FROM ARSE TO ARSEHOLE: JOHN ROBERTS AND THE SPECTRES OF PHILISTIINISM by Stewart Home

The bourgeoisie will have good cause to remember my carbuncles. Marx in a letter to Engels.

In his article Home 'Truths' (everything 20) John Roberts offers a curious piece of advice: 'Adorno of course remains the best guide to... compulsive anti-dialectics. As he puts it: thought has to "immerse itself in the phenomena on which it takes its stand", otherwise thought "extracts from its objects that which is thought already." Or, in other words, phenomena which are objectively preset for 'totality' by the thinker fail to realise the contradictions internal to the subject.'

Strange then, that while Roberts accuses me of 'misunderstanding' the manner in which he is using the concept of the 'philistine', he should choose to claim that my article The Art Of Chauvinism In Britain And France (everything 19) is simply a 'reply' to his 'defence of certain aspects of the new British art'. While a couple of paragraphs are devoted to Roberts, the word 'reply' is - at best - a highly reductive description of the article. Indeed, even from the standpoint of 'critical' theory it is clearly ideological, since it homogenises the distinctions I make between 'contemporary' "British' and 'French' culture. It would, of course, be possible to instrumentalise the notions of identity and heterogeneity in the stilted manner so dear to Roberts, and mechanically apply them to every assertion he makes about me. However, rather than replicating the rigidly bi-polar categories of academics such as Roberts, my 'strategies' have always been more omnidirectional.

Roberts claims that my article: 'takes a familiar form: the neo-populist critique of art as a pernicious act of class dominance. The ruling institutions of art are the cultural expression of the ruling class, hence working class empowerment rests of a rejection of art as a set of professional (specialist) disputes (sic) and the advocacy of "content-led" popular practices and pleasures.' It comes as no surprise that Roberts, as an apologist for art, would choose to use such a thoroughly bourgeois notion as that of 'empowerment' when misrepresenting my position, but even if the phrase 'working class empowerment' is replaced with a word that signifies a very different class perspective, for example 'disalienation', the result is equally absurd. Disalienation does not rest upon 'a rejection of art as a set of professional (specialist) disputes' (sic) but rather, upon the suppression of capitalist social relations (i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat).

The whinging about ' "content-led" popular practices and pleasures' is even more bizarre, particularly as Roberts claims that 'so much' of my 'writing points in that direction', while pointedly failing to cite a single piece that does so. Contrast this smear with, for example, my introduction to Mind Invaders, an anthology that will be published by Serpent's Tail next spring and which provides a 'description' of my own 'activities' as well as those of the other 'individuals' whose 'material' I have anthologised: 'These texts, like everything else, are a self-conscious construction. As such, the notions they utilise - such as "ley lines", "the omphalos" or "psychogeography" - should not be viewed as arbitrary, but as self-contained signs. Everything done with these signs immediately effects what they are supposed to represent. "Originally", these texts were simply fancies circulated in ephemeral forms, private systems of symbols shared among a number of international players. One popular psychogeographical game was to ornament these symbols by enshrining them within an allegorical form, creating fables that could only be deciphered by insiders. At some point, perhaps through forgetfulness, this insider knowledge was lost, and those playing this game had to continually reinvent it. Increasingly fantastic interpretations were made of these symbols, until "avant-bardism" became an "art" of systematic contradiction, a self-refuting perpetuum mobile...'

Despite the 'complexity' of my position, Roberts writes that: 'As with populists of all shades and opinions he (i.e. Stewart Home) assumes that the social and cultural exclusions which underwrite the powerlessness and resentment of the non-specialist (working-class) spectator of art can be answered by the adoption of popular themes and contents.' Just as I do not advocate the 'adoption of popular themes and contents' as Roberts disingeniously contends, I vehemently reject the notion of working-class (non-specialist) 'powerlessness' as an ideologically-driven fantasy propagated by the right. Obviously, the function of Roberts' rhetoric about 'the non-specialist (working class) spectator of art' is to homogenise widely divergent views by tainting me with various absurd beliefs adopted by followers of the Frankfurt School. Similarly, it is utterly risible to assume, as Roberts 'appears' to, that I think a single factor, such as CIA funding of abstract expressionism, is sufficient to explain the 'success' of any particular 'movement' manufactured by the institution of art.

