on Modernism
Brian Dell
Note: I've cut out the parts where I talked about specific
American novels so this essay seems somewhat disjointed.
ABSTRACT:
Moderns are primarily characterized by the esteem with which they
hold consciousness, and this very esteem is the cause of their
angst, as an expansion of consciousness entails an erosion of myth
and this loss of myth, in turn, alienates the subject.
---
The Dilemma of Consciousness:
Modernism as _gnosis_
Although definitions of "Modernism" are generally as varied as the
definitions of "elephant" suggested by blind men touching different
parts of the animal, Daniel Joseph Singal's definition of Modernism
provides a more useful introduction into the nature of the beast than
most:
Modernism - in stark contrast to Victorianism - eschews innocence and
demands instead to know 'reality' in all its depth and complexity, no
matter how incomplete and paradoxical that knowledge might be, and no
matter how painful.
(41)
Paul de Man has said that Modern thought "at its best" has
featured "the persistent attempt of a consciousness to reach an
understanding of itself" (12-13). An inquiry is more productive when
the object of its study is distinguished from its background, and so an
impulse to bring oneself into relief - a will to uniqueness - is typical
of Moderns. Such would explain, it least, the Modern enthuasiasm for the
original and experimental or for what Frederic Jameson calls "the high-
modernist ideology of style - what is unique and unmistakable as your
own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body" (67). An example
of the "the idiosyncrasies of the moderns and their 'inimitable' styles"
(Jameson, 66) would be Hemingway and his distinctive "iceberg" style of
narration.
The lionization of consciousness and the concomitant emphasis on
individuating the self accounts for another distinction of Modern texts:
their inaccessability. Modern works are notoriously opaque to those
ignorant of the cultural tradition to which they allude. This elitism
is largely motivated by an anxiety that "cultured" style and discourse
will be "eclipsed [or] reduced to a neutral and reifed media speech"
(Jameson, 66).
The advanced capitalist countries of today are now a field of stylistic
and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue
to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but
they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable
to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not
only the absence of any great collective project but also the
unavailability of the older national language itself.
(Jameson, 66)
It must be emphasized that the Modern concern for creative production is
_narcissitic_. Its impulse to secure the integrity of high culture by
recovering cultural memory (nursing a nostalgia for the more literate
age) is rooted in the impulse to secure the integrity of the self by
recovering (or becoming conscious of) the self's personal history.
Although the concern in both cases is for creative production, it deals
with the problem as a problem of the self; it is concerned with the
unravelling of the social fabric of particular, concrete communities
only insofar as it affects the interests of the abstracted Individual.
The Modern perspective, in short, is highly "centered."
If ... the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its
pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold, and
to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes
difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject
could result in anything but 'heaps of fragments' and in a practice of
the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary.
(Jameson, 71)
The connection between consciousness and the intimidating nature
of modern texts has been discussed by T.S. Eliot, high priest of
British Modernism, in his 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual
Talent":
But the difference between the present and the past is that the
conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an
extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.
Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because
we _know_ so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are
that which we know.
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my
programme for a _metier_ of poetry. The objection is that doctrine
requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which
can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It
will even be asserted that much learning deadens or perverts poetic
sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet
ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary
receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine
knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations,
drawing-drooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity.
Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it.
Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most
men could from the whole British museum. What is to be insisted upon
is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the
past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness
throughout his career.
(87)
Opposed to the impulse to individuated consciousness is what I
would call the "impulse to innocence" or reunification with concrete
life and unmediated experience. Of course, the pain of lost innocence
can only be felt after one has lost it:
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion;
it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and
emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."
(Eliot, 90-91)
American sociologist Daniel Bell inveighed against "Modern"
culture in his essay, "The Return of the Sacred?":
"[I speak here of] a society [that is] wholly absorbed into the
economic engorgement of the profane, as in a capitalism that treats
nothing as sacred, but converts all objects into commodities to be
bought and sold to the highest bidders. When there are few rituals
to mark the turns in the wheel of life, if all events become the same
with no ceremony to mark the distinctions - when one marries in
ordinary dress, or receives a degree without a robe, or buries one's
dead without the tearing of cloth - then life becomes grey on grey,
and none of the splashiness of the phosphorescent pop art can hide
the greyness when the morning breaks"
(Bell, 353)
Bell's definition of Modernity is ungentle:
Modernity [is] the turning away from the authority of the past, the
shrinking of the realm of the sacred, and the Faustian question for
total knowledge which sets man spinning into the vortex of the
_wissendrang_ from which there is no surcease.
