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Sunday, September 29, 2013

Exploratory Nostalgia (Utopianism?)

Written in the distorted if not perspicacious style of old:
     What can we, whose calendar days are erased by the rustling of leaves and whose cauldrons boil with impotent indignation against the siege of daylight hours – what can we glean from the sand and stars? Our hours ironed out, we fade into abstraction. “Meaning” deigns from its skyward throne – built on clouds. Rain appears as tears to the weeping, and rivulets disregard lachrymose eyes.
     Timepieces mask the honeyed leaves, and torture us from the grip of autumn. What cosmic shout supplants the appointments you’ve made? For your engrossment, could you discern it from a car horn? Do you not hear the stifled siren in the claxon call? Its dumb scream as it rolls down a road darkly… it is pseudo-interaction, reduced to the fundamental social experience of modernity: anxiety and malaise. It is nature dissipating in acidic vapors. Blinding pollution: what can we glean?
     The miasmic artifice must be eliminated. Impotent art wraps itself in similar shrouds of self-importance, universality, and higher realms. Do not transcend; there is no such thing as ungroundedness, only abstraction, the illusion of ungroundedness. They are possible, or at least conceivable, “those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths – ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars.” (Lukács) Driving towards a telos, or feeling nostalgia (whichever suits your preference) implies a critique of the present, and evinces a pragmatic aspect to what would colloquially be called “idealism” in its implication that the present is amenable to directed change.
    Maybe the rosiness of Romanticism (or the romantic style) is not totally blind sentiment. That sentiment seems to have historically accompanied (prefigured) nineteenth-century utopianism with the early Romantic aesthetic movements. Is it that Romantic art, supposing itself autonomous, donned blinders to contemporary society, and the unsavory public manifestations of early industrial-capitalism? After all, it goes without saying that the many popular artists of that period were privileged enough to avoid the conditions of factory labor (although we sometimes see remarkable exceptions to this ignorance that prove the rule of the bourgeoisie artist). Was nineteenth century utopianism just a synthesis of two oppositional tendencies, the sublime divergence from the present and the corpus of social critique that had been steadily growing since the Industrial Revolution in seventeenth-century England?

     Perhaps it is possible to unearth and innovate a style that (nonetheless) countervails the present.

Fallout from the conversation that created Landfill Underground

1.      9/29 3am: Landfill Underground (with Denver)
2.      Human consciousness is continually making predictions of the future based on assimilation (reconciliation) of the past as it moves presently into the future. The development is Erfahrung, and the experiences that may or may not harmonize with predictions are Erlebnisse. In much the same way, scientific theories (the past; historical development) are used to make hypotheses (predictions of the future) which are tested in the present. The dialectical nature of human consciousness is the immediate foundation (or manifestation – either) of this embedded, temporal unfolding. When we assimilate new Erlebnisse into our Erfahrung, we suffer a kind of shock, which can be good (new tastes, new states, new ideas) or bad (destabilizing, causing fear, inducing anxiety). In order to re-cohere (restabilize, reclimitize) our world, our mind reconciles the experience and simultaneously creates a metalanguage between the two opposing perspectives. This openness to the world is the trait that was not recognized by Kuhn when he wrote of incommensurability across paradigms. Each mind, each scientist incorporates (or tries to, with varying degrees of penetration of reconciliation and extrapolation) old and new results into some sort of theory (with varying degrees of knowledge and explicitness of theory). The field as a whole is moved in part (dialectical relation) by the activity of the individuals, and so the theory can progress with the developing metalanguages of each of the individual scientists and also (especially) in their communal reconciliation of thoughts (which are sorts of predictions).

3.      1:22 pm: Of course, we have reached an impasse between quantum mechanics and relativity, but we will overcome this hurdle as our threshold of precision of thinking and our openness of concepts can dig down into the depths of the world and accept into their arms the delicate depths of those realities. Surely though, there will always be things that escape us.