BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. I'm Matthew Sweet and this is the Arts and Ideas podcast. One hour in the studio, five guests around the table. But which of them will survive to the end? Which of them will get the last word? Now, I'm not hoping for blood on the carpet. For a start, it's all parquet here, as far as the eye can see. The subject of tonight's programme may be right... rivalry, competition, and the ground that separates those two things.
But we've chosen these people carefully. As far as I know, none of them has ever fought a duel, or applied for the same job, or vied to be the leader of the Conservative Party. Hey, that's our topical hook, but we won't get hung up on it. Not with... Jilly Cooper's rivals about to appear on the telly, not with new stuff to hear on the struggle between Richard II and Henry IV or the beef between Wittgenstein and Popper. And as well as that, we're going to rummage in the fire.
We have fabulous animals, marvels, monsters and other creatures. Gnomes! Well, not on the nose. Wild men. Meet you in the stacks later. First, those guests. Why, it's Helen Castor, historian and biographer of Joan of Arc, whose new book, The Eagle and the Heart, pits those early modern English kings I mentioned against each other.
Michael Crick is here, veteran journalist and a man who is to British politics what J.B. Priestley's Inspector Ghoul was to morally careless Edwardian households. David Edmonds is here, philosopher, trolleyologist... an author of Wittgenstein's Poker, which will be thrust at us very soon. And Kate Maltby is here, critic and broadcaster, who, like Helen, also has an eye on the early modern period. Hang on, you're thinking. He said...
Well, we also have another guest in the studio who's here to mark the death of a giant of Marxist literary theory, a man who described postmodernism as a force that worked to fill the anxiety. and voids of modernism. So I'm just going to do my bit for anxiety and the void by not naming the subject or our guest for about half an hour. Is that OK? Always historicised, Matthew.
Well, I made a promise to the audience. Let's see if we and our guests can stick to it. What's the difference between a rival and a competitor, Michael Crigg? Well, in a rivalry, I suppose, there's a bit of edge, isn't there? There's a bit of nastiness, but not always. I mean, sometimes there are rivals who are also friends. So it's very difficult to define it. I mean, Nigel... Farage, when he was a young man in UKIP...
was great friends and rivals with a guy called Craig McKinley. And Craig McKinley was an accountant who used to do Farage's accounts. But they stood for the same jobs. And in the end, Farage became a Euro MP and Craig McKinley didn't. And then years later... Later in 2015, Craig McKinley, by now a Tory, got his own back because he beat Farage famously in the election in South Thanet in 2015. So that was a friendship and a rivalry, although the friendship sort of...
Twittered out, really, I suppose. And it became an intense rivalry. I mean, Thatcher and Heath is another good one. I mean, Heath actually, you know, went to speak for Thatcher in about 1949. And then over the years, it's partly because I think... They came from rather similar lower middle class, upper working class backgrounds. It got more and more intense. And of course, Thatcher challenged Heath in 1985. And that rivalry went on for decades after that, even.
it's got to have a bit of edge. So rivalry sounds more personal than competition, Kate Maltby. Well, I think what we're really talking about is the difference between competitiveness and envy. And when we talk about dark rivalries... Which is a sin. But if I can give you an example. If you go down to the National Theatre... This autumn, from this week onwards, you can see one of Shakespeare's highest celebrations of rivalry at its best.
Although even that goes wrong. Sorry, it's a spoiler. And there's a brilliant quote. So Coriolanus, play about martial valour, masculinity. And Coriolanus is a Roman general whose great rival is Alphidius and who says of him on the battlefield. He is a lion that I am proud to hunt. And those are the great military rivals, aren't they? The pride in the combat. So it confers status upon both people in the relationship, perhaps. Dave Edmonds.
Competition is maybe more structural than rivalry. It seems to be present in systems. I think that's right. Rivalry tends to be about... Things like status and reputation and wealth. And, I mean, I think another component of rivalry is that Rousseau used to say about friendship that you couldn't have a real friendship unless it was a friendship between equals. You know, your boss who tries to be friends with you, that's just frankly embarrassing.
And I think the same is true of rivals, right? I mean, Keir Starmer can't have a rivalry with the junior minister for paperclips. That would make no sense at all. You have to have a rivalry between people who are roughly on the same level. Competitions are often also said to have virtuous outcomes. It's a mechanism that makes other things happen within systems. I mean, the trickle-down effect is a famous example, isn't it? Or efficiency. That's a biggie.
Can rivalry produce things like this? Can it produce virtues, Helen Castor, positive effects? I think it can if it's a rivalry of ideas or of... things that are outwardly focused trying to make the world better. But if it's purely personal, if it's about...
two people aiming for the same spot. And that's something I would want to add into our definition, that it's got to have that sense of two people at the same level trying to get to the same place. And there's only room for one. And if they will stop at nothing to get it... can become extremely destructive.
I think this might bring us to the Tory leadership contest, Michael. This is the first field where we might think about how these ideas are played out. Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverley, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugenhart. Are they... competitors, bringing with them... the ideological value of that word, which is highly prized on the right, isn't it? Or are they rivals? Is there a sort of virtue to that system of competition within that? I can't think of those four.
as being rivals. To me, they are competitors. They haven't got any record of having been against each other really in the past, at least not that I'm aware of. The ideological differences are not huge. They haven't sort of, you know...