(335)
Alienated and deracinated by awareness, the Modern is incensed by
the common man's untroubled sleep, his clear, unconscious eyes, his
easy faith in the the platitudes of bourgeois morality. In his essay,
"The Culture of Modernism," Irving Howe writes, "[t]he search for
meaning through extreme states of being reveals a yearning for the
primal," a yearning that in Howe's terms can be helpful, bringing "a
vision of new manliness, health, blood consciousness, a relief from
enervating rationality" (24-25).
Modernists distance themselves, give much needed definition to them-
selves, by living as conscious beings. This consciousness is, however,
alienating and unsettling. If this tension sparks creativity, it
nonetheless forgoes the peace that myths may give; Man does not sleep
well without dreams to dream. The great sociologist Max Weber may
have summed up the rise of the Modern best:
With the progress of science and technology, man has stopped believing
in magic powers, in spirits and demons; he has lost his sense of
prophecy and, above all, his sense of the sacred. Reality has become
dreary, flat and utilitarian, leaving a great void in the souls of men
which they seek to fill by furious activity and through various
devices and substitutes.
(Freund, 24)
WORKS CITED
Bell, Daniel. "The Return of the Sacred?," _The Winding Passage:
Essays and Sociological Journeys 1969-1980_ (Cambridge, MA: Abt
Books, 1980).
de Man, Paul. "What is Modern?" _New York Review of Books_, 26
(August 1985).
Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in _A Modernist
Reader: Modernism in England 1910-1930_. Ed. Peter Faulkner (London:
B.T. Batsford, 1986).
Freund, Julien. _The Sociology of Max Weber_. (New York: Random House,
1969).
Howe, Irving. "The Culture of Modernism." _Decline of the New_. (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1970).
Jameson, Frederic. "Post-modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism," _New Left Review__ 146 (July - August), 1984.
Singal, Daniel Joseph. "Towards a Definition of American Modernism,"
_American Quarterly_ 39 (Spring 1987).
--
Brian Dell
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dellb/
Mike Birtel
In article <51nn7j$n...@pulp.ucs.ualberta.ca>, de...@gpu1.srv.ualberta.ca
(Brian Dell) wrote:
>
> Opposed to the impulse to individuated consciousness is what I
> would call the "impulse to innocence" or reunification with concrete
> life and unmediated experience. Of course, the pain of lost innocence
> can only be felt after one has lost it:
Why exactly is individulted existence and experience not, or less,
concrete than "innocent" experience? It seems to me that they are at most
simply different - is one more "in touch with reality than the other"?
How could such a claim be made?
Modern society has proposed a certain "solution" to the "revolution of
authorities" which, as many moderns know, is not so easy to enact. The
question that most of the critics you cite pose is: "Is it now clear that
we can't live with this solution?" The appeal to "the sacred" (a
gloriously undefined term in your essay) is metaphysically tinged:it is
used as a critical weapon against "profane" modernity because it claims to
be about man's "true" needs. Now I deny that waste and violence and
everthing else which you might want to put under sign of sacred things are
erased for us. And I think that holding onto a "religious" interpretation
of sacredness causes one to miss the way in with modern democracy's ideals
have glorified sovereign waste and made it democratic in the institution
of private property and it's liberties. Therefore we moderns are perhaps
more able to experience the sared than any before us.
Bell seems not so much to miss the sacred as to miss the rituals
associated with it's primitive forms. But isn't it sensical that when
everyone is allowed into the space of sacred consumption that it should
leave it's "sublimated" forms (embodied by ritual/virtual participation)
behind and become more base? So a call back to ritual is reactonary,
though, today, possibly necessary for the welfare state to survive. The
welfare state is more anti-sacred than earlier "rugged" modern forms
because it denies persons the right to excstacy and limits their freedom
to waste: it is strangely interested in keeping us alive and working.
Why? Because we have become conscious of just how terrifying sovereign
enjoyment can be - it supports all natural inequalities...what does it
mean when the fear and attraction for death becomes a political issue? I
suggest that it means just what it did to the pre-moderns: that most of us
"slaves" can only marvel at a distance at the ecstacy and dissolution of
the ruling elite and the unicorporated poor we enable by our profane labor
- we are once again in need of sublime ritualized spectacles of waste...
