Some worthy bloggerel returned by the google searches
"lasch elites site:blogspot.com"
and
"lasch minimal self site:blogspot.com"
:
from Russell Arben Fox
Left (not Liberal) Conservatism (or Communitarianism, if you Prefer): A Restatement
Lasch's taking of his populist synthesis of a conservative or communitarian concern for place, tradition, and culture, on the one hand, and the leftist concern for equality and empowerment, on the other, in the direction of the arts is, I think, a much truer way of expressing the potential of this ideological construct than by simply endorsing strong welfare provisions and strong immigration restrictions at the same time. The latter is simply a grab-bag of policy positions that can be construed as representing the interests of some particular demographic quadrant of society, however historically important such a constellation of priorities may have appeared to Cold War American intellectuals at the time. The former, by contrast, can, when pushed, be revealed to incorporate a deep engagement with political and social theory, far more than loose talk about the consequences of the rise of immigration and the decline of unions....
If the focus of leftism is not simply liberal redistribution, welfare payments, and the recognition of private subjectivities, but rather the public democratization of the social and economic order as a whole, then any movement that is so readily interwoven into the therapeutic managerialism of the corporate and knowledge class, such that Lasch so effectively identified and condemned, has to give believers in real economic democracy pause. And that would include left conservatives. Not so much--as one making use of Kaufmann's articulation of the term might think--because this kind of intersectionality challenges deeply felt ethnic, racial, or sexual hierarchies and thereby troubles our national community. That isn't, I think, a left conservative concern that is worthy of the name. Rather, a Laschian left conservative would recognize that any kind of reform movement, much less a revolutionary one, which allows itself to get centered around emotional or psychological abstractions, as opposed to the material realities of actual social and economic inequalities, whether in education or publishing or policing or anything else, is likely to captured by the forces of capital, and channeled into disputes that, whatever their legitimate need for resolution, will once again fail to connect with the communities where people live, the material lives they live there, and the traditions they build through those lives.
Here is an older post from Professor Fox on the difference between much of what today is labeled "conservative" and
actually trying to "conserve" something substantive.
from Tanner Greer
Changing a Political System That Is Rigged Against You
(Evidently this blog has departed for greener hyperpastures, but I seem to have once accessed this post, somehow, without leaving the Blogspot, so I'm counting it on my current bingo card.)
The phrase "despotism of individualism," attributed here to Tocqueville and likened to the more recent coinage "a crisis of social capital," seems to encapsulate one of the main challenges to accepting a fully "individualistic" conception of the arts. A major theme of my recent posts here has been to suggest that "the arts," or at least certain among them, can tolerate this kind of fragmentation much better than can society broadly. It would not be absurd to suggest, in fact, that certain arts require this. I think that certain people (an irreducible minority of people) might require it too. But this explodes the conversation in more disciplinary directions than I am presently capable of seeing through to their satisfactory conclusions.
Fox is onto the same problem, I think, in his observation that
the populism which Lasch called for--a populism that was, itself, distinctly left-conservative, at least if we hold to the idea that one can put together both an insistence upon the equal empowerment, in social and economic terms, of all communities, and an equal respect for the local norms and traditions which democratic majorities within those communities wish to live in accordance with--was never nationalist, never statist, and certainly never ethnic. It was, if anything, both cognizant of (even, in a way that many conservatives never are, respectful of) the moral opportunities which which modern subjectivity and the liberation of the individual self had made possible, while insistent upon the need to never valorize such liberal possibilities as foundational.
Greer closes with the admonition,
Until subjects learn to be citizens real progress will not be made.This strikes me as great advice in general, and I would aspire that the framework I have laid out here for considering reception as itself a "practice" might, pending some development and refinement, be seen as one instance of this broader idea rather than merely an esoteric or specialist conceit. Failing that, I would be content to eliminate the charge of "self-indulgence" from aesthetic discourse and return it to its proper bailywick in the area of personal conduct.
from Bentley Rumble
THINK ABOUT IT #22: Christopher Lasch
wherein we are linked to
ON THE MORAL VISION OF DEMOCRACY (A Conversation With Christopher Lasch)
BM - Is democracy in worse shape now than it has ever been?
