![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re-Mapping the Human Condition, Historical Division: Further Considerations
One of the so-called mystical traditions that interested me in past decades (and whether it simply imported its insights from contemporary sociological and psychological journals remains to be investigated) dealt extensively with the barriers to understanding: why we are so persistently unable to understand what it is we don’t understand.
There is now a growing literature about this topic, but much of it is specious, based on inadequately conceived research and insufficiently concerned with the contributions of history to our persistent failure to comprehend what is before our faces. (Apologies for the allusion to Logion 5 from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the earliest corrections to the Greek supposition that knowing oneself was sufficient for transformation, rather than also knowing the actual condition of something apparently external.)
Given the extent to which contemporary research corrects old errors by replicating previous generations of errors that no one remembers ever having been made, it would be salutary to look at where it all went wrong in various fields of endeavor, and trying to glean at least a few lessons from the experience.
Suzanne L. Marchand’s remarkable historical survey German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship leads me to think that her earlier Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1730-1970 would be its perfect complement in terms of interpreting how the scholarly fictions we create about the world’s cultures (no matter who the “we” in question might be, or the particular fictions) mask immediate historically given concerns. Those concerns are not necessarily economic or political; they can be bound up with anxiety over the status of personal religious belief, the identification of one’s own place in the universe, what have you, and the answers being sought may not always have been to the financial or social benefit of the seeker. Obsessive and consequential mistakes are made almost as often in the name of abstract truth as in the name of concealed motives of conscious exploitation; all that matters is that the mistaken researcher be unaware of the implications of his or her framing of the research. Marchand’s focus on German orientalists are parallel to recent re-readings of British and French orientalists, and all of the scholarship is implicitly revising postcolonial studies; footnotes to Edward Said, without negating the notion that in some if not all fields of human endeavor, disinterested scholarship is impossible. The problem facing the researcher is to identify as many of the hidden or unconscious interests as possible, rather than having someone else do the debunking for them.
The unconscious influences of previous decades of scholarship continue to have consequences as new circumstances cause their evolution into unexpected popular forms, which in turn have consequences for the decades after that. I suspect, though I haven’t confirmed this, that Marchand’s essay in the newly published anthology of essays Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy would lead in some very interesting directions, just based on its title and what I know of the time period in question: “Eastern Wisdom in a Time of Western Despair: Orientalism in 1920s Central Europe.” Reviewers have suggested that this volume incorporates enough recent scholarship and corrects enough previous factual errors as to make it an indispensable contribution to the history of Weimar thought, and since it covers an unprecedentedly wide variety of topics it may well supplant a good many previous efforts, which is good news for those of us whose shelves are groaning with earlier volumes (future scholars who restrict themselves to e-books will not have this problem, though they will have many others).
The legacy of Weimar is or was well known; a whole generation of American thinkers grew up under the direct or indirect tutelage of German refugee intellectuals, and the generations since then who learned from those Americans may not always realize the extent to which their present-day ideas germinated in the 1920s.
This is only one reason why I am fascinated by the proto-debunking of Georges Bataille’s short-lived magazine DOCUMENTS, which suffered from the necessary limitations of its historical horizon ca. 1929 while reframing or rendering unexpectedly alien most of the received scholarly and popular ideas of its epoch. Undercover Surrealism: George Bataille and DOCUMENTS provides an excellent anthology of excerpts from the magazine (including its provocative juxtaposition of ethnographic and popular-culture images, often presented without further comment), a good starting point for tracing the intellectual legacy of a magazine that probably influenced hundreds of thinkers and artists who never knew it had existed—though I can’t prove this, and don’t feel much like perusing the individual biographies to figure out the lines of generational influence.
All of this intellectual ferment ca. 1930 was about to be spread worldwide by the rise of the dictators and the subsequent Second World War (the unintended intellectual consequences of global conflict ought to be looked at from a fresh perspective; cf. Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire and Marchand’s chapter on “Orientalists and ‘Others’”). Stalin and Mussolini did their part in disseminating dissident thought by sending its thinkers fleeing for their lives to the far parts of the earth.
