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champ's "Urinal," but nothing that cannot be described as the pro–
vision of theoretical context; the work clearly does not have the
qualities that art historians devised their vocabulary to identify. The
only other kind of criticism that seems to be possible is the sort of
rhapsody or gossip that has long been anathematized in the older
tradition.
So
there seems to be no obvious place for
our
kind of thing
in their kind of thing. And this takes us back from the realm of spec–
ulation into the world of fact. What, given our mistakes, and the way
we have been conditioned, are we to do in our contacts, critical and
paedogogical, with the revolutionary generation?
My answer to this question is partly, I suppose, the issue of my
own temperamental noncombativeness. It seems to me a simple rec–
ognition of what has always been the case, that we have no imperial
rights over the culture, only the right to argue by whatever means
we choose that our thing is worth doing. This right, of course, we
allow to everybody else, whatever
their
thing. We should certainly
not take
it
upon ourselves to worry if people do not want to join us,
preferring some world elsewhere.
In other words, we should not be so absurd as to teach and
behave as if there were powerful forces not ourselves that more or
less oblige aspiring human beings to be like us. This may seem ob–
vious in
1970;
I can only say that it has not been obvious for very
long, and was not obvious in the Wesleyan of
1963-64;
there, as else–
where, it was an unspoken assumption that students, if such a thing
were possible, ought to be as cultivated as, and in the same ways as,
faculty. We have to give it up. There are other worlds, and other
fictions, than the ones we agree to cherish. Insofar as these eschew re–
dundancy, the critical assumptions I, and most of my kind, tend to
make, will not enable us to say much about them. Whether they
will in the end discover that their fictions are after all paradigmatic
and radically redundant, and join us in some new alliance, I cannot
say, althought it seems not altogether unlikely. But for the time being
we must cultivate our still ample garden and let others do the
same. We ought cheerfully to resign our institutional powers; other
social universes have their own reality constructions, and an authori–
tarian institution would be obliged to "nihilate" them, but the
humanities are not such an institution and would destroy them-
