Why the blank,
or conversely the horror
around recalling, telling
the 60s/early 70s?
Ulay 3/14/2015 (in the context of the performance ethos then): “Unless you have lived there it is difficult to imagine
because no one can articulate it.”
1950s A Nation of Artists [“Everyone an artist” – Beuys*]
Being (art) & Nothingness (business)
Growing Up Absurd
*The revolution has been accomplished.
(All argument/action for or towards it is thereby redundant.)
What did Marx Expect?
(Magic 8-Ball question)
“Sensibility” 1740s (Diderot, Locke, Rousseau)
Social Contract/ Nation State
Ergo
Bill of Rights (social change)
Gautama Buddha sees Suffering
No hope of social change
Do Not Try to Change the World You Will Only Make Matters Worse
(John Cage, but where’d he hear it?)
Liberal/ Liberality (extends “fellow feeling” throughout the social body)
Otherwise, the less than human (less human than us)
1960 “The Knowledge Industry accounts for 29% of the Gross National Product,” says Clark Kerr, UC Berkeley President.
Whereupon education becomes Service Industry with students/teachers in Client/Provider relation. 1968 = end of authoritative Socratic impart [imprarare], before which the hitch was Student = Raw Material” and Graduate (Dustin Hoffman) Product.
TEACH THE STUDENT TO “THINK CRITICALLY”
––they mean the artist should think like a critic, beside the work.
Art World has A.D.D. Poetry Readership, likewise.
Wordsworth’s Modernity: “the great and simple affections of our nature [blunted by] the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.”
All, including the Revolution, slanted to “save” the nation (and transnation) from the Left.
to David Carrier: A professor of French told me the other night that the main current in France now is analytic philosophy, that Foucault, Derrida and Lacan are all identified with German sensibility. As Connie and I just finished watching THE SORROW AND THE PITY I wondered if the French had in fact become more German in the occupation.
Secular Humanism is a humanist philosophy that upholds reason, ethics and justice, and specifically rejects the supernatural and the spiritual as the basis of moral reflection and decision-making. Like other types of humanism, secular humanism is a life stance focusing on the way human beings can lead good and happy lives.
The term “Secular Humanism” was coined in the 20th century to make a clear distinction from “religious humanism”. A related concept is “scientific humanism”, which biologist Edward O. Wilson claimed to be “the only worldview compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature.”––Wikipedia
NY Times, 1988: John Kenneth Galbraith in his book ”American Capitalism,” published in 1952: ”Liberalism will be identified with the buttressing of weak bargaining positions in the economy,” Mr. Galbraith wrote. ”Conservatism––and this may well be its proper function––will be identified with the protection of positions of original power.”
Re Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus, from Library Journal
Ferry uses the history of aesthetics to explain the origin and growth of modern philosophy. In the Middle Ages, art reflected a fixed order of values, based on divine authority. The onset of the Enlightenment in the 17th century dealt the medieval world view a fatal blow. Human beings attempted to establish an ethics of reason resting on autonomy, not submission to God. In aesthetics, subjective taste moved to the forefront; in politics, rational consensus was stressed. But a new movement arose in turn to challenge the aesthetics of reason. Twentieth-century artists emphasize individuality rather than autonomy; the artist need not be bound by the dictates of an allegedly universal reason. Here the influence of Nietzsche has been decisive. Ferry opposes the excesses of postmodernism and calls for a balance between rational standards and artistic freedom. His erudite work is especially valuable for its careful discussion of Kant and Hegel.
––David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
Can subjective, individual taste be reconciled with an objective, universal standard? In Homo Aestheticus, Luc Ferry argues that this central problem of aesthetic theory is fundamentally related to the political problem of democratic individualism.
Ferry’s treatise begins in the mid-1600s with the simultaneous invention of the notions of taste (the essence of art as subjective pleasure) and modern democracy (the idea of the State as a consensus among individuals). He explores the differences between subjectivity and individuality by examining aesthetic theory as developed first by Kant’s predecessors and then by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and proponents of the avant-garde. Ferry discerns two “moments” of the avant-garde aesthetic: the hyperindividualistic iconoclasm of creating something entirely new, and the hyperrealistic striving to achieve an extraordinary truth. The tension between these two, Ferry argues, preserves an essential element of the Enlightenment concern for reconciling the subjective and the objective—a problem that is at once aesthetic, ethical, and political.
