Hillman—Life Lived Backwards/Letter Writing

James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)

---

[61]

...

Life Lived Backwards

Dear Michael,

There is a painting by Picasso done when he was ninety-one, the year before he died. It is titled Le jeune peintre (the young painter). ...

When I first saw this painting—and it is a big one, nearly a yard tall—I had that frisson André Malraux says leaps from one work of art to another via the human person. This haunting, simple image turned out to be the initiatory experience for my theory of life lived backwards. Here is the invisible Picasso Caught on the canvas, a self-portrait of the daimon that inhabited him all his life. At the end, it emerges and shows itself.

Frederick Crews—Out of My System

Frederick Crews
Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method
(1975)

---

[x]

...the effort to work out a consistent attitude toward radicalism in its newest guises proved to bear directly on the methodological inquiries I kept postponing. Essays that were written as acts of political self-scrutiny, exploring why I felt uneasy about movements I might have been expected to applaud, also amounted to partial reappraisals of psychoanalysis as a "radical" doctrine. At last I realized that instead of being continually diverted from my book, I had nearly completed it. Its true subject, I discovered, was not psychoanalytic method per se, but the difficulty of mediating between empirical responsibility and urges toward deep and revolutionary explanation.

an actual blog post, fresh as they come

Linda Nochlin—The Paterson Strike Pageant

Linda Nochlin
"The Paterson Strike Pageant"
(orig. 1974)

in

Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now
ed. Aruna D'Souza
(2022)
pp. 368-376

[372] A combination of visual spectacle and dramatic performance, the pageant can weld together two seemingly disparate forces, the subject and object of the dramatic metaphor. In reenactments like the Paterson Strike Pageant, the "actors" remain themselves yet at the same time play their roles as symbols of broader issues. In the same way, the farm laborers in Hitler's Nuremburg Rally of 1934 played—and were—themselves but at the same time stood for the masses of agricultural workers throughout the country. In like manner, the vast crowds that reenacted in Moscow in 1919 the storming of the Winter Palace were revolutionaries themselves yet also played the role of vaster revolutionary Russian forces.

For leaders of revolutionary movements, as well as for ideologues consciously or unconsciously intent on maintaining the status quo, the pageant was a potent weapon in forging a sense of communal identity for the hitherto inarticulate and unselfconscious lower classes. A pageant could function in the realm of participatory dramatic action rather in the way Diego Rivera's Mexican murals did in the realm of public visual art: to
[373]
forge a sense of contemporary purpose, self-identity and social cohesion out of a vivid recapitulation of historical fact heightened by symbolism.

But the pageant was also a unique political instrument in another way: the effects it had on the performers were as important as those it had on the audience. This can be said of no other performance art form.

I know not which esoteric usages are appealed to by effects, important, and performance art form, but this appears on its surface to be an absurd statement. Some effect is all but assured by most any performance. The question is not one of evidence or absence of effect; rather it is a question of control, of what in admin-speak has come to be known as Measurable Outcomes, without which not even another Paterson Pageant could get the attention of either the institutional art world or the "radicals" who ostensibly aim to countervail its power.

In the case of the Paterson Strike Pageant, the choice of significant incidents—...and the dramatic simplification and compression of events which may have been unclear when experienced in actuality—all made the striking workers conscious of the meaning of what they had lived through.

Later, Golin would emphasize this point even more forcefully. But he insists with equal vehemence that events were hardly unclear to the workers as these events were experienced in actuality.

At such a distance, now, from these events, and thus relying on "secondary" sources to form a yet more tenuous "tertiary" account, the distinction between general morale boosting and making people conscious of the meaning of what they had lived through could be meaningless. It may be lost to history. That much being granted, Intellectual history is both more amenable to continual revision and closer to my own concerns here anyway. And so as a matter of nothing more or less than Intellectual History, this drift from morale-boosting to consciousness-raising does seem worth noting.

This is above all an epistemological concern: often we realize only too late what we should have said or done; but also, we distort memories beyond any semblance of truth pretty much from the moment they are formed. Literary thought elevates the clarifying potential of hindsight to the status of an unquestioned and unquestionable virtue, of an assured result (think control again); but it fails to reckon (quite willfully, I think) with the distortive streak. It is often unclear, at least to me, just what it is that distinguishes the quotidian distortion of memory (surely a "motivated" distortion) from the production of "literature," aside from the packaging.

This is how activist litterateurs make their own beds and then become reluctant to lie in them. It is less literature itself than the activist imperative overlaid on it, here and elsewhere, which forces the epistemological issue; this because the concrete purpose of the activist demands concrete methods rather than experimental ones. And it is the dissonance between the thesis that workers were the strike leaders, on one hand, and the thesis that events may have been unclear to workers as they were unfolding in real time, on the other, which indicates, in fact, a substantial difference in interpretation even where the later author has exalted the earlier author and turned to her for support.

