Tag Archives: Books

Favourite Thinkers II: Pauline Kael

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Now that I live in a town almost devoid of bookshops, it’s a big occasion when I get out at the weekend and end up buying a book of any sort. Last week in Stroud, the slightly odd leftie-hippy enclave in the heart of the staunchly Tory Cotswolds, I picked up two second-hand volumes of collected reviews by Pauline Kael, the long-time film critic for The New Yorker from the late 60s through to the early 90s. I haven’t read anything by her since I was a student in the late 80s, in the days when I tended to go to the cinema on average once a day, mainly at 11pm at night. I remember liking her not least because she had a soft-spot for John Hughes-style teen movies, on the grounds that they were the only American films left which centred on questions of class.

I was primed to re-acquaint myself with Kael because earlier this year I read a great little book by Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, which compares and contrasts the styles of criticism of these two quintessential ‘New York intellectuals’, both very serious writers, both interested in ‘the popular’, but one, Kael, more than the other, managing to avoid the traps of avant-garde disdain for popular taste. Reading the essays in the two volumes I bought in Stroud, Reeling (which covers the early 70s) and When the Lights Go Down, covering the ‘golden age’ of mid and late 70s Hollywood films (although one surprise is just how many films Kael didn’t seem to review, no Chinatown, or plenty of other ‘classics’ of that time, but lots of reviews of late-period John Wayne), is proving a joy, partly because lots of these films are the films I grew up watching on TV, so there is a familiarity to them, but also because reading Kael writing about them contemporaneously, placed in their 1970s milieu of the weekly or monthly review, throws films like Westworld or Taxi Driver or Saturday Night Fever into wholly new perspective, as part of their time, sitting alongside Rooster Cogburn or The Gauntlet, as part of a contested public culture of representations of violence, sexuality, liberation, aspiration, and resentment.

What I have most enjoyed about reading Kael again is the principled populism of her criticism, expressed most clearly I think in the sense that the object of her criticism is not ‘Film’ so much as ‘the movies’, ‘movies’, or a ‘movie’. This is the privileged term of her writing, and I think it captures something quite distinctive and valuable that offsets her writing from more solidly ‘academic’ styles of film analysis. ‘Movies’ indicates an appreciation of the unavoidably populist dimension of this form of, well, popular culture – Kael’s negative judgements are always shaped by a sense of disappointment that a particular movie fails to be as good a version of the kind of movie it claims to be (in one of these pieces, she describes the latest release by a reknowned French director as probably ‘a perfect film’ but for her an ‘entirely forgettable movie’). This attitude is summed up in a great definition she gives at the start of Reeling, of the ‘maze of borderlines’ in which criticism operates: “criticism is a balancing act, trying to suggest perspectives on the emotions viewers feel, trying to increase their enjoyment of movies without insulting their susceptibilities to simple, crude pop”. This is wonderful statement of Kael’s appreciation of the visceral, sensual qualities of ‘movies’ – that they can leave us ‘reeling’ – but also of her self-understanding of her own relationship to viewers/readers. This definition of criticism strikes me now, on reading it for first time some three and a half decades after Kael penned it, as standing in very stark contrast to a style of cultural theory in which discovering the emotional or ‘affective’ dynamics of enjoyment involved in unashamedly ‘mass’ forms like the movies is still, astonishingly, presented as a politically charged act of revelation and de-mystification. Reading Kael again has reminded me of the rarity of finding academic writing about popular culture that doesn’t fall into the trap of condescending towards popular taste, and of how much of the writing and thinking about ‘culture’ I have learnt most from has not been written by academics at all, but by ‘critics’ who actually like  the cultural forms, if not every example, about which they write.

Favourite Thinkers I: Stanley Cavell

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The American philosopher Stanley Cavell has just published his autobiography, Little Did I Know (Stanford University Press). I haven’t read it yet, it is just out, but I certainly will. I have been trying, and probably failing, to think in a ‘Cavellian’ way for a while, which mainly ends up meaning that I just use the word ‘ordinary’ a lot and in a knowing kind of way. Cavell’s distinction between knowing and acknowledging seems to me to be the basis for a profound re-thinking of  the epistemology of criticism in a more modest direction. ‘Critical’ styles of thinking often suffer from what Pierre Bourdieu called, after Cavell’s mentor and philosophical hero J.L. Austin, ‘scholasticism’. Cavell helped me to see how certain styles of critical thinking are chronically scholastic, in the sense that they tend to assume that relations of knowledge are constitutive of all human associations – and that therefore knowing how things really are, how they really work, is always a politically charged tool of de-bunking, de-mystifying, de-stabilising.  I have a fantasy book project which would reconstruct critical social theory in a Cavellian register, but that might never see the light of day.