Democracy is in danger of extinction.
Mike
Brian Dell
Brian Dell:
:: Opposed to the impulse to individuated consciousness is what I
:: would call the "impulse to innocence" or reunification with concrete
:: life and unmediated experience. Of course, the pain of lost
:: innocence can only be felt after one has lost it:
: Why exactly is individuated existence and experience not, or less,
: concrete than "innocent" experience?
The impulse to consciousness is not gratified by concrete action, by
the exertion of one's muscles or by the beating of one's heart, but
by indulgence in a alienating cognitivism, a retreat into an ivory
tower away from one's situating concrete particulars of family and
community. This sense of separation provokes a wistful nostalgia
for re-connection. (Whether this is equivalent to Lacan's "mirror
stage" is an open question).
: The appeal to "the sacred" ... is used as a critical weapon against
: "profane" modernity because it claims to be about man's "true" needs.
Exactly. To quote Bell again:
"From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century there occurred
what I shall call 'The Great Profanation," a change in moral temper,
in the relation of the individual to the existential questions of culture,
which undermined the cultural foundations of the Western religious
answers that had given men a coherent view of the world. ...
I define culture as the modalities of response by sentient men to the
core questions that confront all human groups in the consciousness of
existence: how one meets death, the meaning of tragedy, the nature of
obligation, the character of love - these _recurrent_ questions which
are, I believe, cultural universals, to be found in all societies where
men have become conscious of the finiteness of existence.
Culture, thus, is always a _ricorso_. Men may expand their technical
powers. Nature may be mastered by scientific knowledge. There may be
progress in the instrumental realms. But the existential questions
remain. The answers may vary - and do. This is the _history_ of human
culture, the variations in myth, philosophy, symbols, and styles. But
the questions always recur. ...
All cultures, thus, "understand" each other, because they arise in
response to the common predicaments. ...
Within this purview, religion is a set of coherent answers to the core
existential questions that confront every human group, the codification
of these answers into a creedal form that has significance for its
adherents, the celebration of rites which provide an emotional bond for
those who participate, and the establishment of an institutional body to
bring into congregation those who share the creed and celebration, and
provide for the continuity of these rites from generation to generation.
The attenuation or the breakdown of a religion can be among any of
these dimensions - institutions, rites, creed or answers. The most
crucial of all are the answers..."
: Bell seems not so much to miss the sacred as to miss the rituals
: associated with it's primitive forms.
I know that in my own case I defend religion not because its
metaphysical claims are true (I don't believe they, or any other
metaphysical claims, can be adequately defended as finally and
absolutely True), but because religion establishes norms and
rituals which integrate the alienated individual into the fabric
of the community (and thereby reduce the probability of his
deviance).
: ... a call back to ritual is reactionary,
Certainly.
: The welfare state is more anti-sacred than earlier "rugged" modern
: forms because it denies persons the right to ecstacy and limits their
: freedom to waste:
Habermas on Bell:
"[According to Bell] the life-world is infected by modernism. Because
of the forces of modernism, the principle of unlimited self-realization,
the demand for authentic self-experience and the subjectivism of a
hyperstimulated sensitivity have become to be dominant. This temperament
unleashes hedonistic motives irreconcilable with the discipline of
professional life in society, Bell says. Moreover, modernist culture is
altogether incompatible with the moral basis of a purposive rational
conduct of life. In this manner, Bell places the responsibility for the
dissolution of the Protestant ethic ... on the 'adversary culture'. ...
For the neoconservative, the question then arises: how can norms arise
in society which will limit liberalism, reestablish the ethic of
discipline and work? What new norms will put a brake on the levelling
caused by the social welfare state, so that the virtues of individual
competition for achievement can again dominate? Bell sees a religious
revival as the only solution. Religious faith tied to a faith in
tradition will provide individuals with clearly defined identities, and
with existential security."
Bell argues that before the middle of the 19th century the "economic
impulse" had been constrained by custom and tradition (for eg., the
Catholic moral principle of just price or the Puritan emphasis on
frugality). As the religious impulses diminished, so did the
restraints. Propelled by the dynamo of technology, there were to be no
limits to capitalism's exponential growth. Modern man has stripped off
the religious and social morality that was imposed on his primitive
nature. Today restraint has gone slack and the "demonic impulse has
now become polymorph perverse and pervades all dimensions of modern
culture. If experience is the touchstone of the self, then there can be
no boundaries, nothing is unattainable or unutterable, there are no
sacred groves that cannot be trespassed upon and even trampled down."
