| |
Famously,
Raymond Williams argued that culture is one of the two or three
most complicated words in the English language . It would be reasonable
to assume that its complications are accretions, that an original
and simple word meaning, say, to grow, has been stretched and monkeyed
around with to the extent that it has now lost its core and plain
reference. The reasonable assumption would be wrong. Right from
the beginning, according to Williams, the word had a range of meanings.
Colonies, cults and cultivation were all there at the outset, like
a chain linking habitation, worship and natural growth. There is
very little if anything at stake between most of these competing
interpretations of culture, and therefore it is necessary to supplement
them with another set, indexed to various sorts of contestation,
rivalry, dispute and fissure. It is one thing for a word to have
a number of meanings, even when they overlap in confusing ways,
but it is quite another for those meanings to be incompatible with
one another. In the former it is still possible - albeit perhaps
mistakenly - to believe that the differences belong to a unified
social fabric. The complications embedded in the word culture today,
however, point to incommensurable interpretations. Ultimately they
speak of cultural and social divisions.
Popular culture is impossible to pin down. Previous incarnations
didn't have the same trouble. Kitsch had certain, specifiable properties,
and mass culture conformed to a given set of social and economic
relations. What unified the intellectual reference to kitsch and
mass culture was not just the obligatory disparagement of "the debased
and academicized simulacra of genuine culture". The formulation
of the concepts of kitsch and mass culture also share the critical,
even radical, analysis of the relationship between low cultural
value and the overarching presence of management and marketeering.
This is best summed up in the term 'culture industry', understood
as the primacy of industrial and commercial interests in the production
of goods that are barely cultural at all. To consume these products,
it seemed, was to be culturally impoverished. The term 'popular
culture' was brought in, initially, to protect radical or authentic
culture (a modern version of folk art) from the same criticisms.
Eventually, after the popular culture explosion in the late-50s
and early-60s, the term popular culture became more capacious in
its use, referring to experiences that had once been thought kitsch
and commercial. There was no turning back and a determined group
of radicals campaigned against the use of such divisive stereotypes
of culture and cultural consumption, turning such terms as kitsch
and mass culture into anachronisms. If the substitution of the term
popular culture for its predecessors had done away with conservative
and radical anxieties about it, then popular culture would possibly
be no more than an anthropological term referring to an heterogeneous
field of cultural and economic activity. Instead, it is one of the
most contested and misconstrued pieces of jargon of the second half
of the twentieth-century.
Stuart Hall once remarked, quite surprisingly, that symbolic aggression
against mass culture was always, though perhaps cryptically, a version
of aggression against the masses. It is worth pursuing the hypothesis
that repressed loathing for the working class returns as contempt
for mass culture, but the argument has to go further than that.
The term popular culture was coined by intellectuals, aesthetes
and the educated in order to refer to the culture of others. In
other words, it was from the outset a projection. If the term popular
culture refers to anything at all, it is not the people or the culture
it purports to name but the fantasies and anxieties of those who
are doing the naming. This is why it is often implied that 'popular
culture' means nothing, that it picks out no specifiable set of
cultural norms or qualities; popular culture is nothing other than
the culture which is excluded from legitimate or cultivated culture
(and defined from within legitimate culture as its other). This
results in a very confused or at best weak sense of popular culture's
own identity. It gets worse. If popular culture is defined negatively
and relationally, then the radical incorporation of popular culture
into the university and the gallery creates even more problems.
When the academics of cultural studies include popular culture as
a legitimate object of intellectual study then the last remaining
criterion of its identity is fudged. The same sort of thing happens
when artists and curators sidle up to popular culture, permitting
its access to galleries and artworks in a radical gesture that erases
the divisions which maintain art's privilege. The effect, of course,
is that popular culture doesn't only attain its longed for prestige
but loses its distinctive character. If popular culture is excluded
culture, then its inclusion turns this empty category into an indeterminable
boundary. This is, roughly speaking, what has emerged as the current
cultural impasse: the divide between art and popular culture has
slackened or disappeared so that either value and criteria has to
be found to reinstate cultural division or we should no longer think
in terms of cultural division. Neither option is satisfactory.
