Late Modernism. Robert Genter

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ self-sufficient and pioneering individual of early capitalism whose adherence to an ethic of work and productive labor marked the self-discipline needed to confront an ever-expanding and unpredictable environment. In an age of historically new roles and opportunities, the old mechanism of conformity based upon a specific body of social customs and traditions began to collapse and was replaced by a set of behavioral norms and internalized controls instilled by parental authorities, a “psychological gyroscope” that helped the individual commit to his chosen goal or career in the face of social pressures. Reflecting in part Freud’s description of the introjection of parental authority and the subsequent development of “the watchful superego as a socializing agency,” Riesman noted that “the drive instilled in the child is to live up to ideals and to test his ability to be on his own by continuous experiments in self-mastery—instead of by following tradition.”⁶⁷ Embodied in the pioneering spirit of the frontiersmen of American expansion, the inner-directed man confronted the intractability of the world around him through the driving sense of purpose instilled at an early age. Work or productive labor had become the central element in man’s conception of himself, property became a sign of his independence, and discipline became a marker of his self-mastery.

      But with the transition from an economy based upon production, manufacturing, and thrift to one based upon consumption, service, and abundance, a subsequent characterological change had occurred. Borrowing from Fromm’s description of the “marketing orientation,” in which the personal values of adaptation and sociability marked an economic regime based upon the salability of goods and services, Riesman described the shift to an “other-directed” character structure in which the source of direction or discipline was no longer provided by the internalized “gyroscope” derived from parental authority but by the demands and commands of contemporaries, peer groups, and social authorities. Forced to become more self-aware of the opinions of others and abandoned by parents whose authority had little say in a consumer-driven, people-oriented, and interpersonal world, the other-directed person was forced to find a “source of direction” from “either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media” (21). Ever sensitive to the expectations of his peers and trained to pattern his desires on the models offered by the mass media, this new character type developed a sensitive “radar screen” to navigate the ever-shifting judgments of value and worth in an endless search for respect, admiration, and acknowledgment.

      Besides his descriptive typology, Riesman added a “non-historical” dimension to his analysis and provided categories with which to describe the difficult relationship between the individual and the characterological requirements demanded by a particular social structure, noting that there were great disparities in and a wide variety of modes of reconciliation with such pressures. Recognizing that “social character [was] not all of character,” Riesman detailed three “universal types” of reconciliation between the individual and the dominant social character: the first was a relatively painless conformity to such personality requirements that Riesman termed “adjusted”; the second was a refusal to reconcile with those demands that he referred to as “anomic”; and the third was a mature capacity to decide whether or not to conform to behavioral demands that he termed “autonomous” (241). Riesman knew from the biographical detail his research interviews unearthed and from Fromm’s own work that there was never a clear fit between characterological demands and actual individual behavior. Character types, in this sense, were not ontological categories; instead, they were merely abstractions for understanding the general pattern of assimilation and socialization within a given period. In reality, individuals dealt with the demands for conformity in different ways, and Riesman’s empirical evidence pointed to anomic and adjusted inner-directed personalities as well as anomic and adjusted other-directed ones. Guiding his study, however, was the assumption that such personalities might also become autonomous, that is, they might also possess a reflective capacity for choosing whether or not to conform to a given characterological requirement. In the Time magazine profile of his work, the editors offered Riesman himself as the prime example of “an autonomous man,” someone who “mingled” the best ideas of the social sciences and the humanities together and someone who “has tried hard not to bore anybody—or to be bored.”⁶⁸ Readers were left to decide on the implications of such a perspective.

      Published at the nadir of a certain level of national self-analysis, Riesman’s book was quickly linked to the myriad studies that criticized the bureaucratization of American life through recourse to heraldic images of an inner-directed world washed away. Noting his references to Max Weber, Erich Fromm, and other prognosticators of social decline, most early reviewers depicted Riesman as a humanist critic of “‘groupism’ and the zeitgeist.”⁶⁹ Although magazines such as the Nation took him to task for his supposed contribution to the rise of “the new cocktail-and-breezeway Bohemia,” most found his analysis an astute portrait of the ubiquitous malaise under postindustrialism.⁷⁰ Consequently, many high modernists assumed that Riesman shared their critique. For instance, in his review of The Lonely Crowd, Lionel Trilling praised Riesman for avoiding the “jargonistic” and “platitudinous” language of modern sociology and for producing “a work of literature in the old comprehensive sense of the word according to which Hume’s essays are literature, or Gibbon’s history, or Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.”⁷¹ Like the great novels of the past that engaged in “the investigation and criticism of morals and manners,” Riesman’s book, according to Trilling, explored the subtle shifts within American culture by exposing what was occurring in the nation’s factories, schools, families, movie theaters, political parties, and courthouses. Noting that Riesman had detailed contemporary “morals and manners” more thoroughly than any other sociologist, Trilling saw The Lonely Crowd as a compelling rejoinder to the current preeminence of “affability, blandness, [and] lively sensitivity to the opinion of the group” as forms of social adjustment. Trilling asserted that “it is still inner-direction that must seem the more fully human, even in its excess” (97), and he argued that Riesman himself, however hesitantly, echoed such a preference. Autonomy for Trilling meant individualism, and he praised Riesman for salvaging the word from its pejorative and bland uses.

      Despite such praise, Riesman spent years after the original publication of his book trying to correct the misunderstanding that he had outlined a tragic historical decline. In several interviews and a number of new prefaces to the book, Riesman argued that “the authors of The Lonely Crowd [were] not conservatives harking back to a rugged individualism that was once a radical Emersonian ideal.”⁷² In fact, he directly challenged two misreadings. First, despite even some ambivalence of his own, Riesman railed against “the panic doctrine” present in many high modernist works and in the pages of many social science journals that the country was “on the road to fascism.”⁷³ While he appreciated Adorno’s inventive combination of psychological and sociological categories, he resisted “the research assumption that authoritarianism is the main problem facing American society today.”⁷⁴ Most of his hesitancy stemmed from the unexpected findings in his interview materials. Not surprisingly, Riesman discovered several interview subjects who bore a strong resemblance to the ego-weakened, authoritarian personalities found in Adorno’s study, including, for instance, Robert Gibbons, a seventeen-year-old student at a Connecticut trade school whose growing feelings of alienation and declining economic status bore a similarity to the “status-threatened youths in Weimer Germany who were early recruits to Nazism.”⁷⁵ Abandoned by his father, a middle-class office manager, and forced to work part-time to support his mother, Gibbons was unable to relate to his working-class associates and unable to find a proper outlet for his pent-up aggression, choosing instead to vent his frustrations within the political arena by scapegoating foreigners. According to Riesman, Gibbons had never gained the ability to overcome his sense of powerlessness either by relating to others in a healthy way or by using the elements of consumer culture to prop up his identity. Instead, Gibbons remained suspended between the other-directed world of his fellow classmates and the inner-directed environment of his middle-class upbringing, a suspension that Riesman believed might lead to self-destruction or to reactionary political attachments. But Riesman hesitated to pass such judgment, claiming that “all СКАЧАТЬ