Sennett—The Craftsman (ii)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

[34] The evidence of demoralized Russian workers that my wife and I encountered in the Moscow suburbs can be found closer to home. When I returned from this final trip to the empire, I began studying the demioergoi of the new American economy: middle-level workers whose skills should have earned them a secure place in the "new economy" in formation since the 1990s. ...

The world that their fathers and grandfathers knew was in a way protected from the rigors of competition . Skilled middle-class workers found a place, in twentieth-century corporations, in relatively stable bureaucracies that moved employees along a career path from young adulthood to retirement. The forebears of the people we interviewed worked hard for their achievements; they knew fairly well what would happen to them if they didn't.

It's no longer news that this middle-class world has cracked. The corporate system that once organized careers is now a maze of fragmented jobs. In principle, many new economy firms subscribe to the doctrines of teamwork and cooperation, but unlike the actual practices of Nokia and Motorola, these principles are often a charade. ...

[36]

Still, the trials of the craftsmen of the new economy are a caution against triumphalism. The growth of the new economy has driven many of these workers in America and Britain inside themselves. Those firms that show little loyalty to their employees elicit little commitment in return —Internet companies that ran into trouble in the early 2000s learned a bitter lesson, their employees jumping ship rather than making efforts to help the imperiled companies survive. Skeptical of institutions, new economy workers have lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago; although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished "social capital," in his celebrated book Bowling Alone, as the result of television culture and the consumerist ethic ; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to people's experiences at work .

If the work people do in new economy jobs is skilled and high pressure, requiring long hours, still it is dissociated labor: we found few among the technicians who believed that they would be rewarded for doing a good job for its own sake. The modern craftsman may hew inside him-or herself to this ideal, but given the structuring of rewards, that effort will be invisible.

Caillois—MPG (v)

Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
Man, Play and Games (1961)

---

[81]

CHAPTER VII

Simulation and Vertigo

The persistence of games is remarkable. Empires and institutions may disappear, but games survive with the same rules and sometimes even the same paraphernalia. The chief reason is that they are not important and possess the permanence of the insignficant . Herein lies a major mystery. For in order to benefit from this kind of fluid and yet obstinate continuity, they must be like the leaves on the trees which survive from one season to the next and remain identical. ... However, games do not have this hereditary sameness. They are innumerable and changeable. ... Their diffusion does not remain determinate for very long. It is noteworthy that playing with dolls and flying kites, decidely Occidental, were unknown in Europe until the

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eighteenth century. Other games have been prevalent all over the world in one form or another since ancient times. They provide proof of the constancy of human nature on certain levels.

...

1. The Interdependence of Games and Culture

Stability and universality are complementary. They seem all the more significant since games are largely dependent upon the cultures in which they are practiced. ... In India, chess was played with four kings. The game spread to medieval Europe. Under the dual influence of the cults of the Virgin and of courtly love, one of the kings was changed to a queen or lady which became the most powerful piece, while the king was limited to the quasi-passive role of figurehead in the game. However, it is important that these vicissitudes have not affected the essential continuity...

...

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...

It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there. In fact, if games are cultural factors and images, it follows that to a certain degree a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games. ... They cause certain kinds of reactions to be anticipated, and as a consequence the opposite reactions come to be regarded as brutal, snide, subversive, or disloyal. The contrast with games preferred by neighboring peoples does not provide the surest method of determining the origins of psychological incompatibility, but it can provide impressive illustrations, after the fact.

Postmodernity presents a challenge to these speculations, if not merely in showing intra-cultural fragmentation to be possible. And if we're really banking on a transhistorical human nature , then what this means is that fragmentation was always possible before, latently, but it wasn't realized. And so, paradoxically, the "human nature" line leads to the supreme culturalist/environmentalist conclusion: the seeming homogeneity of gaming within cultures and any after the fact support this might furnish for various evaluations of those cultures, really this just suggests that the broader circumstances favored uniformity over plurality; and so in any more plural outcome the generalizations on which such "after the fact" thinking might be based are necessarily more tenuous.

To take an example, it is not without significance that the Anglo-Saxon sport, par excellence, is golf, a game in which a player at any time has the opportunity to cheat at will, but in which the game loses all interest from that point on. It should not be surprising that this may be correlated with the attitude of the taxpayer to the treasury and the citizen to the state.

