26
PARTISAN REVIEW
the theoretical presuppositions of current theory can accomplish in the
practice of a powerful "critic." Barthes's performance is a richer
version of the kind of criticism of mass culture accomplished by writers
like Harold Rosenberg, Dwight Macdonald and Leslie Fiedler (before
his fall). The American critics in the fifties formulated a sociology of
cultural hierarchy (high, middle, and low-brow culture), which en–
abled them to attack middle-brow culture. But the sociology was
theoretically simple and vulnerable to the populist assault of the
sixties. Barthes's examination of bourgeois myths is vulnerable
[QO,
as I
have tried to argue in an essay on
Mythologies,
but his extremely
resourceful attention to the
sign-system
of bourgeois myths is, I think,
a contribution to the understanding of our cultural life.
Rosalind Krauss
The title of this morning's session-"The Effects of Critical
Theories on Practical Criticism, Cultural Journalism, and Re–
viewing" -would suggest that what is at issue is the dissemination, or
integration, of certain theoretical perspectives into an apparatus of
critical practice that reaches well beyond the graduate departments of
English or comparative literature at Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Johns
Hopkins. The subject would seem to be the effect of theory on what Mr.
Dickstein describes as "the mediating force between an increasingly
difficult literature and an increasingly diverse audience," a mediating
force that would be represented in this country by a long list of
magazines and journals, headed, undoubtedly, by
The New York
Review of Books.
Now this is a subject on which Mr. Dickstein's
paper-obsessed as it is by what he sees as the deepening technocratiza–
tion of graduate studies-does not touch. And if by this omission he
means to imply that he thinks that advanced critical theory has had
no
effect whatever on that wider critical apparatus, then Mr. Dickstein and
I are in complete agreement.
But the question would seem to be-Mr. Dickstein's laments
aside-why has there been no such effect? And in order to broach that
subject I would like to recall briefly two lectures I witnessed by two of
the technocrats in Mr. Dickstein's account: Jacques Derrida and
Roland Barthes. Derrida's lecture was the presentation of part of an
essay called "Restitutions of the Truth
en pointure,"
which in examin–
ing the claims Heidegger makes in "The Origin of the Work of Art,"
