Everything dies, all of us know that; but, to be more precise, since nothing alive is the same in two different moments and the whole universe relentlessly evolves and goes (mostly unexpectedly) through mutations and changes of directions, focusing either on death or birth of individual things is not particularly clever. From an organic matter organic shapes and phenomena are generated, namely, everything that lives won't be the same forever, but is already doomed to turn into something else, no matter how alien to its original seed. We say modern or even (quite funnily) post-modern because we think many technical achievements around us show we're the "ripest" age at all; actually, they're not but consequences of our lack of meanings.
Oswald Spengler, in his monumental essay The decline of the West (1918 vol. 1, 1922 vol. 2) depicts the history of a Culture (he says there have been several cultures on earth, and he calls his own "Faustian", begun about Xth century with the birth of an "aerial" religious architecture and declined with the tragic notes of Goethe's Faust) as a slow passage form a fertile period, where the spirit of peoples and art are totally and organically in tune with each other in order to create spontaneous and various forms (the majestic symbol of the beginning of the Faustian culture is the cathedral), to a civilization, the type of society he, and we as well, lives in, characterized by the supremacy of huge multiethnic cities, the end of the country settlements and costumes and the repetition and mixture of past esthetical expressions. Of course we're not the first civilization, nor the first one which will fall.
Oswald Spengler, in his monumental essay The decline of the West (1918 vol. 1, 1922 vol. 2) depicts the history of a Culture (he says there have been several cultures on earth, and he calls his own "Faustian", begun about Xth century with the birth of an "aerial" religious architecture and declined with the tragic notes of Goethe's Faust) as a slow passage form a fertile period, where the spirit of peoples and art are totally and organically in tune with each other in order to create spontaneous and various forms (the majestic symbol of the beginning of the Faustian culture is the cathedral), to a civilization, the type of society he, and we as well, lives in, characterized by the supremacy of huge multiethnic cities, the end of the country settlements and costumes and the repetition and mixture of past esthetical expressions. Of course we're not the first civilization, nor the first one which will fall.
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| Oswald Spengler (1880 - 1936) |
Spengler, of course, already knew he lived in the exhausted shell of an old Culture, NOT in a Culture, and his majestic knowledge was absolutely aware of the impossibility to reach the heights of his main teachers, Nietzsche and Goethe: the age of the most meaningful spiritual discoveries of the Faustian Culture (each of them coloured with the essence of this Culture in particular) was already ended, and civilization couldn't but collapse on itself in a struggle to survive to the meaninglessness of its existence. Spengler died just three years before the beginning of the Second World War.
That's why I'm a little tired of all this complaining about the "death" of art, of culture, of books, of things we deem important just according to commonplaces; but I also understand what it's due to. There's no "death". Everyone talks about culture because there's no culture to talk about, just re-elaboration of past things. Apparently, we turned totally unable to understand that knowledge can be built privately, between wise people, with good threads about various aspects of life; in this sense, and in this sense only, culture cannot die. We are totally free to gain any information, and, if we focus just on what we like, there's not danger for "culture" at all.
The fact we name "culture" something belonging exclusively to the past, coming from an hypothetical good age, or rather, something we never really struggled to build, is the clearest evidence that our world is turning less and less organic; and this started several decades ago, more or less when we started realizing art was depleting its abstract repertoire of forms. Everywhere is the same generic metropolis, the same global (globalized) hive. Although we have nothing but fragments of past forms we try to call beauty, we pretend to believe museums and theatres can save humanity from collapse. Spengler had exactly the same feelings about the "men of culture" of his age.
We use categories, definitions, comfortable but sterile borders to keep the living matter in a dead monotonous land, and we claim culture is fundamental, art is everything, history is necessary, ignorance is dangerous, without really knowing the meaning of these words, and we say many other things we learned from the intellectuals monitors teem with. Suggestions about a good mantainance of mankind are everywhere: basically, we step on them without even noticing, during the few minutes our hectic routine allows us.
The fact we name "culture" something belonging exclusively to the past, coming from an hypothetical good age, or rather, something we never really struggled to build, is the clearest evidence that our world is turning less and less organic; and this started several decades ago, more or less when we started realizing art was depleting its abstract repertoire of forms. Everywhere is the same generic metropolis, the same global (globalized) hive. Although we have nothing but fragments of past forms we try to call beauty, we pretend to believe museums and theatres can save humanity from collapse. Spengler had exactly the same feelings about the "men of culture" of his age.
