p. 53, re: William Byrd's observations of early eighteenth century Carolina -- "The little work that actually got done was performed by the female poor." And in the relevant endnote, NI adds: "The idea of women doing all the work and "husbands lie snoring in bed" is a much older theme." (p. 342) Of course my immediate reaction: you mean Hanna Rosin was not, as her publisher's blurb would have it, "the first to notice" such things just a few short years ago?! That said, one of Rosin's more prescient observations in The End of Men is that this combination of male idleness and female bootstrapping is a specifically lower-class phenomenon, and I think this raises an interesting chicken-or-the-egg question when it comes to investigating (1) how a callous disregard of the poor was/is rationalized to/by people who should know better, and (2) the many and various ways that cycles of poverty perpetuate themselves through tacit social conditioning. By which I mean, for example: under patriarchy such a state of affairs of course threatens to attract its share of organic hostility simply for swimming against the current; and at that point the shame associated with male inability or unwillingness to provide takes on a life of its own, with the potential to break subsequent generations of poor men before they've had a chance to know any other way.
"Pictorially, the ad links the most lofty sentiments of motherly devotion and sacrifice to a dream that is unconsciously crude and base. This helps to explain how it occurs that refined and idealistic women in our world are so often the mothers of ruthless men who enslave themselves to the low drudgery of avarice or who live in thrice-heated furnaces of passion for dubious distinction. The objectives of a commercial society, when filtered through the medium of maternal idealism, acquire a lethal intensity. For women don't invent the goals of society. They interpret them to their children. In her Male and Female, Dr. Mead explores the American paradox of "conditional love," showing from many points of view the emotional structuring which results, especially in boys and men, from affection that is tendered or withdrawn as a reward or penalty, at first for eating and toilet habits, later for assertiveness at school and in business. In this prevalent situation a child or adult merits love only when he is successful. The present ad is that entire drama in capsule form. But the drama is not of recent origin, as Dr. Mead is aware."
"... [Iain] Chambers [in Popular Culture] argues that in looking at popular culture, we should not subject individual signs and single texts to the "contemplative stare of official culture." Instead, it is a practice of "distracted reception" that really characterizes the subject of "popular epistemology." For Chambers, this distraction has consequences for the practice of writing. Writing can imitate popular culture (life) by, for example, "writing through quotations," and refusing to "explain...references fully." To explain would be to reimpose the contemplative stare and adopt the authority of the "academic mind." "Chambers's argument emerges from an interpretation of the history of subcultural practices, especially in music. I've argued elsewhere my disagreement with his attempt to use that history to generalize about popular culture in The Present. Here, I want to suggest that an image of the subject of pop epistemology as casual and "distracted" obliquely entails a revival of the figure that Andreas Huyssen, Tania Modleski, and Patrice Petro have described in various contexts as "mass culture as woman." Petro, in particular, further points out that the contemplation/distraction opposition is historically implicated in the construction of the "female spectator" as site, and target, of a theorization of modernity by male intellectuals in Weimar. "There are many versions of a "distraction" model available in cultural studies today: there are housewives phasing in and out of TV or flipping through magazines in laundromats as well as pop intellectuals playing with quotes. In Chambers's text, which is barely concerned with women at all, distraction is not presented as a female characteristic. Yet today's recycling of Weimar's distraction nonetheless has the "contours," in Petro's phrase, of a familiar female stereotype—distracted, absent-minded, insouciant, vague, flighty, skimming from image to image. The rush of associations turns irresistibly toward a figure of mass culture not as woman but, more specifically, as bimbo. "In the texts Petro analyzes, "contemplation" (of distraction in the cinema) is assumed to be the prerogative of male intellectual audiences. In pop epistemology, a complication is introduced via the procedures of projection and identification... The knowing subject of popular epistemology no longer contemplates mass culture as bimbo, but takes on the assumed mass cultural characteristics in the writing of his own text. Since the object of projection and identification in post-subcultural theory tends to be black music and "style" rather than the European (and literary) feminine, we find an actantial hero of knowledge emerging in the form of the white male theorist as bimbo. "However, I think the problem with the notion of pop epistemology is not really, in this case, a vestigial antifeminism in the concept of distraction. The problem is that in antiacademic pop-theory writing...a stylistic enactment of the "popular" as essentially distanced, scanning the surface, and short on attention span, performs a retrieval, at the level of enunciative practice, of the thesis of "cultural dopes." In the critique of which...the project of cultural studies effectively and rightly began."
OOFDAH. So, if the mere "contour" of someone's rhetoric so much as "obliquely entails a revival" of bygone female stereotypes, then at that point "a vestigial antifeminism" is *all up in there*, even if the text "is barely concerned with women at all"? And it makes *no difference* that said "contour" is, in the end, *not actually* "presented as a female characteristic" therein? This is pretty dicey! In the same way, so is my original post here. Regarding Morris's account (and to be clear, I know nothing of the people or the works, only the rhetoric given above), for the sake of communication remaining feasible to any degree at all, I think the surface/literal reading must be indulged on its own terms, temporarily perhaps, but for long enough at least that people can, eventually, at some point, somewhere in a far away academic land, engage in dialogue beyond mere accusations of hidden intent. Still, the "contour" is not to be ignored. We have to find some way to reckon with the contour. That task starts with naming it. The problem is that once we have named something, we great apes are not so great at keeping our contours straight from our names, our materials, our intentions... One minute we have merely "perform[ed] a retrieval at the level of enunciative practice", the next minute we have bombed our entire discipline back to its respective Stone Age (metonymized here into Weimar, which is way over my head). This is what happens when it takes one to know one, a delicious piece of children's rhetoric to which adults quickly and infinitely regress wherever know-ledge is disputed along lines of social standpoint. Woe to any epistemological messengers who might later turn up dead this way.