CL - I don't know about that. What I am saying is that it is not in very good shape.
BM - Can you point to a time when it was in better shape?
CL - That would be futile.
BM - Maybe it is the case the democracy is not designed to work very well.
CL - That is one argument. Another is that democracy is better than any of its alternatives, even though it doesn't work very well.
BM - Do you buy that?
CL - Well sure, who wouldn't? But that is not an argument that is going to get you very far.
BM - What is the essence of democracy for you?
CL - What interests me is that in the early iterations of democratic theory it was understood that you had to have certain preconditions in order to make democracy work, the most important of which was the wide distribution of property ownership. Democracy was based on small property and the responsibility that went along with that for the formation of certain habits of mind and character development. This was the necessary basis of democratic citizenship, a view clearly articulated for example in Jefferson. It comes out again in the suffrage debates in the middle of the 19th century. Suffrage qualifications were removed only because it was believed that property was sufficiently widely distributed to make restrictions on voting unnecessary. Now, what happens in a society where we have a permanent wage earning class? This develops a servile rather than an independent state of mind. The central question now is: What is going to substitute for the small property owner in our democratic polity? That is a question that is not being addressed very well.
Compared to the white-hot prose and brilliant-but-disjointed structure of The Revolt of the Elites, this exchange gets more clearly and directly at an aspect of Lasch's thought which is the basis for his most fervent admirers and most adamant detractors.
At least one Blogspotter I chanced upon has allowed themselves to conflate the Jeffersonian Ideal with the modern suburb. But here Lasch is explicit.
We are accustomed to thinking that the suburbs are the solution to the problem of the cities. We need to recognize that in the deepest sense they are the cause of the problem and not the solution. Suburbs institutionalize a false idea of freedom as social mobility, as climbing out of one's class. They dramatize the dangerous freedom that drains talent and wealth and imagination away. To say that our ideal of freedom is above all a suburban ideal is to give it palpable shape; it helps us understand more explicitly than any other image what's wrong with it....
BM - Have you then become a man of the right?
CL - People sometimes say I have. And there are obviously some forms of conservatism I espouse. But if I have to be labelled I would prefer to be called a populist. That is an ambiguous term to be sure and can give rise to all sorts of misunderstandings. I readily admit populism can be reactionary. Nor has it been successful at countering bad economic programs with good ones of its own. I use the term primarily to recapture a moral vision that has been largely lost in modern society. It is, first of all, a useful way of criticizing the pretensions of progress and also a way of setting in relief certain values I cherish: a sense of limits, a respect for the accomplishments and aspirations of ordinary people, a realistic appraisal of life's possibilities, genuine hope without utopianism which trusts life without denying its tragic character. Populism, however ideally we might want to reconstruct it, does not offer a ready made solution to our multiple ills. I think, however, it asks the right questions. And it comes closest to answering the question about civic virtue. Above all, it is connected to a moral tradition. For this reason alone we cannot let it go out of fashion.
On a personal level, this passage resonates deeply while also laying bare some fundamental tensions. (Both inner and outer tensions, to be sure.)
from William Harryman
Joseph E. Davis - The Shifting Experience of Self: A Bibliographic Essay
The unfortunate irony here is that something like the "automaticity juggernaut" is very much in evidence in the Freudian Lasch's account of the arts.
The flattening out of subjectivity—the notion that persons do not possess much depth of private interior space—across these fields of study is symptomatic of a larger cultural movement that is animated by both ideas and everyday realities.3 The most obvious theoretical development involves the many influential efforts to displace the substantial self or psyche at the heart of modern philosophy and modern individualism. Some, for example, drawing on poststructuralist theories of language and representation, have attacked modern subjectivity as an ideological fiction. ... An early expositor of this position, French philosopher Michel Foucault, once famously wrote, “Man is an invention of recent date” and a figure that quite possibly would “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”4 This theoretical exercise, for a time carried out under the rubric of postmodernism, lives on in some parts of the academy, though now often expressed in less radical forms. However, the normative attack on selfhood should not be confused with and allowed to obscure important descriptive studies of the changing locus of subjectivity and its consequences. A flatter, more “exteriorized” or disbursed subjectivity is not just an abstract image from social theory but an experience from everyday life. That experience is also an important reason why the “dispelling of inwardness,” to borrow novelist Marilynne Robinson’s phrase, has gained such a grip on the human sciences and on our collective imagination.