I find it just as pathetic that a 'critic' championing the concept of the 'philistine' would consider it worth moralising about the fact that I can 'take pride in announcing "art as an enemy of the people" ', while at the same time trading 'quite-nicely-thank-you on the anti-aesthetic frission his sex and politics novels bring to contemporary literature'. Leaving aside the issue of distortion implicit in Roberts' characterisation of me as 'announcing "art as an enemy of the people" ', does he really expect me to apologise for the fact that I make my living as a professional writer? Communists, whether they be factory workers or freelancers, have always had to live with contradictions of this type. I certainly have no intention of taking up the suggestions of the situationist Raoul Vaneigem about living 'differently' in this society, since all of anarchism is there. While I am willing and able to undermine my professional position, Roberts apparently wants to use 'his' notion of the 'philistine' to 'theorise' 'away' the sense of guilt he feels about 'enjoying' a privileged existence as an academic operating within the institution of art, and does this by depicting his navel gazing 'activities' as being - height of absurdity - in some sense 'radical'. This is cheesy in the extreme. As Malcolm Bull notes in The Ecstasy Of Philistinism (New Left Review 219), in part a repudiation of Roberts and Beech's tedious scholastic exercise Spectres Of The Aesthetic (New Left Review 218): 'The German word philister had been used in the eighteenth century to designate towns-people as opposed to students, but was subsequently applied to all those who were indifferent to the arts'.

To continue with my argument it is first necessary to point out that what I understand by 'art' is quite distinct from what Roberts means when he uses the term. However, for the time being, the easiest way to proceed is to accept the content that Roberts projects into this category. Having done so, it becomes temporarily necessary to describe myself as an 'artist', since in taking up the edicts of Adorno on the 'advice' of Roberts, I am 'immersing myself in the phenomena on which I take a stand'. So while Roberts admits that I 'may have a substantial non-literary readership', he goes on to state that my books 'are situated all the same very comfortably within a metropolitan literature of resistance that looks to both exploitation fiction and the bourgeois European novel of ideas. The blurring of cognitive boundaries of different forms and genres, and as such the destabilisation of certain professional protocols that attach themselves to what passes as 'good' or 'advanced' art, is exactly what has been occurring in recent art, particularly in Britain. That Home avoids this, not only makes his argument appear completely adventitious, but reveals how little he has actually looked at the new British art. The very fact that he lumps Damien Hirst in with the newer work I discuss is indicative of this.'

Perhaps the most 'ironic' aspect of Roberts argument is that his writing preserves the very boundaries he 'describes' as being blurred. What Roberts will not, perhaps cannot, admit is that I am not simply a 'novelist'. As he well knows, I have been operating both inside and outside the institution of art for a number of years, and greatly enjoy the tensions and contradictions this generates. According to Roberts, what I produce in The Art Of Chauvinism, 'is the very suppression of the debate about art, power and knowledge' in my 'own work by arrogantly divesting its continuity with some of the themes of the young British art.' If one accepts Roberts' misrepresentations of my position on art, there is more than mere continuity between the themes of my 'work' and that of young British art. Not only did I have a one-person show at workfortheeyetodo this summer, I have also exhibited in group shows with many of the 'young British artists' Roberts and his chum Dave Beech describe as 'philistines' (for example Yerself Is Steam in Charlotte Street with Bank et al, or Matthew Higgs' Imprint 93 show at City Racing with Jeremy Deller etc.). In the light of this, I am not simply a 'novelist' whose work exhibits continuities with what is being promoted as the 'new British art'. If one accepts these categories as having any validity, then I become a paradigmatic example of this 'new breed' of 'boundary blurring' 'philistine' who has somehow managed to grasp the 'Grail', without being smitten by 'Yahweh'.

In Mad For It! Bank and the New British Art (everything 18), Roberts writes: 'The truth is, playing dumb, shouting "ARSE" and taking your knickers down has become an attractive move in the face of the professional institutionalisation of critical theory in art... it would be mistake to identify the new art and it's fuck-you attitudinising with anything so simple-minded as the "depoliticisation" of art...' Having said this, Roberts should not be surprised that some of those his 'theorising' configures as 'philistines', choose to blur the boundaries between 'artist' and 'critic', 'novelist' and 'prankster' etc. This 'new breed' of 'philistine' is not simply the lobotomised creature caricatured in Bank's Zombie Golf, it is also a Frankenstein's monster. Rather than simply screaming "ARSE" and taking its own knickers down, the 'philistine' is also capable of shouting "ARSEHOLE" while debagging those who perhaps imagine that they stand in 'judgement' over 'art'. It should go without saying that this particular 'philistine' has no intention of making votive offerings to 'Yahweh'. Instead, Roberts might like to follow the lead of the biblical philistines and make himself a seat of skins, since he's patently failed to cover his arse.

