Playfulness in language as a notion hovers alongside the conventional informational telling of Western social-history. Where our fact-based education teaches us to learn time events, and believe this was ‘us’, turning to consider ‘the way we express’ our world offers potential. The history of the modern literature canon is a story of playfulness, or its absence. Modern utilitarian education deflected us from knowing ourselves through our own utterances, whilst broadening our language-set simultaneously. A focus away from language and its use is a focus away from us as unique selves. Fortunately, there is an important ‘turn’ towards reflection across many levels of education. A turning of the gaze from ‘out there onto a world’ towards the story of the ‘self within the world’ is a significant shift. Enabling people to locate their own self within their own story may well be the apotheosis of education itself.

A fact-based, object-focused, education is critical to a materialist economy. It drives global competencies. This is the world we’ve built, and we struggle to detach ourselves from its logic. The inexorability of its progress is the seat of our anxieties. The possession of how we choose to tell our own story may well be the most valuable element within a life’s journey, and possibly the saving grace from an economy that at some point will need new assumptions. The unwitting, and witting, result of industrialised education was to dynamically link utterances to objects, evolving a lingua-franca which meant human interaction was dominated by articulating events in time: “where have you been?” eclipsed “what do you think – and who am I?”. To re-represent such a hyper-literal encounter with ourselves fell to the modernists who painted in many colours, some vivid. I see it as playfulness, a coming out of an attachment to certain forms of expressing, to discover that the self should express the self from a consciously chosen language-set.

I popped into Thomas Carlyle’s home in Ecclefechan last year, just up the road from here. It’s not easy to get hold of the man from his roots, in what must have been a very tight language world. The wild playfulness of his Sartor Resartus, 1833, is still powerful to read now. His freedom to imagine, and create a world of allusion, should draw our attention to him again, and his complexities in a solid modern landscape. His ability was to change the horizon around his self and its representation, a virtue modernity intended to offer but gets frequently lost. Where Austen pulls you into the surface displays of a structure, with its detailed mosaics, in the same way modern behaviourism does in business settings, Carlyle re-tells the world through shifting colours. Which of course makes him a figure of suspicion. Re-colouring the world outside of the conventional political economy is iconoclastic, but necessary, as it is intrinsic to being human.

The political landscape for language use is rooted in horizons bounded by discourses. A modern education has its discourses of ‘inculcating information’. The social territory of the Westernised world has its narratives of ‘identity through work, consumption and possession’. Plus many others of course. What religion intended to offer was a domain of discourses resistant to these dominant competitors. But it’s struggled as Westernised nation states have a habit of co-opting religion into their utilitarian architecture, re-representing its meanings, not least the work ethic. Reinhart Kosselleck notes: “Each concept establishes a particular horizon for potential experience and conceivable theory, and in this way sets a limit”. Westernised economies mixed their discourses of political-economy and religious-fervour over the last 400 years with intriguing consequences for its members. A dominant and often unvoiced result was on the limits of expression and the freedom to choose one’s own paint box of language. A paradox for modernity itself which at its core is about freedom of expression.

I like the example in particular of how individuals will talk of themselves through shared discourses. An industrialised education tends to lead people to talk of their selves through their national identity, or their visits to places, which are both an objectivised form of discourse, constructed from the social milieu. A popular example of an objectified narrative which runs through Britain is: ‘We need to get back to when we were a Christian nation’. This is largely irresistible in its pervasiveness. It’s co-opted by political parties, individuals, churches, as a thread on which much is hung. Re-representing this form of immovable discourse playfully was Carlyle’s gifting but by changing the horizon boundaries around such language. If a ‘Christian nation’ as a persistent discourse is locked into the consciousness, Carlyle re-framed its assumptions through allegories, pouring in vivid images that shifted the aesthetics of a past that didn’t actually exist. Remi Brague attempts a similar colourful discourse: “What is called Christian civilisation is none other than the ensemble of collateral effects which faith in Christ has produced on the civilisations it has encountered along the way”. This new representation steers our imagery in a different direction. The portmanteau of Christian-nation is reformed. The story of our selves linked to its import is revisited, if not unlocked. The monumental efforts to restore a past world that didn’t exist can be re-directed. Bakhtin would claim this as a form of leadership agency, where Brague paid attention, dialogically, to the cute fractions of his social landscape enabling him to colour the past in the now.

The danger is getting caught reading these ‘heresies’, just like the Bishop of Barchester, reading Rabelais. Carlyle restores Rabelais’s social role. It’s not a heresy to choose the language that fits a profoundly held belief. What is heresy is to borrow discourses unquestioningly. Education has at times been about learning not to question. Tragic as that is. Govean-type sensibilities seemed caught between a pastiche of a ‘Christian-nationhood’ and a genuine desire to love literature, and its playfulness, but the media’s portrayal of his discourse denied him any humanity. Even Luther, Calvin and Jack Lewis thought it preposterous anyone should read a text divorced from their spirit’s involvement, but the social landscape has been riddled with Govean-language and empirical-self figures, where being invited to ‘tell your own story’ is anathema, and a bucolic image is preferred. This is a very modern inversion. Goveanesque propelled the value of literature, its freedom to colour the canvas, its sacred importance, whilst profaning its message through what Bakhtin termed the “didactic gloom of bigotry and moralising”. Which is the current modus of American Fundamentalism, both religious and secular variants. The two are synonymous.

