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idea of alienation for example-have become objects of popular consump–
tion, thanks to the efficiency with which not only the press and television ,
but also the universities, the advertising industry, and guardians of public
morality reproduce almost all forms of culture for a mass market .
What I'm interested in is your notion that there may not , after all , be
an organic connection between culture and politics . Does this mean you
subscribe to Bell 's theory of the disjunction between politics and culture?
Birnbaum :
Bell 's theory of the disjunction of politics and culture is clearly, I
think, a theory of their conjunction. Bell has argued that our administrative
and productive system has reached a point at which the cultural values of
the elite-the bOllfgeois-are irrelevant to the functioning of the system.
In effect , he has supplied us with a renewed or refurbished version of the
theory of the exhaustion of bourgeois culture . At the end , he simply asks ,
" so what? " and demonstrates that the system which has reduced to
impotence the purveyors of these cultural values can and must continue. It
continues , of course , because those in command of the system have
post-bourgeois values which are not modernist but technocratic. They may
indeed be anti-values .
Lasch:
Something he would deny , of course.
Birnbaum:
I suppose that we should honor his denial , but the thrust of his
thought points the other way.
Lasch:
I must say I find compelling but hardly reassuring the argument that
bourgeois culture or high culture in the contemporary economy is
functionally irrelevant. It's quite compatible with a psychological analysis
of modern society that stresses the obsolescence or dysfunction of
conscience and the psychological processes that formerly shaped it .
We do seem to have a society that no longer requires, as psychological
cement , authority and , in particular, paternal authority-at least , not in
the same wayan earlier form of bourgeois society required it. Nor does our
society seem to require the kind of family structures that characterized not
only bourgeois society in earlier stages but many of its predecessors.
Birnbaum
:
Your remark reminds me of one of Mitscherlich' s: his was that a
historical change requires three generations to work itself out . The
grandparents experience the change but transmit (however unintendedly
or unconsciously) older models ofexistence to the next generation , which in
turn struggles with new experience which it has to confront with old
models, historically inappropriate or maladapted psychic structure. Then a
generation is born which can take all of this more or less for granted , can
mobilize its psychic resources
to
meet the real problems of a changed
historical situation . That 's a very crude summary, but it is roughly what the
analysis entails . When we apply it to our present situation however, we have
