Becker—The Denial of Death (v)

Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)

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[208]

CHAPTER TEN

A General View of Mental Illness

...

[213] even if one is a very guilty hero he is at least a hero in the same hero-system. The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyze it or be able to move out of it and transcend it. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility, especially when the choice comes too late in life fore one to be able to start over again. Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other—when you cannot even dare to accuse him, as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified. If your god is discredited, you yourself die;...

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[215] the woman's experience of a repetition of castration at menopause is a real one—not in the narrow focus that Freud used, but rather in the broader sense of Rank, the existentialists, and Brown. ...menopause simply reawakens the horror of the body, the utter bankruptcy of the body as a viable causa-sui project... The woman is reminded in the most forceful way that she is an animal thing; menopause is a sort of "animal birthday" that specifically marks the physical career of degeneration. ... To paraphrase Goethe's aphorism, death doesn't keep knocking on her door only to be ignored (as men ignore their aging), but kicks it in the show himself full in the face.*

[footnote]
* We might interject here that from this point of view, one of the crucial projects of a person's life, of true maturity, is to resign oneself to the process of aging. It is important for the person to gradually assimilate his true age, to stop protesting his youth, pretending that there is no end to his life. ...

[216]

... One must, so to speak, work himself out of his own system. By a study of these dynamics we see how important it is for man to resign himself to his earthly condition, his creatureliness; and we seem to have put full scientific closure on James's early insight on the place of inner emotional collapse in personal growth... We might say that in this sense Freud developed the dynamics for the total resignation that he could not himself quite manage. His ingenious discovery of the process called "mourning labor" can now be understood as basic to the resignation of the person himself. ... We can also better understand how cultural forces conspire to produce menopausal depression in any society that lies to the person about the stages of life, that has no provision in its world-view for the mourning of one's creatureliness, and that does not provide some kind of larger heroic design into which to resign oneself securely...

...

[230]

The Problem of Personal Freedom
versus Species Determinism

Most people, then, avoid extreme fetishism because somehow they get the power to use their bodies "as nature intended." They fulfill the species role of intercourse with their partner without being massively threatened by it But when the body does present a massive threat to one's self, then, logically, the species role becomes a frightening chore , a possibly annihilating experience. If the body is so vulnerable, then one fears dying by participating fully in its acts. I think this idea sums up simply what the fetishist experiences. From this vantage point we could look at all perversion as a protest against the submergence of individuality by species standardization.

Rank developed this idea all through his work. The only way in which mankind could actually control nature and rise above her was to convert sexual immortality into individual immortality. ...

[231]

In other words, perversion is a protest against species sameness, against submergence of the individuality into the body . It is even a focus of personal freedom vis-à-vis the family, one's own secret way of affirming himself against all standardization. ...

...

[232]

Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it. ...

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[236] Fetishism exists on a gamut running from pills all the way to furs, leather, silks, and shoes. ...men use the fabrications of culture, in whatever form, as charms with which to transcend natural reality. This is really the extension of the whole problem of childhood: the abandonment of the body as causa-sui project, in favor of the new magic of cultural transcendence . ...

[237]

... To control the body, then, it [the fetish object] must show some intimate relationship to the body—have an impress of its form, possess some of its smell,... This is why, I think, the shoe is the most common fetish. It is the closest thing to the body and yet is not the body, and it is associated with what almost always strikes fetishists as the most ugly thing: the despised foot with its calloused toes and yellowed toenails. ...it [the foot] is accompanied by its own striking and transcending denial and contrast—the shoe. ...[which] has straps, buckles, the softest leather, the most elegant curved arch, the hardest, smoothest, shiniest heel. There is nothing like the spiked heel in all of nature, I venture. In a word, here is the quintessense of cultural contrivance and contrast, so different from the body that it takes one a safe world away from it even while remaining intimately associated to it.