It's not like Hesseltine and Thatcher. In fact, you see the same people cropping up in past rivalries, Heath, Powell, Thatcher, people like that, and none of them have got a record like that. Now it may change. It may well be that in five, ten years' time they have become. But I don't see it right now. I mean, on the interesting thing about rivalry and institutional rivalry, I think of ITN and the BBC. BBC News was rubbish until 1955.
Then ITV starts and ITN is really good and go-ahead and modern and learns a lot from the Americans. And the two became rivals. And as a result, television news became so much greater. So it's an example there of... of rivalry actually being productive. David Edmonds. I should say that I worked briefly for the Today programme many, many decades ago, and there our rivals were not LBC or ITN. They were those buggers in...
Radio 5 Live, you know, or Watto. Those were our real ones. The world at once. But now they're not, are they? And that's part of the fragmentation of institutions that I think is also leading us, worryingly, to a kind of collapse of these...
great rivalries in the structural sense, because now the Today programme, I mean, are we allowed to be so BBC and talk about the BBC on the BBC? You can do it a bit, but maybe a klaxon may go off if we feel you're doing it too much. I don't think it's controversial to say that the Today programme is now...
Competing against all of those news podcasts, the news agents, Global, LBC is one big company, but there are spinoffs and spinoffs and spinoffs. And, you know, we may be past the day, we maybe have got past the days of... the great institutional rivalries in that limited sense. What do you think the result of that is then? Michael, yeah, this is your field really, that kind of fragmentation that Kate's observing, that virtuous competition that Dave described.
between the BBC and ITN. If that sort of wobbles, what's the outcome? Well, I think there still will be institutional rights, because certain... you know, big players will emerge and will become rivals. And there'll be institutional rivals in all sorts of other walks of life. You're never going to stop the rivalry between Liverpool and Everton or United and City or whatever, you know, sports teams or...
And companies as well. So there may be moments when there are so many players, there aren't any real rivals, but that won't go on forever. If we just think about the Tory leadership contest again, Michael, I mean, you said about the... Do we have to? Well, yeah. I think we do. It's such a boring one, this. This particular one. And I think it's because there isn't that rivalry. And some of them, there have been. Does it bore you because there's not another...
personal rivalry between the candidates or because the ideological positions are too similar? A bit of each of those, yeah. And there hasn't been that... that rivalry that's gone back in the past. I mean, of course, the great one for that, which was not a Tory one, was the Milibads, you know, a very rare example of two brothers being rivals, which happened back in 2010. And that... brotherness has never really recovered. But...
Do you think that you can identify any ideological differences between the candidates in the Tory leadership race? I mean, do we do we? I mean, I mean, yes, yes, of course you can. But they're not as great as they have been in the past, say, with with Thatcher against. A. Heath and B. Heseltine. They're more narrow. They're narrower than previous ones. What's your sense of the movement here, Kate?
Well, I think the key point is one Michael's already made, which is that none of these four candidates have a long history of going up against each other in the past. And that's what makes a rivalry.
Take us back to Coriolanus. By the time Coriolanus and his great rival, Aphidias, become friends and fight on the same side, they recite to each other their memories of fighting against each other 12 times in battle. And this happens... in the Plantagenet stories as well, doesn't it, which you know about Helen, that these people keep...
A rivalry is not one battle. A rivalry is a war. And you have to have encountered each other on the battlefield many times first, which these Tory contenders have not. Johnson versus Cameron, of course, would be a better example of that, although they never actually stood against each other.
Tory leadership, but Johnson was constantly challenging Cameron and threatening him. And they go wed back to Eton. Do this for us, perhaps, though, Helen. This is why there are so many sequels when Shakespeare writes about them. Well, that's the thing. There's not only the rivalries within the Plantagenes.
but what Kate was just saying is making me immediately think about what we call the Hundred Years' War. Of course, England and France didn't know it was going to be a hundred years, but this is a rivalry between... Enemies who esteem each other in some very important ways. And that is a conflict that runs and runs. Kate Mulby, in a recent column of yours, do you describe the imminent US election as the Taylor Swift versus Elon Musk?
Now, I know what you mean, but this is not a conventional kind of political rivalry, is it? What are these? What's the meaning of that versus there? Well, for me, when I wrote that column, and obviously it's very flattering that you've been going away and digging up my back catalogue, the point I'm making, I think, that many other people have made is that...
There is a huge polarisation amongst US voters between male and female voters. And Elon Musk and Taylor Swift represent a certain kind of masculine reaction, an anti-feminist. ultra-libertarian, very male movement, and a kind of pop culture, bubblegum with bite feminism. But what's interesting about them as rivals is precisely that they are these...
fantastic figures who love them or hate them, that millions of people around the world worship them and look up to the sparring between them as somehow reflective of the sparring between those groups themselves. So do they embody those ideas or are they like kind of... King's champions jousting in front of the public? If only the public were king.
I'm not sure we have champions to joust for us anymore, but they are certainly, they are rivals, great cultural rivals, and they will spar many times. I'm interested in how the framework that we give this idea changes what happens within it, the historical. or the professional, the disciplinary one. With Helen, we've got early modern England and its monarchy in the room. With David, we have opposing schools of philosophy in 20th century Europe. So let's go to the crown first, shall we, Helen?
You've been thinking hard about a transfer of power that happened here in the year 1399. Richard II deposed by Henry. a process that made him Henry IV. Parts one and two, I guess. Tell us what was at issue here. The interesting and important thing here is there should never have been a rivalry for the crown of England, because what everyone knew in the late 14th century was that kings were anointed by God. There could only be one of them. They were unique.
