PAPER: MODERNISM SESSION

Phony Gardens With Real Toads in Them

 

Todd Gztlin

Don ?t ash me any questions. I be seen how things
that seeh their way ?nd their void instead.
There are spaces that ache in the uninhahited air
and in my eyes, completely dressed creaturesnno one
nahed there!
mFederico Garcia Lorca,
1910 (Intermezzo),"
in Poet in New ibrh
(translated by Greg Simon
and Steven F. White)

odernism is, or was, a passion?a wake at

the death of God, a plunging into and past

the heart of darkness. The route was ex nihilo:
out of nothing, something, even everything. Marshall
Berman has written an inspired book about the modern-
ist passion for creative destruction: modernism as the
music of modernity, the sum of the self-creating acts in
which human beings smash up the old world and hurl
themselves into??something else. John Berger writes
about cubism as the inspired discovery, or invention, of
the unity and continuity of the world?the aesthetic
equivalent of the Second International. The one thing
modernism cannot be accused of is smugness: it took
the damage seriously whether promised land.

By contrast, most of what has come to be called post-
modernism makes its dislocated home in a compromised
land. Possibly, if the spirit of modernism is Jewish
(passionate, messianic, redemptive, universalist), then
postmodernism is goyish. Promises, it thinks, are mi-
rages. ?Everybody knows,? as Leonard Cohen says it
on his brilliant recent album~everybody is knowing-?
but nobody knows anything. Around the prevailing
postmodernism?cool postmodernism?is the vast la-
bored weariness and concocted eeriness of deja vu.
The cool postmodernism is a spirit of aftermath and
accommodation?demonstrating that originality is fraud-
ulent by ripping it off; despising human intention by
making a name for yourself. Every belief comes pre-
wrapped in quotation marks. Surface city, here we come.

 

Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at the University of
California, Ber/eeiey, is the author of The Sixties: Years
of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1987), first pithlished in
paperback.

68 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2

Spin the kaleidoscope; round up the usual suspects; sit
down at the language game, shuffle the cards; don?t
bother me about human worlds or freedoms or ex-
perience or heart; reality is another word for nothing
left to lose. The offstage sound is either an extended
yawn or a sitcom laugh track. Irony, which Czeslaw
Milosz has called ?the glory of slaves,? is the universal
solvent. (There are postmodernists who think they in
vented irony.) The world divides between insiders who
get the joke and suckers who are gotten by it.

I?ve had my say recently (New Ybrle Times Boo/e Review,
Nov. 6, i988, and Dissent, Winter 1989) about where this
cool postmodernist mood might have come from?and
I recommend what Susan Sontag (?One Culture and
the New Sensibility,? in Against Interpretation), Fredric
Jameson (?Postmodernism1 or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism,? New Left Review #146), Andreas Huyssen
(After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-
modernism), and Sven Birkerts (An Arti?cial lW/derness)
have written on the subject. I see the phenomenon as
largely generational?post-Vietnam, posrsixties, post?
New Left?and situational: suburban, TV-hip, placeless,
spaceless, surface-bound, frightened of what we might
feel if we took seriously that we live among fellow beings.
Cool postmodernism in this light is bomb damage?
shell shock from bombs that have not yet gone off and
images that have already exploded. It?s the Muzak of
the mall, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mr. grunting a
thick~necked critique of himself. But I also want to say
that alongside the blank look and the glitter of surfaces?
cool postmodernism?there is, or might be, vital post-
modernism?a hot postmodernism of the heart, which
is not a slick capitulation but the unending commitment
and attempt to recover the self from its fragments, and
history from amnesia, and reason from technique; there
is a resistance that is not self-indulgent, a joyous revul-
sion, 21 will ?to undo the folded lie,? as Auden wrote
?fty years ago on the eve of the Second World War-?
and my heart is with that postmodernism; I?ll come
back to it later.

For now I want to speak about the cool post-
modernism, let?s say in the icy version of Andy Warhol,
who has now long since outlived his ?fteen minutes
and ought to be retired, have his silk-screened shirt
hung up in the Hall of?what else?Fame. Suppose

 

 

 

 

that this cool postmodernist mood is an imaginary garden
with real (to use a prepostmodernist expression) roads
in it. Or better, that it is a phony solution to the realest
of problems. Please pardon the abstraction. It?s the
music of our situation that I want to convey.

