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The Point
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So should we just reject the “idea of harmony”? Adorno said not. The idea that a good work of art “embodies the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure” doesn’t mean that it should contain contradiction as a general principle. True, good art doesn’t blithely lie about the continuing existence of disharmony by creating, as most pop music does, a naïvely harmonious tune. But nor does good art simply mirror our disharmonious society by creating irrationally dissonant works, as Shields seems sometimes to recommend. That’s just bad art, like my country cover of a metal song.
In between these two bad options, the best works of modern art express the broken relationship between individual and world by embodying the specific contradiction of our society: economic ends have taken precedence over human ones. So Adorno’s preference was for works constructed with painstaking care; such works (e.g., Beckett, Berg), perhaps despite themselves, hold onto the idea, the final goal, of social harmony. No matter how depressing their content, the forms of Endgame and Wozzeck are utopian. They’re internally inconsistent, but not in a capricious or random way; rather, their contradictions are an image of our own. They’re also moving and effective, incredible artistic achievements—and that achievement in itself is an imperfect image of what we could do, if our interests and our society matched up. Whether such works should take the form of fiction or nonfiction is an irrelevant and even an uninteresting question, from this perspective. Adorno’s continual plea was: don’t replicate the world by acting the way the world acts, because then you’ll just be a part of a bad society; but don’t lie about it, either, because change will only come when we understand the problem
As it happens, I borrowed How Literature Saved My Life from the Los Angeles Public Library. A previous reader had left a post-it in the book. S/he’d written on it something that sounds like a thought David Shields would quote: “In a universe so indifferent to our fate—how best to endure—to go on.” My first thought was that the universe isn’t indifferent to our fate, any more than my desk is indifferent to my fate: the universe is not the kind of thing that could be interested or indifferent. My second thought was that I have a family and friends, none of whom are indifferent to my fate.
My third thought was to look up the sponsor of the Post-It, Kaletra. It’s a brand of AIDS medication.
There really are some people for whom life is a daily struggle. I’m pretty sure that the point and meaning of life is to ensure that as few as possible have to exist in that way. And that’s only possible if we stop assuming that we all do.
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If Lasch were around today, he would undoubtedly see Occupy Wall Street as a source of both optimism and despair—as many of us have. One of his interests would be the movement’s vacillation between two conflicting visions of work. Its populist ninety-nine-versus-one-percent rhetoric, as well as its emphasis on debt and widespread unemployment, seem to point to a society in which good and meaningful work might be available for all. Yet in the carnivalesque atmosphere of the protests, with their drum circles and festive feel, there was also a sense that all work was oppressive, that a revolution would entail liberation from work entirely. Forty years ago, Lasch had already criticized the tendency for certain radicals to “define personal liberation … as freedom from work, discipline and from authority in general”:
The trouble with this definition of the “cultural revolution” is that it tends to divert attention from work to leisure, thereby reinforcing one of the strongest and most dangerous tendencies of advanced capitalist society—the attempt to compensate for the meaninglessness of work by holding out the possibility of spiritual fulfillment through consumption. Contrary to a widespread cliché of popular sociology, “the challenge of leisure” is not the most important issue in advanced society. The most important issue remains work—the loss of autonomy on the job, the collapse of high standards of workmanship, the pervasive demoralization that results from the mass production of goods that are widely recognized as intrinsically worthless by those who produce them, and the general crisis of a culture historically oriented around the dignity of labor.
Counterculturalists, Lasch believed, tended to picture “utopia as generalized leisure, thereby reaffirming, instead of contradicting, the vision of industrial society itself.” Yet, Lasch contended, “centuries of experience … have taught us that work is one of the deepest of man’s needs.” The task confronting the left was therefore not to overthrow the work ethic—which was already under attack from within capitalist society—but to invest it with new meaning.
Lasch was hesitantly hopeful. He noticed former New Left activists joining the workforce, and “rediscovering the importance of institutional ties.” Instead of denouncing all professional organizations as “purely imprisoning,” these new workers were growing more interested in the kinds of solidarity they might discover in the workplace, as sites of potential “ferment,” “fellowship” and “support for the creative use of one’s talents.” To Lasch, a “revolt against narrow professionalism and professional irresponsibility” was key to the unleashing of radicalism in America. But it had to be a “revolt not against the professions but within the professions.” One had to, in the language of our own times, occupy institutions of work in order to infuse them with new values. “What seems to be needed,” he mused,
is a fusion of community politics and trade union politics—two dissident traditions that have increasingly grown apart. The product of this fusion would not be simply a new unionism or a new kind of community organizing but a new form of politics altogether, centered on the factory—and on the research and development laboratory, the intellectual assembly line, the professions, the media—but always heedful of work in its larger social implications.
Today, as many students sink into crushing debt as the price for credentials that increasingly do not even guarantee professional employment, Lasch’s observations about the relationship between student life and work seem all the more applicable. His insights—about the connections between an alienating education and future work, and about the import of workspaces for building solidarity—offer new directions for the ninety-nine percent. Lasch’s reflections on student-worker dynamics indicate that the contemporary effort to delineate between the large, quite diverse group of have-nots and the increasingly small group of elites, must focus not only on the ability to own a home or participate in the consumer market, but also on the draining of meaning from work at all levels.
