Format & Anxiety: Paul Goodman Critiques the Media

by Paul Goodman, Taylor Stoehr (Editor)

Paul Goodman, anarchist critic and author of Growing Up Absurd and Communitas, never wrote a book devoted exclusively to media. Yet he thought the condition of popular arts and news services in America so desperate that by 1964 he was calling it a constitutional crisisby which he meant that our democracy could no longer claim to be based in the public mores or have its justification in the public good, because of the usurpation of every forum by centralized media overseers. Inevitably, then, most of his books raised fundamental questions about the political and cultural effects of the media while addressing his primary concernseducation, psychotherapy, language theory, literary criticism, community planning, and his decentralist program for the New Left. In Format & Anxiety, Taylor Stoehr has assembled a full and coherent view of Goodmans attitudes toward TV, cinema, popular culture, censorship, and the universe of discourse in which these phenomena exist

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream, antiestablishment cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.

Reviews

[Jesse Cohn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of the good stuff was previously published elsewhere; the newly-collected pieces were mainly missable.