Culture is Ordinary
Nobody since Matthew Arnold has had such an impact on the way the
term 'culture' is used than Raymond Williams. It was Arnold's evangelical
tub-thumping about the value of Culture which Williams recognized
was the trigger for the now widespread suspicion of all talk about
culture. If this is where the hostility begins, Williams should
have been where it both came to an end and came to fruition. It
would be wrong to say that Williams's concept of culture was not
normative, but he argued so much against the normative conception
of Culture that he produced an ethics of the value of the forms
of life that a normative conception of Culture typically brushes
aside. An extended and serious engagement in culture which is based
on the fact of division and difference might well have extended
the scholarship of the connoisseur to every last hiding place of
dignity in the lives of ordinary people, annihilating the toffee-nosed
superiority-complex while reinvigorating the intelligent aspirations
of culture (here, again, opposed to terror, but no longer because
it belongs to a special minority style of feeling). What happened
instead is that culture became the great battleground of ideological
sectarianism, postmodernist posturing, identity politics, political
correctness and post-colonial/feminist/marxist studies. Williams
bequeathed us a progressive concept of culture, a weapon against
barbarity and elitism, which we have smashed to bits. And rightly
so.
To describe English life, thought and imagination in the last three
hundred years simply as 'bourgeois' ... is to surrender reality
to a formula, Williams wrote - you can see what he's up against.
Williams hoped culture could be addressed politically without reductivism
at a time when Culture (with a capital 'C') was still cherished
by dilettantes and rubbished by Stalinists. So long as the left
lacked the analytical tools for engaging with culture in its broadest
sense - and the political will to do so - modern society would escape.
Although Williams turned up late, it is this project that has been
taken in retrospect as the defining mission of the first new left.
When I was concentrating on this kind of cultural analysis in the
1950s, Williams said in one of his last interviews before he died,
I was sometimes told by good Marxist friends that it was a diversion
from the central economic struggle. Now every trade union and political
leader cries 'The media, the media'.
Williams's progressive conception of culture is intolerable because
its great promise is the eradication of the pernicious effects of
power and privilege in the striving for happiness and self-transformation.
The trouble is that it comes over as saccharine so long as the conditions
of power keep the vision at bay.
Williams's has been criticized for his romanticism, for the organicism
of his vision for culture, and has come to be seen as an easy target
by those who are constructing for themselves a clear and firm relativist
ground. The promotion and celebration of diversity - liberal, plural,
multicultural, non-sexist tolerance - is no less saccharine, however,
no matter how much it stresses the ethical preferability of difference
over unity. Crucially, the cultural theories attached to the promotion
and celebration of diversity lack a theory of cultural power, hierarchy
and privilege. To point out that they are meant to, that their bete
noir is the untroubled normative concept of culture as a ranking
and hierarchic division of cultures, does not excuse their failure
but underlines it. One of the high-pitched debates running through
Humanities departments across the globe is whether popular culture
should be celebrated or subjected to critique. The fundamental issue,
though, is how to incorporate a theory of cultural power and account
for its effects at a time when policy makers, intellectuals and
artists deny its existence and consign it to a conservative, bigoted
past.
Williams may still prove to have the requisite subtlety to outdo
most of our misgivings about the holistic approach to cultural analysis
and social transformation. It is Richard Hoggart's legacy, however,
which takes the limelight these days. Hoggart, the founder of the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, was responsible
for the establishment of cultural studies as an academic exercise.
It is not through lack of respect that we hesitate to call it an
academic discipline; cultural studies is internally resistant to
having strict demarcations placed on its interdisciplinary activities.
Initially, cultural studies had to be of a politically radical hue
before it could maintain that all forms of culture is worthy of
analysis irrespective of their relative prestige. The position implies
a full-frontal attack on that ideal realm of aesthetics which had
not only dominated cultural discourse, but had, in effect, ruled
out any potential alternative by passing itself off as the very
soul of humanity, all else being unworthy of the term 'culture'.
So, how on earth did cultural studies turn into the wretched display
of subject positions without recourse to judgement, value and ethics?
Before we can answer that little puzzle we must finally face up
to the high-tide of cultural studies, a scholastic world in which
poor, black kids in inner city Britain 'resist' and 'subvert' power
through the ingenuity of their haircuts.