Again, Lasch's Freudian period looks quite enigmatic against this wider backdrop. He seeks to recover a
depth of private interior space,to resurrect the subject which had previously died, to rescue this subject from the
more “exteriorized” or disbursed subjectivitywhich indeed
lives on in some parts of the academy.What is enigmatic about this project, though, is that it is intensely
normativein its plan of
attack.I'm actually quite confused as to which faction this word refers to in the above passage, but it is clear in any case that it is one of the key concepts for evaluating any of the competing schools of thought in this area. In Lasch's case, this normativity is, I do think, a bit too all-consuming. And I suspect, though I must beg off of attempting to prove, that this is a larger tendency across much of his work, rather than a mere diversion which is confined to his (paradoxically) most widely read but also most problematic two books. (This latter evaluation I am lifting from a Blogspotter whose Blogspot I have unfortnately failed to record. I would not have thought to put it so bluntly, but it strikes me as accurate.) It is not just a product of his diversion into Freudianism, which in this light in fact has less the look of a mere diversion and more that of a desperate but earnest search for angles in on one of the more vexing questions of his time.
scholars have noted a shift away from “depth” in a wide variety of contexts. In a celebrated 1984 essay, for example, the literary theorist Fredric Jameson argued that theoretical discourses in art, architecture, music, and literary criticism had repudiated “fundamental depth models” of subjectivity, including the “hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside,” and the “existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity.” ... In the same year, the historian Christopher Lasch described the “minimalist aesthetic” of art and literature that arose in the 1950s and 1960s as a “flight from selfhood,” a “turning away from the interior world,...
Jameson and Lasch may have published in the same year, but are we sure they were writing about (any of?) the same people or works? (Oddly, I made it out of CalArts without reading Jameson and still have not caught up.)
In Mediated, Thomas de Zengotita explores many features of daily life to show how our ubiquitous representational technologies have created a “society of surfaces” that is having unprecedented consequences on self and socialization. Our world, he argues, now comes to us thoroughly mediated, predigested and packaged in images, and addressed to us as an endless flow of flattering, experiential options. Negotiating the flow requires a “certain kind of very flexible self-awareness that depends on habitual reflexivity about emotions and relationships” and is a lot like method acting. Children come earlier and earlier to this elaborate and ironic self-consciousness, which is incompatible with the “stillness of depth” but is quite adaptive for maintaining a life of perpetual motion—“living in the moment,” keeping options open, improvising social performances from a tool kit of adaptable postures.
I will definitely be stealing that.
The irony (or paradox, or tension...) being again that both Lasch's "narcissism" thesis and his anti-individualistic streak operate very much on the surface level of artworks, at the direct expense of their depth, as I have tried to show.
Whenever Lasch is explicitly "taking" these tendencies "in the direction of the arts," as Fox has put it, the discourse becomes permanently mired on the artistic "surface," which is then read in too facile and too literal a fashion. The countervailing tendency of "Cultural Studies" to ascribe a certain depth of engagement to everyone, always also strikes me as dangeously total, flattening, and overbroad. We need to continue to flesh out our ability to identify when, how, and why depth matters, such that orders of engagement and achievement and discernment are not deconstructed out of everyday experience or "cancelled" by the lunatic fringe of wokism; but we must pursue this without playing politics or instrumentalizing the results. It's the second part that's harder than the first part. It is this political and instrumentalizing turn that enables lunatics to sound just rational enough, sometimes, in hungering for scorched earth. Rather than acceding, we should just stop giving them the ammunition.
