The Public Discourse

...Alan Weinblatt himself...

...the Muse has bared her flabby bosom like a too-obliging harlot - there is no veiled promise, no mystery, nothing to divine...

...As such, it is in Decter's view regressive or reactionary rather thannary rather than...

...The abiding message of Metaphors of Self is, I think, that before the challenge of a universe in process - a universe of tragic uncertainty and bleak prospect - both aesthetics and poetics are jointly confronted by a new mode of literature whose task is not simply "to discover truth and to present it, but to pursue and to create it, and not to create it outside the pursuit but within it...

...tern, a second, countervailing tendency is also discemable...

...To be sure, every movement worth its salt will be found marching under the banner of progressive goals and speaking the rhetoric of social justice...

...For whenever movements have flourished, so too have small but influential countermovements, made up of intellectuals who have chosen to resist the Zeitgeist and who oppose the most reactionary excesses...

...The effort to create and sustain such uniformity inevitably makes members of movements hostile to freedom, diversity, and civility...

...Intellectuals' politics are volatile because movements are volatile...

...The movement sometimes then begins to grow...

...In doing so, these resisters, whom Peter Steinfels has termed the "counter intellectuals," have seldom made themselves popular...

...Later on, when a movement begins to flourish and approaches the peak of its influence, it is usually the critics who are hopelessly in the minority, at least in the intellectual community, and it is not without reason that they often feel themselves to be voices crying in the wilderness...

...Later still, however, after the movement has died out or been destroyed (usually by its own excesses rather than through the power of its critics), it is again the critics who prevail...

...These goals and that rhetoric are a reality...

...Today we live in an age of movements, and perhaps there is no need to illustrate the foregoing observations...

...Their books are widely read and sighted as models of humane clarity, and their lives are admired for their qualities of courage and prescience, and the once-popular leaders and doctrines of the movement against which they tilted are dismissed without a thought...

...In a movement's nascency, as its ethos is forged and its first leaders appear, the movement is vastly outnumbered, and its voices are drowned out by a critical chorus of dismissal and derision...

...The critics are themselves attacked in turn for creating straw men, for ignoring the diversity of the movement, and for...

...More and more people begin to enlist their sympathy in support of the reformist definition of the problem- and in reaction against the early critics' insensitivity to it...

...It is solidly in the genre of serious criticism...

...At the same time, however, the leaders of the movement become more extreme, and the definition of the problem becomes ever more sweeping...

...It is also in the nature of movements to be, or become, reactionary...

...In their early stages, movements tend to be reformist in character: they identify specific problems and injustices and press for specific redress...

...One of these is George Orwell, who in the 1940s inveighed so lucidly against the totalitarian aspects of Stalinism and whose recent treatment in the review media exemplifies the case of the celebrated critic of the extinct and discredited movement...

...From having been a specific problem with a specific solution, it becomes a problem inherent in the socio-political system that can be solved only by revolution - and from there it may be further redefined as a problem inherent in life as we know it, so that the solution is nothing less than a recreation of man the same vein, "is that it leaves nothing to the imagination...

...This dialectic between movements and critics also has a substantive aspect...

...But for the skeptics, evidence comes to hand in the form of a recent series of reviews of two brilliant critics of modern intellectual movements...

...A movement is not a movement, after all, unless its adherents exhibit ideological uniformity...

...must in itself be ranked a minor masterpiece...

...They often accept a reformist definition of the problem, but vehemently attack its revolutionary and nihilist redefinitions, the spirit of reaction which intends them, and the movement as a whole, which is now defined by them...

...being indifferent to real injustices and problems...

...At any given point in time, the battle between a movement and its critics seems absurdly one-sided...

...But alongside this patThe Public Discourse Movements and Critics Intellectuals are deservedly famous for being steadfast advocates of progressive ideals...

...Eventually, once the movement is dead and gone, the critics are rehabilitated and celebrated for their courageous defense of human values against radical extremism, nihilism, and totalitarianism...

...Such an animus is the very definition of political reaction...

...Thus, the dialectic of movements and their critics...

...What is less widely acknowledged is that they are also the most volatile and reactionary element in modern political society...

...At this stage, the critic tends to adopt the somewhat Philistine stance of pooh-poohing the notion that there is a serious problem or thai anything should be done about it...

...And in his re-creation, the reader, in effect, becomes the pursuit, the pondering, the process, the poem...

...Periodically, the modern world has been disrupted by movements of this paradoxical variety, and the intellectual community has usually enlisted itself enthusiastically for the duration, with all the predictable, disastrous results for standards of discourse for the intellectual life of the whole...

...Indeed, Metaphors of Self is really a prolegomenon to that vaster undertaking which is yet to be written and impossible to write: an account of the poetics of process or history of the human imagination - that basic (perhaps tragic) human impulse to frame metaphors (be they poetic flights of "as if" or ponderous tomes of systematic philosophy) as a way of probing the mystery around us, as a means, in the words of Paul Weiss, of securing a "static image" or "temporarily arrested sample" or an "ongoing dynamic process...

...The other is Midge Dector, author of The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Wotnens Liberation, whose notices conform precisely to the pattern postulated for the critic of the movement at the height of its influence and zeal...

...Midge Dectes book is quite simply one of the very best works of social and political criticism to be published in this country in the past dozen years...

...But they have undeniably leaned against the winds of fashionable reaction...

...At this point, a new set of critics enter...

...and in the process they have produced some of the most brilliant social criticism and many of the most luminous and enduring defenses of humane values to be found in western literature...

...They discover that their writings, when not disregarded altogether, are received as ill-tempered, ill-informed, simplistic potboilers reflecting only irrational hostility, and unaccountable perversity or some kind of self-interest...

...The book's brilliance lies in the seriousness and sobriety with which it is written, and the complexity and care of Decter's exegesis of women's liberation doctrine, and above all in the extraordinary lucidity and comprehensiveness of the understanding she conveys...

...Midge Decter argues that, as the movement's leaders have defined their cause, women's liberation in its current form represents a desire to escape from freedom, opportunity, maturity, and biology...

...It is a single long essay whose purpose is to locate, through textual analysis, the essential position of women's liberation as expressed by the movement's leaders and ideologists...

...A movement is characterized by the absence of structure, formal leadership, or settled goals, and this makes it inherently subject to rapid shifts and changes, especially in a radical direction...

...This is so for the obvious but often neglected reason that the usual vehicle for the intellectual's pursuit of his progressive ideology is not the party or the interest group, but the oppositional political movement...

...they have made their voices heard...

...Certainly the above phenomena are within the recent experience of us all...

...It is not, contrary to jome reviewers' implication, a polemic...

...But a second and coequal reality is that, regardless of its goals, a movement is a movement, and as such possesses an animus against freedom, diversity, civility, reason, honesty, and maturity...

...As the vanguard becomes more extreme, it does not reject the earlier "reformist" elements of its case, since these remain an effective means of drawing people to the movement...