Nathaniel Budzinski

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Send forth the best ye breed... Niall Ferguson departs London looking for adventure and whatever comes his way. Still from Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World, episode 1: “Why Britain?”, 2003, Channel 4

I remember one wet Sunday, in 1961, driving to Liverpool to see a new group called the Beatles give a concert for their fan club which we televised. For the first time in my life, I saw the industrialised north of England, the rows of terraced houses, fronting onto the cobbled roads, glistening in the rain. The sheer ghastliness of it all was overpowering, but on the roof of every house there was a television aerial. Antennae reaching for escape to another world. And heaven knows, why not?Tom Sloan – lecture given 11 December, 1969, published by the BBC as a pamphlet. Cited in Light Entertainment, pg. 10–11

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In the following I’m going to look at melancholy, escape and entertainment using Niall Ferguson’s

television series Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World [hereafter Empire] as a case study. First

I’ll describe the general gist of Empire. Then I’ll investigate Richard Dyer’s notion of light entertainment

as a way of further specifying this idea of melancholy and how it works in Empire. Then I’ll look at

Empire as an example of what Paul Gilroy has identified as a national nostalgia for the British empire,

or a collective state of melancholy for a dream of history, a prevalent ‘derealization of the past’1. I’ll

suggest that Empire is driven by a melancholia specifically relating to entertainment: boredom.

It’s important to note here that there are several ways of thinking about boredom, from Patricia

Meyer Spacks’s Boredom: The Literary History Of A State Of Mind where ‘The critical act derives from

a commitment to pay attention to a text. Boredom in all its manifestations implies failure of full attention,

as cause or effect of the feeling.’ and ‘[as] action and as product, writing resists boredom, constituting

itself by that resistance. In this sense all writing – at least since 1800 or so – is ‘about’ boredom, as all

physical construction is ‘about’ entropy [...] for reading too, in another sense, resists boredom.

Voluntarily picking up a book, we expect – indeed demand – to have our interest engaged’2 Elizabeth S.

Goodstein’s Experience Without Qualities: Boredom And Modernity is also a useful resource for

understanding boredom. In her book she investigates boredom as a symptom of modernisation and

‘mechanical time’ using the writings of Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Georg Simmel and many

others3. Particularly here her reiteration of a passage from Roland Barthes’s The Pleasures Of The Text

which proclaims ennui as being ‘ecstasy glimpsed from the banks of desire’4. But, for the purposes of

this essay, boredom is both a frustration with ‘a world in which work and the daily round are

characterised by drudgery, insistence and meaninglessness [...]’5 and (modifying what Meyer Spacks

notes about literature) – what entertainment resists, constituting itself by that resistance: entertainment

resists boredom and so, is about boredom.

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1 A. Robbins, The Inability to Mourn. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1975. 322 pp. Review in Psychoanalytic Review, 63: pp 319–320.

2 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History Of A State Of Mind (Chicago and London: University Of Chicago Press, 1995) pp. xii–1

3 Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities: Boredom And Modernity (Stanford, California: university of Stanford press, 1995). I would have loved to have fit in Benjamin’s notion of boredom from ‘The Storyteller’: ‘If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.’ [Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harold Zohn (London, Jonathan Cape, 1970) pg. 83] but that needs an essay to itself!

4 Experience Without Qualities pg. 2 (note that this is her own translation of that passage)

5 Richard Dyer, Light Entertainment (London: BFI Television Monograph, no date) pg. 10

Why Empire?

Empire is interesting for several reasons: Firstly, it’s exemplary of TV shows that occupy a hazy

area between education and entertainment – what’s been called ‘edutainment’. Also, it has an ambition

to essay on global issues and engage with power politics and history; especially engaging with a

traditional form of canonical history writing untouched by post modernism and post colonial critique.

But, despite its initial motivation to participate in grand historical narratives, Empire is foremost a work

of entertainment, indeed that is its core point. This goes for pretty much anything broadcast on

television currently (though this is no guarantee of the quality of that entertainment!). No matter how

complex the subject matter and how serious the program maker’s intentions in communicating those

complexities are, they must produce something which engages and holds the attention of an audience.

This remit to entertain applies not only to broadcasters but also to a wide range of professions from

teachers to lawyers, politicians; any work which demands the effective communication of ideas must

avoid boring their audience at all costs. Boring your audience is a terminal condition.