In this game of cultural correlation, the par excellence is a massive tell. What is the basis for adducing golf as unusually representative? Popularity? Diffusion? A long and stable history? Or is it merely golf's fitness for making this type of comparison to a broader cultural trait which we have already decided, without any appeal whatsoever to games, is a significant cultural trait?

No less instructive an illustration is provided by the Argentine card game of truco in which the whole emphasis is upon guile and even trickery, but trickery that is codified, regulated and obligatory. ...

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...

Together with music , calligraphy, and painting, the Chinese place the games of checkers and chess among the five arts that a scholar must practice . They feel that both these games train the mind to find pleasure in multiple responses, combinations, and surprises that continuously give rise to new situations. Aggressiveness is thus inhibited while the mind finds tranquility, harmony, and joy in contemplating the possibilities. This is without doubt a civilizational trait.

Sobeit declared. But surely these Chinese and their five arts produced at least one Marshall McLuhan.

However, it is clear that such diagnoses are infinitely precarious. Those that seem most obvious must be qualified drastically because of other facts. It is also generally the case that the multiplicity and variety of games simultaneously in favor in a particular culture is very significant.

Yes. Anything else?

And finally, games happen to provide a nonmaterial reward, the pleasant and imaginative result of the illicit tendency disapproved and condemned by law and public opinion. By contrast to wire marionettes, fairylike and graceful, guignols usually reincarnate (as already observed by

[85]

Hirn) ugly and cynical types, inclined to be grotesque and immoral, if not even sacrilegious. The traditional story of Punch and Judy is an example. ... It would surely be a mistake to view this systematic caricature as an ideal reflection of the British audience that applauds these exploits. It does not approve them at all, but its boisterous pleasure provides a catharsis. To acclaim the wicked and triumphant puppet is cheap compensation for the thousands of moral constraints and taboos imposed upon the audience in real life.

And, it must be added, at that point we have pretty much closed the book on the study of Play and Games and moved on to more properly literary territory.

... It may be presumed that the principles which regulate games and permit them to be classified must make their influence felt outside of the domain of play, defined as separate, regulated, and imaginary.

... Just as games are universal, but are not played the same way or to the same extent everywhere—in one place baseball is played more and chess in another—

The previous acknowledgment of multiplicity and variety is already a distant memory.

it is appropriate to inquire whether the principles of play (agôn, alea, mimicry, ilinx), outside of games, are not also inequally diffused through different societies. ...

...

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... The question is not one of discovering that every society has members who are ambitious, fatalistic, simulate others, or are enfrenzied, and that each society offers unequal chances of success or satisfaction to these types. This is already known. The question is to determine the role played by competition, chance, mimicry, or hysteria in various societies.

...

In societies conventionally called primitive as against those described as complex or advanced, there are obvious contrasts that in the latter are not exhausted by the evolution of science, technology, industry, the role of administration, jurisprudence, or archives, theoretical and applied mathematics, the myriad consequences of urbanization and imperialism, and many others with consequences no less formidable or revocable. It is plausible to believe that between these two kinds of society there is a fundamental antagonism of another order, which may be at the

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root of all the others, recapitulating, supporting, and explaining them.

Again, the "paradox" alluded to above: by insisting upon a "human nature" underlying all of this, such drastic and persistent antagonisms among societies become more and not less difficult to account for.

My feeling is there must be some human nature, on one hand, and some margin for adapability on the other; the challenge is in locating the boundaries, not necessaily in saying whether each exists. And if we can't locate the boundaries, it's hard to say much of anything further. In this case, though, we can say that the author has talked a bit out of both sides of his mouth.

I shall describe this antagonism in the following manner: Some primitive societies, which I prefer to call "Dionysian," be they Australian, American, or African, are societies ruled equally by masks and possession, i.e. by mimicry and ilinx. Conversely, the Incas, Assyrians, Chinese, or Romans are orderly societies with offices, careers, codes, and ready-reckoners, with fixed and hierarchical privileges in which agôn and alea, i.e. merit and hereditary, seem to be the chief complementary elements of the game of living. In contrast to the primitive societies, these are "rational." In the first type there are simulation and vertigo or pantomime and ecstasy which assure the intensity and, as a consequence, the cohesion of social life. In the second type, the social nexus consists of compromise, of an implied reckoning between hereditary, which is a kind of chance, and capacity, which presupposes evaluation and competition.

