Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 4

Rovings

april 2025 edition.David Thomas of Pere Ubu.SoundsOral history interview with Michael Hurley, Digital Vermont: A Project of the Vermont Historical Society, 20 April 2016Adam Shatz with Judith Butler, Aziz Rana and Adam Shatz: Trump’s War by Executive Order, LRB Podcast, 9 April 2025How Culture Internalized the Logic of the Stock Market: Andrew deWaard on derivative media—and how Wall Street swallowed culture whole, Culture Journalist PodcastJenny Scheinman, “King of Hearts” (Lucinda Williams cover)Jenny Scheinman, All Species ParadeJenny Scheinman, Here on EarthTatsu Aoki-Fred Anderson Collection, Experimental Sound StudioWire Mix: John KingPhillip Golub and Leslie Mok, Dream BrigadeFrank Carlberg, Elegy for TheloniousJohn Adams, Girls of the Golden WestPere Ubu, Trouble On Big Beat StreetPere Ubu, The Long GoodbyeWordsRob Flaherty, “Opinion | If You’re a Voter Reading This, This Essay Is Not About You,” New York Times, 28 April 2025Prather Marla and Donald B. Kuspit, eds., Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas SamarasAlbert Camus, The PlagueLouise Erdich, The Mighty RedZadie Smith, Grand Union: StoriesColm Tóibín, Long IslandAli Smith, GliffSara Marcus, Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS CrisisDeForrest Brown, Assembling a Black Counter CultureAdam Gurri, “Forming an Opposition Media Bloc in the Network Era.” Liberal Currents, 28 March 2025Karin Wulf, “The Humanities as Canary: Understanding This Crisis Now,” The Scholarly Kitchen, 2 April 2025Timothy Noah, “The Inadequacy of the Abundance Agenda,” New Republic, 27 March 2025Samantha Hancox-Li, “The Present Crisis and the End of the Long ’90s,” Liberal Currents, 24 April 2025John Szwed, “Painting Jazz,” Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2025Hank Shteamer, “Jason Moran Unpacks Duke Ellington’s Greatness in a Single Song,” New York Times, 23 April 2025WallsComposing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas @ Memorial Art GalleryMaking Connections: Highlights from a Decade of Acquisitions @ Memorial Art GalleryNolan Oswald Dennis, overturns @ Swiss InstituteNanette Carter, A Question of Balance @ Montclair Art MuseumFuture Flows @ Marin MocaLucas Samaras, Chalk and Bronze @ 125 NewburySmall is Beautiful @ Van Doren WaxterNancy Holt: Power Systems @ Wexner CenterMaria Hupfield, The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) @ Wexner CenterArlene Gottfried, Picture Stories: Photographs @ New York Historical SocietyJohn Zorn, Hermetic Cartography @ The Drawing CenterA Tale of Today: Materialities @ Richard H. Driehaus MuseumBeatriz Cortez x rafa esparza, Earth and Cosmos @ Americas SocietyMarisa Merz, Listen to the Space @ Kunst Museum BernJiab Prachakul, Sweet Solitude @ The Contemporary AustinAlex Katz, Theater and Dance @ Frye MuseumCrosscurrents: Works from the Contemporary Collection @ Baltimore Museum of ArtChristina Fernandez, Multiple Exposures @ DePaul Museum of ArtStagesSounding Voice: Jonathan Sterne and Nina Eidsheim, Intellectual Publics Series, CUNY Graduate Center, 14 December 2022Jorge Drexler @ NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, 13 April 2018Tracy McMullen, The Courage to Hear: Jazz Traditions and the Price of the Ticket @ The Hutchins Center, 5 March 2025Black Dandyism Revisited @ Intellectual Publics, CUNY Graduate Center, 11 April 2025Marshall Allen & the New Dawn @ Roulette, 5 April 2025Screens Henry Fonda for President A Man and a WomanTekkonkinkreet One to One: John & Yoko The Diplomat S.V.D. (Soyuz Velikogo Dela) Landman, Season 01Van Der Valk, Season 01Gordon Matta-Clark, Food

Sam Shepard Returns

in two recent productions, sam shepard’s plays remind us that family traumas have long afterlives.Caroline Neff and Nick Gehlfuss in Steppenwolf Theater’s production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. Photo: Michael Brosilow.

Two recent Sam Shepard productions in Chicago offered a fine opportunity to take stock of how the playwright‘s work feels long after their 1970s and 80s moment, when they were written. One might think they would not have aged well, but in fact they are surprisingly fresh. This might be because one of Shepard’s key themes was the recurring return of old family wounds and traumas. Steppenwolf’s Fool for Love and Raven Theater’s A Lie of the Mind form the final two installments of the five plays that began with “The Family Trilogy” and concluded with these two pieces. Both are both Westerns of a sort, but postmodern ones. The frontier isn’t receding here, as in the classic Western film, and the past is not fading. Instead, difficult personal histories have firmly lassoed the future in a destructive loop.

