Old and New

There are a range of modern thinkers and writers, from W.B. Yeats to Bataille, who have self-consciously chosen an archaic, pre-modern ‘episteme’ or world view – chosen it for the imaginative and cognitive sparks generated thereby, for its oppositional and aggravational uses, and as a stubborn cleaving to a point of negativity in the face of the overwhelming presence of the new (modern) life world. Needless to say, however, the very fact of being ‘chosen’ transforms the thing itself, for the last thing such pre-modern ‘systems’ were was objects of conscious choice. They were, if anything, the very unreflective framework within which choices were made. And so to cling to such systems can only involve and act of stubborn wilfulness wholly alien to the systems themselves.

“Tradition” is precisely the hereditary/ inborn, enduring, pre-conscious background to belief. To choose it is therefore to negate its very ground. To choose it is impossible, and those who do ‘choose’ it live in and with such impossibility, absurd and defiant, standing haughtily on thin air.

If the artificial resurrection of such obscure 'traditions' has an antiquarian crankiness to it, it can also be seen, perhaps as utopian. (The antiquarian and the revolutionary both suspect the present to be insufficient). What appeals about certain ‘remainders of the past’ such as peasant storytellers (Yeats through to Berger)etc is precisely their seeming inability to be ‘metabolised’ by the logic of capital/ modernity… their stubborn recalcitrance and non-inclusion. (It is of course (by definition) modernity itself which reveals them as such.)

So, for example, Bataille: his perseverance with categories stolen from the world of religious orthodoxy and from feudalism: all of this is in fact a stab at keeping open the unfilled/ vacant place of the New, by using old and borrowed names hitherto of interest only to lexical & philosophical numismatists.

And conversely, did not Benjamin see in the Old allegorists, who exercise an arbotrary command over a realm of dead objects, a kind of antique blueprint of the Modern avant-garde?

The implicit recognition here is that the past is never simply past; it awaits completion, but in a different form. So, isn't one of the critic's undertakings to liberate the useable or even revolutionary kernel from the congealed forms in which they are embedded.