Any other interesting citations about Time? I'm fond of collecting citations, like Bloch and Benjamin.
Yoshie ---------------
Sure. Octavio Paz, `Children of the Mire, Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde', Harvard Uni Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1974. This is a series of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, from 1971-2.
Paz re-tells intellectual history from the French Revolution to the end of the Sixties, through the medium of poetry, and its changing conceptions of time. From the preface, `Our own period marks the end of the avant-gard, and thereby of everything which since the eighteenth century has been called modern art. What is in question in the second half of our century is not the idea of art itself, but the idea of the modern.'
And, he concludes the entire program of the modern was the invention and construction of the future, as an immanent potential, a domain toward which we projected not only the creative power of our look, but also the entirety of our being, as if that domain were our only conceivable transcendence. It's end, the death of the future, becomes the end of belief in even a secular transcendence.
Given that this is the perspective of thirty years ago, from the last section then, The Closing of the Circle,
`All these rebellions appear as a breach in the idea of linear time. They are the irruption of the offended present and thus, explicitly or implicitly, postulate a devaluation of the future. The background for these rebellions is the changed sensibility of the age. Decay of the Protestant and Capitalist ethic with its moral code of savings and work: two ways of shaping the future, two attempts to get the future into our power. The insurrection of corporal and orgiastic values is a rebellion against man's twofold penalty---the condemnation to work and repression of desire. For Christianity the human body was fallen Nature, but divine grace could transfigure it into the glorious body. Capitalism deconsecrated the body; it ceased to be a battlefield for angels and devils and became a work tool. The conception of the body as a tool led to its degradation as a source of pleasure. Asceticism changed; instead of a means to get to heaven, it became a technique to increase productivity. Pleasure is a waste, sensuality an embarrassment. To condemn pleasure was to condemn the imagination because the body is not just a wellspring of sensations but of images. The disorders of the imagination are no less prejudicial to production and optimum output than physical shudders of sensual pleasure. In the name of the future the censure of the body culminated in the mutilation of man's poetic powers. Nowadays the rebellion of the body is also that of the imagination. Both reject linear time: their values are those of the present. The body and the imagination do know the future; sensations are the abolition of time in the instantaneous moment, the images of desire dissolve past and future in a timeless present. It is the return to the beginning of the beginning, to the sensibility and passion of the Romantics. The resurrection of the body may be an omen that man will eventually recover his lost wisdom. The body not only rejects the future: it is a path toward the present, toward the here and now where life and death are two halves of one and the same sphere.
These various signs signal a change in our image of time. At the beginning of the modern era, Christian eternity lost its ontological reality as well as its logical coherence; it became a senseless proposition, an empty word. Today, the future seems no less unreal than eternity. From Hume to Marx, criticism of religion by philosophy is applicable to the future: it is not real and it robs us of reality; it does not exist and it robs us of life. Yet the critique of the future has been made not by philosophy but by the body and by the imagination...
...The time has come to build a Ethics and a Politics upon the Poetics of the now. Politics ceases to be a construction of the future; its mission is to make the present habitable.' (157p)
Although this particular passage has almost no lyricism at all, much of the book does, giving some grace to its turn of ideas.
Now some thirty years later, it is interesting to reflect on the promise that living within the collapsed temporal stream of an infinite present, a world to be made sensually habitable would be a positive affirmation. I think this turn which is now embedded in a past was probably a more terrifying revolt against the bourgeois sensibility of progress, work, savings and the future than we might have imagined. After all we have been living in one long sequence of denials, reactions, rejections and retrograde movements against this turn ever since.
The awareness of the lack of a sensually habitable present is the quintessential point of revolt. To be confronted over and over by the meaningless activity of work, its absolute humiliation, say digging a hole in the ground, or sitting in a bland gray cubical, turns one into a philosopher of time, time to escape whatever horrible stupidity consumes your body so that some stinking capitalist pig can turn a buck on whatever you are doing---that the only way to keep this nightmare from exploding is to create the illusion that there is a future, a potential transcendence, a place of flight. But in the more immediate moment, instant transcendence is all that is made available, for a price of course, hence the endless media stream, the mass cultural envelop of illusions; music for example as the mind numbing throb of a virtual body, which is the similitude of a sensual life fed back upon the dead, erasing the chained fixity of a real body stuck in the empty present.
Brings to mind Shelley, `death worms, like wingless moments crawl...' or Eddie Harris, trying to make it real compared to what?
Chuck Grimes