Why Modernism Still Matters Mars/Mil Barman "r 1968, when the stude its at a the meter, Coium bia University, rebelled and occupied the campus, a senior professor, the critic Lionel Trilling, des- cribed their actions as ?modernism in the streets." I believed then, and I still believe. that he was right: in the troubles of those days, which at the same time tore up the streets of our cities and gave them new life, modernism was alive and well. This was the modern movement that I set out to explore and to chart in the book that eventually became All That It Solid Melts into Air: Modern society, according to that book, is racked with pain and misery, yet it is also a place where men and women can become freer and more creative than men and women have ever been. Modernists, as I portray them, are simultaneously at home in this world and at odds with it. They celebrate and identify with the triumphs of modern science, art, technology, communications, economics, politics?in short, with all the activities, techniques, and sensibilities that enable mankind to do what the Bible said only God could do?to ?make all things new.? At the same time, however, they oppose modernization?s betrayal of its own human promise and potential. Modernists demand more profound and radical renewals: modern men and women must become the subjects as well as the objects of modernization; they must learn to change the world that is changing them and to make it their own. The modernist knows this is possible: the fact that the world has changed so much is proof that it can change still more. The modernist can, in Hegel?s phrase, ?look the negative in the face and live with it." The fact that ?all that is solid melts into air" is a source not of despair. but of strength and af?rmation. If everything must go, then let it go: modern people have the power to create a better world than the world they have lost. Most of my book is about the past. It pays special attention to Marx, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky?the great modernists of the generation of 1848. But my argument is pointed toward the present and the future. In the contemporary world, as I see it, the modernist paradigm is only just coming into its own. I wrote: Mai-swim? Bermm: {ear/k": at City University of cht' l'brfc. is currently worklirg on Living for the City (Random 02:58), a book (:50th New i?brk during the last [terrify years. sing back can be a my to go forward. . . . Remember- ing the modernisms of the 19th century can help us gain the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the let.? When I began work on Al! Thai 15 Solid Me/Is Into Ari; in the early 19705, it seemed to me that the project of modernism was in the foreground of American and European intellectual life. By the time the book came out in the early 19805, however, modernism wasn't even in the background. If people spoke of it at all, they spoke of it as SOmething from another century?if not, indeed, from another planet. Meanwhile, there was an endless flow of critical discourse, asserting that we were inexorably in the perm-zodem world. Had I really been asleep for so long? Or had the structures and dynamics of life, thought, and art changed so much and so fast? I think modernism still illuminates and transforms the world we live in today, but, in order to make a convincing argument, I have to confront the specter of postmodernism and not merely conjure it away. I have to try to understand why many smart people have felt impelled to discard the paradigm of modernism?and why they are wrong. I will try to make my case in three stages. First, I will recapitulate some of the central themes of modernist art and thought as they unfolded in the period that is generally believed to be the classic age of modernism, from just before the revolutions of 1848 to the aftermath of the First World War. Second, Iwill suggesr how the recent movements that call them- selves postmodern iiave only reenacted, rather than over- come, the deepest troubles and impasses of modernism. Finally, I will discuss some of the ways in which modern- ism can still be creative in the present and the future. it i ?k Many of the abiding modern themes are unveiled with great flair in the ?rst part of the Cozmiztmz'st Manifesto, which appeared at the beginning of 1848. The boorgeoisie, Marx says, ?has been the ?rst to show what man?s acrivity can bring about.? Their obsessive and insatiable activism, which they have enforced on their own workers, and then on the whole world, ?has created more massive and more colossal productive II forces than have all the preceding generations put together.? Marx presents a short list: Subjection of nature?s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clear- ing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground?what earlier century had even a presenti- ment that such producrive forces slumbered in the womb of social labor? A century later, we might lengthen the list to include the whole ?eld of electronics [and an amazing array of electronic forms of communication), tremendous break- throughs in public health, a more than doubling of the average human life span from Marx?s time to our own, cybernetics and computerization of everyday life, the understanding and utilization of nuclear energy, knowl? edge of genetics and biotechnology, ?ight through the air and into outer space, and many more developments. What makes all of these changes distinctively modern is not the inventions themselves, but a process of in- cessant inquiry, discovery, and innovation, and a deter- mination to transform theory into practice, to use all we know to change the world..Marx gives the bourgeoisie credit for starting this process; like every other modern- ist, however, he expects the process to go a lot farther than they would like, and indeed farther than they can even conceive. nother great bourgeois achievement, which should also lead far beyond bourgeois hori- zons, is the internationalization of everyday life. ?The need for a constantly expanding market for its products,? Marx says, ?chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle every- where, establish connections everywhere." Moreover, Marx notes, internationalization takes place not only with respect to economic matters, but also with respect to people?s intimate inner lives: And as in material, so also in intellectual produc- tion. The