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Drawing the Line Once Again: Paul Goodman's Anarchist Writings PDF

123 Pages·2010·1.57 MB·English
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DRAWING THE LINE ONCE AGAIN s. g n riti W st hi c r a n A s n' a m d o o 1 G = Paul &ppg ain : 0624 PAUL GOODMAN'S g 0 A 4 ng the Line Once 009. p i. canuc/Doc?id=10 "ThAec orNoef G oAodRmanCp'osl HitwiaIcshsS i dsTe fin iWtoifoa Rnn arIchT.is.lm Io: oNnkO ttG ot heSS t atfeo r Drawi ess, 2 omini solutibountds i scovtehre mf oryours.e.Hl.ev meOsS tp assionabteelliye vedm atnhm auts tn ot Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d commit treasonh ia-mgsNaeAiwTlnh Hf,sa HttN TeOvFteFh, rnes i rB aVitl.eLA-GcE aVOpIiCRst oacliiasltcri, as ie-,c ommands." Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// Drawing the Line Once Again Paul Goodman's Anarchist Writings Paul Goodman Edited by Taylor Stoehr s. g n riti W st hi c r a n A s n' a m d o o 2 G = Paul &ppg ain : 0624 g 0 A 4 Line Once 1. Doc?id=10 g the 09. p anuc/ n 0 c Drawi ess, 2 omini Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// s. ng DrawinTgh eL inOen ceA gaiPna:u Glo odmanA'nsa rchWirsitt ings riti DrawinTgh eL inOen ceA gai©n 2 010 byS alGloyo dman W st IntroducQt 2i0o10n b yT ayloSrt oehr hi Thise diti"o n201b0y P M Press c ar Alrli ghrtess ervNeodp .a rotf t hibso okm ayb et ransmibtyta endym eansw ithopuetr missiinow nr iting n A fromt hep ublisher. s n' a m ISBN9:78 -1-60486-057-3 d oo 3 Library of Congni!EE Control Number: 2009901375 G = Paul &ppg CoveJro:h Yna tes ain : 0624 Interdieosri bgynb riandesign g 0 A 4 Line Once 2. Doc?id=10 PPOM BPorxe2 3s9s12 g the 09. p anuc/ Owawkwl.apnmCdpA,r 9 e46s2s3 .org n 0 c Drawi ess, 2 omini Printiendt heU SAo nr ecyclpeadp er. Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// Contents Preface by Taylor Stoehr 5 Sources of Texts 19 The May Pamphlet 21 Reflections on the Anarchist Principle 55 Freedom and Autonomy 57 Anarchism and Revolution 60 Some Prima Facie Objections to Decentralism 75 The Black Flag of Anarchism 89 The Limits of Local Liberty 98 Civil Disobedience 104 "Getting Into Power": The Ambiguities of Pacifist Politics 114 s. g n riti W st hi c r a n A s n' a m d o o 4 G = Paul &ppg ain : 0624 g 0 A 4 Line Once 3. Doc?id=10 g the 09. p anuc/ n 0 c Drawi ess, 2 omini Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// s. g n riti W st hi c r a n A s n' a m d o o 5 G = Paul &ppg ain : 0624 g 0 A 4 Line Once 4. Doc?id=10 g the 09. p anuc/ n 0 c Drawi ess, 2 omini Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// Preface hen I met Paul Goodman in 1950 I was eighteen, and he was thirty-nine. WI was a callow youth from the Midwest, much in need of menroring, and he was a bohemian guru with a little band of disciples already following him around, and the author of many books, some of them still to be in print half a century later. I saw Goodman only five or six times that spring before going back to Omaha, but for the next ten years he did guide me, at first in a few crucial letters of advice, then only through his writings, which I began to collect and study in a way that I studied nothing else. I say this to orient new readers of Goodman, some of whom I assume will be at the age I met him and perhaps as much in need of counsel as I was. Although it weighed heavily in my own case to have met him in the flesh, what ultimately counted most, both then and later in the 1960s when I reconnected with him, was not his physical presence but his lucidity and common sense. He used to say it was "the obvious" that people never seemed to notice, plain as the nose on your face. That was what was so irresistible about him. As if in dialogue with Socrates, you felt you were in touch with your own wisdom, like a kind of memory, for the very first time. Our mutual friend George Dennison s. g n once said that he was "an angel of mind whose feats of memory and analysis riti W seemed like familiar descriptions of a much-loved home." st chi Goodman had no charisma, whether face-to-face or in front of a faceless r a An audience. But you soon forgot about the figure he cut, because his words lit s an' up your own mind, you listened and you were thinking those thoughts your­ m d o self. They were rarely something you'd want to write down or memorize. For o 6 G = Paul &ppg me and others who gathered round him in those days there was no lesson