Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)
[65] Despite having minority traditions of their own, our present poor are absolute sheep and suckers for the popular culture which they cannot afford,... Indeed, it is likely that the popular culture is aimed somewhat at them,......in these circumstances it is immensely admirable that the Beat Generation has contrived a pattern of culture that, turning against the standard culture, costs very little and gives livelier satisfaction. It is a culture communally shared, in small groups. Much of it is handmade, not canned. Some of it is communally improvised. We shall speak later about the limitations of this procedure and the weakness of its products; but the fact of it, of a culture that is communal
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and tending toward the creative, is so capital that it must have a future, and it is worth while to study its grounding and economy.
...
[67] ...the writers on the Beat Generation are confused. For one thing, they have a false notion that the kind of artistic activity that proliferates among the Beats is art, and gives the justification of art as a vocation. It is not art but something else, and they do not behave as if they were justified by it.
[177] It is both an advantage and a disadvantage for an artist to have around him an intensely creative gang of friends who are not rival artists. They provide him an immediate audience that helps assuage the sufferings of art loneliness and art guilt. On the other hand, it is a somewhat sickening audience because it has no objective cultural standard, it is not in the stream of ancient and international tradition. So its exclamations, "It's the greatest!" or, "Go, man, go!" don't give much security. The artist finds that he is a parochial group hero, when the reassurance that he needs, if he is diffident, is that he is a culture hero for the immortal world. ...
[e.g.] An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of the "previous" generation, of long-proven integrity, with an immense body of work, some of which is obviously good, and the importance of the whole of it (may much
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still be added!) not yet clear. The point for our anecdote is that Patchen has the respect of writers but has received no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now at this party, one of the best of the "Beat" writers, a genuine young artist, came demanding that the older poet give some recognition to the tribe of Beat poets, to "give them a chance." This was ironical since, riding on the Madison Avenue notoreity that we have mentioned, they had all got far more public acclaim, invitations to universities, night-club readings, than all of us put together. But Patchen asked for the names. The Beat spokesman reeled off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two who were worth while. This threw the younger poet into a passion, for he needed, evidently, to win artistic recognition also for his parochial audience, among whom he was a hero, in order to reassure himself that he was a poet, which he was and as Patchen would at once have said. So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his height, called him a young punk, and left. The young man was crushed, burst into tears (he was drunk), and also left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him, came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said, paid him any attention.
That is, the Beat audience, having resigned, is not in the world; yet being an eager creative audience, it wins the love and loyalty of its poet who becomes its hero and spokesman. But he too, then, doubts that he is in the world and has a vocation. As a Beat spokesman he receives notoreity and the chance of the wide public that every poet wants and needs; but he cannot help feeling that he is getting it as a pawn of the organized system.
Here is a simpler illustration of the relation of the spokesman-artist to the objective culture. This fellow is a much weaker poet, more nearly Beat himself, and quite
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conceited. At a reading of some other poet who is not a Beat spokesman, he tries to stop the reading by shouting "Don't listen to this crap! let's hear from X." His maneuver is to make the parochial the only existing culture; then, by definition, he himself is an artist.
And here is an illustration of the most elementary response. A Beat spokesman, not ungifted but probably too immature to accomplish much, gives a reading in a theater. During the intermission, he asks a rather formidable and respected critic what he thinks of a particular poem, and the critic says frankly that it's childish. At this the outraged poet, very drunk, stands in the lobby screaming "I hope you die! I hope art dies! I hope all artists die!"
These illustrations and the analysis of Beat conversation bring out the same point: In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race or what they can produce out of their own guts, it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.
[231] Modern times have been characterized by fundamental changes occurring with unusual rapidity. These have shattered tradition but often have not succeeded in creating a new whole community. We have no recourse to going back, there is nothing to go back to. If we are to have a stable and whole community in which the young can grow to manhood, we must painfully perfect the revolutionary modern tradition we have.
This stoical resolve is, paradoxially, a conservative
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proposition, aiming at stability and social balance. For often it is not a question of making innovation, but of catching up and restoring the right proportions. But no doubt, in our runaway, one-sided way of life, the proposal to conserve human resources and develop human capacities has become a radical innovation.