Spiritual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous local and na- tional literatures there arises a world literature. Thus the modern bourgeoisie, interested only in increasing its private prOperty, inadvertently creates a world culture whose creations are public property. This is the culture of modernism itself. Although it embraces the world horizons of modern capital, it ends up sub- verting capitalism, not necessarily because it sets out to subvert (though it frequently does) but simply because, 12 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 1 W, 4 zu??m as a network of?spiritual creations,? it cannot help but express values radically opposed to the pro?t?and-loss calculus of the bourgeois bottom line. One of the central themes in modernist culture, starting in the 18405, is the drive for free development. Goethe, in Faust, was probably the first to suggest the connection between the modern desire for self-development and the modern movement toward economic development. Marx conceptualizes this connection in the Manifesto: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production. And thereby the relations of production, and with them all the relations of society. . .. Constant revolutioniz- ing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agita- tion, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All ?xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man at last is forced to face his real conditions of life and his relations with his fellow men. In short, under the pressure of the market, modern men and women are forced to grow in order to survive. But their growth is channeled and twisted into narrow-? that is, marketable?directions. Still, Marx believes, the inner dynamism that capitalism creates in its subjects is bound to recoil against bourgeois rule. Sooner or later, modern men and women will inevitably feel that the boundaries of the capitalist bottom line are fencing them in; after a lifetime of forced and distorted develop- ment, they will begin to clamor for free development. This desire, more than any mere economic need, will propel the modern masses into movements for radical change. Indeed, when communism ?nally arrives, Marx says, its gift to humanity will be ?an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all." Free development is celebrated by Marx?s whole gen- eration of modernists. it is what a poem like Baudelaire?s ?Le Voyage? is about: ?to drown in the abyss?heaven or hell, who cares? Through the unknown, we?ll find the new.? Free development is also what the hero of Dostoevsky?s Notes from Underground has in mind when he says, want to live, in order to satisfy all my faculties for And it plays a crucial role even in the thought of so square a modernist thinker as John Stuart Mill, who declares that ?nor symmetry [of character] but hold, free expansion in all directions is demanded by the needs of modern life and the instincts of the modern mind." More than a century later, the drive for free develop- .. a. ment has spread all over the world and has energized a mass public, millions Strong, to demand universal education, freedom of expression, and support for what Mill in Of) Liberty called ?experiments in living.? This public, remarkably open and responsive to any @ng 6E Efeationrthatappears to be authentically inew, has helped to keep many modes of modernism alive. has-encouraged generations of artists, scientists, and same ordinary men and women tohbelicve that, if they ar??n?t?constantly transcending themselves, they might IaTs?we?be dead. (Ironically, this public has also become the audience for postmodernism, which it imagines as the newest modern movement in town.) i he ideal of free development, elaborated in the 18405, soon brought about a powerful undertow. From then till now, this undertow has been a primary source of trouble in modern life. I will call this undertow the problem of Nihilism is often considered to spring from the overheated and drugged imaginations of some of the ?bad boys" of modernism: Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Infact, it can be found in the most sober nineteenth-century accounts of every- day life in the modern world. T0cqueville, for instance, on his visit to the ultramodern United States, saw a pattern of incessant movement everywhere, tremendous - expenditures of human energy in the pursuit of happi- ness. But he could not help but ask where all these people were going. What was their perpetual motion for? What did all their activities mean? What frightened him, when he thought about the human prospect ahead, was the clear possibility that it didn?t mean anything at all. Marx raises a similar problem from a different angle. One of his bitterest complaints against bourgeois society is that it has ?resolved personal worth into exchange value??-destroyed all standards of valuation except the capitalist bortom line. In a society like this, anything becomes morally permissible if it is economically pro?t- able. Thus, Marx indicts the modern bourgeoisie as the ?rst nihilistic ruling class in history. He looks forward to a socialist revolution, and eventually to a communist society that will deliver modern men and women from the nihilism of the capitalist bottom line. But, one must ask, if free development for everyone is going to be the basic norm of the new society, won?t this norm engender new modes of nihilism that are even broader and deeper than the mode they replace? Modernists of the 18405 created a vocabulary that made it possible to raise such quesrions. They did not have answers then, but they had faith in the capacity of modern men and women, in the process of free develop- ment, to generate answers in the future. Hence they could accept modern nihilism, in words, as ?a great clearing away,? ?a simpli?cation for the sake of life,? ?a pathological transitional state," a preface to the creation of new and better values. Meanwhile, however, modernism?s undertow was gathering force fast. The ruin of the revolutions of1848 and the new despotism of Napoleon 111 made it im- possible not to see its force. ?The struggle seems to be settled,? Marx name after Louis Bonaparte?s coup d??tat of December 185l, in such a way that all classes, equally impotent and equally mute, [all on their knees before the rifle France, therefore, seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall beneath the despotism of an individual, and, what is more, beneath the authority of an individual without authority.? In short, there was a very large modern public?no one ltnew quite how large?that, far from yearning for a future of free development, fought to flee from a present in which it felt already much too free. Tba public bar encouraged geueratz?om ofartz?rts, scientists, anal quite ordz'uary men and women to believe tbat, z'f tbey aren?t tramceudt?ug tb ?7725?lv?5, tb cy mtg/9t as well be dead. For Marx, the collective desire to escape from freedom was a subject for comedy, though indeed a black comedy. (The genre of Marx?s Ez'gbtceutb Brumaz're is actually much more typical of our time than of his own. It belongs on the same shelf as Lenny Bruce and Crawly-22.) Thirty years later, Dostoevsky, in his ?Parable of the Grand Inquisitor? (included in Tbe Brot/Jerr Karamazou), brought out the tragic gravity of this theme. The parable is narrated and supposedly written by Ivan Karamazov, the one character in the book with a distinctively modernist sensibility. Ivan brings to life a modern and humanistic Jesus: the idea of freedom of conscience is central to his revelation. The Inquisitor?s objection to this version of Jesus is that he is besrowing more freedom on human beings than they can handle. Thus, he visits Jesus in the cell in which he has imprisoned him and entreats him to fade away before the Inquisition burns him for heresy. Doesn?t he understand that he is making life too hard? tell you,? the Inquisitor says, man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to ?nd someone to whom he can hand over the gift of the freedom with which this illsfated creature was born.? Jesus lacks true charity and mercy: he fails to see ?that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in knowledge of good and evil. Nothing is more seductive for man MODERNISM STILL MATTERS 13 than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.? The Inquisitor now steps out of his medieval setting and addresses Dostoevsky?s modern audience: ?Look,? he says, ?now, today, peOple are persuaded that they are freer than ever before, yet they have brought their free- dom to us and laid it humbly at our feet.? The masses rebel, but they ?lack the courage to carry through their own rebellion.? They are like schoolchildren who riot and drive the teacher out of the room, only to recoil in horror when they see that there is no one in charge but them- selves. Then they will throw themselves on the mercy of the three powers which alone are able to hold captive the conscience of these imporent rebels??a modernist anti~Trinity of ?miracle, mystery and authority? ?rather than take responsibility for their-own lives. ostoevsky?s parable is frightfully prescient, a prophecy of twentieth-century fascist and to- talitarian movements. He comes closest to home, not so much in his pro?le of the leadership of these movements (though his Inquisitor does uncannily pre?gure the Ayatollah Khomeini), as in his vision of their followers: modern men and women who grow up in a state of partial freedom but who ?nd this freedom so terrifying that they are willing to sacri?ce everything, even their lives, to any leader or movement that will take this freedom away. The Grand Inquisitor can teach modernists that they are in a far more precarious and vulnerable position than they think. Marx and his whole generation canonized Prometheus as their primary cul? ture hero. After the Grand Inquisitor, modernists may remember how many people out there are rooting for Zeus, how many would apologize to the gods and give back the ?re if they could. From this point on, if modernism is to grow, it will have to learn to incorporate this potentially fatal undertow into its inner life and development. Dostoevsky?s parable has a remarkably contemporary ring, but in one important way it was anachronistic from the start. The primary source of ?miracle, mystery and authority? in modern times is no longer the church, but the state. A powerful strain in modern thought, starting from the 18-105 generation?~Stirner and Proud- hon, Tocqueville and Thoreau?focuses on decon- structing and denouncing this state. ?The New Idol,? scornfully called it, writing in 1883, in the heyday of the Bismarckian Rez'c/J: State is the name of the coldest of all monsters. Coldly it tells lies; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: the state, am the people. . . Where. there is still a peOple, it does not under stand the state, and hates it as the evil and the 14 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No.1 sin against customs and rights. . . . It will give you everything if you?ll adore it, this new idol: thus it buys the splendor of your virtues and the look of your proud eyes. It will use you as bait. . .. My brothers, do you want to suffocate? . . . Rather break the windows and leap to freedom. Escape from the bad smell! Escape from the steam of these human sacri?ces. . .. One needn?t share optimism about breaking the windows and leaping to freedom?where could one go, after all, except into another state?s jurisdiction?? to get the critical point. Indeed, we could even argue, as Max Weber did, that the more indispensable the state is to all modern people and peeples, the more oppressive and dangerous it is bound to be. 1 might well have agreed. His aim was not to promote any particular escape route. Rather it was tp convince his readers that they didn?t have to let themselves be absorbed by gigantic institutions?to strengthen these readers to the point where they could believe in their own inner Strength. If institutions of social control grew strong, modern men and women could grow even stronger. If modern people found themselves devalued, they had the capacity to overcome and create new values. Here expressed, and deepened, the basic modernist faith. 'livo of images?the tragic image of human sacri?ce to malevolent gods and the black-comic image of men used as bait, killed as promiscuously as flies? propel us into the World War I era, more particularly into the second half of the war. Images like would not have rung a bell with many Europeans in August 1914, when immense crowds danced in the streets of every European capital, and masses of men jammed the recruiting of?ces. Modernists were among the dancers. and' they marched off joyfully to the battlefront. This chauvinistic fervor?rare in the history of modernism, whose horizon has nearly always been international?