THE SELF THAT WRITING EXPLAINS COMMON PLACE NO. 24 | SPRING 2020
One reason to write is to explain the self to the self. But who exactly is this self that writing reveals? Perhaps the writer is least equipped to address this question, considering the prejudices that come along with any assessment. It seems to be an inside job, but this is inherent in memoir as a form, the narrator always suspect and unreliable. There’s also solipsism to consider in any project involving self-regard. But then who else would try to answer it?
THE SELF THAT WRITING EXPLAINS
Prologue Across my life, I’ve had a consistent sense of self. This isn’t to say that I haven’t changed, but the self who experienced everything is at every point a whole despite the variety of these experiences and the way the ripening of the being that lived through them mostly opened windows and doors to them. I always think of the photograph of Joseph Esherick’s Cary House, with its exquisite window wall looking out at the terrain. The self is an animate and sense-laden being alive in and moving through space-time. The term “auto-ethnography,” introduced to me by the anthropologist Vasilina Orlova, captures the field notes character of memoir in this respect. Another of her terms, “observant participant,” also speaks to how my life has always seemed to me: lived, and also seen and pondered. If what emerges from this is more like notes than firm conclusions, this reflects the nature of life itself, unfolding and contingent. For the most part, we don’t really know. Even basic facts like age and gender are less clear from within. And yet a whole, I assert. But this reminds me of one of the clerks at the Cheese Board, a now-shuttered collective down the road, whose spectrum of genders is displayed daily, even hourly, like a performance. My tendency is toward external uniformity, in the manner of traditional houses that fit in, whatever may be happening upstairs. But I admire the clerk’s spirit, making full use of a freedom being affords.
Society has always been a conundrum. I was never happier than as a small child, making my way through a forest of adults at my parents’ Singapore garden parties. The image of a child hanging unseen at the edge of the grownups captures my lifelong sense of not belonging with these others, though intrigued by their goings-on. Recently my daughter and I went to party organized to benefit a locally edited literary review. To cope with my inevitable sense of discomfort, I suggested to my daughter that we stay in one place and talk until someone joined us. She agreed and we had a wonderful conversation. After a while, two friends came up to us, relieved to find others they knew amid the luminaries. We talked with them, and a stranger also came up and asked if she could be part of our small circle. At some point the hostess—the editor of the review— came by, recognizing the other couple, and we had a brief, pleasant exchange. Then we left. I could have written, “then we fled,” but our departure was more orderly than usual. Left to my own devices, I often head off precipitously, drained by the need to talk. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy myself. I’ve met interesting people and stayed in touch with them. But the energy drains right out of me. At work, where I was required along with everyone else to meet the extroverted expectations of the gods, I couldn’t flee as readily, although toward the end of my fulltime career, I found myself dodging these obligations. Also, work is different
than more purely social events—there’s a program, typically, and the conversations are task-related. Society is like the group process workshop I once attended, where I had to interact with others in a continually improvisational way. This is fine, one-toone, but exponentially harder the more people are in the room. The child on the sidelines can eavesdrop on conversations or just enjoy the chatter as chatter, but as an adult I always feel awkward if not engaged. Hence the luxury of having my daughter to talk with, something we do in work situations too, of course, but then feel guilty that we’re not making new connections. There’s also an element of feeling passed over, the gods and their circle getting the attention. All these thoughts, silly as they are, come into play because society really brings ego out. Work events are no different in this respect. Writing this in the midst of the Great Pandemic, I observe how the absolute absence of social and work obligations is what makes it bearable. I miss none of it. A friend whose eyes are bothering her has been sending me strings of audio snippets, a kind of spoken letter to which I reply in writing. We usually correspond, one way or another, and episodically have lunch. This is my kind of society.
