“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, February 13, 2011

Skholiast on the End of (the Illusion of) Modernity

Skholiast writes here on my recent post. I am an inveterate flyer of kites. I'm okay when they fall apart and crash so I'm wondering whether and how this one can stay up. My subjective evidence is that I never, ever would have thought this way until a few weeks ago. Surprise as a token of truth.

It was really not even after I'd accepted OOO that it hit me. It was while I was teaching Hegel's aesthetic philosophy to my undergrads last quarter. Jarrod Fowler had just sent me this incredible piece of music (or non-music) about which you'll hear at the Rutgers talk. So I found myself saying that finally Hegel's dialectic of Romanticism, which I hold we've been caught in since 1790 or so, is done.

When postmodernism hit and when ecocriticism hit in my literary neighborhood, I just didn't buy that these were news of a new era. What's uncanny about Jarrod's music is that it comes out of a very dense post-Derridean theoretical view but it's also a hyperobject...

More on this soon.

1 comment:

skholiast said...

thanks for a gracious shout-out, Tim. I get it about flying kites. But my intuition is also that one's surprising turns of thought are very possibly where the energy is the most alive. More to come.