Author Archives: B Merritt

The Bellwether Revivals – book reading

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Birkbeck creative writing lecturer Benjamin Wood’s debut novel The Bellwether Revivals (Simon & Schuster) was published in February this year, and is currently longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Guardian praised it as “an accomplished novel, suffused with intelligence and integrity.” Here, Benjamin outlines the musical themes at the heart of the book, from which he will read at a special Hubbub event for Arts Week on Monday 14th May 2012.

My relationship with music has always been more visceral than intellectual. By that I mean I was drawn to teaching myself to play an instrument as a teenager, not because I wanted to comprehend the mechanics of music, but because I saw it as emotional release. In some of the most difficult periods of my life—as I’m sure is the case for most people—I have sought consolation in music, be it the mournful hush of a Jeff Buckley vocal, the skin-prickling harmonies of a church choir, or the searing hum of Bach’s cello suites. The impact a piece of music can have on our state of being—how a simple melody can comfort and relieve us, elevate our spirits, and bring memories as vivid as any picture to the surface of our minds—is what The Bellwether Revivals aims to explore.

In writing the novel, I wanted to find out if the redemptive power of music could be explained in definite terms. And so I began reading into music theory and got acquainted with the more cerebral aspects of music that I’d skirted around in my younger days. The themes within The Bellwether Revivals began to emerge when I discovered the writings of the largely forgotten Baroque composer, Johann Mattheson. I approached the novel wanting to build a story around a character who claims to be able to manipulate the properties of music for healing effects, and, before long, I conceived of Eden Bellwether, a gifted organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, who is inspired by Mattheson’s theories. I was also intrigued by the idea of what full-blooded commitment to honing musical technique might do to a boy and his family, the rivalry and tensions this could create amongst them, and how such profound musical talent might alter a person’s perspective on the world.

Through his skill and scholarship, Eden finds a way to connect the theoretical foundations of music with its more elusive, visceral powers—for Eden, the sadness we feel when we hear a sad song is something that can be designed and controlled by the composer. The lives of the characters in The Bellwether Revivals hinge upon how much they believe in the restorative properties of Eden’s music. The book investigates what might happen if the refrain of a cello, or the sound of a church organ, or the swell of voices singing in harmony, could hold more influence over us than we ever expected.

For more details on Benjamin Wood, you can visit his website at: www.benjamin-wood.com

For further details on Birkbeck’s creative writing programmes, please visit: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/study/ug/creativewriting/UBACWRIT.html

Ideology Now – part 3

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This post was contributed by Nick Pearce, Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Is there a distinct social democratic ideology which has political relevance in the 21st century? Patently not, if you think that social democracy was the product of a particular moment in European history that has now passed. This view, exemplified by John Gray’s After Social Democracy, holds that social democracy was a geo-political response to the Cold War, a class compromise to build a democratic, social market alternative to Soviet Communism and US capitalism, which lasted nearly forty years, until a combination of neo-liberalism and the collapse of the Berlin Wall administered its last rites. 

Ironically, this perspective is obliquely endorsed even by self-professed social democrats. In Ill Fares the Land, the late Tony Judt lamented the passing of the post-war European order but did so in terms that conceded the depth of social democracy’s political defeat and offered little hope of its resurrection.

It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Third Way revisionists seeking to revive the fortunes of the democratic left in the 1990s recoiled from professing an ideological position. Anthony Giddens gave the subtitle The Renewal of Social Democracy to his book The Third Way but “what matters is what works, not ideology” was more often the lodestar of New Labour. In the pre-crash period of steady, continuous economic growth – or so-called Great Moderation – a distinct political ideology came to be seen as a little outré.

The political terrain of post-crash politics is more rugged. But as European voters splinter off the mainstream political parties, there is no guarantee that social democracy will furnish the ideological or political tools for a new generation to bring it back to power. Indeed, even contemporary Labour theorists like Maurice Glasman who are critical of the New Labour record disdain the term social democracy, preferring to nourish themselves on European Christian Democracy, Catholic social movements, and the guild traditions of British socialism.

