LIBERALISM WITHOUT THE IMAGINATION: REMARKS ON POLITICS AND CULTURE

...The notion that modernism is somehow responsible for Timothy Leary, Happenings, and the trashing of ROTC offices yields this version of the history of ideas in The Truants: "As the pursuit of novelty went on, the restraining barriers of taste became less and less visible...

...By late 1937, when Partisan Review broke away from its association with the New York John Reed Club and what the editors called "the senseless disciplines of the official [Communist] left," most of its contributors thought modernism a thing of the past...

...Some people are angry at what seems to them the desecration of a fine work of art...

...In the '20s and '30s, readers here and in England were perhaps puzzled by the curious blend of modernist aesthetics and Anglican controversialism featured by T. S. Eliot's Criterion —so at times, no doubt, was Eliot—but they tended to assume that it was meant to add up, if only under the aspect of eternity, to a coherent social vision...

...Trilling's last, unfinished essay proposes a reading of Jane Austen's novels using the methods of an anthropologist...

...formally intricate, tending to derogate the importance of the content of art in favor of its purely aesthetic achievements...

...For most of our century, this problem was one that many writers and editors thought it natural to confront and important to solve, and the history of 20th-century intellectual journalism offers a kind of anthology of the ways in which artistic expression can be recruited into the service of social thought...

...Once there, they look, touch, lean, nestle, sit...

...What has happened to the idea of a high culture united to an enlightened and progressive politics...

...but in most cases, the bottom is not a very long way down—in most cases, it's probably only a difference of political opinion...

...But Berman is suspicious of these claims for high culture: he wants art, but not Art...

...The old idea of art as something that will stand still long enough for you to attach a set of moral or social values to has clearly been subject to a lot of pressure in the past 20 years or so...

...The case of the most identifiably liberal of the three is the least equivocal...

...This paradox is observed frequently enough to seem a very old story...

...The hope of The Liberal Imagination (1950)—with its confidence that literature as "the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty," has something to teach liberal politics —is answered by the suspicion of Beyond Culture (1965) that art—especially but not exclusively modern art—"does not always tell the truth or the best kind of truth and does not always point out the right way, that it can even generate falsehood and habituate us to it...

...he subscribed to this idea of modernism as an authorization for experimentalism in art and thus was an ally of radicalism in politics, and it therefore follows for him that responsibility for all the follies of the avantgarde is to be laid at modernism's door...

...If Barrett is repentant, Berman is unreconstructed: his inspiration is the young Marx, and The Communist Manifesto becomes, in his scheme, along with Goethe's Faust, Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman," and Dostoevsky's The Underground Man, one of the sacred texts of modern literature...

...This reading of literary modernism as a sanctioning body for a perpetual avant-gardism is, I think, fundamentally inaccurate, but it helps to explain Barrett's neoconservative position on modernism...

...in addition, the lower facades have turned into something of a kiosk, decked with innumerable pleasant and unpleasant signs of the times...

...359...

...But when one looks back at the history of 20th-century efforts to yoke culture and politics to the same ideological cart, one is apt to feel that the results have not usually been happy...

...Berman's prescription is neither for the realist tradition endorsed by Lukacs nor for the kind of engaged literary enterprise that for Wilson was personified by the work of Shaw...

...But when we see the resurrection of Leavisite principles in a forum for the same kind of beware-the-dog thinking such as The New Criterion, we have to wonder whether the regressive social policies promoted by Scrutiny were not after all inseparable from its critical posture...

...The magazine's real commitment, the essential ingredient of its cultural politics, was to the spirit of the avantgarde in literature and the arts, which it sought to rescue from the critical repressiveness of party-line Marxism...

...Taken together, these books spell out an interesting fact: modernist culture, which for years served with equal willingness both the regressive politics of the New Critics and such liberal-left enterprises as Partisan Review, is today a culture that, from a political point of view, no one seems to know quite what to do with...

