I need to collect my thoughts on P. Rieff's Deathworks, but also first read it with more attentiveness instead of just plucking quotes from the text (tempting though that is).
The idea that many institutions (the media, higher education, the entertainment industry) are "anti-culture" and "anti-education" is one that resonates with your own unformulated reflections.
Thomas More's strength, opposition: "Not my pride, not my spleen nor any other of my appetites oppose it, but I do, I."
In what sense 'anti-' though? To the extent that the economy and mainstream culture produces and valorizes the fragmentary, the mongrel, value neutrality, indifference (blase: the quintessential modern, urban attitude, pose, stance, gesture to everything).
Duchamps: the piss-take. Art, poetry, architecture can no longer have any "theological reference" (must not be allowed to). Everything (and everyone) must stand alone. In this reading, there is no social because there is no sacred (the cross).
If everything is a game then why bother?
~
The most appalling deathworks are not to be found in art, of course, but in the camps. The spiritual death, the nullity that was imposed on people, before their physical death. Europe, 'the west,' has not thought about this seriously enough.
~
This egotistically invented world..accents its instability. Stability is a function of faith. I follow St. Benedict's use of stabilitas as of something inward and spiritual, otherwise invisible except as an unswerving or determined-what Kierkegaard called "engraved"-character
~
Of course, there must have been something seductive about transgression (the lure of the abyss) but no-one has stopped to think-partly because we cannot stop- what happens when transgression loses its momentum. Once the sacred has been negated and the shock of the new has lost its ability to shock what is there left to attack? Nothing is sacred, Rushdie once wrote, except, perhaps, the freedom to ridicule and debunk and mock..Je suis..
Well, if that's what passes for intelligence it would be better to be naive and free from such sophisticated foolishness. Is there not something slightly infantile in this perpetual desire to rebel?
What, exactly, does a university education prepare you for? Certainly not the possibility of living an open and inquisitive life, or a familiarity with some of the deepest questions (and answers) that have preoccupied so many of those before us. More likely a financially richer life, some technical skills, a casting into those rigorous ways of thinking whose contours are determined by a particular discipline. Only "rigour" here has no relation to first principles or final ends. At bottom it's not much more than a shoddy form of cleverness.
The idea that many institutions (the media, higher education, the entertainment industry) are "anti-culture" and "anti-education" is one that resonates with your own unformulated reflections.
Thomas More's strength, opposition: "Not my pride, not my spleen nor any other of my appetites oppose it, but I do, I."
In what sense 'anti-' though? To the extent that the economy and mainstream culture produces and valorizes the fragmentary, the mongrel, value neutrality, indifference (blase: the quintessential modern, urban attitude, pose, stance, gesture to everything).
Duchamps: the piss-take. Art, poetry, architecture can no longer have any "theological reference" (must not be allowed to). Everything (and everyone) must stand alone. In this reading, there is no social because there is no sacred (the cross).
If everything is a game then why bother?
~
The most appalling deathworks are not to be found in art, of course, but in the camps. The spiritual death, the nullity that was imposed on people, before their physical death. Europe, 'the west,' has not thought about this seriously enough.
~
This egotistically invented world..accents its instability. Stability is a function of faith. I follow St. Benedict's use of stabilitas as of something inward and spiritual, otherwise invisible except as an unswerving or determined-what Kierkegaard called "engraved"-character
~
Of course, there must have been something seductive about transgression (the lure of the abyss) but no-one has stopped to think-partly because we cannot stop- what happens when transgression loses its momentum. Once the sacred has been negated and the shock of the new has lost its ability to shock what is there left to attack? Nothing is sacred, Rushdie once wrote, except, perhaps, the freedom to ridicule and debunk and mock..Je suis..
Well, if that's what passes for intelligence it would be better to be naive and free from such sophisticated foolishness. Is there not something slightly infantile in this perpetual desire to rebel?
What, exactly, does a university education prepare you for? Certainly not the possibility of living an open and inquisitive life, or a familiarity with some of the deepest questions (and answers) that have preoccupied so many of those before us. More likely a financially richer life, some technical skills, a casting into those rigorous ways of thinking whose contours are determined by a particular discipline. Only "rigour" here has no relation to first principles or final ends. At bottom it's not much more than a shoddy form of cleverness.
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