This is why the 'dumbing-down' of much of the 'new art' should not be mistaken for a Hegelian outmanoeuvring of what is taken to be advanced (c.f. my Alchemical Insurrection: Psychedelic Bordiguism and the Mystical Body of Christ the King in Re:Action 3). All of this leads one to wonder just how much Roberts has actually looked at the subject he is allegedly 'theorising' and why he experiences such difficulty when the categories he erects are transgressed, for example by the 'importation' of a figure from a 'different' 'generation' such as Damien Hirst. While I can do this on the grounds that I simply do not accept the categories Roberts promulgates, such 'transgression' should not be problematic for him either, since he is in the 'privileged' position of having 'theorised' my activities and those of my peers as a deliberate 'dumbing down' in the face of an institutionally triumphant 'critical' 'post-modernism' (not to mention the institutionally triumphant 'modernist/realist' championing of Adorno cheer-led by Roberts).

Rather than cheerfully accepting this as one of the 'glorious' contradictions engendered by the doctrine of the 'philistine', Roberts bluffs: 'The idea that I am employing the concept of the 'philistine' to "theorise yBa as a bulwark against criticisms of art made from a class perspective" is an exact reversal of my arguments... Defending the pleasures of the philistine is not about giving permission to people to be insensitive and stupid, but about questioning the right of art to exist untouched by the realities of social division.' Obviously, as a product of class society, art has never existed untouched by social division, therefore to 'defend' the 'pleasures' of the 'philistine' as a means of questioning something that does not, has not and never can 'exist', is a feeble 'reformist' sop to those who make criticisms of art from a class perspective. The use of terms such as 'right', with which Roberts garbs 'art' in the clothing of an individual bourgeois subject, gives the game away completely. In reading Roberts against himself, we are able to discover what he is 'really' doing. His 'work' clearly is an attempt to 'theorise' the 'philistine' and the 'yBa' as bulwarks against criticisms of art made from a class perspective and his ridiculous claim that this is an 'exact reversal' of his arguments, confirms it.

Roberts' next move is a mark of his complete desperation, he claims that I seem to have 'forgotten' that in the novel Pure Mania, I have one of my characters 'expostulate on the merits of "cultivated philistinism" The context is obviously very different (anarcho-punk shenanigans) but Home's understanding of philistinism seems to be very selective'. To equate the views of a character in a novel with those of the 'author' is, at best, 'unsophisticated', but in view of Roberts' instrumentalisation of the notions of identity and heterogeneity, it is particularly contemptible. Rather tiresomely, Roberts goes on to claim: 'But in a fundamental sense all these problems turn on Home's philosophical methodology. From the evidence of The Art Of Chauvinism and his other writings on art, his materialist understanding of culture is crudely identitary.' Of course, if like Roberts you instrumentalise 'critical' 'theory', everything you don't like is going to be 'identitary' or in other words, a manifestation of the excluded 'other'. Likewise, since I have explained elsewhere that I take the rhetoric of my opponents and re-order their verbiage as a means of dissolving ideology, it is absurd of Roberts to bleat about my 'philosophical methodology', when philosophy is 'simply' 'another' bourgeois 'discourse' I wish to 'smash'.

It makes much more 'sense' to read my writing as parodying the 'philosophical' concerns of Roberts and other 'pro-ascetic' followers of the Frankfurt School - who appear blithely unaware that it's more fun to engage in tactile experiences than 'celebrate' the body with words. This is why the 'dumbing down' of the 'avant-bard' should not be mistaken for an avant-garde outmanoeuvring of what is taken to be advanced. Far from having any intellectual stake in either the supersession or the recovery of so called 'critical' 'theory', the 'avant-bard' seeks to adjust the terms of engagement between 'plagiarism' and 'pandering', which as Dr. Al Ackerman has pointed out (Smile 7, London 1985), are not quite the same thing even in Neoist philosophy. The fact that Roberts is not aware of this - and before anyone asks, the article in Smile 7 actually does exist, and is in part a 'poetic' attack on the crudely identitary theorising of cretins like of Roberts - merely shows that despite the advice he offers others, Roberts has singularly failed to immerse himself in the phenomena on which he wishes to take a stand.

