Randolph Bourne's Radical Cultural Idealism

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MAN WITH A GHOST: RANDOLPH BOURNE’S RADICAL CULTURAL IDEALISM

Kevin T. Higashikubo

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

May 2021

Committee:

Jolie Sheffer, Advisor

Andrew Schocket

Kevin Higashikubo

iii

ABSTRACT

Jolie Sheffer, Advisor

Though not obscure as a figure in American intellectual history, Randolph Bourne has largely been overlooked by American culture studies. My main argument is that Bourne’s cultural writings show a distinctly American approach to the complications of modernity that show the early 20th century as worthwhile grounds for more contemporary consideration within cultural studies. I explore the foundations of Randolph Bourne's cultural idealism, beginning with an analysis of philosophical pragmatism. Bourne radical understanding of pragmatism was a framework to reimagine two important cultural concepts: youth and national identity. I proceed to examine the role of irony in Randolph Bourne's cultural idealism. I show how Bourne drew from the history of irony to create a cultural concept that served two purposes. First, it was a companion to philosophical pragmatism that would help resolve some of the philosophy's shortcomings in dealing with social values. Second, it was a means to a creative, social empathy needed to fulfill the promises of American democracy in an increasingly complicated world.

Finally, I examine Bourne’s cultural idealism through his social aesthetics, which was his way for the individual to, through cultivation of personal taste, regain agency and subjectivity in modernity. This is largely framed through Bourne’s essays arguing against the hierarchical and undemocratic cultural idealism of English poet and critic, Matthew Arnold. Finally, I look at

Bourne’s idealism as expressed through the function and power of taste. This project, by looking closely at Bourne’s radical cultural idealism, posits that he had a considered theory of culture meant to answer social problems posed by modernity to early twentieth-century American life. iv

For my parents, Carlene and Ryuji, without whom none of this would have been possible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I need to thank my advisor, Jolie Sheffer, not only for her advice but for her patience during this long process. Next would be Andrew Schocket, who had to endure much of the same. This project would not have been possible without their input and guidance. Beka

Patterson deserves mention for her incredible ability to keep things organized in ways I never could have. I would also like to thank all of my friends, classmates, and colleagues at Bowling

Green State University, who made that time and place not only an experience of deep and rewarding academic study, but also a community that I will forever miss. Finally, I need to give special thanks to two individuals: the first is my brother, Bryan, who put up with countless hours of conversations and digressions these past few years, but did so without complaint and was my regular sounding board. The second is Prof. Krister Knapp, who so many years ago introduced me to Randolph Bourne and thus set me down this path.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

INTRODUCTION: IN-BUT-NOT-OF-THE-WORLD ...... 1

Methodology ...... 10

Structure ...... 13

CHAPTER ONE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF RANDOLPH BOURNE’S IDEALISM ...... 18

A Brief History of Pragmatism ...... 23

Pragmatism’s Radical Potential ...... 27

Youth: How to Live Creatively ...... 35

Trans-Nationalism ...... 47

Trans-Nationalism and Cultural Idealism ...... 51

Conclusion ...... 59

CHAPTER TWO: IRONY ...... 64

The Origins of Bourne’s Irony ...... 68

Three Moments in the Life of Irony ...... 77

1. The Life Ironic, with Randolph Bourne ...... 78

2. Irony and Pragmatism ...... 83

3. Irony and Democracy as Social Philosophy ...... 89

Conclusion ...... 95

CHAPTER THREE: THE AESTHETICS OF TASTE ...... 100

The Philosophy of Taste in Kant and Nietzsche ...... 106

Culture Versus Anarchy ...... 117

Arnold and Cultural Stability ...... 120 vii

The Canon ...... 125

The Cult of the Best ...... 128

Life as an Aesthetic Challenge ...... 135

Conclusion ...... 139

CONCLUSION ...... 143

History as an Echo ...... 143

A Death, Premature ...... 144

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 151

INTRODUCTION: IN-BUT-NOT-OF-THE-WORLD

“What are the seeds of American promise?” Randolph Bourne asked in 1917.1 In that moment, he was writing the question as part of a larger condemnation of the American intelligentsia that had so quickly acquiesced to America’s entry into World War I. Bourne saw this eager acceptance of a war mentality as a total betrayal of all the liberal and progressive ideals that the American intelligentsia had so fervently claimed to hold dear in the years leading up to that horrific conflict. And so, by asking that question in 1917, he was, in effect, accusing the American intelligentsia of, in their desire for international power or influence, salting the soil where the seeds of promise had previously been sown.

This Master’s thesis is about Randolph Bourne’s radical cultural idealism. Most of the work he did on this was written about in the decade before the World War I. And yet, that single sentence – “what are the seeds of American promise?” – though written later on, was really the central question on his mind throughout his entire career. Randolph Bourne was a man possessed by thoughts of the fate and future of American culture. Every topic he turned his mind to, whether it was the nascent youth culture of his generation, the dominant philosophies of his time, the theory behind education, musing on art or literature, or finally the venom he spat at American militarization – all of it ultimately centered around that single question: what are the seeds of

American promise? And from that question, Bourne wondered, how could we, as a nation, best those seeds the chance to bloom and flourish? As America entered World War I, Bourne’s cultural idealism faded; it turned into cynicism and despair. But before that, his idealism was a verdant critical landscape full of democratic possibilities and the means for people to navigate

1 Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915- 1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 53. 2 the social fractures of modernity. This thesis is an account of that landscape, of Bourne’s cultural idealism.

Bourne’s cultural writings, which were written between 1911 and 1916, have never been as popular than the ones that came later. And even when his cultural writings are the subject of scholarship, they often are dealt with in isolation with each other: an analysis of Bourne’s concept of irony here, a reframing of his “trans-nationalism” there. My project with this thesis is to take these pre-war, cultural essays and put their ideas in conversation with one another. From this approach, I argue, we can see that Bourne had a clear vision behind his cultural idealism – a project to strengthen democratic thinking, promote social empathy, and empower people to cultural creativity and new expressions of human agency in the chaos of modernity. Or, as he would probably call it: American “spiritual” rejuvenation.

“Spiritual” is a term that Bourne used frequently – I am pretty sure I have seen the term appear more than once in practically every essay of his I have read – but it was used idiosyncratically; he did not mean it the sense we usually understand it today, which would be something like “vaguely or informally religious or amenable to religious ideas” or ironically/hyperbolically to mean “amazing, incredible.” In the former, one might say, “I’m not religious but my visit to the Sistine Chapel was quite spiritual;” in the later one remarks, “That tiramisu was so good it was a spiritual experience.” Neither had anything to do with Bourne’s usage.

But then, figuring out what Bourne meant by it is not immediate because, though he employed the term regularly, he never clearly defined what he meant by it. I want to be upfront – this is not some grand mystery in which the absence of a clear conclusion renders Bourne’s work indecipherable. Honestly, I think that most readers would be able to get the gist of his meaning 3

after reading a couple of his essays. As I understand it, by spiritual Bourne meant something

along the lines of “socially moral and creative.” “The spiritual world,” he wrote, was “ever

creative” and that which gave “the zest of perpetual adventure to mortal life.”2 He would

continue that part of this “spiritual life” was in holding moral courage in a world that had small

use for it.3 It is also helpful to look how Bourne described a lack of “spiritual” life. Those without a developed spiritual sense – “spiritual parasites” he called them – “have lost the faculty of being surprised” and could life their entire lives with vacuity “without ever making a really individual response.”4 Thus, to live “spiritually” meant to not be alive in just the rote, biological

sense but alive and open to all the poetry and wonder and challenges that life contained.

Randolph Bourne is probably best described as a minor figure in American intellectual

history and cultural criticism. Not minor in the sense that his output and contributions are less

important or notable than other figures, but in the sense that he is usually written about in the

scholarship as a side character in a larger story; a deuteragonist in the grand drama of early

twentieth-century American thought. But Randolph Bourne, albeit a minor figure, has never been

an outright obscure one. He is a re-occurring character in survey-style books, such as Christopher

Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America, Michael Walzer’s The Company of Critics, and

Matthew Stratton’s The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, each of which is an excellent

and notable exploration of a specific topic in the annuls of modern American intellectual and

cultural history. And in each, Bourne is given a chapter, a vignette that shows the importance of

his essays and thought to that particular subject. Similarly, Bourne shows up in some thoroughly

2 Randolph Bourne, “The Experimental Life,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911- 1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 156. 3 Bourne, 156. 4 Randolph Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 139. 4 researched histories of certain movements: for example, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical

Club, which might be the definitive monograph on the development of American philosophy – namely pragmatism – during the course of the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century. Or else there is Casey Nelson Blake’s Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne,

Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, which is a history of the community of young American intellectuals, of which Bourne was a part. In both of these texts, Bourne is less the focus of a chapter, but more organically mentioned as a person who drops in and out of the larger narrative, depending on his relevance to specific contexts or chronologies.

Randolph Bourne is also a regular feature in readers of American intellectual history, those heavily curated compilations of “essential” writings intended to give students a scholarly foundation upon which to build their own understanding – a kind of academic canon, as it were.

This designation that ends up being pretty ironic, given Bourne’s opinion on the practice (as will be explored in Chapter Three). Which is not to imply that his presence in such collections is wrong. Depending on the context, Bourne naturally deserves such a place. As will be examined in Chapter One, he was one of the few intellectuals to consider multinationalism in ways that were, even for his own time, deeply progressive, often in ways that resemble contemporary thinking on the matter.

When it comes to anti-war rhetoric as a reaction to America’s entry into World War I, there was probably no more vociferous or articulate writer than Bourne – in fact, outside of academia, Bourne is probably best known as a for his anti-war essays and the persona they created, as immortalized by John Dos Passos’s short poem:

“If any man has a ghost

Bourne has a ghost 5

a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak

hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,

crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:

War is the health of the State.”5

While I am not focusing on Bourne’s anti-war writings in this thesis, it is important to note that part of his legacy is that as the occasional patron saint of many American anti-war movements.

Noam Chomsky used Bourne to frame his opposition to the Vietnam War in American Power and the New Mandarins. Chomsky drew from Bourne’s seminal anti-war essay, “Twilight of the

Idols.” Comparing the capitulation of so-called liberals to pro-war belligerence in the late 1960s to Bourne’s lamentations of the same in 1917, Chomsky grimly noted that where Bourne saw a

“twilight” of liberal and intellectual integrity, “with the Vietnam war, twilight has turned to midnight.”6 Bourne biographer Bruce Clayton also connects Bourne to the anti-Vietnam

movement and touches upon his mercurial legacy, writing:

“Randolph Bourne Lives,” an anonymous enthusiast chalked high on an American

wall during the heyday of the uprising against the Vietnam War. In those tie-dyed

days, one did not have to go far on any university campus to find a well-thumbed

paperback edition of Randolph Bourne’s paeans to youthful radicalism or his

searing dissents against American involvement in World War I. 7

5 John Dos Passos, U.S.A, Library of America 85 (New York: Library of America ; Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Books, 1996), 449. Original emphasis. 6 Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York, NY: The New Press, 2002), 7. 7 Bruce Clayton, review of Review of Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, by Leslie J. Vaughan, The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1712, https://doi.org/10.2307/2650143. 6

But fate is partial to repetitions. Christopher Lasch noted that “a legend in the twenties,

Bourne was quickly forgotten in the thirties.”8 Clayton observes, himself writing roughly a decade-and-a-half after the high-water mark of the Vietnam War protests, that back then, “reading Bourne…was de rigeur both in the classroom and the coffeehouses. But today?”9 But today, indeed.

Today, Randolph Bourne remains a minor figure, despite so many of the things he deeply

obsessed about burning as hot as ever in the American conscious. Consider the massive

experiential divides that seem to demarcate today’s generational categories – every other week, it

seems, comes some published lament about how “millennials are killing X.” Well, as I will touch

on in the first chapter, the idea that different generations have totally different experiences, and

thus social outlooks and priorities, was a realization Bourne was one of the earliest American

thinkers to touch upon. Then there is the way in which various kinds of social resentments –

whether they be racial, political, or cultural (and usually a combination of all of them) – have

lead Americans to think of each other less as fellow citizens, equally invested in the American

future, but as enemies who can only coexist in increasingly separate communities, if they believe

they can coexist at all. This fraught and divided civil status was exactly the sort of problem

Bourne’s ideal of irony, the subject of Chapter Two, was meant to either prevent or at least

ameliorate. Another pressing issue is the way in which pop culture has become more and more,

for better or worse, the primary site of an individual’s self-identification and social

understanding; the major pop culture institutions – for example, Star Wars, video games, comic

books, Young Adult fiction, pop stars – and the fan communities, sometimes accepting of

8 Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, Norton Paperback (New York: Norton, 1997), 75. 9 Clayton, “Review of Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism,” 1712. 7

difference and other times aggressively opposed to it, that agglomerate around them have

become primary lenses through which one interprets the world. Bourne, as will be discussed in

Chapter Three, may have been one of the first American thinkers to understand this kind of

relationship between the individual and they culture they live within and choose to embrace.

Everyone knows that Randolph Bourne, having lived in the early twentieth century, was

not a postmodernist. And while I do not aim to suggest that maybe he was, I do find he often

resembled contemporary cultural theorists and critics more than he did many of his peers.

Bourne’s thinking was the product of cross-disciplinary interests, combining literary theory, a

comprehensive education in the history Western philosophy, aesthetics and art criticism, and

cultural progressivism. It was also the product of a highly unconventional and deeply personal

social experience: Bourne occupied a distinctly liminal space between rubbing elbows with the

intellectual elite, while at the same time always already outside of them due to, as he called it, his

“handicap.”

“Some to Misery are Born,” wrote William Blake and this may have well described the

early life of Randolph Bourne. The very first moments of his life started with a scarring of his

face, resulting from the slip of the doctor’s forceps. Then, a few years later, came the spinal

tuberculosis that would hunch his back and forever stunt his growth. Casey Nelson Blake writes,

“with his disfigured face, his dwarfed and twisted body, Bourne felt himself ‘truly in the world,

but not of the world.’”10 In many ways, the intellectual elite Bourne circled validated this belief.

Bruce Clayton recounts an anecdote in which Bourne had just been published in the Atlantic and

had been invited to the elite Century Club by that magazine’s editor, Ellery Sedgwick. Meeting

10 Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford, Cultural Studies of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 73. 8

in the club’s “little room” – a modest foyer where non-members would await whomever had

invited for them – the two had a delightful conversation, with Sedgwick being duly impressed by

the then-twenty-six year old. But all the same, the celebrated editor of an august magazine could

not bring himself to the next, traditional step: invite the young man into the club for lunch.

Bourne’s appearance and stature – facially scarred and back crooked, standing barely five feet

tall – was simply too unseemly to welcome, even if only for an hour or so, into the company of

the socially elite men that comprised the club’s membership.11

Now I am by no means a scholar of Disability Studies and otherwise Bourne’s

“handicap” does not figure throughout this thesis, but as Bourne himself identified it as formative to his thinking, it is worthwhile to pay it some consideration. Because of his

“handicap,” he wrote, “Of one thing I am sure of, however: that life will have little meaning for me except as I am able to contribute toward some ideal of social betterment, if not in deed, then in word.”12 On one hand, he had the kind of background and pedigree that more or less guaranteed a man (and only a man) success in life: a middle-class upbringing; an Ivy-League education; numerous affiliations or friendships with many of the other intellectual heavyweights of his era; a regular opportunity to be published in magazines like the New Republic and the aforementioned Atlantic Monthly. On the other, there was a lot in life he had experienced exclusion from – such as invitations or memberships to elite social clubs – or else assumed he would miss out on – such as getting married and having a family. Bourne lived his entire adult life right up on the edge of a world that would only admit him halfway. For all the democratic

11 Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 1–3. 12 Randolph Bourne, “The Handicapped,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 80. 9

ideals it held, America was only partially open to people like Bourne, and countless other

minorities – all those who were in-but-not-of the world.

Again, my project here is not to psychoanalyze Bourne or do a deep-dive into how his

“handicap” directly influenced his thought. But one recurring theme throughout this thesis is the

ways in which Bourne, as Ross Posnock puts it, “sought to explore and promote new forms of

human agency.”13 This need for new kinds of human agency was a continuation of Bourne’s

conviction that “twentieth-century Americans would have to invent new modes of thought, a new

politics, a new literature, a new culture, and new aesthetics. Modern American would need ideas

consistent with current and social and cultural realities…”14

All of this, I believe, positions Bourne as relevant beyond the field of American

intellectual history and into the broader discipline of cultural studies. In this regard, Bourne’s

thinking had more in common with the developments of academic cultural theory of the later

twentieth century than those of his own era. Each chapter of this thesis examines ways in which

Bourne tried to redefine the terms of the world around him and imagine new ways for people to

live in it. As Matthew Stratton observes, Bourne believed that “the notion that mental concepts

themselves were not only produced but dynamically altered by encounters with new formulations

of sensory data.”15 Concepts, for Bourne, were not static, inert things, but rather in constant flux, as they only existed in the lived experience of people in the world – a notion that is extremely familiar to readers of contemporary cultural studies.

13 Ross Posnock, “The Politics of Nonidentity: A Genealogy,” Boundary 2 19, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 36. 14 Paul K. Longmore and Paul Steven Miller, “‘A Philosophy of Handicap’: The Origins of Randolph Bourne’s Radicalism,” Radical History Review, no. 94 (Winter 2006): 60. 15 Matthew Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, First edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 29. 10

While his methods have a postmodern flavor to them, his idealistic vision remained imbedded in modernity and its problems. Bourne wanted to reconceptualize cultural ideas in ways that would make the world less chaotic and hostile; and people more empathetic, more open-minded. He did not want to drift along intellectual currents; he wanted to take control of them and from that work toward a new vision of American promise, based in a true democratic spirit of communal good will and creative collaboration.

Methodology

In general, I have approached this project as a series of close readings of Randolph

Bourne’s essays. While his most famous and written about essays are his anti-war ones, this thesis focuses on the lesser-known works regarding his cultural idealism and theory. As I mentioned above, Bourne typically appears as a side character in broader historical projects: often histories about early twentieth-century intellectual communities or socio-intellectual movements. Otherwise, aside from a couple of biographies, he mostly appears in scholarship through journal articles, which focus on and seek to reframe or reexamine specific features of his thought. My project is an attempt to bridge those two approaches: I examine Bourne by focusing on a few key elements of his cultural writings and I try to reframe them as a kind of pre-political social radicalism, built out of the intellectual currents of his time, but directed systematically and cohesively toward a vision of American promise that has largely been overlooked in the scholarship.

The general plan for this project has always been to take pieces of Bourne’s pre-war cultural thought and put them in conversation with each other in order to shake out a clearer image of his cultural idealism than is often depicted. Originally, I had conceived of this thesis as proceeding chronologically through the selected essays, with the intention of showing how 11

Bourne’s thought developed over time and culminated in a cohesive cultural idealism. The first chapter was going to focus on the cultural foundations of pragmatism, youth, and irony; the second chapter would have continued to his philosophy of taste; and the third chapter would have concluded with an argument for his “trans-nationalism” as a summation of those two earlier chapter – “trans-nationalism” as the machine for which they supplied the ghost.

A skeleton of that earlier sketch for this thesis certainly remains. But as my thinking developed, I became increasingly intrigued with the way Bourne reimagined certain cultural concepts. I have retuned this project to reflect that. Chapter One still begins with pragmatism, but now with youth and “trans-nationalism” as examples of how he used a radical understanding of pragmatism to reconceptualize ideas as a foundation for his cultural radicalism. Irony has been split off into its own chapter – the more I thought about irony, the more I realized how important and central it was to his vision of truly democratic society, from a pre-political position of cultural idealism. Bourne’s philosophy of taste has come to be the subject of the final chapter: where the previous chapters were about his intellectual project to enable people to create a better society, taste was his ideal for how individuals could empower themselves to become active and creative agents against the cultural institutions that would seek to moderate their subjectivity.

There are limitations to my approach, of course. Randolph Bourne was a highly prolific writer and throughout his career he would constantly write on a great number of topics, whether it be designing a pragmatic method for education, literary and philosophical criticism, or the function of art and architecture in modern America. Many, if not all, of these topics certainly intersect with his radical cultural idealism, but simply cannot be duly taken into account in the course of this thesis. So too with his best known anti-war writings, which depict – in real time – the breakdown of his idealism against the forces of cultural closure and political oppression. But 12 in order to make this project feasible, I have had to limit the number of essays I focus on to only a couple per chapter. There is a silver-lining to this however: it means that scholarship on

Bourne’s cultural idealism and its implications for cultural studies continues to be open for further research and consideration.

I have approached this thesis through a few different lenses. The first is from a perspective on the history of philosophy. Randolph Bourne’s thinking, coming from a place deep fondness for the discipline stemming from his undergraduate years, was distinctly entwined with the academic philosophy of his era. Thus, I have sought to position Bourne not merely as an adherent of certain philosophies, but also as a figure who adapted them throughout the course of his broader cultural project. Whether it was pragmatism, Kantianism, or Nietzscheanism, I have sought to establish Bourne as not just a philosophically inclined or inflected thinker, but as one who additionally reveals certain avenues or potentials in those philosophies at the turn of the twentieth century. Following from Bourne’s place in the history of philosophy I examine how he drew from certain philosophies to adapt, reimagine, or otherwise produce new concepts. In each chapter, I emphasize certain concepts that Bourne adapted or refigured to fit within his cultural radicalism which, despite his usage of common terminology, he intended to help solve or ameliorate the social and intellectual problems of his time.

Next, and obviously given that all of this has been written within an American Cultural

Studies program, I have approached Bourne’s thought through the lens of cultural theory and criticism. I spend a good deal of time putting Bourne’s cultural ideas and idealism in conversation with the broader cultural thinking of his contemporaries, in order to highlight the ways in which his thinking frequently stood beyond his particular intellectual context. From that, 13

I also consider Bourne from a perspective of contemporary cultural studies, and investigate the ways in which Bourne often prefigured the shape of thought that emerged decades after he lived.

Structure

This thesis has been written as three chapters, each of which is meant to highlight and illuminate a quality of Bourne’s thought that has elsewise been overlooked or at least underestimated. To support this project, each chapter includes a discussion of the intellectual frameworks Bourne was working in or against: pragmatism in the first chapter; irony in the second; the philosophy of taste in the third. As a major part of my argument revolves around the ways in which Bourne reconceptualized certain cultural ideas, I have attempted to show how his thinking came out of, and then diverged from the context of his intellectual era.

The first chapter is about philosophical pragmatism and how Bourne, realizing the radical potential of the philosophy, used it as a foundation upon which to reimagine social concepts in radically efficacious ways. The first was his reconceptualization of “youth,” which he wrote about in the essay so aptly titled “Youth.” This essay was Bourne’s articulation that the dawn of modernity carried with it novel generational divides. Not only were there new cultural possibilities to explore, but entirely new perspectives from which to explore them. “Youth” was his vision of an experimental disposition towards new experiences for the sake of developing a more exciting and vital apprehension of the world. The chapter continues with “trans- nationalism.” Writing at a time of unsurpassed immigration, which brought with it calls for more rigid Americanization of the newcomers and rising nativism bent on oppressing them. Writing against the “melting pot” or, given America’s increasing militarization toward World War I and thus building concern of how the national allegiance of immigrants would fall, Bourne proposed 14

an ideal of a new kind of national identity; one that drew strength from diversity and difference

and produced national power instead of fracture.

The second chapter takes a close look at Bourne’s essay “The Life of Irony” in which he

articulated a new concept of “irony,” which, I argue, while not being entirely disconnected from

the broader understanding of the word, was ultimately an idiosyncratic concept through which he

envisioned a social ideal of creative empathy. This ideal may have been original to Bourne, but it

is perhaps most familiar to contemporary readers through late and famed (and recently

problematic) American author, David Foster Wallace and his 2005 Kenyon College

commencement address that has since lived on simply known as “This Is Water.” Wallace

adjured his audience to try to exert some measure of control in how we interpret the world. The

point, he said, was to have the realization that “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities

are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”16 Because, he warned, so much of our understanding of the world was done through a kind of autopilot, which was inevitably impatient, uncompassionate, and self-centered. Throughout the speech he gave several examples to illustrate this paradigm, such as waiting in line at the supermarket, or the petty frustrations of driving the daily commute to work. Try to train yourself, Wallace, adjured, to not automatically lock on to the most base or despicable behaviors or motivations of all the people we happen to come across during the ins and outs of daily life, but instead to give them the benefit of doubt – that most people, most of the time, are not acting maliciously but are simply just like us – desperately trying to manage the profound mental and emotional difficulties of simply living in

16 David Foster Wallace and Kenyon College, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York, NY: Little, Brown & Co., 2009), 8, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=763 281. 15

the world, day in and day out. Bourne, however, was thinking on a national level, where the scale

of effect was not so narrowly constrained to an individual’s mental well-adaptedness to a

complicated world, but a democratic society’s very feasibility in a complicated world.

Finally, in the third chapter I explore Bourne’s “aesthetics of taste” as developed in the

essays “Our Cultural Humility” and “The Cult of the Best.” In these essays, he argued for a

cultural idealism conceived in opposition to that of Matthew Arnold. Bourne prioritized the

individual’s potential for social discovery and subjectivity in face of the burgeoning power of

cultural hierarchies designed to define the distinction between “good” or “right” or “proper”

cultural thinking. Against the currents of institutional power, Bourne, I argue, sought to create a

space for individual creativity and self-determination that could defy the established cultural

authorities. There are distinct ways in which Bourne’s opposition to Arnoldian cultural theory

resembles the cultural criticism of Pierre Bourdieu, even though the two men were separated by

seven decades. Bourdieu wrote that cultural consumption is “an act of deciphering, decoding,

which presupposes practical or explicit master of a cipher or code…a work of art has meaning an

interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it

is decoded.”17 Bourne’s “aesthetics of taste” were, in my argument, a means for individuals to

develop this “cultural competence” but reclaiming their cultural agency from institutionally

designed cultural hierarchies. Both Bourne and Bourdieu were writing about the objectification

of the individual through the cultural status quo. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,”

Bourdieu wrote, echoing Bourne’s concern that the “cult of the best” objectified the individual.18

17 Pierre Bourdieu, “Distinction and The Aristocracy of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 4th ed (Harlow, England ; New York: Pearson Longman, 2009), 499. 18 Bourdieu, 502. 16

But Bourdieu, writing from a sociological point of view, was a descriptivist chronicler of extant

social structures; Bourne, meanwhile, was writing from the position of radical prescriptivism,

actively trying to change how culture was understood through his oppositional cultural theory:

Bourdieu wanted an account, while Bourne wanted a way out. The “aesthetics of taste” would

provide that escape.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote English writer L.P

Hartley.19 But that point wherein the past becomes “the past” is always a dicey question. Are the

1960’s a “past” beyond the event horizon of understanding for those of us born thirty years later, simply because we grew up with the Internet and our parents did not? Are my students, who are half my age, from an essentially different world because their Internet and social media is all- encompassing in ways totally foreign to my own experience? These aren’t questions that can be answered with certainty or objectivity. But at least in my opinion, the early twentieth century, while the past, is not quite “the past” from the today of 2021, despite it being a century behind us. The problems and issues stemming one hundred years (if not a few decades longer), it seems to me, have largely persisted and have continued to define many of the dominant issues of

American social, cultural, and political life. Problems concerning the questions of ethnicity and

American identity; of the new and radical ways in which we can understand cultural ideas and products; of how we adopt and adapt to technologies that seem poised to utterly rewrite the way we experience sociality in the first place. The minutia and particulars of those questions have changed immensely in the century between Randolph Bourne’s America and the one in which I am writing today: but the essential substance of those questions has not. Therefore, we might

19 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London, Great Britain: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1913), 9. 17 consider those writing a century ago – Bourne especially – and view them not as being of the

“past” but as constructive to our understanding of the present.

