16.7.08

take tomorrow




In an oral society the figure of the written word stands out against the bardic or poetic ground. It stands out as a precise and abstractly visual figure agains the resonant and acoustic ground of the collective oral tradition, just as the specialized industrial West stands out against the tribal Asiatic world. Today, in exactly the same way, the old visual written tradition appears as the merely humanist and intuitive world of aesthetic values and experience. It stands in contrast to the new scientific figure, contrasting with the nonvisual world of the new physics. It is this reversal that tosses literature and aesthetics into abeyance as an unquantifiable area of mere human preferences and satisfactions without scientific foundations. It is precisely the components of visual or "rational" space, which constituted Western science for two millenniums, that are now degraded into the status of mere entertainment. It is now obvious that the new nonvisual figure of the new physics will soon enough suffer the same fate as Euclid and Newton and Darwin. -- Take Today