I've read stacks of this late-1980s gobbledygook and I've gone deep into the North American Scrabble lexicon, and still I have never seen the word "actantial" before. Turns out it's not in Scrabble at all, and not even Google is much help here. As best I can tell, what this word indicates is that Morris has triangulated her way to the dark island "white male theorist as bimbo" by conceptualizing the already-mapped islands as literary characters engaged in an agonistic, plot-bound struggle. In this episode of the dramedy Cultural Studies, she posits two characters onscreen along with a third offscreen character whose presence is unmistakably evidenced by certain other visible "contours", e.g. the fact that Black (male?!) culture tends to get most of the screen time throughout season ten of this dramedy, whereas in seasons one through nine it was femmy European literary pap onto which the white man projected (while also, oddly, identifying with it too). Long story longer, the reason mere "contour" matters, in spite of being incredibly tenuous in the conventional epistemological sense, is that "The past is never dead. It is not even past." As theorists, it is totally fair for us to say to ourselves, "I've seen this movie before and I don't like how it ends." There are, admittedly, two booby traps we set for our feeble hominid brains this way. One is the infinite regress wherein it takes one to know one. The other is the plight of Taleb's Turkey, the animal kingdom's answer to the financial analyst, who, based on a long-term retrospective trend, wakens the day before Thanksgiving confident of being well fed and cared for. And so, re: the possible genderedness of distraction and contemplation, rugged individualism and collaboration, nurturance and competition, we must always treat this genderedness as a retrospective and not a prospective construct. The gory retrospective details are themselves difficult to handle gracefully; merely pointing them out often seems to invite them into the realm of the prospective. This is not at all my intention here. Quite the opposite, actually. I think it is up to those who would affirmatively, prospectively reclaim such gendered archetypes as affirmative gender identities to convince us through their actions rather than their words that this supposed reclamation has been an affirmative choice, not to mention actually a good idea.
I am eager to dispense with all sexual divisions of labor, role, identity, etc. (this is not at all the same as dispensing with the gender binary, about which I confess I am more ambivalent), if for no other reason than that those archetypically male traits which I do exemplify seem to have become quite incompatible with the traditional male role as it is played today. In that connection, Morris' implicit location of the "contemplative stare of official culture" as male does indeed supply some useful context for all that has changed in the cultureverse since 1988. To relate this directly to some recent reading, the picture of technological postmodernity painted by Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows is one wherein any "contemplative" act worthy of the name is an inherently oppositional act, and indeed can only be achieved via a certain instrumental opposition to the technologically determined status quo. The ethic of distraction has engulfed even "official culture," and it has found, as detailed in these two books, no shortage of (mostly male) apologists. If the laboratory evidence detailed by Carr is to be believed, then contemplation is indeed a sort of epistemological privilege. It's precisely the kind of privilege that men in rigidly patriarchal societies have historically reserved for themselves. In Cultural Studies, meanwhile, it is rendered as merely one culture among many; here, the "official culture". Cultural Studies can render it as male, but not as privileged: the relativistic streak permits only the first, and not the second. This is not too helpful at this particular moment in history. Dare I say it is emblematic of the very techno-determinist, UX-flavored directions that the movement for gender equity has taken.
