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Following the 1960s, that decade's focus on consciousness-raising
transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of
movement politics. The mind's powers came to preoccupy a range of
thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of
justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain,
seventies cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age
persuasions. In Ideal Minds, Michael Trask presents a boldly
revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in
postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the
seventies intellectual landscape who share a commitment to what he
calls "neo-idealism" as a weapon in the struggle against
discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews. In a heterodox
intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, Ideal Minds mixes
ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy,
deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical
economics, and the sociology of religion. Trask also delves into
the decade's more esoteric branches of learning, including
Scientology, anarchist theory, rapture prophesies, psychic
channeling, and neo-Malthusianism. Through this investigation,
Trask argues that a dramatic inflation in the value of
consciousness and autonomy beginning in the 1970s accompanied a
growing argument about the state's inability to safeguard such
values. Ultimately, the thinkers Trask analyzes-John Rawls, Arne
Naess, L. Ron Hubbard, Hal Lindsey, Philip Dick, Ursula Le Guin,
Edward Abbey, William Burroughs, John Irving, and James
Merrill-found alternatives to statism in conditions that would lend
intellectual support to the consolidation of these concepts in the
radical free market ideologies of the 1980s.
Reading across the disciplines of the mid-century university, this
book argues that the political shift in postwar America from
consensus liberalism to New Left radicalism entailed as many
continuities as ruptures. Both Cold War liberals and radicals
understood the university as a privileged site for "doing
politics," and both exiled homosexuality from the political ideals
each group favored. Liberals, who advanced a politics of style over
substance, saw gay people as unable to separate the two, as
incapable of maintaining the opportunistic suspension of disbelief
on which a tough-minded liberalism depended. Radicals, committed to
a politics of authenticity, saw gay people as hopelessly beholden
to the role-playing and duplicity that the radicals condemned in
their liberal forebears.
"Camp Sites" considers key themes of postwar culture, from the
conflict between performance and authenticity to the rise of the
meritocracy, through the lens of camp, the underground sensibility
of pre-Stonewall gay life. In so doing, it argues that our basic
assumptions about the social style of the postwar milieu are deeply
informed by certain presuppositions about homosexual experience and
identity, and that these presuppositions remain stubbornly
entrenched despite our post-Stonewall consciousness-raising.
Reading across the disciplines of the mid-century university, this
book argues that the political shift in postwar America from
consensus liberalism to New Left radicalism entailed as many
continuities as ruptures. Both Cold War liberals and radicals
understood the university as a privileged site for doing politics,
and both exiled homosexuality from the political ideals each group
favored. Liberals, who advanced a politics of style over substance,
saw gay people as unable to separate the two, as incapable of
maintaining the opportunistic suspension of disbelief on which a
tough-minded liberalism depended. Radicals, committed to a politics
of authenticity, saw gay people as hopelessly beholden to the
role-playing and duplicity that the radicals condemned in their
liberal forebears.
"Camp Sites" considers key themes of postwar culture, from the
conflict between performance and authenticity to the rise of the
meritocracy, through the lens of camp, the underground sensibility
of pre-Stonewall gay life. In so doing, it argues that our basic
assumptions about the social style of the postwar milieu are deeply
informed by certain presuppositions about homosexual experience and
identity, and that these presuppositions remain stubbornly
entrenched despite our post-Stonewall consciousness-raising.
Following the 1960s, that decade's focus on consciousness-raising
transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of
movement politics. The mind's powers came to preoccupy a range of
thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of
justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain,
seventies cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age
persuasions. In Ideal Minds, Michael Trask presents a boldly
revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in
postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the
seventies intellectual landscape who share a commitment to what he
calls "neo-idealism" as a weapon in the struggle against
discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews. In a heterodox
intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, Ideal Minds mixes
ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy,
deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical
economics, and the sociology of religion. Trask also delves into
the decade's more esoteric branches of learning, including
Scientology, anarchist theory, rapture prophesies, psychic
channeling, and neo-Malthusianism. Through this investigation,
Trask argues that a dramatic inflation in the value of
consciousness and autonomy beginning in the 1970s accompanied a
growing argument about the state's inability to safeguard such
values. Ultimately, the thinkers Trask analyzes—John Rawls, Arne
Naess, L. Ron Hubbard, Hal Lindsey, Philip Dick, Ursula Le Guin,
Edward Abbey, William Burroughs, John Irving, and James
Merrill—found alternatives to statism in conditions that would
lend intellectual support to the consolidation of these concepts in
the radical free market ideologies of the 1980s.
Modern society, Michael Trask argues in this incisive and original
book, chose to couch class difference in terms of illicit
sexuality. Trask demonstrates how sexual science's concept of
erotic perversion mediated the writing of both literary figures and
social theorists when it came to the innovative and unsettling
social arrangements of the early twentieth century. Trask focuses
on the James brothers in a critique of pragmatism and
anti-immigrant sentiment, shows the influence of behavioral
psychology on Gertrude Stein's work, uncovers a sustained
reflection on casual labor in Hart Crane's lyric poetry, and traces
the identification of working-class Catholics with deviant passions
in Willa Cather's fiction. Finally, Trask examines how literary
leftists borrowed the antiprostitution rhetoric of Progressive-era
reformers to protest the ascendence of consumerism in the 1920s.
Viewing class as a restless and unstable category, Trask contends,
American modernist writers appropriated sexology's concept of
evasive, unmoored desire to account for the seismic shift in social
relations during the Progressive era and beyond. Looking closely at
the fraught ideological space between real and perceived class
differences, "Cruising Modernism discloses there a pervasive
representation of sexuality as well.
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