In Fool for Love, a couple keeps trying to break up or get back together, they can’t decide. We eventually learn of a dark family secret keeping them at once attracted to and repulsed by one another. The story takes on a hypnotic, repetitive quality as the couple keeps retelling their origin tale in different iterations. An older, fatherly man lingers as a ghost in the play—at once a reminder of this secret and himself pulled into the increasingly surreal plot.

The couple become like two tightly wound magnets shifting phases between positive and negative. Or perhaps like moths to a flame, trying to fly away from it only to turn back once again, inevitably drawn to the dangerous glow. Most of all in the play, misrecognitions pile up in a growing, terrifying momentum that builds slowly but steadily. Some kind of demise is coming, but we don’t quite know how it will happen or why exactly it is happening, but there disquietude intensifies as the characters return to the old injuries that were there all along, barely below the surface, repressed but unavoidable, erupting once again by play’s end to rip open old scars.

Similarly, in Raven Theater’s A Life of the Mind, the play begins with misrecognition. One of the main characters, Jake, can’t read the numbers on a pay phone. From there, people get confused with animals, time gets scrambled, no one can recover from past mistakes, and all are trapped in a kind of miserable, inescapable flight from previous errors that they try to correct, but are simply unable to overcome. They are stuck.

These two plays, as with many of Shepard’s pieces, seem to center on the men—perhaps in the typical Western fashion. Yet the “strong, silent types” are anything but; they are numbed, deeply in denial, fearing the truth and trying to push it so far down it will never return. Until it does, often in explosive violence. Tightly wound is the mood of the male characters. In these 2025 productions, however, it was the women characters who seemed most intriguing, trying as they were to deal with failed, flawed men in patriarchal structures growing increasingly brittle and broken. The women in the plays reach for something beyond the traumas of the past. Yet even they, ultimately, cannot escape.

Rom Barkhordar and Joan Nahid in Raven Theatre’s production of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. Photo: Jenn Udoni/Franco Images.

Watching these two family dramas made me think of what many might at first think of another playwright of the same generation concerned with families, but rarely compared to Shepard: August Wilson. Wilson and Shepard both wrote about familial traumas and past wounds that haunt the action of their dramas. Wilson, of course, did so in terms of African American history in his hometown of Pittsburgh; Shepard did so in terms of the American West. With both playwrights, nonetheless, personal crises from earlier moments in life press in on the present. Painful memories, trying to be avoided but inescapable, provide the fuel powering the action. Traumatic family pasts haunt the plays of both Wilson and Shepard with a raw, uneasy, almost at times queazy sense of dread. They lend a tense rawness to the affairs and they often, like the Fates in ancient drama, create an almost determinative quality. Trying to run away from them, characters inevitably are drawn back to them.

In Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, not only do characters get thrown back into difficult personal memories, but a recurring theme is also the collective memory of the Middle Passage, symbolized by the sounds of the bones of the ancestors lost at sea, suffering bondage. All that trauma haunts the plays at both intimate and historical levels.

In Shepard’s plays, it is not bones but fire that becomes the recurring motif. At the end of both Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind, we are left with things in flame. This suggests the destructiveness of past family traumas, a sort of unquenchable fire. Yet maybe they also offer the flicker of a potential purification. Glimmering in the distance, off stage, the flames do not propose the permanent end of past pain, but they do suggest perhaps some kind of hope, a glow, maybe even a regeneration out of the recurrent cycle of past injuries replayed over and over. The family traumas cannot be vanquished in Shepard’s telling, but they might illuminate, ever so slightly, dreamy reconfigurations of the past in the future. The suffering does not stop, but the final images of fire nonetheless crack and split the past open. These plays end, we might say, with Shepard proposing that we flip the adage a fellow countercultural Western myth maker—the musician Neil Young: it might actually be better to fade away than to burn out.

Shades Drawn

icarus had feathers & wax, but he didn’t have a smartphone.

…that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. …Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Theses on Feuerbach”

When did everyone start closing the window shades on airplanes? Somehow this is the new norm, as Henry Grabar and others have noticed. Up in the clouds, don’t look out, don’t see what is going on in the world, don’t appreciate that we are 30,000 feet in the air, above the clouds, or rising up through them, or descending back down to earth.

Encased in metal, deafened by the roar of the jet, life grows turbulent. So we turn to new portals. Away from human sensuousness to a different kind of worship. Better to scroll a fantasyland, stream a fiction, watch a different view, noise cancelled and focused, than to watch the sky roll by.

We try to smooth the ride. No distractions. Or is it only distraction? Better to attend to the digital device or the screen ahead than glimpse reality askance. The high-def display of pretend feels better the grainy plastic partition of actuality, it would seem.

