The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America

Abstract

The problematic and shifting nature of selfhood and subjectivity came to dominate intellectual and cultural dis cussion in the postwar years. The "relation of the self to culture rather than to society," as Lionel Trilling described it, cap tured a shift among many intellectuals away from political and social analysis to an abiding concern with culture, alien ation, and identityl The decade of the 1950s was neatly framed by the publication of David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), with its deep ambivalence about the change from an inner-to an other-directed character type, and by Erving Goffrnan's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), where the theatricality of interpersonal relations became an object for analysis. Generally, intellectuals attempted to save the self from the ravages of a conformist consumer culture. More recently, however, historians of the Cold War period have shied away from this defense of the self. They have wedded theories of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault to a narrative of corporate liberalism that manages to shut down the very possibility of an oppositional self, to foreclose authentic and meaningful forms of personal rebellion. According to this narrative, pro-corporate economic policies that promoted sustained economic growth, rising wages and consumption, and military build-up meshed with anticommunism at home and abroad. Abroad, anticommunism cloaked American expansionism; at home, it contained all forces deemed antagonistic to conformity. Thus corporate liberalism upheld an ideological consensus and assured institutional stability. This overly-worn thesis, begun by historians and espe cially popular of late with literary critics and art historians, posits that American life in the years following the Second World War was bound in a strait-jacket. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Ir.'s The Vital Center (1949) represents, for some, the ur-text of corporate liberalism and the self in the postwar era 2 In this work, Schlesinger's allegiance to the reformism of the New Deal remained steady; his politics of moderation rather than conservatism or progressivism informed the work. As a chastened liberal, drawing sus tenance from Kierkegaard and Niebuhr, Schlesinger embraced an anguished self, which realized its freedom in part by struggling against Communist totalitarianism. For critics of the postwar corporate-liberal ideology, Schlesinger's work is mainly an impassioned call to arms to defend American power and prestige. Although Schlesinger celebrated the moral and political virtues of existentialist angst in general, the vision of the new self that came to predominate and to capture the era was that of Riesman's Other-Directed Individual and Whyte's Organization Man. These "indviduals" were selves without substance, seeking approval from their peer group, lacking internal gyroscopes to resist or to rebel. In many ways, Schlesinger's text has striking affinities with the Puritan jeremiad as interpreted by Sacvan Bercovitch. Borrowing from Gramsci's theory of hegemony, although ofte...