Well, Ok, if you want it. I generally try to back up my stuff, though even as a grad student I do not come close to competing with he what apparently knows all, Mr. VW.
Thank you for those kind words. Having encountered me, perhaps you should kill your mental image of me, though... Goodness knows, I'd never claimed to know everything, and I hope I don't seem infallible... I'm too enamored with my shortcomings to want to let go of them.
Isn't conversation more interesting than competition? In this context, I mean. (I'd hate to see athletes talking rather than competing...)
Glad that the discourses and discussions give you pleasure.
You know, I dont think either of us make good elephants
I like walking in forests (maybe you do too) but we both would be trying to figure out what each kind of plant would be, and its history, or uses, or mythological signification, or how to paint it to get the color just right.
I think too that sometimes You and I have an apples and oranges problem.
Oh, I don't know... I do like forests, but I tend to be mindful of the surroundings, as I worry that some revolutionary or extremist might kidnap me and try ransoming my sorry self-- or some poacher might slaughter me for my tusks. Whichever analogy you prefer.
From our conversations, you seem to be very interested in settings and particualar historical events, where as I am all about meaning and very rarely am asserting that one thing denies the other, or is the only/highest expression of a certian thought/ concept.
I'm not sure there's so much difference between history and meaning. It seems to me that meaning comes about through specific historical events and contexts-- and that our understanding of those those things is part of the process. History is, after all, a kind of narrative. It's when someone inserts something into another context- a quotation, for example- that new or modified meanings are generated, and ironies arise. But that, too, is part of history/meaning...
And I'm as skeptical of "final meanings", i.e. about what something "ultimately meant to history," as I am about narratives involving origins. What was it that Nietzsche wrote? Something about how the true or final value of human existence cannot be ascertained by the living-- who are interested parties-- or by the dead-- for more obvious reasons...
I think I hear that elephant...
Anyways I think we sometimes are talking at right angles to each other.
That must make for some pretty bizarre appearances... and I'm not sure it's good for my back. All this bending and twisting whilst communicating...Yipes.
All kidding aside, I'd say that part of this apparent "talking at angles" undoubtedly has to do with the nature of this medium, some of it probably has to do with language, with the fact that words sometimes mean things other than what we intend, rendering communication a pretty fragile and an unfortunately taken-for-granted thing at times.
That's part of the reason I prefer precision (or attempts at precision) to generalities... So I (and others) can know what someone's saying, and what the intent (or function) of a comment is.
Im not sure why you have fixated so much on my mention of romanticism which was just part of my whole ramble but ok, Im game...
I wasnt saying they began all rebelous thought, far from it.
Perhaps because I was alluding to-- and am interested in-- Kim's comments about technology and reality in the film... And since this topic started as a discussion of one quotation, we might want to look at other quotations and allusions from the movie and see how they work together, what meaning(s) they suggest.
Perhaps my comments took your post as a starting point... and were an attempt at pointing to another line of inquiry.
As I stated:
Let's digress for a moment, as this particular digression might be of some value to the present discussion.
The discussion being the one about the film.
Romanticism... 18th Century notions of man-as-machine... Shelley... La Mettrie...
A. In recent history, neo-clasicism was the last hugely powerful wave of expression of man's truimph over nature. The goals of neo-clasisicm were to up hold mans place at the top of all nature. Descarte's rationality from what I understand, was the ultimate seperation of "animal" from "Human", declaring animals to be soulless machines.
Neo-Classicism was all about control. Control, reason, and rationality, with the exclusion of all else. The excesively trimmed orntate gardens of the Versais is a good example of the control that was idealized over nature. Nature, naturalness, animality, rurality was considered ugly, debasing and wrong. (Of course mainly by the rich, who could be away from rural life, or just play at it, like Marie Antionette playing pastoral shepardess.)
Well, Descartes initiated-- or, to be more accurate, foregrounded-- certain elements in Western thought. La Mettrie (whose ideas are really, really relevant to
Innocence) took some Cartesian concepts and pushed the arguments/reduced them to a certain point. La Mettrie was a lot more secular than most 18th Century thought-- even the aristocracy paid lip-service to Christian belief-- and his work continues to have an impact on our thinking, especially in the neurosciences, etc.
And speaking of the neurosciences, I think that a lot of contemporary scientific thinking calls into question the assertion that Neo-Classicism was "the last hugely powerful wave of expression of man's truimph over nature." If the definitions of "man" and "nature" change over time, I'm not sure we can say that the relationship or conflict between the two (loosely defined) concepts has ever vanished or been lessened... Medical science is in no small part about controlling nature, unless one views disease, cancer, etc. as unnatural. And that's leaving aside the development of psychoactive medication, continued manipulation of images and language to provoke desired responses in voters/citizens/consumers, etc.