2. Mask and Trance

...the general use of masks in primitive society. An extreme and even a religious importance is attached everywhere to these instruments for metamorphosis. They emerge in festivals—an interregnum of vertigo, effervescence, and fluidity in which everything that symbolizes order in the universe is temporarily abolished so that it can later re-emerge. ... The eruption of phantoms and strange powers terrifies and captivates the individual. He temporarily reincarnates, mimics, and identifies with these fright-

[88]

ful powers and soon, maddened and delirious, really believes that he is the god as whom he disguised himself,... The situation has now become reversed. It is he who inspires fear through his possessing this terrible and inhuman power. It was sufficient for him merely to put on the mask that he himself made,...

...

...

They conform... , as do the performers themselves, because they believe that the actors have become transformed, possessed, and prey to the powers animating them. ...the performers must evoke and excite them, must push their selves to the final debacle that permits the rare intrusion. To this end they employ thousands of artifices, any one of which may be suspect—...

[89]

The festival... is climaxed by shared vertigo. It seems to be the ultimate basis for a society not too stable in other respects. It reinforces a fragile coherence,... ...daily preoccupations have hardly any repercussions upon a rudimentary association in which the division of labor is very slight, and as a consequence each family is expected to provide for its own subsistence. Masks are the true social bond.

A novel thesis. It is not new to postindustrial culture that the true social bond would be in play rather than work. Rather, all that is new is certain forms of play, and perhaps the fact that some of us work less and play more.

...

[94]

...

One keeps returning to the general problem posed by the

[95]

wearing of masks. It is also associated with the experiences of possession and of communion with ancestors, spirits, and gods. ... No doubt the wearer of the mask is not deceived at the beginning, but he rapidly yields to the intoxication that seizes him. ... Georges Buraud writes: "The individual no longer knows himself. A monstrous shriek rises out of his throat, a cry of beast or god, a superhuman noise, a pure emanation of the force of combat, the passion of procreation, the unlimited magic powers by which he believes himself to be, and is momentarily possessed." ...

It is not merely vertigo, born of blind, uninhibited, and purposeless sharing of cosmic powers or of a dazzling epiphany of bestial divinities soon to return to the shadow world. It is also a simple intoxication with the permeation of terror and anxiety. Above all, these apparitions from the beyond are the forerunner of government. The mask has now become institutionalized. Among the Dogon, for example, a culture that continuously resorts to masks, it has been observed how all of the public life of the group is impregnated with them. It is at the initiation rites of the male societies with their special masks that the basis for collective life and the crude beginnings of political power may be found. The mask is an instrument of secret societies. While disguising the identity of their members, it serves to inspire terror in the laity.

Initiation, the passage rite of puberty, frequently consists of revealing the purely human nature of the mask wearers to the

[96]

novices. From this viewpoint, initiation is an atheistic, agnostic, or negative teaching. It exposes a deception and makes one a party to it. Until then, adolescents were terrorized by masked apparitions. ...

... The threatening and brutal actions of the initiates serve to reinforce the superstitious terror of their victims. In this way, the vertiginous combination of simulation and trance is sometimes deliberately transformed into a mixture of deceit and intimidation. It is at this point that a particular kind of political power emerges.

These associations have varied goals. As may be the case, they specialize in the celebration of a magic rite, dance, or mystery, but they are charged with the repression of adultery, larceny,

[97]

black magic, and poisoning. ... The masked bands thus keep order in society in a way in which vertigo and simulation or their close derivatives, terrifying mimicry and superstitious fear, again emerge, not as fortuitous elements in primitive culture, but as truly basic factors . It should be understood that mask and panic are present in association, inextricably interwoven and occupying a central place,...

... Whether it be cause or effect, each time that an advanced culture succeeds in emerging from the chaotic original, a palpable repression of the powers of vertigo and simulation is verified. They lose their traditional dominance, are pushed to the periphery of public life, reduced to roles that become more and more modern and intermittent, if not clandestine and guilty, or are relegated to the limited and regulated domain of games and fiction where they afford men the same eternal satisfactions, but in sublimated form,...

Rank—Art and Artist (i)The Autonomy of the Spiritual

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

...

[xiii] the human urge to create does not find expression in works of art alone; it also produces religion and mythology and the social institutions corresponding to these. In a word, it produces the whole culture of which the works of art in a particular style-epoch have to be regarded as one of the expression-forms. We shall therefore avoid, as far as may be, the attempt to "explain" completely any one of these expression-forms in terms of another one, and shall rather consider all the expression-forms of human culture, however various, first in relation to their origins in the creative impulse, and thereafter in respect of their reciprocal action.