The modern's development has been concomitant with the idea of radical
individualism in the economy and the polity, and of an unrestrained self
in culture.
: ... we have become conscious of just how terrifying sovereign
: enjoyment can be - it supports all natural inequalities...
That's a large statement.
"That was morality, things that made you disgusted afterward. No,
that must be immorality. That was a large statement. What a lot of
bilge I could think up at night. What rot, I could hear Brett say it.
What rot!"
- Jake in Ernest Hemingway's _The Sun Also Rises_
Mike Birtel
In article <51rq1h$k...@pulp.ucs.ualberta.ca>, de...@gpu1.srv.ualberta.ca
(Brian Dell) wrote:
> Brian Dell:
> :: Opposed to the impulse to individuated consciousness is what I
> :: would call the "impulse to innocence" or reunification with concrete
> :: life and unmediated experience. Of course, the pain of lost
> :: innocence can only be felt after one has lost it:
>
> indulgence in a alienating cognitivism, a retreat into an ivory
> tower away from one's situating concrete particulars of family and
> community. This sense of separation provokes a wistful nostalgia
> for re-connection. (Whether this is equivalent to Lacan's "mirror
> stage" is an open question).
I still want to say that it isn't a question of concreteness and that
individuation is not simply cognitivist retreat - I can and must enact my
individual self, I must, like Descartes, demonstrate my self. Now this is
certainly less "social" and less "public" but very much about concrete
particulars, namely my self-understanding which is manifest in my
sensual/aesthetic perception of my world. And I don't deny that
re-connection is sought, but it is not a supplimental quest - the work of
consciousness is not finished in the tower, it requires an enactment and
and acknowledgement. It is in fact part and parcel of my coming to
consciousness as an individual that I acknowledge my connectedness. The
idea that this process is one of disconnection is tied up, I think, with
the idea that what is found is some "true self", self sufficient and whole
in itself.
> I know that in my own case I defend religion not because its
> metaphysical claims are true (I don't believe they, or any other
> metaphysical claims, can be adequately defended as finally and
> absolutely True), but because religion establishes norms and
> rituals which integrate the alienated individual into the fabric
> of the community (and thereby reduce the probability of his
> deviance).
But the community which it calls one to is basically anti-modern,
conformist and
illiberal. What about the other quality of religion? What about
Eroticism? Ritual is not simply aimed at integration of individuals but at
the individual's need to waste and die: religious disclaims the danger
that death hold for society by chanelling eroticism through prohibition
and sacrement, by creating a space for death within the profane world of
work and against it's denial of death.
I reject this traditional role of religion because it is incompatible with
the idea of free and autonomous individuality. Bell, perhaps, simply
rejects the modern individual as something he would like to be, but that
claim is as foundationless, or as founded on temper as my claim to desire
this state.
> Habermas on Bell:
>
> "[According to Bell] the life-world is infected by modernism. Because
> of the forces of modernism, the principle of unlimited self-realization,
> the demand for authentic self-experience and the subjectivism of a
> hyperstimulated sensitivity have become to be dominant. This temperament
> unleashes hedonistic motives irreconcilable with the discipline of
> professional life in society, Bell says. Moreover, modernist culture is
> altogether incompatible with the moral basis of a purposive rational
> conduct of life.
Indeed it is, and it should stay that way
> Bell sees a religious
> revival as the only solution. Religious faith tied to a faith in
> tradition will provide individuals with clearly defined identities, and
> with existential security."
No it won't! It can only do this if in some way we can return behind
modernity, if we can pretend that liberal individuality is a undesirable
thing - some may fell this way, and the end up in cultures of authority,
such as Iraq. I'd rather die than forget the desirability of my
tradition.
> Modern man has stripped off
> the religious and social morality that was imposed on his primitive
> nature. Today restraint has gone slack and the "demonic impulse has
> now become polymorph perverse and pervades all dimensions of modern
> culture. If experience is the touchstone of the self, then there can be
> no boundaries, nothing is unattainable or unutterable, there are no
> sacred groves that cannot be trespassed upon and even trampled down."
