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PARTISAN REVIEW
otherwise, he would have all men participate in them to the full. Liberated
man would be aesthetic man, man in substantial rapport with himself
through
his works .
This is not the place to treat ofcauses and cures ; but in order to grasp the
situation of criticism we might at least keep in mind that criticism itself did
not precipitate our complaint . Already in the 18th century a sense of loss and
then ofemptiness began to invade the self and its creations; and surely it was
less than coincidence that during this same period there arose the split
berween self and society , which, since then, has become a condition of
existence for almost everyone . Rousseau , proclaiming
Ie neant des choses
humaines,
lamenting the deceptiveness of surfaces , was also the loneliest of
men . Loss of plenitude, and the pain of isolated selfhood , are the major
themes of Romantic consciousness ; and what these kinds of experience
suggest by their conjunction is that, in a profound way , capacity to perceive
the world's solid presence-to feel substance and depth in the self, in art, in
other selves- depends on rooted participation in fundamental human
relations . We may at least speculate that the perception of plenitude wanes as
soon as we lose touch with the energies of social existence ; as s.oon, that is , as
men are no longer embedded in their social matrix
beyond reserve .
But who
lives without reservation? The alienation of man from his works has been
compounded by a world of relations so dishonored and unjust and ironic,
that estrangement itself, a willful holding of the self apart from its
transactions, becomes a necessity of moral survival . No wonder nothingness
haunts us . So long as we cannot belong to the life ofsociety , life as much theirs
as our own, works ofart will be present , at best, as silence . Which is to say that
the condition of absence , to which criticism addresses itself, has social and
therefore political determinants ; and that the function of criticism at the
present time-to grant a provisional grace-is provisional only .2
2
So
far as I know. th<re is no non·reductive theory of the relation between social order, social being , and the
symbolic submatum of perception which social exp<riencc generates and works of an embody. Durkheim was
on the right track, I think, and the worksof Mary Douglas
~em
much
to
the point . s.,e in panicular her
Natural
SymbolJ
(1 970), which devclops aspectS of the idea that " the perception of symbols in gen<ral, as well as their
interpretation, is socially determined ."