Here is one good reason to treat The Arts as a unit: despite their technical diversity, they share a common psychological origin in the human urge to create .

In the direction of transmission this is origin marks a point of "divergence" beyond which discipline-specific factors are operable.

In the direction of reception it is a point of "convergence" beyond which diverse artworks (and who knows what other cultural artifacts; e.g. religion , mythology , social institutions ) can be grouped together.

Garry Chick—Games and Their Rhetorics

Garry Chick
"Games and Their Rhetorics: An Idiosyncratic Appreciation of The Contributions of Brian Sutton-Smith"
(2015)

[13] In a 1964 study, Sutton-Smith and Roberts showed that 8 to 12 year old children were able to attribute playing style-like characteristics to others. They created a categorization of players wherein those who “act (a) like players in games of chance and try to succeed by relying on luck, i.e., are fortunists; (b) like players in games of physical skill who try to succeed by applying physical power, i.e., are potents; or (c) like players in games of strategy who try to succeed by making wise decisions, i.e., are strategists” (15). Children who either lacked followers or gave up in the face of difficulties were regarded as failures. In addition to the children’s sociometric ratings of others, teachers rated the children in terms of their success in the classroom and on the playground. Sutton-Smith and Roberts (1964) found that 76% of the children named as classroom successes were in the top quarter of the distribution of strategists as perceived by other children. Fifty per cent indicated by teachers as successful on the playground were in the top quarter attributed as being potents. Fifty-nine strategists, but only four potents were regarded as classroom successes by teachers while 34 potents, but only 17 strategists, were classified as playground successes. Teachers classified 65% of the children regarded by their peers as either fortunists or failures as failures either in the classroom or on the playground. Sutton-Smith and Roberts (1964) extended their study by further examining the children who were in the top quarters of the distributions in each of the categories. As some children were in the top quarters of more than one category, Sutton-Smith and Roberts created the additional categories of potent-strategists, potent-fortunists, and fortunist-failures. They reported:

Our results show that boys make distinctions among children who succeed by strategy, children who succeed by power, and children who succeed by using a combination of these two types. Boys do not, however, appear to distinguish clearly between children who succeed by good fortune and those who simply fail. To succeed by luck is apparently tantamount to failure.

[14]

Girls, on the other hand, distinguish between children who succeed by fortune and those who simply fail. The largest difference between the two groups is to be found in the girls’ game preferences in which the fortunist-failures are not unlike the success groups in their responses, whereas the pure failure group is atypical and immature. The distinction made by girls between potent-strategists, strategists, and potent [sic] seems not to be a distinction in type as it is with boys so much as a distinction in degree. Potent-strategists have most of the desirable characteristics, strategists somewhat less, and potents even less; but all three groups are superior to fortunists and failures. (31)

Sutton-Smith and Roberts (1964) concluded that children can consistently place each other into categories based on games and that boys, in particular, play games that are analogous to their success styles. Girls tend not distinguish among success styles but do so among failure groups.

p. 16 subject heading:

Games as Ambiguous Agents of Socialization

My note says:
emphasizes that coaches can usurp decision making and encourage bending the rules...but it seems fair to speculate that the games themselves (more specifically, perhaps, the stakes) could have the same effect.

Now:
Lasch, in his chapter on sport, makes reference (pregnant reference I would say, especially if you are both a sports fan and a musician) to a certain irreducable "autonomy of cultural traditions," and he quotes approvingly an ex-pro athlete who holds that "Money" in pro sports "has nothing to do with capitalism." For Lasch, this stands as a "Reject[ion of] the simple-minded radicalism according to which "commercialization" has corrupted sports."

Neither Lasch nor his source, evidently, foresaw the latter career of LeBron James, e.g., wherein the "corrupt[ion]" of sport by "commercialization" can in fact be noncontroversially pinned to quite specific statements and actions. Hence the managerial turn remarked upon above, while it certainly is in evidence in the NBA, is superfluous to the diagnosis of "corruption;" a strong word no doubt, but the only accurate word for a sport where the top points-per-game scorers, per Ryen Russillo (7 June, 2022, ca. 3:35), on average play no more than 60 of 82 regular season games, and often many fewer than that. Per Russillo, in the last five years the number of missed games among the top 25 ppg scorers has gone from 6 to 23 (of 82). He points out that this past season many legitimate injuries contributed to the spike, but ultimately concludes that, "Until the money [i.e. esp. from live television rights] is screwed up, nothing happens," i.e. there is no urgency to shorten the season or legislate participation. Really it makes no difference whether the league is running the players harder than their bodies can take or whether the players are "resting" preventatively at the expense of competitive integrity. The diagnosis of "corruption" follows easily enough from either factor.

