>Any artifact, once completed, is simply itself. It can be stimulating to
>thought to talk about what it does not do or does not 'contain,' and
>perhaps can enhance perception of the artifact, but one then is also
>talking about something that does not exist, the strictly hypothetical
>artifact that is in some mystic way both the "same" as the one in front
>of us and also a different 'thing.'
I'm struck by the way you, as a retired professor of English, devalue the importance of cultural artifacts. You often sound like some New Critic, for whom the text existed in glorious isolation from social cause or effect. This is especially odd in the light of your specialization in Milton and Pound - the first a significant figure in the emergence of modern bourgeois thought and one of the most influential writers in English, the second rather influential as a poet and an actual fascist. When it comes to political writing, your model is the leaflet, something of purely instrumental value with no aesthetic merit. In literature, it's like you're Cleanth Brooks, and in politics, an activism-ist. Weird.
Doug