The rich writing of Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor remind that Nietzsche said: “The craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the contrary”, pointing out Carlyle was too much the gentleman not to be a ‘good Christian’, which had a different meaning then than now. Goveanesque craving after ‘strong faith’ and ‘good education’ is no proof of a love of anything, but “quite the contrary”, maybe. I argue it is a lack of playfulness in our discourse which is a signal of our fears, our conformism to a very present impenetrable set of discourses, and the presence of others’ ambitions, and their desire to exercise power over of ‘our story’. The fear of other’s individual utterances relates to our very local fears of seeing ourselves in our own constructions. Facebook hasn’t emerged in the West as a tool of critical engagement because its language appears to be held in a tight boundary. Twitter offers sufficient anonymity to express, possibly.

De Tocqueville notes the patriarchy of modernity: “I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world…That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing”. Modernity has slipped into this modus. This is why American conservatism speaks to the world as it does. It tends towards a Goveanesque Cartesian modern Millieism. A utilitarianised modern state where language use is literal and unplayful, as we were oft in the Victorian era. Language seen as a utility is a great danger for most domains. The evangelical church’s horror at Vicky Beeching isn’t her sexuality, but her telling her own story, in her own words. This will be the unravelling of America’s core Victorian literalism, and then China’s, and so on for all utilitarianised landscapes.  Mike Kann offers an image, I interpret, of American manhood resting on the power to steer expression towards convention. Professionalism and other economic modes require approved language-sets. Cosmopolitan Europeanness is what American fundamentalists see as secular, not because they understand its history, but because it won’t conform to recognisable language patterns. To ‘be good’ is to ‘be hyper literal’. When in truth fundamentalist American industrialism is thoroughly modern and thereby secular in intent. We know this because the lack of playfulness in its landscape. Those who do speak oft possess a hysteria, a form of desperation, like Elmer Gantry, or the sourness of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom.

Returning to playfulness as core to language-learning isn’t easy. It’s painful because of the profound association with notions of dignity and self. From a leadership perspective changing the horizons around language-sets has commercial risk for business communities long celebrated for their conventional use of language. Bakhtin appeals to the shades of meaning available in such an approach, its ability to disrupt patterns of thinking which might be locked onto dangerous trajectories. He notes de Tocqueville’s concern for modern patriarchies (Bakhtin being a Soviet subject) where societies perpetuate themselves through bounded language sets. Disruption facilitates change, Bakhtin notes. The other high value proposition is that dialogical societies are fundamentally entrepreneurial, but not just commercially. Dogmas, single narratives and measures have distorted late-capitalism.

**Reflections on poet Norman Nicholson, born Millom 1914**

‘Have you been to London?
My grandmother asked.
‘No.’
China dogs on the mantelshelf,
Paper blinds at the window,
Three generations simmering on the bright black lead,
And a kettle filled to the neb,
Spilled over long ago.

The constant tension within the English spirit is between its strong provincial roots and the demands of modernity. The distinctiveness of our region, its shared meanings are in contrast with what Aldous Huxley referred to as the ‘dreadful joy’ of the ephemeral. Nicholson’s resolution with his provincial self seems peculiar for a man of his period. A fully modern existence of the 20^th century kind embraces disconnectedness as good. To disjoint from the patterns of the natural world, and no longer be located by our position beneath the arc of the sun above our heads is the foundation of modernity’s freedom-giving-power. It’s the escape from what Bakhtin calls the ‘didactic gloom of bigots and moralists’. But along with the freedom of ‘hopping on a train’ to escape time and space came alienation. You arrive in the concrete jungle with a shocking self-consciousness created by the urban environment’s demand that you co-opt their speech and manners, thus implanting further unease alongside your clumsy efforts to ‘fit in’. Although in the metropolitan environment there is no ‘fitting in’. Nicholson seems to avoid such contortions, as did Benjamin Britten, embracing a place where ‘the self’ could speak. In so doing Nicholson disrupts the inexorability of modernity, which in the 1940s and 50s, was Britain’s only answer to its fragmenting markets.

The modernists of the late 19^th century and early 20^th were in a protracted frenzy of unpicking the crumbling of modernity’s promise of ‘peace through The New’, and attempted to create otherworldliness through new representations. Tragically Britain missed this useful introspection and reflection. It was too invested in the mass market. There was little or no mainstream lingua-franca of critical reflection on Britain’s place in the world and the values that had wedded it to solid-industrial principles. Renewal at the level of ‘the self’, the region, and the collective was eclipsed by imperial values of top-table power. Wagner had offered a new sound world, pre-fixing the arrival of modern composers who were to offer a polyphony of new experiences, of which none really coalesced into anything we can agree on today, but they did create an active dialogue for those interested, such as the Europeans and Americans, who industrialised at a different pace, adapting to changing markets. They possessed the self-consciousness of modernism, and its space for thought. Britain, desperate to conserve its lead, maintained the perpetual anxiety of falling forward into ‘The New’. Even pre-eminent modernist T. S. Eliot became more English than the English as his self-consciousness appeared to switch to conserving an English establishment that was in need of re-understanding. Orwell’s message had also been swept aside.