The obvious explanation for why this "corruption" is further advanced in basketball than in baseball or football is simple, and also very simply a function of that narrow but undeniable "autonomy" of the sport which follows ineluctably from its structure: a single great player has by far the most impact on team success (and therefore power over team management, coaches, and other players) in a 5-on-5 sport (or at least in this one) as against 9-on-9 or 11-on-11. It has also been ventured by more than a few talking heads that the NFL, in contrast to the NBA, is a "helmet league" which conceals players' faces and hence limits their off-the-field recognizability as powerful celebrities. Unfortunate as all of this is, the onus is on the detractors (can I just say opponents?) of "autonomy" for the West's more decadent "cultural traditions" to show that the structure of the game is at fault rather than the influence of money and careerism. It is, conversely, not nearly so difficult to show that the autonomy is real, since money and careerism have a way of bringing it into higher relief, as here, even in spite of the overall spectacular quality which all major-league American sports (and big-money performing arts endeavors) necessarily share. In other words, money's influence could not vary even so widely as in the above example if the "autonomy" was not real; and so, at least under the present circumstances, given the ability of autonomous factors to serve not just as vulnerabilities but also as defenses, there are ample grounds for rejecting the loudmouth cries of self-referentiality and decadence which are the customary response to assertions of the "autonomy" of any particular "cultural tradition."

Lasch also makes much of the managerial turn, evidently visible already in the late 1970s, which "makes every effort to eliminate the risk and uncertainty that contribute so centrally to the ritual and dramatic success of any contest." That this factor renders sports Ambiguous Agents of Socialization rather than outright positive or negative ones is a point near and dear to my heart, and also, I must add, fully consonant with my own youth sport experiences from Peewee through Babe Ruth. (Later I was fortunate to have an exceptional high school coach, Dave Wicker, who was a calculus teacher and, formerly, an accomplished baseball player, though there were, let's say, ambiguities to spare emanating from just about every other direction.) Lasch certainly understands this ambiguity, yet one of the few unperceptive aspects of his account is that he, as far as I can tell, treats the money issue and the managerial issue separately. It is a bit odd that he finds only "simple-minded radicalism" in the thesis that money corrupts sport; or at least it seems odd in hindsight, since much else in his account is characteristically on point, and because the conceit to "eliminat[ion of] risk and uncertainty" via bureaucratic means is (and it is fair here to also say was) a highly visible trait of the world he lived in, a major area of overlap between the "captialist" and "communist" leviathans.

[16] In the cross-cultural data, they found evidence that, in societies where all three game types [physical skill/strategy/chance??] are present, obedience was emphasized over self-reliance or honesty. In contemporary American sports, for example, coaches have all but completely usurped decision-making. Hence, there is little need for players to be self-reliant. However, coaches value obedience and self-restraint. And, as for honesty, coaches teach how to shade the rules without getting caught. At both the University of Illinois and Penn State University, I have

[17]

had offensive and defensive linemen from the football teams in class. When asked how often offensive linemen are guilty of “holding,” defensive linemen respond “on every play” while offensive linemen answer, “never.” Obviously, there is a difference in perspective but also in training. Offensive linemen are coached in how to hold and not get caught. Roberts and Barry (1976) concluded, “If games build character, that character may be less than ideal” (59). As Sutton-Smith so often emphasized, ambiguities exist not only in how we study play but in play itself.

...

[18] Sutton-Smith went on to critique [certain] studies and their conclusions based on post-1970 research and theorizing. More important, however, is that he recognized that the studies themselves were grounded in the then-extant view that play is an ideal activity for children rather than one that is to be maligned and avoided as in previous times and other cultures (see Sutton-Smith and Kelly-Byrne 1984). Thus, with respect to games, “When Roberts and I called them models of power, we were becoming victims of our own and other males’ macho rhetoric […]” (SuttonSmith 1989, 13). Further, with respect to games, he claimed that

In their own strange ways, they embody tenderness in their affairs as well as toughness. They make players love each other, or love their coaches, or love their supporters, as much as they make them hate each other. What shall we call them: the games as models of toughness and tenderness? Perhaps games as models of Power and Pusillanimity? (13)

My note says:
I would suggest that part of what BSS is groping for here is captured by the universalistic-particularistic distinction. We hate the opponent, but “it’s not personal,” and “game recognizes game.” Sorry, but this does seem to be a guy thing. Time for us to work on our emotions, and also time for the ladies to work on this.

