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Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, with a New Preface
W. T. Lhamon 's Deliberate Speed is a cultural history of the 1950s in the United States that directly confronts the typical view of this decade as an arid wasteland. By surveying the artistic terrain of the period--examining works by figures as varied as Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Little Richard, Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Pynchon, and Ludwig Wittgenstein--Lhamon demonstrates how many of the distinctive elements that so many attribute to the revolutionary period of the 1960s had their roots in the fertile soil of the 1950s.
Taking his title from Chief Justice Earl Warren's desegregation decree of 1955, Lhamon shows how this phrase, "deliberate speed," resonates throughout the culture of the entire decade. The 1950s was a period of transition--a time when the United States began its shift from an industrial society to a postindustrial society, and the era when the first barriers between African-American culture and white culture began to come down.
Deliberate Speed is the story of a nation and a culture making the rapid transition to the increasingly complex world that we inhabit today.
Taking his title from Chief Justice Earl Warren's desegregation decree of 1955, Lhamon shows how this phrase, "deliberate speed," resonates throughout the culture of the entire decade. The 1950s was a period of transition--a time when the United States began its shift from an industrial society to a postindustrial society, and the era when the first barriers between African-American culture and white culture began to come down.
Deliberate Speed is the story of a nation and a culture making the rapid transition to the increasingly complex world that we inhabit today.
- GenresMusicNonfictionHistory
336 pages, Paperback
First published October 17, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 30, 2015
Stimulating and frustrating. Frustimulating?
Llhamon was among those in the 1980s and 1990s trying to reclaim the 1950s as a historically interesting epoch—not just Ozzie and Harriet at home before the storm of the 1960s. Like Paul Carter’s Another Part of the Fifities. Or the work on the prehistory of the Civil Rights movement (which Llhamon acknowledges as a source). His discussion of the period is really interesting, and the theoretical apparatus he employs to make sense of what was going on—what he calls a lore cycle—is potentially very fruitful, but almost no one has adopted it. (I did in one paper.) That may be a result of Llhamon’s writing style, which is slippery to the extreme. He makes a dead-on point that Marxist writers have been considering some of the same issues but their work—particularly Stuart Hall’s—is hieroglyphic. Llhamon’s is not jargon-laden, but he has too much Lester Bangs in him, and the meaning of his sentences can be elusive (often because it is so allusive—to make a Llhamonian point).
There was a style created in the 1950s that persists, in its way, until the time that this book was written—thus giving lie to the idea, then common, that the 1950s had no culture: only economics and family and a return to normalcy (to import an even earlier phrase). The culture was rooted in the everyday life of post-War, Cold War, baby-boom society. He calls it a “cultural cycle,” embodied int he phrase “deliberate speed,” and is most concerned with yours around the middle of the decade. He acknowledges that this style was only one of many, though it persisted. The style joined deliberation an speed, an oxymoronic combination. In the preface he notes that others might date the beginning of this style earlier—the the 1940s, or even the 1920s: he finds these objectors actually allies, and acknowledges the truth of their argument while insisting that the fifties brought together the deliberate speed cultural style in a complete way not seen before, and that would then be largely unaltered over the next quarter century.
The first chapter starts out arguing, first, that the 1950s had culture—which may seem a bit obvious now, though the fifties are still too often seen as apolitical. His was a part of a larger academic project in this claim, along with the book The Other Side of the Fifties and especially the work of historians of the civil rights movement (Taylor Branch; Speak Now Against the Day) that saw the roil of the 1960s as emerging out of the 1950s. Llhamon spends the chapter placing 1950s’s culture in its material context: because the culture arose in places that used to be overlooked, particularly popular culture. Literature and music, at least of the kind he is interested in, struggled early in the decade, then found their place. They were stories and songs concerned with he dispossessed, those rain dogs looking for a warm place to sleep in the cold world. They were often about overcoming despair.
There were structural, material reasons for youth culture, he said, and black culture and the culture of deliberate speed. The consumer society, the baby boom, these things did not erase culture, but brought a certain kind of cultural style into being (or packaged it from the parts that had been developing since the 1920s). We can link this with arguments about the end of the avant-garde and also about the way the 1950s reinterpreted the 1930s and canonized modernism, hiding some of the more radical aspects of the modernists’s politics, popular culture coming to supplant avant-garde, or consume it, I guess, taking the parts it left behind and creating something new. Youth culture became culture—think of how movies and music are geared for the young demographic. Part of this culture was an emphasis on homosocial binding among males. Folk and oral culture became almost entirely mediated during this decade. Promiscuity was key—sexual, yes, but also the mixing of genres. Electronic technologies fixed these changes—taped them, archived them, recorded them.
