Carol Becker

On her book Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production

Cover Interview of November 10, 2009

The wide angle

The book really does reflect my years of thinking and training as an intellectual—as a public intellectual. Each of the essays evolved in response to a place and then to an opportunity to write and then “give” the essays in a public context. Sometimes I read them as lectures or keynotes many times before the final essay is developed. They are the product of an engaged intellectual life.

I put ideas out into the public arena and get feedback in the form of conversation, public and private dialogues. I then rework the writing. Often the essays were first published in one context—a performance studies journal or art magazine, or a cultural studies publication—and then refined and developed again until they were perfected for the book. They have done their time in a crucible of interaction.

I studied with philosopher Herbert Marcuse when I was a student at University of California, San Diego. So, although I was educated to be a professor of English and American literature, in fact, I became a cultural theorist very much influenced by the work and thinking of the Frankfurt School. I think that orientation is apparent in the way in which I go about understanding the world and also in the inherent optimism of my thinking.

I am also trained as a literary critic who became a writer about art; therefore, so much of what I write about concerns art and artists. I am also deeply an educator—and have spent years teaching and administrating art schools. Watching the new generation of cultural workers in art and design emerge has deeply affected how I think about the cultural arena. I am constantly surrounded by young people who will be the artists of the next decades. This allows me to track the evolution of consciousness through art, culture, and design.

But I am not an art or design historian. In truth, I have invented my own approach to art and culture, with a deep orientation to progressive political thinking. I admire Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Zygmunt Bauman, Rebecca Solnit, and William Blake, all of who express wonderful ideas in fascinating ways. I would feel very fortunate for my writing ever to be associated with theirs.

philosophy / art / literature / education / vietnam / writing / space / frankfurt school / artists / marcuse herbert /

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011