The fact that Nochlin is utterly unafraid of inviting comparison with Nazi and Soviet productions is at least a welcome preemption of the most tenuous, puritanical, animistic objections that might be raised against certain performing arts. But it also railroads us into judging these "participatory" artworks by our agreement or disagreement with their political orientation, and by little else. This is indeed a new kind of art, though there has been political art before. And it is only now, I think, with the long-awaited penetration of the mainstream entertainment industry by an activist ethic that is self-conscious, totalizing, and surface-oriented, with a supersession of unspoken ideology by loudly proclaimed ideological stances, it is only now that we can have an informed rather than merely speculative conversation, beyond the thick walls of academia or the paper-thin ones of industry, as to whether this is something that we really need or want; of whether we are better or worse off (or perhaps merely the same!) this way. I expect that "epistemology" will continue to play no role whatsoever in these discussions, and that this will be the reason why they continue to go nowhere helpful. But epistemology is the question here, and unlike history's lost secrets it will not disappear simply for not being spoken of.

Lasch—Theatrical Possibilites

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[336]
The social conditions that generated the syndicalist explosion in Europe—the imposition of industrialism on economies still dominated by small workshops, a highly combustible mixture—had their nearest American equivalent in the West, where the traditions of the mining camp, the logging camp, and the bankhouse came face to face with corporate capitalism in its most ruthless, predatory form. The IWW was the direct descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, a union that ap-
[337]
pealed to the same sense of manly independence and the same love of combat to which syndicalism appealed in France and Italy. Here too, workers experienced industrialism and the wage system not only as a decline in their standard of living but above all as a drastic infringement of their control of the workplace, of their very status as free men. The company towns that sprang up in the mining states seemed to make "wage slavery" a literal description of the new order, not just a rhetorical analogy. The company controlled not only the workplace but housing, credit, and all the other necessaries. The worker who could remember life as a prospector or cowboy now found that he owed his soul to the company store. He felt literally sold into slavery, and he embraced the philosophy of "direct action" as the only way out.

While social conditions in the West bore some resemblance to those created by the early stages of industrialism elsewhere, the cultural tradition that workers were trying to defend obviously differed from those that underlay European syndicalism. In the American West, the ideal of independence was associated not with the small proprietor's control over his household, his land or shop, and his tools but with the wandering life of the unattached male. It was not surprising that the IWW glorified the hobo, the drifter, the "nomadic worker of the West," in the words of its newspaper, Solidarity. The West was still a "man's country," according to Charles Ashleigh, an English radical who emigrated to the Pacific Northwest and became a "hobo and a Wobbly," like the hero of his novel, Rambling Kid. Ashleigh admired the "reckless rambling boys who despised the soft security and comfort of a dull city-paced existence." Ralph Chaplin, the Wobbly poet and songwriter, was attracted to the movement by its "glamorous courage and adventure," which he too associated with the West. Those who admired the Wobblies from a distance likewise emphasized its western origins. The Lawrence strike was a "western strike in the East," Lincoln Steffens wrote; "a strike conducted in New England by western miners, who have brought here the methods and the spirit employed by them in Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada.

European syndicalism was informed by an austere ethic of thrift and self-denial. In America, the syndicalist movement came to be associated with an ethic of self-expression and defiant irresponsibility—the new "paganism" of Greenwich Village. Literary intellectuals saw the Wobblies as cultural outcasts like themselves, free spirits, rebels against re-
[338]
spectability. They sensed the affinity between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers glorified by the IWW. Having absorbed from modern literature an image of the "beauty of the essentially homeless and childless and migratory life," as Floyd Dell put it, they recognized the Wobblies as soul mates. "Anarchism and art," said Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, "are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason." Hutchins Hapgood, the personification of the bohemian intellectual, called anarchism the fine art of the proletariat. He compared the Armory Show, which brought modern art to New York in 1913, to a "great fire, an earthquake, or a political revolution."

The Wobblies did not object to this assimilation of art and revolution. They too saw themselves as artists. "I have lived like an artist, and I shall die like an artist," said Joe Hill before his execution for murder. Bill Haywood allowed himself to be lionized by Mabel Dodge and other members of her famous salon. He regarded the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913—the fruit of his rapprochement between the IWW and Greenwich Village—as the high point of his career. Conceived by Mabel Dodge, the pageant was intended to dramatize the workers' exploitation by capitalism, but it exposed them to a more insidious kind of exploitation by turning radical politics into entertainment. "Life passed over insensibly into a certain, simple form of art," said Hapgood. ". . . That is the great thing about it, the almost unpredecented thing." Papers opposed to the IWW gave the pageant enthusiastic reviews: what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater. Both Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most flamboyant orator, had earlier turned down invitations to put themselves on the lecture circuit or stage. In her case, the offer came from no less an impressario than David Belasco, who could see the theatrical possibilities of revolutionary activism as clearly as John Reed. At the pageant, Reed led the Paterson strikers in a song he had written for the occasion, "The Haywood Thrill." Haywood thus resisted the lecture agents only to fall into the clutches of the avant-garde, leaving Flynn to wonder whether the distractions of the pageant had not contributed to the defeat of the strike itself.