The general absence of early American modernism in the historiography of cultural studies is an oversight. The fragmentary nature of modernism and its attendant social disorientation, as evident in Randolph Bourne’s writings, seems to have produced a social experience productive of cultural theories typically associated with the post-modern intellectual world almost half a century later. The socio-cultural conditions of turn-of-the-century American thought, this suggests, it ripe for scholarly reevaluation and new investigations by the fields of cultural studies and cultural theory, as many of Bourne’s contemporaries were trying to grapple with the same social conditions. A new critical appraisal of thinkers from this period, I suggest, is long overdue. Second, Bourne, in particular, ought to warrant more attention, as his thinking preempts that of seminal figures in those same fields. Bourne’s unique biography – his contradictory position as being a member of the cultural elite (as a white, educated, Anglo-Saxon male) while also socially outcast and marginalized (by his “handicap”) was one that few others occupied as a public intellectual. I also hope to establish that Randolph Bourne was thinking in a way that stood unique in his own time, and echoes ours as well. As such, he warrants some degree of consideration from contemporary cultural studies that has largely been ignored.

Bourne’s cultural idealism, while certainly a product of the early decades of the twentieth century, touched on concerns far beyond his era. 18

CHAPTER ONE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF RANDOLPH BOURNE’S IDEALISM

The history of turn-of-the-century radicalism in America is usually a political history. Or

a history of labor. It is a history filled with figures like the notable socialists Eugene V. Debs and

Upton Sinclair. Or anarchists ranging from the intellectual Emma Goldman, to the militants

Luigi Galleani and Leon Czolgosz. But to frame that period’s radicalism only as political or

economic radicalisms is to miss out on another, major constituent in the history of American

radicalism: cultural radicalism.

Randolph Bourne was arguably the most underrated cultural radical of the time.

Intellectual historian Christopher Lasch locates Bourne within the “new radicalism,” the shift in

reformist tradition that happened during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth

century, caused by changing attitudes towards government, increasing trust in bureaucracies and

corporations, and the embrace of more scientific ways of thinking. All of this culminates,

according to Lasch, in new radicals seeing “the end of social and political reform to be the

improvement of the quality of American culture as a whole, rather than simply a way of

equalizing the opportunities for economic self-advancement.”20 No doubt this was partially true for Bourne: his focus, at least in the pre-war years, was on the cultural life of America, not so much its politics; and despite his socialist sympathies, his ideals were far more oriented toward the realm of intellectual possibilities than economics. But there is an important way in which

Lasch misunderstands Bourne’s radicalism: Bourne’s radical ideal would never settle for mere

“improvement.” What Lasch fails to appreciate with Bourne is the crucial way in which he stood outside of the context of a “reform tradition.” Bourne saw American culture as being reimagined or remade, not simply reformed. Louis Menand understands Bourne better when he writes that

20 Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, xiv. 19

“[Bourne] believed that American society must be transformed, and that the site of that

transformation must be the culture…He was not a reformer. He wanted a movement.”21

This more extreme understanding of radicalism was not in and of itself anomalous to

Bourne – it was also the purview of the aforementioned socialists and anarchists who wanted to see the wholesale replacement of American political institutions. But unlike socialism or anarchism, Bourne’s radicalism had no use for marches; it was not the kind of movement that happened on the street but within the soul. It did not need agitation or bomb tossing, nor revolution or even ideology. His was, again, not a political radicalism, but a cultural one; he did not want to see a new system of government, but rather a new foundation for democratic

American social life. For Bourne, this was, first and foremost, a philosophical problem.

It started with pragmatism, the homegrown American philosophy fathered by Charles

Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism was Bourne’s first love, intellectually speaking, and it played an essential role in shaping his thinking; although he rarely wrote about it directly, it was a constant presence behind practically every word he wrote. I argue that pragmatism was a philosophy with radical implications, though not intended as such by its creators. Bourne, however, tapped into this potential. The power of pragmatism was in its central claim that the truth of an idea was determined by its social value; that is an idea was “true” insofar as it was useful or meaningful. Whereas many practitioners of pragmatism used it as a method for incremental reform, I argue that Bourne took advantage of its innate ability to radically reframe and reformulate and revise existing cultural concepts such that they would serve to scaffold his radical cultural idealism. These concepts, as discussed in this chapter, were

21 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 1st ed (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 402. 20

“youth” and “nationalism” – which Bourne refigured as “trans-nationalism.” Irony was a third member of this radical trinity, and will be the focus of the next chapter. Each of these three concepts was, more or less, commonly used in Bourne’s world, and much in the same way they are used today: “youth” was, as is now, a typical designation of age and its attendant experiences and expectations; “nationalism” was a shorthand of “true Americanness,” though often interpreted in a way Bourne despised; irony was used to denote either a rhetorical or literary modality, typically wherein what was said or done was not what was meant. None of these concepts were invented by Bourne: he used ordinary language to articulate new ideas.

Bourne endeavored upon this conceptual reframing because his radical idealism needed it to proceed, even though, prima facie, the terms themselves perhaps seem ill-suited for such a project. Much of the political radicalism of the early twentieth-century, after all, was the product of activism, or the violent rebellion against the powers that were, not the products of academic philosophy, or subsequently intellectualized terminology. But Bourne’s radicalism, in my argument, was not political in nature but cultural. And as such, it had to world on a different conceptual paradigm – that of culture. That “youth” was a non-political, cultural concept is probably easy to accept, but “nationalism” likely less so. But in the chapter that follows, I aim to justify that “nationalism” – better understood as national identity (the terminology here gets complicated, as “nationalism” now implies a degree of white supremacist ideology or a quality of “real Americanness” that exists above and beyond the American demographic itself) – was essentially cultural to Bourne’s thinking as well.

Both “youth” and “trans-nationalism” qua national identity appear as the subject of their own essays in Bourne’s pre-war period, which ranged from 1911 to 1916. (This definition of pre- war, if not obvious, relates to when the US entered into the conflict, not when hostilities began 21

on the European continent.) These writings were Bourne at his most idealistic and optimistic.

Youth was his ideal of an open-mindedly scientific and eager approach to life, where new

experiences were to be celebrated and new social possibilities explored. This lived creativity was

needed to thrive in the fractured conditions of modernity. “Trans-nationalism,” as oppose to the

standard, established “nationalism,” was Bourne’s counter to the growing assimilationist and

nativist arguments of his time, brought about by the immigration boom of the turn of the century.

Instead of either oppressing or erasing multiculturalism, Bourne sought to embrace it. By

confronting a vulgar understanding of “nationalism” with a more open-minded concept of “trans-

nationalism,” Bourne hoped to reinterpret the core ideal of American identity such that it stood in

favor of the better angels of America and democratic promise. As America grew into the

twentieth century, it, unlike any other nation in the world, seemed capable of adopting the

potential of a true multicultural existence, and from that unique site of power, in turn create a

democratic, national engine able to make the entire world in a certain image – not along the

terms of brutish, colonial-minded European myopia, but rather that of a spiritually benevolent,

democratic cultural idealism.

These cultural concepts, in Bourne’s thought, worked together to generate a new kind of

radical cultural idealism, which would pull people towards the creative behaviors and

dispositions that would reimagine the possibilities of American culture. Here, I draw upon

Herbert Marcuse’s definition of “concept” as, “the mental representation of something that is

understood, comprehended, known as the result of a process of reflection.”22 Part of what made

Bourne unique in his use of concepts was his canny and prescient addition of self-reflexivity to

22 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 105. 22 it. Though pragmatically derived, it was considerably ahead of its time: whereas concepts like

“youth” and “nationality” would have had generally stable and banal definitions, Bourne was able to reconceive them as radical cultural agents. These new concepts would build up the spiritual creativity needed to both push against the stagnating or calcifying effects of tradition and the status quo as well as power the cultural rejuvenation of America. The cultural concepts of youth and trans-nationalism would aid America in navigating the perilous seas of modernity.

In a time marked by fracture and social uncertainty, the pragmatically derived cultural ideals of youth and trans-nationalism could provide a measure of creativity and social stability; the foundation, along with the next chapter’s topic of irony, of Bourne’s cultural idealism. This idealism, in Bourne’s imagination, would foster a nation of open, democratic discourse; intellectual and cultural camaraderie, and a creative and empathetic social life.

In this chapter, I do a close reading of two of Bourne’s pre-war essays, “Youth” and

“Trans-National America.” I look at how Bourne treats each of these concepts and how each of them was seen as a solution to the problems of modern America. First, however, I do a quick survey of pragmatism, as some familiarity with it is necessary to understand why Bourne’s use of it was both novel and radical. I begin by looking at the ways pragmatism offered a major disruption to the intellectual status quo, though its radical potential was either unnoticed or neglected. The most common tenet of pragmatism was that “truth” was a function of “usage” – that it, something was “true” in so far as it was useful or helpful in one’s experience. I show how pragmatism, in challenging the stability of epistemic truth, opened up the possibility for Bourne to rethink cultural concepts along grounds that were more socially desirable and valuable.

Furthermore, Bourne’s understanding of pragmatism and his subsequent creation of these concepts, I suggest, showed him working in an intellectual mode that is surprisingly 23 contemporary and has far more in common with current practices of cultural theory than previously understood.

A Brief History of Pragmatism

Pragmatism, though developed in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and only hitting its highpoint in the American intellectual mainstream of the mid-twentieth century – was inherently a profoundly radical philosophy. Personally, I am always a bit disappointed but not exactly surprised by the fact that this is rarely brought up. There are a good number of reasons why pragmatism hasn’t received much attention to its radical qualities. For starters, there is the simple matter of terminological drift. Since at least the mid-twentieth century, with the decline of pragmatism as a mainstream philosophy, the word itself has predominantly come to mean

“practical” or “sensible,” both of which mean just about the opposite of “radical” in everyday language. It is safe to say that today when “pragmatism” is uttered it has nothing to do with the philosophy and instead is used to describe someone or some idea as pleasingly level-headed; to be pragmatic, these days, would imply that one is focused on practical, tangible results over all else. And as approached by its prime formulators and evangelists, philosophical pragmatism did not exactly do a whole lot to separate itself from that appraisal. Whether it was William James,

John Dewey, Jane Addams, and so on, it is true that a lot of the power put behind pragmatism was in its assumed or proposed efficaciousness in getting results. But pragmatism’s identity as a philosophy contrasted against its identity as a system to accomplish social ends were not one and the same. Arguing for this distinction is part of my present project. But for the time being, from here on out, when I write about “pragmatism,” I am talking about the philosophical definition and not the common understanding, unless otherwise noted. 24

Another reason pragmatism does not have a reputation as a radical philosophy is that the

men who invented it did not design it for explicitly radical ends, at least not at first. Considering

that I am arguing that pragmatism is a far more radical philosophy than has been acknowledged,

it is at least curious the degree to which its creators handled it with relative modesty, even if they

occasionally spoke of it in grand terms (“The future of our civilization depends upon the

widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind,” wrote John Dewey.23) So

let’s talk for a moment about how pragmatism came to be in the first place, and then how its

intellectual etiology ultimately failed to capitalize on its greater potential concerning the

reimagination of American modernity.

To talk about pragmatism commonly casts it as being the shared brainchild of Charles

Peirce, William James, and John Dewey; yet to do this would be misleading as none of them

meant quite the same thing by it – in fact Louis Menand suggests that we talk not about

pragmatism but pragmatisms to account for the differentiation between the philosophical

systems as imagined by each man (itself an appropriately pragmatic distinction). Each individual

version shared a good amount of common intellectual DNA, however. David A. Hollinger neatly

summarizes this shared central intellectual goal as “the desire for a way of life consistent with

what they and their contemporaries variously perceived as the implications of modern science.”24

The scientific developments stemming from the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the

early twentieth drastically changed how the world was understood. From the position of

contemporary scientism, where we commonly conflate scientific theories with sheer facts about

23 Quoted from: David A. Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas, Johns Hopkins paperbacks ed (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 30. 24 Hollinger, 29. 25

the world, it might be surprising that for Peirce, James, and Dewey, the discoveries of modern

science challenged a static and stable view of the universe. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, for

example, depicted a natural world in constant change, where the teleology of design was driven

by the randomness of adaptation instead of a preordained purpose. For Dewey especially,

philosophy had proceeded as if ideas where somehow ontologically special. But following the

Theory of Evolution, which held that one finch’s beak was no more metaphysically significant

than any other – one was not more lovingly designed by a Creator – pragmatism likewise held

that no idea had “greater metaphysical stature than, say, a fork.”25 Pragmatism was an attempt to makes sense of “the role of scientific method in a universe of change and uncertainty,”26 and to

put philosophy more in line with the implications of this new understanding of the universe.

The short history of pragmatism goes something as follows: Charles Peirce developed

pragmatism as a means to give more scientific clarity to how ideas were used. Peirce’s

pragmatism, or pragmaticism as he would later call his philosophy (to distinguish it from what

James and Dewey were doing with the word), did not have any of the social aspirations of the

later versions, and it does not really intersect with Randolph Bourne’s usage of the concept, so I

will not linger much on it here. The important thing to know is that Peirce’s foundational idea

was “to take account of the practical consequences an object might have is the way to form a

clear idea of it.”27 What an idea did was just as important as what the idea was. William James

took this starting point and from it built a broader philosophy.

James essentially codified pragmatism into the elevator-pitch form currently found in

philosophy textbooks: that the “truth” of an idea was a result of its usefulness in guiding inquiry

25 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 2001, 361. 26 Hollinger, In the American Province, 30. 27 Hollinger, 32. 26

or making sense of experience, or in the Jamesian parlance, its “cash value.” Most of the

Western philosophical tradition had been, historically, prefaced on a belief-to-world

supervention. This meant that whether or not a belief was true was a matter of its correspondence

to the actual structure of the actual world, which was always already external to most beliefs

regarding said world. And yet, in the face of philosophical tradition, James asserted in 1907,

“Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is, in fact, an event,

a process: the process namely of verifying itself.”28 The apparent circularity of truth verifying truth is helpfully explained by Louis Menand who summarizes, “No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.”29 As a psychologist, Menand implies, James was concerned with how mental

objects related to other mental objects. Ideas only connected to other ideas; the mental could only

be plugged into the mental. James, due to health problems, wasn’t able to fully elucidate his

principles of pragmatism, and passed away a few years later in 1910. Yet the Jamesian version of

pragmatism still matters for Bourne scholars because it was the first and foundational version of

that philosophical perspective Bourne encountered and later developed upon.

To say that John Dewey took up the mantle of pragmatism probably is not fair to Peirce

or James, but John Dewey basically took up the mantle of pragmatism and shaped it into what

would become the dominant American philosophy for half a century. If James was interested in

how the idea of truth intersected with lived experience, Dewey directed pragmatism into a

concrete, socially oriented approach to living. This was a process, as he literally spent the rest of

his life amending, defending, developing, and clarifying pragmatism as a valid socio-

28 William James, The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975), 97. Emphasis original. 29 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 2001, 356. 27

philosophical system. And his contributions to the philosophy produced in it a lot of its

untapped, radical potential.

Pragmatism’s Radical Potential

So what made pragmatism potentially radical? First, it was radical in a metaphilosophical

sense, so much so that it would not be out of line to call it a kind of anti-philosophy. It did away

with the traditional pairing of metaphysics and epistemology in philosophy. Absolutes and ideas

that stood beyond the pale of human experience, the pragmatists proclaimed, simply were not

features of the universe. There were no Capital-T Truths floating safe and secure in a Platonic

metaphysical ether. Following from this, if there were no absolute Truths, then philosophical

investigations into them – i.e. epistemology – were no more productive of knowledge than a

zoologist describing a unicorn. “Philosophers, Dewey argued, had mistakenly insisted on making

a problem of the relation between the mind and the world, an obsession that had given rise to

what he called ‘the alleged discipline of epistemology.’”30 Needless to say, this rankled more

than a few, primarily European, philosophers. As Bertrand Russell sardonically concluded of

Dewey’s pragmatism, “ironclads and Maxim guns become the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical

truth.”31 Russell was concerned with the idea that if metaphysical truth could be reduced to functionality or apparent consequence, then the end result would be a metaphysics of sheer power: because in the lay world, what is functional is always what works.

Russell’s critique, however, takes as a given the very thing that pragmatism was trying to do away with: that philosophical inquiry was about mapping correspondence between the mind and an ontologically static world. The pragmatists started from an entirely different position –

30 Menand, 360. 31 Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 123–24. 28

that of a world in constant flux, as informed by modern science – and as such set out to make

sense and navigate that understanding of the universe. The stakes were not meager; it was a

matter of whether philosophy could be socially relevant in any way shape or form. Robert

Westbrook writes: “Philosophy… had two choices. It could become an active participant in the

‘living struggles and issues of its own age and times’ or it could stick to its traditions of

epistemological conundrums and thereby ‘maintain an immune monastic impeccability without

relevancy and bearing in the generating ideas of its contemporary present.’”32 From the pragmatists’ point of view, philosophy was like a motorcycle with the rear wheel suspended off the ground: it could continue to rev the throttle and get the wheel spinning ever more powerfully, yet ineffectively, in the air (which would not, it should be noted, be a gross violation of the purpose of the motor); or it could put rubber to asphalt, grind out some smoke, and actually get somewhere by the end of the day. Or, as John Dewey wrote in his famous “The Need for the

Recovery of Philosophy,” “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”33 In order to preserve the value of philosophy, pragmatism, in turn, had to change its long established, traditional function. It was precisely this kind of egalitarian functionality that made Randolph Bourne fall in love with the philosophy, though as we shall see, for him it did not go far enough in this direction.

By reframing the philosophical project as such, pragmatism was radical in a metaphilosophical sense: it aimed to pull philosophy away from being the lofty, transcendental

32 Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991), 137. 33 John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 1993), 8. 29

pursuit of cloistered academics and into the everyday world of philosophically lay people.

Because, as Cornell West points out, pragmatism made philosophy “a mode of cultural critical

action that focuses on the ways and means by which human beings have, do, and can overcome

obstacles, dispose of predicaments, and settle problematic situations.”34 Pragmatism was about

figuring out the best way for people to navigate an increasingly complicated world. Because with

modernity came an increasingly messy life, replete with unforeseen obstacles and series after

series of situations, each more difficult and problematic than the last. And collectively the largest

number of obstacles and problematic situations – and thus the place pragmatism would have the

most practical value – were outside the halls of Yale or Harvard. “In a complicated and perverse

world,” Dewey continued, “action which is not informed with vision, imagination, and

reflection, is more likely to increase confusion and conflict than to straighten things out.”35 With

Pragmatism, philosophy was now for the people, of the people, by the people, to phrase it in the famous language of American democracy. Pragmatism would help ordinary people make better decisions – of, for, and by themselves – which would ultimately percolate up into better social outcomes for the nation at large. And this system was certainly democratic in the egalitarian sense – the pragmatic method, designed for “dealing with the problems of men” became a philosophy available to all people. Pragmatism was supposed to be the end of democratic philosophy, the system-of-all-systems that was both a summation and a conclusion of that great,

American project. Yet, Bourne feared that if all pragmatism could do was provide a scientific methodology for rational living, it would fail to provide the creative and poetic substance that

34 Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, The Wisconsin Project on American Writers (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 86. 35 Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 7. 30 made life worth living in the first place. Bourne’s concept of youth, which comes later in this chapter, was one way he saw to fix this problem. Irony, which is the focus of the next chapter, was another.

But like so many products of modernism, pragmatism was something of a contradiction: it was a radical metaphilosophy locked together with a decidedly non-radical social functionality.

Sure, it sought to tear down the faulty scaffolding of traditional philosophy and hurry the fire of radical philosophy, Prometheus-like, into the hands common people. But threaten the political and social foundations of American life? Certainly not. It wasn’t meant to do that, at least by its greatest advocates. Dewey, who was pretty much the patron saint of American liberalism in his time, wanted no part of revolution. And not because he was ignorant of social problems or satisfied with the status quo. Actually, he was far from it. As West explains, “The social misery upon which Dewey opened his eyes in the late nineteenth century was principally that of economic deprivation, cultural dislocation, and personal disorientation… In short, industrial capitalist America was a ‘distended’ society – a society without a core, a society unhinged, a nation in a pathological state.”36 This is a pretty dire picture, and as West shows, Dewey was not ignorant of it. But in the face of this pathology, Dewey saw a patient far from terminal condition.

What American society needed to start recovering was not an infusion of revolutionary fervor, but moderate reform. Dewey saw pragmatism as being the primary vessel of this kind of reasonable, progressive change.

Pragmatism was also resistant to radicalism because it was inherently incompatible with ideological thinking. Ideology requires an absolute belief about things as they truly are, not just how they seem; a moral certitude in how things ought to be; and complete faith that in

36 West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 79. 31 understanding the former and the latter, an ideal social paradigm can be achieved. Capitalism, writ broadly, holds: A) that the forces of supply and demand combined with the universal desire for personal gain are the foundations of society, B) that the free market is the system that promotes the greatest amount of competition and thus innovation, and C) that the ideal society is one in which government or institutions don’t impede on the natural order of economics, thus creating a society of ever escalating wealth (the downstream exploitation of people is an unavoidable but temporary misfortune, if seen as a “misfortune” at all). Socialism, meanwhile, states something like: A) the engine of the world (thus far) has been historical materialism and labor exploitation, B) the means and yields of production ought to be more evenly distributed, and C) that such in such a world, people would be free from the tyranny of work and thus capable of achieving true, individual fulfillment (and the force needed enact this system is likewise a possibly unavoidable, but temporary misfortune, if it seen as a “misfortune” at all). In either case, with ideology there is an unflappable certainty in its convictions: capitalism does not fail, it is just that the market is insufficiently free; socialism is not flawed, but it can be improperly incubated in the corpse of capitalism. Neither species of absolutism could be embraced by pragmatism.

An important realization regarding Randolph Bourne was in his ability to fold pragmatism not just into a radical project, but doing so without violating its commitments to democracy or falling into the quagmire of ideology. Ideology was a problem for Bourne because it made critical thinking inflexible, if not outright verboten; it foreclosed upon spiritual creativity, which was perhaps the highest value in his pantheon of cultural idealism. Though himself a socialist, or at least sympathetic to socialism (again, his aversion to explicit politics make this hard to parse out), he wrote of it, “Intellectual radicalism should not mean repeating 32

the stale dogmas of Marxism. It should not mean ‘the study of socialism.’ It had better mean a

restless, controversial criticism of current ideas, and a hammering out of some clear-sighted

philosophy…”37 A common concern for Bourne was that of authority over critical and creative thought. As we will see in Chapter Three, he vociferously levied this concern against the high cultural institutions of the museum and academy. But here, we see him doing pretty much the same against a political movement he liked. Because regardless of how he felt about fine art, or socialism, or even pragmatism, if there was a risk that it would fall into the complacence of intellectual laziness or dogma, it then had to be fought against. This was why he was wary, if not outright hostile, towards any form of ideology, whether or not it was productive of what he wanted: ideology always already implied certainty, and certainty was the death of creativity. And creativity, for Bourne, was one of the most important human qualities; another, corollary quality was social self-determination – that possibility of “being” one’s self in the world – which will feature both later in this chapter when I discuss Bourne’s ideal of “trans-nationalism” and again in Chapter Three with how he imagined taste as a form of social power.

Randolph Bourne imagined in pragmatism something different, something far more effective and efficacious of new social possibilities. He saw in pragmatism not a method of incremental reform and a scientifically informed, systematic progressivism, but a means by which to produce new cultural concepts productive of a radical reimagining of American social life. He may have been a pragmatist down to his bones, but in his heart he was always first and foremost a radical humanist cultural critic. As Louis Menand identifies, Bourne “believed that

American society must be transformed, and that the site of that transformation must be the

37 Randolph Bourne, “The Price of Radicalism,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 140. 33

culture. And he thought pragmatism supplied the method.” But unlike many of his fellow

pragmatists, such as Dewey or Jane Addams, Menand continues, “He was not a reformer. He

wanted a movement.”38

Menand is correct in that Bourne’s interest was primarily in culture, but saying that he wanted a movement is somewhat misleading, because in the context of social reform, a movement is usually taken to be a form of political organizing. Two of the twentieth century’s most famous and effective examples of movements – suffrage and civil rights – were political in orientation, or at least organization. This is not to suggest for a second that they lacked a philosophical dimension – again, these things cannot be separated – but as a social force their victories were the product of activism. Bourne’s radical vision however, in my argument, was not exactly the kind that could be accomplished through marches or demonstrations. Bourne believed that the locus for social change was not to be developed through politics, but culture, and the philosophy of culture. Bourne’s idealism was pre-political; its locus was “below the battle” of politics to reference the title of another of Bourne’s essays. Though this essay was part of his anti-war collection, the overarching trends of his thought persist as he wrote of a friend39

facing military service, “He has ideals but cannot see their realization through a desperate

struggle…”40 Politics, like war, was a struggle; a clash of opposing wills and worldviews that always implicitly desired for the eradication of the opposition. Culture, for Bourne however, was

38 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 1st ed (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 402. 39 When Bourne was writing about a “friend” it was usually a means to express his own thoughts and anxieties about an issue. So even though there was no chance that he himself would be conscripted, he, ironically (see: next chapter) imagined that experience as the basis for developing his opinions. He would use this same tactic when writing about a character called Miro, who will appear in the third chapter. 40 Randolph Bourne, “Below the Battle,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915- 1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 18. 34 not like politics or war. It was the product of community, of the assumed mutual partnership of people in a society. Changing culture was never to be brought about through violence, but open- minded discourse and good faith in one’s neighbors. This meant that changing, or a fortiori, reimagining culture had to happen along different, non-violent means. In particular, it was prefaced on change through new cultural concepts. Cultural change was pre-activist; an intellectual foundation prior to any explicit political platform. Randolph Bourne did not want a movement so much as he wanted a far more fundamental, common and collective, understanding amongst fellow citizens; and as such he wanted, rather than politics, a means by which for neighbors to view each other as, well, simply that. His battle was not a political one, but a spiritual one.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, this made Bourne something of an anomaly.

For those of us involved with contemporary cultural studies, however, it begins to look surprisingly familiar. So much of cultural theory’s influence on the latter half of the twentieth century, up to the current moment, has been how it reframed or redefined the terms of discourse.

It is almost impossible to imagine how contemporary LGBTQIA+ academics and activism could exist without Judith Butler’s monumental, conceptual reframing of gender as a set of social behaviors beyond mere biological definitions. Likewise, an entire sub-discipline of everyday studies scholars have been inspired by Michel de Certeau’s reimagining of what can be considered to be culture at all.

Concepts matter. How we think about, define, approach, and deal with concepts matters.

Concepts are the building blocks upon which we create and understanding, well, everything. And

Pragmatism, far before the deconstructionist free-for-all of the mid-century, understood this. But it never capitalized upon it; it never took it to the far ends of its potential. Well, at least before 35

Randolph Bourne. Because pragmatism opened up the world for new apprehensions in particular

ways: the re-conception of youth was the earliest one to spark an ember in his mind.

Youth: How to Live Creatively

It is a truism – a tired one, but a truism all the same – that each generation bemoans the

next. The Baby Boomers looked with contempt upon Generation X, just as they both now

bellyache about Millennials. Things weren’t any different a century ago. In February of 1911, a

woman named Cordelia A.P. Comer wrote a breathtakingly venomous rebuke of the younger

generation that would put the vitriol of contemporary critics to shame. She looked at the

American youth and saw nothing worth liking. “You,” she spat, “are markedly inferior to your

old grandfather in every way, — shallower, feebler, more flippant, less efficient physically and

even mentally, though your work is with books, and his was with flocks and herds. Frankly, I

find in you nothing essential to a man. God knows what life can make of such as you. I do not.”41

And while she admitted that no generation can be held responsible for the world in which they come of age, there was no excuse for what she perceived to be this generation’s astonishing deficit of social responsibility, lack of integrity, and profound failings of character.

When this essay appeared in The Atlantic, Bourne was 25 and in his second year at

Columbia University. Due to financial hardships, he had been unable to attend college until

Columbia offered him a full ride in 1909, meaning he entered college at the age most of his classmates were preparing to leave it. But he did not mind. Being surrounded by youth suited him. (In fact, situating himself in the youthful community would remain a constant for Bourne, as he lived until the end of his life in that eternal enclave of youth, Greenwich Village.) And he,

41 Cornelia A.P. Comer, “A Letter to the Rising Generation,” The Atlantic Monthly, February 1911, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1911/02/a-letter-to-the-rising- generation/536931/. 36

like Ms. Comer, saw in the classmates around him, and in himself, a major shift in American life

that had happened roughly sometime between 1880 and 1890. “The two generations

misunderstand each other as they never did before,” he wrote in his reply to Ms. Comer’s essay.

The misunderstanding was the result of an unprecedented cultural rupture: modernity. And what

Ms. Comer had failed to grasp, Bourne argued, was that the young generation was rising in a

world in many ways disconnected from the one of their forefathers. “The elder generation,” he

wrote of what was to be expected in life, “should remember that it is no longer the charted sea

that it was to our grandfathers.”42

This rupture was experienced in primarily two ways. The first was economic. Prior to the end of the nineteenth century, how an ambitious youth went about making a living in America was a straightforward affair. “The man of fifty years ago, if he was intellectually inclined, was able to get his professional training at small expense…if commercially inclined, he could go into a small, settled, self-respecting business house…If he had a broader outlook, there was the developing West, or the growing industrialism of the East,” Bourne pointed out.43 But the rising

generation of 1911 had “a very real feeling of coming straight up against a wall of diminishing

opportunity.”44 Apprenticeships had been replaced with increasingly specialized degrees and

their attendant investments. Independent businesses were requiring more and more initial capital

before they could open their doors. And the West was gone: the frontier had been declared

closed by the Superintendent of the Census in 1890. “The only choice for the vast majority of the

young men of to-day,” he wrote:

42 Randolph Bourne, “The Two Generations,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1911, 594. 43 Bourne, 594. 44 Ibid. 37

is between being swallowed up in the routine of a big corporation, and experiencing

the vicissitudes of a small business, which is now an uncertain, rickety affair,

usually living by its wits, in the hands of men who are forced to subordinate

everything to self-preservation, and in which the employee’s livelihood is in

constant jeopardy. The growing consciousness of this situation explains many of

the peculiar characteristics of our generation.45

The problem was not just the kinds of places the youth could get jobs, but also the consequences that these kinds of jobs had on the workers. Subtly evoking his socialist sympathies, he lamented,

“The only kind of responsibility that this can possibly breed is the responsibility for one’s own subsistence. In the big business, the employee is simply a small part of a big machine; his work counts for so little that he can rarely be made to feel any intimate responsibility for it.”46 With the modern economy, there was no longer any ownership of labor, no passion or even sense of place within it. This, however, was ultimately a good thing, Bourne understood, because with the vanishing of the traditional kinds of labor, so too vanished the ways it had previously produced one’s sense of self. It was the realization that one’s identity was not produced through work, but instead through life and its attendant experiences. That one did not discover the world through work, but through everything except that.

This tied into the second major way modernity changed things for the rising youth: it opened up a completely different vision for what was important in life. And while it would seem that Bourne was conceding that the young generation, in rejecting meaning as work in favor of meaning as life, was thus becoming self-centered; it turned out that the opposite was true. The

45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 595. 38

older generation, Bourne agreed, held “service and sacrifice” as the highest nobilities. But he

flipped the common assumption that service meant selflessness, writing, “These ideals…are

utterly selfish because they take account only of the satisfaction and moral consolidation of the

doer.”47 Where Ms. Comer accused to youth of subscribing to a “culte de moi,” Bourne turned the tables and alleged that it was actually the older generation that was obsessed with themselves. The older generation performed acts of service and sacrifice not for the sake of other people but to satisfy their own sense of duty. In effect, their “morals” were about patting themselves on the back. Meanwhile, the youth was becoming the first generation truly capable of getting outside of themselves. “It is true that we do not fuss and fume about our souls, or tend to our characters like a hot-house plant,” he wrote with a sly dismissiveness that would have probably made Ms. Comer spontaneously combust. Instead, he continued, “This is a changing, transitional age, and our view is outward rather than inward.” Why? Because the technological, intellectual, and media landscape, combined with the desire for life experiences, made possible a new way to be in the world:

In an age of newspapers, free libraries, and cheap magazines, we necessarily get a

broader horizon than the passing generation had. We see what is going on in the

world, and we get a clash of different points of view, to an extent which was

impossible for our fathers. We cannot be blamed for acquiring a suspicion of ideals,

which, however powerful their appeal once was, seem singularly impotent now, or

if we seek motive forces to replace them, or for new terms in which to restate the

world. We have an eagerness to understand the world in which we live that amounts

47 Randolph Bourne, “The Older Generation,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911- 1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 162. 39

almost to a passion. We want to get behind the scenes, to see how the machinery of

the modern world actually works. We are curious to learn what other people are

thinking, and to get at the forces that have produced their point of view...we have a

passion to understand why people act as they do.48

It simply made no sense to hold on to the ideals of the older generation because the world had outpaced and outgrown them. The younger generation, through mass media and technology, had access to the rest of the world that had never existed before. The rate of incoming information was unprecedented and it made the younger generation hungry for kinds of knowledge and experience that had previously been literally unimaginable. Modernity had washed away the world of the older generation and in its place stood a vast, uncharted ocean. The only things certain about it were that it was unpredictable and turbulent. But this new ocean, like all oceans, was also a place of creation and evolution, and from it would emerge a new and modern ideal of

“youth”.

Youth as Cultural Idealism

But if Bourne’s conception of youth was a product of modern conditions, it was also the mode of living that was best suited to dealing with them. For Bourne, what was most important for being in the modern world was for one to retain intellectual creativity and spiritual openness.

Youth was many things, but most importantly it was an approach to living that prioritized new experiences and intellectual adventures. In this way, it would be needed to keep pragmatism on track, because, as discussed above, there was a worrying way in which the kind of pragmatism

48 Bourne, “The Two Generations,” 596. 40

championed by John Dewey, for all its good intentions, threatened to amount to nothing greater

than a scientific methodology for daily life; a solid system without a soul; a complex machine

without a ghost. Science, if it were to be truly valuable to lived human experience, needed more

that a competent, rote methodology – it needed poetry as well. Leslie Vaughan writes that with

‘youth,’ “Bourne proposed…a ‘post-scientific’ philosophy, a remarkably postmodern alterative to scientism and ideology, which would restore to the scientific spirit the creativity of the poetic imagination.”49

So how did Bourne understand youth? First and foremost, it was not synonymous with being young, nor was it simply a transitional solar phase that one went through. As Vaughan, again, notes, “The significance of generational thinking, particularly as it developed in the early twentieth century, lay in its political potential as an organizing concept and a source of identity.”50 Youth, for Bourne, mean more than belonging to a certain bracketed age group

whom largely would have gone through the same general experiences that helped solidify one’s

identity. Instead, as Bourne biographer James Vitelli summarizes, “it was for him a state of

being, a state of consciousness of being alive.” This does not seem to be so far off from how our

idioms today capture the term: we regularly speak of people being “young at heart,” “wise

beyond their years,” or “having an old soul.” We are all (hopefully) acquainted with at least one

of those supremely cool, older people who remains sprightly, hip, and open-minded, or else we

might have that one precociously curmudgeonly friends whom, we sigh, “was born 50 years

old.” As such, Vitelli continues, “youth” had a way of “melting and merging with other

49 Leslie J. Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, American Political Thought (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 61. 50 Vaughan, 63. 41

concepts: life, reality, change.”51 “Youth” was, Bourne wrote, “a great, rich rush and flood of

energy.”52 It was a lust for life that wanted “to be everything, to do everything, and to have everything that is presented to its imagination.”53 And, as touched on above, it was the impulse that put “the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established – Why: What is this thing good for?”54 Modern youth was energetic, romantic, idealistic, and rebellious. So ,while it

was likely that most people possessed by youth were young, it was by no means an age-exclusive

club. Youth was a source of identity, but importantly a self-reflexive one that could break free

from mere political organizing and instead lead one to embrace any number of new and exciting

experiences. There was no such thing as “being too old” for something new. (The non-

exclusivity of Bourne’s driving ideals will reappear in the next section).

Youth was a necessary partner to pragmatism, in Bourne’s conception. The youthful

drive for new and exciting experiences was not only individually illuminating, but also an

essential partner to “the experimental spirit of scientific modernism,” meaning pragmatism.55

The scientific methodology, as undeniably powerful and useful as it was, could only be as productive as the diversity of what was put into it. Science requires the introduction of new variables; a new solvent is only as valuable as the number of things it can breakdown; the most promising algorithm only as useful as the number of problems it can be tested to resolve.

Pragmatism may have supplied the scientific outlook, but it was youth that sought out the experiential material to keep its fire hot. Thus, when Bourne wrote, “Youth’s attitude is really the

51 James R. Vitelli, Randolph Bourne, Twayne’s United States Authors Series ; TUSAS 408 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 66-67. 52 Randolph Bourne, “Youth,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 92. 53 Ibid., 95. 54 Ibid., 99. 55 Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, 190. 42

scientific attitude. Do not be afraid to make experiments, it says. You cannot tell how anything

will work until you have tried it,” his choice of language was highly intentional. Youth was an

important force in keeping pragmatism from stagnating; youth kept the engine of pragmatism

running.

Dewey’s pragmatism was a philosophy for social efficacy and as such it oriented

knowledge “as an instrument for action rather than an object of disinterested belief.”56 As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, pragmatism was supposed to help people make better choices individually, which would end up resulting in better social and political outcomes. Broad social benefits would be produced by the aggregation of individual experiences through a system of democratic populism. But the concern Bourne had was what would happen if pragmatism was efficient to the point where it devalued experimentation. To help illustrate this, imagine a website where people could write reviews of restaurants, post photos, and even be in contact with the restaurant’s management. Let’s imagine Perfect-World-Yelp.57 This would surely be a valuable

resource whenever we found ourselves both hungry and adventurous. Assuming for the sake of

argument that the system worked ideally (that is, people behaved honestly and in good faith,

instead of like petty or entitled human monsters as is wont for the Internet), it is easy to see how

this website could benefit everyone involved. Regulars could support and promote their favorite

establishments. Restaurants could access a database of diner preferences and thereby improve

their own appeal (say, with all sorts of metadata on what level of ambient lighting was most

56 R. Ormerod, “The History and Ideas of Pragmatism,” The Journal of the Operational Research Society 57, no. 8 (2006): 893. 57 The problem with real world Yelp is that, as a monetized online community, it ends up having a lot of issues. Bad faith one-star reviews; one-star reviews as petty revenge, accusations that Yelp boosts good reviews for establishments that pay for the service, etc. Regardless of how much any of these factors compromises Yelp’s ultimate utility is difficult, if not impossible, to settle, so it’s much easier just to use assume an ideal world in this thought experiment. 43 preferred or whether abstract impressionism on the walls make a place feel classy or pretentious, and on and on). And most importantly, when diners felt in the mood for something specific or something new, all they would have to do is pull up a list of the peoples’ top choices, thereby largely alleviating the risk of being disappointed. When I think of a world in which I will never again be let down by a soggy margherita pizza or bland lamb vindaloo, I find my mood immediately brightens.

And yet this pragmatic culinary paradigm would hardly be perfect. For starters, it might end up that my tastes don’t particularly line up with the rest of my dining community’s. Maybe what I really want are the intensely pungent and spicy flavors of Sichuan food, whereas everyone else likes to sup on more modestly spiced American-Chinese staples of General Tso’s chicken or beef and broccoli. In this case, Perfect-World-Yelp wouldn’t be all that useful to me. But a more germane issue, as far as Bourne would have been concerned, involves how such a website might change the entire experience of going to a restaurant. (Bourne’s preferences in Chinese food are currently unknown). Perfect-World-Yelp would fundamentally change the way I behave when it comes to dining out by making the “rational” choice extremely straightforward: feeling hungry for some Peking duck? Well, simply choose the restaurant that balances out the highest rating with the most convenience. Of course, doing so would also be one of the least interesting choices you could make.

The point is not that an interesting experience is inherently superior to a good one – sometimes the most memorable dinners end up having little to do with the quality of food and sometimes we just relish a great meal with no frills – but to acknowledge that if we choose solely based on what seems “rational” – i.e. whatever is deemed consistently good by the community of diners – we risk ending up not valuing an interesting experience at all. Because what is great 44

about an interesting experience is almost too personal and specific to be replicable no matter

what. Great dining experiences are not the same as great plates of food. Context matters.

Environment matters. Other people, from time to time, matter. And all of them, in some

unpredictable way, play a huge role in whether or not your dinner was merely satisfactory or

worth recounting to friends. The problem with Dewey’s pragmatism, Bourne realized, was that

in its elevation of social efficacy over all else, it lost the joy of experience for experience’s sake,

instead favoring the safe yet the droll calculus of ends and means. At its best, pragmatism, as a

philosophy of adjustment, was exactly what was needed in a chaotic and uncertain world. It

could help one shift left or shimmy right, depending on the situation. But there was a real risk,

Bourne feared, that in dedicating itself too completely over to “mastery” of the world,

pragmatism would cease to be sufficiently experimental. It would stop being an impetus to

curiosity, a spark to wonder. It would cease to be a philosophy of possibilities, and instead, as

Bertrand Russell critiqued, become the philosophical equivalent to “a bricklayer transforming a

heap of bricks into a house.”58 Rational, utilitarian, but fundamentally unalive.

Pragmatism, to remain spiritually meaningful, needed a sense of elation, a sense of poetry, to accompany experience; it needed a persistent feeling of jubilation in the new, the unknown, the unexplored. And yes, sometimes the experiences would not be so pleasant: with the new and the unknown also came anxiety, restlessness, confusion, and fear. But such things were always already elements of human existence; such feelings were always going to happen.

The question then became: how much control could one have? How much subjectivity could one muster against the numerous, fractious complications of modernity (this question especially is

58 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, A Touchstone Book (New York u.a: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 823. 45

important for Chapter Three)? Youth provided, if nothing else, a semi-scientific, partially

moderated base for these experiences. Because even while it was a corrective to pragmatic over-

rationalization, it remained constrained by reasonable considerations. Youth, in Bourne’s

thinking, would certainly encourage the novel and experimental, but not the reckless or

destructive. It would be the voice in one’s head encouraging one to take a swing dance class or

go to a burlesque show, not the impulse to shoot up a slug of heroin or play chicken with an

oncoming train. In a different essay written around the same time, he wrote of various “dangers,”

“which come to youth from family, business, church, society, state…they force him [the youth]

to perpetuate old errors, to keep alive dying customs, to breath new life into vicious prejudices,

to take his stand against the saving new. They kill his soul…”59 Bourne’s ideal of youth was one

directed towards a fullness of life, not self-destruction, and against such dangerous forces he

warned, “the youth’s only salvation lies, then, in dodging these pressures.”60 Such were not the

words written by one who would have seen a brazen and careless rush to the grave as

commendable.

“It is good to be reasonable, but too much rationality puts the soul at odds with life,”

Bourne warned.61 Life was unpredictable, and from time to time it was good to embrace that because “life is not a campaign of battle, but a laboratory where its possibilities for the enhancement of happiness and the realization of ideals are to be tested and observed.”62

Crucially, it was in such testing that youth was also perpetuated. The experimental life was a rejuvenating one, and it was needed in a world that could be spiritually exhausting. Youth

59 Randolph Bourne, “The Dodging of Pressure,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911- 1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 116. 60 Bourne, 117. 61 Bourne, “The Experimental Life,” 149. 62 Ibid., 151. 46

needed novelty and excitement, it needed to be regularly thrown into situations that would cause

one to declare that they “had never felt so alive!” You needed renewal because youth, though

powerful, was not infinite or invincible in Bourne’s view. Youth could atrophy, as Bourne saw in

those childhood friends who, in starting families and settling down, had given up their radicalism

and “somehow gotten ten years beyond [him] in day.”63 Or else, youth could be deceived by any number of social pressures – family, religion, business, take your pick – and forced to

“perpetuate old errors, to keep alive dying customs, to breathe new life into old prejudices, to…stand against the saving new.”64 In either case, the currents of energy that sustained youth would seize up, freeze over, leaving the radical youth spiritually emptied. This was, by and large, what the hegemonic forces in society wanted: it yearned to see the radical youth succumb to conformity, or to be worn out and made exhausted. It wanted to take a person, as Bourne described with poetic grace and, “kill his soul, and then use the carcass as a barricade against the advancing hosts of light.”65 Fortunately, the radical youth had a powerful ally at their disposal: all ideas and cultural possibilities came from people and so new cultural ideas would naturally be found among those newly brought into a foreign society. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, America had increasingly become the global center of immigration, and thus the center multicultural experience. More people, from different places, of different backgrounds, were arriving day by day upon American shores than in any society at any point in human history. For the most xenophobic Americans (in a grim display of the future present), this became a call to arms, a rallying cry for violence and terrorism. For progressive thinkers, it was a concern to be dealt with through the means of moderate, benevolent administration. And for

63 Bourne, “Youth,” 94. 64 Bourne, “The Dodging of Pressure,” 116. 65 Ibid. 47

Randolph Bourne, it was not a social problem but cultural possibility; this “trans-nationalism,” as

Bourne called it, was a cause of celebration and a font of inexhaustible cultural potential.

Trans-Nationalism

Of all Bourne’s essays, other than “The State,” which I discuss briefly in the conclusion to this thesis, “Trans-National America” is probably the most widely featured in readers or edited collections, and therefore the most familiar to readers. Unlike “Youth” and “The Life of Irony,” which were written during a comparatively calm period of American history, “Trans-National

America” was written in a time of modernist upheaval. By 1916, World War I was already devastating the European continent, and in America, though officially neutral, militarization was in the air. America was already selling arms to the Allies and between the various atrocities committed by the Central Powers and their non-democratic governments, it seemed obvious which side America would be on if it were to join the fray. One problem was that there were a lot of German Americans. In fact, there were a lot of Americans, only a generation or two removed

– if that – from all over the very continent now consumed by war. If America were to commit itself to the Allied cause militarily, how would those people – whose very status as American was not widely agreed upon – react? Which national interests would they align with? What country would they be fighting for? Militarization is like a cough on a crowded train: it does not matter how far from you it happens, it will still make you nervous and it can still end up infecting you. It is both the fear of contagion and contagion itself. And the dying fields of Europe only exacerbated a problem long simmering in the American psyche: what was to be done with the surge of immigrants that had come to its shores in the past few decades? Could they even be considered Americans to begin with? 48

Bourne realized this dilemma this upfront, opening “Trans-National America” with an

acknowledgement of the nation’s changing attitude toward immigration. He wrote that “No

reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than

the failure of our ‘melting-pot.’”66 The impact of the massive surge in immigration starting around the 1880s had long been a major social question for America, and for a while many hoped to see an eventual kind of assimilation among the immigrants – given enough time they would become American enough. This simply was not happening, at least not reliably or quickly enough, especially with the looming specter of war on the horizon. There were still proponents of assimilationist theories, such as Jane Addams and other like-minded activists, but their voices were being drowned out by the louder and louder Nativist demands that immigrant cultures be suppressed or obliterated, often in the name of war preparedness. Bourne’s solution was to reconceptualize “national identity” as a multiculturalist ideal of self-determination and as a new source of national power. Or as he called it, “trans-nationalism.”

The scholarship on this topic is incredibly thorough. With a few exceptions, most who write about Bourne end up writing about trans-nationalism. However, though it is usually understood as the kind of prescient pro-multiculturalism part and parcel with his vision of cultural idealism, it is less frequently seen as a natural partner of Bourne’s radical cultural theory. Christopher Lasch, for example, despite authoring one of the definitive explorations of

Bourne’s radicalism, does not mention “trans-nationalism” at all, as if it existed in a separate plane of Bourne’s thought. Lasch is hardly alone here – when reading about trans-nationalism there is often the feeling of a kind of hard shift, as if Bourne dropped all of his other interests in

66 Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 107. 49

order to focus exclusively on the most relevant problem at hand. This oversight, I believe, fails to

make clear that trans-nationalism was not just a prescient form of multicultural idealism, but a

natural and important development for his vision of American promise.

In some ways, I am building off of Christopher McKnight Nichols’s work on how

Bourne wanted to rethink the meaning of citizenship in modern America. He notes, “For Bourne,

ever the pragmatist, the transnational would be the conceptual locus where pragmatic evaluation

of means and ends helped shape the role the nation ought to take in the world and would redefine

commitments to citizenship at home.”67 Citizenship, like the previous discussed “youth,” needed to be reconsidered self-consciously and pragmatically; the questions “what is this for and what can it do?” needed to be asked. Nichols writes that Bourne saw that “The country needed a new structure for citizenship and social relations to avoid violence.”68 The violence in question was the rising threat of violent nativism. The prospect of war contributed greatly to this domestic climate. President Wilson himself painted immigrants as potential enemies of the state, declaring before Congress that the foreign born were “‘creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy,’ who, he warned, must be ‘crushed out.’”69 This sentiment would only grow. Historian David M.

Kennedy elaborates, “That kind of rank nativism, tinged often with anti-radicalism, seeped deeper and deeper into the American mind as the war progressed, carried by the current of a newly fashioned phrase: ‘100 percent Americanism.’ The 100 percenters aimed to stamp out all traces of Old World identity among immigrants.”70

67 Christopher McKnight Nichols, “Citizenship and Transnationalism in Randolph Bourne’s America,” Peace Review 20, no. 3 (September 2008): 355, https://doi.org/10.1080/10402650802330212. My emphasis. 68 Quoted from Nichols, 350. 69 Quoted from David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 65. 70 Kennedy, 65. 50

Bourne’s rethinking of the concept of citizenship – which fits neatly into my argument of

Bourne as pursuing a project of conceptual renewal – is, in Nichol’s view, one of the ways

Bourne hoped to prevent violence against immigrants by those who saw them as not truly

“American.” Nichols writes, “For the United States to fulfill its democratic promises, [Bourne]

said, the nation had to extend rights to all those we were owed them and to make demands of

citizens to build the nation up by embracing a federation of cultures within its citizenry and

across national boundaries.”

My argument is that Bourne did not just stop at citizenship, but interrogated the far

larger concepts of nationalism and national identity: because the concept of citizenship was a

socio-political one, an outward and public constituent of national identity, but not the same thing

as national identity in and of itself. For Bourne, citizenship concerned the two-way street

between an individual and the political rights bestowed by and obligations to the country; it was

an objective status that one either had or did not. But citizenship is not the same thing as national

identity: one can have the legal designation of citizenship in a country and all the rights that

entails, but have ambivalent or even negative feelings about the country all the same. For

Bourne, the inverse of this was true as well: one could be “American,” regardless of their legal standing. Citizenship was an external designation; it was what happened to someone, as decided by the socio-political institutions that existed outside of them. This was connected to Bourne’s complaints about the melting-pot or any other kind of assimilationist thinking: “We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed,” he wrote.71 Assimilation and all other versions of top-down Americanization were

71 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 108. 51 fundamentally misguided because they sought to determine one’s identity regardless of their individual needs and wants. (Note that this mistrust of institutional authority over the individual’s capacity for self-determination will appear again in Chapter Three, when I examine

Bourne’s attacks on cultural institutions that sought to assert the cultural control over taste).

For Bourne, national identity, unlike citizenship, was an internal, self-determined understanding. It was how one understood their own place in their society, no matter what rights they may have had or lacked. It was not about external, public validation, but one’s personal, spiritual convictions. As such, one could be American regardless of their right to vote, or their ability to speak English, or their desire to watch baseball while eating Cracker Jacks. All that truly mattered was that viewed themselves as American. This conceptual shift in understanding national identity was what Bourne was seeking in “Trans-National America” – a radical reconception of what nationalism meant in and of itself. And for Bourne, this was a question suited for radical cultural idealism, not utilitarian political organization.

Trans-Nationalism and Cultural Idealism

The essay “Trans-national America” was a foil to the popular proposals of how to either assimilate or coerce immigrants into the “American” way of life. In it, he outlined a vision of

America that could fully embrace its multi-cultural potential, arguing that America should grab hold of this promise. Not as the “melting-pot,” which tended to take immigrants and “sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes of American life,” but as a grand conversation in which all participants were equal and their potential contributions to culture equally valuable.72

America should celebrate its multi-culturalism in lieu of some bland, broad ideal of general

Americanness, he believed. “America is a unique sociological fabric,” he wrote, “and it bespeaks

72 Bourne, 114. 52

poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of

men.” It was not in the sanding down of multicultural edges, but in their exultation that Bourne

found the true form of American potential. Christopher McKnight Nichols summarizes:

[Bourne] called for an alternative to those Americanization programs that sought

to homogenize the population and for the institution of a ‘trans-national’

America…For the United States to fulfill its democratic promises, he said, the

nation had to extend rights to all those we were owed them and to make demands

of citizens to build the nation up by embracing a federation of cultures within its

citizenry and across national boundaries.73

The latent promise of America, Bourne believed, was that “there is no distinctly

American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures.”74 Unlike any other

nation in the early twentieth century, America stood as an intersection of cultures and ideas that

need not obscure themselves in order to participate in the greater national experience. Trans-

nationalism was, in effect, the same source of potential as the Experimental Life brought to

fruition by youth, only where youth was an individual disposition, trans-nationalism was a

national one. And unlike other nations which devoted themselves to past notions of greatness,

America was fundamentally a forward-looking country. Bourne was writing just a year prior to

America’s entry into WWI; Europe was already well underway into the madness. The various

nations of Europe were rallying being the call of national greatness (France), or destiny

(Germany), or honor (Britain). It was not working out in their favor. Bourne’s vision of America,

however, eschewed such backward-looking identity in favor of future-oriented values. “As long

73 Nichols, “Citizenship and Transnationalism in Randolph Bourne’s America,” 350. 74 Bourne, “Trans-National America,” 115. 53 as we thought of Americanism in terms of the ‘melting-pot,’” he wrote, “our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the Americans were to be moulded.” But, he continued, “In light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetuate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.”75 That future held unspeakable potential and it belonged to the younger generations. America’s trans-national makeup meant that it could serve as a site for previously unseen collisions of cultures and ideas, which – if guided by pragmatism, as I will argue in the next chapter, irony – would result in a discourse productive of modern cultural modes and values. Pragmatism would evaluate the terms of culture, youth would provide the vivacious open-mindedness for approaching new ideas, and irony would keep the discourse fair and in good faith.

But there are a couple complications with terminology that need to be settled. Most people who write about Bourne tend to use the terms “multiculturalism,” “cultural pluralism,” and “cosmopolitanism” as interchangeable with “trans-nationalism.” And to be fair, I have used the term “multiculturalism” many times above. This happens 1) for the sake of terminological diversity and 2) to clearly identify “trans-nationalism” – a phrase which seems to have lived and died with Bourne – with the terms in common usage today. Bourne, however, never used the term “multiculturalism,” nor did he use “cultural pluralism.” He could not have, as they simply did not exist at the time.

“Cosmopolitan” did. And Bourne used it quite a bit, including throughout “Trans-

National America” and “The Jew and Trans-National America.” So why did he feel the need to create a new term, one which “cosmopolitan” supervened upon? The simple answer, I believe, is that “cosmopolitan” as a concept, robust as it was in Bourne’s time, simply did not have the

75 Bourne, 115. 54 connotation he was after – “cosmopolitan” described a degree of cultural diversity, but did not counter the nativist associations the term “nationalism” had – and Bourne’s goal was very much to counter, to redeem “nationalism” from anti-diversity sentiment.

