Lasch—Restriction of Perspective

***socio-determinism***
***lit***
***self***

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)
Philip Roth once observed, before this kind of observation became a cliché, that the writer's imagination falters in the face of contemporary "actuality," which "is continually outdoing our talents." ... Our culture "tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.". ... In their bafflement and disgust, many writers turn away from the "grander social and political phenomena of our times"...and "take the self as their subject": the "sheer fact of self, the vision of the self as inviolate, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment.
(p. 130)


When social reality becomes imaginatively unmanageable, the imagination takes refuge, as we have seen, in self-defensive survival strategies: exactly the kind of strategies also adopted by the contemporary writer and artist, according to Roth, in their attempt to keep the artistic enterprise alive in an age of extremity. Overwhelmed by the cruelty, disorder, and sheer complexity of modern history, the artist retreats into a solipsistic mode of discourse that represents "not so much an attempt to understand the self," in Roth's words, as an attempt "to assert it." He conducts his own struggle for survival as an artist, under conditions that have made it more and more difficult to transcribe any shared experience or common perceptions of the world, undermined the conventions of artistic realism, and given rise to a type of art that no longer seems to refer to anything outside itself.
(p. 131)




Again and again, Lasch laments these
conditions that have made it more and more difficult to transcribe any shared experience or common perceptions of the world
.
This of course cuts both ways. As indispensible as some shared experience might be, it is also true that many common perceptions of the world were never quite as common as once believed; also that perfect shared-ness can be achieved only by force or coercion, hence we ultimately have to learn to live with at least some diversity of perception even on the local level.

These are central themes of Postmodernism per se. Here Lasch considers the postmodern condition through the lens of selfhood. He finds the common perceptions of the group necessary to proper formation of the self. But I think there are implications here for justice too, as in his own later anti-progressive formulation that,
Hope does not require a belief in progress, but rather in justice.
(The True and Only Heaven, p. 80)
His assertion, from the same work, that
the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race
(p. 36)
would seem, however, to confine justice itself, like culture, production, and just about everything else, to be operative only on the community level, and thus to leave inter-community justice issues essentially unresolvable, or perhaps to assume that they would rarely arise under a regime of decentralized "self-help" and "self-sufficiency."

I recently wrote, in effect, that the potential to leave behind all of the outmoded and unjust common perceptions is precisely what inclines me toward a positive view of so-called postmodernism, this despite the fact that I have no use for much (maybe even a majority) of the other tenets which might be placed under this venerable heading. Reading Lasch clarifies the issue somewhat: the problem with the deconstruction or decentering of received knowledge is not that this is never warranted, but rather that it is warranted only where justice is at stake. I'm sure that sounds painfully banal, and basically it is. It is one way, nonetheless, that I would propose to seek a mediation between Lasch's brilliant political observations and their seeming dependence on the return of a world that is not coming back, and which we may not want to have back anyway.

Turning to the comparatively parochial concerns of art and artists, I would certainly question whether
the conventions of artistic realism
are quite as intimately entwined with the presence or absence of shared experience or common-ness of perception as is a more fundamental, developmental concept like selfhood. The paradox of realism per se is that it does not, in fact, reflect common perceptions retrospectively so much as it serves to create them prospectively. Even the most banal realism makes a statement just by being realist. It is the great virtue of postmodern theory to have insisted that perfect neutrality of statement is not possible even here, and that the statement is always a statement of a particular individual and only tenuously, if at all, a statement of a whole "society," all at once as it were. (Lasch's own contempt for the offloading of personal responsibility from individuals onto a vague notion of "society" is apt here. If this cannot be accepted in the broad realm of conduct-of-life, how can it be accepted regarding art-as-conduct?)

Neutrality is elusive, I would also insist, even when the work
no longer seems to refer to anything outside itself.
At the risk of parsing this too literally, I would agree that this "seems" to be case much more often than it is the case. I would perhaps even channel my inner postmodernist and question whether it is not always the case, with such "refer[ences]" as exist simply awaiting an observer who is able to perceive and articulate them; the corollary being, of course, that just because you can doesn't mean you should. The widespread disregard of this corollary is nothing less than a justice issue for artists, and it hinges precisely on the fact that people do not always perceive things in common. Plurality of perspective, so difficult to navigate in the political dealings of a democracy, is generative in the realm of art; generative, that is, not just of various artworks but of the diverse responses to them, reactions against them, tributes paid to them, and so on.

