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"radical" culture unable to transcend the once necessary but now mostly
self-honoring negativism of its origins. In 1969 Brustein blamed the
devaluation of high radical culture on "a failure of nerve among the
middle classes." Their duty is to remain eternally philistine and hostile,
so that subversive intellectuality may have something to subvert - Bru–
stein won't entertain the idea that this "failure of nerve" might have
something to do with a belated stirring of social and political con–
science Out There. "Radical" critics of art and culture, fearful that a
conversion of the gentiles is putting them out of business, are at om"
with that tragicomic tradition of intellectual radicalism in American
politics that lives with the continual nightmare that some viable popul.–
ism will take up and cruden its finely wrought ideas. What are all
those spectators, those citizens, those
students,
doing on the stage?
Brustein rightly sees that his enemy is not simply new radical
politics or social revolution but the very idea of "popular
cultur~,"
which is for him a contradiction in terms. And its characteristics of
topicality and transience, its accessibility to commercial manipulation,
its appeal to simple people as well as complex ones, make popular cul–
ture an attractive and comfortable enemy, especially because one can
then (as Brustein in effect does in the introduction to
Revolution A.s
Theatre)
line up in opposition with Freud, Lawrence, Newman, Nietz–
sche, Ibsen and Marx. Once these dramatic polarities are defined, of
course, the issues get frozen into the Either
jOr
logic of the polemical
cartoonist. To preserve high culture, and the alienated, argumentative,
intensely serious self who preserves it, you cast every radical student
and professor in the role of a fool who's busy destroying it, as in Bru–
stein's picture of the anxious professor who, to get his beastly students
to like him, lets his hair grow, turns in his hornrims for granny glasses
and "stops listening to classical albums and starts to dig the Rolling
Stones and Steppenwolf." Judicious pluralists need not apply.
This is hardly the tone and mood in which to assert the values
- "disinterest," "objective scholarship," "professionalism" - Brustein
means to defend against the theatrics of political, social and cultural
revolution (if that's what it is). One wants to object that Freud, Law–
rence, Nietzsche and the others were not themselves very "professional"
or academic, that our high culture and the political and social styles
attached to it (in the universities and elsewhere) came out of revolu–
tionary acts of mind that have not yet been realized as they were meant
to
be
in the lives of men and women, that an exclusionary defense of
high culture, with its expression of the curator mentality in all its jeal-