Lasch—Confession and Anticonfession

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[Subheading:]
Confession and Anticonfession  The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism that runs all
[17]
through American culture; but the best work in this vein attempts, precisely through self-disclosure, to achieve a critical distance from the self and to gain insight into the historical forces, reproduced in psychological form, that have made the very concept of selfhood increasingly problematic. The mere act of writing already presupposes a certain detachment from the self; and the objectification of one's own experience, as psychiatric studies of narcissism have shown, makes it possible for "the deep sources of grandiosity and exhibitionism—after being appropriately aim-inhibited, tamed, and neutralized—[to] find access" to reality. [Kohut, The Analysis of the Self] Yet the increasing interpenetration of fiction, journalism, and autobiography undeniably indicated that many writers find it more and more difficult to achieve the detachment indispensible to art.

Well, indispensible might be a bit strong even for my tastes, but the point stands that a detached and...attached (?) standpoint have vastly different implications for artist and audience alike. We would do well to try to understand those implications as best we can.

One reason to beat this particular horse as relentlessly as I now do is that, among said implications, there are many properly epistemological ones which don't get the attention or treatment I would like for them. Also important is that these sorts of implications are not, I don't think, usually having anything at all to do with what motivates or, more sentimentally speaking, what inspires either artists or audiences.

Instead of fictionalizing personal material or otherwise reordering it, they have taken to presenting it undigested, leaving the reader to arrive at his own interpretations. Instead of working through their memories, many writers now rely on mere self-disclosure to keep the reader interested, appealing not to his understanding but to his salacious curiosity about the private lives of famous people. In Mailer's works and those of his many imitators, what begins as a critical reflection on the writer's own ambition, frankly acknowledged as a bid for literary immortality, often ends in a garrulous monologue, with the writer trading on his own celebrity and filling page after page with material having no other claim to attention than its association with a famous name. Once having brought himself to public attention, the writer enjoys a ready-made market for true confessions. Thus Erica Jong, after winning an audience by writing about sex with as little feeling as a man, immediately produced another novel about a young woman who becomes a literary celebrity.

...

[19] The confessional form allows an honest writer like Exley or Zweig to provide a harrowing account of the spiritual desolation of our times, but it also allows lazy writers to indulge in "the kind of immodest self-revelation which ultimately hides more than it admits." The narcissist's pseudo-insight into his own condition, usually expressed in psychiatric clichés, serves as a means of deflecting criticism and disclaiming responsibility for his actions.

...

[20] When T.S. Eliot appended reference notes to The Waste Land, he became one of the first poets to call attention to his own imaginative transformation of reality, but he did so in order to expand the reader's awareness of allusions and to create a deeper imaginative resonance—not, as in these more recent instances, to demolish the reader's confidence in the author.

When T.S. Eliot appended reference notes...
...he was...a century behind Berlioz, who was at least that far ahead of the aforementioned "confessional" writers. Let's not excuse the early adopters just because they have since become classics.

...to expand the reader's awareness of allusions...

...but it doesn't work that way. Just as he who laughs last doesn't get the joke, so he who must read about the allusions in the reference notes has irrecoverably missed the boat. What confidence can one reasonably have in an author who elevates spoiling the punchline from incidental to conventional?

[20, cont.] The unreliable, partially blinded narrator is another literary device of long standing. In the past, however, novelists often used it in order to achieve an ironic juxtaposition of the narrator's flawed perception of events with the author's own more accurate view. Today, the convention of a fictionalized narrator has been abandoned in most experimental writing. The author now speaks in his own voice but warns the reader that his version of the truth is not to be trusted. ... Having called attention to himself as a performer, the writer undermines the reader's ability to suspend disbelief. By fogging over the distinction between truth and illusion, he asks the reader to believe his story not because it rings true or even because he claims it is true, but simply because he claims it conceivably might be true—at least in part—if the reader chose to believe him. The writer waives the right to be taken seriously, at the same time escaping the responsibilities that go with being taken seriously. He asks the reader not for understanding but for indulgence. In accepting the writer's confession that he lied, the reader in turn waives the right to hold the writer accountable for the truth of his report. The writer thus attempts to charm the reader instead of trying to convince him, counting on the titillation provided by pseudo-revelation to hold the reader's interest.

Undertaken in the evasive mood, confessional writing degenerates into anticonfession. The record of the inner life becomes an unintentional parody of inner life. A literary genre that appears to affirm inwardness actually tells us that inner life is precisely what can no longer be taken seriously. This explains why [Woody] Allen, [Donald] Barthelme, and other satirists so often parody, as a deliberate literary strategy, the confessional style of an earlier time, when the artist
[21]
bared his inner struggles in the belief that they represented a microcosm of the larger world. ... The writer no longer sees life reflected in his own mind. Just the opposite: he sees the world, even in its emptiness, as a mirror of himself. In recording his "inner" experiences, he seeks not to provide an objective account of a representative piece of reality but to seduce others into giving him their attention, acclaim, or sympathy and thus to shore up his faltering sense of self.