We don't think there is any point in doubting the radical credentials
of the initial intentions of cultural studies. Eventually, though,
something had to give. At first, it was almost enough in itself
that Hoggart wrote seriously and sympathetically about the working
class, but later, Dick Hebdige was only interested in subcultural,
prickly, indigestible elements of the working class. What couldn't
be sustained from the intellectual mission of this second wave,
however, was the tendency to make political claims on behalf of
the yobs - and later, more preposterously, the fans of boybands
and romance novels. We are not asserting that the politics of resisting
the authority of school teachers, or of indulging in mainstream
culture, was inflated, but that it didn't exist. Not, at any rate,
as a politics. It exists as a politics only insofar as the study
of them interferes with academic customs and standards. This is
a classic case of projection.
The End of an illusion?
The reason there is now an impasse within academic schools of cultural
studies is that its radical politics was based to some degree on
the challenge to a politically unacceptable entrenched cultural
schema. Within this orthodoxy, a routinized aesthetic gradient cast
popular culture out of serious discussion. Radicals took this normativity
by the scruff of the neck and saw what was valuable in the most
detested and debased cultural forms. What's more, it worked. It
turned out, in fact, that no-one behaved in the manner which cultural
prejudice had expected them to. Writers such as John Fiske 'discovered'
that ordinary people watching TV were active and discriminatory;
the surrender to consumerism was done on an individual basis, and
with intelligence; scholars discovered that different individuals
bought the same newspapers and used them in different ways.
Well done, but we might also ask why it took so long. Now, at long
last, you don't have to be an old-style Marxist to acknowledge that
artists are no different from anyone else; art is just as likely
to include rubbish as it is everlasting truth; galleries are part
of the tourist industry. In principle, at least, the supposed superiority
of art over mass culture must now be tested case by case. Having
established these inversions of established wisdom, though, the
radicals of cultural studies had achieved the academic levelling
of art and popular culture (anything now, it seems, can go into
a PhD thesis and in the pages of Frieze magazine), but that doesn't
mean that all cultural division had vanished, or indeed that all
culture is of equal value. In other words, the intellectual justification
of art's superiority over popular culture has been discredited only
to be saved at the last minute by the declaration that these debates
are no longer pertinent to our tolerant culture. A nice little opportunity
here, then, for the slightly bruised cultural conservative who had
been saving up arguments about value and quality just in case the
momentum of cultural democratization would slip.
Typically, cultural studies failed to question the relationship
between the scholar and culture, it merely extended the range of
the scholars objects of analysis. The forms of attention expected
of an intellectual were not challenged, even if punks and schoolgirls
were magically accorded the qualities and attitudes that were previously
the preserve of the educated. The weak-spot of cultural studies
was its radicalism. Like all desire, radicalism blinds. It makes
no sense, and holds no radical promise, to defend the cultural worth
of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em or The Bay City Rollers or Star Wars.
It's not that these are irredeemably bad examples of culture, or
even that it is not possible to enjoy them with a sizeable degree
of intellectual, moral or political savvy. But attending to popular
culture for the purposes of those intellectual, moral or political
principles is perhaps like joining Alcoholics Anonymous to find
a drinking partner. You might statistically have a very good chance
of achieving your goal, but the procedure is inconsistent. There
is no shortage of intellectuals writing intellectually about popular
culture, and it is not objectionable. What is objectionable is when
intellectuals project their intellectualism onto everyone else.
It is not that we must recognise the irreducible worthlessness of
those who love popular culture, quite the opposite. What is frustrating
and infuriating is that their affection for it is being turned into
its opposite by being made radical, intellectual, critical.
Insofar as intellectuals translate popular pleasures into radical
gestures, the things that count in popular culture - the forms of
attention and affection that popular culture lives off - the very
things which guarantee it's popularity, are being sidelined.
