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PARTISAN REVIEW
Perhaps, too, the crap fertilizes the true and the good, the chaos allows
the creative comet to form and flash through, the wasteland provides
the field for the unique bloom....
But enough of such wasteful metaphors, for they also carry a tone
of fancy-dress desperation and rhetorically sanitized despair. Some–
thing still seems wrong when we ask about the realities of autonomy
and equity and diversity in the Waste Culture. The brave images of
protective and fertilizing waste fade. As they should, for much of the
praise of waste can only be defensive, muddled waste over authoritarian
waste, careless rubbish as against imposed excrement. We may pru–
dently choose to defend a particular muddle or mess-sloppy crafts–
manship, garbage books, a stupid bureaucracy, our fatuous media,
absurd schooling, fraudulent cultural markets-as a short-term
strategy against worse possibilities. But such conditions are hardly
sufficient or enduring and will, by their own nature, as an Aristotle
might say, surely waste further away.
Sometimes wasting may be defensive, within a larger purpose;
sometimes waste may be art, within a culture not overwhelmed by
waste. With much time to waste, we have, as in no other time and
place, turned our wasting into art-games. Take the monstrous pseu–
do-vocation of, and schooling in, "Creative Writing." This cultural
industry provides a relatively harmless diversion as a substitute for
more communal or rigorous or even dangerous concerns and so these
days is used therapeutically in the ghettos of the young and sick and
outcast and old. Well-taught, as a few such programs must be (though
the "creativity" rhetoric confuses more honest craftsmanship), they
may have some developmental usefulness, not least in necessary
adolescent wasting around. Bureaucratization may be rather more at
fault than literary and pedagogical theory in that "creative" courses,
programs, degrees, jobs, etc., so often serve as rip-offs. Even so,
institutionalized art-activities do some social services in, say, support–
ing writer-teachers, however mediocre most of them, and in providing
disguised therapy for students, however confusing at times.
It
would
probably be puritanic and utilitarian to ask for more economical, as
well as honest and effective, ways of giving sinecures and psychiatry.
Often most expansive in the worst institutions, imitation-culture
games raise genuine uncertainties about who is wasting what. Surely
they have their utilities: a positi ve rhetoric for education-as-control and
a "cooling-out" distraction and hobbyism. They usually indoctrinate a
privateering ideology of culture as well as the latest waste-fashions.
Even if something like Creative Writing does not provide a very good
