Re: <nettime> re: As Above, [So Below] - Critical Art Ensemble

[Joerg Heiser <heiser@is.in-berlin.de>]

"Susie, this war against "dependency" is waged quite explicitly in a
book
by Christopher Lasch called "The Culture of Narcissism." Lasch's reading
is that American culture, and by this he means a culture born of cowboy
and frontier mentalities, has been supplanted if not eradicated by the
influence of psychoanalysis and feminism in the collective. The brave,
the
"proactive," the pioneers -- they have been replaced by the feminized
and victimized. Lasch argues that Americans are bonding with our Mommys
too much -- what the country needs is to cut the regressive emotional
rhetoric -- and to find a more rigid and ego-boundried... superego.

"Fusion," either on a cultural level ( as in Lasch's analysis (pun
intended) of America ), or a scientific one (Mother and foetus), is
persistently threatening -- as you mention -- and it persistently ends
up blaming the Mother.


In the sun [son]
in the son [sun]
I feel as one.
in the sun
i'm married [Maryed]
buried..."
- kurt cobain"

A very instructive discussion of the blame of the mother in the history
of popmusic (the rockrebel) and literature (the beatnik-outlaw)can be
found in Simon Reynolds/Joy Press: The Sex Revolts, London: Serpent's
Tail 1994, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1995

a small excerpt:
"'we are victims of matriarchy here, my friends.'
Harding, psychiatric ward inmate in Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over The
Cuckoo's Nest (1962)

Rock'n'Roll rebellion emerged at roughly the same time as 'post-war
mom-ism', a fashionable critique which singled out the mother as the
cause of a hefty proportion of America's ills. The term 'mom-ism' was
coined by Philip Wylie in "Generation of Vipers" (1942), a virulently
misogynistic tirade against the degeneration of American culture at the
hands of 'the destroying mother'. Wylie argued that America was being
engulfed by materialism and shallow popular culture, which he associated
with women..." 

joerg heiser
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