[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Less dogmas than placeholders, Hulme’sterms work dialectically, constructing a practice that sets itself outside and against the dominant field of cultural logic as an unnamed negation, in order to create the very standpoint they will ultimately come to occupy.Unlike the studied classicism or intensive manifolds of an earlier phase, Hulme’s medievalism retains its negative function, resisting the reification of a doctrine by refusing to articulate anaffirmative metaphysic.So conceived, it presents a limit case to modernity ingeneral, even as it produces an ideological corollary in the idea of modernism,moving beyond simple genealogies in order to generate more totalizing conceptions of historical form.What Hulme ultimately labels a Weltanschauung is, at its core, an incipient dialectical totality, an inner cultural logic buried so deep within the field of sociological presuppositions that it functions as an ideological horizon: ‘It is these categories, these abstract conceptions, which all the individuals of a period have in common, which really serve best to characterize the period.For most of the characteristics of such a period, not only in thought, but in ethics, and through ethics in economics, really depend on these central abstract attitudes.But while people will readily acknowledge that this is true of the Greeks, or of BrazilianIndians, they have considerable difficulty in realising that it is also true of the modern humanist period from the Renascence to now’ ( CW, p.454).What has often seemed contradictory in Hulme is actually a process of historiographicalrevision, moving toward an extreme formulation ultimately represented by theconcept of medievalism.In a sense, the operation is entirely metaphorical, seizing on the readiest trope for everything not modern, for an alien historical logic as such.More importantly, however, the medieval guarantees Hulme’s critique ofideology by maintaining a space of historical difference, by underscoring the power of the gap or chasm even at modernity’s own boundaries: ‘the difference betweenthe mentality of one great period of history and another really depends on thedifferent pseudo-categories of this kind, which were imposed on every individual of the period, and in terms of which his thinking was consequently done’ ( CW, p.453).But above all else the provision of a lexicon at the gap depends on the prior fact of art, on a material object with which thought never fully coincides.The fact that a critical language trails behind the object itself requires two acknowledgments.First,The Politics of Epochality199art encapsulates a space of non-correspondence, a differentiated set of temporalzones conjoining the terms in which thinking is done with foreign matter thatdemands to be thought in other ways.Art maintains significance precisely because‘the thought or vocabulary of one’s period is an extraordinarily difficult thing to break away from’, precisely to the degree that it forces such a breakage from the other direction.The consequence of that acknowledgment, however, is potentiallymore extreme.For art, under Hulme’s hypothesis, effectively ceases to function as art at all, as a system of representation or value.Instead, art marks time, engraving history as a system of suspended vocabularies.For Hulme, that is, art functions as epochal sediment, the historical thing left over when the words are gone.An Arrested ImpulseOf all the idiosyncratic elements in Hulme’s private vocabulary, none has provenso durably perplexing and rebarbative as the idea of Original Sin.The ‘highlydisobliging doctrine in question’ (Lewis, 1937, p.110), as Lewis calls it, pointedly resurrects a tone of thought no longer considered dangerous, bearing the hint of a modernist fundamentalism designed to annoy polite cultural opinion with a studied pose of asceticism.In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, the idea appears only briefly as a ‘sane classical dogma’ ( CW, p.61).Reformulated as the first premise of ‘A Tory Philosophy’ a few months later ( CW, p.232), it begins to bind the strands of an eccentric conservatism to Hulme’s aesthetic polemics.But it is on thecontradictory knot of Original Sin that Hulme predicates the series of antinomies that anchor the successive twists of his emergent Weltanschauung.In 1912, Original Sin thus marks the relatively simple disparity between liberal andconservative political positions.By 1915, with Hulme’s translation of Sorel’sReflections on Violence, it has begun to do more, concocting an odd mixture of anarchism and Marx, Proudhon and Maurras, to divide the austere pessimism of aTory radicalism from the bourgeois center ( CW, pp.251-2).With each turn, Hulme expands the orbit of his oppositions, first absorbing romanticism and classicism as surrogate political terminologies, stylistic registers of liberalism or conservatism respectively, only to recast those political positions again in the antinomy between humanism and its opposite.Through it all, however, Original Sin remains the axis and dividing line of Hulme’s later thought, the one constant around which otherterms array themselves.At its simplest, Original Sin is merely an abbreviation, a phrase standing against all that Hulme opposes.As he puts it in his preface toSorel, ‘We may define Romantics, then, as all who do not believe in the Fall ofMan.It is this opposition which in reality lies at the root of most of the other divisions in social and political thought’ ( CW, p.250).More importantly, however, it is the notion that Hulme names Original Sin that guarantees a vocabulary ofhistorical discontinuity by decomposing time.If the idea originates as a political slogan, it assumes a broader usage with the last fragmentary meditations onhumanism, marking the limit of a modern imagination in general, defined now bythe fact that it ‘exhibits the same complete inability to realise the meaning of the dogma’ ( CW, p.446).If the idea first draws a subjective distinction, that is,200T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismbetween political orientations and then between artistic styles, it is progressively rendered more objective and more absolute, recoded first as a contradictory set of social determinations (affiliated most obviously with religion and class) and then as an absolute historical difference, the truth of a looming gulf between modernity and the lost attitude of that epoch which preceded