Lying Down with the Barbarians

...This is the anti-intellectual "murder to dissect" view of criticism that Susan Sontag elevated two years later into a quasi-philosophy...

...Without becoming hysterical about it, as F. R. Leavis did in his retort (in the sense of counterattack, not laboratory vessel), one can remark that for all of Snow's reputed ability to encompass both disciplines, he remains (except, perhaps, in The Masters) a consummately pompous bore...

...The curious thing here is the equation of anti-intellectualism with erotics...

...And that may be perfectly proper...

...what happens within them is what happens, that is all...

...I have no solution to prevent the world from getting its just, or unjust, deserts beyond calling on the nonanti-intellectual intellectuals of the world to unite...

...One could start the chronology at the synthesis-a given order of things-out of which arises, constantly and simultaneously, a warring thesis and antithesis...

...The whole emerging pattern, from ideals to campus demonstrations to beads and bellbottoms to the Woodstock festival, makes sense and is part of a consistent philosophy...

...By the 1830s a kind of pitched battle developed in Paris, heralded by the clash, in February 1830, between the bourgeoisie and the literary establishment on the one hand, and the artistic rebels or bousingots on the other, at the first two performances of Hugo's Hernani...

...The cultural conflict, or what little remains of it, is between those who have not yielded up their intellects, and those who have relinquished them in the troughs of Grotowski or Godard, John Cage or Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham or Claes Oldenburg, Marshall McLuhan or Buckminster Fuller, Stan Brakhage or Andy Warhol, William Burroughs or Jonathan Williams, or whoever they all are...

...Starting with the 18th century, when the uneasy neoclassical synthesis fell apart, it used to be a contest between ancient and modern, classical and romantic, and, eventually, burgher and bohemian...

...The turned-on crowd at a rock concert, tossing arms and shaking arses, is simply practicing the erotics of art...

...Snow's two cultures may yet be united on a level below culture...

...This "Battle of Hernani," which was to prove the paradigmatic, archetypal confrontation of its kind, was distinguished by the fact that the rebellious bousingots were, on the whole, more highbrow than their opponents, and that the issues pertained almost exclusively to the arts, becoming politicized only gradually...

...The most recent attention-getting formulation of cultural opposites came from Charles Reich in The Greening of America...

...One thinks of Nietzsche's superman, Rimbaud's "time of the assassins," Lautreamont's Maldoror, Jarry's Ubu, and the various literary and political adherents of anarchy...

...not what a musicologist tells us happens...

...What until not so long ago passed for advanced eccentricity in someone like Howard Hughes-a multimillionaire going about in sloppy dress and sneakers-has become the order of the day: Blue jeans have united the barbarians and the intelligentsia in the same uniform...

...In these areas there is little divergence left between the majority of highbrows and bona fide lowbrows...

...The conservative highbrow composer Ned Rorem, who was later to write an essay for the New York Review of Books in praise of the Beatles, noted in his diary for 1962: "Inasmuch as a great piece resists analysis, opinions about (even physical reactions to) it are worthless...

...The solution, according to Snow, would be a grand synthesis of the riven cultures...

...Or perhaps its vector...

...and a kind of natural miscibility with drugs...

...What is significant is that it was written by a Yale law professor...

...So today's cultural barbarians have been carefully nurtured and developed...

...There is, in any given age, a quality in the body politic, in the culture of the society, in the collective and individual consciousness that cannot be described as anything but dualistic...

...The cult of the barbarian-no longer a noble savage but an untamed brute-surfaces in various forms, yet almost always as an anti-intellectualism sponsored by disaffected intellectuals...

...However, they constituted the kind of anti-intellectualism promulgated in large part, as I suggested earlier, by intellectuals like Reich...

...More and more passionately our society has been "waiting for the barbarians...

...Yet it can be argued that the opposing forces, despite their many guises, always represent the same antagonists...

...All of which brings me to my own assessment of the two cultures as they exist today...

...Mind you, the anticritical approach never prevented the critical eroticists from writing and publishing their metacritical tracts...

...How crazy, I thought, but recalled that this was the fellow who had made his reputation by publishing Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything, and such a one was capable of anything...

