``But the writer Octavio Paz said it before: "you cannot live in the present moment, just as you cannot live in the future". It is exactly what all of us are now going through, and that includes the bankers...''
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(All of this has to do with my own history, so please forebare...)
Paz wrote that sometime between 1970-74 and it appears in one of my favorite books of all time, Children of the Mire. What makes this an important book for me, was it almost perfectly captured what I was feeling when I read it. Paz gave form to my strange thoughts at the time.
By 1972, there were two things that were obvious to me. First was that the 60s really were over and we lost; and second that I would probably never get a teaching job in art and really never make it as an artist. Part of that was due to a slow motion dissolve of the US art world---the bottomless cuts in teaching art.... But the other part was more interesting. I was losing my ability to find a source, a well of sorts to keep my interior and intellectual senses alive.
Then I read Paz, in my usual random and scattered seaches. Wow. I hung on every damned word. That's it. I thought, yes, that's what poets do, they capture the moment of life, the true historical moment. From Romanticism to the Avant Guard (the subtitle) is about the sweep of modernity, and its self-inflicted annihilation---of which I had been part, in a completely unconscience way.
>From my limited exposure to some of the then current writing coming
from French and German student movements, I could already tell, we in
the US were on a different track, and that the just then emerging
academic writers in the US, were way off track. They were off about
the moment, they were off about the direction, etc. There was really
no point in reading them at all. In the visual arts, the great starts
made by say Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt had already lost their charge
and had turned into a mere style. The promise of a political moment in
abstract art had turned into just another conventionalism. And
worse. Just a design system for the corporate logo.
Something had gone wrong with the intellectual machine. But who the hell knew what it was? I sure couldn't figure it out... And that is exactly what Paz captured. Right there. The closing of the cycle of revolt and erasure of linear Christian time of the spirit. Both had evaporated, leaving only the Present. In my mind that was the consumate abyss, the void. It should have been a kind of great liberation, creatio ex nihilo, but it somehow wasn't. It felt like all creative moments were now past. I went into a kind of reading frenzy of Beckette and Robbe-Grillet. Beckette especially, see Texts for Nothing. Or Robbe-Grillet's Snap Shots.
I experimented with several different ways to get at this moment, to give it some form of visual art, and failed. It was just too abstract an idea, or I wasn't up for the job, and could not command the concrete demands of the visual arts. I was no damned genius. I was an LA kid who went to art school in Berkeley.
Okay now the relevance to this moment. We are not at the end of something like the 60s which closed the cultural-historical sweep of the belief in modernity---not just a belief in progress, and progressive time, but also a continual self-conscience system of ideas and works that kept on generating themselves and us, propelling us through history... Now we faced the long intellectual and creative let down that stretched out into the dim lighted labyrinth of the 70s. We are not at the close of what we perceive as a golden age. (Yes, I believed that the 50s-60s were a golden age, by comparison with 70s. I think I still do.)
Ever since I read Paz's Children of the Mire, I have seen we are in some monsterous reaction that we back then had been trying to prevent from becoming the dominant theme of US society. When the reaction hit it seemed to prevail everywhere, almost intantaneously.
I can now see, something I couldn't see then. That reaction was force driven by the power elite's own sensibility and reactions. The elite had come to the horrifying realization that if they really did support the American dream of better life, and helped support the working masses to gain in their own development----then some significant part of that mass were going to start steering the cultural-historical direction of the political economy for their own ends, and not to the benefit of the elite. If the elite continued supporting the post-WWII policies, they were going to get something like the 60s coming back again someday, as their reward. The American Dream, which is just a variant historical particular of a more broadly conceived modernity---that dream was the problem. If you make public higher education for example cheap and available to the lower depths, you are going to lose power. Simple as that. Time to turn the ship of state and its political economic engine around.