Recalling “youth,” Bourne took the concept and broadened its intellectual and spiritual meaning. Instead of being a denotation of age, “youth” became a kind of spiritual ethos, a worldview that embraced the new and the creative, it was the impulse towards the “experimental life.” Similarly, as I will argue in the next chapter, he expanded “irony” from the rhetorical mode of “not meaning exactly what you say” into a discursive disposition that enabled empathy, good faith, open-mindedness, and democratic social life. He was taking the same approach with the concept of “nationalism,” and trying to make it clear that his idea of trans-nationalism was not the same as “cosmopolitan,” and by extension was not synonymous with “multiculturalism” or

“cultural pluralism” either. Those three terms are descriptive. “Trans-nationalism,” on the other hand, was also prescriptive. It was an idealized replacement for nationalism a way of saving it from being a bastion term for some of the least democratic forces in American life.

Saving it meant reclaiming it from those who would use it for purposes of cultural regression or oppression, “against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself ‘patriotism’ and the thinly disguised militarism which calls itself ‘preparedness,’ he wrote.76 In Bourne’s time, as today, the call for nationalism was almost exclusively deployed by those who wanted to restrict or eliminate immigration, have forced assimilation, or deportation of immigrants, all for the sake of protecting a perceived cultural purity. In this way, Bourne’s trans-nationalism was both prescriptive and descriptive: it did not just outline his pluralistic idealism, but it also tried to make a point that American nationalism was always already a trans-nationalism, despite the

76 Bourne, 119. 55 dominance of Anglo-Saxonness obscuring this fact. Bourne was pragmatically trying to take the term “nationalism” away from its reactionary base, and instead position it as a much more inclusive principle behind the foundational American idealism. Bourne seemed to understand that if the debate was framed as between “nationalism” and “pluralism” then the latter would always be assumed to be the invader or the “unauthentic.” It is a tragically natural pitfall of rhetoric. Because it assumes that the “nationalists” are somehow grounded in their stance that there is an absolute idea of pure “Americanness” that “outsiders” or cultural enemies are pushing against or trying to change. Instead, Bourne wanted to shift the entire grounds of the conversation, to flip the proverbial board. Instead of the “nationalists” being the avatars of “real”

American tradition and society, they would suddenly be on the outside: nationalism was never about Anglo-Saxonness-cum-Americanness, but always and already a trans-national foundation.

Reactionary nationalism was a farce because it was based on faulty assumptions: “nationalism” could never refer to anything like “pure” ethnic stock and “rightful” ownership of American culture was a myopic fallacy because there were never such cultural foundations to begin with.

There were only immigrants, a great number of whom clung to a version of Anglo-Saxon identity. To repeat his oft-quoted line: “We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign- born, and if distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be of some other grounds than indigenousness.”77 America could not have “nationalism” because it had never had the foundations such a singular, monolithic understanding to begin with. The story of America was not one of Anglo-American colonial independence. No, it was the story of immigrants and what they could make of themselves. There could be no mere “nationalism” in America because the soul of the country had always been “trans-national.” “Americanness,” was then not a question

77 Bourne, 109. 56 of where someone was from, but where they saw themselves in the moment of identifying their national identity.

Bourne wanted Americanness to be self-reflexively reconsidered. It needed to be, if

American promise was going to be achieved. He wrote:

It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation

of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has

been broad or narrow – whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher

ideal than the ‘melting-pot.’ Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy

when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and

democratic institutions, we fly into a panic at the first sign of their own will and

tendency.78

And it wasn’t solely a matter of American promise, but of social stability – a concern of

Bourne’s that will come again later in the next chapter. Now, bringing up the necessity of social stability might seem weird given the topic of cultural radicalism, but remember, Bourne was not a revolutionary – he did not want to see a violent overthrow of the social order, but a spiritually aligned reimagining. Racial tensions were on the rise, after all, which meant American society was increasingly becoming a powder keg of potential catastrophe. Nichols notes that Bourne

“saw the rising nationalism in Europe and saw a similar path for American nationalism or nativism,” and considering the trench lines that stretched across Europe like knife wounds on a victim from a slasher film, Bourne very much wanted to avoid this fate. Nichols explains that

“Instead, America should embrace its trans-nationalism by striving to be a more tolerant and inclusive society. This would additionally provide a new social framework that would lessen the

78 Bourne, 108. 57

potential for violence.”79 For Bourne, thus, trans-nationalism wasn’t just for the sake of

democratic idealism, but a matter of the very foundations of social cohesion. Which meant that

trans-nationalism had a lot of heavy lifting to do; it had to solve a lot of problems. And this was a

problem in and of itself, because there were no rules, no guidelines, and no examples to look at.

And so, another reason why Bourne’s trans-nationalism was a radical cultural ideal: the

American Experiment was, to Bourne, something entirely new among nations and as such

needed to be described in a suitably novel way. America could be different. The soul of

American idealism was inclusion and equality. And the promise of American culture was not to

be a colonial evolution of whomever had gotten there first, but a new one, emergent from the

diversity of all peoples that called America home. Because of this, Bourne believed, America

was never about the consolidation of the past, but the promises of what could be. “We must

perpetuate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lie in the future. It will be what we all

together make out of this incompatible opportunity of attacking the future with a new key,” he

wrote.80 Being shackled to the past or the colonial, Anglo-Saxon memory of identity was a millstone around the neck of cultural progress. This was not an abstract metaphor for Bourne, but something he saw happening below the Mason-Dixon line. “The South, in fact, while this vast

Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era,” he wrote, “It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like the Northern states.”81 The

79 Christopher McKnight Nichols, “Rethinking Randolph Bourne’s Trans-National America: How World War I Created an Isolationist Antiwar Pluralism,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8, no. 2 (2009): 219, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781400001158. 80 Bourne, “Trans-National America,” 115. 81 Bourne, 112. 58

Northern states had greatly benefited from being cosmopolitan centers, as various immigrant

cultures rubbed against each other and the vestiges of Anglo-Saxonism.

Similar effects were also apparent in the Midwest: “What has happened in such states as

Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures haves stuck root in a new and fertile

soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian political ideas and social

energies have expanded to a new potency,” Bourne observed.82 If culture and social life was more dynamic or exciting in Northern or Midwestern states compared to Southern ones, it was only because they were able to embrace a degree of cultural fluidity between their various populations. They were liberated from the empty weight of the past and in the process of forging new cultural forms. They were not doing so fast enough or thoroughly enough for Bourne’s liking – if they had, then there would have been little point in him writing the essay – but they were at least modestly staking out what was possible. The South, deprived of such cosmopolitanism, displayed no such promise. And for this reason, it stood as a kind of canary in the coal mine: American culture, in Bourne’s imagination, could either embrace its multicultural potential and as such produce a culture literally impossible anywhere else in the world, or it could recede into the malignant safety of its Anglo-Saxon origins and end up being nothing more than a footnote in the annals of unfulfilled human potential. “We have needed the new peoples…to save us from our own stagnation,” he wrote.83 This concern of stagnation was a

persistent worry (see: Chapter Three). In the same way that youth needed a vast reservoir of new

experiences to achieve its radical ends, so too did the national promise require a vast reservoir of

new cultural ideas if it were to truly capitalize on its potential. And in the same way that an

82 Bourne, 112. 83 Bourne, 109. 59

individual, through the ideal of youth, was bettered by the open-minded embrace of new

experiences, so too would the nation be bettered by its embrace of the multicultural possibilities

already within its shores.

The new cultural possibilities brought to American shores in the hearts and minds of

immigrants were part of a continuing discourse over what shape America could become, and

what new things it could produce. So long as American culture could accept this field of endless

human possibilities, the one thing that would be certain about American culture was that it would

never be stagnant. “Whatever American nationalism turns out to be,” Bourne wrote

optimistically, “we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal

has hitherto encompassed.”84 Of course, whether the nation would be worthy of such optimism remained an unanswered question.

Conclusion

Biographer Bruce Clayton notes that, “[Bourne’s] idealism did not blind him to evil. Yet his awareness of evil did not blind him to the possibility of good.”85 And Bourne was

exceptionally aware of evil. “Evil seems to be out of all proportion to the ability of its sufferers

to bear it,” he wrote in “The Adventure of Life,” “or of its chastening and corrective efficacy.”86

In fact, he thought that America in the early twentieth century was, perhaps, more in danger of it

than ever before, writing, “Our forefathers were more fortunate, and could contemplate evil more

philosophically and objectively. Their experience was happily limited to what the normal soul

could endure. Their evil was confined to their vicinity… Perhaps it was because they were more

84 Bourne, 117. 85 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 85. 86 Randolph Bourne, “For Radicals,” in Youth and Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), 157. 60

concerned with personal sin than with objective evil.”87 Fortunately, coming to the rescue – or maybe given that the topic was evil, salvation – was the younger generation. They understood that the problem was “Not how evil came into the world, but how we are going to get it out.”88

They were also uniquely qualified to confront it:

But the youth of this modern generation are coming more and more to see that the

gloom and hysteria of this restless age, with all the other seemingly neurotic

symptoms of decay, are simply growing-pains. They signify a better spiritual health

that is to be. The soul is now learning to adjust itself to the new conditions, to

embrace the wide world that is its heritage, and not to reel and stagger before the

assaults of a malign power. Life will always be fraught with real peril, but it is peril

which gives us the sense of adventure. And as we gain in our command over the

resources, both material and spiritual, of the world, we shall see the adventure as

not so much the peril of evil as an opportunity of permanent achievement.89

The youth had the proper philosophy – pragmatism – to do so, through which “we shall find then that we had no need of despair. We were on the right track… Not less science but more science do we need in order that we may more and more get into our control the forces and properties of nature, and guide them for our benefit.”90 Evil, even if it could not be extinguished, could be accounted for and thus countered. It could be kept at bay, so long as the principles of pragmatism

87 Randolph Bourne, “The Adventure of Life,” in Youth and Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), 159. One of Bourne’s best talents was his ability to punch back twofold at the older generations who grouched about the younger ones. 88 Bourne, 167. 89 Bourne, 160–61. 90 Bourne, 167. 61

and ironic temperament remained at work. If Bourne’s vision was ultimately a utopian one then

it should hardly be a surprise; he was, before the war at least, and idealistic, radical thinker; and

utopia is the natural end for all such minds.

For Bourne, pragmatism, youth, and trans-nationalism were the ideals that together

enabled a kind of cultural radicalism. But not a revolutionary or militant radicalism. Nor a

political one. Those were the loci where the battle was to be fought. It was a radicalism in

culture, in ideas. And it was not one that needed militias or even organized movements. Instead,

it was radicalism seen as a force, something that had come to be through the vicissitudes of

history, economy, philosophy, technology. It was a force like gravity, pulling culture and society

toward itself. The young radicals – those that embraced a course of open-minded inquiry, a life

of adventure and ebullience, and an approach of creative sympathy – would move past the even

horizon of the force, allowing its pull to become even stronger. Sometimes, with gravity, all you

have to do is wait. “Towards himself,” Bourne wrote of the radical, “he finds gravitating the sort

of people that he would find in a regenerated social order.”91 The pull, once felt, no matter how slight, will eventually be enough. And it will be irresistible to those that understand its beauty.

“In his camp,” Bourne continued, “he finds all those writers and leaders who sway men's minds to-day and make their life, all unconscious as they are of the revolutionary character of the message, more rich and dynamic.”92 Once the radical foundations of cultural idealism were

established, a whole new field of social possibilities opened up not only to the radical, but would

spill out into the world around them. “Let the social faith be in a youth, and it will leak out in

every activity of his life, it will permeate his words and color his deeds,” he wrote, “The belief

91 Bourne, “For Radicals,” 309. 92 Bourne, 309. 62 and the vision are the essentials; these given, there is little need for him to worry how he may count in society. He will count in spite of himself.”93

To “count in the world.” In Bourne’s lexicon there was almost no higher compliment. It was the namesake of the ironist and of the radical.94 Not in the sense that it made them superior or more morally valuable to their neighbors, but in the way it made someone more culturally efficacious or influential. Someone who “counted” achieved such because they were part of the radical mass that pulled culture – and thus society – to a better and more proper place; to utopia.

Utopia is a strange concept to talk about today. At least I think so. Because what could it possibly describe? What is a “perfect” world, after all, when we are so far away from even a

“good” one? Then again, do we have the right to evaluate the idealism of the past from the cynicism of the present? I think it is important to understand that Randolph Bourne saw the promise of utopia in his own time – both for us to better understand Bourne and to better deal with where we are now. It is important to study his failed dreams because in the ashes of those failures we might come to find some better understanding of the trash fire of the present. Bourne saw, at the fin-de-siècle, the fractures and fissures and frictions of modernity the potential for a new American promise. All of the foundations of social life were irrevocably upended – there was no turning back from factories, bureaucracies, specialization and marginalization. Those disruptions, in turn, provided the idealistic platforms of pragmatism, youth, and trans- nationalism – which together could create a force of cultural radicalism with the potential to remake American society, and perhaps the world. Not in the fast or violent way of revolution – there was no need for manifestos, the storming of forts, guillotines, or even the overthrow of

93 Bourne, 301. 94 See: Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 364; "The ironist is a person who counts in the world.". 63 governments. Simply the energy, the gravity would be enough. In the distance – slowly, though steadily approached – was that event horizon, after which everything would be pulled into something different, better.

Then again, such pronouncements are premature, because there is another element of

Bourne’s thought that has yet to be properly examined: an element that had equal importance to youth and trans-nationalism in Bourne’s radical cultural idealism – irony. Pragmatism may have been Bourne’s intellectual foundation, but irony was his primary way of expressing his idealism.

In the following chapter, I hope to examine his concept – pragmatically, radically reconceived – of irony, and show why it is so crucial to understanding his cultural idealism. In a sense, it is hard to pinpoint where to draw the line between this idealism and irony: what, after all, is the difference between gravity and the laws that describe it? Irony, for Bourne, was a way of life, in and of itself. And it was, in his mind, an essential disposition for the practice of democracy in a complicated, modern world.

CHAPTER TWO: IRONY

The argument I make in this chapter is that Randolph Bourne’s version of irony is absolutely central to his cultural idealism. In the previous chapter, I examined how – from the foundation of a radical understanding of pragmatism – he reimagined the cultural concepts of

“youth” and national identity as key elements in his project of making a cultural radicalism that could confront the complexities of American social life as the country entered into modernity.

But where “youth” and “trans-nationalism” were products of pragmatism, made possible by the philosophy’s challenge to established epistemology, irony, in his thinking, was something of a different creature. In much the same way he reimagined those former concepts to fit his particular cultural idealism, irony was to be a tertiary feature. Then again, irony, in my view, was something far more fundamental – not exactly an intellectual possibility made such by pragmatism, but a necessary partner to it; the two were connected irrevocably, two sides of the same radically idealist coin. Irony, in my argument, was Bourne’s way of directing pragmatism, as John Dewey wanted, “for dealing with the problems of men.”95 Dewey may have been vague on exactly the kind of problems he was thinking of; Bourne was not. Bourne was thinking explicitly about the types of social problems that arose from living in a diverse, complex, modern democratic society. In this way, irony, for Bourne, was both an element of pragmatism, as well as a means to repair its deficits; the two were not identical, but neither were they entirely independent in his thinking.

In the introduction to this thesis, I brought up one of the rare noteworthy college commencement speeches, “This is Water,” delivered by David Foster Wallace to Kenyon

College in 2005. While being widely celebrated, Wallace’s speech did not say anything Bourne

95 Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 7. 65

hadn’t already a century earlier.96 But it remains a helpful signpost: Bourne, as Wallace proposed much later, envisioned a social ideal based on morally imaginative – or in Bournean terms,

“spiritual” – empathy: the everyday, intentional practice of attempting to understand the experience of others, embodying that experience to the best of one’s ability, and from that position of imagined insight adjusting one’s social perspectives, beliefs, and behaviors.

Matthew Stratton provides an equally useful, if more academic, definition, writing that

Bourne expanded irony:

to subsume an essentially discursive practice among acquaintances and friends,

conducted with the express aim of expanding sociality, gaining new viewpoints on

the world and formulating new approaches to the truth, and trusting that the moral

category of the ‘good’ will emerge from such interactive inquiry.97

This was the heart of Bourne’s irony – inquiry, understanding, empathy – and why I am arguing

it is so essential to understanding his cultural idealism. In fact, I argue that irony was his means

of producing not just a vision of cultural idealism, but the way to establish a foundation for a

modern, authentic practice of democracy.

As far as the scholarship on Bourne goes, focusing on irony is an unconventional – or at

least uncommon – approach to take. Irony is completely absent from Christopher Lasch’s

discussion of Bourne’s role in the history of twentieth-century radicalism. Michael Walzer,

meanwhile, sums irony up as merely, Bourne’s “own name for critical-mindedness,”98 which

96 Has there ever been another commencement speech published for popular consumption, other than the 1997 Baz Luhrmann music video, “Wear Sunscreen,” which doesn’t actually count as the speech has long been misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut? That speech, by the way, was written by Mary Schmich, a Chicago Times columnist. 97 Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, 26. 98 Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 47. 66

comes off as something of a dismissal, particularly as Walzer never mentions it again. I believe

that the overlooking/dismissal of irony elides a crucial element of Bourne’s radical idealism.

Part of the reason, I imagine, for the absence of irony in the work of these scholars is

because in the main essay in which Bourne wrote about it – a 1913 piece published in the

Atlantic, titled “The Life of Irony” – there is some obscurity as to what he meant by the word in

the first place. In that essay he defined irony numerous times, the first (and most mellifluous)

being:

this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent judging of experience, this

sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities, of cosmic juxtapositions, of flaring

brilliances, and no less heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s

world being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only by

being translated into and defined in each other’s terms…99

Needless to say, this is a lot to digest. Even at the time of publication this was an issue. Bruce

Clayton notes that Ellery Sedgwick, the then-editor of the magazine, liked the piece “despite its unremitting abstractness.” Sedgwick felt that, “The essay’s ‘lack of background’ was a serious weakness, and it had a vagueness that resulted from a failure to define the irony precisely or use it in one consistent way.”100 Yet, despite these notable flaws, he realized that the “piece was so often illuminating and so highly suggestive that…it belonged in the Atlantic.”101 As an aside,

Clayton himself seems to agree with Sedgwick’s criticisms, writing, “The essay seems to be an exercise in convoluted thought. Perhaps its only significance is its revelation that irony had become existentially quite meaningful to Bourne.” It is precisely that revelation – irony being

99 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 134. 100 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 60. 101 Clayton, 60. 67

“existentially meaningful” – that I intend to explore here. Because it wasn’t just existentially meaningful, in my view, but absolutely necessary for Bourne’s idealism.

Not helping this project, however, is the fact that despite its centrality to his thinking, his writing on irony is probably among his most convoluted. Not in the sense that it lacked poetry or verve or passion – all of those elements were just as much present for this topic as any other he wrote about – but in the sense that, at least in my opinion, it was so crucial to his vision of modern American potential that it ended up being bloated, over-belabored, and thus too big and unwieldly to consolidate into one essay: all you have to do is look at that block quote just above to get at least the gist that Bourne’s ideal of irony was not the wieldiest of creatures. Sedgwick was not totally wrong in his criticism: as written in the essay, did sometimes lack preciseness and consistency. But only because irony was meant to do so much in Bourne’s imagination.

In light of that, here is my understanding of his concept of irony and what I am hoping to establish by the end of this chapter: irony, for Bourne, was a furnace of socio-philosophical combustion, a conceptual, benevolent space wherein the fission between differing or opposing ideas, beliefs, and experiences, would come ignite, and in turn produce new socio-intellectual possibilities, all of which embraced and expressed the possibilities of “youth” and “trans- nationalism”; in this way, irony would be well-suited to meet the problems of modern American society; and yet it was ultimately prior to either of those terms, as it was not a product of pragmatism but a form of it acting in the world. Where pragmatism denied epistemic capital-T

Truth in favor of the truth of utility, irony sought to challenge closed, subjective certainty in order to extend human understanding and compassion humanistically outwards towards one’s neighbors. Along those lines, first, I will examine how Bourne’s ideal irony was pulled from the broader history of the concept itself, and subsequently reshaped it to a modern functionality. 68

Next, I will explore how the way he wrote about irony – which was as a manifesto – helps us

understand what he wanted out of the concept. Then, I will attempt to show that, despite the

flawed way he wrote about it, irony was a central component to his cultural radicalism as the

foundation for an idealistic vision of American democracy – not as politics but as the far more

essential foundation of society in the first place.

The Origins of Bourne’s Irony

Irony can be tricky to talk about because, in the same way Louis Menand earlier argued that there is no pragmatism, but pragmatisms, there are several – equally valid and oft-used – ways to understand it. Irony is what lexicographer and American English usage expert, Bryan

Garner, would consider to be a “skunked term”, which he defines as “When a word undergoes a marked change from one use to another – a phase that might take ten years or a hundred – it is likely to be the subject of some dispute.”102

Irony has had many faces since it first came into existence roughly 2500 years ago. But generally speaking, it is usually regarded as the disjunction between what seems to be the case and what actually is; or else in the more common usage today, a difference between what is said or done and what is meant by the antecedent statement or action. The weft of such a linguistic, epistemic, and rhetorical device has a wide range of permutations in its history, to which Claire

Colebrook’s book, Irony, provides a splendid and succinct reference that I draw on quite a bit.

Considering the shape of modern irony, there is a further complication: literary historian

Paul Fussell argues that “there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the

102 Bryan A. Garner and Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage, 2nd ed. (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 728. 69

events of the Great War.”103 Randolph Bourne’s irony, written about in 1913, clearly predated

WWI and its legacy, if only by a couple of years. Thus, his irony cannot be the kind of modern irony that Fussell writes about. “But what to make,” asks Matthew Stratton, “of those years before ‘everything’ putatively shattered into fragmented, disillusioned chaos”?104 This is where, I

believe, Bourne’s irony stands on its own as a separate kind of modern irony – equally deserving

of the name, though quite different in its shape and purpose.

At its heart, Bourne’s irony was an adaptation of the Classical, Socratic irony, which was

a discursive method for interrogating ideas and beliefs. As Colebrook puts it, “Either Socrates

uses irony to bring his interlocutors to ethical knowledge, or he uses irony to show that the

knowledge they thought they had was not so certain.”105 It is important to acknowledge that

Socratic irony had two distinct functions: it could be destructive – in the sense that it “[showed] that it is always possible that what we take to be the self-evident sense of a context or culture is far from obvious,”106 thus eliminating the epistemological presence of a formerly assumed

“given” in knowledge; or it could be creative, by leading the interlocutor to the definition of whatever concept that obtained in the world. Justice, to again use that as an example, cannot be

X because of 1, 2, and 3, therefore it can only be Y. But underpinning this destructive/creative binary is a commonality of distance: there is a gap created between what the interlocutor believed before and after the conversation, as well as an erasure between what the interlocutor held as true and what is actually true.

103 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 25. Anniversary ed (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 35. 104 Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, 23. 105 Claire Colebrook, Irony, The New Critical Idiom (London ; New York: Routledge, 2004), 21. 106 Colebrook, 2. 70

Bourne’s irony drew upon the essentials of this method as a discursive mode between fellows in a society, but instead of creating distance, this form of irony was meant to manipulate it or to collapse it. Rather than a binary winner-take-all endgame of “knowledge,” Bourne’s irony was meant to foster a middle ground of mutual understanding, wherein each party would walk away with a better understanding of each other. From a pragmatic standpoint, there could not be any absolute resolution to what was “true,” and as such any immutable standard of “knowledge” wasn’t possible. “Socrates made one mistake,” Bourne wrote, “knowledge is not goodness…. good judgment is the true goodness. For it is on judgment impelled by desire that we act. The clearer and cleaner our judgments then, the more definite and correlated our actions.”107 Irony,

Bourne believed, was a pragmatic way, not for consolidating knowledge, but for honing the means by which people could act rationally and spiritually. Irony was not meant for questioning standard axioms of epistemology, but evaluating social values as a baseline of social judgment.

Bourne also drew from the Romantic understanding of irony as well in his creation of his version. To refer again to Colebrook:

Romantic irony, broadly defined, regards irony as something like a human

condition or predicament…it is precisely because we are human and capable of

speaking, creating and engaging with others that human life has no fixed nature

…human life, as Bildung [culture and creation] is essentially capable of being other

than any fixed essence. This is why human life is ironic.108

107 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 135. 108 Colebrook, Irony, 47. Original emphasis. 71

Romantic irony spoke to Bourne as confronting the modern contradiction between possibility and

objectivity (here meaning “the quality of being a stable object in the world,” and not “a position

of absolute or certain perspective on the truth of the world”). As Marshall Berman writes of

modernism, “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promise us adventure,

power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that

threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”109 Human

imagination was virtually boundless, yet any attempt to express its creativity inevitably objectified

it into a stable entity – a transfiguration that is contradictory to the very boundlessness of human

essence in the first place. Any affirmative statement of what “is” is always already an implicit

declaration of what “is not.” “For any idea we have of our selves or our world,” Colebrook writes of the Romantic’s realization, “will be part of a process of creation and destruction that we can

neither delimit nor control.”110

Bourne understood that this oscillation between potential and destruction was inevitable – in fact, he embraced it as I argued in the previous chapter, as the new possibilities of “youth” could destroy the staid, generational view of social existence, or the way in which “trans-nationalism” grasped the new possibilities of national identity to replace a detrimental understanding of

“nationalism.” But he believed this contradiction could be controlled. Pragmatism, after all, while it destroyed “truth,” did not leave in its wake nihilism, but instead a new field of philosophical understanding; universal “truth” may have been obliterated, but what was created was a far more useful and meaningful understanding of “truth in/as action.”

109 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 30. pr (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 15. 110 Colebrook, Irony, 49. 72

Irony, with its core essence of being “is but is not,” “said but not intended,” “potential and destruction,” would seem to be only ever a form of distance between ideas, people, intentions, or desires. This was what Fussell saw as borne from the wreckage of WWI – a world in which trying to say anything meaningful at all was a fruitless endeavor, as the world had clearly killed that human capacity on the blood-stained fields of Europe. And it is hardly a revelation to see this bleakly ironic disposition at work in the years following the war. Bourne, however, sought to reimagine irony in a way that was hopeful, in a way that was creative not just aesthetically but existentially. But what Bourne realized was irony needed not be a thing that pushed the experiences of people further apart, but could instead be the way by which people could brought closer together – either as the good faith partners in a discourse, or as figures cast into the complicated skein of modernity, equally unaccustomed to the chaos it brought about. He did this not by disregarding the history of irony, but by from that history creating a concept that could speak to the issues and needs he saw in his own time – a move which, while not common in the early twentieth century, would become standard in the Theory-steeped world of the latter half of the century. The conceptual tools were all present, so to speak; it only took a different kind of craftsman to use them for a different purpose.

Bourne borrowed from the Socratically discursive origin of irony and embraced the existential domain of its Romantic permutation. In this, I argue, we can see Bourne working within the modern intellectual landscape – irony as a mode of pragmatism – as well as his realization that irony would have to be adapted to solve distinctly American problems, especially those of social empathy and the transvaluation of social values. Because, as I will argue later in this chapter, pragmatism, as laid out by William James and John Dewey, being a method to add the philosophical weight of reason to everyday decision making, failed to properly consider the 73

human element that always existed beyond the promise of pure reason. This deficit is best

encapsulated by Louis Menand, who writes:

Turn-of-the-century pragmatism does have two large deficiencies as a school of

thought. One is that it takes interests for granted; it doesn’t provide for a way of

judging whether they are worth pursuing apart from the consequences of acting on

them…The second deficiency is…that wants and beliefs can lead people to act in

ways that are distinctly unpragmatic. There is a sense in which history is lit by the

deeds of men and women for whom ideas were things other than instruments of

adjustment. Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person

would be willing to die for one.111

Bourne’s ideal of irony, I contend, was decidedly meant to meet this flaw – not just why certain ideas mattered, but how any idea could come to matter in the first place. But in order to grasp how irony was designed for this task, it is, I argue, essential to have a solid understanding of how Bourne approached the subject to begin with.

