new formations no 44
MASS-OBSERVATION AS POETICS AND SCIENCE
Guest Editors: Nick Hubble, Margaretta Jolly and Laura Marcus
This special issue of new formations explores the history and the cultural politics of Mass-Observation, the movement, founded in 1937, which brought ethnographic fieldwork and observation to bear on everyday life in Britain. Contributors explore Mass-Observation as a project and experiment of modernity, and assess the legacies of its extraordinary archive. The issue also examines the work of Charles Madge, one of the founders of Mass-Observation, whose identity as both poet and sociologist was central not only to Mass-Observation but to the culture of the 1930s and beyond.
Also in this issue is an account of mass observation in a different context. In an illuminating account of Hong Kong cinema before and after re-unification, Karen Fang 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'.
Contents: and Contributors:
Laura Marcus Introduction: the Project of Mass-Observation
Dorothy Sheridan Charles Madge and the Mass-Observation Archive:
A Personal Note
Rod Mengham Bourgeois News: Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge
Tyrus Miller In the Blitz of Dreams: Mass-Observation and
the Historical Uses of Dream Reports
Steven Connor 'A Door Half Open to Surprise': Charles Madge's Imminences
Drew Milne Charles Madge: Political Perception and the Persistence
of Poetry
Nick Hubble Charles Madge and Mass-Observation are at Home: From
Anthropology to War, and After
Jeremy MacClancy Mass-Observation, Surrealism, Social Anthropology:
A Present-Day Assessment
Elizabeth Cowie Giving Voice to the Ordinary: Mass-Observation and
the Documentary Film
Margaretta Jolly Historical Entries: Mass-Observation Diarists 1937-2001
Karen Fang Arresting Cinema: Surveillance and the City-State in the
Representation of Hong Kong
Editorial
This special issue of New Formations has a dual focus. Firstly, it explores the history and the cultural politics of the Mass-Observation movement, the project of bringing ethnographic fieldwork and observation to bear on everyday life in Britain, which came into being in 1937. Secondly, it brings to centre stage the work and writing of Charles Madge, who founded Mass-Observation with the ethnographer Tom Harrisson and the poet, painter and film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Madge has to date been less prominent in the research and writing on Mass-Observation than Tom Harrisson, as Dorothy Sheridan, Head of Special Collections and Mass-Observation archivist at the University of Sussex, notes in her contribution to this issue. In exploring Charles Madge’s writings we intend both to open up the work of an important twentieth-century poet, and to assess the broader significance of poetry and poetics for the Mass-Observation movement. One of the most fascinating aspects of Mass-Observation is the ways in which it negotiated and sought to reshape disciplinary boundaries, and to bring together, as a founding letter-manifesto declares, the artist, the scientist and the mass. Yet the place of ‘poetry’ in the Mass-Observation project was also a contested issue, as a number of our contributors show. The significance of Mass-Observation as project and experiment was not that it reconciled the ‘two cultures’ – art and science - but that it put into play the possibility and the difficulty of their interrelationship, and, in so doing, raised conceptual questions that continue to resonate today.
Laura Marcus
about | current issue | editorial | archive | style guide
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