(He likes to play with language, which is a good thing, but he can take etymology for evidence and argument, which is not.)
This new culture was in battle with McCarthyite xenophobia, and came of age at a time when broadcasting was possible, a lever, then, giving the upstarts some power. Tape recorders, records, and television, which started moving into homes during the 1940s, penetrated homes to an extreme degree int eh mid-1950s. (Tape recording was the basis of the new rock’n’roll, teaching Elvis and Little Richard and others about unknown artists, and preserving their own early experiments.) Technology was also miniaturized, and there was the beginnings of the sun-belt. Tv and music picked through southern culture, and also wedded it to more progressive ideas, setting the stage for later revolts int he 1960s. Of course, one must also look at this as a change from production to consumption and the importance of leisure time.
These changes changed art: old heroes died of overwork, new ones of over consumption. Lolita, for everything else it is, is also a document of this shift. There was a separate youth culture, impenetrable by representatives of the old world, or the old generations, including Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Ellison did something similar, using black lore to recreate culture. Writers feared the new culture—feared television—not unlike the ways other writers had feared film (think Fort). Radio responded creatively to TV—hence rock and roll. Painters focused on process.
The new technology also sped everything up—the new art could seem slapdash compared to what came before. Cycles turned quickly. Novels splintered into many genres—privacy was a counter mobilization against mass society, with genres, and televisions, and cars marking one as part of the mass, but also allowing one to be by one’s self. The rise and fall of the novel took three hundred years; rock and roll took three decades: that’s speed. But there was always a sense of tradition, recharged for a new era.
After World War II, the culture was looking for some new way to begin. Black culture provided the necessary resources—by turning to folklore, which was still, then—for a moment—potent and pertinent. He spends a lot of time reading Ellison’s Invisible Man as the locus classicUs of this reworking of folk culture into popular and literary culture. One sees here, especially, foreshadows of his later arguments about the importance of minstrelsy to American popular culture in general. One part bears pointing out: the role of the Sambo, as a clever clown, pointing out the absurdities and inequalities of power, and then retreating into joking. He notes that there was one other part of culture that turned to folklore as well, which he will get to later. One might wonder how Forteans fit into this, too—since they opposed official culture with—in part—folk culture.
The argument extends from Ellison, first by implication—that other black artists were doing something similar. Then, in the next chapter, that other artists were influenced by this—that the Beats, for instance, took a lot of their cues from “Negro” culture, and so were creating a post-War culture using black folklore and black poplore. “Invisible Man,” though, is the major touchstone through the early third of the book. Llhamon is walking a tricky line here. It is easy to see white use of black culture appropriation, and Llhamon does not give enough attention to the power inequalities. But it is true that something more than appropriation—stealing—was going on here, and that there was a back-and-forth generation of culture, from back to white and back again.
Perhaps the key chapter is the fourth, titled “Congeniality,” which makes the comparison and contrast between High Modernism and fifties’ culture (‘deliberate speed’), elaborates on the theoretical structure of the ‘lore cycle’ Llhamon is developing, and shows how the most important cultural artefacts—movements—of the decades drew their energy from vernacular culture. Llhamon arguments that a major strain of high modernist art curdled in on itself, becoming interested only in its own techniques—the poetry of Pound and Elliott are among the best examples. He has to make two caveats, though—first, that this inward turn was part of high modernism, of the early part of the twentieth century—Llhamon himselff has an odd definition of modern art that dates back to the Renaissance. Second, he notes that there were modernists, even arch modernists such as the James brothers who remained fascinated by the everyday, the vulgar, and incorporated it into their own art.
With this set up,the villain becomes Clement Greenberg, who in a series of articles in the late 1930s and early 1940s—many collected in the 1960s—stood up for modernism’s inward turn—its self-referentiality and impenetrability to those not indoctrinated into its intricacies. Other art he dismissed as kitsch. Llhamon admits that Greenberg’s defense of modern art allowed space for New York abstract expressionism—Jackson Pollock, etc.—to develop, even as Pollock and others would reject modernism’s insularity; and that Greenberg would later change his mind. But in the 1940s and 1950s, he was the defender of modernism against everything else.
Llhamon is just the opposite: he sees high modernism as choking itself off from the vital source of all art: the vulgar, the everyday. It was the quotidian that provided the resources for the ‘deliberate speed’ style—for the blues singers and jazz makers, for the Beats and and for the new generation of photographers (Robert Frank gets a long look). In the past, this vulgar source was often folklore, but also what he called poplore—and which he sees as equivalent of Peter Burke’s “chapbook culture” or Dwight MacDonald’s Midcult. He spends a long stretch, for example, on Little Richard and the creation of rock-n-roll music—Little Richard drawing energy from the gay and transvestite bars he frequented. (There’s the image of the Sambo again, the trickster, masking the taboo, but not so much that it cannot be re agonized.) The new culture, thus, was congenial—open to the public, acceptable to the public.