- needs some explanation. World War I broke out in the midst of one of the most creative periods, not merely in the history of modernism, but in the whole history of culture. Cubism, futurism, and the ?rst great leaps into abstract art; the theories of relativity and indeter- minacy in physics; poetry and literature that shattered all the old unities of space and time; automobiles and airplanes, and electri?ed cities; breakthroughs in cinema, radio, and sound re- cording; the emergence of a whole array of new mass media?it sounds like an understatement to call this a revolutionary age. The modernists of 1914 were breathless in their ad? (Continued on p. 81)? for someone who doesn?t want to gut Social Security can?t really be a con- servative vote. Yet in presidential voting in the 19805, large sections of the elec- torate have responded positively to what they understand to be conserva- tive stances, and they increasingly at- tach a negative meaning to liberalism as a political category. Vorers reject arguments that seem to signal a general increase in federal, social, and eco~ nomic regulation, not to mention direct planning. hen as perceptive as Cloward and Piven use such over" heated rhetoric to deny the reality of a popular conservative political shift in the US, my guess is that they fear that to identify such a shift is to ratify it or at least to conceive of it as fixed into the inde?nite future. But recognizing real shifts and re- thinking political choices are essential to creating new political realities. Poli- tical views are not as linked to immediate socioeconomic patterns as Cloward and Piven suggest, and politi- cal argument is more important than they seem to allow. We should recognize a substantial shift to the right in Ameri- can politics, try to understand its sources both in popular experience and elite advocacy, and consider how another political dynamic might be set in motion. TIKKUN Discussion Groups As Tz'ileemz becomes one of the most widely read intellectual/political maga- zines in America, groups of people meet regularly throughout North America to discuss speci?c articles or editorials. Coming together once every two weeks or once a month, Tz?kkmz discussion groups provide a way for people to connect with Others who share their interests. If you'd like to be in a discussion group, the following people have volun- teered to be contact people. If there is no one in your area who is organizing a group, and you would like to be a contaCt person, write us at 5100 Leona Street, Oakland, California, 94619. We will be happy to help you ?gure out how to get connected to other Tricky): readers. California: Program Director Berkeley, 415-848-0237; Dennie Ann Denton, Laguna Beach, 714-497-2145; Ellis Atkins, San Diego, 619-431-3071; Barry Gurdin, San Francisco, 415-759-1846; Leon G. Kasseff, San Mateo, 415-340- 9084; Ruth Robinson, Santa Monica, 213-392-2615; Dennis Cohen, Studio City, 818-763-879? Connecticut: Judith and Bill Kudon, Southbury, 203-264-6007 District of Columbia: Tasha A. Tenenbaum, \Vashington, 202-483-8907 Florida: Herb Altman, Boynton Beach, 407-734-1805 Illinois: Reva l-lorwitz, Chicago, 312-493-3081 Kansas: Rabbi Daniel Horwitz, Prairie Village, 913-642-6460; Ray Anderson, Wichita, 316-686-7100 Kentucky: Vicki M. Pettus, Frankfort, 502-227-9986, 502-564-6716 Maryland: Michael Sanow, Baltimore, 301-358-7668 or 764-0115 Massachusetts: Kevin Hale, Rowe, 413-339-8580; Brian Rice McCarthy, Worcester, 617-791-8434 Michigan: Dr. Angleine Theisen, E. Lansing, 517-3931950, 5173514081; Dr. Michael Boblett, Southlield, 313-354-4488; Ann Parker, West Bloom?eld, 313661-1000 New York: Sue Ellen Dodell, Bronx, 212?549- 6886; Bryna Millman, New York City, 212-691-7840; Dr. Solomon Levine, N. Woodmere, 516-374-7900 New jersey: Robert Wechsler, Highland Park, 201-572-0816 Ohio: Leon and Miriam Sterling, S. Euclid, Gelles, S. Euclid, 216-421-2424 Oregon: Judah Bierman, Lake Oswego, 503-636-9769; Lisa Magloff, Portland, 503-235-9133 Texas: Evelyn Erickson, Austin, 5124428849 Virginia: Joshua Greene, Fairfax, TUB-4254564 W'ashington: David Tatelman, Seattle, 206-783-3763 CANADA: Nathan l?l. Gilbert, Toronto, 4_16-537-2278 MODERNISM Continued from p. 14) miration for these new breakthroughs; the critical per- Spective that had always marked modernist art and thought shattered like the planes in a cubist painting. The modernists identi?ed with speed, bursts of light, and explosive ?repower; they named their magazines Bowl? and Blast}, and they looked forward to seeing modernism put into practice on a spectacular scale. French cubists and German expressionists used all their talents to create elaborate camou?age, proud to help their respective soldiers kill each other. Proust?s Baron Charlus stood on Paris roofs during air raids, singing Wagner arias and saluting a spectacle that was at once high tech and primeval. By early 1917, however, the modernists who were still alive (many of the mosr creative were dead} had come to see the horror of the war: far from being an expression of heightened creativity, the war had reduced humankind to the most helpless and alienated sort of passivity. ?Neither race had won, nor could win, the War,? said the poet Edmund Blunden after surviving the disastrous Battle of the Somme. ?The War had won, and would go on winning.? Thus, if the Italian futurists of 1914 to 1916 typi?ed the modernism oi the war's start, the Central European TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 1 81 dadaists of 1917 to 1920 best expressed the modernism of the war?s end. Their outrages and provocations were meant to shock people into reflecting on what had been done to them and what they might do in return. Although this movement didn?t last long, it still helped to expand people?s minds?often against their will?to the point where the people pulled down several predatory empires and struggled, for awhile at least, to create modern society anew. ne of the great works of modernist self- educarion, written in the midst of the war, was Freud?s 1915 essay, ?Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.? Freud tried to understand what forces had erupted within modern men and women that led them to press all their energy and creativity into the service of mutual assured destrucrion. He guessed that the scienti?c, artistic, and organizational triumphs of modern civilization had imposed unreasonably high ethical demands upon humanity, which eventually ex- tracted devastating costs. In the respectable world of the prewar middle class, men and women were forced to repress their strongest and deepest feelings? not only sexual feelings, but, at least as important, feel- ings of terror and violent anger?and therefore ?to live beyond their means.? In August 1914 the respectable facades had finally cracked. The war made it clear, Freud said, that ?the state forbids wrong- doing and violence, not, however, in order to abolish it, but in order to monopolize it.? The modern state enlisted people who were seething with repressed rage? rage against parents, children, siblings, authorities? and mobilized them to displace their unresolved private enmity onto socially sanctioned public enemies. Freud's clinical work had taught him how many people there were in modern society whose were like bombs ready to explode; the war taught him how willing and able the modern state was to supply detonators and targets. In uniform, normally peaceful and decent men could perpetrate unthinkable atrocities and not only avoid criminal arrest, but win medals and praise in the daytime?and, because the state assumed responsibility for their actions, sleep well at night. Freud?s insight into the dynamics of patriotic gore is developed and deepened in his most important late work, Civilization and It: Discontent; The book teaches a climax with what may be the de?nitive vision of the contradictions of modern life: Men have gained control of the forces of nature to such an extent that, by using their powers, they would have no dif?culty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their 82 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 1 he - unhappiness, and their mood of anxiety Modern men and women are in desperate need of self-knowledge if we are going to gain the power to protecr ourselves from our own might. But it is not enough merely to defuse ourselves; we moderns must ?nd a way to live. After summarizing the profound destructive forces around and within us, Freud adds-and ends the book this way: ?And now we may hOpe that the other of the two primal forces, eternal Eros, will put forth his Strength so as to main- tain himself alongside his immortal adversary.? Thus, the drive for self-knowledge that forces us to see through our world and our place in it, and brings us face to face with our heart of darkness, will bind us together in a new and more viable life. The dreaded negative powers of modernism turn out to be driven by the power of love. Freud?s lifelong critical quarrel with the modern world ends with a dialectical hope. Having laid out the paradigms of modern society and modernist culture, I will now briefly characterize several attempts to establish ?postmodern? culture over the last twenty years or so; then I will focus briefly on several roughly contemporary works, works that I think are doing what modernism has always done and that Show how, in spite of many obituaries, modernism is alive and kicking. The ?rst postmodernism emerged in the bohemian enclaves of American cities about 1960. It sprang from the people who invented happenings, assemblages, en- vironments, and the art that would later be called pop art?people who, without knowing it, were inventing the 19605. For the most part, they were too busy to worry about labels. But they were at leasr intermittently willing to answer to a postmodern label because they all despised the cultural orthodoxy that seemed to preempt the label of modernism in the 19505. This orthodoxy, hard to recapture today, was narrow, sol- emn, and hieratic. Its high priest was T. 3. Eliot, not the revolutionary poet who wrote ?The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock? and ?The \Wasteland,? but the grey eminence ?Mr. Eliot,? a clerical personage who pres- ided over culture as over a sepulcher and demanded that art be treated with the hushed reverence due to the dead. The worldview of this orthodox culture is character- ized aptly by Norman 0. Brown (in sze Against Death, 3 book that helped to shatter it} as ?the politics of sin, cynicism and despair.? Its overseers were ever vigilant in warding off threats to ?high art" from ?mass culture,? as if art were a delicate antique that could be shattered by any loud noise or strong vibration. Moreover, these overseers demanded that practitioners of each art form should forsake all others and should concern themselves only with the essence of their particular discipline. Thus, the only legitimate subject of painting was the nature of painting, all poetry had to be about poetry, and so on. Nothing would have appalled the 19505 trustees of culture more than the idea that serious art could be fun. The new wave of artiSts in the early 1960s, by contrast, struggled to make art fun. They mixed media, styles, and genres, incorporated in their work motifs from the mass media and from large chunks of the industrial world, and brought art out of the studios and into the streets. The critic Leslie Fiedler?s formula for this new wave was ?Cross the border, close the gap." am for an art that tells you the time of day,? said Claes Oldenburg, ?an art that helps old ladies across the street.? These artists opened culture to the immense variety and richness of materials, images, and ideas that the exploding ?global village? of the great postwar boom was bringing forth. The new faces of the sixties were more active politically, and far more radical in their hopes, than were the modernists of the cold war years. At the same time, they were in love with the world they wanted to change. The spirit of those times still lives in Allen Ginsberg?s poem ?America,? in James Rosenquists?s mural and in Bob Dylan?s song ?Desolation Row.? It is all there in a wonderful phrase fromjean-Luc Godard: ?the children ofMarx and Coca- Cola.? This generation often thought of itself as post- modern, and, compared with the modernist patriarchs of the 19505, it was. But the children of Marx and Coca-Cola have a far better claim than do their prede- cessors to the spirit and honor of modernism: they engaged the contradictions of their times, Struggling to make the teeming and boiling society of the sixties their own. the ?rst wave of posrmoderns was composed of the people