Rejecting postmodern proposals for either a radical break with or return to tradition, Ferry embraces a postmodernism that recasts Enlightenment notions of value as a new intersubjectivity. His original analysis of the growth and decline of the twentieth-century avant-garde movement sheds new light on the connections between aesthetics, ethics, and political theory.
Dear Friends,
I’m trying to piece together the effects of the student uprisings of 1968 on education, and of course by extension on culture, generally.
Can you recommend any good text on this?
My intuition is that along with the easily recognized and laudable “revolutionary” changes in curriculum––woman’s studies, ethnic studies, revisionist histories, etc.––the whole shebang altered in the process, including both student-teacher and administration-faculty relationships, and that somehow, in this bargain, education as a business became, appropriate to the Age, a Service Industry with Student-Client and Faculty-Provider operating skittishly at the mercy of corporate (from Trustees & Senior Administration on down) management.
I know that many people see all administrative power (from White House to How or If Jane Reads) geared to prevent anything like 1968 happening again.
Another aspect here is the End of the Dream (or pretense) of Universal Literacy (which of course is one way to prevent any duly considered uprising or even resistance to Power). I’ve been reading up on French history of the period 1830-1877 and find, one for thing, that suppression or anyhow severe control of general education was considered a pressing issue for governance post-1848.
Well, even if I have all this wrong or assbackwards, I’d very much appreciate any guidance you can supply.
Best, as ever,
BB
Dear Bill,
I’d love to talk about this. I am a dyed in the wool “68er”––France in Mai and Chicago in the summer––though not the Days of Rage––and more thereafter. My sense is that very few people have figured it out, and many are reacting to and actively distorting it (Okwui for one, the whole Republican Party beyond that) in ways that are still central to the way the world works or doesn’t. I am not nostalgic––though I do remember the smell of tear gas in the morning––and in fact quite critical of how the Left veered off course in the years that followed, but it was a defining moment and it ain’t over.
More soon,
Rob
======
Dear David,
Maybe a little clarifying along historical lines will help.
My gist now is first, as ever, to understand, see how things work, and second, to see if there are indeed ways to do such “things” as politics better, even if only a little better. I am the kind of ironist of whom Auden said that for him the limitations of the situation loom larger than the situation itself. But as with most ironic temperaments, mine derives from deep idealism––“a small boy’s idea of doing good” (Bob Creeley at High Noon) going on Mr. Fixit.
I think for a while my idea of politics was Joan of Arc as played by Ingrid Bergman––when those glories burst through the clouds I too heard “my” voices tell me.
When I was a student, starting in high school, two books that fascinated me concurrently, and about which I wrote a series of compare-&-contrast papers right up til I dropped out of college, were Lord Acton’s high liberal FREEDOM AND POWER and Machiavelli’s how-to book THE PRINCE.
In my last year at Lawrenceville, the three-legged chair of my world (and self) view was made complete by Paul Goodman’s GROWING UP ABSURD.
But the “leg to stand on” came with poetry, so I moved to another table, keeping that old “impossible figure” chair in plain sight forever after, including now.
Allen’s “if only Kissinger would take LSD” just goes with my (quasi-innate, I suspect) sense that “really everybody knows better than this.” The child of upper middle class, perfectly comfortable in his liberalism, appeals first to good manners––Emily Post obviates Emma Goldman! Ah, if only they knew what they’re missing! . . . which is not Utopia but Practicality, but which obviously seems impractical to anyone who wants more than just a decent shake.
So we have to understand, without name calling, why Fascism is so attractive, why Russians cannot really conceive of other than axe-handle rule, how nations spread over more than say, 1000 miles in any direction won’t be whole, and how the notion of “human” “rights” has come into play and plays out absurdly in most minds.
All the above seems somewhat beyond my questions re “1968” but it’s this kind of delirium that led to my asking you what was it, what happened, and (admittedly, the corker) What Is To Be Done?
Love,
The King of New York
“A Nation of Artists”––Cloud Layer of 1945––over Reality US.
In the 30s to be an Artist was to make a social statement, and to be a Modern Artist
was to be a member of a significant and inherently suspect club.
After WWII, it was Being and Nothingness:
To be an artist was the only way to Be; the rest, business, was Nothingness.