And this isn't a question, we need to remember, this isn't a question of a dog-eat-dog Game of Thrones which was going on perpetually and Henry happened to come out on top. Everyone in late 14th century England knew that... Richard was the rightful king, and there should be no question about that. So any personal competition between the two of them, and they were first cousins.
Very, very close in age was more of a comparison that Henry was a model chivalric knight. He was an able, charismatic leader of men and Richard was a brittle narcissist. But it wasn't until Richard's... Brittle narcissism played itself out in a way that was so damaging to the kingdom that the interests of the kingdom were under extreme threat. Something had to be done. And because Richard didn't have a son, he didn't...
have a brother. Henry was the only plausible contender to lead the opposition to him. That's the point at which we get a rivalry, because something has gone badly wrong with kingship itself. So the system has snagged, but the individual identity...
and characters of those two men are very important in the way that, I mean, this is the theme of your book, isn't it? Crucial because this is a structure of government that rests on the shoulders of an individual. And if that individual gets it as wrong as Richard did, then... something will have to be done. The point then being that Henry was...
claimed by everybody. England rallied to his banner. But however able he was, however charismatic, he was still a usurper. And that meant he was going to face rival claimants because if you've removed the crown from an anointed king, that can happen again. Can we extract the personal from this? Can we see it as a sort of transition from one form of government to another? It's an attempt to protect a form of government. So in that sense, no, it's an attempt to preserve. with a small c revolution.
But, of course, the very fact of doing it, the very fact of demonstrating that you could wash the balm off an anointed king, as Shakespeare so brilliantly puts it, means that the monarchy as an institution... is compromised and the risk is that if trouble emerges again, that precedent that they're desperately trying to pretend hasn't happened in the aftermath of 1399...
can be reached for again. It's hard to overestimate the importance of this in its moment, isn't it Kate? This is like two different views of the universe, isn't it? Two opposing views of kingship. Yes, and I think as Helen says, it destabilises the entire concept of monarchy and it does begin to move us.
as England at least, to a kind of politics of two shifting camps. But what I was really thinking about when I was listening to you talking about that is, again, of course I'm going to take it back to Shakespeare. What's really striking about the way Shakespeare writes about those two individuals is that... absolutely fascinated by each other.
And you asked me, Matthew, about Elon Musk and Taylor Swift earlier. I think one thing I would add to my answer then is that Elon Musk and Taylor Swift absolutely fit the definition of rivals because Elon Musk, at least, is fascinated by her. I don't know if she's fascinated by... him but there
People as rivals have to choose each other and then orbit around each other, staring each other in the face. And if you read the language of Shakespeare's version of the relationship between Richard II and Henry IV, that's absolutely what they do. Now, is the model that Kate describes here, David Edmonds, true of Popper and Wittgenstein? Let's twist the time dial here a bit. We're in October 1946, King's College, Cambridge. You know, who's in the room?
and what is the matter of the argument? I should say at the beginning that the book I wrote about this... Co-wrote. Co-wrote, exactly. It was with John Eidnatt and he wasn't a rival and amazingly for a co-author, we're still friends and still not rivals 25 years later. Even though you're on Radio 4 right now. Don't tell him. So I'll give you the very short version. Karl Popper arrives from the London School of Economics and...
Wittgenstein is the chair of the Moral Science Club. Wittgenstein gets incredibly annoyed by the speaker, as he always did. And at some stage, he's gesticulating and he picks up the poker by the fireplace. What poker do we think?
Good question. A question that is never quite resolved. He picks up the poker and he begins to... shake it and he demands of Karl Popper an example of a moral principle and Popper said thou should not threaten a visiting lecturer with a poker whereupon Popper Wittgenstein throws down the poker, storms out of the...
And Popper is left victorious on the field of battle. That is Popper's version. Popper has been accused of lying about it. And our exploration of this episode, which lasted probably 10 minutes. try to uncover all the witnesses and work out exactly what happened. Only 30 people in the room, weren't there? It lasted 10 minutes. It lasted 10 minutes. We tracked down nine witnesses from all around the world over 50 years after the event.
But, you know, at one level it was a rivalry because for Popper it was a very, very important incident. He'd gone there to confront... Wittgenstein. At another level, it wasn't a rivalry because Wittgenstein barely knew who Popper was. It was very one-sided, but it was multi-dimensional. What's at stake? Well, there was several levels. There was the intellectual level.
The argument was about whether philosophical problems are in fact puzzles, as Wittgenstein believes. Wittgenstein believed that all philosophical so-called problems dissolved in the analysis of language. Popper thought, no, there aren't just... conceptual issues. There are real philosophical problems. So that was part of it. So the solidity of the poker stands for that? Stands for that. The real problem. And actually that was related to a class element because Wittgenstein was...
one of the richest people in Europe. Popper had lost all his money in the hyperinflation in the 1920s. Popper was basically middle class. Wittgenstein was like the Carnegies or the Rockefellers. They were both... of Jewish origin But they'd had very different experiences. All Popper's family had been wiped out. Wittgenstein was so wealthy, and this is probably unprecedented. He was able to pay the Nazis so much money that they reclassified two of his sisters.
from Jewish to mixed race, and they survived, unbelievably, they survived the war untouched. So there were various elements going on. Wittgenstein was incredibly... Famous amongst philosophers, if not amongst the rest of the world, Popper was a struggling philosopher. So there are all these elements. So for Popper, it was really important. And when he writes his intellectual biography many years later, he begins with the poker episode.