Also, if the fetish is a charm it has to be a very personal and secret charm... We have long known, from sociology and the writings of Simmel, how important the secret is for man. The secret ritual, the secret club, the secret formula —these create a new reality for man, a way of transcending and transforming the everyday world of nature, giving it dimensions it would not otherwise possess and controlling it in arcane ways. The secret implies, above all, power to control the given by the hidden and thus power to transcend the given —nature, fate, animal destiny. ...

The secret, in other words, is man's illusion par excellence, the

[238]

denial of the bodily reality of his destiny. No wonder man has always been in search of fountains of youth, holy grails, buried treasures—some kind of omnipotent power that would instantly reverse his fate and change the natural order of things. ...

The final characteristic of mysterious rituals is that they be dramatized... They stage a complicated drama in which their gratification depends on a minutely correct staging of the scene; any small detail or failure to conform to the precise formula spoils the whole thing. ... The fetishist prepares for intercourse in just the right way to make it safe. ... This pattern sums up the whole idea of ritual—and again, of all of culture: the manmade forms of things prevailing over the natural order and taming it, transforming it, and making it safe.

It is unfortunate (is that putting it strongly enough?) that "homosexuality" and "tranvestitism" are here taken to be mere "perversions" and "fetishes." Certainly there is a massive confounding factor here vis-a-vis secrecy .

Are there actual "perversions" and "fetishes" which operate in the above-given ways? I would certainly think so.

[240] somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure [the immediately preceding example is foot-binding], and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism. The anal protest of culture can be self-defeating, especially if we like

[241]

our women to walk or if we want to relate to them as full human beings. That is precisely what the fetishist cannot do. Secret magic and private dramatization may be a hold on reality, the creation of a personal world, but they also separate the practitioner from reality, just as cultural contrivances do on a more standardized level. Greenacre has understood this very acutely, remarking that the secret is Janus-faced, a subterfuge that weakens the person's relationships to others.

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[247] If, then, sado-masochism reflects the human condition, the acting out of our twin ontological motives, we can truly talk about honest masochism, or mature masochism, exactly as Rank did in his unusual discussion in Beyond Psychology. ... [Freud] was so impressed by the intensity, depth, and universality of sadism and masochism that he termed them instincts. ...[he saw] these drives as remnants of an evolutionary condition and

[248]

as tied to specific sexual appetites. Rank, who saw more truly, could transform sadism and masochism from clinically negative to humanly positive things. The maturity of masochism, then, would depend on the object toward which it was directed, on how much in possession of himself the mature masochist was. In Rank's view, a person would be neurotic not because he was masochistic but because he was not really submissive, but only wanted to make believe that he was.

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[251] The desire to affirm oneself and to yield oneself are, after all, very neutral: we can choose any path for them, any object, any level of heroics. The suffering and the evil that stems from these motives are not a consequence of the nature of the motives themselves, but our stupidity about satisfying them. ...

[Rank in a 1937 letter]

... I began to think that it [stupidity] is even more powerful than badness, meanness—because many actions or reactions that appear mean are simply stupid and even calling them bad is a justification.

Finally, then, we can see how truly inseparable are the domains of psychiatry and religion, as the both deal with human nature and the ultimate meaning of life. To leave behind stupidity is to become aware of life as a problem of heroics, which inevitably becomes a reflection about what life ought to be in its ideal dimenstions. From this point of view we can see that the perversions of "private religions" are not "false" in comparison to "true religions." They are simply less expansive, less humanly noble and responsible . All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrowness

[252]

of being mere fragments of a larger totality that overwhelms them, which they cannot understand or truly cope with—yet must still live and struggle in. We must still ask, then,...what kind of perversity is fitting for man?

Elizabeth Cowling—Picasso

Elizabeth Cowling
Picasso: Style and Meaning
(2002)

[56] Like Matisse—but unlike many other innovative twentieth-century artists—Picasso never forgot, or wanted to forget, the achievements of the 'great masters' and he habitually made reference to them. ...his general approach perfectly fits Michael Baxendall's definition of the active, not passive, relationship which exists between a truly creative artist and the works of art which are his inspiration:

'Influence' is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who is the patient ... If one

[57]

says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality.