We use categories, definitions, comfortable but sterile borders to keep the living matter in a dead monotonous land, and we claim culture is fundamental, art is everything, history is necessary, ignorance is dangerous, without really knowing the meaning of these words, and we say many other things we learned from the intellectuals monitors teem with. Suggestions about a good mantainance of mankind are everywhere: basically, we step on them without even noticing, during the few minutes our hectic routine allows us.
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| The Librarian (1566), by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1526/27 - 1593). Books have been the main source of information for centuries. Of course there's plenty of alternative instruments now, but the number of words known by young people grows smaller and smaller, several studies warn. |
The more we talk about a topic, the less we know about it: this is universally true. Sometimes this happens because we're deeply attracted by very little known things (how many people wrote about God or Greek tragedy?); sometimes, instead, because we grow opinionated thanks to the fact someone keeps repeating us an unorganic definition of something wich is supposed to be organic in and of itself.
Everyone claims books are important because nobody really knows what culture is for, and wants to feel "in safe" thanks to novels and good feelings. Everyone thinks that books can defeat ignorance, instead of understanding ignorance can be built in universities as well, with the illusion of a world change, and that ignorance sometimes means not knowing what is to be known. Without a Culture, books are useless, and Culture cannot be built again, nor imagined. Books are useless without wise readers.
Culture is predestined, including its unorganic parts, its sad old ages, when fantasy turns into the monotonous establishment of repeated forms; as inhabitants of an old civilization, we cannot but claim "culture" is important, since we prefer living in the past, in the nostalgic wave of a determined shape, in the pages of famous works which inspired the cinema, instead of accepting a difficult, modern (someone said "post-modern") standpoint that simply understands the fertile age of the Western civilization has come to an end, and that culture cannot save anyone nor anything. We're nothing.
The most coherent (namely, scientific) artists of the 20th century created artworks which don't look for coherence, don't celebrate the importance of abstract ideals; just few examples, very different from each other, but all related to a sense of decline: Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is a deep glance into the metropolitan paranoic frenzy; Musil's The man without qualities (1930-1943) puts an end to the tradition of big systematic novels, showing the deepest skepticism towards any type of "cultural" association; Fellini's Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) shows the impossibility of facing a balanced thread (and a democracy) when everyone wants to shout their own opinion; Fight Club (1996) highlights the consequences of a job-based alienating society where a generation grew up with no purpose but collecting money for the future, waiting for the crisis. In any civilization, money is the ultimate fuel of every spiritual activity.
All these disenchanted masterpieces notwithstanding, we grow less and less scientific; we keep pretending there's a proper value, a proper art or form. Polite progressist TV talk shows try to tell us we still can live in a ravishing Renaissance, if only we have enough money for bookshops and the thousandth art exhibition about Impressionism. Everything is about pretending, because people need to believe culture is about something specific and easily recognizable, like recycling, like cooking.
Books are everywhere; writers are everywhere. Everyone wants to write about everything, but nobody feels up to an overview, a total judgment; nobody looks the whole picture from far. Everyone repeats reading is a defence against ignorance, but nobody explains us what type of books we're supposed to read: the important is they're made of words. Reading is usually deemed a generic remedy to a disease (ignorance) which is supposed to threaten our freedom to think, but nobody seems noticing that the quantity of things people read and remember doesn't mean they can actually speculate about reality (and this includes the ability of understanding reality grew too difficult to be defined).
Books, once they turn into an abstract symbol of salvation, are a cunning expedient to keep people at bay; books are the symbol through which capitalism can expand a market (culture is a market) by convincing people they are actually free. In the aftermath of the modern "chaotic" development of the Faustian Culture, Western population should have already stopped - I'm not saying reading - but at least giving to books such an absolute, romantic importance. We're not able to stop idealizing culture because we're not coherent, we're not scientific towards the features of our civilization.
The only possible culture of our age is a culture of no culture; namely, the awareness that culture isn't made but for the pleasure of the few people who authentically can get some pleasure out of it. There's no reality but pleasure. All the rest is just words.