This is also a reason why I keep wishing I could find time to analyze the eleven issues of Civiltà: Rivista della Espozitione Universale di Roma. I suspect (from extremely partial evidence) that proportionately fewer cross-culturally-minded scholars emigrated from Italy before the outbreak of war rendered that option impossible; yet their perspective was clearly excluded from the official magazine of the planned 1942 “Olympics of Civilizations,” which was intended to demonstrate the superiority of the Roman-Classical and Renaissance inheritance—including, however delicately the topic might be raised, the superiority of the Italian Renaissance over the inferior German cultural product. The magazine’s very title contains a longstanding cultural coding that predates Italian Fascism: medals commending the “defenders of civilization” were cast for Italy’s military efforts in World War I and in the earlier, but not that much earlier, wresting of Libya from Ottoman Empire control.
The Wolfsonian in Miami is devoting autumn 2013 to a series of exhibitions exploring the curious dialectic between Italian Modernism and the “Rebirth of Rome,” a governmentally sponsored effort that was explicitly intended to demonstrate how the totalitarian state was the perfect rebirth of the ideals of Roman civilization, embracing both the spirit of modernity and historic Romanitas.
Since there will be a catalogue documenting the interwar Italian portion of the Wolfsonian’s collection of decorative and propaganda arts (originally assembled by Mitchell Wolfson Jr.), it would be interesting to use the occasion to revisit the monumental catalogue of the Guggenheim exhibition of fifteen or so years ago that presented Italy’s unparalleled upsurge of trend-setting creativity in cinema, design, and art that began in Allied-occupied cities almost before the end of hostilities. Governmental encouragement of modernist design and architecture had gone into eclipse almost a decade earlier, and what happened in the 1936-1946 time frame is a topic that must have been explored extensively by now, but I don’t know by whom. As with the potential multiculturalists who did not or could not emerge under those historical conditions, there seems to have been a great deal going on of which we know almost nothing.
An interesting bridge between the two eras might be Giuseppe Terragni’s unbuilt Danteum, an allegorical structure meant to transport the visitor from the entangled hell of earthbound error to the heaven of an architecture that was literally openly transparent. As proposed in 1938 as a structure to be in place in time for the Universal Exposition of 1942, it contained heavy-handed thematic references to the glories of Roman civilization (much as Dante’s Divine Comedy does) on the ground level before moving to ever-higher levels of numerologically defined geometric abstraction.
Thomas Schumacher’s book of some decades ago remains the definitive study, as far as I know; it is amusing that the Wikipedia entry for “Danteum” indicates that while the project was never completed, the maquette for it was exhibited at the Universal Exposition of 1942—which in reality was itself a project that was never completed.
One of the so-called mystical traditions that interested me in past decades (and whether it simply imported its insights from contemporary sociological and psychological journals remains to be investigated) dealt extensively with the barriers to understanding: why we are so persistently unable to understand what it is we don’t understand.
There is now a growing literature about this topic, but much of it is specious, based on inadequately conceived research and insufficiently concerned with the contributions of history to our persistent failure to comprehend what is before our faces. (Apologies for the allusion to Logion 5 from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the earliest corrections to the Greek supposition that knowing oneself was sufficient for transformation, rather than also knowing the actual condition of something apparently external.)
Given the extent to which contemporary research corrects old errors by replicating previous generations of errors that no one remembers ever having been made, it would be salutary to look at where it all went wrong in various fields of endeavor, and trying to glean at least a few lessons from the experience.
Suzanne L. Marchand’s remarkable historical survey German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship leads me to think that her earlier Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1730-1970 would be its perfect complement in terms of interpreting how the scholarly fictions we create about the world’s cultures (no matter who the “we” in question might be, or the particular fictions) mask immediate historically given concerns. Those concerns are not necessarily economic or political; they can be bound up with anxiety over the status of personal religious belief, the identification of one’s own place in the universe, what have you, and the answers being sought may not always have been to the financial or social benefit of the seeker. Obsessive and consequential mistakes are made almost as often in the name of abstract truth as in the name of concealed motives of conscious exploitation; all that matters is that the mistaken researcher be unaware of the implications of his or her framing of the research. Marchand’s focus on German orientalists are parallel to recent re-readings of British and French orientalists, and all of the scholarship is implicitly revising postcolonial studies; footnotes to Edward Said, without negating the notion that in some if not all fields of human endeavor, disinterested scholarship is impossible. The problem facing the researcher is to identify as many of the hidden or unconscious interests as possible, rather than having someone else do the debunking for them.
