Goodman and Goodman—Intentional Communities

Paul and Percival Goodman
Communitas
(1960)

[10] The trouble with this good instinct—not to be regimented in one's intimate affairs by architects, engineers, and international public-relations experts—is that "no plan" always means in fact some inherited and frequently bad plan. For our cities are far from nature, that has a most excellent plan, and the "unplanned" tends to mean a gridiron laid out for speculation a century ago, or a dilapidated downtown when the actual downtown has moved uptown. People are right to be conservative, but what is conservative? In planning, as elsewhere in our society, we can observe the paradox that the wildest anarchists are generally affirming the most ancient values, of space, sun, and trees, and beauty, human dignity, and forthright means, as if they lived in neolithic times or the Middle Ages, whereas the so-called conservatives are generally arguing for policies and prejudices that date back only four administrations.

[103]
Intentional Communities

Cooperative farming, pooling land for machine cultivation, reserving part for diversified gardening, with various degrees of family ownership, all as a basis for a more integrated community life: this exists in many places,... The driving motives may be economic, to get a fair deal with the city, to raise the cultural level of the peasants and rescue them from poverty, illiteracy, and disease, industrialize without urbanizing, etc. Such motives can be part of national policy.

It is a very different matter when the way of life itself,

[104]

a well-rounded life in a free community, is the principal motivation. Such an attitude belongs not to backward but precisely to avant-garde groups, who are sensitive and more thoughtful than the average, and who react against the extant condition of society as fragmented, insecure, superficial, or wicked. They are willing to sacrifice social advantages to live in a community of the like-minded. National policy and policy-makers are not up to these refinements; the communities are small, politically on the fringe (though often intensely political as a function of life), and they tend to be transitory; yet they are the vital engaged experiments in which, alone perhaps, new social ideas can emerge,...

Such "intentional communities," as the sociologists call them (modern examples are described by H. Infield), have come into being throughout history—in antiquity as philosophic or mystical brotherhoods; then as Christian fellowships; during the Reformation as part of the general dissent; as ways of coping with early industrial capitalism... But our modern conditions of super-organized capital and one neo-technology after another, have perhaps added a new chapter to the old story. To put it paradoxically, there is today so much communication, means of communication, and communication-theory, that there isn't any community; so much socialism, social-agency, and sociology that there isn't any society of work and living. ...

Consider our modern difference another way. Intentional communities have generally disintegrated, or so their members thought, because of outside pressures or outside temptations, bankruptcy, hostility of the surroundings, loss of religious faith among skeptics, attraction of big-city vices. It is generally agreed that non-rational motives, like religion or nationalism, wear better in this struggle than rational motives like philosophy, pacificism, or economic good sense.

[105]

But today we also think that communities disintegrate especially because of interpersonal difficulties; these explain the boredom, inefficiency, loss of faith; people are simply not up to living and working together. So the experts in community give sociometric tests (Moreno) to determine who among modern men are fit to live closely with their fellows, to bear the tensions and excitements of it. "Integration" is apparently no longer natural for all men. This seems to cut down the possibilies enormously, for to live well now requires, (1) To be disgusted with the common way; (2) To have a burning ideal to share, and (3) To have a cooperative character.

Given the paucity of candidates, such weeding-out tests are a poor expedient. Would it not be better, instead of regarding "non-cooperation" as a datum, to take the bull by the horns and regard community life as a continuous group-psychotherapy in our sick society, in which just the anxieties and tensions of living together become the positive occasions to change people and release new energy altogether? This would in turn diminish the reliance on non-rational ideals, since the excitement of contact is soon more valuable than the attractions of the world.

...

[108] In the educational community, the mores are in principle permissive and experimental, and the persons form, almost invariably, a spectrum of radical thought and life,...

[109] [leading] inevitably to violent dissensions, sexual rivalries, threatened families. It is at this point, as we have said, that the community could become a psychotherapeutic group and try by its travails to hammer out a new ideal for us all in these difficult areas where obviously our modern society is in transition. Instead, the community itself tends to break up.

Yet perhaps the very transitoriness of such intensely motivated intentional communities is part of their perfection. Disintegrating, they irradiate society with people who have been profoundly touched by the excitement of community life, who do not forget the advantages but try to realize them in new ways. ...[Perhaps like] those "little magazines" and "little theaters" that do not outlive their first few performances, yet from them comes all the vitality of the next generation of everybody's literature.

Beautiful.

So when's the last time we actually had one of those in The Arts? In society broadly?