Congeniality, here, is key to Llhamon’s notion of a lore cycle. Lore starts as folklore, is transformed into poplore, and then becomes more widely distributed through a society—not just in the form of literature, but in music, images, and performances, too. (His next next book, on minstrelsy, would stress the performative aspects, especially dance moves and poses.) There is some confusion here over how big or small a lore cycle is. Later he would discuss minstrelsy as one form of lore cycle. But in this book he’s talking about something almost as big as what Foucault would call an episteme. Llhamon is careful to note that there’s always oppositions within any cycle—indeed, that’s what a cycle does, it holds oppositions together, love and theft, fear and attraction; and there is always material outside of it, too—the rejected things, necessarily rejected to allow the culture itself to take shape. It’s when the lore becomes too calcified—too choked off, too uncongenial—that outsiders dip back into the folklore and pop-lore and reinterpret it and create something new that keeps the cycle moving. Still, does the cycle account for all of Western culture since the Renaissance? or certain pieces of it, like minstrelsy? Impossible to say from what is written here.
What can be said, though, is that the fifties is different from any other turning of the lore cycle because, one, most of folklore had been lost by that point—or so he says—the isolated rural communities disrupted, destroyed, or homogenized by the industrial revolution; and, two, because of changes in technology, the pop-lore has been recorded and stored and is more easily visible than at any other period in history. True enough, one can go back and look at the sources for Shakespeare or Rabelais or the founders of what he considers modernism, but the richness of the reservoir upon which they were drawing is relatively hard to see compared to what we have from the changes in the 1950s.
The fourth chapter continues this argument, mostly by multiplying examples—Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac (especially in Visions of Cody), Thomas Pynchon. There was a great deal of despair at the heart of this cultural style, as there had been with the high moderns—the atomic bomb, the loss if authority, the absence of father figures—but Llhamon points out that the style emphasizes optimism and laughter—the clowning that was there in “Invisible Man.” The artists of the fifties are playing with their anxieties. The idea was to cope with—not overcome or transcend—the problems presented by the world, That is how the boy at the center of Ellison’s book became a “Man,” even if an Invisible one.
The final chapter is the most confounding. It focuses on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its intersection with the works of Pynchon. Wittgenstein illustrates for Llhamon the change from high modernism to this new style, which Llhamon is increasingly comfortable calling, as the book goes on, postmodernism: his early philosophical work in the 1920s was rigid and all encompassing, an attempt to find the single key to explain all of the universe. His reworked philosophy in the 1950s was much more playful—though still intense and difficult for outsiders to read—highlighting the changeability of human nature and human practices, comparing culture to a kind of game. I suppose this is correct—at least, it accord with the thumbnail sketch of Wittgenstein I carry around in my head. I am only given pause because Llhamon makes a similar argument about science which does not match well with the history of science: the in the 1920s and 1930s it was unified, its divisions solid, and only in the 1960s, with fractals and chaos theory did the divisions breakdown. Oddly, though, he points to population ecology as one of the key examples of this change, but population ecology was vulgar and rooted in local knowledge and field studies from the 1930s on. The problem, here, is that Llhamon followed too closely the argument of James Gleick in his book on chaos theory.
The real problem, though, is that this ending doesn’t really cap of the book. Even by 1990, when this book was published, it was clear that many of the art forms that Llhamon was documenting had themselves become as sclerotic as high modernism had once been. Jazz had become incredibly insular and backward focused. Rock and Roll was the subject of documentaries on PBS (!). The Beats were subject of nostalgia, not a vital force. (Keouac’s Gap ad was still three years away, but the drift was clear.) Why not close off the lore cycle being documented here? Certainly, elements of it persists—just as elements of high modernism persist—and in 1990 it was not clear what would succeed it—the internet was still mostly a place for the military and academics. That it would be a youth movement was foreordained—the material causes that Llhamon outlined in the first chapter had not changed—and still haven’t—which is why so much of American culture remains adolescent.
