ABSTRACTS
ISSUE 44 : AUTUMN 2001

MASS OBSERVATION

INTRODUCTION: THE PROJECT OF MASS OBSERVATION

Laura Marcus
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CHARLES MADGE AND THE MASS-OBSERVATION ARCHIVE: A PERSONAL NOTE

Dorothy Sheridan

The original Mass-Observation archive was transferred to the University of Sussex in 1970 as the result of negotiations between the then vice-chancellor of Sussex, Asa Briggs, and Len England, at that time Director of Mass-Observation UK Ltd. Set up by Tom Harrisson, the archive became known as 'The Tom Harrisson Mass-Observation Archive' after his death. It was only then that Charles Madge re-involved himself in the project, apparently due to his reservations about working for the government, and M-O's lack of social scientific rigour.
KEYWORDS: Dorothy Sheridan, Mass-Observation, Sussex University, Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge
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BOURGEOIS NEWS: HUMPHREY JENNINGS AND CHARLES MADGE

Rod Mengham

Surrealism can be seen as a formative influence both upon the origins of sociology in Britain, and upon a war-time and post-war new realism that was concerned with the portrayal of working-class culture. This can be seen in the surrealist humour of the original manifesto of Mass-Observation, 'Anthropology at Home'. Madge's 'Bourgeois News', as well as Malinowski's work, emphasises the importance of surrealist humour as a means of achieving the 'home coming' of anthropology, in order to gain a new sense of proportion with regard to our own institutions, beliefs, and customs.
KEYWORDS: surrealism, Mass-Observation, Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, automatic writing, documentary film, new realism, surrealist humour, David Gascoyne, modernist poetics, superimposition
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IN THE BLITZ OF DREAMS: MASS-OBSERVATION AND THE HISTORICAL USES OF DREAM REPORTS

Tyrus Miller

Methodological and interpretative problems contributed to a relative failure of the Mass Observation dream project to identify 'dominant images'; and, contrary to expectations, the project showed no evidence that the air-war years significantly affected the British psyche. Miller argues that dreams represent a form of indirect communication of that which is repressed in a society, and serve as testimony to forces that remain hidden in more official forms of documentation, and they should therefore be considered historically relevant.
KEYWORDS: Mass-Observation, Dream Reports, Governmentality, Biopower, Gestalt, The Blitz, Peter Burke, Reinhart Koselleck, Charlotte Beradt, Michel Foucault, The Third Reich of Dreams
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'A DOOR HALF OPEN TO SURPRISE': CHARLES MADGE'S IMMINENCES

Steven Connor

A sense of anticipation of modernist change is recurrent in Charles Madge's poetry, and while he had an ambivalent relation to modernism, he wrote in the 1930s of his desire to be caught up in the irresistible current of the new. Madge was capable of conceiving a modernism joined to mass expression and asserted the historical necessity of socialist realism. He saw Mass-Observation as a deflection from individual to collective consciousness. The article also looks at the way time and space are expressed and connected in Madge's work.
KEYWORDS: Modernism, socialist realism, mass consciousness, temporality, Mass-Observation, Charles Madge, May The Twelfth, 'The Disappearing Castle'
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CHARLES MADGE: POLITICAL PERCEPTION AND THE PERSISTENCE OF POETRY

Drew Milne

Madge's poems are animated by questions about the persistence of poetry as a meaningful horizon of social being. This essay explores ways in which Madge's commitment to poetry suggests a revision of some canonical conceptions of the politics of modernist poetry, and the continuing relevance of poetry for radical social formations.
KEYWORDS: Charles Madge, 'Of Love, Time and Places', Mass-Observation, historicity, Charles Darwin, ellipse, modernist poetry, Hegel, aesthetic, 'Pandaemonium'
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CHARLES MADGE AND MASS-OBSERVATION ARE AT HOME: FROM ANTHROPOLOGY TO WAR, AND AFTER

Nick Hubble

One of the few constants of Madge's varied career from 1932 to the late 1970s was his interest in the environment of the working-class home. His work on Mass-Observation, his economic research with Keynes, and his town planning work as Social Development Officer at Stevenage, can be seen as part of a continuous development in which each setback is met with a change of tactics, geared towards the same overarching strategic aim of the transformation of society.
KEYWORDS: Mass-Observation, Charles Madge, materialism, John Keynes, poetry, home, Social Development, New Towns
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MASS-OBSERVATION, SURREALISM, SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY:A PRESENT DAY ASSESSMENT

Jeremy MacClancy

Mass-Observation is unjustly remembered in mainly negative terms by the majority of social anthropologists in Britain, and largely neglected by postmodernists. However it can be considered the intellectual predecessor of postmodernism, which replicates many of the original aims and insights of M-O. Had it been conceived later, M-O might have been better received within the current heterogeneous and experimental climate of the social sciences.
KEYWORDS: Mass-Observation, surrealism, social anthropology, postmodernism, Bronislaw Malinowski, Charles Madge, Tom Harrisson, Raymond Firth, May the Twelfth
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GIVING VOICE TO THE ORDINARY: MASS-OBSERVATION AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM

Elizabeth Cowie

The documentary film movement was a social democratic project which opposed traditional class and gender structures by giving voice to the ordinary. Like Mass-Observation, there are issues of verisimilitude, but it is this subjectivity which, whilst limiting its role as objective social history, makes Mass-Observation rich in anthropological terms, and makes the documentary film poetic.
KEYWORDS: documentary film, social history, Ruby Grierson, Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton, mise en scene, Housing Problems, Today We Live, They Also Serve, Give the Kids a Break, Mass-Observation, Modernity
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HISTORICAL ENTRIES: MASS-OBSERVATION DIARISTS 1937-2001

Margaretta Jolly

Looks at the question of observation and testimony in relation to the diaries kept by volunteer Observers, and the ways in which these unpaid volunteers (to be contrasted with Harrisson's team of radical amateur anthropologists) rose to the challenge of providing an 'anthropology of ourselves'. Focusing on three diarists in particular - Nella Last, Edward Stebbing and Naomi Mitchison - Jolly opens up the function of diary-writing, both for the project of Mass-Observation and for the diarists themselves. She explores the thesis that 'a cultural sociology of writing is part of the logic of M-O itself', and discusses the current work of the Mass-Observation Archive in this light.
KEYWORDS: mass observation, diarists, Nella Last, Edward Stebbing, Naomi Mitchison
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ARRESTING CINEMA: SURVEILLANCE AND THE CITY-STATE IN THE REPRESENTATION OF HONG KONG

Karen Fang

In an article that looks at mass observation from a different angle, Karen Fang argues that surveillance is the distinctive characteristic of the city state. In an illuminating account of Hong Kong cinema before and after re-unification, she describes the inter-relationships between new technologies of surveillance, law enforcement and the media, and concludes that Hong Kong is 'the product of a police-entertainment industrial complex'.
KEYWORDS: Hong Kong, cinema, mass observation, surveillance
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REVIEWS
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