---Agamben, The Man Without Content.
The self-revealing gestures of the soul.
--Kenneth Clark commenting on Leonardo's 'Last Supper'
There are some gestures that appear to be highly stylized-the 'mudras' in Hinduism/Buddhism, the attestation of divine unity in Islam and so on. There are others which are culturally specific or maybe linked with a particular vocation or the land..anyway, such a connection, if it did exist, remains largely forgotten in the mists of time...
[aside: the Greek 'Moutza' seems quite similar to the Punjabi 'lanath' and both are, perhaps, connected to shame.]
Traditional civilisations remain faithful to their decor. A Chinese interior of fifteenth century could equally date from the eighteenth...compared with China and the rest of the world, the characteristic of the West in matters of furniture and interior decoration was undoubtedly its taste for change....The beautiful was represented by the feast-day costume, often handed down from parent to child. It remained identical for centuries on end, despite the variety of national and provincial popular costumes.
At that time [1700] the world gained a new lease of life and spread everywhere its new meaning: keeping up with the times. From then on fashion in the modern sense began to influence everything. In fact, the further back in time one goes, even in Europe, one is more likely to find the still waters of ancient situations like those we have described in India, China, and Islam.
---Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism.
Is this, then, the secret of the west's success: the ability to constantly re-invent itself? Is this an indication of its boundless, restless energy, its joie de vivre or might we detect something else going on here?
The quote has the authority it does because it destroys all authority; it is picked up and isolated from its social context where it had meaning and value. It is abstracted from a living tradition, a lived experience. In a similar vein, the collector acquires things whose value has either become completely privatized (my things) or destroyed in the process of being brought into the nexus of market exchange: a mere thing amongst things. It ceases to remain something fundamental to our social world and belongs to a spiritual economy whose barest outlines we do not even fathom.
In some sense, then, the modern west can only accumulate relics from the past, can only stage the past in some spectacular display (museums). The art-objects of other cultures are , first and foremost, viewed as 'objects' in setting that has no or little relation to the web of life from whence they came; they cannot be touched or handled and they very rarely touch us. Instead, they must be displayed behind a protective screen, to be gawped at like a fetish, some lost remnant of a past that no longer informs our present or maps out the horizons of our futures. For sure, we may marvel at some technical ingenuity but on the whole, we are only moved by surface phenomenon. Our response is merely an aesthetic one.
Could there be any clearer indication of the negation of the past as a vibrantly illuminating principle for our current thoughts and actions? Instead, the past is well and truly 'killed', stuffed so that we can think of it as passed. Our unhappy consciousness may on occasion be struck by a sense of nostalgia but this quickly evaporates on coming into contact with the real world again.
This loss of tradition (call it what you may: authority, continuity, cultural transmission) is something that is not to be mourned we are told. But perhaps art can now only be a story that tells of the ending of all stories, a perpetual state of mourning is all we have to cling on to....
Modern dance always seems so clumsy, clownish-a free for all. Just do it, go with the flow, express yourself. When the most elegant of dances grow out of highly ritualised movements and one can say the same for the most passionate as well-Flamenco. Perhaps we need to think of creativity in other ways now...~~~
Gosh, re-reading this makes me sound rather conservative and highly opinionated! Er...don't even start reader!
Strange, when you really don't care much for authority, when you think that much of what passes as 'continuity' is really stagnation or a desperate kind of boredom. And isn't it true that what is said here flies in the face of a lot of the 'open' , 'blue' and 'broken circle' posts?
Certainly you still think that the 'staging' of the past (for political and cultural uses) is one part of modernity-but it's only one part, and evidently not a central feature. To say "can only accumulate.." is bordering on the polemical.
But what about the gestures? Cut to the chase, Watson.
No, the world is till the world, and simple gestures are still unmiraculously understood by most. The fundamental things still apply as time goes by. A sigh is still a sigh. There is no failing of language or words, there are still as many (good) storytellers as there have always been; I wave, you wave back; I say something, you blush. I have to make a sign to show I've no more soul to reveal to you, and you're still a clown. Which gesture, jester?
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