It occurs here that Lasch is on solider ground in telling us what such work does than where it came from. e.g. Here, whether this is actually a matter of shoring up seems tough to say for sure, although there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence to that effect.

Lasch—Nationalism, Survivals, Advancement

Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left
(1969)

[119] the civil rights movement, in its Southern phase, rested on the indigenous Negro subculture which has grown up since the Civil War under the peculiar conditions of Southern segregation—a culture separate and unequal
[120]
but semiautonomous and therefore capable of giving its own distinctive character to the movement for legal and political equality.

...

[121] The one thing that emerges clearly from Herskovits's work is that whether one is talking about Latin America or about the United States, African survivals are easier to trace in areas like music and religion than in language, politics, social organization, and family life, where they seem almost nonexistent.

Unfortunately the whole question of African survivals
[122]
has now become involved in the politics of cultural nationalism, and it is hard to argue against Herskovits without being accused of wishing to subvert the cultural identity of black people. Herskovits himself explicitly acknowledged a desire "to give the Negro an appreciation of his past" and "to endow him with the confidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he must have." The same purpose animates many of his present admirers. It is no service to black nationalism, however, to pretend that it grows out of an African heritage; nor is it even necessary to the argument that Negro culture in America ought to be preserved. If the defense of that culture rested only on appeals to the African past, it would not be worth defending.

...

[124] Some of [Oscar] Lewis's critics...argue that the concept of the culture of poverty implies a "value judgment" and a "cultural smugness" resting on ignorance of the accomplishments of this type of culture, especially of black culture. Thus Todd Gitlin, a spokesman of the New Left, advises those who write about the ghetto to "listen to Otis Redding, B.B. King, the Impressions, etc. etc." and to
[125]
read Charles Keil's Urban Blues, which he says shows "the richness of ghetto culture."

These remarks betray a very common misunderstanding of the culture of poverty and of the concept of culture itself. Oscar Lewis is not making a "value judgment" when he says that the culture of poverty is a "thin culture." This statement has nothing in common with the cliché that Negroes are "culturally deprived"—the standard view to which Gitlin rightly objects, but which he confuses with Lewis's view. When teachers in ghetto schools say that black children are "deprived," "disadvantaged," and "unteachable," they do show a "cultural smugness" which makes them unable to talk to the children or to listen to what the children are saying. The schoolmarm's view of "culture" assumes that poems, for instance, should conform to certain rigid standards of grammar, meter, and sentiment. Thus a poem about "The Junkies," as Herbert Kohl notes, is dismissed as "the ramblings of a disturbed girl," whereas the same teacher praises "Shop with Mom" for its "pleasant and healthy thought." Similarly with music: some people can't hear jazz, blues, gospel, or "soul" because it doesn't live up to their arbitrary expectations of what "good music" should sound like.

These are "value judgments" with a vengeance. But Lewis is trying to understand the culutre of poverty, not in the narrow sense of the term culture but as a design for living. (Gitlin confuses the two meanings of "culture." And what Lewis discovered in the Puerto Rican ghetto applies—urban blues notwithstanding—to the black ghetto as well: "The low aspiration level helps to reduce frustration,
[126]
[and] the legitamization of short-range hedonism makes possible spontaneity of enjoyment," but "there is a great deal of pathos, suffering and emptiness among those who live in the culture of poverty." To cite a book on the urban blues in refutation of these conclusions misses the point. The question is not whether Negro music provides a "rich" record of suffering, the question is whether the ghetto subculture gives much support to its members. It is precisely because the chief characteristics of the ghetto culture are despair and self-hatred that black nationalism has arisen as a radical cultural therapy for the ghetto.

The contrast between the comparative vitality of Negro culture in the South and the poverty of the culture of poverty explains why nationalist sects like the Nation of Islam, which have never made much headway in the South, find the Northern ghetto a fertile soil; while the civil rights movement, on the other hand, has become progressively weaker as the focus of the Negros' struggle shifts from the South to the North. The civil rights movement does not address itself to the question of how Negroes are to acquire a culture, or to the consequences of their failure to do so. It addresses itself to legal inequalities. Insofar as it implies a cultural program of any kind, the civil rights strategy proposes to integrate Negroes into the culture that already surrounds them.

Now the real objection to this is not the one so often
[127]
given by the advocates of black power—that black people have nothing to gain from integrating into a culture dominated by materialistic values. Since most black people have already absorbed those values, this is a frivolous argument—especially so since it seems to imply that there is something virtuous and ennobling about poverty. What the assimilationist argument does overlook is that the civil rights movement owes its existence, in part, to the rise of a Negro subculture in the South, and that the absence of a comparable culture in the ghetto changes the whole character of the race problem in the North. American history seems to show that a group cannot achieve "integration"—that is, equality—without first developing institutions which express and create a sense of its own distinctiveness. That is why black nationalism, which attempts to fill the cultural vacuum of the ghetto, has had a continuing attraction for Negroes, and why, even during the period of its eclipse in the thirties, forties, and fifties, nationalism won converts among the most despised and degraded elements of the Negro community in spite of the low repute in which it was held by Negro leaders.