But Nicholson’s provincialism comes with an assertiveness, maybe indulgence, which is transcendent. This is because looking at his language now, at a time when modernity is as much of a dogma as its religious forebear, it is easier to grasp why he found faith and the physical enduring. His sensibility towards the patterns of the physical world offer modernist impressions: “See it doddering in the ripples of the vapour”. Wittgenstein referred to modernity as a constant restless quest. One which he gave up. Nicholson’s world avoided this questing. In his world the word ‘rock’ meant something he could stand on and something which could transport us. Nicholson’s language stands between positivism and postmodernity, which at the time was a difficult balance. C. S. Lewis’s treatise The Abolition of Man decried the suggestion that the wonder of the waterfall could be created outside our experiencing the waterfall directly . To break free from our rootedness, our createdness and inhabit an entirely constructed world sourced from our passions and creativeness alone, was an ambition that had dire consequences for ‘who we are’. Nicholson looked long and hard at what modernity had sought to escape. He noted we are finite, created and rooted. This was provincialism with a new self-consciousness: “And children suffocate in God’s fresh air”. He invites a fresh look at that finiteness. While Kafka noted that unconscious rootedness led to a descent into the mundane misery of a stuckness in provincial drudgery, Nicholson makes an appointment with it, choosing to see its relationship with the eternal. K., the protagonist in Kafka’s The Castle, didn’t notice his physical world at all, only the barriers to his future status. As a good capitalist does. In this sense Nicholson is profoundly modernist, seeing through the friable state of modernity’s promises, and the stultifying effect of not adopting new language to renew our existence in The Now. Proust talks of an unconscious rootedness, the potential of being ‘trapped by our own soul’ implying even when we do travel through to pastures new we take our ‘own world’ with us like a comfort blanket, adding to any imprisonment. Nicholson chooses to be exigent with his place, not passive, but drawing out from it what he requires. I am provincial, but, importantly it is a conscious choice not a Kafkaesque victimhood.

While Britain was still blackening its landscape Proust and his ilk at the end of the 19^th century observed that institutions of modernity had lost their ability to deliver modernity without dulling the soul, in addition to the already wracked bodies. He observed that the skeleton of the modern world created, however, a space for individuals to meet. Nicholson is appealing to the existing frames offered by the natural world. If you walk down the corridor of your office building, like the backdrop of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, it repeats itself on a loop. You are forever back to your starting point. Everything looks the same. You walk across the Yorkshire or Cumbrian landscape and you are constantly being located by the 3D shifting of the irregular patterns of trees and randomness of the river. The trees are moving as you walk. Every image is new and fresh. You know where you’ve come from, where you are now and where you are heading. You are fundamentally located. Therefore a Nicholsonian conscious provincialism need not be a euphemism for decay or scapegoat for metropolitan spirits but for a widening metaphor of ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’ and ‘rescuing’. He adds “What if I listen? What if I learn?” If ‘to be modern’ means leaning into simulated realities constantly and telling ourselves ‘this is progress’, and ‘this is better’, what David Collinson calls Prozac Leadership, then Nicholson’s language-set is in stark contrast. He is saying capital-P ‘Progress’ isn’t ‘learning’ and implies it is novelty in place of learning. Learning takes place here and now, with what we’ve got between us. Alienation is only broken by this admission ‘we’re both here now’ and the willingness to ‘see’. There isn’t progress at all then, only difference and disconnection. Philip Gardner quotes Kathleen Raine with “Nicholson [feeling] himself to be a living particle of the natural world”. This immersement has attracted its critique but in essence ignoring the prevailing mood was modernism’s core, a breaking of faith with the season’s patterns, an asynchronous life. This wasn’t the message they wanted. An unlikely modernist.

Answers on a postcard please. Modernity might have ‘started’ when the ploughboy opened his  double-entry bookkeeping system?  Or when pints replaced flagons. Or Henry the VIII asked for ‘pastrami-triple-deck-on-rye-no-butter-no-olives-with-double-decaff-skinny-latte-soy-no-sugar’? A concept still difficult at most British cafés! Although if Kolakowski’s right, no person can conceive of the Age they are in. So, if you’re praising Modernity’s greatness ‘we’ must be Post-Modern? Aha! ‘Seeing’ the Modern Age means it’s already finished.

The question is fraught then, if it’s a Modern Question. Something ‘starting back then’, as it were, suggests A Modern History, where, ‘back then’ supposedly can tell us something about ‘now’, when many of you will queue up to say Now is creating Then!  Gulp. Park that nihilist/liberating notion for one moment.