who invented the 19605, the second {and still current) wave is a strange combination of people who were born too early to participate actively in the sixties and people who were born too late and therefore missed the sixties. This postmodernism was created by Parisian academics who spent their whole lives as members of the enviably privileged French mandarin class. For two minutes in May 1968, their lives were transligured?a terrible beauty was born; in two minutes more, all their hopes were dead. The postmodernisms of the past twenty years grew out of this trauma, and also out of a refusal to confront it. Instead, the Left Bank exploded with all the feverish rhetoric and sectarian fanaticism that typify radical politics at its worst, combined with a total abdication of concern for political issues in the grubby real world. (Indeed, it was typical of Parisian postmodernism to insist that there was no such thing as a real world: as Jacques Derrida said, there is ?nothing outside the Derrida, Roland Barthes, jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, jean Baudrillard, and their legions of followers appropriated the whole modernist language of radical breakthrough, wrenched it out of its moral and political context, and transformed it into a purely aesthetic language game. Eroticism, revolurion, terrorism, dia- bolical possession, and apocalypse were now simply ways of playing with words and signifiers and texts. As such, they could be experienced and enjoyed?jomr and jbaissmice, Roland Barthes?s favorite words?without engaging in any action, taking any risks, or paying any human costs. If modernism found both ful?llment and defeat in the streets, postmodernism saved its believers the trouble of having to go out at all. One could be ultraradical without ever leaving one?s desk. If this is nihilism (and these postmoderns are constantly invoking and Heidegger to show that it is}, it is a radically new form of nihilism?nihilism without tears. The ?rsr time it was tragedy; the second time it?s farce. When this production crossed the Atlantic amidst great fanfare and played to full houses of people who bowed their heads in awe instead of laughing, I was mystified for awhile. Then I noticed that the mosr devoted followers of French postmodernism were rather younger than I was, and, in fact, were people who were too young for the 19605. Coming of age in the 19705, they inherited all the bitterness of the sixties left and the Vietnam War generation without any of our experience of protraCted struggle leading to limited but signi?cant changes in the world. This generation appropriated and deepened all our radical negations but ignored our radical hopes. The most impressive achievement of this 19705 generation, it seems to me, is punk rock: a medium that dramat?i'zes, in the most compelling way, a state of radical negation without radical hOpe, and yet manages to create some sort of hope out of its overflow of energy and honesty and the communal solidarity it ignites in its audience. I have recently been reading Jean Baudrillard, the most recent postmodern pretender and the object of cultic adulation in downtown art scenes all over America today. Here is a bit of Baudrillard, just enough to convey the ?avor: The end of labor. The end of producrion. The end of political economy. The end of the dialectic signifier/signi?ed, which permitted an accumulation of knowledge and mean- ingcapital accumulation and VOL. 4, NO. 1 83 social production. The end of linear discourse. The end of the classic era of the signproduction. . .. Power is no longer present except to conceal the fact that there is . Illusion is no longer possible because reality is no longer possible. . .. Having read these words, I began thinking to myself, Where have I heard all this before? Then I remembered. I turned to my record collectiOn. It was the Fugs' ?January nothing, February nothing, March and April nothing. . .. Capital and labor, still more nothing, Agri- business nothing.? It was the Sex Pistols? ?No Future? shouted all night till the band members drOpped. It was Flipper?s Not to believe what you believe, Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing." It was the Minutemen?s ?No heart/soul, no working at that goal. . .. Not living/ dying, life just means No world/no fair, lost hOpe, I no longer care.? - We can feel the metaphysical af?nities here, yet they speak in such different voices! The punks put themselves on the line; the desolation of their world ?lls them with dread; they open up their inner wounds, in the vein of Rousseau and Baudelaire, Artaud and Billie Holiday, Jackson Pollock and Sylvia Plath; in their musical and emotional contortions they are trying (as urged us all to try) to break the windows and leap to freedom. Their spirit moves in the orbit of modernism, whether they know it or not. The voice of the postmodern mandarins, by contrast, seems to emanate from a very different and distant space. They don?t say ?lost hope/I no longer care,??maybe because the supposed death of the subject precludes it?but they manage to sound like they mean it. They announce The End of All Things in tones of serene aplomb, proclaim incoherence in elegant neoclassical antitheses, and assert with dOgmatic self-assurance the impossibility of truth and the death of the self. It sounds as if, after the failure of their one great leap into actuality, back in 1968, they collectively decided never to go Out again?to seal up the windows and convince themselves that there is nothing out there. Like the pharaohs, they have built themselves a grand, luxurious tomb; it?s a splendid setting for a postlife, a ?ne place to stay cool. But is the postsixties generation really ready to join this kingdom of shades, to collectively die without ever having lived? Let me appeal to them?no doubt, to some of you?with a 19605 slogan: Hell no, don?t go! at Finally, I want to address some of the ways in which modernism is continuing to evolve. The artists I will mention?Laurie Anderson, Maya Lin, and Les 84 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 1 Levine?are all concerned with creating some sort of public space or common wavelength in a radically privatized and fragmented world. Laurie Anderson?s world often seems to bear some of the hallmarks of the postmodern worldview: landscapes as cold and lifeless as outer space (often they are outer space, courtesy