...

[134] Black power proposes, or seems to propose, that Negroes do for themselves what other ethnic groups, faced with somewhat similar conditions, have done—advance themselves not as individuals but as groups conscious of their own special interests and identity. A comparison with other ethnic minorities in American history—the Irish, for example—is instructive. When the Irish first came to Boston, they were "the lowest of the low, lower than the Germans or Scandinavians or Jews, or even the Negroes, who had come earlier and edged a bit up the economic ladder. Irishmen were lucky if they could find part-time work on the dock or in the ditch; Irish girls hoped at best to get work as maids in hotels or in big houses on Beacon Hill. . . . The people from Ireland were a proletariat without machine
[135]
skills or capital. Their sections of Boston were the land of the shanty Irish." [Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile] ...the Irish were also the target of vicious ethnic stereotypes. ... Moreover, the Irish were papists and hence presumably loyal to a foreign power. Nor did they speak good English.

In the face of these disadvantages, how did the Irish escape from their shanty-town ghettos? The myth is: by individual initiative, which demonstrated ability, they overcame barriers to advancement through the usual avenues of social mobility, which eventually led to their assimilation. These commonly held assumptions about the nature of American mobility can easily be tested against a familiar case, that of the Kennedy family, which of all examples ought most nearly fit the myth of America as a society open to individual initiative.

As cogent and suggestive as the ensuing passage is, this basis for elevating a single high-profile example to the status of representativeness is quite flimsy! No particular event ought to most nearly fit any given thesis!

The career of Joseph Kennedy, founder of the present dynasty, does conform in many ways to the class entrepreneurial pattern. What is instructive about Kennedy, however, is that even by the 1920s entrepreneurial opportunities existed only on the fringes of American capitalism. By that time the normal avenue of business advancement lay in the corporate bureaucracies—and these, it is important to realize, had become increasingly the last refuge of the old American elite. As one historian has noted: "Once it became clear that political control of the
[136]
big cities would inevitably pass into the hands of the immigrant groups, Big Business came to be regarded as a new preserve of the older Americans, where their status and influence could continue to flourish." The result was that "the social patterns established within Big Business bureaucracies at the turn of the century helped to close off key areas of the economy and to keep them virtually impenetrable to even the most gifted outsiders. For one without the background, etiquette, and personal appearance to 'fit in,' and without sponsors to smooth his way, a career in one of the major corporations would be more like scaling a high wall than climbing a ladder." [Rischin, The American Gospel of Success (1965)] The corporate bureaucracies readily adapted themselves to the purposes of ethnic exclusiveness because success in the bureaucratic career, by its very nature, depends on the accumulation of educational advantages, on family connections, and on other signs of social status. A study of 185 business leaders between 1901 and 1910 shows that while fourteen per cent had either founded or bought the business in which they now occupied the top positions, twenty-seven percent inherited their positions, while all the rest "climbed the bureaucratic ladder, not infrequently, of course, after their family status, education, and other social endowments helped them get the proper start." [Miller, Men in Business (1952)]

Endowed with several advantages at the start of his career, notably a Harvard degree and marriage into the powerful Fitzgerald family, Joseph Kennedy was president of a
[137]
small bank in Boston by the time he was twenty-five. "But many a Yankee banker still could not wholly accept Joe Kennedy. It was alright for Irishmen to run little East Boston banks and handle immigrants' remittances, they felt, but not to crash the central citadels of finance. So Kennedy, disgusted, began to operate more and more in New York and Hollywood." [Burns] His successful speculations on the West Coast, followed by even more spectacular operations on Wall Street in the early twenties, testified to Kennedy's financial genius but also to the degree to which the normal bureaucratic career was closed off to ethnic minorities. It is highly misleading to think that in American history those minorities have escaped poverty through the dominant institutions of the surrounding culture. On the contrary, they have succeeded in marginal institutions, a fact that incidentally reveals one dimension of the present race problem—the decline of entrepreneurial capitalism in a mature industrial economy.

Entrepreneurial opportunities, however, are only part of the story, even in the case of earlier minorities. Those opportunities could not have been exploited if groups like the Irish had not already achieved a strong sense of ethnic solidarity. In the case of the Kennedy family, it is important to note that Joseph Kennedy's career rested solidly on the achievement of the previous generation. Both his own fa-
[138]
ther, Patick J. Kennedy, and his father-in-law, John F. Fitzgerald, had already "advanced far up into the ranks of middle-class respectability" by selling things to other Irishmen (liquor, for instance) and by capturing their votes, "thus stor[ing] up influence to trade in the political arena." Both saloon-keeping and machine politics represented a form of collective self-help in the Irish ghetto; they depended on a sense of Irish solidarity. In effect, the Irish created their own institutions parallel to the official institutions of American society: the saloon, the Irish-American church, above all the political machine. "Unable to participate in the normal associational affairs of the community," Oscar Handlin writes, "the Irish felt obligated to erect a society within a society, to act together in their own way. In every contact therefore the group . . . became intensely aware of its peculiar and exclusive identity." The Irish did not advance as individuals, they advanced as a group, drastically altering the structure of urban politics in the process. Nor did they lose their ethnic character through assimilation into American life; politicians recognize this when they cater to the "Irish vote." As Harold Cruse observes, "Every four years the great fiction of the assimilated American (white and/or Protestant) ideal is put aside to deal with the pluralistic reality of the hyphenated-American vote." The rest of the time this reality is swallowed up in the rhetoric of opportunity and individualism.

