It is tough, though, to know exactly what to make of this development - the foreshortening of the future from way, way out there to quite soon to almost now down toward in selben Augenblick. On the one hand, of course, it marks a foreclosure of the concept that the world might be radically otherwise, as there will never be any time for it to radically change.
On the other hand, the whole scenario calls to mind Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History " and its resistance to the Social Democratic concept of progress as a "progression through a homogenous, empty time" in favor of a "notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.
At any rate, perhaps this sort of issue is exactly the sort of thing that the present day literature department should take up as a task. We English professors love the conjunction of the aesthetic and the political. But something has happened that makes it nearly impossible save through pseudo-blog to make this argument publically. Over at the literary studies group weblog The Valve , Scott Eric Kaufmann [our friend of Acephalous , where his thoughts are cross-posted] wrote the following [see similar threads unfolding at In The Middle here and at Quod She here ]:.
I fret over the university context one minute, the comparative one the nextโ two hundred people died senselesly in Iraq yesterdayโbut more than anything else, it is the professional context that dogs my mind.
Cho Seung-hui was an English major, after all, and thus an example of the abject failure of the liberal arts to humanize the troubled souls who study them. His plays are compelling evidence that Plato was onto something in Book X of The Republic : literature originates in the base, irrational place to which it appeals; and the production and consumption of it succours the worst in us. He fell prey to the vicious cycle of unreason Socrates described.