And I'd make the case that satellite communications, internet technology, etc. all "rewrite" nature, on a pretty basic level-- if we consider communications and distance and expression to be "natural" to human beings.
And we have exercise equipment, etc. to "help nature along"...
To augment is, in many ways, another type of control or mastery...
"Self-determination"- whatever we mean by that term-- also implies control...
Again, this has to do with concepts changing over time. Without considering what a term meant at a given point, we might well become confused about an allusion or reference or even the way we're using the term-- and about what specific similarities and differences between the present and a given point in the past imply about a certain concept, and about the future of the concept.
And on a more basic level, I think we're using "Neo-Classicism" too loosely. I'm not sure we should confuse Neo-Classicism
with the ideology that it expressed or was a function of, or take it as indicative of the 18th Century as a whole. Neo-Classicism, Rococco art and architecture, Enlightenment philosophy, 18th Century developments in physics, and
everything else that took place in the 18th Century... All separate but related issues, and all of which fed into each other in complex ways.
I don't know if I'd lump an Alexander Pope poem with Pierre Jaquet-Droz's automata and think of both the same way that I think of Versailles... All these things tell us about 18th Century views about society, nature, etc. But they tell us different things...
Also, I think your account simplifies the relationship between, say, the French aristocracy and "Nature". One could just as easily say that Versailles, the whole dressing as shepherds and shepherdesses thing, etc. represented a certain ideological/philosophical view about controlling "Nature", and that this expression was related both to pleasure and to the "dominion" notion found in Genesis. Kind of a survival of the whole "Divine Right" notion, too... And one could say that certain monarchies were doomed because they didn't see where technologies, sciences, and lines of inquiry were leading-- to questions about kings, etc. Once the Newtonian and Enlightenment models entered the discussion, well, one had to ask if monarchs and aristocrats were necessary-- as folks could ask the question, "Why
this way, and not
some other way?"
(Let me point out that an aristocrat masquerading as someone from another social class says a lot about the functions of role-playing, fantasy, and sexuality within a given social system... If you read a lot of memoirs and pornographic literature from the 18th Century, you see just how fascinating the idea of
acting the part of a peasant-- even an idealized, Virgilian peasant-- was for the French ruling classes. Leaving aside Virgilian social commentary for a moment, I doubt the shepherds of Virgil's time-- and before Virgil, the shepherds of Theocritus-- were any happier than the French lower and working classes of the 18th Century, or their existence any more idyllic or bucolic... and note that Virgil's shepherds are fantastic creatures whose existence is simplified
and eroticized. Some argue that the whole Bourbon "libertine" courtly mode can be read as a function produced by social pressures, by a desire to find simple...
releases, or to escape into a simpler time, thus offering a sort of commentary on what aristocrats and courtiers saw as the complexities of their day... even though these manifestations and expressions are colored by irony. Hence, I think, the 18th Century aristocratic fascination with the pastoral... and as extension of and in counterpoint to this, the Enlightenment's fascination with the utopian, the encyclopedic, the didactic, and the satiricial makes more sense.)
(EDIT: You might want to compare Versailles and similar locations with Baudelaire's
paradis artificiels, the "artificial paradises" experienced in altered states of consciousness... Despite the differences, there are remarkable similarities between the two kinds of artificial and visionary locales-- although a dandy such as Baudelaire believed in something like an aesthetic aristocracy, as opposed to an actual one.)
So I'm not sure some of the manifestations and behaviors we find in the
Ancien Régime were
simply about control... However "wicked" some of it was, and however much a lot of it relied upon artifice, it was also nostalgic, in many ways.
Control is never really a simple thing. And neither is history-- or art history and cultural history.
And Romanticism is in many ways an extension of elements of Enlightenment social thought, particularly those aspects having to do with Capital-N Nature, social change, etc. (Excluding folks such as Blake, of course.)
Later, we can see the Enlightenment's more radical elements reflected in Leftist thought. The Enlightenment not only generated revolutions and social shifts, but combined with technological change, the ideas gave rise to and offered justifications for
new kinds of upper- and middle-class existence, and to a modified and developed type of capitalism. And this influenced the development of the
type of workers who were needed by the newer models, too. And new oppositions to this developing system came into being.
(The late 18th/early 19th Century Romantic individualist or visionary poet is separated from the 19th Century captain of industry or middle-class citizen more by aesthetics rather than by actual temperament. Both groups had strong senses of individual identity and worth, and both groups "remade" the world in terms of what they thought possible or true-- the Romantic through poetic expression, the bourgeois or capitalist through other, more material means. One can see the 19th Century bourgeois individualist as a mutation of the Romantic individualist... Although 19th Century capitalists were more concerned with materialism than the Romantics, they believed in something very much like the Romantic notion of "Will.")
