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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the feelings" (as John Stuart Mill called it) as an antidote to the
culture of acquisition. But the attempt to insulate art from everyday life
intensified the very traits Rahv deplored in early American writing-its
subjectivity, its absorption with private experience, its remoteness from
the larger world of collective activity-,-and thus deprived the modernist
tradition of the capacity to criticize industrial society on its own terms.
Rahv's charge that the nineteenth-century American classics made a
"cult of personal relations" applied to the whole modernist revolt.
or did the growth of a class of professional intellectuals improve
matters. In his essay on the cult of experience in American writing,
Rahv attributed the backwardness of nineteenth-century American
culture to the absence of an organized intelligentsia. A more rigorous
ana lysis would have suggested that the emergence of an alienated
intellectual class, in America as in Russia, widened the gap between
culture and practical life and rendered the "critical traditions of
modern thought" increasingly innocuous. A criticism of modern life
that tried to make a virtue of its "separation from the mass" ended by
becoming in its own right an object of mass consumption.
As
the
rhetoric of loss, estrangement, and anxiety entered popular culture,
alienation became no more than an "alternative life-style." Ideas
formerly associated with criticism of capitalism became part of the
cultural apparatus essential to its survival. The intellectual avant–
garde now experiments, in effect, with new styles of consumption,
testing them before they go on the mass market. Its routinized search
for novelty conforms almost perfectly to the requirements of an
economy dependent on planned obsolescence and rapid shifts of
cultural fashion.
The "psychology of consumption" can no longer be separated
from the liberated "ideology evolved in intellectual circles." They
belong to the same configuration of historical forces. The development
of advanced industrial society has made theories and practice based on
the assumption of an avant-garde untenable, in art as in politics.
Rahv's inability
to
come to grips with this development limits even the
best of his work. His defense of critical modernism served a useful
purpose in the late thirties, when the very idea of artistic autonomy was
under attack from the Stalinist Left, but it does little to illuminate
more recent events.