Although there is much suffering depicted in Empire, there is no boredom. It is all vital action

taking place in the important, exciting, grand narrative of history. It is certainly an escape from what

Richard Dyer calls ‘a world in which work and the daily round are characterised by drudgery, insistence

and meaninglessness [...]’6 This idea of the world, our reality, as a repetitive and empty experience for

most is one that I want to place in counterpoint to the exuberance and adventurism found in Empire.

That a depressed condition of hollowness and boredom is the invisible base level, a starting point to

desperately escape from7. Violence is its background and in the foreground is conquest, success and

existential fulfillment. In Empire boredom is escaped through cruelty and the blood and guts of colonial

adventurism. Also, as Empire occupies a grey area between education and entertainment and so isn’t

constrained by requirements of factual accuracy, its ‘aesthetic of escape’ is made all the more

convincing as fact8. It can elide uncomfortable issues, gloss over aspects that are deemed too complex

and create ‘blank spaces in individual autobiographies’ all in the name of entertainment.

Empire entertains

The six episodes of Empire were first broadcast in 2003 by the British broadcaster Channel 4. In

it, Ferguson traced out a story of the rise and fall of the British empire from its birth through to its

present legacy. The first episode of Empire, “Why Britain?”, opens with a grand shot of Ferguson on the

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6 Richard Dyer, Light Entertainment (London: BFI Television Monograph, no date) pg. 10

7 This horrible reality is an interesting and seductive idea worthy of investigation, but looking at the role of adventurism (particularly masculine) in empire and Ferguson’s show would be too detailed for the purposes of this essay. Though, Joseph Bristow has written an interesting book, Empire Boys: Adventures In A Man’s World (London: Routledge,1991) looking at the history of ‘Boys Own Adventures’ and their relationship with the British empire.

8 Light Entertainment, Dyer’s chapter ‘Aesthetics Of Escape’ outlines the formal and dramatic tools used by light entertainment in its efforts to escape the world.

prow of a sailing boat as it floats down the Thames, out under Tower Bridge and on towards the Isle Of

Dogs, moody grey clouds looming above. With the backing track of a stirring male choir softly chanting

over a drone as deep and expansive as the river, a well-measured RP-accented voice reads out from

the opening page of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart Of Darkness:

Voiceover: The old river rested unruffled, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.

With this ambience of a holy and inevitable destiny, Ferguson starts in:

Ferguson: When the novelist Joseph Conrad was writing those words, one power governed a quarter of the world's population and covered the same proportion of the earth's land surface. From the mouth of the Thames to the Bay Of Bengal it ruled the waves of all the world's oceans. The British empire was the biggest empire, ever.

Voiceover: What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth? The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

Ferguson: Thanks to the British empire, I have relatives in Toronto, Alberta, Philadelphia and Perth, Australia, and I even spent part of my childhood in Kenya. Nowadays, of course, the phrase British empire conjures up images of chaps with stiff upper lips and Pith helmets being waited on hand and foot by poor, exploited natives. At best, it's a rather corny old joke. At worst, it's something we should say a collective sorry for. The empire's sins tend to be better remembered than its achievements, yet traveling the world today you keep on encountering the living legacies of Britain's age of empire. It was British traders who united the world in a single capitalist economy while British migration changed the face of whole continents. Protestant Christianity spread from Clapham to Capetown, English became the world language, Western norms of law, order and government were exported too and parliamentary democracy became the yardstick by which all political systems are judged. These are the pillars of the modern world and if you like the modern world, you can't deny its debt to the British empire.9

Empire, 2003, episode 1: "Why Britain?", 0'00'00–0'02'22

Throughout the six episodes the charismatic and camera-friendly Ferguson employs a ‘pros and

cons’ approach in an attempt to give a balanced view on the effect and legacy of the British empire. He

asks what the benefits of empire were along with what the negative effects were. In the same way that

certain architectural practices are premised on clearing the ideological rubble of previous architects,

Ferguson’s Empire is an attempt to clear away what he perceives as the conceptual ruins of post-

colonial thought.10 At the same time as having a good number of fans (the Tory faction of the present

coalition government being one of them) Ferguson is not short of critics who, along with disputing

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9 Ferguson’s TV work and prose are littered with these type of odd, often nonsensical phrases: if, for instance, I don’t like the ‘modern world’ can I dismiss the global influence of Britain’s imperial legacy?