W. B. Yeats’ modern antinomies remain alive in the Syrian conflict: “Between extremities Man runs his course; A brand, or flaming breath.” (My underscore.) An event must be matched by another event. This is Modern Progress achieved by vacillation rather than resolution. By seeing an event as the only response to an event, alternatives go hang. By camping on one side you ‘create’ the sectarian divide, even if any fundamental differences in sides are false. Kierkegaard offers up his choice of Either/Or (hedonism versus piety) as the arch parody of the modern fallacy. The joke for Kierkegaard was on Christendom largely, but also us, as no-one chooses such ‘camps’: Firstly, as choice is a luxury, and secondly, no-‘one’ can be one or t’other. But some governments seem to think: ‘Syria is bad, because it bombed, er, Syria, and to punish Syria, we must, er, bomb Syria’. For The West to stay pious it must bomb ‘its opposite’ to keep alive its self-image of being on ‘piety’s side’. This Modern or better still Greek fallacy persists. The Greeks and Trojans march back and forth. Except there is no global synthesis for West versus East it seems. Only back and forth because one side prefers vacillation as a way of life. What if the Taliban wanted to talk all along? Which we suspect they did.

Before this ‘progress’ of Modern history it is somehow comforting to know a couple of things: a) mythologies abound in all societies of ‘the Present Age’ being a poor shadow of some former glory (making spurious the idea of history as working from the ‘then’  to now, when it’s likely to be working from the now to now, remember!)  and b) prior to the so-called Modern Age there was a labyrinthine ‘mess’ of dominions and principalities beyond assessment. So the Modern Age then is an Age where people unscramble a perception, call it ‘unscrambled’ and start writing about it in binary terms. It’s there because a Platonic Ideal emerged alongside the Nation State trying to position itself in its own mind for its own sake. The interstitial space between East and West is ineffable so it can’t exist as an option, says Obama?

The modernist writer explores the ‘space’. If, as Girard points out, the theatre (in Swann’s Way) is a disappointment, just as with a modern institution, the close encounter with the ‘old man’ in The Stalls restores not the theatre or institution but faith in its principles. The old man sits in the space, so to speak, waiting. Kafka’s character, K., a Land Surveyor, can’t visit The Castle, nor his employer, The Count. The Castle is omnipresent in his struggles as he surveys the village. It rules the community. But he can’t go there. Nor bridge the gap with those it rules. Persistent alienation from The Other marks the private reflection of ordinary people. To bridge the divide is to question The Castle and its ‘place’. A moral travesty. K. develops the language of ‘the space’ to navigate between the villagers who keep the Castle at the front of their minds. The Castle, its loyal advocates, enter K.’s sleeping and waking hours, uninvited. For the modernist writer, life sits below ‘the structure’ of the pre-eminent ‘Other’ in modern life. Even if the ‘Other’ isn’t encountered. The Other is The Taliban, the benevolent Monarch, the PhD thesis, or the the much vaunted ‘known customer preference’. Or The Socialist Nightmare in Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Written in 1944 when any neat enemy suited.  What if Thatcher had read a second book?

If not being Modern then is returning  to an ‘Ageless’ labyrinthine world, by, say, de-Stating yourself, or de-modernitying your language, it’s worth noting that some argue that the Modern Age was pre-fixed by other modes, such as The Renaissance or Reformation mindset. Fundamentalists of all shades prefer single narratives and located ‘starting points’. So care needed. Protestant fundamentalism would rarely want to give a nod to Erasmus’s mocking of a laughable church offering cut price deals on a shortened Purgatory; or The Renaissance, or, the weakened North European Princes for enabling Luther’s unction: ‘go on Martin, you can do it my boy; 60/40 alright?’. The idea that powerful self-interest supported radical religious reform makes the story grubby. The conservative right-wing positions the UK as being a post-Christian nation. Ask though a Modern Christian which day in history ‘we were a Christian nation’. Was it Thursday 4^th in 18whenever? The right-wing constructs the ‘Christian’ and then constructs ‘the nation’. Without apology. No-one knows these terms anymore of course, so diffuse are they by overuse. What, then, prefixes a collapsing of the binary opposites?

Stephen Spender (a schoolmate, by the way, of Ben Britten, whose music explores the difficult middle), writing on pre-eminent modernist T. S. Eliot, refers to the brightness of modernity (“eyes cut open”). Implying its construction be-shadows ‘the spaces’ in the gloomy middle. Brilliant (as in dazzling) modernity is better described as a sensate-culture: “Most poets adopted, as Oscar Wilde had done, and as Yeats and Ezra Pound later did, aggressive and flamboyant poses. But Eliot was too profoundly ironic to do this.” T. S. Eliot, the Lloyds Bank foreign account manager, is too ordinary until propelled by The Waste Land into super celeb status. We discover at last language is political. We’re informed by the ordinary man, the bank manager. This is the turning point where theory is seen, as Terry Eagleton notes, as a High Political Project. Modernity itself ends then when all ordinary folks believe this together? Not until then.

GILLIAN Clark’s letter to Carol Ann-Duffy says*: “The pre-[Sylvia] Plath generation of British students had studied old dead men and, marvellous as they were/are, they were a scold’s bridle on any idea that women too could be poets. In speaking when she did, Plath fired the wild hearts of the last silenced generation of poets in Britain.” The image then is voices ranked silent until one person opens the door on Harrods Sale Day and the stampede begins. A new era-of-consciousness dawns, in this case for women poets. Sylvia Plath and her peers, Ann-Duffy writes: “[give] back life to us in glittering language”.

