212
PARTISAN REVIEW
simple recording process, from which any deviation was voluntary.
We know now that we literally create the world we see, and that
this
human creation - a discovery of how we can live in the material
world we inhabit - is necessarily dynamic and active; the old static
realism of the passive observer is merely a hardened convention. When
it was first discovered that man lives through his perceptual world,
which is a human interpretation of the material world outside him,
this was thought to be a basis for the rejection of realism; only a per–
sonal vision was possible. But art is more than perception; it is a par–
ticular kind of active response, and a part of all human communica–
tion. Reality, in our terms, is that which human beings make common,
by work or language. Thus, in the very acts of perception and com–
munication, this practical interaction of what
is
personally seen, in–
terpreted and organized and what can be socially recognized, known
and formed is richly and subtly manifested.
It
is
very difficult to
grasp this fundamental interaction, but here, undoubtedly, is the
clue we seek, not only in our thinking about personal vision and
social communication, but also in our thinking about the individual
and society. The individual inherits .an evolved brain, which gives
him
his common human basis. He learns to see, through this inheritance,
and through the forms which his culture teaches. But, since the
learning is active, and since the world he is watching
is
changing and
being changed, new acts of perception, interpretation and organization
are not only possible, but deeply necessary. This is human growth, in
personal terms, but the essential growth is in the interaction which
then can occur, in the individual's effort to communicate what he has
learned, to match it with known reality and by work and language
to make a new reality. Reality is continually established, by common
effort, and art is one of the highest forms of this process. Yet the
tension can be great, in the necessarily difficult struggle to establish
reality, and many kinds of failure and breakdown are possible. It
seems to me that in a period of exceptional growth, as ours has been
and will continue to be, the tension will be exceptionally high, and
certain kinds of failure and breakdown may become characteristic.
The recording of creative effort, to explore such breakdowns, is not
always easy to distinguish from the simple, often rawly exciting ex–
ploitation of breakdown. Or else there
is
a turning away, into known
forms, which remind us of previously learned realities and seek, by
