THE GREAT REFUSAL

To Live a Useful Life

THE THOUGHT

I wanted to live a useful, fulfilling life, to be able to do ‘good’ through the arts, whatever that meant when I was young. That seems to me to be the wish of most young people I meet through working with the pan-European (now no longer British) Erasmus projects. They ache for the same things I did, so these are especially thoughts for them.

showing the simple truth is part of one’s struggle

THE PROBLEM

One of the central problems artists have, they share with the rest of humanity. They, as most people, have been regulated, canalized, restricted, intimidated, repressed, and forced by the schooling system, the surrounding popular culture and the deeply seated assumptions of corrupted democracies, into developing a particular set of beliefs while at the same time, being coaxed into obedience. Often these beliefs are thought to be original to themselves and good for them, but are detrimental to them. Because of what is a single-dimensional cultural environment, neither do they own their truth, nor do they know who does.

Much of this is down to two clever establishment ploys. First, that in Anglo-American state schools, rarely are children taught critical thinking, thus it is easier to lead them as adults into what has been called ‘false consciousness’ through emotional manipulations. The educationalists, cultural managers, editors, etc know that it is easier to ‘feel’ than to ‘think’. Second, since this dominant neoliberal culture has so successfully atomised us as individuals into a ‘ME’ centred world, we have become unanchored from our own history and from our feeling a part of and therefore responsible to our communities.

ANOTHER PATH?

Many of the young people I have met seem not to be racists, sexists, nationalists or jingoists. Whilst we all know that the internet offers sexualised stuff, fake news and malign psycho stuff, it also offers people a vision of freedom and fairness that would otherwise not be knowable to them coming from religious or otherwise conservative or isolated communities.

How then can individuals free themselves from the oppression deeply seared into their individual character instincts? After all, how can they successfully imagine the liberation of society until they can imagine the liberation of themselves?

This means that they must be able to step back, see themselves trapped inside the power and wealth relationships that engulf them, and then to develop a radical subjectivity and an immunity to defend that subjectivity in the face of almost total cultural, social and political opposition.

Judging by my own history and those of others, it seems that the rebellious children, those who wouldn’t accept the conformist mantel, those who refused to become obedient (the troublemakers) are the ones who survive into adulthood with their imaginations and dreams still intact. This could be why so many artists are seen to be misfits, unsocial and anti-establishment.

THE GREAT REFUSAL

This nascent radical opposition needs to consist of resistance to all forms of injustice, unfairness, and the continual un-acceptance of intimidation and the material inducements of the Establishment. It means that often one must stand in the flood of history and shout ‘NO’ to it and to all those who fill the upstream reservoirs with exploitation, wars and hatred. This in part constitutes what Herbert Marcuse, the radical German social philosopher, called ‘The Great Refusal’.

By this he meant that subjugated individuals (most of us) need to find their own way to be noncompliant within a very powerful system of rewards and oppression. It means that the individual needs to convince themselves that injustice, inequality, unnecessary poverty and the torments of others cannot be accepted in a trade-off for living a quiet, perhaps well rewarded life as a servant of the status quo.  

For an example of becoming noncompliant, an artist needs to be freed of constraints established by the academies, the producers, the money, the dominant ideology. This means that they need total liberty to choose ‘what’ they wish to make art about and ‘how’ they want to do that. This is when the ‘how’ is not a consequence of having been indoctrinated into a dominant style, but rather a consequence of the demands of the subject matter, the appropriateness of the artist’s responses and that which reveals the greatest truths of the moment and not of a rigidified past. Modernity is the intersection between past technical, formal and content concerns with a new generations take on reality combined with new technologies.