It is to Lasch's great deteriment that he retraces the footsteps of so many irresponsible dead-tree art critics in drawing a direct causal link between the cruelty, disorder, and sheer complexity of modern history and the advent of what he sees as a solipsistic mode of discourse in minimalist art. He treats reference as an objective fact, whereas really it is subjective and ephemeral. Just as we can only compare to what we already know, so art cannot "refer" to anything with which an audience is unfamiliar. Without denying outright either the possibility or the usefulness of common perceptions, it is hard to imagine that such asceticism of reference could be functional (or, again, just) even in the Laschian self-governing village. This presupposes a restriction of perspective to rival that of any painter of blank canvases.


Contemporary art is an art of extremity not because it takes extreme situations as its subject—though much of it does that too—but because the experience of extremity threatens to undermine the very possibility of an imaginative interpretation of reality.

The only art that seems appropriate to such an age...is an anti-art or minimal art, where minimalism refers not just to a particular style in an endless succession of styles but to a widespread conviction that art can survive only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision: the radical "restriction of perspective" recommended by authorities on the subject as the survival strategy par excellence.
(p. 131)


The incoherent conflation of anti-art with minimal art is notable here. Restriction of perspective is one thing, restriction of function is quite another; and function-al-ism per se would have it that various arts cannot expand their fields of vision infinitely. As Lewis Mumford might observe here (that is, if he did not share Lasch's contempt for all things avant-garde), the perspective of an art form is restricted most drastically of all by technical considerations. Here artists and critics can, for once, be counted upon to make common cause, that is, to deny the role of Mumford's "technics" and to exalt the ideal of "art" as direct "expression" or "communication" or "reference." Only from such irrational fantasies as this can an artist like Rothko, for example, be put forth by Lasch as having narrowed rather than expanded our perspective or broken with the paradigm of realism. In fact, this kind of abstraction is the only realist aesthetic and the only direct art, precisely because its realism and its directness operate on the technical rather than on the communicative level. That an abstract work might refer to nothing with which the audience is already familiar is rather beside the point. This is a characteristic of the audience, not of the work.

Of all the elements of the high modernist platform which have been broadly rejected, the position I have just taken is, I think, worthy of being considered the very most broadly rejected tenet, more so even than the aesthetic elements, which have at least found a home in the postmodern grab bag of commercial parlor tricks. This rejection is, however, utterly incoherent. It finds in such rhetoric as above only the unforgivable gesture of the artist turning their back to the audience, including, in at least one famous case, literally. But when I say that the absence of reference is a characteristic of the audience and not of the work, I say nothing about success or failure, morality or immorality, conformity or nonconformity. When I say this, I do not tell anyone what or how to think; in fact I make explicit my reluctance to do this, a reluctance which, along with humility, responsibility, self-knowledge, and a few other indispensible personal qualities, is typically in short supply among both artists and critics. I would like artworks to be judged, and for people to be judged on their general conduct of life, but I would not like for people to be judged on whether or not they "get" the references of this or that work of art. If there have been "modernist" enclaves throughout recent history where this attitude has indeed persisted, then perhaps that is just one more outmoded elitism of not-so common perception that postmodernism can be of assistance in dismantling.







[[ALL BELOW EXPORTED TO Lasch-Rest3]]


Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)
In the visual arts at least, the celebration of selfhood, as exemplified by abstract expressionism in the late forties and early fifties—the assertion of the artist as a heroic rebel and witness to contemporary despair—had already come under critical attack by the time Roth published his diagnosis of the literary malaise in 1961.
(p. 132)


Perhaps I have not paid nearly enough attention to the actual critical discourse surrounding abstract expressionism if I have previously viewed it as a sublimation rather than an exaltation of the self. But does any such exaltation really, truly survive the artist-audience transaction? Clearly in this case, quite a lot of this self-exaltation was and is thought to have survived, and dominated, to the point that it is still talked about in such terms as above; but I am led to question whether this was a matter of successful communication in the art-colloquial sense, or whether it was merely the result of well-executed public relations.