to gain : 00624 cboeu lleda rgneet dit ainntdo sytoourer do wawn abyo, nraetsh. Aern adn b aetctaituusdee w troiwtinargd i sl iafe w aanyd o tfh the iwnkoirnldg., Yanodu A 4 Line Once 5. Doc?id=10 hmea wnya so tah werr ipteero tpol et hweh coo rhea, dy othu ec soaumlde g eextp ite rbiye nrceae,d iinncgl hudisi nbgo onkost. aI hfeawve wmheot ng the 009. p canuc/ neveTr hlaeidre e ayrees s oenv ehriaml a. venues by which one might approach what I am calling Drawi ess, 2 omini Goodman's attitude. It was the primary tendency in the Gestalt therapy he was Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d 5 Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// PREFACE just beginning to practice at the time I meth im, and was also at the heart of the artist's life he had chosen for himself. For me, however, Goodman's anarchism best exemplifies this deep-going attitude. I have included two succinct sum­ maries of it in the pages that follow-"The Anarchist Principle" and "Freedom and Autonomy"-but to get the feel of this habit of mind, which he some­ times called "the habit of freedom," I suggest reading through the more expan­ sive essays printed here. As he believed, character is revealed in a writer's style, expressed in the very rhythms of speech, and of course character is the source of any deep-going attitude. Curiously, one finds in these longer selections a number of passages where Goodman repeats himself, not merely in idea or attitude but verbatim, quoting himself without quotation marks, as if it couldn't be said better than he had already said it-a trick he developed early in his career, along with footnotes referring readers to his other writings. In later years such cloning was helpful in meeting multiple demands on him from editors and publish­ ers, but it also highlights what I'm trying to get across here: once we are famil­ iar with his voice, everything Goodman says seems reminiscent of some other portion of his work. "Haven't I read this paragraph before?" Goodman's tone changed dramatically after 1960, once he was no longer writing only for his friends in the San Remo bar, but his "attitude" remained the same throughout the twenty-five years represented by these essays. Near the end of his life he said that he hadn't changed his political ideas "since I was a boy." This was true. My own earliest encounter with the anarchist attitude came by reading "The May Pamphlet" side by side with its imagined spelling-out in The Dead of Spring, an expressionist novel he published in 1950. When Goodman gave me a copy, hot off Dave Dellinger's Libertarian Press, I didn't realize what a s. g n providential act that was to be. I was a baffled teenager stumbling through riti W the rites of adulthood in the U.S.A.-smoking, driving, drinking, punching a st chi clock, matriculating, marrying, and wearing a uniform-for me, in that order. r a An The hero of The Dead of Spring was working his way through different rites s an' of passage, but in the end he arrived at the same crisis, what Goodman called m d o The Dilemma, formulated by the Prosecuting Attorney at Horatio's trial for o 7 G = Paul &ppg Treason Against the Sociolatry: ain : 0624 You have tried to live as if our society, the society of almost all of the g 0 Line Once A 6. Doc?id=104 pcisoe-nofpionler mw, dshi datot n soooutc riee sxtoiysc tic .ea.tny.. ,y [ hOoeuj ub mre csooovcmei eieftsy n s ioisct k tihn ien o ocunerrl sytoa sicnoiec wtieyat?yy .s .t. h..a. If.t oBthnuete r ief he g the 09. p anuc/ does not conform, he becomes demented, because ours is the only n 0 c Drawi ess, 2 omini society that there is. Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d 6 Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// PREFACE In 1950, I was too naIve to truly comprehend what the opposite crime, treason against natural societies (as it was termed in "The May Pamphlet"), might mean for someone setting out on these paths, but what I did intuit, almost wordlessly, was that the world I was entering was founded on lies and hypoc­ risy. Much as I loved my home and the family friends, teachers, and neighbors I knew as a boy, I was aware that almost every adult I met was masked, and no matter how smiling a face might be put on it, their lives were venal and empty. In The Dead of Spring, Goodman had called their condition The Asphyxiation. I had gotten a strong whiff of that self-betrayal festering in my parents' genera­ tion and was afraid that I, too, was infected. Goodman amazed me because he did not live this way. As far as I could tell, he had no secrets, no reticence, no shame. Whatever scary implications such an open life might have for a shy and embarrassed young fellow like myself, it was better than suffocation in conformity and complacency. There was another way to live-one that presented something to believe in, pursuits to follow wholeheartedly, countering the fear that there was nothing worth doing. I began by paying attention to how he behaved in his family, among his friends, in public spaces, and face-to-face with me, but it was not until I had returned to the Midwest and read "The May Pamphlet" and The Dead of Spring that I had any insight into what had bowled me over during our initial encoun­ ter. My misgivings about the adult world were embodied in what he called "treason against natural societies": "every one knows moments in which he con­ forms against his nature, in which he suppresses his best spontaneous impulse, and cowardly takes leave of his heart." It was precisely such moments of self­ betrayal that had led to the great wars of the century, long prepared in the averted eyes and uneasy smiles of parents whose children would die in them. s. g n riti The steps [we] take to habituation and unconsciousness are crimes W st which entail every subsequent evil of enslavement and mass murder .... hi c ar We conform to institutions that up to a certain point give great natural n A s satisfactions, food, learning and fellowship-and then suddenly we n' a m find that terrible crimes are committed and we are somehow the d o o 8 G = agents ....I t is said that the system is guilty, but the system is its Paul &ppg members coerced into the system. It is also true that the system itself ain : 0624 exercises this coercion. g 0 A 4 Line Once 7. Doc?id=10 IIn k n19e5w0 ,w I hhaatd h liet tmlee garnats pa boofu tht em oevaenrianrgclheisnsg j osybsst eomr thhee wsmaso ttahlekriinngg a obfo usetx, buuatl ng the 009. p canuc/ dscehsioroel iinn gt hstei fyleodu ncug,r iaonsdit yI eavnedn k hilaledd a tnh ein skpliirnigt. oBfu ht oI'wm ma ysl oowwn l egaornoder- eannodu ngho Drawi ess, 2 omini matter how much you can take from good advice, you have to make your own Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d 7 Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// PREFACE mistakes. I had gone back home and done all the things I admired him for refus­ ing to do, every one of the treasonous rites of passage I've listed above-even though I carried the truth along with me too, if not fully in consciousness yet alive in the books he had given me and continued to write. By the next time I saw him, ten years later, I had begun to understand. His voice had been ringing in my head as I read Communiws, Geswlt Therapy, The Structure of Literature, and The Empire City. When I visited him in December 1959, Growing up Absurd was in page proofs on his dinner table, and when he came to visit me in Berkeley two months later, chapters of it were already being serialized in Commentary. A more receptive generation than my own, one that included his own son Mathew, was about to have its first taste of his anarchist attitude, focused now as the subtitle announced, on "problems of youth in the organized society." This would be the heyday of his influence. Of course there were other compelling voices-Co Wright Mills at the outset, then Herbert Marcuse, William Appleton Williams, Michael Harrington, to name some prominent authors who figure in histories of the '60s-but outside of the Civil Rights movement (another story entirely), Goodman was by far the most significant of these social critics, despite the fact that he has become just another name in the index of most books about the 1960s in recent years. As the landmark "Port Huron Statement" of the Students for a Democratic Society made clear as early as 1961, the first leaders of the youth movement were completely in tune with his anarchist attitude, not only his critique of the "organized system" but also his scorn for the value system that supported it, the "standard of living" and the ''American Dream." Most of the other public intellectuals were still waving red flags and calling for an old-fashioned taking of power, whereas like most s. g n anarchists Goodman believed "getting into power" was a delusion of both the riti W Marxist and the Liberal Left. