Blue Jay Way
Where Will Critical Culture Come From?
<http://www.dissentmagazine.org/archive/wi00/berman.html>
by Marshall Berman
Considering the mass murder and Nazi-style brutality that engulf so much of
the world in the 1990s, it takes chutzpah for an American to say that our
collective life contains any trouble at all. Our economy is thriving. It
wasn't so long ago that there was nothing out there for kids coming out of
school and college; today, kids are getting jobs. After years of rising
homicide rates, people are killing each other less. People are still
getting AIDS, but more of them are staying alive.
American society is more open and inclusive than ever; it's not just what
you see on the Madison Square Garden station or MTV-though that itself is
something-it's all the interracial families and their marvelously colored
children out shopping any Saturday afternoon at your local mall. So we
should lighten up and enjoy the good news, right?
We at Dissent crave joy as ardently as anybody. But it's not easy for us to
lighten up. Most of us are in or near middle age, and we worry about what
will be there for our children and their children. Here's something that
troubles our minds:
There seems to be no critical culture in America today. A critical culture
is one that struggles actively over how human beings should live and what
our life means. Most of us can remember living in the critical culture of
the sixties-a few of us can even remember the critical culture of the
thirties-and we can feel the difference. When a critical culture breaks
down or wears out or fades away, sources of joy dry up. What makes this
happen? Why has it happened now? Is the loss permanent? Or are there
traces, fragments, intimations of a new critical culture just around the
corner? Where might it
come from? How can it come together? Is there anything people like us can
do to help it come?
One symptom of the lack of a critical culture today is our fetishism of
"order." Giuliani-type politicians have convinced many people, including
those who control the mass media, not only that they personally have made
the homicide rate go down, but that they have done something even more
profound: "restored order." New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani's idea of order
seems to require freeing the streets not only from beggars and homeless
people, but also from newsstands, food vendors, and wandering artists. His
1997 re-election campaign featured born-again testimonies from people said to
be lifelong Democrats and liberals who had come to love him, because, like
Moses parting the waters, "The mayor has stopped the violence." During the
campaign, he proclaimed that, now that he had ended the violence, the
police were going to start arresting people for jaywalking. At that point,
the great Jules Feiffer published a cartoon (on the New York Times op-ed
page) depicting a man making nasty remarks about the mayor's priorities and
his sense of civic life. In the last panel, a police officer arrests him.
For what? he asks. For jaytalking. Feiffer's image gets it just right, not
just about the mayor, but about the culture of the nineties, and its
amazing lack of jaytalking. The most endearing quality of the sixties
was the way it taught us to jaytalk: to talk back; to talk against the
lights; to talk outside the designated lines; to talk like our great
American blue jays (there they are in Audubon's Birds of America, Number
282), small birds who emit loud and raucous cries that no one can ignore.
How does a culture of jaytalking come into being? It requires three things:
(1) powerful and provocative ideas; (2) smart and imaginative people
working in various sectors of life, often wholly unaware of each other's
existence; and (3) "experimental neighborhoods," places where people and
ideas can 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 out their new syntheses.
The critical culture of the sixties came from very diverse sources. There
were our universities, enlarged and intellectually enriched in the cold war
boom. C. Wright Mills, Irving Howe, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, David
Riesman, Norman O. Brown, were all "tenured radicals" who developed their
dangerous ideas within the classiest academic crosswalks. (Many of the
creators of Students for a Democratic Society were their students.) Mike
Harrington and Jane Jacobs worked as journalists and editors. Grace Paley
taught, did secretarial work, brought up kids, and organized demos (at
first quite small) as she wrote. William H. Whyte, Norman Mailer, James
Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Walt Kelly, Dr. Seuss, all got rich from their
books, and used their money to say things that would have got them in
trouble (or gone unheard) if they were poor. Paul Goodman, like many great
artists of the "New York School" generation, was supported by his wife;
Dwight Macdonald, one of very few radicals from the echt ruling class, by
his trust fund. Harold Rosenberg taught us to see through the mass media,
to which he made one spectacular contribution: he was the man who created
Smokey the Bear. The 1950s theatre produced Death of a Salesman, one of the
permanently great radical plays, but also the avant-garde experiments of
the Living Theatre, and Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, which synthesized
vanguard
dramaturgy with popular front marketing.
What about experimental neighborhoods? The 1950s offered plenty of these.
As an ironic result of the flight of capital from American cities after
World War II, every city gained grungy low-rent neighborhoods that could
incubate bookstores and art studios and modern dance groups, experimental
theatres, venues for jazz and folk music and performance, and the sort of
shabby clubs and coffee houses and music stores and cabarets that nourished
Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May and Woody Allen and Bob Dylan. New York's
Village (first West, then East) is what I knew, but there were
neighborhoods like this all over America. Late in the 1950s, they started
to fill up with kids from all over metropolitan areas who could read the
little magazines and the Grove Press paperbacks in the bookstores, hang out in
streets and play their guitars in parks, hear sounds of music that carried
from clubs they couldn't afford to go to, find intense people like
themselves to walk and talk with through the night, and maybe to grope and
love. These people transformed old and often sleepy streets into vibrant
public spaces that never seemed to sleep at all. New kinds of public spaces
were embodied in two important new mass media: alternate weekly newspapers
and listener-supported radio. Once more, it happened all over. New York's
version features the Village Voice and WBAI.
Both rallied superb arrays of jaytalkers (including Feiffer), and formed
intense bonds with their audiences. America turned out to be full of people
who were ready to listen to every minute and read every line in media that
they felt were their own. These media taught their readers and listeners
not only how to grow up, but how to act like citizens, to go into the
streets and make trouble. The earliest struggles were to protect their own
neighborhoods (in New York, Washington Square). But as the sixties
unfolded, the new media made spiritual leaps, expanded their horizons, and
developed into
genuine moral educators. They taught their readers and listeners to think
of black people, poor people, Vietnamese people, and victimized people
everywhere as part of their neighborhoods.