Hence the population of artists grew––a cloud or mold over everything else.
This puts Beuys’ notion of “Everyone an Artist” in another light.
Post-1968 cuts
Prehistory
“Corporate liberalism is a social and economic arrangement that has predominated in the US since the early 1920s.” [Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, 1998] After the Depression CL “left the democratic political machinery intact while concentrating more real social power at the top of pyramidal institutional hierarchies.” Bureaucratic control insures “social cohesion.”
Belgrad: Office of Facts and Figures absorbed by Office of War Information in June 1942. OWI members Charles Olson, Harold Rosenberg, MacLeish, Cowley, Shahn, Ruth Benedict, Owen Lattimore, John Houseman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Domestic Branch headed by Gardiner (Mike) Cowles “a liberal Republcan from the Midwest” who brought in ad media men executives. (Cowles became publisher of Look and other magazines). Olson resigned in May 1944.
1950s
Existentialism (What Is Existentialism? William Barrett, 1947 + 1946 articles by Barrett,
…Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre in Partisan Review)
Barrett spoke at The Artists Club on Existentialism
Merleau Ponty The Phenomenology of Perception 1945; 1947 Auden The Age of Anxiety
Walter Kaufman & others promote Nietzsche in revised form as anti-Nazi
Frankfurt School synthesis of Marx and Freud in circulation
late 50s: KARL MARX early writings re ‘alienation’ first published in English
1946: Dwight MacDonald in PR “The Root Is Man” argues it is preferable “to be able to speak modest meaningful truths to a small audience than grandiose empty formulae to a big one . . . For the present time at least, as in arts and letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of political approach.” Similar to Paul Goodman’s argument for Occasional Poetry in 1951.
1954: end of McCarthyism (pro tem) / 1955––with merger of AFL/CIO, corruption by mob, and Taft-Hartley Act, labor lost power as ‘junior partner in corporate-liberal system” [Belgrad]
1956––Being and Nothingness in English
Lionel Trilling posits modernism as “adversary culture,” later expresses dismay that this has become a defining mode, the “orthodoxy of dissent” (akin to Harold Rosenberg’s “The Tradition of the New”)
1968: The Plaster Caster, a girl fan collective from Chicago, presents a plaster model of Jimi Hendrix’s erect penis.
1986-2015: Practically unnoticed:
1986: Jolie Solomon, Wall Street Journal (Apr. 21) “Working at Relaxation: In Spite of Unprecedented Affluence, Americans Labor to Find the Time for Leisure Pursuits”: “‘Time famine,’ as some sociologists call it, is an extraordinary paradox. Despite shorter workdays, the proliferation of labor-saving devices and unmatched financial resources, true leisure remains elusive.”
2004: Carol Kleiman Houston Chronicle (July 2) “Flexibility is cure for ‘time famine’”: “In the institute’s study, a new phrase is referred to what seems to reflect the condition of many working people: It’s ‘time famine.’ The research shows that ’67 percent of employed parents say they don’t have enough time with their husbands or wives—up from 50 percent in 1992—and 55 percent say they don’t have enough time for themselves.'”
Somewhere in-between, I understood that the situation was such that old friends would have lunch only if there was business to discuss.
2015: The Steve Jobs Synopsis
Steve Jobs, an entirely isolated personality,
designs a computer for maximum “connectivity.”
The device is not yours, he says, it is you.
This. in effect, ensures that users are similarly
isolated, albeit knocked silly with false connections.
The device and its effects combine to form a portrait,
a clone, as it were, of its inventor, Steve Jobs.
Ergo, Jobs is You.
From Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery
Winnicott on how psychology is taught: In the first stage, they learn what is being taught about psychoanalysis just as they learn other things. In the second stage the psychological teaching begins to separate out from the other as something that just can’t be learned. It has to be felt as real or else it is irritating, or even maddening.
1st stage = identification; the student becomes someone who knows these things. [For Winnicott] this would be called compliance; the child fits in with the teacher’s need to teach, and, by implication, with the culture’s demand that these are the things one learns, and this is the way one learns them.//In the second stage, something akin to . . . dreamwork . . . goes on. Each student, consciously and unconsciously, makes something of his own out of it all; finds the bits he can use, the bits that make personal sense.
Bill Berkson, 1990-2015