[111] Geophysical regions do exist spectacularly in our country. It is pathetic if the esthetic advantages of our unique landscapes, of our coasts, plains, subtropics, mountains, river valleys and deserts, cannot make us a more various America than we are getting. In our history, the Americans have thrown away one of our most precious heritages, the Federal system, a system of political differences of regions, allowing for far-reaching economic, legal, cultural, and moral experimentation... This was the original idea of our system. When the fathers gave up the leaky Articles of Confederation for the excellent aims of the Preamble, they were not thinking of a land with an identical gas station, Woolworth's, and diner at every crossroads; with culture canned for everybody in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue; and with the wisdom of local law dominated by the FBI.

Accounting For Taste

Louis Chevalier
The Assassination of Paris (1977)
trans. David P. Jordan (1994)

In October 1957 six government ministers along with the cream of Paris society (as was correct) rode the metro to inaugurate the Franklin Roosevelt station which, according to an official speech, "was one of the most luxurious in the world, with its windows depicting famous paintings with cut-glass replicas." Less enthusiastically, some malcontents commented that the uglier things got above ground the more refined they became below. As the Champs-Elysées, with its shrunken sidewalks, began to resemble a used-car lot, the metro, in contrast, was made beautiful. They even considered having music in the station. It would have been installed if those responsible had been able to choose between classical music and pop, a serious problem that remains unresolved as I write these lines.

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Functionalism as Totalitarian

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

p. 34—on "collective creativity" and the "open work"

Given the context of Jorn's extra-painterly concerns in the early 1940s, the idea of openness implicit in the indeterminate compositional process also takes on social and political dimensions. Openness to the new would become one of Jorn's central artistic themes. He argues in Held og Hasard that curiosity about the new and unknown is the beginning of all aesthetic activity.

Is this orientation indicative of a moral purpose per se? Only by way of analogy/metaphor/mimesis/poiesis/etc. Where it takes hold at all, it is necessarily only at a distance from so-called Everyday Life, or at least this is so in this case because the result is an artwork. As an artist by vocation and calling, Jorn can model "openness" in the way he goes about his work, but he usually won't succeed in communicating per se to this effect, nor does the fact of his modeling seem likely to get over to much of anyone outside of the social world immediately surrounding art and artists. This is of course all well and good until KK would attach greater pretensions.

Jorn did not intervene to save them; in fact, he writes that the quick and inexpensive painting techniques and temporary lifespan of the murals were important aspects of their meaning. More broadly, the emphasis on the social experience over the finished work exemplified the way the collective practices of Cobra anticipate contemporary Relational aesthetics. Jorn believed that the role of artists was to inspire by example, through their embrace of a creative life, rather than either to create finished works which would only end up decorating the homes of the wealthy, like a painter, or to redesign the everyday lives of the working class, like a modern architect. ... The Bregnerød murals attempted to redefine "painting" from a noun to a verb, considering painting a process of redefining a space, transforming it into something at once more social and more artistic, in a new holistic statement that was simultaneously personal and collective. (83)

All of this begs all of the same questions as do so many later bubblings-up of "Relational aesthetics," itself a rather oxymoronic/contradictory turn of phrase, and most clearly so by the logic of its most vociferous supporters. If "social experience" is paramount, why pursue it through an activity which indeed results in, if not necessarily a "finished" work, certainly some kind of work? Does such a choice of vehicle not indicate that there is something about the process of creation, whether or not this process has clear starting and ending points, which facilitates the specific type of social experience desired? And if so, how could the fate of the work be quite as trivial a matter as such theorists would insist? It seems not merely illogical but actually fully disingenuous to have designated a destination while subsequently insisting that the journey is the priority. Of course who knows what scenarios could arise spontaneously; but as far as both internal logical consistency and empirical resonance, Debord's theory of the supersession of art and its absorption into Life actually seems to me to have quite a bit more going for it. As does, IMHO of course, Modernism writ large, which is perfectly transparent in its internal logic, aims, social role, etc., perhaps without much empirical resonance in the Everyday realm (which is of course intentional).

Needless to say that "inspir[ing] by example" as against "decorating the homes of the wealthy" is rather over-reductive and quite the false dichotomy.

Despite his interest in architectural murals inspired by Léger and Le Corbusier, Jorn rejected the emphasis of those artists on designing a complete socialist environment, which he felt only led to the rationalist plans of Functionalism. He critiqued the notion of design creating a new modernist lifestyle for its technocratic and authoritarian tendency. Jorn argues that, "we need an art that is living, a part of itself," adding that the most useful goal for artists is to attack the artistic establishment that prevents the working classes from understanding their own creative potential. (83)

