***** [W]hile demonstrating his accurate aim during target practice, he shoots bottles off a wooden fence, telling Bonnie: "I ain't good. I'm the best." Then he gives her his gun and offers her a try, using an old rubber-tire swing as the target. The gunshots attract the attention of the bank-displaced farmer (with a family that resembles the Joads from The Grapes of Wrath) who has just driven by for a "last look" at their repossessed farm. With a show of sympathy for the farmer's plight, Clyde puts holes through the "Property of Midlothian Citizens Bank - Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted" sign. Then, he lets the farmer and his black hired hand shoot more bullets into the building and its windows. He boastfully introduces them with a disarming smile, accentuating the bond they share with the country folk while anticipating the course that they are committed to pursue: "This here's Miss Bonnie Parker. I'm Clyde Barrow...We rob banks." <http://www.filmsite.org/bonn.html> *****
While history has marginalized petty producers, culture, on the other hand, has tenaciously held on to them as protagonists; it is their dream, fear, hope, despair, joy, and rage that have made the stuff of culture, despite the fact that the majority of cultural producers have by now become proletarianized. We still live with the curse of Matthew Arnold: "...I cannot forbear commending this maxim of the good old man: 'Intemperance in talk makes a dreadful havoc in the heart.'... I conclude, therefore,...that we can as little find in the working class as in the aristocratic or in the middle class [Yoshie: Arnold of course meant the bourgeoisie by this term] our much-wanted source of authority, as culture suggests it to us" (_Culture and Anarchy_).
As a sophisticated petit-bourgeois, Arnold is appalled by what he thinks of as philistinism of the bourgeoisie, but he cannot embrace the working class radicalism, which to him looks too extreme and abstract (or like "dogmatic indoctrination"). It is not by accident that late modern believers in the symbolic power (of money, or discourse, or money as discourse), be they populists or (post)modernists, reject Marxism on the same ground that Arnold used to reject what he called "Jacobinism" (which is a distorted image of Marxism & socialist revolution in the mind of the petit-bourgeois): "Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up in black and white for elaborating down to the very smallest details a rational society for the future -- these are the ways of Jacobinism" (_Culture and Anarchy_). Instead of the abolition of capitalism, they, like Arnold, offer a symbolic "solution" presented as the "Third Way": "democratic money" or "postmodern ethics" (or variations thereof).
***** Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and political organizations give an example of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but culture works differently. it does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, -- nourished, and not bound by them.
This is the _social idea_; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality.... (Arnold, _Culture and Anarchy_) *****
And it is as "the true apostles of equailty" that late modern symbolists (populists or postmodern "radical democrats") seek to make of workers "docile echoes of the eternal voice, pliant organs of the infinite will" that Arnold longed for. Despite their attempts to present themselves as more "democratic" and "anti-Stalinist" than Marxists, their ideas carry the stamp of Arnold's authoritarian longing -- the desire to transcend "an irreconcilable conflict" by "consent" or force (or "consent" to force, force presented as "consent"):
***** Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, _the State_, and to find our centre of light and authority there? Everyone of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly anyone of us has the idea of _the State_, as a working power. And why? Because we habitually live in our ordinary selves, which do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of the class to which we happen to belong.... People of the aristocratic class want to affirm their ordinary selves, their likings and dislikings; people of the middle class the same, people of the working class the same. By our every-day selves, however, we are separate, personal, at war; we are only safe from one another's tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in its turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And, when, therefore, anarchy presents itself as a danger to us, we know not where to turn.
But by our _best self_ we are united, impersonal, at harmony. We are in no peril from giving authority to this, because it is the truest friend we all of us can have; and when anarchy is a danger to us, to this authority we may turn with sure trust.... We want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous classes, checks, and a deadlock; culture suggests the idea of _the State_. We find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our _best self_. *****
With ambivalence to both capital and labor, anti-Marxist apostles of "sweetness and light" seek salvation in culture. Postmodernists long for an ethics that allows us safety "from one another's tyranny" because "no one has any power." Populists seek to make the State with its easy credit "the center of light and authority." Both are instances of a desire for symbolic transcendence of class struggles. And both end up, despite their stated political ends, preparing the cultural ground for "the truest friend," an emblem of our "best self," a Fuhrer, who will arise if anarchy, or a revolutionary uprising, threatens.
Yoshie