H-Ideas

[Stephen Burge]

Like George Cotkin, I don’t see much value in indulging in declension narratives, which is the basis on which Cotkin takes Sven Birkerts to task in his recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, “The Democratization of Cultural Criticism.” Declension stories ignore the consistent unevenness of human affairs; every age has its strengths and weaknesses, its vanities and its virtues. Cotkin is right to say that we’re just as smart as the famed New York intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century; he is right to say, in contradistinction to Birkerts, that the Partisan Review crowd was hardly above engaging in gratuitous attacks against authors they didn’t like. By coincidence, I had been reading through the run of PRs as I was musing over this submission and came across an essay in which James T. Farrell describes Mortimer Adler as writing “with a pomposity that some people mistake for profundity.” Adler’s success, Farrell figures, “indicates clearly that his dullness is new to many people.” That’s pretty “snarky.”

Another problem with declension narratives, however, is that they invite their opposites in the form of overly optimistic rebuttals or boosterish celebrations of “the good new days.” I’m not accusing Cotkin of this sort of sentiment. No one who could write a fine and sensitive book on existentialism, as he has recently done, could ever be mistaken as a Pollyanna. And yet, at the very least, he risks confusing quantity with quality. It is true that there are many solid venues for intelligent criticism today, but there is also a solid grain of truth in the claim that there are too many. It’s impossible to read everything or even to settle contentedly on a dozen or so publications or internet sites. Cotkin applauds this proliferation as a sign of cultural democracy, a tangible improvement over the mid-century situation in which a handful of writers at the Partisan Review set the tone for all. But I don’t see why incoherence born of over-abundance is much better than the exclusivity of an earlier day. Each has its vanities and virtues.

The tendency to equate quantity with democracy is far more troubling. Cotkin applauds the explosion and decentralization of commentary, especially now with blogs, on the supposition that the more voices, the more democracy. But all these new venues might be more accurately understood as a new free market in culture, and free markets are never, over the long haul, democratic. It is curious in this regard that Cotkin describes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as an important “public intellectual” who “also is an entrepreneur of cultural products without peer.” I fail to see what is democratic about Gates’s entrepreneurial activities, particularly when one remembers that his Encarta office treated its staff like Wal-Mart employees. If this is the model for public intellectuals today, then we are better off with fewer of them.

I hope this isn’t just a cheap point. I hope instead that it points us to a deeper issue, about which we should begin an earnest debate. For far too long, in my view, Western intellectuals have conflated the political and cultural spheres and looked to the arts and letters as sources of democratic change, or at least of radicalism. This inflation of culture is a legacy of the same mid-twentieth century intellectuals who led the PR in its heyday. But it has grown very deep indeed among our own generation. The intellectual obsession with culture has taken hold in directly inverse proportion to the extent of rightwing, corporate domination of the sources of genuine power, which are political and economic.

I think the proof is already here for us to acknowledge: Artists and writers can be inspired by democratic ideals, but their creations really don’t have much substantive power to change the world. Art is simply not transformative in the way that many of us have believed since the days of Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, and to expect it to be so is to ask too much. The widespread notion that “popular culture” contains the seeds of “subversion” is unwitting testimony of how desperate many intellectuals are to maintain this untenable faith in the broad power of culture.

I think both Sven Birkerts’s lament and George Cotkin’s optimism share a bit of this confusion. Birkerts is despondent because he believes that contemporary criticism hasn’t arrested the insidious creep of market philosophy; Cotkin is optimistic because he believes the proliferation of voices will counterbalance the anti-democratic forces of today. In my view, those who want to protect and extend democracy had better get back to organizing voters and pushing hard for the re-invigoration of the trade unions. Then maybe the artists and writers can get back to doing what they do best, which is to comment on the human condition in all its absurdity and beauty. Presumably the critics would then follow.