Omar Swartz

 

Interview with Omar Swartz and Jack Wittbold on Kerouac, Beat Culture and Photography
April 2005

JW: In your essay, Exploring the Beat Attitude: Kerouac's Cultural Rhetoric, you assert "My generation came of age when the rest of the nation, giddy with the patriotism and militarism of Ronald Reagan, was busy silencing that part of themselves that questioned, searched, and resisted in the not-so-distant past" (Swartz, 2001). Given the present social climate, do you feel that this claim also applies to today's culture and attitude?

OS: Yes, unfortunately, although there was a hint prior to the 2004 Presidential election that things were going to change, that the conservative forces of this society went too far, that religious extremism had overextended itself, that a day was imminent in which people would again take to the streets as they have done in decades past to create a new and healthy public culture and start facing squarely the apathy and evils that continue to threaten life on this planet. If we could do this, as American citizens I mean, it would make a big difference, as the United States is colossally influential throughout the world (even, I would say, in some cases, detrimental). The human race lost an important opportunity to mature when the U.S. re-elected George W. Bush.

Although it would have symbolically been a great victory if John Kerry had been elected, I do not think it would have made much of a real difference. It is not about one individual (Kerry, for instance, was not against the war in Iraq). So it was not just the opportunity to defeat Bush that mattered, but the opportunity, largely lost, to counter Bush and the vision he represents. For this, John Kerry was irrelevant.

This is the same vision that I eluded to with my reference to Ronald Reagan. Reagan is the one who, in a sense, started the mess, although it is, of course, larger than him. But he is an icon. Reagan did set an agenda that was both consequential and tragic. Bush benefits from that vision. Therefore, we need to both defeat Bush and defeat the part of our nation that finds the world vision of Bush respectable. It is a pretty dismal vision, after all. In order to do this, we have to turn off the television, collectively speaking, reject mass culture, and reread the visionaries of the past who offer us not the way, but, rather, the ability to recognize that potential we have to create new ways. I celebrate Kerouac because he was one such visionary. He is not the only visionary, however, but one in a line of people, people such as Camus, Marx, Nietzsche, Rorty, and Sartre who served as a flash of brilliance to illuminate the cultural darkness for just long enough for sensitive people to see how naked and afraid we all are and that we can clothe our bodies and sooth our fears through new self-descriptions. Here is where art and politics unite. To defeat Bush we have to laugh him out of power.

JW: Much in this country and the world at large has changed since the publication of this essay and your address at the 6th Annual Beat Attitudes Conference in 2001. Without sounding too pessimistic, I feel that as a country and culture we've actually regressed due to socially conservative policy, blind patriotism and general ignorance. I feel that some of my concerns are mirrored in your essay when you refer to the "…crass and selfish conservatism that marks much of our current cultural identity as a nation" (Swartz, 2001). In attempt to remedy this you propose to "using Kerouac's vision as an example…to help construct alternative ways of 'knowing' and 'being' (Swartz, 2001). Considering the current trends politically and socially, do you feel this is still a viable means of change and at this point is this country even capable of such a radical change in thinking? How has your thinking/perspective changed, if at all, since the writing of this essay?

OS: This is a very good question, actually, and it addresses the laughter issue with which I ended my answer to your previous question. I don't laugh enough, especially these days. I, too, wax pessimistic. More unfortunately, in my weak moments I internalize this pessimism. Intellectually, that is not wrong, I think it is a normal response to conditions today. I agree with you that things look bad, that they are bad and that there is nothing to suggest that they inherently have to get better, that they will get better on their own. Things don't work that way in human history. Things get better when we make them better. And we have in the past made things better. That's what makes me most proud of my species--when we get our act together and demand a living wage, equal rights, civil rights, etc. We have lost many of these things in recent years. Things have regressed. But that is not the end of our analysis; rather, it is the beginning. Over a hundred and thirty years ago Nietzsche dealt with this issue directly, although people do not appreciate that. Great minds such as Nietzsche, Marx, and many others have gone over this terrain in the past. Nothing changes. The same human issues reoccur. Because we demonize these thinkers, we have to reinvent ourselves all over every time we decide that we have to kick ourselves in the behind and get on with the business of changing the world. Kerouac would be another thinker here. We tend to ignore these thinkers and take a perverse pride in thinking that the problems of our generation or our specific problems! With my book on Kerouac, I tried to make an argument for reminding us that in his work we can find resources for our own struggles.

If you read Nietzsche you'll see that he views pessimism as decadence, as the condition where one has given up power to alter one's world and has fatalistically accepted this world as the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist is the person who wills nothing because he/she does not feel the power to will his or her will creatively. Most people on the political and cultural left are not this way. Or, if you prefer, most progressive people do not feel this way. So while I have not yet been able to teach laughter (I admit), I do make a point to teach my students hope. I do not position this hope as "radical change" but as down-to-earth edification. Once we understand that we have the power to author our own lives, once we realize that the status quo reifies "garbage" and calls it Truth because garbage is all we expect, we can live in a different world.

