Monday 27 June 2011

Music

Music uses similar mimetic effects to writing. Unlike painting and sculpture, but like writing (but even more than writing - you can't experience it 'at your own pace'), music is relentlessly temporal, but it expresses the kind of non-linear temporality that we really experience. The same things characterise my experience of music as characterise my experience of life: not only repetition (and no, nothing is completely a repetition, things are always different even when they're the same), but the sliding together and apart of different layers of experience, different registers, different pace, volume, effect. Sometimes change is gradual, sometimes sudden, overlapping, hanging, dropping. (Great rock pauses.) Sometimes it will surprise you in a way that straight away seems obvious, predictable, and perfect. That is the great moment of pleasure in music for me - and, maybe, in life.

Saturday 25 June 2011

Thoughts on The Trip

I know I'm a latecomer on this, but The Trip was really great. I tried to talk about it to my friend, who it turns out has never heard of Steve Coogan or Rob Bryden. It seemed to me that the show relies on some background knowledge about who they are - and obviously there are plenty of references to be got. But I wonder, what if you did watch it without that background. Perhaps it could be done, it would still work, with these characters (now presumed completely fictional) really expressing enough of themselves to make sense, and to be poignant and effective in the same way as it is for normal viewers.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say about The Trip was that it seemed to me to be mainly about acting. There's obviously the level on which it's about real people 'playing themselves', which must be a weird kind of acting but is definitely that (although not quite in the same way as, say, Extras was). Then there's the constant thread of competition between them, which centres on impressions but is really about acting, as a skill, an art. Coogan's mock funeral oration for Bryden may be the key moment, I think; because as much as we know Coogan's being an asshole, and Bryden is the good guy, the funnier and nicer guy throughout, actually what Coogan's saying - the hiding, the masking, the distraction that comedy and acting offer from basic misery - is the foundation of the programme.

Hell is other people, especially a dinner for two, with someone who wasn't your first choice to be there; it seems like they can only escape that hell by being other people, and still others, and others.

Thursday 23 June 2011

My Heart is My Own

13 March    The little indispositions of life are essential to happiness. Uninterrupted felicity never fails to cloy, indeed there is very little pleasure without preceding pain.

25 March    In the evening saw a multitude of pretty faces. But my heart is my own.

2 August    First ate Watermelons.

5 August    Finished reading Dr Blairs Lectures. Excellent Criticism!

12 August    Read a little Law and some poetry. If a man lays up a few ideas every day and arranges them, it is enough.

16 August    Mortified to find my eyes too weak to study. But if I cannot devote my time to books, I can to the Ladies.

16 October    My birthday. 26 years of my life are past. I have lived long enough to be good and of some importance.

25 October    Started the idea of dancing tomorrow.
26 October    Invited the Company, had a brilliant Assembly and an agreeable evening.
27 October    Much fatigued.
- From the diary of Noah Webster, 1784

Friday 17 June 2011

Crisis of the Patriarchal Imagination

I have previously thought that what my thesis deals with is the impact of Federalism on American political thought and culture as a whole, and therefore on the 'main stream' of American history. I argue that Federalists in the 1780s developed the ideas and techniques that underpin liberal forms of social control in the modern world. This ascribes them an awful lot of influence, and perhaps creates a rather large burden of proof!

Yesterday my transferral of status interview and the fallout from that made me think again about my overall project. In fact, it made me remember some advice from another friend, who told me to make my thesis as narrow and sharply-defined as possible. I was blasé about it before, but I've been thinking about ways to do that; or to put it another way, I've been wondering if my very broad argument as outlined above is really right.

Perhaps it would be more correct to look at the emergence of Federalism as something that happens within a more constricted field of political thought - specifically the 'conservative' side of the revolutionary elite. If we see the revolution (the 'long revolution' if you like, including everything the 1760s) as the culmination of a general challenge to patriarchal thought, I think we can see the development of Federalism in the 1780s as an internal response: an effort to reconstitute patriarchal values in a new framework; a reform movement within elite thought rather than acted out publically. Even the ratification debates can be seen this way, as primarily arguments within and among a broadly-agreeing patriarchal elite.

We need not see Federalism as a coherent, unitary force gradually coming into view in the 1780s. Rather, it was a set of issues and debates about how elite control (order and hierarchy) could best be stabilised and perpetuated in the new republic. It was both a symptom of, and a response to, the revolutionary crisis of patriarchal imagination.

Monday 6 June 2011

If You Are Reading This Gordon, Call Me

In a May 14 review of Gordon Wood's new (2011) book, James Ceasar writes,
Referring to Isaiah Berlin's famous classification of writers into the categories of the fox (one who knows many things) and the hedgehog (one who fixates on one subject), Mr. Wood describes himself as "a simple hedgehog."
 In my review of his book, Empire of Liberty (2010), published last summer, I wrote,
In Isaiah Berlin’s terms Wood is a hedgehog: he knows one big thing.
Notwithstanding the precision and economy of my language in comparison to Ceasar's, I am led to ask: has Gordon Wood read my review?! (Also, gee, aren't those Americans polite? Since when did we still refer to scholars as "Mr" so-and-so?)

Borders of the Public Sphere

Sitting in a seminar today on borders and non-state actors, one of many seminars with a similar focus over the last year, while Ian Tyrell has been Harmsworth Professor. Of course there's a lot of room for play with 'borders' as a metaphor. I guess it should be noted that 'borders' in the sense of edges of states are also metaphorical too. Borders are hard to define or pin down, which is kind of the point. But what if you're not interested in borders per se: what studying borders (or borderlands) could possibly do is help to delineate the thing inside them. Is that the point of border studies, or totally the opposite of the point? I don't know!

But anyway, my study of Federalism has developed a sort of theoretical framework around the idea of 'borders' of the public sphere. It started with my interest in "coming of age", the border (duh!) between childhood and adulthood, kind of a (or one of the) border(s) between being outside and inside civil society. My work on education is the descendent of that, and I want to combine that with various different angles on Americans entrance into civil society, the public sphere. This is a border that is permeable, movable, and policed, just like other borders.

Next year I want to work on retirement, considered as the process of leaving the public sphere - either temporarily or permanently, or in a variety of ways. What motives and processes are there for retirement, or for preventing retirement? If people take on responsibilities with coming of age, at what point or in what ways can they lay them down again? Do they in fact have a responsibility to quit, some time - so, when?

There's kind of an obvious bridging issue between these two projects, which is inheritance - that's something I want to look closely at too. But in the seminar, talking about the slave-ships and the contested nature of the sea as a gigantic borderland, I remembered (realised?) that there is another, less temporal, border of the public sphere, which is the points where certain groups or people are excluded from it. I think this is a field that has been ploughed many times in different ways (Roget Smith's Civic Ideals comes to mind, and Carol Smith-Rosenberg's This Violent Empire). Nonetheless, I think there may be interesting points to make, linking to the rest of my argument, about Federalist anti-slavery, as well as Federalist ideas about the poor, women, children, Indians, maybe also the insane, the disabled, and so on. If anything, it seems like an important rounding out of the thesis - and, not insignificantly, a criterion for publication and employment in the US history academy...