Reading George Steiner's The Grammar of Creation - interesting, even if
the questions he asks seem to be somewhat behind the eightball, though he
always asks them elegantly. His thesis is that creation - In the
Beginning was the Word and that rich Judaeic-Christian mythological
tradition, which has fired Western art - was just a human invention, and
now we have entered an age of "post creation" (he doesn't use the term,
and would shudder at it). That is, after the anti-creation of Dada -
Duchamp, Schwitters et al - and the reign of science and technology,
where next for art?
A couple of quotes:
"The human intellect will persist in posing questions which science has
ruled illicit or unanswerable. Though perhaps condemned to ultimate
circularity, this persistence is thought made urgent, which is to say,
metaphysical. An imp of demonic triviality inhabits the imperial regime
of the sciences. It could be that music _knows_ better, although there
is nothing more intractable to definition than the nature of that
knowledge.
"We saw that the armature of poiesis has been, in a larger sense,
theological; that it lies on the far side of physics (meta-physics) ...
The wingbeat of the unknown has been at the heart of poiesis. Can, will
there be major philosophy, literature, music an art of an atheistic
provenance?"
Like Zygmunt Bauman, but from a different perspective, he perceives the
fundamental loneliness which besets the individual in our age - for
Steiner an aesthetic rather than moral and social dilemma, though it
seems to me that these distinctions are beginning to dissolve, and the
contemporary obsession with ethics (poethics etc) reflects this uneasy
feeling.
Best
Alison
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