> [Ulysses] was banned for “obscenity” in both Britain and the US. In Britain, the director of public prosecutions Archibald Bodkin read only the last section, Molly’s monologue, and confirmed that “there is a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity”. In 1922, 500 copies were seized by customs at Folkestone and burned. Eventually, a 1932 court judgment in the US allowed it to be published in the country.
100 years later we're still fighting over what gets to be published or broadcast.
> 100 years later we're still fighting over what gets to be published or broadcast.
But notably, the sides have switched.
Censorship used to be associated with "blue hairs," a pejorative term basically meaning old church ladies. Now, the primary advocates of censorship and social condemnation are a new breed of "blue hairs": the young woke pronoun-enforcing variety.
This roughly mirrors the fact that large corporations, technology (looks around), entertainment, journalists, academics, educators, and the managerial class in general hail from the cultural roots that made Ulysses subversive. They now are the establishment. What were mainstream views as of a decade ago are considered subversive and must be banished from the public square.
> in general hail from the cultural roots that made Ulysses subversive.
I don't buy this. I think you're really underestimating what it means for something to be genuinely subversive. It does not mean following fads, it means making an effort to make you aware of something worth knowing about the world, the human condition etc., even at the cost of making you feel deeply uncomfortable about it. For all the controversy about it, one can at least make a colorable argument that the "filth and obscenity" in that one section of Ulysses managed to do that. But pronouns? They're just the silly creed of a new woke religion. They tell you nothing except how self-centered young folks can be these days, and it's not like we weren't aware of that already. The best thing about pronouns is that everyone gets to pick their favorite.
I don't think people like those in Tennessee who just banned Maus from their school libraries 'hail from cultural roots that made Ulysses subversive'.
I do agree that the social justice movement has taken the wrong side in the 'what gets to be published/broadcast debate'. I just don't know if they're the primary advocates, in terms of raw numbers.
> I don't think people like those in Tennessee who just banned Maus from their school libraries 'hail from cultural roots that made Ulysses subversive'.
This is great because it shows how sad this conversation has gotten. Let's put this in perspective:
Side One: "Our world is ending because we have the entire power apparatus of the U.S. State, social and business institutions weighing down on our speech, freedom to associate, freedom to send money, or communicate our thoughts openly without censorship."
Side Two: "Our world is ending because checks notes a school district in McMinn County Tennesse (pop 54K) decided to use a different book for a topic in its elementary school curriculum."
That such a mountain can be made out of this molehill, and broadcast uniformly across the whole country is proof of the cultural hegemony of Side Two. Side Two undoubtedly would not be making an issue out of not using Noah's Ark books in 5th grade biology, and this whole line of argumentation is disingenuous.
If you believe what you consume effects you, and those around you, it is your duty to make sure those effects are positive. Much like fighting pollution.
Look at how social media has driven inattentive behavior, atomization of social ties, teen suicide, and cratering senses of self esteem.
(Throwaway because unpopular opinion, which is ironic given the subject... and I make an honest plea to assume good faith in what follows)
The story so far: In the beginning of the 20th century, Modernism was created. This has made a lot of people very happy and been widely regarded as a good move.
I'd argue that it has also caused a great deal of harm.
Lately I've been analyzing life (as in {people, their actions, reality, fiction, ...}) through a simple filter: is this creating or destroying something?
The thing is, creating is much harder than destroying. The universe generally tends towards entropy, in the more philosophical sense of a gradual increase in disorder.
Creation is the act of building order out of that disorder. It's much easier to turn a glass into shards than the other way around.
Modernism and a great deal of 20th century zeitgeist (bleeding into the 21st century) was about breaking down establish cultural and moral norms. I'd argue that is only a net positive if that which you destroyed is replaced with a new creation that is better than the previous status quo.
Yes, we should absolutely destroy e.g. laws that made same-sex relationships illegal or disallowed same-sex marriages. But the _reason_ for doing that is because we want to replace them with something better: equal rights to people of every gender because liberty and life are the two absolute most inalienable rights.
But maybe, I don't know, abolishing the value of marriage, at least culturally if not legally, isn't a societal net positive. Maybe people drunkenly fucking strangers until they are 38 years old doesn't really lead to great outcomes. Maybe not all aspects of "free love" create a net-better society.
Maybe post-modern art is a "lesser creation" (or "worse") than "pre-modern" art. Just breaking existing standards, paradigms, aesthetics isn't enough to elevate works to the same level as old masters (or even above them, as some would argue). Maybe Jeff Koons baloon animals really are shit.
Anyway, what are we creating today? I live most days thinking we're so focused on destroying that we neglect the value of beautiful, purposeful creation.
> The story so far: In the beginning of the 20th century, Modernism was created. This has made a lot of people very happy and been widely regarded as a good move.
First off, I think you're a bit convoluted with your timeline with modernism and postmodern. Most of what you seem to criticize seem to be related to postmodern sensibilities, rather than modernist one. Modernism attempted to make new, but with a belief in progress and a utopian/ideal vision. Postmodernism in contrast often would have been interested in breaking down long held assumptions, and an inert opposition to grand narratives and a promotion of complex meanings. [1]
Second, looking through the binary lens of 'creation' or 'destruction' is reductive. Plenty of anthropological, sociological and historical evidence seem to suggest that as a species we are capable of being organized in many different arrangements. I acknowledge that marriage 'feels' like a more straightforward institution to enforce with clear benefits to individuals, but I would suggest that you strongly consider that it too has sharp limitations, including aspects of oppression or suppression (e.g. for the more naturally promiscuous) historically.
