192
PARTISAN REVIEW
d'etre. Now that the bourgeoisie no longer retains any faith in its own
culture and embraces avant-garde styles as its own, the idea of an avant–
garde loses its meaning. Under these conditions, art no longer "resists
being drawn into the web of commodity relations. " On the contrary,
alienation itself becomes a commodity, a fashionable attitude with a
nearly universal appeal on the cultural exchange. At a time when
points of view formerly restricted to the avant-garde have pervaded
popular culture, admittedly in degenerate form, Rahv attempted to
read revolutionary significance into the artist's long-standing feud
with the guardians of respectability. The bourgeoisie in its classic form
had disappeared and its culture lay in ruins; yet Rahv continued
to
write as if assertions of artistic independence, attacks on literary
censorship, and denunciations of middle-class sexual morality consti–
tuted acts of revolutionary defiance.
In the well-known 1952 symposium, "Our Country and Our
Culture" -notable for its celebration of a new accommodation between
intellectuals and American culture-Rahv appealed once again for a
defense of modernism against "neophilistinism." Congratulating
himself on the "vanguard role" he and other independent leftists had
played in the thirties, he argued that avant-garde intellectuals had
developed a tradition of their own, which made a virtue of their
"separation from the mass." Yet his own observation that " the passage
of time had considerably blunted the edge of the old Jamesian com–
plaint as to the barrenness of the native scene" raised the question
whether "separation from the mass" accurately characterized the
intellectual's relation to a permissive, flabby , and endlessly absorbent
culture. Rahv's claim that "parvenu conservatives" threatened the
"critical traditions of modern thought" missed the mark. Traditional–
ism, Protestant neo-orthodoxy, the "tragic view of life," and other
intellectual fashions of the early fifties signaled not a revival of cultural
conservatism but a jaded culture's quest for novelties, a liberal attack
on the intellectual foundations of liberalism, a widespread loss of faith
presenting itself as a rediscovery of faith .
To pretend that religious traditionalism-" utopianism of the
right" -seriously threatened critical modernism, as Rahv wrote in a
1950 symposium on "Religion and the Intellectuals," vastly overrated
the importance of the so-called religious revival. In his own estimation
an embattled secularist, Rahv overlooked a far more important devel–
opment: the growth of a culture so thoroughly secularized, so com–
pletely without moorings in any tradition of thought, that it could
absorb therapeutic doses of religion-or of any other alien influence–
without feeling any effects whatever.