Still, this book, in combination with a couple of others on the fate of high modernism and the avant-garde that I’ve read these past few months start to make sense of the time: the crucial change in the American century came not in the 1960s, which built on what came before, nor the 1970s, which consolidated it. The change was in the 1940s and 1950s, which sealed off what had come earlier in the century and set the stage for something new. The avant-garde reached the end of its lifespan in the 1950s, the questions it had set out to answer about how to live in the wake of the Industrial Revolution either answered or made moot by the rise of consumer culture, the energy siphoned off as the avant-gardists entered the academy and museums. (They were no longer congenial, no longer vital, but canonized.) At the same time, much of what had counted as high modern was stripped of its political meaning, sanitized.
The 1940s and 1950s saw American artists shuffling through what had been rejected to create something new. There’s an obvious connection with the Forteans here—they were gathering what science had rejected; but their initial project was mostly modernist, in the sense that they were trying to create a new unified thing, a Theosophical understanding of the universe or some such. (There were other elements, too, more anarchic, that would provide a spark t a renewed Forteanism in the 1960s.) There was also a turn to individual experience, and the imagination as the source of individuality and resistance to the military-industrial complex. Ironically, though, that emphasis on individual experience only helped to feed consumerism, the atomization of society and the depoliticization of art—that is a problem that remains, too, as even among the most liberal groups the idea of a social compact is tattered. If we’re looking to start a new lore cycle, it might be from that rejected idea that we draw our energy.
Llhamon was among those in the 1980s and 1990s trying to reclaim the 1950s as a historically interesting epoch—not just Ozzie and Harriet at home before the storm of the 1960s. Like Paul Carter’s Another Part of the Fifities. Or the work on the prehistory of the Civil Rights movement (which Llhamon acknowledges as a source). His discussion of the period is really interesting, and the theoretical apparatus he employs to make sense of what was going on—what he calls a lore cycle—is potentially very fruitful, but almost no one has adopted it. (I did in one paper.) That may be a result of Llhamon’s writing style, which is slippery to the extreme. He makes a dead-on point that Marxist writers have been considering some of the same issues but their work—particularly Stuart Hall’s—is hieroglyphic. Llhamon’s is not jargon-laden, but he has too much Lester Bangs in him, and the meaning of his sentences can be elusive (often because it is so allusive—to make a Llhamonian point).
There was a style created in the 1950s that persists, in its way, until the time that this book was written—thus giving lie to the idea, then common, that the 1950s had no culture: only economics and family and a return to normalcy (to import an even earlier phrase). The culture was rooted in the everyday life of post-War, Cold War, baby-boom society. He calls it a “cultural cycle,” embodied int he phrase “deliberate speed,” and is most concerned with yours around the middle of the decade. He acknowledges that this style was only one of many, though it persisted. The style joined deliberation an speed, an oxymoronic combination. In the preface he notes that others might date the beginning of this style earlier—the the 1940s, or even the 1920s: he finds these objectors actually allies, and acknowledges the truth of their argument while insisting that the fifties brought together the deliberate speed cultural style in a complete way not seen before, and that would then be largely unaltered over the next quarter century.
The first chapter starts out arguing, first, that the 1950s had culture—which may seem a bit obvious now, though the fifties are still too often seen as apolitical. His was a part of a larger academic project in this claim, along with the book The Other Side of the Fifties and especially the work of historians of the civil rights movement (Taylor Branch; Speak Now Against the Day) that saw the roil of the 1960s as emerging out of the 1950s. Llhamon spends the chapter placing 1950s’s culture in its material context: because the culture arose in places that used to be overlooked, particularly popular culture. Literature and music, at least of the kind he is interested in, struggled early in the decade, then found their place. They were stories and songs concerned with he dispossessed, those rain dogs looking for a warm place to sleep in the cold world. They were often about overcoming despair.
There were structural, material reasons for youth culture, he said, and black culture and the culture of deliberate speed. The consumer society, the baby boom, these things did not erase culture, but brought a certain kind of cultural style into being (or packaged it from the parts that had been developing since the 1920s). We can link this with arguments about the end of the avant-garde and also about the way the 1950s reinterpreted the 1930s and canonized modernism, hiding some of the more radical aspects of the modernists’s politics, popular culture coming to supplant avant-garde, or consume it, I guess, taking the parts it left behind and creating something new. Youth culture became culture—think of how movies and music are geared for the young demographic. Part of this culture was an emphasis on homosocial binding among males. Folk and oral culture became almost entirely mediated during this decade. Promiscuity was key—sexual, yes, but also the mixing of genres. Electronic technologies fixed these changes—taped them, archived them, recorded them.
(He likes to play with language, which is a good thing, but he can take etymology for evidence and argument, which is not.)
