A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.
Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?
And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space.
---Czeslaw Milosz
Notes from P. Rieff's 'Sacred Order':
" A culture is constituted by institutions that supply the texts of transit, those texts in many media, from sacred to social order. The third world's * teaching authority is not to expound eternal truths but cast roles where identities were. Identity must accept a certain canonicity: the commanding truths are known."
Art as a form of redemption, but an art that is severed from its roots and an art "that is not a mode of address in sacred order , to what is above it, fails." Culture is the space in which words, images, social relations are ordered. ..the modern, third-world is anti-culture, and rests on a rejection of any authority. Hannah Arendt would say that this crisis of transmission, the inability to go back to an inaugural moment, is a fundamentally a political failure -but it has ramifications for culture. Is this why creation and new beginnings are so problematic now?
Wallace Stevens: Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not revelations of belief but the portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that man's truth is the final resolution of everything.
Protagoras: Man is the measure of all things. The Renaissance! But he is a king of shreds and patches. What is destroyed is not just particular norms but the very idea of a norm: All that is solid melts into air.
"There is no knowledge of the sacred order, only revelations of it, and embodiments of it in living traditions"; seen in this light, repression is "a way of rebelling against the commanding truths without seeing our face in relation to the lowering elements." In this, it mirrors the Fall: the desire to see the world contingently. It is as if the social order is thought to be completely independent of any other realm; as if the central axis of our lives was no more. And following from that, what does it mean to talk of experience any more? Doesn't experience depend on continuity, on tradition?
"The third world culture is constituted by mocking the efforts to complete continuously the revelationary worlds of sacred order...[in it] the essential knowledge in either the old sacred orders or social orders is true, and the something that matters is the mode of making it clear that nothing is true."
The world is a stage. The theatricality of the modern man. Liquid modernity: we live in times where the stage-set is rapidly changing behind us. We play the king and then sometimes the fool. Compared to stabilitas: something inward and spiritual, an unswerving, determined, "engraved character".
"To live in the verticals in authority is to live secure in that knowledge that by knowing where you are in your very acts and thoughts you could know what you are."
The third culture asserts nothing but ourselves, our powers and interests, dreams an imagination. What else is there in a gnostic universe but quantity: power and force and extension? Nihilism and fate: A. Whitehead: The laws of physics are the decrees of fate...A Parmenedian universe. The Will, whether demonic or not, is all that we can assert. If we rebel, at least we can know that it is we who do so. We read nothing but ourselves. This is not, perhaps, incidental to our fascination with images. Can we think 'out of the box' any more? Totality vs Infinity.[See Iris M. t.v.]
As Michael Lind writes
The US ship of state veers now in one direction, now the other. From a distance, one might conclude that the captain is a maniac. But a spyglass reveals that there is no captain or crew at all, only rival gangs of technocrats, ideologues, populists and zealots devoted to Jesus Christ or Adam Smith, each boarding the derelict vessel and capturing the wheel briefly before being tossed overboard.
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2005/in_defence_of_mandarins
The death of God is the death of all transcendence. In the ensuing vacuum there is a need for fictions, some absolute that will take its place: the State or maybe the process itself. Until merely going round is a final good.
It Must Be Abstract, It Must Change. It Must give Pleasure.
Nietzsche, from 'The Gay Science':
Where are we moving? Away from all suns?Are we now plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward in all directions, is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as in an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? (Hopper?)
* 'Third world' refers not to a geographical or political entity but to the world we live in now, a third stage in Rieff's schema.
3 comments:
I guess what I take from Solaris, although I haven't seen it for a long time, is the realisation that yes even in the depths of space, man can only but confront himself (not to be PC but a good thesis topic must be the gendering of this kind of Sci-Fi) but even that self is an almost total mystery, we may be alienated from the universe but this self-alienation goes even deeper. Personally I find this is quite liberating, if we take it as a place where we start to listen, and respond, rather than act and impose. Perhaps the western headache is that we try as you say, to make noise, nothing of which will make sense, because life is not something that essentially can be captured, harnessed, or bent to our will or that responds to the sound of our voice - we are not magicians!
I was listening to the Melvin Bragg radio discussion prog. all made avaliable by the Beeb; the discussion was about Utopian visions and Steve Connor who's a prof at Birkbeck said something v. interesting, that the debacles of the 20thC were often caused by those 'speaking on behalf of life' for 'life' - who's against that?! this attempt to make 'life' be something,to speak some set of pure values was the excuse people needed to inflict immense suffering.
We're not very good magicians or ventriliquists !
Citizen, too many profound points to contemplate at this late hour. But I do think the point about life is correct..and related to the 'bio-politics' of the last century. Hannah Arendt had said (before Agamben) that the biological ('the natural') was brought into the political realm. I think this ws the decisive modern move. Since then, we 've been obsessed by the 'std of living'.
Perhaps this is the wrong way to put it; perhaps it is the obsession with death that has led to the focus on life. But what of a life that is fundamentally finite, of a life that doesn't open up onto any horizons? What do we do if we want to escape but there is nowhere to escape to? 'Joy in contingency or nihilism'?
I can' but help but think that Julia Kristeva was onto something when she wrote, in a brilliant essay, that Holbein's Dead Christ marked a certain departure..or , rather, a lack of one!:)
Citizen, I've put some of Illich's words on 'life' under 'Biopolitics' if you're interested. Kristeva on Holbein is under 'art': "The dead Christ"
Post a Comment