Advertisement for Victorian-era abortionist Madam Restell, c. 1870, quoted in Marvin N. Olasky, Prodigal Press: The Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1988), 187.
Second-wave publications such as the Redstockings Newsletter contrived this connection wholeheartedly; consciousness raising, for instance, was founded on a kind of discourse-as-expertise apparatus, where the experience was legitimized as a practice requiring—well, practice—in order to truly understand. Per Barbara Susan’s “About My Consciousness Raising,” Redstockings Newsletter, November 1968.
Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic, October 16, 1995. This article helped to galvanize the feminist community against Wolf’s third-wave politics; Dawn Skorczewski’s counter-argument published in On Our Backs helped give shape to this debate as it unfolded.
I refer here to the tendency in logical positivism to rely on observable results, relegating emotions and metaphysics to the margins of epistemological experience. As Walling Blackburn’s notes imply, Surrealism and the countercultural movements that it inspired were instrumental in using emotion and metaphysics to complicate the relationship between photographic evidence and “the facts.” As André Masson said in 1941, reflecting on the Surrealists’ gleeful rejection of Enlightenment philosophy, “For us, young surrealists of 1924, the great prostitute was reason. We judged that Cartesians, Voltaireans, and other officials of the intelligence had only made use of it for the preservation of values which were both established and dead.” He then admitted that this viewpoint had been too absolutist, and quoted the Romanticist critic Friedrich Schlegel’s assertion that “the contrary of a fault is another fault.” Masson’s admission feels, in the context of Walling Blackburn’s project, like a poetic reflection of the failures of 1960s countercultures to also fully unseat Enlightenment values. See Masson, “Peindre est une Gageure,” Cahiers de Sud, no. 233 (March 1941); reprinted in André Masson, Le plaisir de peindre (Paris: La Diane francaise, 1950), 11–18.
It is not a coincidence, I think, that challenges to logical positivism arose at the same time as feminist and activist challenges to what constituted learning and authority in general—in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
In Man at Play (1923) Karl Groos allocates one section to a cursory investigation of “the luxury of grief” in European contexts. Groos describes a bourgeois individual who draws upon distress as a form of play, aiming for a certain “mental suffering, a feeling of suspension between pain and pleasure.” Lee, the protagonist of Sister Apple, Sister Pig, allays the possibility of repressed psychic distress by the active formation of an ally born of that anxiety. Lee does this without lingering in the interstitial space between pleasure and pain. Is there a political stratagem here … when sorrow and fear become light and active?
In Man at Play (1923) Karl Groos allocates one section to a cursory investigation of “the luxury of grief” in European contexts. Groos describes a bourgeois individual who draws upon distress as a form of play, aiming for a certain “mental suffering, a feeling of suspension between pain and pleasure.” Lee, the protagonist of Sister Apple, Sister Pig, allays the possibility of repressed psychic distress by the active formation of an ally born of that anxiety. Lee does this without lingering in the interstitial space between pleasure and pain. Is there a political stratagem here … when sorrow and fear become light and active?