424
CLEMENT GREENBERG
Yippies
&
Mark Rudds that embarrassed middle-class intellectuals had
been insulting
&
cursing and regretting for years.
But now we are all in same boat.
The war is only the most obvious exhibition of planetary biocide
in which we as a nation (consuming half the world's raw material
production with only 6% of world population) are involved. How can
avant-garde or middle class hope to escape self-created holocaust? Pave–
ments cracked and electric-petrochemical systems broken down?
As the seriousness of the fix settles in on all consciousness, a few
squawky politicians and intellectuals who always liked the war anyway
will begin claiming the avant-garde went too far (not the government
and petrochemical industries and universities ) and now's the time for
labeling protest in the museum, as if future history were to be a static
intellectual museum rather than a strangely psychedelic Ghost Dance.
Asceticism, reduction in living standard, flower power, reversal of
conspicuous consumption capitalism's growth mania (always promoted
by real estate speculators and usurers as Pound insisted fifty years ago)
&
exploration of inner territory will be my themes in whatever Salvation
Opera we invent together.
Regarding poetics, continued recovery of community ritual modes
will be my own effort. What kind of song can a million lonely middle–
class pro-peace demonstrators sing on the streets of Miami
&
San Die–
go, what American mantra can be chanted in unison, what verse forms
suit massive rhythmic behavior to manifest public consciousness to
dumbed leader Mind?
Clement Greenberg
To the extent that I'm acquainted with the "situation" today
I share little of the editors' sense of it. I take it that the situation or
"scene" meant is the "serious" one that's represented in
Partisan Re–
view
itself, in
Modern Occasions, The New York Review of Books, Hud–
son Review, Commentary,
the liberal weeklies,
et
ai.
(I may be all
wrong or half wrong here; in any case I see only two of the magazines
I've named regularly.)
I do notice that some people who criticize the New Left also
animadvert on what I call "avant-gardism." But I don't necessarily see
a real rightward drift here - a drift that goes further to the right than
left of center. What I consider a drift to the right really takes you over
to the right, beyond the center. (And anyhow the terms "left" and
"right" don't belong in discussions of art or culture.) Some other peo–
ple whose politics sound extremely left likewise attack avant-gardism.
The editors refer to such "contradictions" (if those are the ones they
mean) as exceptional. In my limited reading I don't register them as
that. On the other hand, I would grant that there's hardly anyone
I know of who's for far-out art without being for far-out politics too.