[15] "Among the arts of performance, there is a broad, commonly assumed distinction between the performances of High Culture, consisting in performances of musical or dramatic texts which exist independently of any production of them, and the performances of entertainment, in which the text does not have the status of a fixed referent but may be infinitely revised with cultural impunity. ...the sacredness of a "text" by Shakespeare or Tchaikovsky bears on any particular production of it in a way quite different from the responsiveness a stand-up comic brings to his performance of routines before any particular audience. Implicit in the contrast are distinctions related to the durability of the "text" and between two understandings of the concept of performance. ... The stand-up comic...is obliged to respond to his audience in exactly the way Kaplan suggests [16] the violinist does not. To carry on regardless would be, in the vernacular of vaudeville, to "die" before the audience. ...two types of performance: that of the actor, whose primary relationship is with a pre-existing text , and that of the entertainer, whose primary relationship is with the audience. Where the actor performs the text, what the entertainer does is to perform himself,... The theatrical actor attempts to disguise his presence in the act of performance,... The entertainer, by contrast, asserts his presence in the act of performance,... "The cinema might seem to occupy an ambiguous position in this typology of performance. It is in itself a fixed text, which appears to deny it the flexibility of response possessed by audience-related performances, while at the same time it does not provide the opportunity for variable interpretation provided by theatrical performance. ...two conditions of entertainment are particularly appropriate to the material form of film. First is the idea of transitoriness, which is implicit in the ephemeral nature of the cinematic image. The other is the proposition that entertainment is self-contained: "going to the movies" is an event, marked off from other activities by a sustained set of segregations. ... However well-worn the metaphor of the Dream [17] Factory may be, the dreaming state remains the most evocative analogy to the cinematic experience, suggesting as it does the contradictory position of the spectator as participant witness to a fantasy not under his or her control." (more
6. "Gilligan's Island" "The ugly side of adolescent sociability suggests that a "web of relationships" can be suffocating, inhibiting, and oppressive rather than "creative and cooperative."" (p. 130) "when feminists began to argue for their rights on the grounds that it would give "maternal influence" a wider sphere, they sacrificed moral realism to political expediency." (p. 131) (more)
Frank L. Schmidt
A General Theoretical Integrative Model of Individual Differences in Interests, Abilities, Personality Traits, and Academic and Occupational Achievement: A Commentary on Four Recent Articles
(2014)
p. 201--"Implicit within a variety of [1920s] radical tendencies was the notion that industrial society contained a liberating potential, a potential submerged and diverted by those who currently authorized and profited from it. "Ironically, it was within these critical, often anticapitalist perspectives that capitalism began to discover the building blocks with which to erect its own affirmative social imagery. We must not take lightly the assertion heard among businessmen of the twenties that in mass production and mass consumption lay the answer to the gnawing threat of what was shorthandedly termed "bolshevism." In the corporate ideology of the 1920s, the goods of the marketplace were sold to the public with the "liberating" and "democratic" lingo which had up till then been heard most loudly among those whose attack was on the corporate premise of the market economy itself." This is EXACTLY what Hanna Rosin has done within the post-industrial milieu. Some of Richard Sennett's critiques, e.g., in The Corrosion of Character and The Culture of the New Capitalism, reappear almost verbatim in The End of Men repurposed as "affirmative social imagery."
"For some people the combination of increased central control and diminished authority works brilliantly. ... "[Yet] My colleague Michael Laskaway [sic; Laskawy?] has found, among young entrepreneurs, that comfort in low-authority firms is short-lived. As middle-age looms and children, mortgages, and school fees appear, the need for structure and predictability in work grows greater. Correspondingly, the employee now wants someone above who is responsive to the workers' own adult responsibilities." (pp. 61-62)
""All art," Oscar Wilde declared..., "is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril." The superficialities of modern society are more demeaning than the surfaces and masks of art. ... "One reason for this demeaning superficiality is the disorganization of time. Time's arrow is broken; it has no trajectory in a continually reengineered, routine-hating, short-term political economy. People feel the lack of sustained human relations and durable purposes. The people I've so far described have all tried to find the depth of time beneath the surface, if only by registering unease and anxiety about the present. "The work ethic is the arena in which the depth of experience is most challenged today. The work ethic, as we commonly understand it, asserts self-disciplined use of one's time and the value of delayed gratification. ... [Formerly, workers] worked hard and they waited; this was their psychological experience of depth. Such a work ethic depends in part on institutions stable enough for a person to practice delay. Delayed gratification loses its value, though, in a regime whose institutions change rapidly; it becomes absurd to work long and hard for an employer who thinks only about selling up and moving on. "It would be a morose sentimentalism which merely regretted the decline of hard work and of self-discipline—not to mention good grooming and respect of one's elders and all the other joys of the good old time. The serious business of the old work ethic put heavy burdens on the working self. People sought to prove their own worth through their work; in the form of "worldly asceticism," as Max Weber called it, delayed gratification could become a deeply self-destructive practice. But the modern alternative to the long discipline of time is no real remedy to this self-denial. "The modern work ethic focuses on teamwork. It celebrates sensitivity to others; it requires such "soft skills" as being a good listener and being cooperative; most of all, teamwork emphasizes team adaptibility to circumstances. Teamwork is the work ethic which suits a flexible political economy. For all the psychological heavy breathing which modern management does about office and factory teamwork, it is an ethos of work which remains on the surface of experience. Teamwork is the group practice of demeaning superficiality." (pp. 98-99)