In the introduction of this chapter, I remarked that Randolph Bourne’s concept of irony has not been regarded as clear, or even coherent, both in his own time and in contemporary evaluations. It was “an exercise in convoluted thought,” to repeat Bruce Clayton’s estimation. So then, one must resolve whether Bourne’s irony was incoherent as a concept in and of itself or the way he wrote about it lacked clarity, but the concept was fundamentally solid. Given that I’ve just concluded a section outlining how Bourne’s irony fitted into the history of the idea, as well as its potential as an alternative vision of a modern sort of irony, it should be obvious where my sympathies lie. That being said, I think it is true that irony, as laid out in “The Life of Irony,”

111 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 2001, 375. 74 does not rank as among the most lucid or easy to follow, as far as Bourne’s ouvre goes. Clayton, despite his calling out of Bourne for his diaphanous handling of irony also notes that, “He did tend to shout ‘eureka’ at every exciting idea his imagination touched upon.”112 And if there was ever such a cut-and-dried “eureka” moment for Bourne, it was in this singular essay on irony.

“The Life of Irony,” regardless of its convolutedness, is an outlier among Bourne’s essays. I will again look to Clayton, who observes, “The point of view is omniscient instead of personal – as is the case in Bourne’s best writing.”113 As a cultural critic and essayist, Bourne usually adopted either a first-person voice, the editorial “we,” or through an autobiographical avatar – in some of his anti-war essays this took the presence of a conflicted “friend” in the face of military service; or, as I will discuss in the following chapter, the persona of “Miro,” a likewise conflicted character, only not about the war but the state of American literary culture.

Writing through an omniscient voice, “The Life of Irony” was far more declarative in form than his other essays; instead of it being his opinions and his arguments for such, it read as a series of brute-fact statements of how things were or how they ought to be. Thus, when reading

“The Life of Irony,” I see it as not being an essay, but rather a manifesto: a manifesto of irony.

In the modernist era of the early twentieth century, the manifesto was a fairly common method of expressing a certain worldview or idealism. As art philosopher and critic Arthur C.

Danto describes them:

The manifesto defines a certain kind of movement, and a certain kind of style,

which the manifesto more or less proclaims as the only kind of art that matters…

Each of the movements was driven by a perception of the philosophical truth of art:

112 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 77. 113 Clayton, 61. 75

that art is essentially X and that everything other than X is not – or is not essentially

– art.114

Though Danto was focused on the “artworld” – the discrete field of art production, criticism, and philosophy – I find his thinking to be useful when trying to make sense of modernism in general. When he writes, “Modernism, overall, was the Age of Manifestos,” I build upon that understanding of modernism to a far broader application than merely talking about paintings and such.115 Because a feature of modernism, as I see it, was a contradiction between a newly

confident understanding of the world, as well as a tacit uncertainty lurking behind it. A modern

artist could, through a manifesto perhaps, declare with the weight of modernism behind her that

“art is essentially X,” but the very fact that she had to make such a statement implied that art was

not obviously X to begin with. Manifestos, in many ways, were the zenith of modernist

declaration: they were founded upon an essentialist approach to certain concepts – “art as X” –

but it also put those proclaimed essences into a public discourse – a discourse that, of course,

could challenge their very status as essentialist. As such, manifestos were an admixture of

philosophy, prescriptive declaration – whether it be in the realm of arts, politics, society, etc. –

and organizational decree. They collapsed the “is” of ontology and the “ought” of a specific

socio-cultural-aesthetic vision into a discrete, formalized statement. The, arguably, most

infamous example of a manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto,

did this by importing historical materialism and class dynamics into a Hegelian narrative of

historic materialist understanding, coupled with a distinct ideal of where society had to end up.

114 Arthur C. Danto and Lydia Goehr, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, First Princeton classics edition, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1995 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 28. 115 Danto and Goehr, 29. 76

Artistic manifestos, such as lobster-gloved poet Hugo Ball’s Dadaist Manifesto, or Albert

Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Cubist Manifesto (“Du Cubisme”), defined what art was by declaring what it ought or had to be in order for art to be meaningful at all in the world.

As far as I can tell, I am the only Bourne scholar to think about “The Life of Irony” as a manifesto. But, given that Bourne was a modernist in so many ways (again, part of my larger argument that, though a modernist, he also acts as a bridge to contemporary forms of cultural criticism), I find that reading “The Life of Irony” as a manifesto of sorts, is productive in understanding what he wanted to accomplish with the essay: namely that irony was so important to Bourne’s cultural idealism that it had to be treated with objectivity. Irony had to be understood

“as X” in order for it to function both as a companion to pragmatism and as a necessary element for modern American democracy.

Of course, there is an immediate problematic with this reading, at least insofar as I have laid out Bourne’s thinking thus far in this thesis: in the previous chapter, I argued that one of the positive qualities of pragmatism, for Bourne, was its natural inoculation against ideological thinking – all forms of absolute certainty, if epistemic “truth” were dethroned, would naturally evaporate. But manifestos were, by their nature, grand statements about the “is or the ought to be” regarding their subject matter, and thus seemingly, inescapably, ideological.

But then again, as I argued above with Bourne’s historical etiology of irony, he drew primarily from the Socratic and Romantic permutations: the former being socially discursive in practice; and the latter being located in friction between human potential cast against the cosmos.

What mattered to Bourne, as I read him, was the human experience over anything else. The world, for Bourne, in a break from Fussell, was not ironic in and of itself – it could only be ironic in the way it was understood and approached. God or the universe or whatever could very well 77 be indifferent, or even cruel, but it was in how those living in a community of fellows conducted their lives in the face of such indifference that truly mattered. And irony, for Bourne, was the means through which such a life could be possible at all.

For Bourne, irony was the singular, essentially interpersonal discursive-unto-empathetic social modality that alone could create a foundation for a modern American democratic society.

Not a political system, but a culture upon which such a politics would be given the possibility to authentically exist in the first place. Because in a nation composed of so many people – one of the topics of the previous chapter – people of so many differentiated backgrounds, beliefs, wants, and desires, the only way to survive as a cohesive whole would require an idealism that could bridge that myriad of differences. E Pluribus Unum, reads the lines across our paper money. But, pragmatically speaking, that kind of statement was meaningless unless it had, well, cash value, though not in the monetary sense. In the previous chapter, I discussed how legal equality, as enfranchised through citizenship, was not the same thing as social belonging in the national identity of America – a problem his ideal of “trans-nationalism” was meant to solve. Irony was part of the same American intellectual program, albeit it directed at an even more socially foundational locus.

Three Moments in the Life of Irony

“The Life of Irony” ran for twenty-four paragraphs and contained roughly thirty claims about irony. I am going to focus on three that I think best encapsulate and best illustrate what

Randolph Bourne wanted and needed from irony. I view this essay as an essential piece of

Bourne’s democratic idealism, an idealism premised on cultural concepts, not political ones . I argue that in “The Life of Irony,” Bourne laid out the heart of his social idealism, while also attempting to articulate a vision of modern America that would be both “spiritual” and 78 productive of his vision of modern American democracy, as imagined through his cultural idealism. He wrote about irony as a series of disparate claims, and because there is not much rhetorical tissues which connects one claim to the next, those individual claims Bourne wrote about seem to stand more or less independently from one another. So I have opted to focus on what I see as a few of his most notable passages. I believe doing so will be helpful, given that the essay can be tricky to parse out and analyze as a whole – the scholars I mentioned above are not wrong when they criticize it as being one of less digestible of his works. By approaching it through what I consider to be the key passages, I hope to establish a clearer picture of how irony was meant to function as a central concept in Bourne’s cultural idealism. The first passage concerns how Bourne say irony as a way of life, more than a socio-intellectual method; the second passage is a jumping-off point to a larger question of how Bourne saw the relationship between irony, pragmatism, and the role of socio-cultural values; the final passage is about how, through irony, Bourne imagined a cultural ideal build from a creative sort of social empathy.

1. The Life Ironic, with Randolph Bourne

“We should not speak of the Socratic method, but of the Socratic life. For irony is

a life rather than a method. A life cannot be taken off and put on again at will; a

method can...The ironist is born and not made. This critical attitude toward life, this

delicious sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not a pose or an amusement. It is

something that colors every idea and every feeling of the man who is so happy as

to be endowed with it”116

116 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 134. 79

The first important thing to note is the distinction made between “method” and “life,” as the two seem to be distinct categories for Bourne. I think Bourne was conceiving of them as two separate social modalities: that of a method, which was instrumental in nature – something that could be used, but then just as easily ignored in whatever circumstance; and that of life, which was inherent to the individual’s understanding of the world; it was fundamentally constructive of how they approached being in the world. Thus, when he wrote that a method could be “taken off” whereas a life could not, he was trying to position irony as prior to one’s unique social experience. Furthermore, this is why he followed up with the distinction that with irony, one was

“born not made.”

At first glance, this statement might appear to be at odds with the entire project of

Bourne’s idealism, as being “born” an ironist seems to insist on a native, pre-determined essence that was contrary his otherwise self-reflexive, self-determined ideals of identity, as explored in the previous chapter with “youth” and “trans-nationalism.” In that chapter, I argued that for

Bourne, one was neither born “young,” nor born “American,” but rather these were dispositions or terms of self-identification that could be adopted, either as a means to live life experientially and thus to the fullest – as with “youth” – or as a means of finding a deep sense of belonging in and belonging to America – as with “trans-nationalism.”

According to this interpretation, both “youth” and “trans-nationalism” were methods, which, as I argued in the previous chapter, follows from them being cultural concepts made possible through a radical approach to pragmatism. Irony, however, was prior to both of those cultural concepts: it was not something adopted, but an existential approach one was “born” into.

Being “born” here, I suggest, was not in the literal sense for born, but more in the way we talk about people being born-again in religion or another totalizing worldview. A less-heavy example 80

comes from punk rock: it is not uncommon for adherents of punk rock to say something along

the lines of “I didn’t choose punk; punk chose me.” I don’t imagine anyone making this kind of

statement is explicitly maintaining a hard determinist view of the universe – i.e. I had no choice,

given the physical organization of the universe, other than to fall into punk rock – but rather it is

an emotional narrative meant to give highlight just how life-changing becoming “punk” was to

them. It is never a mere aesthetic choice – Mohawks, leather jackets, safety-pins-in-ears, and so

one, but the taking on of an entirely different world view than they held before; a new way of life

that could totally change how they lived – whether that be the clean-living straightedge idealism,

their politics, their understanding of the role of sub-communities struggling against the

mainstream.

Another example can be seen in the famous Andy Warhol quip that, “Once you 'got' Pop,

you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could

never see America the same way again.”117 If one was truly in the Pop mindset, then every cereal box, every street sign – in fact, every object of human design – was automatically a moment of aesthetic consideration, and this compulsion to experience the world along such lines could not be turned off. If truly of the Pop persuasion, it would be impossible to look at a stack of, say,

Brillo boxes, and not instinctively think about their aesthetic nature or status.

Pragmatism itself contained such a possibility, which is why I argued in the previous chapter that it was truly a radical philosophy. If you accept the ideal that truth is not a feature of the world but a function of being in the world, then the epistemological consequences would be absolutely transformative. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Bertrand Russell voices his

117 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, A Harvest Book (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), 50. 81 concerns about pragmatism in terms of its metaphysical consequences – “a danger of what might be called cosmic impiety,” as he puts it, writing warily about the implications of pragmatism to the stability of Western philosophy.118 But as I argued in that chapter, part of the pragmatic project was to break apart Western philosophy in order to save it qua making philosophy useful for the everyday needs of academically lay people. But in a sense, Russell was absolutely correct in viewing the implications of pragmatism as cast upon a cosmic scale: for pragmatism, if truly taken as the correct philosophical position, would take one forever out of the assumed ontological hierarchy of facts and knowledge.

Bourne’s irony, I argue, was the same sort of socio-intellectual presence. Once “born” into irony, one could never look at the world in another way – again it would “color every idea and feeling.” And like Pop or pragmatism, it was not something that could be turned off; as he wrote, “The ironist is always critically awake.” Viewing the world form the position of irony was a totalizing perspective that could not be taken off. As such, Bourne’s version of irony is similar to what we might today call “authenticity” or good faith.

The political institutions of American democracy, regardless of how well intentioned or thoughtfully designed have often been turned to anti-democratic purposes. Often couched in the language of “saving democracy” or strengthening it, the political and legal mechanisms of

America have a grim legacy of disempowering, of disenfranchising peoples that those in positions of power wanted to see silenced and removed from the conversation creating the

American present and future. Politicians, intellectuals, media talking heads, and any other stripe of public influence “take off,” as it were, their democratic ideals for the sake of political power.

118 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, A Touchstone Book (New York u.a: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 828. 82

A truly democratic life, however, would not be susceptible to the trappings of mere, or pure social power. The life of irony was, I believe, Randolph Bourne’s idealistic vision productive of a fundamentally democratic culture that could not be corrupted. Because he believed that a truly democratic life could not be “taken off;” one who truly viewed the world ironically would automatically operate from a position of good faith; a position of social benevolence, rather than domination. This kind of essential good faith, as idealized and utopian as it may seem, does seem as necessary to the perseverance of a truly democratic society, especially one that had to adapt to a massive influx of new people and cultural ideas, as America did at the turn of the century. And still does today, of course.

By conceiving of irony as a “life” which could not be “taken off,” Bourne envisioned an ideal kind of a genuinely democratic culture, one protected by the cynical possibilities of politics; his ideal of irony was, as opposed to contemporary definitions, the means to the sincerest social intellectualism. The very thing that provided a novel promise to American culture – the surfeit of new people and ideas coming to its shores – was, in a characteristically modern way, the very thing that threatened to undermine it. Again, with every new possibility in

American history comes and equal and opposite force seeking to destroy it. It was, from a distant view, a battle of ideas over the American soul (a rhetorical framing that is, sadly, still very much recent in its usage). In the early twentieth century, pragmatism would have appeared as an obvious means to solve these socio-intellectual questions – that was, after all, the entire presumed purpose of the philosophy. Then again, maybe not. There were certain features of pragmatism, Bourne noticed, that compromised its ability to deal with the species of social dilemmas based not in questions of epistemic knowledge, but in (spiritual) values. Where pragmatism was epistemic in essence, irony was spiritual – meant to not deliberate between the 83 terms of truth and knowledge, but rather social values and experiences. Which brings us to the next important segment of “The Life of Irony:” namely how it was both a companion to, and correction of, pragmatism.

2. Irony and Pragmatism

Knowledge is not goodness. But it is a step toward judging, and judgment is the

true goodness…Irony, the science of comparative experience, compares things not

with an established standard but with each other, and the values that slowly emerge

from the process, values that emerge from one’s own vivid reactions, are constantly

revised, corrected, and refined by that same sense of contrast.119

The first part of this quote I discussed briefly above, but it warrants more evaluation.

As previously discussed, pragmatism asserted that social, everyday, and even (some) moral truths were distinct from metaphysical ones, for the truth-function of such categories was not based on any grand design of the universe, but instead in how they affected actions that would lead to the desired consequences. Knowledge was, pragmatically speaking, a position vis-à-vis an understanding of the world, not the world in and of itself; judgment, however, was a basis for action within that world, i.e. “it is on judgment impelled by desire that we act.” Thus, Bourne was stating that goodness was a product of action, and not one of fidelity regarding the perception of the True Facts about the World. This might, prima facie seem a bit abstract, but remember that during this time there was the early confrontation between an objective, physics-based understanding of the universe, against the modernistic debate over whether socio-cultural ideas were constructed or natural and essentialist. The scientific understanding of the universe made many theoretical claims of

119 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 135–36. 84

objective fact – the first decade or so of the twentieth century is a really interesting moment

in Western science, as it was just at that point when many of the great breakthroughs,

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, for example (published in 1916), were being developed,

but before they became widespread and accepted – and lots of socially minded intellectuals wanted to play in the same methodological ballfield. Yet, at the same time, there was always a friction inherent in a scientism of cultural concepts, as the terms of culture could

not be triturated or tested in the manner that physical or chemical concepts were; one could

at least theoretically measure the mass of an atom, but how would one go about measuring

the value of reading the morning paper?

Bourne himself referenced this debate, stating that the judgments of irony were “not

artificial but spring naturally out of life.” The judgments produced by irony could not be

“artificial” in the sense that they were arbitrary, because then they would have no social or

spiritual basis to stand on. Therefore, those judgments had to come from rigorously

examined experience. But those experiences, of course, could only be subjective, but a

subjectivity that itself was dependent on (arguably) socially objective categories, such as

race, class, gender, etc. Now any good student of the humanities will, at this point, excitedly

raise their hand and shout, “A-ha! But those very categories are socially constructed!”

Which, yes, as contemporary humanities scholars we would agree with – but the past is a

foreign country, early-twentieth-century America is far less alien than, say, medieval

Europe or Edo-era Japan. But it would be a mistake to assume that we can spread over it

our socio-ethical ideals, as if it were tracing paper on an immutable moral schematic. So,

Bourne had to work out this dilemma in a more definitively essentialist era of social apprehension. 85

This is what, I suggest, Bourne was after when he wrote that, “Irony, the science of comparative experience, compares things not with an established standard but with each other…values that emerge from one’s own vivid reactions, are constantly revised, corrected, and refined by that same sense of contrast.” On one hand, this shows he was deploying irony to work within a pragmatic framework – irony as the “science of comparative experience” – but on the other, it also emphasizes that, for him, irony was fundamentally distinct from philosophical pragmatism in that it was about figuring out social values, not about the ontological status of epistemology. Bourne understood that certain socio-cultural ideas were, by their nature, not scientific in nature to begin with. Though, like the objects of science, socio-cultural ideas could be – and ought to be, for Bourne – subjected to revision, correction, and refinement, they remained categorically unlike the objects of science in that there was not final form of socio- cultural ideas, at least not in the same consensus-seeking way the objects of science had.

Physical objects, by their (proposed) necessity within the laws of nature, had defined and measurable qualities that were independent and self-contained: the mass of any given rock did not change depending on the mass of a different rock. But values, for Bourne, only had value insofar as existed in a society, and being within a society meant being connected to the whole shebang. Values, then, meant nothing in a vacuum. Pragmatism, a philosophy constructed to evaluate and guide ideas into action, would seem to have been a natural approach for a trans- valuation of values, but where it was strong in honing rational thought, it was deficient in its consideration of the emotional weight of values and culture.

This was, of course, not an errant consequence of pragmatism, but a feature baked in from the beginning. If truth was what happened to an idea, then so to with the value of that idea.

Feeding ducks at the pond becomes a valuable action through my putting time and effort into it; 86 my moral belief that ducks ought to be fed becomes a belief, subsequently, by my acting it out.

Moral value accrued to an idea not through some metaphysical preloading, but through behaviors and actions. But what happens when my actions and my beliefs are out of sync? What if they are not in conversation at all? Louis Menand summarizes this conundrum best, writing:

turn-of-the-century pragmatism does have two large deficiencies as a school of

thought. One is that it takes interests for granted; it doesn’t provide for a way of

judging whether they are worth pursuing apart from the consequences of acting on

them…The second deficiency is…that wants and beliefs can lead people to act in

ways that are distinctly unpragmatic. There is a sense in which history is lit by the

deeds of men and women for whom ideas were things other than instruments of

adjustment. Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person

would be willing to die for one.120

Pragmatism did a lot of things right, as far as Randolph Bourne was concerned. It was, as

I have argued, one of the strongest intellectual influence in his thinking about the American future, as the nation emerged into modernity. It not only provided a (seemingly) scientific approach to the philosophical quandaries that ruled the day, but did so in a way that was also in an explicitly, at least as laid out by John Dewey, democratic fashion.

The problem with pragmatism, at least by 1913, was that while it remained a thoroughly democratic philosophy in spirit, it had not, could not, codify any definitive social axioms that were fundamentally for the furthering of democracy. (Such axioms would end up being added, though a good decade later.) In its early decades, pragmatism had a lot to say about egalitarianism – which was a socio-existential consideration, i.e. all people were equal in their

120 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 2001, 375. My emphasis. 87 status to comprehend and judge the world along their own experiences – but had less to contribute to the discourse concerning the day-to-day issues of American democracy, which was a socio-political paradigm in which only certain people had a de facto ability to contribute to political outcomes. Under the earlier versions of pragmatism, all people were equally free, ontologically speaking, to determine their own understanding of the world and then navigate the consequences stemming from whatever understandings. But this was a very abstract way of viewing the individual and their relationship with the world, and so often is the case that the axioms of hardcore philosophy fail to speak meaningfully to the everyday concerns of regular folk.

Bourne recognized this lack in pragmatism—that is, an inability to actively produce values constitutive of democratic thinking in a significantly efficacious way. Pragmatism could question or challenge Truth and, in turn, challenge one’s conception of the world, but that was mainly along epistemic lines of belief and action, as built around discrete outcomes from whatever beliefs and actions. A democratic society, Bourne understood, was always already prefaced on values productive of democracy – values that could not be a product of philosophical debate, but determined through a sincere dialectic among members of a community. Values, not mere axioms, were what a functioning democratic society required. And pragmatism needed help in that regard.

Pragmatism was excellent at creating actionable concepts, and it was valuable in producing beneficial actions. But it was not always so clear when it came to understanding the value of any of those – again, why would anyone die for rational thought? Pragmatism worked exceptionally well on the judgment of means, but faltered when it came to judging the ends to which those means were directed. The question of what made an idea good was 88

not one that pragmatism was well equipped to answer. A few years after writing “The Life

of Irony,” Bourne would explicitly point out this flaw writing, “But there was always that

unhappy ambiguity in [Dewey’s] doctrine [i.e. pragmatism] as to just how values were

created.”121 Arriving at a destination does not mean that that place was ultimately worth going to, no matter how quickly or efficiently one got there: pragmatism risked equated the achieving of a goal with the value of a goal.

Bourne believed irony provided a basis for judging and producing values in a way that was fundamentally pragmatic, but also not subjected to the flaws of pragmatism as such. Irony, if properly conceived, plugged up a great big hole in pragmatism’s hull and did so without compromising any of its principle axioms. Rather than a social ethics – a spirituality – derived from the convictions of old Absolutes or outdated metaphysics,

Bourne’s irony posited a cultural idealism that emerged from the consensus of people acting within an ideal of democratically derived good faith.

As such, Bourne’s ironic ideal, I suggest, was meant to emphasize that the spiritual validity of socio-cultural values was to be found in how they held up against other socio- cultural values; the debate was not between humanity and the universe, but instead one within human society itself, along the lines of regular people and their beliefs as posited against other, regular people; an prelude to his over-arching stance against socio-cultural hierarchies that will become even more significant in the next chapter. Only human ideas,

Bourne contended – ideas produced from one’s “vivid reactions,” to be “revised, corrected, and refined” – could rightfully judge human values, which, in turn, would need to be

“revised, corrected, and refined.” To proceed along those lines meant putting those values,

121 Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” 61. 89 whatever they may have been, up against each other. Yet, the ultimate arbiter regarding what was right or wrong was not some vague conviction of how those notions measured up against some grand visions about what the universe decreed as right or wrong, but rather a dialogue: a dialectic among those that lived in the world, and as such, had to figure out the rules that they had to either adapt or acquiesce to. But this was a conversation as envisioned through a foundational belief in good faith – the ultimate goal of such a discourse was not political power or influence, but always and essentially an expression of culturally situated democratic idealism. Then again, to phrase Bourne’s idealism as a goal would be to fall into that pragmatic folly of a definitive endpoint, when really what was important was the act of cultural conversation. Because when it came to democratic socio- cultural values, there was no state of absolute certainty – there was only a conversation over the kind of values that mattered, and a dialogue over the socially determined validity of those ideas.

3. Irony and Democracy as Social Philosophy

But if irony destroys some ideals it builds up others. It tests ideals by their

social validity, by their general changeability among all sorts of people and

the world, but if it leaves the foundations of many in shaky condition and

renders more simply provisional, those that it does leave standing are

imperishably founded in the common democratic experience of all men.”122

122 Randolph Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, n.d., 138. 90

Here was the first time in the essay that Bourne explicitly made reference to democracy and its relationship with the ironic ideal, and he did so notably in the context of ideals being either destroyed or strengthened. The democratic process, he suggested, was inherently a dialectical one, in which ideals and values were not constants, but instead concepts that existed in a constant state of conflict and flux: they were to be re-/de-/trans- valued.

It is important to note that Bourne was not basing this dialectical approach on any

concrete notion of American ideology or experience – instead he framed the debate as

being between “all sorts of people and the world,” and the only commonality among these

different groups was “the common democratic experience.” I think that Bourne clearly had

in mind the cultural diversity that marked American social life in the early twentieth

century.

And yet, the specter of democracy Bourne was invoking here was not one residing

only upon American shores; this much he made clear in phrasing it as the domain of “all

men.” Herein lies the value of this passage: Bourne was in the moment acknowledging

democracy as not a political system but as a social philosophy. As I argued above with the

distinction between irony as a life or method, a true democracy would have to be one not

reliant on the democratic reliability of its political institutions, but one that was rooted in a

genuine belief that all members were equally valuable. By emphasizing the “common

democratic experience of all men,” Bourne was arguing that the thoughts and experiences

of anyone who lived in a democratic society where those thoughts and experiences must

fuel continual project of making a society. Democracy, for Bourne, was not a set of

particular political institutions, but a culture dependent on the transmutation of social 91 difference to cultural creativity: differences of origins, differences beliefs, differences of ideas, differences of behavior, etc., all of those would fuel the cultural potential of America.

Thus, for a democratic society to not just survive but thrive, it had to reach into that multitude of differences, and create from that apparent chaos, something stronger and better than what the sum of its parts would have seemed capable of.

In the previous chapter, I argued that Bourne envisioned “trans-nationalism” as a way to open up a valid self-identification of “being American” to everyone who truly believed in the

American project, regardless of where they came from. The only thing that mattered was that they believed in that American project, the potential it had, and their place in the nation. But, where in the previous chapter I examined how the introduction of new ideas were a boon to living life experimentally – through “youth” – and to the future of American culture – through

“trans-nationalism” – ethnic and cultural novelty have frequently been a source of social friction as much as they have been a source of social inspiration. So, while the presence of many other ethnic groups and cultural possibilities were embraced with open arms by Bourne and other multiculturalists, there was no denying that the same font of social promise was also one of social strife: for every new cultural idea or possibility introduced by the immigrant cultures coming to American shores, there was a nativist desire to see that idea or possibility stamped out.

With social difference naturally came social friction, which left unchecked could lead to any number of bad consequences, up to and including violence. Irony was a way to manage this difference. “By adopting another’s point of view and making it his own, in order to carry light and air into it,” Bourne wrote, through irony one, “literally puts himself in the other man’s place. Irony is this the truest sympathy.”123 Irony managed difference

123 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 137. 92

by being a way for people to get out of the myopia of their own individual experience and

at least try to look at the world from another person’s point of view. Now how accurately

one could simulate those experiences might not precise in the least, but the act of trying –

from a position of good faith – was at least a sincere expression that another person’s experience, and thus the other person, was, in and of themselves meaningful. In the introduction to this thesis, I mentioned the famous David Foster Wallace commencement speech, “This Is Water,” in which he adjured the new graduates to constantly direct their thinking toward giving other people the benefit of the doubt: that instead of being angry at a cashier for be being rude, that instead they should remind themselves of all the reasons they ought to forgive it. Because, as Wallace understood fifteen years ago and Bourne over a hundred, we usually don’t know what other people are going through; we don’t know their experiences. But we should try to. For the sake of democracy, we had to.

For Randolph Bourne, there was no such singular experience that would encapsulate being American – instead it was a constant process of creation and destruction.

For this process to continue, for American democracy to continue, the people that made up

America had to be able to come together for a common national project. But by its very

nature, democracy, in the same way that science by its nature requires the possibility of

refutation, requires the potential of difference. To live in a democratic society means to

live in one that evolves and adapts to any number of different considerations or values.

This is the great contradiction of democracy: the essential “togetherness” it requires to exist

it built up from groups or individuals that fundamentally need not agree on much of

anything: the only common interest is the pursuit of a democratic society, and its attendant

consequences that whatever I want, or whatever my group needs, is never a given, but only 93

a process of becoming against so many other needs and wants of other individuals and

groups. Politics – whether through organization around certain goals, voting for certain policies, or consolidation around certain groups – was one means to achieve such ends. But prior and more important to any of that was the capacity to be curious, to have an open mind, to be able to perceive a world beyond one’s own initial conviction. Democracy, at its heart, was always already an experiment of difference-unto-unity; E pluribus unum, so says the dollar bill, after all.

