22
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
convincing him to alter previous convictions than they do providing
him a set of beliefs which can command his allegiance for more than
a brief experimental interlude.
Intimately bound up with his flux in emotions and beliefs
is
a
profound inner sense of absurdity, which finds expression in a tone of
mockery. The sense and the tone are related to a perception of sur–
rounding activities and belief as profoundly strange and inappropriate.
They stem from a breakdown in the relationship between inner and
outer worlds - that is, in the sense of symbolic integrity - and are
part of the pattern of psychohistorical dislocation I mentioned earlier.
For if we view man as primarily a symbol-forming organism, we must
recognize that he has constant need of a meaningful inner formula–
tion of self and world in which
his
own actions, and even his im–
pulses, have some kind of "fit" with the "outside" as he perceives it.
The sense of absurdity, of course, has a considerable modem
tradition, and has been discussed by such writers as Camus as a
function of man's spiritual homelessness and inability to find any
meaning in traditional belief systems. But absurdity and mockery have
taken much more extreme form in the post-World War II world,
and have in fact become a prominent part of a universal life style.
In American life, absurdity and mockery are everywhere. Per–
haps their most vivid expression can be found in such areas as Pop
Art and the more general burgeoning of "pop culture." Important
here is the complex stance of the pop artist toward the objects he
depicts. On the one hand he embraces the materials of the everyday
world, celebrates and even exalts them - boldly asserting his creative
return to representational art (in active rebellion against the previous–
ly reigning nonobjective school), and his psychological return to the
"real world" of
things.
On the other hand, everything he touches
he mocks. "Thingness" is pressed to the point of caricature. He is
indeed artistically reborn as he moves freely among the physical and
symbolic materials of his environment, but mockery is his birth cer–
tificate and his passport. This kind of duality of approach
is
for–
malized in the stated "duplicity" of Camp, a poorly-defined aesthetic
in which (among other things) all varieties of mockery converge under
the guiding influence of the homosexual's subversion of a heterosexual
world.
Also relevant are a group of expressions in current slang, some
of them derived originally from jazz. The "dry mock" has replaced
