This is the rough text of a talk I gave at the “Nothing New?” Conference in Huddersfield recently. It needs referencing, and editing, but I’m putting it up here as a sort of extended blog. pdf. version available for download over on the “academic writing” pages.
Ideas of the New
Bennett Hogg
“Nothing New? Understanding Newness in Medieval and Contemporary Music”
Huddersfield University, 25th April, 2009
The idea of the new is inhabited by contradictions; inseparable, as it apparently is, from “the old”. As the quotation from The Devil’s Dictionary on the present conference’s website says, “there is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don’t know”. “Nothing new under the sun”, perhaps, yet we have to face the contradictory fact that under that same sun everyday “a new day dawns”. It’s the second half of that quote from The Devil’s Dictionary that concerns me today, though, the “lots of old things we don’t know”; do we really not know them? have we simply forgotten them? or have they been repressed - in the psychoanalytical sense - or marginalised, in the political sense - by social and historical pressures respectively? It is still difficult for us to look at “the new” without the ideological and conceptual frames and filters that belong to a historical period which may not be ours any longer. Modernity, and its variously defined modernisms, seem to have made the idea of “the new” their own, placing “the new” so much centre stage that anything not “new” has tended to be pushed into the wings; what Walter Benjamin identified, in the context of surrealism, as “the outmoded”.
Many of us, when confronted by the new, struggle, initially, to make sense of it. Typically we triangulate meaning, as it were, from the twin points of our personal memories and our cultural competences - to anchor the new experience in relation to the already known. Confronted with “the new” the phrase “well, at least it’s different” shunts the new off into the flexible category of “the different”, from where, once categorized as “different”, it can be dealt with later. And this conflating of “difference” with “dealing with later” is integral to Derrida’s neologism differance - a differing and a deferring that is never completely achieved, any sense of a signified behind the signifier (in Saussurean terms), any final and ultimate meaning, being infinitely deferred.
We might for a moment, then, place a hold on “the different’, as one possible destination, placement, or marker, of “the new”.
Difference, though, is a loaded term that also carries within itself an ambiguity, an instability, an undecideability. The word “different” is associated, in English at least, with two prepositions that, on the face of it, move in opposite directions - from and to - but in association with the word “different, we find that rather than naming opposites, they combine in a “to-ing-and-fro(m)-ing”, a dynamic process of differing that moves between points, or circulates within a given space; from and to position the word “different” in terms that are bi-directional, and as different differences differentiate themselves, a network emerges - which has, of course, been proposed as one way to think of a language, or a culture. Within this structure of understanding, “the new” in any absolute and non-contingent sense is an impossibility. Networks within culture arise not ex nihilo but emerge and grow from established points. New connections, or what I will be discussing as “inventions”, depend, for their emergence, on existing knowledge and modes of understanding, and for their subsequent and necessary assimilation into a culture. More »
May 27th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
