380
PARTISAN REVIEW
Martin Luther King.
Fred Siegel:
Not at first . But in 1991
The Nation
could run an entire
issue showing that the Moynihan report was still wrong. The earth is flat
In
any case.
James Farganis:
I just want to pick up on a comment Fred Siegel
made on the sixties and go back to something William was talking
about earlier on. There was something about the left, and you certainly
find it in critical theory and the Frankfurt school, that never embraced
popular culture. There was a critical dimension with respect to pop cul–
ture. We used to talk of mass culture and mass society. That terminology
has dropped out of our purview now. The reason it's dropped out, I
think, and Allan Bloom recognized this, is that the foundations of the
current movement are Nietzschean and not Marxist. In that sense there's
emerged a kind of nihilistic attitude toward all history, towards all ideas,
and a reversion to the sense of the creative self as the only source of
meaning. But you can't run a university or a society that way. It seems
to me it's the shift from Marx to Nietzsche that has brought about
much of what we see in the deconstructionist movement and, ultimately,
the personalization of everything: you can't have standards if the source
of truth is the self
Fred Siegel:
That's true. I think you're right. I would just add that
there has been a great deal of continuity on this score. From the political
correctness of the 1930s, which felt it could suppress free speech on the
grounds of Marxianized scientific certainty, on to the sixties Marcuseans
battling what they saw as repression of tolerance, down to the contem–
porary epistemologically nihilist but politically absolutist peers, there has
been a running argument against free speech. The underlying epistemol–
ogy has shifted in the movement from Marx to Nietzsche, but the un–
derlying political sentiment regarding free speech has been strikingly con–
sistent.
William Phillips:
I think you have a merger of Marx and Nietzsche, as
the debunking of history by Marx with the nihilism of Nietzsche get
combined, as they do in Foucault. Foucault has been a large influence,
even though most people can't understand him.
Edith Kurzweil:
I think we
all
seem to agree on the problems, but we
have not yet addressed how to solve them. So why don't we think hard
and try and come up with some ideas of what to do, after lunch? I
would want us to think of how to approach the problems we've been