Philosophy has lots of these sort of oppositional structures. There's the Socratic dialogue and there's the idea of the dialectic in which two opposing positions synthesise a third. But if you see the history of philosophy... as a history of rivalries or disagreements. What shows up? What does that produce? Well, I think...
Philosophers obviously like to argue. In most of these rows, and there are many of them, Hume rows with Rousseau, Adorno rows with Marcuse, Sartre rows with Camus, Hannah Arendt has this very interesting row with Sholem after she writes. writes the book about Eichmann.
With most of these rallies, it's actually not about, I see them as competition about intellectual issues and not rivalries because there's a lot at stake. So with Sartre and Camus, it was about whether violence was justified, for example. And Popper, in that sense, was unusual in that there was definitely a rivalry from Popper's side.
Michael Crick, do you think that the place on the political spectrum of a pair of rivals or competitors affects the nature of the argument? I mean, you've written about Trotskyism in this country. You've also written about... UKIP, we've mentioned them. Does the balance between kind of the importance of the personal and the ideological change depending on, you know...
where that argument is happening? I don't think so. I think you can have these rivalries between people who are very ideologically apart and others who are quite close. I mean, for instance, the rivalry between... David Cameron and Boris Johnson, which had a similar incident almost to the poker when...
Cameron was Prime Minister and Johnson came along with his plans for London and they sat on opposite sides of the Cabinet table and Cameron started reading from his notes and Johnson leaned across and snatched his notes from Cameron. Cameron, and Cameron held on to them, and there they were.
In an argument across the cabinet table, holding on to this sheaf of notes, and all the officials and other ministers around them couldn't believe what they were seeing. Now, the ideological differences between them weren't that great. But clearly, you know, Cameron saw Johnson as...
The threat, you know, the guy he'd known at Eton who was actually older than him, and, you know, the guy who would get the huge crowds at the Tory conference. And there was Johnson at that stage thinking, well, Cameron's got the job that I should have. Of course, he then later did get it. So that wasn't a particularly ideological one, but it was that personal bit that mattered there and the fact that it...
they'd known each other for, what, 25 years or something. Feels a bit timeless, this, doesn't it? Yeah, I almost feel that what Michael's describing here could have happened in your period, Helen. It certainly could, but we also have to remember that there were ideological differences that...
did come into play when we get into the 16th century, because once you've got the big religious divide of the Reformation and so on, that if we look at the female claimants to the throne of England in the second half of the 16th century... On one side you have a Protestant whore and on the other side you have a Roman Jezebel. These are not just who has the better birthright, it's two whole views of cosmology.
if you like, to playing out in the persons of two candidates for the throne. Will anybody here admit to having a rival? Only opponents. Has anybody here got an arch enemy? Do you know? Some people might comment that I very clearly had a rival at school. And she ended up working for the BBC. But, you know, doesn't one get over it after the age of 80? I mean, this is what I find alien, honestly alien, is this lifelong obsessive...
you know, not getting over it. Homes and Moriarty kind of thing. Yeah, well, you would know all about that. Not, you know, not confining these things to a period of your life, but forever. And of course, when you're young, you have ambition and you think...
I should have had that job. And you regard the person who got the job you should have got as your rival. And it's quite possible you don't think, you know, they barely noticed you. And I think that's happened with me a couple of times. But after the age of about 50, I lost all...
ambition and i'm much happier for it and uh i don't have any rivals and i don't suppose anybody sees me that way so i think there's some psychological evidence robin dunbar the psychologist anthropologist talks about this that the closer you are
If you become rivals, then that can lead to a breach from which you never recover. That's like the Miliband, because, of course, they're family members. So that's seen as treachery, and there's no recovery from that. Whereas if you're not particularly close in the first place, you have a rivalry, you can overcome.
that and become friends or have a kind of reasonable relationship after that. With very close relationships, if there's a breach, that can be it. You've got antagonists, haven't you, Michael? Have I? Well, I'm... Only around the table. We've seen Twitter. I'm just remembering that moment when Godfrey Bloom of UKIP hit you over the head with a rolled up copy of his manifesto. He didn't hurt you, but he didn't do it because he liked you, did he?
Well, no, but that was a sort of incident. And actually, my career bounced back from that. And a few months later, we made a film together and we were having lunch together and everything. And this sometimes happens. I mean, Tony Benn was one for later life.
If he got on extremely well with Enoch Powell, with Ian Paisley, you know, people you wouldn't. Now, they wouldn't have been regarded as rivals, really, but they were sort of political enemies, actually. Not so much rivals because they weren't going for the same jobs. But, you know, these.
Things evolve and as you get on in life, you get more relaxed. But also you get more opportunities, right? I mean, one can have a rival at school because there are only 20 of you in a class, for example, and there are only a set number of things you can compete over. And somebody's got to be top of the class. Well, that kind of thing. And limitation on the consequences as well. The world's not going to end over... I mean, it feels like it when you're a teenager, but...
Actually, it's contained. But in the Middle Ages, there is a smaller pool of people, isn't there? If you are the Plantagenets, you'll have rivalries because there are fewer. You can't just move to another big city and build a new life. Seems a lot better to me now, doesn't it? We can choose our enemies more carefully.
