INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
525
Unlike the Lyrical Left of the Greenwich Village era, and the Old Left
of the Depression era, the New Left of the sixties never learned how to
lose, to admit its mistakes and misplaced hopes; and there is nothing
more gratifying than to have one's defeat explained by causes outside of
the self. Hence Antonio Gramsci and the idea of "hegemony," Herbert
Marcuse and the "one-dimensional" mentality, Theodore Adorno and
the Enlightenment as "domination," Jacques Derrida and the "prison
house of language," Michel Foucault and "knowledge as power," Gilles
Deleuze and the "illusions of logic," Pierre Bourdieu and the
"inevitability of hierarchy." These figures were all authorities of failure,
"masters of suspicion," thinkers who opened our eyes to barely felt
structures, systems, forces, mechanisms, and other equally vague con–
cepts that help to explain how what ought to have been realized failed
to do so. Most of these thinkers had drunk at the well of Marxism, and
they either struggled in the arena of politics or waited patiently for the
transition to socialism or the revolution itself to happen.
It
may seem bizarre today, but back in the sixties activists mentioned
the term
revolution
without a smile or wink, as a real possibility. During
the Cambodian invasion, a colleague called me to the window to look at
students who were angrily protesting and setting up barricades, at cops
moving in with their shields and clubs, tear gas darkening the sky. "Jack,
it's the revolution!" he said. Some older PR writers also had their moment
with what Lenin once called "infantile disorder." When the student strike
erupted at Columbia University in the stormy summer of
1968,
Dwight
Macdonald called
F.
W. Dupee
t~
find out what was going on. "You must
come up right away, Dwight. It's a revolution! You may never get another
chance to see one." "I came up," writes Macdonald, "and he was right.
I've never been in or even near a revolution before. I guess I like them."
Another towering intellect whose reputation underwent a transfigu–
ration was Friedrich Nietzsche. But in America, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, Nietzsche's philosophical and political outlook was
articulated by two thinkers who were thorns in the side of the Left: the
journalist H.
L.
Mencken and the playwright Eugene O'Neill. One was
critical of democracy, the other saw revolution as the "pipe dream" of
the radical intellectual. O'Neill's play,
The Personal Equation,
written
in
1915,
the heyday of the Industrial Workers of the World, deals with
the Wobblies' cult of "direct action." The play ends with a militant laid
out in a hospital bed, brain damaged from a bullet, wrapped like a
mummy, gasping in a gurgle one last utterance: "Long live the revolu–
tion." Hearing the death rattle, the comrades in the room are struck
with fear, their faiths shaken.