"I've gone into this history in some detail because the disciplined use of one's time is not the simple, straightforward virtue it may at first appear. A grim, relentless struggle in the ancient world, a conundrum for Renaissance believers in homo faber, a source of self-punishment in the theology of the individual: Surely the weakening of the work ethic could be a gain for civilization. Surely we want to exorcise the furies besetting the driven man. "It depends, however, on how the weight upon the working self is lightened. Modern forms of teamwork are in many ways the opposites of the work ethic as Max Weber conceived it. An ethics of the group as opposed to the individual, teamwork emphasizes mutual responsiveness rather than personal validation. The time of teams is flexible and oriented to specific, short-term tasks, rather than the reckoning of decades marked by withholding and waiting. Teamwork, though, takes us into that domain of demeaning superficiality which besets the modern workplace. Indeed, teamwork exits the realm of tragedy to enact human relations as a farce." (p. 106)
"...she kept intruding information about how people actually drink in bars, which lay outside the purview of those who were in the loop. For instance, she mentioned that vodka is a drink of choice for people who are secret alcoholics, since they believe no one can smell they've been drinking. Her colleagues reacted to this as if it were her private knowledge, disturbing their own discussions. Specialized information often tends to jam the system of communication. In teamwork of a nonmaterial sort, where people are working together on an image, the act of communication is more important than the facts communicated; to communicate, the playing field of talk needs to be open and accessible. Once that happens, the shaping and sharing of rumor becomes the substance of collaboration. Buzz about competitors provides energy to the communication; hard facts weaken the energies of exchange. Indeed, information exchange tends to be self-exhausting; at the ad agency, the buzz about the Russian-name answer lasted only until it had been fully networked, and then the buzz about hexagonal boxing for the bottles began. "The hardest fact about this group effort was that the agency failed to get the contract. Rose expected that there would ensue a period of mutual recrimination and blame on the team, since the financial consequences for the agency were severe. Moreover, she told me, she expected people to experience "grief" at the loss, by which she meant that these hard-driven ad execs would really care about losing. But as a group, they had a different reaction, more self-protective. There was no mutual recrimination. Nor did people make an effort to justify themselves. There was no time. In a few days, the hard liquor group had moved on to another project, and moved on as a team. "A specialist in group behavior might well expect this. Groups tend to hold together through keeping to the surface of things; shared superficiality keeps people together by avoiding difficult, divisive, personal questions. ... But the ethos of communication and information-sharing gives conformity a particular twist: the emphasis on being flexible and open to change made members of the team susceptible to the slightest twitches of rumor or suggestion from others on the party-office-lunch-club network. As I have noted, New York adpersons are not corporate conformists of the tight and buttoned-up sort. In the old work culture, the corporate conformist was an all too predictable and reliable character—you knew every response. In this flexible culture of the image and its information, predictability and reliability are less salient character traits; there is no firm footing here, just as there can be no final answer to the problem vodka poses." (pp. 107-108)
"The individual caught in the toils of worldly asceticism struggles to gain power over himself or herself. More, the driven man seeks to justify himself. In the ad agency, Rose found a different work ethic suited to a firm oriented entirely to the present, its images and its surfaces. In this world, the work ethic took a different form, seemingly more collaborative than individual in its terms, and we might say more forgiving. "Yet it is not quite so benign. People still play games of power in teams, but the emphasis on soft skills of communication, facilitation, and mediation changes radically one aspect of power: authority disappears, authority of the sort which self-confidently proclaims, "This is the right way!" or "Obey me, because I know what I'm talking about!" The person with power does not justify command; the powerful only "facilitate," enable others. Such power without authority disorients employees; they may still feel driven to justify themselves, but now there is no one higher up who responds. Calvin's God has fled." (p. 109)
pp. 56-57—on "the right to association by affinity" —"The open, polynuclear family abolishes forever the patriarchal, monolithic, authoritarian closed family..." (56) —"The rapid decline of [the old way]...has precipitated—and experienced the impact of—an alteration of the family in which women and children...have sprung up as the axis of social influence and exemplary awareness." (56) How many feminists does it take to posit soft sexism in the last bit? Most of them, probably; but is there any denying the veracity of this statement? Certainly not vis-a-vis "children," who are indeed accorded influence and exemplarity in spades (i.e. Filiarchy), passively as it were (they do not rule us, but we are ruled by them), but undeniably. Perhaps the "social influence" of women now only looks so dominant against the historical backdrop of the "the Christian era" (56), or perhaps Hanna Rosin is correct on this point. If the latter, she sure was not "the first to notice!!" The proof of that is right here... On this point see also p. 102—"...the economy of consumerism rehabilitated women and children, who were suddenly elevated to the promotional dignity of the market." Children because we must support them, i.e. facilitate their proper consumption! Women because...well, ask Hanna Rosin why, then try to convince yourself that these are good qualities! [from a post-it, 2018]
[subject heading: Childhood in a Narcissistic Culture] "Men lost much of their authority over children to their wives, while children gained a certain independence from both parents, not only because other authorities asserted jurisdiction over childhood but because parents lost confidence in the old rules of child-rearing and hesitated to assert their own claims in the face of professional expertise. "In the twentieth century, the advertising industry further weakened parental authority by glorifying youth. Advertising, like the service professions, insisted that parents owed their children the best of everything while insisting that they had only a rudimentary understanding of children's needs. Advertising also promoted the "emancipation" of women from household drudgery and Puritanical sexual repression. ... "These changes hardly added up to a "matriarchal" revolution, as antifeminists have sometimes claimed; nor did they even create a child-centered family in the sense of giving children a veto over their parents' authority. They freed women and children from patriarchal despotism in the home but did very little to strengthen their position in the outside world." (p. 186) What seems most important here is the insight that advertising was functionally a top-down mechanism, and that in this way it was allied with more overtly progressive- or reform-oriented intitiatives.