The Trouble with Pleasure: Why pleasure has no pedigree
Cultural elitists regard popular pleasures to be hardly worthy of
the title 'pleasure', and radical commentators fail to attend to
this normative ranking of pleasure because they prefer a different
vocabulary entirely, to speak of political acts rather than entertaining
experiences. Artists have done the same, reclaiming popular culture
for artistic forms of attention. There is, indeed, a whole genre
of art that has built itself out of an anthropological relationship
between the artist and popular culture. It is what Hal Foster calls
the 'ethnographic turn of contemporary art'. "In our current state
of artistic-theoretical ambivalences and cultural-political impasses,
anthropology is the compromise discourse of choice". One
of the reasons why anthropology seems so desirable to contemporary
artists, especially in their relations with popular culture and
everyday life, is that it simultaneously holds out a generous hand
to the downgraded aspects of social life and guarantees that the
artists own privileged position will not be infected by the values
of the befriended culture. It goes without saying that anthropology
offers a model in which the artist can engage in 'low' culture with
the emphasis squarely on knowledge rather than pleasure, in circumstances
where the pleasures of popular culture are hardly considered to
merit the term pleasure at all.
To speak of some pleasures as not deserving the title puts us in
the territory of cultural hierarchies that Pierre Bourdieu's sociology
has done most to map. Pleasure was subject to hierarchization long
before Bourdieu came along, and commentators had things to say about
these hierarchies before Bourdieu gave them a systematic treatment,
but what is most valuable about the sociology of culture is that
it takes what had been thought of as innate or natural and indexes
it to social forces and divisions that had been regarded as external
to art. In one sense, sociology turns its attention to art and culture
generally as a sort of philistine impulse because it treats it as
a secular and ordinary social activity. Taste classifies, and it
classifies the classifier, he says, insisting on the exact opposite
of what is usually claimed by the lovers of art, that taste is subjective,
internal, incorrigible and so forth. Bourdieu challenges this position
head-on when he says, the encounter with a work of art is not 'love
at first sight' as is generally supposed … The 'eye' is a product
of history reproduced by education. And it is the revelation of
the hidden workings of history and cultural reproduction that brings
life to a sociology of culture in the first place - what makes the
sociology of art an impertinence - as Bourdieu explains:
Sociology endeavours to establish the conditions in which the consumers
of cultural goods, and their taste for them, are produced, and at
the same time to describe the different ways of appropriating such
of these objects as are regarded at a particular moment as works
of art, and the social conditions of the constitution of the mode
of appropriation that is considered legitimate.
He might have added that this sociological project was bound to
be misconstrued by art lovers and intellectuals because it discovers
the economies of culture 'behind the backs', so to speak, of its
participants, rather then describing and accounting for how it feels
to be a member of this community and what its values are. The illusion
of the 'fresh eye' as a 'naked eye' is an attribute of those who
wear the spectacles of culture and who do not see that which enables
them to see.
It is an unavoidable coincidence of the sociology of culture that
its results will not conform to the best knowledge about art and
taste because what it speaks of is not only what goes on prior to
membership of a culture (namely, education and socialization) but
also how cultural goods (including tastes) operate not out of the
souls of its members but in economies linked to social divisions.
If Bourdieu is right then such knowledge is typically unknowable
for individuals who live their culture with the fluency of a mother
tongue. What's more the acknowledgement of the production and reproduction
of culture would put a question mark over a core ideology of cultural
value: to legitimatise a social privilege by pretending that it
is a gift of nature. Bourdieu consistently inverts these values,
opposing 'cultivated' pleasures with 'natural' pleasures, pleasures
of the body and so forth. Perhaps the most quoted section of Bourdieu's
inversion of the inverted economies of cultural distinction is the
concluding paragraph of his introduction to Distinction, which is
as follows:
The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile - in a word,
natural - enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture,
implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied
with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished
pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural
consumption are predisposed consciously and deliberately or not,
to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences.
Ultimately, Bourdieu's inversion of the dichotomous field of pleasures
is no better than the one he replaces. What is significant is the
suggestion that pleasures exist in hierarchical relations with one
another and that, therefore, the operations of 'cultural capital',
social codes and symbolic violence find their way into our hearts
- as feelings of pleasure and revulsion, enjoyment and abjection.
If cultural division makes its way into the recesses of our intimate
predilections then it certainly won't do to invert the given hierarchy
of pleasures. Neither will cultural division be overcome with the
uncritical celebration of popular culture or the simple indulgence
and license of corrupt pleasures. Pleasure-seeking is not the answer
because the problem is how pleasure is always already riddled with
cultural divisions. Also, pleasure is incapable of undoing the effects
of cultural division because one of the primary effects of cultural
division is to cast pleasure as unserious.