We get from one destination to another, but what was in between? The view might be cloudy, but at least we could then see it was so. Now the plane goes up. It comes down. We ascend and descend. The journey happens. The attendant tells us we are in the air. We are above 10,000 feet. We are below it. The troposphere is ours for a time. The stratosphere is almost within reach. Yet most just want to avoid the situation. Ears still pop, but minds are elsewhere. We are in motion, to be sure, but who knows where we really are these days? We are not in the pilot’s seat, that’s for sure.

In the plane, perhaps people no longer wish to know where they are headed. They just want to get there. As if life never happened, uninterrupted. Look straight ahead and hope to stay alive. Remain in your seat with your seatbelt on. Don’t move about the cabin.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1560.

We seem to be in flight from flight. Nonetheless the pressure builds. The bumps intensify. The jet stream blows us about. Furious winds.

Perhaps we are too terrified to look as the world burns below, as the oceans heat up, as the clouds gater, as the fires threaten to reach right up and engulf our angel’s wings arcing across the heavens?

Icarus had feathers and wax, but he didn’t have a smartphone.

Trash Room

Kidsoterica

if you or anyone in your life needs a playlist of weird kids music, proceed below.

Dedicated to Belinda and Hova of WFMU’s Greasy Kid Stuff radio show.

Rovings

march 2025 edition.Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Cute Accelerationism Communism, Because Why Is Capitalism Making Us More and More Individualistic?, 2025.SoundsEdo de Waart and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Shaker LoopsLondon Symphony Orchestra, Shaker LoopsArto Lindsay, Songs PlaylistLuis Pérez, Ipan In Xiktli Metztli, México Mágico Cósmico, El Ombligo de la LunaWire Mix: Ciaran MackleWordsRichard Cándida Smith, “On Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America | Society for US Intellectual History,” US Intellectual History Book Review, 9 March 2025Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America – Updated EditionBen Davis, “Culture Has No Name for This Cursed Vibe. It’s Everywhere,” Artnet News, 19 February 2025Damon Krukowski, “For Jonathan Sterne,” Dada Drummer Almanach, 21 March 2025Steven Kurutz, “The Gen X Career Meltdown,” New York Times, 28 March 2025Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes,” New York Times, 29 March 2025Kerry Goettlich, “How It Became Wrong for Nations to Conquer Others,” Aeon, 13 March 2025Ben Tarnoff, “The Labor Theory of AI,” New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025Walter Benn Michaels, “Oriental Jews, or Woke 2.0,” Damage, 25 March 2025Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman, “What Are the Democrats Thinking?” N+1, 24 March 2025Parul Sehgal, “Solidarity Among Progressives Could Give New Life to Their Cause,” New York Times, 15 March 2025Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, “Whose Side Are College Administrators On?” History News Network, 19 March 2025Juliana DeVaan, “How to Forget Alvin Ailey,” Public Books, 12 March 2025Ellen Levy, A Book About RayColm Tóibín, BrooklynNathan Hill, WellnessVinson Cunningham, Great ExpectationsWallsThe Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020 @ Museum of Contemporary Art ChicagoWafaa Bilal, Indulge Me @ Museum of Contemporary Art ChicagoWakaliga Uganda, If Uganda Was America @ The Renaissance SocietyJune Leaf: Shooting from the Heart @ Addison Gallery of American ArtFrieda Toranzo Jaeger, Impersonal Unity Tools @ Bortolami Cities and Eyes @ Fridman GalleryHassan Hajjaj, People of My Time @ Hannah Traore GalleryShilpa Gupta, Some suns fell off @ Tanya Bonakdar GalleryArch Connelly, The Future Reflected, Wallworks 1981-1991 @ Corbett vs. DempseyJohn Chamberlain @ Timothy Taylor GalleryConstellations @ 47 CanalAjay Kurian, Peanuts (Deluxe) @ 47 CanalRichard Prince, Bob Dylan @ Gagosian Beverly HillsRenée Green, The Equator Has Moved  @ DIA BeaconStagesOn the Back of Before @ Logan Center, 1 March 2025A Lie of the Mind @ Raven Theater, 22 March 2025Fool for Love @ Steppenwolf Theater, 23 March 2025Natural Information Society + Stan Brakhage @ Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 7 March 2025What Is Totalitarianism? Understanding Hannah Arendt Now @ Library of America, 11 March 2025ScreensC. Wright Mills speaking at Columbia University, 1959Rio de Janeiro “City of Splendour,” 1936How to Draw a Bunny: Ray JohnsonConstructions/Destructions/Instructions: The Films of Gordon Matta-Clark @ Anthology Film ArchivesThe Night Agent, Season 02American Primeval1923, Season 02Cambridge SpiesJohn Le Carré: King of Spies

Social Criticism & Intellectual History

informed by historical consciousness, two essayists take on the “radical imagination.”

