Blumenberg Reading with Reading O. Bradley Bassler O. The Pace of Modernity of Pace The O. Bradley Bassler The Pace of Modernity re.press Open Access Statement – Please Read This book is Open Access. This work is not simply an electronic book; it is the open access version of a work that exists in a number of forms, the traditional printed form being one of them. Copyright Notice This work is ‘Open Access’, published under a creative commons license which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form and that you in no way alter, transform or build on the work outside of its use in normal aca- demic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. Furthermore, for any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. 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It is therefore a matter of the very old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something new. To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis. a re.press series The Pace of Modernity: Reading With Blumenberg O. Bradley Bassler re.press Melbourne 2012 re.press PO Box 40, Prahran, 3181, Melbourne, Australia http://www.re-press.org © re.press & O. Bradley Bassler 2012 The moral rights of the author are automatically asserted and recognized under Australian law (Copyright Amendment [Moral Rights] Act 2000) This work is ‘Open Access’, published under a creative commons license which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form whatsoever and that you in no way alter, transform or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without express permission of the author (or their executors) and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. For more informa- tion see the details of the creative commons licence at this website: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Bassler, O. Bradley. The pace of modernity : reading with Blumenberg / O. Bradley Bassler. 9780987268228 (pbk.) Series: Anamnesis. Includes bibliographical references. Subjects: Blumenberg, Hans. Civilization, Modern. Philosophy, Modern. 901 Designed and Typeset by A&R This book is produced sustainably using plantation timber, and printed in the destination market reducing wastage and excess transport. Contents Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations ix Introduction: Modernity’s Runaway Pace 13 1. Theology and the Modern Age: Blumenberg’s Reaction to A Baconian Frontispiece 35 2. At What Cost Modernity: Mental Faculties and Total Politics 61 3. The New Poetry and The Mimetic Locus 77 4. Jean Starobinski’s Linguistic Modernism 93 5. Daily Rhythms 113 6. Divagation at the Crossroads: In Search of Modern Wisdom 139 7. Visionary Design: Mathematical Analogues for The Reading Of Poetry 161 8. The Outlook for Legitimacy and The Pace of Modernity 187 9. Convexity and Complexity: Trading Places With John Ashbery 205 Bibliography 217 v HANS BLUMENBERG 13 July 1920 Lübeck – 28 March 1996 Altenberge Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Willson Center for the Humanities at the University of Georgia. vii Abbreviations AI Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence AILWL Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life AR Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple CES Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences LM Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (2 vols.) LMA Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age LL Robert Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas LW Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit M Hans Blumenberg, Matthäuspassion MM Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading NTAP Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of the Imagination OT Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism SPCM John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror SW Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works (3 vols.) TP John Ashbery, Three Poems TSM Angus Fletcher, Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare WW Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? ix There is nothing to be done, you must grow up, the outer rhythm more and more accelerate, past the ideal rhythm of the spheres that seemed to dictate you, that seemed the establishment of your seed and the conditions of its growing, upward, someday into leaves and fruition and final sap. For it is to be transcended… . — John Ashbery, “The New Spirit” Introduction: Modernity’s Runaway Pace The inescapable attribute of our time is its runaway pace. So begins Gyorgy Kepes’ 1965 introduction to a volume on “The Nature and Art of Motion.”1 Kepes’ prose is exemplary of a certain attitude toward technology which dominated the era of the Cold War and, more particularly, the growingly critical recep- tion of those trends in the art world—such as Bauhaus—which had rested on a positive valuation of technology for the future of art. Kepes continues in the vein of dystopic description laced by a strong dose of fascination for the technologically spectacular: Tidal waves of traffic pound us; sprawling cities and exploding popula- tions squeeze us. Wildly erratic throbbing migrations—the daily shut- tle from home to work, from work to home, the weekend surge from city to country and from country to city, the punctuations of rush-hour deadlocks—toss us in an accelerating rhythm barely within our con- trol. Streams of speeding objects—motorcars, airplanes, intercontinen- tal missiles, orbiting space capsules—weave a rapidly changing fabric all around us with patterns of spiraling velocities. At night, the reassuring calm of the firmament is blotted out by our cities, which are transformed into giant circuses where darting headlights, winking traffic lights, glit- tering, gaudy displays, and advertising signs whirl and swirl and pirou- ette in frantic competition for our attention.2 Human reality seems sucked into a giant historical updating of the vortex we find in Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”3 Kepes’ vo- cabulary emphasizes those aspects of modernity’s pace—pounding, sprawl- ing, squeezing, throbbing, shuttling, speeding, darting—which intimate the scarcely controllable energy of its forward motion. But while the tone in which Kepes depicts technological exotica may now itself feel somewhat dated, the condition he indicates is one which continues, and indeed itself accelerates. 1. Gyorgy Kepes, ed., The Nature and Art of Motion (New York: George Braziller, 1965), i. 2. ibid. 3. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry, Tales, & Selected Essays (New York: Library of America College Edition, 1996), 432-48. 13 14 The Pace of Modernity Even earlier, Paul Valéry isolated it in a more purified form in My“ Faust” when Faust declares that The individual is dying. He is drowning in numbers. The accumulation of human beings is effacing all distinction. There’s only a hairsbreadth of difference now between vice and virtue; the two are melted into the mass which is called “human material.”4 The overstepping of human pace has a long modern history which can be traced back at least as far as we can trace the Faust legend, which is to say, anteceding modernity.