From Mark Greif's review of Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (via Milo):
Menand zooms in and out between individual egomaniacs and the milieus that facilitated their ascent and profited from their publicity. The results...are enchanting singly but demoralizing as they pile up. All of these enterprises look like hives of social insects, not selfless quests for truth or beauty. Menand is a world-class entomologist: He can name every indistinguishable drone, knows who had an oversize mandible, who lost a leg, who carried the best crumbs. The caution is that you must not seek lasting value in their collective works. From this vantage, the monuments really are just anthills.
If this damning assessment is at all in the ballpark, then it seems that publicity, not content, has become king. And at that point, the "selfless quest for truth or beauty" is, in the immediate term, not a matter of breadth or restrictedness of perspective, nor of any particular paradigm of "beauty" or "reference." Rather, it is entirely a matter of breaking with the current conventions of self-promotion, which may well, painfully enough, mean breaking with people and institutions who enforce them.



An even earlier diagnosis, quite similar to Roth's in its intuition of the difficulties confronting imaginative activity but very different in its upshot, suggests why a minimal art rather than an expressive art has commended itself to those who despair of expressing the inexpressible.
We're sorry, the "despair" you were trying the reach is no longer at this number. Expressing the inexpressible? YUCK! How about worrying about what you can control, not about what you can't? Surely that advice is not too new-age or survivalist to be taken seriously?
[Merce Cunningham]...urged artists to abandon effects based on climax... A society in crisis, he argued, did not require, as it might have appeared to require, an art concerned with crisis, an art dependent on the sense of climax. ... Not a model of lucidity, this statement nevertheless stands today as a more accurate forecast than Roth's of the direction art would actually take in the coming years: an immersion in the ordinary, a deliberate effacement of the artist's personality, a rejection of clarifying contexts that show relationships among objects or events, a refusal to find patterns of any kind, an insistence on the random quality of experience, an insistence that "each thing can be and is separate from each and every other."


... effacement...

... rejection of clarifying contexts...

... a refusal to find patterns...

... insistence on the random quality of experience...



While it is not hard to see how these maneuvers could be rooted in the psychic response to troubled times, it just isn't tenable to ignore how overdue each had become.
***some media stuff further down*** p. 132--"The statement that reality outruns the creative imagination conveys only part of the truth we need to grasp in order to under-[133]stand the contemporary artist's predicament.
We're sorry, the predicament you have dialed is no longer at this number. I mean, not in our capacity as "artists" at least.
Reality itself is no longer real in the sense of arising from a people's shared understanding, from a shared past, and from shared values.
See previous post re: "shared"-ness.
More and more, our impressions of the world derive not from the observations we make both as individuals and as members of a wider community but from elaborate systems of communication, which spew out information, much of it unbelievable, about events of which we seldom have any direct knowledge. ... The only evidence that would confirm or refute our own experience is the evidence of a people like ourselves, people who share a common past and a common frame of reference.
Again, the irony is that to rely only on people like ourselves for evidence of anything in particular is itself quite the radical restriction of perspective, this time in life rather than in art. And again, even at the village level where skin-deep "diversity" ceases to exist, what of inner diversity? Oddly enough, it is Steven Pinker's retrenchment from "the modern denial of human nature", e.g., which supports a conception of inner diversity as irreducible; whereas in the radical constructivist view he attacks one expects the homogeneity of the village to be reflected, via the primacy of "nurture," in a homogeneity of perception and experience. [[Wait, or is he saying that it is under contemporary conditions that we must rely on people like ourselves??]]
The images transmitted by the mass media usually refer, on the other hand, either to celebrities admired precisely for their ability to escape the constraints of everyday existence...or to a hypothetical norm or average arising not from shared experience or even from the experience of "representative men" but from demographical analysis of a select statistical population, audience, or market.
Great point here. This norm or average is, in this way, something like a rationalist as against empiricist construction of reality, complete with all of the drawbacks but, owing to its construction by interested commercial actors rather than unwitting microsocial agents, few or none of the benefits. And we need not look too far to find this demographical streak invading art and life alike, which is where it becomes doubly oppressive. The demographical orientation underlies popular and commercial art pretty much by definition. Any such works which persevere beyond the immediate moment for which they have been designed do so in spite of this, not because of it.

