STATE OF CRITICISM
75
is to agree to bring to bear on popular forms the kind of critical
intelligence that we habitually bring to bear on high art.
AILEEN WARD: What about the question of the function, the responsi–
bility, of criticism on the one hand and the nature of popular culture
on the other, as regards two very pressing concerns today: pornogra–
phy and the cult of violence in popular culture? What does criticism
have to do with those two aspects of popular culture?
RICHARD GILMAN : The obvious difficulty for criticism in dealing with
pornography or violence is that if you are dedicated or given to a new
kind of position in criticism which is acting against value judgments
as a function of criticism, then you are helpless. You are lost. You
cannot be faithful to your position and say a word about pornogra–
phy or violence.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Let's not ignore the factor of salability. The reason
you have violence and pornography on television and in movies is
because it sells. Salability is not, as far as I know, an aesthetic
criterion.
EUGENE GOODHEART: Haven't we accepted too easily the idea that
popular culture is ephemeral? All the instances given have been
counterinstances of popular culture lasting in all sorts of ways. In
fact it seems to me that the memory of songs, of films, of television
dramas that we have all seen is so strong that maybe there's a will to
forget them. One wants them to be ephemeral, but they aren't.
RICHARD GILMAN: I think the memory of our own experience of
popular culture-of songs, for example, detective stories, the awful
books we read as children or the bad book we read now, is not so
much of the work as of the state of being we were in when we
experienced it. For example, how many times have you recalled the
words of a popular song because you wished to evoke the memory of
your state of being at a particular time? There is a different kind of
memory involved. It's not part of the experience I'm talking about.
What you remember is a structure of experience, what you remember
then is actually a part of your development. I really would go back to
Matthew Arnold in this sense when he speaks about culture as being
a quest for perfection.
ROGER SHA1TUCK: I'd like to point out that this discussion of ephemer–
ality is addressed entirely to popular works of art, not to popular
culture. Certainly popular culture lasts and is not going to disap–
pear. No one has really produced an instance yet of a piece of
popular culture, let alone a work of popular art, which has been
totally ephemeral, because if we can cite it, it's not ephemeral.
MORRIS DICKSTEIN: I think something that ought to be stressed at this
