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65 CHAPTER FIVE Counterconsumerism This might be a good time to review the principal steps of my reasoning so far. That argument was broached by the question of whether my declared culture of modernism, combining elements of traditional Western high culture with some of the countercultural energies I experienced in the seventies, has any importance for education today. To substantiate my intuition that it has, I began by theoretically demarcating a particular part of our education. Existential learning names the project of responding to the realization we exist by learning how we should live with that condition, rather than denying or neglecting it. I develop my idea of this learning out of a critical examination of Oakeshott’s related conception of liberal learning. Oakeshott explains that to be human is to be free to understand oneself; this freedom, however, as Sartre points out, actually puts the possibility of self-understanding seriously in question. In order to save Oakeshott’s conception, I try to revise it such that it is grounded on existence. This condition of ourselves and the world is for us essentially and irreducibly questionable; therefore, when we experience this questionableness, we are challenged to learn how we should live subject to it, to learn what would be a good way for us to exist. This challenge motivates us to develop a pedagogy suitable for cultivating this learning. What kind of cultural works can aid us in recognizing how a variety of experiences lead to the experience of existence, and in responding satisfyingly to that experience in a variety of practical ways? The reason the modernist tradition is educationally important, I claim, is that it gives us guidelines for identifying one fount of such works. The idea of modernism I take up is that of Greenberg’s, which distinguishes modernist from traditional artworks by the former’s stress on the artistic medium. The burden is thus on me to explain how this mediumism theoretically conduces to existential learning. I find help in this task in work of two of Greenberg’s leading acolytes, Clark and Fried. Clark acknowledges the importance of Greenberg’s stress on medium, but contends that what this ends up expressing is political opposition. I concur with this interpretation of modernism as fundamentally negational, but deepen it by likening it to Sartre’s account of the medium 66 Mediumism of consciousness as nihilating. That modernist, mediumist works represent how our consciousness restlessly nihilates its objects, I argue, means that they capture how we are essentially strangers to questionable existence: they represent our strangerhood. They thus link the rich diversity of experiences registered in their mediums to the central experience of existence registered by the distinct fact of medium. If that were the end of the story, though, this existential learning, while showing how many, perhaps all roads lead to Rome, would leave us with no idea about how to do as the Romans, how to respond constructively to our strangerhood. This is why I next turn to Fried who takes issue with Clark; he tries to establish modernism’s affirmational nature by contrasting the aesthetic quality of its works with the nihilistic objecthood of literalist work. I, however, discern in the latter an affirmation too, that of the medium’s materiality, of the Present. Fried discloses, albeit unintentionally, that the modernist stress on medium can represent both who we are in the face of existence, our strangerhood, and what would be a good way for us to respond to this condition, presentmindedness. The key insights of his and Clark’s accounts may thus be pursued into an argument that finally reconciles them and explains their pedagogical value. Part of this reconciliation, I should add, involves a relaxation of the oppositions between representation, abstraction, and literalization. Mediumism employs all three of these modes of art and does not deny itself in the name of some notion of purity. It puts us in touch with familiar experiences of the changing world by representing them. It connects these experiences to that of existence by abstractly estranging us from them. And it finds in the experience of existence an opening to the Present by revealing that abstraction switches ambiguously into literal materialization. The culture to which I understand myself belonging, then, is that formed by a conversation that examines various mediumist works for lessons in existential learning. I want to imagine this conversation taking place not only inside schools and other institutions of formal education but also throughout...

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