To create a society founded on this contradiction, which is to say, to create America, meant to somehow collapse those countless differences among individuals and groups, no matter how numerous or from however many perspectives, into not a hegemonic but conscientiously pluralistic social understanding that did not just accommodate differences but relied on them. The end goal of democracy, at least in theory, is never hegemony but parity; it is not a contest of dominance but a project based on the ideals of compromise and conciliation. This too, was for Bourne, the function and practice of irony.

The ironist’s soul, in Bourne’s conception, functioned much in the same way as a particle accelerator: an assortment of ideas and perspectives would be tossed in and then smashed into each other in order to see what new ideals would be created. Some of them, being unfit for the world, would immediately fizzle out, but others would persist and be, perhaps, of creative or spiritual worth. This clash of ideals was possible because the ironist:

since he has no citadel of truth to defend, is really the more adventurous. Life, not

fixed in predestined formulas, or measurable by fixed, immutable standards, is fluid,

rich, and exciting. To the ironist it is both discovery and creation. His courage seeks

out the obscure places of human personality; and his sympathy and understanding 94

create new interests and enthusiasms in the other minds upon which they play. And

these new interests in turn react upon his life, discovered unexpected vistas there,

and creating new insight into the world that he lives in.124

To experience life through irony was to experience the constant churning of ideas and ideals. The valuable ones would make it out into the world, the poor ones would be dismissed, and in between all the rest would remain in motion: mixing, colliding, negating, until they survived or perished. Irony was an engine that took in ideas and combusted them into movement for change

– cultural, social, moral; the distinctions were slight from a pragmatic point of view. But it needed ample fuel:

There is but one weak spot in his armor, but one disaster that he fears more than the

loss of his life, - a shrinkage of his environment, a running dry of experience. He

fears being cut off from friends and crowds and human faces and speech and books,

for the demands to be ceaselessly fed. Like a modern city, he is totally dependent

on a steady flow of supplies from the outside world, and will be in danger of

starvation if the lines of communication are interrupted.125

Luckily, as noted above, the modern landscape meant fuel was in high supply. With abundance

of newspapers, magazines, and whatnot, there was no shortage of ideas to be found in print. That

America was a grand mixture of nationalities was an even greater boon. The fabric of American

life was already woven from so many people from different countries of origins, who brought

along with them their own cultures and practices. Anyone who stepped off a boat and claimed

America as a new home was full of new ideas. The question, for Randolph Bourne, was how to

124 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 359. 125 Bourne, 367. 95 fold these new people and their ideals into the collective potential of American cultural. “Trans- nationalism” would take care of the people; irony, then, would take their ideas and used them stoke the fires of American creativity, and in doing so, keep warm the hearth of democracy and drive the engine of American progress into the future.

Conclusion

Irony, for Randolph Bourne, did not just produce better ideas, but also a better, deeper, and more connected social experience. Irony had the potential to take the diverse mass of peoples and identities that made up the American populace and form them into the “beloved community” founded on a mutual, good faith desire to be a coherent nation by fostering the grandest ideal that can exist in a democratic society: empathy. For Bourne, as I have argued, this empathy was not just a passive, if benign tolerance of other people, but an active, creative position in which at every instance the good, ironic citizen was compelled to ask “but what of their experience? What of their wants and needs?”.

Bourne’s irony, as such, was both entirely consistent within the broader history of the concept, but also an aberration, and it was yielded not as a means to create distance, but instead collapse it, so that all Americans would have a better, perhaps essential, way to understand and thus live with one another. It is no wonder then that the majority of Bourne scholars have treated it with indifference or dismissiveness: irony, for Bourne, was held up as the single most important socio-intellectual force in American social and political life; meanwhile, Bourne wrote about it with a confidence that was both absolutely certain and pretty much apolitical. He did not frame irony through the most germane politics of the early nineteen-teens, nor did he attach it to any explicit platform of progressive or socialist politics, even though he clearly had an affinity for both. Instead, he wrote about irony as if it were an essential truth about American social life, 96 much in the same way that a physicist would describe the laws of gravity or the behavior of particle flying through space. This, I hope to have convincingly argued, was not an oversight but an intentional rhetorical choice, as irony, for Bourne, was simply an essential constituent of democratic existence, in the same way that electrons or protons are essential particles of contemporary physics: the whole system would fall apart without it. This was why irony could not merely be “taken on and off again” for Bourne – because irony, like democracy, was not just a temporary disposition, but a way of life unto itself. To be committed to irony – which is to say to be an “ironist” – meant, for Bourne, a sort of absolute dedication to its precepts, at least as he understood them. But under a close reading, which I argue I have done, there are some aspects of irony that may, to modern readers, come across as overly ambitious, or even absurd, but all the same none of them appear as cultish, delusional, or even impossible. Irony was exceedingly powerful in Bourne’s imagination, but it was never absurd. By comparing it with David Foster

Wallace’s celebrated commencement speech, “This Is Water,” I hope to have established that such an idealistic impulse, with regards to irony qua empathy, was not only not implausible but in actuality a natural reflex of empathic hopefulness against an increasingly self-centered world view. For a democratic society to maintain itself, both Bourne and Wallace argued – a century removed from one another – that the capacity to either assume the lived position of another, to understand and empathize with them, was not the endgame of democratic live, but the substance of it.

All of this is to say nothing about how Bourne also positioned irony as a key corrective to some major defaults of philosophical pragmatism, at least as far as it was proposed by 1913. In the previous chapter, I examined how between the axioms of pragmatism and the subsequent and novel concept of youth, Bourne imagined a radical, yet slow, reconfiguration of American 97 intellectual life. Through pragmatism, the very fabric of lived reality was opened up for reevaluation, what with the open redefinition of various “truths” along socio-existential lines.

Youth, as a product of this new, conceptual openness, provided the appetite for newer experiences, the accumulation of which could only better inform and prepare the individual for a life in the increasingly fractured and fraught modern condition – a condition largely defined by the increasingly multi-cultural character of American life. But in that sliver of promise between novel philosophical methodology and the want of novel experiences to expand such a philosophy, remained a spiritual absence in regards to evaluation of whatever was to be discovered. Irony provided a means to fill that empty space. Irony could do what pragmatism and even youth could not: evaluate, in a spiritual way, everyday experience along lines not of means and ends but of values and social cohesion.

Matthew Stratton, again phrases this as irony’s ability to “re-value, trans-value, or de- value” so-called “truths,” and he is not wrong in this regard.126 It was this exact multi-critical power that made irony not just useful (in the pragmatic sense) but essential (in the democratic sense). Pragmatism opened up a lot of true possibilities regarding human experience, but if those experiences were to be closed off to morality or a broader sense of human camaraderie, well, then they could not really end up mattering much. Likewise, the concept of “youth” could implore one to be more open in viewing new experiences as valid sites for spiritual or social consideration. But only irony, with its capacity for creative empathy and democratic good faith, could complete the equation, so to speak; only irony, for Bourne, could pull together the philosophically and the socio-conceptually compelling novelties of modernism into a sense of

126 Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, 33. 98 greater community that did not just persist but had potential to thrive. Which is to say, again, his infamous “beloved community.”

The curious thing about modernism, however, was that it did not just create a communal disjunction, but an existential one as well. Irony, offered a lot to the former concern – irony could create a better community, especially so in conjunction with pragmatism and youth, by fostering within the individual a good faith open-mindedness regarding difference and otherness.

Even so, despite all its presumed power, irony in and of itself, did not do much to make the modern American individual self-sufficient in that grand mess of modernity. The “ironist” as so described, was a communal creature – a being meant to pull together and resolve the problems attendant to the creation of the beloved community. But even the ironist had to exist outside the world of ironic criticism. They had to be in the world. And just as much as the realities of

American life in modernism needed an empathic disposition if genuine democratic thinking was to persevere, so too did the individual’s sense of self, and validity. And this was the hard part, regarding democratic idealism: it is so easy to think about the large picture, to focus on how it puts the needs of the group over the comparatively small needs of the individual. But, at least as modernism emphasizes, the individual never ceased to be a singular, monadic site of experiences or concern. I suppose a pedantic way to phrase this dilemma would be something like: irony could provide the individual the means to function within modern society, but something else would be needed if they the individual were to function as an individual within a modern society.

And so, in the following chapter I will investigate the ways in which Randolph Bourne positioned the aesthetics of taste as a means to do just that: an answer to the question of how the individual could be centered and meaningful in and increasingly rote and defined social existence; how the individual could find themselves and thus claim some semblance of agency 99 and subjectivity in the modern world. What comes next is the story of Randolph Bourne’s aesthetics of taste. 100

CHAPTER THREE: THE AESTHETICS OF TASTE

For virtually all readers of contemporary cultural studies, the debate between “high art” and “low art” isn’t really a debate at all anymore. Pretty much any cultural text, whether it be the previously regarded “low” forms of pulp novels, soap operas, comic books, pop music, blockbuster movies, and so on, are, critically speaking, on equal footing with the longstanding

“high” forms, such as literature, classical music, paintings and sculptures by the “masters,” the works Shakespeare, cinema, and whatever else has been, historically, the purview of established, institutional critics, whether they wrote from academia or in the pages of august publications.

This battle has been going on for a long time and outside of certain academic sets, still does – perhaps far longer than a lot of people realize. Only it wasn’t always framed in the terms of

“high art” versus “low art:” in the early twentieth century, it was often framed as “culture” versus “non-culture,” or more direly “culture” versus “anarchy.” This was the debate Randolph

Bourne wrote about in a couple of essays, wherein he sought to counter the cultural idealism of

English critic, Matthew Arnold, who famously wrote that culture was “the best which has thought and said in the world.”127

Culture can end up meaning a lot of things. At the fin-de-siècle, culture was widely understood in terms of tangible stuff – works of art that one could look at, listen to, read, or hold in their hands. Bourne’s take, however, was outside of his own time and more in step with ours.

His concept of culture – in a similar way to how he reconceputalized “youth,” “trans- nationalism,” and “irony,” as examined in the previous two chapters – was less about objects, but instead concerned about the very experience and substance of life itself. There is a lengthy

127 Matthew Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 4th ed (Harlow, England ; New York: Pearson Longman, 2009), 6. 101 passage that appeared in his essay “The Cult of the Best,” and while most Bourne scholars cite at least part of it, none of them give it the attention it deserves. At least not as far as I am concerned, as I believe that it is among the most important things Bourne ever wrote, if we are to understand his cultural idealism:

For as long as you humbly follow the best, you have no eyes for the vital. If you

are using your energy to cajole your appreciations, you have none left for unforced

aesthetic emotion. If your training has been to learn and appreciate the best that has

been thought and done in the world, it has not been to discriminate between the

significant and the irrelevant that the experience of every day is flinging up in your

face. Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after another, and no training

in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to

forms and settings. The mere callousness with which we confront our ragbag city

streets is evidence enough of the futility of the Arnold ideal. To have learned to

appreciate a Mantegna and a Japanese print, and Dante and Debussy, and not to

have learned nausea at Main street, means art education which is not merely

worthless but destructive.128

Being in the world, for Bourne, always and already meant living within a discrete cultural paradigm, wherein culture was not just a category of certain kinds of stuff, but the experience of living in the world itself; it was the substance of everyday experience and the complications that could come from such encounters, far more than it was the act of visiting museums or attending an opera. And make no mistake, “complications” were an essential feature of Bourne’s cultural

128 Randolph Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 194. My emphasis. 102 idealism: it would be from such complications, or friction, or uncertainties – the “nausea at Main street” – that the individual could truly come to know themselves. As such, I submit that

Bourne’s understanding of culture has more in common with contemporary definitions than it does his own historical context. Raymond Williams writes of three categories of culture: the first being aligned with “human perfection” and “universal values;” the second category concerns an analysis of “stuff” from a position that questioned whether said “stuff” was worth considering at all; and finally “the ‘social’ definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior.”129 Randolph Bourne was focused on the importance of the latter two categories during a time when most other thinkers were focused primarily on the first.

For both Bourne and Williams, prior to an evaluation or critique of the meaning of a cultural text should be some kind of foundational, conceptual understanding of what culture ought to mean in the first place. For Randolph Bourne, this meant thinking about “taste.” This was not “taste” as we might think of today, as a passive or instinctive stance of liking or disliking something. Rather, it was an active position interrogating one’s social experience for the purposes of self-discovery and self-definition; it was a process of existential import that I call the

“aesthetics of taste.” Today, “aesthetics” is often meant as shorthand for the philosophy of art, and as such is used in the discussion of the nature of art, beauty, and so on. While not entirely removed from that understanding, in my usage, as it relates to Bourne’s cultural thinking, I am using “aesthetics” in a more fundamental sense: to describe or refer to sensory experiences and how those are constructive or constituent of more complex forms of comprehending the world.

129 Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 4th ed (Harlow, England ; New York: Pearson Longman, 2009), 32–33. 103

In this chapter, I am going to explore how and why Randolph Bourne writings on taste and culture showed him continuing to develop his radical cultural idealism. Bourne’s idealism focused on the individual’s experience as expressed through the “aesthetics of taste”, as opposed to the belief that culture was best conceived as a collection of the “best thought and said in the world.” A lot of what follows in this chapter is going to be about the “philosophy of taste,” a concept that Randolph Bourne hardly invented – though I will argue that he significantly, and radically, adapted it to the modern, American social landscape of his time. In Bourne’s conception, taste was not an endpoint shaped by achieving or appreciating “the best,” but a creative, existential apparatus through which individuals not only experienced culture, but created it in turn through that very act of experiencing the world: taste was the way, he believed, people could wield power over social reality and direct its shape. In the same way that I previously argued pragmatism and irony were independent, but fundamentally linked, in a process of creating and trans-valuing values, so to were taste and culture: culture produced that which taste evaluated, which in turn would play a role in what culture produced. Unlike the

Arnoldian ideal – for all its egalitarian posturing – Bourne’s vision of culture was personally empowering and genuinely democratic: taste was Bourne’s means by which an individual could both find themselves in culture and have a role in creating that culture at the same time, whether it be in pride in their cultural origins or an appreciation of something entirely new – as opposed to the acquiesce to the preferences of elites and their institutions, which for Bourne was a real and ever-present danger in the early twentieth century.

It may seem strange, possibly even funny, to call Matthew Arnold a “dangerous” thinker.

It is hard to imagine anyone reading him today and finding his ideas anything close to threatening or socially destructive. Arnold is the stuff of week-one reading assignments, usually 104

found in the first section of cultural studies readers and compilations.130 Generally, this means

excerpts from his 1869 essay collection, Culture and Anarchy – and in particular the titular essay

– which are read for historiographical purposes before getting to the fun and juicy stuff like

Stuart Hall or bell hooks. But my glibness here belies just how influential he was from the end of

the 19th century and up through around the middle of the 20th.131 The gravity of Arnoldian thought still has a considerable presence today: for example, the acclaimed Pixar movie

Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007) ends up being, more or less, a perfect encapsulation of Arnoldian thought, in telling a tale about a preternaturally talented rodent who is able to rise above his humble origins and cook incredible cuisine. The grand statement of that movie is that despite one’s humble origins (here meaning Remy, a literal rat born in a sewer), it remains possible to transcend such lowly beginnings and produce genuine greatness. This depiction of the individual and their relationship to the broader culture in which they lived was pure Arnoldian thought. I think that most people who don’t professionally or passionately devote themselves to thinking about culture would find a variation of Arnold’s core idea – that culture ought to be conceived as a collection of the best things we make, write, say, or think – pretty amenable, if not outright the best way to go about defining culture, or at least “high culture.” Even if the denomination of

“high culture” or “high art” aren’t explicitly thought of, there has been a constant thread in

American cultural conversations about how whatever is new or radical fails to meet up to the established standard-bearers, either qualitatively (i.e. “This punk rock is garbage compared to

Sinatra”) or categorically (“This punk rock is just noise, not real music like Ol’ Blue Eyes”). As

130 For example, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, the very reader I used for my graduate coursework and which will be cited presently. 131 Iris Dorreboom, “The Challenge of Our Time”: Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne and the Making of Modern America, Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), 201. 105 discussed in the first chapter, this kind of reactionary impulse to any product of youth culture is hardly anomalous. But the critical basis to say something not merely along the lines of, “I just don’t care for it,” but “this is bad and you are bad for thinking that it’s good”? That was set up, or at least given a certain critical legacy, by nineteen-century English poet and cultural critic,

Matthew Arnold. There were many battlegrounds over the “correct” shape of culture and its artefacts, and the role and status of taste was a deeply contested one; one that often – to this day

– is set in terms of “high” vs. “low,” or “elite” vs. “common.”

I begin this chapter with a brief history on how “taste” was understood in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant – from whom Bourne took the idea of taste being a transcendental part of the human condition – and Friedrich Nietzsche – who greatly inspired

Bourne in general, but here was formative in the idea that culture and the individual were existentially inextricable. Then, I will do a lengthy overview of Matthew Arnold’s cultural idealism, focusing on how it ultimately sought to construct oppressive cultural hierarchies, despite the egalitarian promises Arnold believed in. I primarily illustrate this through the creation of a cultural “canon” – that familiar concept of a list of so-called great and essential works of art.

From this backdrop, I will explore the reasons why Bourne felt the Arnoldian conception was a truly dangerous one that needed to be rejected in favor of a cultural project that championed individual agency and relevancy, a conceptual change that was at once radical and necessary given the transition into modernity. This will lead me to a discussion of Bourne’s cultural ideal, the “aesthetics of taste.” I argue that “taste” was a way for the individual to center themselves in an increasingly chaotic and fractured modern world; it would allow the individual to become an active participant in culture, and thus escape the Arnoldian consequence of being objectified by an indifferent cultural monolith. It was also a conception of taste as a form of creative social 106 power: the aesthetics of taste would empower people to determine their own social reality, instead of merely inheriting or acquiescing to a pre-established cultural hierarchy that did not speak to their wants or needs. A cultural ideal built up from taste would democratize culture, make it process that everyone had a role in creating. A culture operating from the aesthetics of taste would – along with youth, trans-nationalism, and irony – help produce a more creative, democratic, and empathetic society.

The Philosophy of Taste in Kant and Nietzsche

One thing that needs to be established right from the top that in all that follows: “taste” is not simply a matter of liking vs. disliking things, or what is pleasing vs. what is not, though it is not exactly untethered from those everyday understandings either. The philosophical discussion of “taste” was a far more foundational one that had to do with the origins of aesthetic judgment: how do we determine what is “good” when it comes to culture and its products, and what are the consequences of these determinations? Whether something was liked or not was just one way that “taste” manifested itself, but that was not the be-all-end-all in the slightest. So here, I will briefly examine the two key figures, as least insofar as they pertain to the division between

Matthew Arnold and Randolph Bourne’s cultural idealisms: Immanuel Kant and Friedrich

Nietzsche.

That Immanuel Kant features at all in a conversation that revolves around democratic idealism might be something of a surprise, as the man’s philosophy isn’t typically regarded as being exactly supportive of democratic ideals. Then again, the complexity of Kant’s idealism contains some surprising avenues, if you know where to look; Bourne did – and it all starts with aesthetics: not as the philosophy of art (as it is commonly meant today), but the philosophical 107

investigation of sensory experience.132 Aesthetics has a long history as a focus of philosophy, but

a formal investigation into taste in particular probably begins with Immanuel Kant. And Kant, as

was his wont, sought to bring taste – which for Kant was a division of the faculty of judgment –

under the umbrella of reason: he wanted to make taste fall under metaphysically rational laws

and the principles of universality, even if the individual act of aesthetic judgment was not itself a

rational one, per se. As Henry Allison puts it in his deep-diving analysis of Kant’s Critique of

Aesthetic Judgment, the aptly named Kant’s Theory of Taste, “Thus, as it were by default, the a

priori principle supposedly governing taste is assigned to judgment in its reflective capacity,

which essentially involves a movement from particulars to universals.”133 Allison understands

Kant as thinking at a distinctly 18th-century intellectual period where “taste was thought of as a special way of knowing, one for which rational grounds cannot be given, but which nonetheless involves an inherent universality. In short, taste was not a private but a social phenomenon...”134

This was important to Kant because if taste were purely private, then it could not be rationally

universalized; this is important for this present thesis because, as will be seen later in this

chapter, for Bourne, taste was both a private and social phenomenon and the dynamic between

those two ended up giving taste a remarkable social power.

132 This can get terminologically messy, but Kant’s idealism did not have the same meaning as it did for Bourne. Idealism, to put it exceedingly simply, for Kant, was a philosophical position that “ideas” are only knowable insofar as they are shown to us through our senses. So, for example, my idea of a barn being red is only a matter of my perception with no bearing on the actual, ontological status of the barn itself. Idealism for Bourne, on the other hand, was the less- philosophical meaning of “an ideal state of things” – for example, an ideal country would have no death penalty 133 Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Modern European Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 5. 134 Allison, 1. 108

This isn’t to say that Kant’s law of taste made an individual’s taste any less personal,

however. And this is where things get a little tricky. As Terry Eagleton writes in The Ideology of

the Aesthetic, “Aesthetic judgements, Kant argues in the Critique of Judgment, are at once

subjective and universal.”135 Frequently, this is called Universal Subjective Validity, and though seemingly oxymoronic, it is not as confusing as it might seem (though this is Kant we’re talking about, so it is not exactly simple either). Essentially, Kant held that aesthetic judgment was not totally private, because all of the objects of taste were somewhere out in the world: they can be mutually experienced, expressed, communicated, and so on. But they are personal in the sense that they certainly happen to me in a distinctive way. And yet, through the process of judgment, they are also universal because all people – having human minds and thus human rationality – ultimately end up calling on that same faculty of reason. Eagleton, again:

Such judgements are certainly subjective; but they are so purely subjective, so

expressive of the very essence of the subject, untainted by idiosyncratic prejudice

and ‘devoid of every possible condition which would necessarily distinguish the

judge from other people’, that it is possible to speak of them also as

universal…Aesthetic judgments are ‘impersonally personal’, a kind of subjectivity

without a subject…To judge aesthetically is implicitly to declare that a wholly

subjective response is of the kind that every individual must necessarily experience,

one that must elicit spontaneous agreement from them all.136

135 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Nachdr. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 93. 136 Eagleton, 93. 109

One way to unpack “impersonally personal” might be to say “personal in a way possible only from a shared rational capacity implicit to personhood.” This shared, rational personhood ought to sound familiar because it was the exact social understanding Bourne hoped and believed irony would make possible: that despite all of our differences and our individual experiences, we are all in the world together, and as such we can always find a way to (at least attempt) to understand one another. Irony hoped to bridge this gap through creatively empathic imagination; Kantian aesthetics offered another bridge, through the brute existential facts of social existence – we all exist in such a way that we experience things, and that commonality alone is a meaningful connection. Thus, Bourne was suggesting that taste could be a means to a kind of social transcendence outside ourselves, in a similar way to irony.

In making aesthetic judgments, Eagleton writes, Kant held that, “we exercise a precious form of intersubjectivity, establishing ourselves as a community of feeling subjects linked by a quick sense of our shared capacities.”137 Now, Kant may have been concerned with philosophical

“beauty,” which for him required a disinterestedness towards an object – meaning that one’s personal feelings did not play a role in aesthetic evaluation. And because this is Kant, it can be difficult to explain. Let’s imagine two people admiring Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Kant would have held that both people, from a position of pure aesthetic judgment, would find the painting to be “beautiful,” not on account of any objective qualities of the painting itself – its composition or its place in art history – nor from any personal relevance. In fact, if one of the observers, say, found the painting “beautiful” because it reminded him of a view from his childhood home, that would negate the necessary quality of disinterestedness. Kant’s “beauty” had no place for nostalgia, sentiment, nor any kind of moral or thematic consideration. The

137 Eagleton, 75. 110

Kantian aesthetic, according to Eagleton, was “in no way cognitive.”138 “Cognitive,” a technical term for Kant, is probably better understood as “intellectual” or “conceptual” today. In that light,

Kantian aesthetics were pre-intellectual: beauty, for him, was not a product of intellectual or reflexive analysis – again judgment based on compositional rules, interpreted themes, or personal resonance – but instead a revelation fundamentally inherent to a shared mental architecture among all people. We observe; we behold beauty: at no point does conceptual thinking feature in the process. Thus, in the Kantian paradigm, “What brings us together as subjects is not knowledge but an ineffable reciprocity of feeling.”139

Randolph Bourne was not a Kantian. But there was something in Kant’s aesthetics he saw as necessary: that shared “reciprocity of feeling,” which created a “community of subjects.”

As I argued with the previous chapter’s irony, Bourne’s idealism needed a mechanism for people to get outside of themselves, to be able to approach the world in a way not constricted to their own narrow perspectives. Irony was meant to do this through a creative vision of empathy and the trans-valuation of values; taste was meant to serve a similar role in the evaluation of kaleidoscopic and modern social experiences. Given the increasing cultural diversity developing in the early twentieth century, Bourne realized that against such a tide of newness and unfamiliarity, there could either be a human reaction based in rejection or acceptance: Bourne opted for the latter. To recall a line from above, “Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after another, and no training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to forms and settings.”140 But as I argued earlier, Bourne wasn’t actually talking about

discrete physical objects, but rather the experience of culture itself. “Forms and settings,” after

138 Eagleton, 75. 139 Eagleton, 75. 140 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194. 111 all, have slight relevance to how one experiences a painting in a gallery, compared to what one may experience during everyday life. So when he continued the above quote with, “and not to have learned nausea at Main street, means art education which is not merely worthless but destructive,”141 I read a definite literalism in his concern – the inability to accept new cultural forms were destructive, as they resulted in the oppressive tactics and violent actions, as touched on in the first chapter’s discussion of Bourne’s reconceptualizing of national identity. Though

Bourne did not cotton to the particulars of Kant’s aesthetic judgment, as described as a pre- conceptual judgment of beauty, nor Kant’s arcane metaphysics, Bourne did want the innate, transcendental humanity suggested by said metaphysics. Bourne’s idealism, after all, was one founded in the idea of democratic togetherness and ironic camaraderie. But his idealism also, perhaps as a contradiction, had to open up a space for individual empowerment – the collapsed

Kantian objectivity-unto-subjectivity as a remade subjectivity-over-objectivity. Bourne developed this through the work of another German philosopher.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy was decidedly anti-Kantian. If part of Kant’s goal was to find a way out of the body and to the deep truths of existence, then Nietzsche was completely and irrevocably embedded in that body. For Kant, the truth may have been out there, so to speak; for Nietzsche truth was anything but. As Terry Eagleton explains: “It is the body, for Nietzsche, that produces whatever truth we can achieve. The world is the way it is only because of the peculiar structure of our senses, and a different biology would deliver us a different universe entirely. Truth is a function of the material evolution of the species.”142 Keijo Rahkonen deepens the bodily nature of Neitzsche’s taste, writing, “Furthermore, Nietzsche recognises that

141 Bourne, 194. 142 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 234–35. 112

individuals sense and taste things differently because they are embedded in different ways of life,

and because they have different bodies.”143 For Nietzsche, the body was the foundation of human experience, rather than a primary site from which to launch a transcendental understanding beyond itself. Contrary to Kant’s “personally impersonal,” Nietzsche’s notion of taste was so personal and embedded in the self that it could not ever transcend that position; taste was simply too in the world to ever find a position above it. But simply being in a body was not the end of

Nietzsche’s aesthetics, as like many of thoughts it led back to the infamous will to power; and for

Nietzsche, “the body itself is…a mere ephemeral expression of the will to power.”144

The will to power, of course, is a constant refrain found in Nietzsche’s writings and many a scholar has dedicated their career to understanding its nuances and depths. For this thesis, however, what is important is a general foundation from which to illuminate Bourne’s aesthetics of taste. And frankly, it is not hard to see Nietzsche’s influence on Bourne. Eagleton helpfully condenses the will to power as, “…just the universal truth that there is no universal truth, the interpretation that all is interpretation; and this paradox…allows an iconoclastic radicalism to blend with a prudently pragmatist suspicion of all ‘global’ theorizing.”145 Following my exploration of the foundations of Bourne’s cultural radicalism in Chapter One, there is a lot in this description that rings as immediately familiar. While pragmatism, especially as developed by

John Dewey, was in part an explicit rejection of previous philosophical ponderings, here

Eagleton argues that the same epistemological conclusions were native in Nietzsche’s thought as well. Then there is the continuation of the will to power into an “iconoclastic radicalism,” which,

143 Keijo Rahkonen, “Bordieu and Nietzsche: Taste as a Struggle,” in The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S Turner (London: Anthem Press, 2013), 135. My emphasis. 144 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 234. 145 Eagleton, 248. 113 as I have argued, is a pretty good apt description of Bourne’s idealism overall. Eagleton continues, noting, “The will to power does not dictate any particular values…it just demands that you do what it does, namely live in a changeful, experimental, self-improvisational style through the shaping of a multiplicity of values.”146 Again, what I have previously argued as part of Bourne’s cultural idealism reappears, as Chapter Two’s irony illustrated this same want in

Bourne: for values to be trans-valuated along lines that were not ontological in origin, but social and brought about through lived experience.