This is quite affirming. It’s the intemperate climate not your voice that’s at fault. Tim Stanley’s pre-Obama-re-election reportage ‘Family Guys?: What Sitcoms Say About America’ opens with the thought that America is so boiling and intemperate that nothing can be said due to its rage and therefore it is the Sitcom that speaks into the ‘dark matter’ of unspoken ordinary life. America is doing then what Britain did long ago, and Kierkegaard practiced through works like Either/Or; that is speaking indirectly through Dialogue. In this case situation-comedy. Somebody said Britain and America are separated by the Irony Curtain, but maybe no longer, as America has cried out to Irony to calm its angst.

Wasn’t it the intemperate climate for Dialogue that gave rise to the likes of Guy Fawkes? Silent landscapes produce a few explosive figures with sufficient brass neck to run out from the trenches; usually to die horribly! Maybe one day the management field will re-discover Dialogue, and maybe without embarrassment; possibly in response to the decades of grim monastic silences that were weighed down under social rules of ‘best practice’. Having labelled the social events of ‘office life’ with stultifying mind-bending Americanistic labels, such as Maslow’s brilliant but constipated Self-Actualisation, it is dawning that ordinary language and interaction is a Great Laxative to problem-solving. Those who self-actualised on a Thursday at 4.34pm, could, after coffee walk around with a bit more dignity, and, a few years later, colleagues could say, ‘she has a bit more dignity!’; and it was alright. Ordinary language suffices and maybe always did. But nothing beats a sexy label backed up by research.

The difficulty with ‘office life’ is that FIFO ruled(rules), with apologies to the feint-hearted, for so long (Fit In or F*** Off that is). Extended Dialogue remains a guilty act that few practice under the false consciousness that pithy punchy exchanges communicated commercial value. Ivan Turgenev’s nihilist Bazarov lives within business and does very well, for a time. In response the re-discovered Soviet-Era thinker and literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, offers a treatise that knowledge is not a growing filing-cabinet of categorised concepts, ideas, theories and models, but rather the sum of flowing discourses and this Heteroglossia of meaning trumps any notion of static labelling. The pre-Socratic river of multiple voices within one voice, such as in Dostoyevsky’s writing, represents multiple perspectives and voices; all beyond atomising. The modern world of labelling is monological in Bakhtin’s terms, conveying the single-consciousness, reduced to its one agreed meaning. The river-like flow of Dostoyevsky’s sweating, heaving, stress-ridden characters, who are on the run from themselves, their past, their present, allows a massive liberation. That the self has a polyphony of voices means, like Ann-Duffy’s Plath breaching the dam of female expression, the individual can admit their own voices to themselves. We’ve known all along our work dialect contrasts with our inner monologues, but we would maybe deny the differences. Bakhtin’s thumping insight is that consciousness is the awareness of these interactions between these voices.

Thumping insight number two is that all the labelling and monological language is still a discourse; one of the voices. So we don’t have to throw out Myers Briggs et al but recognise it as part of the polyphonic orchestrated noise flowing round the office stage. Part then of Ann-Duffy’s ‘glittering language’? Importantly it’s ununified but in a constant struggle. The grey-beards of the literature canon are still speaking Ann-Duffy suggests; boring for England.

It’s dawned on me then, and I don’t know at the point of writing if this is true, but I will take the mocking if it is, that Dostoyevsky’s protagonists in The Double are one person. I confess I don’t know. I read it at the start of my PhD studies and put it back on the shelf and having been encouraged at a conference earlier in the year to re-connect with Bahktin pennies are dropping. Mr Golyadkin is one person with two voices? I will check before the end of this blog by googling the question: is Golyadkin the same person?… and the answer is… well I’m not going to even go there, so there. He’ll be what you and I choose him to be. Much more satisfying. Golyadkin’s doppelganger arrives at work to unsettle reality but we can with Bahktin now believe he’s one person and many voices.

On this line of a Double perspective my brother left home before I was born, but, our voices are similar and tend to move up and down the same abstract scale. He uses language with a number of dialects and constructions of voice; having been a Fleet Street journalist and servant of Murdoch across the world through his career, this is his stock-in-trade. He referred to me recently as a ‘self-confessed Little Englander’ as part of an inter-blog^ exchange on the merits of London and Paris. Such images and constructions act as devices for Dialogue, sharpening the consciousness. Few are brave enough to construct and position other interlocutors; such is the courage of the writer to risk speaking and flush out the hidden. Constructing selves in literary form at times better exposes the voices. We create new voices of others so our own voice can be heard; a kind of Qualitative Easing of our lives by increasing words into the ‘life cycle’.

This then is the criticism of Duffy, that Plath wasn’t a pivotal unblocking voice; but rather we’re constructing Plath now to carry this mantle so she suits our current politics. Plath lives again as a result finding new adherents and new value. Such is the nature of discourse and its speed we can only construct history now for our ‘now-purpose’. My brother constructs me and vice versa and it’s satisfying and possibly far more liberating to ‘create’ new selves for the sake of better Dialogue.

