"It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process"
About this Quote
His intent isn’t anti-reflection. He admits there are “good things” in self-consciousness: ethics, consent, sensitivity, the ability to question power. The sting comes in the turn toward “terrible things,” where self-awareness becomes self-management. In that mode, culture stops being something you enter and starts being something you optimize. You don’t surrender to a ritual, a crowd, a song, a moment; you assess it in real time, worried about looking naive, being cringe, missing the meta. Participation gets replaced by commentary.
The phrase “give ourselves to the cultural process” is doing heavy lifting. It frames culture as process, not product: messy, collective, improvisational, and therefore incompatible with a society trained to brand the self. Harvey’s subtext is that the contemporary individual is overdeveloped as a critic and underdeveloped as a participant. His broader context (as a celebrity-founder of a countercultural event) matters: he’s defending environments where identity can be temporarily unmonetized, where presence outruns posture. In a world built on constant self-auditing, he argues that the radical act is letting the moment take you.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Harvey, Larry. (2026, January 16). It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-avoids-a-self-conscious-relationship-to-the-133795/
Chicago Style
Harvey, Larry. "It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-avoids-a-self-conscious-relationship-to-the-133795/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-avoids-a-self-conscious-relationship-to-the-133795/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.