So it is not difficult to see Bourne’s attraction to this existential underpinnings of truth – again, pragmatism asserted that all capital-T Truth was, in fact, refereed by experience.

Regardless of whether Bourne was starting from his admiration of Nietzsche or his love of pragmatism, he seemed fated to end up at the same conclusion. And Bourne drew upon this body-embedded quality of both pragmatic and Nietzschean thought as a cornerstone to his aesthetics of taste, where, I will soon argue, taste branched out into a social modality from which one interpreted and sought understand the experiences of everyday life. The embodied, social nature of truth qua taste, as taken from Nietzsche’s philosophy, meant taste was a battleground over the shape of life itself, of social reality. And from here was derived a major feature of

Bourne’s aesthetics of taste – namely, as I will argue below, that taste was not just a product of culture, but productive and constitutive of it at the same time. Where Kant saw transcendental, disinterested human perception as guiding taste, Nietzsche, adversely argued, “one cannot watch

‘without interest’ because every perception of the world is necessarily perspective-laden.”147

146 Eagleton, 250. 147 Rahkonen, “Bordieu and Nietzsche: Taste as a Struggle,” 134. 114

In Kant, for all of his deep and twisty metaphysics, there is a sense of optimistic humanism. Simply by possessing human reason, we are all of us capable of coming to the same, undeniable ontological and moral truths that govern the universe. Similarly, as Terry Eagleton observes, “Aesthetic intersubjectivity adumbrates a utopian community of subjects, united in the very deep structures of their being.”148 And if the metaphysics of taste carry with it a hint of this utopianism, then it is not hard to carry that over into a relatively benevolent view of culture – it would be, after all, the product of disinterested, rational practice made possible through transcendental interconnectedness. In Nietzsche, the dynamics of taste were decidedly less cheerful. Culture was a power struggle between competing tastes, where one would win and the defeated alternative, only through a perverse hope of suffering and self-loathing, could in turn hope to become powerful enough to lash out and challenge the status quo of oppression.

The one philosopher Bourne almost certainly idealized more than any other was

Nietzsche. He titled several of his own essays as references to Nietzsche’s works, and Nietzsche was the only modern philosopher (other than the pragmatists, of course) that Bourne frequently wrote about. So, it should come to no surprise that there is a distinctly Nietzschean flavor to a lot of Bourne’s cultural thinking. More important to my argument, is the understanding of taste’s capacity to shape culture and thus social reality and how that factored into Bourne’s cultural idealism, as set against the Arnoldian ideal.

The Arnoldian ideal, despite its Kantian aspirations, would ultimately lead to a recourse of oppressive power. As I will explore later in this chapter, it was a belief that people – left to their own vices and devices – would tend to produce anarchy instead of the stability that society needed in the face of modernity. Randolph Bourne, however, needed those very people that

148 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 97. 115

Arnoldian thinking shirked off. As I will explain later, Arnold’s overarching fear of anarchy ultimately overrode any genuine equalitarian or democratic commitments that his cultural thinking aimed to make claim to. In order to safeguard society from social upheaval, Arnold’s ideal culture, ultimately, could not be anything other than an oppressive one. Bourne, meanwhile, imagined a world in which those same, so-called anarchic qualities of disruption, novelty, and experimentation – as evaluated by pragmatism, youthful idealism, and irony – would be the very ideals that created, not destroyed, the potential of America.

Then, there are many ways in which Bourne utopian idealism was surprisingly reflective of Kant’s transcendental one. In Kantian idealism, everyone was connected by their possessing of a rational mind, and in this way were ontologically united just by being rational beings.

Randolph Bourne’s utopian idealism, however, was not one of ontological transcendentalism, but of social collaboration. As members of a society, all were connected through the process of being in and being productive of culture, and as such, were never truly isolated from one another.

Irony, in Bourne’s imagination, sought to connect people through empathy; taste, he also imagined, could connect them through the sheer fact of social existence: everyone, always already, after all, existed in a society, and as such, one of the most meaningful ways in which they could appreciate that mutual concept of humanity, was through cultural conversation over what they wanted to see, hoped to see, or needed to see.

The debate between Arnold and Bourne, as one-sided as it was (and could only be, given the time between when they wrote), suggests some additions to the historiography to turn-of-the- century cultural thought. First, the way in Bourne oscillated between Kantian and Nietzschean ideas shows that culturally minded intellectuals were still very much engaged with so-called academic philosophy. And engaged in ways which end up being surprising: one might assume 116 that the debate between Bourne and Arnold would have been a kind of proxy war between the philosophies of Kant and Nietzsche: Arnold would, along such lines, naturally be assumed to be the avatar of the more conservative (by modern standards) idealism of Kant and its desire to establish a rational order to the world; Bourne as the Nietzschean agent, enthralled with the rapturous possibilities of a “poetic” metaphysics. But as I have argued, Kant and Nietzsche seem to be present in the thoughts of both men, as Bourne found human interconnectivity in Kantian transcendence and Arnold ultimately relented to a Nietzschean usage of social power. As such, more attention should be given to the ways that intellectuals tried to weave extant philosophies into explicitly social visions. Second, it suggests that more attention specifically should be given into the broader depth of Bourne’s philosophical lineage: his debt to and fondness of Nietzsche is well-established – both Leslie Vaughan and Matthew Stratton have written fantastic work in this regard – but the ways in which he engaged with other philosophers and philosophies, with the exception of pragmatism, is far less investigated.

Now that the background of the philosophy of taste has been established, I will turn to the ways Arnold and Bourne conceived of their respective cultural theories, and why this debate was one of the most important sites in the battle of modern cultural idealism. Because for both men, the stakes could have not been larger. For Matthew Arnold, the battle was one between “culture and anarchy,” which was, verbatim, the title he gave his book on the matter; a title chosen without a sliver of hyperbole. Randolph Bourne also saw the stakes as being dire, though instead of them being over the survival of the nation’s stability, they concerned the fate of America’s soul: the question for Bourne wasn’t whether America would survive as a socio-political entity, 117 but if the country could meet its “spiritual” and creative potential. Could America become, to paraphrase a way he wrote about the ironist, the kind of country that “counted in the world?”149

Culture Versus Anarchy

One of the main arguments I have been making in this thesis is that one of Randolph

Bourne’s overarching goals came from his beholding the new horizon of cultural ideas and possibilities at the turn of the century, and seeing in them a potential for a radical idealism that could meet the problems brought about by modernity, and thus create a more “spiritually” resonant and authentically democratic society. These ideas and possibilities came from many far- ranging sources, such as philosophical pragmatism; new generationally situated understandings of the world; or broadened acceptance of national identity (Chapter One). Or else, from the

“ironic life” that could “re/de/trans-value” the social beliefs that society was built on (Chapter

Two). I have been arguing that it was this humanistic and open-hearted way Bourne approached the challenges of modernity that makes him a valuable figure to think about in contemporary scholarship.

But, while Bourne was not unique in holding a perspective of progressive humanism, neither was he emblematic of the broader attitudes of his time. Turn-of-the-century America, after all, was not just a time of great cultural change, but also a time of an equally verdant, reactionary approach to such changes. As I mentioned in the first chapter, with the explosion of immigration that marked the turn of the century, came an equal and opposite confrontation against it: there was a sharp rise in nativism and a desire for some to fight against the cultural changes they saw happening. Even among progressive thinkers, there was uncertainty in how to manage the implicit cultural “challenge” posed by so many new people, from so many new

149 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 144. 118

places and backgrounds – and thus the many debates between the “melting pot” or other versions

of “Americanization.” But where the nativists could be violent, while the progressives always

believed in an absolute benevolence behind their programs, in either case some kind of

oppression was unavoidable. And Matthew Arnold, though not writing in American context,

certainly believed his cultural idealism to be, if nothing else, fundamentally kind.

In Bourne’s time, Matthew Arnold was one of the mostly highly regarded cultural

thinkers, with influential figures such as John Erskine, Bourne’s Columbia professor and

inspiring voice behind the Great Books movement, and Ellery Sedgwick, owner of and Bourne’s

editor at the Atlantic Monthly, considering themselves Arnoldian devotees.150 Bourne, as is probably clear by now, was decidedly not among these Arnoldian fellows. And he never had been. Bruce Clayton notes that “As early as his college days, Bourne had begun a polemical quarrel” with Arnold’s concept of culture.151 Bourne’s distaste of Arnoldian thought was so

apparent, in fact, upon publishing “The Life of Irony” – discussed in depth in the previous

chapter – Sedgwick mentioned in a letter to Bourne, “I have never heard you say much about

your reading, but I take it that you have great antipathy toward Matthew Arnold.”152

If Bourne held antipathy toward Arnold in 1911, by 1914 he saw Arnold’s idealism as a genuine cultural threat. What was it about Matthew Arnold that Bourne found so dangerous?

What was it about a deceased English poet and cultural critic – whom by accounts was a perfectly amiable fop – that caused Bourne to dedicate two essays railing against his ideas? (To

150 The Great Books movement is probably the most visible and influential part of the Arnoldian legacy that persist to this day. My undergraduate Honor’s College required a cross-disciplinary introductory Humanities survey which they proudly boasted was based on Columbia’s, for example. 151 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 16. 152 Quoted from: Clayton, 61. 119

be fair, Bourne never once leveled any ad hominem attacks against the man; likewise I have no

intention of placing Arnold in the same camp as other culturally conservative moments such as

the nativists or the “America First” crowd). If you read the scholarship on these two essays –

“Our Cultural Humility” (written in 1914) and “Cult of the Best” (written in 1916) – the reason

is mostly depicted as one of a deep, but simple, disagreement about how best to understand

culture. Bruce Clayton understands Bourne as seeing Arnoldian thinking as “loathsome and

politically reactionary.”153 Casey Nelson Blake, meanwhile, sees the main problem as being the

Arnoldian “tendency for an education oriented toward the acquisition of ‘the best’ to overlook

‘the joyous masses who might easily…have evolved a folk-culture if they had not been outlawed by this idea.”154 Leslie Vaughan sees the issue as a category mistake: where Arnold saw culture

as definable entities – art and thoughts – Bourne wanted to change the conception of culture to

“the interaction among people, places, and artifacts…a ‘living effort’ of a people’s self-

expression and solidarity.”155

They’re all correct, here and there, of course. But as I have already suggested, there is a misunderstanding of the stakes at play in Bourne and Arnold’s cultural imaginations. One of the reasons, as I argued in the previous chapter, for why Bourne wrote about irony from an omniscient, objective perspective, was to secure irony’s place for the sake of his idealism – irony was too important for his idealism to be debated, so he simply wrote about it as if it were brute fact. Because, part of his cultural, democratic idealism needed individuals to be able to transcend their personal experience in order to truly appreciate each other’s value and social validity; to be able to empathize with each other in a sincere way: for without that, a genuine democratic

153 Clayton, 183. 154 Blake, Beloved Community, 95. 155 Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, 125. 120 culture would not be feasible – the absence of irony, for Bourne, was a danger for democratic society.

When writing about the role of taste in culture, however, Bourne was concerned with a kind of danger that went in the opposite direction: instead of the question of how individuals could come together to produce a benevolent, democratic culture, he was worried about the ways in which culture itself could be destructive to the individual. The primary source of this danger, in Bourne’s thinking, was not Matthew Arnold himself, but what the Englishman’s thinking sought to create: a top-down, hierarchical, authoritarian ideal in which “good” or “proper” culture was whatever established and hallowed by elites. In this chapter, I am going to examine what it was about Arnoldian thinking Bourne found so dangerous and how his critique of Arnold was his method for explicating his own, radical theory of culture. But to do so requires some basic understanding of what Arnold envisioned with his cultural idealism.

Arnold and Cultural Stability

As I mentioned above, Matthew Arnold was a leading influence on cultural thinking in early twentieth-century America. Leslie Vaughan writes that “the genteel cultural critics of the school of belles lettres” were greatly influenced by Arnold.156 Bourne saw Arnoldian thought thoroughly dominant during his time world, noting that “it was Matthew Arnold, read and reverenced, by the generation immediately preceding our own, who set our eyes to the goal of culture which has become common property of all our world.”157 And Bourne understood that there were very good reasons for Arnold’s popularity in America at the fin-de-siècle. Arnold

156 Vaughan, 124. 157 Randolph Bourne, “Our Cultural Humility,” in History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: B.W. Huebsch Inc., 1920), 31. 121

offered Americans what seemed to be perfect solution to the question of culture and democracy,

as Bourne wrote of Arnold’s persuasive power:

For it was a democratic ideal; every one who had the energy and perseverance could

reasonably expect to acquire by taking thought that orientation of soul to which

Arnold gave the magic name of culture. And it was a quantitative ideal; culture was

a matter of acquisition with appreciation and prayerfulness perhaps, but still a

matter of adding little by little to one's store until one should have a vision of that

radiant limit, when one knew all the best that had been thought and said and

pictured in the world.158

On the one hand, Americans wanted an egalitarian approach to most issues, such a democratic representation in government, and a socio-economic system that (in theory) allowed anyone to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, just as Carnegie or Vanderbilt had done. Obviously, not everyone was “cultured,” in the same way that not everyone was wealthy. But part of that great

American promise was that anyone could be. In the same way that a great industrialist could have begun as a poor Scottish immigrant or onetime ferry boy, so too was cultural wealth open to any individual of sufficient ambition. So, it was hardly surprising to Bourne that the Arnoldian ideal offered a lot that was tantalizing to the American palette: it offered a vision of culture that was both seemingly egalitarian (available to anyone who really wanted it) and consumerist.

On the other hand, culture, for Bourne, was something of a special social category that resisted such seemingly egalitarian intrusions: cultural items could be bought, and cultural

appreciation could be acquired, but the objects of cultural appreciation were something of a

different category. As I’ve hoped to make clear in the previous chapters, culture, for Randolph

158 Bourne, 31–32. 122

Bourne, wasn’t about stuff; it wasn’t about culture qua acquisition, but rather as a feeling of belonging and being able to carry one’s beliefs and experiences into the broader social life, and through that process become a thread in that living skein. Therefore, the general, conservative impulse regarding culture may have been to keep it protected, to keep it from changing too much or too quickly. But such a reflex was ultimately destructive in Bourne’s idealism, as his vision of culture needed to be malleable. In the same way that youth needed to break free from the stodgy, outdated thinking of the older generations, so too did modern cultural thinking need to escape from the cultural reverence that defined the “generation immediately preceding.” Bourne’s ideal needed cultural thinking to be adaptable, open-minded, creative, and resonant with individual needs. Arnoldian thinking was anything but.

Arnoldian cultural idealism started off benevolently enough, defining culture simply as

“being the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world…”159 This is a fairly appealing way to frame culture, at least on the surface. It does not come without any potential issues or critiques (nothing ever does), but I think it would be fair to assume that a lot of people, especially those outside of the realm of cultural studies, would find it more or less agreeable.

Arnold continued, bolstering his egalitarian bona fides, “[Culture] does not try to teach down to the level of the inferior classes…. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely – nourished and not bound by them.”160

159 Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 6. 160 Arnold, 6. My emphasis. 123

Arnoldian thinking proposed a vision of culture that was positioned as universally attainable: it was a cultural ideal aimed to make the “best known and said in the world” the baseline of all things worth knowing, equal and open to all, class be damned. And from this, those gifted with the right disposition or opportunities might be introduced to “sweetness and light.” Although Arnold did not define the phrase – in the Victorian England he was writing to he would not have had to – it was a commonly used literary idiom coined by Jonathan Swift meaning, essentially, “beauty and reason.” All of this was done in the grand pursuit of

“perfection,” which might prima facie ring as a fairly daunting claim. But Arnold came across as practical and level headed, writing that perfection was, “…an increased spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy...”161

This was a remarkably sensible way to define perfection – a concept that hangs heavy, as being at once the only thing worth wanting, but also devastatingly indefinable. Is perfection simply ticking off all of the right boxes, at the right times, in the right order? Is it transcending that checklist altogether? Or at least in some way bypassing it? Or is it borne of pure human folly and linguistic accident? Was it a concept so powerful that it was by its very conception impossible? It is not for nothing that Spinoza only spoke of “perfection” in how it pertained to God. Arnold’s take on the term is, no doubt, somewhat refreshing, as it frames it in attainable watermarks: be better in employing reason; get better at appreciating beauty; be kinder to your fellow person.

This was also a definition that seemed like something Bourne could have written as well – reason as a means to sympathy is definitely something that kicked around in Bourne’s thinking – though

I will soon get into why it did not sync up with what Bourne was thinking at all. But by pulling

161 Matthew Arnold, The Project Gutenberg Etext of Culture and Anarchy, 10th ed. (Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, 2003), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4212. 124 all of these concepts into his theory, two very important things happened here: first, culture was defined as the pursuit of “perfection” via “the best thought and said” in the world; second, this pursuit would lead to an apprehension of beauty and reason. This matters because all of these concepts – perfection, beauty, and reason – were, in an overtly Kantian manner, concepts that had to be virtually immutable if they were to have any philosophical value. If perfection was a moving target, then the word was essentially meaningless. If the concept of reason could be upended or changed overnight, what good was it? And if the ideals of beauty flopped to and fro like a trout on a riverbank, what would that say about the intellectual or social utility of those ideals?

Here, Arnold was aiming for the Kantian metaphysics of rational absolutes; those a priori concepts that had to obtain if there were to be any philosophical baseline to judgement at all. But while Arnold was reaching for that, at the same time he did not totally trust the safety net of

“universal subjective validity.” In the Kantian skein, rational apprehension is seemingly something that all people are capable of, just by having a reason-capable human mind. But what if it were the case that not all people were capable of such reason? What if their lesser appetites overruled their innate capacity to transcend to a higher plane of rational judgment? These concerns were ever-present and dominant in his worldview, and so he needed “a principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be threatening us.”162 Arnold’s biggest problem was that the high-minded metaphysics of Kant did not so neatly line up with the real world Arnold perceived. And so, in place of “objective subjectivity” he needed something more stable, something easier to manage within society. He called it “the best thought and said in the world.” I will call it The Canon.

162 Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 8. 125

The Canon

The Canon is basically a compendium of the “best of the best.” Though my term for it is

somewhat idiosyncratic, what it represents is, I imagine, immediately familiar to anyone who

went through a high school or university Humanities class. Recall the mention above of John

Erskine’s Great Books movement, perhaps one of the most institutionalized, and thus common,

instances The Canon today.

For Randolph Bourne, such a top-down cultural structure was frightful to behold. As he

wrote in “History of a Literary Radical,’ “If the ‘classics’ had done little except hold his mind in

an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous taste, they seemed to have done little

more for even the thorough scholars.”163 The Canon was a form of containment – a prison – not just for the student but even more so for the teacher. The main issue for Bourne, which I will examine in greater detail below, wasn’t that there were “anointed” works of great cultural import: because most of the time the works in The Canon were, and remain, meaningful and valuable and worth talking about; the fact that Shakespeare is taught in pretty much every

English program at some point does not mean reading Shakespeare is a mistake – the problem comes when such works are automatically assumed to be more worthy than anything else, and when their proliferation dominates over other works of art or culture that ought to have a notable place in the cultural conversation.

This is where Matthew Arnold took on a distinctly Nietzschean hue. For all his Kantian teleology, the methodology behind his cultural theory was ultimately one of social power: who gets to decide what is culture? Who gets to guard it? Who gets to determines what is “good” and

163 Randolph Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 193. 126 what is not? The answer, unsurprisingly, was a phalanx of educated, professional individuals for whom cultural attunement was a natural disposition, a cultural class transcendent of social class.

He wrote, “…in each class there are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their best self, with a bent for seeing things as they are… for simply concerning themselves with reason and the will of God, and doing their best to make these prevail; - for the pursuit, in a word, of perfection.”164 At first glance, this might have been a convincingly egalitarian stance.

As in the movie Ratatouille, mentioned during the introduction, even from a society of literal rats could come a Remy, an individual capable of creating cuisine that met – and would end up rivaling – the human competition. But behind this seemingly egalitarian humanism was always a lingering specter of authoritative cultural power. Because Remy never made rat cuisine; he made human haute cuisine – specifically French cuisine, which the viewer is meant to assume as being the pinnacle of gustatory excellence. This culinary assumption is, in and of itself, one baked into wider cultural beliefs about the comparative value among various national cuisines: it is hard not to wonder, for example, whether Western audiences would have been so convinced of Remy’s gourmet gifts had he, instead of French food, which generally commands the highest restaurant prices, cooked kung-pao chicken, which as a Chinese-American fare tends to occupy the cheapest rung of takeout.

A cultural keeper and decider could come from anywhere in theory, but no matter where they came from, they would always end up agreeing on The Canon being the sacred list. Culture was a top-down paradigm, where those imbued with cultural power and status were able to determine the “correct” aesthetics for everyone else to follow and appreciate. In the same way that Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals presented ethics as something the powerful used to

164 Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 9. 127

dominate the weak, Arnold’s theory of culture utilized the same social power dynamic. As

Vaughan describes, Arnold “regarded culture as the property of the chosen people, set against the

shallowness of the philistines. Culture was something to be acquired and consumed passively by

people who had no taste or who presumably did not know better.”165 The purpose of these

“chosen people” was not just cultivation of a list of great cultural works, but a deeper and more frankly insidious means of preventing anarchy – which for Arnold meant any meaningful challenge to the status quo. The Canon was not just a list of artworks and ideas, but a mode of social control. This paradigm was so grotesque to Bourne that he spent two essays calling it out more or less by name, either under the guise of refuting Matthew Arnold himself or the more abstracted instantiation of the Englishman’s cultural theory.

Today, there is no shortage of arguments for why The Canon is a deeply flawed and problematic way of structuring culture. The first that comes to mind is that virtually everyone who has some say in what does or does not qualify as “the best” has historically been socially affluent, financially secure, white men – men who were academics, artists, critics, collectors, curators, publishers, politicians, or otherwise members of the social elite. These were men for whom good faith disinterestedness in cultural values cannot be assumed without profound naiveté. Marginalized and minority voices did not have much, if any, presence in the cultural discourse. This remains a major problem today, but it was an even larger one a century ago. For

Randolph Bourne, however, this was only one expression of a deeper problem: that any form of institutional cultural authority – The Canon, or as he termed it, “the cult of the best” – was, perhaps, the most visible modality of that inherently destructive institutionalism, especially among the university-educated, progressively minded urbanites that made up his social circle. As

165 Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, 124. 128

I have been arguing throughout this thesis, through his writings on “youth,” “trans-nationalism,”

and “irony,” Randolph Bourne was – being one “in-but-not-of-the-world” – always trying to

account and make a place for all of those on the nominal fringe of American society into his

final, idealistic project of American promise. He imagined a place and a voice for all – regardless

of class or national origin – which was the very status that Arnoldian cultural idealism, from its

very intellectual foundations despite its egalitarian posturing, ended up denying. And thus, for

Bourne, dangerous to the potential and progress of his radically idealistic vision of American

culture.

The Cult of the Best

“‘Culture’ has come to mean the jacking-up of one’s appreciations a notch at a time until

they have reached a certain standard level. To be cultured has meant to like masterpieces,”

Bourne wrote.166 Now there wasn’t anything in and of itself wrong with liking masterpieces –

Bourne himself, a talented pianist, took great joy in performing the great works of classical music. He wrote, “I am not denying the superlative beauty of what has come to be labeled ‘the best that has been thought and done in the world.’ But I do object to its being made the universal norm.”167 The last sentence is the clincher: the problem was not liking high art or, by extension, high culture. I doubt there are many cultural studies scholars today that truly lament the existence of the aforementioned Criterion Collection or boycott a curated exhibition of post-impressionist art out of pure principle. For Bourne, the problem came when that was all that one could do; that the appreciation of established “high art” turned automatic– you call something great because it has already been determined as being great or because it sufficiently follows the rules that define

166 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 193. 167 Bourne, 194. 129

greatness. Bourne, again, “We have devoted much attention to importing aesthetic values and

works of art from Europe, and to providing museums, libraries and art courses for the public. But

we have scarcely asked ourselves what is to come if it all.”168 It was easy to walk through a

museum, scratch your chin before a “masterpiece” and say to yourself, “Ah yes, this is a great

and important work of art” while never asking yourself why it was important or regarded as such

in the first place. You could be told what the work art meant, what it represented, or was trying

to say. And you could be told why it was important historically, aesthetically, or thematically.

But that was the extent of the spectator’s job. Determining those meanings, those reasons why

the work of art was important was meant to be left to professionals who knew about such things.

For Bourne, this meant curators, art historians/academics, and wealthy collectors.

Bourne wasn’t arguing that it was bad for a society to have a set of art-world

professionals, or else curated museums and art history classes in universities. But he was very

much concerned about what happened when those institutional opinions were myopic and

powerful enough to reinforce an aesthetic ideal that had little bearing to the realities of modern

life. This kind of cultural hierarchy, which often dominated the cultural discourse, was

categorically un-American in flavor. Bourne noted, “To me this conception of culture is

unpleasantly undemocratic.”169 Instead of culture being a communal, shared thing – a space in which any opinion or preference could be offered and considered, and possible adopted – such cultural hierarchies created an absolute dictated from on high. Arnoldian culture ultimately supported a system that could not adequately understand the social needs of those living in modern America. For Bourne, there were two main dangers that Arnoldian idealism produced.

168 Bourne, 193. My emphasis. 169 Bourne, 194. 130

The first concerned a conceptual dilemma of alienation and cultural disenfranchisement. The

second regarded the practical production of American culture at the turn of the century.

In “The History of a Literary Radical,” a semi-autobiographical account of Bourne’s own

education, in which he wrote himself as his own fictional friend Miro whose educational

experiences were then reported by the “real” Bourne, he recalls reading the “dead classics” – the usual suspects of “the greats” ranging from august Greek and Latin figures, to Dante,

Shakespeare, and so on. Throughout this education, “His mind was a moving present, obliterating each day what it had read the day before, and piercing into a no more comprehended future.”170 For all their importance, they “passed before his mind like figures in a crowded street.”171 He found himself asking, “Where did they fit into [his] life?” For all their gravity, the

“dead classics” did little to move him or speak to him. “Miro found himself surfeited and

dissatisfied,” Bourne wrote of his own art education. 172 What it meant to be alive in America in

the first decades of the twentieth century was not a question to be answered by the classics. They

were not, to his experiences and needs, vital. They were, again, “an uncomprehending prison”

that held his mind in stasis.