...The lesson of these critical careers is in fact the lesson of Barrett and Berman: if you maintain your moral and political standards for art, you will find yourself continually narrowing the range of art you can admire and take an interest in...

...One is even apt to feel that it was frequently not the politics but the art that made the trouble...

...This is the sort of thing the reader must sometimes endure: in the middle of a very brief explanation of the theory of color-field abstraction—"Art wearied, reader, of all this cerebration...

...Those intellectuals today who retain, from their memories of earlier political alignments, some sense of what a socially desirable art ought to look like find themselves in somewhat the same position: can you build a social philosophy on what you find in postmodernist fiction or photorealist painting or, for that matter, New Wave rock...

...As a prescription for contemporary art, this is, I think, an honest recommendation—though I find it, like many of Berman's critical discussions, more wishful than analytics—and its insistence that the artist grant the modern 357 world some degree of acceptance is attractive...

...The animating idea of 20th-century modernism had been, after all, the idea of tradition: art was understood to be the repository of the society's values, and modernism's promise for many readers during the first half of this century was to make art and literature the forums for the arbitration of human values in a world that was rapidly being overrun by the inhuman —by technological blight, monopoly capitalism, faceless bureaucracy...

...Berman's critical benevolence is appealing, but I think he has misread his cultural signifiers here...

...Edmund Wilson used to complain about the New Humanists Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More that though they had a great deal to say about what literature should and should not be, they could not point to a single contemporary work as the fulfillment of their literary ideal...

...introspective, tending to induce an attitude of resignation and cultivated despair...

...The argument yields finally a book that has at its heart a quarrel with the values of much of the major literature of the past 200 years, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972...

...Leavis, Wilson, Trilling—here, we are told, was a criticism undistracted by doctrinal politics, a criticism doggedly antitheoretical...

...But Berman makes a number of significant alterations on the Partisan model...

...And they offer us the names of the great cultural critics of the recent past, meant to recall criticism to its modern promise...

...But it is also a pretty thorough undoing of the notion of an autonomous, highly developed, fiercely adversary work of art that had figured in the old Partisan ideal...

...Your motives are not at all mercenary, for you believe—it is, in fact, part of your politics to believe—that culture is not merely the ideological bubbles on the surface of the socioeconomic pot but an expression of values, and that in certain works of art these values find deeper and more complex and powerful expression than the most rigorous political or sociological analysis is capable of...

...and if you wish to be able to take an interest in any sort of art, you will eventually 358 have to stop worrying about its political usefulness...

...Physical and popular, it points the way out of (or at least waves at) a cultural dilemma in which only prodigious feats of deep feeling can achieve the political and economic equality the world depends on...

...In this country in the '30s, writers for the New Masses like Joseph North read Whitman, Dreiser, and London with the same passion as they read Marx, Engels, and Lenin...

...Much of this pressure has come from the social sciences, which see culture as a valuefree play of symbols, simply one of the ways the members of a social group give meaning to their activities, but as something without inherent capacity to change their lives for the better...

...The classic case of the union of cultural taste and political viewpoint —the case from which, I think, much of our present uneasiness derives—is the attraction modernist literature had for liberal intellectuals, and its locus is Partisan Review...

...William Barrett's The Truants, as well as being a useful and at moments engaging memoir of the author's friendship with some of the figures involved with Partisan Review, is a diatribe against intellectual vanity and the sort of absolutist values it breeds...

...We would have spared you if we could, but modern art is so overgrown with the liana vines of ideology that we cannot try to hack a clearing through the jungle without getting just a little entangled in the creepers...

...And you believe, therefore, that in order to espouse a complete politics, your journal needs to raise, alongside the banners of its political philosophy, the standard of a cultural movement...

...You want to enlist literature and the arts in the cause of the political philosophy your journal seeks to promote...

...Critical thought, they tell us, is so entangled in its own theoretical weaving and deconstructing that it has forgotten what a socially useful art—not to mention a socially useful criticism—looks like...

