[Doug quoting C. Wright Mills]:
``...For genuine crises involve situations in which men at large are presented with genuine alternatives, the moral meanings of which are clearly opened to public debate. The higher immorality, the general weakening of older values and the organization of responsibility have not involved any public crises; on the contrary, they have been matters of a creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out....''
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This goes well with a point Joanna made last week [in Myth of Media Concentrations] about the general inability to articulate a larger truth, hence the focus on small truths that are seemingly more intelligible. She quoted Orwell:
``For as a writer he [Wyndham Lewis] is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in the remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading will follow more or less along the lines that Miller has followed--I do not mean in technique or subject matter, but in implied outlook. The passive attitude will come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before. Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism--robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it..''
Here's Joanna's concluding passage:
``The parallel is not exact, but it seems no coincidence that the best writing and thought nowadays is limited in scope, subjective, and like Riverbend's insisting upon a small objective truth, because when we try to make our statements too big, they cannot help but participate in the dishonesty of an official language that is continually failing us...''
All these quotes are not saying the same thing. Rather, they are circling about the same center which is a vacuum of public consciousness.
I've thought about this large v. small truth business most of the week. The problem really comes down to the failure of the present intellectual class to articulate and develop the larger cultural truths of the age. After all that is their class function, and their inability to generate such a conceptual world with its deep links to the ebb and flow of events in the current period seems to me more like the result of a starvation diet, a loss of creative will in its largest sense. This kind of anorexia of the soul appears in writing, music, film, visual arts, theater, all across the cultural spectrum. Of course there are endless exceptions, but they fail to reach beyond their own example and fail to link up to a larger conceptual universe---to become precisely that larger sort of truth we find in almost all other periods.
In the closing passages of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephan D's arrival as possibly a writer or poet (of twenty) is accompanied by the expansive embrace of his own vision ``to creat in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race...'' It is that grand sort of view that has disappeared.
For generations the most advanced arts depended on a certain limited class of disaffected bourgeoisie who had the money to keep such larger projects going either indirectly through informal financial support for their own salons, or in more public ways for theaters, publishing houses, film making, galleries, museums and so forth---or less common, as artists, writers, film makers, and cultural producers themselves. Most of that class support has disappeared, and has not been replaced.
It's very tempting for me to assign a series of images, or works that represent this void, and my favorite for that purpose are Antonioni's films, L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse. The people in these films are people from the class that should be creating the larger truths of their time, and they have none to offer. In L'Avventura, a leisure class boat outing simply dissolves into a random search for one of their own who disappears after the first few minutes of the film. Somewhere about two-thirds of the way through the story the pretext of looking for the missing woman, or the plot as it were, has evaporated. In La Notte, Marcello Mastronianni is supposed to be a writer, but we never hear a word worth remembering from him. A potential wealthy patron tries to interest him in writing a history of the man's company. Meanwhile of course Mastroniani tries to pick up Monica Vitti. Jean Moreau also leaves the party with her own odd affair. In the end, Mastronianni returns to the party near dawn and he and Jean Moreau take a walk on the wealthy man's empty estate that features a golf course. In L'Eclisse, Monica Vitti leaves her current fiancee, a writer or translator of some sort, and goes a few rounds with a pretty boy business guy with money, and then ends that. The end of the film devolves into the pure cinematography of images of buildings, facades, streets, trees, an occasional car or passerby and reaches an almost science fiction like surrealism.
And then there is Blowup which is a lot more attractive, but it ultimately devolves into the same void. David Hennings, a high art photographer discovers he has accidently photographed a murder, tries to unravel its meaning by tracking down or being tracked down by Vanessa Redgrave (I forget which). Again this thin pretext of a plot, a potential larger truth just dissolves---only this time into the wild 60s London for the rich and famous. Much prettier than the other three.
Like Joanna's missing larger truths, Mills' indifference and silent hollowing out, or Orwell's ``...nothing left but quietism--robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it..'', Antonioni follows a related trajectory.
You will notice of course that all these movies and the writing date from at least forty to fifty years ago. That was the modernist project at its greatest apogee, the point or trajectory at which we were supposed to forge a new world. We had none to offer. So the righwing and an endless cycle of cultural retreads came up with their own world.
And here we are. Ain't it grand?
CG