514
STEVEN MARCUS
culture has had the effect of selectively raising the level and improv–
ing the quality of some cultural activities-one thinks of a number of
movies and of certain kinds of popular music at once. One thinks as
well of the increase in the last thirty years of the number of Americans
who have had the opportunity to experience higher education, how–
ever woefully bad that education may be.
3
For these groups the level
of the cultural floor, so
to
speak, has been lifted; at the same time they
have become a new mass market for the culture industry; from its
point of view they are a new mass of consumers to be served, serviced,
and/or exploited as the case may be.
An obvious illustration of a number of these circumstances is to
be found in what is or was called the counter culture. Its conception of
itself included the notions that it represented a real challenge and
threat
to
the authority of contemporary society and culture, and that
it would subvert them on all sides, not the least of which was their
exploitative sides, which it would expose and discredit. The counter
culture itself was put together in large measure out of certain of the
decomposed elements of late bourgeois and early modern culture.
Fragments of the young Marx's analysis of alienation were knocked
onto fragments of Freud's analysis of repression and the inhibitory
nature of culture as we know it
to
produce a doctrine of "liberation."
Authority was to be assaulted and overthrown by the spontaneous
expression of impulse. This diffuse and unfocused activism was aug–
mented by certain other impulses. Fragments of nineteenth-century
communitarian experiments were disinterred and dusted off and
fused with fragments chipped off the great ancient cultures of the
East-i.e. these fragments were themselves decomposed elements of
cultures that are themselves in a state of decomposition. Such things
still linger on. For example, one voice in the current embroilment
over ecology reminds us that the West will never be able to solve its
ecological problems until it adopts "the truth of Zoroastrianism ...
that we are all of one stuff, difference is only in degree, and God can
be conceived as being in all aqd of all, the sublime and divine imma–
nence." Zoroaster
I
Zarathustral BOUM! If that is the case we had better
start looking for another planet, not merely another culture.
4
3. In California today, for example, and for the first time in history, more than half the
age group between 18 and 21 go to college.
4. The foregoing passage is indebted for a number of its formulations to Norman
Birnbaum.