Everyone claims books are important because nobody really knows what culture is for, and wants to feel "in safe" thanks to novels and good feelings. Everyone thinks that books can defeat ignorance, instead of understanding ignorance can be built in universities as well, with the illusion of a world change, and that ignorance sometimes means not knowing what is to be known. Without a Culture, books are useless, and Culture cannot be built again, nor imagined. Books are useless without wise readers.
Culture is predestined, including its unorganic parts, its sad old ages, when fantasy turns into the monotonous establishment of repeated forms; as inhabitants of an old civilization, we cannot but claim "culture" is important, since we prefer living in the past, in the nostalgic wave of a determined shape, in the pages of famous works which inspired the cinema, instead of accepting a difficult, modern (someone said "post-modern") standpoint that simply understands the fertile age of the Western civilization has come to an end, and that culture cannot save anyone nor anything. We're nothing.
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| Babel (2001), by Cildo Meireles. This artwork, in my opinion one of the most astonishing of London TATE Gallery, is a tower of radios of many types and age piled on each other; the radios are all on, and the resulting noise, buzzing and continuous, is somehow disturbing. It is a beautiful momument to the various and nonuniform culture of modern age, made of a patchwork of voices which doesn't help you to have a cultural over all view about reality. |
The most coherent (namely, scientific) artists of the 20th century created artworks which don't look for coherence, don't celebrate the importance of abstract ideals; just few examples, very different from each other, but all related to a sense of decline: Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is a deep glance into the metropolitan paranoic frenzy; Musil's The man without qualities (1930-1943) puts an end to the tradition of big systematic novels, showing the deepest skepticism towards any type of "cultural" association; Fellini's Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) shows the impossibility of facing a balanced thread (and a democracy) when everyone wants to shout their own opinion; Fight Club (1996) highlights the consequences of a job-based alienating society where a generation grew up with no purpose but collecting money for the future, waiting for the crisis. In any civilization, money is the ultimate fuel of every spiritual activity.
All these disenchanted masterpieces notwithstanding, we grow less and less scientific; we keep pretending there's a proper value, a proper art or form. Polite progressist TV talk shows try to tell us we still can live in a ravishing Renaissance, if only we have enough money for bookshops and the thousandth art exhibition about Impressionism. Everything is about pretending, because people need to believe culture is about something specific and easily recognizable, like recycling, like cooking.
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| Integration (2013) by Piero Tonin. Among the many rethorical, misused, misunderstood culture-related words, multiculturality is one of the most common. Trying to conceal the prevalent role of consumerism in Western society, we act as various cultures cohabited in our metropolises, although we perfectly know the presence of many different languages, clothes and ethnicities does not change the fact we don't share but one only culture, the culture of money.This word, actually, like a huge sponge absorbing whatever it leans on, taught to children and waved by politicians, defines an effective strategy used by "integrators" in order to turn everyone in a standard Western consumer. Reversally, racism, which is a much worse reaction for sure, mostly represents an anachronistic struggle to "protect" a culture racists themselves have a vague idea of. |
Books are everywhere; writers are everywhere. Everyone wants to write about everything, but nobody feels up to an overview, a total judgment; nobody looks the whole picture from far. Everyone repeats reading is a defence against ignorance, but nobody explains us what type of books we're supposed to read: the important is they're made of words. Reading is usually deemed a generic remedy to a disease (ignorance) which is supposed to threaten our freedom to think, but nobody seems noticing that the quantity of things people read and remember doesn't mean they can actually speculate about reality (and this includes the ability of understanding reality grew too difficult to be defined).
Books, once they turn into an abstract symbol of salvation, are a cunning expedient to keep people at bay; books are the symbol through which capitalism can expand a market (culture is a market) by convincing people they are actually free. In the aftermath of the modern "chaotic" development of the Faustian Culture, Western population should have already stopped - I'm not saying reading - but at least giving to books such an absolute, romantic importance. We're not able to stop idealizing culture because we're not coherent, we're not scientific towards the features of our civilization.
The only possible culture of our age is a culture of no culture; namely, the awareness that culture isn't made but for the pleasure of the few people who authentically can get some pleasure out of it. There's no reality but pleasure. All the rest is just words.