10 eg: Le Corbusier’s modernist program or Leon Krier’s classicism.

aspects of his methodology, accuse him of being an apologist of empire11. But this criticism doesn’t fully

describe what Ferguson does with his historiography. He doesn’t deny the violence, injustice and

racism of the British empire. In fact it’s the opposite. He piously relates the horrors in sombre tones.

Even though Ferguson points out the ‘cons’ of empire in a way that one, at first, reads as a protestation

against its horrors, the repetition throughout the six episodes normalises those horrors. From the first

episode, we begin with piracy and colonisation in the Caribbean, moving on to the fight for dominance

in India; then on to plantations in North America and the new world with the displacement and killing of

indigenous and Aboriginal peoples; ‘Christianity, commerce and civilisation’ in Africa; the Indian mutiny

of 1857 and the following massacres; slavery; world wide war, etc12. Empire insistently revisits the

‘blood and guts’ reality of war, domination and colonial enforcement but always in counterpoint with an

argument for the benefits of empire. So for every massacre of Amritsar, there’s a railway infrastructure,

for every genocide there’s a free market economy and so on. Here, this binary argument style

alongside the representation of suffering are not only part of the methodology and subject matter of

Empire, they are also mobilised as dramatic tools to engage viewers. And this is how Ferguson’s

Empire (and supposedly his ideal audience) accept violence as congenital with history and part and

parcel of the future. Here blood, guts and suffering are used to add dramatic excitement and suspense

to a story, but as this story is presented as factual and balanced – representing the world as it was and

is – one must assume that violence is an expected, and regrettably acceptable, routine in Ferguson’s

world view13.

Empire and Light Entertainment

Every society depends on categories which are somehow above all suspicion: people may not be able to define a given practice, but they know it when they see it. Entertainment is one such category [...] the most persistent paradox about the nature of entertainment: how can it be that entertainment simultaneously appeals to the spectator by reaffirming his values and provides the spectator with those very values? [Entertainment] satisfies us at the very same time that it is limiting our interests [...]Rick Altman's introduction to Richard Dyer's 'Entertainment And Utopia' in Genre: The Musical, pg 175

But it isn’t a vague Hegelian notion of war as the ‘motor of history’ which is the most important

dramatic device in Empire. What provides the narrative cohesion and potential seductiveness of

Ferguson’s message – what Empire uses to entertain, to appeal to its audience for understanding and

sympathy – is a dynamic between boredom and desire. Here, Richard Dyer’s pamphlet Light

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11 For information on Ferguson’s work as advisor to Conservative education secretary Michael Gove, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jul/09/television-war-games-niall-ferguson (accessed 23/02/2011); for an interesting critique of Ferguson’s application of ‘counterfactual’ history, see Martin Bunzl http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/109.3/bunzl.html (accessed 23/02/2011) Also on BBC Radio 4 Start The Week (12 June 2006), Eric Hobsbawm accuses Ferguson of being a ‘nostalgist for empire’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek_20060612.shtml

12 There’s a very concise breakdown of each episode on a Channel 4 microsite aimed at school children, here: http://www.channel4learning.com/support/programmenotes/micro/empire/index.html

13 Indeed, Ferguson was an outspoken supporter of the last Iraq war, amongst other British and American military operations.

Entertainment [hereafter LE] is a useful tool in understanding Empire as a work of entertainment and its

relationship to boredom. For Dyer, entertainment is an escape from reality, a reality which he

understands as generally disappointing, and that leisure and entertainment can be ‘seen as the

creation of meaning in a world in which work and the daily round are characterised by drudgery,

insistence and meaninglessness [...]’14 Though LE is about shows which fall under the ‘light

entertainment’ category (a term used by the BBC for their variety shows, comedy sketches, quiz panels

etc) I believe that applying Dyer’s ideas about ‘light entertainment’ to supposedly more sober, uplifting

‘heavy entertainment’ factual television shows is a valuable exercise15. It is certainly important to

recognise differences between shows such as X-Factor and Empire, but it is more important to

acknowledge their similarities, specifically their remit to entertain.