Unsurprisingly, some bourgeois folks
liked elements of Romanticism... after the Romantics were safely dead, of course. And these changes-- this modification and commodification of counterculture-- generated another countermovement. This is what happened with Marxism and Anarchism... if you read Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, etc., you find that the questions have to do not only with social issues... but with matters of technology and science.
(Let me add that if you follow 20th Century and contemporary Marxist thought-- excluding works that are meant to justify the existence of one state or another-- you find that Marxism actually divides into schools of thought, and that the differences between these schools have a lot to do with changes in capitalism-- and by extension with science and technology, which influence social organization pretty profoundly.)
In other words, as technology, science, and philosophy raise questions about order, the assumption that a way of life or a given hierarchy is necessary gets called into question... Hence my proposing that most problems are iterations of earlier problems.
I think it's more dialectical than the reading you've proposed suggests.
Directly following this period was the reaction of Romanicism, with its emphasis on the individual, nature, emotion, intuitivity, and passion. Western thought became enamored with nature, where as it fled from it before. The "sublime" which used to be pejoritive became positive. The natural state of humanity became praised. (examples,Wordsworths lyrical ballads, Paines rights of man, Turners paintings of mountains and sea's, Wollenscraft-Shelly's Vindication...)
It's interesting that your statements don't look at the long-term repercussions of Romanticism. I tend to agree with Terry Eagleton et. al.--that all the examples of the "sublime" you've mentioned fed into the development/were manifestations of bourgeois individualism, and that those in power use the political thinkers and writings you've mentioned in ways that serve the status quo. The subversion
of those thinkers and concepts was contained and implied
within the "new world" the thinkers' ideas helped shape. As Kafka once stated, every revolution leaves behind the slime of a new bureaucracy...
(Notice how consumer choice is identified
with freedom in a lot of advertising, including advertising targeting women and minorities. Even revolutionary images and ideas become "branded"... Same kind of thing, only more sophisticated. Herbert Marcuse did some wonderful but now dated work on this sort of process...)
On a related note, one could read Rousseau's writings about human freedom as a natural state, his concept of the "noble savage", and his fascinating ideas about education (to say nothing of the man's fond memories of getting caned as a child) against or
within each other, and we'd find some interesting and revealing contradictions in the way freedom
functions in his writings and novels. "Freedom" remained self-evident to Rousseau, but the term was rather free-floating-- and could only be described in terms of
natural law, an idea I suspect many people would be unconfortable with, as it's a pretty loose construct, too. (Rousseau's notion of freedom had a lot to do with his taking whatever he didn't like as freedom's opposite; he did a bad job of describing what true freedom
would be like-- so he had to posit a condition that was analogous to humanity's existence before the Fall while criticizing those who believed
in the Fall. Hence Rousseau's statements that facts-- and logic-- didn't much matter to him. Not unlike the playgrounds of the Bourbons and their associates or the religious tracts of so many Christians of the 18th Century, Rousseau's texts are filled with nostalgia for a simpler time that may well never have existed...)
We can see how many contradictory readings and traditions his texts engendered (and yes, that last word's a pun)...
And this raises a further question... What
is the "natural state" of humanity?
Whenever someone talks about origin-points or natural states, I suspect there's a rather costly truth-claim that's somewhere nearby...
Anyways.... Social justice became much more important with the rise of the status of the individual, (ala Rousseau) along with the American and French Revelutions. Darwin's theroies of evolution soon brought out the idea of our evolution from a common ancestor of apes. This brought into the mainstream consciousness, whether believed or not, our kinship to all other animals. Soon after this the new study of Psychology brought to front that all humans have deep ties to thier animal nature, that we have not lost, that lie deep in our minds.
Then came the first world war, which through the advance in medical technology was one of the first to have a large population return from, mangled but alive. The horrors these people faced caused them to question well, prettymuch everything... tada modernism along with expresionism, nhilism, absurdism, and on... which brings me to the begining of where I am talking about how those movements remind me of the Linji quote about how the Budda himself is just a natural man, but Budda nature is something else, however they still exist in the same reality.
Again, leaving aside some of the generalizations you've made (and of course these generalizations are undoubtedly due to time-constraints, rather than a lack of understanding on your part), we're not in complete disagreement...
Although I remain troubled by and skeptical of the relationship between human rights, "natural states", and "progress." And I think "modernism" (not unlike "postmodernism"-- or most other "-isms") is a looser term than I like to employ. (It doesn't help that Modernism is so easily confused with Modernity-- another category that's broad to the point of being problematic.) Although I suppose that such terms provide useful shorthand, as in the discussions of Neo-Classicism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the 18th Century aristocracy...
Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison. - Bosola, in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi