Abstract

In a recent essay, Michael North meditates on the persistence of Modernism as the ‘cultural dominant of our time’, suggesting that our own culture can be described as the ‘afterlife’ of the aesthetic movements of the early twentieth century. In its powerful identification of the modern with the new, Modernism provided the terms with which we are still constrained to theorize our ideas of the contemporary. We live in a condition of belatedness, then, North argues, with what was once the triumph of the new weighing upon us as ‘the dead hand of the past’. I propose that this modernism and its obsession with the new has to be weighed against a counter-tendency during the same period which sought to curb a metaphysics of originality and constant innovation with a modernism preoccupied with its own limits and with the obdurate materiality of a world resistant to aesthetic fantasy. I draw my polarizing terms – mud and metaphysics – from Ezra Pound and then contrast his visionary fantasies with a range of writings that assume the absolute externality of things and other people. The essay looks at texts by Franz Kafka, Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett, and then surveys the nineteenth-century current of sceptical materialism that provides a sort of pre-history of this modernism but which was overshadowed by the lyric materialism so rousingly proclaimed by Marinetti and the Futurists. In conclusion I turn to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves where we find that her usual scepticism is tempered by a jubilant grasp of the ‘mud-stained’ real.

中文翻译：

---

泥与形而上学：现代主义的问题

摘要

迈克尔·诺斯（Michael North）在最近的一篇文章中，对现代主义作为“我们这个时代的文化主导者”的持续存在进行了沉思，这表明我们自己的文化可以被描述为20世纪初美学运动的“来世”。在现代主义与现代主义的有力区别中，现代主义提供了我们仍然受约束的理论，以使我们的当代思想理论化。诺斯认为，我们生活在一个迟来的状况下，曾经是新的胜利的胜利把我们视为“过去的死手”。我建议，在同一时期，必须权衡这种现代主义及其对新事物的痴迷，这种反对倾向试图遏制独创性和不断创新的形而上学，而现代主义则以其自身的局限性和固执己见的现代主义为中心。抵抗审美幻想的世界。我从埃兹拉·庞德（Ezra Pound）得出了我的对立术语–泥和形而上学，然后将他的远见幻想与一系列假定事物和其他人具有绝对外部性的著作进行对比。这篇文章着眼于弗朗兹·卡夫卡（Franz Kafka），温德姆·刘易斯（Wyndham Lewis）和塞缪尔·贝克特（Samuel Beckett）的著作，然后考察了十九世纪的怀疑唯物主义潮流，它为这种现代主义提供了一种史前时代，但被马里内蒂（Marinetti）激怒的抒情唯物主义所掩盖和未来主义者。在Waves中，我们发现她一贯的怀疑态度因对“泥泞”的真实事物的欢欣鼓舞而得到缓和。