Here are some intersecting real circumstances in which
art and thought find themselves today.

 

Alongside the Mam/?: [00k and 2/96
gZz'n?er ofrmfaces?COOZ
postmodermsm?t/Jere 2'5, 07* mag/3t [96,
a vital postmodemzsm?

a 1901? of 2/96 been.

 

The ?rst real, burning problem: the impulse to control
the world in the name of order has, to say the least,
failed to forestall carnage. Arguably it has produced
the carnage. Marry the universalist aspirations of the
Enlightenment and the'rationalism of science, and the
fruit is apparently the atomic bomb. Rousseau fathers
the censor. Extend the dream of humanity mastering
nature, and the next thing you know you are bulldozing
rain forests. The road of belief leads to death camps. In
the name of the universal spirit of humanity, so-called
superpowers incinerate peasant villages. In the name of
freedom of speech, the company interrupts this Story to
?ood you with images and ?ll you with emptiness. Prog-
ress paves over ancestral graveyards. Heroes are killers.
Censors are authors. Authors are tyrants. Marxism, by
enshrining labor, and Leninism, by enshrining the party,
erected pyramids of sacri?ce. There are oversimpli?ca-
tions in this?but who cannot live in the closing decades
of this millennium and fail to tremble at the possibility
that these nightmares are ours?

Well, hey, no problem. Cool out with postmod. Smug
it out or punk it out?in either case, fuck it. Disenchant
the world once and for all; change the channel, couch
potato; put on your Chippendale pillbox hat; buy our
thing; there is no here here. Postmodernism masquerades
as revolt the way anorexia masquerades as diet. Thinking
?at, it says, is the best revenge.

A second problem: how on earth to live in a world
of difference? One of the decisive questions is whether
we can live in a world of difference that is not a world
of deference. For me it is particularly a challenge be
cause, as Horace Kallen said, America is a nation of
nationalities. Interdependence is so obvious it has be-
COme this year?s cliche. How to honor diversity and live
with itP?that is the social question for New York, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Yugoslavia. . . . Look
around the Union of Soviet Socialisr Republics and work

out what Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Estonians,
Jews have to say to each other. Look at Guatemala or
Brazil or Rumania or South Africa or Israel/Palestinesee what nation does unto nation,
tribe unto tribe. The nineteenth century threw up two
answers to tribalism?science; and the International?
the unity of the working men and women of all nations.
The back of both was cracked in 1914: science enlisted,
and the working men went off to the slaughter. After that
catasrrophe, what faith could there be in a transcendence
of nations? Meanwhile, the reactionary proposal is to
wrap yourself in the flag and trash bilingualism as the
Antichrist.

ool postmodernism propounds the cool pseudo-

solution: magisterial indifference. Pastiche, mind-

less eclecticism, is phony coexistence along the
meridian of the least common denominator. Instead of
holy war, bland peace. Instead of respect, packaged
tourism. Instead of a sense of history?histories?let
everyone be equally ignorant of the past.

The third problem is the glut and the central control
and circulation of images. Marx observed that when
everything is for sale, nothing is sacred; capital, which
is congealed labor, makes miracles. The late-twentieth-
century addendum is: if it moves, someone will shoot
it?that is, tape it, wrap it in plastic and package it, and
tell you what it means. We are seen, as William Gass
once put it, as the crossharch where the media intersect.
The machinery of surfaces tears text away from context
until context is drowned by a snowfall of surfaces.

Cool postmodernism?s pseudosolution is to submit
to the maelstrom by discovering untold pluralities of
opinion beneath the uniformities of mass culture. Talk
shows as democracy. Discern unfathomable depths in
?The Donna Reed Show.? Divine a common culture in
?Leave It to Beaver? or a culture of resistance in ?Beverly
Hillbillies.?