The unconscious influences of previous decades of scholarship continue to have consequences as new circumstances cause their evolution into unexpected popular forms, which in turn have consequences for the decades after that. I suspect, though I haven’t confirmed this, that Marchand’s essay in the newly published anthology of essays Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy would lead in some very interesting directions, just based on its title and what I know of the time period in question: “Eastern Wisdom in a Time of Western Despair: Orientalism in 1920s Central Europe.” Reviewers have suggested that this volume incorporates enough recent scholarship and corrects enough previous factual errors as to make it an indispensable contribution to the history of Weimar thought, and since it covers an unprecedentedly wide variety of topics it may well supplant a good many previous efforts, which is good news for those of us whose shelves are groaning with earlier volumes (future scholars who restrict themselves to e-books will not have this problem, though they will have many others).
The legacy of Weimar is or was well known; a whole generation of American thinkers grew up under the direct or indirect tutelage of German refugee intellectuals, and the generations since then who learned from those Americans may not always realize the extent to which their present-day ideas germinated in the 1920s.
This is only one reason why I am fascinated by the proto-debunking of Georges Bataille’s short-lived magazine DOCUMENTS, which suffered from the necessary limitations of its historical horizon ca. 1929 while reframing or rendering unexpectedly alien most of the received scholarly and popular ideas of its epoch. Undercover Surrealism: George Bataille and DOCUMENTS provides an excellent anthology of excerpts from the magazine (including its provocative juxtaposition of ethnographic and popular-culture images, often presented without further comment), a good starting point for tracing the intellectual legacy of a magazine that probably influenced hundreds of thinkers and artists who never knew it had existed—though I can’t prove this, and don’t feel much like perusing the individual biographies to figure out the lines of generational influence.
All of this intellectual ferment ca. 1930 was about to be spread worldwide by the rise of the dictators and the subsequent Second World War (the unintended intellectual consequences of global conflict ought to be looked at from a fresh perspective; cf. Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire and Marchand’s chapter on “Orientalists and ‘Others’”). Stalin and Mussolini did their part in disseminating dissident thought by sending its thinkers fleeing for their lives to the far parts of the earth.
This is also a reason why I keep wishing I could find time to analyze the eleven issues of Civiltà: Rivista della Espozitione Universale di Roma. I suspect (from extremely partial evidence) that proportionately fewer cross-culturally-minded scholars emigrated from Italy before the outbreak of war rendered that option impossible; yet their perspective was clearly excluded from the official magazine of the planned 1942 “Olympics of Civilizations,” which was intended to demonstrate the superiority of the Roman-Classical and Renaissance inheritance—including, however delicately the topic might be raised, the superiority of the Italian Renaissance over the inferior German cultural product. The magazine’s very title contains a longstanding cultural coding that predates Italian Fascism: medals commending the “defenders of civilization” were cast for Italy’s military efforts in World War I and in the earlier, but not that much earlier, wresting of Libya from Ottoman Empire control.
The Wolfsonian in Miami is devoting autumn 2013 to a series of exhibitions exploring the curious dialectic between Italian Modernism and the “Rebirth of Rome,” a governmentally sponsored effort that was explicitly intended to demonstrate how the totalitarian state was the perfect rebirth of the ideals of Roman civilization, embracing both the spirit of modernity and historic Romanitas.
Since there will be a catalogue documenting the interwar Italian portion of the Wolfsonian’s collection of decorative and propaganda arts (originally assembled by Mitchell Wolfson Jr.), it would be interesting to use the occasion to revisit the monumental catalogue of the Guggenheim exhibition of fifteen or so years ago that presented Italy’s unparalleled upsurge of trend-setting creativity in cinema, design, and art that began in Allied-occupied cities almost before the end of hostilities. Governmental encouragement of modernist design and architecture had gone into eclipse almost a decade earlier, and what happened in the 1936-1946 time frame is a topic that must have been explored extensively by now, but I don’t know by whom. As with the potential multiculturalists who did not or could not emerge under those historical conditions, there seems to have been a great deal going on of which we know almost nothing.
An interesting bridge between the two eras might be Giuseppe Terragni’s unbuilt Danteum, an allegorical structure meant to transport the visitor from the entangled hell of earthbound error to the heaven of an architecture that was literally openly transparent. As proposed in 1938 as a structure to be in place in time for the Universal Exposition of 1942, it contained heavy-handed thematic references to the glories of Roman civilization (much as Dante’s Divine Comedy does) on the ground level before moving to ever-higher levels of numerologically defined geometric abstraction.
Thomas Schumacher’s book of some decades ago remains the definitive study, as far as I know; it is amusing that the Wikipedia entry for “Danteum” indicates that while the project was never completed, the maquette for it was exhibited at the Universal Exposition of 1942—which in reality was itself a project that was never completed.