"Both sides [for and against affirmative action] argue on the same grounds. Both see careers open to talent as the be-all and end-all of democracy when in fact, careerism tends to undermine democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience, devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience, and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all." (p. 79) (more) (related, re: "mother wit" and "the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience")
"Unlike old-fashioned intellectuals, who tend to work by themselves and to be jealous and possessive about their ideas, the new brain workers...operate best in teams. Their "capacity to collaborate" promotes "system thinking"—the ability to see problems in their totality, to absorb the fruits of collective experimentation, and to "discern larger causes, consequences, and relationships. Since their work depends so heavily on "networking," they settle in "specialized geographical pockets" populated by people like them." (pp. 36-37) (more)
"how the California task force arrived at this finding—that is, by ignoring the reservations that were advanced by the experts on whose testimony its report was based. ...[the chairman] dismissed these reservations on the grounds that they came from "those who live only in their heads, in the intellectual." The importance of self-esteem, he said, was confirmed by our "intuitive knowledge." (p. 209) (more)
"Lately there has been a tendency for the attack on the family, like so many other fragments of the new left, to degenerate into a purely cultural movement, one aimed not so much as institutional change as at abolishing "male chauvinism." I have already criticized the illusion that a "cultural revolution," a change of heart, can serve as a substitute for politics. Here it is necessary only to add that the criticism applies with special force to feminism, since the peculiar strength of this movement is precisely its ability to dramatize specific connections between culture and politics—between the realm of production on the one hand and education, child rearing, and sexual relations on the other. It ought to be recognized, for example, that large numbers of women will not be able to enter the work force, except by slavishly imitating the careers of men, unless the nature of work undergoes a radical change. The entire conflict between "home and career" derives from the subordination of work to the relentless demands of industrial productivity. The system that forces women (and men also) to choose between home and work is the same system that demands early specialization and prolonged schooling, imposes military-like discipline in all areas of work, and forces not only factory workers but intellectual workers into a ruthless competition for meager rewards. At bottom, the "woman question" is indistinguishable from what used to be known as the social question." (p. 158)
"one has to ask with Ellul whether it is not precisely the conjunction of love and constraint that enables a child to grow up and to accept the constraints of adulthood without losing the capacity for love. It is true that children do grow up in the kibbutz and in fact develop into remarkably "well-adjusted" adults; but it is just that, their "adjustment" and their "ability to work well with others," so highly prized in the kibbutz, that may provide an ominous foretaste of our future." (p. 283)
"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." (p. 137) (more)
5. "The Sexual Division of Labor, the Decline of Civic Culture, and the Rise of the Suburbs" "In reality, full-time motherhood—the rejection of which touched off the latest wave of feminist agitation in the sixties—was something new and historically unprecedented. ... In the popular mind, the division of labor that prevailed in postwar suburbia thus came to be identified—with a corresponding loss of intellectual clarity—with the division of sexual labor in general." (p. 94) "For historians as for everybody else, work is understood as something dignified by a salary or a wage. Uncompensated activity, though it enters the historical record under the heading of "reform," is seldom recognized as a form of productive work, even when it brought women into the public world in great numbers." (p. 96) ""Isolation" was a better description of the suburban than of the urban family; and it was the rapid expansion of suburbs, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, that finally destroyed the social patterns I have tried to sketch in here—the informal system of collective self-help that made it possible, together with the availability of domestic servants, for women to take an active part in civic culture. (pp. 103-104) "[Paul Goodman's] account of the world of work should have forewarned women that they would not gain much simply by entering the work force and achieving equality with men. Once women had rejected the "feminine mystique," it was tempting to think that professional careers would solve all their problems. ... [They] began to demand access to the allegedly "creative," "fulfilling" work enjoyed by men. ... They expected professional careers to bring them emotional fulfillment. If Goodman was right, however, they would find no more meaning than men did in careers the structure of which was governed largely by the requirements of commodity production." (p. 112) "Like the advertising industry, the women's movement has taken "choice" as its slogan... In fact, however, the movement recognizes only one choice—the family in which adults work full-time in the marketplace." (p. 118) 7. "The Mismeasure of Man" "Men were not alone, after all, in their dissatisfaction with a social order in which everything was organized down to the last detail. The rationalization of daily life had similarly depressing effects on women, even though it was often held up as the means of their emancipation from domestic drudgery." (p. 147) (more)
"the psychological patterns promoted by the family are reinforced by conditions outside the family. Because those patterns seem to find their clearest expression in the pathology of narcissism, and ultimately in schizophrenia, we should not jump to the conclusion that the family produces misfits, people who cannot function efficiently in modern industrial society. In many ways it does a good job of preparing the child for the conditions he will encounter when he leaves home." (p. 177) (more)
[173] "When production becomes an integral part of life, the workman becomes an artist. It is the definition of an artist that he follows the medium, and finds new possibilities of expression in it. He is not bound by the fact that things have always been made in a certain way, nor even by the fact that it is these things that have been made. Our industrialists...are very [174] much concerned these days to get "creative" people, and they make psychological studies on how to foster an "atmosphere of creativity"; but they don't sufficiently conjure with the awful possibility that truly creative people might tell them to shut up shop. They wish to use creativity in just the way that it cannot be used, for it is a process that also generates its own ends."
