Lasch—Theatrical Possibilites

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[336]
The social conditions that generated the syndicalist explosion in Europe—the imposition of industrialism on economies still dominated by small workshops, a highly combustible mixture—had their nearest American equivalent in the West, where the traditions of the mining camp, the logging camp, and the bankhouse came face to face with corporate capitalism in its most ruthless, predatory form. The IWW was the direct descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, a union that ap-
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pealed to the same sense of manly independence and the same love of combat to which syndicalism appealed in France and Italy. Here too, workers experienced industrialism and the wage system not only as a decline in their standard of living but above all as a drastic infringement of their control of the workplace, of their very status as free men. The company towns that sprang up in the mining states seemed to make "wage slavery" a literal description of the new order, not just a rhetorical analogy. The company controlled not only the workplace but housing, credit, and all the other necessaries. The worker who could remember life as a prospector or cowboy now found that he owed his soul to the company store. He felt literally sold into slavery, and he embraced the philosophy of "direct action" as the only way out.

While social conditions in the West bore some resemblance to those created by the early stages of industrialism elsewhere, the cultural tradition that workers were trying to defend obviously differed from those that underlay European syndicalism. In the American West, the ideal of independence was associated not with the small proprietor's control over his household, his land or shop, and his tools but with the wandering life of the unattached male. It was not surprising that the IWW glorified the hobo, the drifter, the "nomadic worker of the West," in the words of its newspaper, Solidarity. The West was still a "man's country," according to Charles Ashleigh, an English radical who emigrated to the Pacific Northwest and became a "hobo and a Wobbly," like the hero of his novel, Rambling Kid. Ashleigh admired the "reckless rambling boys who despised the soft security and comfort of a dull city-paced existence." Ralph Chaplin, the Wobbly poet and songwriter, was attracted to the movement by its "glamorous courage and adventure," which he too associated with the West. Those who admired the Wobblies from a distance likewise emphasized its western origins. The Lawrence strike was a "western strike in the East," Lincoln Steffens wrote; "a strike conducted in New England by western miners, who have brought here the methods and the spirit employed by them in Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada.

European syndicalism was informed by an austere ethic of thrift and self-denial. In America, the syndicalist movement came to be associated with an ethic of self-expression and defiant irresponsibility—the new "paganism" of Greenwich Village. Literary intellectuals saw the Wobblies as cultural outcasts like themselves, free spirits, rebels against re-
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spectability. They sensed the affinity between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers glorified by the IWW. Having absorbed from modern literature an image of the "beauty of the essentially homeless and childless and migratory life," as Floyd Dell put it, they recognized the Wobblies as soul mates. "Anarchism and art," said Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, "are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason." Hutchins Hapgood, the personification of the bohemian intellectual, called anarchism the fine art of the proletariat. He compared the Armory Show, which brought modern art to New York in 1913, to a "great fire, an earthquake, or a political revolution."

The Wobblies did not object to this assimilation of art and revolution. They too saw themselves as artists. "I have lived like an artist, and I shall die like an artist," said Joe Hill before his execution for murder. Bill Haywood allowed himself to be lionized by Mabel Dodge and other members of her famous salon. He regarded the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913—the fruit of his rapprochement between the IWW and Greenwich Village—as the high point of his career. Conceived by Mabel Dodge, the pageant was intended to dramatize the workers' exploitation by capitalism, but it exposed them to a more insidious kind of exploitation by turning radical politics into entertainment. "Life passed over insensibly into a certain, simple form of art," said Hapgood. ". . . That is the great thing about it, the almost unpredecented thing." Papers opposed to the IWW gave the pageant enthusiastic reviews: what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater. Both Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most flamboyant orator, had earlier turned down invitations to put themselves on the lecture circuit or stage. In her case, the offer came from no less an impressario than David Belasco, who could see the theatrical possibilities of revolutionary activism as clearly as John Reed. At the pageant, Reed led the Paterson strikers in a song he had written for the occasion, "The Haywood Thrill." Haywood thus resisted the lecture agents only to fall into the clutches of the avant-garde, leaving Flynn to wonder whether the distractions of the pageant had not contributed to the defeat of the strike itself.