Pleasure is the problem, not the solution, but this is not the same
as saying that pleasure is something to be regarded with suspicion.
There is a long tradition of the philosophical and political fear
of the potential of pleasure to alienate us from our best interests
or the best course of action. Lusts take your mind away from questions
of truth, freedom and the greater good. Adorno's concept of the
'subjectless subject' is a dystopian vision of the structural reproduction
and spread of individuals locked in the unfree grip of pleasures.
As a warning it is as clear as a bell, but if it is meant to be
a description of consumers under the conditions of post-Fordist
capital, then it is an objectionable under-estimation of all of
us. A politicised philosopher who has recently turned her attention
to 'hedonism', Kate Soper, hopes to avoid the old Left asceticism
without falling into the trap of consumerist pleasure by thinking
of pleasure as 'troubled'. The general thrust sounds very close
to our own, but it turns out to be less about pleasure being troubled
by social and cultural division and more about pleasure being a
troubling response to a troubling political situation. In other
words, it doesn't respond adequately. Here is how she describes
the predicament of modern pleasure:
Today, many of our simplest, most universal, and hitherto less tension-ridden
needs - for food, travel, recreation, enjoyment of nature - have
become experienced as problematic, either because we provide for
them in ways which we know to be ecologically damaging and hence
in the long term self-destructive; or because we know that the sophisticated
satisfactions we have come to rely upon co-exist with deprivation
elsewhere of the minimal means of life, and cannot be supplied to
the human community at large (or even indefinitely to some affluent
sector within it); or because (as in the case of our relationship
to nature) we sense a loss or corruption of the object of pleasure
itself.
Soper's pleasures are troubled by the conditions under which the
pleasures are produced. So, a love of India is spoiled by the knowledge
that tourism is eroding the land around an ancient monument. At
no point, therefore, is Soper's troubled pleasures meant to account
for the kind of trouble that haunts pleasures related to low, inferior
or shameful experiences. We would have to fashion an alternative
formulation of 'troubled pleasure' if we were to account for, say,
the academic aesthete whose love of country music was kept secret
from his professional colleagues. This sort of pleasure would be
troubled by pleasure itself, or the hierarchies of pleasure. Some
pleasures, of course, would be more likely to be troubled than others,
under this description, because the hierarchy of pleasures will
confer prestige on some pleasures and not on others. This is not
a charter for a Bourdieu-type inversion, however, for it must be
remembered that it is always possible for a Professor of radical
contemporary art to feel as embarrassed about her secret taste for
elevated culture, as it is for an MP to be ashamed of his homosexual
trysts. Think about Bingo.
The
point is not to develop a rival hierarchy of pleasures that could
place Bingo, instead of art, within the wise alliance of beauty,
truth and justice. It may be that art isn't justified in being counted
as a constituent of 'the good life'. Nevertheless, Bingo, booze,
and fags are certainly not the sort of habits or pastimes which
emerge from or contribute to self-consciousness, self-emancipation,
political awareness, and social transformation. In other words,
Bingo falls on the wrong side of Marx's distinction between what
the proletariat wants and what is in the proletariat's interest.
The pleasures of Bingo are not more natural than the pleasures of
American Painting, nor are they more pleasurable. What is troubled
about the pleasures of Bingo is not the proximity of profit-making
by the big gambling companies (this is a problem with the social
relations of Bingo, not the pleasures that Bingo involves), it is
the lack of social value placed on such pleasures. And the problem
doesn't go away even if the lack of value can be justified through
sound arguments that establish the alienation, self-delusion or
corruption of those pleasures. In other words, it doesn't matter
whether the social judgement of the pleasures of Bingo is true or
false, what matters is that the hierarchies of pleasure have direct
impact on the experience of the pleasures themselves. So, our disagreement
with Soper is not the one that she anticipates when she says her
arguments leave her open to the charge of puritanism and self-righteousness.
We do not take issue with the type of pleasures she prefers, or
even if she casts doubt on pleasure in general. Soper wants to ask
others to be troubled by pleasure in the way that you might invite
someone to go on a march; we want to suggest that pleasure is troubled
whether you like it or not because pleasures are subject to cultural
division from within.