Now:
The year I attended his (in)famous Interim class at CalArts, Art Lande related stories of reffing "high level" basketball, wherein the truly "great" players "love the other team."

[notes emailed to self, 26 April 2021]

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Garry Chick
Games in Culture Revisited: A Replication and Extension of Roberts, Arth, and Bush
(1959)

[188] Glassford (1976) enumerated several criteria that characterize good systems of classification. These include:

1. Exclusiveness. Members of one class should be excluded from all other classes that are at the same level of analysis. With respect to games, any individual game should be a member of only one class.

2. Exhaustiveness. The classification system applied to any particular concept should include all instances of that concept. A game classification system should be such that any game will fall into one of its categories.

3. Usefulness. A categorization system should be useful in description, analysis, or comparison (or all three) of the objects or events that it classifies. To be useful, a game categorization system must permit cross-cultural or other kinds of comparisons of games.

...

[189] The problem with all of these systems [e.g. from Caillois on], though they may have considerable utility in describing and understanding games, is that they are not exclusive and often not exhaustive. That is, many games can fall into two or more classes. Systems such as that of Caillois (1961) are so broad that it is difficult to exclude many activities that are not commonly thought of as games (e.g., skiing, riding a merry-go-round). The game classifications based on informant perceptions lack utility for cross-cultural comparisons, though it might be possible to construct some composite system based on several emic categorizations. On the other hand, any activity that fits their definition of games can always be categorized into one of the three classes given by Roberts et al. (1959). Though their categorization scheme has been criticized (e.g., Royce, 1972; von Glascoe, 1976), it has the advantage of being both inclusive and exclusive, unlike the alternatives developed by others. For this reason, it is useful in comparative research.

My note says:
Fair criticism of Caillois’ taxonomy. Still, “comparative research” is just one application. A taxonomy which is not useful for “comparative research” could still, imaginably, be useful elsewhere. And, admittedly, I just like the Caillois version. Will have to think about why that really is.

[193] Tables 3 and 4 indicate that the degree of political integration and social stratification have strong positive relationships with the presence of games of strategy. Hence, these results clearly support

[194]

Roberts et al.’s (1959) conclusions about games of strategy and the complexity of the social system. It is worth noting that Table 3 shows that no societies that lack multicommunity organization have games of strategy. In both his writings and in personal interactions after the publication of "Games in Culture," Roberts maintained that games of strategy model hierarchical social organizations, that such models function as socialization devices, and that for each specific society, there is a fit between the array of games present and the more general culture.

My note says:
...this leap straight to “modeling” is actually rather drastic! What if societies “create what they need” or “reproduce something absent”? This is not just a different explanation, it’s the OPPOSITE explanation.

[emailed to self, 26 April, 2021]

Lasch—An Autonomous Youth Culture

Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965)

[69] The rebellion against the middle class presents an ever-changing face. From one point of view, it was a rebellion of women against the "family claim." From another point of view, it was a rebellion of intellectuals against middle-class culture. But it was also a revolt of youth, and as such it set a pattern which had been followed with variations only of detail by each subsequent generation of youthful rebels... The mass society, lacking the cohesive influences that make a society into a community, tends to break up into smaller communities, autonomous, self-contained, and having no viable connection with the whole. The existence of a "youth problem," a phenomenon mistakenly regarded as a problem of inadequate law enforcement or of a decline of public morality or of society's failure to provide adequate incentives for young people, in reality signifies the emergence of an autonomous youth culture.

...

[80] Europe quickened [Randolph] Bourne's political sympathies. A progressive, he became something of a socialist as well. After Europe, his writing acquired a certain sharpness and bite which it had lacked before; in his later work he was less the genteel
[81]
essayist and more the critic of politics—and his critique, as time went on, became increasingly astringent and increasingly effective. Yet in the conventional sense Bourne had no politics at all. His politics remained largely an extrapolation from his own emancipation from the cultural stagnation of Bloomfield. Though he spoke glowingly of social and political advance, he conceived of it as cultural progress. On the continent, he had noted, "life was enriched by a certain natural sensitiveness to art," the absence of which in England and America had a "brutalizing" effect. He advised a friend in New York, an architect, that if he could do anything "towards spreading that sensitiveness at home," he would have accomplished a work "as important as that of the best social reformer." "Until people begin to really hate ugliness and poverty and disease, instead of merely pitying the poor and the sick, we shall not have, I fear, any great social advance."