X-posted from the Society for US Intellectual History Book Review.

Adam Shatz, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination. New York: Verso, 2023.George Scialabba, Only a Voice: Essays. New York: Verso, 2023.

Two recent essay collections give us an opportunity to explore the long-running relationship between social criticism and history. Adam Shatz and George Scialabba both write about politics and literature of the present, but with deep historical consciousness. In their book reviews, reportage, and thought pieces, they seek to lift lessons from the past’s presence in contemporary life.

Each is particularly keen to investigate what Shatz calls the “radical imagination.” Shatz does so through journalistic reportage, particularly on the Arabic and French worlds, but also with an awareness of his US American perspective. Scialabba too draws on non-US sources, especially the analyses of European social critics in the Frankfurt School tradition, but like Shatz, he brings things back to US intellectual history and culture. Both Shatz and Scialabba strive to achieve a kind of humble fierceness of thinking about the now that is shaped by an awareness of the then. They seek an agile critical confrontation with the conundrums of modernity infused with history.

Neither Shatz, nor Scialabba believe social criticism can change society easily, but they still see it as a necessary and maybe even an honorable pursuit. “If only arguments moved the world,” Scialabba sighs, realizing how futile social criticism can feel sometimes, even when it is smart and perceptive (xxix). “But of course,” Shatz responds, without realizing he is in dialogue with Scialabba, “We are always, whether we realize it or not, trying to move the needle.” For Shatz, “even those writers who don’t think of themselves as political are driven by a sense of commitment” (12). It is this tension between ineffectuality and persistence that marks both of the writers’ social criticism as it relates to their historical awareness. The possible pointlessness of social criticism (or historical thinking for that matter) is overcome by the decision to do it anyway. A combination of humility and doggedness gives rise to writerly engagements with radicality as a way of being, acting, and thinking in the world.

* * *

Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books. He has written about jazz, literature, and Arabic and French politics and culture, among other topics. In Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, he addresses radicalism not as a static leftwing politics, but rather as an effort to reach to the fundamental roots of things (the actual meaning of the term radical, after all). His goal is not to heroize the figures he encounters, mostly writers from marginalized perspectives who want to get to the bottom of things. Instead, it is to bring a fine-tuned intellectual history to bear on our understandings of their thinking. He wishes to grasp the ideas of these writers who sought to “speak truth to power,” particularly when neither the truth, nor the power they were addressing were simplistic or straightforward.

The art critic John Berger, Shatz informs us, argued that subtlety is the luxury of the privileged. Shatz remains unconvinced. “It seems to me,” he writes “that subtlety and nuance are indispensable tools of criticism. …Irony, skepticism, doubt, and detachment are increasingly treated as expressions of elitism or privilege, but I have always found them to be necessary instruments of radical critique…” (11). So while he avoids more “polemical writing” because of a “conviction that ideologically driven writing usually ended up in bad places,” he remains acutely focused on “commitment.” V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and essayist, told Shatz that one could either be a writer or a missionary, which is to say either a keen observer or a pontifical moralizer, but not both. Shatz is not so sure, however. He decides that “the line between description and advocacy is more porous than we think” (12). Navigating the continuum between the writer and the missionary becomes the work of striving, with history on the mind, to explore the “radical imagination.”

Shatz’s book is divided into four parts. The first explores Arabic intellectuals who, by and large, have sought to become “more modern, but on the down low,” which is how the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud describes his fellow countrymen (41). Daoud, the author of The Meursault Investigation, an alternative version of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, takes Shatz on a trip through contemporary Algeria as the critic absorbs Daoud’s complex interpretations of his country, from the legacies of French colonialism to the lack of commitment to a shared public life to ongoing struggles between Islamic beliefs and secularism. Shatz is an empathetic listener, taking in Daoud’s ambivalent perspective without trying to constrain his interlocutor to a single position. When it comes to another writer’s more conservative turn during the War on Terror, however, Shatz grows more critical. Without dismissing Fouad Ajamis pro-American and pro-Israel sentiments, he is unafraid to criticize how Ajami’s positions do not hold up well in light of the historical shortcomings of Western interventions in the Middle East.

A heartbreaking essay follows on the Israeli-Palestinian theater activist Juliano Mer-Khamis, who was murdered by a in a Jenin refugee camp after his binational work with his Freedom Theater. Then, by way of reviewing Timothy Brennan’s biography of Edward Said, the Columbia professor and Palestinian activist, Shatz probes Said’s negotiations of his love of Western classics and his anti-Western theory of Orientalism. This combination, Shatz decides, produced an “ethics of complex resistance, not an escape from complexity” on Said’s part (90).