Love too was often a conundrum. Every love has its context or its contingent nature, arising from one’s own nature interacting with another’s. This brings out specific aspects of the two natures in response to each other—possible attributes, perhaps, that love occasions. It’s often a surprise to find them, and this is part of what makes love so heady in the midst of it. In periods of stasis, most of this potential is out of sight, out of mind. In our native state, we’re more aware of the broader affects, the moods that typify us and color our days. But love brings out the nuances. It also makes us expose ourselves, take risks, plunge in as we have, far from our native ground. This is why I think it’s impossible to sustain. But another way to look at it is that it’s closer to performance art. There is a measure of artifice to it in the care we take to set the stage, despite the truths exchanged in its heat. But a performance that’s desired and bespoke—it takes the sting out its ending, put like this, but love brings so much along with it, has so much chemistry, that its aftereffects are deleterious. Depending on how it ends, it can take years to be totally free of it. Marriage aims to domesticate this dangerous thing in order to sustain the relationship and allow it to evolve as children appear, if they do, as life kicks in with its implacable demands, and as we age. Our appetites remain and we only appreciate the perils after experiencing them first hand. This is the aim and the vow, and we do our best, being human. To which we could add that, being human, we do our
worst—are at our worst—when things fray. Chemistry again: love craves its hit; and desire is craving. The regrets that follow can either be about lost chances or the mortification of doing harm and acting badly. Where this leaves us, if we’re lucky, is with a renewed appreciation of marriage and friendships that stay clear of desire while enabling affection and the attachment it permits. We love our friends as friends; sympathy rather than chemistry governs. Age also simplifies things, giving us a reason to hang up our spurs, if spurs ever figured, and to take on a new persona that has distant origins, the elders we noted in childhood, probably, who impressed us as knowing what they were about. We know what we’re about a little better even we still hide out in our workman’s jackets and work shirts, straw hats. Early in the morning, a coda comes to me. We are the catalysts of each other’s pleasure in love, and this sets us up for acts of cruelty if we fall out of love or if the weight of it is too difficult to support. (This is a stand in for all possible reasons, none of which are ever justified in the other’s opinion although some of them will live on to see it differently.) Possession is a momentary and necessarily mutual giving of gifts, despite our vows and desires. Barthes, de Beauvoir, Stendhal, Duras, and others form a possible syllabus, should someone think to add this add this to life’s preparatory curriculum. Not that those hearing it will believe it until they experience it once or twice.
I owe a great deal to luck. It began with family, the ones who raised me. Along with my parents and my sister, it includes my father’s father, a presence in in very early life, and my cousins in Norway, especially Elsie and Øistein Parmann, and my mother’s father and stepmother—my grandparents, as far as I knew. Before any of that, there was my father’s survival of World War 2. We both owe luck a great deal. Luck isn’t something on which you can depend. Like a psychic sense, it doesn’t tolerate abuse. It’s more like you’re not entirely alone in life, but being followed and sometimes helped out. When help isn’t forthcoming, the withholding of it—if that’s what’s going on—has always seemed justified in retrospect. In some places and situations, you’re on your own. When things broke my way, my gratitude was mixed with a sense of obligation. I was in a jam and then I wasn’t. Why did this happen? I felt that I’d been rescued from it to fulfill a larger purpose. What was it? Life provided no real clues. I worked at one thing and another, adhering to what the I Ching calls the law of least resistance—going where the demand was, mostly based on other people’s assessments. As Woody Allen noted (or quoted), 85 percent of life is just showing up. You make your own luck, they say. What seems true is that efforts reveal talents, and the presence of others gets them noticed. For me, this was always a slow and indirect process. Whenever I tried to leapfrog it, my luck deserted me. My luck, in other words, is evolutionary.
My experience was that the breaks appeared when I needed them, but the need reflected efforts I’d made to move things in a new direction. In some cases, though, the specific break was uncanny. Let me give one example: the day before graduate school was to start up, I was alone in the restaurant in which I had foolishly become involved, wondering how I would pay the freight, given that everything I’d saved had gone into it. A Japanese man walked in and offered to buy it for $2,000. I called my partner, we agreed, and I got my money back—enough of it to pay for the first semester and be free of the weight. It was soon after that I met Richard Bender, my patron at the College and my lifelong writing partner. When I say my luck is evolutionary, part of it is that it’s not always clear if a situation is fortunate or otherwise until later. No experience is valueless, I’ve found—not even owning a restaurant for two months. But it can also take decades to understand clearly how a certain course was the right one, and lucky that I followed it, despite the pain it caused. Others can share it, and their suffering is a cause of regret. It may be though that passing through and out of it was lucky for them, too. This seems true of at least one. I recently read a tribute to a woman who I tried to date in college—our date was cut short by her family’s St. Bernard, which knocked me down. She went on to have a remarkably accomplished life, but one that wouldn’t have suited me. Nor would I have suited her, although I always liked her. Luck for us both.