...except what I subjectively perceive as my limitations. Sounds pretty
exciting to me.
Mike
<Value is Fixed: clark>
> Moderns are primarily characterized by the esteem with which they
> hold consciousness, and this very esteem is the cause of their
> angst, as an expansion of consciousness entails an erosion of myth
> and this loss of myth, in turn, alienates the subject.
>
> ---
> The Dilemma of Consciousness:
> Modernism as _gnosis_
one of the things that strikes me about this (brilliant) essay is the
title. nowhere else does "gnosis" pop up. given that your definition of
modernism above ends with an alienated subject, i'm curious as to how
modernism is indeed "gnostic." while the parallel you offer between the
two is (rightly i believe) the quest for truth which can erode faith and
myth, i do not understand how "gnosis" ends up with the alienated subject
as modernism might. after all, doesn't gnosticism attempt an
(incorporal) experience of a religious truth which, in turn, destroys
subjectivity altogether? if gnosticism is a form of knowledge which
transcends the material, how is it possible to experience alienation if
there is no subject in the first place?
-------------------------
towards the end of the piece, you go on to speak of Bell's world where
deritualization and turning from the past invoke the hum-drums of
contemporary existence. this is immanently tied to the normalization of
(social) reality and commodification of scientific rationalism. but to
what extent is this "modernization" grounded in the past? are these
*new(ness)* trends something which benjamin might call "the conformation
of tradition"? what seems curious to me is that even these
deritualizations are themselves rituals, but in a completely different
light outside of the past. it seems to me that modernism came out of
tradition (masking as tradition), and *breaking into tradition*, if that
can be a coherent phrase. if not, where did modernism come from? and did
it ever disrupt/change anything that wasn't happening already?
------------------
> Alienated and deracinated by awareness, the Modern is incensed by
> the common man's untroubled sleep, his clear, unconscious eyes, his
> easy faith in the the platitudes of bourgeois morality. In his essay,
> "The Culture of Modernism," Irving Howe writes, "[t]he search for
> meaning through extreme states of being reveals a yearning for the
> primal," a yearning that in Howe's terms can be helpful, bringing "a
> vision of new manliness, health, blood consciousness, a relief from
> enervating rationality" (24-25).
what are some of these "extreme states of being"? is this connected with
"gnosticism" and/or some sort of return to a nostalgia of the past? i'm
wondering if these states of being are indeed possible, without falling
into predetermined codes set up by the dominant discourse. for example,
couldn't it be said that the extremity of drug experiences are already
structured or self-alienating? what used to be cosmological gnosis in
relation to drug use amongst many tribal societies has been vastly
deritualized and transformed into abuse in first world nations. the
sacred-ness of experience has turned into trite abuse.
(by way of contingency, there is an interesting x-files program
which depicts an anthropologist in columbia joining the putomayo indians's
ritual of yawey, a peyote substance. upon returning to the u.s., this
man heavily abuses the drug because it has been decontextualized and
deritualized. it is no longer a primary-socialbond, but primarily
individual, which brings in a mask of social quality. this illuminates
what i am trying to point out.)
> (Weber)
> With the progress of science and technology, man has stopped believing
> in magic powers, in spirits and demons; he has lost his sense of
> prophecy and, above all, his sense of the sacred. Reality has become
> dreary, flat and utilitarian, leaving a great void in the souls of men
> which they seek to fill by furious activity and through various
> devices and substitutes.
> (Freund, 24)
it seems to me that these "extreme states" could very well end up
being these same "devices and substitutes." or have you been saying this
all along?
clark
---------- ---------- ----------
It is in order to function that a social machine must not function well.
--Deleuze and Guattari--
moggin
Brian Dell:
>> Moderns are primarily characterized by the esteem with which they
>> hold consciousness, and this very esteem is the cause of their
>> angst, as an expansion of consciousness entails an erosion of myth
>> and this loss of myth, in turn, alienates the subject.
>> The Dilemma of Consciousness:
>> Modernism as _gnosis_
Value is Fixed: clark:
>one of the things that strikes me about this (brilliant) essay is the
>title. nowhere else does "gnosis" pop up. given that your definition of
>modernism above ends with an alienated subject, i'm curious as to how
>modernism is indeed "gnostic."
