Ibb
PARTISAN REVIEW
issues Bense passes over in silence; taking for granted, perhaps, that
all this can and will be worked out to everyone's satisfaction. Is
there any chance, in our society, of poet and technician fruitfully
working together? What group, if any, will take the place of today's
perishing non-scientific elite? The whole question of technics (as a
state of affairs, rather than a psychological conditioner and condi–
tion) , though purportedly at the center of Bense's speculations, is
really begged. Reading Bense one is never aware that we live in a
confirmed
mass culture, that the distinction most difficult to draw
today is not between traditional art and art as commodity but be–
tween the 'regular' and the bogus product, between harmless and
invidious junk. Nor, while expressing constant concern over the future
of our intellectuals does Bense ever refer to one of the gravest nodes
of crisis in our civilization: the idolatrous cult of the thing made and
the attendant neglect (entailing self-neglect, often) of the maker as
a moral person, which between them account for the shoddiness and
boorishness of the present elite as a class-its failure as a civilizing
agent-while there is no dearth among its members, surely, of spe–
cialized talent or dedication.
But there are questions even more drastic which Bense, pure
doctrinaire of the German variety, never faces. Has a program so
shy of political commitment any chance of changing the course of
events? And, efficacy apart, does that program really take account
of the needs and quandaries of our intelligentsia-at the level of
sheer description and prescription?
The answer to the first question is no, and for reasons that
scarcely require support of detail. The programmatic value of Bense's
recommendations is nil because their author faces away from the
disorder which is our society. At bottom, social process does not con–
cern him; such interest as he displays
in
its superstructure is of a non–
directive sort. This in itself is no stricture, seeing that Bense's form
is the treatise, hardly the manifesto. But whatever his avowed in–
tention, the tone of his writings is sufficiently pragmatic to make us
wonder about their possible usefulness. And viewed in this light, they
seem to me to lack function.
The second question is rather more complex and so must be
the answer. Mr. Bense has the cardinal virtues of the good diagnos–
tician: acute perception and a native sense of relations. By submitting