From there, Shatz travels to France, where in essays that usually grew out of book reviews, he probes the lives and work of Richard Wright, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Houellebecq, Claude Lanzmann, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Paul Sartre and Arwa Salih. He is most moved, in a way, by Barthes, about whom Shatz writes, “he was the only French theorist about who can be said to inspire genuine love…. The joy of reading him is that you always feel you’re in the presence of a friend who accepts your moods and imperfections and sympathizes with your desire not to be pigeonholed” (204). One could say the same about Shatz himself, particularly when he turns to his sophisticated essay on the great novelist and travel writer V.S. Naipaul’s distinction between writers and missionaries, the binary that gives Shatz the title of his book. To be a “writer, who describes things as he or she sees them,” or a “missionary or the advocate, who describes things as he or she wishes they might be under the influence of a party, movement, or cause”: this remains for Shatz the challenge that Naipaul lays out for the social critic (307). Naipaul, famously cranky and critical, wanted to be a writer, but Shatz sees this as a kind of cop out. The radical imagination demands a continual, honest, and frank navigation between writerly observation and missionary recommendation.

The tension between the writer and the missionary surfaces in Shatz’s own efforts to make sense of Algeria. The country’s colonial struggle against France, “made a mockery of my nostalgia for the heroic certainties of anticolonialism and cured me of my lingering Third-Worldism,” Shatz explains (311). History forced him to stop romanticizing the far-away place. “The problems of post-independence Algeria could not be divorced from the history of colonization, but the failures were also homegrown, and they could not all be laid at the foot of France, the native bourgeoisie, or even le pouvoir,” the name for those in power since independence (313). Instead, Shatz was “forced to own up to my own uncertainty and to make it a part of my writing” even though “this is easier said than done” since “readers want to be informed, not given a lecture on the limits of knowledge” (313-314). Nonetheless, drawing on ideas of the Algerian novelist Mouloud Feraoun, Shatz concludes that being honest with history requires a writer to inquire into the unstable nature of key ideas such as liberty, dignity, independence, truth, lies, solutions. One must question them both as abstractions and as they play out in actions and real-world situations. “A writer’s job,” Shatz concludes, “is to ask these questions, even when—especially when—they are inconvenient. And the answers lie in verbs, not in nouns. They lie in the distance, sometimes in the chasm, between words and deed” (316).

The problem for a critic, however, as Shatz points out, is that words are the coin of the realm. “How do we reach the space between the words, when our only way of doing so is through words?” Shatz asks. His answer to this dilemma: “I would suggest it is largely a matter of listening, observing, and describing—with a sense of history, and without false consolations” (320). The social critic must try to record what is happening as honestly as possible, with a keen sense of the past. This means resisting “clichés and stereotypes” and it means avoiding “the missionary temptation to mistake one’s hopes for realities” (320). One must avoid stale formulae and rigid theories for history’s complexities and the ever-changing map of the present they create and be attuned to “dizzying complexity” instead of “comforting logic” (326). Only then can social criticism pursue a truly radical imagination. History, reckoned with in the present, destroys platitudes, even good ones, and demands analysis at its most humble, its most savvy. That’s a good aspiration for writing—and for intellectual history too. As part of what it means to write about the world, interpret it, and maybe, just maybe, try to change it for the better, it turns out that the most effective advocacy work, the best kind of commitment, comes not from missionary zeal, but rather from a continual assessment of the slippery distances between how things are and how they should be.

* * *

“What are intellectuals good for?” George Scialabba asks at the beginning of his recent collection of essays, Only a Voice. For him, what is most crucial about the intellectuals he admires is their “combination of discrimination and democratic passion” (xx). He is most drawn to those figures who, even when they made mistakes (Dwight Macdonald’s pacifism during World War II or Irving Howe’s disdain for the younger New Left radicals of the 1960s), also strived to “orient themselves in a political world without wholehearted partisanship” and “kept their critical antennas pointed in all directions” (xx). He turns to thinkers who, for him, insist that “democracy entails not merely that the people should be governed well but also that the people should govern” (xxi).

For Scialabba, there are no simple answers to questions of discrimination and democracy. “Confusingly,” he points out, “there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between embracing science and progress, on the one hand, and humane, democratic values on the other” (xxii). Instead, there is a need, as with Shatz’s contentions, to get radical in the sense of trying to get to the root of things. To do so requires a historical perspective brought to bear on social criticism as a reactive force, but also not assenting to the inevitability of certain modes of progress. Social criticism, for Scialabba, requires the careful weighing of past and present, tradition and modernity, preservation and transformation.

