The Bluestocking, vol 92: Grievance studies and Ivo Van Hove's taste for blood
Happy Friday!
This week I wrote the introduction for a fantastic panel of women to talk about MeToo, one year on. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, because we managed to draw the link between famous actors and the casual labour market, which goes a long way to explain why a) women don't speak out; b) why it's so hard to get redress when they do. Several of the pieces touched on the idea of retribution, and due process, and that feels like the obvious place for the discussion to go next.
We are *terrible* at prosecuting complaints of sexual assault, because they so often come down to competing testimonies, which are intensive and expensive to unpick. And we are pretty bad at dealing with sexual harassment complaints; in the arts, the project-based nature of the work incentivises everyone just to keep their heads down and move on to the next thing. For the accused, though, that can backfire: there's little incentive to air dirty laundry in public, so people get fired (or not hired) without the complaints ever being tested - or sometimes, even fully explained. And that's important when there is such a gulf between the types of actions covered by the MeToo movement: the remedy might be anything from admitting fault and promising to amend your behaviour, right through to criminal prosecution.
I'm going on Front Row to talk about this next week, so if you do work in the arts and think there's a facet of this that's not getting the attention it deserves, drop me a line.
Also this week, I took Stephen to see David Hare's new play about the Labour party and then we fact-checked it on the podcast. At length.
Sorry for the theatre and feminism monomania (duomania?) - basically all I do at the moment is write about feminism and go to the theatre. People are doing such weird things there! Look at this. Maniac.
Helen
The Grievance Studies Hoax
It’s true that Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian tricked some journals into putting out made-up data, but this says nothing whatsoever about the fields they chose to target. One could have run this sting on almost any empirical discipline and returned the same result. We know from long experience that expert peer review offers close to no protection against outright data fraud, whether in the field of gender studies or cancer research, psychology or plant biology, crystallography or condensed matter physics. Even shoddy paste-up jobs with duplicated images and other slacker fakes have made their way to print and helped establish researchers’ careers. So what if these hoaxers did the same for fun? These examples haven’t hoodwinked anyone with sophistry or satire but with a simple fabrication of results.
Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian employed this made-up-data method for five of their 21 papers, and three of those were accepted for publication—yielding a hoax-success rate of 60 percent. When they wrote up papers without this added layer of deception, just four of 16 were accepted.
I planned to write something long about this, but Slate has done it so comprehensively I don't need to. I agree entirely with this piece, that what the hoaxers were doing was essentially unscientific. They've emphasised heavily the places where they were accepted, not where they were rejected. They have smoothed away the complexities of the peer review process; for example, I saw one researcher say that the data sets they claimed to have would have been interesting in themselves, absent any interpretation (they claimed to have watched hundreds of hours of dog owners interacting in a park). One peer reviewer said he tried to be kind in his comments (while rejecting the paper) because he was following the natural human impulse to soften criticism.
And I agree with the overarching thesis, which is that the hoaxers were engaged in a political project, and their evidence doesn't support their claim (which is that liberal academia is unsalvageably poisoned by identity politics). One of their data points is a terrible poem being accepted by a poetry journal.
Yes, there are big problems with peer review (it asks a lot of academics, often junior ones). And there are big problems with how academic journals function (some are predatory in terms of their pricing, knowing that researchers need to show publication to keep their jobs). And yes, sometimes dumbass papers get past the gatekeepers. But the scientific way to deal with that is to carefully document the problems, rather than weave more or less compelling examples into one single grand narrative about "grievance studies".
Ivo Van Hove: theatre laid bare
Van Hove’s Angel is a wingless male nurse in white hospital scrubs. There is no ceiling, no bed. The Angel quietly approaches as Prior Walter, who is suffering from aids, writhes on the stage floor. The grand words of annunciation with which Kushner’s play culminates—“Greetings Prophet; / The Great Work begins: / The Messenger has arrived”—are delivered by the Angel with conversational mildness....
Kushner says that one of van Hove’s gifts is to “make the audience confront the failure to create completely convincing illusions—and the power of the theatre is that failure to create convincing illusions. It is the creation of a double consciousness. Ivo’s impulse is to take that very seriously, and to ask the audience to collaborate in making this thing real.”
A couple of weeks ago, I went to see the new production of Antony & Cleopatra at the National Theatre, which got four and five-star reviews all over the place. The NS doesn't "do" star ratings (long story) but I think I would have given it maybe a three. It was . . . fine.
When I'm totally out of step with the critical consensus, I always want to know why, and this piece in The Stage by Matt Trueman has helped me to figure it out. (If you can't read it, then the key passage compares Ivo Van Hove's adaptation of A Little Life with the National's A&C. Whereas Ralph Fiennes's Anthony spend a full minute prodding a hidden blood bag with his dagger trying to get it to burst - and nearly driving me to hysterical giggles - the self-harming character in A Little Life slashed at an openly visible blood bag strapped to his arm. "Yet, each time he drew a razor blade across it, drawing a red slug of stage blood like a prospector hitting oil, I winced in my seat," writes Trueman.
That led me to this 2015 New Yorker profile of the super-fashionable Belgian theatre director Ivo Van Hove, in which Tony Kushner talks about him embracing the artificiality of theatre, and its metaphorical rather than literal qualities. For me, every successful novel, or film, or play, or installation should contain within it a convincing answer to the question: why this form, rather than any other? What can theatre do, that only theatre can do? One of the answers is: smash together realism and artificiality live in front of you.
It's why Katie Mitchell's La Maladie de la Mort - which features a couple of actors being filmed in a set built to look like a hotel room, with their actions projected onto a monitor above the stage - left me cold, along with the two other people I heard on the way out saying: "Why didn't she just make a film?" (Only one of them was Jonathan.) The mostly naked acting was interspersed with shots of waves crashing on a beach, and lots of chat about the inevitability of death, also leading me to concur with the critic on Saturday Review who said "it couldn't have been any more French if it was wearing a hat made of Camembert".
The profile is also worth reading for the bit where the incredibly fastidious Van Hove has to deal with a lorry load of sheep, which are terrible at acting and also incontinent. [insert own joke about least favourite actor here]
Guest gif: Goodbye from my tiny doppelganger.
See you next time!