This is not a radical change in the sense that we are only discussing surface phenomenon--things like cultural style and ethical/moral commitments. When we assume that there is nothing "deep" to human beings that we can appeal to through language or faith it is not as difficult to change as we think, although it does requires an increased sharing of resources and a willingness to enact enlightenment and humanistic values.

JW: I've recently begun to think of photography as a rhetorical device. Given its inherently representational nature, it allows the photographer to show the viewer something they already "know" while potentially (hopefully) raising many more questions. As our culture becomes increasingly image driven, with the inundation and bombardment of images, the callousness towards the image also grows. Because of this do you think the medium loses impact upon the general population?

OS: One of the things that I teach in my courses has to do with the rise of an "image culture." There was a book published about five years ago called something like "the demise of the word and the rise of the image". My T.A. at the time was trying to get me to read it, but I didn't want to because the point of the book, and the point of my T.A. in getting me to read this book, was that we are making such a change and that, for better or for worse, we need to deal with it. The author of the book thought the change was good. My T.A. thought it was inevitable. I, on the other hand, am really fearful of this cultural shift, and view the mass media, particularly television, as colossally detrimental to human culture. My T.A. was reacting to my practices as a parent in which my wife and I live our lives television and movie free and are raising our young son in such an environment. My T.A. thought this would actually hurt my son, making him dysfunctional in terms of his peers who would be "visually literate." I agree that visual literacy is important, which is why I teach a course in persuasion that has over 1,000 images which I interrogate with my students. Yet I do not think one has to be immersed in the mass media to develop the ability to be critical of the mass media. That skill comes from reading and from abstaining from the mass media. Since I abstain from the media, I literally cannot watch it. It hurts my eyes, makes me nauseas, and I regret the loss of time I spent which I could have been doing anything else. Not only that, but the images themselves hurt me, they get in my head, and my thoughts become someone else's. So I keep the mass media from my child and, instead, bring home many books which I pick up at thrift stores--he literally has read hundreds of books already and he is only six and a half. And these are substantive books, not Disney garbage and the like. Last evening, I invited my graduate students over to my house for dinner, and they remarked how surprised they were when they saw that my son had just finished reading the Iliad. Raised this way, I think my son can deal with the visual clutter of the environment and will probably be a stronger person than his peers because he will have a much better command of traditional rationality, argument, the use of evidence, and all the wonderful intellectual things that come with literacy, such as a philosophical and a historical consciousness.

JW: As an expert on rhetoric, what sort of potential do you think the photographic medium has as a rhetoric device? What do you think are its limitations?

OS: Once again, I really do believe that once we leave literacy behind and adopt a more visual culture--the more that public culture and, ultimately, civilization suffers. A good discussion of this point can be found in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. In general, all the good things that have made us who were are as a civilization--the Enlightenment, deliberative democracy, secularism, the explosion of literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, science, etc., is the result of literacy. During the labor movements in Europe and America during this time, for example, it was the newspapers that brought people together to discuss politics and political theory. As part of this ethos, particularly as we got into the 20th century, photojournalism became an important impetus for change. This was the golden age of investigative reporting as well, when the press could be counted on to do their job and criticize power. Photojournalism, as well as journalism in general, now has lost much of its integrity. A several months ago they had an exhibit at the Colorado History museum of the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs. I took my son to see it. He had just turned six. As we walked through the exhibit, we were able to stop at each picture and I was able to use each image as a heuristic device to discuss the issues of the 20th century, issues we have already been talking about for some time. We started with the oldest photographs and worked our way to the most recent. This was a very rich experience, as the photos where such a part of public culture and had served as witness, teacher, moralist, etc., for our society for so long, that these pictures were like windows to our collective soul--a soul that invited engagement. No matter how gruesome was the picture--in some cases they were quite intense--they were meaningful for me and my son on a level rich in human experience. Because of this, the pictures were not frightening at all for my son. They were like facing truth and thus embodied a profound beauty. "This is war," I told my son, "this is racism," etc. This is who we were, who we in some sense are, this is what we are against!

But the pictures, I felt, lost intensity, during the last decade or two, as if the events documented--it was no longer ideas being documented--were less challenging to the viewer, more empty of truth and beauty. I don't know, but I have always had a feeling that the world has gotten a lot less interesting, a lot more inauthentic, in recent decades, more reified, stultified, and images that we see these days are part of that reification as opposed to a challenging of who we are and what we believe. So yes, I think that photography can be transformative, but it probably cannot do it alone. Probably no art can do it alone. There has to be some human potential first for art to ignite. An audience has to arrive made of fuel and desire.