This new culture was in battle with McCarthyite xenophobia, and came of age at a time when broadcasting was possible, a lever, then, giving the upstarts some power. Tape recorders, records, and television, which started moving into homes during the 1940s, penetrated homes to an extreme degree int eh mid-1950s. (Tape recording was the basis of the new rock’n’roll, teaching Elvis and Little Richard and others about unknown artists, and preserving their own early experiments.) Technology was also miniaturized, and there was the beginnings of the sun-belt. Tv and music picked through southern culture, and also wedded it to more progressive ideas, setting the stage for later revolts int he 1960s. Of course, one must also look at this as a change from production to consumption and the importance of leisure time.
These changes changed art: old heroes died of overwork, new ones of over consumption. Lolita, for everything else it is, is also a document of this shift. There was a separate youth culture, impenetrable by representatives of the old world, or the old generations, including Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Ellison did something similar, using black lore to recreate culture. Writers feared the new culture—feared television—not unlike the ways other writers had feared film (think Fort). Radio responded creatively to TV—hence rock and roll. Painters focused on process.
The new technology also sped everything up—the new art could seem slapdash compared to what came before. Cycles turned quickly. Novels splintered into many genres—privacy was a counter mobilization against mass society, with genres, and televisions, and cars marking one as part of the mass, but also allowing one to be by one’s self. The rise and fall of the novel took three hundred years; rock and roll took three decades: that’s speed. But there was always a sense of tradition, recharged for a new era.
After World War II, the culture was looking for some new way to begin. Black culture provided the necessary resources—by turning to folklore, which was still, then—for a moment—potent and pertinent. He spends a lot of time reading Ellison’s Invisible Man as the locus classicUs of this reworking of folk culture into popular and literary culture. One sees here, especially, foreshadows of his later arguments about the importance of minstrelsy to American popular culture in general. One part bears pointing out: the role of the Sambo, as a clever clown, pointing out the absurdities and inequalities of power, and then retreating into joking. He notes that there was one other part of culture that turned to folklore as well, which he will get to later. One might wonder how Forteans fit into this, too—since they opposed official culture with—in part—folk culture.
The argument extends from Ellison, first by implication—that other black artists were doing something similar. Then, in the next chapter, that other artists were influenced by this—that the Beats, for instance, took a lot of their cues from “Negro” culture, and so were creating a post-War culture using black folklore and black poplore. “Invisible Man,” though, is the major touchstone through the early third of the book. Llhamon is walking a tricky line here. It is easy to see white use of black culture appropriation, and Llhamon does not give enough attention to the power inequalities. But it is true that something more than appropriation—stealing—was going on here, and that there was a back-and-forth generation of culture, from back to white and back again.
Perhaps the key chapter is the fourth, titled “Congeniality,” which makes the comparison and contrast between High Modernism and fifties’ culture (‘deliberate speed’), elaborates on the theoretical structure of the ‘lore cycle’ Llhamon is developing, and shows how the most important cultural artefacts—movements—of the decades drew their energy from vernacular culture. Llhamon arguments that a major strain of high modernist art curdled in on itself, becoming interested only in its own techniques—the poetry of Pound and Elliott are among the best examples. He has to make two caveats, though—first, that this inward turn was part of high modernism, of the early part of the twentieth century—Llhamon himselff has an odd definition of modern art that dates back to the Renaissance. Second, he notes that there were modernists, even arch modernists such as the James brothers who remained fascinated by the everyday, the vulgar, and incorporated it into their own art.
With this set up,the villain becomes Clement Greenberg, who in a series of articles in the late 1930s and early 1940s—many collected in the 1960s—stood up for modernism’s inward turn—its self-referentiality and impenetrability to those not indoctrinated into its intricacies. Other art he dismissed as kitsch. Llhamon admits that Greenberg’s defense of modern art allowed space for New York abstract expressionism—Jackson Pollock, etc.—to develop, even as Pollock and others would reject modernism’s insularity; and that Greenberg would later change his mind. But in the 1940s and 1950s, he was the defender of modernism against everything else.
Llhamon is just the opposite: he sees high modernism as choking itself off from the vital source of all art: the vulgar, the everyday. It was the quotidian that provided the resources for the ‘deliberate speed’ style—for the blues singers and jazz makers, for the Beats and and for the new generation of photographers (Robert Frank gets a long look). In the past, this vulgar source was often folklore, but also what he called poplore—and which he sees as equivalent of Peter Burke’s “chapbook culture” or Dwight MacDonald’s Midcult. He spends a long stretch, for example, on Little Richard and the creation of rock-n-roll music—Little Richard drawing energy from the gay and transvestite bars he frequented. (There’s the image of the Sambo again, the trickster, masking the taboo, but not so much that it cannot be re agonized.) The new culture, thus, was congenial—open to the public, acceptable to the public.
