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4.0
The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
ByPublisher Description
We commonly think of the psychedelic sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround , the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture.
In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture , Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ’50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. Turner tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the most well-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe.
Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today.
In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture , Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ’50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. Turner tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the most well-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe.
Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties Reviews
4.0
“The Democratic Surround centers the question of the democratic ideal as a question of power and communication. The question of what is
“democratic” is in flux; maybe one definition that sticks throughout the whole of the book’s timeline is something like a free-expressive person with the ability to make decisions in opposition to instrumental fascists forms.
During the Cold War the same social scientists who worked WW2 morale campaigns begin to consider questions of international relations and veteran psychology; the idea of democratic, once a counter to wartime fascism, becomes a counter to authoritarianism - it’s used to promote “democratic” values; liberal ideals like tolerance and diversity. Here the book’s focus is on a democratic personality in the sense of liberal western polity; tolerant and egalitarian world citizens.
The strongest arguments in the book pertain to the democratic population communication tools and their morph into liberal managerial-paternalistic tools, problematic especially when combined with the bracketed off political discourse with no real room on the left.
It’s interesting to read about Bauhaus design and Cage’s indeterminacy experiments and their relation to consciousness politics. But equating mass propaganda with mass culture - and equating mass culture with avant-garde artists like John Cage- strikes me as, well not wrong-headed, but rather wide-in scope. If I’m being generous the density of information in the book is itself a surround, a strobelight of reference for the reader to glean a wide network of experiments into democratic-personhood. If I’m being critical, the book reads like a disparate grab bag of expansive expressive art movements and their accidental coincidences with WW2 and Cold War domestic liberal propaganda. And sure, I guess the argument is that this grab bag was the cultural gumbo that mirrored itself in the counterculture. I’m only left wondering is all.
The book is dense enough to return to for more information and wide enough that I’m asking more questions. It’s not a comment on the work itself that I have any criticism for, it’s just a curiosity and hunger for definite answers to indefinite questions.”
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