His book is divided into three parts: essays on the problem with progress as a concept and a politics, essays on the legacies of the left, and essays on the role of the critic. There is a conservative streak to Scialabba, but not in opposition to the radical imagination; rather, in service of it. How, he asks again and again, did modernity get off track, or maybe better put, stay too firmly on track in its insistence on forward motion at all costs? What might be a way to suture stability to equality, balance to democracy, and continuity to change? Figures such as Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Isaiah Berlin, Ivan Illich, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, I.F. Stone, Pier Paolo Passolini, Leszek Kolakowski, Edmund Wilson, Ellen Willis, Christopher Lasch, Vivian Gornick, and even conservatives such as Hilton Kramer (no relation to the author) and Roger Kimball become intellectuals for Scialabba’s own questioning of any uncomplicated path to radical progress. “I have learned, with some reluctance,” he writes in an essay entitled “Progress and Prejudice,” “how readily things go wrong, how ingeniously progress can be faked” (12). An emancipated radicalism is not merely the abandonment of a backwards conservatism, it turns out. Instead, for Scialabba, the social critic (a “citizen-critic” he calls himself at one point, 228) must discern a warping dialectic between past and present, between the resources of the old and the much-needed emancipation from its chains.

The best parts of Only a Voice take up the challenge of imagining a radical future that might be chastened by history’s tragic weight. Scialabba is no anti-modernist in a simple sense. “Of course,” he writes, “no one wants—or at any rate will admit wanting—to roll back modernity altogether” (67). Even antimodernists want the dentist to fix their cavities. At the same time, it is important to identify modernity’s most pernicious effects. These range from a mindless focus on technological solutions for political and social and personal problems to a failure to grasp the forces of both market and state expertise weakening the capacities of citizens to think and work for themselves. To be sure, Scialabba resolutely rejects recent forms of conservatism, which in various libertarian and fundamentalist tones, also clang the cracked bell of antimodernism. No Cato or Claremont Institute for him. After all, he points out, today’s reactionaries are often the utmost revolutionaries, wanting to destroy everything in their path in a kind of infantile fantasy of a lost past. We can’t make America great again, he knows, because it never was great to begin with. Nonetheless, for Scialabba, this does not mean that modernity defined as progress at all costs will suffice for a radical way forward.

Scialabba wants us to notice that liberals and the left in the US have also often come up short in their efforts to make progress toward what would make for a more humane and flourishing society. Most have emphasized the delivery of expertise and services to a passive citizenry rather than developing stronger foundations for a common life shared by independent, autonomous individuals. Managerial administration of the good society, Scialabba explains by way of a marvelous essay on the complicated historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, is no good society at all. Modernization without some type of humility shaped by historical awareness and insistence on “human scale” interaction by rough equals “was not the solution but a new form of the problem—the problem, that is, of domination” (89).

Others on the left, Scialabba contends, have turned to an emphasis on cultural freedom, sexual liberation, and economic abundance as the way forward. Smash the patriarchy, they declare, but in doing so end up unintentionally in league with capitalism’s goal of melting all that is solid into air. For Scialabba, thinkers such as one of Lasch’s fiercest critics, the radical feminist Ellen Willis (herself one of the best essayists to read on the topic of the radical imagination, whether one agrees entirely with her or not), are worth listening to carefully even if he ultimately disagrees with her perspective. Reacting to the constraints on women in patriarchal culture, economics, and politics, Willis called for a left-wing libertarianism that would say goodbye to all that. Radical freedom, for her, was to be found in taking the leisure culture of modern consumer capitalism to the max. “The impulse to buy a new car and tool down the freeway with the radio blasting rock and roll,” she wrote, “is not unconnected to the impulse to fuck outside marriage, get high, stand up to men or white people or bosses, join dissident movements.”[1] A psychic revolution of pleasure, an “overflow of happiness, not the bitter fruit of self-denial” was the path to a radical future.[2]

Scialabba sees the attraction, but he is not so sure this is the way forward. “Imagination itself,” he argues, “is an evolutionary adaptation, whereby we master a threatening environment when young by binding or investing fantasy within nearby entities—parents, neighborhood, church, ethnic group.” For Scialabba, “these intense primary identifications can and should be gradually left behind, but they cannot be skipped, on pain of shallowness, instability, and—paradoxically—an inability later in life to stand firm against authority” (196). To Scialabba, Willis’s radical critique makes perfect sense, but her radical solution is less convincing. He prefers her focus on “tough-minded analysis” to her embrace of gleeful libidinous pleasure as a potential strategy of action, turning to no less a figure than Michel Foucault to make his case: “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power,” Foucault remarked (196).[3] Scialabba agrees.