Cavell is notoriously difficult to read (I think reading Cavell might be a bit like what it must be like to read Derrida in French), but he is also a bit of a populist – most obviously in his taste in films, which he has written a great deal about, and which he uses to make philosophical arguments –  Cavell’s favourites are 1930s and 1940s Hollywood romantic comedies, films like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story. Cavell has an interesting take on the ontology of film, and the screen more generally, though it quite distinct from the sort of ontological account one might find in Deleuze (a film-maker’s film theorist) or Bernard Stiegler – Cavell’s media ontology sets off from the puzzle that we manage to recognise ourselves in the narratives of different genres.

So, I am looking forward to reading his autobiography –  not least, because I increasingly find myself drawn to books which are about theory or philosophy, rather than books of theory or philosophy. This is probably age, and lack of time; but I also think there is something important about the way in which current styles of theory and philosophy  often attach themselves in important ways to Proper Names, exemplary lives, places, or events – Cavell I suspect will have interesting things to say about the relationships between thought and life for those of us who have led very ordinary lives indeed.

Theorising the Crash

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Now that I have finished, for now at least, with regular air travel, I have finally got round to reading a book published in the UK earlier this year by William Langewiesche (how exactly do you pronounce that?), called Fly by Wire – it’s about the US Airways plane which ditched in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. I have not quite felt able to read this book in the midst of various flight-dependent speaking commitments (one thing which Langewiesche’s writing does, mind you, if you want it to, is make you feel a little safer about flying). Oddly enough, aeroplanes were quite important to my early reading experiences. I grew up in a household full of books, which was good, but an awful lot of them were about famous WW2 bombing raids – books by or about Guy Gibson, that sort of thing. And at school I had a subscription to one of those weekly magazines that built-up into a complete encyclopaedia of the history of military air warfare. So this post is partly about a guilty pleasure.

Anyway, so here I am, aware of the risk of seeming to be trying to pull off that most academic of conceits, which is to try to establish some intellectual sounding justification for one’s own personal interests, tastes, hang-ups – like arguing that baseball is ‘the best of all games’, or that all the best cricket writing (not much) is written by lefties – CLR James, er, er.., er…?

Langewiesche writes about why planes crash. I first remember reading something by him sometime last year, on a train, in Vanity Fair, about an accident in which two planes collided over the Amazon forest. The great thing about his writing about crashes is that, of course, you know from the start what is going to happen – the planes are going to crash. But he develops narrative tension by reconstructing the ‘why’ of crashes (think of a highly literate version of the TV programme Air Crash Investigation, which I should probably be ashamed to admit to watching, but hey, it’s sponsored by the National Geographic Channel, so it’s almost formally related to my professional world as a geographer…). The story of crash over the Amazon turns out to be about how attempts to programme safety into complex systems like international airline flight only generate unanticipated consequences of some sort – i.e. crashes.

This essay, ‘The Devil at 37,000 feet’, is reproduced in Aloft, an expanded collection of Langewiesche’s writings on the magic of human flight. Langewiesche is a moralist, of a sort, in so far as what he does in these essays is work-up a clear account of how the development of human flight has gone hand in hand with competing scientific and social scientific understandings of the degree to which complex systems are inevitably prone to ‘normal accidents’, or whether, as in the view of ‘high reliability’ theorists, the prevention of accidents is actually within human control – Langewiesche’s position seems to lean towards the former position. Anyway, I learned new things about social science from reading his books, about sociologists and political scientists like Charles Perrow, Scott Sagan, and Todd La Porte, and other exponents of ‘systems accident thinking’. Langewiesche uses plane crashes to elaborate on the relationships between technologies, organisational systems, and the idiosyncrasies of embodied, human skill and judgement. In the book about the plane landing on the Hudson, Langewiesche has this repeated theme of how the ‘heroism’ ascribed to the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, in terms of his displaying ‘cool under pressure’, is not so much mistaken as mis-described – the theme he reiterates is that both pilots pulled of ‘a work of extraordinary concentration’.  The book is a brief history of fly-by-wire design technologies, pioneered by Airbus – the plane they were flying was an Airbus A320. To cut a long story short, these technologies surround pilots in ‘flight envelope systems’, which ensure that various parameters of flight are maintained automatically, not least in crisis situations. This is one of the feedback loops of perverse consequences which Langewiesche explores in the essays in Aloft, looking at the ways in which enhanced safety-oriented design features of modern commercial airlines can, under certain circumstances, combine with the routinization of the skill and fluency of pilots in flight “to inhibit their powers of self-assessment”. It turns out that the design features innovated to keep us poor folks back in Economy safe (Langewiesche is also very acute on the political economy of the airline business as it impacts on the performance of pilots in stressful situations), might inhibit the exercise of the very reflexive skills which pilots have at their disposal to negotiate unexpected situations when they arise.