Congeniality, here, is key to Llhamon’s notion of a lore cycle. Lore starts as folklore, is transformed into poplore, and then becomes more widely distributed through a society—not just in the form of literature, but in music, images, and performances, too. (His next next book, on minstrelsy, would stress the performative aspects, especially dance moves and poses.) There is some confusion here over how big or small a lore cycle is. Later he would discuss minstrelsy as one form of lore cycle. But in this book he’s talking about something almost as big as what Foucault would call an episteme. Llhamon is careful to note that there’s always oppositions within any cycle—indeed, that’s what a cycle does, it holds oppositions together, love and theft, fear and attraction; and there is always material outside of it, too—the rejected things, necessarily rejected to allow the culture itself to take shape. It’s when the lore becomes too calcified—too choked off, too uncongenial—that outsiders dip back into the folklore and pop-lore and reinterpret it and create something new that keeps the cycle moving. Still, does the cycle account for all of Western culture since the Renaissance? or certain pieces of it, like minstrelsy? Impossible to say from what is written here.
What can be said, though, is that the fifties is different from any other turning of the lore cycle because, one, most of folklore had been lost by that point—or so he says—the isolated rural communities disrupted, destroyed, or homogenized by the industrial revolution; and, two, because of changes in technology, the pop-lore has been recorded and stored and is more easily visible than at any other period in history. True enough, one can go back and look at the sources for Shakespeare or Rabelais or the founders of what he considers modernism, but the richness of the reservoir upon which they were drawing is relatively hard to see compared to what we have from the changes in the 1950s.
The fourth chapter continues this argument, mostly by multiplying examples—Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac (especially in Visions of Cody), Thomas Pynchon. There was a great deal of despair at the heart of this cultural style, as there had been with the high moderns—the atomic bomb, the loss if authority, the absence of father figures—but Llhamon points out that the style emphasizes optimism and laughter—the clowning that was there in “Invisible Man.” The artists of the fifties are playing with their anxieties. The idea was to cope with—not overcome or transcend—the problems presented by the world, That is how the boy at the center of Ellison’s book became a “Man,” even if an Invisible one.
The final chapter is the most confounding. It focuses on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its intersection with the works of Pynchon. Wittgenstein illustrates for Llhamon the change from high modernism to this new style, which Llhamon is increasingly comfortable calling, as the book goes on, postmodernism: his early philosophical work in the 1920s was rigid and all encompassing, an attempt to find the single key to explain all of the universe. His reworked philosophy in the 1950s was much more playful—though still intense and difficult for outsiders to read—highlighting the changeability of human nature and human practices, comparing culture to a kind of game. I suppose this is correct—at least, it accord with the thumbnail sketch of Wittgenstein I carry around in my head. I am only given pause because Llhamon makes a similar argument about science which does not match well with the history of science: the in the 1920s and 1930s it was unified, its divisions solid, and only in the 1960s, with fractals and chaos theory did the divisions breakdown. Oddly, though, he points to population ecology as one of the key examples of this change, but population ecology was vulgar and rooted in local knowledge and field studies from the 1930s on. The problem, here, is that Llhamon followed too closely the argument of James Gleick in his book on chaos theory.
The real problem, though, is that this ending doesn’t really cap of the book. Even by 1990, when this book was published, it was clear that many of the art forms that Llhamon was documenting had themselves become as sclerotic as high modernism had once been. Jazz had become incredibly insular and backward focused. Rock and Roll was the subject of documentaries on PBS (!). The Beats were subject of nostalgia, not a vital force. (Keouac’s Gap ad was still three years away, but the drift was clear.) Why not close off the lore cycle being documented here? Certainly, elements of it persists—just as elements of high modernism persist—and in 1990 it was not clear what would succeed it—the internet was still mostly a place for the military and academics. That it would be a youth movement was foreordained—the material causes that Llhamon outlined in the first chapter had not changed—and still haven’t—which is why so much of American culture remains adolescent.
Still, this book, in combination with a couple of others on the fate of high modernism and the avant-garde that I’ve read these past few months start to make sense of the time: the crucial change in the American century came not in the 1960s, which built on what came before, nor the 1970s, which consolidated it. The change was in the 1940s and 1950s, which sealed off what had come earlier in the century and set the stage for something new. The avant-garde reached the end of its lifespan in the 1950s, the questions it had set out to answer about how to live in the wake of the Industrial Revolution either answered or made moot by the rise of consumer culture, the energy siphoned off as the avant-gardists entered the academy and museums. (They were no longer congenial, no longer vital, but canonized.) At the same time, much of what had counted as high modern was stripped of its political meaning, sanitized.
