[snip]
If one tries to say where the Marxist-Post-Modern encounter has gone wrong, the answers are not altogether predictable. Cultural theorists like Jameson and Anderson are liable to overrate the importance of the political commitments of high-profile artists and critics and philosophers, to say nothing of adepts with less definite portfolios. This tendency is a natural accompaniment of their intellectualism. But it leads them to overrate in turn the social influence of works of art and philosophy and political thought. At the same time, they now underrate the effects of ideology - the 'bridge of excuses', as Havel called it, between a government and a people or a culture and its participants. What is missing in their account is any of evidence of the feelings, or even, for it would be something, the false consciousness of the feelings of people implicated in the system. All that is submerged in a theory whose demand is that people be known as obedient consumers, or exploited consumers whose revolt can only emerge through modified acts of consumption. Some interesting questions have no chance of being answered in this explanatory mode. Are people willing participants in the mesh of images that is offered to those who accept it as a total environment? And are they so all the way down the line: from the morning TV montage of global hotspots, to the afternoon trip to the cashpoint, to the evening dose of mood-altering drug?
Political and literary critics are succumbing faster than necessary to the cant of the virtual. The surrender may be carried out with complacency by a theorist innocent of ideas, for whom it signifies only the triumph of engineered sensations. It must be undertaken with a more troubled satisfaction by a Marxist. On the current view, Post-Modernism, site of total delusion and total reification, enters history to complete the work of decomposition already in progress in the global market. The pleasure of the result relates to an old slogan, 'Don't build on the good old days, build on the bad new days,' a slogan that matched policy of the Thirties - the attack on 'social fascism' - by which the German Communist Party broke down with social democracy in order to stage a purer confrontation with the Nazis: a strategy that at its first trial did not work out well. Perhaps its second will be luckier.
Or perhaps, like the architects Pomo has always written footnotes to, the Marxists are now looking East. Empson tells us that in a compostion class he taught in Communist Peking, his students would sometimes write: 'The Americans are very wicked because they are so material, and the Russians are very good because they are so material.' An unconscious switch between meanings was necessary to produce the irony there, but a similar exercise could come to be performed with a conscious will by the properly knowing. It would have the perfection, the flatness, the enigmatic simplicity of a Zen koan. The banality of Post-Modernism is so good because it is so material.
-------------------------- what's a cashpoint? William Empson? what is this guy getting at?
Peter - by the way Rushmore is a GREAT movie, please go see it