tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post6728751475480489352..comments2024-03-27T18:45:16.950-07:00Comments on Fickle Ears: Mumford -- Art and Technics (iii)Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-58465242664364951182024-03-23T18:20:17.485-07:002024-03-23T18:20:17.485-07:00Frederick Crews
Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, ...Frederick Crews<br /><i>Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method</i><br />(1975)<br /><br /><br />[173]<br /><i>"it would not be altogether perverse to suggest that ego psychology makes the problem of reductionism harder to recognize and address. The very sophistication of recent doctrine may allow its spokesman to forget what Freud usually remembered, that the secret of artistic genius is beyond his science. A theory like Ernst Kris's, which depicts creativity as playfully controlled regression, comes just near enough to accommodating artistic freedom to convince the critic that he can put reductionism behind him and deal with art in all its fullness. In actuality he is still bound to a largely passive and defensive conception of mind—one that omits or minimizes exactly that drive toward perfection of form that distinguishes the artist from the ordinary neurotic."</i>Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-68714884023422617702023-01-21T17:19:06.524-08:002023-01-21T17:19:06.524-08:00Paul Goodman
Utopian Essays and Practical Proposal...Paul Goodman<br /><i>Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals</i><br />(1962)<br /><br />"What is a picture?"<br />(pp. 182-190)<br /><br />[187] <i>"Such pure gesture sophisticatedly recalls the painting of children or aboriginal petroglyphs in what fascinates us is not the painted product but the transmitted action, the sense of the painter painting."</i>Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-17283168352135336712022-12-28T13:59:51.516-08:002022-12-28T13:59:51.516-08:00Martin Green
New York 1913: The Armory Show and th...Martin Green<br /><i>New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant</i><br />(1990)<br /><br /><i>"This was a guerilla war against the bourgeois class and its hegemony, its representatives in the ateliers, its Renaissance traditions, and its Greek and Roman heritage. The great talents in a sense refused to be adults and citizens; they allied themselves to children, to primitives, to madmen, and against the dominant gender, race, and class. They denied reality via their denial of realism."</i><br />(p. 38)<br /><br />(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2022/12/martin-greennew-york-1913.html" rel="nofollow">more</a>)Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-38631742830667966902022-06-10T11:01:43.609-07:002022-06-10T11:01:43.609-07:00Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1...Christopher Lasch<br /><i>The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:<br />The Intellectual as a Social Type</i><br />(1965)<br /><br />For Randolph Bourne,<br /><i>"The key to politics was the process of aging. The root of social disorder was seen not as oppression but repression: the destruction of freedom and spontaneity which was necessary to make children into adults. It was at this point that Bourne's analysis coincided with John Dewey's, Jane Addams's, and the progressive educators in general. It also ran parallel, for a while, to Sigmund Freud's, although how closely Bourne knew Freud's work, if he knew it at all first hand, is not clear. The very fact that the point should be in doubt suggests what is indeed amply confirmed by other evidence, that the concept of the child as a different order of being from the adult—and in some respects a superior order of being—did not owe its existence to Freud. It was rather the general intellectual property of the age."</i><br /><br />(pp. 85-86)<br /><br />(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2022/06/laschan-autonomous-youth-culture.html" rel="nofollow">more</a>)Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-12950447278612173632022-05-09T16:43:44.836-07:002022-05-09T16:43:44.836-07:00Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progre...Christopher Lasch<br /><i>The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics</i> (1991)<br /><br />[91]<br /><i>"For the Romantic poets in general, innocence was "valuable for what it might become," as Peter Coveney aptly puts it. With the Victorians, however, the emphasis shifted "toward the state of innocence itself, not as a resilient expression of man's potential integrity, but as something statically juxtaposed to experience, and not so much static as actually in retreat.<br /><br />"This retreat found its definitive symbol in the deathbed scene, increasingly obligatory in novels aspiring to any sort of popularity, in which a child neglected, oppressed, or shamefully deserted by those who should have served as its protectors expires without a word of reproach—itself the ultimate reproach... In the world of Victorian and post-Victorian melodrama, innocence had only one role: to die as heartrendingly as possible. ...<br />[92]<br />...it was Marie Corelli, in </i>The Mighty Atom<i> (1896), who most fully revealed its significance when she asked "whether for many a child it would not have been happiest never to have grown up at all." She advised her readers not to "grieve for the fair legions of beloved children who have passed away in their childhood," since "we know, even without the aid of Gospel comfort, that it is 'far better' with them so." The idea that children are better off dead casts an unexpectedly lurid light on the nineteenth-century cult of childhood, which held children up to adoration but denied them any compellingly imagined possibility of development, in which early experience would continue to inform adult perceptions. An impoverished view of adulthood, this ostensibly sympathetic view of childhood also falsified the very thing it purported to celebrate, attributing to children Peter Pan's wish "always to be a boy and have fun," a wish that only jaded, embittered adults could have conceived."</i>Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-91670539912440410112021-10-22T20:03:34.546-07:002021-10-22T20:03:34.546-07:00William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communi...William Stephenson<br /><i>The Play Theory of Mass Communication</i><br />(1987 edition)<br />(orig. 1967)<br /><br /><i>"Pope wrote with no thought of hurt or gain...he was having fun, as a child has when it plays. If we are so minded, and so open to joy, reading the poem gives us the selfsame satisfactions. And this is the core of our theory."</i><br />(pp. 199-200)<br /><br />More:<br />http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/10/stephenson-ptmcwork-and-play-and-work.htmlStefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-38680402303108942192021-04-16T19:16:52.904-07:002021-04-16T19:16:52.904-07:00Richard Sennett
The Fall of Public Man
(1977)
&qu...Richard Sennett<br /><i>The Fall of Public Man</i><br />(1977)<br /><br /><i>"The immense literature on play tends to fall in two schools. One treats play as a form of cognitive activity; it examines how children form symbols through their play and how these symbols become more complex as children at play grow older. The other school treats play as behavior, is less concerned with symbol formation, and concentrates on how children learn cooperation, express aggression, and tolerate frustration through playing together.<br /><br />"Those in the cognitive camp have occasionally shown an interest in the relationship of play to creative work, but these forays have suffered on two accounts. One is that many writers have identified play and "the creative act" as virtually synonymous; the strict adherents of Freud have done so in imitation of such sentiments as the following from their master:</i><br /><br />The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously, that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion, while separating it sharply from reality. . . .<br /><br /><i>—a dictum which led Freud to the conclusion that<br /><br /></i>The opposite of play is not what is serious but what it real.<i><br /><br />Those whose studies of play have led them question this Freudian opposition of play-creativity to reality often phrase their arguments in equal if opposite terms. Play and creativity are spoken of as "at work in reality, not on it," as a process of drawing logical connections which cannot be drawn by the particular processes of deductive logic, and so forth. But the play and creativity are spoken of interchangeably still. Thus it becomes difficult to distinguish the specific qualitative differences between a child who, banging on the black keys of the piano, suddenly discovers they form a pentatonic scale, and Debussy, who, one summer doing finger exercises, discovers possibilities in the pentatonic scale none of his contemporaries had before imagined. To say the two activities are similar in kind easily meshes into saying they are "fundamentally" the same, and then an essential quality in each realm becomes obscured: judgment. If Debussy is "fundamentally" playing around the same way as a child, the quality of his judgment about his experiments with the pentatonic scale is obliterated; "any child could do it." But the point is, no child could."</i><br /><br />(p. 316)Stefan Kachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com