Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net
source: http://www.metamute.org/en/content/working_on_a_decaying_dream
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... his great work is a constant elegy on the irretrievable decay of good society; his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction...
This is how Engels famously redeemed Balzac. By bitterly describing the declining social power of the aristocracy, despite the French writer's nostalgic loyalty to a doomed class, Balzac went against his own class sympathies and ‘saw the real men of the future'. Engels recognised how deeply conflicted and ironic decadence was as an aesthetic position: to write about the slow death of a world you recognise as your own is to participate in its destruction, to admit that after the vitality seeps out all that is left is artistic appreciation. London is full of such artistic appreciation of what was alive before and is now simply a sign liberated from any social or economic reality. Like an archaeological dig, the city is built over layers of decaying matter: Victorian churches are converted into bachelor pads, car garages are converted into impromptu evangelical churches, suburban warehouses are converted into call-centres. The memory of organised religion, heavy industry and the age of the automobile of the recent past adorns the city in sites of unwitting commemoration, like an urban unconscious.
http://www.metamute.org/en/content/working_on_a_decaying_dream
This is how Engels famously redeemed Balzac. By bitterly describing the declining social power of the aristocracy, despite the French writer's nostalgic loyalty to a doomed class, Balzac went against his own class sympathies and ‘saw the real men of the future'. Engels recognised how deeply conflicted and ironic decadence was as an aesthetic position: to write about the slow death of a world you recognise as your own is to participate in its destruction, to admit that after the vitality seeps out all that is left is artistic appreciation. London is full of such artistic appreciation of what was alive before and is now simply a sign liberated from any social or economic reality. Like an archaeological dig, the city is built over layers of decaying matter: Victorian churches are converted into bachelor pads, car garages are converted into impromptu evangelical churches, suburban warehouses are converted into call-centres. The memory of organised religion, heavy industry and the age of the automobile of the recent past adorns the city in sites of unwitting commemoration, like an urban unconscious.
http://www.metamute.org/en/content/working_on_a_decaying_dream
