Each of us has our weak spots.
For example, Eric is "fixated" on knocking Chomsky down a few rungs. My Brian Eno-esque distaste for nostalgia, hauntology and any sepia-toned memory of lovely yesterdays makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up whenever anyone starts in with 'back in my day' shtick.
I think these on list, art-related laments are, regardless of whatever individual points of factual accuracy they may contain, wrong in spirit and scope. .d.
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(Below I try to convince you to re-think...)
This sets up an interesting issue. Why a distaste for nostalgia? Serious question. What's wrong with a lament for a past, probably an imagined past? I think it is the obverse of a dynamic celebration for the future. Both are escape from the present state of affairs, which at the moment are unbarable. This psycho-motive register (a Ted Byfield term) as far as I can tell has been a core creative cultural impulse for, probably forever. There is more to this impulse than constructions of decline and or return to a golden age.
In terms of process, our creativity doesn't come ex nihlo, but only in relation to something, in this case a past. It's a pretty scary proposition to pick up a paint brush, a violin, or a camera, a computer--as a tool especially if you go through the academy. The sheer volumn of the multiple pasts you learn about are astonishing.
Well, so I am of multiple minds here. There seems to be an almost Hegelian process at work between the internal dynamic of mind, weighed down with the libraries of the past, the current blank page to write and all the possible futures. This is an experienced state, and not just a philosophical system or theory of psychology or a stylistic device.
There are other aspects to this feeling or sense of regret or state of mourning. For example, it's a core component to various movements that can be labelled romanticism, which in turn cover a whole spectrum of work high, medium and low and takes many different forms from the saccrine to the sublime.
One of the strange things that studying (and doing) the arts teaches, and that is an expansion of states of feeling (expression), the nuances of ambiguity, a kind of fine tunning of sensibility. A metaphor for this expansion is something like the color wheel, where more colors are added for more and more finasse in selection. But this can be carried out ad absurdum until there are distinctions with no difference. A very similar process goes on in poetry and its sense of language, sound, and meaning, again only up to a point.
The practice also teaches somekind of formal conceptual realm, not opposed to the sensible, say for color, but along with it. It's usually called composition. But again, there is a point where it becames too much. It's a point where the relationships become so subtle or abstract, they lose the ability to contain any sense.
Getting back to philosophizing about nostalgia or some other forms of romanticism. They can be used as a kind of psychological tool of analysis. A whole wing of German idealism developed from Hegel's generation and their psycho-motive reactions to the events of the French Revolution, the Terror, and the consequent Empire---along with its subsequent collapse. The political events where turned into forms of poetry, philosophy and across the intellectual spectrum, even into mathematics. This is why the French Revolution (1789) was such a big deal in European history. The American war of independence was not the shot heard round the world---although it can be argued to have inspired some of the French. When that grand scale socio-political moment died (officially 1799), it was seen as a castrophe. The death grip of feudalism wasn't rid of so easily by mere revolt. The triumph of the sciences was not going to overthrow the mind and spirit ossification by the Catholic Church. Alas, the brave new dawn of truth and beauty was not in the offing.
This idea of a failed revolution and the disaster of empire made a tremendous impression on Hegel, Hoelderlin, and Schelling. Hegel was born in 1770, so he was nineteen when the revolution started. Hegel, Hoelderlin and Schelling were close friends in college. It's hard for me to imagine they talked of anything other than art, revolution and philosophy. And later (except for Hoelderlin who became zero) the process of looking back, of reflection on youth, even the creation of youthful idealism (a neo-classical ideal) as a state of nature became perhaps an obcessional figure among a new born class, the avant-garde.
So contrary to 20thC figures like Greenberg, or Adorno, Horkheimer and perhaps Benjamin, the avant-garde in my view was born much further back, and is co-eval with the entire spectrum of Modernity, and its deepest linkage is the romanticism of art and revolution. This is not my idea, I am very sorry to say. It comes from desparate sources: Ernst Cassirer, Andre Malraux, and Octavio Paz. I hear it in Marx, with his murderous denouncement of his bourgois century. I am sure I am using this wrong, but Marx aus der Romantik gefallen in the Heideggerian sense. I think he had deeply perceived Hegel's youth (left) and followed it into a science of modern society.
I first started reading into this dimension (including parts of the Communist Manifesto), of course in the late 60s. May 68 was a pretty damned stunning year to be twenty-six in grad school drafted under sentence, but it became an almost instant engima. What the fuck was that? What just happened? My demo buddy and intellectual friend Mike and I read everything we could think of that might apply. None of it did, except little bits and pieces. I didn't read Paz Children of the Mire until 74, and Paz's project was to trace the Enlightenment and Revolution up through the 60s in the language, literature and history of Spain and Mexico with recursions to India. His perspective was the engima of Spanish and Modernismo---which includes Marxism, Native American culture, and Catholic mysticism. Paz was an extreme Modernist. His poetry depended on a surrealist thread linked to Brunel and Tamayo. It is complex because it flows from something that is and is not politico. Sure I would rather Orozco, but there is something of spirit beyond the political. Art and revolution are a dialectic, not a didactic.
Best,
CG