Format and Anxiety: Paul Goodman Critiques the Media (Autonomedia Book Series)

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 crisis”—by 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 concerns—education, 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 Goodman’s attitudes toward TV, cinema, popular culture, censorship, and the universe of discourse in which these phenomena exist