----- Original Message -----
From: "William Conger" <[email protected]>
We have built a post- renaissance
world on the cult of western style
individualism. Does it still work? Its
central myth is the idea of freedom,
personal freedom as the basis of all
achievement. It has worked very well if we
champion a vague sense of
mythologized freedom (that has never been adequately
defined) but what
happens when the world resources become too fragile and scanty
to support
everyone's free individualism?
______________________________________________________________________________________
I prefer John Dewey's notion of "freedom", which I will rephrase as
"enabling conditions." Dewey rejects the "noble savage" idea that freedom
is an original possession winnowed by the limitations of community. The
"noble savage" hunting and gathering her way across the Europe 40,000 years
ago was not free to catch an airliner to America. In fact the noble savage
led a life of very limited options.
What allows us the freedom of booking a seat on an airliner is the
technology of flight, the development of petroleum based energy production,
radar, a system of controlling air traffic and an economic environment
allowing the concentration of investment capital into an agent managed
enterprise, just to name a few. These are enabling conditions allowing
people to fly on an airplane.
Freedom, in Dewey's sense is not limited, but originates in social
interdependence. For Dewey, democracy is not a way to protect our freedoms,
but to develop them through advancement in the conditions that allow greater
and more creative choices. Freedom in this sense is tied more closely to
communalism than individualism. Dewey argued against the myth of "rugged
individualism".
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
As to the Max Haiven interview, I suggest that the commodification of art is
more serious than either the economic or political implications. Insofar as
a Work of Art is intended to communicate an experience (which I have argued
is always the case), the commodification of art is the commodification of
our experience. As such our meaning is available in the marketplace.
Commercial art does not try to persuade us to buy something, it tries to
persuade us to be something. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak!"
Besides, Haiven fails to explain why a political foundation for creativity
is preferable to an economic foundation. I would reject them both.
Mike Mallory