I'm willing to bet that Brian isn't referring to Gnosticism,
but simply employing the term "gnosis" as a synonym for "knowledge"
(as in "diagnosis," for example). He's probably not thinking about
Valentinus.
clark:
>while the parallel you offer between the
>two is (rightly i believe) the quest for truth which can erode faith and
>myth, i do not understand how "gnosis" ends up with the alienated subject
>as modernism might. after all, doesn't gnosticism attempt an
>(incorporal) experience of a religious truth which, in turn, destroys
>subjectivity altogether? if gnosticism is a form of knowledge which
>transcends the material, how is it possible to experience alienation if
>there is no subject in the first place?
Again, I doubt that Brian is talking about Gnosticism, per se.
But I will. Alienation is central to Gnosticism -- not as a property
of _gnosis_, "the knowledge which liberates," but one of life in this
world, where the soul is lost, captive, exiled. The Gnostic subject
is the "stranger in a strange land" of Exodus, or the pilgrim and the
stranger in the old folk song. From a Mandean text: "How long shall
I wander, and how long sink within all the worlds?" The parallel to
modernism should be clear.
-- moggin
Brian Dell
clark:
: i'm curious as to how modernism is indeed "gnostic."
See moggin's comments. I used _gnosis_ instead of "knowledge" or
"consciousness" because _gnosis_ connotes an esoteric, allegedly
superior existential knowledge gained by self-illumination and
limited to an elite few.
: ... to what extent is this "modernization" grounded in the past?
: ... even these deritualizations are themselves rituals
I would describe the processes of modernism as, first and
foremost, _desacralizing_ processes.
Jürgen Habermas ("Modernity vs. Postmodernity," _New German
Critque_ 22, pp. 3-14):
"[The modern] anticipation of an undefined future and the
cult of the new, mean in fact the exaltation of the present. The
new time consciousness, which enters philosophy in the writings of
Bergson, does more than express the experience of mobility in
society, acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life.
The new value placed upon the transitory, the elusive, and the
ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses the longing
for an undefiled, an immaculate and stable present.
This explains the rather abstract language in which the modernist
temper has spoken of the 'past.' Individual epochs lose their
distinct forces. Historical memory is replaced by the heroic
affinity of the present with the extremes of history: a sense of
time wherein decadence immediately recognizes itself in the barbaric,
the wild and the primitive. We observe the anarchistic intention of
blowing up the continuum of history, and we can account for it in
terms of the subversive force of this new aesthetic consciousness.
Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition:
modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is
normative. This revolt is one way to neutralize the standards of
both, morality and utility. ..."
Brian Dell:
:: Irving Howe writes, "[t]he search for meaning through extreme
:: states of being reveals a yearning for the primal," a yearning
:: that in Howe's terms can be helpful, bringing "a vision of new
:: manliness, health, blood consciousness, a relief from enervating
:: rationality"
clark:
: what are some of these "extreme states of being"? is this connected
: with "gnosticism" and/or some sort of return to a nostalgia of the
: past? i'm wondering if these states of being are indeed possible,
: without falling into predetermined codes set up by the dominant
: discourse. for example, couldn't it be said that the extremity of
: drug experiences are already structured or self-alienating?
Presumably the more primal the experience, the less subject it is to
social construction. When the modern sees the futility of his search
for a meta-narrative in the heavens he may search for it in the earth:
"The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured
into long spells of senseless and sensual ease... Tired of being on the
heights, I deliberately went to the depths in search for new sensation.
What a paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to
me in the sphere of passion. I grew careless in the lives of others. I
took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every
little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that
therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has some day to
cry aloud from the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no
longer captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to
dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace."
- Oscar Wilde
The dilemma for the modern is that a descent into the dionysaic brings
him no closer to meaning, as along as his quest is a solitary one;
- meaning is produced by historical and collective action. The
meaning of life is not writ large in the heavens or the in earth but
in the narrative of one's particular clan and culture. Traditions are,
or ought to be, immune to the demands of (normative) justification and
validation.
:: Reality has become dreary, flat and utilitarian, leaving a great
:: void in the souls of men which they seek to fill by furious
:: activity and through various devices and substitutes.
clark:
: it seems to me that these "extreme states" could very well end up
: being these same "devices and substitutes."
Yes. I'm disagreeing with Howe and his prescription.
Victor Grauer
Pardon me for chiming in as a newcomer to this interesting thread (no
idea how long its been going -- just dropped in today after a long
lapse from this group.)
