When I was quite young, some adult told me that smarts are freedom: the smarter you are, the more you can disregard or work around all those things that people have to do. So I started signing up for a new library card every time I went to the library so that I wouldn't have to return the books, and otherwise started looking at the system, so that I could either beat it or ignore it. And I continued this bohemian existence into early adulthood: racking up lots of parking tickets guilt-free because they were attached to the car's VIN and not me; calling my credit card company to tell them that a check was in the mail every single month, so as not to be charged a late fee for being legitimately late.
When I was growing up, in the age of the Commodore64 and Apple2E, beating the system was not very hard. It was easy to miss at least one class every single day of my high school career (and shuffle through the rest of them stoned), as long as I always got the mail before my mother did and got at least a B- or a C+. I remember a time when it was easy to feign that you never got the piece of paper or argue coherently to an actual person that a rule does not apply in this case.
Saying that the check is in the mail actually used to work.
I am not more cunning than the average artist. Lots of my friends figured out how to dump tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt without going to hell or even getting in trouble. In fact, more than one professor told me to make whatever I want to make, on credit, and then file for bankruptcy.
Who says you don't get career advice in art school?
Every artist living in a big, expensive city who has the time, space and resources to make art knows a certain amount of black magic. But these gypsy spells don't work like they used to. You can't declare bankruptcy over your MFA anymore. Credit card debt is much more frightening. The healthcare thing is harder to game than it used to be. And the worst part is that you are in everyone's database.
Being an old-school bohemian is fundamentally about asserting your individual superiority over a system. The goal is to take everything you need from the system without having to give it anything like your precious time or actual allegiance. When the system is relatively stupid and inefficient, this is easy to accomplish. But the New Bohemian is either going to have to buy in, or stop thinking in terms of individual needs and desires.
To take one example, banking has become too complex and unfair to understand in an arrogantly facile, fuck you kind of way. The increasingly Byzantine fee structure plays heavily to the Old Bohemian in all of us, who wants freedom from the bank and is happier ignoring one's own bank statement; forgetting that the $1.50 you say yes to at the ATM is only half the story; not adding up every single ATM fee over the course of one month or one year. And the impenetrable FICO score seems designed to snare Old Bohemians in a mid-fivehundreds trap of slightly higher premiums for car and health insurance; occasionally getting turned down for apartments; and of course, higher interest rates for those credit cards you shouldn't even have in the first place.
The old-school liberal, indulgent Bohemian model (you are smart enough to get what you need, live how you want and not pay for it) is now the default, the target of every single lender and everyone else with a computer who wants to take advantage of your basically self-oriented behavior. In a world where one honest confusion with the electric company becomes 29% interest on your Visa, is there such a thing as a person who's smart enough to use the system without falling prey to it ? What does a bohemian look like now?
There seem to be two potential models: the hacker and the corporate activist. The hacker is a liberal, modernist figure, preserving his own individual superiority over the system by knowing how to literally beat it. There is probably a hacker out there, or even a large handful, who truly knows how to fix their FICO score. And they are working on the downlow and anonymously, with good reason. Not only is what they're doing illegal...
...it would stop working if everybody did it.
The corporate activist--folks like the Reverend Billy or The Yes Men who are generally using political theater to illuminate the power the system has over people--are also engaged in illegal activity, but it's social, and more important, it's basically conservative. I find this reversal in ideological polarity (mentioned often by Pretty Lady) interesting. The Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Chorus are definitely working in opposition to the existing system. They are illuminating the totalitarian nature of a Starbucks by preaching in a Starbucks and getting arrested. But their message has nothing to do with their own personal indulgence. Instead, their bohemian model is based on a David Brooksian sense of personal choice and personal responsibility. They're not just saying that Starbucks is bland and oppressive. They're saying that you sheeple are choosing to spend $4.50 on a coffee.
The Reverend Billy is not saying that you don't need things in the self-interested, faux-enlightened way Dean Moriarty didn't need things. He's saying that we all should look at the label at the back of each of our necks and repent for the pain we individually caused a thirteen-year-old girl in Bangladesh, and then stop what we are doing for the sake of that girl as well as our own pocketbooks and our own happiness. Save your money. Don't indulge in credit. Buy fewer articles of clothing. Buy the things you actually need from people in small stores. Buy things that were made in less hurtful ways. Yeah, there's a familiar hippy-dippy lesson in there that you should find happiness somewhere else. But there's none of that Slouching Toward Bethlehem disconnect between the immediate good feeling of "turning on" and the actual pain of being homeless and sick on someone else's floor, surrounded by people who are too high to take care of you.
