Part One concerns the reception of May the Twelfth up until the 1990s.
Part Two concerns the ideas involved in the formation of MO and why they were interested in the coronation of George VI.
Part Three concerns MO’s account of the coronation procession in London on 12 May 1937 and the representation strategies they used to prevent their account simply being another part of the media hype.
This extract from my PhD might appear to be a bit of a distraction from discussing MO’s book about the coronation but it is indirectly relevant. For a start, it picks up the story from the end of Part Three, when MO were apparently poised on the verge of becoming an activist movement and explains what happened next (spoiler: MO didn’t become an activist movement). It goes on to discuss some of the influence of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on MO and on Charles Madge in particular. At the time of writing the PhD, I saw Malinowski as the bad guy, and I went on to provide a critical account of functionalist anthropology. By the time, I wrote the book version, I’d come round a bit – not so much to Malinowski as to Madge, who becomes the hero of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life. Indeed, I am planning to go back to Madge and look again at his postwar ideas concerning social eidos, which were influenced by the work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. As part of that, I want to reassess Madge’s relationship to anthropology in general and so posting this section of the thesis is a useful benchmark for me.
There is also an implicit point to this post, which is that if you just study a phenomenon like a coronation from an ‘objective’ perspective, as Malinowski advocates, then the result is that you end up with a false idea of its role in society. In effect, by appearing to be objective, you uphold and reinforce the ruling order. If you’re not careful, you end up like MO Director David Pocock (who was of course an anthropologist) and start claiming – as we saw in Part One of this blog series – that ‘kingship… [rather than constitutional monarchy] is an expression of a powerful human need’. When I wrote my MA dissertation, I wanted to situate MO as a Benjaminian Surrealist-type project contesting the forces of myth and ritual, as outlined in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. I still think this is a valid exercise (and I might even attempt it at some point, with the benefit of more experience and knowledge than I had in the mid 1990s) but at the time I was partly motivated by a chauvinistic desire to show that England could produce its own theory to match that of the continental Western Marxist tradition. To be fair to myself, I didn’t entertain this idea for any length of time: the very act of trying to set it out in writing made plain that it wasn’t going to wash as a proposition. I found different, more productive ways to talk about MO while still trying to indicate the parallels with a wider continental political struggle. However, rereading my MA dissertation makes me think that the similar ideas could be reworked to different effect in today’s different political context. In other words, the way that Jennings and Madge incorporated continental theory into an English idiom is actually testament to the inadequacy of the supposed native English radical tradition and an argument that the strong radical culture of the 1930s (that was to be aggressively repudiated in the more insular England of the 1950s) was the product of a genuinely international outlook. But this is all an argument for another day. When I wrap up this series in Part Five, I will come back specifically to the relationship between MO and the monarchy.
* * *
In March 1938, Madge wrote to the New Statesman: ‘I want to make it clear that Mass-Observation is not an organised faction. Unlike Buchmanites, Rotarians, Wandervogel and Nudists, Mass-Observers do not hold meetings: in the interests of science they are discouraged from doing so.’[i] The national conference for Mass-Observers in early 1938, so confidently promised the previous summer, had never taken place. All that remained of the Popular Poetry program was a big red question mark pencilled into the margin of an abandoned draft of First Year’s Work. The published version contains no trace of any commitment to ‘educate [the unconscious masses] into awareness of their own potentialities and so render them less vulnerable to anti-social propaganda’.[ii] This abrupt transition – an understanding of which is essential for any attempt to make sense of the history of Mass-Observation – was triggered by three vital factors: the commercial and critical failure of May the Twelfth, the subsequent departure of Jennings and the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski.
The announcement in the Mass-Observation ‘Bulletin for September’ did not augur well: ‘On September 23, Faber published Mass-Observation Day-Survey: May 12 at 12/6. The high price was an unfortunate necessity, and we ask all Observers for whom it is too high to make an effort to obtain the book from a library…’[iii] According to Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan, the book only ‘sold a bare 800 copies’.[iv] It also attracted vitriolic reviews from G.W. Stonier in the New Statesman and Marie Jahoda in Sociological Review.[v] This has led Jeffery to state ‘Most critics have agreed that the book was something of a failure … Papers of the right found a leftist bias in M-O, while left-wing journals were generally extremely hostile.’[vi] However, this is inaccurate because there were good reviews in Life and Letters, New English Weekly and Left Review, demonstrating that the world of the literary left journals from which Mass-Observation sprang remained a sympathetic constituency.[vii] Nor was the book unappreciated in all scientific quarters.[viii] Nevertheless, within less than two months of publication, the ‘Bulletin for November’ was characterising the ‘May 12th book’ as representing ‘a stage of M-O that has now been left behind.’[ix] Given that they still conducted day-surveys up until 12 January 1938, it seems reasonable to conclude that the stage being left behind was the tripartite structure of Mass-Observation, outlined in the preface to May the Twelfth, in which Jennings had been responsible for presenting results. For Jennings had left Mass-Observation by this time, holding a one man show of paintings at the London Gallery in October and returning to work for the GPO Film Unit.[x] As suggested in the first two posts in this series, the departure of Jennings altered the balance of Mass-Observation and shifted it on to the Madge-Harrisson scientific axis as outlined in the second section of Mass-Observation.
