Disappearing World

By the end of the 19th century the gestures of the western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost.



'In the cinema , a society that has lost its gestures seeks to re-appropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss. An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them (The Marlboro Man as an image of coolness, courage). 'Bourgeois man's move to interiority, psychology.Silent cinema: the attempt to evoke what was slipping through its fingers for ever.
----Notes on a Gesture, Agamben.



To know is to know of departures, not destinations; to know desires, not the desirable. There is no telos, no purpose to Nature. Just process. The medium is the message. It is a prejudice , a presupposition of the exact sciences that reality is only that which can be known objectively. A total picture would, surely, have to include consciousness itself, the mind that 'knows' , as something objectively known as well? Escher! The mind is both 'subject' and 'object'. The sciences themselves are a product of consciousness.
--From Levinas on Husserl.



The enlarged but fragmented identities of the city. Speed implies we never rest on one; the gaze can never be allowed to settle. A restless mind finds itself disinherited from the earth's slow wisdom. We live in the 'space of flows,' where all is emerging, all is disappearing: all that is solid melts into air. The modern is multicoloured, polyphonic; the old world is grey-and so is mass industrialized society.



The technologies and institutions of modernity-writing, painting, sculpture, drama-give way to other media, ones more appropriate to an age of liquid modernity: the television, film, radio, the Internet. The world itself has become a city. All is flux, light and diversity. All seriousness dissipated by the 'empire of happiness' , that 'pagan concept' that holds us spellbound.
----From Williams Raymond, The Politics of Modernism.


Hugo Munsterberg, commenting on silent movies and how modern media dulls the senses says, the massive outer world has lost its weight..it has been freed from space, time , and causality. [He feared that] moving pictures reach complete isolation from the practical world.
---From R.Sennett, Flesh and Stone.


Society of the Spectacle: DeBord.


Television , with its flickering series of trivial momentary unreflective uncomprehended images, pictures the state of the prisoners in the Cave .Captivated by the spectacle of the plain ordinary man or the absurd, we must engross ourselves in the lives of other people, their petty dramas and tribulations. But you take things too seriously old bean. It's only light entertainment.

Hannah Arendt: The sad opaqueness of a life centred around only itself; a weightless irrelevance. The unbearable lightness of being...

'But there is real pathos in this dying people. These are my people-my own father, brother, mother, aunt and uncle...Yet I have no illusions: the death of these archaic, unprofitable, businesses is inevitable..But it is also the case that something rich and timeless that bids us to our roots and past, something central to our cultural imagination..is being lost. '
---G.Bowley, on the decline of farming in England (Prospect magazine)

'The mountaineers are perhaps America's only peasantry.These men and women have been shut up in their loved mountains since the coming of the first settlers , and have conserved their rough, antique modes of living. the mountains still hold more of mysterious life than a stranger can quickly penetrate. The scattered huts shelter men almost startled by their own voice. Their speech has the intonation of solitude.

A dynamic sense of freedom, unconfiding, unadministered. Knowing only the stark changes of life, the unexplained varying of sun, wind and rain, the diurnal infusions of light and darkness , and the sporadic labour of the open air, the mountaineer obeys instinct without discriminating. Though unconsciously he carries within him, as he breaks into the laurel, that primal instinct of all, the instinct for law.'
---V.S.P., 'The Pritchett Century'

'Modern western culture is largely shorn of attentiveness to both habitat and habitus. Where we live-to what we are rooted- no longer defines who we are. We are, in short, a people without "habit", with no common custom, place or dress to lend us any shared meaning.'
---B. Lane, 'The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

Thousands of years were needed to mould these intensive, monotonous melodies and to bring them to their final form. Unlike the polyphonous western music, which almost always tends to express individual feelings, these Arabian melodies, with their eternally repeated tone-sequence, seem to be only tonal symbols for an emotional knowledge shared by many people-not to evoke moods but to remind you of your own spiritual experiences. They were born very long ago out of the atmosphere of the desert, the rhythms of the wind and of nomad life, the feel of wide expanses, the contemplation of an eternal present; and just as the basic things of human life always remain the same, these melodies are timeless and changeless.'
---M.Asad, Road to Mecca

Never read more than you can live.
---Goethe.

Instead, we think that an ever expanding amount of books, information, images and sounds can be registered, made sense of. But surely there comes a time when things become blurred. Sitting in a train that goes too fast means that we cannot 'take things in'. The world rushes past us, and we either regret the missed opportunities (for we cannot slow things down) or understand little of what comes our way.