To the Editor:
After approving my view that aesthetics and politics are “separate realms of existence,” Norman Podhoretz proceeds rather thoroughly to confound them [“Intellectuals at War,” October 1972]. His argument is that the new sensibility and the counter-culture (imprecise and poor terms, but let them do for the moment), along with their derivatives in the contemporary arts, belong not to the history of art but to the “history of publicity and beyond that to the history of politics and more specifically to the history of radical politics. As such they have always exerted their claim to sympathetic attention less on aesthetic than on political grounds, celebrating themselves and being celebrated as weapons in the revolution against American society and not as the matrix of vital and lasting works of art.” Mr. Podhoretz’s plea for a new form of peaceful coexistence between art and middle-class society does not appear to rest on the view that this society offers aesthetic possibilities hitherto unrealized, or ignored. It rests, rather, on the view that political revolution (such as it was and is) against it is unjustified. A defensible position, certainly—but not one which enables us to understand why avant-garde posturing recently became a standard feature of every suburban cocktail party.
Aesthetics and politics are separate, but they are not entirely unrelated. Surely, Mr. Podhoretz would not dismiss Mr. Sammler’s Planet or Rabbit Redux as unworthy of aesthetic consideration because they deal, among other matters, with recent political themes. And Mr. Podhoretz did publish an excerpt from Lionel Trilling’s new book, Sincerity and Authenticity [“Authenticity and the Modern Unconscious,” September 1971], which is a large exploration of the connection among aesthetic experience, the common life, and individual self-definition. Suppose we take a somewhat different approach. Mr. Podhoretz praises the essay, “The Rise and Fall of the Avant-Garde,” by Hilton Kramer [October 1972]. If I have understood Mr. Kramer correctly, he gives ample evidence that the history of art and the history of publicity have—to a distressing extent—merged. Why? This is not the place to recapitulate the cultural history of the West since the Industrial Revolution, and I cannot claim originality in asserting that there is a connection among the internal development of political-economic society, the forms of sensibility, and the organization of artistic production. Politics and aesthetics are different, but politics does impinge upon, even limit, the conditions of aesthetic experience. The inanities and vulgarities of the counter-culture, its caricature of aesthetic modernism, represent a packaging in commodity form of the experience of the avant-garde. Can we live in peace with a society which sells everything, including the search for the limits of experience? I am aware that there are buyers as well as sellers. What are we to say about a society in which the transformation of art into life is thought of as a right, rather like paid vacations? There is no point in mocking, yet once more, the limitless expectations of history’s spoiled children, the educated American middle class. It is more to the point to ask what in their daily lives is so unsatisfactory, so discontinuous with the cultural tradition we have taught them (ever so badly and dimly, I know) in college. It is absurd to suppose that the middle-class society which produced the counter-culture is one with which we ought to make a pact. A critical view of that society, or critical distance from it—embodied in the work of the imagination—is a precondition of aesthetic and intellectual authenticity. It does not follow, of course, that art has to become political propaganda. It does follow that artists and intellectuals have not alone the right but the duty to scrutinize the experience offered us by our institutions. My own objection to the counter-culture (quite apart from the fact that it represents the plebeianization of bohemia) is that it is a poor substitute for a genuine politics, as well as a genuine art. We do have to be careful: a reasonable skepticism in aesthetics about art that is (in the inimitable tribal phase) “with it,” ought not to blind us to the necessity for painful as well as painstaking experimentation in the arts, and in thought as well. Mr. Podhoretz is wrong, in any event, in supposing that the problem of the relationship between art and politics can be dealt with so summarily.
Norman Birnbaum
Amherst, Massachusetts
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Norman Podhoretz writes:
Norman Birnbaum dislikes the counter-culture and the new sensibility as much as I do, and he laments the failure of the colleges to give their students a proper sense of the “cultural tradition.” He is being much too modest, for the truth is that the colleges have been extraordinarily successful in imbuing their students with the attitudes of at least one cultural tradition—that of the avant-garde, and particularly its hatred of bourgeois society. This hatred is the driving force behind both the new sensibility and the counter-culture (as it of course also is of the New Left and to some extent even of the New Politics). In blaming the “inanities and vulgarities” of all these interrelated phenomena on bourgeois society itself, Mr. Birnbaum merely finds yet another justification for hating that society. But if we are to damn bourgeois society for producing the counter-culture, are we to praise it for producing Karl Marx? In any case, why not “make a pact with it”? (I speak, of course, of a spiritual pact, the social contract having long been signed by most American intellectuals, and to judge by the way all of us live, on very good terms too.) Why, moreover, is “peaceful coexistence” a good slogan in talking about the relations among nations and a bad one in talking about the relations among classes and groups? And why, finally, is Mr. Birnbaum so sure that this society does not offer “aesthetic possibilities hitherto unrealized, or ignored”? I have no quarrel with his assertion that “critical distance . . . is a precondition of aesthetic and intellectual authenticity.” Of course it is. Yet for a long time now we have had nothing but the critical perspective, with what results in art and thought we see all around us—in the new sensibility, in the counter-culture, and in the pap that passes for social criticism. Who can tell what might now come of a disposition to look at contemporary life with eyes directed for a change by some emotion more complicated than spite or more interesting than contempt?
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