"1. An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities; 2. A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; 3. The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel)."
Wrote Milan Kundera in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" (1979), quoted at the Wikipedia entry "Graphomania." "Graphomania" is a word I looked up after writing the previous post, about Mr. Doodle.
What if anything distinguishes obsessive writing from obsessive drawing? I don't know, but back in 2005 there was a show called "Obsessive Drawing" at The American Folk Art Museum. Holland Cotter wrote about it in the NYT:
The act of drawing and painting, [one artist said], helped to ease a debilitating anxiety that had dogged him all his life. Once he started a drawing, the anxiety lifted. Relief arrived as a state of entrancement. One minute he'd be sitting at his kitchen table with sheets of graph paper and a pen filled with ink. The next, he'd be aware that hours had passed, and he'd done a drawing. What was the mechanism responsible? He's not sure, but it worked for a creative half century....
Debates about the ethics and efficacy of Outsider Art as a category, with an aura of exceptionalism and exoticism, are old by now.
Yeah, who even hears about that anymore? On the internet, who's the outsider? Mr. Doodle didn't need the Folk Art Museum to embrace him. He just put himself out there on social media.
Archaic prose from Cotter's article:
This is art that can neither be expressively tempered, nor politically corrected, nor marketably slotted by that great vetting, veneering machine called the art industry. So it stays volatile, radioactive, problematically hot. Is this why our mainstream institutions are so reluctant to exhibit it? Because they're afraid of it, afraid of its unpredictablity, afraid of how its intense singularity will react with, clash with, even infect other art?
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when society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions
"There are five legitimate functions of government," said the Galambosian.
"No kidding. What are they?"
"I am not a liberty to say. The theory was originated by Andy Galambos and it is his primary property."
- Jerome Tuccille, It Usually Begins with Any Rand
"when society develops to the point..."/"There are five legitimate functions of government..."
Transition missing. Society ≠ government.
"social atomization" = favorite complaint of speaker/writer is about to descend upon you
Was Kundera's complaint too much writerly competition? I am the opposite of a Kundera fan, but he did very well despite the competition.
Q: was life on a homestead farm on a prairie "socially atomized"? What lives are not "socially atomized"? In the barrio or the ghetto?
The transition is stating the number of reasons, as if that would be a good way to impress with the science of what follows. If you see that introduction, what follows is bullshit.
I just started reading that book yesterday.
Tuccille made the joke of sounding interested in what they are.
"I just started reading that book yesterday."
Coincidences are cool.
"The transition is stating the number of reasons, as if that would be a good way to impress with the science of what follows."
Kundera is a novelist. There's a playfulness to doing things in list form, to making a numerical claim. It's a funny writerly tactic. There are 2 kinds of people in the world: 1. Those who see the charm in numbered lists, and 2. Those who don't.
Transition missing. Society ≠ government.
Current government begs to differ.
There are two kinds of people; people who think people can be divided into two kinds of people, and people who don't.
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count, and those who can't count.
There's a lot happening in France these days. An entire culture is undergoing change, with an over 20% Muslim population that is booming, while the native population is not reproducing above replacement rate. There is upheaval you can feel in the streets (from what I read).
Does this mean the percentage of writers in France is decreasing? Kundera wrote "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" in 1979. The landscape in his example society has changed. It would seem to me with all that is going on now, French (and all) writers today would have more to stimulate ideas than ever.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world, people who understand binary notation and people who don't...
OK, it's an old joke, but it's all I've got.
I may have a little bit too much of a historical perspective, but I don't understand anything about Kundra's comments. What is this society that he is talking about? Not until mass communications through the radio and more importantly through video on TV did the United States have any semblance of commonality in society unless you are speaking only of the highest level of common views (i.e., land of the free, etc.). So Kundra must be talking about "his" society of artists and intellectuals. I suspect he lives in a bubble society in NYC. As to his three conditions, it was the wealthy from Wall Street and big corporations with HQ's in NYC that had the ability to lead idle, self-indulgent lives. Who is more isolated in their lives than the NYC bubble crowd. They still can't understand why Trump was elected. I must confess, I have no comprehension of what he means about the internal life of the nation. Does he really believe that we all think alike?
