Rank—Art and Artist (iib)—The Inessentiality of Biography (b)

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[379] One of the radical mistakes made by most ordinary biographies and by psychography is the notion of a parallelism between experience and creation.

This certainly exists, if not causally, at least phenomenally connected. [sic] Quite as important, however, or even more so, is the opposition of life and creation, which has been emphasized, but not understood, since this is impossible without taking account of the creative feeling of guilt.

It is significant that many of the greatest artists (though by no means all) have a strong bourgeois tinge, and Kretschmer, in his study of men of genius, declared that genius needs a strong touch of conventionality.

Many whose work is of the highest value and who live wholly in their art lead a very simple, ordinary life, and this purely human side often comes to the surface in their work, in contrast to the divine quality of genius.

The Muse, too, whose idealization by the poet himself and whose apotheosis in the mother-principle by the psychographer look so fine, often comes off badly enough in real life. Not only that she

[380]

has to endure, even enjoy, the moods of the divinely inspired master, but she very often becomes for the artist a symbol of an ideology that is no longer adequate, which she may have helped him to create, but which he has now to overcome and throw overboard.

In that case... the artist is both unable to create without her and prevented by her presence from any further creation. His inclination may be to let her go, along with the earlier ideology, but his guilt-feeling will not allow it. ...

Not only will the artist who finds a creative issue from this conflict show its traces in his work, but his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself, whose solution has to be justified as much as the failure to reach a solution would have to be.

This is unsatisfying given everything that has preceded it.

his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself

If biography is "inessential" here, then what exactly is meant by expression ?

Chomsky—Politics of Accommodation

Noam Chomsky
American Power and the New Mandarins
(1967)

[9] By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one's humanity. This is the feeling I find almost impossible to repress when going through the motions of building a case against the American war in Vietnam. Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case that is overwhelming... In an important way, by doing so he degrades himself, and insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness. There may have been a time when American policy in Vietnam was a debatable matter. This time is long past. It is no more debatable than the Italian war in Abyssinia or the Russian suppression of Hungarian freedom. The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction—all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured.

...

[10] I suppose this is the first time in history that a nation has so openly and publicly exhibited its own war crimes. Perhaps this shows how well our free institutions function. Or does it simply show how immune we have become to suffering? Probably the latter. So at least it would seem, when we observe how opposition to the war has grown in recent months. There is no doubt that the primary cause for this opposition is that the cost of the war is too great, unacceptable. It is deplorable, but nonetheless true, that what has changed American public opinion and the domestic political picture is not the efforts of the "peace movement"—still less the declarations of any political spokesmen—but rather the Vietnamese resistance, which simply will not yield to American force. What is more, the "responsible" attitude is that opposition to the war on grounds of cost is not, as I have said, deplorable, but rather admirable, in keeping with the genius of American politics. American politics is a politics of accommodation that successfully excludes moral considerations. Therefore it is quite proper—a further demonstration of our superior acuity—that only pragmatic considerations of cost and utility guide our actions.

Lasch—The Scale-Victimry Nexus

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

Everyday life has come to present itself as a succession of crises not necessarily because it is more risky and competitive than it used to be but because it confronts people with manageable stresses, whereas the hope of preventing public disaster appears so remote, for most people, that it enters their thoughts only in the form of a wistful prayer for peace and brotherhood.
(p. 64)


Our perception not only of the past and the future but of the present has been colored by a new awareness of extremes. We think of ourselves both as survivors and as victims or potential victims. The growing belief that we are all victimized, in one way or another, by events beyond our control owes much of its power not just to the general feeling that we live in a dangerous world dominated by large organizations but to the memory of specific events in twentieth-century history that have victimized people on a mass scale. Like the idea of survival, the idea of victimization, inappropriately applied to everyday misfortunes, keeps this memory alive and at the same time deadens its emotional impact. Indiscriminate usage broadens the idea of victimization until it loses its meaning.
(p. 66)


...the victim has come to enjoy a certain moral superiority in our society; this moral elevation of the victim helps to account for the inflation of political rhetoric that characterizes the discourse of survivalism. Many writers have adopted a "posture of accusatory public testimony," as Werner Berthoff notes in his study of post-war poetry and fiction. Identifying themselves with the underdog, straining to speak in the voice of victims or survivors...angry young men and angry women have exposed the injustices inflicted on oppressed and exploited minorities. Political spokesmen for these groups have assumed the same role. As they vie for the privileged status of victims, they appeal not to the universal rights of citizenship but to a special experience of persecution, said to qualify their people to speak about injustice with special authority and to demand not merely their rights but reparation for past wrongs. They claim—with good reason, in some cases—to be the victims, or survivors, of genocide. Rhetorical escalation transforms the meaning of injustice; it transforms the cause of oppressed minorities into a struggle for sheer survival. In the sixties, the shift from civil rights to "black power" announced the abandonment of efforts to create a multiracial society in favor of a strategy of black survival. Spokesmen for black power accused whites of plotting the destruction of the black race through birth control and racial intermarriage. In the seventies, radical feminists took up the cry of "gynocide." Instead of seeing the distinctive features of black culture or the distinctive pattern of historically conditioned femininity as "marks of oppression," in the manner of an earlier radicalism, or on the other hand as potential sources of a flourishing new cultural pluralism, spokesmen for disenfranchised minorities have reinterpreted their history in the light of the novel experience of genocide.
(pp. 67-68)

A stray thought: this of course suggests the faux-remedy of denying/refusing victimhood, which would be justified via the same consequentialist argumentation as so many other comparable maneuvers: if we allow there to be victims, people will exploit this; if you feed the stray cat (or stray homeless human), he'll be back at your door the next evening; if you give into your kid once, you'll give in again and again; if you have unemployment insurance in your state, people won't work; etc., etc.