: I would describe the processes of modernism as, first and
: foremost, _desacralizing_ processes.
I agree.
: Jürgen Habermas ("Modernity vs. Postmodernity," _New German
: Critque_ 22, pp. 3-14):
: "[The modern] anticipation of an undefined future and the
: cult of the new, mean in fact the exaltation of the present. The
: new time consciousness, which enters philosophy in the writings of
: Bergson, does more than express the experience of mobility in
: society, acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life.
: The new value placed upon the transitory, the elusive, and the
: ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses the longing
: for an undefiled, an immaculate and stable present.
: This explains the rather abstract language in which the modernist
: temper has spoken of the 'past.' Individual epochs lose their
: distinct forces. Historical memory is replaced by the heroic
: affinity of the present with the extremes of history: a sense of
: time wherein decadence immediately recognizes itself in the barbaric,
: the wild and the primitive. We observe the anarchistic intention of
: blowing up the continuum of history, and we can account for it in
: terms of the subversive force of this new aesthetic consciousness.
: Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition:
: modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is
: normative. This revolt is one way to neutralize the standards of
: both, morality and utility. ..."
The above quote from Habermas deserves very serious study. In my
opinion, however, he is wrong for the same reason that so many have
gotten modernism wrong (and I speak of late 19th and 20th century
modernism, not the post-Cartesian "modernism" of the philosophers and
historians, a usage of the term that seems totally anachronistic to me.)
Habermas is wrong because he, like so many others, sees modernism as
simply an intensification of the earnest quests of late Romanticism, for
"redemption," "revolution," "purity," "truth," the return to an
"authentic" primitiveness, to an ever renewed sense of "origin."
While certain "schools" of modernism can indeed be so
characterized, the most interesting and powerful manifestations of
modernism are, in fact, rejections of the Romantic quest and all it stands
for. They are the work of individuals who had already beforehand
intensified the Romantic quest to a point of dialectical reversal to then
go on from there to reveal something utterly new, utterly beyond reach of
the sentimental psychologizing of a Habermas. The problems posed by
modernism are not the problems postmodernism pretends to deal with in
terms of an utterly traditional thought process, but totally new problems
which have hardly yet begun to be thought and have little to do with the
myths associated with late Romanticism.
: Brian Dell:
: :: Irving Howe writes, "[t]he search for meaning through extreme
: :: states of being reveals a yearning for the primal," a yearning
: :: that in Howe's terms can be helpful, bringing "a vision of new
: :: manliness, health, blood consciousness, a relief from enervating
: :: rationality"
Howe is very clearly speaking of late Romanticism, not true modernism.
: clark:
: : what are some of these "extreme states of being"? is this connected
: : with "gnosticism" and/or some sort of return to a nostalgia of the
: : past? i'm wondering if these states of being are indeed possible,
: : without falling into predetermined codes set up by the dominant
: : discourse. for example, couldn't it be said that the extremity of
: : drug experiences are already structured or self-alienating?
: Presumably the more primal the experience, the less subject it is to
: social construction. When the modern sees the futility of his search
: for a meta-narrative in the heavens he may search for it in the earth:
The "meta-narrative in the heavens" is, again, pure late Romanticism.
The relation to earth is already a step toward modernism (if we can
dissociate it utterly from sentimental notions of what "earth" might
mean, e.g. "blood and soil" etc.).
: "The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured
: into long spells of senseless and sensual ease... Tired of being on the
: heights, I deliberately went to the depths in search for new sensation.
: What a paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to
: me in the sphere of passion. I grew careless in the lives of others. I
: took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every
: little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that
: therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has some day to
: cry aloud from the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no
: longer captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to
: dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace."
: - Oscar Wilde
Typical late Romantic soul searching. Wilde was never a modernist.
: The dilemma for the modern is that a descent into the dionysaic brings
: him no closer to meaning, as along as his quest is a solitary one;
: - meaning is produced by historical and collective action. The
: meaning of life is not writ large in the heavens or the in earth but
: in the narrative of one's particular clan and culture. Traditions are,
: or ought to be, immune to the demands of (normative) justification and
: validation.
Again, the "descent into the dionysiac" is a parody of what real modernism
is all about. The "dionysiac" is a pure product of late (and
even early) Romanticism. As far as "meaning" as "produced by historical
and collective action," modernism long ago shattered all such
conventional notions.
Victor Grauer