Lebenskünstler

This is just a quick reaction to reading Edward Mooney’s Lost Intimacy in American Thought. Mooney is actually writing mostly about philosophy but it is easy to extrapolate his thinking to art. The quotes below are from him (except the Cavell). Extensive notes from Lost Intimacy will find their way into subsequent posts soon-ish and I might even riff on it and social practice a bit more…

Social practice fails, or undermines its potency precisely to the degree that is a public gesture and thus Claire Bishop is right that such practices are inadequate, but wrong to think that it can succeed in the terms she sets for it…it is the ability to enter convivial relationships that give social practices their power and that ability will not be found in DISCOURSE, but “…in a heartfelt acknowledgement of multiple and mutual dependencies enacted in intimate contexts of exchange far from public forums of legalistic or philosophical debate.”

Perhaps social practice needs to embrace “pushing back poetically” against critics like Bishop, those cynical skeptics…while it is certainly possible (and easy) to critique and engage the conceptual shortcomings of her work, you simply can’t argue your way to victory…the skeptic’s failure is not a failure of knowledge or argumentation (although it sort of is with Bishop), but a failure “of affirmation, or acknowledgment – a failure of love.” At some point you either take a leap of faith or you don’t.

“To live in the face of doubt, eyes happily shut, would be to fall in love with the world. For if there is a correct blindness, only love has it. And if you find that you have fallen in love with the world, then you would be ill-advised to offer an argument of its worth.” – Stanley Cavell

Perhaps rather than refute, one should simply set aside. “Pushing back poetically is not pushing with argument or doctrine but with simple lines and longer narratives.” To this I would also add pushing with embodiment, experience, and ecstasy.

This is a much more hyperbolic approach to the same theme.