My political views are inconsistent. Charitably, I could say that they’re perpetually in flux, pulled in different directions by self-interest and the larger interests of the polis as I perceive them. Incoherent could substitute for inconsistent, but amount to the same thing: contradictory and oxymoronic. At heart, I’m bourgeois, but bourgeois in the sense that Walter Benjamin was—a way of life that appeals more than any other, despite sympathy for experiments in living differently. I’m wary of politicians, and of local government and its officials, but admire those that are competent. Competence matters, obviously, but incompetence is the rule and taxes are squandered. A friend who regularly expresses the desire to pay more taxes strikes me as mad. I pay a lot already. I’d be more willing to do so if competence were the rule and if strengthening the public realm were main object of a competent government. Neither is true, although of course it could be much worse. I admire the welfare capitalism of Singapore, which invests in public goods and services. The citystate prioritizes work and is stingy about welfare, to the detriment of some its retired people. It’s also authoritarian, although less so than before.
I admire socialist democracies like Denmark, but I don’t fully understand how they work. Do the experiences of smaller countries apply to larger ones like the USA? The problems of scaling up may argue for devolving power so regions call their own shots and build a political order to suit their situation. California is ripe for this. It points to the idea of regional resilience and stewardship. Regions should be defined by their watersheds. Nature should be a limiting factor on their development, in tandem with urbanity—the idea that settlement should be humancentered and nestled within nature, not out of scale with humanity and disregarding of the environment. In the photo above, indigenous Australians are protesting against the Victoria State Government for its wanton disregard of their rights. They have lived harmoniously on the continent for 50,000 years, so it seems wrong that newcomers can’t accommodate them and live in harmony with the continent, too. We also wrong our indigenous people and many others, and harm our environment—a human as well as a political and environmental failure and the worst kind of incompetence. I abhor this. It will take all of us working together to undo it. This is a core belief.
“Family is so important to me!” I woke up with this thought in my head and have been carrying it around with me, waiting to write it out. In the car, driving back from the coast, we talked about our children’s weddings. But birthdays and feast days also figure, drawing a cohort of family and guests. The family has had a gyroscopic effect on my life, keeping it from toppling over and preserving its forward momentum. Looking back in time, I wonder what we were thinking, those times when we thought to go our separate ways, as if that were even possible. It is in relation to family that my life is at its most bourgeois. A family is in some sense an enterprise, in that each generation invests in the next and has expectations for them that reflect a longer tradition. A commitment to educating the children falls on the parents, if they have the means to pay for it. But it can also be met by encouraging them to organize it themselves. The point is to focus each generation on those that follow. The adults seem to be working for themselves, but they have the family in mind, too. This attachment to family is leavened by a broad sense of family connection. Honorary cousins and old family friends abound, with events that occasion their presence. Attached to this is the network of friendships the parents maintain, often crossing generations so the children form their own links. What makes my own family so compelling is the constant sense of its unfolding. We pay attention to each other, but that attention is rooted in affection. A family wants them all to do well, to see their way through the reversals that life hands us, and to find happiness and fulfillment on their own terms. This is the ideal, and the parents, in our case, vary around it.
I have no talent as a cook. My children once told me, in unison, not to make their breakfast. My wife is a remarkable cook. She worked in a café and we met over the breakfast she made me. She was, as my friend Eva Della Lana exclaimed, seeing her photo, “a stunner.” Early on, she and her sister came to my apartment and made dinner. It was wonderful. The mess they made was appalling. I’ve spent my married life cleaning up. This is a small price to pay to live with such a good cook and so interesting a woman. Over the years, I’ve taught myself to cook basic things. When my wife is away, I try to eat healthily and not depend on takeout. I use these occasions to broaden my horizons a bit further, but what I make is a pale shadow of anything my wife makes. I watch my daughter occasionally—a good cook, too, but slower. I read recipes, but I’ve noted that my wife’s approach often differs from them when it comes to oatmeal, say, or lentils. Hers are better than mine, although mine are better than they were—edible, at least. My criterion is that I can eat it, not burn it or toss it. Cooking well appears to be genetic. That’s my sense. There are courses you can take, etc., but for a cook as good as my wife is, it’s a native talent. Mine is to know how good it is, to appreciate it every time she cooks. In the winter, she often makes soups. We eat them for several days at a time, and invariably she apologizes for serving it again, but it only gets better with age—soup is significantly better the second or third day, when everything has absorbed the flavor of everything else. Why would I want something else? When she serves it, saying she couldn’t take another day of the same thing, I’m grateful, as I should be.