Better for you to read this kind of nonsense than me.
"1. An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities; 2. A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; 3. The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel)."
I seriously doubt the last part holds true today. It may be true of Paris, but Israel is a more urbanized country than France, so it's likely that the percentage of writers in the population in Israel is higher than in France.
The rest of it does fit our condition here and now. Affluence and leisure allow for a lot of bloggers and commenters. Many people are isolated and more likely to interact through and with the media than with others face to face. The third item seems more relevant to Kundera's own experience than to our own, and it looks like a subset of the first. If you don't have to cope with Hitler, Stalin, war, and starvation you are free to blog. But there was a lot of pamphleteering (the earlier equivalent of blogging and social media) in the early stages of revolutions. When changes wreak havoc, people don't have the time or the security to comment on everything, but before that, opinion-mongering flourishes like never before.
All this goes along with the idea that given affluence and security and the absence of external threats or challenges, Americans will turn on each other and tear the country apart. What held it together in other times of peace and prosperity was gratitude that the hard times people had lived through were over and also a level of social and cultural and ideological homogeneity that we don't have now.
A lobsterman from Maine, a cotton grower in Alabama, a mill worker in Pennsylvania, and a miner in Nevada would all have lead very different lives in the old days, but (apart from that Civil War thing) they shared a pretty general consensus about things - country, community, religion, family. Now the nation is much more divided about those things. If people disagreed about politics, they didn't come much into contact with people who presented violently opposed points of view, and the federal government wasn't going to do much that could affect how they lived their local community or their daily lives. The paradox is that the age when individuals couldn't communicate with each other was more united about the basics of life than an age when everyone is actively or potentially in contact with everyone else. Communication doesn't mean communion.
---Many people are isolated and more likely to interact through and with the media than with others face to face. [Lurker21]
With easy transport within reach of so many, your statement is hard to credit. And even in this last year of social distancing, the media through which some have been forced to communicate has been recognized as a surprisingly adequate temporary replacement for commuting to the same big office building downtown. Understanding media as the extensions of man -- didn't someone say that 50some years ago?
---a lobsterman from Maine, a cotton grower in Alabama, a mill worker in Pennsylvania, and a miner in Nevada would all have lead very different lives in the old days, but (apart from that Civil War thing) they shared a pretty general consensus about things - country, community, religion, family. [Lurker21]
Except insofar as they were all Christians, I doubt it. Aren't you romanticizing a time when social lives were FAR MORE "atomized" than they are today?
We are far better connected throughout our society today than ever before in my lifetime. Regional differences have dwindled, which is a shame, southern accents are dying out, another shame, and franchised businesses show up in every mall in every county of America, all the same. "Atomization" is just another word for alienation, which intellectuals feel because they do not receive the nonstop adulation and worship to which they feel they are entitled.
First, I'd say that you have to make a distinction between the people who are interested in politics and those who aren't. Many people do live more in their local face-to-face interactions. But people who are interested in politics live in a world that is far more dominated by media and concepts. I think you may find that the everyday social and working worlds that people live in aren't as all-encompassing as they once were. Andy Griffith's Mayberry (or its equivalent in real life) wasn't much concerned with what happened outside of it (at least before civil rights became an issue). Nowadays, many people aren't satisfied or enveloped by the real world and feel drawn to the politicized world they find through the media.
Second, I would agree that regional differences are less. There's a lot less difference between New York, Atlanta, Dallas and Seattle. That doesn't mean we are less atomized, though. I'm thinking of atomization as the lack of local ties and attachments, as people aware of their isolation from local communities, not as the separation of one community from another. Different groups can live together if they agree to let each other alone. Communities like the Amish or the Rockland County Orthodox aren't atomized and the fact that they live separately from the main stream doesn't make society atomized.
Without such ties and attachments people may feel more at sea in the world. The kind of ties we have in mainstream now aren't very strong or binding, so many people look in social media and in politics for the community they don't have in everyday life. I understand that if you were already attracted to the wider world you would feel painfully isolated and out of place in the older rural America. That was a major theme of American literature a century ago. But those lonely dreamers and misfits weren't characteristic of American society. They were more like us today.
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