548
PARTISAN REVIEW
tradition by disorienting patterns and stylized incongruities. Part of
that was a modulated shout for attention from the
retardataire
official
order and the smug bourgeois audience, but it grew increasingly shrill
to override the mass-industrial static. With modernism, much of the
bind seemed to be external and overt. Now, with the arts postmodern
for technocracy, the artistry double-binds itself, mocking the subjects
and styles and roles it posits, or refuses to posit, fusing self-creation
with self-destruction to leave only the waste processing.
In
Stewart
Head's worn refrain, on his cancer, "we waste, therefore I am."
But we continue as a culture to waste away. Some of the case for
special senses of wastefulness in the contemporary ethos rests on other,
simpler, grounds than processed impermeability, the cultural garage
sale, and art-in-and-as-rubbish-our reverse Midas touch. For pathetic
example: We literature teachers in massive third-rate educational
bureaucracies participate in one of the largest cultural processings of
all time. We consider ourselves lucky indeed to find in a class of forty
students a couple of appropriate ones and a handful of possible ones.
(The passive-resentful majority can only be subjects for demagogism.)
Whoever deserves the blame-we culture-imposers, those misplaced
students, the farcical certification -custodial institutional functions, or
the hypocritical counterfeiting and exploitative processing engendered
by our social order-the schooling in culture is drastically wasteful.
Those enduring it must deeply feel that culture is synonymous with
waste.
Ah, well, it will be said, these must be the transitional costs of
turning class into mass education (but wasn't that a generation ago?) or
of lagging cultural conditioning (but isn't it always?) or of curmud–
geonly intellectual despair (but who else can report?). Though much
seems foolishness and fraud, we generously spend high to achieve our
little and must cynically accept considerable intellectual and social
debris. But what if the wasting-the encouraged intellectual medioc–
rity, the bureaucratic indoctrination and manipulation, the dulling
and resenting and discarding-is the academic reality? Talent and
intelligence and passion might appear anyway, and more c1earl y if not
buried in educational rubble. Since such wastefulness is painful to
contemplate we disguise it with ornate games and rhetoric and pre-
. tenses
to
give it the semblance of value. Thus we get
decorated waste,
as
also in our arts-our desperate residual definition of high culture.
The hired learning, like our publishing and art marketing, and
other institutional processing of culture, seems
to
have discovered its