...A few years ago a new duality was adduced: C. P. Snow created quite a flurry, so to speak, with his essay The Two Cultures, setting forth the view that our cultural troubles stem from the drifting apart of the arts and sciences to the point where scientists don't know beans about the humanities, while the artist-humanists cannot even recite the second law of thermodynamics...

...Make love, not formulas, I would say, or make love, but do not try to make a critical philosophy out of it...

...Masterworks can't be taken apart like watchworks...

...Their protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, ways of thought and liberated life-style are not a passing fad or a form of dissent or refusal, nor are they in any sense irrational...

...Although this seems to be a neat, tripartite schema, I wonder whether it could not be diagrammed differently, bringing it back to the bipartite realm...

...More and more the conflict seems to be between the doer and the thinker, in the sense that in the world of culture and the arts the doers don't think any more and the thinkers refuse to have any truck with such doings...

...And you certainly cannot tell the barbarians from the supposedly cultivated in the arts...

...Although Miss Sontag has sagely repudiated many of her earlier positions, we still find the criticpoet Richard Howard praising the achievement of Roland Barthes in the introduction to the latter's The Pleasure of the Text (American edition, 1975) as "an erotics of reading...

...If embodying the great synthesis is no protection against dullness, let us accept the cultural rift with cheerful equanimity...

...Much of what Reich posited has already been voided by the passage of one lustrum...

...Cavafy's famous poem by that title ends: "And now what will become of us without Barbarians?/ Those people were some sort of solution...

...those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don't...

...Although such fanatical abstractionists as Kandinsky and Mondrian turned into were at work decades ago, it was not until the enshrinement of abstract expressionism that intellectual anti-intellectualism fully took over the fine arts...

...I, for that matter, have always remembered the second law of thermodynamics from my school days but have never felt it to confer upon me benefits comparable to dipping into the Sibylline books, or even awesome responsibilities like those of eating of the Tree of Knowledge...

...Hegel, for example, came up with the underlying principle that any college student knows: Thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis...

...Music, for example, is one of the prime crucibles in which they were fused, particularly rock music...

...They are now thoroughly, inextricably, appallingly among us, summoned forth by the intellectuals but crawling out of all corners and classes...

...Meditation more than analysis will take us toward the heart of music, but to reach that heart is paradoxically to kill it...

...The cultural duality of life-as opposed to the political one it sometimes overlaps, but that does not concern me here-has been variously apprehended at different times, and has indeed had diverse aspects...

...That such a piece of deludedness could have been written and published is only mildly interesting...

...I remember with what amazement I listened-how many years ago?-to Robert Gottlieb, then still an editor at Simon and Schuster and not yet successor to the throne of Alfred Knopf, telling me that rock was a most valuable and important artistic manifestation that I should familiarize myself with...

...primitively insistent rhythm that, with its kinetic platitudes, may be assumed to get the body started on its way to the rhythms of copulation...

...Perhaps more than ever before we may have become surrounded, infiltrated, preempted by them-we cannot even be sure until the last minute who they are, and we may, like the characters in Ionesco's tragic farce, be turning into rhinoceroses ourselves...

...But the conflict also took another, related albeit quite different course that was to prove more important: the combat between intellectual and anti-intellectual elements...

...Here Pollock dribbled, Kline striated, De Kooning smeared, Motherwell daubed-this, ladies and gentlemen, is the locus of art...

...You can no longer tell the barbarians by their manners, their sexual mores, or their clothes-least of all by their clothes...

...As the poet A. S. J. Tessimond put it in an earlier, somewhat different, context but with undiminished applicability, in a poem entitled "Split World": And one can think Another do, But messages Come rarely through Deserts that lie Between the two...

...The answer is that if society can't get barbarians from outside to overrun it, it produces them from within...

...You can no longer easily tell the barbarians by their speech, for grammar is no longer taught, let alone studied, with any conviction...

...This, in an age of love children, love beads, and slogans like "Make love, not war," becomes identified, like all good things, with carnal love-erotics...

...I have no more room to follow this decline in the other arts and cultural mediums...

...Obviously, the brilliance of this remark lies in its canceling itself out-in that the speaker, who seems to stand above such bipartitism, is in fact practicing it, thus implying that everyone in some way separates others into two camps...

