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Introduction: Linearity, Anomaly, and Anachronism: Toward an Archaeology of the New
- The University of Alabama Press
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Introduction linearity, anomaly, and anachronism: Toward an archaeology of the new Many of the chapters in The Darkness of the Present started life on emergent occasions , the details of which can be consulted in the acknowledgements section. Some have appeared in earlier versions and these I have chosen to update; accordingly most are substantively revised and altered (mainly by amplification). As such, they might seem to present a farraginous façade and can certainly be read independently. They are linked, however, by a common preoccupation reflected in the title of the book. In many ways these chapters underscore the interlacement—even perplication—of an odyssey of two well-known, abused, and disabused concepts: the anomaly and the anachronism and the way their empirical emergence works to unsettle a steady notion of the “contemporary” or “new.” I judge my attempts in this regard against the backdrop of one of Jerome McGann’s arresting apothegms: “Out of scholarship comes the advancement of learning, out of criticism, its arrest” (The Point is to Change It xv). The turbulation of the past in order to arouse the imp of anachronism is a critical appropriation of the scholarly and results at times in juxtapositions that might seem mobilized along Reverdy’s theory of the image: a chance convergence of vastly distant periods and proclivities. Hopefully, however, the studies in this book contribute to a genuine poeticology of the anomaly and the anachronism, and in so doing engage the past and the present as both metaleptic and chiasmic, by which the contemporary is historicized at the same time as the historical finds itself contemporized. Collectively the book challenges the validity of historic models of supercession and offers a variety of investigations into undeclared and even uncanny affiliations . It also strives to present historical articulations that disconcert the urge to literary periodization and disciplinary partition. In many ways the book was written in awareness of Derrida’s caveat against periodization: “The post-s and 2 introduction posters which proliferate today (poststructuralism, postmodernism, etc.) still surrender to the historicist urge. Everything marks an era, even the decentering of the subject: post humanism. It is as if one again wished to put a linear succession in order, to periodize, to distinguish before and after, to limit the risks of reversibility or repetition, transformation or permutation: an ideology of progress ” (Point de Folie 137). Derrida’s statement is in broad concurrence with Bergson ’s own emphatic rejection of the linear nature of time and its supporting logic of succession—for Bergson the present and the past are coexistent. Where McGann envisions a historical model that proposes a past that has not yet happened , I activate a model along Bergsonian and Derridean lines in which a past leaps into the now (Black Riders 156). In its investment in bringing to light unexplored connections, the book also situates the radical geophilosophy that Deleuze and Guattari outline in A Thousand Plateaus. Friedrich Schlegel famously declared that “[a]ll self-sufficiency is radical, is original. . . . Without originality, there is no energy of reason and no beauty of disposition” (256). The Darkness of the Present questions this intimate connection of originality and autonomy by calling up the necessary insistence of the unacknowledged precedent and the already belated “new.” The new is always a milieu of multiplicities where echo sometimes meets a magnet that pulls heterogenesis to the past or propels the past forward. In the process this book repositions certain texts in genealogies different from those they are traditionally and customarily assigned to. As well as broadening ancestral series, this book aims to invoke historical rumblings whose sediments collectively work to muddy the clarity of the notion of “contemporary” in a chronological manner recently articulated by Giorgio Agamben, for what is the contemporary if not “that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism”? (Agamben Nudities 11). This sentiment is not that dissimilar to Charles Olson’s bold claim that “the work, the real work of the future has already been done” (Charles Olson at Goddard College) or Lyotard’s tenet that “every occurrence is a recurrence, not at all in the sense that it could repeat the same thing or be the rehearsal or the same play, but in the sense of the Freudian Nachträglich, the way the first offense touches our mind too soon and the second too late, so that the first time is like a thought not yet thought while the second is like a...