Similarly (if more mundanely), Cage is said to have seen the theatrical possibilities inherent in the conventions of musical performance more or less as they already existed. Whole new worlds of making and experiencing art were opened up this way, including even some properly aesthetic and willful avenues that could only be of minimal interest to the trailing horde of Cagean recuperators. No problem there. The problem, if there is one, is that this has gone down in history as a spark of genius rather than a sign of the times, a beginning rather than an ending. But there is much that came to a crashing halt when such long-standing differentiations as between politics and theater ceased to hold, thereby conjuring into being the neologism dedifferentiation (Alan Bryman, via someone or other) to describe this cultural macrotrend retrospectively

Lasch's vignette on Paterson is just one more reminder that revolutionary ideas often appear long before becoming attached to a famous person and, likewise, seem more obvious in retrospect than they evidently were to contemporaries. Ostensibly this applies not only to dedifferentiation but also the initial processes of differentiation too, about which we unfortuntely know a bit less than we'd like to. We create what we need, and we can do so again. All is never lost here. Still, the spotting and the exploitation of formerly differentiated possibilities in hitherto unnoticed places has been a terrible development for everyone who creates the differentiation because they need it. Among whom I count myself, if that wasn't already obvious.

Swimming against the current of a macrotrend is possible. It's usually not fun. This is the bad news, but there is good news too: the possibilities are not unlimited, the limits of the dedifferentiation of forms are made clearly visible by efforts to instrumentalize the new art, and these limits mark precisely where the bases of the old differentiation were just.

Later on, Lasch would find in Philip Roth's observation that

the writer's imagination falters in the face of contemporary "actuality," which "is continually outdoing our talents"

a lamentable narrowing of the topics and mediums amenable to properly artistic treatment. Neither man seems apt to find a burden lifted from art's back by this narrowing of art's mandate or by the new conception and role of "reality" (see below) in the arts. It seems to me, rather, that a world where truth is stranger than fiction is a world where art has both the freedom and the mandate to do what it is good at without literary, representational, activist, didatic, or interdisciplinary imperatives weighing it down. It is precisely the dedifferentiation of art forms, by which logic they are all equally good (or bad) at the same things, that is the epistemological bankroll for said imperatives. These imperatives collapse wherever an older, differentiated taxonomy of the arts prevails.

If what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater, then I would propose that Paterson was nothing less than a felicitous natural experiment testing the above-listed imperatives and finding art unfit for all of them at once. Just one drop in the evidence bucket, to be sure, but a big and splashy one.

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Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

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Radicalism as Street Theater

...

[82] By deliberately provoking violent repression, it [the New Left] hoped to forestall the co-optation of dissent. The attempt to dramatize official repression, however, imprisoned the left in a politics of theater...—a mirror-image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the left to unmask.

Is this because theater is ultimately unreal no matter how topical it might aspire to be? This is a curious remark in any case, since a few pages later the author finds in Radical theater an inability to tolerate artifice and, therefore, evidence again of a narcissistic and/or survivalistic turn.

Theoreticians of the cold war saw the tactics of "escalation" as a means of impressing "relevant audiences" with the nation's stregth of purpose; the strategists of the left, equally obsessed with appearances, believed that gestures of escalating opposition would eventually bring the establishment to its knees. ...

The delusion that street theater represented the newest form of guerilla warfare helped to ward off an uneasy realization that it represented no more than a form of self-promotion, by means of which the media stars of the left brought themselves to national attention with its concomitant rewards. ...
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...these radicals had so few practical results to show for their sacrifices that we are driven to conclude that they embraced radical politics in the first place not because it promised practical results but because it served as a new mode of self-dramatization

...

[85] Narcissistic patients, according to Kernberg, "often admire some hero or outstanding individual" and "experience themselves as part of that outstanding person." They see the admired individual as "merely an extension of themselves." ... [The narcissist] seeks to warm himself in their reflected glow; but his feelings contain a strong admixture of envy, and his admiration often turns to hatred if the object of his attachment does something to remind him of his own insignificance. The narcissist lacks the confidence in his own abilities that would encourage him to model himself on another person's exalted example. ...