"The mass media make an earnest effort to tell us who and what we are, indeed to generate a spurious sense of national identity, but they do this by telling us which programs we like to watch, what products we like to buy, what political candidates we plan to vote for... Demographic analysis is a poor substitute for [134] reality, but since it is the only reality we have in common, we become increasingly reluctant to challenge it by citing our own singular, idiosyncratic perceptions of the world, let alone to hope that we can "impose" our idiosyncratic perceptions on others.
Incidentally, the problem with socio-determinism in art criticism is precisely that
Demographic analysis is a poor substitute for [134] reality.


[134]If the radio, the camera, and the television set merely usurped the representational function of the arts, as often alleged, it would be hard to account for the growing feeling that even an abstract and inward-turning art stands little chance of success in an environment already saturated with images and information. Modern recording equipment monopolizes the representation of reality, but it also blurs the distinction between reality and illusion, between the subjective world and the world of objects, and thus makes it increasingly difficult for artists to take refuge even in the "sheer fact of self," as Roth puts it. The self is no more a sheer fact than its surroundings."
http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2020/10/facts-and-fancy.html ctrl-F "Rostain"
Microeconomics shares important features with mechanistic sciences... At the theoretical heart of these research programs is the "extremal" principle that "a system's behavior always minimizes or maximizes variables reflecting the mechanically possible states of the system

...

Social and cognitive psychology and other social sciences that proceed inductively from observations of human behavior...generally focus on "middle range" theories—theories that fall short of all-inclusive systematic attempts to explain observed uniformities of human behavior with a single set of law

...

In sophisticated quantitative models, conditions that have been found to be relevant, i.e. have an effect, generally account for less than 50% variation in a dependent variable, and typically it is less than 30%. In other words, the best empirical social science models cannot explain most of the variation seen in the variable under investigation.


(And yes, it would be worth going through EACH entry in the list in depth and attempting to contextualize it in history not just of art but of ideas, epistemology, culture, and, dare I say, not least of all technique too.) [It is not for nothing that these are precisely the "shared" items at which Deconstructionism took aim; meaning, it is one thing for them to be "no longer" in effect, but quite another thing for them to have never existed in the first place (or more likely, not to have existed to quite the extent as many people thought or would have liked them too). CL is certainly worth taking seriously as a voice in favor of recovering these supposedly lost consensuses...but does he not have much more to contend with in doing so than he acknowledges?] Inner diversity makes such "common" holdings elusive, perhaps impossible, and at their very worst oppressive against the minority (which may be an Elite minority as easily as a Plebeian one).] (133-34)[But now this is getting weird...because these "idiosyncratic perceptions" are also, equally, the ultimate challenges to ALL shared-ness, whether media-based or, as CL would prefer above, community-based or values-based.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= POSTED VERSION

***socio-determinism***
***lit***
***self***

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)
Philip Roth once observed, before this kind of observation became a cliché, that the writer's imagination falters in the face of contemporary "actuality," which "is continually outdoing our talents." ... Our culture "tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.". ... In their bafflement and disgust, many writers turn away from the "grander social and political phenomena of our times"...and "take the self as their subject": the "sheer fact of self, the vision of the self as inviolate, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment.
(p. 130)


When social reality becomes imaginatively unmanageable, the imagination takes refuge, as we have seen, in self-defensive survival strategies: exactly the kind of strategies also adopted by the contemporary writer and artist, according to Roth, in their attempt to keep the artistic enterprise alive in an age of extremity. Overwhelmed by the cruelty, disorder, and sheer complexity of modern history, the artist retreats into a solipsistic mode of discourse that represents "not so much an attempt to understand the self," in Roth's words, as an attempt "to assert it." He conducts his own struggle for survival as an artist, under conditions that have made it more and more difficult to transcribe any shared experience or common perceptions of the world, undermined the conventions of artistic realism, and given rise to a type of art that no longer seems to refer to anything outside itself.
(p. 131)




Again and again, Lasch laments these
conditions that have made it more and more difficult to transcribe any shared experience or common perceptions of the world
.
This of course cuts both ways. As indispensible as some shared experience might be, it is also true that many common perceptions of the world were never quite as common as once believed; also that perfect shared-ness can be achieved only by force or coercion, hence we ultimately have to learn to live with at least some diversity of perception even on the local level.