In Theory Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power

http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue_ten/faurholt.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroglossia

http://kar.kent.ac.uk/24891/1/Web_Version.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nqbvc

*Guardian Review Section: 3/11/12 (p. 14)

^David Gibbs’ blog: http://platoscafe.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/a-tale-of-two-cities-2/

IS Britain becoming socially and intellectually conservative? It’s a confusing picture. David Swartz suggests that in the 60s and 70s you could be on the religious right in America but be ‘anti-war, internationalist and pro-government intervention on poverty’. Such a careful and then commonly nuanced position has now been swept up into a more hard-line dichotomy of left and right politically, socially and ethically.

Polarisation of this kind does seem the present mood in Britain. It’s too exhausting to explain a worldview that is a mélange of contradictions and only fits ‘Other’ in a government checklist. Our distinctives can’t be indistinct. Fewer spaces deny the clock or Chairperson who demands you ‘get to the point’ and position yourself neatly nor um and er your way to any nugget of wisdom in your bowels. Swartz reminds of Richard John Neuhaus’ The Naked Public Square’s exclusion of language from the ‘civic sphere’. Then it was religion, now, maybe intellectualism?

The most populace public sphere, social networks, don’t do ‘vague or fragile’ well either? A Boris-Johnson-Paroxysm of contempt and scowling at the non-strident makes Facebook-Debate an oxymoron. A colleague recently pointed out that the further East you go Facebook interlocutors spar for intellectual supremacy whereas here someone suggested Facebook is the new Toilet Door for the Internet Generation.

Taysir Nashif writes, maybe with a disappointing lack of irony: “Intellectual conservatism is a uniform line of thinking… less compatible with creativity and open-mindedness”. Is this though the fruit of institutionalised Britain. Nashif adds: “Institutions… restrict intellectual freedom.” Under the EU, UK, BBC, Tesco, UN and NATO we’ve settled into a risk-averse stream that rejects all major change. Maybe a complex society is best left to what Karl Popper called ‘piecemeal social engineering’. Or what Kieron O’Hara terms “dogmatic rationalism of the free market” (remembering a certain woman PM).

Michael Williams writes: “We have to accept the irreducible contingency of our investigations and argumentative resources”. Whoa! Sorry about that. You may not have the same positive reaction to this paraphrase of writer Richard Rorty. Basically: ‘You’re stuck with your supermarket basket of bread and milk and can’t fit in anymore’. But if you’re guffawing at the sheer blinding obviousness of ‘our brains our finite’ then just hold on. No-one says this in education. Well, not to me. And I don’t say it to students really. Generally I keep piling on.

Rorty terms this ‘coming-to-terms’ as ethnocentric: our worldview is likely shaped far more by our journey than we’d maybe wish to admit. This maybe axiomatic but it’s worth re-iterating because I’d argue there is a fairly violent reaction to this assertion. It should matter to scholars as as a modern society I think it’s yet another big elephant in the room. It is the big block to a questioning culture. In fact I’d go as far to say that modern conservative Britain as we know it is increasingly horrified by The Question as questions point to our limitation or unwillingness to stand outside ‘our journey’.

Williams quotes Hume saying: “[scepticism is] a malady, which can never be cured” possibly meaning many now won’t go near carriers of the questioning disease. So, a mini-thesis: a modern world built on scepticism is increasingly resistant to questions because it challenges our worldviews. We are increasingly anxious creatures so scepticism is the enemy to peace.

Is this the real reason Britain is a  more socially conservative society? From Rorty we get our support via pragmatism, and in my unhumble view, it appears to support, maybe unwittingly, an End of Inquiry. Hume, suggests Williams, puts sceptics on the naughty step because of their lack of common sense. But a common sense obsessed community isn’t overly challenging is it?

Williams: “Every aspect of common life works against taking scepticism seriously” and the lonely sceptic misses the benefits of common life’s friends: “social, practical, perceptually responsive and emotionally engaged”. Basically ask questions pal and we’re off.  No leader in an institution then wants a hand up on the back row.

I like these links. You may not! But it does answer why we are a divided society. The quest for peace, and keeping your mates, is stopping questioning some might say. But Nashif warns: “Many social institutions cause growth of bias, partiality, prejudice, bigotry, narrow mindedness and attention to trivialities.”  These biases maybe the root of ‘corruption’. And he adds omens on the consequences for social justice and loss of self in these rational structures.

I recall a colleague who worked for the local government planning office who enigmatically mentioned he wrote the Minutes of all meetings before the meeting itself. Good pragmatism, common sense, rationalist? Or socially and intellectually conservative? And where does this leave leadership?

KARL Rossman lands shame-faced and exiled on the shores of the US, hotfoot from Europe and his sketchy past, to scratch a new existence in Kafka’s 1926 America. Being an intelligent mannered youth in unfamiliar territory means he feels the horror of his vulnerability but remains overawed by his streetlevel encounters. The scale of American Freedom and Possibility consume Karl’s sensibilities. He neither finds his voice nor outwits the Job’s Comforters who track his progress; and who look to him as their own meal ticket. But we suspect Karl felt alive. The sinister side of free-market America fosters a sacred form of potential self-emancipation. The sacred and sinister hover side-by-side in Western culture.