What he's saying is that happiness can not be found in consumption, but it can be found in not causing pain to others or yourself in the first place.
This is a radical shift in bohemian consciousness. It's not just that your personal choices are incredibly important. They are important because they affect other people. This differs from the lessons in radical selfishness I learned from Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who informed everyone else I think I ever listened to, including but definitely not limited to, in no particular order: Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Kim Deal, Patti Smith, Louise Bourgeois and Hunter S. Thompson.
Radical pragmatism. Radical responsibility. Radical consideration of others. This is a list of phrases that we have been trained to think of as smug, boring and intellectually weak. But it's interesting that these phrases happen to be relevant to the actual problems of now: climate change; middle east on fire; corporate feudalism. Will the words "conservative" and "liberal" actually change meaning? Will Bush Jr. be castigated as the liberal he actually is, or as the conservative he claims to be?
I don't know, but if we don't choke on the earnestness or die of an irony deficiency, this could be a radicalism that actually addresses what needs addressing right now.
I have written about the problem of individualism at length, and have never been a fan of the way irony is overused in the production of culture, and have never been afraid of my own potential for earnestness... until I wrote this post. Jeeezus save us. It looks as if--if we are all very good--we could wind up overcoming modernism not by overcoming the systems that restrain the individual, but by overcoming the individual itself.
It looks as if--if we are all very good--we could wind up overcoming modernism not by overcoming the systems that restrain the individual, but by overcoming the individual itself.
Modernism is about heroically reaching beyond the mundane desires of the individual.
Posted by: carla | July 26, 2008 at 05:55 PM
Or rather, Modernism/Individualism encompasses a wide range of motives and desires, including heroic feats which benefit humanity (purposefully or not, performed with heroic intentions or not). I don't understand the interpretation that such acts of individual achievement are are done for self-promotion, or to establish self-identity or achieve authority or power. This may play a role at some point, but we appoint iconiclastic stature to those who give of themself. We do so because we believe the effort is worthwhile; we believe humanity is worthy of individual effort and responsibility. We should question the criterium used, but to dismiss our belief in heroism? And to do so because it seems too hierarchical? I believe we can maturely handle the dangers of heirarchical systems.
Posted by: carla | July 26, 2008 at 06:24 PM
I apologize for going off track from your post.
Posted by: carla | July 26, 2008 at 06:26 PM
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
-Antonio Gramsci
Enlightenment is just progressive disillusionment.
-Buddha
Posted by: db | July 28, 2008 at 08:51 AM
Nice post!
As I was reading your description of the Old Bohemian - and your question about what is possible now - one disturbing example kept popping to mind. I just read "The 4-Hour Workweek," the New York Times bestselling business book right now. In a somewhat slimy, ultra-capitalist way, this book is about being "smart enough" to change the rules of the game, or at least manipulate the rules, so that we can design our lives and careers so that we may work 4 hours a week, get what we deserve, and "join the new rich."
I was intrigued of course - as an artist I'm willing to read anything about maximizing income and reducing time spent on profitmaking in order to free up time to make art.
Apparently, this 4-hour work week model involves a lot of outsourcing of your daily tasks to "assistants" in India, etc. You know, people who aren't crafty enough to change the rules of the game. So some of us deserve the new rich lifestyle, and some are in the support roles. Ick.
There are some good ideas and valuable insights for artists if you put your imperialism filters on though - about how to rethink our relationship to time and work. I think many of us are already great at that and at finding the "black magic" of which you speak.
But I think the scary version of the new bohemian might be the ultra-individualist capitalist who is out there learning the new information/knowledge economy and taking advantage of all the opportunities to automate and outsource entire businesses, and letting the money collect in the Paypal account while taking skydiving lessons. There's even a quasi-environmental attitude about it, in using fewer resources to more efficiently get jobs done etc.
I would LOVE to know the answers to the questions you ask...how radical accountability and responsibility align with individual creativity (and collective creativity), and where the possibilities are of true resistance now.
As for being earnest... The culture is so cynical now, I think we can afford to err on the side of earnestness occasionally!
Posted by: Amy Walsh | August 04, 2008 at 07:05 PM
It's not about overcoming individuality, it's about transcending it. You come to understand that your genuine self-interest is aligned with the self-interest of others, not opposed to it. The sort of 'bohemian individualism' you describe is just stupid, short-sighted selfishness, which always comes back to bite you in the butt--that's just the law of karma.
