American Re-envisionings of the Self

456 Pages·2015·20.6 MB·English

American Re-envisionings of the Self:
From The Lonely Crowd to est
by
Michael C. Fisher

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by
Professor Joan S. Rubin

Department of History
Arts, Sciences and Engineering
School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester
Rochester, New York

2015
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To Betsy,
for longing for the real.
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Biographical Sketch
Michael C. Fisher was born in Hollywood, California on January 3, 1984. He
grew up primarily in Phoenix, AZ before returning to Los Angeles in 2002. After
attending Loyola Marymount and Santa Monica College, he graduated with a Bachelor of
Arts degree, high honors, in History from the University of California, Davis. Under the
direction of Professor Joan Rubin, Michael entered the University of Rochester in the fall
of 2008 as a PhD candidate in American History. He was awarded the 2010 Wilson
Coates Book Prize, the 2011 Lina and A. William Salomone Prize, and the 2012 David
A. Parker Memorial Prize for his work on cultural and intellectual history. Since 2010,
Michael has also taught courses in the Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program. He
has been awarded three Dudley Doust Writing Associates Fellowships and a Postdoctoral
Fellowship with the WSAP for 2015-2016.
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Acknowledgements
Way out west I was once a telemarketer. I worked part-time for MCI WorldCom
selling long-distance plans to weary Americans who sometimes picked up their phones in
the evening. Because these were the days before cell phones had displaced land lines,
our main competitors were Sprint and AT&T. As incentives to switch to MCI we
dangled air miles and Blockbuster Video coupons, hoping customers would bite. It was
relatively easy to close sales if you knew how to talk to people. That is, if you knew how
to “handle reluctance.”
I can still hear the hum of that call center, which somehow set this dissertation in
motion. All those intricate processes of persuasion, frustration, manic rituals of
inspiration whirring in a room the size of a football field. The supervisors kept charts on
the walls to track our numbers. Everyone was encouraged to compete, most of all with
ourselves.
Where would I be without this early sales experience? I’m especially grateful to
the managers who let me do things my way. Julio Herrera wrote one of my letters of
recommendation for college, and for this and other obscure reasons I was admitted to
Loyola Marymount University in the fall of 2002. To cleanse myself of the commercial
guilt I felt for selling all those long distance plans, I plunged headlong into the
humanities. I did not excel at first; I had been a mediocre high school student and had
trouble transferring my skills to this new sales domain. But fortunately I had an inkling
that there was a broader intellectual horizon beyond LMU. Siân White, who taught my
freshman writing class, encouraged me to develop my half-baked ideas into something
more; and the year I spent at Santa Monica College served as a good weigh station in this
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regard. Writing weekly columns for The Corsair, SMC’s newspaper, honed my sense of
audience, and the commitment of professors like Amber Katherine showed me that I
could be a serious student if I applied myself. It helped that my mother had been saying
this for years. (Yes, Mom, you were right.)
When I arrived at the University of California, Davis as a transfer student in
September 2004, I chanced upon two roommates who ushered me into a new era. Joshua
David Moore and Ramteen Sazegari shaped my experience of Davis by becoming
surrogate brothers. They have been there through everything and they have irritated me
to no end. In conjunction with our UCD courses and our shared love of music, our little
trio furnished an endless supply of conversations and arguments. As the youngest
member I often felt like the weakest link; but this meant that I also learned a great deal.
When I lauded Marx, burned for Nietzsche, or savored Rousseau, Josh in particular took
me to task for it. Ramteen sensed the limits of my fledgling convictions in his typical
clairvoyant way, but Josh deserves special recognition for taking the time to demolish my
early precious assumptions and analytic shortcomings with an older brother’s patient
zeal. As long as I’ve known him, Josh has had a flair for waiving his hands and calling
bullshit. I hope the dissertation I’ve written stands up to his careful scrutiny.
Professors Kathy Olmsted, Michael Saler, and Eric Rauchway all taught
wonderful history courses at Davis. At the end of my first year I applied to the honors
program and was accepted to work with Lorena Oropeza on a senior thesis that was to
