Re: [microsound] neo-modermism

["The pHarmanaut" <pharmanaut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The more I read Manovich, the less I like, particularly from the standpoint
of someone with an interest in sonic art forms and literature. I would be
much less bothered by a return to Klee et all than to the sort of modernist
theoretical underpinnings that Manovich attempts to resuscitate.  _The
Language of New Media_ points the way to the return of the very worst sort
of modernism, with its overemphasis on the visual form as having a direct
line to cultural truths. "Generation Flash" is even more offensive in its
obsessive equation of the visual with Hegelian idealism and the spirit of
the age embodied in the form of cultural heroes. Coupled with the "belief in
science and rationality", this is going to take us right back into the worst
form of false enlightenment already thoroughly dismantled by Horkheimer and
Adorno.

More importantly, I think this whole supposition that pits modernism against
postmodernism as a dialectic is a mistake. Postmodernism was already the
fulfillment of modernism, not its antagonist; in fact, postmodernism is the
synthesis of modernism and its antithesis, which was the bourgeois mimetic
realism of the 19th century.

You can already see that Manovich is stumbling into the worst pitfalls of
modernism by the fact that he uses the word "new" four times in this short
paragraph to set off key terms. All of this is old news ... pun intended ...
buying into the project of a singular cultural agenda moving toward
perfection through history.

-=Trace

> To return to the topic of new modernism. Of course we don't want to simply
> replay Mondrian and Klee on computer screens. The task of the new
generation
> is to integrate the two paradigms of the twentieth century: (1) belief in
> science and rationality, emphasis on efficiency, basic forms, idealism and
> heroic spirit of modernism; (2) skepticism, interest in "marginality" and
> "complexity," deconstructive strategies, baroque opaqueness and excess of
> post-modernism (1960s-). At this point all the features of the second
paradigm
> became tired clichés. Therefore a return to modernism is not a bad first
step,
> as long as it is just a first step towards developing the new aesthetics
for
> the new age.
> Lev Manovich - "Generation Flash"

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