Aesthetic Materialism

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 3   "Hey!" you shout. You grab the dagger from the ground, and chase the man through the crowd of zombies.  As you run, trying to catch up to the man, the zombies lurch out at you, and you have to fight them, using the dagger as a weapon and the badge as a shield. You almost catch up with the man.  You reach out to grab him, but just when his shoulder is an inch from your grasp, he bolts further ahead, his fat stomach bouncing rather comically as he runs.  "What?" he shouts, and then again, "What's the deal?" and disappears once more into the crowd. Now you see a new kind of enemy: hazy, gray figures, barely there.  They crowd around you, like shadows, moving without moving.  You swipe at them in a panic with your blade, touching nothing, as if in a dream.  Eventually you manage to squeeze through them and continue running. Up further ahead, in another crowd of zombies, you spot the man you're ...

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" - ...