512
STEVEN MARCUS
vote themselves to important problems rather than trivia.
It
would be
false to say that the humanities today are in a violent state of crisis
-they are too diverse and diffuse for that-but they are undeniably
experiencing a loss of self-confidence. Increasingly the parameters of
social change are being set by technological and scientific innovations,
while explanations for human action are increasingly being provided
in the light of the statistical findings and the behavioral assumptions
of the social scientists. In consequence, the social and cultural role of
the humanities, and of the humanist, appears once again to be shrink–
ing, as the area of values and of art seem to be contracting, while the
importance of the cultural traditions of the past-and of maintaining
them-appear once more to be diminishing.
2
Humanists in the university tend to be more or less aware of such
circumstances. Yet something else has happened as well that is even
more difficult to define and speak about with precision. There is a
general sense that something has in fact happened, but it is difficult to
articulate it clearly.
It
is even difficult to locate closely its occurrence in
time or the appearance of its occurrence in consciousness. My nearest
guess is that this consciousness began to surface in the mid-nineteen–
fifties. The first form it took was that modernism, the modernist
movement, was over: the great figures were mostly dead; and in addi–
tion there was a sense that it had realized itself almost as fully as any
other complex set of projects in the history of art and culture. But
after a while another sense began to make itself felt. Something else
appeared to have come to an end or to be coming to an end as well.
We don't have a name for it in America, although they do have a
name for it in Europe, as they also have had the phenomenon in its
fullness. In Europe it is known as bourgeois culture, and has been
known by this name for a long time. In America we call its equiv-
alent high culture, but they aren't the same thing. And what we have
."
'begun to be aware of is that the modernist movements in literature and
art and thought seem to have been the final phases of bourgeois
or high culture. And they were never more so than when they were
most adversary, critical, apparently subversive and elitist-obscure,
hieratic, mystagogical, outrageous. They were the positive fruits of
that culture, even when and especially when they were negating it.
2. I have annexed much of this paragraph from Lawrence Stone.