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement that spread st chi under other names to campuses across the country, climaxing with the giant r a An antiwar demonstrations orchestrated by Dave Dellinger in April and October s an' of 1967, was anarchist through and through. m d o During these half dozen years Goodman poured forth a flood of books o 9 G = Paul &ppg and articles, public speeches, radio broadcasts, and even TV talk shows. With gain : 00624 aexnp alauidni ethnec ea nthaarct haits tl aasttt iwtuadnet e'tdil thoe hderaorp pwehda: t he had to say, he was ready to A 4 Line Once 8. Doc?id=10 iOs hl ikthee t hneu wmibtcerh o-gfr tahses sinp etheceh geasr dI ehna ve made g the 09. p anuc/ and the press-conferences for peace n 0 c Drawi ess, 2 omini have been almost as many as the wars. Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d 8 Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http:// PREFACE It was near the end of his decade-long harangue when he wrote that exhausted poem about "the old grey goose" that died in the mill-pond, but at his peak in the early '60S he was indefatigable. In 1962 alone he published five books, among them a new edition of "The May Pamphlet," combined with more recent articles as Drawing the Line--critiquing Kennedy's "New Frontier" in Washington, commenting presciently on the epidemic "war spirit," calling the intellectuals to account, and endorsing the "Worldwide General Strike for Peace" for which he had written the broadside. Another of his books that year was titled Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, where he described various ways that "The May Pamphlet" might be implemented in direct action if not official policy. Still another book insisted The Society I Live in Is Mine, gather­ ing letters to public officials and the media in which he showed how things might be done differently. The audience for all this analysis and exhortation was not only on the campuses. There were more anarchists in the U.S.A. than anyone had imag­ ined. When Goodman had joined A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, and others on the editorial board of Liberation magazine in the late-fifties, it was a thin twenty-page anarchist monthly. By 1962 it had grown to twenty­ eight pages, by 1966 a robust forry-eight. A light breeze compared to the dust storms in the national press, but also a weather vane. When Goodman edited a Seeds oj Liberation anthology in 1964, he quite rightly pointed out that "the 'news' has been catching up to Liberation," that the editors, by dealing with "what they consider to be humanly important, ... [what] they themselves get personally engaged in," had scooped all the big media by several years-their intuitions had proved predictive of the issues that now made headlines. More and more Americans wanted not only to hear the truth but to take part in it, s. g n and the young who read Liberation, passing it from hand to hand, also bought riti W Goodman's books-the way they bought the new albums from Bob Dylan and st chi the Beatles, to help them make sense of their pell-mell world. r a n A s • n' a m d o 0 Did I succeed in assimilating the anarchist attitude? I hope so. My own work o 1 G = Paul &ppg these last fifteen years, aside from the teaching and writing I've been doing gain : 00624 asitnticteu dmey i nfi rthste ennecwo ucnotnedr iwtioitnhs Goof olidfem iann t,h hea Us nbieteend Satna taettse. mMyp tw too rkac ht aosn b teheant A 4 Line Once 9. Doc?id=10 watietdh fporro fbealotinoinees rasn idn atrhee n coriwm tirnyainl jgu tsot ircee- esnystteerm th, em seonci wethyo t hhaatv hea bse ceonn idnecmarnceedr­ ng the 009. p canuc/ itnh etmhi.s I p mreefnatcieo nto t hGios owdomrka nin's o orwdenr ctoo nincdeircna twei wthh tyh Ie i nptreonbdle tmo toufm im mpyr iastotennmtieonnt Drawi ess, 2 omini in the organized system. Of course, there is a long history of the State's use Author). A: PM Pr com/lib/d 9 Paul ( A, US brary. man, nd, C site.e Good Oakla http://

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Painting a vivid picture of 1960s counterculture ideas, this new collection of the late Paul Goodman's essential anarchist writings—from utopian essays to practical proposals—reveals how he inspired the dissident youth of the era and profoundly influenced movement theory and practice. Long out-o
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.