tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post5205099073104148572..comments2024-03-27T18:45:16.950-07:00Comments on Fickle Ears: Reports of My Demise (xi) Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-65386262485260312652023-07-08T14:18:11.559-07:002023-07-08T14:18:11.559-07:00Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[169] &q...Ernest Becker<br /><i>The Denial of Death</i><br />(1973)<br /><br />[169] <i>"The great lesson of Rank's depreciation of sexuality was not that he played down physical love and sensuality, but that he saw—like Augustine and Kierkegaard—that man cannot fashion an absolute from within his condition, that cosmic heroism must transcend human relationships.<br /><br />"...people need a "beyond," but they reach for the nearest one; this gives them the fulfillment they need but at the same time limits and enslaves them. ...<br /><br /></i>[170]<i> "Most people play it safe:... they accept the cultural definition of heroism... Most people live this way, and I am hardly implying that there is anything false or unheroic about the standard cultural solution... It represents both the truth and the tragedy of man's condition:...<br /><br />"Women are particularly caught up in this dilemma, that the now surging "feminine liberation movement" has not yet conceptualized. Rank understood it, both in its necessary aspect and in its constrictive one. The woman, as a source of new life, a part of nature, can find it easy to willingly submit herself to the procreative role in marriage, as a natural fulfillment of the Agape motive. At the same time, however, it becomes self-negating or masochistic when she sacrifices her individual personality and gifts by making the man and his achievements into her immortality-symbol. The Agape surrender is natural and represents a liberating self-fulfillment; but the reflexive internalization of the male's life role is a surrender to one's own weakness, a blurring of the necessary Eros motive of one's own identity. The reason that women are having such trouble disentangling the problems of their social and female roles from that of their distinctive individualities is that these things are intricately confused. The line between natural self-surrender, in wanting to be a part of something larger, and masochistic or self-negating surrender is thin indeed, as Rank saw. The problem is further complicated by something that women—like everyone else—are loathe to admit: their own natural inability to stand alone in freedom. This is why almost everyone consents to earn his immortality in the popular ways mapped out by societies everywhere, in the beyonds of others and not their own."</i><br /><br />(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/beckerthe-denial-of-death-iv.html" rel="nofollow">more</a>)Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-22232888257674407572023-01-11T15:52:26.488-08:002023-01-11T15:52:26.488-08:00Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)
[121] "...Paul Goodman<br /><i><a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/paul-goodman/1960/growing-up-absurd/index.html" rel="nofollow">Growing Up Absurd</a></i><br />(1960)<br /><br />[121] <i>"These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as follows: "My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] children." On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condition...is now regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see that it <i>is</i> a hard goal to achieve against the modern obstacles. ...<br /><br />"But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal... How is it that it is the same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race? Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not really achieving it. ... It is</i><br />[122]<br /><i>not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who does not feel justified in his work and independent in the world. ...<br /><br />"It is advantageous to the smooth functioning of the organized system if its personnel are married and have home responsibilities. (E.g., it's much harder for them to act up and quit.) But the smooth functioning of the organized system may not be advantageous to the quality of the marriage and fatherhood."</i>Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-67858289811866096252022-06-24T08:27:31.915-07:002022-06-24T08:27:31.915-07:00Steve Golin
The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Stri...Steve Golin<br /><i>The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913</i><br />(1988)<br /><br /><i>"Sanger had been swept away and transformed by the Lawrence strike, but her experience of Paterson was very different. "I was thoroughly despondent after the Paterson debacle, and had a sickening feeling that there was to be no end; it seemed to me the whole question of strikes for higher wages was based on man's economic need of supporting his family, and that this was a shallow principle upon which to found a new civilization.""</i><br />(p. 230)Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-54609641927904717922021-12-14T11:15:29.663-08:002021-12-14T11:15:29.663-08:00Bob Thomas