Yet there remains even in Lasch’s late books, and especially in his final book, True and Only Heaven, hints and portents of what a truly engaged and “radical” social criticism might look like. A test for this criticism would be its ability to provide a vision of the good life that rejected a progressive fantasy of abundance without sliding into nostalgia for yesteryear. Already in the early Seventies, Lasch had begun to explore how Americans could be made to wake from the dream of perpetual progress:
It is only therefore when we find ourselves imprisoned in our private cars, marvelously mobile but unable to go anywhere because the highways are choked with traffic; when we find ourselves surrounded by modern conveniences but unable to breathe the air; provided with unprecedented leisure to fish in polluted rivers and swim at polluted beaches; provided with the means to prolong life beyond the point where it offers any pleasure; equipped with the power to create human life, which will simultaneously destroy the meaning of life—it is only, in short, when we are confronted with the contradictions of individualism and private enterprise in their most immediate, unmistakable, and by now familiar form that we are forced to reconsider our exaltation of the individual over the life of the community, and to submit technological innovations to a question we have so far been careful not to ask: Is this what we want?
By connecting the big questions of liberal progress and perfectibility to an even larger, more pressing question—“Is this what we want?”—Lasch challenged his readers to search for a way out of the impasse where the only two options seemed to be a crackpot realism that insisted on technological degradation as a necessary corollary of progress, and a glazed-over utopian drive for perfection. As was so often the case, Lasch looked to the past—and to the populist past—for help articulating such a path. In place of the idea of history as linear progress, he argued for “concepts like nemesis, fate, fortune, or providence.” Instead of “luxury for all,” he endorsed “competence, as [American populists] would have called it—a piece of earth, a small shop, a useful calling.” Competence, Lasch believed, “was a more reasonable as well as a more worthy ambition” than consumerism or perfectionism, embodying “a humbler set of expectations” in addition to “a more strenuous and morally demanding definition of the good life.”
cool
I wanted to hear more about Laura’s experience, but I noticed that my own attitude toward the visit was one of cynicism. Not only was I treating the cadaver as a mere curiosity, but there was a hint of self-satisfaction in my conviction that its sight would not affect me—I think it derived from a leftover tomboyish belief that invulnerability is always preferable to fear. I envisioned the piece I would write (the organs gleaming like gemstones), as though the visit itself were a formality. Yet such irreverence troubled me. The notion of going to see a cadaver with the prior knowledge I would write about it struck me as manipulative. If I described the lab scene to a trusting reader, but while in the lab had thought only of its literary potential, must a truthful rendering of that scene thus include admission of my mindset? And what of the poor cadaver, whose former occupant had decided to bequeath her body to the medical school, but had likely not foreseen an outcome such as this? Finally I wondered about the repercussions of undergoing certain “significant” experiences simply because they might provide fodder for one’s stories. In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard asks her students which of them want to be writers, and then she tells them what the decision must mean: “You can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax…” The line had long appealed to me—Dillard’s vision of the artist, whom she later describes as a kind of sacrificial flame, is flattering, particularly if, as she asserts, “the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.” But until I visited Laura’s cadaver, I had always assumed it was one’s past one must attack. It had never occurred to me that one must “go at” one’s present and future as well.
DURING HIS SOLE conversation with Janet Malcolm, Joe McGinniss quoted her a passage from a Thomas Mann essay:
The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe," to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatsoever.
The problem with marriage, we all know, is the endlessness of it. Plenty of things we do will have long-term repercussions, but in what other situation do you promise to do something for the rest of your life? Not when you choose a college. Not when you take a job. Not when you buy a house. During childhood, you pick up many habits that are probably going to be lifelong, like walking, talking, reading, and sleeping, but once you’ve got those down, you start to feel like you’re at greater liberty to decide what things you want to do and what things you want to stop doing. Especially when you’re a young adult the apparently infinite multiplicity of possible choices—possible jobs, possible friends, possible cities, possible girlfriends or boyfriends—can sometimes fool you into thinking you have an infinite amount of time to try out everything. But once you’re married, you’ve significantly cut down the options, and it suddenly makes your life feel shorter—like now there’s a direct line between you and your own death. You’ve just gotten on a train and you won’t get off until the very end of the track. In your final moments, if you stick to your promise, you’ll still be doing the same thing you’re doing now, dealing with the same person, possibly having the same arguments. And that commonality between now and then makes that far-off time, when you’re old and sick and about to die, a little more imaginable. Which is scary.
What Paul says about having children seems to me to ring equally true of marriage. Until you have spent a lifetime in the company of another person, you can't possibly know what it's like to do so. When we get married, there is an important sense in which we really don't know what we're doing. This doesn't make marriage a complete leap into the dark, of course you can be pretty sure that another person is well-suited to you, that you have similar goals, that you love each other, and so on. Even so, no matter how much you know about another person on the day of your marriage, you still don't really know what yourte doing in marrying them. This doesn't make you wrong or irrational to do it anyway; it's just part of what it is to be human. Living as a finite being means projecting oneself toward the unknown.
referring to L. A. Paul's paper 'what mary can't expect when she's expecting'
[...] a wedding is a ceremony in which two people, using words they don't fully understand, make a commitment whose consequences they don't fully appreciate. Depending on one's perspective, that is either a damning indictment of the institution of marriage, or evidence that it deserves its place alongside birth, death and falling in love as one of the transformative experiences of life.