PARTISAN REVIEW
491
above all the distinction between imagination and routine, are not con–
sequences of the acceptance of some .modernist message. They come
from the fragmentation and frenzy of lives, by the turning inward of a
techno-bureaucratic society.
The storm rages in a setting dominated by the conflict of the new
empires, and the eruption of the colonized. Within these empires (and,
above all, the Western one) the new forms of industrialism are striking–
ly different from earlier ones. Capitalism, the mixed economies, the state
socialist regimes, are each torn by conflicts over the control of pro–
duction and distribution. The new relations of production oppose
workers to the managerial class, however much it
has
changed. Why
suppose that these conflicts will stabilize at their present intensity or
organization? That mistake was made by the vulgar liberals and vulgar
Marxists of a generation ago. To abstract, moreover, the advanced
societies from their world role is not only parochial, it is, as the domestic
consequences of the American Vietnam campaign show, lacking in a
grasp of historical fact. The political challenge of these developments
is a familiar one: what are the possibilities of a democratic politics?
Many of those who insist that society has a totally altered shape sup–
pose that a technocratic politics, if benign, is the best that we can do.
Perhaps - but our present problems are derived from earlier ones, and
nothing is gained by presupposing a new leap into the future.
It
was
not in a postindustrial society that the claims of the environment were
raised: the "dark satanic mills" are no recent discovery.
One thing is claimed to be new: the pervasive malaise, and its
counterpart, the extraordinary protean quality of the contemporary
personality. The Freudian categories no longer apply, it is said, since
humans are constructed (indeed, have constructed themselves) differ–
ently.
It
would be surprising, however, if a social change could generate
so rapid and sudden a change in character. History may have ac–
celerated, but has it accelerated so much that a psychobiological muta–
tion has occurred? That circumstances may favor certain kinds of
sublimation, defense mechanisms, or symptoms may be true, but this
does not do away with the principle of psychoanalysis. Humans still
struggle with inner demons, as well as outer ones - with inner prob–
lems which accentuate and deepen historical ones. And History unfor–
tunately supplies more evi,dence for the existence of Thanatos than the
proponents of an unlimited Eros would allow.
New concepts can be useful; in our situation they are indispen–
sable. The view, however, that we have entered a posthistorical epoch
cannot be defended . The fruitfu lness of new ideas can
be
judged only
in intellectual (and subsequently, in political) practice. In practice, the
notion that history has been transformed would be more convincing if
the roots of the change were made clearer. The notion of radical dis–
continuity, in the meantime, is yet another road - a hidden one - to
passivity. History remains the central category of the human sciences,
and the idea that history breaks off every decade is fragile at best,
empty at worst.
Norman Birnbaum