focus on the 1960s counterculture. For a while I thought I would remain lost in the reeds.
But thanks to Gerald Howard’s anthology, The Sixties, I learned of a book called
Growing up Absurd. Like most college seniors I had never heard of Paul Goodman; yet
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his writing struck me as a revelation. The next day I went to the library and checked out
a collection of Goodman’s writings called Drawing the Line. As I read the introduction, I
realized I’d found the centerpiece of my amorphous project. Professor Oropeza never
quite warmed up to Goodman. But to her everlasting credit, she encouraged me to
contact his biographer and literary executor, Taylor Stoehr.
By email, which he never preferred, the late great Professor Stoehr became my
mentor from afar as I painstakingly composed my thesis over the next six months. I
would not have written the thesis I did without his kind mentorship, nor would I have
followed the subsequent path that led me to graduate school. In addition to serving as an
ad hoc advisor, Taylor introduced me to a broader community of Paul Goodman
enthusiasts, some of whom became close friends. Jonathan Lee, the director of the 2011
documentary, Paul Goodman Changed My Life, took a chance inviting me to New York
for an interview shortly after I finished my thesis, and since that first meeting his
encouragement and generosity have proven virtually inexhaustible. I owe Taylor and
Jonathan a great deal for the doors they opened for me, as well as the good times we’ve
shared.
After leaving Davis I nourished myself on Taylor and Michael Saler’s generous
correspondence and book recommendations, which led me in some new intellectual
directions. Meanwhile, I remained fixated on a phrase of Goodman’s from New
Reformation: “the disease of modern times.” In an effort to understand what it meant I
welcomed Allan Bloom, Ivan Illich, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and T.J. Jackson
Lears as my new (temporary) guides to contemporary culture. Most importantly, they put
a roof over my head during a period of bad weather in San Francisco. As I read them on
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the MUNI and in the cafés of North Beach, the fog of social criticism grew thick all
around me. I began thinking of graduate school as a refuge, which I now recognize as a
mistake. I entered the Master’s program in history at San Francisco State, but beyond the
helpful nudges of Professors Carlo Corea and Eva Sheppard Wolf, it didn’t stick. Despite
the charms of California, I decided I wanted to be around buildings that were old and
people who were less cheery. I wanted to go where it was cold, inside and out.
I arrived at the University of Rochester in the fall of 2008 just ahead of the
financial crisis. In those lean early years the chastening influence of Matt Allison, my
first roommate above Boulder Coffee, helped orient me to the rigors of academic life.
Over two years of home-cooked meals, conversations, basketball games, and dance
parties, Matt and I discovered new uses of Manichaeism, as well as some insight into
how and why opposites attract. Luckily, Michael J. Brown welcomed us both into his
Flower City Philosophy Club. Chris Guyol, whose jump shot still eludes me, became my
friend and foil in History 500. And Jeff Ludwig, Emily Morry, and Sam Huntington, my
invaluable upper-cohort friends, warmly embraced me from my first visit on.
During coursework I benefited from the intellectual care of Professors Michael
Jarvis, Robb Westbrook, Celia Applegate, Dan Borus, and my advisor, Joan Rubin.
Thankfully, Joan helped inject a strong dose of cultural history into the philosophy and
social criticism I was still preoccupied with. As I studied for exams my interests shifted
to the middle ground of American cultural and intellectual history, and it was out of this
strange seedbed that my first dissertation ideas began to emerge. I’ll always be grateful
to Mike Jarvis for asking me to revise my first written exam on early American history.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this bit of extra hard work set the wheels of my
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eventual dissertation in motion by making me think more deeply than I had before about
the relationships between capitalism, culture, and modernity.
At the dawn of my long period spent dissertating, my head was full of big ideas.
Facebook, youth culture, and consumer culture all seemed like promising leads. Yet the
connections between these puzzle pieces were too vague. I was searching, and flailing.
This difficult interim, which lasted the better part of three years, led me through three
prospectuses, a brief yet rigorous course of basic training under the command of Robb
Westbrook, and a final coming to terms with twelve words of wisdom from Joan Rubin:
“you need to give your readers signs that this is a dissertation [not something else].”