Wouldn't I of all people like to think so. But I do fear that cause and effect are miscast here. My bandleader at work, for example, told me I have a "disease" when I said I was going to the library after work. Like my old roommate in The Valley, he confuses openness to dating particular "fat" women with being "into" "fat" women generally. And of course, he can play. He's got the hatred of ugliness part mastered as well or better than his mastery of chords and scales, along with more than the usual sensitiveness to art. But no great social advance is on the horizon around here. More like the reverse.

Politics, in short, was important to Bourne as "a means to life." Even his opposition to the war, on which his reputation as a public figure came to rest, was a politically negative act (however appropriate or correct) signifying his continuing preoccupation with the personal as opposed to the public. He opposed the war precisely because he saw that it represented a monstrous intrusion of the public on the private. It showed him the danger, if he had not know it before, of making politics a cult; and it was the reaction to this "cult of politics," he told Van Wyck Brooks, that had finally "driven so many of the younger generation back from the liberal camp." ...

[84] These observations, drawn presumably from private rather than from public life, nevertheless had a way of slipping over into politics. Youth and Life was a political manifesto and a call to revolution. But in Bourne's politics, the source of injustice was seen not as the monopoly of the means of production or as the unequal access to privilege and power, but as the simple fact of age. The older generation ruled the world; "hence grievous friction, maladjustment, social war." More precisely:

Youth rules the world, but only when it is no longer young. It is a tarnished, travestied youth that is in the saddle in the person of middle age. Old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up wisdom, when all it has done is to damage them more or less—usually more. And the tragedy of life is that the world is run by these damaged ideals.

Bourne was like other rebels before him in wishing to throw off the dead hand of the past; to that extent he belonged to a long line of radical thinkers. What was new in all this was his conceiving of the struggle quite literally as a struggle of youth against age, in spite of his awareness that youth is often more conservative than age itself. That only confirmed his opinion of the evil effects of the social domination of the middle-aged. If young people were conservative, when their natural tendency was to be radical, that was surely because they found the world in which they were expected to make their way "rather narrow and shallow."

What was also new in Bourne's radicalism was the way in which the political problem, once it was formulated in this way, dictated nonpolitical solutions. To say that "friction, maladjustment, social war" had their origin in the ascend-
[85]
ancy of age over youth was to rule out politics altogether as a means of social advance. Specifically, it was to rule out the conventional radical solution of social revolution. Bourne could not urge the young to seize power as Marx had urged the proletariat to expropriate the expropriators. In the first place, the struggle for power was itself a form of "friction and social war." In the second place, Bourne saw clearly enough that revolutions are seldom led by men in their teens or even their twenties. ... A revolution of youth is a contradiction in terms. But in the third place, it did not require a revolution, after all, to bring the young to power. The young would come to power as a matter of course, but in their middle age—there was the rub; and what would be the gain if by that time the rebels of today had become the reactionaries of tomorrow? The young must somehow discover how to take their youth with them into middle age.

This is why it behooves youth to be not less radical, but even more radical, than it would naturally be. It must be not simply contemporaneous, but a generation ahead of the times, so that when it comes to control of the world, it will be precisely right and coincident with the conditions of the world as it finds them. If the youth of to-day could really achieve this miracle, they would have found the secret of "perpetual youth."

Not Marx but the spirit of Ponce de León presided over Bourne's vision of the better world.

Uh...Fallacy of Induction, anyone? :^|

His statement of the problem took the problem out of politics and put it squarely into the realm of psychology. The key to politics was the process of aging. The root of social disorder was seen not as oppression but repression: the destruction of freedom and spontaneity which was necessary to make children into adults. It was at this point that Bourne's analysis
[86]
coincided with John Dewey's, Jane Addams's, and the progressive educators in general. It also ran parallel, for a while, to Sigmund Freud's, although how closely Bourne knew Freud's work, if he knew it at all first hand, is not clear. The very fact that the point should be in doubt suggests what is indeed amply confirmed by other evidence, that the concept of the child as a different order of being from the adult—and in some respects a superior order of being—did not owe its existence to Freud. It was rather the general intellectual property of the age. ...
[87]
The nineteenth century, someone said, was the century of the child. The coincidence, toward the end of the century, of so many independent discoveries of the mystery and sanctity of childhood leads one to think that childhood must have owed its discovery not so much to a set of intellectual influences—romanticism, naturalism—as to the social conditions of the period; to some common experience through which an entire generation had passed. To look critically at the patriarchal family was to see it, first and foremost, through the eyes of a child. Psychoanalysis—which has been credited with opening up the study of the child—appears to have acted more as confirmation than as revelation. It gave the weight of science to the intuition which had already impressed itself on so many sons and daughters of the middle class: that culture was founded on repression.

