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So I'll skip over that since we seem to be running short on time. So just a few quick
things on Schiller's notion of the distorting force of culture, by which he meant ideology.
And these are amazing quotes, I think, because you would, if you found these things in a
mid-20th century text from the Frankfurt School of Western Marxism, Theodor Adorno et. cetera,
or you know, The Birmingham School of Marxism in England, they would fit in perfectly. So,
Man, he argues, "develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous
sound of the wheel that he turns". This is 50 years before Marx, 1795. "Little by little
the concrete life of the individual is destroyed in order that the abstract idea of the whole
may drag out its sorry existence." "Live with your century, but do not be its creature."
In other words, we become functionaries, we're not human beings anymore we're simply functions
of the system. Now this critic I've been talking about, who's, I think, a complete genius,
is Morse Peckham. What he argues in his book on, romanticism and ideology, is he defines
ideology as those things that give directions, it gives directions, it explains them, it
justifies them, and so that they "ought to be obeyed", and a quote from him, "On the
whole, people do exactly what you tell them to do." And I think this sort of thing, if
it's called to your attention is, you know, is fairly obvious. The way that we go about
thinking about our lives, in terms of childhood, education, professional training, job, family,
and then sort of growing the family, the house, whatever comes with it, all of these things
are sort of, the ideology that is so familiar to us that it becomes almost a kind of common
sense, it becomes an "of course". But for Schiller and the Romantics, they were deeply
distorting, damaging, and not desirable. Just quickly on this, because this is where the
beauty is, I think. This first quote from Schiller is very Rousseau-ean, "In general
we call noble any nature that possesses the gift of transforming, purely by its manner
of handling it, even the most trifling", oh this isn't Rousseau, "even the most trifling
occupation, or the most petty of objects, into something infinite." So this is for him,
the work of the artist. The world that Schiller describes is a "labile" world, which is to
say a flexible world. A world that is open to kinds of change that the world of ideology
is not open to. These are the fundamental givens for this way of thinking. Art was not
a good in itself, in other words, art wasn't for art's sake. Art had a function, and that
function was, essentially, to model freedom. In other words, art gives us a sense of what
it's like to be free. When we listen to our favorite alt-rock band, Radiohead or whatever
it might be, one of the things that makes us so happy about that music, as different
as it is from every kind of conventional music, what makes us happy about it is that it's
telling us something about what it feels like to be free. Art welcomes the random, and I
think the entire history of art from the Romantics to the present, is the history of, you know,
the development of this openness to the random. Ideology is not open to the random. It kinda
likes to keep things as stable as possible. Art, Romanticism was, for Schiller, an ideology
of anti-ideology, so its only truth was that, well Peckham puts it very well, at the bottom
there he says, "A truth that is announced as a lie is a higher truth than a truth that
is announced as a truth." And one last quote, with Romanticism, art becomes a "violation
of expectancy", a means of "cultural transcendence" and my favorite, "ideological vandalism",
that's what art is. So, you know, if you think about all of the great unruly art movements
from the Romantics onward, from Wagnerism, to Symbolism, to Impressionism, all the modern-"ism's"
of the early 1900's, the Beats, the Folkies, Psychedelia, New Wave, Punk, and on into the
future I hope, what you see in them is that they thrive precisely because of their openness
to the random. They'll let anything in. There are no rules. And they seek to create alternative
worlds, and this is where I think Romanticism kind of comes together with my first remarks,
that were kind of self-serving memoiristic remarks. It seeks to create countercultures.
That, for the Romantics, is art's primary job, is to create countercultures, create
space, that you can live in. I mean, that's how I always felt about the counterculture
in the 60's. They were saying, "you don't have to live in that suburb. Come here, and
live this way." and it was like, "O-K. Thank god somebody said that to me", you know. So
what I've sort of discovered, you know, in terms of becoming who I am and being aware
of who I am, is that this great tradition is who I am. All 230 years of it. This is
what I had chosen, whether consciously, or intuitively, it was what had convinced me
that it could "lead me to life", in Nietzsche's terms, right? I am the enemy, and I don't
mean to be immodest about this, because I don't, I think of myself as being basically,
these days, in the day of the reign of the Tea Party, right, as totally super, super,
I can't say this word today, superfluous, human being. But I am the enemy and that's
what I will always be, of all orthodoxies and ideologies, of religion, capitalism, the
state, local, customer, what your mommy and daddy told you. That's just it, you know.
I don't say that in a boastful way, I'm not saying that's what you should be, that's who
I am, I know that. So there is no truth as Nietzsche said, "truth is a mobile army of
metaphors and metonymies." There is no liberal or socialist utopia. There is only what Nietzsche
called "the one great war" which is the war of the forces of life against the forces of
death. And for Nietzsche, history's heroes are its artists and philosophers, those who
feel free to treat received wisdom as a fraud, and who gaily, one of Nietzsche's books was
called "The Gay Science", or The Joyful Wisdom, who gaily take up the challenge of reinventing
the world, day by day, infinitely. So that's part two. And I hope you'll indulge me just
a bit, and let me do this last bit. I just want to talk briefly about the project that
I'm working on now. I've come out of a, I began as a fiction writer. About seven years
ago I kind of got derailed, because of something bad I said about Terry Gross, into writing
nonfiction. And I wrote three books that I'm very proud of, "The Middle Mind", "The Spirit
of Disobedience", and "The Barbaric Heart", in that period, but now I really feel like
that's done. Actually, a lot of editors have told me that that's done too, so I had some
push, you know? What I want to do with what remains of my creative life, is to work on
one big thing, without worrying about publication, without worrying about what, how big of a
binding a book will hold up to, without worrying about how much it will cost,