The 1940s and 1950s saw American artists shuffling through what had been rejected to create something new. There’s an obvious connection with the Forteans here—they were gathering what science had rejected; but their initial project was mostly modernist, in the sense that they were trying to create a new unified thing, a Theosophical understanding of the universe or some such. (There were other elements, too, more anarchic, that would provide a spark t a renewed Forteanism in the 1960s.) There was also a turn to individual experience, and the imagination as the source of individuality and resistance to the military-industrial complex. Ironically, though, that emphasis on individual experience only helped to feed consumerism, the atomization of society and the depoliticization of art—that is a problem that remains, too, as even among the most liberal groups the idea of a social compact is tattered. If we’re looking to start a new lore cycle, it might be from that rejected idea that we draw our energy.
June 10, 2008
Academic--fascinating study of the 1950s. Argues that 1955 marked a turning point from the dull domesticity and conformity of the early postwar era to the radical cultural experimentation of the 1960s. You won't believe the number of important works and events that happened in 1955.
Read
June 18, 2019Takeaway:
“Folk or oral culture completed its changes during the fifties to popular or mediated culture. Long produced anonymously at the local level, folklore had been collected in urban centers. People make popular culture in urban centers, however, and distribute it to the local level, where it usually dissipates uncollected. This was an important reversal of cultural vector. Lore, which previous generations had absorbed at Grandpa’s or Uncle Remus’s knee or on the store porch, was now absorbed basking in the blue glow of the TV…Instead of producing and participating in their own lore, fifties people began buying it ready-made…” (p. 9)
So Lahmon assembles a pattern out of fragments from the Fifties that may or may not have existed. In great detail he examines Ellison’s Invisible Man, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ornette Coleman, Robert Frank's The Americans, Clement Greenberg, Nabokov’s Lolita, Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, Rebel without a Cause, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollock, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pynchon’s V..
His one glaring error was omitting Gaddis’s The Recognitions.
More takeaways:
“This new material behaved like folklore and sometimes had folk traditions. But identifiable individuals were making this lore in the city now, assembling it with cameras and electric instruments, propagating it on TV and radio and records, multiplying it in books. So it did not fit the current definition of folk-lore, which specified anonymous creation by rural illiterates. Nevertheless, contemporary lore was serious. It widely organized and expressed people’s lives. It was pop-lore.” (p. 98)
“Lore: the stories, customs, patterns of belief and behavior and gesture which inculcate and maintain the structure of belief by which a community knows itself, expresses its common features, and explains to itself its dilemmas. People perform lore outside of official institutions. Schools do not teach it; few books value it; churches disparage it; city halls ridicule it. Like the relatively powerless people it bespeaks, lore is part of any era’s rejectamenta.” (p.108)
“Folk or oral culture completed its changes during the fifties to popular or mediated culture. Long produced anonymously at the local level, folklore had been collected in urban centers. People make popular culture in urban centers, however, and distribute it to the local level, where it usually dissipates uncollected. This was an important reversal of cultural vector. Lore, which previous generations had absorbed at Grandpa’s or Uncle Remus’s knee or on the store porch, was now absorbed basking in the blue glow of the TV…Instead of producing and participating in their own lore, fifties people began buying it ready-made…” (p. 9)
So Lahmon assembles a pattern out of fragments from the Fifties that may or may not have existed. In great detail he examines Ellison’s Invisible Man, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ornette Coleman, Robert Frank's The Americans, Clement Greenberg, Nabokov’s Lolita, Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, Rebel without a Cause, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollock, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pynchon’s V..
His one glaring error was omitting Gaddis’s The Recognitions.
More takeaways:
“This new material behaved like folklore and sometimes had folk traditions. But identifiable individuals were making this lore in the city now, assembling it with cameras and electric instruments, propagating it on TV and radio and records, multiplying it in books. So it did not fit the current definition of folk-lore, which specified anonymous creation by rural illiterates. Nevertheless, contemporary lore was serious. It widely organized and expressed people’s lives. It was pop-lore.” (p. 98)
“Lore: the stories, customs, patterns of belief and behavior and gesture which inculcate and maintain the structure of belief by which a community knows itself, expresses its common features, and explains to itself its dilemmas. People perform lore outside of official institutions. Schools do not teach it; few books value it; churches disparage it; city halls ridicule it. Like the relatively powerless people it bespeaks, lore is part of any era’s rejectamenta.” (p.108)
February 20, 2019
Lhamon's book is an important one. It rescues much of the avant-garde culture of the 1950s from the inclination to align it with mere formalism. As he makes clear, that was the first impulse when works from the likes of Jack Kerouac, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frank, Jackson Pollock, and Chuck Berry first appeared. In the meantime, as the cultural and historical contexts from which they arose has disappeared into time, it is once again the inclination to obsess with formalistic approaches when studying these writers, painters, and musicians.
