“It is difficult to begin without borrowing.”
- Henry David Thoreau
The fight against the culturally homogenizing effects of industrial capitalism preoccupied many American artists and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. Caught up in this struggle was a search for an authentic American culture—one that had plagued artists and intellectuals since the earliest days of the republic. Whether a revolt against Victorian gentility or a rejection of Enlightenment rationality, intellectual and artistic seekers toyed with themes of regional romanticism, socialism and communism, and racial inclusion, among others. In the 1930s the Great Depression appeared to signal the failure of capitalism. Many of the country’s most creative allied themselves and their work with the promotion of communism and socialism as part of the Popular Front. The capitalist experiment, it seemed, had failed. It was time to turn off the radio, take the banjo down from the wall, and return to the porch.
But the dissolution of the Popular Front and the coming of the Second World War, the horrors of Stalinist Russia, and the resurgence of industrial capitalism under the guise of corporate, bureaucratic liberalism, with its “techniques of information management,” once again left many of the producers of American culture disillusioned and disenchanted. The myths that had seemed so fragile in the 1930s only strengthened in the postwar decades. Capitalism had survived. The American way had not only persevered, but appeared to have triumphed. For many cultural critics, ideological division within the country had ostensibly vanished. An American consensus formed, pervading all aspects of American life. Moreover, the expansion of the middle class and the rise of mass consumption, the division of the world into a Manichean binary between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the threat of annihilation from an atomic explosion, instilled in Americans a theretofore unprecedented imperative to preserve the American way of life.
A profound, existentialist sense of alienation set in. Alienation from the self, from an ideal, a deviation from some pre-prescribed normativity, from American fraudulence, reached those marginalized by and left out of the consensus. At the end of the 1930s, during the Second World War, and in the decades that followed, a new avant-garde alternative to the homogenizing forces of corporate capitalism emerged—that of the culture of spontaneity (COS). With its emphasis on the power of the unconscious mind and the notion of perspective relativity, the COS not only rejected the inutility of realism, but also the dominate form of American culture and its critics.
The postwar search for cultural authenticity also manifest itself in the rise of rock’n roll music and rock’n roll musicians. Initially, rock’n roll made a mockery of mainstream America and challenged audiences to question the values of corporately constructed culture. Ultimately, however, both rock’n roll and the COS, while serving to undermine mainstream American culture, reinforced its hegemony.
Postwar Avant-garde
In the eyes of the dominant culture, avant-garde artists were mad. Abstract expressionism, free jazz, Beat poetry—the work of those starving for a sense of authenticity unavailable in the barren landscapes of mainstream popular culture— attempted to expose the country’s fraudulent character. As far as they were concerned, art, whether literature, poetry, or painting, had become stale and predictable.
The COS—improvised, often on-the-spot, stream of consciousness artistic production—arose as a response to a style of realism no longer capable of expressing the wartime and postwar cultural and political milieu. Realism suited the social consciousness of the depression-ravaged 1930s, partly because the economic crisis brought millions of people face-to-face with hunger, poverty, and death. There was nothing abstract about starvation. Yet disillusionment with the left following the Soviet nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany and the New Deal’s strengthening of American corporate capitalism led artists to experiment with the abstract.
For poets like William Carlos Williams and Charles Olsen and automatic painters like Matta Echaurren and Wolfgang Paalen, spontaneous composition, writes Daniel Belgrad, “avoided the falsifications introduced by a conscious mind that internalized ideological standards.” “By offering mediated access to unconscious thought processes,” he adds, “spontaneity provided a vantage point from which to question the culture’s authority and created the potential for authentic communications exploring new forms of human relatedness” ( Belgrad, 29).
Spontaneity, moreover, democratized artistic production and consumption. The artist, even the artist’s unconscious mind, was no longer a dominant referent in a particular piece. Although the author had not officially “died,” she was on her deathbed. The reader, now more of an interpreter, could allow the seemingly random words or notes or brush strokes to congeal in their own minds. Art as communist propaganda had destroyed the artist’s/author’s credibility. The credibility of the interpreter, however, made little difference.
The COS’s democratic sensibilities reflected a growing sense of multiculturalism amongst artists and intellectuals. Free form jazz is the perfect metaphor. The bass and the drummer lock into a groove. The other instruments slowly find their voice. There is space for everyone. The interplay becomes almost antiphonic, and no one instrument dominates. Discord, anxious tension, blends into harmony and back again. Up close no one is on the same page. But with patience the listener recognizes their are no pages and thus no limits. The infinite number of musical tributaries reflects the multitude of voices. Soon the musicians are playing off one another unconsciously while maintaining the democratic spirit. There is no preset point when a guitar player is supposed to run off a chromatic riff. To the uninitiated, whether the music sounds discordant or mellifluous, it all seems intentional. And it is. But not in a conscious, calculated way. It is the unconscious taking over. Here, as Charles Hartman and Daniel Belgrad have pointed out, open spontaneity “embodies” Mikhael Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. “Heteroglossia,” explains Belgrad, “describes a situation in which the poet or artist is not represented in the text as a unified self or ‘subject,’ but as a multiplicity of voices or selves representing different orientations and worldviews” (Belgrad 43). In a way it is a microcosm of American culture at its finest, at its most democratic: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
One of the more important legacies of the postwar COS was its challenge to the dominate forms of cultural criticism. The COS rejected the Marxist and formalist interpretive models of the proponents of High Culture, such as T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, and their like-minded New Critics whom dominated literary and artistic criticism for decades. Belgrad concludes that Marxist analytical frameworks find “collusion” between the art itself and larger structures that in some way determine form, and that formalism refuses to recognize as significant anything beyond the text. In fact, the COS was a precursor to postmodernism and its cousin poststructuralism. The notions of irrationalism, relativity, and fragmentation, important components of spontaneous composition, anticipated the postmodern paradigm.
Spontaneous artistic production—in whatever form—left an even more interesting legacy. It signaled, albeit only slightly at the time, the drift of the political left into the academy, thus diffusing its actual political power and influence. Of course, the late 1950s and 1960s witnessed the century’s most significant and successful social movements that originated from the left side of the ideological divide, but such movements also helped consolidate the strength of the political center, and serve as examples of what political scientist Adolph Reed termed “administered negativity” (Reed, 73). The identity politics that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, therefore, with their redefinition of political expression, built upon the foundation laid by the postwar avant-garde. However, a caveat must be mentioned. While the productions of avant-garde artists remained somewhat apolitical, such artists hoped to affect political change by stimulating cultural change through a bottom-up process. Identity politics on the other hand, coupled with the linguistic turn in the humanities, sought a redefinition of political expression and resistance. So, for example, wearing one’s hat sideways or the spontaneity of a free jazz performance became equally legitimate forms of political resistance. Hence the culture of spontaneity that emerged in the postwar era can be seen as a piece of the concrete slab on which the structure of neoliberalism rests.
No comments:
Post a Comment