In LE Dyer outlines three tendencies of light entertainment programmes in the way that they treat

reality, or their ‘aesthetic of escape’: Obliteration, Contrast and Incorporation. According to Dyer,

Obliteration refuses to look at the meaningless world altogether, obliterating it totally from conciousness

and creating in its place ‘a world, which is totally other than the real world, a completely fabricated,

artificial, separate reality. This is in itself so fascinating, so entrancing that the real world slips from

consciousness.’16 (Dyer cites the extravagant musical productions of Florenz Ziegfeld and Busby

Berkeley alongside the BBCs The Black And White Minstrel Show). Contrast, on the other hand,

acknowledges the drudgery of reality but celebrates the communal nature of the moment of

entertainment. This, according to Dyer, is essentially a live mode which is at work in pub entertainment

and ‘the Northern clubs where jokes are often deliberately drawn from the real concerns of the

audience.’17 Dyer says that Contrast works ‘by harking back to highly traditional forms developed

supposedly before the advent of the mass media and commercial entertainment, a golden age of

community is asserted, where people still got together in the closeness of enjoyment (and the

enjoyment of closeness) against the alienation of the world.’18 Ultimately, it is a ‘packaged

togetherness.’19 Although Empire demonstrates the above tendencies, Dyer’s final mode has the most

relevance to it: Incorporation.

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14 Richard Dyer, Light Entertainment (London: BFI Television Monograph, no date) pg. 10

15 Especially as so much television programming has an educational remit: For instance the BBCs natural history unit is a prolific producer of documentaries which are sold around the world, not to mention a regular output of history themed series. In America, the History Channel is also a prolific producer of ‘edutainment’ of varying degrees of quality. Compared to producing series of Sci-Fi or procedural police dramas, the cost of these factual shows is generally low, but I think their impact is important as they purport to be factual and authoritative.

16 Light Entertainment pg. 23. Though, importantly Dyer goes on to say that ‘obliteration is, in fact, only a tendency, or principle, and not something that is ever wholly realised in entertainment, for its only true form would be total abstraction [...]’

17 LE, Pg 26

18 LE, pg 27 Dyer – who also wrote ‘In Defense Of Disco’ [in Gay Left Magazine, Issue 8, 1979] – must be also be making a jab at the pre-modernist tendencies of folk music tradition here.

19 LE, pg 29

Obliteration blots out the world and contrast asserts a community against it: incorporation tries to deny that the world is, after all, so bad. Incorporation takes elements of the real world (and ignores others) and so presents them as to assert these elements as positive qualities.LE, pg. 30

The balancing act in Ferguson’s show between the ‘pros and cons’ of empire, alongside the

normalisation of violence that takes place in it can be understood as an act of incorporation; instead of

asking ‘was the British empire really that bad?’ and going on to truthfully try and answer that question in

all of its complexities, Empire doesn’t ask anything, it only asserts its desire to say ‘look it wasn’t so bad

after all’. Along with reiterating a nostalgic dream of Britain, at the same time Empire provides a useful

excuse for further adventuring, where the only semblance of responsibility is an arrogant ‘collective

sorry’.

After Empire

Paul Gilroy’s schematic of a melancholic nostalgia for empire in his After Empire: Melancholia Or

Convivial Culture? is also a useful way of understanding the meaning of Empire. In it, Gilroy adapts the

work of German psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich to critique contemporary British

society’s relationship to their colonial past and contemporary multiculturalism. The Mitscherlich’s book,

The Inability To Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, diagnosed what seemed to be a collective

rejection of guilt by the German people immediately after the second World War 20. For the

Mitscherlichs, the German people (here generalised as a society of weak egos – infantile personalities

reliant on external assurance) were unable to truthfully come to terms with the horrors committed during

the Nazi regime:

After the idol [Hitler] has fallen, this weak ego again makes itself heard. It confesses to having succumbed to an overwhelming power; but, like a weak child, disclaims any responsibility for the mistaken educational practices of its elders. In spite of all their efforts at retrospective whitewash, the fact is that Hitler made it possible for Germans on a nationwide scale, with but few exceptions, to believe that their infantile fantasies of omnipotence could be realized. These fantasies were archaic drive-representations to which satisfaction had been promised. Giving up the quasi-primary process sense of security of a commonly shared ego-ideal involved considerable anxiety for a great part of the population. Bewilderment and disorientation reigned. [...] the response to this was an

