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Spender accurately calls "the politics of the non-political," the con–
version of personal values into political counteraction. This he considers
basically an extension of Romantic revolt: "Ever since the Industrial
Revolution it has been impossible for the individual to envisage the
organizational center of productivity as being the extension of the inner
world of values that are at once personal and generally human." This
is lucid, but it almost seems to assign to the protestors the same Luddite
status that Brezezinski would give them. "The imagination has known
for a hundred and fifty years what their revolt is about," Spender says
of all the young rebels: but how do we move from imagination into
politics?
When he is characterizing the expressions of the various student
insurgents he encountered, Spender applies the adjective "hysterical"
to
the Americans: they are driven to it. This is clearly right, and the
hysteria derives from their relatively greater sense of impotence, their
sense that the supreme impossibility within American society is to pro–
voke a response, any response, from an all-<:o-opting system - which
may suggest why the ludic element in the American student revolt is
primitivist in nature, aimed at the creation of a zero-degree sense of
fellowship. Spender returns to his critique of the students for confusing
extra- and intra-university issues, and for threatening to destroy their
base camp, the university. But within the politics of hysteria, this
confusion and this threat are probably indispensible, because the basis
of the students' challenge to those within the university is the Forsterian
plea of "Only connect." As Spender indeed admits at one point,
"parietal" issues and political issues admit of no distinction because the
students are trying to reconstruct public values and styles on the basis
of intimately personal ones. Cohn-Bendit's harangues about "sexual
alienation" are not silly: we should see where the Freudian and the
Marxist senses of repression converge.
Spender in fact has a fine passage on the teaching of literature
in the contemporary university, on the tendency to make of art and
criticism autotelic activities sterilized and insulated from the views
and experience from which they arose, and those amid which they
live. This is to my mind precisely a major instance of where "connec–
tions" have broken down, where the university has defined the knowledge
it transmits as unconnections (which at another level are in truth con–
nected to an unavowed and even unconscious ideology). Our most
persuasive modem theories of criticism suggest that the highest form
of human activity is the disinterested contemplation of a fine aesthetic
stasis in which every utterance, be it the negations of Ivan Karamazov
or the apocalyptic affirmations of Rimbaud, meets its ironic counterpart