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[95] Picasso's concentration on the sufferings of the dispossessed [ca. 1902] testifies to his identification with the workers' desperate struggle. But he was in no sense a political activist, and like most painters of his and his father's generation he was not prepared to put his art at the service of a political agenda, believing that painting should aspire to timelessness and that the appropriate forum for commenting on ephemeral socio-political events or expressing ideological convictions was the illustration, the cartoon and suchlike. Even artists like Picasso who were genuinely engagé made this fundamental distinction between painting and the graphic media. Assessing the relative importance of socio-political realities to the content of the Blue period work remains problematic because, having rejected naturalism, Picasso used an abstracted style as a way of universalizing or masking the strictly local and specific issues which may have provided his initial motivation.

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[228]
The Lessons of the Artisan
In using popular codes of representation and imitating the typography of newspapers, posters, sheet music, and so on, Braque and Picasso signalled their intention to identify with nameless artisans rather than 'fine' artists. Throughout the Cubist years they lived in what were then cheap and unfashionable districts of Paris...where bohemian artists rubbed shoulders with the working classes. ... They took up boxing and affected the working man's uniform of overalls and canvas jacket. ...[as Kahnweiler once "reminisced":] They arrived, imitating labourers, turning their caps up in their hands: 'Boss, we've come for our pay!'

My note says:
Hipsters! Though it seems that ever fewer of today's hipsters are specifically "affecting" proletarianism. ...

Now:
Well, it might just be that I moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. The agro or lumbersexual of the Twin Cities was/is definitionally proletarian; not actually a lumberjack but certainly descended from one. And I suspect that more of the agros actually work for a living, in all kinds of jobs, whereas I find this ever harder to believe about most of the LA cohort with each passing year.

[336] For the three composers, for Cocteau, Massine, and Diaghilev himself, the discrepancies of style in Picasso's designs for Parade, and his virtuouso shifts between naturalism and Cubism in his easel paintings, were not anomalous: they were the norm, and
[337]
awakened in them no mistrust or incomprehension. All shared an essentially dramatic concept of the role of style, and all found the theater congenial because it required them to exercise their gift for composing in different voices and provided a focus for their commitment to the principle of change. In such company the question 'Which is the true Picasso?' did not arise. The contrast with the art world, where consistency was expected and inconsistency mistrusted and feared, could hardly have been greater.

an essentially dramatic concept of the role of style

After the heartwarming remark about stylistic inconsistency awakening no mistrust or incomprehension, this seemingly matter-of-fact observation is really not so flattering. What does essentially dramatic even mean? How can commitment to the principle of change be inherently a good (or bad) thing? It ought to depend on the change in question. And it certainly ought not depend on any old change merely to create dramatic-ness as an end in itself.

The later contemporary/millennial sense of drama seems apt as a corollary here. Perhaps millennial drama is actually a fair conjecture in Picasso's case (see J. Berger's book); but it's equally clear that he was simply a new kind of artist, and that even if he stands as exceptional in stature, the purported drama of his stylistic transitions would eventually become commonplace even among the mediocre, this owing not to anyone's mediocrity or greatness but to changes in the wider world. (Freed thus to reason transhistorically, Ligeti then becomes a much more logical comparison than Stravinsky, whose diversity of style either at any given time or viewed after the fact really was nowhere close either to Picasso's or to Ligeti's.)

[638] The fact that he had remained in Paris throughout the Occupation enhanced his reputation for defiance. But he was in his sixties and by the end of the decade it began to look as if he had been left standing by the rising avant-garde of abstract painters and sculptors. He remained stubbornly hostile to pure abstraction, which he sweepingly dismissed as undemanding, undramatic and, as he told Françoise Gilot, 'never subversive': 'It's always a kind of bag into which the viewer can throw anything he wants to get rid of. You can't impose your thought on people if there's no relation between your painting and their visual habits.'