The “cult of the best” was harmful because it negated the ability to think about culture

reflexively. It rejected the inquisitive powers of youth and irony by declaring there was nothing

to question at all – the best was simply the best. “Art education has, in other words, become

almost a branch of moral education,” he wrote, meaning that all it did was point out right and

wrong, while neglecting to foster any more curious or creative perspective.173 “Criticism and

170 Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” 186. 171 Bourne, 188. 172 Bourne, 187. 173 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194. 131

expression are neglected in favor of absorption and reverence of the classics,” he continued.

Instead of thinking about what a work of art was trying to say, instead of thinking about why a

work might matter, the discourse became a droll matter of repeating whatever established critics

and scholars had to say. An education in “the classics,” Bourne wrote was a sequence of

“medicinal doses of inspiration.”174 This amounted to malpractice, as instead of prompting

anything creative or meaningful for the individual it “had done little for him except hold his

mind in an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous taste.”175 The Canon could define was “good,” but this professional consensus did not mean it was meaningful to anyone’s social experience. The ought to be and the is did not line up.

The “cult of the best” did not care about what mattered to individuals. “It is prompted by the scholarly ideal rather than by an ideal of taste. The prize goes to those who can acquire the most of these goods. No one is challenged to spontaneous any more than the monk is asked to create his own dogmas,” he wrote.176 In this way, the experience of art was a game, either of ownership – who personally owns the most august collection – or of facts – can I cite a renowned critic’s interpretation, can I point out which of the figures in a painting was Toulouse’s mistress, can I list off all of the themes and references contained on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

What’s missing from the equation was what does any of this have to do with me? What can it teach me about my here and now? The answer to those questions was simply: nothing. By design the “meaning” of culture was “something handed down, not grown in the garden of [one’s] own appreciation.”177 But in to live in the world, especially a modern one that was fundamentally

174 Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” 188. 175 Bourne, 194. 176 Randolph Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194. 177 Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” 194. 132 different from the that of previous generations, required far more than the ability to repeat the words of critics or parrot passages from a textbook. It instead required the ability to think critical, to be able to navigate a newly destabilized society and reach into the chaos and from it construct some measure of stability, and this mean fostering an ideal of taste.

This is the first part of the passage cited above: “For as long as you humbly follow the best, you have no eyes for the vital…If your training has been to learn and appreciate the best that has been thought and done in the world, it has not been to discriminate between the significant and the irrelevant that the experience of every day is flinging up in your face.”178 In the previous chapter, I argued that Bourne produced new cultural concepts that would help people navigate the challenges of modernity – the gestalt of pragmatism, youth, and irony that he understood as the Experimental Life. Pragmatism in particular was to be the guide of experience, the thing to determine what was important and what was not. I think it is clear that Bourne was linking the necessities of culture to the same ideals here. Cultural ideals, he believed, needed to be socially efficacious; they needed to do something in helping us process experience and live in the world. The “vital” for Bourne was whatever people needed to flourish amidst the tumultuous tides of modernity. It was what was necessary to push back against the flattening and alienating waves crashing against the shores of early-twentieth century America, as brought about by industrialization, mass media, and mass consumption.

Still, “vital” remains somewhat of a vague term, though this was by design. There was common rhetorical move Bourne often used. He often employed commonplace words, such as

“vital” or “spiritual,” and meant them both in their everyday usage, as well as in a second, idiosyncratic way. You could read through his essays with the everyday usage of certain words

178 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194. 133

in mind, and have little trouble understanding his main ideas. But if you were truly reading him

as he wanted to be read, then understanding him meant in some ways understanding yourself.

Nathan Crick and Jeremy Engels observe that

“Bourne’s writing felt aphoristic because he often presented complex meanings in

short, poetic phrases that required effort on the part of the reader to unpack (i.e.,

‘war is the health of the State’)… they invited the audience into a process of

meaning making, but they were also rhetorical insofar as the meanings created,

although varied and plural, all tended to carry with them certain motivational

tendencies. Aphorisms thus sacrificed power for complexity but gained the

compensation of active participation and depth of meaning.”179

With this in mind, Bourne was inviting us to interrogate the meaning of “vital” along our own, individual terms – because if I cannot determine what the word “vital” points out for me, how can I start to find the things and concepts identified by the word. Discovering what was “vital” was not asymmetrical or static, but a process that was going on constantly. It is only by being in the world that I come to find the things that are important to me, and these in turn go one to change how I understand the very concept of personal importance. And this, of course, would naturally vary from person to person. Just as the “cult of the best” was dangerous in its top-down designation of meaning, the “vital” would, as an oppositional ideal, be a corrective. It was something for everyone to determine for themselves, by reflecting upon their own experiences and needs, and as such it was never something that could be taught down. But all The Canon could ever do was teach downward.

179 Nathan Crick and Jeremy Engels, “‘The Effort of Reason, and the Adventure of Beauty’: The Aesthetic Rhetoric of Randolph Bourne,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 3 (August 1, 2012): 287, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2012.691174. 134

This was Bourne’s concern when it came to the Arnoldian conception of culture. “The best” did not always equate to what one found personally meaningful or socially relevant to their particular situations. Even worse, it sought to negate the ability to think with independent creativity, with a critical eye pointed in service of the self. And if culture did not produce those abilities, what was it actually worth? “Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after another,” Bourne wrote, “and no training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to forms and settings.”180 By its very definition, “the best,” as it was always backward-looking to some degree, did not hone one’s ability to react. It could be a guide to ideals, but these ideals were always a matter of “then” and not “now.” The Arnoldian formulation admitted as much by being the best “thought and said” and not the best “being thought and being said.” Living in a society required being able to cope with whatever assortment of problems it might throw at you right now. When Bourne talked about a series of

“aesthetic challenges,” he was not using the term in its more contemporary meaning of

“regarding the philosophy of art and beauty,” but the more in a sense of “relating to perception and sensation.” Essentially, he was talking about what happens at the intersection of the world and one’s conscious apprehension of it. Here, we can again see pragmatism at work in Bourne’s thinking, as he prioritized the experience of being in the world as prior to any definite conclusions about meaning and purpose, both of which – as the “vital” – were to be determined by people through those experiences.

The Arnoldian cultural platform, Bourne believed, lacking in any capacity for social reaction, was a failure. It was a failure in the same way that the “melting pot” theory of

American multiculturalism ended up as, which I explored in the first chapter: it was situated in a

180 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194. 135

conception of culture that could not speak to the necessities of the American modernity.

Arnoldian culture, given the absence of social reactivity or creative reflexivity it left in its wake,

ended up being a spiritually empty affectation, as had the project of cultural assimilation: they

both sought to fold the kaleidoscopic potential of modern American into a idealism based upon

cultural hierarchies and social homogony. Arnoldian ideals had failed and Bourne had little

interest in running a diagnostic in attempt to save them. He wanted them dead and gone. And he

wanted them replaced. Not with just a different set of values, but with an entirely different

cultural mode all together.

Life as an Aesthetic Challenge

“Artistic appreciation in this country has been understood chiefly as the acquiring of a

familiarity with ‘good works of art,’ and with the historical fields of the different arts, rather than

as the cultivating of spontaneous taste,” Bourne lamented.181 He continued later, “An education in art appreciation will be valueless if it does not devote itself to clarifying and integrating natural taste. The emphasis must be always on what you do like, not on what you ought to like.”182 So what is “taste” and why was it so important to Bourne? “Taste,” of course, does not

seem to be a particularly impressive criteria on which to evaluate art. “I guess I just don’t like it,”

while an entirely valid opinion, is not an especially interesting one. But for Bourne, following

Nietzsche, as explained above, “taste” was the foundation of social aesthetics, and by extension,

social existence. It was the lived framework from which experience was understood and

digested. “Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after another,” he wrote, “and no

training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to forms and

181 Bourne, 193. 182 Bourne, 194. 136

settings” in a pragmatically phrased echo of the Nietzschean conception that all life was a

manifest struggle of taste.183 The purpose of taste, then, was in cultivating the ability to react to these forms and settings; it was liking and disliking unto power. And though he does not explicitly weave taste into his previously established social vision of pragmatism, youth, and irony, I argue that those early ideals were in the background of his thinking. Pragmatism, youth, and irony were all inquisitive methods and critical perspectives about living in the world, and taste was no different. In fact, I think there was a way in which taste functioned as the extension of those meta-cultural concepts into everyday experience. Where pragmatism helped determine the “truth” of philosophical ideas based on their “cash value,” taste was the pragmatic evaluation of cultural objects and ideas, the creation of cultural “truths.” Pragmatism demanded that all critique stem from experience and the first instance of the cultural-aesthetic experience was always already rooted in the self: What do I see? What do I think it is? What do I do with it?

How do I feel about it? Can I find myself in it? Do I want to? Those weren’t just important questions to ask but perhaps the most important ones because they spoke to something that was obscured in the increasingly complicated modern world. The ideal of youth would supply the impulse for creativity and experimentation; it would be the willingness to go out of one’s comfort zone and play around with new cultural possibilities. Irony would provide a spiritual balance through the trans-valuation of values and the empathic consideration of the cultural wants and needs of others, essential considerations for a flourishing democratic society.

Arnoldian thought, however, foreclosed upon the power of these social concepts by denying the individualized self in the first place; it always situated culture on the outside of the individual. “This tyranny of the ‘best,’” Bourne warned in “Our Cultural Humility,” “objectifies

183 Bourne, 194. 137

all our taste. It is a ‘best’ that is always outside of our native reactions to the freshnesses and

sincerities of life, a ‘best’ to which our spontaneities must be disciplined… we effectually protect

ourselves from that inner taste which is the only sincere ‘culture.’”184 The Arnoldian “cult of the best” made cultural value something outside of the individual, something achieved or acquired, rather that part of a personal, lived experience. And it also objectified the person trying to apprehend the work of art, making them an object of aesthetic-critical hierarchies, instead of an agent in their own right. It divorced individuals from their own needs in art and culture, reducing them to objects staring at other objects, all determined by hierarchies that frequently viewed them with indifference or contempt.

This was what made the “tyranny of the best” a destructive force – it denied any open, two-way relationship with culture and in doing so obliterated the possibility for individual authenticity. Under the “tyranny of the best,” what was culturally valuable and meaning was already decided. You could accept it, and be part of a one-way cultural conversation, or you could reject it and have no place in the conversation at all. Culture, essentially, was never really yours, even if you came up in the society that produced it, because it was something that – unless you were part of the small elite of culture guardians – was off limits to your contributions, either material or intellectual.

The aesthetics of taste, however, allowed people to center themselves in culture, which was increasingly necessary in the context of burgeoning modernity. New and developing technologies, the mass industrialization of commerce and media, and the ever more massive social bureaucracies made it easy for one to feel individually insignificant in society; after all, compared to all of those great engines of change and progress, how could I possibly matter?

184 Bourne, “Our Cultural Humility,” 39. 138

When everything was changing so fast and so seemingly indifferent to whether I even existed or not, how could I possibly find anything meaningful in the world around me? Taste offered an alternative. It made it so that someone could look at the world around them and still find ways to be connected, to feel once again as part of culture. Because taste was a kind of ownership: it could only ever be truly mine. Sure, it would undoubtedly be influenced by or shared in part with others. And it definitely ought to confront the new as often as possible and be challenged constantly. But ultimately, no one can make you like something or dislike something against your will. Not truly, not deep down in your soul. What one likes or dislikes can be challenged or judged or even mocked and shamed – it might become the cause of embarrassment or self- loathing in the worst of these instances – but it can never be taken away. And this is where

Bourne, in my argument, drew from Nietzsche – taste was a form of social power, a means to by projecting one’s self out into the social, they in turn could challenge and alter the very fabric of social reality. But whereas Nietzsche saw this mostly in terms of the strong dominating and oppressing the weak with their vision of reality, a victor in competition, Bourne saw taste as liberating and equalizing; it was a power that all held, innately, on an individual level. What did or did not fall under the umbrella of “culture,” under the Arnoldian paradigm, was solely decided by a distinct class of “civilized,” “cultured” elites whose social purpose was determining such things. But because the very nature of taste was individualistic and malleable, it meant that there could never truly be a dominion of taste or an aesthetic tyrant – there could be no absolute cultural authority, just a constantly changing conversation. Bourne, with his aesthetics of taste, envisioned culture as emergent from a communal, aesthetic discourse. It was to be a radical break from the institutional, status quo of cultural power. 139

When Bourne wrote, “Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after another, and no

training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to forms and

settings,” he was offering up a distinctly pragmatic solution to the problem of culture and one’s

place in it. Instead of culture as being deontological, which is to say and endpoint one arrived at

or a mere acquisition one had to make in order to be properly “civilized”, Bourne conceived it as

the very substance of society. Culture was not to be the possession of an elite class that would

then be dictated downward, because it was not a thing to “be held as personal property”185. It was an emergent event that came from people living together in a society; gravity as emergent from the nature of matter. Culture was an effect that was produced by a community, a “living effort, a driving attempt both at sincere expression and at the comprehension of sincere expression wherever it was found.”186 As such, Bourne’s cultural idealism was against the idea of cultural

authority, dismissive of any meaningful distinction of high art and low art, and suggested new

ways for individuals to direct social power. It rejected the socially disinterested interpretations of

the elite and professional cultural stewards, and put the weight of cultural discourse upon the

“vital” – what culture meant or could mean to any and every one living in the world.

Conclusion

Talk about the “meaning of life” has become such a silly cliché at this point that it is hard

to even think about earnestly. I mean, that’s the joke, right? Classic New Yorker cartoon content

– some poor fool treks up a tall mountain to the ostensibly wise mystic just to ask, “what is the

meaning of life” only to be told something disappointing, something that undercuts the whole

value of the question. And that’s the whole point of those cartoons, right? Just to show how

185 Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” 194. 186 Bourne, 195. 140 naïve and dumb and impossible the question is in the first place. Randolph Bourne did not think the question was any of those things. In his pre-war writings on the Experimental Life and culture, finding the meaning of life, or finding a way to come up with a meaning to life, seems to have been the underlying concern that ties them all together. In “Two Generations” – his reply to

Ms. Comer’s grousing about what she saw as the modern, layabout youth, which I discussed in the previous chapter – Bourne made it clear that he believed there was incredible rift between the world America was leaving and the one it was entering. Whatever gave grounding or guidance to the older generations simply would not hack it for the younger ones. Hence, the Experimental

Life of the first chapter: Bourne wanted to find a way for people to not just survive, but democratically thrive in the chaos of burgeoning modernity. This meant that the idea of culture needed to be conceptually rewritten as a process of creative sociality, not merely a pre-ordained aesthetic or intellectual destination. This is why Bourne focused his cultural evangelism on

“taste” and why he felt Arnold’s beliefs were not simply trite or old fashioned but actively dangerous and destructive. Arnoldian thinking, being deontological, was not one of sudden adaptability or personal relevance, though those were the precise qualities Bourne saw as necessary in grappling with the modern world. In the chaos and fracturing that came with modernity, The Canon did not function as an anchor providing stability in the storm, but as a millstone dragging people down and preventing them from navigating through the constant series of aesthetic challenges that confronted them day after day.

“Taste,” on the other hand, would allow people to reclaim their cultural agency, to reach out into the world and freely embrace what was meaningful or relevant to them. Through “taste” and the internalized “sincere culture” that would come from it, the individual would come to matter just a little bit more in the world, be able to find that “self-transcendence” which would 141

help them be less isolated from and more empathetic to their neighbors. For Bourne, taste was

not simply a matter of likes and dislikes, but as I have argued, a complicated theory that tied

together Kantian idealism with Nietzsche means: it was Kant’s social transcendence through a

form of Nietzsche’s will to power, but a will to power that ended up being collaborative rather

than oppressive.

Of course, this did not totally negate the main Arnoldian concern: would not basing

culture on taste bring about the exact kind of cultural anarchy that Matthew Arnold so feared,

wherein a lack of judicious cultural control stabilizing society would result in the tyranny of the

basest individual whims and desires? How, for example, would “taste” not simply replace the

“cult of the best” with an equally destructive “cult of the self?” Or in a society without cultural

hierarchies, would a spat of drunken, back-alley fisticuffs have just as much cultural value as a

Mozart symphony? “Through culture seems to lie our way, not only to perfection, but even to

safety,” Arnold wrote of the key function of culture.187 And while an aesthetics of taste might make the individual more free, it would not seem to make society more safe.

Then again, the democratization of taste was not the same thing as declaring that all cultural artefacts and ideas had an inherently equal value. Nor was it a commitment to act as such. Bourne’s rejection of cultural hierarchies or institutional authority was not tantamount to cultural nihilism or anarchy. It would be prevented from falling into such possibilities as the aesthetics of taste was part of Bourne’s cultural idealism, along with pragmatism, youth, “trans- nationalism,” and irony. It was okay to have disagreements or debates over the value of cultural ideas – that was the soul and function of irony, after all – to trans-valuate values. Meanwhile, youth and trans-nationalism were concepts meant to embrace and celebrate all of the new and

187 Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 10. 142 profound possibilities, and the people who made them so, attendant to American life in the early twentieth century. And yes, sometimes confronting the new and unfamiliar – especially on crowded streets, strewn with colored lights, the smells of smoke and sloshed liquor coming from every direction along with music and chatter in languages unknown, while spinning and spinning just trying to take it all in – was an experience of “nausea on Main Street.” But the thing about nausea is that sometimes it will not go away until you are used to being at sea.

143

CONCLUSION

History as an Echo

“Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries.”

- Jorge Luis Borges, The Plot 188

You don’t even have to imagine this anymore.

There is a plague destroying the nation. And not just the country, but the entire world.

City streets, once pregnant with life and possibility, are emptied. Public officials panic, because there is increasingly the worry that there is not enough space to store all of the bodies, which build up, day after day, with no end in sight.

Rising nativism – increasingly violent – is stoking fires of racial hatred across America.

“America first!” some shout, as they position all their ills and grievances against people who only wanted a chance to live and thrive, or really only wanted a chance for their children to live and thrive, in a country that built its own mythology upon that very possibility, that very promise.

Almost daily, a select few individuals experience expanses of wealth that dwarf imagination; it is above and beyond what has ever existed in human history. Instead coming to the aid of the beleaguered masses, they invest in passion projects, do everything in their power to kill unions, and daydream about things they can name after themselves.

Massive media conglomerates, whether for purposes of ideological power or economic gain, have made the “news” in the image of their own self-benefit: whether through propaganda,

188 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998), 307. 144 or else simple mass disinformation, the day-to-day events of the world are depicted as less-and- less “factual,” than they are as useful to whatever interest reports them.

Europe, tenuously kept at peace by overly complicated alliances – meant to persevere through long standing historical animosities – is starting tear at these seams. Old empires, long dying, are increasingly headed toward the matter of obituaries, not resurrection. What this can possibly mean for the future of the world is gloomily unclear.

New forms of technology have irrevocably changed how people communicate, what they think they know, what they believe. And how they make money, how they survive, how the live day-to-day. Some celebrate these new possibilities; others fear them. But no one really knows which direction the wind is blowing.

The future of American democracy seems genuinely, gravely uncertain.

A Death, Premature

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal

sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were

winning…And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of

inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean

or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply

prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We

had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and

beautiful wave…

- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas189

189 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, 2nd Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 68. 145

There are moments in history where it seems that new and radical possibilities not only appear on the horizon but seem so perfectly poised to occur; to happen; to take place; and thus usher in a new era. And there have always been, it seems, periods of upheaval or instability wherein the old ways of thinking are on the precipice of obsolescence, of replacement, such that the opportunities for radical change and paradigm shifts in ideals seem all but inevitable; and in the wake of the old world’s demise, a better one would be all but certain. From a hotel in Las

Vegas, the legendary and commensurate drunk, Hunter S. Thompson, wrote an obituary for such an idealistic moment, wherein the waters of social renewal, so seemingly strong and certain in the 1960s, had failed, not even a decade later. “With the right kind of eyes,” he wrote, “you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."190

Despite the momentum behind that odd alliance of 1960s subcultures, America refused to change.

Idealism can be likened to a kind of high or drunken optimism, because it usually results in a hangover; an intellectual headache marked by regret and shame that one ever believed in the it at all. Randolph Bourne was no exception to this, as he saw the foundations of his idealism collapse with America’s entry into World War I. For Bourne, the process of militarization was of less importance than the fact that so many of his peers and idols had so quickly acquiesced to it in the first place – it was an intellectual failing more than it was a political one. At first he was angry; then he despaired.

Hopelessness is the antipode of idealism, and what is arguably Bourne’s most famous essay was a thorough encapsulation of that grim intellectual space. There are a lot of reasons why “The State” is stands out among Bourne’s ouvre: it was more ambitious in scope, as he

190 Thompson, 68. 146

attempted to combine a new intellectual history of America, from the Revolution to his present,

with a political theory on the structure of modern nations; and it was unfinished – found in a

waste bin in his room – and published after his death, both of which contribute to it often being

considered his masterpiece. Where he had previously seen so much promise at the heart the

American experiment, “The State” argued that whatever potential he had once descried had only

ever been an illusion, an absence that had always already been there.

In “The State,” to quickly summarize, Bourne posited three levels to society: there was

the Nation (or Country), which was people and their culture; the Government, which were the

political institutions; and then the State, which was an ontologically diffuse “mythic conception”

that operated below the levels of politics and culture. Bourne wrote, evoking the impulse to a

herd mentality, “Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most conscious of their

collectivity at the threat of war.”191 (It is telling that Bourne, who had previously written of all

people at living instances of moral consideration and creative potential, now compared them to

cattle). For this reason, Bourne wrote in his most infamous line, “War is the health of the

State.”192 Michael Walzer adds that while war was the health of the state, “it was the moral death

of the people. And yet the people rush headlong to their death…”193 Modern nations, Bourne despaired, were locked in a cycle where the State, needing war, would induce its citizens to a herd mentality, which would lead them to die on battlefields, only confirming the dangers against which only the State could defend. “We reverence not our country but the flag,” he wrote.194

Symbols and abstract fear had overtaken substance and critical reflexivity.

191 Randolph Bourne, “The State,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 73. 192 Bourne, 71. 193 Walzer, The Company of Critics, 62. 194 Bourne, “The State,” 87. 147

“The State” was, in addition to being among his most famous, was also among Bourne’s most complex works. He was trying to write in a more analytical and less polemical mode, and so it lacked some of his distinctive voice and personality. In the introduction to this thesis, I tried to explain, insofar as I understand it, Bourne’s definition of the “spiritual.” It was best understood, I tried to show, as his concept of a “moral and creative” social existence, in which one would embrace the possibilities of “being in the world.” But now that I have examined the foundations of his idealism, there is, perhaps, another quote that shows just how much he had lost that idealism: “This whole era has been spiritually wasted.”195

Bourne wrote that sentence in June of 1917, in the essay “War and the Intellectuals,” two months after President Woodrow Wilson – who had famously run for the office on the promise of keeping America out of the conflict – had declared war on Germany, thus formalizing

America’s entry into World War I. And so quickly, many of Bourne’s friends and peers had fallen in step with the order – Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, to name the most significant.

That act of American belligerence and the intellectuals’ support for it served to completely obliterate Bourne’s idealism from the ground up. So, when he wrote “this whole era has been spiritually wasted,” he was not writing rhetorically, but from a place of genuine despair. He meant it – all of the potential I have argued above that he had envisioned; all of the idealism he had tried so hard to establish and promote; all of it was simply nullified, seemingly overnight.

The era was “spiritually wasted” because all of the intellectual promise and potential that he had founded his idealism upon were suddenly erased. Instead of an American future founded on the

195 Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 6. 148

new possibilities brought about by creative empathy and recognition of culturally creative, upon

individual determination, there was only an intellectual wasteland.

In the same essay Bourne also wrote, “Only in a world where irony was dead could an

intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-

liberalism and world-democracy.”196 Normally, when we hear about the “death of irony,” it is usually meant as a call for a return to sincerity, a declaration that snark and sarcasm and over- wrought self-awareness have nothing to offer in a given moment. But, as I argued in Chapter

Two, “irony,” for Bourne, was not the same thing as is meant it today: it was, instead, the empathetic disposition that made the trans-valuation of values possible, and thus the foundations that made democracy, in and of itself, possible to begin with. So, when Bourne wrote about the

“death of irony,” he was not making a plea for newfound social sincerity – “irony” already assumed that, after all – but was lamenting the obliteration of the very dialectical process that could sustain American society in that modern time of fracture. And make no mistake, he experienced this obliteration directly: when he attacked John Dewey for supporting American militarization, Dewey got him fired from the New Republic; when he criticized the war in another magazine, The Seven Arts, that publication was promptly deprived of funding and shuttered. In the face of war, Bourne was silenced; dissent or contrary opinions were made virtually impossible to elucidate. The death of “irony” was a foreclosing of any position not already deemed acceptable or amenable to the dominant power structures, both political and intellectual. Walzer puts it succinctly: “To oppose the war meant to howl uselessly in the wilderness.”197 Bourne’s obituary for “irony” was essentially a pre-emptive obituary of

196 Bourne, 5. 197 Walzer, The Company of Critics, 59. 149

American life altogether, as once again Walzer observes that Bourne “seemed to despair of

democracy itself.”198

Too often, this is where scholars mark the end of the story of Randolph Bourne. The prose may change but the events do not: Randolph Bourne died in 1918 from the influenza pandemic that took tens of millions other lives; it was raining; Bourne’s ending was ultimately not a happy one. But Bourne did live to see the end of the war, and on November 21, 1918, he wrote to his mother, “Now that the war is over people can speak freely again and we can dare to think. Its [sic] like coming out of a nightmare.”199 He would be dead before the year was done,

and no one can say what he would have thought – much less written about – the new paradigm of

American power and the cultural explosion that would follow in that wake.

I am not going to end this with Bourne’s death. Instead, I hope that this thesis has shown

that, despite Bourne’s later despair, his cultural idealism ultimately could survive it, even if he

did not necessarily realize that himself. His refutation of that hope does not compel us to follow

him in that direction; that an idealistic vision faltered does not mean that it ends up being useless.

Over the three chapters of this thesis, I have examined Randolph Bourne’s cultural idealism,

from its philosophical foundations through a radical interpretation of pragmatism (Chapter One);

from the disposition of trans-valuative, creative empathy – as made possible with “irony”

(Chapter Two); and from the way he envisioned culture as a living, malleable feature of social

life, which could and ought to be embraced by all members of society, so that they could live in a

world defined by their own subjective needs (Chapter Three).

198 Walzer, 61. 199 Randolph Bourne, “Three Excerpts from Letters to His Mother, Mrs. Sara Bourne, October and November 1918,” in The World of Randolph Bourne, ed. Lillian Schlissel (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1965), 326. 150

Randolph Bourne was an idealist, but what set him apart from others was how he found it

in unusual places. As Cornel West observed in the first chapter, it was “social misery” that John

Dewey confronted in the early years of the twentieth century.200 That time, after all, was in the wake of the so-called “Gilded Age,” and despite the efforts of progressive leaders and activists, the country was hardly in a golden era. It would be easy to look upon the nation; fractured by modernity; rife with inequality, prejudice, racism; confused about its identity, its future, its role in the world; and find little to preface idealism upon. And yet, Randolph Bourne did. He was not blind to the misery of the world, but nor was he blinded by it. With the right set of eyes, he was able to see the intellectual and cultural potential just behind the surface. And it wasn’t just a potential for improvement, but radical change - Randolph Bourne envisioned an America truly steeped in the democratic values of empathy, camaraderie, and open-minded discourse; he imagined a nation where diversity was synonymous with strength and cultural agency was shared by all. He did this by thinking about ideas themselves in radical, novel ways – he took concepts and made them into what they had to be; in, but not of the world.

Today, the future of America seems to be as precarious as it ever has. The fate of democracy, of civil society, is terrifyingly uncertain. This thesis has never been an argument that

Randolph Bourne’s idealism held the solution to our current problems. But I have argued that he too lived in chaotic and uncertain times, and despite that was able to imagine a radical future for the American promise. We still have that choice, it seems to me. And while whatever idealism we imagine today cannot and will not be the exact same as Bourne’s, there are few better places to start, and few better examples to follow.

Randolph Bourne lives.

200 West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 79. 151

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