The assertion that "the individual in America has few
[139]
rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another" is borne out not only in the case of the Irish but even more clearly in the case of the Jews. Like the Irish, the Jews escaped extreme poverty through the labor movement or through marginal businesses or professions serving a largely Jewish clientele. To a degree that is seldom recognized, Jewish life in America is self-contained. According to a recent study of Jews in a midwestern city, the Jews after three generations still live in "separate but equal" communities "that endure in spite of all sociological predictions to the contrary." [Kramer and Levantman, Children of the Gilded Ghetto (1961)] Even Jews who have achieved wealth and status...are "understandably reluctant to sever their remaining ties... The community, and their special relation to it, is, after all, the precondition of their status."

In spite of the decline of overt anti-Semitism, the Jews in this city (Minneapolis?) and elsewhere—except for those in the intellectual community, which is exempt from these generalizations—still live in their own separate and self-sufficient community. They derive important advantages from separation of which Jewish businessmen, for example, are well aware.

"In a period of growing oligopoly, Jewish businesses have survived in the shelter of ethnic segregation. Because Jews are excluded from the dominant business community,
[140]
they are beyond the reach of its informal sanctions. They are 'outsiders,' marginal retail traders, who have no reason to be susceptible to the opinion of gentile colleagues who do not accept them in any case."

Thus Jewish businessmen continue to prefer a flexible price system to fixed prices, thereby performing "considerable economic service as middlemen for inflation-conscious consumers and overstocked manufacturers, at the cost, however, of their social honor in the larger business community." Similarly Jewish doctors serve Jewish patients, Jewish lawyers predominantly Jewish clients. "Exploiting their marginality for their own advantage has been the one means of economic survival consistently available to Jews." One of the marginal opportunities open to Jewish entrepreneurs, it should be added, is the black ghetto. Thus in spite of their services to the civil rights movement, Jews now find themselves singled out as special objects of the wrath of black militants. "It is now widely accepted as an incontrovertible fact that . . . there exists a pronounced anti-Jewish sentiment among the Negro masses in this country."

The history of American ethnic-group pluralism does not support the integrationist assumption that individual initiative has been the traditional mechanism of social mobility. Those who urge Negroes to advance themselves through the "regular" channels of personal mobility ignore the experience of earlier minorities, the relevance of which is obscured both by the tendency to view the history of immigration as a triumph of assimilation and by the individualist
[141]
premises which persistently blind Americans to the importance of collective phenomena and therefore to most of history.

...

[141, footnote] Recent studies do not seem to bear out [the] assertion that "immigrants made sacrifices of present consumption to capitalize their children." One of the interesting conclusions to emerge from Stefan Thernstrom's study of Irish Workers...is that the Irish often achieved "property mobility" at the expense of their children, or at least the expense of "the forms of mobility which required education."

Lasch—To Postpone a Reckoning

Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations (1973)

Ch. XVIII, "Birth, Death, and Technology: The Limits of Cultural Laissez-Faire"

The prevailing image of technological utopia begets the counter-image of technological nightmare—the appalling vision of a scientific totalitarianism, embodied in such anti-utopian novels as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. On the one hand we have a greatly exaggerated faith in the ability of science to solve all the material problems of life, and an exagger-
[301]
ated idea of the autonomy of science and technology as determining forces in history; on the other hand, these inflated estimates of the power of science give rise to a hysterical fear of scientific dictatorship. This fear, precisely because it is cast in the form of an anti-utopian vision of the future, serves to postpone a reckoning with science, while the sweeping quality of the scientific control it envisions serves to paralyze our will to act in the present. At the same time it gives the illusion that the destructive possibilities of science are at least being squarely confronted. The anti-utopian and the utopian myths of science have a common root in the assumption that science is an autonomous force, rather than an instrument of the will of the human community, and that its development is inevitable and irresistable.

(pp. 300-301)

Bibliographilia—Lasch's Roth

Here is the article by Philip Roth which launches Chapter IV of The Minimal Self.

Several passages are of interest despite (in some cases because of) not having been referenced by Lasch.