Quite revealing, perfectly accurate, and meeting no objection whatsoever from these quarters. We're quite comfortable abdicating the imperative to impose, all the same in art as in life.

kacvlog001–this is your (my) brain on mcluhan

The Rosetta Stone of Hipsterism

Jean-Michel Mension
The Tribe: Conversations with Gérard Bérréby and
Francesco Milo (1998)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
p. 79

On the "Meeting of Failures" event (1950):

But when you announce that you are good-for-nothings, aren't you really thinking that you're everything?

Yes, of course—it's very pretentious.

Grandfathered into Hipsterdom

Young man of Athens, your vanity peeps from the holes in your robe!

-Socrates to Antisthenes

Earlier this month, I had two Friday evenings in a row which required hurrying directly from my standing Bavarian gig in Newbury Park to the geographic and cultural center of Los Angeles to give performances more in line with the aesthetics of my life's work: first with a one-off improvising group assembled by Garrett Hickman at the Hyperion Tavern; and subsequently to celebrate the unusual occasion of three Evil Geniuses being in the same city at the same time.

In both cases I chose to remain in my "work clothes" rather than change out of them (no small task) and risk being late. I have previously made a few perfunctory appearances at parties and bars wearing this outfit, and I thereby have learned to expect not ridicule, as I initially feared, but rather adulation, including occasional heightened interest from the opposite sex. The preponderance of evidence coalesced rather decisively one Saturday last summer when two of us wore our full Bavarian garb into the diviest of dive bars, deep in The Valley, complete with "regulars" who looked like death and horses parked outside in a strip mall parking lot. I thought we were not coming out of that bar alive, or at least not with all of our possessions, dignity, and teeth intact; in fact we were literally treated like royalty, were profligately photographed, and were told that our appearance would not soon be forgotten.

On one level I am thankful for all of this, but ultimately of course it merely confirms so much about world and culture that we would change if we could. Any yokel with a few hundred dollars of disposable income can purchase some German clothes and strut all around Southern California wearing them, whereas not just anyone can make something of themselves, or at least not without putting in quite a bit more time and effort. And yet, if you want people's attention and admiration, preliminary results strongly suggest you'd be better served opting for the funny clothes and leaving the hard work of perfecting art and craft to the foolhardy and the narcissistic.

In any case, by the time of my recent calendrical near-collisions, I had long overcome any fear of appearing in my work clothes outside of work. I also knew given the venues that I would probably not be the only one up to some sartorial mischief. In fact, this was the ideal chance to play at being a hipster while ultimately possessing an airtight alibi to any such accusations. After all, those clothes help me pay my rent each month and the cost of purchasing them was a 100% legitimate tax write-off last year. No hipster can say that about their various thrift store raids.

I pulled a similar stunt when the geniuses at PSC decided to strictly enforce the company's grooming policy at Oakwood (incidentally the contract of theirs which undoubtedly boasts the most hipsters per capita, laying bare the obliviousness at play). Thus forbidden from having facial hair below the lip, I resolved to grow the thickest, nastiest cop-stache that heredity would allow. As with the funny clothes, the only feedback I ever heard with my own ears was positive, and as it also forced me to play with less pressure, I discovered a marginal practical excuse as well. (A trombone colleague told me he gets "that mustache sound" under such circumstances and immediately goes to shave, but as with most every other embouchure question, tubists seem able to get away with pretty much whatever we want.)

The very word "hipster" has of course been thoroughly worn out over the past several years, but it is a real phenomenon and we really ought to call it out when we see it. I will always view it as superficial, defensive, and a path of least resistance. However, having somewhat accidentally conducted the fieldwork related above, I will no longer view it as ineffective in any of those ways.

