RE: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity

["Dirk Vekemans" <dv@vilt.net>]

Quickly, to avoid falling into the trap of my addiction to pseudo-academical
nAârty rhetorics:

- master narratives need rails to run their fiction on, nazism the ruins of
WOI and the economic disarray of the twenties, stalinism equally so worsened
by post-tsarist chaos in the Soviet empire. Do you see global terrorism and
its consequences of a culture of surveillance serving as a rail to run the
Benthamian panopticum of semantic capitalism (BPSC) on? How about
justifications for the BPSC in view of our need to avert actual and
impending catastrophes (global warming, reigning famines in Africa
untsoweiter) originating from science? 

- do you think of the BPSC as a closed event? It happened, so we're done
for? Or are we in its concluding phase, wrapping up the remains of the day,
closing up the façade with laws on sedition, cleaning up the mess of
intimacy in the Big Brother house, locking down the gaps in the defense of
our savezones? 

- do you think of your own work as somehow fighting the BPSC, are you
developing strategies towards that, or do you limit yourself to commenting
it, exposing it?

- has the BPSC got the rise of the Asian empire covered (ouch)?

I read your Cosmolalia proposal prior to the discussion, must say there's a
lot there resembling my own thinking, up to the use of Mallarmé's ptix (very
funny, i already considered it to be somewhat 'my ptix', so i feel a bit
bereft of it). There are, however,differences in degree i think, so, knowing
most of the answers are contained within the text at
http://www.cosmolalia.com/readme100/, perhaps you could expand on the
questions here nonetheless? I'm asking a lot, i know how exhausting these
exercises can be, but it would be nice if we could bring the views there to
relate to the problem we're attempting to tackle here.

At the end, for instance, you say you 'don't see any positive rediscovery of

Modernity, that could make us escape this situation.' I'd say that if you
get down to the actual, individuated works of artists known to be engaged in
a quest for the Modern, you could find some particularly potent intensities
that are very useful in cracking the cellophane that we find covering our
skins today, allowing for some breathtaking vista's of the real.
Annihilating vista's perhaps, necessarily so, because as TS Eliot claimed
'Human kind cannot bear much reality'.

Sth i wrote on my blog last year explains the idea as follows:

"But all of that is common knowledge, what i meant to say is that however
hard our ruling machinery tries, it will never be able to capture the
ultimate value of these Modernist supersystems, because that is exactly
placed at the centre of their failure: it's when they break down in
exquisite gibberish (Joyce's Finnegans Wake) or in paralysing silence
(Beckett) that these works of art evoke what they were after in first place,
the poetic realm of absence, it's reality as a counterpart to the simulating
realm of differences differentiating nothing. "

http://nkdee.blogspot.com/2005/03/floating-in-zeppelin.html

Dirk Vekemans, poet - freelance webprogrammer,
Central Authoring Process of the
Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee


> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
> [mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] Namens Christophe Bruno
> Verzonden: vrijdag 3 maart 2006 23:07
> Aan: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Onderwerp: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity
> 
> So, first I would like to apologize again for Aliette's bad 
> English. One never apologizes too much... ;-)
> 
> I have some difficulties I would like to discuss, and I'm 
> sorry if my approach looks a bit naïve but I'm not so 
> familiar with all this academic stuff (thank you wikipedia 
> and if I'm wrong please blame them ).
> 
> Lucio mentionned (and criticized) the idea of Eco about a New 
> Middle Age. 
> However, I think that there is some truth in Eco's idea (I 
> haven't read Eco though ;-) in the sense that to me 
> postmodernism appears as a transitional period.
> 
> I feel very close to Lyotard's or Danto's ideas about the end 
> of a master narrative, however what I feel also very strongly 
> is that this period without any master narrative is not 
> immortal either. The problem is that since we've been  more 
> or less embedded in it (depending on our age), we may not yet 
> realize it. Of course there is 9/11...
> 
> Between Antiquity and Renaissance, there was a long period of 
> latency. This period was crucial in that it gave Antiquity  
> its status of "Golden age". 
> Assuming that postmodernism really means something (which I 
> believe is true), the answer to the question "is Modernity 
> our Antiquity" may depend on this other question: "is 
> Postmodernity for ever", because in the case it is not, 
> Postmodernity may indeed play the role of this latency 
> period. Without any latency period, I can't imagine how 
> Modernity could be our Antiquity.
> 
> Answering yes to this last question ("is Postmodernity for 
> ever") might not seem completely stupid, because after all, 
> if we are grown up enough to be able to get rid of our 
> totalitarian ideals, there is no reason why we should go back 
> to some previous state... But things don't work that way... 
> (We encounter here a kind of paradox, because in a sense, 
> Postmodernity may carry in its very definition the idea of an 
> everlasting state: if we are in a state where the question of 
> progress is negated, somehow the question of time arises in a 
> different manner)
> 
> The problem I have now is that there seem to be several 
> fields that have been experiencing postmodernist eras, at 
> different times of history:
> 
> For instance, postmodernism in history, à la Lyotard, was 
> coined in 1982, but its historical formation lasted from 1979 
> (the Iranian revolution) to
> 1989 (Berlin wall) (I'm not sure that the use of the term 
> "history" here is legitimate, but.)
> 
> Postmodernism in art, à la Danto, is from 1981, but Danto 
> situates the transition in the sixties with Pop Art.
> 
> But now, here is what I thought: the postmodern state is not 
> reserved to history or art. We could apply it to science for 
> instance. If we assume that posmodernity has to do with some 
> crisis that arose from the too pregnant presence of a 
> totalizing ideal, then we could say there has been such 
> crisis in mathematics: the crisis in the roots of mathematics 
> which ended with Gödel (in the 30's). There has been such a 
> crisis in phyics with Quantum Mechanics at the beginning of 
> the XXth century. You can also claim that Dada had already 
> all the ingredients of postmodernism Cf 
> http://www.sociology.org/content/vol004.001/locher.html
> 
> So, some aspects of postmodernism might not be so specific to 
> our late period. But, I still follow Lyotard, because the 
> most important thing here is postmodernism in history! This 
> is the real validation step! Warhol, Gödel, Duchamp, why not 
> Mallarmé, might be operators of some relative postmodernity, 
> but the real stuff is history. So Postmodernity still means 
> something, and can still be dated.
> 
> Now the next step: I would like to isolate now one of these 
> threads (ie one of these fields that might have experience 
> some modern to postmodern transition). And in fact the one I 
> would like to show you developped indeed from modernity to 
> postmodernity but finally went back to some "modern state" 
> in a hidden way. This is called the irony of history. If I'm 
> able to isolate one of these threads, then we might have the 
> beginning of an answer to the
> D12 question.
> 
> Here is one of these threads: it is called the World Wide Web:
> 
> a) the WWW preconcept as a social network was born with 
> Jeremy Bentham utilitarianism.
> b) Totalitarian ideologies of the XXth century are a first 
> attempt to implement Bentham's panopticon over a part of 
> mankind. In the mean time, just after ww2, Turing sets the 
> basics of computing machinery. And finally, in 1989, the end 
> of these attempts marks the end of Modernity.
> c) the WWW can be considered as a characteristic 
> implementation of Postmodernity
> d) With the rise of Google and global terrorism, WWW is 
> turning into a Benthamian panoptic structure of colonization 
> of intimacy and semantic capitalism.
> 
> So my conclusion for the moment is as follows:
> 1) postmodernity is not for ever 2) postmodernity is indeed a 
> latency period
> 3) postmodernity is a "ruse de l'histoire" that allows us to 
> realize some of the ideals of modernity without coping with 
> the unbearable.
> Eventhough I mentioned only one thread, I believe we can say 
> that we are in a phase of achievement of some of the 
> nightmarish ideals of Modernity, but somehow, ironically, 
> postmodernity turned out to be the condition for this 
> achievement, the first attempts (nazism / stalinism) having failed.
> 
> And for now, I don't see any positive rediscovery of 
> Modernity, that could make us escape this situation.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>