, who in turns translates. Sadhbh then questions Amala ‘directly’, but her words, again, must be translated by Mathilde. The layers of removal pile up on each other and we begin to understand the immense challenge faced by the NGO workers; the supreme effort required to break through these obstructions to communication and discover and disseminate the truth. 

Feehily doesn’t just focus on the plight of those in the war-torn Congo though – she is equally interested in the sacrifices made by worker Sadhbh, and many others like her. There’s a brilliant, booze-soaked party scene, in which young Mathilde (Julie Dray) and photographer Vin (Jack Farthing) bond over their humanitarian hopes. Wasted and splayed out on the floor, Dray’s feisty but hopelessly naïve Mathilde drawls, ‘Conflict is amaaaazing’. It’s a funny but moving little scene, reminding us that although people might enter NGOs for the right reasons, they are often horribly ignorant of the sacrifices required.

One character all too aware of sacrifice is Sadhbh (Orla Fitzgerald), who is happily married to her job but not her boyfriend. Fitzgerald does find a little warmth in this character, but she could have been slightly softer. Sadhbh radiates self-righteousness and her central dilemma – will she give up her job for her man – feels a touch redundant. As the evidence gathers and the atrocities build, it becomes all too apparent that the only thing Sadhbh will give up for the cause is her life.

Till 5 November 2011

Eric Thompson of the Arts Council once suggested that I apply to become head of music of the state’s funding agency.‘It’s a cushy number,’ he said, ‘you get six weeks’ leave and spend two weeks spending your budget. The rest of the time you simply say no!’. Few worse methods of funding orchestras could be imagined.

Until the BBC Symphony was formed in 1930, orchestras came and went as regularly as West End plays. At that point, however, musicians were offered contracts, with holidays and pensions. With the threat of bombs in 1939, Beecham abandoned his buccaneering London Philharmonic (LPO) for a cushier life across the Atlantic. The LPO immediately imitated the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) by becoming a ‘workers’ co-operative’, forming a company, with every player a shareholder, and attracting funding from the London County Council. During the Second World War, classical music achieved a popularity rivalled only by the upsurge of religion, prompting two more orchestras to be raised in London.

Once television arrived, the country’s established orchestras lost their markets and looked to the Arts Council for support. Twenty years later, the Philharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic followed suit. Once that happened, this new model became fixed in socialist concrete and another tranche of ‘culture’ came to rely on state subsidies. Orchestras soon lost touch with their supporting audiences as they did with the reality of the box-office.

I well remember the fury of Eric Bravington of the LPO when he heard that the Philharmonia’s latest profligacy had met with another Arts Council hand-out: ‘Why run a tight ship, when incompetence is always rewarded!’ That question remains relevant today, when London’s orchestras are run for their own benefit, rather than that of their audience. Why are concert programmes much the same as those of 1945? Why have the subsidised orchestras failed to commission new music that entertains as well as challenges? Why have they done nothing to nurture a single living composer for whom the public might learn to care? Given less generous funding, the Arts Council’s dependents would have been forced to find at least one composer every decade with audience appeal. Publishers find new authors and the stage finds new playwrights, but such institutions are driven by trade and have their feet planted in the reality of supply and demand.

I would argue that the theatre is Britain’s artistic gift to the world, not classical music and opera, which central funding has deprived of new ideas and sustained with old ones. How many contemporary composers would survive without the Arts Council or the BBC? How would modern music sound had they not been encouraged to write as they have done since the war? The knock-on effect has been the nurturing of orchestral music-making of almost complete predictability. When I became the LSO’s first Managing Director in 1975, I recognised the unwholesome relationship that existed between quasi-independent orchestras of self-employed musicians and their manipulation of centralised funding.

Nearly forty years on, the time is ripe to examine this self-serving artifice, in which ‘precision’ stands for ‘excellence’ and ‘louder’ has become synonymous with ‘better’. Orchestras do no more than survive in a market distorted by an un-commercial and anti-intellectual cultural oligarchy, the consequence of which has been to hasten the downfall of a culture that once mattered to society at large.

As a private citizen, I re-formed the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1997, not because I might grow rich, but because I believed in something different and, yes, better. I wished to restore an aesthetic, and a sound-world, that had vanished, with the strings adopting gut and long-ignored approaches to their craft, and by using the less noisy brass and percussion of a century earlier.

I consider this ambition is now being fulfilled, through regular performances of unique originality and beauty. I am happy for anyone who wishes to find out for themselves to go to the Fairfield Hall, Croydon, on 23 November, when John Farrar will conduct the NQHO in a performance of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony. Such is my confidence in the orchestra and its players, that I am happy to predict that this performance will astonish anyone who thinks he knows the work, and overwhelm anyone lucky enough never to have heard it.

John Boyden © 2011