Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?: Responses
Jacoby, Russell
Russell Jacoby WHO WANTS to criticize a commenta tor as well-meaning and warm hearted as Marshall Berman? He is a bard of urban life with an infectious enthusiasm for New York. For many years...
...For many years he has been singing of the joys of city streets and corners, where he often finds evidence of a cultural renewal and transformation...
...Have the ideas gotten better...
...he checks out cable TV and surfs the net and is awed by the "impressive brains and sensitivity...
...Nothing, but is this a theory or even a notion of cultural transformation...
...Like what...
...To put this differ 40 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 ently, it is better to call a blue jay a blue jay— RUSSELL JACOBY is author of The Last Intellectu an obnoxious bird with an abrasive cry—than als, The End of Utopia, and other books...
...But even Berman is now a little down in the mouth, wondering what happened to the "critical culture" of the past...
...He doesn't know what ideas, but he knows the groups that will engender them: feminists, environmentalists, black people or other minorities...
...we just have to "learn to inhale...
...The streets livelier...
...He tells us radical ideas are everywhere...
...Russell Jacoby WHO WANTS to criticize a commenta tor as well-meaning and warm hearted as Marshall Berman...
...The biggest problem" out there in electronic land is "too many ideas...
...Berman sounds less like a jaytalker than a yenta or perhaps a developer with an idea for an urban coffeeklatch with buzz...
...ergo, it may work soon...
...He to pretend it is a warbler...
...But what does this have to do with anything...
...teaches at UCLA...
...What could be bad...
...He pulls the old leftist trick, substituting group thought for thought...
...Perhaps a fossilized labor movement, paradoxically, was essential for sixties activism...
...Now a revitalized labor movement welcomes radicals and intellectuals...
...He writes we need three things to revitalize a subversive culture: (1) powerful and provocative ideas (2) smart and imaginative people and (3) vital neighborhoods...
...Take some clever people with good ideas and put them in very nice quarters...
...Give us one...
...Berman cannot say...
...Cool...
...HIS SINGLE effort to get specific is ad mittedly limited...
...Putting aside the truth of this, Berman may not realize his observation can be turned against his argument...
...He doesn't tell us...
...For instance, what...
...We probably all share Berman's worry over the disappearance of a critical culture, but the way he formulates the issue reveals how lost he—and let me add, I and everyone else—has become...
...He indicates one important advance from his beloved sixties, when an ossified labor movement spurned leftists...
...Berman may want to reread his Lenin...
...There he goes again: smart and imaginative people doing smart and imaginative things...
...it drove talented and energetic souls, who would have been swallowed up by the union bureaucracy, into other and more radical endeavors...
...But what will these groups offer...
...The people smarter...
...According to Berman, "a new generation" of "brilliant" AFL-CIO organizers is now "winning big strikes...
...When Berman goes shopping and encounters an Asian woman with a black child eating a bagel, he excitedly announces a revolution is in progress...
...If I may be heretical in what is still a socialist magazine, why does Berman think that successful AFL-CIO organizers have anything to do with building a subversive culture...
...At best one might say that Berman is offering the Upper West Side/old Greenwich Village theory of cultural change...
...I will not pretend to have answers, but I do think that it is better to admit that the situation is dark than to affect a cheeriness that finds ferment everywhere...
...The throbbing city streets do not seem to be undermining capitalism...
...Unfortunately he has not gone very far...
...It hasn't worked in the last thirty years...
...Berman has longings for a future critical culture, but, alas, not even an inkling of what he wants...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
