I recall that philosopher Mortimer Adler once set up the Philosophical Institute in San Francisco where a group of scholars would work on basic 'ideas' along the lines of the Great Books ideas. Their one and only (I believe) publication, after years of expensive research, was a huge and very lumpy text entitled Freedom. It failed in both the popular and academic arenas and Adler was ridiculed for his audacious notion that a concept as etherial or metaphysical as freedom could be defined as if it were a rock or a species of insect. Of course I like the notion of freedom but I feel quite strongly that, like art quality, it must be defined by implication and after the fact in some limiting, transient and temporary context.
Moreover, the freedom to act, to do something, is different from the freedom to be or to think. But even that distinction is leaky because if one cannot act -- like acquiring the ability to read -- one cannot think as freely as one might. Maybe in the end freedom is a political term, like money, and a legalistic term or the phantom of enacted law. I once met a very serious philosopher who argued that there are no "intrinsic human rights" (we call them freedoms) outside of laws that define them. Changing the law changes those rights. I suppose this is close to your view of freedom as a mode of access or enabling conditions. But this is simply an expedient way to define freedom as a matter of what's possible to do at any given moment. When you say you insist that an artwork is intended to communicate experience (Tolstoy's view) you assert that experience can be packaged as something and transmitted to someone, like sending package. I suggest it's impossible to do that. Communication is a complicated process that engages people in a creative context of constructing their individual meanings. My outlook on this is taken from Roy Harris, the Integrationist linguist. See his Signs, Language, Communication 1996 or check online for a summary. I wouldn't respond to your assertion if it had not been so insistently stated while the questions of what communication is and how it happens are so obviously unsettled in communication theory. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Mike Mallory <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, November 13, 2010 10:14:26 PM Subject: Re: "Therebs more alienation and separation of people in a commodified landscape ... ----- 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