Guys like Wm Buckley had been advocating all this shit for years (thanks to Doug for posting a reminder). So a vast overhaul began everywhere, including within the extraordinarily arcane places like political philosophy hence my interest in Strauss. When I started my Strauss reading project, I had vastly over rated Strauss's importance. I've finally discovered (thanks to lbo) that guys like Hayek and Popper were far more influencial and instrumental especially in shaping thought in economics, political science, the social sciences, and of course the media propaganda machine. The culture wars followed, actually that is they continued now ramped up in earnest. Academia was no friend of the mostly working or lower middle class students like Mario Salvio or far lesser lights like me, that's for sure. And that same academy was not going to overhaul its assumptions about an Aristotllan hierarchy as the proper model for a well run society. They tried the democratic alternative with the GI bill and got the 60s as their reward. (Remember my stepfather was on the GI bill and that's how I got to see all the great things I did as a kid. Sure most of it was my stepfather's sensibility, but the other material support was a government education subsidity that brought a whole managerie of artists, writers, weirdos, addicts, predators, and various others together in rundown apartments in the LA and Guadalajara of my childhood...)
Getting back to the point. We are not at the same kind of juncture I was back in the early 70s when Paz wrote his lectures. In some sense we are at it's mirror. What has happened to us, in these last few months is a vast speed-up of our sense of historical time (totally agree about velocity). What happened to me back then was the beginning of a vast slowdown. I was emerging from a long period where time raced breathlessly from one moment to the next. I've tried to write about the transistion into this big chill in the early 70s, but things were happening simultaneously by then (The Nixon v. OEO thing, special admissions to UCB, etc).
We are not looking at the death of the future, as we were then. We are experiencing something different, the possibility that the future is an abyss and that the ride into this night might be terrifyingly swift. I agree ``Acceleration. That is what perplexes.''
I certainly feel a kind of gidiness, a breathlessness. These are the mirror feelings to what Paz was writing about, and what I lived. It's difficult to understand but the early 70s were the foreclosure on the past and the death of the future at the same time, leaving only the present, which was uninhabitable, a kind of limbo. Malraux called it the Mirror of Limbo, in his short Lazare, written about the same time.
I have no idea what's next. Is this really the closing door on the forty year reaction? I certainly hope so. I don't think that Capitalism is in any trouble at all, though. It is firmly in place and will drag us all down into the roiling torrents below if necessary. We have no way to stop the system from killing us, if that is what it takes to save Capital order.
On the other hand, today's announcement of Obama's economic team, may have some light, in Christine Romer, but maybe not. Brad DeLong endorsed her, in a hiring truffle between Harvard and Berkeley. That makes me worry.
The deeper problem that I think all ideologues share is something to do with feeling and learning. You have to have lived within the battering forces of history in order to feel them, and therefore learn from them. My joys and despairs have always been the deepest source of thought, reflection... This is why I don't believe the bourgeois order is a healthy source of policy, because they are too well insulated from both the clashing terrors of defeat, and the marvelous feeling of redemption in the all too few victories and vindications. This goes to Christine Romer and Melody Barnes. For example is Melody Barnes old enough to have seen the inside of Johnson's War on Poverty? No. Is Christine Romer older enough to have felt anything issuing from the Great Depression? No. Romer was born in 1958. Christ she was ten at the turning point of the Great Society. Barnes was born in 1964, the year of FSM and Mississippi Freedom Summer. (My inner voice, pleads, god rid us of these yuppies.)
That Barnes worked for CAP and Kennedy tells me she is very far into urban studies and urban planning. But then my ex-wife was, and me and ex fought over and over these issues. Does Barness see how the existing structures of US cities perpetuate the entire class war? I have no idea. Probably not. Is she another of those god damned bean counters Nixon sent after us to destory the momentum we were building almost forty years ago? I sure hope not. That sort of disaster of counting everthting came straight out of Donald Rumsfelt's oversight of the dismantling of OEO. Does Barnes know that? I would sure like to ask Barnes, this question. Would you please discuss and amplify on Donald Rumsfeld's oversight, management and dismandling of Johnson's OEO.
Sorry to pick on the two women. It's just that I gave up on the men immediately and the women are critically placed in exactly the places that I am most interested in, the convergence of the New Deal and the War on Poverty. I do see potential hope---probably because I know nothing about the women who will look through this history for ideas on how to save capitalism from getting us all killed. The men will of course be saving the big picture, the monetary system, while the women will be in the kitchen cooking up the details on who we are going to live in the meantime....
And I have more hope... No matter who Romer and Barnes really are, the people who will be drawn into the projects and programs they design and advocate are potentially the most liberal and progressive I've ever met. We could get lucky. They could accidently unleash what Johnson unleashed in me, a radical revision of the future.
CG