[36] "firms that show little loyalty to their employees elicit little commitment in return—Internet companies that ran into trouble in the early 2000s learned a bitter lesson, their employees jumping ship rather than making efforts to help the imperiled companies survive. Skeptical of institutions, new economy workers have lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago; although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished "social capital," in his celebrated book Bowling Alone, as the result of television culture and the consumerist ethic; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to people's experiences at work." (more)
"Obliged to conciliate or manipulate a variety of people, the other-directed person handles all men as customers who are always right; but he must do this with the uneasy realization that, as Everett Hughes has put it, some are more right than others. This diversity of roles to be taken with a diversity of customers is not institutionalized or clear cut, and the other-directed person tends to become merely his succession of roles and encounters and hence to doubt who he is or where he is going. Just as the firm gives up the one-price policy for an administered price that is set in secrecy and differs with each class of customer depending on the latter's apparent power and requirements of "good will," so the other-directed person gives up the one-face policy of the inner-directed man for a multi-face policy that he sets in secrecy and varies with each class of encounters." (p. 139)
"In a restricted market economy, salesmanship is truly praised as a creative act, but it is entirely too serious a matter to be trusted to mere creativity."
"Even [certain researchers], who each recognize that consumers may be subject to manipulation by manufacturers, do not fully realize the extent of this vulnerability. They do not appear to realize that manipulation of consumers by manufacturers is not simply a possibility in light of the behavioral research but that it is an inevitable result of the competitive market. Cognitive biases present profit-maximizing opportunities that manufacturers must take advantage of in order to stay apace with competition." (p. 195) (emphasis in original)
"we argued that the relative indeterminacy of the behavioral research is irrelevant to products liability theory because manufacturers operating under the evolutionary influence of the market will untangle the various cognitive forces at play in the consumer’s mind even if behavioral researchers and legal scholars cannot." (p. 1427) (emphasis in original) "There is growing evidence that cigarette warnings may actually give the product an enhanced gloss in the eyes of young consumers. ... Tobacco industry executives seem to have been well aware of that possibility." (pp. 1481-1482) (more)
[1426] "Rather than simply [1427] asking how a particular anomaly will influence the typical consumer, the more probative question is how the presence of cognitive anomalies will influence all actors in the market. With that distinction in mind, we explained that manufacturers have every incentive to utilize cognitive biases to lower consumer appreciation of product risks. Such manipulation, we argued, is simply another form of cost externalization, a practice that manufacturers naturally pursue in an effort to avoid costs and increase profit margins. We noted also that this manipulation of consumer perceptions should occur whether or not manufacturers are cognizant of it. That is, the competitive forces of the market should drive manufacturers to act as if they are utilizing behavioral findings to exploit consumer perceptions, regardless of manufacturers’ awareness of the processes. Thus, we argued that the relative indeterminacy of the behavioral research is irrelevant to products liability theory because manufacturers operating under the evolutionary influence of the market will untangle the various cognitive forces at play in the consumer’s mind even if behavioral researchers and legal scholars cannot." (pp. 1426-1427) (emphasis in original) "After a cleaner, more efficient alternative to cockroach spray sold well below expectations in rural areas of the Southern United States, researchers assigned to the problem asked a focus group of representative women to draw pictures of cockroaches and describe their feelings about them. To the researchers’ surprise, all the insects were drawn as males and the stories accompanying the drawings clearly revealed feelings about the men in the subject women’s lives. Researchers learned that for these women, “killing the roaches with a bug spray and watching them squirm and die allowed [them] to express their hostility toward men." (p. 1434) [1481] "There is growing evidence that cigarette warnings may actually give the product an enhanced gloss in the eyes of young consumers. Several studies have demonstrated a forbidden fruit appeal from television parental advisory warnings for violent shows.352 Similar studies on the labeling effects of alcoholic versus nonalcoholic drinks also suggest [1482] that the warning itself may enhance the attractiveness of the product. Tobacco industry executives seem to have been well aware of that possibility. As early as 1973, Dr. Claude Teague of RJR noted that a new brand aimed at the young group “should not in any way be promoted as a ‘health’ brand” and perhaps should carry some implied risk. To the contrary, “the warning label on the package may be a plus.”354 Thus, just as tobacco manufacturers were able to devise seemingly safer cigarettes to appease risk-conscious adult smokers, they also seem able to take advantage of government-mandated product warnings as an appeal to children in their constant efforts to recruit new smokers."