When Fly by Wire was published in the US at the end of 2009, it was rather predictably spun in terms of a scandalous de-bunking of the media-created mythology around Pilot Sullenberger’s heroism – as if the implication was that the plane landed itself on the water. This is unfair – Langewiesche wants to give the built-in design features of the plane their due, for sure, but the point about the pilots being ‘concentrated’ is precisely about locating what it was that they did so well. This is the reason why Langewiesche’s writing is interesting – it is his concern with thinking through the distribution of ‘responsibility’, in good and bad senses, across technologies and humans, between systems and discretionary acts. It reminds me of early actor-networky theory, by Latour and Steve Woolgar for example, which made so much of re-describing social theories of agency in terms of the dynamics of attributions of responsibility. This emphasis seems to have been lost in the slippage of so much of the work inflected by these sorts of thinkers into making big claims about the ontological status of various sorts of ‘non-humans’, ‘actants’, and the like. So if you are ever worried by the challenge of that sort of social theory, I recommend reading something by William Langewiesche.

Just wait ‘til after you have taken that long-planned plane journey. Better to read it on a train.

Collecting My Thoughts

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This time last year we moved house, and I found myself re-reading a well-known essay by Walter Benjamin called ‘Unpacking My Library’. It’s a lovely piece for anyone with an unhealthy attachment, of some sort, to books, of whatever kind, as artefacts. The essay is about the prosthetics of thought and memory, which is a common enough theme I guess, but what is really distinctive about Benjamin’s essay is how he captures the active sense of ‘collecting’ books as a habitual mode of thinking, rather than fixating on the contents of a fixed collection once acquired.

Benjamin’s essay is really quite funny in exposing the nerdiness involved in acquiring books as a process of thought, but in a serious sort of way. The aspect of the essay that rings most true for me is the sense of chance and coincidence that book-buying and book-browsing implies about how one’s own engagement with ‘Theory’ works. He articulates this around the idea of book collecting as a way  of investigating new cities: “How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” Unpacking the library is packed-full of memories, and regrets – for books half-finished, writing-projects never even begun.

The places which are evoked by unpacking my books were often more prosaic than those with which Benjamin was most familiar, although I do have favourite bookshop memories from cities like Paris, Stockholm, Cape Town, or Chicago. More often, though, the places my books evoke are towns like East Grinstead or Cirencester (the town where I can first remember buying a book for myself, in a now defunct Woolworths; You Can’t Win Them All, Charlie Brown, it cost 50p, new). Of course, unpacking books, or just rearranging them, also evokes memories of bookshops which are no more, like Oxford Books in Atlanta, my first experience of a real American bookstore (books and coffee, what a smell!), or Compendium Books in Camden Town, a bookshop so important in shaping the thoughts of an entire generation of British Theory-heads that is was obituarised in Radical Philosophy when it closed.

Our house move last year involved relocating to the weird and not-so-wonderful town of Swindon, and one of the things that was reconciling me to this was the knowledge that at least there was a big Borders on the outskirts of town. The week we moved, it was announced that it was going to close (much to the anger of local residents, many of whom really appreciated the Starbucks upstairs – there are not so many places in that part of town for new mums to hang-out with prams; the Starbucks has survived, only now it is upstairs in a shiny new branch of New Look). Earlier this year, just to make me feel even better, the Oxfam book and record store in town also closed down. Swindon now has fewer bookstores than East Grinstead, the town I grew up in, with dreams of leaving for more bookish places.