Lasch—Survivalism

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

Total institutions—the death camps above all—have made us aware of the banality of evil, in Hannah Arendt's famous phrase; but they have also taught us something about the banality of survival. A growing belief that heroes don't survive informs the disenchantment with conventional codes of masculinity... It is not only masculinity that has lost its survival value, however, but the entire stock of allegedly outworn ideals of honor, heroic defiance of circumstances, and self-transcendence. As Vincent Canby noted in reviewing Lina Wertmüller's movie Seven Beauties, the survivor has discovered that "idealism is self-defeating."
(p. 73)



"A number of things give us hope," write Ehrlich and Harriman in the conclusion to [How to Be a Survivor]... "The first is that survival itself is the issue. Once people understand that, they will fight like hell for it." On the contrary, people committed only to survival are more likely to head for the hills. If survival is the overriding issue, people will take more interest in their personal safety than in the survival of humanity as a whole. Those who base the case for conservation and peace on survival not only appeal to a debased system of values, they defeat their own purpose.
(p. 78)

Vincent Kaufmann—Debord, Autobiography, Exemplarity

Vincent Kaufmann, trans. Robert Bononno
Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (2006)

Debord is one of the great autobiographers or self-portraitists of the second half of the twentieth century... He developed an unchallengeable form of autobiographical writing, through which a statement coincides with an act (and could coincide with an act only because it amounted to no more than "not showing himself".)

...

In this light, it is clear that it is precisely because of their exemplarity that Debord's autobiographical writings must at the same time be "theoretical," or that, at the very least, there is continuity between these and his autobiographical writings in the strict sense of the word. From Saint Augustine to Rousseau and beyond, this has always been the case. Exemplarity always serves ideology (religious, political), at least when the opposite is not the case. With Debord this continuity is especially obvious in the most autobiographical of his films [In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)]...

...

The film does not start out autobiographical. It begins, like the film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973), as a work of social criticism, with themes that will be familiar to anyone who has seen his previous films: the critique of passivity, of separation, of the vapidity of art in general and film in particular... But this tone is abandoned after some twenty pages (and a little more than twenty minutes), replaced by a long and explicitly autobiographical narrative, introduced in the following terms: "Thus, instead of adding one more film to the thousands of commonplace films, I prefer to explain why I shall do nothing of the sort. I am going to replace the frivolous adventures typically recounted by the cinema with the examination of an important subject: myself." There is no film, let's move on to a discussion, to conflict, that is, to me. Such a change of register is indeed an echo of the declaration of 1952, and it is emblematic of Debord's oscillation between "theory" and "self-portraiture," or, if you will, of their continuity. Autobiography is here a form of social criticism by other means; exemplarity, in a way, constitutes the proof of the relevance of theoretical discourse.

As I have already suggested, this exemplarity is negative. The period during which Debord was active, which he anticipated to a certain extent (if we imagine him beginning in 1952), is one in which autobiography, and more generally biography, triumphed. But it's just a short step from triumph to the most repulsive degradation. The death of the author foretold by Barthes and Foucault seems quite distant, and if there ever was a time when the author, modestly converted into an anonymous writer, signed his works only for the sake of form, he is now more alive than ever, and more desirous of proving this, of leaving traces of the life he so enjoys. Proof of this can be found in the recent success of intimate memoirs, correspondence, and biography, and more generally the autobiographical turn taken by contemporary fiction. Hasn't the right to create "personal fiction," as it is called, become as unquestioned as human rights once were? Everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if contemporary authors still had the time, between book signings and television appearances, to lead a life that was unique enough not to depend on the clichés of sentimental personal fiction. It is one thing to have reestablished the author's rights, quite another to identify a life that is prestigious enough and, especially, unique enough to justify their use. The danger of the democratization of the right to self-expression is that when it is overused, the claim to authenticity and singularity that historically justified autobiography quickly fades into indifference and a lack of differentiation. It then becomes no more than a rhetoric of authenticity. Singularity is the condition of authenticity and authenticity is corrupted in the presence of the commonplace. From this point of view, the critical importance of Debord's actions lies in his ability to turn his epoch upside down, to make a break with it, to turn himself into its other." (28-30)

"At the very least, there is continuity between these [theoretical writings] and his autobiographical writings," and the reason is the "exemplarity" of this work, which is to say that "a statement coincides with an act" at all times. (28) VK seems to be getting at something deeper and more profound than mere consistency of words and actions, but I can't tell what. This consistency means that Debord's work is always "theoretical," even when it is also (and more explicitly) "autobiographical." "Exemplarity always serves ideology...at least when the opposite is not the case." (28)

"Exemplarity, in a way, constitutes the relevance of a theoretical discourse." (29) That is, one may prove (such a strong term, but whatever) the validity of a piece of Theory by practicing it oneself; and at that point, a chronicle of such life and living takes on a new relevance.