Yet for all that, the social democratic tradition is a remarkably resilient and versatile one. It defeated its main rivals, Marxism and Fascism, in the 20th century. It fed off a productive intellectual and political relationship with liberalism, the other great winner of the last century, and built institutions for the common good, as well as individual liberty, that have endured successfully in European countries. It was pragmatic, recognising the necessity of building cross-class alliances, and drew political success, as well as ideological flexibility from that pragmatism. But it held fast to core beliefs, chief amongst them the universality of citizenship, a claim which it embodied in institutions of the welfare state, like the National Health Service, through which social democratic values live and breathe, assumed and unspoken, today. And it renewed its political appeal despite the passing into history of the Cold War era and the organised industrial working class which had done so much to shape it. Its most successful Nordic bastions remain beacons of social justice, human flourishing and the pursuit of a decent common life.

If social democratic ideology has continued relevance today, it is because it asserts the “primacy of politics” in Sheri Berman’s felicitous phrase. It insists on the importance of active democratic citizenship and the primacy of politics over economics. As Europe seeks to emerge from the wreckage of the global financial crisis, it will need a new political economy. A new generation of social democrats are likely to be at the heart of that endeavour, even if in partnership with other political movements, and actors, as they have been for most of their history.

Ideology Now – part 2

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This post was contributed by Nina Power, from the Department of Philosophy at Roehampton University.

What do we mean by “ideology” today? Is it possible to identify forms of contemporary ideology, or is the very discourse of ideology itself an ideological remnant of an earlier period? In the latter instance, we might talk about ideologies, plural, indicating perhaps a clash of grand narratives, communism v capitalism in the context of the Cold War perhaps being the most historically obvious: here “ideology” comes to stand in for something like a rigid set of beliefs about the way the world ought to work, which usually incorporates some kind of folded-in theory of human nature (capitalism’s idea that people are ‘naturally selfish’, for example, and that ‘markets’ are the best way of managing this ‘fact’). This understanding of ideology is frequently argued to be over, and we are imagined to now be living in an uncertain post-ideological period, where competing fragmentary ideas jostle amongst each other for perhaps temporary precedence.

Against this familiar story, we could return to the image Louis Althusser picks up from Pascal – the idea that belief is not something that pre-exists action, but something that follows from it: not believe and you will be a good Christian, but rather kneel in prayer enough times and then you will believe. Here ideology is conceived as a material practice, reinforced by repetition and a context in which that repetition has a framework to support it. Spinoza poses the problem in a slightly different way in his theory of knowledge: here ideology is something like a way of understanding the world that ‘works’ but is false – not an illusion exactly, which is sometimes where discussions of ideology end up, but a way of structuring what happens in such a way as to make it seem superficially plausible (thinking that the legal system is ‘fair’ for example, because you agree with its verdict most of the time, while not stopping to ask larger questions about who benefits, the plausibility and nature of the laws themselves, or the likely outcomes for those accused of ‘breaking’ them).

In my paper on the ideology of law and order I picked up a slightly different idea: that ideology is perhaps rather not thinking about something really, really hard, in such a way that it doesn’t come into vision at all, except for if and when it directly affects you. Here it seems to me that the law is precisely this kind of gigantic purloined letter, indirectly conditioning what we do (or really what we don’t do), but not being visible for the most part (the same of course goes for its agents, the police and its buildings, prisons). So while we might know on one level that the police are rarely, if ever, held accountable for the people who die in their custody, for example, the idea that this might be because of a combination of police violence and corruption, racism and legal unaccountability is pushed behind the idea of individuals – the rotten apple police officer, the hint of suspicion that the victim was most likely up to no good, and so on. Otherwise the whole edifice – state ‘protection’, ‘justice’ ‘equality before the law’ – starts to look shaky…it seems to me that the law and its enforcement is most definitely hidden in plain sight, and just as following the economic crash, all the mystified terms of economic skill were revealed to be little more than a pile of Ponzi schemes with some computers attached, the law, used ever-increasingly against those who are protesting against the effects of the austerity measures imposed as a result of the crash, and always used against those the police deem to be ‘pre-criminal’ in one way or another is a form of contemporary ideology we would do well to pay much closer attention to…

Ideology Now – part 1

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This post was contributed by Eliane Glaser, Honorary Research Fellow in Birkbecks Department of English and Humanities.

