Aesthetic Materialism

Analytic philosophy ends up affirming what continental philosophy has already known for centuries.  It's always playing catch-up.  Empiricism, at its slow, plodding pace, eventually gets to the paths long-trodden by those who were willing to take huge intuitive leaps. ...But ultimately it's worth it to do this.  When the continental, in sophisticated boredom, drawls that it's all been thought before, the analytic can confidently reply: but not by me.

 The short version of the story of how modernism drifted into postmodernism: the modernists got religion.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Walter Benjamin was, strictly speaking, a postmodernist.  But there are many tendencies of postmodernism in his writing, and the seeds of other tendencies that would be more fully developed by other writers.   First and foremost: in the Preface to "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," he calls "creativity" an "outmoded concept".  Clearly, this is a postmodern, or anti-modern perspective, reminiscent of Mussolini's declaration that humanity has grown tired of liberty, because striving for creativity is central to the modernist project, and giving up on the very idea of creativity in a provocative pose of trollish world-weariness is the only thing that postmodernism has ever accomplished.  Benjamin may partially disavow or distance himself from the declaration that creativity is outmoded by saying that not he, but "they brush aside outmoded concepts such as creativity and genius" - ...

What Wittgenstein and Derrida have in common is: 1. An antipathy to philosophy.  Not only an antipathy to (almost) the entire history of existing philosophy, but an antipathy to philosophy per se , an antipathy to the figure of the philosopher.  And especially, an antipathy to what they (perversely) call "metaphysics". 2. A delusionally over-broad generalization, a grand sweep of philosophy since Ancient Greece, shoehorning the vast diversity of different ideas and thinkers into their schematic, c account - a universalizing account that elides historical, material differences, as though all philosophy were the same, thus effectively making philosophy into a kind of personality type. 3. A ridiculously ineffective, if not non-existent, solution for a problem that doesn't exist.  A self-defeating, self-undermining responsibility, reduced to the level of language alone, that is ultimately more of a vague sense of morality - a kind of loosely implied guilt - than it is a convi...

I don't believe in postmodernism.   When I say that, I'm not saying that all of the art that is considered postmodern art is bad.  Some of it is quite good!  I just don't believe that it's postmodern.  I don't believe that postmodernism happened .  I think it's all hype and, essentially, a sales tactic, to call certain art "postmodern".  I'm skeptical. I mean, words are our servants, not our masters.  If you want to call this art "postmodern," you can.  No one is stopping you.  You can call it "bananafish" if you want.  And if it has become customary to speak of a "postmodern era" in art and culture, so be it.  I can abide by that convention.  And if so, I would say that little flickers of the postmodern age were starting in roughly somewhere around 1917, slowly building, and that it really began in earnest after the crisis, around 1945-1948, and that it lasted until roughly 1992.  And now it is totally over and done ...

The "always-already" (as Heidegger puts it, the "immer schon") is a kind of trap, or loop - the type that connoisseurs of anxiety delight in.  Althusser, for instance, insists that we are "always already" subjects - forcing one to push back interpolation to the beginning of time or earlier.  But the existence of the "always-already" would necessitate its corollary, the "never yet".  (An example might be Adam Kadmon, which is pure potential.)