[256] two books, by Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, and by Robert MacIver, a history of the academic “freedom of inquiry” and a polemical defense of it against current attacks, especially in the social sciences. ...
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... In discussing the case of Bertrand Russell, Professor MacIver says, “Actually … Russell was dealing, forthrightly and sincerely, with the most problematic of all areas of social relationship [sex].” (AF 156)[4] This is an innocent passing remark in a relatively minor context in the book, but let is suddenly stop at it short and take the sentence at face value. If sexual relations is the most problematic of all areas of inquiry, we should expect that most or very many social scientists are inquiring and teaching here, or at least that the chairmen of departments are falling all over themselves to enlist experts for their staffs in this novel field; in the nature of the case much that these people are hypothesizing and affirming must be unconventional and socially unacceptable, for “in no other area of human behavior is there so unbridgeable a gulf between the officially sanctioned ethics and the socially accepted ways” (AF 157); and so there must here be lots of cases of infringement of academic freedom. But no such thing.
[259] What is problematic for inquiry is always just beyond the known; in socio-psychological matters this is an area of confusion and anxiety, and of suppression and repression; then its exploration must involve interpersonal daring and personal risk, whether or not there is “acting out,” and in these matters there is a generic tendency toward acting out. The vital social questions for inquiry are those you are likely to get jailed for messing with. When you are threatened with academic sanctions, it is a good sign that you are on the right track; when you are fired, it is better; but when you are beyond the pale of the academy and “will receive no support from your colleagues,” then you are possibly touching the philosopher’s stone. My point is not that universities are worthless, nor that they should not or cannot be free, but that one cannot seriously regard them as primarily places of inquiry nor found the case for academic freedom on freedom of inquiry.
[271] the historian, Professor Metzger,...We come to the heart of the difference when we compare the American and German conceptions of inner and outer freedom.… The German idea of “convincing” one’s students, of winning them over to the personal system and philosophical views of the professor, was not condoned by American academic opinion. Rather, as far as classroom actions were concerned, the proper stance for American professors was thought to be one of neutrality on controversial issues, and silence on substantive issues that lay outside of their competence. ...Professor Metzger goes on to argue that this norm of neutrality itself springs from an American bias of thought, its empiricism, resistant to intuition, speculation, fantasy—in the end, a suspicion of deliveries not fairly quickly verifiable.[8] ...
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...with the American limitation, competence almost automatically becomes specialization, for what quickly verifiable fact is to connect the various parts of study? It is plausible for the school to be neutral and present all sides, but how can the teacher be neutral? ...the situation of the student in the face of neutrality and competence: his moral nature must have some culture or other, and if no ideal or moral connections are made in the university, this culture...will fall to the first extramural propagandist,...or even worse, it will continue in an infantile set of prejudices and unconscious conventionalities ...the teacher is responsible either way, whether he freely exerts his influence or withholds it; and I think he does better not to worry about a standard of scientific certainty and impartiality, but, relying on the sense of his own integrity, to act forthrightly according to probabilities, keeping an open mind and heart. ...
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(5) Another loss occurred to Academic Man when he became, and agreed to consider himself as, merely an academic man, without some other function and status of his competence in the larger society. The historians relate with too much satisfaction, it seems to me, the development of a specialist “profession” from a group of clergymen who perhaps temporarily accepted calls as teachers. But teaching on the university level,[9] though it is surely a vocation and requires a special temperament and knack, is not a profession because it does not have a proper subject matter; it is a universal art applied to a proper subject matter;...
[293] Both [the twenties and fifties] are marked by a booming productivity, much money to spend, a rising standard of living, and also by cultural adjustments to great technical innovations that offer exciting prospects;...[also] a vast increase in international travel and cultural exchange. ...At the same time the twenties and the fifties are marked by a profound disillusionment and disgust at the way our civilization has recently disgraced itself. But these experiences, too, foster expansion in those who survive and in whom the shell shock thaws out, for people are purged, especially if there has been frank vomiting; and then more daring and radical notions can express themselves with a good conscience, since nothing an individual can think of would be so wicked as what everybody thought of collectively.