Christopher Lasch The Culture of Narcissism (1979)
"the psychological patterns promoted by the family are reinforced by conditions outside the family. Because those patterns seem to find their clearest expression in the pathology of narcissism, and ultimately in schizophrenia, we should not jump to the conclusion that the family produces misfits, people who cannot function efficiently in modern industrial society. In many ways it does a good job of preparing the child for the conditions he will encounter when he leaves home." (p. 177) "Since modern society prolongs the experience of dependence into adult life, it encourages milder forms of narcissism in people who might otherwise come to terms with the inescapable limits on their personal freedom and power... While it encourages grandiose dreams of omnipotence, moreover, the new paternalism undermines more modest fantasies... Our society is narcissistic, then, in a double sense. People with narcissistic personalities, although not necessarily more numerous than before, play a conspicuous part in contemporary life, often rising to positions of eminence." (p. 231-232) "Studies of progressivism and the New Deal have shown that government regulation of business often arose in response to the demands of businessmen themselves. Regulatory agencies draw most of their personnel from business. Neither the regulatory nor the welfare policies of the state rest on "an implacable hatred of private business and free enterprise," as [Ludwig von] Mises claims. On the contrary, regulation controls competition and stabilizes the market, while the welfare system socializes the "human costs" of capitalist production...and helps to forestall more radical solutions." (p. 234)
[154] "Punctuality is demanded not primarily for efficiency but for the discipline itself. Discipline is necessary because the work is onerous; perhaps it makes the idea of working even more onerous, but it makes the work itself much more tolerable, for it is a structure, a decision. Discipline establishes the work in an impersonal secondary environment where, once one has gotten out of bed early in the morning, the rest easily follows. Regulation of time, separation from the personal environment: these are signs that work is not a way of life; they are the methods by which, for better or [155] worse, work that cannot be energized directly by personal concern can get done, unconfused by personal concern."
[53] "the docility, neatness of appearance, etc. that are useful for getting petty jobs, are not created by years of schooling but they are accurately measured by them."
[in a massive footnote to the very first sentence...] ""Aggression" will be here defined as the disposition on the part of an individual or collectivity to orient its action to goals which include a conscious or unconscious intention illegitimately to injure the interests of other individuals or collectivities in the same system. The term illegitimately deliberately implies that the individual or collectivity in question is integrated, however imperfectly, in a moral order which defines reciprocal rights and obligations. The universality of the existence of a moral order in this sense is a cardinal thesis of modern social science. This is not to say that world society constitutes one integrated moral order in this sense; on the contrary, the diversity of such orders is a primary problem of integration, but it is not as such the problem of aggression. Thus friction and hostility arising from lack of mutual understanding or mere thoughtlessness or insensitiveness to the position of the other party are not as such acts of aggression, although aggressive dispositions become attracted to these situations as fields of expression perhaps more readily than any others, because they are easy to rationalize. The use of the term aggression here is thus narrower than in some psychological, particularly psychoanalytic, discussions. In particular "self-assertion" the "drive to mastery"–for example, of a technical skill–without meaningful hostility to others, will not be treated as aggression. It will not be an issue in the present analysis to decide as to whether, on deeper psychological levels, aggression in the sense here meant, and non-aggressive self-assertion, or mastery, are fundamentally different or whether they derive from the same roots. On the level of social behavior the difference is fundamental, and that is what matters in the present context." (p. 298)
TP implies here what I have always suspected but never had done the background reading to confirm, which is that psychoanalysis was largely or wholly responsible for expanding the concept of aggression beyond the level of "social behavior" to the "deeper" levels of the individual psyche, and in a manner which thus made the concept of greater (over)use to wooly-headed deconstructionists seeking to establish a genetic link between the individual artistic/intellectual products of the colonial era and colonial aggression on the level of the nation-state. It is very interesting that as early as 1947 (!) TP, though he is a notoriously stilted writer, is even by his standards forced to tiptoe around and awkwardly equivocate on this particular issue, as if someone were looking over his shoulder. But is it really debatable that "On the level of social behavior the difference is fundamental" between "self-assertion" and "aggression?" Certainly there must be a use for this distinction in social theory, even if we are champing at the bit to get at those colonialists and their intellectual/artistic output at the very earliest opportunity. And if in fact, subsequently, we were to establish after all that "self-assertion" and "aggression" do in fact "derive from the same roots," would these "roots" not be buried so deep in the unconscious, i.e. so far removed from "the level of social behavior" which of course the critical theorist themselves are so overeager to emphasize as an inescapable force in all intellectual/artistic creation, as to justify the compartmentalization between depth-psychological analysis and surface-level social analysis that TP enforces here?