...While we are on the subject of kinetics and art, what did anti-intellectualism achieve in the fine arts...

...For it is in this movement, as its alternative appellation, action painting (even if launched as a mere critical sobriquet), makes clear, that the emphasis shifted from the work of art to the making of it or, more properly, to its maker, the artwork serving merely as a graph recording his creative movements...

...Not a passing fad, says our professor, and already beads and bell bottoms are out, Woodstock has been given the lie by Altamont, the campuses have little or no protest to offer, and even the liberated life-style yields to all kinds of reactionary religious revivals and a new upsurge of monogamy...

...No matter how many factions may be at loggerheads in practice, in terms of principles, ideologies, mentalities, the struggle comes down to the conflict of two forces...

...Away with this pidgin English of the anti- or pseudointellectual mind...

...The battle line is, clearly, no longer drawn up between barbarians and highbrows, the two having, as I mentioned, extensively interbred...

...The equilibrium of synthesis could then be perceived as extremely labile, the factious disequilibrium of thesis versus antithesis as the more lasting and customary condition of mankind...

...It is this contest, between chiefly bohemian avant-gardists and predominantly bourgeois conservatives, that seemed to continue down to the Surrealists and Dadaists of yesterday...

...Besides, some of the most sophisticated people in this era of structural linguistics consider it a badge of honor to speak street talk in the manner of the ghetto blacks...

...To get back to rock music, if even a masterwork cannot be taken apart and studied, how much less so can pop or rock...

...If you overheard this bit of conversation in the street, you would be hard put to identify the geographical, social and cultural provenance of the speaker-some of the most well-bred and cultivated people have taken to this lingo...

...The essay seemed important enough for Lionel Trilling to conclude his textbook, Literary Criticism, with it-as an act of historical objectivity, or as radical chic...

...Music, typically, is a field where the trahison des clercs has been in full swing...

...noise, sheer noise, treasured for its ability to deaden and eliminate fine distinctions, intellectual or indeed emotional...

...that it became a best seller is neither interesting nor surprising...

...In fact, we may best recognize our allies by their language: neither the jargon of the streets nor the Olympian abstractionese of molehills trying to sound like mountains...

...Unite against the enemy without and within who speaks, writes, paints, composes, criticizes in a pop medium or style, however much he may arrogate such exalted terms as "conceptual art...

...Ubu, Maldoror, black humor, the various Surrealist and Dadaist games like cadavre exquis, Tzara's print cut-ups, Ernst's frottages, Duchamp's ready-mades, and the rest, were all assaults on the rational, controlled, in short, intellectual element in the arts...

...Rorem, Sontag, Barthes, and Howard are representative of the intellectual anti-intellectualism that undermines the rational approach to culture and art (in itself an insufficient method, but not to be swept aside with contempt) in the name of a kind of uncritical wallowing...

...Moreover, the melting-pot aspect of rock, that great leveler of alienated intellectuals and ignorant enthusiasts, derives from its array of thought deterrents: the verbal cliche exalted to the dignity of a motto engraved above the doors of perception...

...Let us look now at where some recent thinkers placed the cultural battlefront, and how they identified and labeled the warring opponents...

...But even from the foregoing I can situate the lines of force, the turbulent frontier between culture and counterculture...

...Take, for example, the illiterate peppering of sentences with the word "like": "Like I said to him I would be there like Wednesday or Thursday...

...Whether Hegel's formula is optimistic (and Marxism, deriving from it, even more so) or not, thus depends purely on where you begin your count, where you see the first link in the chain...

...Here we were told that the obsolete Consciousness II, the Corporate State alias the Liberal Welfare State-a dying but still snapping beast-was being opposed successfully by Consciousness III, which "will originate with the individual and with culture" and become "the revolution of the new generation...

...It is both necessary and inevitable, and in time it will include not only youth, but all people in America...

...And it merged with the cult of the avant-garde...

...The elevation occurred in "Beyond Interpretation," the essay that ends with the now famous, or infamous, sentence: "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art...

...The truly amazing thing, though, is that Reich should perceive the beats, hippies, flower children (including, presumably, those deflowered by Charles Manson) as a form of culture, when in fact they are clearly a new barbarism, an anticulture...