The terms "technocractic" and "authoritarian" serve to highlight the concealed power differential between the designer and the end user. This much, I think, is worth granting and ruminating on (and possibly even connecting to, say, the current design-driven power dynamic in the Music Production/Distribution sector, where those thought to possess privileged knowledge of packaging methods exert strong gravitational pull on the scarce revenue streams while content (let's understand this usage of that word as a double-usage, as in the classical duality Form-Content AND the internet-oriented sense of a Content Producer) generators are, as they always have been but not always for the same reasons, the last to get paid). All of that having been duly noted, granted, ruminated upon, etc., the concealment of such power dynamics is only sometimes, or only partially, attributable to power's own interests/objectives; in the case of Functionalist design, I would say they are concealed in part because they are unavoidable. It is indeed perfectly accessible to the rhetorical "working classes" to paint murals on the walls of their apartments; it is rather less accessible but not insurmountably so for them to produce and distribute their own sound recordings; but it is scarcely possible for them to design and build the apartment building, the audio editing software, or the Internet themselves; and much more to the point, neither is it necessary for them to do so, unless they experience a Foucauldian level of anxiety over the fact that the specialists in design and construction of each of these items hold, it is true, some modicum of power over them. And so, again having granted the mere fact that such dynamics do in fact exist, it is a long way from there to technocracy and authoritarianism, these sorts of terms representing (or they did before people began throwing them around carelessly) a sort of total-ness of top-down power, complete with mechanisms of accountability which flow in only one direction. Obviously I need to brush up on architectural functionalism, because it seems from a distance that it could not possibly have risen to this level.

...Jorn produced so many more murals in private settings throughout his life; the Kindergarten and Bregnerød house were the exceptions. Unlike the 1930s murals of Le Corbusier, his were meant to inspire in the broadest possible sense, rather than to instruct or to enforce social ideals upon a population. For this reason, the gestural nature of both sets of murals was essential to their message of free expression. In rendering personal expression at a public scale, they broke down the strict opposition of public and private space, countering the ideals of public order inherent in the architecture with a seemingly chaotic organicism. The unprecendented combination of automatic drawing, popular motifs, and dynamic monumental imagery at Bregnerød created an aesthetic tension that suggests the mutual interdependence of collective space and personal expression, the situation Nancy describes as "being singular plural." (84)

So, the Direct Path of "instruct[ion]" is eschewed in favor of "inspir[ation]," ostensibly similar to Eu. Rousseau's opposition of intellectual understanding and emotional realization, of just telling a student the answer versus optimizing conditions for them to arrive at the answer themselves. There is indeed much to be said for this idea, but there's no disputing that it progressively loses its appeal as the scale of interaction is increased, i.e. as the range and quantity of distinct outcomes vis-a-vis individual social agents eventually increase enough to become intractable. Hence if a word as strong as "enforce" is occasionally (or, uh, perhaps all too frequently) appealed to, this reflects the necessity of both reductionism and brute force (hopefully merely of the rhetorical variety) in any mass-/macro-scale communication; these are the techniques which yield tractable outcomes. The theory of "free expression" that is presented here forfeits this tractability in exchange for liberation, but not for progress; or not UNLESS one believes in an exceedingly optimistic human nature which simply needs to be unleashed without being told where to go or what to do. More likely it will go everywhere all at once. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps not, but progress will not be achieved via chaos, which theorists of the latter tell us illustrates a certain Sensitivity to Initial Conditions, which is to say the rich get richer.

Perhaps those of us living now can be thankful that Jorn and others thought to pose an alternative to the comparatively naive First Wave progressivism of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet where we go from here is as unclear as ever: the enforcement-inspiration opposition presented here really only marks out the poles of a spectrum, both of which have well-known flaws and limitations. Having learned this much, we may deploy one or the other strategy and hope to learn more about the strategic deployment of each. It is nonetheless hard to imagine resolving the central problem: you can't tell people what to do, and you can't expect them to figure it out for themselves.

Questions of scale arise more specifically as the passage continues. These muralists "broke down the strict opposition of public and private space" by "rendering personal expression at public scale." Seriously?! Just because this act, for instance, highlights the public/private distinction, displays a certain irreverence for it, invites consideration of its nature and implications, in no way necessarily encompasses as well the fait accompli that is related here. In fact the modifier "public" is a rather strange one to apply to the concept "scale," since both physical and intangible objects of all scales comprise the public sphere. As such, a "personal expression" made "public" can have all manner of implications rather independent of its physical scale. Concealed by this rhetorical maneuver is the potential that such ostensibly well-intentioned public displays of personal work reach various absolute statuses at various absolute increments of physical size (and perhaps also, but not necessarily, "scale"). Hence, the general principle enumerated here is quite suspect, and the specific case of "murals" is not exactly an ideal exemplar. The theory runs aground via the same oversight as in the previous case of "enforcement" versus "inspiration:" the sender of communication (in this case the artist) does not exert perfect control (nor anything approaching it) over its reception by any particular individual, or not unless (to recapitulate the previous issue) a degree of simplification and/or reduction is embraced which artists are generally loathe to even consider (and certainly Jorn's larger oeuvre as related throughout this book would give the impression that this sort of truly populist compromise was not in his vocabulary).

