546
PARTISAN REVIEW
war, we would match divine mania in reverse, creating nothing out of
all reality. The sense of such final wasting may partl y sanction the
lesser wastefulnesses of culture-and reveal them as forms of exorcism.
Yet some of the waste-aesthetic cannot be understood as just
decline and destruction. For waste-art may be a positive cathartic and
homeopathic response
to
mortal wasting. And isn't
homo ludens'
cultural imperative often playful wasting? From some narrowly puri–
tanic and utilitarian perspectives (which we may still be reacting
against), any play with sensibility must be suspect, misused energies
and foolishly disposable objects which could have been turned to more
practical and righteous ways. Hedonistic views may also show culture
as wasting, but delightfully so in the charmingly extravagant display
and the potlatching game and the magnificent throw-away gesture. Art
often makes waste feel heroic, not only in tragic nihilation but in
comic garbage-scattering and anal explosiveness, or in sheer energetic
effulgence of sensation, or in the prophetic overreach of the apocalyp–
tic ending-the one complete plot. The most exalted as well as the
most trivial arts-Shakespeare as well as nonsense verse-show exuber–
ant discard and throw-away style. We probably cannot do without
demons of the sewers under the altars, shaman trash, spirits as disposal
machines, and gods making out of and into chaos. Some waste-makers
always turn out to be culture heroes.
Ancient truism holds that art is long, so demanding and excessive
as to waste the very life away. The anguished sense of wastefulness in
artistic activity-the disproportionate pains of genius, the endless
rigors of apprenticeship and connoisseurship, the expense of spirit, the
suicidal poets-don't we often demand these metaphors of waste as
guarantees of cultural authenticity? Thus to perceive much of culture
as waste may be both narrow, unresponsive philistinism and a large,
transcendentally tragic, awareness of the inevitable disproportions and
debris of human aspiration.
In some such senses of loss and defeat and waste, we like
to
think
we detect in past artfulness exceptional experiences and intensities and
excellences. Yet it seems unlikely that we adequately rediscover or
recreate these qualities within our current manias for collecting
primitive and historic and near-contemporary art-junk and sublitera–
tures , from grinding stones
to
comic books. The atavistic pathos of
current art markets goes beyond commodity compulsions and infla–
tionary economics. We may detect desperate imperatives to turn old
wastes into new values, and new wastes into old ones, by frenzi edly
inflating the range of what can pass as cultural artifact and artistic
