Post-

In much of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe, ‘the modern was not yet total, and as such could be measured and its meaning assessed, against that which it was not. Across Europe, the sharply felt experience of the modern could still be silhouetted against a sense of tradition.”

The ‘modern’, a term itself now fallen into disuse, thus names a contrast. The Express train hurtling through a peasant countryside. The ‘post-modern’, which can sound nonsensical (where the modern is taken to mean the most up-to-date, or just ‘how we do things Now), is a term which is reached for when this contrast is no longer available, when the break can no longer be registered.

What makes John Berger a modern writer is that he has placed himself, quite literally, in a position where this contrast can still be registered, seen, rounded on with critical intelligence.

“Being but a negative of the old, the new if subservient to the old”. So Adooorknob. The New has no consistency in itself. It is merely the negation of something else, and therefore an empty formal category. But when the Old has itself disappeared, or almost, the New is necessarily stillborn. On the one hand, the effect of ‘pastness’ is endlessly simulated, invoked, but ‘pastness’ as an effect, unmoored from history. On the other, the endless repetition of proclaimed newness. These are twin aspects of what Benjamin called endless sameness.

The ‘New’ is often merely the latest instalment of Progress, a progress whose terms are laid out in advance. The genuinely New would make a tiger’s leap (Benjamin again) outside progress.

The Moderns were frequently critical of Progress, not because they favoured old verities and consuetudes, but because Progress attempted to pass itself off as Nature, or as History itself. It assumed too much, and had time only for what was placeable within its continuum.

Blowing open that continuum was the dream and stated aim of Walter Benjamin. The historical materialist scans the world for signs not of the merely new but the Unprecedented.

And perhaps the project of philosophers like Badiou is to renew this quest for the genuinely New, the New that is more than just novelty.