To desire, always to desire but never to understand. Now, instead of concern for how we fail culture, the emphasis is on how culture has failed us. Definitely something at work that thwarts us, does not satisfy and this makes itself more evident as we face globally and within us the death of nature. Culture, as the opposite of nature, grows discordant, sours, fades as we strangle in the thinner and thinner air of symbolic activity. It is inseparable from the birth and continuation of alienation surviving, as ever, as compensation, a trade of the real for its objectifcation.
Culture embodies the split betveen wholeness and the parts of the whole turning into domination.
Time, language, number, art-cultural impositions that have come to dominate us with lives of their own. Magazines and journals now teem with articles lamenting the spread of cultural illiteracy and historical amnesia, two conditions that underline a basic dis-ease in society. In our postmodern epoch the faces of fashion range from blank to sullen, as hard drug use, suicide, and emotional disability rates continue to soar. About a year ago I got a ride from Berkeley to Oregon with a U.C. senior and somewhere along the drive I asked her, after talking about the '60s, among other things, to describe her own generation. Meanwhile, massive denial continues.