![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
I'm reading around in Real Sofistikashun, a book of essays by Tony Hoagland, and liked one in particular, "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of our Moment." Some excerpts:
"We have yielded so much authority to so many agencies, in so many directions, that we are nauseous. When we go to a doctor, we entrust ourselves to his or her care blindly. When we see bombs falling on television, we assume someone else is supervising. We allow 'experts' and 'leaders' to make decisions for us because (1) we already possess more data than we can manage, and (2) at the same time we are aware that we don't know enbough to make smart choices. Forced by circumstances into this yielding of control, we are deeply anxious about our ignorance and vulnerability."
Hoagland goes on to say that refusing to conform to a debased grammar of experience is one thing driving us to dissociative poetry (and Art more broadly). He says there's something authentic in turning away from rules and systems that don't sustain us enough to maintain intrinsic authority, and something rightly rebellious about rejecting the discourse debased by power and its misuse (and I'm pretty sure that it was at this point in my readng I heard a couple of "amens" from the corner table where Ms. Lorde and Mr. Bakhtin sat, drinking tea and bullshitting about this and that).
Then Hoagland writes:
"But when we push order away, when we celebrate its unattainability, when our only subject matter becomes instabiity itself . . . we give away one of poetry's most fundamental reasons for existing: the individual power to locate and assert value."
September 18 2007, 13:41:27 UTC 4 years ago
my favorite of his is
http://books.google.com/books?id=1VgAAA
"What Narcissism Means to Me"
You're welcome to borrow it.
September 18 2007, 14:26:50 UTC 4 years ago
September 18 2007, 14:34:32 UTC 4 years ago
"We have yielded so much authority to so many agencies, in so many directions""
Is he talking about our allowing experts to make *our* decisions for us, or he is talking about decisions that were never ours to make?"When we go to a doctor, we entrust ourselves to his or her care blindly." Some do. But less so the last few decades than at any time in the past.
"When we see bombs falling on television, we assume someone else is supervising." There have always been wars. The difference now is that we, as private citizens, can sometimes see these wars on television, not that we, as private citizens, no longer decide whom to bomb or when.
It sounds to me, based on this except, that what he's upset about is not our powerlessness, which is not new, but our forced AWARENESS of our own powerlessness. Which is not new either, but at least one can pretend it is.
September 18 2007, 15:36:31 UTC 4 years ago
Re: "We have yielded so much authority to so many agencies, in so many directions""
I bet you’re pretty onto what he means on the issue of awareness. The contrasting ideal to what he’s describing might be something like a more localized life where we know fewer things, but know them better, or where we are really known by one doctor we also really know, rather than processed by specialists, or whoever is on duty at the hmo. In the older model, the doctor saw you as a whole person maybe, a member of a community in the way Wendell Berry speaks of this. (Of course this is idealized).In the new reality, the subjective experience is of increased objectification and decreased agency. We accept it because of increased effectiveness (better drugs, better cures, etc.).
But on that whole issue, he’s mostly hitting a passing chord. He’s saying the subjective experience of anomie and non-agency can be seen as a turn in our cultural conversation, a turn to which the current artistic fashion for celebrating the impossibility of meaning and value is a somewhat laudable rejoinder. But the real point he wants to make is in the next turn: that fashion has gone too far and costs too much.
September 18 2007, 15:37:34 UTC 4 years ago
Re: "We have yielded so much authority to so many agencies, in so many directions""
I take it he's talking about the therapeutic mindset, a la Christopher Lasch. I've seen it come up again and again lately. There's a real do-it-yourself streak in American history and the American character: both war (think militia) and doctoring were in the hands of everyone at one point in this nation.In any case, Jeff, thanks for the rec. I, too, loved his "What Narcissism Means to Me."
September 18 2007, 15:50:37 UTC 4 years ago
"There's a real do-it-yourself streak in American history"
Or at least a do-it-yourself IDEOLOGY. I mean, as long ago as Ralph Waldo Emerson we had American philosophers taking an occasional "time out" from the general big city hubbub to get back to some idealized, fabricated past in which people were self-reliant.I doubt large numbers of people have been self-reliant in the entire time that people have existed. Bonobos and chimpanzees, the closest surviving relative of Homo sapiens, are not self-reliant. Bonobos in particular live in large interlocking clans (although those clans are dying out rapidly because of turmoil in Congo, the only place in the world they still live in the wild).
An individual man-ape is not much against, say, a lion, or at least a pride of lions; an entire clan of man-apes is a force to be reckoned with.
September 18 2007, 16:19:56 UTC 4 years ago
I doubt large numbers of people have been self-reliant in the entire time that people have existed.
There is a difference between the specialized-citizen of a city/state, and someone who knows all the skills needed for survival, yet of course, works within a family/social group.You seem to be missing the point, possibly due to a lack of context, or a willingness to argue.
One can rely on one's own capabilities, judgment, or resources (independence) without being cut-off from all others. Your definition of self-reliance is at an extreme.
September 18 2007, 15:29:35 UTC 4 years ago
September 18 2007, 15:37:59 UTC 4 years ago