...Scrutiny's hostility to industrial society and mass culture and its nostalgia for a lost rural Gemeinschaft were the explicit grounds for its attention to 16th- and 17th-century English poetry and, later, for F R. Leavis's championship of the tradition of moral realism in the novel from Austen to Lawrence...

...But when we look to these figures so insistently commended to our attention, we are not likely to feel fortified...

...This doesn't mean abandoning the cultural criticism—only letting it wander where it will, in the hope that no matter what aesthetic object its attention lights on, it will find something interesting to say...

...You believe that a wider exposure to and more critical understanding of such works can contribute to a heightened political awareness and a fuller responsiveness to the social issues your journal considers crucial...

...At the end of his life, Wilson was teaching himself Hungarian...

...Let's take an example...

...In this nonprescriptive light, the study of art can yield insight and understanding, but it cannot yield reliable political values...

...These values are epitomized for Barrett in what he calls "the two M's" of the Partisan manifesto, Marxism and modernism...

...Ramparts is gone, but the Voice lingers on...

...And for the process of understanding, any art will do...

...F. R. Leavis, faithful as he was to the idea of a socially informed criticism, always seemed to represent the less attractive aspects of Matthew Arnold's idea of culture: always narrowing the scope of critical discourse, forever turning a new aesthetic experience into a cultural "tradition," perpetually barking at every postman bringing news of Progress...

...This work is located a little off the beaten path, but its presence has begun to create a new path, drawing people magnetically into its orbit...

...It seems to me, however, that all that the city has added to TWU has brought out its special depths, which would never have emerged if it had lain untouched...

...A neoconservative was once a liberal...

...His idea of an exemplary modernism is limited to those texts—all of them from the 19th century—that 356 he can represent as having entered into a dialectical struggle with the modernizing forces of capitalism, and the closer the text gets to these forces, the better suited it becomes for Berman's program...

...The best course for the editor of the journal of "politics and the arts" in this state of affairs, it seems to me, is to abandon the effort to get the cultural criticism of the magazine back to marching arm in arm with the social criticism...

...Yet this was the literature most admired by many people whose politics were activist, progressive, socialist, democratic...

...A criticism like theirs might make it possible to speak once again, and without irony, of art in the context of what used to be called "the moral life...

...But, as two books published last year remind us, it is a story whose moral has somehow been lost in the retelling...

...How do you choose an art that matches your politics...

...A lot of people are prepared to blame criticism for the present state of affairs...

...Twentieth-century literature is detached, introverted, too finely wrought...

...from the left, a recommendation for a kind of aesthetic jungle gym, at its best merely a focus for energies not exactly critical or activist in nature...

...The contradictions between 355 these ideologies went unexamined, according to Barrett, because their adherents were drawn to those special gratifications of intellectual self-esteem Marxism shared with modernism: contempt for the bourgeoisie, a rationale for the necessity of an elite intellectual advance guard, faith in the powers of an absolute agent —the march of the dialectic, the primacy of the artistic imagination.' Barrett's diagnosis, applicable alike to the high fever of Philip Rahv and the mild but persistent discontent of Lionel Trilling, is a want of the religious sense, and he prescribes accordingly...

...It is as solid as sculpture can get, yet ghostly in several ways: its capacity to change shapes, depending on our point of view...

...For art, too, has changed its self-conception, and it is clear that art in the future—whatever sort of art it is, whatever sort of future it is—will have a different social status from the status it has enjoyed for much of the past century, and one of the privileges it will have lost is its intimacy with political vision...

...Berman sometimes appears to forget that although art can be one of the things that bring people together, it is also often one of the things that keep them apart...

...Nineteenthcentury literature, this argument has it, was engaged, its interplay of artistic form and social actuality was deep, complex, dialectical...

...But Barrett's dismissal of modernism as another form of truancy is worth pausing over...