You're listening to Freethinking, live on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds with me, Matthew Sweeter. We're in the thick of a discussion about competition and rivalry with Helen Castor, Michael Crick, David Edmonds and Kate Maltby. We have a fifth guest who is here to speak of the death of a key Marxist critic and philosopher of the last half century. The subject is Frederick Jameson, 1934-2024, author of post-modern... Thank you.
Jameson is as prolific as ever. Dying aside, it's been a great year for him. It really has. At the age of 90, can't we all hope for this? At the age of 90 he's written three books, all of which have really these tremendous titles. I wish I could say that sentence when I'm 90. That's great. What vision does Jameson's work offer us?
Well, he's been incredibly influential, I think, in literary criticism and cultural history, particularly in America, where he was an academic superstar. And he really brought in, I guess, this idea of cultural Marxism. idea that you can read culture as a set of symptoms which isn't this kind of crude reductionist version you get from Marx. He wasn't really very interested in culture although he did read a lot.
But someone like Jameson is saying, actually, if you want to understand the present, understand globalisation, understand postmodernism, you go to culture first, that actually culture is the most important thing, which is, of course, what culture... It's also, rather than being kind of there to come to punish culture, he did seem to kind of take pleasure in it as well. It's not a zone of misery for him, culture, is it? something that should be rejected or disapproved of.
Yeah, that's right. So he was able to speak French, he studied Sartre, but he also was very invested in the German tradition and these great kind of doer Marxist critics from the Frankfurt School like Adorno. who would shout a lot about Hollywood and say it was awful and so on. Whereas Jameson was someone who could, I mean, one of his first essays was about Raymond Chandler. He wrote about Philip K. Dick. He went and interviewed Philip K. Dick, who then reported him to the FBI.
Marxist. He could write about The Wire. His film lessons were legendary for the kind of range from Antonioni to the latest Inside Out. I was at university. when communism fell in Europe. And I remember going to a lecture by Terry Eagleton, who said that when the Berlin Wall came down, a lot of his fellow Marxist critics woke up and found that they were hermeneutic materialists. Now, I don't think we need to...
To unpack that precisely, but did anything similar happen to Jameson? Was he transformed by the end of communism? Yeah, I think I was listening to this kind of conversation about rivalry and really thinking about this because in a way Jameson outlived... a huge rivalry between when I was I was probably at university at the same time as you Matthew so there was this big wrestle between were you a fashionable effete French post-structuralist who followed Derrida and all of these
whizzy people, or were you severe and difficult and Adorno-esque? And actually there was a time in the 80s when Jameson was writing about postmodernism that actually that whole essay is about Marxism is still relevant. You know, and I really want to kind of, you know, hold on to this. And in a way, he outlived that kind of modish post-structuralism stuff. And we're all Marxists again. Well, he also, he outlived that moment where the end of history was declared by Francis Foucault.
didn't he? I mean that seems to me very important and that Jameson wanted to keep telling us that perhaps we shouldn't be ashamed of a desire to want to see structure or even progress perhaps. in history rather than it just being one damn thing after another. Yeah, I think that's right. He was very cautious, though. He wrote very well about utopia and the idea of utopia, but he'd lived through enough of the 20th century to know that realised utopia...
tend to involve the slaughter of millions of people. So he was very much more committed to this idea of the imagination, utopian imagination. One of his greatest students was the writer Kim Stanley Robinson who did a PhD with Jameson. And therefore, Jameson thought his work was excellent because he was following his ideas and they reflected each other perfectly. But that idea of thinking, imaginative possibility and thinking, trying to think even though it's impossible outside your own.
historical horizon was something he was constantly stretching for. It's why his sentences are so difficult and sinuous because he's trying to break open the limits of our horizon. He changed your life I think didn't he Roger?
Yeah, he kind of did. So this is how we rolled in the early 90s when you're a PhD student. So when I was doing my PhD in your hometown, Matthew, in Hull, and a new PhD student arrived... and I'd heard that they were struggling with post-modernism and I happened to have a tape of a 45-minute interview with Frederick Jameson from Radio 3 and I thought I would pass this on.
put the album My Bloody Valentine on the B-side and passed it on to this person and I've been with that person for 32 years. We got married quite soon after that.
You know, this is the nearest thing we've ever had on this programme to Simon Bates' Our Tube. I think we should try and... Yeah, and I have this perfect quote I found from Jameson as well, which is, he says, History is what hurts. It is what sets limits to... individual desire and i thought yes i could even historicize my own relationship well i want to keep that idea of post-modern complexity um in our heads as we go on a trip to the library
Warburg Institute is a fairly obscure subunit of the University of London. It's not a secret place exactly, but it is a place to study secrets. The subject headings on the shelves and filing cabinets are not like the ones... in other libraries, geomancy, monsters, alchemy. It was founded by Abbey Warburg, scion of the Hamburg banking dynasty. It was obsessed with the tracing of images and forms across time and space.
spirals and ellipses were his thing. He fled the Nazis in 1934 and the collection fled with him and was incorporated into the university in 1944. This week, the Warburg announced its rebirth. A substantial remodelling and redesign with a new exhibition gallery and public areas. In we went for a lungful. First let's inhale. What are we getting? Oh, that's the smell of old books. Nothing like it.
