Horrible Workers: Max Stirner, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Johnson, and the Charles Manson Circle [Paperback]

Donald A. Nielsen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0739112007 | ISBN-13: 978-0739112007 | Publication Date: June 17, 2005

The poet makes himself a seer by a long, boundless, and systematic derangement of all the senses_. What if he is destroyed in his flight through things unheard of and unnamed: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the other has fallen. In Arthur Rimbaud's letter to Paul Demeny Rimbaud describes the poet's role as being something like a trickster. But the poet's trick, or joke, is self-directed. A long dissociation of the senses from reality creates, for the poet, a new relationship to reality. But the poet's work with reality is always something like a play at what is real. Play becomes necessary so that the poet doesn't just change his or her relationship to reality but, in playing, creates a space for poetics; a space for work. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud, American blues musician Robert Johnson, German anarchist intellectual Max Stirner, and the phenomena of the Manson family circle have all appeared as forms and figures on the invisible horizon described by Rimbaud above. Through a reading of EmilZ Durkheim's Suicide Donald Nielsen demonstrates how, in each case, one can locate hitherto unnoticed similarities in the social experiences of each subject featured in these four cases. Nielsen demonstrates how social experience can lead to forms of cultural expression that are contrary to the logic of the originating experience. In his discussion of experience and expression Nielsen creates a truly unique text that sheds new light on sociological theory, modernism and modernist thought, ethics and religious thought, and new and burgeoning methodologies in cultural studies. Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers of the social sciences, and adherents to cultural studies will find much of interest in Nielsen's excellent study.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a fascinating little book that deals with characters usually regarded as marginal to or at the margins of Western culture and society. (Culture and Religion, January 2009 )

In reworking the famous categories that Durkheim developed in Suicide, Nielsen offers a fascinating and thoroughly engaging account of the moral careers of four figures who on the surface appear to share little in common: Max Stirner, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Johnson, and Charles Manson. By emphasizing the dialectical interplay of categories and foregrounding the generally neglected concept of fatalism, he offers readers an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated comparative account of the culturally grounded vocations of these "horrible workers." (Peter Kivisto )

About the Author

Donald A. Nielsen is currently working as an independent scholar and writing a book on the concept of experience as a key idea in social theory.

Product Details

• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: Lexington Books (June 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739112007
• ISBN-13: 978-0739112007
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,954,565 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Portrait of the Normal World, May 23, 2007

By 

Richard F. Voorhees "Instructor of Sociology ... (Inver Hills Community College, Inver Grove Heights, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Horrible Workers: Max Stirner, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Johnson, and the Charles Manson Circle (Paperback)

Emile Durkheim asserted that a crime free society is impossible. Crime alerts people to structural dangers within the normal world that require attention. For this crime is essential. The sociological category "deviance" has become a moral category including both crime and creativity. We are led astray and miss both the warnings and the solutions. Nielsen begins his account of tensions within the taken for granted world with this: "Anomic suicide and progress, egoistic suicide and autonomy, altruistic suicide and moral self-transcendence, fatalistic suicide and order: these are four pairs of virtues and vices, inextricably wedded to one another.(p. 3)" Nielsen develops the notion of fatalistic suicide, which takes on a pivotal role, from Durkheim's footnote. The voices of many including Erving Goffman, David Riesman, Max Weber and Johan Huizinga are brought to bear on the dynamics of our everyday world. Nielsen finds an essential tension in this world. On the one hand society becomes structurally and morally rigid. In his discussion of Stirner he observes that "The main aim is to make oneself 'audible.'"(p. 22) On the other hand people are in constant movement, what Nielsen refers to as "vagabondage." In the Rimbaud chapter there is this comment: "Nomadism, vagabondage and adventurism are some of the central expressions of our contemporary anomism."(p. 42) He demonstrates the historic roots of both tendencies. Nielsen finds Durkheim's four categories interacting at the center of the society. He comments that ". . .all express the restless movement which has become a common feature of life for everyone in advanced industrial society. . ."(p. 99).