KINGSLEY WIDMER
549
terrible wastefulness but is currently attempting homeopathic treat–
ment. But hasn't institutionalized culture always been rather wasteful?
Probably, though most of us can come up with examples in cultural
history that, in comparison with ours, didn't look quite so wasteful
quite so soon. Even so, much of what remains was more the result of
historic accident and the arbitrary choices of the dominant than of
more significant discriminations. Thus it seems dubious to insist on
historical comparisons (an often facile gesture of modernism which
now backlashes). Much also of what we have of a different time and
place may inevitably be its waste, in literature as in archaeology. Yet
even most skeptically using the past, it seems hard to ignore some sense
of our peculiar processing as exceptional and as fitting Pound's
"wastage as never before."
Perhaps, though, that should not lead
to
simple harsh judgments
of our Waste Culture. For the big excreta may be essential to the
healthy functioning of the American organism. Our high proportion
of cultural waste may even be the surplus value, not only overhead and
exploitation but expansion and opportunity for our higher meanings:
intellectual freedom, semi-autonomous arts, democratic openness,
pluralistic possibility, and busy markets. (This line is obviously
dangerous, of course; carried far it ends in the placebo apologetics of
such ersatz-Daniels as Boorstin and Bell.) Liberty is wasteful, we are
reminded.
In
our junk is our diversity.
If
we make enough messes we
may make something else as well. Exhausting all the possibilities of
rubbish, like a Dostoyevskian character telling all possible lies, may be
one way of getting the truth, even if we have some trouble in telling
trash from truth afterwards. Intelligence and taste, to parody Monther–
lant, still have a role in telling the genuine junk from the fake junk.
The appeal of some such justifications of Waste Culture may
depend, reasonably enough, on the fear of authoritarian ways of
eliminating waste. Surely in politics, institutional as well as state,
skeptical arguments-better rubbish than what
they
would put on our
heads-reveal a protective wisdom. Personal liberty, as those who have
been at the bottom of big bureaucracies know on their nerves, consider–
ably depends on inefficiency and muddle. We can hide in the dirt,
culturally as well as socially. As the world is, confusion and mess may
be the last bastion of freedom, including the artistic. Historically, the
best in civilization often seems more the result of the messes than of the
masteries. Happiness may be postcivilized, life comfortably amidst the
ruins after the relentless grandeur and glory have turned
to
waste.
