Word: sennett
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...failures of sexual communication than The Lovers, 1928, with two anonymous (but inescapably similar) heads kissing through their gray cloth integuments. Nor are there many paintings that sum up the pathos of fetishism-the substitution of a symbolic part for the desired whole-more acutely than In Memoriam Mack Sennett, 1936, in which a woman's negligee, hanging on its own in a closet, has developed a forlornly luminous pair of breasts. And for sheer panic, one need go no further than Magritte's Hunters at the Night's Edge, 1928, with its two stocky, armed...
...incident by itself would matter all that much. But the weight of the total may exceed the sum of the parts. It seems to be the old problem of the magnifying effect of the White House. Richard Sennett, who has written an intriguing book on "the fall of public man," would perhaps see the White House problem as part of the larger trouble of a people who no longer believe that their public personalities should be based on what they would like to be rather than what they truly are. We are poorer, says Sennett, because we have abandoned control...
Given the internal contradictions that characterize Public Man, it is not surprising that Sennett unleashes his strongest private vituperative to make a public case against the public outrage that emerged in the '60s from a private violation that had come before. The rise of personality politics, where the only thing that matters is the "image" one projects, and the physical atomization of the city, which gave rise to new urban ghettoes, combined in the `60s to create communities more concerned with establishing their own identities than in realizing practical political goals. The radicals who worked for "community," "sharing," and "participation...
Perhaps it is hitting below the belt to criticize Sennett, an erstwhile `60s reformer himself, for attacking his old private beliefs in his new public position. As he might put it, he is simply behaving as a product of his age who allows his private experience to dominate his public conception. But when in his conclusion Sennett offers as an alternative to `60s communalism a vision of the controlled clash of private interests, and when he presents this vision as a return to the happier days of public man, then it is time to call the emperor naked. Rather than...
TODAY, Sennet writes, "we remain under spell of the Romantic performers' code that art transcends text, but we lack their passion, and a certain innocence with which they took themselves so seriously." Writing The Fall of Public Man, Sennett must have hoped that some of that innocence would return. But his fresh perceptions on fashion and theater are overwhelmed by the inconsistencies of his argument. And Sennett is left a dandy in the most embarrassing position of having nothing...