These are central themes of Postmodernism per se. Here Lasch considers the postmodern condition through the lens of selfhood. He finds the common perceptions of the group necessary to proper formation of the self. But I think there are implications here for justice too, as in his own later anti-progressive formulation that,
Hope does not require a belief in progress, but rather in justice.
(The True and Only Heaven, p. 80)
His assertion, from the same work, that
the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race
(p. 36)
would seem, however, to confine justice itself, like culture, production, and just about everything else, to be operative only on the community level, and thus to leave inter-community justice issues essentially unresolvable, or perhaps to assume that they would rarely arise under a regime of decentralized "self-help" and "self-sufficiency."

I recently wrote, in effect, that the potential to leave behind all of the outmoded and unjust common perceptions is precisely what inclines me toward a positive view of so-called postmodernism, this despite the fact that I have no use for much (maybe even a majority) of the other tenets which might be placed under this venerable heading. Reading Lasch clarifies the issue somewhat: the problem with the deconstruction or decentering of received knowledge is not that this is never warranted, but rather that it is warranted only where justice is at stake. I'm sure that sounds painfully banal, and basically it is. It is one way, nonetheless, that I would propose to seek a mediation between Lasch's brilliant political observations and their seeming dependence on the return of a world that is not coming back, and which we may not want to have back anyway.

Turning to the comparatively parochial concerns of art and artists, I would certainly question the relationship of
the conventions of artistic realism
to shared experience and common-ness of perception. The paradox of realism per se is that it does not, in fact, reflect common perceptions retrospectively so much as it serves to create them prospectively. Even the most banal realism makes a statement just by being realist. It is the great virtue of postmodern theory to have insisted that perfect neutrality of statement is not possible even here, and that the statement is always a statement of a particular individual and only tenuously, if at all, a statement of a whole "society," all at once as it were. (Lasch's own contempt for the offloading of personal responsibility from individuals onto a vague notion of "society" is apt here. If this cannot be accepted in the broad realm of conduct-of-life, how can it be accepted regarding art-as-conduct?)

Neutrality is elusive, I would also insist, even when the work
no longer seems to refer to anything outside itself.
At the risk of parsing this too literally, I would agree that this "seems" to be case much more often than it is the case. I would perhaps even channel my inner postmodernist and question whether it is not always the case, with such "refer[ences]" as exist simply awaiting an observer who is able to perceive and articulate them; the corollary being, of course, that just because you can doesn't mean you should. The widespread disregard of this corollary is nothing less than a justice issue for artists, and it hinges precisely on the fact that people do not always perceive things in common. Plurality of perspective, so difficult to navigate in the political dealings of a democracy, is generative in the realm of art; generative, that is, not just of various artworks but of the diverse responses to them, reactions against them, tributes paid to them, and so on.

It is to Lasch's great deteriment that he retraces the footsteps of so many irresponsible dead-tree art critics in drawing a direct causal link between the cruelty, disorder, and sheer complexity of modern history and the advent of what he sees as a solipsistic mode of discourse in minimalist art. He treats reference as an objective fact, whereas really it is subjective and ephemeral. Just as we can only compare to what we already know, so art cannot "refer" to anything with which an audience is unfamiliar. Without denying outright either the possibility or the usefulness of common perceptions, it is hard to imagine that such asceticism of reference could be functional (or, again, just) even in the Laschian self-governing village. This presupposes a restriction of perspective to rival that of any painter of blank canvases.


Contemporary art is an art of extremity not because it takes extreme situations as its subject—though much of it does that too—but because the experience of extremity threatens to undermine the very possibility of an imaginative interpretation of reality.