On Saturday 28 April a diverse group of academics, journalists, commentators and students gathered in Gordon Square to explore the role of ideology today. The premise of the conference was the strange death of ideology within political discourse. When politicians use the word ‘ideology’ now, it’s invariably an insult. Politics is supposed to be pragmatic, consensus-building, about doing ‘what works’.

But is the narrative of the death of ideology itself an ideological move? Are ideologies and agendas still in operation, just under cover? Is ideology today primarily a covert force, creating a topsy-turvy world in which appearance is the very opposite of reality? In my book Get Real I lament the fact that Conservatives boast that they are the party of the poor, BP petrol stations are coloured an environmentally-friendly shade of green, and our TV screens are filled with celebrity chefs baking sourdough as sales of ready meals soar.

Is it time to revive ideology critique, both inside and outside the academy? And is it time to restore overt ideologies to our political culture? Since the financial crash, the Occupy movement has revitalised citizen activism. But would that movement be more effective if it embraced overt objectives and ideals?

These are some of the questions I set out in my introductory remarks, before handing over to Esther Leslie, professor in political aesthetics at Birkbeck. Esther gave a wonderfully rich and provocative talk in which she simultaneously illustrated the workings of ideology in culture today and also critiqued the very notion of ideology, arguing for a version of the term that is more rooted in social being and action. Matthew Beaumont, who teaches English at UCL, then did a fascinating reading of disaster films such as Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, arguing that at a time in which capitalism is in crisis, these films enact Fredric Jameson’s observation that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.  

Two former heads of policy at Number 10 reflected on ideology in political culture. Ferdinand Mount, author of the newly published The New Few, was head of policy under Margaret Thatcher, and he argued for a post-ideological liberal democracy which allows for a diversity of positions. Nick Pearce, director of the IPPR and head of policy under Gordon Brown, made the case for a single ideology: social democracy.

After lunch, author and Guardian columnist Steven Poole exposed the financial metaphors that pervade everyday speech – with philosophy lecturer and activist Nina Power pointing out during questions that, conversely, capitalism is often clothed in humanising language. Author Dan Hind described how the ‘end of ideology’ thesis has obscured the rise of a single ideology, market capitalism, and pointed to new, non-hierarchical forms of public discussion and protest as the way forward.

We had two highly stimulating papers on ideology in architecture and theatre by writer Owen Hatherley and lecturer in theatre and performance at Birkbeck Louise Owen. While Owen Hatherley identified the ideologies embedded in a whole range of architectural styles, Louise Owen detected ideologies lurking beneath what passes as theatrical realism today.

In the final session, a lively and politically-engaged talk by Nina Power linked Althusser’s theory of interpolation to the current behaviour of the police and judiciary in ‘public order’ cases, and argued that protesters attempting to defend the public good are being penalised in the name of an imaginary ‘good’ public. And Renata Salecl, professor of law at Ljubljana University ended the conference with a brilliant and entertaining puncturing of contemporary assumptions about reality and wellbeing. 

What I loved about the conference was the way in which the papers linked theoretical analysis with urgent issues in today’s politics and culture. The perspectives were unusually broad for an academic conference, and the discussions over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner were engaged and convivial. I was left with the positive sense that there is a great deal more to say on this subject; that in the contemporary world, reports of ideology’s demise are both symptomatic and premature.

All the papers are available to listen to online via the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.