Importantly, "this exemplarity is negative," (29) meaning that it instantiates an example of living differently than the predominant examples in one's immediate midst. The "most repulsive degradation" of autobiography occurs when authors no longer "lead a life...unique enough not to depend on the clichés of sentimental personal fiction," when "the right to self-expression...is overused [such that] the claim to authenticity and singularity that historically justified autobiography quickly fades into indifference and a lack of differentiation." Seeing this, Debord achieved a certain "critical importance" by "turn[ing] his epoch upside down...mak[ing] a break with it...turn[ing] himself into its Other." This is Negative Exemplarity. Otherwise known as swimming against the current, zigging as others zag, or perhaps simply being born in the wrong era, city, country, milieu, etc. That is certainly not unique, but consistency is, so that as far as that goes the point is well-taken.

The critique of the prevailing practices in "personal fiction" is always timely. I hesitate to say that it is well-articulated here as I have had to reread the passage several times in order to fully grasp it. But let's just say I'll Take It, which is to say it's good to know I'm not crazy for groping towards more or less the same critique of the Autobiographical Turn. In fact I would say that VK actually doesn't go far enough vis-a-vis "the right to create personal fiction" becoming "as unquestioned as human rights once were." In fact the Autobiographical Turn has become an Autobiographical Imperative in many circles. One such circle is populated by the Arts Entrepreneurs or Arts Businessperson (-Milo's verbiage), who have found (or claim to have found) that the personal sells. It would of course be quite fruitful to attempt to ferret out the essential from the contingent here, as well as the simpler question of whether the seeming infallability of this business plan is the reality or merely the perception.

The consequences are rather different for each combination, including one logical impossibility. But regardless of the truth, I'd expect that this Imperative is here to stay for a good while. It is, let's say, quite overdetermined, no?

[from a notebook, 2017]

Against The Literary Imperative

literature/the novel: "a lie that tells the truth"

so...

=pre-industrial infotainment?!
e.g. when the latest trove of freshly leaked government records is not nearly entertaining enough to hold the attention of an audience whose record keeping is not quite so thorough. instead, storytime! ergo the collective appointment of mandarin technocrats to digest the proverbial federalist papers on our collective behalf. ergo the offense taken to such appointees, drawing as they do equal attention to our own deficiencies as to any justly-sounded alarms. down with the mandarins! unless they entertain us! (and unless we may continue to reason anecdotally! especially if we are 'oppressed'!) thus is the political colonized by the aesthetic and the aesthetic colonized by the political; thus are the minds and souls of the people conquered, in their own names, so as to preserve psychic domicile over a dead land mass; thus the suddenly-old saying about 'letting the terrorists win' metamorphoses from talk-radio zinger to supremely useful figure of speech to the master narrative of our time; etc., etc. so no more art for art's sake k? cuz that is a lie that just plain lies. and we won't stand for that any longer.


...perhaps more specifically...

=victorian infotainment?!
i.e. for those tough household spills wherein The Truth in its unadulterated form is simply unspeakable. in its place, a little white lie! just this once! for your own good! hence a privileged position for literature among The Arts, the lesser castes aspiring half-heartedly to do what literature does vis-a-vis Great Big Truths and Little White Lies. all hail literary thought, the bounty paper towel of the left, soaking up spilled grape juice a whole glass at a time while the leading national brand just turns to grapy pudding. don't make grapy pudding, kids! make art!


...but...!

this place of literature in The Arts and in Society can (and should) (and must) be deconstructed in the best sense of that term. perhaps owing to the impenetrable language in which this has been undertaken by academics, word seems not to have reached the (wo)man on the street that sometimes (or, uh...perhaps most of the time??) a lie is just a lie. less excusable yet is the effect of such "privileged positions" on the internal political dynamics of the professional art world: as in the wider political and social world, a subclass of Limousine Liberals emerges, an art-ontological Bourgeoisie who not only wield the greatest explanatory power but know it too. hence more is more: more narrative, more amplitude, more ethnicity, more mixing of media, more shouting over each other just to be heard; and yes, ever more consequentialist mendacity in purported service of deferred truthtelling. whew!! damned if you don't have to deconstruct just to get through the day!! damned if a profusion of Little White Lies isn't the most effective concealment of one Great Big One!!


hence the guiding rejoinder to the given truism:

"If truth-telling is so important, why not just do that? What are all these indirect paths we keep hearing about and what is lost/gained by way of each one?"

the aestheticist 99% demand answers.


...to wit...

=an aesthetically nihilist (or at least agnostic) social imperative for literature (and its imitators, all the other Arts)

that is, an imperative to address itself (themselves) to social matters which demand corrective Truth-Telling on account of a prevailing Lie which is presently doing more harm than good. (this is nothing like the Little White Lies that literature tells! those we are proud of!)

but of course there are *other* socially valuable functions for art and literature, and there are *other* aesthetics which have prospective value/potential but which necessarily are at odds with this narrow social imperative. further, wider social imperatives necessarily beget value systems, and any value system grown up around such concerns is bound to reinscribe itself on the narrow internal value systems of artists and artmaking. this, then, becomes the opposite of the liberationist gesture which activist artists would like to posit for it; rather, it clutters the social world of critical and popular reception with arbitrary proscriptions and inhibitions, above all a deep distrust of the ineffable which is anathema to so many extraliterary artistic traditions in so many ways.