Thus Roberts attempts to defend the exclusions of art with the statement: 'Art may exclude, but it excludes in many different ways and in many different circumstances. In Home this is all brushed aside in his rush to denounce young British art as part of an "evolving discourse of totalitarian art" '. Needless to say, Roberts pointedly ignores the fact that in The Art Of Chauvinism, I wrote: 'Roberts attacks sociology for its reductive formalism, something that is a feature common to all academic specialisations including art 'criticism', precisely because he does not wish to deal with materialist critiques that do not reduce the organisation of power to a simple question of class categories, but instead allow other specificities, other patterns of exploitation and exclusion, to be seen in relation to each other and the broader articulation of power.' Ignoring what I've said, as well as the problems Paul Gilroy has explored with regard to notions of 'difference', Roberts produces 'what all positivists produce, an eradication of the subject as agent'.

In a manner akin to the cyber-anarchist Nick Land, Roberts talks about the 'technological expansion of art beyond the confines of "painting" and "sculpture" ' in order to observe that 'the assimilation and transformation of the popular representation of signs' is now an academic issue. Rather than being something recent, the technological expansion of 'art' beyond the confines of 'painting' and 'sculpture' has been a commonplace for several hundred years, from at least the time of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century masque through to futurist and dadaist film and performance. Likewise, since one of its major functions was to manipulate popular symbols with the aim of 'modernising', and thereby 'entrenching', the hegemonic position of the monarchy and the court, the masque was far more than simply a product of the academy; it was an important factor in bringing the academy into being as an instrument of rule within civil society. In the light of this, it can be seen that post-modern periodisation (ontology) slices apart history to stitch together academic reputations. The so called 'critical' 'post-modernism', against which Roberts pits the 'yBa' and the 'philistine', is a continuation of modernism, and in terms of the practices by which Roberts chooses to define it, has existed for several hundred years. Thus, it is somewhat rich of Roberts to blubber that in my writing: 'Art is no longer the convergence of practices, theories and audiences in critical constellation, but a subsumptive Hegelian structure in dominance. The result is that art is ripped out of the everyday as a realm of living and contested subjectivities.' Roberts' 'theorisation' of the 'yBa' and the 'philistine' is so monolithic that the 'subject' he attempts to conjure up wouldn't know the 'everyday' even if it walked into a lamp-post.

Then there is the question of where I had previously floated the idea of the discourse of totalitarian art emerging in liberal societies, something Roberts fails to address. The section of The Art Of Chauvinism dealing with this is lifted, with a few alterations, from the pages of a work of fiction, Cunt Lickers Anonymous which was 'originally' published by Matthew Higgs as part of his ongoing collaborative project Imprint 93. Apart from raising again the question of how familiar Roberts actually is with what he arbitrarily categorises as the 'new British art', it also brings into focus the issue of the 'truths' Roberts places quote marks around in the title of his piece about me. What this comes down to is not so much a question of boundaries being blurred, as the inability of the academy to maintain the boundaries it arbitrarily erected in the first place. Unlike Roberts, I am not simply talking about forms and genres; attempts to preserve the distinction between 'artists' and 'critics', 'truth' and 'fiction', 'authors' and their 'audience', the 'current' 'generation' and those that 'preceded' it, are equally absurd.

Roberts is either unwilling or unable to deal with the fact that Rabelais, Villion and their anonymous predecessors didn't waste their breath attempting to articulate 'truth' in a world filled with lies. Instead, bards and minstrels 'circumvented' official 'truth' and turned it inside out, by pushing its logic to a paradoxical extreme. It is a banality to state that the nihilistic tyranny of the academy is best fought by talking outrageously and telling tall stories. In other words, by raising a whirl of fibs and lies until a communication short-circuit dissipates the virtual world of 'critical' 'post-modernism' and the yBa. Radical criticism of the world, even the ability to criticise it, was the overarching achievement of 'plagiarist' pirates of past centuries, of rascals, buffoons and court jesters. The language of Kings and Popes - of the Law, the State and Social Rank - was challenged, perverted and undermined through plagiarism and parody. Resistance through lies kept language fluid and frustrated all attempts at systematic codification. Tramps, tumblers and troubadours avoided sanctioned forms such as courtly poetry and chivalrous romance, favouring instead despised genres such as satire, coarse songs and blasphemous prayers.

