Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?: Responses
Diggins, John Patrick
MARSHALL BERMAN sees in the incoher ence of a punk culture the same po tential that Marx once thought he saw in the rising consciousness of a proletarian movement: the coming "negation" of...
...The Dissent circle, as learned as it is dogged, persists with the illusions of democratic socialism, as though an egalitarian moral economy of community and mutuality can be willed into existence...
...Loman's tragedy was to think he was nothing unless he interacted with others, unless he could make his ambitious energy socially acceptable by being well-liked, unless he could sell himself as well as his product...
...Berman wonders what happened to the "critical culture" that animated the sixties...
...We need to understand, he advises, that "with Marx and Freud, we are living on top of radical gold mines" and that Miller's Death of the Salesman remains "one of the permanently great radical plays...
...Critical...
...It is no secret that the left without its illusions is like a fish out of water...
...Berman pines away for the older culture of innovative theatres, jazz and coffee houses, and shaggy youths coming to life on the streets...
...But neither the street youths of today nor the factory workers of yesterday, neither the guitar nor the hammer, have ever posed such a challenge...
...today the sequence is reversed...
...Loman needed to know how to define himself apart from society and its snares...
...Where is the wish for "polymorphous perversity" more fulfilled than in a Calvin Klein ad...
...Berman is far more optimistic about the materials of intellectual history than may be warranted...
...As to culture, the American worker is more interested in a paycheck than in jaytalk...
...The heady promises of pot and sexual freedom, the assaults on authority and the "bourgeois" family, the fetish of "participatory democracy," and other misplaced wishes could scarcely withstand the scrutiny of selfcriticism...
...A neoconservative might see him as a man without character, one who grew up in an environment that Berman offers as his ideal: in "places where people and ideas bump into each other, and where young people, with little experience but boundless energy, along with middle-aged people longing to escape from 'uptown' or 'the boroughs' or 'suburbia,' can find or imagine new ways to put the ideas together, and to act their new syntheses out...
...In the past the American left could sustain such illusions because it looked elsewhere: Russia, China, Cuba, catastrophes all, but regimes that misled the left into believing that if only democracy displaces totalitarianism, socialism will rise to glory as surely as the sun rises out of the morning's dew...
...As to Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman's plight can be read in many ways, not all of which are necessarily radical...
...The left's worthiest aim has always been not to realize the best but to oppose the worst...
...Marx saw socialism as the stage that supplants liberalism...
...Berman's nostalgia for the past sounds more and more like Willa Cather lamenting the loss of village life, not in New York but in Nebraska...
...Berman says nothing about the achievements made in civil rights, feminism, the environment, and the equalization of higher education...
...So does capitalism and its consumer culture...
...MARSHALL BERMAN sees in the incoher ence of a punk culture the same po tential that Marx once thought he saw in the rising consciousness of a proletarian movement: the coming "negation" of the capitalist order...
...Loman needed Emerson...
...Today the left must face America, a free, liberal society of political rights and property protections...
...The causes are neither transformative nor transgressive, but noble causes they remain...
...Perhaps such causes defy the socialist scenario of collective solidarity and validate the viability of liberal institutions...
...Freud would, I believe, like to be told that we "are living on top" of his corpus, but would he not be a little amused to see the Freudian left trace neurosis and repression to an environment of scarcity when we are living in a society of abundance...
...JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS is author of Foundations of American History, forthcoming, Yale University Press...
...Berman wants people to "come together...
...One of the most desperate illusions is to look to labor for "a vision, a sense of mission, a human solidarity...
...The sustained intensity with which the left has attacked liberalism only dramatizes the historical fact that socialism has never been able to be spawned from it...
...Marx once advised that we must draw our "poetry" from the future...
...Former communist countries aspire to liberalism, assuming they can return to a stage of history they have never experienced in its full flowering...
...In American history no labor organization came close to succeeding when it followed the socialist mystique of organizing all workers in the spirit of class solidarity...
...Berman's hope that John Sweeney's leadership of the AFL-CIO will be a vast improvement over that of George Meaney can only be entertained if he is willing to accept inevitable failure...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
