But it is said of old Cosmographers, that when they had said all that they knew of a Countrey, and yet much more was to be said, they said that the rest of those countries were possest with Giants, or Witches, or Spirits, or Wilde beasts, so that they could pierce no farther into that Countrey, so when wee have travell'd as farre as wee can, with safetie, that is , as farre as Ancient, or Moderne Expositores lead us, in the discoverie of these new Heavens, and new Earth, yet wee must say at last, that it is a Countrey inhabited with Angells, and Arch-angells, with Cherubins, and Seraphins, and that wee can looke no farther into it, with these eyes. Where it is locally, wee enquire not; We rest in this, that it is the habitation prepar'd for the blessed Saints of God; Heavens, where the Moone is more glorious that our Sunne, and the Sunne as glorious as Hee that made it; For it is he himselfe, the Sonne of God, the Sunne of glorie. A new Earth, where all their waters and milke, and all their milke, honey; where all their grasse is corne, and all their corne, Manna; where all their glebe, all their clods of earth are gold, and all their gold of innumerable carats; Where all their minutes are ages, and all their ages, Eternity; Where everything, is every minute, in the highest exaltation, as good as it can be, and yet super-exalted, and infinitely multiplied, by every minutes addition; every minute, infinitely better, than ever it was before. Of these new heavens, and this new earth we must say at last, that wee can say nothing; For, the eye of Man gath not seene, nor eare heard, nor heart conceiv'd, the State of this place. We limit, and determine our consideration with that Horizon, with which the Holy Ghost hath limited us, that it is that new Heavens, and new Earth, wherein dwelleth Righteousnesse.
John Donne - from The Sermons and Death's Duell
Perhaps modernity is no more or less than the attempt to say something or all of Donne's new Earth. To actualise the dream or make it contemporaneous, to make it real. Badiou characterises the 20th Century as having been driven by a 'passion for the real', this 'real' rather than acting as a break or dislocation on development (as something which can stand for conscience) is it's fuel, humility will always appear false. In the face of what cannot be conceived we push and probe, we cannot 'limit, and determine our consideration with that Horizon,'. Rather than being bound to atheism, modernity is driven or haunted by a disavowed religious spirit or consciousness, that can only inspire religiousity - the appearence of religion emptied of content.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
tradition
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. T.S Eliot - Tradition and the Individual Talent (1922)
The modern artist is a figure also, of self-sacrifice. The emptying of the personal, the common or ordinary, the choice of the 'unseen over what is seen', and the need to open up to forces beyond the range of the rational as conceived at the moment, are perhaps examples of how religious motivations, were relocated to and redistributed within novel forms of artistic practise. Tradition is as present within modernity, as in pre-modernity, only its role is reversed, rather than the repository of valuable forms and norms, a bosom, it is perceived at best as something that can no longer bear continued repetiton or reproduction (to continue to do so is cliche), in this sense it becomes at worst perceived as a kind of vice, that the artist must break out of completely.
It's a question whether 'tradition' ever implied a reproductive model, perhaps this is the view of tradition that modernity has had to end up with - now that we seem to be moving away from any dialectical engagment with tradition at all.
The modern artist is a figure also, of self-sacrifice. The emptying of the personal, the common or ordinary, the choice of the 'unseen over what is seen', and the need to open up to forces beyond the range of the rational as conceived at the moment, are perhaps examples of how religious motivations, were relocated to and redistributed within novel forms of artistic practise. Tradition is as present within modernity, as in pre-modernity, only its role is reversed, rather than the repository of valuable forms and norms, a bosom, it is perceived at best as something that can no longer bear continued repetiton or reproduction (to continue to do so is cliche), in this sense it becomes at worst perceived as a kind of vice, that the artist must break out of completely.
It's a question whether 'tradition' ever implied a reproductive model, perhaps this is the view of tradition that modernity has had to end up with - now that we seem to be moving away from any dialectical engagment with tradition at all.
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