On the New by Boris Groys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Groys is a formalist. He recasts the dialectic of subject and object in terms of valorized-profane in order to talk about the production of culture. Through the figure of art (and then conceptual theory), Groys notes the production of new as necessary to stablize the meta-position of culture. He makes these positions independent of specific content and that makes him not only a formalist but also an idealist.
One of the issues with this, is that this ideation remain ungrounded in material practices, that valorization and the profane are “indistinguishable”. Perhaps this makes him a lazy philosopher, but it’s unwelcome since the very ability for one to distinguish the two is the entire point of valorization. A stronger critique of this thought would be to say that all that we can recognize is already included in culture, and that what isn’t in culture is only recognizable through the filter of culture, so it is “not yet itself”, which begs the question of schema.
At first glance I thought he was going to outline a scheme of becoming. Umberto Eco did so in order to talk about how new information can create new categories for the new, but Groys avoided doing this difficult task. Instead he retreated into the familiar dialectical play of cultural difference to pull the new from the auspices of the void… this puts him strictly within the history of formalization as outlined in Foucault’s The Order of Things, wherein the question today becomes how can one pull content from form alone? The appeal to the void (or the Other of thought) or the attempt to think the unthinkable isn’t a new attempt. Groys puts forth a well researched and tightly knit but conservative book. In this sense, he is pretty easy to read, and serves more as a text for a sophomore for an aesthetic reading of familiar forms instead of as an earth shaking opus.
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