tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post7541343544925234989..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Raymond Williams: Language and the Avant-GardeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-21921825627789804862013-05-03T04:13:13.093-07:002013-05-03T04:13:13.093-07:00Yes, Marie, I think that's absolutely right.Yes, Marie, I think that's absolutely right.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-2418100314311840982013-05-03T00:38:29.338-07:002013-05-03T00:38:29.338-07:00Thank you for the link! The concept of walls... b...Thank you for the link! The concept of walls... building the Wall and only then maybe the Tower. Towers used to need Walls around them. Walls around today's Megapolis would be unthinkable. Maybe the Giant Wall has been substituted by Mini Individual Walls surrounding each of us.Marie Whttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07787850063283960703noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-21679349669988545572013-05-02T18:23:08.892-07:002013-05-02T18:23:08.892-07:00There's video of Williams delivering this piec...There's video of Williams delivering this piece as a talk.<br /><br /><a href="http://keywords.pitt.edu/videos/video_4.html" rel="nofollow">Raymond Williams: Language and the Avant-Garde</a><br /><br />His lines about "these centres, where in some sense all were strangers" refers to a text he thought crucial to understanding modernity, the Seventh Book of Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude, in which the poet writes of the shock and disorientation of an early period of residence in London -- the first true modern metropolis. The vision of a spectral "second-sight procession" of a crowd of strangers is experienced in the poem as something new. In our time, the experience is not new but commonplace, and the strangers are, in large part -- and of course in ways that would have bewildered Wordsworth even further -- virtual rather than physical and/or social. For our time, the strangers don't have to be there at all, in physical terms, in order to be alien; the world itself has become, for many, an alien place. This fact is accepted as a given, by many; and perhaps, even, as "natural" (!).<br /><br />O Friend! one feeling was there which belong'd<br />To this great City, by exclusive right;<br />How often in the overflowing Streets,<br />Have I gone forward with the Crowd, and said<br />Unto myself, the face of every one<br />That passes by me is a mystery.<br />Thus have I look'd, nor ceas'd to look, oppress'd<br />By thoughts of what, and whither, when and how,<br />Until the shapes before my eyes became<br />A second-sight procession, such as glides<br />Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;<br />And all the ballast of familiar life,<br />The present, and the past; hope, fear; all stays,<br />All laws of acting, thinking, speaking man<br />Went from me, neither knowing me, nor known.<br />And once, far-travell'd in such mood, beyond<br />The reach of common indications, lost<br />Amid the moving pageant, 'twas my chance<br />Abruptly to be smitten with the view<br />Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,<br />Stood propp'd against a Wall, upon his Chest<br />Wearing a written paper, to explain<br />The story of the Man, and who he was.<br />My mind did at this spectacle turn round<br />As with the might of waters, and it seem'd<br />To me that in this Label was a type,<br />Or emblem, of the utmost that we know<br />Both of ourselves and of the universe;<br />And, on the shape of that unmoving man,<br />His fixèd face and sightless eyes, I looked,<br />As if admonish'd from another world.<br /><br />Marie, the Tower of Babel is certainly an apt reference here. Thinking of another prophetic modern text, Kafka's <a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/franz-kafka-great-wall-of-china.html" rel="nofollow">The Great Wall of China</a>.<br /><br />In Kafka's tale, the Tower will never be completed. The tale is a play on Zeno of Elea's Racecourse Paradox: Suppose a runner needs to travel from a start S to a finish F. To do this he must first travel to the midpoint, M, and thence to F: but if N is the midpoint of SM, he must first travel to N, and so on ad infinitum (Zeno: ‘what has been said once can always be repeated’). But it is impossible to accomplish an infinite number of tasks in a finite time. Therefore the runner cannot complete (or start) his journey.<br /><br />"And it is true that in this respect our age was far superior to that one long ago. Almost every educated person in our age was a mason by profession and infallible when it came to the business of laying foundations. But it was not at all the scholar’s aim to prove this. Instead he claimed that the great wall alone would for the first time in the age of human beings create a secure foundation for a new Tower of Babel. So first the wall and then the tower. In those days the book was in everyone’s hands, but I confess that even today I do not understand exactly how he imagined this tower..."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-26258157229325996562013-05-02T16:14:46.076-07:002013-05-02T16:14:46.076-07:00This thread is so interesting and vast one can pro...This thread is so interesting and vast one can probably only scratch a small amount of the surface of it. The first picture that comes to (my) mind when talking about language and multi-ethnicity in early cities is the one of <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Brueghel-tower-of-babel.jpg" rel="nofollow">Babel</a>. The coining of a new language by melting old ones together (amalgam? I'm not sure this is the right word).<br />I also came across <a href="http://www.michaelerard.com/media-kit/babel-no-more-cover/" rel="nofollow">this</a> but I don't know what to make of it.<br />Tom, those city shots by night are stunning. I used to walk the concrete maze of Tokyo in the warm summer nights in search of street lights. And I remember feeling strangely at home in the city. Even when standing at the crazy Shibuya crossing, surrounded by hundreds of strangers, one can experience a strong feeling of solitude. Almost peace. I don't know if this is good or bad, and it might sound strange, but I don't see the city as a place to escape from. And the language patches there might be make it all the more interesting. <br />Ah, this is such a great post, Tom...Marie Whttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07787850063283960703noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-26104534950097629722013-05-02T12:25:50.885-07:002013-05-02T12:25:50.885-07:00"There was then both gain and loss".
Du..."There was then both gain and loss".<br /><br />Dublin's both dear and dirty. Cities are manufactories of alien beauty as well as our undoing. <br /><br />You're right, TC. It is a universal state of mind. There are no rural retreats now. I'm sure wherever I go I take a particular city with me. I'm made and hurt by it.<br /><br />What is particularly poignant is the thought that Williams comes from a people whose language was harried close to disappearance. A Welsh Marxist at Cambridge too - there's a stranger for you.<br /><br />The Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis - a composer with two musical styles quite distinct from each other; one for the court and one for the recusant community. Another stranger working with a language as a "new fact".<br /><br />Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-8003116894751086922013-05-02T10:58:19.076-07:002013-05-02T10:58:19.076-07:00That top picture, by the way, put me in mind of th...That top picture, by the way, put me in mind of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9Tt9enGH1E" rel="nofollow">this</a>.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-84192500242782135852013-05-02T10:53:02.960-07:002013-05-02T10:53:02.960-07:00Hazen,
I think that what we once thought of as th...Hazen,<br /><br />I think that what we once thought of as the city is now a universal state of mind, impersonal, abstract, networked to the gills yet without any real connection between units in the vast mechanism, which has its own forms of signalling -- in that famous arcane register which only a certain species can pick up. <br /><br />And I don't know what that species is. And I'm pretty sure there is no escape.<br /><br />Williams' rueful and bittersweet prose has a prophetic ring: "Within the real historical dynamics... notably and deliberately manipulative and exploiting."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-22249839915487718692013-05-02T10:40:30.374-07:002013-05-02T10:40:30.374-07:00When I was young, the city was the place to be. No...When I was young, the city was the place to be. Now the city has come to me. In the provinces, highways scarify terrain, and infernal combustion engines roam free, smash worlds, corrode delicate tissues with foul emissions. Is there a way out? When the escape route resembles—and might be mistaken for—a minimalist work of art, or an outcropping of adverts, are we just diddling ourselves to death? Thank goddess for Raymond Williams.Hazenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13417573435195561519noreply@blogger.com