Intellectual Imbecilism
Zizek,
in effect, takes us full-circle in our understanding of the relationship
between theory and popular culture. No more is the intellectual
inviting us merely to keep our eyes and ears open for the rare occasions
on which popular culture can present us with little gems, or how
radical theory can be used to decode the cryptic resistance which
popular culture harbours in its difference from official and elevated
culture. Zizek doesn't even settle for the relativistic or populist
celebration of popular pleasures. Neither does he deny that popular
culture is, or might be, imbecilic. What is important about Zizek's
account of the relationship between theory and popular culture is
that instead of using intellectual categories and values to enlighten
us about the neglected significance of cinema, TV, haircuts and
trainers, Zizek uses banal and imbecilic culture to test the categories
and values of social theory. None of this implies that popular culture
has finally become legitimate or legitimating, but it does suggest
that the old prejudices against it have been discredited at least
to the point that we can refer to it without assuming or confirming
its worthlessness. Zizek does not dismantle the hierarchies of cultural
division but he is attempting to establish new and less divisive
relations between theory and popular culture. If it was once thought
that pleasure - especially popular pleasure - ought to be monitored
and restrained by the enlightened law of the intellect, then Zizek
has learned that love is another form of intelligence. Loving popular
culture is not the antidote to the elitist or radical rejection
of it, but love certainly sees what critique is blind to. Cultural
division and the hierarchies of pleasure has meant that intellectual
culture has failed to have any love for popular culture, and the
resistance to cultural division permits love where there once was
none. Learning about popular culture is not enough; learning to
love it is a good start.
Love is a key Barthesian antidote to the paternal law of reason.
Love scatters with nimble evasions, where methodological rigour
would control every wayward pleasure with its structures and abstractions.
The hierarchies of reason and right-thinking lose their mastery
in the thick of love's seductions. That is, so long as love is staunch.
It is true that love is capable of turning the world upside down.
It is equally true, however, that love can be buried by the weight
of reason, repressed by shame, and sacrificed for prestige. Love
is no guarantee of the self-presence of desire, but is itself subject
to the tyrannies that Barthes would have it escape. Love is not
enough. And this is why Zizek comes in handy, with his politicized
sense of love's traumatic formation. In his Ticklish Subject he
mentions love less often than in some of his other books but love's
value leaves its imprint throughout. This is most evident, perhaps,
in those passages that insist on the unsurpassable status of antagonism.
It is antagonism, not (traditional/ universalist/ or relativist)
inclusion, that promises most. Tolerance precludes politicization;
antagonism vouchsafes democracy through politicization. Visions
and programmes of social harmony gentrify the traumatic dimension
of the political by suppressing antagonism from the social and,
therefore, undernourish democracy by cutting off its supply of struggle.
This is why the habits of universalization have to be reversed:
it is not the propertied white male who ought to be universalized
for the benefit of all; it is those who 'have no proper place' who
ought to be the trigger of our universalizations. This is why Zizek
gets behind the 'scum' who shout 'we are the people'.
Political ideas rarely yield cultural outcomes without major rearticulation.
Zizek's defense of scum, single mums, the homeless and migrant workers,
however, is soaked in cultural debate from the outset. What's more,
there is a substantial field of cultural theory already devoted
to the question of the relationship between the 'false universal'
of art and those cultures that have 'no proper place'. If antagonism
is an unsurpassable precondition of political struggle, then is
not cultural division and the rivalries it fosters the first condition
of culture's politicization, of culture's incorporation of struggle
within its own confines? If so, then it is the cultural scum, the
trash of popular culture, that must be the starting point of our
universalization. This is not because popular culture is ultimately
or secretly 'good', or simply because its affirmation disrupts the
seamless operation of dominant values. Such tactics join forces
with the 'false universalism' by attempting either to reveal its
falsity or substitute it for another positive content. The point
is not to find another affirmation with which to charge the false
universal of culture but to strain the very functioning of cultural
universalization by identifying with the culturally embarrassing.
Love has a part to play because this process of identification cannot
be merely a formulaic adherence to a dialectical law of affirming
that which has no proper place. It will turn out, eventually, that
popular culture is not wayward enough to be the fulcrum of our universalizing
identification, we'll have to get dirtier and dafter than this,
but for the time being, and despite all the postmodernist theoretical
sanctification of pap, popular culture is the scum that we cannot
afford to bracket off from our speculations of a better life.
|
|