The Divine Contemporary

A siren sounds over the rain-sodden city.
A lonsesome lament.

With a virus, and working too hard over the weekend, I haven't managed even the ten minutes a day for this journal. though this morning, I wrote a column, prompted by Uli's exhibition - I fear she won't like it. Now, I feel wrecked.

But compelled to write notes for a further column, on contemporeneity - reading Negri's notes from the 80s, from exile, searching for hope, from the poetic, artistic, impulse - which all leftists do when those doors close on their historical project (Benjamin, Marcuse, Horvat), a leap of existentiaist faith (and the Yugoslav guy from the 90s). Plus a Danish art theorist.

But why is it interesting for me? I used to always want to know, the new trends in usic; less so now - for the first time I feel out-of-touch with culture, its fresh developments. I realise now how it is that the old simply don't understand - they don't want to; their cup is full, their formative influences far in the past.

The contemporary is that moment between past and future, the present; so brief, instantaneous, that it sparks into and out of existence immediately. Like trying to identify/locate particles in physics, which exist only for a short flash of time. The contemporary is what can be said not to exist at all - a micro-thin membrane, skin, pulsating, evolving forward.

What is the new? More than a neophiliac fascination with novelty, it embraces/requires fresh departures. Most contemporary art is mere repetition, of what has gone before. We repeat the tropes of the 60s again and again. Although Deleuze wrote that repetition can produce the new, because each repetition is inevitably a departure, with at least inimal difference: performance, even though the script/score is the same, has variations in style, ability: even the location in time, space/geography, reveals hidden aspects.

But Lacan/Zizek write that the difference between a physical desire and a drive lies here: a drive is a compulsive repetition - as in our art: always busy doing, but never free. Desire, however, is a cut, which enables a genuinely new, free, direction, orientation. Where is this in our culture? A culture repeating the past. A pattern with no solutions. Art moribund, religion in decline. Where is the new? Where is the life?

My wife says that the contemporary is where (and when) God is - everlasting new, freshly (re)creating, keeping in existence, sustaining; each moment is a fresh creation, de novo - in line with current scientific theory: an absence of absolute laws, only the statistical regularities. Each moment is a (re)creation): God the artist, re-making, fresh - and therefore possibilities, potentialities, in unforeseen ways, paths - which might manifest at any moment. And hence the need  for discernment: a spiritual discipline.