Mere preservation of tradition destroys culture, not sustains it

Evidence

It was in this essay that Eliot, in anticipation of Bloom, described the reciprocal relationship between the canonical and the new. The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. The fate of Picasso’s Guernica — once a howl of anguish and outrage against fascist atrocities, now a wall-hanging — is exemplary. Like its Battersea hanging space in the film, the painting is accorded “iconic” status only when it is deprived of any possible function or context. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 564

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: ‘The exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past’ — that tradition needs to be contested and modified to live is a substantial reframing of cultural preservation.
• APHORISMS: A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all — a genuinely preservable maxim about how living traditions work.
• XREF: connects to: Preservation can kill a place by removing its living use — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2919; Culture that is merely preserved rather than contested is no culture at all — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 12; Late-capitalist state intervention destroys traditions and cannot offset the loss indefinitely — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2713 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Culture is an ongoing production, not a fixed inheritance to be recovered #expands (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 862
• Culturalization treats culture as frozen and divorced from power structures #corroborates (0.82)
• Cultural sterility is a culture’s inability to produce the genuinely new #complicates (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 561
• Late-capitalist state intervention destroys traditions and cannot offset the loss indefinitely #expands (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2713