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115 My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect. In college and for some time afterward, my education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries. I learned that lesson well (thought it came too late to wholly supplant certain critical opposing influences, like comic books and rock-and-roll). Yet the modernists’ once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, softminded , and cowardly—not to say smug—as the false cheer it replaced. The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic postmodernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists—credibly—that we can, well, overcome. The catch is that you have to be an optimist (an American?) in the first place not to dismiss such a project as insane. A subtheme of the sixties utopianism was the attempt—often muddled, at times self-negating—to arrive at some sort of honest optimism. This concern was also implicit in the antiutopian sensibility first self-consciously articulated by the pop artists. Pop sensibility—loosely defined as the selective appreciation of whatever is vital and expressive in mass culture—did more than simply suggest that life in a rich, capitalist, consumption-obsessed society had its pleasures ; the crucial claim was that those pleasures had some connection with genuine human feelings, needs, and values and were not—as both conservative and radical modernists assumed—mere alienated distraction. Pessimists like Tom Wolfe’s Failed Optimism 116 THE SEVENTIES Herbert Marcuse argued that advanced capitalism destroyed the autonomous self and with it the possibility of authentic pleasure, let alone happiness; pop implied a more sanguine view of the self as guerrilla, forever infiltrating territory officially controlled by the enemy, continually finding new ways to evade and even exploit the material and psychic obstacles that the social system continually erected. I shared this view; I doubted that either Marx or Freud would quarrel with the proposition that a human being who had the urge to build a castle, and found that the only material available was shit, would soon learn how to build shit castles—and how to use the unique properties of shit to advantage. Pop was about the ways in which the spirit of the people invaded the man’s technology : restrict us to three chords, a back beat, and two minutes of air time, and we’ll give you—rock-and-roll. The pop stance was honest up to a point. But its commitment to making the most of the existing reality excluded painful or dangerous questions about systemic change. Not that pop optimism was devoid of political content: it was by definition populist (while modernist pessimism was, at least in part, an aristocratic vote of no-confidence in the lower orders), and it gleefully offended upper bourgeois pieties about art, taste, and the evils of consumerism. Nor did the pop sensibility deny or defend the various forms of oppression that at once hedged our pleasures and made them possible; its very celebration of human resilience implied an awareness of such barriers to fulfillment. But it took that tension for granted. The price of pop optimism was a deeper fatalism; in a way Andy Warhol’s silk-screened electric chair was more chilling than anything in One Dimensional Man. Those of us who were unwilling to pay that price looked for ways to integrate the pop impulse with political and cultural radicalism and with the parallel experience of the immanence of the spirit—best described as religious—that had become a mass phenomenon because of a technological achievement called LSD. Yet pop remained central, if only because mass culture was the bloodstream in which other influences had to circulate if they were to have much effect. I had no more than an inkling of the importance of all this when, in the fermenting mid-sixties, I first came across The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book—particularly the title piece and the one on Las Vegas, neither of which I’d read...

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