Late Modernism. Robert Genter
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Название: Late Modernism

Автор: Robert Genter

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Историческая литература

Серия: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America

isbn: 9780812200072

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СКАЧАТЬ of Burke’s “un-timeliness” was of course his participation in the 1949 “Western Round Table on Modern Art,” discussed in the Introduction. Amid the clamor declaring “the work of art independent of the artist” and the painter uninterested in “the reaction of the public,” Burke wondered aloud whether or not his high modernist counterparts had negated the efficacy of art in general.114 Burke traced the root of the problem to the beginning of the nineteenth century when the study of aesthetics as a singular discipline emerged and theoreticians separated the poetic (“the work in itself, its kind, its properties, the internal relations among its parts, etc.”) from the rhetorical (“the work’s persuasiveness, its appeal”).115 Noting that this decision was the effect of the “specialized nature of our modern culture,” Burke argued that the “systems of symbols,” despite claims to the contrary, used by artists were not different in essence to those used by other specialists. “Each of these symbolic structures,” continued Burke, “is an organized vocabulary which a man learns to manipulate for purposes of expression, discovery and communication” (36). Consequently, since there was no fundamental antithesis between art and rhetoric, there was no reason to keep reinforcing the solipsistic notion that the artist was merely “talking to himself” (33).

      In a reversal of the argument of high modernism, Burke compared the disinterested stance of the formalist poet to the apolitical stance of the postwar scientist who reluctantly but thoroughly abdicated any responsibility for his role in furthering the advances of the Cold War state. While making claims about the purity and disinterested nature of basic research, the scientist refused to acknowledge that his specialized expertise, whether in chemical, biological, or physical research, was often swallowed up by larger military imperatives. Content with severing his role as a “technical expert” from his responsibility as a citizen, the “pure” scientist ignored the political purposes for which his discoveries were used. As Burke sarcastically noted, “the question of what the new force might mean, as released into a social texture emotionally and intellectually unfit to control it, or as surrendered to men whose speciality is professional killing—well, that is simply ‘none of his business,’ as specialist, however great may be his misgivings as father of a family, or as citizen of his nation and of the world.”116 Even those of “good will” associated with organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists, who clamored for international control of atomic energy, assumed that the inherent “morality of their speciality” would protect their discoveries from the ulterior motives of “fiends.” Science, just like art, was never able to fully protect its autonomy. Formalist poets, like their formalist scientific counterparts, accepted modernity’s severing of art and science from the sphere of moral development.

      Or so it seemed. Burke also argued that claims for the purity of each branch of modernity were often merely a cover for motives hidden elsewhere. American critics who argued for the autonomy of scientific research, particularly in light of the pernicious use of science by Fascist countries during World War II, for instance, often used such arguments to overlook the growing relationship between research and development and the Cold War state. Burke argued that hidden behind the claims of high modernism were similar motives. For Burke, “although the cult of the ‘imagination’ is usually urged today by those who champion poetry as a field opposed to science, our investigations would suggest the ironic possibility that they exemplify an aspect of precisely the thinking they would reject” (223). Consequently, Burke turned high modernism on its head, arguing that the growing connection between the New Critics and the New York intellectuals and the emergence of an aggressive Cold War liberalism revealed the actual motives of Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, and others. As he argued in Rhetoric of Motives, “whenever you find a doctrine of ‘nonpolitical’ esthetics affirmed with fervor, look for its politics.”117 Aesthetics, despite claims to the contrary, was nothing but interested. The tradition of late modernism of which Burke was a key figure began with this principle.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Reconsidering the Authoritarian Personality in America: The Sociological Challenge of David Riesman

      IN A 1961 revision of an Art News article, “New York Painting Only Yesterday,” Clement Greenberg, reflective and triumphant, proclaimed that “someday it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism,’ which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’ turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.”1 Greenberg’s celebratory comparison between anti-Communism and modernist aesthetics validated Kenneth Burke’s prescient claim that ulterior motives lurked behind the disinterested stance of high modernism. Indeed, besides their heroic attempt to defend the humanities in a world that had succumbed to the tools of instrumental reason, high modernists in the 1940s and 1950s fought a desperate struggle to salvage the individual from the trappings of modern authoritarian movements threatening the foundations of Western civilization. Although never engaging in the reactionary forms of nationalistic display like many of their intellectual compatriots, high modernists such as Lionel Trilling, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Clement Greenberg, and Allen Tate echoed the rhetoric of many anti-Communist organizations. They also offered their theoretical perspectives to analyze not just the tremors of the Cold War landscape but, more important, the historical developments that had led so many of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Atlantic to abnegate their freedom for the illusionary dreams found in mass movements. High modernists joined with American sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists in dissecting the mental condition of those who had joined totalitarian organizations to determine if such ideologies had any widespread appeal in the United States. The result was a sustained investigation into the psyche of the American people, an investigation that supposedly revealed the frightening possibility that recent historical trends—ranging from economic catastrophe to postindustrialization—had given rise to the same pathological mental state that had plunged Europe into turmoil.

      In this sense, the debates over modernist aesthetics that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s were not merely about formalist practices versus spontaneous poetics or disinterested contemplation versus rhetorical persuasion. Modernists of all stripes were swept up into this larger discussion about the threat that totalitarian ideologies posed to the American public. This debate, which was obviously not confined to modernist circles, was in fact about the fate of the self in an age of mass politics and mass culture—about whether or not the scale of political and economic institutions had usurped the critical capacities of the individual and had thereby paved the way for collectivism. Most high modernists answered in the affirmative; other modernists were less convinced. For instance, many romantic modernists such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer criticized high modernists for inciting a panic over the so-called authoritarian personality in America, a panic that they argued ironically reinforced the compulsive conformity about which Trilling, Adorno, and others were so worried. Similary, those artists and critics who composed the tradition of late modernism fretted over the almost compulsive anti-Communist stance of most high modernists. For instance, in a paper given to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in 1951 titled “On the Limits of Totalitarian Power,” sociologist David Riesman expressed reservations about the overreaction on the part of European commentators who, in their effort to warn the Western world about the appeal of mass movements, failed to understand how the complexities of modern society might mitigate against such movements instead of merely producing them. Speaking to an audience that included Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, and Nathan Leites, Riesman suggested that such critics had overestimated the “psychological pressure” of totalitarian ideologies, particularly in the United States where such fanaticism had made little advance.2 His argument was that liberal organizations such as the Committee for Cultural Freedom had done a much too efficient job of awakening their fellow citizens to the dangerous appeals of authoritarian ideologies, making everyone begin to “greatly overestimate the capacity of totalitarianism to restructure human personality” (415). In his paper, Riesman took to task writers from George Orwell to Aldous Huxley to Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt, all of whom falsely assumed that the СКАЧАТЬ