``...My impression is that books like Exuberance signal a turn in direction a change in tastes and values away from modern ideals of longing and brooding and toward post-postmodern (which is to say antique) ideals of fulfillment and adventure.
Observing this shift, we may mourn what is lost, in terms of respect for emotional complexity. At the same time, we may acknowledge that the change is overdue. The centuries-long romance with depression what was that about?..''
(Peter D. Kramer is the author of Listening to Prozac and Spectacular Happiness. His new book about depression will be published next year.)
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Kramer get a life.
I find it fascinating that he (or the reviewer) ends on the question, `what was that about?'
In the last few months I've been going over old films that I remembered seeing from the late 50s to 60s: Sundays and Cybil, 400 Blows... These films set a mood and image that was unmistakably the cool, flat, muted emotive distance of complexity and reflection that characterized high modernity, substituting the image for the word, to reach a ever\n greater level of abstraction, reserve, and analytical perspective. They were a reaction to the passionate intensity and evident simplistic and strident level of political commitment of the mid 20thC. They fit perfectly with the high jazz of the period of Charlie Parker, Theloneous Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltraine... And of course the painting and photography. In all these forms, silence, blank areas, stark compositional simplicity, moderate avant-guard technique for the period together conform to and are embraced by the existential mode of ambivalent and mixed emotion that positions critique and analysis at the center of being human. I would be tempted to call it existential humanism, if that term didn't already signify a quasi-religious sentiment that is completely absent in most of these works (the exception is John C). Octavio Paz call them children of the mire.
Yes, what was that all about? Well, After two world wars with a depression in between, and the rise of mass consumer culture as their great desert or historical resolution, it seems fair that at least some elements of those generations stood back a little and wondered, what the fuck was that?
Certainly that kind of reflection has waned to the point of disappearance in the last decades of the 20thC. It was always a very difficult position to maintain and was uniquely intense in the sense of extreme tension---even if this tension was muted and appeared as jarring disaffection and dissonance.
Are the last two or three decades the answer as to how that tension was resolved? Again, Paz in his Elliot Norton lectures of 1970 speculated that the death of the future would resolve in the moment of the present turning as if in a recitation or reproduction, toward the spoken work in opposition to the written word.
Instead we returned to the blatantly naive view of the world. I am curious how could such a return be naive if it is based on a deliberate rejection? Hence the idea that that we have somehow overcome our ennui through an embrace of `fulfillment and adventure' is pure hypocrisy, and hence the strangely alienating quality to the phony boosterism. The current Exuberance reminds me more of the sort of nervous cheeriness that might be found among those waiting for the firing squad.
Among other ways to look at the above quote is to consider that the current forms of psycho-therapy which were half in the Freudian box and half out originated in that same era (40-60s), in which barbiturates were the drug therapy of choice. That is to say downers. Now various uppers are in vogue (70-90s). Both frequently mixed with alcohol so that the Patients can amplify the effects ranging from respiratory arrest in the former case to heart attacks and stroke in the latter. Street wisdom has it that when you start self-medicating, you must be in pain. What was all that pain about? Gee I wonder.
When Kramer mentions a romanticism with depression, he could just as easily dropped the word depression because romanticism as an movement certainly embraced irrational exuberance and the void of depression as a spectrum, in dialectical opposition to the flat line of bourgeois life. For example, consider the ranges in Chopin and Delacroix, or Baudelaire, Debussy and Mallarme who were all precursors to the disaffected afflictions of the 20thC.
If the irrational exuberance of today resembles anything, it is the leering masks of German Expressionist painting and the cartoons of Otto Gross---hardly antique ideals---eros and anarchy... (thanks to Jennifer Michaels for a great title).
For a long time, I wondered how it would turn out. The children of mire could not return to the well of darkness and void forever. There are limits. Tea leaves begin to look like a rainforest compared to the desert of the real. And so now I (or we) know. We get Disneyland on steroids, an insipid fascism. Just fucking great. Oldenburg's Geometric Mouse X:
http://www.ci.houston.tx.us/municipalart/artworks/geometricmouse-l.jpg
This one is red, but the one I like is black and a little smaller... There is nothing like the first time walk around it and realize the eyes have fallen out and landed on the floor.
CG
