T H E 2 0 1 4 S Y M P O S I U M : POWER
Sam Warren-Miell (Year 12) reports on the Upper School’s annual opportunity to break through subject boundaries and wrestle with difficult ideas. This year, Jo Brand and Martin Rowson were among the range of speakers encouraging their audience to ‘speak truth to power’
W e tend to be mistrustful of those in positions of power, and wary of its abuse encroaching on our own freedoms: a whole day discussing the topic might run the risk of creating a kind of cumulative dispiriting effect. Speakers at the 2014 Symposium were therefore tasked with relating different ways of approaching power and identifying its agents and instruments. Indeed, when Dr Spence’s initial address introduced some of the themes that would be carried through the day, most significant was the importance of questioning power in society and those who hold it, of ‘speaking truth to power’ and even mocking the powerful outright. Since the story of those in power throughout history is so often a story of men, it was significant that a woman was chosen as this Symposium’s opening speaker. Indeed, much of Jo Brand’s talk centred on her experience as a woman in a male-dominated world. She spoke of going from Brunel University, where men outnumbered women eight to one, to the Maudsley, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse, and faced both the bureaucratic power of the NHS and the power wielded indiscriminately by the police, who on at least one occasion in her experience beat a mentally ill man so severely that he spat out his teeth on arrival at the hospital. When she entered the comedy circuit, it included a mere 20 women to around 250 men, she explained, and her career in comedy had enabled her to appreciate the importance of pushing boundaries and engaging with taboo subjects in order to challenge power structures in society. Brand finished by fielding questions on a host of topics spanning mental health diagnosis, Ed Miliband, Russell Brand, and feminism. The last was perhaps a dangerous topic to broach in a room of 450 teenage boys, but was nonetheless handled carefully and lucidly by a speaker who brought a strong female voice to a day that might have otherwise been dominated by men talking to men about men.
Our second speaker represented another approach to using language to challenge power. Chris McCabe’s poetry explores how closely entwined the personal and political can be in the modern world, and in his introduction to his work he stressed the importance of challenging the ‘received language’ spoken to us by politicians. The pieces he read covered events central to the 21st-century British experience – Tony Blair’s decision to enter the war in Iraq, the 7/7 bombings, and the recession – and tackled each in such a way that the personal was never lost in the service of any kind of didactic political message, with a vibrancy of language that captured the essence of both his own experience and the shared experience of the nation. Perhaps the most enlightening and invigorating presentation of the day was the Symposium’s closing talk by Martin Rowson, one of the world’s leading – and most ferocious – political cartoonists. In a style as cutting and blunt as the work he produces, Rowson addressed the Sixth Form on the history of the political cartoon and its role, to ‘rip aside the raiments of the rich and the powerful and show that they are the same pissing, shitting, stinking, bleeding bastards as the rest of us’. Rowson’s potted history of the form included images that have undoubtedly entered the public consciousness – Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane , Gillray’s The plumb-pudding in danger, Low’s bitter depiction of the Nazi-Soviet pact – while his own cartoons represented the distillation of those themes, applied mercilessly to the politicians of the past 30 years. To Rowson, the character assassination practised by political cartoonists has a kind of shamanistic, voodoo quality. He spoke of ‘stealing the soul’ of Alistair Campbell, when he drew him for a series of caricatures composed at The Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho, and let his audience in on some of the secrets of the craft, for example the ‘Mickey Mouse rule’, which dictates that any memorable character should be reducible to certain immediately recognisable traits – Rowson used the example of Tony
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