Willis herself would give the relationship of sex to power and feminism to capitalism more serious thought throughout her career, but she continued, for the most part, to locate conservatism within a larger history of patriarchy and its subordination of women. Scialabba, by contrast, believes there might be elements of conservative thinking beyond the patriarchy alone. These, he thinks, are worth preserving, or at least not dismissing outright. “As the global economy and mass culture lay siege to inwardness,” he writes, “plough up our psychic root system, and alter the very grain and contour of our being, conservation increasingly becomes a radical imperative” (196). He sees Willis’s point that “premodern cruelties and superstitions still bulk large,” particularly when they manifest in the fears of women and the fantasies of domination to be found in patriarchal thinking. For Scialabba, Willis’s “left-wing libertarianism is still the best answer” to these ills, but he decides that “to recognize the subtler entrapments of modernity requires, however, another variety of radical imagination” (197).

What would this variety be? For Scialabba, a model is to be found in the writings found in Dwight Macdonald’s politics magazine during the fraught years of the 1940s. “Some of the most remarkable radicals of the time were also contributors,” he notes, naming, Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Nicola Chairomonte, Victor Serge, Paul Goodman, George Woodcock, and George Orwell. What did they offer? They were, Scialabba writes, “morally fastidious, ideologically heterodox, and fed up with brutality and propaganda, both official and oppositional.” To Scialabba, “they made a program and an ideology of honesty.” Overall, “it was an impractical program and they accomplished nothing, but their writing illuminated those dark times better than anyone else’s” (222). The radical imagination, as Scialabba sees it, requires a combination of openness and probity, a willingness to engage, at times, ideas that at first might seem wrong or misguided and, simultaneously, an insistence on calling out actions that are flat-out incorrect, cruel, and harmful. Perhaps most of all, social criticism for him becomes “impractical,” but this is alright. Its value is in shining a light on the world’s many problems and perhaps proposing some possible answers, even if it cannot really solve them decisively.

* * *

For both Shatz and Scialabba, decisiveness is required, of course, when the stakes of moral clarity are involved, however they both model a form of social criticism that seeks not so much to proselytize as to analyze. Essays are not policy papers, after all. They rarely offer a “program,” concrete steps to take, or action items (as managerial-speak now calls to-do lists). There is no precise agenda other than the general pursuit of honest judgment, a heightened sense of irony, ambiguity, and complexity, and, in the end, a striving for ethical clarity and humane principles. History, particularly the history of ideas, becomes a requirement for this approach. It deepens commentary on contemporary times.

The social critic, aware of history, is also then in some sense able to make history: not in the sense of changing anything at the point of a pen (or the tap of a computer keyboard), but rather by insisting upon a combination of immersive solidarity and comradely, distanced critique. The ability to see, even when what one glimpses remains fraught, vexing, or unclear, is what social criticism inflected by intellectual history might give us. To get to the roots of things by way of the radical imagination and historical consciousness also turns out to be a way, perhaps, to ascend to the highest branches—of knowledge, maybe even of wisdom. At the very least, good social criticism is able to take stock of both the forest and the trees. From there, as in the best moments of writing by Shatz and Scialabba, we maybe get a glimpse out of the thicket.

[1] Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock and Roll (1981; reprint, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1992), xvi.

[2] Ellen Willis, Don’t Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000, 28.

[3] The quotation comes from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 157.

Rovings

february 2025 edition.Garth and Maud Hudson, Live at the Wolf, 2005 (album cover detail).SoundsGarth and Maud Hudson, Live at the WolfTetsuo Kogawa, The Radio Art Hour, 25 January 2025Patricia Brennan, Breaking StretchAnne Michelson with Yvonne Rainer, Arts Forum, WNYC, 24 January 1974Framework Radio #918WordsAndrew Simon, “The Making and Mourning of Ahmad Adawiya, a Musical Legend,” New Lines Magazine 7 February 2025Nick Harkaway, Karla’s ChoiceJonathan Lethem, Dissident GardensWallsLet’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar @ Neubauer Collegium for Culture and SocietyLucia Nogueira, Ends Without End @ Luhring AugustineJoel Meyerowitz: Temporal Aspects @ NSU Art Museum Fort LauderdaleThe Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure @ Philadelphia Museum of ArtBelle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy @ Morgan Library and MuseumCaspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature @ Metropolitan Museum of ArtRoe Ethridge, Shore Front Parkway @ Andrew Kreps GallerySoundwalk Collective & Patti Smith: Correspondences @ kurimanzuttoLouise Nevelson, Shadow Dance @ PaceIsabelle Frances McGuire, Year Zero @ The Renaissance SocietyBruce Conner, Three Screen Ray @ Thomas Dane GalleryStagesJulian Kytasty: Ukrainian American Bandura Master from New York @ Library of Congress, 18 May 18Yoshi, @ Elastro, Elastic Arts, 21 Feburary 2025Katinka Kleijn / Kari Watson @ Elastro, Elastic Arts, 21 Feburary 2025Bill Frisell, In My Dreams (Night 1), 7 February 2025 and (Night 2), 8 February 2025 @ RouletteHotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals @ Washington History Seminar, 3 February 2025She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan’s Life and Legacy in Black Politics @ Washington History Seminar, 7 October 2024Jeff Kimmel/Jack Langdon @ Improvised Music Series, Elastic Arts, 13 February 2025Jordan Wright/Adina Rose Duo @ Pleiades Series, Elastic Arts, 26 February 2025Noise Shrine @ Dark Matter Series, Elastic Arts, 15 February 2025Resist and Rest by sun Lynn Hunter/Carissa Lee @ Dark Matter Series, Elastic Arts, 15 February 2025The Limits of Professional-Class Liberalism @ Boston Review, 21 February 2025Chris G. Abara, Synonym for Sound @ Elastro, Elastic Arts, 21 February 2025ScreensFishing with John, Episode 04: Maine with Willem Dafoe, 1991The BrutalistA Complete UnknownThe Room Next DoorAll About My MotherWomen on the Verge of a Nervous BreakdownAbre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)