[from a notebook, 2018]

Consensual Art (i)

The question of gaining access to art for those who don't have it is much discussed. This series considers one species of the obverse scenario: those so exposed who don't necessarily want to be.

It is one thing to lament barriers to access from the perspective of the self-centered, self-interested practitioner/specialist and quite another to frame the access question more broadly as a social justice issue. The latter is by far the more socially graceful position, but it strains credulity in a few important ways. Practitioners have the rhetorical advantage of building their case on a specific metier with recogizable markers, whereas extracting the salient features of The Arts broadly often results in language so vague as to be ill-suited to any aim so fraught as social justice. Similarly, there is an inescapable tension between the absolute conception of access to art as a basic human need/right and the concurrent difficulties in defining boundaries and quality quite so absolutely. What does it mean to guarantee access to such an ephemeral resource? What does it mean to assert that all people need something without being able to define what exactly that something is?

The time-honored maneuver here, rhetorically as well as materially, is to escape into firmer boundaries and more objective standards. A unified Arts front can earn broad political currency this way, but only at the expense of reproducing formerly external barriers as internecine meta-politics within the coalition itself, where the staggering diversity of practices inevitably fit unequally into the framework.¹ The Way Things Are becomes ensconced in rubrics and syllabi simply because it is tractable enough to lend itself to the task, whereas The Way Things Might Be has to win acceptance the old-fashioned way in a marketplace of ideas that is overregulated and gerontocratic.

No such abstract ideals as social justice are realized any other way than through particular people and actions, and so in the end art and artists must proactively make good on the lofty rhetoric of access rather than merely clinging to a blind faith in it. Here I want to draw attention to the old saw about "freedom to..." and "freedom from...", to the question of whether a right to do something is also a right not to do it. Can political processes be both compulsory and democratic? Your answer might be different regarding large-scale, top-down processes like federal elections than it is regarding the smaller-scale, bottom-up, day-to-day goings on of the neighborhood or the subway. Impositions which are expensive, fraught, visible, and issuing from centralized authority have a way of sucking up all the discursive air on this point; yet big-city dwellers pass through myriad subtler gradients of latent/potential power every day. We can allow other drivers to merge or we can stubbornly hang them out to dry; we can use headphones on the bus or we can treat the entire ridership to our latest virtual mixtape. This is the Long Tail of decentralized power which in absence of broadly-shared standards of comportment can easily add up to a mosaic of repression and discontent. It is the type of thing that led Lewis Mumford to compare us to lab rats in psychological experiments on overcrowding. Those of us firmly inclined towards city living so as to be undeterred by such alarmism have many good counter-rationalizations at our disposal: the case is overstated; humans are not rats; dispersion, like density, can be maddening; good design can redeem or doom either modality; the rat race can be invigorating in both its best and worst moments. We can thereby problematize the master narrative of Garden Cityism, but we can't deny that there are bound to be moments in every city dweller's life when the walls indeed close in and latent potentials for conflict are actualized in an instant. If this is not quite as serious as living under an authoritarian regime (or in a rat cage), neither is it quite as good as democracy can be; and if artists more so than almost any others must accept this baseline level of social friction as an unavoidable tradeoff for gaining a foothold in our native habitat, then we are also social actors in real-life cities who have a role to play in the habitability of those cities. How our work fits (or doesn't) into this balancing act says more about us than aesthetics or poetics ever could.

I insist on treating the issue of art in public space as an "obverse" of the access issue (Art in Political space, if you will) not because that is the best or only way to approach it but because of this particular connection between democracy and abstention, between centralized and dispersed repression. The right to impose artistic standards and boundaries inheres at the individual level; projected to the institutional level it becomes disenfranchising. And even before the individual judges, s/he must consent to the experience. Art which is less-than-fully consensual in any of these respects is less-than-fully democratic. This is as true of street-level transactions as it is of Ivory Tower ones.

I hope this makes clearer that the differences among The Arts matter as much as do the similarities; that getting more art into public space is not the same as more music, more sculpture, more theater, etc.; that getting "good" art into public space is a task which confounds democratic processes, since democracy requires some bedrock of objectivity on which to build a consensus; and that such grounding in soft-scientific objectivity is deeply at odds with how the artistic ecosystems of free societies sustain themselves. When art enters public space it does so as a byproduct of blunt majoritarian compromise, be that process formal or informal, macro or micro. I see this bluntness as very much at odds with the professed altruism of so many art and artists, and I see potential resolutions of this tension hiding in plain sight.

1. For a prosaic instance of said meta-politicking, see section heading "Defining The Arts" here. For a rather chilling effort at total quanitification, see here. Of course music can come out ahead by virtue of its technical complexity, or it can be summarily dispensed with for its weakness as a vessel for the delivery of narrative. As Marv Albert said, "You fake the call."