Oxfam bookstores sell second-hand books, but they are run along the lines of commercial second-hand bookshops (not a little controversially). Where we lived before moving to Swindon, in what one of our friends and fellow residents once described to us as the ‘Guardian-and Tofu-Ghetto’ of Bishopston, in Bristol, we were a five minute walk up the hill from an Amnesty bookshop. Amnesty bookshops get all their books from donations, so unlike Oxfam shops, their books are dead cheap. I’ve come to realise that this bookshop has had a powerful influence in shaping how I think as an academic over the last decade. It’s located on the Gloucester Road, the faintly alternative heart of independent retailing in North Bristol, equidistant from the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England – Bishopston is, according to census data, the most educated ward in the whole country (containing a high proportion of geography professors prolific in theorising about neoliberalism too). All of which means the Amnesty shop has this high turnover of lots of academic books of a particular vintage. This shop is a veritable repository of the ‘long-tail’ of a certain sort of British left-sociological culture of the 1970s through the 1990s. It is never without a copy of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, or Richard Hoggart’s The Use of Literary. There is also a regular supply of complete sets of OU Social Science or Humanities courses books, as students finish one year’s study before moving on to the next level (at least, that’s what we all hope if we work at the OU). Sometimes, books with the names of an academic with whose work you are actually familiar appear – books owned by Jean Grimshaw, the feminist philosopher, or Peter Haggett, the geographer.

I have come to cherish this bookshop like no other I know, primarily because of the promise of stumbling across something I didn’t even know I might want to read which will only cost £1.50, at most. I once bought a box full of volumes of Marx and Engels’ Collected Works, not the whole set mind, the Progress Publishers editions from Moscow published by Lawrence and Wishart, for £15, which worked out at about 90p a volume (I turned up the chance of buying the box of Lenin as well). Most of these are not volumes you would want to read, unless you are inclined to do a PhD on Engels’ fascination with military strategy and hardware (and it turns out that, like some of us cheap academic hacks these days, Marx and Engels both helped make ends meet by writing entries for Encyclopedias – my favourite is Engels little piece on ‘The Camp’, pre-dating Agamben on that topic by more than a century; although even he doesn’t mention that this is actually the name of a small hamlet in the Costwolds, as you drive out of the Stroud valley towards Cheltenham and Gloucester).

This is the only academic bookstore I know of where you can buy classics of modern social thought for 50p, often with the added value of someone else already having annotated the best bits for you; I have never spent more than £4 on a book here. Sometimes, you do come across a recent, up-to-date volume. I bought a copy of Twenty Theses on Politics here a few months ago (I still go back to visit), by Enrique Dussel, the leading political philosopher and theorist of contemporary Latin American politics (See http://www.enriquedussel.org/Home_en.html). I had heard of him before, never read anything by him, but there it was, a couple of quid, almost new. But mostly, the books I buy in this shop are older ones, maybe collections of political writings by Weber, old editions of Goffman, that sort of thing. But it is not just the age of the books you find in the Amnesty shop that accounts for their odd combination of intellectual appeal and cheapness – these are not antique volumes, or first editions of any value. These are the books that other academics, teachers, former students or educated lay readers have decided not worth keeping any more. By arriving here, on these shelves, they attest in their own way to their own lack of contemporary resonance, or at least this estimation by those who have chosen to give them away. It’s not just the unlikely student of Engels’ later works who might find an archive of materials here, but anyone who wants to reconstruct the debates on the left of the early and mid-1980s around Thatcherism, often Marxism Today-led conversations which still assumed that Labour might win an election in 1987 or 1988; or the excitement which Glasnost and Perestroika provoked for a reorientation of left-thinking; or the infusion of Marxist ideas into social work or education theory in the 1970s; or the literature of the anti-psychiatry movement (but not Foucault – nobody seems to donate Foucault books for free; he still resonates, clearly). The pamphlets and little magazines out of which New Labour emerged, or the extensive, theoretically sophisticated historiographical anthropological analyses of Southern African politics generated by and around the anti-apartheid movement – all of this can be gathered up from this shop, if you are willing to bide your time.

I haven’t invested my pennies (it wouldn’t be much more) in acquiring any of these archives, although each one would make for an intellectually challenging and valuable project. But I have certainly back-filled some of the holes left by own education-in-Theory over the last decade by buying a book every week or so from this shop, although I’m not to admit which holes. Returning to Benjamin, then, I like to think of this little shop as providing a twist to his tactical image of book collecting – here, collecting other people’s cast-offs is a way of travelling back into recent intellectual pasts, of measuring the unacknowledged distance between then and now, of getting a glimpse of what once seemed possible or plausible yet now seems nothing more than embarrassing, but also, perhaps a little more optimistically, of noticing the little advances or shifts in culture that have rendered certain sorts of critical, theoretical elucidation slightly less pressing.