[86] A narcissistic society worships celebrity rather than fame and substitutes spectacle for the older forms of theater, which encouraged identification and emulation precisely because they carefully preserved a certain distance between the audience and the actors, the hero worshipper and the hero.

Narcissism and the Theater of the Absurd   At the same time that public life and even private life take on the qualities of spectacle, a countermovement seeks to model spectacle, theater, all forms of art, on reality—to obliterate the very distinction between art and life. ...

[87] Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. ... Our sense of reality appears to rest, curiously enough, on our willingness to be taken in by the staged illusion of reality. Even a rational understanding of the techniques by means of which a given illusion is produced does not necessarily destroy our capacity to experience it as a representation of reality.

Perhaps this indicates the difference between naturalism and realism.

The urge to understand a magician's tricks...shares with the study of literature a willingness to learn from the masters of illusion lessons about reality itself.

Sure. But in neither case did previously naive people attend their first magic show or read their first novel with quite such a rational or utilitarian goal in mind. The rationalization comes later, as any good Freudian ought to be able to see. And the etiology of this particular rationalization is something the later, political Lasch, at least, might have noticed and made more of: it is nothing less than the "instrumentalization and debasement of practical activity" which he so rightly identified as "one of the disinctive features of the industrial worldview."

But a complete indifference even to the mechanics of illusion announces the collapse of the very idea of reality, dependent at every point on the distinction between nature and artifice, reality and illusion. This indifference betrays the erosion of the capacity to take any interest in anything outside the self.

This conceit to a deep-psychological, utilitarian role for illusion is provocative but ultimately dubious. Being the exceptional social animal, humans are equally so the self-deceiving animal. Formal art practices are superfluous when it comes to filling the world with illusion and artifice, just as they are superfluous for filling it with beauty, meaning, idols, stories, ritual, and so on. Formalized art practices are not the source of all that is beautiful or illusory, but rather are the source of very particular beauties and illusions. These things are called into existence only when someone takes action to that effect; and action evinces motivation.

Lasch would seem to agree that we create what we need, but he bypasses as superficial the question of what we create and instead rails against what we need and, moreover, why we need it. This is more clever than it is revealing. For one thing, it is essentially deterministic, thus leaving any findings unamenable to action. For another, I cannot imagine any human existence so mundane that the equilibriating function of art is channeled inexorably toward illusion and away from reality. Rather, a dose of reality is typically in shortest supply.

Subsequently Lasch takes aim at the avant-garde for attempting to "close the gap between audience and actors." (89) The reality-illusion question is not a question I would think to raise in that connection, since so much of this kind of work seems to be pursuing a political allegory of radical equality which is oblique to questions of fantasy and illusion unless these are also forcefully articulated. Even within radical equality, plenty of illusion remains available. But in that case the flight into illusion is certainly not a flight from oppression but rather an escape from freedom.

[88] Nineteenth-century realists understood that verisimilitude depended in part on the artist's ability to keep a distance between the audience and the work of art. This distance...paradoxically enabled the spectator to observe events on stage as if they were scenes from real life. ...

As art abandons the attempt to weave illusions around the audience and to present a heightened version of reality, it tries to
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close the gap between audience and actors. Sometimes it justifies this procedure by invoking theories tracing the origins of drama to religious ritual, orgiastic communion. Unfortunately the attempt to restore a sense of collective worship cannot restore the unity of belief that once gave life to such forms. The merging of actors and audience does not make the spectator into a communicant; it merely provides him—if it does not drive him out of the theater altogether—with a chance to admire himself in the new role of pseudo performer, an experience not qualitatively different (even when clothed in the rhetoric of the avant-garde) from that of the studio audience at television performances, which dotes on images of itself periodically flashed across the monitors.

Note, p. 90:
"words do not matter, only action is important" as an indication of the "borderline" condition

Seriously?!

Ditto the "belief that the world consists of illusions."

It just depends. Admittedly, the hardcore pomos do seem a little crazy. But again, the rationalization comes last, not first.