Word: skinnerism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...making is a relatively modest one--there is no room for "dreamers," nature freaks, or ideologists in Twin Oaks. The 40 community members face up to "responsibility," embrace technology and efficiency, and pursue their dreams and pleasures privately. But Kinkade spices this somewhat bland concoction with bits of B.F. Skinner. What we are really trying to do, she says, is create a community following the instructions set down in Walden Two: first, shape the individual's desires and behavior by use of controlled reinforcements (that is, utilize reward and punishment) in order to create the ideal man: "productive, openminded, noncompetitive...
...there are a great many philosophical points of similarity between Walden Two and Twin Oaks. Skinner says "the Good Life means relaxation and rest"; at Twin Oaks, the prime aim is to finish one's work in four hours or less, so as to have "more time for swimming, listening to music, making love, or doing yoga." In both societies, the family occupies an ambiguous position: monogamous marriage is perfectly acceptable, but so is adultery; children in any event are kept out of the way. (In fact, no children are as yet allowed in Twin Oaks, five years after...
These seemingly diffuse attitudes find their unity in bourgeois fantasy life, which is perhaps the point. Skinner is in many ways a bourgeois moralist. The excitement of Kinkade and her friends upon reading about Walden Two (it was "everything I had ever wanted," she gushes) can best be understood by viewing it as a garden of forbidden delights, but in which the institutions whose repressions create the fantasy remain intact. One can go about pleasing the senses only after he has felt the satisfaction of work well done. The titillations of adultery and free sex induce a dizziness curable...
This underlying system of attitudes is more manifestly at work in the Twin Oaks community than in Walden Two, because the former lacks much of the scientistic veneer which cloaks these attitudes in Skinner's work. Behaviorism is, in this context, a vehicle by which Skinner advances the prejudices of an age in the imposing guise of "objective understanding...
...itself, a status drilled into the world audience by decades of institutional art-worship. No matter how nugatory an event or object seems, it is nevertheless special, being art. And within this protective box, the conceptual artist-as Sculptor Robert Smithson acerbically put it-disports himself "like a B.F. Skinner rat doing his 'tough' little tricks...