Introduce yourself. I'm Bill Sherman. I'm director of the Warburg Institute. This is an important day for the Warburg Bill. It's a huge day. Six years of planning. We're finally delivering a building project that will transform the Institute. The Institute has a complex and eccentric history. It's founded upon a very strange and half-forgotten set of ideas that the shelves around us embody.
can it say to the contemporary world? I would say it's kind of coming into its own about a hundred years later. It's about algorithms, associations. It's about how you find what you don't know how to look for. Now we're making our way past shelves on the third floor of the Institute, which is devoted to orientation. That is the subject. Each floor has its own subject. Image is floor one.
Word is floor two. Orientation, the one we're on, is floor three. And action is floor four. People familiar with libraries will be thinking, what? Why? This is a totally unique structure that is genius. And I don't know why other libraries haven't followed it. Anyway, we've just gone past astrology and astronomy, prophecy, divination.
And now we're into mathematics, we're into the history of medicine, we're into chemistry, zoology, botany. That interface of the irrational or the occult and the scientific is what is mapped out. in these shelves. I see plague, number symbolism, metrology. What's metrology, Bill? And then you get my favorite single category in the library under divination.
FMH 1875, divination from involuntary movements. Spasms of one sort or another. Presumably. Although I don't know if there's divination from voluntary movements. We're standing near... sections on hydromancy, geomancy, dream interpretation, augury. Could you actually... Are you just documenting these things? Are you studying the history of them? Or are the techniques and the practices that we see studied here, could they actually perform part of the institutional machinery?
Didn't even have a board meeting where you discussed these things. Back in the very, very first visit to the Warburg Institute that's documented by anyone, famous professor of philosophy named Ernst Kassirer, he said this library... is dangerous. And in some ways, I think it is dangerous because it could have that. It could come out of its academic shell. And in some ways, that's what we're inviting.
By creating a public ground floor, by creating a gallery where we will show these things that normally are kept behind closed doors, we hold some of the most extraordinary material that people want to see and very rarely get a chance to see. and I want to see what happens. I was actually in the process of lining up a seance in the library, and I backed off.
I thought it was too risky. Too much. Yeah. Sorry, too risky. Too risky. Risky to an idea of seriousness or risky in the sort of... Risky in the institutional risk management sense that, you know, I honestly didn't... know where it would lead just socially, culturally, but also risky in the sense that there are so many ghosts in these stacks.
There are so many people from the past who are eager to speak to us. I honestly didn't know who would come through. I'm Gavandra Hodge. I'm doing a PhD on a Tudor mythographer. poet lawyer called Abraham France who was part of Philip Sidney's circle the author he mentions the most is a guy called Valeriano Pierius, who I'd never heard of. So I came to this shelf, which is NOH Pictorial Symbols Texts and Emblem Books, which are down here.
And I found the book that is mentioned the most in my text, which is the Hieroglyphica. Open it up for us. Open it up, OK. So it doesn't have the original bindings, but we can look at the original front piece, which gives us the date, which is 1575. It's published in Basel. So this is the... introduction to the book the hieroglyphica of sacred egyptian symbols and other symbols i want to point out the
The annotations, Throckmorton. Throckmorton. Which I think is interesting because I want to talk about how these books were influential in the English aristocracy. So I mean, this is the first time I've looked at this book. Who is he?
Was he an English aristocrat? Why did he have this book? So this is one of the great things about working here. You can take down a very, very old book and the history of its consumption and reception is there in the margin notes. They're all there. These notes are 500 years old. Exactly. So this is someone's handwriting.
So I'm going to have to look into who owned this book, how they used it, how it was disseminated. And this would have been a source book for artists, poets. You know, Philip Sidney would have used this. Who wrote The Fairy Queen. The Fairy Queen. So this would be... a kind of compost out of which...
culture was made and it's fascinating and it's never been translated into English which really freaks me out. That's your job, that's what you're doing. It's really not because it's absolutely massive and I'm already translating something into English. I think someone else might have this task. Thank you so much. That's alright.
So my name is Maria Golofteva. I'm a collection research assistant in the photographic collection. And these are these blue folders over here. I want to say that you're resting this folder of images on top of a very traditional... gray filing cabinet. As with everything at the Warburg, the labeling is fantastic. This filing cabinet, Saints H2I.
Saints, J to John the Baptist. That's all down this side of the room, that's saints. Well, actually, this whole row, starting from there, is Old Testament, the New Testament, the different iconographies of, you know, Jesus. and mary and then we go into saints and we continue with saints until zed and then some slightly more obscure ideas of you know heaven hell apocalypse there's a filing cabinet of the apocalypse here yeah
Would you like to have a look? Yeah. Zodiac. Yes, this is the magic. Animal, animals, alligator to dog. So we have... Again, as you mentioned, we have animals here, then we move into birds. And I think after birds, we have fabulous animals, marvels, monsters and other creatures. Gnomes! Well, not on the nose. Wild man. Yes, so wild man. So there's a very popular iconography in Renaissance art, but also somebody called Scarepottis.
Which is... Oh, look, we've got to describe what we're seeing here. You're going to have to help me here. There's a person kind of lying on their back with one enormous leg. suspended over their head, like as though one foot, one leg has become enormous. Blimey, what are we looking at? Who is this chap? Well, there is a whole folder. So I assume this is just how this is the depiction of the other or, you know, the inhabitants of the foreign lands, you know, which at that point had never been.
discovered you know so these are like these are kind of imaginary conceptions like like the anthropophagi in hamlet or faces, their heads beneath their shoulders. Oh, we have these ones here. Let me get your photos. Does that go there? Yeah. These are sore. Wow. Beneath their shoulders. These people don't have heads, but they have faces on their chests and little horseshoe-like mustaches.