Building a Company (1998)
"Gunnar...Bob Thomas<br /><i>Building a Company</i> (1998)<br /><br /><i>"Gunnar Mansson, who rose from Stockholm manager to [Entertainment Franchise] head in all of Scandinavia, was a constant concern for Roy [Disney]. A handsome Swede and expert skier, Mansson clung to his bachelorhood. He recalls, "Every time Roy saw me, he said, 'Are you married yet?' He was always disappointed when I said no. 'We don't like that,' he said. 'We run a family business, and we like our managers to have families.' He added with a smile, 'Then we can keep them under our thumb.'"</i><br />(Ch. 21, p. 212)<br /><br />Here is a Captain of Industry with little formal education articulating in layman's terms the nexus of Managerial Culture, Image Mongering, Family Values, and Social Control. The overeducated, few of whom know this nexus firsthand, have spent decades reverse engineering it from a safe distance and subsequently dressing up their conclusions in all manner of flowery verbiage. Undoubtedly most of us so inclined would freely acknowledge that such observations have more power coming from the horse's mouth; but of course part of the game is not to talk about it quite so candidly as Roy does here.<br /><br />There is, furthermore, a reminder here that patriarchy per se consists in prevailing norms and relationships between and among men as well as it does between men and women; that "male privilege" in its purest form is, while very real, also quite scarce, enjoyed only by the biggest ape in the colony, by the exceedingly few men who are essentially accountable only to themselves.<br /><br />Bachelorhood, then, is quite the multi-dimensional threat to those executives who prefer managers they can keep <i>"under our thumb"</i> precisely because the bachelor is less leveraged, less accountable, than the sole-earner of a nuclear family. Worse yet for the Captains, living simply and buying/using only what one needs is, if you will, the new economic bachelorhood, seeing that it similarly elides accountability to the consumerist mainstream and the fantasy of endless economic growth as well as putting into living practice the Debordian assertion that first-world consumerism has "overshot the target" vis-a-vis quality of life.<br /><br />[Looks like this was logged and written years ago but got lost on the way to press. It has been touched up as of this posting.]Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-77136326130758041992021-12-14T10:59:37.051-08:002021-12-14T10:59:37.051-08:00Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations (1973)
Ch. ...Christopher Lasch<br /><i>The World of Nations</i> (1973)<br />Ch. III, "Divorce and the "Decline of the Family""<br /><br /><i>"There are good reasons to think that the decisive change in the character of the family occurred not at the beginning of the twentieth century but at the end of the end of the eighteenth, and that the Victorian family, therefore, which we imagine as the anithesis of our own, should be seen instead as the beginning of something new—the prototype, in many ways, of the modern household."</i><br />(p. 37)<br /><br /><i>"The family by its very nature is a means of raising children, but this fact should not blind us to the important change that occurred when child rearing ceased to be simply one of many activities and became the central concern—one is tempted to say the central obsession—of family life. This development had to wait for the recognition of the child as a distinctive kind of person, more impressionable and hence more vulnerable than adults, to be treated in a special manner befitting his peculiar requirements. Again, we take these things for granted and find it hard to imagine anything else. Earlier, children had been clothed, fed, spoken to, and educated as little adults; more specifically, as servants, the difference between childhood and servitude having been remarkably obscure throughout much of Western history (and servitude retaining, until fairly recently, an honorific character which it subsequently lost). It was only in the seventeenth century in certain classes—and in society as a whole, only in the nineteenth century—that childhood came to be seen as a special category of experience. When that happened, people recognized the enormous formative influence of family life, and the family became above all an agency for building character, for consciously and deliberately forming the child from birth to adulthood."</i><br />(pp. 37-38)Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-33818163095298843752018-06-08T19:49:22.365-07:002018-06-08T19:49:22.365-07:00”I began to realize why people believe the legend ...<i>”I began to realize why people believe the legend that Hollywood corrupts writers,” wrote Dalton Trumbo, himself a screenwriter. “But they’re quite wrong. All Hollywood does is give them enough money so that they can get married and have kids like normal people. But it’s getting married and having kids that really corrupts them.”</i><br /><br />Neal Gabler, "An Empire of Their Own." Ch. 3, p. 111.Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com