Auden and the Infernal Sciences

Abstract

‘THOU SHALT NOT SIT / With statisticians nor commit / A social science’ (‘Under Which Lyre’, ll. 160-2).1 A striking injunction, made at Harvard to the future ruling classes of America, no less; but the lines have received next to no critical attention. Indeed, Auden’s increasing concerns about the social sciences following his move to America in 1939 have generally been lost to the more familiar themes of Auden criticism.2 In ‘Auden in America’, Nicholas Jenkins says:

for Auden, the future was being determined not by collective loyalties but by [the] supra-national impact of technology, hypostasised as ‘The Machine’, which had created a quite new historical complex, ‘The Machine Age’. This idea became an obsession in Auden’s early years in America.3

The moniker ‘machine age’ had been circulating for decades before the 1940s, but it misses the mark on what unsettled him most about technological civilisation.4 It has nonetheless remained a dominant rubric for understanding the later Auden. James Purdon’s Modernist Informatics, which explores issues central to Auden’s critique of the social sciences – cybernetics and mass data-collection – when discussing Auden, reverts to the tried ‘pylons’, ‘instantaneous communication’, and ‘electrical modernity’.5 But Auden’s main concern about technology went further than the restructuring of labour, communication, and even the countryside: it was the technological reconstitution of human being itself that charged his later poetry and prose.