Regrets often surface in the midst of my daily life. I come back to things, wondering if there been a breach between me and some other, and, if yes, then what caused it and how could I have avoided it. Not infrequently, word arrives that my misgivings were unjustified. But sometimes no word ever arrives, and a misunderstanding or an untoward moment hangs between me and this person as an unresolved thing. Another cause of regret is precipitous action on my part to protect my freedom of action. How else to put it? Certain human situations pose this dilemma, which exposes my unwillingness to be caught up in another person’s demands on me unless they truly reflect an agreement struck at the outset. Marriage is an example of this. Within it, we define the limits mutually through a long, arduous process, more pronounced at some points than others. It’s leavened by broader considerations that tip us toward acceptance. In other relationships, we may be less willing to do so if another’s needs and desires come into conflict with our own. A refusal to acquiesce can be brutal for the rejected party. It can ruin friendships and give rise to enmity—regrettable: a specific and aggrieved party has been damaged, yet all we can really do afterward is to apologize and stay open to the possibility that time will eventually heal the rift enough to reconnect on better terms.
“Nothing good we did was ever done easily.” This remark by wife seems absolutely true to me. One of her truisms is people generally can’t see the value in something if it’s not blindingly obvious. A corollary is that they invariably take literally what’s meant as a step toward a final product, misunderstanding the way something good comes into being. If something looks easy, it’s because the person or team doing it is drawing on a lot of experience and forethought. I tend to “work out loud” so that others are able to grasp what I’m trying to do. This is true even now when I’m on my own. It’s interesting what resonates for others, how they look at it. Editors are especially helpful, because it’s their business to question and pose alternatives. Good editors are in conversation with their writers, and vice versa. Those dialogues have led me to rework a piece entirely or to rework a paragraph in light of a comment. Sometimes it’s a sentence or a word that’s questioned. I may end up leaving it, but I learn from these exchanges. If I have a certain confidence as a writer. I’d summarize it as a belief that if I continue to write as best I can, what I write will build on itself, each informing the next. Early on, I was struck by a conversation between Don Juan Mateus and Carlos Castaneda in the first of the Don Juan books. Mateus tells Castaneda that asserting the value or the worthlessness of self and works is an arbitrary choice. How could we know?
I regard myself now as a writer. This was a slow process. Until I was 40, I was still caught up in the acculturation that is part and parcel of how my field, architecture, is taught. When I was 40, I thought of becoming a lawyer, with encouragement from a few architects who had made that switch later in life. A family friend, a lawyer, advised against it, but it was the LSAT guide that sealed the deal. One look and I knew I could never do it. The family friend also told me he thought I had a good career—one of the first people to make this assessment. Ten years later, I moved from marketing to communications, and my talents as an editor emerged rapidly, although I kept writing—I’m always writing. After I stepped down, I heard that the gods thought I rewrote everything, so they could dispense with outside writers. This was a complete misconception of what I did, but it was true in the sense that communications have to be tailored to the firm’s goals and its audiences’ receptivity. The writers went out and got the stories, encouraged to focus on whatever struck them as interesting and to “write long” rather than trim the article to published length. My role as editor was to shape this content, which they drew from the firm, to support its goals and appeal to its current and prospective clients. I found that the talented outside writers got the best stories and wrote them up compellingly. Keeping that alive made for a lively and readable publication. I was attracted to my firm because it had a wealth of stories, but eventually they became repetitious to
me. More accurately, the field itself—even though my firm defined it broadly—interested me less and less. Not that it isn’t useful and important, but where it pointed was rarely paid off by consequential change. Much talk, but change always seemed elsewhere, the field somewhere behind it or perhaps—caught up in other things—somewhere beside it, worrying about the au courant at the constant expense of substance. The Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, in an interview conducted by my friend Richard Ingersoll for an issue of Design Book Review on criticism, said that architects should just design buildings and not worry about anything else. The field is worse for trying to do otherwise, since designing a good building is far from simple and a good building has the possibility of solving a lot of problems, many unanticipated by the client. The main challenge architects face is not to close the building off from the future. The first and last firms I worked for understood this better than most. This account I’m giving is more about why I gave up the field than what I took up. What kind of writer am I? Mostly I write very short pieces of prose and equally short poems. My approach to length has always been incremental, and there’s a definite limit to how long I’m prepared to go. I would be remiss is not owning up to memoir as a constant theme, but it’s memoir in the service of making sense of the present moment, in the approved Walter Benjamin manner: synchronicity between two “nows.”