But if psychoanalysis shared with American progressivism this common ground, nothing could be more illuminating than the way in which they diverged. Freud was led by his evidence to a stupefying irony: an ever-mounting burden of guilt was the price men paid for civilization. Freud was a European, and such a conclusion was implicit, perhaps, in every detail of the European scene. Jane Addams caught a glimpse of it in Madrid. But the American, faced with Europe, found it easy to repudiate its implications. Having no past, Americans could
[88]
look forward to an untroubled future. The American progressives drew back from the implications of psychoanalysis even as they embraced it. If culture and nature were in conflict, culture would have to go.

But in fact no such conflict was thought to exist. John Dewey's resolution of it was characteristic. In traditional societies, he explained—he was thinking of the primitive societies which anthropologists were just beginning to study—the young had to be brought up in the ways of their elders. These societies, being content merely to perpetuate themselves, were obliged to instill in new generations reverence for the customs and rituals of the old. Under such circumstances, socialization might indeed require repression; for "the natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are born." But in progressive societies the "life-customs" themselves are constantly changing. Progressive societies accordingly "endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own." If the better society of the future was defined as a "cooperative commonwealth" (as all of the new radicals, progressives, single-taxers, and socialists alike, defined it), and if it was true, moreover, that children were more adept in the art of cooperation than adults, then children themselves became the teachers in the school of social progress. Teachers became pupils. Far from repressing the natural impulses of the young, progressive societies—progressive schools in particular—tried to encourage their emulation by adults. "For certain moral and intellectual purposes," Dewey concluded, "adults must become as little children."
[89]
This discovery of Dewey's ran parallel to Jane Addams's discovery that it was the "neighbors" who educated the social worker by demonstrating socialized democracy in action, rather than the other way around; and the sentence in which Dewey summed up his philosophy of education reads almost exactly like a sentence of Randolph Bourne's—the one in which he spoke of adults becoming "as little children."

Automation and Autonomy

A friend suggests that live musical performance by human beings could become a species of Vintage Aesthetic when seen against the impending advance of computers and computer-brained robots. No doubt this dynamic has already manifested itself here and there vis-a-vis existing technological leviathans (e.g. "canned" music), and no doubt it will eventually take its place in the canon of anti-aesthetic prescriptivisms alongside moral uplift, the literary imperative, political activism, cultural preservation, and pediatric neural calisthenics. All of which is to say that it promises to have the same chilling effect that such historically contingent prescriptions have always had even as it keeps a lucky few human artists gainfully employed.

To take such a sea change and make it generative rather than prescriptive requires a retreat into the absolute. Indeed, I don't think it is a coincidence that as we perceive the general pace of change to have quickened artistic autonomy has become ever less fashionable, i.e. that feelings of anomie or "normlessness" would beget various desperate attempts to contrive new norms. The word "perceive" is important here, for do we not also see a strong correlation between the more-is-more phenomenon and a certain constitutional fixation on change as against stasis? Change-in-the-air is the supreme rationalization for scorched-earth modernism, whose manifestations range from puerile self-importance to the burning of libraries; hence there is always an important balancing role here for the attempt to step outside the parochial concerns of the moment. I would certainly not place the aesthetic sphere at or near the center of such concerns, but nor does banishing it to the compost heap of history do it justice. Everything is aesthetic, much as everything is political.

We must take the Vintage issue seriously, and certainly the larger one of automation/computerization as well, but only on our (and our art forms') own terms. That is, it behooves any contemporary musician to face directly the formal, technical, and aesthetic questions that automation raises, or raises in the negative, as it were. Fruitful cross-pollenation is inevitable, healthy coexistence is not, and prescriptions are always already constraints, no matter how urgent they might seem to be. Indeed, is it not merely by accidents of history that such urgency ebbs and flows? And is that not a powerful argument for artistic autonomy rather than against it?