"how the California task force arrived at this finding—that is, by ignoring the reservations that were advanced by the experts on whose testimony its report was based. ...[the chairman] dismissed these reservations on the grounds that they came from "those who live only in their heads, in the intellectual." The importance of self-esteem, he said, was confirmed by our "intuitive knowledge." (p. 209) "The professionalization of compassion has not made us a kinder, gentler nation. Instead it institutionalizes inequality, under the pretense that everyone is "special" in his own way. Since the pretense is transparent, the attempt to make people feel good about themselves only makes them cynical instead. "Caring" is no substitute for candor." (p. 210) (more)
"Gunnar Mansson, who rose from Stockholm manager to [Entertainment Franchise] head in all of Scandinavia, was a constant concern for Roy [Disney]. A handsome Swede and expert skier, Mansson clung to his bachelorhood. He recalls, "Every time Roy saw me, he said, 'Are you married yet?' He was always disappointed when I said no. 'We don't like that,' he said. 'We run a family business, and we like our managers to have families.' He added with a smile, 'Then we can keep them under our thumb.'" (Ch. 21, p. 212) Here is a Captain of Industry with little formal education articulating in layman's terms the nexus of Managerial Culture, Image Mongering, Family Values, and Social Control. The overeducated, few of whom know this nexus firsthand, have spent decades reverse engineering it from a safe distance and subsequently dressing up their conclusions in all manner of flowery verbiage. Undoubtedly most of us so inclined would freely acknowledge that such observations have more power coming from the horse's mouth; but of course part of the game is not to talk about it quite so candidly as Roy does here. There is, furthermore, a reminder here that patriarchy per se consists in prevailing norms and relationships between and among men as well as it does between men and women; that "male privilege" in its purest form is, while very real, also quite scarce, enjoyed only by the biggest ape in the colony, by the exceedingly few men who are essentially accountable only to themselves. This is why intellectuals find the primal family archetype so compelling: not in spite of but rather because of its reductionism. The mother's love for the child is unconditional while the father's is conditional. And this conditionality is indeed at the core of so many festering political impasses: the social safety net versus rewarding individual initiative; who the "right" and "wrong" kinds of immigrants (or neighbors) are; etc., etc. Bachelorhood, then, is quite the multi-dimensional threat to those executives who prefer managers they can keep "under our thumb" precisely because the bachelor is less leveraged, less accountable, than the sole-earner of a nuclear family. Beyond that even, living simply and buying/using only what one needs is, if you will, the new economic bachelorhood, seeing that it similarly elides accountability to the consumerist mainstream and the fantasy of endless economic growth as well as putting into living practice the Debordian assertion that first-world consumerism has "overshot the target" vis-a-vis quality of life. [Looks like this was logged and written years ago but got lost on the way to press. It has been touched up as of this posting.] (14Dec2021)
"There are good reasons to think that the decisive change in the character of the family occurred not at the beginning of the twentieth century but at the end of the end of the eighteenth, and that the Victorian family, therefore, which we imagine as the anithesis of our own, should be seen instead as the beginning of something new—the prototype, in many ways, of the modern household." (p. 37) "The family by its very nature is a means of raising children, but this fact should not blind us to the important change that occurred when child rearing ceased to be simply one of many activities and became the central concern—one is tempted to say the central obsession—of family life. This development had to wait for the recognition of the child as a distinctive kind of person, more impressionable and hence more vulnerable than adults, to be treated in a special manner befitting his peculiar requirements. Again, we take these things for granted and find it hard to imagine anything else. Earlier, children had been clothed, fed, spoken to, and educated as little adults; more specifically, as servants, the difference between childhood and servitude having been remarkably obscure throughout much of Western history (and servitude retaining, until fairly recently, an honorific character which it subsequently lost). It was only in the seventeenth century in certain classes—and in society as a whole, only in the nineteenth century—that childhood came to be seen as a special category of experience. When that happened, people recognized the enormous formative influence of family life, and the family became above all an agency for building character, for consciously and deliberately forming the child from birth to adulthood." (pp. 37-38)
"Sanger had been swept away and transformed by the Lawrence strike, but her experience of Paterson was very different. "I was thoroughly despondent after the Paterson debacle, and had a sickening feeling that there was to be no end; it seemed to me the whole question of strikes for higher wages was based on man's economic need of supporting his family, and that this was a shallow principle upon which to found a new civilization."" (p. 230)
[121] "These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as follows: "My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] children." On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condition...is now regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see that it is a hard goal to achieve against the modern obstacles. ... "But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal... How is it that it is the same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race? Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not really achieving it. ... It is [122] not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who does not feel justified in his work and independent in the world. ... "It is advantageous to the smooth functioning of the organized system if its personnel are married and have home responsibilities. (E.g., it's much harder for them to act up and quit.) But the smooth functioning of the organized system may not be advantageous to the quality of the marriage and fatherhood."
[169] "The great lesson of Rank's depreciation of sexuality was not that he played down physical love and sensuality, but that he saw—like Augustine and Kierkegaard—that man cannot fashion an absolute from within his condition, that cosmic heroism must transcend human relationships. "...people need a "beyond," but they reach for the nearest one; this gives them the fulfillment they need but at the same time limits and enslaves them. ... [170] "Most people play it safe:... they accept the cultural definition of heroism... Most people live this way, and I am hardly implying that there is anything false or unheroic about the standard cultural solution... It represents both the truth and the tragedy of man's condition:... "Women are particularly caught up in this dilemma, that the now surging "feminine liberation movement" has not yet conceptualized. Rank understood it, both in its necessary aspect and in its constrictive one. The woman, as a source of new life, a part of nature, can find it easy to willingly submit herself to the procreative role in marriage, as a natural fulfillment of the Agape motive. At the same time, however, it becomes self-negating or masochistic when she sacrifices her individual personality and gifts by making the man and his achievements into her immortality-symbol. The Agape surrender is natural and represents a liberating self-fulfillment; but the reflexive internalization of the male's life role is a surrender to one's own weakness, a blurring of the necessary Eros motive of one's own identity. The reason that women are having such trouble disentangling the problems of their social and female roles from that of their distinctive individualities is that these things are intricately confused. The line between natural self-surrender, in wanting to be a part of something larger, and masochistic or self-negating surrender is thin indeed, as Rank saw. The problem is further complicated by something that women—like everyone else—are loathe to admit: their own natural inability to stand alone in freedom. This is why almost everyone consents to earn his immortality in the popular ways mapped out by societies everywhere, in the beyonds of others and not their own." (more)