It is not simply that The Sixties have been repudiated, and the dissident spirit quashed, even as these have become the object of intense nostalgia. The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons. No recommendation exists outside a certain setting. The recommendations and enthusiasms expressed in the essays collected in Against Interpretation have become the possession of many people now. But so far as my views did, to a certain degree, triumph, it was not only because of the persuasiveness and success of my book.
Barbarism is one name for what was taking over.
So I can't help viewing the writing collected in Against Interpretation with a certain irony. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. I suppose it isn't wrong if Against Interpretation is read now, or re-read, as an influential, pioneering document from a bygone age. My hope is that its republication now, and the acquisition of a new generation of readers, could contribute to the near-hopeless task of shoring up the values out of which these essays and reviews were written. The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have triumphed.