Whatever logical or explanatory power these suppositions might have in their respective arenas, it can still be said that they are blunt-force/blanket solutions, i.e. in most if not all cases, they are overcorrections which achieve expediency at the direct expense of precision; the OVER- part of "overcorrection" lying specifically in the consequentialism of thinking (with whatever justification) that you know exactly how the cat or the kid or the homeless person will react to a certain intervention or stimulus, and that you don't need to consider any other possibilities or any other instances of cat, kid, homeless person, etc. which might respond differently from the baseline expectation.

Lasch is a fan of rootedness in a small community, and while this doesn't solve the problem outright, it does allow us to make better predictions, i.e. to know with somewhat greater certainty how specific people might respond to intervention. It is in this sense, perhaps, that the dreaded Victim Mentality, such a hot-button issue then and still now, is itself very much a product of so-called "mass" society, the mass being at present ca. 8 billion.

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I certainly am inclined toward seeing the distinctive features of historically oppressed cultural groups as marks of oppression, not so much because this is what they look like on the surface as because of the particular contradictions which emerge when their advocates attempt to rationalize them. Instead, on the other hand, we are indeed being treated to a new cultural pluralism, which is flourishing only in the sense of successful self-propagation across many areas of mass culture. No one really flourishes, however, as long as this pluralism is based on superficial traits rather than deep ones.

Lasch—Crises of Competence

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

[84] Dewey's exchange with Lippman raises the disturbing question of whether democracy implies high standards of personal conduct. Unlike many contemporary liberals, Dewey clearly thought it did. ... Like other progressive thinkers...Dewey was bent on refuting critics of democracy who claimed that it fostered mediocrity, self-indulgence, an excess love of comfort, sloppy workmanship, and a timid conformity to prevailing opinion. The idea that democracy is incompatible with excellence, that high standards are inherently elitist (or, as we would say today, sexist, racist, and so on) has always been the best argument against it. Unfortunately many democrats secretly (or not so secretly) share this belief and are therefore unable to answer it. Instead they fall back on the claim that democratic men and women make up in tolerance what they lack in the way of character.

The latest variation on this familiar theme, its reductio ad absurdum, is that a respect for cultural diversity forbids us

[85]

to impose the standards of privileged groups on the victims of oppression. This is so clearly a recipe for universal incompetence (or at least for a disastrous split between the competent classes and the incompetent) that it is rapidly losing whatever credibility it may have had when our society (because of its abundance of land and other natural resources, combined with its chronic shortage of labor) offered a more generous margin for incompetence. The mounting evidence of widespread inefficiency and corruption, [etc., etc....a very long list of contemporary ills]...—these developments, the ominous import of which can no longer be ignored or concealed, have reopened the historic debate about democracy. ... Formally democratic institutions do not guarantee a workable social order... As conditions in American cities begin to approach those of the Third World, democracy will have to prove itself all over again.

Liberals have always taken the position that democracy can dispense with civic virtue. According to this way of thinking, it is liberal institutions, not the character of citizens, that make democracy work. Democracy is a legal system that makes it possible for people to live with their differences. The impending crisis of competence and civic trust, however, casts a heavy pall of doubt over the agree-

[86]

able assumption that institutions, as opposed to character, provide all the virtue democracy needs. The crisis of competence suggests the need for a revisionist interpretation of American history, one that stresses the degree to which liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism.

...

For all its intrinsic attractions, democracy is not an end in itself. It has to be judged by its success in producing superior goods, superior works of art and learning, a superior type of character.

...

[87] The call for models of heroism "common to all" seems to threaten the pluralism of ethical commitments that democracy is obliged to protect. In the absence of common standards, however, tolerance becomes indifference, and cultural pluralism degenerates into an aesthetic spectacle in which the curious folkways of our neighbors are savored with the relish of a connoisseur. However, our neighbors themselves, as individuals, are never held up to any kind of judgment. ... The questions that allegedly divide us beyond hope of compromise turn out to be lifestyle questions, in the jargon of the day. ... In this context, the question that really matters—How should I live?—also becomes a matter of taste... But this deeper and more difficult question, rightly understood, requires us to speak of impersonal virtues... If we believe in these things, moreover, we must be prepared to recommend them to everyone, as the moral preconditions of a good life. To refer everything to a "plurality of ethical commitments" means that we make no demands on anyone and acknowledge no

[88]

one's right to make any demands on ourselves. The suspension of judgment logically condemns us to solitude. Unless we are prepared to make demands on each other, we can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life.

So, regarding

mak[ing] no demands on anyone
,

along with

acknowledg[ing] no one's right to make any demands on ourselves
,

dare
I
ask,

chicken or egg?

Asking for a friend

(perhaps a friend who lives in a certain Upper Midwestern semi-metropolis where

tolerance becomes indifference
,

and/or

who attended a certain a boho finishing school where a

workable social order

was not

guarantee[d])

.

[88] Without these ["minimal standards of workmanship, literacy, and general competence"], we have no basis on which either to demand respect or to grant it. Common standards are absolutely indispensable to a democratic society. Societies organized around a hierarchy of privilege can afford multiple standards, but a democracy cannot. Double-standards mean second-class citizenship.

[107] When the authors of The Good Society say that "democracy means paying attention," they seek to recall us to a sense of the common good and to combat the selfish individualism that blinds us to the needs of others. But it is our reluctance to make demands on each other, much more than our reluctance to help those in need, that is sapping the strength of democracy today. We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good. In the name of sympathetic understanding, we tolerate second-rate workmanship, second-rate habits of thought, and second-rate standards of personal conduct. ... Democracy in our time is more likely die of indifference than of intolerance.