...Art has become simply one of the signifiers in the empire of human signification, and though it may help to tell us where we are, it will not tell us how to get to any of the places we want to be...

...It might be objected—it often is—that this state of affairs only reflects the sterility of contemporary culture, the failure of artists and writers to produce the kind of art and literature that used to change the lives of the men and women they touched...

...Thus The Waste Land, Ulysses, the poetry of Yeats, and the novels of Woolf and Beckett do not figure at all in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, because they are—too airy...

...its metamorphoses of color, luminous bronze gold at one angle or moment, turning an ominous leaden gray a brief moment or movement away...

...To subscribe to the independent leftism of Partisan Review in the '40s and '50s meant a commitment to the experimentalism and the difficulty of high modernism...

...Take heart, just a few steps further, and we shall have done...

...You can, of course, run essays that criticize books and movies and cultural trends from the perspective of your journal's politics...

...its evocation of the steel skeletons of all the skyscrapers around it, of the dramatic skyward thrust that modern architecture and engineering made possible, of the expressive promise that all these buildings once made during their brief skeletal phase, but that most of them blatantly betrayed once they were complete...

...It is consequently, as Berman declares, "remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century [that] can give us the courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first...

...The disturbed decade of the 1960s, with its squalid atmosphere of permissiveness, descended upon us, and the spirit of 'Anything goes!' was in the air...

...Berman's example is a sculpture by Richard Serra, called TWU, which stands just off Canal Street in lower Manhattan: It consists of three immense steel rectangles, each about ten feet across and about thirty-five feet high, aligned like a jagged "H...

...Or, since the process had often worked nicely the other way round, can you adapt any of these movements to the social philosophy you already possess...

...Where do these two books leave our hypothetical editor...

...It would reveal modernism as the realism of our time...

...And in the '60s a magazine sympathetic to the politics of the New Left—Ramparts, say, or the Village Voice—could be expected to exhibit a lively attentiveness to developments in the nontraditional arts: to film, the living theater, popular music, and so on.' These have been times when, more often than not, a political position implied certain cultural preferences, a constellation of cultural preferences described a politics, and the most complete social philosophy was understood to be the one in which aesthetic values and political tendencies were made responsive to one an354 other...

...Here is Robert Christgau, in the July 6, 1982 issue: "I love rock and roll because, unlike literature, it's not caught in the cerebral, self-referential, and ultimately defeatist culdesac of highbrow modernism...

...There is little point, it seems to me, in arguing with those who would see the whole history of secular thought as one vast substitution for an absent living faith: all their trump cards are in a suit you do not hold...

...What is 21st-century modernism to look like...

...Sometimes they insist on participating more actively in the work, and inscribe their names or beliefs on its sides—"NO FUTURE" was recently inscribed in letters three feet high...

...And, given this degree of disenchantment with that idea, what sort of role can art and literature be expected to play in the future of social thought...

...To put it simply: viewed as a form of cultural criticism, modernism was reactionary and antidemocratic, and a number of its major figures—Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Lawrence—(not to mention such minor associates as T. E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis) shared an assortment of political tendencies that included anti-Semitism, profascist sympathies, and various kinds of often wildly anachronistic elitist social theories...

...This attraction makes for a paradox...

...But this is not the end of the story...

...The Sex Pistols' music is a good example of what Robert Warshow used to call Lumpen culture— the culture of people who hate culture—and as such the graffito was probably directed not, as Berman seems to think, against the modern environment but against the elitist pretensions of the sculpture itself...

...The inspiration in 1916 and 1917 for that famous mayfly of American letters, The Seven Arts, was the lyrical leftism of Randolph Bourne...

...The two books I have in mind are William Barrett's The Truants, a memoir of his association with Partisan Review, and Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, an ambitious and, I think, very uneven attempt to promote modernist culture as a way of understanding, and even changing, the modern world...

...Barrett's distrust of ratiocination in this book is so profound that he rarely indulges in extended argument...