During the last couple of years I have been reading heavily Nietzsche and I'm rereading Thus Spoke Zarathustra right now for the fifth time and teaching it to my class. One of the images that I find most relevant to our conversation in this interview is the part, early in the book, where Zarathustra warns that while humans still have the burning in us, the potential to create beyond ourselves, that power is atrophying. Zarathustra, and Nietzsche in general, can visualize a time in which human beings will no longer be able to challenge ourselves. I think we tried in the 20th century, but we failed to change much, and now there is a sense in which we no longer trust our willing and thus will nothingness. The increase in religion and republicanism in the United States are, I think, symptomatic of this trend. The time is long overdue for a Kerouac-like vision to grow and to spread across the nation and the world. It would be tragic if the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s constituted the end of America's moral growth as opposed to its beginning.

JW: To go back to your essay once again, you claim "Kerouac's point was that culturally, socially, and politically, our country is underachieving, that it is up to the artists, poets, and other visionaries to help make America live up to its potential" (Swartz, 2001). I thoroughly agree with this and find it particularly relative in regards to today's society. It seems so much these days simply perpetuates mediocrity. Everything is commoditized, packaged, re-packaged, pre-digested and sold ten times over. In your opinion is there any way to combat this bourgeois capitalism?

OS: There are several inspirational literatures that suggest avenues for this, and I'll talk about them both briefly. The first, of course, comes from the Marxist and critical theory traditions of philosophy and cultural studies--discussions of authenticity, false consciousness, fetishism, alienation, and related concepts come from this tradition. It seems that, early in the twenty-first century, that these concepts have largely played themselves out. The second comes from Nietzsche's writing which emphasizes a hierarchy in taste and resigns the vast majority of human beings to pettiness. In critical theory everyone has the potential to be edified, although that is clearly utopian, and with Nietzsche, most of us are sort of written off, and so Nietzsche, while probably the most stimulating thinker I have ever read, has his limitations for practical political work. Rorty, however, synthesizes these two positions well. Rorty is a philosopher who gave up philosophy and has embraced literary criticism as an important reservoir for forming arguments of human meaning. I'm quite sympathetic with his view, taking, as he does, "literature" in its widest possible sense. Thus, I think we come back to Kerouac and the Beats. And that is, it is crucial to develop a new literature, a new vision, a new movement toward authenticity. If it was not clear in my article and in my book, I find value in Kerouac and in the Beats for what they suggest about our future--the ability to envision something different for human society. In this sense, they are like Nietzsche and Marx. They had the strength as well as the cultural happenstance available for them to articulate a new vocabulary. We need to be cheered on by their work and try to try to come up with something new for ourselves and for the liberal democratic society in which we live.

JW: I like your idea that generations are "ideologically constructed". I feel a special connection to the Beat generation and therefore claim membership or perhaps it has claimed me. My final question is this: Do you think our society/country is due for another sort of generational movement? If so, muse on how that might manifest itself and what that means in regards to our current 'reality'.

OS: I like what you wrote just now about membership in the Beat generation "claiming" you. I think that is how it works, actually, that we really don't have as much choice in the matter as we like to think. When Nietzsche talks about this type of phenomenon he uses the metaphor of a bird which chooses to make a nest in a person's tree. This is virtue, he says. Mine is different than yours and because it picks us, we love it.

When I was in high school in Los Angeles in the early to mid-1980s I had two best friends. One was a transplanted New Yorker named Matthew and the second was a half Chinese half Portuguese guy named Andrew, whose family owned a Chinese restaurant. We used to stay up all night in each other's houses reading Taoist and Beat poetry (and writing our own) dreaming of the day we would be the vanguard of a new literary revolution. It's still a thought I cherish. I became a professor because I always wanted to be a writer and my poetry and short stories were never any good. So I treat my scholarship as a form of artistic, poetic, and political expression, even though, and here is my point, it causes me a great deal of pain. I remember talking with Andrew one evening--we were both moody types of teenagers--and we were reading together in his room when we both stopped suddenly and looked at each other and realized that what we were doing, the path we were "choosing," was going to be the source of much mental anguish for us. And it has. We simply acknowledged that point and went back to reading. We are who we are. My virtue lies in my passion for social justice, my rejection of the crap that passes for culture. In my writing and in my teaching I try to create space for a new social movement, try to show how impermanent, contingent, and problematic our are current believes and practices. And I watch my students carefully. Most could not care less what I have to say. But some do. And when these students one day get up and walk out of class to stage protests on the campus, shutting down the campus as they did in the 1960s, I'll be with them to add what I hope is a bit of wisdom to supplement their vitality. We can be wise and transformative at the same time.

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