If Roberts is as familiar as he implies he is with my 'work', then he will know that I have often made statements along the lines of 'to practically examine the question of truth, I spread ideas that I consider fallacious and carefully watch other peoples' reaction to them' (this sentence can be found in, among other places, Smile 8 London 1985, and my Neoist Manifestos, AK Press, Stirling 1991). Instead of dealing with the complexity of the relationship between my writing and notions of 'truth' and then addressing the fact that my 'theorisation' of an emergent totalitarian discourse of art in liberal societies was lifted straight out of an earlier work of fiction, Roberts stutters: 'It is no surprise, therefore, that Home favours Roger Taylor's Art An Enemy Of The People (1978). A book whose only idea about art is, is that it is nasty and oppressive.' One wonders whether Roberts has read Art An Enemy Of The People, since it is absurd to claim that the only idea it contains about art is that art is nasty and oppressive.

To return to Roberts' diatribe: 'Like Home, his (Taylor's) failure to address the relationship between art's bid for critical autonomy and subjectivity leaves him defending the most conformist of cultural positions in the name of freedom and working class emancipation.' This is crudely identitary, since the cultural positions embraced by Taylor and myself are quite distinct. Likewise, the idea that I would defend anything in the name of 'freedom' is so utterly absurd that it should not require comment, unfortunately by ascribing positions to me willy-nilly, Roberts places me in the position of having to repudiate his ridiculous assertions. Perhaps Roberts hoped to wear me out so that I wouldn't note the way in which he anthropomorphises art, writing of it's bid for 'critical autonomy' as though it were a bourgeois subject, and thereby revealing himself as an idealist.

Further crudely identitary ravings follow this, with my 'concept of "totalitarian art" ' being denounced as 'bureaucratic in exactly' (my emphasis) the same way as Roger Taylor's work as a youth training scheme supervisor. To make this point, Roberts indulges in a bizarre moral lesson about 'how easy it is for intellectuals to move into management and bureaucratic positions once the 'formal' and 'political' are separated', as though Taylor's earlier and Roberts current work (not to mention that of Adorno and every other member of the Frankfurt School) - as academics - isn't/wasn't bureaucratic! Roberts goes on to splutter that: 'in his discussion of the young British art, Home chooses to project the most homogenous national image of the new art over and above its material and theoretical determinates.' One of the many good reasons for focusing on the question of chauvinism in what is being promoted by Roberts and others as young British art, is because of the stress on its national status in its name. However, the issue is considerably more complex than this, as can be seen from both my writing and that of Simon Ford. Typically, Roberts 'conveniently' ignores what we have to say. As for homogenisation, I have already dealt with the way in which Roberts steam-rollers over my examination of the very different forms of cultural chauvinism to be found in Britain and France.

For Roberts: 'Far from being a manifestation of fashionable journalism the new British art is the product of a generation coming to terms with the powerful protocols of the bureaucratisation of art's own critique of itself in the 80s. The rise of critical post-modernism (Burgin, Haacke, Kelly, Sherman, Kruger etc.) as the official ideology of our period is not a "cardboard opponent"... A new generation of artists then, have had to find new ways of being responsible critically in a world where the anti-institutional critique of art and the critique of identity are now academically pre-digested and acceptable strategies.' Roberts' periodisation is far too problematic for him to successfully pass the yBa off as something new among those who are not already inclined to buy into this myth. His talk about 'a world where the anti-institutional critique of art and the critique of identity are now academically pre-digested and acceptable strategies,' is made as if the work of Duchamp and his peers had not been incorporated into the institution of art well before the advent of the neo-dada and happenings movements of the nineteen-sixties. Likewise, the critique of identity has been a feature of art from its very beginnings, as can be seen from sixteenth and seventeenth-century masques and tilts, which did so much to banish the last remnants of the feudal identity. While the critique and 'deconstruction' of modernism may be more recent, it certainly dates back at least as far as dada in the early part of this century.