The problem now confronting Madge and Harrisson was the need to gain recognition from the scientific community, for which purpose May the Twelfth was – as it has appeared in retrospective attempts to legitimate Mass-Observation as a social scientific organisation – something of a hostage to fortune. Therefore, the advent of Malinowski, as potential saviour, was eagerly awaited in the Bulletins of early 1938. The pending publication of First Year’s Work was delayed in January because Malinowski wanted to write a ‘real contribution’ and then again in February because ‘Professor Malinowski has been working hard on his contribution to the new pamphlet “First Year’s Work” and it was finished at midnight on Feb. 16th, having grown to 16 000 words in length.’[xi] That the move to a scientific outlook did not simply signify a shift of power towards Harrisson can be seen from the fact that it was Madge who organised this connection with Malinowski and who helped write the essay in ‘long sessions’ at Malinowski’s home.[xii] Therefore, ‘A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service’ can be read as a public act of recantation on Mass-Observation’s – or at least on Madge’s – behalf. The tone is set in the opening paragraphs, where Malinowski praises the ‘movement’ for ‘humility … in its readiness to co-operate with other scientific workers’ and ‘its ability to reconsider its aims and to reorganise its collective methods of research.’[xiii] It quickly transpires that Mass-Observation’s former heretical deviations, confusing the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and thus being insufficiently scientific, are deviations from the true path laid down by Malinowski himself: ‘I feel that in a way I have been responsible to a large extent for the inevitable consequences in the development of the functional method of anthropology: I mean, for its definite move towards Anthropology Begins at Home.’[xiv] He sees Mass-Observation, once corrected in its errors, as having the potential to realise his own dream of ethnology determining ‘a correct theory of society for the future scientific guidance of human affairs’.[xv] These necessary corrections are that observers should be properly regarded as informants in the ethnographical sense[xvi] and that Mass-Observation’s investigations, questions and instructions to observers should always be oriented by function.[xvii]
The change in meaning entailed by the switch from the original conception of the observer to that of informant is subtle; analogous to the slippage between participatory and representative democracy. Malinowski’s position is that while the more subjective it is the better, the subjective data of the informants has to be subject to objective – disinterested – analysis by somebody outside the grouping in question; as opposed to Mass-Observation’s hitherto position of ‘confusion which would require the observer and the observed to be one and the same person’.[xviii] However, this was precisely the most radical element within Mass-Observation and the necessary condition for the possibility of collective independence in its practice of proletarian pastoral. From now on, to the extent that Madge and Harrisson accepted Malinowski’s criticism, this possibility of independence was limited to them as ethnographers above and beyond the society whose observations they studied.
Part Five, the last, to follow.
[i] Madge, letter, New Statesman and Nation, 5 March 1938, p.364.
[ii] Draft of First Year’s Work, M-O: Organisation and History, box 1, file: ‘Early Original Papers’, M-OA, pp.3-4.
[iii] Mass-Observation, ‘Bulletin for September’, 1937, FR A4, M-OA, p.2.
[iv] Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan, eds, Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology, 1937-49, London: Jonathan Cape, 1984, p.62.
[v] G.W. Stonier, ‘A Thousand Mass-Observers’, New Statesman and Nation, 9 October 1937, pp.532-534; Marie Jahoda, review of May the Twelfth, Sociological Review, XXX (2), April 1938, pp.208-209.
[vi] Jeffery, ‘Mass-Observation: A Short History’, p.24.
[vii] Various, review of May the Twelfth, Life and Letters To-day, 17 (10), Winter 1937, pp.166-168; E.C. Large, ‘The Coronation Mass-Observed’, New English Weekly, 30 December 1937, pp.231-232; Maurice Richardson, review of May the Twelfth, Left Review, 3 (10), November 1937, pp.625-626.
[viii] See unsigned review, supplement to Nature, 12 March 1938, pp.448-449.
[ix] Mass-Observation, ‘Bulletin for November’, 1937, FR A4, M-OA, p.4.
[x] See M-L Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p.16; Stansky and Abrahams, London’s Burning, p.85.
[xi] Mass-Observation, ‘Bulletin for January’, 1938; ‘Mass-Observation Special Directive Feb 1938’, Panel Directives 1937-8, box 2, M-OA.
[xii] Madge, ‘Autobiography’, p.76.
[xiii] Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service’ in Madge and Harrisson, eds, First Year’s Work, London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938, p.83.
[xiv] Ibid., p.103.
[xv] Ibid., p.104.
[xvi] Ibid., pp. 96, 118.
[xvii] Ibid., pp. 105-107, 111-112.
[xviii] Ibid., pp.92-98, 99.
Social Humanities 