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20 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability To Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, translated by Beverly Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975). Inability To Mourn was quite successful when it was first published in German in 1967, selling over 100‘000 hard back copies and remaining one of the top ten books in Germany for a year. Its interdisciplinary approach, mixing ‘social psychology, political theory, history, philosophy and to our understanding of some current socioeconomic-political world issues’ [Pollock, G.H. (1976) pg 303] proved popular at the time. More recently, there have been some interesting critiques of the Mitscherlich’s approach, eg: Tillman Moser’s ‘Inability to mourn. Does the diagnosis hold up against an evaluation? On psychological processing of the Holocaust in Germany’ in Psyche, (Stuttgart]1992 May;46(5):389–405. Here, Moser argues that the Mitscherlich’s ‘analytic-cum-therapeutic, political and pedagogical attitudes [...] was largely inappropriate to the task of identifying the actual psychic condition of the "generation of culprits" and of encouraging self-recognition and a disposition for change [and that] the "tragic paradox" that the people implicated in this crime require empathy if they are to genuinely break with the past.’ Also, coincidently, Alexander Mitscherlich was editor of the Psyche journal for a time.

attempt to reach back to uncompromised authorities and a withdrawal of affect from an immediate past discredited by defeat" Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability To Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior pg. 23

Gilroy takes this schema and applies it to Britain’s relationship with its colonial past:

[The Mitscherlichs] warn that melancholic reactions are prompted by ‘the loss of omnipotence’ and suggest that the racial and national fantasies that imperial and colonial power required were, like those of the Aryan master race, predominantly narcissistic. From this perspective, before the British people can adjust to the horrors of their own modern history and start to build a new national identity from the debris of their broken narcissism, they will have to learn to appreciate the brutalities of colonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit, to understand the damage it did to their political culture at home and abroad.Paul Gilroy, After Empire, pg 108

Though condemning, Gilroy’s is also a particularly optimistic idea; that Britain can escape the

melancholy created by the fantasies of empire, Churchillism, and ‘two world wars and one world cup’,

dispense with their narcissism and embrace a multiculture of convivial living. Certainly a far cry from

Ferguson’s ‘collective sorry’. The connections here with the message of Empire are obvious:

Ferguson’s work is an explicit celebration of a dream of Britain’s imperial past; a tunnel-vision-

worldview powered by ‘infantile fantasies of omnipotence’ in the face of a complex, fractured and

disappointing reality.

Empire Of Boredom

Empire insistently revisits the ‘blood and guts’ reality of war, domination and colonial enforcement but

always in counterpoint with an argument for the benefits of empire, all couched in the assurance that

this is about a real, important history. Although it appeals to nationalistic dreams of British empire and

therefore an implicit racism and violence, the idea that is at work in Ferguson’s Empire is one that is

even more brutal than nostalgia for an unreal time. I think specifying the Mitscherlich’s and Gilroy’s

ideas about melancholy in terms of entertainment would get somewhere close to the core driving force,

or desire, of Empire. By thinking about Empire as fundamentally reacting to Dyer’s baseline reality

‘characterised by drudgery, insistence and meaninglessness’21 it’s possible to imagine the agency at

work there, namely a desire to escape boredom no matter the consequences. This frustration with

boredom and an entailing desperation for escape comprehensively dispenses with any possibility of

conviviality and responsibility towards community and locality. In essence, Empire not only contains a

dream of empire which is retrospective, it also contains a dream of adventurism – the spirit of empire –

that moves forward as part of an insistent notion of history as violence •

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21 LE, pg. 10

Ferguson: The recent clash between America and Islamic fundamentalism also has its parallels in the past. There's a striking resemblance between the Mujahideen in the 1880s and Osama Bin Laden today. [...] Just as in the 19th century, the opponents of empire today are cultural conservatives fighting the forces of globalisation. And just as in the past, by globalisation we really mean Anglobalisation: and integrated economy under English speaking leadership [...]

Voiceover: Take up the White Man's Burden, send forth the best ye breed/go bind your sons in exile to serve your captive's need/Take up the White Man's Burden, and reap his own reward, the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard.

Ferguson: Just as Kipling urged, the Americans have taken on a kind of global burden, fighting the War On Terrorism, preaching the gospel of freedom. But the empire that rules the world today is an empire that dares not speak its name: the American empire is both more and less than its British predecessor, a vaster motherland but somehow in denial about its imperial mission [...] The technology of overseas rule may have changed, the dreadnoughts given way to F-15s, but empire is as much a reality today as it was throughout the three hundred years when Britain ruled, and made, the modern world." 0'48'00–0'50'00 Empire, episode 6: "Empire For Sale"

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