222
PARTISAN REVIEW
now seek to return economics to moral norms, is there not a similar
warranty for culture?
We are groping for a new vocabulary whose keyword seems to be
limits: a limit to growth, a limit to the spoliation of the environment, a
limit to arms, a limit to the tampering with biological nature. Yet if we
seek to establish a set of limits in the economy and technology, will we
also set a limit
to
the exploration of those cultural experiences which
go beyond moral norms and embrace the demonic in the delusion that
all experience is "creative"? Can we set a limit to
hubris?
The answer to
that question could resolve the
cultural
contradiction of capitalism and
its deceptive double,
semblable et frere,
the culture of modernity.
It
would leave only the economic and political mundane to be tamed.
