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from Inversions : a study of warped consciousness, by Burt Alpert

from the book:

The Work of the Intellectual in an Era of Total Commitment

Whatever the inconveniences and horrors of his previous existence may have been, the feeling is general that the personal and social life of man is now fast entering a critical state: a massive social psychosis appears to be weaving its way into the fabric of people's lives, leaving no one exempt.

A Strategy of Work

While everything seems to have failed, there is oddly enough one major opportunity for change that has scarcely been utilized: work. In spite of the fact that people spend the greater part of their most vital hours at work, no serious effort has been made at resolving the rpoblems of lonliness and deprivation of self by altering the conditions of people's employment.

"We cannot create a Left by abdicating our roles as intellectuals." C. Wright Mills said. "to become working calss agitators or machine politicians, or by play-acting at any other direct political action. We can begin to create a Left by confronting issues as intellectuals in our own work." Neither ignoring his work nor renouncing it, the intellectual, like other workers, can endeavor to make his work his own.

Our work, our own work, the way in which we relate productively to each other and to the world around us, whether within an institution or through the craftsmanship of a commune, is the central experience of our lives. The era of total commitment derives it totalistic character from the fact that we have passed beyond the posibillity of divorcing our play, our missions or our politics from this central experience. The most effective and potentially gratifying occasion for total commitment would seem to be in the work we do. Where it's at is where we're at.

"Only by a craftsmanlike style of life," Mills wrote in 1954, "can the split domains of work and leisure become unified." For the intellectual craftsman, Mills held, this style is to be discovered in an everyday "politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality...to find out as much of the truth as he can....This is the role of the mind, of intellect, of reason, of ideas: to define reality adequately and in a publicly relevant way."

By developing a strategy in his work, Mills suggested, the intellectual may be able to generate a relevancy in his life and a degree of satisfaction that neither politics, nor armed struggle nor psychotherapy has been able to provide. The acceptance of a commitment to struggle within the context of one's work would make heroism obsolete and self-immoation inappropriate. The transformation of work in a meaningful and gratifying fasion, through which man might learn to affirm his entire being, drawing together his play-self and his work-self, would have to be a matter not of instant heroics, but of everyday artistry. Being consciously involved in a permanent interchange with reality, the individual is relieved of the obligation, that he might otherwise have felt, to compress his efforts in a few moments of explosive protest. By approaching his work in a revolutionary fasion the intellectual may well learn that total commitment is the antithesis of heroism and sacrifice.

If indeed this is the case, if somehow the intellectual should be able to convert his worklife into a true occasion for making contact with the personal and social revolution that has eluded us elsewhere, is is hard to concieve of any way he can do this other than by consciously interposing himself within the system as guerilla.

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