Same Difference (i)

There are several different ways to explain "The Hipster Thing" as some here at CalArts have called it. One is as a contrived expression of supreme coolness: "I'm soooo cool that I still look cool in the most uncool clothes and grooming conceivable." Another is as an honest aesthetic predilection for said clothes and grooming instantiated in a particularly overbearing way. A third would be as having become the default universal identifier of "artists" to each other, a secret handshake of sorts, except that it's, you know, not a secret or a handshake. A fourth would be the naive, accidental (and, as I might self-interestedly argue, authentic) way of actually being just this uncool and actually owning a wardrobe just this tattered, yet being so comfortable-verging-on-narcissistic in your own skin (as well as oblivious to and/or generally contemptuous of the judgment of others) that you just don't give a fuck, and hence are so uncool that you can pass for cool based on novelty alone.

Does the contemporary popularity of these various modes of appearance not make it all too clear that their pioneers, who initially more truly viewed them as anti-fashions, and at that most of all for their supposed inability to be Capitalistically co-opted or gain bourgeois acceptance, and could more reasonably in their historical moment than in ours expect them to succeed as such, in fact failed miserably at all of this? To be sure, most all of the intentional fashions one sees at CalArts are retro in some respect; this is, yes, a thoroughly postmodern situation by which there seems to be little or no discernible present-day instance of Fashion beyond this mere potpourri of previous styles, each clearly identifiable by decade (and probably ultimately by year if you've payed more attention to pop culture than I have).

The common denominator, of course, between the pathways to Hipsterism given above is difference. Artists are different. We are both alienated and entitled. Our childhoods and adolescence, despite reflecting the bourgeois privilege of our upper-middle class families, were traumatic. In Kindergarten, making art was fun and everyone did it; by fourth grade, it was perfunctory; by seventh grade, peculiar; and by high school, it was downright dangerous. By college, even the master teachers and intellectuals we had escaped to, who supposedly had our best interests in mind and were being remunerated accordingly, had begun imposing stylistic restrictions, railing against the philosophies we had built our lives around, and prodding us to expunge the last traces of the adolescent naivete which had been our artistic inner flame if it threatened to prevent us from earning a living through our work. Art was no longer either a proper vocation or even a timely diversion. Difference, once a mere value-neutral distinction between two things, had in fact become a question of normalcy and pathology, and the moment we had realized we couldn't do anything else was the precise moment we realized this change had occurred.

Or was it (gasp...) the other way around?

It might come as a surprise to some that as an artist myself, I curse my own difference every day. If I am in any respect rebellious, complicated, difficult, unapproachable, this is because my sense of ethics tells me that the alternative is bad news, not because I do not have the same hopes, dreams and desires as a normal, healthy human being. Fitting in is only unattractive to me because of what it would mean under the present political, economic, social and cultural circumstances; all else being equal, I cannot sit here and say I wouldn't take it if I thought I could have it.

This is, needless to say, not the prevailing attitude I detect here at CalArts. More specifically, it is the opposite attitude. I think that the "present conditions," so to speak (all of them, everywhere, now), besides being difficult and unfortunate, also create a desperate need to distinguish oneself in any way possible. In that sense, it is no longer different to be different; rather, it is what everyone seems to want...and yet more acutely now that everyone seems to want it. I fear, above all, that art is little else to these children besides just another way to achieve this; that it is, really, no more genuine than the ridiculous outfits they wear, and serves no greater purpose in their lives.

And how could it be? What else here is authentic enough to so much as permit other authenticities to exist anywhere around it? What better exemplification of the folly of the academic art world than to bring together all of the "different" kids, find that they are all the same, and then watch them writhe aimlessly trying to recover their difference, or failing that, to create it from thin air? It is an unfortunate symptom of the overall condition of our culture that art has become more or less an inherently alienating act. Be this dynamic as it may somewhat inescapable, we nonetheless acquiesce to it at our own peril.