From: JEFF SPARROW <jeffs-AT-werple.net.au>
Subject: re: The retreat of the "intellectual"
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 10:14:09 +-1000


But what about the First World? I can't speak for
Europe or Japan, but intellectual life - even bourgeois intellectual life -
in the U.S. is barren, dismal, bankrupt. High culture has been transformed
into an elite marketing tool; classical music, for example, one of the
treasures of bourgeois cultural tradition, has been transformed into easy
listening for yuppies, a signifier for "sophistication" greatly beloved of
boutiques and cafes. Intellectual/literary life has degenerated into
deconstructive, faux radical, obscurity or utter tedium. There is almost
nothing worth reading in the typical issue of the New York Times Book
Review, and only a little more than nothing in the average New York Review
of Books - and these are supposedly among the best on the scene. Pop
culture has seen its energy and immediacy devolve into little more than
simple crassness and violence. I emphasize that this is a judgment of
*bourgeois* intellectual life; I'm not even talking about the retreat or
degeneration of the radicals. Has bourgeois intellectual life suffered from
the disappearance of its radical critics? Is the devolution and/or retreat
of both bourgeois and radical intellectuals part of the same phenomenon -
the corruption, complacency, and decay of culture under advanced
capitalism? A ruling class that can't produce artists and intellectuals of
the status of Schonberg, Stevens, or Keynes seems like one in trouble,
serious trouble.

Doug

I dunno. I'd be a bit wary of the 'degeneration of culture under late capitalism' thesis.
 The analysis sounds a little bit too much like some of the left papers here that review 
every Hollywood blockbuster as a symptom of capitalist decadence.

Which is obviously true - kind of like the distinction between the classical economists
who accepted some relation between labor and value and the vulgar economists who
are simply interested in calculating, as Mandel puts it, the exciting things that
happen when Mr Jones can't find a buyer for his last ten thousand tonnes of iron.

But how far does it get you? I mean, was capitalism any less late in the 1960s or 1970s,
when most of us would presumably accept that the culture was somewhat more vibrant?
Was there a qualitative  difference in the structure of the system? I don't think so.

I think the answer is, more prosaically, that the collapse of the left has had an immense impact.

Take classical music as a token of yuppie sophistication.
Were there a serious radical presence substantial sections of the intelligentsia would measure
sophistication in other ways - like, for instance, attending cocktail parties with the Black Panthers.

Similarly, when the class struggle was more intense, there was a real Marxist presence in lit crit (in fact,
most of the fads in lit theory can be traced to the disappointment of a generation of intellectuals
in the failure of '68). 

If our side was stronger, the New York Review of Books would not dare publish
articles lauding David Irving as an interesting fellow with a lot of challenging ideas about the
Third Reich.

And as for pop culture, well, there it's really obvious. You look at something like hip-hop. Insofar
as there's something progressive happening, it all harks back to the struggles of the 60s and
70s. The best thing Tupac Shakur had going for him was that his mother was a Panther.

I don't want to sound like an epigone but, really the only solution is - 
build the left.

How exactly we do that is another debate

Cheers,
Jeff