In her study of social criticism and self-help literature, In Conflict No Longer: Self and Society in Contemporary America, sociologist Irene Taviss Thomson shows that relationships have become “constitutive of the self.” This does not mean that groups or communities as such have become primary. Individuals are not simply a part of relationships; they “have” relationships and so retain a distance from them. Moreover, many of these relationships, as other writers note, are not centered in any local community but are widely disbursed and maintained through electronic communications—think Facebook again. The idea of a relational self, rather, is that in a highly fluid social environment, individuals develop a unique and flexible configuration of groups and relationships with which they identify and through which they fashion and anchor their sense of self. This experience, according to Thomson, is other-directed—acutely attentive to what is socially appropriate and adapting to each context of interaction—and self-reflexive. Individuals immerse themselves in relationships yet are also ready to disaffiliate from others as they self-consciously negotiate their multiple social worlds.
A better argument against so-called "relational aesthetics" could not be made.
certain broad trends do stand out that together suggest not the “death of the subject” or even the “twilight of subjectivity,” as in the postmodern formulations, but rather an “exteriorization” of subjectivity.9
from Favereys
Barbara Ehrenreich and the ethics of dying
the Lasch narrative—that it was the despair at not really being able to change anything in this society that made people turn to themselves and this narcissist construction of the perfect body and perfect mind....
[BE] I don’t know where we go from here. I think the idea of the self has to be really reexamined. I’m not a Buddhist—Buddhists would have a good rap on this that I should learn—but the self was an invention that’s only about 400 years old. This is a new idea. This notion of the individual self, as opposed to other individual selves, is a recent one. We have to get beyond it.
J : You also seem very wary of the concept of the self and argue that, in many ways, it’s just the religious soul modernized.
BE : Historically, the soul, which was also at one point an invention, the term became secularized as the self. It is a major concern of, say, psychotherapy. When you go to a therapist, you don’t talk about how the world needs to change or systems of oppression, you talk about minute feelings about these things instead. It’s all self, self, self.
J : This notion of wellness that you home in on is inherently classed. As wellness has really taken hold, it seems impossible to break away from this reality that in order to truly seem healthy you also need to be wealthy....
BE : I think there’s some truth to that in reality too, not just the realm of wellness. There’s a big difference in mortality between rich and poor, between even rich white men and poor white men. That probably has to do with better nutrition and less stress. The working class person today may have no job, may have three jobs, may have jobs in many cases where they’re just on-call with no regular schedule. When you’re on call, you can’t plan anything like child care. It’s extremely stressful, and one way of handling stress, which is deeply disapproved of by the social class I more or less inhabit, is smoking. Weirdly enough that becomes a form of self-nurturance for people who can’t take afford to take a holiday in the Bahamas or wherever.
[BE] I think that a movement should be developing mutual care; a social movement itself should not be about self-care. It’s right to say, and I say it to a lot of people: Don’t burn out. This is a long struggle. Just do what you can but be sure to get enough sleep, enough to eat, and have some fun now and then. But I think that these are thing also that we can do in a more solidaristic way than just say “Oh, go home and do some self-care.” We could talk to each other, we could have more parties and celebrations, we could do more dancing. I know this sounds a little crazy, but I think that it’s something that’s very much missing in our lives.(cont. from above)
J: I’ve noticed that as women’s publications have embraced self-care, they’ve replaced their health sections with wellness sections instead…
BE : Oh yes, health had to go. Health is lower-class.
J : Yeah, definitely. In the book, you note that health, or the absence of disease, is no longer enough, you also have to be well. Why do you think it is that this incredibly classed concept has such currency, especially in women’s publications?
BE : Wellness edged out health because health had this unpleasant meaning of the absence of disease and we don’t even want to mention disease. Wellness is the upper-class version. We have such a class divide in our society that we can’t have one word that covers even a sort of biological or mental condition of both the upper and lower classes. Wellness had to be carved out as something new, something boutiquey, special, and expensive.
Now, wellness has another meaning if you’re a worker, blue- or white-collar; your employer might institute a “wellness program.” All that means is that they want to do surveillance. They had the idea that they could cut their expenses on health insurance if they can monitor the health of employees. It’s mostly about getting their weight down, frankly. Sometimes blood pressure is involved. One of the ironies here is that studies have not found any effect on health insurance expenditures for companies that do this. But anyway, for the lower classes, wellness is a really scary word because if you don’t participate in a company wellness program, you can be fined.
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