MORRIS DICKSTEIN
189
Walter Benjamin analyzed as the techniques of "mechanical
reproduction" -art books, paperbacks, long-playing records–
enabled a minority culture to be diffused and cannibalized into a
mass taste (which of course had other, more popular roots as
well). Thus the growth of television, which they had attacked,
and the growth of the academy, whose scholars had had little use
for them, made possible a curious triumph for the New York
intellectuals and their cosmopolitan, adversary culture, so that
Lionel Trilling could describe the antics of young people in the
sixties as "modernism in the streets."
I can't begin to sketch the results of this change, for it has
left us with the confusions of our present cultural situation. An
avant-garde culture was transformed when its modernist tech–
niques became the staple of artists, designers, and musicians
across the whole spectrum of the culture, from experimental
fiction to popular lyrics to slick commercials. An adversary
culture, marginal yet linked
to
a potent modern tradition, which
depended for morale and cohesion on a monolithic philistine
society, not only became fashionable but found in the politics
and cu lture of the sixties some large-scale projections of its most
privileged cu ltura l stances.
In
this sense the counterculture of
the sixties was the adversary culture of the intellectuals as a mass
movement, with a ll the attenuation and impurity, the kitsch and
exploitation, that such enlargement inevitably entails.
Today the new cultural forms of the sixties have themselves
become attenuated or archaic, but whatever his position during
that embattled time the intellectual has found no way
to
recover
his old role. The o ld postures of dissidence and clerical authority
have grown hollow-and who's listening?-while the new cult
of celebrity can hardly prove satisfying, or conducive to the best
work. Instead we seem to be living through a transitional period
when cuI ture itself, ·along with higher education, has been
devalued, when society is still willing to pay richly for the
practical applications of mind, at the same time that the spirit of
self-generated play and aimless delight, so vita l to the health of
both intellect and the arts, seems less in demand than at any time
in the past twenty years.