it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Less dogmas than placeholders, Hulme’sterms work dialectically, constructing a practice that sets itself outside and against the dominant field of cultural logic as an unnamed negation, in order to create the very standpoint they will ultimately come to occupy.Unlike the studied classicism or intensive manifolds of an earlier phase, Hulme’s medievalism retains its negative function, resisting the reification of a doctrine by refusing to articulate anaffirmative metaphysic.So conceived, it presents a limit case to modernity ingeneral, even as it produces an ideological corollary in the idea of modernism,moving beyond simple genealogies in order to generate more totalizing conceptions of historical form.What Hulme ultimately labels a Weltanschauung is, at its core, an incipient dialectical totality, an inner cultural logic buried so deep within the field of sociological presuppositions that it functions as an ideological horizon: ‘It is these categories, these abstract conceptions, which all the individuals of a period have in common, which really serve best to characterize the period.For most of the characteristics of such a period, not only in thought, but in ethics, and through ethics in economics, really depend on these central abstract attitudes.But while people will readily acknowledge that this is true of the Greeks, or of BrazilianIndians, they have considerable difficulty in realising that it is also true of the modern humanist period from the Renascence to now’ ( CW, p.454).What has often seemed contradictory in Hulme is actually a process of historiographicalrevision, moving toward an extreme formulation ultimately represented by theconcept of medievalism.In a sense, the operation is entirely metaphorical, seizing on the readiest trope for everything not modern, for an alien historical logic as such.More importantly, however, the medieval guarantees Hulme’s critique ofideology by maintaining a space of historical difference, by underscoring the power of the gap or chasm even at modernity’s own boundaries: ‘the difference betweenthe mentality of one great period of history and another really depends on thedifferent pseudo-categories of this kind, which were imposed on every individual of the period, and in terms of which his thinking was consequently done’ ( CW, p.453).But above all else the provision of a lexicon at the gap depends on the prior fact of art, on a material object with which thought never fully coincides.The fact that a critical language trails behind the object itself requires two acknowledgments.First,The Politics of Epochality199art encapsulates a space of non-correspondence, a differentiated set of temporalzones conjoining the terms in which thinking is done with foreign matter thatdemands to be thought in other ways.Art maintains significance precisely because‘the thought or vocabulary of one’s period is an extraordinarily difficult thing to break away from’, precisely to the degree that it forces such a breakage from the other direction.The consequence of that acknowledgment, however, is potentiallymore extreme.For art, under Hulme’s hypothesis, effectively ceases to function as art at all, as a system of representation or value.Instead, art marks time, engraving history as a system of suspended vocabularies.For Hulme, that is, art functions as epochal sediment, the historical thing left over when the words are gone.An Arrested ImpulseOf all the idiosyncratic elements in Hulme’s private vocabulary, none has provenso durably perplexing and rebarbative as the idea of Original Sin.The ‘highlydisobliging doctrine in question’ (Lewis, 1937, p.110), as Lewis calls it, pointedly resurrects a tone of thought no longer considered dangerous, bearing the hint of a modernist fundamentalism designed to annoy polite cultural opinion with a studied pose of asceticism.In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, the idea appears only briefly as a ‘sane classical dogma’ ( CW, p.61).Reformulated as the first premise of ‘A Tory Philosophy’ a few months later ( CW, p.232), it begins to bind the strands of an eccentric conservatism to Hulme’s aesthetic polemics.But it is on thecontradictory knot of Original Sin that Hulme predicates the series of antinomies that anchor the successive twists of his emergent Weltanschauung.In 1912, Original Sin thus marks the relatively simple disparity between liberal andconservative political positions.By 1915, with Hulme’s translation of Sorel’sReflections on Violence, it has begun to do more, concocting an odd mixture of anarchism and Marx, Proudhon and Maurras, to divide the austere pessimism of aTory radicalism from the bourgeois center ( CW, pp.251-2).With each turn, Hulme expands the orbit of his oppositions, first absorbing romanticism and classicism as surrogate political terminologies, stylistic registers of liberalism or conservatism respectively, only to recast those political positions again in the antinomy between humanism and its opposite.Through it all, however, Original Sin remains the axis and dividing line of Hulme’s later thought, the one constant around which otherterms array themselves.At its simplest, Original Sin is merely an abbreviation, a phrase standing against all that Hulme opposes.As he puts it in his preface toSorel, ‘We may define Romantics, then, as all who do not believe in the Fall ofMan.It is this opposition which in reality lies at the root of most of the other divisions in social and political thought’ ( CW, p.250).More importantly, however, it is the notion that Hulme names Original Sin that guarantees a vocabulary ofhistorical discontinuity by decomposing time.If the idea originates as a political slogan, it assumes a broader usage with the last fragmentary meditations onhumanism, marking the limit of a modern imagination in general, defined now bythe fact that it ‘exhibits the same complete inability to realise the meaning of the dogma’ ( CW, p.446).If the idea first draws a subjective distinction, that is,200T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismbetween political orientations and then between artistic styles, it is progressively rendered more objective and more absolute, recoded first as a contradictory set of social determinations (affiliated most obviously with religion and class) and then as an absolute historical difference, the truth of a looming gulf between modernity and the lost attitude of that epoch which preceded it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]