The Ritual of New Creation (29 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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Page 98
But I find this paragraph emblematic of Steiner's case because his work is informed throughout by the vexing possibility that there are no kings. Perhaps they never were; perhaps we have killed them; perhaps, to extend the kabbalistic metaphor, they have so totally withdrawn into themselves that they have disappeared. The centralizing power of cultural elites is broken. The possibility of religious transcendence is nil. Politics as a vital expression of communal life has ceased utterly. As Steiner continually reminds us, the commanders of the death camps listened seriously to Mozart, read deeply in Rilke.
Steiner has a number of terms for our present condition. We live in a "post-culture," suffering "the loss of a geographic-sociological centrality, the abandonment or extreme qualification of the axiom of human progress, our sense of the failure or severe inadequacies of knowledge and humanism in regard to social action."
3
We have endured "the retreat from the word," for "our awareness of the complication of reality is such that those unifications or syntheses of understanding which have made common speech possible no longer work."
4
Thus, ours is the time of the ''after-Word," the epoch which follows upon a "
break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself
."
5
In all of these formulations, we sense a mood which Steiner himself identifies: "Call it Kulturpessimismusit is no accident that the idiom is Germanor a new stoic realism."
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But despite this cultural pessimism, emerging particularly from Steiner's thinking about Judaism, the Holocaust and the virtual collapse of the Central European traditions of humanism, he is also one of our most passionate and sympathetic defenders of those traditions. And yet he also knows that the traditions he defends bear within themselves the potential for their violent unmaking.
Steiner is a rare figure in the contemporary intellectual milieu. Born into that now nearly extinct world of the emancipated Central European Jewish bourgeoisie, immensely learned, a master of many languages, Steiner often presents the lineaments of "mandarin cultural conservatism." Writing about Theodor Adorno, one of Steiner's most important influences, Martin Jay describes this position:
His visceral distaste for mass culture, unrelieved hostility towards bureaucratic domination, and untempered aversion to technological, instrumental reason were all earmarks of a consciousness formed in the wake of what has been called the decline of the German mandarins. So too was the deep
 
Page 99
current of pessimism that informed his thinking, even as he insisted on the importance of maintaining utopian hopes.
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This strikes me as a description that could just as well be applied to Steiner, but like Adorno, there is far more to Steiner than cultural conservatism:
The reflexes of consciousness, the styles of articulacy which had generated messianic Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the philosophies of discourse of Wittgenstein, the art of Mahler and of Kafka, were almost immediate to my childhood and upbringing. The polyglot habits of this background, the peregrine ironies and premonitions, the scarcely examined investment of familial energies and pride in the intellect and the arts, make up what I am.
8
In other words, Steiner's personal and intellectual origins are to be found in the volatile cultural matrix of modernism, which, to an inordinate extent, was formed by assimilated European Jews. Within a relatively short span of time (from, say, the 1830s to the 1930s), a tradition of secular Jewish thought and expression came into being and flourished. Intimately bound up with and at times nearly indistinguishable from the mainstream of Western culture, yet still acutely aware of its marginal and often endangered situation, this tradition transformed every aspect of European society. Whether these transformations were too much for Europe to bear is a question to which Steiner returns again and again: he is, after all, not merely the heir to this heritage, but as he says, "a kind of survivor." His own "peregrine ironies and premonitions," which have provoked so much controversy throughout his career, mark him as doubly an exile, for secular European Jewry felt its diasporic condition acutely, and Steiner has lost that doubt-ridden world too.
In thinking of Steiner's situation and the way he has presented himself over the course of his career, I am reminded of a passage from Walter Benjamin's "The Destructive Character":
The destructive character stands in the front line of the traditionalists. Some pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them, others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.
 
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The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore the destructive character is reliability itself.
9
In Steiner, who readily acknowledges Benjamin's influence, there is something of the destructive character's relation to tradition and to history. Steiner stands on the front line of the traditionalists, for unlike the true conservative, his attitude toward historical knowledge is practicable; he may revere the past, but he uses it strategically. In 1931, Benjamin, as one of the most refined products of secular European Jewry, writes with frightening precision of "a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong." Steiner places this readiness at the heart of his understanding of contemporary culture. Because everything can go wrong, tradition cannot merely be conserved but must be deployed: "To be able to envisage possibilities of self-destruction, yet press home the debate with the unknown, is no mean thing."
10
In the spirit of Benjamin, Adorno, Lukács, and Bloch, what appears in Steiner as a rear-guard action proves to be an assault on the future, on the gates of heaven, launched, as Kafka dreamed, from below. Meanwhile, we are told, "Dreams must be disciplined to cover the ground of the possible."
11
Steiner's rhetoric of cultural authority, the voice of the disciplined master who seeks in turn to discipline his readers ("To Civilize our Gentlemen," as the title of an early essay quaintly puts it), emerges from this usually covert utopian or messianic perspective, which in turn has been influenced by earlier modes of Jewish thought. Like Harold Bloom, Steiner conceives of cultural activity as essentially "text-centered"; as he implies in many of his essays, the Jewish devotion to the text can serve as a model for all readers and writers struggling to continue their work under adverse historical conditions. Thus, given the changes in Western culture, especially since World War II, all those who still devote themselves to literature can be regarded, at least metaphorically, as "Jews." Furthermore, Steiner's insistence that all art depends upon a spiritual dimension, a ''wager on transcendence," productively blurs the line between the secular and the religious, leading us back to crucial questions of belief and artistic creation. As in the case of Cynthia Ozick, Steiner's attempts to come to terms with such questions account for his own style in both his criticism and his fiction. It is Steiner's engagement

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