Bureaucracy, like government, has vested interests. My socialist friends used to speak about placing various stockholder or privately owned institutions ‘in the public sector’. But government is not the ‘public sector’. Government is an institution with its own institutional needs and developmental vectors. Since the primary vector of government is power and the acquisition of power, the downfall of Communism and programmatic socialism is already written into their basic tenets, the presumption that once government has gained absolute control over the economy, it will behave like a service institution rather than a power center.
            Institutions are a form of government. And bureaucracies are the forms of institutions. Americans have been brilliant systematizers. When an ad hoc system was required to accomplish a specific goal, ‘American know-how’, as we used to say, performed extraordinary feats. The reorganization of the American economy – including a radical alteration of cultural conventions and mores – undoubtedly constituted a significant factor in the victory of the Allies. But at this point, we must question whether that kind of creative vitality remains. Probably as a consequence of World War II, the generation that fought it came home and systematized the whole society essentially according to the same program. The so-called ‘military-industrial complex’ is only one residual piece. The reorganization of capitalism itself as a society-wide investment system and hence as a universal cultural ideal is another. And, of course, the complete reorganization of the educational system as a top-down institutional structure is a third.
            The first problem, of course, is that the vitality of a system is largely a condition of its creation, not its subsequent life. When an institution is created for a purpose, the creators function together in the service of the ideal. But once the institution is established, the bureaucrats take over. And by bureaucrats, here, I mean those whose concern is the institution itself and not its ulterior or avowed goal. Because, by its very nature, the intrinsic purpose of an institution is self-perpetuation and the acquisition of power. And this ‘internal’ purpose in the nature of the institution itself inevitably tends to take over the original object for which the institution was formed.

            Less than ten years after World War II, and three or four years after I had begun my classroom education, I was going to school with children who had started their instruction in a one room schoolhouse, a schoolhouse with district affiliation, but almost entirely controlled by the local parents. Today, the educational system is controlled from the state capitol. State inspectors come in, not only to monitor state and federal programs, but also to assess and rate the school itself. The school board constantly operates under the shadowing question of whether its measures are ‘in compliance’.

            The second problem, specifically, is that education itself cannot be institutionalized.
            And this is also the first problem, since the vitality of a system, in its creative phase, is precisely the educational process by which the system is being created. By extension, of course, this means that the bureaucratization of the system is inherently anti-educational. That is, by its very nature, bureaucracy, as such, is inherently anti-creative and anti-intellectual.

            When my wife began taking for-credit art classes at the local community college, the introductory studio consisted in the teacher heaping up a pile of relatively random objects on a table and asking the students to draw it. To say that the placement of the objects was ‘anti-aesthetic’ is understatement. The students were not being asked to identify aesthetic value. Just the reverse, the intention was to have the students render, specifically without reference to aesthetic value. In other words, the anti-aestheticism was a conscious element in the instructional process. Now this kind of anti-individualist instruction is fine, if one wants to develop marines, a cohort of combat ready soldiers prepared to act as a unit in one of the most horrendous situations produced by human activity. But art is ultimately about the individual and individual perception.
            Granted that the aesthetic sensibility of the beginning student is almost inevitably simplistic, at least in some dimensions. As Henry Miller says, we are all in the thrall of ‘feline beauty’, of the simplest seduction of line and color. Almost anyone can recognize Raphael’s line as ‘aesthetic’. But the virtue of Raphael is that he can take us from a relatively simplistic appreciation of line to a relatively sophisticated. The simplistic seductions of the visual are the key to the more recondite. To destroy the simplistic understanding in the putative name of a ‘higher’ aestheticism is a fraud. And what gives it the lie in the contemporary classroom is the practice of ‘crits’, studio criticism by peers. Even at the first level of studio, one’s fellow students are invited to criticize the work. In other words, we are rejecting connoisseurship – the presumption of a superior aestheticism – in favor of a collective process. That is, the teaching practices point directly to a leveling process which is essentially antithetical to legitimate aesthetic understanding, and hence to art itself.
            We have developed a rationale that justifies this, a rationale that aspires to philosophy, namely ‘postmodernism’. But postmodernism is not a philosophy, but an abdication. If, in our research, we try to approach postmodernism directly, we are generally given a history, a history that goes back to Nietzsche, or even back to Hume. But, if we look closely at the history, what we are looking at is simply a critique of all substantive philosophy. In other words, what we are looking at is an essential rejection of philosophy, culminating in the final self-dissolution of logic in the early 20^th century. And, if we press our researches further, we will hear professors of philosophy making vague admissions of the possible ‘end’ or ‘demise’ of philosophy.
            Nietzsche, however, does not justify the abdication. In fact, to this point, he is the last great speculative philosopher. What he insisted, however, is that philosophy finally is the transformation of the individual, and not the presentation of a ‘system’. And he insisted that he had undergone this transformation, a transformation that involved the subversion of all the supposedly rational or analytical processes and conclusions of historical philosophy. He traced his own lineage in terms of philosophers whose conclusions showed the formal limitations of rational philosophy and the inherently tragic conditions of human existence. But he still insisted, contrary to his self-styled followers, that philosophy nevertheless involves a ‘substance’.
            Philosophy can only justify postmodernism by its failure. That is, postmodernism is not a philosophy, but an attitude. As such, in itself, postmodernism can only be justified by its contemporary uses, and not by its history. What justifies postmodernism is the bureaucratization and systematization of the society. Postmodernism is not a philosophy, but the rationalization of the anti-intellectual and anti-aesthetic – that is, the essentially anti-creative – collectivization of the culture. Undoubtedly, Communism has failed as an economic theory of government in Russia and the east. But, equally clearly, communism has profoundly succeeded as a process of intellectual collectivization and aesthetic subjugation in the ‘culture’ of the west.