Habeas corpus?
On 11 April 2012 10:11, Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> To start a discussion or invite comments...
>
> Reading recently without concern for citations I came across a flurry of
> comments which were effectively opposed to presentist poetics and
> presentism, as if it were an accusation of crime, a moral sin or some other
> negative. This was done without any real definition of the term. This also
> invites an opposition to vitalism.
>
> One could assume this above usage is theological, believing that the
> scripture prophecies of the Apocalypse are being fulfilled at the present
> time or that all that exists does so only at the present time and as such
> ignores the historical. History here, is seen as determined by historical
> progress and has a moral dimension (and hence theological.)
>
> But what seems to be missed is presentist poetics as a feature of
> modernist poetry and literature, Pound and Joyce, for example. Such a
> poetics is perhaps best understood as a mode or a way of writing which is
> secular. Also, the theoretical discussions over the past 50 odd years, if
> not the past 150 years.
>
> I admit to writing in the main with a presentist poetics and for me it
> blurs the prior difference between narrative and lyric. The narrative I
> tend to write is non-intentional and I find this a rather difficult way to
> write, even to the extent I have difficulty deciding if it is narrative or
> lyric or perhaps both, except to say novels, verse or prose, are generally
> considered narrative forms. It is also a non-formal way of writing in the
> traditional understanding of formal as being structured on an a-priori (ala
> Kant.)
>
> The other intriguing idea with presentist writing is the way in which it
> can adapt to critique and immanent critique where the present critiques the
> present. (This doesn't rule out transcendental critique, of course.) Modern
> photography and visual arts also use presentist poetics, in the sense of a
> process of producing art which merges with aesthetics.
>
> Isn't the idea of a snapshot presentist?
>
> I have read more on this which is more firmly grounded in rigorous
> scholarly research which more or less supports my understanding of
> presentist poetics which also incorporates vitalism, without denying
> history. I also have a political concern that anti-presentist ideology
> denies that we are living in an era of crisis and has a reactionary and
> even anti-Marxist agenda. (It could be said Marx's theory of history is
> presentist. One of his essential breaks with Hegel's idea of history along
> with breaking history from philosophy.)
>
> Enough for now; comments welcome... even over a longer period of time,
> best cj
>
--
David Joseph Bircumshaw
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