...Berman's preference is for what might be called a "low" modernism: he proposes an art that is experimental, formally flexible, spontaneous, responsive to the modern environment—all the things that 20th-century high modernism, while appearing at first glance to sponsor, was, as he is perfectly aware, completely opposed to...

...but let us say that you want to do more than this...

...The slogan "NO FUTURE" is not a piece of spontaneous creativity inspired by Serra's sculpture, but the chorus line of the Sex Pistols' punk classic, "God Save the Queen...

...From the right, he hears warnings that avant-gardism will lead to intellectual absolutism and the demon Excess...

...and deliberately ambiguous, ironic, and self-reflexive, suggesting, when translated into political thinking, the inadequacy of any program of reform that has as its basis a rational plan for social change...

...After managing to keep his critical head above the rough literarypolitical water of the '30s and '40s, Edmund Wilson ultimately lost interest in the major works of the Anglo-American tradition —including the modernism he had earlier devoted most of his critical energies to—and spent the last 20 years of his life studying the largely second-rate literature of the American Civil War and the literatures of such minor cultures as Haiti's, Canada's, and the American Indian's...

...I have had to interpolate a little here, though I don't think I have misrepresented Barrett's views...

...Viewed as a collection of aesthetic objects, modernist literature was difficult and allusive, tending to promote a mandarin idea of culture...

...But today the effort to contrive an alliance between politics and culture seems to many people problematic in ways that are new and unsettling...

...I have said that Partisan Review was the house of critical thought that liberal-left politics and modernist culture occupied uneasily together, but I do not mean to suggest, as Barrett does suggest, that the magazine's editors and contributors were blind to the incongruities between their politics and cultural modernism that are now so apparent, or that they undertook any sort of programmatic application of the values of modernist literature to the discussion of social and political issues...

...The model for contemporary artistic creation in All That Is Solid is the public sculpture on which handbills have been plastered and graffiti spray-painted—an object barely noticed as art at all, but which can direct us, when we choose to register it as part of our experience, to the counterplay of creative liberation and mindless destruction that for Berman characterizes modern life...

...Let us say that you are the editor of a journal that has a fairly explicit political viewpoint, and you decide that along with articles on political and social issues you want to run some pieces on cultural subjects as well...

...The modernist culture of the early 20th century was understood to have provided the impetus for this spirit, and writers for the magazine naturally looked to it for the kind of urgency, complexity, and adversarial attitude they wished to promote in contemporary culture...

...Lionel Trilling, too, stuck to his texts, but his discouragement with the notion of literature as a source of human value can be easily read in the shape of his career...

...At this point, the argument of All That Is Solid begins to sound like one we have heard before from writers on the left—in Georg Luk5.cs's defense of the bourgeois novel, for instance, and even in the book that was for many the introduction to literary modernism, Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle...

...One of the fundamental problems of twentieth-century modernism," Berman writes, "is the way art tends to lose touch with people's everyday lives...

...One assumes that Commentary will not like the same novels or movies or paintings that the Nation likes, and one assumes also that at the bottom of this difference of critical opinion lies a difference of political opinion...

...Leavis's liberal admirers—and there have been a good number on this side of the Atlantic—used to assure doubters that when the sounds of parochial battle died away, Leavis's criticism would stand in its true light as a champion of culture's fiercely independent challenge to modern materialism in all its most dehumanizing manifestations...

...The purpose of Berman's extended discussion of these works sounds like the old Partisan two M's: A fusion of Marxism with modernism should melt the too-solid body of Marxism—or at least warm it up and thaw it out—and, at the same time, give modernist art and thought a new solidity and invest its creations with an unsuspected resonance and depth...

...arshall Berman's response to such highminded petulance about the '60s indicates succinctly the nature of his political differences with Barrett (though Berman has Daniel Bell in mind here): "It is modern capitalism, not modern art and culture, that has set and kept the pot boiling—reluctant as capitalism may be to face the heat...