of NASA), with cold and darkness en- veloping us all; people engaging in arguments with their shadows, mirror images, magni?cations, or computer clones; hypnotic trance music, electronically made; photographs, shadows, drawings, simulations, and mon~ rages layered or blended with real things and people; communication that seems and erratic at best? the theater we're in feels like a high-tech version of Plato?s cave. But Anderson?s stance toward this weird world is radically different from the postmodern per- spective. When she brings her United States to life, she is always there, at or near the center of the stage, gliding or rushing about from microphone to from vocoder to electric violin: she is the subject of everything that is said or sung, played or portrayed?in- cestuous families, missile silos in farmers' barns, mothers who blend with oil wells and bombs, tigers breaking into family picnics (and becoming part of the family), amorous encounters with President Carter, flights from Stranglers on the Hollywood Freeway, In- dians confessing to anthropologists that they really never knew their tribal chants, travelers in search of towns that are purely hypothetical, and more. So she goes, propelled by an amazingly rich imagina- tion: United States is the of thing James Joyce might have created if he had had cybernetics to work with. The enormous world that rotates around her looks like an update of Chaplin?s Modem Times?only this time the human controls the machines. ?There are ten million stories in the Naked City,? she says, as flash on the screen, ?but no one can re- member which is theirs.? She is determined to ?nd out, both for herself and for us all. United States ends with Anderson onstage alone in darkness, looking toward us, with fog lights shining from her eyes. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, dedicated in 1982, shows how the idioms of the modernist movement in architecture, so often criticized for sup- posed indifference to the historical, may be uniquely qualified to tell the truth about contemporary history. The memorial?s design is distinguished in its purity of form, its open and gently flowing space; it displays an austere honesty in its use of materials and in the direct- ness and simplicity of its gestures. Furthermore, the memorial is as remarkable for what it leaves out as for what it says. It leaves out all the grandiloquence, pomposity, and vainglory that have poisoned so many monuments?and, indeed, so many wars?through the ages. This memorial?s rejection of historic associations enables it to create a prorected Space?we might say, a fortress without walls?where everything is honest and clean. It brings us back to Hemingway?s insight, in A Farewell to Arms, that, for the men who were under lire in the Great War, ?abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the date." The memorial gives us virtually nothing but the names, and it reminds us how, in design as in writing, the sparest and most reductive modes of modernism can be im- mensely liberating: they can set free from lies and give us space to make a fresh start so that we can construct personal and public lives of which we won?t have to be ashamed. We move down a gentle slope in the landscape, drawn forward by the giant extended wings that form the memorial?s walls. As we get closer to the thousands of names, we see ourselves reflected in the black granite with amazing vividness: we may never have seen ourselves so clearly till now. Everybody who goes through this experience cries. We all cry here, no matter how we felt, or what we did, about the war. The Vietnam Veteran?s Memorial shows how modernism can help us look the negative in the face and live with it it shows us how to open up our wounds together so that we can begin to heal themstart to be a community. I?ve focused on modernism?s capacity to heal. But this emphasis shouldn?t lead us to think that it has lost its flair for making trouble. The New York conceptual artist Les Levine made plenty of that in 1985, when he was invited to create a series of giant billboards over all the streets of London. Levine, a from Dublin, went up to Derry in Northern Ireland, where he took a series of photos of Catholics and Protestants threaten- ing each other and Haunting their banners and guns. He turned the photos into enormous paintings, in strong industrial colors, with a tonality that is aggressively flat and crude. He made these people dreadful to look at, in ways that remind us of the post?World War I caricatures of George Grosz. But the captions, in huge block letters, are even more disturbing: all the words, in different but inescapable ways, accuse and implicate God. Thus, overlaid on a grim and worn old lady and an undernourished boy, Levine inscribed a command to STARVE GOD. Over a huddled squad of British soldiers in battle fatigues, ATTACK GOD. Over Loyalist patriots waving their flags (one has actually turned herself into a ?ag) and grimacing at the camera, PARADE GOD. Over a squad of border guards beaming lights at us through barbed wire, BLOCK GOD. Over a soldier prodding a blanketed corpse with his gun, while an old man in shock turns his face away from us and toward the ground, KILL GOD. Over an urban ruin, BOMB con. And so it goes. Mounted together in an art gallery and displayed as paintings, these works are devastating, in the vein of Leon Golub's Mercenaries and Interrogations paintings. Displayed as billboards along the London streets (as they were in September 1985), incorporated into the mass media, sandwiched in between advertisements for tires, cigarettes, and Rambo, they had an even more explosive impact. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London has reproduced some of the many letters and editorials that express unmediated hysterical panic. The posters seem to have forced a large assortment of people to think quickly and intensely, not only about their relationship to the troubles in Ireland, but about the meaning of history and human life itself. And thinking in this way seems to be too dif?cult for many people to bear. They have not been consoled by the hopes expressed in some of the posters??h0pes that they, or people like them, might have (or could gain) the capacity to PROTECT GOD and even to CREATE GOD. Les Levine seems to have spoken more truth than he thought he knew, just as he has penetrated deeper into people?s inner lives than he meant to go. Works like these should make it clear to us what modernism is for: to force modern men and women to come to terms with themselves and their world, to pour the heaviest and deepest meanings in modern life out on the street. Thus we have returned to where we began: modernism in the streets. It may be that the most exciting modernist work of the 19803 will turn out to be the people of Manila?s collective creation. In January 1986 they spilled out into the streets and onto the boulevards, waved homemade signs proclaiming ?People Power,? looked into the eyes of the soldiers who were sent out to shoot them, placed flowers in the rifle barrels and around the bayonets, and somehow, amazingly, got the soldiers to lay down their arms. These crowds don't seem to have been very well-organized (and they are not much better organized today). They don?t seem to have had a very clear idea of what they were ?ghting for-?though they did know exactly what they were fighting against. Their ?People Power? was both naive and ambiguous; yet, like so much innovative modernist art, it was open- ended, reaching toward a future in which its meaning could be worked out. There was something absurd about their whole enter- prise, and even they seem to have grasped the absurdity. Still, they showed us that modern men and women do not have to live out their lives as passive objects or TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 1 85 martyred victims, that they can seize the day and make a real difference. I wouldn?t be surprised if we were to see more days like those in Manila in the years to come. Indeed, people may today be learning to recognize each other, and recognize themselves, on city streets all over the world. So long as they do, I think we can say modernism is alive and well. SURVIVING A BUSH PRESIDENCY (Continued from p. 18) they do need to be reconceptualized within this broader framework. This kind of transformation will take money, organizers, individuals willing to dedicate their time to promoting these ideas, and most of all, people with the courage to rethink basic political and social assumptions without giving up their fundamental commitment to equality, peace, freedom, and human dignity. The transformation will also take a new spirit?a spirit more like that of the sixties than that of the eighties. While politics cannot always be fun, it can be full of humor, innovation, excitement, and creativity. The energy of the sixties can energize the New Demo- cratic Party. 3. The New Democratic Party should foster a nation- wide discussion of social and ethical values. Tele- vision advertisements should dramatize the ways that the present organization of American society destroys loving relationships, undermines families, and encour- ages children to develop sel?sh and self-destructive values. Public forums, teach-ins, community meetings sponsored by the New Democrats should insist on the primacy of values. Elected of?cials at the city, state, and national levels should hold public hearings about the problems in family life, the world of work, and education?and should engage in a vigorous values debate with the right. Their goal should be to encourage people at every level of society to begin to think of the kinds of societal changes that are necessary to produce people who both treasure individual freedom and are able to be giving, loving, caring, spiritually sensitive, and ethically responsible. In the national discussion of values, we should reject a society that sees the individual as the center of exis- tence. \Ve must insist that human beings are funda- mentally in relationship with others, in need of one anorher, and that interdependence is ontologically prior to individual autonomy. While fiercely resisting the right-wing attempt to undermine human freedom or to establish coercive norms that prevent individual self-realization, we should simultaneously insist that the fully healthy human being is one who is involved in a network of loving relationships. The healthy human being, we should insist, is not the person who has 86 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 1 Cassette Tapes from The TIKKUN Conference Reconstituting the Progressive Tradition of American Jewish intellectuals New York, Dec. 18-20, 1988 For information write: Tikkun Tapes: 5100 Leona St., Oakland, CA 94619. or call 4154820805 learned to stand alone and cope, but the person who can acknowledge his/her neediness and can simulta- neously experience the neediness of others not as a threat or a sti?ing demand but as an opportunity for mutuality and shared compassion. This is a very different basis for politics than the politics of ?let everybody do their own thing.? Our highest goal is not to leave everybody alone, but to eliminate the external social, economic, political, and barriers that undermine our ability to love and care for one anOther. Our critique of a com- petitive market society is not just that it is unfair, but that it creates human beings who are morally insensitive, spiritually deadened, and crippled. The New Democratic Party should foster a nation- wide movement of study groups and consciousness- raising groups that focuses on the relationship between personal life and external economic and social struc- tures, and that aims both at reducing self-blaming and empowering people to engage in social change activities. The success of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health in attracting hundreds of rank-and??le working people to its occupational stress groups illustrates the appeal that such groups might have. The institute was formed in California twelve years ago with the goal of creating a mass of empowerment for the average American. \What the institute experience re- vealed was this: many working people are hungry to talk about their lives, but they also believe that doing so involves confronting the aspects of their lives about which they are most ashamed. So we face a circular task: in order for people to engage ii?l discussions that would enable them to reduce their self-blaming, they ?rst need to overcome the self-blaming enough to feel that it?s to have personal problems.? The solution involves the following steps: The leaders of the consciousness-raising groups must Clearly indicate that these groups are not ?therapy groups,? but ?training groups" that teach people to