I got my library books by working at libraries, and taking them out the back door. But I always returned them eventually. ;-)
Posted by: Pretty Lady | August 04, 2008 at 09:23 PM
What's the difference between overcoming and transcending?
(serous question, not being coy)
Posted by: 21st Century Plowshare | August 05, 2008 at 07:04 AM
'Overcoming' implies that 'individuality' is something bad or negative--something to be defeated. 'Transcending,' on the other hand, is about 'moving beyond.'
As Ken Wilber says, you have to differentiate in order to integrate. Establishing a strong, differentiated individual identity is a necessary step toward transcendence; if you don't do that, you end up with a political situation of forced conformity, such as the totalitarian Soviet Union, or a immature psychological state of undifferentiated fusion, such as New Age Girl Scout Camp.
Transcendence encompasses and acknowledges all stages before it. My Zen monk ex-boyfriend used to say that every enlightened teacher has their own 'flavor'--the fact of their enlightenment does not obviate their individuality, but purifies it.
Posted by: Pretty Lady | August 05, 2008 at 10:58 AM
Semantics are so interesting--I'm glad I asked.
I like the word "overcoming' because (in my mind, anyway) it makes the thing you overcome out to be this factual thing that you clamber over and that still exists, and that you can't disown any more than you can disown the ground beneath your feet. To me, that makes the meaning of overcoming similar to what you're talking about with transcendence. You overcome your individuality in the sense that you get over yourself. You don't go away or sublimate yourself. You do the work of moving beyond your self-based way of thinking and get yourself a little empathy.
(not that I am an expert on selflessness...)
Transcendence, to my ear, sounds diaphanous. Like you pass through your illusory sense of self that is not fact but merely a ghost. Maybe I am doing it wrong, but that doesn't sound like the work I am doing.
What I am talking about is that moment when you see yourself grabbing or reacting or thinking in terms of Me! or Mine! and you manage to stop yourself and do what you really want to do instead. To me, that moment feels as tedious and effortful crawling over a boulder.
The moment *after*, when the work has been accomplished, that feels light and diaphanous. To me, anyway. When I manage to get over my self-boulder. If this metaphor is making any sense at all.
Whatever. We seem to pretty much agree. You work with what you have to get to a place you have never seen. There is no good or bad, but there is work to be done.
Right?
Posted by: Deborah Fisher | August 05, 2008 at 05:00 PM
Right.
Posted by: Pretty Lady | August 05, 2008 at 09:00 PM
Most enjoyable post to come across and to read. I think current oppressive amounts of earnestness and lack of irony are the turning in art becoming a sort of marketing toil, enslaving and breeding a new kind of slavishness. Too many artists are afraid of being mad, and I mean this both symbolically and literally; yet there's 'mad money' available. (the frightful thing is, though you may have more time, your art might still be left undone -so there).
That aside, madness does mean not having comforts such as our double frappacino tall lattes to living and (truly) working from the slovenly studio and/or going after ideas that are ridiculous! How do we do this now when so slavish and sold are each of our souls? At the turn of last century, there were artists happy to go the mad house. There was Artaud of course -but there were others.
Believe me, it helps with current global problems if artists in rich countries are crafty enough to let commercial success be....be less driven for the money. Let it go.
Posted by: ic | August 07, 2008 at 10:55 AM
You think earnestness and lack of irony are related to art becoming a marketing tool? I see the intense cynicism and irony in so much contemporary art being more a language designed for an ever more cynical art market.
but maybe the word "earnest" needs to be examined... I see it as being straightforward, direct, honest...perhaps to an embarrassingly eager degree. Could be worse...
Posted by: Amy | August 07, 2008 at 04:45 PM
I see your point. I was speaking though in context of how the main post used same. Perhaps I ought to go back to post.
That aside, I think Hilary is a point to make apropos this theme: many artists are like dear Hilary, so earnest wanting so to get the appointment and ready to tweak here and there according to complaints. Many artists are now like professional politicians. When we use irony in the object itself, there's so much of the clever wink wink going on that the work leaves you cold.
But I am speaking here mainly of our current plague of earnestness, well-meaningness, the facetiousness-toil-for-profits in the lives of people who are suppose to see things upside down. Everyone seems to be aiming to have the comfortable house and the comfortable ride, pay the house loans and the credit cards and be 'thankful'. Positivism and earnestness (in this vein) is killing the soul.
Posted by: ic | August 08, 2008 at 12:31 PM