What are these “nows” that animate my work? To put this another way, what era resonates with “now” as I understand it? My life bridges the remnants of British colonialism as experienced in Southeast Asia and, at this writing, the eclipse of U.S. hegemony in the wake of regional parity and U.S. miscalculation. The way I put this captures my tendency to see life in geopolitical terms, a reflection of my well-traveled childhood and my father’s blend of realism and optimism that I think was gained in World War II. Geopolitical, but also personal and therefore culturally and ethnically diverse from the start, even though I was set among British and American expats like my parents and then raised in a Republican enclave in which Italians and Jews were exotic. My sense of the planet’s diversity came along with me because I’d experienced it directly. So, bourgeois but a flâneur too despite my love of solitude. For the solitary, observation is how balance is maintained. As usual, I’m circling around the question. The era that resonates is probably the coming-of-age era of my parents, the immediate postwar decade, when colonialism was supplanted by globalization. This is the potent fragment that drifts into sight as Trump and his America First goons try to kick it away—the idea that the world is the more interesting project. But it has regularly surfaced as the positive aspect of moments that were otherwise tainted or undermined by chauvinism and willful, destructive interventions.
In 1953, after we returned to New Jersey from Singapore, my parents bought a television so my mother could watch the McCarthy hearings. She used to iron as she watched, and I sat with her. Did she comment? I think she probably did. She loved Edward R. Murrow, the television news broadcaster, but it was also obvious that McCarthy and his cohort were bad guys. Television does this. Later on, I used to watch Nixon “address the nation” and think how he came across as an amateur actor whose model was Bela Lugosi. It’s interesting to me that our current media, although far more partisan, seem to leave the evidently bad free to rave on, the way Hitler did at his rallies. Is it that we watch alone? Watching TV was a shared event in my family, for the most part. When they bought the set, local broadcasting was either live or filmed, and almost all of it was truly local, especially the programs aimed at kids. A cartoonist named Roy Doty told stories and a woman on “The Magic Cottage” read them. Howdy Doody was the closest thing to a packaged show. My sister was on it, but I think this was before we went to Singapore. (It had an audience of kids, “the Peanut Gallery.”) It slowly took form, with public television emerging. At some point, my mother got up early to study Russian, learning enough to say something in that language to a Russian chemist at a convention she attended with my father, earning her a big smile.
My “nows” are about the modern project. I refer to Walter Benjamin’s sense that a past era becomes pertinent when we face an impasse that resembles one our predecessors also experienced. It may have sparked responses that resonate anew and make us feel that we can take them up again, better equipped. The era that registers with me, emerging from a war, looked back past where the modern project went off the rails, trying to reclaim it for a radically different world. This reclamation was widespread, even taking in the postwar Soviet Union, finally rid of Stalin. Its first 15 or so years, 1945 to 1970, were productive, drawing on the optimism with which the generation of my parents emerged from World War II, even in the countries that were defeated. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of the next generation, then students, looking back and across at social and revolutionary movements, and the numerous problems the modern project failed to solve. My “now” from this era isn’t about the forms the modern project took, but rather its optimism that a modern life could be forged based on abundance— Maslow’s pyramid, aiming for self-actualization—and cosmopolitan, international cooperation. All of it was distorted by the vying forces of U.S. capitalism, Soviet communism, and Maoist Stalinism, each seeking to define “modern” in its own terms. The actualization Maslow looked for was personal for one and social for the other. The present “now” for me is about the convergence of these conflicting visions. My writing partner Richard Bender and I wrote a piece for a book honoring the Italian architect and planner Giancarlo de Carlo, a founder of Team X, a group of likeminded younger architect-planners who
broke with CIAM, an earlier group that bridged the war but failed to satisfy its impatient successors. In a letter to the book’s editor, Paolo Ceccarrelli, I wrote that the time seems ripe for Team XX, as I called it— a new group of architect-planners prepared to revive the modern project in light of the global problems that threaten planetary life, our own included. The pandemic, which exposes the frayed structure on which so much depends, is a preview of the much more serious impact of climate change. Ironically, the pandemic also exposes how our energy-based, factory-derived economies, rooted in another era, can if halted rapidly clear the air and finally hit the brakes instead of the accelerator of global warming. My “nows” look across the wasteland of the regional wars fought first over “system differences” and then over access to energy. The juncture we’re at now is either to perpetuate this wasteland, which will surely push us to ignore all the warning signs and make the planet dangerously worse, or to revive the modern project we set aside—self-actualizing, cosmopolitan, cooperative, and attuned to nature. Make no mistake: this will be a different way of life. I think it will combine disseminated, reliable (that is, fact-based) knowledge with a good deal of heuristic—local and individual practices that mediate regional and global guidance. We could call this local cosmopolitanism, based on interchange and consultation that will stay global no matter what. The skill the future demands if the modern project is be revived effectively is network savvy. Social media is to me its most obvious precedent, still primitive though it is. Despite determined efforts to stop it, the word gets through. “Now” will build on this.