Oh, gosh. Well, I think moustaches is a personal preference. It's not for all of them. Oh, wow. Headless horsemen. Yeah. The horsemen of the anthropophagi. Well, not just completely headless. They just have their heads. They have their faces. They have sort of their eyes where their nipples might be. Yeah. But again, this is kind of an imaginary creatures.
Yeah, not drawn from life, I do. No, I hope not. I'm Thalia Ellington-Wood. I research the materiality, reception and afterlives of Italian 16th century sculpture, particularly outdoor sculpture. Currently, I'm focusing on a very idiosyncratic and amazing garden that is found 50 miles north of Rome by Viterbo called the Sacro Bosco of Bermazzo. And the Sacro Bosco means that it is a sacred grove or wood.
And I'm pulling out a book here so we can see some of the images, hopefully. These are sculptures that are carved out of gigantic boulders of volcanic rock of pepperino stone. After it was passed on to its descendants, the patron died in the 1580s, it fell into disrepair. And there are very few records about it for centuries, really until the mid-20th century. in the post-war period, where suddenly there's this huge interest in this garden. We have a newsreel from...
1949, in which Salvador Dali clambers over these sculptures and kind of recasts it as a surrealist site. And what I'm interested in is, was this site really unknown up until this point? Why did it become of interest in the mid-20th century? Previously, it's sort of been thought of that maybe no one did know of the site, but that can't really be true because these sculptures are seven metres tall, some of them. They look very hard to lose.
Beasts of all descriptions, there is a tortoise or a turtle with a tower mounted on its back. That looks like Godzilla almost, or a bear. What is that? That's a dragon, isn't it? A dragon fighting two lions. and we have two giants here tearing each other apart. Really, the question is, why would sculptures that are so fantastic, so large, so clearly prominent within landscape not be... within the academic discourse.
And I think that is because they don't conform to the idea of the Italian Renaissance in the 16th century. They're chaotic, aren't they? They're like the dragons at the edge or the beasts on the unmapped.
part of the world without the lines on it I love that you've said that because absolutely and there are so many references in these sculptures also to hell and to the underworld really what happens I think is that This particular classical ideal of the Italian Renaissance is very, very popular in the early 20th century within Italian fascism. And we know that the scholars writing within Italian fascism knew of this site, but actively didn't.
Of course, because this looks like degenerate art, doesn't it, almost? This is not the sort of neoclassicism that would interest a fascist, is it? It's too monstrous, it's too ugly. Absolutely. And so then in the post-war period when we're... actively trying to move away from fascism, suddenly a site like this becomes the perfect, the perfect sort of case study.
And Hello Dali. And Hello Dali, exactly. Which is also interesting because Salvador Dali isn't... the easiest of characters in relation to fascism but that clearly wasn't what was important at this at this moment in time and so we have it being celebrated and written about as within the kind of surrealist term
Thalia Allington-Wood, and you also heard her fellow Warburgians, Gavandra Hodge and Maria Golovita, and the Warburg director, Bill Sherman. The Warburg is open to visitors, and in January, it will be staging an exhibition built around one of its most glamorous... Anyone here use the Warburg? I'm looking at you, Roger.
Yes, it is a little bit like the inside of my head, I think. I often think of that. And also it's so inspiring for so many crucial people like Marina Warner, you know, these kind of great intellectuals of our time who are so curious and they operate. exactly like Wahlberg in being associative logic.
Kate, you've been there. You've used it. Yes, I was smiling away during that segment because I actually spent a lot of time researching in the Wahlberg when I was doing my PhD on Elizabeth I. And what I love about the Wahlberg is... um However much order they try to impose on it, it's still inevitably chaotic and associative because what it really is is a sort of library of images and images that are related to words. So there's this great interest in the Renaissance.
emblem tradition how do you how do you let people sort through books of emblems connected to a theme well at some level you just you stick you know you stick them in these great folders you pull them out and then if you're a PhD student like me I was looking at Elizabeth first in the icon
of wisdom. So I'd look up female prophets, for example, or Sybils, and I'd just sit there like a child with playing cards, just, you know, leafing through image after image after image after image of a Renaissance ideal of a female. until I could see one that looked a bit like a portrait of Elizabeth. It's the greatest game on earth. I love it there too, I must say. When I sit working at one of its desks...
I immediately feel like I'm a character in an Umberto Eco novel who's going to get obsessed with the quincunx and lose his mind. You've been there too, Dave? I have, actually, because the papers of Ernst Gombrich are there. Ah, yes. was Karl Popper's closest friend. Gombrich ran the place in the 60s, didn't he? And without Gombrich...
Popper would never have published Open Society and Its Enemies, which he became Margaret Thatcher's favourite philosopher, partly because of that book. So I went to the Wahlberg to investigate the Gombrich papers. They've got Gombrich's piano in the auditorium there, if any of it.
if anybody plays. I don't know if you're allowed to think of it. Maybe the ghost. The ghost of Gombrich will come in the seance. Helen Castor, this sounds like your territory too. I've never been, but I'm going to be going next week at this rate. But I'm sitting here thinking how much Richard II would have...
have loved the Warburg. Not only was Image the one bit of kingship that he was really good at, as anyone who's seen the Wilton Diptych or gone into Westminster Abbey will know, but he was extremely interested in geomancy and actually committed... What is geomancy? Well, as far as I understand it, it's a system of divination using figures of apparently randomly placed dots, but it works on the same cosmological principles as astrology and astronomy, which of course are...
both regarded as sciences in the Middle Ages. And he commissions this manuscript in 1391 when his... beloved favourite, Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, has been driven into exile and I think he's trying to work out whether and when he might be able to get de Vere back. Certainly there are no instructions included in this manuscript so it seems as though Richard already... knew what he was doing. So Geomancy can tell you whether your boyfriend is going to come. Exactly. Okay, right.
