EUGENE GOODHEART
207
myths of mass culture. In
The Tradition of the New
(1959) Harold
Rosenberg found himself annoyed with "the mentality of those who
keep handling the goods" of what he calls " the cultural supermarket"
while denying any appetite for them. And he singled out Dwight
MacDonald for particular scorn. "MacDonald's taste for kitsch is
largely negative, but it is genuine, at least genuine enough to yield him
the time to become familiar with it. Modern art, however, revolts him;
it gives him as much incentive to get to know it as would the gases in a
condemned mine." Rosenberg was able to exempt himself from this
condition because of his allegiance to high modern art. For Rosenberg
as for Barthes, Marxism is a superannuated doctrine, which frees them
both to engage in a kind of imaginative play with its categories. Like
Marxism; however, modernism has now lost its power of resistance. In
its present phase as exemplified by Barthes (a connoisseur and expo–
nent of modernist litera ture), modernism rather than resisting the
myths of mass culture has fully entered into them. I do not know
whether Rosenberg has had his say about Barthes, but his strictures
against the complicit critics of mass culture would seem to apply when
he writes, "The people I am complaining about are the mass-art
specialists, particularly the profound ones, those who cannot switch to
Channel Four or roll over the corpse in a red chemise without
beholding hidden patterns of the soul and society of contemporary
man." But Barthes's serious and parodic treatment of contemporary
myths would defy Rosenberg's judgment, compelling Rosenberg to
articulate an adequate alternative, given the loss of authority of both
Marxism and modernism.
Having relinquished Marxism as a basis for a demystifying
criticism, Barthes finds himself in the painful negative state of exclu–
sion. The only choice that he says exists for him is unsatisfactory:
"either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and
ideologize, or conversely,
to
posit a reality which is ultimately impene–
trable, irreducible, and in this case, poeticize."
Mythologies
concludes
with a utopian yearning for "a reconciliation between reality and men,
between description and explanation, between object and knowledge."
Barthes has not reconciled the divisions. Indeed, it is a real
question whether the desire for reconciliation is anything more than a
rhetorical flourish, a vestige of an older perspective that the very terms
of Barthes's discourse has made impossible.
If
reality is empty or
inchoate or a structure realized by another semiotic system, it is not
clear that one can speak of reconciliation at all. What are the terms to
be
reconciled?
If
one assumes the ontological otherness of reality, all