The only art that seems appropriate to such an age...is an anti-art or minimal art, where minimalism refers not just to a particular style in an endless succession of styles but to a widespread conviction that art can survive only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision: the radical "restriction of perspective" recommended by authorities on the subject as the survival strategy par excellence.
(p. 131)


The incoherent conflation of anti-art with minimal art is notable here. Restriction of perspective is one thing, restriction of function is quite another; and function-al-ism per se would have it that various arts cannot expand (nor, I would say, can they restrict) their fields of vision infinitely. As Lewis Mumford might observe here (that is, if he did not share Lasch's contempt for all things avant-garde), the perspective of an art form is restricted most drastically of all by technical considerations. Here artists and critics can, for once, be counted upon to make common cause, that is, to deny the role of Mumford's "technics" and to exalt the ideal of "art" as direct "expression" or "communication" or "reference." Only from such irrational fantasies as this can an artist like Rothko, for example, be put forth by Lasch as having narrowed rather than expanded our perspective or broken with the paradigm of realism. In fact, this kind of abstraction is the only realist aesthetic and the most direct art, precisely because its realism and its directness operate on the technical rather than on the communicative level. That an abstract work might refer to nothing with which the audience is already familiar is rather beside the point. In a just world where both artist and audience are afforded due respect, this is a characteristic of the audience, not of the work. There is no question of being "initiated" (or not) into certain strictures of connoisseurship. If you can see, hear, read, think, feel, then you have already been "initiated." A painting can only be truly "self-referrential" when the observer has had their eyes gouged out.

Of all the elements of the high modernist platform which have been broadly rejected, the position I have just taken is, I think, worthy of being considered the very most broadly rejected tenet, more so even than the aesthetic elements, which have at least found a home in the postmodern grab bag of commercial parlor tricks. This rejection is, however, utterly incoherent. It finds in such rhetoric as above only the unforgivable gesture of the artist turning their back to the audience, literally in a few infamous cases, but metaphorically in all of them. Yet when I say that the absence of reference is a characteristic of the audience and not of the work, I say nothing about success or failure, morality or immorality, conformity or nonconformity. When I say this, I do not tell anyone what or how to think; in fact I make explicit my reluctance to do this, a reluctance which, along with humility, responsibility, self-knowledge, and a few other indispensible personal qualities, is typically in short supply among both artists and critics. I would like artworks to be judged, and for people to be judged on their general conduct of life, but I would not like for people to be judged on whether or not they "get" the references of this or that work of art. If there have been "modernist" enclaves throughout recent history where this attitude has indeed persisted, then perhaps that is just one more outmoded elitism of not-so common perception that postmodernism can be of assistance in dismantling.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

COMMENTS

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Christopher Lasch The Culture of Narcissism (1979) "Sport does play a role in socialization, but the lessons it teaches are not necessarily the ones that coaches and teachers of physical education seek to impart. The mirror theory of sport, like all reductionist interpretations of culture, makes no allowance for the autonomy of cultural traditions. In sport, these traditions come down from one generation of players to another, and although athletics do reflect social values, they can never be completely assimilated to those values. Indeed, they resist assimilation more effectively than many other activities, since games learned in youth exert their own demands and inspire loyalty to the game itself, rather than to the programs ideologues seek to impose on them." (p. 115) In this chapter Lasch is actually too loose in drawing art-sport parallels; and yet he never showed the least interest in acknowledging or accounting for any "autonomy" of arts or of artists.
Vytautas Kavolis Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis (1968) "Increasing role differentiation may further result in such an expansion of the total role repertoire of an individual that, if he takes most of his roles seriously, a sense of the self as a relatively consistent and uniquely identifiable point of reference for his own behavior may become difficult to experience. The peculiarly modern phenomenon of "loss of the self" may be caused in part by role inundation, in part by the expanded awareness both of cultural diversity and of the subconscious levels of one's own personality, and in part by the rapidity of social change which prevents the personality from getting set in any definite mold. However it may be caused, the decline of the sense of the self seems to be reflected in art style by a preference for impersonal and anonymous forms and the more impersonal materials and techniques (including the production of art by machines rather than directly by the human hand)." (p. 183)