PARTISAN REVIEW
359
that these strategies reconciled audiences of culture; they don't. The
work that I'm talking about continues to be inaccessible to a large
audience.
It
continues to be felt as boring and as incomprehensible.
What I'm really interested in is to see how it has, however uncon–
sciously, assumed a great deal of what a mass audience does find
satisfying, which I was trying
to
characterize as some sort of pure
presence. And there's a sort of incredible critical confusion about
locating that issue of presence which I think is really rampant now
in all forms of what we call "experimental culture." Experimental
theater, experimental whatever. The notion that it has a small
audience somehow has put us to sleep about what its sources of
signification really are, and what it is depending on, what it has
unconsciously assumed as a kind of given, formally. I know I'm not
really answering what you've asked.
PHII.LIPS: You've answered it.
ROCKWELL ANDERSON: My question's for you, Bob. It was interesting to
me that the central image that you took for your talk, although it was
from a movie,
2001,
was not an image of the processes of art itself,
but of science. And it seems to me that what you've been saying all
along is that the problems within art are the result of certain
exigencies, that come from outside the world of art, that art is
determined by the entire culture, by the political system, by the
economic system, and so for'th. And my question is, that since art
takes up such a really small amount of the psychic energy of the
entire society, to lecture artists or critics about a situation in which
their actions are determined anyway, I wonder if that isn't a waste of
time, whether, it's a problem for politicians rather than for aestheti–
cians or whatever, and where should the locus of the criticism be?
BRUSTEIN: You picked up very perceptively the shadow behind the
speech I made. I was making a political point. I wasn't making the
point to politiciafls; I was making it really
to
intellectuals, political
intellectuals, cultural intellectuals, And what I was trying to say, in
effect, was that it is futile to talk about the question in the way I've
been talking about it for a number of years without thinking of some
form of political change, that the problem is becoming so fundamen–
tal that applying aspirin or anodynes or something to it is useless.
That we really do have to think if we're serious, if anyone can agree
with what I'm saying, and I gather there're still very few that do; but,
if there are numbers that can, then perhaps the intellectuals can go
back to doing what they once used
to
do, namely to begin to
formulate some political solutions, some political theory, that might
help in t.he resolution of the cultural problem. Art, culture, and