In general while the assertions and influence of the postmodern project are a mixed bag. They've led to overt widespread cynicism and loss of meaning for many in our time, but they've also brought with them an invaluable tearing down of assumptions that would otherwise be treated as unquestioned narratives of reality. [2] I would hope that awareness of such realities won't lead us down disarray but to an embrace of the fact that there is great diversity in the way we live, and that fixed constructs such as marriage might no longer be capable of solely accommodating that, but might instead co-exist among other arrangements and notions that can.
Thirdly, I would suggest looking into 'metamodernism' which we seem to be slowly beginning to enter. One description you might consistently hear of it is that it's described as if it's an "oscillation" between aspects of modernism and postmodernism. - In other words, an answer to postmodernism's shortcomings and negative effects, while still not abandoning its realizations. [3] [4]
> Postmodernism in contrast often would have been interested in breaking down long held assumptions, and an inert opposition to grand narratives
I don't understand why postmodernism is described like this, when the typical presentation of postmodern ideas (even, and perhaps especially, in the primary sources) is literally phrased as a grand narrative, albeit one that points towards a forcefully stated skeptical outlook where even "complex meanings" are ultimately unknowable. Isn't the whole thing a little self-defeating at that point? There are more and less meaningful ways of "tearing down assumptions", and the postmodern approach just tends to come with a lot of theoretical baggage (much of it essentially tacked on from modernism itself) that ultimately weighs it down.
I'm not sure if metamodernism fixes this issue, but your description of it suggests it does not. Philosophical pragmatism ultimately seems to do a better job of shedding the "grand narrative" tendency, and that tradition is largely independent from postmodernism.
Can you point me to one serious postmodern theorist that holds this view? There are many different views of the postmodern, but rejection of meta-narratives (academic speak for "grand narrative" here) is pretty much universally accepted.
It's a pretty standard criticism of Lyotard, with whom that description of post-modernism is perhaps most widely associated. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - which is a quite well-regarded source - has a very readable account of Lyotard's intellectual background https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lyotard/#InteBack which relates quite plainly that he was far from intellectually consistent in his rejection of metanarratives (or "narratives about narratives"). Rather, a number of contingent political shifts in his outlook on the French society of his time seem to have played a larger role in how he chose to frame his arguments.
Given how closely this description of post-modernism is associated with Lyotard, one can only surmise that other post-modern authors were, if anything, even less consistent with it.
I would look at the methods of Jean Baudrillard, particularly his book Simulacra and Simulation which is a collection of parables each of which could be the plot of a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and each of which attacks the reality principle in one way or another.
These are all small micro-master narratives which each have a totalizing perspective and collectively reduce the ‘truth’ to the ‘truth that is out there’ in the intro sequence to the X Files.
Furthermore I would point to his book On Seduction which is is even more accelerationist than Simulacra in that he tells you exactly how to tear the roof down.
It seems to me most modernist ideologies were about “creating” contrary to what you’re implying. They might have been varying levels of revolutionary and totalitarian, but the end goal was always some kind of transformed man living in a glorious utopia. It wasn’t just mindlessly breaking down norms in a vacuum. It was more religious than that.
It’s all failed and discredited obviously, but maybe creating isn’t what you actually want? Sounds more like you want conservation and restoration.
One small thing regarding all this that I think you should toss around as a hypothesis:
Generally, people with a background studying modernism and post-modernism (especially the later) will agree that it is the events of the world that create these, not the other way around.
There is this common, mainstream belief that somehow post-modernism created a crazier world, when the vast majority of artists and thinkers labeled post-modern are describing they crazy world they see, not arguing for it's existence.
Of course there are many perspectives on exactly what it is that creates these trends, for example their are plenty of theorists who posit post-modernism as a reaction to the horrors of WWII and a complete rejection of any claims Western culture has to truth or value (whereas the Moderns are generally considered to be making a last ditch effort to salvage Western culture), while other theorists view post-modernism as largely the result of late stage capitalism.
So whatever your opinions about the condition of (post) modernism, it's worth double checking your causal assumptions.
Historically, the horrors of WWII were not meaningfully different, except perhaps in their sheer scale, from the horrors of WWI. It goes without saying that the destruction associated with war is not exactly conducive to development of agreed-upon "truth", shared "value" or highly refined culture. But even WWII was roughly 80 years ago! If you still see the world as "crazy", this probably says more about you and your contingent opinions than about what the world is really like. For one thing, in the modern globalized world, "Western culture" is not what it used to be: so much of it is now effectively coming from outside the West proper. Even a term like 'late stage capitalism' really fails to capture this development.
There is also the fact that airways are a limited public resource. And parents didn't have parental controls on radios or television until much later. So I think some censorship was warranted, even if the ideal is to counter the bad with more good.
Does society have a burden to ensure children are protected from dangers, including manipulation from disinformation and suicide inducing social media?
You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a theater, now we are just arguing over where the line of acceptable speech lies.
This logic equates to:
“Whelp, I can’t stop my kid from getting struck by lightning, so I shouldn't try to stop them from touching the stove. I can’t see all ends after all”
Just because you can’t see all ends should not stop you from trying to do good.
Huh, it's rare that I started reading this message in disagreement, and while finishing it I ended up saying to myself "Yeah, maybe they were on to something, could be."
Thanks, I guess.
I imagine it was deemed "obscene" for discussing things like the inner thoughts of a man speculating that his wife was having an affair. Mrs. Dalloway was not only written by a woman and about a woman, it in part describes her potentially romantic interest in another woman in her youth.
Ulysses never seems to come up without mentioning bathroom smells.
The article somewhat dismissively mentions "The Forsyte Saga" and if you want to read for pleasure, that's a good pick. Ulysses (or god help you, the "Cantos") are probably best avoided unless they are on the test.
https://archive.is/SzR44