I had a religious self in childhood. What is it now? In “To the Planetarium,” Walter Benjamin notes that our relationship with the cosmos, a communal commonplace in antiquity, is relegated now to poets in their reverie. This, he says, is a tragic error. That religion is all of its forms is still with us is clear, and I embody every last one of them, it seems. Animism; love of ritual; innate respect for religion’s traditional manifestations—buildings, art, priests, nuns, et al; and direct experience of the uncanny, of the dead passing messages and leaving me briefly clairvoyant. I was baptized and confirmed an Anglican Catholic, to which my father converted from Lutheranism in college, I believe. My mother and I both loved the Book of Common Prayer, so gorgeously written. At some point, having married into an Irish family, I drifted into the orbit of Roman Catholicism, but my heart is probably closest to Zen Buddhism as an idea (but not the ritual, which seems at odds with Zen’s simplicity and connection to the Buddha’s teaching.) Yet on both ends of sleep I thank God for getting us through the day and onto another—us meaning me and every other God might countenance to help. I’m enough of a Buddhist not to want to be singled out. (I remember our family friend Kimiko Sakai taking me to a temple in Tokyo, pulling out someone’s wish and reading it aloud, and making a face: “No one should ask something like this!” Hubris is a thing.) I prefer Roman Catholicism mainly because it’s so evidently the successor of countless agricultural cults aimed at preserving the fertility of the planet. The fecundity of Catholic women was palpable when I was younger, but I haven’t gone enough now to say if that’s still true. The Church’s abortion stance is at
least consistent with this, and I always admired John Noonan, a devout member of our parish and an expert in Canon Law, fighting against the death penalty as a Court of Appeals Judge from the same belief in the sanctity of life that led him to oppose abortion—the stance that led Reagan to appoint him. The Decalogue isn’t easy to follow. Neither are the Buddhist Precepts, but as I get older, I see that their real purpose is to give you the instruction book that life mostly lacks. That exceptions are constantly made by “higher powers” who should know better muddies the moral waters, especially re: murder. The Church did it, too, a huge strike against it. Her nominal founder, Jesus of Nazareth, proclaimed the essence of Christianity as love for God, neighbor, and self. My prayers run along these lines. How a religion like Christianity or Buddhism strays so far from its founding ideas is a mystery to me. It must be impossible to avoid elaborating in the direction of chauvinism, mystery, worldly power, and pomp. It brings a lot of good things along with it: art, music, literature, poetry, architecture, and design all owe huge debts to its patronage. I enjoy the patrimony. That relationship is there and not. Religions aren’t the organized force they were, except in theocracies or places where politicians annex them to cement their ties to an ethnic or sectarian base. But many have emerged as local sponsors of culture, music especially. Our parish church is a sought-after venue for early music. One of the loveliest concerts I ever heard was in a 12th-century church in Norway, perfect in atmosphere and acoustics. It’s a tradition to which I’m still attached. There are others, some of which I also admire but rarely partake.