Where will our culture find resources like these again? Maybe it won't, and
crews of Bounderbys and Panglosses and mixed megapirates will rule the
world forever. Or maybe only violent economic collapse will shake Americans
out of their narcolepsy. This would put the left in the creepy position
(where it has been before) of longing for horrible catastrophe.
On the other hand, it may be, as it was forty years ago, that the country's
very prosperity will give us slack, that it will create imaginative space
where people can begin to think about a better life than this.
What forms will critical thought take? Some people think there are no
critical ideas left. My own feeling is that there is a superabundance of
critical ideas in the air, if we can learn to inhale. Marxian and Freudian
thought are both immensely provocative, capable of endlessly new syntheses,
spin-offs, and hybridizations. No one has the authority to say definitively
what these ideas mean. Not even the founders could close the floodgates
they had opened. (They tried, in vain.) Maybe tomorrow's incarnations will
be deepened by feminism, or by environmentalism, or biology, or
cybernetics, or by any number of things that blacks and other "people of
color" will have to say, or by other forms of thought I know nothing of.
Regardless, we should recognize that, with Marx and Freud, we are all
living on top of radical gold mines.
I confess (and it isn't hard to detect), I am guilty of nostalgia for the
sixties, days of my youth. But I can see at least two big ways in which the
horizon for radicalism is clearer today. Many leftists of my generation
disdained the USSR, but still had a deep (sometimes desperate) need to
identify with some idealized Other as a focus for their longings. Since
1989, the need for an ideal Other has abated, or at least radically
slackened. It's a great leap forward that people today can criticize and
denounce life in the West without having to genuflect toward a mythical East.
The other big problem about sixties radicalism was its lack of connection
to a labor movement. The New Left is usually blamed for this. But in fact,
the AFL-CIO of those days, dominated by George Meany and his crew, was not
only aggressive in its chauvinist patriotism, but strident in its
particularism and anti-intellectuality. Obsessed with smashing the commies,
it was as rigid and dictatorial as any Communist Party. It fired its old,
politically incorrect organizers, and made
no moves to hire new ones: it was totally uninterested in organizing the
unorganized. The weakness of today's labor movement follows directly from
the stupidity of yesterday's strong one. But John Sweeney's AFL-CIO has
looked beyond its own apparat, opened up its horizons, and started to
imagine how big and powerful the working class might be. The unions have
opened up an Organizing Institute, and a new generation of brilliant
organizers has come up. Labor has started winning big strikes, not only in
New York and Los Angeles, where you might expect it, but in Las Vegas and
North Carolina. The labor movement's Union Summers have not only trained
several thousand young adults in organizing skills-many are working as
organizers now, many more are fellow-travelers-but generated a vision, a
sense of mission, a human solidarity, as the civil rights movement did in
its Freedom Summer days. We should listen for jaytalk here.
One big problem for any critical culture to come is, how will its concerns
and its ideas be transmitted and shared? There is no way to reach
multitudes of people except through media of mass communication. Many
people think our mass media inevitably turn all ideas into banal slogans.
My own feeling is that, although most of the contents of our mass media are
banal (like most of the contents of our most esoteric refereed journals),
the biggest problem may be the exact opposite: too many ideas, coming
through too many channels. New media played crucial roles creating and
developing
the critical culture of the sixties. In the nineties, along with books,
newspapers, magazines, movies, theater, recorded music, broadcasting, and
the new media of yesterday, there are so many new "new media," from the
many forms of cable television, desktop publishing, video, 'zines, to
e-mail and all the metamorphoses of the Net, that it is harder than ever
not to be flooded out. As communications technologies metastasize, it will
be even harder not to be flooded out tomorrow.
Some people aren't worried about this because they don't think our new
media have much to say. An epigram of the early computer culture was
"Garbage in, garbage out." A decade ago, Bruce Springsteen had a hit, "57
Channels And Nothing On." But anyone today who tries to listen and look
around is bound to find that there's more "on" in American popular culture
than most of us have thought. In the summer, when I'm freer to sample, my
last week's collection included Daria, on cable television, an animated
intellectual nonconformist teenage girl's so-called life-Salinger's Franny,
geworfen
into Orange County; Psychoanalysis (What Is It?) and Prince of Thieves,
albums by the rapper and producer Prince Paul; the 'zine Processed World, a
cyberpunk incarnation of Dissent. All this material shows impressive brains
and sensitivity and critical awareness. If only there were ways for these
people and people like them-including people like us-to connect and interact!
How can the people and the ideas come together? How can they crystallize
into something? In the cyberworld, ideas are channeled into "chat rooms," a
multitude of demographically small, segmented spaces, and focused on
limited but intense "niche" audiences. Most of their chats seem to be
pretty dull, as most chats are; still it could be that some small rooms
have nourished ideas and perspectives that might make big differences. If
only we knew how to break open those rooms, we could build Greenwich
Villages in cyberspace. In these new experimental neighborhoods, the
critical culture of
tomorrow could be born.
Or maybe not. Maybe it all will happen on paper in "old" media, or in "old"
Greenwich Villages, in old streets and restaurants and cafes and parks,
through old-fashioned face-to-face encounters, among people who have lived
through everything new that the eighties and nineties offered, and who feel
a need for more: for insight beyond any Web site, for a promised land
beyond the Net, where blue jays sing.
---- Marshall Berman's latest book is Adventures in Marxism.
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