SIRN SAUM / LASCH
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vulgarity.
It
itself represented the latest incarnation of the American
philistinism which it thought it was opposing. Lionel Trilling recently
published an article in the
American Scholar.
In it he announces, with
genuine regret, that it is no longer possible in this society to promulgate
notions of high culture with any conviction, at least in part because of a new
property ofmodern American culture: a limitless search for a boundaryless
self. He connects this development somehow with mass higher education
and the mass diffusion of high culture, precisely those things which one
would have thought an earlier generation ofliberals would have welcomed.
It seems to me that you were onto something when you talked about
the fear of being negative, but I would think there are two kinds of
negativity. There is a global negativity which argues that everything now is
terrible and therefore we can only defend old positions in an antiquarian
way. And there's a negativity which argues that all the available solutions,
even the old ones, are no good and new ones must be invented .
Lasch:
I agree that there is a great difference between these two positions. The
second refuses among other things
to
set up against the present disorder an
idealized and nostalgically remembered past. Unfortunately, part of the
trouble is that the d\fference is not always easy to perceive when there are no
movements interested in inventing new solutions. In the absence ofany real
political alternatives-the absence of a left-it bc;comes difficult for many
people
to
distinguish between the positions: both of them are opposed to
slogans ofcultural liberation when what the slogans really call for is impulse
gratification, a kind of demand feeding of the self.
.
Birnbaum:
Consider, however, this paradox. The Europeans have the kind of
political movements you say America lacks. European socialism feels itself
revitalized. Yet even there, the impression of cultural exhaustion is
unchanged by a political context much more favorable than our own.
Lasch
:
You see political developments in Europe as much more hopeful than I
do.
Birnbaum:
At the least, one can say that the political space for certain kinds of
cultural experiment or development, a protected cultural space, may be
somewhat larger there.
Lasch:
I'm not sure. That may be only a function of the backwardness of the
culture industry in Europe as compared with the United States, where there
are fewer forces
to
resist its almost total domination of public discussion. I
don't mean that the media in America are necessarily hostile to cultural
experiment. On the contrary, their receptivity
to
changes in cultural
fashion instantly turns all cultural developments into marketable com–
modities, thereby nullifying their capacity
to
provoke thought, let alone
action . Ideas and programs formerly promulgated by the avant garde-the