“The Artist as Producer” raises thoughts. In what was intended to be a talk, Walter Benjamin critiques leftwing intellectuals, sympathetic to the proletariat but separated from it by their bourgeois upbringing and their unwillingness to be activists and to commit their writing to the proletariat’s cause. I remember an exhibit of Russian avant-garde art at LACMA in the 1980s—I still have the catalogue. The work was notably better before the October Revolution than after, and in the 1930s, most of the artists exhibited were dead, killed off by Stalin’s purges. The stairway of the exhibit hall had their photos, each explaining their fate. It was sobering. WB visited Moscow and was tempted to move there, but didn’t. He must have wondered if he could be who he was in that regime. In the end, being WB was what kept him going. I fall in this same category, let me admit it. No activist, I’m as wary of revolution as I am of reaction. Bourgeois revolutions may be an exception, although they too are prone to recreate the aristocracy they supplanted and overreact when their interests are threatened. Assertions made about the bourgeoisie conflate it with what might be called “organized wealth.” A distinction should be made between communitybased owners of businesses and properties, and these inevitably much larger organizations. The pandemic has exposed the particular scandal of forprofit hospitals, owned by private equity, being forced out of business by these owners because they won’t put up more money to keep them operating.
The bourgeoisie as I think of it has a stake in the community it serves. It serves local, communal needs and derives a profit from doing this well. It may be naïve and simplistic to assert this, but even some fairly big firms manage to preserve this ethos. They are content to grow organically and to accept what amounts to a natural limit to their size and reach. “Organized wealth” knows no such constraint. Its destructiveness to bourgeois enterprise is evident, but its wider destructiveness is the bigger issue. So, it’s unfortunate that the bourgeoisie are lumped in with “organized wealth” by leftwing activists—an error that actually deflects attention from the real culprit and its political enablers. The tradition of the bourgeoisie is activism. As Marx noted, they overthrew the aristocracy. The revolution of 1848 failed, but its aim was a bourgeois voice in government—similar to the U.S. revolution. It’s telling that efforts to reform in the U.S. always aim at “organized wealth,” seeking to curb a power that subverts democracy. The bourgeoisie is always the source of this. Elizabeth Warren is a bourgeois candidate par excellence, a classic reformer. I don’t agree with all of her policies, because I think she too conflates the bourgeoisie with “organized wealth,” but her emphasis on reform appeals and is overdue. I’m more concerned about the Precariat than the proletariat, at this point, and that feels like a local, communal problem, ideal for a bourgeois uprising in the grand tradition of securing our children’s future.
I favor evolution and reform. Revolution and disruption make me wary, based on history and personal experience. I sympathize with peaceful protests like Occupy and Hong Kong’s Umbrella movement, and agree with Manuel Castells that despite their apparent failures, they inevitably shift opinion in their direction. A program like the Green New Deal works similarly. There is nothing wrong with setting out ambitious goals and then working out the practicalities of how to get there. Situations like the pandemic speed this process up by slowing life down sufficiently for people to consider it and, at the same time, see through much of what has been palmed off on them as news and information. The new reality ensures that what’s possible and what isn’t are both on view. Even before the crisis, it was clear that whole swathes of “disruption” were a shell game of use only to the IPO racket. Rethinking and regulation will follow, reflecting the public interest. I was born two years after World War II ended, and the arc of my life has seen the rise and decline of organizations set up to prevent its recurrence. The ethnic diversity of my youth was also supplanted by the all-subsuming category, “white.” In California, where fusion is more common than elsewhere, this is less of an issue, but it’s a mess elsewhere, the source of a political divide that was always there but is back in the spotlight in ways that are regressive and ugly. It may be revolution enough if the progress we were making revives in light of what we’ve learned since.
Which is to say that evolution and reform are in fact progressive, but with a willingness to learn from experience rather than lurch forward on the basis of ideology or “genius.” So much that’s put forward as progress now is half-baked and unexamined. It’s obvious immediately in its sledgehammer nature, devoid of nuance or consideration of implications. Activism in relation to evolution and reform is rooted in a constant sifting of polis and planet—what humanity is doing and the impacts of those activities. Activism take this seriously. It sees progress in light of it—an agenda for the future to guide the present. It looks to the public realm to focus on it and provide the political will to invest in societal transformation. If the planet needs a new operating system, as seems likely, only the public realm can bring it into being. If it becomes a crisis, then that transformation will be precipitous—revolutionary and disruptive. Evolution and reform anticipate the crises and seek to avoid them and arrive at something better. This is the goal, modest and courageous in turns, that interests me. Don’t give me barricades or “disruptors” that ever and always care only about themselves, a quick buck. A bourgeois revolution is evolutionary by nature, valuing history and experience; wary of hubris, of the charlatans and narcissists that dog humanity, of the “late capitalists” of all stripes that seek their own advantage at the expense of community, that know no brake, desire only to keep their own game going. With my predecessors, I say no, there’s a better way.
Common Place No. 24 | Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com