Aldous Huxley talked of L.A. as a City of Dreadful Joy. A land built on risky impermanance, ready to upsticks to follow the market. Horrifying but exhilarating; far from European classical patterns of existence and frozen hierarchies blocking social mobility. America is built on individuals finding their voice amongst gauche cultural icons that don’t have any snob-value nor heritage to intimidate or learn. Only in America would a James Holmes, 24, a neuroscience PhD student, walk-in to a midnight showing of a new Batman movie, dressed as The Joker, to exercise his franchise to carry arms. A dreadful life imitation of popular-art. The closest and worst sacred-sinister encounter.

I’ve always admired America’s contempt for European worldviews. Europe after the war, re-built on American loans, conditional on absorbing American Foreign Policy, served to super-charge the American Economy; allowing Levi Jeans to be the key weapon that crumbled the Berlin Wall. Europe has fought back with Integration. Alain Badiou offers a worldview termed ‘didactico-romanticism’, a typical French Philosophical mouthful, meant to expose the overblown art of Hollywood or life imposed by popular culture. This schema has found purchase in the UK where there is little explicitly offered alternative to the stuffy classicism of European high-aesthetics. The sickly-sugary romanticism of a synthetic-life led through multimedia remains overwhelmingly compelling. It’s between these poles of existence that Karl sought his transcendence.

In late-modernity we are searching for meaningful ways to exist that don’t obey ‘didactico-romantic’ laws of popular-culture (and speaking only in what SørenKierkegaard termed abstract language and avoiding personalising ourselves with the dangerous word “I”). Alternatively, we wish to avoid throwing ourselves out of ‘real’-community into the pompous classical world of snobby high-aesthetics, behaving like ornaments. How would Karl have managed that journey between these low and high roads? Could he have found Peace on a separate hidden path, maybe one that’s rarely beaten down as few want or know how to travel it, preferring to skip between the two roads alternately.

Of course integration under the EU offered not just a market counterweight to the US but attempts a cultural alternative to America’s low-aesthetics. A commonwealth of former crusty and guilty nations offering a re-born liberal and non-aggressive pact slowing any Rise and Rise of China and easing the West out from under American hegemony. Driven by France and Germany Europe has recovered post-war to offer a serious new worldview that Karl might have grabbed. The UK positioned itself to slide effortlessly into European progressiveness if the EU took off. Exposure to our own Continent through travel shocked even the hardened Imperialist into a realisation that our Victorian values were a lazy-simplicism and looking strongly-drawn, a meat-and-two-veg position, hopefully dying with our parents’ generation. The enlightened post-war Europe appeared to have embraced free-markets but constrained within a socialist-capitalist Hybrid Experiment headed by the German and French economies; still a tempting vision despite the current meltdown, as Hayekian Free-Markets were at the root of the banking scandals and possibly behind the Eurozone debacle.

The sacred-sinister proximity is still closest in the unabated free-markets, and widening then in the liberalising-secular European Integration. The latter being the same direction that Karl seemed to be moving in as he sat on the balcony outside Brunelda’s apartment, momentarily trapped. His only option was to ‘create’ himself outside, or even in the face of a sinister contexts. He’s responding to Kierkegaard’s appeal to be responsible to himself for his character, life and outlook. His suggestion is that modernity forces the individual to speak only like a ventriloquist’s dummy; in The Present Age he wrote: “In fact there are handbooks for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything.” Karl took a job with The Oklahoma Theatre. To be part of an explicit staged performance being a possible honest choice, like turning to liturgy in church; better maybe to knowingly borrow our words than unwittingly serving a hidden ‘didactico-romantic’ script.

“WHAT is actually morally reprehensible is, namely, the resting upon one’s possessions and the enjoyment of wealth.” In a nutshell Max Weber scribes the kernel of good capitalism. For Calvin wealth accumulation is fine, good, if not Godly, but sitting back to count it is an abomination. And our brand of capitalism was fine tuned in the Scottish Enlightenment and excess was restrained for us by the ascetic disciplines of a life well-led. What has this got to do with research methodology?

The current movement in social science is the validation of reflexive methodologies. That is the legitimacy politically of the individual to represent themselves freely as possible from the filtering of societal politics. As all students of research will know they’re confronted with the dilemma of positioning themselves on the continuum of truth. For we can now use this word ‘truth’. Which is the truth that our research will plump for we ask? A strange suggestion. The problem is we are unlikely to know what we mean by the word truth. It remains arbitrary. But more so it’s politicised and up for grabs like a rugby ball.

If we head towards a post-positivistic worldview where ‘truth’ isn’t rooted in a determined real world that governs us and our being then where do we end up? We may end up cutting all our ligaments to our social world, its meaning, and in the arms of Sartrean existentialism, alone in our world; a false freedom of a neuroscientific future that explains our consciousness and/or subjective idealism. The Holy Grail politically then for social science is freedom of expression in a political determined modern world.

Hence, capitalism. Research under capitalism is determined, I’d argue. There is no post-modern social science in the West. It’s an illusion as the market intervenes at the moment of true expression. So the reflexive progressive social scientist states what pragmatically will be acceptable in their ‘moment of truth’. Hence, Max Weber. All good activity must be productive. And being productive can’t be truthful. Research then can’t be truthful? Not in a modern world. It’s expedient. Not that that’s a bad thing entirely, however. But ‘the good’ is in acknowledging this in a big grown up way. There’s an artfulness then available for the poor PhD student grappling with the promise of reflexivity.