Rovings

january 2025 edition.Michael Nakoneczny, 4 Crickets, 2018.SoundsBob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited If it was made in MotownThe Mekons, HorrorClaudia La Rocco, Momus: The PodcastImpossible Music: On & Off (recorded in 2004), Roulette Tapes Podcast, 28 October 2024“The Waltz,” In Our Time, BBC, 11 April 2024Claire Rousay, SentimentVarious Artists, The Past Is a Wound in My HeartVarious Artists, Folk Poetry, Song & Rhythm in Northeastern BrazilCeleste Oram, Citizens of Spectrum (and the perennial political provocations of the electromagnetic field), The Radio Art Hour, 18 December 2024WordsGabriel Winslow-Yost, “Worlds on a Wire,” The Baffler 76, October 2024William Hogeland, “Sentimentalizing Federalist Ten,” Hogeland’s Bad History, 10 December 2024John Ganz, “Big Tech’s Class War Politics,” Unpopular Front, 23 July 2024Robert Tuttle, “The Appeal to Reason and the Failure of the Socialist Party in 1912,” Mid-American Review of Sociology 8, 1 (1983): 51–81Hilton Als, “The Hidden Story of J. P. Morgan’s Librarian,” New Yorker, 16 December 2024Benjamin Kunkel, “The Art of Criticism No. 5: Fredric Jameson.” Paris Review 250 (December 1, 2024): 30–56Gary Dorrien, “Michael Harrington and the ‘Left Wing of the Possible’,” CrossCurrents 60, 2 (2010): 257–82Noelle Bodick, “Back-Lasch,” The Drift, 11 March 2024Jo Guldi, “The Trouble with Text Mining: And Why Some Projects Take a Long Time, and Future Projects Might Take Less Time,” &Historical Transactions*, 23 March 2023Francois Furstenberg, “Universities and the Coming Storm,” The American Prospect, 6 January 2025Paul Glastris, “Seven Proposals for Democrats,” January/February/March 2025, Washington Monthly, 5 January 2025Joan W. Scott, “‘A Guesser in This Vale of Tears’: On the Politics of History Writing,” History and Theory, 27 January 2025Terri Thal, _My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and MeHeather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of AmericaNathan Hill, The NixWalls Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 @ National Portrait GalleryEtel Adnan, This Beautiful Light @ White CubeAlbert Oehlen & Kim Gordon @ Corbett vs. DempseyJason Rhoades, Drive @ Hauser & WirthMichael Nakoneczny, Housekeeping @ Zolla/Lieberman GalleryRobert Longo: The Acceleration of History @ Milwaukee Art MuseumKamari Carter, Vexillary @ Microscope GalleryStagesDiijkstra/MacDonald/Ali/Zerang + Beisel/Lundberg/Long @ Elastic Arts, 16 January 2025Joan Jonas and Jason Moran: A Lecture Demonstration @ MoMA, 18 June 2024Improv Nights 2025: A Tribute to Derek Bailey Night 1, 23 January 2025; Night 2, 24 January 2025; and Night 3, 25 January 2025Screens Arguing the World: The New York Intellectual Community Five Cartridges: Fünf Patronenhülsen

Theodore Roszak & the Perils of Technocracy

the social critic who predicted big tech’s dark turn.Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration as US president. Photo: AP.

New essay out, co-written with Peter Richardson:

Peter Richardson and Michael J. Kramer, “The Social Critic Who Predicted Big Tech’s Dark Turn: Theodore Roszak and the Perils of Technocracy,” The Nation, 31 January 2025.

Peter and I are at work on an edited collection of Rozsak’s selected essays.

For more about Roszak, see my talk, Michael J. Kramer, “A Tiny Banner Against the Inhumanities of the Technocracy: Unfurling Theodore Roszak’s Countercultural Social Criticism,” 14 October 2015.