Late Modernism. Robert Genter

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СКАЧАТЬ is, a ‘clinical’ case” (220). Indeed, Riesman was much more generous toward his interview subjects than Adorno and his colleagues were to theirs.

      In fact, Riesman pointed to Gibbons’s classmate Joseph Pizzeri as a counterexample. An eighteen-year-old son of Italian immigrants, Pizzeri had learned to cope with his declining social status without resorting to compensatory feelings of superiority over others or repressed frustration. According to Riesman, Pizzeri had found a way to adapt to the traditional values of hard work and obedience without reference to the compulsive need for inner-directed self-improvement or for other-directed social acceptance. As Riesman argued, despite his apparent fixation within the oral stage of personality development (which was expressed by his overattachment to primary groups), Pizzeri did “not at all resemble the sado-masochistic type described by Fromm in Escape from Freedom (or the anti-democratic, authoritarian personality described by Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford)” (163). Whereas Fromm saw orality exclusively in terms of sadistic ingestion, self-aggrandizement, and exploitation, Riesman noted that an oral disposition might also mark a form of receptivity, openness, amiability, and generosity, traits that helped Pizzeri maintain a stable relationship with those around him. In fact, Riesman noted that despite Pizzeri’s tendency toward submissiveness he did not answer in the affirmative any of the questions posed to him that Adorno and his researchers deemed typical of authoritarian personalities. Such examples made Riesman quite wary of holding fast to psychoanalytic categories as explanatory tools.

      Riesman’s difficulties with the assumptions embedded in the social scientific perspective on authoritarian behavior was also evident in his analysis of Walter Poster, a sociology graduate student at Princeton University and the son of Jewish immigrant parents in Minnesota. Poster was, according to Riesman, an example of a character type that did not fall easily under his typology, a person who was neither emphatically inner-directed nor other-directed and who was neither clearly destined for an anomic outlook nor an adjusted one. Instead, Poster, as Riesman originally explained, was a prime example of the rebellious and resentful personality whose ambivalence toward his family had resulted in a pathological projection of his anger from his parents to society as a whole. Echoing Harold Lasswell’s claims in Psychopathology and Politics and Adorno’s findings in The Authoritarian Personality, Riesman argued that Poster was an example of how “affects arising in the personal sphere are displaced upon the public sphere and rationalized in terms of the general good” (529). Unable to assert himself against parental expectations, Poster was unable to define his own identity in any meaningful way, choosing instead to give into his “sado-masochistic tendencies” by sacrificing himself in the name of the larger public good to radical politics. As Riesman explained, “at odds with his father, his solution was to run away from himself and to choose one of the totalitarian political positions which is hostile to the cultivation of the individual self, namely Stalinism” (530). As such, Poster used the party apparatus to escape from his family’s authority without ever engaging in any form of self-realization or self-emergence, marking him as neither inner-directed nor other-directed.

      However, sensitive to the accusation that his own bias against Poster’s political opinions might have clouded his judgment concerning the young man’s character and maturity, Riesman soon believed that his claims regarding Poster’s political fate were too hasty and decided to interview him again four months later. Much to his surprise, Poster, despite Riesman’s belief that his unsettled psychological state would keep Poster “thrashing about” for a prolonged period, had in fact become more “at peace with himself” by ending his “ambivalence” and “animus” toward his family and accepting their “warmth and positive feeling” (544). Equally surprising was that such a resolution to his family turmoil had also resulted in the “sharpening” of Poster’s political position, enabling him to formulate a much more coherent and consistent critique of American society and strengthening his commitment to the Communist cause. As Riesman explained in his revised discussion, Poster’s case history was “an example of how radical political views may in certain situations be less directly related to the family pattern of emotions than in the picture portrayed by Lasswell and taken as the starting point of my original analysis.” Consequently, Riesman cautioned against the tendency within books such as Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer or Milton Rokeach’s The Open and the Closed Mind to regard any form of political allegiance as a form of fanaticism; if anything, Riesman believed that there was something slightly odd, if not pathological, about those who exhibited no rudimentary political attachment. Unlike Harold Lasswell or Lionel Trilling, Riesman refused to consider politics merely “the dumping ground” for private emotional or familial troubles. For him, studies of the authoritarian personality did “not carry us far” in understanding the outlooks, personalities, and political orientations of most, if not all, Americans.⁷⁶ Consequently, Faces in the Crowd was full of hesitations, corrections, and open admissions of speculation, something Riesman found missing in The Authoritarian Personality.

      The second misreading of his book that Riesman challenged was the tendency of hasty readers to equate the rise of other-directedness with everything fundamentally amiss in American culture. Riesman always fretted that the irony and speculation with which he wrote was misinterpreted as nostalgia for an inner-directed world steadily disappearing and as a mockery of the contemporary, other-directed society quickly emerging. In fact, his typology referred only to the mechanisms of conformity, internal and external, that directed individual behavior and not to the actual content or political orientation of any particular character type. All three types, tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed, possessed the capacity for adjusted, anomic, and autonomous behavior. As Riesman explained, “the achievement of autonomy presents quite different problems when it has to be won against a background of inner-direction or of other-direction.”⁷⁷ In fact, he argued that other-directed personalities, continuously attuned to an everyday world of social expectations and demands, possessed a greater sensitivity to others and a greater capacity for understanding individual development. Unlike Erich Fromm, Riesman believed that the loss of the primary ties of blood, soil, and nation allowed for forms of relatedness, care, and compassion missing from earlier forms of social organization and that the weakening of inner-directed restrictions helped to expand everyday notions of the good life. Indeed, Riesman was quite befuddled by reviewers who marked the book as a tragic tale: “Not that Americans today are more conformist—that has always been a profound misinterpretation; and it is not that today’s Americans are peculiar in wanting to impress others or be liked by them; people generally did and do. The difference lies in a greater resonance with others, a heightened self-consciousness about relations to people, and a widening of the circle of people with whom one wants to feel in touch.”⁷⁸ The other-directed self, in this sense, was more responsible and more responsive to the demands for recognition, affection, and love from others within the community of action. Such a self was present to others, for others, and with others in a way that previous character types were not.

      Consequently, where high modernists saw only confusion, dread, and uncertainty as the life-denying consequences of recent social changes, Riesman saw mobility, flexibility, and openness as the life-affirming possibilities. As he explained, “Aldous Huxley’s acidly brilliant vision in Brave New World that advancing mechanization and organization require a graded retrogression in personality development may metaphorically describe what has happened to some people and some cultures, but it is no less true that standardization in machinery (once the earlier, more ferocious stages of industrialization are over) allows us greater rather than less variety in character structure.”⁷⁹ Riesman knew that character types were never a perfect fit; indeed, he seemed more interested in the ways in which individuals struggled and squirmed beneath the roles they had been assigned to play. Character was not destiny, the individual was not merely a replica of a particular social role, and personality was not reducible to a particular stage of psychological development. Willing to experiment with alternative roles in an endless struggle for autonomy, the other-directed personality was more self-aware and more self-conscious than his predecessors and therefore more able “to recognize and respect his own feelings, his own potentialities, [and] his own limitations.”⁸⁰ Although the other-directed personality was intruded upon by myriad visages and voices СКАЧАТЬ