Of course, while I didn't say it, so called 'critical' 'post-modernism' is a cardboard opponent. In Home 'Truths' Roberts simply uses this as a device to avoid addressing the issue of art providing the ruling class with the ideological glue of a common culture. It ought to go without saying that this involves far more than simple 'exclusion'. In like manner, Roberts has to distort the content of my text before he is able to respond to it, and even then he has singularly failed to deal with the key issue, chauvinism. Instead, Roberts yaps about 'recognising the expanded place art now occupies within the transformed technological framework of popular culture. This is what I meant by the increasing popular enculturation of art, its increasing entry into representational spaces of capitalist culture as 'entertainment'. To talk about the transformed framework of popular culture as though it is a new phenomena is, again, slicing apart history to stitch together an academic reputation.

The introduction of railways transformed popular culture, among other things, changing conceptions of distance and making day trips from London to the seaside a possibility for a great swathe of the capital's population. Indeed, the hype surrounding the introduction of the railways has remarkable parallels with the current promotion of the Internet. The assertions Roberts makes about the expanded place art occupies within the 'transformed technological framework of popular culture' are equally problematic, since he fails to indicate both how this expansion is being measured, and what it is being measured against. Likewise, Roberts' banter about the increasing entry of art 'into representational spaces of capitalist culture as "entertainment" ', is indicative of his studied refusal to accept the fact that the emergence of art as we know it is inextricably linked to its commodification. And again, art has always been a form of entertainment. Despite the absurd claims of idealists, the highest realm it is likely to give the 'chosen few' access to is that of the bourgeois dinner party.

Again and again, Roberts demonstrates historical amnesia. For example: 'the claims for art's critical autonomy are now positional within the wider frame of popular culture as such, and not just "outside" in the domain of "fine art" '. This is, of course, the point of departure for my disagreements with Roberts and the point from which, as I have demonstrated above, he ceases to understand what I have to say. Claims about art have always been dependent upon separating it off as an evolving subset of diverse cultural activities - for example, within music Stockhausen is art, a punk band like Raped are not. Thus I do not wish to commend art as somehow superior to popular culture, or vice versa - since each category is produced by, and mediates the other - instead, I recommend the analysis and criticism of both of these commodity forms. Of course, while art is determined by its commodity form, it is determined in other fashions as well, as should be clear from what I have just said about its relationship to popular culture.

Obviously, I have no sympathy with Roberts' bluster about 'art's critical autonomy', especially when it is used for the blatantly ideological ends favoured by the 'pro-ascetic' followers of the Frankfurt School. For Roberts: 'The most interesting of the new art... does not seek a convergence with "philistinism" but incorporates and reworks such pleasures as a means of drawing out the social divisions which produce philistinism in the first place.' Since it is untenable to claim that art is untouched by social division, Roberts imagines he can deflect criticisms of art made from a class perspective by transfiguring the 'pleasures' - the choice of this word indicates clearly enough where Roberts is coming from - of cultural stratification into a conscious feature of 'art criticism' (and perhaps even art works too, although it ought to go without saying that I view Roberts' writing on the so called 'yBa' as a projection rather than a description of something that is happening 'out there'). Worse yet, according to Roberts: 'these forms of attention attempt to do justice to that wider world of everyday pleasures in which art moves and breathes.' Much of this is simply idealism, Roberts is anthropomorphising art, plainly it neither moves nor breathes. However, behind this absurdity lies further evidence of the ongoing colonisation of everyday life.

Of course, rather than admitting that I explicitly reject the ideology he propagates, Roberts projects onto me a 'failure to register' the 'theoretical' basis of his conception of the 'philistine'. Once again, we have descended into the realm of the crudely identitary: 'As with the Situationists his (Stewart Home's) distillation of Hegel's abstract universalism into a 'totalising critique' of capitalist culture prevents him from looking at the crisis of art immanently'. And after this bluff about a criticism which expresses the idea of harmony negatively, by embodying contradictions pure and uncompromised in its innermost structure, Roberts concludes by demonstrating his continuing inability to even imagine something resembling my position on art: 'It is one thing to denounce the "bankruptcy of serious culture", it is another to do this and end up liquidating the subject and contradictions in the process.' Roberts simply refuses to acknowledge the extent to which my views diverge from his, as is clear from his use of the word 'denounce'. I do not 'denounce the "bankruptcy of serious culture" ', I announce it with glee!

Circulated in xerox form prior to its publication in Disputations.

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