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we both fashionable’ ‘and. demotic {it could have trvived one or the other, but not both) and is being ~tampled to death by hordes of status seekers and audi- ice participants alike. JAlong with Professor Kahler, I am not against the ww. In the Battle of the Bookg.of two centuries ago, I ould have been at least as much on the side of the oderns as on that of the Ancients. But the battle of ¢ books has become a battle against the books. Books e becoming nonbooks — catalogues like the nouveau man, boxes of interchangeable sheets, cut-outs and ste-ups; music is becoming pure, noise or impure pture, children’s and anihro- ids’ games, ‘or accumulations of bric-é-brac and tritus; and similarly with the other arts. Worst of are the mixed media, which can be defined as a inch of pseudo-arts forced to perform orgies in public & an audience of voyeurs. Erich Kahler’s The Disintegration of Form in the its is a series of three helpfully illustrated lectures: the Forms of Form,” “The Preliminary Stages of sintegration” and “The Triumph of Incoherence.” ithe first lecture, we proceed from a@ brace of defini- ns: form is “structure manifesting itself as shape” 1 “art is form created by a human, intellectual act.” + aré shown that “even in works with ‘open form’ it wna critic of Commonweal and Hudson Review, dK WORLD May 12, 1968 wee BS Phe deg MUU Lae Gyan) poetunarcae relationship between consciousness and the uncon- scious.” First rationalism took over from religious dogma, and the work of the Devit became a sphere of instinctual error and superstition to be examined by a budding empirical psychology. This led, by reaction as Touch as by linear descent, to a “speculative romantic inquiry into the irrational and transrational” which, in turn, led to a more scientifically analytical study of the unconscious, apps “rational methods to empiri- cal search.” “4 Reaction set in again, and the “unconscious no longer remained @ mere object of conscious acts of explora- tion; it seized upon the artistic act itself and emerged as the very enactor of artistic creation, as... in ‘beat’ literature and action painting.” Finally, we reach the state of affairs that “John Cage . . . explicitly recom- mends: # purposeful purposelessness.” What all this leads to is beautifully chronicled in the third lecture, which contains the meat of the book. But precisely because it is so pregnant with horrible examples and cogent conclusions and caveats drawn from them, it resists adequate synopsis. What Kahler traces in “The Triumph of Incoherence” is, first, the growing insecurity of language and com- munication. He sorts out three phases of, to be sure overlapping, linguistic disintegration. First, the divorce of language from all emational significance; second, la Consciuusiess. Ranier perunculy attacks thal “antes lectual demagogue” McLuhan, who confounds raw perception with meaningful consciousness, the accumu- lation of data with synthesis. Our arts make of the cleavage between original reason and functional, tech nological rationality a programm At the extremes lie things like “creative vafe@WAMtn” and s‘pro- grammed panic” — the announced aims of various groups at the recent International Destruction of Art symposium in London. Kahler shows how in its ultimate stages this dehu- manization reaches the physical constitution of man: the very megalopolitan noises that threaten our health are reproduced and further magnified by art. Con- eciousness is not expanded but exploded, with the final winner being advertising, which turns all this into means of moneymaking. And, as the author perceptively notes, the devaluation of words refiects on the feelings behind them, which become accordingly undermined, making of our arts not just a disaster area but a chain reaction, a self-perpetuating cataclysm. -One may disagree with certain details of the presen- tation; one can find occasional lapses in the diction, perhaps even a slight general grayness. But the bazic argument is so well thought out and so sagely marshaled that this third lecture deserves to be reprinted by a foundation (or perhaps by UNESCO, if that organization isn’t defunct) and distributed free of charge, wherever people convene — at sireet corners, if necessary — as a giant anti-happening. : : ~~ Page 2!