PARTISAN REVIEW
525
to explore in class some extraordinarily important things about
what might seem to them a wholly new idea of self-expression in a
popular art. Perhaps they could be shown that it wasn't a new idea at
all; perhaps
it
could be called a kind of neo-classical revival. How
could any effect be traced back to a performer in something so ar–
ranged, so electronically managed? Perhaps the genre was at last all,
but what and where were the outlines of the genre? Who was respon–
sible for a given song? And if young listeners instinctively knew the
answer-Well, really no one-then perhaps this was an as(>ect of their
feeling that no one was responsible for much of anything, that re–
sponsibility was not only an antiquated but a perverse idea especially
in the arts and learning? The implications of technology in the popu–
lar arts could be shown to have some consequences not only in matters
of academic plagiarism but more importantly in the assessment of
political, moral responsibility.
"Rock" is only an example of an opportunity for criticism that
could have been picked up and developed to some profit only out–
side existing departments of literature or of the humanities. Nothing
very much happened; the young aficionados were themselves oblivi–
ous even to the sttangeness of the thing they liked so much. Hence
when faced with the eventual horrors of the rock festival, a magazine
like
Rolling Stone
was wholly incapable of understanding how difficult
it was to know what any of it meant. Much the same goes for film,
the poverty of criticism in this area being notorious, or for the historic
deficiencies in the criticism of ballet, where only now is there a decent
general response to the genius of Balanchine. The same charge can be
made about Black Studies and Women's Studies and Gay Studies.
Insofar as these are very widely adapted to the academic curriculum,
they are in conception and the way they're managed no better than
tpe
dreariest forms of thematic or sociological criticism. Why, it must
be asked, must Black Studies or Women's Studies or Gay Studies
belong to literary departments at all except for accidents, budgetary
convenience, or reasons having to do with quite unjustified assump–
tions about the continued centrality of literature to all emergent cul–
tural, social, and political problems.
There has been this vast increase in the demands made upon the
study of the arts in order that it might include attention to minority
culture, popular culture, and the politics of culture, and the most
