126
PETER BROOKS
in an harmonious tension, a reconciliation of opposites. Such criticism
defuses the most revolutionary images, dilutes them in a tepid liberal
bath, a kind of pure humanistic tolerance which co-opts everything–
even, now, the Beatles or Malcolm X - into "culture."
If
fifty years
ago T. S. Eliot's "tradition" was a radical reinterpretation of our cultural
situation, it has now been degraded into a set of sacred texts ritually
expounded by the exegetical acolytes in a perfectly hermetic and
unin–
terrupted Beckettian cultural monologue. No wonder that the first effort
of the students should be directed toward eliciting a response, a connec–
tion, and that they sometimes seem willing to trade in their freedom to
be
rid of their sense of helplessness.
What makes things difficult, of course, is that many of the connec–
tions we are asked to make by students are trivial or worse, that we
are so often asked simply to blow our minds. And also, the gentle
Forsterian question
in
moments of crisis escalates into that flung at the
liberals by the straightjacketed priest Jacques Roux at the end of
MaratfSade:
"When will you learn to see/ When will you learn to take
sides?" Spender knows well the force of this question from past experi–
ence. But he in effect counters it with the other question, Will you bum
the British Museum before having written
Das Kapital?
We are
all,
I think, forced to this counterquestion
in
America, where the university
i!l
in
many ways the best thing We have, and where the university is
sincerely committed to quality mass education in a way that the rest
of the educational system isn't. Spender's vision of the possible future
is one of "the university as agora," where the ivory tower of scholar–
ship would stand side by side with the "ferro-concrete tower" of the
activists. Yet the twin towers may suggest too much insulation, too little
connection. Spender does not like the term "the critical university"
because it suggests endless talk about whether any given discipline is
worth teaching or not. But a true critical university should be the place
for discovery of the real mediations among the personal, the cultural,
the academic and the political. It should allow for disciplines to be
taught and deconstructed at the same time, it should permit the cultural
discourse to go on, but permit us to dislodge ourselves from our tradi–
tional place within that discourse. It should foster a
Verfremdungseftekt
within our cultural play, a sense of strangeness in relation to art and
to our cultural assumptions which would foil the endless co-optations of
degraded liberal humanism.
Peter Brooks