I’m very fortunate that Joan has been as patient with me as she has (and that she
still points out my mixed metaphors). It took until my sixth year to develop an adequate
frame for my dissertation, and over the years she fielded more false starts, blind alleys,
and ill-fated experiments than most advisors would. I’m deeply grateful for her kindness
and professionalism throughout my experience in the graduate program. Joan’s faith in
me is one of the main reasons I’ve made it to the finish line.
In addition to the U of R History Department, I owe a special debt of gratitude to
Deb Rossen-Knill and the staff of the Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program
(formerly the College Writing Program). For the past five years I’ve had the privilege of
teaching small writing classes to talented undergraduates who helped change my view of
contemporary culture. My dissertation developed very much in dialogue with my
teaching experience, and since my fifth year as a graduate student I have been supported
by three Dudley Doust Writing Associates Fellowships.
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Numerous friends and colleagues have played vital roles in my thinking and
writing process as it’s unfolded. Amy Negley, John Portlock, Sam Clausen, Michael
Read, Lyle Rubin, Graeme Pente, and other Historians at Work (HaW) regulars provided
excellent feedback and criticism at various stages. The wider community of the Albion
Tourgée Seminar also proved stimulating in the best sense. Karen McCally, Stewart
Weaver, and Tanya Bakhmetyeva were there at crucial moments. And it goes without
saying that Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has been by my side from The Turkish Kitchen to
Walden Pond and beyond. I owe Erik Hmiel special thanks for introducing me to Betsy
and suggesting that we start a collaborative blog together. Whether he thinks longing for
the real was a good idea or not, I’m convinced we did it for the right reasons.
During the past seven years I’ve had a terrific support network. Josh, Ramteen,
Sam, Emily and her guitar, Jeff, Lyle, Erik, Betsy, David Kotler, Katie Jo Suddaby, Alex
Radunsky, Tim Enright, Rachael Day, Jerry Fisher, Ian Heckman, Richard Haisma,
Graeme, and Dan Kraines have all challenged me to sustain my life force in novel ways.
Over countless phone calls, holiday visits, and emails, my four parents and step-sister
have also been a constant source of patience, guidance, interest, and enthusiasm, each in
their own ways. I’m very lucky to have the two families I do, and to be as loved as I am.
Finally, I must acknowledge the most important woman in my life. Anastasia
Nikolis has lived with me through the final stages of writing and revision, and she has
tolerated my share of the neuroses. She’s the one who helped me get this done. Our life
together, and our shared pursuit of “that lifted, rough-tongued bell / (Art, if you like)” is
what has sustained and inspired me. With or without a mind of winter, she made the end
worthwhile.
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Abstract
This dissertation examines how American ideas of the self change over time. In
each of the five chapters, the metaphor of visions and “re-envisionings” is used to track
the movement of several related American preoccupations and conceptions of the self as
they shifted with social and cultural context. What this analysis contributes is a new
framework for understanding the role of autonomy in American culture. In particular, the
dissertation argues that early preoccupations with autonomy followed a pattern of re-
envisionings that influenced social practices ranging from post-1945 consumer culture, to
the human potential and psychedelic movements, to est (Erhard Seminars Training). At
each step in this process, the meanings and uses of autonomy in America changed
dramatically, which inspired enthusiasm as well as unease. By the late 1970s, social
critics including Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch popularized narcissism as a broad
lens for understanding contemporary culture. Yet against much existing scholarship,
“American Re-envisionings of the Self: From The Lonely Crowd to est” argues that this
narrow interpretive category misses much of the complexity of American culture during
the postwar period.
By integrating a wide assortment of texts, figures, and popular cultural documents
between 1945-1980, this dissertation offers an original approach to American cultural and
intellectual history, which is grounded in assessing the prevalence, resonance, and
influence of certain signature ideas of the self. The synthesis of cultural, historical,
anthropological, and literary analysis it offers aims to clarify meaningful assumptions—
as well as tensions, longings, and anxieties—within specific sources that speak to
widespread beliefs and practices concerning the individual self in America.