Aesthetic Materialism

Start at the Beginning Previous chapter: Day 1, Part 2   More "worms" are crawling toward you from every direction.  You hold up your "badge."  The worms don't have eyes, but they seem to wince as if it's too bright.  The ones directly in front of it wriggle away, as if afraid.  You move the badge and point it at others, and one by one, they slither away as well.  But others are slinking around behind you.  You whip around and scare them off as well. You turn this way and that, repelling the worms as they advance on you from all sides.  As you do this, you slowly make your way back to the wall of worms.  You're able to get through it now by repelling them with your badge. This is successful, but on the other side, you are greeted by the appearance of a much larger and more menacing worm.  What's worse, it doesn't seem scared by your badge and begins to chase you.  Your only choice is to run away.  You're running through an unde...

Wagner's "O sink hiernieder, nach der Liebe" from Tristan und Isolde approaches something like religious music, but not of a type one would hear in church. In it, one senses something of the sacred, but not the eternal, or at least not in the religious sense. On the contrary, at every moment, one feels it slipping away, which makes it all the more precious. In it, fulfilment and loss are experienced simultaneously, and this has its own kind of eternity: eternal loss, finite eternity. It is not the feeling of having something and then losing it - the inevitability and the necessity of this loss imply that this loss was beginning before the creation of the universe, into an eternal past as well as an eternal future, that the moment of enjoyment was at once the moment of keenest longing. More: one desires the loss, as the culmination and completion of longing.

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...