The Conformity of Non-Conformity

 Long, long ago, thanks to reading Henry David Thoreau, I decided there was a certain conformity to non-conformity. Today, it would probably be called tribalism. To be a punk, one had to look a certain way. Heavy metal fans segregated themselves similarly. One group of rebels considered themselves cool and all others uncool. I learned of groupthink a little later.

 

Reading Art must act: Throughout decades of writing, Harold Rosenberg exhorted artists to resist cliché and conformity and instead take action by Blake Smith (Aeon) brought me to write about my own observations. 

Whether Rosenberg was ‘right’ about Steinberg, Warhol or Newman and the abstract artists of the postwar years – that is, whether what he said about them helps us better appreciate real features of their work and its significance – must be for the reader to judge against the visual evidence. What’s most significant about Rosenberg’s criticism is that, as he shifted attention from one artist to another, he consistently sought to evaluate what a given artist’s work revealed about how an individual in our society can use the cultural and institutional resources available to pry themselves out of their old personae and craft a new, more expansive and enfranchising identity. Throughout decades of writing about art, he always held that artists were to be judged for their success or failure at acting – that is, in finding ways to resist routine, cliché and conformity on the one hand, and self-deluded escapism and fantasy on the other. These twin evils, he never stopped arguing, arise from the very nature of our capitalist society.

Few art critics or scholars of art history appreciated Rosenberg’s emphasis on action, or understood its connection to a thoroughgoing critique of the contemporary world. But his friend Hannah Arendt took up many of his ideas in her opus The Human Condition (1958), which argues that political life, like aesthetics, is characterised by an innate, albeit now widely ignored, human need for self-display through performances that are not labour, or routine, or ritual, but what she, following Rosenberg, called ‘action’. Like her friend, Arendt was concerned that possibilities for action in our society were being eroded by mechanisation and bureaucratisation on the one hand, and, on the other, illusory forms of pseudo-action, ranging from the benumbing pleasures of the entertainment industry to the chimeras of mass politics. In an essay that marked a turning point in her thinking, ‘The Crisis in Culture’ (1960), she cited Rosenberg as she began to argue that the task for intellectuals today is not to critique mass culture in isolation from it, but to exercise what she called ‘taste’ and ‘judgment’ within it. In other words, to become a public intellectual following Rosenberg’s example. 

Action seems to fit well with the lessons I learned from Thoreau. No ideology will give us the means of grappling with the vagaries of existence.  

What does not get mentioned in the essay is conscience. Whether you come from a religious background or from an existential one, the conscience must face judgment. We have to live with ourselves, which is represented by our conscience. Mass movements of ideology numb our conscience into their forms. Sooner or later, we find our consciences finding fault in the ideologies to which we gave faith.

Be wary of death or glory becoming just another story:

 I can tell you the failure of that numbing led me to depression and nihilism. Now, with what time I have still with me, I mean to do as my conscience says. I guess that leaves me either opposed to certain ideologies (MAGA), or jaundiced (anyone using the phrase "unhoused", or declaring anyone who declares anyone disagreeing with their pronoun use to be fascists). I lean towards those who do not threaten the lives of others. Life is too weird, too protean, for the straight jacket of ideology. Freedom is sticking up for life, standing where your conscience says take a stand.

If this sounds like anarchy:

 

sch 10/12