It does feel in a way like a moment where an institution like the Warburg might be quite attuned to the times. I mean, it's kind of algorithmic qualities. It is a bit like a kind of big paper version of Google image search, isn't it? Something like that. And also, you know, we're often being told, aren't we, Kate Mulby, that we are living through a moment of increased irrationality too. And that's perhaps something that the Warburg holds. Well, increased irrationality.
and a deeply visual culture. But I think we're being a bit unfair on the Warburg if we think of it as irrational. There is a reason to its structure. It is a sorted library. You can search for things by... themes. But there's that sort of chaotic intellectual element that can't ever quite be controlled, which is the association of those images altogether. And yes, I would say there's a happy balance between the irrational and the rational, and that is intellectual serendipity.
So where does the, well, yes, we've described that, haven't we, with Leif just delving into all of this stuff and seeing what comes up. But what about that question of, you know, we heard Bill Sherman there saying that he thought about having a seance in the library. but then thought that would cross a line of some kind. What do you think, Roger? Would you approve of such an activity? Or have you done it? I'm very struck that he's right next to several very famous...
sites of seances that took place in Russell Square. It's where the Spiritualist Foundation was organised. Alistair Crowley was nearby. The Order of the Golden Dawn had one of their temples nearby. And they've got the papers of Crowley. this mad antichrist kind of sex magic figure. So I think there's a lot there that is already kind of being conjured actually by the PhD students who go. You're making a sort of squeamish face, Kate. I am because in the same way that I defended the...
initially against charges against irrationality. I actually think it's really important that in the academic world we can study things like geomancy or astrology, which I might think is absolute rubbish. I will leave your opinions to yourself and impose some kind of rational analysis on why they matter to people, why people believed in them, what their role was in society, without actually succumbing. And I would say that if you start holding seances in libraries, you are getting hard.
on your own supply. You're supposed to study this stuff without being sucked into it. Maybe you're dabbling. Which is always very bad, isn't it? Well, maybe I'm just an old moralist and I need to loosen up. I'd also say the Wahlberg, as we've sort of touched on but not quite said, has a great Jewish intellectual tradition behind it.
Again, to be very po-faced for a moment, I don't think that tradition would be, some people like Abby Warburg would be very comfortable with. It's not a tradition of necromancy, is it? Can we talk about other archives and libraries that we might have vibed with? Helen, where are you happiest and where have you made the most exciting discoveries? Well, I was just thinking when we were talking about the rationality or irrationality of the...
of the Warburgs sorting of its collection, that in a sense any structure that you impose upon knowledge, you can quibble with any of it. So one of the things I absolutely love is open stacks. And my home, my intellectual home, is the University Library in Cambridge, one of the great copyright libraries of the world, because it has what feels like miles and miles of open stacks, and you can lose yourself there and make so many serendipitous discoveries.
Home from home in London is the London Library, which is a little open stack jewel in Piccadilly. Michael Crick, what part does the archive play in your work, the work of a political journalist and biographer? Well, when I write books, they play big roles. And in fact, I think I've even thanked archivists and librarians in the forward to one of my books. dedicated the book to them. And my fear is that...
They won't last, really, that everything will be digitalised. I mean, the public record office, every time you go there, it just gives you a buzz and you want to keep coming back and everybody meets in the cafe and discusses what they're doing. and gives each other ideas. The one where I actually want to write a book is the Gladstone Library in Harden in North Wales, about, what, seven miles from Chester, where you can actually stay there.
And you can hire a room, and they give discounts to members of the Society of Authors, to students, and to clergy. And it's got all Gladstone's books, 33,000 of them he had, and he read 23,000. And why do they know he read 23,000?
because there are his notes in 23,000. If you think about it, it's four books a day, and these are thick books, volumes of theology and classics and so on. You've got about half a minute, David, to tell me about your adventures in the archives. Obviously, I've got a particular desk. I get extremely annoyed. takes that. It's got a Wittgenstein relationship because the architect for the library was a Wittgensteinian who gave his house...
to the Wittgenstein Archive in Cambridge and he was a big fan of Wittgenstein who was an architect himself. So there you go. 30 seconds. Thank you very much because this is the point that I need to say shh. My thanks go in alphabetical order to Helen Castor, Michael Crick, David Edmonds, Roger Luckhurst and Kate Maltby. And to the producer Lisa Jenkinson and technical producer Duncan Hannant. Next week at nine, Shahid Abari will be sitting in...
this very chair, talking to you and me as well. So let's tune in and then we'll find out what she's going to say. Thanks for listening. You can find more from our archives and further information about the guests and topics discussed by looking up the Free Thinking programme on the BBC Radio 3 website. If we've whetted your appetite for more discussions about arts and ideas, you might...
be interested in other BBC podcasts. Start the week thinking aloud and in our time, or if you prefer talks, search out Radio 3's The Essay.