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militams whose prolegomenon for the improvement of culture pro–
poses the end of the arts as primarily separate wasteful activities. But
yet again the barbarians may have the future, and, in ways they don't
well understand, the best of the argument. For to recognize waste
beyond all coherence in contemporary culture-in its inequities and
arbitrariness, in its gross processing and inappropriate institutionali–
zation, in its technocratic subservience and destructiveness-seems to
correspond with our other historical realities. Praise the simple truth:
our Waste Culture is terribly wasteful.
But what would those barbarians have us do? Make creative writers
write creative memos? Artists repaint the rubbish? We literary manda–
rins find more honorable employment? And people of sensibility
sensitize the world we live in rather than the debris of privateering
fantasy? To remove much of the processing and other wasting comrols,
to push art and intelligence into relatively unmediated relation to
social purpose, would no doubt-as with real economic change–
remove a spiraling cultural inflation at the price of a harsh cultural
depression. And whatever it did for the rest of society, such cultural
deflation would really be wasting us-the Saving Remnant-now
wouldn't it?
Waste, I suggest, like Erasmus' Folly, should be seen in several
different ways. But late in our cultural game, there is probably but one
humanistic tone: apocalyptic irony. Yet there is also a clear, though
hardly easy, moral: To look toward bringing the culture imo less
wasteful relation with society, with itself, with ourselves. Unfortu–
nately, for those with fulsome faith in this society, that might be all too
easy, with no wasteful ambiguities. But culture, I have argued, must
never get too far from playing with and accepting waste. For those of us
not at one with contemporary misorder, a more satisfactory relation of
culture and society requires a vision of a radical reordering and, at
present, a constant nagging critical sense, including exacerbated
demands for less processed, less mediated, less disposable art and
imelligence. No doubt, that, too, is self-wasting. But we are also of the
Waste Culture and would not deny its sometimes exceptional intensi–
ties and other qualities whose finest imperative may be to take revenge
on the society by perceiving much of it, truly, as waste.