Finally, perhaps, these three problems become more
or less the same philosophical problem to which the
cool postmodernism is a spurious solution?or a space
holder: the quesrion of the basis for judgment. Russell
proposed logic. Wittgenstein?s idea was to clean up
language. Foucault?s idea was to slide away from a
universal humanism in the name of local values and a
sadomasochistic agon. The Western liberal ideal com-
bines reason with pluralism but gnaws away its own
foundation. In a polyglot world of multiple culture,
where on earth or in heaven is value to be found?

In art and philosophy, the cool postmodernist answer
is a rejection of the absolutes of reasoned universalism
in the name of an equally absolute and dogmatic local-
ism. In the arbitrary equation of all treasures. At worst,
in sentimentality on top of baby talk and nihilism?an

PHONY GARDENS 69

amazing combination. In the name of savvy rebellion,
we hear the arbitrary rejection of all the achievements
of civilization as junk. Ironic leveling and indiscriminate
trashing come together on the premise that autonomous
judgment has to surrender before the market.

The best thing to be said about cool postmodernism
is that it is a holding action?because belief is hokey,
the giants of modernism have been subdued, all the
texts have been endlessly reread and ransacked, and
there are apparently no more giants in the earth. Well,
it does make sense to tolerate the anxiety of our modern
abandonment. And in this abandonment the deeply
unsettling and inspiring project, the unrealized project,
is, more or less, the promise of something else?-call it
a hot postmodernism or a seriously global culture that
would not be brought to us courtesy of McDonald?s.
Not by the imposition of the inaster culture over the
minor, the elite culture over the popular. Rather, the
rock-bottom value, the overriding principle, in a global
culture has to be the preservation of the other. The
revaluation of all value, which proposed, has
to res: on the premise that the conversation and contact
among the values is itself a value. That is why the
politics that follows from the critique
of the Enlightenment is a politics of preservation. The
hallmark is coexistence: that in the preservation of the
other is a condition for the preservation of the self; we

PAPER: Jews AND NEOCONS SESSION

are not we until they are t/aey; for to whom else shall
we speak, with whom else shall we think, if not those
who are different from ourselves? First, preservation of
the living planet from the bomb and the poisons and all
the varieties of reckless endangerment. Second, pre-
servation of the human group from the recklessness
and vanity of other human groups. You do not invade,
you do not occupy, you do not dismantle the history of
nations; you do not rape, you do not destroy the villages
of the others or knock down their houses. Third,
preservation of the self from the group itself.

The ideal toward which politics strives is conversation-?
and conversation requires respect for the other. The fun-
damental value is that the conversation continue toward
the global culture.

That is our political project in the ?n de millennium,
and it is also an aesthetic project: the hot and healthy
culture is never smug about living in weightlessness. It
hears, with Beckett, plain human speech in the garbage.
It knows, with Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective,
that in the swirl of multiple narratives it is worth digging
for bedrock- It knows, with Don DeLiilo, that the manu-
facture of lies can be judged in the face? of more truth?
not absolute truth, that straw injunction, but a more
comprehensive truth. The human voice beneath the
rubble calls out with Blake that energy is eternal life,
life above and over against death. 

The Anti-Communist Past of the
eoconservative Present

 

Ilene Pbilzpron

is often assumed that neoconservatism arose as a
response to the excesses of the New Left during
the sixties. Incipient neoconservative periodicals
such as Commentary, Public Interest, and Partisan Review,
and even the democratic socialist Dissent, often railed
against the New Left?s confrontational style, its romantic
infatuation with violence, its denigration of modernism
and high culture, and its seemingly blind faith inThird
World movements. Intellectuals who were to become

 

Ilene sz?lt'pson is the author of Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the
(Franklin Watts, I988) and coedz'tor of the forthcoming
Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination (Temple Univer-
sity Prerr, 1989).

70 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2

the infamous and in?uential ?neocons? of the seventies
and eighties found the social movements of the sixties
real threats to those liberal institutions of American
society that had allowed them to assimilate, prosper,
and gain a modicum of influence and respect.

While this thesis is manifestly true, it does not ex~
plain why it was primarily Jews, and New York Jews at
that, who were the force behind the neoconservative
movement and who, to this day, remain among its lead-
ing exponents.

It seems to me that it is necessary to look much
further back in history in order to understand the origins
of neoconservatism. For it is in the unique experience of