More Harold Rosenberg

and the examined tote bag

I have another short essay on Harold Rosenberg out, following up on my longer one for Justin Smith and thinking particularly about the paradoxes of the summons posed by his essay “The Herd of Independent Minds” to think for ourselves. It also gives me a chance to make fun of The Point’s merch!

Everyone wants to be a free thinker, or at least to be seen by others as thinking freely. Sometimes we imagine even our most embarrassing acts of conformism as daring ventures of freedom.

The terms we use to express this delusion vary depending on political persuasion. In the United States, progressives can see themselves as dissenting members of a “resistance” to Trump, while centrists oppose both the President and woke shibboleths by holding “heterodox” views. Rightward, those in Trumpworld denounce opponents as automata. Witness tech billionaire Sam Altman bending the knee to Trump on X, where he apologised for his earlier opposition to the President: “i wish i had done more of my own thinking and definitely fell in the npc trap.”

Thinking for oneself is perhaps most difficult among communities — Left, Right, and centre — that celebrate ostensible dissent…

As he developed his interpretation of abstract painting as the visual equivalent of existentialism, Rosenberg became increasingly sceptical of the intellectuals closest to him. His sharpest essay in this vein, “The Herd of Independent Minds”, appeared in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1948. As his biographer Debra Bricker Balken observes, he had intended to publish it in the Partisan Review, possibly hoping to offend his former friends at the magazine.

Thinkers associated with that era’s little magazines — the distant ancestors of n+1 on the Left and The Point or Liberties in the centre today — wrote as if they were separate from American mass culture. But they were, he warned, only members of a subcultural bubble with its own clichés and jargon (these days, every little magazine seems to have its own merchandise as well), part of a “mass culture of small groups”.

I guess that the thing idiosyncratic liberal (or whatever I am) intellectuals ought to be least of all doing is firing thusly on other members of their small groups—surely we should be instead rallying with all others to the defense of our always still more ailing collective freedoms…. Well, I promise I’ll get around to rallying once I’ve finished clearing up what Rosenberg and Arendt and Denneny were up to with their turn to aesthetics. Then, surely, liberalism can be saved!