Lhamon's analysis, on the other hand, discusses the development of lore cycles and, in particular, the displacement of folkore by poplore. His fourth chapter is devoted to a convincing argument of how urban based poplore overtook the rural oriented wellsprings of folkore in the 1950s. It is by far the best chapter in the book, although the subsequent chapters on Kerouac and Jackson Pollock are nearly as mesmerizing in their illustration of poplore at work. The foundational chapter on Ralph Ellison is also convincing, putting that author into what may seem for many a new context.
There are a couple of problems. Generally, Lhamon stalls when writing about music. There is no musical notation in the book, and that is really the only effective way to replicate for a reader who is seeing the sounds he cannot hear on the page. Instead, Deliberate Speed satisfies itself with musical aphorisms supported by a tidal wave of similes, metaphors, and other equivalencies. It just doesn't work.
Then, there is Lhamon's discussion of film. I'm not quite sure he understands film, because almost everything he says relates to themes and performance. That is the stuff of newspaper reviews, not scholarly study. And, frankly, the choice of Rebel Without a Cause as his example of the 1950s' cultural breakthrough cinema is cringeworthy. The film continues not to age well at all--as is the case with the rest of James Dean's star vehicles. Sorry, but it's true. Brando's The Wild One would have been a much better choice.
The same, finally, goes for the last chapter, which devotes itself to Wittgenstein and Thomas Pynchon. I don't care that Pynchon alludes to Wittgenstein. The comparison is forced and awkward. And, ultimately, it is unworkable, as Lhamon uses Pynchon's V as a device to collapse the works of his other subjects into a fitting summary and conclusion. Again, there is a better choice available: John Barth.
As I say, the book overall is important. In fact, I don't think it is possible to make a serious study of overall 1950s culture without looking at it. I do wish that Lhamon had taken some time to look at the more popular instances of mass literature and film from the period. It carried the same impulses, without positioning itself as "elite." For example, there is Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which had a far larger impact during the decade than all the works of literature Lhamon mentions combined. There is also genre fiction, genre films, and genre television, all of which reflected or reacted to the cultural currents Lhamon discusses. More of that, please.
Lhamon's analysis, on the other hand, discusses the development of lore cycles and, in particular, the displacement of folkore by poplore. His fourth chapter is devoted to a convincing argument of how urban based poplore overtook the rural oriented wellsprings of folkore in the 1950s. It is by far the best chapter in the book, although the subsequent chapters on Kerouac and Jackson Pollock are nearly as mesmerizing in their illustration of poplore at work. The foundational chapter on Ralph Ellison is also convincing, putting that author into what may seem for many a new context.
There are a couple of problems. Generally, Lhamon stalls when writing about music. There is no musical notation in the book, and that is really the only effective way to replicate for a reader who is seeing the sounds he cannot hear on the page. Instead, Deliberate Speed satisfies itself with musical aphorisms supported by a tidal wave of similes, metaphors, and other equivalencies. It just doesn't work.
Then, there is Lhamon's discussion of film. I'm not quite sure he understands film, because almost everything he says relates to themes and performance. That is the stuff of newspaper reviews, not scholarly study. And, frankly, the choice of Rebel Without a Cause as his example of the 1950s' cultural breakthrough cinema is cringeworthy. The film continues not to age well at all--as is the case with the rest of James Dean's star vehicles. Sorry, but it's true. Brando's The Wild One would have been a much better choice.
The same, finally, goes for the last chapter, which devotes itself to Wittgenstein and Thomas Pynchon. I don't care that Pynchon alludes to Wittgenstein. The comparison is forced and awkward. And, ultimately, it is unworkable, as Lhamon uses Pynchon's V as a device to collapse the works of his other subjects into a fitting summary and conclusion. Again, there is a better choice available: John Barth.
As I say, the book overall is important. In fact, I don't think it is possible to make a serious study of overall 1950s culture without looking at it. I do wish that Lhamon had taken some time to look at the more popular instances of mass literature and film from the period. It carried the same impulses, without positioning itself as "elite." For example, there is Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which had a far larger impact during the decade than all the works of literature Lhamon mentions combined. There is also genre fiction, genre films, and genre television, all of which reflected or reacted to the cultural currents Lhamon discusses. More of that, please.
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