If we’re disappointed at this point remember that scientific truth is expedient. As it fails to remind ‘the people’ that science doesn’t study the real. It only interprets phenomena. The suggestion that phenomena is real is a neat sleight of hand. If the phenomena fits don’t knock it. Agree. But we’re not being truthful if we imply, as classical empiricists do, that the sensible is real. It’s not. It stands to reason. It’s only capitalism that wants phenomena to be real truth in the same way capitalism doesn’t want individual free expression to be truth.

Hence, the politics of the ‘good life’ and capitalism’s prescription for us. But, true creativity sits outside of productivity, in idleness. Something comes out of Nothing. You need Nothing to be creative. The entrepreneur, probably this expedient world’s greatest ‘artist’, creates something from nothing and takes the ultimate risk, that is their whole self, and puts it on the line. But the entrepreneur doesn’t conform to capitalism and its prescriptions but rather ignores it. Whereas the rest conform to the underlying message of the ‘good life’, consuming not creating. As existentialist writer Paul Tillich puts it, ‘protestants are the worst conformists’.

So what? Well the point is the ‘good life’ isn’t the good life. Good capitalism and productivity is a ‘romantic formalism’. The entrepreneur ignores it, so should we existentially, but the researcher must take account of it carefully. Social science Truth should be spoken reflexively and in the context of capitalism’s complex context. That just like science has to reports its truths according to the ‘good life’ social science has to reveal explicitly the links between capitalism and the voice of the individual.

Good Capitalism then is good conformism and consumerism. So social science truth then and its artfulness is in irony. That is to speak the truth about the social world involves exposing the conformism and consumerism within its own rhetoric. Empiricists can’t be reflexive as physics doesn’t wake up in the morning and say ‘I feel’. But social science can pour scorn on itself, wake up, and change direction.

In essence capitalism’s prescription is one of romantic formalism, affirming the good life as an ascetic journey of work for itself. Research can conform to supporting this unreflective message without batting an eyelid. The problem then is saying this in our methodologies. Inserting the dissensus voice that acknowledges the residual positivism in the Western context and exposes it to the reader. Or what Badiou terms the ‘contrapuntal and rhythmic force’ of Bartók. The music sways but questions.

So what of these dichotomies then? Positivism or Interpretivism, Anglo-Saxonism or Continentalism, Sex or Love, Science or Art. Because fundamentally these are running through research methodologies all the time as discourses. Badiou suggests we should put an ‘end to all ends’ and choose to affirm. I interpret this here as affirming the presence of these dichotomies in our research discourse and that we should avoid positioning starkly on continuums. Propose them as ironies, present pragmatically in ‘us’. Calvin then is the Didactic, Capitalism the Romantic and Science the Classical. The social scientist then can be the Affirmer.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us…

Eliot goes on to offer his barren images in The Waste Land, 1922. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the motifs feel familiar. They pop-up elsewhere as early 20th century themes from Orwell to Huxley to Kafka. Conrad’s Marlow journeys deep into the interior of Imperial European Africa and discovers Kurtz is at the heart of Empire, and he’s not the noble figure from our European Belle Époque. Eliot’s Gerontion talks of the dry month. The seasons and landscape are dry or wet, decaying or budding.  Nature’s cycle pepper Eliot’s work. Bones, stones and deserts in the ‘heart of your brother’, ‘in the tube-train next to you’ (Choruses from ‘The Rock’, 1934) suggest the tensions in political seasons around faltering industries, new uncertainties of ‘our’ place in the world.

Marlow’s journey into the interior was repeated by Orwell’s descent into the mines. This was pre-welfare-state world, a world of ‘irregular labour, which is not pleasant’ (The Rock). Heavy industries couldn’t bend their die-caste-moulds or die-caste-working-practices to a free-market. The shift is then of Greatness slipping. The Rock on which Greatness was built were certainties of economy and the sacred. Work in the week; church on Sunday. The slip was fostered by a realisation that ‘there is no life that is not in community’ (The Rock).

Eliot reveals then that April is coming but it’s quite different from our expectation. The winter months forced us into community. The ease of regular living meant we avoided each other ‘in the tube-train’ but there is in fact a quality in austere winters. It’s suggested it will be missed if we don’t see the barren landscape in its healthy bleakness as a useful necessary decay. Industries and economies and churches need to ‘forever build, decay and restore’ he seems to implore. The Rock suggests truly ‘Daring enterprise’ builds community and economy but Eliot seems to be after a harmony in building, a rhythm of activity.

IT is the library. Libraries were places of terror. Guarded by the austere and severe. The creaky floorboard was feared. Now metamorphosed into metroland ‘places to be’. Libraries have broken up their straight lines. There are little snugs, hang-outs, back-alleys, mazes, cul-de-sacs, booth-ala-record-shop. Surreal levels. Stairs and lifts to hidden floors. Is Floor 2 up or down? Does it matter as getting lost is fun. Snatched conversations in the lift. Polite door holding. After you. Places of intrigue and espionage, where le Carré passes secrets. Love and liaison. Healthy punishment for errant returns. Leather and wood. Dust and slow fire. Elegant bureaucracy. Calm.